Today I learned that, for all heroes with limited ammunition, they can reload cancel their weapons with a melee attack.

What I'm curious about is, does it really save time? Is it really a "cancel"? I'll give an example.

With Reaper's shotguns, if he presses reload, the ammo indicator on the bottom right will instantly refresh to 8/8, but it will still play the "drop gun, pull new ones out of thin air" animation. If I melee after pressing reload, it will allow me to fire as soon as the melee animation takes place.

However, what I've seen is that if I press melee immediately after I press reload, there seems to be a delay as to when I can fire the shotguns. If I wait just a half-second later to press melee, then I can fire almost immediately. Because of this delay, I'm wondering if reload cancelling really does save time, or is the reload time set, regardless of cancelling?

3

3 Answers

No, it is not. After a reload cancel there is a delay, which is equal to the time required to reload without canceling the animation. I suppose that reload animations were made to fit the reload time, not the other way around. Here are two GIFs,which demonstrate that (by reddit user - daddatv):

At full speed

Frame by frame

I did some testing with McCree and Soldier 76 and compared the times in a video so feel free to check it out!

1

Frame perfectly, I think so.

In my testing with Mei, it's equal, but I also use a timing that's more consistent I think, rather than perfect. My projectiles start at an angle though.

As DGarvanski referenced, /u/daddatv found out Reaper can shoot two frames faster by interrupting reload with melee.