This BUG is ruining COMBAT!!!! FIx it now

Mazdryk

Video demonstration is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC6KBO_UMpY&feature=youtu.be

You may have heard that ESO does not have a global cooldown, but since it requires animations to finish before the next ability is used, this basically amounts to a GCD. What’s interesting is that there are different “priority levels” with ESO abilities, with some being able to cancel the animations of others while still allowing the cancelled ability to activate. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Lowest priority:

Light/Heavy Attacks. Activating any ability while using one of these will immediately override the animation and perform the other ability. For this to work on heavy attacks (or presumably any casted ability), you must actually finish most of the “cast time” (not all of it) before casting the activated ability. Here’s a demonstration of this: Video

Middle ground:

Activated abilities that cost Magicka or Stamina – these will cancel the animations of light/heavy attacks if activated while an animation is in progress. If your active ability has a casting or channeling time, you need to test at what point you can interrupt the animation and still get the full effect of the ability. Some can be cancelled earlier than others.

Highest priority:

Bash. (Known as “Interrupt” in your controls/keybinding settings) This ability will cancel ANY other animation that is in progress and begin its own animation.

Block. Simply “blip” the block button to cancel animations for any ability, even bash! Some casted/channeled abilities can be cancelled at the right time so that the ability still finishes casting and can still get on with your next animation.

Thoughts:

What this ultimately means is that to get the best DPS out of your character, you should be weaving abilities together. For example, always start with a light attack and immediately activate your next magicka/stamina ability. The light attack will still go off, but it won’t play the full animation so you end up gaining DPS. Timing on this can be pretty crucial and the faster you are, the better it will work. The highest DPS would be light>activate>bash on every attack, but this is relatively difficult to pull off in practice, especially repetitively on every attack. light>active, light>bash, active>bash are all very easy to pull off and should be done whenever possible.

Another note is that while Bash does the most damage and costs the least stamina with 1h/s – it will also highly benefit 2h and DW users (even bow/staff users in melee range). As long as your stamina doesn’t run out before the enemy is dead, you will simply do more DPS and kill your opponent faster if you weave in light attack and bash cancels with any weapon type.

Please feel free to test this mechanic with abilities from your own class and let us know what you find.

Mazdryk

This was copy/pasted from another site.

Rhythmic

Another bash thread.I wonder when they fix it.

Brasseurfb16_ESO

I think you should speak about burst instead of DPS, playing this way grants you indeed the highest burst capability in the game but you are still limited to your magicka/stamina pool for DPS.

If you run out of ressources you have to wait, like anyone else, for them to regenerate and you are also left vulnerable to stuns and AoE (if you must dodge out of them) when those are very low. So I wouldn't recommend this play style, especialy in dongeons where ressource manadgement and positioning are keys to win.

Mazdryk

Resource management? Save extra health because you kill mobs 3X faster. This bug also really destroys PVP where burst is always King.

Brasseurfb16_ESO

Mazdryk wrote: »

Resource management? Save extra health because you kill mobs 3X faster. This bug also really destroys PVP where burst is always King.

Well, I play as a healer and believe me I've seen tanks go from 95% to 10% in normal dongeons content because they failed to use tools beside block and bash. Bashing 2 or 3 ennemies at the same time is something, bashing 6 to 8 ennemies is something else. When you constantly need to block to bash and get hit by multiple sources of attacks your stamina depletes very fast, valuable stamina wich can prevent situations where a high health pool isn't enough.

For PvP, while I agree the damage from bash could be adjusted on the lower side, you must not forget, to bash you, the players needs to block. And even with the passives a Sword&Board build is still slower than an average player when he decides to block. So the best thing you can do to defeat such "cheesy" tactic is to work around depleting his stamina with fast attacks, light attacks, and use mobility skills or ranged controls (like Magnum Shot, Streak, Destructive Reach,...) to prevent your target from charging you with Invasion.

lajnus86b16_ESO

imagine this with 2hander and bash with the sword. jesus the damage output i knew it worked and done it some times but i noticed it didnt work with 2hander, but i notice now after this video why it did not work.

