Fast Hands minor trait, 15 points in Discipline:
Weapon-swapping recharges 5 seconds faster.
Fast Hands is one of very few unique warrior mechanics and gives you some of that weaponmaster feeling we’re supposed to have. It can be useful in nearly any build and makes playing around with your weapon sets feel much more smooth – when it’s working properly. Sadly it’s bugged, often triggering the full length cooldown instead. This thread is about documenting how exactly the bug happens and how to work around it as much as possible.
BUG DETAILS
Normal weapon swap cooldown is 1 second out of combat and 10 seconds in combat. You’re in combat after successfully hitting or being hit by something. This is indicated by a yellow glow around your skillbar and being slowed to moving at combat speed. You get out of combat by slaying your foes, getting far enough from them or waiting a long time without refreshing combat mode via new hits. With Fast Hands, the in-combat weapon swap is supposed to trigger a 5 second cooldown instead. (A further -1 second is available via Superior Runes of the Warrior but I haven’t checked if they stack.)
For a long time, I thought Fast Hands would basically bug out for every first weapon swap in a fight. I knew this wasn’t strictly true since it wasn’t quite consistent but for my use cases it was mostly true. But recently Jon Peters (GW2 Game Designer) posted this:
Fast hands only is broken on the very first swap after you turn it on our load a map. After that it works. Fixing that first time bug is extraordinarily difficult, but we think it is worth it to keep the trait.
He described the bug as much less severe than I had thought. How could this be? I figured out that some difference in playing habits caused this vast gap in how we experienced the bug.
After some testing, here are the exact details:
- After speccing into the trait or loading into another map, first in-combat swap will cause a 10 second cooldown. This seems unavoidable. Further swaps in that fight are only 5 seconds.
- If you exit combat and start another one without swapping weapons in between, you can keep the 5 second cooldown on swapping.
- If you swap weapons outside combat, the first time you will trigger 5 second cooldown instead of 1 second. Further out-of-combat swaps will be 1 second but damage has already been done because…
- After swapping weapons outside combat, next in-combat swap will again give you 10 second cooldown before returning to 5 second swaps as above.
To minimize the effects of the bug, you must never swap weapon sets outside combat.
Jon Peters likely uses a setup with 2 melee or 2 ranged weapon sets. The sets serve a similar purpose or perhaps have offensive/defensive or fight/utility split where he isn’t overly concerned which one he starts the next fight with – or he nearly always ends a fight with the preferred one.
I on the other hand use melee/ranged and fight/mobility splits, mainly in the highly variable WvW environment. I want to access the mobility weapons outside combat yet often start a fight with something else. I cannot predict what I want to do in next fight when I’m ending the previous one but right before a fight starts I usually see it coming and swap weapons to adjust to the situation. As such, I have nearly always been triggering the 10 second cooldown during the next fight.
BAGSWAPPING
Bagswapping is the act of swapping weapons from your bags (aka inventory) while outside combat. You can bagswap to a warhorn and back about every 20 seconds to access the swiftness cooldown for example. I consider this to be a common routine in experienced warrior gameplay.
Bagswapping does not trigger the Fast Hands bug. You can keep the 5 second swaps in next combat while using it. You will run a risk of being caught in combat with wrong weapons out but that is mitigated via situational awareness. Bagswapping for mobility can allow you to run weapon sets where you care less about what you engage with and may only lack in-combat gap closers and creators.
In cases where your mobility and engaging weapons differ, you should strive to end fights with your engaging weapons while having duplicates of the mobility weapons in your inventory. You can then bagswap to them without triggering the Fast Hands bug. So in case of using greatsword/rifle I would try to end fights with the rifle in my hands and use a second greatsword from my bags to access skills 3 and 5 outside combat.
Yes this is a lot of trouble. We can only hope the bug eventually gets fixed. Meanwhile, this thread may help people avoid some issues with it. Any other workaround ideas are welcome.
