Blizzard devs comment on class balance & animation cancelling

Sevn

This debate is irritating. When folks rage about A/C you all know damn well they are complaining about the full damage of the skill going thru after being canceled.

Not a single player wants the inability to block or dodge when necessary. It's clear as day they want a system that allows you to cancel out whenever necessary but not have the full damage if any of the skill to go thru, like so many other games.

If it's not possible to separate one without the other that's one thing, but stop pretending they don't know what they are asking for, it's insulting and that's from someone who doesn't care one way or another.

starkerealm

@Sevn, sometimes it's just an ideological aversion. They look at the game, think, "there's no way this is the intended way to clear content," and then rage at the people using it, without any awareness how important animation canceling becomes in endgame content.

AgaTheGreat

Why are these threads cropping up all the time?

Zos already said that this is here to stay and no amount of new topics is going on change that.

Paramedicus

@Akisohida
Some glitches make great addition so they are adapted in another games or even in whole genre (combos, juggling). Some are fun but kinda tarded, so they aren't so popular (rocket jump isnt wildly used in FPS games).

AC is one of those more stupid ones (especially if you can replace it with action canceling).

@starkerealm
There wouldn't be need for whole content redesign. Most work would be skill and animation tweaking (*assuming that change is possible). But yeah, it wouldn't be easy.

mdb800

Caligamy_ESO wrote: »

When I read this I couldn't help but think of ESO and I wonder is the devs here have the same thoughts on it..

How many of the awful class changes we've seen over the years here have been a result of not addressing it here?

Good, a/c has caused so many glitches over the years. The game was never designed for a/c but was balanced for it. I wish they did this at launch. It was always a bs mechanic. If the combat system centered around it, it could have added a new layer of play, but it was conceived without a/c. It was like trying to turn your v6 sedan into a hybrid vehicle when the engine and the chassis can't properly fit the hybrid battery; the care is better off being what it was.

starkerealm

Paramedicus wrote: »

There wouldn't be need for whole content redesign. Most work would be skill and animation tweaking (*assuming that change is possible). But yeah, it wouldn't be easy.

Just everything Finn's team worked on, starting with Shadows of the Hist. Which is to say, basically everything since 2015.

So, yeah, no, not, all content. But still talking about completely reworking four years worth of content.

Gnortranermara

Ani canceling is supposed to be for defensive reactions, not for DPS. The solution is simple: give it some significant negative side-effect to make it useless for DPS. A flat stam cost for each ani cancel, plus automatic purge of any DOT that gets cancelled would work perfectly. Then people would only use it for the intended purpose of defensive reaction and not 108k DPS and cheap ganks.

starkerealm

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

Ani canceling is supposed to be for defensive reactions, not for DPS.

Not in ESO. Here weaving light attacks and active abilities is expected behavior.

Gnortranermara

starkerealm wrote: »

Not in ESO. Here weaving light attacks and active abilities is expected behavior.

Yeah, now. But that's not why the mechanic was created by the engine's designers, though, was it? It was an exploit that became an officially sanctioned artificial skill gap between casuals and sweaties. And everybody knows this already, so what's your point, exactly? Ani canceling is supposed to be for defensive reactions, not for DPS.

Why was it never fixed? Because they couldn't. There probably just isn't enough time for a "cancel" signal from the client to reach the server before the damage calculation is already done. Too late. Can't fix that. The only real fix is to add a negative impact afterwards (like I suggested: a flat stam cost for each ani cancel, plus automatic purge of any DOT that gets cancelled) that ruins its effectiveness for DPS. If you paid an extra 500 stam each time you cancelled, good luck staying alive in any real content. If DOT's required the full animation to persist and keep ticking on the target, people would let the animations play out unless they needed to react. The game would look and function the way it was supposed to.

Mr_Walker

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Well even if it was intended or not at the beginning doesn't matter but Zenimax decided to make it a feature.

A few years back, the trains ran late a lot where I lived. They were truly terrible. Then the government rewrote the timetable so they all ran slower, and redfeined what late was, from +3 minutes out ot +6.

Now, we have an amazing service, which is rarely late!

Sanctum74

This is ESO! Go to the Blizzard forums with that nonsense.

It’s not D3, WOW, Final Fantasy or any other of those other cheesy games with terrible combat mechanics. If you like those games so much then go play them and stop trying to change a game that the majority of us have been enjoying for years.

You do NOT have to animation cancel if you don’t want to, but if you want to get better and enjoy more skillful combat then practice and you will get better.

