Please adjust the sfx of rage mode's heartbeat to take priority over other sfx.

It's far too easy for the heartbeat to get drowned out by every other sound effect happening in-game, as well as player voices (mouth breathers, etc). Shouldn't have to look away from combat to time cancels by watching the ability tray. Also don't want to keep count in your head alone, when tanks are often already keeping mental count of time going by before they have to refresh aggro.

The alternate would be to change the visual effect to something that stands out above the player's head and doesn't blend in with the various red blood swirls that already are mimiced by other rage abilities (like the swirl that appears after using rage bringer, outrage, etc), or are obscured by other effects like shielding, and violence's aura, etc.

Either change, or both, would also aid players who are playing with the hud off, or who have fallen victim to the ongoing 'my hud randomly disappeared' bug. A change to the visual would also aid players who have hearing impairments as well.

i havent made a rage toon outside of test but i thought once you activated those rage crash powers you could immediately use a rage cancel, and not have to worry about the crash at all?

or can you only cancel seconds before you crash?

I suggested this a while back and then I felt ashamed, actually the best indicator to avoid rage crash is VISUAL, the aura that is created when youre near the "crash" start to quiver instead of beating, another foolproof method is the icon of the power itself, note the next point of the "crash" while the icon recharges, so you can prevent yourself without worrying about sound or visual effects on the screen.

The heartbeat should slowly drown out the in game sound at least. Starting low frequency and volume and working to a higher frequency/ volume. If it's your actual heartbeat, it's the last thing you should hear before you hit the floor.

i agree with xeromus especially if your tanking

It already seems to have good priority to me, and it would personally annoy me if I couldn't hear other game sounds in content if I were Rage tanking.

Plus we have the visual indicators to let us know as well.

Thank you, Knowing this is very useful

Thanks for the feedback, everybody.

From the audio perspective, we brought in some new tech to get rage crash to pop, without taking away from other audible gameplay messaging. What's in the live game right now is something like the tenth version.

Our final version lined up with Zeo's comment - use both the visual and audio cues to alert you to rage crash. Like the OP said, relying just on the audio cues doesn't help hearing-impaired players.

I'm glad to hear something is in store for this. Eyeballing the loadout bar isn't optimal. While relying on audio may not be best, some of us may be more visually impaired, so the audio queue would be best (especially during raids and other player's fx + npc debuffs etc.). I am glad that both audio and video cues are getting improved. The beat has been very helpful when it works/is audible.

With all of the other animations going on I usually can not use the visual portion to tell when I am about to crash. Last time I rage tanked the audio was so intermittent that it was a horrible indicator so my only option was to watch my load out bar rather than the action. I fully support having the audio portion of the rage crash mechanic take priority as it would be the best way for people like me to tell when are about to crash.

I dont know if you are actually a rage tank, but the op is right. It is a major component of the rage crash mechanic, so for the rage user it should take priority over other sfx. Plus trying to rage tank and watch the rage mechanic animation is extremely difficult. 1) if you are doing your job you ill a crap load of adds around you doing their own animations. 2) you have everybody elses animations hitting the adds all around. 3) you have your other red plastic animations hitting the adds around you. Those three reasons alone make it difficult to see a red pulsing aura on your character.


I would even settle for the heartbeat sfx to be its own entity for rage users. That would allow for rage users to go into there sfx settings and lower the sfx if they wanted to better hear the heartbeat without having to make the heartbeat louder.

It has to be seconds before the crash. Basically you have to be in the animation of the rage canceling move when the crash happens. If you are out of the animation to early you will rage crash. If it just followed the cool down timer it would not be such a problem.

Sorry if I was unclear. At this point we are not planning a rage crash sfx revamp.

The system that the rage crash sound effects use to turn down other sounds is tuned to not cause more problems than it fixes, and we did that very carefully over the span of months.

That said, if we can get it working better, we will. I'm going to discuss this feedback with Homeslice, and look at what other tuning we can do.

Hi everyone!

Here is a breakdown of how the rage crash sound is currently working in the game (or should be!).

