Guild Wars 2

Zepidel.5349:

emikochan.8504:

Just use the skill a few times jeez. I agree with Vayne.

Still hoping for the option to turn the damage numbers off :/

I do like immersion, but uh have you played the main story line? lol… I like this game but its not for its story or RP elements. It’s for the PvP etc… you would expect to find in a MMO. If you are here for the RP and immersion you are in a bad place.

The personal story isn’t particularly immersive to me. The world is. The cities, the events, the hidden things…yes, I can immerse myself readily in this world. There are a few personal story instances that I really liked too, but not too many. But this world, compared to any other MMO I’ve played, is immersive. There’s a whole lot of attention to detail here, that I quite like.

bump—————-

kKagari.6804:

ThiBash.5634:

How would you fit what Elemental Surge does in a single tooltip? It seems to behave differently for each individual skill.

Show another ‘skill tooltip’ above the arcane skill tooltip, like chain attacks.

You could fill the entire screen with info then. The skill literally does work differently for every individual skill.

Orion Templar.4589:

Agreed – not just the tooltips, but the traits too need specifics added to them. There are so many traits currently that say vague things like:
“lasts longer” ? how much longer?
“increases damage” ? by how much?
“burns foes” ? how long a burn?
“effects are improved” ? improved how and by what degree?
“…heals you” ? how large a heal? any internal cool down?
etc.
I’m sure most players go to the wiki to find out the specifics, but we shouldn’t be forced to do that. The details should be in the game.

This.

Also, the wiki doesn’t scale down with your level/stats/weapons.

Agree, like Necro Axe Training.

Increases damage, but by how much?

Should not need to use a wiki to find out this information.

How do I hide the tooltips?

They also have to tell you whether you can use an item in a dungeon or not.

yea you have no idea how long stuffs from traits works like initiative regenerates faster wtf is “faster” i need numbers !!! or range of stealing is increased but by how much?? Stealing deals damage but how much??? etc….

I agree that an optional detailed tooltip would be very nice to have. It’s hard to judge the value of some skills or traits with the vague descriptions that we get.

BioFringe.7945:

They built the wiki into the game to work as the “detailed” option you speak of. Just type /wiki <search term> and it will automatically minimize the game and bring up the wiki for you with the more detailed info you seek. That way everyone wins and they don’t have to code a bunch of extra info into the game.

EDIT: That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to see more detailed tooltips. That’s just to say why they don’t feel they need to spend resources on such things.

The problem with the wiki is that it isn’t necessarily up to date and in general just isn’t reliable. If you look at combo fields, for example, half of the ranger combo fields aren’t even in the table. The wiki also doea nothing to explain some of the more tricky ranger tooltips. And other tooltips are just outright confusing. The tooltips are in really, really bad shape and the wiki isn’t reliable so what we’ve been doing on the ranger forum is testing ourselves in the mists. There’s a long thread pointing out issues with tooltips on the ranger forum now and it’s a HUGE problem for us. We shouldn’t have to go to mists to make sure a tooltip’s description is accurate. I feel like an unpaid beta tester. If the tooltip says one thing, then darn it, that one thing should be what it does. I love anet as much as the next guy but for the love of tooltips, fix them!

The most puzzling part of GW2 tooltips is that GW1’s tooltips were a work of art. The level of precision from such a short description you could get from them was amazing.

ie.

Eremite’s Attack
Scythe Attack. If it hits, this attack deals X damage and removes a Dervish enchantment. If an enchantment is removed, you do an additional X damage and strike all adjacent foes.

Any questions? – no? – Really we pretty much nailed everything there is to ask; we know the attack removes a dervish enchantment specificlly (Seems like this’d combo well with elementalist weapon enchantments), not just any old enchantment. We know how much extra damage is dealt and this damage is dealt to all adjacent foes.

Contrast to:

Hundred Blades:
Repeatedly strike multiple foes. The last strike does extra damage.

How much extra damage? – How many is multiple, all of them? Is there a cap? – How far is the reach is this the forward cone or all around us? How many strikes are there before the finisher. This description tells us almost nothing

Haha yeah Ryu I know. Lot’s of ranger tooltips are like "your pet’s next attack does more damage". Okay....thank you tooltip. "Chance to apply bleed on hit" except the bleed is 1 second so only ticks once--but they don’t tell you that. Who wants one or two extra bleed ticks anyways? Sigh

bookman.9260:

A game should be describing its mechanics and gameplay to the player in-game instead of requiring the player to alt-tab just to read up on some skill (or even have a separate tab with in-depth descriptions of tools). It breaks immersion and more importantly is really annoying when you can’t find the answer that you need on the wiki.

And it’s lazy. To create a game with skills/traits and then not tell us what they do specifically without going online to a website? Lazy.

My personal favorite: Engineer trait Leg Mods – move 10% faster when using an unarmed kit . What is an unarmed kit? How does one use it, if it is unarmed? None of my kits stipulate whether they are armed?/unarmed kits.

Another example is the word “nearby” or “up to”. Signet of renewal: remove all conditions from all allies nearby the pet. Ok…what range is nearby? Spotter: increase nearby (?) allies precision up to (?) 70 points, if I recall right. This information isn’t on the wiki and, to be honest, it shouldn’t have to be. So we’re supposed to let the community figure out anet’s tooltips and then post the information onto the wiki? There is zero incentive to do that except for the very, very few that gain satisfaction ot of documenting companies games for them.

I can only guess what reasons might be behind that vagueness.

