Guild Wars 2

I can’t see why anyone would ever take Cavalier or Valkyrie now over Knights if for some classes like the ele you wanted to raise your survivability at the cost of slightly less crits.

Some builds already in a precarious situation, like a scepter burst ele build with some cavalier is now nerfed to hell, and unlike classes like thieves and warriors who can burst much more often, scepter eles relied on landing that high a burst to even have a chance at killing a condi bunker.

If an ele fails to kill wiith a phoenix+firegrab+arcane util+air sequence, his burst goes on a 20+ sec cd and all he can do after is just die because scepter’s autoattacks suck and have no sustained damage.

I said this too in another thread I posted and people told me I was wrong.

Yes, relying on overpowered gear pieces may eventually get you nerfed. It’s still less than what berserker is losing.

Wethospu.6437:

Yes, relying on overpowered gear pieces may eventually get you nerfed. It’s still less than what berserker is losing.

Ya that is what they said. But they are wrong becasue Valk and Cavaliers has the same amount of crit damage as full zerk. So they will be equally nerfed however. Zerk offers precision and power main. So a zerk build crits more where these builds crit less and hits harder non crit.

A valk/cav will crit less with the nerfed stats. With less power. And hit less hard with less power non crit. so these sets get hit harder.

Valk/Cav will not crit less. The chance to crit will stay the same: very very low. The crit damage will be lower. Since the crit chance is very very low the loss in overall damage will be significantly lower than the loss with beserker. In contrast valk/cav build will profit much more from the changes on sigils like triggers on hit instead triggers on crit. The overall DPS will be higher.

Wethospu.6437:

Yes, relying on overpowered gear pieces may eventually get you nerfed. It’s still less than what berserker is losing.

cavalier and valkyrie wasnt overpowered. The problem is they are going from ok, to weak. Essentially they nerfed all direct dmg sets. I dont think its a good solution, especially when direct dmg really isnt OP. The problem is poor AI and encounter design. Taking a look at WvW and sPVP tells you the real story. Now, if they ever make interesting fights, power based DPS builds will probably be ineffiecient.

number tweaks only go so far

Belenwyn.8674:

Valk/Cav will not crit less. The chance to crit will stay the same: very very low. The crit damage will be lower. Since the crit chance is very very low the loss in overall damage will be significantly lower than the loss with beserker. In contrast valk/cav build will profit much more from the changes on sigils like triggers on hit instead triggers on crit. The overall DPS will be higher.

the valk/cav builds were controlled burst builds where the user forced crits via skills/traits. While the overall dmg wont go down as much, the whole point of using various skills to force a crit in key moments, or temporarily boost your dmg with things like fury, is going to be even more heavily hit, they nerfed your damage by like crit dmg by like 50%. For builds that relied on forcing big hits, thats a HUGE loss of dps.
as far as triggers on crit, they simply wouldnt have used those sigils, and instead opted for things like sigil of intellegience. These builds were not about hitting as often as possible, so really a whole style of play took a rather large hit, and it wasnt an OP style in the slightest.

exactly valk and cav were balanced before becasue just beacuse of high crit damage didnt mean high dps. Now dps is lower for builds that were not high dps before.

Just becasue you can crit hard if u crit doesnt mean you are taking advantage of it to the potential that required a nerf.

This has certainly annoyed me because my Thief was/is in Valkyrie gear using a backstab spec. Not only is this nerfed (because of PvE DPS to boot, which I don’t care about as WvW player), I now also have to look at grinding up another entire Ascended gear set, so I have three choices; Re-grind all my gear to play a non-kitten spec, stick to what I have and just outright play less effectively, or you know, play something else...

I think a solution can be found in raising the Ferocity in non-Berserker critical damage gear, or in class-specific traits. For example, Thief’s Hidden Killer which currently does 100% critical hit chance when attacking from stealth would gain an additional percentage damage increase for that critical hit, the equivalent of what is currently being subtracted from the critical damage bonus gained with Ferocity? (Which is somewhere around 35% damage.)

Edit: I think my main issues with dramatic changes like this that 1) They are coming from PvE which I don’t care about but the changes still affect me, or 2) These dramatic changes render previously acquired Ascended gear obsolete for a spec, I’d be able to live with this if affected stat combos are allowed a one-time change after such a balance patch (how Legendary weapons work, but one-time after such patch). Is such a thing really that unreasonable to ask?

Just farm zerger and spam 2 mate will kill anything in WvW if it under 50%,even after nerf

Wethospu.6437:

Yes, relying on overpowered gear pieces may eventually get you nerfed. It’s still less than what berserker is losing.

Yeah, clearly scepter ele was OP, especially in PvP where eles have virtually disappeared.

kittening brilliant commentary.

Is “scepter ele” a gear piece?

Its pretty obvious that these ferocity changes are a joke and the fact it got out of a design phase let alone is in a patch about to be released is hilarious.

It does absolutely Zero to fix the problem they are claiming it is supposed to fix (Dungeons will still be all Zerk all the time) but does cause lots of extra problems (Celesital/Valk/Cav nerfs, Power builds will be even weaker compared to condi in WvWvW)

Wethospu.6437:

Yes, relying on overpowered gear pieces may eventually get you nerfed. It’s still less than what berserker is losing.

