Animation Canceling

‘Animation Canceling’ describes the action to cancel a currently running animation of a power. Animation canceling is an essential feature to create a fast paced game. Without it Neverwinter would be undoubtedly less successful as one of its major selling points is its fast paced combat system. It is used to allow the player to play like

“I will cast my heavy hitting attack!”

“Oh, wait the boss is planning to smash me, I should raise my shield instead!”

without getting the game feedback

“Sorry, you cannot raise your shield, because you are currently using a heavy hitting attack, so you will die”. - Game

Thus, Animation Canceling is indeed a core feature of Neverwinter.

Now to the interesting part and why it is described here early in the guide: The effect of a power in Neverwinter is triggered often before the animation has finished! This means that with Animation Canceling, players can get the full effect of a power while gaining the time to do other actions too! (Ab)Using Animation Canceling this way is the typical distinguishing factor between a good player and the number one player. However, a too early canceled power gives nothing and represents a waste of time! Animation Canceling thus requires a fine grained feeling for when to cancel a power. Thankfully, humans own ‘muscle memory’ and players may use Animation Canceling this way, without knowing that they are doing it! (That was the case for me a few years back).

The gain of Animation Canceling heavily depends on the class and their powers as not every action is good to cancel. For the Vanguard Fighter, there are no significant animation cancellings anymore. Before the last Fighter changes, the At-Will ‘Threatening Rush’ was the only power worth canceling, as most other powers represent a too high risk or its effect is triggered too late. Vanguards had to use a certain set of powers in a specific order to animation cancel ‘Threatening Rush’: They have to activate ‘Threatening Rush’, then raise their shield (not using ‘Dig In’) and move into any direction (preferably backwards). Then immediately cast the next power (often ‘Threatening Rush’ again). This way, Vanguards could gain substantial more threat and far more Action Points.

The details on why this special order of actions have to be performed and why it does work this way includes a more in-depth understanding of the game, including priority lists of powers, designed cast times, start-of-effect times and so on. There is an extremely old forum post shedding some light into it for clerics, however only the described concept is still worth reading. It is extremely time consuming and hard to get any reliable data off the game for getting the start-of-effect times (so the moment you shall cancel to gain maximum benefit) and I - for myself - have decided to not conduct such tests anymore. Thus the start-of-effect times are unfortunately not listed for Vanguard in the Mechanics section of each power. If anybody knows a reliable source of data, please message me in game or on discord.

As a last note I will copy the list of priorities from the mentioned cleric thread:

What cancels what?

The actions that cancel other actions can be shown in a table. Actions with higher priorities normally cancel actions with lower priority.

Priority	Action
0	Normal stance animation
0	Animations back to normal stance
1	Movement
2	At Will Powers
3	Encounter Powers
3	Daily Powers
3	Artifact Power, Mount Power etc.
4	Dodge, Shield