Guild Wars 2

The people that cry about Heartseeker in pub matches, they only die to Heartseeker because they have close to no toughness/vitality right?

I’ve been playing a complete tank warrior recently with a build just to rally people, and I easily ate 4 Heartseekers to the face and still had a good 10k HP left.

So what I’m trying to determine is: are these people playing incorrect Heartseeker builds, or, is Heartseeker spam only effective against glass cannons?

There is no such a thing as “Heartseeker thief”, seriously.

Yes there is. A thief that stacks power and precision, takes all talents that boost those states as well as Heartseeker itself and additional initiative/faster initiative recharge then spam Heartseeker.

And I’ve seen Heartseeker thieves mow down a purely defensive Guardian and still have enough initiative left over to take down myself (Mesmer with 4 disengage abilities), an Elementalist and an Engineer.
I might make another “NERF DA HARTZEEKAH” thread, because I think people need to take notice of the issues of such a build.

The way HS works, the less health your opponent has, the more damage it will do. At 50% health, it get’s a little damage boost and at 25% health, it get’s an even bigger damage boost. HS is great to use as a finishing move or if you need to catch up to somebody real fast but spamming HS on a person with full health is just a waste of initiative.

When I played D/D I used Heartseeker for what it’s meant to be, a finisher. A build that’s build around HS is a weak build, but it’s effective for the casual player that doesn’t want to be on top on sPvP.

It’s not very effective until your target reaches 25% health anyways

Yeah, don’t range at Heartseeker if you get killed by it, that’s what it’s there for.

However spamming Heartseeker at a target with more than 50% HP is a clear sign of a noob.

TheRamosOnline, your story is made up or you didn’t comprehend what happend during that battle.

No Thief will ever take down a “purely defensive” Guardian with spamming Heart Seeker from the start of the battle and then take down another player with “enough initiative”.

Heartseeker damage is a joke when you are above 50% hp, if I spam heart seekers till I am out of initiative, recharge initiave with traits and abilities and spam more heart seekers in to a purely defensive guardian… I won’t get him below 50% hp.

Heartseeker is gap closer and finisher, nothing more. You can’t use it as main damage ability.

Heart Seeker damage increases at <50% and <25% of the targets health. It is a strong skill only as a finisher, but If he opened up with it and spammed it on you right off the bat, then it’s safe to assume he’s a noob who lost to a Heart Seeker spam noob, so the noob thought it was a super OP skill, he then himself morphed into a HS spam noob and now most thieves went full kitten on HS. That’s the way she goes… That being said, I hope you destroyed that thief because it’s Thieves like that, that make us look bad.

Recently tested Hearseeker on heavy target golem. The hearseeker above 50% target did 1000-2200 damage(2200 criting when i had 50% critical chance) Average hit of hearseeker taking in criticals was around 1500 damage. taking in mind i could use 6 heartseekers in a row. Its enough to down 1 golem, however takes more time to take down first 50% then just autoattacking with basic attack. Which is tottaly inefficient. C&D and backstab even up front works 2-3 times better then hearseeker. Btw tested this with my friend too, speced as glass cannon 25/30/0/0/15 used hearseeker till i ran out of innitiative. Managed to take off 60-80% of his tottal hp w/o him healing or doing anything. This tactic is is kitten not even half effective as autoattack. unless you are pure glass cannon. Tried Hs on light golem too, dealth 1200-2650 or so damage. It is possible to down anothe full glass cannon with heartseeker if he dont dodge/heal/use any defence or chill/criple on me. The hightest hearseeker i ever got was 7250 when target was less then 25% hp and i had used assasins signet +15 stacks of might, which blows all 3 utility.

Blazer Hellsing, I really do wish it was.
The guardian in my guild whispered me to give him a hand with a thief who was grieving him in the EB puzzle, I went inside and almost as soon as I loaded, PHWOMP!
I’m pulled down, locked down, dead.
Didn’t even get to see him, the render engine wasn’t having it.
So after a respawn, I get some guildies together and give it another whirl; we wanted to clear the puzzle anyway.
The 4 of us go inside, coast is clear.
We jump down, phwamp. Guardian at 50%. Guardian at 10%. Guardian down.
Still can’t see what’s doing it. Engie down. Didn’t even notice his HP falling. Now I’m getting attacked. Still can’t see the thief. I pop every field I have ready, thief finally visible but I’m downed. Ele has no idea what he’s doing and hardly fights back before getting downed.
All the while he made sure to melee us to stop us from healing between HS.

