Guild Wars 2

This is crazy. What kind of terrible game design makes a free, spammable ability be better DPS than a spender which takes out half our initiative bar.

It’s not like utility is an excuse, since while Vault offers a wonky evade, the auto offers reflects.

This is terrible and has a really bad effect on the daredevil’s PvE rotation where you’re just autoattacking in between bounding dodges.

You need to shift out DPS from these autoattacks and back into initiative spenders across the weapon.

Autoattacks should never be more worthwhile than skills who cost resources or have cooldowns.

Both revenants and thieves are in this weird scenario where several of their spenders are either DPS neutral or DPS losses compared to spammable skills. This is not good game design.

This also has the side effect of degrading the skill cap differences in PvE. A skillful thief with proper initiative management was the sign of a good dagger/dagger thief over one who misused initiative and lost modifiers.

Now the skill difference between two thieves in PvE is who can land bounding dodges on a boss, as the other part of their rotation is just autoattacks.

Technically vault hits more targets, so it has that use. It’s also an evade, and has 600 range leap.

In terms of DPS, however, that’s the reality of PvE. Some skills do more DPS than others, and you should rotate accordingly. Vault does have uses in pve, though, such as if you need to get to a mob fast and deal damage.

Vault is just simply more useful in PvP/WvW. Certain things are just going to be more useful in certain modes.

I don’t accept the reality of PvE where autoattacking is better than a spender in most circumstances. It should be corrected.

I don’t even find vault that great in WvW/PvP, it’s so obviously telegraphed it never hits anyone remotely competent.

Staff Auto attack only out dps’s vault spam if you have quickness, since vault is unaffected with it being an evade.

voult is more dps becouse of trickery ini dps trait. u must use voult

I personally vault spam in pve agasint a boss that takes extra damage after losing it’s break bar.

Urejt.5648:

voult is more dps becouse of trickery ini dps trait. u must use voult

Hmm? Don’t most people run Deadly Arts and Critical Strikes with Daredevil?

With trickery you gain a 15% modifier, at the cost of using a DPS loss skill vs. autoattack in between bounding dodge.

With Critical Strikes, you gain 5% crit, 7% increased crit damage, 196 precision>ferocity conversion without food/utility included, 10% increased crit damage against targets above 50% health, and 250 ferocity under fury. Adding 250+196 ferocity and converting it translates to 29.7% crit damage bonus.

So Critical Strikes gives you a total 5% crit, 36.7% increased crit damage at all times, and another 10% above 50% health for mobs.

Don’t think a 15% damage bonus will ever be replacing that on someone’s who’s essentially crit capped in a group setting.

So now we look at Deadly Arts. This alone in modifiers brings a permanent 10% against targets with a condition, and a 20% on targets below 50% health. Plus mug on steal.

If you run dagger/dagger in PvE instead of staff, you also gain 200 permanent power from Deadly Arts.

I don’t see how either of those can be replaced by Trickery in a PvE group setting.

ArthurDent.9538:

Staff Auto attack only out dps’s vault spam if you have quickness, since vault is unaffected with it being an evade.

Yeah, but that’s pretty much every organized group setting where you’ll have close to perma quickness if not full uptime.

If anything, organized group content should require larger use of skills.

I think it’s incredibly boring that the class is reduced to autoattack and dodge every time bounding dodge buff comes off.

I should not feel penalized for using a high impact, initiative heavy damaging ability because an autoattack is overtuned, eclipsing other abilities. The damage should be shifted to initiative spenders.

It’s as if suddenly using CnD>Backstab in d/d setup was a DPS loss compared to just autoattack spam in between dodges and you only used CnD backstab if you wanted to gain stealth.

Resources and frequency of use should mean something when damage numbers are assigned to abilities.

Less frequent, more costly skills should be DPS increases.

in pve u use cs da and trickery best dps in the game now

Zenith.7301:

This is crazy. What kind of terrible game design makes a free, spammable ability be better DPS than a spender which takes out half our initiative bar.

It’s not like utility is an excuse, since while Vault offers a wonky evade, the auto offers reflects.

Thief as a whole has its auto attacks do more damage than the rest of its weapons kit on every weapon(staff is no magical exception, pistol is but i’ll get to that later), and frankly that’s fine. As our skills are all readily available which allows for skilled play by properly using our initiative for utility instead of damage. A lot of our utlities support this as well by further increasing our damage, rather then providing defensive options or party support.

