How to make combat smoother

Thank you for sharing all this information with us. Here are a few additional things I noticed.

1. Animation Cancelling
In my oppinion, this is not exactly needed. Other comparable games don´t have it. For example, in Diablo 3 on higher difficulties some battles are impossible with 2handed weapons. You have to wait so long after the attack animation that you can not move out of the burning ground before you die.
However, for your interest, a free-to-play game with a proper animation cancelling is League of Legends. Here, standard attacks can be cancelled at any time but even then you have to wait for your next attack until your attackspeed allows you to do it. Skilled players can use this to slightly change their position during attacking but they cannot increase the frequency of their attacks. (At least I think it works this way.)

2. Shift key issues
In comparable games, the shift function is implemented differently and I believe in Path of Exile it feels awkward for many people. For example: If you push the left mouse button and shift, the character starts attacking. That’s fine. But if you let go of the shift button and still hold down the left mouse button, it will start to act strange. Instead of returning to the normal “walk-mode” of the left mouse button, it will behave like the right mouse button and try to walk (for melee attacks) or shoot to the position of the mouse cursor. This needs to be changed, but ONLY in the case of the left mouseclick.

3. Attackspeed and casting speed
The clunky feeling is closely tied to this attributes. Making them more accessible to all players can help hiding the issues at hand. Balance-wise this has to be evaluated (it would make on-hit-effects stronger), but at least it can be done without changing anything in the core game mechanics.

My proposals:
- More attack/cast speed passives, especially near the beginning of the skilltree for each class
- Give characters automatically more attack/cast speed as they level up but nerf these attributes on gear. This would result in no changes for high-end equipment but a noticeable increase for badly geared players = beginners.

The game smoothness is really an issue and having played many games of this type I can safely say that if its not sorted I will not be continuing on, which makes me sad because the whole concept and look of the game is awesome.

I dont want to dredge up and silly this vs that arguments but...
Look at Diablo 2+3 and look at torchlight. While the gameplay is different to PoE the smoothness of action is really on the ball. (to clarify again, Im NOT comparing gameplay)

If I run my mouse in CLOCKWISE circles around the screen my char follows perfectly in both D3 and torch. In PoE, my char actually runs ANTI-CLOCKWISE!!!

Everytime I log on I can only take about 1 hour of this slow clunky movement with terrible shift implemetation before I go back to playing D3.

In fact, I tend not to go back to games that are slow and clunky because before I click that button to start, I get nightmares about running thru treacle.

Cmon devs, I know you know that you cannot ignore this issue and I am eagerly awaiting a patch that smoothes this out, otherwise my time is limited with this game. (this is not a threat or ultimatum in any way, I love the work you have done and am VERY impressed with the game)

Mark, as I understand there are two issues from a balance standpoint (apart from many development standpoint, but we can't see into that):


With a fast contact point animation (claws in your example), a player could interrupt the animation right after the hit, then swing again. This would enable them to hit much faster than the attack speed.
Couldn't you implement a "cooldown" for the base attack, so even if they interrupt the animation, their attack per second wouldn't change?

The other issue would be that fast contact point weapons would enable much better hit-and-run tactics.
Currently tactics like this don't work well due to sync issues (many times I run behind an attacking bear, and it still hits me), but it could be argued that weapons which have better hit-and-run capabilities can be balanced for.
Following your example, claws fit a more "manual avoidy" character than a sword user, which are likely to be more "tanky". It's logical for them to have better hit-and-run potential.
Players would need to have this information provided to them though. I for one didn't even knew for sure that different weapons have different "contact points". I just felt that with some weapons it's harder to hit moving targets.
Completely eliminating different hit-and-run capabilities don't seem to be easy though, even from a balance perspective, so I understand why you have problems with these suggestions.

