Fertile Soil Orchids no longer per character?
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Kahrin.2137
Showing Posts For Kahrin.2137:
My point was that everything you’re making out to be so difficult about condi thief other classes also have to deal with. PS war had to deal with being animation locked in HB back when they ran GS, eles have lots of long channels, plenty of 1s casts on multiple classes which you have to make sure you don’t have to interrupt by doing mechanics.
The mechanic you are complaining about being animation locked on and potentially failing, which imo is barely worth complaining about, is also exactly 1 boss. In all other bosses afaik you would have either completed the animation and be able to dodge or the evade frame would cover you for the mechanic.
Personally I think the dagger auto being reduced could be a decent place to hit 2 birds with 1 stone as the D/D power is literally 3 buttons for excellent damage so could do with a tone down by 1-2k which would hit condi thief. You can then adjust a little of the condi thief’s damage specifically down by another 1-2k and see where it stands.
I didn’t think I was complaining about those instances. I’m just saying that although a build has less buttons to deal with doesn’t automatically make the build any easier to play (and in turn requiring a nerf on the grounds of sheer ease); there’s other things to account for. This thing is animation locked 50% of the time with no way to break it, once you commit you’re stuck with wherever you’re going. I can’t think of really any other abilities used as frequently that cannot be moved during or at least cancel the cast.
And if it’s evades that are supposed to be the guard for that, I’ll take it, but as another issue, Blossom needs tuning in that regard. More often than not the evade frame ends before the tail end of Blossom. Not to mention Blossom is still affected by movement buffs after that change years ago to all leaps/charges/movement skills. It’s amusing flying halfway across the field with an unexpected super speed, and irritating only going half the distance back to the boss with a chilled Blossom. (On that note, if it does get fixed please make blossom go the same distance as dodge by default, it just makes everything much smoother). I’d also say the responsiveness could be tuned up as well. A similar ability, staff 2, weakening charge, when I hit it I know it’s going to go off; Blossom just doesn’t fire when asked some times (different buttons for me, but no it’s not a hardware responsiveness issue). These are just side suggestions, but they would go a long way for QoL.
And I would love to see an across the board significant AA nerf for thieves with boosts to initiative abilities to balance it. I’m sick of this AA only mentality. Only issue I foresee with it is pvp burst balancing, especially with preparedness and the like. But AA dmg for Condi Thief just isn’t that significant in terms of the whole thing. Perhaps a nerf like that would be just enough to put it in line with where ppl think it needs to be, idk.
(edited by Kahrin.2137)
I agree, it must be very frustrating to have to deal with mechanics on the only boss that gives 0 quaggans about evade frames. Now if you excuse me I’ll go back to casting a 3s uninterruptible channel every 5.25s.
Ok, perhaps delaying every other portion of the rotation in order to get it to align with VG’s blue circles. Maybe blossoming into Deimos at an unfortunate time and catching the front of his 360 knockback off the edge. Maybe pull the same Sab example and put it to Cairn’s arm.
These are all silly mechanics that deserve mockery for falling to them. I ain’t saying that it’s some great task of immeasurable proportion that Condi Thief requires in terms of positioning. But every dodge and every blossom demands a check of where the fight is before committing to it (and there are a lot of dodges and blossoms). Do clarify if I’m wrong, but your frequent casts sounds like fresh air ele. Most of those mechanics require simple side steps during the casts, if in danger at all. Just by virtue of executing the Condi Thief rotation you’re put in danger of being hit by everything from frontals to the stray miss-timed mechanic.
If it’s the seemingly perma evade windows that are the issue with Condi Thief then bring that up. I would counter with that it’s not really perma at all. Timing and positioning is everything, and any time foot is set on the ground a Condi Thief is vulnerable. Tie that it with a mechanic that appeared when the Thief was still animation locked and the Thief is screwed.
Having played Condi Thief excessively I accept all these positioning risks and enjoy them. Rotations like PS warr, Condi Ranger, and the like put me to sleep. Just cause a build has less buttons than the next doesn’t mean it is any easier.
