Guild Wars 2

Self Priority is very important because entire builds can and are usually made around their own combo fields. Water Staff Elementalists, for example.

Time Based should be a second factor too, so that organized teams can coordenate their combo fields well. Meanwhile, as long as a Self Priority system exists, pugs shouldn’t screw you this way.

Another good thing about Self Priority, is that you have control over it. You can choose to delay your own combo fields if you wish to take advantage of your party’s fields.

They’re also both easy to understand, I think.

EDIT
Also, party’s combo fields should have higher priority than other allied combo fields.

I wouldn’t reduce the scaling but actually increase it and lower base HP regen in exchange. Healing Signet should heal less than it currently does with additional Healing Power, but be able to heal slightly more (say, 500 HP/s with 1k Healing Power).

There should be an effort to make Warriors need to decide between damage, tankiness, healing and possibly mobility.

I have a warrior, and I think the scaling is poor. IMO, that’s where the problem is: with NO healing power, it’s still 392 HP/sec. With max healing power, it’s only like 430 HP/sec or something.

They should change it so that it starts off at ~300 HP/sec and give better scaling so that warriors have to actually spec into healing power.

Since we have this handy forum I might as well dump some of the things that I’m sure a lot of us were already thinking, which is that holy kitten, this game promotes the hell out of just stacking DPS and blowing through everything. This is fine in some areas but it also creates problems in others because:

The less you contribute, the easier it is:
- Make the aggro system more transparent: the more health/armor/healing you have, the more aggro you take. The more damage you deal, the less aggro you incur.
- Give mobs in general more low-damage, unavoidable attacks (swipes for 1k per, etc.) that prioritize

Explanation: Right now, zerker/assassin gear are pretty much the only viable gear sets because the game heavily favors just hitting everything as hard as you can and dodging any one-shots. Reducing the frequency of these attacks and replacing them with faster, smaller hits that can be tanked, but not easily avoided, means that defensive stats actually make a difference. The more straightforward aggro mechanics means that these attacks will primarily be directed at the tankier players. This will have the effect of forcing low-DPS players to pull their weight more and also incentivize players to balance their stats a bit more.

Put DR on damage received:
- Implement DR on the amount of damage a mob can take at any given time, so that DPS scales down the more of it you have.
- Significantly reduce mob health across the board.

Explanation: Taking ten minutes to kill a boss is lame but so is one-shotting it. There is a ridiculous damage disparity between organized groups and pugs. The former SHOULD be incentivized to have good DPS but not to the extent they do currently. Reducing boss health pools makes ordinary pugging less tedious and organized speedrunning less faceroll, resulting in a more balanced gameplay experience.

More emphasis on boons, CC, and conditions:
- Rework condition-stacking issues and overall condition power. Not going to go into this as I’m sure Anet has plenty of ideas stewing about this.
- Rework Defiant to be a property on certain moves (i.e. cannot be interrupted) rather than a constant buff. Normal attacks without Defiant property can be CC’d normally. This includes blind.
- Rework the effectiveness of certain boons. For example, regen and weakness could stack in intensity.
- Give mobs more reliance on boons and conditions that aren’t straight-up boonspam. Adjust mob health and damage output to compensate, i.e. give a boss the ability to put protection on itself but also reduce its total health by 33%.

Explanation: Most fairly self-explanatory. Encouraging build diversity by making it so that straight DPS isn’t always the best option for every single fight. The regen/weakness change would also be a good way to allow players to deal with higher levels of unavoidable damage by giving more ways to mitigate it short of going full tank.

you know why I hate these threads? It isn’t because players want more stealth counter play or anything like that. The main reason is that most of the ides have no scope and I am sorry to offend but many of the ideas are just dumb.

If you up reveal in WvW you up it in PvE. Now last time they did they they realized their blunder as the essentially nerfed thiefs sustained DPS in PvE. Your idea would mean that if a theif stealths phases through you and pops BS within a second they could re enter stealth in a second and do it again. Base reveal is 3 seconds. So essentially it would be a buff to anyone that spikes. It would be a nerf to any thief in a dungeon who might Shadow refuge rez finding themselves unable to stealth for 15 seconds.

I am sure you have so 80 thief you either never play or just leveled but take the time
to think before you post.

I will say this again until it gets through the many hard head here. WvW meta is zerging. Any thief nerf to stealth is in reference to roaming. Be mindful of scope 14 traits, 10 weapon skills, 3 utility skills, and 2 stolen skills have stealth interaction.

