Engage/Disengage is a mess

[dunehunter]

I will first list a few fact:

1. A Stunned, Paralyzed, Blinded, Terrified enemy CANNOT be engaged.
2. Flanked and Perception Affliction are tied to each other. So if in a case when Flanked is removed, Perception Affliction will be removed at the same time.
3. Persistent Distraction will cause Flanked when engage enemy, but when leave/disengage it will remove Flanked on enemy.
4. Combine 2) and 3) Persistent Distraction will remove Blinded.
5. Combine 1) and 3) You cannot put Flanked on enemy who is CCed, because CCed enemies are immune to engagement, thus Persistent Distraction become useless.

Edit: I also want to point out, disengage has a time delay when triggered. You will not immediately disengage when u try to leave the circle of enemy. And this will mess up with AI so Disengagement attack is not triggered.

 

Let's imagine this case 2:

1. You are currently engaged with an enemy. Now you try to run away from the enemy. You are about to move out of enemy's engagement circle.
2. Enemy's AI see you are running away, so it decide to chase you.
3. Enemy moved.
4. Enemy lose disengagement attack because a moving target cannot trigger disengagement attack??

Hopefully the dev can polish the engage/disengage system better. I assume the CC enemy immune to engagement is because in Beta, there is a combo Ryngrim's Replusive Visage + Unbroken. So the dev makes CCed enemy immune to engagement. I don't think this is a good solution, maybe a short-term one but not elegant.

 

The case 2 is easy to fix to, remove the disengagement delay(make the engagement circle smaller?), let disengagement attack trigger more easily.

Edited June 7, 2018 by dunehunter

[adragojlovic]

Greetings,

 

Thank you for sharing this to us we'll pas it a long to our development team.

 

Cheers.

[thelee]

I will first list a few fact:

1. A Stunned, Paralyzed, Blinded, Terrified enemy CANNOT be engaged.
2. Flanked and Perception Affliction are tied to each other. So if in a case when Flanked is removed, Perception Affliction will be removed at the same time.
3. Persistent Distraction will cause Flanked when engage enemy, but when leave/disengage it will remove Flanked on enemy.
4. Combine 2) and 3) Persistent Distraction will remove Blinded.
5. Combine 1) and 3) You cannot put Flanked on enemy who is CCed, because CCed enemies are immune to engagement, thus Persistent Distraction become useless.

Edit: I also want to point out, disengage has a time delay when triggered. You will not immediately disengage when u try to leave the circle of enemy. And this will mess up with AI so Disengagement attack is not triggered.

 

Let's imagine this case 2:

1. You are currently engaged with an enemy. Now you try to run away from the enemy. You are about to move out of enemy's engagement circle.
2. Enemy's AI see you are running away, so it decide to chase you.
3. Enemy moved.
4. Enemy lose disengagement attack because a moving target cannot trigger disengagement attack??

Hopefully the dev can polish the engage/disengage system better. I assume the CC enemy immune to engagement is because in Beta, there is a combo Ryngrim's Replusive Visage + Unbroken. So the dev makes CCed enemy immune to engagement. I don't think this is a good solution, maybe a short-term one but not elegant.

 

The case 2 is easy to fix to, remove the disengagement delay(make the engagement circle smaller?), let disengagement attack trigger more easily.

 

i've been bit by variants of #2/3 quite a bit, it's quite annoying.

 

easy way to repro: go to The Hole in the gullet. It's because many pirates tehre have persistent distraction.

 

Hit yourself with some sparkcrackers (you'll get a perception affliction and get flanked) and then attack one of the pirates. you'll get persistent distraction on you. immediately notice that the affliction disappears, it basically gets overridden by persistent distraction. now walk away. you no longer have the sparkcrackers affliction, even if you had many, many tens of seconds on it remaining.

 

now imagine this playing out with any combination of perception afflictions and various flanking/engagement states in actual combat. you can get potentially screwed out of many seconds of debuffs when things play out a certain way.

 

EDIT: also note that your example (movement and not triggering disengagement attack) has been listed as a "Known Issue" in the stickied thread in this forum, but I've seen nothing about getting in fixed yet.

Edited June 7, 2018 by thelee

[Guest Psychovampiric Shield]

#1 also means that there is "target can then disengage without penalty" buff attached to these CC effects, which makes their use a bit tricky at times. Consider this scenario:

 

1) party member A is almost dead, at which point AI directs enemy rogues to use finishing blow, if possible

2) but enemy rogue is engaged and flanked by party members B and C, so finishing blow is not possible

3) enemy rogue gets paralyzed by party member D; engagement is broken

4) paralysis wears off and since the rogue is no longer and not yet again engaged, he can freely run away to execute A

 

100% agree with the topic title, engagement/disengagement is indeed a mess, step back from PoE 1.

 

EDIT:  Actually, I managed to flank CCed enemy:

 

 

Maybe one has to first CC an enemy and then move and surround him. Usually I do it the other way round, first postition characters around and enemy and then CC him, so that they have entire CC duration to land some crits and knock him out.

Anyway, that only makes the point that the system is messy.

Edited July 7, 2018 by Psychovampiric Shield

[Guest Psychovampiric Shield]

I made a short, ugly video, where a snakeman easily disengages from two characters, making one of them miss (out of range) and the other follow him without either of them launching disengagement attack. He himself is remarkably poor at engaging, let alone making disengagement attacks.

Really, what happened to PoE1 system? I liked it, it was so much better than this.

[Guest Psychovampiric Shield]

The time has come again to rant about disengagement. I recorded video 1, video 2, where not only I repeatedly cause a monster, which for some reason can not engage, to miss (out of range), but the monster in turn causes me to miss and freely breaks engagement. This is especially apparent in video 2 where the monster is flanked (= engaged by two characters),  one character moves out (= monster should be engaged by remaining character), monster misses and gives a chase, while the other character misses him with regular attack and makes no disengagement attack whatsoever. WTF?

 

EDIT: also note how terribly not useful long reach weapon (staff) is.

Edited October 14, 2018 by Psychovampiric Shield

[Guest Psychovampiric Shield]

Apparently flanked was decoupled from other afflictions in one of more recent patches.

 

Though most combatants still either incorrectly flank or incorrectly do not make disengagement attacks. That in turn coupled with that out of range nonsense means that most melee combatants are quite pathetic.

[lowdegger]

I thought this was going to be about enemy AI repeatedly disengaging themselves to death but I guess that's just par for the course.