Do you want ZOS to “fix” animation cancelling?

Izaki · March 2018

Its not broken

Stinkyremy · March 2018

Yes

Yes, I would like them to fix "weaving" too. The [snip] level that being a DPS needs is just stupid, especially that they made the skill system to counter the [snip] level that other games have, like wow has with hotbars.

[snip] I doubt they would ever have the ability to recreate an engine that is the cause of the bug that is responsible for animation cancels, block cancels and weaving.

[Edit for bait.]

FakeFox · March 2018

No

Without animation cancelling ESO would not be playable. Let me give you a example: Imagine you are tanking a boss, you cast a ability and then the boss makes a heavy attack. AC allows you to cancel your skill and block, would this be removed you would be dead. Situations like this that force you to AC without you even noticing happen all the time.
As for you suggestion: Wouldn't be as bad but still very bad.

Somber97866 · March 2018

No

I'm on console and it's the one thing left that allows ppl to excel. I know," TROPHIES FOR EVERYONE!"

mikemacon · March 2018

Yes

Yes I would.

Although it's argued that it's now a "feature", it's actually grindingly obvious that its use has ballooned far beyond its intended purpose.

Skill animations are there for a purpose, and generally the purpose is for balance.

I'd made this point before on another thread, so I'll repeat myself here.

I've come to ESO from the FPS world. My last "gotta play it" game was Destiny (D1, not the unholy nightmare which is D2). In Destiny, there is a reload animation for your guns. Some guns have quicker reloads, some slower. The slower reloads are for guns that hit harder or have some other advantage over the quicker reload guns.

A perfect example is the exotic sniper rifle No Land Beyond. NLB was an "op" gun because it could be equipped in the primary slot instead of the special slot, and could use primary ammo. This made it incredibly powerful in the right hands because as a primary-slotted sniper rifle it didn't suffer from the special ammo throttling Bungie threw into the mix to balance out the Crucible (Destiny's PVP mode). All other snipers (except Icebreaker, which regenerated its own ammo) had a very limited amount of ammo you could pick up, and you would spawn in with zero.

NLB, however, spawned in with ammo since it was a primary, and you pretty much never ran out of ammo...because it was a primary.

To balance the gun, Bungie made NLB a single-shot bolt-action, with a long reload animation.

To get around that, some players discovered they could animation cancel the reload by sprinting right after initiating the reload. This circumvented the animation, allowing the gun to fire far more often than intended.

Instead of just calling it a "feature" that they left in the game, Bungie patched gun reloading - so that you could not "sprint-cancel" the animation, thus bringing the gun back into balance.

I hear lots of arguments about how animation cancelling in ESO is just "fire off a skill after light attacking" and "swap bars after firing off a skill" and how it's a "feature", but it sounds to me like so much after-the-fact justification. Either enforce the skill animations or remove them. This middle ground of allowing them makes the uber-sweaty high-dps-god characters look like spastic teens hopped up on caffeine when they jerk around firing off far more attacks/skills than what the game originally intended.

But then again, I'm in the minority believing this, sooooo... ::insert shrug here::

Alaztor91 · March 2018

Yes

IMO weaving is fine(and it seems that ZOS is ok with it), however I don't really like other stuff like block/barswap/rolldodge cancelling. If you really need to use that block or dodge to avoid getting oneshotted or whatever, you should be allowed to do it, but you should also pay the ''penalty'' of doing no damage with your attack, no healing with your heal,etc.

Also why do pretty much 90% of the skills in the game state that they are instant cast in the tooltip when it's obvious that they aren't? why is there no in-game mention of stuff like global cooldown? why are some ''instant cast'' abilities animations longer than others? what does the phrase ''instant cast'' means for ZOS?

LadyNalcarya · March 2018

No

rfennell_ESO wrote: »

LadyNalcarya wrote: »

@Anotherone773 wrote: »

LadyNalcarya wrote: »

When you weave, you dont actually cancel the skill.
And what youre asking for is already in game: if you cancel a channeled ability, it stops. Instant cast abilities, on the other hand, are instant, why would they cancel themselves.

