Guild Wars 2

Once you hit rank20 (not sure if it can be done before) you can use dolyak tokens to dump excess orbs and hope for crits on craftables. At which point you can salvage them and maybe get a few slivers/crystals.

Doesn’t happen stupidly often, but it’s pretty easy to hit the 250 orb/dust cap, so you might as well do something with them instead of just destroying the excess.

Sprawl.3891:

bad premades are losing and going back to farming pugs in free tournies, therefore good premades will continue to have longer queue times and casuals will continue to be spawn camped in free tournies or stuck playing horrible hot join matches.

Until there is a ranking/ladder system this actually made things worse across the board in the big picture.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

Not sure if fun, or just extra work to counter good players using the dual bunker & mesmer setup.

It saddens me greatly that I have little to contribute to this thread except my disappointment. Who would have thought that pushing shiny new toys despite the metagame/ranking problems (or lack thereof) would have such predictable consequences…

I was actually testing the Lesser Elementals this morning, and they’re the same as the Greater in every respect apart from damage. The Lesser versions appear to do approximately 10-15% less damage than their bigger cousins, but that’s really about it, from what I recall.

Get a Nostromo. You can thank me later for how much it makes your life easier :p

Binding-wise, on the nostromo mine look like this:
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 W 8 9
0 A S D

D-Pad is F1-F4, little round button above the D-pad is F, Space is Space. Pretty much covers all the bases except for a drop weapon binding, but since I don’t use conjures that’s not really that important, and I could bind it to my mouse if I started using them more often.

I run a power/crit D/D build for PvP atm. With so much condition removal in the game I don’t consider it worth investing heavily into though I know some people who feel otherwise (and are probably not wrong – I just prefer the reliability of the burst, rather than risking smart condition removal neutering my damage).

Don’t put too much stock in toughness. You need around 2k toughness to take 33% less damage than you take with 900 toughness. What you give up to raise toughness that high isn’t worth the trade-off in my opinion (unless you’re bunkering I guess, where damage isn’t important). From a damage perspective, your only stat-sacrifice for more toughness is vitality, and if you’re dropping vit for toughness, you have around the same effective survivability anyway. Obviously there are exceptions to that generalization, since you can run numbers on effective healing and all the rest of that jazz, but if you’re simply trying to get as much damage as you can, you don’t really have any places to stack toughness without it costing you damage stats, or vitality.

Personal preference really at the end of the day. A lot of the viable Ele builds are pretty much just shades of grey compared to eachother. A little stat tweak here and a little trait tweak there only really alters the damage:survivability ratio by a little bit. Certainly not as significantly as some other classes. The cool thing about that is that it gives you a bit of wiggle room to lean toward your preferred playstyle while retaining much of the durability/damage of an alternative spec, but the downside is that we don’t really have many builds that are so drastically different from eachother in actual performance.

Forum ate my last post :|

In any case, this is purely a pedantic argument. Is GoEH bad? No. Of course not. Neither is Ether Renewal. Both have different places in different builds. ER frees up a utility slot for something that isn’t Cleansing Fire, in addition to being the strongest heal we have that isn’t contingent on certain factors being present (water attunement/trait benefits). GoEH is more versatile in that it can provide protection/swiftness if you’re short of other means of getting the boons (s/d I guess would have the most trouble with consistent swiftness/protection uptime, before traits are factored in).

So yes. Nobody is saying GoEH is useless. The point I was making was that you jumped in and basically said OMGYUORSOWRONGWTFISWRONGWITHYOU ISNT IT OBVIOUS?! Leaping in with some patronizing statement, where you’ve stacked the odds in favour of your argument is obviously going to generate a counter-response from someone.

Personally, I prefer ER with my d/d build and having a spare utility slot. Some people will prefer GoEH and using that utility slot for Cleansing Fire. I don’t think it’s as efficient to use our limited skill slots and trait points in such a way, but there are going to be benefits and drawbacks to both options, so it’s build and playstyle dependant.

edit:

But moving past your strawmen arguments, you seem to have conveniently stepped past the point I was trying to make – Ether Renewal is certainly not the best “sustained healing skill eles have” when GoEH is still in existence.

