Death penalty (or more generally, a failure penalty) in a mmo that doesn’t have a good risk / reward system is somewhat pointless. It would be more of an annoyance than an interesting game element. The game simply isn’t designed something like this in mind.
Death penalty works a lot better in games that have proper risk / reward structure such as Eve online.
Another player: 2+2=22
ArenaNet: Good job! You’re also doing great.
That’s not the case though. It’s more like this:
Player: 2+2=22 ArenaNet: try again.
Player:2+2=22 CCP: buy another plex pls.
Player: 2+2=4 ArenaNet: Correct! You can get your reward from the gem shop.
Did I say that would include me? Don’t think I did. lol
It’s just funny that some people obviously still think that Leaderboards are a skill determiner, when they’re obviously not. Not to even mention how ridiculous your idea is.
It gets even worse, when some random even starts boasting about being ~250 on the leaderboard, be it solo or teamQ. Seriously?
They don’t mean much. But anyone not in the top 100 of solo or team queue cannot be competent at the game. Therefore a forum for the top 100 people to decide on balance without interference would be a good idea.
Sounds like a pretty difficult game if there are only 100 people competent at it. Even rocket science is a lot easier :p
All we can do as users is speak up about what we like and don’t like — don’t pretend to know what their system is like or how complicated changes are. Look at WvW where people would absolutely love to have unique commander pins for guild raids or a better target marking system. We as users think it’s an easy change but obviously it’s not since it has been 2 years and they still have not changed it.
The fact that they haven’t implemented different commander tags does not imply that it would be somehow difficult to do so. You are placing way too much good faith on Anet.
Kind of, I get around this with teleports. But you can expect they will have used infiltrator’s signet, shadow step, or swapped weapons if you don’t get a shadow shot to the face.
If they blow a teleport (stunbreaker) for an immob, congradulations. If they switch to shortbow, congradulations. You’re free from any backstabs and easy application of stealth for 9 seconds. If they shadowshot you, then you’ve blown their backstab opportunity.
At the end of the day, a cooldown was burned, and you won’t be backstabbed. If a person can pull it off, the most vulnerable time for a d/p thief is when they are just about to enter stealth. Fortunately, it’s a pretty big tell when they are about to go into stealth. Unfortunately, most people are focused on rotations instead of timing their skills.
Shadow Shot => spam sheat weapons to skip the damage dealing part in order to stay in stealth. Still, if the immob is long enough the thief might not have enough time to BS you as he is still rooted next to whoever he teleported to.
No thanks. I like consumables and the little extra customization they allow: a zerg pvt warrior may go for the regeneration food while a burst one just tries to maximize his damage through the power & crit dmg soup.
The condi duration ones could use a small nerf though.
You guys need more practice with Zaishen in the queens gambit. Go play against liadri. She uses the same projectile attack as lich. After several attempts I’m sure you can learn how to avoid these attacks.
Champ boxes give infinite skill points you can transfer between characters makes skills super easy to get I’m honestly more worried about the gold to gem ration being completely to high now it is 100g for mini sets which almost completely removes the collectability without $$$$$.
You aren’t supposed to collect them all without $$$. I think that’s fair. Supporters of the game should get some perks.
I have already explored the map and finished the living story on one character, now I just want to try all the other professions and have fun. not slave away for hours making money and tediously gathering skillpoints, I DONT HAVE TIME FOR THAT KITTEN I am here for the parts of the game I find fun not to sit here smashing my head against the keyboard slowly walking around the world waiting for that one event to happen or find all the skillpoints just for traits (keep in mind utilities cost skillpoints too)
there was NOTHING stopping you from exploring and using the map to lvl your character before the change but now the people who hate that are FORCED into your gaming style
I finished the meta during friday. I definitely deserve the full reward because I play in the server that happent to have free transfers before the tournament. This makes my actions in the Edge of Mists Karma train more important than the deeds of those who played in lower tier servers. It’s a tournament after all.
- Mesmer/Thief/Warrior from Gandara
Actually, survival/political power IS the tournament in war. But deleting dead L80s would hurt their bottom line.
