Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone, first time actually posting to this forum rather than just reading. But earlier today in WvW me and my friend got into a discussion over the sense of running sword for leg specialist in a ZergvZerg environment. he claimed that you could snare 5 people with the cleave all at once with leg specialist every 3 or so seconds with the swords crippling auto attack. After some very thorough testing in both WvW, and PvP, I had some facts to post about that a lot of people have different opinions on.

1: Leg specialist still has an internal cooldown of ~8 seconds (every 9 autoattacks with sword for the cripple.)

2. when hitting 5 enemies with cleave, it will only snare one of the targets, and it will snare the same target each time.

3. switching weapons to apply different cripples does not reset the internal cooldown on Leg Specialist.

4. The tooltip no longer displays internal cooldown on leg specialist (idk if this is for all traits or not, but i thought it was worth noting.)

Conclusion: there are a ton of theories around leg specialist about it being this hit-all snare-all that just isn’t true. Am I an idiot for posting about something that was discussed months ago or is this news to guys as well?

Jigsaw.3506:

Am I an idiot for posting about something that was discussed months ago or is this news to guys as well?

I would say uninformed instead, but yes.

Leg Specialist used to have no ICD. When sword was reworked they added an ICD. For a few days after the trait rework in October(?) the ICD was removed by mistake.

Sword auto attack only hits 3 targets and Leg Specialist only works on one target per 5 second cooldown.

Jigsaw.3506:

1: Leg specialist still has an internal cooldown of ~8 seconds (every 9 autoattacks with sword for the cripple.)

2. when hitting 5 enemies with cleave, it will only snare one of the targets, and it will snare the same target each time.

3. switching weapons to apply different cripples does not reset the internal cooldown on Leg Specialist.

4. The tooltip no longer displays internal cooldown on leg specialist (idk if this is for all traits or not, but i thought it was worth noting.)

1. Testing the ICD with the autoattack is a very, very bad way to do it, since there is a forced downtime causing inaccuracy.
2. Cleaving attacks hit 3 targets, not 5. Also, traits with ICDs have always only hit 1 enemy even when you use an AOE attack.
3. Well of course it doesn’t.
4. It does, just that you’re looking in the wrong place for it. The way traits and skills display was revamped last month, now all traits with a cooldown display their cooldown in the upper right corner of the description. And in there, it says “5” for Leg Specialist.

As for why your acquaintance would say that Leg Specialist could be used to snare multiple people, he was most likely referring to the short period where Leg Specialist was bugged and had no ICD. Or he didn’t know that they put an ICD on it when they changed the Sword skills.

You should be using your Leg Specialist procs mostly on the Hammer #3 for an AoE snare in zergs

The “short” period was since launch, they only gave it a cooldown since they changed sword to have cripple on auto attack chain and possibly because they were going to change immobilize to stack eventually.

It had no cooldown for a long time. People exploited this trait with arrow carts to perma immobilize armies.

Internal cooldown was added.

Random patch accidentally de-activated the fix, so it had no cooldown again. Was fixed again swiftly. Only affects one target, even if it’s an AOE skill.