Oh boy I wish I could play some phoenix wright music at the moment.
I figured someone would chime in about “The wiki is player maintained!”, so before this I did some digging with the wayback machine. The original intent of the class, as seen on the official site, is as follows, and I quote:
“A master of stealth and surprise, the thief is deadly in single combat—particularly when catching enemies off guard. Thieves compensate for their relatively low armor and health by being quick and evasive. They can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air, or steal items from their opponents and use them as weapons. Enemies should watch their backs, or the thief will watch it for them.”
Erasculio is on the money more than you might think.
That does bring to the forefront a rather interesting question though.
Why did that snippet of being good at 1v1 vanish from the official site?
Resident Disgruntled, Coffee-drinking Charr.
Zarin Mistcloak(THF) Valkyrie Mistblade(WAR) Kossori Mistwalker(REV) Durendal Mistward(GRD)
I used to think (build op, pls nerf) like you, but then I took a nerf to the knee.
Mr. Whiteside, sorry to bring it up again, but can you clarify the changes in instance ownership? I believe that there’s a genuine concern for griefing, and I was hoping that you could put our legitimate worries at ease.
Thanks again for replying!
We have been discussing this for a very long time. Can you PM me so i remember to get back to this point when it is appropriate to do so please?
Chris
I could answer this! It is true two people could be invited and then boot out everyone else to “take over” the instance where as before two people could only kick the instance owner out closing the instance destroying it for everyone. While this isn’t ideal and something we need to look more into, the goal of this change was to reduce the more common case of the instance owner leaving. For now Ryan is looking into adding some logging (see post here) so people can report people abusing this.
As I mentioned in my thread on the topic, it would be great to have the number of needed kick votes increased to 3, to minimize griefing resulting from this change. Personally I always started my own dungeon parties to avoid kick-happy couples. Now there’s nothing to kep me safe. 2 votes have always been a bad idea, anyway. Not even a majority.
I actually agree with you. I would have liked to increase the vote count a majority with this change, but unfortunately not all the pieces of code around party votes are set up in a way to make this a quick and easy change.
We were aware of the possible issues with the instance ownership change, but felt that holding back an improvement to the base experience on account of trolls was unfair to users that are playing nice.
Stealing instances using the LFG tool, or booting people for no reason (or to give your buddy the rewards for no work) at the end of a run are bannable offenses and should be reported.
Any tips on how to get name of those trolls that kick you from your own instance quickly?
There usually isn’t time to write anything down or to make any screenshots.
Thanks in advance!
There appears to be some nice debug messages for party join/leave that I’m going to see if I can turn into “LFG Messages” in the chat log which should make this easier…
DPS meters are for the unskilled who need to have there hands held. DPS meters will not make you a better player. Skill and knowing what you are doing will.
But hay what do I know right? The “elite” use it to make them selfs better right?
Sorry, but every thread I see like this makes me laugh.
DPS Meter shows only damage. What we need is Contribution Meter. Live meter during encounter or maybe just a static overview one after each encounter/raid ends.
And raids are and probably will be run by organized groups ie guild runs, and in guild runs kicks due to low “contribution” are extremely unlikely.
So the match ready box appears and it locks you out from doing anything, you click accept and you are still locked out until everyone accepts.
First off I don’t remember seeing this change mentioned in previous patch notes. Is this supposed to happen?
Second, presuming that it is intended, I can understand why the lock out occurs until you accept but why lock you out until everyone accepts?
This is particularly annoying when not everyone accepts and you have to wait until it times out, and this can happen several times in a row. During this time you cannot access anything else.
Is thief so UP and nerfed that no one is playing them anymore?
Thief is still reasonably powerful owing to shortbow #5 and Shadow Refuge – between the two of those, the thief can out-rotate anything else in the game, threatening decap and keeping all 3 points under constant pressure simply by being in the match. The traits in Shadow Arts also make it a reasonable support class; you can res downed allies like no other.
For those reasons alone thief will continue to have a role in high level matches – if the other team does not have a thief, your thief can run a member of the other team around the entire match, getting occasional decaps and contributing more simply from rotation potential.
