Click and hold to attack

[ICO]

Devs, first and foremost - Titan Quest is hands down my favourite ARPG and although there are probably no people who worked on the original game here (I know some of them went on to create Grim Dawn), I still wanna say thank you SO MUCH for this DLC!

Can you please make it so that you can attack by holding the mouse button instead of clicking a million times? It is actually already in the game, but for some reason it doesn't work properly in the DLC. I'm assuming there's some onHoverActionEvent which gets confused with the enemie's mesh collider or something...
Please investigate, I'm really getting tired of clicking 50 times on each enemy individually.

[ICO]

I figured out what's happening! Click and hold for continues attack does work, however it is for some reason FIVE TIMES SLOWER than if you keep clicking with the mouse. This has never been a case neither in the original game, nor in any other game whatsoever. The attack should be the same regardless what method one is using.

@Devs, I hope this is a BUG and not a design decision. Please fix that, for it becomes really frustrating, really fast.

[Donoghu]

From what I have noticed, it seems the issue actually comes from the Pathfinder system as the problem doesn't appears as much with bows or long range attacks (at least from my perspective).

When using a melee range weapon or attack, if you're holding the button, you move toward your target and start attacking. The pathfinder only activate if the enemy is further than a distance (let's call it Dis). The melee ranged attacks can only be used if your character is a another distance (let's call it Atk). From what I have tried, the distance Dis can be further than the distance Atk, meaning the whenever the enemy you're hitting on move a big further back than Atk, but within Dis, unless you hold shift, your character will stop attacking (too far) while the Pathfinder won't activate the movement of your character to reduce the distance of Dis.
When you release the mouse button and push it again, it force the Pathfinder to move again which explain why it seems to work.

The "five time slower" attacks is due to the enemy moving in and out of the distance.

The game targetting involves a raycast on Mouse-Down which is why you can't keep attacking after the targetted enemy is dead by holding the button or switch target without lifting the finger. You might dislike it, but that's the same with Diablo 1 and 2. (Ok. Diablo 2 got patched at some point which changed some targeting behavior, but it was like that back in the days.)
That's because, back at the time when this game was developed, games were targetted at PC with 256MB to 512MB of RAM and, at most, 512MB of VRAM GPU with the beginning of PhysX as NVidia bought Ageia. Basically, considering the existance of an OS unoptimized for single-app priority that is Windows, it means those were less efficient than even a PS3/Xbox360 in comparaison even if they had up to 2x their specs. As such, it was a custom for developers to avoid using Delta-Time for a refresh on inputs and instead uses Mouse-Down and Mouse-Up calls which apply only for a single frame each.
Refreshing Input on Delta-Time means, on each frame, the game analyse "What are you aiming on?" with a raycast. Today, that's a nothing, but back in the days, that's required a bit of memory enough to see sometimes, a slowdown with the FPS of the game.

Can they fix it and update it to someting "up-to-date"? Only them can tell. Above, I only applied Game Development logics to analyse what seems to be happening from a bit of testing on my end.

If you're using a wireless mouse, note that there can also be an issue with the Hold-Down parameters of your mouse. If the signal waves just a little, it could count as you releasing the button. The game was developed at a time when debugging the controls didn't really involved a wireless mouse as possible standards for gamers so it could have been something they didn't debug. (Especially with homemade engine like the one used in Titan Quest, that's quite a big possibility as it's not like the Engine got update on every front whenever something new comes into the gaming market like the market engines.)

[ICO]

This is a very interesting addition to the topic, but as I wrote, this issue was not present in the original Titan Quest. You can click once, hold the button and the character will keep attacking the enemy regardless of it's movement or position until the enemie dies. Then, sure, you have to click on another enemy and hold down the button until the enemy's dead.

I'm playing with a mage class character and my mage literally attacks once every 3 seconds if I hold the LMB down. If I click it fast, then I attack 2-3 times per second.

I'm using wired mouse.

[Maverick81PL]

Holding works fine but we need auto atack. Click on enemy and charactes auto attack but only with mele attack no skills.

[marLeo]

Never had a problem with that.

But here's a pro tip:

Hold down the space bar and your character will stand still and you can attack in any direction simply by holding down the LMB.

[ICO]

Okay, it is clear by now that most of the people suggesting solutions haven't played the original Titan Quest, Grim Dawn or any other ARPG game.

Based on the fact that the devs over at THQ Nordic clearly don't care much for this issue, I guess I'll just have to suck it up and live with this odd gameplay decision.

[SLK]

Have you send a bug report directly to THQ Nordic? It´s clearly a bug, cause for me there is no difference in speed between holding down LMB and clicking again.

[Slobodan covek]

I hate this click and hold. It makes my hand hurt after an hour of playing. Yeah, I am not hard core gamer, but atill. It would be better to just click once on the enemy, and the caratcer attacks him untill he kill him. Then you click on the next enemy, and so on. Of course, keep the option to click and hold for those who preffer it.

It would be an easy and quick option for devs to add. For AE too, not just for the DLC.

[marLeo]

I kill monsters so fast it would be extremely annoying to always have to click on a new one to attack him.

What I usually do it to hold down the space bar together with the lmb and let the enemies just rush into their death. This way there's no need to select a new one all the time, just hover the cursor over them. ;)

[Vinc]

https://github.com/Vincenque/TitanQuestAEAutoAttack