Showing Posts For TeoH.2098:
TeoH If you are going to turn mug from a front loaded hit to condition, you gotta do better then stacks of bleeding that can be removed in 1 button.
You’re forgetting the associated talents that are already linked to Mug.
I’m going to go with Mug changed to be a 5 stack of bleeds for 10 seconds, and nothing else.
If HS really is killing people through pure HS spam, then the problem is absolutely NOT that it’s spamable. The problem is that it’s doing too much damage when people are at high health. It doesn’t scale right.
Except it takes 30 seconds to clearly demonstrate that this is false. Like so:
So it isn’t just about stealth-hate then, is it? You should write up a complete list so that all MMOs/FPS know what is eligible for tweaking. Or are you one of those people that thinks nothing should ever be nerfed?
You seem to be incapable of following a point.There are aspects of all genres which attract undeserved hate from certain segments of their player base (traditionally the vocal but incredibly inept segments) despite those aspects being valid and working perfectly well within the framework of each game.
You shouldn’t need examples, you can visit any forum for any multiplayer game and you will see the same patterns across entire genres. Is it really the case that tactic/class/weapon/race X is broken imbalanced and too strong in every game of an entire genre? No that’s stupid. People have been complaining about the zerg rush for 14 years yet it has never been considered a balance issue, it remains intact to this day because it is an important part of the game that people just have to learn to deal with.
So when you look on these boards and see an abundance of threads crying about the Thief class, does the fact that people are crying about it indicate that there is a problem? No, it indicates that this is an MMO and the forums are progressing as expected.
To answer again the original question. “Why does every single game that comes out have to waste months of time and resource balancing the Thief class”? The answer for the overwhelming majority of games is that they didn’t, it just took months for you to stop crying about it.
How do you know if there is an actual balance issue with the Thief? When competitive teams who are playing to win consistantly pick the class over other alternatives, and when the role of the class in competitive games is so important that it dictates the entire meta game, resulting in a breakdown of gameplay. That honour currently belongs to bunker cap point defenders, which as much as i’m sure you would like to believe, are not simply playing bunker builds to survive backstab.
The forum cries, by comparison, indicate nothing at all other than business as usual. I would be far more concerned about class balance if a game had a Rogue archetype that nobody was calling overpowered.
(edited by TeoH.2098)
“naturally complain about archetypes that are designed to do high damage and go invisible” – that DESIGN is flawed.
Except it is demonstrably not flawed, because it’s been done perfectly well in game after game for decades, in a variety of competitive settings, with no issues. GW2 being just the latest in a long line of games that presents a perfectly good version of the archetype.
The fact that people enjoy whining about it, isn’t a balance problem. Neither is it a balance problem when people complain about snipers, spies, vehicles, dive kicks, projectiles, wakeup ultras, bunnyhopping, grenades, weapon jumps, tier 1 rushing, tower rushing, air units, or the red kittening turtle shell.
(edited by TeoH.2098)
Why does every single game that comes out have to waste months of time and resource balancing the “I wanna be a Ninja and kill with impunity class”?
You’re right, clearly there is a giant conspiracy in the gaming industry to make Rogue classes overpowered in every game they feature in.
It couldn’t possibly be that people naturally complain about archetypes that are designed to do high damage and go invisible. No i’m sure the cries of you forum champions are absolutely valid just as they were in every other MMO, you are obviously arguing from a neutral perspective of experience and superior insight. Let us pray that those in charge of the game listen to your sobs and follow your lead, as you truely know how to design games.
PEOPLE PLAY WHAT IS MOST POWERFUL.
People play what they percieve as most powerful…. in genuine competitive matches.
In free for all hotjoin scrubfests people play whatever they fancy playing at the time for whatever reason they like. In WvW people play whatever class they levelled first, chosen by pre-concieved ideas of how MMO archetypes play.
You want to use player statistics to determine class balance? You need to look at the top end of tourney play. I’ll give you a clue, it’s not Thieves v Thieves.
TL;DR I play a backstab thief.
Among other characters, yes i have a backstab Thief, thus making me a better authority on their real damage numbers than anyone who doesn’t. How about that?
