Smoothness/Flow of Skills in PoE2 - Review and Suggestions on Improvement

I haven't seen much feedback about the "smoothness" or "flow" of skills, besides just certain keywords ("clunky" or "slow" for example); I'd like to give more in-depth feedback about the kind of gameplay flow I was hoping for compared to what I experienced in playing the PoE2 Early Access, as well as how that might be implemented.

I'll preface this by noting that the kind of gameplay I'm about to describe is something I deeply enjoy, but there are other playstyles/gameplay patterns that can be fun besides this one, so it's understandable if the developers decide not to implement anything that fits this. I simply have a great appreciation for this kind of gameplay and I think it would provide a style of play that a lot of other players will enjoy, for reasons described below.

First of all, what do we mean by "smooth" gameplay? What do we mean when we talk about how the skills "flow together"? When I use these words, I'm thinking about a certain kind of feeling and experience I've had in other games. I'll go into two examples, comparing them to PoE2, and then will provide some suggestions.

First would be fighting games. If anyone's played fighting games, you'll know the gameplay pattern is very tense, exciting, and skill-heavy. You have to learn combos - inputs in a very specific pattern, within a tight window, that produce a set of hits. Combos take practice, and when they're pulled off well, they feel great: they're smooth, the punches/kicks/etc flow one into another, you feel skilled pulling it off, etc. Even though there can be some downtime, when you're probing the other player, trying to bait them into a misplay, trying to predict when to block or counter, the actual combos feel very smooth and flow well.

Another example of this would be certain champions in League of Legends. I play a lot of Nidalee jungle, as well as Kindred, Lee Sin, Taliyah, and some other champs that use combos. These have a different kind of flow to their gameplay. For example, if I'm engaging on an enemy as Nidalee, it's quite a bit more complicated: I'll auto, E, auto, Q, auto, R + W, auto, E, auto, Q. And I'm clicking to move during all of this as well. It's not the exact same as fighting games - you aren't smoothly flowing from Q to E to W to R in a tight pattern to produce one continuous combo attack - but there is a definite flow to the gameplay: your auto attack speed is the beat you're playing to, and you weave skills in between auto attacks. MMORPGs can be like this too, where the "beat" is the global cooldown and the "accents" or "offbeats" are your off-GCD abilities that you weave in between your global cooldown skills. In both cases, the flow of the gameplay comes from following the "beat" of your attack speed/global cooldown and smoothly weaving in other abilities to "accent" the beat. It feels great to do and makes the base gameplay fun.

Comparing this to Path of Exile 2 Early Access, I see several significant differences that may account for why I didn't feel like the gameplay was smooth or flowed well. I picked Monk, as I figured that of all classes, a Monk would best weave skills together, following the "grace" and martial artist thematic. However, what I found was that the combos have delays and self-slows in them that make it difficult to combo them together in a way that feels smooth. For example, let's look at an example of trying to do a fighting game-like combo of using a skill into another skill into another skill - perhaps I'll try to use Killing Palm -> Falling Thunder -> Tempest Bell -> Tempest Fury on the bell. What you'll find is that there's a delay after Killing Palm, there's a delay after Falling Thunder with a longer animation lock, and there's a delay of casting the Bell and targeting it.

You get the same problem if you try more of a "weaving within the beat" pattern of gameplay. When you basic attack, you root yourself for the full animation. When you dodge roll, you get a slow at the end. The basic attack is more of a skill itself than something you can weave skills in between. So the only "combo" here is just rooting yourself and spamming basic attacks or other skills.

I think the feeling of the gameplay could be improved a lot if at least one of these gameplay styles were made possible. Imagine if, at the end of Killing Palm, if you press Falling Thunder, you smoothly enter into the Falling Thunder skill instead of having to wait for the end of the animation, and then press it, which then starts the next animation. The former is smooth; the latter is clunky. Or imagine if weaving basic attacks while moving between using skills was possible. You could walk and dodge around the boss, weaving your basic attacks in between your skills, while paying attention to and dodging enemy mechanics. I feel like that would increase the skill ceiling of those builds, which is surely a good thing for a game about challenging fights like PoE2 is, while also letting the player feel rewarded with their good timing of skill and movement usage.

What you’re referring to is called Input Queueing. World of Warcraft implements this feature very effectively. In fact, the related variable can even be adjusted via configuration settings. The CVar is SpellQueueWindow, which sets a default 400 ms input window. This window registers your button presses and aligns them with the end of a pre-defined tick rate, typically corresponding to the global cooldown in WoW.

