Guild Wars 2

Sun Lian.4075:

Before they needed to cleanse chill+bleed, now just bleed.

The chill effect is still there.. so that’s just not true. Even if they wanted to only cleanse bleed, it’s not like you can choose what condition to remove so that’s irrelevant.
Chill only applied 1 condition before, now it applies 2 so I don’t get why people say it’s easier cleansed, considering that you now basically apply 1 condition extra with all your skills that apply chill, on top of all the other conditions. Which means in a big perspective, your enemy can actually cleanse less conditions in total.

Yes the chill effect is still there, but the damage isn’t. Before if they cleansed one, they are still taking damage from the other. Now, if they cleanse bleed, they aren’t taking damage from chill, therefore nerf.
Don’t get me wrong, in PVE this new change to deathly chill is better as multiple necros can stack more damage, but in PVP this is quite a nerf.

Rome.7124:

Random Weird Guy.3528:

…having more thieves on your team is a good thing

Great meta.

See, the problem was never really about bunker meta, it was all about thief not being part of it.

Guys, he’s on to us. Whatever shall we do?

As a fellow Aussie who has played thief a lot over the time, I have found playing anything dagger related is not great due to the lag. S/P can do well depending, but have had varying results. By far the best weapon set for me has been P/P due to being ranged helps with compensating for the lag, and due to not being meta, throws a lot of players off because they don’t expect it ( not the good ones, but they aren’t in the majority)
Obviously we can’t really compete at the really high tiers on thief because of the lag, but that would be the same with any character so just play what you like and you will learn to compensate somewhat.

Ithilwen.1529:

My evening/morning continues. 10% win rate. 4 heavy stops in 10 games. Matchmaking is broken.

HoT Mesmer is not what it was claimed to be and is about to be out of the meta. Bad Game, ANET.

Truthfully, I don’t care about the neocon/objectivist trolls. The fact of the matter is that the matchmaking is alleged to be designed to create fair matches. If the matches were fair, the win records would reflect that.

I can’t conjure much respect for the “l2p” crowd. In my view, they fall into one of two categories; reactionaries who call “whining” on everything without any real thought or knowledge and those who play OP classes and want to stay that way.

In any case, matchmaking is not working. Mesmer didn’t need a huge nerf and I think ANET knew it. I resolve to start writing reviews.. and contacting the esports sponsors to ask why anet keeps making such bizzare balance decisions.

Ok, so the reason you lost 90% of your games is because mesmer is underpowered and therefore shouldn’t get nerfed?
So the other 9 players classes and skill level had nothing to do with these losses? Sure matchmaking is and has been problematic.
You are biased, plain and simple, even in a thread about matchmaking you whine about mesmer receiving nerfs that are not the cause of your current problems.
Nothing will convince you otherwise, not even Chaith trying to help, so trying to have a sensible discussion will not be possible.

Lyger.5429:

We gotta be careful with these kinds of threads guys, we don’t want to give the devs any ideas. I understand the frustration of certain weapon sets underperforming but nerfing a certain set isn’t a good idea. Let’s see what the next balance patch holds first.

Ideally yes, D/P shouldn’t get nerfed to have the others fixed, but IF a compromise HAD to happen, I could live with it.
Quite interested to see what the balance patch holds, hopefully something for P/P because I like the playstyle.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

Again with the fat kid, you fattits or something?

Yes, fear my MAN BOOBS…

Never thought I would open with that but whatever :P

We all know that to get something buffed in this game, something must get nerfed. So if by nerfing D/P we get the other weapon sets buffed, I can live with that.

As a side note, I don’t actually have man boobs. I know, I let you all down…

Chaith.8256:

Reem.3578:

@Chaith
Sounds like you want to balance everything around the pro league.
This begs the question: around what should we balance the game?

The answer is, all game modes and all skill levels should be taken into consideration.

If Dragonhunter traps are nerfed to the ground because you can click your whole bar and wipe 5 people out in Amber, that wouldn’t be considering the high skill level, for example.

This specifically is a thread on the PvP forums, pertaining to the state of PvP balance.

My opinion is that the classes should primarily be balanced around being used optimally, in conditions where there’s little or no L2P factor, so apples can be compared to apples.

