Faster Heavy Attacks

crashen17b14_ESO

According to the devs, they are reducing sustain to make combat faster and more intense. Unfortunately, I have always felt attack animations are just too slow and sluggish, lacking any power.

In light of this, I would suggest they shave down the "cast time" of a heavy attack substantially. If they want us to use attacks as anything other than unpleasant resourcd generators or quick animation canceling spasms, it has to be less of a punishment to use them. The flow of combat slows down to a glacial pace when you try to use heavy attacks, with needlessly long wind ups and pauses that completely rob the fight of any urgency. It feels like a fight from a bad anime, except the attacks wind up doing piddly damage.

This would carry over to npc attacks as well, leaving you with maybe half a second to dodge or block, and again making the combat faster and more interesting.

Gilvoth

your right, heavy attack is Way Too slow.
i hope they increase the speed of heavy attack.

Enslaved

NO! That would break carefully tweaked balance we were promised in Morrowind!

Katahdin

Enslaved wrote: »

NO! That would break carefully tweaked balance we were promised in Morrowind!

WUT?

Enslaved

If you speed up heavy attacks, you will have too much resources, and according to Zos, resources are bad thing. Better have a con crate instead. Or 15.

crashen17b14_ESO

I think what they were TRYING to do was reduce ability spam (which I think is foolish because ability use is what differentiates the classes) and passive sustain/efficiency. In place of that they wanted more use of heavy attacks, prompting bashes and exploitation of off-balance.

Thats the only thing that kind of makes sense. Unfortunately taking sustain away without giving a replacement/extra step/refined process results in an across the board nerf.

If they take away passive sustain (not unreasonable) they need to provide a form of active sustain. The closest we have to that is heavy attacking. Heavy attacks however, are slow, exaggerated and needlessly drawn out, even for weapons you would think would be quicker.

One would think dual wielding daggers or swords would be faster than 2h weapons, and therefor restore less resources. A 2h might have a slower heavy attack, but restore a bigger chunk of stamina.

However, that is not the case. All heavy attacks take the same amount of time to charge up, about 3 seconds. That is 3 seconds you arent blocking, casting, countering an attack or using an ability. Three seconds your character stands there completely exposed in the heat of combat, looking like a ninny. That is not fast paced combat. That is turn based combat.

No wonder heavy attacks are seen as a dps loss and everyone spams light attacks and abilities. Your character is DOING something. It might not be so bad if the damage seemed worth it, but it really is not.

So if ZoS wants to move from passive resource sustain to active, and have heavy attacks be the engine through which that is achieved, they have their work cut out for them.

Lightning and resto staves actually are okay with their heavy attacks, because they provide secondary affects (damage and healing respectively). Every other weapon type? No.

The longest heavy attack should be 1.5 seconds. Same damage as now, same resource return. There should also be more synergy between heavy attacks and abilities, not just off-balance.

Making across the board, sweeping systemic nerfs without any form of "compensation" or indication that there are other things in the works was a bad decision. Yes, expansions are the time to make system changes, but this time all they managed to do was unite everyone against them. For once, dk tanks and healing templars are standing beside magblades and sorcs, all in agreement: this sucks.

idk

Zos made changes 2 months ago that increased the time for a heavy attack. I don't see them changing that back so quickly.

Sakiri

Making NPCs heavy come faster is a good way to screw over anyone with a latency issue.

I miss some casts(not heavies unless I'm not paying attention) as it is and I'm rocking a joyous 100ms latency(damn EU server is in what, Germany or France?). It's not getting faster.

I'd likely miss more if the wind up time was reduced, and I feel particularly bad for Aussies and kiwis.

Denyiir

crashen17b14_ESO wrote: »

All heavy attacks take the same amount of time to charge up, about 3 seconds.

Actually full heavy atack charge 1.1 - 1.2 sec, but it fells like forever anyway

Sakiri

I thought it was 2.

WalksonGraves

KennyFknPowers wrote: »

crashen17b14_ESO wrote: »

All heavy attacks take the same amount of time to charge up, about 3 seconds.

Actually full heavy atack charge 1.1 - 1.2 sec, but it fells like forever anyway

There is no way that is right.

Lynx7386

Light and heavy attacks need more animations, since we're going to be seeing them a lot more.

Frost/fire staves could use faster heavies, especially frost since it's a taunt. Lightning and resto are fine.

Bow heavy needs to not "hold" anymore, that's one of the things I hate most about it. Should also be significantly faster.

2h heavy should be moderately faster, but dual wield should have one of the quickest heavy attacks.

1h/shield should be the fastest heavy attack in the game, to aid tanks in getting some of their stamina back without lowering block for too long.

STEVIL

if more heavy attacks are worked into the rotations along with maybe more use of sustain enchants vs damage enchants, sets that also key for heavies might also see an uptick in usage. i think we can certainly expect a push in the desirability of resource recovery favoring sets for instance.