While I don’t have full technical insight into the mechanics of PoE 2, it seems like this kind of system is absent and/or vastly different to PoE 1. It might also just be bugged, but I fear that is not the case. This could be a key reason why the controls feel clunky, laggy and unresponsive.

Oh i soooo much second this !!! I picked monk precisely for that and the delays make it impossible. Ive died sooo many times doing a Falling Thunder to clear a mob charging at me to just be animation locked, stunned , boxed in, rooted and killed in the end. So i had to resort to Focusing only on getting crit and crit multi so that i crit on the first attack to clear the packs coz if I dont then i have to run away and hide or most likely i will just die.

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Gixxpunk#3348 wrote:

What you’re referring to is called Input Queueing. World of Warcraft implements this feature very effectively.

Thanks for letting me know. I can finally put a name to the concept haha. And yeah, WoW was one of the MMOs I was thinking about with respect to this post.

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Gixxpunk#3348 wrote:

This could be a key reason why the controls feel clunky, laggy and unresponsive.

That's my thought as well.

From a DOT focused caster perspective, I think the same applies with the Witch. Slightly less of an issue being ranged. Maybe movement and cast speed solves this to a degree but I can't imagine that either would smooth out the delayed effects of that final wind up/cleave cast in a high movement encounter.

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Kodavor#1200 wrote:

Oh i soooo much second this !!! I picked monk precisely for that and the delays make it impossible. Ive died sooo many times doing a Falling Thunder to clear a mob charging at me to just be animation locked, stunned , boxed in, rooted and killed in the end.

That's happened to me more than I care to admit lol.

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Shthappens#4960 wrote:

From a DOT focused caster perspective, I think the same applies with the Witch. Slightly less of an issue being ranged. Maybe movement and cast speed solves this to a degree but I can't imagine that either would smooth out the delayed effects of that final wind up/cleave cast in a high movement encounter.

Yeah, same. I've tried Ranger as well, and while the ability to attack while moving feels better, it still doesn't feel as smooth as I think it could be. Maybe it's just some combination of poor movement speed/attack speed/damage, but like you said, when it comes to skills, it just feels delayed/disruptive at the end.

Very clunky and alot of the time unresponsive on my melee character, this even includes health pots....Its bad enough that some of the game mechanics are very very hard for some melee characters the unresponsive skills and pots are making the game dismal. Not an issue in POE1

I was initially hoping that Huntress would be able to resolve my worries with Monk, since it'd be a combination of ranged and melee, but if the problem is with an inability to queue inputs well, and an inability for abilities to follow one another smoothly, then it seems like a problem for any class that wants to do combos in sequence. I hope they're able to improve the above by release.

So. It is clunky, and it is slow. And my main issue. It doesn't flow.



Honestly, when they said that they wanted spells to combo. I was expecting more of a flow, a fluidity to combat.

To describe a game with combat that flows. Think like.. CrossCode, Dead Cell, Hollow Knight. For a 3d game example Devil May Cry, God of War, Sekiro, Dark Souls.

The common thing in all these games is that characters are very responsive. Their moves can be, slow or quick. There's not long, big animations that root you in place. They can be chained together without delay. You never feel like you're out of control of your character in them. And a lot of the time, the moves build off of eachother. Combo. Like a fighting game. Lots of them let you move while attacking.


Instead, what we got was 'combos' that force us to use other spells, but without that fighting game fluidity. Which has kind of ruined it for me. Monk could be an amazing responsive martial artist fighter, but he largely feels clunky.


I think this is the biggest thing they could improve in PoE, is the combat. Make it feel better, make it flow. And people will naturally use the spells just because they look cool, or have a nice impact.

Right now I feel like I'm playing World of Warcraft, where I have 50 spells, but only 3 of them are worth using, and I use them on repeat, and a bit like Diablo, where every time you cast a spell you have to stand still. Which doesn't go well with the style of combat they're trying to give us. It needs fluidity, flow. To feel good and responsive, and have combo's that build off eachother.

I've noticed this issue with ball lightning into lightning warp. Ball lightning has a short animation after launching the ball which must complete before lightning warp can cast, but I would expect lightning warp to interrupt that animation. It feels odd for it to take longer to lightning warp to a ball after casting it than it does to simply lightning warp to a cullable enemy.