Guild Wars 2

Esports and GW2, really phanta, that boat sunk 6 months ago.

I am sorry but do you expect to enter paid tourneys just as easy as free ones, play with best teams ingame, withouth any effort ? If you always lose 1st-2nd round in paids its time to think maybe change your team, yourself and tactics or go do free’s.

Its only logical highter quality things are less available.

Apparently, things included in the higher quality things being rare is also the times paid queue pops per day

Good thieves try to make sure their attacks hit. Don’t act as if you’d dodge every single attack in the game with the help of your SB#3 and your infinit ini pool and stealth options. Your immobilize theory is easily countered by condition removal, stealth, blink, weapon dodges or just tanking it for the duration. You are pretty much wasting your defensive options for offensive purposes. You even suggest using steal against thieves – wow I’d only do that if I had no other option left for obvious reasons – oh wait you burn your stealth utility for immobilizes to land your cluster bombs, go steal thieves.
Oh I never said I wanted to compare played games or whatever. I brought this number in to give you a rogh picture of my own experience with the class since you assumed right away that I’m not familiar with the SB condition concept. In fact I’m not interested in any of those comparisons at all since they prove absolutely nothing. The fact that you misinterpretaed that statement but jumped right into that comparison just suits the way you bring forward your somewhat inconsistent and unsteady arguments.

I was not in the first place even conversing so much to you, but to like everyone. I could go through many points in what you wrote but i’ll just say that vs bs thief for example, the typical build has 2 condi removals, heal and sstep. After those are gone he is dead from any bleeds landing. Those are 2 of his 3 stealths, incidently which I have the same in the build, on top of stealth without CnD and my stealths last 1 second longer. Everytime they stealth, I stealth, theirs runs out faster. Result is largely preditable. He either has to dodge everytime his stealth wears off, so he runs out and I can land naked cluster bombs after that.

also evading attacks with so obvious animations such as deathblossom, heartseeker, pretty much anything a warrior does ever etc is not hard, especially when you have 5 from your bow and 3 from your endurance to blow in a row.

Chaining stealths to chain immobilize works exceedingly well with teammates to take down bunkers because immobilizes wreck bunkers. If you don’t see the advantage in 3 2s immobilizes in a row on a bunker while a burst team mate is on him, then well…

Anyway, we can keep arguing, but it doesn’t change a thing about how I’m gonna play, and I assume situation is same for you.

He can’t dodge the cluster bomb while immobilized and surprise shot is a 2s immobilize.

Here’s for a regular opener, pre cast caltrops, steal into them, surprise shot, choking gas, cluster bomb. They either break immob and move away or teleport away or eat damage. Your heal stealths you. Refuge stealths you, steal from other thieves / some NPCs (blinding tuft) stealths you. Hitting 25% life stealths you. Plenty of ways to get surprise shots in to immobilize and then you can land cluster bombs. It is actually very reliable.

And I said earlier, if you trait into steal stealth, it works basicly as a stun breaker. It ports you away, it removes a condi, it makes you stealthed.

The d/d thief can try CnD, but you can just disabling shot that, he runs out of ini sooner than you. Yea he probably has a bow in 2nd set as well, but if he opens the fight with d/d out, he is gonna waste his ini without landing a blossom, then swap to bow and…autoattack for 300?

Duels are important for that build, you aren’t gonna hold a point since you rely on stealth, but you can pretty handily neutralize points, since your area denial is effective and normal node sized. Team fight presence is pretty good as well, since you aoe bleed everything on a node.

If you wanna compare games played that’s fine, I’ve about 1.1k games played as thief, 80%+ of that as condi.

As a sidenote, yes uncatchable isn’t all that good, best use is to dodge on top of someone you immobilized, or dodge on them while you are stealthed and shooting choking gas around, get some bleeds up while they can’t retaliate.

I’m having a dull day, otherwise I wouldn’t be on these forums, and your posts humored me for few minutes with all the self contradiction you have tendency to do.

BTW Anet, nerf shortbow, it deserves it. Was expecting them already in last patch.

What the? He has 2 topics on front page, this and the one about treb which is totally legit issue. There’s another thread on page 2 about load screen bug, which is also a totally legit issue.

So now you aren’t doing it in paids? Well, I actively seek 1v2-3-4s on my thief in hotjoins too, I don’t pretend to be supermegagosu for it though.

You mean you once killed 3 people in a free tournament? Well I guess I still want that autograph! You can have mine and we’re like pub stomp buddy buddies.

Coz you know, I thought we were talking about 1v3ing people who know what they are doing, not stomping new players in hot joins. But I guess I’m too noob to meet you in the shark point where you evaded for 30seconds while sharks killed 3 people, right?

