I did read it, and it lacks any form of logic. They want us to have more mobility, yet they increase cooldowns on our mobility skills, then a few patches later they force feed us a generic dodge roll instead of giving us a dedicated traversal skill slot and reducing cooldowns. This dodge roll icon on the bar is identical to having this extra skill slot, it’s just not physically attached to the rest of our skills and is not customizable.
So I ask again why are we not using our traversal skills? Why must the answer be the flavor of the month dodge roll being added to every ARPG making every game more similar? Why must we now be in the position where they can require a traversal and dodge at a future time? We all know it’s inevitable when a new core mechanic like this is added. Why are we getting scaling from movement speed and CDR, why are we getting interactions with Evade from uniques and skill nodes in the future? This is repeating work already done with our existing traversal skills but massively worse since it’s the exact same skill for every character and every game that uses it.
Dude, the only thing that lacks any form of logic is how determined you are to miss every possible part of the point.
You’re making it really obvious that you don’t actually even care about the dodge. It’s just a jumping off point for you to be mad that having a traversal skill requires you to make decisions and sacrifices, and you can’t spam them to get around.
I agree with you. While I like the idea of adding more dynamic encounters that make the game a bit harder, using the generic solution of an evade in a game that already has movement skills feels very cheap to me.
I would rather have a dedicated slot to our currently existing transversal skills, even if that would require changing some of them so they’re not both a movement skill and a main DPS skill.
Because the goal is to slightly increase battlefield repositioning potential, not give a significant increase to overall traversal speed. Reducing the cooldown on traversal skills would have the intended effect but would also have an unintended downside. This does not share that downside. We also would prefer to have the option of taking a traversal skill or not continue to be an option. It would also require dramatic changes to each traversal skill which would result in the removal of many mechanics that people really enjoyed. I also think that it is a step towards having each ability slot being categorized. If you ever played D3 before you realized that you could put any skill on any slot if you changed your settings, the build restrictions were just savage. It was just a couple days for me but I almost just quit the game over that. Evade is very clearly positioned as not one of your primary abilities and I think that is necessary for it to work long term.
We didn’t make this change because of any other game doing it. I know that might be hard to believe, but we frequently will say in design meetings that it doesn’t matter what they are doing.
I mean, you technically always were in that position, we can add whatever we want really. I do think that would be pretty silly on our part though. I’m not sure how this changes what could be. If it makes you feel any better, we have no plans to do that.
Movement speed scaling is there for 2 reasons. First, because without it, you can get to a point where walking would be faster and that would make the ability obsolete and pointless at top tier content and that’s just a waste. Second, and this applies to CDR too, because we are always on the lookout for ways to make your gearing choices matter.
We are adding interactions with uniques and skill nodes in the future because it would be kinda silly to release Evade with them and then never add more. Having fixed mods that we never update or change is just a bad idea for an evolving gameplay environment like ours. In case I misunderstood that question and you are instead suggesting that the concept of having Evade interact with your gear at all is a bad idea, we think it’s a good idea because it allows us to have the ability progress as you level. It also gives us ways to make Evade be mechanically unique per class in select situations.
I hope that helped to better communicated the reasoning and logic behind this decision.
We are aware the not everyone will enjoy this mechanic (just like every other mechanic in the game really). As usual, I ask that people try it out before making summary judgment on it and also as usual, we will be keeping an eye out after it launches for feedback on it.
Also just as a note, we’re really trying to push the term Evade instead of Dodge because it doesn’t actually grant i-frames and we are also trying to avoid the term roll because it implies that you’ll have the old mage or the heavily armored sentinel rolling, which they won’t. We also already have a mechanic called Dodge in the game and we don’t want them to be conflated.
Hey Mike, just wanna mention that I’ve really enjoyed the game so far, but it’s taking a turn that I don’t appreciate or want to support, so I’m putting it politely here first.
So is the Dodge Roll/“Evade” supposed to share the same speed as walking, in which case it’s completely redundant; or is it supposed to be faster, in which case it will increase traversal speed?
An option for what? Evading? If not evading then what? How would dedicating a(n additional) button solely for a traversal skill be different?
If the problem is that some characters/classes don’t have access to a good dodge/evasion skill, that sounds more like a design issue than a fundamental problem.
Why would it require dramatic changes?
Besides, you can’t (reasonably) use “ability slot categorization” as a defense when that is literally what you are doing. You are literally adding an ability slot that can only be used with one skill, which happens to be a movement/traversal skill.