Yeah but the common soldiers aren’t given anything special :P. And winning a war doesn’t mean it’s good from the point of view of a soldier: the winning country can still suffer a lot more causalties.
Thanks for reporting this! This looks like a scaling issue where the effect is scaling the character’s size but the skill itself is not scaling. A fix for this will require some design work so I can’t say a whole lot in regards to when it could be fixed.
While a respect this honest answer, I’m really concernd that we didn’t even get a "soon™ ".
I wish I could say soon™. But this is a pretty interesting issue to address.
Easy fix:
Just make that if you enter a pvp match, you automatically get transformed into a human character, so no issues anymore (for the time you are in this match). Like when you use a tonic or so.
And btw I want an option for myself to let everyone be shown in a pvp match as a human so I finally can see the animations of the Freaking asuras and norn mesmers stop destroying my view…
How would this idea handle things like cultural armors? Won’t turning everyone into humans cause a loss of uniqueness in the game? Every player has specific facial adjustments, body types, heights, armor colors, and weapons; what happens to these?
You’re designing a competitive PvP game. Balance and fairness is much more important than unique look.
It’s still a mmo as well though. Character customization and rewards are core elements of mmos. The optimal solution is to scale models super adventure box style: asura is still smaller but not so tiny that it can hide inside ranger pets.
Scaling character will still give some race other benefit (not necessary Asura).
Benefit over other races is sort of fine: those who want standarded models can just reroll to the beneficial race while the rest can stick to whatever race at the cost of some effectiveness.
The problem of asura isn’t that it is more powerful than other races. It is that they make the game harder to read than what it should be.
They nerf zerker because DPS builds are too powerful.
A few weeks later, they’re nerfing boon duration making support builds less powerful
A few weeks later, they’re introducing indomitable making control builds worthless
They wonder why there’s so much hostility on the forums. Make up your mind and quit constantly contradicting yourselves.
No DPS, No buffs, No control.
Gemshop only.
Final Destination.
Note that a stealth spam thief can prolong most matchups forever. That could be a problem depending on how you handle such situations. Do you call it a draw for example?
You might want to test your format in a more casual setting first and get some publicity that way. People are more likely to join if they know that the format is solid.
It happens quite often getting paired with 3 thieves while the other tram has 3 warrs and 1 bunk guard. You already know when its GG even before the match starts.
Two of the thieves should probably just reroll instead of giving up.
All this means is that someone got greedy and will likely waste a lot of money on listing fees. New Dusks will drop and provide an opportunity for those who are lucky (or persistent with respect to the MF) who can then undercut the greedy seller and bring the prices back in line with the rest of the precursors.
If these guys would always just “lose lots of money on listing fees”, then they wouldn’t be able to buy ’cursors in the first place D;
Tell me, how do you avoid a pistol whip when an asura pre casts it inside a ranger pet in a cluster kitten? Random dodging is the last thing in this game that needs fixing.
-You only need condi damage and maybe some duration and you’re golden, you don’t need to sacrifice other stats
Aye but you can’t fully abuse it in spvp as there is no dire gear.
-Not mitigated by defense (power builds are, shocking right? protection does nothing against condis, same with regen)
This is valid, though regen works just fine against condis. Weakness however does not. Then again you can cleanse conditions.
-Spam-ability. Engi can just faceroll bombkit or nades. Necro can simply spam 1 on scepter / staff 2345 combined with balanced fears and cover condis. Basically every attack inflicts conditions, while only a select few can burst kitten power builds.
To be fair, spamming is a general issue of the game and isn’t related to conditions only.
-Dodge / aegis a 5k backstab by a thief? rewarding. Dodge a #2 staff mark on a necro? Well you dodged 2 stacks of bleed, too bad he has way more of those in his kitten nal, if not say an unlimited amount through different means.
Here’s why I don’t understand why people think Permastealth is good for winning fights.
The rotations to maintain stealth would leave the thief constantly without initiative to use offensively.
The thief gets revealed for 4 seconds if they choose to attack before they can stealth again.