In PvE yes, but in WvsW some builds will get a bigger nerf where conditionbuilds are already on the top.
I won´t stop playing all my toons Berserker in PvE, because it´s the most fun and still the best.
But im sad that other builds will get a nerf they don´t deserve.

This is completely normal thing. Something is too strong, it gets nerfed, collateral damage. No point to complaint about it.

Your weak build relied on overpowered things to get decent. You shouldn’t be surprised. If you want it to get better you should post constructive suggestions.

I get it the Balance team looks like you’d have to card them at a bar, and some of them might not pass, but I’m pretty sure anyone who does game balance as their 40 hour a week job is aware that crit damage can be found as part of more sets than just berserker.

Players are saying “Oh, this just targets berserker, only it doesn’t.”

No Dev has ever said that was the only, or even principle goal of the change…

Wethospu.6437:

This is completely normal thing. Something is too strong, it gets nerfed, collateral damage. No point to complaint about it.

Your weak build relied on overpowered things to get decent. You shouldn’t be surprised. If you want it to get better you should post constructive suggestions.

That’s quite ironic.

Wethospu.6437:

Is “scepter ele” a gear piece?

Scepter ele build’s reliance on cavalier/valk to function is the gear piece that’s being hit as collateral damage to berserker. It wasn’t overpowered, other wise most other classes/builds would have run valk/cavalier in WvW (they don’t).

What part doesn’t pass through your little warrior brain? Have you even bothered to pvp as a scepter ele? No? Go away then.

Valk/Cavalier was necessary for the ele because unlike your warrior tards our 10k base HP gets you 2-3 shot in a hurry by anyone even wielding knight gear in WvW.

So eles had to stack around a minimum of 1600 toughness to even function, while maintaining that really high burst capacity that had a long cd but served a function in skirmish teams. That is, high ranged burst damage. The ele could compete with a thief for the finisher/chaser spot, even if it could not burst as often, because what burst it had on a 20+ sec cd was higher burst than the thief and enough to threaten condi bunkers.

When ele burst gets nerfed as collateral while their sustained damage and HP pool shows no signs of getting fixed on a feature patch, you just took a viable skirmishing build out of the picture entirely and forced all WvW eles to go staff zerging.

Scepter ele was not a weak skirmishing build. It was a build that just had enough pressure to cross the threshold of the few power builds that can function in skirmishing. And with the nerf you’re basically better off going knights dagger/dagger.

Berserker was kittened on some classes (still will be, on classes like thief and warrior roamers with some knights/berk mixing), but valkyrie and cavalier sacrificed enough damage output. In pvp we operate by thresholds, and the lowering of cavalier/valk output below the threshold where they can secure kills consistently against condi bunkers was a huge collateral hit to build diversity.

After this change there will be 2 categories to skirmish/roaming specs:

Thieves and warriors with their higher base damage, high burst, and strong defensive/escape tools, and condi bunkers like the engineer and BM ranger.

Eles will be pretty much out of the picture, as will be some power based ranger specs and rifle power engineer variations. Essentially, all power based offensive specs that didn’t have strong and constant innate mitigation/avoidance tools and relied more on raw stats to make it through.

Nike.2631:

I get it the Balance team looks like you’d have to card them at a bar, and some of them might not pass, but I’m pretty sure anyone who does game balance as their 40 hour a week job is aware that crit damage can be found as part of more sets than just berserker.

Players are saying “Oh, this just targets berserker, only it doesn’t.”

No Dev has ever said that was the only, or even principle goal of the change…

the problem is, this problem is so old meta. powerbased builds, are under performing in most content these days. Condi is easier, and more deadly in spvp and WvW. The only reason people dont use it to faceroll dungeons is because in game mechanics limit its effectiveness past 1 or 2 people, and the fact that dungeon/encounter design is currently allowing people to stack to win. The only other use it has is heavily extra buff heavy WvW instagib 1 v 1 builds, which isnt even an important part of wvw.

the problem is Anet keeps trying to fix the problem with numbers when its not a number problem. Its an encounter problem. reducing effectiveness of all power builds is not a good thing, because most power builds arent OP.

So why is it that this nerf was needed in the first place? I still haven’t heard any good solid reasoning as to why the fact that a lot of people preferred utilizing crit damage in their builds warranted a nerf that would try and make some people use something else, despite them already using what they want to use.

All this does is strike me as something made to make people do something they may not want to do, which is the opposite of what a game should be.

I could totally see them introducing something in PvP or WvW to keep it balanced (its still totally unneeded since crit damage in those arenas aren’t nearly as OP as they are in PvE where it shouldn’t matter anyways), but this just seems totally pointless unless they’re planning on eventually added more vertical progression in the game via new weapons and armor.

They could have just allowed conditions to benefit from vulnerability and crit chance, and the whole scaling problem could have been fixed.

Then they could have had the much easier task of scaling down condi application on skills accordingly for some classes.

