I understand that because those abilities are most of the time used as autocast the solution you brought was to make those abilities not instant.
But i think it didn’t solved autocast problem but created new one:
Now a lot of support abilities interrupt your main attacks and moving while casting, that seems to me not right at all. (maelstorm for example)
First of all I think auto cast is not bad thing for secondary or buff abilities.( you usually focus on 1-2 main abilities to do damage and other skills just support them)
Its widely used in many arpgs with great success and no one call it cheating.
But anyway the solution to remove instant casts is just not right here. People will still autocast most of the abilities they did before. Its just creates new problems i described above.
Can you list what all instant abilities were removed? I had no idea.
Maelstrom , devouring orbs maybe some others
I just want to prevent it to not go further. If one popular streamer dont like autocast, it doesnt mean it must be removed from game.
While I used autocast much at the beginning, I finally understood. When you’re autocasting, you’re removing part of the game. Really. You’re removing the decision about when to cast a skill.
And you put yourself in danger. I’ve already died to the Emperor of Corpses because of autocast stucking me for a short while. It was enough.
If a skills needs to be cast permanently, then there’s a design issue. It must either be a passive, or work otherwise. Skills need to be cast at the right moment.
Instant cast, then. In a role play perspective, it seems logical to have some skills that can be instant cast and some that can’t. The difficulty is to decide which ones are on each side.
Ouch on that Emperor death. I feel ya! lol
But I don’t feel the word choice of this:
I disagree with removing the decision to cast a skill: You’re deciding to cast it on cooldown. If this is incorrect, please explain.
Your experience with that Emperor is your own. It shouldn’t have weight on whether or not autocast is/isn’t removed. Yours is just an experience you happen to have.
Skills need to be cast at the right moment, yes. This moment is up to the player. If this ‘moment’ is everytime its on CD, then I feel this also needs looked at. So this I sort of agree with. 
You seem t really have specific things about this topic in mind. Please, blarg it out in a post. Lets see what you’re aiming at! 
Exactly. What should have weight on this is: EHG’s vision. And their vision is that we actively use our skills and don’t autocast. 
its exactly one of the problems.
You probably not autocast not instant skills.
But people still do it.
And thats the way EHG approaches this problem, that i don’t like.
Some skills must stay instant, especially buffs, to not interrupt your main abilities
Exactly? Then why did you state it in the first place?
Anyway, gonna have to hard disagree here, again. EHG can have their vision, but as we have seen, that vision doesn’t always pan out: see the Bazaar. If their vision clashes with the player’s fun/interest/whatever you want to list, then is it a solid decision to stay the course? Maybe. But business is business at the end of the day.
Autocast has been in LE for a good bit. from some testing awhile ago when I learned about auto casting, it made things more fluid and I think I did enjoy myself more. But, it still felt clunky and I’d sometimes cast the wrong spell/etc so it has its annoyances. Removing it seems like a watered down way of sticking it to the players. This could be an opportunity for them to come up with something middle ground or completely new. Is there something even better than auto casting?! Maybe EHG will find it!
I personally don’t care one way or another about auto casting, but I understand others do. But this has been a good discussion! Keep going!
Devouring Orb was never instant cast, and the devs “fixing” skills which ate commonly auto cast has nothing to do with streamers not liking it. I’m also not sure Maelstrom was instant cast either.
No need to become aggressive, pal.
I won’t fighter a fellow player. Your arguments were interesting, we disagree, that’s all. I’m done with this topic, have a nice day!
The solution to autocast ISN’T making it inconvenient, like you may think, players will still play a build that stops every few seconds to cast something if it is the most efficient way to play.
The solution is to give the player a reason to hold onto the cast, such as with maelstrom having a node that makes it bigger the longer you wait(which because it is an optional upgrade, is STILL not as efficient as the autocast build. So people do not use it). Or if flame ward gave a passive benefit when off cooldown.
In other words the only way to stop autocast is to make an active playstyle MORE EFFICIENT.
I no way was I ‘fighting’ or being 'aggressive." Unfortunate you felt that way.
@doombybbr Now this is a good idea! And sound reasoning: players want efficiency over quality in most cases. That’s how I see this cause and effect. Let’s see what happens!
I think the issue is there are two different types of players. Those that want every skill specilization to matter and those who want 1 main skill and the other 4 to support that skill.
Every other ARPG mostly tends to please the players in the second group and the first group often gets neglected. LE has deliberately said that the game designwise will not be 1 main skill and 4 supporting skills. They said they are actively trying to make the game appeal to the first group of players.
So the argument becomes should the game appeal to group 1 or group 2. But that’s not the point OP is trying to make. The game has been and always will be geared towards group 1 type of players. What the Op is trying to point is that removing instant cast from spells is not making the game more towards group 1, it’s not affecting the scale at all, only making the game annoying for both types of players.
I quite agree with that part of his statement. If I am to press a skill at the right time than I should be incentivized to press it at the right time. There is virtually no right time to press maelstrom. The only design of it is trying to get maximum stacks as much as possible. Which means any other skill that you use other than maelstrom is reducing the efficiency of maelstrom and thats why you feel the need to autocast it. If for example maelstrom had another component to it that affected when you press than no one would use it on autocast regardless of its instant cast value. If it for example pulled enemies towards you on cast (area based on stack count) or froze enemies on button press, or did something that requires timing. But it’s just a flat buff/flat dmg that wants to be pressed as much as possible.
