Guild Wars: Why Lead Attacks Still Suck

One of the nice things about the way the developers have been announcing patch notes lately is how they're also including their reasoning behidn those changes. In this era of live testing, that makes it easier to understand not only why changes are being made but why those changes might be effective or ineffective. So, one of the things that caught my eye about the Assassin changes was their reason for tweaking those lead attacks. Namely, “These changes are part of larger movement to make the Assassin's lead-to-off-hand attack combination a more attractive option”

Which is, I suppose a laudable goal. But something, I think, they've never going to achieve. The narrowly restrictive lead to off-hand to dual attack chains is just one of the many design flaws with Assassin mechanics. They did it much better with the Warrior and things like Sever+Gash. It's organic there and easily mutable while it's forced and reductive with Sins. People will go through them, though, because they want to get to those money dual attacks like Twisting Fangs or Blades of Steel or Death Blossom or whatever. Not because they particularly like those skills or they're particularly effective but because they have to. Again, it's a “Protector Strike” situation, the actual skill descriptions don't matter. If you can, you'd like to get a lead and off-hand that will complement your dual or, failing that, provide something nice all their own. But what you really care about is syncing up the recharge times so that you have as many opportunities to land your big, heavy attacks as you can. So, tweaking the damage and duration of effects is not really what they should be looking at. It's changes like the one bringing Jagged Strike's recharge down to 1 second that will cause people to take a second look at them.

Of course, it's all a moot point because there are skills out there that let players skip through the lead part of the attack chain and get right to the stronger dual attacks (And dual attacks need to be stronger than the others because if they weren't, there'd be no point in using them. You'd stick to powerful lead and off-hands and forget about finishing those chains off.). And those skills are pretty darn effective themselves. As long as there are skills like Black Lotus Strike and Golden Phoenix Strike, then Lead Attacks and any other Off-hand Attacks are always going to be afterthoughts.