Guild Wars 2

You’re right I DO want to target the 4+ minions/spirits before the player that summoned them. I want to target that Flesh Golem, not the charr i selected WITH my very mouse-click. I want to target the turrets that are absolutely far away over the engineer right NEXT to me. Hell let’s even target the sharks before actual players and call it

ESPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORTS

.__.

its truly horrific that ranger, necro, mesmer combat evasion mechanics based on you cant target the KITTEN player..

Perhaps a bit of constructivism would help this thread.

The minions, pets, spirits, even clones and phantasms are a very irritating issue in targeting. Perhaps it would be good to add a functionality to auto-targeting that would prioritize Players over NPC’s. It could be a simple toggle in the options or even the default functionality of auto-targeting and would take relatively little coding (since it would just be some kind of a Switch() or an If() added on to the existing auto-target code).

How would other players feel about adding this kind of a quality of life improvement for newer players? As far as I know most dedicated tPvP players don’t use auto-target anyway, so I don’t think it would bother them much.

Agreed.
There should also be an auto-reacquire function for stealth target drop.

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

Perhaps a bit of constructivism would help this thread.

The minions, pets, spirits, even clones and phantasms are a very irritating issue in targeting. Perhaps it would be good to add a functionality to auto-targeting that would prioritize Players over NPC’s. It could be a simple toggle in the options or even the default functionality of auto-targeting and would take relatively little coding (since it would just be some kind of a Switch() or an If() added on to the existing auto-target code).

How would other players feel about adding this kind of a quality of life improvement for newer players? As far as I know most dedicated tPvP players don’t use auto-target anyway, so I don’t think it would bother them much.

I’d be in favour of them making it easier to mouse-target specific targets when things are stacked or really close together, but prioritizing players over pets for auto-target or tab targeting would kind of screw up the whole Mesmer clone thing. The idea is for you to not know immediately which one is the player. And having the player prioritized in targeting would make it a little too simple… no? o;

Also,
The difficulty in coding such a feature lies heavily in how their classes for Pets/NPCs and players are set up already. The algorithm for prioritizing players would have to be client side (Having the server decide who you target would be ridiculous), which means that the client would also have to know who’s a Pet/NPC enemy and who’s a player enemy, which is not necessarily the way it’s set up. (Having the client see all enemies as equal would be a good way to prevent hacking the client to auto-target the real mesmer, for example)
That’s just a brief, not-thought-out theory though.

@OP someone from anet already commented that theyre looking into this

There was already a thread with several Dev posts about targetting, go there.

Game needs more pets. Warrior has none…engineer’s turrets cant move. We NEED more pets!

Warrior banners should be pets that fly around in small miniature carpets body blocking attacks

You haven’t played againsta a team of 5 minion necros. I did. That was horrific.

Yes, this game has the most kittened tabbing and targeting logic I have ever seen.

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

Perhaps a bit of constructivism would help this thread.

The minions, pets, spirits, even clones and phantasms are a very irritating issue in targeting. Perhaps it would be good to add a functionality to auto-targeting that would prioritize Players over NPC’s. It could be a simple toggle in the options or even the default functionality of auto-targeting and would take relatively little coding (since it would just be some kind of a Switch() or an If() added on to the existing auto-target code).

How would other players feel about adding this kind of a quality of life improvement for newer players? As far as I know most dedicated tPvP players don’t use auto-target anyway, so I don’t think it would bother them much.

If there where such an option, what would be the use of mesmers? Since the clones are there to confuse the opponent.

EnRohbi.2187:

I’d be in favour of them making it easier to mouse-target specific targets when things are stacked or really close together, but prioritizing players over pets for auto-target or tab targeting would kind of screw up the whole Mesmer clone thing. The idea is for you to not know immediately which one is the player. And having the player prioritized in targeting would make it a little too simple… no? o;

Also,
The difficulty in coding such a feature lies heavily in how their classes for Pets/NPCs and players are set up already. The algorithm for prioritizing players would have to be client side (Having the server decide who you target would be ridiculous), which means that the client would also have to know who’s a Pet/NPC enemy and who’s a player enemy, which is not necessarily the way it’s set up. (Having the client see all enemies as equal would be a good way to prevent hacking the client to auto-target the real mesmer, for example)
That’s just a brief, not-thought-out theory though.

