Make Interrupt Enhancements speed up power execution as well

[temnix]

Interrupt Enhancements are useful only in the few powers that can be interrupted. Make them also, or instead, in the case of all other powers, speed up the execution of the power - its animation and delivery of effects. Testing will show by how much, and it will all need to be tested for balance and so on, but getting powers out quicker would be very welcome. I got that desire while waiting for my character to lean back, slowly blow and release Breath of Fire. This would also put a little play in considerations of recharging, because powers wouldn't recharge any faster on account of going off faster, and characters might find themselves with no ready buttons in a fight. Having to devote some slots then to recharge that would otherwise be dedicated to other bonuses should by itself balance out the impact.

[Rudra]

Fire Breath doesn't take interrupt reduction enhancements though. Those only show up in snipe enhancement sets.

[ThatGuyCDude]

This seems an intuitive adjustment (and I thought it might be the case for Assassin Strike, it certainly sounds like it should be).  I can see Rest being a problem as it can take those kinds of enhancements and if the animation and effect is sped up you'll be able to use it in active combat.  Could just be made to ignore that portion of the effect, though, like powers that ignore endurance reduction.

[Rudra]

28 minutes ago, ThatGuyCDude said:

This seems an intuitive adjustment (and I thought it might be the case for Assassin Strike, it certainly sounds like it should be).  I can see Rest being a problem as it can take those kinds of enhancements and if the animation and effect is sped up you'll be able to use it in active combat.  Could just be made to ignore that portion of the effect, though, like powers that ignore endurance reduction.

Except it isn't an intuitive adjustment. Having an enhancement speed up the execution of a power requires it speed up the animation of the power. Which as far as I know, would require an alternate speed animation for every power that can slot interrupt reductions. And since you can slot multiple interrupt reductions in any given power that can slot those enhancements, you would then need multiple versions of those powers animated to run at each of the possible speeds you could achieve with enhancements. I may be wrong, but what little experience I have trying to do any animations required me to sit down and rework the animation for the different speeds I wanted it to go at. (And I sucked at it, so I gave up. I am most definitely not an animator.)

[Luminara]

Interrupt enhancements only work in specific animations because the interruptible part of those animations is a short loop.  They reduce the duration that the character has to play that loop.  Animations themselves can't be sped up or slowed down unless a developer manually edits the animation.

 

This engine can't do that, in other words.

[Rudra]

25 minutes ago, Luminara said:

Interrupt enhancements only work in specific animations because the interruptible part of those animations is a short loop.  They reduce the duration that the character has to play that loop.  Animations themselves can't be sped up or slowed down unless a developer manually edits the animation.

 

This engine can't do that, in other words.

Interrupt reduction enhancements don't do that though. The wind up animation on a long form snipe is not reduced at all by having interrupt reduction enhancements slotted. What is reduced is the window in which the animation/attack can be interrupted by an enemy. (Edit: So a long form snipe with a 3 second cast and 10 second interrupt window has a 13 second animation between the actual cast time and the added wind up time. I'm just using made up numbers here. Now if you slot enough interrupt reduction enhancements to reduce the interrupt by 50%, that long form snipe still has its 3 second cast time and 10 second wind up prior, but only the first 5 seconds of that wind up are now susceptible to being interrupted by an enemy.)

Edited February 29 by Rudra

[ThatGuyCDude]

41 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Except it isn't an intuitive adjustment. Having an enhancement speed up the execution of a power requires it speed up the animation of the power. Which as far as I know, would require an alternate speed animation for every power that can slot interrupt reductions. And since you can slot multiple interrupt reductions in any given power that can slot those enhancements, you would then need multiple versions of those powers animated to run at each of the possible speeds you could achieve with enhancements. I may be wrong, but what little experience I have trying to do any animations required me to sit down and rework the animation for the different speeds I wanted it to go at. (And I sucked at it, so I gave up. I am most definitely not an animator.)

I meant intuitive as in intuitive to the function implied to the player by the enhancement text.  It says it reduces the interrupt window, so my assumption was that it accelerated the animation to start the power by cutting frames, thereby shortening the 'fire' time.  From a technical standpoint, animations with more frames dropped would appear choppier, and if allowed too extensively might get dropped entirely (resulting in situations where the character stands still with the target immediately reacting to the action, which wouldn't look good and likely would be interpreted as a bug.

I was unaware of the engine limitation described by Luminara, though it makes sense considering the age of the game.  That would mean, as you suggested, that rather than subjecting the animation to a slider it would need to be broken up into separate files based on speed, a process that is time-consuming, resource expensive, and discontinuous (running against the grain of the percentage-based enhancement system, as only six such 'phases' of animation would even be possible).  So it would appear it's a 'too much effort for the payout' situation.

[biostem]

A power must be built to accommodate having its animation time truncated.  The OP's suggestion would require retooling all existing powers, which is very unlikely to happen...

[Luminara]

44 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Interrupt reduction enhancements don't do that though. The wind up animation on a long form snipe is not reduced at all by having interrupt reduction enhancements slotted. What is reduced is the window in which the animation/attack can be interrupted by an enemy. (Edit: So a long form snipe with a 3 second cast and 10 second interrupt window has a 13 second animation between the actual cast time and the added wind up time. I'm just using made up numbers here. Now if you slot enough interrupt reduction enhancements to reduce the interrupt by 50%, that long form snipe still has its 3 second cast time and 10 second wind up prior, but only the first 5 seconds of that wind up are now susceptible to being interrupted by an enemy.)

 

Okay, I was wrong and there's actually no way short of manually editing the animations.  👍

[megaericzero]

What Rudra said; to the best of my knowledge, interrupt enhancements don't actually alter the cast time - just the portion of the cast time that you would fail the power if damaged. It lowers the threshold beyond which someone can take a baseball bat to your character's head and you'll ignore it and still attack but you still take the full cast time to perform the attack, so it's only really useful for powers that even have an interrupt time - snipes, rest, the medicine pool, etc.

 

Beyond engine limitations, I'd be more concerned with game balance. Allowing powers to animate faster would really increase DPS.

Edited February 29 by megaericzero
added examples