Guild Wars 2

Honestly Jakare, there’s so much garbage in your entire post that I’m really having to debate whether or not to engage in this discussion with you. For example…

- You can’t dodge roll through a mark you’ve already activated
- 4 sig thieves don’t even look good on paper, I have not the slightest idea what you’re talking about.
- Why would classes be pigeonholed? As a thief I can play a tank, a burster, a high DPS sustain, a far-node assaulter, a VS support build, and a wide variety of other roles. Changing weapon skills so that they had more indirect utility would in fact diversify builds more and, as opposed to what you said, in fact would prevent pigeonholes from occurring, because every class would have a wide variety of utility on each weapon.
- Chilblains tends to be spammed and, in spite of what you say, the chill has been useful in pretty much every situation. More useful in certain situations? Sure, but why wait another 10 seconds for such a situation to occur when you could just use Chilblains now and apply some more chill and DPS on average than you otherwise would? The fact of the matter is that you want to believe that a “good” necro waits carefully for the perfect opportunity to attack, when really most top-level necros will just spam.
- I don’t think you know what utility skills are. One earlier suggestion was a skill that swapped you with your opponent. I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to just allow yourself to be positioned such that the entire enemy team is surrounding you and blasting you to pieces. Also, one of the damage attacks would be the auto. You can’t just invuln past all damage.

You seem not to realize the strategic and tactical advantages of positioning, territorial dominance, and area denial. This is what separates the mediocre players from the best players.

evilapprentice.6379:

I’ve gone into the mists and tested out the casts myself. I have made videos of this for me to go over later on, where I slow down the video to the point where I’m actually moving through at a rate of a tenth of a second per second. I know that the last quarter of the FS animation is pretty much spent just standing in midair, unable to do anything, because I’ve done the tests and I’ve seen it happen. I know that you can’t just slice at will while dodging; you have to allow a certain amount of the cast to occur before you’re able to evade, otherwise the cast is interrupted and you’re just wasting your time. I run an S/D, SB build myself which I have honed over the past few months and continued theorycrafting on, even when I thought there was little else left to learn.

Now, as others mentioned in this thread, if you’re using HS at a wall and don’t go 450 distance, is that an exploit? You said it wasn’t, but aren’t camera angles just as much a feature of the game as are walls? Why shouldn’t camera angles not work similarly? Heck, if I’m facing a wall and I turn 180 degrees, when I use HS I’ll suddenly go the full 450 distance. If I turn my camera 60 degrees to the right, then I’ll go in a direction 60 degrees to the right. Is that an exploit? Both of those change distances, effects- whatever, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem to you. So, if I use HS towards the floor (which is essentially a wall), wouldn’t it make sense for me not to go as far as I otherwise would? Or is that still an exploit?

Now, for the traits, what I see is “revolutionary” is the fact that somebody realizes that Hidden Killer is potentially much, much stronger than Executioner. I see somebody that runs SoM in a stealth build, or that can keep up high levels of stealth while bothering the heck out of opponents. I wouldn’t call it so much “revolutionary”, as you seem to think I’m saying, but rather, “evolutionary”; another small step in the right direction.

As for 30/0/X/X/X thieves, I’ve tried them and they don’t work. Most of the traits in the CS tree are fairly useless and crappy, but, beyond your first 10 points in, every trait in DA is absolutely meaningless, and worse than the traits in CS. Furthermore, DA has absolutely zero initiative regeneration, whereas, to its credit, CS has a slight amount of more initiative regeneration. Since I can take tons of power from amulets and runes anyways, there’s not much point in me wasting traits on power, since I can’t get initiative regeneration and the like from amulets or anything.

If you think that thieves must be big burst, poor sustain, you’re just downright wrong in every manner imaginable. Just attach a soldier’s amulet to a good S/D build and you’ll instantly be a fairly effective tank.

And finally, in what manner does “practical application” show that 30 CS is more useful than, for example, 10 DA? I’ve played tons of tPvP, discussed with a lot of people, and yet that seems to be one of the last things that anybody would try to claim. It’s simply just untrue.

Gwalchgwn.1659:

Arganthium.5638:

And as for your third point, Hidden Killer is almost always superior to Executioner simply because Executioner doesn’t increase your damage by all that much while Hidden Killer potentially increases your damage by 80%, or even more..

Agreed with most besides this point
Hidden killer is very reliable on stealthing and using dagger mainhand. Sword stealth attack isn’t that very strong and for any builds that plays with minimum stealth hidden killer will be a loss of damage. But for Caed’s build, yeah true :P

This is true, of course. I would only use HK with a Dagger MH build, it’s just worthless without Backstab.

HK has always been an interesting trait to me, in that it can potentially significantly boost your damage potential on the one hand, significantly decrease it on the other, or boost some of your damage potential while severely crippling other pieces of it- y’know, that kind of stuff.

evilapprentice.6379:

snip

Okay.

First of all, Jumper’s build does not revolve around this idea that you speak of. Any S/D build can fit in just as many Slices; this doesn’t make those other S/D builds unique, per se. The real idea behind his build is essentially to spam 3 while throwing in a Slice when possible, in spite of the fact that he knows just as well as I do that the casts and aftercasts on each of these attacks leaves you entirely vulnerable to attack, and frankly a single Slice isn’t going to be worth throwing in when you’re taking 5k damage in the meantime. Jumper knows just as well as I do that the aftercast on FS leaves you wide open to attack whether or not you’re planning on evading with a Slice thrown in. His build is a big gimmick which even he has been forced to change; he stated himself that he was trying to change his secondary S/D to a SB, and, in order to do so, he thought it a good idea to change his build to 0/30/0/25/15 which is quite possibly one of the most godawful ideas for a S/D build ever, and yet one he’s addicted to because he can’t find any creative ways to support an SB in his build. Honestly, if his build against top players relies on a single exploitable weakness that anybody can see pretty clearly, I’m not sure that I want to play it.

And as for Cruuk, why either of your first two points even be considered? They’re purely opinion-based and don’t rely on any specific statements or facts to back them up. “I’m fairly sure”? I’m fairly sure that ANet is perfectly okay with the camera-angle tactic, but just saying that doesn’t make me correct.

And as for your third point, Hidden Killer is almost always superior to Executioner simply because Executioner doesn’t increase your damage by all that much while Hidden Killer potentially increases your damage by 80%, or even more.

Finally, I’m fairly insulted that you don’t think that I have ever played thief in competitive sPvP. I don’t think you understand that 100 power only does ~1.6% less damage than 300 precision and 30% critical damage, simply because you haven’t had the creativity or even the slightest thought to figure it out yourself. I don’t think you realize how your bias towards big red numbers makes you ignore the fact of the matter, being that Precision is the worst main stat (P, V, T, Pr, and CritDam) in the entire game, that 1 point of power is equivalent, at base levels, to what is literally more than 4 points of precision. Even if I haven’t played tPvP in my entire life (and I do a lot of tPvP), I think that your lack of creativity, your little box of thought entirely removes any credibility you may have otherwise had in this matter.

