Sometimes skills don't activate

I have a vindicator with a quirk when it comes to activating all its skills. Although this problem has happened with other classes for quite some time, this is the one I’m dealing with now.

On my toolbar, in order from 1-6 are:
Inquisitor Seal
Storm Totem
Wind devil
Rune of hagarrad
grasping vines
word of renewal

In combat, sometimes when I press 1,2,3,4,5,6 or just 1,2,3,4,5 very quickly, I will see the Rune of Hagarrad depressed, as it should, but then it pops up again without having been placed.

I do have mana and it isn’t recharging, those kinds of issues aren’t involved.

My thinking is that either it can’t be placed that soon after a previous skill. Maybe with a monster in the spot it makes it hard to place so many things at once.

I’ve had this happen with storm totem as well. The button depresses, then pops up again unused, but it’s mainly with rune.

I can’t recreate it on demand, but it happens fairly frequently during combat, maybe even 1/4 times.

Is this something others have encountered? I’d like to know what causes the problem in order to avoid it.

My guess is that you’re moving at the time and interrupted the casting animation.

That’s a good idea. I’ll see if that is the cause next time. Thanks.

Or you could be stunned, or under some other status effect.

Yes, stunned has prevented me from casting at times, but in these instances I’m able to cast all the others and I’m initiating the attack, so I’m not under any status effect.

I think moving is the best explanation, I’m always moving around. It could be that the other skills I used aren’t affected by movement but rune and storm totem are, that’s why those two seem to be the problems.

On the other hand, if they can be cast while running, then that wouldn’t be it. I’m not where I can test it now.

There’s an issue with not only Grim Dawn but even other games, no matter if offline or not, where pressing buttons too fast makes the game forget wtf just happened and will skip few buttons. Very often, if I press buff buttons too quickly (even if staying and only pressing on keyboard) the game skips 1 - 3 buffs.

Yes, in another game I played, minions of mirth, the buffer would fill up too. I’m not sure that would it in this case though, since it is mainly the rune that has the problem, sometimes storm totem, but never the others. If it were a buffer issue, wouldn’t it happen to all of the skills equally?

Not always. There’s never exact time span between your clicks. You may press your second button after a 0.41 sec delay, third 0.32 and fourth at 0.67 sec delay. If you could (by some out-of-this-planet might) press the buttons at the same time, it would work equally for everything.

I realized that I often press 4 and 5 way too fast, therefore I often miss buffs in these slots.

can it be cast-speed related?

It should be. I once played something with just 105% cast speed and it was so hard for me to chain skills in cruci where there’s a lot of slows.

I can confirm that cast speed is important too. My sharpshooter using Inquisitor Seal sometimes can’t recast the Seal in crucible because the cast animation is too slow. But stacking cast speed instead of other offensive tools is way too dangerous, so I decided to learn how to play with such low cast speed: making pauses, timing casts etc.

Lmao. What I do is I hammer away at the key until I see what I-want-to-happen happen. And once that happens, I go off to hammer away at the other thing.

That’s what he said

there’s a internal CD for casting I suppose. It’s not instant. And certain abilities do have a long animation, for instance with toggles, it’s impossible to cast one right after Possession.

Also with seal and runes, certain terrain can rarely prevent casting

I don’t wear any equipment, so it wouldn’t be casting speed.

I tried tests where I’d move the moment I clicked on rune of hagarrad or tried to cast it while running, but I couldn’t recreate it. Maybe it is a terrain thing or casting it on top of a monster causes problems.

I’m really not sure. I guess if no one else is having this trouble, I’m just doing something weird.

I think I found two possible reasons. It could be I am targeting things far away, and if that range is too far for a skill, it won’t execute. The other idea is possibly I press the next button down before the previous has activated. The second might be more likely, since if I press the buttons slower, I am noticing the problem doesn’t happen, or both could be separate problems.