Guild Wars 2

If you’re interested in playing thief, here are the three primary play styles that you can pick from…

Arganthium.5638:

The thief playstyle can, generally speaking, be based on one of three things: psychologically oriented, oriented around single-target slaughter, or oriented around mobility. You, of course, mentioned the psychological aspect.

In sPvP, it’s rare to find good builds that were made just to unnerve people, particularly in tPvP. I see psychological builds as basically including all stealth builds that are either tanky or run 15 or more points in SA (most D/X burst builds don’t run any into SA, though I don’t see why saying that going 10 into SA, for example, should make a build become psychological, especially since most D/X burst builds have 10 or so extra points anyways). The one major example of a good psychological build in tPvP was Cruuk’s build, but that was partially because of the fact that his build was a stealth one that was based a lot around mobility, so he left even good opponents fairly clueless as to his whereabouts. But anyways- psychological builds are good for people that want to play so that they frustrate their opponents, leading to a kitten in their opponents’ armor that they can use against them.

Single-target burst builds are basically any kind of D/X build that doesn’t run any more than 15 points across SA and Acro. They can also be any type of S/P PW burst build. The people who play these kinds of builds are basically the type that is going to step into the boxing ring, and swing once. If that punch isn’t a knockout blow, then they might get to swing once more. If, by then, they still haven’t taken out their opponent, then more than likely, the thief is the one that’s going to be crushed. The other way to play it would be like walking into a boxing ring with two teams of boxers, your team and the enemy team, and finding a weak-looking one and trying to knock him out instantly before being knocked out yourself. Basically, these D/X or S/P burst builds are going to require you to be the kind of player that likes to either blow out your opponents’ brains, or otherwise have your own brain blown out.

The final style is the one dearest to me- mobility. This is for the more positional (as opposed to tactical) type of player, who isn’t necessarily going to go out there and just slam the door on his/her opponent instantaneously. You’re just going to try and limit your opponent’s options while maximizing your own, and when the time comes, you’re going to lay down the iron tactical fist and crush your opponent who- hopefully- you’ve been binding up the entire time.

I’ll mention that there are a few other builds that you can play, but the problem is that these builds tend to either make you an inferior Necromancer or Warrior at best, and honestly, if I wanted to play that way, I’d probably just go roll one of those two classes anyways.

Hope that helps.

lordkrall.7241:

Arganthium.5638:

It’s possible, ANet just supposedly doesn’t have the “resources”.

I would love to see a single game that have 100% balance while still having more than 1 class/weapon/skillset.

I’m not talking about “100% balance”, I have no delusions about the possibility of that sort of thing. But looking at, for example, SCII, which, while having fewer “classes”, also has many, many more variables to deal with, last time I checked, the stats showed that Zerg, Protoss, and Terran were all on relatively equal levels as far as winning goes. Of course, the data were more intricate than just that, but it gives you a good feel for the type of balance I’d like to see as opposed to what we have right now.

I actually agree with the vast majority of the OP (which, for me, is a first- at least, in a very long time). I don’t think that Guards are OP or anything, but given that so many of us go into matches trying to play the same general type of role (I’m included in the list of those guilty for doing so), it’s good to have at least one or two others diversify the team’s strategy.

Warrior and Necro can do nearly everything that other classes can/need to do, and they can do it better as well.

Can’t say how much I hate the Bomb Kit-Grenade Kit facerolling engis that have warped the once rarely seen class that was championed only by excellent players such as Teldo into one of the spammiest classes in the game. Honestly, sometimes I have to worry that they’re even spammier than Scepter/Staff necros.

Spirit Ranger is definitely a good thing to have on your team, as long as you only have one (maybe you can get away with two).

The issue with most sPvP thieves for me is the fact that the vast, vast majority of them are simply bad at their playstyles and/or with their builds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into an sPvP match, looked at one or two thieves’ builds, and then started crying on the inside. I think that thieves are one of the most build-dependent classes in the game, and any build that is even a little unsound in some respect or another is going to unravel pretty quickly. Then of those that can play the game, their skillsets are often overall lacking, i.e. D/P thieves that can’t single-target burst properly, S/D thieves that can’t help their allies with their superior mobility and other smaller advantages, etc. So like you said, having a really good thief on your team is often going to be a complete game-changer, but anything less than that is either going to make your team kinda meh or will actually hurt you.

Mesmer is, IMO, the most balanced class right now (well, that’s not entirely true; the PU condi builds are a bit OP. Still, though…). That stems from the fact that mesmers have a fair number of weaknesses that have to be made up for by strengths in very unique areas. There’s also a lot of skill that goes into (for example) spacing out your clones just correctly so that you can shatter them at the proper time on an S/D thief. For every other class, either those classes inherently have very large strengths with very few weaknesses (and certainly not weaknesses large enough to take them down), those classes have builds with very large strengths and very few weaknesses, or those classes overall have some very significant weaknesses and/or strengths that aren’t significant enough for the regular player to put him or her on par with average players from other classes. Because of the inherent balance in the Mesmer’s case, however, this is much less of a concern, and it’s thus easier to assume that having a mesmer on your team won’t necessarily have overall significant impact, on average.

Definitely agree about non-Spirit Rangers. Sad, actually.

And eles… Compared to other classes, I’d put them on par with non-Spirit rangers at best, and only very slightly below thief.

It’s possible, ANet just supposedly doesn’t have the “resources”.

Cost.6917:

Arganthium.5638:

anzku.2876:

Whats skills are best to get stealth?

Heartseeker + Black Powder
Shadow Refuge
Cloak and Dagger (sometimes)
Infusion of Shadows (sometimes)
Blinding Powder

That list lacks Descent of Shadows, imo.

May be my video will be helpful, guys?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fVE0mJ4Ayc
Some common and not very common spots for Shadow Stepping, to understand it’s mechanics. Annotation is in Russian, but it’s rather clear without it, imo.

DoS is only any good in WvW, and IMO it’s too unreliable to be considered an “amazing” trait. I just listed the most consistent and overall best methods of getting stealth for all game modes.

Wow, thanks for showing us your insane PvE skills, which are almost as good as your build.

I actually think that Steal and initiative are sufficient class mechanics. Neither of them is particularly revolutionary (Steal especially), but they give thieves a unique flavor that you really can’t get close to with any other class.

Here’s a build that you can use for all game modes- I do, anyways. Like any other thief build, it’ll take you a lot of time to become as good as the average player of another class (excluding ele, which is also in a bad spot right now), but if you truly love thief, then it’s certainly doable.

As others have said, try rerolling first. If you still can’t get away from thief (that’s what happened to me…), then just mess around with builds like the one linked above. I’ve made it over the period of about half a year now, so you have the benefit of my experience… And my mistakes.

Same general stats for WvW and PvE.

As was previously stated- certainly not A, D, or E. F probably wouldn’t apply either.

The way I’d define it is this: as the amount of damage dealt by a player to enemies either directly or indirectly who is away from his or her keyboard and/or just using the auto attack increases, the more passive his or her play is. Furthermore, the longer that a player can survive combat while being away from his or her keyboard and/or just using the auto attack, the more passive his or her play is. I’m pretty happy with the first part of the definition, not so much the second part… But I’d say it’s a good start.

