Guild Wars 2

TheLastNobody.8319:

How does it feel to beat thieves at their own game now?

Mostly it’s been an education in how awful most people playing thief are. Like, they’ll just mash Heartseeker into your face and cry when evade+interrupt+burst is response kills them.

(The good ones, interestingly, seem to do just fine. Thieves have a lot of stealth but the trick is to manage it well — using positioning to extend the value of stealth, basically — so you’re not burning all your initiative to abuse it. That way you’ve got enough left over to apply lots of blind while bursting.)

Carighan.6758:

Who is Shiro, other than some DWing warrior dude?

Shiro Tagachi is the villain of GW1 Factions, the campaign set in Cantha (a fictional country inspired by East Asian cultures).

He was a bodyguard who betrayed and murdered the Canthan emperor during a ritual ceremony, setting loose the Jade Wind that turned half of Cantha into the Jade Sea and a petrified forest.

In the Factions campaign, he’s been dead for a long time, but he’s become an Envoy — a psychopomp who guides the newly dead into the Mists. Except he doesn’t do that. He binds the dead into constructs called Shiro’ken, while mutating the living into the Afflicted. You have to defeat him to stop the Afflicted and prevent him from just wrecking up the Mists in general.

In addition to normal boss stuff like hitting really hard and having some burn phases that punish not being able to DPS him fast enough, Shiro would shadow-step around and “banish” players into the spirit realm.

The other legends are similarly related to GW1. Jalis and Ventari are friendly NPCs: the last king of the dwarves and a helpful centaur, respectively. Mallyx is an elite dungeon boss from GW1 Nightfall.

Shiro is the most Mists-related of all the legends presented so far, also (since that was his whole deal with being an Envoy and binding the Shiro’ken and stuff). Pretty perfect fit.

StickerHappy.8052:

You are forgetting not every goes shatter

…

There’s nothing special about HM that makes HM + BD builds trouble in a way that DE + BD builds aren’t.

Plus, you’d be opening up HM + DE which is a whole separate kettle of fish.

StickerHappy.8052:

No change? You dont get the damage boost for HM.

DE builds already don’t get the damage boost from HM.

StickerHappy.8052:

OR

Make DE a master and Put Blinding Dissipation as A GM

So BD competes with HM, no more full offensive and full defensive builds at the same time.

What would this change actually accomplish? Build that took BD + DE just take DE + BD instead. Done! The end! No change!

Extreme.8350:

Blinding dissepation is not over the top we need it not to be free kills

Err, nope. Try Evasive Mirror instead and you’ll do fine. About the only times I’ve found Blinding Dissipation to be a must-have game-changer was actually in dueling other blind-spam zerk builds (like D/P and mediguard); in all other circumstances it was very powerful but hardly necessary.

Nothing about BD’s defensive role requires that it be undodgable/unblockable, for one very simple reason: if someone is evading when you’re popping BD, it means they’re not bursting you right then and there in the first place. It’s a very potent trait that’s fairly easy to use; I have no complaints about at least forcing players to time it to coincide with an actual attack.

zapv.8051:

The real problem is that you can instant cast a daze, mirror blade, mind stab, mind wrack and down most people. That’s simply too strong of a burst in comparison to every other class.

It’s a stun, in builds that do this.
If it were actually a daze you could dodge all that other stuff without needing to use stun breaks or other cooldowns.
Or if the stun duration were shorter.

I bring this up because, well, there’s nothing wrong with some kinda-spammable quick-casting short-duration daze. Thief’s pistol offhand has it and it’s useful but not in any way overpowered.

Also, it is probably worth noting that lots of classes have really good burst right now (including some condi builds :O ).

Narrrz.7532:

a system that rewards you for playing other than how you naturally would isn’t really ‘play how you want’.

No, see, here’s the thing. Dailies basically accomplish these three tasks:

• Magnify the reward for doing just a little bit of something. E.g. harvest a handful mats and get a bunch more mats in a bag, or play 2 PvP matches and earn about 5 matches’ worth of reward. This is to help time-strapped players or jack-of-all-trades dabbler “play how they want” and still makes progress in the game at a decent pace.
• Make specific tasks more rewarding to get you out of the rut of just doing the most efficient thing. E.g. you farm CoF every day to make money but, hey, today is a double-Fractal daily so why not change up your routine, or you adore ele in PvP but having an engie daily is a great excuse to challenge yourself a bit. This is still “play how you want” or whatever, it’s just reminding you that other options are out there.
• Incentivize players to do areas they might not do otherwise, so there’s a critical mass of people there to make the zone livelier. This is dangling a carrot in front of some player so that others — the newbie who just got to Herathi Hinterlands for the first time, for instance — have more people to play with sometimes.

