[Sage] I think the design of some skills should be slightly altered

[tierneymichele]

Today I realized why I'm having such a difficult time learning the class. I don't understand, but I noticed that my learning style is purely visual based. Aside from keys 1,2,3, and 4, I click the skills I use. I'm not a hardcore raider so I've never felt the need to re-do my keybinds and re-teach myself how to play the game all over again, as I'm sure many others would relate to around the globe. Using the keyboard for all of your skills, you have a better sense of what position your fingers need to be in to do the skill you want to use. It becomes muscle memory.

Clicking skills doesn't have an accurate enough aim to use "muscle memory" effortlessly. You need to physically see the skill and point your mouse to that button, and since your eyes are all over the screen watching a boss, it's already a bit difficult. But the reason it's doable is because I'd been teaching myself how to remember it by symbol, rather than position.

On other classes, the skills have distinct shape and color differences. The things that look similar have something to do amongst themselves, some designs show you if it's AoE or not. So in this vein, my mind uses "search for blue arch" as where I need to aim my pointer.

With Sage, though, I think my brain is processing most of the skills too similarly. A lot of the colors are the same or very close, and the same can be said of shapes too.

I don't know if anyone else is experience a learning curve like this, but I can't imagine I'm the only person whose mind works like this. I'm very frustrated because even though I understand what I'm meant to do, I am having too difficult a time distinguishing the skills visually. Unfortunately for me, I rely on my vision in order to play decently.

I would appreciate if there was at least an option to change this particular class's skills to be viewed in color-blind mode (because I don't want to change my whole game into it). Maybe I'm just overthinking it?

[EaMett]

I'm 100% with you. Everything is some shade of blue. The worst part of the whole ordeal > the player buffs on the party list. Honestly unreadable. Doesn't help that we can stack so many.

[NobleWinter]

The fact all of Sage's skills looked so similar threw me off at first too. I still struggle to tell the difference between them at a glance. Luckily on controller muscle memory is a lot easier to build since you never "click" on a skill the same way you would with mouse.

[rewd]

You are overthink this, yeah. It will get better over time. I didn't have this problem with Sage but I had it slightly when I started playing Scholar because many skills are just a different hue of green, for example.

[einschwartz]

With Sage, though, I think my brain is processing most of the skills too similarly. A lot of the colors are the same or very close, and the same can be said of shapes too.

YES. Agreed. Apart from Holos and Kerachole, I definitely struggled to distinguish which icon is which while leveling Sage.


Of course in practice, you don't use all of the tools so you could take a mental note which skill you had just used. But if I'm not on Sage and my cohealer is, I had to mouseover the icons because it was hard to tell just by glancing at them.

It is less of an issue now for me but some adjustment to make the icons more distinct from each other would be very much appreciated.

[Hysterior]

Agreed.



I can only recognized them because of their positions in my hotbars but if you showed me the Pepsis, Rhizomata or Holos without hotbar, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you which is which.