Guild Wars 2

Recently came back to the game from a break and had some fun rehashing an elite spec that I posted posted a while back. I know it’s probably moot after seeing the leaks but whatever I had a good time putting it together. I hope you enjoy reading it and let me know what you think.

The Dart is a rifle user that is elusive though speed and has an very indirect attack style. It uses stolen “technology” from all of the player races of the game (gadgets loosely). The rifle technique was lifted from the order of whispers the rest should be obvious.

The first three rifle skills say ‘shoot into the shadows.’ That’s my way of describing shooting a bullet into ‘somewhere’ and it come out ‘somewhere’ else. You can think of it as shadow stepping a bullet if it helps. The activation range for all of these skill are 900 units but the bullets themselves can travel 1200 units.

New mechanic – Hook and Reel
When you steal you drop a reel at your old location and attach a hook to your target at your new location. There is a visible chain between the two. The reel will start pulling your target slowly at first then more quickly the closer it gets to the reel. Your target can escape the hook by dodging off, destroying the reel or having other protection against pulls.

Rifle:
0. Departing Shot – (Stealth Attack) Shadow step in a line though your target chilling and dazing any foes you pass though.
1. Distraction Shot – Your shoot into the shadows and your bullets advance toward your target from random locations. Has a chance to cause confusion. You shoot at the target standing in front of you but the bullet comes from behind or from the side of your target
2. Delayed Shot – You shoot into the shadows and the bullet emerges 1.5 later. Applies a .5 slow. You shoot and move but the bullet come from where you were not from where you are
3. Double Shot – You shoot a piercing shot that travel and additional 300 units after it strikes its primary target then it enters the shadows returning to the to the point where it started and travel the same path again.
4. Detonation Shot – You shoot an explosive round that sticks to you target and explodes after a short delay / Discharge (flip over skill) send a second explosive round that will immediately detonate the first causing a larger explosion that damages foes near your target. Blast finisher.
5. Debilitating Shot – You shot a bullet that adds to the duration of up to three conditions on the target (prioritizes conditions with the least amount of time) Range finisher

Utilities:

Plead the sixth (Heal) – Heal yourself by rolling a small six sided human relic with the images of the human gods on each side. Gain swiftness and one of the following effects depending on which side lands face up.
Dwayna – Gain regeneration
Balthazar – Next few attacks cause burning
Melandru – Summon an oakheart that entangles nearby foes
Lyssa – Convert conditions to boons
Grenth – gain frost aura
Komir – Gain resistance

Asura Evasion Device – Your next three dodges causes you to teleport instead of roll. Gain blur at the end of each teleport

Cragstead Ale – Cures fear, chilled and weakness. Gain eight seconds of might each second for the next seven seconds

Charr Karka Mech – Release three mechanical karaka hatchlings that inflect blind, cripple and bleeding. Create lightning field when destroyed

Waterberry Seeds – Toss three seeds on the ground that quickly grow and fill with liquid. Allies that step on them create a water field that extends the duration of currently active buffs.

Toxic dart (elite) – Target takes 100 damage for each stack of poison and 50 damage for each stack of bleeding immediately (damage capped at 25 stacks). In addition the target begins to hallucinating (see toxic pollen). The hallucinations do heavy damage but your target recovers from hallucinated damage if not defeated before the hallucination ends. Blowgun animation

Traits:

Minor – T1
Shifting Shots – Gain Access to gadget skill category and rifle weapon type. Stealing triggers hook and reel.

Major – T1
Forceful Flanking – Gain might when you strike from behind or the side
Hurried Inspiration – Nearby allies lose movement impairing conditions when you crit
Fleeting Confusion – You gain swiftness when attacking confused foes and increase the duration of the confusion you inflict

Minor- T2
Dizzying Speed – Gain super speed (short duration) when you gain swiftness

Major – T2
Frenzied Firing – When wielding a rifle, successfully attacking from behind or the side has a chance to increase initiative regeneration
Rapid Ricochet – Ranged critical strikes trigger distraction shots that hit foes near your target
Muscle Memory – Reduces the cooldown on gadgets. Your movements are so smooth when using a gadget nearby opponents lose confidence becoming slow to react or confused about how to respond.

