Guild Wars 2

Apolo.5942:

WoW does this much better. Skills that are meant to be high effect and to be interrupted have 3s casting times. Skills that are meant as interrupters are instant cast. Skills that can be interrupted but are meant to be spammed have around 1.5s cast. That of course does not work for a game where you go from 100% to 0% in 5 seconds flat.

I disagree. Though it has been several years since the last I played WoW, playing a caster back then in PvP was annoying as hell since you spent half your time fakecasting which, in the end, was a gamble between you and the other guy. In GW2 it’s kinda reversed, you have more frequent access to interrupts but in turn your timing and your reactions have to be better. If you prefer the WoW system, that’s fine but I personally enjoy the GW2 playstyle a lot more.

Though you’re right that blinds with high casting times are just as much of a gamble.

Lich King.1524:

Exciton.8942:

It is immensely strong condition if you understand other professions. Definitely takes much more skill to use than weakness where you just put on opponent and benefit immediately.

Just one example from mesmer perspective. Shadow shot shuts down mesmer shield block hard. The skill is unblockable and a blind mesmer will not be able to summon the shield phantasm. Given how important phantasm is to a chronomancer, preventing is from spawning is very impactful in the fight.

you are talking about thief, may be its just overpowered by using such blind
but other professions have almost useless blind on skills:

Elementalist:
Blinding Flash, once per 10s, so we skip 1 attack from 1 enemy during 10s.
Lets take thief: thief can make 20-40 attacks during this time at least if not more, in sPvP enemy may push 1 target to get it down, lets take 3 enemy: then I may receive 60-120 attacks in 10s, so its around 1/60 – 1/120 = 1.6% – 0.8% of damage reduction, so we may assume about 1% of damage reduction (if all attacks are equal),
so it’s just nothing, you can not rely on it, you should not event think that it helps.
its like a lottery with 1% chance, than may be it pevent not 100 damage, but 7k damage with crit. lottery where you will loss in 99% cases. vs 1 enemy chances bit higher, but still about nothing, we can not rely on it

Ok, first of all – adressing thief specifically – the fastest attack rate thief can do is the dagger AA which is 4 hits in 1.68 seconds, in 10 seconds that would be ~24 hits. But the thing is, that’s hardly the point. You’re watching blind too much from a PvE perspective, where mobs attack with the same patterns and attacks all over again. In that case, frequent blind that matches attack frequency is useful for DPS mitigation. In PvP however, blind should be used for negating dangerous attacks, for example warrior bursts, hard CC, high-damage attacks and so on. That is the reason why using blind in PvP effectively takes skill. If it would just reduce your effective DPS intake by a percentage or a fixed amount it would be pretty much mindless blind spamming without any assessment of the situations necessary.

Blinding flash is actually an amazing blind because it is instant cast, so it doesn’t interrupt other skills and you can even use it while being stunned. For example you fail dodging a warrior’s shield bash and he follows up with an eviscerate, blinding flash can save your life by completely negating eviscerate’s damage.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Lich has a good point actually.
I don’t know about stacks but duration time should blind all attacks for that duration.
This would actually help curb some of the DPS that is being brought in from PoF.
Just make sure the durations are greatly shortened on blind effects.

No. It would be absurdly overpowered and that’s coming from a guy who loves thief. Blind is one of the components in PvP that actually takes some skill to be used effectively and when that happens, it’s incredibly powerful. I’m sorry but if you want to find the use of blind, it’s a l2p issue. If you want to have something against channeled attacks, use headshot and get easy pulmonary impact damage.

Tempest is far from weak, the thing is that most people are just so stuck with the old D/D playstyle that they didn’t adjust to tempest yet, or just don’t want to because they don’t like it. Personally I enjoy it far more than the old elementalist because now it’s not just attunement swap every other second just for boon stacking. Though you still stack a lot of boons as tempest but it definately is a different playstyle.

And as Blaine Tog says, if you like it, stick with it. That’s the reason why I always come back to ele, even if I played mesmer, revenant, or engineer for some time.

Well you can’t invent the wheel anew everytime. I doubt it’s directly taken from DotA 2 but still, adaptive armor is awesome and so is Timbersaw.
And the “old” condi/cele builds are not even THAT viable now, I doubt they will be in HoT when there is even more resistance.

No removal! If you remove the rewards, it’s possible that PvP will be flooded with players that only go for the daily rewards which would make it even worse.

I main ele and I say that this is a bad idea. I won’t even bother to explain why, it should be plain obvious.

