WASD Movment and why we do not need to reinvent the wheel

I like twinstickshooters and play some. I just don’t like that deeper games like H&S games devolve into a state of twinstickshooters that a re by nature rather braindead to me :slight_smile: .

Where is it more complex? You have an easier time and if you keep in mind that said input system is implemented into a game that wasn’t made with WASD in mind it gets easier and more braindead and for me this is degeneration and not improvement.

As stated above having a superrior input method isn’t making things more complex but easier.

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Gameplay when you are moving offers more tactical choices than when you spend more time just standing still while attacking. Current gameplay of most ARPGs is extremely brain-dead, I’m not even sure where it could potentially degenerate even further. Unlike, for example, early acts of PoE 2.

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aka making the game easier. Sure you can call it having more options and therefor making the game more complex but making everything easier isn’t adding complexity to me. If you would implement WASD like in PoE2 for example it would be cheating when it comes to LE and making the game babymode. If this is added complexity to you we will never agree on this topic :slight_smile: .

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Games are designed around the input methods commonly, be it in difficulty or for the UI layout and controls.

Each different input method has demands it needs to be fulfilled to work well, and it gives different returns to what it provides. Hence why games look and feel different when their focus is on another input method.

Controller games feel more ‘arcade-y’ commonly because their UI is more simplist designed, but that doesn’t make them better or worse, just different in method. Same goes with joystick, point&click mouse&keyboard or WASD direct control. Each offers a variety of different methods to work around to make a game unique.

Alongside that comes the difference in difficulty, a game designed around a point&click input method will be child’s play when including a direct control method… a game which is focused around using nearly the whole keyboard for inputs or a joystick will feel utterly overwhelming when using a controller instead and so on and so forth.

This makes inclusion of any new input method a large-scale project as it not only demands the need for adjusting simple keybinds but also all related content around it to not make it feels ‘bad’, overwhelming or underwhelming. And there’ll always be a single input method which is superior at any given time. A game for controllers will feel weird with keyboard&mouse, a game made around WASD feels too hard with keyboard&mouse and so on.

It’s utterly nonsensical to argue about ‘superior’ methods when the design is based around creating a optimal environment to fit the input method directly… not to find the ‘best and only’ way to handle a game.

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Balance and complexity are different topics. According to your logic, if we remove all abilities and allow only autoattacks, it would make combat more complex, because it will be much harder. Adding new abilities or moving options should be balanced ofc. Overall, the more choices you have — the more complex combat is (unless some choices are OP and make other choices irrelevant, which would effectively reduce number of choices).

I think that, as Kulze says, if the game were designed around wasd/twinstick then you could add more complex mechanics to prevent it from being “babymode”. But then said .echanics might be too “hard” for mouse/keyboard…

No, that’s not what he said. Quite the opposite in fact.

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This is only true when the game is designed around it (and with “it” I mean WASD movement and the ability to attack while moving). If you would put it in LE as it is the “more tactical choices” would become “move away from the enemy while blasting them”. No enemy is designed with that mobility in mind as such your “tactical” becomes the exact opposite. A brainless kite meta.

You have said it yourself:

You also said:

I agree with this 100%. Though they surely influence each other. In other genres complex characters/playstyles often have some kind of advantage over simple characters/playstyles if you master them. Sometimes it’s more versatility, freedom of skill expression, opening up special playstyles, or flat out more powerful options.

In ARPGs though this is not as important, but also plays a role. If you work through the setups required to play with Runic Invocation you should be rewarded for it and the product of that effort should not be another Cinder Strike (and Cinder Strike needs some serious buffs).

Back to your previous statement (just for context):

I don’t know how you come to the conclusion that gameplay would become more tactical. Tactical means that you need to plan on how to move and how to attack. Both are the same with WASD (at least with the PoE2 implementation). You also lose the restriction of not being able to attack while moving which you currently need to plan around (like saving your Teleport to avoid the big slam you know is coming).

It sure makes the combat more complex as in more input heavy. This makes it more involved and active. I like that, but more input heavy does not equal more tactical.

Without redesigning every enemy around this type of movement there is maybe one single mob in the game that would make playing with this interesting. And that is the plant mob that shoots these AoE projectiles that don’t hit you when you are not moving. Without changes this could actually be quite nasty. Probably everything else is defeated by moving and attacking. PoE2 does a good job with this. The design requires you to move (not moving is not really an option for most builds).

