So in some of the many (MANY) posts - complaining written by bad players* about the tiny supposed delay caused by animation time, that any reasonable good player** can see is no problem whatsoever - it was mentioned that wow is a twitch game, while swtor is a higher more etherial game - hence the delays don't matter.

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well as a bad player* who only has a small collection of hats, I have to disagree.

Wow is not a twitch game, while swtor IS.

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Now a twitch game is one where the reaction time (and ping) of a player effects how well a player plays (clearly rediculous as timing doesn't affect hats.)

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In wow, if you are casting spell 1, then press 2 within half a second of spell 1 finishing, then the 2 spells cast with 0ms between them.

Hence a player with very bad reaction times (say 200ms), with a big ping (say 100ms) who knows what they are doing can do EXACTLY as well as a younger player with a better connection who 'twitchs better'

In WOW both are equally able to play there character with 0ms down time in their rotation.

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Now in SWTOR, let's say you are casting a channelled ability, like say my Vanguards 'Pulse cannon'

Your tanking, so let's wait the 0.7 seconds between your pressing the button and the ability generating any threat and watch as the mobs you are trying to agro have scratched themselves for a bit, made some tea, before finally walking off out of that oh-so-hard to position aoe to head for healerland.

now the electric bolts of the pulse cannon do 3 pulses of damage. so clearly you want to wait until the end or you'll lose 1/3rd of the damage. Now if you press any other ability it will instantly stop the ability, so you can't queue up another one until the ability has finished - or you'll lose damage.

Now after being forced to wait for the ability to finish you rush to press the next ability... this is obviously done at your reaction speed. So the 12 year old with a good connection beats you by, say 0.2 seconds.

Over a 5 minute boss fight all those 0.2 seconds that the young bad player* has built up likely amounts to a good 5-8 seconds.. advantage over the good player** which is, say, enough time for a bad player* to heal the tank for all their hit points - which as you can imagine makes the bad player* even more bad at getting your party killed

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So the conclusion of this bad player* is that WOW has no/minimal twitch element, while SWTOR has a significant twitch element - fast reaction players have a big advantage in this game and may be able to clear additional content purely because of that.

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*Bad players are those that believe in satancrows***

**Good players are those who understand that the goal in a world where everything is trying to kill you is hats. Preferably colour coordinated hats, with bells, and tinsel, and well, as many other accesories that can be fitted on a *REAALY* cute looking hat. Anyone who doesn't understand the importance of hats should be referred to team fortress 2.

***Satancrows also known as macros are pure evil that bad players* use to cheat, which is why only bad players* are able to clear all the content at the end of the game.. Those evil cheating cheaters.

****Satans Numerators, also known as parsers or damage meters, are evil cheats used by bad players* who wrongly think that in a game world filled with things trying to kill you, your ability to kill and be the least worst at getting your party killed is in any way important. Good players** Know that the creatures in the game world are only trying to kill you so that it makes it more satisfying when you /hug them and see what they look like wearing your hats.

If you think that an ability should work before your character physically performs said ability, you shouldnt be playing an RPG.

You sould be playing Microsoft Word more.

Action queueing is a feature most MMOs since EQ2 have. Press one action while your toon casts one and it gets executed as soon as the current one is done. This makes for pretty smooth and easy rotation; combat also feels much more fluent with this simple trick.

Bioware decided not to include action queueing and I have no idea why.

You are of course correct.

even though you ignored the topic of the post - that there is a reaction time involved in players ability rotations - which makes

but You are of course correct.

To make all games realistic they should include two reaction times. One for the player, and a second for the character.

I was thinking as much whilst I was waiting for the traffic lights to change for the third time earlier.

Then the lights changed. I waited for the animation to finish,

0.2 second delay

then I went through the drop the clutch animation

0.2 second delay

then I went through the 1st gear animation

0.2 second delay

then I went through the hand break animation.

0.2 second delay

ah.

The lights are red again.

never mind.

Why's that bad player* behind me honking his horn

If you think that an ability should work before your character physically performs said ability, you shouldnt be playing an RPG.

 

You sould be playing Microsoft Word more.

I would like it if my character did the ability I clicked instead of playing out his master strike animation and doing no damage. all the while I get to sit there and watch this glitched out animation play with my thumb up my ***. why even use channeling abilities if they only work 75% of the time.

I supose the solution would be to remove all +def items from my tank character because when tanking multiple mobs, double and triple dodges are happening quite frequently and you cant do a thing while those animation are playing.

Is that what you were saying?

I supose the solution would be to remove all +def items from my tank character because when tanking multiple mobs, double and triple dodges are happening quite frequently and you cant do a thing while those animation are playing.

 

Is that what you were saying?

Actually no. I was saying that in addition to all of THOSE well known problems, there is another, that all of the channeled abilities require you to wait until they finish before you queue up the next ability, or else the new ability will stop the channelling and you'll miss the last damage tick - dropping your dps by,say 33%

so you lose a big chunk of dps from your ability OR your character does nothing at all and just stands there doing nothing for 0.2 seconds after every channelled ability.

Why dont you all quit crying.

I enjoy playing the game. I do not want macros to let me make a script that plays the game for me.

It they put in macros to help lazy people be even more lazy im going back to BF3 where i have to aim.

Just my 2 cents. Going to bed now.

Why dont you all quit crying.

 

I enjoy playing the game. I do not want macros to let me make a script that plays the game for me.

 

It they put in macros to help lazy people be even more lazy im going back to BF3 where i have to aim.

 

Just my 2 cents. Going to bed now.

That's because your a good player** that has a great collection of hats.

