Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Except not even that is consistent. The majority go off when the AoE indicator disappears, if any, or the cast bar completes if not, but some snapshot slightly earlier or slightly later.
True about the indicators overhead disappearing being a snapshot indicator. It's very rare that others don't align with the cast though. Doom in World of Darkness is an example of a rare exception. Anything else is likely just ping/latency since it's been super reliable for me personally.

I think there are some cases we have seen in Savage with subsequent hits though. A good example was P9S where there was a dummy cast followed by a series of snapshots during rockbreaker. But I believe each of those were their own casts, they were just casts without a cast bar (similar to when a melee DPS does an instant attack that has no cast time). Nevertheless, you could still time it (3 seconds) and pretend there was a 3 second cast bar all the same.

I've also been able to adjust my battle log to only display cast start and cast end and sometimes it will say when they are preparing an attack despite that it's not casted.

One thing that will help a bit is SE is adding cast bars above the heads of enemies so you can see them better. But it's not going to solve all the difficulties people have understand the game. It's probably one of the primary reasons players think they aren't skilled. The snapshotting gets them.