As a “Hidden Killer” thief I do not understand how valk/cav gear is getting a bigger nerf than zerker. I will stick to my playstyle and my gear, crit as often as I do now, but deal 10% less dmg. Why should I regrind a new ascended set and switch to zerker after the feature-patch? Or am I missing something?

Rage.2017:

As a “Hidden Killer” thief I do not understand how valk/cav gear is getting a bigger nerf than zerker. I will stick to my playstyle and my gear, crit as often as I do now, but deal 10% less dmg. Why should I regrind a new ascended set and switch to zerker after the feature-patch? Or am I missing something?

You’re missing the part where you have the “Hidden Killer” just like warriors have plenty of fury uptime and crit chance increase modifiers. To you it feels like you’re just running zerkers like warriors do, because your kittened class is that ridiculously better off, but that’s not the case for all the other classes.

Especially not the ones who don’t have spammable skills with immunity to chill and burst attacks that can be spammed through blocks and blinds until it actually lands, and need to make whatever burst they’ve got on a 30+ sec cd count when it lands.

I don’t think the goal of the Ferocity change is specifically to nerf Berzerker gear as much as it is to normalize crit damage (most likely because they’re planning more vertical progression of stats), and want critical damage on the same diminishing returns scale as opposed to a flat percentage.

ATM exotic zerker chest (using it as example) has +101 power, +72 precision and +5% crit damage
exotic cavalier is also 5% crit damage
exotic valk is like the other two 5% crit damage

only thing being changed is how crit damge works changing it to ferocity, both armor sets will still provide same amount of crit damage as the zerker set, just getting the precision is the kicker and that isnt what is changing
the nerf doesnt effect the other 2 stats on valk/cav

chemiclord.3978:

I don’t think the goal of the Ferocity change is specifically to nerf Berzerker gear as much as it is to normalize crit damage (most likely because they’re planning more vertical progression of stats), and want critical damage on the same diminishing returns scale as opposed to a flat percentage.

honestly this is how i think its gonna work, considering they are saying that pvp crit damage is staying relatively untouched, so im assuming there will be a soft cap at 80% or 90%

crosknight.3041:

ATM exotic zerker chest (using it as example) has +101 power, +72 precision and +5% crit damage
exotic cavalier is also 5% crit damage
exotic valk is like the other two 5% crit damage

only thing being changed is how crit damge works changing it to ferocity, both armor sets will still provide same amount of crit damage as the zerker set, just getting the precision is the kicker and that isnt what is changing
the nerf doesnt effect the other 2 stats on valk/cav

chemiclord.3978:

I don’t think the goal of the Ferocity change is specifically to nerf Berzerker gear as much as it is to normalize crit damage (most likely because they’re planning more vertical progression of stats), and want critical damage on the same diminishing returns scale as opposed to a flat percentage.

honestly this is how i think its gonna work, considering they are saying that pvp crit damage is staying relatively untouched, so im assuming there will be a soft cap at 80% or 90%

That is exactly what I was thinking and I still do not get why many people are complaining about other sets like valk/cav, which in their opinions are getting a bigger nerf than zerker, cause it is not true.

Power – Berserker, Valkyrie – nerf reduced by high critical hit rate
Precision – Assassin – KO
Toughness – Cavalier – KO
Celestial – KO

This is basically it. Assassins (hilarious that it’s not even mentioned), Cavalier, and Celestial are taking huge hits because they were already pieces without high power. Celestial may be getting a “buff” (lol) but defensive stats will never make up for the damage lost from having reduced critical damage. Overall, the impact on damage will be severe.

Berserker users won’t be affected as much as long as they maintain high crits. The same applys to Valkyrie for those few specs that are able to achieve high crits through traits, upgrades, food, and/or fury.

blakdoxa.7520:

Power – Berserker, Valkyrie – nerf reduced by high critical hit rate
Precision – Assassin – KO
Toughness – Cavalier – KO
Celestial – KO

This is basically it. Assassins (hilarious that it’s not even mentioned), Cavalier, and Celestial are taking huge hits because they were already pieces without high power. Celestial may be getting a “buff” (lol) but defensive stats will never make up for the damage lost from having reduced critical damage. Overall, the impact on damage will be severe.

Berserker users won’t be affected as much as long as they maintain high crits. The same applys to Valkyrie for those few specs that are able to achieve high crits through traits, upgrades, food, and/or fury.

I was not talking about pve (i use full zerker for pve for obvious reasons).
I need few cavalier-pieces in wvw for more survivability and i will have the same crit chance which i have right now. The power-difference is not that high between full valkyrie and a mix of valk/cav and the crit chance is the same anyway. At least for my playstyle valk/cav are getting the exact same dmg-nerf as zerker is.

Btw: If i would not use the hidden killer trait, i would not use cavalier — before and after the feature patch.

Rage.2017:

blakdoxa.7520:

Power – Berserker, Valkyrie – nerf reduced by high critical hit rate
Precision – Assassin – KO
Toughness – Cavalier – KO
Celestial – KO

This is basically it. Assassins (hilarious that it’s not even mentioned), Cavalier, and Celestial are taking huge hits because they were already pieces without high power. Celestial may be getting a “buff” (lol) but defensive stats will never make up for the damage lost from having reduced critical damage. Overall, the impact on damage will be severe.

