Showing Posts For Spyger.8675:
There are plenty of positives and negatives with the dungeons; what do you all think is wrong/ right with them SPECIFICALLY. There are plenty of people spouting “too hard” or “this is awesome!”, don’t be that guy. Give ANet some serious feedback. For example:
Bad: Some mobs/bosses have health that dwarves the majority of others. I spent over 40 minutes killing Kubu and his golems in Sorrow’s Embrace, and we were totally aware of the one golem healing from conditions, yes. When a boss has used all of their abilities dozens of times and is still alive, it ceases to be fun.
Bad: 2/3 runs of Citadel of Flame story mode, other players couldn’t see the cinematics.
Good: The dungeons are the only PvE I’ve found that makes all of the game’s unique mechanisms necessary to win. Utilizing combos, dodging, the downed state, etc. I love these things, and the dungeons provide difficult enough content to force my group to coordinate and improve as a team.
Good: Storytelling is great. The cinematics aren’t long enough to be intrusive to gameplay, there’s plenty of in-game dialogue and easter eggs for the rare player that doesn’t just ZERG everything in the game. Plus, the art, music, ambiance, unique bosses, sooo much good here!
Finally, another Bad: There’s no good reason not to make multiple difficulties. Many of the dungeons are simply too difficult for a large chunk of the playerbase. You see all the “QQ I’m not willing to improve my skill, I just want fun handed to me!” posts on this forum and every other one. WoW made easy modes in WotLK and they peaked on subscribers; they made Cataclysm harder and lost millions. Learn from others…
Many people raise the issue, “This event boss just one-shots me if I try to melee!”. Sometimes, this is actually a legitimate complaint. Some creatures don’t give a significant “tell” before they use a one-shot ability. This was a large issue with that first Beta weekend, and ANet mentioned it specifically, saying they would make sure that attacks other than basic ones would give substantial tells. Still though, I’ve seen a COUPLE, as in, VERY FEW instances where people got crushed for no good reason.
Three other issues are far more common:
1. You don’t have enough defense, and you got slaughtered by a basic attack that has no tell. If you enter melee combat with a world boss, dungeon mob, etc., you NEED a certain amount of Health and Armor so as to not get obliterated in one or two hits. You have a 1 ability on your weapon, it’s probably near instant and pretty much undodgeable. Most enemies have this too, and if you don’t build enough defense in melee you’ll just die with no chance. You have the option to build glass cannon in PvP because most players don’t have a huge healthpool and you CAN burst them down. In PvE you don’t have that option.
2. You didn’t dodge. The monster gave a tell that it was going to screw you royally if you didnt do something, and you didn’t do anything. Dodge, block, counter, interrupt, blind, SOMETHING should have happened to respond to that tell, and you failed to deliver it. It’s okay, you can’t expect yourself to be perfect, this is what the downed state is for, and someone should be a bro and pick you up. If it’s your first or second down, someone can pick you up in no time flat, no big deal. After that, play it safe, move to ranged for a minute until you lose the down penalty, then get back in there and fight like a crab!
3. The enemy was completely engulfed in spell effects or simply wigging out from so many attacks that you couldn’t possibly have even attempted to maybe perhaps see the “tell” that you so vitally needed in order to stay alive.
Sorry guys, this one is just total bologna and my only advice to you is to stay as far away as possible. If you have that many people attacking something it’s not as if you need to be in melee to do that extra bit of damage anyway; that thing is just screwed as it is. Sit back and watch the fireworks.
1. Melee vs. Ranged:
This one has been around since Beta #1, and for good reason. I’ve always played rogues, assassins, thieves, etc. in any game that gives me the opportunity to, so GW2 was especially jarring to me for this reason- melee fighting will eviscerate you and strangle you with your own colon.
Here’s the deal, and I actually LOVE why they made it this way, the source of the issue is actually ranged play. In other games, ranged players have a disadvantage that they don’t have in this game: lack of mobility. They were balanced because even though they could attack from outside your range, they probably couldn’t do it for long because melee classes were more mobile due to gapclosers, cast times, etc. ArenaNet decided that standing still and doing your rotation isn’t the most fun gaming there could be, so they gave ranged players in GW2 far more freedom of movement.
But OH NO, that means that ranged is imbalanced now! How do we fix this? “Wait!”, said some brilliant, bedazzling genius of a person at ANet, “We’ll make melee do more damage than ranged, providing a high risk high reward scenario! And on top of that, we’ll give every profession ranged and melee options so no one is trapped in one playstyle. BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! We’ll ALSO give you the ability to switch between ranged and melee weapons on the fly! BOOOOM!”