Zenith.7301:

You need to shift out DPS from these autoattacks and back into initiative spenders across the weapon.

If you want initiative dumps for damage: pick up pistol pistol, unload is totally focused on that. Trickery has lead attacks which supports this kind of play as well, and argueably d/p does this as well, as shadow shot is more dps per initiative than a properly set up cloak & dagger backstab combo.

Main hand pistol is a primary example of a weapon that has had all its damage shoved into its initiative skills; not the auto attack, and its widely agreed that the weapon sucks. Pistol main hands whole problem is that that the game play is one dimensional because you have to choose between damage and utility, you can never do both and thief needs both given how squishy it is.

So no this is not a good idea, if anet were to change to this style of play, they would have to buff the class in so many other areas just to make it viable. You would be effectively buffing a class because you’ve nerfed it to make the skill cap higher. At that point you might as well just rebuild the entire class.

Zenith.7301:

Both revenants and thieves are in this weird scenario where several of their spenders are either DPS neutral or DPS losses compared to spammable skills. This is not good game design.

This also has the side effect of degrading the skill cap differences in PvE. A skillful thief with proper initiative management was the sign of a good dagger/dagger thief over one who misused initiative and lost modifiers.

Now the skill difference between two thieves in PvE is who can land bounding dodges on a boss, as the other part of their rotation is just auto attacks.

Here’s the thing, thief and rev have a low skill floor in pve. Both classes were built around fighting players(engaging, disengaging, & burst) which is where their true skill caps are shown. In all honesty if your looking for high impact skills or complex rotations for pve you’ve got the wrong class.

I do agree with you that anyone can do a lot of damage by doing very little in regards to both classes. Additionally I agree that you don’t get substantial gain on the higher end of the skill cap but it is more dps for both classes. That said the higher end of the thief skill rotation on staff includes 2 weakening charges between dodges . It’s pretty demanding to do effectively, requires a lot of positioning knowledge(which always has been the difference between good and bad thiefs) even without boss mechanics. The thing is people do the auto attack rotation because its safer and easier.

Vault certainly outshines the AA due to its utility (movement, leap finisher, evade). It also fires faster than a full AA rotation and hits more targets.

You’re missing the fact that Staff auto 1 and 2 hit fairly weak and most the damage is built into 3 where vault just frontloads all its damage from range and has massive AoE plus an evade.

It’s often not easy to pull of a full auto because you have to evade or the target moves, teleport or you get CC’d or you have to evade or heal. Vault offers much more utility with the evade plus movement and AoE.

I think it feels fine the way it’s set up, pulling off a full auto3 feels rewarding.

As somebody mentioned earlier, this is only the case because the current pve meta takes into account of really high quickness uptime from boonshare chronomancer.

With that said, you need to take this issue to the pve discussion or the chrono forums because most other professions are in the same state at the moment when it comes to meta pve rotation (raids, fractal, dungeon). Take DH rotation for example: camp hammer and spam 1.

In fact, you shouldn’t even try to justify thief mechanics and game play based on pve because pve in general is faceroll. In high level pvp settings, you will note that thief has probably the highest mechanical learning curve compared to other professions and requires pinpoint player interactions to be successful.

If you want to press other buttons other than 1 and feel rewarded in pve, I’d recommend engineer.

tomwjd.8172:

As somebody mentioned earlier, this is only the case because the current pve meta takes into account of really high quickness uptime from boonshare chronomancer.

With that said, you need to take this issue to the pve discussion or the chrono forums because most other professions are in the same state at the moment when it comes to meta pve rotation (raids, fractal, dungeon). Take DH rotation for example: camp hammer and spam 1.

In fact, you shouldn’t even try to justify thief mechanics and game play based on pve because pve in general is faceroll. In high level pvp settings, you will note that thief has probably the highest mechanical learning curve compared to other professions and requires pinpoint player interactions to be successful.

If you want to press other buttons other than 1 and feel rewarded in pve, I’d recommend engineer.

Only problem with that suggestion is nobody wants engineers in raids.

People already barely want daredevils in raids and they compete with ele on DPS but lack the group utility. Engineer is like 5k DPS behind daredevil and suffers from the same lack of worthwhile utility to a group.

