Guild Wars 2

Weena.6429:

Sweetbread.2679:

Churning Earth is actually probably the most well designed skill in the game. It’s powerful, but not broken op, has a tell, can be reacted to, and requires a setup to pull off. The problem is that a LOT of other skills are just idiotic failures of balance that have no counterplay or downside and dont require any skill to use. The game needs MORE Churning Earths not less.

I agree with you to an extent. I am all about high risk/high reward skills because they encourage skilled play. The problem is it is so easy to counter just by counting to three and dodging even with a setup using lightning flash or any other defensive utility. I am not suggesting changing the skill entirely. Landing the skill after the full 3 1/4s channel would still have the same degree of difficulty but just be slightly less predictable.

Atm the best way to pull it off is probably earth 4 stun > signet of earth or arcane surge immobs instead of lightning flash, but I do think charge skills should come back as they add a LOT to the depth of the game. With so many powerful invulnerabilities like dodge and baked in evades readily available, this game’s combat desperately needs some sort of mixup mechanic. At least they could get rid of the cripple during the windup so you could cancel it to bait out a dodge without putting it on a 30 second cooldown.

Churning Earth is actually probably the most well designed skill in the game. It’s powerful, but not broken op, has a tell, can be reacted to, and requires a setup to pull off. The problem is that a LOT of other skills are just idiotic failures of balance that have no counterplay or downside and dont require any skill to use. The game needs MORE Churning Earths not less.

Shockwave.1230:

The downside is thieves are glass, with no stability, and have 2 utility skills basically predefined on their bars because CC rocks their world.

The meta forces Direct Damage thieves to be what they are within their design. Some people don’t like it, but ANet designed them to be a mobile hit and run profession, and they nerf ed ele which was it’s only competition in mobility way back in the day. Thieves being what they are is in part by design and in part by the meta not allowing them to be much else.

Sorry if you don’t like, it’s a learning issue when people don’t know how to handle them, not that they are unfair. We know this bcs teams in 5v5 aren’t comprised of 5 thieves.

Except zerker thieves aren’t glass. A fresh air burst ele is glass, they either pull off their burst or they make a mistake and die. A zerker thief either pulls off their burst or they make a mistake and then escape, reset the fight, and try again. Yes. Woe is the “glass” cannon thief lol.

I don’t think anyone’s arguing against a high mobility class. They’re arguing against a high mobility class with no downsides that doesn’t require a quarter of a brain cell to use. Also how many times now has Anet proven that they don’t have a clue what they’re doing? You REALLY wanna stick with the whole “that is their design” argument when their “design” philosophy shifts at the drop of a hat?

Yeah and you didn’t see 5 hambow teams either, probably because a thief was absolutely required as a roamer lol. Somehow that makes pre nerf hambow a skill based balanced build that everyone thought was just peachy? Hyperbole doesn’t help your case, unless your case is to look like you aren’t actually thinking about any of this. Come back with an actual argument that isn’t just an extended cover for an idiotic “l2p” post.

Initiative needs to be slowed by chilled (25-33%, not 66%), and there needs to either be a 2 ini cost increase for each consecutive use of the same skill or a SWTOR style energy management system where if you blow an entire initiative bar it’ll recharge much slower than if you pace and manage it. Stealth needs more counterplay beyond blind aoe as well. Every class should have at least one revealed applying ability and any ability used in stealth should remove it, but at the very least make it so that blocked/evaded/invulned stealth attacks reveal the thief. For the love of god make at least one aspect of the thief class require some small modicum of skill.

There’s too many brain dead mechanics on thief that ignore the rules applied to every single other class. Spammable z-axis teleports, so many baked in evade/stealth/blind defenses that there’s no drawback to going glass cannon (warrior and mesmer can pull this off to a lesser extent and that should be addressed as well), a plethora of get out of jail free cards that let thieves reset a fight or harass someone endlessly (sorry thieves, but defending a point from you ad infinitum is not the same thing as actually winning against you), ridiculous burst with no tells or risk that can one shot other glass cannons, and the list goes on and on and on, there’s almost no feature of the entire class that isn’t broken or a ridiculous double standard in some way. The whole class is a complete failure of design imo.

Zero Day.2594:

Why don’t you re-roll to a thief and reap the benefits of this OP class?

