Combat log suggestions

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Sooty
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Posts: 55
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2012 11:04 am

Combat log suggestions

#1 Post by Sooty »

1) I had a few fights at the corners of the map and it turned out that the game will constantly snap the view to within the map boundaries (even though you can scroll further out). This caused HUD elements to block the area I was fighting in. There are two suggestions I have to deal with this, one being the ability to make HUD elements more transparent, especially the combat log. Another is to make the camera not snap back during combat as long as your character is within certain boundaries of the screen. Putting in both would be great :p

2) I found that the non-fantasy font is by default smaller (even at normal), and actually makes the info panels very cluttered by itself. Meanwhile, the fantasy font at smaller is way too small! I suggest separating the combat log's font size, because the small font size works on the combat log very well but is quite terrible on everything else.

3) Is it possible to make it such that the game tells you what enemy talent/abilities do what damage to you? Right now if enemies use activatable abilities like Frozen Spear, you know that the damage text that comes after comes from the spear. But if it's some kind of AOE or some other skill that was preactivated it doesn't tell you that's what did the damage. It'd help us learn how to fight something if we knew where it came from better! Maybe something like "hits player for X fire damage with ___" for skill based damage, "damage player for X fire damage on being hit" for thorns related effects, and some other system could be worked out?

4) An option for how long floating damage (and other) text stays? I find that these things supplement the combat log really really well, and in fact does a few things that the combat log cannot, notably tell you exactly which of the 5 orc beserkers surrounding you got stunned. Maybe make it such that by default these floating text float away and disappear much slower, but if you do another action which necessitates a new round of information then they'll just quickly vanish making space for the new info?

5) Combat log filters? It could help with the clutter if we could disable certain information from being displayed in the logs. Notably the ones involving talents going off cooldown (it's quite obvious if you look at your own cooldown bar), your activation of skills (which are not even accurate, since they display upon hotkey press and you can cancel the use of a targetable ability and choose something else), the collection of ingredients (given that most ingredients don't matter), changes in dates and time, collection of gold (the sound of it is quite enough cues) and maybe the the collection of items of a certain tier or less.

6) In relation to 4), Floating damage (and other) text could use a palette swap and redesign as to how they're displayed. I think the ones that makes least sense are heal numbers, which are shown on you as yellow numbers floating towards the left (sans a + symbol in front, whereas damage generally has a - symbol in front). It took me a while to figure out that the "4" I was getting occasionally was from a life draining weapon, since the combat log doesn't actually tell you how much is drained.

7) More features wrt to floating text. I think showing "Miss!" over your enemies could be useful to quickly help you figure out which targets are the ones really damaging you. Showing a "!" over enemies who manage to see through your stealth/invisibility will also help us learn which enemies we need to take more precaution around. Showing a "?" when enemies randomly fire somewhere in hopes of hitting a stealthed enemy would also be quite useful to know if we're already in danger if they're just lucky.

8) Blindness related combat log text being missing is a tad conspicuous. It seems to make sense to at least allow you to know if your melee hits connect, or if you're trying to punch an enemy instead of moving past them. That said the whole blindness thing is a little iffy given the ability to auto-move with the mouse, so I don't really know.

That's all I can think of for the moment!

Sooty
Higher
Posts: 55
Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2012 11:04 am

Re: Combat log suggestions

#2 Post by Sooty »

A lil bump i'm not sure if anyone saw this ;)

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