Guild Wars 2

There are a ton of attacks in this game that use those green/red AoE targeting circles, or sometimes lines. The circles turn green to red when you’re out of range, which is nice, but with a lot of abilities in pitched combat situations, or in the case of buff fields when you’re running from place to place, getting the pointer to exactly the maximum range you can fire can be a serious pain.

My suggestion is to make it so that if you point your attack in a given direction, and you place the pointer outside the attack’s maximum range, then instead of saying “Out of Range” and not firing, it does fire, to the point at the exact edge of its range in that direction.

By that I mean that if you have, say, Cluster Bomb, 1200 range arrow shot, and you point it at 2 o’clock, and you put the pointer 600 range away, then the attack would aim for that exact spot, 600 range away. If, on the other hand, you moved the cursor to a point 1800 range in that direction, then the shot would fire at the point exactly 1200 range in that direction.

If you’re trying to drop a speed buffing field ahead of you as you run, you just point vaguely in your direction of travel and it would drop as far ahead as it can.

Of course, this would only work for ground targeting. Using the abilities to target elevated positions would still work as they already do. It would also only need to worry about distances within, say, 3000 range or so (longer for siege weapons, of course), since nobody’s likely to aim further out than that anyways.

This should also probably be a toggled ability, like the auto-fire option. I can imagine that some people would prefer the old method.

If this can’t be done, then an alternative proposal would be that when you activate a ground target AoE, it could project the normal targeting circle on the ground, but it could also project a green “border line” at the distance of the attack’s range, as if the entire circumference of the range was a massive friendly AoE, and would do so until you fired the attack. This way you could see at a glance exactly where the edge of your maximum range is.