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The (WiP) Combat Styles Interface Feedback


Elssha

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So, I've played with the interface for a bit... and wanted to point out a GLARING issue;

 

Picking different abilities (i.e. Guardian Awe vs Reflect) deletes the unusable one off the quickbar, EVEN if you add an extra spot for it manually.

 

A LOT of people were expecting to keep unused abilities on the quickbar to retain the keybind uniqueness we need (you can't hit a button only to realize what your muscle memory expects to be Awe is actually blitz and... you're dead).

 

PLEASE change this for live (pref ASAP) to allow 'dead' abilities to still be placed on quickbars if we want. Add a setting or only allow it on the ability pulled from the list or whatever you have to to make it work.

 

This is especially annoying since we are apparently getting very limited loadouts, meaning we can't just save a ton of combinations to counter this design flaw. Just... let us make our quickbars how we want them, and don't mess with what we do.

 

Beyond this GLARING issue I ran into, some less important feedback;

 

The good:

 

  • I LOVE that we no-longer need to delete all the choices to change a single thing. This really helps when you know you just need to change one thing for a cetain boss/trash instead of re-clicking your whole build. Good job!
  • I actually like the layout, and how it's intuitive that you get 2 class options, and each class you pick has 3 specs which you can pick from.
  • It's nice that the perma-passives (the ones you DON'T pick) are off to the side

 

Could Use Tweaking:

  • It would be nice if there was a bigger indication if an option was a move or passive/utility
  • The class spec icons should honestly be closer related to the in-game class icons (, not ability moves/old move icons repurposed... you could even make this show instead of the class icon, giving people more info in PvP since stances used to do this
  • While the passives are separated, it might be better to move them to the far left, further separating them with the level number?
  • Not really liking the hot pink selection boarder... hopefully it's part of the WiP and final one will be like the current Utility one.
  • Since you already added an ability tab in the CS window, the abilities window is redundant and should be removed... and the "pull icon to quickbar" bit be transferred to the CS abilities tab instead - probably the plan, but figured I'd mention it.
     

 

The Bad:

  • DO NOT REMOVE MOVES OFF QUICKBARS (see top of post), at least not within a spec.
  • You really should just use the class icons used in character creation for the icons for class, not new ones... or better yet the ACTUAL class symbols; re-inventing 'icons' all the time makes them pointless, and a cooler graphic isn't as important as a unified, reinforced, clear marking system that translates to things we actually use in-game (aka, knowing what the vaguely V-shaped icon means above the dude trying to kill you).
  • While I LOVE that I don't have to re-do all the choices when I need to change one, seeing how easy it is to miss-click without realizing I'd suggest still adding some sort of lock/unlock toggle or a confirmation at some stage, especially for when you might want to just check that you have the right choices selected.
     

 

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I totally agree with you !

 

Specially fort the quickbar.

Respec to a different role have always been sooo annoying in this game cause you have to rebind all your habilies. We really need a way to make respec to a different role more easy

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I totally agree with you !

 

Specially fort the quickbar.

Respec to a different role have always been sooo annoying in this game cause you have to rebind all your habilies. We really need a way to make respec to a different role more easy

 

I believe that's supposed to happen with Loadouts (which I don't believe are live yet, just the ability trees themselves for a couple classes).

 

That said, I fully agree. If loadouts can hold quickbar assignments, I'll absolutely love that.

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I believe that's supposed to happen with Loadouts (which I don't believe are live yet, just the ability trees themselves for a couple classes).

 

That said, I fully agree. If loadouts can hold quickbar assignments, I'll absolutely love that.

Yes, but we only get 4-5 loadouts per toon... so wasting them on small changes to quickbars vs a one-button respec/regear/quickbar shuffle to change between most of the 6 specs (2 classes) would be a HUGE waste.

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I believe that's supposed to happen with Loadouts (which I don't believe are live yet, just the ability trees themselves for a couple classes).

 

That said, I fully agree. If loadouts can hold quickbar assignments, I'll absolutely love that.

 

Do you have any link explaining loadouts ? I didn't seen anything about it :(

 

Edit : Nevermind, found something :)

Edited by Steuv
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It's pretty barebones, but I like what they have so far.

 

One issue I ran into: where is the vehicles tab? After you grab the speeder on Onderon, I couldn't figure out how to put it on my bar to use it.

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It's pretty barebones, but I like what they have so far.

 

One issue I ran into: where is the vehicles tab? After you grab the speeder on Onderon, I couldn't figure out how to put it on my bar to use it.

 

Same place as the class and basic abilities are, in the drop-down list. Some people have reported that they needed to relog to make it appear, though it showed up instantly for me.

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Yes, but we only get 4-5 loadouts per toon... so wasting them on small changes to quickbars vs a one-button respec/regear/quickbar shuffle to change between most of the 6 specs (2 classes) would be a HUGE waste.

 

I agree, and it would be nice to at least be able to keep 'dead' abilities on our bars for when they're swapped out due to certain encounters, etc. (I had this same complaint in WoW, where I was regularly swapping in and out of a particular ability on raid encounters.)

 

That said, with 4-5 loadouts spread across 2 combat styles, that might at least be workable, and better than what's on live now (where you just respec and re-do everything all the time every time), because it at least allows for 2-3 baselines for each combat style, so you are only tweaking one or two buttons (rather than all of them).