Queus are a bit better on EU side, but not all that much better.

The whole situation is very sad though

So you ended manhandling the top teams 1v3 in 16 days? Wow, I must like have your autograph at the next IEM or IPL.

[why can’t I edit posts, this forum..]
Not to mention Seragi, you said yourself on forums here you weren’t even playing in paids and didn’t have a team 16 days ago..

I would love to prove you wrong, but I’m not about to post my skills/spec all over the internet for every nub to see so it can be hot patched in 2 days sry 8(

hopefully we will meet in a paid and I would be happy to destroy your team solo

Sounds a lot like useless noise in the internets. Curious if you so wreck the paid teams on point alone that no other team seems to replicate your play and has anyone caught any sight of this happening on any paid team’s stream?

I know stealth is not a stunbreaker, but say a situation, mesmer pops his clones, magic bullets and gets ready to shatter you, steal into one of his ranged clones, which stealths you, removes a condi (likely the immobilize he just leaped on you)and break target. Close enough for a stunbreak for me, his combo is ruined, I’m out, in stealth, ready to immobilize and bleed him.

And yea, the bleed is shorter duration from clusters, but you can actually land them. If you haven’t tried the bow build out, then you don’t know how hard it can roll on blossom thieves, they will never ever land a blossom in 1v1, instead they are rooted and eat bombs. He can blossom you 3-4 times, you can evade 6-8 times a row. Then he is at range, crippled.

Dunno, it’s just something you have to try out youself to see. I’ve seen maybe 2 other thieves play it out with bow, so it’s not something you run into everyday and can make easy comparisons, my best advice is to try it out. 0/0/30/20/20, take things that buff stealth, ini regain, steal. Dodgetrops naturally. And unlike unicorn build, you don’t rely on weapon swapping at all. You can play 100% bow if you want. I use d/p in 2nd for some utility for stomps (blinds) and daze from headshot for things like guardian books.

Fighting an ele bunker with ether renewal with any condi build is pointless though, you need back up for that from a burst class.

But first in order for us to have an Esport we’d need enough of a playerbase to form that around, which Anet is actively been destroying since betas sad but true.

Im not sure about you but I can 2v1 even 3v1 people at a point on my thief without going stealth a single time…. so yeah if you know how to play the class thief can be one of the best node defenders

Do show me video footage of you doing this versus people who know what they are doing. oh wait, yea, you can’t.

and pedrst, we don’t call that point defender, that’s a roamer.

It also feels kittening bad when your premade that’s in the rank 35-45s comes up vs a full pug of rank 10s in frees. Like, the other team has no chance at all.

Then you try paids, if it pops and get stomped in 1st map by some of the few real name teams out there who are naturally in queue, because if they ever want to get a paid done, they’ll be there when they pop. There’s just this massive gaping hole, enormous skill/coordination difference between teams that play the paids and teams that try every now and then and head back to frees and then the pug teams.

I guess biggest reason for all this is that the population for pvp is just so small and that’s down to Anet and their design decisions and actions.

Thief a good point defender, now I’ve heard it all. Probably the backstab build as well, can tank so well. LOL.

And before anyone brings stealth into “defending point”, being stealthed means you are losing cap time on the point.

Your explanation of the build is exactly why it boggles my mind why thieves even run deathblossom condi build, when if you run a stealthy shortbow based condi build, you avoid nearly every single weakpoint the d/d build has. You can’t kite the shortbow, it has the best mobility in the game, the 3x bleed attack costs 2 less initiative, is ranged, can be used to mortar shots from LoS, has a poison field, 1 less ini cost cheaper evade that’s also a cripple and not to mention infiltrator arrow at use all times, for teleport or blind AND 1st shot from stealth is an immobilize that will nearly guarantee landing a cluster bomb or 2, not to mention how much immobilize that you can almost spam due to a stealthy build will wreck bunkers. Immobilized on top of the caltrops and a poison field anyone?

Trait into stealth removing condis per 3s (1 insta removed upon stealthing), stealth on steal so it works basicly as a stunbreaker/condi remover. Equip shortbow. Profit.

You are wrong… utility caltrops stacks alone 10+bleed +dodge caltrops

Go into mists, drop caltrops under a golem and watch, it was so hard thing to test amirite?…with 3×3x affliction/krait 15%15% bleed duration runes, I get to 8 active stacks max.

[disclaimer: I have 1061 games on thief, 80% of them as condition bow with caltrops, very similar to d/d blossom]

Sigh, yet more mindless drones exaggerating every number they can think of.

