Thanks for posting this detailed video, I surfaced it to the controls team. The intent behind this change was to not have abilities fail to case or cast at obviously out of range locked targets. It sounds like the core problem here is we do not take zed shadow ranges into account. If we corrected that would it resolve the bad controls feel here? Or are there more factors involved?
Speaking for myself, I'd often rather have an ability not cast (and not go on cool down) than pivot and target a random minion. For that matter, in a team fight, folks are often moving in and out of my range. If I portrait lock a character, and they dash out of range just before I cast an ability, I probably don't want it to choose a new target for me. Maybe that is just me. I'm very new still.
We've kind of done that intentionally. We want judging range and deciding when to cast (even in the chaos of a teamfight) to be a skill that players develop. If we did what you proposed, you could just lock a target and smash the button until they entered range which we thought made it a bit too easy to accomplish.
That is a totally reasonable design approach. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. You mentioned doing what I proposed. Was I not describing the same situation the op was describing? This is a new change to the locking system, correct?
Edited to add: I'm being completely sincere here, and I suddenly worried it might not be taken that way. I really don't know if maybe i was describing aomething different than op. Again, I'm new. I may have misunderstood op's point.
It's a bit more complicated in the Zed case, because the OP is talking a lot about the target being in range of the Zed shadow. So within valid cast range to affect the locked target.
Also without getting into too much detail, if the target is "pretty close" to the range of your ability we won't pick a new target. We intend for it to be more like "oh my locked target was obviously out of range and I clearly intended to cast this ability to clear minions next to me, but did not unlock my target". If you can send me clips where this is feeling bad, we're happy to review them. We are constantly looking to iterate and improve our controls to feel good.
I'm about to feel like the geriatric millennial that I am, but I have literally no idea how to clip a portion of gameplay. 😅
I'm not even 100% sure this change is what I'm noticing. But I have been feeling lately like I was wasting my abilities more frequently than I had been. And hitting the wrong targets. And the info from this post and your comments is giving me some context that might describe why.
It's not that easy to enable or find, but both major platforms have this built in! You can also use our in-game highlights feature, which will let you tag a video clip in-game before and after your trigger a highlight (similar to how consoles do it). There is some performance/battery cost though
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207935
or
devtrackers.gg