Guild Wars 2

I’m posting this again because it’s a huge problem affecting balance in multiple areas and everyone in the world seems to be oblivious to it. There is an issue with the fire rates on ranged autoattack skills being erratic from weapon to weapon when excluding the activation speed. This means that:

A. “Activation Sped” is really a misleading and mostly useless metric.
B. The autoattack skill is very noticeably underpowered on a few weapons relative to most, almost certainly due to the specs not properly taking the between-cast delay into account (or, more likely, the animation is interfering with the intended refire rate).

Here’s the breakdown:
Warrior/Ranger Longbow – .75 Activation speed, .5 delay, 1.25 total refire (BROKEN)
Warrior/Engineer Rifle – .75 Activation Speed, .1 delay, .85 total refire (about right)
Thief/Engineer Pistol – .50 Activation Speed, .3 delay, .80 total refire (BROKEN)
Ranger Shortbow – 0 Activation speed, .3 delay, .3 total refire (band-aided)
Thief Shortbow – .25 Activation Speed, .3 delay, .55 total refire (BROKEN)
Elementalist Fire Staff – 1 Activation Speed, .2 delay, 1.2 refire (about right)
Elementalist Air/Water/Earth Staff – .75 activation speed, .5 delay, 1.2 refire (BROKEN)

Unsurprisingly, the Pisol and Longbow feel very “off” in comparison to the Rifle and the Shortbow, regardless of profession. I’m sure there are also examples with Scepters and other Staffs, but I’m less familiar with them. It seems to be a problem with the lack of chain attacks on ranged weapons and the erratic design of animations accompanying those attacks.

Not sure if trolling…but just in case:

And where does it say that fire rates need to be the same across the board?

If your concern is about balancing the professions, then you need to look much farther than just how fast each profession auto attacks. You need to take into account the following factors:

- Base damage of the skill
- Power coefficient of the skill
- Possible conditions and/or other special effects of the skill
- Whether the skill is part of a chain, and if so what the damages and coefficients and conditions are of the chain skills

Then you need to take into account all the rest of the profession’s abilities, including the other four weapon skills and what they’re damage, coefficients, etc. are, as well as traits and utilities. And then you need to take into account what the weapon is designed to be used for, because not all weapons were designed to be used in all situations (Ranger Longbow in melee range is going to be bad no matter how fast it shoots). Just because one profession has a weak auto attack does not mean they don’t make up for it with the rest of their skills. In fact some professions are specifically balanced around having mediocre auto attacks (Only Fire auto attack of Staff Ele is truly useful by itself, but the Staff more than makes up for this lack with the other abilities from each Attunement).

All in all, weapon activation time is an extremely minor aspect of what makes a weapon balanced or not. Ranger Longbow for example is better than Shortbow with the right gear, traits, and situation, even though it has what you amusingly believe to be a “broken” fire rate.

You mention that “…everyone in the world seems to oblivious to it [weapon fire rate].”, but in truth it’s not that everyone is oblivious, it’s that everyone understands that balancing weapons and professions involves so much more than simply comparing attack speed.

Welcome to theorycrafting.

I responded to your post in one of the class threads. Despite your condescension, you are not correctly understanding the problem I’m describing, which is very clearly a bug/oversight, so let me try again.

No one is saying that the attack speeds need to be the same across all weapons. The problem is that the delay between each activation of a skill set to autoattack is inconsistent from weapon to weapon. It’s clear that this inconsistency is a result of the way the animations were designed (they force a minimum recast depending on the weapon), but more importantly, it’s clear that this is not intended because the ‘power’ of each of those skills is precisely inversely proportional to the delay that occurs between each skill. In other words, it very plainly is a bug or design oversight with the interaction of the skill and the animation.

Here’s a reiteration of the above data (numbers are approximations, but they are close):
Rifle (Warrior/Ranger)- .75 activation, .1 delay, .85 total refire (fine)
Pistol (Thief/Engineer) – .50 activation, .3 delay, .8 total refire (broken)
Longbow (Warrior/Ranger) – .75 activation, .5 delay, 1.25 total refire (massively broken)
Shortbow (Thief) – .25 activation, .3 delay, .55 total refire (somewhat broken)
Shortbow (Ranger) – 0 activation, .3 delay, .3 total refire (broken before, band-aided)

Now, you humorously mentioned the Ele’s Staff in support your assessment, when it actually betrays you and supports my theory (well, fact really) instead:

Fire Staff – 1.0 activation, .25 delay, 1.25 refire (comparatively functional)
Earth Staff – .75 activation, .50 delay, 1.25 refire (broken)
Water Staff – .75 activation, .50 delay, 1.25 refire (broken)
Air Staff – .75 activation, .50 delay, 1.25 refire (broken)

Let me spell out the obvious- Fire’s #1 is better than the other 3 because the other 3 are supposed to be faster, but aren’t due to the aforementioned bug/oversight, which “forces” a recast of 1.25 seconds regardless of the activation speed of the skill being used. Because the damage specs were clearly balanced around activation speeds without taking this delay into account, Water, Air, and Earth are weaker than they are supposed to be. Fire probably is too, just not by as much.

This is why you see endless complaints about those weapons on the forums, it’s just that most people, for some reason I can’t fathom can’t detect something that to me is as plain as day and is made even more obvious through casual analysis and comparisons.