Status Fade Animations

[Zelkelion]

I was thinking that it would be much easier to keep track of short duration buffs, debuffs, and DoT effects if upon expiring there was a visual effect. The icons are quite small and sometimes I won't notice that an ally's Protect is gone immediately.

At the moment my solution is to AoE cast buffs on both myself and my party so that when mine are gone it means that they've all expired. This just doesn't work well because Protect, for example, has a fairly small AoE range. So it ends up being that you have to huddle together to do this properly!

I was thinking the animation could look something like a shattering version of the actual spell's animation. It would have a dissipating effect before fading, something to really say to the caster "This just disappeared, recast it!".

[REDace0]

I like the above posters suggestion, but coming up with new animations for each buff would be a significant undertaking content-wise. It would also not work for buffs or debuffs that do not have animations, such as the defense down debuffs caused by battle regimens. Instead I would recommend a simple fade graphic analogous to the yellow text that appears over the character model when a buff like Protect is applied. Just have the text pop up gray and fade to black, perhaps gradually becoming hazy as it does so. Along with this, it would be nice if all buffs and debuffs on allies and enemies benefited from this treatment, e.g. when a physical attack -> physical attack battle regimen is performed without misses on an enemy, it would be nice to see "Defense Down" appear over the enemy model, analogous to the current effect with Protect. It should also fade as mentioned before when it wears off. This would keep players informed about the state of status effects without having to concentrate intently on the arrays of icons in the party display, self status display, and target display widgets.

tl;dr simple fade-to-black animation when status effects wear off; expansion of this effect to all buffs/debuffs