You’ll now be able to control display of buff icons for yourself, team members, and/or pets. It looks as though you’ll be able to show all of them, show just applied one (vs. auto-powers) or show none of them. That’s a nice, if not earth-shattering, quality of life thang.
Actually, it goes further than that:
– You can now hide all inherent/accolade buff icons via right-click.
– Click buffs now flash/fade on and off a few seconds before they expire.
– Stackable buffs (e.g. Siphon Speed) can now be displayed differently – as normal, slightly overlayed (as in the above image), or a single buff icon with a number in the middle. No change for powers such as Soul Drain.
– Enemy debuffs are also slightly duller that your own buff icons.
and
– There’s a global channel search function
– It’s now possible to set your team seek options to automatically reject all team invites.
– Dodging an attack from defense buffs (?) now puts Avoided! or Deflected! over your head.
– Powers that put you into a self-contained state (tested Rest and Phase Shift, presumably PFF, Invisibility, etc) now display Only Affecting Self in the mez state text below the buff bar.
The third bullet there is kind of interesting — assuming the screen doesn’t get inutterably cluttered (esp. during a major lagfest melee), it will be good to know when defensive powers are doing their thing. As a Dev describes it in a bit more detail:
Any time we determine the miss was due to a defensive power, it gets a new message. What message it gets is based on the power, so as people have said, if your target is a Stone tank you may see “Deflected!” messages, but a SR in Elude might result in “Eluded!”.
There’s also mention in the thread that timed temp powers now have an actual timer on them. Nice, esp. now that PvP zones have brought so many temp powers into the game (I’m assuming that on/off temp powers, like the Wedding Ring, have similar timers?). Usage “timers” are also displayed (“x users remaining”).
Coolness. Sometimes I think UI changes can be the most profoundly satisfying ones of all, even if they are all in the “background.”
And an odd policy change on character renaming:
Previously, names for characters under level 35 on game accounts that were inactive for over 90 days were changed to unreserved status. Data mining has determined that this policy is not needed on an ongoing basis and the program has been suspended. If we need to reenact this policy in the future to free up names then we will give all players 30 days notice before enacting the policy again. We thank all players for their continued support.
Which makes me think that (a) it was a PitA to run the report and/or make the name changes, and/or (b) after the first sweep on this (some months back) they’ve gotten very few names back out of it.