Guild Wars 2

I think it would. Anyone complaining about how there is currently no counter play would now get their chance to actually respond and suck, instead of just whining and sucking at the same time.

People complain everything is “too quick” in this game

I undoubtedly think it would add a new, interesting, much needed facet into pvp

discuss

Woah man that’s too massive a change.
I’d be able to see a Necromancer Doom a mile away!
Or an elementalist switching to Air burst or using Arcanes!

I don’t think it would.
A larger fight would be a cast-bar clusterkitten. Everything is either instantcast or with ~1 second cast-time, interrupting would still be impossible. This would be fine in duels, but that’s it.

nah it is fine the way it is now.
i dun want to be staring at casting bars.
besides, most skills activate quite fast anyway.

a casting bar would add more clutter.
might takes away the suspense and mystery, randomness etc.

Haha. I like how you presented your discussion; ’Agree with me, or suck at the game!’. Classic.

And no. It wouldn’t solve anything major.

I think it would certainly help since animations currently just aren’t distinct enough.

Currently duels are often decided by who, by random chance, could dodge what essential skill.

But I don’t think it would change much about group combat that remains a massive AoE spam-fest.

It might solve the Asura problem definitely. However I don’t think we need to gut telegraphed skills even by a little bit at this point.

I can’t even begin to name how many basic problems currently exist in a game that has been live for over year, and looks worse than most games in beta.

I do not want people to agree with me or not, but the game is based on 5v5, and cast bars in 5v5 in WoW were not that bad, and could be managed here.

Again, we are just adding in more things to deduce better players who can make better decisions, from worse players who think they can be better, but are limited due to system restraints currently in place.

All is vain.

Cast-time-bars: considering loads of people aren’t playing on maximum settings, Yes.
Maybe not make them cast ‘time’ bars but display the cast icon of the skill next to the player UI you have targeted the moment it is casted with a chain log for the last 4-5 skills so you can sort of read what you are fighting/is hitting you/what is the skill to dodge etc..

Add an option to turn it off for people who don’t like UI clutter.

Reading animations is great on high settings, soon as you go lower settings and turn off player skins animations are gone, effects are gone. and you are basicly blind.

castbars could help alot
in this game we have to watch animations to see whats coming and we all know there are alot things with no animation or not enough
AND in teamfight with all this spelleffects noone can see rly whats going on with 3+ people per team

and for spectators its even worse – noone can say anything bout a fight until its over

i think a combination from castbars + animations could work fine
dont need castbars fro everything and lower animations + spelleffects can only be good too

I don’t think cast bars are needed at all. Animation tell system works fine, even better, as long as the game is well balanced around it.
They could start just with:

• Introducing a slide bar in options to display enemies/alliestoo/everyone as a human, just like the team color one works.
• Working on the animations of some skills that are currently hard, even impossible, to identify (necro marks come to my mind)

After that, it’s all about accounting the animation tell system when balancing things. If something can be boosted/nerfed by different means, just chose the one that contributes the most to this gameplay.
For example, if devs would think that warrior longbow is too strong, they should nerf the weapon through an increased cast time and better tell on pin down rather than a condition duration tweak on it or a nerf on combustive shot.

Better alternatives to pet builds, rework (if possible) on instant procs (Dhuumfire, probably a long a boost, could trigger right on the next attack after leaving DS so it could be evaded) and good assignment of cast times and tells might not be as effective as some number tweaking balance wise, but eventually would bring us to a much more enjoyable (both for players and viewers) gameplay.

Divinity.8041

but the game is based on 5v5, and cast bars in 5v5 in WoW were not that bad, and could be managed here.

The cast bars in WoW changed too over the years. First you only had the cast bars from your target, then from your focus target and in the end you had cast bars for the whole enemy arena composition.

Cluttering the screen with an enemy frame with cast bars would might help in some situation, would have no effect or would make things worse in others. Due to that I don’t think cast bars are the right direction to go.

I think a list of the animations which should get reworked might help much more.

