Guild Wars 2

Nage.1520:

Strayhand.8216:

“Just last time I checked they had subscriptions, don’t like me no subscriptions (I guess GW2 has forever ruined me).”

Taking an example from this topic, this is like saying McDonalds spoiled you, and now you are not gonna pay for normal food anymore. How exactly did GW2 spoil you if you don’t find it fun…?

I guess you missed the part where some people find this game not only fun, but more fun than other existing MMOs, subscription or no subscription.

No, in fact I agree with that. Even though I didn’t log in for a while, I wouldn’t even consider logging into another currently running MMO (I played WoW for 5 years). But I forgot to mention that my comment wasn’t really meant to the poster I quoted from, but in general to the MMO community. Nowadays people complain about MMOs having a sub fee because GW2 “spoiled them”, but on the other hand they complain about GW2 not having content. I guess people want it all for free.

“Just last time I checked they had subscriptions, don’t like me no subscriptions (I guess GW2 has forever ruined me).”

Taking an example from this topic, this is like saying McDonalds spoiled you, and now you are not gonna pay for normal food anymore. How exactly did GW2 spoil you if you don’t find it fun…?

Carpboy.7145:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Any-good-EOTM-ganking-builds

Pop signets. Cast CnD from 1500 range and use steal right as it ends casting. One shot with backstab. If theyre still alive theyll be under 25% so just spam HS.

Yeah, it’s totally fun to be a macro-bot.

gengaluf.1729:

Allthough i learned how he played and was finaly able to beat him.

Omg, what is this, I don’t even… Did I read it right? Are these kind of things really happening? People learning to play against another class? It’s hilarious, I don’t beleive it!

Yes, just as you guessed. It packs 5 bleed stacks (if all 5 attacks hit, as NinjaEd said), which does in total 100 dmg under 4 seconds. This means that one stack of your bleeds does 20 dmg under 4 seconds (as you can see on your autoattack above), so one bleed stack does 5 dmg per second. That’s the number you see “rolling” over the head of your target when you have bleed on something, your damage per one stack bleed per second. All the stacks of all your bleed attacks will have the same dmg, e.g. if you equip 2 daggers, your death blossom attack will do 5*3*10=150 damage in total if I’m correct.

Big Tower.5423:

No one kills trash lol. Single target damage is the only thing that matters. Migitation do definvility not count as damage. PVE = DPS

Well, if you can damage the boss by standing in the aoe with pistol whip, I say it counts as damage. Also with sundering strikes PW packs vulnerabilty faster. Not to mention you can get back 5 initiative faster so you can stay over 6 init with PW easier, in other words you can do a PW after every autoattack chain, while you can’t backstab so often (at least not with 25/30/0/0/15).

And an offhand pistol for black powder (melee mobs cannot hit you, but watch out for dredges) and/or shortbow (great aoe, evade).

Travlane.5948:

THAT is why people do guild runs.

Fixed.;) And as I said, I’m not talking about 3 hour runs where people are wiping. I’m talking about this “go meta or delete your character” mentality. If you have a group that is in full berserker, and a group that has PVT armor and builds like e.g. 15 acro instead of 15 trickery, both farming fractals, the first group does 11 runs by the time the second one does 10. Who cares, really.

I understand that, but the thread was going againg into the “if you are not the best then you are a pathetic kitten” direction, while originally it asked for survival tips, so I guess not for how to finish a run as fast as it can be done. Never mind, I guess I envy you that you find challenge in the latter, I personally rather don’t do anything a hundreds of times because I get bored of it long before that.

Just a stupid question: what if you don’t finish a fractal run in 45 minutes, but only in 55. Will the world end? I will never understand this obsession with speedruns. The point is to play with friend or friendly people and have fun during it, so who cares if it’s longer by 5-10 minutes? Basically you want to play a certain content LESS? So you don’t enjoy it? Then what’s the point…? Also “it’s a dps race because the longer the fight the higher the chance of wiping” is a total bullkitten. CDs end. If you can survive for 20-30 seconds, you can survive for any lenght of time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about 3 hour runs with constantly dying partymembers, but runs where people have god forbid PVT armor or 15 acro or something like that. I agree with trying to get so close to zerker and ideal builds as possible, but saying something like “if you’re not full zerker and best build, you are carried by the group and make them die” is just total bullkitten and discourages people from playing thief even more.

