Just started playing this weekend, and at first I felt like there was a problem with the responsiveness when moving. It seemed as if there was a delay between me clicking somewhere and the character actually moving. This made dodging boss attacks and kiting feel very clunky.
After playing around with the movement a bit, I realized what I thought was a lack of responsiveness in the movement actually had to do with skill animations. If you cast a skill and then attempt to move immediately after, the entire animation must complete before the character will actually move. At the beginning of the game where your attack speed/cast speed is very low, this can result in a fairly significant delay between the attack firing and your character finally moving because of the length of the return animation. I did notice this felt better as my cast speed increased though, so maybe this is intentional.
I think it would be a good idea to look into allowing some form of animation cancelling when a movement command is pressed after a skill. For example, make it so that clicking somewhere immediately after pressing a skill will cancel the return animation of the skill. This is present in D3, and I think it is a major reason why movement and combat feels so much smoother there.
D3 did lots of different things to make the play and combat seem very smooth but it created problems of its own like making some skills have breakpoints where you were forced to reach certain fixed attack speeds in order to ‘earn’ the new faster animation (different frame counts) which then gave you the desired output.
That created an unnatural or unintuitive path to improve your character. The improvement was not smoothly linear but crudely broken into steps that a player without a spreadsheet wouldn’t anticipate.
At the moment in LE we have some small input lags in different places, skills that respond differently if they are on the mouse or keyboard, as well as many skills where the ‘move-to-attack’. Many of these have been reported and talked about by devs for the whole moving and dodging and all that fun stuff that makes playing exciting.
If they can get the responsiveness a very small bit sharper from the input/skills activation/targetting perspective it would smooth many commonly encountered stutters. This is also related to all the work they are doing on the game in every aspect. In my first visit to Lagon it was very challenging simply to melee the boss, and none of the movement skills worked reliably. Now just a few weeks later Lagon is really very smooth in terms of where you move and stand when fighting and how quickly you can disengage and GTFO of danger zones as they present.
Personal question to you as you are feeling a lack of responsiveness: have you compared a skill you feel lacking for its response on a mouse click compared to a button press? I’ve found several that feel very different whether I’m using one or the other input. I don’t understand how the game handles ghosting but anecdotally it helped me.
