Guild Wars 2

Roll a thief and go into SPvP, make a build that has no stealth and don’t use weapon based stealth abilities, now try to play as a thief with out ANY stealth… you will certainly have fun being a sub par warrior.

Stealth is OP only when you aren’t willing to put in the work required to counter it.

Welp, I took a look at some hammer skins and from a realism POV many of them are functional, the the ones that look like an enlarged sledge hammer are basically doing it wrong.

As for thin hammer heads, well the thinner and more pointed it is the more focused the kinetic energy is on impact which results in more ‘damage’ dealt.

Attached is a real war hammer, a fantasy version is typified by Thor’s Mjolnir.

Due to the nature of PvP it’s a direct nerf, probably to get us to use something else for a change (not like that’s happening though) but it won’t have a huge impact on PvE because of simplistic AI.

The problem stems from the SB now being treated as the guardian scepter in terms of how it works (although not for speed) but the fact that it has near a 1s fire animation and a moderate projectile speed makes this ‘nerf’ extraordinarily painful and rather undeserved, oh sure, it might not have been functioning the way the devs wanted it to, but as the saying goes “If it ‘aint broke’ don’t fix it” which makes you wonder… where is the compensatory pistol love?

I like it, but it doesn’t function quite as described.
The skill rolls over even if you don’t hit the enemy (bug)
The damage dealt doesn’t reflect the displayed tooltip (bug)
The sword strike portion of FS deals ~50% less damage than LS (bug)
The sword strike portion of FS can still miss the target (bug)
The pathing of FS has been improved, but there is still a 10-15% failure rate (bug)
The animation cancelling effect of LS can cause a delay the further into sword #1 chain’s attack animations you go, thus creating a choppy transition and increasing casting time (bug)

That’s my experience after 20 minutes of testing.

Adaneshade.2409:

The issue is the “lawl-I-so-good-you-so-bad” from the people running these “cheese” builds after they defeat an opponent using a build that’s more difficult to play. Feeling proud about a kill when it was 100% their googled build and had nothing to do with their own skill.

If every build is a google build… who puts the builds on google?

Oh that’s right, “hard” to play builds are “better” because they require more “skill” to use than the so called google builds. Then again, if you think about the way that builds are structured in GW2, all the “good” and “interesting” builds will be on google (and are thus google builds) and most of the “average or bad” builds will also be on google.

Hell, if the build is on google then the counter will also be on google, but it’s too difficult to search for a counter right?

In terms of builds; harder != better, not does using a harder build make you a better player, especially if you complain about the people using the so called “easy mode” builds killing you and your “harder and obviously superior” build.

I’m sorry, but the dreamer is the manliest bow available to those secure with themselves, only sad sad people with insecurities about their “manliness” have any real complaints.

Apolo.5942:

I am both serious and curious about this. As broken as this game is, it is far from the only one to reach this “glorified” status, so as to not aggravate the loyal fanboys here, i am going to use examples from other games.

Take wow pve, take Paladins, from the very get go they had 3 specs, Healer, Tank and DPS. Tank was simply inferior to other tanks, both in health pool and damage mitigation. The DPS spec had no CC in a game where every DPS class was EXPECTED to bring CC for dungeons. This flaws were pointed out, literally for YEARS, before devs acted on them. Same was for longer still lacking in resource sustain and damage in pvp.

So, my question is, what is it that makes Devs blind to what is mostly obvious for the grand majority of the player base?.
And may be more important, how broken, how failed, does a mechanic need to get before Devs acknowledge it and scrap it?.
Is there like a technical analysis to it? does it go entirely on gut feeling? does dev ego play into it?(not being offensive every one needs a healthy dose of ego).

The definition of broken is “Having been fractured or damaged and no longer in one piece or in working order.” From this we can conclude that a broken car is one that can’t function as a car so long as it’s in a broken state, applying this to a game means the game can no longer function as a game while it is broken.

