A very quick plea for Obsidian (combat speed)

[AndreaColombo]

As i have said in another thread, the combat speed is way too fast for me. And please dont suggest reduce recovery with this current speed is a solution. It will be worst.

 

I did mention there should be a slow mode toggle like in the first game, though.

 

I'm OK with combat speed as it is now; I don't want normal speed to be slowed. I want other people to have the option to slow it down without taking the speed I like away

 

As for recovery, to be honest slow drags are unfun and I get bored staring at my men do nothing through an endless recovery. Wearing plate and using two-handers currently curbs your DPS big time and forces you to sit through boring combat sessions. It's fine for 2-handers and plate armor to be comparatively slower, but +100% recovery from plate armor is an exaggeration.

Edited November 21, 2017 by AndreaColombo

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

I like having a gratuitously slow combat speed option. 

 

I'd prefer turn based honestly but slow as heck with all the pause options turned on is a nice second.

[Katarack21]

 

As i have said in another thread, the combat speed is way too fast for me. And please dont suggest reduce recovery with this current speed is a solution. It will be worst.

 

I'm OK with combat speed as it is now; I don't want normal speed to be slowed. I want other people to have the option to slow it down without taking the speed I like away

 

That's *exactly* how I feel. Although honestly, I often run around at and fight in fast mode--I like to set it to pause when finished with an ability or an enemy is killed and also pause a lot manually.

[NoTra]

Hi,

 

I didn't played a lot of combat so, I don't know if I got use to PoE1, but I felt that combat were too fast. I didn't had any problems in BG with play/pause thing, but may be the characters motions or the animations (which are beautiful by the way) make me fell kind of in a hurry when I wanted to take time.

 

I'm not an hardcore rule gamer, I don't know the number of turns in a round (or is it the opposite ?) and don't read that much logs, but it felt too fast for me.

In my opinion, the slow mode button should remain (Q for slow, S for normal and D for fast).

 

Sorry for my not mathematical analysis.

[Tanred]

I'd like having a slow mode instead of relying on manual or auto-pause. I prefer combat to be fluid (albeit slow) than fast and chopped by pauses. Not that I am advocating against auto-pauses, they certainly have their use in more difficult encounters. 

 

On a side note, I have a suspicion that PoE combat needs slow mode not because the combat itself is fast (i.e. animations and recovery are fine imo, maybe with the exception of movement speed) but because it is generally hard to follow due to other factors. Amongst them I'd name in particular:

• chosen camera angle for the isometric view where in PoE characters can disappear behind others quite easily (as compared to the more top-down angle of IE games)
• more elaborate 3D graphics of characters, spells and stuff (however PoE2 is way better than PoE in this regard)
• a relatively short range of spells and ranged weapons
• complex combat systems, many abilities and spells flying around, now also toggable weapon modals, multilayered defenses etc. which all demands to pay closer attention to each moment of combat.

[PangaeaACDC]

I'm finding combat too fast too, by a long margin. In the blink of an eye a character is down, and I don't even know who or what attacked her. Not all of us are from the zero-patience generation. I like to take my sweet time during combat, plan things out and know what the heck is going on. Right now it's confusing and chaotic.

 

A desperate need for a slow down mode.

[jaydee.2k]

Combat speed is way way way too fast. It's total chaos in my eyes. Liked the combat feel in POE 1 a lot more sadly...

[morhilane]

Combat speed is way way way too fast. It's total chaos in my eyes. Liked the combat feel in POE 1 a lot more sadly...

Weird, because POE2 normal combat speed is slower than POE1 normal combat speed (it's close to the slow speed of POE1 actually but with more misses from everyone, including enemies so everyone dies slower).

 

If you find it "way, way, way too fast" are you sure you aren't in fast mode?

[Hariwulf]

At normal speed, combat should flow in real time, which means faster as it is now in the Beta. Between this an the long recovery times, fights are ridiculous idling chores.

 

Slow speed should be re-introduced. Removing options is not adding value, especially good options; plus this would complement real-time speed well.

 

Fast speed should be left as it is.

 

 

I hate to "bash", but Obsidian, this was a short sighted mistake IMO.

[Hariwulf]

 

Combat speed is way way way too fast. It's total chaos in my eyes. Liked the combat feel in POE 1 a lot more sadly...

Weird, because POE2 normal combat speed is slower than POE1 normal combat speed (it's close to the slow speed of POE1 actually but with more misses from everyone, including enemies so everyone dies slower).

 

If you find it "way, way, way too fast" are you sure you aren't in fast mode?

