GW2. A complete guide for the general settings, graphic settings, camera settings, sound settings and keybinds for Guild Wars 2. Configure your game with the best options for maximum enjoyment. Settings guide for new players and veteran players. Learn the most important mechanics to improve your gameplay and enjoyment.
The first thing you should do when getting into Guild Wars 2 is to look at your options and settings, and configure them to your preferences. This can take a while to do and you may not know what most of the options change until you’ve actually played the game a bit. But it’s also very important to get good settings early on so that you don’t develop bad habits. That is why this guide will detail the most important options to change and give some alternatives for you to figure out what works best for you so you can get to playing the game as soon as possible.
General Options and Settings
Access the options menu by pressing the ESC key and then navigating to the options menu or by pressing the default keybind F11. This is where most of the options can be changed, but other places will be detailed later.
User Interface (UI) Options
Here you will find many options that affect how you interact with the game and how information is presented to you. You can copy these settings, or read the description below of the mainly important choices to know and why you want them.
- Cursor Contrast – highlights your mouse cursor to make it more visible with all the spell animations going off in the background. Low is what most people use because it isn’t as distracting as High, but High can give much more contrast if you have bad vision.
- Looting – Any of the loot options will make it easier to loot and faster. This can help you to focus on the combat rather than interacting with the loot on dead bodies. Sometimes you will need a Mastery to enable this option. You may want to disable this option at first so you can inspect and learn what each item you pick up is, rather than opening your inventory to see a bunch of items you don’t know where they came from.
- Show Names – Seeing player names helps to give you all the information you need on potential targets and who is who, especially in PvP situations. However, things can get very cluttered with all the text on screen. Disable these if you want a more immersive experience.
- Enable Usable Object Names because this will make it very easy to see quest items out in the open world. You can even show your own name if you lose track of where your character is sometimes.
- Show Skill Recharge – Places a number over your skills that are on cooldown so you know more specifically when they are off cooldown. Always enable this as the numbers only cover up your skills, not cluttering the rest of the UI.
- Show Target Health Percent – Shows a number on target health bars such as 35% or 65% which is important information when playing around skills that do extra effects to enemies below a certain health threshold or when doing raids and a boss will perform a mechanic or change phases at certain health percent.
- Simple Condition Floaters – Shows every tick of condition damage dealt instead of one number for each type of condition. Disable this to give yourself more information and less screen clutter, but enable it for more numbers which can look cool.
- Thick Party Health Bars – Enable to more easily see the health bars of allies.
- Character Select Background – Shows a different scene in your character select depending on the expansion you choose.
Dynamic HUD
Enabling or disabling any of the elements in the Dynamic HUD can help you to customize and create a more immersive experience. Most players play the game with all of their UI enabled at all times, but this can create distractions and clutter the screen sometimes. You can turn off any element situationally in or out of combat.
For example, in combat you shouldn’t be searching through menus while fighting enemies, so setting the Dynamic HUD to show the Menu Bar only out of combat can feel better. You can access menus using keybinds as well, so this isn’t as potentially limiting. However, the Compass or Minimap can give valuable information in and out of combat so keeping it on always is usually necessary. You could create more challenge for yourself or a more immersive display, but to play optimally will often require the use of your UI.
Rewards can also be distracting in combat, and since it doesn’t matter when you pick up your loot chests in the bottom right of the screen, you can turn these off in combat or even turn them off entirely. Enabling and using the “Show Ally Names” keybind (in the keybinds section) will reveal any elements you have turned off, allowing you to quickly show an element and accept those rewards without changing your set up.
Camera Options and Settings
Your camera is an important part of your controls because the information it provides can influence your actions or allow you to make movements you wouldn’t be able to make otherwise.
- Rotation Speed – This option can also be affected by your mouse DPI, so it really depends on where you want it. I put it near the middle of the slider. You want to be able to precisely but also quickly move your camera where you want it to be to see new information and then move it back.
- Camera Position – Try to center your character horizontally but also have them slightly below the center of your screen vertically. You want to prioritize seeing things ahead of you while avoiding creating too large of a blind spot behind you.
