So about animation canceling...

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Magdalina
Magdalina
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All these ani canceling threads got me thinking. There's an amazing number of people that seem to believe you can magically ani cancel 20 skills into 2 seconds with 0 animation whatsoever, which is so far from truth it's like they aren't even playing ESO. Not only there's a global cooldown on skills but, from my understanding, (most) animations actualy have a point in them at which the skill's effect actually registers. If you cancel the skill before this point, it will cancel the skill's effect entirely(many a time have I screwed up my rotation by block canceling Liquid too early and having to recast it). If you cancel after this you will cut off the "leftover" animation, possibly allowing you to queue the next skill faster. So question is...are there actually any skills you legit can ani cancel so that virtually no animation shows yet the effect is still in place?

I also know how it's possible to have several things hit a player at once in PvP but it's usually a matter of cast/travel times and timing it well, not insta casting them all at once.
Edited by Magdalina on May 22, 2017 7:12PM
  • kuro-dono
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    this is propably best exampla of animation cancelling in pvp:

    charge heavy attack. lanch gab closer ability, press wrecking blow and then finish with dawnbreaker. all those attacks?? all i see is the gab closing when it happens to me with ping below 80 or so and i find myself dead, without seeing the other skills. well actually i see the flashes from dawnbreaker too hehe, like it did help with anything.
  • Turelus
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    I think part of the problem with the threads is that people just believe everything they're told rather than going and doing some research of fact checking.

    We've seen it with a lot of things in the game where it starts to trend as a reason and everyone just believes it's fact then repeats it over, so more believe it etc.

    How many times have you seen that "big guilds manipulate all the market to stay in power" when yes it has happened, and happens a little but isn't this constant all consuming thing.

    This applies to real life and "fake news" as well. People just need to go and learn to fact check for themselves rather than believe everything.

    That's my cynical rant for the day.
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  • FleetwoodSmack
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    kuro-dono wrote: »
    this is propably best exampla of animation cancelling in pvp:

    charge heavy attack. lanch gab closer ability, press wrecking blow and then finish with dawnbreaker. all those attacks?? all i see is the gab closing when it happens to me with ping below 80 or so and i find myself dead, without seeing the other skills. well actually i see the flashes from dawnbreaker too hehe, like it did help with anything.

    Pretty much this. It's usually about the timing and execution which makes PvP a different beast entirely. I mean you're dealing with latency, the skill of the player using the attacks in question, and ruling out any and all potential exploits. A lot of people will be quick to scream "Macros", but generally speaking I roll my eyes because they really don't understand what's actually happening or are too enveloped in their e-pride that they can't take a death.
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  • kuro-dono
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    Pretty much this. It's usually about the timing and execution which makes PvP a different beast entirely. I mean you're dealing with latency, the skill of the player using the attacks in question, and ruling out any and all potential exploits. A lot of people will be quick to scream "Macros", but generally speaking I roll my eyes because they really don't understand what's actually happening or are too enveloped in their e-pride that they can't take a death.

    for me. that skill rotation, without seeing anything else except gab closing and the flashes from dawnbreaker should not exist in competive pvp. i can accept this> gabclosing and then starting dawnbreaker. or. gab closing and when land on ground automatically wrecking blow starts. but not that whole chain of skills.

    most comical thing is. that ppl who say macros are useless... have no clue how usefull they are. problem is, that loads of folks thing that for macro you need atleast 5-10 button pressed for it. when actually. all you need is skill + weapon swap. or skill + dodge roll or skill + block to make it highly effective.
  • FleetwoodSmack
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    kuro-dono wrote: »

    for me. that skill rotation, without seeing anything else except gab closing and the flashes from dawnbreaker should not exist in competive pvp. i can accept this> gabclosing and then starting dawnbreaker. or. gab closing and when land on ground automatically wrecking blow starts. but not that whole chain of skills.

    most comical thing is. that ppl who say macros are useless... have no clue how usefull they are. problem is, that loads of folks thing that for macro you need atleast 5-10 button pressed for it. when actually. all you need is skill + weapon swap. or skill + dodge roll or skill + block to make it highly effective.

