Guild Wars 2

First off, I love Thief, and I love using Sword/Dagger as the main. However, it’s constantly making me want to use Dagger / Other instead. Why? Because Flanking Strike does not always activate immediately when pressed. And please do not say it’s lag, because it is not. I have tested it for quite some time and found out when Flanking Strike actually does not register immediately and when it does register immediately.

It’s all because of what animation you are doing and what time during that animation you press Flanking Strike will determine if Flanking Strike is going to activate immediately and let you dodge those precious moments when you need a dodge, or it’s going to wait until the animation is finished AND THEN activate Flanking Strike giving you a late dodge that actually did not dodge what you intended to dodge, or just not dodge anything at all. Way to go.

During your first auto attack animation, once your sword is past the half way point, i’d say like 60% already finished with its attack animation, and you press Flanking Strike, it’ll take about 0.75 seconds before it actually goes off. Every, single, time. If you activate it before it gets to the half way point of the animation, like 45% or sooner (it not actually landing a hit), it’ll activate IMMEDIATELY. Also, if you do the auto attack and your first swing hits nothing and you activate Flanking Strike anywhere from 65% animation completion or longer, your Flanking Strike wont go off until what feels like a whole second after the animation is done. Every, single, time.

If you activate Flanking Strike ANY time during the second auto attack animation and before the third attack actually lands a hit, Flanking Strike WILL activate immediately. If you activate Flanking Strike during the third auto attack animation once it hits the target but he’s/she’s in that leaning forward stabbing position (Im playing Human, not sure how every other race does it for the last attack animation), he/she will just kinda stand there for like a second and THEN do Flanking Strike. Every, single, time. So no, not lag. Check it for yourselves. Especially if you’ve ever wondered why it doesnt go off immediately sometimes when you fight.

I am very great at timing my dodges on things that truly should be dodged and not wasting them. Which is why i truly love S/D thieves, because, you know, we get so many dodges it’s beautiful. But whenever i play S/D and want to use a dodge, i have to stop, look at my current animation, and then think to myself, “Will i use Flanking Strike or will i use the regular dodge roll to evade this attack?” And based on the current animation, the choice becomes clear.

And what REALLY gets me, is when my endurance is low and cant use the basic dodge roll but i have plenty of initiative to use Flanking Strike but I am currently doing an animation that will make my character dodge a second later when i press it. THAT… That is what makes me not want to use S/D and seriously needs to be fixed to activate immediately no matter the animation. It’s an evade plus a boon stealer, but i believe it’s mainly used as an evade and damager. And evades are one thing that keeps us alive longer yes? Whenever i use dodge roll it ALWAYS activates immediately no matter the animation I’m doing. Why not Flanking Strike?

P.S. I use lots of evades, porting, and line of sighting to stay alive. And with Flanking Strike not triggering immediately every time it really reeeaally throws off the game play style. Especially since we now get rewarded for actually dodging an attack yes? Vigor…. mmm… you are so delicious…..

This skill has been like this ever since i’ve been playing and yet I have not seen any posts regarding this skill in the manner I am speaking of it about. I am quite surprised by that. I think it’s about time it needs mentioning. Especially since all the professions now have been modified and honestly, i only like sword/dagger thief now. But with the sword not using the evades properly 100% of the time… ruins the whole experience of trying to be evade, evade, evade, evade Enemy player: “WTF…. I’ll get you with this next one! EAT THIS!” evade " Mutha …. ! "

All the other weapon choices are pretty boring compared to Sword/Dagger. IMO. No offense to anyone.

It’s not exclusive to flanking strike, there are many times you would need that one skill to fire immediately but it won’t because you"re waiting for an animation to end.

While the majority of us probably agree, animation cancel in video games always lead to increase dps which is not healthy for balance.
For example, the old DoD:S kar98k was a lever rifle, but you could actually cancel the lever animation by fast switching weapons and back to the kar98k to gain a precious second before firing the next shot.
In GW1 you could cancel animation queue by fast strafing around your target and pressing escape while switching weapon sets.
This is how you ended up with hammer / axe warriors and hammer sins, for example.

