Guild Wars 2

This April Fools joke is annoying. It’s distracting and ugly and forcing us to see it for a whole day just because it’s April 1st was a poor decision.

Being offended by it because of flight 9525 is quite a stretch and you might want to meditate on what other more tangible problems you could direct your youthful energy towards solving.

Thief stolen bundles feathers and throw gunk are also bugged – can’t use skills for about a second after casting them.

Changing stability into stacks was clearly a modest nerf to consume plasma and boon steal.

Maybe they didn’t take this into account, thought it wasn’t a big deal or somehow convinced themselves that the totality of the stability changes made this a wash.

You’re probably crafting items that have become “grey” or maybe “white” and so provide little or no crafting experience. You want to craft items that are blue or higher and definitely want to leverage crafting discovery that provides huge amounts of crafting XP.

Try using the site: http://www.gw2crafts.net/

This site will tell you exactly what to craft to get to 400 for the cheapest amount of materials.

I love my Charr thief, I was sold on it in beta.

But I am so disappointed with Charr skins particularly for medium armor. It’s almost always way too top heavy and weird, too big or too small, not bad kitten at all! Especially the leather skins!

The temple karma armor is one of the few that really got it right.

I can’t believe this hasn’t been fixed yet. They even posted this was being “talked about quite a bit internally” over a year ago (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/balance/PvX-Thief-Last-Refuge/first).

Everyone’s an arm chair balance designer, but just give LR a 0.5s “Escape to the Shadows” buff before the blinding powder making you semi-immune to revealed. JUST HALF A SECOND. Long enough to finish a CnD, for that last projectile to hit or cancel your channel.

To avoid uber-insta-gib-double-backstab-lolol @25% builds, limit the reveal immunity to normal attacks (i.e. stealth attacks like backstab/sneak attack would apply revealed, CnD or vital shot would not), so best case you get .5s of invisible normal attacks.

I always thought venom’s should naturally work similar to signets: you get a passive venom proc on attack (e.g. spider: % chance to poison on attack, devourer: % chance to immob on attack) but also have actives (e.g. activating spider drops an 8s poison cloud).

If they worked like that I would love them.

The way they work now never made sense to me, the next x attacks inflict y? On a forty five sec CD (after 2 years now 40s)??? Terrible.

Allie Murdock.8152:

So, it looks like Meteor Shower should have a red circle. Is there a chance that it is being culled out in the situations you experienced?

Oh God, now I wonder if the team also thinks the trebuchet cow shot shows a red ring (it doesn’t, but absolutely should).

Edit: What would be great is if meteor shower showed red circles for each meteor attack.

I hate this as well. Way too often I miss a stomp because my cloak and dagger fails because I didn’t wait long enough for this magical buff to disappear (leaving me without a stomp and no initiative).

It’s annoying and stupid.

Laela, I’m a fan of your earlier video’s the forward withdraw changed my life (I’m still the only person other than you that I’ve seen do it smoothly).

I’m p/d now as well though I’m a different build (perplex 10/0/30/0/30). I think you’ve nearly answered your own question in your rant. You don’t run any stealth utilities and only stealth through cnd.

While that’s very skillful, you need to run a stealth utility to save you when cnd isn’t an option (1vx with a d/p #4 spammer is such a case).

You might not beat that 1vx, but you can at least escape, in addition to the condi clear, healing and offensive options you’ll get from the stealth. I know you’d prefer to win, but you can’t expect to always beat all possible 1v2+ situations.

For 1v1’s vs d/p, it seems the best option is to run p/d main set and d/p offset. Where d/p is used mostly for mobility and black powder > heartseekers to counter the thief’s basi BS. You basically get all their d/p tricks with the p/d awesomeness.

Most server’s have active community web sites with contact information. For example in your current match up:

Tarnished Coast (my server): http://forthetoast.com/
Fort Aspenwood: http://www.fort-aspenwood.com/

evilapprentice.6379:

Just have it work like desperate decoy – you should gain “cloak” instead of stealth. “Cloak” would not activate any of SA’s traits or allow the thief to use any stealth attacks (Since it is “Cloak” and not “Stealth”). There would be no “revealed” tied to attacking from cloak (Since the point of revealed is to mitigate stealth’s benefits, and you’re not gaining any of those benefits while in cloak).

