Guild Wars 2

SolarNova.1052:

Just thought i would point out that they didnt ‘fix’ culling. They simply turned it off and put the culling options client side. They went around the problem, they didnt fix it(the problem being performance). Culling was there to stop performance getting any worse. They couldnt fix the performance so they turned culling off and acted like it was their fix and can now say that any performance issues r client side becouse ur settings r to high.

If u have culling off completly ur FPS will tank, but its ur choice ..so Anet can wash their hands of the crappy performance issues. They just say “change culling options to increase ur performance”., which brings u back to how things were b4 the patch lol.

You have no idea what performance optimisations they made under the hood to make it possible to disable culling, you really think it would have taken them so long if all the needed to do was to flip a switch? Not to mention that culling was not only to do with client-side performance, it’s also a matter of bandwidth-usage (as a result of the n-squared problem).

If you have a slow computer there are settings to reduce the number and detail of visible players and you should use them. Clearly they have done performance optimisations as my FPS certainly hasn’t tanked since the update, I can now see entire battles with no less FPS than before, though admittedly I have a pretty good computer. You can’t honestly expect them to be able to get massive 100+ person fights to run perfectly on anyone’s crappy old computer though, they’re not miracle-workers.

Nilkemia.8507:

Who thought that was a good idea? It isn’t. After all that trouble filling up the map on Tyria, finding out I have to play a mode I don’t like to get the rest kills my motivation.

You don’t have to play WvW. Nobody is forcing you to get the Gift Of Exploration. Nobody is forcing you try to get a legendary weapon. The legendary weapons are supposed to be a reward for mastering every aspect of the game, if you don’t want to play one of the major parts of the game then, frankly, you don’t deserve the legendary weapon.

Advent Leader.1083:

If they can’t do that – and assuming they’ve exhausted all other reasonable options – then I’d be more than happy if they calculated the damage that my bleed stack should have done when it is either applied (or removed to make space for someone else’s more powerful bleed stack) and then convert it into a direct-damage hit (call it Haemorrhage for the sake of argument) and apply that instantly, so if for example if my attack should do 1000 damage over 3 seconds but there’s no space for it then bam, 1000 Haemorrhage damage!

This could be a bit overpowered as damage up-front is more powerful than damage over time.

I think a better solution would just be that when bleeding reaches 25 stacks, all 25 stacks of bleeding are removed and replaced by a stack of Haemorrhage that has damage and duration that are the average of the damage and duration of the 25 stacks of bleeding that were removed (or duration that is the average, then damage per tick that is equal to the total remaining damage of the 25 bleeds divided by the Haemorrhage duration, just to make sure the total damage output is not changed at all). It would remove all the server-side resources used by the multiple stacks while still doing a similar amount of damage.

The only problem would be that it might be trickier to attribute the subsequent damage to particular players (for loot rights etc), and the subsequent damage won’t be able to change dynamically based on the application of things like might to individual players. Neither of these would really be a problem though; the first can be worked around with a bit of clever coding (calculate what percentage of the Haemorrhage is from each player when converting the bleeds, then split the credit from the Haemorrhage between the players based on that percentage as it does damage).

Esprit Dumort.3109:

It’s like an unspoken rule not to camp the chest.

No it’s not, if you don’t like getting killed don’t go into a PvP zone.

samski.5194:

Ironvos.9014:

No need to belittle us by showing off you can hold bay for a few hours with an organised guild against pugs. You are not the only enemy on our border, we have to fight against GH aswell, so in fact you are only facing half our people.

Pretty sure you had 2-3 guilds in bay fighting us with your PUGs and in the chat in the screenshot Gab Superstar linked it says your hills assault force failed and they were returning to bay so I dont think it was just half your people……Just saying

It’s funny how DW and BloS thank us for the badges when they beat us a couple of times, then when they along with other guilds and a lot of PUGs too get turned back at Bay it’s all “oh you were only against PUGs”

marnick.4305:

My CPU isn’t the limiting factor, pretty sure of that.