If the ability is instant, shouldnt the animation also be instant and thus should not need to be canceled. This whole argument, IMO, is based on bad graphics design and the unwillingness to fix it.

Why would you want to cancel an instant cast ability? It wont give you any extra dps, if anything, it might even reduce it (Ive seen players who tried that in pve)
Weaving = using light attack+skill, believe me or not you arent cancelling anything by doing this, you will clearly see a short ligh attack followed by skill animation. Just try it and you will see that animation still plays.

You are cancelling the tailend of the light attack animation.

I don't think anyone has issues with this.

Not the "tailend", just the part when your char moves his or her arms to the idle position. You can still see the attack itself.
And yeah that makes sense since in real life you dont return to "idle" position after every move.
Some of ESO animations look wonky, but it doesnt matter if you weave them or not. It is unrealistic, but even wrecking blow or sword and board basic attack are super unrealistic and would probably get you killed in real life.

zyk · March 2018

No

LadyNalcarya wrote: »

Why would you want to cancel an instant cast ability? It wont give you any extra dps, if anything, it might even reduce it (Ive seen players who tried that in pve)
Weaving = using light attack+skill, believe me or not you arent cancelling anything by doing this, you will clearly see a short ligh attack followed by skill animation. Just try it and you will see that animation still plays.

The light attack animation can be cancelled completely. It just depends on the time between the light attack and when the ability is executed. I just tested quickly to confirm.

Do you play with a staff? With a staff, the projectile isn't cancelled, but the LA/HA animation is.

LiquidPony · March 2018

No

rikimm16_ESO wrote: »

I saw a post saying that 99% of ESO’s population would get angry if ZOS fix the unintended feature of animation cancelling. I don’t think that number is accurate at all so I just want to see what you guys think.

I’ll be happy to see it gone... if you cancel the animation, the damage or heal doesn't go out.

The number's probably not accurate, but mostly because a lot of people don't actually understand any of this.

And your suggested "fix" demonstrates that you don't understand it either.

What you are suggesting is that all abilities have a roughly 1-second delay from the time they are activated to the time the effect occurs. Press LMB, you light attack. The damage (if in melee range) is calculated almost instantly. The animation goes on for some period of time after that. If I were to cancel the animation at the 0.5 second mark, the damage has already been done. It's too late. Your proposed solution does not work mechanically.

And that is probably why it's in the game. It's not easy to "fix" without completely resetting expectations for combat responsiveness. And the ability to cancel an animation has to exist because this is "fast-paced action combat." You can't have people stuck in long animations and unable to block or dodge. That just doesn't fit in with the combat design of the game.

Sabbathius · March 2018

Yes

zyk wrote: »

This is more or less how it works in ESO. An ability with a cast time will be interrupted by block/roll dodge/bash. I think the issue many people have isn't with animation cancelling, it's the fact that most abilities have no cast time. That's actually the counter intuitive part.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but not exactly. First, if channeled ability is interrupted, isn't cost refunded in ESO? I vividly remember last year reading on this forum how Dark Deal on Sorc costs nothing when it is interrupted. Has that been changed?

Second, this would be fine if all abilities in ESO had a cast time/were channeled. Actually it would be great, because again gameplay would be reactive and thought-provoking. But vast majority of abilities fire right away. Also damage hits faster if you animation cancel. You don't get *more* damage, but from cast to damage landing, it's *faster*. So block/bash don't apply. Unless you *perma-block*! See what's happening here? A lot of the "perma-block cancer" in this game is just a direct evolutionary response to inability to see attacks coming, and react to them on attack-by-attack basis selectively! Fixing animation would make perma-blocking far less attractive too.

I didn't like that at first, but now I do. I love fast paced PVP in ESO. Its combat mechanics are actually the best part of the game. It's an addictive rush that could be extremely popular if ZOS would refine the PVP experience.

