It’s my mentality because I play a D/P shadow arts permastealth thief and I pretty much win 1v1 against any class if I’m patient, perhaps ranger being the hardest.
I know you guys love to pretend like stealth is fine, but play other classes before shooting off your mouth. Stealth is an amazing survival tool.
You’re wrong. There are plenty of selfish 1v1 specs across most classes that will consistently beat a D/P build with 30 in shadow arts. What’s more, there are quite a number of team oriented specs that are currently played in tournaments that will beat a 30 SA D/P thief as well.
This is why you don’t see tournaments flooded with Cruuk style farpoint assaulters. Because backstabbing a spirit just extended a fight and lost your team 30 points.
If you’re playing low tier hotjoin bads sitting in duel servers and think you’re up against the best X of a class, you’re wrong. If you think ‘not dying’ is enough to be viable when any point you’re fighting on will reliably get capped on you, you’re wrong.
P.S. The animation on asura isn’t very hard to see if you practice against it unless the thief is using a specific set of daggers which maybe 2 thief players use. Additionally, D/D is trash, and P/D telegraphs their CnD with their position, so CnD should never be an issue.
P.P.S. Can we get something like teamliquid’s moderated strategy forum so that we can have solid commentary without all of the noise?
All stealth has no posturing or animation. Rangers hunter shot/rapid shot/whatever share the exact same posturing. All thief dagger skills have no animation and share the exact same posturing. There is no ability to counter and deny stealth thoughtfully. If your blocking at the time of attack..good one…if you evade and it happens to the attack that was going to grant them stealth,..awesome..but that’s all you can do. The disparity of this is mesmer great sword they lift and arm, or throw their hands down in their posturing on their attacks. If you know mesmer, you know what skill they’re using..guardians have the most overt weapon use posturing and animation, perhaps only second to ranger great sword..these attacks are fairly linear..yet stealth, which is highly tactical has no cue or way of preventing thoughtfully apart from, ‘hoping.’
CnD, Dancing dagger, Death blossom, Heartseeker and each different attack during the auto chain have different animations.
CnD has the thief spin the dagger around in a full circle before attacking. If you see the spin, you evade the CnD. The dagger spin even has a particle trail.
Shadow trap is completely abusive, and I’m pretty surprised there hasn’t been a thread about it yet, and I have no idea why people are defending its current iteration.
And Cruuk isn’t complaining that heartseeker is AoE, but rather that untargetted heartseekers hit kittening ANYTHING even REMOTELY nearby, which is frustrating for a player. The mechanics behind this end up creating situations wherein high value attacks (mace skull crack, backstab, pistolwhip stun, heartseeker, etc) all end up hitting spirits, pets, minions instead of the selected target, or heartseekers being used to leap hit targets completely out of the path of the attack.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
How about making the characters look like humans / sylvari / norn just to the spectators?
It’s not about the spectators. It’s about the players. Good players can counter enemy plays by identifying the animations of their skills. If you can’t read the animations because the character model is too small, then good play is punished.
People like you have derailed this thread and made it into all sorts of issues that I didn’t originally intend which has also derailed the dev responses somewhat. Lots of people here, like you, are talking about the problems of playing against asura. I started this thread to specifically deal with all of us watching proper tournaments like the current pax one. Our personal play experience never came into it. I was simply pointing out that from a viewers perspective the asura are much harder to watch than other races. So I was simply wondering if banning asura characters from proper tournaments in the future is something ANet would consider to make viewing better without needing to do any work. I was never once talking about banning asura from all pvp or even about the experience people have playing against them. It was just my experience watching the streams and really noticing how horrible watching eight asura run around is. The spell effects like dragons tooth were some of the only real attacks I could make out from them.
The reason why so many people are talking about this from a player’s perspective is because the race’s visibility issues are the common theme linking a number of problems.
Spectators have issues understanding what’s going on when there are a lot of Asura but so do players attempting to read skills while in-game. Given that this issue affects substantive portions of gameplay, rather than just stream viewability, it makes sense that a number of people are echoing your sentiments with a more powerful position.
Please refer to the snip I took of our release page (attached). Here’s the link for the full page: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/august-06-2013/
This should help address the concerns about effects covering animations.
Also, note that when I mentioned the hit box, it was in response to the post before mine. I didn’t have time to quote and make it fancy. I’m fully aware that it’s not completely to do with the hit box.
The issue is completely separate from the hitbox. Asura characters using the smallest sized weapons and skin colour to match those weapons make for incredibly difficult to read character models. This has nothing to do with particle effects either. While cleaning up some particle effects would help, it doesn’t actually deal with the problem itself.
Recognizing certain animations is critical in certain matchups. Banish was a classic example last year, when certain teams had no issues holding onto mid on certain maps vs anything other than an Asura guardian. Cloak and dagger’s trail effect is far harder to see on a small character model.
The response to this is to randomly throw out predictive dodges rather than reactive dodges, which makes many matchups frustrating and unenjoyable due to the removal of counterplay elements.
There are additional issues with visual information in the game as well; Large names, titles and other pieces of information will clip through walls even if your character model is completely invisible. This gives an additional advantage to characters who have short names and forego titles. The difference is pretty significant, too; a character with a 4 letter name can hide behind the braziers mid on temple, or the mausoleums/ledges.
This has been a significant issue since release. Please work on it.
Its pretty easy to figure out when a blackpowder is coming. If you concuss a thief as he’s coming down from powder in the middle of a fight, he won’t be using the short HS, and he’ll be far enough away from the powder that he’ll have to perform a hs back into powder at max range. Any movement impairing CC that your team follows up with gives you a kill, and even if you don’t, he gets 1 application of stealth for the cost of 10-12 initiative, and sadly most thieves aren’t running at full initiative if they’re trying to disengage, otherwise they’ve done kitten-all for damage after their opener. If he’s running 10/30/30/0/0, he has to blow 2 utilities or refuge to stealth, if he’s running 10/30/x/x/30, then he can restealth, but he won’t have any initiative after his opener, and won’t be able to escape. Similarly, you can chain your concuss into a kd into a fear.
BP and HS have a combined cast time of 1.25 seconds. If your team knows that shadow step is down and you’ve just trained the thief, its pretty predictable what his only way of getting out is. A number of teams used to use sanc offensively to isolate thieves when step was down, because the only way to miss the sanc is to place it behind him and force the thief to HS into your cleave, which also gives you a free kill, but most of the guardians who used to do it have quit, and most of the new maps don’t have very good spots for it. Khylo and forest have really solid spots for it. But sanc’s really just the first of many options; Ring and Line of warding both work, and both of them are worth blowing a utility to get the blind off and a dodge roll in order to get a kill, believe me. Shield’s still got its mojo, banish works, binding blade, etc.
And those are 1 class solutions from 1 player. You know very well that when a team sends 2/3 people after a thief that he can’t blackpowder hs safely without blowing step or refuge.