The thread title implies that you think the game is broken, given that the game functions as a game, it clearly isn’t broken based on common usage of the word, your post doesn’t clarify what you mean by broken and doesn’t use examples FROM GW2, only from an unrelated game.

Your rhetorical questions at the end of your post imply that it’s certain skills and mechanics that you think are broken, but you name nothing which makes it hard to debate with you and as such, I can only believe that it’s your perception of ‘brokenness’ and not an actual issue. If a skill functions but not in the way you think it should in terms of numbers then it isn’t broken, if it says it will do damage and then makes yellow roses sprout from the ground, then it would be broken.

Lastly, the cop-out argument of “if you can’t see it, I don’t need to repeat it to prove it” doesn’t work because the burden of proof is on you, as you are the one making the claims. It’s not up to me to prove your snake oil doesn’t work, it’s up to you to prove (under peer scrutiny) that it does work.

Add ~50 silver to the price of selling 100 gems and that’s what people pay for the same 100 gems.

If 100 gems has a sell value of 2 gold, it would have a buy value of 2.5 gold, thus frequent conversions of gems to gold to gems are unprofitable unless you can accurately predict a shift of more than 50 silver in the sell price over the buy price.

[edit]
The 5 day low is simply the lowest price the gems have been over a five day period.
The 5 day high is the inverse of the 5 day low.
The average price is the average of the high and low (with an acceptable level of variance) and is what you will receive within the same variance.

Wish I had of seen this (and similar) thread(s) before transmuting the stats on my legendary… all that effort is pretty much gone.

Buy gems, convert to gold, find a crafting guide and level via crafting, should hit 80 in a day.

Aside from that, just play the game and experience the content at your own pace, otherwise you’ll probably get bored after hitting 80 as there isn’t much to do that SPECIFICALLY requires you to be max level… besides farming.

From my experience, most elite skills are too situational to be useful (or used) very often while the non-elite utilities for many professions seem to be much more useful due in part to their lower CD but also due to design.

On my thief I swap my elite from Dagger Storm to Basilisk Venom only during the dredge fractal, but aside from that Dagger Storm provides too much utility and use to NOT use it. Unfortunately for most professions, they don’t have such a good elite that’s useful in more than a small handful of rarely encountered situations, instead they have elites that either summon (lackluster) minions, transform then into a (lackluster) alternate version or provide some buff of some variety that lasts longer than a “normal” utility… the only difference are Mesmers, which have the best group support elite (even post nerf) and no elite from another profession even comes close in terms of group support or personal support/utility.

Essentially, most elites are so situational in use or don’t justify the cooldown with seemingly appropriate power that they just take up a slot that would (in many many cases) be better spent elsewhere.

SneakyErvin.3056:

Vayne.8563:

I can’t wait for the warrior nerf. It’s going to be entertaining as hell.

Wrong approach. Better to buff all classes that are behind instead of nerfing the warrior to the substandard level. Or they could just make content harder on glasscannon specs.

They could make content harder for GC specs… but the glass cannon isn’t the problem, it’s the multiple glass cannons (with high base health) doing their full damage that’s the problem (as small a problem as it is).

Case in point, you can make content so that it drops GC warriors in the same number of hits as a GC thief, but that just addresses a specific and limited area and makes content harder for EVERYONE rather than ‘fixing’ the speed-runnable paths of dungeons.

Well OP, what exactly do you need cash for? Once you have everything then you’d just pile up money and have nothing to do with it and no great reason to keep playing (as complaining about cash makes it seem like you only play to be rich).

I could spend 40-50 days making 10g a day and then buy the rest of the stuff I want to make my character “complete” but then what’s left for me?

In terms of difference when using an exotic weapon the shortbow scales better than the long bow but at such a slow rate it’s almost insignificant, but that just in terms of straight power and doesn’t take into account the bleed effect the shortbow can produce (which makes the short bow vastly better than the long bow).

