Guild Wars 2

Dual Shot has to be the weakest autoattack in the game. I find it annoying because, while the Longbow can still be very powerful in certain situations (zergs/defense), if you’re trying to use it as a primary weapon or just generally it’s atrocious.

What confuses me is that this was a problem for the Ranger’s Longbow as well, but it was substantially buffed by having the aftercast reduced by a full 2.5 seconds in the latest patch. Why didn’t they do the same with Dual Shot?

I dont want to say much, but as ranged weapon it is not weak. I can hit to 2k dmg (2x 1k) and both hits can trigger as critical so you can have twice as much critals as a normal weapon (think about sigils). I dont think longbow is weak and especially dual shot.

It’s not weak, it’s just insanely clunky in any situation that isn’t zerg vs zerg. I can also hit double 1k’s with Dual Shot, but it fires very slow and half the time it bugs out and one of the arrows goes to the moon instead of going to my target. Fan of Fire and Pin Down also miss half the time, and Arcing Arrow is so slow and clunky that the targets move out of it even at point blank range. It was clearly not designed for close range combat, because trying to use it in such a situation is a mess.

Dual Shot is NOT weak!

It hits more than Rifle Autoattack. It’s actually quite strong for a ranged weapon!

Wha…?

You do realize that it does two attacks at the same time right? The damage listed is half of what it does… It actually does quite decent damage.

Not amazing, but if it did it would be quite broken.

Einlanzer.1627:

Dual Shot has to be the weakest autoattack in the game.

No! No one will ever take this away from engg pistol… no one…

Yamsandjams.3267:

Einlanzer.1627:

Dual Shot has to be the weakest autoattack in the game.

No! No one will ever take this away from engg pistol… no one…

Nah, the weakest autoattack is elementalist staff water #1; it has a coefficient of 0.3, no aoe damage and no bleed, and attacks at nearly half the fire rate.

By comparison, engi pistol’s #1 has a coefficient of 0.35, aoe’s and deals a 2 second bleed. (Warrior’s rifle has a roughly 0.45 coefficient, but attacks about 33% slower and doesn’t AoE. The only thing it does better than engi pistol overall is a longer bleed)

I just looked at this thread for the first time since I started it and I have to say I’m surprised by the responses – Dual Shot is objectively and demonstrably very weak. This is because it suffers from the same thing Long Range Shot did until the last patch – an overly long aftercast delay. I don’t understand why Long Range Shot was buffed and Dual Shot wasn’t.

Here’s a rifle/longbow breakdown on my level 80 warrior:
Bleeding Shot- 171 direct + 285 bleeding per shot
Dual Shot – 282 × 2 shot

What the tooltip doesn’t mention is that the 282 is for both attacks, not each.
Additionally, Dual Shot is on a 1.25 recast while Bleeding Shot is about .8

This means:
Bleeding Shot – 456 per shot; 1 shot per .8 seconds = 547.2 DPS
Dual Shot – 282 per shot; 1 shot per 1.25 seconds = 196.5 DPS

It’s such a dramatic difference that it’s completely obvious immediately when you begin to test it, where are you people getting that it’s an effective autoattack? It’s completely, totally kitten. I can’t be 100% certain, but I am relatively sure it’s the weakest autoattack in the game.

Einlanzer.1627:

I just looked at this thread for the first time since I started it and I have to say I’m surprised by the responses – Dual Shot is objectively and demonstrably very weak. This is because it suffers from the same thing Long Range Shot did until the last patch – an overly long aftercast delay. I don’t understand why Long Range Shot was buffed and Dual Shot wasn’t.

Here’s a rifle/longbow breakdown on my level 80 warrior:
Bleeding Shot- 171 direct + 285 bleeding per shot
Dual Shot – 282 × 2 shot

What the tooltip doesn’t mention is that the 282 is for both attacks, not each.
Additionally, Dual Shot is on a 1.25 recast while Bleeding Shot is about .8

This means:
Bleeding Shot – 456 per shot; 1 shot per .8 seconds = 547.2 DPS
Dual Shot – 282 per shot; 1 shot per 1.25 seconds = 196.5 DPS

It’s such a dramatic difference that it’s completely obvious immediately when you begin to test it, where are you people getting that it’s an effective autoattack? It’s completely, totally kitten. I can’t be 100% certain, but I am relatively sure it’s the weakest autoattack in the game.

