Guild Wars 2

The toxicity is getting to me… Developers are too busy working on GW3 using a dx10 engine for release in 2020 when we have dx14.

Developers need to actively look at a better solution to balance, most notably with core trait lines and weapon sets. Anets track record shows that they believe the answer to be in the future of the game. Rather than setting future projects aside to correct serious issues that are a “now” problem, they fumble ahead.

I honestly appreciate your effort to put forth balance suggestions like myself and many others have done in the past few months, but gone are the golden times of the HoT beta in which we had a direct line of communication/influence.

I stress the fact that as a player and part of the community, we do not always have the correct answers, but anet is literally throwing away free game design suggestions through their lack of communication.

This game and combat system have such huge potential, but the majority of it seems to be spoiled by both the community and organization of anet itself.

What we should all be suggesting right now is that during these quarterly balance updates, developers take the time to reach out to the community like they did during the HoT beta. It will only lead to a more constructive environment for everyone.

Terrible idea.

PvP would crash and burn even harder than it currently is. Why?

- Lack of a dedicated balance team (game is balanced around PvE, or at the very least 3 games modes and not solely PvP).
- Lack luster and far and few in between balance updates.

The current model seems to be frustrating the player base more and more. Without proper balance and developer support how do you expect them to sustain and or grow the player base beyond its’ current size? I assume the PvP population is much smaller than we think.

Not for being too strong burst wise, but I definitely wish I started with Thief. I only recently picked up Thief, maybe 6 months before HoT released, and it’s easily the most enjoyable play style overall for myself.

I would love to say ranger, but pet AI and how they work with the class in general is just way too limited to be an interesting mechanic.

P.S. originally ran warrior

The Ace.9105:

Fat Disgrace.4275:

The Ace.9105:

Wait for 1 week for the matches to balance or play more to get better.

it should not take a week when anet states that the mu between premade and solo are “prevented”

Well this system just matches you with people on the same mmr range than you against a team from the division and pip range you are currently in.

MMR isn’t a factor anymore, if I read the S2 blog post correctly. It is soley based on tier/pips within the range of 15, so of course it’s going to be a total fustercluck for the first few days; the entire player base is within amber or within 15 pips due to the total number of pips in amber being so low.

Stuttering while running as well, also gliding animations are super stuttery-ey. Was fine until I patched today, issue popped up with the latest update(s) on 2/23/16

This is why conquest is ruining PvP in GW2, people refuse to see how awful a bunch of random passive aoes with condis attached to them remove any form of skillful play.

I’ll put it this way…

You place your traps on a point and walk away. A player walks onto the traps with no one there. Did you force the player to walk into the traps? Can the player see the traps? Do you have to be present for the traps and condis to do any damage?

No.

The same goes for any ground targeted aoe, especially in team fights and when capping/decapping a node. Aoe CC, traps, and condis do nothing but hurt pvp and diminish the skill needed to play the game as with any aoe you do not have to actively select a target.

You also have no control over crits and condis caused by them. You cannot control 3/4 of your pets abilities and therefor they randomly apply conditions without any direct control.

Furthermore this points out how poorly rounded the OP’s build is because it focuses on players who have not yet learned how to walk out of orange circles and PvE, and if you can’t yet I have no words…

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Ranger has no passive condi application outside of the weakness from PW and few condis from pets, which deal usually way less dmg than their direct dmg. Condi builds are in general not more passive than powerbuilds. If you can kill player as a condi ranger/druid (cele wasn’t pure condi) without even knowing, what you are doing, your opponents must be pretty bad.

-Standing in traps
-Standing in torch 5
-Ancient seeds
-Crit Bleed procs
-Pet swap poison

All passive…. so don’t quite know what you’re on about?

And most importantly, if you can condi bomb and your target is out of cleanses and heals, you could literally walk away and they will die, how is that not passive play? You the player are not directly involved in killing the opposing player. Great I understand it isn’t entirely passive because you do have to decide when to blow all your skills, but once that happens you have 0 control over the damage you do, especially with a build as the op has due to traps and no cc.

I normally don’t do this but…

Conditions are a far more passive and “cheese” way to play. I played marauder staff/gs (sometimes lb) for the first season of pvp and made it to Legendary as solo/duo Q with a mix of druid and thief (really not tooting my horn, but more stating I’ve played against a handful esl players). After getting to legendary I decided to give the cele “condi” focused druid build a go, and what do you know I could sit on point and people would literally kill themselves without me having to put any effort in. All of your damage is entirely through passive means including pets and aoe condis, the definition of unskillful play imo.

Regardless of the spec currently, pets, most notably BB and SS, do the majority of your damage whether you’re playing condi, power, or support. This is 100% anets fault for not fixing core pets, and not taking the time to adjust HoT pets while moving damage from pets to weapon sets and the core ranger trait lines.

On a more pertinent note, playing a trapper build will limit you to protecting camps and choke points as traps are easily avoidable otherwise. You also lack a reliable/on demand stun through weapons or utilities so enemies will be free to cleanse and heal whenever.

I can’t believe this has been unaddressed for this long. I just purchased a laptop for on the go work and to play the one game I play, GW2. Without functioning vsync it looks as if Freddy is having field day on my monitor.

Compatibility mode set to W8 or W7 does not work as a fix, only disabled vsync in game. Gameplay experience is horrible without it even while maintaining 40-70fps.

