Guild Wars 2

Improvements:

1. Bound naturally goes backwards when it should naturally move forward (Dash should work similarly). Players could still directional it where they want. Currently it feels awkward at least for a while.

2. Bound’s coefficient is listed as 1.75. Unfortunately Bound doesn’t use the players weapon to calculate its damage. Instead it hits like a player has no weapon equipped. This makes its damage fairly anemic even with a crit. Bound should hit with full weapon strength. Currently it does less damage than Mug.

Bug(?): The AoE is listed as being the same effective AoE range as Vault but it is much more difficult to land. Something is off I think.

I agree that the AOE radius seems lower than what tooltip says. It feels more like 120.

I do not agree damage on bound anemic. I can easily generate 6 k bounds on crit. Mug can not Crit. Added to that the bound damage is AOE hitting to 5 targets, is coupled with a nice evade and generates 10 percent more damage in followup attacks. Unlike a mug I do not have to wait 21 seconds for the next bound. It also a leap finisher which is significant.

I am still unclear on the issues with the direction of evade. If V default used to dodge on any of the three you will dodge “backwards”. I tend to use LR button depressed to move forward with a third mouse button bound to my dodge and this always gets bound going forward to the enemy.

Now I do not PvP but if you really want to see the damage potential of a bound try p/p at night in wvw. Use sigil of night one pistol and seawood salad as food. I use DD runes. If you continue to move as you unload and than bound into an enemy with might stacks on you will get some huge damage off bound.

babazhook.6805:

I do not agree damage on bound anemic. I can easily generate 6 k bounds on crit. Mug can not Crit. Added to that the bound damage is AOE hitting to 5 targets, is coupled with a nice evade and generates 10 percent more damage in followup attacks. Unlike a mug I do not have to wait 21 seconds for the next bound. It also a leap finisher which is significant.

Unmodified Bound does around 35% of a Vault which means if you can get Bound to 6k you can get Vault to 18k on a hit. I am not saying it cannot be done but the stars have to align for that kind of damage. Mug is a first tier trait that also has a healing component and triggers sigils. Bound is a GM trait that can barely stack up to Mug and certainly pales in comparison to Dash. No reason Bound shouldn’t use the attack weapon and all that it entails. If it is too strong, drop the coefficient but don’t effectively hide the attack type.

babazhook.6805:

I am still unclear on the issues with the direction of evade. If V default used to dodge on any of the three you will dodge “backwards”. I tend to use LR button depressed to move forward with a third mouse button bound to my dodge and this always gets bound going forward to the enemy.

Bound should move forward by default just as Dash should. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for Bound or Dash to naturally move backward. Currently both skills need two keys to operate in their typical usage (press forward, then Bound rather than just Bound). Doesn’t sound like much, but it feels awkward when first using the skill and wastes keystrokes.

A target circle for Bound would be nice as well. Right now Bound is clunky and requires considerable practice compared to traditional skills.

Straegen.2938:

Improvements:

1. Bound naturally goes backwards when it should naturally move forward (Dash should work similarly). Players could still directional it where they want. Currently it feels awkward at least for a while.

2. Bound’s coefficient is listed as 1.75. Unfortunately Bound doesn’t use the players weapon to calculate its damage. Instead it hits like a player has no weapon equipped. This makes its damage fairly anemic even with a crit. Bound should hit with full weapon strength. Currently it does less damage than Mug.

Bug(?): The AoE is listed as being the same effective AoE range as Vault but it is much more difficult to land. Something is off I think.

No bound needs to be toned down actually. 1st It’s ability to crit should be removed. 2nd It should lose it leaps finisher.

^ what this guy said.

To the dodge and it moving forward. I can not agree with your suggestion as it very much a 6 of these half dozen of the other type thing.

I use dodge as often to get out of trouble as in to it and the default dodge moving you back will often take you out of fields or an attack such as a hundred blades. I want that to be infallible and as easy to use as possible. I can deal with a missed attack. It much more dangerous to bungle an escape .

When I do use that dodge I also want to face the enemy when it ends and not need another keystroke if I dodge to the other side of them so as to have to about face.

Azukas.1426:

No bound needs to be toned down actually. 1st It’s ability to crit should be removed. 2nd It should lose it leaps finisher.

So basically gut the trait so the few that do use it stop… hmmmm.

Non crit with 3k power against an NPC creature does 1.5k damage or less. Vault does around 4.5k. If it couldn’t crit, the best a player would see against an armored opponent would be less than 1k.

Remove its finisher… then it would be completely pointless as most take it as a utility with bonus damage. Why would you want to remove the leap finisher?

If they made your suggested changes it would basically be a GM trait that isn’t as good as a minor trait like Lead Attacks.

No.

1.) All dodges by default go backwards. Pointless to change that as that’s a core game mechanic and keeping character behavior control between classes and specs constant should be considered important.

2.) 1.75 is an insane coefficient and it would need to get massively nerfed if given weapon damage scaling. It already hits ridiculously hard at an upwards of 5k regularly, and in a build like mine, closer to 8k, which is ridiculous.

