Guild Wars 2

The difficulty in manually click-targeting the mob you want to target has been mentioned (and discussed to death) in other threads. There is no doubt that targeting is unreliable, unpredictable and illogical the way it operates now.

Because manual “click to target” targeting is so dysfunctional, we are almost always forced to use tab targeting to try to select the target we want.

Unfortunately, tab targeting is broken in two ways:

1. Tabbing almost always cycles through every possible red and yellow entity (including inanimate yellow objects such as Supplies, Cannons, etc.) within 100 miles- ahead, behind, to the left and right… some so far away that they are not even visible. Out of incredulity, I recently ran around an entire Centaur Camp in Blazeridge trying to locate what my tabbing had targeted… I finally found a “Modniir Weapons Rack” object that had been completely out of sight, behind a tent, and far behind me when tabbing acquired it while I was fighting 4-5 Centaurs right in front of me. Tabbing even snags mobs that are far underwater while you are high on a cliff, etc. etc…. while at the same time somehow completely ignoring the gi-normous World Dragon 10 meters right the heck in front of you, so close it completely fills your screen! This is simply absurd.

I read in another thread that some players actually WANTED tab targeting to pick up mobs behind them- to which I would respectfully reply Why? Those mobs are not attackable until you more-or-less face them, at which point they will be in FRONT of you where tab-targeting should logically pick them up.

So I respectfully suggest that tab-targeting should pick up only attackable entities- this means in front of you and within range of your longest-range attack.

2. Tab targeting includes “yellow” mobs, who, 90% of the time, you really don’t want or need to attack, especially when there are 8-10 RED mobs in your face doing their best to remove your lips, ears and eyeballs. Tab targeting should NOT include “yellow” mobs, or, to accommodate those among us who want to kill everything on the map that can possibly be killed, there should be a toggle-checkbox in options that says “Include Yellow-Nameplate entities in tab targeting.”

Please fix tab-targeting so that it includes only in-range RED targets in a 60-degree cone in front of you rather than favoring distant yellow targets behind you.

Thanks-

Agreed, targeting sucks balls and really needs some love.

edit: Can’t believe that didn’t get censored.

Agreed. Please fix the absolutely horrible targeting!

They are too busy adding throw away content to be able to concentrate on something as trivial as a core game mechanic.

they have an option if in the setting that gives a target your moused over a red shaded boarder and npcs a green 1 but thats still not a really help when they get packed together.

They should have tab with a variety of setting. say 1 type being for dungeons which targets boss first, champions,then silver mobs, regular, ect ect. and let us pick 1. not this cycle through till you find the 1 your after.

The one I love is the target closed enemy and it targets the one 5 enemies back beyond the range of my attack and it wastes the attack….. speaking of which, along with targetting, give us an option of range shading on skills. Meaning if a target is out of range of an attack the skill will be shaded. Also if I’m fighting an enemy on say some stairs, and they’re below, targetted, can my attack actually be directed down instead of over their heads while they simply stand there and ankle attack me to death with blocking walls in place so I can’t get down to their level.

Lolyta.4582:

I read in another thread that some players actually WANTED tab targeting to pick up mobs behind them- to which I would respectfully reply Why? Those mobs are not attackable until you more-or-less face them, at which point they will be in FRONT of you where tab-targeting should logically pick them up.

I’ll gladly explain why.

While you are in combat, you will often need to reposition yourself, which means turning away from an enemy. Currently the game automatically deselects targets that are off screen, and you can’t select your closest target either. So if you are in a boss fight (like for example the end of the MF dungeon), and you have to move away from the boss, the boss is deselected again! Which is annoying as all hell!

Also, imagine an enemy is directly behind you, and hitting you. You want to select that enemy and attack him. Preferably you’d want to target him while you are turning around. But you can’t do that. And in GW1 you could! Its so much more convenient if you can just select any target that is close to you.

Being aware of a battle situation, means that you don’t have to do a full 360 camera pan in order to know where your enemies are. It is extremely helpful if you can select a target without pointing your camera at them first.

Even targeting with skills now just targets stuff that’s nowhere near me somehow the game thinks that’s the best thing to do. “Oh yeah don’t worry about the ten things right on top of you target that guy Waaaaaaaaay over there and start shooting! or better yet start swinging your melee kit at it and miss every guy attacking you right now! you’ll be fine!”

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Lolyta.4582:

I read in another thread that some players actually WANTED tab targeting to pick up mobs behind them- to which I would respectfully reply Why? Those mobs are not attackable until you more-or-less face them, at which point they will be in FRONT of you where tab-targeting should logically pick them up.

I’ll gladly explain why.