So yes, there are plenty of solutions to stealth. If there weren’t, people would have been running a bunch of D/P thieves, which do exceptionally well against both necros and S/D thieves. Sadly, they get kittening demolished when 2 people with CCs decide that they’re going to burn his step then switch back to him next time he comes in.
You’re obviously not getting what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about how good/bad a backstab thief is in team fights, I’m talking about 1v1s. Specifically, thieves that revolve their build around stealth spamming, shadow trap, and getting free neutraliziations on your backpoint.
But either way, I would like to see you reliably interrupt a blackpowder > heartseeker on someone that does it ontop of you, or maybe out of LOS. Since it’s so easy and all. Because all it sounds like you do is try to spam CC when revealed is off cooldown. That’s not the same thing at all.
And seriously, saying to use things like sanctuary and banish to interrupt a blackpowder > heartseeker? I’m done, because this won’t get anywhere. It’s also funny that you say “most of the guardians that used to do it quit,” very subtle there.
Its not about ‘spamming cc when revealed is off’. If you watch the blackpowder animation, you’ll notice that before the shot is fired, there’s a very noticeable animation where the thief gestures and lifts his pistol. There’s no such animation for shadow or headshot. If you’re attempting to react after the BP is already fired, you’ve got .75 seconds to react. If you’re watching for the pistol hand, you have an additional half second to reliably CC. If the thief is sitting on you, watching for that will tell you EXACTLY when you need to dodge to avoid the blind + field + the timing for concussive shot.
If you’re running spirits, you probably know that Spirits + Pet + Player make it incredibly obnoxious to get multiple stealths off from a single black powder, which is important for initiative regen. If the thief isn’t running 30 in SA, he won’t win the battle of attrition either, and if he is and is stealthing near your point while you sit on it and its capped because he is 30 in SA, you’re winning.
What you’re probably ACTUALLY kitten ed off by is the fact that the thief can just straight up disengage after 1) getting a free decap via shadow trap, 2)burning time until shadow trap is back up and keeping you on backpoint, 3) putting shadow trap back up and then disengaging. I have the same issues with shadow trap there that you do, but to say thakittens because of D/P’s disengage or ability to 1v1 vs a backpoint ranger is absurd.
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D/P isn’t really affected at all by 4 second reveal.
Whatever was left of offhand dagger gets destroyed by it, however.
D/P is significantly affected by the 4 seconds of reveal, which forces a dodge or extra attack between every restealth rotation that the thief does while S/D rarely has issues with their disengagement or pressure because of reveal. If this was the pre-buff S/D that relied on chain 3s daze, then sure, but that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
Concussion shot doesn’t last long enough. Pet CC needs to be done ahead of time (and is incredibly unreliable for this, but if you really are going to insist this is an easy way to prevent stealth I would like to see you consistently do it with just pet CC). Either way, you can just blind field ontop of the pet, or blindfield ontop of the ranger, and you won’t be able to be stopped because everything the ranger does is blinded until it’s over.
Shield 5 on guardian, sure, if they’re not dropping blinding powder on top of you (which would constantly blind you, which blinds the shield 5). Sanctuary on the powder, well since this has a 1 1/2s cast time, this is not a viable solution. It’s also able to be blinded (which allows the enemy to sit in it for a little, meaning they can avoid the initial knockback), and blowing a 120s cooldown to stop a skill that has no cooldown is completely unrealistic. It’s obvious that you’re just getting desperate now.
Refuge I don’t have an issue with because you can’t spam it every 4 seconds, and you can actually do something about it unless the thief is running something like s/d where they have almost infinite evades.
Its pretty easy to figure out when a blackpowder is coming. If you concuss a thief as he’s coming down from powder in the middle of a fight, he won’t be using the short HS, and he’ll be far enough away from the powder that he’ll have to perform a hs back into powder at max range. Any movement impairing CC that your team follows up with gives you a kill, and even if you don’t, he gets 1 application of stealth for the cost of 10-12 initiative, and sadly most thieves aren’t running at full initiative if they’re trying to disengage, otherwise they’ve done kitten-all for damage after their opener. If he’s running 10/30/30/0/0, he has to blow 2 utilities or refuge to stealth, if he’s running 10/30/x/x/30, then he can restealth, but he won’t have any initiative after his opener, and won’t be able to escape. Similarly, you can chain your concuss into a kd into a fear.
BP and HS have a combined cast time of 1.25 seconds. If your team knows that shadow step is down and you’ve just trained the thief, its pretty predictable what his only way of getting out is. A number of teams used to use sanc offensively to isolate thieves when step was down, because the only way to miss the sanc is to place it behind him and force the thief to HS into your cleave, which also gives you a free kill, but most of the guardians who used to do it have quit, and most of the new maps don’t have very good spots for it. Khylo and forest have really solid spots for it. But sanc’s really just the first of many options; Ring and Line of warding both work, and both of them are worth blowing a utility to get the blind off and a dodge roll in order to get a kill, believe me. Shield’s still got its mojo, banish works, binding blade, etc.
And those are 1 class solutions from 1 player. You know very well that when a team sends 2/3 people after a thief that he can’t blackpowder hs safely without blowing step or refuge.
So yes, there are plenty of solutions to stealth. If there weren’t, people would have been running a bunch of D/P thieves, which do exceptionally well against both necros and S/D thieves. Sadly, they get kittening demolished when 2 people with CCs decide that they’re going to burn his step then switch back to him next time he comes in.
i think d/d fell off more because people realized if you’re gonna run d/x it’s tempting to get the benefits of SA and the blind field from d/p over the harder hitting but less reliable cnd. plus with d/p you get that interrupt over dancing dagger. (i don’t think DD is as bad as it’s made out to be but it is less useful than the daze in my experience)
People switched over from 25/30/0/0/15 D/D to 25/30/0/0/15 D/P a long time ago for the safestomps, headshots on res signet (power necro was large at the time) and the safer stealth setups, not because they needed SA benefits. When most of the D/P and D/D burst was nerfed it stopped being viable to sit on a point, so a few players went into SA, but most of them just went into acrobatics.
D/D is currently trash and completely unplayable at the moment for a number of reasons. Dancing dagger is trash, death blossom costs too much initiative to use even for evading purposes, which limits the weapon set to a poor version of D/P burst that can’t even safestomp the people it downs.
This is a problem because there is no way to ‘counter’ someone going into stealth. There’s no way for me to knock someone out of stealth.
You’ve played guardian and ranger, both of which have easy ways to prevent the standard D/P setup from completing a heartseeker.
There’s a way to counter someone going into stealth, CC them when they press 6, and if they get the heartseeker off anyways, just note where its going and cleave the kitten out of the point. If you immobed or CC’d them properly, they’ll only get 1 leap finisher in their field, meaning the stealth costed 7 initiative and you got free cleave off. Do it again and you’ve won the fight.
Concussion shot, pet cc, shield 5, sanc on the powder, fear mark or spectral wall, updraft, eq to the edge of circle, shocking aura, skull crack, headshot, mesmer gs5, diversion are all common counters.
Refuge has its own counters, many of which overlap the skills above.
