Guild Wars 2

This change is UNACCEPTABLE

What the hell is wrong with you Anet
Why are you ruining everything visually pleasing about class skills? I can understand Orbital Strike but this is ridiculous. It looks like a flaming spitwad!

Ruining the graphically pleasing elements of this game for the sake of your pseudo e-sports is really obnoxious Anet.

Entirely unnecessary changes to effects that have been fine for years, it comes up suspiciously when Anet continues to push their wanna-be esports hard and forget making it dependent on what the rest of the playerbase wants right?

Please keep these threads up with support until we are heard. Spread the message to others.

My first comment on the forums, and it’s to say that I couldn’t disagree more with making Fireball look so wimpy.

Look, I understand making it easier to read attacks in things like raids, at least. Maybe. But this makes attacks look so pathetic and weak, and it’s actually detrimental to the enjoyment. At the very least, bring back Fireball.

At least make the normal particle client-side, or something. As earlier suggested, why not make it so we can see a normal fireball but reduces the particles of other players?

Don’t see why they couldn’t keep the original for displaying a player’s own abilities.

i dont understand why they would waste their own resources making those wells for the chronomancer look so incredibly beautiful only to completely destroy them :c not only the chronomancer’s visual effects of course but every other class as well. for me, the effects are what make a class unique :x or.. well… feel unique. whatever.

when i saw the whole “reduced visual noise” in the patch notes i didnt think it was anything at all, just a slight reduction of bloom or something. god was i wrong D: to be honest i completely forgot about the “reduced visual noise” thing and logged in.

everything was great (: until i put down my well of recall. my eyes instantly sizzled from their sockets and melted into a puddle on the floor. after i scooped them up and squished them back into my eye sockets i felt really irritated. the dust from the floor was now inside of my eyeballs and everything felt weird. that is when i decided to put down a well of gravity and my eyes instantaneously melted out of their sockets again. my body began to spasm —this is when i started vigorously puking all over my keyboard, monitor and not to mention my poor soggy eye-puddle. i guess its better this way. all i would have seen is evil if i could still see. horrible disgusting low particle evil! :<

i truly believe that a slider that controls these visuals should be put into the game as soon as possible… actually, nevermind, while we are at it just remove everything. every single visual that every single class does. only indicate our spells with the red area of effect circles. perfect! :| seriously… put in that slider ArenaNet. ^^

It seems to me that with very little effort, some of these updates could have been presented to the players before they were actually deployed, allowing anet to gauge the reaction to them, and maybe tweak them, as well as preparing players and reducing that disruptive feeling when something you’ve known for years is unexpectedly taken away.

Something as simple as displaying on the wiki front page, or the loading screen, a week or three before the change that “fireball is going to be reduced by 50%” or "the warhorn sound is going to be changed. Sample sound <here>’. People would give feedback, some adjustment might be needed, and by the time of the update there would be no surprises and nobody would much care about it.

What I’m saying is, there may be nothing actually wrong with a particular change (or there may) but at the very least the presentation/communication may not be sufficient to provide a smooth transition. Just a thought.

I’ve never posted on the forums before after 2 years of play but this made me.

Anet this is UNACCEPTABLE 100%. Its like we’re devolving back to GW1 where there was barely any animation for anything. I now don’t even want to play my chronomancer as all the wells look ridiculous and Gravity Well is super underwhelming now. It’s a black hole. It’s supposed to look big and intimidating. Not to mention you can’t even really see some of the effects now in PvP, so this is super counter intuitive. Thanks Anet. This and Damask Patch changes are really kittening me off and I was really excited about the expansion overall but some of these things are just leaving a really bad taste in my mouth.

I esports and raids are the main concern to destroy the beauty of the previous animations, this is just a cheap fix, as cheap as most ANET fixes have done. The game really needs more graphical options to enable or disable stuff like this. If raids are as unforgiving as they are saying most casuals wont even get to them so you alienated the ppl that moved around killing some stuff. If esports is the main thing, just make the client switch to low animations during matches and spectator mode.

But you had to cut corners…

How about a slider function so players can adjust accordingly based on their machines or the activities they are trying to enjoy?

Instead of making the animations less flashy, they could just highlight the boss/enemy so it’s still visible.

I’m kinda ashamed of playing my elementalist now, looks like a joke with that bb bullet…

Both fireball and overload air were completely gutted. Fireball used to be one of my favorite skills visually and now it makes me cringe every time I play. Not only is it tiny, but it doesn’t match the rest of the staff skills and it doesn’t even match the windup of the auto itself. It just looks very out of place.

Overload air now has no cloud, which makes it barely visible and only if you are looking for it. For such a damaging skill, you would think that it would be very visible, so people in PvP know where the damage is coming from. Also, the lightning now comes out of nowhere, at least with the cloud it made sense.

