If you are playing with 30 latency, then the game receives your inputs 30ms after you press them(not accounting for any local delay on your computer, of course), which means there's a 30ms window before a stun hits you where you can input it locally and think it'll hit, but you are actually stunned. Additionally, the stun will stop locking out your abilities locally 30ms after the stun has expired, so the fastest you will be able to have the server register an ability press will by 60ms after the stun expiring on the server.
Now take that up to 250 latency, and those values get pretty big, and pretty annoying.
What could Blizzard to do help make this less sucky?
Implement a hotkey option to enable or disable continuous input for every targeted ability.
What is continuous input? The way it works is if you are holding down the ability while it is unavailable, it will keep on trying to input that command. One example of this can be seen on Gul'dan's Drain Life, which is set to have continuous input enabled, so here are a couple of videos where I showcase how much of an effect this has, one on my local server where my ping is generally sub 30(it was around 22 when testing this), and then again, this time on the server that it put me on when I selected North America, which was US Central, where I get 230-240 ping
Australia Server
North Americas Server
And here are the numbers for that, in frames(recorded at 60fps using OBS), and in the windows timer:
usc: 100 frames for damage to happen(06.38? to 08.06?, or 1.68? seconds)
aus: 81 frames for damage to happen(11.10? to 12.45?, or 1.35? seconds)
for continous:
usc:23-24 frames for damage to happen(17.69? to 18.08? or 18.07? if bar, or 0.39? seconds)
aus:15-16 frames for damage to happen(22.43? to 22.70? or 22.69? if bar, or 0.27? seconds)
Time is from the moment the stun ends(frame 0) to the moment the a damage number first appears for that ability, or the time when the duration bar appears for drain life
So the difference between the two times for standard input is somewhere around 330ms, and the difference for continuous input is somewhere around 120ms. That's around 200ms difference, which the differences in my latency is about 210ms.
I possibly should have done more testing than just Gul'dan, but the heroes with continuous input targeted abilities aren't too common, there is Gul'dan with Drain Life, Junkrat with Frag Grenades, Zagara with Banelings, and Hogger with Ez Throw Dynamite.
It's also worth noting that continuous input "locks" where you are targeting till you release the button once it has actually started doing whatever you are trying to do - this is demonstrated best with Junkrat's Frag Grendes, where if you hold down the button, it'll fire them as rapidly as it can at wherever the first one was fired at. If you were to release the button between the charge cooldown timer(0.5s for Junkrat), then it would instead fire each grenade at a different location, assuming you moved your cursor between charges.
If this sounds familiar to you, it's because this isn't the first time I've asked for this. I last asked around 9 months ago, but it was amongst some other things that would be nice to see, but contained therein is a good example of that "locked target" side of things, where I gave this setting to Genji's Dragonblade Slash using custom Try Me Mode, note the location of the mouse cursor.
I know that implementing this wouldn't be easy, and I'd even imagine there are some abilities where this has some bugs relating to it(those that don't have their initial effect validated properly or aren't using UseValidators properly, like Imperius when he had that bug with Angelic Armaments that let you cast it several times by placing it in the command queue), but I don't think there are any major ones my testing with Deathwing, where his Incinerate is an instant ability with the continuous setting enabled, which you can see for yourself by picking him, being in Destroyer Form, holding down W, and then flipping between whatever other forms, and as long as you don't let go of W, he'll cast it when he gets back into Destroyer Form.
I also will admit I have no idea how involved this would or wouldn't be - the Quick Cast settings that we have now are something I'm glad to have. The closest comparison is the Quick Cast settings, and quickcast on release is something that can be force enabled, as seen with Hanzo's Storm Bow, which uses that system for aiming, but that is a setting done on the ability as a shared flag, whereas enabling continuous input is done as a flag on the command button for that ability.
