devtrackers.gg
Hello Ekler!
This is something that comes up a lot, so I want to break down my response into two parts - “Instant Cast”, and “Auto Cast”, to try to give a full answer.
Instant cast is something we have fairly high reservations about giving a skill because of how incredibly powerful it is. Being able to instantly apply some sort of effect, be it damage, mitigation, or utility means there’s less foresight and reaction time involved in utilizing a skill, making it less exciting, and less interesting as there is no planning.
There is certainly places for this - ‘support’ style skills that don’t necessarily grant any immediate strength by themselves so have a planning factor in how you follow up on them, such as holy aura, or other skills that are specifically designed to be reactionary such as volatile reversal. The other part to instant cast skills is that while they may feel “smoother” to play, they feel less impactful or meaningful as being instant means it’s just something that instantly happens, in the background, even if you’re doing other things.
For Auto-cast, it’s not something we designed the game for. Technically speaking, it’s using a third party software (your OS) to automate gameplay. Though this isn’t the issue here. The main issue here is that by setting something to auto-cast, you have no interaction with the ability, greatly reducing its impact and meaning. When we approach skills that people are commonly auto-casting, we aren’t going “no, auto-casting bad”; we’re instead asking “why are players not wanting to interact with this skill?”. So we try to change the skill to give it more meaning, impact, and make it more interactive overall. The end result of this is that once we rework the skill, people won’t want it to be auto-casted, but instead will want to directly interact with it and be rewarded for directly using the skill instead.
To use a recent example - Devouring orb. We toned down the AoE portion of it, but increased the strength of the central orb. The objective here to change the theme of it from “just have the orbs active and it does everything on its own” to “now I have the orbs active, but I have to think about positioning and movement to get the orbs to connect to get the most value out of them”. So now it makes more sense to watch when you have your orbs active, and how you’re using them, rather as much simply being “just cast orbs - done”.