When it was announced that a debuff bar was to be introduced, I was very happy. Finally I wouldn’t be overspamming all my debuffs and RR and could really get a good idea of what’s up and what needs reapplying. Or so I thought.
Let’s take an example build, a Pierce Infiltrator. It has three debuffs I care about tracking: Word of Pain for RR, Assassin’s Mark from devo, and Horn of Gandarr for DR. And yet its debuff bar looks like this.
Identifying when those things are active on the debuff screen is a bit of an adventure.
Part of the problem is that pretty much everything shows up there. Every little bit of DoT, whether significant or insignificant. Every slow, from auras or otherwise. Any devo proc. Devo procs are also not differentiated. The debuff bar above shows two devo procs. One is the Assassin’s Mark. The other is Tip the Scales. When only one is active, it’s complete guessing game which one it is, if you can’t identify it on the monster itself, you just have no way of knowing. As the various status effects time out and reapply, the debuff bar keeps constantly shuffling, so you’re not just trying to find the right debuff in all that mess, you’re also having to chase it around as it keeps moving in the lineup.
Given that the game now demands constant attention on a lot of enemies to avoid Sunders, I feel like this implementation of the debuff bar is simply not serving its purpose. We can’t be chasing debuffs around on the bar among every single little DoT and proc we don’t care about/can’t influence and keep track of Sunders, and our health bar, and our active buffs, and whatever other skills we have (Inquisitor Seal, for instance), at the same time. I think the debuff bar needs some streamlining to be fit for purpose in the Sunder world.
My suggestions:
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Clearer, consolidated icons:
A lot of skills don’t get represented on the debuff bar by their skill icon, but by their effect. On the debuff bar indicated above, I’m trying to track Horn of Gandarr uptime. Good luck telling at a glance which debuff it is mid combat (it’s not actually on the screenshot at the moment, but I bet you couldn’t tell at a glance). Same goes for skills like War Cry, which gets represented by two icons, one for the DR, one for the RR (if you have Break Morale/Terrify). Not one of them looks like the War Cry icon. If you have multiple sources of DR, one weaker but constantly active, and one stronger that you’re trying to track, the weaker one and the stronger one will look exactly the same on the bar, making it impossible to actually track application. Then there’s Flashbang. Flashbang has five icons. The confuse, the slow, the DA shred, the Fumble and the Impaired Aim, each tracked separately.
I think the icons should both identify the skill they come from, and be consolidated into a single icon no matter how many effects they apply. If I throw a Flashbang, I’m expecting to see a Flashbang icon on the enemy, not FIVE different debuffs mixed in with all the other “red debuff icons” I’m incidentally applying. Whenever I switch builds, it’s as much about remembering where all my buttons are as it is about learning what all my debuff icons look like, cause they’re not intuitive or easy to identify at a glance in the heat of battle. -
Removal of DoTs from the bar, option to turn them off, or separation of effects into rows by importance:
There’s next to no ability to control application of DoTs. They come from everywhere, weapon damage, on-gear procs, devos, everywhere. In the example above, I’m playing a Pierce build, but one that converts a lot of Elemental into Pierce. Since Pierce has no DoT, I’m getting Burn, Electrocute and Frostburn taking up space on the bar, alongside Bleed and some incidental Trauma from a boots proc. That’s 5 icons just taking up real estate and making it harder to track all the other debuffs the enemy has on them. Either DoTs don’t need to be represented at all, or should be togglable in the options so we can decide how detailed of a debuff bar we want, or, and this would be the best option, major debuffs such as RRs and DR should take priority and have a top row reserved solely for them. And then a second row can be reserved for less important shit like OA/DA shred, slows, DoTs and fumble (which, except for RoS or Flashbang often happens incidentally, without direct player input). If 1) is implemented and icons are consolidated better, a lot of these OA/DA debuffs will end up bundled with top row stuff anyway (e.g. BWC includes OA shred and RR and DR and would therefore end up in the top row as an RR/DR debuff). Separation of icons into fixed rows by debuff importance will mean there’s no longer need to chase icons around the debuff bar, as something like Curse of Frailty will always show in the top row, no matter whether it was applied first or last. The important debuffs will be easy to track and we can focus on the fight more. -
Differentiation of devotion icons:
There’s just no way to tell devo icons apart, they’re all the same icon. If a build has, I dunno, Wendigo’s Mark, Rattosh and Tip the Scales, there’s no way to use the debuff bar to identify that Rattosh is up. Perhaps a miniature icon of the constellation shape would help? We’ve already seen the size of player buff icons increased, maybe they could be increased even more to make space for a constellation silhouette, on both buff and debuff procs?