Guild Wars 2

I’m more of trying to confirm if it’s a bug or not, as Larcenous Strike appears in the Pistol Whip tooltip.

And on closer inspection, it appears Larcenous Strike has a tooltip on Pistol Whip.

maybe i’m getting the two shadow returns mixed up, but I remember them adding a max range at some point, so instead of going back to your spot, you go 1200 in it’s direction

No way. It was super long maybe in the BWEs, but they lowered the range at launch. As a long time Sword user, it really feels like they reverted it back to infinite range.

This was introduced this patch. Missed patch notes or a bug?

Edit: This is the shadow return for sword.

[Reserved space for future notations]

senate’s Double Pistol Boon Thief

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAqaVlYmiO3ey5E+5Ex2DgCAe69gsjNsdF4KA-T0Ag0CtIKSVkrITRyisFNIYVwpgZJvCA

I use this same build for PvE, WvW, and sPvP, and I’ve had excellent results with it, so I figured I’d submit it for some peer review.

Notes:

• 1% more damage per initiative, 15% total. 10% more damage at 6 initiative and above. 20% more damage to targets under 50% health. 10% more damage with pistols. You should be stacking all of these as much as realistically possible. Compare these bonuses to your power. 10% more damage on a character with 1800 power means you’re getting a 180 power bonus. These are important, as you’re dumping 30 points into Trickery and missing out on a lot of stats.

• Withdraw awards Vigor, 4 initiative, and a random 10 second boon every 15 seconds. This makes Withdraw, without a doubt, one of your most valuable tools. You can get 10 seconds of protection on a thief, what’s not to like?

• Steal awards 3 initative, 10 seconds of Fury, Swiftness, Might, 15 seconds Vigor to you and nearby allies, and steals two boons for you and nearby allies. 32 second cooldown. On demand Fury is a cornerstone of this build. Again, you’re giving up good stats to go 30 into Trickery, an extra 20% crit chance when you need it is huge.

• Extreme ground speeds. Lots of vigor = lots of swiftness, quick-turn Withdraw excellent mobility tool, extra initative = more Infiltrator’s Arrow. Steal can be burned with no target to proc swiftness. Make up for lack of stealth by outmaneuvering the vast majority of other classes without totally wrecking your effectiveness in battle.

• I’ve messed around with Ricochet and I’ve come to the conclusion that you should just be swapping to Shortbow and taking a more useful trait.

• Critical Strikes 20 is really up to personal preference. I’ve been taking the Fury under 50% health.

• My PvE stats are like mix of Zerker’s and Soldier’s at about 70/30 ratio. I think I have that Karka Celestial thing in too. Not important, just favor power, crit, and and a bit of breathing room on the side.

• The boons you get from stealing are given to nearby allies, always try to maximize this effect. Consider landing Steal on a target who already has an allied thief on him attacking him, or better yet, into a crowd of allied players. Everybody loves free Fury!

I like to think that the only thing keeping Asura from taking over the world is themselves.

I mean come on, The Inquest has a seat on the Arcane Council, right? They’re like a legally sanctioned criminal superpower.

I don’t think there’s anything in the lore that specifically states that Dryders were from the Underworld.

Alternatively, we could say they were from the Fissure of Woe, or the Northern Shiverpeaks for that matter.

For me, they were one of the more iconic creatures of my GW1 experience. Particularly legendary Terrorweb Dryders, who fell many-a unprepared Underworld parties.

Here here. I’m with you guys.

I throw down area protection.
I throw down area regeneration.
I fear what needs to be feared.

Heck, I use Plague over the other elites. It gives you ridiculous toughness so you can pull aggro off of people, and it’s also a gigantic area of 20 seconds of getting blinded or crippled every second.

Currently, the character animation for 2-5 are the same. This animation is the same as most of the wells, and a handful of other utility spells.

What’s your opinion on this?

It has a lot of toughness, and high toughness attracts aggro in this game. The other turrets you can steal aggro towards you if you do damage, but you really need to battle to get anything to lose interest in your mortar, it’s ridiculous.

Blunderbuss has a boring central mechanic. That move can be summed up as ‘stand point black or it’s worse’. The only thing that separates it from other high damage point blank attacks is, instead of missing a. , it just does an inferior effect. Joy.

Make Blunderbuss do bleeding at range and raw damage point blank. Increase the range slightly, increase the bleeding and the raw damage, as you will not be getting both at the same time. I promise it will be fun. I swear, just put it in the game.

a. I mean missing because you logically always want the full effect of the skill.