Problem Solved – Mid CnD while LR triggers? No problem, go straight into stealth. Mid-attack while LR triggers? No problem, no revealed since you didn’t gain any of stealth’s benefits (except for being invisible) from LR.

This is the best idea I’ve heard (assuming it still AoE blinds). Never getting troll revealed again is massively better than the benefits I get from the “free” stealth (i.e. a possible opener + SA traits).

coglin.1867:

Warrior

We want the Warrior to be capable of good melee damage in a sturdy body. They can still do some decent damage at range, but they aren’t as good at it as the Ranger (with their pet). They have a hard time taking enemy boons down, and instead, have to just go through them with raw force. They may have a hard time with enemy conditions, and may need to ask for ally help in order to keep themselves free of hampering conditions.

Kind of speaks for itself doesn’t it???
Source
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-December-14-2012/first#post999247

I remember reading this and quit GW2 about a month later. When I came back last Oct I was shocked at the state of warriors.

The combined buffs to Cleansing Ire, Beserker Stance and Dogged March made in 2013 were clearly too much and against the classes original design philosophy.

ens, you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.

You claim that experienced thieves know when to expect last refuge to proc. Bullkitten. At what point are you “expecting” this? 30% HP? 50%? 75%? Oh I see, it depends on many factors because you’re so experienced. So what do you do while “expecting it?” You just don’t attack and tank damage until it procs? That is a terrible tactic that will kill you just as often as LR’s troll reveal problem.

The issue is a lot of times you can’t avoid it. Yes, you might guess that it will proc in the next 3-5 seconds, but most of the time the best course of action is to bet on a cloak and dagger rather than do nothing.

At the very least Last Refuge should behave like Blinding Powder and cancel all in progress/pending actions on proc.

It’s clearly a bug that last refuge doesn’t behave that way.

And that wouldn’t even solve all the problems. For example, if you’re p/d and have a bullet mid-air when LR proc’s you’ll lose the stealth when it hits a target and get troll revealed. It happens more than you would think.

This trait is so frustrating.

Travlane.5948:

NinjaEd.3946:

Cynz.9437:

NinjaEd.3946:

Why give a profession undeniable pathetic condition effects and say all classes can fill the same roles.

Can a guardian tank a boss? Yes by taking and recovering damage as well as blocking.

Can a thief tank a boss? Yes, by evasion and blind.

Do they achieve the same goal? Yes but by different means.

Now put thief in your equation and tell me what you see. That’s the problem I have.

actually thief can’t tank a boss due to 10% effectivety of blind and you can evade so much

If they have feline grace + d/x they can evade all the time on bosses. They hit rather slow and are easily spotted.

u get 20% endurance back every dodge. that = evading all the time? yyyyyyyyyyah. idk about that.

It’s actually 15 endurance!

The condi durations on p/x are pretty anemic.

Compare thief pistol to the warrior sword condi’s:

Thief

• 1 – 1x 4s bleed (5x 4s bleed if from stealth)
• 3 – 2x 5s torment

Warrior

• 1 – 1x 8s bleed
• 4 – 5x 12s torment
• 5 – 4x 12s bleed.

I know side by side class comparisons miss the whole picture, but those durations and stack sizes are insane. It feels like the thief bleed and torment condition durations need to be increased by 1s.

The direct damage is also pretty terrible.

It doesn’t happen that often, but not prioritizing self-laid combo fields is very bad for dagger/pistol thieves who are designed to gain stealth primarily by heartseeker leap finishers through their black powder smoke fields.

While it’s a little sad that guardians would not always get a little might from random fire fields (there’s no reason to have symbols down while stacking might), that’s far less significant than a thief randomly not having access to stealth in combat, which is crippling.

And, of course, in the current state of the game guardians (and other classes) aren’t always getting might from fire fields already, so prioritizing self-laid fields isn’t creating a new problem it’s merely reshaping it while making life much better for classes designed to self-combo.

