Good day staff members, board members,
I’ve been playing a ranged class for several weeks now, a monotarget one (Wugushi/Musketeer). I obviously started playing with mouse mode but had personnal issues with it so I took a step into the keyboard mode, first with a close-combat class, then back on my archer since I was rather convinced by its usefulness and quite good design.
But now archer is a ranged combat class which needs to aim correctly in order to be efficient on the battle field, and you rely on target selection for this, you can’t of course just run head down into the monster mob and hope getting out of it because you have AoE stun or something like that. 
(which is very fun to do with Restrain 10 by the way).
Thus I found there were some serious issues with auto-targetting, that were really bringing the gameplay down, as well as the pleasure, because some choices seemed very illogical to me. I’d like to highlight some of these that could need a rework in order to improve archer -and mages I think- gameplay. I’ve noted down 3 problems so far and thought about possible solutions for them :
- Selection via looking direction
- Target priority in your vicinity
- Objects-like targets
These issues goes beyond manual selection (tab/ctrl juggling) that have problems too (I’ll talk about it in the end) in overall target priority.
- VISUAL FIELD SELECTION
The current selection system seems to be based on a cone that tries to imitate normal visual field. While this seems a understandable choice, the cone itself is too narrow to be intuitive, that is, it often prioritize targets positionned directly in front of you rather than a bit on your side, even if the latter is much nearer than the first, and even if this nearest one is in your theoretical visual field. I’ll come back to it later with screens.
This system has a major issue : when you’re done killing the targets that stands directly in front of you, you have to move towards your next target until you face it, in order to engage it. While doing so, very often, since the monster itself is already approaching from your sides or from behind, where you can’t directly select it, you cross each other and end up turning your back to the target. Repeat this action, again and again. So you have to move some steps away “safely” from the target, then face it, then lock on efficiently, and while doing so you lose about minimum a second because of the high ping, or either you have to stay in the monster’s vicinity just running back and forth. This situation goes on only for the player since the monster is locked on the player during all this action and attacks you with much joy, especially if it has ranged attacks. Ending game stuff like intense boss fights or maps like Inner Wall districts (and I’ve not yet visited Zima suecourt and so on) does NOT forgive this kind of nonsense.
Now I’m coming to the second issue, which causes other problems logically speaking.
- TARGET PRIORITY
I’ll let screenshots speak for themselves. I’ve not altered anything, this is 100% natural positioning and 100% natural auto-targetting work.
This one is to show the “narrowness” of the visual field.
This one also, and he raises the problem of character’s vicinity and vital space.
Vital space².
I think it’s clear, what the hell with these tree roots crystals ?
Which leads me to :
OBJECT & TARGET
I think all players have encountered this problem : some “objects”, like the ice Wall tiles, fireballs, tree roots, are considered as targets by the auto-selection system. Whereas fireballs aren’t a priority target (unlike the tree roots), sometimes when you’re in locked mode you lock on a fireball without being able to notice (because there is no hp bar nor ground cursor underlining it). Since Agnymancers popped out recently like shiny daisies in a springly meadow, Fireballs sprouted even more as a result. The problem is, when you cast an ability, either single or multi-hit, around a fireballed zone, you end up most of the time shooting the fireballs, or the tree root, or the ice wall tile, etc. For instance, oblique shot does bounce towards these objects, like, frequently enough for me to feel like it’s all the time (that’s Murphy’s law speaking). Multishot or Covering fire are totally handicapped by this problem as well, especially on bosses that are flooded with ballz and tilez and ollodatstuff’.
They should not be available as targets at all for these abilities. For anything actually. It is absolutely pointless. Please do something about it, that problem has been underlined already by many players. :[
Especially : since swordies do not rely on targetting, they just smash the crystals when they need it ; since fireballs can’t be pushed with missile attacks, thus every archer or wizard hits them with melee dagger attacks if they need ; since ice wall tiles do NOT throw shards when hit by missile attacks. It is a pure waste of hits in any case. It’s really bringing the gameplay down, and it makes no sense even from the roleplay perspective.
WHAT NOW ?
Now, I’m done complaining, I’ll try to bring up some ideas to improve the system :
- About player’s vicinity :
It seems obvious that auto-select can be reworked by targetting the nearest enemy available first. We could imagine a circle around the player that would prioritize targets, either you look at it or not. For roleplay reasons, the direction at the complete opposite of visual field could be untargetable, maybe ? So that the “priority circle” would feel like this :
That top-priority circle would of course have a proximity priority (as the current visual “cone” has). It would be not too huge but decent enough to avoid most of the problems going in/out waiting for the selection to catch your target at last ; and it wouldn’t, I think, break the long-ranged targetting work, since this current feature wouldn’t be erased, making a overall visual field that’d look like that :
Instead of the current :
At least, it could be a “on/off” feature for auto-targetting. (Target nearest opponent on/off).
[Maybe technically speaking the starting point of the visual field could be like at distance ~80-110 of the char ? Hm]
- About overall target priority :
- create a “real round robin” selection : currently, when there are several monsters or more in a pack in front of you, whether you are in locked/unlocked mode, you can toggle as much as you want, you won’t be able to select all the monsters one by one. There will often be one or more that you won’t be able to select. And sometimes it’s a boss that you can’t reach. At that moment you get (x+1) hits in your face, x being the number of seconds you stood and ran right next to the boss to FINALLY pick it up amongst… 4 monsters… ._.
- It would be really, really neat if the selection priority could have player-customable settings, like hp-based priority (for instance if you want to aim first at lower life or higher life monsters ; that life could be percentage or raw value). But maybe this is too much like a cheat to ask.
- About objects-like targets
They simply could be put at the whole bottom of priorities. Almost nobody ever needs to monotarget them, either the root crystals, the fireballs, the ice tiles, the traps, anything. Aaaaall the way down. Like if there is a monster in the skill zone, he will take all the hits before any object does.
Side-note : there would maybe be conflicts regarding particular objects for a quest or something, like the stack in Siauliai. Maybe we should list all the “irrelevant” objects.
Besides, it makes much more sense from the roleplay perspective. One wouldn’t target his friend’s balls.
I mean.
Well.
You got my point.
Erm.
Thank you for reading. 