    I have to disagree with that bolded part. I won't get into it because it's been kind of been beaten like a dead horse with mechanical evidence to back it up. A skilled player who's legit won't be using macros. I'll just leave it at that. Not to mention the explanation is in the OP of the thread. *Shrug* Take that with what you will. For the other stuff, it's a matter of taste imo. I don't mind that people get that much off because I wasn't at the ready and that's my bad. I live with it and move on. Other people need to too.
    Edited by FleetwoodSmack on May 22, 2017 10:52AM
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  • Biro123
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    kuro-dono wrote: »
    this is propably best exampla of animation cancelling in pvp:

    charge heavy attack. lanch gab closer ability, press wrecking blow and then finish with dawnbreaker. all those attacks?? all i see is the gab closing when it happens to me with ping below 80 or so and i find myself dead, without seeing the other skills. well actually i see the flashes from dawnbreaker too hehe, like it did help with anything.

    Isn't this just the weird lag-bug.. where the attacker freezes in place for a few seconds doing nothing, then all the abilities he was mashing while frozen land at once when he becomes unstuck.?

    This isn't ani-cancelling, its a bug (which I believe some people have figured out how to intentionally trigger and exploit)
    Edited by Biro123 on May 22, 2017 10:54AM
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  • Sabbathius
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    I think the main reason people believe you can fire off many skills at once is because the game client and its performance are ***. When the game is saying you're getting 60 fps at 125 ping, but because of desyncs and freezes the player just doesn't see the abilities that killed him, or that his health moving. He just goes from alive to dead. And since the death recap isn't time-stamped, there's nothing to disprove what they just saw with their own eyes, hence the complaints. And it's really difficult to convince someone who just saw it happening with their own eyes that it didn't happen as they saw it.


    Personally I feel animation canceling just looks stupid. Not because of what it does, but because of how it looks. The developers spend time and effort making animations, and then allow people to simply skip them? What sense does that make? Not to mention that these animations are meant to telegraph what the other player is doing, this is a very telegraph-heavy game. They just boasted a few ESO Lives ago how amazing a job their artists did with the Wardens' ability animations. And all I was thinking listening to them was "Uhhuh, animations I'll be animation-canceling and will never see." It's asinine. I'm sorry, but it just is. And if "but it's skill" is your argument, there's plenty of room for that in other areas, such as builds, tactics, positioning, etc. The way it is now just ruins the game's appearance and makes it look cheap and unfinished, with a character spazzing out.


    It's also worth noting that a lot of people ARE macroing, and the degree of depth depends on individual.


    I personally know quite a few folks who macroed their keys to fire on keypress rather than on-release. You know how in ESO by default abilities fire when you release the key? Try it. Put Vigor in 1. Press the 1 key down and hold. No Vigor. Release key? Vigor! What these people do is remap their keyboard and/or mouse with a macro that does key press and key release. In Razer Naga it looks like down-arrow 1, up-arrow 1, within a single macro. Here's a thread from this very forum showing how to do it: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/95720/using-razer-macros-to-change-abilities-from-activate-on-release-to-press This is against ToS, and it does give you a fraction of a second of an advantage.


    Then there's quite a few folks that take it one step further. To continue to use Naga as an example, instead of down-arrow 1, up-arrow 1, the macro becomes LMB (light attack), delay 50ms, down-arrow 1, up-arrow 1, RMB (block). What this does is an insanely fast light weave, fire ability 1, then block-cancel that ability's animation immediately. Much faster than a human, and removes error from the equation. Result is absolutely perfect light weaving followed by an optimal block-cancel for any ability on your bar. This is pretty nasty, as DPS jumps up quite a bit. And quite a few people use stuff like this. I know this for a FACT, because I learned about it from someone in game who has been using it since beta.


    And then of course you have the actual macros, scripts, and finally full-blown hack suites like that-one-that-shall-not-be-named-but-was-outed-last-year-when-a-bunch-of-dummies-were-saying-hacking-doesn't-exist-in-ESO. What I'm getting at, when someone says they just died to a hacker...sometimes it's true.