While you are in combat, you will often need to reposition yourself, which means turning away from an enemy. Currently the game automatically deselects targets that are off screen, and you can’t select your closest target either. So if you are in a boss fight (like for example the end of the MF dungeon), and you have to move away from the boss, the boss is deselected again! Which is annoying as all hell!

Also, imagine an enemy is directly behind you, and hitting you. You want to select that enemy and attack him. Preferably you’d want to target him while you are turning around. But you can’t do that. And in GW1 you could! Its so much more convenient if you can just select any target that is close to you.

Being aware of a battle situation, means that you don’t have to do a full 360 camera pan in order to know where your enemies are. It is extremely helpful if you can select a target without pointing your camera at them first.

This requires blissfully ignoring the enemies that are currently in front of you

The logic of “only target visible enemies actively engaged and within attack range” seems to be easier than the logic of “prioritize the enemy behind the player” (which is highly situational)

Because usually, you don’t moonwalk to cross the field

Either way, I think calculating the attack range could be more work. I propose that the TAB targeting system only chooses “Closest target that actively engages the player”, and never locks on a passive enemy.

Yesterday, I was doing arah path 3, and instead of targeting the Abomination that is factually huge that is swinging its club at me directly in front of me (we were stacking in the corner), the Truthfully Almost Broken Targeting System ™ chose a passive, docile, Risen elementalist that is farther away and was blissfully ignoring us.

I lost a bit of credibility over common sense.

Target Closest also suffers from the selects a neutral target before a hostile target problem, with the result that you end up aggravating more enemies than you can handle sometimes. Yellows should be like White targets, you should have to click on them (or throw an AOE attack in their area) to attack them. At the least as one suggested, it should be an OPTION to include Yellow/Neutral targets in the target selection system.

Daithic.6195:

Target Closest also suffers from the selects a neutral target before a hostile target problem, with the result that you end up aggravating more enemies than you can handle sometimes. Yellows should be like White targets, you should have to click on them (or throw an AOE attack in their area) to attack them. At the least as one suggested, it should be an OPTION to include Yellow/Neutral targets in the target selection system.

Which is why I explicitly state “that actively engages the player”

Yellow enemies are usually not a threat, why should the auto target which will be prone to auto-attack mishaps be able to target them is what I want to know from the devs

Raestloz.7134:

This requires blissfully ignoring the enemies that are currently in front of you

The logic of “only target visible enemies actively engaged and within attack range” seems to be easier than the logic of “prioritize the enemy behind the player” (which is highly situational)

Because usually, you don’t moonwalk to cross the field

I’m not saying enemies behind you should be prioritized. But if you are tabbing through nearest enemies, and there is a giant boss right behind you, certainly you should be able to target him, even if you are looking the other way.

Take for example the Claw of Jormag. You approach this enemy till he is in range, but whenever he does his breath weapon you want to move away from him, and then he is automatically deselected. See how annoying that is?

GW2’s camera allows you to easily sweep around you despite the facing of your character, and your facing can be changed at the touch of a button. Which is why it shouldn’t make any difference if an enemy is behind you, or just to the side. You should be able to select them all.

But obviously there should be an order of priorities. Giant bosses should have priority over normal targets. Targets close to you should have priority over far away targets, and targets in front of you, should have priority over targets behind you. But if I flee an enemy, and then want to select him while running away, that should be possible. And I don’t think neutral targets should ever be selected at all… and definitely not npc’s, unless you click on them directly.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Currently the game automatically deselects targets that are off screen

Only happen if you have unchecked the “promote skill target” option.

What that one do is deselect a target that was selected via it being hit with a targetable skill, when said target finds itself outside your front arc.

You can test this on the LA dummies. Line one up with a ranged attack, but do not select it via mouse or tab. Start attacking with whatever autoattack you have, and start turning the camera to either side. The dummy do not even have to leave camera view to be deselected.

You’d think someone at anet was competent with UI stuff and tab-targeting. Sadly, no one is. It feels like they got a first year CS grad to do both.

FINALLY someone posted on this. Yes, the targeting system needs serious work. Sometimes Im trying to select a monster right in front of me, but instead it SELECTS a crate below my character on a floor below!

If they can improve the “About Face” function work snappier that would be great too, sometimes I have to click the button like 6 times before my camera turns around.

And lets not even get to the camera, it zooms in and out constantly by itself when Im close to an object, making JP frustrating as heck.

Since my OP I have been playing my Necro using a staff. The Necro staff has 4 ground-targeted abilities, which require that you press or click the ability button (2, 3, 4 or 5), move your mouse cursor to the target area, then CLICK in that spot to “fire” the ability.