Berserker users won’t be affected as much as long as they maintain high crits. The same applys to Valkyrie for those few specs that are able to achieve high crits through traits, upgrades, food, and/or fury.

I was not talking about pve (i use full zerker for pve for obvious reasons).
I need few cavalier-pieces in wvw for more survivability and i will have the same crit chance which i have right now. The power-difference is not that high between full valkyrie and a mix of valk/cav and the crit chance is the same anyway. At least for my playstyle valk/cav are getting the exact same dmg-nerf as zerker is.

Btw: If i would not use the hidden killer trait, i would not use cavalier — before and after the feature patch.

You would not use cavalier because you have the luxury of stealth/blind spam.

Other classes unlike thief and warrior don’t get the luxury of constantly available mitigation tools while being glassy, so they need to stack toughness.

I think it should be pretty obvious to you as a thief that an ele in zerker can even die to a single backstab of yours with some might stacks.

The difference is that your backstab by itself hits rather hard and can be used often.

The ele’s burst operates differently to thief and warrior. Ele burst comes piece-meal. You need to weave several high cd skills alongside two utility spells, and hope they all crit, to do actual burst.

And this potentially higher burst is all they have because unlike warrior and thief ele sustained damage is garbage once they’ve done their burst, so if they don’t kill something with that high % crit dmg bonus, they die. Elementalists unlike a thief coming out of stealth can’t just do a high sustained damage via autoattack+poison in between revealed timers before the next backstab.

Eles don’t get resets, and they don’t have any staying power or offensive pressure once the arcane utilities are blown or a fire grab misses and goes on a 36 sec traited cd.

And the difference between a non-thief/warrior using cavalier and berserker is the amount of sustained damage they do when their skills that guarantee a crit are over and they need to wait the long cd’s for them to be back up. Their sustained pressure nosedives, their spike capacity which compensated for the low sustained damage is gutted, and the spec is knocked out of viability.

You don’t have to explain the d/d ele to me, cause i play a full ascended d/d ele myself and i exactly know how it is dealing dmg. That is not answering the question. An ele does not need as much crit dmg as a thief cause the ele can maintain much more might stacks in a fight. And while my non-zerker-ele is dealing high dmg in wvw, it also has many defensive utilities like protection, vigor, heal etc etc. You can’t just compare different classes and playstyles.

Nike.2631:

I get it the Balance team looks like you’d have to card them at a bar, and some of them might not pass, but I’m pretty sure anyone who does game balance as their 40 hour a week job is aware that crit damage can be found as part of more sets than just berserker.

Players are saying “Oh, this just targets berserker, only it doesn’t.”

No Dev has ever said that was the only, or even principle goal of the change…

I’m pretty sure everyone understands that a change about crit damage affects crit damage.

Zenith.7301:

Wethospu.6437:

Is “scepter ele” a gear piece?

Scepter ele build’s reliance on cavalier/valk to function is the gear piece that’s being hit as collateral damage to berserker. It wasn’t overpowered, other wise most other classes/builds would have run valk/cavalier in WvW (they don’t).

What part doesn’t pass through your little warrior brain? Have you even bothered to pvp as a scepter ele? No? Go away then.

Valk/Cavalier was necessary for the ele because unlike your warrior tards our 10k base HP gets you 2-3 shot in a hurry by anyone even wielding knight gear in WvW.

So eles had to stack around a minimum of 1600 toughness to even function, while maintaining that really high burst capacity that had a long cd but served a function in skirmish teams. That is, high ranged burst damage. The ele could compete with a thief for the finisher/chaser spot, even if it could not burst as often, because what burst it had on a 20+ sec cd was higher burst than the thief and enough to threaten condi bunkers.

When ele burst gets nerfed as collateral while their sustained damage and HP pool shows no signs of getting fixed on a feature patch, you just took a viable skirmishing build out of the picture entirely and forced all WvW eles to go staff zerging.

Scepter ele was not a weak skirmishing build. It was a build that just had enough pressure to cross the threshold of the few power builds that can function in skirmishing. And with the nerf you’re basically better off going knights dagger/dagger.

Berserker was kittened on some classes (still will be, on classes like thief and warrior roamers with some knights/berk mixing), but valkyrie and cavalier sacrificed enough damage output. In pvp we operate by thresholds, and the lowering of cavalier/valk output below the threshold where they can secure kills consistently against condi bunkers was a huge collateral hit to build diversity.

After this change there will be 2 categories to skirmish/roaming specs:

Thieves and warriors with their higher base damage, high burst, and strong defensive/escape tools, and condi bunkers like the engineer and BM ranger.

Eles will be pretty much out of the picture, as will be some power based ranger specs and rifle power engineer variations. Essentially, all power based offensive specs that didn’t have strong and constant innate mitigation/avoidance tools and relied more on raw stats to make it through.

First of all, you seem way too emotionally attached to your scepter build. Things change and stuff gets nerfed. More faster you willing to accept that, more easier this will be for you.

As a I already state above, every nerf has a collateral damage. Only way to avoid that is to never make any changes. I hope you are not trying to suggest that.

