Guild Wars 2

Turk.5460:

Perfice.4097:

Can someone explain to me why everyone hates the Deadeye so much already when noone has even tried it?

Because people on the forums are never satisfied fully by anything that’s outside of their own personal control. This includes profession development and video game mechanics that do not follow that individual’s personal playstyle to the “T”

I think it’s more along the lines of people suspecting DrD to be an objectively better specialization in all or most areas of the game compared to DE.

DE has to sacrifice mobility for damage, which is new but questionable to some. Conceptually that works fine, but when you look at the numbers DrD seems to have comparable DPS that’s also AoE while also staying mobile.

Malice can produce an inherent +21% damage increase on a single target, but it takes time to ramp up to that cap. DrD has an inherent +27% damage increase all the time to everyone he hits, targeted or not.

There’s a potential build for DE that can make it an effective Might bot that can perma stack 20 stacks of might easily, but there’s question if it’s worth taking over a PS warrior.

People are upset because the DE just looks like it doesn’t do what DrD, or other classes, can’t do better.

grayskull.2367:

Deadeye is not a 1v1 build its a 1v2, its best used when you opponent is busy fight some one else, so you can take a sniper shot at them catching the off guard its a ambush class like the warrior kill shot build was.

crap 1v1 Amazing 1v2 load of troll potential XD

From what I heard on WP’s stream, Deadeye has to mark an opponent and then he’ll start doing more damage to his mark as he hits them. So basically, he has to mark the opponent for a while before he can start doing really big damage.

If you want to use rifle, that means you have to shoot your opponent a bunch (which grabs their attention), then you have to use 5 to set up and immobilize yourself, and fire away with 4.

You might be right that it’s a 1v2 spec, because I don’t see that working well 1v1.

Hey, welcome back!

I actually just came back after a year and a half myself, and have been slowly reintroducing myself to fractals and raids. I’ve found that the obvious metabattle thief build, Staff DPS Da/Cs/DD, is probably the thief’s best build for pve. The one change I made to it is instead of having No quarter, the CS grandmaster, I changed it to Invigorating Precision. Because of how much damage you do, that 1 trait can basically keep you fully healed, which will proc your scholar runes and flawless strike trait more often, and keep you alive much easier to help carry your team if needed. This 1 change has made fractals a breeze.

For the offhand, I usually either have shortbow if we are stacking fields (stealth, might, swiftness), or otherwise I have an offhand pistol for an on demand smokefield for stealth or trash mobs.

For the third utility, I switch between blinding powder (to use in conjuction with smoke fields for longer stealth or ressing) or fist flurry for even more damage.

And finally, I switch to unhindered combatant (second DD grandmaster) while doing stuff in the open world for easy navigation or in the swamp fractal for an effortless orb run.

Hope that helps!

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQJAWVn8lCFOhNOBWmCkmiFaCbLPNcqQaBgJUEYuCuBHhA-TRRBABRcJAA4JAYmSQKV/5q9HlffDCAYVFA-e

I started playing gw2 during the betas and release, and stuck with the game all the way until HoT released. However, about a month after HoT, just before raids landed, I lost interest in the game and stopped playing.

After watching WoodenPotatoes’s review of HoT, I decided to come back and try the game again, and found myself enjoying messing around with the new specializations.

I was hoping someone would be kind of enough to give me a quick primer of what I missed out on in the past 1 and a half years I’ve been absent. And also, if I wanted to start getting into fractals and raids, what sort of things will I need to get or do beforehand?

Thanks.

/15characterlimit

The starter zones are balanced such that everything is mindlessly easy to kill. Combat starts to get a bit more involving and demanding at higher level zones, but to be entirely honest the game really is too easy overall.

That is why they are making an expansion, Heart of Thorns, and focusing on hard-core end game content. They have made challenging content before (like Liadri) so I have some confidence in their ability to deliver on that.

I would suggest trying to get at least half way through the level 15-30 zones before you make your final judgement. At the very least, make it out of the starter zone before you judge the difficulty. But if you’re used to playing on hard difficulties, the open world will definitely be easy for you.

In that sense, I would suggest you try sPvP, where you fight other players. If you’re new to the game, I can promise you’ll have a steep learning curve in that mode.

Just got done watching the PoI today which showcased the Daredevil spec for the thief. After seeing it in action and getting a chance to analyze all of the skills, I wanted to take the time to write down my first impressions of the specialization and discuss its apparent strengths and weaknesses. I’m aware that it may be a bit preemptive to judge the spec before I’ve even had the chance to test it myself, but I feel having a bit of insightful discussion before we can play it would be useful for both us, as players, and the devs, to see our expectations and overall impressions. So, to start with:

SPECIALIZATION MECHANIC

The daredevil elite specialization grants us access to the Staff, Physical utilities, and an extra 50 endurance, giving us an extra dodge. Overall, I’m happy with this. While I’m a little disappointed steal wasn’t touched and we didn’t get anything “new” and shiny, more endurance is very fitting for the thief, and it’s nice to see that dodging and evading in particular is the profession’s theme, making it stand out from the other 8 professions.

TRAITS

Minor

• Enforcer Training – Allows access to Daredevil mechanics.
• Driven Fortitude – Heal ~ 500 hp every time you evade an attack on a 1 second cooldown. Awesome trait. This will help us to sustain in a fight and will reward skillful play (or spamming dodges, however you want to look at it.) I’m glad it’s baseline and not something we have to choose.
• Endurance Thief – Gain 50 endurance (or 1 dodge) when you successfully steal. While I love the thought of this skill, and will be abusing the hell out of it, I’m somewhat disappointed yet more effects are tacked onto steal. However, it fits in theme with the spec and will allow the thief to last longer in fights by allowing him more opportunities to avoid attacks. Can be used both defensively and offensively (given the new grandmasters). Very good trait.

Adept

• Evasive Empowerment – Do 10% more damage on next attack after a dodge roll. Interesting concept. It makes our dodges more offensive and is something we can trigger when we want, meaning we can wither react to it in a fight or use it to set up a burst. Somewhat plain, but it works and fits well at adept tier.
• Weakening Strikes – Apply 5 seconds of weakness to enemies when you critically hit them on a 10 second cooldown. This is effectively 50% uptime of weakness, which will help tremendously on staying alive. However, it only works for power builds, alienating condi. Also, it’s a passive, meaning there’s no counterplay to it. Additionally, what makes or breaks this trait is if the effect can only trigger every 10 seconds or if it triggers every 10 seconds per opponent. If it’s the former, then the trait is bad and lackluster. If it’s the later, then It will see some use.
• Brawler’s Tenacity – Gain 10 endurance when you use a physical skill, and physcial skills have 20% reduced cooldown. Seems a little simple to me, and I’m unsure how useful 10 endurance for a utility is going to be. This depends if each activation of a physical grants endurance (such as each dagger throw on distracting daggers or each chain hit on the elite) or if it is just 10 endurance for using the slot. Obviously, the former is preferable. If it’s the latter, it seems rather lackluster.