Lux.7169:

It’s definitely the high skill ceiling. For example, Caed will always try to headshot your heal after he bursts you while a bad thief will try and HS you down to kill you. Also bad thieves use HS without properly telegraphing it after an enemy dodges. There is just so much room to be bad and so much room to be good. The best thieves are fully aware of their strengths and their weaknesses.

Honestly I used to be a very bad thief until they nerfed Haste. Now I believe I am one of the top 10 D/P on NA. Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking though.

I could believe that actually. But maybe other D/P players just suck. :P

Probably won’t be an accurate representation of the population, but…

1) S/D + SB
2) 10/0/0/30/30
3) sPvP

I’m not claiming to be a great thief, or even a good one, but I’m pretty sure I can spot out a good one from a bad one any day of the week.

If you see a player spamming one attack, they’re playing the class wrong. They’re easily predictable and thus counterable, and things like HS spam don’t even do all that much damage anyways.

Does thief have a higher skill ceiling? I think so. I can count the number of good thieves that I know of on one hand, and really, off the top of my head, I can only think of two (one of which retired from the game for a while but has since returned). Playing a thief “well”, as I’ve found, isn’t good enough.

Copying Jumper’s build, running through his guide, and playing the build isn’t going to make you a top thief (now, as for Spirit Rangers…). In fact, copying builds at all tends not to be good; you have to develop your builds yourself in order to truly understand the purpose behind them, in order to fully appreciate every little detail of those builds. And even then, there are extremely few people that are actually good at making builds in the first place. Cruuk is certainly one of the better ones; his build has a strategy and uses some very interesting (although, for me, partially disagreeable, ultimately, though it depends on play style) ideas. For example, he runs Hidden Killer, which, as it so happens, makes his build one of the only times I have ever supported putting points in to Critical Strikes. See, Cruuk’s build is an intelligent build, and it’s a unique one. And, on top of all of that, he built it himself. That’s a build that I actually appreciate, even though it’s one that I ultimately choose not to play.

So yeah, you’re right that most thieves are bad, or “bad-ish”. There are also some mediocre thieves, and there are thieves with unique builds that are really, truly something special. I remember once running in to a thief with a fairly respectable condition build with a Shortbow as his/her primary weapon. I don’t think I’d fall victim to that build again, but it was certainly a tiny spark of hope for me in terms of other thieves’ builds.

There are also hotshots out there who believe that, somehow, they know all about thieves and that they can just go around dismissing the facts because of their “superiority” over other thieves. These players are all idiots, and the fact that some of them are extremely popular makes me fairly angry.

But anyways, that’s my little rant. So yeah, thieves have a high skill ceiling. OP? I don’t think so, but the most skilled players will definitely require you to put in some extra effort. Most thieves aren’t skilled players though.

It is.

http://intothemists.com/guides/guide.php?id=250

That’s Jumper’s build. It’s inefficient, but people disagree with me about that because they prefer seeing big red numbers over more damage over time.

http://intothemists.com/guides/293-sd_heavy_boonsteal_harassment_thief_by_arga

That’s my build. That’s the tank version of it, but it also works perfectly fine with Zerker Amulet and jewel as well. It probably depends on your preferences and team compositions.

Chase.8415:

This is just in, another stealth QQ thread.

THe best solution is to get better. Thieves are one of the most under represented classes in High End PvP; yet in hot joins and in WvWvW thieves are the most popular? Do you see the pattern here?

Bad players die to spammy thieves, while good ones do not.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), most thieves are spammy thieves, using the exact same attack over and over again. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to see a thief spam Heartseeker over and over again while I’m near full health.

EDIT: oh yeah, and @OP: this idea is so awful, I can hardly believe that you aren’t just trying to troll us right now.

Burp.

Mammoth.1975:

I covered the main reason why conquest is bad here, check it out:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/This-game-is-too-hard/first

Wait, so you’re telling me that because people are stupid, ANet is in the wrong? That because people don’t understand something, conquest is bad?

So, if I don’t know how to play Starcraft II, does that make the game or Blizzard bad? Maybe this game is supposed to be hard so that this game can be interesting and incorporate features of esports like, y’know, skill and strategy.

I would join if I was [EU] :P

I kinda have to agree with Incurafy though.

Sol.4310:

Like I said post a real video of Spirit Ranger then come to forums explaining how every single class is just as easy as each other to play.

Oh, I think that was a real video of a real Spirit Ranger.

But seriously, why use your skills selectively and skillfully when the passive benefits from Spirits actually encourage you to spam weapon skills, since they’re so good (70% chance for protection or burn? Whose idea was that?). It just becomes a faceroll class where activating every skill possible whenever possible is more beneficial because of short cooldowns and overly powerful passive benefits.

Magnus Pym.2356:

Temporal Curtain is already used strategically, even if not specced into it. I can close the gap between me and my target, or create a gap if I’m trying to escape; I can pull many people into an AoE pressure/spike zone; I can pull them off edges; I can pull them away from a downed target they’re trying to resurrect; and I can buff my entire team with a 12 seconds swiftness.

If you don’t use it correctly, that’s your problem.

Same thing with Illusionary Leap/Swap. While the skill has a HUGE pathing bug, it can be used to your advantage on flat ground, in a 1v1.

First of all, I incorporated how certain skills are often used in determining which ones could/were being used strategically. While TC can be used for all of those things, in practicality, it’s often just thrown sloppily into the middle of the battle to insta-pull as quickly as possible, which is fairly predictable and thus easily evaded. I also factored in the effectiveness of a skill at doing things such as you mentioned, and their usefulness. Swiftness is nice for early game openings, but throughout the game it tends to get progressively weaker as positions are established, and eventually AoE swiftness just changes to swiftness for the individual to get from point A to point B faster, while having virtually no effect in combat whatsoever. If I wanted to interrupt a rez, on the other hand, I’d use a faster, less visible method of attack, and would probably use the pistol instead. Either way, because you can just AoE interrupt a bunch of skills at any given point, and there are few times where you actually need to use the skill for some particularly important purpose, it becomes more of a skill to just use as often as possible, whenever possible in practice. On the other hand, long-CD skills like Line of Warding and Infi Arrow don’t give any direct advantage in battle (which Curtain does), which is why I mentioned those two skills specifically and not TC. I will grant you, however, that because of the nature of curtain, and the fact that there aren’t extreme direct benefits to using it, that it is certainly on the higher end in terms of skill required. Of course, as a wall of reflection, it both serves a unique purpose for the mesmer while increasing the opportunity cost of simply spamming the skill.

