Guild Wars 2

The issues
There’s a lot of effects to keep track of both on yourself and on your opponents.

Effects like Burning, Torment, Bleeding, Regeneration, Agony, Terror, Troll Unguent, Heal Signet, Adrenal Health, Signet of Illusions, Virtue of Resolve, Spirit of Nature, Soothing Mist, etc… have only one purpose. That purpose is health impacts over time or Health Degen/Regen.

It’s hard to quantify where your overal health degen/regen is at with all these different kinds of effects. A simplified indicator of some kind would help solve this problem, and could help down the road with organizing some of the effect icon clutter long term (but this is a separate issue).

Solution
There’s multiple ways to solve this. So my suggestion isn’t to be implemented as is, and feedback as well as other suggestions should be considered and implemented.

Show UI elements that display:

• The total health degeneration over time
• The total health regeneration over time
• The net regen/degen over time
• An arrow icon next to the net regen/degen that changes with the magnitude of the regen/degen. (i.e. red down arrow for DoT, green up arrow for regen, small arrow for low magnitude, big arrow for high magnitude)

Other suggestions

• Do not add regen/degen magnitude icons to all in game characters as an effect icon
• Only show indicators for the player and his/her party members

Guild Wars 1 regen/degen worked with arrows and and continual, gradual change rather than ticks in every second. I dare say it was perfect, even though there was no such stat as condition damage. A bleed from an assassins dagger was the same as the warriors coming from a sword or an arrow from the ranger in your party.

The number of arrows (that were shown on the lifebar itself) depended on the magnitude of degen and regen effects. Both the degen and the regen effected the same amount of HP per arrow. Degen and regen balanced each other out.

For example, if you had burning on you, you had 8 arrows of Health degen. If you gained 8 health regen (from a monks Healing Breeze for example), the total change would be 0. No arrows shown on the lifebar, but both effects visible on the UI. If you get rid of burning while Healing Breeze is still up, you get the regen effect fully. If you get poison on top of the burning, you get a total of -4 degen. (8-8-4).

Because there are a lot of passive regens, tt would be nice to have an indicator showing whether you’ve got a net gain or loss and roughly how drastic. GW had a very simple system and it was perfect, but conditions and regen work differently in this game. There’s the regen boon for instance, but there’s also passive health gained from skills like warrior signet and traits like engi’s backpack regenerator.

I think a simple color-coded icon would be ideal:

An arrow up for net gain of hp
An arrow down for net loss of hp
A dash for no net gain or loss
3 colors to indicate severity of loss: green for negligible, yellow for moderate, red for drastic
3 colors for severity of gain: red for negligible, yellow for moderate, green for drastic
(You can normalize the colors, but I think this distribution is more intuitive: green=good, red=bad)

This way if I’m standing next to my Healing Turret with Backback Regenerator ticking away and I get a couple bleeds I can instantly see if it’s worth cleansing or not. In this scenario, probably not. But if I then get poison and my regen rate is cut, the arrow may change from a red up to a yellow down. Now I know I gotta cleanse.

The difficulty will be decoding what the arrows indicate. Only passive regen from skills and traits, as well as the boon regeneration? If I step into an ally’s Healing Spring does it affect my arrows?