    Final note, ZOS is very lax on this stuff. I routinely play with people who openly admit in voice chat to using some of this stuff. Just last night I was in a raid in Cyrodiil with a guy who openly said in group that he's AFKing for 20 mins, but seeing as the queue is almost an hour long he'll just use his macro to keep him from AFKing out, and in ensuing conversation (some newbies wanted one too) he said he's been using it since launch and hasn't been as much as suspended, never mind banned permanently. And I really have no reason to suspect him of lying about it. Because he proceeded to do exactly what he said - AFKed for almost 30 mins, without being kicked.


    I'm not saying removing animation canceling would solve these issues, but they would be a lot less significant if attacks and abilities cut short did no damage.
    Edited by Sabbathius on May 22, 2017 3:07PM
  • Erock25
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    kuro-dono wrote: »
    this is propably best exampla of animation cancelling in pvp:

    charge heavy attack. lanch gab closer ability, press wrecking blow and then finish with dawnbreaker. all those attacks?? all i see is the gab closing when it happens to me with ping below 80 or so and i find myself dead, without seeing the other skills. well actually i see the flashes from dawnbreaker too hehe, like it did help with anything.

    I'm personally calling BS on you not seeing the Wrecking Blow windup here. It's partially hidden by the gap close animation but you will most certainly see the WB windup which then gets overwritten by the cancelled dawnbreaker animation.
    Sabbathius wrote: »

    Then there's quite a few folks that take it one step further. To continue to use Naga as an example, instead of down-arrow 1, up-arrow 1, the macro becomes LMB (light attack), delay 50ms, down-arrow 1, up-arrow 1, RMB (block).

    My ping isn't bad (around 100 i think on average) and a macro like this would result in more failure than success.
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  • Sabbathius
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    Erock25 wrote: »
    My ping isn't bad (around 100 i think on average) and a macro like this would result in more failure than success.

    No it would not. Ping makes no difference here. Either server receives your input, or it does not. If it does, it will execute it, when it can, after it receives it. It works perfectly, like I said, because I observed it in-game and asked the guildie doing it how was he so *** good. He was kind enough to explain that it was his mouse macro doing most of the heavy lifting. It works in PvE, duels, Cyro, etc. Will it become weird and unpredictable in a zerg in Cyro? Maybe. But no more so than manual input.

    This only "stops working" when there's actual dropped input happening. Which means server and client are going to ***. Which is a whole separate discussion, and affects manual input exactly the same way. And you can always tweak it, too, say change the delay from 50ms to 100ms, or 150ms. Still faster than average human. Razer now no longer allows to set a random delay, but back when I was playing SWTOR it was possible to put the delay as a random variable with a set range, which made it look much more human if you didn't get greedy and set it too low. And some macro programs still allow this, just no longer the official Razer software. Worked beautifully, too. Remember SWTOR had this huge ability bloat problem, with a ton of abilities and not nearly enough easily accessible hotkeys to map them all? Yeah, people macroed the heck out of it. And Ilum (SWTOR's Cyrodiil) was as laggy as Cyrodiil. And it still worked just fine.

    Also, stop and think for a second. Even if, with lag as you say, you get a "failure", what would that be? Abilities still take priority over light attacks. And lag can only cause the block to not fire, not cancel the ability prematurely (remember, lag slows, it doesn't speed things up). Meaning worst case scenario, the "failure" would be light attack not firing, or block not canceling. But best case? Insanely fast light weave and animation cancel. Brought to you by animation canceling! But if this were changed so that the effect happens at the very END of the ability, while block still overrides, then this automation wouldn't help. If block happened too early, you would hose yourself. Better yet, if the cost of the ability was taken on START of the cast, but the damage/effect happened on END of the animation, it would be even better. Part of the reason why people are hating on Sorcs and Dark Deal is because even if you interrupt the cast, it costs nothing unless the cast is completed.
    Edited by Sabbathius on May 22, 2017 3:45PM
  • Prospero_ESO
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    Well tbh it is *** combat and animation design if you are forced to animation cancel to get the most out of your char....
  • QuebraRegra
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    Biro123 wrote: »

    Isn't this just the weird lag-bug.. where the attacker freezes in place for a few seconds doing nothing, then all the abilities he was mashing while frozen land at once when he becomes unstuck.?