Except GoEH is only the best sustained heal we have when you trait for it, and when you’re able to cast it in water attunement (which is going to be most of the time, to be fair).

Excluding external factors (traits/attunement benefits), GoEH is supbar compared to ER, if you base it simply on the skill itself.

Yeah. Shaving 24s of a 2minute cd sure seems worth it.

Especially since it’s such a game-changer.

:rolleyes:

Pikafan.3792:

Aether McLoud.1975:

@Pikafan: You forgot that you need to invest trait points to get GoEH to 20 seconds cooldown. Without traits it has 25 seconds cooldown giving it less HPS.

Uh, you would use GoEH without the easy-to-get 10 point air trait? And no, I didn’t forget, it’s a given that people are expected to trait appropriately for the maximum efficiency.

Spending 10 trait points just to get an extra 30hp/s out of one heal skill vs another doesn’t sound like traiting appropriately for maximum efficiency at all.

edit: And if you’re D/D, your 10point Air trait is going to be Zephyrs Boon.

Pikafan.3792:

I laughed really hard when I saw the part where “Ether renewal is our most healing over a prolonged battle it simply gives the most sustained healing however it comes at the expense of burst heal.”

Sorry, have you EVER done the calculations on Glyph of Elemental Harmony over Ether Renewal?

At 0 healing power and lvl 80,

GoEH has 6194 healing over 21.25 seconds
Ether Renewal has 5016 healing over 19 seconds

That’s 291.48 hps for the former, and 264 hps for the latter. Not to mention, you are “stunned” for 4 seconds instead of 1.25 seconds for the former.

Seems presumptuous you would write a guide without having a firm understanding of the basic math of skills.

Nice job stacking the odds in favour of one skill.

If you aren’t in Water when you cast GoEH, and don’t have it traited, it actually looks more like this:
ER - 5016 over 19s – 264hp/s
GoEH - 4894 over 25s – 195hp/s
— In Water only – 6194 over 26s – 238hp/s
— Traited only – 4894 over 21s – 233hp/s
—— Traited and in Water – 6194 over 21s – 294hp/s

You’re not always going to use it in Water attunement.
You’re not always going to have it traited with quick glyphs.
That a flat heal is going to be better than a smaller heal plus huge condition removal is debateable based on context.

Additionally, from a PvP perspective, learn to LoS while you’re healing, and learn that Ele is (at the minute anyway) a sustained dps class, so losing 4s of damage isn’t really that big a deal. You’re waiting on cooldowns some of that time, and the whole point is that you wear your opponent down over a long period of time, until, after a couple of burst rotations, he suddenly doesn’t have the skill that will save him available when he needs it.

The condition removal alone makes Ether Renewal the best (PvP) skill we have.

That’s all it means by attunement bonuses.

Source?

Because the obvious interpretation is ‘any bonus that would be provided by an elemental attunement’. There’s no reason the 10% damage bonuses in attunementX shouldn’t work, since they’re a bonus that is applied when in a certain attunement, so if I’m considered to still be in that certain attunement for 5s after I leave it, it should work (otherwise they really are useless traits).

A ton of knockback to bounce people around clocktower and make uncapping it ridonculously difficult.

If you’re planning on transitioning from a Fire combo into an earth combo, popping Ring of Fire after Burning Speed is a total waste.

1) It does no damage to your target, assuming you’re on top of them (which you should be).

2) More importantly, you waste a lot of the duration that could be used for getting 6 might stacks from earthquake/churning earth, and a fire aura if you’re magnetic grasping a fleeing target through it.

Simple Air → Fire combo is RtL, Updraft, Burning Speed, Drakes Breath (only let it tick once), Firegrab.