So this wasn’t a bogstandard thief, this guy knew what he was doing, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.
:v

TheRamosOnline.2670:

Blazer Hellsing, I really do wish it was.
The guardian in my guild whispered me to give him a hand with a thief who was grieving him in the EB puzzle, I went inside and almost as soon as I loaded, PHWOMP!
I’m pulled down, locked down, dead.
Didn’t even get to see him, the render engine wasn’t having it.
So after a respawn, I get some guildies together and give it another whirl; we wanted to clear the puzzle anyway.
The 4 of us go inside, coast is clear.
We jump down, phwamp. Guardian at 50%. Guardian at 10%. Guardian down.
Still can’t see what’s doing it. Engie down. Didn’t even notice his HP falling. Now I’m getting attacked. Still can’t see the thief. I pop every field I have ready, thief finally visible but I’m downed. Ele has no idea what he’s doing and hardly fights back before getting downed.
All the while he made sure to melee us to stop us from healing between HS.

So this wasn’t a bogstandard thief, this guy knew what he was doing, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.
:v

LOL

Anyone see what I see?

A. Fall damage, and enough to get an increase to heartseeker. One of them was probably backstabbed too
B. Sounds like more then 1 thief, willing to bet big time it was.
C. just haha

If the fall damage wasn’t 10% of our health, I’d agree that it would have given the thief an advantage.
If it was more than 1 thief, the second one must have vanished by the time the render engine decided now would be a good time to show me the face of the Asura who so eagerly turned my Sylvari into Salad.

TheRamosOnline.2670:

If the fall damage wasn’t 10% of our health, I’d agree that it would have given the thief an advantage.
If it was more than 1 thief, the second one must have vanished by the time the render engine decided now would be a good time to show me the face of the Asura who so eagerly turned my Sylvari into Salad.

1 thief cannot down 4 ppl unless you are like sheep, getting lost over someone invisible. random attack in front of yourself, aoe under yourself or something. Ive seeh much worse scenarios with 3-4 mesmers pushing ppl of ledges in the puzzle and they did it for couple of hours. Btw use food in WvW helps a lot along with 1-2 orbs i can have 3500 attack and close to 60% crit rate.

And then you get that one person (me) who actually does cast some AoE’s on the refuge then get greeted with a jolly “How do you do?” to the face. If “How do you do”s where cold, pointy and driven into your skull by a munchkin.
At which point I drag myself to the forums to ask “Is this right? I don’t think this is right. I’m not even a glass cannon. I’m a hidey hidey Mesmer, how was the thief still striking me when I was in stealth? Twice! Every strike hit without fail, how did he see me?”

Well, I’m just thinking the people crying about Heartseeker are probably just glass cannon builds. That said, it doesn’t help that 50% of the sPvP are thieves these days, but thats another story for another day.

I actually had more trouble fighting a very good basilisk venom thief 1v1, though I don’t think his build would’ve worked well in other situations.

None of his story adds up at all, and without evidence its moot anyway. Fun times seeing people go to lengths to make up stories anyway.

The more people hate me, it means I am doing my job
The more people that couldn’t catch me, get annoyed and frustrated. The better I am doing my job
The more people I catch uninitiated, unprepared and unwilling to adapt. The easier that job is.

I am a thief.
Welcome to Guild Wars 2

God you are silly you know that TheRamosOnline. Full glass spec in WvW i got 12k hp. another full glass thief can hit 6k with cluster bomb aoe size of shadow refuge. 2 hits im dead. I wont tell of eles dragon tooth wth full glass that can hit 9k+ in combo burn which gets me dead. But hell, why look for suggestion to how win, better qq.

TheRamosOnline.2670:

Yes there is. A thief that stacks power and precision, takes all talents that boost those states as well as Heartseeker itself and additional initiative/faster initiative recharge then spam Heartseeker.

And I’ve seen Heartseeker thieves mow down a purely defensive Guardian and still have enough initiative left over to take down myself (Mesmer with 4 disengage abilities), an Elementalist and an Engineer.
I might make another “NERF DA HARTZEEKAH” thread, because I think people need to take notice of the issues of such a build.

