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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Crowd Control Diminishing Returns (CC DR)- Nameplate UI?
Xeeg
Member, Alpha Two
Is there going to be an easy way to tell what the current status of CC DR is on your opponent? Nothing worse than dumping a stun on someone only to find they are immune, and have no way of knowing that before hand. Or if you had only waited 3s, it would have been a 4s stun instead of a 2s stun. In WOW I had to get a DR addon to keep track of when the openings were, because the base game didn't show it.
Since we aren't going to have addons, is this something we can have on enemy nameplates? That's where I like to see it. Don't want to be looking up at the top corner of my screen for things that require this kind of exact timing in PVP, I want to be looking at the battlefield and picking targets.
Since we aren't going to have addons, is this something we can have on enemy nameplates? That's where I like to see it. Don't want to be looking up at the top corner of my screen for things that require this kind of exact timing in PVP, I want to be looking at the battlefield and picking targets.
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Comments
keep track mentally duh ;3
In a 250v250 person battle? =D
Heck even a 4v4, or any open world combat scenario that isn't a 1v1.
Hiding this type of information from the player is bad design. Knowing how/when to land stuns is critical to good/enjoyable pvp play. Even knowing when your own DRs are up is key to strategic ability usage. This is too important, has too big of an effect, to be random luck.
And "just not having it enabled" is not an option if this is available, because that would mean gimping yourself against those who have it enabled.
Yeah but that can be resolved with toggle-able options... You can have it so it only displays on characters within a certain range, only on enemies, only on your target, only on allies, only on the stun DRs instead of silence, trip, root, etc. Each character will have different things that they care about.
You could do things like resize or transparency, so it is not opaquely blocking vision.
It could be a simple coloured number with no box or anything taking up alot of visual real estate. I'm sure the devs can get creative if they try.
CC DRs are too important to leave up to chance imo. Having played with knowing and without knowing, it is a better game when you know. Would you like it if some tank shield wall ability had no visual effect and there was no way to tell when it was up, or you had to change your gaze from the battlefield to the top corner somewhere, and find the icon in a group of 20 icons that the character has on at the moment? Not good play.
I feel so much more in control of my rogue in WOW because i can time my stuns properly, and it's a good feeling.
Either way, I wouldn't really care if Intrepid did have this, but they promised that UI will be super customizable, so I assume smth like this will be available.
you arent attacking all 250 players though at all times. you are with your party fighting another party or just kiting and focusing on one person...
i wanna see my debuffs on the other persons nameplate though xD unless I get good enough visual feedback to know when the ylanded or not.
Exactly, people may say the UI "looks" cluttered, but that's like saying a car dash looks cluttered because there is a gas gauge and a speedometer. "Cluttered" is when the information that is important to your character is being drown in a whole bunch of useless information. This is actually more organized.
The game is supposed to be about play and counter play. If you can't easily see things as simple as CC DRs, how can you counterplay against CCs in a satisfying way?
Otherwise it changes target selection/adaptation.
The one above the actual character head in the field. And the reason I am talking about this UI feature in particular, is because it is where your eyes are on the battlefield. It can/should contain information relevant to instantaneous, strategic/positional game play.
Here is an example from my WOW character. Now people are going to say it "looks cluttered", but I can say from personal experience that it feels way better in the heat of a pvp battle. And it's not like I'm walking around town like this. I have nameplates removed in town.
My target, Zoelua, has 3 of my bleeds on him (8s,19s,inf time left), and is stunned with 2s left. Looks like a big fist on the right. Above my bleeds, is the stun DR CD timer. 21s left with 1 stack.
For each stack of DR, the ability effect is halved. If anyone tries to stun him again in the next 21s, it will stun for half the time, reset the timer and add a stack. Once it gets to 3 stacks the player becomes immune until the timer runs out.
Messing this up has a HUGE impact on the fight. It's not like just a little RNG on the edges or anything. It's the difference between winning and losing.
On a side note, I resized my friendly player's nameplate to be very thin, and enemy's thick. Here you can see that there is an enemy rogue in the back, Taiwynd as well as a friendly priest Xaveeno, and friendly druid Mybeefbro.
All I care about on friendly units is basically where they are, what class/spec, and approx how many hps. It is easier for my brain to associate how many enemies and how many friends are in a fight when nameplates are sized by height like this. Then the HP bar colour can be used for class association.
This is partly how I "declutter". Information that isn't as important to my bleed focused assasination rogue is minimized or removed. Then use tools like colour, position, size, transparency, shadow effects, etc. to arrange information that is important to me in a way that I can comprehend quickly.
So when you say that you want to know who to stun during a massive battle and you want to make that judgement based on name-glances - to me that sounds like the most cluttered damn UI possible.
In other words, try imagining this kind of fight but with all the debuffs on top of those names
Btw, those big sword icons were a fairly debated thing when they got implemented, exactly because they were so damn huge (well, debated in my circles at least).
And imo no amount of opacity would remove the clutter. And if you can only see the debuffs of the player you're already targetting, then the decision making throughout the fight doesn't really change. I'm all for in-depth customization of icons under the window at the top of the screen, but I'd personally be against any "above the name" indicators.
WOW lol. OK yeah I would not want this nameplate stuff in that situation for sure. 100% agreed.
This is where the "customizable" stuff comes in handy. Maybe they could have a toggle for adjustable max players = 10 or something, before removing the icon. Or have it turned off in towns and big PVP events, etc.
But out in the open world in smaller groups of pvp, would be nice to have.
It's pretty simple, I think. If you don't know, you assume your target has been hard-CC'd before you most recently started seeing them, and count down from there. Unless your CC is so urgent that you accept the diminishing returns, in which case it doesn't matter.
