Guild Wars 2

Is the lack of enemy cast bars a design choice or something that was just never added? I find it frustrating trying to figure out when targets are casting and can/should be interrupted based entirely on their animation, which can very easily be lost in the myriad of effects during group combat.

Implementing a cast bar would make it much easier to be 100% effective in PvE and probably PvP too, and in my opinion would help advance PvE group combat because of the visual representation of enemies casting their abilities.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/dodge-and-cast-bars/first#post3012809

I still feel cast bar implementation wuld be like turnin easy mode on. 100% effective cast bars would also mean 100% chance of dodgin evrything, btw. aka noobs would not need to learn dungs to be pro if they just looked at cast bars that told them when the next hit was comin. I believe the current system is fine, just need to take some time to undrstand dung/class mechanics if ever u happen to down. I agree with some bosses its kinda hard to tell when their next attk is lookin at their animations, with all the clutter/aoe spams from groups around them. Malrona/Leurent in TA are examples of this. Only mob i feel would absolutely need a cast bar is that Champ Frost wolf at the start of COE (is that its name?) because of his AoE that one-shots parties that stack, every 30sec or so. its hard to even tell when hes gonna use it next coz theres no animation/tell at all.

Somehow searching for “cast” did not bring up that post, my bad. I found it weird it hadn’t been mentioned before.

I don’t understand why people might see it as an “easy mode”. My point is that I sometimes find the current system to be unfair to the player when you cannot accurately see what is going on or how long the casting time is. Here is an example I just encountered:

I fought 1vs1 with an elite monk mob in Ascalon Catacombs that had a heal with what felt like 1 second cast time. The animation for it was literally just moving his hands around a little bit. It also did not seem to have a long cooldown at all as he could repeat it every 4-5 seconds minimum.

I hadn’t noticed that heal before because of the nature of group combat in this game even though I’ve run the dungeon quite some times. Sure I might have remembered monks healed but only when I fought it alone did I notice how obsurd the heal spell they have is. Does that make me a bad player? Is learning boss/mob animations and cast times through repetition instead considered skillful? The current system doesn’t reward skilled players, it rewards experienced players. Or, in other words, players who played the content enough to actually understand it.

If there were cast bars, any person with a minimum amount of experience in combat would be able to see and understand what a mob is doing. It would then be a matter of skill to respond effectively to what the mob is doing. After I’ve played 1000 hours of this game I shouldn’t be struggling by zooming in and getting closer (which I literally did, because I was playing a ranger) to actually see a monster use a 1 second cast heal to heal themselves. And then attempt to interrupt it because it is sort of irregularly cast. It’s that kind of communication to the player that I believe would help players (and developers) understand PvE combat better and help GW2 improve zerg combat.

Edit: Of course I won’t get into details about how a cast bar should work if it were to be implemented. It is obvious that not all abilities should be displayed (if you will) with a cast bar, like abilities that are used for auto attacking, but other more important abilities can certainly be displayed.

i like the idea of a cast bar.

Anticipating enemy attacks by watching their movements is cool in theory, but in practice it is difficult to see what they are doing under all the spell effects.

Relying on a cast bar (which would translate to measurable cast times) is a more objective measure of predictability than observing enemy behaviors (he looks like he’s about to swing) which would be a subjective measure of predictability. That being said, i think objective measures of predictability promote more rigid gameplay, which lends itself to more accurate theorycrafting, which i think is a good think.

I realize there are actual cast time associated with skills, they just arent as explicit as they would be if they had cast bars.

If anet is unable to find a good way to tone down the spell effects, i feel like a cast bar would be a good solution.

While we’re at it, I’d say put in a “display target’s target” option so you can also tell if that boss that is blanketed in spell effects is even looking at you.