The character animations are (literally) killing me.

...or, why the games pace is suffering from your engine decisions.

straight to the point: a character being locked into a running and/or hitting animation while dozens of mobs attack him, is a bad thing:

you will die in certain situations where there's heavy peak damage coming in. server lag will ensure, that you will lose an unhealthy amount of hit points in situations, where you can't easily predict it. at these times it is imperative to be in control of your avatar, but you not always will be. dying to such an incident is painfully frustrating. it has almost nothing to do with being a bad player, but with the engine not letting you react in a timely manner.

this leads to the side effect, that certain classes will be inherently overpowered and i'm not even starting on pvp here. the most obvious choices are fast hitting ranged and summoning class builds, for obvious reasons. i want to name but a few examples that slow but hard hitting melee characters will always have a major disadvantage in this game:

1. you have to run in melee range and then finish your attack animation: this will take in which the positions of almost all mobs will have changed, which could also lead to even further running. every mob in range will hit you, while ranged mobs will run/walk away from you. all this time is not factored into general dps. while most ranged classes can just start hitting stuff,

2. walking mobs will make you miss, no matter your accuracy rating. i've had this several times. i was trying to kill a ranged mob, who was slowly walking away from my character and my attack animation would always be to slow to hit him in time before he was out of reach. the animation would just make him being stuck on the place while the mob could no longer be reached. nuff said, this isn't reflected in dps either,

3. you will need to be in the middle of some heavy damage to hit mobs, which also requires you to take lots of survivability if you want keep up that dps of yours. so you need lots health, armor, resistances, avoidance in ADDITION to damage and speed. playing a melee damage dealer is really a tricky thing in higher difficulties. certainly much more difficult than playing ranged characters with some disable, like ice damage.


as for the game pace... standing still and casting something for a second every few seconds is like a bad hiccup. so if i want to keep those (power/endurance/frenzy) charges up, i basically have to stand still for short period of time. not only is this very cumbersome, but it's also NOT FUN (killer reason number one) and again it's damaging to melee characters, who have to stand in the middle of the damage just to have some sense of speed at all. while it has appeal to have a bit of tactics every now and then against certain stronger mobs, it certainly is not much fun to single out every other mob from it's group, just to survive normal combat. again this works for some classes (ranged) better than for others (2h melee).

if you don't know what i'm talking about, go and play diablo 2 and check how much "standing still" you have to do there. animation canceling in blizzard games is actually a good thing, even though it most certainly wasn't intended.

"

MaxTheLimit wrote:

Yes, melee characters need more HP and defense to compensate for the increased damage they take. I'm not seeing your point. Ranged casters, and other ranged characters also have to finish their animations, they just tend to be out of rang of attacks more often.

the point is, that you already have to compensate for lost dps enough, only to be hindered by your own slow animation to finish too. my 2h-dd has very slow attack animations. compared to a very fast shooting ranged character this is just obscenely unbalanced. this is true for slow casting witches as it is for slow hitting templars.

"

So? You have to anticipate their movements. Attack them when they are still, or at least still in range of your attack. If they are going to move use an attack that extends your range...

example: if i was to anticipate the movement of a skeleton archer, who is always walking away from me, i will have a certain chance that he will walk in the direction i guessed. i now have to run there BEFORE HE DOES (mostly in the hope, that he won't just make a random turn) and then wait for him there to hit him. but while i'm trying to hit him, he might again just walk away in another direction. my point is, he will NEVER be in range for me, because my slow attack animation, which will also pinpoint me to the place where i'm currently standing, will just not be fast enough to hit him, unless he stands still and attacks me or scratches his skull. i had just such a case, where an archer just walked away from me for like 10s before he decided to just start attacking me at melee range and i there where dozens of times, where some ranged mob would just run WALK away from me, even if just for a few seconds.

"

I'm not sure I agree. My high level chars all seemed to be about the same difficulty wise. Just different. My witch and ranger take less damage, but are less able to withstand damage. Ranged enemies can be a real problem. Melee characters have their difficulties too. I'm not denying that. But it's not supposed to be an EASY game. They aren't just going to stand there and let you kill them.

well i see that the devs wanted to make a challenging game. but you can do that by balancing damage output and hit points as well as tweaking ai. but being limited by the games engine is just infuriating.

"

Yeah it's different, and provides some new challenge. Why is that a bad thing? I may disagree that at high levels characters are more balanced than you are indicating, but really it's a moot point. Balance for late game isn't a good gauge because the proper flow of the acts isn't integrated yet.

As for the pace, I on;y find it a problem quite early in the game. As it moves to later difficulties, the pace increases and becomes quite frantic.

how is it different other than the game makes you pause every other second to do this or that? if this is intended, than i will probably pass on this one, because i can't stand 10s buffs, that need me to be standing still for 1s or running after single mobs, because it's impossible to hit them by design.

the only thing frantic at the games pace later on, is the fact that you have to hit the potion button so much more often and you get extreme damage spikes. it's not kill or be killed, it's balancing the game engines short comings against each other. like lag vs animations.

maybe the game is just not for me. i've played diablo 1+2, dungeon siege 1+2, torchlight, diablo 3 beta and now poe beta (again) and poe is the only game that shows this kind of annoyances. if the engine of a game gets in the way of my game play and thus the fun, it's no good. it's actually so bad, that i had to write about it and that it makes me considering not playing poe in the long run. is that the kind of "different" you are talking about?

