Fix the Animation Delay on Hallowed Ground

Really. It takes a full second and a half to kick in, long enough to go from full to dead with 4 groups or more.

SE just LOVES their animations. We can't have abilities go off when we press the button. Oh, no, we must have a cool.animation first. Animations and animation lock are just awful here.

Far too many abilities in this game don't take effect until the animations are finished.

All the emergency-tier abilities works this way.
Hallowed Ground, Holmgang, Living Dead, Benediction, Lustrate, etc.

It's very clearly by design choice they do this.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Canadane

All the emergency-tier abilities works this way.
Hallowed Ground, Holmgang, Living Dead, Benediction, Lustrate, etc.

It's very clearly by design choice they do this.

---

Yeah, at FanFest Tokyo 2014, one player tried a "Hear Me, Yoshi-P!"* about this topic as it applies to Benediction. Yoshi-P's answer was basically that the player needed to time his ability usage better. Player did not go home with an "I beat Yoshi-P" primal t-shirt.

He's right though. We've known for like four years that there's an absurdly long animation lock on these abilities. They're best used when they're preplanned, rather than as emergency abilities.



*HM,YP! was a stage event where each participant had two minutes to debate an issue with Yoshi-P. If the participant won the debate, s/he got to leave with an "I Beat Yoshi-P" t-shirt in the style of the primal shirts.

They have answered this on the forums a long time ago, it's not animation delay that's the issue with HG/benediction, it's the order the server is registering things. When you activate hallowed ground the monsters have already landed their hits, the server is just catching up with them, that's why you can activate HG, take damage from a few hits then start taking 0 damage from some even when you're already dead, because the abilities were queued in that order.

It's not like rage of halone where the move just waits for the animation to end before applying the effect and can be clipped with an oGCD which I believe they could probably do something about if they wanted to.

My advice is to not think of HG as a CD to use when you're about to die, use it in planned situations like at the beginning of a massive pull so the healer has time to apply their HoTs and DoTs and do some AoEs without worrying about you for a while.

I think the idea for putting in the animation lock was to encourage tanks to use it pro-actively, rather than as an "OH SHIT" button.

As I don't raid savage (yet), my only real use for Hallowed Ground this tier has been some of the nastier trash pulls in Sohm Al Hard; there's one in particular where you can get 7 or 8 really hard-hitting mobs together. Throwing Hallowed Ground at the beginning of that pull helps my healer not panic, and usually it's back up in time for the last boss, where it can do a really good job at protecting against the adds that also use the tankbuster.

EDIT: This isn't to say I agree with the design. I want a proper "OH SHIT" button.

I've been able to get some good use out of it when I can see that things are going sideways in a raid (I only do normal 8/24 raids, not savages). When my hp is hovering on the lower half, the whole raid is heavily wounded, and I know that more raid damage is going off soon, I use HG so that the healers don't have to worry about me for a bit and can stabilize the raid in preparation for the incoming damage: I don't use it to prevent ME from dying, I use it so the healers can prevent other people from dying, by not having to worry about me.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by dragonseth07

SE just LOVES their animations. We can't have abilities go off when we press the button. Oh, no, we must have a cool.animation first. Animations and animation lock are just awful here.

---

Yeah it's another instance of lore and presentation getting in the way of functionality. It's something that SE has a problem with.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ToasterMan

Yeah it's another instance of lore and presentation getting in the way of functionality. It's something that SE has a problem with.

---

Yeah, while playing other MMOs in the downtime until the expansion it feels so refreshing and enjoyable to play games that put gameplay first. Most of the time I won't even see much of the animations as I'll be zoomed out as far as possible to get the best overview so putting animations first is pretty much just a negative for me.

Not really sure what the complaint is, really. I mean, yes, I play many others where pressing the button is a near instant effect, so I appreciate that side of it - but over here, I stare at beasties that have 2-5 second long animations of their own - and even then, I see many a tank who can't rotate an ability for, say, Deadly Thrust (5 seconds) in Sohm Al - Hard. Do we really have to have cake and eat it when it's not just us, the players, with those animations?