tmk.7213

When reading the patch notes for the upcoming May 11th patch, I noticed that you’re removing the need to “charge” the mantras. While I agree it’s a huge QoL improvement (needing to do it got old really quickly) I have to say I will miss the little animations that show up above your head when you do that (not the stone screeching noise for the Firebrand mantras though, that part can go away). I have no solid suggestion on how to address that, but I can’t help but hope you might find some way to put them in the game in some other role. Maybe they could play when a mantra charge reloads or something. Or when you select the mantra onto the ability toolbar or something? On a note unrelated to the patch notes but related to the Guardian “flavor,” I’d like to bring up one thing that I find somewhat odd. Most professions feature fairly abstract icons that depict the actual ability (more or less – gun firing, a sword going whoosh, etc). A whole bunch of Guardian icons, however, are some angry guy yelling. Is this someone notable from the lore? My understanding that lore-wise Guardians are a continuation of the Elonian Ritualist tradition. My Guardian character is (headcanon-wise, anyway) a descendand of Elonian refugees. Having half of her abilities feature someone who looks like he wants to make Ascalon great again is... not exactly gamebreaking, but somewhat puzzling, flavor-wise. Another puzzling aspect of the Guardian are the shouts. They have a shout that goes “RETREAT!” It’s a useful shout, but I’ve never once seen anyone retreat when it’s used. In fact it’s arguably more useful on the offensive. Are you telling the enemy to retreat? Because that doesn’t really work either, it would have to apply Fear or something for that to happen. Similar issue with “Save Yourselves!” People usually don’t retreat when you use it either. They just kinda give you an odd look and keep fighting. Awkward. It’s an awesome and fun class to play otherwise, but these issues kinda make it a bit weird.

Haven’t been using the forums much so no idea if this has been suggested already, but I would really love a way to store “appearance templates.” These would remember which outfit you have selected, which mount skin you have chosen for each mount, which glider skin, the dyes applied to each of the above, as well as the settings to show/hide outfit, headpiece, shoulders, gloves, and back item. It would be REALLY awesome if these could also store separate haircuts (since some haircuts clip with some outfits, etc). Ideally I would like to see it as functionality added to equipment templates (which would also make me much more likely to buy them) but I would be willing to pay for them separately (though I’m not sure how many others would). However, if it’s implemented separately, I would also like to be able to activate both with one key (i.e. be able to assign “load equipment template 1” and “load appearance template 1” to the same key combination AND have both activated by this key, instead of the game no longer responding to that key in the context where it may activate more than one function). For example, I like to use the Crystal Arbiter outfit for my Norn Herald character, with backpiece transmuted into crystal wings. When I load the Renegade build I want to turn off the outfit and hide the backpiece. I can load the build and the equipment with F1 and Shift-F1, which is awesome, but then I have to open the character window and go to two separate places in it to turn off the outfit and the wings. Which is frustrating. Then there is a question of saving mounts and dyes. I have an equipment template that’s basically a Halloween costume build. I also have a full set of Halloween mount skins. But in practice I never use them because before I do that I’d have to go through my current mounts and write down on a piece of paper which mount skins and dyes I have right now. Then after the festival is over I have to find that piece of paper (or its photo on my phone, since let’s be real, I’d never find the piece of paper) and go through my mounts and apply the dyes back onto them. The thought of having to do this makes me just not want to bother, but then that kinda defeats the point of buying the mount skins (which you probably want people to do). I spend a lot of time picking the dyes for my mounts, in part because there are a ton of awesome looking dyes and mounts in this game and playing with the dyes can be fun in and of itself, but in part it’s also because the UI itself requires a lot of back-and-forth clicking between the swatches and the channels (instead of selecting the channel and then just hovering over the swatches to preview the color, then clicking the color to select it for that channel, which would probably be at least ten times faster than the way you have to do it right now). Therefore when I do get the dyes looking good on a mount (or an outfit, etc) I am reluctant to touch it again on that character, which is a shame because I’d rather load a fresh template and play with it some more. But there is no such thing. For wearable gear the dyes seem to get stored on the armor, but for mounts and outfits it’s one per character unless you feel like writing them down manually. That’s probably my biggest personal QoL gripe in the game at the moment, but since I’m here I’d like to also bring up another issue related to key bindings. I use B, V, Shift-V, C, Shift-C instead of 1-5 for basic character abilities. X, Shift-X, Z, and Shift-Z are “F1-F4” (profession skills). 4-1 are utilities and the tilde is the elite skill. I know it probably seems weird but I’ve played with it a lot before I found what works and this is what works best for me. I use secondary key bindings (“1-0” – or, in my case, Y and whatever is to the right of it, plus < and >) to play instruments (which, by the way, are a really neat feature). Now, the gripe is that my Mount Ability 1 and Mount Ability 2 are V and C. Which works for most mounts. But it doesn’t work in certain specific cases, like during a sequence right before Dragonfall when you’re flying on [spoilers] to bring down [spoilers]. V stops working as a key binding and you have to press it manually (or at least that was the case back when I did that chapter, which admittedly was a while ago). I’m assuming this is because I’m technically on a mount that has 1-5 abilities, so my V as “ability 2” conflicts with my V as “mount ability 1.” This also happens in the Moa races during Dragonbash. These aren’t really breaking issues, I can just use my mouse during those times. The problem is that if I ever get into WvW enough to fully unlock the warclaw mastery it’s probably going to become an issue again. Admittedly, I don’t play WvW that much, so it’s not exactly a pressing issue, but TL;DR: I’d like an option to map “1-5 while on a mount” explicitly and separately from “weapon 1-5.” I realize this is an issue I might be alone in having, and trying to fix it could affect everyone in the game (at least temporarily), but... for what it’s worth, it’s kind of a QoL issue for me, which essentially keeps me from unlocking the Warclaw mastery for fear that my dodge with stop working (unless I completely reorganize and re-learn my key bindings just for that, which I really don’t feel like doing). Lastly, it would be really awesome if the in-game instruments had a way to set the key you want to play in (e.g. C Ionian, A Aeolian, etc). Like they could have two extra “octaves” where one sets the key note and the other sets the scale you’re playing. This is an issue because if you’re not playing a piece that’s 100% in major scale (which most of them aren’t, because that would be boring), essentially what happens is that your “1” is in the middle of the octave and you have to constantly be switching back and forth to play the melody. I’m sure anyone who has used an instrument in GW2 is familiar with this issue. What would be even better is if, while you’re in the “settings octaves,” you could “save” the current setting to one of the “profession keys” (“F1-F4”), and then pressing those keys while in the actual octaves would recall the setting. Of course, this still wouldn’t quite encompass all the potential possibilities of a real instrument, but it would still be a HUGE improvement for anyone trying to play anything more complicated than “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” I realize these changes might be too complex or risky to implement any time soon, but I thought I would at least bring them up since they’ve been the main pain points with the US that I have encountered in all the time playing (I started right before Path of Fire, so although I’m a fairly casual player I probably have a few hundred hours in the game by now). In any case, thank you for reading! I didn’t realize it’s turning into a manuscript. I will endeavor to be more concise in the future. P.S. Last thing, I would love to see numerical values for the sliders in the character creation and makeover UI. This is for if I want to create, say, a Revenant version of a Warrior character, and want to make sure they both look the same. Right now you just kinda have to eyeball it, which is even more frustrating than writing down the dyes on a piece of paper.