Guild Wars 2

Troll Ungent? Really?

1. It heals for only 340 HPS (52 less base HPS) without taking into account cast times- which, by the way, Ungent has and Signet doesn’t.

2. The nature of Ungent makes the healing skill far easier to reduce using poison than HealSig. For example, if I wanted to cut down a Ranger’s healing by, say, 1/6 (or half of 1/3), then I’d only need to apply 5s of poison during the 10s duration of this heal. On the other hand, to do the same thing to a warrior, I’d have to apply 12.5s of poison, on average, every 25 seconds.

3. Warriors get 3k more health, heavy armor, better damage coefficients, better healing overall (especially from Adrenal Health), and better condi cleanse than rangers get, which only further amplifies the power of HealSig as opposed to Ungent.

Cynz.9437:

PowerBottom.5796:

Atm, I’m blown away by how strong Venom-Share Thief is:

- Some of the best burst in the game (flanking Strike/Pistol Whip + Devourer Venom)
- Probably THE BEST Teamsupport in the game (5k AoE-Heal with Skelk Venom, tons of CC with AoE Devourer Venom and Basi Venom, AoE Might-Stacks, AoE-Lifesteal for your Teammates etc.)
- Very high mobility, high AoE-DPS in Teamfights and insane against downed Players —> usual Thief-stuff…

Here’s the build I use if any1 is interested:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsaVnkElaarJSnwfaCZrQPx9wChqnS7xNZTxEA-TsAg0CnIKSVkrITRyisFNsYZxsAA

No Idea why it isn’t FotM yet. :P

1 CC = that thief is dead

venoms on CD (which are long), that thief is worthless

no real stomps, no team rezzes, no stomp interrupts

that is why you don’t see venom share thieves anywhere at high rating

He’s obviously trolling. His “burst” is practically nonexistent (and extremely gimmicky), his team support is far from being the best in the game, and by any thief standard his mobility is extremely poor.

If you position yourself just correctly you can still melee opponents standing in a BP field.

observer z.6725:

Arganthium.5638:

Warriors can kite just as easily or even more easily than most other classes, because LB allows great condi removal and doesn’t do bad damage either and Rifle is just an absolutely murderous weapon. Heck, if you wanted to just kite, you could run a LB+Rifle build and all of your problems would be solved.

Stopped reading here. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

I don’t see why you would. LB has utility coming from AoE and conditions (and the ability to remove them with Cleansing Ire), while Rifle gets fantastic damage from Volley and has other useful abilities that can hamper opponents significantly. Either way, I was simply proposing a possible option for pure kiting.

nicknamenick.2437:

Warriors and protection?! How? You mean runes i think that gives a protection boon for 10 sec with long icd below 50% health i think.. Lol that sucks, also runes issnt part of the class.

Apparently you never learned your critical reading skills… I never said that warriors have protection, I was simply speaking about protection in general.

nicknamenick.2437:

Detharos.3157:

While we have different class mechanics, the largest raw healing numbers over a period of about 120 seconds I can get on ranger would be with Heal as One. Comparing the two, on my current ranger with an ascended cleric greatsword, 3 ascended cleric trinkets and about another 75 healing power from my other trinket slots, and a FULL 25 stacks of healing (+250 healing) power my Heal as One only hits about 7.3-7.5k (not sure which) which is with no added perks individually on a 20 second cooldown timer, and easily interrupted and susceptible to poison reductions. (Especially for many ranger builds in how limited we are on controlled condi removal.)

So, if Healing Signet really is topping 8k every 20 seconds as many are saying it does with no healing power coupled with by default larger damage reduction from armor type further augmented by easy access to many, many damage reduction functions via traits and skills.. then yes, healing signet may just be a little bit too high at least in comparison to what my class deals with. To be fair you can entertain the “well rangers have a lot of evades argument” but warriors have easily enough damage reduction by nature in every single warrior build(And high damage to survivability ratios) too easily outdo any evade spam.

Wanna compare the rest also?
Yeah warriors have also more health and armor.. but you can also use allot of evade skills + kite around way more compared to warriors + you have protection etc..
I would be happy to get some evade skills on my sword and some protection + stealth also you have to trade for that Healing signet..

When a warrior is out of its endure pain/berserker stance and maby shield stance.. after that we eat almost ALL damage we get.. where you can go stealth or use you evade skills also.. + you also have endure pain like skill + almost perma protection where you get way less damage compared to heavy armor warrior…

All evade skills come with some sort of aftercast or moment of vulnerability or some other type of disadvantage that offsets the strength of the skill.

Warriors can kite just as easily or even more easily than most other classes, because LB allows great condi removal and doesn’t do bad damage either and Rifle is just an absolutely murderous weapon. Heck, if you wanted to just kite, you could run a LB+Rifle build and all of your problems would be solved.

Protection always comes in small quantities and/or has a significant CD. Stone Spirit is a small exception to this (though it’s only any good in Spirit builds anyways), but even that has an ICD, if I remember correctly. On the other hand, warriors will always have a 7% damage reduction buff over rangers, and they don’t even have to build for that. Not to mention- because armor is not characterized by the protection boon, you can have heavy armor and have protection applied to you. Rangers don’t get that same kind of benefit.

There are many reasons why warriors don’t have stealth, but the primary balance reasons revolve around Eviscerate and Kill Shot. Even a level 2 Eviscerate deals more damage than a backsided BS, and Kill Shot would be an absolutely devastating skill- it deals more than 150% of BS’s damage from a 1500 range at level 3.

