Wednesday, September 29, 2010

WoW adds ability queue in Cata/4.0

According to this thread on the official forums, there is now an ability queue in WoW. To explain, currently if you push a button during a GCD, nothing happens because of the GCD. With this change, the first button you push during GCD becomes "locked" in queue; it is set to go off as the next skill you use. To some, that might sound cool: "I can decide what skill I'm going to use next earlier! That's awesome."

However, this leaves you unable to react to the ever-changing situation of combat. What happens when a proc goes off enabling/empowering Skill A, but you just queued Skill B? What if you notice you need to re-apply a DoT, but queued another nuke? What do you do in PVP if you queued up a damaging skill, but your target just got CC'd? The case of procs is where this probably hurts the most, as some procs (Bloodsurge) only give you a few seconds to react and the queue locks you out for another 1-1.5 seconds, giving you a smaller window in which to use your proc.

If this was an optional system that you could disable, I would have no problem with it. Some players (or even certain classes) could enable it if they found it beneficial, while others would not have to suffer unwanted changes to core gameplay mechanics. Hopefully Blizzard will add a toggle for this before it goes live.

22 comments:

  1. Well its just like with so many games in which real micro has been taken away by using queues. The ones not using them are usually in the advantage while the ones using them can be better of because they dont have the reaction times/the clicks per second ratio needed.

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  2. ive been hitting the PTR up every day and the more i play in it, the more i like the ability queue,

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  3. I don't mind it conceptually, I just don't like the fact that you can't turn it off.

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  4. This is something that I've been wanting since I've started playing WoW. I've been using a cast time bar recently so that I am able to know when to start cast the next spell.

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  5. Hmm, that actually sounds pretty interesting from a PvP perspective...

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  6. This is very intriguing. I would have assumed it was great from the getgo, but you brought up a good counterpoint.

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  7. just hit the abilities as you need them?.. hmmn.. I hope they disable this.

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  8. What was so bad about the old system. Wow..

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  9. I'm sure it'll get fine-tuned quite alot before launch.

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  10. This doesn't sound that great, situations change too quickly.

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  11. I really hope the fix it before it goes live, I mean some people just have no use for it so they might not want to use it, dont make them suffer what they dont want.

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  12. so much is changing... I don't play anymore but for some reason I'm still interesting to see what they do in the updates/expansions. Old habits die hard I guess.

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  13. Great post man. Keep in touch... Look forward to more.

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  14. Its going to be sweet, thinking of starting again soon to warm up the ol fingers

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