Minor – T3
Dig Deep – You have a chance to gain quickness (short duration) when you attack while moving

Major – T3
Tactical Superiority – Your attacks have the chance to inflict slow when you are under the effects of quickness
Viscous Shadows – Your critical attacks cause shadows to congeal on your target. Each critical strike increases the likelihood of spawning a tiny black ooze. (Tiny black ooze: attacks cause torment and can create a chilling dark field)
Punishing Pace – Gain one second of swiftness, quickness or vigor each time you use initiative

Just read though this again and realized that I forget the stealth attack.

Departing Shot – Shadow step in a line though your target chilling and dazing any foes you pass though.

Sounds like a fun spec to play and a tough one to fight. I like it though. Nice job

Ok I didn’t see this coming… over 200 views and no naysayers. From this group it must mean I nailed it this time!

And thanks Shadowpass.

For one, the next spec has already been leaked – purportedly called the Deadeye which uses a rifle. I have no idea if what I suggested will have any bearing on that whatsoever. I think a lot of enthusiasm for suggestions and so on has dropped off since the leaks were announced.

I’m going to be critical of your idea here, and to set it straight, I mean you no offense. Having taken a ton of time to suggest the Deadeye in full detail, I understand the process of refining ideas like this can take some time and a lot of drafting. Friends of mine were just as critical in its earliest versions of the proposal’s development and so on.

As for the spec itself:

The concept just seems very disjoint and doesn’t factor much of core thief into it.

Hook and Reel is an interesting idea but needs refinement and clarity. Is the opponent repeatedly dazed/how does the pull mechanically work while allowing them to dodge and break free of the chain? How durable is the chain? How realistic is it that this skill will never work from the slowness of the pull if it can be negated by a dodge roll? Consider your interaction with core melee-only kits. How does a thief cope with the fact their gap-close is now a semi-gap-opener? Does the thief always want this? What about in other formats where stability is permanent? How does the pull interact with break bars in PvE or permanent stability in WvW? Is it a “single” CC or many small ones? Does this change the power-level of the skill in former questions?

RNG on a tight-control profession tends to not mix well. Improv is passable but mostly because DrD will run Phys/Deception/Venom/Signet or core thief Trick/Deception/Signet/Venom, and it used heavily for the re-use of stolen skill since Exec is mediocre in the greater context of a fight.

Cultural-related skills… I’d look into renaming and re-thinking your utilities. No offense, but there is zero reason a charr should be gaining boons from human gods, and so on. I wasn’t even aware these were gadgets until I started reading traits.

The heal is needlessly complicated. Extra VFX clutter hurts performance and the animation of “rolling” something would take too long to make it worthwhile in PvP environments. I’d say keep RNG boons to mesmers (which I still think shouldn’t exist) and pursue some other option entirely.

Hallucination mechanics aren’t really fun for PvP environments and tbh made me and some other players noxious with the VFX. This would get really out of hand in WvW. Give toxic dart some kind of power scaling; the base damage is terrible even at capped stacks for anything other than Dire/TB.

Debilitating Shot and Fleeting Confusion really start breaking things in WvW.

Clarify the mechanics of Muscle Memory.

Rapid Ricochet is overpowered for Shortbow and P/P if it’s 100%.

Waterberry Seeds needs a clarification – Boons or Buffs? Buff extensions would break all forms of PvP such as EP/DP warrior and so on. Boons would be broken quickly via Dig Deep + Tac Superiority. Again, more RNG stuff, this time doubly-stacked. I should beat an opponent by out-playing him and vice versa where everyone’s moves are calculated, not having random super-powered attacks.

Vicious Shadows and ooze have no descriptors at all. What does this trait do?

Punishing Pace is downright overpowered given +boon duration gear on top of aforementioned boon-stacking problems with waterberry seeds.

