- Update 23Ice Furnace: This item set now grants Spell Damage, rather than Weapon Damage for the 4 piece bonus
To be fair you now can actually see sometimes what did hit you in pvp(or at least sometimes you can see the animation of skills). Just look how an animation canceled WB looked before the change.
But the rest did all go to crap in terms of how smooth a combo goes off.
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.
@ZOS_EdLynch @ZOS_RichLambert Are you aware of the issue? Abilities not firing off for seconds and then 5 abilities hit in 0.5s or getting stuck in heavy attack etc? If you are not aware of the issue and you need videos please let us know
To be fair you now can actually see sometimes what did hit you in pvp(or at least sometimes you can see the animation of skills). Just look how an animation canceled WB looked before the change.
But the rest did all go to crap in terms of how smooth a combo goes off.
@ZOS_EdLynch @ZOS_RichLambert Are you aware of the issue? Abilities not firing off for seconds and then 5 abilities hit in 0.5s or getting stuck in heavy attack, fully charged heavy attacks dealing no damage etc? If you are not aware of the issue and you need videos please let us know
ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »Short answer is DKs likely won't be seeing a ton of changes before we go live; this class is still quite powerful (as it should be being a tank), even after some of the adjustments we've made to other classes and abilities.
ztyhurstub17_ESO wrote: »I have done a lot of testing around this because Merciless Resolve depends on light attacks going off, and when weaving there are some timings that have to be perfect, or the system doesn't register your light attack and kills your DPS.
Where it really gets dicey is when some skills animations have different timings than others and you "lose" light attacks because the animation just wasn't finished yet. I can "block cancel" or "swap cancel" skills to end the animations so I can get the light attack off earlier, but again that makes combat look clunky and disconnected. You also have to hold the mouse button down for about 2/10 of a second or sometimes the light attack doesn't register.
Add to that my frustration around heavy attacks. The animation of the actual heavy attacks doesn't match when they strike at all, so you can hold your mouse button down and it looks like you are doing something, but the heavy attack went off a little while ago, and you are losing DPS watching the whole animation. I have figured out the appropriate part of the animation to cut things off at, but it adds to the stupidity of the system when you just raise your daggers in the air and never actually hit anything with them because you cast a skill before the animation finishes. I wish they would just make the heavy attack animation fast enough to finish when the strike, damage, and resource return happens.
To me it feels like they need to do 2 things.
1. Improve the command queuing system where even if you click the light attack or heavy attack a little too early while the animation of a skill is still running (up to say 2/10 of a second) the system still registers it and performs the animation when it can instead of pretending you never did it.
2. Make the animations for all skills and heavy attacks match the duration of their strike point and "Cool Down" so that there is no benefit to animation canceling.
Its not that I am against animation canceling, I abuse it as much as the next player, but the combat would be so much better and feel smoother if they would spend some time speeding the animations up so you don't have to cancel them. It would also help new players since the animation finishing would actually be a cue for when to start the next attack instead of it being an arbitrary point in the animation that you have to learn when to cancel so you can start your next attack.
At least that is my 2 cents...