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Cleave/Brawl/Carve & Volley/Endless/Barrage can no longer be Block-Canceled
Bjond
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Block no longer cancels Cleave or it's morphs. There is no workaround I could find other than to swap to another character that doesn't use 2H melee.
Block Test: activate cleave, brawl, or carve. Immediately press block. Note that your character continues the animation to it's conclusion and does not block until the animation has completed.
Dodge Test: checked carve with dodge (as above) to make sure that isn't broken, too, and you can still dodge-cancel it. Unfortunately, some things in game can only be blocked.
Found the bug in Lair of Maarselok, where everyone needs to block his shout (3rd? boss -- the spider wall fight). For some reason, my brawler's blocks would literally never work. I chalked it up to lag until I ran Lair again on my tank and block worked every time. A guildie was using 2H melee during that run and he kept kvetching in discord about block not working (while everyone else kept trying to give advice along the lines of "well, it's working for me, must be your internet"). After the fight, during which he spent 90% of the time dead due to not being able to block, we figured out that brawl can no longer be block-canceled.
IMHO, this is a major bug that literally kills off using 2H melee in Maarselok and makes it a serious problem elsewhere in PVE. Unsure how critical block is for PVP melee; so, I can't comment on that game style.
EDIT: checked Bow skills and Volley also can't be block-canceled. Block cancel seemed to work fine for Snipe. BTW, by "block cancel" I don't mean the classic trick of speeding DPS by canceling an animation while the damage still lands. In this case, I don't care if the skill lands or not as long as the critical preemption happens (block or dodge). Volley being uninterruptable explains why block "sometimes" worked for me when I was on back-bar -- more of my back-bar can be preempted than my front bar.
Edited by Bjond on August 31, 2021 11:31PM Block Test: activate cleave, brawl, or carve. Immediately press block. Note that your character continues the animation to it's conclusion and does not block until the animation has completed.
Dodge Test: checked carve with dodge (as above) to make sure that isn't broken, too, and you can still dodge-cancel it. Unfortunately, some things in game can only be blocked.
Found the bug in Lair of Maarselok, where everyone needs to block his shout (3rd? boss -- the spider wall fight). For some reason, my brawler's blocks would literally never work. I chalked it up to lag until I ran Lair again on my tank and block worked every time. A guildie was using 2H melee during that run and he kept kvetching in discord about block not working (while everyone else kept trying to give advice along the lines of "well, it's working for me, must be your internet"). After the fight, during which he spent 90% of the time dead due to not being able to block, we figured out that brawl can no longer be block-canceled.
IMHO, this is a major bug that literally kills off using 2H melee in Maarselok and makes it a serious problem elsewhere in PVE. Unsure how critical block is for PVP melee; so, I can't comment on that game style.
EDIT: checked Bow skills and Volley also can't be block-canceled. Block cancel seemed to work fine for Snipe. BTW, by "block cancel" I don't mean the classic trick of speeding DPS by canceling an animation while the damage still lands. In this case, I don't care if the skill lands or not as long as the critical preemption happens (block or dodge). Volley being uninterruptable explains why block "sometimes" worked for me when I was on back-bar -- more of my back-bar can be preempted than my front bar.
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Gilvoth✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭it probably was a bug,
however if it's not? then:
Good! in my opinion.
hopefully this was intended and is a start to finally removing animation canceling.
sory if angers some but, this has Long been asked for help in removing animation canceling.
just my honest feedback.
Edited by Gilvoth on August 31, 2021 11:31PM1 -
Bjond✭✭✭sory if angers some but, this has Long been asked for help in removing animation canceling
I can understand removing animation canceling as a DPS trick. It's something I've been doing forever in about every game and it always feels cheesey. With ESO's absurd level of "button fluff" (the "LOL"-worthy Light Attack Weave and plethora of buttons that have no point but to keep you pressing them), it feels even cheesier.
However, block, dodge, and movement in general, really does need to preempt skill animations even if that means the animated skill doesn't take effect. The game has a 1s GCD to keep a lid on skill spam already.
Preempting skills really is an absolute necessity due to movement mechanics. TONS of games these days are moving to heavy movement and other environment responsive actions to heighten immersion. If you've played any ESO dungeon at all, imagine not being able to dodge or block when you need it. If your actions prevent responsive play it will not only kill the character, but eventually the entire game as well -- starting with the highest ping and eventually working it's way down.2 -
Bjond✭✭✭Hmm. Checked forums and also tested some other skills for whether or not they can be preempted by block and there's no rhyme or reason to it that I can see. Some skills hit and can have their animation block-canceled. Some can be preempted by block (canceled, but the skill doesn't hit), and some run their full length regardless and block only takes effect AFTER both full effect and full animation.