Leap/Swap, however, I would certainly not describe as being very strategic. It creates a clone that immobilizes opponents, and then is often used to swap into Blurred Frenzy instantaneously. I mean- because clones are so important for mesmers, and because the Swap/BF combo happens often due to the incredibly short cooldowns, I can’t call it much of a strategic skill. The opportunity cost of using Leap/Swap is much lower when the CD is 12 seconds than it is when the skill has a CD of, say, 40 seconds (not to say that it should have a CD of 40 seconds).

It’s like the necromancer’s marks. In theory, they all look like some extremely tactical and strategic uses. In practice, however, because of the high opportunity cost of not spamming them as often as possible, rather than using the skills carefully and skillfully, they’re used sloppily and in a spammy fashion, and because of the benefits coming from each of these skills, a player is actually rewarded to use these skills often and without skill than to use them selectively and in a method that fully utilizes all of those skill’s strengths. On the other hand, if Mark of Blood had a 15 second cooldown and only applied regeneration to allies, if Chillblains only applied chill and heal reduction without dealing any damage- the plays that would come of these skills would require much more skill and would be far more ingenious, and that’s why I compared sPvP to the Aspect Arena. Although it was a fairly simple mini-game, what you saw in it was that every skill had its usage in very specific situations, and that these skills gave you benefits for having better positioning and the like. Timing had to be good on these skills too. You couldn’t just condi burst a guy instantly with a short-cast signet on a 60/48 second CD that gave you very little counterplay. Instead (with the Lightning Aspect), similar to Churning Earth, you could take out a quarter of everybody’s health within a decent radius, but the skill had a long cast time and was easily counterable and thus had to be used skillfully, and when it was used as such, it gave significant benefits to those players who did use the skill selectively.

That’s why I didn’t put in Illusionary Leap/Swap, because, in practice, they just really don’t have to be used skillfully whatsoever.

Manijin.3428:

Ya know what I’d like? A mesmer weapon skill, maybe on scepter, that swaps positions with the target it hits. Or maybe an earth elementalist skill that creates a long-duration area which cripples opponents for a second when they move through it, or a necromancer skill that blows up a nearby dead ally that heals nearby allies, or…

Yeah, these would all be incredibly cool ideas. I especially like the mesmer one; I can just picture swapping an enemy into the middle of your forces to get bombarded by damage coordination tactics like that. It’d be fantastic.

Avead.5760:

Arganthium.5638:

Alright, he was a pretty crappy player regardless of his clicking. IMO, I don’t feel that clickers are as bad as they’re hyped to be for clicking, but, in order to really get to the top levels, I think you really have to get used to hotkeys. I used to be a clicker, and I wasn’t bad, necessarily, as one. But I’ve gone to hotkeys since entirely, and I haven’t turned back. For an S/D thief like me, hotkey setups are actually extremely important.

What really bothered me about this video was that the ranger was generally terrible anyways, and yet he somehow did excellently.

You cant click period..its such a disadvantage.Like how are you gonna hit 2 or more instant spells at the same time?
On my burst ele i need to press 10 keys in less than half a sec.How are you gonna click something like that?? unless you use macros :P

The way I used to do it with my S/D build, was that I had some of my skills hotkeyed and others of them not so. Since S/D is mostly three buttons, all I had to do was shift my wrist a little to the right or the left to activate my skills. If I wanted to combo my skills, I’d use the hotkeys and the mouse together- for instance, click Flanking Strike while pressing V, which, on my keyboard, is Steal. Still, I definitely think it’s better overall to use hotkeys entirely.

Manijin.3428:

Agree 100%, OP. I’d love to see the game make itself different from GW1, and from a lot of other MMO’s by really utilizing movement across the Z axis, or by rewarding clever use of area denial and tactical abilities.

Yeah, the Z axis has been a favorite of mine for multiple shenanigans. as a thief, I’ve had the pleasure of jumping up and down throughout the map using various shadow steps and the like. Still, it’s just not enough. Using Infiltrator’s Strike and Shadow Return skillfully in the Clocktower on Kyhlo just doesn’t seem to do much for you- at least, for the coordination it requires.

But yeah. When I tried out guards in the past, I was always super excited to use LoW. It’s just that it was never a good enough skill to give you large benefits of using it well, simply because of the mass of DPS skills in this game.

Why?

Alright, he was a pretty crappy player regardless of his clicking. IMO, I don’t feel that clickers are as bad as they’re hyped to be for clicking, but, in order to really get to the top levels, I think you really have to get used to hotkeys. I used to be a clicker, and I wasn’t bad, necessarily, as one. But I’ve gone to hotkeys since entirely, and I haven’t turned back. For an S/D thief like me, hotkey setups are actually extremely important.

What really bothered me about this video was that the ranger was generally terrible anyways, and yet he somehow did excellently.

I’d like to make a comparison to the Aspect Arena, one of the mini-games for Cutthroat Politics. I played the game a lot, and I enjoyed it a ton, in spite of the fact that almost everything in the game was the same from game to game. I always used to play the Wind Aspect. Of its five skills:

-One is an autoattack that gives you more advantages to having good positioning
-One takes advantage of enemy positioning while dealing no damage
-One allows you to take advantage of enemy CD’s (although there was a glitch in this skill that allowed it to be used every 3 seconds that I found out pretty early on; still, every usage of the skill was a tradeoff)
-One deals a nice bit of damage, but deals even more damage if your positioning relative to your enemy is good, as well as your predictions of enemy movement
-One sacrifices an evade for a possible positional advantage

See, to me, this is the ideal kind of a setup I’d like to see weapon setups have in GW2. There were only two damage-dealing skills, and yet all of the skills were useful in their own situations, and did not benefit you by spamming them, necessarily. Furthermore, all of the skills benefited you for having good positioning and strategy in the game, and that’s something that really does require skill. We didn’t have so much of an incentive to spam damage-dealing skills because- hey! There weren’t so many damage-dealing skills. Rather, we could improve our damage by taking advantage of various strategic and tactical features of the game. Right there and then, this simple mini-game represented the ways that we could change this game to make it require more skill, more strategy, and all the while being infinitely more fun.

I hope that you read this and take this into consideration, ANet. It would certainly require some radical changes, but it would make this game a better one in the long run, and make it infinitely more fun and interesting, both to play and to watch.

~Arganthium

TL;DR: if this game had fewer damage-dealing skills, and more skills that don’t deal damage directly but can improve your positioning and tactical openings in the game, this game would be better off in terms of the interest in the game, playstyles, and the enjoyment coming from this game.

