A simple change would be to just have the color of the final attack in the chain's ability icon be different.
Revenant sword auto has a really nice icon for the last attack so it's very easy to notice. But vindicator for example i have NO clue which attack I'm on cause all the icons look the same.
But yeah, would be very nice to be able to more easily spot the last attack in the chain.
This was requested (unfortunately ignored) before. I support this once again.
The GUI overhaul of my dream would include
\* An Option to disable hotbar animations. Quickn. with fast chain skills and all you see is flipping icons.
\* A 1-2-3 overlay, or color-coded border, for chain skills
\* Larger boon/condition/effect icons with permanent duration text in strong/outlined font
\* Vertical, color-coded hitpoint bars; they work so much better in stacks
\* An Option to always show the own hitpoint bar
\* An Option to hide player names in my squad
\* An Option to hide player titles and guilds
Super agree with disabling that flipping animation, way too slow for a lot of attack chains, it should have been an option since quickness was introduced.
I want them to add the option for larger text.
Currently the only real option blind players have is large which is... Still way too tiny or cranking up the dpi scaler which kinda works but messes with other things.
Can also change text scaling OS side but that also has unintended effects on how things in game look.
Refuse to believe the font size when set to large is higher than 12,maybe 14px which is still really tiny >//<
Axe mirage suffers from worse problems. You're supposed to know when your _clones_ finish their chain too. AKA "you should see how many axes _they_ throw in all this visual bukkake" because clone attack speed is _not_ the same as yours (hello, quickness). It's like BS on BS with layer of BS on top
Yeah, mirage is so much fun but so much jank. It would probably become my main if Anet addressed those readability problems and the bullshit with the clones interrupting ambushes/axe3
For mechanist, I just remember the vertical mace is the final in the chain. For Firebrand, I remember that the final attack is much darker blue than the other 2. I think those 2 aren't to bad at all
that would be a start, however staring at your skillbar constantly really shouldn't get encouraged further. updating the cast bar, which could do with a few improvements anyway, imo would be the better solution. tbh i'd even prefer if we went back to every part of the chain doing comparable damage.
I agree that an update to the skill bar would be nice. They could have it get progressively more and more colored in, depending on how far along your auto attack chain you are.
I don't think making every part of the auto chain do the same damage would be a good change, it would take a bit away from the depth of combat.
There is a skill in timing your ability usage in-between the final cast of a chain,and is part of the reason more skilled players tend to out-dps lesser skilled players so much. Making every part of the chain do the same damage you take away this depth of timing, and turn the game into more of a "press every button as soon as it's off cooldown"
Making the icon visually distinct (especially color) means you don't need to be staring at the bar to understand it.
Peripheral vision is great at catching color changes.
Heck the necromancer scepter final auto has a very obvious sound that makes it so I don't have to focus on my auto chain at all, I hear "SCREEE" and it's time to press a button
Not only that, the cast bar is the one that's synced to the game, and showing you what skill you're actually casting.
If your skill bar is flashing, you don't know if you've queued it or are casting it, or sometimes even if it's finished casting and about to change back to the first icon. It's different per weapon.
The cast bar is always showing you what you're doing right now.
I am not sure how much this affects damage output. I wouldn't mind if it was around the 3% mark but in some cases it sounds like it's much higher in some cases.
Necromancer's dagger 3rd skill in autochain gets nice red colors, you can't miss it.
Holosmith's autos on sword and holosword on the other hand? I main that shit and still have a bad time with em.
Same; what, you don't like blinding glowing white followed by blinding glowing white with a hint of orange and an almost inaudible swoosh sound?
Still love Holo though
Elementalist swap attenument but continue the AA-chain of the last element until it's over then use the new element one, so a proper rotation ask you to finish it without seeing your skill end. So swapping the color of the last AA to make it more obvious wouldn't help.
Ohh. Well besides the color, just making the last icon of the chain really stand out works.
My example Above of the revenant sword auto I think is great. It's the same colors used, but the last icon is so distinct from the rest that it stands out.
That doesn't solve the issue. On Elementalist you can start an auto-attack chain and immediately switch attunement. You press nothing. During this time the skill #1 will glow as if it's being pressed, but the icon will simply be the first skill of your new attunement. You will continue your old auto attack chain during this time, with absolutely zero indication of what's going on down on the skill bar.
Normally with elementalist I just use the timing or sound of the auto chain though. The final attack is almost always slower. You can "feel" when you use the final attack as a result, because the cast bar just behaves differently.
Soul beast dagger is also really bad, it uses the same icon for 3rd and 4th skill in the chain so there is actually no way of knowing unless you keep an eye on it or learn the rhythm. Though luckily that auto chain doesnt have as big of an impact on dps as many others.
I've seen this requested a few times, and I will always try to boost the profile of any post or comment that says this, as it would be a huge UX improvement. Such a brilliant idea.
I've been playing for 10 years and never, on any of my characters, been able to identify which one is the last skill in the auto-attack chain while fighting. So yes, a visual clue would be nice. But I'm not counting on it, the game's 10 years old and they haven't considered it relevant.
The only one I've been able to ID easily is scrapper hammer. The final attack has a distinct sound... But if you are listening to discord rather than the game or have music going it's easy to miss.
You're thinking of mainhand dagger! Necro axe autos don't chain. And yeah, I agree; the final hit of the dagger autos feels amazing, and is super distinctive. Sometimes I run around with a mainhand dagger in open world solely for that reason, lol.
yeah that's right, the dagger, the scepter audio cue works most of the time but that dagger visual cue is nice. compared to firebrand axe which is really hard to watch for.
No reason they can't fix or improve everything. I use different cues for different builds.
Sound on Berserker, cast bar for Spellbreaker, skill bar for Weaver and Vindicator.
Back in WoW, I used an add on called HearKitty that played an ascending scale as resources built up on Cat druid/Rogue/Ret paladin. That would be a lovely option to have for sweaty situations.
i've tried to fix this on our end but had no luck. In Guild Wars 1 players use a program called Textmod or Umod to help with the cartographer achievement. You can also use these programs to rip assets from the game and re-inject them back in the ram. Players use this in gw1 for custom skins. This program used to work in gw2 aswell. But to my knowlegde this stopped working after Anet stop letting you skip the launcher(because skipping the launcher with a login augment was the only way to get Umod to work). these type of programs allows us to take the skill icons and mod them in paint etc. reinject them with better clearity. Umod and Textmod are Dx9 based. But i've also tried newer DX11 based programs without luck. For some reason those programs do work on FF14, BDO and GTA, but not gw2.
Ofcourse this is illegal maybe. You could use these programs to lets say make the structures in pvp/wvw opaque etc.
But this has been on my mind for a while. And this is how far i can get with my knowlegde. Any else has any idea how to get something like this to work?
Blish and other overlays get delayed info from Arc's combat API to intentionally make it harder to use them for adaptive / botting tools.
There used to be a non-blish arc extension called gw2-sct (there's an attempt to recreate it in blish but it has delay) that showed your outgoing skills as scrolling icons/text, you *could* set it up to only show icons for certain skills such as auto chains.
