Shadowy Apparitions can no longer be seen by allies

[Phoenickz-sargeras]

@Prayermonger-arthas

Does this expansion not have a price tag? Are we not paying a monthly subscription?

Yeah, it always baffled me. Other games don’t charge 3 arms and a leg for their expansions. They’re either subscription models, box models or one time models. WoW literally does all 3 types for it’s expansions, and yet they keep falling behind.

Just make a WoW 2; update the engine and upgrade it, get everything needed, fix the spaghetti code still in the game from classic for some areas and spots, fix all the bugs, make the classes and UI better, etc.

Just doing a new game entirely they could full on fix everything wrong with the current game and then transfer us over to WoW 2. Oh well though, just waiting around until ashes anyways.

[Poefosho-stormrage]

@Capslockfury-thrall

I wish there was a middle ground too, but knowing how systems like this work, it’s quite possible they didn’t have a middle ground option without significant drawback in the time they have before the expansion ships.

The middle ground would have been to simply cut back on the number of apparitions by having apparition-generating crits cause apparitions to do double damage instead of generating two apparitions. Which they did do - but that should have been enough. We know this is fine because it was fine six years ago during Legion when computers were weaker, but we still had 100 stack surrender to madness voidforms generating floods of apparitions in sustained multi-dot scenarios. It’s not like they doubled the polygon count of apparitions since the peak of Surrender to Madness during Legion.

Yes, you can make the argument that there are performance reasons. Just as there are performance reasons with numerous classes. But again, that doesn’t explain why they took a hatchet to priest animations specifically and allowed warlocks to still have 14 pets up, including 12 projectiles repeatedly firing, shadows and particle effects for all their pets, and so forth. That sounds an awful lot like their reasoning of “we cannot allow shadow to have animations because other classes have that.”

[Capslockfury-thrall]

There’s differences in costs of each asset.

Quite honestly, you CAN’T say that it is OK because legion worked OK when we don’t actually have knowledge of perf costs on any given thing. Especially since 100 stack surrender to madness on multiple priests didn’t happen in 5 man groups. It happened in raid where they’re already turned off.

[Capslockfury-thrall]

@Prayermonger-arthas

Does this expansion not have a price tag? Are we not paying a monthly subscription?

There’s cost/benefit analysis being done, surely. Money doesn’t buy time. I know people want to pretend it does, but just look at Amazon Game Studios.

Realistically, if your choice is ‘implement X thing’ or ‘implement Y thing’ and you think Y thing is going to give you better return, you do Y thing. That’s often how features get implemented in any game. There’s certain things considered requirements to get out and you ALWAYS budget them (New zones, new raid, new dungeons, new class skills). But when it comes to implementing a feature to remove player FX, that could very well be eating up time versus implementing new UI features, etc.

[Sluggernaut-thunderlord]

@Capslockfury-thrall

We haven’t always been able to generate quite as many as we currently can, is more the thing.

False. https://clips.twitch.tv/HumbleSpikyDogBudStar

There is already a setting for this called, “Spell Density”. This shouldn’t have ever been turned off for us, they should have just added it to the Spell Density filter, and before you say anything about it being hard to implement, it’s not. You simply add a binary flag or a numerical value to the spell’s defining characteristics, similar to Objects in C#, when they stop rendering for clients that have changed the Spell Density setting.

[Kukulcan-caelestrasz]

I miss the mop beta when shadowy appirations were our spender. I know it was goofy at the time but it was so much cooler than a third invisible dot. Now that it’s pretty much fixed surely they could make applications their own ability to replace a boring one.
Maybe people are too emotionally attached to dp though but personally I feel like appirations are the coolest part of our visual identity and the fact their damage sucks is pretty underwhelming.

[Gristle-malygos]

If we are doing this, can we make it so I don’t have to hear the clicks clicks gun noises of a hunter!

[Rotmaw-eranikus]

@Capslockfury-thrall

There’s differences in costs of each asset.

Then we wouldn’t have transmog and a million different combinations of races, character customization, gear, etc.

The apparitions are all the same model, texture, alpha effects, etc. Batching 10 or 100 on screen at once wouldn’t increase the draw calls since they are the same object in-game. A scar on a face, transmog, etc all increase the draw calls in a 25m raid way more than 100 apparitions on screen.

Personally, I feel the issue is effect bloat. There’s a reason even with a beefy rig that can handle everything on full tilt at all times people turn down spell effects so they see theirs over everyone else’s. Getting lost in a sea of alpha effects, particles, models, etc really limits the readability of what is happening on-screen. I run everything full tilt at 1440 with a lock at 140 for GSync except spell effects for this very reason.

