I might sound crazy now, but I feel disconnected with my character when my hunter is holding a gun, but the skill icons portrait bows and crossbows.
I think the abilities can remain the same, but those that picture a certain weapon should change with the weapon you are holding (transmoging).
Some examples:
Crusader strike shows a sword, but if I am holding a hammer, it still shows a sword.
Raging blow always shows an axe.
Mortal strike is also an axe.
Overpower is a sword icon.
And so on, and so forth.
So you get my point.
I think these icons should change based on the weapon we are holding. The new icons can be very similar, so it doesn’t create any confusion. Let’s say Overpower is a silver colored sword, if I am holding an axe, the icon can be a silver colored axe.
There are not too many of these skills, so I don’t think it’s gonna need a huge time investment. Let’s take a look at warrior’s skills.
The weapon icons (except for charge and passives) we have that can be used with many weapons are:
Slam
Hamstring
Whirlwind
Execute
Mortal strike
Overpower
Bladestorm
Raging blow
Devastate
Thunder clap
Shockwave
Rend
Cleave
These skills can be used with multiple types of weapons, such as maces, hammers, swords, polearms, axes, staffs (if am not mistaken). For tanks, it can also be with daggers. So these are 6 main weapon types and a dagger. For warrior, it will require around 13x6-13 icons (minus 13 because these icons already exist). That brings us 65 new icons. These icons can be created again, or they can use many old icons or icons from other abilities, like they do already, such as Titan’s Grip icon is also demo warlock’s stun ability. So, realistically we are talking about 40-60 icons, which is NOT a huge work. It may sound huge for you, but for a multi billion company that already created thousands of icons, it’s not that big. It can be implemented slowly, and let’s say in a span of 1-2 years it can be fully finished.
Why this does not prevent you from anything.
On the interface options you can choose to toggle a checkmark of “Change icons based on my weapon.” So if you are not a fan of your icons always changing, you won’t lose anything.
You might not care, but this will unarguably increase the character perception. Because when I am holding a hammer, I am using a skill that shows a long sword and sounds like katana is not a good perception model to me at all.
Besides, the amount of effort and resources needed to put into something like this would be taking away from something else in the game. Like balancing or dungeon design, or even the lack lustre questing experience which has been denied so much attention this past expansion.
Having the icons remain the same, help with memory. Quite often I forget I’ve even got a new weapon 5 minutes after getting it. So icon changes would be extremely confusing.
No but the art team are working on making the zones look amazing and lots of fun and exciting things which will attract new players to the game. And don’t forget some poor guy has to code it as well.
Have you looked to see how many icons there are?
Go on, have a look in the Macro menu. Count them all, and times that number by the amount of Weapons you find in your Appearances tab.
THAT is how many new icons will be needed to be made. That really doesn’t sound like a fun and exciting job for someone. I think their art team would rather be drawing pictures of dragons, than going through this mundane task.
The amount of work required to put in to something which would have a negligible affect on the vast majority of players, would just make it not worth considering.
An option that would likely go unnoticed when it was implemented. Just like all the other Accessibility options that we implemented recently and I still don’t know what they were and where to find them.
Maybe with the new interface, (which is gonna happen anyway) they could leave the default icons, but…
have a setting that allows players to select an icon of their choice like Macros do now. This would continue to allow personal customisation on a general or per character basis.
When I tried out Final Fantasy, the spells seemed to continually change depending on the weapons I picked up and equiped.
As a new player, this felt confusing to me and I didn’t know whether to stick to a staff or what. Hence that game tends to not get played.
Actually, you can do all that through Weak Aura if you want. Yes, on a personal level, it’s a lot of work, but you can create icons, import them, group them and use conditions to display the right icon.
I have seen a rogue who had done something similar, to have a full custom interface, including changing all his icons to made them more poisonous.
So you want people to have to memorize 3-4 times more icons to immediately recognize? The point of the icons is that you can immediately recognize the ability, the icon becomes… iconic. You know what it symbolizes and it allows you to quickly read what’s going on on the screen, what buttons you should press.
Imagine if you swapped a weapon and all of a sudden your icons all changed to correspond with the new weapon… but nothing else changed. Your new weapon doesn’t bring new skills with it, it just changes your icons with no material change to how your game is played. This will make the whole game an absolute mess.
Things like this make sense in games like Guild Wars 2 or New World, where changing a weapon changes your playstyle, but not in WoW.
