**What is EHG’s stance on Auto-Cast?**This is not an intended feature, but we view its use as reflecting a problem in skill design, rather than a problem with the player using it.Last Epoch is built around the limit of five specialized skills with the understanding that this will generally result in five active skills that you use at least occasionally. Skills that are optimal to auto cast effectively take away an active skill, resulting in making it just a passive that takes up a skill slot, and giving that build fewer tools to actively use in combat, and fewer decisions to make. This is true regardless of whether the player auto-casts the skill or just mindlessly presses the button every 10 seconds regardless of the circumstances.We aim to rework these skills so that their active portion rewards more situational and reactive usage. In the meantime we will not punish players who choose to auto-cast these skills.
I do not agree with their stance on AutoCast. I do not think it is a design flaw, if anything, a lot of people (myself included), enjoy not having to press every button.
And your other design decisions take away from your argument. There are plenty of situations where several spells are “tied” together.
Teleport can cast ele nova on arrival and departure.
Shift can use shurikens, Acid flask on arrival and departure, can basically take shuriken off your bar and just use shift.
You say you don’t want autocast, but then you create nodes that allow us to use one ability to trigger multiple others, autocasting them when we use a different ability.
Its just such a weird design decision, I’m really trying to wrap my head around.
It just feels like if you wanted it this way, then why have synergies within spells that eliminate the need to cast the other spell ever manually.
When you have a triggered ability, you are essentially creating a new ability that is the combination of the two. You are still making the decision to use them both at the same time. The issue comes from removing that decision by making it an auto-cast. I can see why it seems similar but they are different in our eyes.
Taking a talent that lets you trigger Spell B by casting Spell A isn’t what “autocasting” means, so this isn’t actually an argument against their stance. You are still making a decision on when you cast Spell A - not spamming it mindlessly. That it can trigger Spell B when you’ve made that decision - which is a decision-making process that will be changed by the fact that A triggers B - is not “autocasting”.
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They don’t want to have skills in their game that are just mindless maintenance, that you spam on cooldown with no regard to anything other than “It’s off cooldown”. As they said in what you quoted, there is no difference between a skill that you use some method to cast perpetually and a completely passive skill that does the same thing. They don’t want their skills design to be like POE, where you have a bunch of buff flasks that a macro presses for you with zero decision-making behind it. That’s all. It’s not more complex than that.
I guess? but they don’t seem different to me.
Like with multistrike casting smite with every attack instead of creating new swords.
So i can choose to have multistrike cast smite with every attack, but if i numlock my smite to cast on cd, thats bad?
I mean we’re already reducing button presses, and the difference between the two is not so significant that it should cause abject aversion to one or the other.
I like that I can have an ability I just turn on and leave it until I make the decision to turn it off.
If you are saying that you don’t see a difference between:
Use a macro or keyboard trick to continually cast Skill B with no input or decision-making on your part in any way whatsoever.
and
Skill A, which you are deciding when you use, also triggers Skill B (sometimes/always) when you use it.
Then, to be frank, I don’t think you’re speaking in good faith. Because those things are absolutely different, and very obviously so.
The difference is not about button presses,. The difference is your engagement and decision-making - as in, the former involves zero of both.
Well, EHG has decided that they don’t want skills to have that kind of gameplay in their game, which I assume is primarily because it isn’t actually gameplay.
I, for one, think that it’s good they’re acknowledging that maintenance skills are not good design, not good gameplay, not engaging, and no different from picking a passive in a tree except in how many extra steps it takes.
When I disciveed the game, I was like you.
I’ve autocast Wandering Spirits for long. Even now, I still have several (very few) chars that rely on autocast. It’s a very good quality of life feature.
But then, I learnt about EHG’s stance on it. So I tried to understand. And I got it. Having skills that I actively use at the right moment is way more fun and rewarding. The feeling I have is more intense than with autocasting heroes.
On the other had, I’d like to have some passive. Skills like Enchant Weapon, that has a node to autorecast. But I prefer for example the way now Flame Ward works, automatically cast when I’m stunned. It protects me at the right moment, instead of hoping it has some reserve when I need it.
So yes, autocasting feels good and sometimes it’s cool to have a “lazy” build. But most of times, I prefer playing actively.
