[MOVIE] Power Necro vs Thief (balance discussion)
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You lost ALL credibility…
No, I didn’t. I made an argument, backed up with reasoning, based on facts. I never say anything that’s factually inaccurate. I also provide a possible fix. I was actively participating in the discussion, and just because you disagree doesn’t mean I lost credibility. What you’re doing here is avoiding the argument by saying that I have nothing of value to contribute.
I made an argument, but then backed it up with reasoning. You follow up your baseless accusation of lost credibility with several poorly-founded statements:
ALL thief attacks that apply bleed are underpowered
That’s a sweeping overstatement, and not adequately backed up with reasoning. I think you could definitely make an argument for some attacks being weak (pistol #1, for example), but the amount of AoE bleeding we can apply with Caltrops, Death Blossom, and Uncatchable is extremely powerful.
poison is also next to worthless.
I think you’re coming from a damage point of view, in which case I agree somewhat. Poison is equivalent to ~2 stacks of bleeding or 25% of the damage of burning, and given how easy it is to stack bleeding, that’s not very much. However, you’re making a big mistake in overlooking the -33% healing. Any bunker build is depending on high self-healing to keep them up (especially Elementalist), so hitting them with -33% healing is devastating to their defenses. You don’t just use poison for the damage.
Sweeping statements like this are almost never accurate. It’s better to look at specific skills/traits/whatever than to make a broad statement like that.
Also you exaggerate just like all the nerf thief posts, only in a masked version, saying its some super ranged set
I don’t really exaggerate. I had two main points. First off, P/D encourages 1115 spamming because the rest of the skills suck. I don’t think anyone is contesting that.
The second is that the mix of range and stealth could use some investigation in terms of balance. Basically, you can attack from range. The moment your enemy closes into melee, you vanish into stealth (dealing high damage with CnD), open a 900" gap, and hit them with the really powerful Sneak Attack. As soon as they get into melee, you can use CnD again and rinse/repeat. This makes kiting very nearly impossible against a P/D thief, and it also makes the intended counter to stealth (AoE control/damage) far less effective.
Sure, it’s not quite as easy as that sounds, but I still think Oozo raises a valid point (meaning it’s at least worth discussing), and I expanded on it.
TL;DR: It’s amazing what a Norn will go through to avoid their annual bath.
(edited by Dacromir.6207)
TL;DR: It’s amazing what a Norn will go through to avoid their annual bath.
?
That’s just a whimsical TLDR. It’s something that pleases my strange sense of humor, and sometimes makes people who skipped the post go back and actually read it. It’s also a sign that I spend too much time on Reddit :P
And again you don’t understand how the P/D Thief needs to be played. Every skill on our bar is a situational use except for two which is useless since condition damage doesn’t do more damage with vulnerability stacks. I use Dancing Dagger when I want to hit multiple people or to stop a runner. I use 3 if I need to get the hell away from melee range but I’m slowed/chilled/immobilized since I’ll still port away even if I can’t move. So that leaves my auto attack and CnD. For condition damage, I have auto attack and sneak attack, that’s all I have for bleeds. I have to constantly shoot, cnd, shoot and shoot some more to maintain those stacks or I do almost no damage.
In case you’re unsure or not willing to understand this, a Condition Thief doesn’t have any “really powerful Sneak Attacks” unless you consider 800~1200 damage assuming all 5 shots critically hit (and with a 4% critical chance, that’s not very often) to be “really powerful”. And my auto shots hit for a maximum of 450 on a crit. Most hits are in the 230~280 range depending on toughness and armor type. And CnD? My max hit from CnD as Condition is around 1200. So stop thinking just because a full on Berserker Backstab Thief can pull off 6~10k CnD bullkitten that somehow we can do it too. They build for pure hitting power, we build to bleed you to death. Our damage is the bleeds and bleed durations, not spike damage, not massive “sneak attacks”, just a slow boring death. Now if all 5 Pistol attacks lasted longer, did more damage and bled you, then sure we could use more than auto attack to hit you with, but it still wouldn’t change the fact that we’re not hitting you hard with anything, we’re just bleeding you to death over a 3~5 minute fight. Big difference if you know the builds or play a Thief.
