Global Cooldown Changes, What you Should Know
There’s quite a bit of buzzing on the wow forums today about changes that were made to how the server/client interaction is handled when using abilities (melee abilities especially). What does this mean for you? Read on!
Here’s an excerpt from a forum post describing the issue:
“Imagine you are a mage, you see a monster! You press your frostbolt button to attack it well… OK now first the game has to run a series of checks to make sure you can actually cast this spell. It does these checks first from the client side (that means your computer) For example…
1) are you in range able to cast this spell?
2) is the spell on any sort of cooldown (global cooldown included)?
3) meet the requirements of the spell (i.e. have enough mana, aren’t currently silenced blah blah)?”
This was changed to the following:
“Basically, Blizzard intentionally changed server-side checks in conjunction with global cooldowns in the last PTR update. The game now checks server-side if all the requirements are met to perform an ability. So, for example, to use Overpower, the server checks:
-You are in melee range
-You are facing the opponent
-You have enough rage
-They dodged
After the server verifies all of this, then it sends the message back to your client to perform the action. If however, you fail a check, you have to wait for the server to acknowledge that. But the crippling part here is that the server automatically starts your global cooldown for the ability when you hit the key before it performs the checks. Meaning, it starts the GCD, then verifies if you can do it, and if you can’t, interrupts the GCD for you.”
If you don’t feel like reading through that technical mumbojumbo, here’s the skinny. If you are out of range when attacking a monster or player, you’ll trigger your usual 1.5 second cooldown.
Until this issue is resolved or confirmed, only use abilities that you know you are in range for. Don’t mash buttons, hit them once when you get in range.
Good luck!
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