Pyth wrote:
I think the issue is somewhat addressed with cast times, as MOST important skills have had long cast times, though the trend in the last few years has been to reduce cast times a lot, making it much harder.
I agree with Pyth here, however I'm not sure ArenaNet have optimised their cast times to allow for competitive play across all regions. For example, 3/4 second cast time skills could easily be interrupted by the majority of decent American/Euro players while playing on their own servers, however when playing on a different server (or for Australians, playing on any server), this cast time becomes much harder to interrupt simply due to latency. Therefore, why not increase the cast time so it is possible to interrupt it on all server regardless of where you are, or reduce the cast time making it basically impossible to interrupt once the cast has already started?
I think what they need to do, especially if they are wanting to encourage competitive play between regions in GW2, is to reduce the impact that ping has on interrupts by essentially differentiating skills (or perhaps only spells given the mechanics of GW1) into two classes - interruptable (cast time of 1 second or more) and almost non-interruptable (cast time of 1/4 second or less). I say almost non-interruptable because these skills have such a short cast time that aiming to interrupt them once casting has started is virtually impossible, however these skills can still be interrupted through skillful (quarter-knocking/interrupting) or lucky (preemptive) play. The way that I view interrupts is that skillful play comes from interrupting the correct skills at the correct times rather than having the quickest reaction time (which when translated ingame is severly ping dependent). While what I proposed above may not be flawless, it addresses the effect that latency has on interrupts (as even Australians can interrupt 1 second cast times most of the time) whilst still promoting what I believe is skillful play using interrupts.
Interrupts add a whole new dynamic to competitive play which contributed to the uniqueness of GW1, and like Pyth, I would be disappointed to see them go in GW2.
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