Option to turn off other player skills/fashion

[Amalaaniwa.4725]

I am usually not the one who enjoys writing posts about game. I just simply love playing it, but I met a lot of frustrations from players in raids/strikes/fractals whose days due to "too many visual noise" on the screen.

When I first started playing the game 9 years ago there were way fewer skills or bright and "flashy" fashions implemented into the game, there were even not many people having legendary items. Only a minority had it. Skills were not that visual and did not create a big overlap in instances like dungeons and fractals.

The issue started when more and more elite specializations started appearing in-game and more visually "bright and flashy" skills got. I started raiding around 6 months ago, around the same time I started doing raids, but I can honestly say I could never get mechanics correct due to other people's skills blocking my view on the floor or for example huge backpack blocking side of my screen from other players. I had to learn every mechanic a hard way with a lot of deaths and frustration.

Now I started doing raids and strikes with less experienced players and you can guess that they are having exact same issue. They do not see skills I explained them about, as skills from other people block the view around them. It is plain and simple unbearable to play and you cannot ask other players to take off their fashion or use auto attacks only. This is not the way to play if the tools are given to them.

It would be great if Anet could implement option to make only your own skills visible (turning off skills from other players or at least somehow reduce visual noise they make and block boss skills), same with the fashion (options like character model limit and quality do not fix the issue fully). It would greatly reduce frustration and increase people satisfaction with this game

[Merloin.4816]

Although it would be a big step to solve issues in instances, I do think that open world doesn't deserve less than this. In fact, it can be worse in open world, especially in meta events, where more than 10 people stack up, or just press buttons. All the shiny effects around is the killing blow for many, because they don't see, or the visual noise itself is very confusing. I have played too many games in my life and honestly, haven't get tired of visuals in a single game other than GW2. And it is because everything bloating or overlapping each other. I honestly don't understand the design logic behind this, as I have played many games with too many visuals, still all were clean and you could understand what is going on.

In short, the game really needs visual clearing this or that way. Being able to turn other people's skill effects might be a step, but I think we need more than this. As seeing other players' effects is required at some point to understand what skill they used (be it in instances or open world), otherwise it would be harder to utilize combo finishers. Therefore I think overall visual cleaning in the game.

But no matter what kind of solution is implemented, I do think that both instanced and open world contents are starving for it.