So what is the difficulty people have with light attack weaving?

CrashTest

I don't have any problems doing it. I parse 130k+. I just hate it because I don't like pressing LA then a skill. I just want to press a skill and be done with it then move on in combat, not micromanage animation canceling.

Dysturbed

I am 70 years old and use the mouse in my left hand (yes I am left handed) I use the arrow keys and the numeric key pad with the right had and don't have much control of little finger and one next to it due to nerve damage. Never have got light weaving to work. Oakensoul has been my life saver...

KlauthWarthog

It is just busywork. Yes, I have humped dummies long enough to be able to do it, but this does not really change the fact that I am having to metronome the exact same key every second simply... because.

Ingenon

I parse higher on the trial dummy with my 1 bar oak sorc than I do with LA weaving. I'm on PS/NA, so installing combat add-ons is not an option. Not a problem for me since I can still complete group and solo content with my 1 bar oak sorc.

cyberjanet

Dunno, I just can't do it. I *think* I'm casting light attacks, but they don't show up in the parse. I'm just useless. Just lately i've been using LA helper, and even when all I am doing is light attacks - no skills- it shows me as doing no light attacks at all.
Sigh.

Daoin

most of my light attacks are due to the enemy being at low health and start spamming the attack button for a faster death in turn accidental light attacks hit between skills. no problem with it.

spartaxoxo

It's physically painful if I do it for too long and sometimes it hurts to much to do at all.

haelgaan

last MMO i played was EQ2, where the equivalent of a light attack was automated and provided a low level of automatic damage. the focus for much of your dps was always on picking the skills/spells to use, plus the effects of the gear you wore/used.

playing skyrim, i either used my bow or swung my sword or cast a spell, not doing both at the same time.

ESO combat is rather different from everyth8ing else. i expected that i would either do an attack or cast a spell in a tick - and if i had to block or bash, it would cancel either of those out entirely. the idea that i can light attack and cast a spell and bash all in a single tick is straight up lunacy.

unfortunately, it makes high dps in this game all about physical dexterity and click speed (a "skilled" player can still do amazingly well in basic gear), instead of gearing and mechanics.

Dr_Con

Treeshka wrote: »

It varies from medical conditions to hardware limitations, and personal reasons such as being boring or being unrealistic. Sometimes your location to server as well since high ping might be a bit problematic for weaving.

pretty much every response here.

this game has no toggle systems to enable auto light attacking as a passive, and takes it a step further by giving the player the choice to light or heavy attack. Another user above explained their experience in EQ2 where basically the only reason in EQ/EQ2 to auto attack was to get extra procs off on an enchantment, in ESO the item set procs are sometimes activated due to light attacks or heavy attacks. I dislike this design but there's really nothing to do about it without a massive redesign of many of the sets.

Heavy attacking as a main damage source has been encouraged by many low-mid tier raiding groups as a staple and pushed onto players who self-identify as "old" or "disabled" without any plans for them to try out any other builds. When speaking with many of these "old" and "disabled" players in-game I found that no one ever bothered to try and get them onto any other type of build, and that experienced players are more than happy to work with these players to come up with individualized plans to improve their DPS, while few must keep using the HA builds.

Light attacking between ability uses is a difficult concept to teach and the game does not try to teach players how to do it, or quantify the benefits of doing so in any meaningful way. Users are left to their own devices after being introduced via quick tooltips that go away after being shown once.

In reality, every player should appreciate other playstyles and know when it is appropriate/inappropriate to use certain builds. And ZOS needs to stop making it so that people need 10k hours to understand the DPS system in this game & how to respond when major changes happen.

IMO this combat guide really needs to be explained better in-game, with an advanced tutorial at one of the Fighter's Guild/Mage's Guild locations.
https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/newplayerguide/combat

Kalevalatar

My ping is usually 160-190 and even higher when doing events with multiple people around. This causes just minor lag, but just enough for skills not always firing, weapon bar won't switch or when I try to light attack between skills my char ends up just standing there like frozen. It's not huge delay, but juuust enough to stop the flow between skills, light attacks and bar switches.

NoSoup

Ping - once you get over 200ms (which is a fairly decent chunk of the player base) LA weaving becomes RNG. Since update 38 its been counter productive for me on duel wield setups as too often you get stuck with one arm up and unable to fire any skills until you either roll dodge or bar swap, so generally dps is higher if you ignore the LA weaving.

