No enemy castbars?

[Schattenlied]

Woah we couldn't see enemy buffs either?!? How do you know to dispel or not?

Well, back in the day dispels didn't go off unless there was something to dispel, it's not like now where it will just cast the spell and dispel nothing and take your mana, it will just give you a "there's nothing to dispel" error message... So, when in doubt, just hit purge and if it does something, great, if not, you literally lost nothing for checking.

[greenn]

i'm just saying you should make it clear to others how it works. At first glance they do seem like real cast bars

in the classic sense, that is an enemy cast bar.

[Akka]

There were in TBC for sure. I distinctly remember a certain rogue in our guild finding out about this halfway through shade of aran one day

Ah yeah, I remember now ! Wonder how could I forget, as I was giving advice to guildies to kick him not right when the cast bar appeared but when it was about to finish, so we could use his cast time to hit him.

where it would have been really nice for him to know. "Ive just been watching his hands glowing!"

Well, that was how we did it until TBC

[wholol]

Woah we couldn't see enemy buffs either?!? How do you know to dispel or not?
This is all regarding pve and pvp, correct?

Purge or offensive dispels could not function if your opponent did not have any magic buffs on themselves, your ability would tell you "nothing to dispel" similarly to how you get the "out of range" message, this was later changed i believe in wotlk or cata ( can't remember when).

You basically spammed that purge hard until it could no longer detect anything to dispel then you know they had nothing left on them, you'd obviously have to check for visual queues as to whether your opponent is adding a buff on themselves after that ( ie: rejuv/blessings etc).

To be fair, removing enemy buffs is considered extremely high level stuff for classic pvp standards since the actual buffs that are worth removing are too few to count while most of the time you'd be worried about other things, such as your mana and your impending death, the only place that has expected usage of purges is in premade bgs where it's somewhat mandatory but in most other situation ( 99% of the time ) you wouldn't even need to use it outside the occasional specific 1v1 fight in the open world vs that specific class where a purge would actually affect your odds of winning being less than 1 out every 10 of such encounters, even soul link , which was always believed to be purgeable off the warlock's pet was debunked via a blue post, making it undispellable, reducing the lists of things you need to purge even more.

[Whistl3r]

This could be a hazy memory and not be from vanilla but I seem to recall watching pvp videos that had spell casting alerts pop up. "Loladin begins to cast FoL" Seems to me as more helpful than a misleading cast bar. What mod is this? Am I tripping?

[vsb]

This could be a hazy memory and not be from vanilla but I seem to recall watching pvp videos that had spell casting alerts pop up. "Loladin begins to cast FoL" Seems to me as more helpful than a misleading cast bar. What mod is this? Am I tripping?

I think that it's default UI.

[Whistl3r]

I think that it's default UI.

it wasn't in chat logs but I guess thats where the mod pulled it from.