Here let me help you move on to the next step of your post where you call me a scrub who relies on Heartseeker spam to kill unskilled lowbies in WvW, and would be incapable of performing if my number 2 button had a cooldown. Critique away:
Then you won’t mind if the choices you make require the equivalent amount of button presses as the rest of the classes to achieve the results thief is putting out now. Am I right? It’s so trivial the way you make it sound and you have succinctly put it into the most basic of terms. You shouldn’t have a problem with a few more button presses added to your rotation. Easy right?
I have absolutely no issue with pressing more buttons, i come from a background of games which require dramatically more complicated execution than this. Even for an MMO, GW2 requires the absolute bare minimum of control dexterity. The number of different buttons you use in a fight has precious little to do with how difficult the game is to play, but since you seem to be hung up on that, let me point out that GW2 isn’t even on the level of WoW Arena in that regard.
However, how you go from the concept of making Thieves press more buttons (which i can see no sensible argument for) to actual Thief changes is something you didn’t attempt to tackle. The current Thief abilities are designed from the ground up on the premise that nothing has a cooldown, because the initiative system is an intended unique feature of the class.
For that reason, most Thief weapon loadouts only have 1 or 2 buttons that deal any significant damage, with the rest of them being utility skills that don’t have any damage on them. The design allows for this because a lack of cooldowns lets you choose to use the 1 damage skill repeatedly when you want to simply do damage, and other abilities when you want the utility of interupts/snares/evasion/AoE/whatever.
That design allows the Thief access to utility when it is required, rather than rolling utility into abilities that are just going to be pressed anyway as part of a cooldown driven damage rotation. Moving to a cooldown system and putting damage onto the other buttons, apart from removing the unique mechanics of the Thief (never happen) would break this system by requiring you to use your currently situational utility simply to kill people. If using those abilities in rotation then became the most effective way to kill things, then you have just simplified the class by removing the choice of when to use your situational buttons.
You suck at game design.
Not that i’m trying to turn this into a debate on whether teleports are OP (they are, but almost everyone has them).
Indeed gap closers are absolutely not in short supply. Getting into melee range is not difficult for any class that wants to do so – but at the same time, every class also has access to a melee weapon loadout that they can switch to if they so wish. This isn’t a traditional MMO where certain classes have to stay at a distance.
Yea yea Elementalists whatever.
I was just responding to the silly people saying “just use a cripple or chill!” HS has a 450 jump attached. If you’re spamming it you close distance quicker than someone can run away from you even if you are chilled or crippled, unless they also have swiftness.
Not actually true, the distance jumped varies with movement speed debuffs and animation speed. A crippled or chilled Thief does not jump as far, neither does a Thief using Quickness.
1. Teoh ignores the entire aspect of positioning and infact related the Ele’s 15 second combo to “just hitting pre-determined buttons”. Of course, when your bar comes with an on demand gap closer, I’m sure it’s easy to forget about positioning.
2. Somehow, someone thought showing a post of two people using skills on a STATIONARY golem is a good comparison of heartseeker vs. any other skill….. (Do I need to elaborate further on this..? … gap closer….)
Oh this is good, my sarcastic quip about Elem auto attack hit the mark so well that you felt the need to leap to its defense and argue that glass Elems mashing 1 aren’t overpowered. Calm down champ, that’s not what the thread is about. The video does however happily demonstrate that HS damage above 50% is utterly appauling and that any complaints about it are made out of ignorance.
It’s a gap closer, yep. So that would make it similar to a 450r ranged attack, minus the advantage of actually staying at range, yes? Above 50% it actually deals less damage than the ranged auto attacks of classes like Ranger, which also follow you, and are also usable repeatedly. How are you still towing this line that trying to HS mash targets from 100% is anything other than appaulingly bad play?
4. Heartseeker isn’t the only issue. I don’t know why people took this literally.
People took that literally because that is literally what is claimed in this thread on the first page, go back and read it.
you can just keep clicking it until someone is dead. The way it works now even if a person is at say 40% life it still doesn’t hurt to start spamming it because you will stay auto locked on target and eventually they will be at 25% and dead. That’s not a finisher that’s like a “special” move you can always use.