Because people who aren’t complete simpletons find mind numbingly easy things boring as hell? Maybe some people actually play to have fun, pull off insane skillshots, learn their class inside and out, have ACTUAL competition decided by skill instead of poorly designed gimmicks put in to make morons feel capable in pvp and don’t play just to find the path of least resistance, drool on their keyboard for an hour, and then feel like a “winner”. Why do you even play? They could just put a rock in heart of the mists that you slam your face into and get a “YOU WIN!” message and that would be about the depth you’re looking for in a game.

NinjaEd.3946:

People have tried telling them that, it just doesn’t work on this community. They’d rather have nerfs against things they can’t beat regularly.

Because people do and have tried rerolling thief just to figure out how to counter stealth. Learning how to make the best of fighting an incredibly kittened up mechanic is not the same thing as that mechanic suddenly having an actual counter, any semblance of balance, or being remotely fun to fight against. Surprisingly that doesn’t make people stop seeing it as an incredibly poorly designed gimmick that rewards skilless play. Shocking I know. Grow a thicker skin or start playing a class that requires half a brain cell, because anti-stealth threads aren’t going anywhere and you just look ridiculous for defending it.

Seifer Thalaen.7869:

PvP mechanics (Dodges, response and so on) are good…too bad gw2 pvp is based on skilles specs and crap metas, so no since being competitive here doesn’t necessarily require skills it will never be an esport. As i said like 1 year+ ago they must choose between casual friendly and competitive, there will never be an esport caring for nubs, better players should prevale and nabs should be ganked, that’s how it works for every competitive game from gw1 to mobas…..rewarding casuals and randoms while being bad already killed gw2 pvp. Marketing choices after all…they wanted it, now they’re getting what they deserve.

This coupled with a complete lack of quality control/well thought out changes is pretty much exactly what’s wrong with this game’s pvp. The combat framework is great and has an amazing amount of potential, but the obsession with making casual friendly, low skill rewarding builds, based around some sort of “awesome” gimmick (invisible teleporting ninjas! Super “sturdy” warriors! AI armies that fight for you!) just makes it impossible for this game to be anything more than a casual distraction at best. It’s an incredibly frustrating pity.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Insanity.5174:

Sweetbread.2679:

Oh look a bunch of useless PR answers. What a surprise.

as always i would add.

O get over yourselfs you too. God knows I am more critical than most. But this is a thread which has drawn some legit insight from the devs and they should be applauded. You really want them to go back to silence like before? They sound genuine and excited. That is a good thing. If any of you ever worked you would know a positive frame of mind is important for a team working on a project like this. I am glad they said things will be good.

As I said in the OP, my biggest concern is that new game modes will be hotjoin only. But I hope if we qq enough about this after release this will change. I am pumped (as I said in OP) for new sigils and runes. This is honestly going to be huge. It is possible this could really shake things up. There is a lot of lame stuff like PW, Diamond skin, AR, Dhuumfire, ALL SPIRITS AND AI. Obviously the game can’t be “good” or truely fun with this cheese around. But new sigils and runes will be huge. Really looking forward to it

This attitude makes people like me look bad on these forums. Yes I am critical about unfun mechanics. But I also give credit where it is due. Honest feedback (like in this thread) is good. Well done anet. Sigil and rune changes is fantastic. I have said for ages that balance is secondary to fixing the broken stuff. Runes were a huge part of this as there are like only 3 good rune sets. And this limited build diversity. I played the same build for 8 months and honestly I am bored of it. New runes should shake things up and maybe introduce a couple of different builds for each class.

Credit where it’s due? You must have low standards. All they did was say everything was “crazy” and that they love it and it’s really gonna “shake things up”. There is literally 0 useful pieces of information or any transparency in this thread. All they’re doing is throwing the spvp forum a bone in some failure of an attempt to hype the few people that still believe a single word they say up for a long overdue patch that’s still months off. It’s just sad really.

Oh look a bunch of useless PR answers. What a surprise.

Allie Murdock.8152:

I’m going to try to answer as many of these questions as possible, but keep in mind that some of this stuff we can’t talk about.

Why does this thread even exist? All of the serious questions are going to be outright ignored or given “soon” non answers. Try and foster some community relations when your job actually produces something beyond locked threads.

Liewec.2896:

Sunshine.5014:

TL;DR: The customizable zone is too large. Other games allow only 10-15% difference between builds, while GW2 allows a big range between bunker and zerker builds; that makes balancing very hard.

