Guild Wars 2

bbbbbbut zerglings are pr0 in SC

“zerging” lots of people together to take objectives as you say is actually an effective strategy, but “counter-zerging” i.e. intentionally not fighting/defending turf and just taking things in a big circle does not work well.

In my experiences, you must have a good amount of numbers to hold/attack certain objectives, mainly upgraded towers, heavily defended keeps/SM, but then you also need some organization to have a smaller squad flanking/taking out reinforcements. The term “zerg” is simply being misconstrued to mean multiple things. A “zerg” is not a negative technique, it simply must be a well-organized “zerg” for the most effectiveness

Exactly what sin said is what i mean. AoE around once they stealth, keep swinging away even if you can’t see them, and you’ll take em down. Or stop traveling alone and feeding us kills :P

I play a thief, and can’t see myself playing any other class. There is no other faster class, period. I’ve played with 10 or so different skill builds and just the basic thief is more mobile than any other class in the game.

(I currently build my thief to be even faster and stealthier than normal, so I usually can outpace other thieves and run away even from other thieves)

The way to balance a thief-like character is so hard, how can you balance out mobility/stealth characters fighting toughness/vitality? It’s just impossible to make a perfect balance.

Currently, the one true balance of the thief is that it is very un-forgiving. You mess up once and you will get insta-pwned, due to the lower base health/armor compared to other melee/~900 range max people.

Also, one must consider that thieves for all their offense and ability to pick and choose their fights, they’re not very “supportive” in nature. They’re opportunists which in their very nature makes them “annoying” to enemies, but in a long, drawn out battle their weaknesses are much more noticeable.

Another interesting thing to note is the initiative system- the best technique for a thief to be effective generally requires spamming something in one quick burst (of speed or damage), but elongated battles again aren’t as effective. Once I’m out of initiative, and i’ve burned a few cooldowns in my utility/heal/steal, I’m generally dying a few seconds later, not able to finish off the target or get away.

tl/dr:
Thieves? Annoying. Overpowered? Perhaps, but not as much as people think.

p.s. seriously, all the posts about “thief abusing mechanics from the non-rendering bull kitty stuff” you need to just shut up and let aNet do their best to fix it. You couldn’t possibly even consider that it’s even harder on thieves than other classes when you have zergs of 100s of invisible enemies? Like I said, a thief is the least forgiving of mistakes. Charging in on what you thought was 1 lone target happens to be 50 bloodthirsty enemies ain’t exactly easy to escape with any thief build

I’ve noticed a similar bug multiple times perhaps at some camps with the guild claimer being “invulnerable” but not determined but another buff.

However, instead of being completely invulnerable the guy will take anything from mostly 0 damage from attacks to up to like 5 or so. Also he’ll appear “immune” to conditions but they sometimes show up as affecting him for like a 1/10th of a second. This tends to happen when tons of people are surrounding and taking a camp.

I gather that he might supposed to be invulnerable til all the other NPCs die in the camp, but this continues to happen after all the NPCs are dead, and we generally have to either whittle him down taking a long period of time or wait until the invulnerability buff leaves randomly.

Anyone else witnessing this?

What’s the point in a daily jumping puzzle that takes a long time, in each BG, giving rewards? I understand having something that will give you a 1-time benefit, but daily rewards across all WvW that are inherently NOT related to fighting does not make sense.

Perhaps instead of daily “jumping puzzles” we should have daily WvW-related quests, such as capture or defend a tower or camp, defend or kill dolyaks, get a certain number of WvW kills, that sort of thing would make more sense.

Eve would have scheduled events with at least 24 hours notice, such as POSes and stations coming out of reinforcement, so CCP could swap a ton of servers to that node over night.

With GW2, though, someone brought up this point that it could be 250 people randomly charging to any one area of a battle ground, so you can’t prepare more server-power for the fights as needed.

And yeah… eve time dilatation at 90%+ is NOT a fix to lag… Not saying that this culling system is the greatest fix either… but if aNet could at least give us the name plates to know an enemy is there it would be nice.

What would work then is to simply make it if you transferred servers recently you cannot participate in WvW for a bit of time.

