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Power activation delay
tfomega
Member Posts: 812 Arc User
Back when the game only had 3 rows for the power tray because there wasn't enough powers to fill them.. most powers had a .5 or 1 second activation delay.
With so many powers/abilities in the game now (can easily fill up 6 power rows in power tray on a standard build) , has cryptic ever gone back to revisit the activation delays on these powers/abilities.
I see that attack pattern omega still has a .5 second activation from this webpage
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Ability:_Attack_Pattern_Omega
The reason I am asking is that there is a large lag when activating powers from keybinds. It takes forever to buff up because of the activation delays and the number of powers that exist today. Any other people have similar issues?
Cryptic, should you decrease all activation delays by half at this point?
With so many powers/abilities in the game now (can easily fill up 6 power rows in power tray on a standard build) , has cryptic ever gone back to revisit the activation delays on these powers/abilities.
I see that attack pattern omega still has a .5 second activation from this webpage
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Ability:_Attack_Pattern_Omega
The reason I am asking is that there is a large lag when activating powers from keybinds. It takes forever to buff up because of the activation delays and the number of powers that exist today. Any other people have similar issues?
Cryptic, should you decrease all activation delays by half at this point?
I AM NOT A FAN OF PWE!!!!
MEMBER SINCE JANUARY 2010
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It usually becomes noticable (for me at least) after clicking two or three powers without at least a (half a) second between them.
Now consider the information in the original post
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Ability:_Attack_Pattern_Omega
if you actually take the time to read that article, you will see that it says:
Activation: 0.5 seconds for Attack Pattern Omega
Attack Pattern Alpha is .5 seconds
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Attack_Pattern_Alpha
Tactical Team is 1.0 seconds
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Tactical_team
Tactical Initiative takes Activation: 0.5 secs
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Ability:_Tactical_Initiative_(Space)
Torpedo High Yield takes .6 seconds
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Ability:_Torpedo:_High_Yield
I am not going to list out all of the abilities that a tactical captain usually activates when he is about to attack, but those 5 abilities (standard in 2010) take 3.1 seconds to completely activate in order to buff yourself when you are about to attack.
Now, move forward 7 years to 2017. We have focused assault, dynamic power redistributor, probability manipulation, rep powers like intelligence team, kemocite.. and the list goes on. All of those powers are needed to buff yourself for the initial attack if you want to do maximum damage within the least amount of time.
While Cryptic has not necessarily listed activation times in all the new abilities.. you can be rest assured that they are at least .5 or 1 seconds for each of them to activate..
So the countdown timer on the first ability already has what.. 6 seconds gone with the abilities I have listed (more if you use others)? Some powers only last for 10 seconds. When you consider that you are not going to begin firing until you are fully buffed, you have lost a considerable percentage of your first ability buff due to activating a much larger list of initial buffs.
So I am asking if it makes sense for Cryptic to revisit those abilities and decrease their activation time by half?
I AM NOT A FAN OF PWE!!!!
MEMBER SINCE JANUARY 2010
So Cryptic plz...
Well since you don't care about it we should all just drop it right now. Nothing to see here...close the thread.
Well, with all do respect.. this is where you're going wrong.
There is absolutely no need to pop every possible buff right before your initial 'alpha' strike. At some point, yes.. you will simply have so many abilities that by the time you're done triggering the entire chain, your first ability wears off before you even decloak.
Instead of revisiting the timers, the most efficient method is for you to revisit this tactic. There is nothing wrong with dividing your abilities into your alpha and beta strike and if you do this, I think you'll find you're far more effective overall. Generally, you can use an attack pattern, an Emergency Power, a haste ability if available, and a FAW/Scatter Volley for your opening barrage. Save the others and trigger them as alpha abilities start to expire. You want to leave enough abilities left that you can trigger these after a delay and use them to fill the uptime when your alpha abilities expire.
Simply put, there is just no need to prime every ability on your tray before your opening strike. This just leaves you with a large opening burst where some abilities expire before you even attack and then you're sitting there with everything on cool down. The better way is to go through your abilities and prioritize what you want to use for your opening strike and what you want to save for anything that's tough enough to survive the opening attack.
If we're talking power abilities, the bigger issue in my opinion is that you can still occasionally click on an ability and have the game just ignore you all together and do absolutely nothing. It's not as bad as it once was but still happens to me enough to be frustrating. I often have to click an attack pattern or captain ability 2-3 times before it acknowledges it..that gets old fast.
It's not just min/maxers who care about such a thing. To even use some of the basic functionalities of most abilities, it makes sense to combine them and activate them at the same time. It's called synergy and that's not necessarily the same thing as min/maxing.
What is, for example, the use of Endothermic Induction Beam's resistance lowering effect if you don't fire your weapons and other damaging abilities at the same time? What purpose does Emergency power to Auxiliary have if you don't activate most of your exotic abilities to use that exotic damage boost it gives?
What's the point of activating Distributed Targeting if you don't also activate other abilities that boost the damage (such as Overload subsystem safeties and Surgical strikes and Emergency power to Weapons to counter some of the downsides of Surgical strikes) you are dealing to the target that you applied Distributed Targeting to?
While @seaofsorrows has a point in that it doesn't always make sense to activate everything at once even if it's just to ensure you always have some buffs active, in many cases the entire purpose of abilities is to use them in combination with others.
Hit miracle worker, ability goes on cooldown and zero heals from it. Similar thing happens with fleet support except with that the delay seems to be between using the button and the ship deciding to warp in, possibly why they made the command trait remove the sub 50% health req.
