The Controller Beta needs serious improvements to "A" Button priority

What with Controller support leaving beta in a few days, I figured I ought to shine a light on what is by far the biggest problem with the Controller Beta right now: "A" button priority.

What do I mean by this? Well, the "A" button on the controller is used for a lot of things - Looting items, interacting with clickables, and even also using your skill assigned to the "A" button slot. As a result, you end up assigning your primary attack skill to a button other than "A", and putting some sort of support ability on that button. The game then prioritizes what the "A" button does based on a variety of factors.

It doesn't do a very good job at it.

The way it seems to work, is that if there are any enemies near you AT ALL, it will prioritize using the "A" button as your skill in the "A" slot. This will remain true even if you are standing on top of loot, or a league interactable, or that skill is currently on cooldown, or - infuriatingly - EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE A SKILL IN THE "A" SLOT. The game just... eats your "A" button inputs trying to use it, anyways.

Meaning that if any enemies are anywhere near you, you cannot loot items or click league interactables. While this might be fine for leveling, at endgame, where there are huge swarms of enemies and you often want to to click a shrine or pick up loot while running through a map, this is a HUGE problem. And the more your maps are juiced, the worse it gets.

Things get worse though.

Additionally, the game will prioritize interactables over loot. This leads to infuriating situations in the case of portals or boss room entrances, where if you have a portal near some loot, you can't pick up that loot without sitting there for like 30s using the right stick to manually select each piece of loot one at a time.



In practice, let me highlight a number of common situations where the current priority creates problems:

1. Looting in general - You see 3 pieces of loot. You hit the "A" button 3 times. There's somehow still 2 pieces of loot on the ground. You hit it 2 more times. There's still 1 piece of loot on the ground. This creates a situation where I just run in little circles around loot on the ground mashing the "A" button until it's finally all gone. It's the worst.

2. Shrines - You cannot pick up shrine buffs if monsters are nearby, which is a huge problem since they're literally designed for you to run in and click them ASAP, even before killing the mobs (Bonus - this makes divine shrines impossible to deal with on controller)

3. Delving - If you run into the darkness, you cannot click any chests or other interactables without first throwing down a flare and killing every enemy nearby. Considering you're SUPPOSED to dip into the darkness now and again without tossing down a flare to grab interactables, this is a real problem

4. Conqueror maps - When you kill the map boss, a portal spawns. So does a bunch of loot. You cannot loot any of the map boss loot without using the right stick, because the "A" button will always select the portal into the conqueror boss every single time. Even after the conqueror is dead.

5. League Interactables in maps - You can't click any league interactable in a map until ALL nearby enemies are dead. This is super annoying in general, as you generally want to start a blight/open Alva up as soon as you find her, but it's a HUGE problem in delirium maps, where mechanics pause your timer, but you just keep mashing the "A" button and the damn mechanic JUST WON'T START. It's especially bad, too, if your map has Beyond, and that beyond demon has spawned a ton of unkillable Raging Spirits, as those count as enemies nearby, and render you unable to do anything with your "A" button until they despawn.



So, things are bad at endgame with a controller atm. But, the good news is, they could be fixed pretty easily!! The current "A" button priority could be summed up as follows:

"A" skill with monsters around > ALL interactables > Loot > Breakables (Pots, barrels, etc) > "A" skill

Part of what makes this so bad is that the game prioritizes things that will be clickable forever, over things that will only be clickable one time. So, for instance, if there's 3 pieces of loot next to a portal, the game will click the portal first and you'll never ever get the loot. Whereas if the game prioritized the loot over the portal, you'd know that you just had to hit the "A" button 4 times and you'd get all the loot then enter the portal.

My suggestion to fix all these issues would be to change it to the following:

1-time instant clickables (shrines, blight, sulphite, reward chests) > 1-time non-instant clickables (Alva mission, Influence Shrine, etc) > Loot > "A" skill with monsters around > Other League mechanic clickables (Metamorph pod,etc) > Permanent clickables (NPCs) > Portals > Breakables (Pots, barrels, etc) > "A" skill

This way, even if the game picks a mechanic over something you meant to do, at LEAST it only eats one "A" button input that way, instead of eating an infinite amount while you spam the "A" button just trying to do the thing you want.

Despite this long post talking about an issue with the Controller Beta, I want to make clear that I love it. It's rekindled my love for PoE, I hit 40/40 challenges for the first time ever as a result, and I just want Controller play to be the best that it can be!! Hopefully this gets fixed.

(PS - you figured out something good for the 3 keybinds for Sentinels for controller players, right GGG? Right?? .....Right?!?!?!?!?!?!?)

Came back to POE and have the same issue. It constantly gets me killed especially in the Azurite Mines where you have a mine cart to stay close to and if you interact with it and open the menu you will die.