Note this discussion applies to all finishers, not just blast.

Edit: Finisher’s combo’ing with every field in it’s area of effect would solve everything, but sounds like it would create a ridiculous combo field stacking meta.

Yes and how about a ‘reveal mesmer’ ability while we’re at it.

The supervisor or keep lord will have a buff on them called Righteous Indignation immediately after taking an objective. When this buff wears off you can kill them and capture the objective.

There are also various wvw map timer web sites and overwolf widgets people use to know the remaining time without having to target the mob, for example: http://www.gw2score.com/livemap/

Straegen.2938:

Bumping power by 300 is in most situations less than a 10% boost in overall damage. Bumping Condition Damage or Condition Duration by the same amount has a much bigger impact on overall damage output than power or precision.

This is wrong.

Power increases damage proportionally, 1% more power increases direct damage by 1%. This is easily proved from the direct damage equation found on the GW2 wiki.

At anything below 3000 power (power, not attack), 300 power will increase your direct damage by more than 10%.

Condition damage, by comparison, scales much worse than power. This is easily computed from the condition damage equations. For example, you can compute the increase in bleed damage using this equation:

% change = (new_cond_dmg – old_cond_dmg) / (old_cond_dmg + 850)

From this it is obvious that bleed damage scales significantly worse than power’s proportional increase.

I see so many naive posts on the forums about how condition damage scales better than power, which is provably wrong. The problem is very few people do the math and understand that condition damage mathematically scales very poorly in comparison to power until you have unattainably high condition damage (i.e. enough to make the + 850 in the denominator of the formula above insignificant).

Great post DJ, the +/- condi duration food is far more powerful than it should be as your analysis shows.

The fact that +/- food cancels and the effectiveness of cleanses is orthogonal to the power issue.

I believe conditions are too powerful and arenanet’s balancing approach of adding more condition damage and cleansing is absolutely wrong. For example, giving condi necro’s a grotesque amount of condi burst and trying to balance it by giving Diamond Skin ele’s condi immunity is bizarre and seems more motivated at balancing class distribution in that backwater kittenhole that is sPvP rather than balancing the game.

AoE condi damage needs to be reduced – period.

I’ve thought the same thing with my charr thief, after watching countless hours of human thieves streaming and on youtube it seems like they get their cloak and daggers about a 1/4 second faster than I can (and this is not “brain lag”).

I’m almost certain that there’s an after cast bug of some kind with charr.

Over the weekend I created a human thief and cloak and dagger clearly feels faster when following an attack chain but I haven’t had the motivation to record a side by side to prove it. Maybe I will now.

It’s additive. So it’s +60% duration to all conditions plus +55% to bleeds, or +115% bleed duration.

However, all condition duration increases are capped at +100%, so you’re +15% over the cap.

You should be able to verify this yourself by shooting something with pistol 1 once (which applies a base 4s bleed) and seeing how many ticks you get.

Assassin’s Reward should have stayed in master and Hard to Catch buried in grandmaster. I would take buffed AR over nerfed Quick Recovery and probably Pain Response. The new AR still isn’t that good but HtoC is one of, if not the, worst trait in the game.

Most garbage traits people complain about are bad because they’re useless. HtoC is worse than useless as it will unequivocally screw you over.

The thief cloak and dagger skill has the exact same parameters (.5s cast, 130 range, high cost, telegraphed), must be landed more often and is at least as critical as skull crack for many popular PvP builds.

Skull crack is exactly where it should have been.

Pain response. /fifteen

Auesis.7301:

Sanduskel.1850:

Sons.5493:

When will you realise NO ONE takes you seriously Sanduskel. Please give up.

That’s okay. You aren’t my target audience, lol.

Do you even have an audience?

I really wish there was a way to block someone on the forums. Whenever I read something stupid in the Thief sub-forum it’s almost always this Sanduskel kid.

At least there should be a way to down vote so her responses get hidden or grayed out.

Having the raid leader system from WoW would be amazing for both WvW and PvE. Being able to have up to a 40 man raid group with frames, raid text and raid warning popups would be a hugely better experience.

