Guild Wars 2

I didn’t see this in another post, so maybe I’m an oddball, but the one thing that drove me nuts playing DD spec was that every backwards dodge I did left me facing away from my target at the end. This was true of each of the three new dodge roll moves. For one of them, you initiate a backward dodge and your character turns and dashes away from the target and stops with back to target. One of the others (sorry I don’t remember the new names) has you jump to a spot, land hard and do damage — but when that backward dodge is initiated, the character turns away from the target and performs the jump, landing with his back to the target.

I don’t like that from two perspectives: 1) what sort of expert fighter performs moves in-fight that leaves him with his back to his enemy?, and 2) once you end your backward dodge (and so are facing away from your target), a few bad things happen — auto-attack ends and some of the staff skills go wonky because they aren’t programmed to move you back to your target. So if you dodge backwards and then hit staff skill #2, you end up running even further from your target — the skill moves you in the direction you face rather than toward the target, and, again, thanks to the backwards dodge, you are facing away from your target at the end.

The end result makes me feel much slower in combat. Instead of the old way, where I just roll backward to avoid a hit and then immediately attack again, I now dodge away, end up with my back to the target, get frozen at the end of the move for an instant, and then have to swing my camera around to face the target again, and have to perform some sort of closer to re-initiate close melee combat. And if my target is moving (as a player target always will), I have to take a moment to make sure my character is facing precisely the right way before using the #2 staff skill.

I sort of understand why Anet may have done this — if the whole idea is that a DD fights multiple targets at same time, these new dodges might be OK. But I find them next to useless, and in some ways actually harmful, when fighting a single target. I don’t think I’d choose this play style — speccing for utility only in a group fight at the cost of harming your single fight ability.

So, my request would be to at least let my character remain facing my target at the end of a backward dodge.

As an aside, if there’s some chance that staff skill animations will be altered, I would suggest looking at a staff chanter in Aion to get some ideas of what melee staff combat should look like.