I don’t think it makes the Mesmer clones too easy, the value of clones in higher level play is in the bodyblocking far moreso than the target avoidance aspect. Skilled players are able to identify the Mesmer very quickly anyway (under 1s in just about all instances). This is more a quality of life improvement for the lower skill level players.

Wherever the current auto-target routine resides this would simply be integrated into that portion of the pre-existing code. I mostly agree with your assessment of the coding aspect, and I am a bit disappointed in my choice of words, because I obviously over simplified for the purpose of brevity. Presumably the client side already “knows” (or better put can tell on sight) which objects are NPCs by the way that they are constructed. My suggestion is based on that assumption (which may be bad speculation), but it seems a logical way to program it at any rate, and is at least a coin-flip chance at being accurate. I do not have enough knowledge of the GW2 code structure to make claims about hours of coding involved, but relative to re-writing the entire auto-target feature prioritizing Players over NPCs would take little time (that does not mean it would be an insignificant time investment).

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

EnRohbi.2187:

I’d be in favour of them making it easier to mouse-target specific targets when things are stacked or really close together, but prioritizing players over pets for auto-target or tab targeting would kind of screw up the whole Mesmer clone thing. The idea is for you to not know immediately which one is the player. And having the player prioritized in targeting would make it a little too simple… no? o;

Also,
The difficulty in coding such a feature lies heavily in how their classes for Pets/NPCs and players are set up already. The algorithm for prioritizing players would have to be client side (Having the server decide who you target would be ridiculous), which means that the client would also have to know who’s a Pet/NPC enemy and who’s a player enemy, which is not necessarily the way it’s set up. (Having the client see all enemies as equal would be a good way to prevent hacking the client to auto-target the real mesmer, for example)
That’s just a brief, not-thought-out theory though.

I don’t think it makes the Mesmer clones too easy, the value of clones in higher level play is in the bodyblocking far moreso than the target avoidance aspect. Skilled players are able to identify the Mesmer very quickly anyway (under 1s in just about all instances). This is more a quality of life improvement for the lower skill level players.

Wherever the current auto-target routine resides this would simply be integrated into that portion of the pre-existing code. I mostly agree with your assessment of the coding aspect, and I am a bit disappointed in my choice of words, because I obviously over simplified for the purpose of brevity. Presumably the client side already “knows” (or better put can tell on sight) which objects are NPCs by the way that they are constructed. My suggestion is based on that assumption (which may be bad speculation), but it seems a logical way to program it at any rate, and is at least a coin-flip chance at being accurate. I do not have enough knowledge of the GW2 code structure to make claims about hours of coding involved, but relative to re-writing the entire auto-target feature prioritizing Players over NPCs would take little time (that does not mean it would be an insignificant time investment).

While I do not intend to turn this into any sort of debate about how important clones really are to Mesmers, deciphering which is the real Mesmer is part of the combat against players. Yes, good players figure it out nearly instantly and that’s part of the reason they’re good players. That doesn’t mean the game should do all the work for them, and for all the less-good players too.

While I don’t think the tab-targeting priorities are perfect as they are, I don’t think a straight “Prioritize Players over NPCs” is a great fix either. Once they get mouse targeting sorted out, that should be the preferred way to select specific targets out of groups anyway. It’ll always be more accurate than scrolling through tab-targets.

If I recall, Guild Wars 1 also did this fairly well. Where when many players were stacked, it would display the nameplates of every player separately (Not overlapped) so you could click the target you wanted.

There seems to be a lot of little mechanics that were in GW1 that were fantastic that never made the transition.