The flashing effect every few seconds across the entire bar as you use skills needs to go. Flashing is used to draw attention - I have no objection to an important skill just off cooldown flashing (e.g. Whirlwind), or a skill that only enables under certain conditions and thus requires attention drawn (e.g. Riposte), but not the entire hotbar.

The cooldown itself is ok, although on long CD skills it becomes hard to spot if they have become available, because the availability indication of skills is still very hit & miss at best. A proper visible timer or countdown, or instead of a horizontal dropping bar, make it a circle that turns around, would be better.

Above all, make these things configurable!

Stop assuming you know how everyone wants to have their UI work. I don't mean total UI modding, I just mean that if you decide to implement some new UI feature that could be made optional, make it optional.

On a whole I like the change. No where near as bad a what some people are advocating. The icons greying out are annoying. It should remain lit up if it is not on it's own cool down.

The sky isn't failing like some people say however.

Hi folks,

 

We recently implemented a change to the global cooldown UI with Patch 1.1.2 and we realize that it has been a hot topic here in the Forums. In an effort to prioritize any new changes to the UI, we wanted to poll the community on their opinion of the current global cooldown UI. Please vote in the poll above! As a reminder, please only vote with the cooldown UI changes in mind.

I know many people avoid the forums because of how the crowd can get. A poll in-game would probably be a much better sample group. Also, someone else mentioned leaving comments in the poll - that would be great. I really like the new UI, however, I dislike abilities being darkened while the cooldown animation is happening. Overall, it's a much better improvement, but could use a tweak or two.

I won't vote on the poll as I don't feel any of the options apply to me.

I don't mind the new sparkly stuff, but it hasn't been implemented well. You originally changed it so that procs would be more visible, but in doing so made cooldowns harder to manage.

Now you've made cooldowns easier to manage and completely forgotten the original intent to make procs more visible.

IMO I both like and dislike the change. I like the graphics, they look very professional. But they should not flash on every single gcd, ONLY procs and skills with a cooldown longer than the gcd should flash. Thus drawing your attention to them.

The constant flashing does indeed hurt my eyes but I can't say I hate the change, nor do I love the change, and nor am I indifferent.

I voted 'terrible' since there wasn't really an option for my opinion on them so I'll elaborate here.

I played a bit with the new changes last night. Although the changes didn't impact my gaming experience/performance, I dislike the changes. The look way the flashing of finished cool downs look is a bit distracting, especially when applied to the global cooldown. Perhaps if the flashing only applied to normal cooldowns, but even then I do not think it is needed.

As a suggestion for those that would like an indication of when a cooldown is finished, how about we revert the system back to how it was previously to 1.1.2, but we add borders to the abilities. each ability that is on a normal cooldown (NOT the global cooldown) would have a red border. when the cool down is finished for an ability (again NOT the global cooldown), the border would turn white. This would help people to accurately see when an ability with a long cooldown are ready to be used again.

thank you

I really cannot cast a vote based on those options- particularly the way they are worded.

The UI changes are definitely a slight improvement and a move in the right direction. But they are not good enough yet to be happy with. Not by a long shot. So my opinion is kinda halfway - but I do care, it's not like I don't care either way.

Better than before, but not good enough to leave "as is" yet.

P.S. Still many UI issues would incidentally be ameliorated if things like these were addressed:

1) too many buttons

2) too many abilities on different cooldowns

2) too many procs

3) too many abilities depending on procs to be used

I want to look at the world and cinematic combat - not at the action bar.

Joveth, I'm not sure if you're the one I should be asking this but I figure I'd give it a shot anyway.

 

What made Bioware decide to change the initial release UI that had zero problems?

 

The initial UI was perfect. I could see my long CD abilities easily, the GCD was easy to see, and my short CD abilities were easy to follow as well. I also did not see a single complaint about the UI's cooldown system anywhere ingame or on the forums. I simply cannot understand what made Bioware decide the following:

 

"Hmmm we should change the UI even though absolutely nothing is wrong with it. Lets add a dark background over spells on CD instead of light background (the way it was at release) and see what the community thinks!"

