Visual enhancement for crowded party raid screen

In fast and crowded party raid hunting, multiple party members and hord of mobs and many skill/attack visual effects are hopelessly mixed up and make already confusing dynamic screen even more confusing. I constantly get confused and lose track of my cursor and my avatar, and my party members. I usually turn the health bar on to identify party member and the mobs on screen. It helps but not enough.

My suggestions:

1. Use more distinctive cursor in hunting mode. When player is fighting with mob, make the cursor larger, and of distinctive color and with white outline (silver-lining) to make it stand out on the crowded screen.

2. Make health bar more varied. Currently, health bar is displayed for players except my own avatar and our minions in green color, for enemy mobs in red color.

Add larger and thicker health bar on my own avatar and use different colors for health bar, according to type of characters: My own avatar, other players, and its minions and enemy mobs. For example of health bar, larger and thicker health bar in light green color for my avatar, light blue for other players, dark green for my own minions, dark blue for other player's minions. This should match to color of player position on minimap. It will help identify myself and other players and minions.

For enemy mobs, use different color or size for boss mob and other weaker mobs. For example, longer red bar for champion/boss mob and shorter/thinner dark red for other weaker mass of mobs. IMHO, current health bar for enemy mobs are bit too large and thick. Make it thinner and shorter for ordinary (non-boss) mobs.

3. Add colored outline (silver-lining) or simple halo-like visual marker for my own avatar. Or add some location indicator like plumb-bob in Sims game that indicates position of my own avatar on screen. These are different from paid item effects like Ice Crown effects, in that they are invisible to other players.

4. Make the name text color of "currency items" (like Scroll of Wisdom) more distinctive. Current faint yellow color is easily confused with white items. Make sound effect of the currency item drop more distinctive, something like coin drop. Paper sound is hard to notice. Ring drop sound effect is good example.

My problem is with full party with flashy skills. Notice how you can't see anything, nor mobs nor players under that huge explosion (only health bars wich is a new addition, but it's OPTIONAL). Imagine that with 3 dischargers in the party, or 3 dual sporkers, the result will be the same, but with like constant effect, nobody sees anything. Tell me how should i fight with my melee char in this situation? I can't even tell where, what and how many mobs awaiting to kill me there.

The ability to turn off party spell effects would be very nice.

Effects like Puncture, Reflect, would be much easier to see.

I concur. Many explosive visual effects are pleasing to see for a while. But once we are accustomed to them, they become just major hindrance to concentrate our eyes to combat itself and,enemies and ourselves. Make an option to drastically reduce the visual effects of AOE skills and magics. That will also improve graphic performance and frames on some older PC with less powerful graphic board and reduce lag too.

I was having a conversation with a friend the other night about this.

He was saying there was another game (I can't remember which) that gave you the option to dull out allied players effects. Seemed like a good idea though I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement.