Guild Wars 2

Can anyone give me some basic tips for how to use portal effectively?
And tips for knowing when I’m out of the 5000 limit?
And tips for knowing how long you have left before you can use the portal exit?

I have just been randomly using it, but find that it is often wasted/tool late/out of range

Thank you

It’s approximately the range of a fully zoomed in minimap. It may help to place a waypoint when you drop it at first. You have 60s to drop the exit. If you aren’t going to use it and are out of combat, you can always swap to another skill before it expires to avoid the cooldown.

It’s one of those tools that takes a lot of practice to work with, but eventually you’ll learn where the good portal spots are on each map.

I use portal a lot for getting guildies and friends in and out of areas. CoF P1 for example to skip the rolling flame boulders is one example. Helping friends through jumping puzzles is another. Ensuring people can keep up in guild puzzles is yet another.

If you are looking for a combat use, I’ve played around with it for this use and not found a good practical combat purpose. Would love to see if anybody has any advice there.

Invictus.1503:

If you are looking for a combat use, I’ve played around with it for this use and not found a good practical combat purpose. Would love to see if anybody has any advice there.

I mainly play WvW where portal definitely has combat uses. It’s arguably the best escape tool in the game and gives you a safety net in outnumbered engagements while roaming. With a good commander and voice comms, you can also use it to open up great flanking opportunities in larger scale fights (note: you’ll need to coordinate multiple portals if your group is larger than 20).

I usually count in my head to gauge portal range. I use travelers’ runes in wvw and can count to about 12 (straight line) before I’m out of range. Turning, Swiftness, and blinking will of course alter your count. As others have said, you’ll get a feel for range as you practice more.

As far as time until exit, I use either a skill cool down timer (mass invis), or the countdown clock for ppt (wvw). If you get in the habit of glancing at either of those when you lay the entrance down, you’ll have a good guess of when you have to use the exit.

Mezz Murr.2648:

I usually count in my head to gauge portal range. I use travelers’ runes in wvw and can count to about 12 (straight line) before I’m out of range. Turning, Swiftness, and blinking will of course alter your count. As others have said, you’ll get a feel for range as you practice more.

As far as time until exit, I use either a skill cool down timer (mass invis), or the countdown clock for ppt (wvw). If you get in the habit of glancing at either of those when you lay the entrance down, you’ll have a good guess of when you have to use the exit.

To expand on this:
Standard movement speed is 294 units/second. With swiftness it’s 391 u/s. Thus, to reach a range of 5000 you need to run for 5000/391 = 12.8 seconds. Make it 12 to be on the safe side. You can cut this to 10.5s if you blink at 900 range, or 9.7s if you blink at 1200 range.

Timing can be useful but I find it easiest by far to gauge distance with the mini-map. Zoom all the way in, put a personal waypoint where you place your portal, allow the mini-map to rotate and move until the waypoint is at the edge.

Thanks for all the tips so far
But I completely forgot to say that this was for PvP, I rarely do WvW or PvE.

The trick that i’ve always used was to zoom in on my mini map, as far as I could zoom.

The portal length is just slightly under the width of the map with it at max size, zoomed in.

In both WvW and sPvP you can use the match timer or tick timer at the top of the map.

Hamster.4861:

The portal length is just slightly under the width of the map with it at max size, zoomed in.

Opposite. The radius is slightly larger than the width but is slightly less that the corner points.