Folks need to stop listening to clicker boy, his play was poor and some of his comments and advice were just wrong. If a thief, regardless of spec, is tying up a 5 man group, then the 5 man group is at fault and need to sit down and think about their builds, gear and their synergy.
Since when should 5 people need to theorycraft their characters to beat 1? And playing a thief is not hard. If it was hard to do what that thief did then I could understand but I’ve seen keyboard turning “clicker boys” as you say killing 3-4 people in videos they’ve posted themselves.
The state of that class in WvW is beyond ridiculous.
I did not say five people ‘should’ need to do that, I said those five people should do that because clearly it is needed in their case which is more a statement about them, then the thief they are fighting.
Five players who know what they are doing should be able to drive the thief off or kill him if the thief makes a mistake. When on my guardian I purposefully ran shield to counter shadow refuge. On my necro, I can drop a fear mark on the house. However, this is often times not enough since the thief has so many ways to stealth themselves or ports to get out of focused burst situations.
A large part of killing a good thief who exploits all of the ways to stealth and port is just pure kitten luck that you land your party’s focused damage in the right place when they are stealthed.
Builds that can engage 5+ people alone and live are simply out-of-bounds with respect to class balance. It doesn’t matter if those players are bad or not.
A good thief is not going to kill a group of 5 good players, but a good thief can engage a group of 5 good players and just harass them unless the thief makes a mistake or gets unlucky.
Now, from a 1v1 perspective what is required to kill a good thief is absolutely kitten since they have so many means of resetting a fight to get out of combat to fully heal.
So, if they are losing a fight all they have to do is use their stealth and mobility to heal to full and try again and just keep trying again until they get it right. This is kitten and ridiculous in a competitive setting.
[Anonymous Defender] on Youtube
Solo & Roaming Group WvW Movies
Solo & Roaming Group WvW Movies
(edited by Oozo.7856)
So basically it makes sense where the most offensive class, Thief, also can spec to be so defensive 15 people can’t kill them. Great game development, where the strategy is to ‘move on’ and they can follow you around and pick you off 1 at a time. Gj Anet.
We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional
Anet lied (where’s the Manifesto now?)
Anet lied (where’s the Manifesto now?)
Honestly do you guys think they are going to do this again after all the hassle you gave him for one semantic error? He obviously was speaking strategically not tactically class wise.
We need developers to play the game more and give more attention to WvW, but when you guys are this rude and disrespectful when he is obviously trying to build interest it gives them no motivation to do it again.
Honestly, yes I expect them to do this again, this is the internet, they have expect some kind of reaction like this and I dare say they are not so fragile that they can’t handle it and can’t recognise that it’s coming a handful of people (while also considering that that handful may be expressing the feelings of far, far more).
Their motivation to continue is the same as the motivation to produce this first one, it’s to engage with the community so that they can both guide them, instruct them and to find out their problems so that the game can be more successful, if they just run away because “some mean people on the forum hurt their feelings” then I feel the entire exercise (and the whole game) was doomed to start with.
Isaiah Cartwright is a Lead Designer for Guild Wars 2, he’s a professional and I dare say he realises that the vast majority of complaints here are about the mechanics in the game and are not personal attacks directed at him. He would also have to accept the fact that, on the internet, there sadly always seem to be those who are incapable of not personally attacking someone.
The reaction over and focus on his comment about running from the thief and the underlying invincible perma-stealth thief problem obviously points to a serious source of frustration in WvW. Identifying the extent of that problem alone should be seen as a victory by Isaiah and by ArenaNet. Maybe the next stream can extend from this one, “how we deal with a perma stealth thief”?
I personally enjoyed the stream (well, the VoD version of the stream).
tldr: ArenaNet employees are tougher than you think, dealing with this community is part of their job, being afraid that “scary noises” will cause them to disappear forever makes no sense. They will learn from this one and the next will be better.
Because we have talked before.. I know you loved that chess analogy. Gw2 has hardly changed so i would say even then and now the same applies.
