Guild Wars 2

This is an statistic that has no use at all on damage calculation and I think it’s a bit misleading as many players will at first think it’s the main component of the damage formula.

I was hoping with the revamped atributes interface it would be gone, but it’s still there.

Attack is the sum of Power and Weapon Damage, but that’s never used for damage calculation, as the damage formula uses the product of Power and Weapon Damage (and Skill specific coeficient) instead of the sum.

So, as someone who’s studying a videogames design degree and I like to analyze games and see why things were done one way or another and which patterns they follow, I’m genuily interested on knowing what was the intention of putting that atribute on the user interface instead of just showing Power which is the one that really directly affect damage.

Maybe the formula at some point of development used Attack, was later changed and the atribute was left there?

If a dev can solve this for me I would be thankful. I’m curious about this attribute.

Maybe its a way people can reference how their weapons or stats effect their damage in a different perspective?

Desamos.1836:

Maybe its a way people can reference how their weapons or stats effect their damage in a different perspective?

I’m not sure that would be good. Power scales directly with the damage your doing (ie: double power means double damage) while attack doesn’t scale with it (double power is more or less +(2/3) attack). When power scales directly with damage using another attribute that is worse at showing it is strange.

Lokheit.7943:

Attack is the sum of Power and Weapon Damage, but that’s never used for damage calculation, as the damage formula uses the product of Power and Weapon Damage (and Skill specific coeficient) instead of the sum.

if this is true, i don’t see any reason why “Attack” even exists. maybe they don’t want to display the product (which would be actually useful) so it’s more difficult to theorycraft? i honestly don’t see the purpose of this made up, false stat. possibly not removed yet because of an oversight.

Since Attack is the sum of Power and Weapon Damage, it does give the player an indication or comparison of his attack prowess, when he switch different weapons around or gears that gives Power. Maybe that’s all it is for. So instead of trying to track two different values all over the place, you just look at this one stat.

“Combines weapon damage and power; determines skill damage”. Thats straight from the character window.

I’m not sure which to believe, wiki or actual in-game info.