Thanks to the reduction of spell batching, many things will soon be more reliable in WoW Classic. Statements like “The heal was actually through” will come to an end.
Not much is happening currently in World of Warcraft Classic. Many players eagerly await the BlizzConline in February, hoping for the announcement of “The Burning Crusade Classic.” However, a small change is coming. As reported by MeinMMO, the duration of spell batching is being reduced. Currently, WoW Classic “collects” all requests for spells and abilities from players and processes them in intervals of 0.4 seconds simultaneously.
How long has it been like that in retail WoW? The massive spell batching of 400ms was actually active in World of Warcraft much longer than many players think. Originally, it was not removed with The Burning Crusade, but only in 2014 with the expansion Warlords of Draenor. This is evident from an old post from that year in which Blizzard employee Celestalon explained what all the changes affected. The statements also apply to the reduction of spell batching in Classic, of course.
What does this have to do with healing? Anyone playing a healer or tank in WoW Classic surely knows the situation. The tank’s health points drop dramatically, and the healer starts sweating. From the healer’s perspective, the spell is cast, and the tank is healed in time. However, the small delay of up to 400ms means that the tank dies, but the healing is still considered completed. Because during the delay, the mob simply dealt another blow and ended the fight prematurely.
With a shorter interval of 10ms, this can still happen, but it’s significantly rarer and hardly noticeable. Thus, “The heal was actually through” will truly just be an excuse.
What else will improve? The adjustments to spell batching from 400ms to 10ms bring a number of other improvements as well. Many processes in the game will then work faster and can be completed almost “instantly.” These include:
- Looting items from a corpse
- Opening letters and retrieving their contents
- Selling items to an NPC vendor
But there are also several improvements for combat situations due to the change:
- Tank taunts are now almost instantly active and not delayed
- Warriors can use “Execute” more frequently as the game recognizes the current HP value of the enemy faster
- Mages and other crowd control effects are hardly able to be used simultaneously by two players against each other (for example, two mages turning each other into sheep at the same time)
- Rogues can enter stealth without being immediately pulled out by an instant cast spell
There are many changes being made to WoW Classic as a result. While some players do not like this as it changes the “Classic” feel, PvP and PvE should play out much smoother because of it.
In WoW Classic, the spell batching of 400ms comes to an end. Because if the current PTR test runs positively, Blizzard will likely release patch 1.13.7 soon. Players hope that this will coincide with the announcement of “The Burning Crusade Classic”.
What do you think of the change?
