Guild Wars 2

Is obvious.

Long Range Shot has an activation speed of .75 seconds but an actual fire rate of about 1 shot/ 1.25 seconds. The Rifle also has an activation speed of .75 seconds but an actual fire rate of about 1 shot/.85 seconds. This means that the delay between shots is a full .5 (2/3 of the activation speed) seconds for the Longbow while only .1 second (1/7 of the activation speed) for the Rifle.

I don’t care what anyone says, when you look at the various weapons’ data and offensive specs, this gap is clearly unintended and is just a clearly a product of an oversight of the way animations affects delays between attacks when the attacks are not chained. It’s severely affecting the Longbow (for both the Warrior and the Ranger) and moderately affecting the Pistol (for both the Thief and the Engineer). It also affects Staffs for the elementalist (Fire is supposed to be slower and stronger than the others, but is instead only stronger) and probably a few other things.

nearly all skills have cast-times and cooldowns, i dont see why this shouldnt be intended.

Longbow’s problem is that it doesn’t hit hard/fast enough, and that it has no mechanism for holding an opponent at range to avoid the distance penalty.

Note that it is clearly a damage “penalty” and not a damage “bonus”, as even at max range the longbow does less damage than other ranger weapons. This renders longbow almost completely useless in close-quarter combat, such as sPvP.

Zane.8471:

nearly all skills have cast-times and cooldowns, i dont see why this shouldnt be intended.

because he is saying that the cast time is slightly longer than intended due to animations.. thus lowering overall dps..

firebreathz.7692:

Zane.8471:

nearly all skills have cast-times and cooldowns, i dont see why this shouldnt be intended.

because he is saying that the cast time is slightly longer than intended due to animations.. thus lowering overall dps..

Its not just animations its cast-time and why the hell wouldnt it be intended?

Daemon.4295:

Note that it is clearly a damage “penalty” and not a damage “bonus”, as even at max range the longbow does less damage than other ranger weapons.

i really would love hearing how you came to that conclusion.

Zane.8471:

firebreathz.7692:

Zane.8471:

nearly all skills have cast-times and cooldowns, i dont see why this shouldnt be intended.

because he is saying that the cast time is slightly longer than intended due to animations.. thus lowering overall dps..

Its not just animations its cast-time and why the hell wouldnt it be intended?

well from what the op was saying..

Long Range Shot has an activation speed of .75 seconds but an actual fire rate of about 1 shot/ 1.25 seconds.

so the cast time is .75 secs

but the fire rate is 1.25 secs

thats a whole .5secs longer per shot..

can you see how that might add up?

firebreathz.7692:

Zane.8471:

firebreathz.7692:

Zane.8471:

nearly all skills have cast-times and cooldowns, i dont see why this shouldnt be intended.

because he is saying that the cast time is slightly longer than intended due to animations.. thus lowering overall dps..

Its not just animations its cast-time and why the hell wouldnt it be intended?

well from what the op was saying..

Long Range Shot has an activation speed of .75 seconds but an actual fire rate of about 1 shot/ 1.25 seconds.

so the cast time is .75 secs

but the fire rate is 1.25 secs

thats a whole .5secs longer per shot..

can you see how that might add up?

so it has a longer cooldown, still no reason to suspect it not being intended.

just did a little bit of digging and it seems i was defending something that i took at face value

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Long_Range_Shot 1.25 cast time
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bleeding_Shot .75 cast time

altho ingame both skills state .75 cast time…

so my guess is that it’s a tool tip error

Kill shot do twice as much damage with faster projectile speed, They could just make a little bit faster projectile speed on long range shot and it would be good.

Zane.8471:

Daemon.4295:

Note that it is clearly a damage “penalty” and not a damage “bonus”, as even at max range the longbow does less damage than other ranger weapons.

i really would love hearing how you came to that conclusion.

Test steady weapons in the mists and you’ll see, as others have posted time and again, that LB and SB damage are roughly on par with each other at max range. If you factor in flanking and bleeding, SB starts to outperform LB max range damage. At mid range the longbow becomes a pretty weak weapon, at short range it’s basically unusable, at best you can go through a skill rotation and then swap out. Hence why I call it a “penalty”, if it was a “bonus” I would expect it to be a perfectly viable weapon at any range and better at long range. That’s just semantics though, call it what you want but the fact remains that the longbow is only really viable at max range. Or would you disagree with that?

