Action Mode Flaws and Oversights (possibly Megathread)

Hear me out - Action Mode is sick. It's a very immersive experience, with a lot going for it. However, it is fundamentally flawed in several areas, many of which are crucial to the MMO experience.

Number one: Action Mode does not allow interacting with your UI screens via mouseover. As it is right now, it completely hijacks the mouse pointer to turn the character's camera, disallowing its' use for interacting with Inventory screens or skill trees. They do have the feature implemented with the Main Menu UI screen, meaning the functionality is there, it's just not been coded for other UI windows. Let me open my Inventory with I, eat some meat with my mouse pointer while I'm walking and close the inventory without pressing Z to go out of action mode, pressing I to open Inventory, then after I'm done, pressing Z again to return back to Action Mode. It's honestly aggravating after the N-th time, and something that would go a long way towards streamlining the UI.
Also, please add a keybind to temporarily free my mouse pointer. I'd like to view tooltips without exiting Action Mode sometimes, thank you

Number two: self-targeting in Action Mode is difficult. You have to aim in a direction completely devoid of friendly players and/or enemies in order for your target to clear and the spell to proc on you. The arc of aim is also broad, probably to help with target acquisition, but in a target-rich environment, it's a nightmare to clear out your target so that you can safely self-heal. One possible solution is to add a keybind like MMB to self-target, pressing which immediately targets yourself until pressed again, in which case it returns to normal targeting.

If any of you have something to add, feel free to post in the comments!

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Comments

Shabooey

Agree with you on your first point and have already given feedback on it. Really hope they can add that functionality in.

Caeryl

Hard agree. Opening a UI window should unlock the cursor until it's closed or clicked out of

Most games with active aiming have that feature

Chronomage

I also agree. I would love to really use action mode. However, I feel it needs to be closer to New World's system in terms of its functionality and immersion. I can fully interact with everything with that system while still tab targeting. I really really want to use the action system as it is much better especially for melee combat, but having to exit the system just to use all of the functionality of the normal system is aggravating.

DarkSolus

While we are on this topic...
Steven, please, for the love of God above, make my party members a priority when targeting for heals in Action Mode. Also, the whole targeting system in AM is so wildly inconsistent, I am hesitant to even call it targeting tbh. Trying to select my tank as a heal target is an exercise in futility, and I end up switching out when there's more than 2-3 enemies or friendlies on the screen. Maybe for the offensive spells, a simple logic can be made akin to 'if pressed, then target closest enemy' or 'if pressed, then target enemy nearest to the reticle'.

The targeting also seems to grab enemies behind walls and ceilings a lot of the time, messing up the casting and making me cycle through the target list only to then lock onto the same enemy behind a wall. Maybe a cheap raycast is in order so that in Action Mode if the enemy is behind a solid obstruction, they cannot be selected as valid target? And if you break LOS after obtaining the target, it stays for, say, 5 seconds before resetting, so that you can find cover or something? Just giving out ideas here.

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