Buffs bloat in UI and an idea to make them clearer

[Bowbie]

I know there's a lot of thread in this forums about buffs icons that are way to many but here are my cents to maybe give idea to fix this issue.

I made this screenshot in a jiffy, it can be way worst as you know.

 

I personnally don't generally care if someone is in affinity range or in my xaku case, what's my xata's whisper value (57% here) is. I already can see the duration left on the bottom right, on the abilitity's icon. I personnally do not care too of the stack and duration of my secondary merciless.

Though everyone is different i suggest two ways to configure this UI.

 

Firstly, make the buffs' icons interactible when you are in the escape menu. When you right click on one, you will have multiple toggle options:

"show/hide buff", "show/hide buff duration", "show/hide buff stack", shhow/hide buff value"

Sorry for my paint skills but you get the idea. It surely would be a pain in the butt to configure but this method may requires the less work from dev. The better solution in my opinion would be a HUUUUUUUGE list in the option menu where we can see those options one by one for every single buff.

 

Secondly, and i can be implemented alongside or instead of my first idea would be some sort of weakaura (from world of warcraft). WeakAuras is a flexible framework that allows the display of  customizable graphics on the user interface to indicate buffs, debuffs. You can create progression bars for exemple to visually indicate the duration left of a buff.

Imagine this playing Xaku :

Around my character, i now know that my xaku's whisper is up and 84 sec left (or 84% timer left, you choose how to configure this ofc) and my grasp of Lohk has 82 stacks (unrealistic but i got this image from the internet didn't have much choice) and is roughly full duration.

You can customize those bars to show what you want/need. I know, wow's weakaura is way too much customizable for warframe but a toned down version would be possible in my mind. This would allow to disregard the clutter on the top left corner since experienced users won't need to look there. It would create a gap between new and veteran players though, but since it would be an addition to the existing UI, it would not affect beginners at all.

[Chewarette]

I hope something is planned for this indeed. It wasn't a problem a few years back, but nowadays with so many buffs coming from Warframes, Helminth, Arcanes, Focus, specific weapon traits, and god knows what else I'm forgetting, it starts to become a bit difficult to keep track of everything