And it won’t be the first time a PvP guy calls raids faceroll. I could say the same of playing a perma evade/stealth thief cheese build in WvW or grabbing a PU condi aids mesmer in PvP. Definition of faceroll.

Or I could be a MOBA elitist kitten and scoff at MMO PvP. None of them are useful positions.

Zenith.7301:

tomwjd.8172:

As somebody mentioned earlier, this is only the case because the current pve meta takes into account of really high quickness uptime from boonshare chronomancer.

With that said, you need to take this issue to the pve discussion or the chrono forums because most other professions are in the same state at the moment when it comes to meta pve rotation (raids, fractal, dungeon). Take DH rotation for example: camp hammer and spam 1.

In fact, you shouldn’t even try to justify thief mechanics and game play based on pve because pve in general is faceroll. In high level pvp settings, you will note that thief has probably the highest mechanical learning curve compared to other professions and requires pinpoint player interactions to be successful.

If you want to press other buttons other than 1 and feel rewarded in pve, I’d recommend engineer.

Only problem with that suggestion is nobody wants engineers in raids.

People already barely want daredevils in raids and they compete with ele on DPS but lack the group utility. Engineer is like 5k DPS behind daredevil and suffers from the same lack of worthwhile utility to a group.

And it won’t be the first time a PvP guy calls raids faceroll. I could say the same of playing a perma evade/stealth thief cheese build in WvW or grabbing a PU condi aids mesmer in PvP. Definition of faceroll.

Or I could be a MOBA elitist kitten and scoff at MMO PvP. None of them are useful positions.

Tones of people want good engineers in raids runs, they provide the third highest dps, and the highest condi dps (Ignoring epi bounces).

Sad that you have to result to belittling to prove a point. You sure showed him. Sounds like your burnt out… try taking a break.

You are upset about anet degrading the thief skill cap differences in PvE but the skill level gap range in PvE wasn’t big or significant to begin with; if anything, knowing where to “stack” or group stealth, knowing boss mechanics and when to dodge, knowing meta comps for speed clears and such were more important when gauging if some thief was worth their value in PvE.

For the record, the thief back in the day used two buttons for their dps rotation. The current meta thief still uses two buttons. The only difference is that instead of watching our initiative for modifier and pressing 5, we are now watching our energy meter and pressing dodge key. Thief was stupid easy back in the day and its still stupid easy to play thief in pve.
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I do agree that builds like perplex condi mesmer, perma evade/stealth thief and such are dumb but they still die/counterable if you know how to handle them, also they don’t offer anything to the team in proleague level spvp besides condi mesmer which still needs more interactions than something like raids or any other pve content.

I’m actually glad they improved thief AA because I can at least bring my thief to SV and certain encounters in the other wings. Strictly speaking of raids though, engineers and thieves are unfortunately not optimal for it. Its a sad truth and the devs should be blamed for it, but you can still make alts if you want to get into raid groups regularly. Since you mentioned ele, they press +2 more buttons compared to thief in their basic dps rotation if it counts for that rewarding feeling of pressing more buttons to be optimal.

As for vault, you will find more peace regarding it as a mobility/evade skill rather than a dps skill. In raids, I find vault actually valuable because it gives me more mobility than other professions. For example, I can stick to the boss and dps a bit longer before I have to start retreating to take updraft in gorseval fight or fulfill my cannon duty in sabetha fight. In pvp as well, you will find yourself getting punished for spamming vault but if you use it defensively or after cripple/counting enemy’s dodges, it is very rewarding.

The staff weapon itself is designed as a very defensive weapon; weakness application, immob clear, blind application, cripple for control, disengaging evade and another evade with high mobility that just happens to do spike dmg. Spamming 1 for damage is working as intended in my opinion.

The old school d/d dps build isn’t outshined by staff either if you are feeling nostalgia. I believe DA/CS/trick 233/321/211 build has more single target dps than staff and you get to incorporate skill 5 as well as positioning into your dps rotation. Its just a matter of choice.

Are other people finding this to be true? Because I’ve found more dps on test golem throwing in bound and vault after every two aa rotations, even with quickness.

if u have quickcness u spam staff 2, its best dps when hit 3X and its affected by quickness to u ll hit 3X even small targets. best dps thief

Urejt.5648:

in pve u use cs da and trickery best dps in the game now

Depends on the party and on the content. In a raid with a perfect comp, the thief gains nothing from Tr; DrD specced offensively with staff is the best possible, since it has 27% damage modifiers versus Trickery’s 15%, which under the multiplicative way GW2 damage calculations work, churns out way better numbers. In most cases, it’s going to be better than DA/CS/Tr for sheer damage output.

