Guild Wars 2

Asking a quick question for an ele friend: Is Arcane Power bugged? I saw bug reports about it not giving all the crits before the effect goes away going back 2 months ago, but after we tested it, it looks like it’s still doing the same. Are other people experiencing this?

Yes it is still bugged.

The tooltip reads something like ‘the next five attacks will crit’. I activated the skill and tested it on mobs. Out of the first five hits, only two to three will crit

Without Arcane Power, my crit chance also gives me an average of 2 to 3 crits per 5 hit. This skill is useless until Anet fix it.

Still bugged? The 3-crits on first hit are only the tip of the iceberg.

A few days ago, I did some target dummy testing to see the effects of Arcane skills with Elemental Surge. This gave the following results:

~Fire: only 3 hits activate AP.
~Water: next 5 Water Blasts activate AP, but when using Frozen Ground, the frozen ground ‘eats up’ charges without giving an effect.
~Air: next 5 Chain Lightning casts activate AP but each hit procs, resulting in a grand total of 15 activations per AP.
~When using both Arcane Precision AND Arcane Wave, in water they cause the DOUBLE amount of chill, wheras in Earth they cause only HALF the immobilize.

So basically, a Mesmer’s skills are more reliable than AP. You literally have no idea what could happen whenever you try a new combination.

Bleh, that’s sad.

And holy crap is that some weird mechanics behind the bug, lol!

Also, any skills that “pulse” eat it up prettymuch straight away, including almost every aoe field skill and Most of mobility skills.

ThiBash.5634:

~Air: next 5 Chain Lightning casts activate AP but each hit procs, resulting in a grand total of 15 activations per AP.
~When using both Arcane Precision AND Arcane Wave, in water they cause the DOUBLE amount of chill

Well that’s interesting…

By all means abuse it. Maybe it’ll draw enough attention to have all other bugs fixed while it’s nerfed.

ThiBash.5634:

By all means abuse it. Maybe it’ll draw enough attention to have all other bugs fixed while it’s nerfed.

What can you do with it though?

on crit effects are rather weak on our traits, and sigil effects have cooldowns anyhow, lowest being 2 seconds (bleed, lifesteal or chill), well vulnerability and might don´t have cooldowns but they aren´t exactly mad overpowered.

Aguess it could make a passable keep defense swap for d/d or s/d if you swap into staff with on crit sigil for chain ligthning and switch the fire trait for the bruning on crit.

ThiBash.5634:

~Fire: only 3 hits activate AP.

~When using both Arcane Precision AND Arcane Wave, in water they cause the DOUBLE amount of chill, wheras in Earth they cause only HALF the immobilize.

I assume you are using Staff, because I reported the 3 crit only for Fireballs recently and my bet is that the AoE effect of Fireball will eat another charge of AP, hence only 3 crits. I hope this gets fixed soon, because I can’t play the build I was trying to make because of this bug.

Also: Chill stacks, Immobilize does not stack, so that’s not a bug

Xolo.3580:

Also: Chill stacks, Immobilize does not stack, so that’s not a bug

Chill stacks in duration, yes, but not in such a way that when you add two 3-second chill effects the result is 12 seconds of chill. Also, immobilize also stacks in duration.

So I’d say that’s pretty much a bug.

Hm, I was 100% sure I read on the Wiki that it doesn’t stack. I just checked the article and it says it stacks. Maybe I confused it with sth else…