Guild Wars 2: Mount Speed

Which is the fastest mount? Well quite simple. The beetle when you move on the ground and the griffon if you can use it. Well, if you use the abilities. I've always wondered which is faster if you don't use your abilities. Also, some mount engage abilities have quite an insane forward motion. Lastly, to crown it all I already did a calculation on the movement speed and it would be interesting to compare that to the mount speed.

Procedure

Screenshot of the Gilded Hollow bridge in Guild Wars 2

To find these things out, as with most things we will need to find a place that fits our experiments and is measurable. You can compare this to the DPS benchmarks done by Guilds like Snowcrows, except that we're doing speed benchmarks instead of DPS. The velocity is calculated via the distance laid back in a certain time frame. The only way for us to measure the distance is by using the skills and abilities that have a radius given. To have accurate values we need a straight flat track with a clear start and a clear end. This turns out to be harder than one would expect. Back in the old post, I used the World vs World bridge, that's found south of the alpine borderlands. Unfortunately, it's not possible to use mounts aside from the Warclaw, so we need to find another one. The bridge in Lornar's Pass near Durmand Priory one of my ideas. It reaches a total of  4890 units. Another idea I had is the Guild Hall. If I could get the rights to build I could make myself a bridge that's as long as I want. That's when I saw that there was a bridge already in the Gilded Hollow. I went there first to measure the width and it turns out that from the stairs the entrance of the building is 7905 units. I couldn't come up with a longer bridge without building myself - which again would require the rights to build in a Guild Hall, which I don't have.

Screenshot showing the
small bumps on the Gilded Hollow
bridge in Guild Wars 2

Unfortunately, the bridge in the Gilded Hollow Guild Hall is not perfect. It does have a long-distance, it is straight there's a clear beginning and a clear end to use and it's flat. Well mostly, since it does have three small bumps in it. While these do not stop your movement directly they do have a tiny slow effect. Given this, our calculations do have a small inaccuracy. Testing this with walking results in hardly if any change of speed. Thus I'm gonna ignore it for these test cases. Another issue is the dive/flying ability of the griffon. I tried to use the high buildings near the bridge beginning pointing towards the middle of the Guild Hall and used Commander with markers on the map to determine the track and try to fly as accurately as possible. This turned out to be harder than expected so I would take the griffon results with a grain of salt. They may be accurate enough but there could be deviations of up to 0.50 seconds I would say.

The Actual Experiments

The actual experiments aside from those issues are quite simple. We move from point A to point B and whenever we move over point A or point B we respectively start and stop the timer. For the timer, I use my smartphone app again. keep in mind having to manually start and stop the timer results in a short delay due to the reaction time. I did not calculate in my own or the average human reaction time into the calculation so again values may vary by ~0.6 seconds or so. I performed this experiment on each of the eight mounts there are. Experiments were run on normal walk speed meaning not using the ability of the mount, Spamming or repeatedly mounting and using the engage ability and lastly using the mount ability and testing a few mechanics respective to it, such as double dive or the roller beetle speed after the boost.

The Result

I will represent the result in a table again. The table is sorted by time. Each mount has it's own color per row to allow an easy distinction which behaviors time belongs to which mount. The type of behavior is explained by the note. The time is given in seconds and milliseconds where one second is equal to 100 milliseconds. Calculation of the units per second is done by taking the bridge's length in units (7905 units) and dividing it through the measured time (e.g.4''21''') which will then yield the result (e.g. 7905u / 4.21s = 1877.67u/s). The m/s use the conversion of units to meters which is units multiplied by 2.52cm / 100 = 0.0252m. (e.g. 1877.67u/s * 0.0252m = 47.32m/s). I've omitted the conversion from u/s to feet/s to mph. I have also recalculated the walking speed with the mount name being "None" to be able to compare the mounts to the normal walking speed without boons.