There’s literally like 4 of you that keep arguing against it, I will gladly buy each of you a copy of those other games just to go away and stop whining if you enjoy that slow boring combat so much.

TheBonesXXX

I think people are confusing invisible desyncs with canceling an animation but still rendering the visual effects. I'm not sure, speeding up your animation is awesome. Invisible desyncs are not.

Lady_Linux

phermitgb wrote: »

I've always been of the opinion that the very concept of animation cancelling is inherently breaking code. My logic goes something like this...
programmers created the animations for a REASON
under normal play, I hit a button or command, the results of that command goes hand in hand with the animation I watch on screen
the ability to bypass the visual animation part of the is bypassing one of the two fundamental features of code associated with using that action

now, some games, the animations for certain skills or abilities are excessively long, or lock you into an action while still exposing you to the environment. Alien vs Predator by Sega (2010) was a really egregious example of this, allowing players to do these wildly gruesome execution animations, in a fast first person shooter. The animation were pretty cool, but you could very easily be shot to death while locked into the kill animation, unable to cancel out if you started to take fire.

Middle Earth : Shadow of War is a moderately good example of the other side - there were quite a few exotic animations for certain attacks, but most would be cancelled out by certain actions (like dodge) so that your defensive skills could override your offensive skills to allow you to get out of an offensive animation that might get you killed. And it is, in fact, under very narrow circumstances, possible to still get off your offensive skill and then effectively cancel the animation (the context-sensitive BLOCK skill does this pretty frequently)

This is, as far as I can tell, the reason that animation cancelling might have a valid reason to exist - some animations are excessively complicated, locking you into an animation that might get you killed. Especially in an MMO with at least some boss mechanics that are instant kills, maybe animation cancelling is a necessity. BUT...using it as a technique to enhance your outgoing DPS is inherently bypassing what was "supposed" to be a limitation.

And while the advocates of animation cancelling continue to point out that they should be allowed to exploit every advantage they can find and train themselves to use, the blizzard point above is perfectly reasonable. Game balance is, at least at some level, designed around animations as part of the limits of how far and fast players can damage targets, for the general population. Not every member of the general population can use, or wants to use, or even knows to use, animation cancelling, a bypassing of the intended purpose of the code, as a way to compete with the content. So, now devs are forced to either adjust coding for the potentials of animation cancelling for only a portion of the population, or listen to the overly tuned segment of the population *** about wanting harder content to cope with their animation cancelling adjustments to outgoing damage.

in short (too late!) - animation cancelling as a feature of any code essentially acts as an "out" for players, allowing them to get out of a animation that might get them killed. However, when it's exploited as a way of increasing outgoing damage in games that are mostly centered around killing, it becomes a technique that warps game balance in general, actually ultimately harming both those that don't use it AND those that use it, driving a wider gap between 2 mindsets of players and forcing devs to either create a multitude of solutions for different segments of the population, or creating a frankenstein's monster of code trying to appease all.

Ads i understand what you said, the use of animation canceling is an exploit that was not intended and as such those who use it are in violation of the terms of service for exploiting weaknesses found in the game, is that how most everyone see it too? Clearly then, using it is grounds for banishment...

Ri_Khan

Call it what you want, it's an unintentional bug that all the players with 1337 s|<1llz have exploited to the point where it's caused balance issues and endless nerfs. I would like to see something done about it but highly doubt we will. It's probably easier for them to just add cast times to everything.

Royaji

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Not in ESO. Here weaving light attacks and active abilities is expected behavior.

Yeah, now. But that's not why the mechanic was created by the engine's designers, though, was it? It was an exploit that became an officially sanctioned artificial skill gap between casuals and sweaties. And everybody knows this already, so what's your point, exactly? Ani canceling is supposed to be for defensive reactions, not for DPS.

Why was it never fixed? Because they couldn't. There probably just isn't enough time for a "cancel" signal from the client to reach the server before the damage calculation is already done. Too late. Can't fix that. The only real fix is to add a negative impact afterwards (like I suggested: a flat stam cost for each ani cancel, plus automatic purge of any DOT that gets cancelled) that ruins its effectiveness for DPS. If you paid an extra 500 stam each time you cancelled, good luck staying alive in any real content. If DOT's required the full animation to persist and keep ticking on the target, people would let the animations play out unless they needed to react. The game would look and function the way it was supposed to.

One more time..

There are no animations server side. None. Zero. The server is not aware that you have cancelled an animation because from its point of view animations do not even exist. They are just visual fluff that is happening client side, on your system. There can be no negative impact for animation cancelling since for the combat system animations are not a thing. For the server only information about skills and their cast times, GCD, and priority queue exists.

