As you know you can place a spell and bypass positioning reticle placement as follows:
/cast [@player] Death and Decay
or
/cast [@player] Summon Infernal
or
/cast [@player] Blizzard
etc…
The above examples allow you to cast a spell without the need to place the poisitioning reticle, which in many situations is slow and very hard to do (camera angles, walls affecting camera or obstructing view etc).
You can also do
/cast [@cursor] Summon Infernal
etc…
which calls the spell without the reticle and places it wherever the cursor happens to be at the time.
What we are very much missing is a construct like:
/cast [@target] Some Spell
The above would allow us to cast a spell, without the reticle, and placed at the target’s location.
This has purposely been excluded by Blizzard devs, and I am not sure what their reasoning has been.
However, while playing my Destruction Warlock today, I noticed that the Azerite Essence “Vision of Perfection” major randomly activates Summon Infernal !!!
It does this fully automatically, at the target’s location, and there is no positioning reticle involved.
It is proven beyond doubt that the technology does exist and is being used by Blizzard, so why can’t we also not have it as “/cast [@target] Spell” ?
I use that essence on my warlock myself (its amazing). I think the answer here would likely be… Blizzard are allowed to do anything they want, whether they want players to be able to do it is a different matter. It would be interesting to know why though, I will admit to that!
As a guess, I would suspect it would make certain raid mechanics a little too easy… ranged players auto targetting a different NPC and interrupting it with one click of a button…
It is ludicrous that I have two Infernals active at the same time, one which I placed manually and another which was automatically placed by Vision of Perfection! If you were an observer you’d not know which Infernal is the manual one and which is the automatic. The automatic one requires no skill or positioning.
There is no good reason for this inconsistent (and stupid) design.
One of them is an exception to the rule because how else would vision work with a class who’s major offensive cooldown is a placed ability.
The point of placed abilities is when you use them, you have to place them with some degree of accuracy. Imagine if you could just target cap totem or spirit link at people, or mass dispel.
Kinda defeats the point of them being aimed in the first place.