Channeling or not doesn't seem to indicate anything; eg. Snipe can be preempted (and it's a channel), Deadly Cloak can be fully block-canceled (skill hits, anim stopped), but Brawl, Endless, and Whirl run their full anim regardless of whether you block or not.
Dodge WILL preempt everything I checked. Also, bar-swap seems to similarly preempt everything. This permits an extremely annoying "fix" for players that need block to work NOW regardless of whatever animation is playing:
Player Workaround: bar-swap then block. Bar-swap seems to preempt all animations and permit block to work. Talk about a grotesquely artificial UI requirement: "block usually blocks, but when it doesn't, you need to bar-swap and then block." 'Course by that time, you're dead, so you might as well train your fingers to bar-swap every block if your spammable can't be canceled or preempted.2 -
WrathOfInnos✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭I’m not sure if the specifics, but there was a bug going on with that Maarselok fight and block failing. I think it had something to do with having a shield active, which explains why Brawler would cause it. A lot of skills will allow you to block while they play the animation, or before the animation has finished. Pretty much anything instant cast.0 -
Bjond✭✭✭We also found bugs with Maarselok in particular, but was going to post those separately. I can say definitively that it's not a shield issue, though. My tank had shields up (uh, the spell buff, not the off-hand
and blocked worked every time. My magblade similarly had no problems blocking. It was only my brawler that couldn't block the shout.
Based on the anim and the behavior in Maarselok, block isn't actually happening during brawl at all until the anim fully runs it's course.0 -
WrathOfInnos✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭✭I guess it’s possible that a skill that generates a shield happened to be bugged and discovered during the one fight that is also known to have a block bug from shields. Just seems like there would be a connection there. Again, I don’t recall the specifics in Maars, just encountered that bug once a few weeks ago.
On any other fight, what happens if you hold block, then cast brawler while still holding block? Does it drop your block? Does the glowing shield disappear? No instant skill should drop block, even though the skill animation will take priority over the block animation. Is it behaving more like a cast time skill, like Wrecking Blow?0 -
Bjond✭✭✭WrathOfInnos wrote: »hold block, then cast brawler while still holding block?
Ah, I didn't test that situation. It's interesting from a debugging standpoint, I suppose, but not applicable to DPS play. Only my tank puts block up first then skills (very rarely) and neither S&B nor Staff have any issues blocking. For Maarselok, my brawler would stop all skills and ONLY block during that shout, but it's never fast enough -- the animation keeps running and block only takes effect afterwards.
Sadly, because of this bug I no longer consider 2H to be something to recommend for newbies wanting melee. Without the bug, it's a great style to learn mechanics. With the bug, newbies can't learn block mechanics because block doesn't work when they hold the button. They think "what am I doing wrong?" Uh, nothing. It's broken.
What the game needs is the ability to respond instantly to short events, which is not the way it's working now. It's bad enough that I regard 2H as too broken to use. My brawler is going on the shelf until it's fixed or until I care enough to rework it to a weapon style where block works, probably DW.
FWIW, I was already considering punting 2H due to it's plethora of other issues, primarily incredibly slow heavy attack and yet quick heavy attacks are required for mechanics, the hard nerf to sustain (and thus DPS) in the recent patch, lower DPS and less fluid play than DW, etc. etc.; so, this isn't the only thing I see as wrong with 2H. It could be magnified for me due to being MY final straw. Fortunately, I have other characters.
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Fhritz✭✭✭✭✭You can still block right before using the skill. It doesn't make you lose dps at all (since you need to block anyways) , and if you can't play without anim canceling it's kinda sad tbh x) (Plus I use carve and blocking while using this skill work for me)I'm a single character man.
Stamblade. Khajiit. Mostly pvp.
And...that's it.0 -
Bjond✭✭✭
I think you missed the entire point of why this bug is a problem. No one in this thread cares about using block to cancel for dps. It's because it makes dealing with mandatory mechanics impossible. In most dungeons with a good tank, you're almost never going to need to block as DPS. Maarselok, you do. It highlights and exacerbates the bug.You can still block right before using the skill. It doesn't make you lose dps at all (since you need to block anyways) , and if you can't play without anim canceling it's kinda sad tbh x
I had a Maarselok run with 2x DPS using 2H'ers. They were getting tossed about and killed (KD'd into AE) almost every shout. It was ridiculous. Fortunately, this was after I found and knew about the bug or I'd just have put up kick votes for them as "bad players that can't listen to instructions to block the shout".
Any time a bug can convince a party to kick someone through no fault of their own, it's a pretty serious problem.1