Guild Wars 2

I am here just to leave my little feedback:
No more Scarlet Anet please, give me dragons, gods and big stuff, ty

The Living story is just ruining the Guild Wars lore. I’m a big fan of ArenaNet and I’m a player of the Guild Wars saga since prophecies, and I’m ok with Guild Wars 2, with the story of the dragons and the 5 ancient races, even I’m ok with Trahearne, but Scarlet…

Scarlet was interesting when she was behind the aetherblades, but now, she’s just the nemesis of the entire game, not just the living story. I bought Guild Wars 2 believing that we would learn about the world, the misteries surround it, the elder dragons, the gods, the ancient races… But instead, we have an egocentric salad who can unify any race to create unlikely and forced alliances… I’m here to slay dragons, to explore this vast and misterious world. I loved Orr because of the feeling of being in a land unexplored and dangerous, full of secrets and ancient magics… But with the living story, all that was good is gone.

¿Where are the epic concepts of Daniel Dociu?¿And the epic writings of Jeff Grubb and Ree Soesbee?¿And the Epic Soundtrack of Jeremy Soule?¿Where is the promise of a vast, evergrowing explorable world, full of secrets and dangers?
I will continue playing Guild Wars 2, but not for the living story, not for Scarlet. I will play for the old times, for the old good, intrincate and epic scale stories, and for the hope I have that some day we will finally visit new and unexplored regions, with good stories and lore free from a walking salad with delusions of grandeur.

And sorry for my english xD

Please…pleasepleaseplease. This is enough. Stop. Take Scarlet out back and insert a hedge trimmer in her kitten planty face, and get back to doing something worthwhile with the lore instead of messing up Thaumanova with absolute garbage like her. It feels like a kick in the face.

As many have said, Thaumanova was interesting. ‘Was’. Before this. A very integral piece of lore regarding the asura and the state of Metrica Province, and several other locations in the world…it had so much potential. I was so looking forward to seeing just how and why the Inquest, and if it really was the Inquest, had caused the reactor meltdown.

Instead of whatever plausible, interesting and good explanations you could have chosen…you chose, once again, your beloved Scarlet. I think that says enough.

Arenanet, for the love of goodness, get over your fixation with Scarlet. We don’t like her as much as you seem to! Please, I was really excited at first for the Thaumanova reactor, even if I wanted the Abbadon Fractal more. I really wanted to see a grandiose Inquest vs Peacemaker battle. I wanted to see giant golems brawling each other while the Inquest and Peacemakers fight to the death! I didn’t want Scarlet ruining everything. She was JUST FINE when she was behind the Aetherblades after Trin. But when she was behind the Molten Alliance, the Dragon Bash scheme, and everything leading up to the present day in Living Story, I had enough. And I’ll say this as many times as I need to.

ENOUGH. WITH. SCARLET.

Anet has got to be trolling us at this point….

They went on and on about how thermanova had this amazing story that would reveal great things about Tyria… what do we get… Scarlet… again…

There needs to be a god kitten petition for Anet to completly remove Scarlet from the game, and keep her locked away and forgotten.

If she has something to do any of the dragons i’m just grabbing my friends and dropping this game.

Say half a year ago, when we knew nothing about Scarlet, they announced an expansion.

One evil genius is forming alliances with EVERYONE evil and assaulting everything! And you will discover that she is the reason for all evil in the world (forget the dragons, that was a joke.) But don’t worry, no new classes, one new skill, no new areas, and three new instances.

Who would have bought it?

If it isn’t good enough for an expansion, why is it good enough for Living World? Because Living World is free?

Farzo.8410:

Wouldn’t surprise me if Scarlet was behind the fall of Abaddon as well.

Wouldn’t surprise me if Scarlet woke up the dragons.

Wouldn’t surprise me if it actually was Scarlet running away instead of Logan and killing Snaff.

Wouldn’t surprise me if Scarlet was actually Glint too.

Wouldn’t surprise me if Scarlet was Scarlett Johansson too.

