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Asura Animations & Visual Effects are Broken

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Liberis.9573
#1 - April 30, 2014, 3:51 p.m.
Blizzard Post

From Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/24e85y/the_asura_pvp_advantage_is_even_more_insane_than/

Arenanet always championed that they don’t want castbars in the UI because they want the game to be based around animations. A fair goal. Yet we are getting hit by damage we CLEARLY evaded just because some animations scale with character size, giving Asurans an incredible advantage in PVP because opponents cannot see where damage is.

After seeing Denshi reroll mini asura for his Ele in the ToL I did the same for my rather huge Norn ele. Noticing something strange I did some range check tests…

For reference, my female Norn is about 1/4th of the max Norn size, and my Asura is as small as they get.

First, Churning Earth.
Both the animation and the aoe range circle match, and the skill does damage inside this exact area. http://i.imgur.com/SdkBjpb.png 1 and http://i.imgur.com/PnMgdzx.png 2

Next, Drake’s Breath.
On the Norn, the animation matches up almost perfectly with the range the skill does damage at. Max Damage range: http://i.imgur.com/80FvzGv.png 3 and just ouside of range: http://i.imgur.com/efE6QMr.png 4

Also, yay, pretty ele animations.

Anyway, now see what happens when you compare the animation to the real range the skill has on the tiny asura:

The exact spot the Norn was standing on. http://i.imgur.com/g2VLNzf.png 5
The animation doesn’t even reach half the range the skill really has. Your opponents can clearly stand outside of your burning fire yet still take damage from invisible things. This shouldn’t happen in a game that is based around reading the enemy through his animations to counter them.

I also tested Lightning Whip, Ring of Earth and Frozen Burst. They behave the same as Drake’s Breath, the animation not even reaching half the range the skill really has. http://i.imgur.com/jAAq95j.png 6
http://i.imgur.com/EGWkQ4H.png 7
http://i.imgur.com/CVBBFll.png 8

From some further tests on the elementalists it seems skills that are either projectiles (like Dagger Fire Auto attack) or have AOE indicator circles like Ring of Fire are the same size no matter your character size. But I suspect all Skills that aren’t single target and don’t fall into the 2 mentioned categories are effected by this animation issue (like Warrior Hammer swings and cleaves like that).
Which is huge.

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Branden Gee
#43 - May 2, 2014, 3:01 p.m.
Blizzard Post

Thanks for reporting this! This looks like a scaling issue where the effect is scaling the character’s size but the skill itself is not scaling. A fix for this will require some design work so I can’t say a whole lot in regards to when it could be fixed.

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Branden Gee
#47 - May 2, 2014, 4:33 p.m.
Blizzard Post
EverythingEnds.4261:
Branden Gee.2150:

Thanks for reporting this! This looks like a scaling issue where the effect is scaling the character’s size but the skill itself is not scaling. A fix for this will require some design work so I can’t say a whole lot in regards to when it could be fixed.

While a respect this honest answer, I’m really concernd that we didn’t even get a "soon™ ".

I wish I could say soon™. But this is a pretty interesting issue to address.

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Branden Gee
#80 - May 28, 2014, 2:19 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Dwaynas Avatar.1562:
Branden Gee.2150:
EverythingEnds.4261:
Branden Gee.2150:

Thanks for reporting this! This looks like a scaling issue where the effect is scaling the character’s size but the skill itself is not scaling. A fix for this will require some design work so I can’t say a whole lot in regards to when it could be fixed.

While a respect this honest answer, I’m really concernd that we didn’t even get a "soon™ ".

I wish I could say soon™. But this is a pretty interesting issue to address.

Easy fix:
Just make that if you enter a pvp match, you automatically get transformed into a human character, so no issues anymore (for the time you are in this match). Like when you use a tonic or so.
And btw I want an option for myself to let everyone be shown in a pvp match as a human so I finally can see the animations of the Freaking asuras and norn mesmers stop destroying my view…

How would this idea handle things like cultural armors? Won’t turning everyone into humans cause a loss of uniqueness in the game? Every player has specific facial adjustments, body types, heights, armor colors, and weapons; what happens to these?

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Branden Gee
#104 - May 29, 2014, 7:53 p.m.
Blizzard Post

To quickly recap what you have all been saying, it looks like there are two significant groups that think they have the best solution to this issue.

The first being to scale all of the asuras up to be larger and scale down the charr and norn. The second is to turn everyone in the match into a human.

I think that there are a few things worth mentioning. The ‘generic humans from WvW’ are not like other character models in the game. They have a smaller animation set which would be unable to properly display all animations, which is exactly what the original problem is. The other thing to note is that with SAB the scaling did not make all races the same height.

Hopefully this provides some insight and can help drive discussion on more viable potential solutions.