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Valadur wrote:

2. Shift key issues
In comparable games, the shift function is implemented differently and I believe in Path of Exile it feels awkward for many people. For example: If you push the left mouse button and shift, the character starts attacking. That’s fine. But if you let go of the shift button and still hold down the left mouse button, it will start to act strange. Instead of returning to the normal “walk-mode” of the left mouse button, it will behave like the right mouse button and try to walk (for melee attacks) or shoot to the position of the mouse cursor. This needs to be changed, but ONLY in the case of the left mouseclick.

Shift is actually way more broken then that.

For example when you shift and click to make an directional attack you want to attack towards the pointer. But if the pointer is just on the edge of a mob's hitbox it will take presidence and choose to attack straight towards the mob. After which, you will have to start the attack again when the mob dies.
So now you can't use skill to make better use of AoE's like groundslam, i.e. aiming between 2 mobs to hit them both and so on.

But the biggest thing is how slow the game register the release of shift. If you use shift you will constantly take extra damage cause your toon makes an attack instead of starting to move out of harms way.

So all in all shift can pretty much only be safely used when you play with low apm(action per minute) and slow.
If you try to amp up the speed of your skill uses, movement and well placed directional attacks, you will not have good control of your toon.

That's bad and needs attention.

Id like to agree with this post in its entirety and add a /signed or whatever helps get this attention. I understand everything the DEV said about how its not possible, but it seems to me like the issue is that weapon speeds do not determine when the monster takes the hit, its some hidden timer based on what type of weapon you're using. If i misunderstood this please correct me, but I think this in general is a huge flaw. There is no point to making a claw attack at 300ms and a sword at 600 ms if both weapons have to wait 1 seconds before they can initiate the attack animation again. An easy solution? Make every weapon apply its damage based on its attack speed, and if people click to move or "cancel" the animation before this is over, the damage is not applied.

Not only did you just solve the frozen after attacking issue, but you eliminate what you used as an example where the claw would be able to be exploited by canceling after 300ms. People should be able to make the choice between finishing the attack and being able to cancel it and move.

I really feel like this is a game breaker, you can have amazing ideas but if the game isn't smooth and polished in these regards than no one will stick around to explore all the options and builds you can have. Imagine the best script ever written for a movie, but the actors and budget is shit. You wont get 10 minutes into the movie without people walking out and not even getting to hear the story because they cant deal with the quality in which the story was being presented to them.


Quick edit: To address the issue above when it was said that people would button mash and accidently cancel their attack over and over. The easiest, most used, and most effective way to prevent this is have the skill have a "cooldown" based on your attack speed, so no matter how much you spam the skill, it will only be allowed to be activated once every 1 second (example attack speed). And I dont see at any point when you would be able to click or act so quick as to exploit this or this to effect the game because if you use an ability, and click to move before it registers, it would take either super hero reflexes or a useless click (you click to move and instantly try to re activate ability, making the click to move pointless because you wouldn't have enough time to actually go anywhere or dodge anything) to try and activate the ability again before the cooldown is refreshed

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Valadur wrote:

4. Huge delay after each attack
After each action, there is a small time window where the character has to return to a “neutral position” . During this time he is locked in place and can´t do anything. A “wind-up time” for attacks is ok since we are eagerly waiting for the destruction this attack will cause. But after the attack went off, no one wants to watch how the witch has to lower her arms before doing the next action.

Changing this would require redoing many of the game's animations, to keep the timing of attacks balanced. It would likely be a huge and very expensive undertaking - it's not something we can just do.

This... saddens me a lot.

Were it a game design issue with needing the "recovery time" after an attack to finish, then I'd understand that this would be an expensive undertaking. It would still sadden me in either case, because this game has some stiff combat flow (if I may be blunt).

However, if this is purely a matter of graphics, then I don't see how this would be very big undertaking at all. The game engine must only allow new actions to start before a skill/attack animation has played to its end (once it has reached the point where it actually performs the ability). It needs to allow for the player to interrupt the latter part of a skill animation that isn't needed from a game design standpoint.

Game play should trumph graphics, always, and graphics should always be based on the game play design and not the other way around.