Master

• Staff Master – While wielding a staff, each point of initiative you spend will restore endurance (I believe it was 2 endurance per initiative), and you will deal 10% additional damage with the staff while your endurance is not full. I like this trait and also dislike like, for different reasons. On the positive end, It helps us sustain by constantly restoring our endurance, allowing us to fight longer. On the negative end, the trait seems somewhat self-conflicting. One half of the trait helps restore endurance while the other half requires us to use endurance. While this can be argued as a positive rather than a negative, the concept itself feels weird to me.
• Escapist’s Absolution – Remove 1 condition every time you evade an attack on a 1 second cooldown. This sounds to me like the most useful and powerful trait within the Daredevil spec, and will arguably be mandatory in any non-gimmick build. It’s just so strong and useful. The thief’s biggest weakness is his inability to reliably cleanse conditions and has forced many thieves to go into shadow arts for the ability to deal with them. With this trait, along with the plethora of ways to restore endurance and the built in evades of our weapons, we finally have an answer to our weakness without relying on stealth. We’ll have to see how balanced this is, but I’m suspecting we’ll see the cooldown increase on this trait. Otherwise, this is a godsend.
• Impacting Disruption – Every time you interrupt an enemy, they will take massive damage after a delay. This is an exciting trait that opens up the possibility of interrupt thieves (along with disrupting daggers, pistolwhip, and other various stuns/dazes we now have). I’m very excited to try s/p with this trait, but ultimately I can’t see this competing with Escapist’s Absolution. We already do so much damage, tacking on a little more isn’t going to help us as much as improving our survivability.

Grand Master

• Lotus Training – Our dodge roll turns into a mobile death blossom, throwing daggers at enemies and inflicting bleeding, torment, and cripple. It is also a whirl finisher. This is an interesting skill and will help supplement condition builds. However, aside from that fact, it seems kind of boring. Condition builds will take it, but it feels lackluster compared to the other 2 grand masters.
• Unhindered Combatant – Replaces our dodge roll with a dash that travels farther than a normal dodge roll, removes cripple and chill, ad applies 8 seconds of swiftness. It can also move in 8 directions. This is an awesome skills, and very reminiscent of GW1. Being able to remove cripple and chill on every dodge roll seems stupidly powerful, and having the ability to stack up swiftness like that is awesome. This means our dodge roll can be used both defensively and for mobility outside of combat.
• Bounding Dodger – Turns our dodge roll into a leap finisher than does massive aoe damage at the end on the animation. I LOVE this trait. It does more damage than I was expecting, doing around 3k damage on crits with a marauder amulet. Jesus. But, even if the damage wasn’t there, this being a leap finisher is enough to make me want to take it. With this trait, this means you can stealth with offhand pistol without using heartseeker. s/p and p/p now have reliable stealth, which will increase their survivability and utility. I’m absolutely loving thinking about all the things I can do with this trait alone. Good job Anet.

Overall, traits looks very good. There are problems with the adept traits, with the first 2 only being useful in a power build and are useless in a condi build. And the last trait, Brawler’s Tenacity is only situationally useful if you have a lot of physical skills. But chances are you’ll only have 1-2 physicals, and 10 endurance for a utility slot is not worth it. Meaning if you want to go condition, your adept trait choice is pretty much wasted and not that useful.

Additionally, While Escapist’s Absolution is amazing, it is arguably too much so. It’s a clear go-to trait that most will likely never stray from, making the other 2 skills, while interesting in their own right, overshadowed.

On the plus side, there are a lot of ways to restore your endurance among these traits, and nearly any build you create with the daredevil will utilize your dodge rolls in unique and effective ways that other professions won’t be able to, making us unique.

STAFF SKILLS

• Staff Strike -> Staff Bash -> Punishing Strikes – Our autoattack chain. Each hit will attack 3 enemies, and PS is a whirl finisher. It also applies 4 stacks of vulnerability. The animation of the staff looks somewhat weird, but I’ll get over it. There’s not much to say about this skill. It works, well enough, and does decent damage. Seems to be between sword and dagger in terms of damage.
• Hook Strike – Our stealth skill, this will knock down an enemy for 2 seconds. This is amazing, and brings back nostalgia of Assassins from GW1. It’s powerful because the staff has no means to stealth by itself. However, because of Bounding dodger, we can easily use a black powder, dodge through it, swap to staff, and hook stafkittenteal. From there, we can do anything we want, such as spikeing with our skill 5 or stunning them with our elite. Exciting stuff.
• Weakening Charge – Charge forward a set distance while hitting 3 times and weakening foes. It’s also a whirl finisher. 3 initiative. Weakness is very useful for a thief, and considering this is aoe that will help too. However, this skill is also somewhat flawed in that it locks you into an animation and doesn’t seem to dodge attacks while doing so. Staff being a melee weapon without stealth, weakness will be imperative to keep up, which will make us want to use this skill frequently. That being the case, that can make us predictable and set us up to be bursted as we are stuck in our animation lock. This skill would be better without the built in movement.
• Debilitating Arc – Strike enemies, applying cripple, and remove immobilize while evading backwards. 4 initiative. This is basically a better disabling shot, and will more than likely be the skill that keeps us alive. Being able to remove immobilize on demand if huge, and coupled with Unhindered Combatant will make us effectively immune to movement impairing conditions. Amazing skill.
• Dust Strike – Blind up to 3 foes in front of you up to 600 range away. Does a small amount of damage. 4 initiative. While I understand the intention, I can’t but help feel this skill is missing something. A single blind for 4 initiative feels way too costly, as the skill does nothing else. It could be a decent skill to engage with, but there are better options to use, such as setting up a stealth or casting a burst and stealing to an opponent. If an enemy is in melee range, Debilitating arc is more useful, as that will evade, apply cripple, deal more damage, and give you health on the evade (from the minor) for the same cost. It can also remove a condition if traited. I’m finding it hard to justify using this skill over others in any scenario. Lackluster and needs some work.
• Vault – Ground targeted leap finisher that deals significant aoe damage upon landing. 6 initiative. This is your hard hitting skill, and holy crap does it hit hard. It was hitting for 6-7k on crits with marauder’s gear. Fantastic for engaging, covering distance, or following up a CC (hook strike anyone?). Awesome skill.

Overall, staff seems okay. There are some very strong pros to the weapon, such as the kockdown, whirl and leap finishers, blind, weakness, cripple, as well as the amazing utility of Debilitating Arc. However, Weakening charge is risky as it locks you into an animation, and dust strike is underwhelming and overshadowed in both usage and utility from Debilitating Arc.

