This is a guide explaining what animation cancelling and light attack weaving is, why people do it and why people hate it.
Animation cancelling: This is when you interrupt, cancel, the animation of an attack or ability. If you have ever played a fighting game then you have seen this at work. Combos in fighting games came about because players realized that if timed correctly they could chain multiple attacks together by inputting an attack in the middle of another animation. This cancelled the previous animation and started the new one.
Light attack weaving: This is the ESO equivalent of combos and animation cancelling. It refers to weaving light attacks in between your casted abilities. ESO has a priority list for types of attacks.
-Light attacks: Your left mouse button attacks. These are the lowest priority and can be cancelled by any of the subsequent two.
-Casted abilities: Any of your skills that use magicka and stamina. These will interrupt your light attack animations and start casting.
-Block/Shield bash: Your right mouse button. These are highest priority and will interrupt anything else.
What does this mean?
By manipulating the animations and timing your input you can push DPS higher than you could without.
Okay. How do?
For staff users it is a little bit easier, big shock right, so I’ll explain that first. When you light attack immediately after you see your laser beam go flying cast an ability. Your light attack should be truncated and you’ll begin casting your ability. You have cancelled the light attack animation and casted an ability where there would normally be dead time waiting for the light attack animation to end.
For melee users the process is not as simple because it is difficult to only use visual clues to determine when to cancel the light attack. You have to wait until the light attack makes the impact sound before cancelling it. That is the cue for your attack landing and being "counted" by the combat system. If you cancel the attack too soon and only the casted ability will register. With practice you will be less dependent on the sound component but the visual component is definitely not as easy as watching for a fireball, etc. coming from a staff.
If we take this one step further we can push DPS even higher. I mentioned previously that block can cancel animations of light attacks and casted abilities. This means that if we cast an ability then use block or bash then we can reduce the dead time after casted abilities as well. However, in order to do this properly a player will have to practice the timing because cancelling the animation to early will cancel the cast entirely. This is especially true with abilities that are not instant. Experimentation is key to figuring out which abilities cancel and where.
That doesn’t seem like fun...
That’s probably because it doesn’t make sense immersion-wise, removes realism and feels like cheating the game. But to some it makes the game more challenging and rewards players who take the time to read trite stuff like this and experiment with their class and builds. Emergent gameplay like this and fighting game combos can be game breaking for some and game making for others.
If I don’t do this am I doing it wrong?
You’re probably doing it subconsciously some of the time anyway. MMO veterans of a certain game will remember being able to start casting a second spell right at the end of a previous spell when timed right. This shaved off milliseconds of time and was helpful. If you play any game long enough you will discover little tricks that make certain things easier. Now whether you know if it’s a “thing” or not is something else entirely.
Personally I don’t think not doing it is doing it wrong and I’m fine with it being in the game as well. That said the most competitive of players will be doing it whether they’re aware of it or not. Zenimax is aware of this “feature” but I would not expect a change to this anytime soon because any change to the timing of attacks and abilities or the priority list or adding a global cooldown would change the feel of the game drastically.
TL;DR:
Experiment with doing this really fast:
1)Click your left mouse button
2)Press 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5
3)Click your right mouse button
4)Repeat
Edit: Added information about melee that I had forgotten to include.
