Guild Wars 2

An attempt at explaining this differently to try to make people realize how big a problem it is:

Even though all skills in the game, including #1s, have an activation speed (even if it’s 0), weapon/skill animations interfere with the activation speed when a skill is set to autoattack (usually the #1 skill). This would seem to be both intentional and not a big deal.

However, since it’s easily inferred that skills were balanced around their activation speeds, this creates a very serious problem for some weapons where the weapon’s cast animation (which differs from weapon to weapon) is significantly longer than the activation speed of its autoattack skill.

The best example to illustrate this is the Elementalist’s Staff (though the most egregious example is probably the Longbow, followed by the Pistol). What we see from the #1 skills for each element is this:

Fire – 1.0 second activation speed
Earth – .75 activation speed
Air – .75 activation speed
Water – .75 activation speed

However, the reality is that all 4 elements have the exact same rate of fire. This is because the staff’s attack animation takes around 1.2 seconds to complete and that delay is imposed on each of the skills, causing their activation speeds to be entirely ignored, and consequently making Fire objectively stronger than the other three elements since it was balanced around the assumption that it would cast more slowly.

It’s obvious this is not intended, because it’s obvious when you play staff Ele that the Fire attack is stronger and more generally usable than the Earth, Air, and Water attacks. It would also mean that Activation speed is a useless metric. This should be a very high priority for review and correction.