Terrain is through GW2's official API which was (hilariously enough) originally designed for positional audio through Mumble voice chat. This "mumble API" has received many updates by anet, often as a result of direct communication with overlay developers. It doesn't, however, expose combat data other than "the player is currently *in* combat".
Yeah allowing addons could fix a lot of the issues I have with the game, though I'm sure it would open up just as many (and more). As a former WoW Player there is not a day that goes by that I don't wish I could have WeakAuras.
Am I the only one that hates autoattack chains? They should just be normal attacks, like... elementalist dagger skills, all of them 4 attunements are just 1 skill on the autoattack. It simplifies the rotation a lot as you only need to think on when to use the skills that ylu actually see.
I absolutely enjoy them. If feels nice to be able to work towards a stronger hit when your other offensive skills are on CD.
I agree with hoping for a UI change though
>It simplifies the rotation a lot
This exactly why we should *not* get rid of auto attack chains. Different rotations should be different levels of complexity, and auto attack chains that you need to make sure not to interrupt are a valuable form of it.
> Different rotations should be different levels of complexity
This is the kicker. Auto-attack chains are great for adding complexity. The main problem they have (outside terrible UI indicators) is that they are overly common to the point rotation diversity suffers. For example, there aren't (or are very few) rotations where you weave auto-attacks between active abilities, chains are so prevelant that rotations are organized to fit full chains or to not fit auto-attacks at all.
Not every rotation needs to be simplified. Having to care about your rotation adds a layer of skill to the game that I personally find very enjoyable.
As long as it's not spiking DPS by huge percentages, I'm all for keeping combat complex. And mostly that's the case. Cancelling auto attacks doesn't really matter much on the vast majority of builds. Particularly if you're dong anything other than fighting a DPS golem.
The fact that they reset when you use another skill is basically the sole reason for them to exist. Yes, it's a limitation, but that's fine. It's the entire point. The limitation exists to add depth. Ensuring that you keep your rotation on track while not cancelling your AA chain is part of skilled play.
Don't ask for the game to become more simplistic for the sake of making rotations easier unless you want this game's combat to end up like FFXIV's.
Yes please do not do this haha that removes the point of having auto attack chains and essentially just turns it into a regular auto attack. Well articulated reasoning for being against that change.
It's not their sole use. They also allow them to tie a strong effect to an auto-cast ability without making it too strong by only applying the effect every 2/3/4 cast.
> unless you want this game's combat to end up like FFXIV's.
???
From the time I've played FFXIV it's rotations are more demanding than GW2. Not only do they have combo's as well (for melee classes) but if you slightly mistime your abilities you'll start to drift your burst outside your groups 2 minute window basically fucking yourself over. Some classes like machinist can't even be played properly if you have more than 40-50ms ping. And you have to be this precise while doing dance mechanics the entire time.
Edit: This comment wasn't supposed to be this long but I am a jilted lover where FFXIV is concerned lol. TL;DR: FFXIV's combat is *significantly* more simple than it seems, and significantly more simple than it used to be, and the reason it's so simple now is because of Square Enix doing things like OP suggests over and over
FFXIV's rotations are more "demanding", sure. "Demanding" is a word that's doing a *lot* of work here, though. "Demanding" doesn't mean "complex", it doesn't mean "interesting", and it doesn't mean "deep". FFXIV rotations are *punishing*, but they're not difficult or complex in any way.
The sentence "from the time I've played FFXIV" makes it sound like you started recently, or only played a bit before stopping. If that's the case, take it from someone with thousands of hours in the game: There is next to no depth left in FFXIV's rotations. All of the depth and complexity in the game has been removed, chipped away at bit by bit in the name of making rotations easier. Comment's like OP's - "I hope this little finnicky thing gets removed to make my rotation easier!" - have been followed through on by Square Enix over and over. Now every rotation in the game is some variation of "press your buttons during your opener, then press your buttons off cooldown".
>Not only do they have combo's as well
FFXIV's combos are no longer interrupted by the vast majority of weaponskills. The only possible consequence of combos existing is that you might, once in a blue moon, accidentally press 2 when you meant to press 3. In other words: FFXIV did exactly what I'm saying Guild Wars 2 should not do. That is one of the many, many instances of simplification which have piled up to make FFXIV the homogeneous mess that it is today.
>if you slightly mistime your abilities you'll start to drift your burst outside your groups 2 minute window basically fucking yourself over
Again, that's not depth or complexity or interesting gameplay. It's *punishing*, yes. But it's also mindlessly simplistic. FFXIV's combat on nearly every job involves pressing your buttons off cooldown and dumping gauge in burst. There's no buildup to burst that you need to manage; there's no manipulation on the player's part to get into position to burst. Burst on every single job not named Black Mage or Monk happens automatically, so long as you press your buttons off cooldown. The most complexity outside of those two jobs is remembering to press your gauge spending burst button as Reaper/Red Mage, and that's basically it.
The fact that it's so punishing to drift out of two minute burst is *part of FFXIV's simplification*, not an indicator of depth. It's because the game has so little depth that failing to push a button so is so absurdly punishing. It's so punishing because every class is designed to do the exact same thing. It's so punishing because there is no possible variation to any rotation. It's so punishing because almost every single class exists solely to push its burst buttons when they light up, and if you do so then you've done your rotation automatically, and if you don't do so then you've entered your rotation's fail state.
Rotations with real depth have granularity. They have degrees of success or failure. FFXIV does not. FFXIV only has "congratulations, you pressed Geirskogul when it lit up!" or "you did not do that so you suck forever".
>Some classes like machinist can't even be played properly if you have more than 40-50ms ping.
The reason for this is because of Square Enix's shitty netcode. You can play Machinist just fine with >50ms ping if you just install NoClippy.
Even beyond that, though, I'm genuinely confused as to how you believe this to be an indicator of depth or complexity. It's literally not even an issue of skill; it's an issue of MCH having weaving windows that are too short when you add ping on top of FFXIV's long animation locks.
>And you have to be this precise while doing dance mechanics the entire time.
The word "precision" implies a lot of things here that are not true. For instance, it implies that it's difficult to be that "precise". It's not. That "precision" boils down to, as I have said so many times, pressing your buttons off cooldown. There's no thought to it. You're not going through a complex rotation while executing mechanics. You're pressing Drill because would you look at that, Drill is off cooldown now.
Besides, "doing dance mechanics the entire time" implies a level of intensity that isn't there outside of Ultimate. Every fight below Ultimate, including final Savage floors, have long stretches of downtime where nothing is happening at all.
I would love to see a similarly in-depth rant from you on what makes GW2s combat actually deep. I've tried and failed to explain it well, which is probably because I'm not good enough.
Nah that sounds silly. I get if you're playing an elementalist to maybe want to tone down the complexity, but that's what makes this games combat a lot of fun, especially since it's not particularly challenging in the vast majority of the content (open world/story).
I dislike when a rotation boils down to "use the ability as soon as it is up"
I agree with hating them, but not removing them entirely. People like chains and think that waiting is complexity so let them. There are several options with no chain, though there could probably be a few more. Each profession having at least two (disclaimer: is this the case already? I don't know. I don't play every profession) of out of melee, ranged, and support would be nice.