I understand both sides of this argument… Active vs Passive skills each have their pros and cons - thats obvious… The devs making a decision to prefer active skill use is perfectly understandable and some will like it, others will not…
Personally I am in the middle… I like passive aura type skills that make you “feel warm and safe” for the moment the cat jumps on the keyboard and I like the active “hail mary save my bacon” or “ready, not yet, ready, now nuke the bugger” skills… I dont believe that everything should be active or passive… There is a place for both. Taking the 5 skill concept, I like at least 1 passive, 3 active use all the time skills and 1 situational active attack/nuke/heal etc…
From my perspective, if a compromise is needed in favour of active skill use, then I would recommend that passive skills have much more active value - e.g. Holy Auras always on passive effects should be countered by MUCH better active effects - thereby motivating the skill to be used more actively… This compromise allows for people to use skills passively but reward active skill use far more… Enchant weapons active dps increase is an example of a passive that is really good to use actively for burst damage when you want to.
I.e. instead of penalising passive skills… reward active skill use.
ps. if you havent realised by now, I prefer the carrot to the stick approach when it comes to skill changes…
If you use skillpoint to make skill A procc skill B on use that’s not an autocast. Proccs are very old news and rather common from many fantasy settings and across many game genres.
I like my WW Barb in an intreting D3 season for sure but in LE you don’t have 10 skills all on a 0.5 sec CD and the need to play piano that’s why I don’t see any need to autocast.
For myself thigs are rather easy: If I can’t press 6 buttons in a game anymore for whatever reason I stop playing games that require it and save the headache for another time.
I must have mis-read the devs communication, I missed the part where they said auto-cast was a top priority that they would urgently remove before looking at snapshoting…
Anyway, I don’t really understand the fuss, they clearly say it is fine with them if people use autocast. They just try to design skills with a bit more depth than just “recast all the time on CD”.
As a general goal, I think it sounds great.
I don’t think auto-cast is the same as passive skills.
I do like having 1 or 2 aura-type passive skills in a build, but I don’t enjoy it when my main damage dealing skill becomes a no-brain cast on CD thing.
My only build using auto-cast is a VK autocasting both Devouring Orb and Anomaly, and while it is very strong I find him the most boring of my 20+ builds.
Not saying people shouldn’t use it, I believe in letting everyone enjoy the game the way they like it, just that I personally don’t find it fun and can understand why devs would see this kind of build as a design flaw.
Yes… autocast is not the same as passive, but skills being autocast whenever they are off cooldown effectively turns the skill into a passive skill that the player forgets about.
My comments were simply looking at the autocast problem from a different perspective - i.e. why have a skill on autocast - because the player is effectively making it a passive skill - i.e. they dont care when it casts just as long as it casts without the player doing anything - passively…
So taking a currently passive skill (or at least a skill currently used passively via autocast) and giving it something that makes it better to cast at a specific moment, rather than autocasted on cooldown may be a good way to “fix” this issue indirectly… and still let people use skills passively if they want - but they would be missing out imho.
For example, lets say Holy Aura (currently used passively by most people) had a special node that worked off of number of hits received… i.e. boost healing received by X% per hit received if activated… I.e. the more hits you take, the better it heals you if you use it. Its a silly example, but imho, that would motivate a much more active Holy Aura skill… (and maybe some berserk paladin builds )
I think Holy Aura is actually not bad right now, design-wise.
My paladins have it on all the time with no need to autocast, and activate it for a boost when I need one.
And any self-respecting paladin needs a permanent shiny aura.
If I look at Anomaly, the problem begins when I reach the nodes giving me 100% uptime, if I reactivate it all the time on CD. It is a very strong incentive to auto-cast.
For the same amount of points, it would be much better to have a node turning it into a permanent aura, but weaker, that you can reactivate once in a while for a short bigger boost.
But yes, apart from the details, I agree with your process of trying to understand why people use auto-cast and find more motivating ways to promote active play.
From what I have read, I believe this is also the way the devs are looking at skills.
I get why the devs don’t like that mechanic but your argument doesn’t make any sense to me in the context of OP’s issue. How can spending a single skill point (in most cases) in a skill tree for an auto-trigger or having the trigger built directly into an item - so that you can free up a slot in your hotbar for another skill - be considered “engagement and decision-making”, while sacrificing a skill slot in your skills hotbar and building the skill to make it work with auto-cast is not. IMO the latter comes with pretty much the same level of engagement and requires decisions (including sacrifices) to be made, just differently but not any less.
From that perspective I prefer the latter because I don’t get pigeonholed into a build that the devs intended/predetermined. I rather create my own one and make it work. If anything, the latter allows for more build variety and that leads to, at least in my case, way more decision-making.
I don’t understand the opposition to EHG’s stance on auto-cast/macros. LE is not meant to be a “flask-piano” walking simulator, and I find that’s a big part of why it has such a following. I would have expected closer to universal praise for efforts to avoid it becoming one.
There are games for mindless one-button screen-vomit builds. LE is not one of them, and I hope it stays that way.
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