It might be. GW2 is a very CPU-bound game so unless your videocard is terrible your CPU will usually be the limiting factor. Then again, your videocard is pretty old as well, so it could be that instead. Then again, if you get 30fps in Lions Arch thats not bad, I have a Radeon 7970 and an i7 3770k and I still often drop that low in Lion’s Arch.

Either way, it’s nothing to do with your amount of RAM, GW2 is not gonna use much more than 2GB. Running the entire game from a RAM-drive is gonna drastically improve loading times but it isn’t going to help your FPS much.

I’ve seen people from all servers using that invulnerability spot. It’s not like it really gives them an advantage, they can’t do anything from that spot, just don’t bother chasing them that far back.

Tortun.5946:

I think he’s more peed that every time they waited and began to kill them, they all kept running to that spot meaning they had to camp at the supply because they couldn’t leave as they weren’t able to kill the people in question due to retreating to that area time and again.

But their spawn is like 30 seconds run away. Even if they did kill them, they can run back there in no time at all, so it’s hardly like it makes any difference.

And this is why I don’t care to ever bother getting a lengendary, unless I get incredibly lucky and get the precursor as a drop. RNG is not fun.

Tekyn.5376:

Look at it another way, hundreds of players are either too cheap or too lazy to put on both a Food nourishment and a Utility nourishment when they WvW. Should those players be scorned for not ‘contributing’ to their full potential? Should rich players buy them food and give it out? Should poor players expect to get free food & utility?

It’s not exactly rare to see people dropping feasts at spawn to help out their server, which makes your entire point null & void, because yes rich players do buy/make food and give it out. It costs somewhere around 5g to make a feast recipe, and I’ve been considering making a couple so that I can help my server and guild by putting down feasts (and I am far from a rich player).

EnoLive.2367:

Quick note:
One thing they haven’t mentioned is if these “Fallback models” can be attacked or Tagged.
My money is on that no they can’t

Of course they can, I don’t see what on earth would ever make you think otherwise. It is nothing but a visual change to speed loading of the models/textures, it would be ridiculous for it to prohibit attacking.

It would be nice if instead of just splitting allies and enemies, which made very little actual improvement last time they tried it, they would implement something similar to the suggestions I made here which would at least improve things a lot more until they can eliminate culling completely. The placeholder models are certainly going to help a lot though.

Got just over 1500 badges I think, almost enough to buy a set of invader armour for one of my secondary characters, though I’ll hold onto them for a while and see if ANet release anything else I can use them on.

Valik Shin.9027:

I spent over 20 gold to attack SM one time

What on earth could possibly have cost that much? 20 golems? 60 trebs? I can’t see how you could possibly spend half that much before deciding that that there’s better things on which to spend your time and money.

I hope ANet will tweak the invulnerable area to fix this, so they have to at least be up on the hill to be invulnerable, but I wouldn’t call it much of an exploit because it gives them absolutely no advantage whatsoever. The area is far enough away from the camp; just fall back to the camp and don’t follow them that far back.

Cake.4920:

Defending camps is spawn camping? Really bro? Really?

The invulnerable spot is quite far from the actual camp, far enough that you cannot call it ‘defending camps’ to be pushing them back that far.

EliteZ.1682:

Maybe you have a smallish monitor or not having your camera fully zoomed out I don’t know.

27" monitor running 1920×1080 and fully zoomed out. It’s not a matter of how much area you can see, there will always be occasions when the thing you want to target ends up underneath the target UI widget. And not only do the visible parts of the widget block clicks, but there is an invisible box around it that also blocks them, which is the most annoying part. You try targetting, notice that it fails, then have to move the camera around before trying to target again. This probably doesnt make any different in PvE but in fast-paced PvP encounters it can make a big difference.

They don’t need to move the thing, just make it invisible to clicks, it’s hardly a major UI change.

Obviously we can just detarget, we can also just rotate the camera further so the potential target isn’t underneath it, but these are both a pain and delay the action which is not ideal in the middle of combat. We can’t change the UI but there’s no reason ANet can’t make changes to it, and this change could be an improvement with no down-side.

