Guild Wars 2

Pff, the Asura, Sylvari and Norn are all lame; they were poorly planned, thrown in last minute for the final expansion, and don’t fit terribly well with the rest of the game. Because the game was built around them not even existing.
So screw lame Asura lore, I say.
Not in 100 years could I get too much of the demon god of magic and madness! Abaddon was the greatest character spawned from that game, and made Nightfall awesome.

I really think we should be able to choose to use normal helmets with costumes. The helmet portion is already separate from the rest of the outfit, since we can choose to toggle it off and have no helmet at all.
I can’t think of any reason why this would not already the case, except that no one felt it was important enough to program in.

I personally dislike a lot of helmets included with outfits, and I also dislike having no helmet at all. It would really be nice to be able to use things like the eyepatch, glowing eyes or face paint when using an outfit.

Fortus.6175:

thats what you get for playing ugly races :/

Play sylvari, get the best out of all worlds; humn figure, all colors available, glow (!!!!!), some armorshave exclusive glow just because we glow!

In their defense, Charr look ridiculously awesome. They just have morbidly terrible animations and armor.

These forums are linked to our game accounts. I think they should just prevent anyone from posting in a particular class’ forum unless they have a character of that class with a certain minimum level and time played.

Yeah, off-hand dagger, Shadow Protector, Shadow’s Embrace, Shadow’s Rejuvenation and Meld with Shadows as well as stacked healing power makes for one hell of a tough thief.

Calling the OP a liar is a little rash.
He could have a guild with 2 people in it.

Any intelligent person knew this would happen at some point. I thought it would have happened months ago. It was foolish not to use them before any major patch.
If they just randomly hot-fixed it in, then you’d have room to complain about it.

There’s no point.
Racials are deliberately garbage, and have no right to even be in the game at this point. They probably realize that, so they just don’t care about giving racials to Revenants. And they really shouldn’t.
What kind of mind even concocts the idea in the first place to waste resources adding something to the game that you don’t intend for anyone to actually use.
Those things are just pure, un-diluted insanity.

If I were to give them credit, my best guess is that they’re a relic from before they realized what a problem they would pose for balance. Rather than delete them, they left them in purely for flavor/RP while nerfing them down to functional uselessness.

I think what the engineer needs most is a mace, with skins for wrenches and stun batons.

Okay, first of all, stealth has plenty of counters. Particularly with basically any AoE attack in the game. Even your auto-attack works relatively well if you know what you’re doing.
Second, Thieves do not have absurd CC, in fact they barely have any; just a couple 45 second recharge venoms, one of which is a garbage elite skill.

If there’s one good thing about the state of Thieves in this game, it’s this; it proves the hypothesis that MOST people complaining about OP classes in games (at least this one) are just bad players.

Main thing I miss was the dual classes and complete build control. You could put together such amazing concepts…. I spent hours just coming up with builds, it was hands down the funnest part for me.
Ironically, it was also the main thing they shredded and threw in the trash for GW2.

I want to enjoy this game. I really, really do. But the people in charge of making changes are just so wildly incompetent, it truly disturbs me.

The current way in which the game works, forcing players to focus on either direct damage or condition damage, is very flawed. It vastly reduces weapon choices, making it often difficult to find two sets that you not only enjoy but that can also actually work together. And even within a single weapon set, you end up with certain skills being terribly weak simply because they do something you aren’t built for.
Like the Ranger Greatsword’s Maul dealing a measure of bleeding damage in an entirely direct-damage set, or the Thief’s P/P dealing bleed on auto attacks despite dealing direct damage in every other attack.
It’s an issue with every class, but the Thief in particular gets absolutely destroyed by this due to Initiative putting each weapon skill in such strong competition against the others.

This absolutely needs to be fixed, and I have a few different ideas for how it could be done.
The option that seems simplest to me would be to give every weapon set an even mix of direct and condition damage so that either Power or Condition or will increase the damage, but simply focus on either less damage immediately or more over time.
The Ranger Greatsword as an example again might get bleeding or poison added to more of the attacks in exchange for slightly reduced direct damage, and the Thief’s P/P might get shorter duration bleed on auto with more direct damage, and some condition damage added to Unload.
Unfortunately this would require a large number of carefully thought out changes to skills.
But, since this is only a truly desperate issue with Thieves, it would be possible to make this particular change only with Thief weapon skills and therefore greatly reduce the amount of changes made, while still solving the worst of the issue.

