Losing movement skills sounds like a huge decline to me.
I'll try to be the devil's advocate here.
While moving fast with skills felt great, you gotta admit that it ended up in a kinda degenerate place, completely replacing normal movement. We were spamming that shit all the time.
We were spamming them all the time because base movement is so slow. I am not a quick player, mind you. I usually take my time in to do anything. I like to do the chaos orb recipe, so that means I am always going through the rares that drop to see if I got a piece that I need. I will also check all the nooks and corners on the map to make sure I am not missing anything unless I am trying to hurry for some reason. But if you try that on the base speed, without a bonus and without movement skills, it will take forever. Now, maybe they will balance it so that the base speed really doesn't need to be increase (I rather doubt it, but I am willing to allow for the possibility). But the movement skills are more than that.
(...)It's also why they killed the Quicksilver flask, and why they're making sure the roll isn't faster than regular movement, so you don't have a reason to spam it. It's a whole issue, because while movement skills are cool, if you introduce them and make them faster than running, you'll either spam them, or they'll have cooldowns.(...)
Movement skills are more than a simply moving fast, they are both a way to dodge, engage and cause damage; with the specifics of the skill determining how they work in these regards. Having only a simple roll button to dodge makes the game more simple in a bad way in my opinion. Especially since it seems to me the roll button is solely focused on dodging.
Also, someone might oppose the above argument by pointing out that careful positioning in poe is very rarely useful or possible. This is true to me at least, frequently I use movement skills to either escape an obvious attack or just to close in the enemy, and don't bother with them during other times. But I think a better idea rather than removing movement skills to deal with this would be to remove having a billion particles on screen every other boss battle. That stuff makes it impossible to tell what is going on (and frequently look rather garish). Movement skills could matter more if the screen was clearer and seeing what is going on was easier.
I understand the goal start working on movement without all this bagage in order to establish a baseline.
I think it would be better if they accounted for having movement skills into the baseline rather than having to hurriedly put them back in later.
Movement skills were often a way to skip through content, to avoid engaging with enemies. That can't be a design goal, because it basically implies the content is trash. But if you make the content worth engaging with, why would you need to skip it?(...)
Well, most of the content is always going to be trash...
But, besides that, the very approach they have to the game with the idea of seasons make eventually rushing through it desirable. The way poe is played is that you repeat the basic content again and again and again; each time with a different build (you might even try a different class, though I don't recommend it; templar is the only one worth playing). Even if all the content is good and fun to play through; it can't stay fresh forever. People will naturally want to skip over what they've dealt with several times in the past to what is new about a season or to what is new about their build.
(...)On the other hand, stuff like Teleport can't just be mimicked without a skill, and does things like going over obstacles that can't be done without. But that does have the issue of making normal movement seem subpar. Flame Dash on the other hand is basically obsolete now that there's the roll, except for niche burning terrain tactics. Maybe if they introduce a Teleport skill it'll have limited uses like Flame Dash, so it doesn't replace regular movement.
Not a simple problem.
I think flame dash teleports. I use it all the time to escape the traps in labyrinth and to cross abysses.
Maybe we'll get roll replacements, not as a skill, but as an upgrade to regular movement. Say, you teleport instead of rolling, as a passive on the Int side of the tree.
I hope not. One aspect I like about poe is not tying spells and attacks closely to the level system, but rather to gems. In this, poe is more similar to diablo 1 than 2.