If your class has issues go make suggestions about it because personal insults don’t really help anyone.

Rage.2017:

You don’t have to explain the d/d ele to me, cause i play a full ascended d/d ele myself and i exactly know how it is dealing dmg. That is not answering the question. An ele does not need as much crit dmg as a thief cause the ele can maintain much more might stacks in a fight. And while my non-zerker-ele is dealing high dmg in wvw, it also has many defensive utilities like protection, vigor, heal etc etc. You can’t just compare different classes and playstyles.

And I play a D/P thief so I’m pretty sure you’re full of it when you’re telling me that a valk D/D ele with some might stacks is doing the damage of a signet might stack stealth spam build D/P thief.

My Cruuk style stealth stalling build can easily hit 18 stacks of might before a backstab, signet boosts notwithstanding.

Wethospu.6437:

First of all, you seem way too emotionally attached to your scepter build. Things change and stuff gets nerfed. More faster you willing to accept that, more easier this will be for you.

As a I already state above, every nerf has a collateral damage. Only way to avoid that is to never make any changes. I hope you are not trying to suggest that.

If your class has issues go make suggestions about it because personal insults don’t really help anyone.

It’s easy to not be emotional over anything when your class of preference has been in peak performance since the inception of the game and currently dominates in all its game formats, with only the guardian offering competition in terms of inter-format performance.

And please spare me the constructive feedback spiel. I’ve been here since beta, playing ranger, necromancer, and elementalist since release.

1.5 years of constructive feedback since beta, and it culminates on an underwater combat patch for the “big ranger patch”, taking a sledgehammer to the ele down the run, and both ranger, ele, and necro are not much better off after all this time.

So, yeah, by this point it’s pretty clear they can’t be bothered with balancing the classes given the glacial pace and minute scope they apply balance changes to bring classes up. So I will respond to people like you with my “hysteria” because it doesn’t make a difference how collected an argument I can offer.

It doesn’t matter. My kitten new grandmaster traits are a 15% block chance of ranged attacks, a blind on burn, making longbow projectiles actually hit moving targets like rifles do baseline, and more useless weak healing deathshroud tied traits or healing on condition damage on a power line.

I’m pretty much done pretending like offering calm feedback will lead to thoughtful implementation of traits instead of whatever gimmick they decide is a fun concept for them.

Zenith.7301:

Rage.2017:

You don’t have to explain the d/d ele to me, cause i play a full ascended d/d ele myself and i exactly know how it is dealing dmg. That is not answering the question. An ele does not need as much crit dmg as a thief cause the ele can maintain much more might stacks in a fight. And while my non-zerker-ele is dealing high dmg in wvw, it also has many defensive utilities like protection, vigor, heal etc etc. You can’t just compare different classes and playstyles.

And I play a D/P thief so I’m pretty sure you’re full of it when you’re telling me that a valk D/D ele with some might stacks is doing the damage of a signet might stack stealth spam build D/P thief.

My Cruuk style stealth stalling build can easily hit 18 stacks of might before a backstab, signet boosts notwithstanding.

I play d/d thief, not d/p and those 18 stacks of might last only for 5-10 seconds, while a scepter/dagger ele with battle-sigil can easily maintain permanent 20-25 stacks of might, d/d ele can maintain 15+ permanent stacks of might.

Ofc a thief is better at bursting a single target than an ele, but dont forget that a d/d ele is bursting aoe and has far better aoe sustained dmg than a tief. And as i said before: dont compare two absolutly different classes with absolutly different tasks on the battlefield.

First the nerf isn’t just 10% flat damage. That 10% is all added up by a 30% roughly crit damage reduction. So the thief who relies on those high Frits to get the kill will be losing out on more damage than a warrior who isn’t resetting and re-opening.

@zenith we get it you play fresh air ele and don’t know/want how to play anything else. Time to learn dude because it is about to be in the past if the nerf really is as bad as theory craft says for fresh air.

@rage. You shouldn’t be using cav gear as a thief anyway. Valk armor zerk trinkets. If you are dying it is due to bad positioning or lack of attention toughness doesn’t do anything for you when you are only getting about 1-200 of it max. That is like running full zerk with yack runes.

I am with you guys I don’t like the fix they are inserting when it is to fix their bad encounters in pve since the only pve I did was to complete a legendary. The devs know that they are hitting a lot of sets other than zerk and either will buff them or don’t care and we have to deal with it. Go play condi, get a dif gear set, whatever because no amount of our opinion will change the fact that anet is on par with some of the worst game devs I have seen in the past 3-4 years. You have all played other games and seen the qq about this class, that build, this ability and then it gets nerfed into the ground. You want perfect balance? Only make 1 class 1 set of gear and no build options. You want decent balance? Don’t put pve and pvp in your game if you can’t separate the gear and abilities from what they do in pve from pvp.

New mmos releasing in the next couple of months just bide your time for one of them.

