Guild Wars 2

Dadnir.5038:

I think what he want is skill that have long lasting impact on the environment. Basically, after a meteor shower we would see the ground shattered, after a lava font the ground would be dried up… etc.

[…]

NB.: What I don’t understand is why the OP bring up “action never gets boring” while asking for long lasting ground effect. I get that it come from the skills used but i doesn’t add any “action” in game.

Palador.2170:

Adding lingering effects from some skills may not make them stronger, but it could make them FEEL stronger and more satisfying to use. A lot of GW2 abilities don’t really “sell” the damage they do, and I’ve love for the devs to go back and address this some day.

Ah, yes. I totally forgot to mention this, but it’s really the lines I marked bold in your quotes that I thought of when posting this. I do not feel satisfied with the power my character displays in combat. There could be tons of reasons for this, but one is probably the fact that I’ve gotten used to those spells and animations through the years much like others, I believe. Nevertheless I imagine there’s ‘simple’ yet not easy ways to improve combat – though I do not know them at this point, because I didn’t put much thought into it, yet.

As for Dadnirs question: Yes, it seems somewhat ‘out-of-combat’, but:
1. there’s tons of fights that last longer than thirty seconds, thus creating the opportunity of fighting inside the After-Image’s newly created environment.
2. (as Palador mentioned before) the combat would leave the impression of actually being able to impact the surrounding environment (though it wouldn’t) – kinda like levelation in Battlefield

-> So, yes. It does not add action, but it does have an impact on how the action is experienced

“It sounds like you want aoes to stick around even when they no longer are affecting anything? That seems confusing to people trying not to stand in things, "
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Ah, yes. I noticed this, too, as soon as I had posted this, but as it could be turned off, it’d be not that much of a problem though.

“… as well as adding to the business of the combat area despite years of protests that too much visually is going on as it is.”
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Didn’t know that. Thought it was just the fact that the visuals made it lag rather than the visual effects themselves. Thanks for telling me. Though this could also be solved by an option to turn it off/on.

If the majority of ppl is against an increase in visual skill effects, it’s not worth the bother for the devs, anyway (I guess). Maybe there’ll be a demand in the future x)

So, I hope I do everything right with this post and won’t step on a landmine by making a suggestion that has already been made.
I’ll try to cut it short.

My problem: As I am a so called content-rusher (definition taken from another thread) I find myself getting bored with games pretty fast. Which is why things like combat seem the most interesting (to me at least), because action never gets boring. GW2 focuses as many other games like WoW (though not as hard) or Blade n Soul on fashion and good looks. Since the WvWvW lags (which have improved significantly due to I-Don’t-Know-What but it had to be some tough kind of work), there’s been a change in animation procedure I believe, which uses hard math to animate particles rather than using a preset of animations that is heavier to process for a GPU or CPU or whatever. (I really don’t know how this works, this is just my assumptions, correct me if I’m wrong – I read this once, when HoT came out, and ANet bragged about the wyvern fire.) So I thought, maybe there could be more animations now, while using skills. Or more effects or more anything.

My concluded assumption: I assume that there has been found a way to animate skills with a comparingly less usage of server- and client-components than the ones at the start. (This kind of reflects on the new skins in the gemshop, too, I think. Much more detailed now.)

(Just a tiny thing btw, and I know, devs got their hands on other things. But I thought maybe some of the devs find it cool and decide to work on it but whatever)- [One] Solution:
One could make an after-image of ground-targeting spells. It’s basically just a texture on whatever surface you cast the spell on, but it won’t instantly vanish. It’ll stay there for like 20 secs or so. And maybe it’d have some pulse effect going on. Of course with a funtion to turn it off, if it takes too much of your RAM or whatever.

So basically that.
Now that I think about it, I don’t really find it that amazing. But whatever. I’ve attached some images for a preview on how I thought this could look.