Stop removing instant cast abilities

Feedback and Suggestions
15

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?

1 Like
16

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”.

7 Likes
17

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.

2 Likes
18

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.

2 Likes
19

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.

4 Likes
20

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.

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For what its worth, being a boomer on the wrong side of 60 there is no way i have dexterity to operate 4 keys with left hand and don’t even go to a gaming mouse with buttons on the side ! Arthritis is a b%@$#%h. So if i cant auto cast skills then it is 4 skills max i can use with 3rd keyboard button being often forgotten in the forgetfulness of approaching old age. Just my minority perspective.

3 Likes
22

I really don’t have any bias towards or against autocast.

I have a lot of chars that have no autocast skills in use. But I also use it on others. If there are skills where it makes sense to use it, I’ll do. Because its convenient.

But I also don’t have a problem using 5 active skills. Most of the time those active skills are devided into:

  • 1x movement
  • 1x damage
  • 3x situational
    • buff
    • rebuff
    • defensive

So 80% of time I only use 2-3 skills and the last 2 when it comes to bossfights or tight situations.

I stepped back from using Devouring Orb on autocast. It just gets me killed too often on higher difficulty.

Also theres always a combo where I trigger skills by other skills so I don’t even have to use all 5 skills actively.

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But you can put another on your bar.
Lunge triggers Smite, you remove Smite from the bar and put Rebuke. Then, you still have five active skills.

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Haha, I feel your pain to a degree. I’m on the wrong side of 50, plus I’ve broken most of my knuckles over the years in Field Hockey, Cricket, & Football. I, too, suffer a bit from the arthritis caused as a result of those breaks especially in the damn winter.

I am lucky in that mine is not as bad as yours sounds (yet), but I do sympathise :smile:

25

From the past discussions on the topic autocasting seems to be rather unpopular :). Sometimes it’s nice to just play a build and press one button 80% of the time. maybe EHG is open to stuff that increases the duration even more so you don’t have to press a “lot” of buttons a torturing ammount of times.

2 Likes
26

That I can definitely agree on, I felt like that was an issue when I tried to play Lich. Other classes I haven’t had that issue though as I feel my skills tend to be situational, in particular the ones with cooldown.

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27

Yes. But there are also cases where this kind of stuff barely makes any impact. I have builds where it doesn’t make any sense to put an unspected skill onto my bar, because there’s no synergy or the skill is so far behind because it is inspected.

And why would somebody that tries to build a simple and lazy build with less active skills put an unspecced skill on his bar. It’s a choice you don’t have to do, if you don’t want to.

In your example the unspecced rebuke would be of use in 2 or 3 specific situations in bossfights. So 99% of your playtime the skill just is a nice picture on your bar without any usage.

28

Instant Cast with a CD attached to it is fine imo, if the skill lasts long enough to justify it or it’s an OH SHIT button that needs to be like that (immortal call?).

Now, that said, I thought it trivialized the game and mechanics to have something that is instant cast that also can be toggled to continue to cast while you don’t have to think about it. It’s lazy game play and streamers (such as Boardman) even said so (saying he is lazy and just leaves it that way). It doesn’t bring anything to the game and also makes certain skills damn near required cause of the benefits provided for no input essentially. Ice Thorns is a big culprit here. The armour and crit avoidance previously provided were put on a brain dead auto cast sequence to take advantage of the skill. Maelstrom can still be stacked via other methods and does not make the skill required for most builds. Same with Ice Thorns now. It takes thought.

IMO, EHG just had those skills thrown down without going over them to give us the skills (this is a beta remember?) And gamers are notorious for finding an exploit/bug/etc and taking full advantage of that until the gaming company can note it down and fix it. Unlike other games, since this has a set amount of skills that can also define a build, it was not easy to just change it. EHG is still polishing the game and the skills in their current form may not even be what they will be when released since we still have more patches to go. I am 100% sure skills are going to be changed after multiplayer comes out, or maybe add modifiers and text to say X skill does this while alone, but does Y when grouped and Y is less of a benefit than when solo.

Attack speed builds without a built in frenzy in someway are going to go nuts with multiplayer. I main primalist (all builds) and just kind of play some others. Next highest is Sentinel then Rogue. Honestly, primalist seems very fleshed out and thought out where some tweaks would help but are very playable.

29

In order to have a movement skill. A kind of “oh crap” button.
But I see your point and I think you’re right.

30

Building on this…Sentinel, in particular, can be built in a way that you don’t have to have smite (usually) on your bar and can add lunge to give yourself movement skill.

31

Yes I’ve done so sometimes. Or Rebuke, if Lunge is already specialized.

32

This is for SC. Rebuke, even un-specced, comes in handy in HC.

1 Like
33

I think Devouring Orb was an instant cast in a bugged way. Like using any other instant cast (since they were disabled for echoes) triggered Devouring Orb Echo (Especially those toggleable Aura’s with a very low cooldown). But yeah… it hasn’t been long since i came back to the game and i also noticed quite a few support skills not being able to insta cast anymore. I do a lot of theory crafting currently. And what i quite missed, was the Ice thorn instant cast node… was changed to double cast i think… but yeah, i also missed Maelstrom instant cast. At least there are quite a few skills that provide extra maestrom’s now. (But mainly Druid/transforms tho, which aren’t very suitable for the other specialisations)

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