Guild Wars 2

While holding down the right mouse button to turn our character with the mouse (which is how most experienced players tend to play MMOs), the mouse cursor (correctly) disappears, but ground-targeted spells still use the (now invisible) mouse cursor location as their target.

This is made even worse if players enable fast-cast ground targeting (which, again, most experienced players do), because we have no indication of where the spell will be cast until it’s actually cast.

The “correct” behaviour (i.e., the behaviour most players prefer, and which virtually every other game uses) is that, when the game is in “mouse look” mode (mouse controlling the camera / character orientation), spells should be aimed at the location the camera is pointing at (i.e., roughly at the middle of the screen, slightly above our character). This lets players control the direction and distance easily, by moving the mouse horizontally and / or vertically.

In addition, it would be nice if there was some sort of (small, unobtrusive, optional) crosshairs at that screen location, to make aiming more precise.

There are many other issues with the camera (no FoV control, no height control, laggy smoothing, no way to be in permanent mouse look mode – which essentially forces players to hold down the RMB for most of their pay time, etc.) , but I think this one would be very easy to fix, and would make a huge difference to the usability of ground-targeted spells.

TL;DR: When the mouse button is held down (to control the camera directly), ground-targeted spells should respect the camera aim, and not get cast on the location of the (invisible) mouse cursor.

The current behaviour is non-standard and almost certainly not intended (I think it was introduced at some point around BWE3 when some other bugs with ground targeting were fixed), so I believe this is a UI / control bug.

It would be better if the mouse wouldn’t disappear with FCGT on. Or just have a option “Always show cursor” and “Make cursor highly visible” would be nice too, maybe hot pink or even white? Sometimes I have to search my screen for a few seconds before I can find it.

Also, show the ground target when you try to use the skill out of it’s range so we know what that range is. It’s a pain trying to guess where the max range is, although I seem to be getting better at it.

Another thing, what happened to the white rings for AOE skills. I end up missing a number of AOEs because I’m not sure where the edge is.

Azula.7012:

Also, show the ground target when you try to use the skill out of it’s range so we know what that range is. It’s a pain trying to guess where the max range is

Or just add an option to “cast at maximum range” (in that direction) if the cursor is out of range. But anyway, that’s a separate suggestion.

I also agree about the cursor visibility. A shaded yellow cursor over a yellow landscape full of flashing spell effects is not exactly good UI design. It’s another instance of GW2’s UI designers going for “pretty” instead of functional.

Frequently I have to spend two seconds in the middle of a fight just looking for my cursor. If the game would simply aim ground-targeted spells at the middle of the screen (camera aim) as suggested above (and like every other game does), I could simply press the right mouse button (I keep it held down for 90% of the time, anyway) and know where my spell was going to be cast.