Please get rid of spell batching delay on spells/abilities. I will give you some reasons below:
Game spells/abilities are NOT designed to work with delays, combinations like Feign Death + Trap (in most situations the only way to disconnect as hunter from melee) is completely disabled.
Delay affects spells like Blessing of Protection/ Lay on Hands that triggers cooldown but does not take effect on your friendly target if used 0,5 sec before target dies.
It leads to a lot of exploits and ruins game mechanics like:
Warlock sacrifice pet while entering/exiting dungeon portals can give you the buff and keep your demon pet alive at same time.
You can abuse macros with /startattack /stopattack for spells with chance on hit and multiply their proc chance x2, x4 times (saw few videos on YouTube).
No need to be in-game since our internet is way better than the one we had back in 2004.
#nochanges is not even a reason to keep this mechanic in game since you’ve already changed the looting system in raids to prevent ninja looting with making the soulbound items trade-able between raid members for a period of time.
It feels like you play with constant lag and completely kills the pleasure from PVP.
Makes AoE spells in PvP, mostly used to quickly get out of stealth people that used ability/spell/consumable to get invisible during a fight situation, have way bigger window between cast and first tick of damage and makes the spells worthless since you can just outrun the damage area for the time it ticks you out of stealth.
Makes Leeway mechanic even worse since, if chase, you can hit the target in melee even if it’s few yards above the limit due to that 0,5 sec batching.
Probably there are many more, but that’s what me and some friends experienced so far.
Hope you take this seriously since it really kills the game by cripple some classes and forcing exploits.
The hype and love for the game keeps people online but that already started to fade away and when I talk to some of those that quit or considering quitting guess what’s the #1 reason for their decision.
If not completely removed at least reduce the frame rate at which the spells batch. Make it from 0.5 sec (guessing) to 0.1 sec, please.
If this excellent post does not convince you about the removal of spellbatching then try to flip the argument. What big positives does spellbatching give? I can’t find any. The game does not feel more authentic because of it.
Authentic maybe, stupid certainly. Many times literally only latency decides who wins with the spellbatching on. You want to CS Polymorph? Well you better use it in the middle of the cast because otherwise you will end up wasting your counterspell and being sheeped in the same time.
With the server pop so high as opposed to Vanilla there is really no argument left for the authenticity. Remove the spellbatch!
It’s harder. You can interrupt someones cast before it finishes, but it can still go off if it’s in the same batch. It’s the same if you got 2 rogues and rogue A uses Kidney Shot before rogue B, but if it’s actually in the same batch both still gets stunned.
Another thing that feels really OP is in the case of Shamans - when they use Elemental Mastery into Chain Lightning > Shock BOTH spells will infact have 100% crit chance because they are cast within the same batch, so it’s just insane burst. The list just goes on and on with all the downsides batching brings.
It’s as authentic, and makes as much sense, as asking people to play on the same setups the had back in the day - dialup, CRT monitors and everything.
#NoChanges is just a meme and my point is it makes the gameplay worse and just less enjoyable.
You observe changes in classic therefor your custom additional change to gameplay is now valid? Is there any change that logic cant be used on?
Is there some other change to -gameplay- you can point to instead of silly monitor changes?
A great example of an authentic gameplay feature? Or what do you mean? Is it authentic or not?
My problem with these discussions is that people want to change my game and are not asking for classic+ on the side. Classic+ on the side would be cool as long as they keep Classic as authentic as possible.
I’m using it as an extreme example to emphasize my point. The only thing batching does is lower the potential skillcap of players. You can use that logic for other changes, sure, but depending on the example it may or may not make sense.
Another change to gameplay I’d like to see is the insane leeway we see. That also lowers skillcap.
I get that you are a die-hard #NoChanges guy, but the fact is Blizz has already made changes - optimized gear instead of updating it in their respective patch as back in the day, higher population caps on realms and the most noticable is probably layering, which I actually think made sense in the short term.
On certain other servers, which shall not be named, the gameplay felt way better than what we see here on the Classic client. I don’t mind some changes if they make sense and is in the spirit of classic - this is not Vanilla, this is Classic and there are differences.
Example of mechanic that change the design of spells. I see your point, but that’s not something that you need to make the game authentic. This was a mechanic that solved some connection issue that we do not even have anymore so it makes it not feasible now a days.
That just cripple the whole game-play.
On top of all the examples in the initial post:
healing in raids turns into overheal sh*tshow due to spell batching delays if you don’t use who knows what amount of addons (not sure if that even helps);
using food + canibalize (UD racial) macro also exploits batching and both effects can be used at same time for even faster health regeneration;
if rogue vanishes and after that takes damage from auto attack it leads to breaking stealth;
paladins can stack reckoning due to batching exploit with /sit command if timed right;
pets have annoying delay on commands, sometimes does not even attack the target before you double/tripple click the command;
mage Blink spell makes them immune to stun for 0,5 sec, or more if lag, AFTER they blink (I know they made a talent in WotLK with similar effect to be immune to CC after blink for a short time so this should not be the case in Classic, not 100% sure tho)
and so on…
So my question to you is do you consider spells that “on paper” should work in a specific way - in reality have completely different effect.
The game can be way more fun and dynamic by simply reducing the delay, not even removing it completely, just reduce the time to like 0.1 sec and it will still be in game but adapted to modern internet speed.
Again, I do understand your point, but we are not talking about Classic+.
And lastly, reminder that they’ve already launched the game with changed loot system, that, on theory, is way bigger change if you ask me.
It had a delay in vanilla. It had a delay for a very long time. It was changed much later on for retail though to grant that instant effect, which doesn’t require as much timing to pull off by reading swings and gcds.
The spell batching is set to 200 ms. That’s 0.2s, not 0.5s. It’s also not like you’ll always use your ability exactly at the 0.001s start of the spell batching window.
Think of it like a timer, every 0.2s the server batches the abilities and such to synchronize events for everyone regardless of connection speed. So you can end up using your ability at any point of time in this spell batching window.