Guild Wars 2

I’m highly doubtful that this is a legitimate message from an actual game master (GM) but it still gave me pause and I feel bringing it to light was more important that being dismissive.
(also not entirely sure where this should go other than an in-game report, but as a IT professional it has all the signs of a phishing attempt and letting the general public know seems the smart move)

Today I logged in to find the attached message waiting for me in my mail box. And while I am absolutely sure this is a scamming attempt that is entierly transparent (the whole “this message has been sent by another player” at the bottom would be the dead give away)

So if you find a message like this, don’t do anything with the link, just report the sender and delete it.

I should also point out the link that’s included looks like it has embedded terminal line commands (the -mgkk part looks like it would be passed to the site to get around your computer’s defenses) so don’t even test the link to see how bad it might be.

We also don’t get the boon of Developer Attention
Resistance is made redundant by retaliation, protection and aegis
Quickness would only make sense if it was taken from a mesmer or something

I’m getting a lot of obstructed when going downhill toward turrets or other fxed location NPCs

You could make it work in line to how you’re all suggesting by changing the last part of the skill to deal a pulmonary impact if the target isn’t currently knocked down, a very common occurrence for champs and HoT mobs but in WvW and PvP where total resistance to knockdowns isn’t as prevalent it would still have it’s original function.

Coolguy.8702:

7.)Revealed training should have toughness instead of power..

Revealed training giving power is kinda necessary for a few playstyles, having it give toughness if the source of revealed isn’t you (thus it’s someone else) might be a relevant choice now other classes can cause reliable revealed.

VladR.9827:

SB OP !
sb#1 – OP – 3 bounces – thaaaat fat damage !
sb#2 – OP – the arrow travel so fast it is impossible to move from the damage area
sb#3 – OP – evade on skill? omg omg and that cripple ?!
sb#4 – OP – poison reduces healing effectivness 50% for couple of seconds , waaay too OP
sb#5 fat and OP – blind on teleport?! its too much

See, I want to agree…but all of the shortbow’s attacks are just so slow compared to every other weapon set the thief has it’s kinda a joke. I’ve more often than not outran the SB2 bombs or covered half the distance I would teleport from SB5 by running at signet speed. I would argue that SB4 is the fat damage on the weapon…but having seen all the nerfs over the years to that one skill; kinda makes it seem like we’ve already hit peak nerf on the shortbow.

merrykitten .9423:

nah having too many +1 gives you a negative effect. so it’s actually +1-1 which is 0

Yeah with two thieves you hit the “one steve limit”, you can’t have two ‘+1’ players, someone has to change, so one changes to “x-1” where they turn the number into a negative making it -4v5

From the launch of HoT until yesterday I was running a venomshare build that in normal PvE had me frequently being downed toward the end of a fight (less enemies to heal me off Signet of Malice triggers) but with the mob mostly defeated I’d be downed only about as long as the invulnerability period lasted then something would die and
I’d be back up to finish off the last 2-3 enemies with auto-attacks.

However my attempts to use this build in HoT have failed catastrophically.
In large groups I can avoid most enemy hazards (those mordrum snipers and their red lines of death can eat my tiny health pool) but when outnumbered by a mob, for instance defending a point in Verdant brink or running a lane in the 3rd map, I seem to be getting a lot of instant deaths or deaths during the downed animation when I would normally be invulnerable. I am coming off a slight break from the game, but I don’t recall seeing a change to the downed mechanics in the patch notes.

Since the thief requires far more skill to successfully play than most of the other classes (Revenant might give it a run for its money with how much you need to keep track of) I’m all for more nerfs because if thieves still can be found in PvP performing well then it’s clearly too easy as is.

More nerfs plox,
I relish the challenge

It would be even better if they appeared wearing a copy of your outfit, I knew an player a fer years back who had an asura thief and dressed up in the same armor as the thieve’s guild so when he summoned them in WvW there was no telling him apart from the NPCs. If these thieves are supposed to be in your guild (as the name implies) wouldn’t you be wearing at least the same colours?

