Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing GW2 HoT for the past two months now, hit 80 on two characters, done several dungeons, world bosses, and have ~50% map completion at this point. Having come from playing many other MMORPGs (EQ, EQ2, WoW, AoC, TERA, Rift, DDO, ESO, etc.), I’ve got a few suggestions that would greatly improve both immersion and quality of life for players.

These are my own list of suggestions, but I’d like to hear what your suggestions are as well. Please comment below.

1) Weapon Skill Re-Binding

To be honest, the left-side bar that shows weapon skills is a complete mess. There’s no cohesion with regards to what weapon skills go in which of the 5 buttons, other than that the first one is the generic auto-attack skill. While it’s possible to change the keybindings for your entire account, it’s not possible to change keybindings per-character or per-weapon.

What I’d like to see most is the ability to move abilities around on that left bar, and have them left that way on a per-character per-weapon basis. The right side skill slots have a ‘Change Skills’ popup that could be reused for weapon skills. Alternatively, it would be nice to ‘drag’ buttons around on the bar by holding the alt key.

2) Minimap Options

My biggest complaint with the minimap is the point of interest icon size and the fact that most icons disappear and/or get smaller when zooming out. I’d really, really like options to keep the icons from disappearing when zooming out and keep them the same size regardless of zoom level.

3) Condition Popups

When you’re doing world bosses, WvW, or PvP, there’s often a ton of flashy stuff going on. Your own spells are flashy, the enemy spells are flashy, and the AoE is flashy. With that much stuff on the screen, it’s sometimes hard to tell that you’ve been hit with a condition effect. It would be very, very convenient to have an option for high-contrast notification of conditions that have been applied to you. A text popup below your character (where the healing numbers are) would be perfect.

4) Enemy Cast Bars

I’ve got to be honest, I get caught off-guard a lot when I’m fighting bosses. I’m bad at judging exactly when I need to dodge, and that’s really important as a melee character. Sometimes a bosses ability will have a half-second cast, other times it’s a 1.5 second cast. If I dodge too late, I die. If I dodge too soon, I die. Knowing when to use a roll-dodge is absolutely critical. When you’ve been fighting a boss a few minutes, you start to learn the exact timing of those abilities. However, if you die in the first ten seconds, then you can’t learn the timings and are no help to your group. Please, please, please put in an option to show cast bars for bosses (or your current target). To compensate for making the game too easy, perhaps having this enabled would disable a player’s magic find bonus.

5) Crafting and Drop Rate Changes

It’s very weird to kill a hundred animals and only find 3 scrapped hide. Or to go kill a hundred humanoids and find 3 rags. Right now the best place to farm leather or cloth is by killing miners or flame legion ritualists for their miner’s bags or ritualist bags… which tells me something needs to be changed in the loot tables. If minimizing the effect on (the already broken) cloth and leather economy, perhaps increasing the amount of scraps needed to make usable cloth and leather might be necessary.

Again, let me know what you think of these suggestions, and please post your own suggestions. I’d like to see what other things people would consider their own must have changes for GW2.

1. Hard time understanding the solution. You can keybind skill 2 as key 5 I you wanted it instead of skill 5. Just change it if need be for each character you play, or get use to that set up.
It is a lot of work yes, a lot more than pressing a button to have it do that. But it is a lot less work than programming that into the game engine.

2. Solid QoL change but I don’t see that being done in awhile as that is a subjective change.

3. Something would be cool, but while trying to reduce visual clutter I don’t think that solution is a good one. Perhaps better audio ques.

4. No please. If you die to quick sit back and watch the next time. Or maybe a YouTube video, or ask around answers are out there.

5. A rebalance of the entire game would be lovely to be honest.

IndigoNeko.1802:

It’s very weird to kill a hundred animals and only find 3 scrapped hide.

Well… given the way I kill them, you’re lucky to get even 3 scrapped hides. Usually all that’s left is a pile of dust.

3. Are you asking for this in addition to the conditions icons that already show up above the right side of the skill bar?

5. Most players get their cloth and leather from salvaging, I believe…or purchasing it off the TP. (I, personally, sell an awful lot of it each month.)

