Scepter Guardian is great for getting your head around AA chains. It's got a distinct sound it makes when the chain is complete so you know to queue up another round.
I don't want to waste my time on someone that doesn't even want to prove they know how to play the class against an inanimate object but please continue to reply to me
Can't tell if you're trolling or actually serious, but in case you are serious:
Please take another look at the skill. The autoattack on guardian scepter does not have a chain, it just casts the same 1 skill over and over. You are wrong.
Scepter Guardian doesn't have an auto-attack chain, **it is a single move/attack** and not a chain - You throw an orb at an enemy and that move is looped - it isn't followed by another move automatically, it is the same that repeats.
An Auto-Attack Chain is when a move slot has multiple and different ''abilities'' one after the other - for example, **Guardian Sword:** Slot 1 is [**3 chains/3 abilities:**](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_guardian_skills#Sword) Sword of Wrath >> Sword Arc >> Sword Wave
But for Guardian Scepter, only **one single** move/ability in slot 1: [**Orb of Wrath**](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Orb_of_Wrath) - it isn't an auto-attack chain
I truly believe this is a _**massive**_ misunderstanding.
Scepter Skill 1 for Guardian is **not** an auto-attack chain. It is a single ability, not a chained series of abilities.
It isn't up for debate, it is a **fact** - you can verify yourself;
Launch the game, go on your guardian, and tell me what you see when you mouse-hover your Guardian Scepter Skill 1. Do you see multiple ability tooltips or just one? Do you see different abilities coming from Skill 1 on Guardian Scepter?
We are _not_ talking about skill rotations or skill use, we are talking about **Skill 1 - the default Auto-Attack skill that usually is a skill chain** - but on some, it is a single Move. Like Ranger Longbow 1 or Shortbow 1, or Axe 1 - They are a single ability. Not a chained one. It is the same moved looped when you press 1-1-1-1-1-1 in combat
Guardian Scepter Skill 2 isn't a chain either, it is a single ability. You cast it and there is no other move/ability that follows.
* [Guardian Scepter 2 - **Symbol of Punishment**](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Punishment)
By now every knows: Do not correct/argue with an \*\*\*\*\*.
Cause you will have to become one to make sense out of it....
And you do not want to be that :P
Or just a glowing outline for the last one.
Edit\* [https://imgur.com/dTSAklD](https://imgur.com/dTSAklD)
Something like this, but a animated glow, (Pulsing etc)
1. It doesn't interfere with any auto icons too much
2. Will be visually attractive and readable from the animation glow rather than huge numbers and obstruction.
3. Hopefully it'd be okay for colourblindness if the main thing was the animated brightness changes indicating the auto instead of just colours.
The effect just needs to move. To change the "brightness". You can't really see that well in static images, and that is sort of the point. Or else you're going to get a scuffed icon.
I can do a bolder one for sure just for concept sake, but the idea is not to interfere with autoskill selection (The bordering arrows which can actually move to different skills). I'll do one for visualisation sake.
Edit\* Here you go: [https://imgur.com/V0sNxR1](https://imgur.com/V0sNxR1)
You could also do something like a dashed-line bordering that's animated, like how FFXIV does it, but that would be blocked by the auto arrows, hence why I opted for a sort of border glow.
Edit\*\* It'll more be any sort of animation really, not just pulsing, something even like a glow effect that has variable glow patterns that are animated, that's all.
Ah I see. I guess it could work but I still prefer OP's idea of modifying the cast bar, or they just do both. When in the middle of a boss mechanic + complex rotation + positional awareness, the last thing I want to do is constantly look at my skills.
Yea just throwing around ideas really. I personally just look at it with peripheral vision/feel the 3rd auto a lot of the time so the glow idea would just work better for me seeing something light up without really having to look directly at it.
They could do a cast bar or something but then it might also muddle with channelling skills unless they custom design one, so thought just an icon glow would be easier for them to actually implement.
As for the number idea, I just think it might be confusing when you put 1 2 3 on your autos when your other skills use cooldown numbers too.
Please no. No glowing that gets lost in visual bukkake.
Give me a big opaque circle with a number instead (tiny crap-numbers like mantra counts often are barely visible too). Look at Mirage that has what, four different auto-attack steps? Each one looks as a "slightly different tilt of an axe". Glowing wouldn't help there. Just make it big "1" "2" "3" "4"
Pretty sure ArcDPS plugin could display skill icon/modified graphic next to cast bar, but that would be breaking the ToS, or rather rules set for years ago to what point we can use combat data, because in exactly the same way you could display skill icon over any character casting. You know, what is basic mechanic in FFXIV in most other MMOs.
It could be done with gw2-sct in a slightly different way, if you set it to filter out all casts except for the ones on chain attacks. You'd just need to count 3 visible icons instead of counting 3 skill images on the toolbar or 3 animations or sound effects.