Or thiefs would never be able to land a backstab ever is the more likely outcome. Many classes easily counter with a patient activation of block skills, aoe blinds, invulns, etc or at the very least force a face stab instead while dishing out their own DPS.

Hitting a backstab does not win them the fight, it is more like missing one loses them the fight the majority of the time.

Pointless since thief entire survival is based on stealth. Add some other way of survival and thieves will stop going into stealth so much.

Without any doubt, my most important would be Role Diversification

And not just because it was one of the options Chris provided, but because it’s been discussed at length in this thread in various different ways.

The PvE meta in this game is quite abysmal as DPS pretty much rules everything — Tequatle was hailed as adding great new interesting mechanics, but what it ultimately comes down to is a 15 minute DPS check with other mechanics sprinkled on top.

I think expansion of the roles each of the classes can provide would really help alleviate this. Perhaps even skills that alter combat in new and interesting ways with new mechanics could be added.

Alright, I do not have enough time to read this entire forum post so forgive me if I state something that has already been said. My only real concerns are the changes to IS/IR, initiative burst regeneration, and vigor shaving. I main thief and have noticed how quickly I can burst through all of my initiative (my favorite build is S/P) and I have to burst some initiative regeneration. It is the only way I can continue doing damage. As for IS/IR, specifically IR, that is a thieves “Oh kitten!” skill. First we close to distance to deal damage and if we find ourselves outmatched, we run away with IR… taking that away is like taking away a warriors endure pain skill or a guardians boons. Thieves have to run away when they find themselves outmatched, it is our only way to survive. Anet did not give us much in the way of base HP or Toughness so we have to dodge and stealth to survive. This also brings up our Vigor boon. You say you are removing our permanent vigor because it is overpowered and you want us to face enemies head on instead of evading their attacks (completely the opposite of what a thief coughASSASSINcough class is supposed to be) yet you leave the perma-vigor on classes like the engineer, warrior, guardian, and mesmer. If you are going to “balance” us, make sure it is actually balanced across all classes so no class has perma-vigor option

My point:
Please, please, please do not take away our survival mechanisms unless you are going to give us a SIGNIFICANT buff elsewhere (not something that is utter garbage such as the Hard to Catch trait) OR you take away the survival mechanisms from all other classes as well. Leave us all equally wimpy or leave the thieves alone for once.

Edit: Maesk pointed out for me that warriors do not have perma-vigor (thanks! I didn’t know that). I do not play warriors and never have because I find their, playstyle boring and lacking any real skill or knowledge. (This is my own personal opinion so please do not bash me on this)

Perma blinds…

You’re aware that a thief has no real ranged dps, no block/parry/shield moves. Lowest hitpoint tables. No CC. No aegis, no protection boons, no reliable regen, no weapon abilities which give swiftness.

Pretty much the only way thieves can avoid damage is with blind and stealth.

You know how i used to avoid damage on my warrior? I didn’t, i soaked it up with my 3500 armour, regened it with my signet and could still dish out 4k earthshakers all awhile having swiftness/fury and might thanks to my elite signet every 30 seconds out of 60 seconds

Or maybe on my engineer i’ll just throw aoes around me all day, I don’t even have to see a player or target one, just spam it at my feet and watch them kill themselves with 15 stacks of confusion.

JonPeters.5630:

Infiltrator’s Return
The thing I have heard the second most discussion regarding. This is a big change to this skill, but we beleive it is a necessary one. In many cases this is not going to matter. There are only 2 situations where this is a truly impactful change.
1) It stops you from using this skill while stunned, which puts more burden on Sword/Dagger thieves saving their stun breakers. This is the kind of gameplay we want to encourage because it puts more risk in using a rewarding skill like Infiltrator’s Strike.
2) Mostly in PvP, this skill can no longer be used by S/D thieves to teleport stomp someone. This is actually the more impactful moment as it occurs more often, but I think it puts the burden on these players to run a second weapon set that can help them in these situations (OH pistol for instance.)

First I’d like to say thanks for coming here to explain some of this. I’m interested to see how the changes play out but some of them are a little concerning.

It seems like you’re pushing Hard to Catch as the new survivability option to replace some of what was lost on the Shadow Return change. Any comments on the feeling a lot of thieves seem to have that HtC is not desirable because it takes control out of the hands of the player and often hurts as much as it helps?

In a similar vein, will we ever have some comment on Last Refuge? So many thieves hate this trait and it very often acts as “Gain revealed when you fall below 25% health.” I was really surprised it was not even mentioned in the update notes.

First of all, thank you for taking the time to come here and explain your though process on the changes.