In terms of the longbow #1 doing more damage than the #2, it still holds at all levels of tested power, but it’s a minimum of 5% more and a (tested) maximum of 5.5% more.
However because of the #2 performing more hits in the allotted time period, it has a greater variance of damage when crits are factored in, which can be good or bad.

The short Bow has an average of 6.4% more damage than the longbow over the same 1.25s period, but because this doesn’t take into account the bleed it’s a number lower than realistically plausible, given my rangers gear and spec the shortbow is producing 50% (1.5x) more base damage due to the bleed than the long bow at ranges of 1000+ and 170% (2.7x) more damage at ranges between 0-500.

The OP is comparing various weapons to each other and pointing out that the animation duration is longer than the displayed cast time, in relation to my data, I first gave data on guardian weapons and the duration it took to kill the heavy golem, from that one can see that there is a discrepancy between the time it takes to kill the enemy and the time it SHOULD take based off of the “cast time” of the weapons #1 skill.

Case in point, the guardian scepter #1 has a “cast time” of 0.25 seconds, but an animation duration of 0.75 seconds and the animation time supersedes the “cast time” which creates a problem if damage was based off of the “cast time” rather than the animation time (where it is longer).

For the Long Bow data I looked at it first with auto-attack enabled and then spamming it to see if there was some sort of frame clipping that made manual presses do more damage, it turns out that there wasn’t any form of clipping as they both produced the same result of an animation time of 1.25 seconds, and a “cast time” of 0.75 seconds.

The problem in a nutshell is that we, as the players, don’t know if damage and effects were balanced around the displayed “cast time” or the actual animation length. I’d also like to know why there is a discrepancy between the displayed information and the actual situation.

Human T2 Mask
Human T3 Gloves
Mad King Boots
Whispers Chest
Mad King Legs
CM Shoulders
Kenshi’s Wing + Whispers Pistol

ExZee.8109:

Coffeebot.3921 is the only person to do any physical research on the topic, yet he didn’t compare his data to another set of data where he manually pressed the #1 key instead of leaving it on auto-attack.

Manually pressing #1 for Long Bow over 10.04 seconds;
1) 1.38s
2) 1.17s
3) 1.15s
4) 1.26s
5) 1.30s
6) 2.5s
7) 1.28s
Average of 1.43s, remove the outlier and average drops to 1.25(6 recurring) seconds.

Furious button mashing version over 20.28s;
1) 0.56s (outlier)
2) 1.25s
3) 1.1s
4) 1.19s
5) 1.27s
6)1.30s
7) 2.37s (outlier)
8) 1.27s
9)1.12s
10) 2.64s (outlier)
11) 2.44s (outlier)
12) 1.35s
13) 1.18s
14) 1.17s
Average total: 1.45s (reasonably consistent with sedate test)
Average after outlier removal: 1.23s (reasonably consistent with sedate test)

Vayne.8563:

I still don’t know about this. Take the longer auto attack time of the long bow over the short bow. The short bow does a much better autoattack but the long bow otherwise has much higher damage skills. Taking in the whole picture, it might be possible that the short bow’s strong auto-attack compensates for the significantly lower damage otherwise.

The problem with the LB having supposed “higher damage skills” is that the SB outpaces those just with “auto-attack” damage.

With no traits or gear and steady weapons against the heavy golem in SPvP I found;
Long Bow #1 long range: 41 damage 1.25s animation.
Long Bow #1 med range: 30 damage 1.25s animation.
Long Bow #1 short range: 23 damage 1.25s animation.
Long Bow #2 170 damage over 5.5 second animation (5s “cast” time displayed)

Shortbow #1 18 damage, 128 bleed (3s) over an animation that I couldn’t accurately time. (my reflexes kept giving me numbers between 0.76 to 0.89 seconds)

Given that the Shortbow (along with dagger #1.1 and 1.2 for thief and necro) doesn’t display the “cast” time we can assume that the animation and cast time are shorter than 0.25 seconds, otherwise there isn’t a reason to NOT have a time displayed on the tooltip.

