Guild Wars 2

How disappointing. I honestly thought my flamethrower autoattack was doing 1000s of damage, until I let loose on a champion and saw the number skyrocket into the 100-thousands. I checked my combat log…

Sure enough, FT autoattack only does a few pulses of 135 damage, but the pop-up numbers keep adding on top of themselves, even between autoattacks.

Is there a way to fix this, so that the pop-up numbers just show the pulses instead of repeatedly adding to the last attack?

nope, it’s been this way for well over a year.

chain damage has always tallied up like that.

Casia.4281:

chain damage has always tallied up like that.

It has not.

It’s a relatively recent undocumented change. Still no word on whether it’s a bug or not.

I wanna say it was introduced with the second feature pack, but I forget the exact timeframe.

I believe it was changed last september 9th in that big patch.

Halcyon.7352:

It’s a relatively recent undocumented change.

Ehm. No. Chain damage was like this since I can even remember.

Do you recall all those warrior heroes going “my hundred blades hits for 60k”? I do.

robertul.3679:

Ehm. No. Chain damage was like this since I can even remember.

Do you recall all those warrior heroes going “my hundred blades hits for 60k”? I do.

Hundred blades does not behave the same though, because it’s not chainable – it has a cooldown. It simply hits 8x over the course of the cast. It stops tallying afterwards.

Flame Jet, Spatial Surge, and Arc Lightning’s damage counters do not reset after the cast time anymore – presumably because they have no cooldown and are chainable. They used to prior to the September 9th patch, which is what we’re discussing.

Simple really. In 99% of scenarios you do not want to use FT auto attack.
You use it when L
A. tag lots of enemies and damage does not matter.
Or B. When you rapidly need to apply condis with a crit or 3.

No other situation is the auto any good. AT ALL.

My first char (Fall 2013) was a flamethrower engi. Can confirm it’s always been done like that. Auto-attacked a door once just to see how high I could get it. 500k before I got bored.

I agree with the others, it’s been like this as long as I can remember. As far as I can tell, consecutive damage from the same ability gets added together as long as it’s applied within a certain time limit. The time between the last tick of the FT auto attack and when you start the next attack is short enough that the damage will get added together . I’ve noticed that if I interrupt the autoattacks to do anything else, or even just wait a split second longer before attacking again, that the number popping up will start over.

How much is “high” and how much is “low” damage? Do we really can judge using this numbers?

Despite the tooltip, the Flamethrower hits 10 times over 2.57s (see wiki).

That’s an average of one hit every 0.257 seconds. That isn’t bad damage for that fast of an attack speed … especially when you factor in that you’re also applying burning.

As far as the number stacking … I feel ya. Mesmers have been complaining about this with the Greatsword as well.

Halcyon.7352:

robertul.3679:

Ehm. No. Chain damage was like this since I can even remember.

Do you recall all those warrior heroes going “my hundred blades hits for 60k”? I do.

Hundred blades does not behave the same though, because it’s not chainable – it has a cooldown. It simply hits 8x over the course of the cast. It stops tallying afterwards.

Flame Jet, Spatial Surge, and Arc Lightning’s damage counters do not reset after the cast time anymore – presumably because they have no cooldown and are chainable. They used to prior to the September 9th patch, which is what we’re discussing.

This change has at least been around for 2 years… probably since launch.