I just watched Helseth’s latest rant, and although I disagreed with him on a variety of issues, I did feel inspired to make this post. So, let me list some skills here:

Elementalist:
- Staff: Healing Rain, Frozen Ground, Static Field, Magnetic Aura, Unsteady Ground
- Dagger: Magnetic Grasp/Leap
- Focus: Flamewall, Flame Aura, Swirling Winds, Gale, Magnetic Wave, Obsidian Flesh

Engineer:
- Rifle: Net Shot
- Pistol: Glue Shot
- Shield: Magnetic Shield
- Kits: Napalm, Smoke Vent, Acid Bomb

Guardian:
-Staff: Line of Warding
-Hammer: Ring of Warding, Zealot’s Embrace
-Shield: Shield of Absorption
-Focus: Shield of Wrath

Mesmer:
-OH Sword: Illusionary Riposte
-Focus (assuming you have VIII in Inspiration): Temporal Curtain
-Shatters: Distortion, Diversion

Necromancer:
-Dagger: Dark Pact

Ranger:
-Greatsword: Counterattack
-OH Axe: Whirling Defense

Thief:
-Shortbow: Choking Gas, Infiltrator’s Arrow
-Pistol OH: Headshot, Black Powder
-Dagger OH: Dancing Dagger
-Sword: Shadow Return

Warrior:
-Mace: Counterblow
-Sword OH: Riposte
-Warhorn: Charge

These all are skills that, while looking through the build calculator, I thought either are or could be skills that are only used strategically or tactically for teams, with goals that can be related towards the objective of capping points rather than simply endless slaughter.

The two that I bolded were Infiltrator’s Arrow and Line of Warding (I do play a thief, so I might be slightly biased towards thief skills, or know more about them than some of the skills that I listed, but nonetheless that should not affect the point I’m about to make). Now, Infiltrator’s Arrow is an incredibly interesting skill as a thief; it’s used for mobility around the map outside of battle. Inside of battle, however, it plays a different purpose. For example, during a battle in the Graveyard over in LotF, I might use the skill to get a better position overlooking the battle, and help my allies thusly, perhaps by targeting or calling out animations. In other situations, I’ve used the blind specifically to prevent an interrupt from, say, a ranger or a guardian who is in downed state. So, in other words, Infiltrator’s Arrow can be a tactical (taking advantage of short-term features of a battle) or strategic (taking advantage of long-term features of a battle) weapon that does not deal damage, but rather relies on skillful timing in order to be used most effectively.

Line of Warding isn’t much different (at least, in potential). When used correctly, it can create severe positional problems for the enemy, perhaps by splitting a point in two, or preventing an enemy from getting where he or she needs to be. LoW can be spammed for minor bonuses, but, when used correctly, can be absolutely devastating, potentially.

So what’s the problem? In this game, fights typically require that you kill opponents by dealing more DPS to them than they deal to you. This gives people an incentive to spam the skills that deal DPS in order to deal more damage as quickly as possible, which is necessary for winning fights. On the other hand, skills like Infiltrator’s Arrow, for instance, might get left behind because their initiative cost (in the thief’s case) takes away from the amount of damage that can be dealt simply by doing the same attacks over and over again. Because such skills as this don’t deal damage directly, due to the volume of skills that can deal direct damage easily and efficiently, players will prefer to focus on those skills than to invest time/initiative/etc in skills that don’t directly deal damage (or much damage, anyways), because it’s simply inefficient, given the objectives of the team fights.

I agree with some of his stuff, but his stuff about S/D thieves and there being “too much damage” in this meta is complete crap.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Arganthium.5638:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

you guys are no fun.

Fun? What’s that? Is that another stupid PvE thing? Or… Is it a team? A skill?

hmm there u go

https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+&oq=define%3A+&aqs=chrome.0.69i57j69i58j69i59l3j69i62.1350j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=f8873f78dfbb8c5e&q=define:+fun
fun
/f?n/
Noun
Enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure: “anyone who turns up can join in the fun”.
Adjective
Amusing, entertaining, or enjoyable: “it was a fun evening”.
Verb
Joke or tease: “no need to get sore—I was only funning”; “they are just funning you”.
Synonyms
noun. amusement – joke – sport – jest – lark – entertainment
verb. joke – jest – banter – jape – lark

guild wars 2 is made for casuals players.
casual players like to have fun.

did you play team fortress 2 before?

Enjoyment? Amusement? Pleasure? What? I don’t understand any of these words, please stop trying to confuse me.

Hmm… I don’t think I’ve ever played a Team Fortress 2 before. Was there a Team Fortress 1? Was its tag [FORT]? Maybe I’ve heard of them before.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

you guys are no fun.

Fun? What’s that? Is that another stupid PvE thing? Or… Is it a team? A skill?

jmatb.6307:

Where is each guy positioned? How does each guy complement the other?

You claim to know how to team comp and yet leave out one of the most important roles in the game that has been on every single tournament team since there has been Guild Wars 2 tournaments?

Lay out these very simple rules and strategies that I “need” to learn from you?

Again, like the other guy, who are you?

Well, there went even the slightest sliver of sympathy I might have felt for you.

First, God is an NA engineer that I’ve had the pleasure of playing with and against multiple times. He is currently ranked 175 in Team Arena and 46 in Solo Arena. He played in the PAX qualifiers, too (unfortunately, his team lost to [SYNC]… But then again, [SYNC] did win the entire tournament). I’ve found his input quite useful in the time I’ve known him.

As for me, I’m one of the few people on these forums or in the game in general that does not buildcraft off of playtesting (which can sometimes have disastrous effects on build comps due to the variety of biases that can be factored in), but rather views everything from purely objective analysis via the usage of mathematical models that have been quite helpful to me in theory crafting in this game. Granted, I still have a ways to go before my models encompass a significant enough amount of the game to be used on their own, but they have been extremely useful up to now, and after a certain discussion I was having with somebody on the warrior forums a few days ago, I had a few revelations that have come with some major breakthroughs for me. If you still can’t figure out why any of this should mean anything to you, let me put it to you this way: one myth in the thief community is the idea that 30 CS is necessary for damage. What a large portion of the community does not realize, however, is that 300 precision and 30% additional crit damage only increases your damage relative to base by somewhere around ~1.5% more than you’d gain from just taking 10 points into Deadly Arts. Some like to argue the value of Executioner, but even the damage amplification from that tends to be significantly less than what they’d like to think in practical usage. Precision in general, as a matter of fact, tends to be a crappy stat. The exception for 30 CS is Hidden Killer, which is an… Incredibly interesting trait that is fairly limiting in its applications, but could nonetheless theoretically boost damage significantly. Still, for builds like, say, S/D, the value of 30 CS is extremely overblown.

So now that you know who I am, perhaps you’ll take me more seriously when I tell you that defense tends to scale far worse, relative to base, than does offense. In other words, assuming neither player heals (that comes later), if I invested fully into offense and my opponent invests fully into defense, I will win. Even factoring in heals, however, toughness is the only stat that really gets a boost in ability, and even its boost isn’t enough to make it better than plain ol’ power. Ultimately, then, bunkers are only good against other bunkers or tanks, as neither of them deal enough damage to overcome the guard’s heal. Then again, however, if I was forming a team comp, I wouldn’t have a tank or bunker fight another bunker, so that point is often rendered somewhat useless. The only thing a bunker is good for is a team fight, but if I wanted a guard to participate in a team fight, I’d much rather make him or her a tank, dealing more damage than before and having just as much other team support options.