These changes are seriously making me avoid playing my elementalist. I am sure that many mesmers also feel the same for their now bland wells, but I don’t have a mesmer so what do I know?

Can we get an option to disable this stuff? It is not needed for most of the game, just make it an option for people to use in extremely competitive environments. I don’t want to see my ele throw flaming tennis balls when facing random mobs in Queensdale.

I have never posted in the forums until now. Staff Ele main, these visual changes are absurd and unwanted. If they are wanted by others make a visual slider so people can turn down the effects they don’t want to see.

I want my fireball to actually have some umph to it and appear like it has weight. It went from an actual imposing ball of fire to a little pee sized spit ball. Its really pathetic. Just give us the option to turn down visuals in our settings yah know like most MMO’s. I for one like having everything on Ultra with all the pretties.

Fire(tennis) ball. I don’t see why this isn’t just an option if you want to turn your graphics all the way down. Other games do it where you can reduce particle effects down based on what your computer can handle. Why not GW2? I don’t have a good gaming pc in order to have less visual effects when my game handles everything at the highest setting or near highest setting very well. Let it be an option then I wouldn’t be displeased with it, other games have less particle effects as an OPTION not as a requirement.

Senario.2038:

Fire(tennis) ball. I don’t see why this isn’t just an option if you want to turn your graphics all the way down. Other games do it where you can reduce particle effects down based on what your computer can handle. Why not GW2? I don’t have a good gaming pc in order to have less visual effects when my game handles everything at the highest setting or near highest setting very well. Let it be an option then I wouldn’t be displeased with it, other games have less particle effects as an OPTION not as a requirement.

It’s not about graphics, it’s mostly about reducing the visual clutter that happens in group content. However, it should still be optional. Not all players care about maximum performance in raids or other content. Even if they do care about it, I still doubt that they would want to be throwing flaming tennis balls to trivial open world PvE mobs.

It was already annoying when they changed Earth skill 2 on staff ele and the Earth 5 skill on offhand dagger – those animations are tiny now und don’t fit the DMG they make – the sound of them also doesn’t really fit the animation anymore… Before, these skills felt powerful when you cast them.

To me, these changes take away a very important aspect/selling point of this game. The combat felt good (due to the animations, the way the sound team created fitting sounds to these animations, etc.). Now it doesn’t.

Please change the animations back and add an option for reducing the animation size or add it to the already existing sliders for toning down animations. I have them maxed out for a reason – I enjoy the animations and rarely have any problems seeing boss attacks.

The only situation where I have problems reading boss animations is in meta events with “small” bosses. I already hide many character models due to that. If only the game would remove the skill animations of these hidden characters as well, there would not be a problem.

I have a lot of hope for this game as it seems much better than most mmos I’ve played with the primary draws being immersion, adventure, etc. However, complete goofs like this make me seriously doubt how long I’m gonna stick with the game or whether I will purchase HoT. I generally don’t mind gameplay changes even if somewhat controversial but changes like this makes me seriously doubt their judgement. I know a toggle is not difficult to implement. At the very most they should have made the complete change for pvp and allowed us to choose in pve so that guild or raid groups could simply make the toggle mandatory for certain content if they wanted to. Why alienate the entire pve crowd with this in the name of pvp when it’s unnecessary? Seems pretty unanimous that people are against this so I hope they listen and don’t get too overzealous about this esports stuff and end up ruining aspects of the game completely unrelated to pvp as they potentially have with this.

Logged into my Ele this evening… launched a fireball… felt like this..

Daralii.8940:

I’m pretty sure it’s for esports spectating and not for performance reasons, which is even worse. I’m not sure why they would think that it’s particles of all things that’s keeping GW2 esports from being a thing.

Everyone knows that combat looking like kitten is going to draw in all the hot chicks and the spectators! FACT!

It’s how all the esports games work. Starcraft never got big when it originally was developed against the CryEngine back in 1998. Only after they switched to the 2-dimensional and pixely Warcraft engine was it a smash hit.

These fx-nerfs are so depressing.

If they want to make it so new players can see the game better by reducing particle effects. then they should create an option in the visuals of the game to reduce particle effects and make it toggleable. Helping your new playerbase is great but a change like this really shouldnt be mandatory. especially since we know something like this is possible with the “standardize player skin” option in pvp.

Fireball looks awful. Why is it that other classes auto attacks are still huge (in comparison now) yet Fireball is so ridiculously small? The Dreamer’s skill effects are now like 30x the size of Fireball…. why?

Let us choose what we want to see, I don’t want to see fire spitballs coming from my Ele thanks.

I absolutely love the skill effects in this game. Now my mesmer’s wells feel… Less than impactful. What Anet should have done is given us, the consumer, the OPTION to turn the visual noise down, including an option to turn down the visual noise of just other players while keeping our own as normal.

