Guild Wars 2

In response to the thread complaining about TC’s control of 70-90% of the map last night:

TC near-sweep of EB and the borderlands peaked around 1-2 am EST. The map did not look like that by 3 am. By North American standard, 2 am Eastern isn’t actually “nightcapping.” That’s not even midnight on the west coast.

FXLEACH.9436:

FA loses entire borderland

There was more after that:
TC and CD press FA on all four maps. Their income drops to 30-50, then hits 0.
TC’s EB group starts taking other stuff, mostly the hard-to-reach things that people want for map completion. At one point, TC holds all three keeps in EB.
Then things more or less go back to normal (see the most recent map update).

I’ve attached screenshots from 1 am and 2 am EST.

FascistMuffin.2956:

Why does it matter if the SS is inside Wvw or not?

I think they’re saying that you’re online, and you obviously care about WvW, yet you’re not in WvW doing something about it.

~

Also, tonight is special. Tonight a bunch of TC guilds all made a dedicated push to get FA down to 0 points. It’s not how TC usually works.

Maugetarr.6823:

one of the least used builds

S/D is pretty rare in WvW (where it gets a bit more power, thanks to C&D’s bigger damage and Tactical Strike lasting two seconds instead of 1.5 — but where thieves also have to spec for bigger fights unless they just want to hang out being semi-useless in the boonies).

I play S/D in WvW. I’ve seen a few others running around with S/D, including one of our commanders. I don’t think I’ve ever actually fought another S/D thief, though.

XII.9401:

Check it out: 21715 damage on a 1681 toughness/2032 hp from a thief in 2 seconds.

Here’s your combat log:
Infiltrator’s Strike 1.5k.
Steal (Mug) 3k — this is the only insta-cast part of this whole log; everything else is a regular attack with an animation.
C&D 4k.
Tactical Strike 2k.
Auto-attack 2.5k.
Dancing Dagger 1.5k.
C&D 4.5k.
(You hit him for 1k.)
Auto-attack 2.5k.

The thief’s entire spike was under 10k. You died because he followed it up with a mixture of control and pressure, and used what was likely the last of his initiative on a second C&D as a damage-dump.

I dare say that this is what a combat log should look like.

Thadren Calder.1397:

Do I really need to give other examples of thief skills that can do over 30k damage in a few seconds? Really? Lets see…. Unload and cluster bomb comes to mind.

30k with Clusterbomb in “a few seconds”?

By a “a few seconds” do you actually mean 7-10 attacks? (If so, that’s a long time.)

Or does “30k damage” actually mean “6k spread around to a bunch of different targets”? (If so, that’s not at all the same as “30k damage.”)

tagnut.8621:

Its funny. Any other class can spec any other way and have a reasonable chance of beating any other class – but for some strange reason every other class has to spec a specific way to beat a thief.

In my experience, that’s not true. The “Don’t play glass cannon!” echo chamber is pretty severe on the forums, but really what we’ve got is that only good builds can reliably challenge other good builds. In my experience, “glass cannon” warriors who know what they’re doing can hold their own against thieves just as easily as “tanky” ones can. Likewise, the best elementalist, mesmer, or guardian build for fighting thieves seems to be… just the ones that are all-around strongest anyway.

Probably Basilisk Venom and Sigil of Air?

ShadowSoljer.6524:

You can now run around in WvW at whatever level you are with no gear and still win every fight you come across.

… You don’t seem to understand where a thief’s damage actually comes from.
:/

There’s already a TC community website focused on WvW here: http://tcgw2.com/forums/

I haven’t really checked it out much. But they do seem to have a shared VOIP and some other stuff.

XII.9401:

A. You can see glass cannons coming and thus respond accordingly. I can’t see a thief coming and I don’t think its fair playing whack the invisible mole to try to counter one that is stealthing your way.

You can see the thief coming. Our longest-lasting stealth is about 12 seconds, and it comes with a big animated house telling you “Hey, stealth happened here!” Everything else tops out at 4 seconds. All the cooldown-based skills have timers of 30 seconds or more. The only weapon skill that grants stealth requires hitting your target in melee.

The Mug/C&D/Backstab spike doesn’t start with the thief in stealth. Unless your opponent blew Shadow Refuge just to stalk you for a few seconds and is timing his attack super-duper carefully to hit you just at the right time. Which is wasteful and something I have never seen that done in WvW (or SPvP, for that matter, but I don’t do that much SPvP). The reason stealth is in there (C&D) is because it sets up Backstab. The main surprise-factor of that spike comes from Steal’s 900-range shadowstep, not stealth; it’s a lot like Assassin spikes in GW1.

