Guild Wars 2

These are very erratic and in many cases gimp weapon sets almost to the point of unplayability. It is very obviously not intended and wasn’t taken into account when balancing the affected skills. So far I haven’t seen any comment indicating the devs are even aware of it, much less working to fix or normalize it. It is my goal to increase awareness of this issue and the harm it’s doing to the game.

As an example, let’s compare the Thief’s Pistol to the warrior’s rifle, which have the same niche/role in-game:

Vital Shot (Thief)
low upfront damage
4 second bleed duration
900 range
.5 sec. activation speed
.3 sec. recovery
.8 sec. total recast

Bleeding Shot (Warrior)
low-medium upfront damage
6 second bleed duration
1200 range
.75 sec. activation speed
.1 sec. recovery
.85 sec. total recast

The obvious implication is that Vital Shot is supposed to be significantly weaker but substantially faster than Bleeding Shot when in reality it is significantly weaker while being only trivially faster (if at all). This is the main reason so many people complain about Pistols feeling weak.

It also seems to affect Warrior/Ranger Longbows (.75 activation speed, 1.25 recast) and at least the Elementalist’s Staff (1.25 recast for all skills whether .75 or 1 second activation speed).

In other words, the “recovery time” between non-chained attacks either needs to be removed altogether (for #1 skills at least) or normalized to something consistent such as .1 second. It is very obvious on many MH weapons that the #1 skill does not hit as hard as it’s supposed to.