Guild Wars 2

Some changes I would like to see, would be to update the conditions list on hide in shadows for all the damaging conditions in the game. In fact, evaluate the general condition removal options of the thief entirely. Possibly more healing on stuff like mug. Make 15 initiative baseline. Revert the changes done to black powder.

Some tradeoffs for these would be to increase the opportunity costs of the thief: Find a way to increase the cooldown of steal on a trickery thief without breaking the class entirely – this is the big one. Either make black powder shot not have a projectile finisher, or make it so that you can only get 1 stack of stealth from its field (similar to how temporal curtain worked on the mesmer) – this would force the thief to burn a cooldown for extended durations of stealth. Finally possibly reducing the range on shadow shot and shortbow 5 to 600 range. Maybe revert the regen change back to its original values (make 15 int baseline instead).

The rest of the balance would need to come from outside sources (other classes), in my opinion. For example, the near complete removal of revealed skills. Force players to properly time their CC’s to disrupt a thief going into stealth.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If one class is more mobile and evasive than another class, then it also has to be less formidable than the less mobile class. Or else you’ve got a big paper-rock-scissors problem, wherein one class just beats another.

Thus Thieves, being the most mobile and the most evasive, must be the least formidable.

There is more than one way to balance a cat. Just because a class or spec in any game has high mobility doesn’t mean it has to hit like a wet noodle or crumble like paper if its looked at. Storm Spirit from dota 2 is precisely balanced as a highly mobile hero (arguably the most mobile hero in the game) that has high burst damage with his auto attacks.

You play him by alternating between using his spells to give his auto attack a damage buff and his right-click (auto attack). The point is he has incredibly high BURST damage (this is important) and one of the fastest – if not THE fastest – hero in the game. He focuses on being able to fly anywhere on the map to gank someone – and he can do it solo. The thief plays a similar role. Their “stealth advantage” is countered by the fact that they can’t stay in a fight for more than a very short amount of time – their initiative dictates this. Storm Spirit is squishy but can easily blow anyone up. However, the hero is balanced by high opportunity costs. You can be anywhere on the map, but you can only be at one place at one time. Long duration disables, like silence in dota 2, are a real threat to storm spirit. Physical damage invulnerability, like through ghost sceptre, is one of the BEST ways to stay alive against a storm spirit gank. The opportunity costs are what dictate the balance of Storm Spirit.

The thief should be balanced the same way. As a HUGE example: A thief shouldn’t feel it necessary for survival to have sleight of hand, but sleight of hand’s cooldown shouldn’t be so obscenely short. The spec makes steal do everything and should be balanced by the fact that it DOES everything. They could revert the changes to pistol 5, but make it so the thief can only get 1 “stack” of stealth from it (similar to how a mesmer could only get 1 stack of swiftness from focus 5). This would force more cooldowns, via utility and heal skills, to get stacked stealth. Reveal mechanics simply should not exist in this game, instead the devs should be forcing and rewarding properly timed cc’s right when the thief tries to go for stealth. There are many things that can be done without “they have shortbow 5, so they cannot be able to take someone down.”

Thieves SHOULD be weak in teamplay, and they shouldn’t be able to hold a point for crap – or be resbots (what anet?). They shouldn’t be weak in taking someone down though.

The existence of shortbow 5 does not merit a class to be, combatitively speaking, nerfed to the ground. I don’t play this game much anymore – moving towards dota 2 as my competitive game instead. All I see is the same type of people moaning about the existence of storm spirit in Dota 2.

There are opportunity costs for classes/builds that have a lot of mobility. They usually take the form of, “You can be anywhere on the map, but you cannot be at two places at the same time.” This is how the thief, in GW2, should be balanced – tactically speaking.

Ideally, if you could form a magic buff/nerf to the thief class, it would probably be in the form of: You don’t need sleight of hand to just survive as the class, and increased opportunity costs.

These changes can be through things like increased cooldowns, shorter ranges on skills, and possibly a reversion of pistol 5 with a nerf to either its projectile finisher or make it so you cannot gain additional stealth when jumping multiple times through pistol 5 field. In other words to gain extended stealth durations, you’re going to have to spend a cooldown. Also an almost complete removal of stealth reveal mechanics in the game – or have these skills/traits have incredibly high opportunity cost to bring. Instead, combat should favor proper use of cc to ether prevent the thief outright from getting stealth or slowing them down so that a person can know exactly where they are.

I have no idea how they can make the class feel like they don’t need slight of hand just to survive though.

You can kind-of make pets teamfight-worthy against cleave with troll unguent and natural healing trait, but natural healing doesn’t scale with healing power. Also it relies on your personal heal. It also doesn’t solve the condi dmg problem pets have ether to be teamfight-worthy. I wish bears could actually be useful in this department, but they’re not. Drakes do it better. Bears need cleave on their auto – among other things. It doesn’t help the fact that I, and I assume many others, have no idea when the bear uses their invuln skill.

