Game Mechanics: melee swing timers after casting

[kaev]

That patch note is not correct on the prepatch behavior either (not the first or last time a patchnote or in-game mechanic description was flat out wrong.)

If the spell cast completed before the melee delay expired you were golden. So, for instance, you could cast Yaulp between swings of a two-hander with no penalty unless you were lagging too badly.

Also, the melee timer reset ONLY if it expired with auto-attack active while you were casting. Competent hybrids knew that you could turn off auto-attack before starting your cast to avoid the timer reset. I was most certainly not the only person who worked this out by hand-parsing a bit of chat log, and lots of others learned about it from the discussion in the EQ newsgroup I frequented at the time. This was one of the tricks that differentiated competent hybrids from button mashers, the patch just made it less hassle and allowed the button mashers to get the same results without ever acquiring a clue about the (retarded) game mechanics.