There’s no reason that 5-man encounters can’t be made just as difficult and interesting as any raid encounter. Unfortunately none of the encounters in GW2 are that great, except maybe a couple of those in Arah, but that’s just because ANet’s PvE encounter design needs some work, not because we need raids.

+1000

Or at least make most of it, apart from maybe the portrait circle, invisible to mouse-clicks, so we can click or target stuff that’s behind it. And even the portrait can be invisible to left-click as it’s only right-click that really needs to work on it to bring up the menu.

MarzAttakz.9608:

Anyone with half a brain can stop me (as the Ele in Vapour Form) from entering the portal

And by that you mean ‘any guardian with half a brain’, right? What exactly can any other classes do about it?

Raine Akrune.8416:

It’s part of the game mechanics that swords only offer main hand.

Erm, no. Warriors can wield swords in their off-hand.

The ele ability to escape through portals is certainly annoying, but every class has things that other classes don’t. If we nerfed everyone to be exactly even then we’d just have 1 class that everyone has to play, and how boring would that be?

The thief downed abilities are not that great since they got nerfed, all they do is delay the inevitable by a few seconds at best.

Anyway, you’re a ranger talking about ‘levelling the playing field’. How about we all get 1500 range on our ranged weapons like you do? Give me 1500 range on my thief’s shortbow, and then I’ll consider giving up my downed abilities. See how silly this argument is?

Uberlicious.3956:

i cant speak for the rest of you but when i got out into WvW each night its to have fun and kill people , the loot isn’t even on my mind, if i need money i can throw on a mf set and farm pve for a bit… but at the end of the day i wvw because i enjoy it.

+1. I mostly WvW because it’s fun, although it would be nice to have a chance to make enough cash for a commander icon before I die of old age. At currently rate it will take me at least another 6 months before I have enough (and I don’t have much hope of ever being able to afford a legendary).

I have noticed Habib Loew’s post describing how ANet intend to remove culling completely, which is an admirable goal and I hope it may be possible, but it is likely that culling in some form may need to be kept to accommodate players on slower connections or computers. I have been thinking about a few improvement that could be made to make any culling that is necessary less intrusive on gameplay and I will detail them in this post and hope ANet might take some of these onboard.

Firstly, the main problem with the current culling is the granularity of the priority given to each player. All that is currently taken into account is the distance between players, which is not sufficient. Splitting the players into separate enemy and friendly pools did not really help since it did nothing to improve the granularity of the priorities; it made it behave a bit differently, and therefore better in some situations and worse in others, but overall not a real improvement.

When the system is deciding which players to cull, a priority should be calculated using a system something like the following:

Firstly, the absolute highest priority should be given to players that have damaged you. These are put into the highest category, but are then also ordered by the time since they last damaged you. As this time increases, the priority will drop slightly lower. This will guarantee that someone who has just this moment hit you, i.e. a thief popping out of stealth to backstab, will be given the absolute highest possible priority and will be drawn immediately.

The next highest priority will be given to people in your party, then people in your guild, and inside this category the priorities will be ordered by distance.

After this, we then have all the enemies that can damage you but havn’t yet, as well as all the friendly players. You would not want a large amount of enemies to make all your allies disappear, so the enemies should not be in a separate category that takes total priority over allies. But, on the other hand, it is more important to see those who can damage you than to see friendly players. As such these should be in the same category, ordered primarily by distance, but also with a slight weighting towards enemy players, so that enemy players at a similar distance are prioritised slightly over friendlies.

Once the priorities have been sorted out in the above manner, the other issue to address is methods to minimise the bandwidth that is necessary, by transmitting less data, which should reduce the amount of culling that would be necessary, and may allow players to be displayed with less delay for players on slower computers. The most obvious way of doing this, suggested by several people on the forum, is to use placeholder models that are permanently resident in memory and will be used for displaying players immediately while the client is still loading the models/textures for their specific body and armour. Players that are very far away could use only the placeholder, without ever transmitting their specific armour/colours until they get closer.

