Turn on Autofrostbolt go AFK for 5 minutes come back pickup loot ;)

Heh of course any actual interesting fight this wouldn't be possible but the idea of something turning into that is reasons to avoid implementing such functionality.

Pretty much. On the other hand, it does put the point on the deeper issue, which is that some classes are (way) more one-dimensional than others. The worst offender is probably the frost mage, who only needs to press one button against single targets. Kind of sad, really, especially contrasted with tanks/healers, or even another ranged DPS class like warlocks/hunters.

Based on the following, all the bars are tracked Client-side. If not you could use the following to create your own client side casting bar.

* UNIT_SPELLCAST_SENT, "player", spell, rank, target
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_START, unit
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_STOP, unit
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_FAILED, unit
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_INTERRUPTED, unit
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_DELAYED, unit
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_SUCCEEDED, "player", spell, rank
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_CHANNEL_START, unit
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_CHANNEL_UPDATE, unit
* UNIT_SPELLCAST_CHANNEL_STOP, unit

These are ALL new to TBC.

Actually, I just used Patchwerk's example because it's the easiest to envision. (sup chaincasting on OT1) I was gauging the amount of fights while raiding this week where getting off a bunch of heals to random different people in sequence while dealing with a lot of movement was important - Faerlina and Thaddius to name the two biggest hair-loss reasons.

In those fights, I've come to rely on selecting a new target and mashing HT while the previous one has ~1s left on the cast, (Takes a lot less brainpower to do, especially when you have to watch bars on top of it and make sure you're positioned correctly. Rejuvs up? What's my Swiftmend cooldown at? Which people need Abolish Poison? Which guy do I prioritize for my next heal? Who just took damage? Who's in the most critical condition?) so that I can get off the subsequent heal as fast as possible. Four heals in sequence with an average 300ms human delay each will set back the final heal by a whopping 0.9 seconds, often fatal on random AE damage fights.

Asking healers to do the Beatmania thing while worrying about a hundred other concurrent things is just looking for trouble. I'm sure we'll cope, but there's no way in hell it's going to be as efficient as either: A) having a 2 digit ping; B) having an intelligent cast/don'tcast mod, which has the same effect as A)

I'm beating a dead horse; the point has been made a couple of times in the thread. Let's just hope Blizzard takes notice of this before we plow into serious lv70 endgame.

Edit: Turned off auto-smileys

Can you expand on this a bit? Does this mean the need for fastcast-like mods would be eliminated since your latency isn't a factor in the casting of spells anymore? I guess I don't grok the whole system just on your listing of the events here.

I'm saying that it looks like Blizzard has integrated fastcast into the UI for us. If that is not the case, then I can see no reason why a quick and dirty mod can't be made to tell you when it's kosher to cast again, because they've given us more then we need to do the job.

For the past several weeks, I've relentlessly tried to bring the Spell-queuing issue to Blizzard's attention.
I remember Slouken mentioning that adding a built-in "spell queuing" (aka FastCast) functionality would be "easy" to do. However there is no "mod based" way to re-create FastCast, if I am not mistaken. Blizzard simply has to implement this function internally in their code.

Now, I've been using SuperCast in beta... and well, its pretty useless. Its inaccurate too. I've replaced almost all my spells with their consequent "/stopcastig /cast Spell_Name(Rank x) " macro... but as a healer its a very risky move, because you can no longer "spam" your buttons.

I dunno how other people play the game, but when I want to heal someone in an emergency.. I become frenzied and start spamming my buttons. Sometimes during a bad pull, or during very intense encounters, I also start frantically spamming buttons. I've been doing this ever since I started playing a healer. Now I have to change my game style due to a technical limitation (lack of spell-queuing).
I sincerely hope Blizzard implements Spell queuing.

Auto-bolt would completely break gameplay for some classes (hi frost mages), but a one-deep spell queue would be a great solution to the delay casters have to deal with.

This is affecting all classes more or less, and will be felt alot more for warriors(tanks) in 2.x.
Making them spam devestate(more than what they spam sunder), it will be more of an issue during tanking aswell.

Seeing as the only time me as a warrior is really noticing these small 0.05 lags is when I'm spamming Hamstrings while DPSing, and I'm usually at about 7-13ms these days, used to be at about 19-25 before, upgrading my computer was worth it.

Is there any way to make these very small spikes go away for insta-cast spells aswell?

Thank you.

Are you saying that the global cooldown is lagging?

I'm not sure what could be done regarding instant cast spells/abilities, wouldn't any amount of leg be a non-issue when the global cooldown is far longer than any delay introduced by lag? especially your low ping :P

Die! (Preferably in a healing-lag-complication-related accident)

Maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised and find that a spell queue or some kind of fastcast functionality has been implemented along with 2.0 and just wasn't documented. A lot of changes in 2.0 don't seem to be present in the patch notes(and as a result I had a few surprises waiting for me on the PTR 0_o).

