Showing Posts For Wastrelz.8235:
You… realize that Bleeding stacks, right? One DB stacks 3 of them. Use 3 DBs in a row and you’re doing 900 a second.
Well, perhaps now that they lowered the initiative required, it might be worth looking at again, and 3 in a row might be more doable. In the past, I’ve only found it disappointing, but it’s been a while.
I would think the stacks are easily cleansed, however. Isn’t that the case?
I haven’t found it to be very effective at all. I wanted it to be. It’s the coolest Thief skill. I used it while I was PvE leveling last year. But it wasn’t at all unusual to find myself flying unintendedly off a cliff, or worse, stuck behind an invisible wall.
I later tried in in PvP. With a condition build I think I was getting over 100 damage per tick on the conditions (probably could have been tweaked to do better), but nothing was dying. Granted I was hard to kill because they couldn’t focus on me very easy as I flew through the air, but I wasn’t killing much of anything. And then I thought about the damage. Even if I managed to double it to 200 per tick, would that really be effective? It would take 10 seconds to do 2k of damage, which is so ridiculously low, I could see why nothing was dying. And most classes will simply cleanse your conditions if they are at all a problem.
So…I haven’t gathered any scientific evidence, but I’ve seen enough of this skill that I never use it except to do a quick evade and reposition myself.
If anyone else is able to accomplish something more useful with this skill, I’d be glad to see how.
The answer is: roll a guardian. If I die when following a thief commander around, it would be my own fault.
The only other class that really shouldn’t lead a zerg, in my opinion, is Mesmer.
You might try ranger or engineer. They can be played a little more like a thief, but with tons of survivability possible.
I personally think they might be able to give us a 1200 range trait on P/P if they scaled the damage on unload, similar to what they do with certain skills for the ranger or mesmer, but in reverse. Instead of doing more damage from a distance, a thief with pistols should do less damage from 1200, but increasingly more the closer he got to the target. That would be keeping in line with the class motif, and add a little bit of tactical challenge to playing P/P effectively.
I find the best place to demonstrate how easy it is to break shadowstep is in Divinity’s Reach, from the hallway just north of the bank (minister’s waypoint?) into the garden area. There is a cracked tile that can be walked over just fine, but always breaks shadowstep.
Hilarious!
Not kidding.. and I mean mobility with the weapon skills.. all those you described are available to all weps.. name a wep set in thiefs repertoire that doesnt have a gap closer or mobility skill?? PP
It IS lacking, and it bothered me at first. But I think it can be compensated for without much difficulty. I now save Steal primarily for that purpose. Switching weapons is always an option; shadow step, whatever. Also I take Ankle Shots out of Critical Strikes to effectively apply a 3-second cripple every 10 seconds, which is significant. And after all, your real gap closer is that it’s a ranged weapon.
What? No!
Just use 5 and stand in the circle, and then shoot at where he might be~
Really those are not the Problem if you play p/p.
I guess that makes sense. Come to think of it, the only time pesky stealth thieves have bothered me on ANY class is when I’ve been in the process of just learning to play that class, or anyway a particular build for that class, which is where I am now with P/P Thief.
i think pp is pretty cool atm.. it just needs some mobility and a buff to unload..
im going to try and make it work.
Uh oh. If people start liking it, next comes the qq, and the nerfs which follow in their wake!
Yet I hope it does get a little help. It’s one of the few potentially viable non-stealth builds a thief can use. But on the other hand, if they help it the way they “helped” sword skills not long ago, I’d rather they just leave it alone. I turned in my sword the day after they came out with that. Maybe it was just me….
Two things I’d love to change if I could:
Turn Pistol #2 into a 600 range arc-based aoe attack so that if you lost your target, you’d still have another option besides swapping weapons or waiting until your target re-appeared. (see http://youtu.be/4weEXyoXZKs?t=1m58s for what I imagine would be cool). I know that’s more of a dual-pistol kind of move, but something along that idea.
Give Unload an incremental damage boost for each successive hit in its chain. Basically, treat it like Hundred Blades for thieves. If you can manage to lock down a target and make them eat the whole combo, it should hurt like hell.