- Field of View – The slider all the way to the right gives the most information by zooming out as far as possible. However, in some situations this can make it harder to see very specific animations such as in a 1v1 where you need to play around certain skills. In the case where you only need to play around one thing, you can zoom in a bit further to focus in on that, but otherwise you want as much information as soon as possible.
- Camera Shake – Always disable this if you want more clear information as this can become distracting. Enable it if you don’t care about how you perform and want the game to feel more cinematic.
- Camera Teleportation – Instantly shows your next location when you use teleports. Enable this so you see the new information faster, but for some it can be disorienting if you aren’t used to fast movements.
- Free Camera – This is one of the most important options. Normally your camera is locked to your character and will snap back after moving them apart. Enabling this allows you to control your camera independently from your character. Using the left mouse button will control only your camera, and moving your character with the right mouse button will lock your camera to your character again.
- Action Camera – Another alternative to controlling your camera (Enable this using keybinds in the keybind section). This gives much less control than free camera, but often provides more simplicity because you always move your character and camera at the same time, meaning your movement is always the maximum (backpedaling moves you slower). This is at the cost of losing awareness because you can no longer look around with your camera while moving another direction, but also backpedaling is situationally useful depending on skill ranges.
Combat/Movement Options and Settings
These options help to optimize your targeting and character mobility.
- Ground Targeting – Certain skills that target an area instead of an enemy can be considered skill-shots because they require aim. This option allows you to change the indicator for and the speed at which these skills fire.
- Normal Ground Targeting – Requires you to press the key to aim, then press it again to confirm the location you want to cast it at. Not preferred unless you are skill clicking. But you should not be skill clicking.
- Fast Ground Targeting – Preferred for newer players because it still shows the indicator so you can learn the range, but the skill will cast when you let go of the button meaning you only need to press the button once and the skill is much faster to cast. Right-click after the indicator appears to cancel the activation of this skill if you decide you don’t want to use it.
- Instant Ground Targeting – Removes the indicator entirely but casts the skill as soon as you press the key down, making it slightly faster than Fast Ground Targeting.
- Double Tap to Evade – Disable this as you should use a dedicated keybind (check keybind section) to dodge.
- Auto Attacking – This is preference mostly, but your 1 skill on each weapon will automatically begin casting when in range of a target you attacked. This can be enabled on different weapon skills but doesn’t make sense on most skills because they have cooldowns. Press CTRL + Right Click on that skill (you will see a dotted line on the perimeter of the skill image) to enable or disable it automatically activating. Keeping this enabled can reduce your key presses but may also lock you into animations when you don’t want to be. Enabling Auto Attacks but using the Stow Weapon keybind when you don’t want to auto attack is more efficient than pressing a key every time you want to attack.
- Autotargeting – Disable this always because some skills are better to use without a target situationally.
- You can detarget enemies by left-clicking in open space or using the “Lock Autotarget” Keybind.
- Promote Skill Target – Disable this so you can use Tab and Left click to more precisely find your targets.
- Melee Attack Assist – Disable this as it will prevent movement to keep you from running through your target. Sometimes you want to run through them.
- Lock Ground Target at Max Range – Enable this so you can quickly cast your skills at max range by moving your mouse much further than you expect that skill to go rather than trying to slowly find the exact max range. This allows you to whip your mouse to the top of the screen for fast targeting.
- Snap Ground Target to Current Target – An optional setting for builds that use many ground targeted skills and it can be taxing to always aim them on fast moving targets. This will automatically place your ground targeted skills underneath your current target, but often you want to use them in front of your enemies to account for their movement during the travel time, so you may prefer to toggle this off and on using the keybind for it (keybinds section).
- Allow Skill Retargeting – Some skills have multiple parts to them or fire off a chain of attacks. Enabling this lets you cast part of the skill on one target and then choose another target or multiple targets to finish the skill on. Enabling this generally gives you more options, but a specific technique is also enabled by this option. If you also have the Instant Ground Targeting enabled with Skill Retargeting, you can change the location of a ground targeted skill mid-cast. This gives you the ability to react on your enemy’s movement to more precisely aim your skills by just hovering your cursor over them.
Check this guide to learn how camera and movement techniques can vastly improve your mobility:
Competitive Options and Settings
The competitive section is mostly for PvP and WvW.
