Guild Wars 2

After playing since launch, I find that I’m still not able to get used to all of the particle effects and the general chaos of the fights. I’ve turned the effects down but that hasn’t actually helped much. I just honestly have a really difficult time reading the battles.

Another issue contributing to this is that the avatar silhouettes aren’t that clear, especially with the red and blue. You can generally tell heavy versus lighter armors, but class silhouettes are generally tough to pick out, I find. I tend to think a warrior is a guardian or an ele is a mesmer too late, lol.

I come from WAR where I didn’t really have the latter issue, though the former could at times be present.

Anyway, I’m no pvp beast and really am more casual than anything else. But I bought the game for the sPVP and am at the point of just sort of wanting to shelve it. Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Stick to 5v5 where the particle effects aren’t nearly as bad. You can solo queue in free tournaments. I do have the same issue as I’m used to identifying a person’s class based on their look, but you eventually get used to checking the icon displayed near their portrait.

If you insist upon 8v8, then just avoid zergs and stick to roaming solo looking for other roamers, assaulting trebs, or stealing bosses.

^IDK if that’s really the attitude we should be approaching this with (“oh if you can’t handle it stick to lower brackets”). Because even in a LARGE WoW battleground I can easily read the fights.

Sure part of that is based on my long-standing experience, but a lot of it has to do with good, easily recognizable animation and spell design (which it has always done a good job with). Abilities in GW2 are simply more dynamic for the most part than the ones in WoW, but that shouldn’t have to mean that the battlefield has to be so “dirty”. In GW2 I only have like a third of the amount of active keybind/abilities (at a time) that I’d have in WoW, so while the abilities may be more complex, there are still less of them… so I would assume that this issue would sort of cancel itself out a little better. But so far it hasn’t.

I have to say though that much of this could be remedied by simply having a better way to separate pets/pet bars and pet targeting from player bars and player targeting. I expect that WvWvW is going to be chaotic, but shouldn’t structured PvP feel just a little more… structured?

Babypuke.2907:

^IDK if that’s really the attitude we should be approaching this with (“oh if you can’t handle it stick to lower brackets”). Because even in a LARGE WoW battleground I can easily read the fights.

Sure part of that is based on my long-standing experience, but a lot of it has to do with good, easily recognizable animation and spell design (which it has always done a good job with). Abilities in GW2 are simply more dynamic for the most part than the ones in WoW, but that shouldn’t have to mean that the battlefield has to be so “dirty”. In GW2 I only have like a third of the amount of active keybind/abilities (at a time) that I’d have in WoW, so while the abilities may be more complex, there are still less of them… so I would assume that this issue would sort of cancel itself out a little better. But so far it hasn’t.

I have to say though that much of this could be remedied by simply having a better way to separate pets/pet bars and pet targeting from player bars and player targeting. I expect that WvWvW is going to be chaotic, but shouldn’t structured PvP feel just a little more… structured?

No question. 5v5s in this game are incredibly more hectic and messy than 8v8s or even larger group events in other games. Now that I think about it, I remember some very large scale open world PvP in another game with 50+ players on the field, and it looked a heck of a lot cleaner and allowed for a heck of a lot more solid decision making than many 5v5s here.

It’s the pets and effects.