If you direct your attention to the base damage of your melee abilities compared to your ranged abilities, you should notice that in most cases, melee damage far exceeds that of ranged. In PvP, I think people are okay with this. I havn’t seen more than a few people even bring it up, because it’s obviously balanced through damage uptime. If a melee fighter faces a ranged fighter, the ranged one should be dealing damage pretty much the whole time, whereas the melee one has to spend time and effort closing the gap.
PvE though is where thousands of people have raised a storm of complaints. That whole melee does more damage than ranged thing? That applies to NPCs too. If you run up to melee them, they’ll melee you right back, and in a straight up slugfest they’ll kill you LONG before you kill them because they have way more health than you. No matter how strong your glass cannon is, it can’t burst down a Veteran, or a dungeon mob faster than that mob can kill you.
The reason is this: You can heal. You need to build enough crowd control, toughness, vitality, and healing power to get you to that next healing ability before you kick the can. Very few enemies can heal, and even then, their heals pale in comparison to yours. Personally, my 30 second CD heal gives me over half my health back. The biggest heal I’ve seen a mob do was about 1/20th of their health.
This post was HUGE, so I had to break it up below. My viewpoint on melee, hopefully it can put some confusion and nay-sayers to rest.
(edited by Spyger.8675)
Edit: I totally went on a rave below, so I decided to answer you question more specifically up here. Power increases your base damage and counters other’s armor and toughness, ideally, this is on every piece of gear you have. Precision increases your chance to critically hit. This is a far weaker stat than other games, because crits in GW2 are only 150% instead of 200%, so prioritize this after Power. You’ll also occasionally see Critical Damage on gear, but it’s usually a mere 1%. This is TOTAL GARBAGE. You can get 30% just from traits, making crits deal 180% damage. Don’t waste spots on your gear getting Crit Damage unless you find rare pieces, because I’ve seen them give up to 6%, which is not garbage.
In terms of defense, your base health is awful as a thief, while your armor is okay as long as you keep your gear up to date with your level. Also, you should get toughness from the Shadow Arts tree, because that tree is simply the best tree in the forest.
Therefore, your ideal gear has Power, Precision, and Vitality.
If you like d/d and p/p then you’ll want a crit build. The 1 attack on pistol IS a bleed, but the direct damage component is good enough, and you’ll be using Leaping Death Blossom simply for an evade when you have no endurance left, or if you can hit 3-5 people with it, because that’s the only AOE in your build. Your primary attack for p/p is Unload, use Body Shot only when you’re in a group to help everyone’s damage (if you’re alone, there’s no point to dealing 5% extra damage on your next Unload when you could simply Unload twice). Clearly Headshot is simply an interrupt, and P/P 5 skill is AMAZING; the smoke field blinds enemies EACH SECOND they stand in it and you can shoot through it to blind people outside the field. OR you can switch to D/D and Heartseeker through the smoke field to gain stealth!
Daggers are where your real damage will come from. Your rotation is Cloak and Dagger, Backstab, do a 1 combo while your revealed debuff goes away, and repeat! Once they get below 33% health, spam 2 baby aaaaaaaaaawwwwwwww yeeeeeeah.
The number one piece of advice I can give any thief is BUILD VITALITY YOU FOOLS. Thieves have the lowest base health in the game and you must compensate for that. Don’t worry much about it or feel slighted, because your base DAMAGE is off the charts. I’m level 80 enjoying (most of the) explorable mode dungeons (curse you horrible balance (in some dungeons)) I use a 0 30 20 20 0 build, so 40 points in defensive trees and a mere 30 in offensive. I do WAY more damage than anyone else in our 5 man group. I also use D/D P/P and Shortbow depending on the fight. There’s a trait in Shadow Arts that causes AoE blind whenever you stealth, making D/D, which is normally a ballsy proposition, a total breeze!
For utilities I recommend Hide in Shadows for the healing skill, the precision signet for crit chance and condition removal, Smoke screen because it’s just retardedly good (back the boss into a corner and block him in with it kitten), and then Shadow Refuge for when things go badly (great for reviving people and shooting through for Lifesteal, Unload baby!) For the elite, Dagger Storm totally wins on style points, but there are too few situations where that trumps over Thieves Guild.
Oh yeah, in case you didn’t notice, there are two condition removals in this build. EVERY build should have at least 2 if you plan on doing dungeons or PvP.
(edited by Spyger.8675)