Guild Wars 2

Recently, I have noticed a problem with the banner “pick up” mechanic. Sometimes it simply does not work: the player warrior summons the banner, but neither the summoning player (nor any other player) can interact with the banner. This is obviously a bug, but it got me thinking about some of the other issues with the banner’s pick up mechanic.

First, there is the issue of “banner theft” (i.e. when another player takes your banner without permission). I am sure that many times this is accidental, but there are times I suspect it is also trolling (especially in EotM). To be frank, the active banner skills themselves have very little utility; most players summon them because they spec for the party support that banners can grant from the area effects instead. Is there any good reason not to treat banners like turrets (i.e. only being movable by the summoner)?

Second, and I might just be seeing things here, it sometimes feels like the pick up for banners is itself a rather slow action. Sometimes I have to stop right on top of my banner and spam my “F” key until I finally pick up the banner. This could just be a connectivity issue, but it still seems rather slow and more than a tad inconvenient. I know that players have, in the past, asked for banners to be “equipped” when summoned and carried on the warrior’s back (or something like that). This would be a huge change in the mechanic, and I can see why it would not be feasible to implement. Would it be reasonable, however, to speed up the pick up of banners, or at least improve the responsiveness of interaction with them?

As hard as banners are to use effectively, there is a lot of utility to their skills if you really stay on it. The 2 skill does different things for each banner, but it’s generally something that’s worth pressing if you’re holding the thing anyway. 3, AoE swiftness, not much else to say about that. Great for walking yaks in WvW because if you have two people walking it they can alternate holding the banner for pretty much permaswiftness on the yak.

The 4 skill is a little dash, benefits to that are rather obvious, and the 5 skill is that all-important blast finisher.

Those are all useful things, provided you can manage to keep track of your banner, and have the positioning awareness to keep it where you can reach it.

I’ll grant you though, most people can’t.

And all of this they’ve known since release and it’s never changed. It doesn’t seem very likely that it will short of a major overhaul.

Maybe if the banner could be picked up and dropped, but also swapped in and out as the active weapon via F2 or something, but then stuff like that would have to be applied to everyone that has bundles, and at least one of them is already occupying F1-F4. New keybind for that? Iunno. Like I said, nothing short of a major overhaul will change this, and I doubt we’re seeing an overhaul any time this year or next.

I’d still rather see them being treated as a sashimono.