Guild Wars 2

What an absolutely well-made argument, truly. The evidence provided here was just extraordinary. The thesis, legendary. Truly, a masterpiece that represents the epitome of modern debate.

Your language was clear and concise. You used a variety of extremely powerful literary devices to influence the readers’ thoughts on the topic at hand (going from a singular noun to a verb describing a plurality? Brilliant!). The argument was short yet to the point.

You, sir, will have monuments built in your honor. Your story shall be told to generations of children, aspiring just to be like you, for centuries. You will become a god among mortal men, and shall be known as one of the, if not the greatest human being to have ever lived.

Here’s my current build/playstyle, just in accordance with the current state of the thief.

1. Are warriors going to be nerfed? (please)
2. Are eles going to be buffed, and have their various weaponsets become more well-rounded overall? (please)
3. What is the plan for thieves currently, and what is your take on the very limited number of builds that thieves can use, especially after the December 10th patch?

Troll Ungent? Really?

1. It heals for only 340 HPS (52 less base HPS) without taking into account cast times- which, by the way, Ungent has and Signet doesn’t.

2. The nature of Ungent makes the healing skill far easier to reduce using poison than HealSig. For example, if I wanted to cut down a Ranger’s healing by, say, 1/6 (or half of 1/3), then I’d only need to apply 5s of poison during the 10s duration of this heal. On the other hand, to do the same thing to a warrior, I’d have to apply 12.5s of poison, on average, every 25 seconds.

3. Warriors get 3k more health, heavy armor, better damage coefficients, better healing overall (especially from Adrenal Health), and better condi cleanse than rangers get, which only further amplifies the power of HealSig as opposed to Ungent.

… It’s more like a 1 second cast.

That might not sound to bad to some of you non-thieves out there, but given as the skill is one of the sword’s condition removals, and as it is a vital skill to our mobility, this is a MASSSSSSIVE nerf.

Please look into this ANet, and please fix it.

Before you write a long post and put it up, please consider the following:

- Is this an angry rant? Is this post a “ragezone”?
- Will people be able to understand what you’re writing through your Internet dialect?
- Do you use a Fox News-level number of capital letters on your words?
- Do you put in a bunch of letters and symbols right next to each other in an incomprehensible and meaningless “sentence”?
- Are you consistent with your usage of grammar?
- Do you say “u” and “ur” instead of “you” and “your”?
- Finally, do all of the words in your post just mash together into some large clusterkitten that is difficult to understand?

Please use some common sense next time you write a post.

Sincerely,
Your Local Pseudo-Moderator

Fortus.6175:

Cynz.9437:

30/30/30/30/30 build is so OP

I wont call you ignorant, but you sir need to know about the D/S and D/P that plagues sPvP. They have access to all of the afore mentioned stuff without having to fall in your uncivilized and near sighted fail of a joke.

Ah yes, the supreme D/S thief builds, how I despise them. And D/P? My god man, how can you possibly capture a point while your opponent is stealthed?

Dear ANet, sparkflies are OP. They keep getting in my line of vision and my asura can’t see his enemies. Plz nerf.

Thx.

John Smith.4610:

GW2 TP is awesome. Not only is it good for our game, it’s good for the industry.

Information brought to you by a completely unbiased source. :P

Seriously though, I love the way ANet is handling the TP. That they’ve brought economists onto their team to handle the economy in itself speaks volumes about them. I really don’t have any complaints about it, and I’m looking forward to continuing using it in the future.

YEAH LET’S GO TO MID GUYS GREAT IDEA

Vanthian.9267:

You can call me a lair if you want

Your eh lair Vantheen.

Anyways, please, QQ more. Not once in your entire post did you describe an actual reason/justification for why mes is OP. It was just “oh apparently I killed two people lol”, and I’m honestly not sure that you have any credibility here given your blatantly obvious bias.

0/10 for this troll, sir.

Aveneo.2068:

Wow, I never knew thief players had such a condescending attitude towards people playing another class. Someone asks for advice in dealing with a particular build and you demean others while preaching your L2P-mantra.

How can he/she learn if you refuse to offer assistance? Or is there no assistance because stealth is indeed a broken mechanic without a true counter and you just tell others ‘L2P’ because you wouldn’t know how to counter it either?

This irks me for multiple reasons. For one thing, we’ve gone to countless other forums over and over and over again giving people advice, and yet people keep coming to us asking the exact same things over and over again. It’s ridiculous. I’m sorry if we seemed condescending to you, but understand that after people have labeled the thief as “broken” or “OP”, and the only visibly apparent way to keep ANet from nerfing us into oblivion is to keep helping noobs so that they can counter us, we get really tired really quickly of answering questions like this.

For example, some advice to countering I’ve given out in the past:

Today in the Mes forum

A few days ago on the ele forum

Helping out in the Guards forum about a week ago

Countering SR

I mean, I cannot actually think of a single other profession that does this. There was even this not too long ago, where people were actually cheering on Robert Hrouda for giving people advice about how to counter them.

So, I’m sorry you didn’t get the answer you wanted, and perhaps when I get the time I can answer your question better, but please understand that if you’re going to come here and cry “OP”, or, in this case, “broken mechanic”, then realize that people are going to get angry.