FantasticFreddie

Nerve damage from an old injury makes it challenging-- It's why I don't parse much and play support roles less reliant on perfect weaving

vsrs_au

For me it's (a) painful after a while and (b) very difficult with my average 390 network ping (especially if the ping fluctuates).

disintegr8

Like some others, high ping (lag) means that not everything you press actually activates (it often takes 3 or 4 activations to get my Ulti to fire). I actually try and do a light attack in between skill activations but when one, or sometimes both, of them doesn't fire, I'm wasting my time.

Also, not every fight is the same and doing the exact same thing for every situation is just robotic.

Lumenn

I think all the answers I'd give have been covered. I can do, have done it, but each year I have fewer or shorter "good" times with my hands(no RA, no nerve damage, just decades of working with my hands in all weather catching up to me. Regular old wear and tear)

For the most part though I find it incredibly....boring. I began to call it the "Finger Waltz' some years ago and it just stuck. 1,2,3,4, 1,2,3,4. Enough dps in many (though not all,)cases who cares about mechanics? It's worse than playing a bard on original EQ. (In my opinion). Some love that type of play, but it's not my thing

UGotBenched91

I’m just not good at it. I’ve been practicing though. I’d rather just focus on mechanics and what skills to use than forcing a “glitch” to get higher damage. I wish it wasn’t a thing but it is what it is.

Dagoth_Rac

LA Weaving is kind of cool. In the way some lightning fast finger tapped Eddie Van Halen guitar solo is cool. But a Van Halen song that was nothing but relentless guitar solos and scale runs would get old fast. Those guitar solos are a brief, exciting detour. But what people really remember are the grooves and melodies and harmonies.

The weaving focus and "actions-per-minute" focus of combat in ESO feels like some song that is all guitar solo. Technically and almost athletically impressive, but kind of hollow and lacking heart.

Paralyse

The crazy thing is that the only reason weaving exists at all is because the devs wanted the combat in the game to "feel" like an Elder Scrolls game, so made light attacks and heavy attacks part of how damage works.

The problem occurred when they couldn't come up with a queueing (global cooldown) system that would work with multiple simultaneous inputs -- in other words, you cannot light or heavy attack AND cast an ability at the same time. One event has to occur before the other. Other MMO's such as WoW avoid this issue by making weapon attacks automatic as long as the player is in range of the enemy, meaning they do not have to be queued, so the action queue only has to look at skills/abilities, which is much easier to deal with.

In order to make combat in ESO "feel" like the single-player games, they made light attacks and heavy attacks a much larger part of player DPS than they were on other MMO's of the time. Even WoW had toggle-on or toggle-off auto-attack as far back as 2004, but an auto-attack system would be incompatible with multiple types of weapon attacks (light/heavy) so to preserve that "feel" would not have been possible with auto-attacking. So we ended up with the current system in ESO that we still use today.

This is not a problem in, say, Skyrim, where you can make builds that don't even use weapons, or only use weapons for things like backstab/sneak attacks, or builds with a shield but no weapon where you are using the shield to block while casting spells with your other hand, all of which are perfectly viable ways to kill things. Such builds are not viable in ESO because ESO does not support weaponless builds.

master_vanargand

ESO only accepts skill inputs just before the 1 second global cooldown is over which is very frustrating.
If ESO's combat to the fighting game, it's like constantly performing combos with difficult input timing.
I like ESO's fighting game-like combat, but I hate that there are so few ways to break opponent's block in PvP.

Finedaible

Server lag and fps lag primarily from my experience; Light-attack weaving would be fine otherwise but the difficulty for most players often stems from both of those being wildly inconsistent from day-to-day. Some days I can definitely notice that there is server lag at play even in overland content. It also doesn't help that certain skill animations just aren't 'weave-friendly' to begin with. Your refresh rate can greatly affect your input delay in ESO too, so if you play on anything lower than 60fps then god help you. It is probably why most PvPers will recommend turning most settings to the lowest quality even if they have a beast of a gaming pc just so that they have a little more consistency and less frame drops. All of these problems exacerbate each other and result in there being no consistent rhythm to weaving. This is why heavy attack builds were so popular.

rpa

Lag. I'd very much prefer my key presses go in fifo buffer to skills and actions not triggering at all. Canceling a skill not also canceling output is a bug in core design of the game.