You have the pieces and they all work great but your board has holes in it. Not to mention you seem to want to tear it in half. Then add some fuel and set it on fire.
I wonder how chess would play if I could replace all my units with queens and knights or make infinite moves while the opponent is looking away. Because that’s basically stealth. and also WvW in a nutshell if this game were to be compared to chess.
(edited by TwoBit.5903)
Thanks for the feedback here are some clarifications
Vets at tower: Looks like we changed how the defend event is trigger, it now only triggers on attacking the door or walls for keeps and towers, and any guard for all camps. Sorry for the confusion clearly I’ve been doing it wrong sense that was changed.
Thieves: The main thing I wanted to get across with thieves was not meant to be a commentary on balance but just on how you spend your time. There are many builds set up to be defensive and with good evasion and positioning you can run a group around in circles no matter what profession you are. If you let 1-2 people run your group around in circles and get a lucky kill here or there your letting the enemy tie you up when you could move on to another objective.
Yeah….except that basically proves our point. If you see a thief, dont bother. And if you’re alone, you might as well be dead against one. You created a class that is always in control of a fight, that can attack when they want, while their opponent must either swing their sword wildly in one direction, stand still and pray for a good dodge, or just not bother and run away.
The problem is, it depends if the thief wants to even let you run away, since they can use the same tricks that are used for escapes to stay on target.
I guess it should be ‘when facing a thief in a group, pray you arent the one target and keep running’
And lo, now anyone who doesnt play a thief has an excuse when facing a thief in wvw. Just dont bother. No seriously, dont bother, anet dev said a thief could tie up six people for hours, whats the point of going one on one?
Rather than really teaching new stuff or strats in wvw, the dev just confirmed that thieves are stupid good roamers. So good, that if you meet one, just dont bother.
Yeah, pretty kitten funny. But, I’ve got bad news for the super l33t “it’s a good thief, don’t even bother – just move on” strategy. If a thief wants to they can follow you around and harass your group as much as they want to. Witness the 1v15 thief movie that was just posted.
They tried ANet’s advanced strategy of running away but it didn’t work.
Congratulations ANet on creating a game with some of the worst trolling builds in the history of MMORPGs. That was no small feat.
And they wanted to nerf stealth so a thf could not spam it but these forums complained about it to no end so Anet did not do it.
THESE FORUMS ARE KILLING THE GAME. No one knows what they want.
Main : Jski Imaginary ELE (Necromancer)
Guild : OBEY (The Legacy) I call it Obay , TLC (WvW) , UNIV (other)
Server : FA
Guild : OBEY (The Legacy) I call it Obay , TLC (WvW) , UNIV (other)
Server : FA
providing anti stealth abilities on other classes.
Traps are their way of doing this.
Sounds like feature creep to deal with uncontrolled design.
It’s only because of stealth, which is why they’re introducing the anti-stealth traps in a couple of days.
See that would be utterly stupid, doing it for 1 class, rather than just balancing the class better or providing anti stealth abilities on other classes.
Jade Quarry [SoX]
Miranda Zero – Ele / Twitch Zero – Mes / Chargrin Soulboom – Engi
Aliera Zero – Guardian / Reaver Zero – Necro
Miranda Zero – Ele / Twitch Zero – Mes / Chargrin Soulboom – Engi
Aliera Zero – Guardian / Reaver Zero – Necro
Thanks everyone who came out it was a lot of fun. Let me know if there is anything I could do improve it next time.
No clicking. Play a decent setup that can take on larger numbers. Frankly watching you guys play was painful and I doubt it encourages people to rush out and try it. Do more then point out the obvious. Talk about improvements that are coming to the game to encourage this type of play. Those would be my suggestions.
Agreed. Also, play during primetime NA hours on a reset night to give that true small squad experience. Playing in the middle of the day on a workday doesn’t give the experience full justice.
