Spell Batching - YIKES

So now that it’s been out for a while - I just want to vent about spell batching, again.

For me, it makes things really unenjoyable. I realize many people in the community enjoy it…but I can’t stand it.

Things I’ve noticed:

  1. I can be counter spelled in PVP well after stopping my heal. Tested it many many times with a mage friend. It’d be funny if it didn’t happen all the time.

  2. Grounding totem frequently misses the cast you want to ground

  3. Same with tremor totem and fear, it should pulse once you drop it and it does, but the fear hits after the pulse and you’re sent off into oblivion

  4. The NS + CLB + Shock combo - this is one shotting people and it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t work the way it does.

  5. On mages, the delay on slows when questing/etc; is ridiculous.

  6. Heals landing and healing then the player dying anyway. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a heal land, health bar go up, player die. Just insane.

  7. Druids have a double issue, they can get mana burned in form, but also any player can get mana burned despite going LOS just before the cast finishes.

I’m sure there’s lots of other things. Just some I’ve noticed. I know melee, especially rogues, are having some issues with it as well.

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Blizzard doesn’t care. They want this to die before shadowlands releases. They will do nothing to improve or fix this game.

Again, they want this to die, it’s just here to get players that quit over BFA back into the game so they will buy shadowlands

I hope ppl aren’t suckered into preordering shadowlands, it is more of the same with a slight nod to classic.

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adapt. not that hard to play a bit more proactively.

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Out for a while meaning the 3.5 months of Classic or the actual 15 years it’s been around?

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Yeah i love earthshocking a polymorph and still becoming a sheep despite the fact that my earthshock not only interrupted the cast but also killed the mage casting it

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I’m actually moderately confident these types of shenanigans were entirely doable in vanilla and for however long after.

As for spell batching they made a comment that their attempt to emulate how vanilla played definitely meant stupid things like two mages sheeping each other was going to be possible again. As to how accurately it’s emulating vanilla behaviorit is probably anyone’s guess (based on their totally accurate 15 year old memory).

It was of course “possible”, but you’d have to time it so precisely that it almost never occurred. Having a low latency was really important as being able to have your actions processed sooner was much better.

For two mages to sheep each-other with different latency they would have to start at different times to compensate for it.

Having no spell batching is critical for PVP.

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I’m not. But I’m very sure wall walking was doable. So let’s just change up whatever we pull out of a hat, right?

Spell batching is totally, totally off. So is leeway. Yeah melee can still hit you from a mile away as long as you’re both running. This was not a Vanilla thing.

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Many people said they wanted it because it’s authentic and there is a blue post explaining the efforts taken to simulate the effect of spell batching. It’s not something that’s in the game accidentally or because they are unable to ‘fix’ it.
Personally I think it’s weird that people want to introduce random chance into the equation when fighting. Getting a little chuckle out of two warriors charging each other at the same time is not worth the sort of inaccuracies OP is describing but either way I can only play the game blizz puts in front of me and that includes spell batching. I knew what it would be going in so I’m not going to complain about it.

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Well I know wall walking was, thanks swifty. I sort of assume it is still available unless the 1.12 client patched it. Now I’m curious if the horde WSG wall jump is in game.

I think leeway is pretty silly because it’s a mechanic introduced in a world where it’s not countering anything like it did in vanilla so it serves no purpose unless Blizzard started to lag people out to make it serve the purpose.

Spell batching is an attempt to emulate how the game acted and is its own thing. Whether or not it’s doing the job properly is a different discussion.

As a warlock in PvP, who also was a very active warlock PvPer in Vanilla, there is a drastic increase in the likelihood that I Shadow Burn somebody, the spell consumes a shard and mana and goes on cooldown, but the person dies and does not register the damage from shadow burn so I get no contribution or a shard back. I’m not talking about resist/miss, that is an entirely separate issue. This is purely a batching mechanic that did happen occasionally in Vanilla but nowhere near as much as it does in Classic.

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Those people want to make me bang my head against a wall. Look at the list of ongoing, unintended, still persistent bugs and tell me Blizzard is capable of pulling off spell batching without totally jacking it up.

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It was still a thing in TBC, so this was a change to how Vanilla worked.

And yet in order to try to create an authentic Vanilla experience they emulate lag. As if such a thing could work properly.

So crazy.

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Spell batching has always been a part of the game. These things happened all the time in vanilla.

People just don’t realize how much work Blizzard did on this aspect when competitive PVP became a thing.

Authentic to what? This isn’t how it was.

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played vanilla from the start and I don’t recall the original limitations of spell batching causing as many things as what people are describing. I’m not sure what it was meant to achieve apart from ‘no changes’.
I’m sure it’s not easy to perfectly replicate an imperfection and that’s probably why it doesn’t work the way people thought it would.
Or they just aren’t remembering it correctly.

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“It was kinda laggy once in vanilla so we broke the whole system on purpose, whatever lol just accept stupid broken mechanics or you are bad” -Blizzard

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While I’d love to say, “Yes this is it.”, unfortunately, it is not.

It is a manually coded rinkydink attempt at imitating old computers and old internet. They have even admitted themselves that they are having trouble getting the code to behave properly.

While I can appreciate their gesture, it is causing more wonky results than good.

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The problem with spell batching in classic is that it ISN’T authentic. Things like being spell locked by a counterspell yet still having the spell that was counterspelled go off, or a rogue cheap shotting you at the same time that you warstomp them leaving you both stunned happened in vanilla, but it wasn’t anywhere near as frequent as the seemingly 100% chance it has in classic

They are basically making it so that the game by default behaves as if both players have terrible ping regardless of how fast their connection is, its not authentic to have everyone have simulated 500 ping lag 100% of the time, these things would happen maybe 1/3 of the time depending on connection back in the day but blizzard has decided to just make it happen 100% of the time becauseits hard coded to create lag that wasn’t always there.

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Yes… and that work should have applied to classic just like all the other server upgrades…

Batching was only added in late beta for classic due to a few people whining… And it was always a cludge in classic.