How do you display buffs names?

[Rysa]

So it's come to my attention that eastern versions of BnS have buffs names displayed below their respective icons, which I find very helpful when your screen is cluttered with buffs.

 

TW version screenshot:

 

However I cannot find that option in our settings. Am I missing something here or is not available for EU/NA?

[FrozenB]

We had these skills names in one of the patches during summer time. However, since these names are quite awkward, they removed them in the following patch.

 

If you played this game long enough, you should know all the icons without looking at the names. If you need to see the skill name under the buff icon, it means that you don't know your characters well enough.

[Shunaia]

37 minutes ago, FrozenB said:

We had these skills names in one of the patches during summer time. However, since these names are quite awkward, they removed them in the following patch.

 

If you played this game long enough, you should know all the icons without looking at the names. If you need to see the skill name under the buff icon, it means that you don't know your characters well enough.

While you are NOT entirely incorrect, when you say that if you don't know your own buff icons, you don't know your character(s) well enough, that's not exactly fair to some people who have not played every single class, of which there are ten, to know ALL of their buffs, etc.. I have only played an FM extensively, while I have a bit of experience with a WL, and I still don't know all of their buff icons 100%, at first glance. I know the ones I normally have to look out for within my normal rotations, as I play my characters somewhat robotically, doing the same dungeons over and over and over again, due to having to do the same daily quests/challenges over and over and over again. I have all of my character slots filled up with one of EACH class, again, of which there are ten, but have not played ALL of my characters so extensively to know ALL of their buff icons by heart. With the exception of a few months that I was away from BNS for a short hiatus, I have been playing this since the NA launch, but I have only ever played my FM seriously, and had not the time, energy, nor patience, nor drive to play ALL of the other classes as extensively as someone who virtually lives and breathes this game, day in and day out.

I work a full-time job, and mainly only play "event" content these days, or spend time, energy, and sometimes money on such content that gets me the kinds of things I'm interested in: cosmetic items first, and upgrade items/mats second. With this Thanksgiving event, I've normally crafted between 18 and 24 "chances" of rolling the stuff I want from that transmute RNG box, but since I got the Revelry set box so many times, I've already started skipping on my crafting rotations for the day, being a 24-hour wait between doing the usual craft "claims", then setting them to craft again, so I can claim them again in 24 hours, etc.. Every once in a while, I might get a Sacred Oil to sell, or something like that, but I don't feel like doing this stuff every day anymore. The boring and mundane tasks aside, my point is that I haven't played all of these classes extensively. I just don't find BNS to be quite THAT fun, so I play other games. I play other mmorpgs, casually, and a little moreso than I do BNS, but sometimes for the purpose of having an mmorpg to mess around with WHILE BNS is down for maintenance, etc.. Other than that, I have a backlog of other video games that goes back over twenty years, so along with NEW video games, I have plenty of other things I'd sometimes rather be doing.

Even if the OP had played this game more religiously than either of us since NA launch, or even beta and alpha tests beforehand, if this person had only played one build this whole time because it just simply "works" for them, it's not a too far-fetched idea that he/she might not know all of the buff icons for his class with the build(s) he still hasn't gotten around to playing yet.

--And I'm only talking about a player's own buffs here. --What about the buffs of classes that OTHER players my put onto you, or the buffs that their thralls, familiars, etc. would place on you? I sure as heck don't know what everyone's buffs are, and even though I have most of my ALT classes leveled to at least the Lv40-50 range, I still don't know all of their class-specific skills, for that matter.

At any rate, I wouldn't mind them bring the text/labels for the buff icons back, because having the option available, at the very least, can't hurt anyone in BNS.

For those of us, who are many and quite legion, the labels making a return can only help reduce the guess work and repeated "mouse overs" when it comes to these icons that appear and disappear in the heat of battle, when we don't always have time to stop attacking a boss just to put BNS into "menu navigation" mode to mouse over all of these icons before they disappear and/or get rearranged/shuffled with the other buffs AND debuffs that we're still trying to figure out.

Also, every time NEW content brings us new skills, updates, and revisions of older skills, we have to learn those too.

Yeah, this game takes up too much time as it is, so it just depends on how badly someone wants to learn all of those, and then have to re-learn them over and over, as the game goes through is evolutionary cycles. The devs and localization teams re-name the in-game cosmetic items SO frequently, that sometimes, even icons for skills get updated, so there's that too.

