Now that's a change I wish I'd seen back in TBC

[hrugner]

I was wondering when this'd get brought up. I've hinted about this in the past in a couple interviews... Yes, there was a very significant underlying change here, that may have implications for theorycrafting (though minor).

I don't want to get too deep into the under-the-hood workings of WoW servers, but here's a super short version. Any action that one unit takes on another different unit used to be processed in batches every 400ms. Some very attentive people may have noticed that healing yourself would give you the health instantly (minus client/server latency), whereas healing another unit would incur a delay of between 0ms and 400ms (again, on top of client/server latency). Same with damaging, applying auras, interrupting, knocking back, etc.

That delay can feel bad just due to the somewhat laggy responsiveness feeling, but also because the state of things can change during that time. For example: Holly the Holy Priest is healing Punky the Brewmaster. Punky spikes low, and Holly hits Guardian Spirit in a panic. The server verifies that Holly is able to cast it, and that Punky is alive (great!). The cast goes off, Guardian Spirit goes on cooldown, and a request is placed for the Guardian Spirit aura (that prevents dying) to be placed on Punky. That request will be filled next time the 400ms timer loops, which happens to be 320ms from now. 250ms later, the boss lands another hit on on Punky. Punky dies. Sadface. Another 70ms goes by, and the Guardian Spirit aura request pops up, and goes "Hey guys, I'm here!... Aww... damn, I missed the party. Sadface."

We no longer batch them up like that. We just do it as fast as we can, which usually amounts to between 1ms and 10ms later. It took a considerable amount of work to get it working that way, but we're very pleased with the results so far; the game feels noticeably more responsive.

I can't guarantee that you'll never ever again run into cases where Guardian Spirit went on cooldown and the tank still died... but it'll be literally 40x rarer than before, and the whole game will feel more responsive too.

It's nice to know that they've finally gotten around to taking on the weird lag problem WoW has always had between characters. I'm excited for those people who still raid.

[Bladeface]

huh.... that is actually cool... neever knew it worked like that, always wondered why cooldowns still activated sometimes without actually going off D: so it was lag! not me being bad! god damnit...

[Vaelorian]

Thank god for that. It was so dissapointing especially in Vanilla when you would actually cast Lay on Hands with its 1 hour cooldown (or 45min I don't know anymore) and the tank died anyway, yet the cooldown was active.

I think that happened to me well not a 100 times but it did happen a lot. I think my guild would have progressed much faster if we had this working correctly on day 1. The insane amount of moments I had this in Naxxramas 40... The insane amount of moments on Lich King Heroic 25. Or even pvp.

[Joathen]

Thank god for that. It was so dissapointing especially in Vanilla when you would actually cast Lay on Hands with its 1 hour cooldown (or 45min I don't know anymore) and the tank died anyway, yet the cooldown was active.

I think that happened to me well not a 100 times but it did happen a lot. I think my guild would have progressed much faster if we had this working correctly on day 1. The insane amount of moments I had this in Naxxramas 40... The insane amount of moments on Lich King Heroic 25. Or even pvp.

This, so much this.

[Haywire5714]

It's fun when you use void shift on a player who still dies but you take the swap damage.

[hrugner]

Thank god for that. It was so dissapointing especially in Vanilla when you would actually cast Lay on Hands with its 1 hour cooldown (or 45min I don't know anymore) and the tank died anyway, yet the cooldown was active.

I think that happened to me well not a 100 times but it did happen a lot. I think my guild would have progressed much faster if we had this working correctly on day 1. The insane amount of moments I had this in Naxxramas 40... The insane amount of moments on Lich King Heroic 25. Or even pvp.

This is exactly the situation I was thinking of when I read about it. This didn't happen all the time, but that one hour cooldown really rubbed it in. It probably isn't something non-healers really notice though. Confusion over heals not landing caused a lot of stress.

[Darsithis]

That's fantastic. Too often the blame has been put on the healer or the healer just says "sorry, you died as I hit it!". No more will that happen!

[Vaelorian]

This is exactly the situation I was thinking of when I read about it. This didn't happen all the time, but that one hour cooldown really rubbed it in. It probably isn't something non-healers really notice though. Confusion over heals not landing caused a lot of stress.

Well it probably happened a lot more then we think. But we did not notice it (the lag between casting and receiving) because the tank survived. I mean if I did a Holy Light on someone and it didn't land in time, it was noticeble. I've had that a couple of times but not a lot, mainly because we spammed healers all over the place. But since LoH is/was on a long cooldown it is far more noticable.

