Guild Wars 2

Because I think it is strange! If I haven’t selected any target and I press 1 to start shooting you’d think it would pick the closest person in front of me, but often it decides to choose someone who is out of range or behind a tree or something. Sometimes there are like four bandits coming for me and it targets some yellow moa bird instead and now he’s coming after me too.

How does it pick the target? Should I be doing it some other way? It’s hard to click on the right enemy when there is a lot going on …

I’m not sure how it works but it wouldn’t surprise me if they deliberately made it pick a random target rather than the best one to encourage people to pick their own targets whenever possible. Otherwise it’d be too easy.

The ‘Tab’ button usually selects the closest enemy in front of you. And I say usually, because it’s not perfect either. But it works most of the time. Targetting in GW2 has always been wonky from what I’ve experienced.

That being said, if it’s an event where mobs spawn, auto-targetting by using skills automatically skips them while they are invulnerable (spawned mobs are usually invulnerable for a short period of time after they spawn).

Also, auto-targetting only seems to work on enemies in a cone in front of you. If you are running away and use skills, it won’t automatically target the mobs chasing you even if they are a lot closer.

Personally, I disabled targeting assist. If I use a skill, it just fires off in the direction I’m facing when I don’t have a target selected. Works wonders for escape skills such as the Elementalists Ride The Lightning and movement-based AoE skills such as the Thief’s Death Blossom (allows you to more easily target the area which is covered instead of always leaping towards your target).

Hope this helps

Thanks! I’ll try and use the ‘Tab’ key instead.

i generally run with auto targetting turned off.
With the D/D ele is it pretty much required to have that off to use ride the lightning effectively.

Tab is by default set to “select next target”, whatever that means. You can change it to “select nearest enemy” (or some similar wording) in your controls option. That might get you results more like you’re looking for.

The problem with GW2 targeting is that it is nether fully tab targeting ..nor is it fully manual(action combat).

Its a half arsed attempted at going half way. I honestly dont like it ..but i put up with it. I would prefer a system like Tera ..or better yet a system like Tera but proper ‘twitch’ action combat. Problem is that would requir a reworking of alot of other game systems. .like skilsl hit detection and such ..stuff that is effected by the precision of the game engine. Not only that there would a massive amount of MMO’ only gamers who would scream to high heaven that the controls and game as a whole will have become to hard -.-