Guild Wars 2 Forum

Shockwave.1230:
Chaith is touching on the slippery slope I’ve previously mentioned before in one of these threads. As soon as you say you can’t stow weapon in situation A (ie lw stow), when people stow weapon in Situation B (ie spacial surge stow), or situation C (ie canceling a skill from going on full cooldown), or situation D (baiting actions ie CnD stow) people who don’t use stow weapon will start yelling for bans on stow weapon in every situation.

This is why ANet simply needs to take action to change the behavior of the skill in game.

Or at least update their wiki page. It is depressing pulling up pages on cancel and aftercast delay with clear intent and advantages on gww only to not have the same kind of information on gw2w.

In certain cases the aftercast delay can be canceled by situational triggers, e.g. by a change of form.
Assassin dagger attack skills with activation times that are shorter than the typical dagger animation delay can be used to hasten combo attacks.
There are no other known mechanisms to reduce or cancel aftercast delay. In particular, the Mesmer’s Fast Casting attribute has no effect on the aftercast delay of spells or signets.

Example scenarios where cancelling can be useful:
When skills like Diversion have been used on you.
You have started to use the wrong skill by mistake.
The incorrect target is selected.
The skill is no longer necessary/useful e.g. enemy nearly dead.
You are about to be interrupted or knocked down e.g. Giant Stomp imminent.
You can dodge or otherwise leave an area of an incoming projectile or spell e.g. Dragon Blast imminent.
You are attempting to trick enemies into wasting interrupts by starting a skill and then cancelling the skill before the interrupt succeeds.
You are trying to trigger weapon set effects, such as, “Aptitude not Attitude” for a quicker cast.

The most I could find on the gw2w… Stowing away a weapon can be used to cancel the current action, e.g. auto attacking or a utility skill. (The in-game options panel allows you to bind a key to the “Stow/Draw Weapons” command).