Moas seem like a neat idea for a support spec (Moa with Sylvari Hound), but their animations are so absolutely useless. Moa heal needs to have larger range.

Pigs need work. Their forage ability should replace the f2. Their charge is good, but requires a set-up cc to land it and the damage is underwhelming if it does hit the target.

I haven’t bothered buying the expansion, but from the base game I’d say, besides the dogs, the best pet is lighting drake. Drakes can stand up decently well in a teamfight. They have a strong tail whip aoe ability that is a blast finisher – it pairs well with opening strike. Lightning drake particularly stands out for its f2 attack – it does a lot of damage, tracks, and can be an AoE attack if needed.

Spiders are great as a secondary pet. Their range allows you to petswap instantly and not worry about them fumbling around trying to get to the target to make the most out of stuff like quickening zephyr on petswap or call of the wild on petswap. They have a 20 second cooldown immob. The negatives are their damage is mediocre, they are hard to control (maneuver them out of AoE) as a base pet, and their AoE poison ability, while great, the poison field doesn’t last nearly as long as it should (considering the projectile arc on that kitten thing).

Cats are also a good secondary pet. Their f2 ability is a ranged leap, with allows for some neat combo finishers, and easy petswaps as mentioned above. They have good damage. The only negatives are: They are terrible in teamfights, and have no CC abilities besides the snow leopard.

Birds are awful. They may be good with taunt (I haven’t tested it yet), but they fumble around too much because of the take-off/landing animation (anet, just make them constantly flying in combat please). Their f2 attacks are usually just their base attacks with a condition modifier on them. Their screech is useless because swiftness is handed out like candy on the ranger now – Resounding Timbre and Clarion Bond. They die too quickly in a teamfight. But they MIGHT be good with taunt (I doubt it since they have such low health).

Everything else is just bad or useless. Ether they have skills that aren’t useful, or their animations are too clunky to be of any use.

Dogs, by far, are the most versatile though. They have a cripple, and a ranged leap knockdown for 2 seconds. On top of that, their f2 affects everyone in an area, and usually it has a strong impact CC like an immob or fear.

Aeroxe.8140:

Take my opinion maybe with a grain of salt, but I can say this is very accurate and pretty much on point. Thief is alright currently, but I wouldn’t be against tuning down some of the more potent abilities of other classes. Has decent matchups, but gets wrecked by dragonhunters and tempests specifically. If played right with sufficient patience/map awareness of enemy team members, thief is a potent force with alright survivability.

Perhaps it is not an issue of what the class can do, but more of an issue for newer players? The class has arguably more intricacies than most other classes.

Granted I haven’t played this game in a long kitten time, and only recently have started playing again. And perhaps this isn’t the thread to post this, but I tend to think that it would be a better equilibrium for the game if the thief didn’t need slight of hand to just function with the trade-off of higher opportunity costs in the form of longer cooldowns/shorter ranges. But that’s just me, I guess.

In terms of intricacies? I’d probably chalk the most intricacies up to the Ranger class. Everyone says power ranger is boring, but there are so many subtle micro enhancements a person can make when they play ranger. Meh, whatever.

I honestly don’t think the sword is as bad as people make it out to be. When you turn off the auto attack on it, you can control it. You have two sources of evasion: one on an 8 second cool-down and the other on 15. With a dagger you get another evasion, the longest evasion in the game, on a 10 second cool-down and a reliable dagger throw. It’s been shown how efficient it is for a ranger to preform up to par, if not better than, the original S/D thief (before the trait patch). 1v1, with the pet, it’s a very powerful weapon.

Mrocha, that’s actually a pretty good idea. The danger from it is condi spam though. Yet still its hard to complain about ranger traps since they have the arm time.

Traps need to be designed in such a way where anyone who steps on it, with a bit of co-ordination with your pet (or a teammate), will be blown up to kingdom come. If you decide to load up all traps on your utility bar, the enemy should be able to punish you for this though. For the most part this is simply true regarding their arm time and point blank cast range. I like the stunbreak idea on frost trap, but maybe that’s too strong. Frost trap’s appeal is the cold field. The raw damage increase on the other traps would be nice though.

Morwath.9817:

Probably those winning streaks without Monk were nothing but my imagination… oh wait…

Your own experiences do not matter in the grande scheme of things; no offense.

Morwath.9817:

It’s a lie.
You could overcome lack of Monk in team and still win those ~20 games.

He’s actually correct. Anet had to introduce abandonment rules because people would commonly abandon an RA match-up if they didn’t have a monk on their team. If you had a monk on your team, and if the monk was any decent (basically if it was a prot monk, not a healing monk), you would go further than any comp simply because the monk was in your team. Not to mention the AIDS that was 55hp monks.