Tbh I’m not sure why DD would be better nowadays, with sundering strikes PW packs vulnerability quite fast to make up for the dps loss, and regarding which is more boring, I don’t find spamming the cloak&dagger+backstab combo more entertaining than the other. Not to mention you interrupt with and evade during PW. Also the other weapon skills are useful. A lot more utilty, versus a few % individual dps loss (which is compensated by vulnerability). Try the little less offensive builds others mentioned, 25/30/0/15/0 with SP or 15/30/10/15/0 if you are fond of DD. I ususally run with short bow as second, if you have to range your dps is kittened anyway, and in most cases cluster bomb is just fine compared to unload.

Of course there are some exceptions, Mai Trin is one of them. Because she teleports back and forth, it’s a pain to use cluster bomb, so stick with PP. It’s actually an easy fight (at least on low fractal levels where you are at, I didn’t see it above 20s) if you figure out that you don’t need to dodge most of the aoe, just simply walk out of it. Save the dodges for when you really can’t step out of it. Same for Mossman, you don’t need to spam dodge like crazy. When he is invisible, you can see where he is on the minimap so just try to get away from there. Learn to leave the aggro for warriors and guardians as a thief, your best defense is positioning. Actually DD is good at Mossman, but not if you already have aggro. DD is a pain imho if you have aggro, since then stealth won’t save you. With SP you can evade-tank instead of cloack&daggering and still getting hit, since mobs always finish their attacks on you despite stealth…

Oh, just shut up and use the awesome new venom heal we got! Some people are never satisfied…

Zelulose.8695:

Honestly, I faced a P/D thief on my pu zerker mesmer…

Then your problem is not thief but dire gear. P/D is a bleed spec, it sacrificies direct damage for attrition and survival. What is wrong with a char geared for tough/vit surviving longer than a berserker…? With a “normal” crit builded thief the duel would have been quicker.

I don’t get what the surprise is, LFG community is just like that. I never understood why people want LFG in a game, I never use it. That’s why you have guilds with friends… I never used LFG in WoW either (after learning about the community in a few weeks). It’s the worst thing that happened to WoW community, I’m not surprised if it’s similar in GW2.

Yeah, you read it right, they do the total opposite of what they are saying with these silly explanations. Like, regarding every upcoming thief change. Because f* logic.

Sanduskel.1850:

Spec D/D and don’t listen to the negative nancies. the class is great in wvw and going to get better in a week. if you rely on cheesy perma stealth builds too bad though.

So according to you it’s fine that we have less and less usefuly builds? That we are forced into speccing D/D?

And please… PLEASE, understand AT LAST, that most rogues are completely fine with nerfing perma stealth! You don’t seem to get it! You keep repeating perma stealth over and over again, while you don’t see that nobody complains about permastealth nerf, but about S/x nerf and active init skills/traits nerf (while Anet says he wants us to be more active in battle…).

Please tell me why should I bother with Teq. First of all, I got my own guild, which I like to do stuff with. I have no interest in joining a guild jut to kill one dragon. I know it’s not a big hassle, but it’s a freaking world boss. I should have the chance to kill it while questing there. Or else why is it in the open world, why is it not an instance? Secondly, the fight’s hardness is only in getting enough people to the same overflow, not the actual fight. I just don’t see why Teq is more fun than your average dragon. And you have to go there and wait for an hour… It’s not worth the fuss, it’s not fun to do this. In the meantime, I have other stuff I can do which are fun, so what’s the point? Rewards? Give me a break, nothing worthwhile ever drops for me, so who cares about rewards in this game… So in short, I don’t see how it’s fun, it’s not worth the fuss and time. I don’t have a problem with it, but I just don’t care. This content is not for me, Tequatl is nonexistant to me now, I do other things which I like.

