Hello!
As with many, I am super excited for Firebrand to come out. It may actually make a support Guardian viable!
However there is one issue I wanted to bring up, since I hadn’t seen it be mentioned anywhere else, and it has to do with the targeting of the mantra skills.
I play primarily with the action camera on, but I even turned it off for a while and still ran into the same problem, even with action camera off.
The problem is this: The cone AoEs for mantras always emit from your character’s facing, not your camera’s facing.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Action Camera allows you to simply point and aim with your skills, giving the game a very similar feel to Smite, or akin to over the shoulder shooters. However, when using this mode, you can keep your camera pointed in one direction, and your character will change their facing to whatever direction they are moving. This is great since characters move slower when strafing, and especially when backpedaling. this allows me to keep my camera on the action, while retreating from it or strafing past it, and I don’t have to worry about slowing myself since my character is always running forward.
As you can see, however, this causes a problem with mantras. I can have my Camera reticle on someone’s face and fire off a mantra, but the cone of the mantra fires off in whatever direction I’m moving in, NOT toward the direction of my reticle. Essentially this means I have to be running DIRECTLY AT my target to be able to hit them with a mantra, I can’t just be strafing past.
The way I see it, there are 3 ways to fix this problem,
1.) Chance Action Camera so that the character is always facing the same direction the camera is. This would basically mean that I would always have to be looking the way I’m moving or risk slowing myself down with backpedal penalties. This is the way Smite plays, so I’d be used to that, but the GW2 community at large may not like it.
2.) Probably the best solution, without altering the mantra effects to compensate, would be to simply add some programming to make your character face the same way the camera does just for a split second while activating the mantra. Alternatively, the mantra will always face the camera, meaning that the cone could originate from any side of the character, but the effect is always forward-facing. (That might mean my mantras come out of my butt. XD)
3.) Wooden Potatoes sugested that the mantras be changed to a small PBAoE instead of a cone. If that happened, facing would no longer matter. They’d basically be really short range shouts. The problem with this is how powerful the mantras really are. An in crease in AoE size may mean nerfs elsewhere. No nerfs please! I like being strong!
Anyhow. Some action needs to be taken because my ability to aim those cones was severely hampered by the character facing. It was a pain. Please make some changes to these awesome skills!
-Shadowshear
It was very jarring.