Iccotak wrote: »

animation cancelling is obviously a feature in the game.

This is not WoW where we wait for abilities to finish casting or load
This is an Action combat system

Kel wrote: »

Bluepitbull13 wrote: »

Kel wrote: »

xeNNNNN wrote: »

Kel wrote: »

zadrotscrolls wrote: »

Interview from russian mmo-portal https://www.goha.ru
Google translate:

Not everyone likes the constant dilution of abilities with quick attacks, interruption of animations and other crutches. Looking forward to the best?

Yes. We plan to radically redesign the combat system. On the one hand, our goal is to make the rotation of abilities interesting, without undue simplification, on the other hand, we do not want to depersonalize classes and characters. This is a complex process, but we are working hard and while in closed mode we are testing a new combat system, we think the players will like it.

Almost sounds like they are getting rid of animation canceling.

There would be too much outcry, backlash and I do not think based on the the type of content introduced and the implementation of said content is any way for us to determine if they would even do a good job. "drastically" is a strong word so either two things are happening, either there is a sweeping animation change to virtually everything coming (not a removal so animation cancelling will stay) or the flexibility of classes is being changed which is another direction entirely. At this point I do not think they are in a position to remove something that has been integral since beta and then add something that is just as good to compensate but easier for them to balance and develop. There just isn't enough evidence to believe so anyway.

Just to be clear, I'm not in any way against animation canceling. In fact, I'm quite decent at it. Even with PS4's horrific performance.

But...

The changes to block do feel like first steps in a new, redesigned combat system, one that has made animation block cancellations definitely harder. Combined with the timing of this article, seems like something I can't dismiss out of hand.

We all thought the patch notes leaked in Mirkmire seemed crazy too...then every single one of them ended up being true. Nothing teaches how hot fire is like the burned hand, so to speak.

You do understand that the article is inaccurate right? that the response from Rich Lambert has been updated (only the author could say why). The timing of the article? if you actually clicked on the link it has a lot to do with the current chapter announcement "Greymoor". Greymoor was recently announced on January 17th, the Russian article is dated January 17th.

This might sound like a conspiracy to you, but what if ZOS representatives are going around doing PR/Marketing work so that you know, sell more copies of the upcoming chapter.

Oh and why a Russian site? perhaps it has to do with adding Russian localization. You shouldn't be surprised if they did Spanish that they would do interviews with Spanish sites to spread the word.

Not saying the article is true in any way.

Simply pointing out in the past what was deemed as wild claims and something everyone agreed was insane and would never happen, actually happened.

Cast times on ultimate abilities and these new changes to block are real. That's no conspiracy.
This article may be a load of bull, no doubt. But my point remains. Combat is changing. Getting slower and clunkier. Only time will tell, but I've seen this exact thing play out in Mirkmire. Now a article comes out (real or not) talking about changes to the combat system...I mean, are we not kind of seeing that play out?
Sorry, never been one to put my head in the sand pretending not to see what is happening around me.

• Calculations on abilities and how they were handled were completely reworked. If you played over a year ago, you know a lot of tooltips on abilities made no sense, they were bugged everywhere.
• Many dead skills that we are able to use now, albeit, there is still more work to be done, but they're actually within margin of erorr.
• All spammables have same cost and similar damage depending on some factors, before, many spammables were not competitive at all, for next to no reason. Eg. Crushing Weapon and Silver Shard have same damage and cost, but different effects and passives.
• CP didn't increase Food, Mundus stones or 5th set pieces by the 20% it should.
• Food and Drinks in blue -> purple -> gold with same stats didn't increase with the quality, we saw crown store versions of food/potions/poisons were weaker as if they scaled to 150cp instead of 160cp.
• Light attacks took a clearer role as used for damage dealing while heavy shifted primarly to resource sustain after regulating the calculation to match other abilities in the game.
• Racial passives moved to flat bonuses instead of multipliers.
• MANY, many older sets have been adjusted every update. Many were brought to the forefront and made viable, while others were completely reworked.
• Weapon enchantments being locked to the bar they're fired from, aoe ground based weapon dots still fire off enchantments when not using the weapon it came from. They also made it so Dual Wield and 2 Hander have their own "method" of proccing enchantments from the back bar via blade cloak and stampede. This was clearly done to make Pure melee specs more viable in pve.
• Gap closers standardized to 22m, no longer snare to hit their target, instead the animation was greatly improved to get better hit detection. Removed the minimum distance requirement making them usuable in melee combat. Next DLC they removed the pushback and sped up the animation so you can use your next ability easier.
• Resolve and Ward buff combined into 1, the same patch they combined spell and physical resistance set bonuses into armor to simplify these set bonuses. They mentioned about doing a similar thing for fracture, breach and most likely the penetration bonuses found on armor. Still waiting on them to revist this.
• Many dots changed from damaging every second to damaging every 2 seconds, reducing calcuations on the server. Volley changed from 0.5s ticks to 1s ticks.
• Standards set for spammables, dots and aoe dots in terms of cost/damage to help distinguish how powerful skills should be now and in the future. Standard dot duration was updated to 10s, this helped change the 6s on Unstable Wall and 8s on Wall of Elements vs the 12s on Endless Hail and 8s on Arrow Barrage. Now we have variety, different classes choose 1 or the other morph to better suit the rotation they prefer.
• Class identity improvements and interest. We've seen the introduction of 1-2 dynamic scaling abilities per class, giving more usuable abilities to stamina specs where these abilities were used in such a subpar way.
• Pausing CP progression to completely overhaul it, most likely in an effort to get away from multipliers like racial passives, even if it was somewhat being looked at because of powercreep.
• Sprint calculation rework, now less costly and gradual instead of in chunks.
• Finally huge performance changes we've seen in the recent 2 or so updates with this upcomming DLC having some of the bigger changes on their performance roadmap, because of this, the patch didn't continue much focus on combat related tweeks for classes.

