How to get more than 20k dps? Is it impossible without using animation cancelling?

WembleyOTG

Been playing off and on since launch. Mostly in last two years. I can easily get 20k dps. But even on test center using cp 810 and meta gear and rotations it's still under 25k. How are people actually getting 90k dps? It's not by light attack weaving and keeping dots up. That gets you 23k dps. There is a trick that I can't do. I think it's animation cancelling. Seems to be a way to glitch your character into doing attacks non stop without waiting or seeing them go off. So standing there glitchy around.

All I know is you can do light attack then a skill. But after that am I suppose to right mouse block then left attack again then skill? Over and over? I have enormous trouble left click , hit skill ,right click, left click, skill etc.

Is there an easier way? I'm not coordinated enough to alternate left and right mouse so fast with numbers in the middle.

I'm wondering is there another way? Or is that basically it? Are most people using mouse macros to do it fast?

Any help please.

Ogou

Should probably start by saying what's your build (gear, skills, rotation) in order for someone here to be able to help you. From personal experience it usually ends up being something wrong with the rotation so you might want to start there.

mague

WembleyOTG wrote: »

Are most people using mouse macros to do it fast?

Most probably this. And it probably will get worse.

WembleyOTG

Usually copy alcast builds. Run into same problem with stam or mag Nb. Or magsorc non pet. Or stam dk. Seems almost all the same. Blockade of fire. Or endless hail and razor caltrops. Then light attack and spammable. Then redo dots and aoe

WembleyOTG

Alcast doesn't mention animation cancel in his routines though

DocFrost72

Pick any one build you're running (or want to run) and post gear, cp, and if you don't mind a video of you hitting the dummy.

FYI- 90k is raid buffed. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but that's going to be half your problem there.

Runefang

Well first hit the LA button then wait a fraction of a second then hit a skill button. That’s how I do it, no cheating involved at all.

WembleyOTG

Ahh I see. I'm not sure how to record video but I'll try to figure something out tomorrow. I will post a screenshot of my gear and parse screen tomorrow. Sorry posted this before bed

WembleyOTG

Runefang wrote: »

Well first hit the LA button then wait a fraction of a second then hit a skill button. That’s how I do it, no cheating involved at all.

Ya I can do that part good for the most part. Just not the cancelling the skill animation

Vapirko

Don’t confuse animation canceling, light attack weaving and block cancelling. You don’t need to block cancel to get good DPS and don’t think most people do that as it’s a waste of stam. Animation cancelling can happen many ways, the most common of which are light attack weaving and block cancelling. But for PvE DPS rotations what you want to focus on is light attack weaving and by going through your rotation you’re very like doing some animation cancelling already. With BiS gear and the right parse food and setup at max CP it shouldnt be too hard to tack another 15-20k onto your parse with some practice. If you can hit 35-40k self buffed you’re in pretty good shape.

thorwyn

Well first hit the LA button then wait a fraction of a second then hit a skill button. That’s how I do it, no cheating involved at all.

Basically do that once every second. It helps to get the LightAttackHelper AddOn if you're on PC. Also, you can activate an online metronome, set it to 1s and let it run in the background, so you can just barely hear it. After a while, you will get the hang of it. Helps your dps a lot.

relentlessyouthofficialneb18_ESO

No. Most people do not use any macros. You need to learn to weave Light attacks before every skill, the easiest way to do this is to spam La>Skill and start slow then do it faster and faster until you get to the point where LA doesnt fire anymore.. then take a step back and find that fine line.
As for animation cancelling you will mostly do it with light attacks or bar swapping.. take blockade for example.. You can cancel it almost instantly with a bar swap after you fire it.

Other than that its just practice.. hours in front of a dummy.

I can hit 50k self buffed on 4 different chars and im not even max CP yet. No macros or anything.. I have the bar swap on my 3rd mouse button which helps a lot so that might be a tip for you

Good luck!