If the problem is a fear that allowing the player to cut an animation off before it finishes might look like animations get "chopped off", you should consider that any player would probably never really notice this "uglyness" (they're probably rarely perfectionist graphical artists) or care considering you rarely look that closely at your character in these kinds of games when fighting, but the action around you.

EDIT: I just realized this was addressed in a GGG-post, and it does sound like game design has indeed been based on graphical design decisions (if I'm not completely misunderstanding!). Then I understand that it would be an extensive change. However, seen from a "there are other similar games out there, which one should I play" perspective, this could easily be a big reason for consumers to go somewhere else, because this colors the whole feel of the game play. To be blunt again (or rather realistic) it would probably be "Path of Exile has great customization but its game play feels old while XXX and YYY are more modern". This is what I fear, anyway, based on my experience.

I'm being the devil's advocate here of course. Well, my advocate too, I suppose. Some other PoE fans would probably say "if you don't like it, then don't play it" and that's exactly what I'm afraid of people thinking. They don't like it, they won't play it.

(You can hopefully understand that I love this game, and understand completely what it means with "beta" and things being unfinished, and that I'm certainly not trying to trash it or "cry".)

I get the gist of the idea with cancelling attacks and how it would be broken. I understand with how fighting games arrange priority with attacks. You're allowed within a fraction time frame to cancel the startup of an attack with a move with a higher priority move, for instance in this game if you pressed normal attack accidentally in your wild left clicking and wanted to Whirling Blades out, activate Molten Shell, activate your trap card or whatever, you would be allowed to cancel the first one or two frames of your attack animation.

Hey, I'm probably the only one that feels this, I like to be able to cancel normal attacks with a higher priority attack. The "return to neutral state" animation with attacks is sad to be aware that it's not an straight forward fix.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

It is the animations - you perform a full attack animation (which takes a duration based on your weapon) and then you can perform other animations, such as moving as soon as that's done.
The animation has what's called a"contact point" at which you actually hit the enemy, and damage is applied. My understanding of what people are asking for is that they be able to cancel the attack animation after the contact point and not finish it.

Thanks for the excellent response Dev's! I think I understand the problem a bit more clearly.

So the Duration of the animation is EXACT time as the duration of the cast time on the abilities. So then yes, the clunkyness we are feeling is due to a LACK of Cast or Attack speed. Which I will trust aren't there when these stats are raised. Going to try and test this...


I don't think players need the ability to cancel their attacks BEFORE the contact point, we need the ability to cancel our animations AFTER the contact point. I understand the effect this would have.

Heres MY solution. -- Allow us to move after maybe 90% of the animation is through, which should be AFTER the contact point, BUT don't let us make any attacks until the rest of that 10% has finished! That way we are not intruding on the cast duration of abilities and still allowing players the ability to move...

The clunky feeling comes DIRECTLY from the fact that our contact point is so obvious, players feel like they should be able to move after it has been made... SOO Let us move, but don't allow us to cast UNTIL the cast duration is up.

Hope a Dev gets a look at this post! Personally I think its a great solution.

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mercetron wrote:

I just realized this was addressed in a GGG-post, and it does sound like game design has indeed been based on graphical design decisions (if I'm not completely misunderstanding!). Then I understand that it would be an extensive change. However, seen from a "there are other similar games out there, which one should I play" perspective, this could easily be a big reason for consumers to go somewhere else, because this colors the whole feel of the game play. To be blunt again (or rather realistic) it would probably be "Path of Exile has great customization but its game play feels old while XXX and YYY are more modern". This is what I fear, anyway, based on my experience.

I agree totally.

Given the choice between one ARPG that has fantastic customization and clunky movement/combat or another one that has more limited customization and smooth, satisfying movement/combat, I would bet that the vast majority of gamers would pick the latter game.

I know I would, and will if necessary.

I'm really surprised that GGG don't consider the most important design elements of their game (smoothness of movement and combat) to be the ones that should be perfected first.