[Display bug] Alacrity affects GSF ability tooltips

[Gerfaut]

One of the changes that came with 3.0 is that alacrity now decreases ability cooldowns in the ground game. GSF tooltips are also affected by this. For instance, my gunnery commando gets 3% alacrity passively from armor-piercing cell. With no alacrity on her gear, the tooltips for distorsion field and barrel roll show a CD of 29 seconds. As before the patch, tooltips do not reflect cooldown reductions from talent trees.

 

I was curious whether this was just a display issue or whether it actually affected cooldowns during GSF games. In order to test this, I bought 7 alacrity enhancements from the Rishi commendation vendor and I crafted some green lvl 56 implants and an earpiece with alacrity. All together, this gave me an alacrity of 12% at lvl 60 (9% from gear and 3% from armor-piercing cell).

 

Originally, I wanted to test whether this affected BO, barrel roll, and distorsion field CDs on my Flashfire, but the matchmaking kept giving me really challenging games, and using a stopwatch while flying evasively in a scout against experienced opponents wasn't practical. Eventually, I was able to do some testing in a dronecarrier, measuring the cooldown of interdiction sentry drone (with the T1 talent reducing this CD from 90 sec to 60 sec).

 

On fleet, the displayed cooldown for interdiction sentry drone was 90 sec with 0 alacrity and 80 sec with 12% alacrity. In-game, with 12% alacrity, the measured cooldown was exactly 1:00 minute (60 seconds). This appears to indicate that alacrity has no effect during a GSF game, and that the cooldown reduction from the T1 talent is working as it should. Ideally, I should have done more testing to measure the CD with and without alacrity, and with and without T1 upgrade, but I didn't have the patience to test all these combination (I'm pretty sure my team lost that game because I was flying a barely-upgraded dronecarrier instead of one of my "good ships".)

 

TLDR: From the limited testing I have done, this appears to be a display bug with no effect on gameplay. It does, however, make tooltips confusing (or maybe I should say "even more confusing"). Two players with identical builds but different amounts of alacrity will have different cooldowns shown in their tooltips. It really makes me question whether these tooltips have any consistent relationship with reality.

Edited December 8, 2014 by Gerfaut

[Verain]

Nice catch! Internally (like in the XML), all the moves have always been modified by alacrity, but that has never mattered in game, nor in the tooltips.

 

Please post in the bug thread:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=7856166

 

 

Also, nice test to ensure that it doesn't take effect in game.

[SWCNT]

Nice catch! As more people critically analyze GSF and peel back the facade, the underlying structure of the game keeps getting worse.