Undocumented Nerf to Phase Smash

Before the patch, I was able to swap legend mid hammer 3. A well timed one would allowed you to long range hydromancy/geomancy procs as well as a nice 1200 range condi transfer with pulsating pestilence. Now, the legend swap is "locked" and it would only happen when the channel is done. This kills the fun build I had as I would draw condis with pain absorption and transfer it with phase smash. ANET PLZ

It still works.

That is odds. It works in PVE but not in WvW. I just tested it now. I knew I wasn't going crazy.

I just tested and it works in WvW.

I'm testing right now and my F1 is indeed locked until the end of the animation. Seems to be working fine in PVE and PVP. I am trying to find if this is affected by traits. Are you sure it is working in WvW? As in swapping mid channel and not the end of it?

I think I found the bug which now affects PvE. You need to have Invocation as a traitline in order to legend swap mid Hammer 3. That seems like an odd thing and while I know Invocation is a good traitline, this seems like another instance of spaghetti coding.

I tried with/out invocation and it lets me legend swap during phase smash.

Humm, given that there's inconsistency in the results, maybe it's an issue of latency? Like a tiny lag spike or a lost packet that delays the input resulting in only being able to swap when you finish the cast? I haven't tested it myself though.

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Humm, given that there's inconsistency in the results, maybe it's an issue of latency? Like a tiny lag spike or a lost packet that delays the input resulting in only being able to swap when you finish the cast? I haven't tested it myself though.

I have tried swapping invoc in the same instance. Hitting F1 with my keybind, clicking it, and pressing the actual F1 key and I can't get my swap to go off mid cast. This is without invocation traited. I'm not sure how lag spike might affect this but the legend swap appears "downpressed" but the actual swap is locked. Only reason I'm ruling out lag is I can recreate this issue in all game modes and fix it by slotting in invocation. I don't have a screen recording so all I can do is hope if anyone else was having this issue to confirm.

If it happens with invocation traited, it strikes me that it's possible that one of the Invocation traits is making it possible for legend-swapping to occur mid-skill. Empty Vessel is probably a likely candidate, since stunbreaks with no casting time are pretty much always available: being a stunbreak might well be disabling whatever code normally makes it so you can't switch legend mid-skill.

For the sake of scienceTM i tried without invocation and indeed it won't swap stance mid cast (this both in wvw and pve), unfortunately i've exclusively played with invocation since the revenant was released so i'm not able to tell if it's a new bug or it's meant to be like this (because of the stunbreak trait).

(my humble opinion is that it's not a bug but an intended mechanic, but then again without an official dev answer is difficult to say)

@"Set.7461" said:I think I found the bug which now affects PvE. You need to have Invocation as a traitline in order to legend swap mid Hammer 3. That seems like an odd thing and while I know Invocation is a good traitline, this seems like another instance of spaghetti coding.

I believe the reason is: it's not a bug without invocation, it's an after-effect of having "legend swap is a stunbreak" which lets you use it during any animation

@wisebear.9176 said:For the sake of scienceTM i tried without invocation and indeed it won't swap stance mid cast (this both in wvw and pve), unfortunately i've exclusively played with invocation since the revenant was released so i'm not able to tell if it's a new bug or it's meant to be like this (because of the stunbreak trait).

(my humble opinion is that it's not a bug but an intended mechanic, but then again without an official dev answer is difficult to say)

Thank you for confirming. As others have mentioned, while I can see why Empty Vessel can attribute to this, I don't buy that as an after-effect or intended. I've tested this with Staff 4 and Staff 5 and it works as normal. You can Legend swap mid animation without Invocation traited. Staff 5 would be the best comparison as it both does damage/evade like Hammer 3. I've also tested this with Unrelenting Assault(also dmg/evade) and like Staff 5, you can swap legends mid animation.

I just want to remind everyone that Hammer 5 is also bugged. If you cancel the cast at about 50% with stow weapon, it will go on full cooldown. It will be put on the normal 4 second cooldown cancelling it under 50%.

Yes indeed it seems to be a problem only with Hammer 3, i did further tests and it still works with sword 3 aswell, but then i forgot to update the post :(For all we know it could be a side-effect of that stupid utility-swapping bug (which on itself i think it's derived by the fact that you can now change utilities even when on CD and something got broken in the process), let's see what happens after the mini balance patch today (in which i'm probably wrongly assuming they're gonna fix the bug), otherwise we can proudly add it to the already massive pile of revenant bugs (sigh...).

Update after the patch: problem still there, stance-swapping bug still there...