While it can be a bit frustrating to watch your thief finishing that cool move instead of actually put efforts into surviving, you as a player should see it as a slight aesthetic annoyance instead.
Disable AA if you need more controle over your skill queue.

Off the top of my head, you may be able to cancel the offending animation by binding “stow weapon” and hitting that before you want to FS. Not sure if this works as I haven’t played much s/d, but could be worth a try.

@Ink: That only works partially. If the animation to be interrupted is part of a so called aftercast, it won´t work at all. Some animations cannot be interrupted at all, regardless of casting state. Situations where this is needed though is when you need to dodge during a Warrior’s stolen F2 “Whirling Axe” for example – you can only dodge if you interrupt it via stow weapons or weapon swap before attempting to dodge. WHich is silly. But i´ll come to that later.

@Muscarine: Your reasoning is completly correct – i played Call of Duty 1 – X (lost count…) and in most of them you can shoot faster using bolt action rifles if you abuse animation abortion. Same thing with reloading. But the substance is of entire different nature here – we actually do not want to increase DPS but use dodges when they are needed and while it all stems from the same problem it just doesn’t feel right.

Thus (in my honest opinion) any weapon / utility skill or endurance based dodge should take 100% priority over everything else. The Thief and especially S/D Thief basicly is the incarnation of fast reactive gameplay. But where is the point if the mechanical design doesn’t enable you to react? Part of this even spreads out to the problems with immobilize.

Be immobilized during any animation by a Shatter Mesmer? Better spam that Withdraw healing skill or FLanking Strike because they won´t activate instantly DESPITE being instant skills. Instead you have to pray to god that you have another second before the burst lands which would most likely cause your immediate end.

Pumped some auto attacks into the fleeing Warrior’s back and having him instantly flying back into your direction using Eviscerate? Better have some endurance left because you cannot count on a proper evade using Flanking Strike as it won´t activate in time before you take a Warrior to your face.

Lobbing one or two Cluster Bombs from your shortbow into enemy group shortly before seeing their Thief preparing for a deadly Steal+CnD+BS combo? Better have some endurance left because Disabling Shot won´t activate in time to dodge the burst.

Seriously guys, we´re talking about 1/2 second evades based on weapon skills and a 3/4 second evade based on an instant healing skill. I don’t even want to mention the 1/4 seconds on Death Blossom. Those need some pretty good timing and reflexes to be used properly, but the design flaws don’t let you. Up to this date i failed all attempts to do a Lupicus solo because most of the time Withdraw won’t activate when i need it.

Disabling the autocast on the auto attack chain doesn’t help either because we’re not talking about interrupting the chain itself (which is perfectly doable on all classes / weapon sets except Ranger Sword) but about interrupting a progressing attack mid-cast.

If the entire system is the way it is to prevent DPS increases from animation interrupts then please for the love of god move the damage portions of all skills to the very end of their casts instead of trapping people in aftercasts. Just add the aftercast time to the precast time and delete the aftercast time entirely. That would fix the problem with important skills not activating in time and it would also help to solve one aspect of the problems involving the Immobilize condition.

@muscarine I understand your point of view but I’m only talking about flanking strike needing to be instant always because its a skill mainly for evading, not increasing our dps, even though it DOES do great damage. I would rather have it trigger immediately always and the skill do less damage vs this skill in its current state if “OMG DPS Aboose!” Is the REAL reason why it does not trigger immediately like it should.. Honestly.

@Fenda : thank you. I agree entirely and those are more examples of what we have to deal with because yes, s/d is about all about fast reaction timing and that is purely why I only like that weapon set, but when an evade does not go off properly, the whole relying on fast action timing goes out the window and ruins the experience.

You may have amazing reflexes but thanks to how flanking strike works, IT will reward you or not reward you. And when you press an evade button and NEED it but it doesn’t trigger immediately like it should, that screws up your whole play style and frustrates you and can get you killed.

Skill evades, utility skill evades, and your dodge roll evade should always take 100% priority and activate immediately because that’s what it’s used for, TO EVADE attacks. Even if that evade does added bonuses.