Guild Wars 2

So I just started playing a Ranger character, and it started me out with a Longbow. As I moved through the starting area and fought Duke Barradin in his tomb, I was sitting near the room entrance shooting arrows at what seemed like beyond the range indicator of my skill #1. (The line under the skill was red, and it wasn’t auto attacking, I had to hit the button each time to loose an arrow)

So are these indicators supposed to be inaccurate? Or does the longbow have some sort of extra mechanic to shoot further than its stated range?

It depends on positioning of hitboxes. That and there’s an Arc to the arrow. The line under your skills counts units on the ground. Baradin’kittenbox is high, so the arrow makes contact in its arc within the 1200 range, but the ‘ground units’ the game sees as more then 1200.

The range used for the red outline is the exact range of the skill used. The reason why you’re getting extra range is because all projectile effects in the game that can be interfered with (i.e. longbow attacks, mesmer GS autos,) gain an extra bit of range based upon projectile trajectory as the game handles the physics of the projectile as a moving object with a velocity, and these calculations with the animation set used cannot be perfect to their range increment without the animation being wrong (obviously a problem in PvP and active defenses).

With practice you’ll reach a point where you know what is in range and what isn’t just by the relative object size/angles.

What would be nice is an indicator that gives approximate range to help with knowing where the cutoff for the extra damage is.