Combat flow is all screwed up, pause and auto-pause need to be fixed

[gkathellar]

I've refrained from putting forth a critique like this until I had more experience with the game, but at this point I feel ready to say that my big problem with Deadfire is not bugs (they'll get fixed), not companions (they're fine, I like the writing), not even difficulty (subjective, and adjustable), but the basic non-responsiveness and awkwardness of the game in the paused state is really bad.

 

I'll give some examples. Note that most of this is specifically in contrast with PoE1, which I just replayed.

• Auto-pause triggers before effects actually resolve. This makes it extremely difficult to make decisions in combat, because while yes, the character is free to receive new orders, you don't necessarily know what those orders should be. On more than one occasion, I've found that Aloth or Xoti completes an offensive spell, and when I try to pause a second time to see what the spell actually did, I end up unpausing a second auto-pause. It makes fights extremely frustrating.
• Auto-pause in general is haphazard at best. I suppose this might be a bug thing, but "target destroyed" in particular is broken and doesn't appear to work a significant portion of the time. Many attack-based abilities seem to have problems triggering auto-pause, which is especially bad since those abilities do not seem to trigger engagement or set the character to follow up with normal attacks as they did in PoE2.
• In many cases, the action indicators do not respond to new orders when they are given, making it difficult to determine what's happening, if a character can't perform an action, if they've cancelled out of the action, etc. This becomes a serious problem in terms of positioning, as very often neither the movement targeting reticule nor the little footprints icon displays when a character is told to move. It also causes issues with spells - on several occasions I've abandoned casting a spell by accident, but still lost the resource, because I could not tell whether my character was casting the spell, waiting to cast the spell, or what.
• While I like the classification of immunities and resistances by attribute, presenting them in this way is extremely awkward. In PoE1, I could look at an enemy's visible info, and know which abilities they were immune. Here, I can look at an enemy's visible info, and know they're ... resistant to Might afflictions and immune to Dexterity afflictions, which I think includes Stun, ooh, lemme check, oh Stun is Might and wait is Prone Dex or something else and etc.
• I want to put in a special note about micro: some people complained that PoE1 had too much micromanagement, but my experience was that the management aspect was actually quite organic and felt natural (if tedious during trash mob fights that shouldn't have existed). Here, the micromanagement is dramatically worse not because of encounter powers, not because of greater complexity, but because the game is so very unresponsive. In light of this, reducing the party size strikes me as the exact wrong way to reduce micro, since clearly the problem is with the interface.
• Edit (remembered another thing): Some GUI stuff is strictly inferior to PoE1 - notably, why doesn't Carnage have a visible AoE indicator?

 

Because it's 0500 at time of posting for me and I need to eat breakfast, this is not a full list of complaints (If anyone wants that, I can fire up the game and do a couple of fights and articulate the rest). But in general, my experience has been that the biggest problem with PoE2 is the flow and structure of combat. The game mechanics are in many ways strictly improved from the first game, but the implementation of those mechanics is extremely gawky, arguably even more so than during the later stages of the original's backer beta.

 

I really, really like this game ... in theory. But when combat is such a big part of the experience, decipherability is important, and in this case I can feel its lack.

 

tl;dr Please, please fix the auto-pause timing for "ability used" to trigger after initial hits and damage are confirmed, such that the outcome of the action can be seen and selection for new abilities doesn't go into an invisible queue. Make it as it was in PoE1. It will make the combat a lot smoother.

Edited June 3, 2018 by gkathellar

[Hulk'O'Saurus]

Ugh... I don't know, man. I think it might be a subjective thing.

 

Honestly, I really can't dig what you're at with this post--pausing works for me just like it does in PoE. And I don't mind the micromanagement either. That said, I don't use any AI behaviour other than the fighter aggressive because they just spam the knock down.

 

Then again, I am a MOBA player and for me pausing to reassess the combat every second is not an issue; I actually enjoy it, so it might be that. 

[gkathellar]

Ugh... I don't know, man. I think it might be a subjective thing.