Worst case scenario, the animation of the Shortbow is 0.5 seconds, and deals 18 direct damage, we can multiply that damage by 11 to equal the time of Rapid Fire and we have 198 damage for the SB and 170 damage for rapid fire over the same 5.5 seconds, It only gets worse for the LB if the animation of the SB is faster than 0.5 seconds.

[7th edit] Using a 30/30/10/0/0 build the Shortbow can stack a 4s bleed up to 8 times (exact) which means that the Shortbow is pulling off 8 attacks over 4 seconds, as such I can say with confidence that the animation for the SB is 0.5 seconds.

The only Long Bow ability that out paces the Shortbow is Barrage.
For added laughs; over 5 seconds at long range the longbow #1 does 164 damage vs the #2 doing 170 damage over 5.5 seconds, if one takes into account that extra 0.5 seconds then the long bow #1 OUT DAMAGES the #2 over the same 5.5 second time period (assuming nothing crits).

I did some testing similar to this a couple of days ago for the guardian, the seconds aren’t perfectly accurate but are close enough to be taken into consideration.
Scepter: 157 animations over 117.99 seconds
Sword: 90 animations over 76.09 seconds
Mace: 123 animations over 134.43 seconds
Hammer: 69 animations over 82.89 seconds
Great Sword: 122 animations over 101.77 seconds

Given that the scepter has a “cast” time of 0.25 seconds and the fact that I was in melee range (negating the slow travel time) I should have achieved ~472 scepter animations, in reality I was achieving 1.33 animations every second which is quite obviously different than the claimed 4 animations a second that the “cast” time would indicate.

A good three abyss dyes, and I’ve had all bar a black dye over the course of GW2.

I’m sorry OP but this isn’t a throwback to the 8bit era, that era was dominated by the likes of the Atari 2600 which is so visually different in terms of graphics that I’m amazed you think the super funbox is 8bit-esque. No, the Super Funbox is a throwback to the 32bit era, specifically the Nintendo 64 and games like Super Mario 64 and Zelda (possibly Ocarina of Time, but more likely the S/NES version), but given you young people don’t know how to research things I fully understand how you could (mis)believe that it’s an 8bit lookalike. P.S. I’m 25

I play the game in my own way… and the gold accumulates over time.

The maximum range of the current bugged implementation of Shadow Return is… as far as you can run before it vanishes. In theory you could use it at 40 million range if you could run that far before it becomes Infiltrators Strike again, the red bar does appear under it when it exceeds the tool-tip range but it’s still useable.
Similar effect with the Shadow Return portion of Shadowstep.

I’d love to know why the karma armor in Orr is bound to the character that buys it and yet the jewelery that’s purchased from the same vendors isn’t bound to the character.

Only reason I’d love to know is because I evidently can’t read and just wasted 164k karma.

Nothing has changed top address this so called “gap” in the last 2 months.
Additionally, nothing has changed in regard to “end game” content because the game isn’t going to end soon… the phrase “end game content” is somewhat ironic when you thing about it, as it goes against what it is saying by prolonging the end of a game with the introduction of new content which implies that the content ISN’T the end of the game.
This begs the question… why is it still called “end game” when no game with end game content has ended (due to content reasons like a single player game) after the players have finished the “end game?”

For a human female, I count 4 armors that DON’T have a split front coat or short skirt like affair, it leads me to believe that those responsible for design of medium armor have no imagination for a fantasy setting.

Counting the karma from the boxes I got 157 total boxes. From those 157 boxes I got:
1 charged lodestone
1 molten lodestone
1 onyx lodestone
24 obsidian shards
and 641 unidentifiable objects

So about 8 gold worth of stuff for karma that I wasn’t going to use for anything anyway, so it’s a pretty good deal for a useless (after a while) currency.

