Guild Wars 2

Wrote this a few days ago in another thread and it gets lost:

I would love to have this skill central to assassination – pull suitable target out to back row and perform murderous intent. Problem is that it works 50% of the time… not due to legitimate stuff like blocks and dodges, but because it just doesn’t work 50% of the time.

In testing in PvP last night I ended up throwing the wire out 60 times.

7 blocks (legit).
7 fails due to enemy state (I think stability is overriding the wire effect which is fine – legit).
4 dodges (legit).
9 obstructions that weren’t there. There was nothing there… (not legit).
11 inexplicable failures – wire goes out… hits guy with no special boons up… nothing happens.
6 partial successes. Either me and the target meet in the middle or we almost meet but he is not quite in melee range after the wire pull so I can’t hit him until I close a bit.
16 complete successes.

The failure rate is too high on the ‘unexplained’ front. Dodges blocks and stability are fair game… but from my testing there is a larrrrrrrge area of failures that have no discernible reason.

it is a problem that a lot of ranged attacks, projectiles in particular, have. that is about all I can say about that as I have never seen an official post to the obstruction issue. the partial successes are probably due to uneven terrain or the enemy using a skill for mobility when the wire hit them. hitting a thief using HS for instance has a good chance of just knocking him down where he is at instead of pulling, or just not pulling all the way.

Maybe it’s related to pathfinding? Necro’s Spectral Grasp is hilariously bad in the same way, save that I don’t think I’ve ever seen the half-and-half result.

Yeah I’ve had the same experience.

In fact I wouldn’t even say it works 50% of the time. More like 30%.

The ability is just incredibly unreliable for no obvious reason. Even in some controlled PvE environments with more or less flat surfaces is manages to fail.

It’s just hugely annoying to have such an unreliable ability.

Agree – it could be a very tasty assassination tool… but is failtastic.

I have almost never been successfully pulled by scorpion wire
one WvW session I got scorpion wire’d 3 times, and two of them involved me getting knocked down but not moving any notable distance, and one I think nothing happened
My own success rate with the skill seems to be somewhat higher

I have almost never been successfully pulled by scorpion wire
one WvW session I got scorpion wire’d 3 times, and two of them involved me getting knocked down but not moving any notable distance, and one I think nothing happened
My own success rate with the skill seems to be somewhat higher

SW is too buggy to consider putting on your bar, although it is a cool ability…

It would be amazing if it worked 100% of the time.

Hmm…for the most part I’ve had great success with it…pulling enemies in Arah, pulling stuff in pve or pulling invaders off walls or those trying to get away in wvw…haven’t tried in spvp though.

SW is too buggy to consider putting on your bar, although it is a cool ability…

It would be amazing if it worked 100% of the time.

Dee Jay.2460:

The ability is just incredibly unreliable for no obvious reason. Even in some controlled PvE environments with more or less flat surfaces is manages to fail.

I suspect that a large percentage of the inexplicable failures are symptoms of a larger problem with the game’s combat in general.

At a very basic level, all attacks and skills in the game are designed for perfectly flat terrain. If you introduce -any- vertical distance between you and your target, there is a very high chance of failure. This can be seen on nearly all “lunge” style attacks (such as the Guardian’s greatsword ability number 3), where, if used upslope from your enemy, you will attack the empty air above him/her/it, miss, and then fall down next to him. If used downslope, you will very often lunge partway and stop inexplicably, once again missing.

Another possibly relevant problem I’ve noticed is more specifically tied to attacks and skills which move player around, such as Infiltrator’s Arrow or the Engineer’s Jump Shot. When attempting to use such abilities in cases where there is no valid path between the two points (such that an NPC could get from point A to point B, bearing in mind that NPCs do not jump), the ability fails. In those cases, the ability appears to fire off correctly, including consumption of Initiative or initiation of a cooldown.

These two problems can probably account for (nearly) all of the inexplicable failures in your test group. For example, if you try to scorpion wire an enemy who is a few meters above and in front of you, with an unclimbable slope between you, I posit that the skill will hit him and fail, for the no-valid-path reason.

The issue of pulling an enemy partway is possibly attributable to the vertical position differentiation problem. I have no idea what could possibly cause you to be pulled partway to the enemy. Given your thorough approach, it seems unlikely that you would have failed to notice treb knockbacks and whatnot.