Thing is, it can't be refined, because of animation canceling. It also leads to all kinds of problems. Like I said, if you don't get animation/telegraph->effect, you cannot properly react to it. If you cannot react to it, you have to other do onto them before they do onto you (gank builds, bomb builds) or blanket block everything preventively (permablock builds), and so on. HUGE part of the large list of problems ESO faces is directly linked to animation canceling.

With animation canceling gone, combat would slow down a bit. What they could do is speed up animations a little bit to speed the combat back up again. These things are not mutually exclusive. If they want lightning-fast combat, they can just speed up existing animations by 80%. It would still be better than the jerking and spasming we have now, and you at least see *something* before damage comes.

Zagnut123Zagnut123 · March 2018

No

Some ppl go against the grain just to do it with no thought of the outcome or consequences. For one moment, a tiny second think what combat would be like in a trail or vet dungeon without the ability to stop animations. This would certainly bar many from content they previously were able to complete and players that are already good would continue to be good regardless of ani canceling or not.

Sabbathius · March 2018

Yes

Royaji wrote: »

This is a perfect example of someone who doesn't understand what animation cancelling is.

@Royaji

I think you may be misinterpreting what I wrote. I said "to make damage happen faster". Do you want me to find you videos by Blobs, Kodi, etc., advising people to animation cancel things like Dawnbreaker to have that damage come through just a fraction of a second faster? Or do you feel those guys don't understand animation canceling also?

And I could really nitpick the heck out of what you wrote, like "For the server the moment you press Destructive Reach or Reverse Slice on you bar is the moment it is completed." For one thing, that's not how serverside works. You put in a request, and requests are processed. For example, if we put in a simultaneous (down to a nanosecond) request, me to block and you to attack, the order in which server processes its batch requests (which is random almost 100% of the time) will determine what happens. If my request gets processed first, I'll block your attack, but if yours is processed first, attack will land. That's how you catch "uncatchable" interceptors in EVE Online, which warp in under 1 second. With instant lock, and 1Hz clock of the game, if interceptor warps, and you target/scramble, it'll come down to the server's processing queue. If server processes the scrambler's request before interceptor's warp request is processed, interceptor is toast. Second, on PC at least, abilities are on-release rather than on-press. Meaning the game doesn't care when you press the key for the ability, it only cares when you release the key. That's how it knows how to tell a light attack from a heavy attack also. I mean, I could go on, but look what I can do with just one of your sentences.

But all this aside, that's rather my point, that' ESO's system is flawed if there's no such thing as reaction time. Ideally, it would be activation->animation (giving opponent time to react, or you to change your mind)->effect. If in ESO activation equates to effect automatically, then that is already grounds for combat overhaul, imho. Like, nothing else even needs to be said.

Jade1986 · March 2018

Yes

Jura23 wrote: »

SGT_Wolfe101st wrote: »

There is nothing to fix, biased poll and biased options are biased. What is the big d*** deal. Cancel or don't, want top tier numbers do it, don't, then don't. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

There's is actually a lot to fix that isclosely connected with animation canceling. It would be ok if it worked properly, but now we often can't even bar swap when we push buttons multiple times. The delay is awful at times.

full second for me atm.

kojou · March 2018

No

I just don't want them to waste time messing with it.

There are much better things for the developers to fix.

Jade1986 · March 2018

Yes

idk wrote: »

Jade1986 wrote: »

OdinForge wrote: »

Jade1986 wrote: »

OdinForge wrote: »

Jade1986 wrote: »

dovakiin5574 wrote: »

Honestly imo if you don't like animation cancelling then *GO PLAY A DIFFERENT GAME*

OdinForge wrote: »

If you are too casual to understand and practice animation canceling, its existence isn't important to you within the scope of how you currently play the game anyway.

Just continue running dungeons and role playing in towns, and let the people who enjoy the skill cap it provides continue practicing it.

Otherwise go find a new game, seriously.

Super constructive.

: In my best deep south accent :

IF YA DON LAK IT YA CAN GIT AUTTTT!!!!

°Seriously°

I'm not from the south, but basically git good.

