Option to Remove the Circle Image on Skill CD

Ok guys so i ve been trying to clear the new content all the weekend with the damn circles hiding my icons.

How i feel now:

http://www.cheerios.com/~/media/Imag...ut_Butter.ashx

Please remove this .

Personally, I like the change and would like to keep it. However, This isn't the first place I've heard people complaining about not liking it. An option where players can enable or disable this feature in the Hotbar settings seems to be a good option. We've got so many customization options for our cross/hotbars that there's no reason this shouldn't be a switchable setting as well.

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Originally Posted by Waeksyn

Here is an alternative design for the designers to consider if they are so intent on having bright, sweeping white circles.

1. Just dim the icon when it isn't ready and include the count down digits. In the last 2 seconds before it is ready, do your white circle animation. This will attract you to the icon at an appropriate time, instead of distracting you all the time. For those who understand lag and want to get a jump, the shorter duration of the white circle sweep will allow them to "jump" conclusion with more precision (fire at 9 o'clock for example, instead of fire at 11:45).
2. Don't do the circle animation on GCD abilities. If needed, add a single element that can show GCD time remaining

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PS3 limitations ;)

Maybe this will help. As you can see there are a total of 14 GCD circles spinning every time I attempt a combo. I attempted this on a Level 56 Wisent in sea of clouds and with doing a standard setting of combo rotations, it took about 35 seconds to kill the mob and it took 13 total presses of the keys making the total rendered number GCD circles to be:

14 circles * 13 button presses = 182 total circles rendered in 35 seconds.

Thus, approximately in 1 minute killing 2 mobs of this level solo my eyes see 364 circles * 60 minutes = 21,840 spinning circles my eyes have to process.

So how many hours did your testers play? In theory if you accumulate conservatively 24 hours of game play killing mobs that take 30s to kill a WAR will see a total of:

364 * 60 * 24= 524,160 GCD spinning circles I will have to process going forward.

So 10 days of game play: 5,241,600 circles. The defense rests.



http://i.imgur.com/mXtcZQC.jpg?1

There is an annoying issue where going some abilities on different cross bars, for some reason, will not have the circle once an ability is triggered. But, if I go to a different cross bar, then return to the original crossbar, the ability icon will now have a circle on it to indicate that it is on cooldown.

Tbh, all you had to do was add the little number to indicate cooldown - the circle icon was unnecessary and distracting. It is even misleading as it is light colored and highlights a skill - leading the player to think that such a skill is off cooldown instead of on a cooldown. It is counterintuitive because most people will associate darkness with a skill that is on cooldown and highlight/bright as a skill which is off cooldown.

Take a quick glance at the screen shot the player posted above.

Where do your eyes gravitate? To the abilities with the circles leading you to think that it is off cooldown and that you should hit it.

I think this is obvious. The light colored circles were a very, very bad idea imo.

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Originally Posted by P4X0R10N

Take a quick glance at the screen shot the player posted above.

Where do your eyes gravitate? To the abilities with the circles leading you to think that it is off cooldown and that you should hit it.

I think this is obvious. The light colored circles were a very, very bad idea imo.

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This is exactly what I was trying show the devs. I mean the picture I posted, as you can see by the dashed lines there are 2 abilities covered by circles that are ready, and as you can see I was just finishing a combo shown in #8. So the decision making process when 14 circles are spinning constantly and come up all at same time every 2.5 seconds makes making quick decisions incredibly asinine.

So, until the white neon clocks get dimmed down (hopefully), here's what I did to get by. I dropped my hotbars all the way to the bottom of the screen and made a new bar of just oGCD's (plus Straight Shot) and put that way up at the top where I keep all my other important stuff. I put my progress bar up there too, so I'm glancing at that now instead of the bars.

Unfortunately, I don't feel confident enough to play any other jobs like this, by pure muscle memory, so I'm not really leveling anything except through Guildhests and maybe some FATEs. I was working on SCH just to casually heal 4-mans for friends, but I don't want peoples' lives in my hands while I'm essentially learning a new UI. :<

On the plus side, I'll have more time to finish leveling my crafts now. :3 (PLD /bstance looks soooo good on CRP, btw)

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Originally Posted by Mykll

Yeah who exactly needed that auto-attack marker? Is the enemy in combat? What extremely rare circumstances do we need to know that an enemy fighting us is currently NOT auto-attacking?

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Actually, that new autoattack marker is for when WE are engaged. Not like we already have a big circle marker on the target to tell us we are autoattacking... And to make things less useful, one would think this new addition works when soft-targetting other monsters, but nope. So it's just a dupicated marking which is occupying a memory slot they could use for what they say they can't o_O

Edit:
I've tested it today cause I was curious if it really was something useless or if I misunderstood it. I was doing the level 15 archer quest on my alt kitty (where you have to fight a load of ixali together with that elf npc in north shroud) and I had a bunch of them hitting me. It only marked the one I was hitting with that marker, the rest had none. And yes, all of them were autoattacking me.

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Originally Posted by Laraul

Old cool down overlay vs new cool down overlay. Not so much has changed when you examine the two side by side.

http://i.imgur.com/e4rhB5g.png * http://i.imgur.com/ehv8ZYp.png

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They do act differently, though, because they reversed the transparency of the overlay. For the old one, the white parts of that overlay were the transparent part that showed that portion of the normal icon, whereas the dark parts of the overlay darkened and greyed out that portion of the icon. In the new version this is reversed, with the dark parts being transparent and showing the normal icon behind it and the white areas are the overlaid bright circle.

Ignoring the more minor change of putting it within a circle to make the edge clearer (which would probably be fine on its own), the bigger difference is in reversing which section is transparent. Now, instead of darkening part of the icon, they're brightening part of the icon. So now, instead of being brightest when it's available, it's instead brightest when it's not available. As several people have already mentioned, that's the part that makes it counter-intuitive and jarring (especially when other reasons for not being available, like level sync or skills only available under certain conditions, still follow the more standard pattern of darkening them to indicate when they're unavailable).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bebekurenai

I've tested it today cause I was curious if it really was something useless or if I misunderstood it. I was doing the level 15 archer quest on my alt kitty (where you have to fight a load of ixali together with that elf npc in north shroud) and I had a bunch of them hitting me. It only marked the one I was hitting with that marker, the rest had none. And yes, all of them were autoattacking me.

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Well, ok. That is a little different. But, eh, still seems duplicated especially if you are in range and are able to auto-attack (unlike the BRD and MCH stances which don't auto-attack). Next time I am out I am going to have to get on one of those jobs, turn on the stance, and see if it changes that little indicator.

But aside from that, if you are in range (be it melee or BRD/MCH) and are in a stance that allows auto-attack, I don't see the situational times you need to know that. Yeah there are times when you tab through targets and you do not want to auto-attack the wrong one (non-aggroed group behind what you are fighting, something that is rooted, or asleep) but by the time you tab to those targets, the auto-attack already did its thing. And yeah I wish they would properly fix tab targeting.

So while that is interesting testing, and nice clarification, and I may do more later on, I am still failing to see why they gave very strict resources to this seemingly useless UI piece.