It is real, it a real as brass historical re-enactment of a kitten Warrior from 2012

The high risk high reward style is kinda bad for providing players with feedback on if they’re doing well or not when fighting against it. Say you’re playing against a thief at launch and they miss their mug because they’ve become predictable, most classes in PvP could then turn around and destroy the thief in about as fast as the thief could do to them. Which made the fight incredibly unfufilling when compared to the far slower fights any other class would provide.

Except after a while the meta got over this and learned that any dangerous thief build was also incredibly predictable meaning that in WvW or PvP a thief might be able to get one or two easy kills before they lost the element of surprise and stomping thieves who were using the flavour of the week build became a past-time of many high skill players.

The problem with the thief has never been their place in the meta, it’s been that when they go into stealth the other player loses sooooo much information regarding the thief that it starts to feel like the thief is cheating. Having a Guadian drop all his fancy AoE skills that lock you in place and deal huge damage gives the player a big shiny note that there was defiantly something killing them. If a thief used the mug+backstab to wipe a player off the map there was no hurrah or signature that told them what to look out for in the future.

If stopping stealthed NPCs was something you had to do in the story, or if skelks were an actual threat like smokescales are now, players might have learned that if you can’t find your opponent now and are sure they’re about to run away or backstab you and you last saw them literally on top of you some AoEs on your location might ruin their day.

RedSpectrum.1975:

Wasn’t Cloak and Dagger nerfed by 33% at one point?

It’s in my notes, I just forgot to put it in. I may have been a bit tired when finishing it up

Serious Thought.5394:

There are other cookies, but this is to show you that things changed considerably, and we haven’t changed nearly as much. What actually happened is all the other classes have enjoyed massive power creep. Food for thought, right?

The other classes got power creep to attempt to align them with where ANet wanted them in the metagame, it seems like by mid 2013 they stopped trying to do that. And while almost every other class (except Elementalist who have never seemed terribly stable in their position balance wise) got buffs to some skills the Thief got QoL “fixes”. Fixing up unintended interactions, clarifying tool tips and making skills work as intended (which included several patches claiming to do the same thing month after month eventually sticking the landing and fixing the issue), so while the other classes had successful Mash 1 builds, we had a higher and higher skill celling installed as all our skills worked (this is undermined by the terribly harsh nerfs Thief got from the get go with no recuperation, but there is no winning in the game of life)

Khazik.8052:

“but ***class has condi removal”.. great, I have 7 dodges that evade, deal condi damage, remove condi’s, and heal me before I tap into my spammable initiative abilities.

Hard counters to this would be necromancers reflecting all conditions (that health pool is not a fan of the conditions we can squeeze out) and Guardians, who if they’re lucky or good can pen you in with their fancy cages.

But considering Thief matchup history has been almost entirely bad, that’s a solid build for PvP in the current meta

Shadowstep.6049:

It doesn’t include all changes to head shot, black powder and such :P

It was 4 years of changes, I may have skipped a line, if you can find when the major changes happened I’ll include them. Also I left black powder out on purpose because the changes never really seemed that impressive or impactful

From memory, headshot became more expensive and the stun became shorter maybe about dec 2013

OP, for comparisons sake can we get you to while wearing an armor set that doesn’t boost power or condi damage and beat up some of the golums in the heart of the mists who’s health is known and time it, then we can do the maths to get a more accurate number on action times and so others can reproduce your results.

Also can we look into if haste actually doubles activation time of the auto-attack or if it suffers the same 1/2 second delay or if the delay is also sped up?

