Bad tooltips Waste Your Time and Dev Time.

[Bluelightt]

Exactly the same with the Warrior extra-threat AoEs, they are absolutely necessary to establishing threat but there is no indication of that in the tooltips. Hell I'm not even sure whether Even Justice in Cleric works the same way but it's the only AoE in justicar and they get the whole overhealing thing so that's kind of a moot point.

EJ itself doesn't add extra threat. MoL inherently adds more threat from damaging abilities + healing/overhealing of course from Reparation. I think all of that is explained in the MoL tooltip, but not 100% sure.

That being said, yes, the tooltips are pretty worthless and am hoping they get reworked in SL, we'll see.

[Ordika]

By all means, hop on Riftstalker or any Warrior tank with a fresh mindset and let me know how you feel. The dumbed down tooltips are just that, dumb. To further prove my point, here's a post from the Rogue forums about a player asking what he should be using as his main combo builder;



A couple of us quickly replied and informed how Planar Strike has a hidden text that also increases threat said ability provides. Without him asking, that player wouldn't have known.

Please pay attention to the entire conversation. I said I believe the tooltips need to be fixed, and I even agreed on the threat generating issue as it was discussed on page 2. It is beyond horrible for a threat generating ability to not say so as if defeats the purpose of its existence. Yes someone like me who has been playing games since the early 80's would probably assume...use tank spec abilities to get tank spec benefits so I would have been using them regardless. But I totally agree that they need to say they generate threat so someone who combines a dps spec with a tank spec and is new to the game is still using the tanking abilities (again all on page 2 of the thread).

I have only been talking about the meins and phases as the basic information tells you the role that are for and so you should be using them to preform that role, and if you aren't then tooltip info is not the issue at hand but a lack of understanding how your role is preformed and tooltips won't fix that. To me this is what contributes to them getting dumbed down but I won't go into that as it is not the point of the thread.

Suffice to say...tooltips need to specify all the effects of the ability and when they enhance another ability they need to specify by how much. Threat generating abilities, LGV v LBV, these are the kinds of things that need to be brought to the devs attention to get them changed. Asking them to change the meins and phases which already clearly denote their intended purpose would get a snicker from me if I was the dev (I am a dev in something else, not gaming) as I would just say, "what you can't figure out what its for when it says Use for Tanking or Use for DPS".

[Turrant]

EJ itself doesn't add extra threat. MoL inherently adds more threat from damaging abilities + healing/overhealing of course from Reparation. I think all of that is explained in the MoL tooltip, but not 100% sure.

That being said, yes, the tooltips are pretty worthless and am hoping they get reworked in SL, we'll see.

All Justicar abilities were changed to add additional threat a while back but only enough to cancel the benefit of MoH 50% less threat generation. This was done so that mien swapping was a little easier for cleric tanks as to not totally gimp their threat generation in MoH. I did not really understand why they bothered with the change but that was the reason. Also the reason the abilities never said "generates additional threat" for clerics when they made the change was because they thought it would be redundant to have it on every Justicar ability.

[Caldern]

Please pay attention to the entire conversation. I said I believe the tooltips need to be fixed, and I even agreed on the threat generating issue as it was discussed on page 2. It is beyond horrible for a threat generating ability to not say so as if defeats the purpose of its existence. Yes someone like me who has been playing games since the early 80's would probably assume...use tank spec abilities to get tank spec benefits so I would have been using them regardless. But I totally agree that they need to say they generate threat so someone who combines a dps spec with a tank spec and is new to the game is still using the tanking abilities (again all on page 2 of the thread).

I have only been talking about the meins and phases as the basic information tells you the role that are for and so you should be using them to preform that role, and if you aren't then tooltip info is not the issue at hand but a lack of understanding how your role is preformed and tooltips won't fix that. To me this is what contributes to them getting dumbed down but I won't go into that as it is not the point of the thread.

Suffice to say...tooltips need to specify all the effects of the ability and when they enhance another ability they need to specify by how much. Threat generating abilities, LGV v LBV, these are the kinds of things that need to be brought to the devs attention to get them changed. Asking them to change the meins and phases which already clearly denote their intended purpose would get a snicker from me if I was the dev (I am a dev in something else, not gaming) as I would just say, "what you can't figure out what its for when it says Use for Tanking or Use for DPS".

