Aura change doesn’t work in the following scenarios when quick cast is enabled:
Starting a single zeal attack with a single click. Pressing an aura change button before the end of the zeal has no immediate effect, the new aura appears when the zeal is finished (if you survive long enough, for example the explosion/nova emitted by a dying mini-boss).
Zeal is assigned to left_click. I shift+left_click the ground and hold the mouse button to continuously attack anyone who comes close. Pressing an aura change button changes the aura but stops the zeal attack.
Smite is assigned to a quick cast key. I lock onto a single target and hold the smite key for continuous attack. Pressing an aura change key doesn’t do anything.
Games like D3 support, what I call, “Chording”. This is where you can press several keys at once, including mouse buttons. For example, you can Shift+Left Click to attack monsters. Without releasing the key(s) or button(s), you can then Right-Click for a second attack or buff. When you release the right mouse button, you continue to Shift-Left Click your attack. And finally, when you release the Shift key, you begin moving again.
D2:LoD and D2:R has never supported Chording… unfortunately. (I wish it did).
One of Blizzard’s Community Managers thought this might be a bug too. Upon further investigation, believes it is not. The thread is about using Force Move and changing Auras at the same time. But, I think it is related.
You can read about it here:
Apparently, we can only press one key and perform one action at a time in D2.
Allowing the player to change the aura would make much more sense. It seems they just don’t want to invest time in implementing it.
Interestingly, pressing the aura change key behaves differently in the two situations I described. The implementation is probably an ugly/buggy piece of code that no one wants to touch to prevent it from falling apart.
I use 3-4 different auras for uber-farming and before the “quick cast” feature I don’t remember having aura change issues. The aura always changed instantly whenever I pressed the right key. Now the aura fails to change almost always when I want to do it in the middle of a fight.
A few minutes ago I turned off “quick cast” and engaged in a fight with ~10 enemies using zeal just for the sake of testing. If I cast a zeal attack (with a single click) I can change the aura as many times as I wish before the end of zeal. The same simply doesn’t work with “quick cast” (we should perhaps rename it to “slow cast” because it changes the aura when the zeal ends). I just tested the two issues mentioned in my original post, those are also non-existent with quick cast off.
Now I have two options (quick cast on/off) but both are half good half bad. Why can’t they create a single solution that is the best of both worlds? This is just lazy.
TBH I don’t really care how their code works (including old and new code). I’m a user and I expect design and behavior that makes sense. The implementation should be driven by (good) design not the other way around. Their current reasoning sounds like: “the implementation is garbage so the design is garbage”. It’s the tail wagging the dog.
This is a fantastic game but the crappy implementation of controls (input and targeting) just spoils it in so many ways. They should throw out the bad code and reimplement it in a way that makes sense.
The situation seems to be the following:
The old design isn’t very good (in terms of usability and comfort) but the old implementation (code) is good, works as dictated by the design.
The new design is good (or at least the intended design was good) but the new implementation is bad and I hope they don’t want to tailor the design to a bad implementation.
Hopefully, Blizzard’s QA Team will read this thread, investigate it, and if it’s not working as intended, they’ll pass the information on to the Developers.
To be honest, with my play-style, I already have the Active Skill Bindings Bar disabled. I’m thinking of disabling the Quick Cast feature too. It just doesn’t feel like D2 with it.
I’m glad they were added. I think they’re a great QoL improvement. It’s just not for me.
I did a lot of testing during the last hour and here is what I assume based on the behavior I observed:
When you turn off quick cast you interact with the original input system that isn’t buggy but it isn’t very comfortable either due to its outdated design. It’s super uncomfortable to use with my orb-firewall sorceress.
When you turn on quick cast you interact with a new layer that is on top of the original input system and that new layer sends commands to the old system. The quick cast layer is basically a queue. Every action you fire is placed into that queue and competes with (waits for) other actions regardless of the type of the action (probably because it’s easier to implement it this way without checking action types). In the original implementation (quick cast off) the aura change actions don’t compete with anything else. Their targeting system (the old one) is bad for the same reason: it tries to handle a lot of different spells with the same generic code (but snapping certain area spells like firewalls to enemies and objects like gold piles makes no sense).
The quick cast layer seems to be simple and very loosely coupled with the original system. When I cast different spells with my sorceress it’s easy to see that the quick cast system asks the original system below to change the spell (this is visible on the skill bar at the bottom of the screen), fire it and then change back to the originally selected skill.
This simple quick cast system works amazingly for the sorceress, I love it. With the paladin both the old and new systems suck. However, the new system sucks more because failing to change the aura can result in death. Even if I decide to use the new system with the sorceress and the old system with the paladin I will always have to go to the menu and turn quick cast on/off because it it’s a global setting not a per-character option. I’d prefer using “quick cast on” every time because the paladin could also benefit from it if the aura change worked well.
