Remove Dervish Avatar Activation Time

120sec cooldown... read the skill description!

He's talking about if it gets interrupted, you only have to wait 30 seconds to retry. Most of the time, at least.

I think the biggest difference of opinion here between you and those of us disagreeing with you is the idea of avoiding interrupts. Most of us posting against the idea feel that interrupts are a FAIR way to counter the Avatars, and avoiding the interrupt may not be easy at time, but it is possible. Due to the ability to bring an anti-interrupt skill, cancel cast the form, and 'hide' you certainly have options available. And due to the power those forms offer (condition immunity is a HUGE benefit, extra damage from Lyssa is insane, etc.) then you have to balance it. The down time of the forms is one way they are balanced, but preventing the form from being used is still something that needs to be available. Remember how overpowered Paragons were before they got nerfed? Shouts with instant activation and no removal options were WAY too strong for PvP. An Avatar form with no activation time and no way to remove it is WAY too strong.

Being interrupted sux ? welcome to GW , shit happens. No matter what you say , its just a "i dont want this skill to be interrupted so buff it" thread. Once you have it , you cant remove it and have impressive effects , thats why its an elite , thats why that elite and many more can be interrupted. For anything else , masterc.... erm what MagmaRed said.

RANGERS AND MESMERS CAN INTERRUPT ME, NOOOO
MAKE MY INTERRUPTABLE SKILL UNABLE TO BE RUPTED THANKS

please, have you heard of things called cancel casting?

whatever next... NOO, MY WORD OF HEAL GOT RUPTED, MAKE IT UNABLE TO BE RUPTED..

/notsigned

Since the death of VoD and shadowsteps, a number of the derv forms remain over-nerfed for the gvg meta that wouldn't want them anyway. Melandru's could stand not costing 25e (just try to cancel cast that), or having better uptime with a less imbalanced ability (like say, 75% reduction of condition durations)

Current incarnations of avatars and shadows steps are fine oh, and shadow steps and avatars were not just nerfed for VoD reasons.

The problem isn't that there aren't options, it's that most of the options are terrible. I feel that the skills would be balanced without activation time because of the existing factors such as high energy cost, and the fact that they have significant downtime even when successful.

Paragon shouts were largely "balanced" by increasing their recharge time, and other skills such as Harrier's Toss were adjusted to reduce spike capabilities. While they may have overdone some of these nerfs, many of these skills are still powerful without being rigged, despite having instant activation time, and can even be used while knocked down. The Dervish Avatars already have an excessive recharge time, and while minor tweaking would help their balance regardless of my proposed change, would not become overpowered without activation time.

There are many other skills that cannot be removed by opposing players that have impressive effects. Consider Weapon Spells, Shouts, Signets, and regular Skills. While powerful, they have factors that balance them in comparison skills, such as the differences between Guardian and Weapon of Warding. Guardian lasts longer per amount of recharge, particularly with a 20% enchantments mod, than Weapon of Warding with 10 Spawning Power, and WoW costs more energy to boot. Yet, both of these skills see play, showing that neither one is exceedingly powerful. Yes, both of these skills can (and should) be able to interrupted, however, these are entirely different kinds of skills compared to the Avatars.

Perhaps I'm not being clear, or people simply aren't reading everything before posting (ding ding!). I'll not comment on cancel casting since I already have, however, I'll restate what I said in my opening post. When I RA or TA, more than half of the time I am playing a Power Block Mesmer, or some Ranger usually with Cripshot or some amusing self-made Gimmick. I have a pretty good idea about interrupts, and was shocked to see your comment on Word of Healing, because when I'm not on my Mesmer or Ranger, I'm playing Monk. If you honestly feel that WoH and the Avatars are a good comparison, you should be re-thinking your position. Word of Healing (ignoring its post buff healing amount) is balanced, and its powerful heals in tandem with short activation time and recharge are balanced by interrupts, skills like Diversion and Shame, etc.

I agree, the Avatars really do need tweaking. Avatar of Balthazar is terrible, even for everything but running in PvE, Avatar of Dwayna helps with pressure but not spikes, making it only moderately useful in anything but RA, Lyssa is terrible with scythes, Grenth is somewhat useful at first glance, but unless you're running a gimmick team of AoG Dervishes, you're probably going to have to remove blocking skills before spiking anyways for the other physicals. Avatar of Melandru is great, except that to maximize its efficiency you need to fill up on skills like Wearying Strike, that simply are not effective during the downtime (which is balanced!) but are made worthless overall if AoM is interrupted.

The problem is, nobody but you (currently) finds there to be a problem with the current balance of the Avatars. I wouldn't even want instant activation in PvE, and PvE allows overpowered crap.

The main reason you played dervish (aside from AoG's brokenness) was vod splinter farming or teleporting scythespike (but preferably both). The current heavily nerfed melandru's saw play right up until those things were removed. Despite the absurd damage dervs can put out, they are seriously gimped as true frontliners due to their lack of disruption/KDs.

