Guild Wars 2

MMMMM mesmer juice, goes so good with bacon and eggs.

Try 1200 hours on a single class, then get back to me :-P

I’m all for any changes that weed out the weaker theives, ready for another FoTM class so the few good thieves can shine.

Sebrent.3625:

Woot! I’ve influenced two much more veteran thieves! Lol.

Nice thing is the above leaves you with 10 trait points (if you take all of those traits). This would allow you to put them in Acrobatics to get back endurance when you dodge and pick a 20 pt trait (like heal when use initiative), put them in Deadly Arts for poison on steal and probably Mug (if it’s not nerfed too badly), or put them in Critical Strikes for the always welcomed Hidden Killer or Executioner.

If you wanted to use Withdraw, that’s still a great 15 second cooldown that is also a dodge roll and removes chill, cripple, and immobilize. You’d lose out on the 2 Signet traits, but maybe that’s worth it for those benefits and it opens up more trait points.

If you run withdraw, you’d basically be running my evasion condition build I ran at release. It was 25-0-0-15-30, using D/D for LDB bleed applications/evades, withdraw, RFI, and Shadowstep. Also used runes of the adventurer for endurance regen on heal. End result was a near perma evade state in combat.

My biggest concern is the lack of condition purging with the build…. But I guess going cheesy P/D with that extra 10 points in SA for condition purging might bring this into a really good place.

vespers.1759:

Auesis.7301:

Each hit of Double Strike (the first auto-attack in the 3-part chain) hit you for 1k, and Wild Strike (part 2) hit for THREE THOUSAND. What on earth were you wearing? Paper? Might as well have run in to battle in the nude. There is something seriously wrong here.

You have no excuse.

so the solution is to wear only heavy armor and get hit for 5k instead of 7k while thieves run in full zerk without a care in the world because of invis?

and the worst part is a glass canon ranger does about 1k on most of their damage skills. greatsword number 2 hits for 3.5k max.

that totally compares to a thief’s DPS!

It’s not just the gear, I bet none of your traits are in your toughness line are they? You simply can’t run full on “put everything into making attack stronger” builds in PvP, hasn’t worked in any PvP game in history. Even thieves don’t do that. They usually put 30 points in to toughness tree; even those wearing berserker gear.

I’d rather see SR not break stealth upon being knocked out of it, rather just keep whatever stealth you’d built up. Currently it’s nearly worthless vs any but the most pitiful of opponents.

Deniara Devious.3948:

*This stealth nerf is very welcome and in dire need for WvWvW. *

Logically the stealth nerf should affect all professions: mesmers, thieves and engineers alike. Yes, engineers also have several ways to gain stealth e.g. smoke combo fields (really difficult to pull in hectic combat), tossing elixir S gives small chance for stealth (it seems to give stability at least 66% of the time) and there is the cloaking device trait. So in reality the engineer stealth is more or less a gimmick, not really that reliable in combat situations. Of course any profession can gain cloaking using 6 runes superior runes of infiltration, but it has so long cooldown, so this nerf doesn’t effect it.

It would be huge exaggeration that thieves would be useless after this nerf. Thieves have probably the best blast finisher in the game: cluster bomb, amazing mobility and very solid dps. Some people say that thieves only have burst and lack in dps, I think there is something wrong with their build. What thieves lack is utility, which might be addressed in the next patch.

Actually, our utility in open field fights is CC, for those thieves actually using sword main hand. We can lock down fleeing opponents, or their support, preventing their escape/re-positioning.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Adaneshade.2409:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Hmmh, a bit boring. Means I need to buy my thief new gear and just spec for glass cannon or p/d then. My mesmer benefits from this though, as skilled thieves were the only counters for my build. :P Well, p/d ones still are.

Skilled thieves don’t need to chain stealth, sry you’ll still have problems with us. :-P

Yes they do when they fight against me. :P Now I can just dodge / pop invulnerabilities / whatever until you get that revealed debuff, and then burst you down.
Of course I still don’t win against p/d, but then again, nobody does.

Good luck bursting through my 20k hp and over 3k armor lol, you’ll be lucky to half life me. That is if I actually just stand there and take your burst rather than juking back to my shadow return :-P

scooby treat.8420:

I don’t think most of you understand what I am saying. I use food buffs at all times and WvW is all I do. The nourishment buffs you gain from using both a food lets say pizza and a maintenance oil is huge especially if you run a high tough/vit build. You gain so much in fact that a full tank build can hit close to a glass cannon but take hits because they are all tough/vit. This has NOTHING to do with runes or armor or sigils.