There is nothing to be constructive of, the only thing that needs to happen is that ZOS needs to make something about AC in the tutorial. Which I and many others have stated many times.

Acting like it's something broken that needs to be fixed is incorrect, it is enjoyed by many players who enjoy the combat of ESO.

It's broken only in the minds of those that don't understand it, or more accurately care to understand it.

I love hearing people say " many " and " most " players. Again, most players arent even aware of it. And you are right, an in game tutorial, plus fixing the animations so they speed up when they are cancelled would be a good idea.

See, constructive, instead of being a smurf.

Well you can't get angry when people say "many" or "most", then turn around and say "most".

No fix needs to happen to the animation speed with how the current system works, and the tutorial was my idea so don't get angry when you're told to git good lol.

It is common knowledge that the largest portion of the player base are casual players who play mostly story. So yes, it is accurate to say most for those players. It is not accurate to say most animation cancel, because again, most dont come to this forum.

Also, tutorial has been floated around for years now. Come back down to earth.

And yes, the animations should be sped up to see what your opponent is doing, because the skill is supposed to lie in reactive gameplay, you cannot react to something you cannot see. It would not effect the game in anyway, except actually letting people see what the attacker is doing, so they cant actually react to it.

Also, saying "git good" like a spoiled 5 year old , doesnt make you look " cool " , just a quick fyi.

Animation canceling only cuts off the very end of the animation. So if a player is keen enough to watch for skills being used they’ll still see some animation. If they’re needing to see the tail end the it’s to late.

Also in every MMORPG, well any major MMORPG, there is something. While in eso we have animation canceling, other games have fixed skill rotations that are required to do well. Don’t do the exact rotation, and in some cases don’t do it fast enough, your dps will suffer.

As for tutorials, there are tutorials on the internet and have been for years. I assume those okaying this gamehage used google. In game tutorials shouldn’t nit cover everything. It’s not possible to cover every single thing.

But this is a pretty big thing, so yeah, it should be there.

Jade1986 · March 2018

Yes

Aurielle wrote: »

TelvanniWizard wrote: »

It´s a glitch people take advantage of.

You are wrong.

https://youtu.be/ThZtwhYkKSs

Please watch this video until you understand, thanks.

Wrobel also nerfs magdks consistantly. So lets not praise his views too much.

zyk · March 2018

No

Sabbathius wrote: »

Correct me if I'm wrong, but not exactly. First, if channeled ability is interrupted, isn't cost refunded in ESO? I vividly remember last year reading on this forum how Dark Deal on Sorc costs nothing when it is interrupted. Has that been changed?

There is no refund on a channel, but no cost to an ability with a cast time that is interrupted. That's not really relevant to animation cancelling though. The point is that if an ability does have a cast time, it is interrupted by other actions.

Sabbathius wrote: »

Second, this would be fine if all abilities in ESO had a cast time/were channeled. Actually it would be great, because again gameplay would be reactive and thought-provoking.

This is purely subjective at this point.

But vast majority of abilities fire right away. Also damage hits faster if you animation cancel. You don't get *more* damage, but from cast to damage landing, it's *faster*.

This is not true. A cancelled ability is not executed faster than one that is not cancelled. I just tested to confirm this. If you can show abilities hitting sooner because of cancelling, I'd like to see it. Some might work like that. ZOS has said they want the timing on abilities to be different from each other. I haven't observed this in my testing, however -- including 2 minutes ago with some nb abilities.

The benefit to cancelling is that it allows you to perform your next action sooner. This can result in more damage, of course, by reducing the gap between actions as much as possible and therefore increasing damage per second.

So block/bash don't apply. Unless you *perma-block*! See what's happening here? A lot of the "perma-block cancer" in this game is just a direct evolutionary response to inability to see attacks coming, and react to them on attack-by-attack basis selectively! Fixing animation would make perma-blocking far less attractive too.

I disagree entirely. First of all, most abilities that can be dodged have an audio cue and it's totally possible to block/dodge based on that. I'm not an elite gamer and I do so regularly.