Everything is designed around this in PoE2. This is probably one of the reasons we don’t have easy accessible movement skills for all classes. They needed some way to provide weight and meaning to the movement so it wouldn’t devolve into “kite away to enable godmode”. This is not true for LE. Everybody has access to at least one good kiting movement skill. This makes a good implementation of WASD much harder if you want to preserve balance.

Without a shift in design the “kite away godmode” is probably what would happen in LE. Enemies are not equipped to deal with a WASD implementation like in PoE2 and the players are equipped to deal with the movement limitations of mouse movement.

This needs work. A lot of work. I personally would love to see EHG put in the work cause I like WASD. I don’t see this happening anytime soon in any decent fashion.

I personally don’t mind visual jank, but the gameplay impact without rebalancing every movement pattern, attack pattern and probably every player skill would completely destory any semblance of balance left in the game.

So I’m with most people in this thread. Yes to WASD but please not a rushed version. I honestly think that change alone is almost enough to justify doing a LE2 (probably something similiar happenend to PoE2 since it was thought of as an expansion to PoE1 at first but then evolved to it’s own game cause the design was just too different I guess). Of course that won’t happen, I just wanted to state this to underline how big of a change I perceive this to be.

I agree with this 95%. Just a little anecdote. I just played the Monster Hunter Wilds Demo. Great game. Clearly designed around controller. Melee weapons are a blast with controller. But playing bow I love the control scheme of Mouse and Keyboard.
It’s not necessarily the game itself that determines what feels or is better but the thing you do ingame (3rd person melee action game vs 3rd person shooter in this case).

This may also translate a little bit to the current version of LE. Haven’t played this yet but I imagine playing a spin to win Sentinel with Warpath is more fun to control with controller than with mouse/keyboard. This may be the most direct control type of situation we currently have.

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Talking about LE and balance in the same topic is a bit of wishfull thinking. That’s why I’m not a fan. Right now I’m 99.9% certain that WASD implementation would be a shitshow that is only implemented to please the “We need WASD!” crowd. MAYBE WASD will be a good addition once everything that was promised before is in place and WASD is implemented in a way that not lead to WASD>M/K controls like in PoE2 for example.

Still we won’t get to a common ground as long as making a game easier = complexity to you and sure you said it should be balanced but I think everyone who played H&S games with both input methods knows they never were balanced at all.

That is the issue yes and why I say WASD will make LE babymode if they don’t balance the game arround WASD. Balancing the game arround WASD will cripple M/K and M/K will be fubar.

I’m not against implementing WASD at all if it isn’t wastly superrior to M/K and M/K players aren’t forced into WASD if they want to play effectivly without gimping themself.

If you still think that easier = more complex for me after my explanation — no, we won’t.

I saw how people usually play with click-to-move, noticed that they barely dodge and strafe, and thought that with click-to-move, I could do the same and it would be much more boring for me (though probably I still wouldn’t, but then it would be extremely tedious for me to move mouse back and forth). But sure, you can play boring with wasd as well, it just often gives you options to make more interesting plays if you like it. If someone will use it only for going back — totally agree, that it would be only more stupid and not more complex. I personally like to circle around enemies, it makes different groups of enemies to be at different angles from me, and it is kind of interesting trying to keep in mind which enemies are in what direction and how I should move to avoid everything from those directions. And sure, mob design can make it more or less interesting.

And for melee, in my perspective gameplay of melee is around dodging enemy melee attacks by side-stepping or stepping back just as far as it required to be out of range of enemy attack, then immediately step back and attack after they miss their attack. And with click-to-move… Idk, I guess you just going and attacking until it’s dead? No need to learn range, attack angle and attack speed of different enemies, it removes the whole layer of the combat.

Regarding to re-balancing — Idk, maybe you’re right, though I think it would be easier starting to work on it sooner, than breaking balance again later.

I’ll start with this because it’s common ground for both of us. The “kite back godmode” is be avoided, because it’s just stupid to look at and to play.