Honestly, the top of my thief wishlist is now this:

A series of official videos, from Anet, explaining some of the nuances of PvP from the different class’ perspective. Maybe take some of the top tournament games and add some commentary and slo-mo replays.

There’s always room for balance changes in a complicated game like this. But I don’t think the community’s feedback is going to be very truly useful — besides a few obvious things like “Fix culling!” — without a wider understanding of what “ideal” play looks like. For every class.

You don’t see the damage numbers pop up, but you still deal damage.

You can’t target ranged attacks at them in stealth (and untargeted ranged attacks in this game only go, like, 2 feet before they fall down, for some reason), but melee swings and area attacks hit just fine. Also their condition damage keeps ticking normally.

If you see a thief who’s low on health hit Shadow Refuge, for example, a Whirlwind Attack through it can often kill him. (You’ll still have to wait ~10 seconds for him to appear on the ground. Or run around until you see “finish him” and then start swinging at the air.)

Any player on an enemy team.

The kills work like PvE kill credit — which is to say, you only need to contribute a bit to get the point, not solo the player or anything.

Let’s talk about “e-sports”…

Did you ever play GW1? If your monks took two seconds to respond to a spike by the enemy team, you’d be dead every time. Quick reflexes, situational awareness, and anticipation are all a central part of most competitive video games.

I don’t really care for Backstab spikes. I don’t think it’s, like, necessary for thieves. But you’re complaining about 100-to-0-in-two-seconds-flat builds when you’re playing a warrior designed to do just that and only that. Your build does telegraph its attack much more, but you also:

1. Do more damage total.
2. Have much more hp even with your “glass cannon” getup.
3. Get 5 seconds of invulnerability.

Nemo.6295:

Do warriors really “need” the rifle? I mean they are a melee class, right? Built with survivability and mobility, why did they need a weapon that’s good enough to rival ranger damage? Obviously AN thought they did and everyone agrees. How does that change when it comes to the thief?

We already have a weapon that rivals the ranger’s damage: shortbow. In WvW, it’s one of the best ranged weapons for spreading a lot of pain around quickly.

Throw Gunk looks like crap. Then you realize it’s a combo field.

For SPvP, I like 10/30/30/0/0. You get good healing whenever you go into stealth. Putting 10 in Power for Mug gives you some burst capability.

For WvW, I use 0/30/15/25/0. In WvW you’ll tend to stay in Shortbow more, using S/D as a finisher. Acrobatics gives you a lot of dodging and initiative gain, which I think is more valuable than constant healing in most WvW fights.

I like Steal. I really, really do.

I don’t really see “Each point in Trickery increases the recharge rate of stealing by 1%” as a selling point for Steal, though. It’s more like a black mark against Trickery.

Kurow.6973:

People are constantly dying left and right in PvP because a silly thief keeps shadowstepping to their face every 45s…what an OP skill.

Who said it was “OP”? What ever happened to reading “This skill as useful” as “This skill is useful”?

Ride the Lightning is a nice skill. It certainly has a better recharge than Steal. Does Ride the Lightning give you access to on-demand stealth? How ’bout a four-second daze? Can you drink Ride the Lightning to give yourself all the boons? Can you Ride the Lightning in the middle of another skill activation?

And Steal is really, really not the class’ core shtick. That’s initiative, sneak attacks, lots of stealth, and our general movement abilities. Steal is just something that’s there to fill out the F1 slot. But you do get a valuable ability, though it is one that’s much better for PvP. Comparing Steal to virtues or toolbelt or attunements is about as useful as comparing a warrior’s hp to an elementalists: yes, one mechanic is individually more than the other, but how does this affect the classes overall?

Kurow.6973:

It should have been a utility skill, not a class specialty.

It requires way too much traiting to be considered “good”…especially from a class specialty perspective.

The value comes from getting a utility skill’s worth of power without having to use a utility slot for it.

Giving every thief access to shadowsteps is a big deal. It’s pure gold in all forms of PvP. In PvE you’re burdened by a bunch of bad stolen skills, but it’s still a freebie, and who hates freebies, srsly?

TC held FA Keep in Eternal Battlegrounds for more than two hours tonight. Then YB took it away from us. Good job, you guys! Totally surprised us when the keep flipped. Dare you to hold on to it all the way until the reset.

