I’ve been sick much of the week (PITY ME AND SEND ME CHOCOLATE), so I’ve got a couple of behind-the-times posts to make. The first is regarding this twixchange from a few days ago:
@Nicky67806079 We haven't heard many complaints about Vanish not working since we totally rebuilt it a year or two ago. Any more details?
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 15, 2013@ChritznL It was also really buggy BC of server lag and spells already in flight. "Fix Vanish" was probably the number one request we got.
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Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) January 15, 2013
It is likely that, as long as there is such a thing as “server lag,” there will always be someone complaining that Vanish doesn’t work the way it’s intended. Since I primarily PvE, I can’t speak that well to some of the most common complaints I still come across, which tend to revolve mostly around hunter and warlock pets continuing to target the rogue after Vanish has been cast. But even these reports are neither frequent nor consistent.
There can be zero question that Vanish works oodles better today than it did a few years ago, when there were acknowledged issues with the ability — e.g., rogues being knocked out of stealth almost immediately after hitting the button, because they were hit by a spell that was technically cast *before* they hit Vanish but that, because of normal server lag, didn’t actually “hit” them until *after* they hit Vanish. These issues led to a near-complete overhaul of how Vanish was programmed to work, and since then we’ve had dramatically fewer issues with the ability.
I don’t know why Vanish still occasionally seems not to work properly. Anecdotal reports trickle in periodically, but they’re so few and far between that it’s difficult to pin down precisely what might be causing them, or whether the issues people describe are intended or not. If you Vanish and a hunter pet continues to chase you, did Vanish not do its job, or was the pet just close enough when you Vanished that it was able to quickly retarget you (since stealth, after all, ain’t invisibility)? If you Vanish during a raid fight and a boss is still able to target you with an ability, did Vanish muff up, or is the ability itself designed to ignore stealth entirely?
I read those tweets and one of the posts on the official forums and thought “hmm I’ve not seen that at all” but that night in Isle of Conquest had it happen. A warrior was beating on me so I cloaked and vanished and they proceeded to continue beating on me despite being vanished.
Some of it is that if you have a Mage for example casting at you from range – if they cast something like frost bolt that has travel time then you vanish while it is in the air it still hits you. I’ve never checked but I think it is just that the animation isn’t cancelled not that it actually hits you.
It does still occur, but yes does seems a lot more rare.