[SalemK]

1 hour ago, FrozenB said:

We had these skills names in one of the patches during summer time. However, since these names are quite awkward, they removed them in the following patch.

 

If you played this game long enough, you should know all the icons without looking at the names. If you need to see the skill name under the buff icon, it means that you don't know your characters well enough.

I wouldn't say that is necessarily true. I for sure didn't know the debuffs and buffs of the aransu raid when I first started and even then I still got confused on which of the buffs/debuffs was which after learning the icons while I can see that if the names were displayed it would have been easier to remember. Also there are plenty other icons in the game that take a while to remember since I'm sure the OP isn't just referring to their own class skill icons.

[caioc2]

2 hours ago, FrozenB said:

We had these skills names in one of the patches during summer time. However, since these names are quite awkward, they removed them in the following patch.

 

If you played this game long enough, you should know all the icons without looking at the names. If you need to see the skill name under the buff icon, it means that you don't know your characters well enough.

Your kind of arrogance is laughable.
No one is obligated to know all classes buffs and all weapons/accessories buffs.

[Rysa]

2 hours ago, FrozenB said:

If you played this game long enough, you should know all the icons without looking at the names. If you need to see the skill name under the buff icon, it means that you don't know your characters well enough.

Well well, my deepest apologies for not being as knowledgeable and pro as you are, Mr. expert, but unfortunately I'm not the kind of person who can afford to play 24/7 and I may have been playing since launch, there are still icons in this game whose effects remain a mystery to me. Having their names displayed just like in TW/JP would certainly be helpful to some of us.

[xInikox]

11 hours ago, FrozenB said:

If you played this game long enough, you should know all the icons without looking at the names. If you need to see the skill name under the buff icon, it means that you don't know your characters well enough.

Sheesh. You could have given the answer without this snarky comment at the end. 

[Beleth]

9 hours ago, Rysa said:

Well well, my deepest apologies for not being as knowledgeable and pro as you are, Mr. expert, but unfortunately I'm not the kind of person who can afford to play 24/7 and I may have been playing since launch, there are still icons in this game whose effects remain a mystery to me. Having their names displayed just like in TW/JP would certainly be helpful to some of us.

Yes! How dare you not to know all the buffs and debuffs names?! You’re so casual compared to the superior all knowing elite like him! Now go and learn all these names or else YOU don’t know your characters well! /shocked/ Anyway...

 

I like your idea, it’s always good to have more info about buffs and debuffs. 

 

 

[Nala]

14 hours ago, FrozenB said:

If you played this game long enough, you should know all the icons without looking at the names. If you need to see the skill name under the buff icon, it means that you don't know your characters well enough.

Wow such a conceited comment to make and I don't know what you got out of making a statement like this. Don't know if it was an attempt to belittle those that would like the names of the icons shown and boost your ego for knowing every single icon in the game or what but it was not needed. Here's a cookie for you

[Grimoir]

9 minutes ago, Nala said:

Wow such a conceited comment to make and I don't know what you got out of making a statement like this. Don't know if it was an attempt to belittle those that would like the names of the icons shown and boost your ego for knowing every single icon in the game or what but it was not needed. Here's a cookie for you

He is actually right,....the icons represent you own skills so you should know them by heart if its a character you play a lot. As for other classes buffs / debuffs, seeing the name itself will not help you in any way since you still wont know what the buff/debuff does.

It has nothing to do with balittleing people, its actually common sense and logic, its easier to visually tell icons apart rather than investing double the time to read the name.

 

Example:

 

@Rysa

If you saw the buff called "Heaven's Breach" do you know what it does just by reading the name?

[Kozuki]

You need to mod font in order to have text displayed under buff.

 

Also, I don't know about people who don't have the problem with "Knowing buff icon in the first glance". Cool if you can do that, but don't belittle people who can't.

 

The thing is that the buff display bar is overcrowded at high-end gear. It only displays like 10 buff at once. Now throw in three types of party protection and their global cooldown, two types of DPS party buffs and their global cooldown, add in Alpha Call cooldown, then somethings like weapon buffs, bracelet buffs, earing buffs, necklace buffs, soul buff, and soon to be glove buff. There, you have a cluster-freak where you cannot even see your own buff icons, lol.