For those who don’t know, there was a monk skill in the game that capped max damage onto an ally to 10% of its health as long as the enchantment was on them – one of the best protection skills in the game, which prevented nukes. So a 55hp monk would take, at most, would take 5 dmg from anything. Then 55hp monks would use regen spells, raw damage negation, with a bit of burst healing to top off their extremely low health in a rapid amount of time. So they would sit there in spawn and spam these spells. If your team comp in random arena didn’t have enchant removal (which was common because it was random arena), matches with a 55hp monk would last forever. The goal of the 55hp monks was to force the other team to leave the match. It was THE definition AIDS. Not this whiny “It’s not me, it’s because the other guy,” bullkitten people try to convince themselves of these days.

Also there WAS ressing, but most commonly in the form of resurrection signet – a one-time res for one downed ally.

I don’t know how something like this would play out in GW2 though. It could backfire having consecutive matches like this, but it’s an interesting idea.

alain.1659:

And they are a solid (not only) reason why rangers are not considered “enough” in competitive pvp.

A major comparison, in terms of competitive edge, can be between a burst mesmer and burst ranger. A burst mesmer requires a body (not necessarily the mesmer) next to the desired burst target. It requires at least 1200 range. Ideally, this target is isolated. This is the list of requirements for a mesmer mirror blade + mind stab combo to work. This is why mesmer + thief burst combo work so well together. The moment mesmer sees a thief teleport to a target (or the thief sees mirror blade mid-throw), the mesmer has that body needed to do his burst.

Theoretically speaking, a class which has a pull (like engineer) is the PERFECT pairing with a mesmer: As the pull isolates, draws the target to an ally body, and cc’s the target all in one instance.

Look at what a ranger has to do, and lining up his AI is a huge hurdle to tackle right now in comparison. I’m not saying ranger should autopilot his pet – he shouldn’t. If you want to play a good ranger, you should be good at micromanagement. However the hurdle still exists.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

How we make a class that has so much stealth/mobility be balanced? I feel like it being UP in fights is a good trade off for the map control they offer.

I can’t come up with a way to make thief be amazing without it causing cancerous cells to form.

The most common way in which games balance high mobility classes with high burst damage is through opportunity cost and long duration disables. You can be anywhere on the map, but you cannot be in two places at the same time. You can use your skills to get away, but not if they are disabled.

So Anet can do things like increase their survivability, but make them weak to long duration disables (which, with the change to shadow’s embrace and increased cooldown on withdraw, they already are: and I feel were good changes) and longer cooldown times on their skills – initiative or actual timers.

Some ideas: Increase their survivability (by ether reducing all other sources of damage in the game with a focus on aoe cleave damage, or some magic buff to thief), but remove/reduce the 20% cooldown reduction on slight of hand, or decrease all range on weapon-based teleports. Remove virtually all revealed skills in the game – or make them have significantly high opportunity costs to take them – and make a thief’s ability to go into stealth more easily cc’ed (remove the projectile finisher on black powder shot – for example). They could also revert the initiative recharge rate back to its original rate, and make 15 initiative the baseline on thieves. If thieves want faster initiative recharge, some changes to the acrobatics line would be perfect for it.

It would probably be healthier for the game if thief didn’t need slight of hand to even function (increase their survivability), and increase their opportunity costs as well.

There are other issues as well: Panic strike, while not as bad as incendiary ammo as a trait (since you know you will proc it at 50% health), is a pretty poorly designed trait. Crit strikes line is significantly lacking, and some thieves simply don’t like to run with shadow arts (but feel they can’t run anything else) because its overly dependent on stealth.

Acrobatics line was completely gutted with the trait changes too. It would be nice to see the acrobatics line buffed with initiative gain focus and a buff to dodge capability – but that’s hard to do now with daredevil in the game.

Just another reason why Dota 2 is the best competitive game out there right now. Kappa

Rangers
The vision of Rangers is to be well-established as a playstyle which rewards finding symbiotic relationships with the player and their pet. To play a Ranger well, you will have to time your skills appropriately with your pet. To play a Ranger REALLY well, you will have to micromanage your pet and the Ranger.

When fighting a Ranger, you will have to have the situational awareness necessary to pay attention to both the Ranger and the pet. The pet should feel like a +(1/2) body on the battlefield.

Pet Controls
In order for this to occur, some major changes must be made to how Rangers control their pets. The controls for pets need to be made smooth, responsive, and intuitive.

• There will be a quality of life change to the ranger pet. You now will be able to visibly see the cooldowns of your pet, and the buffs and conditions that are affecting them, above the controls and health of the ranger pet UI.

