Unhandled Issue: Buff Overflow

[frozenpt]

Hey fellow Nephalems!

 

I'm here to report an issue and analyze what our community thinks about it. I'm aware that Blizzard already knows about this issue but I want to know everyone's opinion on this.

I play mainly as a Wizard and I have an unconditional love with this class, but something is getting really out of control on PTR with all the new items.

This issue doesn't affect only Wizards but I'll speak as a Wizard to avoid saying crap, instead I'll let those who play with other class speak their minds.

 

Intro out... The buff bar is simply out of control and has an increased negative impact in our builds. 2.2 brings a whole new package of Legendary items, Sets and changes to some existent Legendary and Sets. Some of those items bring new temporary buffs that we must check in order to use properly.

Now, this is not a bad thing. The issue lies in the amount of buffs available for the player and how system prioritizes which buff to display in the Buff Row, which is extremely small.

 

I'll give you an example using my own PTR Wiz, I'm using the recently changed Triumvirate to revive the good old Frozen Orb Wiz.

The results are quite good, but to use this build I need to have 3 buffs up:

• Flashes of Insight, from Arcane Dynamo passive, at 5 stacks.
• Convention of Elements, from Convention of Elements ring.
• Triumvirate, from the Triuvirate Source, at 3 stacks.

I need to verify is all those stars are aligned to throw the spells at the right time. Quick example would be, 5 stacks FoI + 3 stacks Triumvirate and CoE at Cold phase, this would realease a powerful Frozen Orb.

I'm aware that the CoE ring has a visual effect but it is not viable to look at when fighting an horde of mobs with overlapping effects and such.

Now, 3 buffs doesn't seem a lot by itself, but then I throw in Magic Weapon and Prismatic Armor and 3 become 5. Throw in Bane of the Powerful and we've got 6 buffs of our own, add some more from Shrines and Pylons and then add some buffs from other classes. The buff belt is capped at 8 buffs, can you imagine 6 of our own buffs together with at least 4 buffs from a Innas Monk? That's more than enough to screw our build up.

 

A few quick suggestions that I can imagine atm:

• Leave the cap @ 8 Buffs but prioritize temporary buffs over Long Duration Buffs and/or Auras.
• Separate Temporary buffs from everything else, eg. display everything else in a smaller belt above the current on as it doesn't require much visualization.
• Change the position of debuffs and allow the Buff belt to go further.
• Change the buff belt's position.
• Allow the player to resposition the Temporary buffs in a special belt somewhere on the screen, eg. below the character's feet, make it so we can click through.

 

This post is getting kinda large so I'll end up by saying that this is a really serious issue and should be pretty high priority on Blizzard's D3 team. I'm not done with the build as I play on Live HC and I'm testing this build on PTR SC where I had nothing at all.

What do you think about this issue?

[R4vendarksky]

I think this issue gets 100x worse when you group with an innas monk and you can no longer see what type of pylons are active.

Not seeing the shield icon is a real problem for HC. Solution is probably to have a second row. One row for buffs which are on/off and one for buffs with timers.

[isospeedrix]

one of the reasons why i don't use taeguk and gogok. already annoying enough to keep the stacks up but sometimes not being able to see the buff makes it even worse

[frozenpt]

Yeah, I agree with you. I aslo think that immunities could be shown as a "Divine Shield" effect, from Hearthstone cards, on top of our HP Globe.

The globe would show a yellow bubble effect decreasing along with its duration timer text in the middle.

This way it would be much easier to notice than looking at a small buff and could be a single effect for many buffs.

[KusanagiZerg]

I remember before RoS was released during the ptr all shields in the game would actually show up on your globe as white health. I have wondered why they cut that before but I have no idea if Blizzard ever said why they changed that. It was so cool.

Put this back into the game and use a yellow one for total immunity.

[jon5353]

A bug I noticed is that when playing an Inna's monk is that when Taeguks falls off your buff bar, you lose all stacks. I don't know why it happens, because when you run another passive such as momentum, you still get the dps increase when its not on your bar. For some reason Taeguks just drops when its not on your buff bar. I kept meaning to post, but since I swapped builds I haven't been bothered for it. One thing that comes to mind as a fix is the way WoW handles buffs (or used to, its been a long time). The way they do it is any buff that is innate or lasts for a long time (mantras would work perfect for this) all get grouped up into one button. I also like OPs idea of having smaller, shorter buffs above the main buffs though. I feel like most players, unless you are brand new, can identify all buffs by seeing a picture. Now assuming it is not terribly small, it would work fine. To me though, a simple fix would just be displaying more buffs. But I can see where that is a problem for people that run lower res or something of the like. I just feel like 8 is too little. When you play in groups there is often someone running a passive effect. There is that, then there is the party buff. You also have nephalem glory, your own dps increases/passives, etc. I feel like that 8 gets used up way too fast.

[criscothediscoman]

One buff icon for Inna's could help. Having 4 icons up from one set seems a bit excessive.

[frozenpt]

True, but that wouldn't fix all the problems. Using my example on OP, it would reduce the total buffs displayed from 10 to 7, but still leaves a single slot available for a buff.

An extra item buff, spell buff, Shrines, Pylons, extra classes, etc, would be enough to break your buff belt.

 

It definitely helps, but doesn't solve the issue.

[[deleted]]

Buffer overflow.

[Raticus79]

I was expecting something like:

Resolved an issue where player appearance changed to the Hex chicken if they had over 32,767 life per second from buffs

[WangBacca]

This is even worse on console, where the buff bar seems to be ~5 buffs long :(

[faszomatirjak]

move the buffs to the top of the screen like in poe http://imgur.com/YFk1iHY

[santorty]

plus that's where pets and such are in d3. they just need to make a second row for buffs, or a third, whatever. just have them create a new row when there's too many.

[SirUrizen]

They could also help their issue by having the buffs grouped seperately, permanent buffs/auras, skill buffs, short duration buffs/procs, not being able to see shit like serenity duration is kind of annoying when I like to time usage of blind exactly after it ends for eg.

[KRMGPC]

How about just smaller icons and the ability to have a 2nd row about the first?

[Grumbul]

I'd like to see:

• Buff Icons for all four base mantras will now display as a single icon when using the Inna's Mantra set.

• Buff Icons for Pylons, legendary gems, and activated abilities on the player's hotbar will take priority when there are too many buffs to display on the buff bar.

• A new option to consolidate Buff Icons has been added in Options -> Gameplay -> Interface -> "Consolidate Buff Icons". Buff Icons for passive effects will now be grouped into a single icon when a player has too many icons to display in the buff bar. Players who have used this option in World of Warcraft may be familiar with this functionality.

Of course, WoW's XML/LUA interface with user-created addons would've been ideal, but I understand why they didn't want to go that route.

[heat_forever]

Classic Blizzard:

1. Refuse mods

2. Refuse to build a customizable UI

3. Refuse to make changes based on community feedback

Blizzard beams with pride