Secondly, because ESO PVP can be so fast paced (not always), knowledge of other classes and anticipation are essential and assist with blocking, dodging and reactive gameplay.

The trap against a good player is falling into a proactive routine. They'll recognize it, anticipate your attacks and coax you into depleting your resources.

Permablocking doesn't directly relate to animation cancelling -- except in the sense that the block animation is not displayed when one is block casting.

Sabbathius · March 2018

Yes

zyk wrote: »

There is no refund on a channel, but no cost to an ability with a cast time that is interrupted. That's not really relevant to animation cancelling though. The point is that if an ability does have a cast time, it is interrupted by other actions.

Much appreciated!

But basically isn't it the same thing? Either way, interrupted ability costs nothing, whether it's refunded or not charged until successful? I'm also assuming that the ability won't be allowed to cast if you don't have required resources to start with? So that's more or less correct. Bottom line, it's not like in most other MMOs, where if you activate an ability, that resource is GONE, whether it completes or not. So the incentive is to use abilities when you know they can complete, otherwise you're pissing resources away.

The thing is, in ESO this is only true with abilities with cast time. They cannot be animation canceled. In other games, this applies to all abilities. And unlike in ESO, there's a time to react or counter, because the animations are visible, not canceled, and damage comes only at the end of the animation.

I'm still torn on whether the effect happens faster when canceled. I just re-watched Blobs' video on animation canceling, and he shows his Dawnbreaker normal, and Dawnbreaker animation canceled, and I'm watching it in slow motion, and it looks significantly faster. Here's the video I mean, with time stamp (actually won't work with time stamp for someone reason, Dawnbreaker starts at 9m 13sec) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kScCRnXdxo#t=9m12s
And why would Blobs be saying that it pays off, if it didn't pay off? And even in my own testing, I can sort of see the difference, it's a fraction of a second difference, but still a difference.

You also brought up an excellent point about ability animation length. That is indeed how many MMOs balance their abilities. For example, Age of Conan balances abilities by length of their animations, and if it's a combo ability, the number of steps before final payoff. They had to readjust the speeds of certain animations multiple times when they were doing heavy balancing, and it worked fine. That's another thing ESO should be doing, but isn't. Some abilities (Wall of Elements, Hail, etc.) are staples, yet they are also the ones with long animations that get swap-canceled or even block-canceled. Yet perhaps the reason these animations have those abilities is balancing. And the unintended side effect of animation canceling wrecked all that.

Gilvoth · March 2018

Yes

please get rid of animation cancel.

ak_pvp · March 2018

No

Rungar wrote: »

i would like damaging things to be situational and fun.

endless rotation efficiency isn't fun. IMO those who adapt to this go get razr mice or macro keyboards and tell people to git gud or L2P, others just leave, and others like myself, just don't play dps.

i suppose there are a few maniacs that destroy their fingers trying to do that.

so in short:

cause off balance, heavy attack to restore double resources=gud
sequence of buttons with light attacks and heavy attacks inbetween =bad.

great game and its a shame this part of it is garbage. Of course its just my opinion.

I have a POS mouse and nothing rebound, which is all it takes to animation cancel. Press light, press skill.

Sabbathius · March 2018

Yes

ak_pvp wrote: »

I have a POS mouse and nothing rebound, which is all it takes to animation cancel. Press light, press skill.

And how exactly does that extra left mouse click improve the quality of your gaming experience? As opposed to not doing it, or making a macro that has left click + 125ms wait + 1 bound to 1, left click + 125ms wait + 2 bound to 2, etc?

You see, every game designer should ask themselves, before doing something "Is this going to make the game better, more interesting, more fun?" Soooo, does it? Does pressing LMB before 1-6 make your gaming experience better? More interesting? More fun? Because it doesn't do anything for me. I really don't consider teaching my brain to automatically hit LMB with my index before my thumb hits 1-6 (6 being ulti) on my Razer or Logitech a serious achievement on my part. If anything, it's just an annoyance. What my professor used to call "busy work".

