No Longer a Correspondent

Well, it looks like MMORPG.com has finally shut the doors on their correspondent program. No word on why exactly, but I'm honestly not that surprised. Keeping track of so many different writers, many who probably only wrote a couple articles and then left, was probably too big of a headache compared to the return value. It appears they also hired a good number of additional staff to handle all of their important news issues, so they should be good for the future. It was a very enjoyable experience, and I'm glad I was able to participate in it. Getting paid to write, even if it's a negligible amount, felt really good. It looks like I'll have more time to spend updating this blog now though.

I'll go ahead and update today with the last article I wrote for MMORPG.com. I naturally would never repost something elsewhere that I've written for someone, but my last article was pulled due to a misunderstanding on its content. "Promoting cheating" was the reason, though they're also shutting down the program so that would have been reason enough for me. If you ever want to read my old articles they can be found here, though you'll have to sift through to find articles written by Robert Duckworth, the websites search feature can't seem to narrow it down any further.

My last article in its submission form... honestly barely different from its final form.

Swing Timers and Animation Cancelling

Whenever you do anything with your avatar in an MMO you get visual feedback. If you press the forward button then your character starts moving forward, if you use a special attack then you get to see some flashy lights. Those are all animations. Some things you do with your avatar will cause an animation that locks your character into place, essentially removing control of your character from you until the animation has been completed. For example, in Aion if a Ranger uses their Stunning Shot, they are locked in one place until the approximately 1 second animation has been completed, losing all control over their character, they cannot even cancel the shot if they want to by moving. Animation cancelling helps fix this, and is done by revoking the games process which locks your character into an animation sequence. The action continues anyway, but the player is allowed to maintain control over their character. So going back to the Ranger example, they would be able to shoot the Stunning Shot faster by cutting down or completely eliminating the animation before the shot is fired.

This is not something new with Aion; it has been around for a long time in video games. Some players consider the concept to be cheating, while others consider it just another aspect of a player’s grasp of skill over a game. It can definitely feel like someone is cheating if they are using it against you and you do not know how to respond. Whether or not it is considered cheating seems to depend on the community that surrounds it. A factor is how easy it is to successfully cancel an animation, the easier it is to do the more acceptable the practice appears to become. WoW, as must almost always be mentioned when discussing MMO’s, actually does not have any animation cancelling. Character avatars in WoW are never locked into an animation for anything, and it makes the game feel incredibly smooth. WoW used to have another issue though that is sort of like animation cancelling, but is more related to swing timers, which will be discussed first. (Img#1 – Lovely View)

My personal experiences in Aion have mainly been restricted to a Ranger and a Templar so far, so those are the two classes I am going to use in my explanations. The Templar does not have the same amount of animation canceling that the Ranger has, but they do involve the important concept of swing timers. Each weapon has an attack speed associated with it, depending on what type of weapon it is. A Templars Great Sword for example has an attack speed of 2.4 seconds. This means that every 2.4 seconds, the Templar will swing their weapon for a normal auto attack.

The issue here is that when a player uses a special attack, it will delay their swing timer. So if I press a special attack on my Templar 2.3 seconds after their last auto attack, I will not get another auto attack until the animation for my special attack has finished, plus a little bit of extra time even. It actually lowers your damage if you hit special attacks back to back, because you never give your avatar time to get any of their auto attacks in. Normally you would think that special attacks would hit for more damage than auto attacks, and they may at some of the higher levels, but when you take into account a weapons extra hit chance, the auto attacks often hit for more than the special attacks. Great Swords are classified as a “Very slow 3 hit weapon”. This means that for every auto attack done by a Great Sword, you have a chance to hit your target 3 times instead of just once, while special attacks only ever hit their target once.

Auto attack animations, unlike special attack animations, do not restrict your character from using new abilities. In order to maximize your damage, you have to press your special attack right after the auto attack animation starts. You will deal your full auto attack damage, plus your special attack damage, and while going through your special attack animation which you are locked into, your auto attack timer is counting down, coming off the timer shortly after you finish your special attack. Doing nothing but chaining all your available attacks one after the other hurts your damage output by a lot, making solo leveling almost impossible if you do this, and of course not bringing your full potential to a group either.

One thing of note is that because you have over written your auto attack animation, your auto attack damage is applied instantly rather than after the animation. So using your special attacks this ways also lets you spike damage closer together, instead of having it laid out evenly. (Img#2 – Auto Swing)

The Rangers auto attacks work the same way as the Templars, though Rangers deal a lot more damage with their special attacks than they do with their auto attacks. In a PvE setting the ranger will want to do the same thing a Templar does, waiting until right after their auto attack animation starts before using a special attack. In PvP though, Rangers will want to do something different. If someone is chasing you, you typically cannot afford to stop and stand there, letting them close the distance to you while you charge up a 1 second special attack. The solution: cast your shots instantly by canceling the 1 second cast time animation. This is also very good practice for solo questing. Rather than use a trap on every mob, or constantly switching back and forth between melee and ranged attacks, you can kite them and still deal special attack damage.

The process to get instant cast shots out of a ranger sounds a little complex, but actually doing it in game will show that it is not that hard to pull off. The first thing you have to do is make sure that your auto attack timer is fully charged. If you have your attack turned on, then your auto attack is turned on, and the timer will recharge itself no matter what direction you’re facing or if you’re in range of your target or not. So as a Ranger, make sure that your auto attack is turned on, but is charged, so it has not fired in the last few seconds. The only way to really accomplish this is to have your avatar turned away from your target.

Next, you will want to jump. If all you do is face away, charge your auto attack, and then press your special attack, you will turn around and go through the same 1 second cast. So you are jumping, and starting at right before you land, up to right after you land, is the time where you want to hit your special attack button. You also want to make sure that when you are landing your target is in your frontal cone of vision, so you want to go from facing away from them to facing towards them. I have noticed that sometimes if you spam your special attack that it will push you into the cast animation, whereas if you just press it once or twice you will get an instant shot. And that is really all there is to it. Instead of taking over a second of cast time to fire off a supposed zero cast time instant shot, you take less than a quarter of a second before you can start moving again in whatever direction you please.

You will not get your auto attack shot out of this because you are resetting the auto attack timer by shooting your special attack. For Rangers, this is not that important anyway since auto shots do so little damage when compared to special attacks. Also, while your character is not going through the animation for their casted shot, they are frozen from committing any new special attacks until the animation timer that they cancelled would have finished. But instead of firing the special attack at the end of the animation, it is fired instantly and you maintain full control of your characters movement throughout the time where normally you would be stuck in one place. (Img#3 – 15% Cast Time Perhaps)

A few of the other classes probably share the same issues with auto attacks that the Templar and Ranger do. The Gladiator for example I can imagine. I do not see any of the caster classes having to deal with these issues because if they move they cancel their spell casts. Rangers cannot cancel their attack animations by moving, and neither can melee classes. Spell casters may have their own form of animation cancelling but I do not have any experience with it if they do. I have seen an in game advertisement by a player from a private store selling a type of food that transforms you into something else, claiming it cuts down on casting animations by 15%, and thus increasing your casting speed by 15%, but they were AFK so I never got a real answer.

I have noticed a general acceptance of animation cancelling for Rangers. NCSoft has done nothing to stop it from happening for 10 months, and it does not appear to make Rangers over powered. Instead it looks as if it is an intended feature of the class. Forced animations are one of the sad side effects of pushing a game to look better rather than play better, often leading to that annoying clunky feeling. Cutting down on lengthy character animations, as well as the concept of global cool downs between activating abilities, are the two main methods I have seen over the years used to combat this issue.

- Averice