Lotro has had a skill queue for years and it works really well there. STO would certainly benefit from such a system although my fear would be that it would never work properly on release causing folk to walk away and it being put on the pile labled we'll maybe fix it someday if we can be bothered.
You seem like the kind of person who activates one ability at a time, never allowing them to overlap. Take whatever powers are in your BOff tray, and try to activate them all at once, just with your mouse. It's extremely easy to skip over abilities because of the activation timers, and I can assure you, it is very possible.
Except it is possible. I manually activate everything I use (mainly because I wouldn't even know how to do the macro thing) and it is very much possible that abilities don't activate because you click some too fast.
Same with the 'ability goes on cooldown without anything happening' issue. I just had that a couple of hours ago when I was last active: activate a torpedo spread which had already been off cooldown for a few seconds, only to see it go on a cooldown of 15 seconds without anything else happening.
No idea if the two issues are related, but both definitely exist and I very much doubt it has anything to do with connection issues as I don't experience any of those - no lag, no rubberbanding, nothing. Just a lack of response with regard to some clicks if you activate 3 or 4 abilities in a short time.
"I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
Clicking six rows of abilities when you have to use that tiny little arrow to cycle to each row is madness. Better to assign each ability that is straightforward its own key and put them all on auto along with your weapons.You can get real advanced with it if you want and make your own attack patterns that couple certain abilities in one pass and other sets of abilities during your next.
I don’t recommend assigning more than one row at a time to a single key, because the lag increases (at least for me). And the main problem with this is setup is that your clickies will not always be responsive while the macros are running. You got to learn to finesse it and hit the sweet spot by watching how your ship acts after 2 seconds, 5 seconds, 15 seconds of combat.
People talk about timing all these abilities, but that would be six rows of timing for me. 30% of The abilities would never get used, rendering them useless. I would spend the first 20 seconds of combat just clicking stuff, not following my target, and trying to keep track of every little buff. With a few simple macros you can cut the number of abilities you need to worry about in half and only click stuff that has a significant impact on the target and your survivability.
That is exactly what I do. I use keybinds.
numpad1 is for all my abilities that debuff the target as well as buff self. The debuffs go first followed by the buffs. That is entirely row1
row2 consists of numpad2 and numpad3 and is split using maneuvering buffs for the comp eng.
numpad4 (row3) consists of all my healing or defense buffs
for my 4th power tray row, which is usually shift + number, I manually trigger those when needed as those are mostly tier5 rep abilities or specialization powers.
The posters above must be spending all their time in argala at a leisurely pace to be able to manually click on those abilities, and when playing that style of play, sure, makes perfect sense. They have no need to buff in a hurry because 1) none of the enemies are really that threatening and 2) the enemies are slow and not flying around the map with flight speed equal to full impulse due to comp engine procs and 3) have limited weapons or abilities and 4) are just stupid NPCs.
Makes perfect sense why those guys with leisurely playstyles don't notice any problems, although some has stated that when they click an ability, it does not activate. Same holds true with keybinds in that the ability does not activate when needed. This is a bug in the UI. More than that, however, is that the first assault is sometimes the most important of all of them. If you do enough damage, sometimes the enemy can never fully recover quickly enough to pose a responding threat.
Anyway, I still believe activation times should be decreased and Cryptic should also deal with UI problems with powers not activating. Surely they can reproduce that without a video upload from one of us. I even have abilities like aux2sif who are out of cooldown but stay greyed out. I usually have to left click on those powers several times to get them to their color back so that I can activate the power.. meanwhile, all other abilities are not greyed out. Aux2sif will target self when no target is selected and the fact that there is no cooldown timer but it is greyed out is a problem.
I AM NOT A FAN OF PWE!!!!
MEMBER SINCE JANUARY 2010
How about this one?
EPTX (ept-s, ept-w mostly) have longer Cooldown than it should be *see post #5*
Old, old bug — Season 8 — so old that BranFlakes was still around.
For the past week I also noticed a considerable increase of misfires where it does not really matter if the respective abilities are engaged via key bind macros or manually. Especially gravity wells and timeline stabilizers often need multiple times of activation attempts until they are executed.
Could be that we look at more players returning this time of the year and that regular space maps like CCA being played simply stress the server more than funneling the community through mirror AFK does.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Yes, that is what I was referring to. Sometimes, I have to click a power 2 or 3 times in order to get it to work. It seems most prevalent with Attack Patterns and consoles that use click activation.
Yep, same here. I don't use key binds most of the time, I prefer to click things as I need them, and I have the issue pretty consistently. It's definitely not a key bind issue and it's been present in STO for as long as I can remember.
I just learned to deal with it because I'm pretty sure it will never be fixed.
You're speaking from a point of ignorance and it's really showing. You are dead wrong. You even said you don't use keybinds.
I don't min-max. I use 6 abilities, 3 at a time. Attack Pattern Beta, Tac Team and Cannons-Rapid Fire then I repeat them after the others have run out. If I press the buttons too quickly then some of the abilities won't activate, though I have found having them in a slightly different order does improve it slightly.
If you don't use keybinds then you're a clicker, which is a lot slower and that is why you have probably never seen/noticed it.
If you're gonna talk about a subject with authority then at least know what you're talking about.
And even if you would min max it should not bring you into a position where the game flat out bugs out on you as result.
Cryptic hands out the powers, they should see to it that their infrastructure can handle them and times and again it shows that it cannot.
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