Ability delay, macros, GCD, casttime and general gameplay. Suggestions & whine.

This is from the PoW of a CNJ.

Ability delay
This is i think, related to lag and would perhaps be unnoticable if the lag wasnt that bad. I mean i live i Europe and i play on a European world, why do i have noticable lag in FFXIV and not in other mmos? Are the "European" worlds not placed in Europe?

But i think that lag is only part of the delay another part, i feel, is the need for the game to wait for an animation to finish before a skill is cast. This is not as bad as in SWTOR where you could actually interupt your own instant casts, if you did anything before the animation was over. I havnt seen that yet, but it is worse than the way it worked in wow, where it felt like the skill going through and the animation were 2 seperate things. This let to addons like quartz, which would factor lag into the cast times. You could stop the cast before the animation were done and the spell would still cast This meant that even high amounts of latency could go unnoticed.

Macros
There is 2 things about the ussage of macroes that lead to feeling of klunky-ness.
The first thing might be related to the lag or may be a bug. It requires a an explanation.
As a WHM i use the following macro:
/micon Cure
/ac Cure <mo>
/ac Cure <t>
/ac Cure <me>
When i have, let say a boss as my target and i hover the mouse over the groupmember i want to heal, i have noticed that every once in a while the heal is not landing on the groupmember iam hovering my mouse over, but hitting myself. Like the macro skips the mouseover bit.
This usually happens in the heat of battle where iam spamming my heals and that leads my to believe that it has to do with lag. It is not because my mouse moves or the tank moves out of range or out of LoS. I have tested for this and they are not the issue. It simply feels like in a situation where iam spamming, the macro sort of interupts itself. This is actually a mayor complaint and it has caused me to not want to heal anymore.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kanosh

Macros

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The second thing about macros is: Why cant i macro instant cast spells, with no GCD together with spells or with other instants with no GCD and have them acivate with one button press? It would be a nice quality of life improvement.

GCD, cast time and recast time
Finally The single worst thing that makes the skillusage and gameplay feel klunky, is the fact that due to way the cast time and recast time and GCD is designed, makes it very very sensitive to high latancy. I dont know how many GCD i have missed due to a spell not starting to cast though i have been spamming it when its recast time has been up.
IMO, there is no good reason to have designed a GCD of around 2,5s and have many spells have a 1,5s cast time. It would change much to have it the other way around. Give the cure spells a cast time of 2,5s and make the GCD 1,5s instead. It would require some more tweaking due to instantcast being balanced around a 2,5s GCD, i know.

And why cant i post more 1k chars on the forum. Now THATS insane.

Actually I'm having the same issue. I'm not really lagging ping wise but the macro timer is definitely off. I have a buff macro that looks like this

/ac "Raging Strikes" <me>
/wait 120
/echo Buffs Ready!

Raging Strikes has a 120s cool down with enhanced trait and the echo command goes off like 30 seconds before the cool down is even done. Pretty annoying.

Thats because the max wait is 90 seconds.

this game seems like a massive struggle between aggro and gcd as a healer; something needs to be tweaked imo.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kanosh

Macros
When i have, let say a boss as my target and i hover the mouse over the groupmember i want to heal, i have noticed that every once in a while the heal is not landing on the groupmember iam hovering my mouse over, but hitting myself. Like the macro skips the mouseover bit.
This usually happens in the heat of battle where iam spamming my heals and that leads my to believe that it has to do with lag. It is not because my mouse moves or the tank moves out of range or out of LoS. I have tested for this and they are not the issue.

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I've had the same problem (in fact I'm on the forums simply to look for a fix). Right now it's the most "challenging" part of healing for me since sometimes my heals just don't hit my target (and instead hit me)! I'll let you know if I find a solution.

What there needs to be is a way to disable the "BOOP" error sound when you try pressing a button before the GCD is up. If you have a macro with several abilities, like:

/ac "Bloodletter"
/ac "Misery's End"
/ac "Heavy Shot"

Even if you don't spam the button and only cast it once every 2.5 seconds for Heavy Shot, you still get an error sound for the two other abilities. This is really annoying. Give us an ability to disable that sound and message!

All the NA (and EU) servers are in the same datacenter located in Canada(Montreal).
so yes if you play from Europe ( l'm also from EU ) you will have ~120-140ms to datacenter or even higher.

I have this same issue. Especially when using <mo> to target and I'm spamming an ability like Cure.

I have a very fast home connection, my ping is usually 50 or less in games, sometimes 15 or less. Basically, when I spam a key, the action won't register my mouseover target as you said.

So far I have still been using the same macros, but I do feel like I always wait, instead of spamming the button, to cast spells now. Some might say that's a good thing, that I shouldn't be spamming keys. But have your party be at 50% or less from getting hit by a nasty aoe, and you panic, lol...

As for the long gcd, personally (and this is just my opnion), I think they implimented such a long gcd to balance out gameplay between pc (keyboard/mouse) users and controller.

Don't know if this means anything or not, but the issue has supposedly been forwarded to the developers:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...95#post1226595

I have movement lag to be honest. It takes my character 1-2 seconds to realize I moved my joystick... Thought maybe it was just the controller and tested it on the controller. Nope still a delay from trying to move. It doesn't happen when I'm already moving, just when I'm standing still and try to dodge an AoE. It hurts horribly on the red circles that go off quickly, I react in time but my character doesn't. Sigh.

Hey guys! I need to make macros that targets the target of enemy target. How to create one, any suggestion? For example if enemy had agroed on someone i need fast switch to the target of enemy and cast skill for example cover!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SixSymphony

Actually I'm having the same issue. I'm not really lagging ping wise but the macro timer is definitely off. I have a buff macro that looks like this

/ac "Raging Strikes" <me>
/wait 120
/echo Buffs Ready!

Raging Strikes has a 120s cool down with enhanced trait and the echo command goes off like 30 seconds before the cool down is even done. Pretty annoying.

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That's because the max "wait" time you can put in a macro is 60 seconds. You would need

/wait 60
/wait 60

As separate lines.

Also, I agree with most everything. I really don't like the "laggy" feeling all the spells and actions have. I can't say how many times I've cancelled looting/interacting with a quest item because I didn't know if I clicked or not since it takes so long for the action to occur.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bloodborn

Hey guys! I need to make macros that targets the target of enemy target. How to create one, any suggestion? For example if enemy had agroed on someone i need fast switch to the target of enemy and cast skill for example cover!

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You can use <tt> to modify an ability to go directly to your target's target. So for example, the following macro will cast cover on your target's target:

/ac "Cover" <tt>

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kanosh

Macros

When i have, let say a boss as my target and i hover the mouse over the groupmember i want to heal, i have noticed that every once in a while the heal is not landing on the groupmember iam hovering my mouse over, but hitting myself.

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Target is out of range. Modify your macro (because it won't notify you target is out of range)

/macroicon "Cure"
/ac Cure <mo>
/ac Cure <t>


You don't need to target a boss/mob with macros. Let's say you want to cast Aero.

/macroicon "Aero"
/ac Aero <t>
/ac Aero <tt>

With your tank (or anyone else) as your target it will always apply Aero to his target. It works normally targeting too.

/macroicon "Stone II"
/ac "Stone II" <t>
/ac Stone <t>
/ac "Stone II" <tt>
/ac Stone <tt>

This will cast Stone II on your target's target, Stone if LevelSync and will work normally for your solo play.