Another way would be to simply send less granular updates for players that are not as important. For example, if a player is more than 2000+ distance units away, i.e. out of the range of any combat abilities, it is probably not necessary to see every single time he moves an inch or uses an ability. It could be possible to only tell the client the players location every 0.x seconds or if he moves more than x units. This may make the movement of far away players seem a bit jerky, but could allow much better display of other players that are actually close enough to affect and be affected by.

If anyone else has any suggestions feel free to posting them in this thread, and I hope ANet might consider implementing some of these as I believe they could greatly improve the gameplay in WvW, and even if they manage eventually to eliminate culling completely these sort of changes could improve things in the meantime until that becomes possible.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that it is possible to get lvl 80 exotic items dropped in WvW. I’ve got some 80 exotic gloves from a player, and an 80 exotic longbow which I believe dropped from a tower lord. Of course, this doesn’t happen often…

Zyphent.2967:

Mmm I fail to see how this is “at best debatable”. Infinite ectos is pretty blatantly a mistake if you ask me.

So why didn’t they reply to this thread and say so? Clearly even they didn’t decide it was an exploit until they ran the numbers and saw the effect it could have on the economy, so how could they possibly expect the players to know?

kal.4350:

Nate Rush.6970:

kal.4350:

Like in many other games, most players talk about other classes like they have all the traits at the same time, and they can use all skills at once.

“You can remove stuns without cooldowns” “You can stealth all the time” “You do lots of damage”

Thiefs can do all that… but not at the same time. They don’t have cooldowns, but they have a resource, so breaking stuns means they have no initiative to hurt you, and so on.

Right they just pop stealth, and while the person is running around like a monkey with a sledgehammer swinging wildly in the air, using their cooldowns, the thief holding back watching, regaining their resources, ready to strike again without consequence. Worst case scenario, they repeat process until threat is gone. Stop trying to defend a broken mechanic.

Are you serious? Read again what you wrote, I put it in bold.
If somebody is using their cooldowns on nothing, he deserves to lose. It has nothing to do with class, not even skill, it’s common sense.
If the thief is only visible 3 seconds, you have 3 seconds to burn all your cooldowns, and that will hurt. If you used them while he was stealthed…. but I guess you didn’t you must be trolling because it makes no sense

+1. As usual, bad player complains that if playing badly he gets beaten by thieves, therefore thieves must be broken. Doesn’t consider that it might be his fault for burning all his cooldowns on an enemy he can’t be sure he’s even hitting. The only cooldowns he should be using are on AoE which can’t help prevent the thief from getting close enough to backstab.

Gasoline.2570:

Well that’s just stupid. Theyre punishing higher level players for killing lower level ones? If you cant handle wvw then don’t be here, why arenanet thinks this is a good idea?

lol. How exactly are you being ‘punished’? Low-level players are easier to kill, so it seems pretty reasonable that they’ll give lesser loot. Most of the players in WvW are 80 anyway so most of them should give you high-level stuff, unless all your capable of is ganking lowbies.

And regardless of level it’s all just vendor junk anyway, so it’s not like it makes a huge difference. WvW will never be the most effective way of making money.

Lavadiel.6231:

no I was not near watter but it happened on raid of the capricon.

Everywhere on Raid Of The Capricorn is near water.

Dragon Title Hunter.9176:

I wanted 500 badges for the Gift of Battle, to make a Legendary weapon.

There’s a reason it’s called the “Gift of Battle” and not the “Gift of Jumping”. You should expect to have to fight people to get it, whether that’s killing people for badges or fighting your way through other players in the jumping puzzles.

Rob.1039:

I really can’t understand why people get angry at other players doing JP. I personally don’t like mindless zerging and nose-hitting the walls, but enjoy those little skirmishes that pop out every now and then, and in JPs you can get plenty of them. And while I try to get as much fun as I can, just by playing game the way I like to, I constantly get flamed on map chat for doing so.

I don’t mind people doing the jumping puzzles, but if you come on map chat asking people to drop what they’re doing to come help you while we’re all busy doing things that actually help our score like defending our keeps, then you can expect people to be annoyed.

