Spell Cancellation & Weaving

tamedbeast

I've been playing ESO since Beta, and there is only one real thing in this game that bothers me and that is spell cancellation and weaving, I feel like these were unintended combat mechanics that ZOS just decided to keep but was never actually intended to be apart of games combat mechanics, but decided to just keep them rather than fix them to make some players feel skilled.

Change my mind.

Rungar

i imagine zos has paid a heavy price for that bad decision.

Deloth_Vyrr

This topic has been beaten to death. Weaving makes perfect sense given the mechanics of the combat system.

Light attacks were coded to have their own separate global cooldown to abilities. This allows players to do both light attacks and ability casts in parallel without getting caught up in each other's global cooldowns, it's hard to believe this was done for any reason other than a conscious design choice. We'll never know for sure of course, but seeing how ZOS has supported it and designed sets that utilize it, it was either an intentional design choice or a happy accident, but it's here to stay.

Animation cancelling is a whole nother can of worms. Animation canceling wouldn't even be a thing if ZOS would follow their own rules for instant cast abilities. Once again it's about the global cooldown, but this time it's the players making sure the game follows the rules. The global cooldown is a standardized period of time you have to wait between using abilities. As such, instant cast abilities should be able to be used in succession only limited by the global cooldown. The problem is that some instant cast ability animations actually take longer to play out than the global cooldown, thus artificially creating a longer delay between ability castings. Animation cancelling simply clips off the excess animation, it doesn't let people cast more frequently than the global cooldown allows but rather just eliminates excess animation time beyond the global cooldown duration which shouldn't exist. Players want a standardized fair combat system, and a class having overly lengthy animations creating arbitrary delays in casting that exceeds the gobal cool down is rightfully frowned upon and that's why players have circumvented that extra delay.

If ZOS would fix animations for instant cast abilities so they don't drag on longer than the global cooldown, animation cancelling wouldn't even exist in its current form

Vajrak

tamedbeast wrote: »

I've been playing ESO since Beta, and there is only one real thing in this game that bothers me and that is spell cancellation and weaving, I feel like these were unintended combat mechanics that ZOS just decided to keep but was never actually intended to be apart of games combat mechanics, but decided to just keep them rather than fix them to make some players feel skilled.

Change my mind.

So you "feel" like ...the exact statement that was made regarding it. To maintain fluid combat, they opted not to put in a delay on light attacks into skills -- it wasn't an issue until they raised light attack damage a long time ago.

New content is designed with this in mind, and if they fixed it now, DPS would drop a LOT -- and people would freak out, and leave the game in droves.

That said, it's not REQUIRED to do enough DPS to clear all content, it is just something you can use to push a specific aspect of the game to ridiculous levels.

[Edit to remove bait]

Helgarth

I somehow don't care about weaving, been doing it instinctively since long. At least, I care less than ani cancel, which I despise and one of the reason I stopped this game over guild wars 2. This and the stun immune system.

Ani cancel should stay! It's a good thing to be able to brain your opponent or be able to dodge after a key pressed a bit too fast... BUT the damages inherent to the skill cancelled shouldn't be counted! You don't finish your animation because you CANCELLED it, then no damages... That's as simple as that. I suspect the action to be sent to the server as soon as the key is pressed but to me, it should be as soon as the animation is fully finished. Event tho I can't really guess how they handle this dispite being a software engineer.

The little thing I don't get is.. While I understand that ani cancel is healthy for a good gameplay, I don't get why the pro ani cancel want the damages from the skill pressed. They still can have their fast paced gameplay and skilled gameplay without those, while anti ani-cancel would be happy to be able to see the skills performed by the oppenent if not brained by a smart dodge or bar swap. The skill gap would still be there. Because if what the Pro ani cancel want is their damages as fast as possible, a ragdoll with no animations at all on all the skills would perform as well as ani cancel if not better! Would that be fun to them?

I REALLY want to come back to eso since this game has a lot of good things, but unless this hasn't been changed with the stun and stun immunity mechanics allowing 10 chickens running after a guy without having him to die, I'll just stick to guild wars 2, which as a awesome combat and good classes identity.

Everest_Lionheart

What’s more annoying to me is that some animations can’t be canceled by blocking, bar swapping or roll dodging. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been hit in the face with a heavy attack while casting sweeps on my Templar because the attack winds up the second I cast and the channel time is too long to get the block up. Or when using degeneration even if you input a potion or a bar swap while it’s channeling it won’t register so you have to wait that extra GCD for your next input. And my latest toon, stamblade when casting incapacitating strike there is also another half second pause you have to account for before your next input.

Honorable mention to rapid strikes though you can time your blocks and bashes with it. And also to elemental weapons which has a funky channel time as well but a reliable enough cadence that it’s still functional.