The problem with Skill Lock.... It's breaking all combat.

Robbmrp · August 2015

Hello @ZOS_GinaBruno, @ZOS_JessicaFolsom, @ZOS_RichLambert,

It seems that the biggest problem we face in Cyrodil isn't the game lag, but the weapon skill lock. Of course lag contributes to this but isn't the main issue with it. Why do skills "lock" after each cast? This locking mechanism is breaking combat in Cyrodil. When the lag occurs and aren't being CC'd, your skill bar locks and doesn't unlock until you roll dodge. You can be running in a field, cast one spell with no one around and the bar locks up and stays that way.

What is the function of this skill lock anyway? If it's a timer, why not put the timer on the actual skill being cast?

There have been countless posts I've seen on this issue and couldn't find a ZOS response on it. I've also gone through all of the PTS Patch Notes and don't see anything about it with Imperial City.

There has to be a better way to "lock" skills in between casts without using this function as it's ruining the game.

With Stamina regeneration stopping now while blocking, we really need to get this issue resolved. It's going to cost us more stamina to break out of this lock that we really don't have.

Is there any official word on this whether it's designed this way or bugging out? If it's designed this way and is a timer of sorts, could the time on it be cut in half maybe? That would help and may resolve the issue when lag occurs.

Thank you all for your time.

hellkrasher · August 2015

Skill lock? I dont have a clue of what you are talking about

AfkNinja · August 2015

He's talking about global cooldowns and animation delays and I agree they suck.

hellkrasher · August 2015

Global cooldown is in place for a thousand reasons. Theres no way around it, every game has GC, some larger, some shorter.

Robbmrp · August 2015

hellkrasher wrote: »

Global cooldown is in place for a thousand reasons. Theres no way around it, every game has GC, some larger, some shorter.

And I get that, but maybe the mechanics behind THIS GC is more of a problem than actually applying a timer to each spell.

People are getting locked up when lag hits and it NEVER unlocks. This is the only game I've encountered with this type of "Global Cooldown". It locks your bar so you can't weapon swap or cast spells even when your NOT CC'd. There's no reason that the bar should go into an infinate locked state just because of lag. We waste so much stamina on dodge rolling to break the lock currently that this needs to be addressed. If there's a timer attached to it, maybe the game would work a whole lot smoother if the timer was attached to the actual spell itself. I would rather have a 1 second cool down on a spell instead of the current mechanism as it just doesn't work when the game lags.

Swarog · August 2015

Long time ago there was no any global cooldown (lock) and love that times.

byrom101b16_ESO · August 2015

Not sure he is.

In IC on the PTS and ONLY there I've had my entire bar grey out and lock up until I dodged or similar to 'free it up' and it stays like that for 10+ seconds sometimes if I leave it.

It has cost me some kills and got me killed several times, and is as far as I can tell a serious bug.

My fps and latency were all normal in each case and I could do anything BUT click skills.

Robbmrp · August 2015

byrom101b16_ESO wrote: »

Not sure he is.

In IC on the PTS and ONLY there I've had my entire bar grey out and lock up until I dodged or similar to 'free it up' and it stays like that for 10+ seconds sometimes if I leave it.

It has cost me some kills and got me killed several times, and is as far as I can tell a serious bug.

My fps and latency were all normal in each case and I could do anything BUT click skills.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. This happens on the Live Server for PVE and PVP. I notice it a lot more in PVP though as the lag is the worst there. It does happen in PVE Dungeons though.

AhPook_Is_Here · August 2015

Heavy attack with a resto staff sometimes fixes it, rolling, equipping and un-equiping a weapon, and re-loging. Like an old guild-mate of mine once said, "This game is a jalopy".

Robbmrp · August 2015

Yeah, and after browsing through the patch notes this could be a whole lot worse. There's a Global Cool Down of 1 second on every spell now. I can see this being a really big issue affecting all of Cyrodil game play when IC comes out next week.

