Looking back, it’s funny to see how the perception of Klee has changed over time. At the beginning of her banner, many content creators said that she was awkward to play and a waste of money. Mtashed infamously had a saga of clickbait videos where he spent $2000 on Klee only to hate her and quit the game. Over time, however, it became evident that Klee is actually one of the strongest DPS characters in the game as long as you understand her playstyle and importantly, learn how to animation cancel.
Basic Animation Cancelling
Around the time that Klee’s banner first came out, there was a lot of debate surrounding her normal attack animations which caused many content creators to write her off as awkward to play. However, players soon found that you are actually able to animation cancel those attacks meaning you could speed up the time it takes for her to fire them off. If you take a look at the gif below, you can see that Klee has a wind-up time for her attack animations meaning there is a delay as she twirls around.
There are two different methods of animation canceling her basic attacks that you can pick depending on the situation that you are in. The first is called the basic attack cancel. All you have to do is hold a directional key and press your attack button while doing so. As a result, Klee will continually move forward which cancels the rest of the animation. It’s a little easier if you find a rhythm to tap the attack key to and you can match that up to when her catalyst appears. As you can see in the gif below, Klee is attacking as soon as the catalyst re-appears beside her.
However, as you can probably guess, this animation cancel requires you to stay in one spot the entire time meaning that while her attacks become much faster, you are also prone to being hit by AOEs or groups of enemies. This is why it’s also necessary to practice the jump cancel as well. Jump canceling requires a little more finesse and you need to strategize where you want to end up as well. It follows the same idea of the basic attack cancel except instead of simply holding a directional key, you click your jump button immediately after she fires a bomb.
While this does take a tiny bit longer than the basic attack cancel, you are also free to move around while you jump meaning you can dodge or close gaps with ease as seen in the gif below:
Now you might be wondering why this is so important for Klee. Well, the answer is that Klee heavily depends on her stamina and charged attacks to deal damage effectively. If you take a look at her passive talent, you’ll notice that her normal attacks and elemental skill have a 50% chance to grant an Explosive Spark which in turn will deal 50% more damage without using stamina on her next charged attack.
What this means is that managing Klee’s stamina usage is absolutely vital. She has low defense gain compared to most characters and is usually built as a glass cannon. Once you run out of stamina from charged attacks, you need to use basic attacks until she refills her stamina bar. If you don’t animation cancel, you could lose out on a lot of DPS while waiting around for her basic attack animations to finish. Even worse, if you take too long refilling her bar, she can’t sprint or dodge meaning you can easily die in one or two hits. Therefore, you need to learn a basic rotation for Klee where you burn your stamina bar with charged attacks and refill it as quickly as possible by animation canceling your basic attacks.
Advanced Animation Cancelling
Once you have gotten a hang of Klee’s basic attack canceling, you can also learn some more advanced tricks in animation canceling. Klee also has the ability to both cancel and jump cancel a portion of her charged attack. She is also able to cancel any of her attack animations at any time with her elemental skill and elemental burst. Let’s take a look at some of those methods.
The first thing you need to know about her charged animation is that you can are free to move or cancel it as soon as the flower appears. If you take a look at the gif below, you can see that the charged attack has a bit of windup and takes a while to complete. However, the visual is a little misleading because the attack will be issued and persist as soon as the flower appears and you are free to move before it disappears.
This means that you are free to jump around or dodge as soon as the flower appears and you don’t need to wait around for the attack to land.
With this in mind, we can also create another mini rotation for Klee to maximize her damage. Instead of jumping or moving during her charged attack, we are also able to do another basic attack instead. This means her stamina depletes slower and you have more resources available to dodge or jump once your bar gets low. All you need to do is start your charged attack by holding your attack key and then double-clicking your attack key as soon as the flower appears. On the last click, you hold your attack key once again so it uses a charged attack. What this will do is insert an extra basic attack in between the two charged attacks as shown below.
Finally, Klee also has the ability to cancel her basic and charged attacks with her elemental skill and elemental burst. Being able to weave in your E and Q skills between animation cancels will enable Klee to do more damage and it makes difficult content like Spiral Abyss much easier.
Canceling with her elemental skill, Jumpty Dumpty is rather straightforward. While it saves little time during her charged attack, it can be used in conjunction with her basic attack to cancel the rest of her animation. Be careful as her animation to throw Jumpty Dumpty is unavoidable. You must account for the time it takes for her to do a 360 and toss the bomb. Though it’s slower than doing the basic attack canceling, you can also jump as soon as the bomb leaves Klee’s hands meaning you can go back to your regular rotation once more. This is useful when you need to weave in Jumpty Dumpty to the rest of your rotation.
Finally, you are also able to cancel any of Klee’s animation at any time with her Elemental Burst. This includes her basic attack, charged attack, and her elemental skill. However, they all require different timings so it will take some practice to get used to. The main thing to be cautious about is that you don’t want to cast the Elemental Burst too soon. You need to make sure that the attack itself has left Klee’s hands before pressing Q.
