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#733224 12/11/20 06:38 PM
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Further suggestions after playing a while. Some or all of these may have already been discussed but search only goes so far. Apologies for any duplication.

1. As I have seen discussed, the HotBar needs work. It's very difficult to arrange. You can add things either by dragging or right clicking, but you can only remove by dragging. There is no right-click option for anything in the HotBar. The other issue is that once your HotBar is filled, you end up with entries off the main screen. I would rather have to look up everything rather than remember what's in other HotBars.

2. That leads me to my main suggestion. I noticed that when you click Throw, there's a popup for anything in your inventory that can be thrown. I suggest that having at least an option to do the same thing for other categories would be useful. Those special actions would include besides Throw:
- things you can consume, such as food and potions
- scrolls you can cast
- spells and cantrips you can cast organized by type and level
- objects such as special arrows and missiles
- other usable items that you might need to activate

It might be easier to group special actions this way as well, as the number available will likely increase.

If these actions were like the Throw action, they could either be actions to the left of the portrait or special actions that could be in the HotBar. That way, you'd have access to everything without the HotBar being completely cluttered. You could fill out the HotBar with specific items or spells if you wanted them to be obvious, or you could reduce the size of the HotBar to the minimum required to hold the special actions.

Presumably one would want all of their spells and so on in the popup, but if not, the option that already exists under Gameplay would let you turn it off. In that case, an additional "Add to PopUp" right-click option would be useful to populate the popups the way you want.

3. It would be nice to be able to right-click on an item in the HotBar with options like Throw, Cast, Drop, Move out of HotBar, and so on. The need is less if the popup actions in #2 are implemented, but handy nonetheless.

4. I noticed that if I lock the HotBar, I can still add to the HotBar but I can't drag to remove. Seems like it should be both or neither.

5. I'd like to see an Inventory auto sort option under Gameplay options. Setting the option would sort the inventory in the specified manner automatically each time you opened the inventory panel. You could still move things around without auto sorting, at least until the next time you close and open the inventory.

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Originally Posted by bobbd2000
2. That leads me to my main suggestion. I noticed that when you click Throw, there's a popup for anything in your inventory that can be thrown. I suggest that having at least an option to do the same thing for other categories would be useful. Those special actions would include besides Throw:
- things you can consume, such as food and potions
- scrolls you can cast
- spells and cantrips you can cast organized by type and level
- objects such as special arrows and missiles
- other usable items that you might need to activate

It might be easier to group special actions this way as well, as the number available will likely increase.

Oh gods another one. :-/
Do you really enjoy to search in menus, that are hiding in menus of menus? :-/

Gosh i hope they dont do this. -_-
And if, that they make it optional. :-/


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Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Oh gods another one. :-/
Do you really enjoy to search in menus, that are hiding in menus of menus? :-/


It may be slightly old design. But BG1-2 and IWD have that : click "Spells" then you're shown all your memorised spells. And it still works very fine.

The thing is, even if Larian makes sure that a spell doesn't appear multiple times (as you can use higher level spell slots to cast lower level spells), we're soon going to have tons on spells memorised.
I'm not sure that a single "view all your spells" area will do (like the hotbar currently tries to do, but also mixing spells with everything else).
It depends on the numbers, of course.

There would be an intermediary solution :
- you can click Spells and have the whole list (as for Throw currently),
- you can put some spells in some short-access area.
As a matter of fact, the Infinity Engine was already doing that, although it allowed only 2-3 short-access spells. Surely, we could have 8-10 instead.

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First off, if they implement anything like this, it should be optional. Some people prefer putting individual items in HotBars, some don't.

And really, I would hope for a 2 level setup. Similar to what happens if you click the Throw button. You get a single popup with all the things you can throw. And that can get bloated very quickly. I'd prefer a set up popups that are more specific. So you'd have a list of buttons, each of which gave you a popup of the items you can use. A two-level setup.

It's going to depend on whether you can remember all the stuff you have that's actionable. Some people can. Or they have a very specific subset in their HotBars. I'm in the other category. I need to see and evaluate things each time through.

But I agree, anything more than two levels becomes confusing very quickly.

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I remember how BG-2 worked. Although I used the Dragonspear UI++ mod. There were icons/buttons for specific groups of things, like spells, special abilities, and so on. Click one and you populated the HotBar with that category. There were times when you had to scroll through multiple bars worth of entries.

What I'm suggesting is something like a condensed Spells panel. Maybe there's an option to show everything or show what you specify and have others under a separate button. But I am trying to avoid menus within menus.

I can't remember what Divinity:Original Sin 2 did, but I don't remember having an issue with it.

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Originally Posted by bobbd2000
I remember how BG-2 worked. Although I used the Dragonspear UI++ mod. There were icons/buttons for specific groups of things, like spells, special abilities, and so on. Click one and you populated the HotBar with that category. There were times when you had to scroll through multiple bars worth of entries.