P. S. You can learn A LOT just by watching parses on youtube.

SoLooney

The only animation cancelling you need to do is from bar swapping, do not press block during your abilities, it does nothing for you but block stam regen

Your rotation is gonna be the biggest factor in your dps. Dynamic rotation will pull more than a static rotation aka recasting dots as they fall off and not reapplying too early. Weaving is the biggest thing, esp with magic classes. You can cancel a weave immediately into an ability

Obviously gear and how your blue cp is arranged also makes the world of a difference. Also, I have no idea why people dont Google or YouTube guides

WuffyCerulei

If you’re referring to light attack weaving when you say animation canceling, it’s not an exploit/glitch/bug. It’s apart of the game. And yes, it does increase your dps a bit. But it is apart of your rotation, and if your rotation is flawed, you have to work on it. Gear and CP help a lot, as well as having stuff like vMA weapons. However, your rotation is the backbone of your dps. Practice. Get it down. You don’t have to blockcast everything. That’s rarely used tbh. And if you’re a stam dps, you’d just be halting your stam regen all the time.

malicia

@WembleyOTG

What I struggled most with when learning to weave light attacks is the GCD (global cool down).

After each skill that you use, there’s about 1s of dead time during which you cannot use another skill or launch an LA/HA. If you try to go too fast, your next skill/LA will simply not launch, messing up your rotation badly.

If you’re on PTS I assume PC. Try installing the ShowGlobalCooldown add-on (LUI may be able to do it as well, I’m not sure), and the ActuonDurationReminder add-on.

After using a skill you’ll see that the action bar has gone dulled. Wait until it is normal color, then LA, and immediately after you clicked the LA button, use the next skill. Try practicing that with only one skill to start with.

Another add-on that could help is LAHelper (or Light Attack Helper), which makes it easier to see if your LA actually landed.

beadabow

Hope this helps, but know that target skeletons are only a "measure" of dps- with the results being on the high end of actual dps for me. Buff yourself with damage/critical boosting skills and or potions, debuff the target with elemental drain or fracture, work your rotation with logical sequences that STACK damage over time down to an instant damage source (DOTs, LA's, Med Attacks, ULT, etc.) Keep practicing until you find your "mojo." lol! Using Relequen's med armor on a stam build with Advancing Yokeda weapons and jewelry, Weapon Damage/Weapon Crit/Stam Recovery Pots, Blue food and a similar rotation to Alcast's for his PvE stamplar, I was able to achieve 30k dps after a few sessions and improved it to well over 40k as a werewolf in werewolf form.

Bogdan_Kobzar

TY to the op for this thread, I have the same challenge, to get my dps higher.
Typically, the elitist's say "gitgud" or "L2P", my response is right click, ignore
Please, someone who is proficient at animation canceling with light attack weaving, please show us the parse from the target skeleton of:
1) a bunch of light attacks WITHOUT cancel or weave (weapon, pause, skill, pause, repeat a bunch of times)
2) a bunch of attacks WITH ONLY canceling
3) a bunch of attacks WITH ONLY weaving
4) a bunch of attacks with MAX dps with both cancel and weave
Please, please, please
I would like to know just how much of an increase is due to this learned skill.

I'm a PC-NA 1k CP player with a Seche Tiger Mount (been around since 2014), I'd like to see this from a Stam DK
currently, running 5pc Leviathan and 5pc Hunding with Stromfist monster set, I get the following:
Result: 14789.7 DPS, 1m 51s (Target Skeleton, Humanoid)
using a Microsoft keyboard and Logitech G700s mouse (ZERO macros)

malicia

@Bogdan_Kobzar
“Weaving” is when you cancel you light attack’s animation with a skill.

