How to create "flow" in a game like this

Hello,

I think the most fun I have, using the systems that are available to me, apart from managing my character, is when I am in combat and I use my abilities like I am in some kind of "flow" state. What do I mean with that? Is that some kind of transcendent state of mind? Well, maybe some people would claim that, but that is not what I mean. A state of "flow" in this case, is probably what a pianist would experience when playing music, if the pianist played music for long enough. I don't know, maybe that's a bad comparison, but that's the best I can think of right now.

I just played with my Witch and she's a lich. She uses chaos and frost spells, because that's what a lich does and you can't tell me otherwise.

Now I'm in cruel act 2 and I just had a situation where I was fighting a group of mobs and I had the epiphany of instead of using my skills in the prescribed order, like a chain of set actions that you do every single encounter, I actually thought, it was a split second decision, that I would go right into this group of mobs now, while there was a mob charging a powerful attack and I'd use my frost nova to freeze everybody, before that attack was fully charged. And then I'd use my cold snap to kill everything. And it worked.

This is what good gameplay in a game like this looks like to me. Instead of having a set of actions that you just repeat every encounter, you actually "feel" the game and make split-second reactions to what is happening. I am realizing the comparison with the pianist probably wasn't a good one. Probably better to compare it to a soccer player or something. Hm, maybe a pianist that plays jazz and is improvising. I don't know.

Anyway, I don't know how to improve the game so this happens more often. I already think it's an amazing achievement that the game is able to create situations like this and maybe it speaks of the quality of the game and the quality work of the designers to make this possible. I don't even know how you'd create systems like this that allow for situations like this to happen. But I hope the devs build on this, because I don't think I've actually seen this happen quite like this in other (modern) ARPGs.



Cheers