Guild Wars 2

I’ve been running into this a lot lately, mostly on my mesmer, mostly while using attack 1 on the great sword. When I try to attack small creatures, mostly rabbits and such, there is a very good chance that I will get an obstructed notice instead of doing damage, no matter what range I am at or the angle I’m attacking from. I’ve mostly noticed it in Kryta, but I can’t rule out other lands.

From the same spot, if I switch to a one handed sword, I’m able to immediately kill the creature.

In the attached pictures I’m circling the vicious creature. They were just taken really close together, as I was trying to keep other players out of the screen shot.

You need to be in a plain surface (either leveled or higher than the enemy if it’s a slope) and facing it in order to #1 to work for sure.
That’s Arenanet’s way to say you should use staff. GS has been secretly nerfed, borked and bugged to a point it’s unviable. The only reason it’s still there it’s because it’s cool, so people keep paying for GS related stuff.

The serious issue of ranged attacks (especially mesmer Greatsword attacks) seemingly locking onto an area of the ‘hitbox’ of creatures that is below the surface (resulting in obstructed messages) has been brought to ArenaNet’s attention several times since the game went live (and I believe also during beta). ArenaNet chose to not only not fix the issue, but chose to not even acknowledge its existence or give any response regarding the issue at all.

Maybe they finally will to your reporting of the issue. Here’s to hoping.

In addition, they’ve also not fixed (nor acknowledged, I believe) the ‘line of sight’ issue for rifle and arrow shots from Rangers (though not sure about it existing for non-pet classes):
When the pet is positioned directly between the ranger and the target being fired upon, even though the projectile is seen to go far above the pet and actually strike the target, we are given a mixture of the ‘obstructed’ and ‘out of range’ error messages (even if the target is only feet away) due to the pet seemingly blocking the shot that actually went above its head.

This behavior as noted by others above with the LOS issues in the game currently is also easily noticed when you use the Toy Soldier tonic. Try and launch fireworks (quick shot 1 or aimed shot 2) over people. The skill animation and ranged use always ends at the first character or object within the LOS. For ranged attacks, the LOS in the game is awful.