UTILITIES

• Channeled Vigor – Our heal which pulses 3 times, healing and restoring 25 endurance with each pulse. If our endurance is already full, we heal for more. Skills lasts for 2 1/4 seconds and is on a 20 second cooldown. While the endurance regain is nice (even more endurance regain, my god), the worst part of this skill is it locks you in place and lasts too long. Compare it to withdraw, which is instant and an evade, or hide in shadow, which heals for more and stealths you. Both also remove conditions and have, overall, much more utility. There’s little reason to choose this over them. Here are the main problems with this skill.

1. You are locked in place, making you an easy target. Thieves survive by avoiding damage, they can’t take it well. Thus, having a skill that locks us in place (or locks us in an animation) is incredibly risky. The heal we get is not worth the risk we take for it. We can easily lose all the health we regain in those 2 seconds.
2. While regaining endurance is nice, let’s be realistic here. We already have SO MUCH endurance regain from this spec inherently. From stealing, to using initiative, to using energy sigils and signet of agility, we likely are not going to be sparse with endurance.

• Bandit’s Defense – A 1 second block that will knock down an enemy in melee range if he hits you. It’s a stun break and has a 15 second cooldown. I love this skill. I love the concept, and have always wanted a block for the thief (though i always imagined it on the staff or offhand sword and not a utility). Having another way to CC the opponent is tasty, and having a stun break on such a short cooldown is nice. While there are potentially better utilities to pick for PvP, this will definitely be my go to defensive utility for PvE.
• Impairing Daggers – Throw 3 daggers at the target, each dagger applying poison, slow, and immobilize. Has 900 range, does a hefty amount of damage, and has a 25 second cooldown. While I didn’t like the description of this skill at first, seeing the damage it does sold me on it. While I’d like to see it on a shorter cooldown, the immobilize and slow are very useful in setting up an opponent for a safe burst (such as vault). However, I dislike this skill in that it overshadows already existing utilities, such as devourer and spider venom. Why would you ever choose those skill over this one, when this has a shorter cooldown, does damage, and also applies slow? I Love the concept of this skill, but I dislike it making other already existing skills obsolete.
• Distracting Daggers – Equip 3 daggers that can be thrown to interrupt a target. If a skill is interrupted, that skill has an increased cooldown of 10 seconds. The 3 daggers last 15 seconds, and the skill has a 25 second cooldown after that. I love the concept of this skill, and it makes me excited to try a shutdown/interrupt daredevil with pistol whip and impacting disruption. This skill also means you have the option to interrupt key skills, such as heals, when you don’t have offhand pistol equipped, which is useful. This will see some use, albeit somewhat infrequent.
• Fist Flurry -> Palm Strike Strike the enemy 5 times in melee range, dealing some damage. If you land all 5 strikes, gain access to Palm strike, which is a single, powerful strike that stuns the enemy for 2 seconds and deals massive damage at the end of the stun. 20 second cooldown. While Palm strike is exciting, I can’t say I like Fist Flurry all that much. I understand the need for a risk-reward skill, but we sacrifice a utility slot, often needed for our survival for this. To use that slot for a little damage (which we don’t need) and a stun seems lackluster to me. In order to guarantee this to hit, it feels like we’ll need to CC the foe before hand, such as using hook strike. One one hand, this skill is cool as it will allow us to continue to chain CC an opponent for multiple seconds if used in conjunction with other skills. (Just like GW1 Assassin, yaaaaaay). On the other hand, the amount of damage this skill does amounts to a crited vault, backstab, or pistol whip, and taking up a utility slot for something we’ll pretty much always have seems kind of…lame. Using a utility slot for damage is inefficient on the thief, which makes the skill only useful for the stun it provides. But, you will not always get access to that stun, making the skill unreliable. You may as well Choose scorpion wire if you want a CC, or better yet, blinding powder or shadow refuge to gain access to Hook strike on the staff.

• Impact Strike -> Uppercut -> Finishing Blow – Honestly, I feel like this skill should have been on the berserker, but I digress. This is a cool concept. Impact strike will daze a target for 2 seconds. If you hit, you gain access to uppercut, which does decent damage and launches the foe in place. Land that, and you get access to Finishing Blow, which also does moderate damage and will automatically finish the enemy if he goes down from the skill or is already downed. The elite is on a 40 second cooldown. There’s a lot of flavor in this skill, and many will choose it simply because of that, but I have to put int question how useful this skill will really be. If we’re fighting an opponent, say 1 on 1, is a 2 second daze and a launch on a 40 second cooldown that useful? That remains to be seen. The real draw of this skill is being able to instantly kill a foe with this if you down someone with it. Meaning a lot of daredevils will want to save this skill until the very end of a fight. But, it has a very short window. Do it too soon, and you wasted the skill. Do it too late, and you should have just stomped like normal. If you’re trying to stomp someone in a team fight, this skill is not that useful because the CCs will be applied to the downed opponent, not his teammates. The whole chain takes almost 3 seconds, which means it lasts longer than a normal stomp. Thus, the actual use of the skill is very limited.

Overall, there’s a lot of ups and downs with the utilities. Bandit’s Defense and Impairing Daggers are very promising and Distracting Daggers is interesting enough to create builds around it. However, Fist Flurry is a questionable skill to use and Channeled Vigor simply can’t compare to Withdraw (which honestly fits better with the Daredevil) or Shadow Refuge. And our Elite skill seems limited only to PvP, and only in very strict conditions. This may hint at some content in PvE, but given that the mechanics of this skill are only available for the Daredevil they won’t be required for any PvE content. The elite is simply flavor and not much more.

CONCLUSION

Anyways, that was much longer than I had anticipated it to be. If you managed to make it though all of this, then I thank you for spending your time on this and I would love to hear your thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with anything? Did I miss anything?

Anyways, The Daredevil looks very promising and I can’t wait to play it. It was the final push I needed to settle down and Buy HoT, so I’ll be trying it out in the next Beta event. I’ll update my impressions after I get to try it hands on.

Thanks for Reading. Cheers!

I don’t see why people are assuming your dodge will reveal you if it hit someone, heartseeker does the same thing and doesn’t reveal you if it hits.

I only bring the question of s/p being meta because it has problems with survivability. It doesn’t have built in evades, so it needs shadow arts or acrobatics to survive. But with the nerf acrobatics and no inherent stealth on the set, you die really fast and makes the set really gimmicky.

Now, with daredevil, we have the ability to stealth and have a third endurance bar, which could solve the survivability problems with s/p. If it can survive, it can offer potentially more than d/p. It has an engager, just like d/p 3, as well as a condi clear. It cleaves and does weakness on auto. Pistolwhip does about as much as backstab, only is more spammable, hits 3 people, and interrupts often (which triggers pulminary impact for more damage).