I’m not sure if this was a balancing thing or just plain oversight, but my mortar seems to be drawing quite a bit of aggro.

Why is this?

Shouldn’t it draw less aggro?

Travail.7390:

Is there something wrong with Blunderbuss? I always thought the damage was fine, pretty good considering how low the cooldown is.

I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with Blunderbuss, but the general trend of Engineer weapon skills is that they’re dualistic in nature.

Blunderbuss however, only has one strategy and one use: Get as close as possible. I want to add an option. Get as close as possible or keep your distance and go for condition damage.

The increase of damage is only to offset not getting both the damage proc and the large bleeding stack at the same time.

Increase the damage 20-30%.
Increase the bleeding up to 6-7 stacks.
Slightly increase the range.
Have it do more bleeding the farther the target.
Have it do more damage the closer the target.

One is the blast of the shot, the other is the spread of the pellets. Gotta increase the damage to offset not getting both.

Tulisin.6945:

Because in most situations melee weapons are a viable option.

lol.

They’re ranged weapons, nobody needs to act surprised that they do less damage then melee.

i don’t understand why anybody is comparing them to the damage output of melee weapons.

try bringing caltrops *on dodge. or initiative on crit, unload is almost sure to proc it, sometimes twice. also consider it’s the fastest way to proc signet of malice when you only have one target.

personally i take that initiative on weapon swap trait, so i’m never in p/p long enough to have to fall back on vital shot. if you’re always dropping unloads and it’s always when you’re kiting or otherwise unable to melee, i don’t really see the problem.

Ichishi.9613:

not everything is about aoe damage. When you need aoe damage, you are most likely in a group and shortbow will be the solution.
P/P, as it is, does not give outstanding even single target damage but for example in cove – where most mobs have to much hp to be 2-hitted with bs thief – it shines with ability to kill before taking damage with practically zero effort.
I can run around with full zerk gear and 3 signets as p/p in cove/cs. Most of mobs are vital shot + 1 or 2 unloads. And you are not forced to take damage. I WAS running bs. I WAS runnning all kinds of sword builds. Nothing gave me as much mobs/time during solo play with an added benefit of actually not even needing to concern very low surviveability

this guy takes the words right out of my mouth.

The fiends in particular stand out as bad to me. I like the minions that reward you in different ways and can be fit into non-minion builds. Flesh Wurm, Bone Minions, and Golem all present that.

My real problem is taking the rest of your slots and throwing them away for an inconsistent blind and immo, and then taking a heal that’s totally dwarfed by the monster that is Consume Conditions.

In my eyes, Flesh Wurm is the perfect minion. More of them should take after Flesh Wurm.

Look, I’m sorry that minion AI is “bad”, but if you’re filling your bar up with minion abilities, you’re asking to make your Necromancer be terrible, regardless to how responsive they get in combat.

All of the Fiend minions are bad, none of them bring anything to the table you can’t do better with weapon skills or other utilities.

My only hope is Protection of the Horde gets removed from the game and we never again see any mechanic that incentivizes wasting every single precious utility slot on such dismal skills.

inflicting vuln on a target benefits everybody.

rolling to cancel the animation of a cast shall henceforth be called VOID DODGE FORCE FAILING. oh, and getting and hitting pheonix on the way back will be called BIRD CALL RECOVERY PLUS.

switching weapons on my warrior is called ARMS DANCING

from this point forward, swapping to a staff out of combat will be called THE OCTAVIUS MANEUVER. oh yeah, and actually hitting Fire Grab on a burning foe will be called BRAND TOUCH CHAINING.

wait i’m on a roll.

like i said, apparently this is a touchy subject and some people need to lash out and get defensive at the concept of change.

edit: personally, i feel like calling it stance dancing is overly masculine, when gamers need to come up with catchy buzzslang for simple mechanics to make it sound WAY MORE HARDCORE. but no, go ahead and attack my masculinity. :P

Strang.8170:

…it escapes me

among other things, apparently.

oh and there you go straw manning. well i didn’t expect much from you people anyway, so defensive.

why are you so protective of this terminology? is it not misleading? or do you have another series of self justifications for that too?

i’m not demanding. attunement swapping.

trust me, one day you’ll thank me for this.

senate.8126:

spike TV demographic

how about …

attunement rotation. trust me, i’m doing you the favor.

this was invented by the players that surround their usernames with Xx xX religiously and dye all of their characters BLACK AND RED. yeah! stance dancing! that sounds so cool! i’m a spike TV demographic!

how about we move on and use descriptive terminology and not antiquated childish buzz-slang from three four generations of video games ago?

dancing implies movement, you don’t move when you change attunement, you’re not dancing. it’s not descriptive of what you’re doing at all. call it attunement rotations. call it attunement cycling. call it attunement swapping (!!!)

just don’t call it attunement dancing because it sounds terrible and it makes people who say it look sophmorish.