[Anonymous Defender] on Youtube
Solo & Roaming Group WvW Movies
Solo & Roaming Group WvW Movies
Thanks everyone who came out it was a lot of fun. Let me know if there is anything I could do improve it next time.
No clicking. Play a decent setup that can take on larger numbers. Frankly watching you guys play was painful and I doubt it encourages people to rush out and try it. Do more then point out the obvious. Talk about improvements that are coming to the game to encourage this type of play. Those would be my suggestions.
~ AoN ~
I dont think he meant a good thief can kill 6 people. I think he meant more a good thief can tie up 6 people. In this case, the thief didnt kill anyone, but he did distract them and pulled them off their course temporarily.
First he said a good thief could keep a group like his tied up for hours. Then he said a good thief could kill 5 or 6 if they don’t know how to handle thieves. Then, he gave his advice to deal with good thieves which was to “just move on.”
That is basically an acknowledgement that the stealth and porting available to a thief is ridiculous in this game coming straight from the developers but they seem to be just perfectly fine with.
Official Anet stance on fighting good thieves: “Just move on, you aren’t going to kill them”
Brilliant.
[Anonymous Defender] on Youtube
Solo & Roaming Group WvW Movies
Solo & Roaming Group WvW Movies
[snip]
But yeah, you can stop people from escaping from you, but you really can’t halfass it, you have to build around the idea.
Excellent “How to” guide for a snaring/CC necro build.
As you state yourself, however, one has to build around the idea. In response to the devs claiming necros are the class you “run (away from) or die”, I’m arguing this often isn’t the case in practice. The “running away” part certainly works; and is relatively easy.
On the flip side – short of investing heavily into a specialized build (such as you presented) – necros are not living up to the vision that those who fail to run away will die if they linger too long in a necro’s kill zone. I’m simply asking for tools that work better at keeping enemies within our kill zone should they be foolish enough to venture that close to us. Not as a result of building specifically for that role, but rather more broadly available to any type of necro.
Pulls, forced teleports of opponent(s) to the necro’s location, or skills similar to a guardian’s Ring of Warding (but with a necro flare, of course; one of our wells, perhaps) are a few suggestions for achieving this.
So many souls, so little time. ~ Kraag Deadsoul
Actually I would find it quite in inconvenient if I was forced to have ground targeted wells, the extra moment to aim it, even with fast casting is quite precious in certain circumstances.
You can make a build to reliably hold anyone except sword mainhand thieves (because they have basically unlimited stunbreaks/condition removals when combined with the rights heal/utils), but you do have to really build for it.
In WvW I’ve got:
Dark pact: 3.3s immob, 25s CD
Wail of doom: 3s aoe daze, 25.5s CD
Locust swarm: 2 seconds of cripple, 1% LF and some damage every second in an AOE for 13s, as well as swiftness, 25.5s CD
Unholy feast: 5.5s AOE cripple with a very large range, 15s CD
Spinal shivers: 5.5s chill and boon strip at long range, 20s CD
Dark path: unblockable 5.5s AOE chill + long range homing teleport, tiny 12.75s CD
Doom: instant cast 1s fear, 17s CD
Spectral grasp: 4.5s chill + long range pull, 24s CD
Spectral walk: stun break + 30s swiftness, 48s CD
Golem auto attack: 1s cripple, but it’s unreliable so I usually ignore it.
Golem charge: long range on demand CC, 40s CD
SW+ locust swarm gives perm swiftness – anything less simply doesn’t cut it if you’re serious about killing people.
Locust swarm + golem auto typically means near perm cripple which is hard to cleanse, since it’s applied per second.
These two facts are the main points alone mean people can’t escape without movement skills.
The golem charge, SG and dark path are the real keys to actually stopping from escaping, as you can counter play movement skills such as RTL. For example, because RTL goes in a straight line, it means if you cast SG on them as they cast/mid ride, the grasp goes straight to where they end RTL, and pulls them straight back to you. Or if you cast dark path and run towards their end point, the projectile will follow them as they RTL and bring you to them, provided you haven’t let the gap increase even further.