- Team Colors – Every player’s appearance will be altered to match a certain color (Blue, Red, or Green) rather than the appearance they chose. This can reduce the amount your PC has to render, improving performance, and will also make it very clear who is on which team.
- Standard Enemy and Friendly Models – When enabled will make every player of a certain class have an identical appearance. Every Ranger will look the same, but they will look different to a Warrior or a Mesmer. This can help you to learn the animations of certain classes better because different races can have different animations for the same skill. This can also remove a lot of the flashy equipment effects that players use because the standard model is very simple and will make your game look much cleaner and run better. I personally do not use standard models because I feel that it removes a lot of the fun of knowing who you are fighting. However, if you are having performance issues this can be sacrificed.
- Simple Nameplates – Changes the name tags above each character from a lengthy text that includes their server and rank to simply their guild tag and a colored shape to denote their team. For example, enemies will have a Triangle shape, and allies will have a Circle shape. Then depending on whether they are Green, Blue, or Red team that shape will have the appropriate color. Pets or Non Player Characters will have smaller shapes than real players will. Enable this for a much easier to digest display.
Graphics Options and Settings
Change the tab to the left of the F11 General Options menu to reach the graphics options. These affect mostly aesthetics or appearances, but having your graphics turned up too high will affect your performance. Finding the most efficient graphic settings for an appealing look without losing too much performance is key to the best experience.
FPS/Ping
At the very bottom right of the menu, you can see how many Frames Per Second (Higher numbers or more frames mean smoother movement on screen) and your current Ping (Higher numbers mean more time between your connection to the server and therefore more input delay). Keep your eye on this while changing your graphics options to see what gives you better frames. Make sure to keep the window open during combat while testing as that is where your performance matters most.
A good FPS is 30 to 60, but in much larger situations with many players using their skills around your FPS can drop to 15 or lower. Try to test your frames in different situations because a smooth image is going to improve your immersion and your personal performance.
Ping can be less in your control and more reliant on your location relative to the game servers or your Internet Service Provider. If your Ping is below 50 it’s amazing, below 150 is decent, and below 200 is playable. However, playing with 200 or more Ping can cause many issues with skill and dodge timings. If you are far from the server (NA in Washington D.C. and EU in Germany) consider purchasing a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to tunnel your connection closer to the server you are playing on. We strongly recommend WTFast for this purpose.
- Resolution –
- Prefer to set this to Fullscreen Windowed if you like to alt tab or do multiple things at a time.
- If you aren’t multitasking and only have one monitor, then you should Fullscreen Mode.
- Windowed Mode can be used to greatly improve your FPS because you can scale down the resolution by making the window smaller, at the cost of seeing less.
- Interface Size – Normal is the best for the average person’s computer, but with extra large monitors with extremely high resolution or if you have bad vision, making the UI larger can help to see your UI elements.
- Animation – Skill effects in this game are very complex and flashy. Turning animation up to high can make these beautiful effects reach their full appearance potential, but because these animations often stack on top of each other and become a clutter in larger fights, it’s often better to just keep this at Medium to improve performance.
- Antialiasing – Turn this on to make objects smoother in more calm environments, but the effect may not be noticeable in combat when there is a lot of movement, so it does not affect the appearance much and can be turned off for maximum performance.
- Environment – Most of the backgrounds in game look great, and having Environment on Medium or High doesn’t actually hurt your performance that much, so it is worth it to turn this one up.
- LOD Distance – Level of Detail is a threshold at which the appearance quality of objects decreases the further they are from you. Turning this higher will reduce your performance a lot for not much effect, since you should be focusing on the things closer to you generally. Keep this turned on Medium or lower for general play, but you can turn it higher when exploring new zones for a more impressive experience.
- Reflections – This only provides a slightly better appearance in some situations where water reflects images, but more often than this you will experience performance issues because water reflections render beneath the map where you can’t even see it. Turn this Off in most cases.
- Textures – Affects most things in the game, so having it turned High will make things look much better. Performance loss of these textures being rendered can be mitigated by other options that pick and choose what to render such as Model Limit and Level of Detail.