Eviscera.9703:

1. Let’s start with the PvE: Dungeons doesn’t even have the rewards that everyone wants. I’m not talking about items. I’m talking about achievements. Like the ‘’Worlds first 80’’ or ‘’Servers first whatever’’ Those are the things people want.
Let’s take sports as an example. We’re in the Beijing olympics, Mens 100m Finals. Every sprinter has been training day in and day out since they were 10 years old. They gave up all the fun in life just to accomplish this world record. And then suddenly someone breaks the world record and the whole crowd goes crazy, his name is printed in every newspaper and gets famous all around the world.
Now let’s go back to Guild Wars 2. The hardcore players that break records, the famous gamers that puts in heart & dedication into the games they play. 30 hours of straight grinding just to accomplish something spectacular. And what do they get in return? Absolutely NOTHING. This is why all the famous players quit. The famous gamers that stream and advertise your game gets nothing in return. This is why Guild wars 2 is dead on twitch… No competition at all.

Given that you never defined your idea of hardcore PvE content it’s very hard to argue with you, in fact that’s one of the problems with people looking for “hardcore” content in general… it’s never defined and as such never hardcore enough.

The idea of “server first x” doesn’t work in GW2 because of the overflow servers, you could attain a first, but it wouldn’t count because you were also in an overflow.
What it seems you want are things to strive for that the average player will never get… and neither will you because you aren’t “hardcore” enough. If you wanted “hardcore” you would seek out things to be hardcore regardless of what the game says or rewards you for, you would do it because you can,. not for the “fame” and recognition that you want, hell go play Path of Exiles on hardcore mode and delete your character and all its gear when ever you die… that’s hardcore but you won’t get any recognition for it.

2. The PvP: Like come on…. It’s like you Anet released a game that wasn’t even finished. There is absolutely no competition in the PvP. No ladders, No achievments. No one knows whos the best PvPers, because there is no system that tells you that. The PvP lacks variety. No Arenas, No deathmatches… What the hell?! The game needs INGAME ladders… Not the useless ones posted on forums. The people that actually play your game to the max and stream everyday to give to the community gets nothing in return. Why Anet? Just why?

WoW made arenas popular, now every game wants arena style game play because… it’s easy? I actually don’t know, but it wouldn’t work in GW2 because of the profession interaction not being any where near designed for it.
Death match? Again it’s popular because it’s easy… and boring, just follow the zerg in a conquest game and fight in the middle, there, you now have death match style game play and it’s pretty boring.

Sure in game ladders would be great, sure knowing who sits in first place would be nice… it would also be fuel for saying they are only there because of their profession. It also requires a metric that can be used to measure people and HAS to be used on the “general” population as well, as to why? Because people don’t care unless they have their rank shown as well, and even then most people still won’t care.

In the end people strive to be the best or first at something, and after a day or a week or a month no-one will care anymore because it’s no longer relevant except to a small group of people, and those people always want more content so they can attempt to be first or best for their five minutes of pseudo-fame.

What you really want is for a large portion of the development team to focus time and money on a small portion of the community to create tasks for them to accomplish that no-one will care about after they are accomplished, and in addition to that you want the PvE content locked once completed so that no-one else will ever have a shot at attaining the particular rewards, but you don;t want difficult content per se, you just want restricted content that the “average” and most “hardcore” players will never have a chance to get.
Sounds like a smart business model to me… oh wait, WoW used that business model and had to change everything when their game was declining in population and look at WoW now, it’s one of the most “casual” friendly and least “hardcore” games/MMOs on the market.

1/5th is hardly the case, many of the dailies had 3 tiers, there were 4 dailies, that’s 12 hits of experience, currently there are 5 dailies with one tier so a total of 5 hits of experience.

(1-(5/12))x100 = 58.33% loss in experience from dailies.

It’s a loss, but maths over conjecture every day of the week.

The problem with complaining about lack of “fun” while fighting a thief is that it also applies to other classes from the thieves perspective.

The problem with complaining about the thief using stealth to escape is that the thief didn’t kill you so it’s a no-win situation, it also assumes that you WOULD have killed the thief had they stuck around (which isn’t necessarily the case). This just highlights the fact that thieves drop their health really quickly and trigger the “run away” response which could be used as an indicator that… thieves have weak defense? But that was obvious, they sacrificed all their defense for offense and get dropped really quickly, but the real problem for people is “Oh kitten that guaranteed kill just got away” so based on this argument taken to its logical conclusion… buff thieves defense?

