I’m not sure if this is to try to emulate Vanilla, or if it’s the only thing standing behind a completely broken server experience due to hardware limitations, but the render distance for enemy players is FAR too short.
Almost every time I’ve died out in the world to other players, it’s due to an army of 5+10 players appearing from thin air within less than 100 yards from me, giving me literally no time at all to react to it and stealth, particularly when traveling on the road on mounts. I have less than 50ms and use Leatrix addon to auto dismount, so it isn’t a matter of reaction time.
This is annoying for both PvP and PvE, as it makes it really hard to prepare for combat in PvP even if you have high gameplay awareness and are already looking in the right direction, or in PvE because you can’t easily gauge where mobs have respawned or have been killed in a reasonable area.
It makes sense to limit the view distance of mobs and players to some degree to shorten the gap between people’s hardware capabilities, but the distance that it’s currently set at is borderline laughable. I don’t ever remember this being an issue before, and I’ve been playing since 2006. I think that it would really help to make the PvP situation everyone has been complaining about a little bit better to extend the render distance of mobs and players by another 50-100 yards, or better yet at roughly the same distance or slightly farther than the lowest terrain view distance setting (if there even is a view distance setting anymore).
It was. Its part of the reason the flying killed world pvp so much. People would draw in and then out before you could react and even if you tried chase, you had almost no hope of guessing which way they went.
And I’d imagine there would be a crowd shouting “#nochanges” towards any suggestions to alter that for the sake of gameplay health, despite having no negative consequence outside of performance impact that likely isn’t even in question in 2019.
This is a huge problem, I really hope it is not this bad in bg’s. Right now if you and an enemy are both running toward each other on epic mounts, they don’t even render in until they are pretty much on top of you in range of abilities.
Edit: with the current view distances, I don’t see that watching the center flag in AB from the cliff at lumberyard is going to be possible. Or the other flags for that matter, fights were 100% visible at the other flags from the cliff in vanilla. Even on my potato pc then.
I’ve played literally every class in the game extensively up to Wotlk. This affects far more than rogues. Do you have a valid point to make as to why you don’t want to be able to see enemies and prepare for them? You don’t want to equip your PvP or engineering trinkets before you get jumped? You enjoy not being able to tell when mobs respawn near you in a questing area without repeatedly circling every square inch of it? This is a really obnoxious feature for literally everyone, regardless of how they choose to enjoy the game, and it doesn’t benefit the spirit of Classic in any logical way if it doesn’t have a technological reason.
As for your complaint of rogues, warlocks and mages are just as, if not more overpowered overall in 1v1 and MUCH stronger in group play; If you disagree, you’re either not very good at your class, or couldn’t see them because the render distance is so short so you didn’t have the right pet out and/or didn’t have a health and soulstone ready. Just getting one row of dots off will kill any rogue from full hp after they’ve killed you anyway, but why don’t we keep the thread on topic?
I tested the view distance after I made this post last night. From the Orgrimmar entrance, you cannot see anybody in the city. It’s completely empty. Only when you reach the braziers near the gate do people begin appearing at the bank.
I’m highly doubting that we will be able to see anybody at any other node than the one we’re at in AB. This doesn’t promote a healthy PvP environment at all. There is such a massive handicap on player awareness that the only way to be informed and react quickly in a BG is if everyone in the BG is constantly spamming in /bg chat or in voice comm in a premade. That widens the gap between pug and premade even farther than it already is. Who wants to spend their BGs reading and typing in chat log half the time? I think this seriously puts a damper on rewarding a player for being aware of their surroundings, and making PvP even more of a rock paper scissors game where all that matters is who was lucky enough to have the right items equipped and who has the class advantage.
To have to dismount and use that constantly wouldn’t make any logical sense. It could have some small use if it actually extends mob vision range, but outside of spamming it, it wouldn’t be much more than a dollar store bandaid.
hey for what it’s worth i made a thread about the same topic a few days ago, i believe this is the biggest issue in the game (besides faction balance and this recent honor snafu)
however, in retail, BGs have infinite render distance–even AV. this gives me confidence that they won’t have really meme render distances in BGs
While I have zero confidence that this will be the case, I sure do hope you’re right. This problem seems like something Blizzard should have taken into account before it was ever implemented this way in the first place. The lack of foresight is astounding. I bet thousands upon thousands of player deaths in PvP are entirely at the fault of the render distances since there basically isn’t even enough time to turn around and run the opposite direction before you’re already slowed/stunned/polymorphed off mount etc etc. It’s such a toxic situation overall between this and the massive kill squads of keyturners farming 200 honor per hour in 10-15 man groups; not too surprising that so many people have quit or cut their game time massively since p2 was implemented.