I dont even understand your question really, as far as my knowledge goes ESO always had A GCD system.
- you can cast on skill per second
- you can do 1 la per second on top
- you can in theory do 2 bashes on top or 3 bashes per second with no skill/la

so you can do every second the following rotation LA + SKILL + BASH + BASH (tho the second bash makes things very clunky and i cant keep up with the GCD anymore, so most ppl skip the 2. bash)

No macro in the world will pass this limitations !

Any animation canceling you are doing is now just visual, skills don' go out early. (maybe that part was different back then)

On top of that, ESO has an input queue system, so players don't need to have perfect timing. You just press the abilities in the correct order shortly before you want them to actually cast. The game will then queue these actions almost perfectly one after another.

Destary wrote: »

Hello everyone,

I’m taking advantage of these 20 hours of maintenance to talk about a topic that, without a doubt, is important to many of us: APM. When the game was released in 2014 and up until a certain grim update several years ago, there was no limitation on APM. Then, following complaints (from what I understand) from players who weren’t necessarily comfortable using multiple consecutive keys, a limitation on APM, along with the removal of the animation canceling, was introduced.

Do you think that, with a focus on competitiveness, ZOS will eventually realize their mistake and reinstate this system?

As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t hold the changes that were made in high regard, and I think, like many others, I feel a decline in gameplay quality with each new update.

Animation canceling is still a thing....they've made a few runs at trying to "fix" it and it has since become a feature of the combat system.

Think you are falling for ZOS's propaganda. They are the ones who brought up APM as this all important measurement of player performance, as if mystically discovering the secret why some players do better/are more competitive than others. That somehow players that did something as basic as "animation cancelling" (a misleading term, nothing is cancelled as global cooldowns can not be overridden or bypassed) or managed to maintain a semblance of a DPS rotation was the main reason why some players could reach 100K DPS on a target dummy, while other players, who apparently put their controllers down and chomped on their potato chips or something, had long periods of inactivity while playing the game.

While there are ESO's version of "Sunday drivers," the majority of people I fight against in Cyrodiil or take part even in a semi-casual normal trial environment typically have their character do something every 1 second and for whom light attacking in-between skills is second nature to them. Even though many of these players have decent APM, they are still bad and below average players because by definition, half the people who play this game are below average for many reasons (most commonly: poor understanding of what makes for efficient skills/gear/synergies, no idea of the concept of opportunity cost, lack of competitive vigor, close-mindedness, poor hand-eye coordination, fragile ego blaming cheats/exploits/poor balance for their defeats, etc.). Trying to squeeze a few more actions out of players with these debilitating gaming traits is not going to turn average players into good players, just merely making them slightly less bad.

It is true that ZOS has made a number or poor balance decisions because of this belief (basically all of update 35) and they absolutely have tightened the window for players to "animation cancel" making it more difficult, but there has always been a limitation of how many skills could be fired in a given time (the one second global cooldown), and those with good motor reflexes, knowledge of the game, and hand-eye coordination can still block, bash, light attack weave, etc. in 2025 as they did in 2014.

@Joy_Division This is absolutely spot on. I could not have put it better.

Go play chopsticks on a piano. No one would mistake you for a professional musician if you did but congrats - you have a high enough APM to play ESO at the most competitive level. All that other stuff that JoyDivision said is what makes the difference.