Does anyone else feel like combat is a tad clunky because of poor responsiveness?

Talemire

I am a NB who uses a resto staff and sword/shield, and I just got to the point in my character progression where I can put enough abilities on both bars to make effective use of swapping between weapons. Upon getting to this point, combat is beginning to feel pretty uncomfortable (not smooth-flowing at all) as I try to get the abilities off on my resto staff bar, then switch to my sword/shield bar and get those abilities going.

There are times when I get up to a second or two delay before an ability goes off, and other times when I go to swap weapons and the command doesn't register - I feel like I have to back up from my target just to not get hit until I finally swap weapons, and when I do, the swap occurs twice and I get nowhere fast. I am used to playing games where I get an immediate response the moment a key is pressed, despite animation or the need to swap weapons/bars.

I don't know if it's just me, or that's just how it is. I don't even know if it's a known issue, let alone an issue at all. At this point, I feel better off not swapping weapons at all just so I can have at least 5 of my abilities at my disposal with a small response gap due to the lengthy animation (GCD), rather than waste what feels like much more time swapping weapons and casting said ability.

Maybe it's the combat system's coding? Maybe it's just long animations? Maybe it's server-side related? Either way, quick, fast, and responsive combat is the heartbeat of any game, and I'm just not feeling it now that I am able to take full advantage of weapon swap and having more ability slots.

Mablung

I think my issue is the unresponsiveness to abilities after the key is pressed. I read somewhere that the ability does not fire until you actually depress the key. I am not sure how accurate that is because a lot of times when the ability does not go off, I end up pounding the hell out of that key.

steveb16_ESO46

It is a known and ignored issue. I doubt the new death recap will ever read:

Killed by weapon swap not triggering. Play Guild Wars 2 where the feature works flawlessly.

oxylus

Poor responsiveness is definitely how I would describe the combat in this game, although it isn't too bad. There are points where I press weapon swap and nothing happens, so I press it again and it flips the bar, then press a skill and it flips back and casts the wrong skill. One of the problems I think stems from the fact that there are (as far as I can tell) no visible indicators for certain stun/unable to attack situations and you don't know when your buttons aren't working because of a game mechanic or what. I could see a lot of problems being fixed if it queued up your next action. Like if I press 4 and then press 5 while ability 4 is happening, it should go right into 5 when it can. I'm not saying we need long key chains or macros, but just the next attack shouldn't be so buggy when it comes to time sensitivity.

Ysne58

I'm having problems too and have /bugged it more than once. It makes that Lyris Doppelganger fight even more impossible than it already was.

Misty

Yep, it's a throw of the dice if your key press will be registered or not. There are times when I have pulled a enemy from 10m away, it has closed the distance and killed me without me responding in any way due to my dead keys.

I seem to remember AOC suffering from the same disease, but not quite as bad as it is in ESO.

Phantax

If by clunky you mean still having issues where you hit a skill button and it does nothing, or hit a skill button and get 1-1.5 second delay then hell yes it's clunky.
My other fave is hitting a NPC/Mob with my great sword only it doesn't hit it swings right through it. I've had this happen 2-3 time in succession and a hit doesn't register at which point I'm pretty much dead !

Alpha_Protocol

Love the game, love the character progression... hate combat delay... it's really too bad. It's something in the game engine... will they ever fix it? Who knows...

Baphomet

For all I know they could have introduced a 0.2 second delay after using any ability because all abilities seem slightly slower when spamming after last patch.

PBpsy

As a nightblade it always seems that I have to press 6 times for my killer's blade to activate. In pvp that means that the guy that was at 20% when I was at 75% killed me before I got it to work.

Baphomet

Killer blade / impale definately is one of the more unresponsive abilities in the game so that observation is true.

PBpsy

Baphomet wrote: »

Killer blade / impale definately is one of the more unresponsive abilities in the game so that observation is true.

Yes, sometimes I am sure of it. But sometimes I just think it's my perception being skewed by how critical it's is for the damn thing to activate.