I don’t really think that’s a valid comparison. Your calculations are assuming that the bleed damage is all delivered as up-front direct damage every 0.8 seconds, when in fact that damage will occur over a period of 4 seconds. I feel the way you’ve described it mathematically is too simplified, as it completely ignores the way in which condition damage operates.

Also, I’m not sure your math is accurate. You say that dual shot does 282 every 1.25 seconds, but then conclude the DPS is 196.5. Would it not be 282 damage / 1.25 seconds = 225.6 damage/second?

The direct damage from bleeding shot with the numbers you quoted would be 171 damage / 0.8 seconds = 213.8 damage/second.

So in terms of direct damage, dual shot would actually be slightly higher. A reasonable measure of the bleed damage would be more complicated to incorporate the damage-over-time aspect, but it would easily push the DPS higher since the difference between the direct damage is quite small. However, it’s also important to remember that bleeds can be completely negated through condition removal.

The two shots from the bow can also have some interesting side-effects. For instance, this allows two chances for an on-crit sigil to proc since both hits can crit separately, and it also can partially negate blind since only one arrow will be affected by blind and the other will still hit. The slower attacks also make it less vulnerable to confusion damage. On the other hand, that’s also double the damage received from retaliation.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Einlanzer.1627:

I just looked at this thread for the first time since I started it and I have to say I’m surprised by the responses – Dual Shot is objectively and demonstrably very weak. This is because it suffers from the same thing Long Range Shot did until the last patch – an overly long aftercast delay. I don’t understand why Long Range Shot was buffed and Dual Shot wasn’t.

Here’s a rifle/longbow breakdown on my level 80 warrior:
Bleeding Shot- 171 direct + 285 bleeding per shot
Dual Shot – 282 × 2 shot

What the tooltip doesn’t mention is that the 282 is for both attacks, not each.
Additionally, Dual Shot is on a 1.25 recast while Bleeding Shot is about .8

This means:
Bleeding Shot – 456 per shot; 1 shot per .8 seconds = 547.2 DPS
Dual Shot – 282 per shot; 1 shot per 1.25 seconds = 196.5 DPS

It’s such a dramatic difference that it’s completely obvious immediately when you begin to test it, where are you people getting that it’s an effective autoattack? It’s completely, totally kitten. I can’t be 100% certain, but I am relatively sure it’s the weakest autoattack in the game.

I don’t really think that’s a valid comparison. Your calculations are assuming that the bleed damage is all delivered as up-front direct damage every 0.8 seconds, when in fact that damage will occur over a period of 4 seconds. I feel the way you’ve described it mathematically is too simplified, as it completely ignores the way in which condition damage operates.

Also, I’m not sure your math is accurate. You say that dual shot does 282 every 1.25 seconds, but then conclude the DPS is 196.5. Would it not be 282 damage / 1.25 seconds = 225.6 damage/second?

The direct damage from bleeding shot with the numbers you quoted would be 171 damage / 0.8 seconds = 213.8 damage/second.

So in terms of direct damage, dual shot would actually be slightly higher. A reasonable measure of the bleed damage would be more complicated to incorporate the damage-over-time aspect, but it would easily push the DPS higher since the difference between the direct damage is quite small. However, it’s also important to remember that bleeds can be completely negated through condition removal.

The two shots from the bow can also have some interesting side-effects. For instance, this allows two chances for an on-crit sigil to proc since both hits can crit separately, and it also can partially negate blind since only one arrow will be affected by blind and the other will still hit. The slower attacks also make it less vulnerable to confusion damage. On the other hand, that’s also double the damage received from retaliation.

Not really. Condition Removal is the counter to condition damage in the same way that toughness/armor is the counter for direct damage. Condition damage might be slightly less valuable in general than direct damage, but it’s still situational, and given the magnitude of difference between the two skills it is a moot distinction that only serves to obfuscate the rather obvious conclusion that something is amiss with Dual Shot.

I’m not sure what happened with my math, that’s totally odd, but still the accurate figures are close enough and maintain roughly the same disparity, so my original argument remains valid:

Rifle = 456/.8 = 570 DPS
Longbow = 282/1.25 = 225.6 DPS

The Rifle might favor sustained DPS and require a few seconds for full ramp-up, but as I said above, it’s mostly splitting hairs. Dual Shot is crap.

