Guild Wars 2

@Galmac: What you describe happened before the change to the outnumbered buff, because it was assigned dynamicly according to the real life population balance on your current WvW map. It can no longer disappear before the tick and reappear after.

The outnumbered buff is now applied directly after the tick if the condition of being outnumbered on that map is met and stays until right after the next tick. If you are still outnumbered, it stays until right after the next tick, if not it disappears. You get one guaranteed outnumbered tick this way. You do not get the bonus pips on the same tick the buff first appeared, which may seem like it gets ignored as you describe. It is working as intended.

@Offair: This is possible because you can join a map that is / was outnumbered between ticks. To get the outnumbered buff, you have to be on the map when the tick is being awarded and your side is still outnumbered to get the buff.

Shadowtrap is useless because it gets stuck on almost every single pebble on the way. To have it be a usefull skill, it needs to be much more reliable: change the shadowstep mechanic to the portal one. You have to place the trap beforehand, so you cannot reach unintended places with it in the first place. Currently it just happens far too often that i use the trap and either want to port back to it or to whoever triggered it, only to find myself moving a centimeter because of pathing, even on flat areas.

The other two do have their uses though, but i dont think they will see more use just because of the Deadeye. Other utilities are far too valuable and with the amount of random cleanses and stunbreaks being thrown around, you more or less hinder yourself.

My preliminary feedback is as follows:

- Projectiles are way too slow and should be as fast or faster than Ranger Longbow arrows. At 1200+ range, projectiles can be sidestepped.
- Please make Deadeye’s Mark cast faster, 1/4 or 1/8 second. Currently, this feels clunky to use and doesnt provide the synergy for Sleight of Hand’s daze or Bountiful Theft, as we cannot use it to daze or boonsteal at the right moment.
- Death’s Retreat is a nice skill, however as a shadowstep it suffers from any terrain differencies. This would be very nice if it was a backwards roll.

Same problem here. Redirect loop on Firefox, most recent version. Edge / IE 11 report issues with the certificate.

It isn’t. As a german user, the ingame shop throws an error, too. Right before checkout, doesn’t even forward to Paypal. All my browsers throw safety certificate issues, thelling me the site is not safe and someone may want to steal data.

Seeing that the Backpiece will consume 14 weeks worth of tickets (heck, even T1 is already 2 weeks of FULL rewards), this rank requirement is indeed the lesser problem as long as you need to invest unholy amounts of time into WvW to even reach the ticket cap as a low rank player. If you just started playing WvW, all you get is the skirmish placement tick reward of up to 3 pips. Thats solid 33h of WvW per Week needed, provided your server leads the match 100% of the time.

Regarding the interaction of quickness with Vault: it is kind of funny yet sad that ArenaNet simply didn’t see this coming. I mean – they developed this game. They disabled the interaction of movement skills with Slow and Quickness for this exact reason, yet they reenable such interaction without changing the way they interact? Cruel joke.

Regarding the new Vault: The skill casts exact the same time as before. The animation takes the exact same time as before. The damage is done at the exact same time as before. The only thing that changed is that Vault now moves you with a steady speed to your target destination rather than snapping fast to it and staying still for the rest of the skill. The only thing different regarding Vaults function is that it cannot be weaponswap-cancelled anymore.

The new algorithm calculating the trajectory is awesome and please do not change it again. It is perfect.

To fix the issue with quickness: A movement skill needs to be sped up in animation AND execution. if the animation finishes half way through the execution, the movement part gets cut short and thus the movement needs to be sped up as well.

Complaining about cleansing one (1!) Condition upon successful evade with 1s icd in a game where multiple conditions get steadily reapplied in many small increments by, say, condition chronomancers, engineers, druids? I dont see where this is overpowered considering that most conditioners are and always have been a tough matchup for a thief.

The three condition removal ob SoA is more than rectified as long as condition builds like condi chrono and yes even ghost thief exist.

Straegen.2938:

Condi Chrono can be beat. Ghost Thief is nigh unkillable in the right hands even with a successful stealth trap.

BTW, the strongest thief build right now is a Power build at least outside of sPvP.

Last time i checked a condi chrono was nigh unkillable as well because you simply cannot escape the mass amount of conditions being thrown at you, not to mention the insane sustain that build provides. The problem is that you need to burst it down while being lucky on all evades, which you can’t if the condi chrono is not afk.

Also, how can a power build be the strongest when everyone seems to have problems with a condi thief variant? You certainly have an extreme uphill battle if you try to engage DHs, Condichronos, most engineer builds and Druids as power thief. Everything conditional melts you if you miss a single evadeframe or blind if you play D/P. The problem is the constant reapplying of conditions. A ghost thief only has traps and Caltrops – other than that he has nothing to use while staying in stealth.

Anyways – since this is a matter of perspective i am sure there won’t be any kind of agreement besides that condition builds once again got buffed while being far stronger than most power counterparts. I want to be able to fight stuff on equal footing and not win by outclassing or lose by being outclassed simply because of imbalances.

I don’t quite understand why most people only ever mention the ghost thief build as unhealthy, overpowered, cancerous when the same applies to condition chronomancers. Those are far more disgusting. Speaking of the matter though – while i do not play ghost thief as i do enjoy S/D, it seems that power based thief builds get pushed back patch after patch in comparison to most other classes, thus creating almost something like a need to play some cheap OP condi cancer in order to stay competitive. Especially in smallscale a thief is more and more forced to run and reset – and when you do look at the PvP-only changes, ArenaNet clearly seems to think that thieves have no right to successfully 1v1 anything other than a thief without greatly outskilling their opponent.

Yes, the permanent stealth of the ghost thief is annoying, as is the constant restealthing of D/P or constant evading of S/D. But face it, if you take that from thieves, they’re useless. ArenaNet enforces this basicly, you cannot fight toe to toe with thief vs x class.

The character in question is me.
And thats by no means black magic, cheating or whatever you may call it.

