Can you interrupt stances?

Can you interrupt a stance, meaning during its "cast time", for want of a better word. I.e. with a Dshot, leech sig or similar.

This does not include being blacked out, leech sigged, powerblocked, wild blowed or similar.

If you have a yes or a no answer to this question, please attempt to provide some proof to back up your claim.

Guild wiki states:

"Stances give special bonuses to their users for a period of time. Stances don't have activation times or targets. As a result, stances cannot be interrupted"

Anyone got any additional info?

Note: "I saw it happen" doesn't count unless you got a screenshot

Cheers

Umm, Guildwiki already states Stances can't be interrupted. Stances don't have a cast time, hence making them uninterruptable.

you cant interrupt them, simply because they activate instantly. There is 0 cast time, so its impossible.

Didn't you already answer your own question?

Guildwiki isn't the most accurate resource in the world, there are lots of mistakes on there and so I'm looking for something a little more solid.

To clarify, I've always believed stances to be uninterruptable, however recently a number of people have approached me saying they've experienced otherwise. It's just something that's been irritating me as I don't have any "proof" at hand right now.

Stances, shouts, and other skills without a cast time aren't interruptible. You can even use them while moving or knocked down. They're always displayed as the bottom skill in the skill activation monitors and don't go through the bar animations that normal skills have.

As far as proof goes, how exactly do you show an instantaneous cast?

The first part of your post is exactly what I've been saying in a particular thread on Gwonline, where even moderators are arguing that stances CAN be interrupted.

As for proof, you can't show it in game - that's the problem I'm having right now - so I'm wondering if there's any official material on guildwars.com or anywhere else that describes stances as immune to interrupts.

Did the Moderators who argued Stances can be interrupted provide any proof? No, don't think so.

Stances have no cast time, making them uninterruptable. It's like dividing by zero. Not possible.

Tell them to give you a screenshot of a stance activating and being interrupted - if it happened, you'd see a skill activation bar of, say, Gladiator's Defense with the bar being partially filled and purple.

The claim is, that stances/shouts have a 0.25 activation time in which they can be interrupted. I think this myth came about because guildwiki used to list the cast time of shouts as 0.25 (They don't any longer).

The lack of good information that spouts out of various other forums is one of the reasons I think the average skill level in guildwars is so low right now.

It gets on my nerves to see people spreading misinformation without proof, especially moderators. But sadly I can't just claim they're wrong without giving a reason.

That's exactly what I asked for, the response I got, from a MODERATOR, was:

"Seeing as some people will *not* be convinced until it happens to them (incedentally did you know you can get a headshot grenade kill in CS? Bet you'd deny that too *rolls eyes* ) there really is no point to arguing this sub-debate.
"

Apparently everything is true until proven false, I could go claim that every 1/1000000 use of the skill "Charge!" causes instant death to your entire party, and by the logic going on there it'd be just as valid a claim.

thats your first mistake right there: GWOnline is filled with misinformation on its boards.

secondly, the wiki is usually right about these kinds of things. shouts, stance, and skills have a 0 activation time, so its impossible to interrupt it. i mean, how could you? no matter how fast you fire off that interrupt, you cant do it in 0 seconds!

trust the wiki...
the wiki is your friend...

I do trust that stances cant be interrupted, it's just proof I'm looking for to settle a debate

The problem with wiki is that there are some very obvious mistakes dotted around, so linking to wiki as proof is easily brushed aside.

If you have to time, try scrimmaging with a fellow Guildie, have him bring Norgu. Make sure you bring a skill slot full of stances and have your Guildie target-lock Norgu onto you. Now just use Stances one at a time.

If any are interrupted, you'll notice that the stance you had activated will be missing a status icon in your effects box.

I'm sure they can. But only by AI been super f*cking annoying. The thing is it happens so insanely rarely that your never actually going to get a screenshot of it, because you can't actually tell... i'm almost certain i've activated a stance before and nothing happened... and no it wasn't Wild Blow, i'm not an idiot.

Its like 'Glyph of Sacrifice'. It says instant but i think is about 1/8s. Unless your AI or caught extremely unluckily by chaining it doesnt get interrupted. If it did how would we prove it? GoSac is removed on the activation bar when you use MS.

It's not the same as glyph of sac, if I put up a glyph of sac, then cast say, healing signet. I cant instacast meteor shower WHILST I'm using healing signet. Because the skill after glyph of sac still has a cast time.

Stances can be activated at the same time as other skills BECAUSE they have no cast time.

^ above

You got the idea, thats right. When you click or hit the key for MS after glyph in that moment after already knowing its a spell (and can't be instant due to its original cost), it formulates the process of requiring 0 cast time and does just that. Thus there's no way for you to do it while another skill is processing.

