Whats the purpose of animation cancelling?

So its great for auto attacks, great design guys...

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Chadwixx wrote:

Honest question.

to make you play cyclone
-honest answer given the statistics

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Moridin79 wrote:

To acquiesce to the old multistrike complainers, which have now become the new multistrike complainers.

No, this goes way beyond that. It really makes a huge improvement in dodging attacks. Before this change I can see the boss winding up for a massive attack, press my move key, but don't get to move in time to avoid the big hit because the animation of the last attack command hadn't finished yet so I was always stuck and felt my input was way too delayed. Now the end of the last attack animation gets cancelled so I use a move command and get significantly quicker response from it. Other huge improvement is now I can press keys quickly and they get queued. This makes a melee build work so much better. For example, I place my Ancestral Protector totem, go about spamming my main attack skill, when the AP times out I quickly redeploy it, then resume attack spamming, and the server gets all my input. Prior to this change I had to be careful not to press keys too fast or some of them would not be registered by client PoE and thus I'd have to disrupt my attacking to get the AP command acknowledged by the server. Same for movement skills mixed in with the attack skills, no keypresses or mouse buttons get missed because of the command queuing that animation cancellation allows. Overall the whole of PoE timing is better and this is good for all players, not just the melee builds.

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Arrowneous wrote:

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Moridin79 wrote:

To acquiesce to the old multistrike complainers, which have now become the new multistrike complainers.

No, this goes way beyond that. It really makes a huge improvement in dodging attacks. Before this change I can see the boss winding up for a massive attack, press my move key, but don't get to move in time to avoid the big hit because the animation of the last attack command hadn't finished yet so I was always stuck and felt my input was way too delayed.

Movement skills are now instant, is that it?

Animation cancelling is great. Just not this implementation of it, in my opinion. I have always considered animation cancelling something that allows you to cancel what "extra" animation happens after an attack completes but would otherwise still lock you in place. What this implementation seems to do is cancel anything anytime.

Animation cancelling is something that has been (ab)used to gain additional attacks per unit time by adding up all the saved frames from cutting the "extra" animations.

Personally, I think this affects me most negatively because I am so used to using the movement skill (bound to E) and I'm almost always holding it or have let go a moment for a flask and go back to holding it. Of course this cancels cyclone and leaves me running around like an idiot. Or I'll shift-click a single attack expecting it to do its thing but I'll hit E too fast and no attack goes off.

I can see its use mostly for cases such as Spell Echo and Multistrike that lock you into extra attacks. I would be fine if, as a compromise of sorts, it allowed you to cancel after at least one attack. But those skills have a risk reward associated with them and ideally the cancel should only happen after the last successful attack to shave just the "extra" animation from the overall attack sequence.

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nadakuu wrote:

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Chadwixx wrote:

Honest question.

to make you play cyclone
-honest answer given the statistics

Cyclone may be the meta, but it's hardly the only viable melee skill -

https://youtu.be/VOj8thsPjsw (Infernal Blow)

https://youtu.be/6yx_WqeU634 (Viper Strike)

Oh, Mathil doesn't count? Ok, how about Woolfio? -

https://youtu.be/VHMXg06VFfQ (Dual Strike)

For a long time the game added more and more oneshots and dmg spikes, while some stuff still had like 1 second base animation time.

The entire 2 hander branch was in poor words: useless. Like it was better if it didn't exist

Forced to pick every single attack speed point across templar to ranger and they would still be stuck with a 0.20 to 0.40 animation time at best, that with multistrike became a 0.6 to 1.2, you get the picture when comparing it with a 8-10aps with 0.10 and 0.30 multistrikes

Now when you have some corrupted boss slamming you with inc aspd for some never heard of multiplied damage, it was as good as a self inflicted 0.6-1.2 stun to guarantee yourself a -10% exp or character reroll

My impression is that it was lazy times in the office until a series of external factors came in:
- Tencent 80% holder that possibly could not have something that bad under their eyes
- PoE on consoles was looking probably a sorry thing to the masses quickly distracted by blingy and cheaper AAA titles
- D3 dead, meaning no more competition bringing to:
- New ARPGs arrived and are coming. With a real gameplay flow and working animations. Not that programming bug called namelock and multistrike patchwork

So there you have animation canceling for the unskilled poe playerbase

It's great for some builds, but for other builds its fucking horrible.

As mentioned it should be an option in the menu because it's penalizing just as many (if not more) builds than its helping.

1) It's great for some (crap) builds that used slow-ass skills or had crap gear or were in early game fighting in treacle.

2) It's barely noticeable for most melee builds that use fast skills anyways and is essentially negligible.

3) It's horrendous for caster builds that want to cast anything on the move that is not an instant. Really really bad experience now; game actually feels broken.

So to summarize, as implemented in this game: It has improved things for a tiny margin of players - players that needed to l2p, NOT have their bad choices and habits smoothed over by the safety net of animation cancelling. At the same time it has screwed things for a huge margin of the playerbase. And has no real effect for everyone else.

Good job!

Excellent thread, good question and many excellent responses and good information.

Here's my 2 cents. I was playing a cyclone build prior to 3.7 release. I'm playing another cyclone build now. Cyclone is much more responsive now. It is more than just animation canceling I think but, I suspect that is part of it.