New difficult content coming -- brutal programming going to rear its ugly head again

[Muzy]

Whatever the reasoning behind it, it's not intuitive and it requires you to strategize your most effective abilities to cater each fight which is a head ache.

No argument there, but you do adapt, not saying it couldn't be better, but it could be a whole lot worse.

[necrosis]

No argument there, but you do adapt, not saying it couldn't be better, but it could be a whole lot worse.

Tacking on "it could be a whole lot worse" does not instantly make anything better.

[Muzy]

Tacking on "it could be a whole lot worse" does not instantly make anything better.

Not saying it does, but at least this system does let us adapt to it.

[Zaft]

Why on earth would they program a delay like that into a spell? It's just server delay like everything else. Step into a Sacred Soil, you don't get the damage reduction buff for a good two seconds.

Whatever the reasoning behind it, it's not intuitive and it requires you to strategize your most effective abilities to cater each fight which is a head ache.

It also means you have to do a fight at least a dozen times before you can effectively use abilities like Virus and Sacred Soil, as you have to cast them way before the enemy ability goes off.

It's really not. They've straight up admitted that this was the way it was designed on the forums once. I'd have to go scrounging to find it though.

There's no reason to program it as they did, but the fact is that they did, and it's just something we have to deal with until/if they fix it. Every fight in the game is choreographed, so it's pretty easy to determine when something is going to come (IE: Twintania does a plummet every 3 auto attacks, does a death sentence every 3 plummets).

[SeraviEdalborez]

Not really. Here's how it works.

...

However, ENEMY spells are calculated THE MOMENT the spell reaches 100%, but the damage is not SHOWN until the animation of the enemy attack finishes. That means that even if my Adloquium goes off before Death Sentence reaches 100%, if that animation does not finish before it reaches 100%, it will not absorb the damage.

There are some very, very minor exceptions to the rule of "enemy cast bar = calculations done". Off the top of my head, KB's meteor in CT has the hit/miss check done about when the meteor physically hits the ground. Not knowing this, I stepped out as soon as the cast bar finished and still got whomped :P (Edit: Also to a lesser extent, if you kill an enemy before their animation finished [or rather, before the damage registers] you can still cancel it that way).

But for the most part, yeah it's not a crippling issue. Mind-meld with the enemy AI better. Not like it's going to change anytime soon. Think inside the box.