Guild Wars 2

Sword #1 has lots of issues in PvE. Every time I tab to a new target I end up leaping in a random direction once or twice before leaping to a new target. It also prevents circle strafing, which is about 75% as effective as a dodge roll.

The thing that would really fix the sword and make it a great weapon for everybody would be range dependent animations on the auto attack. Just replace the leap animation if you’re already in range to hit. Do that and make dodge stop the auto attack and you have a weapon that functions perfectly with auto attack turned on. I’m not sure what the technical challenge to implementing this would be, but we already have skills with range dependent conditions and damage, so it might be doable.

It should also be noted that we’re getting stun-breakers that can interrupt launches in a coming patch. Hopefully this means that they’ve surpassed whatever technically limitation disallows interrupted actions in mid-air and will consider implementing a mid-leap dodge for sword #1. If no other changes were made to the weapon, could anyone conceive of a reason this would be bad?

Sword #1 doesn’t root you. There is a problem in its design that prevents the use of dodge after the end of at least one of the powers in the chain and before the next.

You can’t dodge during a leap, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the inability to dodge even after completing the leap.

That is what is not functioning properly. It is a problem and has always been a problem. The fact that there are other powers that are potentially able to be used to augment the use of a dodge does not detract from the simple fact that they should not be required at that point because dodge should function properly.

Tricare.2946:

The auto attack works as intended, even a 2 year old can use it. You do understand what auto attack is right? It’s for players that don’t want to learn when to use their skills and go on auto pilot. You can put any skill you want on auto cast, not very wise, but you can. This is why so many people cried about confusion being op, they were using auto attack and kill themselves.

The sword on ranger is awesome, just take it off auto attack. Learn to use it when needed. (yes a l2p if you will) Only use the sword when you need to stick to your opponent, the sword for ranger is prob the best weapon in game to do this. No one gets away from me if i don’t want them to. (ok, some get away)

Edit: not sure why you guys are even talking about auto attack, it has nothing to do with the sword #1 being used. Auto attack is something that’s not even needed in the game, that’s just a quality of life TOOL for you to use.

Get over yourself, every other class uses auto attack for every other of their weapon #1 attacks, there is no reason not to and it doesn’t make you “leet” if you opt out of auto attack. What it does do is drop your dps unless you decide to pretend that a macro mashing 1 for you isn’t exactly the same thing as auto attack.

Oh and people cried about confusion because lag in wvw can get so unbearable that the meta was to get people to kill themselves with confusion because no skill besides auto attack would function. People also spammed the kitten out of their #1 like mad because this was back in the days of WvW culling when the enemy right next to you might be completely invisible. It’s a pain in the kitten when the only action you can take deals 600-800+ damage to you per sword swing and you can’t even strip it off because your utilities won’t activate.

Never mind the fact that a set it and forget it condition that punishes you for attacking is simply degenerate game play and disproportionally affects classes with more channeled attacks than others.

It doesn’t root you, but it does remove your freedom of movement.

Using a sword:

• You cannot circle strafe
• Attacking without a target will cause you to leap across the battlefield and off cliffs
• You cannot dodge roll without jumping through a bunch of hoops

The sword kick/leap is an antiquated mechanic from the early betas where the kick knocked enemies back. Eliminate the kick, tighten up the leap, and allow dodge rolling to take priority over any attack in the chain.

Just allow us to brake the leap when we have the need – dodging, stomping, etc.
The same would be nice for pet f2 abilities, just override everything the pet does and give it priority.

spoj.9672:

Ranger and fiery rush are an op combo.

Legendary and ascended currently require a great deal of gold to complete. Combine this with an inverted risk versus reward structure and you have Legendary weapons becoming a “Gold Grubber Badge”, not a sign of skilled dedicated player; eg. here are how I’d rate gold-earning in GW2:

TP (60g+) > Zerg Farm (Champs) (10g+) > Dungeons (5g+) > FotM (2-3g)

The gold numbers are what have done myself on a typical day doing mostly that activity — perhaps 4H of play.

Here’s the effort scale, including recruiting effort if a group is required.

FotM (no pugs allowed) > Dungeons (pug ok) > Farm (solo) > TP (solo)

IMHO, I see this as the biggest PVE problem for GW2. It’s not just a current problem, too. This inverted reward scale has been in place since the creation of the game and continues to be supported and refined by each subsequent patch in GW2.