Although, one thing I ironically do love about GW2 is that Anet has really tried to make the game as open and inclusive as possible by not having stuff like that.

I’ve been running 4/6 Rune of Perplexity and the (2) bonus of +15% confusion duration is not applying to the (4) confusion damage (unless the base duration isn’t really 5s).

According to the wiki, the (2) and (6) confusion duration bonuses don’t work at all for any confusion application.

As powerful as these runes are, I think it’s a pretty serious bug that these bonuses are non-functional and have been since the runes were introduced.

jaz.8954:

iAmTheDuke.6201:

Well sounds like you got outplayed and I almost feel bad for you.
Also doesn’t change the fact that the gameplay on that video isn’t anything special especially with the ez mode button.

Yes, we got outplayed, now got some of your own videos so we can critque em?

Duke to be clear I think Xara made that video for his friends, it was just footage from a few nights ago and wasn’t meant to show off on the internetz. Maybe I shouldn’t have shared it I thought some people would appreciate (like Jaz who’s being super cool).

jaz.8954:

To the charr necro from YOHO that we jumped near the ne bloodlust point on SoS BL. I’ll take a TC zerg over fighting you again any day…we definitely underestimated you…

That was Xara, dude’s a BEAST:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slr1DZEFFqM

Ashley Segovia.8276:

Hi Zombiechoc – 8.1 isn’t really supported yet as it hasn’t been fully tested, though I do know that with Windows 8.1 you MUST use approved 8.1 drivers and so I’d start there if you haven’t already.

I don’t mean to be the typical grumpy customer, but it’s very disappointing that a world class software company with a history in Windows development and a well engineered patching system doesn’t “officially support” the current operation system release.

Windows 8.1 was released a month ago and there were preview builds widely available for months before that.

It seems like there have more crashes since I upgraded to 8.1 (from very rarely to a few times a week which still isn’t that bad) and send crash dumps every time and I hope they are treated with the same priority as Windows 7/8 crashes.

Einlanzer.1627:

Well, my presumption is that they need to just reduce the aftercast by .1-.2 seconds to give moderate buff to both its direct and condition damage. If they feel like its OP for P/D (I doubt it), they can just slightly weaken the Stealth attack.

That’s a great suggestion, Einlanzer.

Yeah I don’t know why they haven’t slightly buffed vital shot’s direct damage by 15-20%. It would still be a weak 900 range auto-attack but would be less hilariously underpowered against anything with condi reduction/removal and p/p builds.

Since Infusion of Shadows (SA V) will longer work for each smoke field leap or blast (a fair change) can you please fix Meld with Shadows (SA 15) to work with it?

It takes ~1.25s to gain 3s of stealth in d/p (.5 (Blackpowder) > .75 (Heartseeker). That’s a very long time and if anything in that 1.25s process is interrupted or we get revealed we’ve lost 9 initiative and unless we have a powerful defensive utility cooldown available our chances of survival are low. Additionally, the enemy knows where you are while combo’ing. That’s a huge cost/risk compared to cloak and dagger which gives 4s for 6 init in a pre-castable 0.5s cast.

Two leaps offers 5s of stealth, in a highly telegraphed location, where the enemy will have several seconds of knowing where you are and can reposition while you are “stunned” into your extended and easily interrupted 9 init restealthing combo. Currently 3 or 4 heartseeker combo’s are usually required to get enough time to catch up to the enemy (who will have had at least 3-4 seconds to react), which will no longer be possible at a prohibitive 12 and 15 initiative cost.

Multiple smoke field heartseekers’s aren’t required because thieves love permastealth cheese, it’s required because the stealthing mechanic takes so long, is so highly telegraphed and so little stealth duration is gained per leap. You must address this.

Please fix Meld with Shadows to work with smoke field combo stealth. It should still be impossible to maintain permanent stealth via smoke fields which these changes are rightfully trying to prevent but will not kill fair d/p game play.

You can not make these balance changes assuming that d/p works with a single heartseeker smoke field leap.

