Animation canceling intended?

teladoy

Is that really intended?? I think the animation of a skill has a reason, should show the duration of a skill and gives sense to real time combat.

I think they should fix that and not allow the use of another skill before the current ends.

It would give to pvp a better experience.

elium85

Yes, ZOS has confirmed over and over that it's here to stay and not an exploit.

Xendyn

It's staying and they've said so many times.

Iyas

Yes, it is

Paulington

I think "intended" it wasn't. It's just a particular feature of the engine the game uses and ZOS are fine with it, not to mention it would apparently take ridiculous amounts of time to recode the engine to stop it entirely when really it's not an issue.

With a bit of practice anyone can get animation cancelling down.

Bluepitbull13

teladoy wrote: »

Is that really intended?? I think the animation of a skill has a reason, should show the duration of a skill and gives sense to real time combat.

I think they should fix that and not allow the use of another skill before the current ends.

It would give to pvp a better experience.

Recremen

Animations are simply pretty effects that let you know that some specific attack is going off. Most of the animations in this game last far longer than the time until the next attack may be used.For instance, going from your character's neutral fighting stance into a light attack, and then waiting for that light attack to completely finish, then returning to your neutral stance, takes about one and a half, to maybe two seconds. This is so slow that you can actually "cancel" the animation of your light attack with another light attack! So clearly something is up, right? You wouldn't figure that the most basic attack in the game is bugging itself out just by using it back-to-back. So clearly there's precedence for clipping animations that simply take too long to finish.

Now, the real meat-and-potatoes of animation canceling is using an ability shortly after starting a light or heavy attack. This is often called "weaving". It is an extremely common feature of games, including MMO's. For instance, in the ever-popular World of Warcraft, your character can do auto-attacks for "white damage", which basically consists of selecting an enemy to automatically attack with your basic weapon while you sit there. However! They also let you cast any of your abilities while these attacks are going off without interrupting your swing timer! This extra damage/utility is on top of whatever your auto-attacks are doing, and mastering which attacks you use when makes you deal much more damage than less-experienced players. Naturally, there is a limit to this. There is a global cooldown for these special abilities, so you cannot simply mash your keyboard and fire everything off at once. Still, these extra utilities and techniques give a lot of nuance to combat and are a time-honored tradition in this type of gaming.

Naturally, ESO isn't just a WoW clone, and our combat system has its own unique take on these traditions. Our combat is far more responsive (when it isn't lagging, of course) in that we don't get auto-attacks! We also have to manually block!! Very scary concepts if you're coming from WoW, but really fun to play around with, especially at mid and high-level play. Our auto-attack equivalents, light and heavy attacks, can also be interspersed with damaging, healing, or utility abilities. While a conscious understanding of how this works is helpful in mid and high-level play, even players who like to fight more casually stumble upon animation canceling by accident, just by clicking their skills and attack buttons really fast.

Even though lower-skilled players animation cancel, however, the higher-skilled players are going to have an advantage by being more practiced and consciously aware of what they're doing. Is this separation of skill fair? Yes, obviously. People who dedicate a lot of time to practicing how to fight and who spend the time to understand the game systems are always going to outperform those who don't want to take the time, don't have the time, or don't care. Taking away abilities isn't going to make less-experienced players suddenly more experienced and competitive. You can't equalize the playing field and have everyone perform on the same level unless you've taken away every feature of the game except for pressing a single button that says "victory". Different levels of skill and performance is expected and normal. It's not bad to be a casual player, but it's also not bad to be a skilled player, and taking away legitimate game features to try and make them perform equally isn't cool.