Rage.2017:

Zenith.7301:

Rage.2017:

You don’t have to explain the d/d ele to me, cause i play a full ascended d/d ele myself and i exactly know how it is dealing dmg. That is not answering the question. An ele does not need as much crit dmg as a thief cause the ele can maintain much more might stacks in a fight. And while my non-zerker-ele is dealing high dmg in wvw, it also has many defensive utilities like protection, vigor, heal etc etc. You can’t just compare different classes and playstyles.

And I play a D/P thief so I’m pretty sure you’re full of it when you’re telling me that a valk D/D ele with some might stacks is doing the damage of a signet might stack stealth spam build D/P thief.

My Cruuk style stealth stalling build can easily hit 18 stacks of might before a backstab, signet boosts notwithstanding.

I play d/d thief, not d/p and those 18 stacks of might last only for 5-10 seconds, while a scepter/dagger ele with battle-sigil can easily maintain permanent 20-25 stacks of might, d/d ele can maintain 15+ permanent stacks of might.

Which is why you don’t know what you’re talking about. For one, D/D sucks, and D/P stealth based signet build can safely maintain 15 stacks of might for pretty much backstab it does. It doesn’t matter if it lasts 10 seconds because my backstab will take off half the health of even a full bunker and I can shortly follow it with another backstab and the eventual heartseeker finisher.

But by all means bring your D/D or a scepter dagger ele and see how well he does when he’s not running boon duration runes on valk gear.

And PS say goodbye to 70%+ boon duration next feature patch.

Nimbl.8957:

First the nerf isn’t just 10% flat damage. That 10% is all added up by a 30% roughly crit damage reduction. So the thief who relies on those high Frits to get the kill will be losing out on more damage than a warrior who isn’t resetting and re-opening.

@zenith we get it you play fresh air ele and don’t know/want how to play anything else. Time to learn dude because it is about to be in the past if the nerf really is as bad as theory craft says for fresh air.

@rage. You shouldn’t be using cav gear as a thief anyway. Valk armor zerk trinkets. If you are dying it is due to bad positioning or lack of attention toughness doesn’t do anything for you when you are only getting about 1-200 of it max. That is like running full zerk with yack runes.

I am with you guys I don’t like the fix they are inserting when it is to fix their bad encounters in pve since the only pve I did was to complete a legendary. The devs know that they are hitting a lot of sets other than zerk and either will buff them or don’t care and we have to deal with it. Go play condi, get a dif gear set, whatever because no amount of our opinion will change the fact that anet is on par with some of the worst game devs I have seen in the past 3-4 years. You have all played other games and seen the qq about this class, that build, this ability and then it gets nerfed into the ground. You want perfect balance? Only make 1 class 1 set of gear and no build options. You want decent balance? Don’t put pve and pvp in your game if you can’t separate the gear and abilities from what they do in pve from pvp.

New mmos releasing in the next couple of months just bide your time for one of them.

I’ll quit ele before I go play a staff on a zerg and stand on walls. Scepter/dagger was the only truly glassy playstyle I enjoyed.

I don’t want to play some kitten proof d/d cantrip crap god knows that’s been force fed to most eles for over a year and I’m sick of being forced to play a bunker unless I’m a thief or warrior or mesmer.

They say this change is to open up spec diversity, but berserker only needed nerfing on some classes and setups (admittedly the lightning hammer ele alongside warrior and thief and guardian reflects), not all of them.

You never saw people complaining that berserker engineers or necromancers or rangers were driving down diversity.

Zenith.7301:

I’ll quit ele before I go play a staff on a zerg and stand on walls. Scepter/dagger was the only truly glassy playstyle I enjoyed.

I don’t want to play some kitten proof d/d cantrip crap god knows that’s been force fed to most eles for over a year and I’m sick of beiung forced to play a bunker unless I’m a thief or warrior or mesmer.

1) your comment about D/D thief is opinion. I haven’t been beaten by a d/p thief in over 6 months and I play d/d

2) go find something else to play then because your constant rant here fixes nothing. It isn’t about how kittene person can rant it is about how many people back the change or are opposed to it. We get it, you are upset. Many of us are as well but throwing a fit will get even fewer results than your calm suggestion posts did previously.

@Nimbl: I have over 1700 hours of experience on my thief and 80% of my play time i roamed in wvw facing 1v1/2/3/4 and toughness is helping me a lot in such fights cause i dont want to be a 1hit like all the zerker thiefs out there which i do 1hit with only one backstab. There is a big difference between 2000 and 2700 armor in wvw. And while having 2700 armor i still have 18k life, 3800 attack and 117% crit dmg, but this is an other story.

@Zenith: i guess you didnt play your d/p thief for a while now, did you? there is no perma-stealth to maintain perma-15-stacks-of-might. And if u are going to get the might through activating 3 signets then gg. i play my d/d ele in wvw every day with only 45% boon duration so the feature update wont hit my boon duration that hard. i am pretty happy with my ele right now and ofc with the dmg (75% crit dmg) and i was happy with the dmg when i had only 30-50% crit dmg.

10% of overall dmg is not that much, it’s like doing arah without undead slaying potion or sigill, not a big deal at all…

@rage. To each his own I guess. I roam and take on 1vX with 0 toughness I can take the opening back stab from full zerk thief and be just fine. Just have to be on your toes. Divinity runes………

But yeah 15-18 stacks permanent might on a thief? Not since October boss log over to that thief and link us some time/date stamped video of those permanent stacks pls because I would love to know how that’s done.

