|
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/8ysf4y/worried_about_removal_of_exclusive_fullscreen/ @cyro. I remember you did some testing too but dont remember the results, apparently with dx12 we can finally utilize 144fps + 60fps dual monitor setups. Seems almost too good to be true
As for BfA, i have to agree with Cyro. Legion was by far the best expansion they had, thanks to the new m+ system. The first 6 months or so sucked thanks to the ridiculous AP grind and rng on legendaries and left a sour taste but once you got over the hurdle it was fun to play your main. (cause if you wanted an alt you had to redo all the grind again :D). But from everything ive seen about BfA so far im not too hyped. Story is ridiculous, class design is dull. Azerite sucks compared to legendaries + sets. tank balance is a joke still. warmode will most likely be irrelevant, or something you have to do for 30minutes a week to get the weekly reward, lets not kid ourselves. The biggest thing im looking for right now is the announced realm merges. Hopefully my dead realm is part of that.
|
United Kingdom20172 Posts
I've never had a problem with mismatching refresh rates between monitors personally.. at least not yet. The main problem with loss of fullscreen is that windows vista through 10 adds a frame of input lag for the desktop composition and we've been bypassing it since by having the game take direct control of the GPU output - exclusive fullscreen - without the desktop compositor being involved. There are supposedly some tweaks in win10 and dx12 that can avoid this lag in some circumstances but that only applies, when it does, to people who are using dx12 on windows 10; a fraction of the WoW playerbase.
A Win10-DX12-AMD config is a minority and it is not the highest performing WoW setup, why should they be the only ones that can play without vsync lag? We have the technology! Feels like i'm taking crazy pills when someone with flagship 2018 hardware can have more input lag than a dude with a core 2 duo and a CRT because the dx9 version of WoW and OS's before Vista didn't require vsync but the surprisingly poorly performing dx11/dx12 hybrid monster does and Blizzard doesn't seem to know or care about it - their CM's are trying to explain why the sky isn't falling when they don't understand what the problem even is.
Secondary and much smaller is the performance hit - small fps hit, frametime stability loss. I had to re-record all of my frametime benchmarks when i realized that i ran half of them in windowed fullscreen because i had an FPS gain (single digit %) and a significant improvement in frametime stability when i ran the same 100% CPU limited benchmark on exclusive fullscreen mode which was big enough that i couldn't compare a 200mhz CPU change or going from e.g. 3200mhz to 4000mhz RAM accurately any more due to the discrepancy. His settings are lower performance than mine; less CPU limited and higher run-to-run variation because he's flying around the whole broken isles rather than sampling a single flight path half a dozen times hands-off the keyboard with the same screen position and all other players / NPC's not being processed.
If you have everything set up right, all of the tweaks like disabling graphics acceleration in discord and all that then it often won't hurt much but it's not completely negligable. A bit of frametime stability loss, a few % performance hit, maybe 400 MB of VRAM occupied by the desktop compositor but that won't usually kill you. It was the difference between some games being playable and unplayable when i ran my gtx970 during the 3.5GB debacle but this is more of a problem for lower end hardware users than it is for people with decent systems since WoW doesn't use much VRAM.
We made exclusive fullscreen and used it for decades for a good reason, meanwhile making a lot of tradeoffs to other parts of the OS under the assumption that high performance applications would bypass it all and do their own thing so that it wasn't a problem. Until now.
-------
Havoc has been getting cleaned up recently, a lot of the time in hotfixes that didn't have notes. Some of the latest:
Fel Rush, Eye Beam and Blade Dance got ~50% buffs which lets them play a greater role in ST as well as cleave and multi-target situations rather than being tickle cannons (especially FR+BD) between other cooldowns being available. Doing completely single-target nukes with a large fraction of your APM despite having 12 enemies around still feels ridiculous* and doesn't make sense next to toolkits like the balance druid but that's a good nudge towards making the multi-target scaling not be a mathematical disaster ;P
*Legionhavoc got around this by having a talent that did 10% of the nuke's damage to every nearby enemy so it'd hit twice as hard when around 10 enemies. It was also one of three major sources of CDR, the other two scaling strongly with target counts which have all been heavily toned down if not removed entirely in 8.0.