I am here to explain the matter:
What you see there is me standing on one of ArenaNets famous invisible walls. It is exactly as high as the platform next to it. To replicate me standing there, you have to own the tower. Enter the tower and stand on the octagonal platform right before the bridge which leads to the tower lord. Make sure to stand in the middle, facing north. Turn right until you face the first corner you come across. It is the first corner to the right of the flag. If you run a straight line from the center to the corner and cross it, you will not fall down. Instead you will walk right on top of that invisible wall which ArenaNet placed there to prevent people from entering the tower by climbing the lower wall.

I am not a cheater, nor is my guild supporting such behaviour. if standing on things that arent visibly there is prohibited, i am really sorry. Curious by nature i climb on stuff, and when this tower was ours i came across this, well, “phenomenon”. It cannot be abused since there is no advantage gained. You are open to fire at from all angles since that barrier doesnt block attacks.

See screenshots for further proof. And to the ArenaNet-CS-Team: please do not ban me for being a goat trapped inside an Asura. Rather please inform your map design team to slope that invisible barrier so one cannot stand atop of it.

No, bliss.4305, just no. if you could chain it with Steal or other shadowstepping abilities, it would mean that it is not a jump, but rather a “move quickly into x direction”, just like heartseeker. Thieves lack a real jump and therefore it should stay a real jump. Staff has Weakening Charge as high damage skill already (albeit hard to land all strikes), thus i´d like to see Vault lose some Damage in exchange for a range increase to 800. The way it is now its at least finally useful in combat as it is has an evade part now. See kittens flying towards you, Vault out of there. And you cant be interrupted at the start. Or Vault into fights… good possibilities there.

Arctarius.2649:

please no…as a long time thief player, I don’t think we should have to worry about where we need to project ourselves in the split second reaction time we are given during a fight. We already have way more to manage than any other class as it is…I would much prefer it to be like heart seeker.

But keeping it targetted is much MUCH clunkier in combat situations. If you want to whirl somewhere esle than your current tagrte, you either have to retarget something else, which costs more time than just clicking the dircetion, or you have to detarget and manually turn your camera the way you want to whirl, again costing more time.

With a directional targetting system like Warrior’s GS #2 you can much better react in a split second than otherwise. Just point where to go and press 2 (if quickAoE is enabled) or press 2 and click the direction, simple as that. This would be so much better.

Regarding Vault
Please keep the initiative cost at 6 and either further decrease the cast time to 1/2 seconds like all other untargetted leaping / jumping skills in the game (reasoning given in this post by me: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Daredevil-Feedback/5458448 ) or increase the distance to 800 in order to increase distance being truely airborn, just like Jump Shot behaves. While Jump Shot does have a 1 second casttime as well, it’s time spent moving is just about 1/2 seconds, thus allowing the skill to reach the target before landing on the ground. Else this skill will have multiple issues with “pathing” because of not being in the air while looking so, resulting in unusability when trying to cross gaps or uneven terrain. I´m not asking to increase the vertical height, but since all leaps of this kind are associated with a jump, all of them should reach their taget destination within the timeframe they’re airborn.
Evade is not needed in my book if the skill was executed in 1/2 second, and also not on the proposed 800 range version, all i want is that the skill is as usable as Engineer’s Jump Shot. Damage can be tweaked (read: reduced slightly) of course in this case, but the increase in usability would be more than worth it in my opinion. Daredevil should be mobile, and this would increase the mobility.

This is headed towards my prior concerns regarding Staff #5 Vault as seen in my previous post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Daredevil-Feedback/5457503

I deep dived into the actual physics of this skill, Engineer Rifle #5 Jump Shot and Warrior Hammer F1 Eartshaker for comparison. All three share the same baseline physical behavior. You activate them, you literally jump, and you land doing whatever attack. You can reproduce these by going into ego perspective and disabling camera shake. You´ll see that you are actually being lifted in the air for the same time and height as a normal jump.

Now what does it mean for Staff #5 Vault? Well, take a look at Jump Shot and Earthshaker first. Both are executed in about the same time. This time approximately matches the time you are airborn when jumping. Actually they suffer the problem of their animations being a bit longer than this time, which is why both Jump Shot and Earthshaker fail to reach their target destination at maximum range or when elevation is different. However, since that difference is so small, it doesnt cause that much of a problem. But now look at Vault. Vault is executed in about 1.5x of the time you are airborn during a normal jump. This difference in time is huge, causing two problems:

1. You cannot reach your intended target destination on maximum range if its on the same level as you, or if its slightly higher elevated within 400-600 units distance. Since you are only truly airborn during the first 2/3 of the skill, you are actually falling in the last 1/3, causing the “pathing” problems i spoke about in my previous post. Besides one all solutions for this are technically impossible because they’d be breaking the physics of GW2. To stay within these limitations you have to speed up the animation to match the time of an actual jump. All leaping skills work this way. If Vault should lift you in the air at starting point and land on the target point you’d literally have to hack GW2’s physics to low gravity porperties on this skill.

2. This second problem is actually not caused by the time difference i mentioned but rather by the fact that all leap skill currently ingame, be it targetted like Jump Shot, Earthshaker and Vault or untargetted like Savage Leap, Leap of Faith or Swoop, actually lift you in the air. You can reproduce it on any class with access to shadowstepping abilities like Ele, Mesmer and Thief and a Lightning Hammer. Try to teleport during Lightning Leap – it won’t work. The same applies to Vault: Since you cannot use most abilities when airborn, you actually cannot properly combo Vault with Steal and the like. That may very well be intended though, so please just take this as a explanation and not a complaint. The only two suggestions (once again to keep GW2’s physical rules in working order) would be to allow the Daredevil to use Steal, Shadow Step, Signet of Infiltration and Shadow Trap while airborn, or to strap the actual leap from Vault while keeping it’s skill properties and facts. The former would open up a can of worms, thus invalidating the idea, and the latter would mean to have Vault working like Heartseeker, which just moves you over the ground and does not lift you into the air. I dont want that either because the Thief should have at least one true leap ability. You cannot teleport everywhere, you know…

TL;DR:
My proposal is, dear Karl McLain, please speed up the animation of Vault so it is executed in the same time like Jump Shot and Earthshaker. Only this way Vault can be useful on all ranges.