To give my answer to the OP’s question; because thieves have high single target damage, high mobility and stealth combined with their weaknesses being obvious but remaining unexploited by the people complaining on the forums. The people who DO exploit the thieves weaknesses in WvW/sPvP aren’t on the forums complaining about thieves, so it’s just a case of a dissatisfied vocal minority having no forum based counter because satisfied people show their satisfaction by not complaining on the forums.

People just don’t want to think and when fighting against thieves you have to think or else you will get beaten.

Every hit has a 31.6% AND 23.7% chance of applying vulnerability, best case scenario you get 2 stacks per hit, worst case you get 0.

For a single unload, you will on average get 2 hits of vulnerability, for vital shot you will get 1 vulnerability every 4-5 hits on average. Given that Vital shot has a cast time of 0.5 seconds + 0.25 seconds after-cast delay and travel time, you will get at best 3 vulnerability stacks before they start wearing off.
Given that unload has a cast time of 1.75 seconds and 0.25 seconds of after-cast delay and travel time, you will get at best 5 stacks of vulnerability before they wear off.

End result, you can get an average maximum of 8 vulnerability by using that trait and sigil, which is ultimately not worth using over other possibilities.

In games that have player housing the “home” is usually used as a place of storage for junk and not much else, essentially people never actually use their housing for… the purpose of housing, they just want a piece of the world that they can have a limited amount of control over.

Not to mention that the developmental and server costs aren’t worth what ever people think they could get out of it, in conjunction with the fact that most of the furnishings would only be available on the gem store which would cause many players asking for housing to accuse ANet of cash grabbing.

It’s just a no-win situation.

Einlanzer.1627:

Thomassassinate.9370:

I never exclude people for being squishy.

However i hate having thiefs on my team. Don’t know why but they always seem like the weakest of the bunch who can barely survive anything.

Also engineers sometimes only sometimes.

Yes, other classes have decent attrition either through good tanking abilities or the ability to avoid or mitigate damage. Thieves are easily the “worst” class in this ranking, arguably making them the weakest class in PvE in general. They just really need some development attention on a lot of different fronts.

Hardly, the thing about thieves that many people either don’t get or fail to accomplish is that most if not all of a thieves defense is active avoidance, shadow step, stealth and dodge all take a great deal of timing to get right (for defense) and by proxy, take more skill than hitting a button to make you immune to damage for 5s.

That essentially makes thieves bad for people who aren’t constantly paying attention to their surroundings, if you misstep once you can be downed in an instant… on the upside is the awesome damage and potentially awesome utility.

Thieves aren’t the problem, it’s the people playing a thief who lack the awareness and reflexive skill use that are the problem, also those that play the thief like a warrior.

Cash paycheck… acquire yacht. It’s the only logical choice, as changing anything requires a lot of time to do anything meaningful, not to mention no developer can really decide to put something in without consulting their co-staff/team etc.

Blueshield.6291:

Coffeebot.3921:

As far as fractals are concerned, I think it’s a case of people assuming that higher level = better loot, as in level 9 dude goes into level 40 fractal they will be rewarded by level 40 loot (including rings etc.).

Essentially it’s a misconception that higher = better without knowing what the requirements for higher levels are.

In other words, it’s a problem of not having read/comprehended the patch notes?

That makes a lot of sense, but unfortunately the question then becomes what the heck can we (as players) or ANet do about it? They already announced how the new system would work in detail prior to the patch and linked the patch notes to the launcher.

Your comment about reading/comprehension is actually valid here, many people don’t read patch notes nor do they “listen” to what the devs are saying.
It would be preferable if ANet made a system that basically said the minimum amount of AR needed for a certain level of fractals, or at the very least allow people to see your AR if and only if it were below the required minimum level.

