Guild Wars 2

I have noticed a trend in PvP that players tend to roll the smallest Asura they can in order to make them harder to target and even see when they are a necro hiding in their minions.

Targeting has always been a challenge for me with human characters moving so much compared to npcs, and this tactic seems to be kind of cheap to me. Everything else is forced to be ‘equal’ in PvP gear wise so why not size wise?

Should players be ‘scaled’ in PvP to remove that advantage?

Tiny is sort of a double edged sword, you will be hit by attacks that are inside your hitbox but that are graphically far from you.
Of course this also means that your enemies will feel safe while they are still within reach, very situational imo.
I agree that argeting can be a problem, however by expertly tweaking the targeting options it is possible to bypass it.
I don’t really remember what to check and what to uncheck but with optimal settings you only see player names (this way pets don’t have names) and you can cycle through player targets with tab.
As a side note also disable meele assist because it will pick up targets when you are leaping away from a fight and it will cause you to jump back in instead of leaping out.

yep its been an issue since launch,
not only do asuras have the most difficult to read telegraphs (because literally everything looks like they’re having a flailing spaz attack) but also they can simply stand behind/inside other people or NPCs to become totally unreadable.

the one and only exception where height might be good is for mesmers who want to spam NPC clutter to stop the enemies from seeing who is casting what, but that impacts your allies aswell.

i’d also heard somewhere that taller characters get better camera options,
but as someone who plays a big-as-he-can-go norn warrior and a small-as-she-can-go asuran mesmer i honestly dont think this is true, and if it is, it is unnoticeable.

i think we should get racial skills in pvp again, asura racials are fairly “meh” when compared with sylvari/human root skills or norn bear spike, or warband/hounds of balthazaar.
since the whole reason racial skills were disabled was because they “didn’t want one race to have an advantage” well asuras have the greatest racial of all, being tiny!

Being tiny has huge advantages in certain map, as well as in WvW.
For example, in Foefire map, if you’re small enough, you can hide behind the fan edge from 2 far points so foes have a harder time to select you and see which class is occupying the point before they get a lot closer.

In WvW, you’re more easily to hide away from huge zerg by hiding behind a rock or something, whereas the larger size characters will be seen even behind that same rock.

Lachanche.6859:

Tiny is sort of a double edged sword, you will be hit by attacks that are inside your hitbox but that are graphically far from you.
Of course this also means that your enemies will feel safe while they are still within reach, very situational imo.

It’s not really a double edged sword because this affects essentially all characters except the biggest ones. Sylvari and even humans hit outside the area they swing a sword so if you’re an asura people might actually think they need to be closer in order to hit you, making it a double advantage. You hit them when you’re visually far away and they don’t attack you until they’re right on top of your character.

Besides the advantages talked about all the time, asuras actually have an enormous advantage when it comes to skill animations because not only do auto attacks scale, large AOEs scale too. It’s already been demonstrated several times that something like an asuran necro will hit outside their visible aoe range(like plague). If you want to see the difference get a character with a 240 radius skill like shadow refuge and have a necro activate plague inside it. The circles won’t match up but the attack still works at the correct radius. The issue is, even if Anet fixed this and scaled all AOE the same you would have an even harder time distinguishing asura characters. You might see the AOE better but get totally lost in all the clutter.(if you don’t already…)

Youre spot on. In any other sheet MMO no1 would bother, since there is no equality, just pay o win, grind for better gear and all that stuff.

Here they basicaly make the french revolution of pvp, yet they skrew up on the 1st choice you make ingame it is the only flaw beside particle clutter and slow balancing though…..#banasurasbacktopve

I honestly had never even considered this when I made my Asura warrior, and she’s got the tiniest frame possible (I did it to contrast with a new guildie who make a max-frame size Charr).

Maybe now I’ll have to give hambow a shot :p

A simple solution to this problem (and I say this as a player having the main character as Asura) is to put an option in the game that lets you load standardized human models for all the other characters in the match instead of the actual ones.

And I wonder why after almost 2 years Anet never put this option out for PvP.

Galandil has an excellent point as asurans just use human male armor models.

Thaelias.7432:

Galandil has an excellent point as asurans just use human male armor models.

I wasn’t even thinking about armor models.

My point is that, at least in PvP, we should have a simple option to scrap away all that shiny/glittering/fashion stuff for enemy models. It’s PvP, not Fashion vs Fashion mode.

A game that now is 15 years old like Q3 made you choose via a config file which model you’d want to see for enemy models (Keel/TankJr with green acid color ftw!) and which model for friend models. I’m astonished that this game doesn’t give us that option yet.

This should a competitive environment, so everything should be done in order to help players enjoy the gameplay, not let them lose some diopters in order to understand wtf is doing that little asura.

make everyone a maximum sized male Norn in pvp

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

Should players be ‘scaled’ in PvP to remove that advantage?

YES kitten . End of! This kind of thing is ridiculous and unacceptable in a pvp game. The argument has been made a thousand times on here, and the devs refuse to give us a good reason why they won’t do it! It’s a minor client-side tweak on the level of difficulty of bobbleheads to implement.

I’d rather fight a team of 5 asuras than see a turret engi. At least the asura has to play to be effective.

style.6173:

I’d rather fight a team of 5 asuras than see a turret engi. At least the asura has to play to be effective.

