Hello! After playing some beta, I got feedback to share.
Science on topic:
Visual Crowding: a fundamental limit on conscious perception and object recognition
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3070834
A visual search asymmetry for relative novelty in the visual field based on sensory adaptation
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7303077
The effect of chromatic and luminance information on reaction times
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/visual-neuroscience/article/abs/effect-of-chromatic-and-luminance-information-on-reaction-times/41855DE3DF2D1C1C8E9FE07AD31B2B26
Visual salience in the change detection paradigm: the special role of object onset
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15161379
Detection of Appearing and Disappearing Objects in Complex Acoustic Scenes
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3459829
TL;DR: the most efficient way to play the game is to have focus in the middle of the screen aka around our character feet. Important auras/cooldowns needs to be in a predictable place and have short travel distance for our eyes to be tracked with peripheral vision.
Cooldown Manager Feedback:
- Would be nice to have additional categories on top of Essential/Utility and just Buffs
- We can solve defensives situation by creating an additional action bar and putting it below PlayerFrame, but would be nice if it was a built-in option. Invaluable for new players who may not pay much attention at defensives, which is an integral part of endgame content
- We need to have an option to separate important buffs from utility/defensive buffs. Having all buffs together is not optimal, even in a static position. It’s expensive for our brain have 1x12 buffs row instead of 2x6. Having one row for defensives/utility and one for rotation buffs is very efficient. In a heat of a fight, we smash that defensive button and would notice “something” activated in defensives buffs row. We want to pay attention to our feet to avoid puddles/frontals, to our dps buffs and to our essential cooldowns. Offloading defensives/utilities to a separate category would help players perform better.
- Another option for this: make defensives/utilities be actually visible on our character model. Yes, we have some animations for Ice Cold, PI, etc.. But they’re not that noticable, especially if we play melee and doing big m+ pull or doing a raid boss where we have to stack often. Impossible to see our character when there are 10+ friendly/enemy models are on top of us.
- We need have option to change how buffs/cooldowns are displayed depending on their state, e.g. when they’re active, ready, disabled or are on cooldown
- Currently, a yellow overlay is displayed and it overlaps the whole icon. Having 3-5 yellow icons in a row is a bit messy and not really helping
- An option to have a solid glow border instead of yellow overlay is very welcome. Bonus points if we can change glow color per aura. Extra bonus point if we can disable displaying active aura for a cooldown like it’s done on purpose for Blade Flurry. I understand that you want to provide a set of meaningful defaults, but please don’t dictate how things are displayed. Some essential cooldowns are “press and forget” and they don’t affect the rotation. Yet, you still draw the yellow overlay on it, wasting CPU resources and some of our brain power to process it
- Need an option to reduce cooldown alpha level - just desaturate is not enough
- We need an option to track every single self cooldown and self buff that we have
- Would be nice to have charges/stacks text scale with the icon size or to be configurable. The text has to be big, preferably more than 50% of icon height and needs to have an outline. Players shouldn’t spend more than 1ms understanding how many stacks they have. It should be readable at a glance. Ideal option: let us have abstract figures like squares/circles instead of number for such purposes.
Cooldown Manager Bugs:
- Fire Breath doesn’t go on cooldown in Essentials when used
- I can track Verdant Embrace as a Devastation, but not as Augmentation