The second option would be to add a few extra attack skills to each weapon set, and allow us to change them out freely like utility skills, so that if we want to play direct damage we could swap out a condition attack for a direct damage alternative and vice versa.
But this would require a rather significant change to the way the game works, and could be complicated.

The third option would be to merge the effects of Condition Damage directly into Power and reduce the effect the stat has a little on both direct and condition damage compared to their separate states.
Then if one wanted to focus on condition damage they would stack Power along with some Precision for on-crit effects and still get good use out of direct damage attacks, and if one wanted to focus on direct damage they would stack Critical Damage instead of a portion of that Power.
The problem with this is that it would require the creation of an entirely new stat to replace Condition Damage due to traits and gearing.

Like you’ll never find out what happened there if you don’t get the Thaumanova fractal?
All it would mean is that you won’t play it out first hand in a fractal.

Rafahil.2857:

All I know is that Anet doesn’t have a QA team. Oh wait they do….we are……..

If we were the QA team, they’d actually be tempted to listen when the player base starts shouting en mass “Whoa, wait, that was a terrible idea. You have to fix it.”
Not the first time they’ve done something as short-sighted as this. Certainly not the last.

After seeing that both are apparently at the very same percents as before, the idea that this election is fake is really seeming plausible now.

Fenrir.4237:

I want some serious answers please. No replies like: “cuz they’re stupid and need to l2p”, we (us Thief fanatics) know they are. I just want a constructive discussion why they’re “OP” supposedly.

Thank you.

Because their style is annoying to fight against. Whether or not it’s really OP, it certainly is often not fun for the person fighting them.
Whether it’s when the Thief bails every time they’re about to lose, or when they tear you open faster than you can react with a shadowstep burst combo (which Eles can also do).
I’ve fought fellow Thieves on my own Thief plenty of times and thought “Wow, that’s why everyone hates us.”

Onshidesigns.1069:

The GW2 world seems to be going into a more mechanical/steampunk look based on recent living stories. Like sky pirates, sky merchants, and soon watchwork tech.

And this makes me incredibly happy.

Wait, by “perma-stealth”, are you talking about the person just… using CnD, waiting it out, then using CnD again immediately after? Just that, and not much else?
I can see how that might be annoying, but… it’s not like they’re winning any fights.
And where does Backstab fit into that, since using it gives you Revealed.

Just caught it on the stream with Jonathon Sharp, build should be going live 3-4pm PST.

lordhidetora.3189:

So, after QQ-ing about a cnd thief for the longest time, I decided to roll one.

I, of course went cnd to be as annoying as possible ,and holy crap it is so fun!

I love basically not trying at all, and all I have to really do is get behind the person….which is extremely easy (especially with noobs), because once you go stealth they run around, and you just get behind them and backstab, and back you go to being invisible. rinse and repeat.

I love it, I can’t believe I didn’t roll a thief when I first got the game.

The only thing that sucks is that in PvE, I have to use either my ranger, or warrior, or elementalist, or mesmer, or necro, or my engineer. But for annoying people by roaming in WvW, this is the best thing ever.

I cant believe I didn’t roll this earlier for all these easy badges! I sometimes ask myself if I’m cheating, but then I realize that I’m not because, honestly how can I be? This is allowed!!!

Yay stealth and yay backstab!!!

Yeah, man. And this one time I was in WvW and tried doing the Konami Code, turned into Santa Clause and started sicking immortal reindeer on everybody. I killed the whole map, won the game, and got a trip to the Arenanet office as a reward where they paid me $1000,000.

