Guild Wars 2

Last few days, I realized that there is a slight lag in skillbar/casting bar due to animation that is significant enough that if you train yourself to memorize the expected cooldown/cast delay between skills and simply press the keyboard without waiting for UI to update, you would actually improve your DPS by a significant amount.

This is readily apparent for classes whose rotation involves weapon swapping and equivalent. The DPS difference is as much as 2000-3000 at the dps golem, which is like 10%.

I feel this shouldn’t be the case, as it increases skill cap for the sake of UI animation.
Does anyone feel the same way? Anyone know ways to remedy it (e.g. graphics setting)?

None. The delay you notice is roughly your network latency.

When you try and activate a skill, the client sends a request (even if the skill is on cooldown), and starts flashing the icon. The server will send back an ok / on CD / failed, along with a “put this skill on cooldown for X ms” message.

So what you are saying is that discrepancy is entirely because of network latency?

Does that mean the UI doesn’t compensate for lag at all when it displays the cooldown number? Doesn’t that mean if you are suffering even manageable lag (say 300ms), your DPS would suffer.

Do you mean latency, graphical or network? Or the after-cast some skills have like the Meteor Shower on Elementalist that you can cancel the animation using certain skills to maximize damage?

In a word… yes. Skill cooldowns are server-authoritative for obvious reasons. If you want to check whether or not the client does any compensation you’ll probably want to set up some kind of high-latency testing environment for it, same for damage.

yeah, when I started trying to compensate for latency, my dps went way up (ele)