Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, quick question for you regarding dual wielding swords and summoned illusions.

Firstly, I only appear to execute any attack animations with my mainhand sword…the other one is just kind of there. I never really do anything with it. Secondly, all of my clones that I summon while dual wielding only have one sword, and they all appear to do some lunging thrust attacks, but never actually swing their swords.

Then i watched this video

and this lady (or gentleman) appears to be swinging both swords when attacking, and she is summoning illusions that are also dual wielding and they are actually attacking with both weapons as well.

Soo, I’m wondering why mine doesn’t do this. Looks like she’s using sword/sword and sword/focus throughout the video for the most part, which I also use and I have yet to see an illusion/clone/phantasm that dual wields, nor have I ever seen my Mesmer actually use his offhand sword of for anything other than a stat stick.

Ok, so this is a several part question.

Clones and offhands

When the game launched, and for about a year and a half after launch, clones used no offhand weapon. This was something that people complained about quite a lot, since not only does it not look good…it’s also an easy way to differentiate between clones and the mesmer. After about a year and a half, they fixed it.

…and then they broke it again with the most recent feature patch. I haven’t seen much complaining about it anymore because I think most mesmers have just resigned themselves to the fact that the dev team is astonishingly incapable of handling even the simplest coding in a professional and capable manner.

Clone Attacks

Now, where you’re a bit misinformed/mislead is in what the clones actually do. All weapon clones do 1 thing and 1 thing only: Use the autoattack from the weapon that produced them. This means that sword clones will simply do the sword autoattack animation, that’s all. If they weren’t bugged and actually held two swords, they’d still do the same animation…just holding two swords while they do it.

Attack Animations

Your attacks come from the weapon that produces them. Mainhand sword is in your right hand, offhand is in the left hand. Mainhand sword has skills 1, 2, and 3 on your bar. Using those skills will cause you to use your mainhand sword. Offhand sword has skills 4 and 5 on the bar, and using those skills will produce an animation from your offhand sword.

Okay, thanks Fay That explains it pretty well.