You can then, if the cooldowns are available, easily transition into Ring of Fire, (Magnetic Grasp if you need a Fury proc), Earthquake, Churning Earth (optional switch to Water before CE finishes casting to proc sigil of battle and/or grab Frost Aura for chill or Fury if you didn’t get it procced off Magnetic Grasp), and Arcane Wave (if you have it – I personally don’t use it) as part of your Earth combo, which will hit like a truck, and give you a lot more sustain for the rest of the fight due to the huge might stacks, and the fury/swiftness stacking. Optionally use Lightning Flash to reposition CE before it lands for maximum effect (you only need to start the cast in a fire field to gain the triple might stacks), and/or Armor of Earth to prevent the cast being interrupted and give you another couple of boons for the Bountiful Power damage.

Simples!

And you’re making it sound like comp has absolutely nothing to do with victory, when it’s pretty clear that it does based on the fact that 95% of the teams I’ve faced on Khylo run bunker guard or engy, thief, and mesmer on the treb. I’m not saying ‘olol I lost therefore it was their comps fault’. I’m saying ‘olol those guys were pretty good, but their comp was what gave them the edge over our mesmer and thiefless comp’.

There is a reason the metagame is what it is. It’s the most robust and efficient use of manpower. Obviously if you’re a good team you can roll nubs with whatever comp you want, but if you knew you were going to run into a team of equal skill, would you bring the robust, take all comers build, or that 5* Ele build you were dicking around in free tourneys with?

No need to answer that question. It’s rhetorical.

If you can’t win it surely has nothing to do with the skill of you and your team, it is obviously all based on the comp you bring (lol).

Yeah, that explains why the vast majority of tourneying teams who make it past the first round run variations of the same metagame comp and do reasonably well with them (lol).

Between 2 teams of equal skill and strategic/tactical awareness, the team with the less robust build stands a much higher chance of loss.

So what happens is that when you have one team of lesser skill to another, and the lesser skilled team brings the more robust build because it’s the current flavour, it’s compensating for their lack of skill.

Of course, the argument can then be made ‘why isn’t your build as robust as theirs?’, which is a perfectly valid argument, and also the reason why we find ourselves with the metagame we have.

(lol?)

Weapon X.5163:

Weird, people dont want to waste time losing to triple bunker teams. Even though that does sound fun…..

This, to some extent.

I personally am pretty interested in playing some Paid Tourneys, but I’m not going to just throw tickets away because the metagame dictates ‘bring bunker guardian, thief, maybe support/bunker ele, mes for khylo’ when neither I, nor the guys I play with have any interest in caving to the flavour of the metagame comp.

Wasting tickets to lose to inferior players being carried by their comp isn’t my idea of fun.

Mine look more like this >:)

kubertz, I don’t think there’d necessarily be a need to remove the existing utility skills. They’d still have an advantage in the form of much lower cooldown compared to the elite, and, should tornado/elemental ever become more impressive, there might still be people who would prefer to use them and have a conjure in their utilities.

Fiery Greatsword disappearing wouldn’t be a terrible loss. I’ve seen it used once in about the last 300 PvP matches. It may see more use in PvE, but I doubt it.

On the flexibility front, I don’t disagree. It could perhaps have a limited number of charges compared to normal (10 maybe), with the trait buff only providing 5 more, rather than the normal amount. As far as the ‘but then people will use it instead of utility conjures’ argument goes, I don’t think that’s something that happens even with our existing sub-par elites. We have more necessary utility skills than conjures, and until that changes, the weapons don’t even come close to competing with the exception of a few gimmick builds where they are of arguable effectiveness.

Engy’s can suck it :P If Tornado was better we could complain about how they have an elite that gives them that

Just an idle thought, but what if instead of Fiery Greatsword, the elite instead summoned an elemental weapon based on your attunement?

Air would give Lightning Hammer, Fire would be Flame Axe, Water Frost Bow, and Earth Magnetic Shield.