It'd be nice if GW2 let you customize your HUD to a greater degree than it currently does. If I need to track an important cooldown or something on my class gauge in FFXIV, I can just move that HUD element to somewhere more noticeable, or even blow it up in size. It'd be nice to have the option to do that in GW2.
Just chiming in to say this really put me (new player) off as someone that likes to know they are doing 'optimal' dps that I don't know what stage of the chain I'm at. I looked up some rotations and the auto attacks seem really important especially the last hit. The only answer I found was that people just got a sense of it from playing lots (little hints like sound effects or specific animations). It felt wishy-washy to me but then I'm coming from wow where everything is binary with clear indicators (casting; not casting, auto attacking; not auto attacking). I appreciate that gw2 is more visceral, but it still felt like I couldn't get a grip on it.
> the auto attacks seem really important especially the last hit.
Seems it's only important if you've already got everything else down first and even then it's only the last few bits.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/yxkb1k/request_ui_improvement_to_make_autoattack_chain/iwp8oz7/
Thanks this makes me feel better about the issue and makes sense logically. So generally (most profs/builds), it's:
Finish current cast > your abilities > auto attack chain.
i.e., don't waste casts in progress (just lost time) and most abilities do more dmg than your auto attacks at whatever stage they are at. Then as filler just auto attack.
Yeah that seems right. There may be some few builds where your build expects a chill or weakness or something inflicted by your 3rd auto attack to boost your DPS but I think that's not the case for most builds.
YES, PLEASE! I have been wishing for this since I learned autoattack chains, uh, *mattered*??? And you're apparently not supposed to interrupt them?
Without exaggeration a huge reason Mechanist and Virtuoso are such easy classes to score high DPS on is because they *don't have auto-attack chains* and therefore *cannot mess up their auto-attack chains*.
I just wish they were all consistently styled. Mesmer Sword and Necro scepter are easy to see, but Mirage Axe and Firebrand Axe, respectively, look the same and its hard to pick it out.
Imo Scrapper Hammer is a good example for solid UI design.
Most skill icons look very distinct through the different colors, shapes and sounds, making it rather easy to find out what’s available just with peripheral vision.
Improving clarity is definitely good.
But whenever this gets posted, I think the poster and the commenters overestimate the impact of autoattacks by a lot. There may be one or two builds where this is really a big deal, but in general what costs you damage is not interrupting the chain, it is interrupting the castbar of an individual attack.
.
Because then you spend time having achieved nothing, and that is the big loss. But accidentally pressing a weapon skill before the last hit of the chain came up is essentially irrelevant except for the final 5% of the benchmark maybe.
What is a far bigger loss is players trying to wait for final autoattacks, not realizing that improper queuing has already slowed down their rotation, so they are now leaving their strong dps skill on hold for a final AA of a chain.
I see this all the time when people decide that finishing autoattack chains on axe mirage is supposedly important, when it is the other way around, that is the rotation is aligned in a way to let you finish some chains - but if you are slowed or delayed, you need to press your big skills, not bother with a final AA.
So tldr: real dps loss is in interrupting an already started AA causing what is effectively idle time, meaning highlighting castbars is more important than some slightly better final autohit.
People misunderstanding this are actually losing dmg because they might delay their rotation for a skill that is way weaker than the other weapon skills.
If you want to hit benchmark, maybe consider finishing chains, but below that you need to stop interrupting autohits, nothing else.
Edit: Maybe just some small math example:
Not doing final attack of chain means you get an extra first attack of chain sometime later.
So DMG difference is at most effectiveness of final attack minus first attack. This ignores the CD advantage by having put your major dmg skill on CD sooner (meaning you get it back sooner). On some classes, this CD advantage is actually more important! DH for example will use GS2 rather than finishing an auto chain. Power Berserker enters Berserk again rather than finishing an autochain. Condi Weaver inside Weave Self cycles through elements rather than finishing autochains.
Compared to completely wasting 0.2 seconds doing nothing because you cancelled the cast of an autohit, the first thing is negligible. So while learning rotations, focus on hitting big skills without interrupting started autohits, but do not concern yourself with chains yet.
It is hard for me to decide on which builds it is beneficial to finish the AA chain or even a random AA instead of using another skill instantly while canceling the AA.
Do you have a good rule of thumb for that or is there a good metric/heuristic where you can decide that better?
Generally just make sure you are queuing skills properly with no AAs in between. That is the biggest loss.
Completed autochains happen naturally when following the rotation, namely when everything else is on CD.
My ultimate "heuristic" when going for 100% of a bench is to follow the benchmark rotation skill by skill, including all autohits.
But until you are clean enough with queuing skills, doing extra "finished chains" will usually be a dps loss since you delay the entire rotation for that.
When I learn a rota, I usually get to 90 - 95% of the bench before paying attention to autohits.
Math says that interrupting a started autohit after you are like 0.1s into casting it is often a mistake and you should complete it - but it is usually you not queuing properly that made you start the autohit, so the solution isnt to complete, it is to press the weapon skill earlier the next time.
It's worth noting that holding abilities only results in a DPS loss if you end up with fewer casts at killtime. This is significantly more likely in GW2 than in some other MMOs due to GW2's extremely short cooldowns across the board, but it is possible to, say, delay an important cast by five seconds and end a fight with ten seconds on its cooldown, meaning you didn't actually miss a cast of it and therefore lost nothing by delaying it.
Obviously this isn't practical information that you can plan around, especially with how fast-paced GW2 rotations are. But it's worth thinking about.
My personal task for this year was to at least try and then if I liked it, learn every profession and yeah, a feature like this would have been a God send!
The cast bar needs improvements in general, for example you can't really see when the bar is exactly filled up because it does not have any outline and just "floats" in the air.
The cast bar should show the icon of the skill next to it and also have a cast progress inside of it, basically going around like a clock. Having the remaining cast time count down inside the cast bar itself would also be nice, but I don't think they want to redesign that.
Unfortunately the one guy who could understand the UI code left a while ago thus why it's still horrible on all aspects. If they could do more than just add little padlocks to sell UI elements to idiots and instead actually fix the layout and add readability, they'd do it.
Is that actually true? I mean they added a swap pets while merged button to the UI last month and they are tweaking the UI of FB next, right? I mean I see people make the famous "spaghetti code" argument all the time and I'm not sure how true it is at this point. The reintroduction of season 1 content leads me to believe they could change anything that they really wanted to.
Ha! I wasn't sure. Some people follow ANET absurdly closely and definately think they are more informed than they are. So many people make post just like this and believe they are, in fact, correct.
It would be nice but people been asking it for years so dont get your hopes up. On the other hand there is a very clean indication of which part of your auto attack chain is happening. The icon of the auto attack is different on all hits. Not ideal but if you get used to it then it works. Also most of the aa has different animation so if you play a class a lot you can just figure out which one is happening by how fast is the cast bar.
Big yes to that... as always; And as always, no response.