The Scarlett Johansson thing would surprise me, unless Scarlet was an awesome mesmer.

Blindrat.8016:

I will say one thing though, if she even remotely touches Wintersday I can guarantee that will be a breaking point for people that haven’t already flipped their tables over this.

They would make Scarlet the Grinch that screw up the giant golem blimp and was behind the toy chaotic event.

At this point, I just give up.

Can’t wait till we also find out Scarlet’s behind the dragons waking up.

…
Is Scarlet also responsible for the great collapse? Is she responsible for waking the dragons?

This new fractal has got to be some kind of joke. Please tell me it’s a joke. I’m not someone who plays Fractals very often, but I have plenty of friends who were so hyped up about finding out what happened to the Thaumanova Reactor… and then were immediately shot down when they saw it was Scarlet’s fault.

Stop. With. Scarlet.

I’ve stopped playing the living story, I’ve stopped playing the dungeons, I’ve stopped playing the game. The ONLY thing that keeps me coming back to Guild Wars 2 is the role playing community.

I hate Scarlet. Mission accomplished, I hate a villain in a story. But I don’t hate her because of the deeds she’s committed… I hate her because she’s poorly written and shoe horned into every possible place she can be put into.

Was there REALLY a need to put Scarlet in the Thaumanova Reactor incident? Really?! How about more information about the Inquest and how they operate? How about some background information that is plausible as to how the reactor went critical?

Quitting the game today seems like it would protect my blood pressure, but for whatever reason, despite everything that’s happened in the past year, I hold out some hope that Arena Net will fix what’s happened.

I don’t know why I have that hope. Nothing has encouraged me to have hope anymore for GW2’s story.

My heart sank when I saw Scarlet in there, I could feel all of my enthusiasm drain at that moment.
Just the other day, me and my friends were literally making fun of the possibility Scarlet would be behind it. You know the type of conversation where you bring up things that are ridiculous and stupid because the mere possibility is funny? It was that kind of conversation.
Yet here we are, Scarlet making her usual shpeal in front of the core. I suppose it makes sense, there were some hints that it would happen and if it was already planed Anet can’t exactly pull a 180 on it. Just incredibly disappointing that I thought we’d finally get some compelling story that was unrelated to her, and then have this happen when it could have been so much more (anyone here still remember those… what were they called? Elder Dragons).

If I knew Scarlet was going to show up, I would have voted for the Abaddon fractal despite finding it uninteresting and it being completely unrelated to GW2’s story.

Edit: at least the content itself was fun to play though.

Ive been extremely interested in Thaumanova lore since the beginning of the game, adding Scarlet in as the reason completely destroyed the whole thing for me.

Please stop adding Scarlet to everything, Its getting extremely annoying.

When Scarlet appeared, I immediately lost any bit of interest I had in this Fractal.
On the other hand, just imagine how they would’ve butchered the lore if Evon won the campaign. /shudder

Had to repost because apparently the other thread got deleted.

The worst possible choice, that’s who.

Come on guys. Enough of Scarlet. Enough of destroying asuran lore with this ridiculous sue character. Please. Please.

I could list the reasons why this was a bad idea. But other threads have done this already. My only thing to say is, as an asura player that loves their society and lore and history?

You are killing them for me.

I personally wish they would change stuff a bunch during seasons so we can get some nice bugs back like no dolyaks to SMC from Blue Side. That was fun! #Sarcasm

No big changes during seasons was a good idea. It let us establish a meta, and play it out throughout seasons. What if they released some content in week 5, when matches are still close, and there is some kind of exploit that one server takes massive advantage of? Well then seasons would be ruined, and there would be even MORE drama.

Popeurban makes an excellent point, that P/D is easier to learn. You needn’t worry about positional requirements nearly as much.

For any dagger offhand build, learning to time ‘revealed’ is critical. I do that through sound. Both Dagger and Pistol mainhand attacks have a rhythm coming out of stealth that you can time without having to watch your buff bar. It’s been a bit since I played P/D, but I recall the sound of the ‘1’ attack from stealth was, “BOOMBOOMBOOM, boom, boom, boom.” On that final ‘boom’ from autoattack, I want to have CnD started and be in, or on my way to melee range. Dagger mainhand has a similar pattern.