The point to going more power is to do more damage but you will take more damage. however with food buffs giving you the power you lose from going tough or vit what is the point? You now have a tank that can do as much as the person who went more power so they could hit harder.

So I now run higher tough/vit and stack with my food buff to make me that much stronger. I hear many people posting in this thread about choices yet there is only one clear choice that is the best in the end. Higher tough/vit and food buff to give you BACK the power/cond/prec you lose from going that route. In the end your choices become more limited because of the food buffs that many are screaming gives you more options.

Tough/vit nourishments FTW

But we do understand, that glass cannon can ALSO use food to hit EVEN HARDER, or hit as hard as they do but add in some defensive ability……
There is no downside, all it does is allow for more diversity in builds with support from foods to fill in the gaps.

scooby treat.8420:

As much as I LOVE my nourishments in WvW i feel it creates imbalance in WvW. For example you can create a high vitality/toughness build and then put on your nourishment that gives you power on the amount of toughness and vitality you have allowing you to hit much harder then you really should in my opinion as a vit/tough build. This imbalance is what leads certain builds to be marked as OP. Taking to much bleed damage? There is a nourishment for that too making some build useless in WvW because the build is based on dealing condition damage. Like I said I love my nourishments but I think they should go as they create to much imbalance in WvW Doing this would also allow you to see the other imbalances in classes and tweak them easier.

Everyone has access to these foods, how is that not balanced?

Master of Timespace.2548:

Hmmh, a bit boring. Means I need to buy my thief new gear and just spec for glass cannon or p/d then. My mesmer benefits from this though, as skilled thieves were the only counters for my build. :P Well, p/d ones still are.

Skilled thieves don’t need to chain stealth, sry you’ll still have problems with us. :-P

It’s already probably the best S/D tank heal in the game. Traited, it’s cooldown is only 12 seconds and it gives you a 5 stack of might. Combined with sword’s cleave proccing it up to 3x per attack makes it just perfect. We already have 2 good large castable heals, these changes would only pigeon-hole our class further.

wish.3102:

ensoriki.5789:

It’s only a nerf if you sit your kitten spamming Cloak and Dagger.
If you’re actually playing the game you’ll rarely notice it.

Using CnD spam as an offhand dagger thief is the only way to effectively wear down eles and mesmers and make them burn through their cool downs so you can actually kill them. Getting revealed no matter how stealth drops is going to make every thief die to every mesmers clone exploding invincible sword stab bullcrap insta-death move. And also going to make fighting bunker eles impossible. That’s exactly what this game needs, the removal of skill being a factor in whether or not you can win a fight.

NOT true. Wise use of infiltrator’s strike, and the occasional daze will destroy any mesmer. Most D/D ele’s rely on boon stacking which can be stopped easily with some good flanking strike use.

Sounds like people are still running the wrong armor and weapon sets in PvP…..

Soon.5240:

Chainspell.5697:

Ironvos.9014:

wish.3102:

Ironvos.9014:

If this does indeed happen and thieves start dropping dead everywhere cause they can’t chainstealth and can’t abuse culling anymore, i sure hope they wait about 6 months aswell before buffing the thief

That sounds like a good way to lose whatever percentage of your player base plays THF.

It would give them time to L2P

You don’t understand, Thief and Mesmers are the pros of this game obviously the people who plays the other classes was the ones who needs to l2p. Now this nerf will make it so the pros would leave since the other classes are too noob and therefore lack any skills at all to play whatsoever.

LOL, Thief is a mindless build that takes no skill.

“LOL, P/D Thief is a mindless build that takes no skill.”

Fixed…..

-PS: I wanna see you pull off S/D or S/P, buster.

Sounds like a skillseeker spammer is running out of init :-P

Also, was he using staff? The Chaos Storm ability can apply fear.

Yeah, without at least 15 in Shadow Arts, you are losing out on 1 second of stealth with each application (Shadow refuge will show it more since it’s a stacking effect with it’s “ticks”)

Dual.8953:

I find 0/30/30/0/10 works well enough on my S/D. The highlights of my build are blind, regen, condition removal on stealth (which is about every 3 seconds in combat).

Don’t forget condition removal from shadow return, boon stripping, an unblockable attack, snares, and immobilize ^.^
-edit Oh and daze ofc lol

evilapprentice.6379:

I still don’t see the point of S/D tbh. It has all the positional requirements of a Dagger spec with none of the burst, subpar damage overall, and not enough survivability to make up for it.

As for new things, venom triggers no longer deplete on missed swings (but still do on block/evade/blind/etc..) which is kind of nice, and Shadowshot finally doesn’t root on hit (which is awesome) – it’s helped to make D/P the defacto choice more or less atm.

