I mostly play with a controller and would like to share some feedback. There are a few things that feel uncomfortable or are missing compared to what I’d expect in an ARPG with full controller support.
Radial Menu Feedback (Controller):
The radial menu feels very sensitive and difficult to control with the analog stick. A small misalignment often causes the selection to jump to another option.
Please consider adding a deadzone or magnet/snapping effect for each menu sector, so that the selection “locks in” more reliably once you’re close to a choice.
Alternatively, instead of requiring us to hold the stick in the exact direction, you could fix one menu option at the top and let players cycle through the radial options by simply moving the stick left/right around the circle.
Inventory / Stash Management Feedback:
I would love to see a “Move All Items” button that lets us transfer the entire inventory to a stash tab at once. This would make it much easier to clean up after farming sessions.
As an example: when a season ends, we currently need to manually move items from the “Remove Only” stash tabs into regular legacy stash tabs. A one-click transfer would save a lot of time.
It would also be great to have a “Sell All” button, with options for filtering what gets sold. For example:
Sell all Uniques
Sell all Rares
Sell all Magic / Normal items
This kind of bulk action would massively reduce repetitive inventory management and make the game feel smoother, especially for controller users.
Skill Tree Navigation (Controller):
Selecting skill points with a controller feels quite clunky. Sometimes it’s hard to target the correct skill node — the selection often jumps to the one above or next to it, instead of the one I actually want.
There also seem to be different navigation styles in different parts of the game. For example, movement in the Monolith feels different (and actually better) than in the Skill Tree.
Using the right stick as a mouse helps, but it’s far too slow to be practical.
It would be great if navigation was more consistent across menus, or ideally if we could adjust sensitivity / behavior in the settings to make it smoother.
Years later, after some patches that supposedly “improved controller support”, the controller support is still terrible. Once in a while I keep coming back to try and get into the game again, but every time I’m stopped by this issue.
The navigation in UI is limited to d-pad or by using right stick as the cursor. Can’t use left stick for navigation.
Can’t use right stick for aiming while moving with the left stick during actual gameplay. All it does is make the cursor drift around the screen.
Yesterday, Season 5 Rage of the Frostborn dropped and changed the UI.
The virtual cursor that could be controlled with the right joystick has now been removed.
I find that change odd. Personally I enjoyed the virtual cursor (especially for skill-tree navigation). It wasn’t perfect, but it felt comfortable and intuitive to me.
Sadly, navigating the Skilltrees with D-Pad/Left-Joystick only is really unintuitive. Especially for diagonally moving Skill-Tree-Lines, it is not obvious where your selection travels when you press the D-Pad/Left Joystick.
Another new problem with this (that the virtual cursor avoided) is popup-windows blocking the rest of the skilltree. When you select a node, a small popup-window explains some of the stats/mechanics. That’s cool and all, but since you don’t have the cursor anymore, you can quickly make the popup-window leave.
This popup window often hides important informations, like where the next TreeNode is and how many points you need to allocate in order to get there.
These problems create an unintuitive User Experience, in my opinion.
(I’ve only played the new season for ~3 hours so far, maybe there’s a learning curve or some hidden setting that might improve this?)
I would like to add a vote to allow us to reenable the right-stick virtual cursor in settings. Particularly for the menus: skills, passives, inventory, forge and shops. For me, it was nearly as good as using a mouse and keyboard. Navigating with just the D-pad is so clunky, I now have to switch between the controller and mouse and keyboard. Navigating the menus with only a controller is not even an option anymore.
When I play POE2 I sometimes think “I wish I could use a thumb-stick as a mouse like LE.” I kid you not. Now it’s gone