I would strongly recommend taking 30 in both Acrobatics and Critical Strikes.
Critical Strikes has the +10% Pistol damage trait, valuable Precision and Critical Damage, and Opportunist is practically assured to trigger when using Unload, effectively reducing the cost by 1. If you’re lucky, you could actually trigger it twice in a single use.
Critical Haste used to be an absolutely amazing trait for P/P as well, but it was nerfed by half last patch and isn’t so great.
Acrobatics boosts Dodges and general mobility, which are you’re only means of staying alive with P/P. On top of that, it provides great options for boosting Initiative regeneration, which is vital to the Initiative hogging weapon set.
The remaining 10 trait points would be well placed in Trickery. Every time you Steal you get 3 more Initiative on top of being able to Steal more often, and you can take Thrill of the Crime to gain Fury, Might and Swiftness every time you Steal. All of which are amazing for the build. On top of that, it pairs extremely well with Acrobatics and the +Boon Duration.

As for skills, I’d recommend Smoke Screen. Negates ranged attacks, blinds any melee that rush through it, and your ranged attacks fired through it can trigger even more blinding.
ABSOLUTELY take Signet of Malice as your heal, coupled with the signet boosting traits from Critical Strikes. The nearly constant Vigor will let you dodge like crazy, combined with great Initiative recovery and Might stacks.
Even if you don’t find the need to trigger it at a particular point, the passive healing with Unload is great.
Also take Signet of Agility. Beautiful Precision boost when not in use, and more Endurance plus condition removal and all those other traited goodies when you trigger it.
If you took another signet and triggered all three together, you’d get 6 Initiative and 15 stacks of Might (roughly +26% damage), allowing you to absolutely destroy your target.

For armor, focus mostly on Berserker stats, with some others like Valkyrie thrown in for Vitality. Especially focus on making all Trinkets Berserker, since they scale the Critical Damage far better than on armor.
Definitely get some On Critical sigils for your pistols. Fire is a good one you’ll definitely want.

The most frightening aspect of this to me is that they have some morbid aversion to ever undoing a change they’ve previously made, as far as I’ve seen.
If they decide later to fix the chain stealth exploits, we’re just going to end up with something far worse like full 4 second Reveal any time you unstealth.
Or following the established trend, they might “fix” chain stealth by removing Vulnerability from CnD.

It is relevant. Racials are useless for a very good reason. Meaning any new ones would also have to be useless.
And adding new abilities that aren’t meant to actually be used would be a bit ridiculous.

I’m with Korval; if anyone beat him, it was blind luck.
Him non-stop spamming the most powerful signature, coupled with him taking less damage per drink then you and having a near-psychic ability to interrupt your water makes this practically impossible.
I swear I’ve seen him drink water more frequently than should be possible, also.

Daendur.2357:

so let’s make rapid fire beam…

….It is; Rangers have a trait to make all bow attacks pierce.
As do Engineers for pistols and Warriors for rifles.
/Facepalm

Legit Prep In.5893:

turrets die in an instant, but even if they dont:

bomb1 , bomb1,bomb1 , bomb1,bomb1 , bomb1,bomb1 , bomb1,bomb1 , bomb1,bomb1 , bomb1,bomb1 , bomb1,bomb1 , bomb1,bomb1 , bomb1,

That’s for sure not the reason I play engi.

Yeah, I don’t see any build that uses bomb kit as being worth using. Even if it were bar-none the best engineer build, I would just use a different class.

I assume you have Auto Attack on. A ridiculous part of stealth is that if you fire a projectile, then stealth while it’s still flying through the air, once it connects with the enemy you’ll get Revealed.
It’s most noticeable with Shortbow and the stupid bouncing arrow.
Do you have the Ricochet trait? Because that would definitely exacerbate the problem.

Clockwork Bard.3105:

Oh my god, I am loving this thread… And I’m learning things about people that will save me a great deal of frustration in the future.

Exactly how few people read beyond the title of a thread before posting?

ellesee.8297:

Hello frands! Vee Wee here #1 engi NA and world first rank 80!

I’m not a fan of turrets! I’m a fan of what works and the build that I made that uses Flame Turret and sometimes Thumper Turret has seen very successful results! I think your problem is you want a playstyle that incorporates turrets as your primary source of damage! Why else would you trait Rifled Turret Barrels! Unfortunately that route is still extremely lackluster as the Inventions tree is still subpar! Experimental Turrets, however, is great! Hope that helped you my frand!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

…I don’t know if you’r being serious, but stop trying to brag every time you post. Being rank 80, especially after the last patch, doesn’t make you the best Engineer. Not by a mile. I don’t think anyone cares a lot about it, either.

