GGG can't bring good combat to PoE2 without major changes - the "animation" issue.
" My first post here was neutral, basically questions to bring perspective and links for reference. This is now the 4th page. See the full picture please. " And your direct follow up is that : " You can't be serious, comedy :D |
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Great points. Parry really does warrant the importance of readable combat animations.
One of the major critiques I have are about not having visual or audio cues if a Hit Misses due to Evasion and Accuracy. Having Evasion & Accuracy as one of the major mechanics and not have a way of discerning its impact in gameplay is terrible. Armour has break cues and ES is visual. Its a huge oversight to have 'invisible' mechanics of gameplay that no wonder players ignore Accuracy and its whole concept. I would even be up for Projectiles actually being off-trajectory just to discern the impact of accuracy. It might be annoying but it makes it clear why your dps is not optimal. Another importance of animation is with the movement tech exploits and how I think adding a 'backstep' animation on certain movement skills could nerf those exploits abusing speed stacking animations. Because at the end of the day, its never rewarding knowing your builds and gameplay aren't challenging if the meta way of playing is using 'broken' mechanics. |
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" Wind Dancer kinda solves this, maybe if you do not use wind dancer, the devs could implement something similar but a little more undertunned |
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-Readable attack patterns
Heavy attacks are pretty well animated both for small, medium and large enemies. Same for bigger explosions and bigger damage attacks. -Distinct personalities in their movement Smaller mobs tends to be faster, it is intrinsic to the enemy design and pretty readable. The Eternal Guards being fast and teleporting. The projectile spammers normally do not move fast. Assasins reaching close really fast to do fast dagger dmg into your armour. Ethernal Knight holding it's shield and walking forward like they do not care. Zombies and basic mobs being similar is just what you describe as good enemy design. If u pay attention you can discern between a ranger skeleton, a mage, a heavy swinger, a projectile spammer, a bomber, etc... If you say you can't really see them in maps when you are playing fast.. Well, that is part of the game design. At endgame you should really almost do not care about mobs, unless GGG implements specific restrictions in some league mechanic, that cannot change. -Interruptible or non‑interruptible states Now here I feel like it is about experimenting. But the game was designed kinda forgiving instead of punishing mistakes, some states I felt that should not be interrupted at all, but the game let me break and stop them. Maybe I can agree in some part here. Last edited by SteamSkullerR#7239 on Jan 8, 2026, 8:43:20 PM
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" It doesn't address Accuracy from the offensive side of combat. Its a major combat mechanic yet we barely know what or when its affecting. Its a design flaw that affects player experience(px) never knowing what values are good, bad, or enough especially to new players if the values are tweaked too punishing OR a dead mechanic that probably should be cut if its impact is insignificant and/or unnoticeable in gameplay. |
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If it's not doing damage then it missed. (Or you can maybe see if it has invulnerability if you do only a single type of damage). but yeah I can see the benefits of having some animation for missed hits
Last edited by SteamSkullerR#7239 on Jan 8, 2026, 8:56:29 PM
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" Whether they are faithful and accurate about their statements, they shouldn't ignore how 'slow' is an oversimplification of a logical and maybe rather necessary description towards "Engaging Combat". Its literally not 'engaging' if players could one-shot bosses (I'm okay with its possibility but likely at great tradeoffs). Thats one and done. They don't get to interact with any of the enemy mechanics and everything ends faster. Quick. More engagement means more time to interact with mechanics = more enemy ehp = slower. It doesn't have to be a slog but it needs to be slow enough. Slow enough also in terms of animations to be able to be fair for regular players to react to them. But then if their animations are at a fair speed then keeping things challenging and "engaging" would be for players builds to ALSO be capped at a fair challenging and "engaging" pace/speed. If hardcore players want high octane OP gameplay then maybe GGG should add those as mechanics in 'HARDCORE' having faster animations and bigger pools to allow for broken builds OR maybe add new difficulty settings to set them apart. Its a hard truth of accepting One-shot or Uber map-clearing builds cannot co-exist with "Engaging combat". Atleast not in a well balanced and current setting. |
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" While I do not like being able to easily kill endgame bosses and skipping most (the player) or forcing some (the devs) mechanics. I appreciate the game ability to allow the co-existence of both play styles. It is kinda bad for traders that like to do mechanics for sure, but the opposite would make it bad for traders that do not like to do mechanics so... My point is, the game can have engaging combat while having both play styles. It is up to the player to decide which way they wanna play the game. Also, I do think even though the game allows both play styles, devs have to take care to not dismiss one of them by mistake (like happened to POE1). |
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