Amonra

It's downright insulting to suggest that any priest allowing a tick has screwed up. Maybe it is possible with the luxury of a sub 50ms latency, but I play with a 300-400 ms latency and it simply isn't possible to always avoid the first tick. Well, not unless I spend time doing nothing.

Gas nova is a 1.0 second cast time, not 1.5 seconds btw.

So the sequence is more like:

0.0 Gas Nova starts
0.4 My client registers that gas nova has started
0.7 My reaction time kicks in and I realise I need to dispel and start casting MD
X.X seconds lost to being in the GCD of the previous spell
0.7 + X I start casting MD
1.1 + X The server realises I have started casting MD
2.5 + X The server realises I have finished casting MD (I have a little spell haste)
3.0 First tick of gas nova.

If I lose more than 0.5 seconds due to being stuck in the GCD of my previous spell then I am not going to get the dispel off before the first tick. This would mean that 2/3 of the time I can't avoid the first tick.

Realistically my latency is often a little better, and I can often react slightly quicker so I can usually avoid the first tick about 50% of the time.

So unless a guild is lucky enough to have very low latency priests with snake-like reactions, then their strategy needs to assume that a tick of gas nova is going to happen fairly often. Either that or all priests have to stop casting when gas nova is ready which could mean anything up to 40 seconds of inactivity (I've seen a whole phase go past with no gas nova).