People are having the same silly argument about mindblasters being OP'd right now. A one-dimensional bar like that is not going to kill good players as well as a more versatile bar, but it exists primarily to exploit the current tiebreaker condition, and that threat forces the enemy to react in disadvantageous ways.

The point of PvP is to use strategy in order to be better than your oppenents. Therefore, use a strategy that will prevent your Avatar skill.

/not-signed
I love it when people say "cast it out of aggro range". Do you see monks pre-Aegis in the past? Fact is it is a long recharge skill coupled with disabled time length, henceforth you would want to fully maximize the duration when the avatar is active. While I definitely want to see some substantial use in pvp, I believe removal of activation time is the wrong route to take. They should instead water down the inherent abilities and shorten the recharge time to compensate. Until a reasonable rework is sorted out, I think avatars should be left as a 'PvE-only' skill.

Some people are so afraid that their avatars will be interrupted that they use them before the battle even starts. Then again, they also use it 15 seconds before the gate opens, so maybe they're just retarded.

The problem I see is that a no-activation time for dervishes would probably make them overpowered. Think about avatar skill-synchronization, especially in large PvP groups. The other team would have a high chance of being raped on the spot as the Dervishes wade in and then activate their avatars.

/notsigned

Already been discussed.

The Avatar abilities do need some re-working (see FoxBat's earlier post), but the problem with the skills in their current form is not disable time. These skills should not be able to be maintained, and a lot of their strategic use would be lost if they were watered down but nearly maintainable or fully maintainable. Perhaps the solution is to reduce the recharge time (not disable time) to something small like 5 seconds, so that an interrupt can delay the use of the skill and cause trouble for the opposing team, while not preventing it from going off for extended periods of time. At the current recharge of 30 seconds, it's easy to look at the timer and figure out when you need to interrupt the skill again, while trying to interrupt every five seconds is a waste of time, but interrupting once or twice could yield a strategic advantage.

I thought we didn't talk about the people that waste 10-15+ seconds of avatar time by using it before the gate opens. As for the second bold, quite possibly, however, none of the Avatars are well suited for spikes any more than other elites, so I doubt this would happen. Hypothetically you could essentially ignore a BSurge Ele's blind spam by using AoM before a spike, or AoD for getting rid of Blurred Vision, but really there are better ways to go about this. There are better ways to reliably spike, and I don't see the added pressure being much different from how it is now.

120 second cooldown AFTER HAVING BEEN CASTED. If casting is not complete, it cycles through it's standard recharge of 30 seconds.

Yeh , big issue those 30 sec waiting . Only "big" if someone D-shots you , but if you get D-shoted , you deserve the 50sec punish .

/notsigned
As people do say, cast before entering battle. But if you're in the middle of battle this could be a challenging obstacle to avoid an interrupt.
But Avatars do have a generally long duration, if it were any shorter I would vouch for a one second casting time on them.
But if two seconds is much too long for an avatar, I would like to vouch a one second casting time on Healing Signet, that skill is far too dangerous to use for two seconds.

Since you refuse to see common logic, look at it this way:
Assuming you get the form off every time, on the high-end duration forms you have a ~70% up-time. VERY few skills have this much up-time. Even on the low end, you still have over 50% up-time.
Forms need their cast times and recharges to bring them statistically in-line with other skills. They also need to be rather underpowered, just because they are a bad mechanic in general, and never should have been put in the game in the first place.

And just to beat a dead horse, so maybe you'll listen: cast times are there so skills can be interrupted. Cast times and interrupts are what make this game what it is. This is made obvious by the extremely small pool of instant-cast skills.
Positioning in such a way as to not interrupted adds depth to the game.
If you can't deal with that, I think you should find a new game.

Avatars are pretty useless in RA, yes. So are many skills. The game isn't balanced around RA, and buffing a skill to make it useful in RA isn't going to happen. Making them an instant cast for PvP is just going to make them very strong in competitive. No thanks. Just cast it before you run into the enemies.

I believe you are missing my points entirely. Please re-read my previous posts, as I have discussed all of your points already.

Arky, I'm not suggesting this on the basis that Dervish Avatars should be buffed for the sole purpose of Random Arenas. They're fine for PvE because of Eternal Aura, but they don't see any play in any competitive format. I'm not suggesting that every skill that is worthless or otherwise ignored gets a buff, the difference here is that most other professions have hundreds more skills, dozens more elites, and the Dervish lacks the utility needed to perform well with its current skill set. Furthermore, the Avatars are tied closely to the profession, more-so than most elites. It isn't just a matter of tying skills to the primary attribute for balance, the Avatars embody the Dervish profession.

Dervishes don't have knockdowns, so they instantly cannot compete with Warriors for their traditional utility roles. The only thing that Dervishes can do is a lot of damage on spikes, and that is only aided by three elite skills. Assassins spike better and have unblockable attack chains as well as moreutility. The profession as a whole needs major adjustments, as do all of the non-core professions, but changing the Avatars to be made useful for PvP is a step in the right direction. Even if the activation time is not instant, changing it to prevent it from being able to be interrupted, or giving it an increased aftercast would also work, although not as well imo.