Worstluck

Yeah Nightblade here as well. I am going to record some of the issues I am having tomorrow and post a video. I have a heck of a time getting dark cloak to activate sometimes. I press the key, I can see that the key has been depressed on the skill bar in game, but nothing happens. I am almost thinking it has something to do with my keyboard with they way it happens so frequently. Other times my impale goes off, I see it go off, but it does 0 damage. Weapon switching is always a crap shoot.

aleister

It's terrible! I don't understand why this game has such poor responsiveness relative to other games. They really need to go play GW2 and see how good it can be. I really the active combat style of ESO, but it just doesn't work well with variable and unpredictable responsiveness. And weapon-swap is just completely broken.

CerberusCRW

I just don't know what's going on with the combat responsiveness anymore. It appeared to be fixed after the Craglorn patch for me. And then it just wasn't anymore, although it's a different kind of lag than before. My abilities suddenly stop registering and it can take up to 4 seconds for it to start working again. I've had several instances where I was furiously mashing my heal spell within an inch of my life and it suddenly went off a bunch of times, depleting my magicka in the process. I've also noticed my abilities locking up (greyed out at if I was stunned or otherwise incapacitated) right after a weapon swap sometimes. The first time I chalked it off as getting hit by a spell that I didn't see coming but it happened too often for it to be the case every time. Always right after a weapon swap.

Combat usually runs smooth upon logging into the game and starts lagging up over time. Maybe it has something to do with the memory leak? I don't know.

I've also noticed certain ability combos that are buggy. For example, if I try alternating Solar Barrage (Templar- Dawn's Wrath) and Elemental Ring (Destruction staff), half the time it doesn't work. Either Solar Barrage or Elemental Ring doesn't go off and when it does, there's this weird delay that basically makes the combo completely useless. And then there's Spell Symmetry (Mages Guild) and Honor the Dead (Templar- Restoring Light). If I use Spell Symmetry, I can no longer heal with Honor the Dead for several seconds. The spell will cast, magicka will be depleted but no healing will be done, be it on myself or on an ally. It took me several deaths to figure that one out. Every other healing spell that I tried worked fine, it's only Honor the Dead.

That's all I can think of for now.

Baphomet

The greying out of abilities on your action bar has reached new heights. In Cyrodiil, it happens to me about once an hour. This is by far the most frustrating thing in PvP right now (to me).

Nothing beats spending ten minutes riding to a location and prepare an assault only to have your abilities greyed out an not usable.

Arreyanne

The combat has always felt clunky to me, though I will say after this patch there are times now were I have to push a keystroke three or four times before it responds

JinShepard01

I always like to play on the edge to keep me entertained, that does however means that what I want to happen, needs to happen, or iam dead. And i can tell you without a doubt the combat is very unresponsive. Exactly as you say that when you want to swap weapon, nothing happens withing 2 seconds, so you press it again, resulting in dubble swap and your screwed if your healing abilitie is on that other bar.

Many times I want to use X ability then swap wep and use Y abilitie quick, doesn't happen very well.. I hope by god this is due to the server being in USA instead of Europe, but if US peeps got issues to... then.. this is one of the worst twitch combat mmo out there... its even worse in pvp..

Talemire

Wow, thanks for all the responses guys. I am definitely glad I'm far from alone on this one. I too love the game and am enjoying it thoroughly, but the combat has become a hindrance to my overall fun factor. I'm going to give it more time as I have a lot of content yet to experience, but once I hit level cap and have done everything, come time for PvP, I can only hope combat has become smoother, more fluent, and way more responsive to the feel, otherwise they will lose me. At the pace I'm going now I have about another 3-4 months until I get there.

Talemire

aleister wrote: »

It's terrible! I don't understand why this game has such poor responsiveness relative to other games. They really need to go play GW2 and see how good it can be. I really the active combat style of ESO, but it just doesn't work well with variable and unpredictable responsiveness. And weapon-swap is just completely broken.

This is what I was thinking as well.

Talemire

JinShepard01 wrote: »

I always like to play on the edge to keep me entertained, that does however means that what I want to happen, needs to happen, or iam dead. And i can tell you without a doubt the combat is very unresponsive. Exactly as you say that when you want to swap weapon, nothing happens withing 2 seconds, so you press it again, resulting in dubble swap and your screwed if your healing abilitie is on that other bar.

Many times I want to use X ability then swap wep and use Y abilitie quick, doesn't happen very well.. I hope by god this is due to the server being in USA instead of Europe, but if US peeps got issues to... then.. this is one of the worst twitch combat mmo out there... its even worse in pvp..

