Retal would be a better mechanic if it provided a flat damage removal aspect, rather than a passive source of damage. It would provide protection against small attacks while not promoting passive play.
I’ve had many fights wherein I’m not being hit at all, but I take 12-16k worth of retal damage, with no solution other than to stop doing anything, which forces me to disengage and get out of combat healing to proc. I can’t remove the buff, and in a fight on mid, there’s going to be enough blasts to keep retal consistently on a number of targets.
If I detonate a clusterbomb ontop of a group of people, I get hit for retal 3x times. In situations where 2 people are ressing someone, retal is up and I’m cleaving I will take 2500~ damage per shot. In those cases, I generally don’t split, and instead still end up taking approximately 800 × 4 shots during my cleave. The downside is that the non-cleaved shots do slightly less damage, take longer to land and are more mitigated by aegis applications.
That said, I think retaliation is a very poor mechanic because it promotes passive play. Most classes simply do not have the variety in their setups to switch from short quick attacks to big ones. Clusterbombs are a rare example of where there is actual counterplay, but in general the priority in a cleaving scenario is to put as much pressure on a corpse as possible regardless of damage intake, so the tradeoff often becomes irrelevant.
its actually working as long as you know the spots. just like every other “teleport” in the game.
You realize that the ‘teleport’ if the trap is activated is to a player who is moving, which means you don’t actually get to control the teleport location in certain circumstances. The fact that someone can trigger a trap, then move onto a different z axis plane and completely remove your ability to use shadow return results in a skill which is inconsistent and unreliable for providing cover to an area of the map. Instead, people have been hiding shadow trap away from places where it will be activated in order to maintain the predictability of the teleport position.
Let me rephrase that: People are actively kittening up shadow trap positioning so that they can use it reliably.
That’s a pretty big issue. Especially since the skill is clearly intended to have a 10,000 range, not 10,000 range unless you step on a rock that was coded on a different topography layer in which case you die.
It’s funny watching these so called “top teams” run necro now and watch how bad they actully are at it. Most top teams just never had a good necro player to begin with which was why it didn’t work out for them or took their time to actully make it work.
We have played with a necro since January(he is considering rerolling now cause of how face roll it is) and i’ve never ever felt like it was the necro that have dragged us down when we have played the top teams, it has been the rotating, the positioning, the corpse control and the corpse control we have sucked at(mainly due to a very unstable team).
Only time i’ve actully felt necro was part of the problem was vs the tripple ele teams.
We have done good vs most top teams, if we haven’t beaten them we felt like we could with enough practice. It have always been a skill issue from our side, like we have beaten TCG in team fights but we always lost cause they are superior at rotatating or have better downstate managment(just an example)Look at symbolic for example(don’t take this offensivly, you are a great guy that is pretty smart too and TP is my fav team <3): watching him play necro vs watching our necro play is like day and night in terms of skill, guess he could be rusty though.
There are maybe 5 necros on eu i can think of that actully play decent and most of them doesn’t have a team, an unstable one like our or their team don’t want to try make it work so they are forced to play something else.All we really wanted for our necro was a way to be able to either disengage or a way to survive against the pressure in team fights but we had almost made up for that anyway with peeling(WOW YOU CAN DO THIS?!), he would have been happy with greater marks(the radius) becoming base line and then unblockable+cd reduction merged into 1 trait and then maybe some life force gaining buffs.
Sorry the randomness of the structure and grammar destruction of this post but i’m a horrible person at typing and i’m newly awake.
Please recognize that top teams are running Necro because even without being skilled at necro, current players who have swapped to the class are providing more to their team as poorly skilled necros than as some of the best of x class that they switched from. Additionally, necros provide more for teams the more of them you bring because of how epidemics and condi removal works.
Condi removal scales in a step-ladder function in a condi removal v time graph. Any condis you apply above that threshold will not be removed, which means stacking condi-applying classes improves the relative effectiveness of each of the condi-applying classes. What’s more? Epidemic scales in effectiveness only with respect to the surplus conditions above the removal capacity, so more necros means more condis that stick, which means more condis that are spread, which again burns removal and creates additional epi targets.
The relative effectiveness of Necro may yet increase or decrease as teams learn how to both play and counterplay against them but while necros were slightly underrepresented on teams, most of the top teams that I know of cut their necros for because of the players behind them.
Okay, so, to the people who don’t know how the build works, please stop chirping.
The 150 power you miss out on from not getting 25/30/0/0/15 is compensated by the +300 power that you can keep on with might, nevermind the +750 you get come burst time . The biggest loss isn’t the difference in burst, its having a much weaker shortbow setup because of 1) no weakness and 2) your sustained damage in shortbow tails off after your stacks start dropping.
Additionally, because 10/30/30 can heal itself to full repeatedly before opening, scholar runes’ 10% additional damage always procs, completely negating the requirement for 25 in power. Ogre works very well too because of how durable the spec is.
And no, you don’t ‘usually maintain 4-6 stacks, since the 10/30/30 runs 2-3 signets, all of which provide 5 stacks of might for 10 seconds. You can easily open on someone with 22-25 stacks of might with assassin’s popped and your scholar’s bonus activated. Basically you lose the 5% in dagger training for +500 might when straight up comparing the bursts. Note that in team fights, alternate sources of might make 25/30/0/0/15 stronger, but that’s part of why 25/30/0/0/15 is considered the most team-reliant spec in the game.
Heads up, you can still blink while stunned with lightning flash, and in the majority of cases the distance will allow you enough time for the stun to wear off before you can dodge roll. Lightning flash’s damage was also significantly buffed, which makes flash into burning speed deal a decent chunk more damage.
I really don’t get why people are crying about the change when the downsides are functionally minimal.
I’ve run a similar build on treb for a very long period of time. The idea is good, but you’re VERY easy to disengage on and once your guild and double ambush are down you’ll probably lose the fight. If you can’t double-trap, the build is very weak. Also, we don’t know if dodge rolling the traps will avoid the vuln, which is a key part of the setup.
Another issue is that without thieves guild, if you lose home point for whatever reason, you will have HUGE issues taking it back, which will force a 2v1 rotation to your backpoint which will lose you mid because you lose the ability to double-up on ambush and tripwire. Soldiers + withdraw just plain isn’t enough sustain against a lot of far-point specs.
Another weakness is that without the vuln stacks, your damage output is going to be significantly lower than it currently is, which means you’re very dependent on landing your whips to have any form of pressure. Since inf strike and return are being weakened substantially, you’ll also end up being very susceptible to condi pressure as well as burst combos. The ambush npcs more than make up for this, when they’re up, but when they’re not its a really dicey proposition.
