Guild Wars 2

When you hit a monster with a projectile (or anything for that matter), the monster reacts by flashing a white color, or displaying a certain particle effect (birds or electricity for example).

Bosses often become impossible to see when fighting due to all these effects stacking up. The boss often becomes a moving glowing orb with all the stacked effects.

A way to significantly improve performance and gameplay, is to make the hit box of boss monsters much smaller so that the hit box which displays all these effects is actually inside the body of the creature you’re fighting.

Your skills or projectiles will travel INSIDE the monster, not cause it to flash or change color or display cluttering animations.

This would improve performance as your machine won’t need to render the extra particles, you’d be able to see the creatures, and be able to more easily identify important effects such as when a creature may be rooted or stunned.

This could lead to some better gameplay-focussed mechanics with boss fights. Such as boss animations giving indication of powerful attacks which need to be dodged or interupted without relying on red circles. Or a certain fight where roots and binds are crucial to maintain and with a party of only 5 people good timing is necessary to reapply them.

Providing the visibility to the gameplay-changing effects and removing the non-gameplay effects is a great way to improve this issue

Or a better idea: Outline of the target, visible through all particle effects.

It would just be nice if they outlined the creatures/bosses so you could make them out better. They already do that subtly with the players.

That might help for some effects but not the most problematic ones like the burning from Guardians. The problems with the birds and other similar effects is that they scale too much with the bosses, most bosses are not fat enough to hide the birds in their body.

Other effects are not even on an enemy like Time Warp. Sometimes it is just the zoom such as the fight with the Statue of Dwayna.

I think gw2 effects are amazing, but they really need be toned down. don’t want to lose the effects entirely just tone them down. Even better, like some people have already suggested in other posts, having a slider like for gamma for eg: would be an ideal solution. That way, in big battles u could turn them down and turn them up when the party is smaller or playing solo.