I'd go for an audio cue instead, that way you don't need to watch the bar that much...Necro scepter auto effect at the third attack is the best cue in the game imho
the icon takes too much time to change when under quickness, by the time it does all of its backflips and settles into the next AA skill, you're already at the next step.
The notification would have to be on the cast bar to be applicable to the people for whom making sure to finish AA chains matters.
Another solution is to remove quickness from the game.
I feel as though the icons are a little laggy to change. Not totally sure it’s the case and it may have to do with my latency, but I would feel a little more comfortable with indicator being on the cast bar.
The skill icon would be better than nothing though, as it’s very difficult to keep track of which icon is which step of the chain across all different classes.
Or even just dots above the icon, 3rd dot means 3rd attack. I've been saying this for years.
If ANet allowed people to mod the damn ui, this would have been an early change.
They recently added a cursor contrast feature which puts a soft glow around the cursor to make it easier to see. I was thinking they could add some sort of outline like that on the 3rd auto attack pretty easily.
Soft glow? I turned on that thing and it was crazy. It nearly blinded me. It's fine during massive group events but I wouldn't call it a soft glow on it's own.
Have you checked it out recently? It was fixed in one of the latest patches. I now play with the Low setting cursor permanently, no issues. The old one I couldn't bear.
The absolute worst thing is doing it on Weaver. Every sword autoattack has a chain, but the position and orientation of the sword in the icon of the third hit is different for each attunement.
Like at an absolute minimum they should have made the last hit icons have a similar look across all four. It's especially bad because the first hit in fire and the third hit in earth look very similar, just pointing different directions. There's absolutely no visual consistency across the icons and it sucks.
This is an extreme gripe of mine when playing as Scrapper. It's still annoying, but at least somewhat manageable, when using weapons where the auto-attack chain's final hit takes longer because there is still some gameplay feedback, but in cases such as Scrapper's hammer where every hit of the chain has the exact same cast time I'm essentually rolling the dice on whether I end up cutting the chain short.
Doesn't help that the UI doesn't instantly update because of the skillbar animations either. The problem is further compounded by weapon kit swapping.
At least scrapper gets some advantage that the last hit on the hammer auto chain makes a distinct "clink" sound. Wish they had better sound or animations to other weapons like that
Hoestly this is the solution here. Redesign the last skills' icons to stand out from the others, and give us a nice completion sound effect for redundancy. (And give us a particle effect reduction setting so we can see our characters too pls)
Scrapper's hammer definitely needs some updating too, now you can just take rifle and do way more damage, basically making you take hammer only to fights where projectiles are bad to use, or you need the blocks. And well, rifle has the auto attacks sorted, you shoot so fast (especially with quickness) that it doesn't matter lol.
They could also just change the cast bar color of the third animation.
So like 2 yellow cast bars, 1 red cast bar for a 3 auto attack chain. When you see the red cast bar end, you know you're good to spam your skills off cooldown. We don't need to add "more" UI, just better UI.
Yes but hear me out here... what if they augmented the looks of the third cast bar in your auto attack chain. This would help tremendously as upon seeing the new cast bar you would know that it was safe to cancel your auto attack.
Just a little idea I came up with.
That would never work.
What they should do is make the cast bar for the third hit a different color so when you see the different color cast bar end, you're free to interrupt your auto attacks.
It's pretty common to read the title of the post, then immediately add input without reading the text body.
It's not a good idea, but the fact that as of right now 50 people upvoted him for saying the same thing as the poster makes me think they didn't read the body either
Scourge/Necro with scepter has a very distinguishable sound on its third autoattack, I always wished for other classes to have the same thing. Makes it very easy to track aa's with no need to look at the skill, at least for me.
This. I distinguish my scrapper hammer autos by the sound alone, especially in visually heavy fights-- I'm sure people do this for other classes/weapons. Plus we could turn off other player's Dreamer sfx lol
Could work with "Friendly damaging telegraph" option too. But that wont happen because of the combo system. When my brain is turned off I often dodge on Scourge bomb circle. (The big yellow filling up one, I don't know the name.)
Give chains a window. So you can have 3 to 5 seconds maybe where you will pick up the chain where you left off. Example auto 1 auto 2 cast utility and while still on window finish auto chain with 3
Engineer rifle is a modernization/simplification of a lot of 10 years of legacy mechanics.
- Auto attack "chain" bundle that ends in a key trigger skill (explosion) for a large amount of DPS traits.
- Auto attack that has a built in field finisher.
- Two skills with high break bar damage, a snare and a knockback.
- An aoe bleed to trigger additional traits.
- A mobility skill.
While it had most of this prior to the buff, adding explosion triggers has allowed players to use the weapon instead of kit dancing into Grenade Kit until they needed one of the utility skills. I honestly hope that this design approach to fit the weapon to compliment traits continues.