As a community, we’re just really mad that this is what we have to do in order to survive.

Looks like you haven’t gotten any smarter.

Swagg.9236:

Guild Wars 2 was a game with combat designed around the player anticipating an opponent’s moves and appearance by reading the opponent’s actions and gear,

No it wasn’t, otherwise there would be visible casting bars.

then either preparing a plan of attack or actively counter-playing properly after the opponent had engaged.

Then there’s the Thief.

Is that supposed to imply that thieves can’t be actively played against? That certainly seems to be what you’re saying, though in the context of your next statement

The Thief is a profession so innately crippled; with such a one-dimensional and predictable play-style that it requires evasion tanking, blind spamming, direct-to-target teleports and super-high damage on every attack in order to compete with any other class in the game in its only function: kill the selected target. In order to be remotely functional in GW2 combat, the Thief has to break every single rule in the “How to balance combat in GW2” book. This isn’t to say that other classes don’t break these rules in their own ways, but the Thief is founded on breaking those rules, making the entire class a mess that goes against the fundamental conventions that govern balanced GW2 combat.

You seem to be contradicting yourself (not to mention you have no evidence to back up your claims about how the game was designed).

Furthermore, Thief attacks, thanks to their universally high base damage

Empirically incorrect. First of all, thieves have no additional base damage stats; as a matter of fact, all classes have the same base offensive stats. As a result, what we really have to look at are damage coefficients. Let’s use one of the highest weapon coefficients that thief has- 1.5 on LS (we could compare with BS, but there are a ton of attacks that do lots of damage just barely wouldn’t make the list). So let’s see what skills have Standardized Weapon Coefficients greater than 1.35 (90% of LS’ damage)(including multi-hit attacks):

Elementalist

• Fire Grab
• Churning Earth
• Dragon Tooth
• Phoenix (Explosion)
• Drake’s Breath
• Burning Speed
• Meteor Shower
• Ice Spike
• Lightning Surge
• Eruption

Engineer

• Jump Shot
• Blunderbuss
• BoB
• Grenade Barrage
• Flame Jet
• Detonate Flame Blast

Guardian

• Whirling Wrath
• Faithful Strike
• Mighty Blow
• Smite (at least 5 strikes)
• Zealot’s Defense
• Sword Wave
• SoWrath (explosion)

Mesmer

• Phantasmal Berkserker
• Illusionary Warlock
• Confusing Images
• Blurred Frenzy
• Phantasmal Duelist
• Illusionary Riposte
• Phantasmal Swordsman
• Phantasmal Warden
• Mind Wrack (three clones)

Necromancer

• Ghastly Claws
• Life Siphon
• Life Transfer

Ranger

• Maul
• Counterattack
• Rapid Fire
• Barrage
• Hunter’s Call

Thief

• Backstab (back side)
• Heartseeker (< 50%)
• Unload
• Pistol Whip
• Cluster Bomb

Warrior

• Hundred Blades
• Rush
• Arcing Slice
• Fierce Blow
• Backbreaker
• Earthshaker
• Arcing Arrow
• Volley
• Kill Shot
• Triple Chop
• Eviscerate (any)
• Pulverize
• Counterblow
• Skull Crack
• Final Thrust (either)
• Whirling Axe

And that’s not including AoE pulses or conditions, neither of which thieves have in abundance. Of course, not all of these skills are very good, or hit often enough to always do more damage than LS, but many, many of them deal more damage than LS does anyways (100b only needs to hit a few times to do more damage, for instance), and to act like all of these skills are worse than thief’s skills is, quite frankly, absurd and ignorant. Thieves quite definitively do not have more damage “universally” than other classes do.

Enmity.3428:

All you need to do is roll a Mesmer, Guardian or Thief and you’ll dominate PvP.

*says the person who has literally zero credibility to anything he says

Allie Murdock.8152:

Just because we don’t have any plans to remove skyhammer from solo arena right now, doesn’t mean we aren’t kicking around ideas. I can’t get into much detail about it, but we’re trying to figure out how to measure it’s effect on solo arena.

I love how this is such a typical ANet response. Keep everything extremely vague in order to keep the concerned pacified while the devs do less for the game than the players do (just look at the Balance forum). There is absolutely no transparency here, and quite frankly, it’s extremely frustrating for those of us that are actually concerned about this game. The next balance patch, from what we’ve been hearing, is still ages away (though, not surprisingly, even a rough time frame is difficult to determine due to ANet’s policy of keeping everything as vague as possible), and people want to know that things are going to change for the better if they actually have to wait for that long. These types of responses are not helpful to the community whatsoever.

Unfortunately, one straw poll of 300ish people is a very, very small amount of our active player base. It may not seem like we have many people playing because we are all spread over different servers, but our active numbers are much, much bigger than that.

You don’t need a straw poll in order to determine that certain classes/builds have a massive theoretical advantage over others on that terrible map. Sure, keep it in hot join; hot join is meant to have fun, and even though the map is poorly designed, at least it can be enjoyable. However, SoloQ is meant to be competitive. The entire point of balance is to give classes equal footing. However, Skyhammer goes completely against this idea, and gives some classes a massive advantage over others. For instance, thief is nearly inviable on Skyhammer, because of its lack of stability and CC, as well as its frequent reliance on skills like Withdraw, Roll for Initiative, and Shadowstep that call for a more open and less hazardous battleground. On the other hand, engis and warriors are able to get tons of CC’ing ability via AoE stability and lots of knock backs/pulls. If SoloQ is going to be held as a “competitive” game mode (which is a pretty terrible joke even without Skyhammer due to the ridiculous ranking system) then maps like Skyhammer have to go.

