Guard, Surge, and other former commands

[Subutai]

With the changes to guard, surge, and others, there seems to be an ongoing effort on Arelith to move things from commands to feats and spells. I'm finding myself to be consistently wary and even displeased by these changes, since they seem to me to largely be done just because we can do it now. We can move guard to a feat, so we do. We can move surge to a spell, so we do. But the result is, ultimately, a decrease in QoL that I feel is unnecessary.

When it comes to guard, if I wanted to guard Aaron, I could just quickly type -guard Aar, and it would be done. Now, without the command, I'm relegated to either sticking the feat on my hotkey bar (which is already packed full, so I might have to sacrifice something else there), then finding it in the middle of a fight, clicking it, finding the portrait of the character I want to guard, and clicking that. Or, if I don't have room on the hotkey bar, I have to navigate all the way through the radial menu, which means I either have to use physically click on all the different sections of the menu, or I have to memorize a numpad combination just to get to the feat.

Surge is the same, except that I also have to spend a spell slot on it, where I didn't before, so I also lose out on that.

The -command interface is really great, and much better in many ways than the hotkey bar. Is there are reason that these extremely user-friendly and useful functions are being removed and replaced with often clunkier and more difficult to use feats/spells?

[Morderon]

You do realize every feat that was once a command is back to being a command now? And have been since 2 days, or at least the following weekend, after the initial the hak update?

As far as the reason: I kept being asked 'hey how do i activate x'. Now that they been moved to feats? Those questions stopped

As far as why they weren't available as both commands and feats at release? There was always a more prevalent bug to squash.

[Ork]

Thanks for giving us a lot of options for using these cool, and completely Arelith specific actions & commands!

[Subutai]

Had no idea the -guard option had returned. I looked through the HAK and Update threads, and didn't find anything, which is probably why I didn't know, but I'm glad they're back. Thanks for that!

[RedGiant]

This both/and solution is genius. It retains Qol for the existing community and eliminates the esoteric knowledge gap experienced by many new players.

[WJLIII3]

And it really is a QoL state itself, some things, -ward for RP purposes comes especially to mind, its just a lot smoother and easier to type than to go from conversation mode to spellcasting mode, in terms of hands on the keyboard/mouse. Sometimes teleport, too. having both options is really great.

[Sea Shanties]

Had no idea the -guard option had returned. I looked through the HAK and Update threads, and didn't find anything, which is probably why I didn't know, but I'm glad they're back. Thanks for that!

Yeah I try to keep up but had no idea the commands returned. Seemed like the feats were meant to be a replacement at the time, not an addition (or that the -command removal was a bug instead of intentional.) Thank you for the addition.

To the devs, I know we can be trying but please have patience with players trying to keep up. Since news is announced/discussed in multiple places (updates on the forum, clarification in various threads, the news feed, the wiki, Discord) it's easy to miss crucial details.

[Morderon]

Correction, removal of -commands wasn't a bug, but leaving them in as they were would had meant you got double uses of many feats and they had to be ported to the -usefeat system; which also has the benefit of simplying the code base some as less redundant code compared to when they were in separate -commands.

[Subutai]

Correction, removal of -commands wasn't a bug, but leaving them in as they were would had meant you got double uses of many feats and they had to be ported to the -usefeat system; which also has the benefit of simplying the code base some as less redundant code compared to when they were in separate -commands.

Thanks for the clarification. Does this mean to guard Aaron, I would now use "-usefeat guard Aar" or something similar?

[Morderon]

All of them are aliased so they function without having to type -usefeat

I actually don't recall if i readded -guard [name] or if now if the only current way is to send -guard through a tell.