You can try to improve your odds but it’s still random. You seem to think batching is tied to your spell and works in a consistent way while the opposite is true. Your spell lands in a batch, whether it lands in the batch you want is RNG made worse by your latency to the server.
Hence why you can have two people consistently performing actions with the same timing and randomly getting different results. The smaller the batching window the more consistently things work, which is good.
Not a very good one if you don’t understand the basics of why batching adds a huge RNG element.
Batches happen on a predictable cadence, so if you notice when a previous batch was resolved, you can feel when future batches will resolve. It is only random for players who are not paying attention to the tick rate of the server, which you can actually feel in events and actions involving your character.
Having some element of gameplay which is not 100% reliable is not necessarily anti skill. Skill is involved in understand odds and risk/reward tradeoffs and making a jugement. It’s particular rich that you are trying to use this line of argument in a straight face in a game that involves a ton of mechanics that are truly more random and less controllable than batching, such as critical strikes to name one of many obvious examples.
Batching is far more reliable and reproducible than critical strike RNG in the hands of a good player. Your argument is a terrible one.
If you don’t understand why a smaller batching window will lead to much more consistent gameplay I don’t know what to tell you.
Crits are a terrible comparison as crit rate is an actual gameplay mechanic controlled by the players not an artifact of server side performance optimization.
This is somewhat different from what you stated previously:
You seem to be stating that batching is based on RNG.
Which may explain what you are trying to get at with your other point that the consistency would change.
When someone says something like, “if you don’t agree with what I am stating is the case, I don’t know what to tell you,” I’m generally wary as to whether that person has any understanding of what it is they think they believe.
And yet, players have more ability to influence spell batching than they do crit RNG, so your point that it’s bad because it makes gameplay “unreliable” is a stupid one. Batching is consistently reproducible.
This whole argument boils down to me saying that batching is consistently reproducible and you plugging your ears and screaming “LALALA no it’s NOT nobody can do that”
You can at best try to improve your RNG, but no sorry batching is not consistent. You can keep pretending otherwise but you are doing nothing more than trying to gimmick a bad system.
If you were truly skilled and valued actual skill you would be glad for the batching changes.
Average human reaction speed is 250 ms. Meaning that, assuming you are at least average, any decision you make as a reaction to ANY form of data input in this game that results in you putting a command of any sort in will have a window of 150ms of time to “catch” in your target batch. Now sure, some people are faster. Some are slower. But I can pretty solidly say that it is going to be physically impossible to continually keep track of everything going on in the game so precisely that you can predict the outcome of events to 1/10th of a second precision reliably.
Also, as another note: average human blink lasts 100ms. Meaning if something happens at the moment you blink your eyes, and you react with no “lag” of the mind or body at average human speed, your window is now 50ms.
I can’t feel the batch window. Sorry I’m a bad player
I also play from Asia with pings from 250ms to 450ms. If you remove leeway, i’m Fked. Without it, I will have to predict enemies’ movement 250ms before it happens.
You have no idea what you are talking about…
The higher batching was not RNG it was an increased skillcap that could be used/abused if you knew how to use that mechanic
Now you will constantly get caught in random cc with not counterplay other than luck
Yep, people seem to think they have 0ms reaction time and are gods at the game when it is not even possible.
Even if you predict something and try to react to it you are not guaranteed to counter it, very competitive…
Surely if TBC arenas are coming and this is a change to make that competitive then a higher batching window would make the most sense and not 10ms batches
Batching is not RNG, but it effectively feels like RNG from the perspecitve of a player.
Say a mage starts casting a 1.5 second Polymorph. Let’s say spell batching windows resolve after 0.3, 0.7, 1.1 and 1.5 seconds into the cast. If I drop a grounding totem or cast Earth Shock on the mage in that 1.1 to 1.5 second window, I eat the polymorph anyways.
Compare and contrast having that window resolve at say 1.09 and 1.49 seconds into the cast. I no longer eat the polymorph even though I countered it in the same timeframe.
The first window “robbed” me of 400 ms of potential reaction time. It feels like RNG (even if it isn’t) and well “bull feces” from the perspective of the player because they can’t control the batching windows, the server does. Any time you attempt to interrupt a spell or heal someone before they die, doing it 400 ms before the end of the cast or before the next damage intake is effectively rolling the dice that the server tick is in your favour.
What a few people seem to have missed is that this update regarding seal twisting isn’t a Change it is actually finally a much anticipated and long awaited Fix… the reality is seals have been Extremely bugged for the entirety of classic, purely due to the way that the spell priority/artificial batching system was implemented.
Tl/dr the way seals are functioning due to the artificial batching system is bugged and combinations such as SoR / SoC twisting are broken because of it.
Seal Twisting should indisputably be in game and unfortunately has been majorly broken up until this new PTR fix.
Moving forward into tbc this will actually prove to be a great fix to the paladin class with SoC on SoC twisting reimplemented, specifically to the alliance, it will mean that should blizzard choose to not add seal of blood to both factions then alliance will actually have a not as good, but at least remotely competitive option (without which alliance would have literally nothing), which will assist in reducing the horde faction imbalance which is innate to tbc.
All in all I’d just like to say thank you to blizzard for finally fixing a bug which has plagued paladins for the entirety of classic, and for providing a measure for enhancing faction balance moving into tbc.
In their zeal to changeover data packets from the original WoW engine to the Legion engine, sadly they retained batching and leeway, which obviously malfunction in Classic.
It only feels like RNG from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know how the game works. If you spend enough time dueling mages you will get your grounding totem consistency close to 100%.
During the tbc/wrath days it was common to see all the gladiator priests dueling their teammates in between arena games just to practice shadow word:death cc breaks, which by the way, only worked because of the 400ms batching. And guess what, the ones who did it consistently were the ones getting good ratings.
Do you have any proof that SoR/SoC twisting worked?
Even in TBC seal twisting guides I can find no evidence of it being a thing. When it comes to alliance side, the best I can find is that SoV specifically did not work with SoC twisting.
It seems to me as though this really is a pretty heavy handed change to the game.