• The controls will be changed as well. The “heel” command will be changed into controls similar to the Revenant ventari tablet. With one press of the heel button, you will get a small aoe target area which will allow you to micromanage where you want the pet within a 1200 range radius from the ranger. The pet will immediately travel to that position and wait for 2 seconds. Then, depending if the pet is set to guard or passive, will ether attack the closest target attacking the ranger or retreat back to the ranger. With 2 quick presses of the heel button, the pet will immediately retreat back to the ranger. Once it reaches a distance away from the ranger, it will wait for 2 seconds before ether attacking the nearest target attacking the ranger, or stay passive.

These steps allow the ranger to fully micromanage his pet. He can cancel-cast pet skills to line up attacks by pressing the heel button twice, like he always was able to do. He can also micromanage his pet out of incoming aoe spells as well. He can also set up a clean, positionally advantageous f2 attack from his pet. Overall, this gives the ranger the control he needs to cleanly and responsively micromanage his pet.

Pet Damage
The pet damage is going to be re-scaled to resemble this symbiotic vision of the ranger and its pet.

• In general, pet damage should be re-scaled such that skills purely focused on damage will, in general, deal more damage than skills which focus on a complementary CC ability. This will require the high damage pet to have a CC ability from the ranger to get its maximal effect off. There will be exceptions for skills which may have a strong CC and strong damage, but require a set-up CC to hit reliably. Pig Charge is such a skill. Furthermore, all pet skills will track the target slightly better.

Ranger Damage

Ranger damage will be moved away from their personal weapons to encourage players to find fluid combos with their pet.

• Rapid Fire, and Long Range Shot damage will be reduced
• Sword auto attack will provide a 1/4 second evasion times on kick and leap attacks.
• The cripple shot on shortbow will last 6 seconds instead of 3.
• Bleeding Duration on shortbow will last 2.5 seconds instead of 3.
• Whirling Defense now does not root you in place. Cooldown has been increased.
• Winter’s Bite chill duration has increased to 5 seconds.

These changes, again, push the ranger to find fluid reliable combos with their pet. Soft CC, like chill and cripple, durations will be increased to allow the pet to stick to their target and reliably have their skills connect. The overall damage on ranger weapons will be reduced, if it is considered reliable damage, in order to keep with the vision where you look for certain cc abilities from your pet, like knockdown or cripple, in order to get your damage off and push you to micromanage your pet.

Utility Skills

• All trap physical damage needs to be dramatically re-worked and buffed, and possibly some cooldowns slightly increased. The goal of ranger traps is for all of them to be worthwhile no matter if the ranger is playing a condition focused spec or a power focused spec.

• The ultimate goal of traps is to plan a possible attack with your pet in order to “blow someone up to kingdom-come” – no matter if you are condition focused (condi nuke) or power focused (raw dmg nuke). Traps benefit to the team is they allow the ranger to have presence at two places at once. Anyone on point, where the ranger is not, should be able to see and use them to their own benefit when they go off. They should feel powerful, but not too powerful where the ranger just wants to load up all of his utility bar with traps and spam them as aoe damage instead of focusing on finding those combos with his pet.

• Spirits should also be changed with this vision in mind. They should allow the ranger to hold valuable presence in multiple areas of the map at once. They should give valuable endurance (not the dodge energy bar) to a group of allies so they can last longer in a fight.

The Ranger

The Ranger is a class that, when played well, requires the most amount of micro of all classes. It’s a class that is constantly looking for synergistic relationships with its pet and its weapon skills.

• A Ranger using the CC of Point Blank Shot to set up a cat’s Maul is an example of a synergistic relationship between the Ranger and her pet.

Moreover, the important pet skills are usually the third skill of their species attacks.

• The feline’s Maul, the canine’s Brutal Charge, and the drake’s Tail Swipe to name a few.

The best thing about these skills is they are controllable with a bit of micro.
The pet will ALWAYS favor using their third skill over all other skills. This allows the Ranger to manipulate and control her pet through smart use of cancel-casting and timing. Also, when pet swapping, the pet will ALWAYS appear right next to the Ranger. This allows the Ranger, in some instances, to control where she might want to use a specific F2 attack or again, the third skill of a species.

The class needs to have smooth, workable micro tools to make the class itself (and its pet) feel responsive and valuable.

I argue the biggest quality of life change for the Ranger class will be:
Create a small UI element which shows the three cooldowns on pet skills above the command keys for the pet.

• As a Ranger, I (like the person who I am fighting) have no idea when my bear uses Defy Pain or Bite. Currently Rangers have to do the same guessing game as their enemy. This hurts the micro capability of the class.

This makes the Ranger pet feel random and unrewarding. To many, the pet feels like a tag-along that drags down the Ranger instead of an actual class mechanic. In some people’s eyes, it’s so unrewarding, they would rather not have a pet AT ALL. You need to change this perspective.

Adding a UI element for the ranger pet will help because it provides the necessary feedback to the player so they can learn and improve.

Arken.3725:

I slightly disagree. At the games release we had the Power-meta which to me, was the best meta due to proper risk/reward.

