So i’m mainly playing a sapper (this is an archer for those who don’t know) right now fairly low level, low enough that my team level is still 1 just for some context for my feedback. I also played cleric for a short time so I am familiar with melee systems too.
Currently, I play mouse mode because It can offer more precision and speed in movement and most importantly targetting especially. When I started out, I actually played Keyboard mode for my first 30-ish levels, but realizing some of the benefits of mouse mode, I have switched and am currently lvl 71 or something (my add-on tells me if I use all my exp cards I’m lvl 95 or something).
Onto feedback:
Mouse over namelock:
One of the most annoying things I have experienced in this game is the mouse over name-locking. It seems just mousing over things will cause them to be namelocked (targeted). This is seriously awful. As a sapper, I can place a stake stockade, and as a target walks over it, I can target them, and then move my mouse away to kite backwards while planning to use keyboard bound keys to perform basic attacks, but while pulling my mouse backwards I can mouse over my own stake stockade for a quarter of a second and instantly lose targeting. I press Z and i fire at nothing when this happens.
I know there is an option to use tab or something to retarget, but the reason I use mouse mode is to be able to quickly target one thing I want, not slowly toggle through some queue of targets in which the order is not known. This mouse-over namelocking needs to be turned off or be toggleable. I suggest a bindable left mouse button click targeting.
Additionally: as a ranged character I have for the most part gotten used to the mouse ‘directional’ skill use. But there are some huge flaws with this: when you approach boarders: mouse inputs in some locations are completely ignored.
I suggest holding mouse in a direction should try to emulate something like analog stick input or even just arrow key/wasd movement, but once your cursor goes off the map (into air or a wall) no more walking is done. This is even worse when you need to target things near a wall without a namelock skill. Examples of this for a ranger could be barrage: you move cursor towards enemies and intentionally overshoot them, so your cursor is now out of the map but behind the intended targets, and then your barrage fires in some arbitrary direction your cursor was at before you moved it behind them.
In short, should allow this type of directional sensing even if cursor goes out of bounds.
Some other mouse mode stuff: interaction with some NPCs and environment is literally impossible.
For example, one of my experiences: in the lvl 17/19/2x-ish area Ashaq Underground Prison i think, in one of the floors theres an entire area with a grated floor or something that for some reason lights up when you mouse over it indicating it can be interacted with or targetable or something, but it can’t. But then theres another quest there, something to do with targeting these black blob NPC things, corrupted area or something (i can’t remember the details), and every single corrupted blob on the grated area cannot be interacted with, ie clicked on. I literally opened up the options and changed over to keyboard mode so that I could press spacebar to interaction with the quest target.
I recall having other similar instances, and overall it’s just hard to click on a lot of NPCs (quest objects) with unclear or very small ‘hitboxes’ where you can target them with mouseover.
Another experience is I was in town (Orsha) on like channel 1 or 2 and I wanted to use goddess portal… prepare for a fun minor griefing story:
Now theres this guy, he clearly knows whats up for mouse mode users, cause he had a pet called “GodessStatuePlz” or something and was just sitting onto of the statue. In short It was really hard to click on that statue lol, since I would end up clicking the pet or something else, I think I changed to keyboard mode to ‘spacebar interact’ that thing too.
For another example of how painful hitbox clarity can be: once I was in Klaipeda, going up to the magic association NPC, clicking below the NPC to move up, and it kept something targetting some invisible uppermost hitbox of the statue and sending my character moving back downwards…
Some other things: cancelling movement. The loading screens claim you can press ALT to instantly stop moving! These loading screens also only ever tell you anything about keyboard mode, because there is no way to easily cancel movement with just your mouse, which would be fine but the movement speed in this game is no ARPG’s, if you click, or even hold lmb down on somewhere you essentially are committed to spending the next 2-3 whole seconds moving unless you input a closer location or use the bindable WASD movement. Currently If I want to cancel movement I tap wasd to move a tiny bit which is really painful. Currently this is worse seen when clicking a location to move, then you use a skill such as barrage, then after the skill animation ends, your character continues moving like it’s nobody’s business.
Last I checked the key binds and I didn’t see a cancel movement key I could bind so I think this should be in the game. Alternatively, when walking via lmb held down, allow release of lmb to stop movement or something.
Finally a less mouse mode oriented feedback, I would like skill scroller in the game. In Ragnarok Online when you leveled a skill, depending on the ability, you sometime’s want to use a lower level of the skill… typically for SP cost reasons, but I guess stuff like teleport existed (choose Bufferly wing or Fly wing function).
I’m currently sitting with 10 unused job points, 7 in sapper and 3 in ranger because I know leveling up some of these skills is just going to increase the sp cost permanently and from what I see, a lot of the damage bonuses are flat values which may become negligeable later on (actually their current lvl 1 performance is good enough for me already).
I think currently, there is an implicit toggle system for skills where you can ‘charge’ up to max level but I’m not too sure how that works. From my observation I think it does decrease the SP cost if you release before full charge but maybe I’m crazy, and that system is really weird. Anyways I’d like us to be able to choose the deploy level of the skill. Even now I sometimes regret having leveled barrage to 5… the sp cost T_T
So a small recap on my suggestions:
- Please rework mouseover namelocking (targetting), it is so painful, either remove entirely or make optional, I mainly suggest left mouse button click targets but this is just an example of a fix.
- NPC interaction hitbox with mouse for a lot of things is unclear.
- Mouse movement needs a better way to cancel (stop moving).
- Mouse interactions (aiming skills and input) around borders of map needs improvement (stop being so clunky, emulate keyboard directional input).
- Skill scroller (scroll between casting a level 1, 2, 3,… max) ofc it doesn’t have to be a actual ‘scrolling’ (ie of the mouse wheel) but just any way to choose to put like a lvl 1 version on your hotkeys.
Sorry if I’m really wordy, thanks anyone who reads this and agrees or if I’m personally missing anything, like a suggested option is already in-game and I didn’t notice, please tell me, and my apologies in advance!