Vanish is far from perfect, but like it or not it’s one of our most essential, class defining abilities. I’d go as far as to say the outcome of the majority of my arena games is a result of how effective my vanishes were. I guess that’s not surprising considering that it’s an ability which immunes almost any damage, drops combat, and makes you invisible to your opponent. It’s too bad it’s so finicky, but there are steps you can take to give it the best possible chance to work.
- Watch your opposition. Did they just cast something or use an ability? It’s a good idea to use your vanish when the opponent is on a global cooldown.
- Although this may seem obvious, couple vanish with cloak in situations when it’s possible. Sometimes you need to use them separately so do this at your own discretion through experience.
- Don’t wait in stealth after using vanish near a hostile target. If I’m not immediately reopening, I get away far during and after vanishing that aoe ability will be far less likely to take me out.
- If you are, for example, fighting a frost mage and you need to vanish, don’t simply vanish and keep chasing. Move in a direction they won’t expect (backwards, sideways) to give yourself the best chance of avoiding aoe.
- Try to vanish behind melee classes when going for an in-combat vanish-> reopen so that their abilities and auto-attacks are less likely to cancel vanish.
The mechanic with vanish is currently the following for those unaware. If you use vanish when a projectile is in mid air that is not instant (ie. frostbolt, lightning bolt, lightning generator, deathcoil, icelance, etc) then vanish will negate the projectile’s damage and effects. If you use vanish at the same time as an instant ability (fireblast, counter-spell, shadow-word: pain, blind) both abilities (vanish and the hostile ability) will be canceled out. If a hostile ability is used just slightly after vanish (probably about 0.2-0.4 s) then it will not be immuned, it will treat it as if vanished never occurred (this is why people can get blinded or counter-spelled out of vanish, or when sometimes you will vanish then get hit by an icelance right after). I’ll note that it is possible to knock a rogue out of vanish in response to it using any instant ability.
But as we all know, vanish sucks because it’s no where near concrete due to latency, etc. Imagine a mage’s iceblock or paladin’s bubble worked as inconsistently as vanish. Blizzard noted on the common suggestion of the suggestion of adding a brief immunity to vanish:
[What's] wrong with giving vanish a ~.5 second (or whatever) immunity to stealth breaking?
That’s an idea that has come up a few times. It may be something we experiment with, but it’s not the kind of thing you can just slap on and call it done. It would take quite a bit of testing to solve any edge cases or exploits.
My suggestion would be (more…)