Back when Mug critted for 6k, azn signet was a one-skill 150% dmg hit, pets casually critted for 8k…

You sure you don’t have rose-tinted glasses Arken?

You can stow weapon shadow shot. One use of it: It preserves the stealth so you can bait out a dodge.

shimmerlessEU.6841:

Oh goodness! That’s two people now who’ve put words in my mouth and radically spun a very brief post I made to suit their own ends. Can I ask where in the world I ever said that portal was utterly useless? Will I be waiting as long as I am for my answer from Jayden Ennok?

Decoy is not mandatory for tournament-level Mesmers by the way, nor has it ever been cited as a balance concern by the dev team. Portal has, in both respects. But of course why bother responding at all, this isn’t the first time the wise oracle Chicago Jack has dodged the question only never to be seen again. You promise so much knowledge on matters like these and deliver very little. If there’s any purpose to that last departing line other than such grandstanding I can’t see one.

You know, after trying to be so nice, I was going to write a whole jovial diatribe on you, Shimmerless (I hope I can keep up with your dramatic acting with this line: You do seem to get a kick out of it). In the end, it’s not worth it. So I take it back, I should have just let you soapbox like you always do. Ironically, I try to go out of my way to avoid angry to absolutely melodramatic posts. They serve very little to forward any type of conversation. And yet again, I find myself talking to a brick wall. Why do I do this to myself? The irony is beating me over my head with a mallet and it’s painful.

If you can’t see why people would consider your post (or others) overly dramatic, then I don’t think anyone can help you. Keep fighting the good fight, my defiant commander.

BTW: Shimmerless, you think of me as an “Oracle!?” Wow! I’m flattered, but I can assure you that I’m no more than an average dude with an opinion on the internet. Oh wait… you’re being overly dramatic again. Darn it! Got me again Shimmerless.

shimmerlessEU.6841:

Please point out where in the post you’re quoting I said any of this utter nonsense? I assume I’ll be waiting a while?

I think it has something to do with comparing portal to shadow refuge, saying portal is utterly useless in comparison, and how you said the mesmer class is “held back” by portal. If anything, it’s “held back” by the almost mandatory decoy (which is a small portion of the reason why this tread exists). In the end though, you really ought to use less “flourish” in your posts. You might not get those types of responses in the future.

There could be a long discussion about portal on why, but the short answer is: It’s not.

lvis.3824:

One simple question to the OP, WHY do you want it to be nerfed ?

I’ve already wrote why, but I’ll say it again. I think it would open a broader range of possible team compositions.

Yeah, you hear that boys? Just keep disengaging. Kappa.

Electro Swing is Kreygasm right now

If you play d/p perfectly, you can 1v1 anything. However, they excel in +1’ing fights and peeling for your squishy targets. It’s easier to utilize that executioner’s trait and they can engage from 1800 units away (so that means they usually can los wall hug before they go for the stab).

Here is from my personal experience.

Warrior: The most common spec you will see is hambow. With this spec, it’s of upmost importance to have poison on him 100% of the time. They cleanse conditions most frequently through cleansing ire and combustive shot. That being said, interrupt combustive shot to maintain poison on them. If they pop berserker’s stance, use shadow refuge in response and wait the stance out. Use whirling axe when they enter longbow and try to use it in blackpowder field with a disable (ether bassi venom or shortbow immob) to blind their arcing arrow shot (can’t be reflected). If you refuge, prepare for an earthshaker by ether dodging or shooting shortbow 3 into the ground.

Mesmers: Really this is just a fight of paitence. If you’re s/d, you have more ports than they do, so you can engage and disengage easier than them. If you’re d/p, you have more stealth – so just be patient. Use consume plasma when you’re stealthed, the most common use of it is when you’re in shadow refuge because of the stability gain. Interrupt their heal and mass invisibility.

Necros: LoS the crap out of necros and avoid pressuring them when they have skills which give them easy death shroud on pressure. If they pop death shroud, kite away until they exit the shroud – you have 10 seconds to kill them after that. Interrupt their heal.This is a hard fight 1 on 1, because one good fear chain will destroy you. Their steal is one of the best steals in the game.

Eles: This is going to be a really hard fight. Their main dmg comes from their burning. You need to avoid their damage when they are in fire, interrupt cleansing heal when in water, and use steal item when they exit water. Avoid their cc in air (shocking aura), and strip protection whey they enter earth.

Engineers: Hardest fight in the game for thieves. You can try to get rock dog to proc ip, but that’s difficult to do. Don’t get pulled by magnet (remember it can be stow weaponed). You can bait out protection injection by bassi venoming a blackpowder shot + port – or some other similar manuver (like infilrator strike). Then you can strip it with steal for clean dmg. You can shortbow immob into gunk into clusterbomb or weapon swap. If you want to really get cheeky, you can immob into gunk into bassi venom (gunk procs bassi) then you can follow up after that. Doing this will condi overload the engie. The biggest issues for you will be gear shield, incendiary powder, and their stunbreak. It’s a hard matchup, and most i try to handle with shortbow as their effective range is scariest when you are closer to them.