Guess what? In a furball fight (like any of the Southsun events) where there is one main mob (for example, a Champ Karka) along with numerous melee players and hostile + neutral adds all clustered up at the boss’s location, when you CLICK on the area where you want your GT spell to land, you almost invariably deselect the boss and select some random close-by target including other players! This completely stops any and all targeted attacks, and requires that you spend half the fight tabbing through seemingly hundreds of hostile and neutral mobs, in all directions from you and at all distances from you.

So it’s even worse than I realized when I made my original post. Please, Anet, in addition to fixing Tab-Targeting to prioritize attackable hostile mobs in front of you, put in some kind of target-lock that requires a deliberate action by the player (an action that is NOT related to firing off a ground-targeted ability) to de-select that target.

Please. Thanks.

I hope this gets bumped up to the top of the priority list. I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t one of the first things fixed.

I’ve wondered why I have trouble targeting at times. I tend to use FT on my eng though so it isn’t as bad for me in most PvE situations. In WvW though, it makes fights with mesmers very hard for me to win. Auto-attack seems to only target their clones, and the actual mesmer is usually moving around, making them hard to click on. Using FT doesn’t seem to help either. I’m bad at fighting other ppl though so my issue may be a lack of skill rather than targeting.

Dodforer.2470:

[…]give us an option of range shading on skills. Meaning if a target is out of range of an attack the skill will be shaded. Also if I’m fighting an enemy on say some stairs, and they’re below, targetted, can my attack actually be directed down instead of over their heads while they simply stand there and ankle attack me to death with blocking walls in place so I can’t get down to their level.

This seems to me to be a separate-but-related issue from the tab-targeting issues I raised, but I wholeheartedly agree with you!

To me, the ideal fix would be that abilites are shaded for both Range- and Line-of-Sight issues ***AND*** the abilities simply shouldn’t fire if the target is unattackable due to range or LOS issues. The problem with just shading is that it causes us to spend half our time looking at our abilities bar instead of watching the fight. There is no excuse for wasted attacks and cooldowns, but as you posted, the game forces us to waste attacks all the time.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Lolyta.4582:

I read in another thread that some players actually WANTED tab targeting to pick up mobs behind them- to which I would respectfully reply Why? Those mobs are not attackable until you more-or-less face them, at which point they will be in FRONT of you where tab-targeting should logically pick them up.

I’ll gladly explain why.

While you are in combat, you will often need to reposition yourself, which means turning away from an enemy. Currently the game automatically deselects targets that are off screen, and you can’t select your closest target either. So if you are in a boss fight (like for example the end of the MF dungeon), and you have to move away from the boss, the boss is deselected again! Which is annoying as all hell!

Also, imagine an enemy is directly behind you, and hitting you. You want to select that enemy and attack him. Preferably you’d want to target him while you are turning around. But you can’t do that. And in GW1 you could! Its so much more convenient if you can just select any target that is close to you.

Being aware of a battle situation, means that you don’t have to do a full 360 camera pan in order to know where your enemies are. It is extremely helpful if you can select a target without pointing your camera at them first.

it’s even worse when you play a GS warrior, plenty of times the enemy somehow ends up behind you which also de-selects the enemy.
in a big enough fight de-selecting an enemy is the worst thing that can happen, especially against champions.

Really need to have yellows only clickable to target. It’s bad enough in regular fights targeting some random yellow. In the Southsun instigator fights I run up then go tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, …….. until I FINALLY get to the red target that I want to hit, I tried clicking on the red target but there were too any other players and yellows to do so.

Astral Projections.7320:

Really need to have yellows only clickable to target. It’s bad enough in regular fights targeting some random yellow. In the Southsun instigator fights I run up then go tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, …….. until I FINALLY get to the red target that I want to hit, I tried clicking on the red target but there were too any other players and yellows to do so.

This ^^^^ say’s it all.

Really the targetting selects a yellow non-threatening target instead of the mob (Red target) that’s trying to rip your face off !!! Get out of here.

The targetting system is a disaster.

“Guess what? In a furball fight (like any of the Southsun events) where there is one main mob (for example, a Champ Karka) along with numerous melee players and hostile + neutral adds all clustered up at the boss’s location, when you CLICK on the area where you want your GT spell to land, you almost invariably deselect the boss and select some random close-by target including other players! "

I think the fast ground targeting option will solve that for you.

As well the tab problems, the option to automatically find targets when using an attack skill is peculiar. This doesn’t seem to follow any sensible rule and can pick a target out of range or behind you when there’s a mob in plain sight in front of you nearby.

Funny thread,i think its like the 1000th time ive seen it,suggested myself aswell..Months and months and months ago…still collecting dust somehwere or dying from old age…Goodluck with this one !