I’d go into more details, but as I’m probably approaching the 5,000 character limit, I’ll just let you mull over that for a bit.

Now, if I really want to create a unique burst spec, this is what I’d take…

Boon Counter, Evasion Spec

Cruuk’s Far-Point Decap Build

Aiden’s Tankier S/D Build

God’s Engi (btw God, I was actually screwing around buildcrafting some engis today, and, feeling somewhat inspired by Teldo, I created a build individually that I just found out is almost exactly the same as yours though :o but your playstyle and the differences in the build I made and the one you made are probably fairly significant)

D/D Ele by Blinx

This setup isn’t necessarily good, but it certainly isn’t meta. It doesn’t run condis either (apart from God, anyways, but that’s not quite the same as a necro). The difference, however, is that you really don’t seem to understand the basic foundations of a team comp, but others of us do. In this comp, I left out a bunker, but it otherwise follows some very simple rules and strategies that you need to understand.

Godofallu.2935:

I told you earlier in Blu’s stream that I thought your comp was really bad. I suppose that was a bit harsh and I know you didn’t take it to heart since I only looked at the builds and didn’t read your text.

Reasons why this is atrocious: Staff elementalists have horrible defense. They don’t have blocks or lots of blinds or anything to keep themselves alive. They are horrid in 1v1 and 2v2 fights and can’t handle being trained by even 1 good dps player. In return they offer almost nothing offensively with slow and obvious attacks. They also don’t have the ability to revive players or control the downed game.

You mesmer is specced in a way that makes him useless in a 1v1 or 2v2 as well. It’s been said to death but shattered conditions is a bad trait that has no effect on 1v1/2v2 fights and only serves to kitten the mesmer by taking away his only chance at beating a necro/engie. By spiking him before the condi’s burn him out. What you have there is a build with far less damage and no real added survivability. You’re going so far out of your way to add a tiny bit more condition removal that you’re just gimping yourself. Removing your teams only revive skill in a team of 5 (most teams have many of these skills) for a tiny bit more condition removal in null field is just further proof of you not understanding that there is always a tradeoff in bringing more condi removal.

Yeah, God’s right here. staff eles are just… I mean, no. They really don’t do much. The only thing going for them is their Earth auto-attack, but I don’t think that’s enough to justify taking a staff ele over some much better options. Undoubtedly, I have seen good staff eles before, but I think that any build or weaponset can be made to look good by the best players. Ultimately, there just isn’t enough going for the build to justify its being used in a team comp most of the time.

I used to try to play a Shattered Illusions mesmer too. The issue is that you can easily allocate 10 or 20 points into a trait line without having to be dedicated to having your playstyle revolve around it; at 30 points, however, you have to give up so much that what you’re getting had better be really good. Shattered Illusions was just never good enough, ultimately, for me to justify continuing to take it. The whole trait line, in fact, is whack; it focuses on buffing your phantasms until the Grandmaster traits, when suddenly it becomes about shattering. If you want to go into shattering, you should go into Illusions; the all of the minors are, at the very least, useful, and you can use every major trait quite effectively as well. The condition damage and shatter recharge are also useful. If you’re really looking for condi removal, then Sigil of Nullification should be enough to fulfill your needs, and/or Null Field if really necessary. I pretty much always carry Null Sigil on my mes now, because it’s a really effective way to remove conditions with my 20 in Dueling and my zerker amulet.

Ensign.2189:

Undercutting itself is a good process. There’s just a lot of friction in it due to the 5% listing fee.

On buy offers I’ll be very competitive with a lot of 1c overcuts, pull and relist, to stay on top when I want to have the top offer. You cannot do that on the sell side of things.

It does keep the bid/ask spread higher and lowers trade velocity. It also creates a huge asymmetry between buy strategy and sell strategy, and is pretty punishing to players who are not intimately familiar with prices.

AFAIK the 5% fee up front is to prevent the TP from being used as free storage. From a market efficiency standpoint it’s wholly negative, but something we have to live with due to the design of the TP.

Yeah, this was the argument I was making a few months ago against the 5% listing fee on the TP. It basically slows down the rate at which market transactions can occur, and, of course, the fee is, to some extent, passed on to consumers. If I’m flipping a market in which one item is highly overpriced, then I’ll reduce the price on that item with my sell orders. If others come along and realize that the market is ripe for flipping as well, however, then they begin to undercut me. It simply becomes a series of undercutting wars, where the opportunity cost of taking an item off the market and putting it back on at a lower price tends to be less (at least, in the foreseeable future for a lot of traders) than keeping the item on the market, where it will likely not sell as prices continue to fall lower and lower by other traders undercutting one another.

Since any listing fees become sunk costs, if I’m flipping an item that costs around 30s, I could either choose to take the item off the market and put it back on to make somewhere around ~25.5s, or I could keep the item on the market and make nothing (at least, not for a very long time, in which the money that I could’ve made just from selling the item to the highest bidder upright and then flipping/investing that money would have exceeded the money gained from having kept the item on the market). The issue comes in where people have to decide how far they think the price is going to fall, at which point some of them might feel tempted to simply leave their item on the market and then come back much later to reprice their item, but sometimes that’s not really an option when the later price is going to be much, much lower than what the current selling price is.

It just makes everybody paranoid, loses everybody money, and slows down how fast transactions can occur. If I knew that continuing to undercut my competitors would result, ultimately, in a total of ~30s in listing fees, I might choose not to undercut my competitors over and over again, but most sellers don’t know how far the price is going to fall, often.

Maugetarr.6823:

S/D got very popular for a while, but they removed the infinite range return and the stunbreak on sword #2. I don’t remember when they changed #3 on S/D, but it’s split into 2 skills now, the first costing 3 initiative, and after people started complaining since FS was tracking properly, the increased the initiative of the second half of the skill by 1 for a total of 2 for the second skill to reduce spamming. Overall S/D got better, but it certainly left a sour taste especially considering the stun and fear locking abilities of warriors and necros right now. I’m not saying those are overpowered, but it would be nice to have a counter to the counter.

Yeah, S/D is a pretty good weaponset but some of the CC right now can kill thieves if they make a single mistake.

As for builds…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Guide-to-Thief-Guides/first

The first S/D build is Jumper’s. It’s probably the most popular one right now, but I’ve always disagreed with it… But to spare myself from the flaming of the entire thief community, I won’t go into detail about that…

The second S/D is mine. The version there is the tank version, but recently I’ve been practicing with Zerker amulet/jewel. Maybe it’s just because I find it more fun with more offensive stats though.

The real reason why thief wins against a warrior is not the lack of a CD stun break; using Shadow Return often is costly and wastes a lot of time that you could and should be spending attacking. The reason is that thieves steal some incredibly important boons off of warriors and can evade the major attacks.

ensoriki.5789:

Arganthium.5638:

ensoriki.5789:

S/P thief not invited to this party? As far as I know there’s 3 melee sets you can get away with running as a thief.
Would think it makes sense to put all of what you’ll see.