Initiative changes

I’ve been asking for a Initiative regen bump for months now, so Kudos on that decision. Part of it though was to remove/modify some of the init regen traits to be more interesting. The initiative per second changes to opportunist, quick recovery and kleptomanic make complete sense, considering the new base init regen. What doesn’t make any sense is that the traits haven’t gained anything in compensation – they’re now fairly kittenty.
Quick recovery will never, ever be slotted at .1 init per second – consider adding “Cleanse one condition on dodge” with a Five Second ICD.
Opportunist is underwhelming for a 15 point minor trait – .2 init per second is bland, and does little to help differentiate thieves with points in CS from other thieves – consider adding “Strips 1 boon on crit” in addition to the init regain, 5s ICD.
Klepto is in the same boat as opportunist – boring, bland, does nothing to differentiate specs – consider adding “Transfers 1-2 conditions to target on successful steal”

Infiltrator’s Return

Please elaborate on why it’s necessary to kill Sword mainhand. A Sword thief has to go full Zerkers in PvP to do enough sustained damage to actually drop a target. With the amount of random, mindless CC spam flying about in every single fight, relying on stunbreakers just doesn’t cut it, because we’re not running a spec that drops a target in 10 seconds and is made of glass. We’ll be out of stunbreakers long before the fight is over, and 1 stun can result in half our HP disappearing. If you must, shorten the return distance on IR to limit just how far a thief can go when escaping using the skill or reduce the amount of time before IR flips back to IS (to force the thief to keep spending init on IR/IS to have his escape button ready), but a cast time will just ruin the spec entirely (IMO, of course, its not like I’ve tested it). Please test any changes to this thoroughly. Please also remember, you designed thief with 0 access to stability – I feel 1 skill on a specific MH weapon that allows a very squishy class with evade based survival mechanics to move but still remain stunned is a fair trade off.

Infusion of Shadow

Couldn’t agree more – perma stealth has always felt cheap and against the design of stealth to me.

Flanking Strikes

Flanking strikes needs to be good enough to compete with Uncatchable, Long range and Thrill of the crime before you can discuss moving it out of tier 1 – In tier 2, it clearly doesn’t compare to Bountiful theft.

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft

Thank you for considering this – 50% seems like a very big change for a “Shaving” balance philosophy. I think 25% on Vigorous recovery (reducing it to 6s) and 33% on Bountiful Theft (reducing it to 10s) makes much more sense – if it’s still a problem, we can address it in the next patch.

It’s also worth noting that you’ve moved Hard to catch down a tier, without addressing how awful the trait is. No thief is “gaining survivability in the Acro line” by slotting Hard to catch – it’s poorly designed, and has too much potential to be a hindrance to ever be slotted by a serious player. Please consider redesigning it entirely.

The PW ‘fix’ feels like a bandaid, not a true fix – it feels like PW will be marginally useful like it was prior to the 15th.

There’s been plenty of attention paid to nerfing S/D into uselessness (IMO), and fixing permastealth in D/P, but absolutely no attention paid to underperforming weaponsets (P/P, D/D) – I Understand fixing overtuned stuff comes first, but you can’t just keep wrecking our few TPvP viable weaponsets without fixing the ones that have been useless for months (or in the case of P/P, since launch)

Thank you again for keeping us informed, I hope my opinion on the matter can be of some help.

Healing signet needs NO NERF , don’t listen to the whiner . Warrior has no sustain outside of high regen . Those hammer dmg nodes nerf are perfect . But im dissapointed about thief changes honestly , S\D is the only viable build anet

Jeknar.6184:

pedrst.3127:

Do people actually brag about taking empty maps and PvDoorin’ for hours straight ?

People that blindly play for ppt do. Help to boost their egos…

PPT is what wins the match. Fightin’ a zerg is what makes it fun. We took the ET borderlands because ET was bragging about having waypoints on their keeps and being able to keep them unlike us. We changed that by taking over their map with a 15 man zerg. We faced roughly the same amount of oppositon from ET.

I find it amusing that you can’t even post a video of wiping GoM, instead you rely on a video that has been heavily circulated of another server doing a WvW match.

At any rate, any thing you can do, we can do better. We love ppt, we love zerg v. zerg fights, and we love cupcakes. Keep em’ coming ET.

Paint it red, baby! Our borderlands now!

okay so we’re not happy with just taking ET bay, so we took it all. Keep it RED!

Also on sigil/runes:

-Have you ever considered introducing a system where you can opt to have a higher amount of stat A while also introducing a penalty for Stat B?
E.g. right now we have a sigil that gives 5% more damage. Would introduce a rune that would give 10% more damage but take 5% more damage?