Greetings everyone!
Some of you may have noticed the hero updates slow down slightly this week, and though that was partially due to bug fixes, we've also taken some time out to resolve a long-standing friction point with almost all heroes - Animation Lock.
Shipping with the next patch, we have vastly opened up our Animation Cancelling feature, and have allowed most cooldown and non-spammable powers to be animation cancelled shortly after their 'contact time', or 'the point at which the power deals damage'. Powers can never be cancelled before the contact time, so you don't have to worry about cancelling out of a power before it hits.
Animation cancelling is performed automatically so long as you have queued a power, so you don't have to worry about precise timing of button presses - the cancelling will happen behind the scenes as long as you have queued up another power to activate. The most noticeable way to see this is when using a Dash power - Cooldown powers with long animations can now be cancelled by using a Dash power much faster than before, getting you out of harm's way sooner, ultimately making the game feel more responsive and giving you more control over your hero.
Here's an example: Captain America has a movie-inspired animation for his shield throwing powers, which has a bit of flourish time at the end as the shield leaves his hands - half a second, to be precise, from the time the shield leaves his hands to the time you regain control of Cap. Now, after the shield is in the air as a projectile, if another power has already been queued (or you activate another power manually), then that flourish at the end will blend seamlessly into the new power that has been activated. If you want to see the flourish, no worries - it will always play as long as you aren't telling the game via another key press that you want to do something else immediately. To help visualize this, here is a sample of the timeline before & after:
Before - 900 Millisecond Animation of a Non-Repeatable Power
|-Start------~450 MS------Contact Time-------~400 MS----Power Is Cancellable-~50 MS-End-|
After - 900 Millisecond Animation of a Non-Repeatable Power
|-Start------~450 MS------Contact Time-~50 MS-Power Is Cancellable----~400 MS------End-|
These cancel windows are meticulously manually placed, to ensure that no animation 'breaks' or looks awkward when cancelled. For example, Human Torch's Scorching Pyre has a very slightly longer than average cancel window, because he's up in the air during the contact time, and interrupting the animation at that point causes some visual hitches. We instead allow him to cancel when he's about halfway back to the ground.
Additionally, we took the time to analyze every single animation in the game regarding its lock time - how much time between the moment the power is activated to the moment the power deals damage. This time frame is always going to prevent further power activation and movement, since cancelling is only allowed after the power has dealt damage. Any animations that were found to be excessively long have been trimmed down, and some animations have been replaced entirely with new, crisper, more responsive animations.
In total, over 400 Hero Powers have been changed to better their responsiveness in this pass.
Question: Will this mean I need to execute these cancels in order to maximize DPS?!
Answer: Strictly technically speaking, yes. However - since the system accepts queued commands as instructions to cancel, most players won't change the physical button presses of a rotation. Almost all players queued the next power they wanted to use quite some time before they were allowed to use it, and the power queuing system simply took care of executing the power when it was able to do so. All of that is still true - the only difference is that those powers will be executed just a hair bit faster than before. If you are familiar with a particular rotation, you will not need to master new timings or make flawlessly timed key presses - the queuing system will still do the work for you, just like it did before.
We're excited to deliver this long-requested feature - it really does feel like a night & day difference regarding the responsiveness of the game. We expect it to be released towards the end of the month. Current expectations are that this will be available in Public TC next week, but as always, dates are subject to change.