There was a time when people cancelled skill animations with block, but that hasn’t been a thing for a long time now. On what server are you? If on EU I’d be happy to show you the basics.

malicia

@Bogdan_Kobzar

I see from your post update you’re NA. I can probably still show you the basics, though I only have one lowby char there I used for the Summerset house event. You’ll have to provide the dummy - my poor char has no gold nor furniture there. 😂

Izaki

WembleyOTG wrote: »

Been playing off and on since launch. Mostly in last two years. I can easily get 20k dps. But even on test center using cp 810 and meta gear and rotations it's still under 25k. How are people actually getting 90k dps? It's not by light attack weaving and keeping dots up. That gets you 23k dps. There is a trick that I can't do. I think it's animation cancelling. Seems to be a way to glitch your character into doing attacks non stop without waiting or seeing them go off. So standing there glitchy around.

All I know is you can do light attack then a skill. But after that am I suppose to right mouse block then left attack again then skill? Over and over? I have enormous trouble left click , hit skill ,right click, left click, skill etc.

Is there an easier way? I'm not coordinated enough to alternate left and right mouse so fast with numbers in the middle.

I'm wondering is there another way? Or is that basically it? Are most people using mouse macros to do it fast?

Any help please.

@WembleyOTG

Okay... Animation canceling is not actually animation canceling (like you don't cancel out animations because there's no point).
What people refer to as animation canceling (for some reason) is simply the overlapping of global cooldowns on skills, light/heavy attacks, bashes and barswaps. Allow me to explain:
- You can only use abilities every 1 second. You've probably noticed that if you spam the button of any non cast time skill (be it Surprise Attack or Breath Of Life, etc) it will not go off as many times as you've pressed the button but rather once every 1 second. That is a glodbal cooldown. The GCD on skills is 1 second.
- You can only use light attacks every ~0.8 seconds. Same deal as with the abilities, but on a different "timer".
- You can bash roughly every ~0.8 seconds too (I think not too sure).
- You can only barswap every 1 second.
You get the idea. However, the important thing to know is that all of these things have individual GCDs only. You can overlap all of those GCDs in order to get the most damage out of everything. That's why we weave in this game. Because we're essentially overlapping the Light Attack GCD with the Ability GCD, thus using both things as soon as possible. Same thing goes for the barswaps, since its on a different GCD from the other stuff, it means that instead of waiting for the GCD of whatever you were doing before to expire, you can just instantly barswap without wasting any time. Due to the fluidity and high pace of ESO combat this is a necessity no matter how you look at it, since you might have your main heal on your back bar.
Same thing goes for block and roll dodge, for example you're casting a skill but then see a massive Crystal Frag going straight into you, what do you do? You block or dodge. But you might have been casting a skill at the same time! No worries, your skill will still go off and you will still block or dodge. Or maybe you see Boss casting an ability that's basically a one-shot unless you interrupt it. So you bash. Same thing as for blocking and dodging.
Now this brings me to talk about priorities. As you can see, the fundamental functions of the game (Block, Dodge, Bash and Bar Swap) have the highest priorities, meaning that you can execute them virtually anytime. Then come the Abilities. Then come the Light and Heavy attacks.

And another thing to mention is that simply spamming Skills will still fire off skills faster than using Light Attacks in between skills. Basically the more things you try to do at once, the longer you'll have to wait before doing that again (its all a matter of milliseconds though).

So overlapping GCDs is not only an option for higher DPS, like for example the very common "execute weaving" (since its generally used when the target has low health left): Light Attack > Skill > Bash, but its also necessary for fluid gameplay whether you're in PvP or in PvE. What is generally called a "weave" is Light Attack/Heavy Attack > Skill.

However, it is impossible, to overcome any GCD, meaning that you can't do any of the game functions faster than the GCD. There is no mechanic that allows that. None. And the whole purpose of "Animation Canceling" isn't to do that, but rather to just use the GCDs to their fullest potential. Getting the most out of something within the limitations basically.

And now for the actual "canceling" part. The animations don't magically disappear, you will still see a fireball from your Flame Staff's light attack and your Crushing Shock beam in the air traveling towards your target. What you won't necessarily see is the part of the animation where the character brings his whole body back into the usual standing position, which takes longer than the 1 second global cooldown. However, the animation for the skills generally is slightly longer than 1 second which may be canceled by your next skill cast. In that regard, no matter what you do, as long as you spam one skill without anything in between, you will be animation canceling a portion of the skill anyway. But the animations don't disappear. Your skills don't become invisible, you aren't one-shotting people while they can't see anything coming, etc.