Caltrops, the utility, can only stack to 6-8 stacks of active bleeds (depending on your +bleed duration choices on runes/sigils). It is impossible within the game mechanics to get 20 stacks of bleeding just from caltrops (utility), since it applies 2 stacks of bleeds every 1 second that last for 3 seconds. The utility’s area is as large as normal sized cap points.

Dodgetrops apply 1 bleed per 1 seconds, max 3-4 stacks of active bleeding. The area is also smaller than the utility, so no, you won’t cover a whole cap point by just dodging in the middle.

If you drop caltrops (uti) and dodge twice on top of that and someone kindly sits in it for 5 seconds, you’ll max out on 16 stacks of active bleeds. 18 if you dodge 3 times on that spot. So that’s a good 4-5 seconds total ‘casting time’ and the target needs to stand in a half-cap-point area for 5 seconds. Mmmhh, totally broken I agree.

As for the build itself, deathblossom is so inferior to shortbow variant. D/D is better for killing neutral bosses. Shortbow in itself is extremely OP weapon though, since it has too much of everything. It works for power, it works for condi, it has aoe poison (one of the best condies), it has a spammable evade and it has a teleport shot that can be used as aoe blind.

Matchmaking is direly needed. Facing off a team of 5 all under rank 8 on Kyhlo just feels bad. I mean, the match never even gets to a point where player skill is involved, they lose simply because they don’t know enough about the game yet.

Even if it’s as crude as a team’s average rank gets paired with similar team ranks would help.

And fix the kitten load screen bugs and lags.

how the kitten you manage to reintroduce this bug every kittening bigger patch is beyond me.

Five slots and eight classes makes this impossible at all times.

delete one of the lvl 1 or 2 characters?

or if you leveled all 5 slots up, buy more slots? should have gold if you have 5 pve toons. Buy gems buy slots.

Makes me lol when people in this thread think that the stealth from Shadow Refuge breaks from going outside of it. You guys do know it was fixed to not do that, right?

Makes me lol when you don’t even bother to log on a lvl 1 thief to test that if you leave shadow refuge before it fades (4seconds), your stealth breaks as soon as you leave the refuge area. You need to stay in full 4 ticks before you can leave if you want to keep your stealth.

Really, it’s hard to make a lvl 1 thief and go to mists to test this stuff out guys, really hard!

Some of you new generation gamers need to google up your acronyms. PvP is Player vs P…..(not Pillar à la WoW. Just kidding!)

Evoneva Drakon.1754:

Leeach.3547:

Finally, Tornado will be your ace skill. A useful tip for becoming a pro with this skill is to leave the transformation as soon as you accidentally activate the skill. This way you actually won’t die, and the skill will safely be on cooldown, effectively preventing you from accidentally activating it again for 3 minutes or so.

Lol. I must say i have fun in tornado form. Shame it only last 3-4 Sec before people root and kill me.

Sorry you must be mistaken, Tornado has stability so you can’t be rooted.

You must be thinking of Magnetic grasp the skill that puts you into melee range and then self stuns for 3 seconds

;)

And this is why immobilize is the strongest condi in the game, because you infact can immobilize a stabilized target.

Aoe blind on dodge is useful to an extent, but it’s not like you’re gonna be like “OH I’M GONNA DODGE BLIND THAT DUDE” because dodging takes so much time you probably gonna miss your target with it. It’s not nearly as useful as some signet activates or scepter 3. As I said, it just happens on the side.

LoL wasn’t marketed as would be e-sport though. They had very humble expectations for the game, 10k users for them was like a first aim.

Then the game exploded.

I know exactly how it worked and from what he typed it seems he doesn’t know how it functioned.

And no it’s not a strong trait without the blasts, or when was the last time you checked what dodge procs in fire and earth do damage wise. Water’s cleansing wave is still useful, the blind one isn’t really usable as counter, it just happens. So a grandmaster trait that doesn’t work underwater for one cleansing wave proc.

khadorian.6417:

Daays.4317:

The whole mesmer fix was entirely needed. They were the ONLY class in the game that didn’t play by the rules.
Every other class needed LOS. Not mesmers.
Every other class could be blinded. Not mesmers.
Every other class could be blocked. Not mesmers.
It was a complete fire and forget class. Now the mesmer has to actually pay attention. Any well-timed dodges/blocks will shut down a shatter mesmer. It’s going to be much more difficult to get off a shatter combo outside of spamming dodge for illusions.

.

you serious? ever seen a elementalist miss his “fire storm” because of line of sight or because he was blinded?