OK, so I went back through the wiki’s archives and tried to compile a mostly chronological list of major nerfs and buffs this class has had, this brought back a lot of old memories of sad farewells to useful skills and builds. The following is an abridged summery of the changed, a mostly complete change log is found here as these are the notes I made as I researched.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KynnPQh0rOo31_eY_CUgX3I2GS4lqcTzRU8HGGe_e9c/edit?usp=sharing

Starting in 2012:
Flanking Strike is unblockable now
Pistol Whip nerfed by 15%
Heartseeker nerfed by 20%
Dancing Dagger nerfed by 50%
Tactical Strike buffed +15%, PvP split introduced
Cluster Bomb nerfed only in PvP -20%, PvP split introduced
Cloak and Dagger nerfed in PvP -33%, PvP split introduced
Scorpion Wire range increased to 1200
Ricochet chance increased to 20%
Super Speed in stealth trait buffed up to +50% speed
Pistol Mastery and Improvisation buffed to +10% damage

2013:
Venoms and Assassin’s Signet “fixed” to lose charges if attack fails
CnD fixed to make attacking walls not give stealth in WvW
Caltrops nerfed duration 15sec -> 10 sec
Flanking Strike now two skills, boon steal no longer unblockable
Mug can’t crit, can heal through
Signet’s passives doubled
Death Blossom costs 4 initiative now
Pistol Whip activates and channels faster
Signet of Malice buffed by 33%
Steal baseline reduced down to 35sec
Cluster Bomb range reduced 1200 -> 900
Larcenous Strike now costs 6 initiative total
Shadow Return no longer a stun break
—Major trait changes happen--
Steal can be trait’d to 1500 range
Destroy Shadow Trap no longer stun break
Larcenous Strike only steals 1 boon
Pistol whip is made faster again

—New heal skill introduced and Initiative worth rejiggered—

2014:
Runes change
Traits start to change
Pistol Whip gains PvP split, costs more in PvP
Poison Gas nerf poison duration 5sec -> 3sec per pulse
Trait System changes completely
Ricochet gains bonus pistol range +150
Dagger Auto-attack now cleaves into a second target
Unload channels 20% faster
Flanking Strike increased to 4 initiative, larcenous reduced to 1
Venom’s baseline recharge reduce 45sec -> 40sec

2015:
Might nerfed by 15%
Traps properly buffed
Invigorating Precision buffed 8% -15% (crit dmg delt becomes life gained)
Teleports don’t activate if path can’t resolve
Backstab doesn’t reveal if it fails
—Conditions changed--
—Armour and Lv 80 Baseline stats changes—
—June balance patch, goodbye Acrobatics—
Steal becomes 1200 range as baseline
—Skill classifications mean something again—
Traps no longer cause revealed
CnD PvP split removed, dmg values averaged
Basalisk and Devourer Venom CCs nerfed
Chocking Gas nerfed again
Potent Poison buffed poison duration +10% -> +33%
Expeditious Dodger buff swiftness duration increased 2sec -> 4sec
Death Blossom evasion extended

Then Heart of Thorns
Then present day

Now you can draw accurate conclusions on how the class has changed

I feel like this missed a few steps, but is a moderately working timeline of changes. A full timeline would be cool though, that way when people claim we have potential for 12k backstabs we can point directly to when we could last do that.

Thanks for the info, I’d been checking the wiki for info and found it quite lacking

*Thieves
/15char

Do any of the physical skills that throw daggers count as dagger skills for Dagger training?

Does the dodge roll that throws daggers count as daggers for Dagger training?

Can I have more than 1 Pulmonary Impact on a single enemy at a time?

What attribute does Pulmonary Impact scale with? (Condition damage? Weapon power?)

If Brawler’s Tenacity (Daredevil Adept trait) give endurance on the first physical skill in combat, and I disengage for a moment in the middle of a fight can I regain the endurance again at the start of re-engaging into the same fight?

What are the numbers on Staff Master(Daredevil major trait) in regards to the bonus damage and endurance gain?

In the Grandmaster traits is the stat increase and damage decrease a set amount or does it scale? (eg a 7% condition damage increase or a 120 point increase?)

Do you think the lack of definitive numbers on these traits due to the continued balances the devs are doing

I’m just not cool with the idea that if I’m running a P/D and P/P set and a class with access to 1200 range weapons starts hitting me, the two skills I’ve got to respond with is Steal (which puts my 360 range focused build into melee range and often into the range of 600-360 range attacks) and Scorpion Wire (which I think has hit maybe two targets in my several years of playing and has virtually no synergy with other skills/traits), neither of which I want to use.

