Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if anyone else has this issue as well, but I’ve found one of the most annoying things about the gameplay in PvE is the lack of a maintained target. This never happened in GW1 because the target you chose you never lost sight of, the AI made sure of that.

What I mean by a maintained target: the target will either be lost in battle or shift to another random target depending on where the character is facing. Even if I click on the target to maintain it, it’s not guaranteed to hold.

Some of the best examples of this are in meta events. The Shatterer is one, in fact any dragon really, but probably the best one is the Inquest Golem Mark II meta. People will stand right at the base of the target enemy (the golem) and the target won’t maintain for more than about 10 seconds before it’s lost to something else. I’ll be at the base of this target all the time and there will be nothing anywhere closer to me than this target, but for some reason even hitting C (for closest target) won’t always work.

Is there anything effective to prevent this from happening? I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed it and there’s probably similar threads around but this is being rather specific.

You are, in fact, very much NOT the first person to notice this. It’s a major bug that’s been discussed ad nauseam since the game launched, but it’s still “low priority” to the development team. You can read more about it here for a lengthy discussion, here for one of the proposed solutions, here for a developer response, here for a Reddit discussion, and in so many other places I couldn’t begin to list them all.

I don’t mean to suggest that you should have known about this; quite the contrary, this has received so little attention from the ArenaNet team that it’s understandable that one could be unaware of the fervor with which this topic has been discussed.

Many of us are more than a little bit irritated that a significant number of people (I have no idea how many, though I suspect there are many who don’t realize what’s causing their target loss) have seen an issue with what appears to be a glaring design flaw, and yet the developers don’t seem to notice.
They’re very busy people, I know, but this issue has been an immense pain in the neck for far longer than we ever expected. I’ve heard that there are some people who don’t actually have this problem, and I guess the developers are included in that group.

Otherwise, surely someone would have realized how incredibly frustrating it is to lose your target constantly in a game that can essentially be summarized as “use skills on your target.”

Thanks for the reply, and for the links.

The only thing I can really add to this is that the dev’s will always be oblivious to this flaw because they spend more time working with people in teams on their test-beds than they do in the live MMO, and this is by far not the only flaw to occur because of said behaviour.

I firmly believe they need to spend more time in the game to realise what’s going on first-hand to get accurate accounts of what people are so frustrated about.