Shadow trap, by contrast, is broken as kitten in its current form.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
This is directly for the devs:
If you really are going to hotfix smth about the necros for the tournament then, for heaven’s sake, only change it for sPvP. Necros struggle enough in PvE and WvW, especially in WvW since organized guilds run high condition cleansing and high condition duration reduction (melandru runes and lemongrass soup). If you decide to bring down DS to a weaker lvl overall just for the PAX tournament, then all the necros who do not attend on it (and we’re looking at probably 98% of the whole necromancer community) will suffer from any further changes.
Then maybe the solution is to fix Lemongrass rather than keep necros broken as puppies.
With the shift in the meta, having a Mesmer on your team flat out gimps you in competitive play. How can we fix this?
They just can´t compete with necro and evade thief, that´s all. The problem is not the mesmer tho.
To be honest is the necro the one who brought the thief to “opness” state.
Pre- necro horror, an evade thief was a strong build but nothing else, now it’s basically the only power build capable to go 1vs1 a necro without insta dying ( while even having a chance to win) and the only power build capable to attain mobility, disangage, 1vs1 and AoE in a single build, all packed with good condi cleansing ( signet, shadow return, lyssa runes).
It just fits the meta perfectly, but it’s not thief fault if the meta is this way.
If necro gets nerfed, S/D thief will still be strong but not “as strong” as it is now.
You can consistently beat any necro build with a D/P setup 1v1 reliably. You will, however, get your kitten demolished in team fights because you can’t deal with the CC and cleave from 3 other players.
Please for the love of god make Tab targeting actually select the nearest player! I don’t care where my mouse is looking. When I press tab I want to target the person attacking my side not the person 50 ft. away.
This would be a separate bind called ‘Target Nearest’. Tab targeting is meant to cycle through targets with some priority that may or may not start with your closest target. For instance, tab could prefer targets towards the center of your screen, and not necessarily the closest.
Its really nice to see someone giving us a heads up on what’s being worked on. I know you have a company policy against giving dates, but the comment about the invisible walls showed how much you care about polishing up the game.
Players, myself included, appreciate that.
a thief can’t hit an 8k backstab in spvp without “prepping”. maybe if their target is sheer glass and suffering a bit of vuln or something, but even then i doubt it.
Hardly. I can get 10k Backstabs in PvP, with a 10/30/30/0/0 build, just by activating an Assassin’s Signet in conjunction with Signets of Power prior to attacking. That’s far more than 8k and requires a single utility.
I’ve been hit with 13k Backstabs on my zerker Mesmer in sPvP. Given I had no added toughness, that’s still ridiculous. It’s no wonder Thieves are whine topic #1 with all of the food buffs and potential superior stats in WvW.
Wait, eles’ burst can be mitigated with certainty?
Melee shatters off mirror images can be mitigated?
Melee range whirlwind hitting 4 times can be mitigated with certainty?Okay.
Yes? You can see them all coming and they’re so FotM that anyone that’s played a little hotjoin will find them all extremely predictable.
All of them literally have zero cast time and can be done from 900 range with blink or lightning flash, with the exception of whirlwind, which the warrior needs to be in melee range to hit.
I crafted my build a week before the buff to S/D in preparations to the buffs. My inspiration had actually come from a thief that played for only a few months after release known as “Deeja”. He ran a double shortbow perma dodge ‘spam 3’ build.
However, obviously it did zero dps and offered very little in teamfights. Especially after the Cluster 15% nerf very early on (and subsequently the 900 range and heatseeking nerfs).
Yep, I didn’t run my build very often before the patch, so I would have been very surprised if you took it off me, but cluster and trickshot both got hit a week after I came up with it so I scrapped it, and then dropped D/D. Shortbow main works better with D/D vs D/P because of the near instant spike timing after the switch from shortbow to your melee weaponset. But now shortbow deals around half the damage it used to while also having less range.
The move towards a sustainable thief that was most effective with specific team synergies that could be neutralized by smart counterplay already existed. Instead, they gutted the existing option for thief, and gave S/D a truckton of power instead, allowing for damage and evasion to come from the same initiative point expenditure, with the added bonus of having infiltrator strike’s bullkitten to back you up.
http://www.twitch.tv/tehmaker/c/2605731
(Referring to the part he talks about other classes balanced around warriors)
This is a very good interview. I’d edit in a specific time for people to listen to, though.
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Jumper is right s/d thief is strong if u play it in the right way and it do nothing if u dont know how to use that spec or ure just spamming 3 how many ppl say.
S/D thief is made easy to play because people blow their high value skills during the evade on 3, rather than when 3 is locked down due to larcenous being available. When people are better, it makes S/D much harder to play.
Still, the damage from the set is overly focused on larcenous and flanking, and playing it doesn’t feel right. There’s still very little need to toss that much ini into a CnD, and tactical strike requires a setup that makes it weak as a method of reacting to a skill you want to shut down.
Weeks before jumper made his S/D build, I made a similar one using shortbow as the main running 25 in acro, 30 in crit strikes, and 15 in deadly arts. I remember telling Acandis I had found the next biggest thing. The build ran a bunch of +might duration runes and might on dodge + agil sig, vigor on heal, withdraw, etc. It kept 8 stacks of might on itself consistently and blasted out stupid amounts of might when paired with an ele (and at the time aurashare D/D ele pairs were popular and gave me peels and sustained pressure for me to capitalize on) and I ran it in a few tpvp matchs, and I could consistently stay alive with 3 people training on me. The tradeoff was that the sustained damage the build put out dropped to zero when people trained you, whereas an SD thief can still put out pressure while being focused. This build is why bry and a number of people consistently lose their kitten about me running withdraw a month before it got popular.
Then they decided to nerf trickshot, cut cluster damage, and give a massive boost to S/D the next patch. The exact same evade-centric play came out, but instead of having damage centered on avoidable cluster bombs and mitigatable projectiles, requiring positioning to deal with condi pressure, and the cross team ele synergies, instead we got all of the upsides of the build’s support and sustained damage with none of the downsides.
Instead of focusing on buffs that allow for cross-class synergy and the development of team wide strategies, Anet has just been trying to give every class a ‘complete’ toolkit to deal with everything. That’s obviously not going to work. If the devs get worried about power creep, they end up just homogenizing classes’ strengths. If they’re worried about class diversity, they do kitten like give necros a thousand different buffs concurrently.
Instead, devs should be examining how classes interact with each other and try to lessen their ability to function at 100% on their own, while emphasizing their ability to help out other classes.
Wait, eles’ burst can be mitigated with certainty?
Melee shatters off mirror images can be mitigated?
Melee range whirlwind hitting 4 times can be mitigated with certainty?
Okay.
but if the only thing you do is play hotjoins, you don’t really know how the class works
I’m more afraid to face a good hotjoin player than a tPvP one. tPvP players are used to hanging on to the coattails of their teammates and relying on them to make up for their weaknesses.