GW1 allowed you to choose 2 classes, put your attribute points anywhere you liked and then allowed you to pick 8 of any of the skills that those 2 classes have…

and that game was fairly balanced, probably the most balanced pvp i’ve played.
(and i’ve played pretty much every MMO released in the past 10 years)
if there was a build you considered OP then you could make a build that counters it.
everything had a counter.

its such a huge contrast in balance between GW1 and 2’s balance,
obviously the brains behind the GW1 balance must have moved to other projects.
because the current balance guys obviously don’t have a clue what they’re doing.

Agreed. They tried to make the steep learning curve of GW1’s skill system more accessible to the BOOM HEADSHOT crowd and ended up just creating a bunch of kittenty gimmicks and wombo combos that are near impossible to balance. Hell just by removing energy they basically doomed the balance and design from the start.

They haven’t even started TALKING about the feature patch. It’s months off. The SPVP forum is pretty much about to riot since they haven’t gotten even a hotfix in like 5 months now and everything’s tied to the feature patch for god knows what reason.

Cynz.9437:

honestly, why don’t you just ask anet to remove every weapon skill and utlity from thief and rename them into “walking loot bag”… this topic is filled with posters who don’t even play a thief but are arrogant enough to assume they could make any good suggestion on how to nerf the class even further

Having chilled or interrupts affect thieves like every other class in the game makes them into a “walking loot bag”? Talk about hyperbole. It’s like unless thieves are the exception to the rule 100% of the time when it comes to counterplay you people will think the class is completely useless or dead weight, when in reality it’s just in line with all of the other classes. Just how much of a leg up do you need to feel competitive exactly? It’s laughably pathetic to react that way to something that’d be less of a nerf and more of a bug/consistency fix than anything and just points out how much you rely on the poorly thought out class mechanics to cover up your own skill deficiencies.

It’s more of a mesmer/thief being explicitly designed to be as unfun and gimmicky as possible to fight thing than a spec thing. Not really sure why Anet thought that a stealth/ai spam class would be a great idea.

Yeah I know how chilled works. The cooldown countdown is 66% slower while the condition is applied. It’s not unusual for me to get a straight 20-25 seconds of chill uptime with my ele by using glyph of elemental power and threading skills and auras in succession, generally evening out to around 60-70% uptime total. It’s hard to pull off and probably one of the only things that balances out ele’s abysmal sustain. You know, unless your opponent completely ignores it for no reason, because the devs have a kitten for making their class immune to counterplay for whatever reason.

I do love though how you think that assuming I misinterpreted how chilled works somehow makes it suddenly make sense for initiative to ignore it. Gotta love that thief logic. If you don’t have an actual point to make, EVADE SPAM.

Bazzoong.7145:

Sweetbread.2679:

I don’t think having a little consistency between class mechanics and counterplay warrants thieves getting any sort of buff. Initiative already ignores chilled for god knows what reason while other classes can be utterly crippled by it, ignoring interrupts as well is just icing on the double standard cake. It’s gimmicky, counterplay ignoring crap like that that makes everyone hate kitten like Healing Signet. It isn’t the fact that it’s a really good skill or that it’s hard to outplay that makes it aggravating, it’s that the opportunity to outplay that mechanic just flat out doesn’t even exist beyond the warrior completely kittening up. Initiative is the cooldown equivalent of Healing Signet.

Thief weapon skills are affected by chill, the time inbetween skill uses increases, you lose the time even if initiative is not affected a chilled thief can use less skills in the same timeframe than a thief without the chilled conditions.

In addition to that there are special effects hindering thieves while chilled, heartseeker will jump only half the distance for example.

Yeah obviously people generally use chilled to make leap skills shorter and not for the giant 66% additional cooldown it applies. Were you actually thinking that having a fraction of a second additional aftercast was somehow the same thing as being locked out of a 30 second weapon skill for an additional 20? What fantasy world do you live in, why do you people even reply? It’s just embarrassing.

I don’t think having a little consistency between class mechanics and counterplay warrants thieves getting any sort of buff. Initiative already ignores chilled for god knows what reason while other classes can be utterly crippled by it, ignoring interrupts as well is just icing on the double standard cake. It’s gimmicky, counterplay ignoring crap like that that makes everyone hate kitten like Healing Signet. It isn’t the fact that it’s a really good skill or that it’s hard to outplay that makes it aggravating, it’s that the opportunity to outplay that mechanic just flat out doesn’t even exist beyond the warrior completely kittening up. Initiative is the cooldown equivalent of Healing Signet.