jcm2606 wrote: »

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Well given the issues that have been piling up with performance and the general oversize of the game. They are revitalizing the code I think to be not as bad it is with performance. There is many issues with things that hurt performance. Calculations I think is a big one the huge huge numbers in terms of damage. To much of a certain thing in an area. Like certain kinds of heals ablties that mobs or zergs use in pvp when all grouped together. People talked about performance being a lot better when groups were unable to be formed in Cyrodiil. So there is something there that has to be addressed. Players stacking up in a group all casting similar or performance killing abilties.
What they should do is limit group size in Cyrodiil. To be no more then 12 players.
Doing more to abilties making similar changes like they did with the orb ability that players were not happy about. I know its painful but for performance it is necessary. I think that was the main reason for that change. More changes like that need to be done to help the servers.

Another issue that might be another problem for the game is how much damage output healing output and blocking out put in terms of very high numbers into other millions and even billions its so easy to unlock the million damage achieve I believe now. I can see that being a major issue.

Everything needs to be scaled down. More like how it was in Oblivion like weapons dealing like say 20 or even 30 damage per hit. That would mean readjusting every single mob in the game. Reworking the entire combat system. Changing it to where it can be balanced with low numbers again instead of high ones like we have now.
Examples here, right now a weapon by itself does like 1238 damage, 4000 with an enchantment. Adjusting that down to be 123 damage for that weapon and 400 enchantment damage. Performance would likely go up because the number of calculations and high numbers would be lower.

It might help with stability not putting a cap or anything just reducing the numbers down I would say about 99% If they could make the combat more like oblivion's in terms of damage numbers I think that would be the best thing they could do. The highest damage a weapon could get in Oblivion was with Umbra I believe. That max was 33 damage going by the fandom But not sure on accuracy on that. . Applying a similar concept in terms of very low damage and adjusting all the mobs accordingly to work like Oblivion's combat system in terms of Numbers. I think the server might be able to handle millions more people if they can get it done. Though it might be harder to balance behind and might be why they changed it to be higher numbers to begin with . But I think it was a mistake because then the server has to do all these high number calculations no wonder performance could be getting worse.

The size of a number has no bearing on performance, because the system is still performing the same calculation on the same set of bits that represent the number.

Everything in computing is expressed as a binary number, which is made up of a set of bits, or specific parts of a binary number that are either 1 or 0, on or off, true or false. Even if a regular number doesn't make use of a specific bit, that bit is still counted within the whole number. Take 14, if you express this as a byte in some code (ie 8 bits), it is expressed as 00001110, and even though it doesn't make use of those first 4 and the last bit, those are still counted within the byte.

When doing any arithmetic on a binary number, the size does not matter, because the number of bits are the same. 14 + 2 is fundamentally the same as 140 + 20, if both are expressed as bytes, since everything is still made up of the same 8 bits, just with different values within those bits.

The two most common data values used in computing when referring to numbers, int (whole number) and float (decimal number), are both stored within a 32-bit number, or 4 bytes. Even if you have some astronomically high number, like 10 million, and add some astronomically small number, like 0.0000001, both of these, assuming you store them as floats, are stored as 32-bit numbers, and so have the same cost as any other set of numbers.

There's really no reason to specifically have big or small numbers for the stats in a game, so long as they all fit within a relatively small data type in terms of bits used, the performance cost won't change. Even if you were to bring every number in ESO down to the triple digits or less, the performance would still be the exact same, because the game is still working with 32 bits.

The only reason to specifically have big or small numbers is to make it easier to wrap your head around, that's it.

If you have Windows 10, the calculator app has a programmer mode that allows you to play around with binary and see how it works. I'd highly recommend playing around with it, if you're interested in learning it at all.

