Official Feedback Thread for Prioritization of Combat Animations

ZOS_GinaBruno

In the Thieves Guild update, we wanted to make it more clear which attacks players are using, while preserving the responsiveness and feel of the combat system. So, we started with a simple premise: if an ability is successful, you should be able to see it impact (or launch, in the case of projectiles). Now, every successful attack will display until the moment of impact/launch. Instead of canceling the impact/launch of the first ability, we now obscure the first few milliseconds of the interrupting ability.



The above examples show a Heavy Attack interrupted with an instant ability. The green part is what you see, and the red part is what is not shown. In the first example, you can see the way it is currently on the Live megaservers and has been since launch. The Heavy Attack can be interrupted at almost any time during the wind-up. At the time it is interrupted, the strike happens, but it is invisible because it is obscured by the beginning of the interrupting ability. The second example shows our current method of handling interruptions. Instead of obscuring the strike/launch, we show it up until that point of impact/firing, opting to instead obscure the (less important) first few frames of the interrupting ability.

We believe this visual adjustment meets the criteria we set when we were designing this improvement:

• A successfully-fired ability should not be visually obscured; if an attack lands or an ability is launched, we should show it happening
• DPS and other playstyles should not be adversely affected
• The game’s “feel” should not change

One side effect of this change is that there are shorter (or in some cases, no) blend times to smooth the transitions depending on exactly when you choose to fire an interrupting ability. When you’re dealing in milliseconds and giving players that kind of freedom , you sometimes have to forego perfectly smooth transitions in order to make sure the player is receiving proper feedback and telegraphing to other players exactly what they are choosing to do. Having said that, if you find particularly egregious combinations (ability X interrupted with ability Y), please let us know; there may be some things we can do to help smooth them out.

As always, we welcome your feedback. In fact, it will be instrumental in informing us how to proceed with this improvement. Our internal testing has proven to be very successful, but there are so many different playstyles, builds and rotations, we want to make sure we try to implement this in a way that feels good in all cases and doesn’t need to be taught through a tutorial; exactly what you see is what is happening.

HeroOfNone

Thanks for the clarification @ZOS_GinaBruno

Enodoc

People are saying that combat feels slower; does anyone think it's actually slower, or that it's just a result of the change in animation cancelling? (The fact that they're now cancelling the beginning of the second skill animation instead the end of the first.)

Tankqull

this creates a horribly wonky ability usage if you are not animation canceling...

zerosingularity

I noticed the following:

Light Attack - Skill is essentially the same as on live in terms of performance. (Main DPS animation cancel.)

Skill - Dodge Roll or Block or Bash. Here is the biggest change, part of the skill MUST fire before you can dodge roll/block/bash, and if you do so too early, no skill goes off. Not a big effect in PvE, but I can see this being big in PvP. Many will not like this. I think it is alright, but this is where people think combat may feel clunky or slower. Skill - Weapon Swap is NOT affected. (This is a good thing, it would majorly affect DPS if it was.)

Also, sometimes after weapon swapping or running, skills won't activate. Dunno how to reproduce this, but it is an issue and I dunno if anyone else noticed this.

efster

Occasionally, my one-handed sword heavy attacks are not connecting at all even though I am right in a mob's face. Not trying to do anything fancy, just plain heavy attacks, and there's no contact -- it's like my sword just goes through the mobs. No damage done, no stamina return, so I'd class it as both a DPS loss and a change in the game's "feel".

Casdha

Does this apply to enemies as well?

If so, this could explain what I was trying to describe in this thread:

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/245364/visual-cues-are-not-consistent-thieves-guild-2-3

spoqster

While dueling it sometimes felt like I didn't see all attacks by my opponent. I remember one particular fight where I didn't quite grasp why my health went down, and the death recap listed 4 Wrecking Blows.

This is no exact feedback as these fights happen very quickly. Maybe I just missed them. But it's highly unlilely that I missed 4 WB animations.

