Good Morning Friends! If you have read my blog for any length of time you will understand that I truly and deeply love Diablo-style Action Roleplaying Games, or ARPGs as the genre tends to be collectively referred to. Even a good deal of my current love of Guild Wars 2 is rooted in the fact that for the most part, it owes way more lineage to Diablo than it does World of Warcraft. The only problem with all of this is that the older I have gotten, the less forgiving the deeply repetitive process of clicking to move and attack has become on my hands. At this point, I am on the late side of 40 sliding over forward towards 50, and after decades of heavy computer usage, I just can’t handle spamming the mouse button in quite the same way that I used to. For many, this has meant a shit to controller gaming for their ARPG fix which tends to be considerably more forgiving. However for me… I still deeply prefer the mouse and keyboard experience and have landed on a control scheme that works for me. I thought this morning I would share some of this wisdom for anyone looking for a way to play these games without killing your hands in the process.
Generally speaking, the ARPG is a genre that allows for quite a bit of customization of your keybinds. So far I have figured out a way to configure pretty much every game I have played in this manner. I can’t take full credit for this because my good friend Ace set me on this path some years back, but I have adapted their processes and made them my own over the course of adapting them to several different games. Essentially to understand this process you need to understand two common concepts within ARPGs.
Force Move – This keybind will be called different things in different games, for example in Last Epoch that I have been playing most recently it is just called “Move”. Conceptually what this does is start your character moving to a point defined by where your mouse cursor is sitting on the screen. So if you drag your mouse all the way to the other side of the screen and tap force move, your character will path in a straight line to your cursor.
Force Attack – This keybind is the opposite of force move, and it will stop all motion and cause you to execute a basic attack regardless of whatever movement inputs were in progress. While I am not actively using it, it can be important to know what this keybind is for the game you are playing in case you need to immediately stop executing a movement command.
One of the quirks of Force Move is if you hold the button down it will be constantly executing a move command toward wherever your mouse cursor is pointing. So effectively it is like your character’s movement is tied to the heading of your mouse cursor allowing you to “steer” the character by moving your mouse. In truth, once you have started doing this it feels way more intuitive than it sounds because your character goes where your mouse cursor goes, and once you are comfortable with it can execute some tight turns as a result.
Because my fingers are already very comfortable in the traditional WASD configuration, I opt for using W as my “Force Move” key allowing me to place my fingers in that orientation and then map other important buttons to be comfortably pressed within the orbit of the W key. There might be some variance between games depending on what is supported but effectively I tend to follow the same configuration setup when possible. It will depend slightly upon the abilities you have access to on a given “class”/build but my standard process follows something like this:
W – Force Move – The button I am holding pretty much at all times to allow me to steer my character with my mouse.
Right Mouse – Primary Attack – This is the button that I bind my primary attack to that I am executing the most often.
Spacebar – Movement Ability – This is the key that I will tap when I need to execute whatever movement ability my character has. If it has no movement abilities I tend to bind a reactional ability to it that I might need to hit on a moment’s notice.
E – Secondary Attack – This one is going to vary quite a bit, but if I need to hit an ability periodically other than my primary attack it is going to go on this key. For example, if I am placing totems or mines or something of the sort, it goes on this key because I find it most comfortable to press while holding W.
Q – Primary Cooldown – This one also varies quite a bit, but if I have some sort of a survival cooldown I generally put it on this key. This is in part because Diablo III trained this to be my potion hotkey so mentally I associate it with survival.
R – Situational Attack/Cooldown – Since this key is further away, I tend to place whatever I need to use that infrequently.
1-5 – Potions – You can blame Path of Exile for this shift, but effectively if there is a health potion button I place it on 1, and if there are other kinds of potions I place them on 2-5. I am very used to reaching up to hit 1 when things are going poorly at this point.
Left Shift – Force Attack – If the game offers some sort of force attack key, I tend to put it on left shift so that when I press it, my movement will be canceled for the moment. This is useful for situations where you might need to pause on a moment’s notice to avoid getting into an area effect for a trap.
I’ve pretty much been able to adapt every game I have played over the last handful of years to some version of this keybinding system. You might have to dig around a bit, but almost every game seems to have some version of “Force Move”. In Path of Exile unfortunately I have to sacrifice a possible keybind, because they do not have a separate button that I could bind to it independent of the hotbar. The only game that I have not been able to configure in this manner was Lost Ark, which is probably in part why I never spent much time playing that game. That game had some very specific opinions on what you should be doing gameplay-wise with your keys. I don’t feel like I am losing much of anything though because there are other things about that game that did not exactly jive with me either.