Qae, on your specific question above, I’d stick in P/D when they close, if it’s a single target. If CnD is ready, hit them with it. If you’re still revealed, dodge roll. I don’t think you gain a lot against a single foe by switching to D/D for deathblossom.

When new people ask me “what thief build should I roll?” I always point them to P/D

P/D is a good beginner thief build (and the build I started with) because it has a very straightforward attack rotation, doesn’t worry a whole lot about initiative starvation, and succeeds or fails based on the positioning and timing of a single skill (CnD)

P/D is pretty bunkery and does a great job of distilling what’s important about playing thief down to the basics. It’s a one trick pony, but it’s a one trick pony that will teach you the importance of skill timing and managing adrenaline, which are the two defining attributes that good theif players have, and bad ones don’t.

Most people, once they get the hang of P/D graduate to something a little harder to play after they’ve used P/D to learn to count revealed timers in their own head, played around with some combo effects, and been forced to kick their own skill level up a bit by having had some tough PvP or boss fights with it. After a while, P/D starts to feel “simple” and that’s about the point where you’ve become aware enough of the core strengths and weaknesses of the build that you will be comfortable taking a few lumps while learning another build, because you’ve learned what makes thieves tick, without having to learn the intircate nature of a lot of other stuff at the same time.

I’ve had the same issue as you do with almost all games. I remember how terrible I was with my rogue on WoW. However after a few weeks of failing I eventually started tearing all classes to shreds to a point that horde didn’t bother coming to Tol Barad anymore because of me. Same with the thief class here. I’m reasonably new to the game and finally I’m starting to notice a rapid improvement in my abilities.

Irrespective of build or gear, you will get better in time as you find yourself more comfortable with your class and learn how to deal with other classes.

This video helped me quite a lot too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUmrfBr1R5s

You’ve started with D/D & SB, and that is a terrific build for a WvW roamer. It has tremendous overland speed (heartseeker covers a lot of ground), and it can certainly kill things. 30 in Criticals and 30 in Shadow Arts are pretty standard for the WvW variant. The other 10 can be useful in any of the other lines — it’s preference.

Watch some of Yishi’s vids to see how the build is played. Be aware, this shows the upper limits of the build. You don’t need this guy’s ludicrous levels of situational awareness and experience to do well, but you can learn a lot from his vids because he talks you through his thinking. Here’s one..

I favor Valkyrie armor, with some mix of berserker trinkets/ weapons. For a build with Hidden Killer, you can afford to drop some precision in exchange for vitality.

If you want a build with an easier learning curve, look at a P/D condition build. That does not translate well to group PvE, but it’s effective in WvW. Google up some Laela Blackbird vids to see how that plays.

Qaelyn.7612:

Thief seems to be one of the classes where player skill has the most effect. And I’m inexperienced and not super-fast. I don’t have a good handle on how to use the skills in the right combos at the right times, so I end up being fairly ineffective, and I die quickly.

It’s actually more deeper than that.

When playing a Thief, timing is everything because you don’t want to be wasting precious resources — initiatives and cooldowns will cost you a lot when you fail to manage them compare to other professions that only manages one resources instead of two.

You need to do some basic Math when playing a Thief. If you see a Warrior, how much damage do you think you can deal before your initiatives are tapped out? So you start with basic addition and subtraction trying to manage your initiatives. If you are using D/D, when you use CnD, how long will it take to get those initiatives back?

Once you wrapped your mind around those, then you can work on your play style then build your gears around it. Without the basic understanding on how Thieves works, being “super fast” can only mean that you are going to die fast because you are spending initiative faster than you are gaining it back.

Then you need to think about your exit strategy when your plan fails before you think about your engagement strategy. An example of an engagement combo, using D/D, I love opening with CnD->Steal->Backstab. Although this requires timing, you don’t have to be supper fast.