Never had this bug before today. Now I’ve had it twice.

titanlectro.5029:

It was never intended that you could “own” a borderland and push the enemy out.

Yep. It’s not meant to be easy to hold anything below Hills/Bay on your own borderland. The parts that are supposed to be easier to hold are Hills/Bay and everything north of that on your own borderland, plus the tower and camp in your particular corner of each of the other two borderlands. You should be taking that lower tower on the other two borderlands before trying to take and hold the harder lower towers on your own borderland.

It does seem that a thief running all signets in a dungeon will be somewhat less useful that one using other abilities. Having blinding powder and/or shadow refuge is extremely useful for ressing for example, and you’re throwing that away by not using one of them. It does generally suggest a player who’s just too lazy or inept to do anything but spam DPS.

stof.9341:

Jamais vu.5284:

I’m just puzzled – why do I never ever have issues with thieves in sPvP, but in WvW they seem utterly broken?

No food in sPvP and the berserker gear there isn’t pure zerk either but a mix of power/precision/crit/vitality

People go into WvW with low level kit, no buffs and no food, then complain that the ‘class is broken’ when they get killed by someone wearing full exotics with Omnomberry food and buffs etc.

Chakuna.6325:

• Thief

• Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage. They can be very fragile if you counter their stealth with area of effects or large stacks of conditions, but they trade this fragility in order to have some of the highest burst damage in the game. They are able to help allies through traps, venoms and the mobility to flank most encounters.

Trait IV – Shadow’s Embrace: Remove one condition every 3 seconds while in stealth – Trollolool

Lol, seriously? Most stealth abilities barely last more than 3 seconds, so that’s one condition we get to remove, if we specifically trait to do so! ONE condition. Unless we use Shadow Refuge, in which case we have to stand in the circle to get the full effect giving enemies a big red target showing exactly where we are to AoE us.

drkn.3429:

UNTY and FURY both field formidable forces, but are pretty zergy – unless they outnumber their enemies, they have troubles taking anything; usually they do, though, so no biggie.

lolwut.

Chimaira.8534:

Doing an event in a PvP zone and dieing to a guild in PvP…. hmm, whats the problem there ? If you really want to go do it, what till late, or really early.. problem solved.

This. If ANet didn’t want people to fight over the JP they wouldn’t have put it in a PvP zone.

Minos.5168:

This still isn’t affecting the reason WHY people disconnect. Which is entirely because of repair costs.

Even big gaming blogs have stated that repair costs are one of their major complaints with WvW.

I don’t see how a tiny penalty for death is a problem. If anything the penalty should be more, it makes it more exciting. I’d love to see how the sort of person that complains about minor repair costs would fare in a game with full loot like Eve or early Ultima Online…

Disastro.4086:

Wise.8025:

Wait wait…. you’re trying to tell me that Deceptive Evasion has always created a clone that attacks neutral targets that are not in combat with you and that is something we’ve been content to live with that I have never noticed until now?

It has always been this way. The mechanic behind Deceptive Evasion is such:

1. Dodge roll to spawn a clone
2. Said clone attacks nearest attack-able target based on it’s path finding algorithm to determine “what” that shortest distance may be so it may be next to you or far away depending on how it determines that.

It would make much more sense if it worked like this:

1. If the dodge evaded an attack from an enemy, clone is spawned on that enemy.
2. If the dodge evaded attacks from multiple enemies and one of these enemies is your target, spawn the clone on the one which is your target.
3. If the dodge evaded attacks from multiple enemies and none of them are targetted, target either the closest one or one at random.
4. If the dodge didn’t evade any attacks, but you have a hostile enemy targetted, spawn the clone on your target.
5. If the dodge didn’t evade any attacks and you do not have anything targetted, either do not spawn a clone at all, or spawn one on the nearest red target in range and only on yellow or grey targets if there are no nearby red targets.

typingofthedead.5614:

NightyNight.1823:

@typingofthedead its called getting owned.You’ll have to accept that some people are just better than you because I play berserker elementalist too and I don’t have those problems that you’re talking about.

hahah kitten that thats a lazy response bro. so what, do u have 0 latency and super human reaction time? im not exxagerating when i say twice in 1 match the SECOND i heard the thief weapon sound (before i could even see him), i went for mist form (which is bound to my mid mouse button and muscle memoried), and twice i was dead before i could use that SINGLE SKILL. with full health.