(edited by Setima.8741)
You lost ALL credibility…
No, I didn’t. I made an argument, backed up with reasoning, based on facts. I never say anything that’s factually inaccurate. I also provide a possible fix. I was actively participating in the discussion, and just because you disagree doesn’t mean I lost credibility. What you’re doing here is avoiding the argument by saying that I have nothing of value to contribute.
I made an argument, but then backed it up with reasoning. You follow up your baseless accusation of lost credibility with several poorly-founded statements:
ALL thief attacks that apply bleed are underpowered
That’s a sweeping overstatement, and not adequately backed up with reasoning. I think you could definitely make an argument for some attacks being weak (pistol #1, for example), but the amount of AoE bleeding we can apply with Caltrops, Death Blossom, and Uncatchable is extremely powerful.
poison is also next to worthless.
I think you’re coming from a damage point of view, in which case I agree somewhat. Poison is equivalent to ~2 stacks of bleeding or 25% of the damage of , and given how easy it is to stack bleeding, that’s not very much. However, you’re making a big mistake in overlooking the -33% healing. Any bunker build is depending on high self-healing to keep them up (especially Elementalist), so hitting them with -33% healing is devastating to their defenses. You don’t just use poison for the damage.
Sweeping statements like this are almost never accurate. It’s better to look at specific skills/traits/whatever than to make a broad statement like that.
Also you exaggerate just like all the nerf thief posts, only in a masked version, saying its some super ranged set
I don’t really exaggerate. I had two main points. First off, P/D encourages 1115 spamming because the rest of the skills suck. I don’t think anyone is contesting that.
The second is that the mix of range and stealth could use some investigation in terms of balance. Basically, you can attack from range. The moment your enemy closes into melee, you vanish into stealth (dealing high damage with CnD), open a 900" gap, and hit them with the really powerful Sneak Attack. As soon as they get into melee, you can use CnD again and rinse/repeat. This makes kiting very nearly impossible against a P/D thief, and it also makes the intended counter to stealth (AoE control/damage) far less effective.
Sure, it’s not quite as easy as that sounds, but I still think Oozo raises a valid point (meaning it’s at least worth discussing), and I expanded on it.
TL;DR: It’s amazing what a Norn will go through to avoid their annual bath.
You failed again and still have not regained any credibility because you cut little pieces of my post to twist the context. You did lose all credibility because you posted misinformation, just like the OP, and now you are flip flopping my in the last part by agreeing with me… just laughable.
So let’s reiterate;
Just because 2 attacks are spammed or given the perception of being spammed it does not make them overpowered. They COULD in fact be underpowered and either way none of the other attacks offer ANY benefit to the build. If you actually played thief or made one to try to understand how they work, you wouldn’t be so ignorant. -33% healing is nothing to write home about, it would be different if poison naturally had a 10s+ duration and was harder to remove but its not that way. Also in practice, any DoT that ticks slower is actually going to do even less damage because that is more time in between ticks a condition remover can be used and you cannot stack something like poison, which if changed would actually make it useful (like the damage would tick faster like a bleed but the healing debuff wouldnt say double or anything).
Once you feel like posting actual information with REAL reasoning to back it up (like you claim but fail to do) I will be happy to discuss it further, but if you want you can continue to argue basically that Blue is not a color, when clearly it is.
TL;DR: It’s amazing what a Norn will go through to avoid their annual bath.
?
That’s just a whimsical TLDR. It’s something that pleases my strange sense of humor, and sometimes makes people who skipped the post go back and actually read it. It’s also a sign that I spend too much time on Reddit :P
It was a heart when I posted it but a mod got to it and didn’t like the lack of content. I actually loved the summary ;-)
Judas – Kaineng
[CO] Cryptic Omen
[CO] Cryptic Omen
Just because 2 attacks are spammed or given the perception of being spammed it does not make them overpowered. They COULD in fact be underpowered and either way none of the other attacks offer ANY benefit to the build.
Agreed, mostly. Dancing Dagger is a fantastic ranged cripple, but you rarely need it. #2 and #3 are trash.
If you actually played thief or made one to try to understand how they work, you wouldn’t be so ignorant.
I gots a thief, yo. I’m pretty good at it too.