Frigid.6027:

i solo roam and can barely find people willing to fight without odds in their favor. It’s not just jq players who wont fight 1v1.

three [PiNK] thieves were in ruins on jqbl and if i managed to get one to wander off from from the other 2, he/she would cloak and dagger off an animal and run back to his buddies.

Don’t put your servers on some high pedestal because you think you fight unfair odds.

Since this was almost certainly my group, I’m assuming you’re that terrible d/p thief that ran away every time I got you to 15% health.

Dude. We were there to roam together. I was running p/d and which your weapon set directly counters and I destroyed you during each of our three 1v1’s before you stealthed away at which point, yeah, I went back to my friends. I’m not going to stick around waiting for your cool downs to reset if you want more 1v1’s why don’t you try not hard resetting immediately after every single failed opener no wonder you “can barely find people willing to fight without odds in their favor.”

The most you ever did was use your basilisk opener on me a few times but stun breakers are cool and you’d disappear.

Now I’ve wasted even more time on your non-sense. Don’t expect a response to whatever additional garbage you have left to say.

On Hard to Catch. I hope it’s understood that the only reason a lot of thieves take this trait in sPvP is because it’s the only viable trait once you’ve filled out 10/30/0/20/0.

Ningyou explains this clearly in Sensotix’s thief interview:

That does not mean it’s a good trait or that people even want it, it’s simply the only viable one.

I think it needs to, at a minimum, break stuns. But probably even more than that to be something people actually want since it can really screw you over (chasing some one and then out of no where getting teleported away is terrible).

The thief initiative regen buff is amazing, arguably the largest buff for thieves since launch.

I understand wanting to significantly curb vigor up time for all classes, but the Vigorous Recovery 50% reduction from 8s -> 4s is too much. Can you consider shaving it to 6s instead of a massive nerf? Even with an unlikely 50% + boon duration that would be far short of perma-vigor. Thieves don’t have high armor, invul’s, blocks, aegis, stability or any of that, with the ridiculous amount of AoE attacks. stuns and whatever dodging is all we have, it’s not cheese and it still requires a great deal of skill compared to other survival mechanics available to other classes.

Can you also consider adding more condition removal options for thieves? We used to be great at it b/c of SA IV (Shadows Embrace) but that era is history with the insane condition arms race that started 9 months ago.

I understand the change to SA V Infusion of Shadow to curb permastealth cheese, but it will really kill legitimate d/p play. Remember that smoke field leaps give 3s of stealth (SA 15 Meld w/Shadows has no effect). It takes much longer to stealth in d/p than X/d and it is much more visible/telegraphed and interruptable, you generally need at least 2 leaps and often 3 or 4 to successfully backstab. That is not permastealth cheese that is how you play d/p effectively.

Perhaps you could fix SA 15 to work with smoke field leaps? That would be HUGE and I think a legitimately fair change.

I guess I’ll add that I genuinely can’t believe that the thief class received so many nerfs (outside of the awesome init regen change) when the profession is probably one of the most in need of buffs. You’ve been nerf’ing our stealth and now our evades when virtually no one that knows what they’re talking about thinks thieves are overpowered right now, that’s bizarre.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Also, we want to shave most things down, instead of just running around with a “buff” stick. That’s how you get a lot of power creep, and it’s something a lot of you, very astutely, have pointed out – we need to avoid that.

Thank God. Stop buffing!

I know players love buffs but I wanted to throw my monitor out the window when I read the Oct 15 patch notes.

I know this word is thrown around a lot, but there really are some incredibly obvious changes that need to happen discussed all over these forums and pvp podcasts. There are a lot of bad suggestions too, but it’s a not impossible task to sort out the rational ones if you actually play this game. Just slight nerfs, for example, to things like the warrior healing signet passive, warrior mobility or necro condi burst would make a huge difference.

So many confusing replies in here, hopefully this helps:

All berserker armor, weapons and trinkets is the highest direct damage set you can have.

Start with this in a build editor like http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/ and start replacing armor pieces (not weapon or accessories) with either Valkyrie or Soldier pieces. For soldier replace in the order of: head, legs, chest. For valk replace any armor piece.

