Ancient Memory turning off after spellcasting?

[SableShrike]

I'm using the 3.03 Beta patch.

 

Not sure if I've only started noticing this now, but playing my Chanter, every time I use a spell Ancient Memory turns off.  It then never restarts, even if I resume chanting.

 

I guess I'm wondering if this is normal behavior.  Seems like a total waste, if so.  You basically have to forego casting spells if you want the healing off Ancient Memory.

 

At this point, I think I'd be better off ignoring both that and Beloved Spirits and just taking the on-til-completion Veteran's Recovery.  Memory/Beloved would help with the initial part of the fight, I guess, but that's about it.

 

In a hard dragon fight where you could actually use the longterm regen, it's relegated worthless...

[colfirefly]

I'm using the 3.03 Beta patch.

 

Not sure if I've only started noticing this now, but playing my Chanter, every time I use a spell Ancient Memory turns off.  It then never restarts, even if I resume chanting.

 

I guess I'm wondering if this is normal behavior.  Seems like a total waste, if so.  You basically have to forego casting spells if you want the healing off Ancient Memory.

 

At this point, I think I'd be better off ignoring both that and Beloved Spirits and just taking the on-til-completion Veteran's Recovery.  Memory/Beloved would help with the initial part of the fight, I guess, but that's about it.

 

In a hard dragon fight where you could actually use the longterm regen, it's relegated worthless...

I first reported this bug back in 2.01 almost a year ago.  It seems there still has been no fix.

 

Chanters were meant to be party support but this makes them crappy Ciphers.

[Loren Tyr]

More generally, Ancient Memory stops whenever you stop chanting, so also if the chanter switches to another chant or becomes disabled in a way that prohibits chanting. 

 

There's also a time limit on it by the way, 45s base. Though that's also in the description when you look in the character sheet (not sure it's in the description of the talent when you take it, though), so this is presumably intentional.  Which seems fair enough (Constant Recovery has that as well, after all), but given the above bug (?) you're unlikely to get to that duration (especially since a chanter is likely to have higher intellect as well).

 

Implementationally speaking, I think the reason this happens is because the ability is marked as per encounter. I'd have to delve deeper into the exact mechanics to be sure, but how it seems to work is: the AM ability has a CasterIsChanting prerequisite, once this is met the ability activates and initiates the AttackPulseAOE that actually does the healing. The AM ability keeps checking the CasterIsChanting prerequisite periodically, and when this is not met removes the AttackPulseAOE and deactivates itself. Being a per encounter ability, it will then not activate itself a second time even if the CasterIsChanting prerequisite is again met. 

 

To be honest I suspect it isn't really possible to implement it correctly as a GenericAbility (which it is now, almost all abilities are). The finite duration gets in the way, there isn't an obvious way to keep track of the remaining duration across multiple activations, this would require a specialized class (like Carnage, for example). Which to be honest isn't prohibitively complicated in itself, but at this stage in the development/updating lifecycle it probably would be.

 

On the other hand, stripping out the duration and just letting Ancient Memory last the duration of combat should be straightforward. Removing the "per encounter" limitation should do it; I'm not sure the duration can technically be removed, but even if it can't this shouldn't be an issue since it should reset every time it reactivates. Though it would do to make sure either that the duration isn't visible in the description of AM, or that it is clear from the description that it restarts when you start a new chant.

 

Personally, I wouldn't think making the duration unlimited would make it overly powerful, so that would seem a reasonable solution. It certainly seems preferable to leaving it as is, because at the moment it just does too little (without telling the player).