Guild Wars 2

There is something in the game that often prevents skills from firing off immediately. This is especially noticeable with skills like the Mesmer’s Sword ability Blurred Frenzy or the Thief’s Sword/Dagger Dual skill Flanking Strike that are often used in situations where minimal delay is key. These skills will usually cancel autoattacks, but quite often they will cancel them very late so that an activation delay of almost a full second can occur.
Potential lag spikes is something that comes to mind, but IMO it has nothing, or very little, to do with lag. My bet is that there is a queuing problem where somehow an animation that has started will not be cancelled until a certain time has passed and if you happen to activate a skill while an animation is already going on, this newly activated skill will not always take priority right away.

PS: why I’m rather against lag being the source of these delays: Yesterday night when no one was around anymore to do Plinx in Cursed Shore, I figured it would be good training to try and solo the Champion Ettin with my Thief using Sword/Dagger. After 10 minutes into the fight I could still not get a reliable timing for my Flanking Strike, because it kept activating at different intervals after I pressed my hotkey. Sometimes the skill would fire off right away (minus the 1/2sec cast time), sometimes it would take almost a full second until the skill started. The zone was obviously pretty empty at this time, since it was after midnight, so that’s why I count out lag for this problem.

PPS: a related issue I posted about in the Thief forums: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/The-dodge-freeze

I’m a bit concerned that this doesn’t seem to resonate with more people, but maybe it’s because of the hype about the new patch. In any case, I hope that reliability and responsiveness of skills is always a priority in Anet’s game development and these problems will eventually be ironed out. Cheers.

I’m sorry you didn’t get any answers sooner.

I guess when this happens, most of the people just think that there is an issue with their connection, or that it’s just temporary.
But I just want to confirm what you said : I often have a delay when I activate some of my skills, and sometimes they would never launch unless I button mash. Very often, I try to use a skill, and if I’m not careful and I use another one too soon, the previous one didn’t even had time to launch.

I guess this lag is coming from their server, because I can have some of this latency in an area, and then if I go to someplace else, the delay is less perceptible, or worse.

I have reported this several times myself as a bug since it only occurs on the sword/dagger on my thied and is consistent. dag/dag dual doesn’t have the same issue. Also the sword/dag dual most often places yo uconsiderably outside of melee range of target instead of directly behind as it did in the first couple weeks.
I report this at least once a week and keep hoping it gets fixed.