 

Honestly, I really can't dig what you're at with this post--pausing works for me just like it does in PoE. And I don't mind the micromanagement either. That said, I don't use any AI behaviour other than the fighter aggressive because they just spam the knock down.

 

Then again, I am a MOBA player and for me pausing to reassess the combat every second is not an issue; I actually enjoy it, so it might be that.

 

I don't use the AI at all, and I love RTwP gameplay. The problem is that the game is not responsive while paused, so it feels like a distressing portion of the time I give orders and don't know what's going to happen.

[Nights86]

I agree with everything you said. I noticed some UI improvements in 1.1, like the chanter phrase indicator moving a bit, so there's hope for the future.

[Purudaya]

It sounds like you're using auto-pause after every resolved action - are you trying to simulate round/turn-based combat? If so, that's why it might feel a little clunky (I don't have enough experience with that style of gameplay to compare it to PoE1, so I can't really offer much insight there).

On PotD, I play with auto-pause on trap detected, enemy sighted (for stealth), and combat start only. With combat speed turned slightly up, I then pause manually about every 1.5 - 2 seconds to issue commands/check results. So far, this has flowed really smoothly for me - you see actions happen fast and can then pause as soon as a spell/ability is done firing to queue up a new one or reposition.

Alternatively, maybe your playstyle would benefit from turning combat speed down? Would give you more time to identify whether the action indicator lag is the result of the game or some state your character is in. Keep in mind that being interrupted prevents you from completing/queueing an action and does not show up as an affliction (interrupts can be found in the combat log).

I totally agree with you about afflictions being awkward at first, but you eventually get used to them. It would be nice if they implemented an icon or color-coded system to these so that inspirations and afflictions could be more easily countered. There's actually a decent-looking mod that does exactly this: https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/32

[JFutral]

I don't use auto-pause for much, but I kind of agree in the conflict between manual pausing and auto-pausing and some of the auto-pausing being a bit confusing.

 

I kind of wish manually pausing had some sort of overriding function. Even when I trim auto-pause down to "Combat start" and "Action compete" auto pauses, my manual pausing sometimes tends to hit just after the auto-pause and I end up not pausing at all. That is very frustrating. So then I get into double tapping my space bar and everything goes sideways quickly.

 

I do not like the current method of inspiration AND afflictions titling. I hated in PoE1 that there were 15 different ways to get stuck and each way needed its own remedy. This is worse. Now I don't even know what each inspiration does or which affliction I can cast affects what attribute of the enemy. The signifiers don't directly match the signifieds. They are all (at least) one step removed.

 

Joe

[gkathellar]

It sounds like you're using auto-pause after every resolved action - are you trying to simulate round/turn-based combat? If so, that's why it might feel a little clunky (I don't have enough experience with that style of gameplay to compare it to PoE1, so I can't really offer much insight there).

 

On PotD, I play with auto-pause on trap detected, enemy sighted (for stealth), and combat start only. With combat speed turned slightly up, I then pause manually about every 1.5 - 2 seconds to issue commands/check results. So far, this has flowed really smoothly for me - you see actions happen fast and can then pause as soon as a spell/ability is done firing to queue up a new one or reposition.

 

Alternatively, maybe your playstyle would benefit from turning combat speed down? Would give you more time to identify whether the action indicator lag is the result of the game or some state your character is in. Keep in mind that being interrupted prevents you from completing/queueing an action and does not show up as an affliction (interrupts can be found in the combat log).

 

I totally agree with you about afflictions being awkward at first, but you eventually get used to them. It would be nice if they implemented an icon or color-coded system to these so that inspirations and afflictions could be more easily countered. There's actually a decent-looking mod that does exactly this: https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/32

It's how I played all of the IE games, and how I was comfortable playing PoE, so it's a bit of a sticking point for me.