You can keep pressing it untill the target is dead? Christ you’re right! Eventually if i keep pressing this button that deals damage, things will die! But wait, what is the other person doing during this time? I know, we’re playing the hilariously inaccurate example game so the other person must be backpedalling while doing nothing untill they fall over. I think i can beat that, lets keep pressing HS.
I’ve got this amazing Ranger tactic where you never go anywhere near anything and just send your pet after people. You deal damage and don’t die, it’s incredible.
A skill that can crit for 8k on a softie should not be spammable three or four or five times in a row.
Technically it isn’t spammable three or four or five times in a row, because if you crit 8k with it, it means the target is in a glass cannon build and is below 25% life, meaning you just killed him.
I mean you can spam it 5 times on the corpse if you like, but i don’t think that’s very constructive.
Of course if your target is a glass cannon on no life you could just press pretty much anything else. Like…. Unload? A skill with no cooldown that homes in on your target and deals damage from range! Christ it’s just like a Heartseeker, better nerf that next.
Until stealth if fixed/adjusted thieves will remain unbalanced.
What needs to be fixed/adjusted for stealth? The fact that channel skills hit them through it? Mesmer illusions hit them through it?
Don’t bother responding. Namu is a simple gimmick poster that repeats this kitten in every thread he can find but isn’t capable of arguing his point. Just treat him as scenery and move on.
But 100% critical during stealth? lol that’s complete ridiculous. What will ever happen if the community ever knew of the trait part regarding assassin’s signet w/ 100% chance of crit under stealth.
That’s funny, the 100% crit trait is a terrible option for glass cannon builds because they are already running at over 50% crit. They also have easy access to fury, so for much of a fight will be at over 70% crit chance. The alternative choice for last slot in crit traits is +20% damage against targets below 50% life, which is vastly superior to increasing your crit rate from 70% to 100% on 1 skill.
That trait is practically a scrub trap that appeals to silly people with no numeracy skills.
“OoOoOhh 100% crit!”
(edited by TeoH.2098)
It was funny at the time, it was also completely incorrect, but never let that get in the way of comedy.
I challenge you, go and make an elementalist.
How did you end up at that, from a Heartseeker thread? I have an elementalist, you just saw it hit a Golem. How about you make a Thief and go into a tourney game mashing number 2, and see where that gets you. Since you’re the one suggesting that is a viable way of playing the class.
Untill then, thanks for explaining quite clearly that you don’t run anything close to a squishy damage build, making your comparison of ‘19 moves versus 5’, meaningless. Join us next week when we complain that bunker guardians have to press signficantly more buttons before they have done as much damage as a Thief backstab opener.
Clearly the “effort” to damage ratio is just off there.
Golems? Your entire point is drawn from Golems?
Yea I hear that Golems have a magical effect on them that makes Heartseeker do less damage than Elementalist auto attack. Oh wait that’s not a magical effect, that’s how the game actually works.
Are raw numbers too complicated for you to work with? It seems to require significant effort for you to press a list of numbers in order so perhaps you actually do have difficulty understanding what i’m showing you. The Thief clip shows the Thief with optimal damage traits, that’s all i needed to show. The Elementalist is also of course running optimal damage traits, i don’t expect to have to convince you of that.
But you don’t personally run with a full glass cannon build that has no life? Yea no kitten. So why are you comparing your damage against people who are?
Let’s just clarify, Heartseeker is not the only problem with the Thief profession, its the consolidation of skill into a few key buttons that have unrivaled damage potential.
Effort: Low
Damage: Top Tier
The levels of bullkitten in this thread are approaching critical mass so it’s time for some footage of the actual game.
Glass cannon zerker pendant Thief and Elementalist. Feel free to start crying about Elem 11111111 now instead of Thief 22222222.
Or you could realise that spamming either of them is just a stupid idea, and you were an idiot for suggesting that mashing Heartseeker from full life is effective at accomplishing anything at all.
No the decision is:
I use Heartseeker, then I use Heartseeker again, and if he is still alive, I use Heartseeker again…
You don’t actually have the slightest clue how the class works or how much damage that ability does, do you. Not a clue.
Have fun with your pattern reproduction game then won’t you, i’ll be somewhere else PvP’ing instead.
