Guild Wars 2

Many people have heralded or complained about the scepter abilities. On paper the scepter is our most damaging weapon, in effect it can be lack luster due to slow flying orbs being easy to dodge and what many people may not realize, but Smite never hits for full damage.

By doing a log of number of strikes done by Smite never reaches full damage potential due to the number of strikes being random. The targeting circle was never moved and this test was done in the Mists on a targeting golem (if you have your mouse in the chat box it puts the target circle at your character’s feet).

The tooltip states that it will strike 15 times for a total of damage shown on the tooltip, but in effect the most strikes done in a log of 50 skill usages shows the following data:

Highest strikes – 13
Lowest strikes – 3
Average strikes – 9.5

The following is a log of how many times Smite struck for that listed number of hits.
1 strike – 0
2 strikes – 0
3 strikes – 1
4 strikes – 0
5 strikes – 2
6 strikes – 2
7 strikes – 2
8 strikes – 9
9 strikes – 7
10 strikes – 10
11 strikes – 5
12 strikes – 10
13 strikes – 2
14 strikes – 0
15 strikes – 0

I do feel that when a skill says 15 hits it should hit 15 times.

I am noticing the same effect for whirling wrath on the greatsword too. So far it always totals 14 total strikes to include blade hits and projectiles, but the number of blade hits changes.

I know there was posts about race size and number of hits from whirling wrath, as well as standing “IN” the target versus infront of the target. I am doing my testing inside the target.

What it “seems” like is that the speed of hits precludes some attacks from counting.

This is why I think Smite needs to be a symbol, it even uses the same graphic style as a symbol. If they don’t want it to be too small by default, they could just make it a combo field at least! (Or make symbols bigger! I find I need to take Writ of Exaltation for symbols to be useful anyway)