TL;DR: If I get hit from 1200 range my two good options are escape (rarely works) or tank the damage while I get in range (reminder of Thief health pool).
If supporting build variety is part of the current design philosophy why do I have to carry a Shortbow everywhere to stay competitive?

Also, we get to stack all sorts of extra features onto steal

As the title says, do finishers (the swishy glowy ball skill to finish off downed players) do anything meaningful?

In WvW I’ve been told they give a better chance at loot, but in PvP I’ve seen no change in score, and there’s no special loot to gain.
Admittedly I don’t have the largest experience with PvP and it could be a reflex players carry over from WvW into unranked, but with so many player’s builds and playstyles focused on surviving for a few moments more or escaping the combat scenario entirely with their downed skills my question stands thusly:

Is there a meaningful choice between choosing to using the context prompt finisher or continuing to attack the downed player until they die?

A condition on the enemy you are targeting in stealth called suspicious gaze, does nothing but let them know they’ve been targeted (as any war-worn fighter would probably become aware of in a sixth sense kind of way after lots of exposure).
Still player skill focused because a player might target moments before attacking, low experience players or players who refuse to understand how stealth works would get the moment to judge their surroundings and ready for a fight (or very obviously burn their protection skills early so the thief has an easier time killing them 6 seconds from now).

Want to avoid trolling with the feature? Give the affected player crit bonuses against the source of the condition if they suffer from it for too long or something to discourage unsportsmanlike behaviour.

The main problem is a hoarding of information on the stealthing player’s side, so to balance the stealthed player should also not get perfect information, being unable to tell enemy player’s health total or condition/boon status would be a equivalent exchange for a properly powered backstab.

A big side effect of the stealth and spike focused builds on thieves is that with all the patches and nerfs; to make the same play-style successful as the metagame advances the player had to get better, learning to judge other players most likely next actions, learning to time your attacks for when an opponent is most vunerable, learning how to survive on less than 20% health for about 7 seconds so your heal skill comes off cooldown, all of this forced thief players to get good in the same way Dark Souls does with its unforgiving mobility and positioning focused gameplay.
Except Mesmer (where the player needs to learn how to act like one of their own clones to appear invisible) none of the other classes force the player to git gud to stay alive, even in PvE a thief is never safe.

So in conclusion as an alternative to revealed, the game should also teach new players how stealth works in the racial starting areas in the same way they teach how dodging works. Litter the zone with enviromental weapons that put the player into stealth for 4-ish seconds so they can get a flanking attack on an unsuspecting NPC that swaps from having aegis and retaliation to not.

With some builds using an often limited supply of condition sources, getting a good read on an opponent rather than having the choice to drop everything or very little on your target if you join a half started fight makes this a means of everyone suddenly getting better at the game.

Would this feature count the thief feature of Pulmonary Impact? Or does that get to stay a surprise?
For those who don’t know pulmonary impact is a ‘condition’ that thieves can apply that does nothing until it removes itself, then it deals serious damage

I dunno, I’m running a venomshare thief with Power, Condition Damage and Healing Power supported most by my gear, it still takes mere moments to kill me if an enemy can close the gap, but since I’m running on a knife’s edge in regards to survivability if I survive a few combat encounters in a row it feels a million times as long as when I trade a kill for a kill in a 2v1.

Though I might be supporting the old meta by not bringing any condition cleanses and having a team focused heal skill.

Wait!? At about the minute mark do you start a stomp, shadow step away and continue the channel, then undo the stance and shadowstep back to land the finisher?!
Cause that’s a really smart play!

For the last few days I’ve been rocking it with a venomshare build in PvP and since I’m running P/P and P/D or SB (or just P/P again to get the sigil of energy proc for extra dodges) but with such a ranged heavy loadout my F1 skill of Steal is mostly unused, and if I do use it, it will probably get me killed or force me to burn all my dodges to get back to a safe range.

