Guild Wars 2

The “ability-queue” is a mechanism in the user-interface that lets you press a button for the next ability you want to use, before the current ability has finished. This can be convenient when you deal with larger delays (“high ping”). However, for the Thief class this technology is counter-productive. And it can be really irritating. I want it fixed.

There are 2 main differences between the Thief class and other classes.
1) Thieves have initiative.
2) Thieves have stealth.

Both these 2 mechanisms don’t work well with the ability-queue.
Let me explain 2 things that can go wrong.

a) You press Heartseeker to leap to an enemy. For some reason, you either: press the 2-button twice quickly, or: you keep the 2-button pressed a bit too long. The game registers the 2-button pressed twice, very fast. It executes the first Heartseeker. And puts the 2nd button-press in the ability-queue. As soon as you finish the first Heartseeker, a 2nd one immediatly starts.

This was unintended. You wasted initiative. If the mob has just died on the first HS, then the 2nd HS will make you leap somewhere random. A similar problem happens with Disabling Shot, and any other ability with a low initiative cost.

b) You go into stealth. E.g. because you pressed “Cloak&Dagger”. For some reason, the game immediately makes you do another ability. Attack the target, and breaks your stealth. In theory it must have been that you pressed 5 (C&D) twice. But it feels like my auto-attack kept going. Open on a mob, hammer 1 a few times, wait a sec, press 5 once, go stealth, and then it seems like auto-attack keeps going. (Need to check my logs). You broke your stealth before you could move to the back of the target and do a BackStab.

I experience these issues all the time. Even when I try to be careful. When googling, I quickly found other Thieves with the same experience and opinion as me.

Now you could tell me that I should be more careful when pressing buttons. But this is a videogame. A hectic videogame. You’re supposed to mash buttons a bit. In all other MMOs I’ve played, this was never a problem. Why in GW2 ? Also, GW2 is played over a network, and delays and timing will always be an issue. The game should help the user here, not act against him. I feel like I have to play as if I am handling eggs. Not fun.

There must be easy solutions to solve these irritating inconveniences.
Here are 2 suggestions:

1) Implement some sort of Global CoolDown (GCD). Make it a short one (maybe 1 second only, or half a second). If other classes don’t want a GCD, make it for Thieves only. Or even better, make it a cooldown registering button presses of the same button within the cooldown period. So you can’t press 2-2-2-2 in one second. But you can press 2-5-1 in one second. If some Thieves don’t like it, make it configurable in the options.

2) When a Thief goes into stealth, do not only switch off auto-attack, but also empty the ability-queue. So that a Thief absolutely stops with everything when he goes into stealth.

With these 2 (small) changes, the Thief class will be a bit more fun to play.

The easiest solution is to just enable the ability to turn down, or turn off, the ability queue. No need to over think it with GCD’s and stealth mechanics.

This is mostly a problem for me when I get a slight bit of lag, which happens here and there. I’ll press a button, nothing will happen, I’ll press it again, and suddenly the first heartseeker finally decides to work and kills my target while the second also decides to work and send me off a cliff.

elithrar.7143:

The easiest solution is to just enable the ability to turn down, or turn off, the ability queue.

That is exactly the 2nd part of my suggestions. So you won’t break stealth.

However, that doesn’t fix the problem when you press a key twice by mistake, and execute the same ability twice. Suppose you want to press 1 (start attack), and then press 3 (shortbow: leap back). People with “high ping” want some sort of ability-queue. Because with a ping of 200 ms, if they press the 3-button too quickly (within 200ms + responsetime of the server), their button-press is rejected. The ability-queue in itself is good and useful. It’s just that if abilities have no cooldown (as with the Thieves class), then pressing the same button twice becomes a problem.

Hehe yeah that double heartseeker really is annoying. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve jumped down the hills, bridges, towers, piers etc because of that..