Anyone figured out what causes the timer display bug yet?

This is really starting to annoy me with the new ARC tap 1 for light shot and wait 4 seconds play style. If my recast timers are out by more than 4 seconds I don't get to see the timer tick away for light shot. More often than not my timers are out by around 6-10 seconds. Worst case I've had them out by almost a minute.

Fixing this requires a full shutdown of the game and starting it back up again. I have to do this every time I zone into a new region if I want to see my timers. Zoning into a dungeon doesn't seem to affect it.

Tonight was especially bad, my group decided to do some NMs and since I didn't know where we were going first I shut down the game in Ul'dah and logged back in. We went to buffalo and my timers were out after zoning into La Noscea. I went the whole buffalo fight without knowing when light shot was up. I didn't even bother relogging to fix it again as it would go bad again after going to the next NM.

It's not just an ability recast timer display issue either, it's the game's internal clock as a whole. Starting a leve will display the timer starting at say 29:45 or whatever too. Same with food/buff timers and everywhere else that displays a timer. It's just most evident in abilities. You don't lose the time, it will just hang at 0:00 for the seconds that were cut off or in the case of abilities it will tell you that action can't be used right now.

I can't believe such a massive bug exists and has done since beta. I can't think of a worse bug in the game right now. Why do timers not use your PC's clock and initiate a new timer each time an ability is used? Why is it using some internal clock which is running seconds ahead of where it should be?

I do realise not everyone encounters this but some people do, and that's enough to warrant a fix. This isn't even a bug report thread, I reported it a month ago in the correct forum. Others have reported it too. But discussion in there isn't allowed since threads are locked.

My question is, has anyone actually figured out what causes it and how to stop it happening? I'm hoping there's some temporary way to stop it until SE patch it.

Nope, don't know aether.

ah I also get this problem...I just spamming the button when recast timer is gone...

When you experience it, write down as much detail as you can. Post it as a bug report!

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Originally Posted by Catapult

When you experience it, write down as much detail as you can. Post it as a bug report!

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I did that over a month ago. There's no detail to write other than login and teleport to another region. It's not repeatable for everyone because not everyone encounters it.

I'm trying to figure out if it's a problem with playing in windowed mode, too many apps running in the background, certain game graphical settings etc.

I can't really give you an honest answer as to what may be causing your specific problem, but 9/10 times either a restart of FFXIV or a restart of your computer will fix the problem with recast timers being off. I only seem to experience this myself when I AFK for 24+ hours, with the game left on and even then it isn't all the time.

Being logged in too long, i think, that is what it used to be prior to this update. It would also affect stamina bar but thats gone now.

Have you been logged in long (and yes couple hours is considered long haha)

I've never heard of this bug, when I read the topic title I thought you were referring to when dungeon/leve timers/objectives don't appear.
I've had it happen when doing Darkhold quite a few times and not being able to see the timer at all =/

this is what i have experienced,

i run FFXIV on windowed(x1080) i got 2 monitors, now sometimes when clicking out of FFXIV to lets say Chrome to go to YG.com or something, when i switch back to FFXIV the window becomes non responsive for like 2 sec, then i get RED arrows on connection then green again and puff timers are off, this only happens if i leave the FFXIV window, if i stay on FFXIV window only it never happens

try this and see if this its what happens to you

This happens all the time to me. The longer I stay in, the worse it is, but even a few hours will put multishot off by a few seconds. A day or so will make the multishot timer display as 6 instead of 15. I don't think anything in my computer is overclocked, so I don't know what causes this either.

I haven't encountered this bug yet and I can play for 8+ hours at a time (when I have time XD)

There was a thread a while ago where someone linked the broken timers to his overclocking. He assumed the game actually uses the CPU clock speed as a base for its calculations, which causes the timers to freak out if you mess around with them. OP, you overclocking?

I'm not over-clocking, but my CPU does seem to be a bottleneck, IE my graphics card is possibly a bit too good for my CPU. I run a lot of applications in the background too and many FireFox tabs because I am a web developer. Probably over-stretching the CPU. I wonder if this could be the cause.

I do browse the net a lot when idling or crafting but that's the whole point of windowed mode. I've found switching to another window while changing zones is a bad idea so I generally avoid that. It's probably windowed mode only issue. Yoohre_WildRiver's suggestion is worth looking into more. I think if we can pinpoint the cause we could post a better bug report rather than saying "this sometimes happens, you may not be able to repeat it yourself".

As for being logged in a while, it definitely makes it worse. I've had timers off by over a minute before. But as I say in my OP reloading the game in Ul'dah last night and then teleporting to Bald Knoll was enough to throw them out by about 5 seconds.

I don't know why they can't just handle timers better. Sloppy coding I guess, much like everything else.