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Well given the issues that have been piling up with performance and the general oversize of the game. They are revitalizing the code I think to be not as bad it is with performance. There is many issues with things that hurt performance. Calculations I think is a big one the huge huge numbers in terms of damage. To much of a certain thing in an area. Like certain kinds of heals ablties that mobs or zergs use in pvp when all grouped together. People talked about performance being a lot better when groups were unable to be formed in Cyrodiil. So there is something there that has to be addressed. Players stacking up in a group all casting similar or performance killing abilties.
What they should do is limit group size in Cyrodiil. To be no more then 12 players.
Doing more to abilties making similar changes like they did with the orb ability that players were not happy about. I know its painful but for performance it is necessary. I think that was the main reason for that change. More changes like that need to be done to help the servers.

Another issue that might be another problem for the game is how much damage output healing output and blocking out put in terms of very high numbers into other millions and even billions its so easy to unlock the million damage achieve I believe now. I can see that being a major issue.

Everything needs to be scaled down. More like how it was in Oblivion like weapons dealing like say 20 or even 30 damage per hit. That would mean readjusting every single mob in the game. Reworking the entire combat system. Changing it to where it can be balanced with low numbers again instead of high ones like we have now.
Examples here, right now a weapon by itself does like 1238 damage, 4000 with an enchantment. Adjusting that down to be 123 damage for that weapon and 400 enchantment damage. Performance would likely go up because the number of calculations and high numbers would be lower.

It might help with stability not putting a cap or anything just reducing the numbers down I would say about 99% If they could make the combat more like oblivion's in terms of damage numbers I think that would be the best thing they could do. The highest damage a weapon could get in Oblivion was with Umbra I believe. That max was 33 damage going by the fandom But not sure on accuracy on that. . Applying a similar concept in terms of very low damage and adjusting all the mobs accordingly to work like Oblivion's combat system in terms of Numbers. I think the server might be able to handle millions more people if they can get it done. Though it might be harder to balance behind and might be why they changed it to be higher numbers to begin with . But I think it was a mistake because then the server has to do all these high number calculations no wonder performance could be getting worse.

jcm2606 wrote: »

Zordrage wrote: »

Iccotak wrote: »

animation cancelling is obviously a feature in the game.

This is not WoW where we wait for abilities to finish casting or load
This is an Action combat system

80% of ability is WoW are prety much instant what the hell are you talking about lol the fluid and smoot combat is the best part of WoW basically the only reason im still playing it....

Animation canceling was a design bug that they were lazy to fix and just said OH its a feature now so no it never was "obivously a feature"

Animation canceling makes the combat and animations look *** and outdated the end.

No, animation cancelling was an intended mechanic to allow players to immediately and consistently react to incoming attacks by dodging/blocking/etc. If it didn't exist, you wouldn't be able to perform any action while in the animation of another action, and that's what it's there to fix.

What was unintended was players learning how it works, and exploiting it so effectively that they can significantly improve their damage output.

idk wrote: »

Olauron wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

its not a troll article. its a troll "translation" Rich mentioned balancing and that its on their list of priorities once performance updates are done. and that they will release a roadmap once they have it.

idk wrote: »

Once again, when I looked at the article and ran it through Google Translate there was nothing like what is posted in the OP. The "new combat system" is what Zos has already been implementing over the past year.

The answer specifically states they are working polishing and balancing the new combat system which is exactly what Zos is doing right now.

Really, what is the need to blame OP? If you have read this thread as well a a discussion under the interview you would know that answer to that question was changed. That is the reason of translation in the current OP being different from current article.

@Olauron

I specifically noted what is posted in the OP and was not mentioning the person who posted the original post. In other words, I made a factual statement about the text in the OP.

Also, if you had bothered to read the several posts you would see that people are still taking what is posted in the OP as what that article currently states because the OP has not changed it. People tend to not read entire threads so they would miss the information pointing out that the text in the OP no longer reflects what the article states.

So what you should be advocating is the OP edit the original post to reflect what the article currently states so people get the correct information vs scolding someone for being factually correct.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone, just wanted to let you know that although this was a legitimate interview with Rich, some of the initial answers did not represent what was actually said. We reached out to the site to provide clarification, and they have since updated their article with responses that more accurately reflect what Rich had initially conveyed. To be clear, we are not currently planning to create a new combat system for ESO, and Spellcrafting isn’t currently on our future roadmap. As the most recent reply from the article states, our current priority is on game performance. Apologies for the confusion this caused.

Seraphayel wrote: »

I don’t think that any of the content was made with Animation Canceling in mind.

The same arguments were brought up during the changes to Restoration Staff and Orb, people claimed trials weren’t doable after the changes and that veteran trials were designed with them in mind... guess what, all of that has been proven false after the changes went live. It’s the same with AC.

It’s a broken mechanic they never achieved to fix and eventually accepted as a feature, which was a mistake in the first place.