Casting Time, Instant Feats, Eldritch Blast

Casting Time, Instant Feats, Eldritch Blast

nicethugbert 1214795534|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Eldritch Blast is one of the many things in the game that make it feel sluggish because it's front loaded with a delay. It kills the fun of action when you go to act but have to first stop everything and wait while getting pummeled and watch all the melee classes shred everything. I see nothing in Complete Arcane that says Warlocks have to just stand around waiting to cast an eldritch blast. EB should be on a cool down timer so you can do other things rather than root on the spot waiting to save your hide. So, I want to know if this can at least be relieved.

I toyed around with casting times back when the game first came out. Setting them to 0 did help if not get rid of the delays completely, IIRC. Would it be possible to take some of the delay out of Eldritch Blast by setting the casting time to zero? Maybe quicken it then give it cool down timer to shift the delay to where it should be?

Re: Casting Time, Instant Feats, Eldritch Blast

Kaedrin 1214803026|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Nope. The engine imposes about a 3 second delay regardless of animations and even then you cant do two in a single round due to the spin up time inside the engine of actions. There's absolutely nothing that can be done about it until we have the ability to make feats *actually* instant.

Eldritch blast is supposed to be a standard action. That means you can move your full movement rate and still do it every round. Unfortuntely the NWN1/2 engines were NOT built to handle 2 move actions or 1 move/1action or 1 full round action. Everything is either instant or full round. The only exception to this is quicken spells and even then NWN2 broke that functionality. Now you can quicken a spell and waste half a round. The only way to actually get two in a round is through quickening both spells.

last edited on 1214803780|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Kaedrin + show more

Re: Casting Time, Instant Feats, Eldritch Blast

nicethugbert 1214835820|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

More than one spell more round is not my primary issue here. Although, it is related and there is a D&D monster, Nagahydra, which can cast one spell per head per round and has sorceror and/or cleric caster levels.

My primary issue is that it would make more sense to put Eldritch Blast on a timer than to use the casting time mechanism. It would be more enjoyable as the current situation has Warlocks play the role of sitting duck, which I do not enjoy and is not D&D. In D&D warlocks can skirmish(not the Skirmish feat). They can shoot an EB then reposition themselves. In NWN2, when they shoot an EB, they have to sit and give the enemy time to close ranks before they can reposition themselves, something they don't have to do in D&D. Timers do exist in NWN2 so there is no reason for The Devs to fail to use it for EB, that I know of.

Is this solvable by the community? Does pre-empting EB in the spell hook get rid of the 3 second delay? Can EB be replaced with a custom feat EB on a cool down timer?

last edited on 1214836511|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by nicethugbert + show more

Re: Casting Time, Instant Feats, Eldritch Blast

Yume-kun 1214838362|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

The main problem appears to be that NWN2, although being a real-time playing game, still tries to impose "turns" on the player, albeit in a rather stilted and obtrusive way - I can understand why, rewriting every spell to have a cast time in real-time rather than "turns" would be a nightmare, unfortunately this means you have only a few options:

- an 'instant' activation (as the stuff on the mode bar/some abilities)
- going through the casting motions of a 'turn' action.

So I'm guessing this is just their solution to avoid having to work timers etc. - it's a pretty horrible kludge, but that might be said for amny more solutions in NWN2 in general, unfortunately.

Re: Casting Time, Instant Feats, Eldritch Blast

Kaedrin 1214850882|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

No.

last edited on 1214851467|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Kaedrin + show more