Guild Wars 2

The philosophy of GW1 – and as far as I remember also GW2 – was to make effects in battle visible. This was very well done in GW1. I remember that after some practice, I had no issue figuring out what the visual effects of a cast or boon indicated.

However, in GW2 this visualization has gone over board, especially in zerg fights. Combo fields and explosions left and right. It lost any meaning. Rarely can you identify a single effect. It was important for the developers, if my memory doesn’t fool me, that you are not supposed to watch health indicators and little signs but can focus on the actual battle (one reason they removed concepts like skill targeting friendly players).

However, lately I have started to be really annoyed with invulnerability skills. Many don’t really have an indication except for a little sign on a bar with way too many sings already and the fact that it says “invul” or dmg “0”. Both of which become increasingly unnoticeable with an increasing number of players involved in the fight.

When a player has chaos armor, an armor that got nerfed into the ground, everyone sees it clearly. The same with an elementalist going into vapor/mist form, Guardian focus block, or even the shield of warriors or the tool kit thingy from engies (at least that works well in small scale fights). You can also easily identify a warrior that rallied himself with his down skills. But that ranger signet, that offers invulnerability, or the warrior stances, that do the same for condition/direct dmg don’t. And especially in WvW, where the icon bar is often full with little signs, I have sometimes issues realizing that I can’t touch that dude atm.

Other players have those issues with confusion and retaliation, especially in zerg fights. I mean figuring out, that you have a certain effect on you, is often not that big of an issue. But the more people are involved in a fight, the trickier it gets. Especially boons like retaliation, protection and stability are hard to see in big fights (unless you check all the opponents icon bars).

I wish there was a clear indicator (that stands out from the other effects, which could anyway be tuned down a notch) for such significant boons/buffs/skills, so that you don’t have to circle through your targets to find out about them and they don’t get lost in the see of icons they have in their icon bar already.

TyPin.9860:

However, in GW2 this visualization has gone over board, especially in zerg fights.

Game is designed for PvP, 5v5 not 60 vs 60 blobs, many aspects not just visualisations are broken in zerg fights – damaging condies being useless due to endless condie cleanse / AOE healing, a melee ball of guards / warriors that have perma boons and in particular stability up the majority of the time (covered by at least 4 boons) which renders what is supposed to be one of the most powerful things in PvP – hard CC a joke, numerous skills and weapons that are simply useless in zergs, because they were designed for small scale fights, and so on.

They can’t fix visualisation or anything else for zergs, they’d need to redesign the game and base it on mass scale PvP, that isn’t going to happen.

Just an example: Engi granades and D/D Ele on cap point… Still explosions left and right and over all just chaos^^ At least that is my impression^^

But I think that still some things could be done for WvW. First the number of billions of icons from certain banners and food buffs are kitten annoying. Why do I care that this dude has increased magic find and karma gain and what not? And tuning down explosions a bit for the sake of a shiny effect above a character to indicate boons like retaliation or stability would be very welcome… by me at least^^