Template talk:Skill list by property

Underwater icon

What's exactly the idea of showing the underwater icon right to the skill name? I see several issues with the current implementation.

Issues:

• Format: For me the icon is randomly floating around which in my opinion should be avoided as it decreases readability. I think icons should be aligned properly, e.g. see the profession and skill icon aligned on the left in a perfect column or in general any other icon list on the wiki (for example I spent some time aligning the tier rewards from achievements, e.g. see No Quarter (achievements), nothing worse than seeing a list of jumping square item icons).
  • So what about turning the icon into the text "underwater only" and show it in the notes. Or what about moving it to the left of the skill name (after the skill icon), sure then the skill names are jumping around a bit, but the icons are always at the same position.
• Redundancy: I think the icon is redundant for the following skill contexts: weapon (why do I need an underwater icon before the underwater weapons Harpoon gun, Spear or Trident), probably pet (kinda tricky there as some may need it, but listing an underwater icon before the pets Shark or Armor Fish seems redundant) and my favourite context drowing (they are underwater skills by definition, obviously they can be used underwater only).
  • I understand that the additional information can be useful for bundle, transform, healing, utility, elite, profession mechanic skills, especially when the land and the water version share the same name, but maybe we could restrict it to those contexts.
• Inconsistency: This template shares (or better shared) the same format with the skill fact query template skill list. The two templates exist only for internal query reasons, for the mainspace and the wiki user there should bevisually no difference in how the skills are displayed. In the end it would just cause confusion: "Why is the underwater icon visible in this skill list but not in the other?" and "Is this an underwater skill even if there's no underwater icon shown?"
  • The solution would be to add it also there, however the template skill list is used more heavily with larger lists, so an additional ifeq check might matter.

Example:

• Shrapnel

Suggested solutions:

• 1) The icon solution is easier to implement (no checks if we need an mdash, whitespaces etc...), so if we want to keep the icon I would suggest to move the underwater icon to the left. Then we could probably also ignore the redundancy since that way the icon fits better into the whole page design. Furthermore, I would add the icon to the template skill list for a consistent mainspace representation.
• 2) The text solution is a little bit harder to implement with all the checks, there I would also say that we should not list e.g. "Underwater only, Harpoon gun". However, this might require additional ifeq checks which in my opinion should be avoided at skill list.

--Tolkyria (talk) 12:15, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

I added the icon because when Template:Related skills show both land-only and underwater-only skills with the same name, it would appear the same in the list; see Debilitating Blows where it lists Spike Trap, or Generous Abundance where it lists Call to Anguish and Inspiring Reinforcement.

I don't think the current location of the icon decreases readability that much. Moving the icon to the left will cause the skill names to be unaligned which would decrease readability even more.

Adding a context restriction is a good idea but as you say it might have a negative performance cost.

Turning the icon into text is fine if you really want to get rid of the icon, but that would definitely require adding a context restriction.

--BuffsEverywhere (talk) 18:48, 28 September 2022 (UTC)