Maybe Anet really thinks that hiding numbers makes them less important. I mean, look at the UI; they hide a lot of other things too. Like information about internal trait-cooldowns. Look at the downed-mode-UI.

Or maybe these tooltips arent that bad on purpose. Maybe anets communication (between their teams) and documentation (of changes) is just that horrible(non-existant) that the ppl who are responsible for the tooltips dont even know what exactly the skills actually do.

TBH, idc anymore. In the months after the game release this really annoyed the kitten out of me. But by now i already spent a lot of hours in the Heart and the world, testing out all kinds of vague, incorrect tooltips and it doesnt really bother me anymore. I know most of all the hidden stuff of my main classes by now and im used to do Anets work.
The incomplete patchnotes still frustrate me tho. Cause after that you have to test some things again to check if they secretly messed around with them or not.

And tooltips that actually show duration-increases or cooldown-decreases would be a very pleasant surprise.

@Guardian and its Elusive Power-trait: the funny part about it is that there are a lot of similar skills, but most of them do tell you the exact damage-increase.

edit: @Vayne: it’s completely fine when you dont want to see numbers. But it cant be that difficult to implement an option for more detailed tooltips for ppl who want that, as lots of ppl alrdy suggested. I mean, even D3 made that right.

Yes. They totally need to designate two people and have them improve/expand current tooltips for all skills and traits. I don’t think it’s a really taxing job (it would take what, a week?) and I wonder why this hasnt been done yet.

And I’m not even talking about numbers. Guardian 5th Hammer skill is a light combo field, yet it’s not written in the tooltip, for example. Engineer medikit 4th (?) skill says “removes conditions”.. you’d think it would remove all conditions, or at least not less than two but guess what, it only removes one…

It’s easier to stealth-nerf with vague tooltip.
Kidding aside, I agree most tooltips could use more details. The wiki is nice and all but it’s not 100% accurate and you don’t always find everything that you want to know there.

Andaras.9317:

For that skill, I’m about 90% positive that it means that each dart does the 40 damage, so if you are at point blank range, you’ll do 40 damage five times.
The poison does 86 damage total across the 2 seconds for one dart, so if all 5 darts hit, you get 10 seconds of poison that is SUPPOSED to do eight hundred and sixty damage total, or something like that, at least mathematically that’s the total.

But I am in full agreement, tooltips are pretty friggin useless, especially trait ones, and having to open my browser to check the wiki feels like a waste of time.

I know this doesn’t solve the problem of having to use the wiki in the first place, but there is a much easier way to do it. If you type /wiki search query here (you can use spaces) it will automatically minimize the game, open your browser to the wiki and open the page with your search results all in one go.

Example: typing /wiki mystic forge will take you to the page about the mystic forge.

3 months later and tooltips are still just as bad.

For some reason developers never want to give out too many specifics when it comes to the mechanics of their game. The only time I was ever able to get specifics about the mechanics of this game was when I met the developers face-to-face at PAX East 2011.

The best information you can get is that from datamining.

1. A misguided attempt at combating theorycrafting.

2. A equally misguided attempt at promoting “skill” via seat of the pants playing.

digiowl.9620:

1. A misguided attempt at combating theorycrafting.

2. A equally misguided attempt at promoting “skill” via seat of the pants playing.

what

God Of Fissures.8627:

For some reason developers never want to give out too many specifics when it comes to the mechanics of their game. The only time I was ever able to get specifics about the mechanics of this game was when I met the developers face-to-face at PAX East 2011.

The best information you can get is that from datamining.

which is dumb because its obvious they balance the game around TPvP. For a game that wants to be esports, it needs concise descriptions of skill cooldowns and how other skills interact and effect each other so people can make builds without having to do guesswork or redundant most of the time kitten attempts at “testing” something.

Theres so many traits that literally say “A chance to do damage”
-How much damage?
-What percent chance?
-What cooldown
-Is there skills which this wont proc off of?
etc…

Zepidel.5349:

God Of Fissures.8627:

For some reason developers never want to give out too many specifics when it comes to the mechanics of their game. The only time I was ever able to get specifics about the mechanics of this game was when I met the developers face-to-face at PAX East 2011.

The best information you can get is that from datamining.

which is dumb because its obvious they balance the game around TPvP. For a game that wants to be esports, it needs concise descriptions of skill cooldowns and how other skills interact and effect each other so people can make builds without having to do guesswork or redundant most of the time kitten attempts at “testing” something.

Theres so many traits that literally say “A chance to do damage”
-How much damage?
-What percent chance?
-What cooldown
-Is there skills which this wont proc off of?
etc…

i completely agree.

I agree. The tooltips are less than intuitive.

At first, it seemed to me that ANet was really trying to make the interface user friendly, but then I realized that certain UI elements are terrible (tooltips) and other UI elements from GW1 (degen/regen/colored health bars) were completely removed.

What could be more user friendly UI design than having your health bar change to green when you are poisoned?

What could be more user friendly UI design than Burning ALWAYS doing X degen. Now, in order for me to know how much damage I’m taking from Burning, I have to mouse over the Burning Condition image on the UI and read the tooltip.

One step forward and five steps back.

I wish, with this next balance patch and trait reshuffling, the would take the time to address this. It might be tedious work, but its beyond frustrating to read trait descriptions that lack any numbers what so ever. It wouldn’t take up that much more space, and I think anet would be amazed at how many casual players actually have the capacity to judge numbers themselves.