 

The reason I stress the timing of the autopauses so much is for two reasons. Firstly, the current timing doesn't provide much information about your action's result. Second, I think it's the simplest solution to a more complex problem. As you've likely observed, normally, when you issue a command, the GUI gives you several indicators that it has registered, notably a little icon in the "what am I doing" circle on the left of a character's overhead/top left of their portrait. However, there seem to be a multitude of junctures where the action queues up, but the GUI will not acknowledge it until a bit of time has passed, leaving a sad, empty little circle. This gets especially bad if the action fails to queue, which it does at times, or in the case of movement, where even the green crosshairs will fail to appear when you first click. In general I feel the game does a very poor job of affording me a comfortable level of tactical control.

 

Now, it looks like I could get around a lot of this through use of the fairly robust AI system. But I'm really pretty uninterested in the game playing itself, so ... yeah. YMMV.

[BalkothTheFeared]

tl;dr Please, please fix the auto-pause timing for "ability used" to trigger after initial hits and damage are confirmed, such that the outcome of the action can be seen and selection for new abilities doesn't go into an invisible queue. Make it as it was in PoE1. It will make the combat a lot smoother.

 

I would rather they just add a "If enemy is hit with a spell" pause trigger. That way if I use the "Pause after spell cast" is triggered, I can immediately queue up another move.

[Wormerine]

All seem like a worthy suggestions, though I must say, I didn't notice anything of the sort, but combat was easy enough for me not to care if indeed, I have missed something. 

[the_dog_days]

Another thing I'd like to see Obs change is separating 'weapon ineffective' and 'damage immunity' auto pause options. Weapon ineffective means I'm still dong some damage and I don't want to auto pause for these vs damage immunity means I'm doing nothing and is when I want an auto pause.

[rhugga]

I've refrained from putting forth a critique like this until I had more experience with the game, but at this point I feel ready to say that my big problem with Deadfire is not bugs (they'll get fixed), not companions (they're fine, I like the writing), not even difficulty (subjective, and adjustable), but the basic non-responsiveness and awkwardness of the game in the paused state is really bad.

 

I'll give some examples. Note that most of this is specifically in contrast with PoE1, which I just replayed.

• Auto-pause triggers before effects actually resolve. This makes it extremely difficult to make decisions in combat, because while yes, the character is free to receive new orders, you don't necessarily know what those orders should be. On more than one occasion, I've found that Aloth or Xoti completes an offensive spell, and when I try to pause a second time to see what the spell actually did, I end up unpausing a second auto-pause. It makes fights extremely frustrating.
• Auto-pause in general is haphazard at best. I suppose this might be a bug thing, but "target destroyed" in particular is broken and doesn't appear to work a significant portion of the time. Many attack-based abilities seem to have problems triggering auto-pause, which is especially bad since those abilities do not seem to trigger engagement or set the character to follow up with normal attacks as they did in PoE2.
• In many cases, the action indicators do not respond to new orders when they are given, making it difficult to determine what's happening, if a character can't perform an action, if they've cancelled out of the action, etc. This becomes a serious problem in terms of positioning, as very often neither the movement targeting reticule nor the little footprints icon displays when a character is told to move. It also causes issues with spells - on several occasions I've abandoned casting a spell by accident, but still lost the resource, because I could not tell whether my character was casting the spell, waiting to cast the spell, or what.
• While I like the classification of immunities and resistances by attribute, presenting them in this way is extremely awkward. In PoE1, I could look at an enemy's visible info, and know which abilities they were immune. Here, I can look at an enemy's visible info, and know they're ... resistant to Might afflictions and immune to Dexterity afflictions, which I think includes Stun, ooh, lemme check, oh Stun is Might and wait is Prone Dex or something else and etc.
• I want to put in a special note about micro: some people complained that PoE1 had too much micromanagement, but my experience was that the management aspect was actually quite organic and felt natural (if tedious during trash mob fights that shouldn't have existed). Here, the micromanagement is dramatically worse not because of encounter powers, not because of greater complexity, but because the game is so very unresponsive. In light of this, reducing the party size strikes me as the exact wrong way to reduce micro, since clearly the problem is with the interface.
• Edit (remembered another thing): Some GUI stuff is strictly inferior to PoE1 - notably, why doesn't Carnage have a visible AoE indicator?