Killthehealersffs.8940:

Arganthium what about the Runes of Balthazar and the ability to stop the animation of Withdraw (while u change weapons) + keeping the evasion animation as long as you like ? (+ Lotus Poison if you want as an for extra cleansing protection)
And the Potent Poison + with Sigil of Doom as D/D ?

I’m trying to remember how the stopping of Withdraw’s animation works (I’m pretty sure it’s possible, but it’s somewhat difficult and somewhat inefficient)… Honestly, I’d have to try it out on some golems before I could give you my full opinion on that. Still, though, you’re not applying many condis (and certainly not in a large AoE), and it’s extremely difficult for you to apply large amounts of poison (even with the sigil), which makes LP and PP somewhat ineffective. And either way, LP in itself isn’t very good- it’s just a 4s weakness on a 15s CD. And you still need to solve the problem of being able to remove condis on yourself, as well.

I mean, I’ll try it out as soon as possible, but just from hearing it… I’m not so sure about how good it would be, even if that bug worked, partially because comparisons to the Necromancer still seem to put Necro on top, and you’re still applying very few conditions that don’t last very long anyways (can’t say I’m totally impressed with the 3.5 seconds of Burn tbh).

Bsgapollo.5364:

S/d thief is still extremely good and broken, I’d 10x rather face a d/p thief then this bullkitten.

I’d rather face a D/P build too, but only because I understand how D/P works and how to counter it, and once you know those two things, D/P becomes farrrr worse than S/D (unless in the hands of an extremely skilled player like Caed, but any good player can make a bad build work well).

I encourage you to try actually playing an S/D thief in its current state though. We have two decent skills, one kinda bad skill that we still absolutely have to use for condi removal and mobility (the main attraction of the weapon set), and two virtually worthless skills. Our defensive resources are also extremely lacking compared to other classes as well; pretty much the only one that we have is evades, and given that every evade comes at the cost of time we could’ve spent doing damage, and that evades don’t go through condis, the build has honestly fallen into pretty bad shape. Our offensive resources don’t really make up for it, either; we don’t have a consistent stream of damage like condi builds do, we have virtually no CC or area control, and our skill coefficients aren’t nearly as high as those you might see on warriors, either.

Honestly, although PU Mesmer is kinda OP right now, Phantasm Mesmer is literally going to be among the top four easiest builds or build types in the game (the other three being Spirit Ranger, pretty much any kind of scepter/staff necro, and basically any type of warrior that runs HS and at least 20 into Defense).

So I’d say that PU is probably better, and honestly, it’s actually not as spammy as many if not most other builds/classes in the game. Actually, I’ve found it kind of relaxing.

And shatter mesmer versus S/D thief is probably about 50/50 IMO, as long as you’re not shattering every instant that you physically can. The reason is that a shatter mesmer can have 1-2 little tricks up its sleeves to get out of really tight situations, and, if played correctly, good positioning of your clones and knowing when to shatter them is going to make winning a lot easier. Just position your clones in relatively tight bundle around a point or an area, and when the thief engages you in melee with IS, you can shatter at certain points during or after animations, and the damage is often extremely difficult to stop as a thief.

Bsgapollo.5364:

Valentin.2073:

just think of spirits as moving signets. at least, spirits die not like signets.. signets are just plain boring. spirits take rangers to the frontline. they make rangers tankier and more aggressive. spirit rangers ftw!!!

what rangers need is more buffs on spirits. anet, please give us back that 33% damage on our storm spirit already. thank you.

spirits should be removed from the game. along with other passives & evade spamming.

Maybe you haven’t noticed- it already has been virtually removed. Even before the thief nerfs, though, S/D thieves were extremely vulnerable anyways due to casting times, immobs, the LS in the FS/LS chain, and an overall lack of damage from simply trying to spam 3.

As for my input: while I think that spirits should be removed, keep in mind that eles have 0 viable builds (they do have plenty of fun but inferior ones, though), and all of the thief’s “viable” builds are extremely gimmicky and easily countered, while builds like S/D have joined the ranks of “inferior but fun” builds.

Well, the thing is that while P/D can apply four different types of condis (which isn’t really that much already)(not including Cripple, which is a decent condi but Dancing Dagger is a horrid skill), in practice it’s only able to really apply two different conditions, bleed and torment. Body Shot simply has an extremely obvious cast and a fairly inaccurate projectile beyond a certain range, and even if it hits, the 1s immobilize and 5 stacks of vuln for 3 seconds are not going to mean much.

So that just leaves the auto, Shadow Strike, and CnD. Shadow Strike might be okay if P/D was a melee set or if SStrike was a ranged skill, but since it’s a melee attack, then you usually have to run up to your opponents and then SStrike away, and then run up to your opponents again so that you can SStrike away yet again. The lack of cohesion between the 1 and 3 skills makes this fairly pointless. The same goes for CnD- having to switch between melee and ranged all the time makes the weaponset highly inconsistent.

The auto attack itself isn’t bad, in spite of its massive aftercast, but in all honesty, given that most of the other skills in the weaponset are either bad or inconsistent, Bleed becomes the build’s only real condi, and that’s easily removed by condi removal.

Also, because the only way for this build to have any condi removal is by going for SA IV, P/D builds often become extremely stealth-centric. That’s okay in WvW, but in sPvP it’s inefficient because you’re basically always going to allow your opponent to decap a point because you’re playing attrition. And, of course, CnD ends up having to be your main source of stealth, and there were already the aforementioned problems with that skill anyways. Shadow Shot could be good if it was a single shot that stacked 3-5 stacks of bleed at once, but it’s easily avoidable because you can allow yourself to get hit by one or two shots, revealing your opponent, and evade the rest, taking only minimal damage.

Necro, on the other hand, has decent condi removal through other sources, and can tank pretty well anyways (especially with its 8k more health). Scepter and Staff weaponsets tend to work fairly harmoniously, the condition application is much larger, and there’s a much wider variety of condis that can be applied.

As for other thief condi builds… Venoms are just awful; the ability to apply a single condi from a utility (excluding Skale venom, though the vuln is really negligible anyways) really isn’t anything to be swooning over. Also, evading or missing hits will result in your stacks of poison decreasing, which makes the build even worse. D/D condi builds… LDB is a horrible skill that costs a lot of initiative, has a poor evade and range, and makes you extremely vulnerable. It doesn’t even apply a lot of bleeding anyways.

Kagamiku.9731:

Bhawb.7408:

Kagamiku.9731:

My build for warrior or thief?

And why does capping or decapping a point have anything to do with this? The topic is “best 1v1 class” not “Best 1v1 class who can hold a point”

Because we’re on the sPvP forums, and except for dueling for funsies, the majority of your 1v1s are going to be on fight. And even if you win 100% of your 1v1s, if you can’t control the point at all while you’re fighting, you’re pretty useless.

If the OP wanted to know what class was best at holding a point he would have. I’m only answering his question; whether or not this is the Spvp forums is of no relevance.

