Guild Wars 2

Been gone for a very long time, haven’t picked up HoT yet but wanted to check the game out. One of my first impressions was…I thought several of my skills were bugged and had no animation. After prowling around a bit I find out this thing about removing “visual noise” that has been ongoing.

Seeing it now compared to then, is really jarring, in a bad way. Some field skills I only know are there because of the circle, but then I don’t even know which field it is in the moment its animation is so tiny/slight. My elementalist throws pebbles, my mesmers once beautiful animations end faster than I can see them or like chaos field… is there one? Worse yet, I see very little communication here at ALL from the devs, even with a new expansion here.

I know now that this is a pretty common topic, but I wanted to put it out there as a potententially returning player. It looks bad. The lack of option to turn it off/on is bad (ffxiv did this). The lack of dev communication is even worse. I should be able to see an enemy skill and know what it is, now I don’t know wtf is going on not because of effects, but because lack thereof oftentimes.

The animations aren’t just tuned down, but rather often gutted and silly looking, elementalist pheonix and fireball as prime examples, as well as chaos…field? If things were just tuned it wouldn’t bug me, but when I cant see a skill or tell one field from another because the effect is so small, that’s just not fun.

I’m not saying “remove it all” as I understand the competetive side, but why cant he have a high/low option I see in so many other games? A few of my classes feel so disappointing now I don’t even want to play them, I feel you are approaching this too one-sidedly, thinking only of the high end pvp aspect and nothing else. This will also effect newer players who are not yet in pvp when they see very lackluster visuals.

This is why I detest PvP instead of just ignoring it – developers make decisions for PvP that affect the whole game, usually for the worse.

Seems fitting for Anets policy: If it’s not broken, “fix” it until it is.

They had to make room for all the apples on screen.

Colin posted on reddit (yes, annoying that it wasn’t here) at the beginning of this month that they’ve read the feedback and will be working on graphics options that allow you to select what you want to reduce. It’s likely we won’t see them re-implement the old effects until it goes live.

No idea when that’ll happen, but not this year. Everyone’s off for Christmas-New Years vacation.