GW2 has zero executional requirement
This is just wrong. I gather that every skill ever on every profession “just makes sense” to you, and thus you have some warped view that everyone views everything the same way you do, so all the most efficient rotations must scream out at you from the skillbar, and anything else is just l2p.
That’s nothing to do with execution. Execution refers to the difficulty of performing a particular action once you have made the decision that you want to perform it. Executing a 1 frame link combo in a fighting game is difficult, performing a static damage rotation in an MMO is not. There is no effort required in executing a fixed sequence of Elementalist abilities, or 5 heartseekers: You just press buttons. with a ridiculous input buffer so timing doesn’t factor into it.
I can press 453324234511, it doesn’t require anything that i would describe as effort. Look, i did it just there.
Here i’ll do it again: 453324234511
I’m failing to see where this effort comes from. I suggest you move your argument away from the idea of performing a set sequence of abilities in GW2, because there is no scenario where i’m going to acknowledge that your rotation requires any effort worth mentioning.
If you were instead trying to make some point about the length of time it takes you to deal X amount of damage as an Elem by providing a long list, then your intention missed me completely, but in that case i fail to see what you’re getting at.
if you can’t see the joke of thief damage output for what it is, I can’t help you.
A full damage spec squishy zerker burst melee class hitting you repeatedly in melee does a lot of damage. However, it would do a lot more damage from the start of the fight if it used literally any button on D/D other than Heartseeker. So since the thread is called ‘Heartseeker’, i’m having some trouble seeing how the complaint is valid.
Confusion damage is not a percentage of skill damage returned.
It’s a fixed amount of damage that scales with the Condition Damage stat.
You’re welcome.
‘Noone’ likes being zerg rushed either. Ask Blizzard about that one.
You seem to forget that Anet didn’t hype their game. The players did.
Someone needs to Google “Astroturfing”.
Typical D/D Elementalist “damage rotation”
Your “damage rotation” is achieved by pressing numbers on the keyboard in a predefined sequence.
Please explain why you believe the act of moving your fingers over several different buttons in a preset order requires some degree of skill that you should be praised for.
GW2 has zero executional requirement, pressing 1234 is as simple and mindless as pressing 2222. Your performance in the game hinges on the choices you make – how appropriate your decision is and how quickly you respond to the situation. What seperates players are the decisions they make outside of that sequence of damage dealing abilities.
That means the choice of target, the decisions of how to move and when to dodge, when to use utility skills or other weapon abilities as the need arises, which of your opponents abilities to watch for and how to respond to them. Elementalist doesn’t have any sort of patent on any of that, the fact that you press more buttons in a sequence to deal damage is not something to be proud of.
A Thief jumping you and mashing Heartseeker from full life is an example of a bad player who is not responding to the fight. An equally hilarious example would be an Elem walking up and performing your damage rotation, button by button, without responding to what their target was doing. Both of these examples are brainless and ineffective. The only difference is the Elem looks like he might be doing something clever and complicated, because his character is cycling through a varied sequence of different attacks, while the Thief is jumping at people repeatedly.
That is the only distinction, and that is the only reason people complain about HS – because they think it ‘looks silly’. That’s it. It’s not a gameplay argument, it’s not a balance issue, it’s an aesthetic problem because you don’t like watching a Thief perform the HS animation repeatedly.
And god help you if you’re suggesting it’s anything other than an aesthetic problem, because a Thief spamming HS at you from full life is
a) Dealing less DPS than he would deal with his default attack above 50% life
b) Completely open and vulnerable to all forms of damage and CC
c) Stuck in a long buffered cast animation which he cannot interupt to dodge
d) Performing a telegraphed sequence of attacks that can easily be avoided on reaction
and e) Never going to kill you.
TLDR: A bad player runs at you and mashes an ineffective sequence of moves while making no attempt to respond to or counter anything you do in return. You complain that the ability should be changed because you don’t like the way the fight looks when playing against someone who has no idea what they are doing. Maybe i should make a post asking for a cooldown on backpedalling because i think it looks ugly.
Still not a class balance issue.
(edited by TeoH.2098)
Except that little combat log thing, or the death recap…You know, the ones that CLEARLY show heartseeker spam.
You seem to have some kind of comprehension problem.
