Spell batching is stupid, please remove it

I like spell batching.

:cocktail:

So you like the batching implementation we have in classic which is not the same as vanilla?

Every single example someone has used to “prove” it’s not working like it did in Vanilla, I’ve debunked.

If you’re suggesting that that’s a reason to change it in and of itself, I think you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the forum.

You should read the other reasons people want it gone. Not just because people complain about it on forums.

I should? Why? You do realize I don’t work for Blizzard and have no say in whether it gets removed, right?

Just so you’re more informed I guess. You don’t have to.

When a shaman pulls a mob with earthshock, the earthshock pulls the mob, does damage, and interrupts the initial cast, even though the cast came after the the mob was pulled with earthshock.

I don’t think that is how it worked in vanilla. Most people say that spell interrupts were processed on a separate batch from other actions.

Also, I don’t remember improved Blizzard not applying the slow until the following batch after the initial damage. In Classic this means mobs will often run straight through your Blizzard.

Lots of discussion here. Though most is based on people’s memories from 15 years ago.

Regardless, almost everyone thinks Classic spell-batching is different from vanilla, and nearly everyone hates Classic spell-batching. I don’t know if Blizzard will change it at this point. It isn’t bad enough that people quit playing because of it so Blizzard doesn’t really care.

Got anything on spell interrupts, especially earthshock interrupting after a pull? Were interrupts on a separate batch? Was there any kind of batch priority at all?

The necessary technical concessions server engineers made a decade and a half ago isn’t what made Classic a good MMO, it was the conscious gameplay design of it’s developers. Who cares how accurate it is? It doesn’t benefit the game.

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No, I don’t know about any of that. That’s going to require a ton of research through archives and old videos. Everything else people have claimed is wrong with spell batching I’ve been able to contradict through videos or old archives of the WoW forums.

Like the vendor lag we have when purchasing or selling items. Here’s a video of Joana’s leveling guide showing the same vendor lag back in Vanilla:

Alright, so retroactive spell interrupts, right? There were changes during Vanilla that prevented retroactive Divine Favor crits on Paladin heals:

Patch 1.7.0 (2005-09-22): Paladins can no longer activate Divine Favor on the previously cast healing spell.

Patch 1.11.0 Divine Favor: It is no longer possible to cast this immediately after a healing spell and “retroactively” make it a critical hit.

There’s also evidence all over old forums that implies many of these spell batching fixes didn’t even work. It’s a little funny actually, what I think the fix did was just make your Divine Favor get canceled. It happens to me on Classic, If I spam Divine Favor while I’m casting a heal, sometimes my Divine Favor goes on CD and doesn’t cause a retroactive crit.

Anyways, even if spell batching isn’t functioning 100% correctly, do we really want Blizzard to just “fix” it? It’s still going to suck for 99% of the things it causes, right? Like, there’s a reason they changed it, there’s a whole huge post by Celestalon detailing how awful it was and how defensive spells and heals would just dissipate into the nether. It’s awful, it’ll still be awful even if it IS bugged and they fix it.

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With Divine Favor, you are basically casting your heal and divine favor in the same batch, so even though divine favor was cast after the heal, it would still be applied to the heal.

With Earthshock in Classic, the spell action doesn’t get batched but the effect of the spell gets batched. So you cast earthshock on a caster mob, he turns and begins casting a spell, and then the earthshock effect gets processed in the next batch, and that effect is the interrupt. So when you pull a mob with earthshock it always interrupts the spell even though you pulled the mob with earthshock before they were casting.

In the video in the thread I linked, the guy posted a mage video where it seems to show his spell interrupts not being on the batch. A lot of people think spell interrupts were processed on a secondary high-priority batch.

Does Counterspell in Classic have the same delayed interrupt effect that Earth Shock does?

Earth Shock has two components, the initial damage and then the interrupt. It’s the same with melee interrupts as well, but Counterspell is a single component. You said the damage comes first, could it be that abilities with two components are batched twice?

I know people were complaining about Execute being batched twice, and lo and behold:

Execute

Effect #1 Dummy
Value: 124
Server-side script

Effect #2 Trigger Spell

Execute

Earth Shock

Effect #1 School Damage (Nature)
Value: 16 (SP mod: 0.154)

Effect #2 Interrupt Cast
Mechanic: Interrupted

Counterspell

Effect Interrupt Cast
Value: -1

I’m trying to find Vanilla video of Shaman casting Earth Shock and interrupting heals to see if there is a delay from the damage to the interrupt. I’ll report back if I actually find some clear video evidence one way or the other.

In the video, the mage’s counterspell didn’t seem to be on the primary batch, it always looked instant(he cast it and it interrupted immediately). In Classic all interrupts are on the batch, which is why you can interrupt after someone has already cancelled their cast, or why spells go off long after an interrupt went off.

But, hard to really tell from the video, and he could have just gotten lucky and cast right on the batch. As I said, a lot of people claim that interrupts were processed separately on a faster batch.

Some people have argued that it doesn’t work how it did in 2006, others say it does. In the end I (and most people) don’t really care how it worked in 2006. It makes gameplay feel clunky and I feel that the game would be MUCH better without it.

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I’d like to point out that spell batching existed until WoD. I am pretty positive MoP was not this unresponsive.

Spell batching is artificially placed now. It used to make sense because it was 16 years AGO.

The “spirit of classic” was to have a smooth/more fair running game, and given internet connections at the time it made sense.

Keeping with the “spirit of classic” spell batching doesn’t make sense. To a new player it looks like a blatant bug because of how broken of an idea it is in 2020.

its just another word for server tick rate, which every game has to this day. the ticks are just getting faster

still possible for two mages to poly each other

I agree, if people want the original laggy experience they can use dial up.

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