Quote Originally Posted by JanVanding View Post
Except it doesn't and I don't know where this idea that Cactbot does that came from.
Well, if you mean "that" to be "Cactbot can read mechanics before a raid-caller can", that's absolutely true, since it's reading the network traffic. Now, like... 90% of the time, the mechanic information isn't sent to the client until just before the mechanic itself happens, so presumably while Cactbot might be half a second faster than a human raid-caller, it's not going to be massively/game-breakingly so.

But there are mechanics that have long animations where it isn't clear which animation it's playing until fairly far into the animation; in those cases, Cactbot can absolutely call way faster than a human raid-caller. An example is P3N; I'm given to understand that the server has said "this will be in" or "this will be out" when the bird sort of starts to gather itself up to begin the lengthy Experimental Fireplume castbar. So if I were to be raid-calling a normal raid for whatever reason, I'd probably say "okay, be halfway out..." as a warning as the cast started, and then wait to see see which fireball appeared and go "Okay, go OUT!" or "Get into the middle!" once it did. Whereas Cactbot could say "Get out, big AoE soon" as soon as the cast-bar started, and give maybe a... what, 2-3 second lead in that specific case? Since the animation and cast is a long one.

But on the other hand, as I mentioned in my earlier post, from what I've seen of people blindly following Cactbot—and been told by said people—there are mechanics that Cactbot cannot call in advance... or even cannot call well at all compared to a human raid-caller.