OK, so after going through a couple of spreadsheets here are my conclusions:
- People not using stopcasting on spells with casts longer than the GCD will either see no change or actually improve their DPS if they happen to hit the next spell button within the Quartz red zone
- People currently using /stopcasting on spells with cast times longer than the GCD will see no change if latency remains constant or rises. If however the latency drops by less than 50% of your initial latency (the one you had when initiating the previous cast), the penalty will be at worst up to twice your initial latency. In exchange for that you remove the risk of cancelling your pending cast which occurs today in the exact same situation
- People using instants with a GCD cooldown or longer will suffer from the same penalty if latency drops by less than 50%. This affects, among others, Holy Shield for tankadins.
The real issue is that it impairs your ability to adjust, especially in PvP. If for the time being a warrior goes for a hamstring too early but suddenly gets a notification that his opponent has dodged, he can switch to mashing overpower, which will proc as soon as it gets through. Under the new system, it will get denied and delayed for twice the current latency at worst. Big deal for warriors mainly, but also rogues who can no longer mash keys in order to keep a stunlock going.
For tankadins, assuming a latency of 100ms (you probably shouldn’t be tanking if it is more than that, you’re putting your group at risk otherwise no matter how), that means up to 200ms of crushability between recasts. A problem warriors will face with renewing Shield Block as well for that matter, on top of their issue about more risks to be crushed on fast hitting mobs.
With that in mind, it will become more important than ever that the rest of the melee DPS do not give the boss any additional parries (as it shortens the delay to the next swing, increasing the risk that a crushing blow goes through during the HS gap). To that effect, all melee DPS including hunter pets, an off-tank, felguards, treants, shadowfiends and melee elementals should be behind the boss.
As I once mentioned a couple of months ago, the simplest way for the tank to optimize their and their raid’s gameplay may be to make turning the boss away from the raid a habit which should become the norm whereas another orientation becomes the exception, not the other way around. If you do and it constitutes a change of your habits, I’d advise making sure your rogues know about it beforehand though.
Based on all this, I can only keep my recommendation not to mash in 2.3. Unless they adjust the mechanisms again, of course. Remember, a PTR is a test realm, things may yet change.
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Just wanted to add that, as you might know, the pet mechanics were changed too so pets always attack from behind and melees now can attack from where they want if they reached the expertise cap ( if nothing else but parries have to be avoided ).
Oh yes, absolutely. I have talked about pets elsewhere but indeed, this is of course also relevant to the present discussion.
I’m still thinking about Shield Block. The improved Shield Block talent increases the duration for 1 second but the cooldown remains at 5 seconds. So there shouldn’t be latency problem if a tank spamms it?
well, shield block (I think) is not tied to the GCD so it remains spammable.