We’re not looking for the class that can kill other classes the best or the class that can hold a point the best; both of those, by themselves, are two extreme ends of the spectrum. We’re looking for the class that’s the best at doing both of those at the same time. That class is also going to be the one that can cap the most points and decap the most points, two factors that are equally if not more important.

But if you can’t incorporate points into your definition of 1v1’ing here in the sPvP forums, then you are simply missing the entire point of this sector of the game. If you really just want to run around killing people, go to the WvW forums and discuss it there.

Interceptor.2653:

Interceptor.2653:

Arganthium.5638:

Interceptor.2653:

[snip]

Your sad little examples […]

Do you talk like this to people in real life?

This was a real question.

Okay, I’ll bite. Yes, I do, as a matter of fact, although I usually prefer the word “pathetic” to make my sentence easier to lather in disgust.

Here’s a question for you- do you try to avoid any sort of remotely sound logic in real life, too? Because after having written out a well thought-out response to your already ridiculous post, the fact that this was your only “counterargument” was simply quite… Pathetic.

redslion.9675:

sorrow.2364:

redslion.9675:

Remember: a character with protection and 2500 armor has the same damage reduction as one with 3750 armor. And I’ve seen eles with pretty high protection uptime. And they also have vigor. I don’t know about their hps, though.

So what? A character with 300 base extra armor and 8k base HP is still better.
That is the equivalent of 300 toughness and 800 vitality, which means only with Barbarian Amulet an Elementalist can match the baseline vitality of a Warrior, while still being far away compared to a Berserker Warrior in terms of overall devensive capability.

Protection uptime on Elementalist, also, is way lower that you might espect.
Elemental Attunement provides about 6.5s of protection with 30 in Arcana. Assuming you are popping in and out of Earth on cooldown, the protection uptime is about 50% of the time (including the attunement swap cooldown), that with at least 20 points of trait investment. In real time situations, the longer you stay in earth and the longer you don’t pop into earth while it is available, the lower is the uptime, bringing it to about 20-30% in real-time situations. That leads to the conclusion that having baseline higher damage resistance is better than having 20-30% uptime of protection, because as you weight down its benefits with the uptime, you realize that it isn’t that much.

Warriors have Vigor too, I don’t see the point. Warhorn alone, as far I know, provides condition cleansing along with perma-swiftness and perma-vigor. There is also Vigorous Focus, which provides quite an high uptime on stance warriors.

Yes, but we need that slot for other stuff.

And warhorn needs 20 points in tactics to be used that way, other than the fact it doesn’t give much utility for power builds.

However, try to play a GS berserker warrior. The problem with other weapons sets than hambow is that most of the time you can’t use all 3 slots for stances. Few warrs can afford endure pain other than hambow. And you are forced to stay melee, that means you’ll take even more damage. (GS burst needs Bull’s Charge and Frenzy, or Bolas if you want to play risky. Then you have to use stability for stomping/ressing. That leaves you with at most one slot)

And, you know, considering how things were some time ago, base stats don’t make the difference.

Try a 30/0/25/0/15 GS+LB build with ogre runes and zerker amulet w/ soldier’s jewel. Put a force sigil on GS and fire sigil on LB. Healing Sig and the three non-Frenzy stances. I’m sure somebody’s come up with that build before, but it’s the one I’ve been playing on my warrior and it works like a charm.

GS doesn’t need to use 100b to be good; it already has great mobility and relatively quick animations.

Docherty.8372:

Nobody ever mentions Quick Pockets… it’s only an effective +30% init regen, I suppose, and they nerfed the only other decent init regen traits into worthless POS, forget-about-it.

It couldn’t possibly be that good… then the never-go->15 Acro dogma would be false, and those preaching it noobs. No way.

Quick Pockets is only good when you’re using the same or very nearly the same (ie D/D and D/P) weapon sets as your primary and secondary. Otherwise, there’s a large incentive conflict where you either have to swap to an inferior weapon set for a given situation or you’ll waste at least 5 trait points that you spent to get a GM major trait. That’s why QP is good for Jumper’s build, but not for Lady Nag Nag’s or my own.

I do, however, have to agree that this widespread and extremely dogmatic belief about how far you can go into Acro in WvW is, quite honestly, ridiculous…

Kagamiku.9731:

My build for warrior or thief?

And why does capping or decapping a point have anything to do with this? The topic is “best 1v1 class” not “Best 1v1 class who can hold a point”

A zerker warrior build that doesn’t run HS.

This game is one of capturing points, not killing people. To think otherwise is to blind yourself to the objective, and, as a result, capturing and keeping objectives should always be used to measure a player’s skill, not killing others. Otherwise, what point would there be in having, for example, bunkers? Incidentally, however, I do think that the warrior is superior at 1v1s in the dueling sense as well, though. It’s just that that kind of test is somewhat irrelevant to the point of the game.

Kagamiku.9731:

Arganthium.5638:

Kagamiku.9731:

>>Arganthium.5638

lmao no, a zerker thief will kill a zerker warrior before he even knew what hit him.

As for storngest 1v1 class— Mesmer, easy.

Naturally he shouldn’t die so quickly. He has 8k more health, 7% damage reduction, and the large amounts of passive healing from HS without requiring a cast time gives the warrior a huge advantage. Furthermore, a warr can pop invuln to live at least 4 more seconds, which is absolutely crucial. Warrs also have higher skill coefficients; a level 2 eviscerare does more than a single BS, for example. With the warrior build I’ve been running over the past few days, I’ve run zerker ammie w/ soldier’s jewel and have had absolutely no troubles dealin with burst thieves.

You act like 8khealth and 7%dmg reduction means anything when you’re going full zerker. That’s basically enough to tank one backstab crit from a thief. And i’ll say it as many times as it needs to be said; healing signet is trash on a full glass build.. Why use something that gives passive regen when virtually any opposition even remotely glassy is going to burst the crap out of you. Healing Surge > Healing Signet with full glass build. Blind power and invis is a far better utility than anything a warrior has in a 1v1 when both are going full zerker. It comes down to who manages to get the first few hits in, and a thief is far harder to target than a warrior after his 4 second endure pain is inactive; which a thief can just just disengage from.

I could respond to all of this, but as this seems to be some kind of opinionated rant on your behalf, I think it would be more effective for us to have a duel. I’ll run my warrior build, and you can run the D/P build of your choosing. Oh, and you have to be able to hold a point or decap a capped one quickly.

Until then, why don’t you link your build then show us how you play?

Kagamiku.9731:

>>Arganthium.5638

lmao no, a zerker thief will kill a zerker warrior before he even knew what hit him.

As for storngest 1v1 class— Mesmer, easy.

Naturally he shouldn’t die so quickly. He has 8k more health, 7% damage reduction, and the large amounts of passive healing from HS without requiring a cast time gives the warrior a huge advantage. Furthermore, a warr can pop invuln to live at least 4 more seconds, which is absolutely crucial. Warrs also have higher skill coefficients; a level 2 eviscerare does more than a single BS, for example. With the warrior build I’ve been running over the past few days, I’ve run zerker ammie w/ soldier’s jewel and have had absolutely no troubles dealin with burst thieves.