And yet it is a dodge/evade/movement skill with it’s own dedicated button, almost as if you were locking the skill slot to one type of ability, that only has one ability in it, and it just so happens that we can’t skill it up.
While I want to believe you, and I don’t think you did it because other games did, it does feel heavily influenced by other games, and the desire to be closer to them in look and feel.
Yet. I may be wrong, but didn’t you also say, albeit four years ago, this about dodge roll/evade.
We have talked about it and tried it internally several times over the last 2 years. Currently it’s not planned to be implemented but we aren’t explicitly saying that we won’t ever do it. We don’t like ruling things out completely in general but we don’t think that it fits with our game. Players have a lot of mobility options and if you’re looking for this type of play style, we think that the Rogue (when it’s released) will help scratch that itch pretty well.
I totally get where you are coming from. We have tested it out before and just don’t feel that it fits our game as well. I think that you’ll really like the rogue class when it’s out. She has several distinct playstyles and you’ll have a ton of quick mobility options to play with. I appreciate the clear and well thought out feedback.
Or maybe that was just someone on reddit who had the same avatar and in the know.
Fact being, just because it’s not something you think you will do now doesn’t mean you wont do a 180 later.
So on some gear it will become optimal/required to use dodge roll/evade?
Feels pretty forced to me, why not just have it interact with the gear that already does something for movement/traversal skills?
I’m glad to see you have ideas, but I would refer to the above for my opinion.
Although optimally, I would prefer dodge roll/evade to be an alternative to other traversal skills, rather than a requirement.
It did, I just strongly disagree with it.
Ain’t that the truth.
The problem I see is that “Try it out and tell us how you feel after we’ve implemented it,” is unlikely to produce an outcome that I would be happy with, since you already seem wed to the idea of it being a separate skill slot, and not sharing cooldowns with other movement/traversal abilities.
That (and WASD for optimal DPS) is also one of the reasons I wont be playing PoE2 whenever 3G manages to launch that.
I appreciate the thought, but people know that kind of thing as a dodge (roll), and it was your own “Oopsie” that that was the terminology you used in your roadmap.
OK, let’s get into it. Before I get too far, the specific details on exact timings, speed, cooldown, interactions and everything else is still very much up for adjustments and will almost guaranteed change between now and 1.1 launch. The start of my Evade description post starts by saying that these are the details for the version that we are doing internal testing on. It still has to go through that and to our CT program before it gets a 1.1 launch version. So, lots of stuff here will see adjustments between now and then. All I can describe is the version that we are testing now.
I believe Evade is currently slightly faster than walking. However, if the goal is the optimize, spamming Evade between packs is not necessarily going to be any better. I have been testing this out a bunch and I have consistently posted slower times on echoes when I use Evade as a traversal skill. Having it as a tool to quickly reposition in combat saves more time for me than spamming it between packs. So in the current version it could theoretically very slightly increase traversal speed but at least in my case is less optimal overall if used as such.
We like that traversal abilities such as Teleport, Transplant, Lunge, etc are optional. If the evade button were to be dedicated as a traversal skill then there would be no upside to not taking one. Currently the upside is that you get the opportunity cost of taking one back. (I think there was some miscommunication on this one but I’m not sure which one of us didn’t understand the other).
The original suggestion that I was responding to with this one was talking about significantly reducing the cooldown of traversal skills at the same time. That’s the main part that would spark dramatic changes. However, among other things, some traversal skills have damage components. If we are making it a dedicated ability slot then those would each need to be at the very least examined and probably more likely replaced with new nodes. Just for the record, this is not a traversal skill, it’s just a movement skill. I think you might be just using the term as a “I’m expecting to have to use it to get from back to pack” way but just in case, it doesn’t have a traversal tag.
Ahh yes but we aren’t and it is a different beast when looking at a character with how it goes together and players.
We try very hard to ignore what other companies are doing when designing the game itself. The most frequent thing we do talk about other games is once we’ve got something we want to do, we might say “uhh is that too similar to game x?” Of course we get influenced by the other games we play. That’s just the nature of doing anything creative and ARPGs are the games that we all play the most. I think that we probably got an influx of community requests for this because other games are doing it but that only gets an idea back to the table, it has to stand on its own once it gets there.
