Tidbit Leaked from Blizzard

[Quark]

As many of you know, there's been another Hunters vs Blizzard fight going on recently over a bug surfacing in the 1.5.0 patch. Certain skills had timers affected by their weapon speed when they shouldn't have.

The Hunters screamed and clawed, claiming DPS nerfs as if the Fires of Hell had come down on them. Then Blizzard released that the bug was not intended to be fixed when 1.5.0 went live. Oops. Hell hath no fury like the Hunters scorned, apparantly.

In the midst of the flames, Blizzard then released this information: it had always been bugged this way. The difference between now and the test patch was that the Client side used to show the "right" cooldown, but the Server side enforced the wrong, longer one. The test patch had the "wrong" - but accurate - cooldown displayed. So all the Hunters giving numbers about how they suffered sounded like they were lying.

Of course, now Blizzard says it'll try to fix the cooldown bug completely before 1.5.0 goes life (but, hey, Rogues getting hurt by their own skill - Ghostly Strike - isn't important). Why does any of this matter to me? Because it gives the backstory to a revelation Blizzard posted here.

People have claimed 1.0 second global cooldowns. Others have claimed 1.5 second global cooldowns. I had tried timing it in my head before, and came closer to 1.0 but somewhat off. What's the discrepency? There is a 500 ms grace period given in cooldown calculations server side, to allow for latency problems. So if you hit the button at, say, 1.1 seconds, the server would still allow even though you're 0.4 seconds early. The reason some Hunters experienced reduced DPS in the test patch was that they were no longer using up thier grace period.

Just some interesting information, and it shows that neither relying on a 1.0 cooldown nor a 1.5 is completely accurate, as you are fluctuating between them to account for latency.

[lfd]

There is a 500 ms grace period given in cooldown calculations server side, to allow for latency problems.  So if you hit the button at, say, 1.1 seconds, the server would still allow even though you're 0.4 seconds early.
[right][snapback]79712[/snapback][/right]

Urgh. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but why do I feel there's going to be some clever sod who works out how to modify the client to allow it to send attacks to the server 0.5 seconds early, thus always hitting near the start of the grace period?

Edit: I mean after the described changes go live, when server cooldown will almost always be half a second shorter than client cooldown.

[Quark]

Urgh.  Maybe I'm overly cynical, but why do I feel there's going to be some clever sod who works out how to modify the client to allow it to send attacks to the server 0.5 seconds early, thus always hitting near the start of the grace period?

If you hit the key right before it finishes a cooldown, it will still work already. This just confirmed my experiences.

Edit: I mean after the described changes go live, when server cooldown will almost always be half a second shorter than client cooldown.
[right][snapback]79727[/snapback][/right]

Changes are only to certain Hunter skills, those are the ones that are bugged, supposedly.

[Ruvanal]

People have claimed 1.0 second global cooldowns.  Others have claimed 1.5 second global cooldowns.  I had tried timing it in my head before, and came closer to 1.0 but somewhat off.  What's the discrepency? There is a 500 ms grace period given in cooldown calculations server side, to allow for latency problems.  So if you hit the button at, say, 1.1 seconds, the server would still allow even though you're 0.4 seconds early.  The reason some Hunters experienced reduced DPS in the test patch was that they were no longer using up thier grace period.
[right][snapback]79712[/snapback][/right]

Quark, you are misunderstanding where the latency they are referring to is at. It is server side latency that may cause the server to still be doing calculations on some rather large events (say a 100 alliance verses 100 horde raid in a major city). In a case like this if the server was enforcing a straight 1.5 second cooldown; the server itself may not have cycled the cooldown correctly till 1.6 seconds due to a heavier than designed work load. Your client is still enforcing the full 1.5 second cooldown. Keep in mind that the flash you are seeing on the icon is after the cooldown is over on the client side.

[Bob the Beholder]

Something odd with cooldowns I have noticed while playing a hunter--and not with anything else so far. With every other skill with a cooldown I can hit the button at the exact moment it starts to flash and the skill will go off. If I do the same with arcane shot, without fail, it will tell me that the skill is not ready. I have taken to not using just that skill until after the flash animation on the button is finished, because otherwise it simply will not work, when I don't have to with any other hunter skill I've used. Or any mage skill. Or any druid skill.

[Mirajj]

Something odd with cooldowns I have noticed while playing a hunter--and not with anything else so far.  With every other skill with a cooldown I can hit the button at the exact moment it starts to flash and the skill will go off.  If I do the same with arcane shot, without fail, it will tell me that the skill is not ready.  I have taken to not using just that skill until after the flash animation on the button is finished, because otherwise it simply will not work, when I don't have to with any other hunter skill I've used.  Or any mage skill.  Or any druid skill.
[right][snapback]79734[/snapback][/right]

This is what I get for playing a Hunter...I thought that the skill wasn't usable until after the flash, as I'd been told "That skill isn't ready" so much I just started using them after the flash.

[Quark]

Something odd with cooldowns I have noticed while playing a hunter...
[right][snapback]79734[/snapback][/right]

You're hitting the bug that should be fixed in time for the patch if the latest blue posts are accurate.

[savaughn]

This is probably similar enough that I'll put it in here.

I was leveling my wands on a 42 priest and a 28 mage this weekend and noticed a different wand behavior than I'd ever seen before when I'd done wand testing previously. When using a wand with a slow timer you would see the timer cycle around on the wand and the "after shot" timer goes a bit slower than the standard cooldown. You see the standard cooldown go on your spells and the cooldown will still be going on the wand for a short bit.

You can fire the wand any time after the standard cooldown goes. I don't know if this will make sense or not, but I can fire off the wand shot when it gets approximately to the 9-o'clock position on it's own little cooldown timer. I don't know if this is this latency issue or if this is something that has changed with wands but you can definitely get more wand shots off now.

[towelrod]

Now that the wand is autoshoot, I notice the same buggy behavior as arcane missiles. I turn on autoshoot to finish off a mob that is almost dead, and instead of pumping out one wand shot every 1.4 seconds, it fires right away... then pauses for 2 seconds, then fires 2 in a row...

Its not network lag, because my latency is always below 100ms. This was happening last night when I had about 35ms.

[Treesh]

I turn on autoshoot to finish off a mob that is almost dead, and instead of pumping out one wand shot every 1.4 seconds, it fires right away... then pauses for 2 seconds, then fires 2 in a row...

Its not network lag, because my latency is always below 100ms.  This was happening last night when I had about 35ms.
[right][snapback]80147[/snapback][/right]

That's not something I see with Aleri though so I wonder just what is causing that behavior for you. There are no pauses for me and on the first shot, it isn't immediate. There's still the warm-up time on that first shot that there's always been, but it's no longer there on the subsequent shots.

[Roane]

In the midst of the flames, Blizzard then released this information: it had always been bugged this way.  [right][snapback]79712[/snapback][/right]

Just wanted to mention/confirm that this bug had always been there -- or at least for the last few patches, which is when I first noticed it. The complaints were low until the display change, I guess, since I remember reading the fuss about this on the Hunter forums and wondering how it was that people were just now noticing this problem.

Edited to add emphasis/clarification.