“As a thief, you just used your damage skill, that left you with 0 initiative.
As a warrior, you just used your damage skill, and it went on cooldown.”

You still deal in the totally unrealistic. So both used one skill, and warrior has all other weapon skills ready, but thief has zero initiative? Sounds totally legit and equal. And what if the warrior used up all weapon skills and thief has 10 initiative ready? What about the weapon skills at slot 4-5 which have 25-40(!) sec CD? Imagine a situation where a blind could save your life and you used up your blind skill with 25 sec CD. Imagine a situation where your skill with a 25 sec CD missed. And so on…

Initiative is 100x more fun than spamming the weapon skills one after another to cooldown. What Dee Jay wrote around the beginning of the topic. You just have to manage it. You don’t spam skills to burn your initiative to zero (more so because you get 10% dmg above 6).

Is it just me, or this trait somehow worked on object-like world bosses (wurm, golem…) until yesterday and today it doesn’t? Yesterday I did 2 autoattack chains on these by the time I got back the init for a cloak&dagger (25/30/0/15), today, I do 3… Anyone else noticed this, or is this only my imagination?

Use signet of malice, and either PW or on trash packs use shortbow, you will heal yourself like a pro and it does good aoe (by the time you cast e.g. a 10K PW, you can cast 2×5K cluster bomb, which is also a blast finisher). It depends on your build as well though, posters here will consider my 0/30/10/20/10 build lame, although uber builds initiative-starve while I spam cluster bombs and other weapon skills all day long. I don’t do speedruns though, because I don’t give a kitten about a few minutes. I only go on guild runs anyway.

Vayne.8563:

JustTrogdor.7892:

I thought the OP said he was rolling a Thief?

We’re still barracking for our favorite professions. A lot of people come to this game from other games, and roll a thief, expecting it to feel like a rogue profession in other games. Many of those people end up rerolling.

We’re preempting. lol

Strange. Thief is the only class I feel really comfortable playing, because initiative works exactly the same way as rogue’s energy in WoW, which I played for 5 years. With other classes in GW2 I have to watch CDs all the time, which makes no sense to me and feels unrealistic (I mean why would I be able to do the same move only every 25 seconds…?), and in the meantime I can see better what’s going on around my character, instead of checking the action bar. It’s no surprise that thief is strong 1vs1, it’s completely different from other classes, feels much more fluid and reactive.

I’m thankful on the explanation on the 3/3 armor set. However, as Nilgoow said, that 50$ is 50$ no matter how much money you had before.

205/200=1.025
255/250=1.02

The damage gain is exactly the same in the two cases, 5 damage. How is the first 5 damage more than the second 5 damage…? This is not what diminishing returns is. DR would be if e.g. you would need more and more precision to raise your crit chance by 1% the more crit chance you have.

Your goal is to evade everything, so even if you fail now and then, ideally you will get hit very rarely, in which case +1000 hp sounds better than +100 dmg reduction. Also if you have your crit above 50%, it means you will crit more than not (not to mention fury), so crit dmg will get better than raw crit chance. So I don’t get why soldier is better than valk. It’s just my simple logic though, I’m not a math-head, so this is kind of a question from me.

So if you join a specific guild, it’s basically the same as before, no challenge in the actual fight, you down him every time. And drops? Give me a break, nothing ever drops for me. So why should I bother?

My main is this thief, but all of my alts are norn as well. :P

spoj.9672:

You just need to learn to evade key attacks, position yourself correctly and use blinds when fighting trash. Good thieves dont compromise dps for survivability, they stick with the 25/30/0/0/15 build. If you cant play with it then you may aswell just play a warrior and let someone whos better at thief play it or practise more.

I heard this game is so hard that only pro gamers are allowed to play certain classes. Give me a break…

/OFF

GW1 was not called MMORPG at it’s launch to begin with. They marketed it as CORPG (Competitive Online RPG), because the “outside” world was all instanced.

/ON

@Vayne, so you’re saying that the people in Anet are morons? Because everyone seems to understand the problems and see them more clearly than them… You can understand, the people in this thread can understand, everyone can understand, only Anet people can’t understand. Yeah, sounds logical… And there can’t be different problems with the game’s different systems, right.

