An Explanation for Why People Want to Disable Autotargeting

During the recent Talkative Tri and Jonathan interview, Jonathan went into great depth explaining his explorations into being able to disable autotargeting (ie free aim) in ARPGs and was wondering why its a feature people are demanding in PoE2 when they weren't demanding it in PoE1. I wanted to try and help offer an explanation for this based on personal experience in 0.1.

The answer is that they are using attack skills to move at speeds faster than walking/running in the game to get around having to scale move speed. Scaling attack speed is much easier and skills that move you (eg: Tempest Flurry, Rake) can cause you to traverse very quickly. The main problem is that with autotargeting enabled, you lock onto enemies and can end up getting stuck on terrain or on corners because the game seems to use some kind of shortest path calculation to zip you to the enemy during the attack animation. The problem is that this pathing algorithm doesn't account for terrain or other blocks being in the way.

My guess is that the reason this is popping up is because there are more skills on the Huntress (eg: Disengage, Rake, Whirling Slash) that allow for this kind of playstyle. I realize that this may not be in line with the design intent of the game, but I think that it should show the development team that people are clearly looking for any kind of method of being able to move faster as scaling movement speed in PoE2 simply isn't enough.

Hope this helps!