Ability Weaving: A very brief guide

While it's spread fairly far and wide, not everyone in our family is aware of a very simple yet powerful method of increasing their damage rate. 

ESO operates on a priority system when it comes to attack and ability activation. Block overrides everything, bash overrides abilities which override regular (mouse button) attacks. Currently bash will even override itself, though in 1.1 this will be changed. 

What this means is you can increase your rate of attack by activating abilities in a very simple chain with good timing and still have all attacks land. 

For example: Light Attack into Surprise Attack into bash, slight wait, repeat. 

Sword and Board users have been abusing this for some time now, though many just bashbashbashbash. Get ahead of the curve, learn and practice the weaving method instead and enjoy some excellent single target burst. 

yep been doing that with ranged bow attacks as well  heavy draw , fire off a attack like silver shards then release venom arrow and heavy or toss light between etc . .

  Time stamp attacks are great for burst as well . getting 2 or 3 damage to all go off at the same time frame for huge bursts .  like sorc  velouious curse, crystal frag, and lighting to all do their damage withing 1 sec , hard to heal that .

It is funny that most people miss it. It took me several weeks of playing my templar to get some skills and chains figured out. When I look at morphing a skill or choosing a new one now, I read and reread all my descriptions. It is important to consider the way you want to play and how you use your skills when taking new ones or morphing current ones. Like focussed charge can morph to set the target off balance .... Charge in, if it sets them off balance, heavy ttack, if not shield bash or use another ability based on your current weapons... The game designers have crafted a wonderful combat system and those synergies and chains you can build are amazing. They work the same agains NPCs and PCs alike.

What I am referring to specifically is "animation cancelling" certain attack types will cancel the animations of others but still allow the cancelled ability to hit and do damage, thereby increasing the rate of attack without compromising damage. This is what bash spammers are doing with bashbashbash, but there is a better method. 

ESO has no global cool down like most other MMOs. It relies on the animations to control rate of ability use and by following the priority while weaving attacks (LMB, skill/ability then bash) you land three hits in little more than the time it takes to normally land one, depending on the length of the animation and your own timing in clipping them. 

It sounds cheesy but actually takes a bit of skill, coordination and timing. However, if you take the time to learn it you'll find yourself much more competitive in tough situations in pvp or just bursting through pve for quick kills and progress. 

Chaining abilities for synergies and proc timing is another matter again, though also worthwhile to learn. :)

Another thing that could be mentioned in the same category is weapon heavy attacks. I know when I was playing around with heavy attacks and light attacks in my 2H build if you didn't let the charge up animation finish it didn't do full damage. But when I wanted to see if Heavy attacks where affected like light attacks where when it came to clipping animations I found that you can start the heavy attack charge then hit your ability (do not let go of your heavy attack channel) it will hit with the heavy for full channel amount and ability damage at the same time.

"ESO has no global cool down like most other MMOs. It relies on the animations to control rate of ability use"

This is only partially true - ESO has no global cooldown, but it appears to have a server-side hidden cooldown for each ability, including weapon-specific light and heavy attacks... i.e. you can "swing" a 1-H sword faster than a 2-H sword - This was clearly visible for me with the bugged 5-pieces "Torug Pact" set which has now been corrected "Torug’s Pact Set: Fixed an issue with Torug’s Pact item set where it was reducing the cooldown of light and heavy attacks instead of enchantment procs."

This internal cooldown seems to be in average slightly shorter than the animation, probably to account for any transmission delays - It must be set to 0 for bashing (I have not tried bashbashbash...)
So you can indeed "weave" heavy attack/ability/light attack as long as you do not try to reuse an ability before its internal cooldown runs out. 

The timing on these things has gotten slightly trickier since the patch. A few abilities are rather clunky, but with practice attack/ability weaving still works very well.