JETWING.2759:

Cynz.9437:

JETWING.2759:

1 – Mesmer. Impossible to kill.
2 – S/D Thief. Infiltrator’s Return need be removed from game
3 – Thieves (other than S/D)
4 – AI (Pets, Spirits, Minions, Turrets, …)

it is already got removed kind of.. considering it has cast time now so you can’t use it while sitting in CC

.25 seconds is very low cast time to a skill that remove condition and remove the character from danger zone, not forgetting adjacent effects.
Thieves can just #2 > #3 > #3 > #2 and restart the chain again and again. They gap, steal boon and attack ferociously while walk over fire field, dodging every thing, and in the end back to safe place while remove condition, wait and choose how will kill the foe.

Go try out the cast time for yourself.

It’s more like a 1s cast time that now queues with other skills. Also, IR is basically sword’s only condi remover…

JETWING.2759:

Arganthium.5638:

JETWING.2759:

1 – Mesmer. Impossible to kill.
2 – S/D Thief. Infiltrator’s Return need be removed from game.
3 – Thieves (other than S/D)
4 – AI (Pets, Spirits, Minions, Turrets, …)

Lol
“Teef running from me, cant 12k evicerate as eesily. Pl0x nerf”

Zerker warr is definitely the best 1v1 class. It has the highest base health in the game, the strongest heal, heavy armor, great coefs, great CC, amazing condi removal… Basically, best everything.

Zerker warriors with high armor and high health? Where? I do not even see their health

You’re kidding, right?

8k more base health and an additional base reduction of damage by ~7%.

Interceptor.2653:

[snip]

Life doesn’t happen on a piece of paper either, and yet somehow there are certain rules that everything seems to follow. This is no different from GW2, and thus it is possible to make accurate predictions about a variety of subjects.

A 150% damage amplifier in a 1v1 is still, on average, a 150% damage amplifier in a 1v500, as long as you don’t spend lots of time picking out individual targets, or something to that effect.

Your sad little examples are all well and good, but they still fail in two respects: one, that your examples don’t show that “secondary stats” are superior to primary ones of their same type (ie HealPow vs vitality and toughness), and 2) you’re making assumptions that I am, by necessity, suggesting that people only go for zerker stats, for example. A “perfect DPS build” does not mean that you’re going to take only offensive stats, per se; in fact, theoretically speaking, in a perfectly balanced game, the highest damage over time that you are going to do is generally going to require an equally large amount of defensive buildup as offensive buildup. However, my post was an indirect response to your assumption that HealPow cannot be compared to power and precision. And, in this regard, objectively speaking, for the vast majority of builds, nearly every stat with an accurately quantifiable effect (power, prec, crit dam, condi dam, condi due [not always], vitality, toughness, and HealPow) is completely superior to Healing Power.

That was my initial point that you seem to have twisted and turned into my saying that apparently zerker stats are theoretically superior to defensive ones. That is not the case; if you look at some of my earlier theorycrafting, in fact, I was a huge advocate of PVT gear before I took a less dogmatic stance and chose to start comparing between classes rather than comparing the thief to itself.

Oxygg’s point is the one that bridges the gap between defensive stats and offensive ones. Being “well balanced” does not necessarily imply mathematical superiority, especially in the more “modernized” view of mathematical theorycrafting. In fact, for thief, being well balanced as far as stats go, in the current meta, is simply going to make you a less effective warrior. You instead need to utilize initiative and mobility by making fights last shorter periods of time (initiative used more effectively, mobility used to maintain your flexibility while restricting your opponent’s, though you are only able to do so for a limited period of time). That is, however, besides the point.

So whether I’m speaking from the more dogmatic, purely mathematical point of view, or from the cross-profession point of view, the answer is still objectively the same: HealPow is a terrible stat that does very little for you compared to most other stats.

Also, I’m from ET, one of the most underpopulated servers in NA. If that was how we fought, we’d be even worse off than we are right now. As a long-time chess devotee and member of the USCF… We go for the quickest kill and/or the largest advantage.

Interceptor.2653:

Oxygen.5918:

Killing is the ultimate utility.

And you cannot deal damage when you are dead. Builds are always a balance between DPS and survival, especially in WvW, where glass Thieves are nothing but rallybots for the other team when they go down.

Actually, Oxygg has the right idea. Builds can be a balance between those two variables, but in order to find the optimal mix, you have to compare the two in terms of amplification. Amplifying your healing might allow you to live 5% longer, but the same amount of power could let you kill 150% faster. Mathematically speaking, situations like this are actually fairly typical; power is virtually always going to be better than HealPow. There’s also something else to consider. You can, theoretically, increase your lifetime indefinitely, and eventually become invincible (not really, but if you could get the stats, that’s what would happen). Yet, what’s the reason to be able to survive an indefinitely or extremely long 1v1, when you could kill faster and still live just as long with a bit less, say, toughness? The net result is that any build can take more defensive stats than necessary, but you can never increase your damage by more than necessary unless you consistently hit for more damage than your opponents have health, which is a much rarer situation.

You could also just as easily argue that glass thieves are good for downing opponents and thereby rallying allies.

JETWING.2759:

1 – Mesmer. Impossible to kill.
2 – S/D Thief. Infiltrator’s Return need be removed from game.
3 – Thieves (other than S/D)
4 – AI (Pets, Spirits, Minions, Turrets, …)

Lol
“Teef running from me, cant 12k evicerate as eesily. Pl0x nerf”

Zerker warr is definitely the best 1v1 class. It has the highest base health in the game, the strongest heal, heavy armor, great coefs, great CC, amazing condi removal… Basically, best everything.

Build (for everything): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsYVlYm6OncS6E/5Eh3DyO2wqVgmdP4qV1KA-TsAg0CnIKSVkrITRyisFNKYZxkCA

Role: doing a good amount of damage as a guerrilla fighter; scout; catching fleeing opponents; downing targets

Effectiveness: overall, worse in its respective role(s) and in what its roles are than every other class in the game save ele.

Weapon sets: no recent, lasting changes

Power: underpowered; all of our weapon sets are either gimmicky (D/X, P/D, and S/P) or simply inferior (S/D, P/P) when compared to those of most other classes in the game.

Stats: the only usable ones to try and make yourself valuable for your thief-specific abilities are Zerker stats; base stats, condi application, and weapon sets are overall too weak to make use of anything else.

Lol.

First of all, between all of those attacks, you would’ve lived at least 5x as long as you said you did.

If you’re a warrior, you should have at least a small advantage over a BS thief, and most likely a very distinctly superior one. Of course, this isn’t accounting for using an nonoptimal build.

If you think healing power is good, go do the math. My build heals for more than many other “meta” thief builds, and yet it is still one of the worst stats that my build can take. At least precision, which starts off as being valued below than HealPow, benefits from the amount of power I get and can eventually become a very good stat. Healing pretty much just gets worse unless you’re running a build with tons of toughness and little vitality.

