BioWare elaborated on their promise that global cooldown customization features will be coming soon in a recent developer blog by Stephen Reid. He had this to say on the matter:
This week several user interface changes were made as part of patch 1.1.2, including some that changed the look of the ‘global cooldown’ animations. ‘Global cooldown’ is the delay after an ability is used before other abilities can be used. As the global cooldown can affect many abilities at once, the animation is seen frequently and for some, the changes made were distracting.
Our UI team took this feedback to heart and worked up a solution which gives every player a lot more choices in how cooldown animations are displayed. If you’re happy with the way the game currently looks, you can ignore these changes – but we think some of these preferences will be welcomed by many players.
Currently, these new preferences are scheduled to be added to the game in patch 1.1.4, which should be available for preview on the Public Test Server next week and deploying to the live servers soon afterwards.
He went on to outline some of the features players will be able to customize such as turning the flash for when an ability finishes its cooldown on or off, different art styles for what abilities will look like when they are on a cooldown, the ability to change when the game will start showing tenths of a second on cooldown abilities, plus several more. They even included a video showing some of the customization options in action.
You can check out the video and read the blog in its entirety here.
That’s right, even after being updated in Tuesday’s patch there are more changes on the horizon for the global cooldown animation.
Ever since the cooldown animation was updated in 1.1.2 their has been a growing group of players who have been disappointed with the change. The white flash of the abilities as they enter the cooldown state has been visually unappealing to players, with some even reporting that the animation makes then nauseous and causes headaches. There have also been complaints that since using any ability causes all of your abilities to go grey it makes it difficult for classes that spam abilities every second (such as the Sentinel or Marauder) to know if their abilities are ready, if they are in the correct range, or even if they have enough resources to activate their abilities.
BioWare opened a poll earlier today to try and get a feel for what percentage of players were disappointed with the changes. By the time the poll was closed over 57% of players who responded voted that the thought the new animations were terrible. BioWare assured players that changes would be coming based on the feedback that they received, and elaborated that they would not have implemented these changes in the first place had they received this kind of feedback out it on the Public Test Server.
Getting players to participate on the Public Test Server has been somewhat of a challenge for BioWare, as most players do not want to roll and level a brand new character for the sole purpose of testing new content. In order to help alleviate this problem BioWare announced that they are working on changes that will allow players to freely transfer their characters to the Public Test Server in order to help test new content. No official word on when these changes will be coming, but we will be keeping an eye on the forums and will update you with a date once it is announced.