Mount Name	Note	Time	u/s	m/s	km/h	mph
Griffon	Ability (One boost)	4''21'''	1877.67	47.32	170.34	106.26
Griffon	Ability (Double boost)	4''03'''	1961.54	49.43	177.95	111.01
Rollerbeetle	Ability	4''72'''	1517.27	38.24	137.65	85.86
Rollerbeetle	Rolling (After Ability)	5''75'''	1374.78	34.64	124.72	77.80
Griffon	Ability (flight)	6''47'''	1221.79	30.79	110.84	69.14
Raptor	Ability	8''60'''	919.19	23.16	83.39	52.02
Jackal	Ability	9''41'''	840.06	21.17	76.21	47.54
Rollerbeetle	Engage Spam	10''06'''	785.79	19.80	71.29	44.47
Skyscale	Ability (Charge)	10''31'''	766.73	19.32	69.56	43.39
Skimmer	Engage Spam	11''20'''	705.8	17.79	64.03	39.94
Jackal	Walking	12''65'''	624.9	15.75	56.69	35.36
Warclaw	Ability	12''80'''	617.58	15.56	56.03	34.95
Griffon	Ability (Flutter)	13''11'''	602.97	15.19	54.70	34.12
Raptor	Walking	13''18'''	599.77	15.11	54.41	33.94
Skyscale	Ability (Flight)	13''27'''	595.7	15.01	54.04	33.71
Rollerbeetle	Rolling	13''41'''	589.48	14.85	53.48	33.36
Bunny	Walking	13''72'''	576.17	14.52	52.27	32.61
Skimmer	Ability	14''00'''	564.64	14.23	51.22	31.95
Skimmer	Walking	14''37'''	550.1	13.86	49.91	31.13
Warclaw	Engage Spam	14''37'''	550.1	13.86	49.91	31.13
Warclaw	Walking	14''44'''	547.44	13.80	49.66	30.98
Jackal	Engage Spam	14''71'''	537.39	13.54	48.75	30.41
Raptor	Engage Spam	15''33'''	515.66	12.99	46.78	29.18
Griffon	Walking	15''82'''	499.68	12.59	45.33	28.28
Skyscale	Walking	15''87'''	498.11	12.55	45.19	28.19
Griffon	Enage Spam	16''37'''	482.9	12.17	43.81	27.33
Bunny	Engage Spam	16''88'''	468.31	11.80	42.49	26.50
None	Walking	20''11'''	393.09	9.91	35.66	22.25
Skyscale	Enage Spam	20''15'''	392.31	9.89	35.59	22.20
Bunny	Ability	22''15'''	356.89	8.99	32.38	20.20

Conclusion

#1 Majestic Griffon

So, as you can see the griffon seems to be the fastest way of traveling if you can get one or two dive boosts in.

#2 Roadorolla-Beetle Da

The roller beetle is the fastest if you can't use the griffon and even after only one boost you have a decent constant movement. 

#3 Rapping Raptor

If both of these do not apply, the raptor is next on his third place. Though it comes short when you have to move uphill.

#4 Jackal with it's Portal

 Moving uphill I'd probably advise the jackal as it's ability is more dependable in an uphill scenario.

It's really awesome to see that using the roller beetle you could basically roll around the streets of some countries such as Germany. even though cities only allow 50km/h at maximum and the highway often has a limit of 100 or 120km/h. Then again if you had the mounts from Guild Wars 2 aside from some people sexting Asura's or whatever we would have portals and waypoints. I would definitely pay 1€ to teleport to university or work to port back for 1€. Worth it!

Oh, by the way. I heard there is actually 3rd party software that shows the current speed and you could basically take that. The thing is that from talking to someone who uses it the values might vary depending on the direction. Like for example a griffon with a downward motion has a faster vertical movement that gliding straight and some ground tracks you roll with your roller beetle aren't even or maybe you're in a curve or not moving straight. All these aspects can have an effect as you travel more distance in a zigzag than a straight line.