Guild Wars 2

The Mesmer’s portal ability is a lot of fun to use, but also incredibly inconvenient to keep track of. Apart from the fact that once both portals are connected they only last half as long as their tooltip says they should, and often are bugged and completely unuseable, there is no way to know how long you have to cast an exit portal other than keeping a stopwatch near your play area and resetting it every time you cast an entrance.

This is a horrible mechanic. It is of course possible to mouse over and see which ability is in line to be cast – the entrance or exit – but once the entrance ability comes back up you’ve already missed your opportunity to connect to wherever you were trying to connect to. The ability absolutely needs some sort of visible timing mechanism. A simple buff on the player with the white timing border (like boons and conditions) would do the job wonderfully, and should not be difficult to implement.

The mesmer’s “Feedback” utility, for those unfamiliar with it, is a dome that reflects enemy projectiles from the inside or outside. It requires a target, and if that target is in range it will center itself on that target.

From a game design perspective, this ability doesn’t really fit with Anet’s “play your way” style. The current targeting mechanic does not allow the spell to be cast on any target other than an enemy target. This makes it extremely easy to use the spell in an “offensive” way (casting it on a particular target who you want to damage), and makes it possible but often very difficult to use the spell in a “defensive” way (casting the spell on something or someone that you want to protect from projectiles momentarily).

I propose that Feedback should be able to be cast on any target – friend, foe, or neutral. This would not change any actual functionality of the spell, but would make it much easier to use the utility for more varied uses.

There are plenty of valid reasons for someone to want to stay on a server that they have been playing on for a few weeks now, all of which are beside the point. I am not complaining about the fact that there are queues – I play on a high population server, and I accept that I must wait my turn in order to participate in WvW on my server.

The problem is that the current mechanism severely penalizes people who do not have perfectly reliable connections.

Seeing the recent posts about WvW queues, it seems that they will probably be around for awhile. That said, a disconnected-played timer is sorely needed. Not everyone lives in an area where ISPs can give a 100% stable internet connection with no interruptions. It is incredibly frustrating to spend hours in a WvW queue only to lose your spot minutes after entering when you lose your internet connection for 5 seconds.

When a player times out they should not be immediately moved from WvW – they should have two minutes or so to restart the client and get back ingame before they are forced to wait through another queue.

Solution:
1. Bind a key to “about face” (I use C for easy access)
2. Hit bound key immediately before and after casting. Now, the ability will rocket you forward