True skill is forged in the fire of hotjoin. Not everyone can take it. And those who can’t try and pretend that carebear tPvP is the best where people help each other out of scraps.
That’s not how things work. At all. If you’re subpar at your role in a tpvp team, you will be replaced with a better player and you constantly have pressure to up your game. You will be compared to other players who play your class, and teams will shop around if they feel they could net someone who could fill your role better than you could. What’s more, the opposition you face is organized, the matchups you’re put into are designed to make you lose, and you need to understand rotations and positioning to a far higher degree. Even fights that you could win aren’t worth it if they’re putting your team behind in points. In hotjoins, if I hit my 350 farm-train limit per match, I don’t even give a kitten if my team wins.
Thief in particular plays drastically different in a tpvp setting, because the moment you appear in a team fight, generally 1-2 people begin to train on you immediately, with multiple people available to call target on you. Thieves present a massive liability when downed, much moreso than other classes because while they’re difficult to stomp, they’re probably the easiest class in the game to drop once they’re in revealed, and they have the easiest corpses in the game to cleave, and consequently the hardest corpses in the game to res. As such, even if your combo drops someone but you can’t get out, your team requires the ability to safe-stomp your target, otherwise you just lost your team mid. Eles, the other main burst class, cannot be safestomped, and can evade a large amount of cleave by misting once they see the large-value cleave skills come out.
In hotjoins, I can regularly win 3v1s as a thief because the players are bad, refuse to res each other, don’t attempt to interrupt key skills, have terrible downed fight mechanics and they rotate incredibly poorly between points. In tpvp, I will not even attempt to 1v1 a class that I have a poor matchup against unless I know the player’s spec and what I can get out of the engagement. Hotjoin trait distributions are suboptimal, the players have less experience, and there is far less synergy between the classes, setups, and the teams’ capabilities to engage with the tertiary objectives. In hotjoin I will jump into melee range and beat on a necro in a 4v4 because no one on their team has the presence of mind to call a target on me, isolate me, then run a train on me. In tpvp, I’m forced to bait out key skills while in shortbow, then wait for an opening where most CC skills are down, and someone is at 1/2 hp to jump in, all the while attempting to put out as much pressure as possible from range.
Thieves are often called the class that’s most reliant on their team for success, and that’s because with the severe reduction in our damage output after chain-nerfs to all of our main skills, we’re forced to capitalize on openings that others provide. If your guardian is sitting on a point with aegis up, for instance,
Right, and they should be if they see a thief stealth. And if they time it right and the thief times the bs wrong, there should be a consequence, no? If reveal on evade is too much, starting with block would be a fine start. I agree that evade may be too much considering ranger and thief evade spam builds atm.
The consequence is that the bs doesn’t hit, basi venom is used up and the opponent either gets to wait out the stealth and is given the knowledge regarding where the thief is, so that he can auto at him and try to take the next stab or pommel bash to the face, which does mediocre damage or blinds instead of dazes.
Additionally, if there’s a steal in the combo, which normally there is, steal will not actually provide the thief with a kit if the steal hit is evaded, blocked, or otherwise does not land.
If the thief isn’t 30 into shadowarts, then taking damage while in stealth severely limits the thief’s ability to stay in melee range, which means that giving away his position with a missed attack opens him up to getting blind binding bladed, whirlwinded, etc. which might force him to disengage or outright kill him if he has no other way out.
Is D/X even desired in the tournament scene anymore?
Its great that some people here ‘main’ a thief, but if the only thing you do is play hotjoins, you don’t really know how the class works, nor do you know why it is valuable on a team. Currently, the main element that drives a team to bring a thief isn’kittens burst (eles do that better, safer, more consistently and with more CC), but rather the ability to stealth rotate with refuge.
So what do people in this thread want? Nerf the burst which is already telegraphed and impossible without some sort of advantage in the team fight, nerf the ability to stealth rotate with refuge by making stealth stacking impossible (and therefore forcing everyone out of taking any points in shadow arts). Basically nerf the 1 thing thieves are viable for, or re-nerf an aspect of the class that is supposed to be where they excel, but currently dont.
Here’s a heads up: people want thieves to be less gimmicky and have more sustain, right? That means thieves need to run 30 in shadow arts. If that’s what you want to promote, then shredding stealth duration and stealth openers would do the opposite of what you’re hoping to achieve.
100% Yes.
It’s time thieves go through a number of changes to move them away from the hyper gimmick builds they run to more well rounded ones. This does require nerfs (like the one suggested) but also buffs in return.
I wish thief players would stop getting out thier pitch forks every time something that might hurt their class is suggested. Would you guys really not like to see your class moved to an over all better state for both thief and non thief players? … Does-not-compute.
I and several other thieves agree with this. Most thieves that freak out are those that created one because they wanted to steamroll everything after being oneshotted in WvW.
Anything that could make the toon feel the stab should reveal the thief.
Wait, but you can’t feel where a clusterbomb is coming from the impact, so can clusterbombs keep thieves in stealth now?
This thread is giving me hopes I never knew I had.
Backstab has a full cast time of 1 second if you combine the pre and post-cast animations.
I’m curious, so should I, as a thief, get revealed when I use any shortbow ability because they all have projectile paths that should ‘show’ where the thief is? Should shooting a clusterbomb instantly reveal me before it lands? Should surprise shot reveal me before it hits? Should scorpion wire trigger revealed even if it doesn’t hit a player character after being stutter step juked? Should shadowstep’s return?
Because if ‘knowing where the thief is’ is the criteria for getting a revealed debuff, every single one of those should.
But lets say that’s not the case, and its just the stealth attacks in slot one. That means these skills are the ones effected:
Surprise Shot
Backstab
Sneak Attack
Tactical Strike
The Ripper
Deadly Strike
Venomous Knife
Are people kittening about surprise shot not revealing on block? Sneak attack? Harpoon? Deadly strike? Venomous Knife? The ripper?
No, people are kittening about Tactical strike and Backstab. Note how both of those are the ones with the back-specific hit conditions. Start juking into facestabs and use aegis to kill basi.
Play guardian. See how you like it then. All the defense in the world, but can’t kill a thing because it has been decided for you, that with that much defense your not allowed power.
i feel like making a dps guardian just to prove you wrong.
it’s a rare sight, mostly because bunker is so ingrained in guardian, but it’s definitely not impossible.
People have run offensive guardian pretty frequently not but a few months ago. Condi pressure shuts them out hard. A few months back, that meant only trappers would deal with them effectively (or mesmer if the mes engaged on them while they were crossing the map, but that requires the mes to self-isolate himself, which is generally not the best of scenarios), but now we’ve got engineers and necros being the core pressure component on every team.
Even if necros are toned down significantly in the near future, engineers still put out enough condi pressure to make them significantly weaker then they would be otherwise.
Offensive guardians used to play offensive roamer/decapper with a GS+2 weapon or as a replacement for a normal bunker guardian mid for a team comp that could maximize on Staff 3 and Greatsword 5 to cleave a team down in 2-3 seconds.