Thus I have two questions for your forumites, since a lot of you seem to have quite the brain between your ears.

1) Do you see much synergy with the steal mechanic and any general play?
There’s one obvious good synergy of maintaining melee contact on an enemy that wants to escape, but outside this there seems to be only niche fulfilment of functionality from traits.

2)If steal could be traited, or by default, count as one of the following: a leap, projectile or blast finisher, do you see it being a more robust tool and have more use in a wider range of builds?
Cause to be honest thief as it stands now has two non-projectile finishers, and with a single skill on a 20+ second cooldown I see little reason why it wouldn’t be mostly balanced.

So for my time with the BWE I built a full condition build, which sounds impossible, especially with how DD and the physical skills doesn’t exactly support conditions. Except I started with a trapping build and P/P weapon set attempting to stack as many pulmonary impacts on my targets, which in high end PVE and PVP works quite well, players auto-attack between rotations and BWE NPC enemies spam attacks like no one’s business (probably part of their high population AI) and as far as I could tell, nothing can cleanse a Pulmonary Impact so I was laying down unavoidable damage and boosting survivability by restricting my opponent from landing nearly as many attacks. Admittedly I was wearing Dire armour for every ounce of toughness and health I could muster and I felt like I was getting less heals from malicious signet (I could be wrong).

I eventually swapped to mainly physical dagger throw skills and basilisk venom for the spam interrupt and extra conditions and it played out quite nicely, and staff even had a place in the rotation while I waited for my skills to cd allowing me to spam weakness.

In PvE I don’t see this build as being as powerful as venomshare, but it seems more reliable when I don’t have 4 extra PCs to help finish the fight…just not in conjunction with the staff.

PopeUrban.2578:

Disrupting daggers needs to stick around more than 15 seconds. It’s basically a mantra that throws a dodgeable projectile.

The visual effect allows the enemy to see when it is cast, and exactly how many daggers you have left, which is good for counterplay, but IMO 15s is too short to get good use out of it.

Since it tosses a counterable projectile, and the enemy can easily predict when we have the ability to use it due to the visible daggers, why doesn’t it just work like a mantra with an icon visible to the enemy? Heck, you could even greatly increase the cast time to balance that if you wanted, but 15s isn’t really enough to use it as pressure, or successfully interrupt.

15s is actually a sensible amount, it’s to stop thief players from setting up the daggers too far out of combat and not giving enough information to their opponents. Will have to wait till the BWE to see if it’s cooldown is solid, but maybe a 2/3rds cooldown if you prep the daggers and don’t use them?

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

I think fire should reveal thieves tough. Just like in real life

But like a really weak version of reveal, like not actually revealed but particle effects to give away position so an Ele’s wide array of ground targeting skills can be put to good use.

If a Thief is stabbed in the face while in stealth and doesn’t break out fire can’t do much either

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The main issue from Necros is just how everyone seems to be getting more and more ways to counter or ignore Chill, which is a main focus of Reaper.

This is probably in part because every condition is un-fun to be suffering from and removal ASAP is always the best option and keeping the professions mobile is one of the selling points of GW2 PvP. A risky addition might be a double edged condition (like gives the player suffering from it a damage bonus but drops their movement speed harshly), and then give it a mechanical tweak so it is always the first condition to be removed. Or something, cause as it stands the only player choice regarding conditions is when to use a total condition cleanse (once there’s a decent amount of conditions or after all have been applied to you) and that’s a bit dull when one third of all combat is condition related (the other two being positioning and raw damage).

IDICERI.4268:

…though the staff does brings something new that thief hasn’t had an ample supply of, and that is weakness.

Can I just point out that the Thief has had an ample supply of weakness, both in the health pool and damage output.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

They will just whine that DD has 50% more.

But it’s a feature of the class now, like how Necromancers have a possible second health pool, Elementalists and Engineers have so many weapons skills available to them in a fight and warriors get a lot of dev attention. It’s a feature of the class.

