As a returning player after a 5-year hiatus: on tooltips

Community General Discussion
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I bought my Collector’s Edition Vanilla in 2005. After a very long break starting in Season 9 Cataclysm, I came back towards the tail end of Legion. And now that I am actually enjoying BFA, I felt compelled to note something for the developers to hopefully consider and fix.

I want to preface the below by making it very clear that I am a highly advanced player. I play rated PvP at high level and use third-party tools to sim and theorycraft my items and abilities, yet these complaints continue to be valid:

WoW’s traditionally very helpful and transparent tooltips have become an absolute mess. I’ll give you my story trying to get back into my Arms Warrior in Legion:

1/ Understanding how the Tactician proc works for Arms /as in, what abilities proc it/.

2/ Mortal Strike. A warrior staple had its tooltip made ambiguous by stating it simply reduces healing received. Okay, but by how much? This was and still is the same for other classes with similar ability effects. Most annoyingly, I had to actually go on the forums to ask people how much healing reduction their own abilities provided, as the amount isn’t universal. Couldn’t a simple tooltip change fix this?

3/ Hamstring and other slow abilities. “Reduces movement speed” is incredibly unhelpful when you have a heap of different skills that do so to a varying effect.

4/ Defensive Stance. Now, that one was clear enough: you deal and receive reduced damage. But what about Battle Stance? Literally nowhere in the game does it even mention Battle Stance. It’s not in the Spellbook. It’s not visible in the spec change menu. What does it do? Is Battle Stance just NOT Defensive Stance and nothing else? I obviously figured it out, but why did it have to be so convoluted? For a returning player used to different stance mechanics, this was needlessly confusing.

5/ Diminishing Returns. There are a plethora of categories here, but these had changed during my break. To this day, there is still no resource available that is up-to-date listing the various DR categories and what abilities are in them. Is this the intention?

6/ Azerite traits. Now, the tooltips themselves are fairly good, but with all the special behavior within a PvP environment, it has now become a necessity to dig through old patch notes to figure out. A good example is Lord of War Arms trait. It does reduced damage in PvP after a change a few months ago. But I forgot how much and this impeded my decision making. I had to Google this. Wouldn’t it be so much better if this was simply listed on the tooltip?

7/ Trinkets in PvP. Same as before. Example being Radunk’s Big Red Button or whatever it’s called. It was nerfed in PvP, but no tooltip change to reflect this. Have to dig through old notes to find out. The tank trinket from Uldir that was being abused in the online arena cups is another example. No tooltip change to reflect its different behavior within instanced PvP combat.

8/ In Legion, when templates were a thing within instanced PvP, your abilities’ damage/healing drastically changed inside Arena. The only way to know by how much? Enter the Arena and mouseover the tooltip within the 40 seconds before the battle starts. Why does it have to be so complicated?

9/ Just now on the clarification RE: Titan Residuum. The official Blue Post says that, depending on M+ key completed the previous week, a differing amount of the currency will be available in the chest, with diminishing returns. But how much? Would it be beneficial if I bother to do a harder-than-10 key, and more specifically, by how much? A simple table could solve this question.

10/ RE: Titan Residuum again. The post mentions that the M+ cache will contain it. But what about the PvP one? I am guessing it, too, will, and depending on your highest rating the previous week, the amount will grow, again with DR? Why do I have to guess?

11/ Island Expeditions. To this day, when my group queues up for it, I do not know whether I am queued for Heroic, Normal, or Mythic. I sometimes end up doing a Normal, because the other guy off LFG only needs a few more points to cap and would rather go for the easiest thing. But I still need Mythic. Annoying!

12/ Not specifically a tooltip related issue, but why is whispering cross-realm people so darn difficult? More often than not, despite correct spelling and formatting, I get a Player not found error. Same for adding Friends. Sometimes, I would start a group in LFG and go AFK. If someone whispered me too long ago, the game just refuses to let me talk to him, no matter what I do. And no, the person hasn’t gone offline (I’ve checked).

These are just off the top of my head. But as a returning player, it took me no time whatsoever to realize that tooltips have, at some point, lost their polish for no apparent reason.

Now, if the developers’ goal was to have mystery in the game, I can think of a million better and less confusing and annoying ways to go about it. But considering the developers have stated that they are not happy with everyone having to sim their characters; or rely exclusively on third-party tools to figure out what’s best for their toon, I believe that’s not at all the case. Just something that lost its polish.

Since there is no feedback/suggestions forum, this is where I put this thread. I hope someone on the CM team sees this and hopefully passes it onto the Dev team for their consideratio, as I feel these are valid issues.

2 Likes
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you can try using the “/console UberTooltips 1” since that should enable detailed tooltips :slight_smile:

It was a option once in the interface but not anymore for some reason.

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Thanks, I’ll test this. But you’re kinda making my point :smiley:

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Thanks was looking for that my self as returning after just under 7 years away so much has changed it is frying my Brain :grinning:

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I fortot to come back to this, about “/console UberTooltips 1”

Because I was curious, I tried it. I didn’t see any change. AFAICS, the only options are 0 for very short tooltips with just the name, and 1 for what I consider regular tooltips. I’d be happy to see a 2, with actually detailed information!

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My advice is to quit again.

Because wow is bad now.

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An UberTooltips 2 option would be sick! But if it is implemented, this needs be available in the Interface menu. Expecting people to know about obscure /console commands is unreasonable. As a highly-advanced player myself, I didn’t. Imagine if you’re a returning or new player?

I am sad to see this post of mine, which is still very valid, has failed to raise awareness to a very real issue. Unlucky.

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Yeah thats sadly what happens :slight_smile:, but true a UberTooltips 2 would be nice :slight_smile:

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Thanks for bringing up an issue with the game in a constructive manner. These days it’s pretty much just “BfA is terrible and the end of the World!” vs “Nah, BfA is quite alright”.

Personally, I love BfA, but the game certainly has its issues. What you bring up is certainly one of them.

I have had similar experiences to yours when I’ve come back to the game after hiatuses. It is hard to make out what abilities actually does, how they are important, which traits and talents are useful. It is hard with regards to your own class, virtually impossible for classes you do not play.

Maybe it is done on purpose, to add importance of third-party sites and addons and thus make the game bigger in a community sense. If using addons and third-party sites, less effort would go into that sort of stuff, and less value would be added from it. If the third-party scene had been killed, the game would lose out on a lot of creativity.

But yeah, the communication from Blizzard should definately be improved, and so should the transparency of classes, speccs and their abilities.

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