The damage portion of DBlades was buffed up a lot - by >2.5x - so that part of its identity became dealing ~1/10'th of our damage as an auto attack enhancement rather than just as a fury generator. That took it to top of the ST sims by a strong margin and it got knocked down a bit here for tuning reasons. It plays fairly well with the reworked momentum - although that still has fairly large issues with the added GCD's - so that the flood of fury income from other sources can mask the relatively ineffective and random generation from Dblades itself.
Eye beam - although it had a big damage buff - got the bonus to the primary target reduced from +100% to +50% which is preferable IMO. If that bonus was too big then the AOE portion would have to be tuned rather weakly to balance the ST portion but if the bonus doesn't exist at all, it may not be worth casting on ST unless it were buffed to levels that were oppressive on multi-target. +50% is a solid bonus that's easier to tune for both to play well~
Trail of ruin was hotfixed - on patch week, lol! - to properly scale with mastery and momentum as well as that buff; it hits 2.5x harder now. Scratching my head on why they didn't do that 5 months ago but better late than never!
Fury bar was increased from 100 to 120 and some fury costs/generators were tweaked a bit to fix the frequent huge overflows and flow problems that came from not being able to bank enough fury to cast more than 1 nuke in a row without risking an overflow.
The buff duration of Demonic was increased from 8 to 10 seconds and the buff now begins when you start to cast eye beam rather than at the end of the cast. This basically keeps the duration post-EB similar but it also buffs the cast time of EB which lowers ramp-up time and maintains a strong DPET (damage per execute time) on eye beam - it hits hard and fast right away rather than having to wait through the whole cast to apply its buff and then start to hit hard with other abilities afterwards.
Some other tuning stuff to make more fun talents playable - more options - and some of the trashier talents no longer 5%+ overall DPS ahead. We got a few more azerite armors i think. Some of the interesting ones are based on fury cost reduction so they'll help with fury starving. Dungeon APM is still very low, as low as 40-50 compared to 80+ on live Legion when comparing 120 with full azerite gear to 110 with legendaries and T21. We've relied on powerful and high uptime haste increases to make Havoc more playable as a spammy and fast class in lack of some other complexities; they're improved on that area a bit but i'd still like to see it get faster and more responsive again.
It's a lot more playable than 3 months ago but still needs a significant stat pass as well, Mastery could do to get its worth bumped up by 1.5x (we now deal more like ~50% chaos damage instead of a more typical 85% on Legion and the Mastery only buffs chaos damage) and Crit needs a little help to keep up with versatility as well; scaling in general is poor. I'm expecting that relatively soon for more than just Havoc, a handful of other specs have this kind of issue and they prefer to fix it later in the design process when other changes and tweaks have been done.
Through various nerfs and redesigns my dungeon runspeed has dropped from 150% (Legion) to 110% (BFA) which has left the char feeling more like an old arms warrior which is really not my thing, i can't play low mobility melee and i loved Havoc as a way to get around that in WoW.
I'm really liking some of the dungeons & the warfront music. A bit more hyped, i've been very critical though i think most of that was justified. More communication about the plans - what kind of things are going to change, when they're going to change and why (rather than no post about a class for 6 months) would have helped a lot with feedback, criticism and planning.
|
Hey, I've been a Liquid fan for a number of years. I used to follow a number of SC players from brood war into SC2 and recently I have been follow the LCS team. Over the past number of months I've been playing ALOT of WoW. I was just on the BFA beta as was playing around with the new "communities" stuff. I set up a "TL Beta" community if people wanted to join and just have a look at it (HORDE). Here is the link: https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/invite/qpd7mFlzK?region=US&faction=Horde
PS, if I've done something stupid and there is (or plans to be) an official TL community in BFA, just let me know and i'll delete this.
|
Cant join since I am EU.
Is this community just ingame like guilds or is it for connecting outside of it?
|
United Kingdom20172 Posts
AFAIK it's largely a copy of the guild system but without server lock or exclusivity
|
Could maybe be used for making M+ communities for finding groups then. Or indeed a TL community for EU, although our numbers are dwindling.
|
On July 15 2018 09:37 Cyro wrote: I've never had a problem with mismatching refresh rates between monitors personally.. at least not yet. The main problem with loss of fullscreen is that windows vista through 10 adds a frame of input lag for the desktop composition and we've been bypassing it since by having the game take direct control of the GPU output - exclusive fullscreen - without the desktop compositor being involved. There are supposedly some tweaks in win10 and dx12 that can avoid this lag in some circumstances but that only applies, when it does, to people who are using dx12 on windows 10; a fraction of the WoW playerbase.