It shouldn’t have a leap finisher imho. It provides so much unnecesarry extra utility to OH pistol and rewards spamming for no reason, often rewarding thieves who can’t manage their initiative by still giving them stealth access and extra damage instead of punishing them for misplaying. Daredevil as a whole is stupidly easy-mode. There’s no reason to further buff the dodges when it’s the dodges and EA alone that make Daredevil as low-skill and easy as it is. S/P and P/P either should be re-examined if stealth access is essential, or more support given to builds which do not feature stealth access in general. I prefer the latter.

I find that most of the time I prefer dash. Its nice to be able to stealth and then dash away even if your build has very little stealth. Dash without stealth feels superior as well.

Bound is kinda wonky. I feel when I use it I have to be more careful than usual when I disengage a fight. Bound also puts you closer to melee class range so it may benefit a melee class to eat your bound and then burst you or time their burst right after you hit the ground.

DeceiverX.8361:

No.

1.) All dodges by default go backwards. Pointless to change that as that’s a core game mechanic and keeping character behavior control between classes and specs constant should be considered important.

2.) 1.75 is an insane coefficient and it would need to get massively nerfed if given weapon damage scaling. It already hits ridiculously hard at an upwards of 5k regularly, and in a build like mine, closer to 8k, which is ridiculous.

It shouldn’t have a leap finisher imho. It provides so much unnecesarry extra utility to OH pistol and rewards spamming for no reason, often rewarding thieves who can’t manage their initiative by still giving them stealth access and extra damage instead of punishing them for misplaying. Daredevil as a whole is stupidly easy-mode. There’s no reason to further buff the dodges when it’s the dodges and EA alone that make Daredevil as low-skill and easy as it is. S/P and P/P either should be re-examined if stealth access is essential, or more support given to builds which do not feature stealth access in general. I prefer the latter.

The problem is, what would you give S/P and P/P in place of the stealth from the leap finisher? That utility is only really unnecessary on D/P, the stealth really opens up both of those sets and removing the leap finisher would be a much bigger nerf to those sets than D/P all told.

Other than that, I agree with what you said. The damage is great, and dodges are defensive in nature so having them go backwards by default is fine.

Simply, they don’t. Or they run Blinding Powder and blast the smoke field with a stealth skill to gain 6s of stealth, use shortbow’s blast OOC, use SR, blast or leap Smoke Screen using shortbow or MH dagger, or from an ally, or run alternate set D/P for stealth attack/ganks. P/P and S/P aren’t really designed to have stealth; OH pistol has plenty of disruption, MH pistol has a brief immob built in to help get the Unloads working (which with recent buffs has absolutely astronomical damage), and the benefit of 900 range. Pistol Whip as an attack from stealth is one of the most devastating possible, since it inflicts a stun and the damage of almost 1.5 backstabs on top of an immunity evade. And it’s on MH sword such that it has a proper disengage via IS/IR if it finds itself in trouble.

And then it adds another 10% damage for the already-hardest-hitting abilities on the thief. You can build quite durably or not invest in much damage and still get 20k Pistol Whips and Unloads in WvW, while doing so for Backstab requires all three trait lines and all utilities burned for signets to do so.

There does need to some love for the less-used sets, but I think the leap finisher was a lazy idea to try and blanket the real problems and it again continued to give more options/advantages to OH pistol (particularly D/P) to keep overshadowing the OH dagger, which is already in a bad place.

I’ll toss this nugget in as well, something I said as to the nature of why Bound shouldn’t be considered as an important part of the OH pistol’s kit, and thus, I don’t think should provide stealth, and rather that other weapons need a re-investigation:

Basing OH pistol’s utility based on Daredevil’s Bound is short-sighted.
When the next round of power creep comes to the thief in the form of the next elite specialization, what then? Will all X/P players, particularly S/P, find themselves at a loss since the new shiny will prevent them from gaining stealth access and thus be stuck with a not-as-viable kit? Then what? Ask for changes to make BP just innately give stealth? Then what of OH dagger? This is obviously a slippery slope.

people defending bound… there is no logical reason whny i can random dodge into people and hit them for 4-5k. so silly

Well, some do because I do, and I’m not the only thief I’ve seen running bound like this. I used to play with blinding powder and SA with S/P between the June patch and HoT, honestly bound is much better. I can understand your point about bound not being considered an essential part of offhand pistol’s kit, but if the next elite spec gave something different that made those sets viable in a different way, that would also be fine with me. If I wanted stealth on S/P I could use daredevil, and I’d use the new elite spec for the new mechanic. Assuming they actually give us a new mechanic this time, and don’t just nerf one of our existing traitlines in order to resell it to us.

