Newbie questions on some Guild Wars terms

What are the following and how do they work?

1) Lead attack
2) Off Head attack
3) Dual Attack

Also, what is Hex?

Lead Attack, Off Hand (not Head.. LOL) Attack and Dual Attack are all attack skill's/types associated with the Assassin - which is a Chapter 2 (ie Guild Wars Factions) character class.

They are basically attack moves that need to follow each other in a chain - you strart off with a Lead Attack and then follow up with a Off-Hand Attack and then a Dual Attack.. and so on. This was seen in the previous weekend (Jan 19-22) as there was a GW:Factions PvP preview event where players could create PvP characters using the new professions.

A Hex is a spell which causes a negative effect for a period of time. Hexes may prevent the target from using certain skills, slow skill recharge rates, or cause health or energy to degenerate over time.

Example is a Mesmer skill called "Empathy. This hex spell will cause the target to taek damage whenever it attack's with it's weapon. Or the Mesmer Skill "Ethereal Burden" which causes the target to move slower than normal.

Heh, thanks.

Two questions:
1) On the application of the three attacks, do you just unload your attacks on the target as soon as you are engaged? Or do you watch if the Lead attack hits first, then apply the Off, and finally Dual?

2) May I ask what is the story of you using "Taliana" as the surname of all of your characters?

1. You have to follow the attack's through.

- You can land a Lead attack whenever it's charged.. it's hit/miss will be detirmined by your natural chance to hit/miss.
- The Off-Hand and Dual attack's have to follow in order.. the skills will tell you what they need to be used after.
- If you try and use a Off-Hand or Dual attack skill out of order you will completely miss and do NO damage at all.

So you do have it.. Lead, then Off-hand, then dual, then off-hand, then lead.. etc and so on. (well, thats how the A/W preset PvP character went.. but the principle is there).

Note that some Off-hand attacks follow Lead atatcks while others follow Dual Attack's - you'd have to read the skill description.. which of course we can't do right now as the skills aren't in the game anymore.

If you want more info on Guild Wars: Factions, Assassins, assassin skills, etc.. then I'l suggest reading through the PvP Factions Weekend Event forum here at GWG:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/f...play.php?f=216

2. As for using Taliana as the surname of all my characters... It's a name I quite like as a surname and when I was creating my characters I couldn't come up with any other names that I'd prefer, so that ended up being the surname of all my characters. No realy great big story to it I don't mind, I like the name very much and for me it distinctly marks my characters as me.

Thanks for the explaination, but please bare with me, I have more questions.

1) When I was playing an Ass over the PvP weekend, I was blindfully following the high light of the icons, once the off head attack lit up, I press it, and sometimes, after that lands, the dual attack icon lit up also, so I press that as well.

From that experience, I find that I pay too much attention on the high lights of the icon, rather then the overview of the battle, I just wish there was better method to watch on the attack progression.

2) What determites your chance to land a hit?

I also have a surname that I got hooked to, which is Feivrine, its from a ramdom name gen of a game called, Neverwinter's Night. It is a surmane for Elves. Since I almost always play an Elf, I usually use this surname.

But when I am playing a Human, which is what it would be in Guild Wars, I oftern name them "Long" as the surname. As in my handle online, "Longsword".

1. I found that when I tried my assassin too, otherwise i'd end up pressing a dual attack when it had nothing to follow :S hopefully this will be sorted somehow, or maybe it will just become the style of play for an assassin, much like a healing/protection monk gets used to never seeing any of the battles, just a load of red bars going up and down

2. I'm not certain on this, I would guess that either everyone has the same chance to hit, or that the weapon skill determines it. And of course, if someone is in a defensive or evasive stance, you will have a lesser chance. Someone else should be able to answer this one better

The Assassin attacks also show up as little slashes on your opponents health bar.
A lead attack gets a \ mark, adding an Off hand attack makes it an X, following up with a dual gives you a * (+ behind the X) and enables the final attack which will drop it back to an X which if you have a recharged dual attack enabled you to use it.

The pre-made Assassin/Warrior looked to me, like you could cycle through the Dual/Offhand (Moebius Strike) part of the combo several times if necessary/possible. I personally couldn't make it work too well, but I landed it a couple of times and it seemed to be very deadly.

Aside from the automatic misses that assassins have for attacking out of order, all attacks have a base chance of landing of 100%. This can then be modified by the target using an evasive stance (such as Whirling Defense, which has a 75% chance of causing enemies to miss), you being afflicted with the condition Blind (which causes a 90% chance of miss), or you being affected by certain hexes (Spirit of Failure and Price of Failure both have a 25% chance to cause attacks to fail). Both the evasive stances and the hexes can be overrode for an attack by using a skill that says "This skill cannot be 'Blocked' or 'Evaded'." However, these moves do nothing against blind, as blind causes "Miss", not "Block" or "Evade".

Each % chance of miss is calculated separately, and if any causes an attack to fail to connect, the attack does not connect. In the case of the hexes, all negative effects occur, regardless of what caused the attack to fail. If you want to calculate the chance of hitting when miss abilities are stacked, just take the percentage chance of hitting for each one (in decimal form) and multiply them.


If you are using a bow, it is also possible to the target to manually step out of the way of the arrow while it is in flight or put a solid piece of terrain in the flight path. Different bows have different flight times, where lower flight time makes it much more difficult to manually dodge.