I’m lucky because my 10/0/0/30/30 wasn’t technically hurt by the moving of AR, but the patch was definitely a nerf and swapped a good trait for an absolutely godawful one.

You’re being ridiculous if you think that a single full attack negation isn’t powerful. Moreover, with the levels of blind accessible to the Thief, it’s often possible to temporarily gain immunity to attacks in melee under the right conditions since blind now only goes away after a player strikes with an attack that would have actually hit.

Care to elaborate? This is the part I’m really interested in here.

As for the thief’s “level of blinds”, they only come from three places, mainly: from the SA VI trait, from Shadow Shot, and from Black Powder. The VI trait has a small radius and can only be activated upon entering stealth- the usual counter is just to auto once and, since your opponent is so close by, you’ll usually get rid of the blind instantly. Black Powder requires a lot of initiative as well, and requires you to stand in place. Shadow Shot requires a decent amount of initiative but doesn’t really help you get much closer to a BS combo.

Alright, let me back away from the damage then. While damage is an important factor in a skill, its utility and counter-playability is also crucial. [Shadow Shot] has effectively no counter-play to it. You can block the follow-up stab for high damage, but is that really a win since the Thief still gets free movement to you and you are now blind? The Thief still comes on top in this situation. It’s a free one-up on a target player and there’s no proper counter to it. It needs a nerf. Breaking that into a two-part skill chain will fix it.

Spending four initiative for a blind and a teleport, by themselves, is rarely a winning situation for a D/P thief, unless your opponent was already low on health and you’re simply planning on HS’ing him or her to death.

The counterplay is very simple- just evade the shot. It’s extremely obvious, particularly with its coloring.

Free movement to a player isn’t necessarily a winning situation for a thief either, especially when the thief moves into an Eviscerate, CC, 100 Blades, or some kind of burst.

Putting the skill into a two-part chain will not fix it. It’ll still allow you to get the blind, and you’ll be able to get the damage as soon as your opponent stops blocking (in a blocking situation). If anything, it’ll make the skill “more” OP.

The blind and teleport is the most powerful part of this skill. The fact that the thief gets free movement to a target on top of blinding that target is why this skill is imbalanced. The projectile can’t be blocked, it can’t be reflected, and it can’t even be destroyed.

Once again, you’re missing the point of these skill changes. These thief skill changes related to [Infiltrator’s Strike] and [Shadow Shot] aren’t necessarily about raw damage, but rather addressing the issue of free, uncounterable movement to a target (that is often followed up by free hits on said target either via immobilize or blind).

There was a reason that shadowsteps in GW1 were given a 3/4-second after-cast. Also, those shadowsteps never had any immediate damage tied to them. Shadowstep mechanics are incredibly strong—borderline broken—and adding anything on top of that simple free direct-to-target movement is asking for balance troubles.

I think I’ve already addressed in this post and previous posts most of the issues with these statements.

It is not. Projectiles have to travel. [Infiltrator’s Strike] has no identifiable cast-time, no travel time and also inflicts considerable damage. This is why it’s so imbalanced.

IS is also highly predictable, and does in fact have a traveling time (go use the skill on the golems in the Mists, again…). Furthermore, projectiles allow you to stay at range, which is often highly preferable, often have longer immob durations, and have Projectile combo finishers. That “considerable damage” is less than many, many auto attacks in the game, and far less than the majority of 2 and 3 skills.

Again, you have to actually step up to somebody and use that skill. It also has a considerable wind-up and unique activation animation.

It’s certainly less predictable than skills like Shadow Shot, which shoot a very clearly black and large projectile straight at your face before even doing damage. It also does as much damage at <50% health as a level 3 Eviscerate.

Thief with 2,853 power yields a 877 base damage [Crippling Strike] in PvP without any other modifiers. It also inflicts cripple and weakness. Elementalist with 3,310 power yields a 754 base damage [Fireball] in PvP without any other modifiers.

Fireball also has to occur at a range, and isn’t part of a chain, whereas CS is the last strike in a chain of auto attacking strikes. Each of the previous autos deals less damage than Fireball, and they all must be activated at melee range, must hit, and must all hit within a fairly short window of time.

One doesn’t make comparisons without fixing variables. Your situational circumstances mean nothing.

You’re not making any real arguments against my main point: cue-less ranged attacks without projectiles in GW2 are broken and should be readjusted to balance game-play. There are a lot of skills like this. They all should be looked at critically.

One doesn’t make comparisons without considering all of the variables, either. To argue that Crippling Strike- a chain attack that must occur at melee range, must have all of its previous attacks hit, and must have all of its previous auto attacks hit within a fairly short window of time- is better than Fireball, which deals more damage than either of the first two skills in the Sword auto chain at 1200 range, is simply ignorant of the huge amount of complexity that goes into this situation.

Ranged attacks without projectiles tend to require you to be in melee range. Melee range, by definition, requires you to be right up next to your opponent, and that means that your opponent can force you to fight on the battleground of his or her choosing.

Swagg.9236:

Immobilize gives you a free hit.

So does being rooted, but apparently that doesn’t matter to you.

I was able to reliably get [Pistol Whip] off on players. There’s no after-cast. There’s “after-cast” but no more than what you would get from a regular auto-attack. It’s not nearly as bad as you make it sound. You get a free follow-up hit out of it. Given that that free hit is attached to [Savage Leap] damage, has no activation cue and can hit you from 600 range, it’s rather broken.

Go use IS on golems in the mists, go make a video of your doing so, slow down the video to a tenth of a second per second, and then tell me that there isn’t a long aftercast. Also, comparing the damage to Savage Leap is absolutely pointless- that’s still virtually no damage. Furthermore, even if you hit, on average, half of your hits on PW, you’re still doing less damage than or equal damage to many, many other fairly regular 2 and 3 skills across other professions, like Maul, Final Thrust, Fierce Blow, Arcing Arrow, Mighty Blow, Blunderbuss, and Burning Speed, to name a few.

[Net Shot] actually has rather poor tracking and the projectile tends to go astray if used at a range of 600 or more. It’s best used against stationary targets or targets that are rather close to you.

Even so, you neglect to evaluate this skill in the context of the overall weapon set as well as the value of a 2s immobilize as opposed to a 1s one where you don’t have an aftercast.

This attack is clone dependent. You can CC the clone or destroy it. You can also see the clone perform a very obvious leap animation toward you. It’s balanced in that it has a blatant cue that can be dodged or even outright stopped in its tracks via CC or raw damage.

You’re suggesting that we either waste a CC on the clone (which is much more difficult on professions like thief), or we destroy it, which usually takes at least three hits, by which time a mesmer will usually already have Swapped. You still neglect to evaluate the 2s immobilize, cohesion with the rest of the weaponset, aftercast, and a point I mentioned earlier- the predictability of when a thief is going to use IS.

I’ve already suggested a skill functionality change for this as a nerf.

I’m not going to argue against Pin Down needing a nerf, but just an FYI, if everything is “OP”, none of it is.

The player has a walk up to you to perform this skill. That’s the innate balance. Warriors don’t get direct-to-target teleports.

