After recently returning to wow and playing for a while i have noticed that todays wow players are a bit different than “back in the day”. It might be a general trait of people nowadays who are drawn to play video games.
Notably, a lot of people are having a hard time to read, or just dont read too well. Me including. Which makes me fit in well (took me a long time to write this by the vay).
So i would appreciate if the amount of text on items and talents could be reduced and simplified. There are now so many talents to choose, and most of them have a paragraph to read and study to understand what it does. So do spells.
But do you remember that back in the day there was text like:
“Equip: Increases haste rating by 99”
Now its:
“+99 haste”
This approach would be good for all talents and spells - is what im saying i guess. Do we really need massive paragraphs of text everywhere, does that improve the understanding of an already very complicated game?
There’s a thing in linguistics called “language sufficiency”. According to it, it takes as many words to define something as necessary. If you can do it with a single word - so be it, but in some cases we need slightly more than one word to fully describe a thing or a concept.
Many spells in WoW takes literally 1 line of text, but for some more complex mechanics more lines is a necessity.
I’d rather have this for FF14. That game has weird and huge tooltips compared to wow, and if it weren’t for tutorials I’d not even use core abilities as I’d not know what a combo strike means.
Here’s one.
First off, 90s recast. That would be 1.5 min CD, which would be way easier to remember than a giant number.
Then, you’ll have to find out what this Coda is, as well as song gauge. (I don’t know at all. Facts, don’t even play this class.)
But, you can see that the more you have, the stronger this ability is. So it’s like combo points to me.
And in a separate line you see it’s a 15 sec duration.
Yes, well-ordered but… idk. Even the window itself has a tiringly huge size.
Now take a look at WoW’s tooltips.
Simple enough cooldown for me.
I can gather in two seconds’ notice that this is a 2 min cd improving my pet’s damage by 20% and makes them unstoppable. (It’s just a flavor text really. No idea where it’s from, prolly a movie reference.)
Sure, there are more complex abilities, but the tooltips here are much easier to read and understand imo.
there were a large number of posts where players complained not enough information. This is the first I have seen about too much information. Perhaps blizzard can meet everyone halfway and shorten tooltips and put in much more detailed explanation in the spellbook ?
