Hey Dungeoneers, v3.0.0 and the Cleric are finally ready for beta!
In this blog post I’m going to share more details about the Cleric! Just as with the Duelist, I’m releasing the Cleric’s beta a little early. There’s still one subclass and two armor abilities to implement before the Cleric is content-complete and ready for release.
You are seriously overestimating the player’s ability to reflexively understand multiple default targeting behaviors depending on context. What I want to avoid is the player tapping an item and either having to pause to see what it is auto-targeting, or making an incorrect assumption about what was auto-targeted and firing at the wrong target. If either happens with any regularity then auto-targeting becomes pointless. That’s why the behavior is extremely consistent and simple: “always auto-target the currently focused enemy”, rather than trying to make decisions for the player based on context.
Obviously this isn’t perfect (auto-targeting enemies for buffs being the biggest example), but in my view it’s preferable to trying to decide what the player is going to want to do for them based on context.
That already happens tbh, don’t worry if that’s your only concern. I’ve targeted many more piranhas and wasted more throwables because auto-target targets the piranha instead of the enemy I’m fighting right now and let’s see who’s the guy that’s retrieving the item cuz I am not way more times than I’d wish to recognize.
There is no context needed for Wand of Warding or Bless. Wand of Warding would always target the last targeted ward (or nothing). Bless would always default to yourself.
You never want Wand of Warding targeting an enemy. Targeting an enemy sometimes plants a ward at their feet where they immediately melee it (unless they are targeting you), but often it does nothing and wastes the charge.
It would be desirable to force the player to select a location (and perhaps actually prevent them from targeting enemies since that behavior is so inconsistent). And once a location is selected, the best next step is to target the same ward again. It’s the thing you will do literally hundreds of times in Wand of Warding run, yet the game doesn’t help you do that. Instead, you are forced to manually target it over and over and over, leading to mistaps and wasted charges.
That’s exactly what you have do today! Bless targets an enemy with a purely beneficial spell. Wand of Warding targets an enemy and does literally nothing. You are forced to manually target these effects every single time. They auto target the wrong thing every time.
You say you don’t want players reflexively making mistakes, but I started this conversation explaining how I reflexively made a mistake and casted Bless on an enemy. That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
You don’t have to change anything else. If you literally only changed Bless and Wand of Warding, I’d be happy, and so would every other player. You can’t tell me that would confuse players or cause them to make reflexive mistakes. (They are not meant to target enemies!) Maybe it turns out that those are the only two spells or items that can be easily changed. That’d be fine. The game would be much better even with just those two changes.
If Evan added this I’d unironically rate the WoW higher
It’d be such a good quality of life improvement!
The items are the context. The point is that I don’t want targeting behavior that changes and adopts one of several different behaviors depending on what item is used. I would rather have extremely simple targeting behavior that is correct in as many cases as possible and does not make circumstantial assumptions as to what the player wants (e.g. based on what item they’re using). There is no way to add targeting behavior for these items/effects without making the logic far too complex, so instead it uses the same behavior as normal. The only alternative I would consider is turning off targeting entirely in these cases, but interaction-wise that pretty similar to leaving things as-is.
Jst add a button to toggle “smart targeting” on and off. Leave the current as default and make other 2 states: off entirely (doesn’t even target) and smart targeting, it adds these QoL targets that CrayonRosary mentioned and I am too lazy to repeat (it’s not laziness, it’s just 8am and I am still awake, did not go to sleep yet) I think that’d make everyone happy and It’d be a nice QoL
Fair enough.
Thank you for continuing to update one of my favorite games. The priest so far has been a lot of fun to play!
Have a Merry Christmas!