Would this give us a more versatile Elite that could compete with Elemental?

Would it perhaps even be too strong, given the immense versatility it would provide? There’d certainly be a good chance it could become the new ‘de facto’ elite over Summon Elemental.

Lingering Elements is apparently not working when combined with any of the +10% damage while attuned to <element> traits. That is to say, when you swap out of one attunement, the bonus 10% damage from the previous attunement will not apply if you have it traited.

Tested using Air Training and Internal Fire.

Can certainly just buy the right pieces from Nightmare set, but it’s stats are pretty bad.

…

Ele downed state is worse than most classes. Your suggestion does not address the problem, which is downed states in general, rather than simply the Ele downed state. So what? They buff the Ele downed state and then some other class has the worst one? Suddenly Necro downed state is the worst, so better buff it. Oh, and Ranger downed state would then be a bit pants, so I guess we buff it next.

Patching one of the problems without looking at why it’s a problem (apart from the obvious reasons I guess) is not a solution. It’s a bandaid to placate one section of the playerbase without actually doing anything to solve the real issue, which is the relative power balance of downed states in general, and how they greatly affect play surrounding it, both to punish players who play well, and to skew the dynamic of combat in favour of certain parties with vastly superior toolsets while downed.

I posted my idea as a solution to the actual problem. You posted your idea with the implication that if they just did ‘x’, then everything would be ok, when that, in fact, is not the case.

Universal Down State for all classes.

Button 1) Toss Rock – deals 200-350 damage or something smallish. Not enough for you to solo someone while downed but enough to at least allow some contribution to a fight so you can rally off the damage if the target gets stomped.
Button 2) Heal Self – Operates as normal.
Button 3) Suicide – Starts on a 10-14s cooldown. Intended for use in situations where you’re not on a point and the enemy team is waiting for you to bleed out, forcing a longer respawn time.

Done.

You still get to contribute in a small manner, but the system doesn’t punish people who are good enough to take 2 people on at once, since they’ll never get the stomp if your partner is wailing on them, and they can’t afford not to stomp because (as it stands right now) most classes attacking for 800-1k damage from downed is enough for their partner to swing the fight his way, kill you, and rally his buddy.

IMO downed should be a ‘Welp, you died. Get your team mates to bail you out if you want back in’. This whole teleporting or mistforming or vengeance → 100b rubbish removes a huge portion of the skill involved when fighting outnumbered, because you can’t afford to be even further outnumbered while trying to stomp and you can’t afford not to stomp because the dude is gonna either get back up and smash you, or continue to push out damage that’s just not quite low enough to ignore.

Maybe you should read my proposed changes again and see if you can find Vapour Form in that list of 3 options I think players should have while downed, since that’s where the ‘10-12 second cd suicide button’ aspect of the discussion originated.

Likewise, not every class has vapour form. Similarly, quite a few classes have knockbacks, which, y’know, will move you back off that point again. But if you think it’s a better idea to prolong the time between when you go down, and when you res at your spawnpoint, please do feel free to continue letting smart teams play 5v4 against your team.

Pretty much every highlevel team has a glasscannon thief. With 900 toughness they’ll instakill you without being seen with their combo.

Out of all the tourney and 8v8 games I’ve played, I have only twice been insta-gibbed by a thief before I was able to react. Both times were by the same thief. That’s not to say there haven’t been times where thieves have come alarmingly close to downing me in a very short period of time, and it’s also ignoring the times where I died simply because I didn’t have the cooldowns up that i needed. Most thieves who open on me force me to turtle a bit until I stabilise, at which point I can turn the tables and kill them if they haven’t already left me alone because they realised they messed up their combo and their window is gone.

Sacrificing the damage I do to be more survivable against one type of build by one class is not worth it. Especially so when it requires them get a series of good crits and to execute their combo perfectly to merely be in with a very good chance of taking me down.

…

I don’t think you understand how this works.

