Guild Wars 2

Does anyone else have issues with skills missing their target far too often?

I play a D/D Ele, and I’m constantly missing with the Fire Grab and Lightning Whip skills. It’s particularly annoying when you’re point blank on a massive boss or champion mob and one of your highest damaging, longest cool-down skills misses for apparently no reason at all. Lightning Whip connects, maybe, 60% of the time.

Is this an effect of the class/skill, or something to do with my stats? Does precision have anything to do with missing, and would increasing it cause me to connect more?

Happens to me when attacking while moving sideways and holding right click.

Fix: don’t do that.

Never missed my Fire Grab on anything but a too far or evading target… Lightning whip on the other hand misses all the time. Quite frustrating, especially when it STILL misses with target selected and no matter how you position yourself. Short answer – if you find yourself needing an auto-attack filler/lazy trash killer, fire is much much more reliable. Pretty sure, though, lightning whip failure rate is a known bug.

Only way to guarantee a fire grab hit is to literally “kiss” your opponent, in the sense that you need to stay face to face to land the burst skill at 100%, choose any other way and you better pray to land that burst

i barely have an issue with them missing anymore (except having to stand still to hit environmental objects with lightning whip… that sucks)

i also regularly hit fire grab at max range on multiple opponents

i think its most important to keep your character facing whatever you’re trying to hit (i circle around enemies using lightning whip continuously moving the camera to keep the enemy in the middle of the screen… if that makes sense)

it was worse in the game release, but its still buggy.

No problems with fire grab, but what I did notice on lightning whip is i get significantly more misses when i camera is aiming down rather than forward. If I am not targeting something and have the camera face down, I can miss 100% of the time on a guy immediately in front of me, but when I tilt the camera back to face him, I start doing damage. When an enemy is targeted, it still misses a lot, but I got in the habit of aiming my lightning whip FPS style at my melee opponents for the best results.

The animation on lightning Whip doesn’t change if you are aiming the camera up or down, but test this with a fireball on the staff. You can shoot them up in the air or straight at the ground if you aren’t targeting. I believe the whip does this too so it always misses.

firegrab for me seems just buggy or poorly designed.Many times i have a character completely aligned with my toon i activate the skill and it misses.
I still havent figured out whether i have to face the target the moment i activate it or the moment it goes off after a sec but i think it have landed with me aiming a non target after i acticated facing thin air..
Anyway it feels cheap that a skill doing this damage with a huge cd and a burning requirement has to be this hard to land..If the enemy is strafing in front of you then gg you missed

oh i forgot ..autofacing also doenst work with firegrab.Every (most) melee ability in this game autamtically lands if you stand still in melee range and let the autofacing kick in except this one
It still kittening misses

Staff skills miss ALL the time and I’m not even talking about dodges either. It’s similar to scepter for Guardian: if the player is moving/gaining height it will completely kitten up the shot about 30% of the time.

Hm, I might angling down a little too far. I’ll try leveling out the Y-Axis to see if I start landing more hits.

Just to be sure, though… there’s no stat in the game that increase accuracy? I want to rule that out.

Lightning Whip and Fire Grab follow the same “cone of attack” rules as the engineer’s flamethrower. Regardless of your target and the animation (the latter needs a change), the attack will hit in the direction your camera faces. This can be both good and bad: bad for the reasons listed in the OP, but good in gathering multiple targets, if one is slightly off to the side.

My two cents’ worth is that I’d like to see the animation for such attack cone skills reflect where it’s actually going, and Fire Grab should probably not be such a skill with that cooldown time. But that’s just me.

Something i do to mitigate the problem is to “aim” where they’re going rather where they are.
If you’re an FPS gamer you probably know what i mean, but incase you’re not try have the center of the scree, or your characters head slightly ahead of the mob/player while you’re moving about.
This ussually fixes it for me.

The only reason you are missing with fire grab is because you are not facing your oppoenent directly, your opponent might have moved a bit to the sides, dodged out of the way or simply out of the close range.