BlackDevil.9268:

I don’t see why you would need ‘’stow weapon’’ if you already dodge. Dodge already cancels any casting time. Not only that but ileap casting time is incredibly low, I’m amazed that can have an aftercast so big that you can neglect it.

It’s more of a habit, really, as I don’t always blow a dodge. It’s a good habit to get into and it saves a lot of time. iLeap has a 3/4th second cast time. You can cut it down to pretty much 1/4. That is a huge difference, actually. Especially when the clone can die so easily.

Phantaram.1265:

One of these days the internet will get my name right.

Okay Phanta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ranta-ram.

Funky.4861:

how can u swap weapons 3 times in less than 9 seconds?

I’m swapping once. From s/f to gs. You might be confused with the stow-weapon thing. I cancel the rest of the animation on ileap with stow weapon, then dodge to get an extra clone – it’s quicker that way. I’m not switching weapons. It can get buggy though, because sometimes when I leap to clone and weapon swap, the game still thinks I’m in sword set, so it does blurred frenzy and puts mirror blade on cooldown.

skcamow.3527:

For ranged shatter one of my favorites is the mirror blade > blink to their face > F1 > mind stab.

I like to blink when the blade is mid-air. It looks cooler, I can port behind the target (less risky), and (in my mind) it’s harder to spot what I’m doing.

I’m talking shatter mesmer: My favorite combo is ileap, stow-weapon + dodge, swap, weaponswitch, mirror blade, mindstab + shatter. I usually use it when someone is chasing me as the ileap clone typically pops up behind the target. It does about a12k burst on a squishy target.

What is your favorite combo?

Sandrox.9524:

Secondly,unless you are The Flash(which will be very cool) I cant see how can you dodge a 2.5sec(almost insta) surprise RF,maybe in the last 3 arrows.

In a game where people can potentially jump you from equivalent range literally without any warning, the last thing I’m worried about is a 2.5sec channeled skill.

I really don’t know why they would keep hotjoin under these rules. Nobody is going to learn anything there. The only thing they will learn how to do is bop to the team that is winning.

Finally. SOME level of structure in PvP. Hopefully this won’t be 2 years too late.

GOSU.9574:

As soon as you finish the tutorial the cross swords is at the top left of the screen. It hasn’t changed since release.

No, I didn’t have access to them until I hit a certain level. I can’t remember which level, but the only way I could have gone to wvw or pvp was to walk to lions arch.

At first, I really hated the “New Player Experience”. But I’m starting to like it after fully leveling a character through it. Some things are really dumb, like blocking access to quickly get into WvW and PvP. I hate the late access to traits though. I love the idea of going out into the world to get them for free, don’t get me wrong. The late access though really breaks classes.

Chaith, this is a question to you and a bit offtopic.

In your opinion, what is the +’s and -’s of bringing pistol shield nade bomb over pistol pistol nade toolkit?

Clownmug.8357:

Somewhat true, it’s like I have a nice house but my neighbors next door live in a mansion and play loud music.

Ha, this made me laugh.

Look at it this way: You can have portal and Mass Invis.

Clownmug.8357:

In conclusion, why the hell is Shadow Refuge’s cooldown 60 sec and Mass Invisibility is 90 sec?

I think it’s because shadow refuge allows the thief to fork, whereas portal does effectively the same thing for Mesmers. Portal provides presence on a point for up to 60 seconds. Shadow Refuge is somewhere between 15-20 seconds.

Zefrost.3425:

15s of stealth is just ridiculous.

No, 15 seconds allows the thief just enough time to +1 another point.

shimmerlessEU.6841:

Portal has really held the class back while SR has always been a painless option.

I don’t understand how portal has “held the class back”. Do you mean it as a mandatory pick to be useful to the team? Because shadow refuge is really the same way. You wouldn’t sac shadow refuge for shadow trap, for example.

Chaith.8256:

Either way just by giving him the impression he could get an ez-decap, you can slow his rotation to mid significantly.

Interesting Chaith, I honestly hadn’t ever thought of that. I still think 3/4 sec cast time is reasonable, and would make for better play and possible team compositions overall in the game.

We all know about quickness, but what if there was a debuff that increased cast time? Would it be OP on Time Warp? Maybe there could be a rework to certain GM traits with it?

Carighan.6758:

Oooh, 1v1.

What? Nobody mentioned 1v1’ing at all.

See, your change would make an already weak ability in group usage even weaker.

Don’t disrespect the usefulness of shadow refuge. It’s a VERY good skill, and VERY good in team play. It’s certainly not a deathtrap if used correctly.