Balancing things like MinionMancer, Turret Engineer, Dragonhunter, 100Blades Warrior for entry level skilled players should be a consideration too, but as a second priority, and it can’t impact the class potential, after all, it’s admittedly a L2P problem.

I have to agree, I would prefer to balance around pro players because they are the ones who will look for the most broken combinations and take advantage of them.
While the majority of players won’t be able to play optimally (myself included), it will be a better game overall with the broken combinations removed.

WhiteRabbit.6931:

As upcoming balance patch say, warrior is getting buffed! But there are things that needs to be fixed before this happen!

Today I got one shotted by a warrior! At first I heard several people in my team qq about warrior beeing OP as hell!

I was like, you kidding me… They are trash, forum been filled with tears for weeks now about that issue! But everybody just stopped playing, and stayed near spawn, saying that they couldnt go near this guy or they die instantly…

So I run up to meet mr warrior, to see what everybody was complaining about!

Well, i was shocked! tha fuq…!

This guy litterally one shotted me… And no, I was not in any glasscanon spec…

Anyway, I was dead before I had any chanse to react, it was that bad… I never seen anything near this before…

How can you guys say warrior needs a buff, when they can do this!??? I mean, Cmon!!!

You cannot ask for buffs, while beeing able to run broken specs like this…

Nobody, and i mean nobody… Should be able to kill someone in 0,1 sec…

Is this some kind of broken spec warriors been keeping from community and devs knowledge? Or you guys think this is ok!???

I think not!

I see you think you got “one shotted” by this warrior.

Going to lay some maths on you. The biggest hit you received was 19k. Your health was nearly 25k. They are not the same number. Clearly not “one shotted”…

Ithilwen.1529:

Thief detected. Worry not though, you’ll have your time of eating Mesmers with no risk at all, then you’ll hear the drumbeat ; "thief is so cheesy , wtf? " and I hope you lose stealth altogether along with anything else that you can use for defense.

So because someone is a thief player and disagrees with you, you hope that thief gets completely gutted?
Wow…
How childish…

Do you honestly think that anyone will take your opinions seriously with that attitude?

Jana.6831:

Yuffi.2430:

There is no such thing as “night capping”.

There is – we’ve got 3 time zones in EU – people need to sleep and work as well. Those who recruited NA guilds to do their night capping or who karma train before they have to work (yes that is happening) have servers with high PPT at night and they often win because of that.
Look at the scores on millenium – Desolation is a night capping server – they wouldn’t be on top if it weren’t for that.
That being said: I don’t really oppose night capping as it can be a fun time if the nightcappers are ~15 ish – but I hope that the PPK will partly take care of that and reward the servers who aren’t karma training when no one else is around a bit better.

There is such thing as night capping

ETA: And there are servers who take advantage of that. It’s not really the time “people play” as they’re being paid (in gold) to play in off times (no joke).

You are right, there is such a thing as night capping. As a Australian player in a NA server, all those NA primetime players are nightcapping all my hard work during my primetime. I wish to complain too… :P

It seems as though we may have a quantum thief problem. It has been shown earlier in the thread that the Thief equals less than one, therefore underpowered, while at the same time able to backstab for 17k, therefore overpowered.
Unless of course they cancel each other out and we are merely just powered?

You can smash buttons and win as a thief? I guess I’ve been playing wrong all this time…

Azure The Heartless.3261:

This thread is pure gold

Too true.

You may have thought that 3 pages in people may have wised up and realised Thief is OP, but nope. I had to re roll reaper cause Thief was too survivable…

I know how you feel, but all support says on the matter is contact my ISP, helpful yes? By the way, i’m from Australia and while my ping is normally 250-300, and is playable, the last couple of weeks or so has given me results similar to yours with the packet loss in ping plotter. Pretty sure the problem is not on my ISP’s end.
It’s making it really hard to get hyped for HoT…

If someone is guarding YOUR home the fight will be 4v4. If the other team wish to push on your home then that’s the risk they take in being outnumbered, likewise if you do the same to them. If you leave your home undefended to outnumber them, then that’s a risk you take, they could be doing the same to you as well. It’s more about good map awareness and tactics than just oh, go +1 them.

Oh and remember, to go +1 somewhere, you have to -1 everywhere else…

Been happening on and off for me for the last few months. Once again, only Guild Wars.