Honestly, it does everything d/p does only with less blinds and more weakness, condi clear, and interrupts.

You have to consider that thieves who get stealth from heartseeker stay in stealth even if they hit with the attack. It could easily be the same for Bounding Dodger. But, even if it isn’t, having the ability to stealth with any offhand weapon is huge and adds a lot more options for any given scenario.

s/p new meta

The daredevil’s grandmaster traits all change its dodge in some way. One grandmaster, Bounding dodger, changes our dodge into a leap finisher that damages at the end. This is huge, as now a thief can use offhand pistol to stealth without the use of heartseeker. This means p/p and s/p now have access to a reliable means of stealth.

There is also a master trait, impacting disruption, that triggers a pulmonary impact every time you interrupt an opponent, which is something pistol whip, head shot, and sword’s stealth attack are awesome at.

So what do you guys think of this? Will s/p + impacting disruption become the new meta? Or do you think d/p is still superior?

While it’s considered acceptable to use a script to playing music in the game, you have to understand the point of view of the people who play music without scripts. These people put in a lot of time to learn how to play the instruments in game and also a lot of time converting music to tabs for those instruments. While it’s nice that everyone has the ability to play their instruments well, even if not everyone is musically inclined, it’s still somewhat insulting to the people who genuinely learned how to play when you use a script.

It’s like you’re playing an instrument with a group of people at a party, and people are gathering around you to enjoy what you’re playing. Maybe you make a mistake here and there, but overall it’s a nice experience. Then a stranger walks up to the group, pulls out his iphone, and starts playing some mp3s of recordings to everyone (most of these recordings he didn’t even make himself). And then everyone starts gathering around him. It’s insulting to the person who put out actual effort.

I tried using some scripts to play some songs in game for a day. While it was really cool to see what crazy stuff the in game instruments could do, it got boring quickly. It felt no different from listening to a recording, and made me question why I was even on playing at all. It is so much more entertaining to put out the effort and play it yourself. As a musician, I feel you should think the same way.

I want to iterate that I do think the scripts are pretty cool. But it’s all in how they are used. In many scenarios I’ve seen, people use the scrips to 1-up people who are playing in game, and I’ve seen people try to claim their scripted songs were them legitimately playing as well.

You should be playing the game for one purpose: to have fun. And you should be able to have fun as you like. But when your idea of fun steps and spits on others’ idea of fun, that’s when I have a problem. And people who use scripts for in-game songs tend to stray into that territory.

Ouroboros.5076:

Make dying PENALIZING, like GW1’s death penalty, and steadily increase rez time each time you die.

I completely agree with this statement.

Yesterday, I played a game on my thief. The hero channel spawned on the enemy’s side, so I decided to go over and try to capture the point or prevent the enemy team from getting it. When I got there, I had to do a 1v2 while consistently interrupting the person who was trying to channel while I was distracted from his teammate.

After about a minute, a third person from the enemy team showed up, and I had to back off until finally someone from my team showed up to help me. We ended up slowly killing each person and won the 2v3, but before we could finish capturing the channel the first person we killed already re spawned and cc’d us. A few seconds later everyone we had killed showed up at the spawn again, and we fought over it for a second time.

This lasted for over 5 minutes and turned into a 2v4 at that point. We had killed each person at least 3-4 times during this but it didn’t matter because of how fast and how close they re spawned. They just kept spawn-rushing us and we eventually lost because of it, and they got the channel in the end.

We still won the match because we distracted most of their team for 5 minutes, but that situation should never have happened in the first place. It’s one thing to give both hero channels an advantage to each team, it’s another to make dieing completely inconsequential or advantageous at points.

As said above, a thief who is paying attention can easily deal with lich form. However, a lich form that catches you off guard can pretty much insta-kill you.

I’ve seen lich autos that crit for over 6k on a thief. Thats half of our total hp. Add the spinal shivers trait and air/fire runes, a lich auto has the potential to one shot a thief if it lands. Given that, a thief who doesn’t see the lich form or doesn’t have the initiative or cooldowns to get away will pretty much be guaranteed to die. Especially if the thief was below 50%.

IGN: Lokí (í = alt + 0237)

Playstyle: sPvP (Mostly) / PvE (Sometimes) / WvW (Rarely)

Server: Sanctum of Rall

Experience: My thief is my first and main character, and I have been playing him since early access and the pre-launch betas. I’ve played the game on and off since release, having only around 2500 hours total in game time (I don’t afk). About 1800 of those hours are on my thief, with a majority of that time in sPvP.

While I consider it a bit arrogant to claim myself to be “high-class”, I feel it is safe to say I know how to play a thief and how to play it well in all formats due to my experience and sPvP focus with the game. I win most of my 1v1s on a thief (especially against other thieves) and I almost never die in a match anymore. I’m also well versed in all of the main builds and weapon sets for the thief.

I’ve also spent some time helping newbie players learn pvp and specific builds, albeit not always on a thief specifically. I’ll leave it up to the leaders of the guild to decide if I’m fit enough to help other players, but I’m mainly joining so I can learn myself. I feel there is always room to improve, and I would love an opportunity to play with some other experienced thieves and learn from them. Of course, if it is found that I am fit to help others, I’ll be more than happy to share my knowledge to those who ask. Though, I find that, like with most things, the best teacher is experience, and having actual 1-on-1 duels and instruction will help more than any answer to a question about theory or mechanics.

I’m looking forward to see what comes of this.

I’ve played off and on since beta, but when I do play I usually play in spvp. Thus, I never really spent enough time in PvE to save up a lot of gold for legendaries and other prestigious things. However, I do have a few things I’m proud of.

1) Storm Wizard’s Greatsword – This is the yellow version of the super adventure box skins. You could only get it from completing tribulation mode on world 2 of SAB. I hold this skin highly as almost no one in the game actually has a tribulation mode skin, so it is one of the most rare skins in the game. It also shows a level of skill and mastery of the game for getting it.

I would have had more of these skins, but I was on vacation when the patch landed. I got back the last day of the patch, and had under 5 hours to get the skin. I ended up staying awake all night long trying to get it. Additionally, I had a really bad computer at the time, and it would overheat easily. At the end of the last zone, right before the final boss, my computer started overheating.

When my computer overheated, pressing 2 skills at the same time would cause gw2 to minimize. None of my hotkeys for my skills worked, and I couldn’t strafe right for whatever reason. I completed the end of the last zone of world 2 and the final boss under those conditions. Upon beating the final boss, with under an hour before the patch ended, I had never felt so invested into the game as I had then. I consider that skin as a trophy of one of the hardest challenges I have ever done, especially considering I had a major handicap to overcome.