In spvp, sure, but in tpvp where you’re going to be forced into shield block, then trained the moment you come out of it with next to no mitigation in your kit, you’re going to go down early in fights.
Warriors used to do better when frenzy allowed them to roam into fights and drop a target instantly while their team had stacked stun and immob for them. Now, because their damage comes out a bit slower, they don’t have as much of a tide turning roaming presence. Same thing happened for thieves.
Are you surprised that the meta shifted to condi pressure and attrition after the two premier burst roamers got cut to pieces in terms of balance? Having 1 person at half hp when a roamer arrived simply wasn’t cutting it as a win condition anymore. Giving warriors a token few more condi removal opportunities isn’t going to do much, either, unless they’re given a relatively robust anti-condi engine. They’re just going to need to eat another nade and a half before going down.
Warriors have naturally high vitality which is a natural hard-counter to conditions. If the changes go through and the defense master trait is made available it’s not hard to consider their clears “robust” in conjunction with healing surge.
Yeah, I was expecting a few removals to be added to marginal skills, but their condi-mitigation kit was substantially improved according to the patch notes. I don’t really think their natural high hp ‘solves’ condis for them, though; they’re also the class that’s most negatively influenced by chill and crip.
That said, I’d be really unsurprised if we started seeing something akin to a shout hammer + mace/shield warrior bunker, as condi pressure was the only thing keeping them down. Combined with the new heal cds, warriors can tank up excessively hard. Skull crack is now a three second stun, most of the hammer aftercasts are being reduced, etc.
I suppose it depends how much incoming damage increments adren buildup; if its relatively high, you’ll get consistent condi removal AND incredibly powerful CC out of the deal. For burstier trait setups some of the traits, like berserker’s power, are insane. Berserker’s might with the new berserker’s stance might be very powerful too from both an adren AND condi mitigation perspective.
Anyways, warriors got WAY more than I had anticipated. I figured they’d give mending an extra condi strip or two, and add a -chill and -crip duration to a trait.
I don’t really care what’s done to S/D, but feel free to increase trickshot projectile speed in exchange for the clusterbomb range nerf that everyone was demanding.
In spvp, sure, but in tpvp where you’re going to be forced into shield block, then trained the moment you come out of it with next to no mitigation in your kit, you’re going to go down early in fights.
Warriors used to do better when frenzy allowed them to roam into fights and drop a target instantly while their team had stacked stun and immob for them. Now, because their damage comes out a bit slower, they don’t have as much of a tide turning roaming presence. Same thing happened for thieves.
Are you surprised that the meta shifted to condi pressure and attrition after the two premier burst roamers got cut to pieces in terms of balance? Having 1 person at half hp when a roamer arrived simply wasn’t cutting it as a win condition anymore. Giving warriors a token few more condi removal opportunities isn’t going to do much, either, unless they’re given a relatively robust anti-condi engine. They’re just going to need to eat another nade and a half before going down.
If you know how to time your skills, there’s a window between each shadow assault where you can lift or sink the thief, which will result in him dying rather quickly. Go to a hotjoin with a friend and try it out.
Walk to the white circle, drop a cc after flanking strike hits. Every option he has after that requires him to reposition, or to start blowing huge amounts of initiative or dodges on strikes that don’t get him out of range of your pet/symbols/chaosstorm/whatever.
Not all specs will outlast the initiative and endurance, but you’ll neutralize a lot of his spec’s mitigation and, at the very least, set up teammates who are roaming towards you. Unlike D/P, S/D has a much harder time disengaging from a 2v1.
In team fights, the build’s main weaknesses revolve around how vulnerable the thief is when he attempts to use LS. Many teams aren’t running aggressive 25/30/x spec thieves anymore, but they can swoop into fights and pressure an S/D straight off the guardian nearly instantly, then resume ranged pressure. Additionally, skills like black powder, chaos storm, well of darkness, and any of the movement impairing fields severely lower the pressure that S/D is going to perform on the individuals within the area.
Much like grenade-based condi cleave forced teams to think about projectile mitigating abilities, S/D thieves force teams to think about melee damage mitigation. Which used to be common, but then warriors kinda got removed from the game.
And for all the complaint about these nerfs in tpvp, they were done for wvw and spvp reasons.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner.
In guild wars 1, certain abilities had conditional effects if they were mitigated in a certain way.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Irresistible_Blow
If blocked, Irresistible blow knocks you on your kitten . Also note that the skill is on a 6 second cd, and it costs very little energy. Trying to mitigate hammer warriors damage with block was stupid (instead, you’d take advantage of their kittenty adren build up and blind them when they were about to unleash their pressure combo)
The important thing to note here is that it wasn’t so much ‘evade hate’ as it was ‘types of protection hate’.
Imagine a skill: Poisoned Medicine. Ground targeted Applies 3 stacks of bleeding for x seconds. If affected foe has regeneration, it applies 5 stacks of bleeding and a stack of poison.
Or something like: Protector’s Betrayal: Under your sustained damage level damage, if target opponent is under the effects of protection, x2 damage + 10 vuln.
Or maybe something even like: Rended: x damage. If target foe has 15 stacks of vulnerability, apply deep wound. If not, apply 10 stacks of vulnerability.
Tripwire could be redesigned such that it doesn’t activate until someone tries to evade across it, then it causes 3s kd.
Etc.
Wow, I don’t know why they changed the title. Rightfully so people need to learn to play, and stop complaining about whats OP, and asking for nerfs.
Not really feeling you here. While I agree with all the skills they touched being touched for a reason. That doesn’t mean it was done well. The circumstances that justified some nerfs have changed. PW nerf? Quickness has now been nerfed, Mug has been nerfed. The PW +Mug & Haste build has had all 3 aspects changed as of the previous balance patch.
Venom share is niche and it is not S/P exclusive you can run it with S/D. It’s hard to slot yourself in as a venom spec.
This is not a balanced environment, it is quite clear that it is not and if “Competitive means that the only thing which matters should be skill, not your class” then you still cannot say this. Your builds are tied to your class, and weapons are a part of that. Weapons clearly becoming niche/underpowered how can you stand by your statement that Competitive means only thing that matters is skill when it clear isn’t and underpowered specs are the flip side of the coin to overpowered specs in balance.
In addition as far as weapons themselves, skill usability should not decrease as it has. In efforts to balance dancing dagger they’ve practically taken it out of use, the skill is heavily unused, not for lack of wishing we could use it but this profession is based on opportunity cost for weapon skills and it is seldom worth it. If we had 100 initiative then sure tossing out Dancing Daggers is no problem, but we do not and throwing out Dancing dagger can literally cost you a fight.