Why is it that way? Because no MMO in the world has managed to dynamically process animations for tenths and hundreds of players in the same place. You can do it in a fighting game or a 4v4 arena game but not in a MMO.

So the only way animation cancelling can be "fixed" (in a sense you anti-AC crowd use) is to put a cast time on every single skill. This way server can get information about you casting a skill, start a countdown which is your cast time and if you then send it information about your next action before this countdown is other the initial action can be cancelled. That's how current cast time skills work. And they suck. You can say goodbye to "fast paced action combat" the moment all of the skills would work that way. Not even talking about what will happen in a laggy situation.

That's why AC became a feature. Because "fixing" it will quite literally break the original intended combat system. AC exists because devs have decided that the game should function how they have initially supposed to. Not the other way around.

Stevie6

The solution might be easy to implement but it will take the players and devs to cooperate and not be one sided or favoring those that cry over everything. There needs to be a different damage output for pvers especially for those that can’t AC. They are not going to put in the time to learn AC. When I watched a youtube video on AC I just laughed. A person should be able to LA and hit a skill within .5 seconds of each other and repeat it for rotation/bar swap. Someone is bound to say no freekin’ way. I can do at least 15 to 22k dps most days while doing normal and vet dungeons. That’s with LA. My connection to the internet is good 11 to 60ms to the server, but in game it’s anywhere from 90 to 15000 ms. Lag spikes are not cool and ruins the overall gaming experience.

I can AC all day long on a test dummy and average 22k dps with packet loss and lag but the overall damage output feels like a wet noodle. My old pet sorc (pre nerf) was great. I could easily do 30 to 50k dps with some packet loss and the lag wasn’t bad at that time. So what is the average player to do? Get good is out. Already tried that route. What’s next?

starkerealm

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Not in ESO. Here weaving light attacks and active abilities is expected behavior.

Yeah, now. But that's not why the mechanic was created by the engine's designers, though, was it?

The mechanic wasn't created by the engine's designers. The engine ESO entered dev on was middleware. I'm not sure if the final version of the game is still running on a modified form of the Hero Engine or if they actually swapped during development, but the engine designers are irrelevant to this discussion. They didn't make the game.

starkerealm

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

Why was it never fixed? Because they couldn't.

No, because the community asked them not to. We've been over this. Six or seven times.

Royaji

starkerealm wrote: »

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

Why was it never fixed? Because they couldn't.

We've been over this. Six or seven times.

Talk about an understatement...

Gnortranermara

Royaji wrote: »

There are no animations server side. None. Zero. The server is not aware that you have cancelled an animation because from its point of view animations do not even exist. They are just visual fluff that is happening client side, on your system. There can be no negative impact for animation cancelling since for the combat system animations are not a thing. For the server only information about skills and their cast times, GCD, and priority queue exists.

Yeah, and nothing in my post suggested that there are animations server side, did it? Really, really bad strawman attempt. Feel the shame.

Royaji wrote: »

So the only way animation cancelling can be "fixed" (in a sense you anti-AC crowd use) is to put a cast time on every single skill. This way server can get information about you casting a skill, start a countdown which is your cast time and if you then send it information about your next action before this countdown is other the initial action can be cancelled. That's how current cast time skills work. And they suck. You can say goodbye to "fast paced action combat" the moment all of the skills would work that way. Not even talking about what will happen in a laggy situation.

That's why AC became a feature. Because "fixing" it will quite literally break the original intended combat system. AC exists because devs have decided that the game should function how they have initially supposed to. Not the other way around.

False. I already suggested one fix that would work. Any dolt could grok at least a couple more decent alternatives, but a stam cost and DOT removal would fix the problem by making it largely useless for DPS purposes.

Royaji

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

Royaji wrote: »

There are no animations server side. None. Zero. The server is not aware that you have cancelled an animation because from its point of view animations do not even exist. They are just visual fluff that is happening client side, on your system. There can be no negative impact for animation cancelling since for the combat system animations are not a thing. For the server only information about skills and their cast times, GCD, and priority queue exists.

Yeah, and nothing in my post suggested that there are animations server side, did it? Really, really bad strawman attempt. Feel the shame.

Royaji wrote: »

So the only way animation cancelling can be "fixed" (in a sense you anti-AC crowd use) is to put a cast time on every single skill. This way server can get information about you casting a skill, start a countdown which is your cast time and if you then send it information about your next action before this countdown is other the initial action can be cancelled. That's how current cast time skills work. And they suck. You can say goodbye to "fast paced action combat" the moment all of the skills would work that way. Not even talking about what will happen in a laggy situation.

