Guild Wars 2

Any body know what is the difference from technical point of view between games with instant reaction times of spels and games with slight delay.
Example: In WoW if you play hunter there is thing called jump-shot, your character is runing forward, then you jump, turn in mid-air 180 degrees fire to say arcane shot (which is instant), turn again facing forward (still midair) and when you lend you keep runing and you kept in effect the continuos speed of runing forward but you fired instant shot to the chasing mab/player.
However in GW2, the first ability of the short bow, equiped by ranger, which is instant also, doesn’t work like that. You can fire doing “jump-shot” but to be able to hit you have to wait fraction of second (my estimation is 0.25-0.35sec) which makes you landing back not fully facing the original direction.

I explained this technic only because it shos better the time lapse between presing the key and the actual start of the spell. In WoW it works in way to make you feel is instant or nearly instant regardles input or internet lag (it could be 2-3 sec lag and the technic still looks same). Other game that works like that is Tera.

To clarify, I use high end hardware, i7-3970, 2x GTX 680, SSD hard disks, 28" monitor, several razer gaming mouses, keyboards, etc, everything overclocked. With couple of words money are not issue and I try to use the latest/best avalible on the market. I checked all combinations of settings, windowed modes, etc, lowest fps was around 230 with other players around. I have 2 broad band internets, for both game show around 15-20ms delay. I am aware there is engineer ability called jump shot, I am not bashing GW2, it is best game ever imho.

Only thing I want to know what makes these games different, does wow make your pc making the work and gw2 make these things server side or something else. Thank you in advance for the answer and patience.

I skimmed through your post because really after reading the title I need not read anything else. And yes, there is a built-in spell delay in this game, although the spell icons react instantly upon pressing the button, spells seem to go off at a certain delay – I’d say 200ish ms.

I’m well used to WoW and LoL commands and I can easily notice a difference between 40ms and 60ms, so no, it’s not up to my or your connection, or PC, it’s simply the way GW2 was built. A lot of people tend to say they have no delay, but I’m 100% sure they just can’t notice that tiny lag.

My theory as of why this exists is that GW2 has a certain threshold (say 200 ms) under which everyone (even the people with perfect connection – me for example) will always lag the same, so that if someone’s connection is not so good (say 150 ms normally) they would still not be disadvantaged. In other words it tolerates latency up to 200 ms, so in the latter example it would only add ~50 ms to that player.

I also tested this during a short period of time while my connection was being sort of twitchy and unstable (70 ms with google instead of 40 ms) and I could notice NO difference in GW2 which confirms my theory. Hope this helps.

Most skills have a cast time and if not, they usually have a hidden cast time equal to the animation. There are skills that truly are instant cast and can be casted while jumping or during the cast of other skills.

All abilities have a cast time corresponding to their animation

You can’t spam your auto-attack 20 times a second just because you can press the button that fast

xiv.7136:

All abilities have a cast time corresponding to their animation

You can’t spam your auto-attack 20 times a second just because you can press the button that fast

The exception to this is shouts, the Elementalist’s lightning strike attack (Scepter 2), etc.

Thank you for the answers. What I mean is not GCD, which will prevent the spaming, but the delay between pressing the key and the time the animation begins, which in wow and tera is below my treshhold of perciving it at all. Could anybody cite such instant spells, which Healix said exist, that can be cast in mid air, while turning, preferably rangers whith which I am more familiar (seems only the first skill of the shortbow is doing that on theory, but not on practice, and I’ll go now to look if I can find other professions’ skills). But what I wonder is what exactly is that, server-client differences in where the animation is processed or something else. If there is intentional build in delay of 200ms this will answer my question, but I can’t find source to mention such thing. Thanks again.