2) Liadri mini – Another skill based achievement, you could only get this mini from beating the final boss of the Queen’s Gauntlet, Liadri. She was notorious for being one of, if not the, hardest fight(s) in the game. I beat Liadri on my fourth try during the first Queen’s Jubilee.

The value of the mini somewhat went down as during the second Jubilee people were able to cheese out the fight with a life-stealing necro build, and didn’t have to actually complete the fight under the harsh second phase. Nonetheless, it is still a trophy of my mastery of the game.

3) Incinerator – Playing the game since beta, I was able to scavenge up enough gold to buy spark when it was around 500 gold. From doing map completion on 3 characters, and being a horrible hoarder, I was able to create my gift of might and magic with little investment.

4) Selfless and Thoughtless Potions – During the attack of Lions Arch, you could collect Found Heirlooms from piles of rubble. You could buy a Potion for 250 Heirlooms. However, you could only get an heirloom from a pile of rubble once per 24 hours. These potions give you a halo and devil horns respectively. Again, not many people have these items because of the amount of time and dedication required to farm up 250 Heirlooms. I am proud of these items because I invested the time to get 500 heirlooms, to get 1 of each potion. Plus they look really cool.

Learn to use shortbow effectively. It is absolutely devastating against d/p thieves.

d/p thieves have a clear giveaway of when they are going to stealth. They pop their blackpoweder and then heartseeker through it, most of the time towards you. As Jrunyon said, heartseeker locks the thief in its animation, and will travel a set distance. You can exploit that animation lock and interrupt them with a traited steal, or you can use cloak and dagger on where you predict they will land.

However, you can also exploit that animation lock and deal massive damage to them with clusterbomb. When the thief heartseekers towards you, switch to shortbow and clusterbomb at your feet/where he will land. Then, start kiting and throw a few more clusterbombs at your feet. This will either punish the thief for following you and force him to retreat, or he will have wasted his stealth because he couldn’t approach you.

A thief who takes 2 direct clusterbombs will usually come out of stealth super low. You can just pick him off from a distance then.

Additionally, you can use your shortbow #3 to give yourself extra evades. Use it when you think he may try to backstab you. If you see an evade when you use it, he’s in range of your clusterbomb.

I normally play d/p thief, as I’ve done since beta. Lately I’ve been getting bored with d/p’s playstyle so I decided to try s/d for a change of pace.

Yesterday I was playing mostly in hotjoin for fun. During this time, I occasionally fought another thief and ended up winning most of the 1v1s. After a few wins, they would rage at me in map chat saying how I’m horrible and then ragequit. Trying to mail them showed me they blocked me. This happened 6 times.

I never said anything, I literally just won a few fights, got raged at, and then was instablocked. I found this odd as people normally never block me, even when I’m being a total troll. And in 1 day, 6 random people blocked me for no reason other than they lost to another thief.

I’m calling bullkitten on the op.

First, it makes no sense to have a macro on thief. All of their skills have an animation of some sort. All of the instant cast skills are shadowsteps or evades. Those are reactionary skills, you would handicap yourself by having a program use them under specific timings.

For elementalist, swapping attunments puts all other attunments on a half second cooldown, preventing you from swapping through all 4 instantly. A lot of really good scepter eles have their keybinds in such as way that they can execute their combos really fast. If you’ve ever watched a scepter combo tutorial on youtube, many of them do their full burst combo in under a second.

If you’re dieing from a chain of lightning strikes then that person is hacking; he’s not using a macro.

mUnROIDs.4629:

So, I’m a male asuran and with all my armor piece everything is too squashed and just becomes too busy. Hiding the chest piece changes all that I simply look beautiful.

Is there any kind of transmorg item that i can use of a skin that makes my chest item barely visable??

Help, I’m tired of being ugly

There is no hide chest option, but there are some armors in the game that show a lot of the bare chest.

For light armor you have:

• Feathered (or Flamekissed)
• Tribal (if you were lucky enough to get it before pvp rewards changed)

For Heavy Armor you have:

• Gladiator
• Barbaric
• Pit Fighter (or Flamewrath)
• Scallywag (I recommend this if you’re a heavy class)
• Braham

Medium armor, unfortunately, doesn’t have any such skins.

Vayne.8563:

The funny bit is, if people analzyed what you said, what I said, what anyone said with the same degree of scrutiny that Anet gets, none of us would be safe.

We put too much on each word, each syllable. It’s so people at Anet can’t talk, can’t say anything. They should walk around saying what? We’re not going to show you a profession this week so we can show you something mediocre?

I think people need to embrace reality a bit.

It’s important to note that the reason why people put such an outrageous emphasis on any and every little thing a dev says is because we have been conditioned to do so from being completely in the dark in terms of the game’s development. Anet does not tells us ANYTHING until it’s practically done and finalized. This leads to ridiculously long periods of time where we simply don’t know what is being developed or changed.

Thus, we latch onto any word that may indicate what is in store because that is all we have to go on. If Anet was more open with their development process and communicated more with the community people wouldn’t be so preemptive in every little thing that is said.

Yes, people may react if they are looking forward to a feature and it doesn’t turn out the way it was originally advertised. But the outlash is, again, caused by a lack of communication.

There are a few channels on youtube that are owned by indie devs, and every few weeks they update their channel explaining the new changes into the games they make. Some of these changes drastically alter the game and planned mechanics, and there have been some disappointments to come from them. However, I’ve never seen any negative criticisms or outlashes from the comments when there are, and I attribute that largely to the amount of communication that community receives from the devs.

I know it’s Anet’s policy to not talk about things until they are finalized. I just think it’s a horrible policy that makes things worse rather than not.

Can’t tell if serious or just a troll.

If you’re using DS just to prolong your death then you aren’t using DS correctly. It has CC, mobility, condition damage, and hard hitting attacks. It’s also a secondary life bar that you can use to sustain and wait for cooldowns to recharge. Needless to say, it’s super powerful with all forms of builds.

Saying not to use DS to see how strong necromancers really are is like saying not to use any clones or illusions on mesmer and see how strong it really it. Classes are built around their primary mechanics. If you don’t like the mechanic, then play a new class. It’s not going to change.

Thanks for the response Necrotize. I didn’t think hard enough about Continuum Split shattering all of your illusions. For some reason I was thinking the Grandmaster would somehow bypass that because they would be restored after a shatter, but your answer makes complete sense.

I love your combo too. Continuum Split/Shift is so interesting, it’s giving me some serious nostalgia about the GW1 mesmer and how it could manipulate skill recharges and doublecast skills with Echo. Mesmer is my least played class, but with Chronomancer that might change.

Hey guys, I was thinking of starting a thread where we could list and discuss possible Continuum Split/Shift combos with Chronomancer. Things aren’t finalized yet, and we don’t know all the details, but we learned a lot from the Poi stream today.