This feeds an impression I’ve come to embrace more and more: a legendary weapon on a pug is scary. It indicates a player that is unlikely to have any skill playing in a group. It’s not a definite mark of badness, though. I’d say it’s about 70/30. Most of them are horrible, but the ones that aren’t horrible are usually pretty good. That’s why it’s scary. You can’t just kick on seeing a legendary; it might be one of the good ones you’ll want to add to your list, but it’s probably not. ><

Back in november they had still had plans to slowly roll out more event chains and content across the existing outdoor world. Those plans were canceled with the onset of the circus rotation (I mean, living story). So dont expect Anet to go back to improving the existing outdoor content at an acceptable pace until the living story concept is changed in some way.

Shemsu.8721:

Zanryu.3417:

Shemsu.8721:

Zanryu.3417:

It does my heart good to see a stealth class get a major nerf to that mechanic. For those of you complaining about a useless trait line… you do realize every class tends to have a PvE and a PvP build right? There are traits on classes that are useful for PvP or PvE, but usually not both as they don’t offer what you’d need in such a situation depending on your build or what your’e going for. Surely the other 4 trait lines of a Thief could be used for PvP and the stealth line could be used in a PvE build?

jajajaja?

You should learn more about classes before posting. at most a thief will run 10 SA in pve, only for reduced init on stealth to maintain long term backstab rotations. otherwise no thief with half a brain would run SA in PVE, its a complete DPS waste and all it serves is to draw more agro to your thief. So SA is already useless in PvE, so lets make it useless in pvp also? good idea right jajajaja?

Huehuehue that’s not completely useless ehuaehuaehua.

Being able to stealth for over half a fight is complete garbage of a mechanic and anyone with half a brain would realize that. Thieves already have excellent dodge and access to blinds, oh and let’s not forget the teleports. The amount of stealth they have to go with that is absolute overkill. Some kind of nerf to it is more than welcome in my opinion, please accept my sincerest apologies that you can no longer spend most of your time in stealth.

Pfftbahhaahahahaha sorry, I couldn’t say that with a straight face. Ah. A thread of kitten thieves sure does brighten one’s day.

Ohh yeah I forgot about the infamous 30/30/30/30/30 thief build, with double trait selections, max dps with d/d, perma stealth with d/p, infinite teleports with sb, max evades and boonsteal with s/d (did i mention thief has at least 4 weapons swaps too). You certainly know how the game works

And for the record I dont run a stealth build on my thief, I find stealth more useful on my engi and mesmer

Someone seems upset.

Zanryu.3417:

It does my heart good to see a stealth class get a major nerf to that mechanic. For those of you complaining about a useless trait line… you do realize every class tends to have a PvE and a PvP build right? There are traits on classes that are useful for PvP or PvE, but usually not both as they don’t offer what you’d need in such a situation depending on your build or what your’e going for. Surely the other 4 trait lines of a Thief could be used for PvP and the stealth line could be used in a PvE build?

jajajaja?

I am a thief, and I consider the upcoming patch to be a buff. My fellow thieves shouldn’t rely so much on stealth.

I’m excited that GW2 is focusing more on hard counters. That’s one of the reasons GW1 builds were so interesting and thought out. Now if they start to add more skills to the game and allow changing traits on the fly I will really be happy.

Fortus.6175:

SteepledHat.1345:

Tell that to all the guards that shrug off a group of four and keep running….

Soldier runes shout guard in WvW traited for cleanse. Try it.

and hit for…..wait for it; 10 damage! can follow up on people…..wait for it…..nope, oneone.

basically a meatshield that you can….wait for it….Ignore! yay!

This. I thought I said something similar in my post, but I guess not. Guards can spec to become very good meatshields, but these builds are viable for killing nothing. My guard is hybrid specced (group/zerg support) and in WvW I can’t chase or kill anything unless they stand there like a tree or I join the zerg on a single-target.

Going back to the original purpose of the thread: thieves can build too well to be “burst and escape” without having to worry about zergs. They have this build and they have very little in the way of diminishing returns with the build. Sure they can’t last in a long-term fight, but most of the time they make the fight short-term and it isn’t as though their CD’s are 1 minute+ [like that of guards or other classes]. I’m sure the short CD’s have something to do with initiative costs, but to be quite honest I don’t think initiative is as much a barrier as Anet wanted it to be given the huge damage capabilities of a thief.

