If you bind a skill with cooldown to LMB or a rush skill from the rune to RMB, your char will be autoattacking during the cooldown if the button remains pressed.
This may be useful for some builds based around an attack skill like Shadow Strike. However it’s infinitely inconvinient and usually detrimental to gameplay for a caster. Here is a build example: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/M2gO8Mv2
This is the char i decided to make after the new mod on the amulet was added. Cooldown on Grenado is very low, less than a second. Naturally you want to bind it to LMB to have it cast on cooldown.
But the result is appauling: your char starts to autoattack with very low AS which makes you miss the cooldown by up to 0.5 secs due to slow attack animations. Not only that, the attacks on this caster are so terribly weak that even 16% leech rate doesn’t transfer into any health. As the result the char cannot survive in endgame despite very tanky platform, half converted bat and high leech rate.
In my opinion, this mechanic is counter-intuitive and goes against the spirit of building in GD. If you make a caster, you do not expect to attack.
You might argue, i’m not using the set correctly because it has attack speed. But if you look at the set bonuses, it’s clearly meant to be used with explosives and that’s what i did. Taking other profiled MI items boosts your main skills further and leaves no time (or free skillpoints for that matter) to attack.
Overall i feel kinda betrayed by the game and i very rarely feel that way. Once in a lifetime i decided to make a proper caster with new items clearly intended by the devs to be used together. And i’m getting punished by some obscure mechanic.
Same goes for the rush runes. Why in the world would char start to fire their guns if MELEE skill is on cooldown?
The whole Ulzuin’s chosen mechanic always felt weird and wonky to me tbh. And those pistols support the strongest (or at least top3 strongest) skill in the game (I am talking about lightning CB of course, forget Grenado) and they are the most awkardly and poorly designed set in-the-game. I guess it’s a weird way to punish players for playing Lightning CB.
Add it to the toggle of “attack with chanelling skill on target” to make them LMB-bindable. And to several of other useful toggles that would improve the experience so much.
I agree, I know this mechanic is pretty much mandatory for some other builds like ABB Witch Hunter but in these cases it’s pretty jarring. You can put your attack skills on your keybinds but for some extreme builds, like OP’s build + Light’s Defender set, it can lead to finger fatigue/pain.
+1
I noticed the same thing with my Vire’s Might Vanquisher Templar. If i assign the skill to the mouse buttons, it wastes time with autoattacks beteween the short VM cooldown, and this is a problem since, when VM is avaiable again, the char is still autoattacking and must wait till its animation finishes.
The only fix I found is assgning VM to the other buttons.
IIRC auto-attacks were added as default for skills on LMB and RMB while they are recharging during Early Access. Long before we had today’s means of reducing the cooldown. Also the recharge time of many nukes was significantly higher - I believe Doom Bolt had 30 secs.
I see the point for those builds which use a spell as main attack. But for augment skills I can imagine weapon focussed builds, which want to benefit of auto-attacking while recharging.
How high does your attack speed has to be, that you can always use the assigned skill immediately when it becomes available again?
Wouldn’t this justify to get a mouse with extra buttons? Or do you only want to alternate between the assigned skill and moving around?
Should Crate agree to add this to the options, then you probably want this to be a per character setting. Also as gamepad user I would like to have an option to move auto-attacks to different slots and the possibilty to set a second auto-attack slot - currently auto-attacking is on hot key 1.
An attack will always get in the way since 1) it still has to finish animations for me to use my skill 2) it will be used instead of moving to the target.
It creates a conundrum where i want to use my main spell on cooldown but the game says i cannot. It’s discouraging because of how much value this build spends on Grenado to lower its cooldown to the point where it is competitive in endgame with other skills.
As the result my yesterday’s gameplay looked like this: i use LMB as “move to” or bind Chain Lightning to it and in hte meantime furiously mash “d” key to spam my Grenado. This was the only way i could benefit from low cooldown and not get myself constantly killed.
Not only is it very tiring for fingers, as mentioned above, it’s irritating as a core of gameplay and if i’d polish this build in the future to make it consistent, i still couldn’t recommend it to anyone. It’s simply unpleasant to play compared to classic Canister build and doesn’t give you enough power to justify this complexity.
I don’t think this was the goal the devs had in mind when they created these helm, amulet and medal to support low cooldown Grenado.
I have the same issue with zero cool down storm box and how it can’t be recasted if I hold the button down. Different but same because it still causes hand fatigue.
Not to mention that I feel (bias) that those guns are just blah.
Give an option to turn this off and for crying out loud save my hands from storm box fatigue.
+1 to the suggestion of this being 100% customizable.
On the margin, I’d actually like to see GD2 with two skills bindable to one button. When holding the button, they would both fire when the other one is on cooldown. Thinking of hybrid autoattack / short cd nuke builds like VB dervish wherein you could actually bind ABB to the same button as Fervor, and play the dervish just like the witch hunter. When cd approaches 1s, let’s be honest, you gotta mash that nuke button like crazy. That’s RSI (Repetitive Stress Injury) right there. I’m serious
Chronicon Arpg is the best in this regard because skills (most have cooldowns but not all) are on a priority list.
If you bind the same button to different skills their priority, the order of activation when you’re holding the button is the same as the order on the list.
In case of Grim Dawn ABB would have higher priority / position on the list and activate as soon as off cooldown delaying Fervor.
Binding multiple skills to one button works pretty well in Chronicon since you can set this priority.
Since I always play melee AA builds, and holding lmb can cramp my fore finger, I keep one of the keyboard buttons for the same skill, in case in a long combat I might need to relax my finger. And It’s different with desktop and laptop. I play with laptop so Keyboard is not that comfortable to use constantly; and the position of monitor can’t be adjusted in laptop; one of the reason’s that I play always AA. With a piano builds I probably won’t perform it’s potential due to hard keyboard using. With a desktop, you can position your keyboard, mouse and monitor as it suits you but not with a laptop.
I do support every comment of “tqFan” in this topic.
I do not like the idea of narrowing my freedoms of play styles in any ways, but I do like the ideas of adding more options to game settings.
