Blizzard Addresses World Of Warcraft Classic Spell Batching

As part of Blizzard’s ongoing mission to make World of Warcraft Classic feel as close to the Vanilla WoW experience as possible, the company has tweaked the game’s development plan and made efforts to restrict Soulbound loot trading.

Now, Blizzard is taking a look at spell batching. Outlining its plans in a post on the WoW forums on Battle.net, Blizzard said:

For WoW Classic, we’re moving spell casts to a low-priority loop that will cause them to be processed at the frequency that best fits how the game actually played in version 1.12.

Two mages will be able to Polymorph each other somewhat reliably, resulting in two sheep nervously pacing around at range. Two warriors will be able to Charge one another, and the end result will be both warriors standing stunned in each other’s original location.

For those unfamiliar or in need of a refresher, certain abilities utilized by different classes in vanilla WoW would occur simultaneously without one interrupting the other. That was because those abilities were in the same batch. 

Over the years, Blizzard has managed to more or less fix this, although it can still occur on occasion. The changes the developers have made over time have resulted in more responsive combat in the more recent versions of WoW.

However, to create a more authentic experience in Classic, Blizzard is including certain quirks to make the combat feel like it did in the past. 

The plan to revert to a quirk of the original game for Classic might seem weird to some, but judging from the comments in the forum thread, it’s exactly what prospective players are looking for.

There’s still no word on when World of Warcraft Classic will launch, although it is expected to go live sometime this summer.