When Do Cooldowns Begin?

As far as we know, recharge begins when cast time expires. The only open question appears to be whether a power can actually be used the *instant* its calculated to recharge or if there is a tiny delay** between when a power is fully recharged and when the combat engine will allow it to be triggered (or when the client will allow it to be activated).

So to be very specific, in your example above there will be 13 seconds between the *start* of the first animation and the *start* of the second one.

Your actual question is a little more complex. Animations can last shorter or longer than the cast time, although they are normally approximately the same length. If you are measuring the animation duration itself somehow (say, by recording the sequence and playing the animation back frame by frame) the time will be about 10 seconds between the end of the first animation and the start of the second one, but probably slightly more than that. The reason isn't technically the aforementioned Arcanatime, but just because cast times are normally set to be slightly higher than animation durations. Arcanatime causes the rooted time to be slightly longer than the animation duration, which means there tends to be an impossible to eliminate pause between attacks that is due to the game's combat clock only ticking eight times per second, and the game engine trying to align visual activity to the 30/sec animation clock.

If you are theorycrafting attacks, the things you probably need to know the most is that Arcanatime dictates how long an attack "takes" and therefore how fast a sequence of attacks can execute; attacks generally start recharging when their cast time expires (NOT arcanatime); and if you construct an attack chain that has a power recharging the *instant* it needs to be used that will often be too close to actually use, real chains generally require about 0.125 to 0.2 seconds of leeway to make sure an attack recharges "just in time" to be used.



** Oddly, the "tiny delay" that shows up in measurements tends to show up with multi-attack chains and disappear in single attack tests, which is odd but may suggest a difference between activation and queuing powers

If I remember correctly, Hail of Bullets has a cast time of zero, so it begins recharging immediately upon activation. Its not an exception to the rule in that sense. However, it has a rooted animation like all attacks, so even though its cast time is zero you can't activate another attack until its animation completes, which is about 4 seconds long (I don't remember the value off the top of my head). It is an exception to the general rule that most attacks have cast times roughly equal to the duration of the rooted part of their animations.

("Rooted" for those not familiar has a technical meaning to the City of Heroes game engine: it means that while this animation is playing the game client will not allow the player to activate any other powers or use movement controls, and the game engine will not allow the game client to attempt to activate any other powers.)

Yeah yeah, quit showing off :P i was just trying to keep it simple (and in reference to animation time as the OP originally asked about)

Interesting avatar by the way.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Originally Posted by reiella Until I see something that states to the contrary, going to assume VK is right .

Oh good, I wasn't the only one staring at it for a minute or two going "wha- bu-- how?.... oh. OH!"

Random offtopic question - if posting Arcanaville's name multiple times in a thread summons Arcanaville, does Arcanaville's own forum name + title + avatar create an infinite loop of summoning?

I just thought my browser was stuttering. Then I went and highlighted it and saw what she did.

I would of figured it out right away but someone mentioned the villain skin to our alpha-fading math genius.

I've bolded that specific part.

I wanted to ask, how is it mechanically possible to skip the rooting time of some powers? I know strafing with certain directions can skip the rooting time, and I also reguarly skip weapon redraw by untargeting/Queueing an attack to retarget to skip animation.

If you've got a Weapon/Regen character, use MoG without a target, then click an attack twice to skip the long rooting time of MoG. The first time hitting it, you'll target an enemy, the next you'll queue the attack and draw your weapon during the MoG animation (instead of after).

You can't use any powers during it, but it allows movement (and drawing your weapon).

Technically, posting everything I know about this could be considered discussing an exploit, but I'll just say that the unrooting bugs in the game all seem to trace to one root cause. Animations are set to be interruptible or not interruptible. The rooted ones can't be interrupted by other attack animations, which is why we can't cast another power while we are playing a rooted animation. But *sometimes* we can do something that interrupts the rooted animation itself - basically causes something else to play instead of the normal animation of the attack. Since its the animation itself that roots us, somehow interfering with that animation can prevent it from playing, and as a result prevent you from being rooted.

So long as the power is also under its cast time, you won't be able to activate any other powers because there is a separate lockout for that. But you will be able to move, because cast time alone doesn't block movement controls. Only rooted animations do that.