Guild Wars 2

I understand and even respect to an extent that you don’t want to display aftercast data to prevent theorycrafting from totally ruling the game, but there is something about them that’s been bugging me a lot from day one that this recent patch is pushing me over the edge on: The aftercasts are all over the place and seem badly tuned on a lot of skills, especially the autoattacks on ranged weapons, and they’re never discussed about and appear to rarely receive balance passes.

As an example, people complained nearly unanimously about how weak the Longbow felt on Rangers for a very long time, which I identified early on was largely due to how slow the rate of fire was on Long Range Shot for its damage specs, leading to poor sustained DPS on top of its rather mediocre utility. The firing rate was finally improved, which resulted in a badly needed buff, but the Warrior’s Dual Shot remains painfully slow for no apparent reason. While it’s still situationally effective for its other skills, this forces it into a highly specialized utilitarian role and makes it feel awkward and weak as a primary weapon.

A similar issue exists with Pistols. Both the Engineer’s Exploding Shot and the Thief’s Vital Shot have very sluggish firing rates for their specs. This is an annoyance for the Engineer, but it entirely breaks P/P for the Thief due to the way Initiative works – it forces you to rely on Unload (an Initiative hog) for not just burst but also sustained DPS, which cripples your utility AND mobility just to get the same DPS you’d get from any other set in the game without sacrificing anything. It also just isn’t fun or engaging.

There are other examples too, but those are the most egregious ones I can think of right off the bat. Are these actively reviewed and tested during balance passes?

I would really like to get some discussion and feedback around this.

Some weapons are simply useless. Will they get fixed, or just completely reworked as they should be?

No, they won’t.
Meanwhile we still have stuff like the No.3 skill on Thief Pistol and Dagger with no offhand which just boggle my mind why they are there in the first place.

Pariah.8506:

Some weapons are simply useless. Will they get fixed, or just completely reworked as they should be?

No, they won’t.
Meanwhile we still have stuff like the No.3 skill on Thief Pistol and Dagger with no offhand which just boggle my mind why they are there in the first place.

Yeah, they really need to give every class an ‘empty’ skill set that, for the offhand, is semi-viable. Thieves in particular should actually have options to specialize in fighting with only a single one-handed weapon.

But, that’s a different discussion. I am very concerned about how many ranged weapons feel broken almost entirely because of aftercast issues.

Pariah.8506:

Some weapons are simply useless. Will they get fixed, or just completely reworked as they should be?

No, they won’t.
Meanwhile we still have stuff like the No.3 skill on Thief Pistol and Dagger with no offhand which just boggle my mind why they are there in the first place.

I always assumed the empty-offhand skills were there to justify making a thief named ‘One Armed Bandit’…

Pariah.8506:

…Meanwhile we still have stuff like the No.3 skill on Thief Pistol and Dagger with no offhand which just boggle my mind why they are there in the first place.

I lol’d… this is so true…