The idea is unique which is nice and Hook and Reel has some very interesting playmaking possibilities within sPvP, but the idea needs a lot of refinement and in general some better planning about the interactions with the rest of the thief’s kit as well as the rest of the game, be it in sPvP, WvW, PvE, raiding, etc.

Ahh there you are Deceiver X. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me. Yes I know about the leak. Did you know that there has been Deadeyes in the game since launch? In fact, there is one in the human story line so it’s likely that your suggestion has no influence at all on the new spec.

Hook and Reel
Anyway hook and reel’s pull would work like gravity well pulling the target to a fixed point. As far as it working for the core spec we have pistol and shortbow that would benefit from a “semi-gap-opener” you can also make a case that sword/dagger could get some use out of it as well. That’s three out of four of our land weapons that has some use for the new mechanic and I would also add harpoon gun to that list as well. Your critique is not founded.

Hook and Reel would have different uses in different game modes. In PVE the pull would work as described. It can also be used to damage breakbars. In PVP it can be used to force a dodge. I’m no PVP expert but I suspect that would be useful. However your opponent chooses to respond to it space is created.

The heal
The change to improvisation was actually a suggestion I made that the devs picked up slightly modified so we just disagree about that and RGN skills. If not overused they can make you pay attention to what’s going on. I assume this critique is for the heal. I take your point and disagree for the reason above. In addition I never detailed how any of the skills would look so I don’t know where your coming from about the VFX. I’m agnostic to visual. The devs would decide what looks best.

Utilities
As far as the cultural elements, I specifically wanted to create a spec that would be unique to Tyria. I have a deep appreciation for the world that the devs created and I wanted to show them that. I hope when they are designing this next batch of elite specs they take the time to pat themselves on the back by creating something that reflects the Tyria’s uniqueness.

The Elite
Again I don’t understand your objection to hallucinations. I don’t think they have ever been used in PVP. I only remember them around the toxic offshoots. To be clear there are two types of damage. 1. The instant damage that occurs when your target has poison/bleeding. This can influenced by stats. 2. Hallucination damage not affected by stats. If you manage to defeat your opponent the elite can be responsible for a lot of damage when combined. I don’t know what the right balance is but I was conservative because the damage can get out of hand on large fights with huge stacks of poison/bleeding

Debilitating Shot
Intended to be a support skill. I envision a low damage skill that relies on party members to be effective.

Muscle Memory
Enemies in your immediate vicinity are inflected with confusion or slow when you use a gadget.

Rapid Ricochet
On all crits but with a cooldown. No I don’t know what the cool down number should be

Waterberry Seeds
Boons. I’m thinking about something like a 30% increase on the level of Facet of Nature from a Herald. Has Herald broken PVP?

Vicious Shadows
Ok this one is weird and I probably let my imagination run away from me. So the idea is that with all of the shadow stepping you’re bound to snag some of the shadow on your weapons in the process… and when that happens … you know mixed with the blood of your opponent … sentience in the form of tiny black oozes. These oozes will act like other oozes in the game and will produce dark fields, inflict torment and chill.

Punishing Pace
So the big secret is that quickness on this spec really only affects auto attack. All of the other skill are instant so it sounds good on paper but has limited impact. Secondly the spec is designed to have perma swiftness. The real potential problem is the vigor but having the other two boons in the queue helps to mitigate that issue.

I was aware of that – it’s actually where I got the name to begin with; Deadeye Della is in my suggestion’s post. We also have Deadeye Dunwell. I doubt they used anything more than the name in the leaks given the skill icons being so vastly different in theme than what I proposed, and the recent balance decisions not going in favor of what I proposed at all.

As for your spec:

Hook and Reel:
Gap-openers aside from P/P really don’t benefit the thief much, S/D would just waste initiative by using IS an extra time or steal when not opportune, and "Burn even more resources when avoiding steal or take extra punishment via a 20s GWell is honestly just not a good idea for the health of the game in general when you realize baseline endurance refills at one bar every 10s. This ability basically reduces enemy dodges to one which is quite punishing, especially given steal is a non-cast ability with so much extra on it as it is. The playmaking via the skill alone for +1 is also insane, and two Darts would be able to pretty much permanently deny a target a dodge at all without major CC punishment.

