smallhammer wrote: »

Just a simple question: Why do we have animations at all, in combat? When one of the main "skills" is to cancel it?

Skills can cancel LA animations, but skill animations are still performed just as fine.

smallhammer wrote: »

Yes, I was thinking about LA animations.

Its been fine that LA animations get canceled since they are so much less impactful as compared to active skills...........However this is only true assuming no proc effects. In reality we see enchants, poisons, proc effects, status effects, etc all able to trigger off of animation cancel-able triggers like Light attacks and medium attacks.

This is a main point I always bring up when it comes to the Off-Balance system being a terrible design. Why have a main counterplay system trigger off of invisible medium attack weaves not only animation cancel-able but also from any enemy. It just breaks down the GCD ability system.

Ok so in regards to the combat animation memory reduction,
I have tested it and Yes, It still interacts and affects my ability to light attack weave and cast my skills.
The polymorphs still retain the old animations and I used that as a side by side when comparing parses.
I was using Torc of the last ayleid king to minimize the variables that procsets introduce when parsing.

DPS on average was about 5-8k higher with a polymorph, than without, And this was with me aggressively weaving my skills.
I recorded the parses also using OBS and had a Controller overlay to see if I was missing any skills, and reviewing the footage, I was missing a considerable amount of skills and light attacks. I could feel this as well when parsing. The flow of my skills and basic attacks felt out of sync and off.

On top of this, These new animations just look bad. The visible stutter and stiffness my character has makes them feel janky and incomplete. Its pretty immersion breaking tbh.
also the offset idle poses for my character when holding weapons are bad. its a 45 degree tilt when just holding weapons and not doing anything. It looks out of place. If you heavy attack or cast a skill and let the animation follow through, you can see your character stop in the old idle position and then suddenly twitch rapidly to adjust to the new idle stance. It just looks bad.

Unarmed sprint animations just speed up the speed at which your walking animation plays, which makes my character look like he is tweaking out. plus when going into an idle stance from unarmed, you character assumes the idle pose of the bow, despite not holding a bow.

I have spent probably more time than I should have, testing these specific changes, about 5 hours, give or take and recording the whole thing. I made a video about this as well, since this update, as a whole, scares me.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9OhWCEffjOE&t

This is not to mention my concerns regarding the constant CRASHING that happens on the pts while interacting with these new changes.
Also now with week 2, there is a new bug that is affecting PS5 Controllers if you are using a gamepad. Its an issue I have seen before, its just strange to watch it come back.
Please Consider Shelfing these Animation changes

Well, that is fairly alarming!

@ZOS_Kevin it would be a good idea for the combat team to address the changes to animations and points in the video people are mentioning. It's not a good look for these bugs to have not been addressed since the last combat animation iteration.

Video for reference:
https://youtu.be/9OhWCEffjOE

I haven't done any serious combat testing, but just in case this contributes: I played with a PS5 controller (the standard type), and I had a few crashes and disconnects. I just put it down to the test servers and didn't think any further about it because I haven't done a lot of PTS testing yet, but crashes were also mentioned above in the thread, so just in case it's connected...

I think I've only been on this PTS four times now, and luckily I haven't experienced any crashes myself yet. The performance was really bad yesterday, though - I couldn't finish any parse and it did feel like I was close to crashing a couple of times (the game didn't register any of my inputs for 20+ seconds or so and all I could do was run around during those times).

Edit: I just saw Gina's post. I use a mouse and keyboard, which explains why I didn't have as much issues as some of the others in this thread.

I also think that some animations - especially the two handed animations - look worse, though. I didn't really pay attention to the animations and only parsed with a dual wield front bar at first, but after reading epic-buttkkr's post and watching his video I tried some parses with a greatsword too. It really looks janky.

When last year's letter mentioned that you were working on "improving the overall feel of combat with animation, FX, and potentially audio work", I hoped to see some actual improvements. Some of these new animations have the opposite effect, though - overall, it feels and looks worse.

As for whether I could still perform animation cancelling effectively - maybe it's a nocebo effect, due to having seen this post, but it does seem like my weaving is slightly worse. I've never been a top parser, but overall I'm missing a bit more light attacks than before and skills not firing seems to happen a bit more often too (though the latter is, admittedly, still a rare occurrence for me).

FuryOfTyphon wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi all, thanks for the feedback thus far. We have confirmed there is an issue when using a PS controller on a PC that is causing decreased game performance on the PTS, and we're actively working on getting this fixed as quickly as possible. Our theory is that this may be contributing to other issues some of you have been seeing such as missing ability hits and weaving issues. For those that have noticed a performance hit, could you confirm if you were using a controller or mouse & keyboard (and if the former, what type of controller)?

As for the handful of polymorphs that don't have the additive animations enabled, we are working on fixing those as well.

Thank you!

Don't mean too sound disrepectful. But please don't work on fixing those aswell.
The animation changes look horrendous.
Why are yall trying to "fix" something that isnt broken?
The animations have worked perfectly fine for 11 years, and do not need to be changed to achieve a 1% increase in performance. If you can even call it that, considering it looks like they are directly linked to all the crashes.

Please watch epics video and seriously rethink this change.
Nobody asked for it, nobody wants it, and its not going to make the company money.
So why are you wasting your time and resources trying to push this through?

"Nobody asked for it, nobody wants it" - extremely false.
Fixing the animations was one of the most requested items when they reached out to us asking what changes we want to the game.
Players feedback was that combat feels floaty, animations lack weight and they look janky due to animation canceling. It was not requested to get rid of weaving or animation canceling, but it was requested to make it less janky.
Players WANT combat and animations to get fixed.

I'm not commenting on the status of their work on PTS - if it's bad it's bad. But it was necessary to remember that yes, it is important to many of us, it's not a waste of time/resources.
Thanks devs for working on this; personally it's all-year that I'm waiting to see the fruits of your work...

I partly want to raise the alarm of why we are cutting out portions of active skill animations cast by the player instead of reducing particle effects and ground stamp effects. How do those compare memory wise?

In terms of animations+particles there seems to be a lost art where the combat used to be so clear. You could see what enemy character animations were doing to know what skills are going off. More importantly you'd have things like old dizzy Loooooong windup into a knockup CC. Now adays these crucial effects like stuns are sometimes not tied to any animation at all. Leading to confusion and people thinking cc is unresponsive and untelegraphed. Other times cc has a very minute animation, while DLC proc sets and skills that are insignificant blow us out of the water with particles.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi all, thanks for the feedback thus far. We have confirmed there is an issue when using a PS controller on a PC that is causing decreased game performance on the PTS, and we're actively working on getting this fixed as quickly as possible. Our theory is that this may be contributing to other issues some of you have been seeing such as missing ability hits and weaving issues. For those that have noticed a performance hit, could you confirm if you were using a controller or mouse & keyboard (and if the former, what type of controller)?

As for the handful of polymorphs that don't have the additive animations enabled, we are working on fixing those as well.

Thank you!

@ZOS_GinaBruno the polymorphs using the old animations wasn’t the reported issue in the video,; the polymorphs using the old animations was the workaround for the broken new animations that are themselves causing issues. In fact the point of the video was please to showcase how the new animations are breaking the game and causing issues and shouldn’t be added into the next patch.

Please for the love of Tiber Septim listen to the community when it comes to animations as it has a huge impact on all aspects of the game. Templar players still want the option to use the old animation and spear model for jabs and this should be doable given that ESO has many similar customized actions available for skills in the crown store that are fare more elaborate than the old spear model and animation, but ZoS hasn’t one time recognized us raising the jabs model/animation issue for the past 2+ years.