- Render Sampling – Set this to Native to prevent any extra rendering. Sub sample would render something to lower quality, but often the performance gain is not worth the massive loss in quality. Super sample would only be worth it if you have extremely good performance or are trying to record the game in higher resolutions.
- Shadows – These can add depth and make a more contrasting aesthetic, however Shadows can really reduce performance because everything can render a shadow on it. If you are having performance issues, turning shadows Off is one of the first things you should do.
- Shaders – Keep this on Medium to get a more realistic look. High will make things brighter and more colorful, but only if you prefer that aesthetic.
- Best Texture Filtering and High Res Character Textures – These often make the game look better with little loss in performance when you enable them. If you do need to, turn them off for better performance.
- Effect LOD – Turn this on to filter out many unnecessary skill effects. In raids this may remove some unnecessary animations so you can more easily see the most necessary mechanics, but mostly in WvW this makes the game playable in larger fights because you can get massive lag when there are hundreds of skill effects going off at the same time.
Postprocessing – Adds more lighting and visibility to objects despite the ambient lighting. Turning this on Low will make the game look much better, like a studio instead of a realistic setting, but in some cases like snowy areas it can be way too bright.
Depth Blur, Ambient Occlusion, and Light Adaptation make very little difference on performance, so they are your preference if you like them. They can create a more realistic appearance.
Sound Options and Settings
While sounds may seem optional because most of the options are preference, they can greatly improve your immersion and your ability to react to in game mechanics which have distinct sounds tied to them. Setting up your sounds to not become tedious to listen to is important so you’ll keep them on instead of turning them off entirely.
- Music in game is great but can be tiring to listen to the same songs. Always turn music back on when going into new content.
- Effects volume affects all skills, so in situations where many players are all casting skills in one area this can get very loud. Turn this lower than other sounds to reduce that clutter.
- Dialogue volume affects ambient voice lines from NPCs which you may or may not want to hear, but always turn this back on when doing story quests to hear their voice lines.
- UI volume off is good if you don’t like to hear the error sound when skills fail to cast.
- Unique Item Sounds can include legendary weapons with their own sounds. Some of these items have obnoxious sounds, which is why this option was created in the first place. Turn this off if they become too much.
- Player Chatter is when something occurs and your character says something appropriate to it. For example, if you are low on health your character might start saying they don’t feel so good, or when you get an achievement they might rejoice. These can become tedious after a while, so you might want to turn these off unless you enjoy them.
Control Options / Keybinds
Learning new keybinds can take a lot of time to get used to because of muscle memory, which is why it’s important to get keybindings that work for you the first time. However, it’s always worth it to relearn them if something is causing issues. Below are the keybinds that I use. They are mostly designed to minimize hand movement and to be as efficient as possible while also staying as close to the default keybinds as possible because most video games use similar default keybinds.
Movement
Because movement is half of your actions and positioning can be so crucial to survival, these are some of the most important keybinds.
- Strafing is always better than turning because keyboard turning your character is much slower than using your mouse with the right button held in to turn your character. Therefore you should turn your character with your mouse and strafe relative to that.
- Moving backwards is still relevant in some situations, but you should avoid it if possible because moving backwards is much slower than forwards or strafing.
- Dodge is the most essential mechanic to this game. Get a keybind that you can easily access and that won’t compete with other keybinds. Often this is best to put on one of your side mouse buttons.
- About Face is a more advanced mechanic that you need to learn if you want to master movement in this game. It turns your character around, but can also be done without moving the camera to allow you to make quicker movements. Most players don’t utilize it too often, but the players with the most mobility use it all the time. Because it is a movement technique, having it keybinded to something close to your WASD (or whatever you bound movement to) will often be the best. Check the videos above for more information on this mechanic.
Skills
Your class skills are the keybinds you will press the most, need the most reaction speed for, and require the least amount of space between them to make combos easier, and therefore the highest priority keybinds you’ll have.
- Weapon Skills should be left as 1-5 because all class weapons share these cooldowns and it can be much easier to remember them this way.
- Healing/Utility Skills should be rebound because no one is going to reach all the way over to the 9 key. Any of the keys around your movement keys work such as Z X C V Q E R.
