Impending Doom dialog box notificaiton

[wyzzarrdd]

On my toons it usually isn't the impending doom itself that kills me, its the fact that it blends in to the stack of debuffs and you first notice when you are asking "why didn't my heal work?".

My proposal is that when you are doommed a dialog box pops up that says something witty like "You have been DOOOOMED!!!!!1!!!" and you have to acknowledge it. Maybe accompanied by a dramatic sound effect like: http://soundbible.com/1623-Dun-Dun-Dun.html

Over the average game you would get the notification maybe a dozen times so it wouldn't interrupt the game flow. Having to stop the action and acknowledge it at least give players an opportunity to deal with it before it goes into "too late" conditions.

[Robsoie]

Having recently lost a character to Impending Doom because i didn't noticed i was affected by it
(or i would have teleported away instead of staying in battle and losing more precious health that then lacked to resist the end of Impending Doom) i wholeheartedly agree.

Impending Doom is simply a player killer spell if you don't immediately teleport away in order to conserve the health you will need to survive the whole spell duration without healing.

So considering what it does on a player, an impossible to miss notice about that player killing spell affecting your character would really help.
And indeed the spell not being a common one, there wouldn't be some annoying notification spam messages as it would stay rare.

[SageAcrin]

If any status is so dangerous that it requires a box that Stun/Confusion don't get, it probably ought to be nerfed. Not have a feature that is entirely separate from any other status in the game.

Though, don't they have color feedback if you're using shaders? Maybe this needs a special color feedback?

[nate]

There's already a wonderful visual indicator for confusion, which is why you don't see people saying, "Confusion needs to be more obvious." Absent the blur, I think they'd have a point.

Stun could probably use better indication anyways. Maybe stun/confusion are intended to be the Ultimate Detriments, but I don't see them that way, just as very bad detriments, awash in a sea of 1 damage per turn DOTs.

It's a slippery slope, of course. First a dialogue box for Impending Doom, then one for Worm Rot, then one for Stun, but eventually every detriment has a dialogue box, making the dialogues annoying and meaningless as you just spam through them anyways. And of course, different classes and different players are concerned about remaining oblivious to different effects.

Whether impending doom needs to be nerfed (I kind of like it, although it is certainly one of the most threatening effects I face, far more threatening than Stun), there is certainly room for making such a dangerous effect more obvious. There are ways to do that other than a dialogue box. 'Quest Updated' text is much more obvious than small +Impending Doom floaters or more effects icons. Effects like that of confusion are really nice, and I can imagine several different kinds of visual effects that would be appropriate for Impending Doom.

Ideally, if the slope gets too slippery, there'd be an option to hide visual effects associated with some detriment for this character (or even account).

[Nivrax]

I'm actually baffled why Stun don't have visual indicator while confusion do. It's just a bit less dangerous, but way worse if you don't notice it and try to act, as moving with it give other foes 2 turns over you.
As for Impending Doom, it doesn't need indicator by itself, it's any effect that blocks your healing that ought to have it, pretty much every AntiMagic/Fugus classes rely on constant regen, when your life drops so low you see red it sometimes might be too late to act.

[hamrkveldulfr]

Why not just have a small box appear on the side, like with your sustains? Then there is a visual notification without it interrupting game flow

[Strongpoint]

I really miss "force more" from crawl every time I play TOME

I'd love to see configurable option to get a dialogbox for many things: Set health percentage, all status effects the player desire, loss of set sustains, rare\unique spotted and so on. Of cause it needs to be fully configurable

[Cinghiale]

You could make the pop ups optional for each effect, that way if players think they're annoying they don't have to have them and could only choose the ones they are terrified of, or not have any at all. This really is one of the biggest flaws of this game, stealthy negative effects or stealthy loss of positive effects. I really don't like taking a second every turn to count through five or six icons on the right to make sure they're squared away, it's tedious and breaks immersion. I would really like to play necromancer but find it too frustrating to have to keep checking to make sure blurred mortality hasn't been broken by corrupted negation or some other cheap ass debuff.

[Nivrax]

A Power Auras system, for those who played WoW, would be perfect, although I could imagine implementation to be rather hard. What it did in that game is to let you configure diffrent auras, icons, colours, timers etc. that showed up when certain set criteria has been met, like you could make a symbol that showed up when your mana was below certain point, or colour whole screen if one of your crucial self-buffs is missing. In this game, I would really like 'special' warning to effects like Stun, Disarm, Counterstrike, any debuff that prevent healing, Burning Hex, DoTs that damage over turn is very high, you get the idea.

I know that for sustains you could turn 'use when no enemies visible'. Except it can kill your character, since majority of them take turn to cast. I was fighting alchemist and his golem on my way back to East, he disabled my sustains and knocked me back beyond vision range. His attacks still could reach me however, and at one point all sustains came out of CD and game decided it's good time to turn them on, lost 3 turns in a row, when I could act again I went from full health to sub 10% with my own golem dead -_-.

[nate]

I was thinking some more about this. A system similar to the one Nivrax describes wouldn't be all that hard to mod. Click on an effect icon, it gives you a little table: Apply [x] effect when I a)acquire this effect b) have this effect c) lose this effect. Just bind a function to the effect.

Tome code is beautiful, it wouldn't be that hard to get effect code to interact cleanly with it. A dialogue box could be a "visual effect" until enough interesting ones are made. The system could be expanded to resource bars, inventory, or cooldowns without that much work.

And I think that a self-contained library of visual effects, with clear examples and no confusion about where to put the code, would spur amateurs to create a lot of potentially beautiful effects that could eventually make it into the game. Getting visual effects working in Tome isn't hard, but it can be very intimidating.

The only potential for complaint I could imagine from that would be that people would complain that they have to suffer an effect before they can attach a visual, which isn't that big of a deal if you store the attachments in a config or world file.

[Aerach]

Confusion and low health have excellent indicators that don't need flow disrupting popups. As as been mentioned, that's a far superior way to go so we don't miss our imminent deaths and fits current systems better~

[Nivrax]

Confusion and low health are basically what auras are. We just lack ability to configure them.

[nate]

And, I believe I've at least got the OP's request addressed, http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/fx4fx

Beginnings of an aura system, at least. Never played WoW, dunno how they did it-- feedback welcome.