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Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Housekeeping in the Old Republic

Various RL factors kept me from really playing Knights of the Fallen Empire on Tuesday or Wednesday evening like I wanted and intended to. That's not to say I didn't log on, just that I didn't actually get to play, instead getting caught up on various "chores" in the game.

My stronghold could have been a closet.
There was a bunch of inventory and mail to take care of because of changes to companion stats, plus items returned from the GTN because of a reset. On top of all that was the swag for having been subscribed for several months leading up to KotFE. Plus I bought a GTN node for my stronghold and ended up reconfiguring a space into my utility wall.

All the buttons!
Just days ago, I decided it was time to do something about the monstrosity of my action bars. There are many temporary buffs and conditional abilities that I have tended to neglect if they weren't on my main hotbar, which is tied to my Nostromo (I'm a bit of a button masher). One thing that I really like about GW2 and especially TSW is the limited ability bar; which, while requiring some tactical planning, frees me to concentrate more fully on the action taking place in the game environment, instead of what is happening on my UI.

Minimalist
So I changed my UI around to hopefully pick up on those situational abilities and remember to use the battle buffs. Last night, I did some further tweaking to accommodate the altered companion ability bar and take advantage of the new snap-to-grid to properly align some stuff. This led to two annoying discoveries.

Snap to it!
First, even though the grid origin has XY axes running through the center of the screen, and many UI elements expand from their own center, they have no center anchor point, only edges. And the various elements don't match perfectly to the grid. So snap-to was not helpful for stuff I wanted centered (or some stuff at the screen edge, but that was not as critical).

Now you see them...... Now you don't.
Second, and even more annoying, the new Heroic Moment ability and related Legacy abilities are only situationally available at all even from the ability window (P). I am forced to mouseclick the pop-up ability bar, when I had planned to use a secondary bar and switch to those abilities on my Nostromo. Now, these abilities may be pure cheese, inferior to any regular ability, but if so, there's not much point to putting them front and center during the two-minute (for me) Heroic Moment period. And there's not a good way for me to check their effectiveness, since they are not available to even check on if Heroic Moment isn't in effect. My first request would be a permanent return of those abilities to the Ability Window (and optional hotbar placement), even if they are not active all the time.
Spot my party.
The third UI annoyance, which I discovered later in the evening, is that the group member map icon that used to be an easily distinguishable purple figure has been recolored to a pale blue, which causes it to get lost on the overall blue of the map interface. (Thanks to Antuan of The Ebon Hawk server for his assistance getting the above screenshot.) I was only able to see Scooter's character on the Vaiken Spacedock map because she was in motion. Otherwise, it faded into the map background. all the other map legend items are a different color than the map, from Mission givers to vendors and trainers. Why did the devs change the group member icon?

I wasn't able to jump into the new content tonight (Wednesday) either, because Scooter isn't available. And I had to go back into town on an extended errand anyway. So I'll probably do more housekeeping and work on leveling some of my Republic characters. Gotta get Legendary status!
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2 comments:

  1. Oh geez, that map picture is like Where's Waldo (On The Fleet)? I agree about the legacy abilities. I thought that we'd be able to customize their placement on the pop up bar (or just not use the popup bar if we didn't want to). I don't relish hovering over them going "duh which one is that" next time I need to hit heroic moment.

    Tip for the (very annoying) GTN decoration, which I was frustrated to discover goes waaaay too high on the wall. If you change the wall config to two blue boxes rather than one pink box, you can put the GTN on the lower one and then nudge it down as low as it can go. That puts it at normal human height.

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    1. Thanks for the tip. That is actually the one blue, four green layout. I needed an anchor for my wall safe, which is visible between my GTN and my Legacy storage. Since this configuration is more for efficiency than aesthetics, I can live with the odd GTN placement (though it would have been nice if I could place it on a green anchor.

      And yes! "Where's Waldo" is exactly what I thought. Scooter pointed out last night that group members' mission objectives are the same pale blue, almost impossible to pick out on a busy map.

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