Earth 2 should be up 100% of the time.

Air should be in for mere seconds to blind or to pushback or to escape. Take these moments to toss in a free Air 2.

Earth 1 is amazing, Earth 3 is for blinds, Earth 4 is an area KD, and you can cast Lightning Flash while channeling Earth 5.

Water is… lacking. Water 1 is the fastest actual attack, good if you’re using Restro Signet.

Water 2 = Vuln. Use it if there are heavier hitters then you who will benefit from Vuln.

Water 4 is good to kiting melee, Water 5 is good for your team.

Remember that Fire 3 is an AMAZING ability. Good damage, burst combo, Vigor, and it cures ALL OF YOUR CONDITIONS. Use it offensively and defensively. Fire 2 is slow but I use it a lot in PvE and WvW. Fire 4 is a fire field for combos, use it. Five 5 is strong damage but your target MUST be burning and it MUST not miss.

I’ve seen people say attunement dance, and I’ve seen people on the necro forums calling switching in and out of death shroud to get free fury ‘shadow dancing’. I’m not kidding. There are people out there who say these things.

… is a terrible name.

Can we call this something else?

Seriously, attunement dancing? Really? Okay, so when you swap weapons on other classes, is it WEAPON DANCING? No, it’s swapping weapons. There is no dance. Don’t inflate the concept with some terrible misleading name.

Swapping attunements for whatever reason, to stack boons, to quickly use one particular skill, to combo, you’re not dancing. There is no dance. You’re just playing the class how it was designed to be played.

edit: This is apparently a touchy subject.

Look, the scientist in me is suggesting is we use more accurate terminology to describing game mechanics. Seeing as though it’s virtually identical in practice as swaping weapons, kits, and enviromental weapons, calling the simple action of swapping your attunement should be called, I don’t know, attunement swapping.

Send your fastest riders in all directions to spread word to the kingdom.

I call both melodrama and first world problems.

Also I like how the relatively benign changes caused yet even more uproar in the elementalist community. Are you guys even playing the same class I am?

Maybe because all minion builds are limiting and uninspired to begin with.

This is one of those ‘you can’t please everybody’ threads. Perhaps a stronger coping mechanism?

i don’t want people pulling horses out of their pocket. a channel and the horse appears? that looks awful. please don’t do that because some gamers can’t let go.

besides, they’d need a huge amount of animations for every race and mount to match the level of polish that the characters already have.

guild wars 2 pulls away from awful played out MMO gimmicks so well, but i guess you can’t please everybody

Rangers can’t use hammers.

And if you don’t know about Bunnythumpers, then this thread isn’t for you.

Aireroth.7596:

senate.8126:

Aireroth.7596:

shroud-dancing

lol’d hard. wow, really?

Why not?

i’ll never understand why some gamers carve out a specific combo of game mechanics and call it by a special name to give it some sort of special meaning like they discovered some secret amazing thing.

Aireroth.7596:

shroud-dancing

lol’d hard. wow, really?

yeah but i use DS to soak up damage and to fear so this is all kind of the point.

This is honestly only for the devs, I probably won’t hang around to make a conversation out of it.

Look, I understand why you changed Spectral Walk. It makes more sense now. Rather then this feeling of a time limit threatening vulnerability, you know have a clean simple window opportunity. Rather then having to cancel the coming effect, you activate it yourself.

90% of the time I use this ability, I use it for the swiftness. It only makes sense that I should press the button for the 30 seconds of swiftness. Rare moments do I use it for the stun break and the return.

It makes sense the favor the swiftness mechanic of the skill.

But

You made it like all the other instances of this mechanic. It was a unique element. It was it’s own thing. It didn’t make sense to me at first, even though I’m well versed in Shadowstep and Infiltrator’s Strike. Now it’s exactly like those two skills. I understand that’s intended and makes sense, it’s just…

I hope this doesn’t start a trend of purging the game of unique ability mechanics.

Why wasn’t it okay Spectral Walk was backwards from how thieves do it? I had no problem with the old version. It wasn’t like some big deal. Heck, a learning curve can be good. There was really no change other then making it fall in line with other similar mechanics.

Come on. Don’t do that. That makes games suck.

But that’s just my opinion, I do actually like the changes.

(Also this is not withstanding the removal of the vuln or any changes for duration. It was the mechanic re-arrange.)