And the hits don’t need to land for the immobilize to work; it’s essentially unavoidable. Furthermore, Savage Leap gives warrior that range, the immobilize is, again, much longer, and there’s no reason to value having to walk up to your target as being higher than teleporting to him or her (as much as you do, anyways)- they both suffer from requiring a melee range to deal damage/immob, and because of that fact, they suffer from things such as AoE’s or predictability.

This uses a projectile that can be blocked and reflected. It also as a 3/4-second cast-time which can be difficult to get off in a pinch.

It also has a longer immobilize, bleed, a combo finisher, and longer range to pay back for those facts. Its cast time is just as long as IS’s overall cast time.

This skill has a long cast-time and a VERY unique animation cue. Despite it having no projectile, I could almost argue that it were balanced.

If you’re going to argue that a Necro MH Dagger skill in imbalanced… I’m really not sure what to say. It still has a much longer immobilize and doesn’t require melee range (which you seem to neglect, in spite of the benefits of range). I’m interested in knowing what objective sources you are using to propose these changes.

[quote=3421084;Swagg.9236:][quote][quote][quote][quote][quote][quote][quote][quote]

Acandis.3250:

• It will add a huge risk/reward factor to utilizing these runes; if you use your elite before you have any condis on you, you won’t get any boons.

For instance: Player A takes Ogre Runes, Player B takes Lyssa Runes. Player A is getting a reward and Player B is at a serious disadvantage.

Risk/Reward.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Arganthium.5638:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

finally, sPvP will be made so casual friendly by then, the population will be stable and healthy, then they will finally make sPvP esports worthy. yay!

This statement is inherently self-contradictory.

doesn’t matter [snip]

How does it not matter? That was the basis of your argument for saying that appealing to casuals will help promote sPvP turning into an ESport.

Gwalchgwn.1659:

I see you took the OP trait-build: 0/0/0/0/0 … I hope you don’t get us nerfed even more with this build!

Next patch:

We didn’t want thieves doing as much damage as they do in the current meta (actually, we didn’t want them to be doing any damage at all), and since stealth = invincibility that you can do damage in, we’ve decided to cut down the thief’s damage by changing all of the trait trees so that 1) you have to invest all 70 of your trait points in them and 2) so that you didn’t get as much damage and/or defense by, for example, not getting Last Refuge. While we still have yet to finish our changes to the thief trees, here’s one of the edits that we’ve made:

• Tree: Free Loot (+1% enemy magic find, -1% thief defense)

Adept:

5 points- Non-improvisation: When you steal, start all of your utilities on their cooldowns. Bundles now do 10% less damage.

I- Critically Slow- you have a 25% chance to gain Delay on a critically weak hit.*

• Delay- skills and actions are 50% slower.

II- Slighted – Stealing also dazes you.
III- Mugged- when you steal, you have a 50% chance to lose half of your gold.
IV- Impotent Poison- when you use a poison utility, it now applies the effects of that poison to you.
V- Shot Ankle- you now have permanent cripple.
VI- Impatient- lose all of your initiative when you enter stealth.

Master:

15 points- Hard to Catch

VII- Pain Response- you are stunned for 20 seconds when your health is below 75%. 10s cooldown.
VIII- Ricochet- pistol shots have a chance to bounce back to yourself.
IX- Go Meld With Something Else- you now have permanent Revealed applied to you.
X- Non-opportunist- at the beginning of each match, you /sit for the first 5 minutes of the game.

Grandmaster:

25 points- Exposed Weakness- you now run around naked and cannot equip armor.

XI- Thrill of Losing- whenever you join a Solo Queue match, you cause your teammates to say “gg we have a thief” and then disconnect. Teammates are routed to another match and you are given Dishonorable.
XII- Last Refuge

*Your base Critical Damage is now 50%, which you can decrease by investing points into what was before the Critical Damage stat. Therefore, if you make a critical hit, you’ll now hit for only 50% damage at base levels.

In another day and age, thieves could tank.

Now, you’re going to have to live on the edge, or you’re simply not going to do anything.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

finally, sPvP will be made so casual friendly by then, the population will be stable and healthy, then they will finally make sPvP esports worthy. yay!

This statement is inherently self-contradictory.

It’s a great idea that the devs are never going to implement because this game is supposed to feature skills that a) do damage and b) are highly spammable.

Paulo.8459:

I really don’t get why people think they can balance classes without even playing them.
I’d like the OP to make a thief and play some tpvp against competent players, not only wvw heroes with zerg builds.

But hey, thieves have an absolutely overpowered skill (shadow shot) wich is basically a free meteor shower!
And everyting without cooldown!!11
Hell, pistol whip is 150% evasion uptime and you can spam it all day long, there is no cooldown!
Who needs more than 10k base health? Pfft, thats for noobs who can’t hit their 3 key fast enough to spam invulnerability!
Who needs high armor? Defensive boons? Blocks? Whatever? Thieves have unpredictable and very high damage (the damage is even higher than meteor shower!) and everthing without cooldown! It’s not fair that every other class drops like a fly if somebody sneezes at them.

Stealth and stealth attacks are SO OP because every time i enter stealth my enemys freeze and are unable to move, so unless i suddenly have to sneeze 3 times in a row, i always land a very nice backstab.
(tactical strike so op btw)

Did i mention that thieves can spam their attacks because they have no cooldown? :O

Obviously somebody here got killed by some mean wvw thieves.

Not to mention- Shadow Shot is an unblockable Meteor Shower!

Blind is incredibly powerful. It gives the Thief effective impunity for the follow up attack. Five seconds of blind is not short. That’s more than enough to negate a follow up attack and it would be an incredibly poor decision to wait out 5 seconds of blind vs anyone given the typical speed of GW2 combat.

Are you seriously arguing that [Meteor Shower]-tier damage is not a big deal just because it’s single target? And it doesn’t have a cool-down? And it’s unblockable?

Also, are you really sure that you know how [Shadow Shot] works? ANet made the bullet unblockable to prevent players from teleporting to thieves and interrupting their attacks as a result of proper use of reflect. However, instead of really fixing anything, they just gave thief free [Meteor Shower] damage that also blinds and provides free movement to a target.

One should be able to block or reflect the movement-triggering projectile. Breaking this skill down into a two-part chain could help this.

Hmm. There are a lot of things wrong with this.

First of all, if you consider things such as, say, using warr’s shield 5 to block for three seconds, or using Guard’s Renewed Focus, or whatever, 5 seconds really isn’t that long. More importantly, however, it only prevents one attack, and the simple counter to that is simply to just auto once and then continue doing what you were planning on doing before.

Secondly, as I told you… Meteor Shower deals more damage than SShot. Furthermore, if you think that this is something unique to thief, it’s not. Ranger’s Maul does more damage, as well as (to list out some skills across various professions: Lightning Surge, Eruption, Rush, Fierce Blow, Counterblow, Final Thrust (>50% health), Counterattack, Putrid Mark, Orb of Light, and Faithful Strike, and I neglected to mention skills that either did 1) lots of condition damage as opposed to direct damage or 2) did far more damage than Meteor Shower did. This isn’t some kind of end-all be-all argument that you’re making here; if you were arguing about something doing the damage of at least a level 2 Eviscerate, then that would be an entirely different discussion.

