You had a poll recently about what the game needs to fix most and since I completed it late at night while tired I’m rectifying my mistake by posting here.
The biggest problem right now with the game is bullcrap game mechanics. In particular animation locking, which makes it so I have to wait 2-3 seconds (and perhaps even more) until an action I’m spamming on my keyboard is performed due to animations having to play out.
This results in horrible gameplay. A couple of annoying situations are:
You hit dodge but you don’t dodge because some long attack animation is playing and instead of it cancelling upon player input and performing the new action, namely dodge, you have to wait for the animation to end. Result: boss performs ultimate attack and kills you.
You are low life, spam the potion drinking button but you don’t drink the potion because you’re in an animation and the action will not execute until you finish the animation. This vastly decreases the viability of drinking potions and gets you killed stupidly a lot. It’s particularly annoying when you get resurrected, you spam the potion button to recover health but it takes so long for the “getting up” animation to play that the boss hits you again while you’re low life and you die.
What is the point of this mechanic? The only result is that it makes playing less enjoyable and more random, reducing the impact of attention and skill. Nobody enjoys getting killed in ridiculous situations where you didn’t even have time to act or your keyboard input is ignored because of reasons.
Please prioritize fixing this ABOVE everything else because it doesn’t matter how much content you produce and how uber difficult you make it if it’s unbelievably infuriating to play. No wonder there are 2-3 lobbies (on a full server) of Ennead on a Saturday night when this kind of thing happens constantly and destroys your chance of getting gold in M9-10.
Tell me you never played a souls game without telling me you never player a souls game.
I mean, i kind of agree not canceling animations sometimes feels frustrating, but the same time do we want things like berserk animation cancel? We should stick to what is acceptable.
Either we embrace anination cancel as a feature.
Or its a non intended mechanic which could be seen as an exploit?
1 year, you pressed potion, got healed immediately
then they ninja patch so potions don’t go off, until you finished any animation, resulting in potions just being consumed after a few seconds sometimes.
so yeah, when you want to make a “souls” game, where potion is an actual long animation, that’s fine, but don’t start with fluid animations for pots and consumables and then throw it all out the window without even mentioning it in patch notes.
Souls games are SOLO games, not multiplayer. When you introduce other factors such as lag and the whole negotiating hits between clients and servers this whole concept doesn’t work.
Also in souls games they take care to make very different animations and winding attacks for bosses so that you can learn to recognize them and have time to avoid them. This is very far from what this game is, where a bunch of bosses just make the same movements for pretty much every attack.
Case in point it shouldn’t be that I launch an attack combo, during which Neishatun has time to decide to do his up and down circle thing and 1-shot me before my dodge will activate. Or I go to kill the orb and as I return get hit with some random attack that wasn’t even in my field of view.
Also getting revived on low health and not being able to drink potions until some silly animation ends makes 0 sense. With the floor effects the most recent bosses leave all over the place and the shaky way aggro works there is often no place during combat where you can be safe for the several seconds it takes to play the revive animation and drink a potion.
It wont work. Some skills have long animations copared to other. It would benefit them more. And most of them have long animations couse they are one of best skills in game.
It would work only if you had option to dodge/block animation cancel for few framers when animation starts. But its the way it does work right now, isnt it?
Imagine skills like relentles rush that you can cancel any time you want? It would be broken as f…
Or WH skills - if i could cancel when i already see enemy wont get hit, it would make WH most broken weapon in game.
Lots of players demand animation cancel as long as they can outplay everyone without anyone outplaying them.
If you look at it, most dex weapons have animation cancel, hardly any str or int has them. I for one don’t mind having animation cancel on heavy attacks, but on skills it’s broken
This is why WH is balanced. It has long animation abilities and you can see them from a mile away so you can punish bad players. if you give me the option to cancel abilities on WH it’s gonna be the most fun/broken weapon in the game
Could you imagine a hammer user using shockwave 30 times cause while he’s in the middle of casting shockwave he sees that your gonna dodge it so he dodged to and cancels it cause he can’t be animation locked? No, you commit to your moves so that if you messed up you get counter attacked
That makes no sense, if you started the animation you’ve already used the ability and it goes on cooldown, it’s just that you can cancel it and walk away faster. Removing animation locking doesn’t give you the possibility of spamming an ability, they still go on cooldown even if you don’t finish the whole animation.
The difference then just comes down to pure reaction vs reaction. I hit shockwave, you dodge and start a counter then if I’m fast enough I can dodge and move out of the way. If anything it makes combat more dynamic.