I’m assuming that is the effect of the new anti-stealth trap?

Initiative has at least as many problems as benefits.
A huge example is weapon swapping.
Other classes can blow through all attacks, then swap weapons and do it all again.
Thieves don’t even have enough Initiative to blow through every attack once on a single weapon set, and even if they could it would take far longer to “recharge” than other classes.

As someone with HoM rewards, I don’t care. At all.
I wouldn’t care even if they were letting everyone get the straight HoM items themselves and not just reskins.
The need to have something others can’t get is terribly juvenile.

Basically, they do want to fix it, but no one actually is.

AAAAAAAAHH!!
I can finally wear Norn-style armor on a human! THANK YOU!!
I’m making a Warrior RIGHT kitten now JUST for the Braham armor.

I swear to god, if this goes the way of the Aetherblade weapons and we don’t actually get that armor, I’m’a STAB somebody!
o_O

…The light armor is awful on guys though.

You were supposed to let him just walk away when he realized he wasn’t going to win.

Kir Sakar.3647:

Humans. I can’t even argue with their lore since I don’t have a single human character. Being human in real life and having plenty of humans around me, I just don’t see the point playing one in a fantasy game. I really wonder why they are so popular with players.^^

For many people, playing as some dragon-fighting wizard is fantasy enough, without needing the character to also be all fangs and fur with 4 arms and 6 eyes.
Traditionally, the setting is the most important element of fantasy. The more alien the characters are, the more difficult it is to empathize with them.

I’m curious if a Custom Arena server can host only one match at a time. This could make duels and build testing rather difficult.

pot.6805:

Dark Omens.5768:

Tallis.5607:

tagnut.8621:

Seriously is someone blowing the thief dev on a regular basis? So they get to spend 50% of the time invisible and immune to all damage whilst pumping out insane dps? Really? Really? 4s revealed reverted to 3s? Should be 10s min.

<nods in agreement>

It’s amazing that thiefs get BUFFED. Just before the last patch, they announced that thiefs will get their DPS down to more normal levels.

But they chickend out and didn’t do the change, they just changed the timer from 3 to 4 and called that a nerf (lol).

Now, it’s back at 3 and thiefs are just as OP as before.

I really, really wondered what happened inbetween.

Did all the WvW DEVs got a 80 thief on their accounts with zerker gear or so? It’s amazing how they can keep one class so OP. Highest DPS and stealth at will.

What’s next, give them clones or so? Oh, wait…

Actually warriors dps is prob a tad more with evis and 100b but hey whatever…..

Uhh no. You actually see those coming and can dodge them.

And everyone knows, when a Thief stealths, you just throw your hands up into the air, stand around and let it happen.
What else are you supposed to do? Critical thinking is for nerds.

Seriously is someone blowing the thief dev on a regular basis? So they get to spend 50% of the time invisible and immune to all damage whilst pumping out insane dps? Really? Really? 4s revealed reverted to 3s? Should be 10s min.

Way to understand basic game mechanics before complaining about them.

tagnut.8621:

Tallis.5607:

tagnut.8621:

Seriously is someone blowing the thief dev on a regular basis? So they get to spend 50% of the time invisible and immune to all damage whilst pumping out insane dps? Really? Really? 4s revealed reverted to 3s? Should be 10s min.

<nods in agreement>

It’s amazing that thiefs get BUFFED. Just before the last patch, they announced that thiefs will get their DPS down to more normal levels.

But they chickend out and didn’t do the change, they just changed the timer from 3 to 4 and called that a nerf (lol).

Now, it’s back at 3 and thiefs are just as OP as before.

I really, really wondered what happened inbetween.

Did all the WvW DEVs got a 80 thief on their accounts with zerker gear or so? It’s amazing how they can keep one class so OP. Highest DPS and stealth at will.

What’s next, give them clones or so? Oh, wait…

They really just need to make stealth work in a specific way when it comes to exiting it. If an opponent blocks or evades a skill the thief tries to hit them with while in stealth, the thief is thrown out of stealth with the revealed condition. However if the attack misses due to Out of Range, the stealth stays intact. This would fix the main complaint with thieves.

