Guild Wars 2

There is a massive problem with evade mechanics. Unlike the dodge roll, they are queued up like any ordinary ability. As such, any ability prior must complete its animation/effect (a.k.a. start up plus recovery frames) before any evasive skill (any attack that gives x seconds of evasion) can be used. This includes auto-attacks (d/d thief, third hit), that can increase the delay by up to nearly a second. Its current implementation has it arbitrarily set up so that the thief, for example, has to time his/her evade attack by watching their auto-attack sequence. Unfortunately, due to the nature of evasion mechanics and their inherently short duration (typically 1/4-3/4), even a half second delay can be massively detrimental, and as any pve thief knows, the difference between taking a hit and not can be a life or death scenario.

My proposition is simple. For auto-attacks (d/d thief as an example where the third combo hit takes x seconds to perform from start up to recovery), reduce the animation length of each successive hit a single frame (1/60 seconds) and incur a cooldown after the third hit equal to x seconds. This way, there won’t be much difficulty coding every evasion attack with the priorities of a dodge roll.

(For anyone who doesn’t understand where I’m coming from, try starting a thief and using d/d. When you start your auto attack sequence, press the evade attack (third skill) immediately after the third successive combo attack (the one that applies the venom) and notice the delay between pressing the button and when the invincibility frames come out. Compare doing the same thing, but with a dodge instead of the evade attack, and notice just how much faster the dodge comes out.).

And this is a problem how exactly? I see that as a natural balance to how powerful evade/block mechanics are. They are abilities, not the dodge roll.

Thief has an issue with his ability to quickly spam evades.

And we thought we’d seen it all on these forums…

The problem is very real. You can especially see this when playing ranger on sword 1handed and GS.

Sublimatio.6981:

The problem is very real. You can especially see this when playing ranger on sword 1handed and GS.

Again, I’m not doubting that the effect exists, but that it’s actually a problem in any way.

It’s a big problem. I see an upcoming attack and want to dodge it, but I need to wait for it in skill queue, and even then I need to wait 1/2 sec of casting time (hornet string). You basically CAN’T dodge anything with that, except some seriously long casted skills.

Well that’s because you’re not supposed to. You can reliably dodge it.
Just not evade or block it via your skills, those are more tricky to use.

Like I said above, I feel it ensures a certain amount of balance with these skills.

I agree with the OP on many levels. I’d prefer any skills which have evades attached to them to over-ride any current action being executed.

It would be kinda nice if burning speed started to evade as soon as you used the skill instead of starting to evade a quarter+ of a second later after using it.

I’m fine with with queuing on everything apart from the bloody ranger auto, that thing is just horrible to play with. It adds a bit of weight in a game mode in which everything else is just spamming everything off cool down.

The evades themselves on the other hand: why are there delays? Just why? It’s like calling the ambulance, then the driver just goes ‘ehhhh, he can wait’ and arrive after you’re dead.

Carighan.6758:

Well that’s because you’re not supposed to. You can reliably dodge it.
Just not evade or block it via your skills, those are more tricky to use.

Like I said above, I feel it ensures a certain amount of balance with these skills.

No in the case of ranger you cannot dodge it. A regular dodge roll does not interrupt the sword auto. This is a major complaint for the rangers sword. It locks you onto the target so it can throw you off cliffs when mobs suddenly die and you cannot dodge exactly when you want. You have to time dodges inbetween the chain attacks (often requires unbinding auto attack).

Your point is kind of acceptible when considering abilities. Although i still disagree with it being ok that aftercasts often cause excessive delays. But thats not what Sublim was referring to.

hmmm, when you mention it, i’ve never seen a thief actually dodge roll…

All abilities operate like this. Changing only dodge abilities to work like this would be odd. Maybe adding some abilities on each class/weaponset with the ability to cancel after cast would be interesting. Although these kind of mechanics are not something easily understood by a large percentage of the player base.

Phantaram.1265:

All abilities operate like this. Changing only dodge abilities to work like this would be odd. Maybe adding some abilities on each class/weaponset with the ability to cancel after cast would be interesting. Although these kind of mechanics are not something easily understood by a large percentage of the player base.

I don’t think they need to be. The idea is to have a game which is simple enough to understand at a fundamental level so everyone can pick it up and play, but to have advanced layers of it such that the truly dedicated and skilled can distinguish themselves from the rest and feel rewarded for their dedication and skill.

Carighan.6758:

And this is a problem how exactly? I see that as a natural balance to how powerful evade/block mechanics are. They are abilities, not the dodge roll.

There’s no point on an evade ability if you literally can’t evade when you want to. If they are as powerful as you say, a more logical solution would be to reduce the effect time for these abilities or cap how many attacks you can evade in x seconds. This is strictly concerning pve, anyway.

Phantaram.1265:

All abilities operate like this. Changing only dodge abilities to work like this would be odd. Maybe adding some abilities on each class/weaponset with the ability to cancel after cast would be interesting. Although these kind of mechanics are not something easily understood by a large percentage of the player base.

Which is why I said in my post to change the way auto-attacks operate, not how specific abilities work.

Carighan.6758:

Well that’s because you’re not supposed to. You can reliably dodge it.
Just not evade or block it via your skills, those are more tricky to use.

Like I said above, I feel it ensures a certain amount of balance with these skills.

It’s not tricky, it’s arbitrary. Those are two different things. Tricky would imply a higher learning curve when using these abilities, but it’s arbitrary mainly because you can’t time when auto-attacks come out. Therefore, you can’t appropriate the exact time it would take for these abilities to come out since it is by all means random.

Your idea of balance is silly. An ability should always do what it’s supposed to, and if it needs balancing, you limit its worth, not make portions of it worthless. There are many other avenues to take when it comes to balancing, and quite frankly, leaving a mechanic broken is the laziest way to ‘fix’ it.

It seems the absolutely opposite of arbitrary to me.

Right now, skills work like this:

• You press a button. No skill is currently firing, so you use the skill immediately.
• You press a button. A skill is currently firing, so it gets queued at the end of it.

New system would be:

• You press a button. No skill is currently firing, so you use the skill immediately.
• You press a button. A skill was firing, it gets interrupted and you use the pressed skill instead.
• You press a button. A skill was firing, but it doesn’t get interrupted and your skill gets queued instead.
• You press a button. A skill was firing, but it doesn’t get interrupted and you have to manually press the skill you wanted to use again.

Can you tell me what scenarios are bullet points 2-4 in the second case? Because without listing what is what, it seems quite arbitrary to me.

Right now it’s very dependable. All skills function the same, in regards to all other skills. Because there’s one implementation of the skill queue (actually at least two, but only one in regards to player-originating abilities).
Why make it more complex, when the queueing also serves as a limiting factor on how different dodge-abilities can be between classes, always making sure that a “natural” dodge is superior to an ability-based dodge?

(edit)
There’s also nothing broken about it, as the auto-attack follows a very rhythm. It’s dependable, just not in the way you’d like it to be. Which is fair enough, but it’s very different from something being “broken” (or an exploit, or lame, or cheese, a few more words readily thrown around these forums).