Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing mainly as a thief for awhile now… just long enough to see that there is pretty much only one “correct” build for any given class, and long enough to be convinced (probably wrongly) that this game has zero balance. I can solo a camp, and once even solo’d a small tower. However, put me up against even 1 other player and I’m toast. Doesn’t matter what player. Give a kid a keyboard, have him spam 1 and I’ll be dead. I dodge, and use my skills, have exotic armor, the works… yet find I’m constantly be one shot ko’d by pretty much every class… and this is with the PVC build which I’ve read is supposed to be more survivable. I’ve tried the zerker build which is even worse for someone who hasn’t played for years. Can someone help me with either build or something so I can at least play the game? It’s really not enjoyable to just wander around a map until you’re murdered in under 2 seconds. I used to be almost an even match up with a ranger… then they did a patch and rangers became immortal gods who could hunt me in stealth and half of their arrow barrage downs me. Any help would be appreciated.

If you get one one-shotted you can just one-shot enemy faster and you win.

You would get more focused advice in the thief specific sub forum to be honest.

I leveled all 8 professions in predominantly WvW, and personally, I have found multiple builds on eachat profession that suit me. With out a little more informotion as to why you die to players, I cannot offer much advice. For example, I have no idea what build your running, or how you play it. So I can’t even begin to suggest what problem you may be having.

As a general hint: A visible thief has to be toast, just to counter it’s capability to be invisible (nearly) all time.

This game really isn’t balanced when it comes to individual classes so here are my WvW solo tips.

Avoid fighting warriors unless you have a group, they are basically raid bosses. They are incredibly tanky, have insane regeneration, and all at the cost of still having high damage, condi cleanses, stability, and insane mobility. They are the golden children of this game, the justification for being OP is they are designed for new players but a good player on them can pop all of their cd’s and wreck a small group.

Don’t bother fighting guardians if you think their allies might come, too tanky and takes too long to down them.

Don’t bother fighting thieves and to a lesser extent knowledgeable mesmers, their stealth get aways as soon as a fight turns south are ridiculous. You’ll never catch them so don’t bother trying.

That leaves up levels, engineers, necros, elementalists, and rangers that are even worth bothering trying to one vs one.

Another thing to be cognoscente of is map awareness. Try to keep track of zergs and think where their spawns are so what route catch up players will be taking to get to them.

One other thing I think may help overall balance in wvw is to make it so that waypoints don’t become contested just because someone tapped the door with a sword once or twice…why not make it so that it only becomes contested when it gets hit with siege?

In my opinion the two biggest problems with WvW balance are:

1) Skills that cause so much damage in one hit that the target cannot recover in time.
2) Differences in gear and levels between players.

To fix that I would suggest the following:

1) Ensure no attack takes more than half of an enemies health in one hit.
2) Change gear and levels to work exactly like it is in sPvP, so every player is on equal footing (besides build and skill).

I find 1v1 and small group fights in sPvP are a heck of a lot more fun than similar fights in WvW, and I feel that is mainly due to point 2 above.

And before anyone says ‘WvW is not supposed to be fair or equal’, if that is the case why does each world have an identical map and identical siege weapons? The point is, WvW is predominently a PvP game and therefore all players should be equal in gear and level.

Up levelled players are no fun to fight against (too easy) and are not fun to fight as (too difficult). If Anet wants to encourage more players into WvW they would do well to follow a similar system to sPvP in my opinion.

You know there is no balance when one guy who plays thief says he dies to anyone he fights and in the same thread someone responds not to fight thieves because they are impossible to fight against

There is no chance that both of them can be correct right!?

This game is balanced around group fights and not 1v1. However when the group become too big (zerg), it’s all about GWEN or GTFO.

The problem is you’re running solo when you could form a gank havoc group to look good while your guardian buddy keeps you alive work more efficiently. If you’re forced to run solo, run like a coward avoid fighting other players head on. Instead, you should jump them when they’re not paying attention check their food, buffs, etc. then decide whether to run away because they have 25 bloodlust stacks engage or not. I’m sure if you keep trying you’ll eventually find some lone uplevels to murder get the hang of it.

lol thief complaining he can’t win a 1v1

I mained as a thief for a long time, and I was having extremely difficult time winning fights. I would usually try to gank the stray person in wvw every now and then but most of the time I would simply ignore duels. This went on since I first started playing GW2 and my main focus became WvW. Only recently did I realize that I have a constant 200-250ms ping to GW2. This is the only game that I’ve ever played in my 10 years of pc gaming that I’ve had such bad lag, and I’m thinking that it’s the reason why I suck so bad at PvP. I mean, without the lag I wouldn’t be an amazing PvP’er or anything but I think I would win at least one fight, ya know? Maybe you’re having the same problem

Narkodx.1472:

You know there is no balance when one guy who plays thief says he dies to anyone he fights and in the same thread someone responds not to fight thieves because they are impossible to fight against

There is no chance that both of them can be correct right!?

