Shaman Spell Batching Exploit

doesnt work that way friendo - as seen here with the Runeblade sword nerf thread - scaling and snapshotting was nerfed within a few weeks on top of blue post without any vanilla era evidence

TLDR - no one knew for certain whether it scaled or snapshotted in Vanilla as the only evidence found was from TBC onwards and yet decisive action was taken by the devs to nerf it.

Same thing applied to the Blessing of Sacrifice + Reckoning nerf several months ago

PS never mind the fact that we have no idea when the video’s footage was actually recorded, it’s upload date is Jun 28, 2006 - Patch 1.12.1 went live on 26 September 2006 - besides I only see ONE double crit within the batch window with multiple attempts over the course of the video.

That leads me to suspect that the one crit he got was just that, nothing more than a spell crit on the shock itself - if each successive Elemental Mastery cast with Chain Lightning + Shock double crits were shown then by golly you would have something.

Alas you don’t - sorry fam

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If all you’re going to do is move the goalposts after I do what you ask, then there’s no point in ever responding to your posts again.

that would be lovely - but i digress - even you said elemental shaman had an abundance of spell crit in your earlier post…

just simply ask yourself the following questions

If this mechanic was present in Vanilla - why wasn’t the Shaman able to get double crits on each Elemental Mastery cast showcased in the video upon which multiple EM Chain Lightning + Shock combos are cast?

Why was he only able to get ONE crit when several were shown?

You may call it moving the goalpost - I call it simple logic.

These fixes you mentioned were to fix Divine Favor causing a crit by using it AFTER a spell was cast.

You can still cast Divine Favor and Holy Light/Flash of Light and immediately follow up with a Holy Shock to get two guaranteed crits on those spells.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060529021949/http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-bugs&t=103709&p=1&tmp=1

Using Divine Favor immediately following Flash of Light can cause the spell to crit retroactively. - Future Patch

Here’s that post from 2008 I linked before:

If you have Divine Favor up, begin casting either Flash of Light or Holy Light on the target you are healing. Then as your heal goes off, press Holy Shock. If you do it right, both of your skills will get the Divine Favor buff effect, and both will crit. This works 100% of the time. If you have trouble doing it, you can spam a hotkey for Holy Shock. I find this trick to work great while healing hard hitting bosses.

Because his latency wasn’t good enough and he wasn’t spamming Earth Shock. Spell batching wasn’t changed until 2014, this 100% worked in Vanilla.

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I imagine this is easier to do than in vanilla because of the Spell Queue Window, which did not exist in vanilla. If you try to take a combat action while casting/in GCD within 400ms (the default SQW) of the end of the cast/cooldown, you will queue up the spell on the server to go off as soon as your current action is finished.

By spamming a shock while casting chain lightning, you will guarantee the shock will hit the exact same millisecond that chain lightning does, every single time.

Thank you for pointing this out. This was Vanilla…Most people had lag, so it doesn’t make sense to have the same batching. Batching was put in as something to remedy not break the game, so therefore it would be more Vanilla like to have a smaller window to more accurately capture what you see. Sounds to me like you never played Vanilla. If the goal is to recreate the experience of Vanilla, introducing new exploits with Vanilla mechanics does not seem like a step in the right direction.

See this rank 10 title I have? Yeah, I played Vanilla.

I don’t like 400ms spell batching. I don’t like all the flaws in the game but that’s what people wanted, hence the chants of “No-changes” that went largely uncontested, except by people like myself. You can go read posts from the first days of Classic’s announcement and see me fighting back this ridiculous “No-change” philosophy.

Facts are facts though, I’m not going to pretend something isn’t working right because I don’t like it.

welp if it makes you feel better, I don’t even play Classic anymore - not for this bug report but for the absolute craptastic communication job that the devs and QA have done overall with all of the Paladin bugs such as Consecration taking up a debuff slot, to shadow oil’s internal cooldown to lifestealing and life drain procs no longer being able to crit at all anymore

the game is monkey coding upon monkey coding - which is fine if there was actual communication back from the devs and QA - but those bug reports have been up for over 4 months now and not a peep from Blizz

likewise with the diamond flask report compared to runeblade being gutted and nerfed within a few weeks of being report.

gg

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QQ more. This was 100% a thing in Vanilla. I know because I mained a shaman. The community wanted NO CHANGES, warts, bugs and all. This is what we have. If you start making “changes” to the game, you have a huge slippery slope. NO CHANGES. WALL OF NO. BACK TO RETAIL IF YOU WANT BALANCE CHANGES.

yea i want shadow oil not to have an internal cd, consecration not to take up a hidden slot and lifestealing/life drain spell effects to crit as they functioned in Vanilla

Then advocate for those things. Instead of trying to make MORE changes.

lol are you for real?!?

This is the strange thing to me. Weird tiny “bugs” like this that existed in vanilla are fixed, yet game changing bugs are left alone. I don’t understand the logic behind these changes and they should either plan to fix them all or leave them as they were. Picking and choosing is just furthering the problem and confusion.

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Shatter combo wants to talk to you

oh yea forgot to add this bug to the list of “Are you frickin kidding me?!?”

Wow that sounds idiotic

Nope. Shatter works because the mage times two spells to land at the same time. All versions of WoW used batching and the shatter timing was pretty tight. This works because the buff on the shaman isn’t being removed fast enough due to the absolutely disgusting 400ms batching windows that some dev, who likely never played Vanilla, thought was reasonable. It’s a guaranteed double crit that is given to even dumpster tier Ele Shaman, granting them absolutely unhealable 100-0 burst if they have a lick of gear.

Eh, the grounding totem thing is much more reasonable to me. It’s the same logic as shatter combos- the spell has to land to break the totem/nova, so any fast traveling/instant spell will hit the totem if there’s another spell in flight.

They probably thought using the same 400ms batching window that was in Vanilla was appropriate for a recreation of Vanilla.

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“In the past, back when servers had less computing power than phones nowadays have, these windows could be very large, with some games having up to 200ms windows of batching, including WoW. With better technology and servers, this system was improved over the years and, while it still exists, and effects from it can still be seen, the windows are much smaller, being 20ms wide for abilities in retail WoW. This means that abilities cast within 20ms of each other are considered simultaneous in the eyes of the retail WoW servers, while this window was about 200ms during Vanilla.”

I don’t want to get too deep into the under-the-hood workings of WoW servers, but here’s a super short version. Any action that one unit takes on another different unit used to be processed in batches every 400ms. Some very attentive people may have noticed that healing yourself would give you the health instantly (minus client/server latency), whereas healing another unit would incur a delay of between 0ms and 400ms (again, on top of client/server latency). Same with damaging, applying auras, interrupting, knocking back, etc.