Fun facts ahead. Because I have so much interest and so little life, I went and compared the old sword with the new sword auto-attack animations. I will also list stuff we lost and stuff we gained.
You be the judge for yourself (obviously) if this change was more beneficial to you or less. All due to preferences and different modes Rangers of all types play in. Trying to keep this as non-bias as possible. [Cowers behind a shield] Oh, snap. Rangers can’t use shi-!!
Old vs New
What Was Gained
The ability to freely move during the entire sword chain.
The ability to dodge during and between chain strikes. #ImFree
New sword animations. The 1st and 3rd strike look new. Actually, the 3rd strike looks like an axe auto attack found on Warrior, but with a twirl at the start. I play a Human Ranger, so your experience may vary due to race.
240ms worth of aftercasts; 120ms added onto the 2nd & 3rd strike! This is actually a bad one to be gained, but a gain nonetheless. Sadpandas be sad.
What Was Loss
DPS reduction due to aftercasts. See above.
Double Pounce trick.
Gap-closers from 1b (Kick) and 1c (Pounce).
Tracking targets going into stealth.
Being able to stick on a target. Like it or not, it was a feature a percentage of Rangers favored, so it’s on this list.
Old sword animations. For those that can’t remember, or never saw them, here is a link of a video I made per request of our local Ranger forum frequenter, Fluffball.
I can at least laugh at all the people who wanted to remove what made mainhand sword fun. Since the DPS got lowered and both axes got huge buffs, if they want to stay competitive in dungeons they don’t get to use sword either.
The icing on the cake is now they have to actually root themselves since Whirling Defence has great damage and path of scars no longer suffers reliability issues based on the terrain.
“Never Fight Alone” – Sunspear Creed
“There, it’s dead and it’s never coming back!” – Famous last words
Technically you will do more damage with the new Sword AA in PvP at least. The reason is because with the past Sword autos you sometimes had moments of hesitations because of not being able to move freely. Now with this change I’m pretty sure people will realize they will feel much more comfortable landing their autos.
It does suck that some of the great stuff has been taken away from the sword, but overall I’m liking it as a PvP player! Can’t say the same for PvE tho.
You only needed to move if you were avoiding damage thus not doing damage. With the after cast quickness is less effective. The root kept you on your target and thus keep your pet on target because of the cripple. Now its likelier that you wont apply the cripple missing your next attack as well as your pets not being able to land their attack.
So not a dps gain a loss in ways to numerous to mention. The only place I can see this as a dps gain is on the claw of Jormag after he flies away but you still can dps him. The root (actualy a movement skill) would make you jump to another area.
The root wasn’t a root. It was a targeted attack skill insuring you stayed on your target. It only rooted you when you were trying to do anything else other than doing damage.
In order to properly understand the big picture,
everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.
It’s not that I’m surprised they didn’t do anything, but it’s pretty obvious that this change should have advocated some buffs to the skills in the chain. The overall damage on all three strikes should have been bumped up, and the second strike still only hitting one target is simply a joke. It made sense as a kick, now it’s just less damage and pressure for no reason.
I find myself foolishly tumbling around hitting nothing because I’m used to sticking to things, but I think that’s just something to get used to. Anet isn’t reverting this, so better make suggestions on what needs improvement.
Edit: if we’re gonna keep the rather boring “pet might on hit” with the third strike, perhaps they could make it give the pet a stack per target hit. Just some more “umph” to it.
As a bad/casual/non-ranger, the new chain is a massive improvement, if a bit uninspired. Against any powerful foe, the old one had me either dishing out poor damage due to having the AA off and hesitating between each strike to decide whether to press 1 or dodge, or dying mid-animation with the AA on.
Not sure about everyone else but I was taught to be careful of what one asks for…
I might be the 1st one to be taught this and yet, I like these changes.
A lot of my nightmares and frustration went away traded for … a tiny DPS decrease.
Which is a good change. If anyone intended to go for DPS (PvE) he would have taken condition build anyway.
Plus no one used sword in PvP for damage. It was primarily used for acrobatics.
The strength of the sword auto was being able to stick to opponents and suprising them with a fast-hitting dps. I do not like the changes.
The only real gap closer was the 3rd attack of the chain.
If my enemy happened to be under swiftness he was usually able to run away from my kick. If he, however, ported or moved away when executing Pounce – that was a nice 2 jumps worth of 500 range.
But that was a roulette. Nope, I can clearly see the vast majority being happy with the changes. We have been asking for this ever since release. Yet once we finally get it done – people magically start hating it…
… I’m not really surprised since I knew it’s gonna be like this – but it’s a subject for having a thought.
[quote=6107108;Tragic Positive.9356:We have been asking for this ever since release. Yet once we finally get it done – people magically start hating it…
… I’m not really surprised since I knew it’s gonna be like this – but it’s a subject for having a thought.[/quote]
That basically sums up the attitude I’ve been seeing everywhere. We ask for something, we get it, people complain they didn’t get this other thing over here, or that it didn’t help their special snowflake build so what good is it, or the whole pve vs. pvp arguments, etc.
