Junior Member
Thought I would drop my thoughts on the mouse and keyboard controls here. This was my first alpha participation for this game, but I logged 18ish hours in this alpha round, all using keyboard and mouse. The vast majority of my playtime was on Warden, who I got to level 51. In the last few hours of the alpha I also started experimenting with Orochi to understand his deflect mechanics.
The first thing I will say is that I found the default lock keybind to be terrible. After disabling toggle lock and rebinding lock to 'spacebar' and dodge to 'ctrl' I found it much easier to manage my target, especially in situations where I was outnumbered. That said, 2v1 situations were extremely tough to deal with the mouse, which I will touch upon later. With better control over my lock state, I was able to accurately time dodge rolls out of bad situations, space myself from my foe and regain my wits. This strategy helped me overcome some of my failings in correctly guarding with the mouse early on, and in some cases make up for Warden's poor maneuverability.
The seeming inaccuracy or unresponsiveness of the mouse while changing guard directions was far and above the biggest problem I have with the K+M controls scheme. It's very possible it is simply my own ineptitude and muscle memory fighting me, but quickly and accurately bringing the correct guard to bear in stressful circumstances against rapid light attacks (Orochi and Berserker especially) was tough to say the least. My left and right guards would often drift into an upward guard, or I would fail to guard against fast alternating left and right attacks, despite thinking I should have. That said, I never experimented a ton with the mouse guard sensitivity, and that could have possibly alleviated some of my problems. After hours of beating my head against Orochis in duels and brawls, I started to have better success with successfully changing guard direction quickly by the end of the alpha. This alone does lead me to believe that while awkward to use at first, the K+M controls are usable, although certainly not the ideal controls to use for this game.
However, even after getting used to controls over all those hours of playtime, I could not hold my own when outnumbered. Again, this is probably my own incompetence, but it's extremely awkward and difficult to successfully block attacks from multiple enemies simultaneously. As such I resorted to boning the **** out with a combat roll when engaged by multiple enemies and trying to make the fight more mobile, intermittently engaging single targets when possible with surprise heavy attacks and shoulder bashes, and hope to slowly whittle my enemies down or frustrate them enough to disengage.
The last thing is that I briefly tried a somewhat unorthodox control binding in order to increase my control over my guard directions. The jist of the control scheme is to use the numpad instead of your mouse to control your guard direction. I used '4' for left guard, '8' for up, and '6' for right, then '5' for guard break, 'enter' for heavy attack and '0' for light attack. My right hand fell to these keys much the same as my left hand does to WASD+shift+space. In order to retain camera authority when not locked and mouse combat controls for emergencies, I used Razer Synapse to rebind 'enter', '0', and '5' to the mouse buttons that typically control the actions I noted previously. I only really tried to use this layout for an hour or two, as I was playing a lot of Dominion with friends at that point, and needing to frequently switch between mouse for non combat camera control and the numpad for combat got to be very annoying. However in Duels, and for the most part Brawls, I found this to actually be a decently effective strategy. If I had better committed myself to it, I'm sure it would have bypassed many of the issues I had with mouse guarding. However, learning new things is hard, so I ultimately gave up and stuck with the mouse. Also, considerations would also have to be made for additional controls that I wasn't aware of at the time, such as heavy cancel.
In conclusion, these are all personal problems and I have no clue as to how any of the issues I described could possibly be fixed.
TL;DR: Get a ****ing controller
Member
Yep, I can sign this with all my yesOriginally Posted by Post-ItPyro Go to original post
Changing stances, and especially *quickly* changing stances by using the mouse is extremely hard to pull off (sadly).
Left | Right | Top is "good" as directions, but something in this game makes it hard. Maybe the fact that it's shaped like a Y? Left-Right-Top-Piece.
In another game I played in the closed tests was Dreadnought. (There you play as capitol-spaceships). You can direct the main energy to either thrusters, shields or weapons. Basically like in For Honor the stances.
But there the game is like a pie chart with the center rather far on the bottom, so as soon as the mouse was moved upwards, it was always top-energy, if I recall correctly.
This might maybe worth trying out, I imagine.
But yeah, overall changing stances with the mouse is clunky, something needs to be changed ASAP :P