I’ve said that I still think that this game isn’t balanced yet.
I’ve also said why I think Pistol Whip was a fair nerf.
Pistol Whip, back prior to nerf, had the same DPS of HB (keep in mind that PW takes less time to channel) while having also a stun and an evade. There was no reason that a skill with so much utilities was able to deal that damage, it’s simple.Dancing Dagger was completely broken before the nerf, not only overpowered. It was pretty obvious.
Right now, DD has its use which is the real use it was supposed to have by design: a snare. You don’t want to use DD as your damage skill, neither to finish off a target. You would use it just to cripple a running away target and it does its job fine.This is sort of what I was getting at. When they nerfed C&D, and DD, like they did it made the OH dagger so unlikable that thieves were forced in to going for D/P. And anyone that was using S/D for the daze build got shafted to.
Now S/D has a decent build, and people are asking for nerfs to it. What’s next P/P and traps is OP, and that has to get nerfed back?
D/D was still viable after Dancing Dagger and CnD were nerfed. It just had a very specific niche. Mug being nerfed completely took it off the table. D/D was an all-in weapon set. If you kittened up your burst, you got demolished because there was no defensive blind option, nor the ability to disengage via 5+2. Subsequent nerfs to elements of that spike (mug) and your ability to set it up (trickshot) are what relegated D/D to unplayable kitten-tier.
Oh man, this thread is producing some GEMS:
Caltrops: be serious. That skill allowed to wipe an entire group of enemies while staying in stealth. It
Where do you find these people? This is hilarious.
Several vertical teleports that did not abuse wall-clipping now have what seems to be a hidden RNG factor that decides whether it works or not. I’ve literally tried some of these blinks from the same angle/distance and had varying results.
This is, ofcourse, as opposed to positioning and angling yourself properly pre-nerf.
I’ve tested for a few hours and had multiple incidents in live matches.
Can you let me know a few of the teleports that are giving you issues? I wouldn’t mind testing this out myself.
Its far less gamebreaking to perform small incremental buffs to skills which are far outside of being contemplated for use than to take significant chunks out of the currently most effective builds.
This is especially important when it comes to emergent gameplay; removing mechanics that are unintended often ends up oversimplifying games to the detriment of their long-term survival. Most non-starcraft RTS games have well documented change-logs as well as server activity graphs that prove this trend. Instead, it becomes more interesting to incentivize in-game solutions to excesses presented by emergent gameplay. Exceptions exist, but they’re rarer than most devs would like to admit; in the end, they have a vision of the game and players creating more out of their software than they’ve envisioned is often perceived as an indictment of their ability to create.
I’ll be entirely honest, I haven’t seen any RNG. It just seems as if the teleport skill placement need to be changed in certain areas so as to prevent body clipping. I’m sure this is far more difficult while using S/D because you ultimately don’t control the location of the teleport, but for infiltrator’s arrow and shadow step, things have been predictable, albeit severely restricted.
I don’t think this is a healthy change, but I can understand wanting people not to be able to teleport from the bottom of clocktower straight onto the point.
And this, folks, is how you derail a thread with pve bullkitten and turn this forum into an unreadable cesspool,
Who cares?
OP is a madbad and all the good posts in the world don’t make a bit of difference.
Most of what people think are intellectual epiphanies are actually posts which have been happening since 2011.I’m sad about it, not mad.
Good posts do make a difference, but our community doesnt have the equivalent of izzy taking notes from ensign or any other dev listening to an articulate and knowledgeable set of players. I was hoping Powerr’s recruitment into anet’s team would help things, but the pvp patch record since he’s joined the team hasn’t really filled my sails with wind. (not hating, though, I’m still really glad there’s a solid player who’s on the inside).
The problem is that if players comment at a roughly equivalent rates, and player engagement/skill/knowledge/lucidity follows the 1% rule and post quality follows Sturgeon’s rule(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law), then from the outset the suggestions the devs are getting are from an unrepresentative sample of loud people who, on the whole, are missing 9 times for every hit they score.
Those are horrendous odds.
I’ve seen games of all genres flourish or fail based upon who devs listened to, how they listened to them, and how communities organized around games. This game is no different.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
And this, folks, is how you derail a thread with pve bullkitten and turn this forum into an unreadable cesspool,
snip
Working from the bottom up:
The post was in the spvp forum, and was clearly designed to address the state of thieves’ viability in spvp. Do you think that Grouch’s dev sitdown’s name changes what the thread was designed to do?
The developers are currently in the process of doing the equivalent of A/B testing with mechanics in the game. There is a rather large body of systemic and organizational literature about best practices for optimization of systems. Having properly organized data sets is one. Muddling sources of input by moving the thread does not help; if wvwvw thieves want to make a thread in the wvwvw section and devs believe that their issues are more pertinent wrt a specific skill or mechanic than what’s listed here, that’s their call.
A bunch of off-the-wall suggestions made by players with little design knowledge is exactly the problem at hand. If you think those types of suggestions are an issue, then you’d want to see the source of the suggestion in order to determine the aim of the suggestion so that you can evaluate it better. A thief in tpvp asking for survivability buffs encounter different scenarios than a roaming thief in wvw, for instance.
I’ll take exception to that idea. spvp’s balance is significantly less plastic than pve or wvwvw. Let me give you an example: if Class A and Class B are carbon copies of each other, but class B is only 90% as effective as class A, then Class B might be excluded from dungeons or have a slightly harder time in wvwvw, but they’ll still be able to complete pve content, and they’ll still be able to sit in a zerg and run around busting down doors and hitting up supply camps. In competitive PvP by contrast CLASS B WILL NOT BE PLAYED. EVER. Want an in-game example of this? Anet nerfed quickness in order to lower the speed at which zerk groups cleared CoF1; no one in the pvp community was complaining about quickness, while lots of people were kittening about the formation of exclusive speedrun groups. The removal of quickness from the arsenals of warriors and rangers has decimated the warrior population and turned them into a huge liability, while it also severely reduced the effectiveness of rangers overall. I don’t recall seeing a single warrior in the previous tournament, whereas warriors STILL zerk farm CoF1.
Competitive balance is more brittle than balance against PvE mobs, accordingly it should be a primary concern. Dealing with PvE mechanics and class desirability can be solved by adding boss mechanics which substantially favor certain classes, whereas the only x-factor in pvp is map design, which iterates far less frequently than changes to dungeons and their mechanics do.
Posts like yours remind me why a lot of quality posters don’t bother to write down their thoughts; too much noise from low-quality posters.
@Archer Henchman.2534 Please get your facts straight before you come and expose your ignorance. Thank you.