Also, I am on a Mac. Could be a client issue. The new Mac client is still very buggy overall.

fred.thomsonb16_ESO

The diagram is incorrect as far as wind up can be completely negated in the current live iteration outside of skills with a cast time. (except for opening attacks between combos)
Now we are stuck with skills we can only cancel by weapon swap and dodge roll, heavy attacks can still be wound up in the release of a skill animation in PTS.

NewBlacksmurf

It does feel different. Noticeably different as in I thought my PC couldn't handle the FPS but now I see it's just the animation changes. This was mostly tested on levels 4-10.
Now I'll say I think it's better for gameplay with the new changes but I'm a PvEer.

Thanks ZOS

FYI: If you truly intended it to not feel any different, you failed miserably but again...while it can cause me to not do something as fast, for PvE it's better. In that context better means it makes the game harder and not a face roll. Because it's harder, the PvE difficulty feel adjusted and may cause out cry for changes.

Ref to Animation cancelling:
-It does not seem to work as drawn because you are not displaying The actual reality of animation cxling in your diagram before or after. You guys have to test both normal and animation cxling and show both diagrams. Because you're not removing animation ccling what has happened is that heavy attacks take a lot long to complete and as such animation cxling will become a l2p requirement for competitive PvP and PvE.


YOURE MAKING the game for ELITISM and not for an EVEN PLAYING field as far as animations.

remilafo

bookmark for later read

Aunatar

fred.thomsonb16_ESO wrote: »

The diagram is incorrect as far as wind up can be completely negated in the current live iteration outside of skills with a cast time. (except for opening attacks between combos)
Now we are stuck with skills we can only cancel by weapon swap and dodge roll, heavy attacks can still be wound up in the release of a skill animation in PTS.

THIS.
In fact, the issue is not about the animation happening between the light/heavy attacks and the skill, but with the animation of the skill. Animation canceling as most of the player intend is related to the skill's animation (for example, skill+bash), this is the real change we are noticing.
What is bothering the community is about what ZOS said long ago about this topic: they said animation canceling (intended as stopping the animation before its end in order to deal faster dmg or to proceed with something else, such as interrupting an enemy) was fine and working as intended, it was also a matter of player's skills.
I personally think animation canceling is one of the things that distinguish skilled and trained players from the others, this is just one of the changes made to help casual players to compete against assiduous ones, such as lowered AvA ranks requirements etc. Poor design, all the non-casual will eventually quit: many already have or will with the upcoming patch, and these are not rumors but fact

Emma_Overload

OK, after extensive testing of medium attack weaving with both instant damage spells and spells with cast times, here are my initial findings:

1) Weapon attacks (e.g. Heavy attacks) DO have a higher animation priority, which is not a surprise because of what the OP told us.

2) As far as I can tell, successful projectile attacks are always shown flying through the air, even if the animation for the spell cast was overridden by the animation for the heavy attack.

3) The timing of instant damage spells woven with medium attacks has not changed adversely at all. It seems like it might even be better.

4) HOWEVER... the timing of hard cast spells (e.g. unprocced Crystal Fragments) HAS been affected. If you were accustomed to holding down the attack button (prime your medium attack) immediately after activating a cast spell, you will find that your cast spell will FAIL to complete!

The solution to point #4 is to wait until the cast time of the spell (1 second in my example) is complete or nearly complete before holding down the left mouse button to initiate your heavy/medium attacks. Without going into a lot of detail, I found that this does not have any adverse effect on DPS as long as you can adapt your timing to the new system.

Overall, as a diehard attack weaver and animation canceler, I found no major reason to be distressed by the changes. Most of the changes seem pretty positive to me. As I can continue testing, however, I reserve the right to change my mind

WillhelmBlack

So I just tried some duels, Magicka Templar. Yeah I had crap gear but I'm used to that.

I got wrecked. Can't animation cancel heals anymore. This is vital for Templar! We have no shield, no defence skills. The template just felt completely unresponsive and just dire. Combat feels dire! Block cancelling is a life jacket for Templar, you either give us defensive skills or we stand in the background healing.

I stand at the front of my group, I take the flack, if I can't do that I'll just stop playing the game. It's what I enjoy.