Anyone know if there are any good guides that include a build suitable for a newer player and also specific advice on how to use it? I don’t want to clone someone else’s build and playstyle entirely, but I need somewhere to start from or I’m just going to end up shelving this class.

Here’s a good place to start: Guide to Thief Guides

Main interest eventually will be WvW roaming. I’m tinkering in PvP since it’s easy to change things around without having to buy a lot of new gear. Mostly been focusing on a D+D/SB combo since I’m somewhat familiar with it. I’ve tried D+P/D+D and D+P/P+D but they seem to require even more skill and timing.

Keep in mind that some skills function very differently in the Mist. It’s a great place to plan your build, but not to flesh out your play style. WvW is very different mainly because of the stats on the gears. So plan out in the Mist, but practice in the Borderlands.

Thanks!

You are welcome, just ask away.

I will repost this from before (edited a bit)…

So the thing is…
People don’t want to be dropped in 3 seconds, regardless of what it means for the person that’s killing them (or the over-all/global context). They want to fight, and feel like the fight is fair.

You brought up (GW1) assassins, remember BoA/Shadow Prison assassin? Here’s a video of an average BoA assassin day

The nice part about that video, is that it’s not a montage, meaning it shows what happens to the assassin AFTER they killed their target or failed to do so. You can kind of see that it’s sort of iffy when you will take down a target if you don’t use proper judgment. You can see that really, if he killed 1 person it was good, if he made it out live it was just amazing (then proceeded to run around waiting for CDs). Some planning/judgment does need to take place to decide who to jump and who not to jump.
Despite all this, people cried that the build was OP, and it was eventually nerf-ed (rendering it completely useless).
Assassin type builds will NEVER exist, where their sole purpose is to drop one guy and gtfo or be killed.

Stealth in this game, on some levels I have to agree that it’s badly handled only because the enemy can’t force* a thief out of stealth or detect the thief in stealth. WoW’s rogues when they came too close too you (touching you pretty much), you would see them, hunters could put up flares that revealed stealth within a certain area…. In LoL there’s oracles, there’s wards (if you don’t use them it’s your fault)… I believe in most games where there’s stealth the enemy gets a way to reveal stealthed units.

Combine “no way for the enemy to detect stealth” issue with “wanting a fair fight”…. tada! you got a problem.

And so, when Dec. 10th does go through, and a thief build manages to 1v1 people, and it becomes a build/flavor of choice for 1v1/roaming/scouting, people will complain once more, calling it OP/broken/abusive.

Elaborate a bit further on wanting a fair fight… or the term fight in general. Most of my friend’s (in real life, yes I have those) understanding of a fight is what you would see on UFC. While I agree that that is fighting, but to a certain extent it’s also not. In UFC they get points for dominating/controlling the ring, points for doing this and that… there’s rules set in place so that not too much harm is done between the two fighters. And they’re view (my friends) is limited to that and just a little beyond that… My concept of fighting can range from anything UFC like and even more restrictive – to – no rules (sand in eyes/kick to crotch), anything goes (use of objects), last person standing/alive is the “winner” (hey, we’re animals after all, look at them). Yes the extreme is that fighting can lead to death. Clearly you can say, and it’s proper to say, wars were “fought” between X and Y. That being said, the same can be applied to fights within a game, or people’s concepts of fighting in games.

Thief can’t and never could do frontline damage tanking.. And to be honest, Thief not being able to do something another class does makes up a lot of the whining I see on these forums. “Thief can’t take frontline damage and still deal out decent damage like a warrior. Thief can’t do as much AoE damage like a Necro. Thief can’t support like a Guardian”.

Let’s be clear here: the Thief is not a Warrior. Thief is not a Necromancer. Thief is not a Guardian. And while we’re at it, it’s not any of the other classes either. That’s not the class design. It’s a thief, rogue, assassin, whatever you want to call it.

I’ve played Warrior since I started this game last year, but I finished my thief a few months ago and have been playing it almost exclusively in WvW when I’m not with my guild on WvW nights when I need to do a different job. I roamed on my Warrior way back when, but since my axe build got nerfed, it hasn’t felt the same since, so I switched to thief roaming once I finished it. It’s startling how much more powerful I feel than on my Warrior.

