Guild Wars 2

Title says it all. I just want to see my character up close when applying dyes or looking at a piece of armor.

I will be happy enough if the preview window can show my character just as he is in the loading screen.

Either a bigger window (just let me resize it like the inventory!) or a zoom feature would be fantastic, maybe even both. And neither should be all that difficult to implement. +10 to this suggestion!

Also, while they’re improving the preview window, it’d be nice if when you selected the “wielded” option for weapons your character actually went into the combat stance for the weapon itself, instead of just standing there idle holding it awkwardly in their hand. Hard to tell how a weapon will look if they aren’t holding it the way you would normally.

Totally agree, Electro’s suggestions are good too.

I dislike how wielding a weapon doesn’t use normal stance/animations for wielding. The weapons aren’t held in a regular fashion.

It also bothers me how you can’t see your already equipped off-hand weapon if you’re previewing a main-hand weapon. You should be able to preview two-single hand weapons at once.

Honestly I want it even better if they are going to put the effort into updating it. It’d be nice to zoom in up close. Like real close.

I would get rid of the preview window altogether. Even the one in the gemstore.

When choosing to preview something, it’ll be added instead to a new “Preview” section in the Hero panel before the account unlocks. Much like how skins and minis appear already in a section when you have them in your inventory.

You’ll be able to keep the items there there until you log out, even if you switch characters.

Additionally, extra buttons would be added to the visuals tabs of panel to preview the following things:

- Animation: Combat animation, idle aniamtion, walking/running/swimming, emotes (pops a dropdown list with emotes to perform), attacking (performs several autoattacks and then cycles skills in your current build).
- Terrain: Underwater. Ground. Gliding.
- Lighting: Night/Day, with a lightning slider.
- Hide armor toggle.

Then also add zooming, panning and rotation to the panel, to better see details.

• To zoom, posion the pointer over the character in the preview and use the same zoom as with the usual camera (wheel mouse by default)
• To rotate, hold right mouse button. Move up/down to rotate vertical axis and left-right for the horizontal axis.
• To pan, hold left mouse and move the mouse up to pan vertically and left/right to pan horizontally.

That way, we’ll be able to preview items along our stuff, even our dyes, and switch between characters previewing a selection of items added to the preview, and see the stuff we preview along several animations, and even watch close details.

MithranArkanere.8957:

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Awesome idea It would be great to stream-line the bank wardrobe into the Hero panel preview.

Adding extra options (like you’ve mentioned) to improve the preview experience and to tie it in with the environments you’ll discover yourself would be fantastic. This game is so heavily orientated around aesthetics that an overhaul of the current system would make sense.

I feel that your lighting options suggestion especially are important. It would be nice to have a similar “lights on/off” feature as seen in the character creation screen, or even better, like you said, a slider. Sylvari glow, luminescent armour, auras, dye/dye reflections… so many aesthetic items depend on light levels.

Fingers crossed that something like this comes with HoT or a future feature pack.

Awesome suggestions popping up here.

While I doubt we will see anything changing on HoT, I hope we can at least get their attention for future updates. Some of these ideas are fantastic.