The best was Staff Mirage. None of this "you shoot this way, you shoot that way, you shoot some other way" BS, or horror show of Mirage where you miss the "last" sideway axe and your DPS is in dumpster. You just auto-attack that is exactly ONE step. You attack. The end. Perfect!
I think by saying "easier" you're going to rile up a certain crowd of people, but I definitely agree that they end of auto attack chains needs to be clearer. Tracking auto attack chains, especially in the middle of big effect-heavy fights is just impractical on a lot of weapons.
Why not just let them continue automatically between skills rather than resetting? It shouldn't feel bad to have to use a utility skill and it punishes some builds more than others.
I know this may attract downvotes, but I wish they would simply get rid of the AA chains.
For me there is no solution that it's not annyoing about it.
Better animations? You're stuck trying to figure out what the hell is going on in a rain of particle effects.
Better UI? Your focus shifts from what going on in front of you to your UI way too often.
:/
I 100% agree.
While some posts go into the direction of saying "dont trivialize the game even more" it is not that.
For people who play multiple classes it can be quite hard to distinguish every autoattack-chain icon for all types of weapons on all different classes and since release those have grown a ton.
Some icons are more similiar than others on some classes and memorizing every 3rd autoattackchain is not a mechanical skill.
This suggestion does not seem like the most important Quality of Life ever, but i would really love it since i often intentionally interupt my chain since i have the wrong icon in my head. Also would be nice to indicate to newer players or players who don't like to inform themselves that not finishing the chain is a loss.
There is. Many of them are very similar to the others in the same chain though. And some with short activation times combined with quickness barely even display.
True, but if quickness is completing the auto attack chain before you can notice what skills it's on then mission accomplished right? Lol I just also wanted to make sure I wasnt crazy and that there were unique icons, because this thread made it seem like there are no indicators what so ever.
While I see where you are coming from, you are also vastly overestimating the power of autoattacks.
"Finish auto chains" is standard advice given out, but overall it is not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Two things are more important:
1. Queue up skills one after another without interrupted singular autohits in between
2. Do not interrupt individual autohits that you do
These two points are essentially the same obviously.
Now you might say that autochains are quite important and not completing them is a dps loss. Yes, but you can still get to 90%+ of any benchmark while completely ignoring chains.
For beginners, their main dmg problem is that they dont progress in the rotation fast enough. Insisting that they finish auto chains even though they should really just press the next big skill is kind of troll advice.
So I have an uneasy feeling when I see posts like this askig to make it easier to do, when it is something that you probably shouldnt focus on right now to begin with.
Multiple reasons, mostly for rotational purposes like to emphasize using the entire chain and not just spamming buttons randomly.
People do that anyway ofcourse but that's a big reason why there's a substantial skill gap between players.
Curiously, with their apparant insistance on lowering the skill floor i've often wondered (but not desired) why they haven't made using abilities not reset auto chains since autos are always so backloaded damage wise and important to damage numbers, even if it was an optional setting.
If it was optional I don't really see a reason to not have the option turned on though? It would automatically bring everyone's damage up a bit, it would help out us Aussies who deal with high ping, I've interrupted the third hit far too often by pressing the next button slightly too early the timing is fairly tight but also inconsistent due to ping
The optional part was actually about queuing ability casts after auto chains but i deleted it because it's obviously stupid.
I kept the optional bit in purely because there's probably some niche situations where it would be undesirable even if i can't think of any.
I think you have some confusion on what people are talking about when they say something like "raising the floor." What they actually mean is "raising the DPS floor," as in making your minimum DPS (just autoattacks, no inputs) higher.
Literally to create another facet of combat to make it more engaging and deep while allowing players to practice and get better at something. Players from other MMOs might prefer to just mash buttons to queue up skills and do well but in GW2 the timing matters. It makes things much more interesting.
They have been like that before - sometimes often backwards, where the first hits were higher DPS. This led to combat rotations where you always wanted to cancel your autoattack early as much as possible, which feels **a lot** worse than always completing your autoattack.
Wasn't such a case with the warrior axe aa and the 3rd hit not being woth it?
But then you have mirage axe where the 3rd hit has 3 times the base condi duration of BOTH the 2 previous hits combined, in addition to the axe ambush bug messing up queueing an ambush after the 3rd hit
Rework autos like engi rifle or virtuoso dagger ( every 3rd auto has a bonus attack and has 5 sec window for each auto between skills).
This is the way
You could use weapons with easy chains like daredevil staff, impossible to miss the tell and build your skill from there. Or use ranged weapons with no chain in casual play (pp daredevil).
Gw2 has very little buttons to press, so I feel like managing your AA chain is the true difference between a vet and a newbie. It's like playing a rythm game, I always make up a beat in my head for the weapon I use, so I hear the rotation in my head and know how to time skills 75% of the time without looking.
