Spell Reflect, and its cousin, Improved Spell Reflect, is both the bane and the boon of my existence sometimes.
When it works, it works fantastically - and yet, I feel so much in the dark as to how to determine which situation or encounter it is going to succeed in, or, how much it's going to succeed.
Here are a couple of examples, and some questions for anyone that might know:
- Malygos. Having watched Cider's video and read some of the other comments in that thread, I make sure to spam it in phase 2 wherever possible. Apart from the slight annoyance of occasionally reflecting the magical protective bubbles that come down to protect us (ho ho Blizz, you do have a sense of humour don't you) it works great.
But I find myself wondering exactly how the ability works, specifically in terms of charged for party / raid members. I always thought it was just one 'charge' for the entire group (or perhaps, one charge for me, one shared between the rest of the group). But, having some time on my hands to look at things while running from bubble to bubble I see this isn't the case; instead it looks more like each person in the raid gets one charge from the spell reflect. This is insanely cool, if I'm right. Am I?
- Ahn'Kanet. Does anyone else run this dungeon purely for the fun of reflecting mammoth amounts of damage to the Spell Flingers? I don't know what the deal is, but they have a very long cast (5 secs or so I think) on a shadow blast spell, and 2 spell reflects kill them. They have about 60k health. So you're reflecting a minimum of 30k dmg, and I actually suspect it's a lot more. Their spells don't hit you for this much, and I haven't noticed a shadow debuff on them.
- Timing in general. Sometimes it seems to take a while to 'activate' - a good couple of seconds after I've pressed the button. I don't know how this interacts with latency however, or, the cast timers of mobs shooting spells at us. Maybe SR has to be fully up before the spell leaves their hands. Anyone know?
Alright, well, thats a few questions out there, it's a slow day at work so I thought I'd post to see if anyone had any answers, or in fact their own questions to share.
Peace!
On this im 99% sure that if caster a and b cast a 4 sec cast and caster c casts a 4,5 sec cast(all three casts at the same time) then you will SR the casts from a and b. If caster c casts a 3,5 sec cast and a and b still casts the same 4 sec then the SR will only work for caster c.Originally Posted by dyls
I think Swifty showed this in his first tbc movie where he SR'ed like 20 people at the same time ^^
SR needs to be up before the cast is finished
Noraxe
Magtheridon EU
50k shadow bolts are fun
I am very interested in learning the answer to this - after the cooldown reduction was removed in beta, I discarded this talent and considered it useless in all but a gimmick scenario. If it works the way you describe I might have to reconsider my thinking.But, having some time on my hands to look at things while running from bubble to bubble I see this isn't the case; instead it looks more like each person in the raid gets one charge from the spell reflect.
[18:19:08] [R] [80:Neuter:1]: if bush can dodge a shoe, you can dodge the wall
Personally, I suspect the skill is heavily bugged. But it's such a unique ability, it's really quite hard to tell!
Main things I can cite as examples:
In classic Volley situations (Think the casters in VH, or Black Morass, or any equivalent) assuming the group members are all close enough to get the buff, all the casts will be reflected.
This is obviously quite nice
In other instance situations where I throw up an Imp SR as something is being cast at another party member, the buff DOES disappear as soon as that person reflects the single spell.
Finally, in more random situations (ie, bunch of mobs, PvP, anything without 'controlled' cast times) I quite often notice multiple reflects going on, which I would expect to some extent from latency, but sometimes it seems to be a LOT more than I would expect from 300ish ms of latency.
Example: The Voidwalker in VH, on heroic. His massive amount of small shadowbolts from the little orb adds cause huge pains for the group. So I spam SR whenever I can. And I was getting reflect messages flying up spread over at least a second or two. Not just the half a second I would have expected if the debuff was meant to disappear as soon as a spell was reflected.
The only real conclusion I can come to is that either the buff has a MINIMUM uptime of at least a second, or... it's all down to travel times of spells. Your average shadow/frost/fire-bolt has a travel time of at least half a second. Assuming the spell is only reflected if the buff is up BEFORE it's cast (which I'm 99% sure is true) and then assume the reflect charge is only lost AFTER it's physically reflected, factor in the latency of 1/4 of a second or so for the server to confirm the reflection and get rid of the buff, and there's at least 3/4 of a second window of opportunity where the whole group could have reflected spells.
It's an ability I keep trying to find ways to test during instances, but have yet to get any sort of conclusive answer
So... it may simply be buggy... but at the moment, that's my best estimation for how it works
The answer is simple. Shadow Blast does 50% of the target's max health worth of damage on normal, and 80% damage on heroic.
