Suggestions for minor changes to improve playability

[grmblfzzz]

These are suggestions for minor tweaks to existing features that I feel would greatly enhance the game experience. Feel free to add other suggestions of a similar nature. Here they are:

1) Removed: apparently it worked like this all along, and my game was just somehow magically corrupted. Fixed.

2) More hotkey bars, or some system that could save sets of gear. The current setup is more than enough for all abilities you could want, but often you have characters that want a couple gear-sets (such as a boss set vs clearing random trash, or a set for resists/survivability vs max dmg, etc). The feature that when you click on a hotkey it equips the item is great, and I got spoiled by using that for commonly swapped stuff. But if you have to change a whole bunch of gear (particularly near end-game), there aren't enough bars to put it all on.

Even just 1 more bar would be amazing. Particularly since there are 5 available now, which since it is an odd number means that if you are trying to display all of your hotkeys then it is unavoidably asymetric. One row is either less full, or you have to split up the bars and configure things in a wierd way (i.e., can't have all norm, then all shift, then all ctrl, etc. Also, more hotkeys can just never be a bad thing!

3) Some option to rest until your cooldowns come back, instead of when your resources are full. Resting twice obviously works, but I often wish it worked in reverse order (stop at cooldowns full first, then life). Examples include when you have a char with super low resource or life regen, so that you could use an infusion on cooldown to speed things up game-turn-wise, or you are just waiting on a certain ability to continue such as temporary buffs. Either providing a option to change the rest priority, or just a different hotkey for the other type would be great.

This is minor, but ideally there would also be an option to rest until items regen to full energy. This might be harder to do, but there are many situations where you have to wait till your useables are full, and currently you have to just use some long-cooldown ability/rest/repeat. Perhaps make it a third step, (rest stops at full resouces, cooldowns, then item cooldowns).

EDIT: lukep made the suggestion that resting stopped at whichever came up first (full resources or cooldowns... and in an ideal world item cooldowns too), instead of a set priority. This is a much more elegant solution!

4) Show the cooldown state of npc abilities when you inspect them. Would allow for more intelligent decisions when fighting particularly tough mobs, and would just reduce the feel of randomness. Obviously you could manually keep track of what turn they use it and try to count, but this gets difficult when any speed bonuses are involved...

[lukep]

1. I don't understand the problem fully, I thought that the last used hotkeys for each talent were saved and passed on to future characters. Could you provide an example to clarify?

2. Having one button to swap out multiple pieces of gear would be very nice, but could place you in danger as you spend 10 turns swapping 10 pieces of equipment (but that's easy enough to get around). As for the current UI, I found it to be very adequate with two rows at 32 pixel buttons, though I could see others having space issues with 64 px ones.

3. What if resting stopped at whichever came first (HP/resources vs cooldowns)? IMO that would be the best of both worlds as the added keystroke needed to get full (when you had just wanted one or the other) would be well worth the extra control to me.

4. +1, though I can't think of a good way to show it.

[grmblfzzz]

response to lukep:

1) For example, I just decided to try out arcane blades. When I start a new character (or start same character after he dies), stunning blow is on hotkey 4, arcane combat is on 5, flame is on 6, sustainables out of the way on +/=, etc. I prefer flame on 4, lightning on 5, etc. So I move them about, but when you die (if you die early on, such as trying to get almost any insane mode char started) and restart they go back to their original, awkward, places.

There is some feature in the game where it remembers where your talents were on hotkeys ( for instance, 2 and 3 are my regen/wild infusions on all chars), but whatever the trigger is that makes it save that doesn't happen right away. So there's some extra fussing about when starting chars that is kind of tedious (mindslayers for instance have like 10 starting abilities to move around). Making that happen earlier, or be controllable would be great. Unless I'm missing some option to control it? If so, please let me know!

2) A sort of gear-changer would be a kind of big change. My suggestion was just adding more hotkeys, so that you could do it manually (but much much less tedious than via the inventory screen) if you wanted. Also, I find difficulty squeezing all the things like Rod of Recall, Orb of Scrying, Pickaxe, etc, on the bars anyway. I suppose I do have it set to really tiny resolution, but unless it's super difficult to add somehow I still just don't see the problem with more hotkeys!

3) That is actually an amazing suggestion, would be the best of all worlds. +1! Oh, and shroud of weakness not interrupting rest/auto-explore, please!

[bricks]

I imagine it saves your key setup when the game is saved. Doing a manual save shortly after rearranging your character's buttons might do the trick. The keybindings should probably also be saved on death.

[grmblfzzz]

Sadly, it most definitely does *not* save the talent setup on a manual save. The remember-what-talents-go-where is somehow character independent (it's certainly cross-character, as infusions/etc appear in the appropriate slot in classes I've never played before). Saving it on character death would be an excellent solution though.

[Grey]

It gets saved for me. Not sure why it isn't working for you.

[grmblfzzz]

@Grey: Are you running it on linux or windows, out of curiosity? I spent a great deal of time starting new characters today and it definitively doesn't work for me. I'll mess around with it, see if I can figure out why. It would make starting new chars much more pleasant!

[Grey]

Windows 7. I presume it works for other people too?

[Avianpilot]

It works for me in Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux 10.04 at least.

[grmblfzzz]

Well, I got it working by just doing a fresh install and deleting my old t-engine folder (then copying over the couple critical files). Much obliged to people for informing me of the normal functionality. Exact cause remains a mystery, but anyway I've updated the original post to remove the unnecessary suggestion!