Yup, my experience as well. I really hope this is smoothed out within reasonable time.

aleister

Talemire wrote: »

Wow, thanks for all the responses guys. I am definitely glad I'm far from alone on this one. I too love the game and am enjoying it thoroughly, but the combat has become a hindrance to my overall fun factor.

My feelings exactly. They really get on top of this and at least be competitive with other games.

Another thing they could do that is pretty standard in other MMOs, is to show cool-down sweep timers on all abilities. This might at least give us some clue as to why the client is not accepting keystrokes.

greeat-scottb14_ESO

yeah - both GW2 and FF14 have FLAWLESS combat mechanics. when GW2 came out (and after playing EQ2 for years) I thought I was in heaven. From particle effects to the unique style to combat spells/abilities to each class. Skyrim's engine is passable (there's a reason it picked up the name Bugrim). But this incarnation takes it to a diff level with server lag. Same here with a little less than a quarter of combat hits not connecting. The tilde key just isn't seen in the combat queue at times - unless its just a keyboard flaw in the mechanics (game actually geared toward joystick/controller queues). guess I'll have to pull out the x-box controller to see.

Indarqeen

i'm usually on skype with 4 friends if i got 100 bucks every time id hear "why dident my ultimat respond" i would bild a new TES game

Aeradon

Loved the active combat style when I played Raiderz. It was so responsive and amazing.

Hated it when it's in ESO, the controls are the same but it's just too clunky. Something doesn't feel right and I can't tell what.

But such is life. ESO does offer much perks. And both concept is different. Let's hope ESO doesn't put in a highly responsive 10 storey dragon, the combat system needs to be more responsive for that.

kimboh

Yep, standard procedure is to spam skill/ weapon swap keys just to make sure they trigger.

Talemire

Indarqeen wrote: »

i'm usually on skype with 4 friends if i got 100 bucks every time id hear "why dident my ultimat respond" i would bild a new TES game

Lol

Talemire

Update: I'm still subbed at this point, but the more abilities I get and the more I build up my spec, the less efficient I feel trying to get the most out of it. If only I were much more quickly able to access all of my abilities, I would be having a blast playing my character. The slow combat response time coupled with the clunkiness of weapon swap is what really kills the combat for me.

I feel a good solution to this would be to double the ability animation speed (cut the GCD in half), eliminate the weapon swap animation all together, and just have the alternative weapon appear instantly along with with its respective bar. This would smooth out combat almost ten-fold, and you would be able to continuously and efficiently swap between weapons and still have almost immediate access to the abilities on both bars if you so choose to keep swapping between weapons.

As the combat system stands right now, you're pretty much hosed if you want to swap weapons just to use one or two abilities from that respective bar only to switch back and be pretty much dead already. I firmly believe smooth, quick, and responsive combat completely trumps pretty and detailed animations. Who's really looking at that during heated PvE or PvP anyway? We just want access to our abilities as fast as possible.

Kiash

I actually found ESO to have the most responsive action combat to date. I've been playing WildStar with the wife recently and that game feels like you are on ice skates the whole time you are playing, the combat is very clunky. The only other game that comes close to ESO is TERA with GW2 in a distant third imo.

mutharex

Hmm no much unless I am in a laggy zone but as someone pointed out, TESO fires skill on keyRelease not keyPress. Surely lag doesn't help either

Talemire

Kiash wrote: »

I actually found ESO to have the most responsive action combat to date. I've been playing WildStar with the wife recently and that game feels like you are on ice skates the whole time you are playing, the combat is very clunky. The only other game that comes close to ESO is TERA with GW2 in a distant third imo.

That's odd, because I've always felt like GW2 was the poster child for responsive weapon swaps and ability executions. I could use 1 ability from one weapon set, swap weapons, use two from the other weapon, swap again, use the rest of the abilities on my initial bar all with no sweat or sense of time wasted.

In ESO, you are pretty harshly penalized if you have to keep switching between weapons, almost to the point to where each weapon bar could be labeled a different play style if you so happen to get bored with your current one. That is not the light weapon swap should be in. I'd rather have quick, smooth, and effortless access to all 12 abilities, not feel like I have 6 for this particular scenario and 6 for that.