Carighan.6758:

Another interesting counter is simply leaving.

If you leave, the thief decaps. In other words, it’s not an option. This is what a thief does to fork the enemy. They put them in a position to pick two choices which they don’t want to take. Ether they stay and sit afk for 15-20 seconds while the thief +1 a point, or they leave and the thief gets the decap. This tactic should be used because it’s how the thief plays and provides a more diverse game to play, so no need to nerf it to the ground like a 90 second cooldown or 1 and 3/4ths cast time or something. 3/4’s seconds is just enough time for someone to counter it directly if they’re good at saving their hard cc.

Chaith.8256:

I’m saying that you should re-compensate the skill by allowing the thief and allies to exit the shadow refuge early and keep the stealth they accumulated.

No. I don’t think it needs that. Thieves already have ways to avoid the ringout. Granted, they don’t have good ways to avoid a constant barrage of aoe attacks other than blowing more evades, but the opposing player has no feedback on whether or not they are actually hitting the thief in contrast.

“- Remove the healing it provides (at least on downed people). Currently, SR is like a weak Elixir R, in addition to the whole stealth thing and being a dark field.
- No longer able to drop at range, simply a player-based skill so that there is risk to dropping this on a team-mate (besides lost CD).”

I don’t think ether of these things need to happen. If you remove the range on SR, it becomes severely hampered for team play. And the healing is pretty negligible without 30 points into SA.

Chaith.8256:

If they put a cast time on it, and then the player could exit refuge at any point without being revealed, then perhaps.

Chaith, it already has a cast time 1/4th second. I’m saying increase it to 3/4th’s seconds. I have no idea what you are talking about.

How the skill functions now, as it stands, is the following:

1) You spend 1/4th seconds casting shadow rufuge.
2) House ring pops up for about 4 seconds.
3) If you stay within that ring for the full duration, you will have stealth permanently, if not you will instantly be revealed.

Shadow Refuge is mandatory on nearly every thief build. It saves lives who are about to get stomped, it allows the thief to “fork” the enemy team by providing a +1 advantage somewhere else on the map without any drawbacks, it personally saves the life of the thief, you can shadow refuge bomb a point with your entire team – it’s good and quite possibly the best utility on a thief skillbar. Currently, the best way to counter shadow refuge is to rip the thief, and anyone in it, out of the house circle. This is usually countered by a thief timing a dodge or evade (or in the case of mesmer vs thief, consume plasma).

Give Shadow Refuge a 3/4 to 1 second cast time – leaning on 3/4 cast time. It provides a short period of time where someone can counter it directly with an interrupt, and the thief still has the opportunity to dodge roll/evade a ringout if he pulls it off. It doesn’t severely hamper getting that clutch stealth on a downed ally. And it becomes less of a “I suck kitten , better use refuge” button – as it’s usually best to use when you have some distance to your foes anyway. If you want to point bomb, it’s best to use it out of sight.

Discuss.

SlimChance.6593:

So saying Lockdown specs can handle Thieves is a little far fetched. IMHO.

It’s not too far off actually, I wouldn’t call it a “hard counter” to thieves though. It’s definitely about the same difficulty on S/D now that they changed how flanking strike works (they’ll just evade in place), but there are more options to deal with flanking strike like blinds, dodges, and blocks (doesn’t matter too much with mesmer though). On any other set, interrupting their heartseeker through blackpowder is a big oh crap moment for the thief and putting immob on top of that is an even bigger oh crap moment. Also shatter Mesmer has absolutely zero shot against S/P without mantra of distraction.

The big crux of the matter is that d/p has more stealth than mesmers, and S/x has more ports.

I’m with blu in saying that the comparisons are more subtle. As an offlaner in dota, if you can keep the supports busy, it means they aren’t ganking other areas of the map. You are being a good offlaner (and not dieing) if you do this because you are “creating space” for the rest of your team. In gw2, a similar tactic can be employed by trying to keep 2 people on 1 node and not dieing in the process. This generates an advantage for your team somewhere else on the map. Map vision is a huge deal in dota, and it’s also a huge deal in gw2. In dota, you play bounty hunter, nature’s profit, and other similar heroes almost exclusively in the fog. This is because the simple non-existence on the map tries to force people into not playing too aggressively, or else they might get ganked. The same can be said for gw2 in which you can’t get too greedy on your positioning if you can’t see potential gankers on the map. As a thief, you might force a mesmer at mid to jump into the hut on temple (can’t be blinked to). Even the doctrine of gw2 combat follows closely to dota: damage, control, and support.

