Precast Fastcast And Midcast Cureset For Healing

I recently upgraded my WHM with a precast set for healing magic (medala cape, dominie grip, cure clogs, etc)

I noticed that most of the time it heals in the precast set. Should i add something specific to the code like a delay tag? How do you guys manage precast/midcast on cures in spellcast?

I asked pretty much the same thing here : http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/36224/whm-spellcast-help/

Hope that helps.

Try that, it'll offset your cast time by 0.3 seconds to give your midcast set time to go on after your precast. Play around with the values a little and see what works best for you.

Doesn't castdelay just delay the casting?

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure how it works, all I know is that people told me it fixes their fast cast problems.

Now that I re-read what I wrote though, my head is like "dafuq is that?", so I could be wrong and I'm thinking of a different option.

Type	Options	Description
GearDelay	See Description	Optional	To delay PreCast. Must Set Delay with this.
	Delay	Required	Used with GearDelay. This is how long in seconds you want to delay the equipping of gear at PreCast action.
CastDelay	See Description	Optional	To delay casting after PreCast, mainly if you want say a few milliseconds delay for gear changes to finish. Must Set Delay with this.
	Delay	Required	Used with CastDelay. This is how long in seconds you want to delay spell casting after PreCast action.
MidCastDelay	See Description	Optional	To delay MidCast action after casting, mainly if you want to delay MidCast gear switching for whatever reason. MidCast will default to a delay of 600 ms after casting if MidCastDelay is not specified. Must set Delay with this option.
	Delay	Required	Used with MidCastDelay. This is how long in seconds you want to delay MidCast action after casting.
AfterCastDelay	See Description	Optional	To manually adjust AfterCast action delay after casting finishes. Delays are relative to a base of castime + 1.5 seconds. If AfterCastDelay is not specified, it will default to 0 for spells, 0 for ranged, and 1.5s for instants(ja/ws). Must set Delay with this option.
	Delay	Required	Used with AfterCastDelay. This is how long in seconds you want to delay AfterCast actions after casting(+ 1.5s).

Yep, as I understand it precast command will be executed before the cast, therefore, if u delay the cast by 0.3. it will give you time to fully change the set before midcast set is executed. 0.3 usually works for me, but as Hitetsu says it will depend on your lag/connection etc.

I use a .3 and yes it does delay the cast but the .3 is less than you gain from all the fastcast so it's still worth it.

Cure base casting time is as follows and the second part with 80% fastcast:

C1: 2 secs .4 sec
C2: 2.25 .45 sec
C3: 2.5 .5 sec
C4: 2.5 .5 sec
C5: 2.5 .5 sec
C6: 3.25 .65 sec

When you hit a macro it sends the command to spellcast, which then puts on your precast gear, then instantly casts the spell you are trying to cast, then during midcast, puts on your cure potency gear.

The issue is that there's a minimum time between slot changes. So if you change to your precast gear, then you are unable to change to your midcast gear for as long as .7 secs. And ALL of the cure spells have a shorter cast time than that when you have full fastcast. So what a cast delay does is insert a small wait between putting your fastcast gear on and the actual casting of the spell. .3 secs is enough to make even cure1 have enough time, but you can technically narrow the gap for the higher tier spells since their cast time is larger. Curaga's are also longer so a cast delay isn't necessary most times, or at most, a .1 delay should do.

But despite delaying your cast .3 secs you still get a nice benefit. Because .7 sec cast time is much better than a 2 or 3.25 cast time.

So if one wants an overall correct rule hidetsu one is ok, but if i'd like to be a perfectionist i should made a rule for every cure spell with his own castdelay like sekundes posted right?

Well what I posted is just a reference of the after Fastcast cast times, you'd have to have capped fc for those numbers also.

If that cast time after fastcast is above .7 your fine and probably don't need a cast delay but if it's below, then you likely will need a cast delay to bump it up to .7 for the total cast time.

So for cure 6, since it's cast time will now be .65 you only need .05 cast delay if you have 80 fastcast.