It’s really not meta though. I mean, I could introduce eles that run 4 different conjured weapons (which includes the elite of course), because a person might see that, but it’s unlikely that he/she will.

That’s not even close to the same representation.

Yeah. Yeah it is. If S/P is meta, it’s meta because people suck.

Yeah, I mean, I can play with you guys. I feel fairly experienced, but I’ve needed a tPvP team for a while now anyways.

ensoriki.5789:

S/P thief not invited to this party? As far as I know there’s 3 melee sets you can get away with running as a thief.
Would think it makes sense to put all of what you’ll see.

It’s really not meta though. I mean, I could introduce eles that run 4 different conjured weapons (which includes the elite of course), because a person might see that, but it’s unlikely that he/she will.

Kavia.8249:

OK so thinking about D/P thief – probably 10/30/0/0/30 with dagger+pistol / shortbow, berserker’s amulet

Condi necro – even match/advantage necro
Shatter Mesmer – even match
Bunker Guard – stalemate (maybe advantage thief? not sure if thief can kill fast enuf)
Spirit Ranger – even match/advantage ranger
Stance Warrior – even match
Burst Ele – advantage thief
Kit Engi – advantage engi
Evade Thief – advantage D/P thief

This is just me brainstorming a first draft. Anybody have thoughts?

Here are a few changes I’d make. 10/30/0/0/30 has some really poor condition removal with D/P, so I think that a Necro should have a good chance if not a winning chance against D/P.

Against Spirit Ranger, it’s really difficult for me to say, but I feel slightly more inclined to lean towards the Ranger because of the conditions and lack of good sustained AoE by the thief, even with a SB.

Against evade thief (in the current meta), D/P should win. D/P has the advantage of blinds and stealth, which, given that most S/D thieves run fairly glassy, means that there isn’t always a whole lot the S/D thief can do to avoid getting killed by the D/P thief eventually.

Yeah, I remember once before Solo Arena came out playing Solo Q in what is now the Team Q, and I played against a team of 5 spirit rangers. I’m pretty sure that must mean that Spirit Rangers are super OP, because everybody’s running one.

But… I love temple. :’c

Veritas.6071:

Arganthium.5638:

(D – H)t > (D – H)/1.5*t, or, in other words, the damage done per second (with healing) before the additional 50% health is going to be greater (relative to 1, our total health, whether that’s 10k health or 30k health) than when we did take the additional 50% health.

Okay, I’m still following you. So my next question would be, in (D – H)t > (D – H)/1.5*t, are you giving (D – H)t an equivalent investment in any other attribute to keep the playing field level(toughness comes to mind)? Obviously, the initial numbers would still favor (D – H)/1.5*t, but with my broken math skills, I’m thinking that if, through the course of a fight, an equal investment in toughness could mitigate damage >/= hp gained from vitality, toughness would be an equally good choice and even better once its mitigated value surpassed that of an equal investment in vitality; unless, as you stated earlier, you are taking heavy condi damage, in which case I see the sense in your vitality argument.

Yes, I do take other stats into consideration. Basically, vitality reduces damage dealt to you (relative to our 1 value) more than does toughness up to a certain limit (barring a few initial stats exceptions, such as the necromancer’s extremely high base health but extremely low base defense). Of course though, as stated, against condition damage toughness does nothing, so if I’m expecting to take a huge amount of condition damage then very little toughness should be taken of course.

Macro it to say “EAT MOAR CHIKEN”

A serious post on the meta by Lordrosicky

HAHAHA OMFG THAT WAS KITTEN HILARIOUS, I loved that. Got any more jokes up your sleeve?

Veritas.6071:

Thank you for the thorough explanation. I understand what you mean now. One question though, do your calculations ever assume that you will lose more HP overall in a fight than your initial HP pool? I think I read earlier that your current models don’t account for all the variables within player healing, but it seems to me that as soon as health starts to fluctuate, the 1 value becomes more and more outdated as the fight goes on. There are obviously an unimaginable number of variables to consider, but in my own thoughs, vitality loses its luster as a fight drags on, especially if the attacker’s DPS is outpacing your HPS; at which point the advantage of avoiding “over healing” no longer exists.

Well, once your health pool turns 0 or negative, then that’s basically just downed state. If I have 5% health left and take 10% damage, I go into downstate. It’s pretty much as simple as that.

The 1 value, remember, is simply “full health”, so it can’t really get outdated. For example, if I’m healing for .01 health per second on average and getting .03 damage dealt to me per second on average, then the simplistic equation for damage dealt to me over a period of time is going to be 1+(.1-.3)t = 1 – .2t, where t is time in seconds. I can now manipulate that however I want; perhaps if I apply weakness to my opponent 50% of the time, since weakness reduces damage by 25% of its original amount on average, I’d change that equation to 1+(.1-(.3*(1-.25*.5))t = 1 – .01625t damage (I’m doing this mostly in my head so there may be a slight error here or there).

But anyways, basically, assuming enemy DPS is greater than your healing in the long run (otherwise these calculations are pretty much useless anyways), we can measure the effects of enemy DPS in the long run. So, let’s define DPS by the variable D and health per second by the variable H. So, at base levels, your remaining health pool after t seconds equals

1 + (D – H)t

Now let’s say that I increase my health by 50%. Now, this equation equals

1 + (D – H)/1.5*t

Because, as we’ve already discussed, damage in these equations is represented as a fraction of health, so increasing health to 150% multiplies damage by the reciprocal of 1.5, which is of course 2/3. The same, however, goes for health; a 5k heal can be represented kitten for a person with 10k health, but for a person with 15k health, that heal can only be represented as ~.33.

However, as we stated earlier, we’re defining D in the long run as being greater than H. Therefore,

D/3 > H/3

Both of which are the changes in DPS and HPS by increasing health by 50%, respectively. Thus, because D/3 is going to be greater than H/3, we can confirm that the change in damage is going to be more significant than the change in healing in the long run, and thus

(D – H)t > (D – H)/1.5*t, or, in other words, the damage done per second (with healing) before the additional 50% health is going to be greater (relative to 1, our total health, whether that’s 10k health or 30k health) than when we did take the additional 50% health.

So, to answer your question, assuming DPS > HPS, vitality does not in fact lose its luster over the course of the fight, as it decreases the amount of damage done to you. Furthermore, the original “1” value is simply our base health, our maximum health. You can’t define “1” as our health at any given moment, because if I have 5k health left out of 20k health and I heal for 5k, it would seem rather silly to say that I have 150% health left in the long run, and ultimately the “1” value would mean nothing.

There is, of course, one dilemma, and that’s when DPS is actually less than or equal to HPS (this happens frequently with bunkers). In this case, it would be most preferable for the character doing the healing to change the bunkers stats so that HPS = DPS, or, your healing per second equals the amount of damage per second you take in the long run. It’s unnecessary for you to take more healing than you can use, of course.