Anet. Please listen to your playerbase and start giving us OPTIONS instead of just gutting visual aspects.

Work on PvP is really starting to get to the point where it’s detrimental for the rest of the game. Astroturfing an esports scene never works. If a game is naturally good in a competitive way, esports will follow naturally. The biggest esports titles never went out of their way to design for it initially. PvP is statistically the least played gamemode, and gutting your visuals for it is a terrible idea.

Darksabre Aldarion.4159:

Dear ANET,

I love you very much. It is the truth. You have made a game that I have played for many hours, and greatly enjoy to share with friends.

However, you have ruined an animation I greatly enjoyed by turning it into a joke. When I first heard of the change, I though people were exaggerating. This was not so. It is actually tennis ball sized.

This is not game-breaking, and I am not threatening to leave or anything, but I seriously doubt that any measure of reasoned thought went into the new animation. It is actually more underwhelming than “flare” from GW1…I never thought that this could be true of GW2, but it is.

Please reconsider your animation choices, this was truly a poorly designed ‘fix’ for the visual noise problem.

Sincerely,
Darksabre (now and forever an ele).

+1

Style matters. It was reduced waaaaay too much. This is silly. I want my old fireball back, or at least one that’s a wee bit bigger and flashier.

I get the why, but the current change is overkill.

Same damage, more compact package. Young mages these days, no appreciation of efficiency in their spellcraft…

This should not be a global change, it should be an option.
This is exactly the same as if they lowered everyone to low res textures from ps1 era. Of course you will have complaints.

And even if they did want to do it, the execution is bad, because a lot of these changes are less readable now, not to mention a lot of the graphics dont line up well with the actual damage areas.

As many people said already, this should be optional. GW2 had great spell effects, the ones added in the expansion were even nicer and now you are making them look bland, lackluster and weak. Make it optional, then people will play how they prefer.

What the hell? Why are you destroying the beauty of this game? Fireball looks like a joke. Eruption looks like a joke. What’s the point in this? And what about the sound? I love the sound of skills and I like to feel that what I do is actually VISIBLE to everyone. I thought you should focus on updating the animations… Elementalist’s lightning still looks like it was taken from a 1999 game, which is pathetic. Maybe it will be better if no one will have any sound or animations and we will only see numbers on screen? <sarcasm off> It’s sad to see this game getting destroyed. I don’t see any reason why there should not be an option for someone to lower animations only for himself if it bothers someone so much, like every good game has. And as for me, I love the visuals in this game.

Now that this is a merged thread on visual nerfs, I shall add that Eruption, Air Overload, and most of the mesmer Wells were also hammered into insignificance. Why can’t we have nice things?

This trend is seriously annoying me. I absolutely hate all the visual nerfs, across the board. Orbital strike → weak spark… All that beautiful chrono animation lost… etc etc. It’s depressing and all to satisfy a small part of the game.

There are tons of solutions that are better then forcing the change on everyone:
Make the following toggle in options:
1. Disable Distracting Animations on all powers.
2. Disable distracting animations on all powers except your own.
3. Full power animations.

One of the reasons I play this game is for how beautiful it all looks. After HoT everything felt awe inspiring… now its all receding into blandness so that PvPers and large group coordinators can do their thing a little bit better. Let me decide how I want the game to look!

Mesmer only player here, and it’s not JUST the wells that got gutted….

Look at how tiny GS5 is, how fast GS3 disappears, how tiny null field is, how bland timewarp looks and it’s all squished, phantasms are missing shaders and their mist effects on their weapons, mass invis white ring disappears in seconds now, portal looks flat and bland like timewarp and feedback. There’s more too, but the Phantasms and wells are the most obvious.

All of these changed effects across all classes are just flat out awful, and to be honest, they still don’t really help being able to see jack kitten in big battles. But I wouldn’t hold your breath on getting these back…. human female idle animations are still missing for over a year with no word on those ever being returned/fixed.

Goodluck all, anet really likes taking away from our characters time and time again.

There is really no reason this couldn’t have been our choice via slider.

I have never seen a company purposely make their game look like kitten.

Particle slider would have fixed this and made everyone happy.

Fireball spell now just looks like red spit.

Yes indeed. My favorite classes are mesmer and elementalist. The fireballs have lost so much volume that they barely look like attacks. The mesmer phantasms are looking very much faded, the wells barely noticable depending on the ground you place them on.

Please PLEASE make an option to revert the changes back for personal use of powers at least. GW2 for me is so much about look and character style and powers that it’s a serious detriment from the game for me.

Fully agree with the sentiment here, also baffled as to why they chose to leave the most obnoxious visual ‘noise’ alone. IE the Herald buffcircle. I play Rev and this thing is permanently distracting. I’ll happily swap it for all the super-sized fireballs in the world.

