Now, can we please talk animation cancelling?

PC General Discussion
1

Hello there…

I’ve been playing this game for waaay too long now but this is actually something I’ve been noticing from day 2 of prerelease…

The lack of animation cancelling!

You might have been hearing streamers talking about it as well, though they just didn’t seem to realize the real issue at play… The streamers talked about that when you pressed an ability it wouldn’t activate at all, that it seemed to not register the key…

Well I think that the problem is that you cannot animation cancel your basic attacks (or most of any non-channeled attacks for that matter), so when you are in mid combat maybe getting a bit slowed and you already pressed a target with your left click mouse button (I assume that’s where most of the players have there basic abilities), well then you can’t cast anything else that requires animation… That might mean your core ability, your escape ability, heck even maybe your barrier or defensive ability…
It just won’t activate the skill because your attack animation from your basic skill or whatever skill you’re using is still undergoing…

This presents a HUUUGE problem to how the gameplay feels and how smooth combat is…

I started out as a druid, all the way to lvl 82, before rerolling into barb which is now 95… I particularly noticed it on my druid since it was league start and druids are waaaay slower than any other class in terms of movement, attack speed (except for wolfs), gap closing and those damn high cds as well… So it was VERY noticable whenever my druid chased an enemy because i accidently left clicked it and for maybe 2 seconds i couldn’t just any non-instant abilitym, not even my defensive or gap closing ones… Which meant i died alot to not being able to animation cancel at all…
It is REALLY noticable if you are using 2H and getting slowed to an enemy and you use Pulverize or some other skill with a big animation frame…

I am also noticing this on barb, though I am WW so most of the time i don’t really basic attack… Still, sometimes I get stuck having to wait for that stupid animation, not being able to start using WW again…
Having to slooowly wait for the animations to finish is PAINFUL…

Blizzard, could you please do something about this? :slight_smile: Just add animation cancelling to the game (and ofc a small internal cd so you won’t cancel the animation that cancelled the animation that… etc…)

It would make the combat and the game feel ALOT smoother…

Thank your for reading this far :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Doing a quick search, it seems it was possible in Alpha/beta? And added animation delay complain on faster attack speed by repeat inputs instead of holding.

I would like to suggest that CD (cooldown) skills has animation cancel.

For example, I am currently playing sorcerer with ice blade enchantment. While in theory the CD reduction does not affect total CD over time if all CD skill are activated once available, when two skills are available at the same time, one is delayed by the other’s animation. The more CD skills equipped and the more CD reduction stacked, the more animation delay adds up. This penalize build progression and synchrony.

3

who cares

the shako issue is the focus right now, stay on topic bro!

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As a sorc player, what is this “basic attack” you speak of?
All 4 Defenses (not enough to live through a normal skelly bow attack from offscreen), an ult, and a main attack.

5

There used to be…it was a problem for rogues (you could literally do 2x the basic attack skills in the same interval by animation cancelling with moving) and they fixed it in the…sever slam (or previous beta).

Now it’s RIP and weapon swap barbs have it the worst.
It would be nice if it was half “unfixed” somehow (only for certain things) but it can’t go back to what it was in the 1st beta (2 before slam).

There are also problems with skill queue. Maelstrom gets interrupted after first swing by a leap or deathblow queued previously then continues. Or last swing of it casts twice (animation only on 1 - so no extra damage).