Of course. ANYTHING that happened on your beta character and / or in beta maps will not be carried over. Imagine all those precursors forged from the geta gear chests being carried over…

“Progress and rewards earned by beta characters or in beta maps will not be saved.”

“What happens in Beta, stays in Beta.”

TL;DR: Yep, you’re right. Nothing gets carried to your main account and it should stay this way. I´d love to keep those mastery points, too, but its better if ArenaNet stays consequent on this.

So, since this will be “the” Feedback-Thread, i´ll start with mine now. All in all i agree with most people on the Daredevil as a whole, but one thing didn’t get adressed now.

- – - – - – - – -
Staff #5: Vault
Lets be honest. The damage is fine, i like the overly spinny animation, and the duration for the damage it does right off the bat is okay. It is more damage than a backstab after all. But there is something i want to see adressed.

First, the animation lock. Normally you can use any instant skills during any animation, but during Vault, you can’t. If you want to steal-combo to make it land, you have to steal right at the beginning, or at the very end. Right at the beginning defies the use of it being a steal combo since it is easily visible, and right at the end tends to fail landing the damage on your target. Please change the animation lock in order to allow the use of Steal and other instant abilities. Signet of Infiltration, Shadow Stap and Shadow Trap’s Shadow Return (when the trap has been triggered) behave the same.

Second, the pathing. This shares a lot similarities with Shadow Trap – its just horrible. besides Mesmers and Necroes, all other classes have some shiny cool leaps. Ours is shiny too, no debate here. But it doesnt work properly if you want to cross gaps. Often you dont land where your target marker is, thus resulting in a shorter jump distance. The slightest – really, the slightest, thus its as broken as Shadow Trap – change of elevation will result in weird behaviour most of the time. Even Jump Shot on Engineer’s rifle isn’t as picky. It also doesn’t like changes of elevation, but it has way more leeway there. The results are that you either seem to glide over the ground without lifting off at all, or you simply land in front of your intended landing zone, but below it, since it was just a pixel higher than your lift off point. Please – and this is almost my biggest concern – please, Karl, please change the skill so it behaves like Engineer Jump Shot. Give it a range of 700, so we can use it safely up to 600 units (try it, Jump Shot doesn’t reach it’s maximum distance), but keep the animation speed. Make it less dependant on elevation. If needed, give it a higher flight arc while keeping the horizontal speed. Just not too high so we don’t constantly can leap over Line of Warding and stuff like that.

- – - – - – - – -
Utility skills: Distracting Daggers

This needs much faster flight time, like almost all things the thief throws or shoots :|
Please give them the same speed as Ranger Longbow Autoattack. THey can be sdiestepped at 500-600 range. This applies to Shortbow Trick Shot and Disabling Shot, Dancing Dagger and Impairing Daggers as well. Please give them ALL more speed!
Second, this should be working like a mantra. Please make it so the charges don’t decay over time, and since it is an instant skill with no cast time, please make it usable during casts.

- – - – - – - – -
Utility skills: Impairing Daggers

As said above. Is in desperate need of a speed buff, everything else about this is fine in my book.

- – - – - – - – -
Utility skills: Bandit’s Defense

This skill is absolutely a god sent. But it also can get you killed – you cannot interrupt the block animation after breaking stun using another skill. Please make it so using other skills override this one. At least all defensive and evasive skills. Those should have priority over any and ALL cast / aftercast durations, but oh well, i fear thats like asking to send me 100k gold.

- – - – - – - – -

Thats it for me for now. I have one last honorable mention though:

Utility skills: Shadow Trap

Please please please change this skill’s behavior/mechanic from “Shadowstep” to “Teleport”. Since i can only place it where i can naturally walk in, it won’t break the game to have it behave like a one man, one direction, single use Mesmer Portal, right? it would only fix this skill from not working properly because of a pebble on the road or pathing hiccups.

- – - – - – - – -

Thanks alot for reading this, and please keep up the good work. The Daredevil seems to have the potential to give the thief the value back it had 1 or 1 1/2 years ago. Being more than just the fastest decapper would be so graceful.

Thus, a big, fat Thank You, Karl.

Thanks for this in-depth analysis. So i puzzled numbers between heavy and light armor targets and was wrong on them as well, my bad.

Thats not so bad as it looks then. Maybe i was distracted from the multihit on the third chainskill, it makes the complete chain look like lower DPS than it is. Actually if it is on the same level or just lower than Dagger, its fine – with staff comes way more utility than just #1ing enemies down in a smoke field.

I guess we`ll see deep dives regarding testing on the second BWE. I know i will, just to try and contribute my part to make (or keep) the Daredevil what the Thief currently needs and deserves.

Well, according to the health points and the amount of critical hits we’ve seen its most likely the marauder amulet. The rune is not so easily to identify, but i´m certain its nothing which adds vitality. I´d wager Karl McLain was using marauder’s with Vampirism Runes. When i´m back home i can dive into the recording again and compare it to ingame numbers. kitten you, brain, why dont you remember the stuff i need to when i need to :P

Did we watch the same stream? The Autoattack chain was lower than dagger and sword iirc. The first two hits critted for 1.5k each, while the final 4-hit chainskill critted for 3.2k (4/4 crits). Numbers from the cluster of golems, which are Heavies. Since i´m at work right now i can’t check back on actual sword and dagger AA chain damage, but i am under the impression that those are higher, with dagger hitting 1.5k on the first double strike and 3.2k each on the second and third strike, while sword is sth like 3.2k, 3.2k and 4.5k. Or am i mixing up numbers vs Lights and Heavies now?

Vault critted for about the same amount a frontstab does. At a cost of 6 initiative and with an overly visible and long flying arc this isnt overtuned, and while you won’t see it coming from stealth, you have to enter stealth first, which on staff isn’t as easy as on x/P or x/D.

Staff #2 indeed seems like a deadly attack and seems to behave much like Warrior’s GS#3. If you manage to catch an enemy right at a wall, you can reliably get all hits of the whirl to connect, e.g in PvE. In pvP this may be less consistent to pull of.