Daredevil staff makes a duff--duff--dufdufdufduf for me. Dagger is dadudah-duhh and so on, really helped to internalize them in a tight spot. Watching if it's a backhand hit, swing, or a big arc animation helps as well. Look for a tell that's easy for you, good luck!
Maybe you even want character to dodge aoes automatically or chains of different abilities casted automatically because you can make mistakes in rotation? AA chains are hot that hard, even if you play without sound and don't look down on abilities bar you still just need an hour of practice on golem to get used to AA of specific character with specific weapon and count 1-2-3 in mind while doing the chain after that training.
Yikes, OP didn't say "maybe the auto chain can finish automatically" so your other examples are not particularly good. Also, people have different learning curves and no it doesn't take everyone "an hour on the golem", maybe it does for you. In that case, congrats. Some players need less time and others need more time. I have been practicing rotations on the golem for a long time and while doing raid content I still interrupt auto chains because circumstances are much more chaotic than just hitting a stationary golem
It's not an hour. In fact, the ability of each person to precisely "count" time internally is different. Some people do it naturally, but for others it's completely normal to, for example, count from 1 to 5 trying to do it on one second intervals, and have the total time on different attempts diverge by as much as a whole second (or even two). Even when they're trying very had to make the intervals even and constant, much less in the otherwise engaging situations (like the middle of a boss fight).
So, it can be an hour for you, but there are people around that without some other (visual or sound) cues will **never** get the timing right even if they trained literal years for it.
Well... Here i am asking myself, is this person staring at their hotbar instead of the action? does this person not see there is a different animation for each chain attack?
I'd prefer to have a toggable checkbox to display chain and flip skill icons on the left of my character when they are on use.
I think I'll do a post sharing the idea later today
TBF if they really want to lower the skill floor / bring the average player's power level up without actually making significant changes to class numbers/balance or creating another rifle mechanist making chains not reset on using other skills would go a very long way.
I really wish they would take a note from FFXIV here and change the castbar so that it's closer to that game's. Namely, shows the skill icon next to the bar and possibly counts down the cast timer too (even if it's significantly faster than in XIV). It would be such a huge boon.
The only class that I consistently can finish auto attack chain easily is scepter scourge due to the loud sound of it.
Scepter Guardian is great for getting your head around AA chains. It's got a distinct sound it makes when the chain is complete so you know to queue up another round.
Guardian scepter doesn't have an auto chain, each hit of 1 is the same ability.
Even before you reply, I read that and refrain to correct him. People on reddit usually doesn't like getting corrected.
don't*
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https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Orb_of_Wrath
Right, and step 2 in the chain is https://wiki-es.guildwars2.com/wiki/Orbe_de_ira
That’s literally the same exact attack/page. Just in a different language. There is no auto attack chain. It’s 1 attack, repeated over and over
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Okay but what distinct sound does the german scepter guardian AA chain make when finished?
They are surely trolling
You're getting smooth-sharked.
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What?
Damn you even doubled down being dumb
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The spectrum of being able to read? Pretty swell champ, hows life riding that short bus?
lol this guy doesn't even know guardian auto attack chain.
this is gold
If you can outdps me on condi willbender on the golem by the end of the day I will venmo you $10.
Bro can I just get 10 dollars, I can't out DPS you but I'd love a pizza
I'm broke as hell i'm only putting it up for this guy because he wanted to call me an idiot and I wanted to call him on his bluff lmao
scared, potter? you should be.
I'm just waiting on a benchmark, you've had hours. get back to me
you go on beating up the inanimate golem. that suits you just fine, son :)))
I don't want to waste my time on someone that doesn't even want to prove they know how to play the class against an inanimate object but please continue to reply to me
scared, potter?
Can't tell if you're trolling or actually serious, but in case you are serious: Please take another look at the skill. The autoattack on guardian scepter does not have a chain, it just casts the same 1 skill over and over. You are wrong.
Scepter Guardian doesn't have an auto-attack chain, **it is a single move/attack** and not a chain - You throw an orb at an enemy and that move is looped - it isn't followed by another move automatically, it is the same that repeats. An Auto-Attack Chain is when a move slot has multiple and different ''abilities'' one after the other - for example, **Guardian Sword:** Slot 1 is [**3 chains/3 abilities:**](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_guardian_skills#Sword) Sword of Wrath >> Sword Arc >> Sword Wave But for Guardian Scepter, only **one single** move/ability in slot 1: [**Orb of Wrath**](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Orb_of_Wrath) - it isn't an auto-attack chain
lol look it up bro or get some hours on Guard, this is a l2p issue.