You realize your list of ‘proposed changes’ are things that single posters have mentioned, and largely changes that don’t solve any of the issues the the class?
Next, skills have already started to be split between PvE and PvP, so if the change is substantial, there’s no need to maintain it across gametypes (besides for an argument about maintaining shared functionality across gametypes, which is silly, because the different damage modifiers possible in, say, wvwvw, create completely different expectations of players within classes.)
Originally I looked at the skill changes you talked about, but then I realized that all of the proposals on the table are to strengthen those skills, which shouldn’t break any pve/pvp workflow issues.
Given the above, I have no idea how straight improvements to the class which have been requested threaten to ruin pve, nor do I see what spvp gains from commentary from the wvwvw and pve crowd.
Segregating input from different sections of the userbase is standard procedure when performing A/B testing. It allows you to determine who wants what, why they respond differently to differing offerings, and what you can do to maximize a few key metrics. Lumping feedback together in a situation where we KNOW that the strengths and weaknesses of thieves in the three game modes are drastically different. But not only are they drastically different between game modes, they’re also drastically different across an axis of player skill as well as weapon/rune/sigil setup and trait allocation.
Given that muddle of different groups, it makes sense to FURTHER segregate feedback, not to amalgamate.
well, basically it is more like a prediciton you make. As most classes play with energy-sigils + vigor + evade skills (to name a few: updraft, whirlwind, phase-retreat, serpents strike etc.). Basically most classes have 3 dodges every 10 seconds + 1 evade skill/block skill.
Altough there is something called immobilize. The perfect counter to it, which makes it in my eyes balanced overall.
I can’t think of an immob that doesn’t have a clear, dodgeable animation. While they may be an effective “counter” in larger scale fights, in 1v1s-3v3s they’re hardly as effective given their short duration
In 1v1s, and 2v2s, sure. But in 3v3s, immobilizes should be capitalized in order to land bursts.
Surprise shot and chains of light are decent examples of solid spike setup immobilizes that are hard to dodge. Flurry, infiltrator’s strike, devourer venom, signet of earth all immobilize pretty reliably too. Flurry, devourer and the signet aren’t used, though.
lol you really have some nerve. Regardless of where you yourself see the problem in these skills. They still persist everywhere in which both pvpers and pvers can relate. Which is why the old thread was moved so all thieves pvp and pve could post and give A-net a good well rounded opinion on what should be done. Not just listen to spvpers and change the profession based on them, and leave pve thieves out of the loop. What the moderater did was good, and your acting childish about the situation.
A good well rounded opinion on issues in sPvP coming from people who play WvW and PvE?
What?
These issues don’t just affect spvp. If they were to make big changes to the traits and what the skills do, it would be to everyone regardless of spvp or pve and wvw. Therefore they need opinions from everyone in order to please everyone.
What big changes to traits and skills exactly are being proposed here, and when has anet floated potential changes for us to discuss in the past.
Oh wait, none and never.
Thieves are talking about their issues in sPvP. If the issues are compartmentalized, why would you try to have a conversation between people who are discussing fundamentally different issues?
lol you really have some nerve. Regardless of where you yourself see the problem in these skills. They still persist everywhere in which both pvpers and pvers can relate. Which is why the old thread was moved so all thieves pvp and pve could post and give A-net a good well rounded opinion on what should be done. Not just listen to spvpers and change the profession based on them, and leave pve thieves out of the loop. What the moderater did was good, and your acting childish about the situation.
A good well rounded opinion on issues in sPvP coming from people who play WvW and PvE?
What?
6. NEVER apologize when casting. It reinforces that a mistake was made and it makes the caster look incapable.
I find the fact that you’re saying this to be quite sad. If a caster is good and he makes a mistake and apologizes it’s just good manners or sometimes when there are 2 of them they can joke about it a bit.
>>>>>Apologizing doesn’t make a capable and good caster look incapable.<<<<<
I’m also sure that a lot of companies have this business corporate rule for their staff to never say that they kittened up even when they did and apologizing publicly is not even an option. It’s very sad to see you promoting it here.
Also regarding the topic and my experience from watching today’s/yesterday/s SOAC tourney I felt like the map explanation videos were just self advertisement that kept being shoved up my face over and over again which was quite annoying. During the games the things that were mostly called are stomps and players going down which is quite obvious from the HP bars. Calling some of the stomps was quite funny too when it’s just one person stomping another without anyone around, and when the stomp happens the caster tried to hype it up like it was something special and not a completely obvious and inevitable outcome. No calls on wells or other abilities, mostly just players going down/how many people are fighting/rezzing/stopps and self promoting map explanation videos shoved in your face in a repeated manner multiple times.
It has nothing to do with corporate ideals. It’s simply the fact that when casting there are so many things going on, apologizing for a mistake takes away from the viewers experience as well as the casters ability to continue calling plays.
Also, for new casters, apologizing focuses their attention on the mistake rather than the action which can shake their confidence. You will rarely see a professional caster apologize for a mistake. They act like it didn’t happen and move on.
Granted, this is just my opinion. I respect that yours is different.
This isn’t entirely true, but to a certain extent its a good rule of thumb. In more developed caster communities, like those found in SC2, DotA2, or LoL, commentators will make predictions about how the matches will play out. If they’re incorrect, they’ll explain what factors they didn’t consider which led to the surprising outcome.
Examples: We’re seeing a reactor with port come up and he’s been playing pretty aggressively all game, given the timing, we’re probably going to see banshees while he secures his expo. Oh, no, we’re seeing quick ravens! It seems that xyz didn’t want to harrass with that port, he wanted to force a fight at his opponent’s nat and he needed energy for PDDs.
The focus isn’t on the ‘error’ so to speak, but rather on the idea that the play being watched is surprising. When actual errors are made (ie: Archer in chat saying that a res was due to ranger ult vs. it being due to IoL), keeping the focus on dynamic elements of the game becomes rather difficult.
Forgot about shortbow nerf. That one hurt a lot in spvp. I still use shortbow tho because its still out best aoe weapon.
You mean the fact that SB arrows are no longer heat seeking? Seriously, how can a nerf like that impact the thief in some way?
It completely decimated the thief’s ability to provide sustainable levels of pressure from range, entirely crushed the sb as an option to chase someone disengaging and made 15+ points in deadly arts a hell of a lot less valuable because staying in shortbow to apply choking gas’s weakness isn’t as appealing when there’s no sustained damage.
The nerf to trickshot lowers the skill’s sustained damage in team fights by more than 40% on most maps.
You probably won’t notice the difference in hotjoins, because people there will not stutterstep your trickshots intentionally, nor will you notice the difference in ranged pressure because proper rotations aren’t really a thing, and timings are far looser.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
D/D was played as a quick switch after using sb main during team fights in order to mug combo someone down after choking gas, cluster and trickshot had burned through a few cds and brought them to around 50% hp.
