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FAQ: Delayed actions and the global cooldown - or, why do my powers not respond?

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
edited March 2010 in The Academy
People seem endlessly confused why, during frantic combat, they sometimes press a button and "nothing" happens. It is very important to understand what is happening here; you cannot fight effectively without it.

There is a global cooldown across all powers. It's approximately 0.5 seconds. You cannot activate powers more often than this. The global cooldown is not displayed as a timer on the UI directly, unlike other cooldowns.

If you attempt to activate another power before the cooldown has expired, then it becomes a delayed action. When this happens, the power icon in your tray will be lit up, but won't do anything more just yet. When the global cooldown expires, the delayed action is activated. This is an attempt by the game designers to smooth out the gameplay experience and make the global cooldown less awkward - so far, so good.

Here's the important bit: you can only have one delayed action. If you attempt to activate another power, then your delayed action is cancelled and the new one becomes the delayed action.

An example:

At 0 seconds: you press space, to fire energy weapons. The 'fire energy weapons' power is activated.
At 0.3 seconds: you press 1, to activate 'high yield torpedo 1'. The 'high yield torpedo 1' power becomes the delayed action.
At 0.4 seconds: you click on a torpedo to fire it. The 'high yield torpedo 1' power is cancelled. The torpedo becomes the delayed action.
At 0.5 seconds: the global cooldown expires. The delayed action is activated. That's your torpedo. Your torpedo fires, without being buffed to its high-yield form.
At 1 second: the player says "huh what? why did my power not work?"

This is further compounded by the fact that network latency means a button in your power tray can indicate it is activating, then suddenly revert to its original state; there seems to be some client-side prediction going on here.

In order to keep this from happening, you must slow down. Do not activate another power while the global cooldown is still in effect, and you won't hit these problems. Get into a rhythm, activating powers at regular intervals - I aim for a little bit short of a second. Two particular forms of player behaviour are worth avoiding here:

- Mashing the spacebar every time an energy weapon comes off cooldown (or even more often). If you fire each of your four beam weapons individually, it takes 2 seconds to work through all the cooldowns. If you fire them all at once, they only trigger the global cooldown one time. This is even worse with turrets; if you fire 6 turrets individually, then by the time you've activated them all, the first one has finished firing. Mashing space here will prevent you from getting anything else done.
- Auto fire. Don't use it. It will mess up your timing.

Is this a bug? Not exactly. Everything that's happening here is intentional. It could use a rethink, because it doesn't work very well with the pace of combat, but that's not going to happen quickly. You'd better learn how to cope.



So, we've been talking about 'powers', but what is a power here? It is anything you can put in your power tray. Open the powers window for a complete list (press 'P' or the little button on the right-hand edge of your power tray). All of the following things are powers:

- BO skills
- Class-specific skills (rotate shield frequency, subnucleonic beam, etc)
- Shield power transfers
- Weapons

The following things are not powers:

- Movement / heading / throttle
- Ship power levels
- Chat

You can change these things at any time without causing problems.

If you use macros which trigger two powers at once, note that you are activating one and making the other into a delayed action. You must wait until the second power has activated before you trigger any further powers, or it will be cancelled.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Miiru wrote:
    People seem endlessly confused why, during frantic combat, they sometimes press a button and "nothing" happens. It is very important to understand what is happening here; you cannot fight effectively without it.

    Good post; I knew there was some kind of queuing system and a cooldown, but I hadn't figured it quite out yet.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Yeah, great post. The presence of a global cooldown or queued actions is far from obvious on the UI, so hopefully this will help a lot of players who never realized there was a cooldown rethink their timing when using weapons and tray abilities.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Very helpful post. Now I won't jackhammer each button in sequence wondering why my abilities won't go off. This definitely needs to be displayed better on the buttons.
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