Skills trigger normally until its time for the real deal and takes into consideration the formulas or strings (as you could call them) of programming to alter the original effect or result.

i've interrupted shield stance before i swear i have even my friend i was playing was like "OMG! u interupted my stance!"

was quite a wyle back, but yea it was a total d-shot accident

I went to GWO and read the thread before I came here. After reading your message above I went back to GWO and look again. And you know what?

I don't see any mods saying "Stances can be interrupted", or anything even vaguely similar.

The only mod I saw on the thread is Ragnarok- (with green name, that's how you know he is a mod), and he said CLEARLY that "stances can not be interrupted".

In conclusion, I think you've mistaken Gold Pal users (with a gold badge) for moderators. And then managed to spread FALSE information (about some other webbords) of your own HERE.

The idea of it sounds impossble, but I seem to have a vague rememberance of my Bonnetties or Glad defence being interupted while trolling.... Cannot be sure though, all farming runs merge into one after awhile.

Maybe if a group of 15+ (ie Trolls) all use it milliseconds apart right when you use it.... rare but could (however slight the chance) happen.

I dunno eh

A stance is instantaneous; it has no delay. None. But, just for fun, let's continue.
Let's pretend that stances have an activation time of 0.00 seconds, and a 16 Fast Cast Mesmer boss
in Factions or Nightfall(Cantha and Nightfall bosses use skills twice as fast)can use Cry of Frustration in 0.06 seconds. That is still more than zero.

Cast meteor shower and while the cast bar is filling, use a stance. Look it went on during the casting of a different spell!
If it had any cast time at all it would have to wait for MS to finish first.


o and the troll thing- what happens there is a delay on the activation of cyclone axe.
you use cyclone(or triple chop, or whatever axe skill), then bonetti, but cyclone activates after you hit bonetti , removing it immediately as it goes on.i have done that, you need to really wait for the axe to chop before you use bonetti.

stances cannot be interrupted, but they can be removed almost instantly with a well timed wild blow. Trust me, I've been playing a ranger since the WPE and I'm pretty sure I'd remember if any of my stances was ever interrupted.

I've heard stories of trolls interrupting stance farmers.
I've seen a res chant after Glyph of Sacrifice been interrupted. No, it was not shame or something like that.

I think this happens when it is "precasted", you are not in range after activating Glyph of Sacrifice, and therefore u run op to the unlucky one when u pressed res chant, the skill still casts instantaneous when the target is in range, but, can be interuopted while u are not in range. Never cast wehn not in range!

That's your proof right there.

Because of Glyph of Sacrifice, it has no casting time. However, unlike with stances, you DO see a castingbar being filled up when you've casted Meteor Shower after a Glyhp of Sacrifice.

If it was interruptable, I'm sure I would have interrupted it quite a few times while spamming interrupts. My arrow hit right at the moment he started casting and it didn't interrupt, therefor, it's uninterruptible.

If those other guys think it's possible, let them try to interrupt Glyph of sac + any spell, if they can interrupt it, you should be able to interrupt stances as well.

Can't remember who it was that claimed he PDrained a GlyphSacced spell. Think it was Lews. Anyway, he claimed that although he got energy from the drain, the spell still went through.

But it isn't! Glyph of Sacrifice does not make spells cast instantly despite its wording. Even though it says spells cast instantly, they take 0.25 seconds to cast. Its really not the same as stances. You can use a stance while moving without breaking stride, but using a spell with GoS requires you to stop and cast (implying a cast time).

Yeah, Glyph of Sac doesn't make it instant. Do GoS then Meteor Shower, you still do the cast animation, correct? That means it's interruptable, with a VERY lucky interrupt. The cast time (or aftercast) is on every spell, and goes for another 0.25 seconds, and during that time you can be interrupted. So despite the description, you can interrupt a Glyph Sacced spell.

On the other hand, Stances have no activation time, no use animation, so there is nothing to be interrupted.

a skill after glyph of sacrifise is NOT interuptable. Using an interupt when the "instant spell" is used will not stop the spell from completing. However, when the interupt has any other effect besides the interupt, that effect does trigger (like the energy gain with power drain). I know it might sound odd, but that's at least my experience with it. This of course gives a clue that glyph sac spells do have a very short casting time, but are uninteruptable (much like glyph of concentration does).

stances however, cannot be interupted, ever. They have no casting time, and therefor cannot be interupted. Need proof of the "no casting time" ? simple : you can use stances while casting other spells and while being KD. In both of those situations, any skill with a casting time wouldn't be usable.

c_ras just won the thread.

Sometimes.........you have nothing better to do at work.

I have interrupted Shiros Battle Scars once, and I was just lucky. I was tring to stop sopmething else and they must have activated both at the same moment.

Prot Spirit has a cast time of 0.25s.

Savage Slash has a cast time of 0.5s

Without chaining anything the latter has interupted the former. Therefore you have no point at all. The enemy AI cheats, it seems to start interrupting your skills before you've actually started using them so please, stop trying to use the cast time arguement.