Some of the tasks and rewards leave me scratching my head, and I think the individual PvE tasks could use a close look from a designer, but the fundamental idea is both sound and very much in alignment with “play how you want(*).”

(* – It annoys me that this empty motto comes up around here so much. But, enh, that’s a conversation for another day.)

Youkay.5294:

When thieves could do a 100-0 burst from stealth everyone, including mesmers, complained and thieves said it is a L2P issue.

That’s not the actual “hard counter” complaint. The “hard counter” complaint was, more or less, based on the idea that a thief could burst, and fail to kill her target, and disrupting the burst would nearly always cost the mesmer more resources than the thief, leading to a pretty easy win through a second quick burst or just general attrition (those autos hit kitten a squisy). This is distinct from “omg instagib” because, in fact, you often do get a chance to fight back — the claim (back then) was just that it was almost always a losing battle.

N.B. This was the result of both a limited mesmer meta and the prevalence of evade-spam thief builds (“AcroTrickery” was the name, IIRC?).

Tman.6349:

If this trait is such a ‘hard counter’ for you, then that means that you’ve stacked TWO passive defense stats. Sit down and be glad those stats help you SO !much in literally every other encounter.

Well, in SPvP it likely means they’re running Rabid. Since the ultimate two-defense-stat gear (Dire) isn’t available.

0-cast-time skills are still usable.

Try it with a warrior’s “Fear Me!”, a thief’s Blinding Powder, or a ranger’s Signet of Stone (also, of course, all the stun breaks).

IIRC, you can still physically walk through the portals in LA even if you don’t meet the level 31 requirement. Just can’t use the menu.

Note that playing WvW underleveled can be a frustrating-for-you/counterproductive-for-your-team experience.

There are some tweaks I really, really want to see, but, in all honesty, the way people complain about it? It’s pretty obvious that there are a ton of mechanics they previously didn’t need to give a crap about because the builds that ran them just didn’t have the DPS to be particularly threatening (despite going full zerk) even when you played into their hands cluelessly every time. Universal access to IP really changes things.

Achievement points don’t really do anything beyond serving as a very basic shorthand for how much experience you have, and earning you a reward chest once in a blue moon, though?

This thread in a nutshell:
“l2p!”
“no u!”
“no u!”
“no u!”

DieFinn.3594:

Maybe the group who profit from such an option is to small to even bother. Why should I even bother, I have no problem in doing map-exploration and so the challenges.

[…]

And to the rest. Do not bother anymore. Only 24 h and I have enough of the forum for a year. Why should I bother and think about other players or try to make constructiv posts… when they aren´t read by most of the other posters.

Your problem is that you’re starting with a problem you don’t actually have, so it’s just a hypothetical.

Which leads to people asking “Okay, who is this actually a problem for?”

And the answer seems to be… “No one, really.”

DieFinn.3594:

There are people who dislike or hate doing map-exploration. Some off the hardcore-WvW players have charakters with zero worldexploration.

Those hardcore WvWers also level 80, because they know that playing an upleveled rallybot can significantly hurt your team.

(Also, easy solution: do your skill points while sitting in the reset night queue.)

TyPin.9860:

I have the suspicion, that some people are defending Diamond Skin in its current state, because of a general dislike for conditions. Imagine if there was a trait to give immunity to hard CC and physical damage when your health is above 90%. Would that be an okay thing?

Also, currently it is no issue to design a 5man power damage team. Imagine a 5 man condi damage team. It would already be disadvantageous in the current meta, but would be utter useless against one ele with diamond skin.

Imagine a 5-bunker team. Is it a problem that there are totally specs that a 5-bunker team just couldn’t kill?

Imagine a PVT warrior without a source of Poison hitting like a wet noodle and thus being unable to out-DPS a cele ele’s basic rotation no matter how hard he CCs or concentrates his “burst.”

Folks act like “conditions” and “direct damage” are supposed to be two sides of the same coin, but they forget that condition builds aren’t going all-in on damage. They’re typically really tanky and hard to bring down, while still being able to do good damage and even “burst,” to a degree. The price of that is cleansing, which is an all-or-nothing removal mechanic. Diamond Skin is just uber-cleansing that you can’t overload by bringing a second teammate with a trivial understanding of timing.

