GW2 Making Improvements

Before the June Beta Weekend Event ArenaNet went through a list of the changes they were making. Many of those changes were really easy to understand and generally straightforward, but the one change "UI Improvements" was pretty general. In the end it ended up being a lot of little updates that caused some gigantic improvements.

The first thing I noticed was the updates made to combat text notifiers, most notably being the new feedback for confusion damage. As you probably know by now, I play a Mesmer and confusion is a condition almost entirely unique to Mesmers. In the previous BWE, and subsequent Stress Test, I had actively been trying to figure out what exactly confusion did. Does it do a lot of damage? Was it worth it? Should I put more effort into building up stacks of confusion? How worthwhile is Cry of Frustration anyway? I would dig through the combat log to see what confusion was doing and most of the time it was more work than it was worth to track down one tick of confusion damage in the multitude of notifications flooding my combat log.

Now with this new update it's obvious. Confusion actually has it's own unique damage notifier. You can see it in the screenshot above. It's super easy to see how much damage its doing, and how often. Other combat notifiers that are especially awesome now are the new critical hit text and the revised notifiers for combo field combos. 

If anyone combos with your combo field a heart will show up over their character. Not only does it show that they've made a combo it also says what condition they caused, if they caused one. This makes combat a lot more fun, and if you're a class that generates a lot of combo field opportunities you get some great positive feedback. You can actually see if your support is working effectively.

The other big change, which is really subtle, is the update to the condition and boon notifiers. Now there's this little white stroke that decreases around the condition or boon flag. It's super subtle and that's ok. Even this little change goes miles to show some more minute information that can be extremely important if you need to know when to start stacking cripples back onto your foes. Even in the WvWvW combat I participated in above you can obviously see what's going on at a glance. It's awesome.

This last one I got a lot of joy from. The new 'map completion' notifier.

Previously the notification came in the form of a letter, the same way you get from filling out an NPC Heart anywhere else in the map. I love the treasure chest, it's so satisfying. I feel like I've truly accomplished something and having this unique chest popping up really brings me back to completing a dungeon in GW:EotN, super fun. If you haven't gotten the chance to complete a map yet I highly recommend it. The rewards are great, 52 silver, a sword, a set of shoulders, a mystic key, some cloth, and 2,500xp. I know I for one am going to be striving for 100% map completion once GW2 launches. This is the first time I actually feel encouraged to go for it! I'll get more than just an achievement!