Ignite Munching And Why Mages Wanted A Fix – WotLK Classic PTR 3.4.2

With the recent Bluepost from Blizzard, it was mentioned a much requested fix for Ignite which is a huge quality of life change for Fire Mages, currently one of the most popular and better performing specializations. This bug caused Ignite damage to be lost due to specific spell interactions. Essentially whenever two spells critically hit within approximately a 50ms range.
This happens in a few scenarios:

Alongside Munching, there’s was also a beneficial bug named Vomit (or bleeding) which instead added bonus Ignite damage. This was caused by landing a critical hit within 40-50ms of the next Ignite tick causing it to extend further and provide free unintended damage. This bug was not replicable through any player’s efforts, and only had 30% “success rate” when in near perfect conditions.

It’s important to mention fixing these bugs isn’t a buff since Munching was almost completely avoided with the clever use of specific tools which evolved throughout these first two phases. To explain why here are some simulated damage numbers using the Mage Sim:

What all this means is that if both Ignite related bugs are fixed, then the gain is only ~55dps out of almost 10.5k (~0.5%). Any informed mage would be equipped with one of these tools to get them into that range. The only players for whom it can be considered a buff are those who were uninformed, meaning it’ll boost lower-end Fire Mage damage, but it won’t impact high-end players besides the quality of life improvement.

Early in the expansion the response from the Blizzard team was that they wouldn’t get involved because it could break other things or have unintended consequences. Since this was what we were left with players-made solutions were made to avoid this bug and these evolved as the past two phases went on, here is a little history of the solutions used:

• Initially a simple solution was used in the form of a CQS macro (cancel queued spell) alongside the Pyroblast cast which created a delay after the Fireball just before it by canceling the queue system, meaning a mix of how fast you mashed the key combined with server lag and your own ping added up to the delay inbetween the two.
  Not only did this cause pretty big gaps in your casts causing DPS loss, it was also very inconsistent due to the multiple factors causing the gap itself.

• Afterwards some tools came into the fold, the Pyroblast Anti Queue Weakaura blocked the Pyroblast from being clicked at all until the Fireball had been cast. This caused it to be more consistent but again required very good connection since it needed you to also mash the Pyroblast as fast as you could whenever you had an Hot Streak active.

• Alongside it there was another Weakaura, the Pyroblast Fake Queue: this one instead of requiring a good connection, required a computer that performed somewhat well. This weakaura froze or stuttered your entire game at the end of a Fireball whenever you were queue’ing a Pyroblast. Although this still had limitations, it was a solution for people who had bad connections since you were allowed you actually queue your spells normally.

These solutions were the most commonly used tools to avoid the damage loss of Munching. Sadly Blizzard ended up blocking the function the Fake Queue weakaura relied on to function due to separate issues as can be seen in the error the weakaura caused suddenly: “1x AddOn ‘WeakAuras’ tried to call the protected function ‘SpellCancelQueuedSpell()’.”

• Some minor improvement happened until recently where the SnakeQueue weakaura which used the infamous Albino Snake pet to summon the Snake in between specific spells to create a consistent gap which seperated the landing of your spells similar to the past. This specific pet unlike others doesn’t have a global cooldown when summoning or dismissing it making it perfect for small intended delays.

  This allowed players to both queue their spells which made the connection not as relevant as well as having much less stutter/freeze if at all when casting your Pyroblast. As a bonus you also summoned a cute pet repeatedly during combat.

Around this time, there was also a tool made that automatically detected the presence of either Ignite bug, and measures your ignite lost, or gained, from both. Alongside other metrics, it also provided delay measures on your Fireball to both check whether the solution was working for you, as well as tinkering with the window/offset settings of the weakauras to further optimize them for people’s personal ping, FPS performance and stutter preferences. It was named the Munchalyzer and you could troubleshoot your issues with the help of the community to reduce your Munching damage loss.

Recently while Blizzard was in the middle of balancing Feral Druid, one of the Blueposts briefly mentioned they’re finally fixing the bug:

Lastly, and for transparency, we wanted to let you know that we have been experimenting with some foundational adjustments to Deep Wounds and Ignite to fix the very authentic–but very frustrating–“Munching” effect that causes these spells to not stack properly when two attacks that add to their magnitude land at the exact same time.

This was very appreciated news, although with some community concerns related to it possibly being misunderstood as a buff instead of a quality of life change, since the solutions involved having to lag or freeze your game to avoid damage loss.

Now, this week the fix was finally released in the PTR as can be seen in the recent Bluepost which mentions the following:

After the community tested this bug it was concluded that neither Munching nor Vomit/Bleeding was occurring on PTR and players will be able play the main Fire Specialization with peace of mind that they’re not losing damage due to something outside of their control. The Weakauras and any delay, stutter, or lag tool will become obsolete and players will be able to play normally without the use of external weakauras, macros or addons.