The problem with "Instant OFF GCD" abilities makes combat feel less rewarding.

[complexxL9]

I really can't believe this is "working as intended." FFXI had an animation lock that was absolute hell, and now Yoshi et al. want to bring it over here? What's so hard about immediately stopping an animation and running another one?

I'm so tired of DPSing on BRD and not being able to hit Bloodletter immediately after Straight Shot. Having to sit there spamming the hotkey is extremely annoying.

Consider this a well-deserved bump.

I think working-as-intended is just their excuse, either because they don't have the resources to fix it, or they lack competence.
I refuse to believe that game director actually considers these mechanics to be ok as they are now.

[Chokee]

i agree, bump.

[Naks]

indeed, gotta keep this alive til we get some feedback me thinks

[complexxL9]

Looks like too little people care about this or they already lost hope to see any improvement.

[Jayrune]

I have to agree with this, as a tank i have to spam defensive cooldowns to get them to work because if i just press the button once there is a very high chance that it will not actually work because of some animation i'm in the middle of, like rage of halone.

This game has implemented both animation lock AND a GCD on abilities (though not movement), the result is a great deal of unresponsiveness and delayed effects which force us to spam buttons until it finally works. I strongly recommend getting rid of one, and since combat is balance around the current global cooldown it seems getting rid of the animation locking is the better solution. You don't lock our character in place for animations, don't lock our abilities either.

[MomoOG]

The current system is just terrible. We basically have the worst of both worlds. Games that use pure animation lock have realistic feeling animations at the cost of slower/clunky gameplay. Games that have no animation lock have smooth/fluid/responsive gameplay at the cost of realistic animations. Combat in this game is by far the worst thing about it with terribly weightless and ridiculous ice skating sliding animations combined with horribly unresponsive/clunky combat.

[Ruprect]

It is really stupid to have to basically spam the ability for the entire GCD to get it to go off and even after it goes off it does not take effect for a split second. This all goes back to the ability/aoe lag that you find everywhere in game and it is game breaking. As a healer it is even worse on some of the tougher fights, it is very difficult to manage your mana when you cant count on your heal actually healing the target for a second after the cast finishes. You just have to spam heal and try to interupt it by moving, but wait.... that does not work either because if you move with a second or less of you cast remaining it still goes off lol. It isnt that you cant work around this it just makes things feel clunky and unnecessarily hard. We should not have to work around fail server lag and ability lag in a game we are paying a monthly sub for. Most other games even free ones do not have this issue and the ones that did fixed it relatively quickly.

[Ahlen]

Exactly the same problem SWTOR had. And part of the reason why it died/failed as an MMO (extremely bad combat)

Hopefully they'll fix it.

[Ruprect]

Exactly the same problem SWTOR had. And part of the reason why it died/failed as an MMO (extremely bad combat)

Hopefully they'll fix it.

They fixed SWTOR server/ability lag in like the second major patch. SE should be able to do the same thing.

[Kantide]

I think the issue is that Square is trying to keep some realism in the animation fluidity. The other thing is that by the nature of the combat system their definition of instant (no cast time) is correct, however players will impose their own definitions of instant to it as they see fit (At button press or release, the effect should occur).

Admittedly, the tactical nature of the combat system is a turnoff to some people but it is as FF like as you can get. You have the 2.5 second GCD (think ATB from classic FFs) and then you have cast times to balance things and animations to provide some form of realism.

The other issue here is that we all know for position, the server checks the client every .3 seconds. I am wondering if the delay for abilities not activating instantly is due to this and maybe the buffs were intended to show up regardless of animation. Combined with your own latency for most people this could mean up to .5 seconds or more of delay. If this is the case, the check needs to be reduced to more like .1 second however seeing the server's condition, this may greatly reduce the number of users Square can support concurrently.

That's just some food for thought, have at it.