Not crit-ing gives players suffering from it a chance to see what damage they are likely to suffer from when it resolves, it’s being treated as a condition – thus flat damage output.

I think it’s awesome though, makes the traping builds more viable

(also I say being treated as a condition, we don’t know what stat it pulls it’s numbers from yet, but I meant mechanically it looks like it works as a condition)

Also cause the shortbow naturally has ricochet, giving both weapons that feature removes the combat uses of shortbow. To keep each weapon set distinct they do kind of have to not overlap at all (which is why some of the weapon combinations don’t mesh in the slightest).

So the actual loss from the ricochet was the damage and range loss, which may come back if people use all sorts of weapon combos over the next BWE and P/P is without a doubt the weakest set; not just in a build that doesn’t support it, but under best conditions, if the P/P set can’t match a mediocre damage output from S/D, D/P or Staff then it might get addressed. ArenaNet can’t exactly make balance changes before anyone’s tried the new stuff but they might have with assumption they’d get around to bringing lost potential back with the DareDevil traits and maybe forgot, it’s a big game and these changes take a while to implement.

I’m just glad we have another skill that throws the thief backwards to safety. Enjoying the look of diversity amung the traits and skills and the risk they’re taking in giving the profession everyone hates for stealth stomping an even cooler way to do it (land first two hits from the elite skill, stealth, deliver the crushing blow).

Maybe also include a “Last enemy skill that hit you before you died was:” for PvP so when people complain they can do a better job (let us know exactly which skill we used to 1-hit KO you so we can tell you how to counter it)

With many of the other professions claiming the thief has no cooldowns, essentially tying endurance to a few more features will ruin their argument and give us something concrete to hide behind when they turn to the forums to kitten (cause no other class has initiative, but they do have endurance so they now have a common feature they can’t make wild claims about with no understanding)

What will ultimately decide weather this trait has any solid uses is the interaction between ground targeted fields that pulse conditions and weather dodging through them counts as a dodge, cause unless your opponent is auto-attacking you (and if they’re not a thief, there’s a good chance they are while their main skills are on cooldown) you might run out of things to dodge to cleanse conditions. But it looks like with very tight control on a skill rotation thieve’s might be able to pull semi-decent damage negation with a staff/shortbow combination fairly consistent dodge-rolls and bandit’s defence to negate single target threats.

But this will all come out in the next BWE, so don’t get too caught up in “facts” yet; we’ve waited this long, what’s another week?

Dodge core mechanic?

OK, so while +1 isn’t considered a role (because the role is actually support, the word you guys were looking for is support, which the thief has one viable build for) would you consider -1 a role: where you incapacitate a single enemy fighter for as long as possible to give your team a numerical advantage. It’s the same as being able to hunt down a back-line fighter in the middle of a fray, but slower.

kitten widget.9301:

I am starting to get tired of that many non sense, non worthy speculative posts about the elite spec when the thieves problem are far beyond a silly new weapon or a new trait line but a complete fix/redesign of the majority of our weapon set skills and traits.

We’re just preping for when there is solid info or a beta weekend and we’re called upon for solid feedback, we can quite well and concisely list out the “issues” we’ve found with the profession, and since the devs are already changing one thing, why not try out some of the other changes. We like to pretend to be optimistic here on the thief sub-forum, one laughs to keep from crying.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

(if they hit something)

If they don’t hit something, you’re looking at a player who can stay invisible at the cost of all of their initiative (the collective cooldown on all thief weapon skills) and can only drop CC and poison traps. The solution being to either leave the point to the thief, who cannot capture while invisible, or cleanse and dodge roll (dodge rolls break their traps and you don’t get hit).
So if you find you’re under attack by a permanently invisible thief in sPvP you should do the normal thing and stay calm and dodge roll to start moving. Every theif build that uses stealth aggresivly preys on you making mistakes and panicking, exposure will solve that.