"

the point is, that you already have to compensate for lost dps enough, to be hindered by your own slow animation to finish. my 2h-dd has very slow attack animations. compared to a very fast shooting ranged character this is just obscenely unbalanced. this is true for slow casting witches as it is for slow hitting templars.

Have you tried getting IAS? If you invest in increased attack speed the attack animations will be quicker....

By default a ranger shoots a bow pretty slow too. Many melee characters can attack very fast as well and the 'pace' is quite fast. I suggest watching some videos of better players.

"

thepmrc wrote:

"

the point is, that you already have to compensate for lost dps enough, to be hindered by your own slow animation to finish. my 2h-dd has very slow attack animations. compared to a very fast shooting ranged character this is just obscenely unbalanced. this is true for slow casting witches as it is for slow hitting templars.

Have you tried getting IAS? If you invest in increased attack speed the attack animations will be quicker....

By default a ranger shoots a bow pretty slow too. Many melee characters can attack very fast as well and the 'pace' is quite fast. I suggest watching some videos of better players.

are those players better, because they know overpowered builds and just do insane amounts of damage due to the fact of some weird skill interplays, that should not be working in the first place, so that nothing else really matters? could you link me a video, that does not fall into that category?

"

2. walking mobs will make you miss, no matter your accuracy rating. i've had this several times. i was trying to kill a ranged mob, who was slowly walking away from my character and my attack animation would always be to slow to hit him in time before he was out of reach.

I strongly agree with this one. Just small movement to various directions make me miss my melee attacks. It feels extremely annoying, and for this reason I avoid single target melee characters.

Its a fine line you need to tread between having annoying melee in game or having monsters/players who strike you even though you are far away. But I think that range should be increased some, or at the very least make the attack cancel. Its a huge minus currently to this game in my eyes. Dont know how others feel about it.

"

eNTi wrote:

"

thepmrc wrote:

"

the point is, that you already have to compensate for lost dps enough, to be hindered by your own slow animation to finish. my 2h-dd has very slow attack animations. compared to a very fast shooting ranged character this is just obscenely unbalanced. this is true for slow casting witches as it is for slow hitting templars.

Have you tried getting IAS? If you invest in increased attack speed the attack animations will be quicker....

By default a ranger shoots a bow pretty slow too. Many melee characters can attack very fast as well and the 'pace' is quite fast. I suggest watching some videos of better players.

are those players better, because they know overpowered builds and just do insane amounts of damage due to the fact of some weird skill interplays, that should not be working in the first place, so that nothing else really matters? could you link me a video, that does not fall into that category?

Sure. Here is a cool one I saw last night as an example.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/28464

I don't think its just cause they know the overpowered builds and just do insane amounts of damage. It is because they thought through the strengths/weaknesses of a build and optimized it to the best of their ability. Has a lot to do with experience with the game.

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Witheringx wrote:

"

2. walking mobs will make you miss, no matter your accuracy rating. i've had this several times. i was trying to kill a ranged mob, who was slowly walking away from my character and my attack animation would always be to slow to hit him in time before he was out of reach.

I strongly agree with this one. Just small movement to various directions make me miss my melee attacks. It feels extremely annoying, and for this reason I avoid single target melee characters.

Its a fine line you need to tread between having annoying melee in game or having monsters/players who strike you even though you are far away. But I think that range should be increased some, or at the very least make the attack cancel. Its a huge minus currently to this game in my eyes. Dont know how others feel about it.

Have not had too much issue with this, but could see it being a problem especially with slow attacking builds.

"

Witheringx wrote:

"

2. walking mobs will make you miss, no matter your accuracy rating. i've had this several times. i was trying to kill a ranged mob, who was slowly walking away from my character and my attack animation would always be to slow to hit him in time before he was out of reach.

I strongly agree with this one. Just small movement to various directions make me miss my melee attacks. It feels extremely annoying, and for this reason I avoid single target melee characters.

Its a fine line you need to tread between having annoying melee in game or having monsters/players who strike you even though you are far away. But I think that range should be increased some, or at the very least make the attack cancel. Its a huge minus currently to this game in my eyes. Dont know how others feel about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTuKRovG5P0

Seriously, wtf Max! I've posted this bug several timez and you've shot me down everytime, but now a huge portion of the community also experiences this obvious bug and you still can't accept it? Go to hell! I've posted about this bug, commented on several members posts about this bug, yet GGG never acknowledges it , why? Because people like you keep distorting the truth! Its such an obvious bug, I'd go so far as to call the mechanic BROKEN! I have no idea how you can't reproduce or see this error! We're not making this up. You click on a target with melee, it moves before you attack, you miss 100% of the time...