Not sure exactly, I’d guess 600ish. I might be wrong, but I think you can also chain it off mesmer illusions and onto a stealth mesmer too.

gesho.9468:

how about air#1 auto in team fight? i checked on three gollums it gave me 3k dps.

Fire 1 is probably a better bet in a team fight since it hits harder, is an actual aoe, and is an arcing projectile so you can actually use it past 1200 range if you get high enough. As for air 1 It’s actually pretty decent against a ranger 1 on 1. If you can keep the pet in range of the chain then the ranger will always eat 2 of the 3 hits, plus it tracks so it can’t be sidestepped with ease like every other staff auto.

You can do quite a bit of burst with an Air 5, Air 3, Earth 5, Earth 2, Earth 4, Fire 2, Arcane blast, Fire 3, Glyph of Storms/Fire 5 combo if you can manage to trap your opponent with unsteady ground. Water 2 also has a HUGE radius so you can use it to force your opponent to blow a dodge to get out of it and water 4 is great at slowing an enemy enough to eat a lava font or ice spike > blinding surge burst (they hit at almost exactly the same time). Generally you can retreat and lay down fields ahead of your opponent as they’re forced to chase and then trap them with cc, it’s not ideal but you’d be surprised how much damage you can make an opponent eat by using the terrain and kiting/line of sighting them through choke points.

Allie Murdock.8152:

FYI, we don’t think it’s balanced. That’s why we’re still balancing it.

The OP actually makes a good point, though. For this particular feature build, we have not shared much about what’s going on, we get that. Don’t mistake that with we’re not doing much, though.

Thanks for the feedback

People think you aren’t doing much, because you AREN’T doing much. Nobody’s “mistaking” anything. It’s months and months between tone deaf updates and you expect people to cut you some slack for the next one (whenever that is) based on what exactly? The complete lack of transparency and abysmal track record so far coupled with a deluge of accountability dodging posts filled with PR doublespeak, non answers, and thread locking?

AcidicVision.5498:

Once again, Thieves are not spammy. A misunderstanding of non thief players and the initiative mechanic is what is causing that entire misconception. Every time a thief uses a skill, one or more things go on CD. Init recharge is no different than being able to trait faster recharge on weapon sets for other classes. But whereas other classes can save their cool downs for appropriate times and maximum effect, thieves have to play further ahead because every skill costs them something.

For a working example, a Guardian can sit on Shield of Absorption as a clutch knockback to get a revive or finish or push off a warrior or thief defensively. That option is available until he uses it, period. As a Thief, if I use infiltrators strike to set up pistol whip, I have now lost access to black powder shot and headshot which are my defensive gtfo skills if the encounter goes wrong. Could you imagine losing Shield of Absorption in exchange for using Zealot’s Defense? Thats how a Thief works.

Yeah except you didn’t lose access to black powder or headshot at all. You only spent 8 init for the infiltrator’s strike > pistol whip combo, one initiative’s already regened during it so even with no traits for initiative you still have enough for black powder or headshot, not that you would even need them with infiltrator’s return available. And that’s baseline, with no traits or skills boosting intiative gain. And you know what it would actually be kind of balanced were it not for the fact that you can just blow all of your initiative, hide in stealth or disengage while it regens and take all the risk out of the downtime, possibly throw out a stealth attack towards the end that requires no initiative for god knows what reason, and then do it all over again. Oh and then if you get chilled it doesn’t put your attacks on cooldown or even slow your initiative regen, thieves get a double standard on that because why the kitten not, might as well keep the fail balancing consistent.

KarsaiB.9475:

I’ll share my personnal opinion. Bringing pve/wvw players by integrating spvp more with the rest or something isn’t going to give people incentive to play it. At the moment, my team and I get at least three 500-0s per evening vs randoms everytime we teamQ. There were only 2 teams that were challenging to fight and are probably decimating randoms as well when not playing against each other/us. Being a pve/wvw more casual player and getting disemboweled by long time pvpers is NOT fun. Make the pvp so unique, interesting and balanced (aka better balance, game modes, less messy particles and stuff) that it would bring new people into the game, and THOSE people, coming FOR THE PVP would actually make the effort to get destroyed at first and then improve, etc etc. Trying to salvage your playerbase by changing the reward system as a main strategy to get spvp back on track is meant to fail.

