Guild Wars 2

There’s something wrong with animations/activation/recast/GCD in the game that affects a lot of weapon skills, and it’s most notable with those set to autoattack (usually #1) and with certain ranged weapons. In particular, it seems to be most pronounced with Pistols and Longbows across professions.

As an example, due to the difference in activation speed (1/2 second vs 3/4 second) and overall difference in power/range between the two, pistols are obviously meant to fire a lot faster than rifles. In actuality, despite the difference in activation speed for the skills (if the tooltip is even accurate), the rate of fire is almost exactly the same for the two (about .8 seconds).

If you check out the warrior’s rifle #1 on autoattack and compare it to the thief’s pistol #1 on autoattack, the difference in power is obvious. Vital Shot is very clearly much weaker than it should be, doing pathetic upfront damage and only stacking up to 5 bleeds (and it’s difficult to maintain even that many). Most people don’t seem to realize why, but Thief balance threads are saturated with complaints about how weak Pistols feel. I feel it’s entirely because of this issue.

I believe it also greatly impacts the speed of longbow autoattacks, both the ranger and the warrior have a #1 for longbows that feels weaker than it should, and it’s because even though the activation speed for those skills is 3/4 a second the total recast time is about 1.2 seconds, far too slow for the amount of damage they do.

This is something that very seriously needs looking into. It throws the balance of those sets way out of whack, and it needs to be fixed before looking at other skills within the set for changes.

That’s all, thanks.

I’m bumping this because it’s a very critical issue single-handedly breaking several weapon sets and needs some attention before changes to other skills are made.