Suggestion - Remove the problem of GCD clipping by raising the GCD "cap"

[LilimoLimomo]

Recently I learned of some tests that demonstrate that even if your play is optimal, the lower your framerate, the more likely that there will be some minor delay between when your GCD becomes available and when the game casts your queued GCD. And that's a bummer, because many players put a lot of effort and thought into not clipping their GCD so that they can get closer to optimal play.

I was thinking about this problem, and I think I have the beginnings of a solution.

Let's imagine the GCD as a 1 liter cup. At a constant rate of roughly 0.0004 liters per millisecond, GCD juice gets poured into the cup. When the cup contains 1 liter of juice, two things simultaneously happen:

1. The cup is full, so no more juice can be poured into it until it's emptied.
2. The player can take a GCD action (including actions that queued before this point), which will also have the effect of emptying the cup.

Here's the important thing to highlight: the reason that GCD clipping is even an issue is because when your GCD cup fills to 1 liter, it cannot receive more juice. This is why when trying to optimize your play, it's important to use your GCD as soon as possible, because every moment that your cup is full is a moment that it could instead be getting more juice for the next GCD, thus raising your actions-per-minute.

My proposal is simple: increase the capacity of the GCD cup. If the cup could hold something along the lines of 1.5 liters instead of just 1, then players would still be encouraged to keep pressing buttons at the same rate, but they wouldn't have to worry about permanently missing out on casts/skills due to a clipped GCD, whether that's caused by framerate, latency, or even their own fingers.

To illustrate, let's say a sudden drop in frames results in your queued weaponskill activating 50 milliseconds after your GCD had filled to the 1 liter mark. With this increased cup capacity there would be no problem, because the cup was still filling during that delay. So when your weaponskill activates, the cup has 1.02 liters of GCD juice in it, and 1 liter is removed from the cup, leaving it with 0.02 liters remaining. Thus, as long as you don't get in the (bad) habit of waiting to press your GCD until the entire cup is full at 1.5 liters, a player who is staying on top of their skill usage will never have to worry about clipping their GCD.

Anyway, this is my suggestion. Maybe this would benefit from some kind of UI tweak, or maybe it would work just fine with the current UI. But regardless, I think something like this would improve the game by allowing players to trust that their efficacy isn't at risk due to their hardware, software, or even the occasionally button press that is slightly mistimed. Thanks for considering it!

EDIT: I've realized that this solution wouldn't move the needle for any weaponskill/spell with a cast time that is equal to or greater than the recast time. I don't immediately have a solution for that, though I'm definitely curious to hear if others might! But as I said earlier, hopefully this can be the beginning of a solution.

[CamuiKushi]

They've lowered animation lock on abilities before. Honestly they should lower it even further for every ability, and entirely for abilities intended to be weaved during fast GCD moments like on Machinist and Viper's bursts.

I've seen videos of people doing stuff against TOS that fixes it, and if they can do it, why can't the devs?