D-shotting unused skills

Something's been really pissing me off.

I run the normal KD-lock for Random Arenas, D-Hammer etc. As a result, it's easy for rangers to D-shot my "chain". But I've noticed something as of late, something that actually happens to me all the time. A ranger D-shots my chain, and Hammer Bash/Heavy Blow gets disabled. I target myself to find that Hammer Bash/Heavy Blow was never even activated. I don't know if I'm lagging or something, but how the hell can a ranger D-shot something that was never activated.

Any explanations?

You sure it was a ranger? Could have easily been a mesmer skill that disabled/stole the skill from you.

Ran out of adren?

It's more than likely this is what is happening, failing that it's just lag.

Might be mistaken, but I believe the only skill a mesmer could do this with is Simple Thievery, meaning the skill would have to have been activating. Arcane Thievery/Larceny only do spells. If it was something like Clumsiness, the adrenal skill wouldn't have a recharge time.

Sounds like lag to me, the only thing I can think of is if you lag to the point where by the time you target yourself your skill activation is gone. Honestly don't know on this one.

Visages, Blackout, etc. can all disable skills or remove adrenaline. If it was only 1 skill being affected than it wouldn't be anything like that. Diversion would disable, but the skill would have to be activated. My guess is you aren't paying attention to what is occurring, or are lagging severely.

You probably got your first kd dshotted. When you use an adren skill it takes 1 strike of adren away from every other adren skill. You have to hit again to recharge them and usually the adren attack itself will recharge it. Since your adren attack was interrupted, you didn't gain that strike of adren back so hammer bash/ heavy blow wasn't charged.

If the skill itself was recharging then it wasn't the ranger doing it.

Try keeping an eye on your ping the next time you play and this sort of stuff happens, it may help to find the source of the problem.

Also take note of the professions you're playing against when this is happening also, I mean if it's happening when there are no Mesmer's, or Mesmer secondaries then that deducts Mesmer skills from the problem entirely.

Press F10 and See what skill has been used on that battle and read them.

Sometimes I get stuff like that when I quarterknock someone: at first I don't see that they used a skill, but I will see it interrupted when they get up (it will pop up and fail). It is usually lag's fault so maybe you're having a bad ping?

The skill you're looking for isn't Distracting Shot, it's Disarm.

(actually, it's the first thing that came to mind, there may be a different cause like the ones above posters noted)

Since the OP specifically mentioned a Ranger with Dshot and not just interrupted, I'm assuming that the skill was recharging after this interrupt. If that's correct, I doubt it's Disarm since there's a pretty noticeable difference between 2 second recharge and 20 second recharge (also if it was a Warrior skill it's probably Dchop), and I find it hard to believe it was a Mesmer since that would imply Simple Thievery. I also don't think it's Diversion with a clueless OP since the attack would have gone through, and similar to my above argument, there's a pretty noticeable difference between 20 second recharge and 50+ second recharge.

I'm still saying lag.

I based my conclusion on the "Hammer Bash/Heavy Blow gets disabled" (both of which are attack skills) and "Hammer Bash/Heavy Blow was never even activated" parts of the OP's post. The disabling of his adrenal attack skills would also cause any adrenaline "stored" in these to be reset.

I say it's possible that it was due to Disarm (we are talking Random Arena's here), but I'm not excluding the possibility it was due to lag, like you suggested.

Not entirely sure if this would help you find the issue but as I used to play a mesmer interrupter frequently (to an unnaturally intuitive extent...) and I occasionally noticed that I interrupted spells without seeing them (ie. the interrupt animation played, the player was visibly interrupted however no skill was displayed). Considering that this was often things like power block/drain/leak on monks it also caused a fair amount of confusion for the opposing player.

Not entirely certain if this was lag, but it might be the case for you as well if you had the attack queued and the ranger happened to get a blind interrupt in just from spamming. Seeing that you would likely be in practically melee range, there wouldn't be a significant delay between when the ranger fires the arrow and when it strikes either.

Not sure if they fixed this or not but there used to be a bug where you would hit a skill and while running up to a player someone could interrupt the skill without you even noticing it. This was mostly seen in pve where you'd hit an attack skill and while running up you would get hit by cry of frustation and be interrupted without really using the skill.

Though i'm pretty sure they fixed it dunno : /

It has something to do with knockdowns. It occurs often when a caster is KD'd too: you pressed a skill, you got knocked and when you get up again it then shows the fact that it failed. Not sure why it does that, but it just does sometimes.

The same goes for interrupts. There they interrupt you on the very beginning of the cast ( of hammerbash for example ) and you still do the animation. When the animation is over, it shows the cancel-like thing.