I believe in this, precisely. Everyone immediately jumps to the defense of this game calling the system more "tactical" but I truly do think that having to click on attack buttons really detract from my immersion and more importantly, the extra challenge is certainly not "good" challenge. I mean, the majority of the combat "tactics" in this game is already based on abusing AI and doors; making this more difficult by requiring us to click on spells seems like such artificial difficulty. It wouldn't hurt to be able to load up a spell by right-clicking the spell tome or something, to facilitate casting. Add a casting time, even. It'd make more sense that way just because you already have 3 other hand icons to click on (and I'm sure in any "real" circumstances four people would be able to attack simultaneously).stirfry wrote:Omitting hotkeys creates an ergonomic challenge, not a tactical challenge. Do you think if you removed all the hotkeys from Starcraft and had to press the icons manually it would require more thinking? Good mechanics should test your mind, not give you arthritis. The game gives you incentive to fire off attacks as quickly as they are available but instead of limiting your speed with in-game resources like stamina or refresh periods the attacks just require a great deal of mousing that wears out the wrist.
There are games that legitimately force you to split your attention between resource management, combat, and movement, but that is not what is happening here IMO. It is always best to attack as soon as the icon lights up, it just hurts my hands to do so. There are dozens of better ways you could stop people from spamming abilities. You could force the party to stop for a period of time after casting a spell or tie various other statistical or mechanical penalties to casting spells. You could make mana only rechargeable by consumable items so you have to choose when to cast very carefully or spell costs could be increased. Physical fighters could be given stamina bars that cause their defense and offense to be lowered if they fire off abilities too rapidly.
If I sound too harsh I apologize. The devs have done a great job and I love the game, I just think they went the wrong way on the interface by imposing real life physical inconvenience on attacking instead of in-game consequences.
The only issue with keyboard controls is that this game is so heavily dependent on the mouse that even if we had keyboard-mappable attack commands (let's say we have the UIJK square for attacking, and it did right-hand attacks by default) we'd still need to move back and forth from mouse to keyboard with the right hand to open up secrets, etc. I think the UI is definitely still immature at this stage, and could use improvement.