W10
R9 375M

Yes, this seems to be an issue with BOTH amd and nvidia mobile cards.

100% yes, this has been a necessary improvement since release.

For the love of everything, NO!

The only suggestion for this should be full control over pet skills. This would be a HUGE QoL change, provide increased depth to the class as a whole, and I would think increase pet diversity based on builds.

Imagine having control over CC skills, burst skills, defensive skills, and misc pet skills that are just randomly used and hardly connect on core GW2 pets. Full control would increase the skill cap for the class and provide a huge boost to all ranger builds in general.

Boon strip/corruption, high poison uptime, heavy cc, and well timed condition bombs. Well played Reaper should always win, unless going against LB druid who can actually kite.

Interrupt traits that cause confusion from warriors and thieves are also incredibly strong. Pulmonary Impact trait on thief is SOOO strong if a druid decides to camp staff and auto you, as the staff auto is the easiest skill to interrupt in the game and is often spammed.

Eurantien.4632:

Without these pets druid would never kill anything unfortunately.

Finally someone who understands the real issue. GS, LB, and Sword all provide laughable damage in comparison to other power oriented classes, specs, and weapons. A more traditional condi spec would be the best bet without reliable pet damage which core GW2 pets have some serious issues with.

sinject.4607:

how is bristleback balanced? can anyone seriously say bristleback doesn’t need a damage reduction?

druid itself is fine, just nerf bristleback damage PLEASE.

I’m not defending BB damage, I clearly stated it needs to be “toned down”, please read…

The majority of a druids damage in a fight comes from pets, most notably Bristleback. If you nerf Bristleback damage has to be compensated for on weapon skills, all of which are on the weak side for power builds; % mod traits* for GS and LB are awful as one relies on having your endurance full (in pvp, yea right…) and the other requires they have a movement impairing debuff, meanwhile HoT introduced multiple traits for several classes that provide removal for immob, cripple, chill, and duration decreases for these skills that are on very low icd’s.

In order for GS to perform well as a melee option, you’d need high swiftness uptime, constant cripple and chill removal (which kills youre ability to remove condis through the druid line and seeds) and to reliably be able to stick to a target that is likely to drop several point aoes that will almost insta gib you if you try and stay in melee range for a few seconds; GS ranger is incredibly easy to kite. There is really too much to discuss in terms of balancing out power weapons for ranger when nerfing pets such as bristleback or smokescale.

To get to the point quickly, any bursty or high continuous pressure would require a ranger to forgo taking the Druid line, severely reducing defensive capabilities. Sure, you shouldn’t have a class that can do everything (cough cele tempest cough), but nerfing pets into the ground and doing nothing else isn’t the solution; this would essentially turn any power based ranger spec into a less mobile thief. There still exist too many braindead aoe condi bombs and point coverage skills that really hurt conquest balance imo, another thing that hurts melee based power specs such as warrior, thief, rev, and ranger.

I’m done… I think…

To anyone complaining about druid, play condi rev or any reaper build well and druids will be an issue of the past. Also, if you can avoid pet swaps for bursts on thief druids are also fairly easy to kill with d/p + pulmonary impact trait.

Poor stability access, direct heals also scale very poorly with hp (regen scaling is very strong however), huge weakness to condis and confusion in general (shout build with soldier runes may counter this however), and go down in a 1v2 like cake.

There’s also the issue that the majority of damage from a ranger spec’d druid/x/x comes from bristleback quickness swaps, which still needs to be toned down imo; nerfing bristleback will leave any druid/x/x spec with 0 damage and they will become a non-factor in the meta. GS, sword, axe, and sb all need some serious work in the damage department if a bristleback nerf ever comes to light.

23rd of Feb. I think

Hey everyone, was just reflecting on ranked and my overall experience for PvP this season and was wondering what everyone’s experience in terms of difficulty throughout the League divisions was. To be more plain, which division was the most difficult to cross and why (from hardest to easiest)?

1) Emerald: Lot’s of AFK players and teammates who just had no clue what they were doing.

2) Ruby: Again very similar to emerald, mostly players running around chasing people off points and sacrificing themselves mid. Many refused to rotate or defend.

3) Sapphire: Slightly less bad players for some reason, didnt have any afk issues or dcs, was also fairly easy to carry matches throughout sapphire.

4) Diamond: Overall decent players, teammates generally listened. Diamond was a lot of fun as most games were fairly competitive, did have a lot of blowout matches in the last 2 tiers. Ended up with roughly a 70% win ratio through Diamond and completed the entire division in 3 days.

5) Amber: Can’t remember much aside from being able to carry every match due to starting late in the season.

6) Legendary: only played one match once I completed diamond so nothing to comment on, I could guess very similar to diamond.

Played Marauder Druid and Thief throughout every division, solo q and duo q in diamond.

How about you?

Wait for the dodge animation to end to land a stun.

Play necro and spam aoes, or play any class and spam aoes on a point. Worry free win.

Marauder Druid, mostly solo q and occasionally duo when my friend was on.

Halfway to legendary, but just don’t have the time unfortunately.

A – Necro, Necro, Necro, Thief, Necro again

B – Necros

C – Well you get the point

I think we need to see a slight nerf to LF generation on staff as well as chill.

Druid is far too susceptible to CC and condi’s, so no. Chronobunker was strong due to the fact that it had numerous invul frames and could provide a team with boons, and heavy hard cc (not just dazes) often thanks to alacrity.