F.e. animations disturbing the gameplay / too bright:

• Call Lightning
• Sun Flare
• Detonate Cluster
• Flash Grenade (maybe other grenades too)

animations that are not telegraphed enough:

• Signet of Spite
• Magnet (bugged, sometimes you can not see the lines connecting you and the enemy)

strong instant effects which should get looked at:

• Fresh Air with Electric Discharge (with the option to follow up with additional instants)
• Mirror Images

Feel free to complete the list.

most healspells are to fast or dont have good enough animations and interupt healskills should be a big play in this game

when i interupt a heal most time its cause i just “feel” he will heal now, i never see it. Or maby im jsut to old and to slow now^^

than most necrospells i dont see whats coming. I tried now to paly necro to learn it maby but this dont help^^ to play necros feels clunky cause there is a lot aftercast and such and should be enough time for enemy to can see what im doing but somehow arenanet forgot to bring the animations

Well atm interrupting a foe in a team fight is nearly impossible lol , something needs doing . You can lucky sometimes tho n say wow im so pro

Vargamonth.2047:

Animation tell system works fine.

orly

/15char

People are entitled to their opinion, of course, even if it is that animation system serves for counterplays. This opinion is completely WRONG, of course!

Yes, there are certain abilities with obvious tells, like Big ol’ bomb, churning earth, burning speed, dragon’s tooth, eviscerate, warrior burst skills, pistol whip, mesmer greatsword skills and whatnot. But at the same time you have a buttload of important abilities which aren’t possible to identify in time for counterplay

Introduce the casting bars, and add an option for players to turn them on/off. All of you who complain about cluttering casting bars can turn it off. The screen is already obliterated with effects when there is a 4v4 fight on a node. If I can actually tell what is going to happen next by looking at casting bars, I will gladly take it.

We’ve had this discussion countless times, and the some points will be brought up here as in the previous threads.

Give us our kitten casting bars.

If they just fixed their animation system this wouldn’t be necessary at all. Cast bars were better for more static games where casting was just raising your hands in the air like you just don’t care for the cast time.

But if they made the Oddjob class bigger in sPvP, fixed a lot of the visual clutter by toning down a lot of casting effects (especially the weak ones) and then gave skills animations/effects appropriate to the strength and type of effect, we wouldn’t need cast bars.

At this point in game design, asking for cast bars is like asking for us all to stand still while casting. Its an archaic mechanic from a period of game design that should not be revisted in this kind of game.

Cast bars are for your dads mmorpg’s! If you can’t react to something coming your way, or get surprised by a sneaky attack, well that’s just part of the game. Works both ways, btw. Now for those a sura, there have been some great suggestions already.

Mightymealworm.8409:

Cast bars are for your dads mmorpg’s! If you can’t react to something coming your way, or get surprised by a sneaky attack, well that’s just part of the game. Works both ways, btw. Now for those a sura, there have been some great suggestions already.

That’s pvp is about spamming at each other until someone goes down.

Fast paced and animation based don’t mix that well.

Dark Souls is animation based, and isn’t fast paced for good reason.

Yes, isn’t it just strange that they turned away from all the awesomeness they’ve made in GW1 and decided on button mashing playstyle. I mean, the biggest problem people had with gw1 is that they couldn’t jump, then you take a look at problems in gw2 and the list is just ongoing.

PvP was much better in gw1 in my opinion. For instance you were able to actually counter important skills/spells, which put the skill on cooldown or outright doubled the cooldown or something like that.

In gw2 all i see is a spam zergfest when it’s anything over 1v1 or 1v2 situation. I might be wrong, but i’m probably not far off.

I think that all this focus about fast pvp is the problem.

Look at popular formats, like MOBA: it’s kinda the opposite of fast-paced.

Yeah, like playing a game of chess…yipeee!

Mightymealworm.8409:

Yeah, like playing a game of chess…yipeee!

Even chess is more popular.

Well u got me thinking, and I’m still not a fan of cast bars, but… There is already somewhat in place a cast tell when using signets and the one for necro fear when downed. I would not be opposed to say, a red hammer symbol over a players head when they are channeling a hard CC like stun/knockdown. Maybe a purple chain symbol for casting an immobilize too. I wouldn’t want symbols for everything, just some of the really important stuff. It would go a long way to increase readability on the battlefield I suppose.

It would kind of just band-aid the real issue, which is too much crap on the screen. If the animations are so excessive on screen that certain animations can be “lost” or hidden, adding a cast bar to watch when you can’t see because of all of the AI and fields and clutter and flashes and sparkles would help.

…But so would just toning down all of that stuff and overhauling the game to a system where the strongest or most important to watch skills are the most animated and/or telegraphed, and the other skills are much less animated in comparison.

