And it’s absolutely infuriating. In vanilla yes there was pushback, but your spells could never get knocked all the way back to zero. There was some kind of diminishing return that allowed for your cast to finish. I just spent ten seconds casting a two second regrowth which never went off because it kept resetting to zero and was eventually killed. Before that I spent around eight seconds trying to cast a two second rank two healing touch (I purposely tried the faster cast rank to combat the pushback) but it never went off and I was killed (this was against two NPCs at the same time – a ranged with a rifle and a melee with a 2H). I’ve tried every one of my healing skills with a cast time and they just get knocked back and back and back and back and back and that really should not be happening at all. Any NPC that dual wields seems to be able to almost completely shut down a cast. I can get some to go off sometimes, but it’s more consistent with them locking me down than it is with me actually finishing casting. If you get aggro on more than one NPC, game over. You’ll likely die before you get any spells off.
Please don’t @ me with “welcome to vanilla” or “that’s how it was back then” because no, that’s not how it was. Please also don’t @ me with “then just spend the ten talent points to prevent pushback.” I had a druid in vanilla and as feral, I never needed to spend those points there.