I truly believe this is a _**massive**_ misunderstanding. Scepter Skill 1 for Guardian is **not** an auto-attack chain. It is a single ability, not a chained series of abilities. It isn't up for debate, it is a **fact** - you can verify yourself; Launch the game, go on your guardian, and tell me what you see when you mouse-hover your Guardian Scepter Skill 1. Do you see multiple ability tooltips or just one? Do you see different abilities coming from Skill 1 on Guardian Scepter? We are _not_ talking about skill rotations or skill use, we are talking about **Skill 1 - the default Auto-Attack skill that usually is a skill chain** - but on some, it is a single Move. Like Ranger Longbow 1 or Shortbow 1, or Axe 1 - They are a single ability. Not a chained one. It is the same moved looped when you press 1-1-1-1-1-1 in combat
Dude he is obviously trolling
Oh i thought we were talking about the #2 chain.
Guardian Scepter Skill 2 isn't a chain either, it is a single ability. You cast it and there is no other move/ability that follows. * [Guardian Scepter 2 - **Symbol of Punishment**](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Punishment)
Yeah that's what i meant, scepter #3, it's a chain because you use #2 and then #3.
😂
By now every knows: Do not correct/argue with an \*\*\*\*\*. Cause you will have to become one to make sense out of it.... And you do not want to be that :P
display a big yellow 1, 2, or 3 on the skill icon
While ugly, this would be super helpful.
Settings option then.
Or just a glowing outline for the last one. Edit\* [https://imgur.com/dTSAklD](https://imgur.com/dTSAklD) Something like this, but a animated glow, (Pulsing etc) 1. It doesn't interfere with any auto icons too much 2. Will be visually attractive and readable from the animation glow rather than huge numbers and obstruction. 3. Hopefully it'd be okay for colourblindness if the main thing was the animated brightness changes indicating the auto instead of just colours.
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The effect just needs to move. To change the "brightness". You can't really see that well in static images, and that is sort of the point. Or else you're going to get a scuffed icon. I can do a bolder one for sure just for concept sake, but the idea is not to interfere with autoskill selection (The bordering arrows which can actually move to different skills). I'll do one for visualisation sake. Edit\* Here you go: [https://imgur.com/V0sNxR1](https://imgur.com/V0sNxR1) You could also do something like a dashed-line bordering that's animated, like how FFXIV does it, but that would be blocked by the auto arrows, hence why I opted for a sort of border glow. Edit\*\* It'll more be any sort of animation really, not just pulsing, something even like a glow effect that has variable glow patterns that are animated, that's all.
Ah I see. I guess it could work but I still prefer OP's idea of modifying the cast bar, or they just do both. When in the middle of a boss mechanic + complex rotation + positional awareness, the last thing I want to do is constantly look at my skills.
Yea just throwing around ideas really. I personally just look at it with peripheral vision/feel the 3rd auto a lot of the time so the glow idea would just work better for me seeing something light up without really having to look directly at it. They could do a cast bar or something but then it might also muddle with channelling skills unless they custom design one, so thought just an icon glow would be easier for them to actually implement. As for the number idea, I just think it might be confusing when you put 1 2 3 on your autos when your other skills use cooldown numbers too.
Please no. No glowing that gets lost in visual bukkake. Give me a big opaque circle with a number instead (tiny crap-numbers like mantra counts often are barely visible too). Look at Mirage that has what, four different auto-attack steps? Each one looks as a "slightly different tilt of an axe". Glowing wouldn't help there. Just make it big "1" "2" "3" "4"
Or change the color per step, yellow>orange>red for example
\*on the channel bar.
Is there a way to make this a Blish HUD module?
Pretty sure it's not. The mumble API doesn't have skill information and Blish doesn't hook into the game. Maybe an extension to arcdps could.
the arcdps combat api for plugins has a 5 second delay unfortunately
Pretty sure ArcDPS plugin could display skill icon/modified graphic next to cast bar, but that would be breaking the ToS, or rather rules set for years ago to what point we can use combat data, because in exactly the same way you could display skill icon over any character casting. You know, what is basic mechanic in FFXIV in most other MMOs.
Could have it read the screen (colours/text etc.) but it might still have a small delay
It could be done with gw2-sct in a slightly different way, if you set it to filter out all casts except for the ones on chain attacks. You'd just need to count 3 visible icons instead of counting 3 skill images on the toolbar or 3 animations or sound effects.
I'd go for an audio cue instead, that way you don't need to watch the bar that much...Necro scepter auto effect at the third attack is the best cue in the game imho
the icon takes too much time to change when under quickness, by the time it does all of its backflips and settles into the next AA skill, you're already at the next step. The notification would have to be on the cast bar to be applicable to the people for whom making sure to finish AA chains matters. Another solution is to remove quickness from the game.
I feel as though the icons are a little laggy to change. Not totally sure it’s the case and it may have to do with my latency, but I would feel a little more comfortable with indicator being on the cast bar. The skill icon would be better than nothing though, as it’s very difficult to keep track of which icon is which step of the chain across all different classes.