Hype.8032:

I think dancing dagger should move faster and cripple longer to make it worth using. As far as the other suggestions, I don’t use those skills/traits now and I still wouldn’t after those changes. When I look at suggestion threads I’m wanting to find things that will improve our weaker weapon sets.

5s is a pretty good amount of cripple for a skill that you can use over and over again with little cost. I remember using DD yesterday on some practice golems while waiting for a tourney, and I managed to throw a ton of them before initiative started becoming much of a problem.

I do agree with the speed change, or at least a change to the cast so it’s not some big windup skill.

Yeah, I see what you mean. It can be difficult to try to know what you’re supposed to learn next once you’ve learnt the basics. I guess if you knew what you had to learn without having anyone else tell you, you’d already have learnt it. :P

Like Stof mentioned, once you get into higher levels of play, personal positioning and map control become all the rage (among other things). For example: I play a thief, Sword/Dagger. In case you didn’t know, my second weapon skill allows me to pretty much teleport to an opponent within 1200 range and immobilize him/her while doing damage. I then have a 15-second window in which, if I use my second weapon skill again, I more or less get teleported back to my original location where I first activated the skill. It’s pretty simple in its idea, but in practice, it’s weapon skills like these that can create a lot of really interesting plays.

For example, I was playing on Skyhammer today. I was near the center of the map (where there are a lot of staircases and whatnot to the second point). I was standing above a Mesmer that was approaching the stairs to the point. I used my second weapon skill, laid on a bit of damage, and as the mesmer used its skills to try and get away from me, it got increasingly closer to the area where I had first used my #2 weapon skill. I activate my third weapon skill (the spinning-human-with-a-sword movement you’ve probably seen by now), and during the cast activate my second weapon skill, teleport to my opponent, and once again close the gap between us. Just a few more strikes, and the mesmer is down.

Of course, that was the simplest way I could think of to put it. I could always go on to talk about how you can evade during the pre-cast of Infi Strike so that when the attack hits you get all the benefits of Infi Strike but that you get to land the attack while evading, or I could go on rambling about how there is a window of time after using LS where you can use the auto-attack while evading, or how the last quarter of the Flanking Strike animation makes thieves weak to attack as they have to remain rooted in a single position- whatever. The point is that the strategy and tactics underlying this game are far more complex than lots of people will want you to think.

There’s one particularly huge part to this game, however, that I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of. Buildcrafting. I mean, let’s put it this way: there are two versions of my build, which vary based on what amulet I’m carrying. In one version, I stick with my team, and during large battles I stay to the outskirts of the fight, dealing tons of damage to specific individuals. With the other build, I’m much more free to roam around, can 1v1 virtually any enemy, and can take a heck of a beating for my team. The builds only vary in one relatively minor aspect, and yet they result in absolutely incredible playstyle differences. Sure, you can copy and paste other peoples’ builds, but the problem is that they’re often deluded by their own biases. For example, most people either don’t know or refuse to believe that, just looking at stats, 30 points into the Thief trait line “Critical Strikes” only allows a player to deal ~1% more damage than going only 10 points into “Deadly Arts”, and yet the majority of thieves have 30 CS (in spite of my suggesting they not do so). Personally, I’ve never been one to stick to the meta, really; I prefer to create my own builds that end up being vastly different from those of other players. But anyways, buildcrafting is another huge area that any player can improve on.

So yeah, hope some of that helps.

Veritas.6071:

" It’s not like vitality magically disappears in the long run or something; it still remains and it still reduces condition damage more than if you had had, say, 5k less health."

This is the part that caught my attention. Once the HP from vitality is gone, it’s gone. At least that’s the assumption I’m opperating under. However, the health pool ceiling being raised is permanent which is what I thought you were referring to by vitality not “magically disappearing”. So once the initial health gained from vitality is taken away, it won’t help you again unless you replenish some of that extra space for hp that exists between base and +vitality heal pools. I’m getting the feeling I’m way off in understanding what you were trying to express.

Haha alright.

You are certainly right to an extent, but it’s difficult to say what health comes from vitality and what doesn’t. For example, if I have 15k base health and boost that to 20k health, and then I take 15k damage, does that mean that the 5k health that I got from vitality still exists directly, or that the 5k health was depleted and then I took 10k damage- whatever. In truth, it doesn’t really matter that much. What matters more is really how much damage opponents do relative to your level of health. As shown in the little problem beforehand, how can we say that the 5k health was depleted from the initial 5k of the 15k damage? However, we can say that, when I went from having 15k health to 20k health, the 15k damage that was dealt to me turned from being 100% of my health to being 75% of my health. So rather than looking at health as a resource that, once depleted, means nothing, we can relate damage dealt to a player relative to his or her total health to come up with a more accurate value of how much damage is done to players.

It is thus that my most recent theory crafting does not necessarily define health by numbers like “20,000 health”, or anything to that extent, but it has rather been defined as an extraordinarily simple number: 1. 1 represents the whole of a player’s health. Every player has a health level, thus, by this formula, of 1, but the damage dealt to these players varies. For example, if a player has 10k health and takes 2k damage, I’d say that the player takes .2 damage, or 20% damage. If that same player has 20k health, however, then that player takes .1 damage (10% damage).

Also, if a person has 15k health left, but had 20k health originally, then I also define remaining health by a fraction of original health. In this instance, I’d say that the player with 15k health has .75 (75%) health left. Thus, if somebody with .75 health left took .1 damage, he or she would be left with .65 health. When you look at vitality in this light, rather than acting as an arbitrary number that boosts health (which has no true meaning unless compared side-by-side with damage), vitality instead acts directly as a form of damage reduction, by reducing those decimals like .1 and .2 to numbers proportional to the amount by which you’ve increased your health.

So maybe that’ll help you understand it better. Also, realize that vitality also allows you to use your heals more productively. For instance, would you rather heal for 5k if you currently have 12.5k health and a maximum of 15k health, or if you had a maximum of 20k health? Well, in the second example, you heal for 2.5k more, meaning that you can spend 2.5k more health dealing more damage to opponents, or increasing how far away you can escape- whatever.

But yeah, the important takeaway from this is that vitality doesn’t just “disappear”; like toughness, it has long-term effects on the amount of damage that is dealt to you.

Sil.4560:

Arganthium.5638:

You’re lucky that I even decided to bother reading the rest of your post after the first sentence.

I’m not here to argue with somebody who’s going to try to pull the “you’re stupid, therefore I’m right” argument.

Did you really expect anything more from this forum? >_>

Depends on who I’m talking to. -_-

I doubt you’re interested, but in the case that you are, I’m a thief that would be particularly interested in joining the team if you guys were up to that.

You guys already have Infanta though (he’s pretty great), so it may not be in your interest to take in another thief. I could always play as a sub or w/e however.

