I feel that this mechanic is extremely outdated, and needs to be addressed.
Why do casters suffer delayed spell casts just from taking damage? What’s the reasoning behind this mechanic’s existence?
I feel like it’s a mechanic that Blizzard thought was fitting for the fantasy in vanilla, and they never bothered to remove it or address it. It’s outdated and honestly should’ve been removed a while ago.
Can you imagine the outcry if taking damage caused melee to suffer a .5 - 1 second gcd? Blizzard would remove it immediately.
You could also probably argue that melee shouldn’t be able to zigzag through a caster to cancel a spell cause they weren’t momentarily on front of them. We already send spells flying through allies and objects like WSG stumps.
Most the time you’d still want to be facing your opponent to keep a visual. Of course stuff like cone of cold would still be be frontal only. A few abilities like gouge would he affected.
How has the fantasy changed? Should the pushback be replaced with no pushback at all, or should it be replaced by interruption? It’s still the same game as in Vanilla; I don’t see a reason for a change.
Presumably melee abilities don’t get pushback because the abilities involve trained actions designed to be performed in melee, unlike spell casting.
I’d like to see them give (back) certain abilities to low-mobility casters to create some breathing room when the mongoloids decide to sit on you and spam their swifty macros.
the pushback was there because ranged dps (mage) did the same damage as a warrior except the warrior was limited to melee. They balanced that by giving a warrior intercept/charge and the ranged a pushback.
They also gave hybrids a hybrid tax where they didn’t do as much damage as dps specs because they have a heal ability in their spellbook.
None of that exists in the game anymore. Melee have near 100% uptime vs how it was in vanilla.
To me those are relatively minor class balancr changes. I do agree melee range closing has been made excessively easy, but I think the solution is to make it less trivially easy to close, not to set things up so ranged become essentially melee.
A shaman and pally doing 50% of the damage of a warrior/mage to equal damage is not a minor class balance change…
Stance dancing and losing a chunk of your rage in order to charge in combat to close gaps vs charge whenever every 15-20 sec is not a minor class balance change.
Hunter’s deadzone and not able to auto attack with their ranged wep while running isn’t a minor class balance change. Or trapping in combat.
Rogues sap breaking stealth or at best 90% chance to not break stealth isn’t a minor class balance change either.
It probably made more sense back before melee became near-unkitable. I think kitibility is actually the issue. Not just mobility but also the “effective reach of melee” which was increased a while back from what I understand. You’d think someone who can turn into animals would be able to outrun a guy in full plate mail, but hey. It’s not my class fantasy it’s Blizz’s class fantasy I’m supposed to fantasize.