Actually no. I was saying that in addition to all of THOSE well known problems, there is another, that all of the channeled abilities require you to wait until they finish before you queue up the next ability, or else the new ability will stop the channelling and you'll miss the last damage tick - dropping your dps by,say 33%

 

so you lose a big chunk of dps from your ability OR your character does nothing at all and just stands there doing nothing for 0.2 seconds after every channelled ability.

Ah sorry, i get it. It's called 'clipping'. Not sure if it applies to swtor but in other games you might be actually be able to increase your dps by clipping off the last tick of a channeled ability to cast a higher dps one that came off cd earlier, and thus perfect your rotation.

I realize that is not something 'normal' players do however.

If you think that an ability should work before your character physically performs said ability, you shouldnt be playing an RPG.

 

You sould be playing Microsoft Word more.

It's simply that animations should be shorter than the amount of time the game tells me I need to wait before I can use the next one. The GCD in this game is 1.5 seconds - so in other words, when I use an instant ability, I cannot use the next one until those 1.5 seconds are done.

In some instances, however, the animation takes longer and, therefore, the game is telling me I can use my next ability when, in fact, I cannot. This makes the game unresponsive - the rhythmic nature of combat starts to give way and the longer a fight goes on, the more compounded the issue becomes.

WoW can let you clip animations but most animations are designed to either be very quick (see Templar's Verdict for example - quick spin around attack, takes about 0.5 seconds total). Cast time animations are a very short animation, looped so that when you interrupt it, it feels seemless - hands on fire while conjuring a fireball for example. It doesn't look like a jumbled mess because the animations are designed in such a way to look seemless even if clipped or interrupted.

I'm more than happy with SW:TOR's animations looking fancy - I quite like some of them, in fact. But if they take precedence over the combat mechanics (the GCD being the fundamental metronome on which combat is based) then it begins to feel like you don't have the level of control you'd like.

So I agree with you - you shouldn't be able to stab while also swinging your sword about. But your sword should not be swinging longer than the game has told me it's going to. The game says "hey, Mert, you can do your stab in 1.5 seconds" but then makes me wait 1.6. On quest mobs, this doesn't matter. On a raid boss or a player character, that extra 0.1 second gap begins to add up over time to the point where I'm missing interrupts, missing a spell from my rotation, not generating sufficient rage quickly enough to get my next ability off and so on.

Ah sorry, i get it. It's called 'clipping'. Not sure if it applies to swtor but in other games you might be actually be able to increase your dps by clipping off the last tick of a channeled ability to cast a higher dps one that came off cd earlier, and thus perfect your rotation.

 

I realize that is not something 'normal' players do however.

ah, I can tell your a bad player* after my own heart. Yes some games have clipping, but you almost always have to macro it in, also most games have more than 3 ticks of damage in their abilities, so it's a purely a lose lose scenario... It may be such a big % lose that it isn't worth taking any channelled abilities, as even bad/innappropriate ones that can be queued up would be better since they'd get rid of all the downtime.

If you think that an ability should work before your character physically performs said ability, you shouldnt be playing an RPG.

 

You sould be playing Microsoft Word more.

If you think ability animations should be longer than their cast times, you shouldn't design games of offer your opinion on such topics.

OP: what you describe is what WoW aff warlocks have been doing for years: renewing a DOT erases the previous one so if you lost a tick you weren't optimal.

Im down for abilities matching the cast times. But the guy who started the ability delay post liked a video where he praised his ability to start running on his mount before it appeared on screen.

If you were actually a good player you would adapt and be good regardless.

You are all forum warriors who whine on the forums until the game gets easy, and then you load in with macros and collect your free purples.

Also id assume there are no raid parsers because the game only has 2 raids.

If you came here to run an Arena team or to farm Raids you picked the wrong game.

This isnt WoW, You cant force Bioware to make it WoW.

SWTOR? a twitch game? wow...

Everything is too sloppy/delayed to even remotely be called a twitch game.

OP: what you describe is what WoW aff warlocks have been doing for years: renewing a DOT erases the previous one so if you lost a tick you weren't optimal.

Yes your correct - it lowers your effectiveness much the same as a warlocks dot - only in this case you are limited not by your competence or skill, but rather by your own reaction time and ping.. which is a big step backwards in my opinion. Also the % lost is very high you could be talking about 10% lost easily through unavoidable interspell downtime.

Hence a player with very bad reaction times (say 200ms)

200 ms is about one standard deviation faster than the average human reaction time.

http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/index.php

If you guys are this determined to not have fun, why are you playing a video game?

There is a perfectly good twitch mmo (LOLOLOLOL) waiting for you on warcrafts website.

Dont let the Pokeball door hit you on the way out.

SWTOR? a twitch game? wow...

 

Everything is too sloppy/delayed to even remotely be called a twitch game.

Actually the sloppyness and delay just makes it harder to see that it is a twitch game.

There may be a 1 second delay before anything happens, but the one that mashes the button faster WILL go first.

200 ms is about one standard deviation faster than the average human reaction time.

 

http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/index.php

Not for a repetitive action you've been doing for dozens of hours it isn't. If you try to play Call of Duty with 200ms reactions you won't have a fun time

Actually the sloppyness and delay just makes it harder to see that it is a twitch game.

 

There may be a 1 second delay before anything happens, but the one that mashes the button faster WILL go first.

I mash my buttons pretty fast, have you noticed if you hit certain abilities your char just jerks about in some weird void doing nothing?

So you're actually forced to slow down and play slower just to cater to the awfulness of the combat system, which apparently isn't a high proiority issue right now. Allowing people to emote while on their speeder however!, is.