…Sorry if that sounded ominous.

When doesn’kitten

Just put on HealSig.

I think that, after a great deal of reading posts on this forum, I have reached an inevitable conclusion: ANet is seeking to tax the living daylights out of us on the Trading Post. And they must be stopped.

See, the 15% tax on the Trading Post is a absolutely meaningless, worthless device. I mean, what does it do? Imagine this: what if you had a hundred ectos, just sitting in your bank, and, suddenly, ANet decided to get rid of the tax? Imagine how much the price of ectos would skyrocket! Everybody would have so much extra money that they suppliers would be able to afford to make their prices higher. You could suddenly be selling off your ectos for over 100G! And without tax, too!

(Psst, little hint: make sure to empty your bank accounts and your pockets before you do that! Buy as many ectos and other mats as possible.)

Imagine where that tax money is going, too. Straight into the pockets of ANet’s employees, I bet! I bet John Smith has hundreds of millions of gold just sitting in his bank account, and he’s laughing his kitten off at us at the mere idea of us scrambling to get legendaries! I mean- right?!

And what about drop rates? I mean, why can’t the Inquest drop, like, 1G? Or Sparkflies, or other easy enemies, like mosquitos, bandits, and elementalists? Imagine all of the money that we would have to spend on the Trading Post!

We should all meet in Lion’s Arch and destroy the Trading Post headquarters.
Next Monday. Be there.

(This is obviously complete satire. If you’re reading this and you’re one of the people opposing the TP tax, let me put it to you this way: even if you sold all of your ectos for 1G each, by the time you picked it up from the TP and were able to spend it again, the price of individual ectos would have increased tenfold, and your money would be virtually worthless due to the fact that everybody had so much money that they would have to raise prices on all of the things in the economy to make up for the massive amount of money, and the continuously increasing supply of money. That’s hyperinflation for you guys. c; so be glad that there’s a TP tax, because it’s hugely important in reducing inflation.)

Rottaran Owain.6789:

Daecollo suggestion thread. Nothing to see here.

I love this.

… Please sticky this thread on the thief forum. I know that I and many others have expressed interest in having this thread stay up for reference, and it’s being expanded. Unfortunately, I feel like this thread is easily forgotten- it just floats back down the stream of posts, which is why I believe it should be stickied. Also, I know that the mesmer forum has a post like this stickied for them (which is a bit more complete, although it is also older than ours and has benefitted from the sticky); in fact, the inspiration for starting the Guide post came directly from the mesmer forum.

Anyhow, I and many others would very much appreciate to see the thread stickied. Thank you.

~Arctu Spackle Yarba, Asuran Thief~

Roy Cronacher.1576:

I wanted to come in here and clear a few things up. We wanted to add this runeset because it will open up a lot of builds increasing build diversity.

Yeah, just like how boosting thieves’ initiative, constantly refusing to buff certain weapon sets (thief’s P/X and necro’s D/X come to mind), only patching every 4 months, whack-a-mole balance, your over-nerfing of some ele skills, and your constant over-buffing of some skills and abilities (like PW, HealSig, Dhuumfire, etc) followed by either over-nerfing or hardly nerfing at all have boosted build diversity.

And then there’s the useless community, telling ANet how its changes will only reduce build diversity, even though it’s ridiculous that something like buffing initiative would reduce build diversity by reducing the need for initiative-focused builds, and throwing out useless comments like “Warriors are heavily increasing the opportunity cost of using, for instance, Soldier’s amulet on a thief or a Mesmer”. No, those couldn’t possibly be true. I mean, just look at the huge number of builds in the meta today!

saVdoom.2067:

If you just watched the tournament Good Fights Invitational you’d see how thiefs are completely broken right now. They simply made the whole tournament by nuking players while evading… while having insane mobility.

Insane mobility? Ha, yeah right. What a joke.

If you still can’t counter PW, then, sorry, but L2P. It’s such a gimmicky weapon set, and the 10/30/0/0/30 build is so glassy that it’ll usually burn extremely quickly anyways (just look at how much damage Toker was doing, it’s pretty obvious that if the other teams had put in just a little more effort to at least try and kill him that he would’ve just melted). Just play actively against active play, otherwise you’re going to lose 100% of the time. S/X thieves basically define active play, and if you’re going to play defensively or passively against them, they’re simply going to go right through you.

This isn’t a problem with thieves, it’s a problem with your play style.

adrianz.9672:

Wow, I’d love to see all of the calculations and research you did to come to these conclusions.

Just some more absolutely idiotic changes based on things that either a) allow dominant builds to be even more dominant, b) completely annihilate other viable thief builds, or c) have literally no basis in any reality known to mankind.

Just the usual, though.

EDIT: oh yeah, and still no changes to P/P that make the weaponset more viable… Changes that were promised in May.

