Hey there, really hoping I can get some eyes on this post because as a controller only player (except for certain menu stuff which is dreadful to do on a controller) there’s some design decisions that are pretty poor, and that I believe could be relatively easy to fix. I understand that the majority of the player base is not using a controller, but since work was put into adding controller support to begin with, I don’t see a reason not to improve it.
This game generally works pretty well on controllers, and I’m happy about that, but it could be way better.
First off, the aiming of ‘targeted’ skills are currently a disaster given our options, and this issue is heightened depending on what targeted skill you’re talking about and how many a given class uses with ideal meta setups. My chosen preference out of the two options is where all targeted skills (and stuff like grenades) locks on. The problem with this is the lack of choice, most pointed skills will be used to obviously target an enemy, but some of them can and are often used to reposition your character, which is quite literally impossible with the lock-on option assuming an enemy is within the targeting radius.
There’s also the fact that this game has back/front attacks, but you get no option to reposition when using the lock-on which is actively hurting your damage potential in some cases that a mouse and keyboard player doesn’t have to deal with.
My solution to this is relatively simple, just make work similarly to how aim assist works for controllers in first person shooters, do the lock on to begin with assuming an enemy is within range, but then allow me to manually adjust the targeting using my analog stick so I can fine tune where it goes. I’m aware of using the controllers right trigger to switch targets, but that’s obviously not the solution to this issue. There’s also a little bit of an issue where often an enemy is on the outskirts of the target skills range but clearly still within it, and the lock-on refuses to target them, but that’s the least of my concerns personally, though that should also be looked into.
And in regards to your other choice of control, the manual aiming option, it needs to be changed so it’s actually “manual” aiming like it suggests, instead of it forcibly moving your cursor in the direction your character is walking. This will often completely mess you up when you had the cursor where you wanted but needed to move your character in the opposite direction to say dodge something which obviously happens quite often in the game.
Now on to a different subject, I believe in the April update when you added dead zone options that the movement of characters with your analog stick was messed up. I recall before this update that while the movement wasn’t perfect (character often walking an extra step or two than what they should have done based on your input), it at least felt like proper 360 analog movement. Ever since that update analog movement is no longer linear like it should be, but instead there’s like gates or segmented directions that your character can move in.
For example, if we use a clock as an example, if I’m moving in the direction of the 12 on a clock but I want to move to 11, I can slowly move my analog stick from 12 to 11 but the 11 will never come, and instead I keep moving it past 11 until it jumps straight to like 9 on the clock. It feels like there’s like 8-10 directions my character can move in the complete circle of the analog stick, where if it was working how an analog stick should work there would be many more. And from what I recall it was like this before the April update.
The analog movement just doesn’t feel correct anymore, and is a huge handicap for harder endgame content where you often have to be very precise in your movement to dodge certain attacks. It’s not just an issue with where I have the deadzone set, I can have it at the default 50% which is presumably where it was before you introduced the setting and it’s still not the same as it used to be.
I hope this post doesn’t fall of deaf ears and can at some point be forwarded to the devs and possibly be fixed. I really enjoy this game, but if these issues are never fixed I genuinely question whether I will stick with the game, because if they’re never fixed it seems like as the end game content gets harder and harder that I’ll be too handicapped to properly experience the content with my choice of control.