Infusion Stacking Please Temporarily Fix

[Gregious.8903]

I acknowledge that the entire "aura" system needs to be completely overhauled, but in the meantime there is an issue that could use a "band-aid" fix.After a small amount of testing, it appears that the load sequence for infusions has nothing to do with what slot an infusion occupies. The infusions have various arbitrary rules applied to them where some override others and the last infusion applied will be the one shown in the case of conflicts. This can be observed by manually taking a piece of equipment off the character and putting it back on while there is an infusion on it to force it to have loaded last as well as having infusions on weapons and the weapon swap skill doing the same thing. However, these are the ONLY ways a user can control override order. This has become a more troublesome issue with the new Polysaturating infusions. The new infusions do not override the older Polyluminescent infusions, but the older infusions do override the newer ones. The issue here is the load order appears to be random from all possible aura effects so if you have both an old and a new Poly then you have a chance on any map change that you have the new Poly either active or inactive and nothing short of having the new poly on a weapon slot and changing weapons or manually unequipping the item with the new poly and putting it back on will rectify the situation.

This is not a "bug" as this is something that simply no one from the developer team has given any thought or effort to and is therefore functioning "as intended". I would like to propose that someone change how the load checks work for infusions so that a user can have more control or go through and adjust "aura" interactions so there are less conflicts while they are working on a complete "aura" overhaul. Reducing conflicts is self explanatory so I will only explain the former suggestion further.

Currently, "aura" loading is random and has no input variables that a user can control. I suggest changing this such that at least infusions are loaded in a certain order for "auras" so that a user can put their infusions in a certain desired order to create consistency in character appearance. For example, if all armor infusions load before trinket infusions, I could place Poly Orange into an armor slot and Poly Red into a trinket slot and because Red doesn't override Orange (but the reverse is the opposite) I will always have both Red and Orange active. This could be easily accomplished a number of ways, such as having every infusion slot load in a certain order, or having groups with certain priority.

My primary suggestion should be quite easy to implement, as there should somewhere be a very basic hard-coded hierarchy that stipulates infusion conflictions. Sadly this is probably on a per item list as part of an item property which is a truly horrible way to program...in which case, there should be a separate function somewhere that is responsible for checking agony resistance that simply does not have any priority programmed into it because it is irrelevant which infusions slots have +7 agony resistance and which have +9 since the total is all that matters. Therefore, this particular segment of code could be modified or copied and modified and some load hierarchy for infusion "auras" could be added without much difficulty on the programmer or the server load. In fact, this section is likely what is already controlling "aura" load order and its general lack of definitions is probably causing this "random" appearance and adding definitions would probably decrease server load, albeit probably insignificantly.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

Since it's not a bug, just annoyance, it's not a question of "fixing" anything. It's an unintended consequence of people getting creative with the use of auras. It probably also depends on which effects: some might be able to stack, some not. Further, there's no bit of coding that involves precedence of effects that will be "quite easy to implement;" there's always something that makes it challenging to design, test, & implement. And most importantly: this isn't urgent, so it doesn't need a temp solution.

In other words, I'd rather ANet look holistically at visual fashion-vs-noise, including magnitude of effects, portability, FPS & loading times & performance, and sure, precedence of effects.

For now, what works for me is to try out the effects individually and carefully choose which I want to combine. Often, I'll use an infusion for one weapon set, so I get a weapon swap effect (and prevents precedence from being an issue).

[tuck.2719]

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:Further, there's no bit of coding that involves precedence of effects that will be "quite easy to implement;"

While it's not guaranteed (and neither of us can know for sure), I'd imagine that loading infusions based on a set order (say, trinkets, then armor, then weapons, and in a specific deterministic order for each) would likely be fairly easy to implement and would offer a reasonable solution.

[Asum.4960]

Looking at some of these Characters standing around and what they do to FPS and load times (or my eyes), the best fix might be to make Infusions not stack, period.

Probably not a hugely popular position though...

[crepuscular.9047]

simple fix is just turn them into novities, only a single aura can be turned on at once, no stacking allow.

[Vrita.7846]

@"crepuscular.9047" said:simple fix is just turn them into novities, only a single aura can be turned on at once, no stacking allow.

Not going to happen. A dev already confirmed they're not going to remove aura stacking, because he knows a lot of people spent a lot of time and money into obtaining them. There's the possibility they'll add an option to disable other player's auras to reduce visual noise for people that want it.

Here's the comment on a reddit thread from the dev.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/9bg73p/by_evanderyne_if_someone_was_wondering_what_the/e540c80

[Sanity Obscure.6054]

Imagine the price crash when infusion auras are able to be turned off from menu.

They exist to show off your character. No value if everyone turns it off lmao

[Vrita.7846]

@Sanity Obscure.6054 said:Imagine the price crash when infusion auras are able to be turned off from menu.

They exist to show off your character. No value if everyone turns it off lmao

I make my character for me. I really wouldn't care if an option like this was added, hell I'd probably use it too for the people that like stacking those disgusting phospho and queen bee infusions and then turning into a giant plastic spider so they can blind everyone they run by. I stack auras, but at least I try and make my character look unique instead of obnoxious.

[Gregious.8903]

I'll just type a brief response as to my personal issue. While I understand that this is not urgent, I do believe that this would be a simple fix based off my personal understanding about devolving games and programming.

https://imgur.com/a/B43dTtA

So this is my biggest grip, the orange poly during the daylight reflects a lot of light and basically turns black (pictured shadow abyss) into gold. I don't hate gold but I don't want gold with red and I only have the orange poly to turn my "red" celestial infusion to actually red instead of purple. Now, this is so far is actually all intentional and how orange poly works so I could just not use it.

https://imgur.com/a/g1NuG0S

Now this is where it gets cool and hence my 50/50 activation issue. Check out this same setup but with red poly added, the red poly completely removes any gold glares with a sweet red glare.

[Magnus Godrik.5841]

Wish i can combine the old orange and teal infusion so i can be a brown color.