Just my .02 from having ported games to Switch which is essentially a potato with a screen duct taped to it and some buttons. That thing is hella awful unless you ground-up on it. Here’s hoping Nintendo’s next console has more oomph.

[Capslockfury-thrall]

@Sluggernaut-thunderlord

False.

BfA with 120% haste corruptions being the exception is not the win you think it is. Especially when this DID cause performance issues for most people doing it. Seriously look up videos of tol dagor, and you’ll almost always see that pull causing some lag - and people recording videos (especially streamers/content creators) are usually not on a terrible rig - they can’t be without quality being complete trash.

@Sluggernaut-thunderlord

You simply add a binary flag or a numerical value to the spell’s defining characteristics, similar to Objects in C#, when they stop rendering for clients that have changed the Spell Density setting.

I will say, you simply do not know this for sure. I’ve seen databases that are set up in the worst ways. There’s no telling how sophisticated their spell density system is. Also I don’t know if you’ve ever USED the spell density setting, but it very much doesn’t just turn down spell effects very well. And depending on how ghosts are done, It very well could be an on-off system. I do agree that they could have determined a setting to turn them off at - but there does come the whole ‘I have to turn down my spell settings just because of the priest?’ problem.

@Rotmaw-eranikus

The apparitions are all the same model, texture, alpha effects, etc. Batching 10 or 100 on screen at once wouldn’t increase the draw calls since they are the same object in-game. A scar on a face, transmog, etc all increase the draw calls in a 25m raid way more than 100 apparitions on screen.

You say this way too confidently, lol. I’ve also shipped games that are multiplat, and have had perf issues happen as a result of Switch’s memory specifically and seen the team have to cut back on multiple things just to get Switch to not crash entirely. Even with every trick in the book thrown at it. Fact here is we’re not on switch.

But also, this is just not how batching works. Well it kind of is, but it kind of isn’t. Batching almost always gets used for static meshes. But you can’t just batch ANYTHING. Something like a projectile will still need to update its position, and if you’re not spawning those projectiles in a group, you’re not going to get nearly as much out of it. If we had a game where when the projectiles hit something they became static objects on the ground (like bullet casings), sure, you could build a way to batch all those static objects and allow for a ludicrous amount of bullet casings with very small increase to GPU pull. But hundreds of moving projectiles all firing at once out of sync? You’d have trouble. That’s why when you see a boatload of projectiles, (like a volley of archers) it’s usually NOT actually projectiles. And if it is, the arrows will all shoot suspiciously in sync volleys.

Also, again, Apparitions seem to all have their own emissives, which isn’t helping their problem.

---

And I think we’re skipping over the point where I would have preferred a middle ground. I just think that the ‘middle ground’ solution likely comes with caviats, and isn’t obvious. If it was they absolutely would take that path. It doesn’t make sense not to.

[Jarnkanu-illidan]

Its good alot of effects are not visible by allies and vice versa, it adds too much cluster in 25 and 5 man enviroments and makes seeing and reacting to mechanics harder for no good reason

[Jarnkanu-illidan]

@Primarch-icecrown

I speak of Ashes of COPIUM and while they have yet to actually put out a game, the performance they showed in their server stress tests make Blizzard look like a bad joke

These stress test are nothing to how live gameplay will be, look at new world stress test game was fine but in live you had it a full Poop show of lag from people AOE spamming.

[Arros-bleeding-hollow]

@Rotmaw-eranikus

The easiest performance saver here to tie in with class fantasy is to continue the insanity route - to the priest these things look as they do because we are insane, to everyone else they look like orbs. Only priests can see them as apparitions.

lul, i love the idea that youd be raising all kinds of hell on your sceen but on everyone elses youre not doing anything.

[Rotmaw-eranikus]

Meshes aren’t the issue. The game can run on very old hardware and there is LOD applied. Apparition meshes are very low poly count. I wouldn’t consider the materials emissive, either. They have some alpha particle “glow” but I don’t see anything that would be an emissive. With low LOD and the same texture being reused everywhere you’re looking at a small performance hit for the models and textures. Alpha transparency of particles would be the largest performance hit here but again with the same texture, probably refused in a million different effects from multiple classes to save draw calls from sheets and more than likely GPU instanced you’re not looking at much of an overhead considering the myriad of other things loaded up and not being culled I’d say it’s more of an annoyance issue and not performance issue. Not to mention the inclusion of dynamic resolution, engines have gotten much more mature these days with being able to push low end hardware. Take Ori and WotW on Switch. Absolutely incredible work on less powerful hardware than most mobile devices these days. They get the gold sticker for sure, imo. Just thinking about getting that going gives me a headache XD

Edit: I’ll add this is just guessing. I’ve seen devs get stuff completely wrong with how well some are able to work their smoke and mirrors. It’s all “don’t look behind the curtain” for most development because things that appear complex are exceedingly simple and things that seem simple can be exceedingly complex. But that’s half the fun of doing this stuff. I started fiddling with procgen animation and some things wound up being simple with incredible results while something far less noticeable and innocuous required more work than I’d like. Just one of those things .

