Heavy Attack Question

JackSmirkingRevenge

I have a real quick question, prefacing this with the fact that I have been away from the game for over a year.

When it comes to executing a rotation with heavy attacks, specifically a 2h weapon, do you want to ensure that the weapon swings itself (I guess a fully charged heavy attack) or cancel the animation before that. I am not sure how or when to best cancel the animation to maximize resource return and damage. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Asmael

Hold the heavy attack button, when your character starts the heavy attack animation, click your ability without releasing your heavy attack button. The heavy attack and the ability will be casted as soon as the heavy attack is fully charged without having to worry about proper timing.

JackSmirkingRevenge

Thank you!

Vostorn

Asmael wrote: »

Hold the heavy attack button, when your character starts the heavy attack animation, click your ability without releasing your heavy attack button. The heavy attack and the ability will be casted as soon as the heavy attack is fully charged without having to worry about proper timing.

Is it the same if I heavy/light attack while the skill animation is pending (let's say flurry) ?

Loc2262

@Vostorn: Yeah you can pretty much use the same method for cast time skills. Click or hold the mouse button about halfway through the flurry animation, and the LA/HA will be done as early as possible. If you weave HA with a cast time skill, let's say Wrecking Blow on a two-hander build, you can hold the mouse button down all the time, and just press the skill button at the appropriate moments.

xiZeroPointix

quote="f047ys3v3n;d-347165"]So I hate the new combat system. No surprise there. If you have read anything I have written since beta you know that I think it feels clunky, sluggish, and the rhythm of it is very disjointed. I am not enjoying spending all my time in combat closely scrutinizing each DOT bar to fit a full heavy attack in everywhere it does not interfere with a DOT application and so I am just not enjoying combat, or consequently the game, at all anymore.

In the process of messing with all this though some things about how heavy attacks were happening seemed off though and I decided to take a peek under the hood and see just exactly what was happening with them each fraction of a second. Heavy attacks have actually been changed a few times in the past. Originally, they did not return resources at all. Furthermore, in 1.6 the timing of heavy and light attacks was greatly sped up to make the game feel more responsive. I believe this mostly was a case of reducing the cooldown. It was at that time that light attack weaves came to do more damage than heavy. In the 1.5 and pre days partially charged heavy attack weaves known as medium weaves were the highest dps. These latest changes were the most dramatic though and I have posted them and the developer notes below:

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

· Increased the damage of Light Attacks by 15%.
· Decreased the damage of Heavy Attacks by 15%.
· Increased the resources restored by fully-charged Heavy Attacks by 30%.

Reduced the cast time of fully-charged Flame and Frost Heavy Attacks by 12.5%.
· To compensate for this increased attack speed, the damage for Flame and Frost Heavy Attacks has been reduced by an additional 12.5% for a total of 27.5%, and resources restored has been reduced by 12.5% for a total increase of 17.5%.
There are two goals with all the changes listed above. First, we want the damage difference between Light Attack weaving and Heavy Attack weaving to be more prominent. Light Attacks should be the clear winner when you are trying to maximize damage per second, while Heavy Attacks should deal less damage per second in exchange for restoring resources.

Second, we want to speed up some of the slowest Heavy Attacks while also increasing the amount of resources all Heavy Attacks restore. This should improve the combat feel of winding up some of the slower Heavy Attacks, while also allowing all builds to restore their resources faster and with less Heavy Attacks needed.

The changes didn't seem quite right to me as a fully charged heavy did not seem to be taking any less time and a few other things so I went home to my dummy and very precisely beat on it for a while. Lets look at the numbers.



There are a number of things to note that are really not right here and / or make little sense.

1) Partially charged heavy attacks return no resources yet did receive the heavy attack 15% damage nerf. This is not in line with the developer comments on that change which seem to indicate that you get either resources and a damage nerf with heavy or no resources and a damage buff with light. All partially charged heavy attacks got a damage nerf and no resource return.

2) Fully charged heavy attacks actually didn't get any damage nerf. Seriously, put a scale to the graph, no nerf. Even at 2.2 seconds the medium trend line clearly runs 15% under that last data point. Furthermore, because you now get credit (resources back and full damage value) for a fully charged heavy at just over 1.6 seconds, the duration change in concert with no nerf to a full heavy actually gave it a massive damage buff. It looks a little like when they created the category "fully charged heavy" in 1.6 in order to destroy all those nice medium weave sets like infallible and mephalas they actually made it count as a categorically different skill once it reached that point. That difference seems to have exempted full heavies from receiving the 15% nerf that medium attacks got and also resulted it no longer scaling with charge duration making it actually receive a very potent damage buff when it's charge duration was shortened.

3) The animation for heavy attacks has not changed. It is 2.2 seconds as it always was though now the attack actually reaches full potency just over 1.6 seconds (about 33% of the time it is full at 1.6seconds.) In other words, you can guess when it ends and skill cancel it or be 23% inefficient. Get to practicing or, write a heavy macro like some I know did in order to cast it like a skill. If you simply hold down the heavy key each attack will take 2.2 seconds of which 23% will be waste.

4) The actual duration timer on heavy attacks is effected by what skill is cast before. It appears that making a block cancel on the skill animation may give you a clean timer but I am not yet entirely sure on all of this. I am sure precise timing and canceling is now more important than it was in the past.

5) Landing anywhere in the medium attack range, from either end, is now very bad as you will now be getting both substantially less damage and no resources. In the past, I think, heavy attack damage started to increase linearly from the point an attack was considered heavy linearly until full duration. Now the line drops to medium from light and massively spikes to fully charged heavy.

What I think should happen:

1) All medium attacks should return resources in proportion to how long they are. The equation might be something like resource return = (duration / 1.61) * max resource return. In this case the minimum return, experienced on a .23 second heavy, would be 15% of the max, experienced on a 1.61 second heavy because it takes 15% as long. This scenario allows people to dynamically manage there resources based on how long they let a heavy attack charge. I believe the idea behind the whole heavy attack resource thing was to decrease the average casts per second as an anti lag measure (see, players can figure out your dark motivations that you lie about.) Making mediums have scaled resource return still decreases average casts per second without the horibad effects on player experience that sitting for more than 1.6 seconds with your finger on the left button does. Furthermore, a player could still create temporarily higher burst damage by weaving a light sequence.

2) You should probably actually apply the 15% heavy nerf to the actual heavies that are returning resources as well as rescale the damage number so that it is back on the heavy line. Right now you gave it a massive, roughly 30% buff, when you intended to nerf it.

3) You really should set the heavy attack animation to ~1.7 seconds so that less experience players aren't getting screwed by the fact that the skill still appears to need to charge when it stopped charging more than half a second ago.

I hope this data helps some of the players who are having difficulties figuring out what is actually happening. I also hope some changes come. I find the combat experience terrible as it is. I know many others agree as many quit and many more, like myself, unsubbed and are just doing casual stuff hoping changes for the better come so that doing any challenging fights becomes interesting again. Lastly, if any of you have data on how previous skill casts effect heavy timing I am interested to know that without having to do the testing myself.
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A little long but good info nonetheless.