-33% healing is nothing to write home about, it would be different if poison naturally had a 10s+ duration and was harder to remove but its not that way.
Poison (at least for thieves) actually has a very long duration. It’s easy to keep up near-permanently (with points in Deadly Arts), even if it gets removed several times.
Additionally, -33% healing is something to write home about. It all depends on what build you’re fighting, but that can make a massive difference by preventing the enemy from healing.
Let’s take an extreme case. You’re fighting a bunker Elementalist. Under ideal conditions, a water/arcane Elementalist can heal up to 1,463 health every second. Math here. Now, obviously they’re not going to time every single heal correctly, and they’re going to be busy dodging or they’ll be stunned for some of the time. I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume 1k hps (68% efficiency). If that’s the case, then maintaining poison on that Elementalist would effectively deal 417 (+0.1 per condition damage) damage every second.
At 500 condition damage, that’s 5% more damage than Burn, or 607% more damage than Bleed. That’s a ton of damage.
So is poison amazing against a glass cannon build? No. However, it scales in effectiveness with the enemy’s healing. The more defensive their build is, the stronger poison becomes. It’s the game’s best counter to a bunker, since all bunkers rely on healing for the core of their sustained defense (block/protection aside).
Also in practice, any DoT that ticks slower is actually going to do even less damage because that is more time in between ticks a condition remover can be used and you cannot stack something like poison, which if changed would actually make it useful (like the damage would tick faster like a bleed but the healing debuff wouldnt say double or anything).
You have a slight, but understandable, misconception here. Both bleeding and poison tick once per second. Bleeding appears to tick more often, but that’s only because you’re seeing each of 8 stacks tick every second. So there’s that.
I also think you’re talking about having poison be compressed in time (i.e. lasts half the time, does twice the damage). That would be nice, but I don’t think that’s the intended role for poison. We have three damaging conditions in the game: burning, bleeding, and poison. Burning applies really high damage the moment you apply it, but usually doesn’t last that long. Bleeding does low damage per tick and has a medium duration, but you can stack it. This means it does high damage once you get multiple stacks going, but it has a ramp-up. Poison does low damage, but has a long duration and debuffs healing.
I think Burning is supposed to be the “fast damage” condition. If you apply Burning, you deal high damage in a hurry. Bleeding is the standard damage condition. It deals damage reasonably fast, but you have to stack it to get the most damage. Poison is the attrition fight condition. It’s not very strong in a short fight, but in a longer fight that healing penalty really starts to kick in and give you a strong advantage.
Once you feel like posting actual information with REAL reasoning to back it up (like you claim but fail to do) I will be happy to discuss it further, but if you want you can continue to argue basically that Blue is not a color, when clearly it is.
There. Actual information, real reasoning, and a nice chunk of hard math to top it all off.
Also, I’m willing to continue to continue to discuss the merits or lack thereof of poison, but I think you kind of pushed us off-topic here. Back to P/D, could you show me where I did this:
flip flopping my in the last part by agreeing with me
.
I’ve read through my posts, and I can’t find it.
Also,
you cut little pieces of my post to twist the context
I don’t think I misrepresented anything by taking context out, but just in case I’ve been careful to keep your full argument for this post. All context is intact.
TL;DR: He counted his ducks by row before they hatched. Hijinks ensued.
(edited by Dacromir.6207)
blah blah too long
I don’t think I misrepresented anything by taking context out, but just in case I’ve been careful to keep your full argument for this post. All context is intact.
Waiting see any math posted.. still more misinformation.
Poison does not have long duration and will not be kept up perma except for something like shortbow, so big tradeoff. Counting wasting a utility slot and dumping a TON of points into DA and maybe poison duration sigil or runes is not even feasible in the least bit, so bypassing that.
If poison wasn’t meant to be damaging then why does it have a damaging function. Id be willing to keep its current form of being easily cleansed, low to moderate duration, but with zero damage if at least the heal debuff was far more major, at least that way it would have a role. I don’t want to compare apples to oranges, but one of my fav open world pvp games of all time had a debuff on the rogue/assassin archetype that was a 100% healing debuff, that could be cleansed easily, had moderate duration but obviously big gaps in applying which i would prefer. I would also prefer if weapon sets were more streamlined for a given role, so multiple weapon abilities are not useless (also 1-2 attacks that applied burning would be nice) but anyway done with that ramble.
