No, he isn’t. He’s correct. Take a look at literally everything that pops up in various spots in the viewport. Quest counters literally fly in PlayStation Trophy style from the righthand side in the (somewhat laughable) quest tracker. Paragon notifications fly in similarly from the lefthand side. Resource popups, a constant annoyance, are front and center and block a significant portion of the combat area. Quest Complete popups are large, and block not one but two locations: top center in a wide area and lower mid-left quadrant approximatly half as wide as the top quest popups, but twice as wide from a vertical perspective.
Those quest counters are rather intrusive as well, repeatedly flying in after literally every single pickup/update. If you’re on one of the Harvest (gather 100 motes) quests, every single pickup will trigger a fly-in, so if you just rapidly picked up ten motes, that counter indicator will fly in from the right side ten times in succession.
The status HUD UI elements are also misaligned. The combo points indicators are actually partially obscured by the buff/debuff icons for instance on a rogue instead of having at least a few pixels of padding between them.
That paragon notification? I forgot to mention that appears in two locations: the large popup to the lower left and a smaller flashing “A” just above and to the right of the righthand resource globe.
The large boss health bars would be a lot more tolerable if our camera position wasn’t so claustrophobically zoomed in. As it is, the zoom level is so close to the character we often can’t even see the boss completely due to either the upper or lower HUD elements.
The map is atrocious as well. Upon opening it, you will be hard pressed to easily see your character marker arrow. It just blends in too well. And if you have the quest tracker pane visible? Your map is also no longer centered, obscuring a huge portion of what would otherwise be visible in addition to your character marker still being hard to see.
Got a window of any type open? You have to reach up and hit ESC to close it. No contextual switching whatsoever that would allow you to quickly tap spacebar with your thumb to close the window so you can quickly re-enter combat if you’re interrupted. And oftentimes you frantically hit ESC more than once, which then brings up the game’s menu pane, which you then have to dismiss with, yes, ESC.
Chat is still not clickthrough. That is, you can accidentally click the side of the window and activate text input, blocking clicking until you hit ESC to dismiss the chat window. It should be clickthrough with only the Enter and / keys activating text input and thus temporarily disabling clickthrough functionality. Diablo 3 has always had and still does have this problem. Eleven years after launch. Blizzard didn’t learn a thing from that game’s inflexible UI apparently. Oh, and speaking of the UI not being clickthrough, you can accidentally trigger unwanted UI button interaction during combat or when mounted due to mouse cursor positioning requirements.
And don’t get me started on the rewards and shop sections respectively. To view rewards you have to hit TAB and then W. When viewing the shop you have to sit through that obnoxious animated intro. Every. Single. Time.
Detailed item text, while salvageable, is a real bear with regard to ease of readability. The nesting “lines” at the top on things like weapons doesn’t help either. A change of font and background color would help, as would not having to scroll to see item differences with virtually every item being compared to what you have equipped.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the UI is a clusterfudge in this game and it is in dire need of a major overhaul. Minimalistic is it not.