“In other MMOs not having BIS gear means not seeing content at all.”

This is not really true. You don’t need BiS to see the content, it only makes it easier. In WoW for example, there were achievements for doing raids in low itemlevel gear (like blue or green in GW2), because it could be done. Even when the next tier comes out, there are usually other easy methods coming with that raid-tier to obtain pre-raid gear again. You can e.g. aquire gear with running simple 5man dungeons for tokens, a.k.a grinding. To be honest, I don’t see that much difference in this regard between other games and GW2 now, only that in GW2 the whole process is slower, and gear doesn’t come tier by tier, but piece by piece. And what is the point of ascended gear’s higher stats? To make the already easy PvE more easy? Am I supposed to be glad about that?

Lyru.9380:

killed with zerk shortbow

Same here, with bow in zerker gear (+valkyrie armor). I use 0/30/10/30/0, for this fight I packed signet of shadows for movement, roll for initiative and signet of agility but I didn’t even have to use the last one. Withdraw as heal with vigor on heal trait, 2 init/10 sec trait and assassin’s reward, so I didn’t have problems with HP. You can have so much dodge with the bow it’s unbeleivable, so just stay calm and dodge everything (if you’re close to a safe zone just run out to save dodges) while autoattacking Liadri. For this you might need mostly zerker gear though, I’m not sure how close I was to the time limit. I tried it like 50 times without the bow because I was concerned about the damage but most of the time I didn’t even make it to phase 2, after I switched to bow it was like 2-3 tries.

I agree it’s better to run around in a smaller circle, not at the edge, you can even see better this way. And don’t forget you don’t have to be outside of the red circles to dodge them, you just have to time your dodges right.

I’m wondering why did you need a spreadsheet to tell that the most theoretical dps comes from the maxing of the power and precision traitlines. That’s quite a surprise there!

Well I’m not a pro or anything, just in fractal 10-20s, but I use 15/30/0/25/0 and shortbow is kinda my main weapon so I consider myself “support damage”. I use D/P as secondary for it’s utility and it does noticably more single target damage (dagger autoattack is miles ahead of bow’s, and cluster’s flytime/initiative cost), but in many fights – especially on bosses – it’s painful to melee, so you’ll find yourself switching range a lot (that’s not a bad thing though). At the beginning I tried to stack bleeds because I kept reading that the bow is good for conditions, but it takes ages to stack some decent bleeds on the mobs, also in instances you don’t alway want to detonete cluster bomb rather do some combos – so I went valkyrie armor and berserker everything else (ruby orbs in armor) mainly because of the bow… Cluster bombs do 4K+ (usually you always have some might stacks which rounds it up to 5K+) in aoe while comboing and 1,5K autoattack crits. Plus you have good mobility, can evade even if you’re out of dodges and/or immobilized, and aoe weekness with lotus poison. I love the bow.

Leeto.1570:

Ah good to hear that he can beat bad thief on ranger in 1v1, thief`s must be really fine or our dev just is not completely handicapped. Good news either way.

So if a ranger beat a thief, then the thief must be bad, but if a thief beats bads in videos, he must be OP. The double standards again, welcome to MMO forums.

It’s funny people are demanding from guilds that they shouldn’t tell them how to play – but you are allowed to tell a guild how to play…? If a guild demands 100% rep, you have 2 simple choices, either join and represent, or don’t join. It is really that simple, instead of coming to the forums and hate.

So if I understand it correctly, D/P was always OP, but people used the subpar D/D because it’s a macho spec and takes more skill. Aha. Sounds completely legit, because people think this way. They use the macho thing instead of the effective one when they want to steamroll in WvW. Right.

Support is not limited to buffing, to this “force multiplier”, as others already wrote. In fact, I don’t get why you call this force multiplication a.k.a “more dps” support to begin with… We have very different idea of what support is.