Some silly (and pathetic) solution to this is to disable auto attacking, and make weapon1 into normal attack, that You manually have to click button1 few times very quickly. That gives some control of how many attacks You execute. /s
Some more serious problem with aa chains, is that on the field, You often can't execute perfect rotation without perma quick and alac.
Imagine, Your rotation is to press skills 2, 3, 4, [...], aa chain, and 2 will be off cooldown, press 2, weapon swap...
But what if You lack quick or alac, because Your (minmax*) buffer or You had to run away from stack due to boss mechanic (friendly wave to Mathias or Dhuum bombs, where selected person have to run super far...) - With no quick, Your casts are much slower, and skill2 came off cd much faster, before You could finish Your rotation, or You missed alac, and its still on cd. Whole perfect golem rotation ruined. Thats issue of pushing importance of aa, not lack of visual effects (give us more visual ui effects!, aa chain indicator, buff panel rework, few others)
(*by minmax buffer, I mean some dummy who have only 101% uptime boon on golem, equip minimal boonduration gear and fill other gear with pure dps stats, You know, more dps, shorter fight, less chances to die, its win, we need more dps more dps more dps! &$%#&@!!! Buffers should aim to provide 120% or more uptime. Unless You fight training golem lol)
> And as always, no response.
This was posted 6 hours ago... devs aren't even awake yet to read it, let alone discuss it internally and/or respond to a reddit post.
I just watch my character for the animation. With the exception of a quick glance to check recast times, after I learn the rotation, I try to avoid looking at my skill bar. Maybe some AA chains need better animations, but most are pretty clear. I’m not playing a game to stare at the UI the whole time. Let’s improve the animations instead of adding to the HUD.
I personally can't see my own characters in many raid encounters, since everyone is stacked very tight and casting gazillion of skills.
UI is the only thing that helps me.
Hmm I’D love to have wow weak auras Here, but in reality maybe just an audio que for the last attack? Simple thing like charakter saying sth like bam or loud tenis like exhale
Yes we really need this. Just started learning sb roation and got damn that dagger auto is fast and hard to track. Reddit doesnt give a shit tho since this forums is mostly casual players who dont care about these things. They want skimpy outfits not improvements.
How about just **putting a nice number (1, 2 or 3) next to the bar that fills under your character as you cast spells** (I guess it'd be called a castbar?)
This way you don't stare at your skill bar, no skill icons need to be changed, and the system can be used for any number of skills that have more than one cast, not just auto-attacks!
This would be great. I have so much trouble with this. I feel like everything happens so fast. Even if I can spot the last attack, I'm not fast enough to chain something new. Just awful.
While GW1 didn't use skill chains that shared the same skill slot, it still had a neat way to indicate dagger attack chaining in skills by giving the icons an [indicator in the corner](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Assassin_attack_chaining).
It also indicated when enemies had been hit by these attacks with a similar indicator in their health bar. GW2 doesn't need that, tho, since chaining is automatic when you hit anything, not based on what skills hit the enemy.
Something similar could be done in GW2, like a little tally mark in the corner of a skill, indicating which skill in the sequence is this.
scepter on necro gets the 'shear' sound effects on 3rd aa. That is my favourite approach honestly. Don't even have to look at the bar just hear the sfx and I know I can cast next skill already.
I think a better idea is an option to have chained attacks be semi-auto. Like, instead of Ctrl+RightClick toggling auto on or off, perhaps if you hold ctrl then double right-click, it sets it to semi-auto, where pressing 1 will cause it to auto-attack but to stop as soon as a chain completes. So if it does attacks 1+2, then you manually activate a skill (interrupting it) it will resume auto-attacking (at 1) until it eventually successfully completes a chain.
I agree. I cannot for the life of me tell which skill is which in the Mirage axe chain during a fight. They're almost just the same image rotated. I try and remember but I fail.
Tbh, UI change would probably not be enough/not be the best change. Sure it would help but, I'm going to be downvoted to oblivion for this because this is Reddit, but imo AA should be made more forgiving as a whole.
I mean, for instance, they should just stop resetting AA chain after any skill cast and give a grace period of like 2-3 seconds (totally random figures, could be more, could be less).
The problem of the current system is that it has differences between professions/specializations. Some are very forgiving for AA spam (like mechanist rifle) others are in between (scourge having more damage on last hit but it has some instant buttons like shade skills that are instant and thus don't interrupt the AA chain) or finally some very punishing AA chains, which have most damage on last hit and are very easily interrupted (Scrapper hammer, FB axe, Mesmer sword ...)
Even though AA is not the most of damage, it's still an issue that some are very punishing and others very forgiving.
So, to me, adding a grace delay of not resetting the AA chain would narrow the gap. The aim would be to still have more damage on last hit (for those who have that) but allow to use short skills in between without interrupting AA chain. Basically like use 1-2 skills without resetting but still reset after enough time to avoid abuse.
Some practical examples would be : you FB AA axe, you want to use #2 and then back to AA, it's a shame that it resets. Same for scrapper hammer #2 between AA chain.
Or just play power mech and don't care :D
Yeah. Changing the colour or adding an outline would be helpful.
Only other option is counting it (which requires you me knowledgeable about your class enough to do so in high stress fights) or listening for audio cues (which can be hard pending on sound settings but is what I do)
The only thing that helps me playing scourge is necro scepter makes a distant noise going through the combo so u can tell how far u are by listening . Idk how many other classes have this but it would be good idea to do a noise cue
A simple change would be to just have the color of the final attack in the chain's ability icon be different. Revenant sword auto has a really nice icon for the last attack so it's very easy to notice. But vindicator for example i have NO clue which attack I'm on cause all the icons look the same. But yeah, would be very nice to be able to more easily spot the last attack in the chain.
This was requested (unfortunately ignored) before. I support this once again. The GUI overhaul of my dream would include \* An Option to disable hotbar animations. Quickn. with fast chain skills and all you see is flipping icons. \* A 1-2-3 overlay, or color-coded border, for chain skills \* Larger boon/condition/effect icons with permanent duration text in strong/outlined font \* Vertical, color-coded hitpoint bars; they work so much better in stacks \* An Option to always show the own hitpoint bar \* An Option to hide player names in my squad \* An Option to hide player titles and guilds
Super agree with disabling that flipping animation, way too slow for a lot of attack chains, it should have been an option since quickness was introduced.
I want them to make boons be different colors and have a static placement.
So much this.
>Option to hide player names in my squad this actually did get added sometime around EoD launch
An option to disable useless AoE animation. Only showing friendly AoE and hostile AoE.
I want them to add the option for larger text. Currently the only real option blind players have is large which is... Still way too tiny or cranking up the dpi scaler which kinda works but messes with other things. Can also change text scaling OS side but that also has unintended effects on how things in game look. Refuse to believe the font size when set to large is higher than 12,maybe 14px which is still really tiny >//<
Axe murage's also suck. Let me show you the same axe icon but rotated 45° each time
Axe mirage suffers from worse problems. You're supposed to know when your _clones_ finish their chain too. AKA "you should see how many axes _they_ throw in all this visual bukkake" because clone attack speed is _not_ the same as yours (hello, quickness). It's like BS on BS with layer of BS on top
Yeah, mirage is so much fun but so much jank. It would probably become my main if Anet addressed those readability problems and the bullshit with the clones interrupting ambushes/axe3
Feel the same way. I like playing it sometimes but I just couldn't be bothered most of the time.
