I’ve seen and heard a fair few people confused about how skill timers work so I’ve thrown together a guide which hopefully clears things up. I hope this helps!
Team Skill Timers Explained
By David Smith
Below are some explanations of words and phrases used which may cause confusion:
- Rotation: this covers the time it takes for the boss to cast their full list of skills from start to finish.
- Stalling: this is when you delay a skill so you can land it at a specific time.
- Witch’s Remains/Crown of the Unclean holder: the hero with either of these artefacts is the “holder” and therefore the hero assigned as your “defence down” applier.
- DPS: meaning Damage Per Second: these are your units focused purely for damage.
- Attack Penalty: a debuff which reduces the damage dealt by the unit inflicted with the debuff
Enter the battle screen and click the scroll like icon to open the boss information, note the ability explanations and the time they’ll be cast per rotation (you can click on each one to see the effect) and the accuracy required (check the note in the image).
Drag your team onto the battlefield into the positions you want them, try positioning them to get the best out of your Ally’s buffs and heal zones.
Once this is done, click the flag icon and hit save.
Select your team and hit the “edit skill timing” – Don’t be alarmed! It’s not as confusing at it looks.
The “first cast” on the left column is as it says, the first time you want your hero to cast their ultimate. – This is especially useful for “stalling” a hero’s ultimate to set them up for the longevity of a certain fight.
As you can probably guess, the column on the right is how often you want your hero to cast their ultimate after their first cast. – This is especially useful for slowing your hero’s down so they cast at a time you want, which we’ll get to shortly.
Before you input your times, hit the icon for each hero’s ultimate to see their initial recharge time (how long it takes for your hero to unleash their first ultimate) and their complete recharge time (how long each ultimate after the initial will take to recharge).
Note: Not understanding these times can lead to confusion if you input times that are faster than your hero can apply.
Here is an example of skill timers for a boss battle.
Red: Garius is my tank/main healer – his ultimate is a large AoE heal which is set to start at 14.9 seconds, which you can see if 0.1 seconds before the Vortex ability. This ensures your team is fully healed before they take a big smack from the Vortex.
Orange: Voresh is my “Witch’s Remains/Crown of the Unclean holder” – When he uses his ultimate he’ll apply a Defence Reduction on the Vortex, enabling my “DPS” units to do more damage.
Green: Main Character and Usha are my DPS units – they are set to 12.2 seconds, this will unleash their ultimates just after the Vortex Defence has been reduced, this ensures they’re applying as much damage as possible.
Blue: Frurbath is my “Attack Penalty” applier – He is set to 19.9 seconds to ensure he reduces the attack of the Vortex to ensure your team take reduced damage when taking a smack.
Note: The Skill Casting Interval is set to 20 seconds on everyone as the Vortex’s skills are on a 20 second rotation, this means your team will do their ultimates at the same point against the boss for every rotation. This is very important!
Time for some Advanced timings (specifically for the Vortex)
Red: Assume you want Garius to unleash his first ultimate at 14.9 seconds but his initial cast time is only 16 seconds – to counter this you can essentially skip the first round by adding 20 seconds to the 14.9 you want (20 seconds is a full Vortex rotation so adding that to the 14.9 is how you end up with 34.9)
Green: Your DPS units want to do as much damage as possible! To get this, you can set their Skill Interval to the Recharge Time of the hero with the highest Recharge Time.
Example – Voresh’s Recharge Time is 18 seconds, Main Character is 17.7 and Usha is 17 – from this you can see Voresh has the longest Recharge Time so use that 18 seconds as a base to get your DPS and Defence debuffer rotating as often as possible without falling out of sync with each other.
Blue: This one is important! The Vortex casts his ultimate at 20 seconds but due to an animation delay, it doesn’t land until 21.6 seconds
Because of this, we unleash Frurbath at 21.5 seconds which gives us an attack reduction lasting 10 seconds. What this means is your team is covered with an attack reduction for the ultimate hit on rotation one, and the first 2 abilities of the second rotation.
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