Yeah, some non-targeted AOE might help a little, since a P/P Thief will get totally pwned by any stealth-build thief.
But since Unload is ranged, I don’t see it getting an incremental boost. It’s not that hard to keep a target in range (unlike for hundred-blades).
Design issues make this class unnecessarily difficult for most people who try to play it, I think. It’s not that a thief can’t be effective—it’s that so many possible builds for the class just don’t work. Things that look good on paper can be either useless, or difficult to pull off. And even the learning curve for the builds that DO work is rather steep. So you end up with many weak thieves.
That said, having played all classes, I do think thief is actually overall the weakest. You don’t realize just how weak it is until you start playing something else and find you are in easy mode by comparison.
I’ve played around with P/P and I’ve had some fun with it. I’ve run it mostly in a zerg, so my build has had more survivability and aoe damage (making ricochet useful in this context).
No P/P build is very elegant, of course, as you pointed out: you are spending useless points in condition damage. Anet could certainly improve upon these options.
Apart from that, however, I think the biggest thing they could do to make this build viable is give us armor piercing as a trait, similar to what a Ranger has. After all, it makes sense that if a Thief can steal his way in close to a knight in armor, he should be able to place an aimed shot at the armor’s weakest point, or bypass it entirely, as in a shot through the visor. Give us that, and P/P might be viable, in spite of it’s condition/direct damage awkwardness. As it is, it does way too little damage to, say, guardians, warriors, and tank-build engineers.
(edited by Wastrelz.8235)
The question somewhat misses the point, because the best zergs are balanced with different classes. If a zerg has 10 Necro’s already, for example, the addition of one more will not have much impact. But if they have only 1 Mezmer and you brought a second one, that could be invaluable.
If you wanted to zerg ATM the top 5 profession are the ones with the synergy.
The bottom 3 are the black sheep’s of the zerg. They are missing abilities that would make them necessary in the zerg.
Yes, the synergy is the important thing. However, the other three classes are not useless in a zerg by any means; just not individually necessary, perhaps.
Even that is somewhat debatable, however. For example, if you realize the value of having a good scout, you may appreciate how much a thief who’s good at it can benefit a zerg. Not much appreciated, perhaps, but can be a matter of life and death for the entire zerg, perhaps making 1 Thief, at times, THE most valuable class of all.
That looks like a good longbow PvE build to me.
For most PvP, of course, you’d probably want something more mobile than using the spirits (although if the dumb things would stay with you as you move around, that would be helpful).
Good to see an attempt to mix things up, because things had been way to static for way too long. Looks to me like a definite improvement.
Thanks for posting! It’s great to see talented players stepping forth to share some great stuff with the rest of us.
Lol you cried when mobs used to lose agro on stealth, now you cry couse they dont.
Good thing they don’t require you to actually read the post before making a comment. You’re safe.
Well, the one thing I thought this would fix, it didn’t even fix. When doing skill points, it’s always been hard for a Thief because when you stealth the mob resets back to full health and there is nothing you can do but start over.
In finishing up my world completion, I had to go back and kill a number of skill point NPC’s, and was able to confirm that, yep, it’s not fixed. The dumb things still like to reset, after just a fraction of a second in stealth sometimes. Ironic that you can’t lose aggro on the other mobs to save your life sometimes, but when you really don’t want them to lose aggro, they do.
The concept behind this change was debatable, but the implementation is not very good. Please fix or remove.
(edited by Wastrelz.8235)
Okay, so now NPC’s stay aggro’d on me in stealth. I’m guessing that’s a major nerf to thieves trying to level, but okay, fine, I’m not leveling anyway. But why do that when it doesn’t work properly? I stealth when NPC’s are on me, and then there’s a pretty fair chance they will bug out on me. I can be standing inside of a keep, nothing anywhere around, waving my arms in the air, and nope, still in combat.
The only way to get out of aggro, it seems, is to relog (or die). Unfortunately, relogging in WvW means not being able to return to where you were. Worse, it means I may be waiting in a 2 hour queue to get in yet again. Maybe that’s good for all of those who can play at off hours, but I can’t. I am stuck playing at prime time.
