"Increases healing magic potency..."

Just a small peeve with healer tooltips:

Would be awesome if this phrase "Increases healing magic potency..." present in many healer actions like Neutral Sect, could be reworded to "Increases healing spell potency", because as it is is extremely misleading.

Today I know better but I've been, for a long time, thinking that healing magic = abilities as well, because... you know, those are "magical actions" too.

While I don't particularly disagree that there's a lack of intuition to it, I'm not sure this would fix it. Even if SE changed the verbiage to use "spell", plenty of newer/less technical players probably wouldn't realize there's a distinction between spells and abilities.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

While I don't particularly disagree that there's a lack of intuition to it, I'm not sure this would fix it. Even if SE changed the verbiage to use "spell", plenty of newer/less technical players probably wouldn't realize there's a distinction between spells and abilities.

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Indeed, not just that but all across the board needs some tooltip text revisions to make stuff clearer. My bother with this situation in specific is that there's nowhere in the game (at least that I know of) that explains that "healing magic" is just spells, even though the abilities clearly look magical in nature. For a distinction between Spells/Weaponskills and Abilities, you can eventually figure out because they appear as denominator tags on the tooltips. But yeah, not as intuitive as it should be.

Yeah, that's a good point - it'd at least be an improvement to match terminology.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

While I don't particularly disagree that there's a lack of intuition to it, I'm not sure this would fix it. Even if SE changed the verbiage to use "spell", plenty of newer/less technical players probably wouldn't realize there's a distinction between spells and abilities.

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It's not a case of catering to less technical players.

"Spell" and "Magic" have (or should have if consistent) technical definitions. "Healing Magic" should apply to all sources of healing that are derived from the Mind or Int stats, whereas "Healing Spells" should apply only to those on the GCD.

Honestly, as much as I love this game, I've said before on many occasions that it could use a serious editing pass on the tooltips in general. I know so many people who don't realize what Arm's Length does, for instance.

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Arm's Length
Creates a barrier nullifying most knockback and draw-in effects.

Duration: 6s
Additional Effect: Slow +20% when barrier is struck
Duration: 15s

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I've seen people read that and think "Okay, that additional effect means that it'll counter a knock-back, but if it does, my movement gets slowed by stopping the knockback." Or "This will slow an enemy's movement if they try to use a knockback on me when this is up." or whatnot.

It's not clear/intuitive to people that "Slow" means it literally slows something's GCD down, not the movement speed. (Which is Heavy, or as I've described it before, "The debuff with an icon of a person on all fours, crushed under the weight of life's cruel indifference.") Especially for folks on console, it can be hard to go mouseover a debuff icon to see what it's called and what the description is.

I've seen many, many players who read the tooltip and still didn't parse it as "If this barrier is hit with a physical attack, regardless of any knockback or draw-in, the thing striking the barrier will have that Slow debuff applied to them with a strength of 20%, slowing their own GCD/cast times down for 15 seconds."

"Spell" vs "Magic" vs "Actions" is another thing that's not necessarily intuitive to folks. I mean, yes, Neutral Sect is arguably using it wrong; other places use "healing spells" to refer to heals on the GCD which can be affected by Silence, and "healing actions" to refer to all healing including oGCD abilities, and Neutral Sect ought to be consistent. But even if they used it right, it's just plain not intuitive to folks.