Necros, with the slight buff to boon corruption and the chance to corrupt more often, will make it impossible for druid to be too strong by itself; with a coordinated team it may be a different story. But no they will not be godmode in soloq.

There’s also the fact that while base healing is high for celestial skills the scaling isn’t overly strong, and the boons shared most often are regen and swiftness. In order to further improve healing you give up condi removal only creating more problems for yourself as a druid.

Condis will reign supreme!

What class are you playing currently? Might I suggest playing Tempest or Reaper? If you can pick up the class in a day or two decently they’re both very forgiving, especially when you end up with teammates who refuse to listen when you’re trying to help them out.

I’d also suggest trying to befriend players you find to be at a similar skill level or better than you in the same division to try and queue as a group of two or three.

You can still solo carry a game, but that requires that your team is at least willing to listen. If not, it’s almost impossible to carry if your team is arguing and everywhere on the map chasing enemies.

Schtizzel.5497:

@Agemnon: Then you have basicly no toughness while rolling a class with the lowest starting toughness. Some useless precision because your crits will hit like a wet noodle without ferocity. In the end you’re dealing way to less damage while not being tanky enough for all the condi AND direct damage flying around.

@Avador: If you’re a good player nearly every build can work and net a decent winrate. That was never the point. Next time you wanna show me that condi ele is viable because you don’t get kitten d in amber queue or what?

I’d just like to point this out, it made me laugh. How do you think warriors and thieves feel in teamfights right now.

Cele amulet needed to go plain and simple, it discourages build diversity and also promotes brain dead specs that can stack might and roll their faces over their keyboard.

To some degree I second this, cele amulet was cancer.

The dev team is opening up another can of worms, having to take a look at a lot of ele healing and dmg scaling/base if this goes south and the community erupts.

You’re all missing the point. We should all welcome the necro overlords for the next pvp season!

foste.3098:

AegisFLCL.7623:

What also strikes me as odd is that Beastmastery is where the GS traits are, and yet there are no secondary effects for your pets on your GS weapon skills.

Hilt bash grants your pet a moment of clarity, but other than that as you said no synergy. If they changed the gs trait to give your pet fury instead of you on crit it would make more sense. But that would be a nerf to remorseless which is an underwhelming trait as is.

You have to trait for that though, the point was more that other weapon sets have direct secondary effects in their tooltip, yet are some of the weaker/less used weapon sets off the top of my head.

That and we need full control of pet abilities, engies and mesmers get 5 f1 skills, what’s so hard about enabling manual control over other pet skills! (I can dream at least)

Ario.8964:

snip*

Read most of it, decent suggestions, but I’d like to make a note on rangers.

Yes the pets are incredibly strong currently, but I strongly believe some scaling on power weapons needs to be adjusted, as they move damage away from the new pets they should pack a little bit more into the actual weapon skills.

What also strikes me as odd is that Beastmastery is where the GS traits are, and yet there are no secondary effects for your pets on your GS weapon skills. Outside of your unique pet abilities most ranger builds don’t output very high damage (the number of reflects really hurts LB in the current meta), and I don’t find a rangers power damage to be as sustainable to certain condi builds. While GS builds in a lot of useful defensive skills, aoe chill and cripple everywhere often make the weapon rather clunky. Without pet damage I don’t believe power based ranger specs to be a highly viable option in the current meta.

Khenzy.9348:

Did I just read they are planning on buffing Thieves AA damage? Really? What the hell?

If they touch any initiative based skill remember that it becomes spammable, that’s there only choice without creating a huge imbalance for a damage buff. The problem with any of that being we do not need the damage, we need survivability and massive updates to utility skills. Don’t understand why they think thieves need an AA buff…

Josh Davis.6015:

AegisFLCL.7623:

Snip.

I’ve thought through the implications of removing cele from PvP and what would happen to elementalist quite a bit, actually. It’s pretty risky. I think elementalist would need a new 4 stat combo to be viable at roughly the same level (maybe something like 1050pow/1050condi/560vit/560healing).

I believe everyone would prefer an amulet like this over celestial amulet. I’m sure tweaks to base hp and base healing for water atunement skills/traits could make up for the lack of celestial amulet without a massive overhaul; this would also increase the personal reward of playing ele well rather than it’s current form of “let us hit every button I can and still out-sustain 50-60% of players without any thought required”.

Note, passive play is boring, unrewarding, and bad design in my personal opinion. Cele amulet and passive proc’ing invlunerabilities are two of main culprits contributing to this.

If you’re afraid of tweaking base healing for skills and traits due to other amulets making a class to tanky, that should again raise a red flag for the issue of ele being reliant on cele amulet. A good tempest can currently 1v1 on a comparable level and shuts out almost all condi builds. They are unbelievably strong in teamfights, providing unmatched support, healing, conditions, utility, and situationally high damage with overloads. No class should be able to do everything as well as tempest currently does.

I stress that players should have more than one amulet option to be successful in any meta, and not being shoe-horned into cele amulet to function.

Custom 3 and 4 Stat amulets would also be a good idea alongside the traditional amulets as an option for new players.

Xillllix.3485:

AegisFLCL.7623:

Xillllix.3485:

AegisFLCL.7623:

Josh Davis.6015:

Aside from skill adjustments, another way we can adjust balance in PvP is by looking at the runes/sigils/amulets that are available for use through the customization panel.