They wipe you at a point. You aren’t on the point (preventing it from ticking points), you’re in some corner or other out of the way. They don’t have to stand beside you to stop you from healing yourself back up, they just have to check in on you every 5-10s to interrupt any ongoing heal and knock you back down to 50% health if you’re above it. At this point you are stuck in limbo until one of a few things happen.

1) A team mate is able to come and res you manually. This is good unless said team mate will be outnumbered and die in the process of trying to res you. It’s also reliant on you having a team mate nearby who can spend time away from whatever other task he needs to do so that he can get you back up, which isn’t necesarily going to be an option if your team is 4vs5 because you’re downed and useless.

2) You wait to bleed out. The second best option if they won’t finish you. It’s much quicker than healing a bit, getting interrupted and knocked back down some health, then healing a bit more until the next time you get interrupted and knocked down some health, and so on. This process is still takes much longer than if they finished you and let you respawn less than 20 seconds later.

3) Your team brings the fight to them in enough numbers that they can afford to dedicate one player to ressing you while they fight off whatever amount of people are on the point. This is a reasonable option assuming they aren’t smart enough to finish you once they see major incoming. It also isn’t the default option because if your team brings 3 guys to try and get you up and cap the point, you have only 1 guy elsewhere on the map (since you’re downed, afterall), and that may or may not leave more of their team to overwhelm you somewhere else.

Either way, there are tactical reasons to let someone bleed out, and it’s especially viable if they’re stupid enough to try and heal up, thereby costing themselves more time in the long run since they will never be allowed to self-res. As long as you keep someone lying on the floor instead of ressing at the next 20s res point you’re at an advantage, because the paltry amount of damage you’re doing in a downed state while solo isn’t going to have any serious impact on a guy who’s just standing on a point bunkering while the rest of his team makes a mess of your, now one man down, team.

I run with 900 toughness and have few problems.

People need to lose this idea that if they want to be survivable they need to sacrifice everything for millions of toughness. Yeah, sure, you can do that, but you’re either saccing HP to do so (resulting in your effective HP being around the same) or you’re saccing damage to do so (in which case you might as well go full bunker).

Because a smart team will interrupt your heal with a small amount of damage? Thereby preventing you from further healing until it comes off cooldown again, and forcing you to wait for the bleed out. Trying to heal up against a team doing that is actually the worst thing you can do, since you’re actively helping them achieve their goal of keeping your contribution to the overall game at a minimum if you’re spending a long time downed.

The idea is not that you use it to prevent people stomping you.

It’s there solely to stop people from leaving you downed on 50% hp outside a point, causing you to lose 20seconds or more while you bleed out. If it didn’t start with a reasonably long cd, people would just use it as the default suicide button as soon as it came up. The enemy should have a chance to down you, and your team mates should have a chance to revive/rally you. If the cd is too short that entire aspect of the game is removed.

Again, it is suggested solely to slightly reduce the impact of a team leaving you to bleed out over 45seconds.

I’d rather they just get rid of every classes downed skills and give everyone:

1) Throw rock – does like, 250-300 damage or something.
2) Heal up – performs as currently.
3) Suicide button – starts on a 10-12s cooldown.

If you’re downed, your best option is that an ally comes and revives you. Not that you can throw some stupid bouncing crippling daggers that hit for 800-1k damage. Not that you can teleport around to delay a stomp. Not that you can root someone or go into mistform if it comes up in time. You lay there contributing little and hoping a team mate can bring you back into the fight, or, if there’s no hope, you can commit suicide after a little while to prevent teams just leaving you outside a point and interrupting your heal so you take ages to bleed out.

The downed system does not reward skillful play against the odds. Oh cool, I just downed one guy in a 1v2, but I can’t finish him because the time I spend stomping will give the other guy a ton of free damage on me, and I can’t not finish him because he’s slamming me for 1k damage every second while his, still alive, team mate wails on me, so they can eventually kill me and rally. If I’m good enough to take on 2 people and kill one of them, I shouldn’t be punished by having little chance of finishing them or surviving the downed players attacks long enough to kill his partner.