Good luck.

Riku.4821:

1. Hard time understanding the solution. You can keybind skill 2 as key 5 I you wanted it instead of skill 5. Just change it if need be for each character you play, or get use to that set up.
It is a lot of work yes, a lot more than pressing a button to have it do that. But it is a lot less work than programming that into the game engine.

You’re really saying it’s less work for a programmer to change the way the UI is programmed than for someone to rebind all their keys in the middle of a fight every time they hit `? (Or F1-F4 for elementalists) Because that’s what you’re saying.

Riku.4821:

1. Hard time understanding the solution. You can keybind skill 2 as key 5 I you wanted it instead of skill 5. Just change it if need be for each character you play, or get use to that set up.
It is a lot of work yes, a lot more than pressing a button to have it do that. But it is a lot less work than programming that into the game engine.

I play 5 different characters. Having to rebind the keys every time I swap toons, swap weapons, and go in and out of water, is a huge pain. I should know, since I do exactly that. As far as programming that into a game engine, they already did it with the profession skills. Why not weapon abilities?

Riku.4821:

4. No please. If you die to quick sit back and watch the next time. Or maybe a YouTube video, or ask around answers are out there.

Yes, please. Being killed in one hit by an ability you didn’t know about is infuriating. Watching a fight while you’re dead and supposed to be contributing is humiliating. Telling someone to research every fight beforehand is ridiculous. It’s a GAME not a JOB.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Well… given the way I kill them, you’re lucky to get even 3 scrapped hides. Usually all that’s left is a pile of dust.

LOL

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

3. Are you asking for this in addition to the conditions icons that already show up above the right side of the skill bar?

Yes. Glancing down at the buff/debuff bar every second in the middle of PvP, WvW, or a boss fight is basically asking to be killed. I like Riku.4821’s suggestion about better audio cues.

1) I have to agree with heavily. Typically I like to place similarly styled skills in the same slots, and often times that is how the weapons are set. Sometimes though, they are not.

For example: Elementalist Offhand weapons. Dagger and Focus have their Fire field on 4. Warhorn is on 5. It’s a minor change, but having the fire field on 4 would be better for familiarity. Often there are conflicts that can’t be resolved by grouping similar skills. Staff has Burning Retreat on #4. Flame Axe has it on #3. Flame Axe #4 is Ring of Fire (Fire field) which makes sense given offhand Dagger & Focus.

I don’t know if there is an easy way to change this. I’d certainly appreciate being able to set different hotkeys for different classes and that would go a long way to helping the issue. (Important to be able to share hotkey settings with alts though, too. We certainly don’t want to have to set them up for every new character).

My mental image is of the ‘Weapon skills’ screen allowing you to drag and drop skills to different weapon positions. It likely wouldn’t work well with one-handed weapons (#1-3 could be interchanged and #4-5 could be, but probably not #1-3 with #4-5). For two-handers it would be wonderful.

2) is not something I’ve had troubles with, but I can see why some would. Might be nice?

3) and 4) seem like understanding the boss issues. I have very much the same problems. It takes me many many many attempts before I understand what a boss is doing and I have pretty much zero chance of recognizing which animations signify which attacks. #3 tends to resolve itself (in my experience) with familiarity. Once you (or I, anyway) know what the boss’s attacks do and where they hit you’ll spend less time focusing on them and more on your rotations, buffs/debuffs, assisting allies, etc.

5) not much to say. I think the loot bags that drop are enough in most instances. I would like to be able to target level-specific materials when farming, though.

1) New Elite Specs added.

2) Player Housing with ability to move things around and place items in our house.

3) Twisted Marionette brought back.

4) New Mid Scale PvP balanced group mode, something around 20 vs 20.

5) Server Merge for WvW

1) Weapon Skill Re-Binding

The current system is good. It requires a little practice to learn the skills and rotations, but at least this needs some skill. Of course it would be easier to press 1-2-3-4 on every class and weapon set, but I don’t want to see that.

2) Minimap Options

It would be a nice feature.