MrGarlic

300 ping and varying above and below by about 50 ms either way makes light attack weaving unreliable for me. Probably some jitter there too and a few lost packets.

I still LA weave, but I have to be slow and methodical and lose much DPS compared to someone with better, faster internet.

Thats life when you live on an island in the south pacific at the bottom of the world.

Muizer

Not sure it's been mentioned yet, but for me it seems to depend on the skill animation and sound. In general I'd say I can LA weave quite well on melee and bow single target, direct damage skills. Perhaps because those skills are targeting in the same way as the light and heavy attacks.I find it much harder to combine with e.g. self buffs , healing or AoE attacks, And with staves in general I'm hopeless.

Having said all that, I don't feel the lack of weaving is what's holding my DPS back. It's something that probably could add a fraction, when seeing the numbers I'm missing out on a multiplier, lol. I mean, I couldn't think of a load-out that would add up to 80k + dps. All the dots I can think of wouldn't come close and with direct single target damage I'm stuck at 20-30k at best, weaving included. (edit, that's in regular overland, not a target dummy. never tried that).

fizzylu

Sometimes light attacks simply don't work. My fingers also start to hurt after awhile if I'm doing content that requires me to fight for a prolonged time, specifically at the PIP joint. I'm still a little young, but I'm guessing this will progress into an actual issue down the road.
Thankfully, I'm at the point where I find ESO combat to be kind of dull. It can be fun and reactive.... but all the repetitive button clicking, waiting for procs and burst windows (sad magsorc here), rebuffing every 20-30 seconds.... it's all gotten a bit old so I find myself rarely participating in a lot of combat oriented features that can drag on a bit (vet dungeons, trials, large scale PvP). Still, it bothers me to see other people who would love to do such content be gated from it simply because they struggle to light attack weave.

OtarTheMad

For me it’s more about just my brain won’t let me, easiest way to put it. In terms of parsing I usually do it on a 3M robust target dummy which is equivalent to a Veteran Dungeon Boss and I can get, on Arcanist, about 35k… which is great for me. I don’t know what that translates to if I tried on a dummy that gives you all kinds of buffs but I don’t do trials content so I stay away from those dummies.

In dungeons it’s another story because my brain just travels. I get distracted, forget mechanics, forget rotation, forget what I am doing entirely because of the convo happening in discord, standing in stupid… all because my brain just gets lost. Even during parses my brain can just travel. I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid and I don’t take meds for it so it can get kind of bad. When I snap back into what is going on I try to go too fast to make up for getting so distracted which doesn’t help.

That’s why I like the Arcanist class so much, it’s just easier. I would do Oakensoul but some of the sets I’ve seen “required” to maximize it drop in content I don’t really like so that’s a no. At least I have Arcanist until players get it nerfed to uselessness like Necro.

Toxic_Hemlock

XSTRONG wrote: »

Because I suck, and wanna play the game to full anyway.

Anyway thats why endgame trial groups dont interest me, im fine with 70k dps when doing the content I like

70? I'm lucky to get 30 with a golded build, but it is what it is. I might not be even using the right dummy, don't care.

I won't play the DPS minigame anyways, I do overland and some base game dungeons, so I hurt nobody.

aussie500

My ping rate is usually in the red and it usually takes a few goes just to get a skill to work, or change bars, without trying to include a light attack in between. I do anyway, but my dps is never going to be great, light attack weaving in my case is just a waste of time.

munster1404

1) Lag. Depending on local ISP. Even a good ISP can have sub-par ping to the servers, especially in far off locations such as Oceania and SE Asia. My average latency is 250 to 380. You can discern a lag with any value above 280.

2) Muscle memory does not come easy. Yes, this is a thing. There are many people who will suck no matter how much practice they put into an activity. I practice whenever I could (Been playing since 2017) but I still forget to LA weave in intense situations. And even if I remember, the success rate of a LA weave is somewhere around 60% for me.

3) Physical disabilities. Injuries of the limbs.

endgamesmug

Judging by the common thread of isp reliability and distance to server, makes me wonder why any of us bother with eso in oceania 😆. Im 230-270 but i do pretty good in combat maybe i got used to predicting ahead of time because of the resulting delay 😆

Elrond87

not sure cant get the hang of it, combat metric always say i lose 25sec in between casts zero light attack miss 110k at most, i light attack-ability-light attack fast as i can yet the time lost doesn't improve