Guild Wars 2

There have been a lot of bosses lately that have strong conditions, either on themselves or on you, that you need to adapt your playstyle to. This is awesome, it makes for much more engaging encounters that are more fun to play. Unfortunately, I fell, these conditions are conveyed very poorly.

They are basically displayed as ordinary conditions, on the enemy or your own condition tray. This presents several problems:

1. It’s only visible at all while the boss is targeted. This is not trivial. In large zergs, activating lots of ground targeted attacks, I find that I’m more often “targeting” friendly players, because they are so easy to click on in the mess, then I am to have the boss targeted. Ctrl-Ting a boss can help a little, but in many cases bosses shake this effect too. If there were a way to disable being able to click on friendly characters and NPCs then it would help, but as it stands, requiring the boss to be targeted to see their conditions is a significant problem.

2. You have to mouseover the condition to read it. It’s just a small icon that you need to hover the mouse over, while dodging incoming attacks. After a few tries you can memories the icons used, and this is nice, but it takes a while to pick up.

What I’d like to see is a semi-permanent “boss conditions” tray on the screen. maybe to the side of the normal enemy target tray, maybe under the event tray, someplace very visible on the screen. It would show all the normal conditions in the standard size, but instead of a simple icon for the “unique” conditions, it would just say in plain English, the same scale as the current event text, it would tell you the rule in play, like “don’t use conditions because Power is the only stat worth slotting,” or “don’t attack with the wrong attunement,” or whatever, so you could glance over there and know what to do. This would stay up the duration of the fight.

This is one of my biggest issues with this game. Normally i wouldn’t have a problem with these being conditions on other games but in this game with so many conditions coming and going on targets it is virtually impossible at times to see what these conditions are and what they do. They need a new special conditions area for bosses or other special event type conditions that can easily be highlighted to see what they do and so it is easier to see when critical conditions/buffs are active.

There have been way too many events lately that require you to focus on these conditions to do certain things and you have no idea of this because they are so hard to read. This event isn’t too bad as they are basically color coded, but the point still stands that seeing what different conditions and effects do and when they are up is kitten near impossible. At the very least they need an ingame “boss guide” that gives tips and/or hints for each boss or special fight that shows stuff like conditions and buffs you need to look out for.

But on the topic of trouble clicking mobs in zergs, something seriously needs to be done about this. There is also the issue of not seeing a single thing during fights like the knights that drop aoes we need to avoid when the ground is completely covered with friendly aoes. Then the whole not being able to see enemies animations due to 20+ people spamming attacks on it. Something needs to be done about this that doesn’t involve dropping all the settings and making the game look like crap.

Another thing, special buffs/debuffs on myself take ages to read because I can’t keep the icon hightlighted with my mousepointer. They keep jumping all over the place because of the continuous gaining and losing of boons and conditions. Very awkward.