Given the current state of the thief, a powerful traitline is more than needed. look at all the ridculous stuff other classes have or get. In comparison this is just about right and i hope ArenaNet has pulled the brakes on the Thief Nerf Train once and for all. Tweaks -will- be needed, because numbers and stuff, but no further nerfs.

maybe this is just a side effect from changes regarding the behaviour of the dodge mechanic. Because whatever broke dodge casting also broke the superjump (swing your sword, dodgejump + weapon swap right at the end of the animation) but it fixed a rather annoying game breaking bug – you can now properly dodge during Dagger Storm or stolen Whirling Axe on thief. The dodge problem came up when they “fixed” dodging during Whirling Axe about 1 year ago where you were able to dodge during the execution of the skill without interrupting it. The consequence was not being able to dodge during these skills without stowing weapons. Well, now that that is possible again… R.I.P superjump. The abuse potential was indeed a great one, but it was fun to use for going places never seen before.

The problems and bugs that come with immobilize on the other hand though… well, i hope they work on that one as well. Its incredible that immobilize can interrupt skills like Pistol Whip, force you to spam skills in order to get them activated (even instant stull like Withdraw doesnt activate when you need it), or disable you entirely if you happen to be immobilized mid air. The latter should only happen near ledges and stuff you need to jump over – if it happens on flat ground its a good punishment for excessive jumpspam.

Okay, on to some feedback for the feedback:

yolo swaggins.2570:

Utilities

[snip]

---

Name: Shadow Trap
Comment: While good, the main gripe is the loading screen that happens when shadowstepping at max distance.
Suggestion: By reducing the distance covered down to 2-3k, the loading screen will not appear and the trap maintains it’s escape function.

---

[snip]

You guys found a possible loading screen more annoying than the fact that the trap often if not most of the time ens up porting you into the next pebble on the road or not at all because of serious pathing issues? Thats disheartening because now i feel like i´m the only one having problems with this. In addition to your suggestions this skill should work like a teleport. Make it a personal, one-way one-time portal. At least it would work consistently this way. I lost count of how many times i endured the lengthy cast of the return only to find myself not moving a single inch or moving only a fracture of the distance.

Regarding Withdraw, RfI, FS, Disabling Shot: You didnt address the problem that skills like these need to take priority over any other currently ongoing skill or animation. When i am immobilized i need to break it asap ond shouldnt have to wait for a non existing animation to finish since immobilize stops them. When i see a heavy blow coming i want to use FS or Disabling Shot, but those simply won’t activate in time due to animation restrictions. RfI shares the same problems like Withdraw.
To prevent abuse, aftercast conditions should be altered in a way to only allow evasion / defense skills during their course. To even things out, the aftercast time remaining when using said skill should be added to the end of the used skill and then some as opportunity cost, for example .25 seconds. This way you cannot do more DPS by disrupting aftercasts, but you can properly evade on reaction.

Dancing Dagger, Scorpion Wire, Trick Shot, Disabling Shot, Clusterbomb: I wholeheartly agree with these, but cannot stress one thing enough: please, for the love of god, increase their projectile speeds. Dragonhunters got the same treatment for their bow skills:

Karl McLain.5604:

While the changes listed are the ones you’ll be seeing in the next beta weekend, we haven’t stopped making changes as we work to improve the Dragonhunter specialization. Here’s a few more changes we’ve been playing with for the longbow.

Puncture Shot: Arrow velocity is slow! We’re looking at increasing it so that it’s less strafe-able. What we’ve got it at is ~66% increase, putting it at around Hip Shot (engineer rifle) velocity. We’re also looking at the base and bounce functionality.

True Shot: To make this ability more rewarding for stopping you in place, we’re looking at further increasing the damage.

Deflecting Shot: We’re looking at increasing the damage values of this ability, so that it has a bit more impact to it.

Symbol of Energy: It’s really hard to place this in a position on allies/enemies without them being gone by the time the arrow gets there. Upping the missile velocity by ~60% and allowing it to be fired behind you.

Thanks for your constructive feedback, everyone. I’ve got to head out for now. We’ll be back with more stuff, like traits, soon.

-Karl

So please, Karl. Please do the same for thieves and make Trick Shot, Disabling Shot, Dancing Dagger, Scorpion Wire, Clusterbomb etc. finally usable at 900 units distance. All of them can be sidestepped at 500-600 units distance. Clusterbomb is essentially behaving like Symbol of Energy, it could use a speed up as well. At least bring it to the same level of speed as Arcing Shot from Warrior Longbow (#3). Better would be to use the same speed and arc of Choking gas, or a higher speed but keeping the arc of the current Clusterbomb.

Thats it from my point of view. Great compilation and ideas from [Teef] overall, so thanks!

GW2 Movement Speed Physics 101:

Base Movement Speed ooc (out of combat) is 100% and base Movement Speed ic (in combat) is 66%. All speed impacts use these as their base to calculate.
Maximum Movement Speed attainable through ingame means is 133% (excluding Movement Skills which seem to move at 166 – 175% regardless of being ooc or ic, formerly scaling with speed impacts. Most Movement Skills now ignore all speed impacts. One exception which should be fixed asap is the Acid Bomb on Engineer’s Elixir Gun, which still scales 100% with all speed impacts but Superspeed which behaves like Swiftness in this case).

Thus, we get the following total values ooc:
Base 100%, Signet/Runes of the Traveller 125% ( + 25%), Swiftness 133% ( +33%), Fleet Shadow 133% ( + 50% but hits cap), Superspeed 133% ( +100% but hits cap).

It follows for being ic:
Base 66%, Signet/Runes of the Traveller 82.5% ( + 25%), Swiftness 87.78% ( + 33%), Fleet Shadow 99% ( + 50%), Superspeed 132% ( + 100%).

A Dodge Roll is capped at 125% regardless of being ooc or ic and is not affected by speed impacts, thus resulting in a slightly shorter jump distance than if you’d just jump while under the influence of Swiftness. Ic however Dodge Jumping takes you at almost maximum speed to make jumps one usually could only make when being ooc.

Science, Bookah I´m an Asura, we just behave a little kitteny.

