Guild Wars 2

There is a method behind weapon skill bar placements, and its not cooldowns. Though many bars are organized by cooldowns, this happens to be solely coincidental. The old GS order wasn’t organized by cooldowns.

Two-handed weapon bars, at least for guardians, have always been organized by the role of the skills themselves.

The autoattack is always 1. This isn’t because it has no cooldown, this is because its the simplest and most basic offensive attack. As you go down the bar, skills become more team and utility based. Lets look at the Staff.

Wave, Orb, Symbol, Empower, Line

Of those 5, only 3 actually deal damage. Those three happen to be the first three. Of THOSE three, only 1 is devoted solely to dealing damage. That’s the first one. The skills go from offense to offense-support to utility. There’s an order

Hammer.

Swing, Blow, Embrace, Banish, Warding.

Offense, offense, utility, utility, support

Spear.

Spear, Flurry, Brilliance, Wall, Grasp

Offense, offense, utility, utility, utility

Trident

Light, Purify, Pillar, Refraction, Weight

Offense, offense, offense, support, utility

Now we get to the outlier.

Greatsword

Strike, Whirl, Leap, Wrath, Bind

Offense, Offense, Utility, Offense, Utility

And if you prioritize finishers and fields as the prime purpose,

Offense, offense-utility, utility, offense-utility, utility

Yeah. Leap of Faith is not a damaging move. It deals damage, but besides the fact that it misses constantly, its meant for the blind. That’s it. By that logic, its not supposed to outrank a skill that deals quite a bit more damage on a regular basis. It clashes with every other weapon build as well.

They were organized by cool down before and they are organized by cool down now oO. It changed when the cool downs changed. It was a nice theory, but the CD change was the actual culprit.

It’s a general trend because utility skills are usually given higher cooldowns than raw damage skills. However, this isn’t always the case. Take a look at the engineer’s rifle bar:

Hip Shot, Net Shot, Blunderbuss, Overcharged Shot, Jump Shot

Net Shot, the #2, does no damage. It’s pure utility, only providing an immobilize condition on the target. Yet it is on the second slot of the weapon, even before Blunderbuss which is pure damage and shares its cooldown of 10 seconds.