Guild Wars 2

Having read several of Jon’s posts on the various profession boards pertaining to the Dec. 10th balance updates, I have concerns about the way he views autoattacks on the different weapon sets. I get the impression that he is borderline dismissive of them as a balance concern because he doesn’t like the passive gameplay they create.

I get that. However, there are several (mostly ranged) weapons in the game across professions that have serious problems almost entirely due to having a poorly designed or badly tuned autoattack. Most of the time it’s simply too long of an aftercast for the damage (Mesmer Scepter, Thief Pistol, Warrior Longbow), though in a handful of cases it’s something unique (Ranger Sword autoroot).

But autoattacks exist to serve a purpose, and he’s apparently disregarding how important it is for them to behave consistently both within a particular weapon and between weapons. This is because the autoattack carries disproportionate weight in determining how well a weapon works. All weapon balancing should begin with the #1 skill then spread out to the other skills then to traits, instead of being myopically focused on traits. The only way to compensate for a weak or badly designed autoattack is by overloading other skills or traits in the set, and that’s not a very good design approach.

A much, much better design approach would be one of the following two options:

1.) The easier route- Carefully balance all autoattacks with regard to one another so that they perform as equivalently as possible across all weapons and professions. Solidify your expectations of the role autoattacks play to be very concrete and apply that to all weapons. They should be the “bread and butter” skill that works as the primary source of sustained DPS in contrast to the utilitarian/strategic role of other skills, and they should never require micromanagement.

2.) The tougher route- Remove autoattacks altogether and replace all the current #1 skills with more powerful utility oriented skills similar to the 2-5 skills. This would likely require some rebalancing of enemy health, etc., but would still be better than the current haphazard approach where autoattacks have large discrepancies in their relative efficacies which creates severe balance issues between the weapons.

Yea, there are some great auto attacks and there are some terrible ones. Two of the best autoattacks in the game I believe are the Guardian hammer and the Ranger short bow.

Best Autoattacks

Guardian Hammer
The beautiful thing about this autoattack is that you have to pay attention to your swing combo for the 3rd attack. Since it’s the hardest hit of the chain, you want to pull it off before using another skill that interrupts the combo. However, you also have to pay attention to it with combo fields. If you want to help your group stack might, then you need to make sure that your fire field is down before the symbol from the attack so that you stack might on blast finishers instead of retribution.

Ranger Short Bow
The beautiful thing about this attack is that the flanking bonus really encourages you to stay on the move. However, it’s also not too restrictive. You have a large area, so that you’re not forced into a bad spot, but it is still limited enough to keep you from just standing in one spot for a long time.

Potentially Great, but Ultimately Problematic Autoattacks

Ranger Longbow
While at first glance, the autoattack of this weapon is great for the same reason as the short bow autoattack, it ends up being worse than a normal autoattack for three reasons. The first is that the long range forces you to miss out on group boons since shared boons have a 600 range, which is much shorter than the 1200 (1500 traited) longbow range. The second problem is that it is impossible to keep a max range in a lot of small areas, which can be quite common. The third problem is that it makes the 25 point Skirmishing trait, Hunter’s Tactics even harder to maintain (+10% damage while flanking) since this increases the distance you have to travel to get back in flanking position when an enemy turns. Flanking with a short bow is much more practical since you can easily stay in close range to reduce travel distance when re-positioning for flanking.

Ranger Sword
The actual combo on the autoattack of this weapon is beautiful. Taking this ability off the autoattack rewards players by allowing them to use things like the Pounce to close distance when they need to or to Kick for a needed snare. The might that is granted to a pet is also great since it keeps players involved with their pets and gives them more reason to keep their pet alive and on target.

However, the problem that moves this from being the best autoattack in the game to potentially one of the worse is that you can’t dodge during most of the autoattack animations. You can work around this by taking the ability off autocast, but in doing so, you must limit how much you use the attack beyond the occaisional tactical situation to be prepared for a potential dodge. Even with a perfect sense of awareness, you will still take hits from being stuck in animation.

The average human reaction time is about 215 milliseconds (just over 1/5 second). The cast time of Pounce is 3/4th of a second, meaning that even if you see an incoming attack during about the first 1/2 second of Pounce and have time to react to it, you won’t be able to. In other words, this prevents your skill and reaction speed from being rewarded, which is inherently counter to the way game and battle is supposed to work.

I agree with Jon that autoattacks that make you think are better than passive autoattacks, but I don’t agree all active autoattacks are better because of this. Active autoattacks are only better when they reward smart choices, not when they punish unavoidable ones.

Autoattack was a late addition. Before then i think the design was more in line with SWTOR, where you have to keep hitting that attack skill.

Then again, at launch the game didn’t even include activation times on non-channeled skill tooltips.

I am getting the impression that they never intended for us to constantly spam skills, but instead run and dodge until a opening offered itself (or we created one with a interrupt) and then pounce.

But IMO the control scheme do not favor this. And so instead we get people piling in tight spaces to maximize the effects of support skills, while spamming weapon skills between long sequences of autoattack.

If they want to see more active playstyles. increase strafing speeds and introduce toggled mouse look (and perhaps aim based targeting).