Instant portals for mage?

anyone managed to try this on ptr?
i tryed to make portal but it cast normally
anyone know how to make it instant?

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THat would make for an awesome portal roulette.

I’d maybe half the cast time rather than make it instant…but that’s personal preference, I suppose. Not seen anything else about it at the moment.

post edited.

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Tried it on the PTR a moment ago and it’s still a 10 second cast. However it seems like a really weird change in the first place. Imagine you accidentally press it and instantly go poof. At least some cast time is needed on this. I’m also sure people would find a way to abuse it.

Aside from that, this utterly breaks immersion as well. Portals usually require channeling and focus. To just teleport instantly feels…wrong.

It’s a nice quality of life change at least.

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Not something that bothers me personally but I can see how it could have that effect as well.

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Pretty sure this is why posting datamined content is against the rules (even though nobody cares enough to report). They make some mistake in their spaghetti code and people start furiously discussing even though it could have been changed back already.

There’s nothing in the notes about this, so even if it was in the game it should be considered a bug.

That must be some very very very bad spaghetti if they can mess this up. I would be laughing very hard on how incompetent the devs are if it isn’t handled like spell.cast_time=x

Well maybe a tired dev changed the wrong variable while working late, or maybe internal testing that accidentally made its way into the PTR.

Are you saying they don’t have a code review system and everyone can just push their commits without supervision? Don’t try to find more excuses because it makes them look even more incompetent and the whole issue even more funny.

Look I’m no expert in the field but is it really that hard to accept that someone made a mistake? If anything people are saying they don’t see the change so maybe you should ask wowhead to verify their sources.

Well, laugh then, because it isn’t. What you suggest would actually be what we call “hard-coding” variables into the code, and that is one of the practices that contribute to spaghettification of code. When you hard-code these things, you always run the risk of a value being changed in one module, but forgotten in another. Yes, projects can create code libraries of headers to be copied into every build, but still it leaves the possibility open.

Larger projects, and more sophisticated projects, encode all these constants in a separate data structure, independent of the code, to be pulled in when needed.

In WoW’s case, they store all of the defining constants in a database of names and values. That database is the prime target for every datamining expedition. You can find a datamined version of it online at wow.tools.

So when a new version of the database is found, ofc the first thing the dataminers do is compare to find any changes, before thinking what those changes mean.

With a database, someone can just overtype a value, and if you have enforced the discipline of using constants only from the database, you can be sure that that value has changed consistently EVERYWHERE, and without rebuilding the code. It may be entered incorrectly, or it may have been a bad idea to change it at all, but at least it will be consistent. :stuck_out_tongue:

When they introduced scaling, a lot of the remaining bugs and messiness was in the values in the database. I remember one mob in Northrend that famously hit like a raid boss was explained because that value 600 was applied not to its base damage, but to the multiplier of its damage. But at least it was consistent! :rofl:

I think this instant Portal change has to be an error, someone overtyping the wrong value. If followed through, it would make Teleport irrelevant, unless the same change was made there. It’s interesting that it happened, I suppose, but I expect it to disappear.

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Checking PTR it seems like the only spells made instant are the placeholders that appear in the spellbook before you get them. Since every city has a different spell and you get the one to your race’s capital by default, the placeholders aren’t used ingame.

The spells you use weren’t changed so it’s most likely a mistake.

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It’s a staging / test environment. You don’t really need Code Reviews for that.

I’m with you there. It feels strange to make it seem so casually easy.

Datamined tooltip are usually wrong.

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Sorry, but why do people still get misled by these datamining errors? In just about every PTR build, some value (usually a spell damage/healing value) seemingly goes from or to zero.
This is either just a tooltip error, or even a mistake by the Wowhead datamining tool. Doesn’t mean anything.

Here, let me give you several examples:

Death Chakram’s debuff apparently was datamined in a previous build as “until cancelled” (=no duration given) and then “fixed” back to the actual duration.

The Soulbind Ability Combat Meditation is seemingly changed to a 0 Mastery bonus.

(in Uncategorized Spells) Guardian Shell is “fixed” to heal for more than 0 again.

I’ve noticed these changes in PTR builds for years and years, it’s nothing new, and it means absolutely nothing.

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