[Long winded and I think it is a fairly known problem, but none of the descriptions seemed to match what I’m seeing exactly and they don’t seem to be as build-breaking as I’m experiencing…]
I’ve seen reports that there is a bad interaction with skills, animations, and the force move binding, but it is failing for me in a very repeatable and simple way that basically makes the whirlwind skill unplayable for me. I’ve leveled pretty much every other character in multiple builds to 100 or close to 100, but never seen this type of bad interaction before (even on some of the other classes I’ve seen reports about).
Most of the other reports I saw claimed that it would just take a few seconds to start force moving, but in my case the force move never recovers. It refuses to force move no matter how long I hold the key down. This isn’t a delay, this is a refusal. I’ve also seen reports that it only happens when the character is undergoing certain transition animations, but I have no such skills chosen and I can repeat this 100% every single time in a quiet environment where there is nothing triggering any kind of reaction animation from my character.
It’s simple.
It’s repeatable.
It’s wrong.
And it kills the game for anything but Sunday tours through empty fields of low monster density.
It resembles having been CC’d, but I can demonstrate that this isn’t a case of CC.
I have whirlwind bound to one key.
I have force move bound to another key.
Whirlwind will prevent me from force moving if there is any overlap between switching between the 2 states from WW to FM. There is no lockout transitioning the other way or if FM is held down the entire time WW is activated and then deactivated.
To demonstrate repeatability I went to a mostly abandoned field in the game. I held down force move and I was able to then press and release whirlwind as much as I wanted with the FM key held down. The force move would resume as soon as whirlwind stopped. Every single time for several dozen casts in a row. This swapping has never failed, but it isn’t a common play style for me for many reasons. I can only do this for demonstration purposes.
Then I started the whirlwind without the force move pressed and then pressed force move while I was still whirlwinding. At that point, when I released whirlwind my character just stood there. Forever. And ever. The force move button was pressed, but my character never recovered and never started moving.
I could also try to do it quickly to release WW and hit FM, but if there was any overlap at all, whether .1s to 10s, the FM would fail to trigger.
This isn’t a case of “taking some time to switch states”, it sat there doing nothing for 15 seconds or longer until I released force move and pressed it again.
There are only 2 ways to successfully alternate between whirlwind and force move and one is to always have force move held down and press and release whirlwind when I need it. That works fine for demonstration purposes, but isn’t conducive to combat where lots of keys are involved and you eventually need to release the force move.
The other is to make sure the whirlwind key has fully been released before even trying to press the force move key. I can do that maybe 4/5 times if nothing else is going on and I’m concentrating on that. But in the middle of a horde, I can’t ever do that. I always end up frozen in the middle of a giant pack of mobs getting CC’d, surrounded, and/or murdered.
If this was a typical way that games behaved I could learn how to deal with it, but locking out keys because they were pressed in an unexpected state is just not good input management (indeed no other combination of actions will lock each other out this way).