Lol, so the 3 of you that were left had full health and couldn’t kill him? That’s bad

TheRamosOnline.2670:

Blazer Hellsing, I really do wish it was.
The guardian in my guild whispered me to give him a hand with a thief who was grieving him in the EB puzzle, I went inside and almost as soon as I loaded, PHWOMP!
I’m pulled down, locked down, dead.
Didn’t even get to see him, the render engine wasn’t having it.
So after a respawn, I get some guildies together and give it another whirl; we wanted to clear the puzzle anyway.
The 4 of us go inside, coast is clear.
We jump down, phwamp. Guardian at 50%. Guardian at 10%. Guardian down.
Still can’t see what’s doing it. Engie down. Didn’t even notice his HP falling. Now I’m getting attacked. Still can’t see the thief. I pop every field I have ready, thief finally visible but I’m downed. Ele has no idea what he’s doing and hardly fights back before getting downed.
All the while he made sure to melee us to stop us from healing between HS.

So this wasn’t a bogstandard thief, this guy knew what he was doing, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.
:v

WvW… should have known it. Sorry man, I can’t be bothered to take input from WvW experience serious when it comes to game balance. In WvW there is a thing called “Gear Imbalance”, in sPvP a Heartseeker won’t be that effective. The developers are not concerned with “balance” in WvW, only in sPvP. WvW was designed to be large scale imbalanced PvP.

WvW is a great place to look at balance. You’re looking at a much bigger crowd size to take data from. sPvP has it’s place, but don’t go getting all high and mighty because you refuse to play WvW.

TheRamosOnline.2670:

Blazer Hellsing, I really do wish it was.
The guardian in my guild whispered me to give him a hand with a thief who was grieving him in the EB puzzle, I went inside and almost as soon as I loaded, PHWOMP!
I’m pulled down, locked down, dead.
Didn’t even get to see him, the render engine wasn’t having it.
So after a respawn, I get some guildies together and give it another whirl; we wanted to clear the puzzle anyway.
The 4 of us go inside, coast is clear.
We jump down, phwamp. Guardian at 50%. Guardian at 10%. Guardian down.
Still can’t see what’s doing it. Engie down. Didn’t even notice his HP falling. Now I’m getting attacked. Still can’t see the thief. I pop every field I have ready, thief finally visible but I’m downed. Ele has no idea what he’s doing and hardly fights back before getting downed.
All the while he made sure to melee us to stop us from healing between HS.

So this wasn’t a bogstandard thief, this guy knew what he was doing, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.
:v

If you can’t see him and he’s attacking you then its a stealth bug where you can hit people while still in stealth, it happened to by in WvW by two different thieves, they would go in hide and still be able to attack you, i don’t know if it’s a bug or not, but i want that kitten they were rolling on.

Calysto.7469:

WvW is a great place to look at balance. You’re looking at a much bigger crowd size to take data from. sPvP has it’s place, but don’t go getting all high and mighty because you refuse to play WvW.

Great comedy, thank you.

Calysto.7469:

WvW is a great place to look at balance. You’re looking at a much bigger crowd size to take data from. sPvP has it’s place, but don’t go getting all high and mighty because you refuse to play WvW.

In WvW, you can solve any problem by throwing more people at it. Balancing is to be done in a controlled environment, where you can be certain of all the factors at play.

Lets actually go back to OP’s question and not divert our attention to a situation where 3-4 people died because the server didn’t render.

No, heartseeker doesn’t kill people instantaneously. No, heartseeker build is ineffective against other glass cannon builds.

@ Lan

Agreed, Heartseeker spam is inefficient at best. Relatively easy to dodge, low initial damage, burn out of initiative quickly.

@ OP
There is no ‘correct’ way to play HS spam in the way you imply. It is literally button mashing skill 2, usually with Haste. If there were two targets, I’d rather spam Dancing Dagger if I was going to spam anything.

@ no one in particular
Ever see the average Heartseeker spammer go against a Backstab stealth build? It would be kind of amusing if it wasn’t so sad. Mostly involves the Heartseeker spammer button mashing 2 into nothing, burning all their initiative and then either dying or running away.

edit: them typos

Heartseeker thieves is only effective when the target is at 50% health or below, usually in WvW, roll a glass cannon, find a zerg to go raid with, when they meet an opposing team, just pull out your shortbow and wait for someone to have 50% health and then you can go ape kitten on them with HS.

672 against a foe already low on health, against a full health foe it’s barely more then some auto-attack-1 skills

Leap and strike your foe. The less health your target has, the more damage you cause.
100%-50%: 336
50%-25%: 504
25%-0%: 672
Combo Finisher: Leap
Range: 450

You have to trait to get damage and when you do you can not also trait for mobility or survivability, there is no thief traited that hits 5k HS ánd can repeatedly dodge away from retaliation.