Yup that looks like me (ekimarcher on reddit) but that doesn’t contradict the point I was making with that text I just posted. I think it actually helps it. We aren’t prepared to lock anything in or out. We always look to see what the best changes we can make are for the game right now. There are features that I’ve tried to get through a design meeting for years that I have to tell players no all the time for. This is actually one that I was pushing against but my point is that the game is always evolving and it will continue to. I think that’s a really good thing.
I’m so confused by this point. Yes? Why is that a bad thing? No reason why not, it will? I feel like this one has a miscommunication on it too and again, I’m not sure who isn’t understanding who but I think I don’t understand. [hypothetical example disclaimer] Like, if we added a unique Sentinel Relic in 1.1 that had to stat, +5% chance to release a flame arc each second per Evade charge while using Warpath. Isn’t that an interesting interaction on an item that can be used in a build? (ok, I just made that up but it sounds kinda cool, needs some workshopping I know)
Evade is nowhere remotely close to the power level of other traversal skills so it won’t directly compete with their design space.
And it’s fine that we disagree on this. Unless the CTs really dislikes it, I think it’s very likely that it will get added in a pretty similar way to how it is now. But that doesn’t mean it will stay exactly the same. I think we’ve proven pretty clearly that we aren’t afraid the adapt when needed. I know it can sometimes feel like you’re shouting into the void but we do collect and discuss the feedback that we get. We have a meeting scheduled next week specifically to discuss the feedback from the roadmap (mostly Evade) announcement.
I understand that you are used to dodge roll being the term and it’s hard to change that in a discussion but if you can, I’d really appreciate it if we can use Evade instead of Dodge or Roll. It does look like people have latched onto the term more than we expected. We probably should have just said Evade. It’s not like I’m going to delete a post because someone uses dodge or not but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable ask to use Evade.
Thank you for engaging with the community about the whole Evade mechanic, and providing such long posts explaining your view points.
I’ll just have to agree to disagree with this specific point, though. I realize giving us a dedicated transversal skill slot instead of an Evade would require changing many transversal skills to be less powerful, but to me it would have been a better and more creative decision than adding a generic mechanic.
Last Epoch’s skill customization system is one of the greatest things about the game. Adding a new Evade mechanic feels a waste when it would have been an opportunity to enrich and expand something that already exists instead.
I’ve already pointed this out several times, but will reiterate once more.
You can not make an encounter that is hard, and does not require both Traversal and Evade skills, when players have such an option.
Imagine you are designing a fight that is baseline equivalent to fighting Lagon on a non-broken build at 800 corruption while the boss is Enraged. With only one option to get out of harm’s way, you need to think twice before using movement skill to avoid Circle, or Eye Lightning, because you now have a possibility to get trapped in the corner by his Eye Beam. The second movement option will make it a lot easier to avoid both mechanics at the same time.
If you make a fight with multiple mechanics that have to be avoided, and it is just right in terms of difficulty with only Evade skill, adding Traversal skill might make it trivial. If you then up the difficulty, the fight will become impossible without both Traversal and Evade.
The players will always choose the most optimal option, and for bosses it is almost guaranteed to be to take a traversal skill. Then top-level players/streamers will complain about “bosses too easy”, so you will be forced to adjust the difficulty of current fights or make future bosses require both.
“You will regret this, Pakicetus, the environment will force you to adapt.”
That is the issue with the evade roll ability. It doesnt require decision or sacrifice. Its brainless and will be spammed all the time just to move around now. All classes will have it with no planning or investment in it. A generic feature that the current game doesn’t require.
The Devs are saying they want to to design difficult fights that don’t require choosing a traversal ability, so the solution is to give everyone a free traversal ability? I for one don’t look forward to hitting the space bar incessantly.
Extreme mobility decreases the importance of positioning and planning. If you end up out of place, so what, you can dash around at will on quick cool downs. It dilutes strategy (“do I invest in lunge or not?”) and dilutes tactics (“no need to think ahead about the boss’s pattern, I can zip around with ease”).
The effect this will most likely have is not the one you stated but that you’ll be using evade for getting out of area attacks/dense mob packs and using traversal skills (or not, your choice) to navigate the map.
So evade is more a defensive tool than a traversal one.
From the information provided, the cd is crazy low and scales with movement speed, so i as an actual player would use it inbetween traversal skills while its on cd and turn the game into a poe variant. I have to emphasize players have movement speed…
Also on another part of it, this is a scaled increase on movement, so faster classes will gain more than slower ones (acolyte will get a little boost while rogue will get a lot), and ranged also benefit more. This is only making the already existing gaps wider.