It would be awesome and add a skill factor since atm when a teamfight with 3+ people of both teams start is pretty much chaos (since there can be mesmer, thief using pet elite, necro with pets, rangers with spirit)

Cast-time bars would do nothing but send epileptics into seizure fits.

What needs to be fixed is the speed of combat. Reducing the amount of ranged, instant-cast, no post-cast effect delay, no projectile skills in this game is stage 1. Stage 2 is increasing the cast-times of many skills across the board and transforming many skills into longer channeled versions of themselves.

Your goal by introducing cast-bars into the game is to somehow bring some order out of the mayhem that is spamcombat in this game. The only way to bring order out of spamcombat is to actually recreate the skills that cause spamcombat rather than just tell somebody that those skills are happening.

Divinity.8041:

Vargamonth.2047:

Animation tell system works fine.

orly

/15char

I said it works fine as long as the game is properly designed for that, which currently is not the case.

Warrior hammer is an example of a well animated weapon. Every attack has a fairly distinct animation and adds next to zero clutter to the fight.
Then we have lets say a Nade/Bomb engineer whose animations (even on autos) are way too flashy in the bad way (upon detonation, so when the chance to react to them is already gone), hard to identify (grenades can only be distinguished during flight time, and even then, sharpnel one is easily missed as a regular auto) and lay a lot of red circles and pulsing fields on the ground.

I honestly don’t know what cast bars are meant to solve.
With most skills having cast times under the second mark, bars should probably be paired with skill icons for a fast information delivery, and that’s exactly what an animation based system tries to accomplish: provide information by visual clues.

Once the clutter is gone and animations are made clear and distingishable from each other, there’s only one big difference left between this system and cast bars.
A displayed icon grants full cast time to react, while an animation requires, by its very nature, part of it to take place before it can be identified.
The undeniable fact that, for a given cast time, reacting to an icon will always be easier than to an animation doesn’t, however, make cast bars a better option; it just changes the game completely (may be for good, it’s just a matter of taste. I would prefer a raw increase on animation times, which would achieve the same while also reducing a little bit the pace of the game).

In any case, teamfights will always be a mess.
Right now it’s hard to understand what’s going on. It would be pretty much the same with cast bars, where we would have, idk, lets say 5-6 icons popping here and there every single second.
That’s not really a telegraph issue, it’s more the result of combining fast pace and a spammy gameplay caused by low cooldowns + weapon swap, quite powerful autoattacks and, specially, the lack of energy.

Cast bars don’t register as an issue. Despite the unfamiliarity I sometimes feel when I log in.

With so few skill shots a lot of defense is put on available skills over positioning bar los. That’s fine because this is an MMO however Gw2 feels fairly extreme between offense and defense for a game where so much attacks are “guaranteed” with a target. Gw2 has quite the amount of invisible offenses as well via crit procs. The camera and I sometimes dont get along and there’s moments of time where you just twiddle your thumb on a node waiting for it to cap as your character stands on it as you watch the bar fill.

Run into two mesmers and while picking out the behaviours of a person are fine I have to tab/click through AI crap and hope none of the crap takes priority over what I actually want to select. Then deal with retargetting pains of stealth. When truthfully I wish the manual aim wasn’t balls so I could ignore most of this targeting crap from the get go and just put my arrow in his head.

When you want to try something and see your doing no damage through healing signet and there will never be that interrupt opportunity on the heal so you just straight have to throw in more and more damage on your profession of choice to stay relevant to a constant threat. Game of extremes.

Trying to predict instant abilities especially instant CC. Dont even know where cats bars become relevant to that.
Having to deal with node large aoes in this capture point format serving to frustrate. Spam dodge and I mean from more than thieves making the idea of punishment in general a crap shoot outside of CC given there is a sigil rune and traits to throw off any initial sense of depletion on that resource.

I’ve probably made a ton of run on sentences but when I think of gw2 and issues cast bars probably wouldn’t make a top 20 list. I wouldnt even call their absence an issue.

wouldnt solve 1/2 the problems, but a third maybe… definately a good idea.

All? no.
Some? Probably.

Jumper.9482:

Woah man that’s too massive a change.
I’d be able to see a Necromancer Doom a mile away!
Or an elementalist switching to Air burst or using Arcanes!

