I want to explain what “WSG” is to people who don’t duel enough to use it all the time
WSG stands for “Weapon Switch Glitch”. This is two different effects that both happen when you switch weapons, and can be used in dueling in particular by rapidly pressing the weapon switch button.
First, each time you switch weapons, it interrupts the current animation you are in. You’re set back to an ‘idle’ animation, even if you were halfway through an animation like hit recovery. This means that when your character is locked up in animations like hit recovery, blocking, dodge/evade/avoid, you can interrupt those animations and restore your free movement/action by using weapon switching. Those disabling animations are so fast, and only lock you up when triggered many times in a row rapidly, so WSG is used by spamming weapon switch to run away or break free to get a cast/attack off. You cannot, however, use WSG to speed up your own cast/attack animations by animation canceling the backswings. Even though a character like a trangs necro can have a very short foreswing and very long backswing, the game disallows you from switching weapons while in casting or attack animations.
Second, each time you switch weapons, the game shows your movement as having stopped to other players, even if you are able to continue running unimpeded both on your client and the server. This causes desync: Other players see you at a location you aren’t actually at. This desync can create large gaps that have important PvP applications- not just making projectiles aimed at you miss, but even melee attacks trying to hit you like charge will send the attacker to the wrong location and make them attack air, when they see themselves hitting the WSG’ing opponent. But this isn’t an unlimited effect. Your position resets to its ‘true’ location quite frequently and is also reset instantly every time you get hit, which other players can exploit to re-sync you, like with frost nova, FoH, blaze, etc.
Now why does WSG exist? Its not really a glitch, its just a consequence of a limitation of how Diablo 2 displays animations. There are different animations for different equipped weapons in attacking, casting, hit recovery, even blocking. A druid wielding a 1 hand swinging weapon has different FHR tables than other weapons. These animations couldn’t just swap between each other freely, so the original developers just made your animation state reset when you swap weapons. But as above, to prevent this from being abused, they stopped you from switching weapons while in attack/cast animations. Otherwise if you had a 20 frame animation with 5 action frame (the whole cast takes 0.8 seconds, but the spell is fired at 0.2s), you’d be able to animation cancel on frame #5 and restart the animation, rapid firing a spell at 5 fpa instead of 20 fpa. This is actually possible to a very limited degree in-game, if your cast/attack foreswings are interrupted by a hostile monster/player putting you into block/hit recovery/evade, and then you wsg out and restart it (or just go through a faster hit recovery animation than your backswing)
Now why is WSG important? The dueling metagame is heavily dependent on it. Both aspects of WSG- animation canceling and desync- are used by duelers to give a defensive edge against aggressive builds, making them harder to lock down, and giving openings to turn around and punish offensive stomps. WSG serves as the natural counter to stunning effects that can lock players down indefinitely otherwise, but also as the natural complement to amazons with dodge/evade/avoid that would lock themselves up indefinitely by taking rapid damage. Spells like mind blast, shockwave, war cry, smite and twister apply a stun debuff that doesn’t directly disable players like it does monsters, but instead eliminates the % max hp threshold and random chance for damage to put you into a hit recovery animation- all damage you take while ‘stunned’ puts you into hit recovery. When a trap assassin can be pounding someone with mind blast cast every 9-10 frames, and traps that can hit up to every 5 frames, and blade shield and shadow master on top of that, the result is a very large number of rapidly striking damage instances that lock someone in place. Without WSG, this is inescapable. Assassins can trivially win duels by just holding down mind blast and going afk, let alone their power with traps and whirlwind. It is completely gamebreaking and imbalanced. However, with WSG, this is a fair matchup for many builds and there is a great deal of counterplay, and a lot of top tier duelers believe assassins are disadvantaged against many casters who can just WSG around punishing them. It goes from a completely broken game, to dynamic skill-based dueling.
But this isn’t limited to an issue with a single character, or even the stun mechanic alone. WSG provides a safeguard against overlapping hit recovery, blocking and dodge animations for all characters. Even in a matchup as mundane as a fireball sorceress teleporting on top of someone and spamming fireball at point blank range, WSG makes them both hard to target, and keeps them from getting chained by each fireball interrupting them and letting the next hit. WSG is even useful in some PvM situations, when you’re getting blocklocked on a slow animation or rammed by charging vipers/zombies with their unblockable, autohit knockback charge.
WSG isn’t some obscure mechanic or exploited glitch that ruins game balance. Its quite the opposite. The vast majority of active duelers use it frequently, and it helps buff otherwise underpowered PvP characters (anything melee, bowazons, javazons, etc) while keeping in check some of the overpowered PvP characters (all assassin builds, and helping against paladins to a considerable extent). Without WSG, the game balance that existed in LoD is ruined.
And lastly, what’s the history of WSG?: It has been in the game since LoD first launched and added a weapon swap. It was briefly removed from the game with a silent serverside patch in 2018, only to be re-added after player outcry a month later. Now in D2r, WSG is conspicuously absent. Its missing, doesn’t work. And the PvP scene has been trying to bring attention to it and get it restored again.
Here are some videos detailing what WSG looks like when its working, and when its not.
Here’s WSG working in LoD:
Here’s WSG not working in D2r:
Here’s what WSG looks like with user view side-by-side with an opponent:
Here’s what WSG looked like in the month that it was removed in 2018:
