When doing comparisons and analysis and arguments, I often find myself using the tooltip information for comparing things. There are a couple of problems in doing this, though.
Issue 1: Most people have no idea where the information from the tooltip comes from. Unless you dig around the wiki for awhile, you’ll never know the tooltip arbitrarily assumes 2600 armor for your current power setting, that tooltips ignore condition specific boosts to their condition duration, or that trait specific increases to damage also aren’t displayed.
Issue 2: On activation time and recharge time, the tooltips are flat out wrong. This makes nearly every evaluation have to result to some outside timing test done by someone else, and if someone doesn’t have the necessary tools they can’t figure the timing out themselves. There are several factors that contribute to the attack rate of each skill:
A)Delay in activation. This is what is currently displayed in the tooltip, and is the time that passes before the skill can start its animation.
B)The animation. This eats up the majority of skill time, and it is completely ignored when balancing the skill. This is the biggest cause for dis-balance in the game right now, causing the auto attacks of different weapons to be only half as effective as other weapons due to the fact that their unlisted animations are twice as long.
B sub): Channel time. This is for long duration skills that last several seconds and can be interrupted mid-action, and this closely resembles the animation time of those skills.
C): Aftercast. This is another portion of animation time that, after skill usage, is the delay in time before a player can preform another action after using a particular skill. Now, the recharge time usually kicks in before aftercast, but not always. The aftercast itself isn’t displayed and is a complete unknown.
D): Server tick delay After the aftercast animation is done, the game needs to wait until the next complete server game tick before it will process information and continue with actions. This is a very small amount of time, usually less than 1/5th of a second in time, but nonetheless it adds to overall skill usage rate of the player. This information isn’t displayed, but to be fair most people don’t realize this exists. Designers included.
Issue #2 Is a big one, since Issue #1 can be dealt with mathematically. While the toolbar tooltip might not have enough space to include everything, the hero panel definitely has enough room to put in as much information on any skill as possible. It is enough to fill up an entire screen full of information, so we should definitely do that.
For the tooltip on the skill bar:
#1: Condition duration should be accurately displayed, taking into account condition specific boosts to that condition.
#2: Permanent bonuses to weapons should be factored into their tooltips. If you have yourself specced to do 5% more damage while wielding a greatsword, then greatsword attacks should reflect that 5% increase.
#3: Temporary boosts and condition specific boosts should not be reflected in tooltip damage. If you only do something like 5% more damage to bleeding targets, this should not befactored in.
#4: The direct damage of tool tips should be displayed assuming 2000 armor, and not 2600 armor like currently. To be blunt, you rarely ever see 2600 armor. It never appears in PVE, and it is rare to find in PVP as well. 2000 armor is about the armor rating of a medium-armored player with no additional boosts (1980), and this reflects the real damage done more accurately
On the hero panel, the following should be changed:
#1: All skills should now display the following information:
A)Activation delay (or Pre-cast time). Currently, this information is displayed.
B)Animation time. This is currently not displayed.
C)Aftercast delay. This is currently not displayed.
D)Recharge time. This is currently displayed.
E)Channel time when appropriate. This is currently displayed.
Server tick delay is just something devs have to consider when balancing. With all of this information available, it’ll make players more readily understand their damage output, while also making it much easier for players to critique the skills themselves. With this in mind, players can then more meaningfully contribute to the balancing of classes in the game, making the workload of the devs lighter in this regard.