Guild Wars 2

I’ve recorded two videos of Mind Wrack recharge, with and without alacrity. Without alacrity, Mind Wrack recharges in about 10.152 seconds. With 1 second alacrity, it recharges in 8.843 seconds. That’s a difference of 1.309 seconds. Can somebody explain why alacrity does this? I know it reduces recharge of skills by 66%, but shouldn’t it reduce 0.40 seconds per second of alacrity instead of 1.309 seconds. I think it’s using a different calculation formula, maybe it’s calculation is based on the whole recharge time, instead of just adding milliseconds to the recharge ticker.

I don’t know how it works, but if that were the case, the benefit would vary depending on the recharge time of the power in question, which you could test by trying something with a longer recharge (e.g. time warp)

Yeah I was about to do that, but something happened. ^^;; Could somebody else test it for us, for example Distortion with and without alacrity. I used nVidia’s Shadowplay @ 60fps to record the videos, then used Avidemux to time the recharge.

My dirty testing on time warp said the math was working out the way I expected it to.

It was talked about on Chrono reveal, it’s not a 66% recharge (like a negative chill) but has a whole difrent math line for it.

Are you sure you didn’t have the 33% alacrity duration trait or something? Or maybe the game places alacrity on you a fraction of a second after mind wrack goes on cooldown? It doesn’t sound like there’s different math going on. It sounds like a slight delay due to programming limitations.

Xenon.4537:

Are you sure you didn’t have the 33% alacrity duration trait or something? Or maybe the game places alacrity on you a fraction of a second after mind wrack goes on cooldown? It doesn’t sound like there’s different math going on. It sounds like a slight delay due to programming limitations.

The game ‘ticks’ interval recharges on a global-like basis, not a per-case basis. You can test it with Pledge and Prestige. You should have 6 intervals (6s of stealth) with PU, but you sometimes only get 5 intervals. Just count how many times the cooldown “ticks” down (not literally ticks, but you’ll see when it jumps/skips). Ignore the fact that the cooldown is ticking too fast for Pledge’s 1.5% CDR. Just keep dropping it every so often and you’ll see.

I don’t know. Can you explain how you test this out?
In theory, 1 second of alacrity should give 0.66s extra cdr. Did you accidentally get 2 second of alacrity w/o realizing it?

Esplen.3940:

Xenon.4537:

Are you sure you didn’t have the 33% alacrity duration trait or something? Or maybe the game places alacrity on you a fraction of a second after mind wrack goes on cooldown? It doesn’t sound like there’s different math going on. It sounds like a slight delay due to programming limitations.

The game ‘ticks’ interval recharges on a global-like basis, not a per-case basis. You can test it with Pledge and Prestige. You should have 6 intervals (6s of stealth) with PU, but you sometimes only get 5 intervals. Just count how many times the cooldown “ticks” down (not literally ticks, but you’ll see when it jumps/skips). Ignore the fact that the cooldown is ticking too fast for Pledge’s 1.5% CDR. Just keep dropping it every so often and you’ll see.

I’m not 100% sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that the game keeps a steady clock and counts down boons and cooldowns based on this global clock? If so that still doesn’t account for the possibility that the game might take 0.03 of a second to get from “you cast mind wrack” to “apply traited effects added to this skill”. No matter what a computer system takes time to calculate, even if it is an incredibly small amount of time and a simple calculation. Anet might be able to tighten it up if they are aware of it though.

The reason I suggested this possibility is because engineers used to have a trait in explosives that gave 3 stacks of might when you use a healing skill, but it would apply that might about 1 second after you finish casting. It seemed odd when used with HGH because the 2 stacks of HGH would immediately apply, and then a second later (after the elixir bottle hit the ground) the other 3 stacks would show up.

Basically this amounts to an inconsistency in their coding which results in some off-timing of certain things. I can’t remember the name of that engineering trait. Apparently it doesn’t exist anymore, but I remember it was a master trait in the explosives line of the old trait system.