The animation change is good, the decreased attack speed is not. I know that it may feel silly but the decreased attack speed of the auto attack impact both the ranger dps and the pet’s DPS by potentially reducing the cripple uptime and the number of might stack that you put on your pet. Seriously it’s not like the sword dps was OP.
No core profession should be balanced around an optional elite specialization.
The strength of the sword auto was being able to stick to opponents and suprising them with a fast-hitting dps. I do not like the changes.
The only real gap closer was the 3rd attack of the chain.
If my enemy happened to be under swiftness he was usually able to run away from my kick. If he, however, ported or moved away when executing Pounce – that was a nice 2 jumps worth of 500 range.
But that was a roulette. Nope, I can clearly see the vast majority being happy with the changes. We have been asking for this ever since release. Yet once we finally get it done – people magically start hating it…
… I’m not really surprised since I knew it’s gonna be like this – but it’s a subject for having a thought.
On the other hand, people like me (the minority), loved the sword, never wanted it changed, and knew ANet wouldn’t change it the right way because the ways that it was strong would be removed/altered in some way, to compensate for a new ease of use autoattack.
Apparently though, people would rather have a game you can play one handed (in PvE) than a unique and effective weapon.
Now the sword is neither unique or effective, it’s just “easier.”
Then again, if ANet would just stop designing weapons around their autoattacks being their optimal DPS, then this would have been a nearly nonexistent issue to begin with.
Now the sword is neither unique or effective, it’s just “easier.”
Easier? Half the complaints seem to be about the sword no longer magically sticking to targets, including stealthed ones.
Easier because in PvE I can hit autoattack, then sit back in my chair with my hand on the dodge button, just like every other class with a boring autoattack.
When you were “sticking” to targets, you were “animation locked,” so that you weren’t able to dodge to interrupt the animation.
ANet properly balanced risk/reward, so the only thing I can really do is blame the community and blame ANet for listening to a community of players that wanted a good weapon changed just so they could sleep at the keyboard.
I don’t know about you guys but when I play Guild Wars 2 I hire homeless people to taser my privates while blasting out thrash metal and get some crazy guy to hold knifes up to my eyes, you know for the challenge.
Guess you people aren’t pro gamers like me though.
I don’t know about you guys but when I play Guild Wars 2 I hire homeless people to taser my privates while blasting out thrash metal and get some crazy guy to hold knifes up to my eyes, you know for the challenge.
Guess you people aren’t pro gamers like me though.
That’s no challenge, solid mental discipline can get over that. Try playing while the kids spend the evening streaming youtube on the various phones and PCs of the house over a 4Mb/s “broadband” connection. Us dads are the real pro gamers, ha!
Sword autoattack was never tracking stealthed targets. You just jumped away from stealthed targets, like you did if you hit it untargeted. Which made it for example impossible to prevent/slow down a stealth rez with sword – you just could’t cleave stealthed targets even if you knew their location.
Sword autoattack was never tracking stealthed targets. You just jumped away from stealthed targets, like you did if you hit it untargeted. Which made it for example impossible to prevent/slow down a stealth rez with sword – you just could’t cleave stealthed targets even if you knew their location.
This. I sure as hell dont know where this “tracking stealthed targets” is coming from. Pure misinformation.
Win10 pro | Xeon 5650 @ 4 GHz | R9 280x toxic | 24 Gig Ram | Process Lasso user
Sword autoattack was never tracking stealthed targets. You just jumped away from stealthed targets, like you did if you hit it untargeted. Which made it for example impossible to prevent/slow down a stealth rez with sword – you just could’t cleave stealthed targets even if you knew their location.
This. I sure as hell dont know where this “tracking stealthed targets” is coming from. Pure misinformation.
It wasn’t really tracking so much as you could tell where a thief was in stealth because you would leap if you hit them
Sword autoattack was never tracking stealthed targets. You just jumped away from stealthed targets, like you did if you hit it untargeted. Which made it for example impossible to prevent/slow down a stealth rez with sword – you just could’t cleave stealthed targets even if you knew their location.
This. I sure as hell dont know where this “tracking stealthed targets” is coming from. Pure misinformation.
I sure as hell dont know where this “tracking stealthed targets” is coming from. Pure misinformation.
Kind of what FrownyClown stated. Personally, I never stocked much into that, but since some (like a very low %) did, it was on the list. Being able to manually move and swipe around with the new sword is personally better (for me) when targets go into stealth than the old.
It wasn’t the stealth tracking for offense, it was that it let you know where the thief was and then automatically removed you from the backstab zone with two leaps. It didn’t prevent backstabs with great regularity, but there wasn’t really a downside to doing it if you weren’t precasting something or etc.