Not a single skill besides the Area Denial AoEs like Necro Fear Wall, Guardian Line and Ring of Youshallnotpass and so on hit through evades or blocks, and blocks are only ignored by skills which are meant to be unblockable – which still doesnt enable them to hit through evades. Fear also doesnt hit through blocks or evades, Anduriell. This is clearly a bug and needs to be fixed just like all the other bugs.

45 – you conveniently forgot to add Beastly Warden to that list even though it has been mentioned throughout the thread. It hits through blocks, it hits through evades, which certainly shouldnt be the case and makes an absurdly strong trait completely overpowered.

Roll for Initiative is an evade though and thus it would ignore the second hit of Basilisk Venom. And if it hit you twice before you break stun, well, the effect doesn’t stack so RFI will remove the stun.

What can be the cause though is certain animations blocking you from using such skills. If you are immobilized during any animation with aftercast you literally have to spam Withdraw / RFI in order to get them off about one second later. Stuns seem to work the same way – while the animation is interrupted, the aftercast time seems to continue, kittening up your stunbreak in the consequence.

Exactly THAT is the reason why skills like Withdraw, Roll for Initiative, Flanking Strike and so on should take 100% priority over ANY currently running animation, ESPECIALLY during immobilize – which still works like an interrupt in some cases where your skills just wont activate. The immobilize in mid air thing is yet another story which shouldnt happen usually as long as you dont jump around during fights.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Thief is getting rifle tough

That assumption is entirely based on the trailer and coming from a five second lasting scene with a thief-looking NPC wielding a rifle. For all we know it could have been an Engineer as well, or one of those environmental sniper rifle NPCs.

We actually have the same level of proof that Thief is getting Staff as we had with Elementalists and their Warhorn. Datamining showed two things: A specialization background art for the elite specialization and a weapon skin akin to the weapon shown on the background art.

The specialization background art: http://i.imgur.com/xA8qvVk.png
And no, thats clearly not for Revenants. This one is brown/black/red, the colorcode of almost all Thief art, while the Revenant uses strong red tones with and pitch-black background.

The staff in question: [&AgFgEQEAAA==] , http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/gw2-staff.jpg
Totally looks like the Staff in the art piece.

For further information: http://dulfy.net/2015/06/24/gw2-upcoming-items-from-june-23-patch/

The ascended weapons shown all correspond to the specialization backgrounds known or datamined. The Bow clearly is from Braham (Dragonhunter), the Greatsword is from the Reaper, Warhorn is Elementalist and the Shield is somewhat Glint-y or Shatterer-y in appearance, hinting towards the Revenants Elite Specialization which we know will be Glint as a Legend while the Mesmer’s Shield in the trailer looked completly different and this one doesnt fit the theme of the Mesmer at all.

Chances for Thief getting Rifle as his first Elite Specialization weapon are in the 1% range right now, and as much as i´d love to have a 1.2k ranged weapon on my Thief, i hope the Staff brings back the viability of stealthless fighting. I hope its a bruiser style.

There’s probably an easy fix for that problem, ShadowMageAlpha. Make sure your tablet and your PC both show the correct time according to one of the sites showing the time of an atomic clock. If your tablet is just 1 minute late, the generated code will fail to work.

The app works as following: You get a specific, unique code from ArenaNet, which serves as the base encryption key all your generated codes respond to. The exact time and probably date this code gets generated also affects it. So if your tablet is more than one minute off, the code is invalid because it’s time stamp is invalid. Your tablet showing one minute late means your codes are already expired as they are generated every 30 seconds and only the newest and second newest code seem to work. Your tablet showing one minute early means the codes you generate are not valid yet.

Sync the times (there are apps doing that in the appstore if your system doesn’t manage it by itself) and your authenticator should work. Since it worked using the PC-based one i´m almost 100% sure the cause of this failure is a difference in system time and date between your PC and your tablet.

This seems to happen when you taxi people onto your map while it is in “soon to be closed” state. In this state you won’t get onto the IP by normal means, if the player count is not close to the minimum limit. By taxiing people in, the system doesn’t seem to lift the closure state, because you are essentially ircumventing the only condition the state has, namely people going there by normal means. Its a bug that happens rarely enough but is nonetheless a huge disappointment. Happened to the german Dry Top organization twice as well.

You seem to be able to prevent it by NOT filling a map with guild mates which is doomed to be closed soon. Instead search for another IP which isn’t in the state of closure.

BillFreist.1527:

[snip]
I also got a couple client improvements that should help reduce framerate hitching with lower-mid range video cards and/or higher shader settings. Coming next release, too.
-Bill

First of all, thanks – performance issues being fixed is always appreciated. But while we’re at it – can something be done about the horribly low framerate when 20+ players are on the screen while neither CPU nor GPU, RAM, HDD or whatnot are at their limits? Please make the game less CPU bound and make it utilize the power of the GPU. Anything below stable 60fps (which nobody can reach even when setting their game to graphics equal to the good old Amiga days when too many people are on screen or just in range) is just not acceptable, especially if you have a PC which should easily be capable of keeping the game at 60+ fps. Would help with the responsiveness of skills as well.

Of course you can evade instant skills – if your opponent uses them during your evade, it simply misses. Like Steal, Mantras, Sic’Em, Signet of Shadows, Lightning Strike and so on. Blinding Dissipation and Bestial Warden (the trait that causes Taunt on Ranger F2) hit through evades and blocks because they’re bugged. Not a single skill any playable profession has hits through evades besides area denial AoEs like Static Field, Guardian’s ring and line of YouShallNotPass (forgot their names), Spectral Wall, Ring of Fire and so on. Anything else doing this is bugged – its not even listed as a skill fact, though thats nothing you can count on nowadays. Hitting through blocks is one thing, but hitting through invulnerabilities and evades is another.

So its fine for the classes with the most sustain while being full zerker to have access to yet another damage preventing tool while thieves only have stealth? Mesmers can indeed lose some blind, especially since Blinding Dissipation is bugged and hits through evades. But Thieves? Really? Stealth is next to useless against enemies with long casts (Ranger, Necro) if you are using stealth in short durations but frequently or enemies with tons of AoE and / or cleave (Ele, Engi, Guardian, Warrior) as a defensive mechanic if you’re still within melee range – which you have to be if you want to use Backstab. Seriously, Thieves have to be a 100% ontop of their game to have a chance at survival. Survival! Killing their enemy is a complete different story in the current meta. If you strap access to Blind from Thieves, they are even more kitten and can’t compete at all because D/P is the last functional weapon set, sadly. I sued to play S/D but i just can’t justify it anymore.

