Guild Wars 2

Oh well. I’m sure we’ll see a million more comments in that vein or people rushing to scream about how guardian is a challenging class to play and how they’re god’s gift to GW2, none of which is much for discussion. There’s not much to say about this thread anymore anyway. Thieves have excessive escape from everyone in WvW and Anet doesn’t seem to care.

Sil.4560:

As far as being condescending, I just plain don’t like the class at this point.

And this goes back to my question. Why then do you exactly post in the Guardian thread? You aren’t really contributing anything to the forum.

Again, it’s stated in the first part of my post. The more exposure to the fact that guardians are overly forgiving, defensively, that devs actually get, the more likely they are to consider along the line of “boon hate” and providing better fixes than the ones we saw last patch. Meh, nevermind, you’re probably ignoring that part on purpose. You got your answer.

pick up the boon removal on burning trait and the boons the thieves steal from you wont be there for too long.

I hate d/p thieves, takes all the fun out of playing a thief and its horrible to play against. they arnt unbeatable but are bloody annoying.

sil, anet wanted thieves to have the best mobility in wvw. its not an accident theyre like that.

Sil.4560:

Thieves have excessive escape from everyone in WvW and Anet doesn’t seem to care.

This is one of the worst complaints about thieves I see.

“Oh, thieves are OP because they’re really good at giving up points!”

I think it’s mostly that they can get in and out of groups in battles while doing huge amounts of damage to select targets at little risk.

Sil.4560:

I think it’s mostly that they can get in and out of groups in battles while doing huge amounts of damage to select targets at little risk.

while doing huge amounts of damage to select targets at little risk

select targets at little risk

at little risk

You’re kidding me, right?

Is this a warrior / thief forum?

I’m confused.

Arganthium.5638:

You’re kidding me, right?

Not even going to bother arguing with you, honestly. There’s no point to it because I already know what you’ll say, how I’ll respond, and what you’ll say to that, etc. Nobody’s mind will be changed, and yes, not really the point of this thread. I was simply stating that the escape potential of the thief seems excessive to most other classes, not just guardian.

Arganthium.5638:

Sil.4560:

Thieves have excessive escape from everyone in WvW and Anet doesn’t seem to care.

This is one of the worst complaints about thieves I see.

“Oh, thieves are OP because they’re really good at giving up points!”

WvW is not PvP. Sil specifically said “in WvW”.

In PvP abandoning a point can cost a match. In WvW abandoning an area so you can survive means you’re still a problem. In PvP staying power is king. In WvW survivability, especially through disengage, is.

ProxyDamage.9826:

Arganthium.5638:

Sil.4560:

Thieves have excessive escape from everyone in WvW and Anet doesn’t seem to care.

This is one of the worst complaints about thieves I see.

“Oh, thieves are OP because they’re really good at giving up points!”

WvW is not PvP. Sil specifically said “in WvW”.

In PvP abandoning a point can cost a match. In WvW abandoning an area so you can survive means you’re still a problem. In PvP staying power is king. In WvW survivability, especially through disengage, is.

Yes, imagine how powerful armies would be if they suddenly fled every time they were engaged in battles.

WvW starts with the individual, and when you have individuals out of combat for 30 seconds because of their “lol OP escape”, I fail to see a difference between that and having the individual dead for 30 seconds.

Arganthium.5638:

Yes, imagine how powerful armies would be if they suddenly fled every time they were engaged in battles.

WvW starts with the individual, and when you have individuals out of combat for 30 seconds because of their “lol OP escape”, I fail to see a difference between that and having the individual dead for 30 seconds.

Mostly because you don’t know much about WvW. Or PvP. Either. Or both… You seem to know deathmatch…

I’d go through this nice and easy, but I can’t be kittened, so you have to pretend this is a conversation and play along:

Why is dying bad in PvP?