Right now, if they're going in the WoW direction design wise (that's mostly what we've seen), then we're with Xeeg, regardless of what happens otherwise.
A massive battle in the L2/TL/FF style is a visual mess either way, but putting WoW ability design into a 'massive PvP' game will probably wreck it all as much as we saw in A1 anyway.
I could maybe see a party marking system work well with this. Anyone in your group could mark a player and everyone else in the group would see that name stand out from the crowd and have this info visible above their name.
This would also greatly help with group coordination and synergy. You'd still lose some visual acuity in bigger fights, cause of the obstruction, but at that point group-based actions are more important so I think it would be fine.
So yeah, that'd be my piece of feedback on this topic. Give us group marking tools.
Well my current setup only sees it on enemy players within 20 yards. So if there was an additional setting where if there were more than 10 people (adjustable) within 20 yards then it turns it off automatically.
Your idea is good as well.
My main point is that information important to our characters and the sort of play/counterplay they are talking about should be adjustable.
For example, when I play a healer, my nameplate heights are the opposite. Very thick for allies and very thin for enemies. Because I care A LOT more about easily seeing my friendly players HPs.
OK. Now imagine that you are playing a healing class. If the devs gave you the ability to turn off both friendly/enemy nameplates and ONLY turn on friendly nameplates when they take damage, it would be a lot easier to tell who needs healing in this game.
Or if you are someone who has a lot of counterspells, maybe you want friendly nameplates disabled/minimized and enemy nameplates to become purple when they are casting a spell.
The big sword icon above a whole mess of hundreds of identical nameplates is way more cluttered in my opinion.
L2 didn't have counterspells, so I'd need to see how those work in Ashes (if they are even present) to know how I'd want them to be visible/discernable.
Like I said, the change to huge swords was a debatable one. This is how they looked before (the pink fists).
Also, you could remove names altogether and only see enemy the icons for guild crest and ally/enemy allegiance. At 2 minutes in this video you can see the Red Shields (defenders of the castle) and the Blue Swords (attackers). And when the MC of the video hovers over a character - their full name pops up.
I'm uncertain if we can attain a natural level of clutter because games tend to have an unnatural amount of modifiers
I would only display modifiers on the selected target or on those within the area of effect I'm about to cast. If a target cannot be affected by my action, then I should only see their name on the nameplate, greatly reducing the clutter... and yes I would not know which target is suffering from certain conditions I would have to look for the guy or someone from my party would have to broadcast the target for me or call his name on coms
Or maybe display effects only on those immediately around me + those selected by me + or those targeted by my area-of-effect abilities. This would greatly reduce the clutter and still give information I need
For sure the game will need in the party system a way of broadcasting targets by marks, icons, tags, this is very necessary. And people should have keybindings for broadcasting and keybindings for locking the broadcasted target and locking party members who can be broadcasted
Well this is where I am asking for "adjustable" settings. A healer has very different things it cares about than a dot DPS. My bleed assassination rogue ONLY shows my bleeds on the target, but not poisons.We have already seen the trip effect and how things are supposed to combo off of each other. The UI should be flexible enough for players to adjust it so that the things that are important to them are clear, and the things that aren't are minimized/hidden.
Heck, they could even come out with a premade UI template for each class. Talk about class identity! They could have UI tutorials/walkthroughs from the main menu to help players get acquainted and adjust as their playstyles morph. Depends on how ambitious they really want to be with this game. Is it next gen or what? ;P
The fight at the 2 min mark is pretty clean looking. A lot of this depends on the numbers of players in the fight for sure.
I also really like how their spell effects have transparency on them so you can still see the players.
The first video I posted and this one at 25:50 are the rough representation of what we'll see in sieges. A mass of people that are all visible. Layers would literally defeat the purpose of a mass battle.
Here's another example from a current mmo as well.
TL doesn't have the style or amount of CC that WoW/Ashes has, nor a specific way in which you heavily care about debuffs and 'CC DR'. It doesn't make sense to have in a dynamic game like that.
This is why I 'complain' about the amount of CC in Ashes, also. It's just mashing together two design goals that don't combine well.
Basically, if there's enough CC that we need CC diminishing returns in big battles and even the people coordinating the CC actually need what Xeeg is asking for, we shouldn't have mass PvP. I mean, sure, it can just be random stuff for people who are into that, too, but at that point, the UI barely matters.
A1 Sieges worked sorta-fine because it wasn't just 'easy to get CCed', I think I don't remember actually being CCed properly more than once.
That video where Steven gets CC-locked is 'funny', but not even enough to justify CC diminishing returns.
mmmm... Don't really like it tbh. Def prefer my setup in wow. He doesn't even have health bars on nearby enemies to see who is hurt. How do they know what class the unit is? Player name and guild is like the most unimportant information in the middle of a fight, but that is what they show? I understand this is alpha 1 early version, but I expect that they are working on something better/customizable. I can't link my own videos on here right? I can make a clip of my wow battleground ui so you can see.
It's in development though, that's the 'problem'.
It's early, and from there, they have to choose a direction:
1) You don't need to see all those things because the battles are entirely about positioning and tactics rather than picking out the correct target consistently.
2) You need a lot of UI data because choosing the correct target and not wasting skills is really important to the battle flow.
If we get #1, we shouldn't get a ton of CC, particularly not long range CC.
If we get #2, we should get what you're asking for so that we can do the thing.
The reason the TL video is like that, is because TL is in camp #1.
Well, it also depends on what game mode we are talking about. Open world content, levelling progression, caravan runs, castle seiges, etc. all might have different ui requirements.