For example:
1. The spell "Divine smite" is grayed out and cannot be used.
2. You hit. The game registers successful hit and the target.
2. The game highlights for you the spell "Divine smite" and allows to use it against that registered target at expense of 1 spell slot.
Oh this is good! +1 to this.
No, it's not. I'm sorry, and I don't mean to discourage or be aggressive, but this suggestion is the exact same terrible UI design that has plagued this EA; it has little to no foresight and compounds existing issues and makes them worse.
It's not the only such case, but it seems that often many of the 'suggestions' for how to fix or implement something 'better' are things that would ultimately require *More Time*, *More Clicks*, *More Attention*, and be generally *More Work* for the player to fumble with the UI, than a properly implemented player decision-point system. It puzzles me, to be honest. Again, no attack intended.
If you have a proper reaction system which optional class abilities can use the core of, your situation is:
- You have an ability, and when its requirements are met, you are asked, briefly, if you'd like to use it and how strong.
- You do this with *One* click, in an operation that takes *Less Than A Second*.
- You decide in the moment, taking whatever 'decision time' is needed then.
If you do it in the quoted way, your situation is:
- You have an ADDITIONAL spell (or rather, you have an additional *Five* spells by late game) taking up either your screen space and/or your bars.
- They spend MOST of their time grey out an unable to be used, and are just wasting space.
- When you hit something, the button(s) all light up; the player must both notice this and remember to do it.
- The action from their hit has already ended: it's still their turn, but there's every likelihood that the player's focus was on what they were doing with their turn, so after hitting, they may already be thinking along the lines of their movement or their bonus action, so it's much easier to miss or forget this.
- Provided that doesn't become an issue (and I will assume it doesn't), the player must then select a DIFFERENT skill, after the hit effect from their attack has already long since passed, and either
a) click, and then wait a second for the game to register it, and then click again to confirm (because that's how larian's engine works - it NEEDS two clicks, even for Dash, right now), OR
b) click once, and THEN target the creature you hit before with this separate ability... and you do THAT bit manually, and have to fiddle with selecting the target again (while all other targets can be highlighted but are inappropriate targets, because, again, that's how the current engine would need to rectify it if done this way).
- Because the player has to do this manually, they have the freedom to move or take other actions in between instead, but IF they do so, by accident or distraction, but opportunity is forfeit, potentially against the player's intended desire.
- The player decides well after their attack has resolved and the animation has ended and their character has recovered from their animation, rendering the smite a completely separate thing to the attack, in an immersive sense.
- They take their 'decision' time at this point, after the hit - the SAME decision time that needs to be taken in the comparison case; it gains nothing and loses much - including the ability to smite on opportunity attacks.
No, in short, it's not a good suggestion. It's a solution to a problem that shouldn't be a problem, but it's one that is exactly the sort of thing the current design method and UI might be inclined to do... the same thing that has caused no end of complaints and problems throughout this EA for its cluttering of the UI space, its pointless excessive buttons and its general clunkiness. It's more of the same, creating more of the same problems.
Once more, this isn't intended as an attack; it's just pointing out that if this were implemented in this way, and had been presented with the rest of the EA in an earlier patch, it would fit right in with many of the other UI design failures, and would have received the same level of criticism, dissatisfaction and unhappiness that those other elements have all attracted and which most posters (those who comment at all) seem to be unhappy with and want changed.
How should divine Smite work? With a proper implementation of your ability to make meaningful decisions and reactions during the flow of combat, that's how. Nothing short of that is really going to feel acceptable.
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