Haha, so I'm not the only one who does that :)

I think it makes playing a healer a bit more interesting because you can actually watch the fight instead of just playing Whack-a-Mole with the raid bars. It also makes many fight noticeably easier to heal on(Particularly fights like Hakkar where the tank changes frequently and you have to keep up). Granted, I don't raid on my priest much because I'm pretty tired of the content he has access to as an alt, but it's nice to get a different perspective on things once in a while.

What ? Are you implying that there is undocumented spell queue/fastcast functionality coming with 2.0 ?

Hehe, it seems I got a few people overly excited with my post, so allow me to clarify:

I'm one of those "2 digit pingers", so I've never really paid much attention to the impact of lag vs casting aside from what aussies and east-coasters in my guild have related to me. I haven't seen anything to that effect in my time on the PTR, but to be honest I haven't been looking for one either as it's never been an issue for me. There ARE a number of undocumented changes that I've encountered, but I don't know if such a change is among them. I was only theorizing that it might be possible since pretty much every patch includes multiple undocumented(and sometimes major) changes and in the last few patches Blizzard has integrated quite a few common and useful mods into the game code. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they did the same in this case to avoid shafting our beloved 300+ ping guild members =)

I logged onto the test realm to see there was anything to your post.
I was in Winterspring and had an amazingly low ping of 207ms, I cast HT rank 4 on myself as fast as possible after typing /combatlog.

My average cast time for a 2.5 second spell was 3.19 seconds, while the sample size was small the latency was better than half of what I normally play with :(

Edit.
I did a few more tests on both test and live with and without FastCast, mostly for my own interest but I thought others without this problem might be interested to see.
Spell used is Healing Touch rank 4, talented casting time is 2.5 seconds.
Live server with FastCast
3.05 seconds with around 300ms latency
2.88 seconds with around 400ms latency
3.04 seconds with around 500ms latency

Live server without FastCast
3.33 seconds with around 260ms latency, in the quietest place I could easily get to.

Test server using a macro.
2.90 seconds with around 250ms latency

The differences in the Fastcast numbers with varying latency is probably just human error, occasionally I would be too early on the cast and I would get the clunking noise indicating that FastCast had stopped me canceling the spell, this would normally lead to the next spell being a little late because of the extra button press.

The casting times in the combat log while using a macro on the test server are very close to live with Fastcast.
While it was possible to do that for about 50 casts on the test server while concentrating only on timing it right, so I wouldn't cancel the spell, I don't expect to be able to consistently do it in a raid.
With varying lag, required movement and many visual distractions I am not sure if using this is a good idea for a healer :(

I feel quite confident in saying that there is no undocumented spell queue on the current test server.

You win!

I hope theres some type of fastcast, its the one mod thats managed to stay through my multiple UI changes with the exception of CTraid. I still get random interupts, but thats about 1 for a full clear of AQ40/BWL.

See posts 12, 18, and 22 in this thread, albeit on the first page.

The best solution that I can think of currently involves a mod that plays a sound of some sort that gives a discernible progression as to when your next spell is good to go. This would eliminate the need to watch a new source of information (hp bars, grid, fight parameters/positioning, and now casting bars)

An even better solution would to allow code to enable/disable protected bindings/buttons but not change the bindings. It would preserve the choice by the player.

While mashing a button/key, you might be denied due to Blizzard code and you could incorporate your own yes/no blocks on actions.

The biggest "exploit" that I can think of currently would involve binding different sized heals to a sequence of keys and spamming them in order to autosize the heal based on some logic or to quickly test/cast a specific heal on the most appropriate target of a fairly limited set (how many keys are you binding and spamming in a sequence?).

If you can change protected frames with user input, then a two action solution should work for any situation. (I haven't kept up to date on the UI changes). The first input uses it's hardware event to setup a protected binding and the second input executes it. Given this, it would seem likely that protected frames can't be modified in combat even if the user wants to manually change them, but that seems like it would really annoy players.

edited for grammer

is there any state or action that could prevent /stopcasting from executing? if so, you could protect the current cast in that way....

/script checkCastBufferAndEnterUnStoppableModeIfNotReady
/stopcasting (which would fail if current cast was protected)
/cast ____
/script ifInUnStoppableModeLeaveUnstoppableMode

You can't use /script in macros.
That is why /stopcasting and other similar things, which used to require a script command, were added.

Yes, you can. They just added a few things to the list of stuff non-blizzard code is blocked from doing.

Like targeting and casting.

My favourite part of fastcast is actually the channeling protection. If I only hit my button once it doesn't always fire (at the end of a previous cast, end of a cooldown, etc). That's plenty fun when I really need the spell to go off fast. If I hit my button more than once I'd often cancel it just after it fired if the first click worked, wasting mana and a cooldown. When I put 2 seconds of channel protection up I can spam the button in that 2 second window until it fires and not risk cancelling it early. Does anyone know if that functionality would be possible in the xp?