Now about what you (and many others, way too many others) call animation cancelling. The whole glitchy thing, where your character moves really rigidly and everything. That's different. That's generally due to people using Block after each weave light you said. It gives the impression that your skills are going off faster, since at this point you literally cancel your character's body movement half way through (so you'll only see the skill's animation, but your character appears as though he/she/it is standing still after twitching a little). This is due to the fact that Block (a primary function) has higher priority than Abilities, for obvious reasons mentioned above.
Its commonly used by Console players for some reason (I used to be a Console player and saw this ALL the time, people practicing this ALL the time). The truth is... It is pointless. It doesn't do anything at all. Just makes your character look stupid and stops you stamina regeneration (since you don't recover stamina while blocking). And in fact, more often that not, your weaves will be longer than if you just let the animations happen correctly. So yeah, don't bother with this. The whole, left click > skill > right click thing is nonsense. Don't do it. Really. Don't. Please.

As a side note: macros aren't permitted in this game. I doubt many people are using them anyway, since ESO isn't a macro friendly game due to how dynamic it is.

If you're struggling with DPS and have copied a endgame DPS build to the letter. That means that its obviously your skills that need honing. Takes a bit of time, but anyone can do it! Firstly, focus on using "static" rotations (AKA where you use the exact same abilities, the exact same number of times every time you change bars. Sometimes referred to as "Easy Mode" rotations. With those rotations, once you've learned them, you'll be able to perfect your weaving, barswapping and in general, your gameplay. once you've mastered those, move on to the dynamic rotations, where you reapply everything as it runs out. My guess is that you need a bit of practice with weaving first of all. If you only gain 3k DPS by using light attacks in between each skill, means that you aren't casting your light attacks and your abilities fast enough. Most really good players' average weaving speed would be ~1.1-1.3 seconds. A really good way to measure your progress is to choose a spammable, go up to a target dummy and weave until you run out of Magicka/Stamina then stop touching the dummy entirely. Then open up Combat Metrics (a great addon for analyzing your own fights) and check the number or light attacks and skills that you've performed. Then check the total time of combat. Divide the number of light attacks by the seconds that you've spent in combat. That will give you your weaving speed, assuming you didn't miss any light attacks.

Hope this clears up some stuff for you and gives you a few pointers on how to get better

WembleyOTG

Thank you all for awesome feedback. Yes I believe my issue was I was clicking light attack too fast and trying to put skills in too fast. I was basically clicking light attack like mad and trying to add skills in the middle. Like some said my skills and light attacks most of the time aren't firing properly. I'll work on the training dummy. Thanks so much everyone. 😁

Taloros

Not an expert on this, refuse to animation-cancel, but maybe that'll be a helpful perspective.

Try this: Just spam Lethal Arrow on a target dummy. That gets me about 20k DPS on a 300k dummy on my StamDK:
- Stamina 37850
- Weapon Damage 3027, 3765 with Major Brutality from Igneous Weapons.
- Weapon Critical 34.4%
- Physical Penetration 3419
- Tooltip on Lethal Arrow says 14268 Poison Damage, 15855 with Major Brutality
- Warrior Mundus
- no buff food
- Sets: Hulking Draugr + Bone Pirate (which is pretty sh... without buff food)
- Golden weapons, infused bow with weapon damage enchant

Now, build from that base. Keep Poison Injection, Razor Caltrops and Endless Hail running. Even without any meaningful rotation, you should get above 20k. Without using any light attacks at all, using Dubious Cameron throne, I just got 27067 as a result.

To help with the rotation, maybe put your skills in an easy to rememer order. For example, I usually put
- buffs on 5 (both bars) and activate them before combat,
- then put all bow dots on one bar, which I just have to use 1, 2, 3, 4,
- then switch to my melee bars, where the dots are 4, 3, 2 and
- then just spam 1, which is my spammable.