Because it opens up the opportunity for your opponent to neutralize and/or capture points while you’re waiting to respawn. Surviving by running away is not optimal, but it is better so long as the time taken is inferior to that of respawning and rejoining the fight. Still, “staying power”, the ability to remain in the fight, is superior, as every second matters in the short duration round.

Why is dying bad in WvW?

Well, WvW is a more complex issue than PvP, but for the most part: because it forces you back to a spawn area, away from wherever you’re needed and whatever you’re doing. If you’re attacking something, dying means being forced to walk all the way back. If you’re roaming behind enemy lines, you’re forced to “re-infiltrate”, with all the dangers that carries. The deeper you go into enemy territory the less backup you can count on.

On the surface it’s easy to think “well, they’re both the same really… it’s all about downtime”. But there is a huge difference: scale.

A PvP match happens in a small map and lasts a few minutes. WvW happens across 4 huge maps and lasts a week.

In PvP it is common to have someone covering each of the important parts you own, or at least most of them, so there is far less of an issue with “backdooring”. Yes, you can stealth around, but when you get to the point, at least in decent teams, someone will be there waiting for you. Sure, you can run around in “unprotected” areas, but who are you inconveniencing really? Your team is getting kitten all for it. If you go in and have to run away all the time, you might as well be dead.

In WvW, on the other hand, it’s virtually impossible to cover everything. Hell, it’s virtually impossible to cover most things for any decent amount of time… Unless guilds start paying real money you’re hard pressed to find someone willing to play “sentinel duty” on a camp for a whole week… When you find someone roaming in your backline, the only thing you can do is kill them, so they’re, at least, forced back to their spawn and forced back through your front line of defense. It forces them away from your objectives for a period of time, and raises the chances they might be caught again on the way back.

And there we go, the most crucial difference. In PvP it’s ok to “shoo” someone away. In WvW you need to kill them. Sure, you can defend one camp… But they’ll just go to another. It’s still costing you points. The only way you have of having any meaningful impact in their presence is to remove them back to their closest spawn. If you can’t do that, you haven’t eliminated the threat. You simply moved it around.

In WvW there are other objectives unprotected.

In WvW there are people to catch off guard, traveling between places.

In WvW the 20 seconds it takes the thief to reach a new objective mean nothing. Especially nothing compared to the 5 or 10 minutes it would take them to return from spawn.

In WvW you don’t necessarily have even numbers. A run away in PvP means their team is now 5 vs 6. In WvW 1 person is usually less than 0,1% of that server’s force…

In WvW you need 10 or 20 people stationed around the map just to protect the most important areas for every one run away thief.

I guess the closest way to put it is if disengaging from a fight in PvP only took 2 seconds from “last damage received” to “full HP”, capping an unprotected point was instant and it kept you from re-capping it for a few seconds after… That would be a bit closer to the WvW scenario, and why Thief’s disengage is so much more ridiculous there.

Well this is a funny thread…
Just before I left to work I did some WvW, now mind you I’m quite rusty since I haven’t touched any pvp in months.

I found this ranger next to a guard, got him, then the guard.
Then a thief popped up, came at me, got taken out pretty quickly, followed by another thief, who did attempt some kind of daze and stealth tactics, didn’t work so well for him, and got killed as well.

I have a pretty solid roaming build which I’d like to share:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAS8elYgSCHHSEEfIFRWBWa9ggC0fVK2n8uK4QA-jUyAYrIjuAIQBiIAn9QTgERjlxioxqrxUuER1A-w

This build got heavy control against your enemy.

• Here’s how you should deal with the thief:
• Cast hammer, make sure you got block on in case thief goes in stealth.
• As soon as he pops out cast SoA (#5 shield).
• Use flashing blade and trap him with hammer (hydromancy activated)
• Cast RoW (#5)
• Use your hammer of wisdom to disable him.
• Kill.

You can also start with hammer instead and cast ZE (#3) and Mighty blow to attempt to take off some of his endurance. Then switch back to tactic 1.