One of my favorite (theoretical) combos is being able to use your elite 3 times in a row.

1. Continuum Split – Set restore point
2. Use Elite
3. Continuum Shift – Go back to restore point
4. Activate Signet of Illusions - Recharge Shatters
5. Continuum Split – Set restore point
6. Use Elite
7. Continuum Shift – Go back to restore point
8. Use Elite

What combos have you guys come up with?

I just finished watching the PoI that showcased the chronomancer, and I’m absolutely loving all the new mechanics and skills. I was thinking of a cool combo to use with Continuum shift, and my favorite one involves the new grandmaster Chronophantasm, which restores your phantasms whenever you shatter them.

The combo goes like this:

1. Summon 3 phantasms
2. Continuum Split – Create restore point and get your phantasms back
3. Mind Wreck + Tides of Time
4. Continuum Shift – Go back to restore point and regain shattered phantasms
5. Mind Wreck + Tides of Time

My concern, however, is whether or not Continuum Shift will restore summoned illusions or not. If not, then my combo is kind of ruined.

If your goal is to advertise your stream, it might be wise to actually link your stream in your post.

When you kill someone holding a supply, you can pick up the supply they had. However, when I picked up the supply off of someone I killed, it turned into a bundle. When I used the bundle on the npc doors at my spawn, I could drop the bundle and reuse it, effectively giving me infinite supply.

I was able to send an endless supply of npcs down our attack lane, overwhelming the enemy team.

Below are some screenshots of the results. You can also see this on this twitch stream at 1:52:00. http://www.twitch.tv/bringyourfriends/b/649993248

What are the chances? Fairly low considering ranger is getting a staff.

Rifle is the highest chance because of the early concept art of the thief and the trailer showing a medium armor class with a rifle.

Mace also has a decent chance.

For pvp, I’d say the best is the warrior’s whirling axe. It’s a whirl finisher, reflects projectiles, and does a significant amount of damage. The mesmer’s ectoplasm is also really strong.

The worst is probably the engineer’s gunk. While it’s a field that applies random conditions every second, it’s a small aoe that people can easily walk out of and avoid and it lasts too long, meaning you can’t stealth while it’s active or it will reveal you.

For PvE, I’d say the best is either drink for the invulnerability or the stealths. PvE wise, thieves already do enough damage, so utility is the better option.

The worst is definitely tooth stab. It applies a single bleed for 30 seconds. It’s really not good at all.

Dave.6819:

Do you guys really honestly think that thief doesnt need a revamp/buff? yet i want to stress out that mostly im talking about spvp. in wvw/pve everything is quite okey. anyone who tells me that thief doesnt need a revamp is either : A – a pro pro thief that is genius and playing for 3years. B – just a regular person who thinks everything ties into “l2p” issues. C – a potato.

I’ve been playing thief as a main for like 3 to 4months. tested many many builds. s/d d/d d/p (hell even pp and pd), meta, not meta, evasive, boon ripper, condi, troll pp etc etc etc… practiced ALOT. learned all the combos and techniques. studied it like some kind of college discipline. so i rly dont think i need to l2p. (making it easier for B and C type of people. dont bother to reply.) and yet… you just get literally REKT in pvp arenas. with just faceplant style of course u get rekt. with engage / disengage style u get rekt. you get warrior down. he gets up. u get rekt. he wins a 2nd life. so you need to put enormous amount of effort to really be very useful/good to your team (cuz mostly u r just a burden to them). maybe the only thing that you are good for is waiting in stealth until ur enemy is 50%hp or less and just then you go for the kill. but even that kind of gameplay says alot of how squishy we are. well and of course not to mention rangers/warriors/turret engis that plays like with half of their brain and yet are rockin hard. why playing a fun but terribly squishy class when you can roll ranger and let your cat press #2 while you go afk? you understand the main point i guess. why does Thief/Mesmer has to suffer so much while Warr/Rang/Engi can do alot better without putting any effort? (ill repeat myself – mostly in pvp) in WvW its bit better cuz u can just stalk and B.stab for 8k-10k.

Of the categories you listed, I suppose I’m closest to group A. Thief was my very first character and I’ve been playing it since early access as my main. More than half of my total play time is on my thief, and most of that time has been in sPvP.

There are 2 forms of defense in GW2; there is passive defense and there is active defense. Passive defense is using skills, abilities, stats, or traits that are designed to mitigate the amount of damage you receive. Protection, regeneration, stability, toughness, vitality, and passive condition removal are all examples of passive defense. Active defense is using skills, abilities, and movement to avoid damage altogether. Dodge rolls, blocks, evades, blinds, shadowsteps, stealth, and line-of-sight/kiting are all examples of active defense.

Most classes have access to both forms of defense in varying degrees, but thief is the exception holding nearly no form of passive defense and must survive almost entirely on active defense. And because active defense requires skill and timing to use effectively, most players who are new to thief tend to die very quickly. And this is also why players who are experts at the class seemingly never die. Thus, it is my opinion the most important thing to learn on thief is how to survive.

You need to learn how to use your shadowsteps, stealth, dodgerolls, blinds, and evades to their fullest to do well as a thief. After, you can then focus on how to deal significant pressure and winning 1v1s.

It is my opinion that thief is the strongest 1v1 class in the game. It has the most mobility out of every class and deals the most single target dps. Thus, it has the potential to kill anything, no matter how much of a bunker it is. And because of its mobility, it can both escape whenever it needs to and catch up to anything that tries to escape from it. Given time, a thief can kill anything.

Now, as for if I think needs some tweaks or revamps, that’s a hard question. When they game came out, thieves were way too strong. They could kill people by just spamming heartseeker. They could 1 shot heavies with mug->c&d -> backstab. They could shut down people by spamming haste and pistol whip. When thieves had access to large bursts, they were unstoppable.

If we increase the damage thieves do now, we’re going to see a repeat of thieves destroying everything that isn’t a complete bunker. And because of all the forms of active defense thieves have, giving them passive defenses will make them unkillable. The only thing I can say I want to see is conditions have more of a presence on thief, but being able to apply a myriad of conditions and hold superior mobility and stealth also seems too powerful.

So, I’d say, for now, thief is in a decent place. New players have trouble surviving because they aren’t used to active defense, but once you become used to it the class becomes both more effective and funner to player. While you insist that it isn’t a l2p issue, it really is.

So, I just tested something out.

Using 6/0/2/0/6 with revealed training, Dagger training, and flanking strikes, along with a force sigil and and scholar runes, I was able to crit the light golem in the mists with an 8.4k backstab using mug-> backstab combo.

Using the traditional panic strike build (6/0/2/0/6) without any force runes, flanking strikes, or scholar runes, I was only able to crit the light golem in the mists for 6k with the same combo.