Also, not to get personal, but how old are you, and what kind of work do you do? No answer needed, it's purely rhetorical. But the reason I mention it is because my guild has a lot of people in their 50s and 60s. Arthritis is a definite issue, and animation canceling isn't doing their hands any favours. Some of them, even younger folks, also do work that is pretty heavy on the hands, so the last thing they need after a 9 hr shift is more LMB and RMB spam. And yes, obvious answer is "go play something else". But as a business owner, that's really the absolute WORST thing you can tell your customer, "please take your money and go over to my direct competitor and give it to them". It's just not smart. Soooo, perhaps tweaking ESO to not be quite so spammy is a right move, even if all other arguments for keeping animation canceling have total merit.

Hluill · March 2018

Yes

I apologize for not reading all the responses. I know i am reiterating some and ignoring others.

I am an old and practiced casual and I don't find Animation Canceling that difficult. I discovered basically by accident and thought that it didn't look right. So, game developers went through all this trouble to make cool animations but to "git gud" I have to ignore them. All this time and money spent on animation and graphics, let's just throw that away and pretend we're back to playing old Everquest on twenty-eight-kbs dial-up. Yeah, cool.

If a skill or spell or Heavy attack is designed to take a period of time to execute, then require it take that amount of time. It's a simple design feature. I would love to understand developers' "working as intended" reactions to some of the quirkier mechanics of this game. Player: "Uh, this is wonky!" Devs and Fanboys: "That's the ways it's supposed to work. Git Gud."

So why waste the time with a design feature like cast timers when the intended mechanic is just to ignore with a block or light attack? Just looks sloppy, visually, mechanically and professionally. It's not a gamebreaker for me. Like a lot of the silly mechanics in this game, I can basically ignore it most of the time.

Aurielle · March 2018

No

Jade1986 wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

TelvanniWizard wrote: »

It´s a glitch people take advantage of.

You are wrong.

https://youtu.be/ThZtwhYkKSs

Please watch this video until you understand, thanks.

Wrobel also nerfs magdks consistantly. So lets not praise his views too much.

So? How is that AT ALL relevant to the incorrect idea that animation cancelling is a "glitch" or an "exploit"?

Animation cancelling is condoned by ZOS. Deal with it.

kadar · March 2018

No

This game would not work at all without AC. Every time this comes up I simply cannot understand why people actually want to be limited to performing a single action per second in this or any game...

MasterSpatula · March 2018

Yes

The fact that you have to glitch the game to be considered good a good DPS is shameful.

Aurielle · March 2018

No

Hluill wrote: »

I apologize for not reading all the responses. I know i am reiterating some and ignoring others.

I am an old and practiced casual and I don't find Animation Canceling that difficult. I discovered basically by accident and thought that it didn't look right. So, game developers went through all this trouble to make cool animations but to "git gud" I have to ignore them. All this time and money spent on animation and graphics, let's just throw that away and pretend we're back to playing old Everquest on twenty-eight-kbs dial-up. Yeah, cool.

If a skill or spell or Heavy attack is designed to take a period of time to execute, then require it take that amount of time. It's a simple design feature. I would love to understand developers' "working as intended" reactions to some of the quirkier mechanics of this game. Player: "Uh, this is wonky!" Devs and Fanboys: "That's the ways it's supposed to work. Git Gud."

So why waste the time with a design feature like cast timers when the intended mechanic is just to ignore with a block or light attack? Just looks sloppy, visually, mechanically and professionally. It's not a gamebreaker for me. Like a lot of the silly mechanics in this game, I can basically ignore it most of the time.

News-flash: if you're "animation cancelling" with light attacks (*cough* weaving *cough*), YOU ARE NOT CANCELLING THE ANIMATIONS OF YOUR ACTUAL SKILLS. The skill animations complete! You might cancel the animation of the light attack if you're fast enough, but you're not cancelling the animations of your actual skills. NO ONE who actually cares about their DPS block cancels their skills (unless they're trying to roll out of AOE or suddenly need to block). Some damage dealers -- but not all -- bar swap cancel at the end of their back-bar rotation, and bar swap cancel again when they return to the back bar. That cancels the animation of ONE skill on the back bar and ONE skill on the front bar. The rest of the animations fire off completely.