I’m not sure how many people are having this problem, but I find it quite annoying. If it can’t be fixed, then please take it out. And it’s awfully silly to be fighting some NPC guard, stealth so I can do a backstab, and have it pivot round and round with me so I can’t get behind it. It’s just silly. Is it stealth or isn’t it?
I’ve done this on 3 characters previously, but with the 4th character now it’s beyond hopeless. What a waste of time.
Breaking opponent server’s morale is a strategy that all competitive servers strive for. Unfortunately, lower (all?) tiers may not appreciate that “style” of play.
Before I get l2p, I know WvW is war. But with apparently exploitable, poorly enforced computer rules .
No doubt you’re right about their strategy, but I don’t believe it’s for the best for people to take that kind of attitude. It’s a game, not war. What kind of game do you have if the other side stops showing up? Do the Chicago Bears want to put the Green Bay Packers completely out of business just because they’re rivals? No, I think the betterment of the game will be to promote the welfare of both teams, regardless of which side I’m a fan of.
And as for me, I want the other worlds to keep logging on and showing up for the matches because they’re having fun too. If they’re not, then eventually neither will I be.
But as you pointed out, a lot of that has to do with the design of the game and enforcement of the rules.
If you actually watch the matches in the various tiers, you’d see that balanced matches are way more important for player interest than are matches with new opponents, even though players obviously would also like to go up against new opponents from time to time. The current ranking system sucks, but it sucks because of blowouts and replacing it with a system guaranteed to generate blowouts (which your proposal would do) isn’t the answer.
Actually, I think it would almost guarantee that it’s not always a blowout, or at least if it is, we wouldn’t know in advance….unlike now. Ultimately, just about every world will have a reasonable chance of winning at least one week in the schedule. Only the worst of the worst would lose every single time, but at least even that server would have a chance. Personally, I’ll take having a chance to win (or conversely, a chance to lose) every week any day over the current system.
If you would prefer going into matches week after week and knowing that there is no way your server is ever going to win (until enough people quit playing that you drop down after 2 months and finally play someone you can beat, and in turn know you are going to beat THEM every single time), then you have different tastes than I do.
The match-up finally changed, but the root of the problem remains.
I would like to see a play-off system implemented, in place of the current system. You should not be going up against the same worlds time after time. I mean, what is there to prove? The same world that wins this week will win next week, or so that has been our experience EVERY single week. A playoff system would allow the winners to play the winners, the 2nd placers to play the 2nd placers, and the losers to play the losers, until a final standings come in and a victor is determined. Then it can start all over again with new match-ups. Eventually I should be able to see every other server out there as an opponent sooner or later. Sure you get blown out at times, but I can deal with that if it’s not EVERY single week. Each week would be a new match-up and a new chance.
Also, a related problem is that all of our matches seem to be fully decided by Sunday night, leaving the rest of the week as kind of a lame duck session. Why not make it best 2 out of 3 instead? The weekend could be part 1; Monday-Tuesday part 2; Wednesday-Thursday part 3. Best 2 out of 3 wins, or otherwise at worst it’s a 3-way draw, which has its own possibilities. Anyway, that way at least things can go until Tuesday night before they are decided.
Been playing against the same world every week for months now (SoR vs BG). The result is the same EVERY time (my world has not won once). Why in the world would the system be designed this way? People stop showing up when there is no chance at all. Or else they transfer servers, as I believe many have done, but I’m not going to do, resulting in the problem just getting worse and worse. I don’t get it.
Discouraging.
Others have posted about the issue with rendering opponents, but a particular problem lies in those who seek to exploit this issue. Specifically, a thief on the server we’ve been fighting this week has been able to successfully prevent 50 people from flipping a supply camp a number of times in which I was there. Ironically, the more people you have there, the more successful the thief will be, because of the rendering issue.
To me there seems a simple fix, which does not make the rendering issue go away but prevents this particular exploit. Anyone in stealth should not count toward flipping a point/supply camp/keep. If the thief is stealthed, he should not prevent a group from flipping control of the location. This would at least force him to come out of stealth to count toward taking control.
I have nothing against thieves having stealth and don’t want to see the class dramatically changed, but I don’t think this exploit is what was intended.