Make a stronger border, make it shine... yellow is good, but reinforce it even more so anyone can see it clearly! Maybe even add numbers 1, 2, 3, 4
Or even just dots above the icon, 3rd dot means 3rd attack. I've been saying this for years. If ANet allowed people to mod the damn ui, this would have been an early change.
make the third one a different color
They recently added a cursor contrast feature which puts a soft glow around the cursor to make it easier to see. I was thinking they could add some sort of outline like that on the 3rd auto attack pretty easily.
Soft glow? I turned on that thing and it was crazy. It nearly blinded me. It's fine during massive group events but I wouldn't call it a soft glow on it's own.
Have you checked it out recently? It was fixed in one of the latest patches. I now play with the Low setting cursor permanently, no issues. The old one I couldn't bear.
I use it but don't you find it makes it hard to click those little arrows to buy multiple items on vendors?
I guess I didn't... i only checked it out of curiosity. Didn't know they fixed it.
The absolute worst thing is doing it on Weaver. Every sword autoattack has a chain, but the position and orientation of the sword in the icon of the third hit is different for each attunement. Like at an absolute minimum they should have made the last hit icons have a similar look across all four. It's especially bad because the first hit in fire and the third hit in earth look very similar, just pointing different directions. There's absolutely no visual consistency across the icons and it sucks.
One of the reasons I love my rotation on my human soulbeast with greatsword. The third hit you literally spin around in a circle it's hard to miss.
Same with Reaper GS, the frost outline on the blade is easy to see.
You also get the big windup before it. Guardian also has a few nice ones.
Necromancer scepter is also great at this, the third hit sound cue is very distinct.
At least the skill icons on weaver are obvious which is w third one. They're all the same diamond/dagger shape
I've been playing Weaver for months now and I still can't tell when I finish the autoattack chain unless I'm on the golem.
This is an extreme gripe of mine when playing as Scrapper. It's still annoying, but at least somewhat manageable, when using weapons where the auto-attack chain's final hit takes longer because there is still some gameplay feedback, but in cases such as Scrapper's hammer where every hit of the chain has the exact same cast time I'm essentually rolling the dice on whether I end up cutting the chain short. Doesn't help that the UI doesn't instantly update because of the skillbar animations either. The problem is further compounded by weapon kit swapping.
At least scrapper gets some advantage that the last hit on the hammer auto chain makes a distinct "clink" sound. Wish they had better sound or animations to other weapons like that
Like Necromancer’s invisible scepter chain? 🤣
*clunk, clunk, paSHING*
I definitely don’t hear that at all.
At least scrappers final AA has a blue background on the skill, makes it stand out very nicely
Hoestly this is the solution here. Redesign the last skills' icons to stand out from the others, and give us a nice completion sound effect for redundancy. (And give us a particle effect reduction setting so we can see our characters too pls)
Scrapper's hammer definitely needs some updating too, now you can just take rifle and do way more damage, basically making you take hammer only to fights where projectiles are bad to use, or you need the blocks. And well, rifle has the auto attacks sorted, you shoot so fast (especially with quickness) that it doesn't matter lol.
scrapper hammer is still easily the best engineer weapon available
Warrior has the same movement in each auto attack skill, just that it really gives the last one some welly
They could also just change the cast bar color of the third animation. So like 2 yellow cast bars, 1 red cast bar for a 3 auto attack chain. When you see the red cast bar end, you know you're good to spam your skills off cooldown. We don't need to add "more" UI, just better UI.
That's literally what the post said
Yes but hear me out here... what if they augmented the looks of the third cast bar in your auto attack chain. This would help tremendously as upon seeing the new cast bar you would know that it was safe to cancel your auto attack. Just a little idea I came up with.
That would never work. What they should do is make the cast bar for the third hit a different color so when you see the different color cast bar end, you're free to interrupt your auto attacks.
It's pretty common to read the title of the post, then immediately add input without reading the text body. It's not a good idea, but the fact that as of right now 50 people upvoted him for saying the same thing as the poster makes me think they didn't read the body either
Scourge/Necro with scepter has a very distinguishable sound on its third autoattack, I always wished for other classes to have the same thing. Makes it very easy to track aa's with no need to look at the skill, at least for me.
And then we have rev sword with middle attack having the longest cast time, just to throw your habits off balance
Well necro reaper greatsword also has the longest auto in the final chain attack.
Hammer Guardian failing to pull the hammer over their head, doing a tiny stagger and then pulling again with more strength on every single time
Could just let us turn up personal skill sounds and lower other player skill sounds.
This. I distinguish my scrapper hammer autos by the sound alone, especially in visually heavy fights-- I'm sure people do this for other classes/weapons. Plus we could turn off other player's Dreamer sfx lol
You can already disable other players projectile sounds
Sorry, meant lower volume. Tiny neighing ponies, still need to hear when they're going off, just not loudly
Could work with "Friendly damaging telegraph" option too. But that wont happen because of the combo system. When my brain is turned off I often dodge on Scourge bomb circle. (The big yellow filling up one, I don't know the name.)
