In many dungeons players must face situations, when mobs aoe/frontal abilities indicated/visualized really poorly. These are hard to detect and avoid.
In Siege of Boralus, frontal is a light brown stuff on a dark brown floor, in NW dungeon one abo frontal at 3rd boss is hardly detectable in the middle of the room, etc. There are tons of bad examples.
Is some rare cases you proved, your can make good visualized effects (like a visible arrow in StoneVault dungeon when a mob charging - right, it is a blue arrow on blue floor, but still visible). So there are some proof, you have a technical solution to solve these kind of problems. The main question, why do your developers refuse to use it in the 90% of the cases?!?
I know, hard to be prepared for all game video settings, quality, and players age, vision problems, color blindness etc.
Developers should not act as a fashion designers, who focusing which color variant of the same color matches together and looking cool, instead they should focus on visibility and use none matching colors. (Imagine a pink or yellow frontal on a drak floor.)
I’d always advocate for contrasting effects. And no, i’m not asking nor thinking of completely adding in bubblegum pink or sky blue effects as is the want of seeming forum posters trying to make a rebuttal either.
You can make it bright and contrasting whilst keeping it in theme, which is ultimately what I assume is what these effects try to maintain. All they need do is brighten it or contrast the effect better.
Siege of Boralus having firey markers on dark brown floors for example.
It’s long been a bugbear of mine, and I completely agree. Swirlies are the worst. You have to know exactly which swirlies will allow you to have one foot in the area of effect and be fine, and which one will need you to be an extra two yards clear unless you want to get mulched.
But what makes it extremely frustrating is that Blizzard knows it’s an issue. Just look at the mobs in Grim Batol, specifically the Twilight Lavabenders and their Shadowlava Blast abilities. A clearly defined area of effect with glowing red lines that shows exactly where you can and can’t stand. Or, for that matter, the Erupting Webs ability on the final trash mobs and boss in Ara-Kara. At the start of the expansion it was a white swirly effect, but then they patched it to make it a clearly defined circle.
The frontal cone in Siege of Boralus is an excellent example of how not to do it. This season has an even worse one - the Gruesome Cleave from the Skeletal Marauders in Necrotic Wake. That one doesn’t seem to have a visual at all. It has gotten to the point where I’ll wait two or three seconds after one of those gets pulled, just so I can be absolutely sure of how the tank has positioned them.
In an ideal world, they’d at the very least go through any dungeons that get added to the seasonal rotation, go through all the spell effects, and clean them up. They clearly know how to do it. Why they only do it for a handful of abilities and leave the rest as is I have no idea, other than them simply not budgetting for it.