Guild Wars 2

So I’ve loved S/D since the beginning of this game. It was my favorite weapon set on any class. I actually stopped playing this game for 6 months when inf. strike/return was first made useless since it was my favorite skill and made me feel like nightcrawler.

I can see that it was on the OP side since it was a stun breaker. But why remove stun break AND also add a cast time (that seems longer than .5 seconds IMO)???

Don’t want it to be a stun break?.. fine, remove the cast time at least. Since this new patch S/D is becoming pretty useless across the board, how bout giving it some love it deserves.

For the record I’m talking from a PVE/WvW perspective.
Not sure why all the hate on S/D from the devs. It’s one of the hardest sets to learn and you never hear anyone saying how cheesy it is.

Thanks for pigeonholing us into S/P cheesyness in dungeons and p/d cheesyness in wvw. That’s fun.. i guess.. smh.

ya the cast time has ben unwanted sense the change

Reroll ranger or anything other than teef!

The only issue I have with the cast time is that it seems a bit sluggish, almost like it has additional pre-cast frames or something that end up making it longer than a half second. It might just be in my head though, but I sometimes get a feeling of unresponsiveness when using it.

I still think having a cast time on it is warranted though. If they were to remove the cast time, it should not receive its stun breaker functionality back though. That was just way too strong.

obviously ….
taking away the stun breaker from S/d was a good idea ….
but adding a cast time to it was a bad idea.

how can u see a cc coming and dodge it in time if there is a cast time in the way !

when u have a cast time in the way like that …
u are just predicting attacks and hoping for the best

You should w8 another 6 months for more “balance killing the game changes”. Im so happy i changed this game seriously and very sad because it was so good game..

I don’t care about the stunbreaker nor teleporting while stunned.
But the cast time severely ruined the skill, pretty much changed the whole set,
from a set balanced across all skills (except 4) into a set with most of its weight on #3.

I remember I used pretty much all weapon skills to take down my opponents, even Dancing Dagger which I often regretted using !

Combos like CnD>Tactical Strike could be used often in order to unload an AA chain, then teleport out with 2 before getting slamdunkdafunk’d.

Infiltrator’s Return could be used to instantly get out of kitten (AoE) before getting rek’d.

and ofc FS>LS times when it was useful, could be against slow and telegraphed attacks, and when there were any specific boons to be stolen.

After the nerf I felt pretty much left with #2 to enter combat, #3 spam and some auto attack chains, ofc some cnds to stealth and reposition/escape. Haven’t tried it after #3 got nerfed into the ground as well.

This is just a visual graph of the direction I felt the nerf threw the set, it’s not based on percentage, just a visual comparison of usefulness and usage from my PoV.
(I used to play 10/30/0/0/30, and I felt competitive with quite minimal dodging by using all weapon skills, positioning etc. together)

/incorporate.thiefbuff
…..
…..
Does.not.compute——virus activated
ERROR→ERROR→ERROR
DELETE.THIEFS
SPELLING.ERROR
SERVER DISRUPTION

And that is how lag is created ladies and gentlemen.

It never should have been changed. Jumper and other “top” players balked at the suggestion, and explained why it was an awful, awful idea.

Many countersuggestions were had, the best being “Leave it instant cast but unusable while stunned/using another skill”. This would have been fair and balanced.

But no, it was butchered. Jumper posted shortly after the patch to confirm that yes, every issue he foresaw with the skill change was included with the patch.

You know the best part? Dev’s claimed that the primary reason the change was put in place was because of how it facilitated stomps. Apparently, some thieves were using IS to get to a downed target, SSing back, then using steal/is to port back to their target for the stomp. Ignoring the fact that I’d never seen a thief do that ever, 5 init and a 30s CD (or 35s CD, since 2/6/0/6/0 was the meta at the time) was much too powerful to secure a stomp on the class most vulnerable while stomping. Lawl.

@evilapprentice

It was easy to use IS under clock tower, down somebody upstairs, teleport downstairs with IF while casting stomp and come back with steal.

A thief that used IS/IR well was almost unkillable, unless jumped with huge burst. Dagger was really supbar, not to mention pistol, while dagger offhand beaten pistol offhand because of cheap #3 that had to be nerfed.

Anyway, I would revert the change, with IR being just unable to be cast under stun, without that horrible skill que that made it 1 sec cast time.

Dagins.5163:

@evilapprentice

It was easy to use IS under clock tower, down somebody upstairs, teleport downstairs with IF while casting stomp and come back with steal.

That’s an issue with Shadowstep skills not interacting with clocktower correctly. It’s a bug and should have been fixed, this interaction isn’t a valid reason for nerfing the entire skill. IIRC, this bug still exists.