Since I'm bad at using the talent hotkeys, making the game more gamepad friendly or even just easier to play with only touch/mouse, is something I have some thoughts about.
First, here's the control scheme I've come up with.
I've limited the buttons necessary to what I'd think would be the bare minimum in order to play this on a controller but there's also room to expand on it if an important function is missing.
Things that should be mapped to buttons
Face Button 1: Confirm
Face Button 2: Cancel
Face Button 3: Action Wheel
Face Button 4: Look Around
Shoulder Button: Modifier to lock movement to diagonal only because moving accurately on a pad is hard, also a modifier during look around to disable snapping to characters, and maybe other button modifying related duties??
The action wheel would be an 8-way radial menu to keep it compatible with d-pad or analog stick. You should only need to push in the direction of the menu item and confirm to make it quick to use and muscle memory friendly.
Example I hastily put together:
https://i.imgur.com/UO64Tps.jpgNot sure if it's better to use text or graphics for the menu options but you could always make it so the text name appears when you highlight the menu item.
Actions that may require more menu items or a button on the controller:
- Change Level
- Party (list of command-able friendly characters)
- Dedicated sustained ability menu
- Dedicated menu for invoke-able items that show you which items give you a talent, and whether they're equipped or not.
For how to use talents I've come up with 2 possible solutions.
Solution 1
Revamp the
actions menu. From what I can tell, right now it only has 2 different contexts that change which talents you see when you open it. If the action menu were more aware about what you were targeting it could be realistic to use it as your only way of invoking talents.
This could be done by:
- Letting it only show talents that are in range of the selected tile
- Only showing talents that are not on cooldown (it currently already does this)
- Sorting the listed talents depending on the tile selected. If there's a friendly unit there beneficial talents are listed first, if it's the player it lists sustains or anything else that makes sense in that context, enemies with adjacent enemies make it list area of effect abilities first, neutral or ground targeted abilities maybe always high on the list?
I think the action menu should also be off to the side when it appears so that there's room for a talent description on the other side of the screen with the target area being clearly visible so that you can preview the talent's range and effective area as you scroll through the talents.
I don't think this solution can handle item talents as nicely as it current hotkey bar does where you can have them all on a hotkey and switch your equipment by attempting to use them, but maybe there's other ways to make those kinds of items convenient to swap to on a controller.
Solution 2
Using another 8-way friendly menu for talent selection


Similar to the proposed action wheel it would make every talent accessible with only 2 directional inputs and would be easier to use than a list menu as you learn the muscle memory.