Exactly this. Even if the reward system is on par with pve, that still doesn’t change the fact that if people don’t like the pvp then they won’t stick around to play it. It makes no sense to try to attract everyone to spvp and THEN focus on making it something they like once they’ve already tried it in it’s current state and left.

Gimmicky hard counters need to go. Diamond skin is terrible design as it is and I say this as an Ele. It’s not nearly as bad as Automated Response imo, but that doesn’t excuse anything and they both need a complete rework. At the very least conditions still need to apply a reduced duration so that soft cc still works somewhat instead of just making the fight completely 1 sided.

AcidicVision.5498:

How exactly is using a skill 3-4 times “spamming”? Considering to do that the thief can use nothing else and one of those skills if spammed is useless on high health characters? Can you honestly tell me that while fighting for a CP you don’t use any of your skills 3-4 times in that duration?

That massive burst you are talking about comes with 13k health. 13k health, very specific traits, and long cool downs. It is the definition of glass cannon. Hits hard, breaks easy, and takes forever to reload. If you let that nearly down you and get away, its honestly a ltp issue.

Pistol Whip costs five initiative. It can’t be spammed. It can be used twice. One more time if traited. It also has a long, very obvious start up, and roots the thief. Making it very very unsafe and punishable on dodge. Honestly people, do you even bother looking at how these things work or just parrot things you hear somewhere else?

Yes I consider using a skill 3-4 times in a row (and with init regen being what it is, it’s more than 3-4 times and we all know it), because do you know what happens when you use an ability with every other class? IT GOES ON COOLDOWN.

Yeah my ele is crying you a kittening river for your 13k health. Wow it’s like playing a glass ele, but with more base health and armor, spammy escape mechanics, and the ability to go kittening invisible and run away.

Yeah and pistol whip is the epitome of risk vs. reward. A burst skill with a stun AND an evade baked in that can be precast and then teleported in so there’s no chance to avoid it. Wow really nailed the balance on that one ANet.

Jowiso.8602:

Tatsuo.1478:

You picked the class who’s core mechanics are: counterless invisibility, spam, massive solo burst damage, and running away..

As a PvPer who mainly plays a Thief, you’re not looking at it correctly. If you’re fighting a Thief that constantly goes into stealth and runs away, he’s not helping his team in sPvP and you’re definitely winning the match, even if you don’t kill him.

Also, it’s not that hard to CC a Thief – most classes have a couple mechanics that can handle this. It helps prevent the running away issue and the “counterless invisibility”. On occasions where I need to retreat, any good players often have ways to stop this. Especially 1v1.

I think you missed the part where the whole thread was about how people want a thief to actually lose when they lose a battle and not just get inconvenienced for 10 seconds. Say what you want, but dying and getting sent to respawn compared to running off point for a few seconds to heal and regen init and then immediately coming back is not even remotely the same thing.

And sorry, but if you’re not removing invisibility and you’re just blindly aoeing and hoping that it connects, that’s still counterless invisibility. The invisibility is still there, it is not being countered, the thief is just being a complete kittening moron and wandering into aoe that people are throwing out with an educated guess at best. Yeah a thief is killable, but a good 2/3 of that is just trying to wrangle in an idiotic, poorly planned gimmick ability instead of actually fighting the player. And god forbid the thief actually knows what he’s doing, because you will NEVER finish him 1 on 1. It’s a get out of jail free card plain and simple.

lol you guys are a bunch of kittening jokes. No wonder you’re drawn to the class explicitly designed to appeal to cowards, trolls, and kittenty players.

AcidicVision.5498:

Tatsuo.1478:

And was not surprised how powerful thief felt (at least compared with ranger as that is the profession I’m playing – not the spirit ranger though), and especially stealth.

Highlighted your problem for you. Rangers are pretty useless in PvP atm and arguably the worst class in the game right now. And you intentionally aren’t playing one of the builds that could give them presence on a team.

When CDI called for class that needed the most changes and updates, Ranger won overwhelmingly and generated over 20 pages of suggested improvements. Mostly because their traits are just all over the place (for example, all condition weapon set buffs, and minor traits in pre line, but condition dmg being in toughness) and issues with pets.

Ofc you are going to feel more powerful switching from a barely functional profession to the most mobile profession in the game. You might as well have said “I dunno, I tried playing a Guardian and it felt much tougher than my ele”. Next you’ll tell us you are playing zerk/bear/bow.