Mogar.9216:

Beetamus.6403:

Mogar.9216:

Zietlogik.6208:

Mogar.9216:

Impact.2780:

I too, noticed that you avoided mentioning the fact that stealth (and vanish) expire after a short time (with the exception of Prismatic Understanding buffed stealth which I argue should never have existed).

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!#$$ there are SOOOO MANY ways to chain stealth it’s not even funny the fact each stealth skill only give you a short period of stealth is meaningless .

There is alot of meaning, stealth in games like WoW dont even really use a skill, it is just a profession button you hit and you are in stealth. GW2 you need to use your combos, you need to use skills, utilities, you need to specc for it, it isn’t just something that is available to every build a thief has freely, you need to put some effort into being stealthed for longer periods of time…and even then, very very rarely perma.

dagger + a pistol = perma stealth no matter what build. off hand dagger hit anything = perma stealth, I still have ‘fond’ memories of thieves only fight beside walls to free cnd off it for stealth. I can keep on going if you want and I don’t even main thief.

Off hand dagger hit anything equals perma stealth? It’s pretty obvious you don’t main a thief.
1. If you use Cloak and dagger while stealthed, you get revealed.
2. If you use Cloak and dagger to stealth, well you weren’t stealthed to begin with.

lol you fail to point out all you need to do is wait for stealth to wear off for a fraction of a second to cnd again to regain stealth to get around revealed. So yes it’s not ‘perma’ stealth but for all practical purposes it might as well be. The best player in the world would not be able to do anything in that split second to attack you let along even to see where you are at.

I didn’t fail to mention anything, you clearly said off hand dagger hit anything equals perma stealth, which it doesn’t…
As a side note, while you can keep Cloak and Dagger going for a while (not indefinately, not enough initiative regen) blocks, blinds, invulns and evades stop it from working.

Mogar.9216:

Zietlogik.6208:

Mogar.9216:

Impact.2780:

I too, noticed that you avoided mentioning the fact that stealth (and vanish) expire after a short time (with the exception of Prismatic Understanding buffed stealth which I argue should never have existed).

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!#$$ there are SOOOO MANY ways to chain stealth it’s not even funny the fact each stealth skill only give you a short period of stealth is meaningless .

There is alot of meaning, stealth in games like WoW dont even really use a skill, it is just a profession button you hit and you are in stealth. GW2 you need to use your combos, you need to use skills, utilities, you need to specc for it, it isn’t just something that is available to every build a thief has freely, you need to put some effort into being stealthed for longer periods of time…and even then, very very rarely perma.

dagger + a pistol = perma stealth no matter what build. off hand dagger hit anything = perma stealth, I still have ‘fond’ memories of thieves only fight beside walls to free cnd off it for stealth. I can keep on going if you want and I don’t even main thief.

Off hand dagger hit anything equals perma stealth? It’s pretty obvious you don’t main a thief.
1. If you use Cloak and dagger while stealthed, you get revealed.
2. If you use Cloak and dagger to stealth, well you weren’t stealthed to begin with.

blarghhrrkblah.3412:

Beetamus.6403:

I accept that raids are most likely to be using more optimised groups, but the thread was about the PVE zerk meta. So dungeons and open world content have to be considered as well, not just the raids.

Oh…in that case, I highly doubt the zerk meta will change at all. None of the dungeons or fractals are receiving significant changes as far as I know. Maybe Fractals 50+ may require more support-oriented specs, but the higher up you go the more organized your group will have to be to be able to complete content in reasonable time.

Edit: Oh I forgot to address open-world. If event chains are going to end with Tequatl/TTS scale world bosses, then I can definitely see the zerker meta getting changed up. However, it’s hard to say what thief will use since, as a few others have mentioned, anything not damage just doesn’t scale well with the class. We’ll just have to see.

Edit2: Also…I wasn’t aware that the zerk meta extended to open-world events.

Open world doesn’t really have a zerk meta as dungeons do, but i’m assuming (possibly wrong) that most people don’t really change their gear much from dungeons to world bosses so it may well still kind of apply?