And here I agree as well. You can also already do this with click to move though. It’s just not as direct and a lot more cumbersome to actually do. It’s a lot of clicking and of course it’s slower if you want to keep doing damage while moving around. I think we both agree that WASD in concept is the more engaging and fun way to play. Of course it’s not for everyone.

And here we are starting to disagree a bit. What you said is not wrong I would just go a step further. Mob design is one of the most important aspects of the games design. And mob design is very dependent on the options available to the player.

I don’t feel like this is true. It’s not removed it’s just a whole lot smaller and adjusted to the control method. I’ll try to explain my point below with examples directly from LE. I’ll put them in spoilers cause it’s gonna be quite long.

Summary

Here an obvious example from LE:
Standing in one of Aberoth Slams is bad news. You don’t want to stand there and just take it.
Same goes for Julras Time Explosion. You don’t want to tank it.

These two are obviously boss mechanics. WASD makes avoiding the Aberoth slams a whole lot easier due to direct control. But it does not do anything for the Julra Time Explosion since it’s “scripted” escape is using the dungeon mechanic.

But even with that the Julra fight is a very good example of how good WASD becomes without changes to the fight. A top of my head here are two things you can do with WASD and attacking while moving:

  1. Move out of the puddle while keeping up DPS. (Small issue, but great for melee builds that leech)
  2. Dodging attacks and keeping up DPS while the spinners are on the ground. (Absolutely great for ranged and with enough ms probably also great for melees)

Don’t get me wrong, I like the sound of these options. But the intended challenge of the fight gets completely undermined with WASD. The control scheme does not change the time explosion but basically everything else in the fight making it way easier.
If you ask me the execution requirement in that fight is already very low (i.e. dodging everything is easy). Adding WASD on top of that makes it even easier due to the new options.
Due to Julras design you actually shrink the layer of proper positioning and recognizing DPS opportunities with WASD since you don’t need to stop in “safe moments” to do your damage. You just move correctly (what you already must do anyway and you do so easier due to direct controls) and keep the DPS up.

But this is a boss. Let’s take a look at regular mobs. I’l try to focus on the ones that are more dangerous in my experience. I’m gonna state some obvious things because they are important for my understanding of the design.

The Avalanch golems. Big, beefy, slow and their Avalanch hits like a truck. There smallish circles on the ground (quite a few of them) and if you aren’t super tanky and you get hit you often take enough damage to get stunned.
The challenge for this mob is either dealing enough damage to kill it before it uses it’s avalanche, and/or move out of the way of the boulders, and/or be tanky enough to kill it through the avalanch and live to tell the tale.
With WASD you combine the first point (killing it) with the second point (moving out of the way).
Again - of course this feels more engaging. It also takes away a lot of the danger. To keep up with the increased mobility of the WASD controls the most direct and simple solution would be to increase the AoE of the Avalanch boulders. Now this is punishing click to move players because for them actually evading the attack becomes a lot more difficult just to provide WASD players a baseline of a challenge.
The same goes for the big necro boys that smash their rock on your head and like to spin to win.

Another example in the same vein: The stalker mobs that move fast and breath an AoE DoT in your face. The cats and bats come to mind.
Their AoE is a lot smaller but they also stay in place when doing their breath. Without specific anti DoT Gear these can actually kill quite quickly. they also like to spawn in packs, meaning their DoTs stack.

These pack tactics get heavily nerfed with WASD, because you don’t ever stand still. So the first one reaches you and breathes. You are already moving away. The second one slightly behind the first one reaches you and by the point of him starting to attack you already moved out of the first AoE. This means the AoEs tend to not overlap as much as it is with the current control scheme.
So it’s not only easier to move out of the dangerous AoE, the mobs also don’t attack as coordinated as before in the first place.

With regular trash mobs though, you are right. They are weak enough that most builds don’t need to avoid their attacks. This means clicking a lot to do the dodge - attack - doge - attack dance is just not worth it. It’s cumbersome.
Of course WASD does this better. You can “dance” around trash mobs without much issues since the inputs are a lot less cluncky. But since WASD does not make you more squishy you also don’t need to it. You can still facetank those with WASD. But it does feel better.

So I hope this explains why I think it’s not only a problem of “interesting” or “dumb” mobs. But a fundamental issue with how movement impacts the game design and how just throwing WASD in there causes a lot of issues that need to be at least thought of before an official release (and I haven’t even touched on how this works with the skills we currently have in the game).