Maybe it’s another issue and we could discuss a way to nerf it. I already brought up ways to deal with combo finishers earlier in the thread, as those seemed to be major imbalancers due to their frequency. Though, I would instead say, maybe we should look into ways to make combos more relevant across the board. I remember one of the earlier game trailers featured an ele and a ranger facing down an oakheart. The ele laid down a fire field at the ranger’s feet and he proceeded to fire his bow thru it at the oakheart. If combos were a relevant and perhaps selling feature then, then maybe they ought to be looked at as something to build up to a meaningful place in DPS builds.
Thief is pure melee, brings no group buffs, and Venomshare can only work in a group setting with 1 per group. Shouldn’t it be warranted to have somewhat higher DPS?
For pretty much autoattack and dodge? No.
Would like to clarify that auto attack deals insignificant damage compared to what Death Blossom and dodge bring. Most of the damage is from bleeding, and then poison. Most of that is coming from Blossom and dodge; auto attack is merely a filler in between Blossom and dodge in order to space out the Lotus Condi Buff.
And I would note that it isn’t simply just blossoming and dodging all over the place. These are your survival skills that must be timed and executed around mechanics or you’re toast. Blossom has a rather irritating after cast that, if executed wrongly during Sabetha, for instance, will land you stuck in front of a spawning flame wall, or receiving a timed bomb while locked in animations with no time leave the group before detonation. On bosses like her I’m often tempted to just swap to condi ranger or something similar so I could just stand there and have better reactions in order to counter embarrassingly simple mechanics. Yes it’s technically a three button rotation (not including utilities and geomancy swaps), but I’d say underestimating the movement and positioning required for it is a mistake. Animation locks become very dangerous on several fights.
Condi Ranger certainly has more than a 3 button rotation, but I consider it to be much easier than Condi Thief since it can just sit there and execute its rotation.
On that meta discussion… I’m pretty sure most of us are in agreement that if a spec pulls the numbers it’s fine. If a commander wants to go all authoritarian on an LFG and accept only eles, I just won’t join. I don’t normally want to use my ele, nor can I force him to take a thief or w/e.
The Nature of Condi Thief
Let us not forget that historically, and even now, Thief has been the selfish DPS class that focuses on buffing itself, and receiving buffs from others. If a class brings no other group utility than DPS itself, shouldn’t it be justified in having high DPS? Perhaps not ridiculously high, but certainly competitive for no. 1 (with limitations based on ease of play). Condi Ranger for instance brings mass immobilizations, highly useful on Gors, Sam, and Deimos. Ele brings mass stun breaks for stuff like Sloth.
We also have the issue of ranged (hybrid) vs. melee classes. When working for my Deimos CM kill, I was a little bugged that we couldn’t come up with a strat that allowed for a pure melee class (which Condi Thief is). Ranged damage is a commodity all its own, and ought to be regarded as such when dealing with sheer DPS. In the course of any fight, there’s often instances when everyone needs to step out of melee due to mechanics or w/e. In fractals this is easily seen on MAMA post 30%, and in Raids with Deimos due to the black/oil circles. In these instances, ranged (and even hybrid) DPS classes are still able to continue damaging the mob while pure melee builds are stuck there twiddling their thumbs.
And on to Venomshare itself. Venoms account for a significant portion of total DPS for Condi Thief. Venoms work by granting others the means to apply damage for you. The damage of others is not buffed when you give them venoms, they merely become the vessels through which your damage is applied. Thus Venomshare, Condi Thief, only functions in a team setting, and only 1 Venomshare can really work per group. Venomshare Thieves also have a little issue when it comes to other Venomshare Thieves. We overwrite each other’s venoms. Thus it’s hard to envision the idea of 4 Venomshares in the same raid squad. Even if you’re calling out venom application in voice comms, you’re still probably going to run into the issue of delaying venoms, thus still shorting DPS.
TLDR:
Percent Traits don’t do anything outlandish.
Maybe Percent Proc Rates need to be added to Death Blossom and Impaling Lotus to counter Condi Thief’s benefit from groups.
Thief is pure melee, brings no group buffs, and Venomshare can only work in a group setting with 1 per group. Shouldn’t it be warranted to have somewhat higher DPS?
I’m not sure where this thread has been going, so let’s see if we can get this thing on track. The OP mentioned wanting to discuss Percent Modifier Traits, and Finishers. I would also like to add The Nature of Condi Thief to the discussion as well.
