[2020] Making Skills Feel More Responsive

We are in the process of updating skills to make them feel more responsive. This work has included changes to their animations - so before we explain the adjustments we’ll be making, we’ll be taking a brief look at the different phases of skill animations.
 

Table of Contents
1. A Skill Animations Primer
1.1 Anticipation
1.2 Impact
1.3 Follow Through
2. The Changes We’re Making
3. The Skills Being Adjusted
3.1 Acolyte
3.2 Mage
3.3 Primalist
3.4 Sentinel

 

A Skill Animations Primer

Each skill animation has three phases, which are;

• Anticipation
• Impact
• Follow Through

When looking at each of these, there’ll be a GIF of my Mage - he’s called Meatier, because of course he is - casting Fireball with the name shown during that phase of the animation. We’ve slowed down the GIFs so that each distinct phase of the animation is easier to see.

 

Anticipation

Anticipation is the part of the animation which occurs before the skill takes effect - which in the majority of cases is when a skill deals damage to an enemy or heals an ally.

This is often used in boss fights as a visual cue for dangerous abilities. An example of this featuring a player-controlled character is when the Mage pulls his hand behind his head, before dramatically throwing it forwards as he conjures Fireballs to unleash upon his foes.

 

 

Impact

Impact is the moment during the animation in which the skill takes effect; for example, the moment in which the Fireball skill’s projectiles are created and begin moving forwards.

 

 

Follow Through

Follow Through consists of the character transitioning back to their regular standing pose. It is sometimes partially skipped so that characters can move sooner after activating a skill.

 

 

The Changes We're Making

In Patch 0.7.6 we are updating many skills with some of the following changes;

• Some skills are having the duration of their anticipation reduced, and the duration of their follow through increased. What this does is allow the impact - usually when a skill deals damage or heals - to occur sooner, without changing the total animation time.
• The follow through part of an animation can be partially skipped, allowing characters to move (but not use skills) sooner after that skill is used. The proportion of follow through which allows you to move is different for each skill. We are reviewing the proportions for every skill, and many skills will allow you to begin moving sooner after their use. This prevents a character from being trapped in place for too long.
• Each skill has an ‘ability time’ which dictates how long a character must wait before using the next skill. We are shortening this for some abilities so there is less of a pause between skills. This change is being made to fewer skills than the previous two.

 

The Skills Being Adjusted

Here are the skills we will be updating;

 

  Acolyte

• Hungering Souls
• Mark For Death
• Marrow Shards
• Rip Blood
• Sacrifice
• Summon Bone Golem
• Summon Skeleton

 
 Necromancer

• Summon Skeleton Mage
• Summon Wraith

 

  Mage

• Elemental Nova
• Fireball
• Focus
• Glacier
• Lightning Blast
• Mana Strike
• Snap Freeze
• Static Orb

 
 Sorcerer

• Black Hole
• Meteor
• Volcanic Orb

 
 Spellblade

• Flame Reave
• Shatter Strike

 

  Primalist

• Maelstrom
• Summon Thorn Totem

 
  Beastmaster

• Summon Frenzy Totem

 
 Druid

• Entangling Roots
• Spriggan Form abilities
  • Root Wall
  • Vale Blast

 
 Shaman

• Avalanche
• Summon Storm Totem
• Tornado

 

  Sentinel

• Shield Throw

 
 Forge Guard

• Forge Strike

 
 Paladin

• Healing Hands
• Judgement
• Sigils of Hope
• Smite

 
 Void Knight

• Abyssal Echoes
• Devouring Orb

 
If there are skills not on the above list which you would like us to review, post their names below and we’ll look at them. We may not be able to change them in time for our next patch.

@Korimoor @danklebs I’ll make sure we look at Reaper Form. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

@danklebs @Vulkan I had discussed the possibility of doing ‘before & after’ comparisons with Sam from our Art Team. Our concern was that most of the changes likely wouldn’t translate to a non-interactive medium such as video very well. Even if we tried imposing keyboard input over the video, adjustments of less than a second here, less than a second there wouldn’t necessarily look very impactful. The improvements are mostly compelling due to the sense of urgency you can feel while playing - and without that, it’s hard to appreciate their significance.

If you look at the Impact GIF above, it was created after I had slowed down the video to make things easier to see - and even then the word ‘Impact’ was probably on the screen longer than was entirely warranted to ensure that it would be visible long enough to be readable.

 

@danklebs Heh, I seem to be pinging you a lot! I’ll pass that on, too. Appreciate it.

 

@RawSuicide We’ve been periodically addressing how impactful combat feels in concentrated bursts such as when we implemented Screen Shake and its related settings, as well as when doing a pass on combat-related sound effects. It can be hard to prioritize this work over a new feature or other addition to the game, but we do make improvements here as and when we find the time. Last year we recruited an Audio Engineer who has been doing great work improving the sound of combat (and destroying fruit & vegetables in the process).

If you notice any particular abilities you feel are a bit lacking, it would be very helpful if you could post in #feedback-and-suggestions to bring these to our attention. If you can be specific about which aspect of them in particular feels bad then that would be excellent - but please don’t worry if not; we can play with it internally to try to isolate specific problems.