Background/rationale
Changing weapons/charge attacks/spells mid combat sucks in so many ways.
You’re a doom howler. You’ve got the full spell tree. On paper your build is great. You come across a sucker in the wild and use your attacks
- Attack 1 – t3 auto-hit cold spell + enervate
- Attack 2 – T3 auto-hit + phantasmal terror
- Cast your aura buff spell
- Attack 3 – Now the damage. Touch attack with no charge
- Attack 4 – Stygian fury has drained your hp dangerously low… touch attack with feast on suffering
- Attack 5 – touch attack
- Attack 6 - Touch + hellfire to eke out a little extra damage from finishing them off
2 minutes later, you’re done after a session of fiddling with dropdowns having only accidentally used the wrong charge/spell combo twice.
Now you encounter a revenant who slaughters you in 7 attacks by mashing alt-a before you’ve even selected and performed attack 1. Your life is miserable and once more you consider resetting your character.
What if there was a better way?
This suggestion is for a new input option for saving attack presets that gives more flexibility than the existing ‘save charged attack’ system.
The solution
A new character settings option that enables ‘preset attacks’. You configure these in the weapons tab. Each preset constitutes an attack and a charge option. Each one configured makes a new button next to the ‘attack’ button in the targeting section, possibly abbreviated to make them small ‘PA1’ ‘PA2’, and so on. Hotkeys should be alt-1,2,3,4,5 on the number line above the letters (as oppose to the numpad which is already for walking around).
So, for the case above, the DH would configure
- Preset attack 1 might be t3 autohit + enervate
- Preset attack 2 might be t3 autohit + phantasmal terror
- Preset attack 3 might be touch
- Preset attack 4 might be touch + feast
- Preset attack 5 might be touch + hellfire
Now, with everything set up, the player can use the hotkeys alt-1 through alt-5 to use these preset attacks on the currently targeted player. So they can hit alt-1, alt-2, alt-4 -> repeat in active combat to get a solid outcome. The rev still solidly wins, but the DH at least gets to use their fancy active-combat focused charged attacks and doesn’t feel like a piece of dirt being scraped off someone’s shoe.
See similar scenarios like if you’ve got an accuracy enchanted weapon you want to use for applying a debuff, then you want to follow up with a high damage weapon.
See also demoralise, only really valuable in active combat but using it is never viable because of the time overhead of selecting it.
It will not be practical to fully label the new buttons, because anything longer or more descriptive that ‘attack’ is going to take up a lot of UI space. The option mentioned above of using simple labels isn’t really informative – it relies on the user remembering what each button does on each character.
Perhaps a simple abbreviation system of hotkey number+ weapon + charge initials like…
Saber + enervate becomes 1:S+E
The Thousand Razors + Taint spell becomes ‘2:TTR+TS’
And so on and so forth. Enough to jog the memory if you’ve forgotten but still relying on the users recollections.
Benefits and drawbacks
- It comes at the cost of adding additional buttons. Mitigated by the fact that the buttons only appear if the user enables the ‘preset charge attack’ setting.
- The new buttons will be a bit more difficult to interpret than most buttons.
- It makes certain builds/charge based characters objectively stronger in raids and live combat situations. I think this is justified and an overall positive. All characters benefit to some degree. Reducing balance that stems from UI jank/fiddling is a net benefit to the game, even if specific skills might need to be rebalanced in the context of being more usable.
- It might make the weapons panel messy. Mitigated by the fact that it’s not really an everyday panel, so a bit of mess there doesn’t matter.