Doom with it’s very short CD and no cast time means you can reliably interrupt key skills like heals, CC or movement skills, which typically have longer CD’s than doom.
High amounts of chill further make it hard for them to escape, but the slower CD’s are the real kicker, messing with their timing more then anything, which is especially notable against ele’s.
Perm weakness from traits (11s AOE weakness on entering DS + how ever meany seconds of weakness on a quarter of crits, with 77/97% crit) also reduces the amount they can dodge, and combined with constant cripples and short bleeds from crits also make it hard to cleanse off all the conditions, especially the important ones like immob.
Of course this is for solo/gang wvw – all this is redundant in PvE, and in PvP where it’s about point capture I’d rather be a ranger where I can be extremely difficult to kill, and let the pet follow them (which does x5+ of the player’s DPS), while staying on the point yourself.
But yeah, you can stop people from escaping from you, but you really can’t halfass it, you have to build around the idea.
“Felt” is not proof of the bug lacking existence. If members can take the time to mathematically find the evidence of the necro’s downed health, then surely a dev can spare a couple of minutes. We don’t even know if Jon Peters was in a level 80 zone, WvW, or even if PvP (because it works in PvP). Sigh…
Ask, and you shall receive. (Kinda. It’s hardly “proof”, but I feel it’s sufficient evidence to warrant a Developer’s investigation).
Interesting, although it looks like tying to form a special Olympics team!
RIP ‘gf left me coz of ladderboard’ Total views: 71,688 Total posts: 363
Good day folks. I have decided to put together a video showcasing the hypothesis that the Necromancer has lower Downed State HP than other classes. While it is not proof that the hypothesis is true, it is certainly evidence.
Method: Care was taken to remove any possible variables present. Here are precautions that were taken:
- All recordings and measurements were taken in the exact same area. Both characters are at lvl 80, but leveled down to 13. Neither character had any food boosts.
- The Ice Wurm’s attacks were uniform and predictable. If there was a “Critical Hit” or “Glancing Blow” while the character was downed, the observation was discounted.
- The Necromancer had all gear removed and all traits emptied.
- The Warrior had all gear removed and all traits emptied.
- All WvW bonuses were accounted for. The recordings in the video are taken within 15 minutes of each other. No new bonuses occurred during this time span.
- While only one video was shown of each downed state, there were many more iterations performed behind the scenes. The above videos simply showcase the most frequent occurrences.
- Timing for downed state began when the HP “Bubble” at the bottom of the screen began to fill when downed. Timing ended when the skills for Downed State completely disappeared. This was done to keep uniformity in measurements.
- The Warrior was used due to its identical passive HP pool to the Necromancer.
Results:
- The Necromancer had an approximate downed time of 13;06 for the above video.
- The Warrior had an approximate downed time of 21;19 for the above video.
- The Necromancer survived approximately 4 strikes by the Wurm when no glancing blows or criticals were made.
- The Warrior survived approximately 6 strikes by the Wurm when no glancing blows or criticals were made.
- The Necromancer suffered 12 ticks on Downed State Degeneration.
- The Warrior suffered 21 ticks of Downed State Degeneration.
Should the health numbers appearing when downed be trusted, we have:
- Necromancer illustrated approximately 962 HP while downed.
- Warrior illustrated approximately 2824 HP while downed.
Conclusion: There is good reason to believe that the Warrior has more Downed State HP than the Necromancer in PvE (when downleveled and in a level 80 zone). I cannot make any conclusions about other classes in comparison to the Necromancer.
I apologize for the informal presentation of the above information. I do not have time to offer more numbers and analysis. My sample size was, unfortunately, fairly small due to my time constraints. However, due to the disparaging difference in numbers observed, I suspect more iterations would produce results that were similar to the above incidents.
Have a nice day!