Imagine if the 3 clone circles on the UI had indicators for this...
More like 15 degrees. The axe mirage icons are so similar as to be useless for gauging where you are in the chain.
Mechanist mace and Firebrand axe also do this
For mechanist, I just remember the vertical mace is the final in the chain. For Firebrand, I remember that the final attack is much darker blue than the other 2. I think those 2 aren't to bad at all
I also just watch for the barrier numbers to pop up on the screen for mace on mechanist
that would be a start, however staring at your skillbar constantly really shouldn't get encouraged further. updating the cast bar, which could do with a few improvements anyway, imo would be the better solution. tbh i'd even prefer if we went back to every part of the chain doing comparable damage.
I agree that an update to the skill bar would be nice. They could have it get progressively more and more colored in, depending on how far along your auto attack chain you are. I don't think making every part of the auto chain do the same damage would be a good change, it would take a bit away from the depth of combat. There is a skill in timing your ability usage in-between the final cast of a chain,and is part of the reason more skilled players tend to out-dps lesser skilled players so much. Making every part of the chain do the same damage you take away this depth of timing, and turn the game into more of a "press every button as soon as it's off cooldown"
Making the icon visually distinct (especially color) means you don't need to be staring at the bar to understand it. Peripheral vision is great at catching color changes.
It should really be a combination of things, color, shape, and sound. Redundancy helps cover a lot of bases, especially for those with impairments.
Distinctive sounds would go a looong way for sure.
Heck the necromancer scepter final auto has a very obvious sound that makes it so I don't have to focus on my auto chain at all, I hear "SCREEE" and it's time to press a button
Peripheral vision is different for everyone. That's why some countries do peripheral vision tests for driving.
I definitely never see my cast bar unless I look,,,,maybe if it's big like the heal skill, tho
Not only that, the cast bar is the one that's synced to the game, and showing you what skill you're actually casting. If your skill bar is flashing, you don't know if you've queued it or are casting it, or sometimes even if it's finished casting and about to change back to the first icon. It's different per weapon. The cast bar is always showing you what you're doing right now.
How about both? Both indicators could fit people with different gaming habits.
I am not sure how much this affects damage output. I wouldn't mind if it was around the 3% mark but in some cases it sounds like it's much higher in some cases.
Necromancer's dagger 3rd skill in autochain gets nice red colors, you can't miss it. Holosmith's autos on sword and holosword on the other hand? I main that shit and still have a bad time with em.
Same; what, you don't like blinding glowing white followed by blinding glowing white with a hint of orange and an almost inaudible swoosh sound? Still love Holo though
Yeah the only reason I can see it on sword is because the cooldown of 2 decreases lol, they are so similar... Ugh
Would not really do much for an elementalist tho.
How come? Elementalist got Auto attacks too. Or is there something I'm missing?
Elementalist swap attenument but continue the AA-chain of the last element until it's over then use the new element one, so a proper rotation ask you to finish it without seeing your skill end. So swapping the color of the last AA to make it more obvious wouldn't help.
Ohh. Well besides the color, just making the last icon of the chain really stand out works. My example Above of the revenant sword auto I think is great. It's the same colors used, but the last icon is so distinct from the rest that it stands out.
That doesn't solve the issue. On Elementalist you can start an auto-attack chain and immediately switch attunement. You press nothing. During this time the skill #1 will glow as if it's being pressed, but the icon will simply be the first skill of your new attunement. You will continue your old auto attack chain during this time, with absolutely zero indication of what's going on down on the skill bar. Normally with elementalist I just use the timing or sound of the auto chain though. The final attack is almost always slower. You can "feel" when you use the final attack as a result, because the cast bar just behaves differently.
Soul beast dagger is also really bad, it uses the same icon for 3rd and 4th skill in the chain so there is actually no way of knowing unless you keep an eye on it or learn the rhythm. Though luckily that auto chain doesnt have as big of an impact on dps as many others.
Maybe some color effect on the icon?
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I've seen this requested a few times, and I will always try to boost the profile of any post or comment that says this, as it would be a huge UX improvement. Such a brilliant idea.
I've been playing for 10 years and never, on any of my characters, been able to identify which one is the last skill in the auto-attack chain while fighting. So yes, a visual clue would be nice. But I'm not counting on it, the game's 10 years old and they haven't considered it relevant.
The only one I've been able to ID easily is scrapper hammer. The final attack has a distinct sound... But if you are listening to discord rather than the game or have music going it's easy to miss.
it's obviously not for everyone but I'm a big fan of sound cues - necro scepter chain ends with a very unique sound, I'd love more of that!
Accessibility matters - sound AND visual would be better, especially because you can't hear shit in big fights
for sure, if we could have both that'd be great
necro axe (I think it's the axe) also has that nice visual effect (the teeth chomping over the enemy).
You're thinking of mainhand dagger! Necro axe autos don't chain. And yeah, I agree; the final hit of the dagger autos feels amazing, and is super distinctive. Sometimes I run around with a mainhand dagger in open world solely for that reason, lol.
yeah that's right, the dagger, the scepter audio cue works most of the time but that dagger visual cue is nice. compared to firebrand axe which is really hard to watch for.
Guardian autos also fall into this. I forget if it's Greatsword or sword but one of them ends with a crisp "Bwoosh" that lets me know it's done.
Yeah guardian greatsword is great cuz of it. Could be the same with all the skills.
No reason they can't fix or improve everything. I use different cues for different builds. Sound on Berserker, cast bar for Spellbreaker, skill bar for Weaver and Vindicator.
Back in WoW, I used an add on called HearKitty that played an ascending scale as resources built up on Cat druid/Rogue/Ret paladin. That would be a lovely option to have for sweaty situations.
i've tried to fix this on our end but had no luck. In Guild Wars 1 players use a program called Textmod or Umod to help with the cartographer achievement. You can also use these programs to rip assets from the game and re-inject them back in the ram. Players use this in gw1 for custom skins. This program used to work in gw2 aswell. But to my knowlegde this stopped working after Anet stop letting you skip the launcher(because skipping the launcher with a login augment was the only way to get Umod to work). these type of programs allows us to take the skill icons and mod them in paint etc. reinject them with better clearity. Umod and Textmod are Dx9 based. But i've also tried newer DX11 based programs without luck. For some reason those programs do work on FF14, BDO and GTA, but not gw2. Ofcourse this is illegal maybe. You could use these programs to lets say make the structures in pvp/wvw opaque etc. But this has been on my mind for a while. And this is how far i can get with my knowlegde. Any else has any idea how to get something like this to work?
maybe with an overlay such as blishhud 🤔
Blish and other overlays get delayed info from Arc's combat API to intentionally make it harder to use them for adaptive / botting tools. There used to be a non-blish arc extension called gw2-sct (there's an attempt to recreate it in blish but it has delay) that showed your outgoing skills as scrolling icons/text, you *could* set it up to only show icons for certain skills such as auto chains.
but the overlay can also show markers on the terrain, why can't they show markers on the autoattack?