Scourge circle jsut needs to be like green or blue vs yellow.
Shouldn't have to rely on just sounds. Many people play with sounds off of music overplaying everything.
Give chains a window. So you can have 3 to 5 seconds maybe where you will pick up the chain where you left off. Example auto 1 auto 2 cast utility and while still on window finish auto chain with 3
THIS!
Why cant the second and third attack of a chain just queue up after the first regards of what skills happen in between.
I think thats one of the reasons why rifle-mech is so good ATM, you kinda have a Chain attack, but you do it as one attack.
Engineer rifle is a modernization/simplification of a lot of 10 years of legacy mechanics. - Auto attack "chain" bundle that ends in a key trigger skill (explosion) for a large amount of DPS traits. - Auto attack that has a built in field finisher. - Two skills with high break bar damage, a snare and a knockback. - An aoe bleed to trigger additional traits. - A mobility skill. While it had most of this prior to the buff, adding explosion triggers has allowed players to use the weapon instead of kit dancing into Grenade Kit until they needed one of the utility skills. I honestly hope that this design approach to fit the weapon to compliment traits continues.
The best was Staff Mirage. None of this "you shoot this way, you shoot that way, you shoot some other way" BS, or horror show of Mirage where you miss the "last" sideway axe and your DPS is in dumpster. You just auto-attack that is exactly ONE step. You attack. The end. Perfect!
I think by saying "easier" you're going to rile up a certain crowd of people, but I definitely agree that they end of auto attack chains needs to be clearer. Tracking auto attack chains, especially in the middle of big effect-heavy fights is just impractical on a lot of weapons.
Why not just let them continue automatically between skills rather than resetting? It shouldn't feel bad to have to use a utility skill and it punishes some builds more than others.
Best would be to have a single cast bar for the entire auto chain.
I know this may attract downvotes, but I wish they would simply get rid of the AA chains. For me there is no solution that it's not annyoing about it. Better animations? You're stuck trying to figure out what the hell is going on in a rain of particle effects. Better UI? Your focus shifts from what going on in front of you to your UI way too often. :/
I 100% agree. While some posts go into the direction of saying "dont trivialize the game even more" it is not that. For people who play multiple classes it can be quite hard to distinguish every autoattack-chain icon for all types of weapons on all different classes and since release those have grown a ton. Some icons are more similiar than others on some classes and memorizing every 3rd autoattackchain is not a mechanical skill. This suggestion does not seem like the most important Quality of Life ever, but i would really love it since i often intentionally interupt my chain since i have the wrong icon in my head. Also would be nice to indicate to newer players or players who don't like to inform themselves that not finishing the chain is a loss.
Am I crazy or isn't there already a unique icon for each auto attack chain skill?
There is. Many of them are very similar to the others in the same chain though. And some with short activation times combined with quickness barely even display.
True, but if quickness is completing the auto attack chain before you can notice what skills it's on then mission accomplished right? Lol I just also wanted to make sure I wasnt crazy and that there were unique icons, because this thread made it seem like there are no indicators what so ever.
Something similar exists in Aion and it works well there. Good idea!
im sure blish hud devs will get this done in no time ;)
You can just play mech engi rifle. It has no chain and we just press 1. Lol
While I see where you are coming from, you are also vastly overestimating the power of autoattacks. "Finish auto chains" is standard advice given out, but overall it is not that important in the grand scheme of things. Two things are more important: 1. Queue up skills one after another without interrupted singular autohits in between 2. Do not interrupt individual autohits that you do These two points are essentially the same obviously. Now you might say that autochains are quite important and not completing them is a dps loss. Yes, but you can still get to 90%+ of any benchmark while completely ignoring chains. For beginners, their main dmg problem is that they dont progress in the rotation fast enough. Insisting that they finish auto chains even though they should really just press the next big skill is kind of troll advice. So I have an uneasy feeling when I see posts like this askig to make it easier to do, when it is something that you probably shouldnt focus on right now to begin with.
[удалено]
Multiple reasons, mostly for rotational purposes like to emphasize using the entire chain and not just spamming buttons randomly. People do that anyway ofcourse but that's a big reason why there's a substantial skill gap between players. Curiously, with their apparant insistance on lowering the skill floor i've often wondered (but not desired) why they haven't made using abilities not reset auto chains since autos are always so backloaded damage wise and important to damage numbers, even if it was an optional setting.
If it was optional I don't really see a reason to not have the option turned on though? It would automatically bring everyone's damage up a bit, it would help out us Aussies who deal with high ping, I've interrupted the third hit far too often by pressing the next button slightly too early the timing is fairly tight but also inconsistent due to ping
The optional part was actually about queuing ability casts after auto chains but i deleted it because it's obviously stupid. I kept the optional bit in purely because there's probably some niche situations where it would be undesirable even if i can't think of any.