Regarding the mechanics, Improved Spell Reflection makes it so that every party member gets its own buff (the range is not all that big, though I haven't yet determined exactly how far away a party member can be and still be buffed). Once you or a party member reflects a single spell, all the other recipients lose the buff, too.
I hypothesized a long time ago that the server rounds times in order to decrease the number of calculations it needs to perform. That would explain why you were able to spell reflect multiple spells, interrupt a spell without actually stopping it, and have a heal land or a cooldown trigger without working properly as a player dies.
Say something like anything within .25 seconds is rounded to the nearest half second. It would explain all of these situations. You would interrupt the spell and it would finish casting simultaneously, you would heal and the player would die simultaneously, and the spells would hit you simultaneously.
Pretty sure its only one charge for the whole group you are just experiencing the issue we've had for ages where you reflect multiple spells cast close together. It used to catch even more of them but they must've nerfed the rounding around Hyjal making the timings tighter.
The range seems very small. Also keep in mind if your partymate reflects a spell he gains the threat, not you.
Odd, because I've definitely seen behaviour contradictory to this. It's been most obvious to me during Malygos phase 2.
We will be running from one bubble to another for example, and I'll turn my camera round to see which of the raid members are away in dreamland and have forgotten to follow me. Numerous times (we wiped on Maly a LOT
Given that each one of these bolts reflected is ~15k damage NOT hitting the raid, and ~15k damage hitting a bad guy, I'm delighted it's getting reflected multiple times, but just wish I had a concrete answer for future strategies.
The other thought I had was that (intentionally) some spells use up the charge, and other spells don't - for instance, I seem to remember that the...erm....big robots in hero mech that do charged fist - you can reflect one of their charged attacks with SR up, but it doesn't use the charge. I'm not 100% on that, though.
Also, thanks for your reply re: shadow blast, clears that one right up, I really should have noticed
I would like to see the actual combat log, because what I see in mine clearly shows that the buff gets removed the moment one party member is hit by the spell. You can get a lot of examples on Dalronn the Controller, for example, who casts randomly targeted, but reflectable shadow bolts. The moment one party member reflects a shadow bolt, all the buffs are removed.
There are some spells that get reflected, but do not consume the buff, but that is a different effect, and probably a bug (it's usually channeled spells, but King Ymiron's Bane effects also has this property, whether SR is improved or not).
I also wonder about the 4% spell hit reduce. Does that mean a player with +8% spell hit will never miss me? Or does that mean I will now always be missed at least 4% of the time.
How does it affect bosses?
Damn hidden modifiers...
Hopefully I'll get a chance to do it again this week, if we don't have too many raiders away. I'll record it if so
Having in mind Malygos:
I have had big disccussions about grounding totems consuming multiple spells. And spellreflect works the same.
It looks like it works like this: the moment a spell leaves the "hand" the engine checks if there is a reflect buff on the target, if so, the spell gets reflected. A lot of spells have an "air time" though. So if someone else or you manages to finish the cast of another spell before the previous spell has hit the target, you get another check if there is a SR buff on the target, it turns out a yes and on impact the spell gets reflected.
When the first spell hits the target, the SR buff gets removed. The second spell however will also be reflected because the check whether it will be reflected is not on impact but when it leaves the casters hand. It's already flagged as being reflected and will fly straight back even if there's no SRbuff active at the time it hits.
This can be often seen by quick combos of a spell with airtime followed by an instant spell: they both get reflected (like casting a lightning bolt immediately followed by a shock, the shock will land before the lightning bolt actually hits the target). Or when you go into a big group of caster mobs who all start casting at the same time and all get reflected because all their bolts are in the air the same time.
In the Malygos encounter in p2 the casters use "flighttime" spells where there is a lot of room for the other casters to get of a cast in between.
You can't reflect spell already flying at you but I don't think they consume your spellreflect buff if they're not reflect-flagged.
Last edited by orcstar; 12-24-2008 at 05:59 AM.
Orcstar's got it all right!
Nothing is bugged about Spell Reflect, it's simply how the mechanics work, which is both good and bad at times.
You can use it to your advantage though, for example if you're in an instance that's somewhat caster heavy (Occulus is one), you can pop reflect when every mob is casting their spells, then run away, or intervene to your party member, so that way you force each spell to have some "travel time" - thus basically guaranteeing you'll reflect all the other ones too.
Once you understand the mechanics quite well and are familiar with all the abilities mobs in a given instance do, spell reflect becomes infinitely more fun!
And yes, Ahn'kahet heroic is an absolute Blast to tank as a warrior.
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