Namelocking/Cursor targeting - Problems, discussion, potential solutions

First, I just want to say I'm really enjoying early access for PoE 2, it's shaping up to be an incredible and worthy sequel to a game I have over 10,000 hours in.

The only thing, so far, that consistently has felt jarring is the mix of WASD movement and namelocking/targeting monsters instead of the cursor position.

There are many instances when this can be incredibly frustrating. I am currently playing a monk and I use Tempest Bell frequently; if I drop Tempest Bell, particularly among larger monsters, the game frequently assumes it knows better than the direct input I am giving it and namelocks onto a large mob who's head, from the players perspective, is obfuscating the tempest bell and my character will turn around, in the opposite direction to where my mouse pointer is, in order to attack the base of the very large monster, missing the bell entirely and despite my cursor being right over the bell.

This is just one scenario of many that are problematic, I understand some of the reasons namelocking is used; it simplifies a lot of the things that need to happen in the game and makes a fluid playstyle much easier in many situations. That being said, as a gamer of depressingly impressive experience, I do not believe overriding the input of the player is ever truly justified.

On a personal note, I would rather be bad because I'm bad than generally be elevated by my input being overridden only for that override to occasionally make me worse than I would otherwise be in that moment. These moments of having ones will overridden, despite the correct input, are the worst moments in gaming. Now, games override the players will all the time, if they didn't there would be no jeopardy, but the mechanic that is overriding a players input should never also be the thing that is overriding their will as this will quickly make anyone irrationally angry. It is a helpless and frustrating feeling, akin to realising that we, as small individual humans with limited wealth and influence, have almost no agency in the world at all.

Now, I believe the most straightforward and easy to execute solution to this problem would be ground targeting. Basically just a gameplay setting that means every targeted action a player can perform will target the ground under the cursor, regardless of what else is between the cursor and the ground. This could also be a bound key, much like 'attack in place' but I'd much prefer a permanent gameplay setting (or both).

(This would also allow us to AOE attack pots on the ground without the game namelocking the pots and causing you to politely open them all one by one.)

The reason I feel this should be particularly easy to execute is, when there are no monsters (or pots), you can freely attack the ground/air, so it would just be a matter of making it so the monsters are invisible to the cursor and it only sees the ground.

To finish, I just want to acknowledge that relatively speaking I am an ignoramus and the GGG dev's have spent a vast amount of time, thought and expertise in refining this system and I'm sure they are aware of a million reasons my position in this post is moronic, but it is the only thing currently really holding back my enjoyment in this game and, from reading other's posts, I am fairly certain I am not alone; though I haven't seen another post that quite distils the cause of the problem in the way I have here I've seen plenty that have described consequences of the same core problem, that of the cursor targeting things above the ground when the will of the player is to target where the cursor is pointing, which is the intuitive thing with WASD movement (think twin stick shooter).

Edit: Just want to add that I understand ground targeting would be an issue for skills like killing palm or staggering palm, but I believe this could be overcome by enabling them to treat the ground as an enemy to jump to, the game calculates their AOE and collisions etc regardless so I don't think this would be too difficult? I also understand that this would enable significantly faster movement and GGG see this is bad, but I must admit I do not share that reservation, I feel it is far worse to override the input of the player than to allow them to move a bit quicker.

huge +1

Namelocking is driving me crazy in this game. I really really really hope GGG acknowledges this and gives us more control over our character.

Monk is extremely frustrating to play when he completely ignores his own bell and just jumps around attacking random mobs when I could be hitting them all at once.

+1

it's not just namelocking, try a ranger, aim cursor on due west or east of the player, see the arrows/skills go way above the cursor instead of on target... so the aiming is off nonetheless

You get similar problems, honestly probably worse, if you're using mouse movement. If I want to kite away from something while firing my crossbow and toss a grenade behind me to kite the mobs into I straight up can't do it because I'm locked into the backpedal animation and can only shoot directly at the enemy.

If I click an ability somewhere, it should fire at that spot. I'm not playing on a controller, I don't need any FPS style aim-assist. A mouse is a precice tool, let me use it.

Really glad I'm not crazy. Playing as a ranger I am definitely noticing way too many issues of my character not even aiming at the right half of the screen relative to the cursor. There is definitely some major issues around aiming that go beyond just having poor accuracy - namelocking, invisible targets (maybe off screen?), and just downright inability to re-target are making fast-paced, non-AOE builds very tedious.

Playing warrior this is getting on my nerves.

Wanna hit all those mobs with a skill? But there's a single guy to your left, lets auto target that one.

The game should never be doing shit im not telling it to do.

+1

Game is borderline unplayable with most skills in the game because of this.

Also this is a solved problem in most ARPG's, probably since D1. Some targeted skills can easily use a slightly different targeting system if required, but even Killing Palm should be possible to use without the dash when using "Attack in place" (Shift).