Animation cancelling

fred.thomsonb16_ESO

Not sure what the idea behind changing the animation priorities is, but after quite a few hours of testing I've found combat to be disjointed and sluggish, not being able to block or bash cancel certain abilities is making timing extremely difficult, dodge roll cancelling eats a lot of stamina in a tough situation and weapon swap cancelling can lead to a pointless death on more than a rare occasion. I think it would be helpful for all of us if you (zeni) outlined the changes you are making to these animations and to what end, not that we don't like a bit of mystery, I just worry that a large chunk of both PvE and PvP will be left almost impossibly challenging for classes that rely on accurate timing. (Not that I just died in VMA during a dawnbreaker animation with not enough stam to dodge roll and the inability to block cancel before I wrote this .)

Zinaroth

Combat sure feels very different now.
My testing so far has been very limited but I was trying out some light attack weaving with Executioner from the Twohanded skill line last night.
It's hilarious how they sped up the actualy ability animation in order to make the light attack more visible, now it just feels like my character is on speed.
Oh and block cancelling the Dawnbreaker animation is gone, so no more instant cast Dawnbreakers, this is most definately going to affect burst combinations in PvP a lot and Dawnbreaker might go back to being completely avoidable again.
Not sure how I feel about these changes, feels like I need to learn a somewhat different combat system now.

Tarrin

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.

here

fred.thomsonb16_ESO

Thanks @Tarrin , I knew there would be something on it. I'll move over there

Soris

I dont see any attacks while cancelling. It is worse than live

fred.thomsonb16_ESO

It's very different, in live it's possible to squeeze a hell of a lot into a very small gap with knowledge as to what you are doing, the new system hides half of what you want to do and puts roadblocks between the rest.

....After a few hundred corpses...quite like the animations for the most part, when you find the rhythm it's quite fun but there is still the issue with not being able to block/interrupt cancel the wind up animations for a lot of effects dodge rolling does work so recommend 100 cp into that particular devil.