Sometimes a tank would go nuts at me or others if they died "and had no healing for ages" according to him. Then I told him to look at his combatlog and you can actually see:
10:12:00 you died
10:12:00 Lay on Hands heals you for XXX

[hrugner]

I'm sure it did, I know there was a good amount of confusion on some fights where certain healers had different heal types they were focusing on and the big heals weren't coming in for much longer than expected. I'd like to see how this change impacts mana conservation in raids and the effectiveness of interrupts in pvp, particularly against short casts.

I hope all my old healer buddies see this and feel vindicated at least a little bit.

[Super Kami Dende]

Considering WoW is already the most responsive MMO I've ever played, this can be nothing but a great thing.

[Alanar]

It's fun when you use void shift on a player who still dies but you take the swap damage.

I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW!!!!

does this FINNALY mean Shadow word: Death will react faster????

[Soulwind]

I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW!!!!

does this FINNALY mean Shadow word: Death will react faster????

Not only SWD, Execute and Shadowburn also take a while to notice that the target is below 20% HP.

[Warlord Booty]

It's fun when you use void shift on a player who still dies but you take the swap damage.

I liked void shifting the tank after he's battle rezzed while I'm in an Axe on Nazgrim. <3

[greysaber]

now if they would just fix the lag you get when entering a new area. you know when you fly in to start a quest, then suddenly you're surrounded by mobs and enemy players and you're dead 1 second later.

i swear it didn't used to be like this; i'm guessing it has to do with some type of phasing system.

[Orangetai420]

I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW!!!!

does this FINNALY mean Shadow word: Death will react faster????

Isn't that a bad thing for pvp? IIRC you can use SWD to break polymorphs and the like if you can anticipate it and time it correctly. Without that little delay I don't see how it's possible.


EDIT: ahhh I see what you meant - you can use it sooner because the game recognizes that your target is actually below 20% much faster.

[Saberstrike]

Is this active currently or will be in wod?

[hrugner]

Is this active currently or will be in wod?

It's a proposed WoD change.

- - - Updated - - -

Considering WoW is already the most responsive MMO I've ever played, this can be nothing but a great thing.

It's about the third worst I've played. Falling just above FFXIV:ARR and ESO. WoW covers a fair bit of it behind auto-attack and global cooldowns, but whenever you focus on instant changes like range, interrupts, heal response and threshold response, the responsiveness becomes glaringly bad. It's probably about tied with FFXIV:ARR, ESO is probably the same amount of delay, but without the global cooldown to disguise the errors.

If WoW has satisfactory responsiveness for you with a potential half second lag on top of double your latency for player to player abilities, then I doubt you'd notice this change.

- - - Updated - - -

now if they would just fix the lag you get when entering a new area. you know when you fly in to start a quest, then suddenly you're surrounded by mobs and enemy players and you're dead 1 second later.

i swear it didn't used to be like this; i'm guessing it has to do with some type of phasing system.

I hadn't seen this too often till after cross realm zones.

[Super Kami Dende]

It's about the third worst I've played. Falling just above FFXIV:ARR and ESO. WoW covers a fair bit of it behind auto-attack and global cooldowns, but whenever you focus on instant changes like range, interrupts, heal response and threshold response, the responsiveness becomes glaringly bad. It's probably about tied with FFXIV:ARR, ESO is probably the same amount of delay, but without the global cooldown to disguise the errors.

I've played every MMO that has been released in the last 9-10 years or so and not one has every come close to the fluidity and responsiveness WoW has.
What games have you been playing that are actually fluid? GW/GW2 was clunky, ESO was clunky, SWTOR as much as I love it is incredibly clunky, Wildstar is probably the nearest a game has got to being as responsive as WoW but even it still feels broken at times, RIFT is clunky, pretty much every F2P game i've played was terrible for responsiveness, Secret World and Age of Conan were both horrible in responsiveness.

[Terahertz]

It's a proposed WoD change.

I'm unsure if this issue is also present in PvP (surely anything player on player related ability usage is affected by this), but if so and they're changing this in WoD to make combat feel much more fluent then I seriously can't wait for WoD

[hrugner]

I'm unsure if this issue is also present in PvP (surely anything player on player related ability usage is affected by this), but if so and they're changing this in WoD to make combat feel much more fluent then I seriously can't wait for WoD

How they describe the issue makes it sound like you'd be working through two batches of 400ms buffering in pvp. That's nearly a second of delay with bad luck, though obviously much closer to half a second in practice.

It should really change how well regarded certain classes are in pvp.