When a rage character uses either Relentless Anger or Remorseless Recovery, (Rage Crash Damage Mitigation mechanic) a sound will play along with the visual effect. The sound has two layers. The first layer plays like a regular sound effect and is audible by everyone, and pitches up and gets louder as the effect ends. This layer is a medium priority sound that plays in the sfx sound category and does not alter the volume of any other sound categories. The second layer is the heartbeat sound which increases in speed and volume as the timer runs out, and that is ONLY audible to the player that performed the ability. This layer plays in the UI sound category and is a high priority sound. The second layer (Heartbeat) also lowers the volume of the music, ambient, and sfx categories when it plays so that the rage tank can focus on timing the rage crash immunity at the right moment. It also prevents a rage player from hearing another rage player's Heartbeat sound if both players perform Relentless Anger or Remorsless Recovery at the same time. It doesn't have any affect on voice chat volume levels though, which would have to manually be adjusted in the Settings menu.

It sounds like (see what I did there?) players are not experiencing the expected behavior though, so we'll be taking a closer look to see if we can find any issues. As an aside, I know that our engineering team is currently looking at an issue with mixer snapshots (the tech that lowers the volume of sound categories) which is used heavily in this game mechanic, so if it does turn out that there is a bug here related to the mixer snapshot issue, I will be sure to update everyone on it.

Additionally, the Rage Crash Timer sound is tied to the visual effect. This means that if the visual effect fails to play, the sound will not play either. We have fixed several bugs with the visual effect not playing, however if you are experiencing this, please let us know.

Best,
DC_Homeslice

Devs-

Something else to keep in mind is the variety of hardware. The "heartbeat" layer is bass heavy and is hard to miss on a system with a subwoofer. It's barely noticeable on most laptop built-in speakers though where treble is higher.

Thanks for looking into this.

-The Shadowdragon

Maybe this is why I have trouble hearing it sometimes.

It is working as described, BUT there is a second SFX which behaves the SAME way: The "low-health warning heartbeat", which is only audible to the one affected as well.

This other heartbeat SFX seems to overwrite the ragecrash heartbeat, even if the health is low for only a short instant (which happens a lot in tough combat).
If the "low-health warning heartbeat" happens first and then activating the rage-heartbeat also the second one persists: the rage-crash heartbeat (well, if I manage to survive in that condition)
Audible feedback is very important for me and it makes me mad whenever the ragecrash audio is overwritten .

I hope this helped to find the problem .

Hi LadyLightning,

Actually, this does help a lot. The Low Health Heart beat is a different system than the Rage Crash Mechanic Heartbeat, but they both use the same sound category and mixer snapshot tech, and follow a hierarchy with the Low Health Heartbeat being the higher priority one. The only time that it should knock out the Rage Crash Heartbeat is if there are no more available voices in the UI Category to be able to play the Low Health Warning Heartbeat sound. We'll take a look there, and see if we can find out why the Rage Crash sound is getting killed.

Just to be clear about the behavior you are seeing, If you go low health first, and then do Rage Damage mitigation, you hear both heartbeats. If you do Rage Damage mitigation first, and then your health goes low enough for the Low Health Heartbeat to kick in, it kills the Rage Crash Heartbeat?

Best,
DC_Homeslice

Ok, so sound bugs out, but we have the expected performance (what we want here) to look forward to. None of this helps when you lag however. The visual cue can be obscured by the 30 mobs you have us tanking now, and the massive amount of on screen effects in raids. Maybe for our hearing impaired friends, and those that have ever lagged, the fix should be in the icon.

We can sort of time the icon's CD clock to pop a mitigation/cancel, but maybe make it more distinct...white CD clock turning pinkish red to deep red or maybe even flashing for 1-2 secs before crash hits. Honestly, I can tank anything watching my ability tray once I have the mobs, and I don't see why anyone else couldn't either, especially for one skill. Glancing is an option too, and with color changing or flashing that would be cake.

Anything that keeps the "timer" on top of everything else and lag resistant would be a huge plus here. I think this is what we're REALLY looking for.

I am not absolutely sure if the low health heartbeat vanishes, but I have never ever heard both overlapping.

Exactly. If the health falls low, even if it is just for a brief moment (which is sort of typical for ragetanks), then the rage-heartbeat is gone .

A solution could be to make the ragecrash SFX a higher priority than the low-health SFX, because the screen-effect for low-health is very easy to notice .