Hello. I’ve played up to the endgame in LE right now (that is, I finished the Lagon fight), and I can confirm just about everything that Xanaki said was true. To point out examples:
Mainly the biggest issue for me is the fact that the right stick moves the mouse pointer and you need the mouse pointer for many activities such as applying skills, collecting loot, accessing inventory items etc.
You can’t pick stuff up, you can’t interact with items, you can’t even change zones, unless you pick up the mouse and use the pointer. Path of Exile on console’s able to rebind everything to the controller; they have a specialized cursor for using stash and inventory, it moves square by square but it works well. They also auto-target items, interactibles and enemies for you when using controller.
For me, as of the current patch (or rather, the last one I played, I noticed there was an update recently and I forgot to keep track of version numbers, last I played was 4/3/21), the “best” way to get auto targeting to work is to play the game in windowed mode and move the cursor outside said window. It doesn’t always work, but I’ve had more success actually targeting what I want my character to attack, instead of the direction of the cursor, or in some cases…Just whiffing my attacks entirely and not hitting anything period. To compare, I used to put my cursor on top of my character to mitigate random targeting, and sometimes my Lightning Blast (my main skill) would…Not go anywhere. No bolt, it just fizzles out. And having to reposition the cursor midfight is rather annoying.
Is it possible to have a controller mode where we could use the right stick for attacking towards the direction where you push the stick to.
PoE on Xbone/PS4 does this to an extent, you don’t need to use it all the time but if you need to highlight a specific thing to pick up, you can nudge the cursor over an item, or point at specific enemy to target. The auto targeting and loot pickup for PoE works marvelously though. You should really look at this bit:
Also a key/button bind for ‘Loot nearest object’ so this could be either bound to a keyboard or to a controller button → This way you wouldn’t have to move the mouse pointer to the loot if you are using controller. This could be a selectable action for the A-keybind (left mouse button). E.g. an action which would do in this order: Loot → Attack to the facing direction of the player. Looting should of course obey the loot filter rules set by the player behind the curtains, so loot only visible loot in the order of loot nearest first.
…And have a non-overlapping button bind for picking stuff up/interacting/etc. Again, console!PoE does this with the A button on Xbone (Cross/X on PS4) and allows you to pick up items with said button regardless of if the button has a skill/action on it or not.
With keyboard/mouse you can select a skill and action type for every quick slot easily by clicking on them and selecting a skill/action from a given popup. How do you do this without a mouse using the controller only?
Console!PoE solves this by letting you click the right stick to enter binding mode. Then you point the right stick at the skill you wanna change, press A (or Cross), and it brings up a list of skills you can assign. It takes some getting used to, but it works.
Another thing to consider when it comes to UI: console!PoE, when you open the equipment screen, allows you to page through the various menus by pressing the triggers, kinda like how you can scroll through menus in JRPGs and other games. They had to do this because trying to menu while moving your character would be difficult to do with a controller. So maybe consider a “controller mode” that triggers when you press a button on the controller, which does the following:
- Ignores mouse cursor placement, only attacks/interacts nearest enemy, lootable item, or interactible
- Allows square to square movement on inventory, and node to node movement on skills/other menus
- Allows “flipping” through different screens by pressing Left or Right Trigger
Can this be changed so that channelling skills their direction will also be influenced by moving the left joystyick?
Also, this. As it stands, when you channel a skill, you cannot reposition your character, period with the controller alone. You cannot rotate your character using the left stick, which you’d think would be the first control you’d think of (again, having played PoE for console and used aimable channeling skills), but no, it’s still stick to the mouse cursor and the right stick. I can’t use Disintegrate now because of this issue, and that skill looks really good for bossing and big single targets. Please fix this.
Hopefully we can keep this thread going, and visible. We got about 7 months until LE releases, which I hope is enough time to do all the coding necessary for controller UX support, because it’d really be awkward if we released, and the controller support only works half the time. ^_^; Thanks for reading!