In massive zergs, the Thief is not a great choice. But was it ever? No. It’s fragile and doesn’t have great AoE. But again, the class design hasn’t changed. If you want sturdiness, AoE, or support, you should’ve picked a different class in the first place.

However, almost no other class augments the power of a small group as much as a good thief does, maybe debatable against Guardian or an aura-share Ele. With the distractions of other players around, a backstab power thief can easily do its job and dance around eliminating targets. A great example of that is what Mugi does in his small groups. By the very nature of stealth, either your opponent ignores your teammates and takes more pressure from them to try and find you, or you pass in and out of sight killing people. That’s incredibly powerful, and even if insta-kill Haste+Mug → CnD → Backstab → Heartseekers has been nerfed, your kill potential may be even higher without you blowing all your cooldowns in one go. You must be patient.

I’m not gonna argue about ease of use. Warrior isn’t a hard class to figure out. I still very much enjoy the “screw your gimmicks, I’ll chop you with my axe” style and I will likely never fully put my Warrior down, but as far as potential scaling with experience goes, a Thief’s so much higher than a Warrior’s.

In WvW group play, small group or peripheral target elimination is the “role” of the thief. In a medium-sized group (~15-20), get around the hammer train, take the ranged damage dealers out of the fight, and survive. I won’t say it’s the easiest job, but it’s very powerful in the right hands. Any larger groups than that and you’re looking at a different class philosophy, and it shouldn’t be something you expected from an assassin archetype.

TL;DR: In a good group, the role of a thief hasn’t changed. People are just looking in the wrong places for inspiration.

deepwinter.9015:

I don’t want six skins of a Fractal shortbow when I want a dagger or a shield.

Lol! I main warrior through fractals and i’ve only ever gotten fractal shortbow skins.

I gotta say, that trailer got me so pumped for GW2. Even though everything shown was already familiar it was so well done. The trailer made it look like it was like a minor teaser for an upcoming expansion or similar.

Thumbs up Anet!

Would be easier to watch a vid of you fighting, but some general things that I can think of…

- Never be in melee range when his longbow fire field is down, switch to range and kite. Unless he’s at 10% health and you think you can finish the fight, it’s not worth taking the damage. If possible fight in open spaces that deny him the chance to area control.

- Stolen skill from warrior is so strong against longbow as it reflects and does direct damage, so you can use it at melee range for burst or while kiting to nullify his range pressure and force him to either stop attacking or switch to melee set.

- Taking 10 in DA would give you access to poison on steal which is really strong against healing signet, this may be worth swapping in and taking out your 10 in Acro. If you’re using steal when it’s off cooldown you can get 33% uptime on poison without even needing to use shortbow, plus extra burst damage/2k heal from mug.

- Using inf of shadow instead of cloaked in shadow would let you chain cloak and dagger more. Don’t be afraid to do this, even if you can’t CnD on the warr, try and keep some kind of mobs/critters nearby for a back up source of stealth. You have condi removal, might stacking and healing in stealth, the longer you spend in stealth the better your burst will be, and the higher your health uptime will be. Sometimes chaining 2-3 CnDs and being patient is better than going for the backstab straight away.

- Learn to animation cancel your Cloak and Dagger attack by putting away your weapon (you can keybind it). This is super key for d/d builds as you get kittened if you miss 2 CnDs in a row and are left with no initiative. CnD has a 1ish second animation so if you see your blinded or the warr is dodging or blocking with sword, save the initiative. Longbow has a very fast ranged blind that is hard to see coming, and you don’t want to waste a CnD when you’re blinded.

- Don’t think of shadow step as just a movement utility, if you get hit by pin down or flurry and you’re at 50% health, just use it for the condi removal. Removing condis quickly stops the warr gaining the health advantage over you.

- Don’t spam heartseeker.

I solo Hybrid as D/D – SB half zerk thief and it is satisfying challenge.