I would be interested in hearing thoughts (with the high-level goals from the blog in-mind) on adding/removing various sigils/amulets/runes. In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.

I know we’ve had this conversation a few times before, but it’s always important to have this discussion with the correct context in mind.

If the team is going to be looking at runes/sigils/amulets, might I strongly suggest getting rid of celestial amulet. I know it has be suggested before, but I think this would be a very healthy change for pvp overall. Some reasons:

- Cele amulet is a huge reason we have poor build diversity, especially when there are classes that get a huge benefit defensively because of self sustainable might stacking. These classes most notably include ele, engie, necro, ergo allowing these classes to fulfill multiple roles with no downside.

- With the release of HoT your developers have steered away from being a non traditional mmo by introducing druid as a more healing dedicated spec when it comes to PvE (this includes several unique pvp builds). There is also the more strongly designated role of tanking in raids. I now see that it is pointless to hamper build diversity through the use of this mentality that no trinity exists, as support (healer), bunker (tank), and burst (dps) rolls have become more fleshed out across the classes with HoT’s release.

Further more the removal of celestial amulet would allow players to make far more match influencing decisions by more specifically choosing a roll they would like to play. I believe it will also make matches far more interesting.

Lol if they get rid of the celestial amulet they will break the elementalist. The class can’t sustain with any other amulet.

Your statement proves that cele amulet is poor design, think about it. You say ele can only survive with one amulet. Any single class should not have to rely on one amulet to properly function in pvp.

Cele amulet is poor and lazy design no matter which way it is put. To the other poster trying to say that the “weakness” of cele amulet exists in not excelling in any specific area, why use the amulet in the first place. If the point of having several “unique” classes in a game to make it interesting, or allow their players a choice, why bring those classes closer and closer together with a unifying muddle item?

Well then they would need to completly rebalance and buff the elementalist class, so that it can use berserker amulet like it could on release. You need to realize that we are forced to use the celestial amulet because of the boon duration, toughness and hp we lost from the new trait system. As the squishiest class there is just no other option.

Warrior and Thief would like a word with you.

Also, the balance team should be forced to look at an elementalists sustain with the removal of cele amulet. The game should not be balanced by looking at one class’ reliance on a singular amulet to function in pvp. I have two words, and two words only, poor design.

Not that I’ve played my ele during the current meta because I find tempest boring and incredibly overpowered, but during some of the previous metas I had a lot of fun and good success with marauder fresh air builds with s/d.

Again, the play-style and success of any class should not rely on a SINGULAR amulet.

Xillllix.3485:

AegisFLCL.7623:

Josh Davis.6015:

Aside from skill adjustments, another way we can adjust balance in PvP is by looking at the runes/sigils/amulets that are available for use through the customization panel.

I would be interested in hearing thoughts (with the high-level goals from the blog in-mind) on adding/removing various sigils/amulets/runes. In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.

I know we’ve had this conversation a few times before, but it’s always important to have this discussion with the correct context in mind.

If the team is going to be looking at runes/sigils/amulets, might I strongly suggest getting rid of celestial amulet. I know it has be suggested before, but I think this would be a very healthy change for pvp overall. Some reasons:

- Cele amulet is a huge reason we have poor build diversity, especially when there are classes that get a huge benefit defensively because of self sustainable might stacking. These classes most notably include ele, engie, necro, ergo allowing these classes to fulfill multiple roles with no downside.

- With the release of HoT your developers have steered away from being a non traditional mmo by introducing druid as a more healing dedicated spec when it comes to PvE (this includes several unique pvp builds). There is also the more strongly designated role of tanking in raids. I now see that it is pointless to hamper build diversity through the use of this mentality that no trinity exists, as support (healer), bunker (tank), and burst (dps) rolls have become more fleshed out across the classes with HoT’s release.

Further more the removal of celestial amulet would allow players to make far more match influencing decisions by more specifically choosing a roll they would like to play. I believe it will also make matches far more interesting.

Lol if they get rid of the celestial amulet they will break the elementalist. The class can’t sustain with any other amulet.

Your statement proves that cele amulet is poor design, think about it. You say ele can only survive with one amulet. Any single class should not have to rely on one amulet to properly function in pvp.

Cele amulet is poor and lazy design no matter which way it is put. To the other poster trying to say that the “weakness” of cele amulet exists in not excelling in any specific area, why use the amulet in the first place. If the point of having several “unique” classes in a game to make it interesting, or allow their players a choice, why bring those classes closer and closer together with a unifying and muddled item?

Josh Davis.6015:

Aside from skill adjustments, another way we can adjust balance in PvP is by looking at the runes/sigils/amulets that are available for use through the customization panel.

I would be interested in hearing thoughts (with the high-level goals from the blog in-mind) on adding/removing various sigils/amulets/runes. In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.

I know we’ve had this conversation a few times before, but it’s always important to have this discussion with the correct context in mind.

If the team is going to be looking at runes/sigils/amulets, might I strongly suggest getting rid of celestial amulet. I know it has be suggested before, but I think this would be a very healthy change for pvp overall. Some reasons:

- Cele amulet is a huge reason we have poor build diversity, especially when there are classes that get a huge benefit defensively because of self sustainable might stacking. These classes most notably include ele, engie, necro, ergo allowing these classes to fulfill multiple roles with no downside.