And by D/D was played, I mean I was the last person to run D/D, and that’s how I ran it. D/D, however, sucks gigantic donkeyballs vs team comps with D/P thieves for the following reason: You can’t kittening hit their thieves.
Mug, the CnD nerf, and the trickshot nerf all have significantly reduced both the rate at which thieves put pressure onto points during team fights, and reduced the effective window in which they can burst.
More importantly, however, engineers have forced teams to bring walls of reflection and feedbacks, both of which, oddly enough, ruin D/D by severely mitigating shortbow. So instead, now thieves all run D/P or S/D. S/D won’t last a huge amount of time, because the build is rather easy to lock down in a team fight once you learn the animations and understand when the thief is going to be vulnerable. D/P, however, has access both to headshot, shadowshot and blackpowder, all of which are excellent skills which demand respect.
Black Powder, it should be noted, gained a lot from the nerf to frenzy: being able to run warriors and burn frenzies to deal with the blind application of black powder allowed warriors to be a much larger threat than they currently are to D/P thieves. Additionally, trap rangers were quite vulnerable to shortbow pressure during team fights, and their skillset had a lot of synergy with sb + d/d, allowing for cnd backstab into concussive shotted setups for mace skull crack, into dog knockdown into zephyr crossfire. The current D/P + bm setups don’t offer the same amount of residual pressure on guardians, which is just as well, because the currently popular engineer centric team-fights play out completely differently than far point pressure with classes that can disengage + spike pressure on mid.
Ah jeez, I write too much.
A few patches ago is when Mug and Trickshot were nerfed, not when D/D or CnD were changed. D/D was still viable even with D/D and CnD nerfed, but it was very shortbow heavy.
Thief already has a kittenton of applicators for weakness and poison; adding more isn’t fixing the core problem that D/D has: It is a melee weapon set that will not survive in melee for very long. If D/D doesn’t down someone in a very short timeframe, the thief is going to get downed from cleave, and his pressure is going evaporate when he rallies the opposing team.
The solution being proposed is giving thief another applicator for conditions that they are the undisputed best in keeping applied. How does that solve the weapon’s weaknesses, and aren’t the proposed buffs already non-issues for thieves?
Snip
1) Stability is most commonly applied via two classes, eles and guardians, both of which have 0 gcd condi removals in shouts or cantrips. BM rangers running rampage are being replaced by those running spirit and roots, and a ranger’s sustain far outpaces a thief’s ability to push them off the backpoint anyways, so the matchup is rarely going to be anything more than a backcap, then ditch in order to force a 4v5 mid where the thief can quickly burst someone, then threaten to backcap to keep the ranger out of the running. Trading 4 initiative for mediocre damage and poison vs guardian and ele, however, doesn’t really put much pressure on either class.
Second, if the poison only applies under 50% hp, then its being used on targets that can be spiked down, and is going to be used not to mitigate incremental healing, but rather spike healing. Headshot does that better.
If you want to fix P/, /D isn’t the place to do it. Body shot requires far too much setup to be worth the initiative cost, and is a very good candidate for being reworked. The combination between straight power stats on most of P/X’s skills, and the condi-damage weighted auto is the source of the weapon’s issues, not the lack of conditional condition spreading on dancing dagger.
Next: Changing shortbow into reliable ranged damage significantly changes how effective /D is, because /D’s main mechanical setup is stealing, shadowstepping or infiltrating (strike or sig) into CnD range. Note, however, that this ‘surprise’ factor is only really relevant at range. Melee range CnD’s are easily blinded and dodged, and the vast majority of players dodge because the skill is telegraphed, rather than dodging because of the animation, which is why the instant gap closer hits more often than not. If this wasn’t the case, you’d see a lot of thieves learning how to stow-weapon cancel missed CnDs in order to bait out dodges.
D/D doesn’t need poison application, because they apply poison in the following ways:
Choking gas applies poison while you’re in sb. Once you switch and CnD-> mug, the mug applies poison, and then once you’re following up the spike, your autos apply poison. D/D applying poison does VERY little that the weapon set doesn’t already have. If anything, the D/D + SB setup can be argued to have the highest poison availability of any class, running any traits, and any weapons. Adding more onto dancing dagger, which is atrociously overcosted, does nothing to fix the weaponset’s weaknesses.
Finally, at 2 or 3 ini, depending on the damage numbers, DD’s output would be roughly 50% higher than it currently is, per point of initiative. Prior to nerf, DD’s output was 100% higher per point of initiative than it currently is, and it was one of the most powerful single weapon skills in the game. Putting it at 75% of the original keeps DD as a damage option (albeit not at ‘ranged heartseeker range’), while creating interesting cross-class play via combo fields. At 2 ini, dancing dagger would be one of the strongest healing abilities that a thief has by tossing it through shadow refuges or wells, condition removal through guardian symbols, and it would be the single best applicators for confusion, and burning via their respective combo setups. You’d need to build teams to take advantage of this capability, but the potential is phenomenal.
Why would I use dancing dagger for poison when I can use headshot to counter the heal entirely?
If you want /D to be relevant again, revert the change to trickshot, to allow thieves a viable damage option at range. If you’re not running /P, you don’t have the ability to reset at range with triple or quadra self-stealth applications, nor do you have the ability to stay in melee range due to the lack of mitigation coming off black powder.
This means when you go in for your combo, your targets have to be lower hp, and you’re severely penalized if you don’t capitalize on the weapon switch. The changes to trickshot and mug lowered both:
1) The rate at which a thief could attrition someone down into a range where spikes were possible (to the extent that a stutter stepping opponent cannot be hit), and
2) Narrowed the window wherein spikes were successful by removing 2k damage off the combo.
Since d/d’s weapon set cannot survive in melee vs most classes, and since the spike that it sets up has to put the thief’s team in a hugely advantageous position for it to secure a stomp (without powder blinding for stomps is much more difficult, and without headshot, preventing resses is far more difficult), switching into D/D from sb is a huge risk.
D/D meant that your ability to gap close and spike was higher than D/P, but your ability to stay in melee was far diminished.
As for dancing dagger itself, the cripple duration is low enough to give it negligible gap closing utility, and the initiative cost is too high to reapply it during a chase. Because of its bouncing nature, dancing dagger loses half of its effectiveness while being used to chase down a lone straggler. An alternative solution is to drop its initiative cost to 2 or 3, which would allow it to be used for combo-field projectile finisher application. Its damage would need to be lowered 33% if it was changed to 2, though.