That’s because you take a simple minded approach to pvp (MOAR DPS OR IT SUCKS)….S/D is about CC and does extremely well at it’s job. A good S/D thief is a D/D thief’s worst nightmare with the immobilizes and snares.

What would you guys do if you did get to that higher tier (other than get roflstomped due to being so outpopulated)…….

Swap that 10 from trickery into deadly arts and grab mug, puts the burst to insane levels not far from that of backstab builds. Plus give you a reliable application of poison which is great to keep your target from healing too much.

Better than starting a new thread…..

Nah, no need for it at all. Don’t like noob zerglings, certainly don’t want a bunch following me around, would be an absolute waste of gold for a buff I’d NEVER activate.

Mrbig.8019:

The sad part is that in PvP there’s no reason to use FS instead of C&D: easier to get, faster animation( it actually HITS, i would like FS to do the same), tactical advantage ( stealth), more utility ( FS removes a boon, JEZUZ ITS AWSUM -.-’’) and about the same damage.

FS is exclusively wasted ini.

I’m playing an S/D build and i ( now, after thousand of tries about choosing the build) can fight effectively against ANY class ( lol, even mesmers and guardians).

Never used FS even once.

That boon removal is the difference between you and your buddy blowing up that bunker guardian/ele or having a drawn out fight (stripping regeneration or protection). Or how about fighting those guys with insane might stacking…stripping that off makes them hit like a wet noodle. A player that thinks in extremes is one with poor judgement.

In effect, if you aren’t using the one mechanic that makes S/D special beyond any other class (spammable boon stripping) at all, you’re only playing half the build.

Woaden.9425:

First of all, I’m sure many have/will respond that zergs are fine, or zergs are like RL armies, or zergs are what wvw is all about, or zergs are massive battles and we just want to run in small groups, so take that stuff to spvp. Those people have too broad a definition of zerg.

“Bad zerg” is 20-40 people all occupying the same little space, taking advantage of aoe buffs and culling and aoe stealths, without the drawback of being exposed to aoe.

“Stack, Stack, Stack” “Fire fields only”

It’s this (very effective) type of strat that must be fixed in the mechanics. I’ve posted a few times ideas on how to spread out formations.

AOE damage target uncap would help.

There also needs to be a more immediate and recurring drawback to this.

I wish there was a speed debuff “pressed” or something, where if too many allies occupy the same small area, they get a speed debuff. This will force people to spread out, but still be a “massed group of players” just not all on a needle point.

If you get bunched up by the enemy and get a speed debuff, well that’s what being “pressed” is all about.

If you all try to run out of a chokepoint at the same time, you’re going to collide at the door and be slowed. Makes sense to me.

Better yet, just implement collision detection (in combat zones only to prevent people trolling npcs etc). Collision detection would force people to have to funnel through choke points since their avatars wouldn’t overlap, would also prevent the “stacking” problem.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Here’s my experience on Tier 1 and 2.

Get into TS so you can hear the commanders actual commands.
Run with the large, co-ordinated force.
Watch as the game ascends to a higher level where it’s no longer about your individual skill and effort, and instead you become a part of a much larger whole, able to pull of feats that will blow your mind only thanks to what is summed up as, or dumbed down to, “The Zerg”.

From the outside, from a roamer, or small group perspective zerging looks ridiculous. It’s only once you fully invest in zerg vs zerg that you come to appreciate what the hell is going on. Commander vs Commander, Guild vs Guild, Discipline, moving as one collective force, trying to outplay an opposing monster who, if a mistake is made, will roll right over you and yours.

There’s nothing here to fix. This is the height of warfare. Beautiful, beautiful warfare.

Who wants to be put in a situation where their individual skill doesn’t matter? (Aside from those who are not proficient players. In which case, I could see someone wanting a situation where they can be carried and it doesn’t matter whether or not they are any good.)

For PvP, yeh S/D is miles ahead of S/P. I do still use S/P as my PvE kit though for tanking dungeons etc.

TainoFuerte.8136:

Ah, the L2P and “all thieves are just better people” arguments. What would a thief discussion be without these?

More likely – bad players are getting held up by an overpowered class.

The L2P and “people are garbage” observations go both ways. Just so happens thieves are the exception to the rule and are solely populated by good players? LOL

It’s not that playing a thief means you’re better. I’t simply that soloers are better players than those that play in groups by necessity.