Someone better with game mechanics and fastcast may have some corrections here for me but this is what has worked for me on rdm and whm. I've had others need to add or take some cast delay away to make it work for them.

Cures are easy to test though cause if your gear doesn't equip, you cure a different amount so be sure to test everything after any change.

Also, as I mentioned curaga's don't need a cast delay unless you're having trouble getting fastcast to proc or lag issues.

bah it seems like i lag too much, even if i set precast or midcast delay to 0.1, HP healed is always less than the expected. So disappointing.

Precast delay isn't what you want, that delays the precast gearswap

Do:
<CastDelay delay="0.3"/>

Edit: I think I recall something about the whole precast/cast delay thing. Perhaps it doesn't matter but I can't recall now if they are actually the same or not ^^; i remember it being questioned at some point and I tested it and it turned out differently than I thought but I'd try that first and see if it helps. If not, we can look at other things. It could just be a matter of .1 not being enough?

Fixed

Midcast delay will help provided the only issue is that their midcast is trying to fire too early and is getting blocked by the .7 sec wait but if they have a good amount of fastcast then delaying the midcast only won't help since the cure will fire before the potency gear gets put on.

castdelay delays the actual casting of the spell so your precast has time to cool down before the midcast goes off. But I can't recall if precastdelay and castdelay are the same or not. For some reason I think I recall someone correcting me on that.

Just don't use too much fast cast for some spells, actually I just use all of them in Curaga's.

adding astDelay delay="0.3" is the same as just removing some pieces...

Aikchan makes a valid point. If you're delaying the cast by .3 seconds then you're adding .3 seconds on to the cast, which is the same as just removing .3 seconds worth of fast cast gear.

I find it's easier to simply put a delay for the rule of that spell than to make a new set or modify the gear in the rules just to take a piece out. And if for some reason it's left on from the prior action and didn't get removed/replaced by the precast, it could mess up your cast since you'd cast too fast. Also isn't it something like only even numbers of fastcast get the bonus so like 3 = 2 and 5 = 4 unless you have another odd piece which makes the total even? So you'd have to account for that for what pieces you took off. Just overly complicated. And to make matters worse, for each cure, the amount of fastcast you'd need to remove to get you .3 secs is different cause each cure's cast time is different.

With a cast delay, you can be sure everything is going to work nearly all the time, exceptions being a lot of lag or trying to do actions over each other which might screw up your equip delay.

Looking at this portion, could the midcast delay actually be a problem? since cure spells fire off before .6

Could also be an issue with what gear you use.
If you idle in af3+2 body, precast in heka and then midcast in af3+2 again, it won't work.

If your precast in more than 75% cast time down the spell fires off before you get the cure off, idk if thats the problem cause I just woke up '-'

I usually say .7 to be safe since .6 doesn't always work but I also rarely have issues with the standard midcast. Really short cast spells tend to screw ***up though.

I think everyone has to do a bit of experimentation on their own to ensure everything will work exactly how they need it to, though that's XML101 since you ALWAYS have to test, and it's best to test in many situations to ensure things are working right.

Excellent chart there! That should really be in a spellcast wiki/resource page somewhere.

Only even values of fast cast affect Recast reduction. Meaning 5% FC gets you the same recast reduction as 4%. Seems like FC gets truncated in the recast calcs. So, 5%/2=2.5% which gets truncated to an integer for 2% recast reduction. Whereas every point of FC contributes to cast time reduction.

But, I definitely agree, I'd rather have custom cast/midcast delays for very short casting spells than varying fastcast sets per spell.

Ah, okay thanks for the clarification. I knew there was something to deal with odd/even and fastcast but I couldn't recall.

What if you set the midcastdelay to around .4 instead of .6 / .7 and had no precast / cast delay. That seemed to be working for me using cure IV on sch with 80% cct, I haven't been able to get on whm yet to try. This would completely eliminate the cast delay speeding up cure times.

Update: Went to try it out on whm with .4 midcast delay and no cast delay. Seems to be working well. I did have to reduce the number of items I was using in precast (possibly due to the merit -cct) for it to work for me though. This is a non issue as whm needs few pieces to cap.