Guild Wars 2

I’ve made a few posts about this in the past. “Visual clutter” is not in the player’s skills or effects that center around deployed fields (for the most part). The problem is in skills applying status effects and oversized “impacts” and flashes, the details of which scale with the size of a mob. Begin by reducing these effects first; the difference will be immediately noticeable.

Suggestions for alterations: condense visual cues such as burning down at the base of the mob—much like the “new” elementalist aura effects, or—even better—place a moving texture over the mob with minimal accompanying particle effects. This way you see the mob, and can see that it is affected by a status.

In terms of field visibility: alter the thickness of the circle line; make it bolder. Red for bad; change good to blue instead of the basic white that is currently visible. Additionally: the puzzle pieces effect as it is is minimal and practically invisible at any distance and is an unnecessary effect. Add a puzzle-pieces shaped edge to the inside of any circle texture that needs to indicate a field can be used in a combo. Do this stylistically, much like the painterly player-placed green circle for targeting to match aesthetics.

These are the sorts of changes that will make combat easier to parse.

Another problem with the “noise reduction” is during events like Tequatl: you cannot see your own projectiles due to the amount of ground noise from the boss. These are the sorts of areas that need clutter reduction—not the player’s skills. Furthermore, the reduction (upon playing around with it a deal more) is so drastic that on any bright type of background, the projectile for Fireball is almost invisible. The effect equates to pointing at a target and watching numbers pop up, essentially stripping the aesthetic soul right out of combat. Most people are complaining about this whole ordeal for that very reason.

If it doesn’t look cool or interesting, why bother playing? There’s a reason why the economy basically revolves around Legendary weapons. They’re neat. People choose classes because they think they’re neat. If they’re.. not neat any longer. Well.

Maybe do some research and watch how many elementalist players suddenly start playing alts for a while.

In terms of skills that are visually interesting, fireball—before the “decluttering”—felt like it had weight and substance. You know, like pitching a ball of fire. It’s even the skill that originally sold me on the class (oh dang “fire mage” that looks cool).

Now it’s kind of like … like tossing a BB with a streamer attached to it.

It is perplexing, to make such a significant change, especially when (and I’m pretty sure a bunch of folks will agree with me, here) I don’t recall a particular moment where there was a pressing agitation of “you know these fireballs are just too darned big and in the way”.

Perhaps something halfway between the old and the new would’ve been more interesting. Or maybe even some kind of “tone down other player’s graphical effects” toggle in client options (many have been asking this for a while). This mainly affects melee classes and would be helpful.

I mean, yes, I can live with it, but I remember reading about the design stuff for Guild Wars 2 back in development. There was even a video posted about sound development for fire and its many uses (you can hear some elements of what would later become fireball in the video, too). So it’s clear a ton of thought went into the aesthetics of these skills. Fireball was supposed to be a big, dangerous hurtling wad of fire. To pull the rug out from under it—as the OP said—is very “what”.

I’ve been noticing this off and on for a good year or so. It’s intermittent, difficult to reproduce, but essentially “locks” your character in place until you release your movement key and press it again, engage some sort of skill that affects mobility, or are affected by something in the environment that moves your character.

Having the same issue; in cutscenes where characters are across from one another over the painterly backgrounds, the first line of spoken dialog is often non-playing. In addition, the personal story quest “The Steel Tide” had this issue and a few others such as: non-displaying dialog options for other players; bugged instances of the charr tanks appearing both at their previous location (Risen mine-exploded front tank event), and their secondary location when progressing the episode (complete with infinite spawns and inability to progress due to required NPC being stuck at previous location); and, upon redo/completion, having the entire personal story quest log “back up” several steps, displaying incorrectly.

I seem to have this issue on water fields fairly often. The others are more reliable.

Admittedly, it is also disconcerting that the animation triggering a blast is lined up for when you initiate the skill, rather than when it finishes; this seems counter-intuitive.

This bug was mentioned in the most recent small (9/11) patch—

“Fixed a bug that prevented the cave-in debris in Dry Top from being destroyed.”

—and appears to have been fixed. No more invisible wall/non-removable debris. Thank you! This was preventing story content progress for a lot of players.

Having this issue on Sanctum of Rall, too. It appears to be an invisible wall. Projectiles can’t even get through (and ground-based targeting skills place their graphical effects vertically).

Burning Retreat Foward:

Setup: bind a key to About Face.

To execute:

1.) While running, right click to take control of the camera (if not already doing so while moving), let go, and left click once in front of you (don’t hold).

2.) Press your bound About Face key immediately, then use Burning Retreat.

3.) At the end of the Burning Retreat animation, right click to grab the camera again; your character will automatically face forward in the direction of your camera.

Explanation: The left click forces your camera to not turn when you About Face, making this useful if you don’t want your camera spinning like mad.

This trick can be used with the Conjure Flame Axe’s Burning Retreat, too.

Related to the same story step, there appears to be a bug in which the text in your “My Story” log book/journal doesn’t properly display (it gets cut off early) once completed. Attached is an image showing as much.

If you complete all of the objectives in a story area a small little door icon should appear above your mini-map. Sometimes the star showing the exit doesn’t draw on the mini-map (not sure why). The door icon, when clicked, should pull you out of the instance regardless of where you are.

This is a pretty common bug with several pairs of boots, (and gloves). Perhaps other armor pieces are also affected? The bug occurs, as others have mentioned, when transitioning from above water to under water.

It is slightly frustrating when one has to search through armor pieces to transmute them to avoid this bug, only to discover other armor pieces are prone to the bug as well.

From a technical standpoint I can’t fathom why textures on a character model would need to undergo any sort of change when making a transition from above to underwater. So it seems like something pretty off-base is going on here! Hopefully it gets looked into.

EDIT: This is definitely related to having a piece of equipment in the Aquatic Headgear slot. Removing armor from that slot and then descending from above to under water “fixes” the problem, (though one is left without that armor slot being occupied).