A feature request!

[Morkai.3165]

Hello there! I think this must be my first post on these forums(unless I've posted before back on launch when I first tried the game out and I don't remember!)

 

I've been enjoying GW2 a ton, lately and would like to say a thank you for making such a fantastic game!

 

Being a person who enjoys making builds(My favourite online GW2 content is Boots bad builds, btw) I spend a lot of time reading over skill lists and trying to make combinations to create playstyles that I'll enjoy for my toons! Since I'm a new player, I don't really know much of the game's core mechanics, plus there's a TON of skills and interactions to remember, and I find myself jumping back and forth from the game to the wiki(/wiki is fantastic in that regard!)

Here's a few things that I'd find really helpful, were they in the game:

 

1)I'd love to see a compendium of core game mechanics that explains things like how stats work, damage formulae, cc bars, casting times, aftercast time, etc. This is the largest request and I know it'll require quite a bit of resources to do, but that'd be really helpful for a new or returning player. Perhaps with a class tab as well explaining some core class mechanics, like what's special about some kind of skill category(like mantras having multiple uses and a long cast to charge up or glyphs having a different effect depending on the attunement etc, or how the mesmer's clones and phantasms work.

 

2)Similar to the compendium, an alternative for skills only would be a check box in the game options allowing players to view damage details on skills, like damage coefficients, damage range, healing power/condi damage coefficients and perhaps stuff like aftercast time, if you can move while casting etc. Things that will allow a player making a build to better understand what's the most important skill to use and what it's limitations are and how to play around them, when creating a build. Like, right now, there are some skills that I've been casting during the cast of other skills, and others that interrupt my current cast and I've had to figure out how these work by experimenting. It'd be great if tooltips offered that extra bit of information, as an option(not baseline because there's already enough information on tooltips as some skills are quite complicated by default)

 

3) And I think this is the one I'd like to see the most: Would it be possible to have chain skills or alternative skills pop up on the weapon skills tab like they do when mouseovering when out of combat, or in the trait tab? I often find myself wondering if a weapon skill 1 has a secondary attack that I have to equip the weapon to find out or having to go to the wiki to check the reaper's shroud skills or the elementalist's tornado or conjured weapon skills because there's no easy way to see what they do in-game within the build panel where the theorycrafting happens.

 

 

Also, as a sidenote: I'm maining an elementalist, and I see a lot of people complaining about the meteor secondary strikes feeling weak. While I agree with the changes, I also agree that it feels a little weak having a meteor hit for 800(or less - I haven't played staff after the change). Here's an idea though that would make it feel better while maintaining the current design on this kind of skill: How about showing the damage as the total damage done by the cast on the target, like a few channeling skills do? This will make it feel even cooler, as if you hit a player with let's say 4 hits for 5k, 4k, 3k,2k, that 2k might feel a little lackluster seeing it out of context(that's the 5th consecutive hit on said player) when attacking a blob in wvw, but that player took 14k damage, which in turn is insane and would make it feel really good. And it'll also make it feel much less bad when attacking a huge target - yeah the total damage will be less and will increase slowly after a point, but seeing a single spell do 20k or 30k or however much meter does in a raid environment(I haven't raided so I never really cared about that :P ) should make the player feel like they used a really strong skill overall.

 

Anyway, these are my first ideas, playing this game for a while!

 

Cheers!