 

 

It is too much slow. Way too much. Real time is bullet-time now. Plus extremely long recovery times. And misses. 4 seconds to swing a sword? Is my character a freaking sloth?

 

 

I didn't bake the game to have it ruined in an attempt to suit to players that are not gonna like it anyway. Enough bending over Obsidian.

[jaydee.2k]

Just reactivate the option for people who want to play in slower speed.

What's the point in removing the option anyhow?

It doesen't make any sense. I can't enjoy the fights like they are now.

This needs to be reimplmented, so that everyone can choose the combat speed they are happy with...

[Tanred]

Just reactivate the option for people who want to play in slower speed.

What's the point in removing the option anyhow?

It doesen't make any sense. I can't enjoy the fights like they are now.

This needs to be reimplmented, so that everyone can choose the combat speed they are happy with...

I'd guess that's because Obsidian wants the normal default speed to be comfortable for most players and tweak the combat mechanics around that speed.

 

If a majority of players, or even a substantial amount of them, prefers speed slower than the default one, then it is a failure in design (and the default speed really can't be called normal).

Edited November 22, 2017 by Tanred

[Hariwulf]

My .02 on combat speed:

 

• Current combat speed is fine for a "normal" setting.
• It can feel too fast at the beginning because a) we're facing lagufaeth, who are fast enemies; b) we are still getting used to new mechanics, which requires time to think our moves in combat.
• Combat did not feel too fast for me when facing enemies like xaurips, delemgan, or wurms. After warming up to the mechanics, it felt all right against lagufaeth too.

However:

 

• A slow mode appears to be called for, if nothing else out of popular demand.
• Increasing recovery times further won't do any good. In fact, it will do harm: Recovery times are already very slow. If you wear plate armor and wield a two-hander, you spend half the encounter staring at your idle guy doing nothing, which isn't fun.

I believe recovery times were good in PoE. If the problem was that we could reach 0 recovery and the team wanted to balance that, just reducing the number of bonuses to recovery that can be obtained and stack would do. Deadfire is not going to have Durgan steel enhancements, that I know of, which was a big contribution to reaching 0 recovery (I also don't believe it's a problem if it can be reached; you had to take very specific steps to achieve it.)

 

100% agree on the whole line.

[Hariwulf]

Just reactivate the option for people who want to play in slower speed.

What's the point in removing the option anyhow?

It doesen't make any sense. I can't enjoy the fights like they are now.

This needs to be reimplmented, so that everyone can choose the combat speed they are happy with...

 

Precisely.

To appeal to some "slow players" (no pun meant), they took away the enjoyment of others. This is so infuriating, they break the game for no reason.

Why take away the choice? Can you believe I cannot play the Beta because of how frustrating is to see those 5 dummies staring at the enemies?

 

I am Not a pro, but I almost never slowed down time in POE1. I just Paused few times.

[Breckmoney]

 

Just reactivate the option for people who want to play in slower speed.

What's the point in removing the option anyhow?

It doesen't make any sense. I can't enjoy the fights like they are now.

This needs to be reimplmented, so that everyone can choose the combat speed they are happy with...

 

Precisely.

To appeal to some "slow players" (no pun meant), they took away the enjoyment of others. This is so infuriating, they break the game for no reason.

Why take away the choice? Can you believe I cannot play the Beta because of how frustrating is to see those 5 dummies staring at the enemies?

 

I am Not a pro, but I almost never slowed down time in POE1. I just Paused few times.

 

 

So are you saying that fast combat speed is even too slow? 

[Katarack21]

I play on fast. I turn to normal on boss battles and big arena fights. In the beta, normal feels like slow, so I'm playing on fast all the time, period.

 

Much pausing ensues.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

I'm always going to use the slowest speed option available. If the game had a 'virtual turn based' setting where it auto paused after every action, I'd use that exclusively (and I pretty much do via the pause options).

[AndreaColombo]

I play on normal speed. For easier fights I can use Fast, but it's generally because I was using it to move around and forgot to toggle it when combat started.

[wbc889]

I want to echo the feedback that combat speed currently feels too fast. In fact, in certain situations the player cannot even find the moment to pause correctly. Whenever combat speed is such that the player no longer has a basic level of control, i.e. pause, then the combat speed is probably too fast.

 

Take, for example, the full frontal fight in Boa Hika Pass. The Lagufaeth can wrap around the player's front line into the back line in a couple of seconds. The player seldom have the reaction time to pause and address the situation as it unfolds. One way a player can address this is to pause the combat every couple of seconds, but this can happen - between - a couple of seconds. Either the Lagufaeth are too fast or the combat speed is too fast.