- With the release of HoT your developers have steered away from being a non traditional mmo by introducing druid as a more healing dedicated spec when it comes to PvE (this includes several unique pvp builds). There is also the more strongly designated role of tanking in raids. I now see that it is pointless to hamper build diversity through the use of this mentality that no trinity exists, as support (healer), bunker (tank), and burst (dps) rolls have become more fleshed out across the classes with HoT’s release.

Further more the removal of celestial amulet would allow players to make far more match influencing decisions by more specifically choosing a roll they would like to play. I believe it will also make matches far more interesting.

To those of you patting them on the back for make a generalized statement of a “we’re going to look at these classes”, with very few specific changes listed, shame on you! Wait until we get a legitimate list of changes to trust a single word that’s been posted!

Until then, criticize and make suggestions in the hope that they are listening.

Having two viper revs on the opposing (mind you skilled players), would devour any focused druid no matter how many heals you get. If you get ccd after you pop cele in a fight to clear condi bombs or heal, if the revs are smart enough to banish plus pop mallyx elite you die from trying to simply cleanse the 9+ stacks confusion. Much better team comps than this imo, as bunker mesmers are also incredibly weak to condis.

While I haven’t been stuck in ruby for more than 5 days, I was at 24/30 pips, just about to hit t5 after even fewer matches than I played in sapphire. I then had 3 games of 4v5, then the majority of my teammates wouldn’t listen to rotations, communicate, or do anything but sacrifice themselves mid. Over the past 2 days out of the 5 in ruby, I’ve gotten 4 wins out of about 22 games. I’m an above average player and love pvp, but the combination of dcs and abuse is keeping me logged out for the rest of the season. Very sad that good players out there are getting dogged by this matchmaking system.

They finally sent someone in for damage control. Here’s to not getting my hopes up!

P.S. Anet, please higher more staff to take care of pvp

Valkyriez.6578:

Haha. Last thing I would do as a Dev is talk to the players around here. If twitch chat is anything to go by, I’d rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon then go through that willingly.

Look how well the beta weekend feedback went. I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.

We had an open chance to review, communicate, and majorly influence how a lot of skills ended up. This is something that had never happened before, and almost gave me the slightest glimmer of hope they would continue to do so in a mild manner.

Any rank system without a team to focus on balance in a timely fashion is a waste of time. They need more employees, that only touch pvp, and pvp only.

JTGuevara.9018:

Liam McColgan.7689:

This whole pvp meta is a mess. Just one big huge aoe, bunker kitten fest mess.

I dont think ANET intended for this. But their lack of experience, balance testing, and general knowledge of how a competitive MMO PvP should work is diabolical at best.

Their track record over the past 3 years speaks for itself to be honest.

The fact they did no balance before the leagues started, other than nerfing mesmers because thats what everyone whined about is just laughable.

I dont play thief or warrior, but i would be furious that they got no help what so ever, when it was obvious for weeks and weeks they were in a bad spot.

I always get the feeling that because this is not P2P, and there are no monthly subscriptions, they don’t feel accountable for having to put out regular balance patches/listen to what the people at the top, who actually are trying to push this game to ‘esports’, are saying.

This is a different pvp team, not the gw1 team which was very renowed. These guys are straight of college/university. They don’t know what they’re doing, they need veteran devs to properly balance this monstrosity.

They don’t need veteran devs, they need to sit down and think! Some abilities are so blatantly strong from the get go I don’t know how they expected pvp to be balanced. You have 4 classes which rule the meta, 2 that can pull their weight when a player is good, and 2 classes that are almost completely forgotten.

90% of kills come from aoe spams/which ever team can drop the most condis and interrupts

There are way to many passive procin’ invuls, which need to go.

Celestial amulet is cancer

Similar skills on different classes are completely unbalanced, herald heal vs warrior heal, some mesmer sword and thief sword skills, different traps etc….

The second your team lacks damage, and the comp is in the enemy teams favor it’s impossible to carry due to the AoE nonsense.

I called this all the day they introduced leagues, that pvp would be a total kittenestorm because there would be no balance, everything is tuned for pve, and anet can’t manage what their employees do to save anyones kitten . All of it is a mess.

Spam conditions like a moron.

Some good stuff in this thread, and it’s always nice to see a talented warrior and or thief on my team in ranked, it’s however very unfortunate the balance of the game is in it’s current state and that every class is far more forgiving than warrior and thief.

Problems I see that would be interesting changes:

- Removing all passive proc in-vulnerabilities (promotes less skilled play)
- Removal of celestial amulet (fuels the kittened ability for some classes to might/boon stack and still pull off zerker dps)
- Spread out mechanics amongst the classes; more specifically boon access → exclusivity
- Modifying certain AoE skills to also effect point capture
- Forcing full 5v5 teams queuing to only be able to use 1 class per team

… But who am I kidding, this is anet we’re talking about

Don’t bother upgrading your GPU, even a cpu upgrade isn’t going to help. Overclocking can get you between 10-15 fps on the low end but not much else (both cpu and ram); this is coming from a stock 6600k to 4.7ghz.

The majority is games fault, and no one can really do anything about that at this point. Better wait for GW3 for a better engine.

+1, still hasn’t been addressed since the new trait system…

Bumping this.

Anet, you really need to give some sort of feedback to your player base. I stress once more, if you think having sPvP leagues was going to make players take your game more seriously, think again. If you do not address balance issues within PvP and provide community feedback in a timely fashion, no one will.