F7sus4 · August 2015

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

Heavy attack with a resto staff sometimes fixes it, rolling, equipping and un-equiping a weapon, and re-loging. Like an old guild-mate of mine once said, "This game is a jalopy".

Yeah, that's a perfect thing to do when you're in the middle of the raid and your guild is just breaking the world record.

But yes, happened to us multiple times. You can run with your character, dodge, block, but you can't use abilities for several seconds. Wrecks everything.

AhPook_Is_Here · August 2015

F7sus4 wrote: »

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

Heavy attack with a resto staff sometimes fixes it, rolling, equipping and un-equiping a weapon, and re-loging. Like an old guild-mate of mine once said, "This game is a jalopy".

Yeah, that's a perfect thing to do when you're in the middle of the raid and your guild is just breaking the world record.

But yes, happened to us multiple times. You can run with your character, dodge, block, but you can't use abilities for several seconds. Wrecks everything.

LOL you think I am justifying it? I'm just saying some methods to work around it, and this bug isn't nearly as bad as endless load screens on the door before the boss to HR when getting there deathless in 3 min and 2 people have to restart and you are stuck doing it with 10 because you will have a worse score by waiting. Or crashing right before the serpent and having to walk all the way back though the whole trial to get to the group. I don't know how many records we missed when we did trials because of stupid, stupid bugs from in game mechanics, to this games issues with various graphic drivers, to poor net performance of their servers on large pulls and so on. Even if your player's game is on 75% of the time you still have to have that lucky 1 in 4 run when nobody is hit by some bug that costs them a few minutes to recover from. Anyway, we don't do trials any longer because of these ongoing and unaddressed issues but it is good to see people believe they can still compete around the RNG of game-breaking bugs.

Zlater · August 2015

It sounds like the one where it gets messed up with a chat bug, try pressing shift to release it.

Robbmrp · August 2015

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

F7sus4 wrote: »

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

Heavy attack with a resto staff sometimes fixes it, rolling, equipping and un-equiping a weapon, and re-loging. Like an old guild-mate of mine once said, "This game is a jalopy".

Yeah, that's a perfect thing to do when you're in the middle of the raid and your guild is just breaking the world record.

But yes, happened to us multiple times. You can run with your character, dodge, block, but you can't use abilities for several seconds. Wrecks everything.

LOL you think I am justifying it? I'm just saying some methods to work around it, and this bug isn't nearly as bad as endless load screens on the door before the boss to HR when getting there deathless in 3 min and 2 people have to restart and you are stuck doing it with 10 because you will have a worse score by waiting. Or crashing right before the serpent and having to walk all the way back though the whole trial to get to the group. I don't know how many records we missed when we did trials because of stupid, stupid bugs from in game mechanics, to this games issues with various graphic drivers, to poor net performance of their servers on large pulls and so on. Even if your player's game is on 75% of the time you still have to have that lucky 1 in 4 run when nobody is hit by some bug that costs them a few minutes to recover from. Anyway, we don't do trials any longer because of these ongoing and unaddressed issues but it is good to see people believe they can still compete around the RNG of game-breaking bugs.

When you get this bug in Cyrodil 9 times out of 10 your dead. You as you cannot fend of 2-5 people by using only light and heavy attacks.

F7sus4 · August 2015

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

LOL you think I am justifying it?

I think none of us would do that.

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

I'm just saying some methods to work around it

That's not really a solution when every second counts towards (and against) your raid.

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

this bug isn't nearly as bad as endless load screens on the door before the boss to HR when getting there deathless in 3 min and 2 people have to restart and you are stuck doing it with 10 because you will have a worse score by waiting.

We already estimated that we spend almost half of our raiding time on loading screens.

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

Or crashing right before the serpent and having to walk all the way back though the whole trial to get to the group. I don't know how many records we missed when we did trials because of stupid, stupid bugs from in game mechanics, to this games issues with various graphic drivers, to poor net performance of their servers on large pulls and so on.