In this example, I used Noxious Breath, Razor Caltrops, Endless Hail, Poison Injection, < switch bar > Rearming Trap, Venomous Claw, Bloodthirst.

The parses and rotations Alcast and similar youtubers create usually are for veteran trials. In most dungeons, including veteran ones, those rotations are not necessary, and I dare to even question if they'll help at all. Do the lazy boy routine I posted above - when you're done, there'll be some mechanic that interrupts your rotation anyhow, and most fights won't last long enough to get into any meaningful pattern.

Pure button mashing won't be enough. But even just spamming Lethal Arrow is more than enough for most dungeons.

As a side note: Magicka Sorcs can use Crystal Blast for pretty much the same effect, but with added AoE damage. Yes, Crystal Blast, the morph all the guides tell you not to use. It's an amazing skill. Its bad reputation, in my view, comes from the difficulty to animation-cancel with it. But if one doesn't do that anyhow, it's the one-button solution to almost all encounters. Add two pets, map all key to crystal bar, and you can pretty much face-roll through veteran content.

Gilvoth

mague wrote: »

WembleyOTG wrote: »

Are most people using mouse macros to do it fast?

Most probably this. And it probably will get worse.

a horrible reality but that is the truth.

Aurielle

WembleyOTG wrote: »

Been playing off and on since launch. Mostly in last two years. I can easily get 20k dps. But even on test center using cp 810 and meta gear and rotations it's still under 25k. How are people actually getting 90k dps? It's not by light attack weaving and keeping dots up. That gets you 23k dps. There is a trick that I can't do. I think it's animation cancelling. Seems to be a way to glitch your character into doing attacks non stop without waiting or seeing them go off. So standing there glitchy around.

All I know is you can do light attack then a skill. But after that am I suppose to right mouse block then left attack again then skill? Over and over? I have enormous trouble left click , hit skill ,right click, left click, skill etc.

Is there an easier way? I'm not coordinated enough to alternate left and right mouse so fast with numbers in the middle.

I'm wondering is there another way? Or is that basically it? Are most people using mouse macros to do it fast?

Any help please.

This again.

Light attack weaving is a form of what people call “animation cancelling.” By activating a skill immediately after a light attack, you cancel the recovery animation of the light attack. You still see your actual skills playing out, except when you bar swap cancel long duration recovery animations, like Endless Hail. You don’t “glitch” your character in any way when you weave and bar swap cancel. You can not bypass the global cool down on skills.

DPS is about rotation, first and foremost. You do NOT need to block cancel to deal good DPS.

CellularAutomaton110

malicia wrote: »

Try installing the ShowGlobalCooldown add-on (LUI may be able to do it as well, I’m not sure), and the ActuonDurationReminder add-on.

Many thanks for this mod it looks very helpful, never knew it existed!!

cpuScientist

Get on a magPlar right and just jab 20k dps. Add in a shard on cooldown and jab no light attacks nothing 20k DPS...

Now light weave and you get more. So to light weave say a normal pet sorc rotation

Light > liquid lighting > Light > blockade > bar swap > Light > scamp > Light > daedric prey > Light > psijic > Light > psijic > Light > psijic > Light > psijic > bar swap start over replace any psjic spam with frag if up.

Just mouse click skill button mouse click skill button. Left mouse button that is. Nothing else needed except bar swap quickly after skill when it's time to return to back bar.

Now the easiest way to play. If this is a pain. With this circular heavy attack rotation I've gotten 50k with just a ele drain buff


Light > liquid lighting > Light > blockade > bar swap > Light > scamp > Light > daedric prey > heavy attack x2 on lightning staff > bar swap start over if you had a frag proc from the scamp or daedric prey launch it after one of the heavy attack channels. That's it endless sustain and good enough DPS for anything.

But yes you can get 20 without animation cancelling.