I feel like this was discussed a lot around launch, but understandably quickly became a secondary priority in the face of all the much more glaring issues being pushed to the forefront and now is no longer really part of the active discussion since there’s a lot of bigger fish to fry.
I am talking of course, about the targeting system.
Many may not even notice how bad it is in this game, as it really only affects healers, but the implementation of targeting in this game is absolutely atrocious. I can’t get any real consistency in targeting other than attempting to point my cursor at the target and HOPE it selects the right player, which is really kinda a roll of the dice in the middle of a chaotic battle between 40 people.
Even some twenty years ago with Everquest, you could use F1-F5 to target specific group members for buffs, or even build custom buttons using the /target command. The /command functionality is already baked in to New World, and simply exposing the F# keys for rebinding (or others) or building in the /target functionality so we could build our own hotkeys shouldn’t take much dev time at all and would be a VAST improvement over attempting to mouse-wheel to the proper player in the middle of a battle when fractions of a second could spell the difference between a Gold-tier finish and a full group wipe. We can keep the current scroll functionality intact to heal the rest of the team, but healers NEED a better method of QUICKLY and ACCURATELY targeting the specific person that needs heals, and it’s absurd that we should have to scroll through potentially 40 moving characters with the wheel to maybe find our guy in the pile while getting beat on, trying to move, trying to listen to comms and all the other things we need to do during a fight. Healing is stressful enough, and we already get blamed for everything as it is.
I’ve waited this long to bring this up figuring it would be so obvious an issue it would be addressed quickly, especially when I saw it mentioned by the numerous threads on the topic around launch. It appears I was mistaken as I don’t see any mention of this issue more recent than November.
I don’t think it’s an improvement that would divert development resources in any significant way from the much more serious priorities the team needs to work through right now, otherwise I wouldn’t even be bringing it up at this point. This seems like REALLY “low hanging fruit” that could VERY easily be plucked without much difficulty and would IMMENSELY improve QoL as well as the overall play experience for the entire player base.
I know I can’t be the only one this is driving crazy.