Patch 0.8.2 made playing with a controller quite nice, because picking up items is easy and feels natural now. Depending on the character, playing with a controller can vary between working well and being suboptimal. I will pick on some of the shortcomings now - but even if the remainder of this post focusses on the negatives, don’t think that playing with a controller is a waste of time. The game is quite playable and enjoyable with a controller.
(1) The auto-targeting is mostly really helpful. I can hit enemies far more reliable with my marksman when using a controller compared to using a mouse. However, with movement abilities the auto-targeting becomes an issue. My character rarely shifts/teleports into the direction that I intend to. Usually, I use it defensively, to get away from enemies or AoE effects. And more often than not, I will shift right into the enemies. Or into some crates in a corner when I wanted to shift/teleport/leap straight ahead.
But I think the solution is not just to remove the auto-targeting from movement abilities - because with Leap for example you may want to jump right into pack of enemies. Unfortunately, I can’t think of an easy fix. Even having auto-targeting be toggleable for all skills would not be enough, because whether you want it or not is highly dependent on the situation at hand.
(2) Teleport and similar movement skills have some more issues. Going up ramps/stairs for example does not quite work. It seems as if it checks for obstacles at the height of the character, ignoring the incline of the terrain, and stops at the ramp/staircase, which is considered an obstacle. This is also apparent with small obstacles. When using a mouse, you could easily teleport across a small obstacle, but with a controller, you stop right at the obstacle. Oftentimes, I leap/teleport only a very small distance (if at all) because of this issue.
I would like to propose two changes to how it works: follow the height of the terrain and start from the edge of the screen instead of from the character. Imagine drawing a line from the character to the edge of the screen, using the direction of the input (from the gamepad’s thumb stick). Project this line onto the terrain (which should eliminate the influence of the terrain height). Starting from the edge of the screen, test whether the character could teleport/leap to that point, wandering towards the character until a point is valid. I don’t know whether this approach is feasible, it’s just a rough idea.
(3) I seem to not be able to turn around as promptly as when using a mouse. Maybe the issue is related to the input method - the thumb stick has to be moved to the neutral position and then further, which is why it feels not as responsive. However, when using Dancing Strikes on my Bladedancer, this is much more of an issue and can’t be explained with that alone. My character keeps blade dancing in one direction when the thumb stick is already pulled to the opposite side. The reaction to changes in the movement direction is really sluggish with this skill for some reason.
(4) The option “move to melee attack enemies that are out of range” does not work when using a gamepad. This may be a concious decision by the developers, because moving while attacking is much simpler with a gamepad. But it could also be an oversight. I had a few moments where I expected my character to move into range.
(5) The new way of picking up items is great. I could imagine using a similar technique for all UI interactions. You could show a little icon on everything that can be interacted with (dialogue choices, buttons, items in the inventory, …) and highlight the current choice. Using the d-pad or right thumb stick, we would then select a different element and press A to select it. Right now I often switch to the mouse for these interactions, as it is much faster.
(6) Which brings me to my last point: Switching to the mouse has some issues. For one, the last command of the gamepad stays active. You run into a direction, use the mouse, stop using the gamepad - but the character still keeps running, because the “thumb stick returned to neutral” event was not processed, because the input method already changed to mouse and keyboard. It would be nice if those neutralize-events would be fired artificially as soon as the gamepad input is disabled.
When changing to mouse/keyboard, the tooltips that were shown by the gamepad persist. I need to move away from items on the ground before being able to use the mouse properly, as otherwise parts of the screen will not be usable. The item labels are also sometimes faded out a bit, which would not be the case if using mouse/keyboard only from the very beginning. See the screenshot below: I was using mouse and keyboard for some time (notice the numbers and mouse symbol on the skill bar), changed zones, and even died - yet it still shows the “A” on the item labels and some of them are greyed out, some aren’t.
