Cant you just add a 50% damagereduction for the first damage taken? Would remove oneshots, without breaking it so it takes forever to kill someone.
Paladin is just at the point where damage dealable is a fraction higher then health returnable. Lowering the damage would make it so they can’t kill eachother at all.
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Please make that longer or best use the actual time… I first was excited to finally have an orientation about when to renew what, but then everything really looked same to me. I still got no clue about when to prepare what and, most important, the different lengths of buffs.
30secs is normally too short to do anything and while fishing I’d love to see if I am at 75 percent already or 50 etc. Even more in dungeons, if I am about half through a potion I know it lasts for an entire shard, if I am 10mins to the end it’s perhaps not worth drinking another etc. etc.
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Eeehm and what about a transparent version behind the countdown version? Then that countdown can be started on the begin of the hour?
(Edit: Probably don’t try to actually put a transparent version behind the non transparent version. That layering things close together really doesn’t seem to work with this game xD (e.g. dragon scoreboards). Instead rendering an inverse transparent countdown on the empty part would be a better approach. Still same result though)
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Although to be fair with all damage reduced mages can really shine, as they got one shot before getting in that huge damage, I feel like they will now have a better chance against some of the more bursty classes like paladin and scoundrel. But we definitely need some love for ranger and some huge changes for warrior in PvP I feel really sorry for them.
What about something like this for potions lasting 20 minutes or more? (Sorry for the bad paint image)
Put a border around the icon which goes away as the potion wears off and the actual animation starts during the last 25% of the potion duration.
This would allow people who want a more constant (?) timer to look carefully between fights, but for people who only want a quick glance during the last few minutes of the duration, they can get that too. It would also have the benefit of not being a constant animation until the last few minutes for performance purposes (assuming that is important).
Oh, and an extra ramp to the basement level is awesome!! 
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So the main reason we avoided doing a layered approach or a border or things of that nature was performance-related…it causes a lot of extra draw calls which are bad and with something like status effects which are everywhere it really adds up fast. Having the currently-drawn image just be drawn unfilling doesn’t really cost anything extra performance-wise.
One approach we could try is to make it based on a percent of the total time? So for buffs > 30 seconds long, it starts counting down when 10% of the buff is left (or 30 seconds, whichever is longer). So that way a 15 minute buff would start counting down at 1.5 minutes left, a 60 minute buff when 6 minutes left, etc?
Sorry but any however-percentage timer right before something expires is not what I find helpful… in fights I want to know exactly how long a buff lasts, in comparison with others, to plan accordingly.
For 30sec-buffs it all hardly matters, but as for potions the typical situation is that I took one and do not know if it still will last for a whole shard or not. Plus - at least for me - the intuitive expected behavior is that the icon starts diminishing, counting down, right after it’s placed.
I’m not sure if it’s that much a performance issue because in-fight there is a flood of the 30sec-buffs anyway so there will be lots of calls this or that way…
My approach would be possibly even the opposite, do not even show every sec, bt make it diminish much slower, in 5sec, 10sec or 15sec steps even.
I really like the showing off buff expiration timer. It’s made it so I have something to focus on instead of forgetting about it and going “oh crap it’s gone!” lol
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Sorry maybe I wasn’t clear, the counting down of the buff isn’t the performance issue, it’s adding a second image of the buff that’s transparent behind it or a border around it or something.
The only reason we didn’t have it count down immediately from e.g. 60 minutes is because we thought it would be really hard to know what buff was expiring if say with 10 minutes left only 10% of the image were visible (a little sliver). Maybe there’s a better solution for that, or maybe that’s not a concern?
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It could have inconsistent progress. So, if it’s less then 75% through, it’ll slowly chip away at the first quadrant. So, 30 minutes in, you see about 16% of the Sprite gone, because it’s 2/3rds of the way through the first 25% area. Then at 45 minutes in, it starts through the rest of the quadrants, with 25% of the Sprite gone. 50 minutes 50%. 55 minutes 75%. Then the last quadrant lasts the last 5 minutes.
Is it possible to replace the image by other images that go in steps down? Where you can have all kinds of things on the icon then. A clock, a grayed out part of the image, maybe only eating the edges of the image? It will still keep only 1 image rendered at a time.
There is probably even a shader trick which grays out the image in the same way it is eating it now xD
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So I think there are two goals with the PvP balancing. One is global balancing to reduce the one-shot meta, the other is addressing relative-class balance.
On the global balancing we want to give some room for people to breathe in PvP, have bringing a healer be something that actually makes a difference, etc. Reducing the global damage modifier does that. If it still means Scoundrel is OP and Paladins have too much survivability, then we’ll have to address those with the class-relative balancing.
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Sorry, what I meant, is that the image wouldn’t change at all between the ranges. The image would only update a couple times until the last 25%, rather than a continuous animation through the whole thing. It could also be set so the animated part doesn’t start until part way through the last 25% to decrease the duration of the animation.
Something that was mentioned in another thread was an option for time remaining being listed on the inventory menu. That could be combined with the last 10% animation as well. It would be less performance-intensive, because it could be set to only update while the menu is open.
You could add a new screen with the current buff info on the back of the main or offhand. Something like OVRDrop can do. So we could see more than just a logo. And a quick look will tell us how many time left on buff, and maybe even more informations about the currents buffs.
To answer that shortly, no I don’t think that’s a concern, because a 1h-buff already was visible 50mins. Even if I don’t take several potions together - what I mostly do - it is unlikely that I suddenly forget what my lowest potion was, looking at the bar every 2mins or so; the icons are clearly distinguished by color and if nothing else then I can figure from the other icons still active.
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