Plague Bearer infection mode expiration does not provide the player enough notification.

Plague bearer is often difficult to tell when the skill has finished it's infection mode or when it is full from incubating. This makes the skill very annoying to use.

- The aura around the player is near invisible; especially in the middle of many other things going on. This is fine for leveling but in mapping and bossing with lots of stuff going on, it's not ideal.

- The sound it makes while infecting is a very quiet hiss.. I would prefer this to be every so slightly louder OR (more preferred) would be for the end of the infection mode to make a very clear sound effect. Again, when nothing else is going on and you're leveling it's fine but in maps or bossing it is not fine. Player attention should be on the action going on elsewhere, not focusing on trying to track one buff (that constantly changes position!) in the middle of 50 other buffs.

I'm not sure increasing the hiss noise would be the right way forward, as it may still be drowned out by other sound effects and really I just care about the infection ending more than anything.

Tracking this via the buffs on screen is always a nightmare given how poor the buff/debuff status effect display is when there are many many buffs going on and changing state at once.

The skill currently can be tracked by watching the skill bar but then the player is then fully distracted from other ongoing events; some of which can instantly kill a player in under 0.5s.

Additional, especially for deaf or hard of hearing players the visual awareness just doesn't cut it. The following would improve things visually:

- On the skill bar, the infection vs incubating mode are not significantly different. There is no way to tell from the skill bar the progress state of the skill. Instead, the skill could act more like Vaal Skill where as the incubation mode fills to full the skill icon is clockwise shaded. Likewise when the skill is infecting, the skill should be shaded counter clockwise to convey how full/empty the skill is. (Side note: This might conflict with a future Vaal version of the skill.. so design carefully). If there is a chance for this to be a Vaal skill in the future simply having a numerical fill-percentage [0% - 100%] would work great.

- On the screen the skill ability is too transparent to tell what mode we're in. Instead, when infecting, it should be a have more opaqueness added to tell what mode we are in and if possible if we're down to 10% or less of the infection amount, visually increase or decrease that opacity to convey the state to the player.

For reference, here is what the skill looks like today with nothing else going on and in a calm (leveling) area. As you can tell, adding any additional actions, sounds, or packs of mobs drowns out the current cues for the skill.

Here is what the buff area and skill bar icons currently look like for each state, note how very similar these are, especially when quickly checking the state in a sea of other status effects.



Just improving these visual and audio cues should help make Plague Bearer a lot smoother to use (and arguably more fun?) for players using the skill and less of distraction during intense action.



Thanks!

Edit: Thinking about this more, if infecting mode on the skill bar changed color (Purple?), that would help. This may also be more friendly for some spectrums of color-blind persons.