That's why AC became a feature. Because "fixing" it will quite literally break the original intended combat system. AC exists because devs have decided that the game should function how they have initially supposed to. Not the other way around.

False. I already suggested one fix that would work. Any dolt could grok at least a couple more decent alternatives, but a stam cost and DOT removal would fix the problem by making it largely useless for DPS purposes.

Alright, lets back this up. To apply your Stam cost and DoT removal you need the server to know that an animation was cancelled. But I guess that "strawman" was kinda useful... You know, because we have established that there are no animations server side. So your idea does not work. At all.

aetherial_heavenn

Recently there have been umpteen videos on bash cancelling also increasing dps on some builds. The problem of LA weaving and ani cancelling (AC) as a huge source of dps has also brought AC back into focus.

We have also had a bunch of group combat and PvP events that have illustrated the simple DPS gap viscerally to some players. So ACing as a source of increased damage is back under the microscope.

Personally I'd leave ani cancelling where it is for all the reasons stated many times elsewhere. Hee's a brief summary of why:

ESO is a game with a single length global cool down, without many cast times, with very fast telegraphs. In any vet content that has telegraphed one-shot attacks or mechanics you cannot wait until your character returns to the idle pose before using any action, you'll die. (This how lag due to high ping works. It kills you.)

Everything in ESO is hooked up to a priority queue, that allows some actions to take priority over other actions, hence cancelling them.

The order, based on other posts on this topic are

"Dodge -> Swap -> Bash -> Block -> Skill -> Light/Heavy Attack.


From this priority queue order it is pretty obvious, animation cancelling is in the game for defensive reasons, not to maximise damage or make combat more fluid but to make combat more responsive when you need to block/dodge/bash an attack, now. "

Unfortunately, a by product of this combat system is that those who AC well can double their damage, using the same skills and sets as those who cannot. So player skill, and low ping are well rewarded. Deliberately animation cancelling to string multiple moves together to damage more quickly had nothing to do with the intent of AC early on....but players will always find ways of maximising their gameplay. So now it is a much disputed issue: defensively it is a necessary feature, offensively it has some unintended upsides for players. These are now also part of standard end game play and seem to have been integrated into the later end game design.

My opinion is that the rewards of ACing have become too skewed toward relying on the unintentional aspect of AC: ie, increased damage thru LA weaving, and bash cancelling.

This has made a 'skill gap' a chasm. The original LA damage increase was to raise the floor for newer players who mouse click only, but Weaving and ACing has made the ceiling rise steadily away from players who do try to use appropriate skills and LA but cannot AC and weave with perfect rhythm.

Unfortunately, being fundamental to ESO's signature combat system removing AC is not a viable solution to the dps gap performance gap. (Imagine waiting for every animation to complete and until your character is idle before you could use the next skill! I am old and slow and used to high latency but it would drive even me nuts.)

If non ani cancelling players could get more dps from the skill combos directly then the gap could be reduced. Weaving with lag, old fingers, or crappy Pc mice and keyboards is harder than working out the best 3 or 4 skill combo to use in the right order under specific conditions, but such knowledge and execution could could be rewarded with more DPS (or even HPS) without affecting the 55K+ DPS , self buffed, 6 mill dummy parsers too badly. .

Reducing dps from LA weaves and tweaking up damage from actual skill combos would probably fix the constant threads about ani cancelling being removed from game. But i sadly expect that they'd only be replaced by 'I was nerfed because of noobs' whine threads instead. *shrug*

Gnortranermara

Royaji wrote: »

Alright, lets back this up. To apply your Stam cost and DoT removal you need the server to know that an animation was cancelled. But I guess that "strawman" was kinda useful... You know, because we have established that there are no animations server side. So your idea does not work. At all.

You... do understand that the client knows the animation was cancelled, so the client can communicate with the server to let it know, right? Try to grok the sequence of events: you cast a skill, the client sends a signal to server to charge you some resources and process the ability's effects, then you block to ani cancel, the client recognizes that you ani cancelled and sends a signal to the server to charge you an extra 500 stam (or 2 ulti, or whatever constitutes a sufficient deterrent) and remove any DOT from the ability that was just cancelled. Simple.

Jayroo

Stebarnz wrote: »

No, the ZOS devs do not think like this as they know removing A/C would turn this game into a dead landscape of rp'ers and low dps potatoes.
If every class and everyone can A/C then balancing is the same as if no one can.

Because its impossible to make the combat in eso rewarding/challenging, and not an "its not a bug its a feature" feature?
Don't be so narrow minded

barney2525

I am confused

If the article was written about Diablo 3 .....

who gives a carp?