Ever seen a mesmer miss his portal because he was blinded?? Ground targeted aoes are ground targeted.

thejoshknight.4697:

Ember.4326:

Arheundel.6451:

Ember.4326:

The patch was actually pretty good. The philosophy behind the nerfing is slow nerfs so that they don’t overdo it. It actually works really well

Lol, well if that was the aim, they missed it with the ele changes. Instead of slightly nerfing staff builds, they removed them from tpvp. Didn’t seem to happen to backstab.

Ele have not been removed from tPvP..pls stop with crap, like every ele in this game has always used a staff and exploit a bug while in water attunement…give me a break

I’m sure it was difficult to read the whole 2 lines of text and miss the point where I said staff builds, not all eles. I’m perfectly aware several d/d and s/d builds function, but show me one viable staff build left.

Also don’t get what you mean with abusing a bug while in water element? Evasive Arcana had nothing to do with being in water element, blast finishers fired off every dodge, you didn’t need to be in water to detonate water fields. Sigh, another counter complainer who doesn’t even have a clue about things.

Although I’ve played a staff ele, and the evasive arcana change saddens me, you had to assume it was coming. Nowhere in the trait evasive arcana does it state that the dodge roll should cause a blast finisher, as a matter of fact, the only attunement that would make sense to have a blast finisher is earth, seeing as it uses churning earth, while all the other skills fired off in all attunements aren’t blast finishers. A bug fix is independent of a buff or nerf due to the fact that even if the bug was helping a build (and the blast finishers helped a lot, gave you most of your blast finishers in staff) a bug is a bug.

This however does not change that the end result is staff lost the only viable build in tpvp, bug fix or not. Can you name me a reason to bring a staff ele to a team now? You can’t point defend long enough vs anything without the heals, you can’t really roam as you don’t have dmg (burst nor condi) and only swiftness as mobility. You can “support” aka drop a water field down for your thief to blast. Or go S/D and deal dmg and be more mobile.

If it takes a year there’s no one left to play the e-sport.

Arheundel.6451:

Ember.4326:

The patch was actually pretty good. The philosophy behind the nerfing is slow nerfs so that they don’t overdo it. It actually works really well

Lol, well if that was the aim, they missed it with the ele changes. Instead of slightly nerfing staff builds, they removed them from tpvp. Didn’t seem to happen to backstab.

Ele have not been removed from tPvP..pls stop with crap, like every ele in this game has always used a staff and exploit a bug while in water attunement…give me a break

I’m sure it was difficult to read the whole 2 lines of text and miss the point where I said staff builds, not all eles. I’m perfectly aware several d/d and s/d builds function, but show me one viable staff build left.

Also don’t get what you mean with abusing a bug while in water element? Evasive Arcana had nothing to do with being in water element, blast finishers fired off every dodge, you didn’t need to be in water to detonate water fields. Sigh, another counter complainer who doesn’t even have a clue about things.

The patch was actually pretty good. The philosophy behind the nerfing is slow nerfs so that they don’t overdo it. It actually works really well

Lol, well if that was the aim, they missed it with the ele changes. Instead of slightly nerfing staff builds, they removed them from tpvp. Didn’t seem to happen to backstab.

Berserker amu/gem, strength runes

Has 0 sustain in a team fight, dmg output would be great if you were alive to do it.

Any thief that’s even half aware of their surroundings will never get hit by your opener. Simple shortbow 3 at the end of your RtL means you wasted 2 cooldowns, disengaged from melee range and are now crippled.

Never seen anyone make berserker amu/gem work in tournaments. If someone has video footage of it working vs decent people, do please post. I just never seen it happen.

This is true, we suffered same issues, both sides.

Arc, as much I agree that staff ele needed nerfing and that this was too much, just who the kittening hell are you to tell what sort of builds have a place in the game?

You guys don’t seem to realise that there’s a good chance all the glass cannon builds will eventually be tweaked downwards. That the Ele glass got nerfed first is irrelevant and shortsighted. They have no place in the game. Period.

See, that would make as much sense as your version. Builds have place in the game, you can nerf them to make them less efficient, but these changes downright kill the build.

Healing ripple halved, evasive arcane nerfed to oblivion, gutted the 2monk2water2earth rune combo, yeap, staff ele got hit hard.

This doesn’t fix the issue that the barrier of entry to paids is still too high, so there’s little point to them unless you have a really solid team.

We have other games with 10 million subs , that all the time say << we would love to add this , in the future>> :P

Games with a huge, active playerbase can afford to do that, although the players may not like it there either.

