[Suggestion] boss starting animation earlier

[Canadane]

It's actually lore approrpiate you see the attack resolution before it happens. You have the Echo afterall.

[Callinon]

You wouldn't have less time to react, those with higher latency would have more so they are on a par with you. It's only deciding a hit or not, higher latency will still stunt your max dps, because you can never get that time back. It's a single variable decided beforehand so the calculations wouldn't be a big deal. There's always "oh, but exploits", that happens already, they already exist, cheaters will always be out there.

I'm still on the server having to process that. Also how would you handle back-to-back boss actions? I can foresee a situation here where you could potentially have a party member who's a full second or more behind the rest of the raid responding to things.

You're right that there isn't an even playing field. Any online game is going to have latency as a limiting factor on performance and that's unfortunate, but I don't think the solution is to process a single attack several hundred times per second to make up for people who are stuck with potato internet speeds. I don't have a solution for it either, if I did I'd be quite rich indeed, I just know this isn't one.

[Noldornir]

I do agree,

It's comletely against intuition but it's not just the bosses; every skills seems to work like this:

- Skill Activation (if it' you the moment you press the button)
- Wait for X seconds (cast time, can be 0) while showing a "charging" animation (and the AoE)
- The Skill Procs (THIS is the X moment when damage, positions, buffs, debuffs and such are accounted. In this moment the AoE, if present, will disappear)
- Skill animation (can last a while but it's not accounted, just for show).
- Damage/efffect is applied on target

Side effects are a lot, some benificial, some not.

When a PAL flashes for instances we can see the situation pretty clearly:

- You press FLASH
- Game calculate radius and a little white orb pops over your head
- Game decides which enemies are into said radius
- The little white orb "explodes" into a flash of light (this takes like 0.5 secs)
- Affected enemies are blinded/taunted

Any enemy that WAS NOT in radius when the "little orb" spawned (but was when it explodes - let's say the enemy was walking toward you when you was about to cast) on your head WILL NOT be hit
Any ememy that WAS in the radius at first (but was not later) will be hit anyway

If you perform a long skill on someone you can see this even better (try rage of halone on an enemy then start moving away, on the fifth hit of the animation you can be yards away and the enemy WILL be hit. But the damage will be applied only in the end).

While this makes the game easier/better in some instances it becomes confusing when mobs are doing that too:

First: the AoE disappears after the charge. This is misleading. It should disappear only AFTER the animation has depleted.

At the current state we can see an AoE -> Run out -> It disappears (cast complete) - we go back in - a flaming upset meteor comes on our head but nothing happens.

like this:

13.00.00 AM - Boss Charges a meteor (3s animation+5secs cast) - AoE turns on
13.00.05 AM - Meteor animation starts (the sky opens, it gets dark meteor starts to drop out etc.) - AoE goes off and position is calculated
13.00.06 AM - Meteor animation is up an running, expert players goes back in the AoEd (beneath said meteor)
13.00.07 AM - animation ends, meteor hits. Player inside the AoE at 13.00.05 are hit while player that actually look like been crushed by meteor (they got back in between 00.06 and 00.07) receive no damage

Imagine this:

13.00.00 AM - Boss Charges a meteor (3s animation+2secs cast) - AoE turns on
13.00.02 AM - Meteor animation starts (the sky opens, it gets dark meteor starts to drop out) - AoE still on
13.00.05 AM - Meteor HITS - AoE disappears - position calculated and damage applied

The difference in cast/animation time is there because, at the present, it looks like the animation is "just a cool thing to show" we'd get hit after 5 secs in both cases which is the important thing

[XiXiQ]

make up for people who are stuck with potato internet speeds

It's got nothing to do with internet speeds, it's to do with how far you are away from the server. You can't adjust the speed of light, you can only take it into consideration when you code these things. SE clearly didn't.

[chidarake]

actually op is kinda right, the animation could align better, cast timers are just a way to say something is coming and at the end of the timer server decides on if you got hit or not via whatever variables are set.

however this does not stop the devs from having animations start earlier, basically bosses build up to the attack via an animation that then follows through at the end of the cast. think along the lines like the claw swipes from certain bosses.. we see the boss is going to do the attack (hidden cast time) aoe marker goes out, server does checks and finishes animation we see results via damage taken or not. this has nothing to do with latency.

however in the case of clearly being out on your screen and still getting hit has nothing to do with the animation. if the game applied the animation and cast to align better then the latency on you receiving the information from the server to say whether you got hit or not is when your character can move away from the animation on your screen but you still receive the damage. without a perfect connection or lan type connections you could always potentially move out of the way on your screen and still take damage.

online games are never going to be the same as locally run games for animation alignment and character placement. they can be very close especially with faster connections but any delay will cause a mis-alignment potentially.

[Zuklar]

Exactly as OP says. Just have the boss start the animation 80% or so through the cast bar... Have the boss start it's animation before the AoE circle disappears... So the second it does disappear - the bosses attack has hit / exploded. It's so friggin' lame to have an AoE circle disappear while you're in it... You move halfway across the map... and 2 seconds later a meteor drops on that location you were in and then you take damage super far away. Hate it, hate it, hate it... To heck with the people defending this dumb crap. It seems like an easy fix to me. "Boss starts animation 80% through cast bar instead of at the completion of the cast bar". HOW HARD WOULD THAT BE?!

[NeoDivinity]

HOW HARD WOULD THAT BE?!

As someone who plays with 180 to 200ms i noticed that they already made lots of adjustments to that area, on the new trials and normal raid even with high pink im able to evade AoE almost based of the animation only, since they're triggering a lot faster. This is something that some of my friends alrady noticed.

That said, yeah the cast bar triggering the animation before its completion is a bit weird on a programming perspective but i can be done of course if they change how those interact with each other, but since its a major problem for now i dont see it changing soon.

This remember me of some issues i used to have with my fc mates where playing as a melee would be a pain on ARR and HW because the positionals werent being registeres due to high ping, something we don't see very often nowdays. So these changes are very technical impovements that they might adress in the future but rarely announced on patch notes or interviews since they wouldnt make an impact on the major population of the game.

I agree it can be improved but we also need to keep in mind that every major system change requires them to build or rebuild the system to acomodate all new and already existent assets that depends on it, that one of the reasons why new hair or helmets for Vieras en Hrothgars arent added yet, because the chances that the one we got were made individualy are big, therefore they cant be modified easily. Of course thats only things that we can deduce, since this kind of informaton isnt revelead to the public