Hermes.7014:

There are many PvE situations in which Thieves are very limited because of their short range.

In PvE? Where is it that 1200 is absolutely needed and 900 with occasional 1200-range Clusterbombs just won’t suffice?

Aside from dragon boss fights, 900 vs 1200 range has made absolutely no difference in everything I’ve done so far (75% map completion, including all the hard zones; at least half of the dungeons; Lost Shores and FOTM).

I can’t complain about the shortbow. It does great work. I don’t know what you guys are doing in WvW, but I absolutely drool over offensive sieges, because I can just maneuver around a little near the wall and collect bag after bag after bag. It’s a really good, really flexible weapon.

Daecollo.9578:

For PvE, Thief is ranked Lowest Class, even under Ranger.

Man, what?

I hate to beat the “l2p” drum, but anyone who says this is mistaken. Thieves can take on really big numbers and come out unscathed.

AcidicVision.5498:

Now, I would like you to also hit pistol whip and try to dodge. You can’t. You are rooted. The only way to break it is by burning initiative or a cool-down to cancel in to another skill.

Try taking a step first. Then you can dodge normally. Same way as you’d break out of ressing someone. It’s a bit annoying to do but doesn’t require using any resources.

You say “add synergy.”

I say “arbitrarily force every crit-based build into one trait allocation.”

cesmode.4257:

1.Adjust the time you are in stealth with the downed state #3. It is something like, one second. Completely useless in any situation, PVE or PVP.

I thought so, too, but then I realized you can use it to disrupt stomps. Just gotta start it when their wind-up starts.

It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing.

The underwater version is pretty pointless. You can’t be stomped underwater anyway, so what does it actually do?

Dispari.3980:

For PvE only, my feedback would be that my thief is the least durable of all the characters I have. I have one of every class. I don’t have much ability to deal with groups or hard-hitting single targets. Which basically just means dealing with small groups of regular enemies.

Since thief has so few support abilities, my options for not dying pretty much just involve stealthing and running away, or spamming dodge skills. I don’t feel that the damage they do offsets their squishyness. Pretty much the safest and most viable build I found was to just go D/D and spam Death Blossom and do nothing else. It’s boring, and even then not as safe as basically any of my other characters.

No opinion on PvP..

Black Powder and Dagger Storm allow me to take on much larger numbers than I ever could on my warrior.

Only champions and certain weird dungeon mobs (like the grenade-spammers in CoE story mode) really give me pause.

How the heck are y’all getting knocked down constantly, anyway?
I don’t think I’ve ever had a Risen pull me more than once during a fight, at the beginning.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a big group of Risen pull me more than once every 10 seconds.

It’s bugged according to the wiki.

This is how blind worked in GW1, more or less (90% miss chance). GW1 had way, way, waaaaay more spammable condition-removal, though. So, I’m not really a fan of this proposed change. Blind is still plenty powerful if you’re actually applying it often — and thieves are pretty good at spamming it, at times — or timing it well, like SoSing in response to that big telegraphed attack.

Unrelated to that criticism, though:
It seems to me like instead of coming up with special rules for stacking with capped duration, you should just recommend changing “stacks durations” to “stacks intensity”: each attack pops 1 stack of blind, but you can multi-stack blindness.

Doggie.3184:

Cursed Shores you can’t move an inch without “Everyone! Come” horde of zombies descends upon you.

I have trouble aggroing more than two guys at a time without running around like a madman.

I would just run around like a madman more, but it looks really stupid, and also the potshots that Risen get in while I do that (mostly that chomp-chomp-chomp thing) do add up quickly, so it’s more expedient to kill a couple at a time than to seek out a big battle.

Steal is excellent in PvP. The shadowstep is invaluable. The stolen things are awesome and nearly always relevant.

In PvE, it really varies. A quarter of the time, you get something cool, like the club-smash attack from an Ettin. The rest of the time, it’s kinda dull — usually just something that’s too much like a regular attack. I think the stolen abilities need to be skewed more towards the cool special stuff like in PvP.

I don’t see a reason to rework it into a whole complex fancy thing, though. The thief’s signature abilities are stealth, initiative, and shadowsteps. F1 Steal is just gravy.

LegoTechnic.5910:

Most complaints for being downed come from engineers and guardians because, to be frank, they’re absolutely terrible when down.