 

Because it's 0500 at time of posting for me and I need to eat breakfast, this is not a full list of complaints (If anyone wants that, I can fire up the game and do a couple of fights and articulate the rest). But in general, my experience has been that the biggest problem with PoE2 is the flow and structure of combat. The game mechanics are in many ways strictly improved from the first game, but the implementation of those mechanics is extremely gawky, arguably even more so than during the later stages of the original's backer beta.

 

I really, really like this game ... in theory. But when combat is such a big part of the experience, decipherability is important, and in this case I can feel its lack.

 

tl;dr Please, please fix the auto-pause timing for "ability used" to trigger after initial hits and damage are confirmed, such that the outcome of the action can be seen and selection for new abilities doesn't go into an invisible queue. Make it as it was in PoE1. It will make the combat a lot smoother.

 

 

It needs to be action-point/turn-based, otherwise it's just an arcade style joke.

[Purudaya]

 

I've refrained from putting forth a critique like this until I had more experience with the game, but at this point I feel ready to say that my big problem with Deadfire is not bugs (they'll get fixed), not companions (they're fine, I like the writing), not even difficulty (subjective, and adjustable), but the basic non-responsiveness and awkwardness of the game in the paused state is really bad.

 

I'll give some examples. Note that most of this is specifically in contrast with PoE1, which I just replayed.

• Auto-pause triggers before effects actually resolve. This makes it extremely difficult to make decisions in combat, because while yes, the character is free to receive new orders, you don't necessarily know what those orders should be. On more than one occasion, I've found that Aloth or Xoti completes an offensive spell, and when I try to pause a second time to see what the spell actually did, I end up unpausing a second auto-pause. It makes fights extremely frustrating.
• Auto-pause in general is haphazard at best. I suppose this might be a bug thing, but "target destroyed" in particular is broken and doesn't appear to work a significant portion of the time. Many attack-based abilities seem to have problems triggering auto-pause, which is especially bad since those abilities do not seem to trigger engagement or set the character to follow up with normal attacks as they did in PoE2.
• In many cases, the action indicators do not respond to new orders when they are given, making it difficult to determine what's happening, if a character can't perform an action, if they've cancelled out of the action, etc. This becomes a serious problem in terms of positioning, as very often neither the movement targeting reticule nor the little footprints icon displays when a character is told to move. It also causes issues with spells - on several occasions I've abandoned casting a spell by accident, but still lost the resource, because I could not tell whether my character was casting the spell, waiting to cast the spell, or what.
• While I like the classification of immunities and resistances by attribute, presenting them in this way is extremely awkward. In PoE1, I could look at an enemy's visible info, and know which abilities they were immune. Here, I can look at an enemy's visible info, and know they're ... resistant to Might afflictions and immune to Dexterity afflictions, which I think includes Stun, ooh, lemme check, oh Stun is Might and wait is Prone Dex or something else and etc.
• I want to put in a special note about micro: some people complained that PoE1 had too much micromanagement, but my experience was that the management aspect was actually quite organic and felt natural (if tedious during trash mob fights that shouldn't have existed). Here, the micromanagement is dramatically worse not because of encounter powers, not because of greater complexity, but because the game is so very unresponsive. In light of this, reducing the party size strikes me as the exact wrong way to reduce micro, since clearly the problem is with the interface.
• Edit (remembered another thing): Some GUI stuff is strictly inferior to PoE1 - notably, why doesn't Carnage have a visible AoE indicator?

 

Because it's 0500 at time of posting for me and I need to eat breakfast, this is not a full list of complaints (If anyone wants that, I can fire up the game and do a couple of fights and articulate the rest). But in general, my experience has been that the biggest problem with PoE2 is the flow and structure of combat. The game mechanics are in many ways strictly improved from the first game, but the implementation of those mechanics is extremely gawky, arguably even more so than during the later stages of the original's backer beta.

 

I really, really like this game ... in theory. But when combat is such a big part of the experience, decipherability is important, and in this case I can feel its lack.