- Professions Skills can also be rebound depending on your keyboard or hand size. Most people have to reach pretty far for the default F4 key, so it may be better to put them on the keys around your movement keys. Alternatively, you can add Shift keybinds such as Shift-1 for F1 or Shift-2 for F2.
- Special Action Key is very niche and not often requiring fast reflexes to use. Put this on a keybind so you can use it later, but not on one of your high priority keys.
Targeting
Because Guild Wars 2 offers a hybrid of action and tab targeting combat, there are numerous options to customize and cater your experience.
- Call and Take Target helps to coordinate with teammates. This puts a red crosshair above the target and will send a message in chat. You should be comfortable using and reacting to this in combat so place them on a keybind that you can use in the middle of combat, but not one too high priority.
- Personal Target works the same as Call and Take Target, but only you can see this orange crosshair. This is great for keeping track of a specific target without overwriting your team’s target calling.
- Lock Autotarget sounds like it does something that it doesn’t. I’m not totally sure if it’s intended for this, but this keybind essentially works as a Detarget. You will no longer be targeting anything. This is great for using before a skill that moves you in a direction toward a target but without a target will move you in the direction you are facing, allowing you to use it to move away if needed.
To master the hybrid action and tab targeting combat, watch this video guide:
User Interface
Many of the keybinds here are nice to have just for opening menus, but they are not high priority as they aren’t used in combat. Use very out of the way keybinds for these so you don’t take up any skill or movement keybind placements. In particular, the Guild tab on “G” can be replaced because that is a decently accessible keybind which you could save for something else.
Camera Settings
- Free Camera provides the most optimal movement of your camera, but you don’t need a keybind for this, enable it in the options.
- Action Camera can be a more efficient option for those who want a simpler experience. This moves your camera and character together like a shooter game, but shooter games have limitations for a reason. You can even toggle Action Camera using a keybind so you can turn it off when playing builds that use tab targeting more often.
- Look Behind is a completely optional binding because with Free Camera enabled you should be able to see things around you much more fluidly by constantly rotating your camera, and seeing behind you may be more disorienting than helpful.
Miscellaneous
There are plenty of options here that you may or may not need a keybind for. Most importantly, the Stow/Draw Weapons keybind allows you to cancel animations and therefore prevent wasting cooldowns or to reduce long aftercasts. The rest are optional, but Build Template keybinds can also be very useful for swapping between builds quickly when doing fast paced content such as fractals/dungeons where certain situations have specific weaknesses.
Keybind Templates
Another option is the Export and Import buttons at the bottom right of the keybinds tab. This is to save and load Keybind Templates to and from your computer. If you prefer to use specific keybinds for each class or build, you can easily swap your keybinds using this function.
Chat and Other Options
Not all options are accessed by the F11 menu. Opening your chat tab by typing Enter will allow you to access some additional changes.
Chat Tabs
Clicking the + icon next to each tab will allow you to create a new one. You can name these anything, but preferably something concise. You can also delete any tabs by clicking the x icon.
While highlighting a tab, click the downward arrow to open a menu. This allows you to choose which chat channels you want to see in this tab. Checking or unchecking the boxes can create unique channels and give them names. For example, a tab labeled “Silence” may have nothing in it for when you don’t want to be disturbed, the “Pst” tab has only whispers in it, and the “Cmbt” tab only has the combat log. Create your own channels to suit your social habits or use them as tools to help you focus on the relevant information.
Clicking the Cog Wheel in the top left also offers some general chat options.
- Text Size can be turned up for those with larger monitors
- Show Timestamps is useful to see when things were said to better understand the context of your response, but most of the time this information isn’t that useful and can add extra screen clutter.
- Show Channel Tag uses a letter to label messages instead of just using colors. For example, any message from Map Chat will also have an M, and any message from your Guild will have a G. This can help distinguish the messages more clearly instead of between the colors yellow and red, especially if you are color blind.
- Show In-World Bubbles enables messages in certain chat channels including “say” chat and “party” chat to show above the characters who spoke them. This creates more immersive dialogue and can make it immediately clear who said what. However, this can also add screen clutter or allow others to spam outside of the chat box.
Once you have your settings completed, you can learn the mechanics of the game through this guide: