why do people keep saying the spy addon was buffed? what did they do to buff it?
Blizzard reduced the combat log detection range. This is actually a nerf but some players see it as a good thing because the detections they get now are guaranteed to be closer. You could say it’s more precise, as opposed to being more broad. But if rogues wanted to stealth from further away without being seen… that’s exactly what they got. An obviously better solution would have been to just remove the stealth text altogether… but this is Blizzard we’re talking about. You have to be thankful they cared at all. “Day late and dollar short” is like their company motto.
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It’s a buff for me. When I am farming, I often position myself to see patrols of horde. With the nerf to range, they often don’t get the ping on me so I stop attacking and just chill. A lot of the horde on my server are amazingly blind and can even just walk right past because they’ve developed a reliance on it.
It also now warns you when you’re in immediate danger and it doesn’t bother you as much with inconsequential enemy players.
Also, you can still get the ping just by mousing over a target if you have a mod that targets on mouse over. So you can just glaze over a group of targets to find someone even at the max range.
It’s only a buff to certain play styles honestly. It’s a nerf to people LOOKING for players to kill since they don’t immediately get pings just by walking into the area and using a spyglass.
They nerfed the RvR ability of the addon to detect and add up the number of enemies in a given area through walls and across large amounts of terrain. This allowed people to get a good idea of how many people there were along with being able to select people by class just by clicking the list of generated names.
Solo or Small Scale PvP is generally buffed as you want the data but don’t want overwhelming amounts of clutter. The change also didn’t do much about stealthed targets other than narrowing the distance to 50yds, which can be considered a buff in most cases.
This is quite the nerf to the player count and raid detection end of things. It also creates an issue for it that people might not be considering, as well as potentially an issue that I have not tested of yet (I’m busy).
- The buttons in Spy seem to be designed in a way that doesn’t allow for them to be generated in combat at all. It acknowledges the player, but it doesn’t add a button with their name to allow players to /target them. This doesn’t need to be the case, but I guess Spy didn’t take this into consideration.
- I’ve yet to test this, but I’m pretty sure Aura detection occurs when a player first enters view distance. It could be when the player enters log distance, but I’m not sure that this is the case. This is where the lazy part of Spy gets a lot of power. If it is lost, then it will be much harder to detect specific classes. I’ll try to investigate it later if I ever get the time (job is keeping me busy).
I might also test out some methods of detection that Spy hasn’t seemed to consider. This might restore some lost functionality to Spy if they work and are implemented. I actually had been testing one of said methods and it improved my own addons detection beyond that of Spy.
Potential Buff: A 50 yd range on combat log can be used to tell if a player is near range of spells. If a player loses activity in the combat log, then that means that they are outside range of spells. This could make the GUI pretty informative. Think of friendly target raid frames being used for gauging distance, but for enemies. Coincidentally, I was working on something like that. Maybe I can experiment.