I had a chance to play a bit with the GCD change and overall it just feels bad. Ranged classes standing still stuck in cast times may not notice as much of a difference, but for melee classes moving around using skills every CD it just feels clunky and slow.
The "real" GCD of 1.15 s not matching the displayed GCD of 1.5 s was weird but it worked. After playing for a bit trying to spam buttons I would say most players figured out that the GCD was something shorter than displayed by the skill bar and learned to play with it. Myself I didn't know it was exactly 1.15 s and thought it was 1.25-1.3 s, but I had figured out that hitting skills at about the 10 o'clock mark was about the real GCD. You also figured out pretty quickly about the fact that you could wait a little bit between using skills to sacrifice damage but get some AP regen as mentioned on page 1 by Grock.
As I'm not the best player but even I figured this out, we can assume that most players innately knew and played around this. A pretty reasonable assumption is that most people have probably been playing at around a 1.3 s GCD to leave a bit of margin for error. Thus this is in effect a balance change and a more accurate patch note would be simply:
" - Increased global cooldown from 1.3 s to 1.5 s
- Maintained AP regen interval at 1.5 s, changes to make it more consistent "
Stating it this way it becomes more obvious what the effects of this are. Firstly it makes it clear combat is going to feel slower and overall increase TTK. It removes the ability to make a decision between more damage vs more AP sustain as mentioned by Grock. The effect on damage isn't going to be uniform however, classes that rely mainly on dots/cast times in excess of GCDs won't have their damage impacted as much as DD classes using skills every "true" GCD to secure a kill. Killing guarded/heavily focus healed targets is already too difficult I think most people would agree, so removing the option to trade AP regen for more damage burst is going to make that even worse. Classes that have a lot of skills/buffs to manage are going to suffer, especially IB which even with the old GCD did not have enough time to maintain all buffs has been as described in another forum post. SM/BO are going to feel more static as they are not able to change up their skill intervals to speed through parts of their chain/slow down in others. This is just off the top of my head but I'm sure this list goes on.
Overall I agree with making the UI more transparent and reflect the true nature of the mechanics. But doing is this way is ultimately a balance change to a low level mechanic that affects all classes differently and I don't think anybody was asking for. That along with the fact that it removes options and makes the combat feel clunky makes me say that this isn't an improvement for anybody.
The proposal elsewhere in the thread of setting the GCD to 1.3 s (or whatever most people were achieving that felt good/smooth), updating the visual indicator to match and keeping the AP regen interval at 1.5 s I think would be a more reasonable approach. This would improve consistency while maintaining overall balance and feel as I don't think many people thought that was broken to begin with.
Also, I'm not sure if this was at all related to the crying about getting timestamped by BWs/Sorcs but if it is this change won't have an appreciable effect on that since that's primarily due to combining projectiles with instacast spells.
dalen wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 9:29 pm
... The reason for having a 1.5s GCD is that literally all tooltips and damage values on abilities are made for that. And the visual indicator is also 1.5s. ...
On a semi-related note, I've been noticing a bit of a pattern with some of the recent changes in that when there've been mismatches between the actual effects/damage of skills and their tooltip/displayed effect the solution has generally been to update the skill to reflect the tooltip, rather than the other way around. Examples I can think of off the top of my head include the engi/magus turret damage nerf to match the tooltip and shaman/AM puddle radius nerf to match the graphics.
These changes seem to have been cast in the light of "correcting a typo" and framed that the tooltip is gospel in a sense but I think that this is the wrong way to view it for skill effects that have been around for years. The true damage/effects that have been around for a while are innately integrated into the balance. They've already been affecting damage/kill numbers in SCs, TTK in RvR etc. Even if the tooltips show the wrong information players at a certain level inherently know what the true effects are and have learned to adjust their builds/play around it. Sort of an efficient market hypothesis thing. If the resulting balance as a whole is good and has been for a while the number on the tooltip is in effect meaningless and the true outcome from the code should be viewed as the "baseline" value.
My point overall is that changes to true skill values to reflect tooltips for things that have been around for a long time should be framed as balance changes/nerfs, rather than minor corrections of no consequence. For new effects that were recently introduced, say like a new tactic or skill, changing true values to match the tooltip is obviously the right view as this makes the true values reflect the new intended behaviour. This isn't a criticism on specific changes, mainly just a comment on that I think these changes to resolve mismatches are being framed/presented the wrong way and is why the community may react a certain way to them or perceive them differently than intended.