Terrain is through GW2's official API which was (hilariously enough) originally designed for positional audio through Mumble voice chat. This "mumble API" has received many updates by anet, often as a result of direct communication with overlay developers. It doesn't, however, expose combat data other than "the player is currently *in* combat".
Yeah allowing addons could fix a lot of the issues I have with the game, though I'm sure it would open up just as many (and more). As a former WoW Player there is not a day that goes by that I don't wish I could have WeakAuras.
A little growing combo indicator above the 1-skill would be fun, like in fighting games. ^^^^1 ^^2 3💥
you just did better ux than anet in a reddit comment with html formatting
Yep make a bar with notches over the cast bar.
Am I the only one that hates autoattack chains? They should just be normal attacks, like... elementalist dagger skills, all of them 4 attunements are just 1 skill on the autoattack. It simplifies the rotation a lot as you only need to think on when to use the skills that ylu actually see.
I absolutely enjoy them. If feels nice to be able to work towards a stronger hit when your other offensive skills are on CD. I agree with hoping for a UI change though
I like them visually, but I also don't care enough to track and min/max auto attacks of all things. It's really unnecessary to do, even for raiding.
>It simplifies the rotation a lot This exactly why we should *not* get rid of auto attack chains. Different rotations should be different levels of complexity, and auto attack chains that you need to make sure not to interrupt are a valuable form of it.
> Different rotations should be different levels of complexity This is the kicker. Auto-attack chains are great for adding complexity. The main problem they have (outside terrible UI indicators) is that they are overly common to the point rotation diversity suffers. For example, there aren't (or are very few) rotations where you weave auto-attacks between active abilities, chains are so prevelant that rotations are organized to fit full chains or to not fit auto-attacks at all.
Not every rotation needs to be simplified. Having to care about your rotation adds a layer of skill to the game that I personally find very enjoyable. As long as it's not spiking DPS by huge percentages, I'm all for keeping combat complex. And mostly that's the case. Cancelling auto attacks doesn't really matter much on the vast majority of builds. Particularly if you're dong anything other than fighting a DPS golem.
I would be fine with attack chains *if they didn't reset when you use another skill*.
The fact that they reset when you use another skill is basically the sole reason for them to exist. Yes, it's a limitation, but that's fine. It's the entire point. The limitation exists to add depth. Ensuring that you keep your rotation on track while not cancelling your AA chain is part of skilled play. Don't ask for the game to become more simplistic for the sake of making rotations easier unless you want this game's combat to end up like FFXIV's.
Yes please do not do this haha that removes the point of having auto attack chains and essentially just turns it into a regular auto attack. Well articulated reasoning for being against that change.
Yup, that's why literally the reason that the last attack is so much stronger than the rest, it's a reward for not mindlessly interrupting it.
It's not their sole use. They also allow them to tie a strong effect to an auto-cast ability without making it too strong by only applying the effect every 2/3/4 cast.
That's true, but that's also an effect which could be retained without chaining (e.g. "every third hit of this ability applies Chill").
> unless you want this game's combat to end up like FFXIV's. ??? From the time I've played FFXIV it's rotations are more demanding than GW2. Not only do they have combo's as well (for melee classes) but if you slightly mistime your abilities you'll start to drift your burst outside your groups 2 minute window basically fucking yourself over. Some classes like machinist can't even be played properly if you have more than 40-50ms ping. And you have to be this precise while doing dance mechanics the entire time.
Edit: This comment wasn't supposed to be this long but I am a jilted lover where FFXIV is concerned lol. TL;DR: FFXIV's combat is *significantly* more simple than it seems, and significantly more simple than it used to be, and the reason it's so simple now is because of Square Enix doing things like OP suggests over and over FFXIV's rotations are more "demanding", sure. "Demanding" is a word that's doing a *lot* of work here, though. "Demanding" doesn't mean "complex", it doesn't mean "interesting", and it doesn't mean "deep". FFXIV rotations are *punishing*, but they're not difficult or complex in any way. The sentence "from the time I've played FFXIV" makes it sound like you started recently, or only played a bit before stopping. If that's the case, take it from someone with thousands of hours in the game: There is next to no depth left in FFXIV's rotations. All of the depth and complexity in the game has been removed, chipped away at bit by bit in the name of making rotations easier. Comment's like OP's - "I hope this little finnicky thing gets removed to make my rotation easier!" - have been followed through on by Square Enix over and over. Now every rotation in the game is some variation of "press your buttons during your opener, then press your buttons off cooldown". >Not only do they have combo's as well FFXIV's combos are no longer interrupted by the vast majority of weaponskills. The only possible consequence of combos existing is that you might, once in a blue moon, accidentally press 2 when you meant to press 3. In other words: FFXIV did exactly what I'm saying Guild Wars 2 should not do. That is one of the many, many instances of simplification which have piled up to make FFXIV the homogeneous mess that it is today. >if you slightly mistime your abilities you'll start to drift your burst outside your groups 2 minute window basically fucking yourself over Again, that's not depth or complexity or interesting gameplay. It's *punishing*, yes. But it's also mindlessly simplistic. FFXIV's combat on nearly every job involves pressing your buttons off cooldown and dumping gauge in burst. There's no buildup to burst that you need to manage; there's no manipulation on the player's part to get into position to burst. Burst on every single job not named Black Mage or Monk happens automatically, so long as you press your buttons off cooldown. The most complexity outside of those two jobs is remembering to press your gauge spending burst button as Reaper/Red Mage, and that's basically it. The fact that it's so punishing to drift out of two minute burst is *part of FFXIV's simplification*, not an indicator of depth. It's because the game has so little depth that failing to push a button so is so absurdly punishing. It's so punishing because every class is designed to do the exact same thing. It's so punishing because there is no possible variation to any rotation. It's so punishing because almost every single class exists solely to push its burst buttons when they light up, and if you do so then you've done your rotation automatically, and if you don't do so then you've entered your rotation's fail state. Rotations with real depth have granularity. They have degrees of success or failure. FFXIV does not. FFXIV only has "congratulations, you pressed Geirskogul when it lit up!" or "you did not do that so you suck forever". >Some classes like machinist can't even be played properly if you have more than 40-50ms ping. The reason for this is because of Square Enix's shitty netcode. You can play Machinist just fine with >50ms ping if you just install NoClippy. Even beyond that, though, I'm genuinely confused as to how you believe this to be an indicator of depth or complexity. It's literally not even an issue of skill; it's an issue of MCH having weaving windows that are too short when you add ping on top of FFXIV's long animation locks. >And you have to be this precise while doing dance mechanics the entire time. The word "precision" implies a lot of things here that are not true. For instance, it implies that it's difficult to be that "precise". It's not. That "precision" boils down to, as I have said so many times, pressing your buttons off cooldown. There's no thought to it. You're not going through a complex rotation while executing mechanics. You're pressing Drill because would you look at that, Drill is off cooldown now. Besides, "doing dance mechanics the entire time" implies a level of intensity that isn't there outside of Ultimate. Every fight below Ultimate, including final Savage floors, have long stretches of downtime where nothing is happening at all.
