HOWEVER.
Not all skills were meant to have lengthy cast times! Some skills were meant to be slow starting out and get faster (even instant!) later on, such as Arrow Vulcan, Slinging Arrow, Focused Arrow Strike, Falcon Assault, Magnus Exorcismus, etc. In fact, these skills are useless with fixed casting as they are either impossible to finish casting without phen, and their are outdamaged by even melee with their cast times as they are. I know for a fact Arrow Vulcan's 6 second base cast time wasn't because the skill was meant to always have a long cast bar. Its this way because the developers figured minstrel and gypsy would never have less than 120 or so dex and would require a really long base cast time on the skill in order for there to be any semblance of a cast time. Obviously it was meant so when you first got AV it had some room for improvement and you could work toward making it faster (or instant) as you leveled.
Now, skills are 20% fixed casting across the board without ANY thought as to modifying the base cast times of any skills whatsoever. Skills like M.E. with their, what, 10-second-ish cast time and AV's 6 second become extraordinarily long (try 2-4++ seconds minimum!!!) regardless of how much DEX you have, making the skills unusable. It is a sad state of affairs when a Gypsy is nothing but a dancer with +25% HP, leveling with double strafe just as she did for the LAST 99 levels.
jRO, being wise, unlike kRO, saw this. They also saw that in the 3rd class bracket, skills like SG, which were considered unbalanced with instant cast, were now not so useful anymore compared to 3rd class skills. An epiphany struck. Remove the fixed casting from all 2nd/trans job skills. Apply fixed casting only to 3rd job skills. So brilliant. So marvelous. So functional.
Please follow jRO's move.
Edited by Jaye, 13 September 2010 - 05:29 AM.