[Atropos]

Hey Chip,

Thanks a lot for sharing these plans with us ahead of time, I appreciate the advance heads up. I honestly believe this is a step in the right direction and will greatly improve the quality of addons like my own that are trying to re-assemble this information. I'm sure that being able to present this data more efficiently will benefit addon user's gameplay experience.

I do have a number of questions about these changes, if you can answer:

1. Integrated Combat and Effect UI

Recently during an Xbox One Reddit AUA Chris answered the following question:

Tasteh: The lack of Floating Combat Text is hurting this game’s long term potential. I am a player who enjoys optimizing my character. Because floating combat text is missing, it makes it much harder for me to do so. I am left with 2 options: I can choose to rely on the work being done on PC or try to use time to kill tests on some standardized target. Either way this is suboptimal because I must rely on either external sources or relatively rough estimates. One of the things I’ve heard raised against floating combat text is that it would separate the community. I’d like to address this point now. Regardless of what changes are made, the community will remain separate. The PC community has already determined what builds are powerful, and thus acceptable in hardcore endgame groups, and what are not. That knowledge is already available. Therefore, players who choose to make their own builds that are weaker will already be excluded by these players. You can see then that this point is moot. Another point I’ve heard raised to be a negative for some players is that seeing numbers reduces immersion for them. That is a completely fair and valid argument. To negate this, I would propose that this be a toggle. This would result in no changes for more casual players who want to be as immersed as possible and a positive change for players like me who seek to squeeze out every ounce of damage that we can.

Chris Strasz: hey Tasteh, glad to hear you're enjoying the game! We have begun exploring ways to integrate floating combat text and buff/debuffs within the HUD in a way that still keeps the spirit of the UI minimal. There's several challenges with both of these. We'd like to make sure that the combat text feels satisfying and there's some effort involved there when it comes to the aesthetics of it, the accuracy/data setup, and overall iteration on it. With the buff/debuff feedback, many of our effects are not as long term as other games so we're looking into ways to give this feedback while also not making the HUD appear like a blinking casino machine. But both of these are things we have been exploring internally.

I assume this relaxation of the API is both an effort to reduce the amount of acrobatics existing addons need to perform as well as support the development of integrated UI tools. Some questions on this front:

1. Is this still a current development goal?
2. Will an ESO integrated buff tracking and/or damage tracking system be included in 1.7?
3. Would such systems be shared between PC and Console? I ask because several other interface enhancements are thus-far console specific.
4. If such a system is created, will there be easily accessible API functions to pass additional combat and buff data for effects that may not be tracked natively?

2. EVENT_EFFECT_CHANGED

I have a few questions and concerns about the new behavior of this event.

1. Adding a unit name field to the event will help a lot. Do you have any internal suggestion or solution, however, for correctly associating effects with targets in encounters where multiple targets share the same unit name?
2. Have you considered any potential ramifications of triggering events for cases where a unitTag does not exist? I'm envisioning situations in Cyrodiil where large groups are fighting and spamming AoE effects, many of which incorporate buffs or debuffs. Obviously such cases where a unitTag is not reported can be filtered out, but it may impose a lot of checks to determine when unitTag-less data needs to be used and when it can be ignored.

3. EVENT_COMBAT_EVENT

I have a few questions about this one too.

1. Would you consider adding abilityId to the data returned by this event?
2. There are several addons (including my own) that have options for visualizing outgoing damage using ability icon textures whether for in-combat display or post-combat review. Would you consider adding the appropriate texture file-path when one is defined?
3. When you say COMBAT_EVENT will now be sent for ability casts, do you mean that it will be sent with its full information? Particularly for incoming damage, will we be able to see information about the damage source (origin and ability)?

Thanks a lot for sharing with us Chip, much appreciated.