There was a thread a few months ago like this one, it was called “Famous Last Words” or something. Anyways, my quote for this thread is still the same one as the one that I used for that thread:

Arganthium.5638:

While I was stealth stomping a player once…
“The coward is strong in you”

Lolllll…

I’m basing my list on the strategic value of various builds in team comps overall as well as their value compared to other builds that attempt to complete the same role they do. I’m also basing this off the average skill level of players.

S Tier:
1. Hambow warrior
2. Any other warr that is not extremely glassy
3. Engi point assaulter
4. Engi point bunker
5. Spirit ranger

A Tier:

6. MM Necro
7. Condi Necro
8. PU Mesmer
9. Bunker Guard

B Tier:

10. Shatter Mesmer
11. Non bunker, non DPS guards.
12. DPS guard
13. Glass warriors
14. D/P thief
15. S/D thief

C Tier:
16. Rifle engis
17. Power rangers
18. Burst eles
19. Non burst, AoE support, area denial staff eles
20. Non D/P or S/D thieves
21. Power necros
22. All other types of eles

Justin ODell.9517:

@Sensotix.4106

We didn’t promise anything, we shared our high level road-map plans.

This is why we don’t like sharing dates. I know you’re waiting on things, and the wait is driving me crazy too, but saying we made promises when we clearly did not does not help get the content out sooner.

If you want greater transparency, like I do, then you must accept that dates, features, and plans are not a static promise. Things can happen to shift priorities, dates, or designs, causing things to changed, be pushed back, or accelerated.

Please stop.

/personal rant

I can handle the fact that the dates aren’t able to be easily set in stone, that’s easy. But in return, what I (and other players) want is larger changes with far more significance to them. You can be completely opaque about when the changes occur, but you can’t also be opaque about what they are. So far, the community has absolutely no idea when the changes are scheduled to happen, and we know so little about the changes (and even what we know is highly subject to change) that, for all we know, there isn’t even an upcoming patch. The little we do know is no less upsetting; we’re not looking for 8% nerfs to Healing Signet, or nerfs to Turrets, and for all we know, the problems that have been plaguing this game for the past half a year or more are still going to be problems for another 3-4 months after the patch, if not for longer.

Then there’s the community; we’ve tried incredibly hard to give suggestions to balance the game. Certainly, not everybody agrees on certain issues, but of the issues that we do, in large part, agree on, we have no indication that ANet is even listening to us. Personally, I’ve been extremely vocal about my opinions, and I’ve done everything in my power to help the game. I’ve even sent (or offered to send) my theorycrafting spreadsheet that I’ve spent well over a year slowly developing and that literally nobody else has access to. The only response I’ve ever received was from the Customer Support team, who couldn’t understand what my request was when I asked them to forward my email.

So whatever, fine, you can be obscure about the dates. But when that’s combined with a lack of information about the patches and with insignificant patches, the community, you have to understand, is going to be extremely upset.

Sanduskel.1850:

Stealthers aren’t this hated in other games because once they commit to a fight they can’t disappear mid fight. It’s clearly not a minority who hates this. Anet has the facts, and they wouldn’t respond to a minority. I for one, trust anet to do what’s right for the health of the game. They have data, we don’t.

This is absolutely and horrendously incorrect. I’ve developed hundreds of equations to describe a host of various aspects of the game, and in doing so I’ve been both criticized and completely rejected by a number of players who perhaps don’t think that their “amazing skillz” can be changed into numbers. And yet, here we have a case where it is in fact ANet with the numbers, and it’s credible? Certainly, throughout my studies of this game, no one has refuted my calculations, but I’ve received little credit for those whereas ANet is being hailed by people like you as some kind of truth-telling prophet. The truth of the matter is, when you truly understand what the kitten you’re doing when you play this game, it’s really not all that difficult to delve deeper into the mechanics and derive the usefulness of certain skills, utilities, and stats. So please, understand what you’re talking about before making broad, sweeping claims like that.

Wait, somebody who is coming to the thief from another profession, not telling us “LOL THIEF IS OP EASYMODE”? 0_o

Look here brothers and sisters, this strange phenomenon may never happen again.

hellsmachine.4085:

OP needs to L2P. Try dodging their obvious attacks.

Yeah, you just have to dodge all of the Eviscerates, Kill Shots, Volleys, Staggering Blows, Backbreakers, Earthshakers, Pin Downs, Combustive Shot pulses, Skull Cracks, Pommel Bashes, Tremors, Shield Bashes, Whirling Axes, Impales, Arcing Slices, and Final Thrusts. Of course, it’s not like every warrior build has all of these, but many of them (particularly the adrenaline skills) have a very short CD, which, combined with the shortened weapon swap CD, makes them extremely difficult to evade. With all of the vigor nerfs, and the fact that you can potentially remain perm-stunned (or the equivalent thereof, anyways), it’s impossible to just evade everything.

In the past I’ve stated that HealSig should be reduced by small amounts- 30 to 50 HPS, for example, in a short period of time until it is balanced. What I did not state was that we should just nerf HealSig by 30 HPS and leave it be because apparently 30 HPS “is a lot more than we think it is”.

