So I just got the expansion and was playing around with Necromancer. I was using Bone Harvest (which is a large cone attack) and noticed that when I tried to use Stationary Attack (holding shift and left-clicking) out of the “range” of the ability I just stood there doing nothing.
As you can see the ability (as far as looks go) seems that it should hit enemies further than I could cast it. Even still… I should be at least using the default weapon attack (when left-clicking).
So my idea:
Cast abilities even if the mouse is “out-of-range” for stationary attacks. If the ability is ground targetted, like Storm Totem, place it at max range.
I agree with that, it’s incredibly annoying to position the spell correctly without running head first into enemies due to how it works. At the very least, I’d like the passive that increases the range to also increase the targetting range, so it works a bit better, since currently even with the increased range it still uses the unmodified targetting range which leads to the situation in the gif.
It’s even more annoying since the skill is vital to buff your pets and has to be recast constantly, yet is super clunky to use.
IMO this is a problem with a lot of skills in Grim Dawn. It could be fixed by allowing skills to always cast when you’re holding Shift, defaulting to max range if the cursor is far away. Could be an optional setting since it wouldn’t appeal to everyone.
There’s also the issue of “snap targeting” i.e. any aoe skill will snap to the center of whatever monster you’re mousing over, rather than casting directly at the cursor. This makes it impossible to use a lot of skills properly against multiple enemies. Particularly annoying with sigil of cosumption against 2-3 enemies.
Fixing these things (or adding a couple of options to change their behaviour) would surely be pretty easy, and it would really improve the game for many players.
I agree that this should be fixed. For most skills that already existed before the expansion (Storm Totem, etc.), it is more or less just a convenience or quality of life issue, but they ultimately work as intended. However, for Bone Harvest specifically, it actually creates tactical problems and disadvantages, especially for characters which use it for the pet buff and aren’t very tanky.
I am a summoner Cabalist with Bone Harvest as my LMB mostly for the aforementioned buff, and I took a point in Dread for the range increase. I have the same issue you do with the stationary attack (Shift+clicking is quite inconvenient because my cursor has to be much closer to my character), but actually clicking an enemy makes me walk much closer into combat than I’m usually comfortable with, since I’m pretty squishy. That makes it more of a real issue and less of a QoL complaint.
Even though the skill damage cone itself works for the full range, the character walks all the way up to half the skill range before casting it.
Edit: I would like to see all projectile type skills fire off in the direction of the mouse cursor while using stationary attack. That would solve the problem. I’m not sure how I feel about that for things like Storm Totem, and I would imagine not all players would like the totem summoning somewhere other than where their cursor is. I actually like the fact that the character walks toward the cursor to get into range before summoning it. If anything were to be changed with that skill, I’d like to simply see the summon range increased a bit since it’s very low currently.
