Melee while casting?

[Selzak]

Wow we are still talking about whether or not it can be done. There hasn't been any real discussion on melee solutions during casting in like 3 pages. Thanks for going off topic again GG and turning another RDM thread into a quagmire that isn't even focused on what we were talking about.

Well, if it can't be done then what's the point of discussing it? But since our discussion is going a bit off-topic, how about this to contribute:

Enhancing Spell:
RDM 45) Subtle Sword- Self-only, potent Subtle Blow effect.
RDM 70) Boost-ACC- Does this exist yet? If not, it would help.
RDM exclusive, self-enhancing spells like Temper are the road to melee RDM...sorry, but it's the most realistic way to make it happen.

*How powerful are En-Spells right now? This should be the road to RDM melee, so a boost is in order if they don't make it worthwhile (worthwhile is just enough to not be wasting your time).


Job Trait:
RDM 30) Manablade- Attacks occasionally regenerate MP while wielding a sword.
This would activate around 10% and the amount gained would scale with levels (ex. Manablade II at 70).

The cast time bar is just a graphical doodad which fills up at a rate specified by the spell's cast time in the .DATs (which is why it never adjusts based on fast cast, and instead you just see spells go off at 50% cast time) in the form of ([1/Cast time]*Pixel size of bar) pixels/second.

I had no idea about this. It's interesting and disappointing at the same time!

This would also explain why you see the kind of lag that you do when spells are interrupted. Rather than sending a "Stop casting spell" command to the server in real time, I believe the server simply flips a boolean for "SpellInterrupted" to true whenever an attack/stun would interrupt casting. This boolean is then only checked when the game actually processes the end of the cast, at the same time that the server checks to ensure that the player's ending position is the same as the starting position.

You can see evidence of this in the way the server handles player movement while casting. As long as you end the cast in the same place that you start it, the cast will go through. This means that the client is most likely not sending any information to the server about casting status in real time, as then any movement would stop the casting of a spell.

Apparently you have dug around in the workings of the game a lot more than I have (not at all), so I'm gonna change my original (very computer sciencey, out-of-the-ass estimation) assumption that there's a 35% chance of them being able to do this to around 10% and closer to your estimate, lol. I had no idea that the game calculates an interrupt this way (now that I think about it, they do tend to happen closer to perceived cast-time...I just didn't know that's how it worked), and I definitely agree that this makes it seem like no, they are not keeping track of casting time continuously (the the start, stop work-around would probably not be able to be applied). Super interesting stuff though, thanks for explaining. I like the Internet sometimes.