Kudos to everyone actually reading this far.

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I’ve read all your examples :slight_smile: It makes sense, if some things are too easy to dodge, they will never hit, which can make those mobs or bosses completely different from what they intended to be. It can be very easily adjusted with reducing delay before those slams or abilities hit though. Ofc, people who will not use wasd might not survive such adjustment, it is impossible to perfectly balance these two control schemes. But it probably can be balanced good enough, so it would be challenging for wasd and still not way too hard for click-to-movers. Like you said, those abilities are already quite easy to dodge.

Maybe it’s even better to not add wasd at all so it could be perfectly balanced for click-to-movers and sell LE as old school ARPG for old fans, because genre is changing quite fast, couple of new ARPGs should be released soon, while people who wants simpler traditional gameplay will want to play something too. Though PoE 1 is not going anywhere, and few other old ARPGs as well, so it’s not a free niche, but maybe for LE it would be easier to compete in this niche, Idk. With their speed of development, they probably will not keep up with how genre changes anyway.

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I think you are absolutely right with this. It can be done. Will it be easy? Probably not. Not because making those changes is hard but because finding the right changes takes a lot of time. A lot of time to test these changes to make sure they feel right and good.

The only recent point of reference we have for this is PoE2 (I think). The endgame was done within six months according to the devs. That means the rest of the development time was campaign + basic systems (including moving). Since things are always developed alongside each other (cause they depend on each other like enemy design and movement) we can safely say that it took them several years to reach the current state of things. Of course not all of it was spent solely on developing WASD. But I’m pretty sure it took a good chunk of ressources to develop it and then refine it to it’s current state. I think the devs said something to the effect that the core systems took most of the time to create and refine.

Now LE does not have the luxury of being able to design the rest of the game along the development of the movement system. This already has happened for click to move. They however have the luxury of having a working game that works well (enough) with click to move. They can take their time implementing WASD. Maybe they will find a way to make it work and make it work well. Like they did with factions CoF and trade (even though Kulze may argue against this :stuck_out_tongue: ).
I’d rather they use this advantage they have to experiment with several ideas and solutions for WASD than that they rush out a not so well thought out implementation.

Honestly I think from a buisness perspective this may actually be the smarter move.
A lot of people bought LE as a click to move game. And while many players like WASD there are also a lot of player that like click to move more. And some players (probably most players) don’t care either way as long as it’s fun enough. But those that like click to move more than WASD get the short end of the stick since their prefered control scheme is suddenly inferior to the new kid on the block that wasn’t a selling point for the game when they bought it.
We can only speculate about the ratio between the these groups so implementing WASD is not without risk even if the implementation is good enough.

No idea how big the risk is though. Personally I think not developing it while PoE2 is popular is a missed opportunity. LE could very well ride on the tailwind of the success of PoE2 but to do that EHG need a solution that feels mostly up to par with how PoE2 did it. Without a doubt this is difficult to achieve.

Harsh but sadly very fair. The only good thing is that EHG knows this as well and is (at least according to Mike) trying to speed everything up. Time will tell if they manage to do this. If they manage I hope they also manage to tackle the WASD hurdle.
I just talked with a friend that casually plays ARPGs (he like 100h in a single arpg at most but has played several but not all). And I quote:
“After playing PoE2 with WASD I can’t imagine ever going back to games that don’t have it.”

And I think you see this view quite often among the more casual ARPG enjoyers. If EHG want to target those doing WASD is probably the smart choice in the long run.

I don’t think the hardcore ARPG audience really care that much about the control scheme. Sure some would like on more than the other but at the end of the day they play both. They are more motivated with builds, engame/gear progression and pinnacle content than your semi-casual video game enjoyer that maybe plays 20-50h every three seasons or so.

Oh and thanks for reading all those long posts. I know I tend to be long winded. :slight_smile:

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Nah, the core concept they made is fantastic, the realization is just garbage still, at least for MG. CoF is fantastic and only has some minor issues which can be ironed out. MG needs a rework instead. Also they forgot to adjust content regarding the new acquisition speed of gear and hence throwing their already precarious balance completely out the window, which we see the aftermath currently… something that’ll hopefully be fixed to a large degree in 1.2.