Daecollo.9578:

Good.
Now, what do thieves do for other allies?

Kill the people who are trying to kill their allies? :p

I don’t follow.

When you transmute gear you can choose which of the 2 pieces models you want, which of the 2 pieces core stats you want, and which of the 2 pieces socketed gems/runes you want. The runes are where the set bonuses are. They aren’t on the armour pieces.

If you just want Nightmare for the looks, you can, depending on what stats you’re actually aiming for, either buy the crafted armour that has the stats you want, buy the karma armour that has the stats you want, or get the dungeon armour with the stats you want. You can, additionally, buy whatever runes/gems you want. You’re going to make enough gold farming tokens for the set that you’ll be able to afford the rest of your exotics as well as any crafted armour you need to get the stats you want (assuming you wanted crafted armour instead of, say, karma armour, or whatever).

My point is that you can transmute any light armour to look like any other light armour while keeping the stats and/or gems intact, if you so desire.

You could always just get whatever set you want and just transmute it into the stats you need.

Given that the PvP blog was slated for ‘soon’, and wasn’t released until 4 weeks after it’s announcement of ‘soon’, I would extrapolate that ‘a while’ will probably translate into ‘4 months’.

:p

Since the thread has been placed in the sPvP forum, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s sPvP oriented, and therefore, what thieves have or don’t have access to outside of sPvP is irrelevant to the context of the discussion.

From the looks of things, the damage you’re doing is in no way making up for the collossal amount of survivability you’re losing.

Practically no condition removal. One stunbreak on a 75s cooldown. No stability. No protection outside of an earth swap.

To be honest, it looks a lot more like a build that relies on getting your team mates to distract the enemy so you can play the opportunist and sweep in to grab the kill. If the burst fails you have only mistform to get back out, which limits you to either engaging once every 75s, or risking yourself for kills when it’s on cooldown.

Anything that shuts down your movement is going to make a real mess of you real fast, likewise if you get jumped by a high burst class. A bunker will probably kill you before you kill him (not that we have much chance at killing bunkers played well anyway, but the modus operandi is to tie them up and force a team mate to come and assist so they can get points from the objective they’re standing on again).

This has all been pretty general criticism though, which I guess doesn’t help much. Here are the exact problems.

Bolt to the Heart – +20% more damage under 25% is the same as +5% damage for the entirety of the fight. A reasonable portion of the time (in my experience anyway) we’re finishing with Fire Grabs or Churning Earths. They don’t benefit from that trait because they already hit like trucks if they hit. Having CE do 8k damage instead of 7k damage when your opponent is under 25% is pointless, because that’s much more HP than most people actually have when they’re under 25%. You want CE/Firegrab to hit hard, but they need to do it all the time, because they’re our main sources of single-hit burst.

Scholar Runes are only good between 100-90% health. Once you drop below that (which you will) you lose 10% damage, and the last thing you want is for your damage to get worse as you drop HP. Same problem with Vital Striking (which is 10%, by the way). So once you drop to 89% HP you lose 20% of your bonus damage. It wouldn’t be as big a problem if you were playing staff, because you have the range to stand-off, but as d/d? Most fights I’m sitting at around 50-70% HP constantly. I’m rarely above 90% for more than the initial few seconds of a fight, so I can’t imagine losing that much bonus damage guaranteed for anything beyond that initial burst. Seems like a bit of a waste.

Sigil of Superior Force isn’t terrible from a ‘damage right now’ point of view, but compared to something like Minor Accuracy, it falls short. 5% more damage on crits isn’t as good as 12% more crits (with max accuracy stacks) most of the time.

The main problem is that you’re a glass cannon, except you’re insanely glass, and the cannon part doesn’t, in any respect, make up for how glassy you are. If your opening combo doesn’t work you’re boned. If you get caught by a thief without mistform you’re boned. If someone is paying attention to you when you initiate, rather than being distracted by a team mate, things aren’t going to go well (assuming they know what they’re doing). It might work in 8v8 where it’s a zergy mess, but you’d get totally tooled in Tourneys.