Thieves will occasionally perform the same animation more than once in succession, this apparently gravely offends people.
Get over it. This is not a class balance issue.
Some of you little gaming prodigies really need to get over the idea that ‘Skill’ is measured by the number of different buttons you press.
I can put my cat on the keyboard and it’ll hit a whole shed load of different buttons.
OP didn’t get his final points across very well, but i understand what you’re getting it. I assume these comments are fairly PvE focused, but some of it does translate over to PvP.
GW2’s main departure from ‘regular’ MMO combat is the shift towards reactive counters. The dodge is incredibly important for every class, and the rest of the combat is clearly built around it – key abilities have long cast times and obvious animations because they are supposed to be dodgable on reaction. PvE content works the same way with mobs having clear tells and reactive dodging being a requirement.
In this sense, it nudges slightly into the domain of TERA. Except it isn’t TERA, and the technology behind GW2 will never be able to do this type of solid reactive combat as well as TERA’s engine does. What it lacks is the tight link between the visuals of an attack, and what that attack actually does in game terms.
In TERA damage is modelled in a fashion similar to fighting games, with moving ‘hitboxes’ for individual attacks that closely match the size and shape of the weapon animation. When you’re standing infront of a 20 foot monster who swings a big scythe down at you, and the weapon lands 2 foot to the side of you because you were strafing, that attack does not hit you. Because the damage is modelled by a hitbox that extends out along the length of the weapon and only connects with things that are actually in the path of the attack.
In GW2 however, i can’t count the number of times i’ve been standing a good distance behind a humanoid sized mob who swings a hammer towards someone else – which proceeds to knock me over and take away half of my life despite me being 10 times the mob’s reach away in the opposite direction. If we’re supposed to react to the visuals of an attack and dodge out of the way of it, it doesn’t help when there is no natural correlation between what you’re looking at and what is actually happening.
For people who haven’t experienced anything outside of standard MMO combat, you might feel that it’s normal for you to constantly take damage in a group fight from things that you can’t actually see connecting. To expect to lose health all the time and to browse through combat logs in order to see what you actually died to in a messy battle. But in TERA, you don’t need to do that, you know what’s hitting you because you can see it physically connecting with your player model, everything that deals damage to you is very clearly shown in a way that’s instinctively obvious.
This is why everyone comments that TERA combat ‘feels’ so good, because you have a connection to the fight with doesn’t exist in other systems. When you hit something, you are actually hitting it. When something hits you, it is actually hitting you, in the face with a big axe that very clearly connects with your player model. The dodging and blocking feels so very different in the two games because TERA manages to trigger a natural reactive response. When you see an attack actually coming towards your character and the visuals clearly show how it threatens you, trying to dodge is an instinct.
Using dodge against a little hammer swing 10 meters away from you because you know from experience that it hits everything within a 15 meter radius of the mob in all directions just doesn’t feel the same.
Constant complaints.
First rule of MMOs, everyone complains about the Rogue.
You’re assuming the devs are stupid enough to base their class design on that. The changes made so far are not unreasonable, Pistol Whip’s adjustment reflects the fact that S/P as a whole had everything going for it and stood well above other setups for competitive play.
D/D lacks the utility of that build and primarily brings single target burst damage. It doesn’t cleave multiple targets, it doesn’t have easy access to repeated interupts from any distance, it doesn’t have a gap closer and stun break escape with no cooldown that cures conditions. S/P was not simply ‘the Pistol Whip build’, and their change backs that up. It was a genuinely strong rounded build at high levels of play, while all-in backstab opener builds are simply a gimmick that annoys people in WvW.
Reducing backstab base damage would hurt all mainhand dagger builds including ones which aren’t attempting to throw everything they have into a one shot opener. If any adjustments are made they are likely to be to the stacking cooldowns, signet and associated talents that are used to boost backstab damage for that gimmick. However i wouldn’t bet on such a change as there is no genuine class balance issue there in the first place.
Honestly, a nerf is coming, and if they nerf thief the way the players want, you’re not going to have much to worry about with thieves anymore.
That’s a baseless assumption, i don’t see you producing any reasoning as to why they would change backstab.
