We need some kind of shield indicator, (maybe visual like poe, or always on numerical like d2) since lots of endgame builds use shields, (Like dh fortress ballista, or wizard everything, or zmonk mantra).
Thoughts?
A shield indicator has been something many of us have been asking for quite some time now. But sadly it’s something that has yet to come to pass.
We in fact had one. It was removed for amorphous reasons. We never understood.
It was supposed to come back, but…one of the many broken promises of D3.
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Already been requested multiple times by multiple forum memebers/D3 playesrs for years… As usual something obviously helpful and would improve the game for many to enjoy is being completely ignored by Blizzard and the D3 team. I seriosuly can not push my friends that are not playing D3 to play D3 with this lack of appreciation and implemenations of great suggestions/feedbacks, they would just run into many disappointments.
Found the blue post on this. Needless to say, it never came back. Something was better than nothing.
Damn when was this? Must’ve been when I was taking a break from D3. So it never made it into the game because of this “scaling” issue? What does that even mean?
This is exactly what I was thinking of that should be implemented. But didnt make it cause of “scaling”??? So meaning they couldnt make the code/script to work? Well that sucks… Feel like they should’ve found a way to make it work by now.
Like I said, it didn’t make sense to any of us.
This happened WAY back in 2014. I go back a LONG friggin time. I am the self-styled oldest wizard playing, dating back to Wizard before the game even launched.
“Scaling problem” means displaying two different scales (min:max) on the same UI item without breaking any user expectations. And each of the ways that were suggested so far breaks something:
• A single layer/bar over the whole HP globe means that scales are not synchronized: both small Smax (Fortress Ballista shot) and big Smax (Galvanising Ward with Ashganarr’s) will make two parts of the same UI element behave differently; and with rapidly changing Smax (Ballista/Deflection/etc) even behavior itself will be unpredictable. All of this is no good.
• A synchronized scale would make behavior predictable, but it would spawn two other problems (insert Hydra joke here). The first is mentioned in bluepost: small values of shield would be barely visible. The second is that big values of shield could be bigger than HP pool itself, so it would require extra tricks to display, like several shield bars (and in some degenerate cases like lvl 1 char with rank 150 Molten Wildebeest Gizzard this may not even work).
• Just slapping shield number over the HP globe and calling it a day is bad UI, again, for multiple reasons. First, it would not be on same UI element. Second, a player would then expect the HP values to be shown, to make meaningful comparisons. And not only comparing numbers is much more inferior method than using visual indicators, the fact that HP/shield number reach 6-7 digits for majority of characters makes one completely unable to quickly assess the state of their toughness. You’ll get yourself killed while you’re checking if you’re getting killed.
So, as I see it, no working UI solution was found, and devs see no value in replacing broken UI with another broken UI. And it may be even impossible to find a good solution without gutting the shield mechanics somehow. (Inb4 ”PoE does [thing] and it works!” — PoE is an abusive game which doesn’t hesitate to hit its players with constant stream of “gotchas”, not an example of great UI.)