Shemsu.8721:

Actually I find the opposite to be true. When i’m playing my thief I have 0 room for error, one mis-timed dodge and i’m done (even in soldiers gear in wvw) you have to play perfect to succeed. However when i play my warrior or guardian its an entirely different story, I usually watch tv while playing those two toons, because I dont need to pay attention, just hit 1-10 keys randomly and pick up loot bags, nothing is more forgiving than having access to ACTUAL INVULNERABILITY! not to mention highest armor, some of the highest healing, aegis, protection, massive aoe cc, highest damage specs is there anything that guardian and warrior dont have?

What? Guardians can go Healway build that has nice retaliation, but this is negated by backstabbing thieves and generally guards in this build have to run. AH build is the same. Most if not all guard builds are absolutely no threat to a thief because a thief can quite easily run if they are in trouble given that guards have no reliable source of cripple, pulls, etc.

Warriors are not guardians so please don’t clump them together.

Shemsu.8721:

Actually I find the opposite to be true. When i’m playing my thief I have 0 room for error, one mis-timed dodge and i’m done (even in soldiers gear in wvw) you have to play perfect to succeed. Guardian; ACTUAL INVULNERABILITY! not to mention highest armor, some of the highest healing, aegis, protection, massive aoe cc, highest damage specs is there anything that guardian and warrior dont have?

Im sorry but you are wrong, if you are dying in WvW more often as a thief than as a guardian you are doing Oh so very wrong!.

Guardians have no disengages and the only invulnerability they have at command cannot be used while CC’d and has a veeeeery long CD, longer than any stealth skill of thieves. No amount of aegis or protection will save you from a focused fire of a zergs, once you commit to a fight as a guardian, thats it, you either win or die. But as a thief you have the short bow and several stun breakers on top of perma stealth to keep you alive, unless you are going head first into the fight in which case thats just unskilled playing of the class.

My guess? Lets hope you were lying because otherwise you will appear as not only a liar, but a very unskilled player.

Not a bug — it’s a laggapult!

Kaz.9376:

I actually tried this awhile back. I just shelved the Warrior and made the Thief my main lol.

Shelve classes that can’t face roll escape zergs and kill people gg bet you can’t touch kitten in pve get good nub at least my warrior can be used everywhere l2p from thief means they have no skill they just panic button if they get hit and run like a little kitten I face roll troll people on my thief with the simple avoidance of people 1 v 1 I can kill but lately it’s always 1 v 3-8 and well when u get stunned and immobilized for 8 seconds stealth only does so much when they spam aoe kd cripple and stun when u need to be able to use ur next stealth

I can only feel pity for them, not because of the recent changes to the class mechanics, but rather the concept at which they were first created. At first I used to hate them, then I started playing the class to learn it and realized that while OP, they are a victim of their own strenghts.

A class created to be evasive, hard to pin down, but that offered some good counter mechanics and trade offs that could be fun for the opponent to beat. They are actually suffering from a subset of skills (which sadly attracts very unskilled set of players for the stupidly low skill ceiling) and make them take the easy and unfun way out by abusing two mechanics that are pulling the thief down; Stealth and Backstab.

I have seen well played thieves that dont rely on neither of these mechanics to be effective or annoying. They use teleports, poison, calculated skills, skillful use of teleports, tactical stealths. This thieves are fun to play agaisnt, they have skills which are difficult and slightly frustrating to fight agaisnt, but beating them feel rewarding because you have to outplay them, they have to make decisions, you are constantly playing whack-a-mole but you can kind of expect where it will pop, with the twist that the mole can fight back.

The problem arises when the thief has D/D and can burst you for 8-10k hp without absolutely no counter. Aegis wont block the damage nor reveal them, blocks wont work either. Basically backstab is a guaranteed 10k burst that if you are an ele (12k hp) or a guardian (12k hp too) you will most likely die to it if you arent at full health, or the HS following the BS will kill you for sure. There is absolutely no counterplay to that, not even dodges can save you because you cant dodge what you cant see.