The thief is not a good combat class right now – it is at a disadvantage 1v1 against every class in the game except perhaps warrior, and in general you can only drop an opponent in an even numbered fight if you massively outplay them. This makes thief incredibly frustrating to play – you spend nearly the entire match running away from stronger combatants. This is even moreso when queuing solo, when your teammates are not reliable and your weakness at scoring – and snowballing – kills makes it more difficult to carry on than many other classes.
I still find it fun, as I like winning matches by reading the map better and out-rotating my opponents. You are absolutely a support character however, and if you’re looking to carry you really should be playing something else.
I regularly stream the Ghost Thief build, perma invis killing and stomping. The enemy doesn’t even see you once if you do it correctly.
When people mock others who die to the build, they just don’t realise what they’re against. A smart ghost wont burn all their Condi on a high-cleansing target (Shout Warrior/Guardian, D/D Water attuned Ele, ect ect ect). They’d save the big damage things like Steal and one Trap, that’s more than enough to kill someone with 0 clear left. Plus, the fight lasts for as long as I want it too, since I can follow you with SB-5 whilst perma invis from Traps and Steal. If you stand your ground, I’ll just D/P 2+5 to stay around forever.
The counters to the build are as follows (In order of what kittens the build the most):
1. Reveal Trap [Costs 10 Supply to place]
2. Taunt from Ranger Pets
3. Standing in my Black Powder
4. That AOE Engi ability that reveals
5. Perma Chill (Longer cooldowns on Traps can kill you)
6. Sick’em from Rangers
This is the best build available for it (I’ve done A LOT of testing, being a human is almost a must):
Mesmer is totally braindead class right now mostly for “wannabe pros”. Except the good ones prepatch, 90% of them are totally carried by the OP class mechanics.
Yes , it’s a rant post.
ANet was so close to make it a very high skillcap-class that’s balanced very well! Look at Powerblock; one of my favourite new traits; really high skillcap but very rewarding and powerful. but what do ppl do with Mantra of distraction now? they just spam it because it’s a guaranteed stun anways! Most high level players don’t even pick PB anymore, but the extremely dumb and boring mental anguish.
I personally don’t think Mesmer is extremely OP and I could live with it being strong (although I don’t main Mesmer), but I hate when sth. that could be so skill-intensive and amazing just gets dumbed down because of bad balancing. I mean; why should I w8 to interrupt sth with powerblock when I can just daze (=stun) and spike it down?
Solution: Confounding suggestions only Stuns when you’re interrupting a skill!
→ This would help to make the class more balanced, skill-intensive and rewarding and it would be an incredibly easy fix.
Just want to clarify since I saw this come up a couple of times in this thread and we haven’t actually released our full official patch notes for 6/23 yet….
Ascended Gear will be staying 5% better than Exotic Gear. Gear beyond the tiers we already have are not going to be added and our existing tiers won’t change, they won’t be our main end-game form of progression for your characters/account for all the reasons we’ve covered before – it isn’t what we think Gw2 is about.
Masteries is being added to PvE to help provide this system as our form of progression for PvE moving forward, and the WvW ability system exists for WvW and will be what we use to expand WvW in the future.
To more directly answer some of your point….We are adding a system that lets you change the stats for your ascended gear (weapons and armor) next Tuesday – which will cost a combination of 10 spirit shards, piece you don’t want anymore, 5 ectos, and an exotic insignia of the stats you want to convert to. Legendary Gear will remain the gear that can freely change stats any time.
Warrior is brought for its offensive buffing from both banners and might generation through PS. It also has vuln application which can be bursted with OMM while doing reflects at lupi.
Guard/Mes are your reflect and utility classe. Guard bringing blinds, aegis, reflects and some cleansing as well as good damage. Mes bringing lots of reflects, good cleansing, good burst but mediocre average damage and a good pull, plus power block on bosses.
Thief has good cleave, lots of blinds and ridiculous single target damage as well as easy access to smoke fields and plenty of blasts.
Elementalist has good might generation in s/f, excellent aoe damage with staff which becomes stronger the larger the bosses hitbox, as well as amazing vuln stacking with glyph of storms.
Engineer has very good sustained vuln as well as access to smoke fields, reflects, easy blasts and a pull if traited. All of the attacks used in the current meta rotation are aoes/cones.
