Guild Wars 2

…had posted this in a thread on a different topic but will repost it here since I spoke with someone today who didn’t know you could do this kind of thing.

It is possible to set just about all your slot skills, right bar and left bar, to auto-attack. This can be used to do things like making sure you don’t lose cast uptime by having to manually trigger something as soon as it’s off cooldown, good for stuff like Warhorn on a perma-swiftness or fury build, or even Sharpening Stone.

A cool thing you can do with this, is take advantage of the weapon-switching. Through a quirk in the mechanics, even though when you weapon-switch only the left bar, the weapon skills, actually changes, the auto-attack settings for both bars change. Because of this, you can set one of your utilities to auto-cast only for one of the two weapon sets…so you effectively get a free non-manual cast ‘on switch’ effect much like you can get from Sigils, say Hydromancy and the AoE chill.

Taking this a step further, you can even get 2 such casts – using a Spirit. Set the auto-cast on the spirit slot for one weapon set, your secondary. Engage in combat with your primary, and then switch. The spirit will cast and come out, enabling it’s passive effect – burning or whatever – AND, immediately execute it’s active effect – say, cast an AoE blind. Obviously the usefulness of this depends on managing it so you get the right usage out of it…but it’s an example of one of the neat things we can do as Rangers. Stupid Ranger Tricks. :P

this effect that you are talking about, doesnt work quite this well.
infact, i used to have horn 5 on auto attack, and it will only trigger while in combat. which means you will be running at “combat speed” which is slower then anything else.

Dunno how much you tested with spirits, but i can tell you one little secret… if triggered too soon after spawning the spirit, the spirits active attack will play through the animation, but nothing happens. I think it has something to do with an ICD on the spirits attack.

X amount of seconds must pass after spawn before it can use its active ability. This ICD depends on the spirit, for the sun/frost/storm its short, but for the elite one, it’s kitten long.

I’d noticed that with horn, and this seems to be a change from how it functioned originally, but it is not the case with other skills. You can still run perma-might (multistack) or perma-fury builds doing this however – as in combat is when you want those, so it’s a more appropriately contextual auto-casting in that case.

I did not know about the ICD on spirits, I’ll have to record a few runs and try to catch if the effect is actually being applied on mobiles, thanks for that info.

It does seem to work quite well for Sharpening Stone at least, it also works on a perma-heal build – and with secondary effects on heal that is nice as well to have assured 100% handsfree uptime.