There’s a pretty good PDF guide floating around that explains how “hammertrain” works. Short, incomplete version:

Warriors and guardians form a front line. You want to be pretty tanky but still deal damage. The proper mix of damage and defense depends on your server’s meta because it’s about how big the fights are and how the commanders like to engage.
That front line generally wants to stay on the pin (commander). Being on the pin is life. Being off the pin is death. Because…
Eles are gonna be putting down water fields for you, usually on the pin (you’ll hear “big water” and “small water” in comms). People will be blasting these with their hammer skills. So the front line is CCing and healing. The idea is to roll over your enemies and chew them up with all the damage you get from cleaving auto-attacks and AoEs.
These days, warriors tend to be on the hook for condi cleansing while guardians provide party-wide stability. Party comps are very important.

Eles and necros form the core of the back line. They tend to be very zerky.
Staff eles provide waters, CC (Static), and AoEs.
Necros provide a ton of ranged DPS, both direct and AoE, and try to rip boons (especially stability) with wells.
The back line generally tries to hang about 600 behind the front line and also move so as not to get killed (getting your back-liners caught by their front line is a great way to lose very quickly). Who you’re targeting as a necro or ele varies.

Thieves, engies, rangers, and mesmers are most often part of a “pick team.” Using pulls and burst to bring down priority targets (examples include killing eles so the opposing team heals less, or trying to gank the enemy commander so the group becomes disorganized).
Mesmers also provide invisibility (Veil) and portals for the zerg.
Thieves can group up with the necros and venom-share to make their wells super-powerful.

Everything I’ve described is power-based because hammertrain groups do a lot of work to mitigate the impact of conditions (Hoelbrak and Melandru runes, condition-reducing food, all those warrior cleanses and stuff). Folks have experimented with condition tricks like Epidemic but running condition damage in a zerg is not “meta,” besides the venom-share thieves (who are mostly there for Immobilize but you might as well get some condi dps out of your venom-sharing, too).

~

For roaming, zerky gear is pretty typical for most professions, including guardians (maybe with a bit of extra sustain from a few bits of PVT or Celestial) is going to get you pretty far. Mediguard is fun and successful in WvW. Though you may need to build a bit differently from SPvP.

If all your gear is zerk everywhere, I recommend just getting some more defensive trinkets to play around with. Swapping trinkets is a lot easier than swapping armor. (You probably have a few lying around in your bank from rewards you’ve gotten, if you didn’t trash them.)

Roaming thieves tend to run zerk D/P or condition-troll builds. Not sure how well the condi builds work since the big June patch.

I think most roaming necros do conditions. It’s a bit tricky because you’re slow. Helps to have allies rather than go totally solo.

Laraley.7695:

Imo a class that has so much access to interrupts shouldn’t be able to remove boons so effectively as mesmer. What actual counterplay is there?

Counterplay is to time your boon application instead of spamming them. Pop stability when you want to land something important. Cover it with other boons, also. Many builds just crap out boons all the time, so often that fat stack of stability is quite hard to strip.

Note also that several elite skills pulse new stacks at regular intervals.

If you make it give Resistance, it needs to be on a much shorter cooldown. Otherwise that’s a severe nerf. (Unless it’s, like, pulsing Resistance? Note sure the change is meaningful enough to be warranted then, though.)

Mostly I think it could use a better graphical representation because a couple of the warrior skills icons just sorta blend together. Not too flashy, though, because too many buff particles make it harder to see animations (and this gets really annoying when people are throwing CC in between their attacks, especially — which is what warriors love to do when they’re going Berserk).

Loxsus.3841:

5s of uptime for our ELITE slot at that.

As far as I’m concerned, elite skills in GW2 are just a way to force everyone to take one kind-of-long-cooldown utility from a particular subset.

In my experience, vanilla Mass Invis is more versatile than Moa or Time Warp and just as potent in a lot of circumstances. Pretty good for a skill with half the cooldown.

I feel like this discussion is way more personal than it needs to be. :/

Tealots.6095:

When will it sink in that trait “levels” are irrelevant. If you pick a trait line, you’re all in.

This bears repeating.

Tealots.6095:

Regarding Mass Invisibility: It actually feels like an “elite” skill when paired with PU. And it feels so even without Master of Manipulation to reduce to cooldown. The frequency it provides with MoM is nice, and maybe makes it easier to exploit.

However, without PU, Mass Invisibility just feels like a 5-second stealth that I need to cast.

The stealth “problem” comes from how frequently we can disappear, coupled with the duration. But I think it’s fine with MI. It’s a true elite reset when traited. Otherwise Time Warp or Signet Moa may be more beneficial (even the signet passive — anyone else excited to couple that with ‘Time Marches On’ come Chronomancers?).