Most people who like to play alone and dislike groups tend to pick stealth classes in MMOs for avoiding zergs. This causes the stealth based classes wind up with a higher population of people who focus on dominating in PKs from the release of the game, even before anyone knows what balance is like.

(TLDR – Playing a thief doesn’t automatically make you pro, it’s just that good soloers with allot of experience in the genre tend to roll stealthers for soloing, giving the thief a high concentration of great players compared to other classes.)

I generally swap in P/P as offset when dueling vs D/P. It has good synergy with most builds that revolve around S/D and is probably the most effective set vs D/P since you can counter blind then use unload to burst while they are visible. Since stealthing won’t stop a channeled ability like unload it also gives you a bit of tracking as to where they run after stealth.

Increase base duration and stack “intensity” so that a 2 stack would negate 2 hits…etc etc

Iruwen.3164:

Legendaries don’t have better stats and ascended stats advantage is still negligible, there’s nothing to keep up with. Also you can now complete your dailies (didn’t check the monthly yet) in WvW and get the same ascended items too.

Well, not right this moment, but legendaries will auto-upgrade to match the stats of the current highest level weapon in game. So effectively those with legendaries already have ascended weapons, they just haven’t gotten the stat update.

Dangerkips.6035:

Or just knows how to play a character instead of crying continuously on the forums, maybe something crazy like that.

Acting like everything is fine and saying “L2P” is a good way to adress class balance issues. (<— sarcasm)

No one really cares if you could play a thief with one leg and no eyes and still kill one mob. Doesn’t prove the class isn’t underpowered for the majority of the people playing the game.

Why do we now expect games to be modified to meet player’s level of competency rather than expecting players to increase their competency to match what the game requires? Seems to be a major trend since the 2k’s began.
Left wing attitudes reach even to the video game world…its inescapable.

Omaris Mortuus Est.2738:

Blizzard off free transfers to low population servers and I think Anet should do this too.

Of course people wont get the same fights in lower servers, so an incentive must be made to make it appealable for some people to go. But then I think the numbers should be limited and kept up to date. Afterall you dont want to have a guild decide to move only to then find only half of them were able to transfer.

But yes, thanks to the hugely expanded time of free transfers, WvW is a bit of a mess.

Blizzard doesn’t have WvW populations to worry about. Since it’s Horde vs Alliance on the same server.

The issue with doing what you suggest is it’ll start this never ending escalator. Big guilds push server to Tier 1 > big guild tired of queues > they transfer to T9 server > T9 server makes it’s way up to T1 > rinse/repeat

ensoriki.5789:

skupuz.6940:

BobbyT.7192:

skupuz.6940:

Adaneshade.2409:

Same range as mesmer portal, nothing to see here, move along.

A 90sec utility vs a spammable ability…come on now….

The tooltip says 1200 range. I don’t think 3600 range is intended.

it’s 90sec because you can teleport your whole party, 3 more parties, and their relatives in one go.
Plus you can’t really spam 3600 range if you got to walk that first.

You cant spam it but there’s really no CD on it.

Don’t use 1 OP ability to justify a broken mechanic. Just make it 1200 as the tool tip states. Is that too much to ask for?

If you port 3600 range you are gone and you are not coming back lol wtf.

Anyways anet
please fix that Shadow return doesn’t stun break knockbacks, pulls and launches.

You have to have a return set as in phase 2 of the ability. The tooltip only refers to the initial port. So the thief not gonna be able to just use it to just run away.

The return has a set duration which isn’t very long at all, not like we can set a return up, go into a fight for a while then magically port back, unless we plan that fight to only last like 10 secs lol.

Quickhit.3620:

Thief can’t be tanky no matter what. snip

Beg to differ here…. My 3100 armor rating and 20k HP tanks quite well….

Culling was introduced on purpose by the development team. In effect was “flipped on” because not running it caused tremendous lag.

When the game initially launched, it was not in effect. Do you guys not remember the horrible rubber-banding in the headstart? That is what we would have been stuck with if they hadn’t turned culling on while they worked to fix the engine problems.

Now that they have the engine fixed, it’s a simple matter of just flagging the culling system “off”.

Same range as mesmer portal, nothing to see here, move along.

I also play a thief as a main (1200 hours and 14k kills in WvW mostly solo) I actually agree with the OP about needing changes to stealth. I would prefer to see the thief go more along the lines of the assassin from GW1.

Instead of making the player totally invisible to the enemy, just make them transparent and add in a chance to evade incoming attacks. Note this should be a CHANCE not 100% but some percentage that could be tweaked in testing.

This would make it so that stealth still performs it’s basic defensive purpose but removes the issue of fighting against an opponent you can only see 40% of the time.

