Path of Exile

Lowball said:

I keep seeing people say "X skill sucks now!!1" because it requires more investment to reach high attack speeds. But the attack speed changes have been DPS neutral and the reason skills needed attack speed to play effectively was animation lock... which is gone.

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You're still locked into 80% of the animation, you only cancel 20% at the end(and if you're using the skill more than once, you can't actually get past that delay either). With the skills being noticeably slower(albeit doing more damage per hit) and multistrike nerfed to give more damage but less speed, it makes a lot of skills fairly clunky without heavy attackspeed investment, especially when not using dual wield and fast weapons.

Sas there a patch last night that broke movement? Today i'm noticing that while holding movement key down + using right mouse (with stand still to cast enabled) it does this wierd stutter step where I start to see the trap throw animation start followed by it canceling, no trap being thrown and movement re-engaging. Didnt have this happening at all last night.

Deathwing said:

Reddit says the patch basically makes movement skills cancel itself unless you press it for a considerable amount of time. There's some fuckery with multistrike too.

Someone pushed to live without testing and then went home.

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KK that sounds like what I'm seeing but not with a movement skill just movement in general.

Lowball said:

Per baeclast dev interview/demonstration: Animations consist of windup-damage-recovery. You can cancel the recovery AND windup portions into the windup of another ability or target change or movement. You can't cancel the damage portion unless you are using a movement ability which cancels any portion of the animation. I don't know where the 10%-80%-10% values are coming from? When referring specifically to earthquake, he says you can cancel out of the last 15-20% of that animation. That's 30-40% of the total animation time which can be canceled, 100% with movement abilities.

Re. mustrike as damage spread that only holds true for dot skills, otherwise TTK per pack is neutral.

I think these vocal complaints are annoying because people are doing a really bad job differentiating between bugs, feels, and damage, and survivability:

1. Animation cancels are buggy as fuck right now.

2. People who like the feels of attacking fast don't like that GGG has reduced the attack speed to investment ratio. Personally I am with GGG on this one because it opens up design space for play style variety. If you like the feels fine, but don't mix up your complaints with the other three categories.

3. Again, game is buggy as fuck right now. Multistrike single target should be DPS neutral, multitarget DPS neutral for any instant damage non-dot.

4. Survivability. This is where the old "you have to have multistrike" came from. It's because the total animation time to damage window time was such that you had to stack attack speed with old speed multistrike or you died. Again, separate this from feels. I fucking hate the way this part of the game is designed, and I think it's lazy as fuck that they never actually crafted most of the fights in this game, just threw a bunch of abilities on shit and called it good. I don't think it leads to faster reactive gameplay I think it just leads to proactively running around in a circle stopping as little as possible because you know there is a 90% probably of an attack landing where you are in the next .5s.

out of time on the shitter

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I didn't mention 10/80/10 at any point. I said 80%, because the only relevant part you want to cancel when talking about attack speed is the recovery, which is 20%. If you cancel before the hit even fires, it doesn't do anything, so that doesn't fucking help you in that regard. Like it's useful to dodge stuff, but not to kill stuff, so pointless to mention that part. On top of that, even if you do cancel that part, you still can't bypass it to hit again(in case you need more than one hit), you can move during that part but that's it. If your attack speed is high, but "not high enough", you won't even get much movement out of it, maybe half a step before you can hit it again, so the advantage of cancelling it there is minimal to inexistent, it's only relevant on the last hit of a given encounter where you can cut 20% of it to start moving from the monsters.

And DPS neutral isn't helpful for the "feel" of the abilities. If an ability took 3mins to fire but did 200trillion damage, it'd be the strongest DPS ability, but no one would play that shit, even if you can cancel it at 2:24mins and start moving away. Hyperbole obviously, but just the example. Slow hits that hit really hard aren't necessarily that good. You want to still hit at a decent pace so you can keep a smooth progression through your map, you don't want to be sitting there for 1full second to do a single hit. On top of that as I mentionned, even if you can cancel the last 20%, once you're into your animation past the windup, you're fucked if you have to cancel if your hit is slow. It'll then feel just as clunky as before. The window for it to happen is smaller since you can cancel earlier, but since the attackspeed also went down, it increased that window a bit at the same time, making it feel not as good as it could be.

I do agree however that attackspeed was too fast. I don't necessarily agree that they had to nerf BOTH multistrike(the massive culprit of the problem) and the skills themselves. Just nerfing multistrike was fine, especially since they added many good supports(or buffed existing ones like fortify which is actually worth using now) so you don't feel forced to use multistrike anymore(well that and the many changes to smoother targetting and weapon range and all that jazz).