There are many MMOs, most of them not even good, that give you the option to toggle which spell effects you see. They let you say things like;
- Only show my spell effects
- Only show my parties spell effects
- Only show my raids spell effects
- Show everybody’s spell effects
They also have options like;
- Only show my player character
- Only show my parties characters
- Only show my raids characters
- Show everybody
I’m asking because a bit of an annoyance I’ve found has been brought to light as a result of the new Hero Talent system.
My partner and I are both playing Mountain Thane dwarves - we love seeing the lightning effects go off as warriors. Only, we weren’t seeing each others effects, only our own. There were some other weird things too like how our Easter Hearthstone wasnt showing the bunny ears or flower effects.
After googling it, I found that it was the ‘Spell Density’ setting in graphics that was causing it. It seemed to be set to ‘Dynamic’ by default, which I assume is designed for altering the spell effect load in high traffic areas. Makes sense. I had to change it to ‘Most’ in order to show their lightning strikes. I had to set it to ‘Everything’ in order to see their hearthstone animations.
And I thought to myself; “Why would hearthstone animations need to be throttled? You can’t even spam these, and are likely not using them in combat or a high-performance situation in the first place?” Which beckoned the question; “Whats the point of the almost completely passive-upgrades granted via Hero Talents if you are literally the only person who knows what you do?” So many of the hero talent trees are completely passive and its hard enough for the player themselves to tell if anything different is happening.
The answer seems obvious; Make it so that we can choose what people we actually care about seeing spell effects from.
And no, I won’t be accepting “but blizzard can’t handle their own spaghetti code” as a reasonable answer any more.