Guild Wars 2

It’s always been the case that the Autotargeting setting (F11 options) has been attached, pretty much, to EVERY skill whether it makes sense or not: Retreat, Drop Antidote, Summon Minion, everything. And it would cause you to autotarget then initiate an attack if your currently wielded weapon’s #1 skill was within range.

I’ve advocated this be changed to only do what it says, which is to Auto-TARGET, and leave the attacking up to me to initiate. In other words, if I hit a weapon skill or a target-requiring offensive skill and I don’t yet have a target, it should pick the nearest target for me and g’head and attack. With any other skill—barring logical exceptions I can’t think of—it should not be targeting anything at all, much less going above and beyond its purpose and attacking that target.

I’ve made this desire known to ANet in a few ways, but it never got changed, so yay.

As of today’s patch this rebellious behavior is even more of a problem because now when I hit F3 to call my pet back to me while I have Autotargeting toggled on (as I usually do), it targets something and causes me to begin attacking it because I usually have a bow readied.

I use F1/F3 CONSTANTLY to manage my pet, so I know full well this was not the case prior to this mega-patch. Personally, I have issues with not having Autotargeting on due to the difficulties of click-targeting, so I can’t see myself not using it. And I can’t be attacking stuff willy-nilly with skills and now pet commands whose primary purpose is not offensive.

Furthermore, I notice that when I hit F1, my pet will go and attack the nearest target even if I don’t already have one selected. That is to say, it performs “Attack My Target” even if there is no “My Target” to attack. This may have been in place all along and I never noticed it, but it makes no sense either way.

Stuff is just getting messier and messier as things progress, and now my favored Ranger class has become a nuisance despite some welcome improvements.

Please fix this. Please detach all non-attack, non-target-requiring skills from the Autotargeting setting. It is incorrect implementation and causes unwanted side effects in its current form.

Addition: Forgot to mention that this F3 autotarget->autoattack business and the F1 issue only occur when I hit F1/F3 on my keyboard; it doesn’t happen when I click the option(s) on my pet skill bar. Not going to guess why.