Guild Wars 2

There is nothing more annoying than trying to chat and every couple seconds some new important window interrupts the chat box, thus making the letters you were typing open all sorts of shortcuts and hotkeys. This happens frequently in PvP, especially at the end of a match, and it happens with anything involving party changing, team changing, map changing, tournament queue requests, tournament queue pops, often something beyond your control. It’s doubly annoying because often it’s interrupted multiple times in a row, so just as you click in the chat box to type that last word, some other priority window opens, and all you’re trying to do is answer a question quickly before the map whisks you or the other people away. It’s head-fuzzyingly frustrating.

I’m sure someone else has posted on this matter, but all forum search did (as it ever does) is return with unrelated posts about rangers and their pets or warriors’ shouts.

As it stands right now, Blind is kind of a wildcard defensive move. A player who is Blinded usually has no time to react before their next attack misses. Similarly, player 1 cannot guess player 2’s next attack, so there is no way to intelligently use Blind against them. All Blind does in 90% of scenarios is mitigate an auto-attack, because that’s the most it can ever be intended to do in its current state.

I may be describing exactly what Blind is meant to do, but I believe it could be more than just an offensive version of Block. For now, though, that’s a good place to start:

- Similar to some block mechanics, Blind could make attacks miss for a certain amount of time or number of attacks.
- To prevent it from being overpowered, it could last a very, very short amount of time, or for a very short number of attacks. Very similar to what it already does. But better.
- Another way to prevent it being overpowered while also introducing a more strategic use, Blind could only affect instant or single-target attacks, and only work against channeled abilities if they’re already being channeled, while not affecting AoE at all. It makes logical sense, after all.
- More far-fetched: it could make players untargettable for a short time. This might make it too similar to Stealth, though, except players can still “see” other players.

Really, there are quite a number of creative changes that could be made. Blind’s potential is vastly ignored so far, mostly just existing as some environmental factor that mitigates a random-but-heavily-tending-toward-minimal amount of damage. I’m mostly speaking in terms of PvP, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be turned into a mechanic for strategizing in PvE as well.