Guild Wars 2

From today’s patch notes:

Reduced quickness from 100% attack speed to 50%.

How does this affect rangers’ shortbow damage?

• Shortbow’s base attack rate is 1 per 0.520 seconds, which is 1.923 APS (attacks per second). (Test data here.)
• Before the patch, quickness increased the attack rate to 1 per 0.320 seconds, or 3.125 APS. (Test data also available at link above.)
• With quickness’s effect now halved, we should expect (theoretically) that the new APS with quickness is halfway between the old quickness APS and the base APS, which comes out to (1.923+3.125)/2 = 2.524 APS during quickness. This is a gain of precisely 0.600 APS over the base attack speed. (When I have time, I will seek to confirm this through testing. Edit: Confirmed. See note at bottom.)
• Quickening Zephyr (utility skill) now lasts 5s and therefore grants a total of 3.0 extra attacks over that time.
• Zephyr’s Speed (Beastmastery minor trait) lasts 2s and therefore grants a total of 1.2 extra attacks over that time.

So let’s say our shortbow attacks deal 520 damage on average. (Let’s ignore condition damage and pet damage for now.)

• With no quickness effects, that’s {520 damage per attack × 1.924 APS} = 1000 DPS.
• Using QZ (60s cooldown) raises total DPS to {(520 damage × 2.524 APS × 5s uptime + 520 damage × 1.923 APS × 55s downtime)/60s cooldown} = 1026 DPS, which is a gain of 2.6% (pre-patch gain would have been: 4.2%). If it’s traited (48s cooldown), it’s 1033 DPS instead, which is a gain of 3.3% (pre-patch: 5.2%).
• Pet-swapping and gaining ZS every 20s increases the base 1000 DPS to 1031 DPS, which is a gain of 3.1% (pre-patch: 6.2%). If pet swapping is traited (16s cooldown), that’s 1039 DPS instead, or 3.9% (pre-patch: 7.8%).
• Maximum total gain by traiting for and using QZ and ZS is {3.3% + 3.9%} = 7.2% over using no quickness effects at all (pre-patch total gain: 13.0%).

In your opinion, does this change make Quickening Zephyr and/or Zephyr’s Speed non-essential? (Or if they were already at that point, does this change make QZ and/or ZS weak?)

Edit: I’ve confirmed through testing that the quickness change is indeed working as I assumed above. Shortbow #1 skill attacks at the rate of 1 attack per 0.396 seconds, or 2.525 APS (within measurement resolution error of ±0.003 APS).

Good read and if correct validates my position that this was a nerf to our already sub-par dps.

Thanks for the hard numbers. Very insightful.

Nice number crunching, but a bit misleading imho. Quickness is for burst damage (or for quicker use of ressing, stomping, whatever) – it’s what it did during the 4 seconds it was running that that mattered – in short double damage (or should’ve been) during those 4 seconds from direct damage (not really in the case of the shortbow due to other things that’s already been discussed). You can’t really compare damage during the course of a minute, it’s really not of any interest when talking about abilities of this kind.
Not only have the direct damage part been nerfed, but also the ability to stack bleeds if we’re talking shortbow, the ability to stack might if talking about sword… the list affected by this goes on and on.

And quickness stomping / rezzing is fairly pointless now as well. I’ll be ditching QZ and 5 points in beastmastery and trying to salvage some other form of a reasonable build. UGGGH traps… I don’t want to use them but they are really forcing me to.

Actually, does anyone know if the QZ nerf also impacts other things that quickness impacted? Like Stomping/Rezzing/Gathering, or is it just “attack speed” as it has in the patch notes.

Wow! This is.. incredible!! I don’t know about you guys but to me it just seems that Anet hates rangers. First there are no Rampager Ascended rings, amulets and backpacks and I end up spending 20 Pristine Fractal Relics, 30 Laurels and 1350 Fractal Relics on gear that is not optimal for me. Than they put them in there. It’s like “Ha! kittener!! You’ve just wasted a month of your game time.” And now this.. Now I’ll probably have to change all of my gear because unless I switch to longbow, which I WILL NOT, I’m going to die a lot. There are some good news though, they’ve fixed the 3rd downed skill after 7 months of the game being released. Well, we’re going to needed now after they’ve completely kittened us SB rangers up. Anet, you guys… you did so good with GW1, and now this.. Next time just don’t make a ranger class if you don’t like it really.

roadkill.3749:

they’ve fixed the 3rd downed skill after 7 months of the game being released.

From early reports, apparently not.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Nice number crunching, but a bit misleading imho. Quickness is for burst damage (or for quicker use of ressing, stomping, whatever) – it’s what it did during the 4 seconds it was running that that mattered – in short double damage (or should’ve been) during those 4 seconds from direct damage (not really in the case of the shortbow due to other things that’s already been discussed). You can’t really compare damage during the course of a minute, it’s really not of any interest when talking about abilities of this kind.

That’s true if the class features burst damage as a primary tactic. Ranger typically has crummy burst damage, so the point of quickness was to improve its overall DPS.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Nice number crunching, but a bit misleading imho. Quickness is for burst damage (or for quicker use of ressing, stomping, whatever) – it’s what it did during the 4 seconds it was running that that mattered – in short double damage (or should’ve been) during those 4 seconds from direct damage (not really in the case of the shortbow due to other things that’s already been discussed). You can’t really compare damage during the course of a minute, it’s really not of any interest when talking about abilities of this kind.
Not only have the direct damage part been nerfed, but also the ability to stack bleeds if we’re talking shortbow, the ability to stack might if talking about sword… the list affected by this goes on and on.

That’s a fair point about burst damage, but remember that anything that procs on hit with no internal cooldown ends up scaling proportionally with attack speed. That is to say that the bleeds from shortbow skill #1 are not affected any more than the direct damage (again, with respect to sustained DPS).