I’ve been playing GW2 HoT for the past two months now, hit 80 on two characters, done several dungeons, world bosses, and have ~50% map completion at this point. Having come from playing many other MMORPGs (EQ, EQ2, WoW, AoC, TERA, Rift, DDO, ESO, etc.), I’ve got a few suggestions that would greatly improve both immersion and quality of life for players.
These are my own list of suggestions, but I’d like to hear what your suggestions are as well. Please comment below.
1) Weapon Skill Re-Binding
To be honest, the left-side bar that shows weapon skills is a complete mess. There’s no cohesion with regards to what weapon skills go in which of the 5 buttons, other than that the first one is the generic auto-attack skill. While it’s possible to change the keybindings for your entire account, it’s not possible to change keybindings per-character or per-weapon.
What I’d like to see most is the ability to move abilities around on that left bar, and have them left that way on a per-character per-weapon basis. The right side skill slots have a ‘Change Skills’ popup that could be reused for weapon skills. Alternatively, it would be nice to ‘drag’ buttons around on the bar by holding the alt key.
2) Minimap Options
My biggest complaint with the minimap is the point of interest icon size and the fact that most icons disappear and/or get smaller when zooming out. I’d really, really like options to keep the icons from disappearing when zooming out and keep them the same size regardless of zoom level.
3) Condition Popups
When you’re doing world bosses, WvW, or PvP, there’s often a ton of flashy stuff going on. Your own spells are flashy, the enemy spells are flashy, and the AoE is flashy. With that much stuff on the screen, it’s sometimes hard to tell that you’ve been hit with a condition effect. It would be very, very convenient to have an option for high-contrast notification of conditions that have been applied to you. A text popup below your character (where the healing numbers are) would be perfect.
4) Enemy Cast Bars
I’ve got to be honest, I get caught off-guard a lot when I’m fighting bosses. I’m bad at judging exactly when I need to dodge, and that’s really important as a melee character. Sometimes a bosses ability will have a half-second cast, other times it’s a 1.5 second cast. If I dodge too late, I die. If I dodge too soon, I die. Knowing when to use a roll-dodge is absolutely critical. When you’ve been fighting a boss a few minutes, you start to learn the exact timing of those abilities. However, if you die in the first ten seconds, then you can’t learn the timings and are no help to your group. Please, please, please put in an option to show cast bars for bosses (or your current target). To compensate for making the game too easy, perhaps having this enabled would disable a player’s magic find bonus.
5) Crafting and Drop Rate Changes
It’s very weird to kill a hundred animals and only find 3 scrapped hide. Or to go kill a hundred humanoids and find 3 rags. Right now the best place to farm leather or cloth is by killing miners or flame legion ritualists for their miner’s bags or ritualist bags… which tells me something needs to be changed in the loot tables. If minimizing the effect on (the already broken) cloth and leather economy, perhaps increasing the amount of scraps needed to make usable cloth and leather might be necessary.
Again, let me know what you think of these suggestions, and please post your own suggestions. I’d like to see what other things people would consider their own must have changes for GW2.