Please understand what you're complaining about before you actually complain about it.

Sabbathius · March 2018

Yes

The_Outsider wrote: »

This game would not work at all without AC. Every time this comes up I simply cannot understand why people actually want to be limited to performing a single action per second in this or any game...

Imagine chess, in real time. Challenging but not bad, right? Now imagine chess when players don't have to wait for each other to finish their turn. They still have to obey the rules, but they can move pieces, based on the state of the board as it is when they grab the piece, as fast as they want, with as many hands as they want. See the problem? That's why people want to be able to perform one action at a time to completion, before beginning another action. It's a poor analogy, but you get the drift.

Ragnaroek93 · March 2018

No

Sabbathius wrote: »

Ragnaroek93 wrote: »

It's funny how many people really think that no animation cancelling would make the game easier. Good luck when you can't dodgeroll or block immediately anymore.

You are kinda missing the point of what many (most?) people are asking for.

In many MMOs that have action combat, it goes like this. You press the button. The resouce (stamina, mana, energy, what have you) gets used up. You are not getting that back. Then the animation starts playing. If you need to "dodgeroll or block immediately", YOU CAN! Nothing changes! Except you don't get the effect from the ability you activated, UNLESS the ability completes! Makes sense now? You can still roll-dodge if you need to. You just can't roll-dodge-cancel an animation of an attack to make its damage happen faster, killing the opponent. You'd have to choose - dodge roll, or kill the opponent. But since animation would play, the opponent now has time to react, rather than just die to a burst which happened with no corresponding animation.

See it now? What anti-ani-cancelers are asking is actually quite sensible, and will not harm the game in the slightest. What it will do is make combat more reactive, and force people to think a little more. Or how ZOS would put it, "this is a buff if you have a working brain".

No, you can't block cancel a heal or shield anymore nor can you roll cancel a heal or a shield anymore so don't tell me that nothing changes, it would be a massive global nerf. I have the feeling that most people who voted with "yes" actually have no idea what they are asking for and wouldn't even be happy with the result. The game wouldn't feel smoother at all nor would it be easier nor more casual friendly. If you want to see how a game without animation cancel works then go ahead and play Dark Souls... I can guarantee you that Dark Souls combat isn't easier nor smoother than ESO combat.

There is simply no reason to change animation canceling, you can't bypass a global cooldown with it, all you can cancel is a visual animation. It's not possible to hit several skills at the same time with animation canceling (not even macros allow that) unless you run a cheating program in the background.

Kingslayer513 · March 2018

No

OP's "fix" is to just remove AC, which means removing the entire combat system and completely rebuilding it, probably for the worse.

AC is just a byproduct of the fact that actions in combat have priority levels, and rightly so. Block/Dodge Roll > Abilities > LA. Do you know how unresponsive the game would be if everything was on the same priority level? Cast an ability while the boss is about to one shot you? Goodluck, you have to wait for the ability animation to finish before you can block or dodge roll. Fire a LA and can't block or use abilities till it's done. Etc. Having priority levels for different actions is far better than having frustratingly slow and unresponsive combat.

Should ZOS fix AC so that it is consistent across all abilities? Yes
Should ZOS fix AC so that it looks more smooth? Yes
Should ZOS gut the combat system so there's no more AC? No

Aurielle · March 2018

No

MasterSpatula wrote: »

The fact that you have to glitch the game to be considered good a good DPS is shameful.

Oh. My. God.

In order to be considered a "good DPS," you need to have good gear, and a good rotation. Weaving and bar swap cancelling will net you a 5k DPS increase at the most.

How many times do we have to tell you people? If you're only doing 10k DPS, your inability or reluctance to animation cancel IS. NOT. THE. PROBLEM.