That’s not correct. Try to play Games like Bastion or Hades, and then directly compare it with Diablo 4 or Grim Dawn. Than you can clearly tell the difference and it’s not anything close to an actual ‘souls-like’ at all.
People who dislike dodge-rolls always overstate how it effects ARPG’s in a negative way, in reality this stuff is a nice thing to have to make combat, positioning and mobility a bit more dynamic so you aren’t stuck onto clunky movement (or sacrifice a skillslot for it) while still allowing the basic principle of facetaking-builds or traditional ARPG Gameplay. And it still can feel good / be a nice addition outside of being build around. (And nah it doesn’t makes game too easy neither. Devs might need to look over balancing a bit but again, it’s an nice addition and not an geniune replacement).
Maybe in the ‘future’ more bosses will more telegraphed with the dodge-ability in mind, we’ll see, but even THEN it won’t be closely the level of other Games like Hades or Bastion - or Souls where every single element is build around a combat/movement with dodging in mind. (Not to mention that Boss-Design should be an entirely different debate… as i said above, you can factually do an traditional arpg with having dodge-roll as an nice addition… if you don’t consider Diablo 4 atleast Grim Dawn is one of the most traditional ARPG’s right now on the market)…
Also a basic Dodge-Roll as a separate Skill used in the Skillslots. What’s next? Basic-Movement via Leftclick should also be considered a skill and be placed in one of the 5 available skillslots. Again people overstate the actual significance of Dodge-Roll. It’s significant enough to make mobility&combat a bit more dynamic, it’s not closely enough to be on a level of actual traversing skills.
Which is by the way a Reason why i’ve to disagree with most people here in this topic.
If you geniunly compare a Game like Hades… a game which ACTUALLY is build around dodging from the ground up… versus an traditional ARPG’s which have this as an nice addition, than i’m sorry, than i don’t know how i should keep the conversation about it with you (and some others)… because you should be able to tell clearly the difference if you actually played both games. They aren’t alike at all…
Man, and i was wondering why i don’t have the motivation to visit the forum as regularly… (was more of a lurker anyway but even that have become much rarer to just look into what’s new) always with nonsense like this.
@EHG_Mike
Nice to know. Can’t wait to give it a try.
Actually, it does. If you spam your Evade all the time just to move around because you want to play POE instead of Last Epoch, you will be sacrificing your actual traversal speed for the sake of perceived traversal speed.
It’s truly astounding that Mike can lay everything out, clearly and explicitly explain why you’re not correct, and y’all still just shove your fingers in your ears, misrepresent absolutely everything, and go LALALALALA CAN’T HEAR YOU EVERYBODY GETS TRAVERSAL ABILITY IT SHOULD JUST BE A TRAVERSAL SKILL SLOT.
Bro, you are the 2nd person in a row confusing what I’ve said. The original statement was:
In greater detail: if Evade is in the game, the design of the game will shift towards (maybe not instantly, but over time, I probably should’ve clarified that in the original post, to accommodate the increased mobility options), to something that is closer to [Hades/Soluslike/V Rising], not become one, but shift towards one, which means will resemble these games more, and resemble, for example, Diablo 2 less.
Grim Dawn has had evade for a few years now and it’s far from resembling one. Same for D4.
Having mechanical fights != souls-like.
I would say that, if anything, having evade is more likely to move the game towards vampire survivors/bullet hell territory than souls-like. Although neither has to happen.
They also have additional movements skills? If yes, then maybe adding Evade won’t be that big of an issue. We just have to hope that the developers remember their initial intention and not design fights around the super optimal maximum mobility builds run by players with Korean Starcraft APM.
Yes, lots of them. They not only had a few base ones (not many), but they added a bunch of them (6, I think?) with the Forgotten Gods expansion, that you could add to any character.
I find this unlikely to happen. There are plenty of builds that don’t use traversal skills and they deal with bosses just fine. So clearly traversal skills haven’t been a focus point for boss design. Evade isn’t likely to change that.
You don’t need to use traversal for bosses. You just need to know the mechanics and move out of the way (often with a long windup). Some builds just handle it easier with it.
That’s because Mike has said before that the only thing they could guarantee was that the player could move & do damage. They couldn’t assume that a build had a movement skill so they designed the boss fights with this in mind. With the evade/roll/whatever they can assume that the player has this available as well so they can design boss fights with it in mind.
(November 2023 as of Patch 1.2.0.0)