Where is the official documentation on ability queueing ?

soelslaev

Update 45 patch notes read:

Abilities with a cooldown can no longer be queued if their slot was attempted to be activated while on cooldown. This resolves the unintended action to cast an ability the instant their cooldowns ends.

Reading this, apparently:

1. When I press a button to do a skill, it goes into a queue.
2. A skill has something called a cooldown
3. It is possible to put the activation of a skill into this queue even tho the skill might not be available at the moment it is put into this queue

There is no mention of a queue in the combat basics here: https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/newplayerguide/combat

I can find no "advanced" guide on combat even though I would think the mere existence of a queue and how it operates would be basic knowledge.

Further, this mention of a cooldown in update 45 patch notes directly contradicts the words in the docs which read:

In ESO, abilities have no cooldown (although some do have a casting time), meaning you can generally use them as often and as quickly as you'd like...

So, according to that, if I should be able to light attack 10 times in 1 second if I can squeeze the trigger fast enough.

So my question is, considering how fundamental the operation of this queue would be to playing the game with any degree of satisfaction, where is the official documentation that answers questions like: how deep is the queue? What is the rate limit to adding abilities to the queue? What exactly constitutes an ability (bash, light attack, skill, weapon swap, jump, potion drink)? What is the rate limit that items are pulled from the queue for processing? What happens when the queue size limit is reached and the user adds another item to the queue (new item dropped, first item dropped + shift, last item dropped)? Under what conditions would an ability be unavailable but also be allowed to be added to the queue?

fred4

I don't think I've ever seen official documentation, but many of these things are common knowledge. E.g. I've picked them up from other players, the forum, and Discords over the years and haven't found contraditions in my own occasional testing.

soelslaev wrote: »

So, according to that, if I should be able to light attack 10 times in 1 second if I can squeeze the trigger fast enough.

No. Light attacks have, I believe, a 0.7s cooldown that is specific to them. This might be temporarily reduced by one particular armor set, targeted at werewolves. Werewolves aren't meta, though, and I don't think that set is or ever was either. Nor do I think there is a meta playstyle where that short 0.7s cooldown is really taken advantage of. Overloading sorcs, maybe, but I doubt it. In general light attacks are incorporated into the 1 skill per second rotation.

Skills = Abilities. They are are on a 1s cooldown, also known as the global cooldown, or GCD. When people say there is no cooldown, they mean that skills do not have individual, long cooldowns, as they have in other games. Not player skills anyway. The exceptions are companions.

In general you can fit a light attack, a skill, and one further combat action into 1 second and I tend to think of those in that order. It's the further combat action that may cancel the skill animation, and that is where the term animation cancelling comes from. It doesn't usually mean that skill is performed any faster and it never means that you can squeeze in more than 1 skill per second. Anyway, the further combat actions are:

• Dodge rolling
• Blocking
• Bashing / interrupting
• Bar swapping

In general you can fit these into the same second as the light attack and skill. You may even combine them, such as blocking during a dodge roll or bar swap. Or you may even block during a skill cast, so long as it is not a channeled skill.

You cannot gain a DPS advantage via animation cancelling outside of additional bash damage (if you can sustain it), e.g. it does not speed up your skill rotation. It doesn't increase your throughput. However, at least in the old days, block canceling certain skills, like Impale, might reduce the Impale projectile's travel time. You could hit the target fractionally sooner, that way, within the 1s window in which you were casting the skill. This could give you a timing advantage for PvP burst combos.

Also noteworthy is that ultimates and certain other skills, e.g. Merciless Resolve, have a built-in 400ms delay, before they activate. This is a measure to make them fractionally easier to counter in PvP. I find that this does tend to mess with your (PvE) rotation, e.g. these skills seem to increase the global cooldown fractionally. I could be wrong about what technically happens, but I find it hard to weave light attacks after these skills. Skills that have a short sub 1s channel time, on the other hand, such as Jabs and perhaps even an unprocced Crystal Fragments, don't seem to suffer from the same issue.

how deep is the queue? What is the rate limit to adding abilities to the queue?

1 ability only. 1 skill per second.

What exactly constitutes an ability (bash, light attack, skill, weapon swap, jump, potion drink)?

Skills only. Potions and synergies should be asynchronous. Sometimes it feels hard to get the potion to go off, but you can basically hammer that key (without holding it down) while doing everything else.

What is the rate limit that items are pulled from the queue for processing?

1 second, aka the GCD. Note that even though everyone calls it a "global" cooldown, I am quite sure it's actually personal to you, the player. It is not global to the server or global to all players. It is global only in the sense that it applies equally to all skills ... with the aforementioned idiosyncracies regarding ultimates and a very few other skills.

What happens when the queue size limit is reached and the user adds another item to the queue (new item dropped, first item dropped + shift, last item dropped)?

The previous one and only item is dropped and replaced with your latest skill cast.

Under what conditions would an ability be unavailable but also be allowed to be added to the queue?

Hmm. From ~0.2 seconds (I think) after your last skill went off up to the 1 second mark after that skill, at which point your queued skill goes off. Queue is arguably a bit of a misnomer. The whole mechanism merely buffers one skill in advance and is merely designed to make the game feel smooth and responsive.

In the case of long channeled skills, such as the Arcanist beam, Templar Radiant Destruction, or in case of heavy attacks, the queued skill will only go off after those skills or the heavy attack is finished. Of course you can either lift off the heavy attack or block cancel the above skills to change that. I'm pretty sure blocking will also cancel your queued skill.

Things can go a bit awry in the case of ground-targeted abilities. If you hammer the key for such abilities repeatedly, you can easily cause them to go off twice in a row. This doesn't happen as easily with regular skills. There have also been some skills that change state and really count as two separate skills to the game egine, internally. The only one I can think of, which is still like that, is Shadow Image. It's another finnicky skill when you hammer the key repeatedly. So I think actually there may be a longer "dead time" after using a skill, before you can queue up that exact same skill again, but with a skill like Shadow Image it changes from "Place Shadow Image" to "Port back to Shadow Image" on the next cast. This seems to make it easier to accidentally queue up the "Port back" version of the skill immediately after casting the "Place" version of the skill, e.g. if you have a habit of hammering keys multiple times in (perceived) lag.

The absolute worst skill that messes up the "queue" is the scribed bow backwards jump skill. My advice: Don't use it. They made it interact in a funny way with dodge rolls, resulting it to sometimes not fire and hang in the queue while prioritising your next skill in the meantime. E.g. that skill randomly causes reordering of your current skill, the bow backflip skill, and the single next queued skill. Very annoying.

soelslaev

Excellent write up. Thank you so much for the time and patience to answer.