Now, with a crit strikes build, with dagger training, revealed training, flanking strikes, and executioner, along with a force sigil and scholar runes, I was able to crit a light golem for 9.7k under 50% hp. Adding Assassin’s signet to this, I was able to get 12k damage under 50%.

So in conclusion, you can still get those same numbers, but you have to pretty much sacrifice everything and is fairly situational.

My Charr is an engineer, not a thief, but they’re both medium armor classes so it shouldn’t make a difference. I use 2 different armor sets for my engi.

The first uses

1. Glowing Crimson Mask
2. Shoulder Scarf
3. Viper’s Jerkin
4. Glorious Wristplates
5. Viper’s Leggings
6. Magitech Boots

The second is

1. Phantom’s Hood
2. Shoulder Scarf
3. Stalker Coat
4. Flamewalker Armguards
5. Flamewalker Leggings
6. Flamewalker Boots

My thief has gone through dozens of different looks, but I’m positive that this one is my favorite thus far.

I can’t decide between my thief and my ele, so I’m just going to post them both. I’m pretty proud of them both.

Q: How many mastery points will there be in relation to Masteries?

Masteries are a very exciting concept for GW2. Instead of a traditional approach to just increase a character’s stats, Masteries will create character progression by giving a character more actions and abilities it can do. The versatility of this system is what makes it exciting. However, in order to use a mastery, you need to unlock it with mastery points, which are scattered all over the world behind various forms of content. No matter how much time you spend playing the game, doing PvE and completing events, you will not gain the ability to glide without first investing a mastery point into gliding.

Given this, there is an important question that needs to be answered.

How many mastery points will there be in relation to Masteries?

Let’s say it takes 100 Mastery points to gain and master every single mastery in the game. From this, we have 3 options.

• Will we have more than 100 Mastery points, so that players can do the forms of content they want, avoiding the content they dislike, and be able to get every mastery?

• Will we have less than 100 Mastery points, so players won’t have access to every single mastery at once (much like traits) and will need to specialize in what they want to do?

• Will we have exactly 100 Mastery points, spread throughout all the various content in the game, that will allow us to completely progress our character if we do every form of content?

While the exact numbers may not be finalized, this is a question about design rather than numbers. Does Anet want players to have easy access to progression by doing the content they enjoy, does Anet want players to have to play every form of PvE content to progress in PvE, or does Anet want people to specialize in what they can do, and never fully achieve 100% progression?

First, for all the people who haven’t see them yet, here is a screencap of all the shown traits for the Revenant during the latest PoI.

http://imgur.com/RCqawRo

I want to talk about a Retribution Major trait, Improved Aggression. What this trait does is double the duration of taunt on non-player chatacters and reduces the damage you recieve from taunted enemies by 20 %. Additionally, there is a taunt skill in Jalis’ legend that applies 3 seconds of taunt, slow, and costs 50 energy with no cooldown.

Do you think this is Anet’s way of experimenting with tanking in PvE? Do you think there will be any viability in a person trying to tank traditionally with a revenant using this trait?

Discuss.

Here are the screencaps of all the shown traits.

http://imgur.com/RCqawRo

Gamblit.5041:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

…and this is why we showed all the things. Awesome job getting all the info dulfy.

Inspiring Reinforcement only on a 5 seconds cooldown with 6 seconds Stability? That would make this a Spammable Utility skill with infinate Stability pulses.

While the same skill on Guardian: Hallowed Grounds have a 80 seconds cooldown.

This is just crazy.

It also costs 25 energy, so you use up 1/4 of your resources to use it each time. If you want to attack with your weapon and use another utility, you’ll deplete most of your energy doing so.

From the quick look we got at the Revenant, energy seems to be more spammable than initiative though. We’ll have to see in the demo how balanced it really is.

T raw.4658:

DeceiverX.8361:

Yea, you’re comparing two different trait setups and builds. You need to run something like my 5/6/0/0/3 on the thief with signets to beat the damage of a RF from a 6/6/2/0/0 ranger, which makes sense seeing as the ranger has an inherent +200 power advantage and better damage scaling on RF itself.

It’s that the thief has way better damage modifiers and a massive power advantage when playing for damage without the might from other players.

Yet you have zero survivability on that thief compared to a ranger.

Who needs survivability in PvE anyway?

But if you want survivability, 6/6/2/0/0 will give you that just fine. While you lose 5% damage on your backstab, you gain a blind on stealth, 50 extra power from deadly arts, and 200 more power from revealed training for your auto attacks. You really don’t need anything more than that.

Between mug and withdraw/signet of malice, and a blind every 3 seconds, you’re not going to die in pve. If you do, it’s a learn to play issue.

I don’t think it’s bad, or anywhere near as dangerous as you are thinking. Taunt is just an inverted fear, and you can still auto attack in it.

However, while adding more CC to the game has potential to be troublesome, you are also forgetting they’re adding a new boon to the game, resistance, which negates all conditions while it is up. The fact they referenced fear during its explanation makes me believe taunt is also a condition like fear, and resistance will negate its effect.

In short, we have a new CC added to the game, but we also have a new condition added to the game that directly negates its effect.

Duka.5864:

HOt is not near to come out no1 played a single game of Stronghold and here we have first complain about thief’s OP :P CRY………….

I’m not complaining though. I actually main a thief, done so since the open betas, and I spend most of my time in PvP. Over 2000 hours just in pvp on my thief. If thief does end up being mandatory and overpowering in this mode, I would benefit the most out of it.

However, I also appreciate class balance and diversity in pvp, and I’m suspecting thieves will go against that in this new game type. I feel it can be heavily argued that thieves are the reason why we don’t see other berserker classes in conquest and wvwvw: they just destroy them, and force the meta into more defensive builds.

The single biggest concern I have with the information we’ve been given is thieves seem to be able to cover multiple roles with the same build. To me, this suggests they will be the most important and most used class in this mode. And from a balance perspective, I dislike this.

Svarty.8019:

I’m going to take a punt and say “meta” (whatever it is) will be zerk for every class.

I’m going to take a punt and say thief will shut down anyone stupid enough to go berserker. I simply cannot see a situation where thief doesn’t dominate this mode.

Makes me wonder how they plan on handling the guild aspect of this. If I’m remembering correctly, they stated there would be a guild leaderboard for this mode. There HAS to be a way to play this mode outside of the normal conquest queue.

I realize this post is a bit preemptive as the Ready-up livestream that is demoing stronghold is being released in a few hours, but after reading the description of stronghold I have a bit of a concern with thieves and the number of roles they seem to be able to fill.

First, here are the described roles in Stronghold.

