Spell Batching in Classic

Since we first announced World of Warcraft Classic, we’ve seen questions about spell batching. While we never really eliminated spell batching in WoW, we did change how (and how often) we process batches of actions coming from players, so you’re less likely to notice that processing in today’s game. We’ve been working to ensure that in WoW Classic, the gameplay of activating spells and effects will not differ from the experience of playing original WoW.

It was relatively common in the original game to see a warrior Pummel a mage who simultaneously and successfully Polymorphed the warrior. The mage suffered Pummel damage but no spell-school lock, because the mage didn’t get interrupted. This could seem paradoxical, but it could happen because the Pummel and Polymorph were both in the same batch, and were both valid actions at the start of the batch. For the most part, things like that don’t happen in modern WoW, but they still can. We’ve made improvements to batch frequency, and the game is much more responsive than it used to be. Still, if you manage to get both a Pummel and a Polymorph into a tiny processing window in modern WoW, you’ll experience the same behavior as in original WoW.

As with many other areas of WoW Classic, authenticity is our primary concern. It used to be the norm that combat flow and PvP balance were defined and tuned in a game where spell messages were resolved less frequently. There was a single game loop that processed all messages sent and received every server tick. Nowadays, the game processes multiple loops for messages of differing priorities. Spell casts are high priority, and have been for a long time.

For WoW Classic, we’re moving spell casts to a low-priority loop that will cause them to be processed at the frequency that best fits how the game actually played in version 1.12. Two mages will be able to Polymorph each other somewhat reliably, resulting in two sheep nervously pacing around at range. Two warriors will be able to Charge one another, and the end result will be both warriors standing stunned in each other’s original location.

We think it’ll be fun to see those sorts of things happening again.

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Oh Lord, I love you guys.

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Whoa, awesome!

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This is amazing. Classic team exceeding my expectations with every update.

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Neat.
#Nochanges

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PvP will be great again! Thank you so much. And thanks to Xjum for leading the charge on the forums and slaying several trolls along the way.

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Awesome thanks!!!

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This wasn’t something I was super-invested in, but I feel very good about this outcome all the same. :sunglasses:

Thanks, Classic team

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These latest updates have made a lot of my worries go away. Love it. #nochanges

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Thank you for this. From these recent blue posts it seems like classic will be restored pretty faithfully.

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Not something I was incredibly invested in, but the dedication to authenticity is always great to see.

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Thank you for listening and for the news!!

#NoChanges

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THANK YOU BLIZZAARD!!! You really do care!

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This is great news!

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Nice work.

#ClassicIsKing

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Wow. This is a very pleasant surprise. The dedication to authenticity is real.

Now if we could just get wall jumping back…

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I love how much the devs are listening and keeping things like they were originally. Great work.

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Thank you so much! This is great news!

I’m so happy to see Blizzard be faithful to the original game and I’m so happy about the amazing communication these past couple weeks!

Great job!!!

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Amazing!!!

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