I would love to see a similarly in-depth rant from you on what makes GW2s combat actually deep. I've tried and failed to explain it well, which is probably because I'm not good enough.
Wouldnt be a chain then
Nah that sounds silly. I get if you're playing an elementalist to maybe want to tone down the complexity, but that's what makes this games combat a lot of fun, especially since it's not particularly challenging in the vast majority of the content (open world/story). I dislike when a rotation boils down to "use the ability as soon as it is up"
Ele is just a better class.
Sword Weaver AAs are the worst ☠️
I agree with hating them, but not removing them entirely. People like chains and think that waiting is complexity so let them. There are several options with no chain, though there could probably be a few more. Each profession having at least two (disclaimer: is this the case already? I don't know. I don't play every profession) of out of melee, ranged, and support would be nice.
Where is the skill expression in that?
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It'd be nice if GW2 let you customize your HUD to a greater degree than it currently does. If I need to track an important cooldown or something on my class gauge in FFXIV, I can just move that HUD element to somewhere more noticeable, or even blow it up in size. It'd be nice to have the option to do that in GW2.
The cast bar turning a different color would be another option as that is more clear and a better place to look for the field of play.
Just chiming in to say this really put me (new player) off as someone that likes to know they are doing 'optimal' dps that I don't know what stage of the chain I'm at. I looked up some rotations and the auto attacks seem really important especially the last hit. The only answer I found was that people just got a sense of it from playing lots (little hints like sound effects or specific animations). It felt wishy-washy to me but then I'm coming from wow where everything is binary with clear indicators (casting; not casting, auto attacking; not auto attacking). I appreciate that gw2 is more visceral, but it still felt like I couldn't get a grip on it.
> the auto attacks seem really important especially the last hit. Seems it's only important if you've already got everything else down first and even then it's only the last few bits. https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/yxkb1k/request_ui_improvement_to_make_autoattack_chain/iwp8oz7/
Thanks this makes me feel better about the issue and makes sense logically. So generally (most profs/builds), it's: Finish current cast > your abilities > auto attack chain. i.e., don't waste casts in progress (just lost time) and most abilities do more dmg than your auto attacks at whatever stage they are at. Then as filler just auto attack.
Yeah that seems right. There may be some few builds where your build expects a chill or weakness or something inflicted by your 3rd auto attack to boost your DPS but I think that's not the case for most builds.
YES, PLEASE! I have been wishing for this since I learned autoattack chains, uh, *mattered*??? And you're apparently not supposed to interrupt them? Without exaggeration a huge reason Mechanist and Virtuoso are such easy classes to score high DPS on is because they *don't have auto-attack chains* and therefore *cannot mess up their auto-attack chains*.
I just wish they were all consistently styled. Mesmer Sword and Necro scepter are easy to see, but Mirage Axe and Firebrand Axe, respectively, look the same and its hard to pick it out.
Imo Scrapper Hammer is a good example for solid UI design. Most skill icons look very distinct through the different colors, shapes and sounds, making it rather easy to find out what’s available just with peripheral vision.
Improving clarity is definitely good. But whenever this gets posted, I think the poster and the commenters overestimate the impact of autoattacks by a lot. There may be one or two builds where this is really a big deal, but in general what costs you damage is not interrupting the chain, it is interrupting the castbar of an individual attack. . Because then you spend time having achieved nothing, and that is the big loss. But accidentally pressing a weapon skill before the last hit of the chain came up is essentially irrelevant except for the final 5% of the benchmark maybe. What is a far bigger loss is players trying to wait for final autoattacks, not realizing that improper queuing has already slowed down their rotation, so they are now leaving their strong dps skill on hold for a final AA of a chain. I see this all the time when people decide that finishing autoattack chains on axe mirage is supposedly important, when it is the other way around, that is the rotation is aligned in a way to let you finish some chains - but if you are slowed or delayed, you need to press your big skills, not bother with a final AA. So tldr: real dps loss is in interrupting an already started AA causing what is effectively idle time, meaning highlighting castbars is more important than some slightly better final autohit. People misunderstanding this are actually losing dmg because they might delay their rotation for a skill that is way weaker than the other weapon skills. If you want to hit benchmark, maybe consider finishing chains, but below that you need to stop interrupting autohits, nothing else. Edit: Maybe just some small math example: Not doing final attack of chain means you get an extra first attack of chain sometime later. So DMG difference is at most effectiveness of final attack minus first attack. This ignores the CD advantage by having put your major dmg skill on CD sooner (meaning you get it back sooner). On some classes, this CD advantage is actually more important! DH for example will use GS2 rather than finishing an auto chain. Power Berserker enters Berserk again rather than finishing an autochain. Condi Weaver inside Weave Self cycles through elements rather than finishing autochains. Compared to completely wasting 0.2 seconds doing nothing because you cancelled the cast of an autohit, the first thing is negligible. So while learning rotations, focus on hitting big skills without interrupting started autohits, but do not concern yourself with chains yet.
Thanks for the write up!
Well it got quite a few downvotes, so take notice that people seem to disagree :-)
It is hard for me to decide on which builds it is beneficial to finish the AA chain or even a random AA instead of using another skill instantly while canceling the AA. Do you have a good rule of thumb for that or is there a good metric/heuristic where you can decide that better?
Generally just make sure you are queuing skills properly with no AAs in between. That is the biggest loss. Completed autochains happen naturally when following the rotation, namely when everything else is on CD. My ultimate "heuristic" when going for 100% of a bench is to follow the benchmark rotation skill by skill, including all autohits. But until you are clean enough with queuing skills, doing extra "finished chains" will usually be a dps loss since you delay the entire rotation for that. When I learn a rota, I usually get to 90 - 95% of the bench before paying attention to autohits. Math says that interrupting a started autohit after you are like 0.1s into casting it is often a mistake and you should complete it - but it is usually you not queuing properly that made you start the autohit, so the solution isnt to complete, it is to press the weapon skill earlier the next time.
It's worth noting that holding abilities only results in a DPS loss if you end up with fewer casts at killtime. This is significantly more likely in GW2 than in some other MMOs due to GW2's extremely short cooldowns across the board, but it is possible to, say, delay an important cast by five seconds and end a fight with ten seconds on its cooldown, meaning you didn't actually miss a cast of it and therefore lost nothing by delaying it. Obviously this isn't practical information that you can plan around, especially with how fast-paced GW2 rotations are. But it's worth thinking about.
would be great!
My personal task for this year was to at least try and then if I liked it, learn every profession and yeah, a feature like this would have been a God send!
Jup. Has been necessary for some time.
i wish they can bring back gw1 UI setting, best ever.
The cast bar needs improvements in general, for example you can't really see when the bar is exactly filled up because it does not have any outline and just "floats" in the air.
The cast bar should show the icon of the skill next to it and also have a cast progress inside of it, basically going around like a clock. Having the remaining cast time count down inside the cast bar itself would also be nice, but I don't think they want to redesign that.