• Assaulter—This player clears the way of enemy players, trebuchets, and NPC guards, giving doorbreakers a clear shot at the gate. A high-damage build for bursting down NPCs being healed by defending players and the ability to go one-on-one are a must.

• Smuggler—Smugglers gather supply and spend it at the barracks. They keep an eye on which unit best suits the current situation and then send that unit down the offense lane. Swiftness, stability, and evasion are a big help when gathering and running supply, but be prepared for a team fight at the supply depot when being quick and sneaky isn’t enough. Smugglers will also be well positioned to compete against enemy players to channel mist essence and call forth a hero, thus possibly turning the tide of a battle.

• Shepherd—The shepherd meets up with units spawned by the smuggler and shepherds them up the lane to where the assaulters are keeping the lane clear. This is a role perfectly suited for players who love to play support. They keep their doorbreakers moving, buffed, and—most importantly—alive as they protect them in face-to-face confrontations against enemy defenses.

• Defender—The defender’s job is to stop the enemy and their doorbreakers from breaking down their gate and advancing. You can play a high-damage dueling build to kill the enemy assaulters and shepherds in order to pick off doorbreakers as they come through, or you can take a more defensive approach and focus on keeping your guards alive so they can stop doorbreakers in their tracks.

• Trebuchet Master—The trebuchet master operates their team’s trebuchet in order to rain fiery death on assaulters, shepherds, troops, and anyone else who dares approach their stronghold. They also exert control on distant parts of the map, such as the strategically important supply depot. An effective trebuchet master must be prepared to fight duels to maintain area control and prevent opposing players from summoning a hero to gain the upper hand.

• Roamer—The roamer is a jack-of-all-trades. This role is for the generalist who fills in wherever needed, in any number of situations, by bouncing constantly between lanes, the supply depot, and hero channels to fight enemy players all over the map.

• Slayer—This player tries to break apart and destroy other player roles. They hunt down players who are smuggling, shepherding, defending, or manning trebuchets to wipe them out while mostly ignoring NPCs.

At only a glance, it seems to me a thief can fill every one of these roles except for shepherd. What makes thieves balanced in conquest are the capture points. Thieves are mobile and deal lots of damage, but they can’t take damage: they need to avoid it. This makes them particuarly bad at holding points, but fantastic at neutralizing them. However, stronghold doesn’t have capture points, and so thieves can use their superior mobility to escape and get to key locations without any worry.

Because of the thief’s mobility and high damage, coupled with the mode’s lack of bunkers, thieves seem nothing less then mandatory. The high damage fits the Assaulter, Defender, Roamer, and Slayer roles. The high mobility fits the Smuggler and Trebuchet Master roles (If the trebuchet is anything like in Kyhlo). Channels seem to only be interrupted by using a CC or killing the enemy, both of which the thief does well. Trickery-traited-Steal targets stability first, and daze shot can be used at any time without restraint.

To reiterate, conquest limits a thief’s potential with the usage of capture points. Without them, it seems thieves will reign as king in stronghold, being able to fit nearly any role, shut down other players (especially other berserkers), and can use their mobility and stealth to control objectives with little effort, and all on the same build.

>>>>>>> What are your thoughts on this? Do you think other professions will be able to counter the thief, or will the thief reign supreme?

Reading the responses in this thread honestly got me really angry. All the people who are complaining how open world pvp doesn’t fit into this game and we have WvW didn’t read the OP’s proposal AT ALL. Most likely just read the title and had a gut reaction.

He’s proposing a small zone in a pve map where players can dual/FFA/etc. but is completely separate from the rest of the map.

So you guys going to discuss the actual topic or are you just going to ignore all logic so you can complain?

I wouldn’t invest in some of the ingredients until there is more information, such as gifts of might or magic, but there’s no harm in getting as much money as possible, or full stacks of t6 materials/ectos. Worst case, they’re irrelevant to the new legendaries and you can use them for an old one or sell them to help with the new legendaries.

I like how the bottom left info wasn’t changed at all. That dude is totally a level 11 Human Mesmer.

Dahkeus.8243:

Yea, the community for PvP was never particularly stellar, but it’s certainly in a terrible place now. I know Colin (I think that’s the dev that said it) cited the community as a strength of GW2, but that only really applies to PvE. There’s still a very toxic PvP community, which is largely what drives other players away from the game type.

(Keep in mind this response isn’t directed solely at you)

I’ve seen a lot of people on the forums and on reddit complain how the PvP community in Gw2 is bad and toxic recently, and I’m completely baffled at this. People are saying how it’s as bad as the LoL community and made them quit the gamemode altogether. What? Are we playing different games?

I’ve been playing this game since launch, and while I dabble around in all of the game modes, I spend most of my time in PvP. And in my experience, the community there is just as good anywhere else in the game. Sometimes you see some ragers, like today when a thief was complaining in map chat how bad a thief I was and had to be carried by teammates. Though, back in reality, he just ran into 1v2s completely oblivious and got mad when I killed him every time. Yeah, it’s annoying, but that’s the nature of competitive games. People get serious and emotional.

But I’ve never seen another player verbally abuse another for playing bad. Sometimes I’ll see “Ranger, what are you doing?” followed by furious pinging on the mini map, but otherwise it’s fairly tame.

But here’s the thing. Even if it is the case that there are a lot of toxic people in PvP, so what? The good people greatly outnumber them. People in HotM are very quick to answer questions and help out noobies with builds/etc when they ask. A lot of people will ask if you want to join their guilds if you aren’t representing one too, anticipating that you are a new player.

And when you do come across the occasional “toxic” player, and he starts yelling at you, why would that matter? Why would that deter you from a game you enjoy playing? If a single insult was all it took to get you from playing a game, then why are you playing an MMO in the first place? Stop being so kitten emotionally fragile, go learn some social skills, and deal with it. There a plenty of people willing to help you out if you need it. To ignore that for a few angry people is idiotic.

People also need to get out of this “block-happy” mindset, where anyone who says something even remotely offensive to you is immediately blocked. Seriously, grow up. As I see it, there’s only 2 things you use your block list for:

• Gold sellers/spammers
• People who whisper you to insult you after a match has ended

If you’re blocking someone in the middle of a game because he’s yelling at you, deal with it. Chances are, he may have a reason for it. I’d much rather be yelled at and criticized for making a bad play than being reassured I’m fine and that I tried my best. And I’d much rather that because people learn through criticism.

Again, if you’re blocking people because you can’t deal with them saying something you don’t like, why are you even playing an MMO? How do you deal with normal socialization? You’re going to hear things you don’t like. If you can’t deal with that, then you have no reason playing a social game, and furthermore a team-oriented one.

2323 hours played over 895 days.

0 precursor drops.
0 precursors from forge.

Tom Gore.4035:

Imagine the flying turrets engi will get in HoT…

With Hammers too! CCs galore!