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.