Smoothness/Flow of Skills in PoE2 - Review and Suggestions on Improvement

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agentyoda#7967 wrote:

I haven't seen much feedback about the "smoothness" or "flow" of skills, besides just certain keywords ("clunky" or "slow" for example); I'd like to give more in-depth feedback about the kind of gameplay flow I was hoping for compared to what I experienced in playing the PoE2 Early Access, as well as how that might be implemented.

I'll preface this by noting that the kind of gameplay I'm about to describe is something I deeply enjoy, but there are other playstyles/gameplay patterns that can be fun besides this one, so it's understandable if the developers decide not to implement anything that fits this. I simply have a great appreciation for this kind of gameplay and I think it would provide a style of play that a lot of other players will enjoy, for reasons described below.

First of all, what do we mean by "smooth" gameplay? What do we mean when we talk about how the skills "flow together"? When I use these words, I'm thinking about a certain kind of feeling and experience I've had in other games. I'll go into two examples, comparing them to PoE2, and then will provide some suggestions.

First would be fighting games. If anyone's played fighting games, you'll know the gameplay pattern is very tense, exciting, and skill-heavy. You have to learn combos - inputs in a very specific pattern, within a tight window, that produce a set of hits. Combos take practice, and when they're pulled off well, they feel great: they're smooth, the punches/kicks/etc flow one into another, you feel skilled pulling it off, etc. Even though there can be some downtime, when you're probing the other player, trying to bait them into a misplay, trying to predict when to block or counter, the actual combos feel very smooth and flow well.

Another example of this would be certain champions in League of Legends. I play a lot of Nidalee jungle, as well as Kindred, Lee Sin, Taliyah, and some other champs that use combos. These have a different kind of flow to their gameplay. For example, if I'm engaging on an enemy as Nidalee, it's quite a bit more complicated: I'll auto, E, auto, Q, auto, R + W, auto, E, auto, Q. And I'm clicking to move during all of this as well. It's not the exact same as fighting games - you aren't smoothly flowing from Q to E to W to R in a tight pattern to produce one continuous combo attack - but there is a definite flow to the gameplay: your auto attack speed is the beat you're playing to, and you weave skills in between auto attacks. MMORPGs can be like this too, where the "beat" is the global cooldown and the "accents" or "offbeats" are your off-GCD abilities that you weave in between your global cooldown skills. In both cases, the flow of the gameplay comes from following the "beat" of your attack speed/global cooldown and smoothly weaving in other abilities to "accent" the beat. It feels great to do and makes the base gameplay fun.

Comparing this to Path of Exile 2 Early Access, I see several significant differences that may account for why I didn't feel like the gameplay was smooth or flowed well. I picked Monk, as I figured that of all classes, a Monk would best weave skills together, following the "grace" and martial artist thematic. However, what I found was that the combos have delays and self-slows in them that make it difficult to combo them together in a way that feels smooth. For example, let's look at an example of trying to do a fighting game-like combo of using a skill into another skill into another skill - perhaps I'll try to use Killing Palm -> Falling Thunder -> Tempest Bell -> Tempest Fury on the bell. What you'll find is that there's a delay after Killing Palm, there's a delay after Falling Thunder with a longer animation lock, and there's a delay of casting the Bell and targeting it.

You get the same problem if you try more of a "weaving within the beat" pattern of gameplay. When you basic attack, you root yourself for the full animation. When you dodge roll, you get a slow at the end. The basic attack is more of a skill itself than something you can weave skills in between. So the only "combo" here is just rooting yourself and spamming basic attacks or other skills.

I think the feeling of the gameplay could be improved a lot if at least one of these gameplay styles were made possible. Imagine if, at the end of Killing Palm, if you press Falling Thunder, you smoothly enter into the Falling Thunder skill instead of having to wait for the end of the animation, and then press it, which then starts the next animation. The former is smooth; the latter is clunky. Or imagine if weaving basic attacks while moving between using skills was possible. You could walk and dodge around the boss, weaving your basic attacks in between your skills, while paying attention to and dodging enemy mechanics. I feel like that would increase the skill ceiling of those builds, which is surely a good thing for a game about challenging fights like PoE2 is, while also letting the player feel rewarded with their good timing of skill and movement usage.