We’ve all been there: you are taking a beating from [insert number and name of mob(s) of choice] and you just need to get one more spell off. It might be a healing spell or that finishing fireball. Doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to happen because of that frustrating game dynamic – spell interrupt. The rest of this read comes down to this: I don’t see a player-to-mob spell interrupt in combat from melee or ranged or spell damage alone. When I get hit, my spell casting is interrupted, but I don’t see that happening to the stuff I whack, shoot, or burn/freeze, do you? Maybe it’s there, but all I see is a casting bar running along at a pretty nice, steady clip with full fury blazing on Gitr, Rapid Fire on Huntr, and more.
I’ve played nearly every class in the game, and the only classes that I didn’t experience a problem with interrupt were my warrior and mere level 24 rogue. Certain classes have talents and trainable skills that allow you to avoid interruption, at least for a certain amount of time, sometimes with a severe cooldown. A 5-30 minute stun ability doesn’t do crap for leveling, now does it?
Why is it that no matter what you’re going up against, outside of PvP, it is not deterred by dozens of slashes with daggers, 50% health-sapping spells, or a steady spell like Mind Flay? It is an unfair advantage that mobs have. Can you imagine how heroic you would be if you could take on 8 mobs at once and then heal yourself as a druid or paladin? What about those times you need to Scare Beast when your pet loses aggro and is about to go down? Heaven forbid you just put up a bubble as a priest and got whacked by something that cleared its entire absorption limit. Good night, fair priest.
It was just yesterday that I came across a perfect time when it would have been nice to have a tit-for-tat interruption. Paladr, my level 47 tankadin was in Feralas going after the 10 Gordunni Shaman when he purposefully aggroed 2 of them and accidentally invited 2 more. What do we have here? Four like-level mobs with 1/2 melee, 1/2 spell damage, healing abilities, and mana equal to me… per mob. Great! Now I have to beat my way through over 8k HP and 8k mana with only a 2k mana pool.
Every time I wanted to stop one of them from healing, I’d use up my 1 minute stun ability because I had to keep Seal of Light up for self-healing. I could leave Seal of Justice up to stun them periodically if it was possible to heal myself – oh yeah – I get interrupted, even with Aura of Concentration up. None of them were dissuaded from casting a heal on each other or themselves despite standing on Consecrated ground and hitting them with an epic mace. Even with Aura of Retribution up they will still cast their spell in 2 seconds flat.
At the least, casters should be able to interrupt mobs with spells to make it a strategy game to use faster spells to interrupt them, no differently than you do in PvP.
That takes us all the way to contemplating why PvE isn’t treated the same as PvP in this game dynamic. I understand not having player collision, but this difference doesn’t make any sense to this gamer. I also get that this would dramatically change the nature of leveling, especially grinding. There are mobs that get ignored more than others because of the certain spells they cast, and others that get targeted, and I daresay over-camped, because of a lack of spells to fight through, especially heals and stuns. Oh, the dreaded mana drain… don’t get me started on that…
What do you say? Is there server-side interruption on mobs and I’m just not seeing it? I don’t see any downsides to having it be a fair exchange of weakness to place that dynamic on NPC casters.