But yes, OP, the generation of spam 1 and done has been born. It’s been going that way for a while, and with all the passives and insane sustain in sPvP, using skills for damage has been pretty punishing for a while. Just the nature of the game, I guess. All competitive facets and interaction have been on the decline for a long, long time.

I like it much more this way. DPS on auto, utillity on 2-5. Everything else just ends in mindless rotations.

I agree and disagree. I agree that perhaps the auto should not be the MOST DPS in our kitten nal, but not necessarily that Vault should be. Vault does have a lot of utility, so it’s ok that it’s not the best attack to spam, especially since certain builds can chain spamming it and dodging almost indefinitely. I think Vault should be a powerful single burst AoE, but you should not be spamming 5 any more than spamming 1.

If any abilities got a damage boost, it should be a boost to Weakening Charge and Debilitating Arc. Make it tactically sound to use those abilities to weave in and out of melee range. Give each a slight damage boost (with most of Weakening Charge’s boost to its final hit) and then reduce the auto a bit, so that alternating 232323 is a strong combination.

yes, vault should do more dps, thief has been obliterated into a spam class and now has kittens like op wanting to just spam more, its sad, just cause u have the ini (aka off cd) doesn’t mean u have to use it… so tired of kittens, like why? ZOMG my warriors rush does less dps then auto attack, ZOMG there’s so many skills that are kitten situational skills why! I just want to spam and be super efficient while spamming and not thinking halp me plx… kitten off and play scrapper

Zenith.7301:

tomwjd.8172:

As somebody mentioned earlier, this is only the case because the current pve meta takes into account of really high quickness uptime from boonshare chronomancer.

With that said, you need to take this issue to the pve discussion or the chrono forums because most other professions are in the same state at the moment when it comes to meta pve rotation (raids, fractal, dungeon). Take DH rotation for example: camp hammer and spam 1.

In fact, you shouldn’t even try to justify thief mechanics and game play based on pve because pve in general is faceroll. In high level pvp settings, you will note that thief has probably the highest mechanical learning curve compared to other professions and requires pinpoint player interactions to be successful.

If you want to press other buttons other than 1 and feel rewarded in pve, I’d recommend engineer.

Only problem with that suggestion is nobody wants engineers in raids.

People already barely want daredevils in raids and they compete with ele on DPS but lack the group utility. Engineer is like 5k DPS behind daredevil and suffers from the same lack of worthwhile utility to a group.

And it won’t be the first time a PvP guy calls raids faceroll. I could say the same of playing a perma evade/stealth thief cheese build in WvW or grabbing a PU condi aids mesmer in PvP. Definition of faceroll.

Or I could be a MOBA elitist kitten and scoff at MMO PvP. None of them are useful positions.

The fact that this post exists demonstrates that PvP gamemodes requires and allows for more variated skill combos, which was what tom was based on when saying that most PvE is facerolling (which it actually is, cause raids/whatever arent most of this game pve)

Zenith.7301:

This is crazy. What kind of terrible game design makes a free, spammable ability be better DPS than a spender which takes out half our initiative bar.
~snip~

I totally agree with you but the Devs would disagree. This is their solution to our initiatives problem. They don’t want us to rely on using our initiative skills in order to keep up on DPS. The main complaint is the fact that Thief doesn’t have enough initiatives to even use every skill in the skill bar once. So instead of lowering the skill cost or increasing the Thief’s initiative pool (or both), they instead told us that Thief doesn’t need to use initiatives to maintain a high DPS because they’ve just increased the auto-attack damage output — which is a middle finger to the idea of lowering cost and/or increasing init pool. It’s never gonna happen because they think that they can play Thief better than us even though they’ve never shown a video of a Dev who actually plays a Thief regularly. Or maybe they’ve buffed the auto just so that they can play a Thief mindlessly (without thinking about other skills and possible combinations) instead of playing the profession the way we all play it.

However, if and when the Dev will ever agree with us on this, they will instead nerf Vault as their solution to the problem.

We’ll see.