Thirdly- and this is probably the most important point for you to take away- Shadow Shot is not unblockable. The blind can’t be blocked, but the damage can. Go test it out yourself. Until you decide to do some actual research (instead of just looking at the wiki or gw2skills.net, I don’t feel much of a need to respond to the rest of your post; honestly, I feel that it would be meaningless to do so.

Swagg.9236:

Immobilize usually has either no damage attached to it, very low damage attached to it or has a projectile (outside of passive trait procs). [Infiltrator’s Strike] goes against all of these commonalities. It’s an instant-travel, no cast-time [Savage Leap] that inflicts immobilize.

You fail to realize the actual scope of IS’s actual abilities, and its value in the context of sword builds. For instance, many of those no-damage or low-damage immobs also have immobs longer than just 1 second, such as the engi’s Net Shot, which deals 2 seconds of immob at a longer range, and the engi’s rifle also has high-damage attacks which benefit greatly from having an immobilized opponent. Immob does not give Sword builds many benefits (particularly since the aftercast on IS is too long for the immob to be utilized very well, often), and the range and technically speaking, the CD, are both worse than those of Net Shot. Another similar skill is Mesmer’s sword’s Illusionary Leap/Swap to Blurred Frenzy combo. Swap, to my best recollection, does not have a cast, and so the Blurred Frenzy combo can work well (and even more so because swap has a 2 sec immob as well). On the other hand, again- such combos are difficult with thief if only because of the fact that IS has a long aftercast. Other skills that have longer immobs, have immobs that work better for the weaponset, and/or do more damage include Warrior’s Pin Down and Flurry, Ele’s Shock Wave, Necro’s Dark Pact, and Guard’s Chain of Light. While skills like Pin Down are harshly criticized, the others here are, for the most part, not criticized. To pin that all down on the fact that they’re projectiles or whatever is simply inaccurate; the trade off is that they don’t have to deal with aftercasts ruining any chance of utilizing the immobs, they have longer ranges, they have longer immobs, do more damage, and/or work better with the set.

Furthermore, there is certainly no way for you to compare between Infi Strike and Savage Leap and determine that IS is superior. To the contrary, the Leap Finisher on Savage Leap, the 3s cripple (a highly underrated condition), and the low CD (whether you realize it or not, thief skills have a CD- simply spamming them is a ticket to losing) make this skill very good, and more so in the light that the Warrior’s Sword has an extremely good auto attack and an absolutely ridiculous #3 skill.

Furthermore, you argue that the sword auto-attack is also balanced. [Crippling Strike]
deals astronomical damage for an auto-attack that complete outclasses every other example in the game. The only auto-attack in near competition is the Necromancer dagger auto-attack, however, the only thing with Necromancer dagger main-hand is that you can see those players coming and thus it’s more balanced.

That post requires a lot of fairly wild assumptions to even attempt to justify. For instance, in WvW, I can deal a heck of a lot more damage with ele’s Fireball than I can with thief’s sword’s auto attack when the ele is standing on a wall.

Even so, your statement still lacks sight into a number of other variables. For instance, what about alternative effects (such as conditions, evades, cast times, AoE, etc) on other weapons for other classes? There are some extremely large aftercasts on the thief’s auto on sword (you can check out Jumper’s work on the subject to determine that, since that’s his speciality, although I’ve delved into the area with my own personal studies as well)- how does that fit into the context of other weapons? What about boon strips, the aforementioned range, and the value of the auto in the context of other weapon skills for the weapon set? As for your Necro example- if you can’t see a thief coming after you with his massive aftercasts on his sword, and you can’t predict that he’s going to hit the third auto in his chain, but you can see the same thing for a necro, then, as much as I hate to use this expression, it’s a L2P issue. Even with thief’s teleport, it’s not like the auto chain has some kind of 0s animation.

In fact, even your statement by itself is simply wrong. Guardian’s GS, mace, and sword and Warr’s Axe and Hammer have stronger auto chains in and of themselves, yet they have their own weaknesses just as Sword does. Then there’s considering Fire Ele’s Scepter auto, which deals burn at range, and so forth.

The difference is that while guard can overall heal for more than warrior if specced to do so, the guard is going to do virtually no damage, while a warrior (which has 8k more health at base levels, higher skill coefficients, heavy armor as well, and the best healing skill in the game) will be much more efficient for the amount of damage he supplies (be it to himself or allies) given the amount of healing he has.

That being said- like Deathspike has said, just pick what you enjoy. Personally, I’d prefer guardian (simply because of balance issues in the game right now, and I like the guard’s feel), so just because something is going to overall be inferior doesn’t mean that you can’t choose it.

Not gonna lie; unless I’m playing an OP class/build, I try to remove as many condis as possible. For my sword thief (my main), that usually entails that I use Shadow Return frequently. On the other hand, if I’m playing, say, a warrior, there’s no reason for me to worry too much about removing condis (not that it matters that much, though, since they have the best condi removal in the game…). That being said, don’t use something like, say, Cleansing Flames to remove a couple of stacks of bleed.

I just dislike having condis on me (particularly large amounts of vuln, cripple, chill, weakness, and immobilize) because not removing them tends to result in some type of severe disadvantage that’ll end up killing you pretty quickly.

P/D lacks AoE, only applies two conditions (one of which is fairly hard to get on your opponent if he/she know’s what he’s/she’s doing) (not taking into consideration the fairly easily avoided and short-lasting immob and vuln), has low skill coefficients, requires you to be in stealth often (thus being unable to cap points), and has a very odd and inefficient mixture of both long range and short range attacks, neither of which are any good without the other.

It is, however, fun to use a pistol.

Bambi Is Strong.6083:

Oh such a silly question, we players all know that all ANet employees only play Warriors. Logging on other characters are just part of their job to make it seem like they play something else but seriously when have you seen an ANET employee play a non-warrior class without sitting in town afking or trolling WvW?

This, obviously, isn’t entirely true, but of the ANet employees I have seen, to my best recollection, the majority of them were playing warriors. I remember seeing one that was an ele in WvW, next to his/her warrior friend (no apparent reason they came to ET, the best worst server in NA, especially with our population problems… We told them all about our pop problems and they basically just disappeared into oblivion).

Swagg.9236:

Unreadable offensive skills are unfair. That’s the change to [Infiltrator’s Strike].

Unblockable free movement that has a higher base damage that [Meteor Shower] and also blinds is overtuned. That’s the changed to [Shadow Shot].

Spammable high AoE damage without a real post-cast delay is overpowered. That’s the change to [Cluster Bomb].

Getting to spam powerful attacks with impunity even if someone dodges them, line of sights you or you just start spamming them from outside of range because you can is broken. That is the change to Stealth-triggered 1 skills.

Spammable invulnerability is overpowered. That’s the change to [Pistol Whip].

Excalibur.9748:

Arganthium.5638:

Not gonna lie, the thief changes are absolutely garbage. Better kick thieves further down the hierarchy of classes.