The thief can’t do damage while in stealth
The thief is only allowing cool downs to recharge while in stealth, which are cooldowns for more stealthing, and the enemies cool downs are recharging too.
Perminantly stealthing means you’d never be doing anything
Counters to stealth in general
Blackpowder – Start attacking it, so that when a thief heartseekers through it you hit him, and he will sometimes heartseeker you and reveal himself. Obviously don’t stand in it when you are attacking it.
Smokescreen – Same counters as blackpowder
Heartseeker – Interrupting heartseeker doesn’t allow the leap finisher to complete, preventing the thief from entering stealth through smoke fields.
Shadow Refuge – Use knockbacks, launches, and pulls to knock the thief out of the refuge revealing him. AoE the refuge forcing him to take damage.
Hide in Shadows – Interrupt hte 1 second cast time
Already in stealth – Use an auto attack chain to tell if you are hitting him, and keep track of his location. Use AoE’s to damage him. Recognize how much stealth a thief would have obtained depending on the skill used. Distance will work for the short duration stealths, so will blocks and blinds. Combine blocks and blinds and distance and evades for longer duration stealths.
Because permastealth loses offensive capabilities, and because there are numerous counters to stealth, I am failing to understand what people are complaining about.
You never use shadow arts in spvp. Perma stealth is for trolling in wvw.
Necro isn’t even good at attrition based fights. You don’t have many stun breaks or other escape cards as a necro. This means that the longer the fight has taken, the more likely you are a sitting duck because you are out of stun breaks or other means to avoid focus fire.
Condition based stealth spam builds are the true kings of attrition. I’d argue that necro is more about DPS, control and pressure.
And the dude you CANNOT get away from. Well I think we all know who this one is. They stick like glue :p
I don’t really like GS, but I still use it in spvp because of it’s massive ranged pressure. My another weapon is staff and if only ileap wasn’t so terribly unreliable, I’d change GS to dual swords. Currently however, I feel that I must too often burn blink just to compensate a failed ileap which is oh, so frustrating. So for now I just stick with the Helseth’s gs/staff build.
EU started the double warrior comp with Cheese Mode (the top team in EU for a really long time, that would usually wreck 55 HP monks). EU players have usually stayed away from bursty varieties of thief like D/P. EU warriors also do not run berserker amulet, like Apex warriors do (at least last I saw). NA also plays Engineer which is riskier in team fights.
Double warrior is still tanky no matter what amulet you have. If double warrior is not tanky to you then I don’t know to say.
Yeah, it really is tanky as hell no matter what. That’s why we have this topic.
Currently the thief loses the initiative cost of the skill that was interrupted
So if you interrupt HS the thief loses 3 initiative. Auto attacks cost none so none is lost.
Though a thief player might know a bit more than myself
Actually heartseeker is essentially the only thief skill that causes initiative loss when interrupted. Non channeled thief skills such as blackpowder, cloack and dagger, shadow shot or larceous strike never result in initiative loss when interrupted.
Pistol whip causes initiative loss if it is interrupted during it’s evasion frame. (Interruption is still possible through say a nightmare rune fear proc.)
Personally I don’t find necro to even be that powerful at the moment. Not when compared to all the engineers and warriors. Not that I even really played this game, but anyway.
Yeah, reduce the amount of damage conditions do over X seconds so that total is less than the amount of damage that direct damage attacks do instantly.
Balanced.
Yes that would be balanced. If you have extreme defence through dire gear, then your offensive output should be a lot weaker to compensate.
You can make the active counter-play to conditions more effective and more interesting.
And also make condition applying less passive. Dhoomsfire change was a good move.
Why do you assume that a Soldier’s geared person doesn’t have a ranged weapon or the target doesn’t avoid the Dire user’s attacks?
Currently the condition warrior has attacks that are difficult to avoid and deal massive damage: pin down and impale. You just need to hit with those two while the pvt warrior has to be on top of you all the time to deal damage. You can’t deal good dps from range as a pvt warrior. Both shrotbow and rifle aa have really low direct damage. Condition warrior can easily kite a pvt warrior forever.