D/P cannon power has always been superior than D/D.
D/P has always been superior than D/D in every aspect ( costant gap closing, more burst, istant interrupt, blind field).
The only way to bring /D back is to make it an utility weapon.
A /D thief needs to be kinda like a chill necro, OH dagger needs more control via conditions.
Poison-weakness-cripple are very good for this purpose.
Until a few patches ago, D/D’s spike did equivalent damage to d/p, but with less initiative cost, with vuln added to help others in the spike, and more importantly, it did so more quickly, than D/P and with a lower initiative cap to start. CnD’s windup time was the only setup time between switching from shortbow to spiking, which meant that it was easier to setup with teammates as well, and teammates had additional juice added to their spike.
Also, the follow up, if you’re not harrassed straight off point, was stronger in that you can restealth for less initiative. Where D/D was deficient is that it cannot reset fights very well, and it does not have very much melee mitigation. In terms of damage, though, it edged out D/P.
Its also time, condition and position dependent.
If a mesmer has his ileap on cooldown, I don’t give a kitten if he magic bullets me. If I’m on a guardian and an ele updrafts me at full hp around the point I’m on, I don’t give a kitten. I’d give a kitten if he updrafts me off the point, or if he’s just set up a spike on me, though.
because you can’t cap points while stealthed.
I kid…a little, but seriously—stop painting it as a weakness in conquest mode. Thief is made to be a vulture; picking off the weak or unsuspecting and roaming to trash trebs and steal npc kills. AND THE PROFESSION IF EFFING FANTASTIC AT IT.
Thief also could use some toning down so they can’t dance in and out of a group, nab a kill, and disappear.
I agree. Thief shouldn’t be able to kill anything in a team fight, and should spend their time pveing against svanir and chieftain for the entire match, while not being able to contribute to point captures which constitute 80% of a match’s total point revenue.
Yep.
Why would I use dancing dagger for poison when I can use headshot to counter the heal entirely?
If you want /D to be relevant again, revert the change to trickshot, to allow thieves a viable damage option at range. If you’re not running /P, you don’t have the ability to reset at range with triple or quadra self-stealth applications, nor do you have the ability to stay in melee range due to the lack of mitigation coming off black powder.
This means when you go in for your combo, your targets have to be lower hp, and you’re severely penalized if you don’t capitalize on the weapon switch. The changes to trickshot and mug lowered both:
1) The rate at which a thief could attrition someone down into a range where spikes were possible (to the extent that a stutter stepping opponent cannot be hit), and
2) Narrowed the window wherein spikes were successful by removing 2k damage off the combo.
Since d/d’s weapon set cannot survive in melee vs most classes, and since the spike that it sets up has to put the thief’s team in a hugely advantageous position for it to secure a stomp (without powder blinding for stomps is much more difficult, and without headshot, preventing resses is far more difficult), switching into D/D from sb is a huge risk.
D/D meant that your ability to gap close and spike was higher than D/P, but your ability to stay in melee was far diminished.
As for dancing dagger itself, the cripple duration is low enough to give it negligible gap closing utility, and the initiative cost is too high to reapply it during a chase. Because of its bouncing nature, dancing dagger loses half of its effectiveness while being used to chase down a lone straggler. An alternative solution is to drop its initiative cost to 2 or 3, which would allow it to be used for combo-field projectile finisher application. Its damage would need to be lowered 33% if it was changed to 2, though.
At these lower costs (esp 2, it could be used during p/d rotations in order to set up cripple for CnD without being a waste of initiative. It could also allow for S/D to be less reliant on Larcenous strike as an initiative dump in order to create functionality.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
Mesmer needs the ‘bounce-to-clone’ bug fixed, but besides that they’re still in a pretty good place.
it’s amazing what the power of fotm can do. before the patch no one ever noticed bm rangers and almost all rangers ran trap…
Traps do not put pressure on anyone besides the person on point. With engineers making up a prominent part of teams, warriors falling out of favor, thieves playing differently and mesmers being used proportionally less, on-point cleave has dropped down in terms of value. Being able to throw a bird on an engineer, however, always puts pressure on him, regardless of his positioning.
Been trying to do forum searches and checking posts, but I surprisingly can’t find an answer to the incoming question:
Why, when I currently check my leader board position, does my current rank show as a percentage number?
I initially assumed that this just meant that maybe I had not played enough higher ranked players to establish a leader board placement; but now I am more than 80+ tournament matches in and still no leader board placement.
Since the leader board came out, I have checked it several times to see my placement, and every time it is just a different percentage number. Sometimes the number is lower; sometimes the number is higher. I have seen leader board placements in the top 1000 that have WAY less matches under their belt. Why are they established on the leader board?
Thanks ahead of time for any responses I could get on the topic; much appreciated.
Why are they on the top 1000?
Because they are higher ranked than you are.
What is the % number? Its your rank in percentile. If you’re 75%, that means you’re better than 75% of players. The game has around 3 mil copies sold. If all of those accounts are placed at some default point level to start, then the top 3000 players are in the 99th percentile. Your number changes because relative to the rest of the population of the game, your relative ranking fluctuates when you win and lose.
Damage was never an issue per say for warrior. If anything Destruction of the empowered serves to pigeon hole you most so then benefit, but i need more testing. I just curious what to do. I have tested other classes and there are some face roll ones out there. As in it is easy to become competitive with it in like a day.
Almost switched to guardian. It made me lol at how much simpler it was to play for maximum team benefitKeep testing for new warrior builds man, hopefully you’ll find something that works for you. I remember a few months back when I was reading these forums and people were ranking engineer as even less viable than warrior. Little did they know that Five Gauge was silently testing his new engi build that would later come to be known as the 100 nades build -a build that required a nerf so hard the devs had to redesign Kit Refinement.
100nades didn’t require a nerf, and was mitigated very effectively by solid play; if you weren’t sitting underneath the barrage or knew when to break and evade, you’d essentially get a free kill. The devs have been removing builds that are frustrating to play against, not builds that are necessarily too strong from a team-meta point of view.
Warriors have a number of interesting options, but their lack of condi-cleanse prevents them from running CC-bunker type builds effectively, and they suffer from not having access to a number of critical conditions. Warriors have been experimenting with mace/shield, longbow, rifle and sword for various team roles for nearly a month and a half, but all of them suffer from passive condi cleave and positional issues.
If anything is going to revive the warrior, its not going to be the creation of a new sick warrior build. Its going to be the resumption of teams exploring comp setups that enable warriors, or warriors built to setup certain comps. After that, a bunch of me-toos will pop up, and people will happily believe that the class is perfectly fine. Half of the current wave of HGH engies play horrendously poorly and lose matches, but their teams consider them an asset because of what Ostrich can do. Same thing happened earlier when Khalifa and Powerr were the only people leveraging necro properly.
