The primary reason combat sometimes feels clunky

100 times this!

Its all about the feedback. Combat, and to be honest a lot of other systems, in this game lack the extra special effects / animation to provide feedback on various things.
Its impossible to tell whether you've missed a hit on an NPC or whether it was lag or something else. This creates frustration to the user as he has no course of action to take to resolve it because its just not clear what the problem is.

It is indeed a large part as to why at least half of my gaming group have given up on PoE so quickly (The other half of us love it) - The art in some areas is lacking or just missing.

Unfortunately the root cause here is wide spread across the game - Its an art issue and its obvious to me as an indie developer myself (www.wftogame.com) that GGG have a lack of resources in their art department. Its all the small things - Portal creation sound, block animations/FX/Audio, miss animations/FX/Audio, etc. Then the larger things too - My biggest gripe in this game so far is the massive lack of monster models. There are way too little and you can reuse of monsters across acts.

Not sure what GGG can do about this in the immediate term - They obviously have a lot on their plate and its difficult to make yourself turn around and fix acts you've already done as opposed to working on new acts.

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Stiler a écrit :

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Delmas a écrit :

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EnderCN a écrit :

The graphics are really uneven and the combat is clunky because of a relatively poor game engine. It really is just the melee combat though. Targeted spells can be annoying sometimes too since the first cast tends to fly off in the wrong direction.

Yea this game engine that does not require daily maintance and that is patched in seconds is soo poor.

What are you talking about? This game engine is on the levels of epicness..

I don't think you understand what a game engine is and what a server reset/patching is, that really doesn't have muchto do with the actual "game engine" in terms of pushing patches and rebooting servers, etc.

The hit boxes and lack of dodge animations are two problems that make the combat feel clunky.

You are partially correct, I understand very little about this stuff.

However am I wrong in saying that the patching time etc has a lot to do with the engine?

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Delmas a écrit :

You are partially correct, I understand very little about this stuff.

However am I wrong in saying that the patching time etc has a lot to do with the engine?

Yeah technically it is. Usually when someone uses the term that isn't what they are talking about. Patch times heavily depend on how much testing etc you have to do and just how many servers you have running your game and how complex the code is though.

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Delmas a écrit :

But having an animation of the monster dodging my attack would be perfect.

having an animation of a monster hitting me would also be welcomed.

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Delmas a écrit :

You are partially correct, I understand very little about this stuff.
However am I wrong in saying that the patching time etc has a lot to do with the engine?

Sorry, but you are wrong. Patching has nothing to do with the engine capacity. Engine means how its able to put all the data together, which meshes, maps (heighmaps etc.) can it convert etc. For example the engine of The Elder Scrolls- Morrowind could only handle flat maps etc. Here you see an actual presentation of Cryteks Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmCvHel7PL8

@ Topic
I actualy like to play a 2H character in any rpg, but the melee combat of poe really doesnt feels right. I played a dualwield Duelist during closed beta and i didnt enjoyed it much. I like my ele ranger much more. I really dont like the melee in this game. But maybe its just me.

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TemptedNZ a écrit :

For what it's worth I took resolute technique on another character to really see how much was lag and how much was evasion.

A lot of it is lag/netcode. I still miss the start swing very often because of this and it's pretty irksome.

Glad I went Summoner/Spell as my main.

agreed, the lag is killing it.

This game seems to be effected a lot by a little lag, much more so than other such games. I take 10 swings at something, none hit, then my character rubber bands a little to the side and I can see Im just swinging in mid air, on the server I was never in range of the enemy. 95% of the time you dont get the rubber band, or you dont notice it, but what you have been seeing on your screen has quite obviously been completely out of sync with the server for the majority of the play. Sometimes Im shooting poison arrows at creatures and I can see the poison puddle forming in another room behind me, presumably where my character REALLY is, in an empty room running into a wall shooting at nothing while on my screen Im fruitlessly fighting badguys that cant seem to be hit.

This is hurting me in act2 cruel mode, those purple exploding mobs in the forest, I cant avoid them. Im not even on the same screen as them when they explode, but I die, then my body rubber bands all the way back into the middle of a pack. This was happening every minute, open portal, try and move through area, die, portal back, die, portal back, die, portal back, die.... it becomes virtually unplayable, yet I can log on to other games and get a 15ping with somewhat smooth play. Dont get me wrong some of it is my connection which can get a little erratic at peak times latency wise despite being 100meg down/5meg up, but the levels of it and the way it is effecting this game seem to be a lot more extreme than other games.


Another part of the problem is I am playing a whirling blades/cleave/dual strike glass cannon build with high attack speed, almost 2.8 aps. Theres monsters than can take me down to like 1/6th health with 1 hit, the whole way Im enjoying playing is by franticly kiting trash with whirling blades and using dual strike to slay ranged enemies before taking on the mob with 2.8aps and cold damage to keep them rooted, whirling out again milliseconds before disaster. This doesnt go well with lag, but its so fun and makes this game a really fast paced, skilled fighter, I dont want to just keep backing off and taking on mobs slowly because elements of the system are too fragile to keep up with me. The game is too hard and can be way too fun for it not to be razor sharp in terms of connecting with hits and being able to see EXACTLY where all the entities are at a given moment, its crucial, esp with no pause button.

^^
This

The lag spikes are very bad atm. That is the sole reason combat feels a little bit clunky at the moment. I hope this will get sorted out soon.

i thought it was slow at first.

the slowness faded as i hit ~act2 cruel. if you get more movement speed and cast speed it gets really similiar to d2 in speed imho.

the reason why many people see hitbox issues (i can only tell for ranged) is the different target mechanic compared to d3 imho. many people are used to this mechanics.
PoE targets as d2 did. in d3 you shoot direcly to your mouse cursor.
it just needs time to get used to.

and +1 against floating combat text.

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Charan a écrit :

This was an oversight by GGG: the client has no idea if you've evaded or not.

All that happens is the damage packet isn't delivered.

I also remember reading this in some other thread. But wouldn't at least a partial solution be that the server would send a 0 damage packet for a missed hit. Then the client could interpret that as a miss and at least play a "miss" sound or something.

I've too noticed that the "feel" in combat got better when I got Resolute Technique. Though I too get out of sync a little too often.

One suggestion I read elsewhere was to remove missing and instead let every swing hit but you'd sometimes get 0 damage hits or similar. Although I'd prefer the current system but just with more feedback and without the OOS problems. :)

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EnderCN a écrit :

The graphics are really uneven and the combat is clunky because of a relatively poor game engine. It really is just the melee combat though. Targeted spells can be annoying sometimes too since the first cast tends to fly off in the wrong direction.

Pay no attention to this troll. He is Ender from the Diablo 3 forums and a notorious Blizzard fanboy. He's just mad there's no pay-to-win! :D