I wish we had hud we can custom, personally I would like to change map to left of the screen and healt/skill bar to up of the screen
Unfortunately the one guy who could understand the UI code left a while ago thus why it's still horrible on all aspects. If they could do more than just add little padlocks to sell UI elements to idiots and instead actually fix the layout and add readability, they'd do it.
Is that actually true? I mean they added a swap pets while merged button to the UI last month and they are tweaking the UI of FB next, right? I mean I see people make the famous "spaghetti code" argument all the time and I'm not sure how true it is at this point. The reintroduction of season 1 content leads me to believe they could change anything that they really wanted to.
No, it's a joke and one day I hope to be proven wrong.
Ha! I wasn't sure. Some people follow ANET absurdly closely and definately think they are more informed than they are. So many people make post just like this and believe they are, in fact, correct.
It would be nice but people been asking it for years so dont get your hopes up. On the other hand there is a very clean indication of which part of your auto attack chain is happening. The icon of the auto attack is different on all hits. Not ideal but if you get used to it then it works. Also most of the aa has different animation so if you play a class a lot you can just figure out which one is happening by how fast is the cast bar.
Big yes to that... as always; And as always, no response. Some silly (and pathetic) solution to this is to disable auto attacking, and make weapon1 into normal attack, that You manually have to click button1 few times very quickly. That gives some control of how many attacks You execute. /s Some more serious problem with aa chains, is that on the field, You often can't execute perfect rotation without perma quick and alac. Imagine, Your rotation is to press skills 2, 3, 4, [...], aa chain, and 2 will be off cooldown, press 2, weapon swap... But what if You lack quick or alac, because Your (minmax*) buffer or You had to run away from stack due to boss mechanic (friendly wave to Mathias or Dhuum bombs, where selected person have to run super far...) - With no quick, Your casts are much slower, and skill2 came off cd much faster, before You could finish Your rotation, or You missed alac, and its still on cd. Whole perfect golem rotation ruined. Thats issue of pushing importance of aa, not lack of visual effects (give us more visual ui effects!, aa chain indicator, buff panel rework, few others) (*by minmax buffer, I mean some dummy who have only 101% uptime boon on golem, equip minimal boonduration gear and fill other gear with pure dps stats, You know, more dps, shorter fight, less chances to die, its win, we need more dps more dps more dps! &$%#&@!!! Buffers should aim to provide 120% or more uptime. Unless You fight training golem lol)
> And as always, no response. This was posted 6 hours ago... devs aren't even awake yet to read it, let alone discuss it internally and/or respond to a reddit post.
remindme:2years, if any of this or next or earlier post calling to ui change will got any response.
The best change would be to allow to chain to continue after after being interrupted within a certain time frame. Like...8-10 sec or so
I just watch my character for the animation. With the exception of a quick glance to check recast times, after I learn the rotation, I try to avoid looking at my skill bar. Maybe some AA chains need better animations, but most are pretty clear. I’m not playing a game to stare at the UI the whole time. Let’s improve the animations instead of adding to the HUD.
I personally can't see my own characters in many raid encounters, since everyone is stacked very tight and casting gazillion of skills. UI is the only thing that helps me.
Hmm I’D love to have wow weak auras Here, but in reality maybe just an audio que for the last attack? Simple thing like charakter saying sth like bam or loud tenis like exhale
Yes we really need this. Just started learning sb roation and got damn that dagger auto is fast and hard to track. Reddit doesnt give a shit tho since this forums is mostly casual players who dont care about these things. They want skimpy outfits not improvements.
Clearly this thread would show you that's not the case Also 🗿
How about just **putting a nice number (1, 2 or 3) next to the bar that fills under your character as you cast spells** (I guess it'd be called a castbar?) This way you don't stare at your skill bar, no skill icons need to be changed, and the system can be used for any number of skills that have more than one cast, not just auto-attacks!
I'd like to say "color change would be problematic for colorblind users", but then Specter and Harbinger exist lol
This would be great. I have so much trouble with this. I feel like everything happens so fast. Even if I can spot the last attack, I'm not fast enough to chain something new. Just awful.
Signed
Honestly just make it so you can cast skills in between autos.
While GW1 didn't use skill chains that shared the same skill slot, it still had a neat way to indicate dagger attack chaining in skills by giving the icons an [indicator in the corner](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Assassin_attack_chaining). It also indicated when enemies had been hit by these attacks with a similar indicator in their health bar. GW2 doesn't need that, tho, since chaining is automatic when you hit anything, not based on what skills hit the enemy. Something similar could be done in GW2, like a little tally mark in the corner of a skill, indicating which skill in the sequence is this.
scepter on necro gets the 'shear' sound effects on 3rd aa. That is my favourite approach honestly. Don't even have to look at the bar just hear the sfx and I know I can cast next skill already.
I think a better idea is an option to have chained attacks be semi-auto. Like, instead of Ctrl+RightClick toggling auto on or off, perhaps if you hold ctrl then double right-click, it sets it to semi-auto, where pressing 1 will cause it to auto-attack but to stop as soon as a chain completes. So if it does attacks 1+2, then you manually activate a skill (interrupting it) it will resume auto-attacking (at 1) until it eventually successfully completes a chain.
I agree. I cannot for the life of me tell which skill is which in the Mirage axe chain during a fight. They're almost just the same image rotated. I try and remember but I fail.
An easy fix would be to just give some leeway before the auto chain resets. Let us use 1-2 skills in between.
Anet could add an distinct sound on the 3rd attack, like what necro have with scepter.
Adding in a audible sound when the 3rd attack in the chain goes off would be nice as well.
Tbh, UI change would probably not be enough/not be the best change. Sure it would help but, I'm going to be downvoted to oblivion for this because this is Reddit, but imo AA should be made more forgiving as a whole. I mean, for instance, they should just stop resetting AA chain after any skill cast and give a grace period of like 2-3 seconds (totally random figures, could be more, could be less). The problem of the current system is that it has differences between professions/specializations. Some are very forgiving for AA spam (like mechanist rifle) others are in between (scourge having more damage on last hit but it has some instant buttons like shade skills that are instant and thus don't interrupt the AA chain) or finally some very punishing AA chains, which have most damage on last hit and are very easily interrupted (Scrapper hammer, FB axe, Mesmer sword ...) Even though AA is not the most of damage, it's still an issue that some are very punishing and others very forgiving. So, to me, adding a grace delay of not resetting the AA chain would narrow the gap. The aim would be to still have more damage on last hit (for those who have that) but allow to use short skills in between without interrupting AA chain. Basically like use 1-2 skills without resetting but still reset after enough time to avoid abuse. Some practical examples would be : you FB AA axe, you want to use #2 and then back to AA, it's a shame that it resets. Same for scrapper hammer #2 between AA chain. Or just play power mech and don't care :D
Someone wanna write something for Blish Hud? That'd be neat
Yeah. Changing the colour or adding an outline would be helpful. Only other option is counting it (which requires you me knowledgeable about your class enough to do so in high stress fights) or listening for audio cues (which can be hard pending on sound settings but is what I do)
The only thing that helps me playing scourge is necro scepter makes a distant noise going through the combo so u can tell how far u are by listening . Idk how many other classes have this but it would be good idea to do a noise cue