Although in this case, the guardian knockback bubble is better against stealth-stomping thieves than most other abilities, since you don’t have to target it. I’ve seen too many guardians just pop it as soon as a guy comes towards them instead of waiting until he’s 3/4 of the way through the stomp, though.

Now, a thief can stomp guardians on the first go by popping Signet of Shadows when they go for their bubble, but:
1. That is actually a utility skill, with a cooldown and stuff.
2. Timing!
So that seems pretty fair to me.

Hika.1264:

• The Thief needs effective condition removal abilities for non-stealth builds

Infiltrator’s Strike. Signet of Agility. Shadowstep. 2/3 of your heals. You’re really not lacking in options, in my view.

Hika.1264:

Signet of Malice
Issue: Without using a stealth build the Thief lacks effective condition removal. Click-activating this ability has little to no reward worth the risk of loosing life-taps.
Suggestion: When Signet of Malice is click-activated, poison + bleeding conditions are removed and you deal moderate damage to a selected opponent

This is exactly like the Warrior’s Healing Signet. Both aren’t usually worth popping except in emergencies… until you pile on the traits. With traits in two very good lines, SoM is 2 initiative and a decent-duration vigor every 12 seconds.

Hika.1264:

Withdraw
Issue: The Thief lacks effective condition removal. This heal is very engaging to use but quite situational.
Suggestion: Activating this “roll & evade” ability should additionaly remove the burning condition, now break stun and have a slightly increased heal amount

Now you’re just asking for easy mode. Withdraw is excellent as-is.

The thief currently has three good healing skills that excel in different situations. Two of them have amazingly short cooldowns. Two of them have excellent secondary characteristics that make them more like a fourth utility skill than just a heal.

Rukia.4802:

Well I wasn’t expecting much just hoping that the thief thread they brought up would be put to use and maybe our suggestions would get through to them.

I think that’s an unreasonable expectation.

1. It takes time for any suggested balance changes to be implemented and playtested.
2. A lot of the suggestions in that thread are mutually contradictory.
3. I think it’s ill-advised to make big balance changes before fixing culling.

Bug-fixing known issues is another matter, but those issues have been documented and tracked since, like, day one. If they were easy to fix and a priority, they’d have been fixed by now. I don’t think the thread has altered their visibility.

Siad.3608:

Thief and Ranger. Thief has no stability and I’m not running with quickness atm. Usually on my thief I just attack someone until they die because of the burst and it just seems to go faster at times.

Thieves are the masters of finishers.

You can use stealth to negate most class’ downed defenses. With the 15-point Shadow Arts trait, your C&D stealth lasts long enough for a full stomp.

You also have Signet of Shadows, which is an instant-cast blind you can activate while channeling the finisher. You can use this to stop stuff like the guardian bubble (the untargeted area-effect knockdown they have).

Against thieves, you can use an instant-cast shadowstep (Steal, Infiltrator’s Signet, Shadowstep if you are quick at aiming the circle) to shadowstep to them when they shadowstep away. It’s really satisfying when you do this, too! It works against mesmers, too, but only if they time their stealth-teleport poorly or you trick them.

Here’s a video that might help.

Crafting in this game is primarily a way to convert gold (crafting materials are worth money) into XP, not into more gold.

Stiv.1820:

The mechanic is horrible of WvW and just fine in PvE and even sPvP.

WvW is full of situations where you can be brought down super-fast: by focused fire, by bursty builds, by one cannonball or ballista bolt or Kill Shot you didn’t see coming in the middle of a fireworks show of fire storms, arrow barrages, wells, and mesmer bubbles. Seems like the downed mechanic is even more important here than in SPvP.

Bunzy.8674:

If you don’t fix this issue soon you will see lots of people leaving the game.

No, they won’t.

The downed-state mechanics have barely changed since day one. You think people are going to suddenly freak out about them now, three months after launch, en masse?

:/

naphack.9346:

• Moving through a zerg with Dagger Storm is fun until that necro turns your stability to fear or that big guardian with the hammer just ignores your elite and whacks you away.

OH NOES!

Then you Shadowstep away.

BakedGoodz.4082:

Also I wanted to add an idea taken from a previous game I played that should help increase activity in wvw seeing as many people have lost interest in it from lack of goal.

I think I’d like to see a weekly reward based on your personal actions and the server’s total score. That way your server’s points count for something tangible other than just some better crafting XP on Thursday nights.

