During the dev stream we had a short conversation about how easy it is to get stuck on collision points in the game. This is in stark contrast to PoE, where the character will smoothly move across a collision point instead of stopping in place. @EHG_Mike asked us to provide some forum feedback on it, so here it is. The short video shows an example of what it looks like to get stuck, and how extreme of an angle the player needs to take in order to get unstuck.
Thanks for the video. I was playing around with it a little more after stream and with this, I know whatâs going on. Not sure how to fix it yet but I get the issue.
So, the walkable area has a defined blob for each zone. If you click on it, your character paths to that spot. Holding down the mouse button is the same as just clicking a lot except you donât see the âclick vfxâ. If you click off the walkable area, you click at your feet instead. So, this makes you stop and get stuck because you are constantly just clicking in place. This is partially done for performance reasons. Detecting the nearest point on the walkable area from a point off the walkable area isnât simple to do reliably. This is the same issue that causes loot to sometimes drop where you canât get it. (Side note: this is why the specters in D2 donât drop anything if you kill them while flying between platforms in Arcane Sanctuary.)
We know that movement feeling good is very important and we will look into improving this for future patches.
As always, I really appreciate your feedback and thoughts on this Mike! Iâm also glad to hear that you were able to identify the issue. If you need any help with testing any potential fixes in the future, you know where to look. 
Really glad this will be looked into, because I have to agree with McFluffin here, itâs atrocious as it is. You learn to get around it, but it isnât something fun to learn to get around, if you can get that. I understand how problematic it might be to fix, specially from your answer about what is actually happening when we stay stuck, but itâs really nice to have such quick feedback.
Hey Mike,
I fiddled with a specific point that always bugs me, and may have encountered some possibilities.
I donât know how the controller movement is working under the hood, but I noticed that it does make me run into a wall whenever I want to. Perhaps using this directional orientation can help? People that hold down the mouse generally use it more as directional movement than location-based, if that makes sense.
A more âdirty solutionâ I could think of is to only look in a straight line for that nearest (to cursor) on-map point, as a âclose enoughâ workaround, but I donât know how much performance that alone would cost.
At the end, if neither is a viable solution, I think (as a game option) not clicking at your feet at all is the better choice for the stickyness, as itâll only path towards âvalidâ locations players click, rather than accidentally stopping. I rather be able to decide myself if I want to stop whenever I click off-map or continue to the last point.
The specific issue I noticed is on the Monolith Echo reward island:
If you move to the loot chest on the right and then click on top on the Echo web crystal itself from that point, it wonât path either. You need to click just next to the crystal to move. Somehow Teleport does work, and always places me in front of it. So maybe it has a manual location linked that needs to be updated? I think this specific point is also one many people will encounter if they arenât click-spammers like you
PS: I love the stream, although I couldnât ⌠bee ⌠there during the Live session. Looking forward to the âKiller Beeâ form (that ends in an âEâ, right?)
Thatâs good insight about teleport vs movement. With the way itâs set up, it totally makes sense. We do more computationally expensive operations for events that are infrequent. Someone can teleport only every x seconds due to the cooldown and itâs often in a âoh crapâ situation so it needs to work.
I think that there is a way to do a more dirty solution like you have suggested to get closer and at least move instead of just sticking.
Polling along the line between the target point and your position would be too expensive but weâve got some similar tricks to work with.
a) why are you working on what I assume is Sunday afternoon in the US?
b) just remember, Iâve got plenty of spare time free if you need an EU-based QA
Itâs often those weird-ass questions that give you a starting point, so if that was the catalyst needed, Iâm happy to help! Just remember to spell my name correctly if you name a set after me! 
Please this. Im beginning to feel it the more i play this game. It gets so frustrating i just log off sometimes.
I get why there should be collision but the penalty to manoeuvre around pass it should be âpenaltyâ enough, instead of completely halting your movement.
Weâve investigated this further, tried a few things, and have a solution internally that seems very promising. This will likely be included in 0.8.4.
Thats great. Thanks for all the hard work!
Thanks for your efforts. Iâm not sure if this deserves another topic of itâs own but i have a request about mobility skills.
I simply would like my characterâs mobility skill to work when i click outside the playable area. Meaning my character should teleport/dash towards edge of the playable area even when my cursor is outside. It is i think how any player would expect mobility skills to function.
Mike commented on a similar request to that, apparently working out the nearest valid position to your cursor when you click out-of-bounds is computationally quite expensive which is why they donât do it at the moment.
Given that most of the people who hit this hold down left-mouse to move (as opposed to occasional clicking the map), maybe they could just preserve the âpreviousâ valid position (not all that expensive to store). Any time a player clicks out of bounds, it uses that âpreviousâ position instead.
While this would be a decent work around, we have found another method that will be more representative of the playerâs intent.
Hm I get the problem from a QoL point of view but right now I enjoy beeing aware of where I click because it adds a bit more artifical difficulty to the game. On the other hand the stupid as a brick AI moves arround niceley and at this point it feels like the beginning of a joke :D.
A lot of this block happen in the temple of eterra, at least for me, and i always felt a bit stupid about it but never thought about it anymore then âclick on the right spot you bonobo!â and was done with it.
Intresting people have issues with this and I always thought it was intended :D.
If you have a solution, is this maybe something to solve the problem with summoning totems in narrow passages?
The pattern of where totems are positioned is strict. If you cast it in an area where the pattern doesnât fit, totems that have no place are just not summoned. The expected behaviour would be that the pattern somehow adapts to the area so totems would more in a line or whatever form would fit.
This is precisely what stopped me from playing past 1 hour mark a few months back and the fact that the developer had no idea what you were talking about does not bode well for the future of this game.
There is another issue not mentioned in this thread, where you will get stuck on waypoints/npcs/any other interactable point whilst âmove onlyâ is pressed, so hopefully thatâs getting fixed as well, although I suspect that neither of these issues can be smoothed out to poe/diablo levels without a complete game engine swap.
For me, the fact that they requested further feedback, immediately looked at the feedback, then investigated it, identified the problem, and came up with a solution within a week is the big takeaway that leads to the opposite conclusion. Not every developer is this involved with their community and humble enough to take the feedback and internalize it in order to make the game better. There was no argument between the devs and the players, just working together to fix a problem. This thread, to me, is a shining example of how we should want devs to operate.
I agree that itâs a good thing that theyâre reacting to feedback, my point however is that this shouldâve been fixed a long time ago, somewhere around the internal alpha phase.
Fluidity of movement is paramount in a game where positioning your character matters as much as it does in LE (which is a good thing, by the way), therefore it baffles me that the issue had to be brought up externally for it to be addressed.
Let me clarify that even though Iâm not a dedicated player right now, I sincerely hope Last Epoch succeeds and becomes a real competitor in the arpg genre, which is why Iâm suggesting that perhaps more internal play testing is required in order to catch such fundamental problems in the future.
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