    This isn't ani-cancelling, its a bug (which I believe some people have figured out how to intentionally trigger and exploit)

    oh no... please tell me we don't have lag-sploiters in this game? You know the same kidz and their lag switched from the COD and BF series games?
  • Zander98
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    The obsession with macros has always baffled me. In a dynamic, moving, dodge rolling, ultimate building, resource driving game like this they are of limited used.
    A player who's been playing long enough will have muscle memory set to global cooldowns. Now...if someone is bypassing that it isn't macros we're talking about.
    Like I've said before, scripted macros, at least in pvp, would be useful for buffing/shielding in the fasted way possible with a single bottom press.
    Beyond that....I couldn't imagine any real benefit to a long term player.
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  • acw37162
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    You can only cancel part of an animation In ESO.

    And the basic rules for animation canceling are so simple it hurts;

    1. You can cancel the end of a light or heavy attack with and ability or weapon swap.
    2. You can cancel part of an animation for an instant cast ability with a weapon swap.

    That's it my friends and ESO only permits part of animation to be clipped you CAN NOT hide an whole animation.

    That is lag or lag switching if you see that.

    The OP is very right about travel time and delayed burst abilities and how the better players line all of these up as best they can.
  • darthsithis
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    I thought block canceling was animation cancelling because the animation was cancelled lol.

    I was educated by y'all and blocking no longer causes things like liquid lightning not to cast! Yay!
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  • Waffennacht
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    oh no... please tell me we don't have lag-sploiters in this game? You know the same kidz and their lag switched from the COD and BF series games?

    It's an exploit using Mementos. You hit the buttons and the memento, the memento animation takes priority stacking the abilities, once the Memento animation stops, the stacked abilities unleash in a single moment preventing counter play.
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  • SquareSausage
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    One thing i noticed when ani cancelling was with c-frags, if i cast light attack quickly after, occassionaly you hear the sound of it landing but dont see the damage numbers of it on the target, in this case is it landing or was it cancelled too quick and wasted it?
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  • Waffennacht
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    One thing i noticed when ani cancelling was with c-frags, if i cast light attack quickly after, occassionaly you hear the sound of it landing but dont see the damage numbers of it on the target, in this case is it landing or was it cancelled too quick and wasted it?

    I do not believe a light attack can cancel an ability, you can however, not use said ability. What I mean is, if you actually cast the frag (instant or not) a LA will not make it disappear.

    You can animation cancel so quickly stuff doesn't appear, but it does register. At this point, though, you're not playing ESO but rather bop-it, as it's entirely muscle memory and not at all reactionary. For this reason I purposely avoid going that fast.
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  • trustcotraptb14_ESO
    Turelus wrote: »
    I think part of the problem with the threads is that people just believe everything they're told rather than going and doing some research of fact checking.

    We've seen it with a lot of things in the game where it starts to trend as a reason and everyone just believes it's fact then repeats it over, so more believe it etc.

    How many times have you seen that "big guilds manipulate all the market to stay in power" when yes it has happened, and happens a little but isn't this constant all consuming thing.

    This applies to real life and "fake news" as well. People just need to go and learn to fact check for themselves rather than believe everything.

    That's my cynical rant for the day.

    Except your rant is completely off base.

    Ani canceling is very real. Take a trip to Cyrodiil sometime, you'll find yourself 100 to Zero'd instantly, with a death recap of half a dozen skills done in a split second.
  • Sigtric
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    Except your rant is completely off base.

    Ani canceling is very real. Take a trip to Cyrodiil sometime, you'll find yourself 100 to Zero'd instantly, with a death recap of half a dozen skills done in a split second.

    that's not animation cancelling

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  • danno8
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    I hope everyone who contributed to this thread in May had a pleasant summer, Thanksgiving, Christmas (et al) and New Year.

  • NyassaV
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  • ZOS_KatP
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    Hi all,

    Since this thread is fairly old, we've decided to close it. If you'd like to start a new discussion on this topic, please feel free to do so!

    Thanks :)
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