[PUP] Abbasid - Ghulam attack speed significantly slower than intended? Strictly worse than Man-at-Arm

Age of Empires IV IV - Report a Bug
1

For Abbasid, the new Ghulam Man-at-Arm replacement has a double-attack style mechanic. The first hit has an attack speed of 1.125s for the normal attack, and then 0.50s for the quick second hit.

However, it appears the second attack is far slower than 0.50s, and is more like 1.00s attack speed. This significantly reduces its overall attack speed and DPS.

Currently, the effect means the Ghulam (150 res) is essentially a more expensive Man-at-Arm (120 res), meaning cost-for-cost, they have the same health pool, but the Ghulam has -21% DPS.

So right now, the Ghulam is strictly worse than the Man-at-Arm.

If the intended overall attack speed was 1.875s (calculated below), then the actual attack speed of 2.375s nerfs their DPS by 21%. I doubt this is intended, so hopefully you can fix this soon.

I used a millisecond stopwatch to measure the actual attack speed.
Note: Generally melee attack speeds are 0.125 seconds slower than what the game says. For example, if a unit has tooltip attack speed of 1.5s , it’s actual attack speed is 1.625s.

Attack Speed Measurements with Millisecond Stopwatch

  • Ghulam First Swing
    • Tooltip: 1.13s
    • Actual: 1.25s (Expected)
  • Ghulam Second Swing
    • Tooltip: 0.5s
    • Actual: 1.125s (Very Unexpected!)
    • Expected: 0.625s
  • Ghulam Total Attack Speed
    • Tooltip: 1.13s + 0.50s = 1.63s
    • Actual: 1.25s + 1.125s = 2.375s (Far slower!)
    • Expected: 1.25s + 0.625s = 1.875s

Build: 7.0.5741.0

4 Likes
2

Great observation.

And maybe this isn’t a bug (or maybe it is), but I wanted to point out that their attack loop is also seemingly reset whenever a unit repositions after their first attack. So on top of this strange bug, their short attack range and the long time between attacks, it opens up the possibility for the unit to never get off the second strike, and reset the loop entirely–drastically reducing the intended DPS.

This happens quite often in the beginning of a fight, where everyone is moving around a lot. It also means despite having a slightly faster movement speed to MAA, that kiting Ghulams is twice as effective as they do not consistantly attack twice for their full damage. Perhaps the there should be a shorter interval between the two attacks, or perhaps the second attack should have a longer range ensure that it happens more consistently?

1 Like
3

Thank you for this very detailed report! We are investigating this issue on our backend.

4

I also tested the attack speed and what I observed is that 1.12 (or 1.13) is the AVERAGE time between attacks for example I get roughly 26 attacks in 29 seconds (excluding the charge attack, see video below). Meanwhile 1.63s for double attacks should imply an average of 0.815.

This is a video illustrating the case.

Also it was clear without even timing that the “quick” 2nd attack wasn’t that quick.

5

Now that season 5 is officially out, Ghulams’ attack speed is still as low as when this thread was made yet the update notes still claim a much higher speed.

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6

The Ghulam’s attack speed is STILL incorrect now that Sultan’s Ascend is out.
This twitch vod shows a player testing Samurai against Ghulam: Twitch from this reddit thread: Reddit - Dive into anything

The post underneath doing a writeup about the Ghulam is mine:
TL:DR; Ghulam’s attack speed (still) doesnt reflect reality and is significantly worse than stated.

First fight starts at 2:16ish game time (5:19 video time). Fight finishes 2:48 game time (5:51 video time).

Lets do some math now that we know the first result.

The patch notes state that the attack speed of Ghulam deal damage every 1.13 seconds and every follow up is .5 seconds for 1.63 total. This is reflected on the unit’s stats in-game as well (swapping between the two with every attack).

They deal 10 damage baseline. Samurai has 4 armor and 155 health.

Ghulam deal 6 damage a swing.

155/6 = 25.83 hits to kill a samurai. Since you cannot have a fractional hit. It takes 26 hits for their health and +1 to break their deflect.

Lets be generous and assume that the higher number of hits takes the full 1.13 second swing to kill and ignore the charge for now.

14 swings at 1.13 = 15.82 seconds of full swings.

13 swings at .5 = 6.5 seconds off double swings.

Or about 22 seconds of swing time.

What we actual get is another 10 seconds of swing time.

Next fight:

Fight starts at 4:02(7:03 video time) to 4:34 (7:36 video time) with the Japanese getting unique upgrade, Castle Upgrades and no Odachi.

Ghulam deal 12 damage a swing. 6 armor. 6 damage a swing.

It still takes Ghulam the same 27 hits to kill a Samurai. Same large difference between what is observed and what’s been stated both in-game and on the patch notes.

Odachi included:

4:49 (7:51 video) start, 5:11ish (8:14 video) finish

Now lets do the math for the Samurai.

Samurai with all upgrades in the castle age have 19 attack. Ghulam have 6 armor and 195 health in the video (since the tester didn’t take Boot Camp at this point afaik).

195/13 = 15 attacks

15*1.375 = 20.625 seconds to kill a Ghulam.

Roughly 21 seconds of swing time for the Samurai to defeat the Ghulam. Whats being observed is in line with the what the unit’s stats say.

Conclusion: Ghulam’s stated attack speed is inaccurate and the fix from way back when completely missed the mark. And just to be sure this was the case - I went in game and tested several units including Abba Spearmen with their 1.88 attack speed and HRE MAA with their 1.375 attack speed. These melee units are in line with both the stated attack speed and observations. Either the Ghulam needs to be fixed to match what they state in game and on the patch notes or their stated attack speed needs to be changed to reflect what’s being observed in game.