 

tl;dr Please, please fix the auto-pause timing for "ability used" to trigger after initial hits and damage are confirmed, such that the outcome of the action can be seen and selection for new abilities doesn't go into an invisible queue. Make it as it was in PoE1. It will make the combat a lot smoother.

 

 

It needs to be action-point/turn-based, otherwise it's just an arcade style joke.

 

 

I can't stand turn-based, personally - real combat isn't turn-based and playing a CRPG shouldn't feel like a board game. Still can't bring myself to enjoy the Divinity series because of the combat...it just looks and feels ridiculous. 

 

 

 

It sounds like you're using auto-pause after every resolved action - are you trying to simulate round/turn-based combat? If so, that's why it might feel a little clunky (I don't have enough experience with that style of gameplay to compare it to PoE1, so I can't really offer much insight there).

 

On PotD, I play with auto-pause on trap detected, enemy sighted (for stealth), and combat start only. With combat speed turned slightly up, I then pause manually about every 1.5 - 2 seconds to issue commands/check results. So far, this has flowed really smoothly for me - you see actions happen fast and can then pause as soon as a spell/ability is done firing to queue up a new one or reposition.

 

Alternatively, maybe your playstyle would benefit from turning combat speed down? Would give you more time to identify whether the action indicator lag is the result of the game or some state your character is in. Keep in mind that being interrupted prevents you from completing/queueing an action and does not show up as an affliction (interrupts can be found in the combat log).

 

I totally agree with you about afflictions being awkward at first, but you eventually get used to them. It would be nice if they implemented an icon or color-coded system to these so that inspirations and afflictions could be more easily countered. There's actually a decent-looking mod that does exactly this: https://www.nexusmods.com/pillarsofeternity2/mods/32

It's how I played all of the IE games, and how I was comfortable playing PoE, so it's a bit of a sticking point for me.

 

The reason I stress the timing of the autopauses so much is for two reasons. Firstly, the current timing doesn't provide much information about your action's result. Second, I think it's the simplest solution to a more complex problem. As you've likely observed, normally, when you issue a command, the GUI gives you several indicators that it has registered, notably a little icon in the "what am I doing" circle on the left of a character's overhead/top left of their portrait. However, there seem to be a multitude of junctures where the action queues up, but the GUI will not acknowledge it until a bit of time has passed, leaving a sad, empty little circle. This gets especially bad if the action fails to queue, which it does at times, or in the case of movement, where even the green crosshairs will fail to appear when you first click. In general I feel the game does a very poor job of affording me a comfortable level of tactical control.

 

Now, it looks like I could get around a lot of this through use of the fairly robust AI system. But I'm really pretty uninterested in the game playing itself, so ... yeah. YMMV.

 

 

I guess I'm just not experiencing what you're observing with the GUI. Maybe ask in the tech support forum for some clarification on what causes hangups in the queue - if it's identified as a bug, great, but even if it's not maybe enough other people are bothered by it to justify a new patch feature or something.

[Lokithecat]

I don't use the AI at all, and I love RTwP gameplay. The problem is that the game is not responsive while paused, so it feels like a distressing portion of the time I give orders and don't know what's going to happen.

 

If you're not using the AI, and are attempting to rely on Auto Pause + Manual pausing to issue orders, I'm not surprised in the slightest that you are having problems.  While it sounds reasonable that you should be able to do this, it doesn't really seem that was the way the game was designed to work.

 

Hopefully if there's an issue with icons indicating your actions, gets cleared up. 

 

Or, maybe they might one day add in two buttons for Start / Stop Pause, instead of one that just toggles...  Then, if you have your auto stop, and you want to advance a second to see how your spell / effect landed, you could press the 'Start Time' button, to have time continue, and use your 'Stop Time' to halt it.  That way, if you hit the Stop button, just as an Autopause triggered, you wouldn't accidentally restart the combat.  (at least I think that's what you were saying in one of your posts)

 

Otherwise, maybe just try removing some of the autopause triggers, and adding in the time based one, so it pauses every 2 (or w/ever seconds).

 

But the best option, that you could do right now, without waiting for fixes... would be to try creating some AI Scripts.  They are impressively flexible, while I certainly wouldn't let them self govern their way through all the fights, you can at least keep them doing 'reasonable' things, til you over ride them with specific orders.