My suggestion is to start practicing with another class until Rangers see some tender love and care. Life will be much easier for you. If you insist on sticking with your bear/bow, I recommend looking into a condi trap build with axe/torch. Awesome for farming glory on waypoint zergs in sPvP and against thieves you can pretty much stand still while they kill themselves.

Yeah every class, but thieves and mesmers hate stealth for being a terrible, unfun, cheesey mechanic to fight against that let’s thieves get away with monumental amounts of kittenty play or completely reset a fight at a whim, because of rangers being underpowered. Stop deluding yourself. You picked the class who’s core mechanics are: counterless invisibility, spam, massive solo burst damage, and running away. Literally no part of that combination makes for a good pvp experience. People are right to think the class is a failure of design and it’s not because their class is underwhelming, it’s because thief is just flat out awful to fight against in almost every way, it gives a huge leg up to kittenty players, and is essentially unkillable in the hands of a pro player.

AcidicVision.5498:

The options are there. I don’t want to sound condescending, but just play smarter, maybe?

Funny how the burden of skill is never on the player with the obviously kittened up gimmick ability that everyone hates.

Iason Evan.3806:

I never said, “be positive”. I said we need to be cooler to each other and the devs. By still posting in these forums it at least means you are still playing or wish they would change some things so that you could come back because you played at one point or another. Letting our words to each other and devs devolve into vitriolic rage and sarcasm and terrible feelings does nothing to make the game better or the community.

I encourage you to go back and actually read what I have been saying all morning in this thread. It boils down to us taking charge of the only thing we have control over on these forums: being kind to each other .

I don’t agree with the cadence of releases as it pertains to skill updates. It has been really slow. That Does Not give me the right to use inflammatory language aimed at devs or other users. It doesn’t give any of us that right.

You need a thicker skin plain and simple. The “toxic” community that the devs created by completely ingoring the “polite and helpful” community for an entire year isn’t going anywhere soon. Anet deserves the bitter, jaded community that it created and nobody’s going to just pretend the past year and a half didn’t happen just to tip toe around how sensitive you are.

Justin ODell.9517:

I completely get that, and while I have no idea how/why sPvP got off-track around launch, I’m determined to keep moving sPvP forward to be what many of us hope it can be. I’m very proud of the work the team has been doing, and I think we’re heading the right direction.

I generally try to be very understanding, and put myself in the shoes of our players, which is usually very easy because we often share the same concerns. Occasionally it just gets on my nerves how myopic some people in the community can be at times.

You can’t rag on the community for being “myopic” when it takes 5-6 months for even the smallest hotfix to happen and you leave us almost completely in the dark aside from a few “yeah you guys will really love it when it happens!” and “soon!” posts. Basically nothing Anet says has any merit at this point, because there’s very little consistency or follow through and the pvp team doesn’t have enough of a track record showing effort and competency to complain about the community being fed up with it or judging it on the actual work it’s put out.

Put up or shut up essentially, because nobody cares about your good intentions for pvp when they don’t ever materialize into anything and the spvp community is pretty much all out of good faith at this point. Start producing tangible results instead of excuses and the community will have your back.

What? People actually expected Anet to not completely kitten up something in a way that benefits warriors above all other classes? Why are we even hoping that these people aren’t completely incompetent at this point. We all KNOW it’s going to break warriors even more and we all KNOW it’s going to take them 3-4 months at least to fix it. Why even bother?

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Perhaps one player needs to make a guide on how to kill a stealthed player. Both from enemy and ally perspective. This will help players understand that it not so shallow and easy for the thief.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but counterless invisibility beyond blindly aoe spamming is never going to be considered “not so shallow and easy for the thief”. You rolled the class that’s core mechanics are spam, being invisible, ludicrous burst damage, and running away. People are right to consider your class shallow and catered to cowards and morons who can’t compete otherwise.

Wow people actually enjoy stacking and impossible to fail auto attack zergs? Why are you even playing a game if it requires next to no input from you? Go watch a friggin movie.

This is the player base that happens when you design a GAME around being as “accessible” (read: dumbed down) as possible instead of designing it around people who actually enjoy PLAYING games.

Poor baby. Now you’ll only get 50% vigor uptime for a 5 point trait investment on a class that already has ludicrous baked in defenses. Just because one class is a gimmicky, complete failure of class design doesn’t mean your gimmicky, complete design failure of a class shouldn’t ever get nerfed.

zone.1073:

garethh.3518:

The hype… everything Anet innovated, everything people were talking about (class design, combat system, party setup) was largely focused on PvP.

