WvW Beginners Settings Guide

Today we are going to talk about how you can tweak your in-game settings to get a better experience in World vs. World. These optimizations will generally also improve your experience in the rest of the game, so you can take this post as a general settings guide if you want to.

User Interface settings

Let's go through some user interface settings. These will help you do less and see more critical information on your screen.

  • Turn on AoE Loot on Interact, Autoloot: Autopickup and Autoloot: Quick Interact. This will minimize the amount of UI you have to look at while looting things. And you will autoloot things around you if you have the 4th Provisions Master ability. If you don't have the ability yet, turning it on now, will make sure you can make use of it, the second you get the ability.
  • Show All Enemy Names and Show All Usable Object Names are settings you want to turn on as well. This will make it easier to spot if something is an enemy and also spot interactable objects like Tactivators inside towers, keeps and Stonemist.
  • Show Skill Recharge. This will show a countdown on your skills. It just makes it more transparent when a skill will be available to be uses again.
  • Show Simple Condition Floater. It's not important to see a lot of small numbers, what you do want to see if how much your conditions are damaging each tick, that's why you should turn this on.
  • Turn on the thick health bars for your party and show them at all times if you are playing a support build. It will make it significantly easier to spot your party members and see how they are doing without having to look at the squad UI.

Camera settings

Default camera settings in Guild Wars 2 are bad and we need to push them to a more competitive level. Let's do this.

  • Rotation Speed. Crank it all the way up. You want to rotate your camera the fastest you can. If you have a very sensitive mouse, it might be a bit too much, in that case, just turn it down again.
  • Turn up Vertical Position Near, Vertical Position Far and Field of View all the way. These will change the game for you. You will be able to see so much more and that is absolutely critical as you get into more end game. Pro tip is that you can also play around with these to get some super nice camera positions for screenshots.
  • Make sure Enable Camera Shake does not have a checkmark. This will cause your screen to shake constantly and it is incredibly disturbing.
  • To make it all the more confusing, turn on Disable Player Camera Shake, because this one disables even more shaky things. Why is one called Enable and the other one disable? Come on ArenaNet.
  • Let's turn off Adjust Camera to Character Height such that you are not limited by the height of your character in terms of where your camera is placed. This can be a huge help to look over wall and similar objects.

Combat / Movement settings

Let's take a look at the things that are going to affect you directly in combat and while you are moving.

  • Ground Targeting. I highly recommend running this on the setting "Fast with range indicator". This means you can hold down the button of your AoE skill and still move your cursor around to place it. To cast the skill, simply release the button. If you want to cancel it you can right click. This will make it much faster to cast AoEs. If you know where your cursor is at all times, then going for the absolute extreme "Instant" cast could be an option too. Instant will place the AoE where your cursor is when you press down the button rather than when releasing it.
  • Disable double-tap to evade. It is much slower to doubletab a key, than being able to simply click your dodge button. If you want to dodge in a direction, hold down one of your WASD-keys while clicking your dodge button. This will also help you during jumping puzzles where you can't accidentally double-tap to dodge.
  • Lock Ground Target at Maximum Skill Range. This is optional and it's a personal preference of mine to have it turned on. It will make sure that your AoE can't be moved further away than the maximum range. This can help make it faster to cast at max range in certain situations.
  • Allow Skill Retargeting you should definitely turn on. Let's say I am casting a targeted skill with a bit of cast time, with this option on I can change my target during the cast time instead of being casted at the old target.

Competitive settings

The competitive settings are small tweaks that are pretty optional and opinionated, so this is mostly just personal preference of mine.

  • Turn on standard enemy models. This will turn all enemies in competitive modes into generic looking enemies. This makes it easier to identify which profession an enemy is playing as.
  • Set WvW Simple Nameplates to enemies only. Enemy names will change from "Desolation Platinum Recruit" to simply being an arrow and a guild tag. I find it easier to estimate an enemy groups size with this setting.

Graphic settings

Okay and now the settings most people are looking forward to. Remember, these can highly depend on your computers specs to make sure you try out different settings and find what works for you. I will try to go through the most impactful ones that you should be aware of.

  • Frame limiter. You should only ever have your frame limiter to unlimited if you have a higher than 60 hz display. If you can barely get above 30 FPS, then just cap it at 30 FPS to make sure your PC gets some breathing room here and there. It can help with overheating issues on lower end systems that are being pushed to the limit.
  • Set reflections to "Terrain & Sky". The Guild Wars 2 engine is a bit quirky and having reflections on the water can decrease your performance even without water around you. This is because every map is built on top of water and that the engine is weird. Therefore we limit this and it will give you a few FPS under some circumstances without affecting the visuals.
  • Character model limit is one of the most impactful graphic settings in the game. I run a very high end CPU, the Ryzen 3900X and I still tend to have it somewhere between lowest and medium depending on what I am doing in the game. This will limit the amount of characters shown on screen. Just make sure you turned on "Show All Enemy Names" from earlier so you can always see enemy names, even if the enemy character itself is not shown. For better performance keep this as low as you are willing to go.
  • Character model quality is not a limiter on whether characters are shown or not, but how many characters are fully rendered with all their skins vs. how many are shown as generic characters. This can also impact your performance a lot. I tend to keep it on medium in my settings.
  • Effect LOD is something you definitely need to turn on. Skills in this game can be incredibly beautiful and have amazing effects, but when there's 100+ players casting them as the same time, it is going to result in a ton of visual clutter. By turning it on particle effects in the game are more limited giving you better visibility.

Conclusion

Alright, we made it to the end and we are through all the settings that I recommend for end-game content. If there's a setting that you think is absolutely needed then post it in the comments and let the community know about it.

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