Technically you can execute earlier but I think this actually may have some adverse effects you may not have given consideration to yet. The one who gazes reminded me that this batching thing may not be limited to just your actions and the actions of your enemies, but because of how blizzard has this set up it could be both a massive blessing and a colossal curse. Really they might need a couple of resolution loops to deal with the situation because of how very different Vanilla servers and clients were compared to what we have now. I assure you the meta now VS then is similar in terms of what you can do and get away with, but there are things that were possible in Vanilla that don’t work that way any more because of how the batching thing acts, however on the same coin there are things you can do now that were simply not possible in Vanilla.
So lets say for a moment that blizzard flawlessly duplicated the vanilla client, and servers and put those up instead and on patch day that’s what we got… No one is the wiser, I can tell ya that there are a few present tricks that would not work any longer, but there would be a few that I could use again. Its a mixed bag for several classes if you know where to look. I don’t want to spoil all the fun, nor do I want to popularize certain things that are questionable in terms of “is this an exploit?”, but they do raise some serious questions.
Thus far on the PTR things do feel really good, but I just havent got enough time on it to know any better, ill go do some testing and with any luck we can all provide some really good feedback that Blizzard may consider?
What I am saying is that even though I like the feel of the PTR the OP has a point, and He who Gazes has reminded me of my roots, that sly devil.
Whether or not you think it’s a good mechanic or a stupid mechanic is not the point – without these mechanics we are no longer playing vanilla world of warcraft, instead we are playing a game that is more like retail with all the rough edges sanded down in order to be more friendly to players who don’t want to invest the time and effort to learn novel and interesting quirks of the game.
Mindtrick is right. Spell batching adds an important dimension to the game, allowing users to do things like cancel out one CC with another, or completely immune/break from CC with special items. It’s very hard to do but one of the most skillful, rewarding things a player can do in PVP. In PVE, batching allows for special mechanics that simply don’t work otherwise, like seal twisting for pallies. Removing batching would be a huge step backwards. Currently the window feels too big to me and I think reducing it to say ~200ms would be fine, but with 10ms it might as well be gone. I hate to see classic get watered down for folks who will never be happy with it anyway. I think if “feeling responsive” is more important to someone than core mechanics like batching, then they should probably just play shadowlands where all the polish is there. If you take away the special things that made classic great, then what is it anymore? The appeal of classic was never the polish, and it was never the quality of life mechanics. There’s a place for polish and quality of life, and it ain’t vanilla wow.
As I understand it, a lot of private servers have taken this approach (200-250ms as a compromise). Khlause, who is pretty knowledgable on the topic as well, has also suggested that although 400ms batch size is faithful to the vanilla, tbc, wotlk, cata, and mop servers, there is more processing done on the server in later expansions and less done on the client side (also true of current classic, which is built from a retail fork codebase), which can lead to the same batching window feeling larger due to the relative balance of server and client load.
I would say also that player awareness of batching and general knowledge of the game has greatly, greatly increased since vanilla, which has the effect that players notice it more even if it’s been there all along.
Anyway, the change to 10ms feels like an alarming copout and an abandonement of the philosophy of trying to re-create all of the rough edges and quirks of vanilla. I would have accepted less drastic tuning of the batching window as an attempt to get it right and preserve these quirks and unique mechanics while accepting the realities of the modern, retail-forked client and server, but 10ms feels like a total abandonment of what was supposed to be the core design philosophy of classic. This is a gross overreaction to be be able to say “look, we hear you! and we are doing something about it!” to satisfy an ignorant mob that mostly doesn’t understand batching to begin with or operates from outright misinformation, which is unfortunately rampant in the community.
<333333
I love the quirks and rough edges of this game. It gives it so much depth and potential for inventive gameplay that is still worthwhile to explore even 16 years later.
Warriors can only benefit, pvp and pve. Getting sapped mid charge, shouting rogues with demo shouts somehow still getting openers, faster execute.
And @mindtrick, your whole argument is wrong because back then in 2004 we had atrocious internet connections and computers so the batching actually made the game feel normal and fast.
For all the people here arguing, I recommend you logging on the PTR, and testing it out. I sent out several bug reports with some of the tricks that were only possible with spell batching, and they fixed almost all of them.
From what I can tell, blizzard is opting for a hybrid approach, where most things in game are on a 10ms batch, while some interactions are still on a 400ms batch (or at the very least it simulates the same effect).
From that I can see, the developers are committed to preserve all those quirks while improving the game responsiveness. If you log on the PTR and feel like something in the game is missing REPORT IT. Try to be as much descriptive as you can to make sure the developers can address the issue.
Afaik they got rid of spell batching in WoD iirc. The current server architecture process everything in real time. they added some elaborate spell priority system to classic to replicate the behavior of spell batching.
I suppose it depends on what you mean when you use the term “spell batching.” Events being processed in batches (or jobs) is a pretty common way to handle multiple things happening nearly concurrently.