While I understand the point you’re trying to make, you’re misunderstanding my point. Hype and attention are two different creatures.

Hype refers to before a game is released. It gets hyped up, but the hype says nothing about the attention the game will have after it is released.

Attention in general is self explanatory. What this post is referring to is not the hype the game had back in August 2012. I’m specifically discussing the amount of attention the game has right now at this very moment, which is more relevant.

Hope that clarifies things.

You’re just splitting hairs. All of that hype WAS people paying attention to it. People stopped paying attention to it, because spvp could barely be considered out of beta and anet completely dropped the ball and let it stagnate for a year. It isn’t that people never payed attention to GW2’s pvp, because they did; it’s that people STOPPED paying attention to it, because it simply just wasn’t worth paying attention to.

In an ideal setting I’d say a 2 week cycle for balance and bug fixes would be optimal and realistic. However given Anet’s propensity for adding hard counters and overpowered mechanics to a single build in order to fix a class wide issue and then nerfing everything else around those new traits and abilities, a 2 week cycle would probably only escalate things for the worse. If the problem was just the speed of changes, then yeah a 2 week cycle would be great, but it’s also about how tone deaf and poorly thought out the actual changes we’ve been getting have been and I don’t really know how you fix that.

DiamondMeteor.8345:

Bottomline is that no class should earn arbitrarily high health per second without heavy healing power investment.

Exactly. Nothing should just let a class ignore game mechanics like that. The tradeoff in offense for investing in defense is there for a reason.

I love that the reverted Signet of Restoration will still heal for less than the 8% nerfed Healing Signet’s passive even if you invest 30 in earth for Written in Stone and spam the heal on cooldown every time it’s up. God this game is a complete kittening joke.

Kargath.6598:

Kiriakulos.1690:

Kargath.6598:

Can you say kitten one more time? also according to you people are – “QUITING LEFT AND RIGHT!”

How is this a counter argument to anything he said?

You don’t counter argument some one who is emotional beyond reason.

Ah the good old “I have no actual argument so I’m just going to pretend yours isn’t worth listening to.” defense.

dreztina.4820:

Jayce.5632:

No class should be able to simultaneously attack while evading (invulnerable) incoming damage.

This is such a big problem with the game. Between thieves with sword builds, AI condi builds, warriors with healing signet and multiple immunities, and the other various invincibility attacks, there are far too many ways for people to do damage without answer. That is just bad design. It removes the counterplay from the fight.

What is anet doing about it? Adding evade frames to burning speed. So much incompetence.

I’m like 90% sure that all of the class design in this game is just them sitting around a table going “you know what would be AWESOME?” followed by something like “backflipping ninja evades!” or “invisible teleporting mages!” without actually giving any thought to if that would be fun, balanced, or interesting to fight against.

Well GW2 obviously shouldn’t have been a sequel to GW1 in the first place. The game design is the exact antithesis of the first game’s and even the lore is pretty much unrecognizable. They have absolutely nothing in common besides an art team and composer. GW2 was dumbed down for mass market appeal to go after market share instead of building upon the innovative systems of the first game. It’s the exact same thing that happened to Blizzard with Diablo 3 and WoW after its giant paradigm shift in wotlk to make everything more and more “accessible”. Great game companies that abandoned making deep, although sometimes daunting and complex, innovative games to develop shallow, but idiot friendly and widely marketable, revenue streams posing as games.

Anyway OP you should give Path of Exile a try. It’s basically what Diablo 3 should have been and has some really innovative, deep customization systems.

mini.6018:

So many bad ideeas and poor to no knowledge of the game.

If your ele is broken or have l2p issues ask to fix ele not cry about nerfing warriors

Warriors are a lot less powerfull than they were before december and they need to spec berserker to do damage.If you can’t do more than 400 dps on a berserker than just reroll.

All i see is bunker easymoder crying they can’t do enough damage wich is ridiculous since they already put out too much for their risk/reward ratio involved.

Funny how you never have anything to say besides “LOL L2P SCRUB”. Man. What a well thought out and convincing argument backed up by data and reasoning that is. If only there was some giant unbalanced handicap you could rely on for forum discussions in addition to pvp, because you obviously can’t cut it with just your own rhetorical skills.

mini.6018:

If hps is all that matters why are not all guardians using the signet over shelter ?They will have the double healing with the signet plus a condition removal. Please explain to me?

