Guild Wars 2

This is a little thing that has been bugging me for about as long as I’ve played this game: When auto-targeting is on, if no enemy is selected and one tries to use a movement ability to escape (or simply to move faster), it will instead target any enemy in range if auto-targeting is on and move you towards them (or away from them in some cases). Ride the Lightning is perhaps the best example of this. My usual solution, of course, is to simply turn auto-targeting off, but I do like not having to constantly tab target, particularly when a lot of other players are around and enemies are dying very fast.

Related to this, I almost always turn off auto-targeting in PvP, because there’s a lot more cases where I want to use a movement ability without targeting an enemy in PvP.

I think it would be great if there was an option to disable auto-targeting only on skills which move the player character. Alternatively, if there was a way to manually choose which skills use auto-targeting, that would probably be even better, but I suspect that it might be seen as too cumbersome or cluttered for the player by the UI team.

I couldn’t agree more to this. It’s utter nonsense to cast Ray of Judgement without target to put it under a 3 second cooldown.

Amen to this!
15chars

In this suggestion I have a solution that I think could work for you:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/SUGGESTION-Hand-health-features

Manually setting autotarget for each skill.

MithranArkanere.8957:

[…]
Autotarget improvement:

• Give each skill an individual autotarget setting. The copies of a skill (e.g. PvP/PvE splits) would share its setting.
• A mouse-key combination (e.g. Alt+Right click) would cycle the setting for a skill from between “Default”, “Always autotarget” and “Never autotarget”. Default will listen to the current setting in options, and all skills would start set to “Default”.
• Skills with autotarget enabled are indicated visually. For example, by having their number’s color reversed (white background black number instead black background white number)
• Skills that require an individual target and have no effect at all unless there’s a target (eg.: Flamestrike, Ghastly Claws, most Phantasm skills…) will be considered to have always autotarget on, and not and respond the to command to switch, as there’s no point on disabling it for them. Note that skills that can have a target for certain effects but also have effects with no target (e.g.: Clone) would not be included in this.
• Skills that require no target like skills that affect self and PBAoE skills would be consiered to be always off, and also not respond to the autotarget toggle command, as it’s pointless for them.
• Ground-target skills will behave differently with autotarget manually enabled for them. When autotarget is enabled for them, instead requiring picking a target, they’ll automatically aim at the location the target was when the skill started activating, like GW1’s long range AoE skills. With a global autotarget on but the skill set to Default or Never autotarget, they will still behave like now, requiring the player to pick a target, based on the Ground Targetting setting.

This way, you can disable it individually for skills that behave better without autattack, and enable it for skills that behave well for you with autoattack, doing things like, for example:

• With Flamethrower, enable autotarget for Flame Blast, so it goes for targets more easily, but disable it for Flame Jet, so you can move around without the character awkwardly trying to turn towards the target while you move around.
• With a warrior greatsword, you would be able to disable it 1,2 and 3, but enable it for 4 and 5 to make aiming with those easier without locking on a target with the cleave attacks.
  And so on.

This should greatly improve responsiveness and reduce strain from having skills that work better with autotarget on and skills that do not work so well, and require less manual targetting for better responsiveness.
[…]

This would not only allow you to manually disable autotarget for movement skills, but much more.

MithranArkanere.8957:

In this suggestion I have a solution that I think could work for you:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/SUGGESTION-Hand-health-features

Manually setting autotarget for each skill.

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

MithranArkanere.8957:

[…]
Autotarget improvement:

• Give each skill an individual autotarget setting. The copies of a skill (e.g. PvP/PvE splits) would share its setting.
• A mouse-key combination (e.g. Alt+Right click) would cycle the setting for a skill from between “Default”, “Always autotarget” and “Never autotarget”. Default will listen to the current setting in options, and all skills would start set to “Default”.
• Skills with autotarget enabled are indicated visually. For example, by having their number’s color reversed (white background black number instead black background white number)
• Skills that require an individual target and have no effect at all unless there’s a target (eg.: Flamestrike, Ghastly Claws, most Phantasm skills…) will be considered to have always autotarget on, and not and respond the to command to switch, as there’s no point on disabling it for them. Note that skills that can have a target for certain effects but also have effects with no target (e.g.: Clone) would not be included in this.
• Skills that require no target like skills that affect self and PBAoE skills would be consiered to be always off, and also not respond to the autotarget toggle command, as it’s pointless for them.
• Ground-target skills will behave differently with autotarget manually enabled for them. When autotarget is enabled for them, instead requiring picking a target, they’ll automatically aim at the location the target was when the skill started activating, like GW1’s long range AoE skills. With a global autotarget on but the skill set to Default or Never autotarget, they will still behave like now, requiring the player to pick a target, based on the Ground Targetting setting.

This way, you can disable it individually for skills that behave better without autattack, and enable it for skills that behave well for you with autoattack, doing things like, for example:

• With Flamethrower, enable autotarget for Flame Blast, so it goes for targets more easily, but disable it for Flame Jet, so you can move around without the character awkwardly trying to turn towards the target while you move around.
• With a warrior greatsword, you would be able to disable it 1,2 and 3, but enable it for 4 and 5 to make aiming with those easier without locking on a target with the cleave attacks.
  And so on.

This should greatly improve responsiveness and reduce strain from having skills that work better with autotarget on and skills that do not work so well, and require less manual targetting for better responsiveness.
[…]

This would not only allow you to manually disable autotarget for movement skills, but much more.

That sounds like a good implementation to me, although I think the dev team might ultimately see it as too complex.

I was thinking about that ground targeting thing, as well, mostly just because it’s the reason I rarely bother with the engineer grenade kit.

It’s a lot of text, but it’s simple in practice.

You are playing with a flamethrower, you find annoying how the Flame Jet autoattacks, you sinly alt+right click it, and it no longer autoattacks. You go on until you find another problem with autoattack.

You are palying with elementalist daggers? Annoyed by Ride the Lightning autotargeting? Alt+right click, no longer does that. Move on with your playing.

As it’s done on the fly skill by skill, you’ll naturally end up setting the skills the way you want with time.

The main difficulty is making sure players are aware of that. Some people just close those help messages as they pop up.