Interesting fact about Empowered Spells

Hey, everyone!

I was sitting, analyzing logs, video guides, rotations, and suddenly I realized that for more than two years of playing an Evoker, I didn’t know something very important and interesting, maybe for some of you this will also be a revelation.

It turns out that when we cast Empowered Spells 4th square in casting bar (and 5th square with Font of Magic) gives us nothing, it just takes away the time of casting!

Pic for a visual example:
https ://imgur .com/a/6NAONy0
(with my 16-17% haste, the casting time of it is 1.0 sec).

I have a question, why was it necessary to come up with this and add it to the game? For what, to mislead players?

That’s not an extra charge state, that’s just extra time that you can “hold” the spell to make sure it releases at the appropriate moment. It is a massive QoL thing to have.

Also, the text of each spell describes how many charge states they have and what they do.

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Did I understand you correctly, by this logic, if I want to release it at full power, I need an additional 1 second to aim, right? So basic 2.2 seconds (of 3 charges) is not enough for me to do this?

Aim it, time its release with add spawns, whatever the case might be. That extra time just gives you flexibility with when the spell takes effect.

Consider that the charge level of the empowered spell happens at the beginning of each charge threshold, including immediately upon starting the cast. The final charge state is not the max possible time to cast the spell, but rather becomes available at the beginning of the last charge bar. The difference in time from that point to the auto-fire of the spell is simply time for you to adjust the spell”s direction and release timing.

Sometimes mobs have moved, sometimes mobs have yet to spawn, sometimes people are at full health.

Empower spells aren’t solely for damage.

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Thank you, well noted, now I understand the meaning, I wasn’t thinking from the perspective of a healer.

Sometimes I’ll charge spiritbloom and it’s a half second too soon so that buffer lets me hold it til dmg actually happens. Otherwise I’d need to perfectly time my cast every time.

Sometimes I’m charging eternity and it charged too fast and I wait just a bit for mobs to get gathered a little more to be within 12 yd range.

Temporal whatever stacks on pres make the cast time completely different sometimes.

Tldr; without the buffer you’d have to perfectly be able to guess the exact moment to start casting depending on circumstances and haste/cast time differences.

The pips are unintuitive though, the second bubble is level 1, idk why there’s a first bubble. But I guess it’s supposed to be the pip line indicates level lol

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There really isn’t any good reason for it not to cast automatically once it reaches max level.

Forcing people to have to perfectly time releasing the spell down to the millisecond with latency is just a pointless and frustrating mechanic. They need to change this already.

Not only is there a good reason, it’s been explained in this post (several times).

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If the extra cast time didn’t exist, evoker players would litterally just time their cast anyway. So where’s the logic here?

If your target isn’t in range or hasn’t spawned yet and you need an extra 0.3 seconds it means you’re casting too early. You can’t move while casting empowered spells anyway so there isn’t any point even if you can think of very minor niche situations where you could easily just train yourself to time your casts better.

You just described the point of having a buffer between Max Charge and Automatic Cast.

There is literally no downside to having that buffer there, it just provides versatility to the caster to more precisely time when their max-charge takes effect.

Also as a note, this behavior is consistent across all the charge ranks of Empowered spells. Each charge rank requires an amount of time to attain the Charge State, and then offers an additional short window within which you can tailor the release of the spell or continue charging to the next rank.

Not providing this buffer to Max Charge State would be both inconsistent and problematic for accurately timing the effects of arguably our most important spells.