Volrath.1473:

so much for the BIG pvp patch.

wasn’t it a SURPRISE?

That patch has been pushed to March. We knew this weeks ago.

Jericho.4521:

Maugetarr.6823:

Bloodgruve.6038:

‘Using stealth no longer resets NPC aggression tables.’

I thought we were already quite squishy, how is this going to effect us in dungeons?

Blood~

I’m hoping this means that as soon as you stealth the mobs don’t run away and start healing. Nothing as frustrating as trying to res someone in a dungeon in SR losing aggro completely while the boss heals to full when you had <10% left.

Same. I’m really afraid it means that stealth doesn’t lose enemy aggro at all though now, and we’ll be attacked in stealth. Could be a nail in the coffin for thieves in dungeons.

Doesn’t mean mobs will attack you when stealthed. It does mean that stealthing your whole group won’t reset a boss……so a good thing.

Just sounds like someone who lacks the ability to compete on this level getting upset at those who can; trying to make it so no one can, to lessen the evidence of their own inadequacies.

Psychotic EGG.1376:

My issue is not that we are losing. but rather why. I wouldn’t care if it was due to skill. Because the blame is on us. But when it’s sheer numbers. something entirely out of our control. No then I have a complaint.

Skill has absolutely no bearing on what tier a server is in. It’s purely a “who has the bigger zerg with the closest to 24 hour coverage” game in it’s current state. The ranking system is simply a top down list of the most WvW population/coverage to the least.

Yeah, already checked TC. That leaves me just one more guest server today…wanna make sure it’s a winner ^.^

I need to access that vendor, and my server is basically dead in Cursed Shore…no hope to open it anytime soon here. Guesting ftw?!

Straegen.2938:

Magnetron.5823:

Will there ever be change to :

Thiefs pressing 1 skill for 6 times and the other person dies in 3 seconds even when he have 3200 toughness?

This should rarely happen if you are a half decent player. With the exception of backstab the 1 abilities have a base damage of sub 500. Even if pumped up they will rarely do that kind of damage. Now a mug, backstab, HS combo can drop even a good player pretty quick but these days most builds run with some form of thief defense and generally get upset/annoyed by not being able to kill them or see them more so than dying.

Magnetron.5823:

Mesmer confusion stacks or condition time? Those two things need attention, or else i want to spam frenzy every 10 seconds too

Mesmers are a power class but confusion is part of the meta and IMO working fine.

Gotta disagree here, have you never used sword auto chain? Even in full PVT gear I hit for roughly 1500×2 then a 3k or so.

11 per hour, at least 80-85% solo though so I’ll take it.

Dabrixmgp.4758:

Isnt the AoE nerf going to make zerging even more mandatory? Its going to hurt rather than help.

No, It will force them to spread out, rather than"zergball". AoE has always been intended to be an “area denial” tool. With the current implementation, AoE has ZERO ability to force a zerg to relocate or die.

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

Because people like to complain online…

WvW is about big armies fighting big armies. Do smaller ‘havoc squads’ and ‘kill teams’ have a place? Absolutely.
But, if said small team runs into a 30+ person zerg, and tries to stand their ground (for whatever reason) then the odds should not be in their favor.
Sure, skill can help. Good tactics on the part of the small team can help. And hell, despite the odds, the small team /could/ manage to come out on top. It’s not an impossibility.
But that should never be an automatic thing, even if it is just because of sheer overwhelming numbers.
Zergs are here to stay, whether you like them or not. If you never want to deal with the fact they you might be outnumbered and overwhelmed, then sPvP is over that way…

Even the games mentioned used “extend groups” to wipe superior numbers. No one “stood their ground”.

The issue in GW2 for elite 5-mans, currently, is threefold:

1.) Causing a player to overextend does nothing as they are revived by the wave flooding over them (dead player should not be rezzable from defeated in combat, downed state, sure, but not totally defeated.).

2.) The current rendering issues (mistakenly called culling) make it impossible to tell exactly where the “front” of the pursuing zerg is. This makes it nearly impossible to effectively “kite” the whole zerg.

3.) Aoe caps make it so that AOE CC applied, only affects 5 players. If groups could snare an entire zerg with an aoe, a 5-man, if well played, could force a zerg to “extend” making the numbers more manageable. They’d then only have to deal with a few overextenders, then rinse and repeat.

Most of the more experienced thieves actually do use S/D or S/P for at least one of their sets.

DPS is not everything. D/D offers NOTHING in the form of good CC other than dancing dagger. Also it has no inherent stun breakers or condition cleansing like sword builds do.