[Sluggernaut-thunderlord]

@Capslockfury-thrall

BfA with 120% haste corruptions being the exception

You didn’t need 120% Haste to do this though. Apparitions used to be tied to Shadow Word: Pain, which was applied to everything hit by Searing Nightmare, so it was fairly common. This is also the most extreme example that has ever existed for Apparitions on screen at a given moment, we don’t even have a way to do this anymore since Apparitions are tied to Vampiric Touch now, which is capped behind 8 target Shadow Crash and how many Vampiric Touch spells you are willing to hard cast on a pull. (Which shouldn’t be more than 4.) So again, this can’t and won’t happen anymore, and NOW is when the visual is nerfed? Years later? It doesn’t make any sense.

@Capslockfury-thrall

and people recording videos (especially streamers/content creators) are usually not on a terrible rig

This is a terrible excuse, Blizzard drops support for hardware all the time. I remember when they dropped Laptop support for motherboards that didn’t have a separate Graphics Card chip many expansions ago. There is a settings option for this exact issue. No excuses, they just need to use it.

@Capslockfury-thrall

I will say, you simply do not know this for sure.

This argument is poor because you can’t say for sure either. We can state our experience with things but none of that matters anyway. I’d be extremely surprised though if it really is as hard as you seem to think it is.

@Capslockfury-thrall

Also I don’t know if you’ve ever USED the spell density setting, but it very much doesn’t just turn down spell effects very well.

Never had issues with this setting. I’ve used it in the past but haven’t had need for it during Shadowlands. What spells are you having issues with?

@Capslockfury-thrall

I do agree that they could have determined a setting to turn them off at - but there does come the whole ‘I have to turn down my spell settings just because of the priest?’ problem.

This is exactly why the settings exists. A better compromise would be to make the ghosts more opaque so things can be seen through them.

I think you’ve missed an extremely important and frankly frightening point with Blizzard just turning off a specific visual like this, at what point does it stop? Because me personally I played a Warrior for most of Shadowlands and the Spear of Bastion floor effect both visually dominates the ground with a bright white color but also hovers on a weird Z axis above all other floor effects. Never once did I think, Blizzard should turn off the spell visual for this spell.

If we are OK with them turning off visuals for specific spells that they deem a problem, we are going to end up not seeing anything but our own spells. This is such a terrible way to handle a problem that has a setting to fix it, and if it’s complicated and spells don’t work with it well then they need to spend some time to fix it. And if it isn’t ready for Dragonflight then that’s fine, but don’t just turn off visuals for those of us that both have the hardware to show them and like seeing them. An opt out or opt in are better options, we have a setting for this.

[Capslockfury-thrall]

@Rotmaw-eranikus

I’ll add this is just guessing. I’ve seen devs get stuff completely wrong with how well some are able to work their smoke and mirrors. It’s all “don’t look behind the curtain” for most development because things that appear complex are exceedingly simple and things that seem simple can be exceedingly complex.

That’s kind of my point.

Would you agree that as a dev, you wouldn’t make a decision like this unless you felt you had to?

Like, you make a game where clearly you have decided that abilities like this should feel good, and you’ve gone to lengths to where “non essential” in your filter barely filters ANYTHING in order to preserve vfx. And then you go and make a decision like this. You really think it’s specifically visual clutter, when there’s plenty of other examples of that in the game?

@Sluggernaut-thunderlord

This argument is poor because you can’t say for sure either.

Occam’s razor.

I’ll be honest, I don’t care enough to argue with you guys - and I don’t know why you’re acting like I am trying to argue. I’m just offering what is the most likely explanation considering how I see it. You’re yelling into the void by trying to argue with me lol.

[Sluggernaut-thunderlord]

@Capslockfury-thrall

I’ll be honest, I don’t care enough to argue with you guys - and I don’t know why you’re acting like I am trying to argue.

Maybe you didn’t mean it to come off as argumentative but you’ve been defending Blizzard’s action on this in several replies, even if you’re just meaning to share your experiences or theories. Which is fine to do so, but you can’t say that it presents you as being objective to the topic either.

@Capslockfury-thrall

Would you agree that as a dev, you wouldn’t make a decision like this unless you felt you had to?

If this were the case they would have made this decision back in BFA when it was at it’s peak in performance expense. Doing it now when it’s almost 1/4 of what it was, especially without communication to the players, just doesn’t make any sense. Why now? Why Apparitions? Why not other spells that also present performance expense? Surely there’s something else out there that is more expensive? Why did Shadow get singled out here when it has almost zero performance expense outside of Apparitions? Meaning their whole kit has almost no graphics at all.