At least you could see which mark he has been used already, if you’ve dodge/block some of them. However, we all know that instant-casts are a bad design (atleast in the form of damage).

question:
what castbars should show?
Everything?
Heals?
All CC´s?
CC´s only with me as target?
Damage spells? on me or all?
wanna see only castbars from guy in my target or everyone around me?

what you guys think we would need and what would go to far?^^

edit: made a screen and used paint to show how i think it would be cool^^
http://s1.directupload.net/images/140106/zb7dl97n.jpg

top bar shows everything my target casts and bottom bar shows only some important spells around me (maby 1200 radius?) i should care about but cant see
and i dont think this would clutter the screen

I understand the need for an “Oh please this will solve everything” concept, but this is far from that. Adding a castbar won’t really help much, right now we’re scanning for animations (which has issues) but adding castbars would have that shift to castbar icons? This won’t add meaningful play since most skills have a really short casttimes regardless.
Most casts are so fast that from an 1 on 1 perspective different animations will actually be more distinguishable than a 0,5 sec castbar with a small vague icon next to it.
Castbars above enemy heads would make things slightly easier in clusterducks, but I doubt it will allow for much more meaningful play. There’s five people spamming at each other but you’ll dodge the 0,75sec necro fear mark? Questionable. Would this create for a less chaotic situation? I highly doubt it, if anything you just added a load of bars floating around. Picture it: a spirit ranger running around spamming uninterruptable evade skills (with castbar?) while his spirits have castbars popping up above them when activating their skills. Wouldn’t this just give you a load of random bars popping up all around you? I have no trouble keeping an eye on that res spirit animation right now, I can’t imagine having bars everywhere would help me to interrupt that one (it will make it far easier to dodge the other spirit skills naturally).

Don’t get me wrong, I definitely think the current system has flaws, but I don’t think castbars are the solution, I think they will change too much for too little. As long as skill balance account for some skills being hard to track this entire topic would be rather unimportant.

As for the speed of combat discussion…. matter of preference, there are plenty of popular games that are fast paced and animation based, fighting games and (fast-paced) shooters are based on these principles. That said, fast paced games will never attract the biggest crowd since it’s simply more demanding for players and not everything is willing to play the game that way. Slowing the game is out of the question as you’d move closer to the competition and in this day and age that’s really not the soundest strategy.

KrisHQ.4719:

I don’t think it would.
A larger fight would be a cast-bar clusterkitten. Everything is either instantcast or with ~1 second cast-time, interrupting would still be impossible. This would be fine in duels, but that’s it.

Poor clusterkittens.

look: cast time bars from 2008! (rawr-KMD)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFWvdyCk1Uo

Instead of going forward we go back in time, literally…

I’d love to see cast bars implemented into this game.

I am serious, this is much easier than implementing NEW animations for characters which is much harder to do imo. All you do is create a box that is visible to other people that let’s them know wtf is going on.

This would add so much counterplay, and actually make interrupts useful in this game.

Think about how much this game would change if interrupts worked like they did in WoW.

The best moments in my WoW arena experience were spell locking (an interrupt which “silences” them, disabling them from casting) pallies/priests/shamans during their heal, just to interrupt them, and lock them out of casting again for 3-4 seconds, which means gg to their partner in 2v2.

Plays like what I just described are what makes the reward so fulfilling! Interrupts in this game are just kitten at the moment, and this would literally change the game sooo much for the better.

oh asp..that’s my boy. i love him. anyways…oh gw1 and those clutch plays. oh the memories. this video brings me…but still nothing on the match where tommy the best monk ever wins gw1 with rof.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

nah it is fine the way it is now.
i dun want to be staring at casting bars.
besides, most skills activate quite fast anyway.

a casting bar would add more clutter.
might takes away the suspense and mystery, randomness etc.

I’m with Deimos it takes away the mystery. Think of yourself in a brawl. You don’t know whether the other guy is going to kick, hit, charge, etc except for what you can see. If you make the wrong choice to defend well then you reap the consequences.

This game has relatively fluid battles, why cheapen the risk/reward of making choices?

Well, there is also the Dragon Age system:

when you use a skill, the name pops over the head for an istant.

Just don’t pop autoattacks’ names.

The animations are pretty awful and close to unreadable even without all of the ai spam and effect clutter. Adding in cast bars and a fading used ability log for your current target would definitely make things easier to follow while opening up a lot of counterplay and strategic shutdown opportunities. God knows this game needs more depth and less flashy, gimmicky bullkitten,