Notice I said most people, as sure there are the more serious gamers who are looking for every advantage and have multiple sets of spare gear banked, but there are ALOT of casual gamers, especially now its F2P who couldn’t be bothered or afford it.

blarghhrrkblah.3412:

Beetamus.6403:

No help in the form of big might or vulnerability stacks from any other classes to help you as we are not talking optimal only runs.

I don’t see why that is relevant considering raids HAVE to be done with groups that provide these things.

I accept that raids are most likely to be using more optimised groups, but the thread was about the PVE zerk meta. So dungeons and open world content have to be considered as well, not just the raids.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Beetamus.6403:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Zerker gear will still be useful. Don’t believe the hype. If anything, PVE thieves will just have to change from No Quarter to Invigorating Precision, and heal themselves for 700 per hit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…..

700 per hit HAHAHAHAHAHA…..

Ok, I think that’s out of my system….

No, wait… HAHAHAHAHA….

So a bit of math. On my dagger auto I will frequently hit 5k on the second and third attack. Invigorating precision recovers 15% of crit damage, and 15% of 5k is 750 health. Likewise, I also regularly hit 14k backstabs (2.1k heal) and 12k heartseekers (1.8k health per seeker), 4k-4k-7k with the sword auto (2250 health per chain per target hit), and 18k pistol whips (2.7k health per target).

This is all with No Quarter, which is exclusive against Invigorating Precision, so the actual numbers you’ll get are toned down a bit. This has two interesting behaviors. First is that a thief gets healing proportional to their crit damage, so the more damage you do coughzerkercough the more you can heal yourself. Second is that against multiple targets, the healing is so high that unless the thief gets one-shot, the thief will quickly heal up to maximum again.

Personally, I don’t think it is funny that you can’t do math. I just think it is sad.

So, a bit of common sense. Are you telling me that you can do THAT much damage just using your build? No help in the form of big might or vulnerability stacks from any other classes to help you as we are not talking optimal only runs. Otherwise we can say anything is fine.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Zerker gear will still be useful. Don’t believe the hype. If anything, PVE thieves will just have to change from No Quarter to Invigorating Precision, and heal themselves for 700 per hit.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…..

700 per hit HAHAHAHAHAHA…..

Ok, I think that’s out of my system….

No, wait… HAHAHAHAHA….

Still happening to me and really wondering why it’s only limited to guild wars. As an Australian with 250 – 300 ping as the normal, which is playable, to be having 800 ping is not what you want from a game. I’m glad I didn’t pre purchase the expansion.

To reiterate, this is ONLY happening with guild wars, no other online games.

ronpierce.2760:

I’m probably overstaying my welcome here in the thief forums, but I’d like to add my 2 cents to the mechanic denial debate, and clear up some misconceptions.

Warrior, necromancer, and to some extent, Mesmer both experience mechanic denial, and while Necromancers are fairly strong against D/P, both Necromancer and Warrior are subject to, quite literally, “mechanic denial” when facing a S/D thief or anything with high avoidance, especially Necromancer which actually has a much harder time with S/D than D/P, despite its less than optimal performance overall.

Evading a LF building attack or a Scepter or Axe can leave a Necromancer almost entirely void of Life Force which is basically certain death against a thief. This is part of the reason most PvP Necromancer builds have adopted to Soul Marks/Dagger+Warhorn and Spectral Armor. It’s the most likely to build sufficient Life Force against a thief, where a build that differs from this norm can be quite literally cut from most of their “mechanic”, which also includes basically all of their defense.

Warriors are similar in that the more pure-avoidance you have, the harder it is to build Adrenaline which reduces Burst finished rates, lower condition removal, less healing and so on, so that’s something to consider.

Mesmers are a bit in their own category where AOE is a mechanic denial.

Arguably, these situations are more of a mechanic denial as these are things ALL warrior/Necromancer/Mesmers use, and not just certain build types.

Food for thought.

To be fair about the classes you gave as an example
Warrior – has shouts if traited to give adrenaline, plus the heal shout maxes your adrenaline
Necromancer – if traited spectral skills give extra life force (while not huge, it’s something) and only spectral grasp needs to hit (20% if traited is really good life force gen for spectral grasp)
Mesmer – has many ways to generate more clones, phantasms not as much
Thief – if revealed, has no way of getting back into stealth until revealed is gone. As you can see, he is the only one actually denied getting off one of his mechanics, the stealth attack.

