Wishlist for new UI enhancements after announcements

[Semirhage]

The ability to disable or filter toast notifications. I don't need to know that my retainer has sold an iron ingot when I'm in the middle of a Savage pull.

[Nav_Fae]

Chat bubbles. It is the one source of temptation for me when it comes to modifications... (Haven't yet... for the record.)

I genuinely don't get the appeal of this. Why do people want this so badly? Actually curious.

[Aluja89]

Synched UI option for all characters.

[Aluja89]

I genuinely don't get the appeal of this. Why do people want this so badly? Actually curious.

It can be handy when in a fight, makes it easier to notice someone said something.

[Catwho]

I genuinely don't get the appeal of this. Why do people want this so badly? Actually curious.

If you are in a very crowded group with lots of conversations going on, it makes it easier to keep track of who is saying what.

Doesn't matter that much outside of that context. I think as long as it's optional, it'd be a fine addition for those who prefer it.

[lAurasl]

If you come back to Chaotic Spring with 8 seconds left on the DoT you are woefully unqualified to talk about DRG gameplay.

yeah, just tested it, i seem to be at the perfect sks tier where i make it back to chaotic as the dot wore off, i dunno why i remembered making it back there so quickly, but still, you dont change your rotation, you change your sks stat. consolidating your combos into 1 button literally helps more than it hurts.

[Themarvin]

How is it all us other Mortals can play the game without all that, and still do just as well if not better?

Please leave it as it is and please hit these people who get caught hard.

[QooEr]

How is it all us other Mortals can play the game without all that, and still do just as well if not better?

Please leave it as it is and please hit these people who get caught hard.

did you read yoship's announcement or are you just here to be obtuse and contrarian

[Baxcel]

yeah. button bloat is easily fixable with the pvp combo system without removing any depth from classes.'

consolidation of skills that just make sense helps as well. they already started moving that way with certain skills, for dragoon, mirage dive replacing high jump for example. it just makes sense for it to replace it.

It would have to be optional per class choice simular to how the mod shows it where you can turn it on for certain classes and leave it off for others without changing the setting each time.

I've had plenty of fights where my healer died and I'm spamming 1-2 as a GNB to keep my health an shield going

[Eorzean_username]

Mouseover casting

This is a rudimentary, "caveperson-tier" feature in WOW: the ability to activate actions on whatever target is currently under your cursor, without needing to actually switch your "hard target".

This allows, for example, a healer to quickly cast a heal on a party member simply by placing their cursor over the party frame, and pressing the heal key.

Likewise, actions like "Dragon Sight" and "Astrologian Cards" would be significantly less irritating to use if mouseovers actually functioned smoothly and responsively.

You can currently create "<mo>" macros in FFXIV, but they're essentially untenable because they use the utterly-loathsome FFXIV macro system, which is intentionally designed to be almost unusable, and intentionally does not utilize the action queue, meaning that they have little practical purpose in combat beyond broadcasting an obnoxious Raise macro to an Alliande raid.

Macros that are not deliberately sabotaged at the design level

Actually, while I'm on the topic of FFXIV's user-hostile Macro system, Macros should be allowed to utilize the action queue normally as long as they contain only one action.

In other words, I understand (I guess?) discouraging a macro such as:

/ac Meikyo Shisui
/ac True North
/ac Sprint
/ac Gekko
/ac Kasha
/ac Ikishoten
/ac Yukikaze
/ac Iaijutsu
/ac Hissatsu: Senei
/ac Tsubame-gaeshi
/ac Meikyo Shisui
/ac Gekko
/ac Iaijutsu
/ac Ogi Namikiri
/ac Ogi Namikiri

However, it's ridiculous to punish a player with lack of ability queuing for creating a macro such as:

/ac Living Dead
/p Living Dead activated, please do not heal me.

...since it activates a single combat action, just like any normal keypress. And it's serving a reasonable function, because it's flatly unrealistic to expect a player to type detailed information into their chatbox during combat, especially when activating "high-pressure actions".

(Note that I'm not necessarily advocating for the use of this specific macro, it was just the first example of a "reasonable" (from a game balance perspective) macro. Please do not hold me accountable if your static becomes annoyed by your unnecessary Living Dead announcements.)

Slidecast indicator on castbars

Slidecasting feels like a technique that is basically required to play any spellcaster at a high, or honestly even "medium-high", performance level in FFXIV. Otherwise you waste instant casts unnecessarily, or spend way too much time plodding around doing nothing.

If SE is going to insist on leaving this bizarre mechanic in the game, then it's straight-up unfair to not indicate it more clearly to players.

And because I worry that things like this actually need clarification when dealing with the "telephone game" of trying to communicate with SE devs, let me explain what we all mean by "slidecasting":

• The castbars and cast timers in this game are, basically, a lie.
• Your actual cast time is approximately 0.5s shorter than the indicated time (fluctuates a bit with latency, and probably other mystical FFXIV factors).
• Therefore, you can actually "interrupt" your cast about 0.5s sooner than the HUD indicates, and the cast will still succeed.