I’ve found equipping a bomb kit and running away placing bombs is a good counter to backstab. Stealth doesn’t block damage, and bombs don’t care if you can’t target anything.
Actually, nothing cares that you don’t have a target. Abilities in GW2 can all be fired without anything targetted and will all hit people in stealth if they happen to be in the way. Just point your shots at where you think the Thief is.
That includes single target ranged and melee attacks, stuns and interupts, snares whatever. As long as they’re fired in the general direction of the Thief it doesn’t matter that they are in stealth. The only thing that stealth does is prevent tab targetting and hide their position, that’s it.
Knowing the mechanics of the trick should help you find your own solutions specific to your class.
The Thief is using Dagger/Dagger, which is a melee weapon setup. He begins to cast Cloak and Dagger which is a melee range attack with a long wind up, from range. Before the animation for the CnD finishes, the Thief uses Steal which will teleport him to you without interupting the CnD cast. If the CnD connects, the Thief goes into stealth, and can then try to backstab you.
Tells to remember:
- If you see a Thief at range with D/D it’s almost a given that they’re going to try and do this once they get inside 900 range.
- If you see a Thief with Assassin’s Signet buff visible, this is also only used with this type of build so you again know that they’re going to go for this trick as soon as they can
- CnD is a melee attack with a visible animation – if you see a D/D thief go into any sort of casting animation from range it’s possible to dodge it on reaction to avoid the setup. If you dodge the CnD then the Thief will not stealth, and cannot backstab you. Dodging this is made easier because seeing D/D and the signet should tell you straight away that they’re going to go for this combo.
- If you see a D/D Thief dissapear from range then you may have been too slow to avoid the CnD, but it’s still possible to dodge the Backstab which is the meat of the damage. The build is often paired with poison that will stun or immobilise, so you will need to use a CC breaker followed by an immediate dodge. Again reacting to this is easier because if you see the Thief from range you will know in advance that they’re using this build.
The versions of these builds that pull out the numbers you’re quoting are all-in gimmicks, that blow all their cooldowns on an opener, and are very squishy with zero survivability traits. As such, if you dodge the opener you win. Dealing with this is simply something you need to learn, just like you have to learn to dodge or break glass Warrior stun into 100b.
Numbers are inflated in WvW compared to SPvP because of Orbs, and because full exotics give you more stats to play with than PvP gear. Those extra stats could be put into damage mitigation… but nobody does that.
He’s not naked, he has a Berzerker’s Amulet on, which in SPvP with full traits is 90%+ of your damage stats, meaning he does almost the same damage as a fully geared Thief. Since all he’s doing is jumping people with a glass cannon build and showing a clip reel of fast kills where he isn’t being hit, the fact that he has no armour on isn’t relevant.
It’s basically the same as every other glass cannon big crit montage, except with the neat gimmick of wearing a bra and panties. I applaud the concept.
The ability does not have invulnerable frames for the entire animation.
Why would that be a bug?
Bunker purpose is to “waste time” not necessarily “win” a 1v1 fight.
Listen to this guy, all the complaints in this thread are missplaced because you are concerning yourselves with who ‘wins’ against who, as if these different roles were duelling eachother.
A glass cannon sacrifices survivability in order to be able to kill things quickly.
A bunker sacrifices damage in order to stay alive as long as possible, and hold a point.
If the bunker’s goal is to stay alive as long as possible, it’s plainly obvious that the counter to that goal is a character who is built to kill things as quickly as possible. Any other conclusion would require some alternative victory condition that didn’t involve killing the bunker so you can cap the point.
The problem the devs are referring to is not the ability of the bunker to stay alive for a long time, or the ability of the cannon to kill things quickly. The problem is that the excessive retaliation on the bunker allows them to outright kill the cannon in a fight, rather than just turtling up for time. The bunker is supposed to have sacrificed damage to be able to turtle for a long time, allowing them to kill cannons while turtling through reflection doesn’t make sense.
Which is why their solution doesn’t touch the ability of the Guardian to stay alive, it just makes it harder for them to kill things while doing it.
You make some good points Teoh. But how does toughness fit into this? If the playerbase suddenly started stacking toughness would that make condition damage more desirable? Personally I really love the feel of pistol/dagger but after reading your posts it seems I am kittening myself somewhat.