SolarDragon.7063:

Thieves as a profession are meant to reset and come back when conditions are better suited. However, most of these AoE burns have lower cooldowns than we do.
So, quite simply, thieves need more condi removal, both active and passive traited.

I’d support the Guild Wars 1 approach to condition removal and give us a grand master trait that gives condition removal on critical hit in any of the trait lines that aren’t shadow arts, because as you bring up, we have condition removal already on that line. Why on critical hit and not proc on specific skills? To not pigeon hole the profession any further, most builds run some amount of critical hit chance, even by accident (or have the trait that gives 100% crit chance when leaving stealth), which also supports the mentality of pushing foreward and making the best of the situation we’ve created.

Also, I’m not misremembering things and GW1 had a skill that gave condition removal on critical hit, right?

Thanks.6859:

the point is this is one of many many bad things about pvp aerna in this game the other would be letting all walks of life into it . I would like to see a American only server for the simple fact im so tirred of clicking and nothing happens the servers in this game lag bad . They offer some of the best reward chest bribing people to play here I could and will continue to add bad things about pvp from my personal experience aion pvp was far better this this in so many ways Im relly really tying to enjoy the pvp game type but teams get stacked and eles are also another class that’s overpowed.. I don’t care about winning or losing I play for fun and this is just unbearable

If you’re playing with a poor ping (essentially internet speed) then it may not be a case of thieves being permanently invisible and more a side effect of the mega-server suffering from high load. Thieves have to have 4 seconds between stealth exit and their next disappearance.

I didn’t get to watch it all the way through (but I will come back to do just that) but I like what I see, this looks like a really fun build

Right, I’ma teach you something so listen up.

In Game Design there are two main types of game balance methodologies:
Difference of Scale
and
Difference of Kind

Difference of Scale is the style of fixed roles, where one class is quantifiably best at a single job (i.e. the paladin is best at surviving continual damage of any sort), where regardless of what they are built for, their numbers in a specific field will always be the best. Guild Wars 2 wasn’t designed for this approach, but it is the quickest and easiest to apply fixes with so it has been used in many a nerf and buff in patches.

Differences in Kind is the style of balance where no two classes can be quantifiably (able to be counted numerically) compared to find the “true” best in a field. Where the two classes share so little in common they don’t have enough common ground, or the situation can’t be predicted reliably enough to where there isn’t a single best answer to any generic scenario. Guild Wars 2 was specifically designed with this in mind, another genera of games that does this is the MOBA, where comparing champions is pointless as they all have their own strengths and weaknesses, where the pinnacle of once class can’t compare to the pinnacle of another because both situations exclude each other (i.e. a warrior might facetank damage and conditions where as a thief might spam blindness to not get hit in the first place, both situations are mutually exclusive and can’t be quantitavly compared).

The strength in Differences in Kind is that: in a well built system there is always a hard counter to any single solution (i.e. condition spam or AoE spam is the hard counter to thieves perma-stealth builds) and the metagame will gravitate toward a solution before any balance patches need to be applied. If, and only if, the metagame gets stuck on a single “true” solution to generic combat scenarios that’s when numerical adjustment needs to occur(or functional adjustments if numerical adjustments don’t have the desired result).

So as an earlier post claimed, there is always going to be a metagame the moves toward favouring the best or “most broken” in the current meta, but just remember that the system is designed like that and you shouldn’t worry.

TL;DR: You can’t fix a broken system if it isn’t broken and is currently working as intended
EDIT: fixed typos

OK, so after reading through this, is seems like someone was killed by a build that was essentially a hard counter for their own build so they had no response. Seems like what one should expect from time to time, there’s too many variances in the PvP metagame to be able to accommodate all threats and losing like this is to be expected. Maybe next time come back to us with some screenshots of the damage you suffered so we can better understand the situation and help with solutions.

Also earlier the OP mentioned the post was addressed to the ArenaNet staff, it should probably be reminded that doing so is kinda frowned upon and shouldn’t be attempted again. The forums are for us players to talk to one another, the dev team might read or chime in, but it shouldn’t be expected or demanded.