They do not meaningfully up server load. Even if every keystroke was sent, which would be a ridiculous design (a cat sleeping on a keyboard can send way more than one keystroke-up or keystroke-down every 50ms on average). In practice, the only thing being spammed is your client, which is more likely to send the correct key in the correct window such that the server will (hopefully) do the correct thing.
But even if every keystroke went to the server, that still means nothing, even on a 40 man Oondasta raid. It's just meaningless compared to the total volume of data, and the total volume of players, and what a server is and does.
So forget about this. This is you just not knowing a technical thing, and is no big deal.
This is a philosophical point, and I disagree with it entirely. When WoW was new, it would only send the message on key UP. Meaning if you pressed and held down a button, it wouldn't fire at all- the button would glow with the white frame until you released the key.the GM does make a good point in that it's not your dps anymore.
Because this is stupid, many people used either a Windows setting or a keyboard which snappily transmits keydown/keyup almost at the same time. Many high ranked players- especially melee- invested in this kind of thing. Was it not their dps? Was it not their whateverthefuck? All they (and me) ever wanted was for pressing a button to be that, instead of imbued with some mysterious hardware dependent delay.
Now it's Interface -> Combat -> Cast action keybinds on key down.
IS NO ONE'S DPS THEIR OWN????????
WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE!!!!
No. It's fine. This was just removing a garbage hardware limitation. Autohotkey, or the equivalent windows and keyboard feature, just ensures that the client has the move queued up at the correct time- you still have to press the button.
The GM is wrong. This isn't automation.
I disagree with the first, and agree with the second. I think a GREAT player should be able to reach the max dps of the spec. But I think it should involve correct thinking and responses, not hammering a button in a small window and HOPING that the server doesn't lag- and of course, heaven help you if your connection is subpar.In my opinion a spec should be designed so that under optimal circumstances a good player should be able to reach the max dps of a spec. If the best player in the world can't do what the spec is designed to do then it's a poorly designed spec.
I travel a lot for my work. When I'm on travel (as I am now) I play from a laptop. It's a gaming laptop, and a good one, but it doesn't compare in power to my desktop. More importantly, at home I have a low latency connection, but on travel I have wildly varying connections- any place with LTE lets me tether, but LTE is super rare over the US as a whole, and I normally have to play on the hotel internet. What is my dps, and what is some old man streaming group sex such that my ability to tell my character to press a button is best described as coaching, and what goes on in the raid switches from raid leading to historical documentation?
I have very little sympathy for anyone who defends a bad design on the basis of "but it sucks for someone else". Well, make it not suck for them. That's not my job.
You know what the worst design in this game is? Well, I will tell you.
It is the loading screen on death.
Now, of course, there should be a penalty for dying. WoW's version of it is very small indeed, especially compared to older games. I would be fine with a greater penalty for dying than the game has, but it would discourage certain behaviors that are death intensive (for instance, raiding).
But the part that is awful is this:
1)- You die inside an instance.
2)- You see a LOADIGN SCREEN as the game THROWS AWAY ALL KNOWLEGE OF WHAT IS IN THE INSTANCE. This is a really dumb call on the part of the client- it may be coded kind of meh, but most certainly the DESIGN is stupid. This is, defacto, a huge part of the death penalty.
3)- Now you are loaded, as a GHOST, and you are OUTSIDE the instance. You have to walk TO the instance. Now, this distance that you have to walk could in fact be part of the death penalty- it is clearly intended to be at times. Some instances have a walk of a dozen footsteps, others you have to run around crazy places. But almost everything recently has been in the first camp.
4)- HO SHIT GUYS, I THINK WE HAVE TO LOAD UP THAT INSTANCE AGAIN the game says internally. MAN IT SURE SUCKS THAT WE WIPED ALL THAT OUT, TRANSFERED THE PLAYER TO ANOTHER SERVER, AND LOADED ALL THAT SHIT HE USED FOR ALL OF 2 SECONDS RUNNING BACK. This completes the death penalty.