Firstly, for condition damage abilities to do more effective dps as a Thief than your direct damage, you’re talking about a metric kitten-tonne of Toughness.
Secondly, the meta is actually more likely to swing the other way. Condition Damage is expected to be buffed, Necros probably need some love and they are primarily Condition Damage based, as well being extremely resilient to Condition Damage used against them. Guardian tanky builds with high armour also have excessive condition removal which breaks the assumed counter to them, they are likely to be addressed in some way.
In general, expect builds and classes that focus on Condition Damage to be buffed, and for people to be more concerned about Conditions in future patches. Given that assumption, there’s really no reason why the meta would shift towards more Toughness, infact you may see the opposite.
i look at it like this. power attacks you avoid or use mitigation tools BEFORE you are hit by them. many large hitting power based attacks have tells so you can avoid them.
condition you deal with after its on you. the fact that it ignores armor/toughness is to give it more incentive.
This is part of why people like P/D for thieves for bleeds over deathblossom. less ini intensive, and the bleeds only last a couple seconds or so, making it hard for the defending player to simply remove it when its been applied.
You’re acting like pistol attacks can’t be dodged. The pistol shots take as long to cast as CnD, as well as having a travel time. Sneak Attack starts instantly like backstab but then takes a second to complete all 5 hits. Deathblossom is as telegraphed as Heartseeker and costs more initiative. Everything is potentially dodgable before it lands, but only the bleeds are removable after the fact. Even if they weren’t, you are doing less total damage and you’re spreading that damage over several seconds.
Maybe what you’re actually trying to discuss is melee vs ranged rather than Condition vs Power/Crit? You have 2 weapon sets, you’re not limited to one or the other. Unless you build full Condition, and then you’re seriously limited in the range of attacks you can actually deal decent damage with. Pistol damage looks a bit better when compared to the Shortbow…. untill you add more than 1 target, or a pet, or a turret.
talking about WvWvW is not a good indicator of anything but your gear level.
Yes the difference between Power and Condition is more pronounced in WvWvW – because you have more total stats to play with in exotics, and since direct damage has far better scaling than conditions, it pulls even further ahead from those extra stats. That doesn’t mean you suddenly deal less damage than a pistol bleed in SPvP. Clearly you need a visual aid here:
SPvP gear, 18k life, bonus endurance regen for more dodges. No signet bonuses, no venom bonuses, no cooldowns used other than steal.
(edited by TeoH.2098)
Condition damage really doesn’t scale with anything other than the Condition Damage stat. Even then, it doesn’t scale very well with it.
Also if they’re useless and you ‘roll them all day long’, why are you arguing that those builds should be kittened out of existance in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Thiefs-Discussion-Thread-Merged/page/6#post329998
?
to get anything reasonable with PW/BS you have to build glass cannon and you likely also have to use up util slots to make them viable.
No that’s just what every genius on the forum tells you to build because they like seeing big numbers. Did you think that ‘9k’ was the damage a pistol whip did in a full glass cannon build with utility cooldowns? Christ no, try 14-15k. My numbers are conservative precisely because i usually run a balanced build with a decent amount of Vitality and Toughness.
Mix Invader / Valkyrie and Berzerker gear, run points in Acrobatics for better endurance and some health. You can push 9k Pistol whips with 18k health and 2.3k armour in crafted gear. Even if you want to go tankier than that, the gap in damage is so huge that it won’t change the comparison.
Hell i don’t even use Pistol Whip, i used it as a comparison because it also happens to cost 5 initiative. I run D/D backstab / Shortbow with a fairly squishy gear setup (16k life 2.1k armour) that still survives fine through a combination of stealth and lots of available endurance due to 25 points in Acrobatics. I backstab for 6-10k without using any utility slots. The numbers are so far away from the damage of Condition builds that it seems silly to have to compare them.
I run condition and dont run D/D. Think outside the box. I roll PW/Berserker thieves all day long because they all have the sustain of cabbage.
Think outside the box? I’m sorry but you are not the first Thief in GW2 to use a pistol in their main hand. Sneak Attack applies 5 stacks for 4 ticks, which is around 2400 damage. If you have talented and geared into increased duration it’s possible to get 6 ticks out of it, taking it to about 3600 damage again, in an optimal scenario. Plus around 1k for the direct damage.
