In Update 54, the Marksman's Snipe skill description was fixed to show 4 seconds instead of 5 seconds. But according to my testing, the actual cooldown seems to still be 5 seconds. I verified this in 3 different ways: Method 1) The above video shows me using solely Snipe, holding down the button so that it fires immediately when the cooldown expires. I set a timer for 3 minutes as well. If the cooldown is 4 seconds, I should be able to fire off 15 Snipes in 1 minute, which means in 3 minutes I should get 45 snipes. But the actual number I counted is slightly less than 36 snipes, which corresponds with a cooldown of just over 5 seconds. In fact the timing drifted, and after 3 minutes, Snipe was delayed by a few seconds. Method 2) I also did a DPS test on Krex 2nd eye. First the theoretical DPS. I know I can fit 6 Strafe between every Snipe, and I do about 5,000+ damage on a non-crit and 15,000+ damage on a crit. With an approx 50% crit rate after SE, I should be doing 40,000 damage per Strafe. So, in every cycle of 6 Strafe + 1 Snipe, I should do 40,000 * 6 + 195,000 = 435,000. If the cycle takes 4 seconds, my DPS should be 108,750. If the cycle takes 5 seconds, my DPS should be 87,000. To verify the theoretical DPS, I did a practical test. I don't have screenshots of this, but I finished the 2nd eye in 49 minutes and 45 seconds, checked using ~mapowner. That means my DPS is 250,000,000 / 50 / 60 = 83,333. If the cycle was really 4 seconds, that means my uptime is 83,333 / 108,750 = 77% which is absolutely abysmal and I think I would have noticed if it had really been that bad. If the cycle is actually 5 seconds, then my uptime is 83,333 / 87,000 = 96% which is much more in line with what I feel actually happened. Method 3) The Speed Infusion guide says a Fast (4) weapon, which is the speed of my crossbow after Booster, takes 750ms to fire. I know I can fit 6 Strafe followed by a Snipe without noticeably clipping the CD. Assuming Snipe animation is the same length as a normal Strafe, then 6+1= 7 attacks takes 7*0.750 = 5.25 seconds to execute, which almost exactly lines up with the observation in (1) that Snipe is slightly delayed. --- Overall I'm not entirely sure what should be done to fix this. If the class balancing was done via theoretical math of the 4 seconds cooldown, then the cooldown should be reduced. If it was done by practical observation of in-game solo kill times, then the description should be fixed. Either way, at least I found out why my DPS calculations have been showing me underperforming. Now it's more accurate, but please do make the necessary changes as a QoL for other Marksmen. Thank you!
If you like , I can add your publication to my change request to my publication so that others can see your tedious discovery , thanks for your work !
What you are seeing here is due to how buff cooldowns work on the server-side. The information for buff cooldowns are updated every 1 second on the server, and this 1 second is not determined by when players use buffs, but just something that runs continuously in the background. This means that buff cooldowns can only be accurate to the nearest whole second determined by the server's buff cooldown worker. For example... Let's say the buff cooldown worker is updating half way through each second, e.g. 00.00:500, 00.01:500, 00.02:500, etc. You use Snipe at 00.00:800, which has a 4 second cooldown, the server will only be able to enable the skill again at 0.05:500 (4.7 seconds after the skill was actually used). If you used Snipe at 0.00:400 then you would be able to use the skill again at 0.04:500 (4.1 seconds after it was used). The cooldown of snipe will seem to be 5 seconds if you hold down the button because your previous Snipe would have been done just after the buff cooldown worker had updated, e.g. 0.04:520 (depends on your latency), therefore the next allowable Snipe would be 0.09:500 (4.98 seconds later). There is not much we can do to make the cooldown more accurate without making it computationally expensive, however this is essentially the reason why we reduced the cooldown from 5 seconds to 4 seconds, as the intended 5 seconds felt more like 6 seconds. I hope this makes sense.
That makes sense. Admittedly I probably have a terrible latency as I'm connecting from Singapore, so that might explain the slight cooldown drift. I also did notice that the last 'tick' of the cooldown takes a bit longer to refresh than the other 'ticks', so that does line up with what you said about the server-side mechanics. I did not fully understand your explanation, and I'll take another look later. But if I am reading it correctly, all players will experience the cooldown as 1 second greater than the pre-programmed value, regardless of their latency. If this is the case, would it be possible to leave the cooldown as-is but change the skill description back to saying 5 seconds at level 30, since that is the effective and intended cooldown on the player's side? It would be a good QoL feature that will make the skill's use clearer to future players. I think the accuracy of the skill description is important as it affects players' planning. I had intended to multi-client my Marksman with a Buccaneer as dual attackers since the Barrage + Demolition combo takes exactly 4000ms, and I had previously thought that I could seamlessly weave the two characters' attacks together because it's both apparently 4000ms. But now that it's clear that it's not going to happen since Snipe is closer to 5000ms, I'll need to find some other way to deal with the drift. This is probably a really niche case, but yeah it would be nice if the description was more accurate.