When maelstrom was instant cast I loved playing with the skill. Sure I had it on autocast but I was already juggling 4 other skills that were not and having 1 skill on auto didn’t seem all that gamebreaking. But after it got removed of its instant cast (and cd) suddenly I realised how bad it feels to stop doing everything else (including moving) to get your maelstrom stacks up. I dropped the skill completely after that. I think that is the point OP is trying to make and if that’s the case then I completely agree.
There are no popular streamers making this decision, it’s the developers who don’t want you autocasting. By the same reasoning they avoid having many passive abilities. They want players to actively play the game. Your skills require you to activate them and autocasting circumvents playing the game as intended. It’s more likely they’ll have passives added that give skills instant cast, like sigils of hope does, so as to force you into a cost for your convenience.
However, it’s important to not forget one thing. Despite a Dev’s initial wishes, it is important not to discard how popular something is to the players. Ok, so autocast might not have been an intended feature in the initial “manifesto”, but despite that it has become something that I would guess almost all players use at some time or another. Surely then, it’s important to note how popular that feature is, and perhaps amend that “manifesto” to incorporate something that accidentally became one of the most used features in the game?
Instead of trying to eradicate something so popular, why not embrace it instead? Surely that would keep more players happy? Perhaps players themselves don’t want to have to press 5 different buttons for skills while playing a game?
Hello Ekler!
This is something that comes up a lot, so I want to break down my response into two parts - “Instant Cast”, and “Auto Cast”, to try to give a full answer.
Instant cast is something we have fairly high reservations about giving a skill because of how incredibly powerful it is. Being able to instantly apply some sort of effect, be it damage, mitigation, or utility means there’s less foresight and reaction time involved in utilizing a skill, making it less exciting, and less interesting as there is no planning.
There is certainly places for this - ‘support’ style skills that don’t necessarily grant any immediate strength by themselves so have a planning factor in how you follow up on them, such as holy aura, or other skills that are specifically designed to be reactionary such as volatile reversal. The other part to instant cast skills is that while they may feel “smoother” to play, they feel less impactful or meaningful as being instant means it’s just something that instantly happens, in the background, even if you’re doing other things.
For Auto-cast, it’s not something we designed the game for. Technically speaking, it’s using a third party software (your OS) to automate gameplay. Though this isn’t the issue here. The main issue here is that by setting something to auto-cast, you have no interaction with the ability, greatly reducing its impact and meaning. When we approach skills that people are commonly auto-casting, we aren’t going “no, auto-casting bad”; we’re instead asking “why are players not wanting to interact with this skill?”. So we try to change the skill to give it more meaning, impact, and make it more interactive overall. The end result of this is that once we rework the skill, people won’t want it to be auto-casted, but instead will want to directly interact with it and be rewarded for directly using the skill instead.
To use a recent example - Devouring orb. We toned down the AoE portion of it, but increased the strength of the central orb. The objective here to change the theme of it from “just have the orbs active and it does everything on its own” to “now I have the orbs active, but I have to think about positioning and movement to get the orbs to connect to get the most value out of them”. So now it makes more sense to watch when you have your orbs active, and how you’re using them, rather as much simply being “just cast orbs - done”.
While you aren’t wrong, let’s not assume everyone wants autocasting. I don’t. I agree with what the devs say on the subject.
I don’t want autocast either, but there needs to be a recognition that most people don’t want 5 active use skills. If a class doesn’t have passive skills, I just won’t spec more than 2 or 3 skills or I just avoid the class completely.
Some skills just don’t have any interaction in it. Ring of Shields and Sigils of Hope are good examples. You cast them and they do their own thing. They don’t give you the feeling of being rewarded when you cast them at the correct timing so naturally you would want them active all the time.
I would suggest adding some effects on skills activation especially buff skills.
When I play sentinels, I often forget to cast Sigils of Hope. But somehow I always remember to cast Abyssal Echoes to get the attack speed and ailment damage buff. I think this is because Abyssal Echoes gives me a strong feeling of doing something on activation.
My post above was a generalisation just referring to a large number of players, not actually necessarily myself. I post like that a lot, so I’m not necessarily speaking about how I feel when I post, but I do like to present the “devil’s advocate” side of arguments on occasion.
Personally I could take it or leave it with autocast, I’m on the fence about it.
The one thing I don’t want is as DarkDeal said, having to mash 4 or 5 keys for abilities. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting old, but I don’t have the enthusiasm for playing games 2 handed as much as I once did, and by 2 handed I mean operating several buttons on a gaming mouse in my right, and pressing 4 keys with my left. I do think this might, in my case, be an age thing as I never used to mind playing classes in older games with tons of trigger abilities via key, like rogues. Now days though, if I run out of buttons to bind skills to on my mouse I get a little annoyed having to lift my left hand up to the keyboard again during a mono/dungeon run.
So, I’m fine doing skills myself but only as long as there aren’t too many of them. As others have said, if there isn’t an obvious interaction, then skills maybe should be passive instead. I don’t know, overall I think it’s pretty well balanced in the game at the moment with all the builds I have played so far. I haven’t come across one that required a ton of different key pressing, but I might also have sub consciously avoided those builds as well.