The numbers are easily calculated and compared, and they fall short. They fall short even on the abilities that benefit significantly from the Condition Damage stat, and we’re not even comparing every other ability on your bar for both weapons.
The screenshot shows you eating the 1-off burst of a full gimmick glass cannon mug/signet backstab build. It involves venoms (45s cooldown), a precasted CnD follwed by Steal (45s cooldown), and Assassins Signet (45s cooldown).
The numbers shown in the screenshot rely on various stacking bonuses with long cooldowns, and are not representitive of Backstab’s normal damage against that amount of Toughness.
After using the 1 off gimmick opener that thief then has no survivability stats or utility, and is generally up kittencreek for the next 45 seconds. And he still has to finish you.
Since this gimmick requires the Thief to load multiple cooldown abilities into one damaging opener, if you succesfully dodge his opener then you probably just won the fight. In this build, the start of the burst is telegraphed because you will see the Thief begin to cast CnD at range. Dodge as he starts the cast and the guy just lost half his initiative, his teleporting opener, his venom, possibly his Signet, and he didn’t stealth so he can’t backstab.
The downed state / rally system allows builds like this to exist without breaking the combat, because blowing someone up doesn’t immediately remove them from the fight, and trying to run around and finish a downed player in a group fight when you have no health or armour at all is likely to get you killed. Since the downed state is an important part of the combat, there is always a role for a tankier player who is able to easily stomp or res without being in danger of dying.
Yea Heartseeker above 50% life deals less damage/time than your autoattack, so have fun with that.
…on the other hand Conditions still deal damage when disengaged.
Logical failure, DOT abilities taking time to apply their damage is not an advantage.
If i deal 10k damage immediately, and you apply 10k damage worth of bleeds, and we both run away, the fact that you are ‘still doing damage while disengaged’ is not something to be happy about.
You would assume that because condition damage has the disadvantage of taking time to apply, it would be tuned so it deals more total damage over time in the above situation, to offset the lack of any burst potential. Except it isn’t, and it doesn’t.
With a full Condition Damage build your bleeds will tick for 100-120. DB applies 3 stacks for 10 seconds, that’s 3000-3600 damage per DB, plus a pitiful amount of direct damage taking it to a little over 4k total. Over 10 seconds, assuming no condition removal. For 5 initiative.
Alternatively, you can Pistol Whip in a crit/power build for 5 initiative, and deal 9k+ damage immediately, and that damage is not removable. You can Shortbow cluster for 3 initiative and do more damage immediately than a DB, without even accounting for the bleed. You can CnD>Backstab for over 10k damage easily for a similar cost.
Not only that, the Power/Crit build keeps its damage advantage across every ability or weapon that you may wish to use. A Condition build can stack Condition Damage across every piece of gear and all it gets out of that is a kitten poor Deathblossom that barely competes with the autoattack damage of a Zerker, and every other ability on your bar including your secondary weapon is kittened. You are kittened. Condition Damage is a wasted stat.
Bleed abilities themselves can be useful in situations where you are undergeared or have minimal damage stats due to wearing some crazy survivability kit for godknows what reason. They are useful in those situations precisely because bleeds scale horribly – they are mediocre when you’re fully geared for Condition Damage, and they’re still mediocre when you have no Condition Damage at all. As such, if you find yourself with few damage stats of any description, then you might as well throw some bleeds.
And that’s the only scenario where they are ever competitive with their direct damage alternatives.
(edited by TeoH.2098)
Most of your other cluster bomb crits did about 2k, but we’ll just ignore those.
You are looking at detonated clusters, that’s 3 clusters per shot, which crit around 2k each. Meaning the total damage for a crit shot would have been 6k.
6-7k is what you’d expect in a full glass cannon build for the main bomb, which you should leave to explode on landing against any large group of people due to the target cap. I run a balanced build with some health and armour, and i normally crit 5k with it. So to back up Flamu, here’s me with no buffs or orbs critting 5k on multiple targets in a balanced build:
(edited by TeoH.2098)
I like to do this: