Guild Wars 2

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.

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:

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.

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.).

Title says it all. Anyone having the same problem?