[Katarack21]

 

I've refrained from putting forth a critique like this until I had more experience with the game, but at this point I feel ready to say that my big problem with Deadfire is not bugs (they'll get fixed), not companions (they're fine, I like the writing), not even difficulty (subjective, and adjustable), but the basic non-responsiveness and awkwardness of the game in the paused state is really bad.

 

I'll give some examples. Note that most of this is specifically in contrast with PoE1, which I just replayed.

• Auto-pause triggers before effects actually resolve. This makes it extremely difficult to make decisions in combat, because while yes, the character is free to receive new orders, you don't necessarily know what those orders should be. On more than one occasion, I've found that Aloth or Xoti completes an offensive spell, and when I try to pause a second time to see what the spell actually did, I end up unpausing a second auto-pause. It makes fights extremely frustrating.
• Auto-pause in general is haphazard at best. I suppose this might be a bug thing, but "target destroyed" in particular is broken and doesn't appear to work a significant portion of the time. Many attack-based abilities seem to have problems triggering auto-pause, which is especially bad since those abilities do not seem to trigger engagement or set the character to follow up with normal attacks as they did in PoE2.
• In many cases, the action indicators do not respond to new orders when they are given, making it difficult to determine what's happening, if a character can't perform an action, if they've cancelled out of the action, etc. This becomes a serious problem in terms of positioning, as very often neither the movement targeting reticule nor the little footprints icon displays when a character is told to move. It also causes issues with spells - on several occasions I've abandoned casting a spell by accident, but still lost the resource, because I could not tell whether my character was casting the spell, waiting to cast the spell, or what.
• While I like the classification of immunities and resistances by attribute, presenting them in this way is extremely awkward. In PoE1, I could look at an enemy's visible info, and know which abilities they were immune. Here, I can look at an enemy's visible info, and know they're ... resistant to Might afflictions and immune to Dexterity afflictions, which I think includes Stun, ooh, lemme check, oh Stun is Might and wait is Prone Dex or something else and etc.
• I want to put in a special note about micro: some people complained that PoE1 had too much micromanagement, but my experience was that the management aspect was actually quite organic and felt natural (if tedious during trash mob fights that shouldn't have existed). Here, the micromanagement is dramatically worse not because of encounter powers, not because of greater complexity, but because the game is so very unresponsive. In light of this, reducing the party size strikes me as the exact wrong way to reduce micro, since clearly the problem is with the interface.
• Edit (remembered another thing): Some GUI stuff is strictly inferior to PoE1 - notably, why doesn't Carnage have a visible AoE indicator?

 

Because it's 0500 at time of posting for me and I need to eat breakfast, this is not a full list of complaints (If anyone wants that, I can fire up the game and do a couple of fights and articulate the rest). But in general, my experience has been that the biggest problem with PoE2 is the flow and structure of combat. The game mechanics are in many ways strictly improved from the first game, but the implementation of those mechanics is extremely gawky, arguably even more so than during the later stages of the original's backer beta.

 

I really, really like this game ... in theory. But when combat is such a big part of the experience, decipherability is important, and in this case I can feel its lack.

 

tl;dr Please, please fix the auto-pause timing for "ability used" to trigger after initial hits and damage are confirmed, such that the outcome of the action can be seen and selection for new abilities doesn't go into an invisible queue. Make it as it was in PoE1. It will make the combat a lot smoother.

 

 

It needs to be action-point/turn-based, otherwise it's just an arcade style joke.

 

 

Um....no. If you want turn-based games, there's plenty for you. This game is designed for the RTwP crowd. If you don't like it, that's fine, it's just not the game for you.

[wih]

 

Or, maybe they might one day add in two buttons for Start / Stop Pause, instead of one that just toggles...  Then, if you have your auto stop, and you want to advance a second to see how your spell / effect landed, you could press the 'Start Time' button, to have time continue, and use your 'Stop Time' to halt it.  That way, if you hit the Stop button, just as an Autopause triggered, you wouldn't accidentally restart the combat.  (at least I think that's what you were saying in one of your posts)

 

 

This toggle thing for the pause is a pain point in the game. It conflicts badly with the autopause options and limits their usefulness. The game definitely needs separate hotkeys for pausing and unpausing.