This is extraordinarily powerful for dealing with mechanics in encounters: you can cast uninterrupted through "gaze" attacks by turning around in the last 0.5s of your castbar, you can stare down AOE telegraphs under your feet by moving at the last second through the leeway granted by that 0.5s shorter cast time, etc, etc, etc.

Furthermore, it allows casters with a good sense of the "slidecast rhythm" to micro-step from one location to another without losing any (or barely any) cast time, even without spending any instant casts.

This is one of the single most powerful techniques that the game never tells players about, or indicates in any way, and it's a definite discrepancy vs. players who have it indicated simply on their castbars using a 3rd-party tool.

As far as the "kludge" solution of placing an icon on your hotbar to track the slidecast window, this actually does not work properly. If you closely compare the rhythm of the icon with the actual timing window of slidecasting, it's often late, and rarely accurate.

Filter Target Effects

Okay look, I do not care about the 6 different "Combust" effects on a Hunt target. And I don't care about the 10 "Death's Design" on a Alliance boss.

However, I do care about things like "Vulnerability Up", and whether someone else has already applied "Reprisal" or "Addle". So if I select to show only my personally-applied effects, it's still an information problem — going from "too much" to "too little".

The HUD should have an option to either filter out all "unimportant to other people" effects, or allow players to customize exactly which effects do and do not appear in the Target Effects display.

Zoom out further

Yes, I get it, arenas are designed to look "pretty" at a specific zoom level, and it would cause the designers immense anxiety to imagine people seeing the wrong parts of the arena.

But honestly, FFXIV is frustratingly-claustrophobic, and some mechanics seem to become difficult solely on the basis of lacking visual information, and forcing camera-swinging to try to memorize the overall state of the battlefield.

You could say, "Well, but that's part of the mechanic design!"

It is... except it's not really, because FFXIV can't stop people from buying bigger, wider, higher-resolution displays.

Therefore, you can essentially use the "Third Party Tool" of spending money on a 4k ultrawide monitor, or multiple monitors, or etc, to brute-force getting the wider overview of the battlefield that SE refuses to allow 1920x1080 single-display peasants.

So if SE is aiming for "parity", uh... just let people zoom out as much as they want to. Since the alternative, dynamically "clamping" people's viewport to the same universal standard via detecting what size of display they're running, seems like it would be a rather unpopular idea.

Turn off unwanted icons on the Map / Minimap

• I don't care about those swarms of boring Side Quests that all follow the same generic story formulae, and offer me nothing except less EXP than a FATE, and 3x NQ Skill Speed + Determination food items.

• I don't care about that Triple Triad NPC that will use some ridiculously-annoying ruleset like Random + Order, and has a cheating deck of 5x 5-star cards.

• I don't care about the Materia Melder and Repairs because I can meld my own materia and repair my own equipment.

• ...etc...

But, every time I want to use an Aetheryte, or just otherwise look at and navigate my HUD maps, I have to deal with my cursor bumping into all of these annoying icons that obstruct useful functions, or cover up information that I actually do care about.

Better Range indicators

"Will the boss aggro if I step forward another yalm? Hm, no clue. Guess I'll just have to risk wiping the raid to find out!"

"Oh, this is yet another mechanic where it is designed to force Melee DPS to stop their rotations, unless they find the exact pixel where it's still possible to use melee attacks without being hit."

...etc.

It would really be useful to have an additional "target ring" that indicates maximum melee range for each particular target.

And likewise, before combat begins, some kind of clear indicator of the "aggression radius" of each particular target.

Acknowledge and address input-latency and excessive animation-lock issues

I'm not smart enough to explain the technical issues correctly and in proper detail.

But basically, if Mr. Yoshida and the SE staff wish to understand this issue correctly, they need to stop testing in SE's supposed "simulated latency environments" because... "I don't think the system works".

Instead, I encourage SE to try something like this:

1. Fly to USA.
2. Choose a random residence in the middle of East Coast or something on an ISP using "less than ideal" routing (that you have zero control over). Make sure your latency is at least 175 or 200. Bonus points if your connection also has significant jitter.
3. Log in to FFXIV and switch to a job like Machinist.
4. Attempt to do your rotation consistently for 10 minutes. If you clip your GCD during Hypercharge, you lose!
5. Log out.
6. Download and enable a "Third Party Tool" related to input latency reduction. I am confident that SE's powerful on-staff detectives are capable of identifying and locating these tools. If you require clues, consider the Heavensward Raid series and the old helper mascot from MS Office.
7. Log in and try the rotation again.

Perhaps then you will be able to actually understand why many global players find FFXIV's input so frustrating, and are resorting to 3rd-party solutions in slowly-increasing numbers in order to compensate, and ensure a smoother gameplay experience.

...Alternatively, you could also just stop designing FFXIV rotations to operate on the implicit assumption that players are double-weaving OGCDs in nearly every single GCD of their burst windows... or stop giving Jobs more and more 1.5s-GCD attack chains...

...But since every expansion instead releases another swarm of Job actions that merely double-down on these problematic design tics, despite years of players trying to explain the associated issues, it now seems more realistic to simply ask for the integration of input-latency-reduction 3rd party tools into the base game's functionality.