Cast (or rather Animation?) Time Madness

Kaliki · August 2015

I have long been wondering why some abilities with a cast time seem to take much longer than others, so I did some testing.

Edit: I did some retesting and found that the results below are not correct.
You can cast Crystal Fragments and Dark Flare much quicker, same as Wrecking Blow or Snipe.

There is however still a difference between those skills:
Dark flare and Crystal Fragments have animations that are up to twice as long as their cast time. The animation time was so long, that I did not hit the ability key fast enough during my initial testing - that is why my results are wrong.
While restesting I essentially kept mashing my ability key over and over and found that by getting the right time for initiating the follow up cast you can have the projectiles hit at almost the same rate as the tooltip cast time.

However, the long cast time remains an issue with sorcerer pets as you dont spam them so often.
I still think updating the animations for the skills concerned would make their use feel much better.

Here's what I found:

As you can see, you can land two uppercuts or snipes with only 1.2 seconds in between them, so the deviation from the tooltip is only 0.2 seconds, which could be influenced by lag/measuring inaccuracies.

However, if you cast two Crystal Shards or Dark Flares right after each other, you will notice that you spend up to 0.8 seconds longer casting than is stated in the tooltip.

Cast times for summoning Sorcerer pets are also by far longer - about 0.7 seconds longer than stated in the tooltip until the familiar icon appears (takes at least a second longer till the familiar is actually visible and starts considering if it might join the fight).

Jeckll · August 2015

Just interested: how did you messure times like 0,2 increase?

yeso112860 · August 2015

Just an idea, combat log timestamps?

Kaliki · August 2015

@Jeckll: I measured in a few different ways, but the results above, I obtained the following way:

I cast abilities right after each other a few times while having FTC open and recorded it with Fraps.
I then opened the videos with subtitling software and measured the time between the frame where damage hit no. 1 and no. 2 showed up on FTC. Also measured times between a 3 and 4th hit as well just to be sure it was not an exception.

When I started out I also measured pure animation durations - but I found those might not be that useful/accurate, because I would have the problem of where to start measuring and where to end.

Measuring the time between hits should reflect best how long a cast actually takes, or am I wrong?
I measured pure animation times as well - that also lead to the result that Dark Flare and Crystal shards take about 0.5 seconds longer than in the tooltip from when the char starts casting until the projectile visually leaves the hands. but as stated above, I doubt this is reliable.

Edit: @yeso112860: I did not use time stamps as FTC only seems to show whole seconds, but the subtitling software has its own time stamps for every frame, which in this case is about 1 frame per 0.033 seconds, so accurately enough for me.

Jeckll · August 2015

okay thx. While I dont think FTC shows the damage without delay (might be those 0.2s), what your test shows is, no matter what the real numbers are, there seems to be a difference in how Snipe/Uppercut and the other skills you tested work.

Even if the times are not exact, there seems to be an issue.
Thanks for testing and sharing.

yeso112860 · August 2015

I do not qestion your ability to measure time, mine is mere statement of there is/are tool(s) to pick up and go with it.
Aside from that misunderstanding, I present my respects for the work done.

Kaliki · August 2015

@yeso112860: No misunderstanding here, I just took your comment as an incentive to elaborate a bit more. One might consider using an addon that shows milliseconds as well and test this further.

Would be awesome if someone else could test this as well. The more evidence, the better.

First I was thinking it could be a melee/range thing, but especially with snipe being as quick as Uppercut, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Fixing this would perhaps make Dark Flare and Fragments a bit more worthwile and bring them out of that niche they are in right now.

Sacadon · August 2015

Would be interesting to have the animation cancel and/or animation workaround times too.

Kaliki · August 2015

I unfortunately can't really test weaving/animation cancelling – I am too bad at it/don't know how the pros do their medium heavy weaving. Every ability seems to behave a bit differently when weaved as well. I don't think you can Heavy Attack weave other abilities like it is reported for Wrecking Blow.

On logging back in to the PTS and checking my NB and DK I was startled when I found that those classes don't seem to have abilities with casting times any more.

But I could do some tests with other abilities with casting time that I have left out so far:

Force Siphon
Healing Ritual
Roar (WW)

Let me know if I forgot any ability. I'm just realizing that there really aren't so many with cast time around any more...

Sacadon · August 2015

Kaliki wrote: »

I unfortunately can't really test weaving/animation cancelling – I am too bad at it/don't know how the pros do their medium heavy weaving. Every ability seems to behave a bit differently when weaved as well. I don't think you can Heavy Attack weave other abilities like it is reported for Wrecking Blow.

On logging back in to the PTS and checking my NB and DK I was startled when I found that those classes don't seem to have abilities with casting times any more.

But I could do some tests with other abilities with casting time that I have left out so far:
Force Siphon

Healing Ritual

Roar (WW)

Let me know if I forgot any ability. I'm just realizing that there really aren't so many with cast time around any more...

Understood... Not talking about LA weaving BTW. But either way, it takes a bit of practice to work around or maximize the value that can be obtained from the cast times and it is not simply animation canceling.

I mentioned this because I think the ability to do this is what prevents ZOS from reducing the times for highly used skills like shards. Dark Flare being an exception as they've tried to improve it slowly, but think they stopped before they got it right. But you can queue-up subsequent uppercuts faster than 1s per cast.

Kaliki · August 2015

Sacadon wrote: »

But either way, it takes a bit of practice to work around or maximize the value that can be obtained from the cast times and it is not simply animation canceling.

I just had to update my post. After your post I did some further testing and found that I was wrong.
Seems I had the wrong "rhythm" in my test runs.

I attribute this to the fact that the animations for Dark Flare and Fragments are much longer than their cast time - while with wrecking blow, the cast time and animation are more equal, so I did not delay the next cast.

Like with crystal fragments you have to initiate the next cast as soon as you see that your character starts casting - otherwise the animation will play for close to 2 seconds.
Still think that this should be changed. But apparently not the cast time is the problem, but simply the animation did not keep up with the (since a few patches) reduced cast time.

Dracane · August 2015

It's true. I can't think of any magical cast, that doesn't take much longer than expected.
Also the Sorcerer pets. Even though the cast is done, I can still be interrupted because the animation is much longer and the ability is not tied to the actual casttime, it's tied to the animation time.

The cast time of the familiar is supposed to be 1.5 seconds, in reality however, it takes around 2,5 seconds until the familiar appears and in this time, I am interruptable.