Guild Wars 2

Imo rifle feels pretty good, it didn’t take long until kneeling and the slower animations began to feel quite natural. Daredevil during beta was clunky as kitten, Deadeye is fine.

Nice

/15151515

There isn’t really any, and I’m sure a-net would had ended it already if it wasn’t beneficial overall for the game.

It just seems to be a common misconception that gw2 e-sports is somehow taking something away from player’s who don’t care about it, even though devs have explained it doesn’t.

Yeah it is pretty crazy how volatile rating gets after not playing. Played today after a break and got +83 from first game , +60 from second and so on.

^ They do read forums, just because devs don’t answer to everything that doesn’t mean they don’t see it.

Just my 2cents on this topic. I think this is a good way to do things.

What this update is all about is competition, meaning this could be the worst time possible to throw a large balance patch at the game, especially if there is any risk that new broken builds could emerge from that as that would be horrible from competition standpoint.
Instead we got this smaller update that shows that devs are aware of the unbalances, told that they have better tools for future updates and shaved some of the more powerful stuff which fits this update well.

I do also want to see more drastic changes and better build diversity in the future, but this patch is definitely not the right time for that.

Just train to be better with thief, seriosly. Then you understand how stupid it sounds what you just said.

If that is what you want then I would recommend playing some other class completely.

Also using even one minute per build would already add 10 minutes of delay if you want to go through everything.

Also remember that pvp team decided to remove some of those to cut back overpowered builds which relied on them as they don’t have control over skills.

I really don’t believe we would get a long range sniper spec, and I also feel that rifle thief is so heavily tied to that concept that it would be quite unlikely for it to be anything else without disappointing a lot of people.

Also that would automatically mean it’s bad for open world if it is single target, and bad for raids/fractals because long range weapon would obviously have less dps than melee sets.

Also there is a very good reason why thief is so heavily tied to melee weapons in pvp. While conquest makes you want to fight on close ranges, it would be almost impossible to really fight against ranged thief on many of the existing classes.

While i would love rifle from aesthetic standpoint and it would be great to have long range weapon, i have hard time believing a-net could implement that in a way where it is balanced, not horrible for the health of the game and both of those not just in one game mode. Also we already have p/p

And that’s the point, if you want access to shortbow mobility in middle of combat, you have to pay a price for that because it is really kittening strong for a weapon skill.

Giving that mobility to x/p would be terrible design and just spread the gap between /d and /p even more.

This is really kittening stupid.

This is all kinds of horrible.

Jerus.4350:

DeceiverX.8361:

DrD is just better than acro.

They specifically nerfed Acro before adding in Daredevil. I still remember being surprised there wasn’t as much outrage as I expected when they showed Daredevil. ‘you get three dodges’ ‘you mean like old acro?’ ‘umm….’

Well i remember that very differently, there was a crap loads of complaining about that.

I just would like to hear what others would think of this.

Add leap finisher to #3, add smoke field to #4 and remove blast finisher from #5.

Smoke field from #4 would only last one or two seconds and it would only be a field, and not have blinding effect like /p #5.

You could then use either #2 on it once to blind enemies with that whirl finisher, making it actually a useful ability.

Or you could use #3 on it once to gain a short duration of stealth, and again, making this skill worth using.

I would also remove blast from vault as it is already a strong ability and would be too strong with stealth combo.

And all of this would just add some depth to staff and make #2 and #3 useful when comboed.

Good site for build related stuff http://metabattle.com/wiki/Thief

inb4 some kittenty s/p condi interrupt build.

But on serious note, you can’t expect people to believe you if you make claims like that without backing them up somehow.

But everyone does use marauder in pvp.

For wvw? not many care enough to get marauder set and just use what they already have which is zerk.

Impairing daggers is pretty good too in some situations, i just feel like blinding powder is too important to replace if there is even one reve or thief on the enemy team.

And shovel, i didn’t mean that someone said that, i just personally assumed that i wouldn’t get legend during this season.

Recorded 3 games, maybe they help someone a little bit. I went full tilt mode during the first one but got carried anyways, next two were better.

I have only been playing soloque during this season, so comp is obviously just what i happen to get.