The arcane skills aren’t decent when used in isolation. No one runs arcane blast or wave alone, and shield is entirely underwhelming as a defensive option when compared to flash or mist. Additionally, arcane power is completely useless unless you’ve got a specific burst combo to use it with.
That’s the problem; they’re trash or they’re an instant 80% of your life as currently designed.
Lets have a near omnipresent buff in teamfights cause 4k net damage per grenade tossed and cause upwards of 20k net damage per use of choking gas.
I’ll pass on this one.
Seems people can’t learn to play. Too many 1 v 1 s and 1 v 2s on maps like Spirit Watch and Skyhammer I guess. RIP the best of the maps. These secondary mechanics really change the games up. No longer can players just focus on holding points and killing players but have to actually fight off point over a cannon or an orb. These are the things that make the game interesting. Hopefully more valuable secondary mechanics can enter the game unlike kyhlo, forest, and foefire.
I agree entirely. PvP has been stale for quite some time. Matchups on Khylo, Foefire and Nilfhel are great and whatnot, but we’ve been doing them for a year. Spirit Watch and Skyhammer are a well enjoyed break.
If you yank this map from the rotation before players have time to figure out the map, you’re going to be doing it a disservice.
People kittened that they wanted something other than conquest, and here you’ve got 2 maps that emulate the flag cap and lighting pedestal maps in GW1 and people are revolting. I don’t get it at all.
I’ve RTL’d off a cliff on the map, shadowshotted to someone who just broke glass, gotten hit off the side, and it was frustrating. Equally as important, however, I’ve baited out people’s condicleanse with immobs and then surprise shotted them as I kited through a glass panel. I’ve avoided line-dash attacks by booking it to a jump panel. I’ve had 3D teamfights and intercepted people using jump panel-only routes out of the side points. If you’re getting knocked into these panels, its 100% a problem with your play. Including (especially!) in the cannon room.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
The map design features assymetical mobility depending on your location, has a fantastic secondary mechanic centered around co-ordinating CC in conjunction with cannon-fire and has many methods of play above and beyond what you’re hearing in this thread. Playing 5 on the field is perfectly viable, as long as you run builds that can drill through the far-point defenders quickly.
Movement and positioning on this map is crucial. Far from being engi/necro/guardian and no one else, eles and thieves do very well by chain-roaming and decapping points, avoiding fights except to bait cannon shots.
Teams can respond to this roam-reponse by unloading their cannon-room, which then makes the cannon vulnerable for capture.
Overall, the mechanics are a lot more interesting than this thread would have you believe. The only issue that I would mention is that it isn’t immediately obvious that you can dodge roll into your interaction with the warpgate, which clears necromarks off the entrance. If you could do something to show the cannon room through the backside of the warpgate so that you had some inkling of what you were engaging into , that would be nice.
Yep, agreeed. I should be able to headshot a guardian out of shelter, sanctuary and renewed focus.
Think about the issue in terms of team composition instead of individual 1v1s.
How am I QQing when I recognize that thief roundly wins 1v1s vs necro consistently?
I have no issue giving necros s’more oomph in 1v1s (although people who main other classes will want to stab me for saying that, because thief is the only class that 1v1s necros so consistently), but the dynamics that they create in teamfights with their area denial completely shuts down melee classes.
And obviously even if 1 spec wall was an issue to play around, 2 specc’d into walls just makes backlines impossible to extend into. But that’s okay because teams aren’t bringing thieves and warriors, hence why you see some necros running something that isn’t wall, because the threat of wall has made multiple classes impossible to play at a viable level.
I mean, maybe the answer isn’t to nerf necros, but to buff rifle, longbow and shortbow. …I haven’t been asking for trickshot to be fixed for months or anything,. Oh wait, that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing.
If you just got wall feared, its because you’re in their mid-line. And if you’re in their midline, you’re not there to pull out a rifle on warrior. If that won teamfights, you’d see people running shortbow, longbow and rifle on thief and warrior respectively as their main weapon.
Here’s a hint: They don’t. Because your advice doesn’t work.
So you think that pulling out your ranged weapon when you can’t hit in melee your enemy doesn’t work?
Oh, well…
On a thief, the proper response is to stealth up and wait the wall out so that you don’t lose access to flanking strike or blackpowder, both of which are vital to you being able to survive while training the necro. On a warrior, you… well, you die.
If thief and warrior ranged options weren’t a huge liability to switch to, sure they’d be able to make the swap, but as it stands that’s not the case.
I get that theoretically that SHOULD be a viable counterplay option, but it currently isn’t because of how the ranged weaponsets for melee classes are; they’re entirely supportive by nature and the switch from melee to range locks you into that weapon set and out of your melee-based mitigation.
I watched tournaments, it’s an unreadable mess short of watching the point ownership interface or when the action shifts into a back point where a 1v1 is occurring.
That’s an issue with your understanding of the game. Team fights are exceptionally readable if you know what to look for.
Sadly, 95% of our casters don’t know what to look for, so there’s not much help for you in that department.
5s is PLENTY of time to melt someone with condis as a necro especially if he has dhuumfire ready to proc + his marks. As a bunker guard, a line of warding could delay you, but your friendly neighborhood bunker guard isn’t going to murder you within those few secs neither. That’s the difference.
The problem is that the spectral wall is both offensive + defensive. Gives the user proc if you walk across it, and fears EVERYTIME the enemy walks through it…on top of that, the fear procs with terror trait so you can very well kill yourself if you walk through it a few times…
Switch to ranged and punish them, then.
There is no melee-only profession in this game. You can always switch to your ranged set and damage them for afar.
If you just got wall feared, its because you’re in their mid-line. And if you’re in their midline, you’re not there to pull out a rifle on warrior. If that won teamfights, you’d see people running shortbow, longbow and rifle on thief and warrior respectively as their main weapon.
Here’s a hint: They don’t. Because your advice doesn’t work.
You put one person on the point, not 4. The rest stay back and shoot onto the person who’s on the point, who is generally your bunker.
Positioning 101.
So basically there’s no room for melee in the game except for bunkers?
No no, there’s room, but it always takes the form of overextensions past the point into their team’s midline, or briefly onto the point. If you can’t overextend and get a decent return on putting yourself in danger, your class won’t be viable. thieves and warriors generally need to make sure they drop someone if they over extend, otherwise they need to spec for a lot of disengagement. The fresh air S/D eles are the same way. If they go in, they need some return on the risk. A thief should not be meleeing a guardian in a 4v4 if the guardian isn’t about to die; his guardian is going to be getting cleaved, and he’s going to go down for free if he does.
Note: if you over extend, you can relieve pressure from your guardian or other point holder by redirecting midline attacks onto whomever is overextending rather than the point. This gives your point holder more beef so that when you disengage, you’ll have more time to drop combat or wait for some healing before going back in.
Creating an opportunity to dive on is one area that warriors are very weak; running longbow someone alleviates this problem but longbow has a lot of its value invested into condi skills that aren’t going to output very much. Thieves can stay back and toss clusters poison and shots until there’s an opening to drop someone.
