Blizzard: WoW Forever's instant Auto Shot is a bug, and the 0.5-second wind-up is coming back

For two weeks the WoW Forever beta gave Hunters something Classic never did: auto-shots that fire with barely any wind-up, so you hardly have to stand still. We wrote about the argument that started around it on September 22, when there were no patch notes to explain it. Now there are.

What Blizzard said

In a post titled Auto-shoot Bug and Fix Incoming on September 23, community manager Kaivax wrote:

We’ve been tracking an issue in the WoW Forever Beta where the 0.5-second cast time that precedes a Hunter’s auto-shot or the use of a wand is not functioning properly. Due to a bug, these auto-shots are currently incurring a much shorter cast time, which in practice means that Hunters and wand users don’t need to stop to shoot for as long as intended. This is something that we will fix in an upcoming Beta build, hopefully next week.

So the wind-up was always meant to be there, and it applies to wands as well as bows and guns.

Why it mattered

The classic 0.5-second wind-up is what forces a ranged attacker to stop moving. Without it, a Hunter can kite and keep shooting almost freely, and Mages, Priests and Warlocks can wand while running. Players had noticed exactly that: in the thread Hunter is ruined, which now carries the edit “WE ARE SAVED”, the poster listed what the beta version was missing compared with Classic, from the cast time down to the bow-draw sound, and argued that a core mechanic of a Classic+ game should not change quietly.

That thread also shows the split. Its first replies call the whole thing a non-issue and say Hunter has never felt better. On the Blizzard thread, one player is glad the kiting will end, another points out a melee swing still seems to put auto-shot on cooldown, and several caster players are openly disappointed: wanding while moving would not have been strong in raids or battlegrounds, but it made leveling and questing with a Mage or Priest more pleasant.

Hunter creator Kippzo, who had argued earlier that the fast auto-shots felt good, covered the announcement the same day and makes a point worth keeping: what felt good was partly that the swing timer on screen matched what the character was doing.

What happens next

The fix is due in an upcoming beta build, per Blizzard “hopefully next week”. If you have been testing a Hunter, your leveling pace and your kiting will get slower, and any build or route you tested around instant shots is worth checking again once the build lands.

We will report the build when it arrives. The beta changes list tracks everything else that is moving before the November 4 launch.