Ok. Wow.

First, you begin by making allegations that suggest that I “lack experience” in either WvW or PvP… What do you think I am, some wimpy PvE player? I can recall quite well destroying your prized team of guardians at the SOAC tournament last week, watching as they spawned boons just before we stole them away. I remember holding multiple points against you guys in 2v1, and even the occasional 3v1 (although, admittedly, at that point I died fairly quickly). I remember evading attacks left and right, weaving my way through magic and some pathetic attempts at pinning me down, and slaying you guys.

So please, don’t start the game of “oh you don’t have any experience in such-and-such”, because I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the extent of my knowledge about strategy, tactics, and buildcrafting surpasses your knowledge of the subjects.

Now, you make the case for retreating in PvP as being bad, but not inferior to dying- which I agree with. Recall that thieves are very squishy, however, and we can’t just be escaping every ten seconds from just any player. However, your arguments for why escaping is “OP” in WvW are… Terrible. First of all, you completely missed the point of my question: what if an army never fought? If, whenever faced with opposition, it fled? You state in your own post that there’s a huge scale difference in WvW as opposed to PvP. If that’s the case, then doesn’t retreating every 30 seconds mean having to go very far distances as well just to get to a single point?

Again, I would agree that, yes, escaping is superior to dying, but you act as if the ability to escape is an advantage. It’s really not; it’s just the weakening of a disadvantage. If thieves had to escape as often as you seem to believe they do, they would never capture anything. Furthermore, the only objective that a thief, realistically speaking, can take is a scout. Maybe if you have the best gear, you can take a camp, but that would require a great amount of effort and skill anyways.

I find it ironic that you think that the ability to retreat makes thieves overpowered. Let’s run an experiment, then; every time you run into enemy forces, run as quickly as possible in the opposite direction from them. See how much you complete by being able to retreat so much.

I think its more of a “if I’m going to lose this fight, I can quickly escape if I want to.” Guardians have been complaining about how a lot of the classes can just escape the fight if they want while Guardians are left in the dust watching them flee. A thief can commit to the fight and then leave if needed. Guardians don’t have this luxury. We have to commit or not commit. Win the fight or die.

For your first paragraph, that makes me think the new boon steal is even more OP than it should be, especially if its as easy as you make it sound.

Arganthium.5638:

However, your arguments for why escaping is “OP” in WvW are… Terrible. First of all, you completely missed the point of my question: what if an army never fought? If, whenever faced with opposition, it fled? You state in your own post that there’s a huge scale difference in WvW as opposed to PvP. If that’s the case, then doesn’t retreating every 30 seconds mean having to go very far distances as well just to get to a single point?

Before I get started I would like to say I do not think Thieves are OP. Unbalanced around a poorly thought out set of class abilities and game mechanics? Maybe. But not OP. THAT SAID?

If there was an army that never fought…. only engaging exactly when and where the situation was advantageous to it, I would think that would be a very powerful army indeed. This is the advantage that thieves get in WvW, where forcing someone to defend an objective is rather more difficult and less straightforward than in PvP. It’s not necessarily that they can flee any engagement (though the better thieves for the most part can and it’s horrendously annoying), it’s the fact that unless a thief missteps horribly or gets unlucky, they always have the advantage of initiative.
Pun on class feature not intended but appropriate.

In most engagements in WvW, a thief will both start and end an engagement on their own terms, a luxury that most classes, and especially those such as Guardian or Necromancer, cannot have. Thieves will almost always have the advantage of opening first, and I’ve noticed in the few times they don’t have that advantage, the thief usually dies. The fact that most thieves open with spike damage that drops a target’s HP pool by 1/4- 1/2 simply exacerbates the issue. And the fact that a thief can end a fight on their own terms and whisk themselves away tends to be a source of great frustration, especially to classes that do not have any escape mechanisms.