What I'm suggesting is something like a condensed Spells panel. Maybe there's an option to show everything or show what you specify and have others under a separate button. But I am trying to avoid menus within menus.

I can't remember what Divinity:Original Sin 2 did, but I don't remember having an issue with it.

DOS2 literally just has one hotbar for everything, pretty much what we have now in BG3, aside from the standard actions panel. You can switch between multiple hotbars, but there really is no organisation. The difference is, there is no upcasting in DOS2 and fewer standard actions. You don’t even really need to keep the standard actions on your hotbar because you can do most things with a right click on enemies, objects etc. You can have items in your hotbar which can get a bit messy, but there are few that you really need in there – and there’s the option of putting backpacks into the hotbar which gives you a popup to select the items within.

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More hotbar customisation is definitely needed. I'd also greatly prefer if upcasting was condensed in pretty much any way that won't make the spells take up individual hotbar slots.
Many other CRPGs already have perfectly functional UIs that can handle characters with very large amounts of spells, and I heavily implore Larian to allow themselves to be inspired by these games. Having to cycle hotbars in DOS2 really wasn't fun and I hope it won't become another necessity in BG3.
Personally I think I'd prefer if I could choose to display one more row of ability slots at the bottom of my screen, but I won't be picky. I'll take any feature or implementation that makes me able to have more abilities and items slotted.

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Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Oh gods another one. :-/
Do you really enjoy to search in menus, that are hiding in menus of menus? :-/


It may be slightly old design. But BG1-2 and IWD have that : click "Spells" then you're shown all your memorised spells. And it still works very fine.

The thing is, even if Larian makes sure that a spell doesn't appear multiple times (as you can use higher level spell slots to cast lower level spells), we're soon going to have tons on spells memorised.
I'm not sure that a single "view all your spells" area will do (like the hotbar currently tries to do, but also mixing spells with everything else).
It depends on the numbers, of course.

There would be an intermediary solution :
- you can click Spells and have the whole list (as for Throw currently),
- you can put some spells in some short-access area.
As a matter of fact, the Infinity Engine was already doing that, although it allowed only 2-3 short-access spells. Surely, we could have 8-10 instead.

I would like to add 3 additional, and in mine opinion better, solutions, that i readed here around ...

1) Interactive spellslots ...
That way you will get on hotbar each spell only once ... and you will determine its spell level by choosing spell slots you want to use.
Meaning you click on spell level 2, and all your spells you cast since that moment will be level 2 (if they have level 2) until you click on different spell level.
Personaly i think this system could be improved with enabling right-click on spells to change spell level for single cast ...
For example Mage Armor ... there is no reason to spend level 2 spell slot, since level 1 spell does exactly the same.

2) Expandable hotbar ...
Right now we have 2 rows and they are geting full allready. If we could expand hotbar to another row instead of searching in it ... our hotbar space could be instantly doubled, tripled, or quadrupled ...
Not as elegant solution, but it certainly works.

3) Enable casting from spellbook.
That way you in fact gets button that will contain all your spells, and it is allready possible to modify Keybind to your liking.
My favourite one, to be honest ... maybe it would be more usable, if there will be some possibility to open spellbook of only selected party member, simmilar to when you open character specific inventory. smile

Last edited by RagnarokCzD; 13/11/20 08:48 AM.

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I like the idea of casting from the spell book. It's organized already. If there were some right click options, it would do the trick. You'd probably want some button or command that would pop up the spell book for only the character whose turn it is.

Something like that might work with inventory items as well. Maybe it pops up separated by item type. The right click options are already there. Throwable items have Throw. Things like arrows have shoot as well as throw, and consumables have eat as well as throw.

The only downside of using the existing panels is that they're large, taking up a quarter of the screen, presumable on the right or left (with an option). I suppose it wouldn't matter if they were for selection only. For example, select Spells or Inventory (button or command), and the panel for the character whose turn it is pops up. If you left click, it's the same as selecting an entry from the HotBar. You;d get the default action. If you right click, you'd have more options. Once you select the item, the panel disappears and you have your full screen back. And if you change your mind, you ccan always right click to cancel the action.

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I like the idea of casting from your spell book too, but please Larian stop calling It a spellbook unless you’re a wizard. And keep abilities that aren’t spells out of your spellbook.

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In BG1 and 2 they had Priest Spells and WIzard Spells. I think Larian is trying to simplify things by putting Cantraps in the Spell Book as well.

I just found out, and maybe I'm the last to know, that if you put a backpack in your HotBar and put things in the backpack, clicking on the backpack opens dialog with all the things in the backpack. You can then right click and you get the context menu with all your options. So that's another way to organize the HotBar. Presumably pouches work the same way. And you could put scrolls in there as well. Now, if there was only some way of gathering spells plus having a context menu...

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Remove the multiple icons for up casting skills, and just reuse the U.I for disguise-self for upcasting.


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