Either you have incredibly slow reactions or you’re just plain making this up. Even with the highest possible damage and lucky crits against a glass cannon light-armour target it would be impossible to kill anyone in less than 2-3 seconds, which should be plenty of time to at least hit one skill. It sounds like you’re just bad. That or you’re a low-level player going against 80s in WvW, in which case the damage will be much higher than if you were using equal level kit and is hardly representative of PvP as a whole. Also, if you had any situational awareness you would see the thief coming and be ready, since its not possible for a thief to run around perma-stealthed, they have to stealth shortly before attacking.

WereDragon.6083:

Was this within the span of a second. Since combat log doesn’t track time it may have been a backstab ((Wait for revealed)) then an instant stealth like blinding powder or such, due to culling this may have looked like one stealth.

Cornholio.1567:

He might have had another stealth stolen from a thief.. In that case he probably used haste to execute it fast.. Only explanation comming to my mind atm

How can either of these be the case when the first backstab should give the revealed debuff and prevent stealthing again for 3 seconds?

I think it may just be a timing bug. I’ve managed to somehow do two attacks before being revealed before, the second being a backstab, so it might be possible for it to happen with two backstabs, though I’m not sure how. It seems that the revealing isn’t quite instant. I only did it once against a training golem and wasn’t able to reproduce it.

mulch.2586:

Amonde Daneren.2380:

mulch.2586:

Amonde Daneren.2380:

Pizza doesn’t cost much, buy one every day and they add up.
Play only one character ever, moving forward, you won’t have to grind much for Ascended.
Play one of each profession and you could end up doing nothing but chasing the carrot forever.

But this is neither here nor there. As for people who are saying the Ascended increase is negligible…

Rings only: 0.85% damage over someone in Exotics
Greatsword only: 6.48% damage over someone in Exotics.
Greatsword and rings: 7.19% damage increase over someone in Exotics.

It shouldn’t be too hard to see what the difference becomes when you add up all the gear, and then with infusions on top it gets even higher.

Don’t make up pretend numbers…

Actual numbers, a ring will be less than that. Of course it depends on build and all, but getting all 3 ascended items will be around 1.25% increase in damage if you’re going power-style.

There is no ascended greatsword, and we’ll have to wait and see if/when ascended weapons are added.

For the time being, if you do or if you don’t, doesn’t very much matter.
Using actual number for actual items in game — We’re looking at shaving a second or two off a two-minute boss fight.

Ha, I love this kind of kitten. Take two characters, give them base stats, add the stats from rings and the greatsword they accidentally released, then run the damage formula (you can find it on the wiki). Ascended versus Exotic. My numbers will come up.

Whether it’s +5 power or +15 power is not the issue, the question is how much damage that translates to, versus someone in exotics.

I have done it with the rings, and verified in-game as well. What looks like a meaningful bump in stats ends up being almost invisible in the damage from abilities in game. Less than half a percent from a ring. Actual amount varies, cuz of course if you have a completely defensive build +11 power matters more than if you’ve stacked power.

The greatsword or any weapons haven’t been released in the ascended tier yet.

Half a percent from a single item will add up to well over 5% once they’ve introduced all the different ascended armour, weapon and jewellery pieces, which is a significant difference.

Alex Kelley.2748:

2) Mist Form lasts exactly long enough to finish one stomp. There is no way of leaving Mist Form once it is entered, so if the player is interrupted before they’ve entered Mist Form, they’re unable to attempt another stomp until the cantrip has ended.

In WvW the elementalist’s Mist Form is 10x better than any of the thief downed skills. This is because it is able to go through tower/keep portals to get them to safety. None of a thiefs downed abilities can do this.