I’m running with 15/30/0/25/0 in PvE. My main weapon is the shortbow. I do 4K+ cluster bombs while throwing out buffs for melee like retaliation, cleansing, might, heal, depending on the combo field. You can stack might up to 20+ in a fire field, or keep healing continuously in a water field while aoe nuking. I can keep up perma weakness in aoe with a poison cloud every 10 sec or so in the meantime. If the mobs can be blinded, I can switch to D/P and keep up blind on more mobs while backstabbing and ‘heartseeking’, because I make use of the blinding field at stealthing as well. We could go on with shadow refuge and other utility skills and so on, but in my opinion, theif provides more support in the real sense of the word than some other classes who simply buff dps – which I wouldn’t call support, I would call it what it is, buffing dps.

Ok, I’m not one to complain about the nerf, I just adapt and carry on. But the question here is not how much our PvE capability was nerfed, the question is WHY. Why did Anet ditch the original nerf which would be more of a PvP nerf so it would satisfy the whiners about thieves a lot more to begin with, and went with this nerf, which is more of a PvE nerf than a PvP nerf. What is the logic in this…?

Vayne.8563:

The object of the game for me is NOT farming. I could care less about farming. The drops I get are completely incidental to me playing the game. I don’t go through a dungeon for drops. I don’t go through fractals for drops. I get drops doing them, but that’s not why I’m there.

I also play to have fun. I enjoy certain things. I enjoy finding things I’ve never seen before. I enjoy some dynamic events. I enjoy leveling alts. I enjoy running fractals. I do them because I enjoy them.

This. It’s not the game which is gated, it’s your mind. I play games to have fun, not to have some virtual swords. Your obsession with purples is what makes you unable to enjoy a game for what it is – a game. I don’t say it’s the best game ever btw, I couldn’t care less about that, I simply enjoy it so I play it. You shouldn’t play a game you don’t enjoy.

uberkingkong.8041:

One thing GW2 lacks is raid game, things to do with your guild besides bounties, open world pvp (WvW is instanced), and most of all gear that makes you better than the majority of people aka RAID GEAR.

Dude. These things are meant to be this way in GW2… (There isn’t only bounties in the guild missions.) Some stuff are missing, yes, but raids and open world pvp are not those. You are again one of those who want this game to be something it isn’t and doesn’t want to be.

I’m only browsing the forums from work (I’m working on a PC, so it’s only a click) and occasionally in the morning before going to work. In the afternoon/weekend when I have time to do my freetime stuff, I hardly ever think about coming to any game forums, because freetime is precious.:P

But if the game would improve, change, how do you know how it would be and if it wouldn’t last a month with a fee…

Nappychappy.7046:

Okay, see, I didn’t say “If they just out of the blue added a sub-fee” I said “if it had one.” Big difference.

That’s exactly why your statement has no ground, the game would have to be different with a sub-fee as well.

Nappychappy.7046:

This game wouldn’t last a month with a sub-fee, that alone judges how great this game is.

No it doesn’t, because this game was designed without a sub-fee. Who cares if it would or wouldn’t last with a sub? It’s like saying that a single player game wouldn’t last a month because you wouldn’t pay a sub-fee for it. Guess what, you don’t have to. It makes absolutely no sense comparing the game to sub-based games – at least based on the sub-fee. Once you realize that, you can start enjoying the game for what it is, without your stupid rules that you set for yourself.

Not this thread again… Do you go to the Diablo forums as well demanding a trinity? Or the Need For Speed forums? They will not add the trinity you miss, because this game was not designed that way. There are however games with the trinity if you want to play combat with that boring crap.

As I see, the main reasons why thief “is a joke” in PvE are the following:

- PvE is easy
- warrior is better

Ok, nice logic…

By the way, following your “DPS is everything” logic, if we would be better at dps than warriors, wouldn’t that be rendering warriors useless? Then would you go to warrior forums and whine about your warrior being a joke? I’m just trying to understand the logic here.

DanH.5879:

if we are so OP in PvE, i want you to explain to me why ppl hate thieves so much in pug parties

We are not OP, but we are not a joke either.

Konrad.9587:

will nerf damage done, due to the initiative system.