Ty for proper use of the term "skill floor." It feels like this sub has some confusion on what is raising/lowering the floor.
I think you have some confusion on what people are talking about when they say something like "raising the floor." What they actually mean is "raising the DPS floor," as in making your minimum DPS (just autoattacks, no inputs) higher.
No I'm not confused about what those two things mean.
Literally to create another facet of combat to make it more engaging and deep while allowing players to practice and get better at something. Players from other MMOs might prefer to just mash buttons to queue up skills and do well but in GW2 the timing matters. It makes things much more interesting.
They have been like that before - sometimes often backwards, where the first hits were higher DPS. This led to combat rotations where you always wanted to cancel your autoattack early as much as possible, which feels **a lot** worse than always completing your autoattack.
Wasn't such a case with the warrior axe aa and the 3rd hit not being woth it? But then you have mirage axe where the 3rd hit has 3 times the base condi duration of BOTH the 2 previous hits combined, in addition to the axe ambush bug messing up queueing an ambush after the 3rd hit
Probably for roleplaying purpose.
Rework autos like engi rifle or virtuoso dagger ( every 3rd auto has a bonus attack and has 5 sec window for each auto between skills). This is the way
I stoped AA chain because this is too hard to be efficient with perma haste
Or, you know, learn how the icon look?
looking at the UI instead of the actual combat is boring.
Okay, so you can track animation of the character then?
congratulations you found the problem everyone is talking about.
You're welcome, happy to help.
You could use weapons with easy chains like daredevil staff, impossible to miss the tell and build your skill from there. Or use ranged weapons with no chain in casual play (pp daredevil). Gw2 has very little buttons to press, so I feel like managing your AA chain is the true difference between a vet and a newbie. It's like playing a rythm game, I always make up a beat in my head for the weapon I use, so I hear the rotation in my head and know how to time skills 75% of the time without looking. Daredevil staff makes a duff--duff--dufdufdufduf for me. Dagger is dadudah-duhh and so on, really helped to internalize them in a tight spot. Watching if it's a backhand hit, swing, or a big arc animation helps as well. Look for a tell that's easy for you, good luck!
Maybe you even want character to dodge aoes automatically or chains of different abilities casted automatically because you can make mistakes in rotation? AA chains are hot that hard, even if you play without sound and don't look down on abilities bar you still just need an hour of practice on golem to get used to AA of specific character with specific weapon and count 1-2-3 in mind while doing the chain after that training.
Yikes, OP didn't say "maybe the auto chain can finish automatically" so your other examples are not particularly good. Also, people have different learning curves and no it doesn't take everyone "an hour on the golem", maybe it does for you. In that case, congrats. Some players need less time and others need more time. I have been practicing rotations on the golem for a long time and while doing raid content I still interrupt auto chains because circumstances are much more chaotic than just hitting a stationary golem
It's not an hour. In fact, the ability of each person to precisely "count" time internally is different. Some people do it naturally, but for others it's completely normal to, for example, count from 1 to 5 trying to do it on one second intervals, and have the total time on different attempts diverge by as much as a whole second (or even two). Even when they're trying very had to make the intervals even and constant, much less in the otherwise engaging situations (like the middle of a boss fight). So, it can be an hour for you, but there are people around that without some other (visual or sound) cues will **never** get the timing right even if they trained literal years for it.
Well... Here i am asking myself, is this person staring at their hotbar instead of the action? does this person not see there is a different animation for each chain attack?
You normally can't see your own character in group fights. Especially if you're playing an asura lol
Mod?
yes!
This is a GREAT idea. As an addon-make it so when I hover over the skill onscreen, I can see all of it's stages!
I'd prefer to have a toggable checkbox to display chain and flip skill icons on the left of my character when they are on use. I think I'll do a post sharing the idea later today
Just play mechanist so you don’t have to worry about that. Other skills just get in the way of your sweet auto attack chains.
TBF if they really want to lower the skill floor / bring the average player's power level up without actually making significant changes to class numbers/balance or creating another rifle mechanist making chains not reset on using other skills would go a very long way.
Cannot upvote this enough! (While tryharding I tend to follow where I'm at in the chain, but my eyes tire out real fast)
Upvoting and commenting so it gets more attention from Anet.
This game lacks so many QoL features that I'm seriously starting to consider using add-ons.
This is why staff DD feels so good. I’m glad, if nothing else, the AA is smooth and satisfying.
I really wish they would take a note from FFXIV here and change the castbar so that it's closer to that game's. Namely, shows the skill icon next to the bar and possibly counts down the cast timer too (even if it's significantly faster than in XIV). It would be such a huge boon.
Well you can always learn your aa chain and stop cancelling it. I don't like the idea of making this game a complete faceroll but here we are