I find reading a Mesmer Q.Q about thief rather difficult without scratching my head. Mesmer can out-glass thief, because their clones can do a lot of the heavy lifting. It is like putting two betta fish in the same tank and one can destroy the other one at any given moment, but the Mesmer once mastered, is far stronger and thief has to really time their burst or it kills them.
You are wrong. If you had followed spvp a little or watched tpvp streams, you’d know why. In high end play a thief is a lot better than a mesmer. The OP is a top player by the way.
Of course, in duels mesmers can compete but then they need to use a pure duel spec that is useless at everything else.
Honestly do people forget that even us thieves have to deal with thieves?
Aye. The only class that really threatens thief is another thief. This is true to a degree even in spvp but the most obvious it is in WvW. It’s really quite silly. If I notice that the enemy group doesn’t have thieves, I know I can engage pretty freely without the risk of being jumped on. As a full glass thief with 0 in shadow arts and no lyssa runes, I have to be careful with many other classes as well (e.g. nuke necros). But these are much easier to deal with because they can’t instantly jump on me from a range of 2000+.
But does this change make the game easier to balance in any meaningful sense? How many balance problems have there been due to the jewels?
In a way a simple game is less stable when it comes to changes in the rule set (nerfs, buffs, new content). If there is room for micromanagement, then builds can more easily adapt to the changes.
3) Over competent for pvp how? Does picking a thief = auto win? No. Picking a warrior hambow, decap engineer, bunker guardians = them over competent professions. You want to change meta, start with your own profession and ask for buffs. I don’t play as much PvP compared to WvW, but I know certain professions are in a bad place. Thieves are somewhere in the middle, maybe middle upper tier.
“You want to change meta, start with your own profession and ask for buffs.”
Lol. It’s absurd that with all this power creep someone thinks buffing is the right way to go. Gosh.
It does not apply very well to mmos where you have FOTM builds that change over time. The article is fairly old. The only mmorpg that was running back then and is still alive, is Runescape I believe.
See the following text from the end of the article.
In the end, playing to win ends up accomplishing much more than just winning. Playing to win is how one improves.
Well no. You definitely don’t improve if you run around as a hammer monkey or spirit ranger.
I did not improve as a thief player when I abused the hell out of culling.
try to get backstab off while being chilled and crippled on target with perma swiftness… then let’s talk about chilled affecting ini
d/p #3 should work. You could also burn utility shadow step or steal, but not a good idea since the chill will affect that.
If you’re an elementalist letting your opponent stack enough chilled on you to put your fire grab on a 45 second CD you’re doing it wrong. Thief lacks out-of-stealth condi removal, and is forced into spending 5 initiative to remove one at a time on one certain weapon outside of stealth.
I’m not sure if people use shadows embrace these days, but Withdraw is a fairly viable way to remove chilled and most tpvp thieves carry it. You also have lyssa runes.
And lol @forced to lyssa runes. Thieves are forced to it only because it is so kittening good thanks to the short cool down of the venom.
yep, interrupt that hs through BP and you cost the thief 9 initiative… no cooldown though.
You cost him 3 initiative. He will just use hs again while the BP is still active.
99% of the time that won’t happen because the interrupted HS will carry the thief pretty far from the BP before it is interrupted. Interrupting the HS just before it finishes stops the stealth and costs 9 init… like I already said.
Lol. So turn 180 and leap over the black powder? It takes 4 seconds for it to disappear, and as long as your hs touches the combo field, you will gain stealth. It doesn’t matter if the black powder disappears before your hs actually finishes, not as long as it touched the field.
Before the change to the initiative system, everyone in WvW leaped 4 times over a single black powder, as you can remember.
Damage Dealer when he sees a thief in group:
WOW
much unfair
very cheese
so buttery
disgusting
*The damage dealer leaves the group, exits the stage on the left side. *
Finally, rather than seeking opinions, you should actually take a look at top PvP win percentage. You should check the top ranking matches and see if thieves contribute to the winning rate. That is a far more accurate representation of the current situation rather seeking forum users claims.
.
Do you watch any yoloq, teamq or other tournament streams?
. Even rocket science is a lot easier :p