I´d much prefer them reworking the trap’s teleporting mechanism from “shadowstep” to actual “teleport”. A single pebble on a flat even road may karka up the port which is just plain stupid. Since one can only place the trap where he can go without using the trap, it won’t break anything as far as i can tell. At least to me thats a whole lot bigger issue than some missing might stacks or vulnerability when you won’t reach your opponent after triggering it anyways.

@Kidel: Thieves and Elementalists may come in first and second respectively (Ele first when using FGS), they’ll have to spend major CDs doing so. A GS Warrior will always be the fastest when its about maintaining a state of combat readyness, because Eles will spend all escape mechanisms and thieves basicly have to drain all their CDs (initiative based and utilities) in order to just keep up with a GS Warrior. Even if you reach him, you won´t have the resources as a thief to whittle him down and as an Ele you may be unable to escape the fight if it goes bad.

The swiftness on dodge is next to useless with its base two second duration because the dodge animation lasts about one second and moves you around with fixed 125% movement speed, essentially wasting 50% of the swiftness gained from dodging. If it was to be made useful again, ArenaNet should handle it like Ranger’s Companion’s Defense trait, where the protection on dodge is applied after your dodge finished.

Runes of the Centaur in combination with a tonic to get around supplies you with endless Swiftness. Next is any useful Swiftness increasing rune like Rune of the Pack in combination with Thrill of Crime. That gets you to about 70% swiftness uptime. You may cover the remaining 30% with Infiltrator’s Arrow if availiable. Don’t use Heartseeker as it already only was faster than Infiltrator’s Arrow prepatch by a small margin, and especially out of combat it is only faster than 133% by a small margin now.

@Ink: That only works partially. If the animation to be interrupted is part of a so called aftercast, it won´t work at all. Some animations cannot be interrupted at all, regardless of casting state. Situations where this is needed though is when you need to dodge during a Warrior’s stolen F2 “Whirling Axe” for example – you can only dodge if you interrupt it via stow weapons or weapon swap before attempting to dodge. WHich is silly. But i´ll come to that later.

@Muscarine: Your reasoning is completly correct – i played Call of Duty 1 – X (lost count…) and in most of them you can shoot faster using bolt action rifles if you abuse animation abortion. Same thing with reloading. But the substance is of entire different nature here – we actually do not want to increase DPS but use dodges when they are needed and while it all stems from the same problem it just doesn’t feel right.

Thus (in my honest opinion) any weapon / utility skill or endurance based dodge should take 100% priority over everything else. The Thief and especially S/D Thief basicly is the incarnation of fast reactive gameplay. But where is the point if the mechanical design doesn’t enable you to react? Part of this even spreads out to the problems with immobilize.

Be immobilized during any animation by a Shatter Mesmer? Better spam that Withdraw healing skill or FLanking Strike because they won´t activate instantly DESPITE being instant skills. Instead you have to pray to god that you have another second before the burst lands which would most likely cause your immediate end.

Pumped some auto attacks into the fleeing Warrior’s back and having him instantly flying back into your direction using Eviscerate? Better have some endurance left because you cannot count on a proper evade using Flanking Strike as it won´t activate in time before you take a Warrior to your face.

Lobbing one or two Cluster Bombs from your shortbow into enemy group shortly before seeing their Thief preparing for a deadly Steal+CnD+BS combo? Better have some endurance left because Disabling Shot won´t activate in time to dodge the burst.

Seriously guys, we´re talking about 1/2 second evades based on weapon skills and a 3/4 second evade based on an instant healing skill. I don’t even want to mention the 1/4 seconds on Death Blossom. Those need some pretty good timing and reflexes to be used properly, but the design flaws don’t let you. Up to this date i failed all attempts to do a Lupicus solo because most of the time Withdraw won’t activate when i need it.

Disabling the autocast on the auto attack chain doesn’t help either because we’re not talking about interrupting the chain itself (which is perfectly doable on all classes / weapon sets except Ranger Sword) but about interrupting a progressing attack mid-cast.

If the entire system is the way it is to prevent DPS increases from animation interrupts then please for the love of god move the damage portions of all skills to the very end of their casts instead of trapping people in aftercasts. Just add the aftercast time to the precast time and delete the aftercast time entirely. That would fix the problem with important skills not activating in time and it would also help to solve one aspect of the problems involving the Immobilize condition.

Standard? At least i never played S/D this way. I´m in dire need of new ideas… D/P was the superior set for Thieves for a long time now and yet S/D gets the nerfbat again. This is so disheartening. I don´t want to play cheap stealth hide and seek -.-

From what i have observed, he is using Deadly Arts, Critical Strikes and Trickery.

Deadly Arts: Mug (Target gets a white hit upon steal every time), Panic Strike (watch guardian fight at 4:16), and Executioner (most likely)
Critical Strikes: Signets of Power (he gains might on signet usage), Practiced Tolerance (most likely), and No Quarter (fury refreshes on critical hits)
Trickery: Haste (watch Thief fight at 0:38), Trickster (Withdraw has 15 sec CD), and Sleight of Hand (watch Thief fight at 0:38)
Marauder amulet (look at all those preciousssssss life points) and Runes of the Pack (watch Guardian fight at 1:00)
Fire sigil (watch Thief fight at 0:42). I cannot make out the second sigil. I´d choose Air, but i did not see a single Air proc, So it is either a sigil with stat boost or something that proccs on weapon swap (Energy comes to mind)

TL;DR (u= up, m = mid, d = down)

DA: m, m, d
CS: m, m, u
Trick: m, m, m
Marauder, Pack rune, Fire sigil, ? sigil

Surbrus.6942:

[snip]
There is one hilariously unintended thing about this though. Quickness and Slow both affect the distance and speed of movement skills, however in the opposite way you would think. While under the affects of Quickness, movement skills are horribly nerffed, a Warrior GS5 rush looks pathetic. However under the affects of Slow, the movement is buffed massively, a Warrior GS5 rush while subject to Slow will rocket the Warrior nearly twice the distance that GS5 rush normally would do.
[snippety]

Thats only partially right.