Let’s look at what are generally considered the best healing skills for each class (by HPS assuming that you use your heal whenever it comes off CD and not including cast time) in the game. If two skills are used equally often or both very often, I chose the heal that healed for more:

Elementalist- 333.33 HPS via Ether Renewal (in actuality this is much lower because of cast time, and the cast time removes a great deal of damage application and defense that the ele could be using instead. It’s also very, very easy to interrupt)

Engineer- 2520+390+2520+650 = 405.33 via Healing Turret (again, though, much lower due to cast times and damage output/defense lost. I was using this in sPvP today and I was horrified by how long the entire combination took for the amount it healed me. I’d much rather take a consistent heal that heals for 100 HPS less than Healing Turret)

Guardian- 151.83 HPS from Shelter (lol)

Mesmer- 278 HPS + 32 HPS per clone via Ether Feast

Necromancer- 209.6 HPS + 28.96 HPS for each condition you have on you on average when you heal via Consume Conditions

Ranger- 242 HPS assuming that you get the maximum amount of regeneration (3s on activation and then another 3s per 2 seconds) via Healing Spring

Thief- 289.6 HPS via Withdraw

Warrior- 327.33 HPS with HealSurge if you have 3 bars of adrenaline each time you use it and 392 HPS with HealSig

The 8% nerf translates the 392 HPS to only a 31-32 HPS reduction. That’s still 360-361 HPS. That’s absolutely massive compared to most other heals, and, unlike other heals, it doesn’t have a cast time. Granted, it doesn’t come with some of the side effects of other heals, but most of those are already covered when you take into account things like Cleansing Ire that most warriors take already.

Warriors already have a 7-14% damage reduction over medium and light armor classes, respectively, and have the highest base health (8k more than thief, guardian, or ele) in the game. The logical conclusion would be that the warrior would have an average or even slightly below average heal to make up for these defensive benefits, but right now not only does HealSig heal for more than every other skill in the game (with the 8% reduction it heals for slightly less than HealTurret and slightly less than Ether Feast w/ three clones out) without facing the negative effects of a cast time.

I highly suggest that you at least take down HealSig to the level of thief’s Withdraw, and even further since you don’t seem to be planning on reducing it any more after this patch. The defensive benefits granted to warrior just by base stats is already enormous, and when combined with Cleansing Ire, Adrenal Health, and HealSig, it far exceeds every other class in the game. The logical conclusion is thus to nerf HealSig significantly so that the defensive options of warrior are balanced with those of other classes, given that their offensive options are no worse than those of any other class.

Rednik.3809:

And here is another blatant lies. We love to “forgot” some “redundant” facts, aren’t we?

Ele- don’t even start that crap with me. Ether Renewal is an absolutely godawful source of condi removal, if only because of the fact that it is so easily interruptible. If you can’t get this through your skull, go play an ele and then tell me that it’s one of the “best condi removals in the game”. That’s complete garbage.

Engineer- that “large” part isn’t really that large, and relies on your allies being at least somewhat close to you, which creates an incentive problem: either you wait for your allies to be in range so that you can use HealTurret for maximum effect but you thereby weaken your own healing, or you use it as soon as possible (which is the HPS that I accounted for in my calculations) and risk being unable to benefit your allies. Engis also don’t have heavy armor, and warriors have 3k more health than they do.

Guardian- if you can’t wait until Shelter is finished to burst an opponent, you shouldn’t play a burst build.

Necro- necros don’t have that many ways to get rid of condis already- both of their other two main sources are weapon skills, one of which has a pretty obvious cast. Either way, the heal is still on a 25s CD, which isn’t exactly super reliable, and again it creates an incentive problem: wait to use your heal for when you have a lot of condis, thereby sacrificing your healing potential, or use it as soon as possible, thereby sacrificing some of your condi clearing potential.

Ranger- not many other condi clears in the first place outside of Empathic Bond (which is getting nerfed/debugged anyways). Rangers also have very, very few ways to actually utilize the water field by themselves, and most attempts to utilize it too much will often result in lost damage potential (I’m speaking as a thief who’s spammed water fields with Cluster Bomb before). The condi cleanse is still nowhere as reliable as Cleansing Ire, which, combined with LB, allows you to remove up to 4 conditions in a 10s period of time very easily, and with Berserker Stance, warriors already become immune to condis anyways. Either way there aren’t enough conditions in fights to make Healing Spring completely OP. That’s why mesmers are still playable. Anyways, you still have 3k more health and heavy armor over rangers.

Thief- you can easily get gap creators with weapons like Sword and Greatsword. The condition clear only applies to very specific condis, and honestly neither of those are enough to justify not getting 392/360 HPS with no cast time whatsoever.

Warrior- so we’ve finally gotten here… Do you still really believe that Healing Signet is weaker than or on average with other healing skills in the game? It has no cast time (meaning no lost damage potential, no lost defensive potential, and no lost healing potential), is less counterable by poison (you have to maintain constant poison uptime in order to get the full reduction from poison), and, when combined with warrior’s other amazing defensive options, is downright OP. Cleansing Ire and Zerker Stance get rid of most of the problems with conditions that warriors ever have. Meanwhile, warrior still has the highest base health in the game except for necro, which doesn’t have the 14% damage reduction from heavy armor anyways. It’s funny- yesterday I was watching a battle between a warrior and an MM necro where the warrior didn’t fall beneath 20k health even once. The fact that it is so impossibly difficult to take down a warrior should be a testament to how overpowered warrior is right now. As for side effects, the fact that Healing Signet is in and of itself a passive effect is a side effect that no other usable skill in the game has. The fact that you don’t have to cast it or, for that matter, even worry about it is such a huge benefit, and you don’t even take that into account.

