Movement Momentum

This game has a lack of 'momentum' in its movement, which I think is what makes the game feel "slow." I genuinely think that the baseline speed of your character is actually perfectly fine, especially now with sprinting, but the problem is in moving from one movement state to another.

When you dodge roll, you come to a full stop at the end. When you stop sprinting, you come to a full stop (unless you use a skill). When you take damage and get light stunned, you come to a full stop. You take damage during your dodge roll, you come to a full stop. From what I've seen of skills that provide their own movement, they also often come to a full stop (I've played with a limited number of skills compared to a lot of others, but if these issues exist early on I'm going to assume it's also the case later and on different archetypes). It creates this feeling of stuttering, where all your movement is just gone in an instant, repeatedly, constantly. Yes, it adds to the difficulty to the game, and I don't mind difficulty, but it's a kind of difficulty that is annoying to deal with.

Some things I thought of that could maybe help. Doesn't need to be this specifically, but it's at least a starting point:

1. Make the dodge roll simply not come to a full stop. Have the character be at ~30-40% speed at the end, for a smoother transition into regular movement. This smaller decay of speed would also mean that it goes a longer distance, which would also improve its feel, and can be justified due to the existence of sprinting. The main argument that was given for not doing it that way previously was to prevent people from dodge roll spamming to get around places; now you can just sprint. (I think about ~15-25% increase in dodge range, even if it comes to a full stop at the end, would immediately make the game as a whole feel better.)

2. Maybe remove the transitional animation when you stop sprinting entirely? That or make it only last as long as it takes to get back to regular move speed if you're still actively moving. In combat you'll typically use a skill which forgoes that animation anyway.
Edit: on second thought, in the about 3 hours I played with sprinting so far I don't actually remember clearly whether it already does this or not (i.e if you stop pressing the dodge button but are still moving). It definitely comes to a full stop if you also take off your movement input, even if you start giving movement input again during the animation, which still feels bad.

3. Have player light stuns transition from 100% speed to 0% speed over the very short duration, with some sort of stagger animation in which the player character stumbles a little bit in the direction they were moving in, rather than removing all movement immediately.


I do get that with sweeping changes, particularly the first of these suggestions, comes yet another balance pass over the entire game.

The worst flaw in POE2 is the character movement and controls. The characters feel heavy and slow when walking, respond slowly when changing direction, and keep their inertia. It’s obvious the game was designed with consoles in mind and meant to be played with a controller, instead of the agility we had with characters in POE1

Are you sure that the lack of inertia (where it still happens) adds to difficulty rather than removes it ?

As also evidenced by the comment above, quite a lot of players seem to really dislike inertia.