Wishlist for new UI enhancements after announcements

[Roda]

Please correct latency causing skills to execute slower. A player in Japan can literally use skills faster with the same skill speed than a player in another part of Asia because the game does not account for ping in how it handles skill queueing, it's frankly unbelievable.

Also, this game doesn't correct for frame rate in skill queueing either. If you have a high frame rate you can have a lower GCD, this is mainly a problem for fast jobs like MNK or in a very long fight (like ultimates).

Not to mention how there is about a whopping 3 second difference between where the game thinks a player is, and where they're displayed on their own screen.
How many times have y'all failed a spread mechanic because Person A saw Person B chasing behind them, while Person B saw themselves running in front of Person A, and both were trying to go farther to adjust for the person they thought was lagging behind...?
Or those tiny red arrow stack-on-buddy mechanics? How we have to make a billion tiny adjustments, 'cause we're all chasing after eachother's shadow from last week??

[eagledorf]

That's impossible to fix, it's the reality of online games. Skill queueing however is entirely possible to fix

[Shurrikhan]

look at some other game like elden ring, all you need is your hp and mp(and enemies) and current item hold/can be used

This is true only if your game is as limited/narrowly-defined as Elden Ring. That's not to say that Elden Ring is a bad game, but it is objectively less systems-expansive and less complex then damn near any MMORPG, let alone XIV.

[Roda]

That's impossible to fix, it's the reality of online games. Skill queueing however is entirely possible to fix

While you can't solve it entirely, the amount of delay is definitely way more than most online games I have experience with, or at least these specific issues have never been this pronounced.
It's just another thing on the pile, really.

[Baxcel]

+1 for the zoom.

For the battle effects: You can already change between all effects, limited effects or no effects, individually for you, your party, other people and PvP. It doesn't allow specific choices about what to show and what not, but helped me a lot with seeing more than a big colourful blur. I only wish there would be an option specifically for healer bubbles and friendly ground AOEs, because I don't want any other effects apart from my own, but really need these. Afaik the limited effect option contains more than those..? (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Unfortunately battle effects dosnt limit or hide limit breaks at all.
. 3 RDM lb3 burned into my eyes during 24man confirm it lol

[kevin_satron]

Hotbar double skills - its where you can put 2 skills in 1 square. Like if you press 1 button for 1st combo skill, it will change to 2nd combo skill in instant, no 0.5s gap for ogcd skills. Dont need 3 skills in 1 button, minimal 2


Also about the personal dps meter, for the love of god please no. People in PF will ask you to share your numbers. And they'll harrass you or kick you from the group if you have low numbers or for not sharing with them

[Shougun]

I have to disagree if they add so much stuff to be put in the UI instantly, the current states of the UI is already good enough, i agree for them to add some UI improvement or modification, but putting a lot of them will also forced other player to force other player to put them on if they are built in game, for example, there is a reason why dps meter wont be put by the dev, once these dps meter is in the game officially, most player will force other player to use it, it will be justification by player to forced other player to use it, "the dev put dps meter in the game, it means its part of the game experience", i always welcome more quality of life, but too many UI or information on screen will be bad experience for most people, look at some other game like elden ring, all you need is your hp and mp(and enemies) and current item hold/can be used, that is what mostly all displayed and most player can finish the game, they dont need dps meter, they dont need range indicator, they dont need so much information displayed on screen, its part of the gaming experience intended by the game developer

Friend... respectfully, I disagree. Elden Ring is an open world game where none of this extra information is needed for you to make progress. In a combat-oriented MMORPG like XIV, the more information you have in combat, the better the experience will be as a whole. This is not something that can be argued against, it's simply a fact. This has nothing to do with the intended experience by Square Enix, as they themselves know that the UI is wholly lacking in multiple departments.

Love Elden Ring, the esoteric nature of the game is part feature of that world certainly - I think a smooth UI that doesn't aggressively cloud your gameplay is also nice (those meme's of the screen full that came out after Elden Ring did well), that said there is a lot more going on in FFXIV than Elden Ring. You've got a boat load of people doing things of importance, chat whizzing by, and a boss throwing out a multitude of relatively strict mechanics that Elden Ring doesn't really have. Of course you need to git gud in the game, but there is far less stand here while facing the wall before you turn around and ram your tether into your friend's face while also watching your 20 skills and if anyone died so you might raise them.

Because of that I believe you cannot have an esoteric / hyper minimalist UI like style and be any good to the masses. Naturally some might like it, of course some might like the meme screen full image as well- I've seen addon screenshots of WoW that looked pretty much like that. To me I think it's trying to pack as many feature smooth options as reasonably possible (new menus for the sake of it isn't helpful, but it could be the difference from 20 seconds of wasted time each day and thus such a change may be valuable). For example the current gardening UI and seeds usually takes about 30 seconds extra, imo, for no particular reason, it could help identify what I've planted or what seeds I have via better icons but it doesn't so you get to highlight it all to find what you're looking for unless you know it's an herb vs fruit type situation and even then that's not enough info to know without quickly highlighting them. Or a bit decisive example but having PvP combo would actually allow you a smoother more minimalist experience, and probably /closer/ to an Elden Ring comparable, even though I imagine some people would try to use the git gud narrative to suggest that condensing cooldowns is for scrubs (yet again in Elden Ring, and like games, you hardly manage as many things as you do in FFXIV, or even say a MOBA which is only 5 skills usually lol).