Xavori.3768:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Precisely. You get rewarded extra for helping the group less. Goes against everything Anet stands for.

Magic find in a dungeon/fractal SHOULD equal out. So if 1 person has 100% magic find and all other 4 have 0% magic find then everyone (including that person in mf gear) should get 20% magic find (100 divided by 5 = 20).

Plus, MF users kick puppies and steal babies from dingoes so they can eat them first.
-rolls eyes-

Why should a skilled player who can contribute significantly to a group get less reward because the rest of the group is too cheap or not skilled enough to be using MF gear themselves?

Oh, and bad players or players in over their head…they come in all varieties, not just MF gear. You don’t need to inspect their gear to know they are dragging down the group and potentially making things impossible to complete.

This is true of all fractal groups, btw. If you get a player with no fractal experience or no agony resistance in your level 30 group, you’ll know. Ask them to leave, and if they don’t, kick them. Easy enough problem to solve.

The baby reference will be lost on most of the people here.
As far as fractals are concerned, I think it’s a case of people assuming that higher level = better loot, as in level 9 dude goes into level 40 fractal they will be rewarded by level 40 loot (including rings etc.).

Essentially it’s a misconception that higher = better without knowing what the requirements for higher levels are.

I’ve tried Jormag and Penitent chain and when there is a large group of people + enemies the new culling system seems to cause a client crash (which wasn’t happening before).

Assuming that the monthly gives 10 laurels then no-one will have the amulet until the 16th of Feb, and that’s the earliest estimate assuming you got a laurel before the daily reset today (2 laurels today total).

Given that it hasn’t been addressed to your satisfaction by now, I’d say you have a choice of February or never.

Oh BTW the whole “it’s not fun” argument also gets applied to other classes as well, so it would be best to stop using it. Case in point as a GC thief it’s not fun fighting against bunker elementalist/guardian but you don’t see me complaining about it… because I’ve learned to accept that as part of my weaknesses. Nor is it fun to be close to stomping a mesmer in their downed state only to be dropped myself by their #3’s insane damage against GC characters.

Based on pure stat points, the rings seem to be a bigger upgrade than the amulet, which would attribute to its higher cost.

WvW is PvE, and t/sPvP is PvP.
That seems to be what ANet defines the realms of play as. If you, the player, don’t agree then that doesn’t affect the game, only your enjoyment of the game.

The achievements known as dailies and monthlies are optional extras, you are by no means required to do them (until they added laurels for ascended necklaces) which makes it a case of bad form to complain about certain facets of the monthly because you don’t like to participate in that area.

So far I’ve achieved the 10 combo finishers, but I’m not sure of the mechanics of ‘why’ I got the finishers.
So far, I know that the finisher must apply a condition to the enemy, which excludes many of the most useful finisher effects like AoE might etc.
I believe that you need to get the finishing shot with a damaging finisher, but the opening shot also seems valid (but couldn’t reliably test this).
Fire fields with ranged attacks or whirls seem to be the best option, poison will also work well but other fields don’t seem to be useful.
Leap finishers are mostly useless and blast finishers (bets for the team) are useless for this achievement.

The dreamer looks… even better than before. This just made the patch seem a little better.

Based on previous M.O. and developer/CSR work times, the patch will most likely go up during American off peak time, so either early in the morning (14 hours from the writing of this post) or late at night (30 hours from writing this post) but it’s very difficult to tell when the actual time of release will be.

Spent about 300 hours on my ranger doing map completion while leveling (completed after 80) so it’s not difficult, just time consuming.

Kasama.8941:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9grDRzNT_wg

Ranger didn’t do enough to counter the thief, and made many mistakes that could have won him the fight in the first 30s rather than taking 12 minutes.

