Guild Wars 2

Yup, I think an activation bar would be great. The defiance/break bar already means we have to look at UI, why not add activation bar too

Xytl.8659:

Being able to see a channeling bar would allow you and your group to coordinate interrupts to completely turn off an enemy. Even a break-bar wouldn’t help to combat this issue because if everyone knew exactly when to CC spike an enemy, there would be no risk of failing to do so. Unless you want to turn all of the enemies into useless meatsacks that you break open for XP and loot, this is a bad idea.

Sorry, as I mentioned in the OP, this thread is mainly about enemy players (PvP/WvW). Besides, in PvE you can coordinate this anyway if everyone knows the tells since mobs are a lot slower paced, unless I misunderstood what you meant?

I would agree that a lack of resources on the part of ArenaNet would warrant not spending any time on this feature for the release of HoT, if they think it doesn’t deserve priority attention. But does that mean to say it’s a feature not worth considering at all for the future?

I Forgot.1684:

The addition of a feature like enemy skill cast bars, would have a massive impact on balance.

But I would disagree that this feature would have any detrimental impact on balance, care to elaborate?

Seen this mentioned a few times two years ago with generally split opinions. But almost three years down the line and an expansion on the horizon, I feel like it’s a small thing that’s still missing from the game. Anyone else think we should see enemy cast bars?

I understand they originally wanted for us to learn the “tells” of skills, especially for boss encounters and that’s fine. To be honest though, I am mainly suggesting this for enemy players (PvP/WvW) where cast times are shorter and the information matters more. But if it can see benefit in open world as well, especially for teaching new players then that’s even better. At the moment casting animations are clouded by particle effects in large fights and character model sizes. We’re already looking up at the top of the screen for what boons, effects or buffs the enemy has, why can’t a cast bar be up there too?

I do think that we need to look at what our characters are doing and not just play by staring at the top of the screen, but positioning is already enough of a reason to do that. The way I see it, we look at different parts of the screen to get distinct pieces of information.

• Character position (centre of screen): To line up skills and make sure we’re not standing in line of our enemy’s. Line of sight and try to get out of their onscreen zone of vision. And at the moment, skill tells.
• Top of screen: For enemy health, boons, effects and buffs.
• Bottom of screen: For our cooldowns, health, energy and debuffs.
• Other: Minimap, team mates, for obvious reasons.

Information from the top and bottom of the screen requires reaction by button press, e.g. cleanse your debuffs, strip their boons, heal or damage spike at the right time. I would say that all information from the centre of the screen should require reaction by positioning. However, knowing that a skill is about to be cast requires reaction by dodge, pressing that V key. Isn’t that a reaction by button press? Yes, you can also avoid a skill by positioning, however that’s usually after the skill has already been cast, e.g. moving out of AoE. Yes, if it’s a pre-emptive skillshot evasion then it’s positioning information but adding a cast bar doesn’t take away from that, the animation tells are still there. Adding a cast bar just allows us to be more suitably informed to react by relevant information, rather than distracting that information with noise such as particle effects/character size.

This is one feature that I think the game really needs. Most builds are defined by their trait distribution (I agree with Xae, it’s quite unexciting). It’s such a common thing to see on these forums that someone posts a build and someone else comments later saying “oh, that’s just the Mind Crush build” or whatever. Well, they may have both come up with the builds independently, in fact often I’ve run the same build myself without ever having seen their posts before. Clearly there’s limited room for originality. Also, as a result, there is very little sense of the undiscovered. In GW1 I always thought “I wonder if anyone has tried using these skills together,” whereas now, I’m sure most viable permutations of traits/weapons have been tried, even if it isn’t necessarily the meta.

I admit that the problem of having so many skills will create some ridiculous combinations and balance becomes an issue. But balancing is part of the fun, as is discovery of these that are unbalanced. In GW1 there were regular skill balances, it was fun simply reading what the changes were and what else would become viable due to the changes. Yes, it might be hard work but what would we lose if more developer time was dedicated to this? Some living story content, a few less minis or a gem store skin? The source of fun in the game should not be focused entirely onto one thing. A lot of people will have a great time simply playing/testing different builds. Besides, if hypothetically speaking, everything was perfectly balanced, would everyone be happy if they never changed anything again or added new skills just to preserve this state of balance?