Its becuse i did somthing wrong

This need to be solved.

Ralathar44

There is no issue with this.

There are priorities for a reason. It's because alot of abilities are used in a reactive manner and bash is intended to be used in a reactive manner.

Example: Venomous Arrow interrupts casters. If I had to wait for animations to finish most times it'd be too slow to be useful.

Bash interrupts everything and is integral to fighting some enemies while taking less damage. If it didn't interrupt everything it would be too slow most of the time.



Also there is inherently nothing wrong with animation canceling being superior DPS or burst. It is a valid style of combat. If you do not like it that is preference.

If, however, there are skills that you feel do too much damage then by all means talk about that needing to be balanced. On my max stamina bow Dragon Knight however my bash is a terrible use of stamina. I need my stamina to aoe, do much better single target damage with heavy attack/poison arrow animation canceling, and most important ROLL!!! Yes roll doesn't seem very important when you are facing easy low level PVE content but it gets more important and is vital in dungeons.


Also keep in mind that alot of times stamina dumping on a single target is the single stupidest decision you can possibly make.

Lynx7386

What's game breaking is the fact that half of the time my abilities wont even work because of some hidden global cooldown. I pop invisibility then try to use sneak attack, or even uppercut, but the attack doesnt go off. Mashing the button just gives me a constant error blip sound, and I'm lucky if the attack goes off within 2 seconds after using invisibility - nullifying any bonus that it would give.

SirTinbox

Ralathar44 wrote: »

There is no issue with this.

There are priorities for a reason. It's because alot of abilities are used in a reactive manner and bash is intended to be used in a reactive manner.

Example: Venomous Arrow interrupts casters. If I had to wait for animations to finish most times it'd be too slow to be useful.

Bash interrupts everything and is integral to fighting some enemies while taking less damage. If it didn't interrupt everything it would be too slow most of the time.



Also there is inherently nothing wrong with animation canceling being superior DPS or burst. It is a valid style of combat. If you do not like it that is preference.

If, however, there are skills that you feel do too much damage then by all means talk about that needing to be balanced. On my max stamina bow Dragon Knight however my bash is a terrible use of stamina. I need my stamina to aoe, do much better single target damage with heavy attack/poison arrow animation canceling, and most important ROLL!!! Yes roll doesn't seem very important when you are facing easy low level PVE content but it gets more important and is vital in dungeons.


Also keep in mind that alot of times stamina dumping on a single target is the single stupidest decision you can possibly make.

What?
I don´t even....

Everythig you say is basically how convenient it is to execute multiple attacks/abilities within a blink of an eye via animation cancle. That doesn´t make it right.

There is everything wrong with canceling an animation and still performing the ability, attack, whatever...

The animation basically defines how long it takes to perform a certain action.

Just to get this straight, canceling an animation in order to stop whatever you´re currently doing and do something else instead (like interrupting or whatever) is perfectly fine. Doing both is not.

You can now basically light attack as fast as you´re able to alternate between left and right mouse button without messing up. That´s just wrong.

Basically an exploit that needs to be fixed. Damage, healing, etc. needs to occur at the end of the animation, not at the beginning or half way through.

Why take the medium armor passive that increases your attack speed when I can attack however fast the f.. I want to?

Ralathar44

It's part of the game's balance already. The game was balanced around this. It's a "feature" lol.

bantad87

^^^ Veteran content stamina build is incredibly difficult even with weaving, it would be disgusting without it. Without weaving you'd have too low damage or run out of stamina too fast, leaving you defenseless.

SirTinbox

Ralathar44 wrote: »

It's part of the game's balance already. The game was balanced around this. It's a "feature" lol.

If you say that the game was balanced around the fact that a player can abort the execution of an ability/attack at any point in order to quickly react rather then having to wait for the animation to finish I believe you.

But the game is certainly not balanced around the player being able to cancle animations in order to get that extra damage, heal, etc going.

If my character twitches with his sword arm and my opponent receives damage, I call that broken.

Ralathar44

SirTinbox wrote: »

If my character twitches with his sword arm and my opponent receives damage, I call that broken.

