Guild Wars 2

I haven’t spent much time playing a ranger, but I just made a post on the Thief forum that I think would be appropriate to generate discussion about here.

A lot of people complain about MH Pistol being weak on the Thief forums (they are). I also see a lot of people complaining about Longbows for the Ranger, and I’ve also noticed Longbows being a bit weaker than expected on my warrior. There are also complains about pistols on the engineer forums. Etc, etc.

I think these are all tied together. The issue is the recast. Each of the above weapons has an activation timer of 1/2 second (pistol) or 3/4 second (rifle and longbow). I believe that the calculations for damage, etc., were balanced around the activation timers for those skills.

HOWEVER! Due to recovery/animations, there’s an issue where the activation timer does not properly reflect the rate of fire for those weapons. Rifles have a relatively appropriate rate of fire (about .85), but pistols and longbows do not (about .8 and 1.2 respectively, should be about .6 and .85).

After a fairly thorough analysis, I believe that the designers have not thoroughly examined the actual recast rates of the #1 skills tied to those weapons and have primarily only looked at the activation speeds, which means those weapons are weaker than they should be in-game.

In short: #1 skills for Pistols and Longbows across the board fire more slowly and are consequently weaker than the designers intended and probably continue to believe them to be.

Thoughts?

Probably right. The programmers/devs have constantly shown huge faults and mistakes (Of course they are only human). But the disheartening part is they’ll know it’s a bug and just call it “Working as intended”.

INB4 fraction

Bump, I want people to see this and offer their feedback. I posted about it on the Game bugs forum. I think it’s either a bug with activation or a design issue with recovery animations or the GCD. I think it’s single-handedly breaking several weapon sets across professions and needs to be looked at before other changes are made.

Jay.3284:

Probably right. The programmers/devs have constantly shown huge faults and mistakes (Of course they are only human). But the disheartening part is they’ll know it’s a bug and just call it “Working as intended”.

INB4 fraction

Really?
!http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f18/Don_X/wai.png!

Honestly with all the bugged traits, weak weapons, bugged projectiles, squishy pets, Ive kinda lost count. But I do know that animations are a huge downfall of ranger, I do love animations so dont get me wrong but when my bird swoops for 2-3 seconds instead of dpsing I lose alot of damage, when I go to use long ranged shot and it takes longer than needed and I have to roll, its a huge dps loss. Now if they made it so long ranged shot did the same damage 1-1000 range as the current max range damage, and then from 1001-1500 range it did 30% more then Id be happy with the cast speed of longbow.

Jay.3284:

Probably right. The programmers/devs have constantly shown huge faults and mistakes (Of course they are only human). But the disheartening part is they’ll know it’s a bug and just call it “Working as intended”.

INB4 fraction

Sad but true..

Dante Dragonhand.2538:

Honestly with all the bugged traits, weak weapons, bugged projectiles, squishy pets, Ive kinda lost count. But I do know that animations are a huge downfall of ranger, I do love animations so dont get me wrong but when my bird swoops for 2-3 seconds instead of dpsing I lose alot of damage, when I go to use long ranged shot and it takes longer than needed and I have to roll, its a huge dps loss. Now if they made it so long ranged shot did the same damage 1-1000 range as the current max range damage, and then from 1001-1500 range it did 30% more then Id be happy with the cast speed of longbow.

They seem to have the physics back to front on this

One story told in medieval times was that an arrow fired from a long bow could penetrate four inches into oak. Recent tests have shown that this anecdote is true when the arrow is fired close up. From 200 metres, a longbow arrow penetrated over one inch of solid oak – more than sufficient power to penetrate the armour worn by soldiers. Plate armour gave more protection but could still be penetrated from 100 metres. The maximum range of a long bow was 400 metres but at this distance, it was far less effective.(from http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/longbow.htm)