There are also more subtle tactical comparisons. In dota, if you are capable of pushing a lane, you start to develop more control over the map, and your team becomes more capable of snowballing late game. The same can be said about gw2 and it’s capture points. The more control you have over the capture points, the better the chance to snowball. Capitalizing on player deaths is a huge deal in dota, and the same can be said about gw2. There are also more “macro tactical” comparisons that blu talked about. You see similar team strategies in dota as you do in gw2, and how certain synergies exist with different builds.

There are a lot of contrasts too. The blatant ones are the non-existence of towers, creeps, and gold in gw2. But there are more subtle ones as well. In dota, if you get chained stunned, there is a very good chance that you’re going to die. In gw2, you have more options of escape – you rarely get stunbreaks (items like linken’s sphere) and absolutely no dodge rolls in dota. The way combat flows is also very different. You have to stop and attack in dota, in gw2 you can move and attack – this is a huge difference. There are even deeper differences. The way the two games evolve is vastly different. In dota, there are heroes who have high impact at different times in the game. This is primarily because of the item purchasing system they have in the game, and the lack of immediately having access to all skills available to you at the start of a match. In dota, you go from a farming phase to an attack phase. This, along with long cooldowns on skills, forces the game into 30 to 45 min matches (and that’s if your team is doing well). In gw2, it’s always gogogogo.

So yeah, I’d say there are some well defined similarities, and some major differences.

MSFone.3026:

[…] I think a big reason is the increased awareness required.

One thing I consider about any build on whether it’s good or not, at least for me, is its demand for situational awareness. I come from gw1 days in which my main was a cripshot ranger. It focused on landing critical interrupts, stopping or assisting spikes, and spreading degen to the enemy. So you couldn’t just tunnel vision on one target, and you couldn’t spend most of your time spreading pressure around ether (you’ll miss critical interrupts). Long story short, it was the most demanding spec that required a well-developed situational awareness skill (very few could actually play it well). Specs like Lockdown have this in spades. Right now, in common specs, you very visibly see d/d elementalist pull this “stuff” off quite often. Supcutie has commented that denshee “carries” TCG with his ability to read what is going on at any given point of time and respond accurately.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

So I’m going to clarify something for your third reason. CI mes has been known by the top mesmers since last year from Chaos, myself, and a couple of mesmers. Supcutie believes it has potential (after seeing me dominate everyone including himself one day) but Helseth believes it is bad/cheese and apparently his word is law so that’s why people don’t use it. Also people are afraid to try some experimental builds so they never change, even though CI mes is incredible in this meta of d/d eles/cele engis, as it completely shuts them out.

I’ll use another example of a setup that most people have known about, but really hasn’t been put to the test: Venomshare thief. It suffers similar negative stigma, everyone has known about it for years, as you pointed out here but really no one has seriously fleshed it out in a team. That’s what I’m trying to get at.

Personally, what I call “cheese” would be something like: Stealthing a killshot warrior or ice bow ele or both (lol). Or more recently seen, double lich bomb after the enemy team has blown all their cooldowns killing the necros, only to have them ressed up by a mercy rune warrior then auto 1 them to death with lich. Something that is overly restrictive to get to work reliably. Double lich bomb we have seen is less restrictive, but I still think it’s not something that could seriously hold up water.

I don’t see lockdown mes under the similar banner.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Portal because to me that’s the one thing that Mes brings to the PvP table that no other class can. No one else can go home, place a port, go mid, and still be able to defend home at a moments notice. I thought I would miss Decoy, but you can use Portal to get halfway across the map if things get dicy. I’ve also noticed that CI has a much better chance vs Thief than Shatter.

While I personally would agree with most of this, not bringing decoy means you’re going to have a harder time pushing far. I personally run under the guideline of, if you are a mobility focused class and you don’t have stealth, you probably have no business going far. Moreover, with Mesmer, I rarely go alone even with decoy. All you need to disengage from any fight is 3 seconds of stealth and something like a port. Engies are a bit different because they have swiftness and 5 seconds of stealth, but the same rule applies. When you are using portal to save your hide, remember you’re not using it to move your team around the map. That’s a large tole to take to move one person around the map for a 90 second cooldown.

In any case, it’s a hard question to answer because I generally do feel CI has a better shot against thieves over shatter, if played well, and portal is pretty much mandatory on any mesmer build focused on providing the most for the team (in soloque, you might be able to get away with not bringing it because it’s harder to co-ordinate with your teammates). Yet you also have to make hefty sacrifices because you don’t have decoy (amongst other things).

“Sure People here are in love with lockdown, portraying it as the better build, meanwhile there hasn’t been a single lockdown mesmer in tournaments in the history of GW2 (or at least not on a serious level).”

And also there is an abysmally low amount of people who really want to play the game seriously. There are a lot of stuff that has yet been really put to the ginding stone.

“3.Lockdown is still “young” build which ppl yet to really appreciate.”

I think this is the biggest reason. People always try to play different specs in the same way they are used to with some other spec, and it usually doesn’t work out as well (big surprise).