The thing to notice about these videos isn’t only that the Thief is able to have stealth up for what seems to be next to permanently, but also how easily the Thief is able to escape once low on health. That shadow stepping makes the Thief able to easily escape AoE attacks and snares. That with Cloak and Dagger the Thief can keep stealth up without any lose to playstyle, thanks to the fast recharge of initiative. That “Revealed” is not a hinderance for the Thief at all, because the three seconds that the Thief can’t stealth, is the time that’s spend on attacking anyway. That the Thief don’t have to use their utilities for anything, other then gaining more stealth. And that on top of all of this, the Thief can also use skills like Dagger Storm to avoid damage, or Thieves Guild as pseudo clones for distraction.

Stealth is used about as often as in can be used in the videos, that is far from permanent.
Cloak and Dagger takes 6 initiative, in a burst build focused on C&D there isn’t any initiative regen, after that initial initiative is used the standard thief has 9 initiative left, this greatly hampers their damaging capabilities.
It’s not that thieves don’t have to use their utilities for anything other than stealth, it’s that stealth is our major defensive aspect and the utilities that don’t provide stealth are usually worse than the ones that do.
Dagger storm lasts for 8 seconds and reflects projectiles, it does nothing to melee damage, so you are flat out wrong there. Thieves guild doesn’t even count as pseudo clones, they are obvious and die easily.

This is how the majority of Thieves play: Stealth to get the upper hand and maximum damage on first attack, attack for three seconds until Revealed has passed, gain stealth again to regain positioning on your foe, attacking him again when he’s got his back turned, keep attacking him as he tries to run away with 20% health left, alternatively use shadow stepping or cripple to stop him from escaping, stealth again when he’s downed so he or an ally can’t stop you from stomping him, and then stealth/shadow step away, or start attacking the ally who was trying to help the foe you just stomped. If three or more players finally do manage to get you down to low health; use shadow stepping/Dagger Storm/Thieves Guild to get away, go back into stealth to make your foes lose track of you, hide until your health is restored, proceed to attacking again.

Yeah, that’s pretty accurate… there also doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with that. It’s pretty much what ANet wants thieves to do so I don’t understand why you are complaining, if you know what’s coming (most of the time) you should have a pretty good idea of a counter.

Am I the only one who can see the contradictory between how ArenaNet wants the Thief to play, and how it is actually played? I’m not sure how anyone (other then a Thief maybe) can justify stealth, for the Thief, as being balanced. I mean, how are you suppose to fight a profession that you can’t see for 80% of a fight, and who can easily escape you during the 20% window where you actually do see him? How is this fun to play against?

No, but you are one of the few who thinks it’s a contradiction. At best you couldn’t “see” the thief for ~65% of a fight if they were specced for as much stealth as possible, they would also do very little damage. Additionally, just because you can’t see the thief doesn’t mean you can’t hit the thief, seriously, AOE and randomly swinging your weapons around downs more thieves than you can possibly imagine.

Oh, the whole “How is this fun to play against?” argument is a fallacy to begin with, firstly it assumes that things should be fun to play against and secondly it doesn’t JUST apply to thieves. I find fighting against bunker elementalists and guardians lacks the whole “fun” aspect, but I don’t complain about it because I’m fully aware that my build leaves me with a 5% chance of winning and I’ve accepted that… so why haven’t you?

Generalizations aside, pistol whip is slightly more damaging and slightly more useful than #1 chain if you are in full berserker gear, the problem is the whole “slightly” bit.
Not to mention that is has a hidden 0.5+s cast time that isn’t reflected in its tooltip.

I’m close to getting my first legendary, I’ll probably play the game long enough to get a second one, but it’d be easier to just farm 2.2k gold that get some of the rarer mats (like Charged Loadstones etc.)

Based on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD7AMGOfcwc ensoriki seems to be right, Throw Gunk does periodic AoE damage which would disrupt stealth.

Phenn is right, when you use throw gunk it tends to put a “random” condition on your foe, 4 of those conditions (poison, burning, bleeding and confusion) deal damage which knocks you out of stealth, I’m not sure about the other conditions though.
So it basically counts as a damaging attack when the condition is applied, not to mention that the gunk itself does damage when it lands.