What about 5 Asura Turret Engis?
A lot of people rerolled Turret Engi because it’s easy as pie. And of course, they made their toons Asuras, because AI faceroll was not enough.

Malediktus.9250:

make everyone a maximum sized male Norn in pvp

and then all run mesmer…how about dat?

Maybe they will add unlimited asura transform tonics to the gem store

Archaon.9524:

Malediktus.9250:

make everyone a maximum sized male Norn in pvp

and then all run mesmer…how about dat?

would be pretty nice

Galandil.9641:

Thaelias.7432:

Galandil has an excellent point as asurans just use human male armor models.

I wasn’t even thinking about armor models.

My point is that, at least in PvP, we should have a simple option to scrap away all that shiny/glittering/fashion stuff for enemy models. It’s PvP, not Fashion vs Fashion mode.

A game that now is 15 years old like Q3 made you choose via a config file which model you’d want to see for enemy models (Keel/TankJr with green acid color ftw!) and which model for friend models. I’m astonished that this game doesn’t give us that option yet.

This should a competitive environment, so everything should be done in order to help players enjoy the gameplay, not let them lose some diopters in order to understand wtf is doing that little asura.

This makes perfect sense. A standardized enemy (and maybe allied) player model, along with standardized weapons would be great, and help to improve the readability of combat. It wouldn’t fix all the readability issues, but it would be a good first step.

The ability to do this with weapons would even be beneficial in PvE, where important animations can annoyingly be clouded by a bazillion particle effects due to legendary weapons, making the game “harder” because you and/or your allies are using legendary weapons.

+1 for scale in PvP. Asura’s broken in PvP when it goes for fair fights.

Would love it if they made it so all players could customize their own “human avatar” in the mists. And that they fight with this avatar instead of their original form.

This would level it out pretty good. This is coming from someone with 6 Asura characters. The tells and animations on Asuras are just too small to be noticed in team fights, which is giving them a huge edge.

+1 fix please it will also make watching streams more entertaining if not everyone is an asura

The option to have standardised enemies would be awesome. +1 to that. That should include (taking some stuff from above):

• Two standardised character models, one male, one female
• One standardised weapon per type
• A standardised light/medium/heavy armor (maybe with the class icon on back and front of the chestpiece and dyed in the color of the team)

And their should also be another option to reduce the particle clutter, but this has already been suggested all too often.

Apparently, and finally, we’ll get it in the end.

Except… why the hell only in team and not in soloQ? Why? It doesn’t make any sense at all, you should leave the original models just in hot join.

Galandil.9641:

Apparently, and finally, we’ll get it in the end.

Except… why the hell only in team and not in soloQ? Why? It doesn’t make any sense at all, you should leave the original models just in hot join.

I’d say you should have the option to use standard models in any mode.

They finally address this issue and then DON’T let you use it in Solo Q? DUH!!!

I would not want to see it in WvW, and they only added an ON/OFF switch so I am glad it’s not supported there personally, but I would think that would make WvW perform better for some people.

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

They finally address this issue and then DON’T let you use it in Solo Q? DUH!!!

I would not want to see it in WvW, and they only added an ON/OFF switch so I am glad it’s not supported there personally, but I would think that would make WvW perform better for some people.

I’d use it everywhere in sPvP, and for both foes and allies if I could.

I’d use it in WvW, and for both foes and allies if I could. Nothing to do with performance at all, either; I can comfortably run the game at 2560×1600 at MAX graphics settings, even in WvW.

I’d use it in PvE for allies if I could. (Weapon standardization would at least go a very small amount of the way to improving combat readability, since one is supposed to read tells of bosses who can probably 1-shot you when said tells are clouded by a bazillion particle effects which obscure them, including particle effects from legendary weapons)

As for why I’m guessing you can’t use it anywhere except Team Q and custom arenas? Legendary weapons. Couldn’t have people not be forced to see their particle effects, now, could we? =/

Zui.9245:

As for why I’m guessing you can’t use it anywhere except Team Q and custom arenas? Legendary weapons. Couldn’t have people not be forced to see their particle effects, now, could we? =/

Well, no, first of all it’s just an option, so if you don’t want to use it, you don’t.

Second, it’s about standardizing enemy models, not your teammates’ or even yours, so legendaries kitten will still see their glittering particles spam.

Galandil.9641:

Zui.9245:

As for why I’m guessing you can’t use it anywhere except Team Q and custom arenas? Legendary weapons. Couldn’t have people not be forced to see their particle effects, now, could we? =/

Well, no, first of all it’s just an option, so if you don’t want to use it, you don’t.

Second, it’s about standardizing enemy models, not your teammates’ or even yours, so legendaries kitten will still see their glittering particles spam.

Perhaps I was unclear in my post (or you just didn’t read it… you did read it, right?), so to clarify:

I would use the option everywhere it is available, and think it should be available everywhere in the game, or at the very least all of sPvP.

I understand the feature only standardizes enemy models. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a similar feature to standardize the models of your teammates, even though apparently such a feature does not exist. Certainly, such a feature would be lower priority, but given it’d work exactly the same way, there isn’t a good reason not to have such a feature.

I was speculating the reason why the feature will not be available in hotjoin and solo q (much less the rest of the game) is because ANET feels that it’d upset those with legendary weapons. This is the only possible reason I can think of. It’s of course a terrible reason, but can anyone think of a better one?