In a game where a class exists that can take up to 1m or infinity to kill, There has to exist a class that can kill in a minimum of 3-5 seconds.

One of the biggest problems with the game balance right now is that these 2 extremes exist, and if you’re not playing one of those 2 types of builds, you get screwed by both.

The argument relating to bunkers is a common reasoning for why some classes should be able to wreck you in a matter of seconds. It’s a poor argument not because it’s particularly incorrect, but because bunkers shouldn’t be as survivable as they currently are, which necessitates the need for extreme damage on the other end of the spectrum.

‘This is broken, so that’s why this other thing needs to be broken’ is not the way to balance.

tOss.9024:

Arc.9374:

If you’re fighting a 3v3 at a point and you roll in and drop one of those 3 opponents in a matter of seconds, your side just gained a 50% advantage. That you maybe have to peel back and trickshot from afar is irrelevant. You cut their damage output by 1/3 (or possibly much more if you pick your target properly).

That all your damage is frontloaded is irrelevant at that point. You’ve given your guys the advantage they needed to swing things your way (assuming you’re not playing with terrible team mates).

Then your teammate uses a pushback/stun/imo/ etc, and revives or casts a revive. And the thief/warrior/etcis countered and effectively useless for a good amount of time. And a lose of 1 out of 3 people wouldn’t be a 50% advantage.

…

I’m not trying to be funny here, but this is basic math.

You have 3 guys (including the thief) at a point. They have 3 guys at the same point. The thief rolls in and downs 1 guy, effectively removing him from any significant contribution to the fight at that point. You now have 3 guys. They have 2. You have 50% more guys.

And the ‘lol then you can just use some CC and revive’ is nonsense, because any one of those 3 guys can just as easily use some CC immunity for the stomp. You’re still a dude down, and outnumbered.

It’s not rocket surgery.

The +20% damage on vulnerable oppoents in Water doesn’t work. It gave me an idea to test something earlier, but on testing, it seems more like +10% damage to vulnerable opponents, making it no better than picking up the +10% damage in fire attunement trait for 10 points in fire, which isn’t conditional on having vulnerability on the target.

Would be a good alternative if it worked though.

Piercing Shards – Function bug or Tooltip error
Only adds 10% damage to vulnerable enemies while in Water Attunement, instead of the 20% the tooltip states.

edit Appears to be some weird interaction with Piercing Shards/Lingering Attunements. It works as described when in Water Attunement with Vulnerability up, but does not behave as expected during the 5s of lingering Water attunement/vulnerability when switching to another element.

If you’re fighting a 3v3 at a point and you roll in and drop one of those 3 opponents in a matter of seconds, your side just gained a 50% advantage. That you maybe have to peel back and trickshot from afar is irrelevant. You cut their damage output by 1/3 (or possibly much more if you pick your target properly).

That all your damage is frontloaded is irrelevant at that point. You’ve given your guys the advantage they needed to swing things your way (assuming you’re not playing with terrible team mates).

I challenge anyone on here who talks about the OP of the thief to play one and then come back and tell us how you did.

After all, it is so easy, right?

I did.

After a couple of hundred games on my Ele I checked out a thief, and after about an hour of 8v8 I jumped into some tourneys with a few team mates and was of more use to them than with my roaming Ele build. It’s not rocket science to Infiltrators Arrow your way to a point holder under attack, and then Devourer Venom → Mug → C&D → Backstab → (insert finisher or fight reset of choice) to kill someone. My team mates even kindly lined the victim up so that his back was to me as I was getting into the fray, once they knew I was on the way to relieve them.

There’s no skill requirement in doing damage as a thief. Most of the finesse with the class is in making a clean getaway. The damage is the easy part, assuming you have half a brain-cell and don’t do dumb stuff like HS-spamming into a Mistform or something.