Valkyrie is always greater direct damage than soldier. But soldier’s offers more effective stats/piece than valkyrie.

If you compare at how much crit damage you get in the head, chest and leg armor slots you’ll see that you get much less crit damage per stat than anywhere else (i.e. you get 2% crit damage for a 32 point slot in the head versus 4% crit damage for 31 points on an exotic backpiece).

Note also that because oils/stones convert toughness to precision/power, each point of toughness is actually worth 1 toughness + .06 power/precision, further improving the efficacy of soldier gear.

There are many reasons why you would want valk over soldier and to say soldier is always better is misleading. But it is arguable that the zerker + soldier set recommended by Wish is the most balanced direct damage set available for most builds.

Also, generally, don’t use cavilier. Power is such a valuable stat (tip: increasing your power proportionally increases direct damage, e.g. @ 2000 power, 20 power increases damage by 1%) you should always prioritize it over other stats unless you’re trying some kind of bunker build (which I wouldn’t recommend).

Hold your strafe key down.

This was a good interview. The interviewer asked good questions and the thief had clear, knowledgeable answers. Thanks for making this OP.

Despite the troll title I guess this is as good a place as any to voice my opinion that I also hate the ruins.

They are nothing like what i like about wvw. It’s as if the designers tried to cram as much garbage as possible into the lake area. Between the tunnels, stairs, narrow bridges, aquaducts, trees, jumping puzzle crap, unclimbable ridges, sky high capture points and everything else it just sucks.

I feel like they tried too hard. I really enjoyed the open world feel of the original borderlands. They weren’t perfect. I didn’t like the water. But I liked it more than these crappy ruins.

Besides the design, ruins just attract mini-zergs trying to spvp in WvW. I guess that’s cool for them, but it feels like you now need to either join a zerg or party up with 4 people to have any fun.

I wish they added only 3 well designed capture points instead of 5 to leave more room.

It’s easy to assume I’m just resistant to change, but I really don’t see how I’m going to suddenly like the terribly unfun ruins over the next few months.

Yeah it doesn’t work for black powder either which is perhaps even more disappointing.

Kwak.4810:

Is CnD —> Backstab better than spamming HS?

If you’re being serious, the answer is as long as the target is > 25% HP.

At 25% HP heartseeker does nearly the same damage as backstab but costs much less initiative, is heat seeking and you don’t need to wait for revealed to fall off.

From the title I was sure the original post was going to be:

Last refuge.

(15 characters)

What have people swapped in to replace signet of shadows after switching to traveler runes? Particularly for d/p builds.

I previously ran infiltrator’s, blinding powder (or shadow refuge) and SoS.

I swapped in shadow step which was a solid upgrade.

To do this you’re going to need to: 1) record, 2) edit, 3) post.

The two popular options for recording (or at least they were) are bandicam and fraps.

Fraps provides better quality video but Bandicam offers real time video compression which can be very useful if you have limited disk space (recordings may take 2GB/min uncompressed)

They cost ~ $39 each but have free versions available.

Bandicam is the better free version, you can record up to 10 minutes with a small watermark added (here’s an example). Fraps’s free version is terrible, limiting you to 30 seconds of recording.

For video editing you might want to just start with Windows Movie Maker (assuming you use Windows Vista+). For Windows 8 you’ll need to download it from Microsoft it’s in their free Essentials suite.

Uploading your video to youtube is pretty easy. If you have a google account, you should see an “Upload” button on youtube.com when you’re signed in.

For editing and uploading you’ll probably want to research some guides online.

Now I’m bummed I didn’t register

Johje Holan.4607:

Asudementio.8526:

A list of added content:

5 WvW ruins in the borderlands, when you hold 3 you get a buff.

This is all that really matters. Did they go into details? Can you elaborate please? I can’t watch it at work, its blocked, those kittens!

He didn’t go into a lot of detail. There were 5 capture points spread evenly around the lake (one looked underwater) of the borderlands. If your realm captures at least 3 you are granted an unknown buff called “bloodlust.”

He showed one capture point near bay which was a new colosseum ruin which demonstrated that they’re slightly changing the borderlands map.