I said they aren’t worth fighting because they can escape and there is nothing you can do about it. The OP is saying that he isn’t winning fights.

If he’s sticking around trying to down someone he’s not trying to escape so the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Most thieves I’ve fought disengage as soon as they see the fight isn’t going their way.

Clownmug.8357:

The problem is you’re running solo when you could form a gank havoc group to look good while your guardian buddy keeps you alive work more efficiently. If you’re forced to run solo, run like a coward avoid fighting other players head on. Instead, you should jump them when they’re not paying attention check their food, buffs, etc. then decide whether to run away because they have 25 bloodlust stacks engage or not. I’m sure if you keep trying you’ll eventually find some lone uplevels to murder get the hang of it.

I like the jokes… Here is my +1

I don’t agree with the OP, but balance is questionable at best at WvW. I realize that WvW isn’t meant to have ‘real’ balance as you can never count on each side having the same number of players or all being at maximum level. But I often question if ANet has even made an attempt to have a balanced game?

Have Rangers ever had a single reason to exist in WvW? Engineers? Any reason to ever have more than 1 Mesmer? These aren’t shifts in the meta that have invalidated these classes. They’ve never had a use other than yakslapper.

It’s much the same in PvP. Has there ever been a time when all 8 classes were represented at the same time?

Atherakhia.4086:

Have Rangers ever had a single reason to exist in WvW?

They’re great long-range DPS for defending towers, and Barrage is a great AOE cripple if you want to prevent a group (or even a single person) from getting away.

Engineers?

Grenade kit is amazing for bombarding enemy walls in a tower/keep attack to keep people from shooting down from them. The fact that they’re target circle AOE means you don’t have to worry about line of sight ever.

Any reason to ever have more than 1 Mesmer?

I can drop a Feedback in a zerg and watch a half dozen people down themselves before they realize it’s up, even if it’s only due to lag not letting them stop in time. So yes. Multiple Feedbacks means locking down ranged attackers. Bonus for making omega golems blow themselves, and their zerg protectors, up.

Mobility is your friend, , do not trade blow for blow
Bait your enemy, to use his cooldowns, then attack him
you got no skill cooldown, while they do ^^

Rin.1046:

To fix that I would suggest the following:

1) Ensure no attack takes more than half of an enemies health in one hit.

If you want to play a build where you can’t lose more than half your health, you have that option. Just run full tank gear on a soldier profession. I like having the option to run a glassier build because I like high risk/reward.

Rin.1046:

2) Change gear and levels to work exactly like it is in sPvP, so every player is on equal footing (besides build and skill).

Even if you took out the amount of gear customization that there is, you still wouldn’t get balance, because it’s impossible to balance fights at every single scale (1v1, 2v2, 5v5, XvX). This is without even considering the fact that fights are usually unequal in numbers.

In any case I like that it’s different from sPvP. If you want to have sPvP fights, you can already find those in sPvP. WvW is supposed to be an endgame that motivates you to build up your gear for it.

Rin.1046:

And before anyone says ‘WvW is not supposed to be fair or equal’, if that is the case why does each world have an identical map and identical siege weapons?

1. Eternal Battlegrounds is not symmetrical.
2. WvW population sizes are not equal.

Link.1049:

I’ve been playing mainly as a thief for awhile now… just long enough to see that there is pretty much only one “correct” build for any given class, and long enough to be convinced (probably wrongly) that this game has zero balance. I can solo a camp, and once even solo’d a small tower. However, put me up against even 1 other player and I’m toast. Doesn’t matter what player. Give a kid a keyboard, have him spam 1 and I’ll be dead. I dodge, and use my skills, have exotic armor, the works… yet find I’m constantly be one shot ko’d by pretty much every class… and this is with the PVC build which I’ve read is supposed to be more survivable. I’ve tried the zerker build which is even worse for someone who hasn’t played for years. Can someone help me with either build or something so I can at least play the game? It’s really not enjoyable to just wander around a map until you’re murdered in under 2 seconds. I used to be almost an even match up with a ranger… then they did a patch and rangers became immortal gods who could hunt me in stealth and half of their arrow barrage downs me. Any help would be appreciated.

1- WvW is not balance and anet doesnt even try to balance, because almost all the class balance is based on pvp conquest mode fight in a node.

2-Thief shoudnt have problems to 1v1, specially in wvw where you can easily reset the fight if you see that you are losing it.

