It's not frame perfect stuff, it's like you do a light attack, then a skill cast as close as possible to it actually firing as you can, then another light attack as soon as that actually fires, then the global cooldown (1 second) should be up and you can cancel the animation with another skill cast, and so on, and you generally want to be within less than .1 seconds off that mark on average. It's not hard especially with addons that can give you a metronome for the timing, but it's absolute murder on your hands over the length of a dummy parse.
The dumbest thing is is that if you do that perfectly you gain about 15% more DPS, but the community acts like it's where all the damage comes from. Like doing it well or doing it poorly means a difference of a few thousand DPS, while just maintaining a decent rotation and having the gear and champion point perks you need will cover almost all of your actual damage output. But literally every single resource on ESO DPS focuses on animation canceling and everyone acts like it's some esoteric art and the key to everything, when the actual key is to just use the right skills and also have like 5,000+ attack/spell damage from your gear and buffs, while also somehow having a 75+% crit rate and a +100% or higher crit damage bonus, which will more than triple your damage output versus having 3,000 attack/spell damage, a %50 crit chance, and like +40% crit damage. In that case the former can literally ignore the animation canceling completely and still do like 80K DPS and the latter can animation cancel perfectly and not break 20K.
is this for PvP or PvE? Requiring frame-perfect timing for PvE content sounds like a mind-bogglingly weird design decision
It's not frame perfect stuff, it's like you do a light attack, then a skill cast as close as possible to it actually firing as you can, then another light attack as soon as that actually fires, then the global cooldown (1 second) should be up and you can cancel the animation with another skill cast, and so on, and you generally want to be within less than .1 seconds off that mark on average. It's not hard especially with addons that can give you a metronome for the timing, but it's absolute murder on your hands over the length of a dummy parse.
The dumbest thing is is that if you do that perfectly you gain about 15% more DPS, but the community acts like it's where all the damage comes from. Like doing it well or doing it poorly means a difference of a few thousand DPS, while just maintaining a decent rotation and having the gear and champion point perks you need will cover almost all of your actual damage output. But literally every single resource on ESO DPS focuses on animation canceling and everyone acts like it's some esoteric art and the key to everything, when the actual key is to just use the right skills and also have like 5,000+ attack/spell damage from your gear and buffs, while also somehow having a 75+% crit rate and a +100% or higher crit damage bonus, which will more than triple your damage output versus having 3,000 attack/spell damage, a %50 crit chance, and like +40% crit damage. In that case the former can literally ignore the animation canceling completely and still do like 80K DPS and the latter can animation cancel perfectly and not break 20K.
whatever I'll just play support