As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the new DA bubble I went back and looked at some old DA footage I had lying around to see if I could spot the differences, because I have a terrible visual memory and really couldn’t remember enough detail.
Unfortunately I don’t have any video on hand from pre-4.2 Cataclysm, only late ICC, so if there were changes made between those times then this post won’t reflect them. I don’t recall any, but I’m sure someone will correct me if the Cata DA bubble was different to the Wrath one.
What I observed is that the bubble effect is basically the same, but the effect when it procs is very different. This makes me more confident that this is the fixed-up 4.3 DA animation and not an accident, but don’t hold me to it!
Videos for Comparison
On the left is a segment from an ICC raid showing the “old DA” applying and then persisting, and my “new DA” video from yesterday is on the right. Unfortunately the old DA procced from a Glyph of PW:S crit, so there’s the PW:S graphic in there to confuse things, but the effect is clear enough. That’s the best shot I have available, but I’m sure there’s plenty more examples on Youtube.
The Proc Animation
On the left is a still of the old version, on the right is a still from the new version:
That new still is so damn tasty I shall find every opportunity to use it as my new avatar. It looks so sweet!
The old Divine Aegis used to wrap beams of light around the player as the bubble appeared, while the new one sort of expands a rainbow-coloured soap-bubble effect instead. I can see how the old effect could end up looking very flashy and noisy on screen, whereas the new one, while still really cool and colourful, has less point movement and is less bright overall.
Quoting from the original blue post:
To use the particular example of Divine Aegis, the visual wasn’t too bad when it was only created by infrequent crits, but once we allowed Prayer of Healing to always cause Divine Aegis, the flashes on the screen became distracting and obscured the view of what was actually happening in the fight.
[…] we used the temporary solution of using the Power Word: Shield impact, which is much less prominent.
As you can see from the video, the newer version is less intrusive when it procs. But while it’s more subtle, the image and video show that it’s still a very funky effect.
The Bubble
The bubble effect is pretty much unchanged. As Kaivax said above, the problem was the proc and the resulting flashes, not the bubble itself, so I’m not surprised to see this essentially unchanged. Stills are below for comparison, old on the left and new on the right (remember to ignore the PW:S):
There’s really nothing in it that I can see, there’s the same old smooth and slightly cloudy bubble with the orbiting gold flecks. Anything else that’s different can be chalked up to resolution/graphic settings differences since one’s a screenshot at high resolution and ultra details and the other is a compressed videocap with unknown video settings.
My Feeling
As I said at the top, seeing that it’s clearly different suggests that this is, if not the final product, then an iteration that they’re trying out to see how it plays out in testing (this is the Public Test Realm, after all).
I have to say I don’t mind the new version at all: it’s still distinctive and the proc and bubble are interesting without being overpowering like Val’anyr’s bubble effect was. Deep down I still think I’d like a cooler bubble too, but then we always want newer and cooler stuff and there’s really nothing to complain about with this DA bubble at all. Plus anything’s a step up from PW:S, right?