This escalated quickly…

Anyways, I dueled a couple thieves yesterday that were quite good. So let me give you my experience.

Thieves typically use two of three weapon sets when roaming, if they focus heavily on direct damage that is. Set 1) D/P. Set 2) S/D. Set 3) Shortbow. The first set does the most damage, the second set steals your boons and gives them weapon skill teleports/stunbreakers, and the third set is their ranged set that doesn’t really have a lot of utility in a guardian fight. If they’re carrying #3, that means once they want to disengage they will, so you will have to kill them within 10 seconds after they switch to D/P or S/D and/or keep them interested while they’re in shortbow.

That’s just ROAMING though, I was fighting under duel rules, which means no disengaging if you’re losing.

So how did I beat them? Well, I still equipped shouts, but here’s the thing, I didn’t use them while he was in SD. What I did, was I exchanged autoattacks with him. I don’t know if it is just my build, but my autoattacks hit him harder than vice versa, so he would have lost an up front slugging match. The only shout I used was SyG, and I used it to stunbreak his dazes and stuns. It doesn’t matter to me if he steals 4 seconds of stability/retaliation. That expires very quickly and he just wasted 4 initiative.

So what do they do? They switch to D/P most of the time. THIS IS WHEN IT IS SAFE TO USE YOUR OTHER SHOUTS.

Also, to a lot of guardians, you underestimate the power of your own autoattacks, I rarely see them used when I fight other guardians. Did you know the autoattack chain on the Greatsword has high dps than whirling wrath? The only reason you would use whirling wrath is for up front burst and/or AOE, I use it when he stealths so he can’t backstab me without taking punishment in return.

Thread getting trolled by one of the biggest forum thieves. Hits and runs better with his text than with his thief.

modDW.4187:

I made this video for someone else, but maybe it will help give you some ideas for fighting thieves. Guardian naturally counters thief, as we have access to a huge amount of anti-burst, but you need to learn the mechanics of thieves to take full advantage of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgAgqcgdZ5A

Hope it helps

It’s a good battle, but I don’t see your point being made that guardians are “natural counters” to thieves. You actually do get bursted quite a bit, just not enough to kill you because you’re a bunker and they invested out of power. The only “natural” counter I see is the occasional aegis (which a staff +/- trait Mesmer can out-produce by a lot) and a ridiculously long vigor and retal where one requires skill to utilize and the other is simply a boon many other professions can also have.

IMO the thief is the natural counter to guardians, as guardians require boons gained temporarily for survivability at the sacrifice of a naturally low health pool, which in turn allows well-timed or lucky bursts to be more effective than against other professions. But as your video shows, concept and practicality are irrelevant on the battlefield.

Do you guys think there is a rock, paper, and scissor mentality about the classes?

I mean if that were true, some classes would be stronger vs others and vice versa but I honestly can’t say guardians have a natural enemy besides someone that is more bunker than they are.

ArtemisEntreri.4138:

Do you guys think there is a rock, paper, and scissor mentality about the classes?

No

There is a rock paper scissor mentality about builds, though. Vitality counters condis, condis counter toughness, toughness counters direct damage, direct damage counters vitality. Well, not so much counter as much as “work better against than the other”.

Teamkiller.4315:

Also, to a lot of guardians, you underestimate the power of your own autoattacks, I rarely see them used when I fight other guardians. Did you know the autoattack chain on the Greatsword has high dps than whirling wrath? The only reason you would use whirling wrath is for up front burst and/or AOE, I use it when he stealths so he can’t backstab me without taking punishment in return.

1h Sword AA, such insane damage when you can actually stay on someone. lol

Thieves aren’t really a threat, they are just boring as hell to fight because they can escape and disappear whenever they want to.

Stealth (rather total invisibility…) is such a boring mechanic, especially in MMOs. ArenaNet should have just stayed with Assassin and its shadow stepping, there were no need for stealth…

This is World of Roguecraft all over again.