I honestly don’t have a problem with being tied to particular traits for a particular playstyle though. If anything, I think we have a lack of such meaningful traits what with critical strikes only really offering damage etc. And as far as defending bound goes, I’d sooner lose the damage than the leap finisher, since the leap finisher enables new playstyles while the damage is straight up power creep.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

people defending bound… there is no logical reason whny i can random dodge into people and hit them for 4-5k. so silly

Except it doesn’t unless everyone involved is pure glass. Damage against 2.5k armor with 3k power:

(690 * 3000 * 1.75) / 2500 = around 1450

Add in a crit with 180 ferocity:

1450 * 1.62 = around 2350

So to get a 5k crit a player has to be around 4000 power, 225 ferocity hitting a base toughness player with light armor…. and they have to have several damage modifiers (at least 20%):

((690 * 4000 * 1.75) / 1920) * 1.65 = around 4150

Typically Bound hits for well less than 1k on heavy armored players.

Except it does. Regularly. Especially when augmented with boons.

A thief not having at least 20% damage modifiers is playing a full-defensive build.

Trickery and DA alone push at minimum 25%.

Something isn’t right with what you’re saying.

Tested just now using standard DA/Tr/DrD using Marauder gear + Pack runes, 187 crit damage 2225 power, no stacks of Lead Attacks, no conditions, and no Executioner bonus. Heavy Golem has 2597 armor.

I then switched to Scholar Runes and CS using a Signets of power to get my stats to 3k power and reflect the precision/ferocity bonus of roughly 216% in WvW using a mixed berserker/marauder/berserker+valk build with 10 might. Still at 2600 armor.

On my actual DA/CS/Tr stacked thief built for damage which does actually run close to 4k power and 261 critical damage + 70% damage modifiers, the damage would calculate well over 8k per bound in WvW on 2500 armor.

I have no idea what you’re talking about in terms of bound dealing low damage. Sounds to me like you’re not actually playing for damage in your build… like at all.

Or, more likely, you’re believing the damage is what it is when negation effects like Frost armor, protection, and other mitigation are being applied by other specs.

In which case the problem is the mitigation (which is nothing new) and not bound dealing too little damage.

Learn to bind skills to your mouse. I have dodge on there and choosing a direction to dodge is now effortless.

ParanoidKami.2867:

Learn to bind skills to your mouse. I have dodge on there and choosing a direction to dodge is now effortless.

I won’t go into details but I do run that way. I actually run a pretty advanced setup with the Action Camera. With that setup Bound still felt clunky in the beginning and still sort of does. I think it not having a target reticle yet functioning as a naturally backward attack is just strange.

DeceiverX.8361:

Tested just now using standard DA/Tr/DrD using Marauder gear + Pack runes, 187 crit damage 2225 power, no stacks of Lead Attacks, no conditions, and no Executioner bonus. Heavy Golem has 2597 armor.

I got an average of 1160 across 50 non-crit attacks in sPvP with 2289 power, no traits outside of minor SA/Acro/DD with the exception of Bound and no weapons. This is near what I expected.

The strangeness was the 2275 crit average which should be very high with a 210 ferocity. Not sure what is going on there. I need to check the math against the wiki since 210 ferocity should be a 1.74 additive not 2.15.

DeceiverX.8361:

On my actual DA/CS/Tr stacked thief built for damage which does actually run close to 4k power and 261 critical damage + 70% damage modifiers, the damage would calculate well over 8k per bound in WvW on 2500 armor.

I have no idea what you’re talking about in terms of bound dealing low damage. Sounds to me like you’re not actually playing for damage in your build… like at all.

Dude. You have to remember you run an abuse case build. The avg power thief is running marauder/pack runes. Which his numbers are in line with. Even running an offensive lines.

Straegen.2938:

The strangeness was the 2275 crit average which should be very high with a 210 ferocity. Not sure what is going on there. I need to check the math against the wiki since 210 ferocity should be a 1.74 additive not 2.15.

Nope. crit damage is multiplicative. Ferocity to crit damage is simply divide by 15 add 150.

As for my own build, I run about 2456 power before bloodlust. With furry up, 262.5% crit damage.

((690 <-min weap str + 762) /2 * 2456<-power * 1.75 <-coefficient) * (1.1 <-bound * 1.07 <-havok mastery * 1.1 <-ferocious strikes * 1.07 <-flawless strike * 2.625 <- crit multiplier) / (2500 <-armor)

= 4539 damage and I left out lead attacks. I also don’t run force.

I hit the amount above regularly and that’s more on the low side. Maxing out bloodlust is roughly another 500 damage. Maxing out on might on top of bloodlust brings it up to 7k per bound on a 2500 armor target. Sounds Insane right? Before you say I am pure glass, I have 1601vit but base armor because you can get more effective health out of vit than toughness on thief. Anyways…

The thing to take away from this is none of the numbers matter for the most part. Yes they are high in wvw and pve, but neither of those matter because they are not actively balanced. Almost everything in wvw can become an abuse case optimization.

In contrast if you were to even attempt to run full glass in spvp (zerker scholar), you might get 3k bounds because stats are so much lower thus all our percentile scalers mean next nothing. Just because of stat discrepancies we hit like a wet noodle and it accounts for many skills hitting twice as much on thief in wvw than they would in spvp.