Oh wait hps is not the only thing that counts in this game now go and reflect about that.

Well the entire post was about how chilled and delayed activation affects basically every healing skill except healing signet in some way, but I guess you’re not really into that whole reading comprehension or critical thinking thing.

HPLT you just made my night. Here let me even enhance that for you and take chilled into account, which healing signet COMPLETELY ignores:

Healing of Healing Signet:
11,760 per 30 seconds (392 hps)
with poison 392*0,77*30sec= 9055hp /30 sec = 301 hps

Healing of Shelter:
4555hp (152 hps)
with poison: 4555*0.77= 3507/30 sec = 117 hps
with chilled: 4555/(30 sec x1.66) = 91 hps
with poison and chilled: 4555*0.77 = 3507/(30 sec x 1.66) = 70 hps

Even if you keep poison up 100% of the time on the warrior, Healing Signet’s hps will outclass Shelter’s hps by 257%. Now let’s take chilled into account, Healing Signet ignores chilled completely and will end up outclassing Shelter’s hps by a wopping 430%.

Now just think about the delay between Shelter coming off cooldown and being activated. Imagine getting interrupted or cc locked. Healing signet just keeps right on trucking at at LEAST 301 hps with poison up, while the hps of shelter diminishes from it’s full 152 hps with no conditions on to less and less each second.

THAT is what is wrong with this healing skill. Not only does it take absolutely no skill to use and have mac truck throughput that requires no healing power investment, it flat out ignores 3/4 of all counterplay against healing skills in general. It’s basically a giant abomination against game design in general and if I hadn’t lost all faith in GW2’s devs several times over already, this would surely make me question their competence.

sorrow.2364:

When was the last time any of you have seen a competitive warrior using any heal other than Healing Signet?
Yet Surge and Mending are amazing healing skills.

I want people to think about it before saying that Healing Signet is not OP.

Seriously this. It’s like even the most basic forms of critical thinking escape these people, player AND developer.

Bearhugger.4326:

Change dodge so that it gives 75% damage reduction to all ground-based attacks such as traps and AoE. You’re moving out of the way of a spike trap but you’re still getting hit by a spike or two. Makes sense. It should still grant full avoidance to direct attacks though.

And I don’t see how Block makes any more sense than dodge in being a % damage reduction. Especially not blocking with a shield. (ie: Shield Stance, Gear Shield, etc) Perhaps weapon and magic blocks could be % based but not shield blocks.

66-75% damage reduction on aoe sounds about right, I’d say allow conditions to still apply from aoe at the reduced damage, but give immunity to all cc, as well as cripple, chill, and immobilize for the duration of the dodge.

Block could use some work as well, right now it’s just aegis on a duration instead of a charge and really kind of boring. Something more like a 220 degree frontal arc that blocks anything, while leaving you open from behind would make for some really interesting positioning tactics instead of just rotating your various forms of invincibility.

TPMN.1483:

Dodge is meaningful – ‘you dodged that bullet/arrow’ = you got clean out of the way just in time (no dmg taken – makes sense). Having dodge just be a % reduction of dmg you might have taken removes the purpose of dodge.

Except it’s not even a dodge atm, it’s just an invulnerability with a roll animation tacked onto it.

Wow, as if we needed more evidence that the devs are hopelessly tone deaf and incompetent. I swear one class could have a one shot kill lazer from 9000 range and they’d nerf/rework/buff anything even remotely, tangentially affected by that skill, but never the obviously broken gimmick ability that ignores 90% of all balancing checks and everyone hates to begin with. This game is a kittening joke.

The animations are pretty awful and close to unreadable even without all of the ai spam and effect clutter. Adding in cast bars and a fading used ability log for your current target would definitely make things easier to follow while opening up a lot of counterplay and strategic shutdown opportunities. God knows this game needs more depth and less flashy, gimmicky bullkitten,

Why does there even need to be any discussion of Anet’s integrity or commitment to their said design philosophies after the whole manifesto fiasco? They can declare, promise, commit, plan, intend, proclaim anything and at best you have absolutely no idea if they actually mean any of it or not. I don’t feel that way when WoW or LoL devs discuss things, they actually have some proven reliability or merit behind what they say. With GW2 it all just feels like PR doublespeak or hype with little follow through. I’ve never seen a company kitten all over a good reputation as quickly as Anet has done this last year with how they’ve handled GW2.