Guild Wars 2

I’ve posted this on a variety of other boards, but I felt it was appropriate here because it seems to disproportionately affect more ranged-oriented classes.

There is an issue with erratic attacks speeds on certain weapons across professions, in particular most ranged weapons (the only ones that seem about right are Rifles and Shortbows for rangers). The thief’s and engineer’s pistol, the ranger’s and warrior’s longbow, and staffs and scepters for various classes all have some glitches with their rates of fire for their #1 skills.

For instance, have you ever noticed that in most situations Fire just feels more effective on the Staff than other elements? Here’s your reason why: The Air, Earth, and Water #1 skills are supposed to have a faster recast than the Fire #1 (3/4 sec. vs 1 sec) but they actually don’t. This means that they are all weaker than Fire #1 when that isn’t intended.

There are examples like that all over the place, such as Thief Pistol’s Vital Shot being only very marginally faster than Warrior Rifle’s Bleeding Shot due to an arbitrary difference in recovery speed while being substantially weaker.

Has anyone done any testing or data gathering of this kind of stuff? I feel it’s one of the major reasons why some classes feel weaker than others, at least in PvE.

The question is: Is the time listed in the tool tip mean to specify the attack rate and not just the activation time?

Patch notes in the not too distant future:

• ALL CLASSES: updated tooltips to accurately represent the recast time, going to drink kittentails with the PR team later.

DesertRose.2031:

The question is: Is the time listed in the tool tip mean to specify the attack rate and not just the activation time?

No, it specifies only the activation time, not the overall recast. The problem with this is that the recast varies from weapon to weapon with the power of the skills seems to be based on activation speed, not taking into account recovery time , so the activation speed gives you very little real indication of what the attack speed is.

The Mesmer’ s Greatsword has no recovery time, so the 11/4 activation speed is exactly how fast the recast is. In the case of the Elementalist’s Staff, the recast on each of the #1s is about 1.4 seconds, slower than the Mesmer’s greatsword, even though the activation speed on the skills shows to be much faster. Additionally, the recast for Water, Air, and Earth should be faster than they recast for Fire, even though they actually aren’t.

There is something off about the GCD/attack animations and how they play with auto-attack #1 skills. This needs to be thoroughly investigated and fixed.