Rage.2017:

@Nimbl: I have over 1700 hours of experience on my thief and 80% of my play time i roamed in wvw facing 1v1/2/3/4 and toughness is helping me a lot in such fights cause i dont want to be a 1hit like all the zerker thiefs out there which i do 1hit with only one backstab. There is a big difference between 2000 and 2700 armor in wvw. And while having 2700 armor i still have 18k life, 3800 attack and 117% crit dmg, but this is an other story.

@Zenith: i guess you didnt play your d/p thief for a while now, did you? there is no perma-stealth to maintain perma-15-stacks-of-might. And if u are going to get the might through activating 3 signets then gg. i play my d/d ele in wvw every day with only 45% boon duration so the feature update wont hit my boon duration that hard. i am pretty happy with my ele right now and ofc with the dmg (75% crit dmg) and i was happy with the dmg when i had only 30-50% crit dmg.

10% of overall dmg is not that much, it’s like doing arah without undead slaying potion or sigill, not a big deal at all…

All the change did is that you can’t renew stealth from stealth itself. With a revealed time of 3 seconds it’s still kitten easy to might stack through BP backstabs and with some might from dodge rolling and stealth+signets you only need 1 VP+HS to get 18 stacks of might for your backstab.

If you can’t wait 3 seconds in between backstabs on steroids (while still having a tanky build since you use hidden killer), you got problems.

D/P thief is meta 1v1 thief. There’s a reason why in spvp high rank as well as duel tournies in WvW all thieves run D/P.

Cloak and dagger only hits noobs or helpless pet classes whose dumb AI can’t dodge.

BP also completely shuts down some classes like warrior, which is one of the threats to a thief.

Nimbl.8957:

@rage. To each his own I guess. I roam and take on 1vX with 0 toughness I can take the opening back stab from full zerk thief and be just fine. Just have to be on your toes. Divinity runes………

But yeah 15-18 stacks permanent might on a thief? Not since October boss log over to that thief and link us some time/date stamped video of those permanent stacks pls because I would love to know how that’s done.

You don’t need it permanent. You need it for the backstab. you carry 2 signets and a shadow refuge or shadow trap. You use might on dodge roll food with the endurance regen buff that stacks on top of feline grace and the might on dodge trait so you don’t have to take vigor on heal.

You’ll have 15 stacks of might easy for any backstab you do.

So riddle me this. What are you going to do when you get stunned? No stun break, so you better never make a mistake. And your 15-18 stacks rely on signets and refuge + rolling. Not saying it doesn’t work but in order to do it you become a 1 trick pony.

So you blast 2 signets + shadow refuge / shadow trap + 2 dodges + all your init for your first backstab. what happens then? you dont have any utility skills, no init and no dodges left. you wont have all the CDs rdy for the 2nd backstab.

Nimbl.8957:

So riddle me this. What are you going to do when you get stunned? No stun break, so you better never make a mistake. And your 15-18 stacks rely on signets and refuge + rolling. Not saying it doesn’t work but in order to do it you become a 1 trick pony.

You do realize one of the signets (infiltrator, traited for lowered cd) is a really short cd stunbreak shadowstep, and that you can pop the signets in advance, getting the might ahead of time, and the signet has recharged by the time you do your backstab combo? And that the build makes use of the lyssa for the stability and much of my time spent outside revealed is inside a black powder?

The refuge is there for extra beefed up backstabs if im facing a bunker. You can pull off at least 2 backstabs with high might stacks easy, and if your target isn’t a bunker they are dead.

It’s not a 1 trick pony. It’s a spec built for patience and making your hits count. Cruuk was a rank 60+ player in spvp you don’t get to rank 60+ by playing one trick ponies.

I know it is hard imagining that anything besides the usual shadowstep+shadowrefuge+signet of shadows can exist, but I assure you there are plenty of viable D/P variants, and this one can abuse more defensive stat allocation because of its might stacking capability.

We are talking about wvw and not about spvp, these are completly different worlds and spvp is not affected by the nerf. A d/p trickery glassy thief in wvw is a 1/2hit for any decent thief.

btw: i play assassin’s signet on my d/d thief with might on signet and might on stealth, i can maintain 10-15 stacks for my burst and 5-8 stacks for every following backstab. thiefs like you are getting 5-7k c&d + 12-15k backstabs even before they can do their bp+hs-combo.

Rage.2017:

We are talking about wvw and not about spvp, these are completly different worlds and spvp is not affected by the nerf. A d/p trickery glassy thief in wvw is a 1/2hit for any decent thief.

You are kidding me, right? The 4 sec revealed time is on spvp, not on WvW. If anything the spvp thief struggles more to make his build work.

A D/P trickery thief still has hidden killer. What you don’t have is 30 in the power line, just 10 for the poison. Average D/P trickery build cruuk style has 15k HP. It’s not a 1 shot.