 

1 week later

 

"Hmmm the community hates this change. We never saw that coming! Lets change it so all our cooldowns now blink every single time an ability is used! They are gonna love this!"

QFT. I also don't understand why they changed it in the first place. I guess they have some UI devs without much work to do and they decided to twiddle with it out of boredom (but actually, I thought all of the UI devs were hard at work on the new UI customizations that are on the way). It is a puzzler, for sure. I would have though they had enough to do working on features/bug fixes that users are requesting instead of working on things that have not been requested.

I have both 41 Jedi Sentinel and a 50 Scoundrel. The Sentinel would be nearly unplayable for end game content. The first 6 abilities on both the top and bottom middle bar were constantly flashing at me. I was literally guessing at which abilities are available and trying to avoid looking at the bars for any reason.

The Scoundrel was not quite as bad since there were fewer abilities flashing at any given time on my screen. However, it was still somewhat annoying.

In my opinion, the effect for the global cooldown is too dominant and shows over the top of other effects. Personally, I do not want to see anything about the global cooldown on a skill if that skill is on cooldown or if the skill has other unmet requirements. The global cooldown effect should only show if that is the only thing keeping me from using the skill.

There are two main problems:

 

One, the Global Cooldown causes ALL abilities to flash when it's up. This means all of your bars will flash white every 1.5 seconds.

 

Two, using ANY ability causes all of your abilities to go grey and they don't fade back in until after the Global Cooldown is up. This is a huge problem when you're a class that spams abilities every second, such as a Jedi Sentinel. Basically, the abilities never light back up and are in a constant state of fading grey and flashing. Because of this, you can't tell what abilities are ready, whether or not you're in range, or if you have enough resources to use the ability.

- Sums it up for me, as well. (& although I have not had any headaches, due to my vision problems; I can feel the strain on my eyes).

For cooldowns - Like it

For GCD - Hate it

The flashing effect every few seconds across the entire bar as you use skills needs to go. Flashing is used to draw attention - I have no objection to an important skill just off cooldown flashing (e.g. Whirlwind), or a skill that only enables under certain conditions and thus requires attention drawn (e.g. Riposte), but not the entire hotbar.

 

The cooldown itself is ok, although on long CD skills it becomes hard to spot if they have become available, because the availability indication of skills is still very hit & miss at best. A proper visible timer or countdown, or instead of a horizontal dropping bar, make it a circle that turns around, would be better.

 

Above all, make these things configurable!

 

Stop assuming you know how everyone wants to have their UI work. I don't mean total UI modding, I just mean that if you decide to implement some new UI feature that could be made optional, make it optional.

Pretty sure it's always flashed. It has at least always shown the global cool down over all the skills and this always flashed. This isn't new, the only thing that was added was the white border.

We all know that there is a flashing light warning on SWTOR, but I think the current system is causing a lot of people issues. The implementation just went way overboard in my opinion. We asked for an easy way of telling when a cooldown was ready, instead we got a disco, and all of my abilities have boogie fever...

-boogies-

How about something simple instead of lighting up the entire monitor.

I'll have to go for "terrible", but I'd rather vote between that and good.

The change seems very heavy-handed with fat inelegant borders around the icons, and it introduces a LOT of visual noise to the UI, with a good bunch of elements starting for flash a lot. In comparison, cooldown indicators in other games manage to convey the same or more information without basically flashing the entire screen, so go forth and ste^W be inspired!

In the long run, maybe experiment with a more visible, optional, and click-through global indicator centered around the PC, showing global cooldown and times for some important cooldown groups (medipacks!) around the character. A quick net search shows the WoW addon IceHUD as an example, but maybe not quite as annoying and limited to CD and maybe health. (The really popping and annoying UI elements can be left as an exercise to the modders once customisation is in place.) To be useful and have acceptance this will need at least the customisation facilities shown in the last video so players can move it around, resize it, and change opacity.

For cooldowns - Like it

 

For GCD - Hate it

In a nutshell, this is exactly the way I see it.