So I agree with Aniya, and I do want to say there are great points to Elden Ring not bloating UI but beyond the point that FFXIV functionally just can't do some of that (how are you to represent a raid without showing people what's going on? press f to pray people have hyper awareness lol), also.. in some situations I'm not sure the success of Elden Ring is 'because' of some decisions but in spite of it them (fantastic open world with great environment and dungeon content design with great combat, insane amount of content). Like I don't think 'not having a quest journal' is an achievement or makes the game any better if not worse. For example that was rather annoying and I used third party websites to which felt like a requirement in order to fully enjoy the game because I found lack of quest tracking very annoying and high chance to waste my time to experience the game if I didn't use them (but the rest of the game still fun). Strong imo but a journal would improve Elden Ring, even if it didn't tell you exactly where on the map- more like on cRPGs where you had a literal journal for events.

[Shurrikhan]

...

To be fair, you can have a hyperminimal UI without also being limited to a hyperminimum of available information.

On WoW, for instance, my only visible UI outside of combat (areas) was my mini-map, a line of buffs (filtered) at the bottom-center of my screen, and a minimized party/raid list. The last appeared as simply portraits and a counter; those within 80 yards got portraits, increasing slightly in size until within 40 yards, while the rest were reduced to a +<n> counter. Mousing over the area would expand it to show all others, so I could easily right click on them for whispers, promote them to leader, etc.

When they were in combat (areas) or when their HP was below 95%, a segmented circle border would form around their portrait, each segment equal to an amount of HP, so that I'd effectively have visual indication of both %HP and true value. That border's color would transition fade from light green to darker green to gold to orange to red for better at-a-glance reading.


Once an enemy was selected or I was in combat, I could see my on-cooldown CDs and my 5 core rotational skills, an enemy HP bar, name, %HP, and abridged remaining HP value. These on-cooldown CDs would appear below the rotational skills, centered and forming two rows for role-centric (Primary) and utility (Secondary) CDs. Refreshed CDs would flash (with color based on CD type) and linger a brief moment to better catch my eye, but I otherwise just understood that if they weren't on the list of things on cooldown, then they were ready to go. A couple high priority CDs I'd also have move to the top of the bars and glow upon refresh.

Mini-menu? Flyout from the right, now with larger buttons and some further shortcuts. If I were able to change jobs or had further reason to swap gear-sets on the fly? Would have been a fly-out from the left.

Thus, in total, I'd have all the information I needed for my 25-28 skills (depending on spec)... with only 5 persistent buttons showing on my screen, while being just as readable, after a couple hours getting used to the new layout, as my old brick hotbars (a 3x12 layout keymap I'd copied over from XIV).

My monitor (3440x1440) has 4,953,600 pixels. My personal combat UI, in total, took up a little under 4k pixels before procs/CDs, and around 5.8k pixels at most, despite using large, highly readable icons. The party list, with or without buffs/CDs (tracking just a few core CDs from each spec), took up another 6.2 to 8k pixels. The minimap was the largest expense, at another 32.4k pixels. Details, if I was running it, would take up about another 14k.

In total, though, my UI covered barely some 1% of my screen. It was incredibly readable, gave me what information I needed (and M+ tends to want more information than anything in XIV), and was still quite minimal / uninvasive.


Now, all that is a matter of combat UI, rather than, say, guiding players towards Recommendations, Challenges, Daily Roulettes, etc., let alone providing in-game guides, additional information like how various gear is stat-ed or look and where one can acquire them, and so forth, as nicely put together through WoW's Adventurer's Journal, but the idea that having a solid amount of information would necessitate a claustrophobic, UI-ed-to-death mess seems a failure of imagination.

(And the thing that was so nice about addon support like WoW's, was that one could tailor absolutely everything to their personal preference.)

[Limecat]

I'd like to see /micon depreciated and players given a list of every icon from the game period. While we're at it, get rid of the little gear on the buttons or at least add an option to turn it off.

[Grebeny]

To be fair, you can have a hyperminimal UI without also being limited to a hyperminimum of available information.

On WoW, for instance, my only visible UI outside of combat (areas) was my mini-map, a line of buffs (filtered) at the bottom-center of my screen, and a minimized party/raid list. The last appeared as simply portraits and a counter; those within 80 yards got portraits, increasing slightly in size until within 40 yards, while the rest were reduced to a +<n> counter. Mousing over the area would expand it to show all others, so I could easily right click on them for whispers, promote them to leader, etc.

I would say that(and I am totally for it) there should be easy way to change wayout of FF UI. But there is option to create 4 diffrent UIs and change between them at any point. There are few elements that cannot be tweaked and this should be fixed from a long time now... But addons are not the way, we should be a bit more vocal about the issues we have with it (and allow us to have more UI presets ffs 4 really...) because for people like me, I play on 2k on ps5 and 1080p on the pc, I kind of need my presets on both platforms. It is super annoyong right now when I make some changes for one reason or another and I need to tweak the system settings two times saparately.