 

It is the very reason why NCSoft bothers to make class buff/debuff indicator, as well as orb/weapon/bracelet buff indicator in the first place, making it much easier to monitor your own buff. However, the attempts are in the right direction, but it still needs improvements.

[KromaXamorK]

As you can see and as a warlock we have a lot of buff/debuff with the same colors (blue in this case) when they are side by side during a battle is hard to spot the differrence, it helped a lot when the name was there especially for soulburn and when they are multiple wl in sb to set the skill at the right time.

At least put an option to let us choose if we want this name or not.

[Shunaia]

3 hours ago, Grimoir said:

He is actually right,....the icons represent you own skills so you should know them by heart if its a character you play a lot. As for other classes buffs / debuffs, seeing the name itself will not help you in any way since you still wont know what the buff/debuff does.

It has nothing to do with balittleing people, its actually common sense and logic, its easier to visually tell icons apart rather than investing double the time to read the name.

 

Example:

 

@Rysa

If you saw the buff called "Heaven's Breach" do you know what it does just by reading the name?

Actually, you shouldn't presume to speak of logic when your own is flawed. There's always the possibility that "Rysa" in your example has overheard or seen talk of such buffs and effects in clan chat or with friends or acquaintances and just never saw the buff icon itself. Once Rysa WOULD see it for the first time, if it was labeled as "Heaven's Breach", she would at least have SOME idea, rather than absolutely zero information to go on, and can at least commit the icon's graphic to memory until she had a chance to look it up somewhere online, etc..

So no, "he", being FrozenB, is not correct, in this regard. As Kozuki mentioned, sometimes that buff bar gets crowded with buff icon overload. Information overload can at least be dissected into smaller manageable portions of easier-to-digest portions of data, whereas a bunch of icons of various colors shuffling, disappearing, and reappearing will usually just confuse people, until they can make sense of some of them through some research. Even when you know your own buffs, new legendary accessories and weapon upgrades usually have new effects that take everyone some getting used to. With as much as this game is evolving, or rather, CATCHING UP to Kr and other regions, we're going to always struggle with such things until the servers close down for good.

Just keep in mind, that no matter how much ANYONE here claims to be such and expert on these things, we were ALL newbies at some point, and started out with ZERO knowledge in this game with only previous games' experiences to go on, even those of us who were in the earliest phases of alpha and beta testing. Belittling ignorance (The NOT knowing the information just yet) only begs the belittling of stupidity (The KNOWING of information, but disregard for it), and thankfully, there's a difference.

[Grimoir]

1 hour ago, Shunaia said:

Actually, you shouldn't presume to speak of logic when your own is flawed. There's always the possibility that "Rysa" in your example has overheard or seen talk of such buffs and effects in clan chat or with friends or acquaintances and just never saw the buff icon itself. Once Rysa WOULD see it for the first time, if it was labeled as "Heaven's Breach", she would at least have SOME idea, rather than absolutely zero information to go on, and can at least commit the icon's graphic to memory until she had a chance to look it up somewhere online, etc..

So no, "he", being FrozenB, is not correct, in this regard. As Kozuki mentioned, sometimes that buff bar gets crowded with buff icon overload. Information overload can at least be dissected into smaller manageable portions of easier-to-digest portions of data, whereas a bunch of icons of various colors shuffling, disappearing, and reappearing will usually just confuse people, until they can make sense of some of them through some research. Even when you know your own buffs, new legendary accessories and weapon upgrades usually have new effects that take everyone some getting used to. With as much as this game is evolving, or rather, CATCHING UP to Kr and other regions, we're going to always struggle with such things until the servers close down for good.

Just keep in mind, that no matter how much ANYONE here claims to be such and expert on these things, we were ALL newbies at some point, and started out with ZERO knowledge in this game with only previous games' experiences to go on, even those of us who were in the earliest phases of alpha and beta testing. Belittling ignorance (The NOT knowing the information just yet) only begs the belittling of stupidity (The KNOWING of information, but disregard for it), and thankfully, there's a difference.

Actually the buff i mentioned is from a dungeons that you at least will run a lot of times because its regularly in the daily challenges and drops one of the legendary accessories, so i am 100% sure Rysa seen this buff more than once, and if the issue was really that they want the names the person at least hovered with the mouse over it at least once to see what it does. And as you say, if she would"SEE" the icon she would know, there you go, visualize text under it doesnt matter.

