About Spell Effects' Visual Clarity

[Miradelle]

Suggestion to the devs that totally read these forums:

Designing two different VFXs is probably not worth it financially, but perhaps the artists can create these in layers, and the "limited" effects has the less flamboyant layers of the VFX enabled. Idk if anyone really enjoys the crazy flamboyant stuff, so I'd rather just tone it all down for visual clarity's sake.

I personally also feel like the sound feedback from abilities going off isn't always the best. In other games, you can tell your ability went off by the distinct, effectively simple sound that it makes. The sounds that abilities make in FFXIV tend to have so many components to them, or just too subdued, that it basically gets lost in all of the other noise.

[ThreeBeastSmile]

Suggestion to the devs that totally read these forums:

Designing two different VFXs is probably not worth it financially, but perhaps the artists can create these in layers, and the "limited" effects has the less flamboyant layers of the VFX enabled. Idk if anyone really enjoys the crazy flamboyant stuff, so I'd rather just tone it all down for visual clarity's sake.

I personally also feel like the sound feedback from abilities going off isn't always the best. In other games, you can tell your ability went off by the distinct, effectively simple sound that it makes. The sounds that abilities make in FFXIV tend to have so many components to them, or just too subdued, that it basically gets lost in all of the other noise.

+1 for criticism on sound direction. This is especially standout for PvP. As someone who is especially audio-focused, having such weak sound cues is pretty irksome to deal with. I don't find them too complex as they are subdued as you put it, though.

Like man Berserk was tough to listen out for in HW versions of PvP where that was paramount to pick out. And sound is STILL the only way you can tell if a Marksman's Spite is trained on you with limited effects on if you don't catch the MCH crouching, and that's pretty damn quiet with a lot going on. Sound is a really weak point in the combat (or I should say just another weak point in the combat...) very hit and miss for prominence, or generally how it meshes with what the ability is.

Visuals wise... there's a lot of hazy bloom and not much crispness to a lot of it, talking about recently. There's some cool stuff like Earthly Star and Stellar Detonation that are in-theme and are exceptions to that imo, but recently there's been a lot of skills where it's overblown rune spaghetti soup, with dirty convoluted hues and rude flashbangs. Far too many of them, much like fight mechanics. I mean that across jobs as a quality, I don't know how else to describe them. It sure sucks though.