Namelocking: The Source of All Skill Clunkiness and Combat Feel Issues

The game has an inbuilt 'Namelocking' feature which occurs whenever you hover your cursor over an enemy, this causes all skills to aggressively lock on to the enemy selected, at this state the character skills automatically targets the Namelocked enemy no matter where your cursor is.

The Namelocked enemy is shown by the game as 'whenever the monster has its HP bar (along with its name) shown at the top of the screen.



For example: If you are using Leap Slam and your character is locked onto an enemy, it will only attack the enemy, and won't respond to your new cursor position, this means you cannot reliably use Leap Slam to escape away from the enemy. This is a major problem with all melee skills, and Warrior suffers the most, skills like Rolling Slam are almost unusable.


Leap Slam example, Character is locked onto the boss, and won't attack towards the cursor at the bottom

From a detailed video talking about this mainly from a Melee standpoint, credits to
Conner Converse: https://youtu.be/fltwSk10Elo?si=miNzLe5i747pMbyU&t=814

The character Leap Slam the boss instead of going to the cursor at the bottom, it was namelocked to the boss, leading to death.

Detailed Examples with other skills:







These footages were made by the kind streamer named 'Chef Nunu'

Original video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBIEKlB44Lc

Another issue is: If you have a skill bound to the left mouse bottom, the character completely stops attacking/moving whenever the cursor is hovered over items/chests/pots/NPCs and other interactables while shift key(attack on place) is pressed together.

This wasn't an issue with Path of Exile 1, and new to Path of Exile 2, I'd assume it's related to the new Controller and WASD mechanics, whatever it is, the issue is that majority of players use Mouse and Keyboard, and that is undoubtedly not changing. Give us the option to either manually disable the namelocking feature(and let it be disabled by default for the new players), or disable it entirely.

This serves almost zero positive purpose and is the main reason why Skills have an inherent clunkiness to them and feel bad, mind you that skills in this game are almost fantastic by themselves. Changing this will fix 80% of combat related issues, mainly for melees.

It literally makes you feel that you are playing against your character.

TL:DR: Namelocking and Character cursor attacking needs changes, make Namelocking a Toggle feature, or remove it from Mouse and Keyboard and WASD, majority find it more intrusive than helpful in any way, players want to attack where their cursor is, and not a random enemy automatically.

Note: the buggy interactions shown in some footages have already been addressed on the initial months.
BUT the core issue still persist, the aiming is 'sticky', the aim sticks to a highlighted(shown by the healthbar) monster, and the character refuses to change targerts/follow mouse cursor, unless the entire attack has been stopped.

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I notice is especially on my Melee. It's really not helping me enjoy the game.

Monk especially feels very clunky because of it I feel.

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Akedomo#3573 wrote:

I notice is especially on my Melee. It's really not helping me enjoy the game.

Monk especially feels very clunky because of it I feel.

Yup, frustrating is the best word here. Which turns into exhausting after a while.

The worst part about this is that, even if you start your click on an empty patch of ground without the name locked and NEVER release the click hold it will STILL name lock if the mob runs under your cursor. You will no longer be manual casting.

The worst case scenario of this is with a mob that dashes across the screen (or ROLLS). That mob will pull your aim up to 180 degrees from where you were aiming.

Stampede was another awful skill to experience because of this. My character would just run the opposite direction to where I was pointing my cursor.

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EvolvedQS#4379 wrote:

The worst part about this is that, even if you start your click on an empty patch of ground without the name locked and NEVER release the click hold it will STILL name lock if the mob runs under your cursor. You will no longer be manual casting.

The worst case scenario of this is with a mob that dashes across the screen (or ROLLS). That mob will pull your aim up to 180 degrees from where you were aiming.

Stampede was another awful skill to experience because of this. My character would just run the opposite direction to where I was pointing my cursor.

Can you confirm if these issues persists after 0.1.1c, latest update?

Persists.

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Note: the buggy interactions shown in some footages have already been addressed on the initial months.
BUT the core issue still persist, the aiming is 'sticky', the aim sticks to a highlighted(shown by the healthbar) monster, and the character refuses to change targerts/follow mouse cursor, unless the entire attack has been stopped.

The game can never be skilled based while this "feature" is active. The gameplay is degraded so much by this, it feels like you have no control over your character. I find monk completely unplayable because of it.

I agree, this is very annoying. Honestly it seems to me like one of the biggest issues with the "core" of the game, that is otherwise very good and polished.

I can't count the amount of times I had a corpse selected on the ground (it was lit green and my mouse was on top of it) to cast Unearth, only for the skill to strike a mob 60-degrees off target. Here I wanted to summon more fiery exploding minions, instead the game decided "NO, you do 50 damage with a spike to *that one guy*"!. A misbehaving Unearth happens every second/third pull I make. And casting DoTs (Contagion) just seems plain random as well, I no longer care about selecting anything, the game taught me not to.

Any type of autopilot like this devalues player skill. Unless it's a CC mechanic, it's not very good if in an action game your character does not follow player controls.