For the heal:
VFX, quote from you on the skill:
“rolling a small six sided human relic with the images of the human gods on each side”

RNG is in more than one location in this spec. The heal’s boons, Distraction Shot, Frenzied Firing, Dig Deep, and Tac superiority all use RNG.

It’s also NEVER a good thing for competitive play, especially with potent effects. One of the biggest complaints regarding sPvP skillplay was Fire/Air sigils providing too much without any way to deal with them or predict them.

Utilities
Coupling world lore to character abilities in an RPG almost always a bad move, and doing so only within existing lore is unfitting for the game’s current lore direction, the expansion content, and in respects to the greater notion that the thief has no real reason to be connected to it mechanically, or why gadgets of all things should be. If your utilities were facets or for the revenant, then I would see it 100% fitting, but it just has no context and isn’t fitting to the game. You might like it, and that’s fine, but it simply doesn’t make sense on pretty much every level.

The Elite
Again, this comes down to “fun” concerns and VFX. A lot of people actively dislike and disliked playing against this mechanic as a concept. It also begs problems in multiplayer scenarios, where the victim might be hallucinating while other players see him as just being a bad player spamming keys hitting air or something. It makes a mess of larger-than 1v1 encounter tech and opens up a can of worms for people bad-mouthing others for no good reason. There’s a mile-long list not to include this mechanic as part of a profession for many, many reasons, and at the end of the day, as you mentioned, it’s extremely difficult to balance; it forces opponents on the build-level to have an inherent strength or weakness based on arbitrary measures. A lot of the flow of control of the opponent leaves them, making the ability and consequently the profession itself just unfun to play against. HoT broke PvP and WvW for being un-fun. I see no reason to justify adding more of such mechanics.

Debilitating Shot
I recognize it’s a support skill. It doesn’t change the fact this skill is busted OP. I’m sorry, but unless it costs something like 10 initiative and barely affects the timers, this skill will break competitive modes or be entirely useless.

Rapid Ricochet:
As a protip, just add something like (ICD TBD) or something in the proposal to make it clear you understand its potency to help legitimize the suggestion. Even if you don’t know the numbers specifically, you should convey you know what you need to about the profession to not break it to be taken more seriously in general.

Waterberry Seeds
Yeah, Herald did break PvP WvW and is still breaking WvW. Further, FoN only applies to boons applied by the herald, not by anyone else. This is a seriously broken utility and again, would break the competitive modes.

Vicious Shadows
Should probably add that to the mechanic description. Dark fields are also very, very strong especially on projectile builds. Your profession already stacks a very wide array of conditions as well, which needs to be considered further in balance. I think chill is unnecessary and in general the skill doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the profession. Further, this goes back on the ICD thing; is there an ICD? I’d hope so, as unload, PW, and SA would break this trait pretty hard in Sinister/Rabid/Rampager gear due to how much poison could be applied from multi-hits. Limited opportunity to work with power/crit builds itself.

Punishing Pace
Again, bigger picture; you have the ability with Seeds to stack boons and boon duration, and this is a boon which is persistent on the character. You could easily swap weapons to say, S/P, P/P, or D/P and gain an insane amount of bonus damage from this trait.

Rifle and spec synergy needs to be made explicit with the rifle/spec or designed in a way to be compatible with the rest of the possibilities. There five other core trait lines, four other primary weapons, a number of overall kit possibilities, and a bunch of other existing utilities you need to consider first and foremost. Then you need to ask yourself if it works and is fair and fun for all other professions, too. A lot of GW2’s PvP right now isn’t fun nor fair, and is a major reason why people have left. Diversity and new things is great, but it needs to come with solid mechanics and a good understanding of the class and the rest of the game within the context of ultimately making the game more fun and interesting for everyone.