The tl;dr version of what I wrote is:

Server-side, usually things that are counted in certain intervals are always counting. That means 1s intervals are only being checked once per second.

Longer version:

Theoretically this works for anything that has an interval based on duration, but it’s not actually true. For cooldowns (and their interaction with Alacrity) it should check your buff bar whenever it ticks, not in between the ticks. However, it sometimes does not work as intended, as noted with Torch stealthing (ignoring the CDR bug) not always granting the correct amount of intervals.

Note: the terms intervals and ticks are the same, simply meaning when it occurs. I use these interchangeably because I’m used to the term tick (in regards to DoTs, etc) but the game description uses the term intervals.

If you want to talk about things that occur after the fact, Restorative Mantras no longer heals upon immediately finishing the channel, it now waits a set duration (always the same, based on my eyeball math) before healing. Before (the trait revamp), it used to apply the healing as soon as you could use a Charge (aka as soon as it’s charged).

EDIT:
A possible solution is instead of having the interval ticks based globally, set it based on the duration of your boon. I don’t believe there are any sources of Stealth or Alacrity that are given in non-Integer (assuming fractions of a second are not Integers) and there is no way of getting fractions of Stealth/Alacrity. This way, whenever your stealth ticks, it will apply the proper effects.

However this poses a problem, with regards to Alacrity no longer affecting cooldowns until a full second after it is obtained. Additionally, this check will need to be made for every stealth application (unless they’re properly hierarched in code) in regards to Stealth-related traits.

The current system is “fine”, but it does have some quirks relating to these newer interval-based effects. (The problems existed with the old interval-based effects, but it wasn’t as noticeable. For example, as a Thief, do you notice if you lose a condition as soon as you stealth or have to wait for the full interval to lose a condition with the appropriate traits? Usually not, you just kind of stealth and wait for your conditions to get cleansed. There’s a lot of finesse going on that people don’t always pay attention to.)

Alacrity is the counter part to chill this isn’t a false statement.
The tooltipps might be easy to missunderstand.
Chill makes 3s in real time cool down only 2 1 seconds of our cooldowns.
Alacrity makes 3s in real time coold down 4 5 seconds of out cooldowns.
Basically it additionally reduces .33s .66s per second ending up with 1.66s per second while chill does the opposite (adding .33s per second)

Me Games Ma.8426:

Alacrity is the counter part to chill this isn’t a false statement.
The tooltipps might be easy to missunderstand.
Chill makes 3s in real time cool down only 2 seconds of our cooldowns.
Alacrity makes 3s in real time coold down 4 seconds of out cooldowns.
Basically it additionally reduces .33s per second ending up with 1.33s per second while chill does the opposite (adding .33s per second)

I think chill makes 3s cooldown only 1 second, alacrity makes 3s cooldown 5 seconds.

When they had the stream of the chrono I’m sure it was 3->4 but yes you are right it’s 3->5 now :o

EDIT: Back then I downloaded the stream about the chrono from yt and looked at the times when the character had alacrity on it. 1 second of the video resulted in 1.3s of the cooldowns being reduced.

So what does chill do, perhaps it’s worth checking how that works given we can check that at any point in game.

If chill makes a 3s cool down ability take 5s to recharge then we know alacrity should be making a 5 second cool down ability take 3s to recharge.

apharma.3741:

So what does chill do, perhaps it’s worth checking how that works given we can check that at any point in game.

If chill makes a 3s cool down ability take 5s to recharge then we know alacrity should be making a 5 second cool down ability take 3s to recharge.

Assuming you’re chilled forever, 5s cooldown will take 15s to complete.
Assuming you’re Alacrity[ied?] forever, 5s cooldown will take 3s to complete.

Instead of thinking about it as a %, think about it like this:
Every second in Alacrity reduces your CD by 1.66s.
Every second in Chill reduces your CD by 0.33s.
Every second in neither reduces your CD by 1s.

They negate each other but are not actually inverse (because, you know, having 3x shorter CD’s would be kind of ridiculous).