By the way… Signet of Malice and Signet of Restoration are both signets that have “no side effect” and heal for 200-300 health less than HealSig does, and both of those require you to hit somebody with a skill in order to activate. Furthermore, of the two classes that own those two signets (Thief and ele respectively), they both have 8k less health than warrior, and get 7/14% more damage dealt to them, respectively.

Good guy Robert Hrouda:

Even when everybody else is complaining about how “OP” thieves are, he manages to prove them wrong.

Arekai.5698:

Thief needs to get nerfed.
Still able to be perma invisible and burst 6k crits without needing skill.

Can’t burst for 6K without Backstab.

Can’t Backstab unless you’re in stealth.

Can’t attack from stealth without getting Revealed.

Can’t be permanently invisible if you’re under the effects of Revealed.

Your statement is self-defeating.

in addition to whatever other effects come with them, force an opponent to face the issue that getting hit with any Thief attack typically bears an enormous consequence.

Like getting damage done to you? Because it’s not like you get 3s stunned by BS or something.

This, combined with the lack of Thief skill cool-downs, has the potential to turn fighting a Thief into guess work and twitchy skill spam rather than clutch counter-play governed by quick, conscious decision making.

“Has the potential” being the key phrase here. Most spammy thieves do nothing for their teams and are, as a general rule, godawful. To act like no thief requires uses “quick, conscious decision playing” (as you seem to be implying) is just flat-out abhorrently wrong.

To fix this issue and give the Thief a real place in GW2, I’ve made many changes to rebalance its damage,

By decreasing the damage of extremely powerful skills like Surprise Shot? Right. Also, I’ll remind you that the only class that fewer skills on the list I put above than thief is necro, though Ranger does manage to tie. Thieves, if anything, do very little damage, which is only offset by initiative and the fact that they tend to build to do lots and lots of damage while taking a lot themselves.

increase its base survivability,

It’s not like thief’s survivability is bad, it’s that thieves don’t build to be survivable most of the time.

introduce more combat utility outside of just stealth/blind spam

In order to “blind spam” you typically have to go 10 into SA. If you know anything about thief, you know that there is not a single meta build that runs even a single point into SA. As for stealth, only D/X and some P/D builds have any significant access to it. Either way, it’s one of the thief’s relatively unique mechanics anyways, and apart from S/D’s evasion, our only defensive mechanic. We also get lots of utility from Headshot, stomp insurance, support via Shadow Refuge, mobility, etc.

and also to give the Thief a unique condition that would give it a more defined role in both PvE and PvP.

It already has a well-defined roll.

With such changes as a whole, we can bring the Thief back down to a level which allows opponents counter-play opportunities without stripping the Thief of its ability to contribute to a fight.

So thief has no well-defined roll, but still needs to be brought “back down”? And, as you said earlier, thieves play very predictably, and yet opponents have no counter-play opportunities against it? What a terrible argument, truly.

Tellah.8073:

and so im supposed to take from this that everything’s alright?
the massive influx of condi builds and the 1st hand observations of condi builds dominating the meta are all just figments of my imagination and i just need to l2p?
the fact that top teams have turned heavily to condi builds are all just a random twist of fate?

cmon now lets be reasonable

Lemme tell you a story, young fella (and likely one that’ll get a bunch of people from the thief forums extremely angry at me… They know why).

A not-so-long time ago there lived a GW2 player who went by the username “Jumper”, and he played a thief called “Jumper X”. One day, he butts into an SOAC tournament that our later prodigy Arganthium was playing in. He magically manages to do well with his zerker S/D build against a team with 5 guardians running tons of boons. He is later credited with winning the match for the team, and, rather than at least giving some degree of credit to his teammates as any alleged “team player” like him would do, he basks in the glory given to him through all those watching the Twitch stream as well as the shoutcasters for the tournament.

Some time later…

Jumper is one of two co-hosts for the Revealed podcast, a podcast dedicated simply to talking about thieves. This being their first podcast, our prodigious young Arganthium.5638 asks a fairly normal albeit insightful question to the hosts. Simply put, the question was “Is 30 Critical Strikes (a thief trait line) really necessary for dealing damage?”. Because of its being apparently common knowledge, the two hosts both said that yes, it is. However, what they could not have known was that Arganthium would later plug some numbers into his magnificent mathematical machine, and find out that…

30 CS, looking at the stats (300 precision, +30% critical damage), only does about 1.4% more damage relative to base than does 10 DA (100 power).

Now, is this the end of the story? Of course not. There was a helluva lot of debate in the thief forums about some of the numbers that I had discovered a while ago, resulting in a lot of kitten among a whole bunch of people, etc etc. But that’s not the point. The point is that people are blinded by their own biases.

