Guild Wars 2

The axe autoattack chain is as follows (dmg stats from wiki):

Chop: Dmg – 252, Time – 0.25s, DPS – 1008
Double Chop: Dmg – 538 over 2 attacks, Time – Unlisted (but short), DPS – Unknown
Triple Chop: Dmg – 858 over 3 attacks, Time 1.5s, DPS – 572

What the crap? Why would I want to let triple chop ever finish if pressing ‘1’ again uses a much higher dps skill?

Here is a screenshot of the full chain hitting a heavy golem with a steady weapon, which seems to indicate that the 3rd part doesn’t have a higher skill damage multiplier or whatever the exact term is.

Posting to confirm that triple chop is better off cancelled.

Bonus: you still get one swing at a higher damage before returning to ‘chop’.

Because the target is meant to die with the first three attacks, when the character realizes that the person is not dead, he/she gets pissed and starts chopping up some more like cutting off someone’s head with a dull knife.

Found it giggly the first time.

Because the animation is fricking awesome man! You can really tell your character just wants to slice and dice whoever he / she is attacking.

Usually the third attack in a combo applies a condition. If I had to guess, I’d say that whatever condition got applied (probably vulnerability), made dual axes OP and they removed it, but didn’t do anything else with the skill to make the combo useful. Design oversight ftw.

This is a bug that’s worth reporting, imo. That, or wait for the next warrior patch, whenever that might be.

I don’t use axe mainhand anyway, and this might be part of the reason why I find it so bad.

Why dual axes specifically? The other axe vulnerability skill is #2. #4 gives you fury, although on a mace #4 is also vuln. Sounds like a reasonable theory though. They probably just never looked at the fact that it was a complete waste.

Until then, pressing 1 repeatedly improves damage!

Hm … too bad you can’t stop it from using the chain without awkward cancelling of the third step.

I tested out many builds the past few days with axe/axe and the damage was always significantly stronger the deeper in the chain. I’ll have to look into it more if the dps is truely lower due to longer casting.

This is with 60 crit damage increase: the 1st attack critted for around 1500, the second 2x were around 1600-1700 each, the third part 3x was around 1900-2000 each. And from testing it for several hours I would say that chain #1 + chain #2 attacks are around 1 sec or maybe just a little under/over.

If thats the case then yes chain #3 is less powerful then #1 + #2 attacks, unless the tooltip is wrong and the casting for #3 is actually shorter than 1.5 sec

Something for me to look into later when I have time. Thanks for the notice and I’ll post my findings later

Tested it out. Seems the combo #1 + combo #2 chains are def over a second long combined and the third part of the chain is slightly less (not by much) than 1.5 seconds. So it seems that there is no dps loss in doing the entire chain. But I did notice that after the 3rd strike in the 3rd part of the chain there is a slight gap before it goes back to the 1st part of the chain. This is a great time to use your other axe attacks (ie 2, 4 and evisc) but doesn’t cause you to lose enough dps to declare it wasteful if you just cycle the chain over again.

hmm… maybe the ‘gap’ is what I’m noticing, or it also accounts for the longer than advertised cast on the other two and I didn’t notice it at all. I haven’t actually tried timing each swing (can’t really think what to use… can fraps do that?).