Update
In order to remove any more potential variables, the experiment was repeated in Frostgorge Sound, where there was no downleveling. The same foe was used and the exact same conditions were met as stated above. These are the findings after one iteration of testing:
- The Necromancer had an approximate downed time of ~13 seconds.
- The Warrior had an approximate downed time of ~21 seconds.
- The Necromancer survived 4 strikes by the Wurm when no glancing blows or criticals were made.
- The Warrior survived 6 strikes by the Wurm when no glancing blows or criticals were made.
- The Necromancer suffered 13 ticks on Downed State Degeneration.
- The Warrior suffered 21 ticks of Downed State Degeneration.
Should the health numbers appearing when downed be trusted, we have:
- Necromancer illustrated approximately 15,301 HP while downed.
- Warrior illustrated approximately 43,846HP while downed.
(edited by OmegaProject.9831)
Mine are still one forward, one back. It still irks me that you only ever have 2 prints, I know it’s not something they will ever change I can imagine it would be a nightmare to code in to swap between 2 and 4 on a whim, but it still knots up my fur nonetheless.
http://almunns.wix.com/elitedeathsociety
~Surrender fiend and you will get an easy death
~I could promise you the same…but it would be a lie…
~Surrender fiend and you will get an easy death
~I could promise you the same…but it would be a lie…
LOL at Anet. Guarantee you if a thief or memser experienced this, they would be all over it, babying their two favorite classes. I lost trust in Jon Peters back when he told the necro community to learn to death shroud.
Another point, our control is also weakened because a lot of gapcloser are not used as such, but as an escape mechanism. Swiftness is not mobility, it’s mandatory right now to just try to keep up. Call it the normal speed. Then you see them use a Gapcloser to move 600yd (and sometimes more because of swiftness) away from you, and you hope your Wurm was precast in the good direction so that you can try to come closer and chill/dark path.
I think they went in the good direction with Ride The Lightning, but I would go farther and require a target IN RANGE to even use to skills in the first place. Now that would give our Control tools a bit more value, and Swiftness would just not be the Normal Walking speed anymore so that stripping it would have even more value. Warriors, guardians, thiefs, mesmers, rangers and eles are all professions that can use gap closers the “wrong way” and on such a short cooldown that it makes our “Locking Horns” skills looks pale and depressive.
I’ve even had trouble getting away from a Warrior with my mesmer yesterday, Perma-swiftness, gapcloser non stop and must have had the 98% Immo/Cripple/Chill reduction build. He chased me around a good portion of the map until I was able to blink somewhere he couldn’t reach and he finally got bored. I was using Staff #2 (traited), Centaur rune (So perma-swiftness me too), Blink (Traited) and he was still keeping up, and when I say keeping up, he was in close combat range almost all half the time… If a mesmer can’t trail off a warrior on open grounds, imagine a necro.
80’s: Razdhül Necro/Desire Mesmer/ Ykarys War/ Yphrit Ele/
Panhauramix Guardian/Pistoleros Engineer/ Orbite Thief
Gates of Madness – Leader of Homicide Volontaire [HV]
Panhauramix Guardian/Pistoleros Engineer/ Orbite Thief
Gates of Madness – Leader of Homicide Volontaire [HV]
I only see a lot of people that don’t know thief mechanics get trolled by 1 good s/d thief here. However, I do agree chaining cnd is imbalanced in wvw. IMO you should get revealed debuff 1.5s at the end of a stealth, even if you have not attacked anything(normal 3s, if you attack).
That’s the main issue in bold.
Thief and mesmer punish players that don’t understand those classes the most out of any other class.
New players get upset since they have no clue of what’s going on or how to counter it. Then they go on the forums and cry nerf nerf nerf instead of learning.
The other day there was a guardian on the thief forums asking for a nerf. A fricking GUARDIAN asking for a thief nerf. Guards have a VERY easy time killing thieves. They have SO many great tools against them. Dear god I still see players spamming ranged attacks at a thief doing dagger storm on a daily basis… but why should players learn when they can go cry for nerfs instead of learning to play?
