Personally, I never liked the concept of numlocking to autocast stuff, even in D3. It’s hacky and fails to address the issue of a skill that inherently requires to be spammed continuously, or is vastly superior by holding all of your keys down all the time, which is awkward. The most egregious offender for this to me is Diablo 3 Necromancer Cannibalize (good luck playing necro properly without numlocking that skill).
I’m sad to see this practice being more common place in LE. The fact that some of the most fluid and fun builds are using 3 or 4 skills exclusively numlocked gives me pause as to what the future of this game looks like.
Is autocasting by numlocking accepted by EHG? Will there be anything done to address this? Or is it just something I should embrace?
Currently, there will be nothing done against using this feature, but this decision may change, once the game is no longer solely offline.
Here a decently recent post by Sarno
Devs definitely don’t want players to do this and they already did change some skills (most notably Flame Ward to be more situational and not a auto-cast ability).
I am sure skills like Maelstrom and Devouring Orb will most likely be address in terms of their skill tree/base functionality to just make using auto-cast be “weaker” or not using it’s full potetnial, similar to Flame Ward.
I wish there was less need for Numlocking. Devouring Orb would be so much better as permanent “aura” type skill where the Orbs you cast circle you and do their thing indefinitely. Numlocking makes your movement animation so janky and terrible, but it’s necessary because it’s nearly impossible to manually keep maximum uptime while doing everything else if you have 5/5 CDR.
Similarly, anyone who has played a Sigils of Hope build knows how painful it is to have to tap the key every 3s (7 if you waste a 1x4 Idol slot). These are things that might be considered mechanically skillful to manage, but they are not fun at all.
Agreed. This seems definitely be a larger problem for Sentinels in general too. Almost every build uses either Sigil, devouring orbs or abyssal echos to keep void pen stacks up.
I’m currently leveling a void knight warpath build, and im considering switching out sigil for holy aura or something. It’s not going to be as good, but I really want to get away from the necessity of numlocking as best as i can.
I play VK and I’ve seen how to auto-cast. I still just manually spam devouring orbs and dont mind at all. To me it seems like a mechanic that shouldnt exist (NUM-LK) but just my 2 cents as a VK player whos fairly new.
Personally I don’t see the problem here, you use numlock cool you don’t use it also cool.
From a practical point of view its hard to stop numlock/programmes doing autocasting.
I think the dev’s for LE have opted to make it either unneccessary to autocast or make the skill situation as was the case with flame ward.
I think some skills like devouring orb/ring of shield/etc are just going to benefit from numlock autocasting.
Stacking anything with Warpath will be difficult unless you really want to keep dropping in and out of the spin. Later on you’ll want to use the Wings of Argentus for the 40% DR while moving and then it puts you in conflict between dropping out for offense or constantly spinning so as not to drop your defense. It’s one of the few design decisions (having to mechanically maintain buffs) that I don’t like about LE.
In the last stream Mike said that they tolerate the Num Lock but they consider that is a skill needs the num lock, it’s due to a design error in the skill.
Some of us proposed to add a node for certain skills. This node would allow the skill to automatically recast when possible. There may be other solutions.
This is exactly my feeling. If a skill can be held down and continuously cast while moving, there is an issue with the design of the skill (aside from warpath). Either just give it a toggle option or adjust it to be more situational.