It’s the same with WASD and mouse&keyboard. I don’t want EHG to rush into releasing a half thought-through mechanic again like they did with the factions, which while having a solid foundation to work on get utterly negated through the way of their implementation. I would rather enjoy them taking a bit more time to at least provide a ‘presentable’ solution by the time they release and polish it from there for the pieces which were missed or need adjustments.

I played MG with the reset for the first time. Most my issues were UI related (and that some filters were missing). Since this thread is not really about the power level of MG I’ll keep it short: Usability was not where I wished it would be. A friend of mine didn’t even engage because it was so cumbersome to do.
But I never progressed as fast as I did with MG, my builds were never finished faster and I felt like I was cheating cause money was just so easy to get. I sold 150 million plus worth of items, 42 million remaining for stash tabs for my legacy chars. I won’t be playing it again as it is just not my cup of tea and has shown me (again) that I don’t enjoy trade in “exile-likes”.

100% agree. And I honestly think for this feature they are not in a rush doing it (compared to balance, performance and content). I don’t think it would be a bad idea to piggyback off the actual launch of PoE2 1.0 to tap into the hype that the game brings. After the initial surge of players is done with PoE2 they could release the WASD patch (with content of course) in a hopefully decent state and make the switch to LE for the PoE2 downtime more enticing.

I don’t think this would be a bad plan.

“Decent State” is the main issue here. I realy like the EHG devs and they had some awesome ideas… sadly they lack a bit behind in making the ideas a reality. Even GGG messed up WASD big time and as much as I hope for a miracle I still belive a WASD implementation will hurt LE more then it helps because it’ll be mostly flawed and result in even more work while the game isn’t even finished when it comes to basics.

On one side it would be good to throw it out to get more feedback on it but implementing WASD will lead to a never ending tail of even more construction sites ingame and every enemy needs a rework and every second enemy needs a charge or a 50% MS increase to compensate.

I just don’t think it’s worth it right now mostly but I guess making fun of the WASD implementation would make up for it. At the end of the day I think WASD in LE is like killing the patient with the cure.

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I completely agree. I don’t see the overall state of the game as grim as you. I like the game, I’m still playing it and I’m still having fun. Actually I came back to it after enjoying PoE2 for a while.

But I still agree with your assessment that it needs to be somewhat polished and enjoyable.

Of course this means different things to different people. And in that sense I would like to ask what exactly you mean by this:

If you have mentionend this in this tread before just point me back to it (haven’t read all the posts in detail I must admit).
I ask because I really enjoyed their version of it. It has some rough edges that get better over time (like getting stuck on things or mobs and in MP it’s jittering like crazy if you walk in the more or less same place with your mates). But all in all I found it to be very fun and engaging.

So I honestly can’t see how they messed it up big time. Well the only reason I could imagine would be that WASD is still a lot better than click to move. But in my mind they always advertised it as a WASD (not with these exact words but how they talked about it and the movment) game first with the option for classic mouse controls.

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GGG did an awesome job with PoE2 and their implementation of WASD is the best I know of. Then again PoE2 is build arround WASD and it’s painfull to play it with M/K if you compare it to WASD. That’s a mess up in my book because both input methods don’t even come close to each other. They most likely didn’t even try to make both input methods compareable but I see it as a loss.

Yes PoE2 is fun but for my taste they simply underdelivered when it comes to input methods because WASD is so much better and makes the game easier big time if you compare it to M/K even keeping in mind that they improved M/K inputs very much over other games. Non the less every game where X>Y when it comes to input mechanics in the H&S genre is a loss to me.

Why even implement M/K at all when it is far less effective and bad compared to WASD?

That’s why they messed up big time from my point of view because they forced everyone who want to play effective with the time at hand to use WASD and using M/K is a huge time loss in the big picture.

Sure if you don’t care if you lose time or gimp yourself everything is absolutely fine but I’m against systems that offer an inherit advance about the other. Even worse for me is that they made it by choice and didn’t even try to come up with methods that are compareable or closer to each other keeping the raw power difference between M/K and WASD in mind.

In my book that’s a big mess ^^.

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Thanks for explaining. I don’t agree with your opinion on this - at least not in the case of PoE2 and an optional control scheme. Optional being the keyword here.