Thats what needs to go away, no class should have a 10k nuke without any counterplay. The other issue is permastealth and how “newbs” rely too much on it to survive. Every now and then you see these “new players with low skill” threads popping up everytime their “sacred” completely balanced and full of fun counterplay mechanics is touched. We had them first when revealed was applied. Was the class uesless? no. Then when the duratio was increase? were thieves useless? No, once again. Now the rangers pet apply them. Will it be useless? I bet no, because unlike most of the population, not everyone plays ranger, in fact I dont play ranger, and if I were to play ranger I wouldnt go for beastmaster.

Point is, for most people the problem of lowly skilled thieves who rely too much on the annoying stealth mechanic and OP uncounterable backstab the QQ will never stop.

Once we rework backstab to have a maximun %hp cap and have a long internal CD, and stealth to be a skill of tactical use rather than just spam it for everything, then we will have a more balanced class. The class should be about timed dodges, timed teleports, timed blinds, timed skills, timed poisons, not spam 1222161228112, heck most people dont even get past the first set of 2s.

Talonblaze.3175:

The key farming was the main reason for the drop rates of the chests to get nerfed.
I haven’t gotten a Box o Fun out of a chest yet, but its possible. There’s alot of useless junk in them though. (I’m looking at you Bag of Coins)

There’s still good stuff in them, but its a gamble. Always be aware of that.

lol, I got a heavy bag of coins with 8c in it once. I guess BLTC has a different definition of heavy than I do.

Not using autoattack didn’t do anything to help me.

Chopps.5047:

It’s a case of L2P and no tutorial mode by anet.

L2P is a situation like don’t stand in the fire.

Turn off auto attack on this single weapon in all of the weapons in the game in order to even be functional is not L2P. It’s getting around a broken design. Work arounds aren’t learning to play, they’re learning to cope with something that doesn’t work right.

If there was even one other weapon in the game that simply was no usable if left on auto I could almost accept this. But there isn’t. I know, I’ve used all of them. The sword is broken, and you can go on and on about it all you want but you’re not making it less broken.

Turning off auto to gain improved functionality is fine. Being required to do so in order to have ANY functionality is not.

If only the Sword auto wasn’t such a PITA to use i’m confident the “Decent Ranger” population would skyrocket.

Brother Grimm.5176:

Eclipsiste.3251:

Soft wood is not easy to farm…

Obvious “that’s what she said….”, jokes aside, taking more logs per plank does NOT make it harder to farm….just longer. In fact, it is distributed across more zones than any other basic material (except maybe iron ore). The higher availability is exactly why they changed it from 3 logs to 4 logs per plank quite a while ago.

I fail to see how a LVL 80 in a lower end zone causes anyone a problem. Now if they are trying to “champ train” and are yelling at new players to not kill the Champs they are trying to farm, then that’s different. I go to starter zones with my LVL 80 all the time for various reasons and try to go out of my way to be helpful to lower level players.

Wait…no she didn’t say that about me….

You lack a point.

With ascended recipes, soft wood planks should seriously put be back in line with 3 logs for a plank. Please correct this!

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this yet, but I found I ran out of soft wood logs when refining into planks quicker than any other wood type, and the reason why is it takes 4 logs to refine rather than 3 like for every other wood type.

Is there a reason behind this? This wood is no easier or harder to get than any other, but I had noticed even before the patch that soft wood planks cost a bit more than even seasoned or hard wood, which are 1-2 tiers above it. I see no reason why soft wood planks should need 4 logs rather than the normal 3 for refinement like every other wood has.

Oh look, someone who has enough money to be able to buy precursors being able to throw enough money in the rng kitten hole to get more precursors.

Rich get richer, poor get poorer.

Oxxy.7068:

Upper left. Take a look at his title. He also had the pony shooter as offhand if i’m not mistaken.

Is it bad that I know the warrior you’re running with who has their commander tag up to make himself a special snowflake is in celestial gear?

JonathanSharp.7094:

Ranger
Sick ‘Em will now apply ‘Revealed” to enemies they target. We want to introduce some counter play to Stealth (players have asked for that for a while), so we thought a pet “catching your scent” might be a cool way to insinuate some anti-stealth into the game.

Excellent! Finally some counterplay to Stealth.

More please!

Thing thing about Aragorn is he realizes when to weapon swap to a higher-DPS option