Easy to say in theory, but hard to achieve in reality. You can get pulled once and your positioning is history. Also when staying too defensive at the back, it’s too easy to get melted by a coordinated AoE spike. Especially on forest and khylo, balling is inevitable due to the map-design.
Forest is actually the map where the front, mid and backlines are most obvious to a casual observer, there’s no mistaken bunching, because the point setup at keep is linear. As for whether or not its difficult in practice; its really not, but not many people put much effort into it. One of the main differences between good players and average players is being conscious about your positioning in teamfights. This requires an understanding of how pressure works in team fights. Sometimes your best move is something that you’ve been told is stupid; to sit back and autoattack their guardian for kittens and giggles.
Here are some examples:
1) the damage is free; your guardian has a lot of his beef up and their midline isn’t going to pressure him off point, whereas their guardian has already dropped 3 cds and their midline cannot advance because you still have a lot of dissuasion ready.
2) their guardian is almost down, and if a guardian goes down, either you take the point, or their midline is forced to start standing on the point.
3) someone else is about to go down and you know the guardian needs a bit more pressure until he cannot res safely
4) you’re almost dead and need to hang back while your heal comes up in 3 seconds.
5) their midline’s about to move up and wouldn’t you know it, their guardian needs more condis on him before you epi to wipe their team.
Watch tournaments and tournament replays and just watch the health bars in the top left and right of the screen and think about how their position effects what options the players have.
You point about pull is why magnet is such a useful skill, and additionally why temporal curtain was nerfed. Scorpion wire, however, can be avoided on command with just strafe-juking, let alone dodging. These skills have value specifically because they allow you to tinker with positioning, not because positioning isn’t important.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
How does one not cluster on a point when winning the game is about standing on said point?
You put one person on the point, not 4. The rest stay back and shoot onto the person who’s on the point, who is generally your bunker.
Positioning 101.
I can walk out of black powder. I cannot attack the thief for his 3-4 seconds of stealth. You know, because dagger necro needs to melee. Marks don’t do crap on a power spec.
And in that time out he can easily spam every 10 secs worth of ini regen he’s taking out 6-7k of my health in one invisible attack I have to gamble a guess on unlike every other telegraphed burst in the game.
Your class is cheap crap hardly punished for missing attacks thanks to how fast initiative regens and how your damage is concentrated in one or two button presses while some other class can miss a skill and have it go on a 30 sec cd.
I will not shed a tear for poor thieves being invonvenienced when they’re farming anything that isn’t a bunker.
And I don’t want to hear excuses quite honestly. I have my lv80 thief, be it s/d or d/p I farm pretty much everything in wvw and spvp unless it’s an engineer bunker. It’s such a kitten -proof class with all the escapes and resets it gets.
You can’t hit a thief while he’s in stealth when you have access to marks? You’re running power necro, which is designed to abuse the scaling on lichform in team fights and you’re trying to 1v1 a thief?
Feel free to 1v1 me in-game, toss me a pm if you’d like. I’ll explain the matchup to you and how it scales into teamfights.
Ok… we’re way off topic now. We already answered Op question. I think this thread should be locked at this point. I don’t care if you are having trouble 1v1 against any conditionmancer with spectral wall. It’s a l2p issue. Dhuumfire + terror is the only reason why necromancer are so over the top, not because of a wall. That’s pretty much your problem. Cut the bs already, and deal with it.
Let me repeat this: the issue isn’t in 1v1. Equally skilled necro v thief is 90% in favor of the thief. In teamfights, however, the threat of wall makes pretty much any melee class in the game useless on any map with small point geometry, like forest, khylo, temple and spiritwatch.
What’s more, there’s no counterplay possible on any of these maps. Your best option when wall goes down in a team fight is a terrible one. Always.
That’s not even to say that thief currently isn’t viable (although offensive guardian, melee ranger, d/d necro and warriors of all stripes currently aren’t), but that’s mostly due to the fact that shadow trap is currently incredibly strong.
I can walk out of black powder. I cannot attack the thief for his 3-4 seconds of stealth. You know, because dagger necro needs to melee. Marks don’t do crap on a power spec.
And in that time out he can easily spam every 10 secs worth of ini regen he’s taking out 6-7k of my health in one invisible attack I have to gamble a guess on unlike every other telegraphed burst in the game.
Your class is cheap crap hardly punished for missing attacks thanks to how fast initiative regens and how your damage is concentrated in one or two button presses while some other class can miss a skill and have it go on a 30 sec cd.
I will not shed a tear for poor thieves being invonvenienced when they’re farming anything that isn’t a bunker.
And I don’t want to hear excuses quite honestly. I have my lv80 thief, be it s/d or d/p I farm pretty much everything in wvw and spvp unless it’s an engineer bunker. It’s such a kitten -proof class with all the escapes and resets it gets.
You can’t hit a thief while he’s in stealth when you have access to marks? You’re running power necro, which is designed to abuse the scaling on lichform in team fights and you’re trying to 1v1 a thief?
Feel free to 1v1 me in-game, toss me a pm if you’d like. I’ll explain the matchup to you and how it scales into teamfights.
for the record, amaterasu, the spectral wall is no worse than the line/ring of warding that guardians have. it’s stronger (fear instead of knockdown, with potential to corrupt boons), but in practical terms, it’s the same: don’t walk through it because you can’t, but you can wait 5 seconds or teleport through.
oh and you really shouldn’t be 1v1ing a necro as a thief, unless you know that necro is a glass cannon (in which case, hack away, no amount of death shroud will save him).
You just contradicted yourself there…it’s no worse than line of warding but it’s stronger in every way?
I don’t agree about the 1v1ing necro thing neither – a good dps thief is a necro’s worse nightmare if played correctly. Trust me, I still kill necros 1v1 post-patch.
Anyway that’s besides the point, I’m only here to discuss the state of spectral wall, not whether a thief should engage a necro or not…
it sounds like it, but it isn’t. my point is that both skills create an impenetrable barrier that you’re not supposed to pass through unless you have a teleport of some sort. they both serve the same purpose and both are countered the same way.
Except the part where a necro can kill you in 3-5 seconds, whereas the warding abilities are both on support/utility weapon sets of a class that cannot do any consistent ranged damage.
Functionally, in team fights, the warding abilities are used to split up teams in order to allow you to focus someone down. The wall, however, makes your backline immune to any melee class.
So, functionally, how are you supposed to counter it? If you teleport to the other side, the necro can walk through the wall, and he gains prot. If you teleport back, he walks through the wall again, all while hitting you. If you wait it out, well, great, the wall is now a functional 5 second peel. That outlasts any of the warrior’s mitigation abilities and any single stealth application, meaning that besides for a thief with 10+ in shadow arts, you’re going to be eating up multiple skills to wait it out.
What’s more? Even at the end, their midline now has prot. Even assuming you took zero damage during the wall, your offence requires 50% more damage to achieve equal pressure, meaning you can’t open with frontloaded damage unless you’re substantially ahead. Which you aren’t. Because you were eating nades and marks for 5 seconds.