And it’s hard to believe reading all this “what if you mess up/something goes wrong talk” from the dude playing D/D. Because as far as I’m concerned, if you miss the CnD, you’re dead. Any decent engineer or warrior will walk all over you.

D/P is superior to D/D on all accounts except some sad gimmick highest cnd>backstab combo that anyone should have learned to dodge by now.

By all means go into the Thief forums and try convincing anyone that your D/D is better than D/P.

Don’t think anyone said d/p want viable or even the build wasn’t. But you aren’t going to 1v3+ with it even if you pop your signets early enough to still have them a second time and you have lyssa for buffs. Not against good players at least

FYI standing in blinding powder does nothing for you if you get a c&d steal backstab combo, the thief will not be blind I hit it every time. Also c&d hits if you know how to do it properly even without steal it may be avoided from time to time but I have no issues with it. And I still hit 18k back stabs without 15-18 stacks of might granted not as often as I would with those stacks.

Anyway to return the thread to the topic in the subject line yeah, nerds inbound adjust or fail basically is what it boils down to.

Edit: spelling

Nimbl.8957:

Don’t think anyone said d/p want viable or even the build wasn’t. But you aren’t going to 1v3+ with it even if you pop your signets early enough to still have them a second time and you have lyssa for buffs. Not against good players at least

FYI standing in blinding powder does nothing for you if you get a c&d steal backstab combo, the thief will not be blind I hit it every time. Also c&d hits if you know how to do it properly even without steal it may be avoided from time to time but I have no issues with it. And I still hit 18k back stabs without 15-18 stacks of might granted not as often as I would with those stacks.

Anyway to return the thread to the topic in the subject line yeah, nerds inbound adjust or fail basically is what it boils down to.

Edit: spelling

You don’t just passively sit on BP. After each backstab attempt you drop it on your target, and they’ll be blinded. BP also doesn’t just blind when you drop it. You fire a projectile that blinds your opponent on top of dropping the blinding field itself.

I don’t know how you’re hitting CnD because the tell is pretty obvious, even on asura. If you’re hitting CnD, it’s because you’re catching people unaware.

There is a reason why D/D thieves disappeared and D/P thieves quickly took their place.

D/D thiefs have never existed in spvp, there allways were only S/D, S/P and D/P. There were many D/P trolls in wvw before the perma-stealth-nerf, but now there are nearly no D/P thiefs left in wvw. And btw, if you miss c&d a lot, then practice is the only advice i can give you instead of playing d/p.

btw2: i never said that d/d is better than d/p in a duel. I killed many thiefs when i played d/p a year ago, but d/d absolutely shines in an outnumbered fight.

Zenith.7301:

Wethospu.6437:

First of all, you seem way too emotionally attached to your scepter build. Things change and stuff gets nerfed. More faster you willing to accept that, more easier this will be for you.

As a I already state above, every nerf has a collateral damage. Only way to avoid that is to never make any changes. I hope you are not trying to suggest that.

If your class has issues go make suggestions about it because personal insults don’t really help anyone.

It’s easy to not be emotional over anything when your class of preference has been in peak performance since the inception of the game and currently dominates in all its game formats, with only the guardian offering competition in terms of inter-format performance.

And please spare me the constructive feedback spiel. I’ve been here since beta, playing ranger, necromancer, and elementalist since release.

1.5 years of constructive feedback since beta, and it culminates on an underwater combat patch for the “big ranger patch”, taking a sledgehammer to the ele down the run, and both ranger, ele, and necro are not much better off after all this time.

So, yeah, by this point it’s pretty clear they can’t be bothered with balancing the classes given the glacial pace and minute scope they apply balance changes to bring classes up. So I will respond to people like you with my “hysteria” because it doesn’t make a difference how collected an argument I can offer.

It doesn’t matter. My kitten new grandmaster traits are a 15% block chance of ranged attacks, a blind on burn, making longbow projectiles actually hit moving targets like rifles do baseline, and more useless weak healing deathshroud tied traits or healing on condition damage on a power line.

I’m pretty much done pretending like offering calm feedback will lead to thoughtful implementation of traits instead of whatever gimmick they decide is a fun concept for them.

Thanks for admitting that. Now I don’t have to read your posts as I know you have nothing to say.

I’m a Cav, Valk, Celestial Ele…

Still can’t break a warrior healing signet…

Guess what I’ll be doing after patch……

little tip, I won’t be reGRINDING more ascended gear…

I do find it amusing that a majority of professions I see these days are Warriors/Guardians and Thieves…

A dev could easily look at the stats of active WVW characters and see the picture themselves and posting the unaltered stats for our amusement.

Nike.2631:

I get it the Balance team looks like you’d have to card them at a bar, and some of them might not pass, but I’m pretty sure anyone who does game balance as their 40 hour a week job is aware that crit damage can be found as part of more sets than just berserker.

Players are saying “Oh, this just targets berserker, only it doesn’t.”

No Dev has ever said that was the only, or even principle goal of the change…

It’s not safe to assume ANET would have made any adjustments to celestial without player outcry. How many times in the past has ANET not been aware of their own game until players notified them of it? Countless. I wouldn’t give them too much credit. I’ve seen too many mistakes and poor judgment calls and choices.