My honest opinion is either that ANet meant for the damage to be for each shot rather than for both, and so therefore Dual Shot is bugged and doing half the damage it should be doing, or they massively miscalculated on the rate of fire like they did with Long Range shot and it should be doing at least 20% more damage. Possibly both.

Could be worse. It could be long range shot.

Shiren.9532:

Could be worse. It could be long range shot.

I don’t actually think it’s stronger than Long Range Shot, especially now that it has been buffed.

A thought: 50% of longbow skills are condition skills, one of which creates a fire field.

The trait “Stronger Bowstrings” makes both arrows from Dual Shot 100% projectile finishers, though this isn’t mentioned on the tooltip. This means that shot through a fire/poison field, each shot adds 2 seconds of burning/poison (before condition duration), making the skill fit in with the weapon’s general theme of condition damage via burning (as it can create its own fire field to combo with)

Of course, the warrior doesn’t personally have access to any other fields in PvP; PvE can get the warrior poison or water fields via racial skills (asura radiation field, human avatar of melandru) or for water fields the healing seed consumable (probably unusable in WvW now), so using Dual Shot this way requires team support in most cases. It is, however, something to keep in mind.

Side note: the bug list for stronger bowstrings says it reduces dual shot’s damage by 10% as well. 2 seconds of burning per shot adds a lot more damage than that if it runs its course, but it’s very rare for a trait to make anything weaker in some way.

dual shot aftercast is ridiculously long

You’re not running the LBow for auto attacks, that’s kinda like running GSword for auto attack.

Edit: Haven’t tested if they bothered to touch the 10% dmg bug yet. Running over to golems now.

Edit 2: Tooltips get messed up for all the skills so much still >.> gonna do some light testing on the actual results of hitting things tho.

Einlanzer.1627:

This means:
Bleeding Shot – 456 per shot; 1 shot per .8 seconds = 547.2 DPS
Dual Shot – 282 per shot; 1 shot per 1.25 seconds = 196.5 DPS

Your calculation are totaly wrong, same goes for the damage input coming out of your skills. I don’t know where you got those numbers but they can certainly not be right.

With full exotic Rampager gear :
My Longbow (2916 attack) gets
466 × 2!!!
My Rifle (3041 attack) gets
310 × 1

So lets do you some calculation again…
Longbow ->[(466 : 125) x 100] x 2 = 745,6 DPS
Rifle -> (310 : 80) x 100 = 387,5 DPS*

*This doesn’t include damage coming out of bleeds.

Dual Shot aftercast needs fixing.

Ambrecombe.4398:

Einlanzer.1627:

This means:
Bleeding Shot – 456 per shot; 1 shot per .8 seconds = 547.2 DPS
Dual Shot – 282 per shot; 1 shot per 1.25 seconds = 196.5 DPS

Your calculation are totaly wrong, same goes for the damage input coming out of your skills. I don’t know where you got those numbers but they can certainly not be right.

With full exotic Rampager gear :
My Longbow (2916 attack) gets
466 × 2!!!
My Rifle (3041 attack) gets
310 × 1

So lets do you some calculation again…
Longbow ->[(466 : 125) x 100] x 2 = 745,6 DPS
Rifle -> (310 : 80) x 100 = 387,5 DPS*

*This doesn’t include damage coming out of bleeds.

You should try reading before you comment. My numbers came directly from my tooltip, which were accurate when I was testing the damage. It’s actually your calculations that are way off.

a.) Bleeds are about as substantial as direct damage in most situations, so removing them from the equation totally is completely asinine. Bleed damage has the drawback of being removable, but has the perk of ignoring armor/toughness. It will be more useful than direct damage in some fights and less useful in others, but it still counts.

b.) The tooltip for Dual Shot is misleading. In your case, both arrows together do 466, not each one. So divide your total calculation by 2, and that’s an accurate comparison of the two for direct damage only. Because of the difference in rate of fire, your Bleeding Shot out-damages Dual Shot even when you only look at direct damage. The bleeds skew it so much it’s hilarious that anyone is dense enough to argue about this.

LB > Rifle for dps, why is this even a discussion.

Einlanzer.1627:

You should try reading before you comment. My numbers came directly from my tooltip, which were accurate when I was testing the damage. It’s actually your calculations that are way off.