Thieves are good against necro because they can consistently blind their high value skills, but that doesn’t really matter when you’re stuck at range in team fights plinking away with a shortbow that misses half the time while your team eats condi cleave.
To the guy above me:
You know you can walk out of black powder, right? At best it should eat 2 skills.
Deep wound (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Deep_Wound) and a modified version of GW1’s dazed (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Dazed)
Necros losing bleed could get (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Disease)
You don’t think a nec could walk back across the wall faster than you can walk around it?
Then just wait 5 seconds and make him regret casting his wall.
5s is PLENTY of time to melt someone with condis as a necro especially if he has dhuumfire ready to proc + his marks. As a bunker guard, a line of warding could delay you, but your friendly neighborhood bunker guard isn’t going to murder you within those few secs neither. That’s the difference.
The problem is that the spectral wall is both offensive + defensive. Gives the user proc if you walk across it, and fears EVERYTIME the enemy walks through it…on top of that, the fear procs with terror trait so you can very well kill yourself if you walk through it a few times…
“5s is PLENTY of time to melt someone with condis as a necro especially if he has dhuumfire ready to proc + his marks.”
Try using any of those moves:
Thief: Infiltrator’s arrow 6 initiation no cooldown vs 45 cooldown
Mesmer: Illusionary leap/swap 12sec cooldown vs 45 cooldown, blink 30 sec vs 45 cooldown.
Ele: Put as much boon on you to cover stability so corrupt bone doesn’t convert it (stability is corrupt boon lowest priority) cross the wall. lightning flash 40 sec vs 45 cooldown
Guardian: Same with ele.
Warrior: who cares?
Ranger: Why would he ever cross it? Use your ranged weapons.
Engineer: Why would he ever cross it? Use your ranged weapons.See where I’m going at? spectral wall is hardly the reason why necromancer are so dumb right not. You even stated yourself where’s the problem at.
Dhuumfire+terror set up combo. Not spectral wall. Or I’ll see more build that only focus on terror with a lot of fear without dhuumfire. 0/30/10/0/30 for example.“on top of that, the fear procs with terror trait so you can very well kill yourself if you walk through it a few times…”
“few times”
l2p issue
If you’re meleeing someone and they drop the wall, you’re gonna get feared. If he stands near the wall I cannot shadowshot, inf sig or steal to him. If I switch to shortbow, I cannot cleanse condis or restealth, and his dps far exceeds mine.
The only solution as a thief is to just stop fighting for 5 seconds, which isn’t an option for any build that doesn’t immediately have access to multiple stealth applications.
I feel even worse for warriors.
And as for stability, there’s kind of an issue there: Corrupt turns stability into fear, which walks you through the wall, which fears you again.
Whirlwind hitting for 14k aoe instantly on startup or having above average corpse cleave with 100b should not be the only thing which makes warriors viable. Nor is it currently enough to make warriors viable, either.
Well, the point isn’t to 1v1 at their home node with Shadow Trap, though. The goal is to use it to quickly neut/cap their point and then leave after winning a team fight. You never stay there and fight — leave them to recap their point and return to mid quickly for the 5v4.
Good point you brought there. But a lot of times there is a bunker at their home, and that is when neutralizing doesnt always work.
And that’s when you get a free 5v4 in mid. And there are VERY strong thief 1v1 specs that don’t lose a lot of their value in team fights. Thieves get neuted on regardless, though, so you’ll never want to keep your thief on their point for very long regardless of whether or not he can win the fight.
Can someone explain to me why people explain away the current necro meta as being a result of the fact that no one has ever played against a necro before?
Freecasting necros have been a team-fight ending force since khalifa and powerr started running power necros that would sit on ledges and bomb points, then shift into lich and timewarp or precast their sig of undeath for when allies would go down.
Players know what necros do if you leave them alone to corrupt boon and epi an entire team.
Sc2 managed to find my place accurately in 5 games. So it can be done.
The key here is pain ? Just get a knife and cut yourself, it will make u stronger!! No decent game will make u lose 20 games in a row, not even Etrian Odissey does that.
Just a note: ELR is estimated ladder rank, Ie, where you should theoretically end up sitting after you’ve played a lot of games.
You don’t find your place accurately in 5 games. The first 5 games simply don’t have ratings displayed so that new players do not feel bad about losing and contain a k-value amplifier in order to allow players to more accurately ‘sound out’ where they should be. K-values for elo systems can be thought of the maximum possible points you can win per match. High k-values mean that your ladder rank is unstable and you will shift positions quickly, but you should end up getting into the general ‘area’ that you should be in quickly. Low k-values by contrast, slow down your rate of positional change in the ladder, which creates stability. Generally, k-values applied to matches near the middle of the ladder distribution tend to be higher to allow for more efficient sorting, while k-values applied to matches at the extremes (mostly the top, as k-values affecting the bottom create a sunk-point trap for poor players who have improved) tend to be lower in order to allow for more finely grained sorting within more-homogeneous groups.
Warcraft 3 had a nearly identical MMR algorithm and took 15-25 games to match smurfs up against players roughly in their skill bracket. Similarly, you might end up being placed near your ELR after 5 games, but that does not necessarily mean that all players, especially those near the top or bottom of the ladders will be accurately placed within that time period. Additionally, games with set k-value accelerators fall prey when the distribution of players making new accounts ends up being non-random; smurf players heavily depress the rating position of average players by disproportionately affecting their initial ladder ranking.
If you queue as a team, the regular mechanisms for pushing your win-rate towards 50% do not exist; if your ELR is near the bottom .1% and you’re running with a 5 stack that isn’t at their ELR, you’re going to lose repeatedly. There’s no ability to put better players on your team to even out your weaknesses and groups that are legitimately as bad as you get rarer as you descend on the ladder; not only is the bottom .1% of players a relatively tiny group to create teams out of, but poorer players tend to have a lower play-frequency than the best players, which means that you’re more likely to have a few effects play against you:
1) As search duration increases, the accepted variance between team aggregate skill increases. If you’re in a player poor environment, you may be matched up against players who are substantially different from you.
2) Teams generally perform better overall than individual players, and its possible to pull a specific MMR-value for the effect of a team size out of the analytics that the ladder provides the devs. As stated in a previous message, a poor team might be receiving the +50 MMR rating per person bonus for being in a team without any of the functional communication or organization which creates the MMR disparity at other levels of ladder play.
TL;DR elo systems do not function perfectly at extreme ratings. The OP’s best chance for escaping his current issues are to get better at the game in order to return towards the center of the player distribution. None of my posts should be seen as an excuse for a lot of the ladder mechanics that are currently ruining soloqueue, though. They’re just an explanation of what’s likely being done underneath the hood and what steps you can take to improve your play experience.
ELO ladders reach ELR faster if the starting ELO is close to the average elo of the system. If you’re bad you’re going to lose while you approach your ELR, if you’re good, you’re going to win while you approach your ELR. These relationships breakdown near the top and bottom of the ladders.