They don’t do as much sustained damage and they have almost no staying power and limited mobility.
This kind of feedback can only mean one thing. You’re one of those Thief players in hotjoin that are always on the tunnel vision target’s heels spamming 1111111111 in the air, and get flanked by everyone.
It’s a playstyle issue. Once you discover the magic of Shortbows, you’ll never have a complaint about sustained damage, staying power, or mobility again, I promise.
Sustaining pressure on people:
- Between Trick Shot, Choking Gas, and an occasional Cluster Bomb, your sustained pressure on a point is really high, and extremely easy to do. Auto-attack is easily 50% of your pressure, depending on how much initiative you want to put into cluster bombs. Shortbow is still effective in 1v1’s to dish fair damage while not risking yourself, until the opportunity for a dagger combo arises. Thief Shortbow is one of the best weapons, period. Maximize it!
- Problems with staying power is all in the positioning, & disabiling shot & Shadowstep usage. Convert initiative into evades & cripples when the situation demands, while you lay low for a second or reposition.
- Bad mobility. You can slot signet of shadows, which I personally don’t recommend, or you can press Shortbow 5 more often. I’ll remind you that when you’re escaping, a vertical teleport can put you 5-15 seconds ahead of your pursuers, depending on terrain. You can’t even put a price on this in Temple of the Silent Storm or Khylo maps.
Hope this helps you overcome your problems with sustained pressure, staying power, & mobility.
This was true as of the last patch, but with the changes to trickshot the amount of sustained damage put out by shortbow has been cut roughly in half. Thieves don’t put out enough pressure in team fights with just clusters and trickshots anymore.
You can now evade 100% of trickshots at 300 range by tapping leftrightleftrightleftright as you walk away from a thief.
I’m also having repeated “you cannot connect to the login servers” mid match.
This has been a fantastic patch.
Blinding powder =/= Black powder. Otherwise you’re right. /P kittens on S/.
S/D is grossly bad and underpowered, along with 70% of other thief sets ( condi builds, S/P, S/D, P/P, P/D) and along with 80% of thief traits and U-skills.
There is no point into have a reasoning with you.
You are too biased toward your profession. This statement is utterly stupid to be said by a impartial point of view.Lol it’s common knowledge that thief is bad, aside D/P burst, in tPvP.
Go outside of hotjoin for a moment and try the thief, ANY OTHER thief build aside D/P burst with ANY OTHER utility skills aside Shadow refuge, shadowstep and sin signet and take a look at how effective and useful to your team you are.
Even devs said “thief is strong at low elo , but struggles at higher ratings”.
If you believe thief is good , you can draw your own conclusions.
You’re right that thief has very few builds that work, but you’re wrong that that setup is the only one that works.
and what else ?
S/P venom share ?
S/P venom share is a “decent” build, but is still mediocre. There’re tons of builds out there for other profession which can offer a lot more than a venom sharing thief ( terror necro, for example).
The point is exactly this: there’s nothing a thief can do other classes can’t do better.
Aside burst.
Which will be nerfed.
That’s rather incorrect. Venom share isn’t decent. Its trash. I don’t think a single thief in the top 500 runs it. I’m really baffled that people keep talking about it; its bad. Every thief of note runs a build tailored to dealing physical damage.
But there are other ways to run physical damage than d/p burst, and there are builds that provide more total damage output than 25/30/0/0/15.
Start thinking about which classes you’re bringing to a team fight, and what your thief is accomplishing in those situations. Think about what build setups make you effective in the maximum amount of situations. What is your thief trying to do in fights? Burst people down, then try to neut their back point? If so, yes, the mug nerf hurts. The objective of thieves playing like that is to pull people someone to the backpoint, then quickly capitalize on a 5v4 mid with a spike to create a 5v3 situation.
If that stops working because of the mug change, start thinking about other things that your thief can do and then do those.
S/D is grossly bad and underpowered, along with 70% of other thief sets ( condi builds, S/P, S/D, P/P, P/D) and along with 80% of thief traits and U-skills.
There is no point into have a reasoning with you.
You are too biased toward your profession. This statement is utterly stupid to be said by a impartial point of view.Lol it’s common knowledge that thief is bad, aside D/P burst, in tPvP.
Go outside of hotjoin for a moment and try the thief, ANY OTHER thief build aside D/P burst with ANY OTHER utility skills aside Shadow refuge, shadowstep and sin signet and take a look at how effective and useful to your team you are.
Even devs said “thief is strong at low elo , but struggles at higher ratings”.
If you believe thief is good , you can draw your own conclusions.
You’re right that thief has very few builds that work, but you’re wrong that that setup is the only one that works.
People have been getting so off topic in this thread after its main question was answered by J sharp.
This isn’t a thread to suggest balance changes just because a dev replied. This is a thread to discuss the pros and cons of splitting balance across the 3 different game types guild was is split into.
Although honestly, what are the cons?
There’s only one real con, but its a significant one. Its that players migrating from PvE into PvP who have skills doing different things will have their expectations dashed, and as such will be less likely to understand what’s going on. This will frustrate players and make their game knowledge acquired in PvE seem useless in PvP, which is frustrating.
Better documentation, an in-game guide system or similar tools may mitigate that, but generally you’d expect skill x to perform equivalently regardless of where you’re using it.
The big issue with that, which you touched upon, is that sPvP and WvW are balanced with vastly different stats. A lot of the complaints that are levied upon certain classes are only valid in WvW, yet those changes end up being ported into sPvP, where they have negative effects on the meta. From the perspective of balancing in the aims of fostering a competitive community, the risk of WvW and PvE fallout is extreme. The recent quickness nerf was likely aimed at curtailing CoF farming with frenzy and timewarp, not gutting warriors in PvP.
Since competitive players invest substantial amounts of time into the game, the risk of deleterious changes being hoisted upon their community is a threat to the value of their efforts to improve. When competitive players stop seeing value in developing their skills, they leave.
Anyways, that’s the way I see things.
Oh wow.
EU’s thief playerbase is really mediocre if they’re reliant on haste to have impact in team fights. This patch was a massive meta-buff to thieves. Less quickness ressing and spike-potential means less pressure on thieves and less ability to react to shortbow poison+cleave. Many of the skills and builds that made playing thief a liability for team fights have been nerfed significantly.
Multiple ele comps are difficult for thieves, but not because of any haste change. Its entirely because of how effective multiple copies of frost and shocking aura are against thief’s damage output. None of that changed, so why the crying now? We already knew that frost aura was crushing Thief and Warrior impact on fights. The quickness change didn’t make that any different; the problem was independent of that.