I'm liking the changes to my Templar, really, but this change to animation cancelling just broke PvP. You've actually managed to dumb it down further than 1.7, which I thought wouldn't be possible but you proved me wrong big time.

ZOS_EdLynch

fred.thomsonb16_ESO wrote: »

The diagram is incorrect as far as wind up can be completely negated in the current live iteration outside of skills with a cast time. (except for opening attacks between combos)

Thank you for the feedback! To help clarify, the illustration is specific to heavy attacks interrupted mid-wind-up by an instant ability. However, in the case of an instant ability being interrupted, just remove the wind-up and the remainder of the image is correct -- the instant ability will display up until the moment of impact/launch. That second, interrupting ability still happens the moment you activate it, the only difference is that the beginning few frames of that animation will be obscured by the impact/launch of the preceding one. Conversely, on the Live megaserver, the impact/launch of the first ability is obscured by the first few frames of the second one.

So, while it's true that you can no longer entirely hide a successful ability with another, the way the game is reacting to your input should be unchanged. If you find that not to be the case, please let us know your rotation and we'll investigate what is happening.

ZOS_EdLynch

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

4) HOWEVER... the timing of hard cast spells (e.g. unprocced Crystal Fragments) HAS been affected. If you were accustomed to holding down the attack button (prime your medium attack) immediately after activating a cast spell, you will find that your cast spell will FAIL to complete!

The solution to point #4 is to wait until the cast time of the spell (1 second in my example) is complete or nearly complete before holding down the left mouse button to initiate your heavy/medium attacks. Without going into a lot of detail, I found that this does not have any adverse effect on DPS as long as you can adapt your timing to the new system.

We'll have to do some testing on our end but if this kind of ability queuing is something you can do on the live megaserver, this may be a legitimate PTS bug. Any change that is more impactful than a visual difference should be reported as a bug.

Ffastyl

Dual wield Heavy Attack > Flurry (or Blinding Flurry in my case) has some weirdness to it. In third person, the new animation priority works as expected and is effectively the same as Live. In first person things get buggy... The first rotation of these moves handles normally, but subsequent rotations has Flurry almost failing to cast. The animation for Flurry does not play nor does the audio, yet no basic attack is charging or executing, indicating we are in the "Flurry" state. Then the last hit of the attack lands on the target with audio but no animation and the queued Heavy Attack begins to charge. This behaviour continues until the last rotation, or when Flurry is the killing blow. Here Heavy Attack > Flurry plays normally, like the first execution, except Flurry is stabbing at nothing halfway through it's animation (like it does on Live when target dies mid ability).

It is unclear whether the full damage from Flurry is applied altogether with the last hit or skipped, but the SCT implies the first five hits (the DoT part) are skipped during this animation bug. I have to say it is unclear despite having SCT toggled on because Console UI elements easily obscure the numbers from SCT in first person, so I was looking specifically for the color indication of DoT damage, which I failed to see. I was not tracking the actual numbers due to the aforementioned UI conflict.

Xantaria

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

In the Thieves Guild update, we wanted to make it more clear which attacks players are using, while preserving the responsiveness and feel of the combat system. So, we started with a simple premise: if an ability is successful, you should be able to see it impact (or launch, in the case of projectiles). Now, every successful attack will display until the moment of impact/launch. Instead of canceling the impact/launch of the first ability, we now obscure the first few milliseconds of the interrupting ability.



The above examples show a Heavy Attack interrupted with an instant ability. The green part is what you see, and the red part is what is not shown. In the first example, you can see the way it is currently on the Live megaservers and has been since launch. The Heavy Attack can be interrupted at almost any time during the wind-up. At the time it is interrupted, the strike happens, but it is invisible because it is obscured by the beginning of the interrupting ability. The second example shows our current method of handling interruptions. Instead of obscuring the strike/launch, we show it up until that point of impact/firing, opting to instead obscure the (less important) first few frames of the interrupting ability.