Before the June 23rd update, the following would have been the case:

1. Change of movement speed: Many Movement skills scaling linear with Chill, Cripple, Swiftness, Fleet Shadow, Super Speed, while some only scale up to Swiftness level (133% absolute speed). This affected travelling speed and distance while the time to execute was the same.

2. Change of animation execution speed: Most Movement skills scaling linear with Quickness and Slow. This affected travelling distance and time to execute, while the travelling speed stayed the same.

You see, there really are 2 compounds to this dilemma. Decrease or increase of distance travelled because of altered travelling speed, or because of altered execution time.

However, the June 23rd update removed compount 1.) on all movement skills availiable to players without external influence (including conjured weaponry). We are left with the annoyance of Quickness causing a nerf of movement skills (just as Surbrus said), but only because the time needed to execute the animation gets altered. The travelling speed remains the same.
A slowed Warrior GS#5 increases it’s range by about 50%, from 1200 to 1800.
A slowed Warrior S#2 causes matrix-style aerial flight time, increasing the range from about 730 to about 1095 – with loss of altitude slowly tuning in from 730 and onward.

This also seems to include all effects which come with the execution of skills:
Thief’s Withdraw and Roll for Initiative evade for half an eternity across half an eternity.
Dodge Rolls may receive the same benefit

This opens up some interesting questions though:
Will Ele’s FGS Rush, Burning Speed and Burning Retreat cast more of their small fire AoEs? Will Elite Skills not only last longer, but also pulse Stability more often?

We’re left with a borked mechanic opening a can of worms to be honest. Take a look at Lupicus, that poor bugger doesnt even survive his first grub cast. Take a look at the Molten Berserker in the Molten Facility boss fractal – his Shockwaves travel at half speed while ticking at the same rate, causing unlucky players to be instagibbed (at least it looked like that, more intensive testing needed). And while i think of it, the Chronomancers moving projectile reflecting barrier may last 50% longer because of this. Revenants front reflector may be longer. Heck, even a Guardian’s Wall of Reflect may be influenced when casted under the effects of Slow. [Testing needed xD] Some projectile- and AoE-based attacks may receive a dislocation of animation vs actual hitbox…

All in all, the changes should be reverted and Slow / Quickness should have been the effects which do not affect movement skills at all, or only affect them in their respective way while keeping the distance travelled at a constant value, just like how those skills work when being Crippled, Chilled or doped with Super Speed.

Just be grateful that you still can jump anywhere. I main thief and i used to jump / mountain goat just about anywhere and then some just because of Runes of the Trapper and Withdraw executed while jumping. Meanwhile Warrior’s Savage Leap (Sword #2) and most others dont only reach 600 units like shwon in the tooltip but rather 730 units. So you guys still have it easy to be honest.

I´m now bound to obey the rules of gravity again. It was fun while it lasted, being able to take shortcuts only Engis, Eles, Warriors, Guardians and Rangers could take (Obsidian Sanctum for the most part), but all by myself and with no external input like Fiery Axe, FGS oder LH involved.

I swear if i ever get to put Slow on myself… tested it already, the distance you reach with Savage Leap is ludicrous when under the effects of Slow. Sadly Slow does not help me with my jumping shenanigans when playing thief, because while it does increase the range of Withdraw / Roll for Initiative, it neither affects the speed i reach my destionation, nor does it help with gravitational loss of altitude, causing me to drop from the sky like a heat shielded toilet seat from the ISS regardless of being Slow’ed.

Thus, ArenaNet, PLEASE. Bring back the old interactions between all movement skills and speed increases / decreases. Not just for the sake of jumping, but also for combat healthiness – you basicly removed counterplay from those skills when talking WvW / PvP, and its not like classes like Warrior have been overly harmed by Cripple and Chill in the first place. But if we were to talking jumping and mountain goating… fix it where it harms the game, e.g. Dungeons, and – the most important part – fix it properly. Not meant as an insult at all, but if someone finds kitten in the map, allowing this person to execute a void jump, then you should close the hole instead of drawing even more invisible barriers all over the place if you really really really dislike people taking exploration to the absolute limit. Is it really that bad if people want to climb the highest mountain? Is it so harmful to have people standing on top of various otherwise unreachable places, where the only real advantage is that these people have an incredibly splendid, panoramic view over your beautiful cities and valleys? Yes there are a lot of graphical bugs involved, but there are just as many outlooks which are worth the hassle. Just as an example: Having a view over Lion`s Arch from the big concrete walls or the ray-shaped airport thingy is worth it over 9000 times. Even if you see that the interior of the airport is just a big, ugly hole. But thats because, you know, you normally don´t get to see it. Thus it cannot be a bad thing. Anyone who breaks out of maps knows what he is doing and thus shouldnt be disturbed by breaking his or hers immersion

Just as Purple Miku said… the change didnt do anything but excluding poor sad asuran lady thief (alias “me”) from natural goating. And it harmed combat situations more than it helped imo.

If you have bad internet, then thats a problem that only you can fix (or cannot, depending on situation).
if you have a bad rig, then its up to you to either deal with it, or fix it by buying a better rig, however harsh and rude that may sound.
This game already caters more than enough to people with weak PCs. Still only Dx9 support. Heavyily CPU-bound code execution which causes graphics cards to be next to useless. No x64 client. So if anything, ArenaNet should start to work on Dx11/12 support and on optimizing utilization of GPUs.

That said, compared to what happened two years ago, ArenaNet worked wonders on how the game runs. Removal of culling, increase of overall performance… so rest assured that Lion’s Arch will be okay as well.

It absolutely works how it is supposed to, just like Fleet Shadow for thieves works as intended.

You have base speed of 100% out of combat (ooc) and 66% in combat (ic). Speed ooc and ic is capped at 133%, thus you max out movement speed just by applying swiftness ooc and neither Fleet Shadow or Superspeed are faster. But ic you have a base speed of 66%. Swiftness then puts you at 88%, slightly slower than a person ooc without swiftness. Fleet Shadow brings you to 99% and Superspeed maxes speed at 132% even ic. Nothing bugged there!

