New skill animation cleave/flashy skill styles in general

Puffgee · March 16

The 2handed skill cleave has seen alot bad change decisions over the years. Changing the aoe from 120° to 270° and the range from 7 meters to 6 meters was one of them. But the new cleave skill animation brought by update 49 is a torture for eyes and ears. A flashy whirlwind and a blob sound is nothing you wanna have constantly. On top the new skill animation is now unskippable by other abilities which reduces the attack speed. The cleave skill has 3 styles atm which are only different in colour. My suggestion would be to change back one to the original animation like Cinnabar Red which had a calm audio and video effect before update 49. So all players who dont like flashy animations have a alternative to choose. This could be an idea in general and for all skills. Nearly every skill has a couple of different skill styles now. Leave one of them with a minimum on visual and audio effects for those players in the community who just interested in the gameplay itself. Thanks!

tsaescishoeshiner · March 16

Some of the new 2H animations are cool as far as how you hold the weapon, but the bright colors are odd. The old ones had a white color that accentuated the movement and motion of the ability without looking too much like magic or an unrealistic visual. The new ones are cool, but stand out way too much.

MincMincMinc · March 18

Zos 1 month pushing performance and vengeance, zos the next month is giving every generic spammable an ultimate level animation+vfx with a 5 paragraph essay tooltip doing multiple buffs/debuffs and CC.

Not much more to point out on the current designs.

The original game was designed....

in a way to reduce bloat and performance while visually helping players understand combat. Keeping the game clean while also easily understandable for new players. Before, generic spammable skills you'd see in the first three unlocks of a skill line would be much less flashy since they'd be used more often. Then you'd have ultimates and the later unlocks like streak be the more defining flashy skills that had major impacts in combat while having large costs. Guys its game design 101 being messed up. They should have used this chance to tone down the power crept bloat, instead they are adding to it.

Proc sets were always hated at their introduction because they not only trivialized the gcd combat system, but also because they bloated the screen with effects. Now adays it has only double, tripled, or even quadrupled because people can slot more and more set bonuses further bloating up the screen with overblown vfx for the sake of selling dlc.

At the end of the day we are stuck in a nonsensical animation soup instead of a clean combat experience.

Kalthea · March 23

Sorry to be pedantic, but it is important to make a distinction between "animations" and "visual effects" in these posts. Animations are what cause your player model's body to move, twist and bend, literally animating the skeleton. Visual Effects (VFX) are the particle effects (little wisps of flame or light), sprites (images used in place of particles, such as a ward or portal) and models (like DKs Shell or Molten Armaments) that spawn with the press of an ability.

On to the actual discussion, Visual Noise is very much a concern. While I personally enjoy the brighter colors that pop (the game suffers horribly from being too afraid to saturate colors at all), I can see a lot of issues with the new visuals. The flame breath can barely be seen through, Molten Armaments not only overwrite your weapon skins, but also have a glow that covers up a ton of your character, and I've never been fond of the turtle shell from the spines.

As for the performance, I havent noticed any problems? You can have a brighter color that doesn't affect how fast the game runs. Unless you took Performance to mean "how well you can play the game", which is not what a developer means when they say Performance. They would say "player performance". The tooltips also don't bother me. The more things interact, the better IMO, as it would definitely make you question whether or not to swap out a skill line.