So as we approach the early access testing period of Diablo IV, the very first thing I will be doing is configuring my keybinds to match something akin to the process I just highlighted above. This is what works for me personally, but I suggest it as a less damaging alternative to spamming your mouse click constantly to keep registering a movement input. I had a copy of the game gifted to me, so I will be checking it out along with everyone else when the early access period opens. I am not entirely certain it is going to be my jam, but I am willing to give it a shot. At the moment, however, I am very much enjoying my time in Last Epoch. I am sure tomorrow I will have a post talking about my experience playing it with friends.
The post Less Repetitive ARPG Keybinds appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! On Friday evening Season 28 of Diablo 3 started, and I returned to my regular rhythm with my good friend Ace in attempting to complete it. We decided to come back to Diablo in part because this is probably the last great hurrah for the game before the launch of Diablo 4, and the title goes even further into “maintenance mode”. Speaking of maintenance… I had a bit of a rough start. I logged in early Friday morning and was encountering all sorts of issues where my stash tabs were not loading immediately and when they did load it looked like a 90s-era GeoCities site loading one icon at a time. This stabilized but when it came to the actual seasonal launch, I started encountering a problem where I would hard lock every 30 mins or so and then have to hard kill the application to get out of it and back into the game… occasionally having to go so far as to go into task manager and kill battle.net entirely.
I am not sure what caused this or honestly what solved it. I tried to do a client repair but it did not seem to be doing much of anything. Instead what I ended up doing is exiting Battle.net entirely, moving my D3 install, and then going through the process of reinstalling the game while pointing at the new directory. From there I attempted a client repair again, and this time around it took about 10 minutes to complete making me think that maybe it was actually doing something that time. When I got into the game I noticed that for some reason it was set to 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. I swapped that and from that point forward the game has been extremely smooth and I’ve yet to crash out to the desktop again. I am not sure exactly which of the things I did actually solved the problem, or even what the problem was exactly… but for now I am going to stop asking questions.
When I want an easy mode season, I always lean heavily on the Demon Hunter. This time around the Gears of Dreadlands set was on Haedrigs Gift, which meant that I completed most of the early seasonal accomplishments on that set. It is perfectly cromulent and is technically supposed to be the best set currently for progression. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of it because it feels a bit piddly given that you have to keep weaving in normal attacks or you just stop functioning entirely. Weaving normal attacks is always a good idea mind you, but if you get to a point where you can’t easily the wheels sort of fall off.
I used my farming ability however to piece together the Unhallowed set and swap over to Multishot. While my brain had gotten used to the spin to win strafing GoD build, I am slowly getting adjusted once again to the more familiar Demon Hunter gameplay. For the longest time I was waiting for a Yangs to drop and then… waiting for a second Dawn. Once I got both I swapped over and can immediately more comfortably farm T16. Saturday night after recording the podcast several of us knocked out two conquests in rapid order, so I should be able to complete the third one without much issue when I finish leveling 3 gems to 65.
That puts me in a very familiar spot when it comes to finishing up the season. I’ve not touched a set dungeon at all because I hate them. Right now I plan on doing the Marauder set because if I remember correctly it is a pretty easy one. I’ve almost completed building out Marauder and am only missing a few pieces. I have everything that I need ready for the Augment minus one of the red gems, and then it is simply a case of extracting a bunch of cube powers and pushing the gems to 70. I feel like some of the pressure has lessened because I could slack off entirely and then finish up all of this stuff in the final weekend if that ended up happening.
This season’s gimmick is the Altar of Rites, which ends up driving a lot of your farming and grinding. Essentially you sacrifice items to the Altar to get permanent buffs. For example, now my pet can salvage whites, blues, and yellows in addition to picking up gold. The problem with this however is that it cannot keep up with the process and seems to miss a ton of gold and a ton of materials. Another buff is that it makes it so all gear has no level requirement… but what it actually does in practice is set everything to level 1. However Companions don’t seem to be able to take advantage of this, so it means while leveling you cannot tell if your companions can or cannot equip something. The Altar is cool, but also seemingly introduced a bunch of jank into the game that they seemingly were not quite prepared for.
What I was not really prepared for… is how much more I seem to enjoy Path of Exile as compared to Diablo III. I just don’t feel nearly as engaged this season in Diablo, and it is almost as though the gameplay loop is nowhere near as rich as I remember it being. I had fun running amok with Ace, and I had missed that sort of experience, but for whatever reason, the gearing process in D3 has felt way more hollow this season than it has in previous ones. I could micromanage getting exactly the right stats, but it doesn’t feel as repeatably enjoyable as roaming around in Delve, Heist, or doing Maps in Path of Exile.
I am really hoping that when the Last Epoch Multiplayer launches, it can be that happy medium between the more casual grouping play of Diablo III, and the more rich systems of Path of Exile. I also hope to get into testing for Diablo IV so I can try that out and see how it feels. Basically, I am not sure if I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this season of Diablo III, but something feels missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I am going to wrap things up, but I think I would rather be playing Guild Wars 2 when I am not actively playing with friends.
The post Diablo III Season 28 Start appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
