Autocasting (numlock trick) shouldn’t be part of the game. It contradicts the gameplay. Right now it’s exploiting the game in such way that you gain advantage against people who actually play the game.
For example: the Zoomer build (primalist: maelstrom + tornado). Put these on autocast and you gain with 6 stacks automatically non stop Haste. Combine it with Tornado movement buff and you’ll run around killing and leeching without even pressing a button. You only need to cast Eterra’s Blessing to make you immortal from time to time
Suggestion: people tend to use the numlock trick because the skills they use needs to be repeated. Repeated pressing of those skills is cumbersome. It’s logic people tend to use this kind of exploiting. Imo, disable numlock key binding and take a look into those skills and change the behaviour to a more friendly way. For instance, tornado should last for 20-30 seconds or make the tree interact with Maelstrom. But by all means, autobuilds should not have a place in this great game!
+1
This was bothering me aswell in d3. Should never be possible for players to use that as an advantage, especially later when we have seasons. People should use their skills at the right time in a hard boss fight and not focus on pressing one button only, while the rest can be casted automatically.
So your solution instead of wanting auto cast is to make the skill last longer (20-30 seconds) so you dont have to constantly push the button???
Now, while i dont disagree that auto casting does take away some of the gameplay immersion, i feel a better solution is just to get rid of cooldowns. No cooldowns means builds could not auto cast beacuse they wouldnt have the mana to sustain, also if you have tried autocasting 2 or more skills with no CD is doesnt work well lol.
Since everyone can use auto-casting. How is that an issue? If your moving around, your playing the game. And honestly, with the amount of small cool down buffs/spells in this game. How does clicking the key over and over and having it auto cast change anything?
This is literally something you could do without autocasting. Only difference is the amount of buttons you click versus auto casting. Not sure how this seem’s bad or an exploit. Now if they didn’t allow it an people were using auto key or something, then I could see an issue maybe. But literally, you get rid of this. Then people switch to a program like auto key, which FYI, is hard to detect.
Whilst I agree that the auto cast on the shaman build is a bit extreme I like having the option to use it on other skills like holy aura and flame ward. Yes this is lazy but it really enhances my enjoyment of the build when I can automate some things. If you take away the ability to bind numlock people will just use other macros anyway.
If you take away the ability to bind numlock people will just use other macros anyway.
This ^
While I don’t use the numlock “trick” myself, even if it would be advantageous to do so (flame ward I’m talking about you), I don’t believe there is a 100% foolproof solution. You either combat the idea entirely and ruin some of your skill design intentions, or you allow it to happen and discourage it in a few places.
LE’s mana management design already partially stops auto-cast from being too prevalent.
So in D3 I played Condemn Crusader which revolved around pressing Condemn every 750ms for 5-10 hours a day/night. I used to push top Ranks in D3 leaderboards and would constantly grind.
Not only Condemn he had 3 or so other skills needing to be spammed. I worked out over about a 6 month period playing this much I would have to press Condemn key over 6million times to just play the game.
What kind of insane idiot would gladly press a SINGLE key only 6 million times when they didn’t have to? nobody. Not even counting the other 4 billion keystrokes/mouse clicks I was doing at work/ingame anyway so anything to lighten the load was welcome.
By all means press every key when you need to, just leave everyone else alone to play the way they want…OR maybe the devs release a game that isn’t so goddamn reliant on pressing a key for a buff every X seconds without thought as theres nothing but a penalty to NOT having the buff up
TLDR if devs remove Autocast please rebalance every skill in the game to match it too
I think the issue goes back to the cost v benefit choices of original skills. The current situation is there are a LOT of skills that you can gain a bit (or a lot) of extra power in exchange for having to press lots of buttons. It was supposed to be a meaningful choice, but with autocast you can have both the power and the ease of play.
I, personally, do not play these games to piano the keyboard (or grind for that matter). I will always sacrifice power to avoid repetition. I do not use auto cast, but if you are going to get rid of it, I agree with this:
“if devs remove Autocast please rebalance every skill in the game to match it too”
My Beastmaster numlocks every beast skill on a loop, why NOT have 25% more attack speed constantly going off? when my BM has no mana costs basically and does nothing but keep pets alive with Entangling Roots why not auto cast my pet buffs. Theres no reason not to.
So the solution is… Add higher cooldown/ increase mana cost OR make it a reservation of Mana or remove the buff entirely
I would rather there was LONG cooldowns with massive dmg buffs. IE 1 minute long cooldown for 20 seconds of damage, cannot be modified. Use it when you really need it and nothing more
This is a great topic! I tried to address this some weeks ago.
I thought about @boardman21 's suggestion to remove cool down completely. So it indeed would make some builds unplayable but on the other hand it encourages people to use macros like autohotkey where you can set delays (e.g. cast once every 4 seconds).
The skill design of some skills encourages this kind of workaround because otherwise it’s unfun to play.
Changing the skill design is the only way to compensate for this. I don’t see any point in letting the numlock autocast become a valid technique to enable certain builds.
I’d rather see something like this:
Add a checkbox underneath every skill in the action bar that says “toggle autocast”
This way you can autocast every skill comfortable without the need to make weird key combos on your numpad after every start or tabbing out if the game
Change the skills this way the become “auras” by reserving a fix percentage of your mana pool or decreasing your mana regain when active. Effects that proc with casting a skill could then be procced in fix intervals that match the actual cool down timers.
To put up front; it’s not the solution (20-30secs). What I try to address here is to get rid of autocasting as it undermines the gameplay and fix the skills which are now to clumsy to use because they have a very short cooldown and requires you to press every few seconds to make use of it.
In regard to Tornado (eye of the storm) I was comparing it how i’ve played the wind druid in D2. It was on a timer and could have been around 30-40 secs even. Long enough not to bother with it as it was fine as a duration. Removing cooldowns would also be a good option and my preference. Make it more persistent.
I would love for there to just be an option like they did with left click where you can just set skills to autocast so there isnt some wonky numlock mechanic. If they removed autocast and didnt give the main autocast skills a rework, it would definitely reduce the enjoyment of the game for me
I don’t understand people’s gripes with autocasting. Pressing buttons is not hard, it is not adding some huge advantage over other players. You could just as easily hold down those keys to have them autocast. Would people complain about that too? This is nothing more than a QoL issue.
In my opinion, auto casting using numlocks now is definitly an exploit, because there is no tutorial or help button in the game where the devs tell you that you can use this trick to benefit with your playstyle. In general, i also want to have QoL improvements for certain skills (ex. maelstrom with max 1 stack should always be on without pressing it over and over again/ when you stack it to get more dmg then of course it should be strickted to a certain duration)
true
this is the solution = noone could say it’s an exploit whether you like to play like that or not