 

So, like the seasoned players we are we go on to another option: pause after every combat action. But wait, this doesn't work either because if disengagement doesn't fire then the Lagufaeth wraps around the front line anyways.

 

In sum, current combat speed feels (a tad? or a torrent? hard to say) too fast. It gives rise to situations where not even pausing the game is an option to the player. Adding slow motion back would be of value to the game.

[sethillgard]

I also felt like the combat speed was too fast. I don't like having to quickly pause the game in a split second in order to react to a new debuf or enemy action, that makes the game twitchy instead of tactical.

[Clean&Clear]

The normal combat speed is much better now than it was in PoE1, but it still feels a bit too hectic at times, and I believe it is mostly due to 2 things: movement speed and ranges+size of AoEs in general. These two things go hand in hand, so I'll talk about both of them, even though it's not technically combat speed related.

 

One problem I had with PoE1 and it's at this point mostly the same in Deadfire beta is how short most ranges for ranged weapons and casting spells are. Coupled with that are really small AoEs even for traditional "big" AoE spells like fireball.

From a thematic perspective, I would imagine that when casting a fireball in a relatively small room (e. g. the marked tomb in the top center of Poko Kohara second floor), the fireball should cover most of one half of the room, when cast from the other side. Right now, the proclaimed radius of fireball is 2,5 meters, which doesn't really feel good imo. I think it should be around 5m, then it would feel much better, like the good old fireball should. In-game example would be te current size of Merc. Priest Holy radiance. I know the sizes of AoEs were reduced due to it being hard to hit them, but this problem is now gone with retargeting, so they could be made bigger again. Also, I think the hazard of hitting your own characters is part of playing with big AoEs, and solving this through reducing their size imo doesn't feel good.

For the ranges of weapons and spells, they are generaly quite short, and while for some spells and weapons it's intentional, even those that should be the long ones are often still quite short. Coupled with how fast movespeeds can get in combat, where most enemies can close the gap to your backline shooters in around 1 second, I feel like these things combined make the combat feel unnecessary cramped. It should feel like that in dark dungeons, but not on the surface in open maps. Oftentimes It's hard to react to an enemy fighter charging your back line mage, because your mage has to stand close because of his/her short range, and the enemy movespeed makes him get to your mage incredibly fast. While I don't think the game should be about kiting like IE games were, right now I feel like there is barely any kiting possible, and some amount of kiting would seem realistic, logical and would add more tactical options for you in the combat.

For recovery times, I think they are generally fine, incereasing them could make the combat feel too idle.

 

TL;DR: My feedback: Significatnly bigger AoEs, longer ranges and slighty slower movespeeds would imo make the combat pace and combat in general feel great.

 

Slowmode: I think it fits the "play our own way" nature of RPGs, so it would be nice to have it for the people that want it, considering how well it worked in PoE1.

 

EDIT: I went through some more fights trying to focus on movespeeds, and I'm not so sure about slowing them down anymore. Would still be interesting to try it though.

Edited November 27, 2017 by Clean&Clear

[IndiraLightfoot]

Let me put it this way. Even if slowmode existed in Deadfire, and spells really could be retargetted, any AoE-spell still would feel like a waste of time. Such small areas of effect, and an annoying chore to aim it, and only to see it miss a few baddies in slomo, and the rest of them probably just flaunting the barkstring "No pen". I'm not even sure I like that string popping up en masse during combat.

Edited November 27, 2017 by IndiraLightfoot

[Katarack21]

Let me put it this way. Even if slowmode existed in Deadfire, and spells really could be retargetted, any AoE-spell still would feel like a waste of time. Such small areas of effect, and an annoying chore to aim it, and only to see it miss a few baddies in slomo, and the rest of them probably just flaunting the barkstring "No pen". I'm not even sure I like that string popping up en masse during combat.

The "No Pen Bloom", as I call it, really makes me a sad panda.

[Climhazzard]

Spell penetration is just badly balanced at the moment.  Spells should penetrate against everything except for the mobs that are resistant to their damage type, rather than penetrating against nothing except for the mobs that are weak to their damage type.

 

As for the original topic, I agree with the person who said you can't pause>unpause>repause the game fast enough to properly control the positions of your characters and enemies because everything is moving so fast.

Edited November 28, 2017 by Climhazzard

[draego]

1. They are changing combat by making recovery longer for melee and shorter for spells. 

Combat move speed is also being reduced.

Slow Mode issue.