Guild Wars 2

While we’re talking about improvements for the sake of new players, I think a big opportunity for improvement would be in the conditions area of the game. Especially those conditions I have put on an enemy. Making conditions I’ve placed or someone else has placed on an enemy needs to be more visual.

As it stands now, there are just tiny boxes. I understand you can memorize what’s what, but on the flipside of that it wouldn’t hurt to make them more visual. Bigger icons for ones I’ve placed. Maybe a blue border on boons the enemy has placed on himself (I understand these are yellow generally, but putting boons underneath conditions would help immensely instead of having them share a space with conditions).

You could even color the border for the TYPE of condition that it is. Purple for dots. Red for bleeds maybe. Black for movement impairing. There’s a lot you can do to make looking at conditions on an enemy easier.

To be fair, in one of these past updates, they did go back and add condition symbols to the floating damage numbers that appear every time a condition “ticks”: Bleed damage has a drop of blood next to the number, Poison has the little green skull, etc.

That said, I’m not against making condition symbols easier to read (I’d caution against changing the visuals TOO much, especially size-wise since the number of different conditions and/or boons that a given enemy cold have on them at one time is pretty big), but what I’d really like to see are the conditions themselves being tweaked to make them more viable to use, especially in group play.