Proc Weapons and the GCD

Just because people did not have the same ability to catch bugs in vanilla does not mean they were not bugs.

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Can you clarify if this is how it’s currently working and intended to work or if you need to fix physical abilities blocking procs on the GCD?

Thank you for the prompt response! I appreciate it greatly.

There are just a few things I’d like to say.

You may want to check this part on classic, as wingclip was certainly blocking the auto attack procs, and is a physical attack (unless it is coded as magical for some reason).

While he can’t post on the forums anymore, Theloras did ask Kevin Jordan (one of the original WoW devs) about this on his discord.

Kevin JordanYesterday at 7:27 PM
Don’t remember things working like this. If correct, I would have considered it a bug back in the day.

So, it likely wasn’t an intended interaction. There’s some evidence that Seal of Command also suffered from this bug and was fixed from being interrupted by it during the 1.11.2 patch

Fixed a bug where sometimes casting a spell immediately after a swing would prevent Seal of Command from triggering.

Overall, I don’t believe this “quirk” of the game is worth preserving, but hey, I’m not the one in charge here.

Thanks again. Have a great day!

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So our shaman when he’s twisting, shocking, or doing anything else that isn’t an autoattack is basically doing nothing for us. Great design you got there. Totally worth exalted Thorium Brotherhood rep cost.

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You can still use abilities, just after the attacks land and before there is less than 1.5s left in the swing.

For Paladins it is 1s after swing start to 1.5s before swing ends…

Or on an unhasted nightfall… about 1s per swing of safe time

I don’t want to be pessimistic, but this just feels like some lack of love for Paladins and Shamans. Why must we suffer just because some of our attacks are considered magical?
This is clearly a bug

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If you guys could actually read, you’d see this is not a bug:

The original devs deliberately designed it like this. Should have taken it up with them 14 years ago.

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Designed or overlooked?

Myself and a few others are leaning towards overlooked.

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Well, let’s think about it logically:
Why should a melee player who uses swing procs have them sometimes not happen because they used a certain type of ability before their swing?

I don’t think that a warrior should lose their ability to proc just because they cast Battle Shout after charging.
I am an FQA Tester myself, and I would bug the heck outta this.

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How many bugs were found by blizzard and fixed compared to how many bugs were found by players and subsequently fixed.

As I said just because it was not found in vanilla does not mean this was not a bug.

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Speaking as an FQA tester myself:
We miss a lot

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The only thing y’all are overlooking is 4th grade reading comprehension. Read the quoted sentence again, and again, until you understand what “specific provisions built into the game to force this to be true” means.

It means they deliberately did this, and went out of their way to create extra rulesets to ensure this.

Then it is bad coding and laziness to try and make it better. The items do not say that they cannot proc if you are currently using another skill while using a melee attack.

So basically, they’ve said they don’t care whether it is supposed to be one way or another and you can figure out what actually works in the system they do not understand how to fix.

But sir, I believe you may need to expand how far you read. Their immediate following statements were

“However, we discovered that this is true only if the spell or ability that triggered the GCD was flagged as a magic-based attack (or more specifically, spells flagged in our data with a defense category of “magical”).”

Which means that they did not foresee this occurring as a result.
It’s an old error that did not mean enough back in the day to be caught by players or devs alike. This kind of stuff sweeps under the radar of released games all the time and gets fixed later when found.

yes, Vanilla wow patch history is full of fixes just like this. I for one don’t care if they fix it or not but it would be nice to see a response to the inconsistency with what they said and the wingclip tests that have been done.

Well… every bug has code that forces them to occur. That doesn’t make them intended.

It’s a stretch that any dev would be like: yes! This weapon can trigger this cool thing… but not if the warrior activated find minerals before he hit!

Some abilities that can even trigger the weapon, like wing clip, then prevent the weapon from triggering for 1.5s after use.

Plus one of the original devs already commented on it, and said he would have considered it a bug.

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Whether it’s a bug that was never fixed or not is impossible to know without going back in time. Even a old dev saying “I think it’s this way” you’re just going off the word of the dev on what they remember happening 15 years ago… Nothing against him, just saying the World of Warcraft is vast and it’s unlikely they remember specific details on everything especially quirks like this.

The goal with classic isn’t to identify bugs and fix them, it’s to recreate a true as possible version of classic with warts and all. Typically the only things that are changed from their reference client are exploitable bugs or things that just don’t make sense to be in place or that don’t impact the balance of the game. A lot of it is a judgement call and it’s generally easier to err on the side of #referenceclient rather than change something that was intended to be part of classic as well. Who’s to say a lot of things aren’t bugged? Should they fix everything that is consistently inconsistent?

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exploitable bugs or things that just don’t make sense to be in place or that don’t impact the balance of the game

I would debate that it, indeed, does not make sense to include a consistently inconsistent occurrence in which a player is denied an ability granted to them by their composition simply because of an arbitrary overlooked piece of code.

I would make the bold statement that this is indeed an exploit, but rather an exploit that works against the player, and would make the argument that it indeed impacts the balance of the game by causing melee characters who rely on weapon procs to be effective (such as paladins, shamans and some warriors) to be literally unable to perform a job that they are attempting solely to perform (apply the proc).

After reading a few responses I did want to clarify one minor thing; a spell’s “School” is not the same thing as its Defense Category. There are spells with the school of holy/shadow/frost/etc. that have a defense category of melee/physical, and spells with a school of physical that have a defense category of magical.

…and before it’s asked; no, we are not going to post a full list of which spells are in which spell school or defense categories :slight_smile:

I’m also going to go ahead and close this thread since we’ve concluded our investigation into this issue. We very much appreciate everyone’s efforts to help us track down inconsistencies between WoW Classic and the original game.

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