I’m not sure how game breaking it would be to have the option of switching: e.g. Scepter 3 on Mesmer (Confusing Images: channeled skill that does damage and confusion) into either a phantasm summoning skill or grants you and allies retaliation. (I’ve just chosen some random possible skills). The phantasm skill demonstrates that now it is possible to have two phantasm summoning skills on a single weapon set. Now people may say “clearly the game was balanced so you can only have one phantasm on a weapon set,” but they’re the developers, they can do what they want. If they want to maintain that then they can chose not to make such a skill. The retaliation skill demonstrates one that doesn’t conform to the current “flavour” of the scepter, whatever that may be (shooting bolts?). If people really care about that then have a bolt which bounces from your enemy to allies doing damage and granting retaliation. My point is, the current state of weapon skills is bears no restriction on what can be done.

It’s not like it will be a free for all anyway, skills will still have to be tied to weapons. I feel like it’s still a lot easier than the task in GW1 (which I think they were doing a great job at balancing anyway.

tl;dr: New weapon skills = good, benefits outweigh problems. No new weapon skills = lose potential fun.

Sorry, I meant new new weapon skills which can be swapped in like utilities. For example, current Mesmer main-hand sword:

Weapon skill 2: Blurred Frenzy
Weapon skill 3: Illusionary leap

Would both be the “core weapon skills” and new additions can be unlocked and swapped in instead of them. E.g.:

Weapon skill 2: casual flick
Weapon skill 3: whatever stab.

This is akin to the system in GW1 where there were 8 skill slots you could put whatever skills you like in.

The new traits highlighted a philosophy of progression which I think could be extended to weapon skills. I’m sure many other people have had this idea, it may even have come up in the CDI’s, but here is my breakdown. (Parts covered by spoilers are asides).

Basic premise (tl:dr): New skills in weapon skill slots (excluding autoattack) which can be switched in, similar in mechanics to utility slots.

Limitations:

• Each weapon with skills unique to its type (i.e. sword has a set and axe has a separate set, or pistol has a set and off-hand pistol has a separate set).
• Similar to the way “core traits” and “new traits” work, all the weapon skills we currently have will belong to the set of “core weapon skills.” New weapon skills will have to be unlocked at level 80 (or some other level). Why? From what I understand, the original reason for binding skills to weapons was to reduce confusion for new players and to prevent them from playing in an ineffective way (c.f. GW1: firestorm on warrior). This maintains the original system whilst giving experienced players more options.

Benefits:

• Build diversity.
• (Slightly) More content after level 80.

Problems:

• PvP unlocks: People dislike having PvE unlocks for PvP. I think this is really a separate issue and whatever solution there is for traits, that would make people happy, can also be implemented here.
• Balance: Adding more skills may mean more issues with balance. Some people may even strongly believe that it’s more important to balance current skills before adding new ones. That’s okay; the purpose of this topic is also to gauge people’s opinions of priorities. But there was a time during GW1 where ArenaNet released balance updates for skills once every half month, so I trust in their capabilities. Due to the workload, this may be one of the reasons why they didn’t want to make so many skills again, so I understand if it’s unfeasible in GW2. But could more skills even make it easier to balance? Currently the a small pool of skills are being balanced against each other, a fraction of skills will be seen as “balanced” or “in a good place” so the remaining ones will be compared against those. However, this is like trying to determine a trend from a small number of data points. A larger sample may give a better indication of what “balanced” is.
• Thief profession mechanic: This would probably make their dual wield mechanic redundant. As an alternative, I suggest maybe changing it so their third skill is instead: a weapon attack chain (sets of two skills which are bound to each other, i.e. one would not be able to choose which two skills are chained) like autoattack?
• Elementalist: A lot more or a lot less choice? It might seem like they get the a lot more choice for each weapon. However I don’t think it’s too different from the current system, elementalists have access to more skills already per weapon set, but they have less choice of weapons. I’m not sure how people will feel about this, it would be interesting to know.
• Engineer(?): They have weapon kits which belong to utility skills so there shouldn’t be the option of changing skills within weapon kits. Would engineer players feel they’re benefiting less from more weapon skills than other professions?