Guild Wars 2

LONG VIDEO

8 min S/D tickle fight vs 1 min D/P faceroll on a bad scrapper.

kinda pathetic really. have the same thing vs scrappers on my server, some even use defender runes.

Thank you for helping to show the state of S/D right now. Hopefully the devs notice this stuff and try to bring S/D up enough.

What ruined S/D is the addition of boon strip. It was a great set pre-boon strip but because of the boon strip, they have to tone down the damage of the second strike (LS), ruin skill #2, and trash CnD in the process.

This kind of “balancing” is typical of ArenaNet when they don’t want to see the set being used in PvP. Back in GW1, this is what they did to a skill that they won’t even bother balancing properly;

Smiter’s Boon (PvP) – Enchantment Spell. (5 seconds.) Your Smiting Prayers have double Divine Favor healing bonus. 25e / 0.25s AT / 90s CD

Note: (5 seconds) is the duration. Enchantments are similar to boons in GW2.

The PvE version;

Smiter’s Boon – Enchantment Spell. (30 seconds.) Your Smiting Prayers have double Divine Favor healing bonus. 5e / 0.25s AT / 10s CD

Note: This is what it’s supposed to be; long duration, low cost, and low CD.

As you can see, if the balance team decides that they don’t want something in PvP, they will destroy it by making it unusable. We can clearly see that the Devs doesn’t want S/D in PvP because all the tweaks and improvements are only happening to D/P and nothing else. So Thieves who wants to play in PvP and actually to be competitive are being pigeon holed into one weapon set.

“It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.” – Colin Johanson, January 2013 (link)

I guess that philosophy is no longer being followed.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

“It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.” – Colin Johanson, January 2013 (link)

I guess that philosophy is no longer being followed.

To add to your theory, I do remember Anet actually being legitimately annoyed at S/D Thieves when they were running around in PVP meta last year.

Something along the lines of “It’s not fun fighting something you can’t hit”

Then they gave Chronomancer, Scrapper, and Revenant a ton of evades and blocks xD

It just seems to me you dont really have dmg on him as s/d like on d/p and I know d/p does more dmg but the gap in dmg is not like when I play for example.

Rain.9213:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

“It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.” – Colin Johanson, January 2013 (link)

I guess that philosophy is no longer being followed.

To add to your theory, I do remember Anet actually being legitimately annoyed at S/D Thieves when they were running around in PVP meta last year.

Something along the lines of “It’s not fun fighting something you can’t hit”

Then they gave Chronomancer, Scrapper, and Revenant a ton of evades and blocks xD

And gave thief more evades as its big mechanic bonus as an Elite spec.

They’ve contradicted a lot of their past statements which sold the game and did good things. Most of what’s released now makes no sense to their original manifesto and ideology which got them to be so successful to begin with.

Sandrox.9524:

It just seems to me you dont really have dmg on him as s/d like on d/p and I know d/p does more dmg but the gap in dmg is not like when I play for example.

Agreed. I noticed his crits were like my non-crit AA’s. Usually I pull 6-9k LS’s and 4-6k AA’s with MH sword in WvW.

S/D does fine damage. It’s just got weird casting time issues on its damage and a crappy 4’th slot ability.

Sandrox.9524:

It just seems to me you dont really have dmg on him as s/d like on d/p and I know d/p does more dmg but the gap in dmg is not like when I play for example.

It’s a Scrapper. My backstab normally hits 8 to 9k on thieves. On him without protection we see 5k in the video. My 2k crits on sword are easily 4k on thieves. I hit 5-6k larc strikes on thieves typically. I don’t think there gap in damage shown in the video is atypical for any thief at all. I wasn’t even hitting that hard on dagger, highest auto I saw was 2.4k.

Other sources of extra damage on D/P is more consistent burst with backstab vs LS, and bound instead of dash. To be fair, I mostly run that S/D build in groups for giggles and its uncatchable. I probably would have switched to bound if I knew how the fight would go.

DeceiverX.8361:

S/D does fine damage. It’s just got weird casting time issues on its damage and a crappy 4’th slot ability.

lamo. s/d can’t even apply meaningful pressure w/o using major cooldowns XD

dancing dagger is just fine imo. could use some dmg buff un first hit but meh.

MadVisions.4529:

DeceiverX.8361:

S/D does fine damage. It’s just got weird casting time issues on its damage and a crappy 4’th slot ability.

lamo. s/d can’t even apply meaningful pressure w/o using major cooldowns XD

dancing dagger is just fine imo. could use some dmg buff un first hit but meh.

Agree. When steal is down, S/D is hard to burst with vs a good player because of the predictable nature of FS LS compared to D/P which can burst easier without any cooldowns and only initiative.