Guild Wars 2

Here’s the problem. Tooltips for channeled skills use four different formats. Lets say we have a channeled skill that has 5 hits, with each hit dealing 100 damage.

1) Total Damage with number of hits. Looks like:

Damage (5x) : 500

Examples: Drake’s Breath, Hundred Blades

2) Damage per hit, number of hits. Looks like:

Damage: 100
Number of hits: 50

Examples: Unload, Mariner’s Frenzy

3) Total Damage. Looks like:

Damage: 500

Examples: Cone of Cold, Healing Breeze

4) Damage per hit. Looks like:

Damage: 100

Examples: Ether Renewal, Dagger Storm

Now, #1 and #2 are both perfectly fine. They give you all the information you need about the skill. #3 is okay, but it leaves out very important information. The number of hits is very important, because some builds rely on procs from hits or crits. If someone has a chance to, say, apply bleeding on a critical hit, a skill that does 50 damage per strike for 10 strikes will be far better than one that does 100 damage per strike for 5 strikes.

However, #4 is completely unacceptable; the tooltip does not even give us the basic information we need to understand how good the skill is. If I were to look only at the tooltip for Ether Renewal, I would assume that it is a horrible heal and never try it. However, since it pulses 12 times, it’s actually an extremely powerful skill. The tooltip should give us the information we need to make a decision, and it isn’t present in #4.

I would like to see all channeled skill tooltips converted to either #1 or #2. I have a slight preference towards #1. It’s easier to compare 1210 damage (x5) with 1128 damage (x10) than it is to compare 242 damage (5 hits) with 141 damage (8 hits). However, those both give all the information we need to know, and either would be fine. The important thing is to be uniform; use the same format for all tooltips.

Additionally, it would be very nice to see some indication of how long it will take to channel a skill. There’s a big difference between a 2s channel and a 4s channel, and that can drastically change how you use that skill. The easy method would be to put “channel duration” on the tooltip.

However, there’s another way that I kind of like. Give each skill (all skills, not just channeled ones) a “speed”. You could use an hourglass icon and place it similarly to the cooldown. A skill’s speed would be twenty seconds divided by its channel/cast/animation duration. With this system:

Math comparing skills would be easy. [damage] x [speed] = [DPS]. This would be friendlier to people who don’t like math, but still want to think about their builds; “18” is a lot friendlier than “1.18 seconds”.

This would allow tooltips to give you a much more accurate view of the skills. If you look only at the tooltips for Long Range Shot and Crossfire (Ranger longbow and shortbow “1” attacks), you don’t get the full story. It appears that unless you can attack from behind, shortbow will never do as much damage as longbow, even at point-blank range. However, this doesn’t take into account that Crossfire fires several times faster than Long Range Shot. By adding a speed indicator, you’d be able to tell that from the tooltip alone.

More informative tooltips can only be a good thing.

A speed indicator isn’t necessary, although I think it would be really good. However, you really do need to update your channeled skill tooltips to give us all the information we need. Those skills that fall into category #4 especially need some attention.