Not sure if bug or intended: Yi vs Warwick

Nebuul·Sep 20, 2014·1 votes·698 views

I was just in a game where Yi dodged Warwick's ult with an alpha strike, and the WW ult went on cooldown. How is that possible?

3 Comments

Deep Terror NamiSep 20, 20141 votes

A lot of "instant" abilities actually have a delay, or possibly a priority level where A always hits first, B always hits second, C hits third and so on. It seems that the abilities that don't do this are the ones that don't go on CD when they miss due to the target becoming untargetable within a split second of being cast. I'm sure you've seen this scenario many times but didn't recognize it as the same circumstance as a Yi Alpha Strike dodging a "zero" travel-time targeted ability (like WW Ult).

I'm sure there are discussions about this somewhere on the internet, but it would certainly be nice for a Riot programmer to chime in and clarify.

Baitsa DasutoSep 21, 20141 votes

I'm pretty sure that LOL has no real "priority", but that this is actually about micro delays. Every ability in the game has a casting time, even the "instant" abilities. They are just so short you only seldomly notice.

67chromeSep 21, 20141 votes

When you press a button to attack, you don't instantly deal damage, you don't instantly launch a projectile.

There's a brief delay where the champion you issued an order to needs to perform part of their animation sequence. Usually it's about a 0.5 second wind-up to get to the right part of the animation.

You do instantly spend mana and cooldowns when you issue an order though.

Anyways: if you get interrupted, killed, have your target die on you, target someone that becomes untargetable, etc. during that brief 0.5 second window - you can get screwed out of your ultimate on a wide range of champions.

I've had it happen a decent number of times to me on a fairly wide selection of champions.

Riot has been putting forth some QoL buffs to a few champions so they get refunded mana and cooldowns if such shenanigans happen, but not every champion gets a grace period - and some that supposedly have been scripted to have one still seem to go awry every now and then.