3) Condition Popups

The current system is enough, you have visual effects and icons. Also, if you know other classes, you will know which conditions you can expect from them. In a zerg or pvp match it doesn’t matter, you can get 5-6 conditions in a few seconds, so you will have the same problem: looking at popups instead of the actual fight.

4) Enemy Cast Bars

If bosses can easily one hit you, then try to run a build with more toughness and vitality. You can also use a ranged weapon set to safely pewpew the boss.

5) Crafting and Drop Rate Changes

It is not a traditional grindy korean mmo, farming doesn’t mean you have to kill 2000 of the same mob (because of DR). Just do events, enjoy the game and you will get enough gold to buy the materials you need. If you need specific level materials, you can farm chests in silverwastes, and open the bags on a level 40-53-80 character.

I’d love to be able to reorder the skill bar, especially on my main who is an ele.
Ele’s can attune to 4 different elements so those first 5 skills change with depending upon weapon choice and attunement so there is a large number of combinations to learn. The AOE skill hops around as do some of the other debuff and defence skills, depending upon your attunement, and that’s before you consider my much used Ice Bow. I’d love to be able to reorganise them to better match my “normal” rotations. As it is I suspect many ele’s stick to just one weapon and one or two attunements.

And who thought slot 6 was the most logical place for the heal???

I’m neutral on the other 4 suggestions.

IndigoNeko.1802:

Yes, please. Being killed in one hit by an ability you didn’t know about is infuriating. Watching a fight while you’re dead and supposed to be contributing is humiliating. Telling someone to research every fight beforehand is ridiculous. It’s a GAME not a JOB.

Nearly nothing in this game can one hit you if you have appropriate gear. Not being able to master the highest level of challenge in the first try isn’t unreasonably. Adding an easy-mode to every encounter is ridiculous. It’s a GAME not a SLEEPING PILL.

Seems like most people here agree with the being able to reorder the skill bar as a really important feature, Knighthonor also brought up a couple of good points regarding PvP and WvW.

Does anyone else have anything to add?

Hi all,

I wanted to mirror the Top-5 WvW Overhaul Priorities thread by creating a version for the overall game. By way of background I come from playing WvW primarily/exclusively for years. I only started playing PvE (open world, dungeons, fractals, HoT) more recently but I honestly have mostly enjoyed the content that has been created. I think the diversity, or at least the potential diversity of content, is actually quite good. I’ve recently built my first legendary and am working slowly on my second.

1) Rewards balancing

The reason I put rewards balancing at number one is that, in general, PvE rewards have vastly outstripped PvP and WvW rewards. People should not be “PvPing to have fun and PvEing to earn money” to such a great extent. Players should be rewarded relatively well for playing the content they enjoy. As it stands now, some content earns anywhere between 10%–40% of what can be earned farming a meta in HoT or Silverwastes (meta or chest train). Players should be earning 50–75%.

2) Living world, dungeons

Living world episodes should come out monthly. Episodes can be episodic (one off stories) or part of longer story lines. Living world episodes that do not permanently change the world should be converted into fractal content.

Dungeons should be revamped to allow for “challenge modes” that offer new bosses with increased difficulty.

3) WvW Overhaul (previously mentioned, covered in other thread)

4) New Content: Mixed PvP GvG

PvP allows for GvG on a small scale. WvW is limited to particular servers affiliation and is therefore somewhat clunky. Guilds can invite players to their GH arena, but this depends on having HoT and the arena size is rather limited.

I propose introducing one larger PvP map designed for between 10v10 and 20v20. Like Stronghold players can take supply and then use that supply to build siege weapons (not spawn NPCs). The goal is to capture the enemy castle. There is no keep lord. Instead, players must stand in the capture circle to contest it. If players fill up the bar a 3 minute event begins. If the capturing side can hold the ring for 3 minutes then they win the match.

I don’t have any. I’m a dedicated PvX’er. So I just do whatever I feel is the most fun at the time

Really wish they’d fix WvW.

I hope it isn’t too late…

Celtic Lady.3729:

Really wish they’d fix WvW.

I hope it isn’t too late…

I don’t believe in “too late”