[Rumpelstilskin]

the problem with auto-pause on action is that many spells don't act instantly, they launch a projectile or something similar that takes a while to hit, and it would be a waste to have your character do noting waiting for it to happen. of course, a lot of other spells are instant (or should be instant based on the description), but i guess they didn't bother to make a special case for that. but yeah, i found that delay a bit annoying as well. i always play on the lowest combat speed though, so it's not too terrible (as in not much can happen while i unpause/re-pause)

[Sven_]

Auto-pause seems to be triggered outside of combat as well, e.g. City Exploration and NPCs, at least on mine. Trying to demand this to be turn-based is pointless, both real-time and TB have their merits. Though I'd argue quite a few mechanics come from a tb mould rather than a real-time one readily -- more so than in the IE games. If given the freedom, I have a suspicious Sawyer and co. would have opted for something more TB, be it traditional or something similar to older Final Fantasy games with their active time battles. This extents to other areas as well -- IE games were class based, so class based this is going to be -- except not quite like you knew those classes before. That may be my perception bias after having followed dev statements, but I think compromise shows in multiple areas.

The Overall Combat as such flows pretty nicely, it's when you try to get into the mechanically nitty-gritty that things get a bit more complicated thus. This starts with fairly simple things -- all damage indicators being of the same colour in the main screen, friend or foe. No immediate easy feedback as to whether hits crit. etc. But also the new affliction/inspiration system: There's modders that try to make it a little more transparent with quite simple overhauls. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/100337-mod-release-color-coded-afflictions-and-inspirations/

Edited June 4, 2018 by Sven_

[powerofvoid]

I don't use auto-pause for much, but I kind of agree in the conflict between manual pausing and auto-pausing and some of the auto-pausing being a bit confusing.

 

I kind of wish manually pausing had some sort of overriding function. Even when I trim auto-pause down to "Combat start" and "Action compete" auto pauses, my manual pausing sometimes tends to hit just after the auto-pause and I end up not pausing at all. That is very frustrating. So then I get into double tapping my space bar and everything goes sideways quickly.

I was about to make a thread about this exact thing.

 

In a pitched battle, it can sometimes be a second or two (or what feels like it) before the game actually responds to my pause command.

[JFutral]

Auto-pause seems to be triggered outside of combat as well, e.g. City Exploration and NPCs, at least on mine. Trying to demand this to be turn-based is pointless, both real-time and TB have their merits. Though I'd argue quite a few mechanics come from a tb mould rather than a real-time one readily -- more so than in the IE games. If given the freedom, I have a suspicious Sawyer and co. would have opted for something more TB, be it traditional or something similar to older Final Fantasy games with their active time battles. This extents to other areas as well -- IE games were class based, so class based this is going to be -- except not quite like you knew those classes before. That may be my perception bias after having followed dev statements, but I think compromise shows in multiple areas.

 

The Overall Combat as such flows pretty nicely, it's when you try to get into the mechanically nitty-gritty that things get a bit more complicated thus. This starts with fairly simple things -- all damage indicators being of the same colour in the main screen, friend or foe. No immediate easy feedback as to whether hits crit. etc. But also the new affliction/inspiration system: There's modders that try to make it a little more transparent with quite simple overhauls. https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/100337-mod-release-color-coded-afflictions-and-inspirations/

 

That in itself is probably bad enough. But there is also often a lag when the game decides it wants to pause and when you want it to pause. that REALLY throws things off. I know I don't have the most current laptop, but it is still an i7 dual core.

 

Joe

[InsaneCommander]

It's how I played all of the IE games, and how I was comfortable playing PoE, so it's a bit of a sticking point for me.

 

I play the same way and I hope they change it back to how it was in PoE1. I never saw this happening there, an ability finishing and no effect yet.