Communication is your friend, look at all the helpful and constructive feedback/changes that came from the BWE’s…

Azure The Heartless.3261:

I applaud the OP for once again shedding light on what is causing the thief to suffer, but at this point I don’t really have any belief that:

1.) Thieves will receive a rework
2.) Players that do not play thief won’t cry in the event we get a rework.

Its like: we started off with all of these neat mechanics to devour people whole in 1v1, but gradually just had everything that made some inkling of sense removed. And now classes are getting reveals. invisible ones at that, in the case of dragonhunter, which is just a stupid counter to our only meager source of damage reduction in the game.

It’s whatever, really. There has to be one painfully difficult class for PVP to be ‘structured’. It would be very nice if a developer could sit down with mains, touch base with them and see what the general consensus was on gameplay and then implement the changes they request, while at the same time weeding out the “waaah, stealth so op!” from the players that dont know how to fight something they can’t see-

But I’m not holding my breath.

I knew what this was.

Rogue classes are never balanced. they start off strong and then end up being sandbags halfway into a MMO’s life. This was no different.

I believe if they want anyone to take the upcoming PvP Leagues seriously, they have to begin addressing these issues. If you’re going to put in place a more rigid ranking and rewards system you HAVE to address issues like this, otherwise it won’t be just Thieves crying about how terrible their class is, it will be everyone. I’m also well aware a lot of people do make threads expressing their dislike, not in the best way, but threads such as that will become even more widespread.

I honestly don’t think ANET understand’s the rough road they’re in for if they plan on such sparse quarterly balance changes in terms of community outcry. As they stated jokingly in regards to their plans for balance changes, “…In order to shake the meta up…”, don’t seem to be taking PvP very seriously. Want a good PvP system, dedicate the man power to a team who focus solely on PvP, live for GW2 PvP, and truly want to make it a better experience. Let their players know that this sort of “team” exists, and it will go a long way in helping stave off threads crying about this and that.

It’s very hard to know what goes on behind the scenes, and we may agree or disagree upon how things are executed. But the fact is a player may have a better idea than a developer, just like a better athlete will eventually come forward and eclipse the shadow of a previous star. If they’re going to ignore suggestions, ideas, and constructive criticism it is truly a shame, as it will only help them grow.

On the flip side, after the way they addressed and did consider feedback from the beta weekends, I have hope that our suggestions and ideas do get across in some form or another. The best thing we can do is stop crying, stop being sarcastic, and consolidate our efforts to really try to get something accomplished.

A short note, to people posting ideas in this thread I would like to edit them into the original post at some point as quotes (soon as I get a day with some more free time that is). The more suggestions here in one place the better. Keep it coming folks!

Reklaw.1496:

I just hate how thief Traps are the only Traps you have to actually lure people into, and there the only ones that aren’t worth it. I know we won’t get a rework, but a nice bandaid would be dropping the trap slightly in front of you, so its more consistent when you’re already in melee range. Other than that I’d love ground targeted caltrops, and it seems like a no brainer to put some protection into the acro line, for instance at the end of a roll, or whenever you drop below 75%.

To me the only trap that makes sense with linear coverage is Tripwire, all the other traps from a contextual view do not need to have the same linear format. This would at the very least help with them be more reliable.

As for acrobatics I agree. This traitline needs some love, and stability/protection based traits would be a great place to band-aid in some passive defenses that Thieves lack compared to every other class.

Felwal.9618:

Overall a great post but you forgot one thing the fact that backstab deals very average damage compared to a lot of other classes abilities for example ALL of scrappers hammer abilities except for the auto attack deals more damage and dragon hunter has a short cd attack like 2sec that hits harder. I think they should up the damage by a bit and maybe give it a little utility if you could get like 8k Crits with it regularly in pvp with a marauder amulet that would be nice since we can only use it every 4sec and we need to line it up too. Sry if my English isn’t the best it’s not my native language

I personally find that the damage off backstab is fairly balanced when running any power based build. I believe the bigger issue is the number of passive immunities, blocks, and blinds that other classes have; Mesmer blinds, ele blinds, guardian blinds, all passively proc and may often leave you out of stealth by the time you attempt to backstab a second time.

For power builds, Thief damage in pvp is actually fairly good in my opinion. What Thieves lack is the sustain to back up that damage. And to anyone thinking mobility with SB counters this and allows a thief to reset, try telling explaining to your team why you can never cap a point 1v1 even if there was no enemy player on the point when you were decapping; equally skilled players will always favor the class that is not thief in 1v1 scenarios.

Please keep the suggestions and ideas coming people. The fact that everyone’s ideas and suggestions exist in one thread make the chances of getting at the very least some changes much greater.

I strongly believe a minor acrobatics trait should give stability off dodging or something of the sorts.

As far as might stacking is concerned I think mixing might with entering and leaving stealth could be interesting rather than just spamming blasts in a fire field. I’d rather have a more rewarding means of getting the might stacks; amazes me you can toss pots and spam flamethrower on engi and spam attacks on a necro and get 25 stacks of might without a problem.

I think some access to protection would be a huge turn around in the current meta as a very very simple fix.

The issue at hand is that there is so much to change to really make Thief all around better and address everything; basically redesigning the core class and I just don’t think they’ll dedicate the man power to doing so.