Adding recharge mechanism on top of initiative is a little bit excessive, I agree.

But I fully support a COMPLETE rebuild of thief class, scrapping the entire stealth and stealth attack mechanism to let it fight head on like other classes.

It’s a real shame that this is what Thief needs. However, ANet will never do it because “it’s too hard.” The entire class is utter garbage and will never truly be both fair and effective at the same time. Truly it is the worst class and ANet will never fix it.

Infi Strike has an absolutely dismal skill coefficient of .75, less than the auto attack, and while the animation isn’t exactly readable, the times when it’s being used or about to be used is. Also, no reason for such a low-damage attack with a very small immob (small enough that it’s basically over by the time you’ve finished the after cast) that costs a lot of initiative to be considered “unfair”, especially since “unfair” seems more like a personal viewpoint than a logically based one.

Shadow Shot has a fairly obvious animation (the blinding shot, which does no damage, comes before the actual damaging animation occurs), and in fact does less damage than Meteor Shower does (coefficient of ~1.25 vs ~1.43). The difference is that Meteor Shower is a fairly obvious skill but still has a large AoE that does decent damage, while Shadow Shot is a lot easier to hit but is only single-target. Furthermore, the blind is fairly short (and will probably end if you swing your sword as soon as the projectile hits you, since your opponent will be teleported to you), and only the movement is unblock able; you can evade the skill entirely and completely ruin the teleport as well. Furthermore, if you lay down an AoE as your opponent hits you with SShot, then your opponent could very well land right where you want him or her to.

Cluster Bomb has the most obvious animation ever (extremely slow projectile moving in a long, arcing path that’s flashing on and off and lights up the area where it’s about to land), and the time required to wait between shots (unless you blow up the CB every single time you use it, which isn’t necessarily optimal) is more than enough to justify the fact that it does a decent bit of damage for an AoE (but it does fairly low damage for a non-auto attack that doesn’t deal lots of condi damage/remove condis/etc). Maybe a small nerf is required, but certainly not 12.5%. I wouldn’t argue for anything over 5%.

BS does less damage than a level 2 Eviscerate, and is more predictable than one as well (since it takes longer to prepare the combination). Stealth makes protecting/capping a point exceedingly difficult, and the amount of initiative required for a BS combo and stealth is quite high. Furthermore, you can still deal damage to enemies while they’re stealthed; they can’t without breaking stealth. You can also see when you’ve evaded a BS, which generally allows you to know the thief’s location and makes the combination much more difficult to land. As for the other major stealth attack, Sneak Attack, you just allow yourself to be hit by one, maybe two of the projectiles, evade the rest, and you’ve taken minimal damage while your opponent is revealed.

PW is far from being a “spammable invulnerability”; of the S/P thieves I’ve seen, they say that it is not in fact their main source of damage, but more of an interrupt skill and an occasional burst. Like any other rooting skill, PW makes you extremely vulnerable at the end of your animation, especially with aftercast, because your opponent can basically pin you down. PW also costs a load of initiative.

My god, people. The argument about “base damage” has turned into complete gibberish. However, I’ll try to explain…

The formula for damage in this game is Damage done = (Weapon Strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor), from the GW2 wiki. So, first and foremost: no, there is not some kind of “base damage” (unless you’re talking about damage done with the level 80 amount of power, precision, etc, in which case, obviously, there is). So, as Slim has mentioned, if you have 0 power, then you will do 0 damage (0/[target’s Armor] = 0). If there was some sort of “base damage”, then the formula would look more like Damage done = (Weapon Strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor) + C, where C (“constant”) is base damage. In this situation, then we see that you could still do, say, 100 damage even with 0 power. Looking at lower-leveled players, however, we observe that they don’t deal 100 damage with their attacks (or sometimes even 10 damage), and so we can conclude that such a constant is either very small or, more likely, doesn’t exist at all.

(Note: in theory crafting, a theorycrafter like me will say “relative to base” to reference the level 80 base stats of a player’s profession. This, however, is not quite the same as base damage, because of the variable C that I mentioned earlier that does not in fact appear to exist. Thus, C is a fairly irrelevant variable, which allows me to use “relative to base” as referring to a level 80 character differently than if I was referring to some kind of variable C.)

That being said, every weapon skill in the game has some sort of coefficient to it, as was mentioned in the formula earlier. This coefficient, in a sense, could be considered “base damage” since, at level 80, every profession has the same base offensive stats (precision, power, and critical damage), and thus damage is determined by skill coefficients and weapon coefficients (which another topic, though a much, much different one) more so than by stats.

It’s also not very accurate to say that the coefficient makes damage scale with power; it is in and of itself a variable that needs to be considered carefully and isn’t necessarily constant (particularly when comparing damage across professions). You could just as easily say that damage scales with coefficient. For example, a level 3 Eviscerate has a skill coefficient of 3, whereas a Backstab has a coefficient of 2.4. In other words, at equal stat levels, Eviscerate will deal 125% of Backstab’s damage. In order to make these equal, then, the thief has to increase his total power by 25% so that the damage for these two skills is, on average, the same. In this example, we can see that it’s not entirely accurate to say that coefficient scales damage with power, because we saw that when we held power constant, Eviscerate did an additional 25% of BS’s damage.

So, overall, from what I’m seeing, Slim seems to be more correct about this issue (though I wouldn’t necessarily say that damage is based solely on modifiers, unless skill coefficient is defined as being a modifier, which would then mean that we’re either comparing damage across professions or across different weapons, which… Well, it gets complicated). So when ANet says that Skull Crack is getting a 50% damage buff, it means that SC’s coefficient is being multiplied by 1.5, which would result in a 50% damage buff (dividing the damage formula by itself times 1.5 by the damage formula without that 1.5 multiplier results in a relative damage buff of 1.5).

Still, I’m confused because Acandis said that

Acandis.3250:

Slim.3024:

Acandis.3250:

Decrease the scale with power, not the base damage.

99% of damage skills in GW2 have no base damage, it’s all based on scaling and stat contribution.

Each damaging skill in GW2 has a unique coefficient a.k.a base damage.

Which isn’t exactly the same thing as base damage, but… Yeah. I think there’s just some kind of serious misunderstanding between you guys. /shrugs

Sykper.6583:

So I heard poison is a thing…

Yes, it’s easy for me to apply perma-poison on the class with the best condi clear, and especially with my mesmer and my guardian’s amazing poisoning potential.

The Economy is using us?

All is vain

TL;DR: ANet, unless you can get a grip on those supposedly elusive “resources” that you seem to think don’t exist, then the player base is going to continue falling out for you until you have nothing left to stand on. If you don’t analyze skills within the context of the way you designed them (i.e. slopes w/ healing power, skill coefficients, CDs and DPS, etc) and instead simply listen to others’ interpretations of those skills, this game is going to continue being a sinking ship. I mean, for crying out loud- theorycrafting isn’t that difficult. Just get somebody with a bit of mathematical knowledge (they don’t even need to know calculus) and who took an introductory course to economics, and you’ll already have the base set for a much more well-balanced game.