No aftercast is something completely different:

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Aftercast

Its the 0.75 seconds AFTER the cast that u can't activate other skills. U cannot be interupted anymore. The only possibility i currently see is that the skill was activated from too far a distance and therefor interuptable. When i GoS MS it goes of immeadiately.

Maybe they are just like the other super rangers on this forums "predicting" that u are gonna use something. They just spam skills and then it can indeed hit 0.25 AT skills. Its not so hard to predict u are gonna use a skill. it is almost inevitable ^^

Guildwiki is a fine source of information and very much accurate. Least I never had any problems with information on there.

Anyways as people have said Stances cannot be interrupted.

You can not prove a negative - no one can prove it is impossible to interrupt a stance or shout. The only provable thing is if it can be interrupted and that requires one to be interrupted. Plus there is the idea of "impossible" vs "so improbable might as well be" (more on that later). In this particular case I do would take dev posts to mostly be "what we wanted to happen and are very sure it works that way" as it is subtle. I know I have personally written similar code that I wouldn't be *that* firm on on commercial software - if it is possible it would be VERY VERY rare, but I've found the term "impossible" to not be a good one to use. In this case you need the algorithm, the code, and the compiler to do the right thing - one of those you have pretty much no control over.

I can not prove that you can not fly around the room simply by chanting "Famous Amos cookies" over and over, we just know that to be so ridiculous that no one argues the point. Just because trillions of people have never been able to doesn't mean the next person born can not. In this particular case there is no "obvious" so many will believe what they want.

Stances and shouts act as un-interruptible - they can be activated under pretty much any circumstances. They activate fine while knocked down, while casting spells, while moving, they do while doing *anything*. The general community is pretty sure of this and so am I.

There has never been a video or proof that they have been interrupted, only some people swearing they have seen it. Well, people swear they have seen all sorts of things that are later proved false. I've seen them knocked out before the icon even appeared on the interface and I've seen this happen when I'm getting hit where the damage indicators scroll off and it was just luck I saw it. No matter the amount of AI interrupters and what interrupts they carry no one has ever documented it.

If there were a hex that interrupted next *skill* usage then yes, they could be (diversion works on pretty much anything, though it adds to recharge not interrupt). Depending on how the software handles critical sections and interrupts (woo - software engineering terms having a cross over) it may or may not be possible. That is - does an "interrupt" act which of the following ways (amongst many of the way possible): (unfortunately my formatting is removed, so I will use {} for blocks)

Skill activated
while timer < time needed
{
check for interrupt
timer = timer + 1
}
activate skill

or

skill activated
do
{
check for interrupt
timer = timer + 1
}
while timer < time needed

in the first case having a cast time of 0 would have them never check for an interrupt and, thus, be non-interruptible. In the second case they would be interruptible you would jut need extreme luck. Given the general way programmers think, my guess is the first case. Even if it is the second case the window for interruption is so slim that it might as well be impossible as even the AI will pretty much never do it.

Until someone shows me that they are interrupted I will continue along the lines of the way things work. If a video capture of one being interrupted is shown, then I'll agree.

One thing to keep in mind here.

It's impossible to reactively interrupt an 0 second cast skill. Simply put, if your reaction time is 0.0000000001 seconds, you've already missed it. There's no way around it. Even speed of light is too slow for this.

The real question here is, are stances truly uninteruptible by design and the way combat engine works, or is the possibility of interrupting a stance cast just so small that's it's believed to not exist.

GW's engine processes player and npc actions sequentially. The only question here is, are events processed in discrete or analogue fashion. Many game engines partition time in packets. Let's say one packet is 1/100th of a second.

During those 10 milliseconds, the consider events to occur simultaneously. In GW's case, that would mean, if someone's interrupt activated (after apropriate casting time) in the same time frame as someone activated the stance, then the stance were interrupted (if they are truly interruptible).

But if GW's engine processes events in analogue fashion, then events are always one after another. In that case, nothing with true 0 second casting time can ever be interrupted.

I guess a better question here would be, do stances carry some internal flag which says "un-interruptible".

I have personally been the unfortunate victim of bonnettis being interrupted back in the griffon farming days. Rockshot devourer interrupted it and it put the recharge timer right on that adrenal stance which was hilarious.

Anyways I am 100% positive that the AI can interrupt a stance (it happened to me twice) I may go farm rockshots to get a screenshot of it.

just because your stance hasnt been interupted doesnt mean it cannot be interupted or someone hasnt interupted someone els' stance.

yea ok man someones gonna vid cap something that happens on total accident, and no one really cares wat u agree with, people who have interupted stances or have had their stance interupted know wat they're talking about. cut the dumb explination and go interupt one for yourself and quit asking other people for something like a vid cap.