^^ yeah the world bonuses are epic.

http://www.gw2db.com/skills/calc/thief#19|0|2642|2631|3997|6677|11435|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|20|2199|746|0|30|727|1700|2354|20|2419|786|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|

WvW Scout shortbow: High mobility, speed and stealth combined with excellent single target crowd control every 30 seconds. Hold them til your allies come to destroy them.

This is NOT a solo PVP build and is pretty worthless in pve.

thief WvW is full of possibilities, which I love. I don’t love that I have to spend a few silver each time I wanna change it tho :P

Started w/ a heavy crit/power build with 15 trickery for the extra initiative. Don’t forget to have a shortbow as your 2ndary weapon cuz of that 5 skill to get away/run faster.

Now I’m running a completely different setup which does NOT work solo, but it is extremely useful with some allies.

Shortbow mainly with double dags for one on ones- Set your skills to have Devourer Venom, Signet of Shadows, Scorpion Wire. Elite skill: Basilisk’s venom

20 Shadow Arts: Infusion of Shadow & Hidden Thief
30 Acrobatics: Fleet Shadow & Fleet of Foot & Hard to Catch
20 Trickery: Thrill of the Crime & Instinctual Response

Basically, you’re reallllly hard to catch. You’re a scout, an initiator into a big group then you GTFO using evade to get the Expeditious Dodger proc and your 12 different ways of teleporting around. You have the scorpion wire which is amazing combined with your basilisk’s venom followed by the devourer venom to snag someone off the top of the wall or away from their allies and lock them in place.

Your steal cloaks you so your next attack will immobilize, and you’re faster moving while stealthed. Add on top of that your 3 with the shortbow or 4 with the daggers to slow people down, and noone gets away from me unless they dodge the basilisk’s venom

The big downer though is of course, you won’t do a single bit of damage (okay maybe a little condition dmg but not really), so you really do depend on having allies with you to finish the suckers off. This will work well if you have comms with a small gang. you ctrl t your target and announce you got it tackled or something (Eve reference, this is totally an interceptor)

And this is a totally different WvW build than my buddy’s. Honestly I think you could go 10 different routes with a thief. I just focused on speed and stealth. Heck I think you could make a dank aoe support/healing thief with the right setup.

to go back on topic, if you are low level, great things to do include repairing gates/walls, and manning things like catapults, arrow carts and trebuchets. you could be a lvl 1 and you’ll do the same effectiveness that a lvl 80 does with those.

As for build/traits, I swap my skills and traits out for more of a pvp focus (at least the roman numeral abilities). Remember the best things to stack in WvWvW are speed and survivability. As a ranger you should be constantly sniping with the longbow with that raining arrows ability (slows n damages in a big aoe) for the most range so you can “kitten” on kills from afar without dying. Also, abilities that give aoe buffs like quickness or might is very useful when you’re with a big group of allies.

Just don’t try to solo anyone… When I first WvWvW at lvl 20 somethin I saw an afk thief and i was pounding away for a good 30 seconds and he got down to like 50%. he eventually realized what was happening and healed and popped an elite skill and I melted in seconds.

and sure, WvW is certainly worthwhile at low levels, learning the systems and maps at little to no cost, why not?

I for one love it when the Anvil Rock zerg is taking stuff and then leaving them undefended Makes it more fun for everyone since not everything is blue anymore.

If your server is winning WvW, you can easily make tons of coin and karma. Taking over 1 farm with 2 dolyaks chilling there gives you quite a large boost of income.

Without upgrades, and if you run away from key fights which revolve around events such as defend the tower or taking a zone, you won’t make good money— in fact you’ll probably lose some from the repair bill.

I think the bulk of NSP WvWvW’ers were smart in saving our money til it actually mattered (who wants to invest in only 1 day of pvp) :P

Also just a note I love how much NSP is always rezzing. Huge battles can turn around if you get your people up again.

Honestly this is a totally different NSP than it was before, and we and everyone down in the lower brackets just got screwed by something the “math” of the server rankings can’t calculate.

As for hacking and logging off, bots are prevalent in every game and server, do your job to report them to aNet