Showing shields on health bars as white health?

[RichardButte]

EDIT: I mean BLUE health, or any color that differentiates the HP as a shield and not HP.

Just wondering why XIV has never done this.

Being able to see shields on HP bars has been extremely useful in other MMOs. As it stands right now, two players may look like they have equal HP by their HP bars, but one may in fact have a huge shield protecting them at that point in time.

It'd also be nice if shield HP pulsed or blinked before expiring, letting healers know that this shield is about to fade, leaving a player more vulnerable.

[xJimmehx]

Probably the best idea I've seen in a few weeks.

[Niwashi]

Simple (from a user's perspective), clean, providing highly useful information easily available in the spot healers are looking for teammates' health anyway, and without taking any extra screen space...

Sounds great to me.
+1

[BorisDaBlade]

Well, imho, shields last for just about one hit anyway. The icon should be enough.

But maybe give a crit shield some sort of visual. That might be nice.

[Dzian]

Good idea. But I think the problem would be how do you represent hp. Shields have a variable amount of hp. Some shields can be like 3k some can be like 30k if you get a fully buffed crit adlo for example.

If it scaled the same as the targets hp bar then you wouldnt be a terribly visible difference between like a 3k shield and a 6k shield.

[RichardButte]

Good idea. But I think the problem would be how do you represent hp. Shields have a variable amount of hp. Some shields can be like 3k some can be like 30k if you get a fully buffed crit adlo for example.

If it scaled the same as the targets hp bar then you wouldnt be a terribly visible difference between like a 3k shield and a 6k shield.

Heroes of the Storm handles this by having the shield portion of HP appear over the existing HP bar and move backwards toward the "beginning" of the HP bar.

If you have more shield than HP, than the whole bar is simply covered by shield and you won't know how much it is until the shield is either damaged or expires, but it informs you at a glance that this player is currently well protected and you might want to worry about healing another player more.

[tdb]

That's not entirely correct. In HotS shields are inserted in between the filled and empty portions of the HP bar, scaling those back in proportion. Suppose you have lost 50% of your HP, so half the bar is filled and the other half empty. Then you get a shield for 100% of your max HP. Now your bar will have one-quarter filled with green HP, two quarters (one half) filled with white shield and the last quarter empty. You can easily see that you have more shield than HP remaining and some HP is missing as well so heals would not be wasted.

If you are attacking a target which has full HP and some shields, such as the enemy core, it may look like the shield bar shrinks towards the end of the bar. However if you look closely at the tick marks as you work through the shield you'll see that the number of ticks on the actual HP portion stays constant. Also if you leave the core alone long enough for it to regenerate shields, you'll see that the shield bar no longer starts at the end.