"The hitbox," suggestions for improved combat and fluidity

I read a few posts where people complained about the hitbox. I never fully understood the frustration until I switched from a ranged character to a melee class.

As a ranged character, there is often the desire to adopt a "spray and pray" strategy. Simply point your mouse cursor in the general direction of the enemies, hold down shift and an attack button, and keep at it until they're dead or you have to flee.

As a melee character, holding down the attack button isn't as useful. Your character will swing wildly in the general direction of the mouse cursor and rarely land hits. What I realized though, importantly, is that this has nothing to do with the so called "hit box"

Path of exile has a targeting system such that:
1) when you are not holding down any attack buttons and
2) your mouse cursor is over an enemy
3) that enemy will stay highlighted and your character will attack it for as long as you're holding down the attack button.

In my view, this system is a bit unwieldy for three reasons:
A)In tight combat (as melee players often find themselves) they may not always select the correct enemy first. So that they will have to lift up the attack button, put the cursor over the correct enemy again, then press the attack button again. Not intuitive.
B) Even worse, if a player is holding down the attack button in their siege against a pile of enemies, moving the cursor anywhere else will not tell them the life of the monsters they are selecting, nor will it cause the player to attack other monsters.
C) Worse still, if in the midst of battle a player initially used the mouse to select an enemy for attack, then kills that enemy, the mouse cursor will not select another monster as long as the attack button it still being pressed. The player will attack wildly in the general direction of the cursor, sometimes moving. It requires the player to lift up and depress an attack key again just to select anything else.

These issues are incredibly frustrating for players who want to go through a battle holding down the attack key, even in short bursts.

The solution: When holding down the attack button, your player should ALWAYS be attacking and moving in whatever direction the mouse cursor is pointing. It's really that simple. Currently, it's possible to have your character attacking in one direction while the mouse cursor is pointing in a completely different spot. This is the source of the confusion. Simultaneously, the mouse cursor should always highlight an enemy when it is placed over it, and your character should turn to face that highlighted enemy immediately, even if in mid swing. If these changes are implemented, monster combat, and especially melee, will feel smoother.

A quicker, less complicated fix might involve the character auto-selecting the monster that the cursor is nearest to, regardless of attack button input, but I'm not sure how smooth this would feel.

Yup, that sums it up well. The problems are better described than I could.

In your solution, I suppose you mean "move + attack" when holding the button, then moving the cursor over an enemy, right?

I'm not sure your solution would fix the little moving foward after enemy death that occurs from just clicking each attack on enemies.

i have also experienced a couple of problems related to targeting with diffrent types of attacks, but its warying much depending of the type of attack.

for melee characters i often use the following setup:
Mouse-1: Primary Attack-Skill (most often singletarget)
Mouse-3: Curse or Totem
Mouse-2: Secondary Attack-Skill (most often AoE attack or DPS-Totem)

Only problem with mouse-1 sometimes, if i fail to click the target my character moves instead, but not big problem for melee, however if im a ranged character and fails to click the target with a mouse-1 attack my character will move to the target and i dont want that, so i try to avoid using attacks on mouse-1 with range characters and use Move Only on mouse-1 instead, may look something like this:

Mouse-1: Move only
Mouse-3: Secondary Attack Skill or Totem/Curse
Mouse-2: Primary Attack Skill

only when i run out of slots for all my abilities i will bind some attack to mouse-1 and use shift clicking to not accidently move towards an target.

another problem i have is when myself or other partymembers are using minions, it feels like the game prioritises targeting minions over hostiles, so mouse-1 clicking an enemy that is surounded by zombies and skeletons most often results in moving to one of the minions.

i think one solution for this issue could be an setting in the game options to disable targeting friendly units, and then also having a keybinding to allow you to target them while holding down a button, similar to corpse targeting.

i also like the idea of attack-move for any button except mouse-1 (may cause problems with moving to near the target) but any of the other keys, Diablo 2/3 Have this, bind a melee attack to your mouse-2, if you target the ground with no monsters around you move there, and if there is an enemy near it will be attacked, and if you hold the button down you keep moving and attacking anything in your way until you stop, i liked that.

in Diablo 3 you could also mouse-1 click and hold down on one target and as long as you hold it down and your cursor is over another target when the first one dies you will start attacking the second target without having to release the mouse-1, i think Dungeon Siege 2 also had this or you had to to that with mouse-2 or something :)

For ranged attacks i think it works fine the way it is now in Path of Exile, autotargeting should be for specific skills like it is, i do however really enjoy skills that do autotarget, for example flicker strike with frenzy charges, hold down the button and wreak havoc, or Arc for casters, just put it on mouse-2 and hold down in a group of monsters :)

that reminds me of another skill in Diablo 2, "Strafe" for the Amazon, when you use it your character whould rapidly shoot several arrows with an bow that auto-targets random enemies on your screen,.

How about a support gem for players who like this kind of stuff? :)
"Berzerk"
"Skills suported by this gem attacks/casts randomly on enemy targets in range"
"Increased attack/cast speed"
"reduced accuracy for attacks"
"reduced range for spells"

This whould allow players to make skills like Amazon "Strafe" or Paladin "Zeal" from Diablo 2

as a keystone this whould really change the playstyle of your character:
"All attacks/spells targets randomly"
"100% More Attack/cast Speed" or something :)

The one thing Diablo 3 got right was it's targeting/combat system...(for the most part). It was really smooth aside from the terrible animations. I'm not really exactly sure how to word it for it to make complete sense the way Diablo 3 had it set up but if the combat system that's in diablo 3 made it into PoE, that would be the nuts. IMO at least.

In Diablo 2, characters without an active aura could assign a skill to rclick and "drive" the character around, where the skill would automatically attack the nearest enemy to them.

I remember this not being terrifically necessary except for the 2fpa weresin build, but it helped smooth targeting when you didn't need to hover over the enemy to see its name.

This explains the issues well. I don't find melee characters fun at all in this game and I really enjoy playing a barbarian in Diablo 3.

As far as click-move, I'd also like to see a move key available. You can get surrounded and end up attacking instead of moving, which is even deadlier than clicking the ground and accidentally running toward an opponent. Diablo 3 has an optional keybind for a key that moves you in the direction of your mouse. It gives far superior character control and would be a really nice addition to Path of Exile.

Good post. I have been having a lot of troubles with this lately. I never have any use for the shift-attack as a melee character. I can't start swinging my weapon until the monster is standing right next to me and I have to click that mouse-button until it's broken.

I also agree with MorriganGrey that there should be a move-only option that doesn't take up a skill slot.

A thing I also often worry about: with the default attack, you can (ranged) attack monsters, but not other targetable objects (barrels etc). You always have to use Shift to avoid moving to the object to access it.

I think the OP is spot on and has some good ideas, as well as other posters in this thread.

I've found it helpful as a meleer to have sweep or cleave on one of my mouse buttons as it doesn't require me to click on a target; I push the button, and the attack occurs.

Adding to the requests for move-only as a keybind. It's pretty much unusable in the current state for characters with more than a couple of auras or curses.

Also Shift should (perhaps optionally) stop the character mid-movement in addition to being a toggle for movement during attack.