Question on casters

[Darkpaw]

It’s called slidecasting and it’s basically weaponizing your ping to the servers to grant you more mobility

[Eorzean_username]

It’s called slidecasting and it’s basically weaponizing your ping to the servers to grant you more mobility

Not quite.

I think (and anyone who's better-informed, please correct any details I get wrong) that it's an intentional feature of the game that was added [citation needed] time ago as compensation for the game's dubious handling of client-server relationships.

Basically, the cast time listed in your tooltip is actually 0.5s longer than "reality", to provide "slush space" and prevent issues where the cast seems to complete on the player's screen, but the server doesn't agree yet, so even though your cast bar finished, you move and suddenly see yourself interrupted.

This can be exploited by people who know about it to just ignore the last 0.5s of a castbar, regardless of the cast length (and thus makes shorter casts easier to slidecast out of, as the portion you can "cheat" is proportionally larger).

There's another bit of extra slush space that depends on latency as well, but I think the 0.5s is the fixed baseline amount of slidecast breathing-room, even if you were playing from inside the server room.

Great way to take advantage of slidecasting is to place an emote icon on your hotbar. When all your abilities are greyed out while casting, the emote icon will light up a little earlier than other icons which means you can move without your cast getting canceled.

Just to note that in my own testing, you can actually slidecast sooner than the action icon lights back up, so this method can "cost" you slidecast time vs. learning to do it by muscle-memory or castbar timer.

[Fawkes]

I think (and anyone who's better-informed, please correct any details I get wrong) that it's an intentional feature of the game that was added [citation needed] time ago as compensation for the game's dubious handling of client-server relationships.

I think it's just how casting has always worked. Even in FFXI, since 2002. But it wasn't really something people used like a mechanic there since that game is so much slower paced and doesn't have manual dodging. But for most spells you could usually move once the cast bar was past ~70% and not interrupt yourself.