Sounds more like eso is the game you want, bb already has no animation locks except bb blast and it’s a mess fighting it since there’s no counter attacking or knowing when to dodge, if you let everyone cancel their attacks then it’s just going to be people spamming abilities and rolling around till one person is out of stamina.
If you commit to vault kick and chose the wrong time to do it you get punished, we aren’t going to be playing a game where everyone gets to spam their hard cc moves with no drawback since they have a safety net to cancel it and dodge away when they F’d up. ESO is the game you want, not this
I don’t know man, some people want to push the game further and further into a lightning fast keyboard smash combo game. I understand people want animation cancel combat, but I don’t see it being balanced in this game.
Being able to punish people for mistakes is what made the combat great in the first place. Being able to punish people when they don’t smash Shift fast enough is not that fun. I’m not playing Mortal Kombat
Well here’s the problem, animation locking in PVE is magnitudes of horrible. For the reasons I outlined in the OP and many other examples beyond that. There’s literally no point in making difficult PVE content such as raids if you’re gonna get killed stupidly because of animation locking. It’s going to make for extremely frustrating gameplay and nobody is going to play it.
I’m on a server that’s about 70% full at peak time daily and it’s already quite annoying to find mutation groups most of the time for say something like Ennead. It wasn’t like that for Genesis or Lazarus, the easier mutations. Had the same issue on Tempest a few weeks back, where Neishatun is the king of random bullcrap.
All the objections I’ve seen here are about PVP. Which reminds me of the musket issue where PVP players complain about how OP muskets are and on the PVE side nobody’s using them. I think PVP and PVE should be completely split in terms of gear and effects. You guys can keep your animation locking, I want to play without it. Maybe they can make special PVP servers for it, though I doubt how viable those would be longterm.
If you commit and telegraph your skill, why macro-cancell? You are somehow exploiting delay with unintended game mechanics and external aids to get any advantage. A few ms in response is all it takes.
I’ll really ragequit if people can anim-cancel berzerk, even when they are stunned already they can macro-swap-escape when no other weapon has that, and it’s all product of unattended exploitable game mechanics that have been around, patched, came back, changed, but are still there as part of, as usual, gameplay-revolving-around-bugs style that AGS has been feeding us for over a year now.
Learn mobs attacks and don’t self lock into animation in wrong time?
Reason to have animation lock is simple. Fight is less fluid but does require more decision making on fly. You made wrong call, you might get punished if other player did notice.
In animation cancel world you dont get punish for bad calls. Just for slow reaction time or/and bad network.
Like I said, some boss special attacks (e.g. Neishatun up and down circle attack) happen faster than my animations. This means boss can decide to start his attack AFTER I started my animation and kill me BEFORE my animation lock ends. Not to mention you have to factor in player reaction time of at least 0.5 seconds plus another 0.1 seconds from lag between the time that a boss does something and the player can respond to it in real time.
And that’s IF you instantly recognize what the boss is doing, which is not always the case as most bosses do pretty much the same hand and body movements for like 3-4 attacks in this game and there are usually no special markers like colors or circles or whatever to visually signal different attacks.
Take for instance the Heru mob clones in Ennead that teleport and do a metric ton of damage during teleport. The attack is them standing still holding the staff in both hands while the floor lights up underneath them. Problem is you usually have 4-5 other mobs around them clouding the visual field so that it takes me a second to realize the Heru clone is charging up. The floor lighting up gold/yellow also DOES NOT HELP because EVERY FREAKING ANCIENT MOB lights the ground yellow with DoTs in that dungeon.
Same issue with Heru & Anpu fight. In the middle of the action I cannot see what is a Heru ground splash or an Anpu ground splash and everything is constantly lit up yellow around me. They even have yellow traveling circles made by Heru for God knows what reason because they don’t seem to do a lot of damage or degen, they just seem to be there to annoy me and cloud my visual field. This is NOT skill based and NOT entertaining.
Yes, because bow is SOOO great in PVE. GL being accepted into mutation pug groups playing bow.
WEll this are bad game designs. ITs same with pvp where fs burn out skill can be interupted by any mele skills. You can start burn out and in example gravity well thrown as reaction to it, will break it. But it does not work other way around.
And 0.5sec reaction time is for very old ppl. Even i dont need that reaction time. I would say if you already have grandchildren then it does make sense that 0.5 is to fast for you. Any other case it should not be.