Thankfully that's your opinion and not the dev's . Because you are basically talking about a blanket nerf of everybody in the game by a fair degree because something bothers you because you don't like it.

steinernein

For once I agree with the cat, this mechanic -unintended or not - improves the game play. The game was also probably designed with the mindset that the game play was supposed to be a lot smoother/responsive than it currently is which means animation canceling is probably bringing you closer to spec rather than farther away -- a thought at any rate.

Andy22

Ralathar44 wrote: »

SirTinbox wrote: »

If my character twitches with his sword arm and my opponent receives damage, I call that broken.

Thankfully that's your opinion and not the dev's . Because you are basically talking about a blanket nerf of everybody in the game by a fair degree because something bothers you because you don't like it.

First of "everybody" are only those that aware of this "feature", which i guess are 5% of the total playerbase. The way it works now is so strange and inaccessible that going by there UI Addon "nerf" this is very likely unintentional and will be fixed.

If this is than a "nerf" for players like yourself, they ofc need to find ways to offsit the sta/dmg reduction.

My main argument would be player 08/15 does not understand and know about this cheap extra dmg "mechanic", so it should be fixed. I also did not notice a "animation canceling" or "skill weaving" tutorial section

Mazdryk

I wish a DEVELOPER would comment on this. I'm starting to see that their communication is terrible. Trying to keep quiet about something like this is bad business.

Eris

Mazdryk wrote: »

I wish a DEVELOPER would comment on this. I'm starting to see that their communication is terrible. Trying to keep quiet about something like this is bad business.

OR

The developers are hard at work developing new content, fixing bugs, working on requested features, and not wasting precious development time sifting through the forums. Seems like good business.

Thechemicals

This isnt a bug. Its working as intended and can be done in many other mmo's that use active blocking,attacking, abilities. AoC and Dcuo are examples of this and both have had verification that this is working as intended

lao

Mazdryk wrote: »

Video demonstration is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC6KBO_UMpY&feature=youtu.be

You may have heard that ESO does not have a global cooldown, but since it requires animations to finish before the next ability is used, this basically amounts to a GCD. What’s interesting is that there are different “priority levels” with ESO abilities, with some being able to cancel the animations of others while still allowing the cancelled ability to activate. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Lowest priority:

Light/Heavy Attacks. Activating any ability while using one of these will immediately override the animation and perform the other ability. For this to work on heavy attacks (or presumably any casted ability), you must actually finish most of the “cast time” (not all of it) before casting the activated ability. Here’s a demonstration of this: Video

Middle ground:

Activated abilities that cost Magicka or Stamina – these will cancel the animations of light/heavy attacks if activated while an animation is in progress. If your active ability has a casting or channeling time, you need to test at what point you can interrupt the animation and still get the full effect of the ability. Some can be cancelled earlier than others.

Highest priority:

Bash. (Known as “Interrupt” in your controls/keybinding settings) This ability will cancel ANY other animation that is in progress and begin its own animation.

Block. Simply “blip” the block button to cancel animations for any ability, even bash! Some casted/channeled abilities can be cancelled at the right time so that the ability still finishes casting and can still get on with your next animation.

Thoughts:

What this ultimately means is that to get the best DPS out of your character, you should be weaving abilities together. For example, always start with a light attack and immediately activate your next magicka/stamina ability. The light attack will still go off, but it won’t play the full animation so you end up gaining DPS. Timing on this can be pretty crucial and the faster you are, the better it will work. The highest DPS would be light>activate>bash on every attack, but this is relatively difficult to pull off in practice, especially repetitively on every attack. light>active, light>bash, active>bash are all very easy to pull off and should be done whenever possible.

Another note is that while Bash does the most damage and costs the least stamina with 1h/s – it will also highly benefit 2h and DW users (even bow/staff users in melee range). As long as your stamina doesn’t run out before the enemy is dead, you will simply do more DPS and kill your opponent faster if you weave in light attack and bash cancels with any weapon type.

