Guild Wars 2

I went back to watch the livestream again, and there’s a couple things I couldn’t find that maybe others have figured out.

- Does Illusionary Persona count for Alacrity? (i.e. do you get 1 second of alacrity when you shatter even if you have no clones)

- Shouldn’t alacrity give you 2 seconds of recharge bonus for every 3 seconds you have the buff? It seems to me that if it gave a 50% bonus, your recharges would tick for 3 seconds of cooldown each 2 seconds you have the buff (and would save you 1 second). With a 66% buff, it seems like you should get 5 seconds of cooldown benefit for 3 seconds of having the buff (so a 2-second benefit).

I’m looking forward to actually testing this out. It seems like ANet could get a lot of benefit from letting players try the specializations in beta form (much like testing the revenant).

I’m kind of confused on alacrity too.
The given description is just “66% Skill Recharge Rate”, I’m assuming it means +66% recharge speed, but even then I dont know if that means recharge/1.66 like you stated, or if it means recharge -66%, essentially making it an inverse chill.

tbh im worried it’ll come to Beta weekend we’ll test it… a ton will flame it and Next day it’ll get nerfed into the floor and when we finally get to test it again after its actual release it’ll prove worthless after how much they took away from it :/… Generally what im expecting to happen tbh.

I think it really depends on how available it is. The wiki only shows 3 sources of it so far, so if it stays as a rare buff, I’d expect it to be pretty strong.

There’s only 2 ways to give alacrity to teammates right now. One is the well, and the other is the random bouncing projectile that iCaptainamerica will use. Suffice to say it’ll be pretty rare.

Thx. I give ANet credit for coming up with unique mechanisms. I think that really makes the profession fresh and interesting. I know that makes balancing tough. But it would be really disappointing to add a mechanic that had no practical way to use it in a viable build.

So on the actual mechanic of alacrity, suppose that I triggered a 10-second cooldown at the exact moment I had 3 seconds of the alacrity buff. After 3 seconds, assuming I never had chill on me during any of this time, what would the recharge time on my 10-second cooldown skill show?

I think the answer here has to be 5-seconds. But I’m curious if I’m looking at this wrong.

eldenbri.1059:

Thx. I give ANet credit for coming up with unique mechanisms. I think that really makes the profession fresh and interesting. I know that makes balancing tough. But it would be really disappointing to add a mechanic that had no practical way to use it in a viable build.

So on the actual mechanic of alacrity, suppose that I triggered a 10-second cooldown at the exact moment I had 3 seconds of the alacrity buff. After 3 seconds, assuming I never had chill on me during any of this time, what would the recharge time on my 10-second cooldown skill show?

I think the answer here has to be 5-seconds. But I’m curious if I’m looking at this wrong.

10-3-1 so 6 seconds. Alacrity is just /3

I know that they said on the live stream that alacrity meant that you got 1 second extra cooldown for 3 seconds. But they also said that alacrity would cancel chill. So the chill description in the wiki (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chilled) says:

While chilled, skill cooldowns additionally progress at a 66% slower rate; i.e. for every 3 seconds chilled, only 1 second of cooldown will have expired.

So it seems like chill is creating a 2-second penalty in 3 seconds of elapsed time, so it feels like alacrity would need to create a 2-second bonus in 3 seconds of elapsed time to counter chill.

Thx for helping me try to get my head around this – it seems like it should be a simple concept but dividing the alacrity duration by 3 to find the recharge reduction just isn’t clicking for me.

eldenbri.1059:

I know that they said on the live stream that alacrity meant that you got 1 second extra cooldown for 3 seconds. But they also said that alacrity would cancel chill. So the chill description in the wiki (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chilled) says:

While chilled, skill cooldowns additionally progress at a 66% slower rate; i.e. for every 3 seconds chilled, only 1 second of cooldown will have expired.

So it seems like chill is creating a 2-second penalty in 3 seconds of elapsed time, so it feels like alacrity would need to create a 2-second bonus in 3 seconds of elapsed time to counter chill.

Thx for helping me try to get my head around this – it seems like it should be a simple concept but dividing the alacrity duration by 3 to find the recharge reduction just isn’t clicking for me.

We had some very extensive and math intensive threads about this a long time ago, if you want to dig them up. The ultimate conclusion was ‘we have no idea how they actually coded it, we have no idea if the people that coded it understand math, or understand math partially, or just did something random, and ultimately we’ll just have to wait and see.’

It’s kind of tough to do precisely with the livestream video, but if you go to the 22:19 mark in the video, Robert shatters two illusions so he has 3 seconds of alacrity (with the one extra second from illusionary persona). You can see when the alacrity buff kicks in, the Illusionary Disenchanter is at 17 seconds of cooldown. Three seconds later, you can see the alacrity buff drop and Illusionary Disenchanter goes from 13 seconds of cooldown to 12 seconds of cooldown right at that moment (and Mind Wrack seems to go from 11 seconds to 6 seconds in the same time).

I don’t know if there’s a way to play back YouTube videos with precise control of the timing. Here’s the livestream I’m talking about: http://dulfy.net/2015/05/01/gw2-chronomancer-points-of-interest-livestream-notes/