So yeah, I did try it, and found that with an hour of practice (rather than the dozens of hours I spent playing the Ele) I could easily provide a more swift and decisive impact on a fight than my Elementalist could, with no significant cost to my mobility, and no significant difference to my defensive playstyle (since people survive on cooldowns and dodges, moreso than just having a big pool of HP and toughness).

I’d much rather see how all these supposedly pro thieves deal with playing a non-bunker Ele with an hour of practice.

Better hope the guy you’re bringing that partner to fight doesn’t also have a partner though, because then you’re back where you started!

I play guardian. I have the tools, the timing, and the knowledge of how the enemy works to successfully avoid every “1 shot spec”.

It’s ok everyone! Guardians don’t get tooled by thieves! Nothing to worry about. Balance is here. If, of all the classes in the game, a Guardian can survive, then there’s really no excuse for all the rest of you guys, since we all know guardians have the weakest defensive cooldowns and least damage mitigation in the game!

Hey.

Wait a second…

I don’t think you quite understand how application of resources works in a 5v5 game focussed on point control.

If you need 3 guys to take out a bunker before his backup can arrive, how do the other 2 members of your team deal with the 4 members of the enemy team that have free reign? Oh, right, you have to run a bunker in your team to even the balance.

Mandatory classes and/or builds in the metagame ftw.

You guys seem to forget that there are builds out there that aren’t glass cannon or bunker and get rolled on both ends.

If a glass cannon can’t kill a bunker, what hope does a non-glass cannon? If only a bunker can survive glass-cannon burst, what hope does anyone who isn’t bunkering?

There’s more than just two extremes, and the problem is that everyone in the middle gets boned.

You can also use Ring of Fire/Dragon’s tooth at close range, and if you’re quick (and they’re not) swap to earth for magnetic grasp (immobilizing them for DT to hit) and giving you a fire aura as Mag. Grasp is a “leap finisher” (as well as 3 might stacks from using DT in the ring). You have to be fairly close for this to work though, cause grasp is slow.

Magnetic Grasp is a dagger mainhand ability. You can’t have it and Dragons Tooth/Phoenix.

If the point of the game is to bring the player, not the class, then I think that question sort of answers itself.

I love how the most common argument that bunkers are fine is ‘BECAUSE THIEVES!’

If that’s not a telling commentary on the state of the game, I don’t know what is.

They don’t.

Weapon swap sigils share cooldowns, and Sigil of Battle takes precedence over the rest, so if you’re running battle+<something>, battle will proc every 9s on attunement swap, and <something> will proc rarely, if ever.

Source: I just tested it (to confirm what I was pretty sure was the case anyway)

This sounds more like “I don’t want to do this, so no one else can,” issue than an actual balance issue to me.

From the opposite side, it sounds more like “I don’t want to make hard choices balancing my build for versatility, so let me swap on the fly so I can have everything, and make no sacrifices”.

Argument can be made both ways.

Pretty simples.

Take the points the entire team earned at the end of the game. Average it. The average across the team is what each player receives. Toss in a 50% bonus for winning and tada! People get just as much reward for holding points all game being bored out of their brain as the people rampaging around trying to farm glory. Incentive is provided to win and work as a team, rather than zerg from node to node abandoning the prospect of winning in favour of farming more kills.

One obvious problem to this is people going afk and (possibly?) bots.

Bots have no real reason to spend their time farming glory up – it’s not like they can turn it into real money. That’s why they farm mats/gold afterall.

AFK is pretty simple. Don’t do anything for 30 seconds? Kicked out of the match.

Additionally, all glory/rank gains are awarded only at the end of the match, and you only get a reward if you’ve been there for more than 75% of the duration of the match (to stop people from skipping from match to match to get the round-end rewards). Suddenly people have a lot less incentive to leave the losing side because if they bail, they get nothing.

Discuss.