A guildy of mine was running an expert with a warrior who had recently hit 50 and thus was using a tank/dps combo setup, because it had been good for leveling. He was using high threat tank tree aoe because it was aoe and he needed to use aoe abilities, but had no idea it was generating extra threat.

as far as the Veils go, not having the percentages on them is ridiculous, for all we know they could change the percentages now without saying anything, and most chloro players probably dont even realise that the entire chloro soul really doesnt work particularly well for tank healing unless you spend 51 points in it anyways.

[DisneyShadow]

After reading more of the reply's I think most of the issue is we assume new players are just plain stupid and I think that is an unfair assessment and hurts the cause of getting the tooltips fixed.

I am all in favor of more info not less, but for a new player one would have to be a idiot on the level of like a 10 IQ to screw up the meins or phases. Using the quote as an example I can't imagine someone seeing the two phases and their descriptions and not using Guardian Phase while tanking. I'm sure someone will say they have seen it, but I'm sorry I just don't buy it.

What about for someone who is only thinking about using Riftstalker as a backup soul?

Say I'm developing my Marksman. Stalker Phase says it has a damage boost, but how much? I might do 5 points for Unseen Fury, but is it worth another 13 for the Stalker Phase bonus?

Or say I'm working on a Bladedancer, and I'm concerned about being so close to enemies so much of the time. I want deflect, armor, endurance, and resistance. How much threat might I be pulling from the main tank? How much DPS am I losing? I'd like to know this so I can evaluate the trade-off.

Otherwise I would only use these phases if I'm going full Riftstalker, in which case I can't imagine anybody ever using Stalker Phase.

[bombasy]

Guys, old tooltips are not returning, I've quoted this PM every time this stuff comes up in the cleric forum:

I saw you post on a cleric thread about Banish and a bug with it's tooltip, so I thought I'd ask you.

I'd like to know why the cleric tooltips got so badly dumbed down, the Mien tooltips are some of the worst offenders and probably more confusing than the originals with the percentages. For a new player not knowing the exact effects of Mien of Aggression or Honor or Leadership can be misleading.

I for one do not like it, is there a way to get the old tooltips back? Pretty please, cherry on top and everything.

Thanks for your time,
--
Mandulis

The old tooltips won't be returning.
Our goal with tooltips is as follows: Give players the information they need to understand the function and purpose of the ability.

We have mounds and mounds and mounds of feedback that people simply cannot understand the intent and purpose behind some of the more complicated abilities.

I understand that some people want those very specific numbers -- those are not something we are trying to hide on purpose for any nefarious reason - but it simply isnt something that the average user needs to have.

Contrary to popular belief we do not go around ninja nerfing things - it is not to our benefit or the players.

~Daglar

My attempt to alleviate this for clerics is here: http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-gene...-tooltips.html

And barely anyone seems to care.

[TheGrinnz]

Guys, old tooltips are not returning, I've quoted this PM every time this stuff comes up in the cleric forum:



My attempt to alleviate this for clerics is here: http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-gene...-tooltips.html

And barely anyone seems to care.

And every time I see that quote, it's obvious they are not fulfilling their "goal".

[Thargrom]

Simple tooltips would be fine if they actually covered the essential portions of an ability... removing the line "This ability is not affected by the global cooldown" or "this ability does not trigger the global cooldown" has not helped simplify anything.

New players have no idea whether some reactive abilities are on or off the GCD by reading the tooltips.

I believe LBV and LGV are also pretty uselessly worded now.

They also didn't do anyone any favors by removing "this ability generates increased threat" from the tooltips of some warrior tank abilities... especially when they did it right after adding massive threat to the 10-target AoE abilities... we had weeks of "hybrid" dps idiots not understanding why they pulled threat in random dungeons. It's fine if they wanted to simplify by removing the "significant" "more" "increased" "great deal of" and other adjectives... and standardize it with one term... but removing it completely leads to less-informed new players.

[Nsayn1]

The only reason they dumbed them down is b/c most of them were wrong. They dont want to be held accountable for skills not working as implied.

[TheGrinnz]

The only reason they dumbed them down is b/c most of them were wrong. They dont want to be held accountable for skills not working as implied.

Missing information implies just as much incorrectly.