Having spent the majority of the past year in GW2 learning to play thief, mostly in pvp, I’ve tried to summarize why many people view Thieves to be under powered in comparison to other classes. It is my personal belief that the following points are the direct reasons as to why Thieves in PvP (and likely relates to WvW and PvE in a similar fashion) perform worse in general than other classes. Just a precursor before I continue: I do not know every build or every class well, so I chose to analyze class differences through traits and skills for comparison in the first part of this post.

Defensive boons and Mechanics

The first point I’d like to make has to do with trait, skill, and class mechanic access to certain boons and mechanics; this includes protection, retaliation, might stacking, stability, and invulnerability (both direct and full immunity) access. This summary of mechanics access excludes weapon skills, as this is a whole issue in itself for Thief.

Classes with access to protection directly: Every class but Thief

Classes with access to retaliation directly: Every class but Thief and Ranger

Classes with sustainable might stacking: Every class but Thief, Guardian*, and Mesmer*

Classes with access to full immunities: Guardian, Mesmer, and Elementalist

Classes with access to direct damage Immunity: All classes but Thief and Necromancer

Combined stability access (traits and skills): Warrior 5x, Mesmer 2x, Ranger 4x, Engineer 5x, Revenant 3x, Thief 1x, Necromancer 6x, Guardian 5x, Elementalist 6x

Conclusions:

Thief has no direct access to protection or retaliation. Thief has the worst access to stability and is forced into doing so through an elite skill on a 90 sec cooldown that is likely to get you killed; this skill also conflicts with the new DD mechanics being loaded into dodge skills. Thief has no viable way of might stacking without wasting all utility slots and giving up defensive cooldowns. Thief has no immunities, and have just recently recieved a single means of blocking that may be beneficial or may get you killed thanks to the way the skill works.

Before all you thief haters rageslam your keyboard saying that thieves have tons of stealth access, please think about the following. Revealead exists as a self regulating mechanic in combat and now several classes have means to reveal a stealthed player. Many of the classes that excel in pvp or at the very least in conquest (the majority of pvp) have high point contention and multiple ground targeted aoe’s that will rip apart any stealthed player. The shadow arts and acrobatics line of traits have been continuously nerfed since release in terms of a Thieves defensive buffs when using stealth; most notably less and less useful condi clear, a huge nerf to damage reduction while in stealth 50% down to 25%, and normally no way to access the +50% movement speed in stealth because devs enforce this must be in the acrobatics line (a line that has since been gutted to make way for the DD traitline). In general when I find myself trying to stealth for defensive reasons, 50% of the time I’m spammed to death by auto attacks and or aoe spells in both 1v1s and group fights. In sPvP I find stealth to be a very poor defensive mechanic, and find it far more useful for offensive purposes.

Now where does this leave Thief?

- Worst boon access in the game; no viable celestial build, but I don’t mind as I believe celestial might stacking builds are a plague and cause meta stagnation within GW2 pvp.

- Smallest HP pool (alongside guardian and ele) with medium armor and no protection access which allows for huge damage mitigation; effectively the weakest stat based class in terms of defense.

- Worst passive/active defensive mechanics; bad dodges punish the player while every other class with immunities and good defensive mechanic access can just pop skills and make up for mistakes. Meanwhile a Thief player is punished and often one shot when a mistake is made.

- Hybrid weapon sets that function best 9/10 for power based builds, leading to no truly viable condi build for pvp. Another contributing factor is bleed and poison are the main condis a thief can apply, both of which are the poorest scaling conditions (I exclude confusion and agony as they have passive and active dmg which in turn make them more useful than bleeding and posion in terms of straight damage). There is also little access to more than 3 condis at a time, making any players condi clear extremely effective at shutting down condi Thieves. Strong condi builds generally have access to burning, which imo needs to be put in line with other conditions in terms of damage. Venoms leave you with no defensive skills if you want more condition access. The list really just goes on and on for this part…

- Worst passive aoe and ranged aoe in the game. With the removal of ricochet and the nerfs to choking gas, there are no means to safe ranged aoe damage in pvp for a Thief. Thieves are also outranged by almost every classes when it comes to ranged combat.

- Initiative. There are a lot of benefits and drawbacks to a resource managed class. My biggest issue with this is that this severely limits the potential of certain skills due to the possible nature of spamming them if you have the initiative; some notable skills here include body shot, choking gas, headshot, and pistol whip, all of which have severe drawbacks in terms of damage or negative effects such as the root on pistol whip (meanwhile mesmer gets a secondary effect of being invulnerable…). On the flip side initiative allows thieves to be incredibly bursty in perfect scenarios. A system such as initiative is honestly a very delicate one, and I’ll admit it is far from easy to balance being so far in to a developed and functional game.

- Useless utility skill categories. I find signets, traps and venoms to be almost useless in pvp. Most signet active effects are very poor and are often outweighed by similar trick and deception skills. Linear traps are much harder to use than Ranger and DH counterparts, they offer no real damage outside of the ambush trap (trapper trait for might is outweighed by a power based build that needs mobility, stun break, and condi clear to surive), and don’t really provide a secondary bonus unless traited. Venoms are bad, and in all honesty they need a redesign as do the traits relating to them (I will expand upon this later in this thread). Utilities such as this and Thieves innate lack of defensive boons/immunities shoe horn players into rolling 3/3 stunbreaks, mobility, and condi clear utilities.