EDIT: oh yeah, I should also mention that I’m pretty big into the mathematics behind this game. If you or your team is ever interested in that kinda stuff, just PM me in-game and I’d be cool with telling you more about it.

Zinwrath.2049:

your ego overlooked the main point of my post. Vitality doesn’t lower the damage taken from conditions. Because attrition is very real in fights with heals/regens/deathshroud etc. The fight is not about who started with the highest HP, its about who can out last.

Vitality does NOT help you against conditions more than it helps you against direct damage. Fact. You seem to think this variable only applies to condition damage…it doesn’t. Vitality is simply the HP you start out with. But a guardian or necro who constantly knocks you off your feet while regening and lowering a huge portion of the incoming damage…may start the battle with half your HP, but end up taking FAR more damage over the course of the battle due to their ability to absorb damage and heal themselves.

You know this, you just dodged the main point cause…well…your ego couldn’t handle being proven wrong. Sorry, its a fact. Vitality does NOT lower the damage of inc condition damage anymore than it lowers the damage from direct damage…infact it lowers neither, simply allows you to see a bigger number at the start of a fight…does not mean you will have been able to take more damage by the end of the fight.

Fights in this game are a battle of attrition, perhaps you blinded yourself to that.

You’re lucky that I even decided to bother reading the rest of your post after the first sentence.

I’m not here to argue with somebody who’s going to try to pull the “you’re stupid, therefore I’m right” argument.

Kavia.8249:

Arganthium.5638:

Couldn’t burst ele and D/D ele both fall under the same category? I dunno, just “D/D Ele” seems a bit vague to me.

While you can play S/D and D/D both as a burst spec with things like bolt to the heart and vital striking, I would argue the advantages of scepter mainhand for that purpose are considerable due to the much better air damage skills (instant cast). Especially since the buff to pheonix’s speed, you are seeing less and less damage oriented D/D eles.

D/D’s advantages rely on shocking aura, better mobility with burning speed and/or windborn dagger, etc. I think in the current meta if you’re going to play a D/D ele you’re probably doing it as a roaming support bunker with 3 cantrips, Powerful Aura, and clerics amulet. Some D/D diehards out there feel free to correct me!

Yeah, I figured that one of the main reasons for choosing S/D over D/D is the air insta-cast skills, especially Lightning Strike (which I just did the calculations for, and found that it actually does some really good damage for its cast time and recharge). Phoenix is also a fantastic burst skill.

I feel that D/D also has the advantage of PbAoE and perhaps just some more AoE in general, but I might be wrong on that one.

Defektive.7283:

I don’t agree with Condi Warrior. mainly because it hasn’t been proven to be even a viable concept in legitimate tPvP (YoloQ, Hotjoin != tPvP).

D/P should def be on the list, since the list of competitive thiefs playing S/D or D/P is about even at this point.

D/D Ele should def be on the list.

Symbol Guard is definitely picking up in some areas.

Haven’t seen a BM in a very long time (or HGH Engi).

/shrugs I think that SoloQ is going to be considered as “legitimate tPvP” very soon, if it isn’t already. Probably when queues are fully randomized.

I agree about D/P, don’t know why it isn’t there yet (probably because there only seems to be 1 build per prof).

Couldn’t burst ele and D/D ele both fall under the same category? I dunno, just “D/D Ele” seems a bit vague to me.

I’ve never even heard of a symbol guard, and honestly the idea sounds generally awful.

BM’s, but HGH Engis especially were probably killed by S/D thieves.

Zinwrath.2049:

Vitality doesn’t lower any damage. Heres a flaw here….

Vitality will not slow down incoming damage. As you pointed out earlier, toughness actually IMPROVES the effect of healing, which is why healing has to be so weak. If I can cut down the damage incoming by even 20% that makes my heals 20% stronger over the course of a fight, because it takes less of them to replenish the damage I took…because I took less damage as a result of that toughness.

*Vitality however doesn’t slow down the rate at which you take damage, it just initially says you can take more damage. *

So in a battle of attrition, condition damage is ideal because it ignores toughness (you will have some of this no matter what) protection boons, weakness condition, etc.

This is why certain abilities actually remove conditions. That’s right, they had to put in abilities to get rid of conditions because otherwise your only counter would be as you put it vitality (which I proved does NOT really counter it at all in an attrition sense….which is very real because everyone can heal themselves and many can avoid damage for quite awhile to buy time to heal 2-4 times per fight or more depending on how much access they have to self heals).

Mind blown? I can break it down more into formula if you like, but I think its basic enough knowledge that it shouldn’t warrant that.

with all that said, classes that have higher access to CC and means to stay in the fight longer benefit more from the condition meta than others, which is apparent by who is dominating right now in matches.

This seems to be the issue that everybody is having here.

1000 damage to somebody with 10k health is equivalent to 10,000 damage to somebody with 100k health. But if you did 1000 damage to somebody with 100k health, it would mean far less than doing that same amount of damage to somebody with 10k health.

It’s problematic because you people don’t see past the numbers. If something says “100” here, and says “100” there as well, you immediately find those two to be equivalent.

If I had a part-time job paying minimum wage, the decision to buy a yacht might have a much different result than if I worked full-time making 10 million dollars a year.

You say that in a “battle of attrition, condition damage is ideal because it ignores toughness (you will have some of this no matter what) protection boons, weakness condition, etc.” The next paragraph, though, you say

This is why certain abilities actually remove conditions. That’s right, they had to put in abilities to get rid of conditions because otherwise your only counter would be as you put it vitality (which I proved does NOT really counter it at all in an attrition sense….which is very real because everyone can heal themselves and many can avoid damage for quite awhile to buy time to heal 2-4 times per fight or more depending on how much access they have to self heals).

First of all, you didn’t prove anything related to vitality- in fact, all you mentioned was toughness. But anyways, moving forward:

You want to believe that, in the long run, vitality means nothing because people can heal themselves, and, if I understand correctly, is actually detrimental because it reduces your heal effectiveness. In the long run, however, vitality still reduces condition damage just as much as it would otherwise. It’s not like vitality magically disappears in the long run or something; it still remains and it still reduces condition damage more than if you had had, say, 5k less health.

And of course there are abilities that remove conditions, because conditions also reduce mobility, heal effectiveness, etc, and if a player was able to force all of these onto an opponent, it would be impossible for that player to win if he or she couldn’t use a condition removal. Also, remember that you can’t evade past conditions that are already on you, which you can do with direct damage that hasn’t hit you yet, so of course there need to be condition removers.

You finish with a fairly standard causative-correlative fallacy. How do you know that conditions are dominating the meta now because they’re OP? Maybe they’re dominating because everybody thinks they’re dominating the meta and thus they choose to play condition builds, and with the influx of condition builds it becomes more likely for condition builds to dominate the meta in the first place.

But go ahead, show me your math, blow me away. Not that that’s really possible.

You guys do realize that it takes 10 games to get ranked, right? Each day there are hundreds of more people getting into the Leaderboard.