cast times on Terror line of spells

[Glamrin]

Current cast times for these spells are:
lvl 34 - Terror of Darkness - 1 second (hate 200)
lvl 44 - Terror of Shadows - 1 second (hate 400)
lvl 53 - Terror of Death - 1.5 seconds (hate 450)
lvl 59 - Terror of Marlow - 1.5 seconds (hate 510)
lvl 63 - Terror of Kaezul - 1.5 seconds (hate 675)
(aa - leech of shadows - 1.5 seconds, lasts 6 ticks (hate 350))

Is there a good reason for the different cast-times of these spells?
Now ofcourse sk's alternate between casting two (or three) of these spells (since theres a 6sec refresh), but if that isnt considered might it not actually be advantageous for a lvl 53 sk to keep using his lvl 44 spell over his lvl 53 one?
As a lvl 65, I find there are still times when I load up the lvl 44 spell for the faster casttime, in some situations that 0.5 second can be crucial. Also when exp'ing and tanking multiple mobs, using single target agro spells to get agro on all of them, those 0.5 seconds sum up to a lot!

If there is no good reason for the difference in casttime, could these spells be aligned either (prefferably) at 1 second or at 1.5 seconds? It would make more sense in progression.
Also if making them 1 second casttime would be considered to give the SK a too high possible agro generation (I wouldnt think it would) could the casttime of the aa be lowered since that would not seriously affect total agro generation (with a 6 tick recast on same mob), but would help sk grab agro on single targets faster (SK is supposed to be master of single target agro) and would help immensely when tanking multiples?

 

[Manguadi]

There's another side-effect here at play I discovered when arguing with some shadowknights. I have found it is possible to use 3 terrors simultaneously before the first terror refreshes. This is how the spells are supposed to work, as you noticed, from the 6 second refresh time.

However, on internet with some lag spell gem refresh is sluggish and you can only chain cast 2 terrors in a row. This means, interestingly enough, that a better internet can generate significantly more hate for a shadowknight.

That lag affects your gem refresh time isn't new, but I feel this particular effect is rather severe and I hope there can be some way to mitigate this extreme difference in hate generation between different computers.

So, in essence, I support changing all the cast times if it will enable more shadowknights to generate equivalent aggro.

 

[Glamrin]

There's another side-effect here at play I discovered when arguing with some shadowknights. I have found it is possible to use 3 terrors simultaneously before the first terror refreshes. This is how the spells are supposed to work, as you noticed, from the 6 second refresh time.

However, on internet with some lag spell gem refresh is sluggish and you can only chain cast 2 terrors in a row. This means, interestingly enough, that a better internet can generate significantly more hate for a shadowknight.

That lag affects your gem refresh time isn't new, but I feel this particular effect is rather severe and I hope there can be some way to mitigate this extreme difference in hate generation between different computers.

So, in essence, I support changing all the cast times if it will enable more shadowknights to generate equivalent aggro.

unfortunately very true. think solving that would mean fiddling with the recast more than the cast time though. Think only solutiion for that would be to remove recast and switch to it taking up a buffslot for a while on a mob (ie not stacking) modifying agro generation accordingly. This would free up two spellslots so would be nice that way I suppose.

 

[Manguadi]

That would probably be the most fair from a lag perspective but it would change quite a bit about how a shadowknight is played and significantly increase their power in some substantial ways.

I don't mean to make this a paladin versus sk argument, but I think comparing them will show some of the changes using one terror would cause. Paladin single target aggro is almost totally unaffected by lag because of the ability cast divine stun while spell gems are down, as well as only have one important single target aggro spell. In order for paladin aggro to be competitive, the actual aggro generate on these spells is significantly higher than the highest SK terror. Due to the low recast on blind this meant that a paladin could generate more AE aggro than a shadowknight without ever using an AE spell in the first place. Shadowknights are clearly better single target aggro (probably even with only being able to use two terrors), but when they have to split up low aggro spells on several targets they just fall behind.