About capping and decapping, that depends entirely on the situation. Don’t full cap points unless your team already has an advantage on the map, there is nothing else you can do, you need it to win or teams are so tanky that you can’t break mid fight. Also winning team fights is always the top priority because then you can snowball the game, don’t go decap far if you can win mid fast.
But again there are also always exceptions, you could do a pretty kitten long video on how to rotate properly and play the map.

About fights, you just need to learn your own limits and know what your enemies can do, it is fine to just stand outside of the fight for like 3 or 4 seconds if need be.

412 games played, 232 of those wins, got a lot of losses during the last season but improved it during current one.

I’m thinking about just recording few of my games and uploading them somewhere, it is pretty difficult to explain what to do and it is easier to learn by watching.

One in team is fine you can play it well, just a matter of “git gud”

Managed to hit legendary playing mostly thief, though i played some other classes at ruby.
http://imgur.com/a/B1a8Z

Build is almost exactly same as in metabattle, only difference is that i use weakening strikes instead of havoc mastery and basi venom instead of impact strike.

Got told 14 times “pls reroll thief”
Won most of the games where our team had multiple thieves.

Not sure about the condi build as i haven’t played it myself, but i don’t think it would be very good.

Problem with staff is that vault is easy to dodge, and it lacks interrupts which is really bad when fighting against eles/necros/rangers

But really, d/p is the way to go, i have played maybe 150+ games with thief this season and managed to get to diamond, i have tried almost everything i can think of and in the end i always come back to the “meta” d/p with some slight changes.

If you want pvp backpiece that means you have to be good at pvp, part of being good at pvp is the ability to adapt.

Well revenant is op as hell so yes, arguably even better for carrying games.

It would be a good idea.

I managed to get myself to ruby with thief, but at this point i have much higher chance to win with scrapper or ele. Thief is just too squishy and doesn’t have the tools to break up large team fights, and 1v1 situations are out of the question too. When you combine this with the fact that at this level enemies will defend their points most of the time there just isn’t that much you can do.

The way i see it is that yes, stealth needs some counterplay, but currently reveal is too devastating, one skill can disable your whole trait line and possibly your utility skills which are majority of the defensive tools thief has if that thief is running shadow arts. Assuming you don’t use dd and sa both at the same time.

Yeah, because scrappers surely aren’t tanky enough yet…

Well what people consider to be op also depends a lot of what they tend to play, for example, a lot of people don’t seem to consider reve to be op anymore but for me it is the worst kittening thing in the game when playing thief, while necro is pretty harmless because of how kitten easy it is to play around them

Druid and scrapper are the two classes that i would like to see nerfed, just too much sustain combined with damage in my opinion.

DPS check really should not be a problem at vale guardian, but if it still somehow is then your group either has horrible gear of just isn’t playing well at all.

I’m usually just criticizing kittenty ideas at this forum, but i think this one is actually reasonable and could help a lot to make another melee weapon set more attractive, maybe throw it to acro line as base trait or something.

So your crusade for justifying rifle thief continues.

The first point is still a real problem, no matter how hard you try to downplay it.

I don’t really like any part of this.

Without even going to all the details what i see wrong here, this has the same major problem as all the other rifle suggestion that have been thrown at this forum. You simply can’t give thief, a class with best mobility and very good access to stelth, crazy long range weapon combined with high damage.
You need to have some real counter play possibilities when designing skills and such or we end up with loads of different super obnoxious elite specs.

People are qq’ing because revenant is overpowered.

I also happened to watch helseths stream yesterday, who is one of the best players in eu, whose opinion about revenant was also along the lines of “stupidly overpowered” and said it is only going to get worse when people learn to play it perfectly.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Some-dps-numbers-for-comparison/first#post5803734

you may want to read that

Just a note, the differences on dps can also be result from the meter you are using.
I did my tests on jaxnx, as it does not violate any rules, as far as i know.

You can actually maintain that vault rotation pretty well for a long time, though sometimes you need to attack twice on top of normal auto chain.
Did again that test on WC and vault and again got higher dps on vault rotation. While it is true that you get more value out of your initiative when using WC, you get value out of vault faster which lets you auto attack more, on my tests it seems to result in higher average dps.

Galandil.9641:

Uhm, I wonder why your numbers are lower than mines.

Interesting, what kind of rotation are you using and for how long. I just can’t get to over 9k whatever i do. I also used exactly same build as you.