Can’t tell if you’re weapon is going for is condi or power and this isn’t reflected in the traits either. I would just drop the condi.

I would like to point out that this elite spec could easily be called “The Fart”.

0. Departing Shot – (Stealth Attack) Shadow step in a line though your target chilling and dazing any foes you pass though.

1. Distraction Shot – You shoot into the shadows and your gas advances toward your target from random locations. Has a chance to cause confusion. You shoot at the target standing in front of you but the gas comes from behind or from the side of your target

2. Delayed Shot – You shoot into the shadows and the gas emerges 1.5 later. Applies a .5 slow. You shoot and move but the gas comes from where you were, not from where you are

3. Double Shot – You shoot a piercing shot that travel and additional 300 units after it strikes its primary target then it enters the shadows returning to the to the point where it started and travel the same path again.

4. Detonation Shot – You shoot an explosive round that sticks to you target and explodes after a short delay / Discharge (flip over skill) send a second explosive round that will immediately detonate the first causing a larger explosion that damages foes near your target. Blast finisher.

5. Debilitating Shot – You shoot some gas that adds to the duration of up to three conditions on the target (prioritizes conditions with the least amount of time) Range finisher

Just sayin

Straegen.2938:

I would like to point out that this elite spec could easily be called “The Fart”.

Heh this made me laugh. Maybe there should be a spec built around flatulence. Let’s see you have poison, toxicity, aoe fields, maybe a fan looking focus, land air breathers… could work. Could be really crappy.

DeceiverX.8361:

For the heal:
VFX, quote from you on the skill:
“rolling a small six sided human relic with the images of the human gods on each side”

RNG is in more than one location in this spec. The heal’s boons, Distraction Shot, Frenzied Firing, Dig Deep, and Tac superiority all use RNG.

It’s also NEVER a good thing for competitive play, especially with potent effects. One of the biggest complaints regarding sPvP skillplay was Fire/Air sigils providing too much without any way to deal with them or predict them.

So the heal for this spec needs to be really good because the other natural choice is hide in shadows. If you don’t have a very strong option everyone would just use that. The randomness allows it to be strong but unreliable. Also I understand what you are saying about the visuals but I never intending there to be a long drawn out animation. You get a heal and a random effect immediately. The casing time can imply that you are rolling a die. Plus I’m really proud of the name. It’s super clever. Imagine a smiley with shades on here.

DeceiverX.8361:

The Elite
Again, this comes down to “fun” concerns and VFX. A lot of people actively dislike and disliked playing against this mechanic as a concept. It also begs problems in multiplayer scenarios, where the victim might be hallucinating while other players see him as just being a bad player spamming keys hitting air or something. It makes a mess of larger-than 1v1 encounter tech and opens up a can of worms for people bad-mouthing others for no good reason. …

No no no you are taking it to literally. If you’ve ever played around near a toxic offshoot you can be affected with hallucination. Everyone can see the things and fight them but in this case they would only target the thing you’ve attacked with the skill. The lore implication is that this class stole some “tech” from Scarlett.

DeceiverX.8361:

Debilitating Shot
I recognize it’s a support skill. It doesn’t change the fact this skill is busted OP. I’m sorry, but unless it costs something like 10 initiative and barely affects the timers, this skill will break competitive modes or be entirely useless.

So here’s another way to approach the skill; tell me if it makes any difference to you. Debilitating Shot copies three conditions on your target; basically adding a stack of each. This is really no more powerful than something a necro or mesmer could do. Also note it is in the last slot so it will cost more ini than all the other skills.

DeceiverX.8361:

Punishing Pace
Again, bigger picture; you have the ability with Seeds to stack boons and boon duration, and this is a boon which is persistent on the character. You could easily swap weapons to say, S/P, P/P, or D/P and gain an insane amount of bonus damage from this trait.

I see your point but I’m not convinced that it would be overpowered especially compared to what some of the other classes can do. You’ll run out of ini before it can become a real issue. For context unload spam would get you 3 seconds of haste if you are traited for trickery and if the rgn gods are kind.