Advanced - Attack Animation Canceling

The normal notion for repeatedly attacking a hero is to right click target him and just hope your move speed is great enough to get more than one hit in before the hero gets too far away from you.

Attack animation canceling is a great way to get more hits in on a running hero, or even a hero that is standstill which you are attacking. Put simply, the concept is to cancel your heroes attack animation right after the animation fires from your hero. To do this on a running hero or hero in place, first right click target him. Your hero will go through his/her animation and fire the first bolt, shot, whatever you want to call it (the heroes attack). The key is in this next step. Right after the animation goes off, quickly click in front of you in the direction of the fleeing hero, and then right click target the hero again. By quickly moving forward right after your attack goes off, you cancel the latter half of your heroes attack animation, allowing you to get another shot off, and essentially dealing around 1.5 times as many hits on a hero (depending on your hero) than someone who would not be attack animation canceling. Someone just right click chasing a hero goes through the full animation of each attack, which takes much longer and is drawn out beyond the necessary damage dealing part of ones attack which occurs at the beginning of ones animation.

Heroes that have very drawn out attack animations, which would be good to practice on are the following: Silencer (glaive strike) , Viper (poison strike) , Enchantress (impetus) , Harbinger (Arcane Orb), Drow Ranger (Frost Arrow) . These are just a few heroes with long attack animations. Once one gets good with these heroes, you can essentially cancel any heroes attack animation, it does not have to be just orb spells. People sometimes associate names like orb walking, specifically glaive walking and impetus walking, with attack animation cancelling because you are walking (quick clicking, forward or to any side) to cancel your animation to get extra hits in.

I plan on posting some videos on this in a short while to help with the explanation.