Guild Wars 2

This becomes especially annoying when you are fighting a guardian for example because I really need to pay attention to their buffs (mostly protection and stability). But when they have every kitten boon up I have to literally squint and go up to my screen within licking distance just to see the kitten symbols. The symbols are far too small when there are many boons.

buff/condition, everything need to be much bigger. condition/boon both very important on this game and we have a tiny symbols and in a very bad place ( condition on us)

we need lot more UI options

Or a nice little tick box, which lets you keep boons large, whilst still allowing conditions to shrink. Lets them both be visible at the same time, just prioritising.

I also think some steps could be put in place to improve the visible effects of buffs. For example, a chaos or fireshield has a very cool and very obvious graphic. Huge glowing red/purple dome of magic that says “hey, back off bud!” And the shield effect for Ageis is also quite nice. But as far as I know, stability and protection, 2 pretty important boons that make you rethink the way you attack your opponent have no visible graphics.

Seriously, I would love a tick option to double or even triple the boon/condition size on myself, target and even party frames.

The boons/conditions are so crazy important that I don’t mind giving up screen real estate to see them better, in fact I would love to do so.

This is where a movable ui would be nice. I have 3 23" monitors but because of Anet’s CIA like control over their UI I can’t utilize it. I should have an option to move buffs/conditions to anywhere and make them larger, but then again we don’t even have simple target of target options so I ain’t holding my breath.

Perhaps instead of having small icons piling up under the target’s health bar, why not have boons appear at the left side of the target display and the conditions appear to the right of the target display, next to the head icon? That way their size can be double what it is now and still leave the screen uncluttered.

While icon readability is a small issue, I think a better solution is just to build on the already excellent set of visual queues. For example, the flame effect for the ranger ability Rage As One does a great job of indicating that that player has stability. Something like this should happen whenever a player gets stability. Retaliation could use an obvious spell effect as well.

Evan Lesh.3295:

While there are times where customization is nice, there is probably something we can do to alleviate this issue. The reason the buffs get so small in the first place is that there just isn’t enough screen space to show full sized icons without without wrapping them, and eating up precious vertical viewing room. I could imagine an option to show only boons/conditions similar to how simple party UI works. This way we would probably never have to scale the icons, or at least stacking them would only be twice as high as normal. Another possibility is to prioritize the scaling of icons based on target relation. Enemies have larger boon icons, allies have bigger conditions, etc. In any case, “Make them bigger!” isn’t a full solution, but I agree something more could be done with that piece of UI.

shouldnt it be the players choice if they want to eat up viewing room or not?

make the boon icons different colors so at least if i check quickly i can see what boon they have.
exemple;
stability- black
might- red
swiftness- yellow
protection- blue

could be a helper.

I think something as deadly as retaliation should make the character glow or something. If a Warrior is doing 100 blades every body on the map can clearly see that he is doing it. If a Guardian pops up retaliation in his sea of boons you are have to go out of your way to look through all of them to see what all you have to avoid, including that one.

Also, no other boon on someone else causes me to die. Conditions are easy to spot, because they are right there on my bar. That specific boon makes a huge difference because it’s so different than the others.

A special type of aura specifically for that boon would help a lot.

Sprawl.3891:

Evan Lesh.3295:

While there are times where customization is nice, there is probably something we can do to alleviate this issue. The reason the buffs get so small in the first place is that there just isn’t enough screen space to show full sized icons without without wrapping them, and eating up precious vertical viewing room. I could imagine an option to show only boons/conditions similar to how simple party UI works. This way we would probably never have to scale the icons, or at least stacking them would only be twice as high as normal. Another possibility is to prioritize the scaling of icons based on target relation. Enemies have larger boon icons, allies have bigger conditions, etc. In any case, “Make them bigger!” isn’t a full solution, but I agree something more could be done with that piece of UI.

shouldnt it be the players choice if they want to eat up viewing room or not?

Well, my choice is that I don’t want that. It’s perfectly fine the way it is now and I hope they won’t break it.

GW1 had a very customizable screen, you could drag icon boxes, health bars, chat boxes, info boxes, interaction buttons, ect. wherever you wanted them.
Stretch them out, shrink them, just about w/e you wanted to do. Would like to see that customization again.