Now, if you’ve made it through the post so far, I hope you can begin to see as to why Thieves really have a lot of core class issues and also why the sheer number of them make it incredibly hard for devs to actually change much without a huge redesign. What can we make of all this, and what can I/we personally suggest?

Short term/simple general solutions:

- Grant trait or skill access to defensive boons

- Ranged weapon buffs to improve aoe damage through traits or base weapon

- Increase base HP to be inline with other medium armor classes

- Add secondary functionality that is universal for Thieves of any spec to Traps and Venoms; i.e. stun breaks, boons and so on (that are strictly not through traits, as the current traits that grant might on traps/signets/venoms are always left in the dust for another, better trait or traitline).

Long term/Large redesign solutions:

- Redesign venoms* (see explanation in the next section)

- Major overhaul of Acrobatics, Shadow arts, and Critical strikes lines to accommodate possible skill and weapon redesigns as well as better functionality over; removal of useless traits such as guarded initiation, trap mastery, might on signet activate etc…

- Redesign/modify weapon sets to create a more definitive weapon set for condition based builds.

- Redesign of traitlines for a form of self might stacking like other classes, or remove the ridiculous amount of self might stacking classes such as engineer, necro, ele, and ranger can apply. CELESTIAL BUILDS ARE THE PLAGUE OF PVP, why else do you think we see these classes performing best in general in pvp.

- Remove/redesign duplicate traits. Specfically Deadly Trapper, Signets of Power, and Leeching Venoms. Seriously Anet?! Three traits that do the same exact thing, and 3 traits that are never taken in pvp, pve, or wvw because Thieves are shoehorned into 3/3 defensive utility skills the majority of the time.

- Remove Celestial amulet from sPvP thumbs up; for the sake of role differentiation and promoting a more healthy style of pvp in conquest mode.

Specific changes/suggestions

- Venoms and Shadow Arts Traits. First off, basilisk venom is not worth an elite utility slot when venoms can be consumed on dodge/blind and due to the nature of hitting with multiple attacks at the same time, be consumed back to back for a minimized duration. It is also not worth an elite utility slot and cast time when necromancers chilled to the bone exists; base cc, dmg, and chill… Make it a single stack and increase the stone duration to 2-3 seconds flat.

Again I ask why is it that that venoms are consumed on a dodged or blinded attack when logically you aren’t actually hitting your enemy? Venoms should only be consumed on connecting an attack or when hitting an opponent that is blocking, not under any other circumstances.

Venoms desperately need secondary affects as with Thieves current lack of defensive boons and immunities, will almost always slot a trick or deception skill over a venom out of necessity. A viable means of accomplishing this could be by replacing the Venomous Aura trait with a new trait such as “Mutated Injection”.

Mutated Injection – “Flavor text here about being continuously exposed to venoms and so on…” The Thief also injects the activated venom granting might (moving the might from Leeching venoms trait to the new grandmaster) and secondary effects to the thief; here devs could decide which buffs best fits with each venom: cc break, quickness, protection, regen and so on for each individual venom.

To still make use of Leeching Venoms and Venomous Aura, the two traits could be combined into a new trait that still provides the aura and life leech without granting might as a master level trait.

That’s all for now folks, please leave your comments, opinions and suggestions.

I guess Steal as a whole could use a lot more looking into by devs in terms of it’s current functionality; I believe a lot of what was mentioned in the other threads would also be beneficial changes.

Upon checking a few other things today I also noticed that the boons you have stolen are only a single stack/general duration of the boon; say your target has 13 stacks of might, you clear their might stacks yet only gain 1, when if you are technically “stealing” those boons why wouldn’t you get the 13 stacks, or the stacked duration for other boons such as protection. A dynamic check doesn’t seem to exist for stolen boons.

I really love the thief play style as a whole, mostly in pvp, but they really need to consider a more serious overhaul imo. Obviously it’s not really possible currently or in the past few months because of HoT, but with the attention they’ve paid to the community I feel suggestions unrelated to beta events and good communication between player/dev is really what thief needs after HoT drops and things settle.

I often find myself wondering why nothing has ever been done to address the glaring issue of steal in combination with using a ranged weapon.

Several traits make steal an incredibly powerful tool on a short cd; boon strip/steal, dmg tool, healing tool, interrupt, reset for skills, and so on. Sure if you steal with shortbow you can always #5 away, but now you’re just wasting a huge chunk of initiative for no reason. You could trap and run etc.., or waste other important cds, yet all of these ways of re-positioning put you in more danger or in a worse scenario. Why not give thieves an alternative version of steal when using a ranged weapon that still interacts with all of the traits in the same manner, but has a different base skill approach?

One idea could be a ground targeted skill (maybe it summons a decoy or something of the sorts) that taunts for 2 seconds when using a ranged weapon.

Another possible idea could be summoning an ally thief to shiv the target causing cripple and torment for a short duration.

Suggestions such as these could go a long way to adding some more active and skill based defense that Thieves desperately need. Opinions? Ideas?

With proper CC chaining I found Shiro/Jalis with Hammer/Staff and marauders to be incredibly effect last BW. It’s impossible to deal with if you chain the taunt and CC properly, into the staff knock down with your opponent ~80% from the start of the chain. Unfortunately just isn’t up to part with my current Mace Axe/ Sword Shield and Herald/Mallyx combo.