And other classes cannot spam their most damaging ability. Btw, you don’t need to spam poison cloud, because the cloud in itself applies lotus poison every second (which means the mobs will be weakened for a lot longer than the poison cloud’s duration), also if you shoot trough the cloud, your poisonous attack applies lotus poison as well. My other weapons set is D/P, so when I’m placing blinding powder, I can also do a HS+backtab combo, meaning it’s not going to waste damage wise (on a sidenote I also have an on demand interrupt).

Konrad.9587:

but if you talk about group support and group survivability, they are far behind guardians.

Which other class isn’t? Every group wants a guardian, imho it’s a bad design that one class has the best of all group support/healing.

Konrad.9587:

And behind warriors in terms of damage, too.

So we are supposed to be as good as 2 classes combined?

Konrad.9587:

Pyroatheist.9031:

You bring high damage and excellent survivability to a party

Thieves? Excellent survivability to a party? Perhaps in P/V/T gear, 30 in Shadow Arts/Acrobatics and only to yourself, but then your damage will be pitiful low.

What about perma aoe weakness from range and aoe blind every second in melee (on top of good damage of course)?

critickitten.1498:

We’re debating the notion that people claim the game has no grind in it when it clearly does.

SOME people claim that. I don’t. And if you check the thread, there are others who don’t say that either. Just because some people claim it, you cannot say that everyone does. Btw I reacted to the post where it was said that WoW players found GW2 more grindy than WoW. I didn’t, quite the contrary. You cannot say that the whole community says this or says that based on a few posts.

critickitten.1498:

Now I’m not sure you actually play this game. It is literally impossible to obtain two rings, two earrings, and an amulet at that rate, or even double that rate. Even if you assume the person grinds the hell out of Fractals for the rings, that still leaves 3 months of play to get the other three items.

What I said: it takes 20 days to get 3-4 ascended items. Lets see: you do the daily fractals and by that I mean lvl10, you get a ring after every 10th run. That’s 2 rings after 20 days, it can be even shorter, because rings have a chance to drop. Plus you’re doing the daily achievement, which is about half an hour on top of the 1 hour fractal run per day (which in your opinion is “grinding the hell out of fractals”…). In those 20 days you get 20 laurels, and you finish your monthly, which gives you another 10 laurels. Now you buy the amulet for 30 laurels and got 2 rings from fractals. That’s 3 items in 20 days. Plus you can craft the backpiece if you got lucky in fractal drops, and you have the money for it, that’s the 4th. If you never set foot into fractals before add 10 days to that and you get your guaranteed 3 ascended items in a month. I said 3-4, not all. (With 4 pieces (if you crafted the backpiece) you can run lvl30+ fractals.)

Earrings are another question, but if you really want them fast, you can have those in another month. I have 6 commendations from guild missions (did the bounty every week since it came out), and 25 laurels I think. By the time I get 12 commendations I will have 40 laurels as well – although I probably won’t spend it on the earring, but if you really want to, the option is there.

Yes, the combat in GW2 is more like an action game or TPS, you have to learn to dodge and move a lot. I think that D/D is the worst weapon combination for solo PvE. You don’t have any defensive mechanic while doing an autoattack chain, nor you attack more mobs at a time, etc. While it’s good at spamming backstab and does the best single target dps, it leaves you vulnerable. Try out other weapon sets. E.g. with S/D you still have cloack&dagger, but attacking from stealth with the sword dazes the target for 2 seconds, while sword also hits more mobs. D/P or S/P gives you even more defense with blinding powder, since you blind all the mobs hitting you in melee (you have to watch out for ranged mobs, it’s better to take out those first). You need a lot of init regen for D/P though, then you can combo blinding powder with hearthseeker into stealth and backstab. With S/P you just stand in the smoke and pistol whip. You also have shortbow which is a powerful weapon if you want to kite mobs.

OR if you don’t like stealth, get condition damage and try D/D doing death blossoms + caltrops on dodge. DB is an aoe attack, and once you are in the air it’s a dodge as well. With 15 in acrobatics you can spam DB+dodge almost non-stop. The other option for condition damage is also good, P/D, which even combines bleeds with cloak and dagger (your main attack for stacking bleeds is 1 from stealth).