What really sucks for me personally is how there’s no tiering or ladder or anything put in the game. Hop on to free tournaments, chances are you’re gonna meet a team full of people under rank 10 who will get stomped hard when my team is nearing rank 40. Rank doesn’t mean much, but it does mean that the guys with 4 times more rank have gone through more burden of knowledge about the classes and builds than the other guys. Meaning they’ll likely smash them to the ground. Maybe those guys will go “well kitten this, not really fair, I’m out”. And we lose yet more people…

GW2 pvp cannot wait for a year or 2 to get good, it’s dead by then. Or well, MMOs don’t really ever die, they dwindle down to near nothingness and only a few really die hard fans of the game stay and how fun will the pvp be when you can get a match up at only certain time of the day, because there’s not population to support ongoing games.

Anet, -1 to my internal counter of “will I buy an expansion?”. This is dumb, release patch notes at least.

Anet is it this hard to just post the patch notes?

Or use your twitter for something useful and tell when stuff is actually coming out, instead of leaving us guessing.

Sigh, people who don’t have the slightest clue or haven’t even bothered to go through the intro and try backstab out call out numbers like 19k bs, jesus be with us. Highest I ever managed to land was 14.4k backstab and ironically, that was against another thief >_> Got some 700-800 games on my thief.

Also show me one class without a stun breaker ability. Oh it was on cooldown? well boohoo, kinda happens to thieves too when the only stun breaker they run (shadowstep) is on cooldown and a warrior/mesmer/glass ele catches you with one CC, you blow up.

I can survive bs thieves on my ele just fine, unless they catch me with all cds down. Then I die, and that is absolutely fine. But if I have time to get protection up between the steal CnD → bs, there won’t be a problem with that thief anymore.

Oh well, maybe they nerf that. Time to bust out more bow condi builds, god people cry in whisper like mad when they can’t get their head around how that build functions.

Moa Morph: Summons a friendly unstable Moa Spirit. The spirit will slowly chase down your target increasing in speed each time one of your illusions is destroyed. If the spirit makes contact with a foe they will turn into a Moa Bird for 5 minutes. If the spirit does not make contact with a foe after 10 seconds it will become hostile and instantly return to you. The effects of Moa Morph persist through death.

Haha that’s the most kitten kitten I’ve read in a while, thanks for the chuckle. I mean, being CCed for 5 MINUTES that persists through death is completely balanced ability in a competetive setting right? 5 minutes of 4v5, it’s like hockey. Hey, can we get red cards from football in too? One guy gets driven out of the match and your team has to play the next map 4v5 too, absolutely balanced.

I consider myself having good reflexes. Took about 19k hp in 1.5 sec.

You had 1.5 sec to press one button to negate half of that burst or all of it if you saw the thief coming and you call that good reaction time?

Time to read what your Illusionary Persona combined with Distortion does and rethink your move in that situation.

Or in my case , i take an utility that reduce damage taken to 0 damage for xxx secs
Counter an utility spell with an utility spell = meta game

Sigil of Rage. Have fun spotting the random proc, followed by utility quickness if you managed to survive the proc.

On swap sigils work on the next attunement swap once their internal CD (i believe most 20s?) is up. Which basicly should mean you get it everytime the cd is up, but pinpointing accurate time when you want said sigil buff is hard.

http://gw2.luna-atra.fr/skills_tool/?lang=en&code=3210206vlglk2b2g0000auu0t1demeneq1gf0

Pretty generic staff support build, Dwayna runes, Bloodlust Sigil, Cleric amu/gem. Tons of survivability, tons of group support. Swap out elite for elemental if you wish, though Tornado with protection and regeneration up is good way to clear a contested node for neutralize/cap.

Because when it’s not 1v1 I have other teammates who can(should) help me. I know that doesn’t always happen in pug matches, but I also tend to be moving too much for a thief to be able to sneak up on me

Okay, you do know that let’s say you are fighting in a 2v2 in Windmill, you use your mistform, 2 dodges and suddenly the Thief who was standing at the Clocktower edge haste spams you down, because he just used Shadowstep and Infiltrator arrow to cross over to you in the time it takes you to swap elements? You can step down from the edge to the ramp towards the nodes with sstep and 1 arrow is already close enough to the point to butterfly-woomph-woomph on your back. And I didn’t even count Steal in yet.

Happy fun times! Please tell me in your regular play, you see that coming when you are already engaged in a fight. I beg you.

Note, meteor shower absolutely wrecks destroyable objects, like catapults, risen mouths, trebs in pvp and so on.

Depends on what “level” of people you are fighting. I think there’s some modicum of matchmaking in the hotjoin spvp that ranks get paired with somewhat similar ranks. Total newcomers are still figuring out which weapons they can use, people ranked 20-30 at this point of the game actually know how to dodge..

Earthquake effect ends well before Churning Earth finishes cast, at which point everyone will simply dodge in place and avoid Churning Earth completely.