If you Block/Evade an attack it may not remove them from Stealth, but it does already let you know the Thief is directly on you and trying to attack. There are all kinds of options available to anyone by that point.

I think a huge improvement for this in PvE would be to have it automatically show for activation, on a low priority, anytime an ally in range is downed. You shouldn’t have to select them.
I also kind of feel like it should work on people that are actually dead, though that might be overpowered?

Even if it were actually good though, I’d still hate it. It has zero synergy with the rest of the specialization and feels tacked on.

I think they nerfed pet damage because of the recently popular BM Bunker builds, where the Ranger could just focus on throwing all their stats into defense while their pets did all the damage, creating both incredibly high defense and moderately high offense all at once.

Oxstar.7643:

ensoriki.5789:

It’s 3s of stealth, 4 if traited, not 5. Anyways you might as well count it as a meager class-feature not that it is particularly impactful. As a result of how thief durability, you can just nuke your team-mates body and the thief will then have to pop a utility like everybody else or be downed trying to stomp.

Nukes that could have won another fight around the corner, nice…

Yeah, God forbid you should have to defend your teammate.
I know when I see a Warrior or Engineer trying to stomp someone, I’m just like “Whatever, he can totally take care of himself.”

A big contributing factor to the problem is that condition builds only need two stats, whereas power builds need three. Hell, Condition Duration isn’t even a huge enough factor to be “mandatory”, but merely very helpful. Good luck stacking Power without Precision, or Precision without Ferocity though.
And Condition Duration isn’t even a stat on normal equipment. Just traits/runes/sigils.

Yeah, I kinda wish they would swap Condition Damage and Power between Trickery and Deadly Arts. Everything would feel a lot cleaner and easier to build around.

darkace.8925:

Vargs.6234:

It was a really stupid nerf that hurt PvE thieves…

This nerf hasn’t hurt my PvE thief at all.

I’m going to repeat something I said back when life-steal food was “nerfed” (i.e. balanced): if you build your character around a single skill, trait, boon, or consumable then you’re setting yourself up for a aggravation should the day come your gimmick build nerfed.

What else should you do with a D/D Thief, spam Heartseeker? The set has a distinct lack of options built in on a fundamental level.

Cuddy.6247:

Grimwolf.7163:

Cuddy.6247:

Lol, this thread is basically what I was kittening about earlier today. I read a few posts about people claiming with complete determination that each class was getting one specialization and no new weapons and I just thought to myself…these things were casually mentioned over at PAX? How on earth could anyone actually know without any official statements, oh right – they don’t.

I’ll wait until the official announcements, but I’m 100% certain I won’t be disappointed. Even if it is smaller than expected, they’re delivering what I’ve been asking for a year now.

Ironically, those two things you just mentioned are objective facts that were already stated by ANet themselves.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/

Where? It was casually mentioned at PAX and they’ve made no official announcements. You’re a bullkitten artist.

Kitten, my bad. I thought I was talking to a person.

Dasorine.1964:

And how you get deadly arts is direct damage when the only “direct damage” bonus it really gives is the 300 power, 2 +5% damage traits and +50% damage when downed, the rest are all about cohesion with venoms and conditions…

D/D is no more a direct damage set then shortbow is a condition set or elementalist staff is a healing set.

Direct damage traits;
Exposed Weakness
Back Fighting
Corrosive Traps
Mug
Sundering Strikes
Dagger Training
Combined Training

I defy you to find a single condition damage trait in that tree. And don’t mention the Poison, like I said that’s used for the healing reduction. The damage is trash.
In fact the primary purpose for Lotus Poison is likely to give Poison greater value in a direct damage build.

Any chance we’ll see the previously released ones re-released at some point? I don’t know why they were only temporary in the first place.
I finally decided I wanted that mechanical axe, just a single day too late
Turning down money doesn’t seem like good business.

The true OP nature of Thieves is the degree of stupidity they invoke in other people.
I seriously can’t count how many times I’ve hit someone with 1-2 Heartseekers before the person dies, only to have them shout some variation of “LAWL HS SPAM FAIL!”