[Suggestion] Actions appearing over party members

I've often wanted battle to be more "readable" in that I want to be able to tell what my party members are doing, be they casting, attacks, etc.

Thus, I'd like to have some type of onscreen display that shows me what my party members are doing. In the chaos of battle (and on a lower-end machine), it can be less than obvious.

It would be great if we had an option to display the action a player is currently taking over their head (maybe below their name) and even a casting bar for a spell so we know what they're casting at that time.

I realize not everyone would want this which is why it would need to be an option to have it on, but I would like to know what's happening and the text log scrolls far too quickly for me to read it.

Oh, I second that! In a huge behest party in example, the chat log battle info flies by before you get to read it, so it's basically impossible to keep track of these things.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Leowilde

Oh, I second that! In a huge behest party in example, the chat log battle info flies by before you get to read it, so it's basically impossible to keep track of these things.

---

Exactly.

It would also help out in the case of "Hmm, that Lancer is doing something really cool. I wonder what attack that is...".

You want an icon to come up above a player's head when they are executing an "important" ability... Really?

Theres so much wrong with that that I'm not even going to comment any further. Bad idea is bad.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kurokikaze

You want an icon to come up above a player's head when they are executing an "important" ability... Really?

---

No, I want the name of the ability to show up over their head, not an icon. If they're casting a spell, a cast bar to show what they're casting and how long until it completes. I'd imagine the name of the next queued action would appear so I know what they're about to do.

This is already information the game is haphazardly giving us (in the form of the text log), but it's not giving it to us in a way that's readable, thus we're not actually receiving the information.

It would be great to know things like whether or not someone is about to cast a heal or if I should use my 2nd wind, for example.

Thats even worse.... Can you imagine Behest with that over everyone's head? Thats massive onscreen clutter.

Maybe give everyone a target frame that can be toggled on and that would change into a castbar with the spell name.

Either way its very messy; this is why everyone turns that off for players in WoW unless its arena.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kurokikaze

Thats even worse.... Can you imagine Behest with that over everyone's head? Thats massive onscreen clutter.

---

Behests are already a massive mess of particle effects as it is. This wouldn't make it any worse but certainly no better.

In smaller party play, however, it would give us a means of knowing what's going on which is what I want here.

Maybe make the action appear under the player's health bar in the party member interface (and make the entire interface larger, since it's pretty small right now).

I didn't know they had this in WoW, but it's pertinent information to the fight that the chat log is attempting to deliver to players but ultimately failing to do so.

Yes, adding the information to the list of players is a good idea. There have been several occations where, in a smaller party, I healed myself at the same time as the healer did. Because it is hard to keep track of what the others are doing. This would make combat strategy much more available, and easy to get the overview of.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Leowilde

Yes, adding the information to the list of players is a good idea. There have been several occations where, in a smaller party, I healed myself at the same time as the healer did. Because it is hard to keep track of what the others are doing. This would make combat strategy much more available, and easy to get the overview of.

---

And in the end, that would be fine by me.

Just something to keep me in the loop about what players are doing.

Personally I feel this could be solved more elegantly if the actions and spells themselves had enough visual identity that you wouldn't need to read any sort of text. It would simply be apparent that someone was casting a specific spell or using a specific ability.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ark_mage2

Personally I feel this could be solved more elegantly if the actions and spells themselves had enough visual identity that you wouldn't need to read any sort of text. It would simply be apparent that someone was casting a specific spell or using a specific ability.

---

In a perfect world, I agree.

The issues with that are the added effort to do more animations and the sad fact that lower-end machines (like mine) suffer horribly in any type of crowded situation to the point where text on screen is the only real indicator I have left. :(

In time, that would be a decent solution. But as it is now, it would take ages to implement that, while there are still so many things for the dev team to take care of. I'd say add spell names now, change animations later. How's that? :)

It's a complicated issue... I'm kind of sad that the battle log is largely useless because of how quickly actions occur and the amount of words used to describe them.