Zane.8471:

firebreathz.7692:

Zane.8471:

firebreathz.7692:

Zane.8471:

nearly all skills have cast-times and cooldowns, i dont see why this shouldnt be intended.

because he is saying that the cast time is slightly longer than intended due to animations.. thus lowering overall dps..

Its not just animations its cast-time and why the hell wouldnt it be intended?

well from what the op was saying..

Long Range Shot has an activation speed of .75 seconds but an actual fire rate of about 1 shot/ 1.25 seconds.

so the cast time is .75 secs

but the fire rate is 1.25 secs

thats a whole .5secs longer per shot..

can you see how that might add up?

so it has a longer cooldown, still no reason to suspect it not being intended.

If you’d actually read my post and use your brain, you’d see there is plenty of good reason to suspect that it isn’t intended:

1. The ‘cooldown’ from animations is inconsistent from weapon to weapon. For the rifle, it’s a mere .1 second. For the pistol, it’s about .25 seconds, and for the longbow, it’s about .50 seconds. It just so happens that the Rifle’s #1 is noticeably stronger than both the Pistol and Longbow, across professions, and that the Pistol is slightly less kitten than the Longbow, across professions.

2. The ‘cooldown’ from animations is consistent for the same weapon. The best example to illustrate this is the Elementalist’s Staff. The Fire attack on the staff has a 1 second activation speed and stronger offensive specs, while the Water/Earth/Air attacks have a .75 sec activation speed and weaker offensive specs. However, the attack animation is the same for all 4, and the recast time for all of them is about 1.25, and therefore they are all somewhat weak but Fire is noticeably stronger than the other three.

3. The animation delay and how it supersedes activation speeds does not exist as a metric in the game, only the activation speed by itself, so it intuitively seems very likely that the whoever designed the skills was not aware of it or taking it into consideration and that it is therefore an oversight.

All in all, it is perfectly obvious that it’s a bug or an oversight and that it’s the main reason so many people complain about the same weapons feeling weak. It’s so obvious that it makes me bang my head against a wall that no one else notices it.

firebreathz.7692:

just did a little bit of digging and it seems i was defending something that i took at face value

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Long_Range_Shot 1.25 cast time
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bleeding_Shot .75 cast time

altho ingame both skills state .75 cast time…

so my guess is that it’s a tool tip error

No, I actually think the site is wrong. The Warrior’s Longbow #1 shows to be .75 seconds and has the same fire rate as Long Range Shot, and is also much, much weaker than you’d expect it to be. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the past they reduced the activation speed from 1.25 seconds to .75 seconds for the skill to make it stronger and didn’t actually do anything because of the animation. Furthermore, you can see that most of the delay in-game occurs between the skills’ activation and not while the meter is charging.

I maintain what I said in my original post.

While i agree that the tool tip activation time is incorrect (8 attacks within 10 seconds), that doesn’t really affect the dps of the range’r longbow compared to the warrior’s rifle.
I ran some tests with both a naked warrior and ranger with no traits, basic max weapons and a beserker amulet(speed things up). The first 2 pictures show those stats, you can see most of them are the same, with the warrior having a slightly higher attack power due the rifle’s damage.(LB 920-1080, rifle 986 – 1205)

After doing the test several times, the average time for both the ranger and the warrior to kill the target was roughly 15 sec. You can see the damage done to kill them with the second set of pictures. This was done with the ranger at max range, doing the test with her at point blank took about ~25 sec to kill.

In that test, the ranger had a dps of ~729.8 max range, ~429 point blank. while the warrior had about ~470 dps before the bleeds, ~685 after.

While i understand that it isn’t 100% perfect(stop watch, eye balling, and quick math), looking at this i can tell the ranger’s #1 long bow in terms of dps is on par with the warriors rifle……as long as the ranger is a max distance.

I think they need to just get rid of the range penalty and rapid fire. Then replace rapid fire with a strong burst shot something similar to swoops animation (fire a gaint hawk ballista or something). The longbow might then be better for more than support at max distance (anything less than max distance and the stupid thing becomes useless; which I hate because I love to use longbows in games…).

The current flight time and fire rate would be fine if they did the aforementioned two changes.

The way that most melee works in game, you can easily and almost instantly cover any distance “advantage” the longbow, or other ranged weapons, should possess….

There is a longbow problem that is not entirely about the longbow itself. If you use a longbow for damage you are putting yourself about 1000m away from the melee. This separates you and your buffs from the melee group and their buffs. For easy play this is fine but in any difficult dungeon this is insufficient since the group needs to perform better than the sum of its parts.