You did flip flop because you made the claim the spamming was overpowered, when it is how the thief was designed, and you specifically targeted the P/D set and sneak attack. But then above, you quoted me and agreed that the other weapon abilities are just extremely unviable for a condition build and the ones spammed are the only ones viable (ergo NOT overpowered).
just because you post a random youtube vid of a thief playing in wvwvw, does not automatically make it yours or that you know how to play thief.
Are we… Are we talking about poison being underpowered now?
Also @Dacromir Nice video! Clearly you got a random video of a thief who seems to have the same exact alias as you do!
I don’t think there’s a question about how crap the poisons and traps Thieves have are underpowered as hell. I mean any game I’ve played where the Rogue/Thief/Assassin types had poisons (WoW, Rift, Star Wars, Guild Wars 2) they were usually a weapon enchantment and not something that only lasted for X amount of hits. I think if they were to be made viable, they’d have to become either extra effects that proc at set rate like in every other MMO on Earth, or they just poison the enemy for a set duration for an unlimited amount of attacks.
The same thing could be said of the traps. They’re all very limited to a small area and don’t do enough damage for the cooldown and duration they last. You can make them work if you’re part of the big zerg and just wanting to have fun, but honestly the only Trap I’ve ever found useful in PvE or PvP at all was the Ambush trap since the Thief that’s summoned is just as strong as the one from the Thieve’s Guild Elite and the cooldown is short enough to be up quite often. If you start to pick apart the class and really focus on all the semi useless to very useless skills you’ll quickly realize why almost every Thief out there has very few options for traits, weapons or skills to choose from which of course limits the builds that are going to be useful for doing what the Thief was designed to do: kill you.
Waiting see any math posted.. still more misinformation.
Pay a little more attention when reading. I’ll quote the applicable part:
… a water/arcane Elementalist can heal up to 1,463 health every second. Math here.
(Emphasis added).
There’s the math. Especially click the link, it shows how I calculated the “1,463 health per second” number. Using a spreadsheet is far easier than typing it out on the forums. Spreadsheets win at numbers.
Poison does not have long duration and will not be kept up perma except for something like shortbow, so big tradeoff. Counting wasting a utility slot and dumping a TON of points into DA and maybe poison duration sigil or runes is not even feasible in the least bit, so bypassing that.
You need 5 points into Deadly Arts and Spider Venom. Combine the steal (10.5s every 45s) and the poison (31.5s every 45s) and you get 93% poison uptime. Put a few more points into DA for venom recharge or whatever, and that’s easily 100%. Points in Trickery will also push you to 100%.
If poison wasn’t meant to be damaging then why does it have a damaging function. Id be willing to keep its current form of being easily cleansed, low to moderate duration, but with zero damage if at least the heal debuff was far more major, at least that way it would have a role.
It is meant to be damaging. However, it’s focused on attrition fights. It does some damage in the short term, but it truly shines in long fights or against healing-heavy builds. It’s intended as a damaging condition that counters defensive builds.
I don’t want to compare apples to oranges, but one of my fav open world pvp games of all time had a debuff on the rogue/assassin archetype that was a 100% healing debuff, that could be cleansed easily, had moderate duration but obviously big gaps in applying which i would prefer.
They also had the tank/healer/DPS trinity and perma-stealth out of combat with stealth only as an escape tool. GW2 is different in a lot of ways.
I would also prefer if weapon sets were more streamlined for a given role, so multiple weapon abilities are not useless (also 1-2 attacks that applied burning would be nice) but anyway done with that ramble.
I’ll agree, most weapon sets have skills that need improvement (I think only D/D and SB have 5 solid skills).
You did flip flop because you made the claim the spamming was overpowered, when it is how the thief was designed
Quote me where I said that. I said that spamming is bad, but then I explained why P/D thieves have to spam if they want to deal damage, and went on to say that Body Shot at least should be changed so there’s a reason to use it. I think you and I agree on this.
and you specifically targeted the P/D set and sneak attack.
Yes, I did. Not because of the spamming, but because of the mix of range (even if it’s 900) and stealth.