Server-points-based rewards do seem to encourage actually defending stuff.

gabal.4520:

Well, maybe if they offered a chest for capturing a tower…

The thing is, you don’t want the payout from constant flipping to be better than the payout for actually defending things.

If every keep flip gives you great stuff, the optimal way to play is to just have three zergs chasing each other in a circle around the map, capping poorly-defended un-upgraded keeps and towers.

The thief has a few great things going for it:

• You can spam Clusterbomb, which is a big area attack capable of 5k crits. It’s powerful area denial.
• Clusterbomb is also a blast finisher. It arcs over wall nicely when you’re on the defense. If people move out of your target zone, you can pop it into sub-munitions that fly everywhere.
• Moving through a zerg with Dagger Storm is fun.
• “Glass cannon” gear you’d want for big ranged blasts works well with the thief’s melee strategy.
• The class has good movement abilities to get you where you want to be.
• Thieves are the masters of finishing downed opponents. Stomping is fun.
• The downed-state teleport is handy for getting you back behind your own lines.

However,

• Clusterbomb has a very slow flight time due to its high arc.
• Other than Clusterbomb, your ranged attacks are 900 range. You kinda have to run into harms way if you want to start spamming your bouncy arrows.

There are other options… seems like engineer, ele, warrior, maybe wells necro might be enjoyable for you as well. I don’t have personal experience with these, though.

Theory:
Scholar is good when you can meet the bonus damage requirement. Which means basically never getting hit. This makes it a good fit for BS burst builds in SPvP.

In WvW, however, you tend to get hit with incidental damage a lot. Running through an area-attack, getting shot by an NPC archer, all kinds of stuff.

If you only care about burst, Scholar might still work for you. Maybe if you have a ton of healing (one of those 30-points-in-Shadow-Arts constant-regen builds). Otherwise, Ruby Orbs or Runes of Divinity are going to give you more consistent benefits.

Personal anecdote:
I use Ruby Orbs for a rather glassy 0/30/15/25/0 S/D + SB build. 25 in Acrobatics is for the “+10% while endurance isn’t full,” which comes up a lot more often than “+10% while health is above 90%.” (I sacrifice quite a bunch of that, though, because there are some great major traits I could have for another 5 points in Shadow Arts. But that’s not really relevant to the runes.)

Mandrew.2853:

I really love how the thief works, but the biggest issue i have is it is practically impossible to go melee to heavy armored classes. They can just spam aoe sword swings, it doesn’t matter if you stealth 6 times in the duel, guardians and warriors can just run around swinging their sword without a care because they know you aren’t a threat at all to them.

This hasn’t been my experience (WvW, mainly). Getting caught by one of their stronger attacks sucks for the thief, but they’re not too bad to control with Sword/Dagger. Harder than rangers, engies, necros, but rather easy compared to fighting mesmers, thieves, or a good D/D ele.

In one-on-one-ish circumstances, I soften them up a little from range, because I personally am pretty bad at melee. This also lets me get a feel for how “tanky” they actually are.

Might this just be the tradeoff between S/D and D/D? Seems like D/D can spike way faster than I can but has a harder time grinding down people it can’t spike.

krixis.9538:

black powder is far to expensive for a utility maybe bring it down to 3 int in PVE only.

You’re crazy. Black Powder wins most of PvE. Just, like, by itself. And it can be kept up continuously as-is.

kenshinakh.3672:

guardians have pretty big base health to start with

Guardians have “low” base health, same as a thief.

When I take a swing at you, I’m stealthed until my attack actually hits. In fact, if I miss, you never see me at all. So why insist that beginning a stomp should expose you?

If there’s anything that’s a bit off about stealth and stomping, it’s that stealthing the downed guy blocks stomp. This is rather inconsistent with the way attacks that would hit a stealthed guy anyway still correctly connect and do damage. (Fixing this would require changing thief downed skill 3 to actually do something, though.)

I keep telling you guys: doesn’t make a difference.

Any competent ally can hit a stealth-stomping thief just as easily as a non-stealthed one. Because he’s still just gonna be standing in one place, right next to you.

If you don’t have an ally nearby and aren’t an ele or mesmer, you will be stomped by a thief without stealth on the very first try.

So, this proposed change affects:
1. Crappy thieves who don’t understand downed states and timing.
2. Being downed with a bunch of allies who’d rather hang out at 1200 range than actually move their butts to come to your aid. (I really don’t want to reward this.)

EDITED: Nevermind, turns out you can just blind necros.