I would also like to add ranger to your list as aoe kills the pet quite fast.

I’m not of the opinion revealed needs to be taken off us, I’m fine with it, just wanted to clarify things.
Also good to see someone not raging at thief mains

How would it be if we just changed the co-efficients for the pistol to be much higher. As a example then the power builds would get their damage and a small condition bonus. Likewise condition builds get their higher condition damage plus a small physical bonus. Obviously the numbers would have to be tweaked so celestial is’nt op. That way we have more variety. Then we can obviously get the actual skills looked at if needed.
Also making pistol shots bounce once or pierce shouldn’t hurt the “purity of pistols”, no rng needed.

Ausfer.1853:

Kocoff.7582:

the Ricochet effect is mostly why Thieves picked the trait, not the other way around.

I would like to emphasize this for its truth. Karl seems to believe that most players preferred playing without riccochet, when that was not the case at all.

Now that I think about it, in all the time spent playing this game, I haven’t seen or heard anyone ever say that they preferred p/p without riccochet.

This, very much this…

It made P/P much more useful in fractal/dungeon runs, not to mention WvW. It really seems to show how out of touch the people doing the classes are.

Great to get a reason though…

Ghotistyx.6942:

Just like everything else in the game, they’re just as good as your opinion of them is.

So they are just as good as D/D Elementalist? Must be why so many pro’s use them in tournaments…

The real answer is they are not great, but they are a lot of fun if you like the gunslinger theme, and if you kill people, you can relish it more.

Showbiz.9725:

Hello,

I’m not a brand new player; I got the game when it was released in 2012 and played a Warrior for a few months but I found it very boring.

I wanted to try the game out again and I was torn between Elementalist and Thief (Still kind of am) and I am starting to think I’ll enjoy Thief more. I prefer faced paced gameplay with high mobility. I enjoy open world PvE/PvP in most games as well as small scale PvP. I don’t know anyone that plays this anymore so I will mostly be solo for a while.

I’m new to the forums and the first post I read here on the thief boards is, “Which class will you reroll to.” Obviously this doesn’t make me feel too comfortable. Is this class in a really bad state right now? Should I just go Elementalist instead? I was looking forward to some fast paced shadowstep + dagger slashing mobs and players.

If there is another class in this game that fits my playstyle more can someone recommend it? I don’t like pet classes at all by the way…

Thanks

Just as long as you don’t expect to have a easier time than other classes (or even some other weapon sets on thief) you will be fine. Play the game the way that suits you, which sounds like a thief, or maybe a melee ranger? Like I said neither are a top class but if you enjoy them, go for it.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Shimekiri.1580:

There are no viable P/P builds. There are subpar P/P builds for those that really wish to keep on playing it.

You seem to erroneously think “viable” and “optimal” are synonyms. They aren’t. Not even “meta” and “optimal” are synonyms, though you’d make a much better case if you were arguing that.

Even with ricochet, p/p wasn’t really something you’d ever use in pve (I would know, as I ran p/p in pve). That being said, there are already plenty of different ways to play p/p, and more are coming with daredevil.

You are right to say that a lot of people wrongly think that viable and optimal are the same. However, saying that there are plenty of different ways to play p/p (while also technically true) none of them is what you would call particularly good.
Viable, yes.
Good, not so much…

Why should Pistol/ Pistol suddenly be a anti group tool? You mean the Ricochet trait that it had for quite a while until recently when Anet in their infinite wisdom weakened the arguably weakest weapon set? Hell I would be happy if they just put it back to what it was, anything above that is a bonus.

A similar thing has been happening to me since the last big patch, and getting steadily worse. I start at 500 ping and have been going to 3000, as opposed to the normal 250 (cause Australia). The ping gets higher when I attack or generally do things other than walking. Other games and streaming videos are unaffected. Any help would be appreciated, cause i’m stumped…

I’m getting something similar, it’s been happening for the past few weeks. Normally I get around 250 – 300 ping (cause Australia) but have been getting random spikes as high as 3000 for a few seconds, then kinda normal, then way back up again. I’ve even had periods of 0 ping, so i’m guessing so high it doesn’t register. As a side note, i’m only having this trouble on Guild Wars, other similar games are fine.