5-second Mass Invis is plenty of time to res someone, reposition your whole team, or pull off a pretty decisive ambush.

It was my hands-down favorite before the PU change and it’s still my hands-down favorite even though I’m not running PU now.

silentnight warrior.2714:

Shattered Concentration: Have a CD of 15 sec.

You’re mad that someone can interrupt you through Rampage, huh?

SlimChance.6593:

I disagree. That will only weaken other lockdown builds that don’t use CS. Before the trait changes, MoD was never a problem. CS is simply too strong for an Adept level trait. It needs to be adjusted.

“Other lockdown builds that don’t use CS?” If you’re running full-on lockdown you need to be taking Power Block and Chaotic Interruption. There’s no reason not to pick up CS while you’re at it.

MoD has always been about interrupting, not about putting a second of daze on someone here or there.

MoD also got significantly improved by the mantra recharge overhaul — it’s the mantra that benefited most since previously the cooldown between charges basically doubled the actual cycle time of the skill. So arguably something’s gotta give, and I think increasing the spacer cooldowns or the recharge time would be worse.

I must admit I kinda like the new “explosive” meta.

Playing zerk, I was getting downed in like 3 hits before anyway, but now there aren’t as many fights that just involve sitting there applying DPS pressure like it’s PvE while some warrior or ele just goes through their heal-and-cleanse rotation while sitting on point.

YuiRS.8129:

Mesmers and eles are bonkers. But to fix them they need to overhaul them, take a look at their actual mechanics, not numbers, and Anet is never going to do that anymore.

Or just redo Confounding Suggestions a bit and mesmer will still be an amazing and fun class but half the people FOTMing it won’t know what to do anymore.
/shrug

The profession I one-burst most often is thieves, nowadays.

But I think that’s partly because I’m pickier with my timing against them, waiting until their evades/escapes are limited. And because a lot of thieves will totally HS face-first into a shatter.

A good thief (and I’d say the primary measure of “good” here is “good with Shadow Shot”) can still give you fits.

It’s not an auction house, it’s a commodities market. Even precursors aren’t unique heirloom collectibles.

A few buy orders more generous than yours aren’t going to keep you from getting the thing you want forever. Many will, but if that’s the case it’s because you’re offering too little for the current market price.

In my experience…

Killing eles is mostly a matter of watching their attunement rotation. You don’t necessarily need to memorize all their skills perfectly, but any time they’re in Earth they’re going to be able to soak a lot of damage, and then when they go into Water they’ll likely heal up to full.

Which means the best time to truly burst an ele is when they can’t jump into Earth and Water, probably because they’ve just come out. Against the tankier builds especially, this often involves a considerable amount of baiting.

Fay.2357:

The stun lasts 1 second. In order for your team to focus on target in 1 second, VoIP is required.

Your target’s movements help you sync your burst even in the absence of comms. You don’t need VoIP to have two or three players select the same called target and watch for a good opportunity. They’re both responding to the opportunity.

Sandrox.9524:

not balanced around dueling-yet insta jib everyone in wvw even in mid-zerg.yeah lets make warrior rifle #1 skill killshot+quickness w/o use of adrenalin and say yep its ok gw2 is not balanced around dueling.

…

You do know that the real mesmer burst is melee range, right?

If a full-glass mesmer is diving into your zerg like that, it’s because you’re all about fifteen seconds away from being completely routed. (I’ve done that, pre-patch. It’s really fun but you’re really just profiting off your enemy being really, really strung-out and confused already.)

The 1200-range greatsword 4-2-3 burst is much easier to avoid and doesn’t do a full health bar’s worth of damage.

I think the easiest “fix” that doesn’t turn into a huge CS nerf is to reduce the daze duration on MoD.

Because the problem isn’t just the rather low ICD, it’s that it makes the initial opening very powerful. If you up it to 10 seconds it’s not a big difference because you’re getting CS again right as Mirror Blade and Mind Wrack are ready. 1/2 or 1/4 second MoD would still be very powerful in the right hands.

(Being able to get a nice full-second stun out of F3 is legit. This needs no change.)

Esplen.3940:

The problem with Desperate Decoy (and the same trait on Thief lines) is that the stealth comes out when you’re not really ready for it, so you tend to get revealed almost instantly because you have damage going out as it spawns.

Yup. Exactly.

Hey Pi!

