I’ve been healing instances on my druid alt, Lyf, and I’ve come across an interesting phenomenon.
No one can tell when she’s drinking!
In a game like WoW, visual feedback is really important – the mouse icon changes when you hover over someone who can repair your gear, you cast a spell and your arms go up, the ground changes colour and you know to move away. This feedback is an important part of an intuitive user interface – you understand what the game is trying to tell you without needing to be told that this person can repair, that your spell cast has finished, or that the stuff on the ground will probably kill you.
Which leads me to the problem with tree form.
Here’s my druid Lyf in Night Elf form, not drinking and drinking.
Note that there’s really strong visual feedback here – and it’s not the cup in her hand (which you can’t see from the back anyway). She’s sitting down – and there’s no other reason why you would sit down in an instance, except that you’re eating or drinking.
And here she is in tree form, again, drinking and not drinking. The “drinking” hand near face is still here, but she’s practically the same height – and therein lies the problem.
The healer’s mana is important to the group, but you don’t always need a full mana bar to pull the next group. Smart tanks rely on the healer to monitor their own mana pool – the tank only watches to see if the healer is drinking or not. This works really well when they can just look to see if the healer is sitting or standing, but not so well when they have to look for a tiny action like a moving hand.
I imagine this is an issue that they’ll look at when they design the new tree forms.
It’s interesting to look at subtle cues like this that the game gives us, that we intuitively understand. This attention to detail is why World of Warcraft is such an immersive and easy-to-use game.
Are there any other places in the game that you feel are lacking visual feedback?
It should start raining over the tree when you are drinking.
Hehe, that would be kind of cool… but being the User Experience person that I am, I am duty-bound to point out that that’s a change in metaphor – you’d have two different representations (sitting or raining) for the same thing (drinking). The tree really needs to sit or get shorter, to come into line with the visual cue that other classes use.
I was thinking that maybe a good fix would be for the tree to revert to seedling state?
That would make it shorter and visually different from the normal state…
Make the leaves wither and die as the tree runs out of mana. It can be a sickly brown sapling that slouches over under its own weight when it drinks.
I have this issue on Euca as well!!!!! I can’t believe no one has mentioned it before.
I’m really hoping that when they give you different tree skins to match the different bear/cat skins, that they actually give you different types of tree too. It would be great to be able to pick a huge stately oak tree, or a flowing willow, or a scrubby eucalypt.
I like the rain idea, but agree that sitting is the important cue for drinking. Sitting isn’t just about drinking, it’s about making yourself vulnerable (am I the only one who remembers when you’d get stunned and crit if a rogue caught you drinking?).
A player sitting down looks unprepared for combat. A tree hunched over does not.
That’s a very good point Cass – sitting says “I’m not ready to go yet”.
And yes, I remember the sad old days. I still can’t play a rogue for that reason – night elf rogues (I was horde at the time) were the biggest jerks. And I’m still sure they were all played by 14 year old boys.
Druids need to drink? LIES!!!!
everytime u sit u get crit
its awesome
all female night elf rogues are 14 yr old boys…