Once she saw the icon and knew, hey this is from Citadel she would exactly know what the buff is about without reading any description.

 

And once again this is not belittling because its far easier to visually distinguish icons rather than read the names of them. If you play a character long enough you can tell just by looking and knowing what buttons you press which icons are what regardless if they are "all blue" or "all red". The weapon and soul procs even got their own special indicators.  Also no one said "no" to the suggestion, we are literally just voicing opinions here. If they want to add the text sure but i want an option to disable it if i choose so, the screens are cluttered enough as they are.

 

And yes we all were newbies but as you play the game you see and you remember even without reading,

 

 

[caioc2]

3 hours ago, Grimoir said:

Actually the buff i mentioned is from a dungeons that you at least will run a lot of times because its regularly in the daily challenges and drops one of the legendary accessories, so i am 100% sure Rysa seen this buff more than once, and if the issue was really that they want the names the person at least hovered with the mouse over it at least once to see what it does. And as you say, if she would"SEE" the icon she would know, there you go, visualize text under it doesnt matter.

Once she saw the icon and knew, hey this is from Citadel she would exactly know what the buff is about without reading any description.

 

And once again this is not belittling because its far easier to visually distinguish icons rather than read the names of them. If you play a character long enough you can tell just by looking and knowing what buttons you press which icons are what regardless if they are "all blue" or "all red". The weapon and soul procs even got their own special indicators.  Also no one said "no" to the suggestion, we are literally just voicing opinions here. If they want to add the text sure but i want an option to disable it if i choose so, the screens are cluttered enough as they are.

 

And yes we all were newbies but as you play the game you see and you remember even without reading,

 

 

1.  Most of people wont be able to stop at middle of the battle and point the cursor over a buff, which sometimes are too fast to even point and then read
2.  I've done more than 100 runs of DT, EC, NF, NS and I'm clueless of buff names. What does it mean? Dont assume things about people. We are not like you, every1 is different, if you look through the game and want remember everything good for you, but when you start with the "you should know" you are already wrong no1 should nothing.
3.  Yes it is belittling, dont try to cover it.
4. It is not easier to remember icons, we are trainned to read since earlier childhood, we read/associate a name much faster than you can imagine.

Now the last but not least, If you dont like names it's ok, thats a personal opinion and I respect that, but wanting everyone else to know about something or dont having names because they "should know" is not a personal opinion and is not an acceptable behavior.

[SalemK]

I think it is silly that some of you think this person SHOULD know the icons from just seeing them. I guess they never told you guys in school that there are different learning methods for everyone, what could be an easy way for YOU to learn or memorize could be difficult for someone else. I'm pretty sure them adding an option to enable or disable wouldn't be hurting you anyway.

[Rysa]

Well thank you all for your inputs but there's no need to get so carried away. The only question at hand is: Why is this option available on TW/KR/JP versions, and not on NA/EU?

[FrozenB]

I don't know why my comment is considered arrogant. Looking at an icon with name or without name, you still have to know/memorize what the skill does; aka, you still have to memorize all of the skills for these 10 classes? Having names under icons doesn't automatically let you know what the skills do.

 

As I said "If you have played this game long enough...", you don't actually need to see the skill names under the icon. (at least for your class). 

[ClassicMan]

3 hours ago, FrozenB said:

I don't know why my comment is considered arrogant. Looking at an icon with name or without name, you still have to know/memorize what the skill does; aka, you still have to memorize all of the skills for these 10 classes? Having names under icons doesn't automatically let you know what the skills do.

 

As I said "If you have played this game long enough...", you don't actually need to see the skill names under the icon. (at least for your class). 

The problem is that you can't tell someone's tone of voice through text, so I can see why some thought you were being arrogant lol

[Grimoir]

13 hours ago, Rysa said:

Well thank you all for your inputs but there's no need to get so carried away. The only question at hand is: Why is this option available on TW/KR/JP versions, and not on NA/EU?

Because in the other versions the language used is formed of signs, so for example a skill name thats 20 characters long in NA/EU, only has 4-5 characters in the other versions, so its much easier to display.

They removed it from our version becasue there is no way they would put all names under the icons and display them fully. If they did that then your screen would be just buff icons nothing more.