If you start at a default ‘0’ rating, the only thing that happens is that if you’re under the average, your rating will not adjust to create fairer teams as you lose. Ie, if your effective ladder level is -500 and you start at 0, and cannot go under 0 because the ladder is ‘positive’ only, then you’re effectivly masking a 500 deficit and putting your team down. What’s more, because 0 will, over time disproportionately aggregate people with unquantifiable negative skill values, games will be both low-value in terms of learning how to play, but also very unpredictable in terms of matchmaking. 5 people legitimately at 0 vs 5 people at -500 represented as 0 does not a fun game make.
This is why nearly every ladder which has some kind of linear progression system (0-> x) is actually just masking some kind of elo system. In many moba games you’ll notice that linear progression systems are implemented in tandem with your matchmaking rank. League has levels and # of wins, infinite crisis has levels, DotA 2 has levels, etc. Even leagues which appear to have linear ranking systems like ICCUP don’t work that way; the gradual point inflation which occurs over the course of a season is due to the deficit of points created by D- rank accounts which stop playing.
Linear progression means nothing wrt matchmaking and is generally used as a tool to increase player retention by giving them the illusion of progress as they play, even if they get stomped on their way to hitting their ELR. In GW2, this is supposed to be granted via glory, chests, and rank-up bonuses, but those aren’t working well.
Put simply, if you are worse than the average player who joins pvp for the first time, matchmaking is doing its job in making you lose.
so much truth in these words.
there is a reason why every EU Top Team is switching to AOE-Conditions and just keeping a burst mesmer/ele because of their utility/support in teamfights. well probably to finish low targets too but thats just a bonus.
Well, its not entirely true. Some teams are moving towards S/D-centered power-spike builds because of how powerful fresh air is.
If you look at the patch history, however, you’ll note why condis are so prevalent:
Power necro in lich form + old timewarp used to belt out approximately 80k damage within 10 seconds. Shortbow on thief prior to the trickshot nerf used to deal around 50k sustained damage in team fights over 10 seconds as well. These two setups allowed power-specs to deal consistent damage from a position where they could avoid AoE with the downside that if they weren’t free-casting, their pressure would drop substantially.
Then timewarp got kitten on and shortbow as a primary damage vector for thieves gets removed. Consistent ranged power dps gets demolished. Warrior, losing frenzy, largely drops from the limelight.
Enter the pre-nerf ele: D/D becomes the fotm unkillable power-spec that provides consistent damage and peels. Because of its strengths, the build could both roam and sit on points effectively. D/D also has access to magnetic grasp, earthquake, chill application off frost aura + water 3 and updraft. Not only does D/D kitten on melee classes with pre-nerf frost aura, but D/D is also the most powerful spec for setting up warrior spikes with its powerful burst + cc.
Ele gets nerfed in pretty much every patch until present.
Subsequently BM ranger is introduced, which largely uses increased base pet damage in conjunction with hyper-defensive weaponsets to wear out opponents while overwhelming them with pet damage. Thieves running a similar evasion-centric S/D build in reaction to the rise of engineers, rangers, and the continuing presence of rangers.
Pet damage is reduced in the last patch. Rangers become more reliant on player applied condi damage. S/D is heavily nerfed.
There’s been a massive homogenization of classes in the balancing methods used by the dev teams, largely based on which classes are being badmouthed on the forums. Players have noticed this, which is why you notice such spirited defenses of necros by necro players in this most recent patch cycle; they know the complaints are going to lead to class specific necro nerfs rather than giving teams the opportunity to deal with a necro-centric teams’ methods of generating advantage. This last patch is a great example, with necros gaining burning to attempt to reach condi application parity with engineers, rather than having their skills focused on traditional necro mechanics. Lets look at a different way of adjusting mechanics:
Ex:
If ‘save yourself’ for instance, was on a longer base cooldown, but lowered cooldown for every stack of conditions that it pulled in, for instance, it would make an incredible pairing with the new smite-condition. If you add a cast time to smite condition, increase its cooldown, then allow it to clear all condis with a conditional effect if it clears x or more condis, suddenly there’s a massive amount of counterplay; if you’re playing guard, 2 condi-cleave + and 1 power spiking class, do you attempt to wait for the save yourself then try to interrupt the smite? Do you try to bait out the save yourself with immobilizes that set up your S/D ele or D/P thief, then move into full condi cleave? Do you blind the smite’s conditional, or do you hold back your high-value CC condis like immobilize and chill until the guardian pops his combo? Do you bait out non-guard condi removal with chills and immobs, then just stack bleed/burn/poison exclusively to force a long duration save yourself+smite combo which you respond to by fearbombing the kitten out of their team? Do you intentionally condi-cleave with the aim of corrupt + epi bombing off the save yourself? Do you run a lyssa guardian specifically to allow you to whiff the smite, and if you do, is your team supposed to win before the lack of melandru or mercy starts to kitten with your team’s sustain? Do you intentionally bait out a lyssa in order to corrupt?
That’s what this game could be about. Every single play up there could be the topic of a shoutcaster’s screaming ‘holy kitten’ moment. Every single play involves a specific setup as a part of a team’s advantage engine rather than an individual. Every single play sounds fun to play as or against, with counterplay and yomi thinking extending 2-3-4 levels deep.
they would do it if they got worth while rewards.
Ding ding ding.
The game actively penalizes you for staying in spvp if you have goals outside of spvp.
You will not get stomped for weeks or months. If you’re in the lowest 10% of players, most elo systems will accurately place you within 15 games, but even in systems with initial placement acceleration via temporarily increased K-values for new players, reaching your estimated ladder level takes 15 games or so depending on the plasticity of the ladder.
Put simply: Being bad at the game is not newcomer friendly because competition is not rewarding for people who are bad. Matchmaking can’t solve that. You’ll receive tangible reinforcement once you start to improve, but don’t expect to play organized teams once you hit the bottom 10% of the ladder.
If you want to improve rapidly, there are many resources you can access, but the main one is going to be your own desire to improve. It might be daunting at first, but you’ll make it if you stick with it.
If you need help learning the mindset behind pvp, feel free to pm me, or ask some of the players who are well placed on the leaderboard. Most of them are very helpful and will be more than happy to explain the game concepts in a manner that will allow you to understand how to generate advantages and to understand why games are turning out the way they are.
I know its easy to blame matchmaking, but it may simply be that your team is legitimately worse than 90% of the groups that are currently forming.
Reaching out and asking for help rather than making excuses for your performance will propel you past the vast majority of the playerbase in no time, believe me.
20 seconds of stability is a bit off in crazy land. Warriors have issues with sustain, but making them uncontrollable during fights given their raw damage output is a bit nuts.
Cleansing ire removing condis on burst use rather than hit creates a problem where you can use a burst multiple times if it doesn’t connect, which would make you invulnerable to condis in certain matchups.
Besides that, though, the suggestions look pretty good. I’d add some beef for offhand mace, though.