Same here. We did our 99k SO run after one person crashed and catched up just before we triggered the final fight. But that's a significant raid performance decrease for the time already. Caused by, solely and sincerely, ZOS.

BuggeX · August 2015

yea pls, fix this

AhPook_Is_Here · August 2015

Robbmrp wrote: »

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

F7sus4 wrote: »

AhPook_Is_Here wrote: »

Heavy attack with a resto staff sometimes fixes it, rolling, equipping and un-equiping a weapon, and re-loging. Like an old guild-mate of mine once said, "This game is a jalopy".

Yeah, that's a perfect thing to do when you're in the middle of the raid and your guild is just breaking the world record.

But yes, happened to us multiple times. You can run with your character, dodge, block, but you can't use abilities for several seconds. Wrecks everything.

LOL you think I am justifying it? I'm just saying some methods to work around it, and this bug isn't nearly as bad as endless load screens on the door before the boss to HR when getting there deathless in 3 min and 2 people have to restart and you are stuck doing it with 10 because you will have a worse score by waiting. Or crashing right before the serpent and having to walk all the way back though the whole trial to get to the group. I don't know how many records we missed when we did trials because of stupid, stupid bugs from in game mechanics, to this games issues with various graphic drivers, to poor net performance of their servers on large pulls and so on. Even if your player's game is on 75% of the time you still have to have that lucky 1 in 4 run when nobody is hit by some bug that costs them a few minutes to recover from. Anyway, we don't do trials any longer because of these ongoing and unaddressed issues but it is good to see people believe they can still compete around the RNG of game-breaking bugs.

When you get this bug in Cyrodil 9 times out of 10 your dead. You as you cannot fend of 2-5 people by using only light and heavy attacks.

Well I have never been in Cyrodiil before, but thanks for taking the time to explain to me.

Wreuntzylla · August 2015

Two thoughts to share.

First, I had a locked abilities issue that was driving me nuts until I realized it happened about 50% of the time when dismounting in PvP combat. It turned out that I was locked into sprint. Tapping the sprint key once or twice resolves the issue. I checked and it is not a keyboard issue.

Second, there is also a longstanding issue with silences/reflects locking skill bars when you take particular actions when the silence/reflect hits. I can't recall the specifics, but it should be found somewhere in the PvP forum with respect to the templar reflect.

Robbmrp · August 2015

Wreuntzylla wrote: »

Two thoughts to share.

First, I had a locked abilities issue that was driving me nuts until I realized it happened about 50% of the time when dismounting in PvP combat. It turned out that I was locked into sprint. Tapping the sprint key once or twice resolves the issue. I checked and it is not a keyboard issue.

Second, there is also a longstanding issue with silences/reflects locking skill bars when you take particular actions when the silence/reflect hits. I can't recall the specifics, but it should be found somewhere in the PvP forum with respect to the templar reflect.

I found the post below that talks about it as well. It also mentions other classes as well. As far as the Silence part goes, there's a mention in that post as well about mobs that shouldn't have the "silence" ability so I don't think it's related to that either. From what I've seen on how it affects my game, it's only when ping shoots up to 999+ or being rubber banded where it goes into perma lock. It's always consistent also, when that happens, it locks every time.

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/156586/skills-becoming-unresponsive-during-combat

IMO it's a disastrous idea for @ZOS to tie in a Global Cool Down with the Weapon Swap Lock. Lag can affect this to much and it stays in that perma lock state. I'd rather they set the CGD to every spell and get rid of that lock altogether. We have two skill bars for a reason, we should never have a locked weapon bar ever. Disable weapon swap(Not with the lock) for levels 1-14.

Put a cool down where it's supposed to be, on the spell itself and not the bar as IT'S NOT WORKING AS INTENDED....

@ZOS all you need to do is add 1 second to every spell and this will work as intended.

Get rid of the weapon swap bar lock please.