3- Thief and mesmer are the most op 1v1 classes

4-Try a p/d perplexity or a sw/dg zerker if you want an easy and effective build

Link.1049:

However, put me up against even 1 other player and I’m toast. Doesn’t matter what player. Give a kid a keyboard, have him spam 1 and I’ll be dead. I dodge, and use my skills, have exotic armor, the works… yet find I’m constantly be one shot ko’d by pretty much every class…

That doesn’t make sense. No class, not even thief, can 1-hit KO a player in full carrion exotics by spamming 1, especially not if you’re dodging their attacks. Give us more information about what you’re doing and what’s going wrong and you might get some useful help from this thread. Hyperbole won’t help.

You can use this editor and create a quick link at the bottom to show us:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/

My first thought is that you have a really slow reaction time, either due to your ping or just a poor keyboard/mouse setup, but honestly I need more information.

With the exception of the condi-stealth builds, thieves are at a decided disadvantage against strong meta builds. You are playing a class/build that does not forgive error.

Where the non-condi thief excels is strafing opponents. Punch them in the nuts when they aren’t looking. To master the thief class is to learn to play its strengths and run like you just ate some bad Taco Bell when a fight turns against.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQRAqY6YlsMpopNNxzJ0PNBSBxdDCwC88F1ozQUVA-TlSEABIoE0XlYAYCqgDCgUKNo4EAEj6PN8EAmSZQL7PEAABgZOzhezhmQAKmDA-w is for my current build.

1 hit KO’s are typically from ranger’s bow barrage, some class that jumps and instantly downs, don’t know what that is. Necro’s sometimes take a couple hits but they freeze me so I can’t move the entire time, and mesmers split into multiples then explode and kill.

oh, and a guardian just hits me once with a hammer.

Link.1049:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQRAqY6YlsMpopNNxzJ0PNBSBxdDCwC88F1ozQUVA-TlSEABIoE0XlYAYCqgDCgUKNo4EAEj6PN8EAmSZQL7PEAABgZOzhezhmQAKmDA-w is for my current build.

1 hit KO’s are typically from ranger’s bow barrage, some class that jumps and instantly downs, don’t know what that is. Necro’s sometimes take a couple hits but they freeze me so I can’t move the entire time, and mesmers split into multiples then explode and kill.

You have got to be kidding me – You’re a condi thief!

First of all you should be running 2/0/6/0/6 – acrobatics does not do much for condi thief

Second of all you are using two venoms?! And NO STUNBREAKS?!

Take those garbage venoms off and put on shadow step and shadow refuge next take that garbage signet off and put blinding powder – voila! You now have three utilities that actually help you survive

Also – Where is your shortbow? The fifth skill will teleport you away from those pesky players who keep killing you

Lastly you simply need practice Thief is hard to master but once you do it is godly – I engage anything on the battlefield because I know I can escape at anytime regardless

Yup, no point to equipping venom unless you’re running a venom share build (but you play solo). Even then, the immobilize venom is way more useful. However it’s much better if you just get the Deadly Arts minor trait to poison on steal. You also need a second weapon set, which will help with your lack of gap closers (I suggest getting in shadowstep and/or infiltrator signet too).

You are basically letting a ranger pew pew you to death without ever getting in range for Cloak and Dagger. If you are running stealth (which is great for condi, you just apply conditions then wait in stealth) then you should take the advice of getting some stealth utilities in like blinding powder or shadow refuge.

With your thief, you already have tons of ways of apply conditions to your enemy. The venoms and even those runes aren’t necessary. Start thinking about ways to prevent them from doing damage to you, and how you can control them so it’s easier to apply those conditions. Being able to apply one burst of conditions is no good if the enemy can cleanse them and live, it’s better that you can continuously apply conditions to your enemy.

Watch some good thief videos and you might figure out what you doing wrong. You need to remember that players who run alone in WvW often are much better than average WvW players or at least they have more suitable builds for small scale fights.

One of our best commanders is surprisingly critical of bringing any class other than guardian, warrior, ele or necro into a zerg fight. Once in a while he will ask for a Mesmer veil or portal knowing there will be a few mesmers around anyway. He swears the mechanics or ‘meta’ of wvw makes the other classes so much less useful you would be better off just leveling something else.

Bertrand, which runes would you suggest?

Another question on balance… why is it that the last month high tier servers are being set upon low tier servers? It’s 1 server week after week beating the other 2 in a match up 4-1. Looking at the pie chart it’s all 1 color all the time. What changed?

Thank you for the rune advice

Zetsumei.4975:

lol thief complaining he can’t win a 1v1

Maybe he really didnt mean it. /shrug