Have this for an overview:

Superspeed +100% /// ooc 133% /// ic 132%
Fleet Shadow +50% /// ooc 133÷ /// ic 99%
Swiftness +33% /// ooc 133% /// ic 88%
Signet +25% /// ooc 125% /// ic 82,5%
Base ooc 100% /// ic 66%
Cripple -50% /// ooc 50% /// ic 33%
Chill -66% /// ooc 33% /// ic 22%

You don´t need a video for that. As long as the target location is 600 units (i believe – don’t know the exact minimum range right now) away from the arrow cart, counted in a straight line, you can target whatever is within your (=the camera’s) line of sight and you’re not limited to the arrow cart’s line of sight. So you may not be able to shoot right onto the opposite side of the wall, but you may hit the opoosite side a bit further away from your location to the left or right since technically there are no line of sight restrictions. Whatever you can click at will get pierced by arrows.

But what would that cause? They would have to alianate triplehead-gamers in order to cater towards the non-triplehead gamers. They way the engine behaves to render the game in different aspect ratios is incredibly good because it adjusts the FoV depending on the aspect ratio. No part of the game gets distorted ever, if you overlook the problems with UI scaling. Nah, ArenaNet should further improve the FoV settings and general camera mechanic and instead fix the arrow cart problem by mixing LoS restrictions with range restrictions, meaning you can only ever target an area with x amount of structure within LoS. Example would be an arrow cart, placed directly at the feet of a wall, just able to target the top of the wall but is disallowed to target the ground. Make heightened ground matter, thus allowing higher placed arrow carts a more LoS independent range of valid target surface. Something like that… but dont ever mess with the FoV because now that its here it should never go away.

Most teleportation spots work so flawless now, many new have been added simply because the pathing has been extremely upgraded. In the process, some others which used to work before may not be working anymore because they actually have been bugged teleports. Just adapt to the new mechanics, don´t target the floor near walls, and even more importantly: relearn all the spts. There is so much to discover right now. Anyone calling this a nerf to thieves or any other teleport reliant build / profession is either unable or unwilling to adapt to the now definitely better pathing of shadowstepping and teleportation abilities. If anything, its a rather hefty buff to jumpy playstyles.

Sure there are a lot bugs left to squash, but would you rather like to waste your Shadowstep CD on a failing teleport than receiving red text saying “invalid path” on your screen? I sure vote for the latter. Since the update no Steal, Infiltrator’s Strike or -Signet have failed to work (for me).

@Shufflepants: If i understand it correctly, you want the arrow carts to force a specific camera setting, right? By proposing this you effectively want to limit the advanatge of additional FoV to the multi monitor crowd and those who simply put GW2 into windowed mode and squint the window to aspect ratio of 2:1 or greater in order go obtain a higher FoV. I´m asking you, is that more balanced than allowing EVERYONE to legitimately achieve the same FoV by just dragging an options slider to the right? If you dont like it, don´t use it, simply put. There are far more viable options to change the way arrow carts work.

That being said, i don´t really get why all people are upset and say “defensive siege isnt viable anymore”. Any arrow cart placed outside of your keep able to hit your arrow cart inside your keep may be able to be hit as well. Adapt to new placement strategies where your usual placement locations won´t be able to hit arrow carts directly to the feet of your walls for example.

Nope. Just because this is a problem now it does not justify reverting the changes. The camera features outweigh this little problem by far – instead i suggest ArenaNet to rework how siege can be placed, and which requirements a placed siege’s location has to meet in order to be able to target x location.

And you (or the uploader of the video if its not you) wrote it right into the video’s description: Anyone who wished to have a better FOV would just play windowed mode and squint the window a little to achieve this. Multimonitorsetups have the same effect. So why revert something which everyone should have access to instead of having a closer look at the targetting mechanics of siege weaponry?

Yes. All classes only reappear from stealth when one of the following three things happens:

- Stealth runs out. Character reappears on screen. No “Revealed” applied
– Stealthed character does direct damage. Character reappears on screen. “Revealed” is applied.
– Stealthed character is forced to leave stealth by stealth trap (WvW) or similar mechanics. Character reappears on screen. "Revealed is applied and further affected by the mechanic which caused the character to leave stealth.

So – a blinded thief does no damage, therefore does not get revealed. A backstab getting blocked or evaded does not do damage, therefore does not cause “Revealed”. Attacks hitting immune or invulnerable foes don’t do damage either, so no “Revealed” here as well.

With the amount of random dodges, AoE blinds, blocks, invulnerabilities and immunities currently in the game this is for the better. Counterplay exists in the form of not getting hit by CnD in the first place or preventing a thief from using Heartseeker in smoke field. if thief uses heal or utility to go into stealth he blew a cooldown, which counts as the counterplay regarding preventing stealth in this case. Rangers and Engineers can do the same by applying “Revealed” onto the thief using utility skills.

Funnily enough i found most teleportation spots working way better than before. At least on the very same structure located near the south east keep on the borderlands. Teleporting onto the straw roof works from anywhere and any angle now, not just from specific locations or angles. Didnt get to test that in the south west keep area yet, but i´ll make sure to head over there once i´m home today. Also its not like it is a Thief only thing. Last time i checked, Guardians, Elementalists and Necromancers could do the very same thing. It is called map awareness and proper usage of terrain, a kind of skill which is – aside from skills necassary to do it – profession independent.

And anyone calling this exploiting or bug usage in general: It is neither because whenever you can reach a certain point by merely walking to it, you should be able to teleport there. If you cannot walt there, teleportation should not be possible. And this patch finally fixed all the real teleportation bugs as in reaching unreachable locations, for example entering the outer border of the citadel on each borderland by using a teleport where the wall connects to cliffs to the west of the north keep – you could then get onto the straw wall and traverse it all the way into the area protected by legendary NPCs. This is not possible anymore. But anything else should be, like Nilfhel castle, which finally is easily doable from any location or angle on the plateau and not just from a specific spot on max range on the stairs.