Your Youtube profile says you’re running Desperate Decoy. How’s that been working for you? It’s been alright for me, but only as a source of free clones. I always — always — just seem to get revealed with it. (I eventually dumped it for Phantasmal Fury.)

Also, I am pleased that none of the shots with me in your party involved me dying off-screen this time.

Builds that rely on phantasms for a significant part of their overall damage output and don’t shatter particularly much are playable in PvP.

I think the trick is to think of your phants like Hundred Blades:
Hundred Blades hits like a truck, especially with the right build. But even your Hundred-Blades-iest of builds isn’t just about Hundred Blades, you know?
You’ll want to use your other skills to help you set up Hundred Blades. Players aren’t just gonna stand in it for no reason, after all.
You’ve got all these other weapon skills, and utilities, and traits. You should make use of them. Be effective even when you’re not standing there doing Hundred Blades.
Sometimes you’ll want to cancel Hundred Blades.

That’s how I would approach even a very “dedicated” phantasm PvP build: plan to support your phantasms with CC, think about how you’re going to sustain yourself, freely dip into other mesmer tricks if your build has room for it, and recognize that sometimes phantasms are totally disposable.

I think HM and DE offer you different kinds of staying power. DE helps ensure that your second burst can be as big as your first. HM in the typical build helps sustain (it’s pretty much a given you’re using Mantra of Recovery with it) and keeps those interrupts going. I kinda like that trade-off factor.

I’m just saying there’s literally no reason to think of one person’s PvF nonsense as representative of the typical players of entire profession.

There’s very little reason to think of an entire board’s consensus as representative of the typical players of an entire profession, even.

DaShi.1368:

A ranger is here asking for stealth to be removed from mesmers. Unbelievable. Not long ago, rangers were telling me that they only focus on their own profession and don’t go around trying to get other professions nerfed. :lol:

All rangers aren’t one monolithic ranger blob.
Not even all longbow rangers.
Not even all pew-pew stand-in-one-spot-getting-one-shot-by-Mirror longbow rangers.

Now that IP is standardized, DE is no longer such a solid requirement.

I hated the idea of DE vs. HM when it was introduced but, having played it, I think it’s a good trade-off because both traits have serious value, just along different axes. That third MoD charge is srs bsns; you should have to give up something good for it.

You get personal points for some stuff that doesn’t give team score, and vice versa.

E.g. you get some personal points for decapping.

That’s part of why personal points don’t add up to team score.

Necrotize.2974:

Regen was already iffy, but since it was only a 1/3 chance of getting a meh boon, it was ok.

Regen wasn’t iffy.

Because it combined with the preceding minor trait that gave you Prot when you got Regen (15 sec ICD).

Hence the original use of PU to come out of stealth with like 5-10 seconds prot (it was wildly swingy), which helped a ton with survivability during the bad old days.

Chorazin.4107:

Having massive burst in a game is doable with targeted healing, youve got that Cleric watching your back ready to top ur health up. This game has nothing of the sort, the healing requires generally setting up and then executing in the case of blasts or wind up animations in the case of personal healing.

GW1’s solution to this was pre-prot: your monks needed to anticipate bursts and put relevant protections on you to reduce damage or soak attacks. This was way more fun than just having red bars go up and down.

GW2’s solution to this is dodging, evasion, blocking, invuln, and stun breaks. Some are preemptive, some are reactive. It’s very different from GW1 in execution but has a lot of the same underlying philosophy.

Simonoly.4352:

The only things I’m not finding much to hate on right now are Necros and Engis.

I must find something to hate about them. Any tips?

Hating on Lich autos is pretty popular.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Obviously we all know there’s plenty of pre-patch montages of this same thing.

The introductory post says this already. I think OP is aware.

You do realize a single bolt of Damask is 14 gold, right?

Are you even remotely close to being able to buy any of the other junk you need for your characters?

knkasa.2608:

Most players you bump into aren’t likely running roaming build with full zerker+food, but rather majority are running tanky support build who aren’t designed for 1v1, but simply trying to catch up to their commander somewhere on the map.

In NA T1, only frontline is super tanky (tankier than typical in T2/T3, as far as I’m aware — at the expense of their DPS, of course). Backliner, pick team, and most of the random folks in the tail tend to be pretty glassy so they can actually hit the enemy hard.

Definitely a lot of the folks you’re seeing here are glass: thieves, longbow rangers, mesmers, mediguards. Some militia-type folks just hanging around by themselves may still be rocking PVT gear (from back in the ancient days when people would straight-up tell you that was the correct thing to do in WvW for all classes), but I doubt it.