Tarnished Coast
Salvage 4 Profit + MF Guide – http://tinyurl.com/l8ff6pa
Salvage 4 Profit + MF Guide – http://tinyurl.com/l8ff6pa
(edited by Aberrant.6749)
Yes, changing the rules of the game should provide a reset of the points.
With the new AC rules, a ballista which should absolutely trump an arrow cart on single target damage is actually less effective and less dps than an arrow cart does. So the points someone put into a ballista are fairly wasted at this point.
I was shocked that they put that kind of a radical change in without providing a refund. It hurts no one and can only provide a more fair playing field. Or is this another way of Anet screwing you with RNG? They randomly upgrade something to god status and you better hope you either didn’t spend your points or put them in the right place!
It is highly unlikely. WvWvW must account for the players that can participate in it, because, as a person in the lowest tier like me (I am FC) you know what it means to see an Outnumbered icon in YOUR OWN Borderlands. If you think HoD has few players in WvW, just come see the situation here.
It is then that you will account for how many people play PvE and don’t even care about WvW or PvP. FC and ET are really badly hit by that wave of players. Might help you if you check the server population too.
Taerima (Dungeon Guardian), Xeona Shadow (Thief), Dobchan (Ranger)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ3rXeSXZ4w
Fergie, and proud!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ3rXeSXZ4w
Fergie, and proud!
You’d expect someone looking for difficulty in WvW to look to the actual players, not the NPC’s…
^The “pitiful amount” really made it sound like a necro trait.
Apart from that Dark Armor should probably be more like for example Nature’s Protection (Ranger/ Nature Magic/ VI), a trait that triggers on x amount of health gone in one hit.
It could be as easy as giving us frost aura in such a case. Fits thematically well with 10% less Damage and chill on getting struck.
I love the idea of unlocking additional skill effects.
However, it seems like you’re suggesting the various Tiers would stack, so at Max Tier Upgrade, your Fireball would have 50% bigger splash radius, renew burning, apply burning (wich is also renewed), and leave a Fire Combo Field on impact.
I’m against that much of an improvement to skill effects.
Regarding your Notes, renewing Burning, applying Burning and creating Fire Combo Field count as increasing damage.
I think it would actually be alot more fun if you were only able to benefit from 1 of the Tiers at a time.
So you would choose between renewing burning (so you’d depend on other sources of burning), or applying burning, or bigger splash radius, or fire combo field.
Finally, 150 Skill Points to improve 1 skill to max is insane…
In my suggestion, it’d take 1 skill point to unlock each “variant” of each skill, wich would take a decent while to do.
Salvaging Revamp || Combo Concepts || Expansion Concepts || Condition Stacking
Endurance 2.0 || Attributes, Traits and Conditions || Skill Variants
Endurance 2.0 || Attributes, Traits and Conditions || Skill Variants
(edited by Nurvus.2891)
Look at the image. Traits limit the Elementalist in useful skills.
Doesn’t matter, switching from staff to dagger mid combat will still make him OP regardless of a couple of traits as his close range attacks become faster. As it is elementalists already have the most skills available at any one point, doubling that would seriously impact balance and complexity. There’s a good reason why eles can’t have two weapons at once, cause they already have four attunements.
There is no imbalance when Elementalist have to pay to reset their traits.
Only one to two of the four attunements are even useful.
Another reason for a swap is a place to store a exotic.
A good elementalist uses ALL skills, not just the few he traited. Each skills can be good in different situations, and even though he isn’t traited in water doesn’t mean he should never use water to heal allies for example, adding another weapon set doubles his already too big potential.
So you want 40+ skills while the rest of us gets 10 skills?
5x Warrior, 5x Ranger, 4x Elementalist, 4x Engineer,
4x Necromancer, 3x Mesmer, 4x Guardian, 4x Thief, 4 Revenant
4x Necromancer, 3x Mesmer, 4x Guardian, 4x Thief, 4 Revenant