So why would people believe that precision (and technically crit damage as well) are both really good traits when, in all practicality, they’re both infinitely weaker than power? I suspect that it has to do with the visual apparency of damage. If I look at a trait and see that it says “Do 20% additional damage to foes under 50% health”, I might think “Oh! That’s marvelous. I’d love to do 20% additional damage!”. Now, if I see some really big numbers with a 50% critical chance with 0 additional crit damage, I might think “wow! That’s amazing! Precision is such an excellent stat!”. On the other hand, if I added 300 power to my build, I might not notice that I actually do ~32.75% more damage than beforehand. I’m not seeing some huge number with a big red background that basically shouts “HEY LOOK AT ME I’M AWESOME”. I might not realize that I’m actually doing ~10.25% more damage relative to base with 300 power than with 966 precision (yes, it’s that bad) because I’m not adding up the numbers and making an accurate statistical observation of each of them. It’s not exactly likely that some of the top players create 2-Sample T-Tests to measure the probability of one stat variation doing more damage than the other, or making 2-Sample Confidence Intervals to measure with a 95% level of confidence the average difference done in damage between the precision and power variations.

The fact of the matter is, when you see a big number pop out of your screen that hit for 1.5 times regular damage 50% of the time, and you see a bunch of fairly regular numbers that, under the covers, actually deal ~10% more damage on average, you might be persuaded to choose the more visually apparent stat even though it’s far worse.

But anyways, to get back to your comment: do I really believe that maybe, just maybe, some people might be wrong about how dominant some builds are? Of course. I believe that people are easily persuaded by experiential observations that are subject to their biases, and don’t look for more objective evidences to disprove them, in fear that they may be wrong.

Not to be outdone by Jumper, I created a decent guide explaining my build and the ideas behind it over here. Check it out, if you’d like to see it.

1. Ranger
2. Elementalist
3. Thief

In a sudden change of events, with the help of our new FoE allies, it looks like Eredon owns Stonemist Castle.

I’m sorry if this comes off as a bit of an angry rant, but…

I’ve been off of these forums for a few months, and I came back to find that apparently 2 0 0 6 6 (formerly 10 0 0 30 30) has become relatively popular (somebody made a thread on the build, which is enough for me to call it popular I guess). I’m not going to lie, I’m actually kinda amazed that the build has been graced with an appearance at the top tiers of play.

However, then I saw some comments such as these (emphasis mine)…

Audiogasm.7643:

The sizer build is the most effective one on thief at the moment.

Shockwave.1230:

Sizer’s build is an ‘evade tank’, it’s got a lot of evades that provide a lot of sustain. It also offers perma vigor. Between signet of agility, feline grace, and perma vigor you can literally dodge 6 times in a row. On top of that you have evades from flanking strike and withdraw. You also can evade via teleports. You have Slight of Hand too, and basi venom, for 2 interrupst. You have 3000 more health than any non-acro thief build, it’s basically as close as it gets to a bunker thief.

Combine all the above defenses with with a Berserker’s amulet and you have a pretty rediculous build on paper (I think it could be tiered on the level of Soldier’s Strength Rune Hambow Warrior and Celestial Strength Rune D/D Ele). I think it’s the thief’s best build honestly, but choose not to run it because I feel like having that many dodges and evades with that much damage and mobility isn’t an intended playstyle, so I don’t want to get used to it only to have it nerfed in the future and feel like I was playing with a crutch.

Crovax.7854:

@ panicbutton: we know sizer didn’t come up with it but i don’t even know the
name of this other guy. plus sizer made the build popular and everybody here knows immediatly it’s a 20066 s/d if you say ‘sizers build’.

Amonatory.2453:

Idk who made the build I don’t really think anyone does tbh. But people think whoever made the build popular made it, which can be true but idk about this build.

I actually created the build well over a year ago and have been playing it ever since. I created this guide to my old variation of the build at the end of July 2013: http://intothemists.com/guides/293-sd_heavy_boonsteal_harassment_thief_by_arga

As you can see from the pinned “Guide to Thief Guides”, the build was later adjusted to the state that I currently use it in (and to a state extremely close to the one used by Sizer): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAsYVl0Mp3pVOx0J8PNBNh4d4vb1KQ3RL2E-TZRBwAROCAA3fgcZgHnAAAPAAA

Now, anybody who’s been around the forums for the past year or so may know how hard I fought to promote the build to the community, and I was met with a very large rejection from a very wide range of thieves. So, I hope that you guys understand that the fact that people are suddenly proclaiming it to be the best thief build now and are yet attributing the build to Sizer agitates me a lot. For those of you out there who have continued to attribute the build to me, such as RedSpectrum and Panicbutton, thank you. However, I do want to establish that Sizer leapt onto the 2 0 0 6 6 boat ages after I and some other S/D players did, and I’ll be checking in with Sizer soon to make sure that he isn’t plagiarizing the massive amounts of work that I’ve done on the build.

Again, I apologize for the nature of this post, but I hope you all can understand the amount of effort I put into making 2 0 0 6 6 viable, and why it makes attributing the build to Sizer extremely annoying to me. Thanks.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Demand-pull inflation…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-pull_inflation

Feel free to dispute the idea. But to say Supply and Demand isn’t inflation is not some universally held belief…

Supply and Demand is not inflation.

An increase in Aggregate Demand that causes suppliers to increase production levels and prices is inflation.

A decrease in Aggregate Supply that causes suppliers to decrease production levels and increase supply (“stagflation”) is inflation.

