Hi, im so sorry if this is posted somewhere else, I tried finding it and I couldn't locate anything about this.
So one of the things that im really concerned about is how you guys plan on addressing the interface when you join a team.
I have played many mmo's since COH and none of them had anything close to how the UI worked when joining a team in CoH. to be more specific, I'm talking about the list of team members showing up above the chat window as soon as you clicked Join. From what I remember, a star would be next to the team leader, and you could easily spot everyone's health because each member's health was displayed in green and would shift to yellow and red depending on how low their health was.
This was great for healers, because as a teammate's health went down, you could easily click their name, and if they were close enough, click your heal button and immediately heal them. It also helped teleporting members who were low on health and too far away to heal.
I really liked the way it was so easy to find teammates as well. When you joined a team, and clicked on anyone's name, you could spot them by a green square on your screen and easily travel to their location.
All the games i've played have nothing like this. Like in ESO, when you join a team, nothing really changes on the screen so you don't know who or where your teammates are and you couldn't see their health. If you try to find a teammate and clicked on their name you had to rely on a tiny white arrow on the screen which I often kept losing.
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[color=#FF0000]Graphic Designer[/color]
That was the revised team UI, which was much better. IIRC, the old one made the HP and END bars the same size and shoved both behind the player name.
ESO went out of its way to clear UI elements from the screen. No mini-map, no notifications when you picked something up, etc. I think that was done for fidelity with the other Elder Scrolls non-MMO games. Something about immersion, too. (It became immersion in a pool of your own blood, amirite?) Back when I played ESO, I had probably 20 mods loaded to put all that back, and the mini-map never really worked right.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
This actually brings up a good question:
How much of healing do we want to turn into playing whack-a-mole in a Raid Menu? And how much of healing do we want to make into watching the actual happenings in the game world?
I know a lot of game designers have been attempting to avoid the whack-a-mole that WoW made popular and that is used in a lot of games now. When I say whack-a-mole I mean by clicking on a character's name or icon in the UI, we target that character and can subsequently heal them as well. So healing in a group just turns into a game of click the shortest health bar in the raid UI, regardless of placement or situational awareness.
While I found that extremely convenient, I'm not sure I like it as a gameplay mechanic. I'd much rather have to keep my eyes on the battle to know who to heal or not, even if that means healing would be less efficient.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I find it hard to easily spot the other player's health bars in the midst of battle where everyone's effects are coming up on the screen. Of course, maybe im just a bad healer lol but either way, you end up spamming. Whether its clicking on each players name on a list and direct healing, or spamming your aoe heal because you cant figure out who is low.
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[color=#FF0000]Graphic Designer[/color]
I'd have to say that I agree with you here.
Having the rely on visual indicators gets extremely problematic the more visual fx are introduced to the scenario. And that's assuming that those visual indicators are in and of themselves reliable. In ESO mobs play a specific FX when they're about to carry out a high damage or controlling attack (this is distinct from the red patches that shout "Get out of the way" for AoE attacks), thus alerting you to the need/ability to block/interrupt them, but I find that for whatever reason fairly often the game DOESN'T play that indicator FX, so either I don't even know they're executing that power until I'm hit with it, or I only know because I've previously memorized which animations belong to which attacks.
It's bad enough when its just YOUR survival/attack chain/abilitie pre-requisites that rely on recognizing those queues, but when you're a healer/support and thus it's EVERYONE that relies on you hitting the right button at the right time, it becomes downright infuriating.
As someone who most often plays healer/support for group content in MMOs, I'd far and away rather have the "whack-a-mole" mechanic/ui in place, than a less user friendly system even if it was drastically more immersive, realistic or "fun."
I also play healers mostly.
I think the absolute best experience I have ever had playing healers is in TERA. Yes, it is an "Action Combat" game, but when it came to healing it required so much more situational awareness. There are basically three heals a priest uses[list][*]Targeted heals on up to 5 allies. Heals a lot but draws a lot of aggro[*]large AoE regeneration centered around the priest at the time it is cast and causes almost no aggro[*]a smallish to medium sized AoE centered exactly 10m in front of your character that does a good amount of healing and regen and not a lot of aggro.[/list]
I know a lot of healers who preferred to use the targeted heal, and that was always good in a pinch, but I rarely had to resort to it. Rather, I ran all over the battlefield casting my 10m heal and could keep the tank up with that alone so long as the tank didn't miss a big block.
As I ran around the world doing quests and levelling, I would constantly practice my 10m heal. I would target bushes and rocks and things just to make sure I had my 10m range calibrated in my eye so that in the heat of battle I could always place it under the tank's feet, or in the path of the archer who is trying to avoid an add, etc.
I am in no way saying that we should have action combat in CoT, but I am saying that there should be more to healing than playing the UI. I would very much like to see more AoE heals and less targeted heals. I would like to see the AoE heals centered around the healer, as well as centered around a telegraph on the floor as well as centered around targets, whether those targets are allies or enemies.
I am very good at playing whack-a-mole healer because that's what I've grown up on, but I know we can do better. Why should healers be playing the UI while everyone else is playing the game?
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I agree playing [i]The Team Window[/i] made it hard to keep up with what was going on around me.
What helped me was setting up a special set of keybinds for my healer, arranged in the order of the team UI, so I could target each teammate more easily.
Eventually, it got where I could spot who needed what with my peripheral vision and keep an eye on the whole battle more easily.
"I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation."
I found the whole 'Healer game' complicated by the way that the different 'Support' powers did healing differently. Some were single-target, some were AoE from the target, some were AoE from the Caster, and some were ground-placed. Some 'Support' powersets had little or no healing at all.
Worse, was when the Team, or more often the team Leader, didn't know and didn't care about these differences, and screamed when they didn't get healed as much as they thought they should. I've been abused and told I 'suck', and booted from the team, because I spent time attacking and debuffing, instead of 'just healing'.
I know that has nothing to do with the Team UI. I actually used it more often as a Tanker, to 'assist-target' my Taunt and pull a little aggro off a teammate that was suffering. So the Team UI clearly needs to be visible and show health-bars.
Be Well!
Fireheart
My .02 inf: I actually liked the CoH/V Team/League window pretty much just the way it was, so if the Team UI was implemented the same way, I'd be a happy camper.
To an extent, we had a lot of this in CoH. The most common heal was some form of AoE (be it PBAoE[Emp/Pain/Rad/Time/Thermal], EnemyTargetAoE[Kin], TargetRequiredPBAoE[Dark], or even Cone[Nature] or LocationAoE[also Nature]; so what mattered the most when it came to healing was actually positioning. Only a handful of sets even had targeted heals. This worked well because, as we all know, CoH/V was far more reliant on Buffs/Debuffs and Control than Heals for mitigation. If CoT follows suit, then it's really not such an issue.