I'm a pretty new player, but I've been toying around with something I call, "shield canceling."

I don't know if it's new and exciting or whatever, but the general idea is after an animation, you can pre-emptively hold shield to cancel your ending animations with your blocking animation. It works best for moderate delay weapons like the Spur series, I find. It's mostly timing, you release the shield quick enough that it just, "flashes," sort of, and you have faster single strokes. I mostly like the Spur because it lunges so far forward and I get a lot of coverage by one slash > shield cancel > move > repeat.

And I have a friend who, "discovered," what he calls vial canceling. You just switch to a throw vial after the end of anything and it immediately cancels the animation. It's pretty cool, and you can do some locks with like, the Magnum with it. It works out like, shoot shoot, reload, immediately cancel reload with maybe stun vial, throw vial, shoot shoot, reload, cancel animation, etc.

Just some nifty little things I figured out. Didn't know if it was common practice or not.