Performance and animation canceling

Erikx · October 2023

Does anyone else think that the games performance issues are directly related to the removal of animation canceling? My friends and I were talking the other day and remembered that we never had any performance issue when animation canceling was a thing. What do you guys think?

fizl101 · October 2023

Maybe you and I are talking about different things, but animation cancelling as I know it is alive and well. When I LA weave I am cancelling the animation of the light attack when applying the skill

Braffin · October 2023

Nope, the performance issues are most probably related to 10-year-old highly fragmented code (they promised a rework and didn't yet deliver) and insufficient hardware-ressources.

Animation cancelling wasn't removed btw, it still works as usual.

CameraBeardThePirate · October 2023

Performance issues aren't a result of the loss of animation cancelling; however, they are more noticeable now that many ultimates and abilities have cast times, as abilities with cast times are impacted the most by skill delay. Arcanist in particular feels this heavily. It's also a reason the cast time on Dizzy Swing was reduced - bad performance + movement speed made that ability feel awful to use when the cast time was longer.

Also, for those that aren't understanding, OP is referring to the animation cancelling of ultimate abilities, not light attack weaving/animation cancelling regular abilities. Dawnbreaker, Incap, Soul Siphon, Thrives in Chaos, Onslaught, and probably a few other burst ultimates I'm forgetting about were given cast times and can no longer be animation cancelled by a bar swap/bash. They are now impacted much more by lag and performance than they ever were before.

Braffin · October 2023

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Performance issues aren't a result of the loss of animation cancelling; however, they are more noticeable now that many ultimates and abilities have cast times, as abilities with cast times are impacted the most by skill delay. Arcanist in particular feels this heavily.

Also, for those that aren't understanding, OP is referring to the animation cancelling of ultimate abilities, not light attack weaving. Dawnbreaker, Incap, Soul Siphon, Thrives in Chaos, Onslaught, and many other burst ultimates were given cast times, and are now impacted much more by lag and performance than they ever were before.

I see, it makes definitely more sense that way. Thanks for clarification.

Alchimiste1 · October 2023

You can barely animation cancel anything these days. They should bring it back. That being said, the performance was bad back then too. We didn't see any performance boost until the new servers.

SeaGtGruff · October 2023

As far as I know, animation canceling is still a thing.

On the other hand, the amount of damage done by light attacks was adjusted back in Update 35, and a lot of players were calling it "the death of animation canceling" and saying that ZOS was trying to remove animation canceling from the game.

Animation canceling, the amount of damage done by the different kinds of attacks (light, heavy, and "medium"), weaving skills and attacks together (be it light attack weaving, heavy attack weaving, "medium" attack weaving, or a mixture of those), and rotating between a specific series of skills while weaving, are all separate things-- that is, animation canceling is not the same thing as light attack weaving or the amount of damage done by light attacks. They might be interrelated, but they aren't the same things, just as the bananas and oranges and apples that make up a bowl of fruit are different and separate things even though they're arranged together. Reducing the amount of damage done by light attacks did not "remove" animation canceling from the game.

I never tried to master those things on my stamina-melee two-handed main characters, but since creating my Arcanist healer and Arcanist damage dealer I've had to work at using light attack weaving with staves and ranged fighting. To the best of my knowledge, animation canceling is still happening, and I've been using it pretty much constantly with my Arcanists.

baselesschart · October 2023

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Also, for those that aren't understanding, OP is referring to the animation cancelling of ultimate abilities, not light attack weaving/animation cancelling regular abilities. Dawnbreaker, Incap, Soul Siphon, Thrives in Chaos, Onslaught, and probably a few other burst ultimates I'm forgetting about were given cast times and can no longer be animation cancelled by a bar swap/bash. They are now impacted much more by lag and performance than they ever were before.

This is deserving of a discussion. Not only, as you pointed out, are the ultimates affected by lag more so now than before, also cast times on ultimates as far as balance is concerned is not healthy and I think deserves reconsideration from ZoS, but we know thats probably not going to happen.