Guild Wars 2

This has been in since launch, and is likely more of a design oversight than it is a bug, but it’s a very egregious one that is affecting gameplay for most professions and very desperately needs to be looked at.

It’s very clear that skills were balanced in part around their activation speeds. However, the activation speed is superseded by and absorbed into the length of the attack animation when a skill is set to autoattack, meaning that the Activation Speed is actually a non-functioning metric.

In particular, this affects weapons that have #1 skills that aren’t on a chain, and causes them to fire at a slower rate than was almost certainly intended when the skills were being designed. It’s easy to overlook because there’s no metric accurately measuring the total recast time of a skill, only its activation.

As an example, the Thief’s Vital Shot has a 1/2 second activation speed and a 4 second bleed. The Warrior’s Bleeding Shot has a 3/4 second activation speed and a 6 second bleed. It’s easy to infer that Bleeding Shot was meant to be 50% stronger while Vital Shot was 50% faster. However, the reality is that Bleeding Shot is 50% stronger, while Vital Shot is only about 10% faster.

Want to know why everyone complains about Pistols feeling weak on the Thief? That’s the major reason why. This also severely affects Longbows (both Long Range Shot and Dual Shot are exceptionally weak autoattacks), and the Elementalist’s staff. On the latter, Fire is stronger than the other 3 elements, but the other 3 elemements are supposed to be faster. They in fact all have the same recast because they use the same animation, so therefore Fire’s autoattack is strictly better than the other 3 elements.

It’s a major problem causing massive balance issues that seems to be continually going unnoticed, while changes are made in other areas to attempt to fix the problems it’s causing. Please look into it.

Bump. This is a bigger problem than any other issue in the game currently, and I’m tired of it not being addressed.

Add to this its tendency to attack stupid. As in moronically stupid.

I mean, you’re standing right next to a monster who is already aggroed and it picks some other random monster — unaggroed — to shoot at. Or you’ll be standing there shooting at an aggroed monster, kill it, and it just keeps on shooting,bringing aggro on you from outside the aggro range even if you needed to give your skills a few secs to recharge. Even stupider is when it does this against a yellow monster, one that would NEVER attack you if you did not directly aggro it.

1) Auto attacks should shoot at the nearest aggroed monster if you haven’t specifically clicked on one within a short fraction of a second… and I do mean short — short enough that it’s clear you were targeting.
2) If there are no aggroed attackers within range after a kill, it should “shut off” for a fraction of a second to allow you to choose to continue attacking.
3) It should NEVER auto-switch to attacking yellows after a red has died.

Alternatively the game is actually balanced around the actual attack speeds and the activation times in the tooltips are merely a horrible indication of actual attack speed.

Were these accurate an Owl would attack 4 times per second (healing over 1000 health per second if doing nothing but attacking thanks to carnivorous appetite). Oh and y’know, the Ranger’s shortbow tooltip says crossfire has no activation time and no cooldown, ergo, shortbows must get infinite attacks per second.

Oh yes please, give me the power to shoot a stream of death at anyone in 1200 range, destroying the servers thanks to the sheer number of projectiles.

HotHit.6783:

Alternatively the game is actually balanced around the actual attack speeds and the activation times in the tooltips are merely a horrible indication of actual attack speed.

Were these accurate an Owl would attack 4 times per second (healing over 1000 health per second if doing nothing but attacking thanks to carnivorous appetite). Oh and y’know, the Ranger’s shortbow tooltip says crossfire has no activation time and no cooldown, ergo, shortbows must get infinite attacks per second.

Oh yes please, give me the power to shoot a stream of death at anyone in 1200 range, destroying the servers thanks to the sheer number of projectiles.

Nice attempt at mockery, but the reason why you’re almost certain to be wrong is that the animation length only really matters for skills set to autoattack, otherwise only the activation speed is really important. On top of that, there’s huge inconsistency from weapon to weapon, making it very likely that it’s just something no one noticed. The skills were likely to be balanced around their activation speeds early in development, then when the animations superseded that for attacks set to auto the balance disruption it caused was overlooked.

Also, the Ranger’s shortbow used to have a 1/4 second activation seed (the Thief’s still does), but it made the attack too slow so they removed it as a band-aid. It was most likely the same issue at play affecting it (and still is).

If you use just a tad bit of deductive reasoning, you can see that something is off. An autoattack is functionally weaker the greater the difference between its activation speed and its total animation time. This is why both Long Range Shot and Dual Shot are exceptionally terrible autoattacks – they have 3/4 second activation speed but only fire at about 1 shot per 1.25 seconds, meaning there’s a .5 delay not taken into account anywhere. Surprise, surprise, if you go around shooting stuff with the Longbow #1 you’ll notice that do pitiful damage, and this is why people complain about them ad nauseum on the forums.

In contrast, Bleeding Shot also has a 3/4 second activation speed but actually fires close to to that, at a rate of 1 shot per .85 seconds, meaning there’s only a .1 second delay not taken into account. Because of this, the Rifle is a good ranged weapon that does damage on par with most melee weapons and you don’t see very many complaints about it.

Jaxson.1593:

Add to this its tendency to attack stupid. As in moronically stupid.

I mean, you’re standing right next to a monster who is already aggroed and it picks some other random monster — unaggroed — to shoot at. Or you’ll be standing there shooting at an aggroed monster, kill it, and it just keeps on shooting,bringing aggro on you from outside the aggro range even if you needed to give your skills a few secs to recharge. Even stupider is when it does this against a yellow monster, one that would NEVER attack you if you did not directly aggro it.

1) Auto attacks should shoot at the nearest aggroed monster if you haven’t specifically clicked on one within a short fraction of a second… and I do mean short — short enough that it’s clear you were targeting.
2) If there are no aggroed attackers within range after a kill, it should “shut off” for a fraction of a second to allow you to choose to continue attacking.
3) It should NEVER auto-switch to attacking yellows after a red has died.

While it is a side issue to the one in this thread, best i can tell the targeting mechanic uses center of screen and ignores the character completely.

That is it seems to draw a invisible line from the location of the camera forward, through the center of the screen onwards. And prioritize targets based on proximity to that line first, and proximity to camera second. That is why you sometimes have it target things directly behind the character, because it is on or nearest the line and nearest to the camera (that happens to be far behind the character).

It is like everyone in QA plays the game with the camera stuck to the back of the characters head at all times. And given the spastic nature of the camera when near walls and such that would not surprise me one bit.

Erm, is this even being looked at?

SadieDeAtreia.8912:

Erm, is this even being looked at?

Probably not. :-S