But how noticeable is that really, be honest? The last time i remember having problems with vsync is probably in the hl2 era. Ive been playing all games that allow it on windowed fullscreen and i actually hate it when games dont have that option as tabbing out of fullscreen has a big chance of not being able to tab back in. I can understand when you want more fidelity on maybe a twitch shooter or a fighting game but i dont see the problem in wow. I get your point though, removing options sucks.
|
United Kingdom20172 Posts
On July 15 2018 19:13 Warri wrote:Show nested quote +On July 15 2018 09:37 Cyro wrote: I've never had a problem with mismatching refresh rates between monitors personally.. at least not yet. The main problem with loss of fullscreen is that windows vista through 10 adds a frame of input lag for the desktop composition and we've been bypassing it since by having the game take direct control of the GPU output - exclusive fullscreen - without the desktop compositor being involved. There are supposedly some tweaks in win10 and dx12 that can avoid this lag in some circumstances but that only applies, when it does, to people who are using dx12 on windows 10; a fraction of the WoW playerbase.
But how noticeable is that really, be honest? The last time i remember having problems with vsync is probably in the hl2 era. Ive been playing all games that allow it on windowed fullscreen and i actually hate it when games dont have that option as tabbing out of fullscreen has a big chance of not being able to tab back in. I can understand when you want more fidelity on maybe a twitch shooter or a fighting game but i dont see the problem in wow. I get your point though, removing options sucks.
It can be as much as 1.5x input lag multiplier so it's not just a marginal thing
I used windowed fullscreen a lot too, but with windows themes that didn't use vsynced desktop composition. They don't exist in windows 8 or 10 and they don't support several newer techs so we're getting backed into a corner here.
The same change removes all multi-GPU support from the engine because SLI and Crossfire require exclusive fullscreen. You can technically code for multi-GPU usage specifically in dx12 but that would only cleanly apply to win10+dx12+radeon users.. if it were implemented (it's not). Multi-GPU is not relevant for WoW when talking about new and higher end systems but it's another thing on the list that i think that the devs have not properly considered that they're removing.
---
They're also getting pretty brazen with the b.net client autoplaying streams now.
|
|
[QUOTE]On July 15 2018 16:57 Redox wrote: Cant join since I am EU.
I'm on EU too...i think the region is showing as US as the beta is on US (i have zero proof of this, just a guess)
|
If its a beta community anyone on beta can join since they are only the 2 servers.
Once its on live though you wouldn't be able to join a community in NA from EU and vice versa.
|
Aren't live communties going up on Tuesday?
|
United Kingdom20172 Posts
US communities on tues, EU on wed
beta only has US, their servers are in cali AFAIK (lolping)
|
What are these communities again? I've completely missed it and why everyone is ecstatic about them.
|
Region wide chat channels basically. To help connect groups of people outside of Guilds. Tho why they have kept them faction specific I do not understand.
|
On July 16 2018 18:28 Gorsameth wrote: Region wide chat channels basically. To help connect groups of people outside of Guilds. Tho why they have kept them faction specific I do not understand.
Oh cool. Thanks for the info.
|
United Kingdom20172 Posts
On July 16 2018 18:28 Gorsameth wrote: Region wide chat channels basically. To help connect groups of people outside of Guilds. Tho why they have kept them faction specific I do not understand.
"Faction pride", we can do a lot of stuff cross-server but not cross faction. There are two great splits at the moment; Region and Faction.
Of them i think faction would be the easiest to break for gameplay reasons but we're not even close to doing dungeons, raids, quests, wq, island expeditions, warfronts, arathi rare farming etc with a mix of alliance and horde characters. It would be weird if you had to check the faction of other people in your community all of the time to see if you were even capable of grouping with them when they asked.
Real life limits messing up regions with the order of magnitude increase in ping
---
Prepatch at 02:00 CEST Wednesday for EU
|
|
Wow, calling this a trailer is bold... Its even vague for a sneak.
|
I think its fair, given how its not fully animated and just uses awesomely glorified slides.
|
|
|
|