But then above, you quoted me and agreed that the other weapon abilities are just extremely unviable for a condition build and the ones spammed are the only ones viable (ergo NOT overpowered).
Yes, this is exactly what I’ve said all along. P/D needs some skill tweaking so that it’s viable to do something other than 1115.
I made two points:
1) P/D’s mix of ranged attacks and stealth are a little OP, or at least merit discussion.
2) P/D forces you to spam 1115, because the other skills are lackluster. That needs to change.
You seem to have read #2 as “spamming is OP”, which is not what I said.
just because you post a random youtube vid of a thief playing in wvwvw, does not automatically make it yours or that you know how to play thief.
That’s not a random video. It is, in fact, my video. My GW2 name is “Dacromir”. My youtube channel name is “Dacromir” (I signed up for YouTube years ago as “MrPhilosomanic”, but if you check my Channel Page you’ll see that the channel name is “Dacromir”). My wiki name is also “Dacromir”, and my wiki page is referenced both in my forum signature and in my video descriptions. Finally, at the very start of that video, I say “Hey guys, this is Dacromir…” and you can verify the spelling by reading the captions which I typed out myself.
Pay attention. I disagree with lots of what you say, but this is a forum where people with different opinions can debate. I at least do you the courtesy of reading your reply and thinking before I reply to it. If you did the same, others might pay more attention to what you have to say.
Are we… Are we talking about poison being underpowered now?
Apparently. I don’t really know why he brought that up, I’m just responding to what he says.
Also @Dacromir Nice video! Clearly you got a random video of a thief who seems to have the same exact alias as you do!
I know, right? I’m incredibly talented.
Lots of misinformation
Well no need to draw out any more big replies you keep spouting the same thing, if you don’t know how to read what you wrote, that is your own problem. I also like how you tried to bring bunker ele into this, and how majorly incorrect you are on the poison, when you clearly need 20 points in DA for 100% uptime on an AFK, key word AFK, target.
Good luck with that tho.
Why are you still arguing over useless skills like this? Nobody uses the poison skills to do damage, not even Wild Bill who was the first person I ever saw use a condition thief that wasn’t D/D in the first place. He uses them for the healing, the small bit of damage they add is just a bonus. The lowest you can get them is 36 seconds on the cooldown and only one does actual damage (spider venom). The other three weaken, immobilize or chill them. So that leaves you one venom, steal with 5 points in DA or Shortbow 4 to apply poison. Sounds like a total waste of time when I can just keep auto attacking? And if you’re willing to blow spider venom to keep up a somewhat weak poison and give up the healing you’d gain then sure you could keep poison on them for a bit longer. But also if you’re using the poisons you have less defensive cooldowns to use when the crap hits the fan. No shadowstep, no signet of shadows, no traps, nothing. You’ll have your heal and your house and maybe shortbow to run if you find out the guy you were about to kill just found 30 friends.
And again, I keep wondering why you continue to harp on the fact that we can come out of stealth with an attack that’s ranged? I have to be in MELEE range to go into Stealth in the first place unless I’m willing to blow long cooldowns or my heal to go into it from ranged (and that’s what bad Thieves do). What is it that’s wrong with that? I mean what the hell am I supposed to do then? CnD and stand around letting you hit me while you swing at the air or suck the gd life out of me with an AoE? I’m popping into melee to stealth to gain some benefits for being in stealth and then rolling the hell out so I can gain some distance from the AoEs and reckless swinging madmen trying to kill me.
And buffing the other skills for Pistol won’t make me stop doing auto attack to stack bleeds unless they remove bleeds from the auto attack altogether. To be honest there’s really nothing they could add to skill 2, 3 or 4 that would make me waste my small initiative pool to spam them or use them, at least not in the small ways they’ve been nerfing and “compensating” Thieves as it is. The only way they could make the weapon sets better is a complete overhaul of the Thief class but even that wouldn’t shut up the whining because as long as somebody has stealth and somebody else doesn’t, they’re going to cry that they lost and instead of blaming themselves for not winning, they blame the game (or the mechanic). Either way I’m done posting my say on this stuff. I liked the video as I said but whining after showing you can destroy a Thief just makes no sense to me (in a nerf/buff/boring this or that way). Take care.
(edited by Setima.8741)
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