Not a single decent thief NA ran haste besides for critical haste, and even then the trait was unreliable and too short to capitalize on in the majority of cases. Big whoop.
- How would you know who runs what? You don’t.
- Since you will never know who runs what, how do you know what most decent thieves in NA would run? You don’t.
- Since haste was more unreliable and shorter to capitalize than critical haste why would a single decent thief in NA invest on a trait that is worst than the sigil?
- A patch that tones down thieves more is a massive meta-buff?
- Why are you even making this a NA vs EU?
Counter-logic gaming much?
I’m not sure if you’re serious about any of these points, or trying to mock the conversation in this thread has been.
I don’t mean to condescend. I’m actually unsure. Are you claiming that its impossible to know what other people are running?
I think people can’t read.
Thieves aren’t bad at all, in fact, thieves are very powerful.
The absolutely necessary nerf to haste has and will continue to see more classes build offensively (those without haste), as they now can afford to be more aggressive, which is really bad for glass cannon thieves.
The end.
I think its the complete opposite. Glassy thief setups have better matchups vs a number of classes when they go glass (necro/mesmer/ranger/ele all come to mind), and in the context of a team fight, the glassier a team is on the whole the better a thief’s cleave and pressure become.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
Not a single decent thief NA ran haste besides for critical haste, and even then the trait was unreliable and too short to capitalize on in the majority of cases. Big whoop.
Critical haste is/was bad. To get it you give up 7& additive crit chance from behind/side. This ends up being +18.5%.
Way too good to pass up.
Not to mention unfavorable situations like hasted heartseeker for half distance or hasted evasive shot for half evasion duration.
Your numbers are wrong. Critical hits do .50 + Critical damage/100. For you to do 18.5% extra damage per hit, you’d need to have a damage multiplier of 114% and hit 100% of your hits from the back or side. Assuming full zerker kitten, 5 scholars and 1 divinity, you get 60% critical damage, not 114%. This means you have a 7% chance to do 110% damage, which works out to 7.7% net extra damage per hit if you hit from the side or back 100% of the time. Overall, the skill is around a 3-6% increase in damage overall depending on where and when you fight. Additionally, the skill does not synergize well with hidden killer (and plenty of people are using that, although I much prefer executioner).
Anyways, just some numbers: W/ fury up it procs around 14% of the time off dual strike, 20% of the time off trickshot, split cluster bombs on as single target and 25% off a dancing dagger. An unsplit, saturated clusterbomb procs it 33% of the time, and It procs around 48% of the time during pistol whip. Unload probably procs it pretty reliably too, but lol p/p. A proc essentially gives you 2 extra attacks (assuming a cast time of 1s/skill. just makes it easy for me to calculate, but the numbers will be rough), and as the numbers show, you’ll probably pop the proc within the first 5 seconds of a fight. This means in a 35 second period you’ll get 37 attacks vs 35. That’s a net increase of 5.7% measured from the worst possible time in terms of ranking the skill’s effectiveness. Over the short term the advantage is far more pronounced (over the course of 10 seconds, its a 20% increase in output. That’s massive for cleaning points while roaming).
Should be pretty obvious from the numbers which types of builds would run one trait over the other. I personally dropped critical haste a while ago because of the drawbacks you mentioned, too, but I still see it used pretty commonly.
All of the numbers are for pre-nerf quickness. Its an unsalvageable trash trait now.
(edited by Archer Henchman.2534)
Oh wow.
EU’s thief playerbase is really mediocre if they’re reliant on haste to have impact in team fights. This patch was a massive meta-buff to thieves. Less quickness ressing and spike-potential means less pressure on thieves and less ability to react to shortbow poison+cleave. Many of the skills and builds that made playing thief a liability for team fights have been nerfed significantly.
Multiple ele comps are difficult for thieves, but not because of any haste change. Its entirely because of how effective multiple copies of frost and shocking aura are against thief’s damage output. None of that changed, so why the crying now? We already knew that frost aura was crushing Thief and Warrior impact on fights. The quickness change didn’t make that any different; the problem was independent of that.
Not a single decent thief NA ran haste besides for critical haste, and even then the trait was unreliable and too short to capitalize on in the majority of cases. Big whoop.
Beep beep. Acandis, time for me to teach you Dota2.
Who cares about whether or not he has pride or not?
If you perform an analysis of development strategies across competitive games and determine which type of balancing technique was more successful at retaining and growing a playerbase, Davinci’s answer is undisputably correct. Not all games that balance with the competitive scene in mind become successes, but the majority of successes balance with the competitive scene in mind. Why is that?
Well, its pretty simple:
Balance is less important when there is a larger field of viable options. When you are a mediocre player, you can do things which aren’t viable competitively and come out as a winner. Because the relative ‘field’ of strategies which can win over inferior opponents is larger, accordingly there are less metagame related bottlenecks.
Additionally, the object of a non-competitive gamer is not to improve, and therefore win. Its generally to enjoy the process of playing. However, this type of engagement with the game leads players to stop playing once the fun value of novelty wears off. Competitive players are not motivated by the fun of novelty. They are motivated by the fun of mastery. Mastery, by contrast, allows for communities to have longstanding pillars of knowledge, as players who stay for mastery tend to play more, and play with the objective of understanding the game, rather than doing stupid kitten which is fun.
It may be annoying that certain things exist within your game at lower levels, but without the longevity provided by competitive players, you rarely get decent stream viewership, tournament prize pools, community produced content, etc. The transition of a player between the casual and competitive phase isn’t done based upon whether or not a game was ‘fun’, either. It is done based on whether or not a game is ‘competition worthy’. The players who still PvE intensely, if you look at the cross-section of desires and complaints that they have, all show signs of playing competitively for decorative features. Players getting angry that they couldn’t get their unbreakable bell, or that they wasted a month of laurels, or that they didn’t have full access to the guild-mission content, etc.
If those players played for non-competitive fun, they wouldn’t mind that pre-buff dragon chests dropped kitten. They would be thinking “wow, dragon fights look kittening cool”. They don’t.
So, since ‘competitive’ players have additional motivation to stay with your game, YOU CATER TO THEM. Their friends who have only a casual attachment to the game end up joining because they like the network effects related to socialization and the novelty of the game, etc.
GW2’s PvE has been developed with competition in mind. Look at the amount of unbreakables, the scaling and gating on fractals, the unlocking process for guild missions, etc. GW2’s Pvp has been developed without competition in mind. You can see which segment of the playerbase has vanished, and it should be entirely predictable based upon the case-studies of previous games why that is.