The problem with "Instant OFF GCD" abilities makes combat feel less rewarding.

[Jinko]

Either way this is its own game with its own combat system I have never really had an issue with aoe so I cant speak on that I have seen many other people get hit with stuff they say the shouldn't have but I have never experienced it myself. It is truly an instant gratification attitude that ruins this combat system. They never state that these skills are supposed to be instant.

I think when your skill say Cast: Instant, you generally thing its an instant ability ... or maybe I am wrong :S

Here's an example for you, If I use Swift Cast > raise during Titan, which is a pretty hectic for healers, I will sometimes be in a rush to heal the next target.

So I go Swiftcast (subtarget dead person)> Resurrection > carry on healing the tank with Physick, but sometimes raise doesn't fire off and my Physick just used the swiftcast, I have absolutely no time to stand in place and cast a Resurrection spell, 1) because people are taking damage and 2) I don't want to be standing on a plume when it pops up.

This is pretty frustrating, you can say oh but its working as intended, well I say working as intended = complete shit.

Edit because of post limitation:-

Instant cast does not mean there is not an animation or effect or even that the effect with be applied instantly it simply means there is no cast time. Being able to apply 6 dots in an instant would just be broken, it would take all the skill out of chaining off-gcd and on-gcd abilities together to make a good attack chain.

A good example is thunder to aero, cast thunder the nano-second its down casting you can cast aero bam, two dots on the target at the same exact time, thats how you chain effectively. I dont know of any dots that are off gcd lol so aero was all I had there.

Nobody is asking for this !, for example summoner has Virus(which isn't a dot) and Bio both of which are instant, you couldn't possibly stack 6 dots in one action and you can't even do this in games like WoW which does have instant cast with no animation limitation bullcrap.

There is no reason why an animation has to block the next skill from activating either, they could just incorporate a system where the first animation takes priority and the second one is skipped, its not rocket science, so stop using "the animation must play out" as an excuse.

Show me a job (or class for that matter) which has 6 instant cast DoT's and I will agree with you.

[Hirosashi]

I think when your skill say Cast: Instant, you generally thing its an instant ability ... or maybe I am wrong :S

Instant cast does not mean there is not an animation or effect or even that the effect with be applied instantly it simply means there is no cast time. Being able to apply 6 dots in an instant would just be broken, it would take all the skill out of chaining off-gcd and on-gcd abilities together to make a good attack chain.

A good example is thunder to aero, cast thunder the nano-second its down casting you can cast aero bam, two dots on the target at the same exact time, thats how you chain effectively. I dont know of any dots that are off gcd lol so aero was all I had there.

[Reika]

And then there is that issue where instant abilities are never really instant. Spirits within, instant right? wrong. You have to wait almost 3 seconds for the ability to do damage and silence your target. thats not instant. Even shield bash isn't really instant even tho it is a lot faster than spirits within.

You can't be truly reactionary in this game, because no skill is really instant. And they do this by design. in 1.0, skills were actually instant. You may have had animation lock, but if you use say Chaos thrust, the damage was registered to the server the moment you used the skill before it appeared on your screen. you can tell because if a long animation WS were to do enough damage to kill a monster, your party would not be able to attack the monster further, and they would have sheathed their weapons the moment the kill-skill got used.

It is even worse with healing spells. Lustrate is the worst of the single target, and succor is the worst of the aoe.