ALL PUNY MORTALS SHALL BOW BEFORE THE RAW POWER OF MY AWESOME…. um… sort of glowing pebble thing, travelling quite slowly.

Yeah, it’s not ideal. If it was a firework it would be from the small family box rated 2/5 on the bang-o-meter.

“Feel the fires of Balthazar! "

fizzle

Balth, hunny, you feeling ok? We’re hardly getting a smolder down here..let alone “fires”

puff of smoke

Or maybe not? Someone got a match? Need to relight this puppy.

For me, the visuals are a big part of what makes the game fun to play. It really hurts to see what this “visual noise” change has done to many skills for almost every profession. Some changes simply feel “lazy” (just downsize a projectile, reduce animation times, remove some effects entirely) Depending on profession and size of the change, the experience or feeling you get from playing will suffer from this.

While I understand that the amount of visual effects makes it hard to keep track of some fights (World Bosses, large WvW fights or even a few group events), I don’t think this is the way to address this problem. There are still many other skills/effects that obscure the fight even more (Guardian Justice Burn).

On the other hand some effects were reduced so much that in a small encounter you won’t even know what hits you. Some skills are “almost” invisible (Dragon’s Maw, Orbital Strike). Some other have a reduced animation time (Many Engineer Explosives).

I’m not sure what the reason for these changes are, but there are definitely more viewpoints to consider. A great idea many in this thread have already suggested is the extension of the “Effect LOD” option. Let everyone decide for themself if they are in a situation where they need to reduce the effects or if they just want to enjoy the visual aspect of the game.

I somehow feel bad that something like this caused me to make my first forum post after almost 3 years -.-

Implement an On/off option and be done with it.

Would be nice to get an official response explaining to us why making this effect culling optional would hurt the game. I really want to know.

With all the love, care and hard work put in to make the new HoT maps so visually stunning and intricate, it must really depress the design team to see their baby getting killed by inches this way…

So. We were all promised this that and the moon with the overpriced $50 expansion only to find out it’s bug ridden rehash of Invasion of the body snatchers story. Now they take away the visual appeal that we have already purchased. If I new Anet was going to do this I would never have purchased HoT for my son and myself. EVER! Anet you pulled a bait and switch. This with the bugged train wreck this HoT are to me grounds for me to get my money back. Anet knew they were going to do this and kept it under wraps. This would have definitely stopped me from purchasing HoT.

I really dislike the new fireball design. I’m sympathetic to the desire to reduce visual clutter, but this isn’t a good solution.

I know it’s just a visual nerf, but they don’t feel powerful anymore. I’m squinting to see them, and it’s really disappointing. Maybe it’ll cut down on visual clutter, but it’s hard to care about that when I’m roaming around Verdant Brink on my own and my fireballs are teeny-tiny even compared to my other auto-attacks.

Fireball has been my go-to auto-attack for over three years now, and it’s really disappointing to have it changed on me like this. Please change it back, or make a “reduce visual noise” toggle in the game options.

These fire needles are so small and move so fast that, frankly, I can barely see them. They’re not bullets.

We do have graphic settings for a reason Anet.

This reduced noise thing should be part of the Effect LOD. The option states “Limit detail of particle effects.” Yet the option is so tiny you can’t really see any difference. This is where I believe it should be implemented into. This option, since it does pretty much nothing as it is right now.

I’m not typically one to complain about things like this, but here I have to concur with the majority. That “fireball” is actually immersion-breaking. It might not be so bad if the name were changed to something like “Flame Spike,” but honestly…that little orange pinprick is NOT a fireball. It even looks out of place when cast by my tiny Asura, which is saying something.

As the adage goes… “If it ain’t broke…”

It’s not enough for me to overreact and have a tantrum, but I certainly would prefer to see the old fireball restored.

Beginning with the orbital strike nerf visual nerfs are now a trend. Consequently, more are likely to follow and the chances of Anet reverting any back are virtually zero.

All the speculation on the reasons why doesn’t change the fact that Anet is gutting the most compelling aspect of the game: flashy visuals. Black Desert NA can’t come soon enough.

Personally I don’t give a darn about my skills looking impressive. I want to be able to see what my enemy is doing, and I am tired of not being able to do just that.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Personally I don’t give a darn about my skills looking impressive. I want to be able to see what my enemy is doing, and I am tired of not being able to do just that.

That’s great and all, but many people do care about visuals and with all these changes the professions are becoming more and more bland-looking. Fireball was one of the primary reasons why I initially got my ele to 80 before any of my other characters. It just used to feel awesome when you threw those impact balls of fire.

No matter what you prefer, there is no reason to not at least support the notion that all of this effect culling should be an optional thing for whoever wants it. If it becomes optional, Anet can cull effects from every single ability without any complaints whatsoever. This is a win-win situation, right?