This is awful, wasteful design. Do you pay by the byte in your country? Does your connection temporarily degrade if you have to send through a lot of extra bytes, like at most hotels? Hell, it even wastes power. For whatever reason, there's a burst of communication as it zones you two unneeded times.
This makes me furious mostly for three reasons. First, it is wasteful. Second, it is uneven- at home on my SSD with my super great connection, load screens are almost instant. Off a hard drive with a fan that always has to try hard with an internet that can go shaky or decide to deprioritize my packets based on my actions, it can be awful. I can get disconnected from the repeated zoning. If the point was to make everyone spend time running back, why do we take the delta between the best computer and the worst one, double it, and add that on top? Third, it doesn't make any sense. It's not like we are buying realism or immersion or verisimilitude with this dumb fucking policy. It's as sensical as if the penalty for a character death varied wildly with whether you paid with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or prepaid game card. Actually, that MIGHT make more sense- one of those gives Blizzard a better deal than the others, so they could at least incentive it and some fatcat CEO could use it to upgrade his hooker or whatever.
This doesn't make anyone happy. You should just have a damned res timer, or you should spawn at the start of the instance and have a run-back debuff, or anything at all that is a TECHNICAL solution IN GAME instead of a network and hard drive access based one.
Ok, shit, sorry. Really a big pet peeve.
Those are different things. I think combat is fun, but I think it needs to do more damage to justify its current iteration. More importantly, I wish it would play like it did back in icecrown. I dislike that the things that were added to it don't really add too much to its concept.And personally people who say combat is fine I think are absolutely wrong. It really should be that whatever weapons you have access to if you want to play that spec you should be able to respec and have a great time playing it and pull higher dps rather than the current situation of say having 522 daggers and getting a thunderforged combat main hand going combat and then pulling less dps.
I mean, ok, we get bandit's guile. This encourages you to time your cooldowns. Then we get restless blades. This encourages you to spam your cooldowns. These were added in the same patch. That's ridiculous. I thought that we'd sometimes have one favored over the other, but in practice, restless blades almost always wins. And when restless blades doesn't win, it means that you shouldn't even be combat for that fight- and that's in tiers where combat is a little ahead of mutilate single target.
Second, we have this dumb version of blade flurry. The old version gave us a niche. The new version is just so awful. Do you find yourself topping meters with like five clumped mobs? Not that such an event even happens. I find us way behind ele, and often behind fire, shadow, any lock, and warriors in practical aoe. Combat's blade flurry was so useful and good when it had a job, and now they really shat all over it. We have no niche. And of course, it's totally absurd to take a cleave mechanic and make it apply to more than one extra target. The other abilities that cleave to this many targets are either a circle, a cone (a real cone, not a cone based on where you are standing to melee the first guy), or actually just PICK a goddamned target in range like chain lightning. They don't rely on a bunch of clumped things.
The blade flurry nerf should be reverted. That would be a good start there.
Third, we have very little ability to plan. Combat should be able to have dead globals, and choosing where those globals go should be part of the spec. It had this before. I really liked the old fan of knives, because if you were seriously so flush on energy somehow, you'd press fan. Since it cost so much energy and hit so hard, it was better than wasting energy. We were a really well designed spec before Cata, and I was very hopeful that I would get to use bandit's guile cleverly. In fact, bandit's guile has never had a chance to really matter much.
Also our mastery is dumb. Like, super dumb.
Restless blades should be deleted. Just like, take it away. Balance us around not having it, please.
The second part of your thing is mostly, "hey, I'd like the specs to be close enough that top weapons make the difference". Well, that's fine. And a well designed combat spec would give us that. But it's not really related to the spec being fun, the spec being deep, the spec being interesting. They could do that today by shrinking A's damage or growing C's with a hotfix. But my gripes are more fundamental- I think the spec lost a lot of strategy and relative power (not numbers exactly but, if you assume that you'll be balanced to deal X dps on patchwerk, the version of your spec that is deeper is more powerful if you play it correctly because you can line stuff up better) when the addition of bandit's guile should logically have ADDED to both of those things.
More work for less dps is an absolutely horrible game play design any anyone who argues against that is a glutton for punishment.
Agreed. And on this note, buff sub :P