You just need to accept that each class has abilities that are better in some ways but worse in others. ‘Balance’ doesn’t mean making every class identical so nobody can do anything another class can’t. That would make for an incredibly boring game.

Have you unlocked the thieves guild elite? Skill points become a lot easier once you get that.

Last time I did Giganticus none of our party even died once. If nobody dies, then it doesn’t matter how near or far the waypoint is. If it’s too hard for you, then maybe you’re just not good enough.

Thobek.1730:

I recently created a mesmer and have been levelling her up and playing a bit of WvW at lvl40 (scaled to 80 but obviously without exotic gear or top tier traits)

Anyway thiefs have been basically killing me without a chance to use decoy. Its basically me walking around then BOOM! I’m dead.

You’re level 40, with level 40 gear, what do you expect? Many people would like you to believe that you can be competative in WvW at low level because you’re levelled up to 80, but it’s simply not the case.

A little example, I tried playing my warrior, who is level 41, in WvW. I came up against another warrior who was likely lvl 80. My entire Hundred Blades totalled around 2000 damage to him. When he did Hundred Blades to me, every hit did around 1800 damage, for a total of over 12000 damage.

In other words, you really need to get to 80 before complaining about balance issues, as any 80 player will probably destroy you 1 v 1. Thieves are just more obvious about it due to their burst damage and their penchant for stealthing in and taking out squishy cloth-wearers…

Panther Chameleon.8465:

kitten, I got bored one day…made a thief. Used just the sword. No offhand because I’m a player like dat. Just popped in and out of fights with 2. Go in…land some aa…pop out. Surprisingly, worked. I don’t understand “Stab” skill though. It costs 4 initiative and does less damage then your aa. Like wtf were they thinking? I would play thief if there was a kitten greatsword skill set, and a god kitten katana.

The #3 skill when not wielding an off-hand weapon is only designed to be used for the first few levels until you get an off-hand weapon. As such they’re kinda sucky, and you really should be using an off-hand.

WeWantWaffles.2873:

I think it is a bit insulting how it was assumed that I should play an elementalist just because I’d like to have direct damage options to mesmer. That is incredibly closed-minded, because why should we be forced to rely on one mechanic constantly? That’s boring!

Because its like rolling a warrior then complaining that you don’t want to hit people with big weapons and you’d rather cast spells. It’s just not what the class is about. At all. Clones/illusions are integral to the Mesmer class.

plasmacutter.2709:

Summons DO NOT EQUAL ATTACKS! say it with me, say it until it sinks in!

You should not be able to put a SUMMON on cooldown by dodging. You want the primary offensive ability to be dodged by dodging, SURE, but the current situation post-patch is someone can cause your SUMMON to fail by dodging, then, if by chance they mis-time it, they can either: dodge again OR kill the summoned minion. They just heaped the drawbacks of primary attacks on top of the current drawbacks of pets with low hp, and tried to call that “balanced”? I suspect the (literally, CONFIRMED BY RED POST) 2 person balance team has been denied sleep so long they’re no longer rational if they think so

Totally agree, it makes no sense. I understand they put in a LOS check to stop people summing iBerserker on people through walls, but surely they can make it check LOS without also causing it to fail on dodge/blind.

I havn’t had any trouble with skill points since unlocking my elite, thieves guild makes them all pretty easy. I have noticed once or twice them resetting when I stealth, but that doesn’t happen very often, certainly not every time I use stealth.

AnemoneMeer.7182:

Long story short, Warriors weren’t nerfed because much of the warrior kit that people complain about consists of moves that are easy to react to, and require setups to use.

And so do all the thief abilities that got nerfed into the ground.

Mjk.7562:

Stealth immunity btw doesn’t solve anything,l it activates when activating stealth not when leaving stealth.

No it doesn’t. Please try to get a clue before just making stuff up. ‘Revealed’ always activates when leaving stealth, but only when you leave stealth by doing damage. This means it is possible to chain stealth but only if you don’t actually damage anyone which makes it pretty useless in combat.