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I'm really pleased with the WIP interface. Seeing those ABC choices laid out in a graphical interface with tooltips for each ability is far superior to just reading text when it comes to combat styles one doesn't main. I am also pleased that they are switchable just by clicking on a different ability on the same level. I had feared that those ABC selections would be permanent per toon or per loadout. One of my greatest fears has been alleviated--total number of abilities are not being pruned.
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I'm really pleased with the WIP interface.

 

I actually really like the general look of the UI, too! It needs some polish, and I'd rather they use Class/spec icons than generic pictures of toons wearing gear + weird ability icons... and polish-up the general window boarder (see GS vs missions window in-game).

 

Seeing those ABC choices laid out in a graphical interface with tooltips for each ability is far superior to just reading text when it comes to combat styles one doesn't main. I am also pleased that they are switchable just by clicking on a different ability on the same level. I had feared that those ABC selections would be permanent per toon or per loadout.

 

I do believe they'll become permanent per loadout, but you can swap them around after popping the loadout (loadout will pick A AB A C BA every time you click it, but can manually change it to all A's or whatever).

 

One of my greatest fears has been alleviated--total number of abilities are not being pruned.

 

 

The total ability count IS going down, but we have some more than we get to use in any given loadout.

 

Personally, I'd prefer not to have to pick and choose my kit, as I foresee a lot of issues down the line, where players use the BW default or their personal pref, and get stonewalled when they try to do harder content that needs moves they don't even know they have.

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My context for using pruned here was in context of removal of abilities from the game.

 

Default choices and possibly needing to switch things up for harder content could be a new hurdle for new or inexperienced players in terms of the entire game or a specific spec. Just have to wonder how many of this particular segment of the playerbase are on PTS. My bet would be on very few.

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It would be nice if there was a bigger indication if an option was a move or passive/utility

 

I recall the original vanilla skill trees used blue borders around passives and green borders around active abilities. that's an existing UI pattern they could bring back

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Personally, I'd prefer not to have to pick and choose my kit, as I foresee a lot of issues down the line, where players use the BW default or their personal pref, and get stonewalled when they try to do harder content that needs moves they don't even know they have.

 

Theoretically if npc fights are properly rebalanced we shouldn't need the extra opt in abilities. If that isn't the case, then the system will have utterly failed in it's purpose imo.

 

I recall the original vanilla skill trees used blue borders around passives and green borders around active abilities. that's an existing UI pattern they could bring back

 

This is a good idea and I hope something along those lines is implemented to make the choices more apparent.

 

My context for using pruned here was in context of removal of abilities from the game.

 

Default choices and possibly needing to switch things up for harder content could be a new hurdle for new or inexperienced players in terms of the entire game or a specific spec. Just have to wonder how many of this particular segment of the playerbase are on PTS. My bet would be on very few.

 

I completely agree, we're losing abilities and thus losing complexity by default, but then gaining complexity by being forced to choose between high value abilities that we're used to needing for harder content.

 

Overall I do much prefer the new ability tree window to the utilities window we had before. Being able to quickly swap between things is great. So much is dependent on npc rebalancing though, and we have no idea if and when that will be on the PTS.

Edited by LordCamTheGreat
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Theoretically if npc fights are properly rebalanced we shouldn't need the extra opt in abilities. If that isn't the case, then the system will have utterly failed in it's purpose imo.

 

Making all the moves you have to pick basically 'not matter' would screw things over royally... and make fights boring. Look at the moves we're having to pick from.

It might be the case for SM stuff, but if they do this for Nightmare or even hard mode ops/ MM flashpoints it'll kill any complexity we have left. You are supposed to milk your whole toolkit in Nightmare, and there's literally 2 moves I don't mind losing on my tank... one of which is the new 6.0 ability and the other is a PvP thing.

If tanking becomes "hold boss, pop a DCD every minute or so (since we get less) while healers heal you through everything else" there'll be no point in playing.

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Making all the moves you have to pick basically 'not matter' would screw things over royally... and make fights boring. Look at the moves we're having to pick from.

It might be the case for SM stuff, but if they do this for Nightmare or even hard mode ops/ MM flashpoints it'll kill any complexity we have left. You are supposed to milk your whole toolkit in Nightmare, and there's literally 2 moves I don't mind losing on my tank... one of which is the new 6.0 ability and the other is a PvP thing.

If tanking becomes "hold boss, pop a DCD every minute or so (since we get less) while healers heal you through everything else" there'll be no point in playing.

 

It's going to be even harder balancing the opt in abilities for operations and harder content considering we don't know if we can or cannot switch our ability tree options within phases (we know we cannot switch combat styles but that's it). We also don't want things to be rebalanced only for sins and shadows to be the best tanks because they just cheese everything again. Yes, the abilities should still matter, but they shouldn't matter to the extent that one tank should be taken over another in this example. Unfortunately we likely won't know the state of harder PvE content until the changes go live because even once that content becomes available to test, there aren't enough people actively playing the PTS to test operations. The devs did say that they're looking at making changes to the way interrupts and stun breakers work, so maybe they are looking to add complexity in different ways beyond just pressing your reflect or shroud. Fingers crossed at least, the last thing end game content needs is reduced complexity to the point of boredom.

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