For comparison sake, let’s take the three more recent condi builds that have sprung up in the meta (and no take root). Engineer, Ranger, and Thief. Taking the qT golem benchmarks (since they’re widely accepted by the community) of these three classes gives us:
Engineer Condi: 35.5
Ranger Condi: 33.8
Thief Condi: 33.0
Percent Modifier Traits
I believe we would all agree that Engineer has the hardest rotation of these three classes, thus them being top in a straight golem would be justifiable. With this spread of numbers, I’m not sure where the OP is going with bringing up the fact that Thief is the only one that gets percent modifiers to condi damage via traits. This spread actually points out that it might not matter that Thief holds that position of having percent modifiers, as that’s what makes them competitive in the first place. I remember screwing up my traits one time and walking into Sabetha with the Critical Strikes line completely missing (contains many percent modifiers for power thief), and I dealt significantly less damage than I should have (35% ish less iirc). Now that’s more anecdotal, and relates to power, but it’s always been known that thieves’ traits tend to be selfish and have had percent modifiers since the beginning. So I’m not sure that there’s much there to tackle considering the current topic.
Finishers
So we’re talking in terms of “Raids and even fractals” as the OP said, meaning we have to deal with finishers and other group buffs. In terms of group buffs, the qT “Realistic Boons” set does not include glyph of empowerment, yet it is an important bonus from Druids during a real fight. To help guide this section I’m gonna link a reddit thread from a month ago with some important links in the OP.
Contained is a Golem Benchmark video showing without (33.4k), and with combo finishers (36.2k) for Condi Thief. Also is a Padl log of Mursaat Overseer with a boss DPS of 37,299. Right off the bat I would note that there was a Glyph of Empowerment uptime of 43%.
The bonus from the whirl finishers resulted in a 2.8k DPS bump in a straight Golem fight. Condi Thief has 2 whirl finishers, Death Blossom, and Impaling Lotus. Let us compare this to Condi Ranger (If someone would like to Compare with Eng, pls do, cause I know like nothing about Eng). Condi Ranger has 1 guaranteed projectile combo finisher (Sb4), and 3 20% proc rate projectile finishers (Sb1, Axe1, and Axe2). There aren’t any numbers available on how much Ranger projectile combos add to DPS that I know of, but I would think it is lower compared to Thief just because of sheer proc rate. The Whirl Finishers of Thief seem to be the biggest imbalance’er of this DPS spectrum we have here. I might be totally wrong here, but iirc, all the currently 20% proc rate projectile finishers used to have a 100% proc rate. Perhaps the whirl finishers need a similar treatment? Any other kind of nerf that I can think of (for now) only hurts the core of Condi Thief. The issue here isn’t the solo play (Venomshare only works in a group btw – more below) as demonstrated by the non combo finisher Golem Benchmarks at the beginning, it’s how well the Condi Thief benefits from having others around (+2.8k DPS from fields).
“The Nature of Condi Thief”, and TLDR below. (I’m sorry, my wall of text is too big even for the system)
I love being able to know what’s up behind the scenes and if issues are being worked on! The issue tracker is great!
I see you mentioned the Tribal Armor set! Please don’t forget about the Stalwart set (I would swap to that in an instant if I could get my hands on it), and the other previously similarly attainable sets, that are now unattainable.
I too would love to see this set come back, in addition to other previously available PVP skins. Especially the Stalwart set; I for one would swap to that set in a heartbeat were it to become available again (the shoulder armor from that set is amazing and very versatile). Be it gems, crafting, or achievement grinding, I’d love to see these skin options come back.
Hey all, been playing the game, and as a thief, for ages now. Just got into the higher level fractals and ran into the Mistlock Instabilities, specifically: Boon Fumbler.
Question is, at what point of might stacks, or any other boon for that matter, does it become worth it to NOT dodge for the Bounding Dodger buff, if you’re aiming for max DPS? Or is it better it to just operate as if under normal circumstances? Has this been gone over mathematically at all, or is it just speculation?
I’m pretty certain that it’s better to just sit there and AA while under quickness, so dodging should be avoided then, unless its life or death. However, might, and specifically what stack of might, throws me for a loop.