It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s like someone made this decision and committed code without talking to anyone else, or the players.

[Rotmaw-eranikus]

As a dev I personally focus on the various feedback loops above all else. There’s no consistent metric tying sales to any one element like visuals, genre, etc. Most breakout games go gangbusters due to a system or mechanic, visuals and even performance be damned.

As far as plenty of other examples of visual clutter in the game - this is Blizzard. Consistency is sorely lacking across various elements of the game. I made the comment about perception vs reality for the both of us, not just me. I don’t see anything unreasonable about performance since there’s obviously levels of various graphical elements the end user can adjust - so I’m going to bank on having a hundred humanoid sized models flowing all over the screen as being more distracting than a purple blob on a single character. Again, I don’t see consistency with many elements in this game so I’m going to chalk it up to a guy or two at Blizz thought it was a good idea just like they usually do when it comes to class design. I think we’d see a much different game if every decision had to get signed off by consensus rather than “this small group is in charge of X” with heavy crosstalk between group managers.

[Morìs-moon-guard]

@Rotmaw-eranikus

Though I never knew this was an issue before with priests. You can already turn down spell effects for everyone but you in system settings.

I literally only started hearing the “bad 4 performance” mumbo jumbo crap like after the change happened, from the same two people, One of which is in this thread and i think we both know who I meant, lol.

[Mystakai-zuluhed]

Someone who doesn’t understand how shadow plays might see the doubling of apparations damage in Crit as functionally the same as doubling the number if apparitions spawned. I have to wonder if this change was made by someone who is aware of the interplay between apparitions, auspicious spirits, and puppet master.

[Capslockfury-thrall]

@Rotmaw-eranikus

I think we’d see a much different game if every decision had to get signed off by consensus rather than “this small group is in charge of X” with heavy crosstalk between group managers.

I don’t think you’d even see a game at that point. Consensus is never entirely reached in any design team I’ve ever seen - especially with live products. There’s always disagreements, and final say ends up being either a majority decision or comes from leads - but that tends to be a team to team thing.

Also, I just don’t agree on your assessment of performance cost, nor the things WoW are doing to deal with it, IE dynamic resolution scaling - which I’ve never seen in WoW and I’m not sure why it was mentioned. They’re specifically a PC audience and PC audience are VERY averse to things like that and will notice it immediately. I might agree that they don’t actually have emissives, I just remember them glowing more than they do - but it really doesn’t change what I’m saying all that much, just less concern.

Fact of the matter is when you’re creating a ton of projectiles, there’s a perf cost associated, and batching them isn’t easy when they have to update their position to the client. Slow moving projectiles with smoke and what I thought might be an emissive would be one of the larger projectile costs in the game regardless.

In the end though, we disagree, and that’s fine. I still don’t think a decision would be made like this without a larger conversation internally. And considering the amount of visual clutter that Blizzard tends to be fine with, as well as apparitions causing FPS issues in the past, I just think it’s very much performance related.

@Sluggernaut-thunderlord

Maybe you didn’t mean it to come off as argumentative but you’ve been defending Blizzard’s action on this in several replies,

No I haven’t. I said what I figured was probably the case based off my own experience in work. I responded to a few people who took issue with it, but I mean, I never actively defended Blizzard’s actions, and more than once said I wish they had a better middle ground implemented - just that I think with the time they have left to them, there may not have been an immediately better middle ground.

If you’re reading a stark defense in that, I think that’s a bias you’ve got.

@Sluggernaut-thunderlord

Apparitions used to be tied to Shadow Word: Pain, which was applied to everything hit by Searing Nightmare, so it was fairly common.

I did just realize I hadn’t addressed this though. When Shadowy Apparitions were tied to SW:P (like BfA), SN wasn’t in the game, dark void was. SN got introduced in SLands to plug a huge hole in our AoE, along with vampiric embrace being tied to apparitions. Also worth noting almost nobody took dark void, even for large AoE as a 2s cast with 30s CD - ESPECIALLY in late BfA with corruptions to a point where you could reasonably DoT up mob packs of like ~15 using void eruption/bolt along with VE. Giving up misery was a lot of potential damage loss in favor of AoE pulls of an extreme size. Very few dungeons were even worth that.

@Morìs-moon-guard

One of which is in this thread and i think we both know who I meant, lol.

You can just… say names? Not gonna lie this is a super weird post, guy. I offered an explanation, and the most likely explanation given the information we have. You can like it or dislike it, but it doesn’t require you be a dick or villainize ME or pretend I’m some ‘other’ for a change that I had as much agency in as you do.