Why is this an issue here, since I have not heard of any devs announcing that they are planning on changing AC ?

Why is this on ESO forums?

Royaji

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

Royaji wrote: »

Alright, lets back this up. To apply your Stam cost and DoT removal you need the server to know that an animation was cancelled. But I guess that "strawman" was kinda useful... You know, because we have established that there are no animations server side. So your idea does not work. At all.

You... do understand that the client knows the animation was cancelled, so the client can communicate with the server to let it know, right? Try to grok the sequence of events: you cast a skill, the client sends a signal to server to charge you some resources and process the ability's effects, then you block to ani cancel, the client recognizes that you ani cancelled and sends a signal to the server to charge you an extra 500 stam (or whatever constitutes a sufficient deterrent) and remove any DOT from the ability that was just cancelled. Simple.

Funny. Like I have already addressed the issue between client and server communication and dynamic animation processing.

Oh. I did.

Royaji wrote: »

SidewalkChalk5 wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Not in ESO. Here weaving light attacks and active abilities is expected behavior.

Yeah, now. But that's not why the mechanic was created by the engine's designers, though, was it? It was an exploit that became an officially sanctioned artificial skill gap between casuals and sweaties. And everybody knows this already, so what's your point, exactly? Ani canceling is supposed to be for defensive reactions, not for DPS.

Why was it never fixed? Because they couldn't. There probably just isn't enough time for a "cancel" signal from the client to reach the server before the damage calculation is already done. Too late. Can't fix that. The only real fix is to add a negative impact afterwards (like I suggested: a flat stam cost for each ani cancel, plus automatic purge of any DOT that gets cancelled) that ruins its effectiveness for DPS. If you paid an extra 500 stam each time you cancelled, good luck staying alive in any real content. If DOT's required the full animation to persist and keep ticking on the target, people would let the animations play out unless they needed to react. The game would look and function the way it was supposed to.

Why is it that way? Because no MMO in the world has managed to dynamically process animations for tenths and hundreds of players in the same place. You can do it in a fighting game or a 4v4 arena game but not in a MMO.

Anyway, I see no reason to continue this discussion. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Sanctum74

barney2525 wrote: »

I am confused

If the article was written about Diablo 3 .....

who gives a carp?

Why is this an issue here, since I have not heard of any devs announcing that they are planning on changing AC ?

Why is this on ESO forums?

Because people are desperate and don’t want to put in any effort or practice to get better so they blame their failures on animation canceling. Even if it was changed then they would still be looking to change or nerf something else because they are just too lazy to learn game mechanics.

Gilvoth

Sanctum74 wrote: »

barney2525 wrote: »

I am confused

If the article was written about Diablo 3 .....

who gives a carp?

Why is this an issue here, since I have not heard of any devs announcing that they are planning on changing AC ?

Why is this on ESO forums?

Because people are desperate and don’t want to put in any effort or practice to get better so they blame their failures on animation canceling. Even if it was changed then they would still be looking to change or nerf something else because they are just too lazy to learn game mechanics.

that's not why.
it's because that article shows that other mmo's have removed it and they removed it because it is a glitch and it was not intended.
we know how to animation cancel, we all do it even if we don't intend to it happens all the time, especially with light attack canceling.
light attack canceling is fine, that's not the problem.
the problem is we don't like using a glitch and quote the article "trick" to pvp, instead we prefer to see the animation take place realistically and have the ability to react to animations instead of tricks, glitch, twitching dependent to the point that you don't even see the fight happen, just watch people glitch out and claim its skill when zero skill is involved.
if they lowered the timer on the animations and made the animations much faster and block animation canceling it would then be actual skill to fight.

Dusk_Coven

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Well even if it was intended or not at the beginning doesn't matter but Zenimax decided to make it a feature. Likely do to the coding and maybe because they didn't see the harm.

This is starting to look like the story of ESO. All the :facepalm: things that have happened -- "we didn't see the harm" <.<
Like the Legion Zero "alliance" flags?

Contaminate

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Well even if it was intended or not at the beginning doesn't matter but Zenimax decided to make it a feature. Likely do to the coding and maybe because they didn't see the harm.

This is starting to look like the story of ESO. All the :facepalm: things that have happened -- "we didn't see the harm" <.<
Like the Legion Zero "alliance" flags?

That is a nonissue to the max

Animation Canceling exists due to an action priority system, and functions as a potential dps boost because there aren’t cast times, and guess what:

The playerbase as a whole don’t want cast times on abilities