For me it was bound->fist flurry->double vault->autoattack chain->bound->vault->autoattack chain->bound->vault and so on, using steal when low on endurance and fist flurry when off cooldown.

also just to be sure, i did mine on indestructible target golem

4 am and can’t sleep so did some quick dps tests, might as well post them here too in case someone is interested.
Taken with dps meter, average dps for 1 million damage done to pvp golem with meta gear (so numbers are more in pve).

staff rotation with vault 8,5k second try 7,4k

staff rotation with #2 7,8k second try 8,2k (all 3 hits connecting every time)

dagger/dagger 6k second try 6,3k

And revenant

sword/sword 7,7k second try almost exactly same 7,7k (around 10-17 self might all the time)

So in a raid setting where everyone has 25 might, thief has clearly better dps but yeah, still not very impressive for offering nothing but damage + much more inconsistent.

Also i have seen a lot people saying that you should use staff 2 if you can land 2 or more hits, i would say just stick with vault unless you can connect all 3 every time, even then it might not be good because you spend so much time doing it instead of autoattacking.

E: also one thing, you can still shorten staff 2 distance if you point your camera down, just make sure you have no target and hitbox of this skill is in front of you so don’t sit right on top of enemy.

Also agree, haven’t had this much fun in this game since, well, launch.

Enrage timers are good, this is supposed to be hard content and you have to be a very good player to finish it AND you have to be willing to change your team comp to what is needed, not just what you want to play. Removing timer just lowers the amount of skill needed and is replaced with time needed.

I have never really believed in this game becoming a large scale esport (though i would want it to succeed)
Mostly because of what tim.1280 already said earlier along with op, this game is just too hard to understand for spectators and i don’t really see how a-net can fix that

Hotjoin is a mode you play to test stuff, practice something or just play dumb builds that work maybe once in five games. It is deliberately made so that it is fast to get in and out, you really should not expect to get good games there.

It was really surprising to see that you value dust strike so highly as it is the skill that i probably use least. Though it also may be that the build i run is more defensive and it really feels like i have to save ini for vault if i want to kill something in reasonable time.

e: also nice to see people who don’t just complain like thief is some super underpowered class.

I prefer keeping them somewhat simple.

You should not worry too much about the negativity on this forum, while it is true that thief has some problems, this place is vicious circle of whine.

It is not going to come back, dev already stated something along the lines “it hurts the purity of the weapon set” and it wasn’t even that good.

Also to the post on top of me, 3 sec immob on thief? that can spam it like 5 times in a row? that would be the definition of absurd

DD feels much much better than during previous beta but there are still some problems, like with staff skills.
Most of the stuff has already been said by others, so i just give a quick feedback.

*all of this is from pvp perspective

1 : Feels kind of lackluster, almost every single time it felt like it wasn’t worth to complete the whole chain when comparing how much damage i would receive during it. I don’t think it necessarily needs more damage, but some kind of better utility.

2 : The new targeting made this skill also much better than what it used to be but i would really like if it was easier to land multiple hits.

3 : Also much better now since the evade starts right away, lets you actually use this thing for what it’s supposed to do. I would personally like to see some kind of different utility on it instead of the immobility removal, thief already has so so many different ways of getting rid of it that it feels like huge overkill to have that on a spammable skill.

4 : I like the suggestion that people have been making of making this aoe around you instead of a cone. Imo could cost one ini less.

5 : still difficult to land on enemies who have eyes, not really sure how that could be adjusted.

Overall i think staff really needs something that really differentiates it from s/d (in a good way).

Also quickly about the other stuff.

Fist flurry is still too hard to land for what it does.

Impact strike suffers quite a bit from the same problem.

I hate how it feels like i’m absolutely and completely forced to take escapist absolution instead of the other traits in pvp because of how bad our condi cleanse is.

kitten like this is a guaranteed way of making sure no dev is going to take you seriously.

Some of those things are just straight up insane, like giving 3 blasts to skill that is already the most spammable blast in the game.

Also why even buff shortbow so much, it already does what it’s supposed to do and is probably one of the last things on thief that needs to be changed.

The thing is that p/p isn’t even very good against single targets, especially if the fight is long

Your usual dagger brings more single target damage and has small cleave.

I couldn’t bother to read through the whole topic, but if we are talking about pvp then you don’t use p/p because utility on it sucks, you are never going to kill anyone with it (well maybe with quickness cheese) and you absolutely need to have shortbow as secondary weapon set*.