[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

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

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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.