Steam Deck/Controller Beta pain points/feedback

Ever since I got my Steam Deck, I've been playing a lot of PoE on it. And when the controller beta dropped, not only did it become WAY better, but I started playing primarily with controller on my PC too, I loved it so much.

However there's some pain points with Steam Deck and Controller Beta that I'd love to see addressed:


1) Battery Drain in hideout/town:

The Steam Deck can hit a solid 60fps when not a ton is going on. However, having the Steam deck constantly go at 100% really drains its battery. Where this is by far the most wasteful is in my hideout. I'm mostly just looking at UI elements, but the Steam deck is burning through its battery life to maintain those 60fps for things I can't even see.

There's currently in-game FPS limiters for foreground and background. I'd love to see a 3rd one added: "FPS limit while it town/hideout". This would help save battery life while not really affecting gameplay - and it'd prolly be nice for my desktop gaming PC to not be rendering 144fps in hideout for no reason, too.


2) No keybinds for extra buttons

The controller beta currently doesn't have rebindable keys. That's somewhat understandable, as things are mapped to a complex series of buttons on the controller UI. However, controller players often have access to more buttons than PoE utilizes - the Steam Deck has 4 back buttons and bindable trackpads, many modern controllers have back buttons, and PC controller users have an entire keyboard sitting in front of them. I would love to see a series of rebindable "extra" keybinds for various shortcuts, that I could bind to these buttons.

Examples I'd love to see include: "League" key ("V" equivalent), specific league keys, /hideout, hotkeys for opening specific UIs (Passive tree, Atlas Passives, etc), invite last player who whispered me (for trading), start trade with player in 1st party slot, leave party (for trading)

This would really help smooth out a lot of the jank of using a controller, and level the playing field between controller and KB+M players quite a bit


3) Selling items

While buying items with a controller is obviously a no-go, **selling** them is something that should be possible, and is unavoidable. After all, people are going to whisper you to buy stuff while you're mapping, and you're going to want to sell it to them.

However, while on PC, popular trade tools like MercuryTrade exist to streamline this process, no such tools exist for us poor controller players. Plus, pulling up chat in the heat of mapping to invite someone is really inconvenient. And, if you've ever played PoE recently, you know that if you don't invite a player within seconds of you whispering them, odds are they've whispered 3 other people and no longer have an interest in buying YOUR item, wasting even MORE time.

I'd love some rebindable keys for managing trades. Most crucially a button to invite the last player that whispered me, that I can just hit while mapping to get that player in my party so they know I intend to trade them what they want.

Furthermore, I'd love a way to scroll through stash tabs quicker. Just holding RT til I get to the tab that has the item is kinda slow for a veteran PoE player like me that has many, MANY tabs. Maybe some sort of modifier key that makes it scroll through the tabs faster??


4) Harbinger performance

My fps on the Steam Deck **dies** whenever a Harbinger is on-screen. Like, less than 10fps. I know Perandus mobs used to cause similar fps drops, and were fixed with revised graphics, so if something like that could happen for Harbingers to reduce the effect to which they kill performance, it'd be a really nice improvement.


5) Cannot toggle loot visibility

As far as I can tell, there is no button to hide/show loot like there is on PC. This can occasionally lead to a HUGE problem. Sometimes when there's huge quantities of loot that drops, the tooltips can "drift" quite far away from where the item actually is. This leads to a situation where when you click (or press "A", in the case of controller) on a piece of loot, it's too far away for your character to walk over to it and pick it up. The solution to this is to toggle loot visibility, which refreshes the location of the loot tooltip so you can pick it up.

Since this doesn't exist on controller, you end up in situations where sometimes you literally CANNOT PICK UP AN ITEM. I had this issue to an EXTREME extent testing triple beyond delirium on my Steam deck - there were multiple piles of loot that I literally could not pick up.

I would reccomend replacing the LS button (show all loot) with "Toggle Loot visibility". Nobody realistically needs a "crash the game" button, but the ability to toggle loot to either make it lootable - or to just to hide it while combat is intense - is sorely needed.


6) No auto-cast on LMB

Many builds are built around having an auto-cast skill om LMB for KB+M. Controller players simply don't get access to this, which is a HUGE survivability hit to Controller players. Your build is just significantly worse as a result of your choice of controls (Especially these days, with Molten Shell on LMB being in most good builds).

I don't have a good suggestion for this one. Maybe some sort of "auto-cast on LS movement" slot for controller players, which defaults to the LMB?? Or.... maybe you just remove this functionality from KB+M.



Hopefully with Controller support exiting beta soon, and being officially supported, we can see it get many of these much-needed fixes!! I really love how PoE feels with a controller during gameplay, and really hope to see the rest of the experience brought up to parity with KB+M - it's really not that far off from being there!

so they got at least one steamdeck user.

that's good news that adding joystick support hasn't been in vain!