We believe this visual adjustment meets the criteria we set when we were designing this improvement:

• A successfully-fired ability should not be visually obscured; if an attack lands or an ability is launched, we should show it happening
• DPS and other playstyles should not be adversely affected
• The game’s “feel” should not change

One side effect of this change is that there are shorter (or in some cases, no) blend times to smooth the transitions depending on exactly when you choose to fire an interrupting ability. When you’re dealing in milliseconds and giving players that kind of freedom , you sometimes have to forego perfectly smooth transitions in order to make sure the player is receiving proper feedback and telegraphing to other players exactly what they are choosing to do. Having said that, if you find particularly egregious combinations (ability X interrupted with ability Y), please let us know; there may be some things we can do to help smooth them out.

As always, we welcome your feedback. In fact, it will be instrumental in informing us how to proceed with this improvement. Our internal testing has proven to be very successful, but there are so many different playstyles, builds and rotations, we want to make sure we try to implement this in a way that feels good in all cases and doesn’t need to be taught through a tutorial; exactly what you see is what is happening.

Dislike it a lot. Blockcanceling got screwed.

MikeB

ZOS_EdLynch wrote: »

show previous quotes

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

4) HOWEVER... the timing of hard cast spells (e.g. unprocced Crystal Fragments) HAS been affected. If you were accustomed to holding down the attack button (prime your medium attack) immediately after activating a cast spell, you will find that your cast spell will FAIL to complete!

The solution to point #4 is to wait until the cast time of the spell (1 second in my example) is complete or nearly complete before holding down the left mouse button to initiate your heavy/medium attacks. Without going into a lot of detail, I found that this does not have any adverse effect on DPS as long as you can adapt your timing to the new system.

We'll have to do some testing on our end but if this kind of ability queuing is something you can do on the live megaserver, this may be a legitimate PTS bug. Any change that is more impactful than a visual difference should be reported as a bug.

So the only changes made were visual? Meaning you can take dmg from an ability before you even see it cast? Because if animations are queueing to be shown, and what you said in bold is correct, there should be no change in putting out dmg at the same rate as live. The only difference being animations are playing out, mostly, completely.

Jeckll

I played quite a bit with the new system and like others said before, light attack cancel is kind of the same but block cancel feels really bad. If possible, I would love to keep the current system please.

JackDaniell

Hello, just wanted to talk about a few things regarding these changes.

Roll cancels and swap cancels seem to work the same as on live. But something has gone horibly wrong with block canceling.

Light attack > Skill > block

On live you can block cancel all skills to get them to fire a few milisecconds faster than before, but on the pts this is no longer the case. Some skills still function the same when block cancelled (channeled focus) while others can no longer be block canceled (purifying ritual, binding javelin, executioner)

Please tell me this is a bug Zeni because as it stands right now my Templar is feeling very clunky on the pts without the ability to properly block cancel half my skills.

Emma_Overload

JackDaniell wrote: »

Hello, just wanted to talk about a few things regarding these changes.

Roll cancels and swap cancels seem to work the same as on live. But something has gone horibly wrong with block canceling.

Light attack > Skill > block

On live you can block cancel all skills to get them to fire a few milisecconds faster than before, but on the pts this is no longer the case. Some skills still function the same when block cancelled (channeled focus) while others can no longer be block canceled (purifying ritual, binding javelin, executioner)

Please tell me this is a bug Zeni because as it stands right now my Templar is feeling very clunky on the pts without the ability to properly block cancel half my skills.

I'm curious, why would you need to block cancel Javelin or Executioner? Both are instant cast, so the next action you initiate (e.g. another ability) is going to start immediately at the end of the 1 second GCD anyway. Even with cast spells, my experience has been that block canceling will shorten the animation time if the animation lasts longer than the actual (tooltip stated) cast time, but it will NOT shorten the underlying cast time. For example, you can block cancel something like Wrecking Blow, but doing so won't let you cast more Wrecking Blows back to back in the same amount of time.

DschiPeunt

The new system feels much slower in my experience and does not look smooth anymore, but really weird. My character does some weird movements with my usual middle-attack-weaving rotation. This may partly be caused by lag, but I think it is mostly caused by the new system.
I would think that you want to change the system for PvP, because it does not really matter so much in PvE.
But the way you did this does not feel right to me. It makes my DPSing much less enjoyable. So pleeeeaaase take a look at it again, so that it looks more like before and feels as smooth as before and does not look as my character is having a stroke.

