Guild Wars 2

So I’ve noticed recently a lot of my skills are taking more than one button press to actually work.
Example:
I see a Mesmer teleporting for a shatter combo with the Guard’s Chains of Light. I try to use Renewed Focus / Shelter but it takes 7 or 8 button presses just to activate. Taking Australian ping into account (because ANet refuses to give us Singapore or Australian servers so we can’t play properly) it means I’m either dead or on really low HP and my blocks/Invuln do nothing.

Do I need to be pressing the button much, much harder or just loads?
One press is clearly not enough.

Before anybody responds with maybe you were lagging etc, I’m not stupid, it’s not due to lag.

I have the same “issue”, especially on immo-shatters or bs-combos. I don’t feel like it’s a big deal though.

My advice as always with pressing buttons is SPAM MORE BUTTONS. After that, conduct a small ceremony to Cthulhu and hope his evilness lends a tentacle to your troubles by checking whether the problem is resolved.

Yeah, for me it also happens on my weapon swap. Pressing ^ then try to do a specific defensive skill, just to see myself casting something offensive because I didn’t switch weapons is just aweful. And it really just started to happen recently.

It happens to me most of the time when I’m immobolized. I am speculating that it’s due to a lag between the location before a blink and the current location—causing you to not attack because they are not in LOS. Not exactly sure though—I just hate standing doing nothing when I’m using skills that don’t require any target.

This happens to me all the time on my engineer. Skills like big old bomb If I don’t press it at least 4-5 times it won’t activate 90% of the time

Happens on my necro when I put down a well. The well takes more presses than any other skill. Very weird :/

Possibly related to skill queuing?

First press doesn’t register, then spam and heartseeker three times.

Varonth.5830:

Yeah, for me it also happens on my weapon swap. Pressing ^ then try to do a specific defensive skill, just to see myself casting something offensive because I didn’t switch weapons is just aweful. And it really just started to happen recently.

This has recently also started happening to me as well. I go to swap weapons and use an ability and I am still on the same weapon. I have also found that, just recently, my character will not always start a finishing move when I press the key as well and I often have to press it a couple of times to get him to start one.

I am in New Zealand and have always dealt with the latency differences, but this appears to be something else. It especially seems to be prevalent when I get immobilized by some ability, but I have seen it happen without any immobilize as well.

Thanks.

I actually thought this was just me. I have the same lag when I try to go into elixir S during a burst combo initiated on me.

To the OP— if you are very sure it’s not lag in playing from Australia (I hear the internet quality itself is quite bad in Australia though, nevermind the distance), pressing the keys harder will probably not result in any improvement. In your specific instance, you mentioned that you were immobilized though. I think that might be the cause of it.

Immobilize creates some big problems with the existing skill queuing. When immobilized, I’ve noticed on occasion that whatever skill I was currently executing occasionally freezes up. Pressing another hotkey simply cancels the casting of my current skill, so I have to double-tap the skill to ensure it goes off. It causes some actions to queue to activate as soon as movement is restored again as well (dodge in particular seems to activate as soon as immobilize ends if you tried to dodge at any point while immobilized). This can be very aggravating, as it will cancel out any animation you’re currently in the middle off executing when the immobilize ends.

There’s also quite obviously a queue system in place for skills (anyone who’s tried heartseeker before will know this, pressing heartseeker again at any point during the first heartseeker will lead to a second executed right after the first— quite annoying if you double-tap keys often).

So to your point, I think pressing the hotkey twice is the best way to ensure that it goes off when immobilized. If skills aren’t activating in a single press when absolutely nothing is happening and you’re providing no additional inputs however, it really does sound like a connection issue.

Some much older computer and laptop models will also only accept a certain number of keyboard inputs at once as well, so, for example, if you’re moving forward and strafing and holding the mouse down, the keyboard would not accept additional inputs (and it makes this very unpleasant beeping noise to let you know it’s not pleased). Others have conflicting BIOS commands hotkeyed to certain combinations involving shift (seriously, kitten StickyKeys), ctrl, and alt, so problems could come up if you have shortcuts on those buttons while trying to play the game. This is a much less likely explanation though, since these are functions largely on much older computers built around the mid 2000’s, so it’s unlikely this is the cause. Worth mentioning though, as my older laptop (which I fortunately no longer use) carries the latter function, and I’ve ran into inputs being stuck a number of times while gaming on it.

I think it actually is just lag, not direct lag but a GW2-consequence of lag. I only recently started noticing it in sPvP, but it only ever happens to me around times when it’s also laggy (busy part of the evening). And in WvW I’ve had it for ages, also only when it’s laggy.

I had no problems until a patch about a month or so ago. Now I can NOT play my ele unless I use a service called WTFast. I think it’s just certain networks are messed w/ anet’s servers. I would attunement swap and it would take 1-1.5 seconds before it happened. So annoying.

Yep, have had this same issue several times. Happens a lot when I break a stun with a teleport, and I can’t move, or use an ability, or anything…I don’t know what it is.

My problem is that all of my skills interrupt all of my other kitten skills. I’ll get into an intense fight then die and notice that some of the skills I used aren’t on cool down. The cast bar can’t be moved and you can’t toggle off not to interrupt skills via other skills. This is the most frustrating thing when your skills aren’t activating when you want them to. It causes you to get out of sync with your mental timer and key presses are too early canceling skills that haven’t activated. Well, aside from Right Click Targeting of course. Top it off with enemy skills that bug out my Runes……