Guild Wars 2

This has actually been going on for quite some time, but I’m still having trouble quite…describing it. Or getting a video of it, as it only occurs some of the time, though often enough that it occurs at least once per play session.

I’ll just go ahead and list steps to reproduce it:

1. Slot a knockback, such as the Engineer’s Overcharged Shot or Guardian’s Banish.
2. Find a mob.
3. Knock the mob back.
4. See what happens when the mob recovers.

When the mob recovers from knockback, sometimes it snaps back into melee range without having to cross the newly intervening distance, rendering the knockback moot and oftentimes wasting follow-up attacks.
If it is Immobilized after being knocked back, it does not snap back, at least not so far.

Bump.

This is a very disorientating bug, and I’ve experienced it for probably a couple months now.

What’s weird is that there seems to be some kind of disconnect on a per client basis – I’ll see a mob sent flying, and aim my skills accordingly, or move to melee. Then comes the ‘snapback’, while other players seem to keep aiming at the original location.

I’ve had skills misfire and either go on full or the ‘interrupt/cancel’ 3s cooldown because of this – sometimes this can really screw you over.

This seems to happen most frequently to me on uneven terrain. I suspect it’s a bug tied to the ubiquitous issue with terrain edges or what have you that causes, for instance, Necro minions to vibrate in place instead of attacking, and mobs to not be knocked back at all by skills such as Point Blank Shot where they’ll be knocked down briefly as expected, but stay in place despite the terrain being mostly flat.

I also suspect it may be similar to a Fear bug I’ve noticed with Moas in Queensdale (though not that I can recall anywhere else). When you kill one Moa in a linked group, the others will often flee in Fear (complete with a fear icon floating over them), but after that wears off they’ll all suddenly teleport back to where they started fleeing. The difference is that where this happens the terrain is about as flat as it can get. Reported THIS one the first day I saw it some 6+ months ago. Still happens today.

This knockback bug, however, is IMO, a big issue, and was introduced at some point so it doesn’t appear it’s just because of terrain that’s been in place since launch. Something was changed that caused this to start happening. Knockbacks sometimes failed to occur, but this teleporting trick is (relatively) new and as the OP stated, tends to invalidate the purpose of the knockback element of a skill (to me, it renders Point Blank Shot nothing more than a potential interrupt and gains me no space/distance at all which, to me, is its primary purpose).