Ability Stalling Guide (Text)

Welcome to this guide on ability stalling. Please refer to the timestamps in the description if you wish to jump to a specific part of the video. While watching the video, please take note of the on-screen keyboard as well as my binds for my autoattack spell and entangle, which I will be using to release stalled melee abilities.

Simply put, ability stalling is the act of activating an ability outside of your weapon’s max cast distance. For melee weapons, this is 1 square excluding halberds. For all magic weapons, this distance is 8 squares. Ranged weapons have a multitude of max cast distances ranging from 5 to 7 to 9.

When you use an ability whilst outside of your max cast distance, your character will move within range before using the ability. This is the simplest form of ability stalling and offers no control as to when the ability is cast.

Clicking the ground under you or away from your target while using an ability out of range will cause the ability to become “held,” so to speak. This allows the ability to be released when you click your target again.

Building on this, held stalled abilities can be released on the same tick as other abilities or on different targets by using a targettable combat spell from the action bar. Melee and ranged weapons have the obvious issue of not being able to cast autoattack spells, which means you will need to cast a non-damaging debuff such as entangle or vulnerability to release the ability. Note that if you are clicking to switch targets you must click and cast entangle on the same tick, otherwise you will simply auto the new target and lose your stall. This however can be circumvented by using target cycling to switch targets.

When using ranged or magic, it is not always practical to stall by moving out of your cast distance simply because it is so long. In everyday use it is much more efficient to equip your mainhand weapon and an enhanced excalibur or other melee offhand. Abilities used with a melee offhand must be cast in melee distance, which means that using them from a range will stall them. From there, you can equip your offhand or 2h and release the stalled ability as normal.

Normally, using an ability after stalling will cause you to lose your stall. This however is not the case with bladed dive, which can be used freely between stall and release. This can be useful for either keeping yourself in combat, as stalling an ability will not keep you in combat, as well as building adrenaline if you are not diving with mobile.

The aforementioned problem also means that sigil abilities must be used after you release your stall. For applications where you must stack 2 abilities with a sigil activation, this means that you’ll have to release your first ability, activate sigil, then second ability in that order in the same tick.
Lastly, stalling can be used in some niche ways to apply certain ability effects. The most notable of these includes stalling meteor strike to get a longer crit adren buff, as the 30 second timer only starts when the ability is cast, not activated. Stalling can also be used to cast incendiary shot with mechanized chinchompas, effectively multiplying incendiary shot’s effectiveness by a factor equal to the number of targets that can be chinned, since the incend effect is applied to each of them. This allows for ridiculous amounts of aoe damage and is commonly used in solo rots or chinning at aod.

Stalling abilities is a very useful skill that has many applications. These include talking advantage of periods where bosses are invulnerable, such as Telos phase transitions, bypassing ability cooldowns, such as stalling a storm shard on a dummy before releasing it on phase 1 Araxxor, or dealing high amounts of burst damage like stalling abilities like hammer or hurricane in Berserk at Vorago and many other bosses.