Having no recast on a terror that had a recourse would obviously imply a substantial increase to the hate generated by that terror, but it would also enable SKs to far far far more easily tank several mobs at once. It would also prevent a shadowknight from going into "aggro mode" where they constantly spam terrors and ignore all other spells, since, like a paladin, they would have downtime while still generating maximum single target hate. I think overall your suggestion would be a good change, but it runs into a lot of the same problems I had when I suggested nearly the exact same thing in another thread: recourses are dispellable, require you to read wearing off messages, and impact a lot of the flow of playing a shadowknight. While I never thought these were real problems apparently lots of people do.

 

[Glamrin]

yah. This was just an offspin commenting on your thoughts though, which is really separate from the casttimes.

 

[Dzillon]

So connection might matter, which would explain why Gladis was talking about refresh times that I wasn't noticing... I hope it's somehow fixable.

 

[Vartenaal]

So connection might matter, which would explain why Gladis was talking about refresh times that I wasn't noticing... I hope it's somehow fixable.

you fail dzi. lag was the first possible reason for failure that night that i listed. and it later turned out that it in fact WAS lag.

damn french

 

[Dzillon]

I thought sweden had uber Inet access and all
I guess Scandinavia sucks, being that close to Russia

BUUUURN

 

[Glamrin]

we have uber internet access. unfortunately sod doesnt... different hookups.

 

[Otcho]

There's another side-effect here at play I discovered when arguing with some shadowknights. I have found it is possible to use 3 terrors simultaneously before the first terror refreshes. This is how the spells are supposed to work, as you noticed, from the 6 second refresh time.

However, on internet with some lag spell gem refresh is sluggish and you can only chain cast 2 terrors in a row. This means, interestingly enough, that a better internet can generate significantly more hate for a shadowknight.

That lag affects your gem refresh time isn't new, but I feel this particular effect is rather severe and I hope there can be some way to mitigate this extreme difference in hate generation between different computers.

So, in essence, I support changing all the cast times if it will enable more shadowknights to generate equivalent aggro.

I love any change that promotes this and I think this is a serious class issue especially being one of the shadowknights who can only use two =(

 

[Cinn]

There's another side-effect here at play I discovered when arguing with some shadowknights. I have found it is possible to use 3 terrors simultaneously before the first terror refreshes. This is how the spells are supposed to work, as you noticed, from the 6 second refresh time.

However, on internet with some lag spell gem refresh is sluggish and you can only chain cast 2 terrors in a row. This means, interestingly enough, that a better internet can generate significantly more hate for a shadowknight.

That lag affects your gem refresh time isn't new, but I feel this particular effect is rather severe and I hope there can be some way to mitigate this extreme difference in hate generation between different computers.

So, in essence, I support changing all the cast times if it will enable more shadowknights to generate equivalent aggro.

I agree completely that internet connection / zone lag should not play a role in class balance. This is a major issue currently and any change to remedy this would be welcomed with hateful arms.

 

[Otcho]

There's another side-effect here at play I discovered when arguing with some shadowknights. I have found it is possible to use 3 terrors simultaneously before the first terror refreshes. This is how the spells are supposed to work, as you noticed, from the 6 second refresh time.

However, on internet with some lag spell gem refresh is sluggish and you can only chain cast 2 terrors in a row. This means, interestingly enough, that a better internet can generate significantly more hate for a shadowknight.

That lag affects your gem refresh time isn't new, but I feel this particular effect is rather severe and I hope there can be some way to mitigate this extreme difference in hate generation between different computers.

So, in essence, I support changing all the cast times if it will enable more shadowknights to generate equivalent aggro.

I would really love to see a staff response to this, having lag affect your ability to perform your class properly is horrible, sometimes im fine other times its flat out two terror hell rides in emberflow and the difference is extremely crippling with more then two mobs. Were lag issues not one of the reasons for the bard spell changes besides carpel tunnel?