WoW arcane mages troubled – missiles and blink

Tinfoil Hat conspiracies - Image 1Ever since the anticipated mass nerfing on the patchnotes for 2.0.10, everybody seems to be busting out their tinfoil hats and churning out conspiracy theories. What’s to be nerfed next? Why are the devs changing so much?

Anyway, this time it’s onto the mages. Just yesterday we reported about the change on the rooting mechanics of Frost Nova – and the infernal rain Blizzard guy Tseric took. Today, it’s about Arcane Missiles (AM) and Blink. Both are Arcane spells, and both have problems. According to Gnusha from the WoW Forums, Arcane Missiles only fire four instead of five missiles. She theorizes that since the one missing missile would cut down DPS, there would be “no need to nerf it… no need to fix it”.

As for Blink, a teleportation spell, apparently bugs out due to terrain issues. The topic was only briefly touched on the thread but Tseric addressed the problem as well. According to him, both spells bug out due to latency issues (the ever omnipresent lag) and terrain issues. He added that the said bugs are quite difficult to reproduce (you can’t wait for a lag to happen then cast the spell.) The bugs are similar since they both target the same way. He concludes:

Blink and AM use a sort of terrain-mapping function to determine a path, rather than just pinging the target. It’s the terrain inconsistencies which cause the failure of the spell, coupled with latency issues… We’ve wanted to implement new methods of testing, such as putting ‘artificial load’ on a test environment, but that can be costly. We’re also looking into other possibilities of ‘live testing’ so that latency can be taken into account, somewhat… The biggest problem with resolving these bugs has been recreating the variable of network latency, which affects these spells more than other types.

Some players still insist on wearing their tinfoil and say that since the problem boils down to network latency then the problems would never be solved. Anyway, let’s hope the guys at Blizzard come up with something – before everybody else catches on to the new fashion statement that is the tinfoil hat.

Tinfoil Hat conspiracies - Image 1Ever since the anticipated mass nerfing on the patchnotes for 2.0.10, everybody seems to be busting out their tinfoil hats and churning out conspiracy theories. What’s to be nerfed next? Why are the devs changing so much?

Anyway, this time it’s onto the mages. Just yesterday we reported about the change on the rooting mechanics of Frost Nova – and the infernal rain Blizzard guy Tseric took. Today, it’s about Arcane Missiles (AM) and Blink. Both are Arcane spells, and both have problems. According to Gnusha from the WoW Forums, Arcane Missiles only fire four instead of five missiles. She theorizes that since the one missing missile would cut down DPS, there would be “no need to nerf it… no need to fix it”.

As for Blink, a teleportation spell, apparently bugs out due to terrain issues. The topic was only briefly touched on the thread but Tseric addressed the problem as well. According to him, both spells bug out due to latency issues (the ever omnipresent lag) and terrain issues. He added that the said bugs are quite difficult to reproduce (you can’t wait for a lag to happen then cast the spell.) The bugs are similar since they both target the same way. He concludes:

Blink and AM use a sort of terrain-mapping function to determine a path, rather than just pinging the target. It’s the terrain inconsistencies which cause the failure of the spell, coupled with latency issues… We’ve wanted to implement new methods of testing, such as putting ‘artificial load’ on a test environment, but that can be costly. We’re also looking into other possibilities of ‘live testing’ so that latency can be taken into account, somewhat… The biggest problem with resolving these bugs has been recreating the variable of network latency, which affects these spells more than other types.

Some players still insist on wearing their tinfoil and say that since the problem boils down to network latency then the problems would never be solved. Anyway, let’s hope the guys at Blizzard come up with something – before everybody else catches on to the new fashion statement that is the tinfoil hat.

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