My Bad for the Dualshot tooltip, it was a while sinds I hadn’t use it yet, but I made some further calculation and if I remove 160 power from my items :
- My Dual Shot looses a total of 50 dmg (25×2) = 0,3125… power coeff.
- My Bleed Shot looses a total of 35 dmg (35×1) = 0,2187… power coeff.

If you round those informations down into a power coefficient per second rate :
- Longbow gets a 0.2604… Power Coeff./Sec
- Rifle gets a 0,2734… Power Coeff./Sec

So it seems indeed longbow primary attack doesn’t scale as well with power and doesn’t get the extra benefit from conditions like the Bleed Shot on Rifle does.

Einlanzer.1627:

a.) Bleeds are about as substantial as direct damage in most situations, so removing them from the equation totally is completely asinine. Bleed damage has the drawback of being removable, but has the perk of ignoring armor/toughness. It will be more useful than direct damage in some fights and less useful in others, but it still counts.

I know it still counts, but you won’t get the same results with Bleed Shot if you spec into Rabid, Rampager or Berserker. If you should take my Rampager Bleed Shot into consideration I can deal 1152 dmg over 12sec with each of my shots, without even including Precise Strike and Sigil of Earth. With a full Berserker gear you should be around 342 dmg over 6sec if you took 25 points in Arms traitline.

Einlanzer.1627:

b.) The tooltip for Dual Shot is misleading. In your case, both arrows together do 466, not each one. So divide your total calculation by 2, and that’s an accurate comparison of the two for direct damage only. Because of the difference in rate of fire, your Bleeding Shot out-damages Dual Shot even when you only look at direct damage. The bleeds skew it so much it’s hilarious that anyone is dense enough to argue about this.

Yeah yeah, I made a mistake… Happy now? But still, do not forget it has double the chance to proc on sigils and Precise Strike. Traited with Stronger Bowstring it becomes a 100% Projectile Finisher (even if it is a bug) and it also generate twice the amount of adrenaline per use making it slighty ahead when it comes to adrenaline generation.

While yes Longbow auto attack is not as strong as the Rifle one, the other utilities and combos with the Firefield puts Longbow way above Rifle when it comes to AoE damage and team support.

The warrior longbow autoattack is the worst thing it has going for it. It’s 5 and 3 skills are amazing and they get even better in its own combo field. I actually really like the longbow and wouldn’t mind if it got some love. Its a very interesting weapon and it would be cool if builds could focus on it more.

P.S. The Longbow for a ranger is terrible still.

Saderic.2961:

The warrior longbow autoattack is the worst thing it has going for it. It’s 5 and 3 skills are amazing and they get even better in its own combo field. I actually really like the longbow and wouldn’t mind if it got some love. Its a very interesting weapon and it would be cool if builds could focus on it more.

P.S. The Longbow for a ranger is terrible still.

I agree, I enjoy using the Longbow but the autoattack makes it harder and more difficult to use as a primary weapon than it should be. At the very least, they need to give it the same aftercast reduction Long Range Shot got.

Tip: if fighting an opponent alone, you can minimize the chances of Arcing Shot being avoided by throwing it at point blank.

Do you confirm?

I’d actually say the two weapons (Rifle and Longbow) have their auto attacks confused with one another.

Isn’t Rifle all about power, mainly Volley and Killshot?
And isn’t Longbow better off with condition damage, like burning?

Yes LB does have arc tho, that’s a sweet power based move.

Maybe they should swap the two?

PS: Longbow #5 has a crazy long CD. Buff CD time pls!

The problem I have with longbow is that putting 20 points into Tactics narrows your choices, especially since you’ll want 30 in Discipline for Burst Mastery. So basically you’re either forced to run 0/20/0/20/30 or 0/30/0/20/20 if you want to lean towards conditions. This is why a lot of people would rather just put 20 into defense instead of tactics to get Cleansing Ire. I also haven’t checked to see if they fixed the Stronger Bowstrings bug that reduced Dual Shot’s damage by 10%.

I love the longbow, and I’m ridiculously anti-ranged combat.

Not that a low DPS auto attack on ranged weapons matter – there are very few fights that require you to go ranged anyway. Hell, even PUG Lupi rarely have to range anymore.