Crafting julianos over magnus/seducer might be a tougher choice.

Twohothardware

They definitely need to speed up the heavy attack animation with the huge resource nerfs. I'm all for making players use skill to maintain their resources rather than just putting points into CP but you have to give players the tools to do that. Right now heavy attacking is way too slow. Your DPS in PvE falls way off when you're having to add in heavy attacks to your rotation and in PvP it's difficult to land heavy attacks against a decent player that's roll dodging and moving around.

Gilvoth

right now, it's so slow that people can just "move" out of the way, it's stupid slow atm.
try it in real life, heavy swing a weapon and you will see your faster then it is in eso.

ADarklore

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Light and heavy attacks need more animations, since we're going to be seeing them a lot more.

Frost/fire staves could use faster heavies, especially frost since it's a taunt. Lightning and resto are fine.

Bow heavy needs to not "hold" anymore, that's one of the things I hate most about it. Should also be significantly faster.

2h heavy should be moderately faster, but dual wield should have one of the quickest heavy attacks.

1h/shield should be the fastest heavy attack in the game, to aid tanks in getting some of their stamina back without lowering block for too long.

Have you EVER used a Bow in real life?!? If you did you wouldn't make such a bizarre request. Part of the awesomeness of Bow is being able to HOLD your heavy attack for the right moment not spamming it like its a Light attack.

Lynx7386

ADarklore wrote: »

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Light and heavy attacks need more animations, since we're going to be seeing them a lot more.

Frost/fire staves could use faster heavies, especially frost since it's a taunt. Lightning and resto are fine.

Bow heavy needs to not "hold" anymore, that's one of the things I hate most about it. Should also be significantly faster.

2h heavy should be moderately faster, but dual wield should have one of the quickest heavy attacks.

1h/shield should be the fastest heavy attack in the game, to aid tanks in getting some of their stamina back without lowering block for too long.

Have you EVER used a Bow in real life?!? If you did you wouldn't make such a bizarre request. Part of the awesomeness of Bow is being able to HOLD your heavy attack for the right moment not spamming it like its a Light attack.

In pvp, sure, I definitely see the use of holding the attack, but it screws up pve rotations so bad =/

Fallen_Ray

In a sense..... it will feel ALOT like Oblivion & Skyrim. Remember the light and heavy attacks there? Ah those were the days...

KeiruNicrom

I miss the weighted trait. Took it out at the same time they gave bows that buff that increases damage by weaving. We could really use it again with these changes

Denyiir

WalksonGraves wrote: »

KennyFknPowers wrote: »

crashen17b14_ESO wrote: »

All heavy attacks take the same amount of time to charge up, about 3 seconds.

Actually full heavy atack charge 1.1 - 1.2 sec, but it fells like forever anyway

There is no way that is right.

It's less tahn 1,5 sec its really easy to test

WalksonGraves wrote: »

KennyFknPowers wrote: »

crashen17b14_ESO wrote: »

All heavy attacks take the same amount of time to charge up, about 3 seconds.

Actually full heavy atack charge 1.1 - 1.2 sec, but it fells like forever anyway

There is no way that is right.

Just take your phone start stopwatch and start hitting mob at the same time and stop when damage appears. This will be not super accurate but every time it will give you result around 1,5 sec, definitely not 3.

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ofSunhold

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Bow heavy needs to not "hold" anymore, that's one of the things I hate most about it. Should also be significantly faster.

Yeah, that one is hilarious. Fully draw bow, stop to admire fully drawn bow, release arrow.

Enslaved

PelinalWhitestrake wrote: »

A fully-charged heavy attack takes much longer than 1.5 seconds. Go do a fully-charged heavy attack with a fire staff and tell me that's 1.5 seconds.

It's more like forever than 1.5sec

Greydir

One of the Reasons Heavy Attacks have such a long wind up is, that once in the days of yore they where interuptable in PvP making it a Skillbased thing.
Since than the ability to interrupt Heavys is gone, but the wind up was left in place. Recent nerfs even elongatet the windup for Firestaves since the Passive allowing for a faster windup was removed.

SublimeSparo

Last I checked dw heavy attack was faster than inferno heavy attack, this was measured by two characters standing next to each other completing 5-10 fha's in a row, starting at roughly the same time, the dw'r finished significantly earlier..
This was tested a long time ago so unsure if it still holds true

wolfdoggie_ESO

Needs more diverse/interesting animations too.

zaria

Someone with combat metrics could easy see the time in log.

I have only used heavy attack on healer to restore magic.

Zyrudin

The old Weighted trait.

Nord_Templar

I do not see any reason to use a two-handed weapon in PvP. An enemy with a weapon in each hand will let you through the meat grinder while you are swinging at him.

Dreepa

It is just the animation that sucks

GreenhaloX

If you want faster, get or hit Rapid first.