A lot of times it’s super frustrating. I love it!

Srsly, I hate S/F fresh air post-patch. Because everyone else got their burst buffed it’s even harder now to survive, still manageable but way harder. With zerker amu it’s impossible, every thief will kill you using backstab + autoattacks with haste only. Also tried D/D with water, arcane + either air or fire, was ok, but well… With our survivability slightly nerfed and other classes dps and burst buffed, D/F with fire (blinding ashes), water and arcane felt way better.

However, the best results so far burst and sustain wise I’ve had with staff using this build: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-oZ;3g20U0v4-N;9;732G;0248256057;9;1CoF2CoF20d
Because arcane got buffed so hard this build really felt like it had the potential for outplaying the opponent and aeromancer’s training comined with lightning rod is just silly on staff, as supreme already mentioned. The application of burning is great, it has area denial, water field and crowd control + the survivability with aquamancer’s training was just way more than with D/D and noticably more than with D/F. Also worked really well in 1vX situations though the condition cleanse is lower than with D/D and D/F of course but healing rain did really well in those situations.

Not sure about the sigils so far, I think sigil of doom can be scrapped in the current meta, so energy and battle could workout well.

Give us cyborg spec!

Thief is more of a tactical class and is used to bring instability to the enemy team. Because your shortbow/shadowsteps give you so much mobility you can often step away from a teamfight with invisibility, go for far and decap, maybe even cap. So at least one of them has to go back and not everyone can win a 1v1 against a good thief, so they may send even 2 ppl back, which in turn gives your team the advantage at a contested point. At the same time, the opponents have no guarantee of recapping far fast enough or even to kill you because you can disengage so easily. And if that’s the case you arrive back at the teamfight earlier than the guys the opponents sent for you.

That was just one example, of course, you can also focus squishy targets, in fact you should (but maybe not as S/D thief, idk, i play D/P). What you should NOT do is trying to decap (or even worse, cap) a point against a class that you can’t kill quickly, that’s just a waste of time and therefore your team’s resources.

TL;DR: Thief is used to tip the balance of teamfights and to apply tactical pressure which he can do by moving fast and disengaging easily (and yes, stealing stability from necro elites and SB bombing is pretty sweet too)

Mystogan.4157:

Example:

Burst ele vs terror-mancer. Most burst eles have very little condi remove. This does not mean terror-mancers are op. It simply means that the terror-mancer counters the ele.

Now pit that same terror-mancer to a stability warrior. Obviously the outcome will be different given the skill level of each player is the same. Since the necro spent many of his traits in to damage on fear or even duration runes, much of his power is negated by the stability.

1v1 duels?
The majority of the other classes and builds have a very tough time handling one hambow war, and i bet. That if you put in the ring a hambow war with the same skill lvl as his opponent, he will win.

Sorry, but these two statements show that you don’t know jack kitten. Stability is horrible against terrormancers because corrupt boon makes it into fear, the exact thing that the warrior is trying to avoid. I did that myself countless times, it still puts a smile on my face when a warrior pops stability.

Second: Hambow will win 1v1 every time? Have you ever seen a duel on a 1v1 server, save even played a duel yourself? Even before the last balance patch hambows were terrible in duels. Their playstyle is predictable, their moves can be anticipated easily and their animations are obvious and easy to dodge.

If a class is overpowered or not depends on the player’s perspective. Bad players will consider hambow to be overpowered since they are unable to play smart and to dodge properly. Once you learn that hambow can’t do anything against you. Still talking about 1v1, but since none of the typical tPvP builds seems to be overpowered to the community it HAS to be 1v1 which determines which builds are seen as overpowered. Or did you ever see a bunch of whinethreads about the super important altruistic healing bunker guardians? I think not. Whinethreads are currently about LB rangers (and Engineers of course).

So what is overpowered? It can’t be determined by an impartial view IMO. Bad players will always consider “chesse builds” with low skill floor to be overpowered (such as hambow, LB ranger) while good players usually see builds with a high skill ceiling as the strong ones. Take for example a shatter mesmer, they are quite popular in duels (other than hambow) but they are just very hard to play. In the end, the better player actually wins quite often, at least in duels.

And THIS means that all the “lololol class x with build y is so overpowered” is a learn to play issues in most cases. Sure, there are super easy faceroll win builds like PU mesmer, or P/D thief (though my personal opinion is that P/D thief is not THAT strong) but at least these builds are terrible in tPvP and can be ran away from easily.

I think this describes it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w