Please feel free to test this mechanic with abilities from your own class and let us know what you find.

to be honest this may be a bug but its also like the only skillbased mechanic in the game. reminds me of comboskipping in AoC.

do not remove that pls.

vyndral13preub18_ESO

This thread has popped up in so many games i have played. On reactive abilities like dodge and interrupts the cancels are almost always meant to be there.

But i have yet to see a developer come out and say yes, we expect you to animation cancel to increase your dps. At least not right a way. I have heard of one that tried to fix it and couldn't so they gave up. But in most of the games i have played animation canceling was slowly removed as skills were identified that could do it. All the time people on the forum would be crying that the canceling was intended and removing it was destroying the game.

But who knows this is a new game and a new company. So until we get a response *shrug*

xxslam48xxb14_ESO

Well the obvious solution to this is to make abilites who have had there animation cancelled not do any damage. If your character isnt even swinging his 2 handed because he bashed then why would the 2 hander still hit and deal damage? That way it can still be used to pull off a quick bash/block, but you wouldnt get the exploited dps aspect of this. Just in case this type of change doesnt go through though, practice practice practice at it because if you arent doing it in pvp, your wrong!

Aphilas

Likely it's working as intended. Otherwise there'd be no explanation to, for example, how weak 2 handers are without weaving.
And no, your opinion about 2h being fine because you can kill *** in lvl 30 PvE content is not needed.

Andy22

Aphilas wrote: »

Likely it's working as intended.

I simply wonder if u really expect a dev to come in here and say something like:

"Yes utilizing our advanced Animation Canceling System is the best way to go if u want max. dps, we just included a tutorial for new players in coldhabour to show u how its done!"

I imagine they setup a enemy like the one to-do the "interrupt", but instead u need to animation cancel "light attack->skill->bash".
This would actually be very funny and a great way to make fun of ESO.

Sorry, but this discussion seems so absurd to me.

tossop

Cancel animations is good as it is, e.g. if you cancel heavy attack, you got only partial damage from full heavy attack, or full damage from light attack, its nice ingame combo, you can doing it, if you want max dps. Some way to twitch basic attacks. Very skillfull player should know how to get ideal ability weaving, but player must have some Amadeus Mozart piano skills , or good keyboard macro programing skills.

Aphilas

Andy22 wrote: »

Aphilas wrote: »

Likely it's working as intended.

I simply wonder if u really expect a dev to come in here and say something like

I don't expect anything. I'm playing the game and while not playing somewhat amuse myself with very narrow points of view of majority of these forums posters.

Mykah

They need to make Bash damage only land when it actually interrupts a skill.

Combo weaving Attack > Ability is fine and adds some depth to the combat mechanics.

kirnmalidus

This thread is redundant with another thread (and both OPs are copy/pastes of the exact same post from another forum). The other thread is longer so I suggest this one be locked/closed (@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom‌).

Other thread is here: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/85594/major-combat-flaw-animation-canceling-damage-stacking-devs-please-look-here

mblythe21b14_ESO

Wanna be mods make me laugh.

dw0011nrb19_ESO

Like already mentioned in the video, this is no bug. Mutsuu has simply figured out how the priority system in this game works. Just because someone explains to you what rain is, are you gonna run down the street and yell everyone THAT RAIN IS WATER AND CONSISTS OF DIFFERENT STRUCTURED MOLECULES OMG! HANG HIM!

We already had this behaviour a couple of times in our recent past? Maybe its time to calm your ***.

Enigmatix

Its not a damn feature I think.
Sure you should be able to cancel abilities to react to something but then you should not do any damage.
How can people think that it is intended to start a skill and cancel them instant so that nobody can see what you are doing(you just look like a spazming thing) is a feature??
How should someone react to that?
You just cant.
Its not an feature its an exploit.
Even more annoying is that people use macros to do that.
BTW: Macros are not allowed read the TOS there is stated that you are not allowed to use hard or software that improve your skills. What Macros clearly do.
Edit:
Its under point 9:
You agree not to use any hardware or software or any other method of support that is not authorized by ZeniMax or that may in any way influence or advantage Your playing abilities, or influence or advantage Your use of the Services