Hold absorption cool-down confuses players and breaks mods (and vanilla, sometimes).

[stiff star]

The cause:
There is a cooldown between the time the game allows you to absorb notes while holding down absorb.

The issues it causes: (TLDR below)
The game never communicates that this is the case, and since there are so few times that the game clusters enough notes for this cooldown to matter when it does happen (such as Red Gnome battle) I constantly see players that are playing the game try to hold to absorb those lanes, only to take damage. These clustered notes are usually very brief, I don't really see the harm in letting them be absorbed since you'd only be absorbing a few extra with it allowed. And it's not even a consistently happening issue: its semi-random because the timing that you begin holding absorb will change if it damages you mid absorption or not, and I believe this has happened to me a few times in some regular battles (though I cannot remember which) because of said timing making it random and hence hard to catch. This issue is also what caused players to endlessly die at the end of the blackhole fight over and over if I recall correctly... they had to be re-arranged to fix it. But in game bugs are just the tip of the ice burg, because this has the potential to break all mods until it is fixed. Players creating custom battles probably won't even know this cooldown exists, and hence will cluster notes closer together than they are supposed to despite the clear intention of them being able to be held to be absorbed. And once again, the slight randomness will cause mod creators to not catch this, so it WILL plague all future mods unless every modder is told about a mechanic that the game never mentions.

The fix(?):
Just remove the cooldown entirely when holding down. I think the cooldown exists while not holding to prevent players from absorbing two lanes at once with skill, but only disabling it while holding/not moving would fix that easily. If it causes visual weirdness... a functional game is more important.

I can get a video of this happening in a mod in a bit

TLDR: Absorption cool down causes vanilla and modded battles to unfairly damage the player when attempting to absorb a lane of notes by holding.

It happens around 4-5 seconds in this clip. It happens a lot more, but OBS doesn't like cooperating with EH2 so this is the best I could capture.
And yes, I know for a fact I was holding the whole time, and I also know that it's not my keyboards fault.

[tawdry geyser]

My suggestion around this, if you devs see this and want to fix it, is to remove the absorb cooldown after the first note absorbed in a hold

[stiff star]

That's also a valid solution

[cloud barn]

Oh so that's why I was getting damaged on gnome

[dim arrow]

We'll try to take a look on the issue!

It is something we are aware of but modifying this aspect affects all battles and could potentially cause other issues which is scary.

[stiff star]

Hm, maybe you should consider opening up a temporary beta branch let players see if it breaks?
I hope I don't seem pushy, haha...

[dim arrow]

^That could possibly work!

The problem is that the cooldown ensures so player doesn't gobble all projectiles infront of them so the cooldown doesn't get enough time to recharge back.

A potential solution if we could calculate the distance of first absorbed projectile and then adjust cooldown once for the 2nd projectile in hopes to stabilize the rest of the projectile chain.

We would modify the timing
by 0.001-0.1 if the distance of player and first projectile is too narrow.

I'd like to start with this suggestion instead of messing around too much on entire absorb mechanic.

Note that the projetiles in the modd above the projectiles are too narrow compared to main game.

This makes the issue more prominent, there would need to be more spacing between projectiles.

[stiff star]

That could help, although one of my concerns is that it isn't clear the cool down exists at all - the mod creator may have put the projectiles too close in this instance, but how were they supposed to know that they can't be that close in the first place? Who is to say other mod creators won't put them to close?
This is definitely a good start, though.

[queen trail]

By the way if just custom worlds are the issue, you can attach a CB_EventCommand to the OnAbsorb - Always player event that resets the GameplayPlayerAttack component to be enabled and this should disable the delay. I can make a dll for this on the weekend if there's some demand

[queen trail]

For those using BepInEx, I made a plugin that resolves this issue: #💀┃eh2-spoiler-discussion message

Note that I went for a solution slightly different from Chris', since that wouldn't work for variable speed notes, or two notes coming at you at different speeds (and depending on lag, might still not work if you were super close to the notes).

[stiff star]

Although this is helpful, it only helps people who know about it. Mods such as... I dunno, every entire custom world submission, have been affected by this issue. I have encountered it multiple times already.

[queen trail]

This is more to facilitate something like this ^^ so people can play around with a different implementation and see how it feels

[worldly leaf]

is it just me or is this video broken and stuck on one frame lol

okay nvm i downloaded it and its normal

just discord being weird again

[stiff star]

I just realized that the cooldown also can have the reverse issue:
If you have notes that usually can't be absorbed by holding, if you start holding late enough into the first note, you might be able to absorb them

The fix might just to be make the cooldown last longer if the note is further from you... because removing the cooldown would still allow this issue to persist.

But doing this might fix both issues

I don't hate that the cooldown exists, I hate that it is inconsistent

[queen trail]

the change I described/implemented - keeping a static countdown to when absorbing fails, but making it so you can only absorb a note that is as close to you as the first absorbed - makes this consistent