As you said PoE2 was made to work mainly with WASD. They said so and I think most people expected that.
But the option is there for the people that just vastly prefer mouse and keyboard. Just like almost every console port has a shitty mouse and keyboard control scheme in addition to the original controller support. Hell, I know people that play DMC3, Dark Souls and Elden Ring with M&K and those games, especially the older ones, are really bad with M&K.
If you ask those friends of mine if the game would be better without M&K support the answer would be a clear no. Of course it would be better if the implementation wasn’t so bad. But at least it’s there.
I know the situation is different with these games on pc since not every pc owner is a controller owner. But I think the comparison is still valid.

I see PoE2 in similiar way. M&K is the traditional way to play. They added it in for those that really wanted it to the point that they can’t play the game without it. Even if it means not being optimal.

And I also disagree with this:

They did. Otherwise you would not be able to move in one direction and attack in the other while using M&K. Could it be better? Honestly I don’t know.
I have honestly no idea how to “buff” / change M&K to make it comparable to WASD in speed and control. At least not without limiting WASD heavily.

So no I don’t really think it’s a loss. It’s an additional option. So as to why implement it even though it’s bad? Because it makes the game better for (probably) a few people that really like classic arpgs but are not really interested in efficiency.

Circling back to LE:
I see LE in a tricky situation because of the same principle. They have build the game around M&K. Adding in WASD will most likely - regardless of how they implement it - result in the same situation. WASD will be more effective. As I said above I don’t think it’s really possible to balance the “power level” with each other. M&K is just slower and less controlled. You can’t really change that fact with numbers I think.

So everyone that likes M&K less than WASD will get fucked over with this change (if they do it). I don’t think there is a way around it. Maybe they can come up with some kind enemy behaviour that they implement across the board that makes mobs react differently between each control scheme… But I don’t know if I like the idea of mobs acting differently just because I still use the mouse to move.

The only way to lessen the impact is to make WASD really fun. This means responsive as in the controls feel good, but also feel good in the context of the game with balance and everything else. So most people want to switch over. If people don’t like how it feels because all in all it’s bad it will be a loss. Not only because of wasted dev time but also because people want to be efficient, but to be efficient they need to use a worse feeling control scheme.

So yeah, again, no rushing this. Rushing WASD is just all around a bad idea.

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Usability at first and long-term viability is where it’s not ‘on par’ yet. Long-term viability is related to it keeping functional even in Legacy for a long long time. Which it barely is with not even 5k people playing in total… so imagine if it goes to 10 or 20k regular playerbase in the future. It bricks itself sadly, shouldn’t.

Which is another part of what I’m faulting the execution with. Items early one had ridiculous prices, which was expected, but they fell through the ground with basically nothing being valued higher then 10k nowadays, very very very few exceptions which are respectively rare to get. Expedited through the scaling of corruption as it provides a substantial higher amount of top-tier gear which is also expedited through the scaling system being exponential with higher tiers rather then inverse-exponential like most games have it for a reason.

It simply compounds together with several issues that have ‘not been well thought through’ beforehand.

And this is exactly the point I want EHG not to repeat with a WASD implementation, namely to ‘think it through’ carefully and without an urge to simply throw it out willy-nilly like Factions have been done. CoF is a well balanced mechanic unfitting for the state of the game, but the core of it is… well executed. I simply wonder if it was through sheer luck or actually necessary thought being put into it, because MG… lacks that. Makes me wonder if MG is the sad outlier here or CoF is the lucky one. The second wouldn’t bode well for overall longevity of the game, the first is a mistake simply, one which hasn’t been fixed properly yet though, which is also not a good sign.

I direly hope so! It’s a mechanic many people would really enjoy to have, and especially because of that it should be properly handled, agreed.

And yes, it wouldn’t be a bad plan, if the state of the game were respectively ‘there’ to do so. Which is currently isn’t and would only cause - as mentioned - more of a mess to clean up then they already have.

Because it isn’t for some classes. Warriors for example fare very well with M/K, spellcasters do as well.
Archers on the other hand with the need for high mobility (since evasion is a equilibrium based system and not a luck based one there) fare a ton better with WASD since it offers more options overall. As does direct casting or anything with very high mobility.