WillhelmBlack

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

show previous quotes

JackDaniell wrote: »

Hello, just wanted to talk about a few things regarding these changes.

Roll cancels and swap cancels seem to work the same as on live. But something has gone horibly wrong with block canceling.

Light attack > Skill > block

On live you can block cancel all skills to get them to fire a few milisecconds faster than before, but on the pts this is no longer the case. Some skills still function the same when block cancelled (channeled focus) while others can no longer be block canceled (purifying ritual, binding javelin, executioner)

Please tell me this is a bug Zeni because as it stands right now my Templar is feeling very clunky on the pts without the ability to properly block cancel half my skills.

I'm curious, why would you need to block cancel Javelin or Executioner? Both are instant cast, so the next action you initiate (e.g. another ability) is going to start immediately at the end of the 1 second GCD anyway. Even with cast spells, my experience has been that block canceling will shorten the animation time if the animation lasts longer than the actual (tooltip stated) cast time, but it will NOT shorten the underlying cast time. For example, you can block cancel something like Wrecking Blow, but doing so won't let you cast more Wrecking Blows back to back in the same amount of time.

Some people can break free faster than you can complete the animation of Javelin. Sometimes it needs to cancelled to cue up another attack. Some can animation cancel a heal or simply roll dodge away faster than an Executioner because they know it's coming. The faster you can do it, the better. It's skill.

I've seen guys roll and dodge and wreck and have fun going from one kill to another. Fluidity. Sorcs being Sorcs spreading fights and angering pugs. Templars and DK's stood on a flags getting beat on and on and on and on, block cancelling heals and shields. All of these, weren't your average players mind. These were guys pushing the limits of the game...can't do that anymore. Not since 1.7 and especially not in this update incoming. Those are the guys I and many have become by now. We mastered the game.

If this goes live, I'm done. Just can't be bothered, I'll find another. Sick of the dumbing down.

Stikato

I think the changes are great. Holding block shouldn't make animations fire off faster. If the spells need to be sped up then that should be a balance change made by adjusting the cast time. Not by requiring people to do keyboard/mouse gymnastics (aka programming their Naga)

Callidus_Est

Once again, ZOS pleases the casuals and the QQ'ers. I hate this new system, I miss animation cancelling with block. It was the trademarks of a skilled player, never a sign of a potato player who is cheating. All the good players animation cancelled, while bad players never did.

Zenimax screwed one of the games only awesome systems because of the QQ spam on the forums. Combat feels sluggish now.

Anhedonie

Destruction staff light attack is awful. Animation is bad and often locks me out. It's too slow and abrupt at the same time.
Combat feels very unresponsive and counterintuitive.

Recremen

This change is consummately delightful. Everything objectionable about animation canceling (the obfuscation of abilities) has been smoothly changed while preserving the base mechanics. Takes a little getting used to if you're used to timing things based on the old visual feedback, but that comes with time. Another win for the design team this patch!

Manoekin

My only complaint is if I cancel the animation with a weapon swap, it will often swap twice. Although, it could just be swapping twice randomly.

silky_soft

Callidus_Est wrote: »

Once again, ZOS pleases the casuals and the QQ'ers. I hate this new system, I miss animation cancelling with block. It was the trademarks of a skilled player, never a sign of a potato player who is cheating. All the good players animation cancelled, while bad players never did.

Zenimax screwed one of the games only awesome systems because of the QQ spam on the forums. Combat feels sluggish now.

Disagree, all the bad players seem to not be able to adapt to the change. Shield and heal spammers are hit the hardest. Just like what happened dodge and block changes. Your lazy cheese play style is over.

WillhelmBlack

Manoekin wrote: »

My only complaint is if I cancel the animation with a weapon swap, it will often swap twice. Although, it could just be swapping twice randomly.

and the skill you bar swap cancelled sometimes doesn't even go off.