Idea for healer awareness indicators in PVP

Guides UI and Macro
1

Healer awareness is an important aspect of PVP. Knowing where your healer is and what their status is, is important. Unfortunately the current UI doesn’t give great tools in PVP formats (arena and BGs) for players. I thought I’d mock up an idea that could help.

Taking some inspiration from Overwatch, it would be great if you could add a peripheral healer position indicator for non-healer roles (similar to when a Mercy is healing you).

This would be helpful for DPS understanding:

  • Where their healer is in relation to them
  • If they are out of range or out of line of sight currently
  • If the healer is in trouble or CC’d

These are all important statuses to know, and would benefit both DPS and healers.

I’ve mocked up what this might look like. Keep in mind you already have this functionality to a certain extent with quest objective tracking markers (yellow diamonds), so it might be something you could translate here.

https://imgur.com/a/pOYnrtx

This would show a general direction of where your healer is even if they’re currently offscreen. The healer icon would show.

From here we can build on the concept. When a healer is CC’d show the status and duration:

https://imgur.com/a/QzfTFLW

And, when healer is out of range or loses LOS, fade out icon. (faded icon could exist up to 80 yards out to give general position):

https://imgur.com/a/vukKYZa

Additional features could include a flashing red border when their healer is low health and a glowing icon when the healer has incoming heals to you.

The intent here is to help DPS have better awareness where there healer is while they’re focusing a target. I know as a DPS player I have had to spin my camera around many times to try and find my healer. This dynamic visual feedback could give more easily readable information in PVP.

2 Likes
2

Don’t friendly nameplates essentially do this already? (Genuinely asking, it’s been ages since I’ve done arena)

3

To my knowledge, nameplates are only visible when they’re on screen/in view.

This is meant to help show where your healer is off screen, and what their status is. Particularly in battlegrounds it’s harder to know where your healer is at any given point, if you’re over extending or your healer needs help.

It would definitely help in arena too. In solo shuffle, it auto assigns markers, but a dedicated healer marker could help player across the board to combat tunnel vision.

4

Looks like only the nameplate of your current target has a cvar to enable a radial position.

1 Like
5

Ah. I’d remembered seeing a CVar for the max distance a nameplate would be visible behind you but that’s also limited to target.

6

I see what you mean though. Friendly nameplates off screen have a very limited range. So I’m not sure how helpful that is in practice.

7

Ya, definitely needs a new mechanism or expansion of exiting ones, to do what you’re proposing, but it like the idea.

I recommend also making the suggestion in-game via the support tool as devs aren’t known to frequent these forums.

1 Like