Breakables and skills
It feels pretty bad playing a devouring swarm or drain essence build and having to use a valuable button binding for weapon attack just to break a door or access loot you earned.
This extends to pet attacks, as well. For example, I was playing a player-scaled pets archon with wind devils and guardians, and discovered that their pet attack can only break some items but not all.
In my opinion, all skills should be able to break all breakables, where I define breakables as:
- crates, scrap heaps, etc
- Heroic spoils
- Doors
- Quest objects: nests outside homestead, caravans in Necropolis, vents in Malmouth, etc
I do understand there’s a kind of lore to this behavior, but this also uniquely impacts leveling and budget play, since there are no breakables in SR.
As a possible alternative, the default weapon attack button able to break all items regardless of what’s bound there, not only when it’s a cooldown skill (though this risks “stealing” valuable presses, particularly for channeling skills).
Or, more out there: what about a cosmetic pet that just runs around and breaks stuff for you?
Item pickup priority
Sometimes, it is impossible to actually pick up an item because of nearby enemies. For example, on a recent run of Tomb of the Heretic, there were some items on the ground near 3 permanent monster summoning portals, which spawned enemies frequently enough that the items were never targetable for pickup. I also once tried to follow a speed-leveling guide which has you pick up a lore note in a room with skeletons, and it invoked multiple minutes of luring and kiting them to get enough distance to grab it before losing focus.
Of course, it can also be annoying in other games when you try to attack an enemy and instead pick up some garbage item, so there’s a balance.
One suggestion: “move to” should ignore enemies and always allow you to pick up items. Or a new action that can be bound to the second skill bar for rare cases where you really need it.
Buff/debuff info
At my preferred UI scale for console play, all buff/debuff icons (player, zone mutators, enemy, etc) are covered when the character screen is up. Of course, even if they were visible, moving the cursor quick and precisely enough with a joystick over them to read is almost impossible.
It should be possible to inspect the icons from the pause menu screen, too. The menu is small enough that the icons should be visible at most UI scales, and since the game is paused, you actually have time to get the cursor over the icon and read what it says.