The concept of Supply and Demand is not inflation. Now, what happens to aggregate demand and aggregate supply might affect inflation. But Supply and Demand does not equal inflation. You could just as easily argue that it can equal deflation.

Also, keep in mind that inflation is for the entire economy, not simply individual products.

To be completely honest with you, Celestial gear is almost never superior to other types of gear in any build across any profession. The inconsistency simply makes a build completely pointless. If you ever use Celestial gear, it’s only going to be to balance out the other gear types that you have in what would otherwise still be a “jack-of-all-trades” build, and those builds tend not to be very effective anyways.

If you’re looking for survivability, go Soldier’s. It’ll provide you a decent bit of damage while also giving you magnificent protection. The build that I used to use in sPvP was this (or this for WvW), and while it is still an acceptable build, the truth of the matter is that it is fairly ineffective. Thieves have begun to crawl to the bottom rung of the ladder, and I would say that, apart from elementalists, thieves are very likely the worst class in the game (eles, unfortunately, were hit far harder than they should’ve been, and many of the problems plaguing them at the release of this game still affect them today). As it just so happens, the only real trump cards that we have compared to other classes, which are, for the most part, independent of one another, are stealth and mobility.

Stealth is only really useful for reconnaissance and burst damage, although the former can easily be accomplished by mobility. On the other hand, mobility affects a large number of factors: being able to travel to places you normally wouldn’t be able to, to use different tactics in battle, and so forth. However, burst doesn’t work if you don’t do a lot of burst damage, and, given the current state of the game, using your mobility will only work out to your advantage if you can do lots of damage, because it takes so long otherwise to take out an enemy and thus gives them more time to counter you.

Long story short, if you’re going to run a stealth build (D/D), these days, you have to run high damage. Otherwise, you defeat the purpose of the build, and other classes are going to surpass you in effectiveness. While that especially applies to D/D, it also applies to all other thief builds. In other words: if you aren’t going to run high damage, you’re going to be very ineffective compared to other classes.

Hope you only read the important bits. tell me what you think so far.

This isn’t a duel, this is a video of one warrior running around with no purpose as you slay him/her, and another trying to duel you but failing miserably by running in random directions and looking like an idiot. Your build isn’t even all that good; you probably would have lost had you gone against a single more experienced warrior.

Not impressed.

Darnis.4056:

you’ll set back balance into the Stone age.

Now now, don’t get your hopes too high up for a balance improvement.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Ursan.7846:

DarkSpirit.7046:

And we are saying that 200 may not be enough of a sample size to account for the “luck” factor. I won’t be surprised if someone repeats this little experiment and come up with the opposite conclusion after just 200 salvages.

Hahahahahahaha

Wait what? Is 201 be large enough to account for the “luck” factor? 202? 300? 400? What arbitrary number do you think is enough of a sample size to account for the “luck” factor, I’m curious?

Though I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt, the way you worded it makes it seem like you fail to grasp the concept of statistics.

Ok, since you brought it up first, then justify, with statistical calculations, why you think the number 200 is enough to prove that BLSK would give more ectos. All I see from you so far is a lot of taunts about how well you know statistics compared to me but no math to prove it.

There may be other factors that can affect the rate. For example, are the salvages done, with different kits, at exactly the same time and place?

Btw, thought I’d bring this up now.

I’m lazy, so I’ll just use Geotherma’s first tests for BLSK and MSK instead. I’ll give you the statistical evidence you want.

High and equal n’s, lack of outliers (I’m assuming, unless geo got, say, 10 ectos in one salvage…), and the general robustness of two-sample t-intervals make this a quite robust test.

First, here’s a hypothesis test, where Mu1=Average number of ectos given by BLSKs and Mu2=Average number of ectos given by MSKs. We’re testing hypotheses
H0: Mu1=Mu2
Ha: Mu1>Mu2

Alpha level = 5% level

BLSK kits
n1=200
x-bar1=1.285
S1=1.0193

MSK kits
n2=200
x-bar2=0.93
S2=0.81141

So

df=378.95
P=.00006836
or
P=.0068%
t=3.854

So, not only does the test succeed at the 5% level, but at multiple levels above that. Thus, we reject the null hypothesis.

Interpretation
Basically: if BLSK kits and MSK kits had the same rates of ectos drops, the probability of getting results like Geotherma got are virtually 0- a mere 0.0068%, approximately. Thus, we can reject any foolish ideas that BLSKs produce the same amount or even less ectos than MSKs.

Here’s additional information:

Difference between average numbers of ectos produced by MLKs and BLSKs.
Confidence Level: 95%
Interval:(.17386, .53614)

Gaiyeerishima Cat.1082:

Sure, I can do that. I don’t really want to pull up all my trading post records, but I got a ton of passiflora/fruits/karka shells obviously, 2 minis that were 17g each, 1 mini worth 3g, a couple tiki masks and shark/consortium skins that were pretty worthless. Altogether it was worth maybe 70g? I used that money to buy some more crates. Oh, and two single use mobile crafting station and a single use mobile mystic forge.

Oh my god.

Now I really don’t pity you whatsoever.

Where the hell is this “perma-blind” nonsense coming from, anyways? I have never been “perma-blinded” before on any class by any other player in any game mode before. Ever. Absolutely absurd.