Ranger has good damage, reflects with offhand axe as well as a pull, a longer fire field, permanent fury if you lack an ele plus spotter and frost spirit for unique buffs. Also some vuln and possible might from pets. The AA chain takes practice.
Necro has weak cleave, but good damage. Unfortunately it lacks group support outside of vuln application and 1 blast finisher on a minion utility which you don’t want to get stuck in combat with.
Has anyone had success as a team-buff thief using venom sharing?
I realize most people as a thief want to be fast, crafty assassins.
But if venom share is bad, what exactly is weak about it?
It’s not weak, its quite powerful. It just that venom share is like Necro or Mesmer (lock down build), the group has to work together to make it effective. Why baby a venom share thief when you can have a thief that is self efficient?
Playing with “bad players” can be very frustrating sometimes but the thing is that “bad player” or “personal performance” is a very subjective thing. And realistically you cannot measure personal performance with any objective metrics – too many factors should be taken into consideration. If you introduce any kind of automated metrics system and start rewarding for that – players will find a way to exploit it to their advantage (i.e. if it’s a max damage metrics – everyone gonna play staff eles etc.). This will literally ruin any kind of teamwork.
Instead of punishing people for being bad game should reward em for being good. Being good not only means highest damage but also how helpful you were. I can think of 3 basic things that ANet can introduce without too much of an effort from their part
1. Bonus chests for completing encounters fast enough or under certain conditions. They already have bonus chest in grawl fractal rewarding you if you didnt lose any prisoner. You can also reward for fast kill/no downed state/evading certain attack etc.
2. MVP system. Let players vote at the end of each dungeon path and choose whoever they think was more of a help to the group. This will work better than any automated metrics system.
3. Bonus reward for completing dungeon through LFG system. This will help greatly with “spreading knowledge” about the game since it will encourage experienced premades to use LFG and teach other people their ways of doing dungeons
A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.
-Carlos Castaneda
Skady Valda
what do you guys think of having these 2 statistics in this game?
Objective holder would calculate how long a person stayed inside objective area.
Hero damage dealt would calculate how much damage a player dealt to the opposite team players.
As of now, i think the pvp statistics are too bland and too small. You can’t even tell what people doing and most of the time, people just ended up doing things on their own. Most of the time people actually ignore these statistics, except for the points.
I think having these 2 statistics will give the game more strategic purpose because it will open up new ideas and make the game more competitive, because it will urge other players to either do more damage or cap more objective.
We are happy to present a new competitive and player friendly weekly tournament. In this format, veteran players will be diluted into free agent teams. Teams of five that sign up will be given a higher seeding than free agent teams.
REQUIREMENT: FREE AGENT MUST BE ABLE TO USE TEAMSPEAK3 (Mic).
TIME: SATURDAYS AT 4PM EST.
PRIZES: 1st—- 2,000GEMS /player
2nd—- 800GEMS /player
Disclaimer: In order to ensure the quality of each match, this tournament will be capped at 16 teams (80 free agents). We will try to accommodate as many players as we can but signing up does not guarantee a spot on a team.
I think thief really shines in a few fractals
1: Cliffside(the one with the giant) They bring blinds for the bodyseal so you can stand in the middle without wiping. They can use shadow trap for the double arms seals to make it go extremely quick( http://www.twitch.tv/eco_r_i/c/5038020 ). Mesmers are better at the double arms but they suck everywhere else that it is not worth bringing them at the moment.
2: Dredge, you can literally avoid every single dredge in the beginning up to the clown car by stealthing.
3: Ascalon fractal you can stealth straight to dulfy, icebow burst her down without ever killing any vets. Past that you can literally stealth to the middle arena. Usually in the arena, you kill 2groups then you stealth again to make a bee line to the next spot to kill the 2nd group.
4: Thaumanova, They can do solo shenanigans in the turret room(Pretty hard to pull off).
5: Harpy fractal, if your group is good at jumping puzzles you can stealth all of that.
TL:DR thief is really amazing in organized groups and pretty decent in pugs where blinds shine since most pugs do fractals with full clear mentality.
It is true two people could be invited and then boot out everyone else to “take over” the instance where as before two people could only kick the instance owner out closing the instance destroying it for everyone. While this isn’t ideal and something we need to look more into, the goal of this change was to reduce the more common case of the instance owner leaving. For now Ryan is looking into adding some logging 