Thought I'd get the ball rolling with a place we can toss up changes that may / will be necessary with the way Blizzard has modified the UI again in 2.3 (current PTR). I got most of my addons functional, but there seem to be some modifications to the way the paper doll is referenced that bug out a couple of things, and the /stopcasting change may be interesting to talk about, especially ways to ignore Blizzard's crap solution and keep our current functional macros.

How exactly is their solution "crap"? In fact, looking at the /stopcasting thread in this forum, nobody seems to have raised a single objection about it.

Right now it only affects spells longer than 1.5 secs, for instant casts, channeled spells and spells with 1.5 secs or lower casting time it doesn`t do anything.

So it would seem like the more appropriate thing to do in that case would be to hop on the PTR and submit feedback through their reporting tools, rather than try to find ways to "ignore Blizzard's crap solution."

Pardon my ignorance perhaps, but why would you want to stopcast a 1.5second cast anyway. In my case that would mean I go below the GCD (when I was still healing), so it seems a bit futile?

Because your lag still gets added onto a 1.5 second cast spell.

You can make your 3.0 cast take 3.0 now instead of 3.5, but there's nothing you can do anymore to stop your 1.5 from taking 2.0.


Which is unfortunate because, by the very nature of the beast, lag affects short-cast spells more than long.

That information is not entirely true.

I have be able to spam a 1.5 CAST spell, get the cast bar to show interupted, which means the the server got the message and the spell was finish, but the client still showed it as casting, and this is what happens now with /stopcasting.

There needs to be a little work done on the client side to be able to distinguish from client side messaging showing interrupts, and server side messaging showing interrupt->casting.

Manly has shown this change to a nice effect in This Post. It is not the best it could be, but it's a lot better than it was.

Now remember for true instant casts, whether it succeeds or fails the time between client->server->client is always less than the GCD, so it has no effect either way since the GCD is handled client side to begin with.

The most amount of changes I see occurring, which happening with this last patch too, is that functions that took no arguments to execute, i.e SomethingToDoSomething() will now require SomethingToDoSomething("argument"). Not a major change, just a minor annoyance.

I do know what stopcasting does and I did make use of it whilst I was healing, but when I stopcasted my LHW I would sometimes do it faster then GCD. Making it futile, since I had to wait for it to finish..

I'm interested to see what this does for Australian players (I have never played with a sub 400 ping) Also I wonder if they will do anything about hunter shots having to be perfectly timed?

If you used Quartz, and had the GCD bar showing, you would see that there is a slight difference in the ending of the GCD bar and the cast bar, and with a /stopcasting macro you could press it at the end of the GCD bar and be fine. With the implementation Blizzard has just given us /stopcasting that same spell now is the same as spaming the button near the end of the cast. With 1.5 second cast spells and quartz you can still use /stopcasting as it till ensures a 1.5 cast.

Question for mod writers:
Is is possible to take the tooltip cast time for a spell at all? I don't know the very complex functions at all, but if this is possible it would seem like Blizzards new implementation uses it. So if that is true, and you can base a bar for quartz off it, /stopcasting seems better, but this is all hearsay.

Any Australian Hunters please post results I am interested as well.

Are you sure it's the stopmacro changes and not just the unusual latency playing you a trick?

I'm pretty sure I've had this on live, although I can only recall specific events when i dismounted from the netherwing disguise mount. I assumed it had something to do with either the disguise or me downloading stuff in the background.

Hm, could be. The latency on PTR is about 300-400ms, whereas on live I usually have <100ms.
Although it happened every single time I used the macro.

Try adding [nomounted] to the cast lines.

Ie:

/cast [nomounted, flyable] Flying mount; [nomounted] Ground Mount

Has anyone had an issue on the PTR where they can't change Interface settings? With all my mods enabled, when I hit the Interface button on the ESC menu it just completely removes my UI (like I hit Alt-Z). I know it's a mod because when I disable them all it doesn't happen; just wondering if anyone else had this happen and has narrowed it down, because I just noticed it before work this morning and didn't have a chance to fully test anything before I had to leave the house.

Disable Skinner.