Those 3 “stances” (“Shield Stance” isn’t actually a stance…) have a combined base duration of 15s, which can be brought up to 18s with Sure-Footed. Heavy armor and the 18k base health both reduce the amount of damage you take anyways, and Adrenal Health, combined with Cleansing Ire, seals the deal. You have absolutely nothing to complain about (especially since nobody has “perma-protection” anyways… Jeez, man…).

Judging by how your “proof” worked, I think I can give you a better method to prove that warrs aren’t OP:

1. Roll warrior
2. Run naked in sPvP using the infamous and OP 0/0/0/0/0 build with no amulet/jewel and no weapons and never use your heal.
3. See that warriors are not OP and then go complain about how thieves are hitting for 2k

Neko.9021:

Holy crap.

Rangers are being rated as 7th place by the general populace in sPvP?

My gosh, the general playerbase really is out of touch with the sPvP meta. No wonder the devs ignore everything players say.

IMO that rating is actually half true (and btw, the majority of votes currently rate ranger as the worst class for sPvP, though the margin is not even close to that of eles- it’s 24.0% versus 44.0%).

On the one hand, Spirit Rangers are a completely brain-dead spec that I would say are even less challenging than any warrior build you’ll find out there (though if you put in just a slight amount of extra effort into a warrior build, you’ll get significantly better results overall). On the other hand, literally every other Ranger build is absolutely godawful. I don’t remember the last time I lost a fight against a non-Spirit Ranger. It annoys the heck out of me, but… What can you do? So the rating is at least partially correct. Heck, if it weren’t for Spirit builds, I might even rate Rangers lower than eles.

tetrodoxin.2134:

I don’t think you can rank classes in PvP that simple. There are several roles to be fullfilled, with different classes for each role excelling. A similar thread was posted some time ago in the PvP section, and Grouch/Powerr pretty much explained why these black/white rankings aren’t really representative/useful.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Best-PVP-Class-1-January-2014/first

I’m just suggesting that maybe you should be a bit more specific in your survey.

To quote myself from that particular thread…

Arganthium.5638:

I’m basing my list on the strategic value of various builds in team comps overall as well as their value compared to other builds that attempt to complete the same role they do. I’m also basing this off the average skill level of players.

That’s how I evaluate different classes and their individual builds, and while it isn’t a perfect standard or anything, it does show how you can compare classes.

Steal is fine, it has a lot of mobility and a lot of utility to go along with it.

hihey.1075:

The only thing I’d like to see changed about steal is it going in full cd if you don’t have anything targeted. It should go to kitten cd like when you try to use it on a target which is out of reach.
Everything else is fine imho. It’s a free, pseudo-stunbreaker (it saved my life in many occasions) and a teleport.

There aren’t range markers in this game, and Steal doesn’t produce some kind of circle that tells you whether or not you’ll be able to land the skill. This change would completely break the mechanic. Anyways, we already put Steal on CD if we don’t have a target in sight whatsoever. The 5s penalty for being out of range is quite enough.

Arlette.9684:

What I noticed last night, and made me wonder was, whenever my HP drops bellow a certain point I’d start regenerating like mad and people would attack me and my HP would go up instead of down. Any thoughts? Is it just the healing signet that’s the problem or the healing signet in combination with something else?

That’s probably you subconsciously playing to survive when you reach a lower health. It also might be because as your health goes down, typically, so does your opponent’s, and that puts more pressure on him/her to play defensively as well. You also have to consider the effects of Endure Pain, of course. I don’t know if there are any traits that give you, say, regeneration when you reach a certain health threshold off the top of my head.

LOL

First of all, the most powerful Healing Surge only heals for 9820 at base, and that’s on a 30s CD with a 1s cast. In any battle, mathematically speaking, a warrior only needs to live for a few seconds (~10s against a thief with Withdraw, for example) before he/she starts healing for more than his/her opponent does. With Endure Pain, 18k base health, heavy armor, Adrenal Health, and amazing condi cleanse and adrenaline regen from Cleansing Ire, that’s extremely easy. If you really need to increase the passive effect more in order to survive, then you’re just a bad player, and that’s all there is to it.

I’m actually okay with Basi venom as long as Lyssa runes remain the way they are right now. The elite is terrible but the runeset makes it pretty good (but then you have to sacrifice a runeset of course).

So if Lyssa is nerfed, then Basi Venom will need a massive buff.

• Pistol Whip- that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is that the risk far exceeds the reward for this skill- hitting the same skill twice in a row within a 2s period is extremely difficult. I will say, however, that I am somewhat opposed to a large number of risk-reward skills because they invite an element of randomness into the game which then decreases the skill required to play. Knowing what you get when you get it allows you to focus more on perfecting the usage of those skills instead of gambling each time you play. Also, about the cast times- if you haven’t noticed, every single cast time in the game is more than the tooltip says (with a couple of exceptions). For example, pistol’s .5 second cast has a massive aftercast that makes it more like 1 to 1.5 seconds, and Infiltrator Return’s .25 second cast is easily more like a 1.5 second cast as well. Thus, the idea you’re proposing implies that the casting time used will be more like a full second, particularly because it’s not an auto attack and thus doesn’t activate instantaneously after the first aftercast is finished.

• Cluster Bomb- further evidence you don’t know what you’re talking about. Any thief that’s spammed Cluster Bomb for any reason at all during his/her career knows that the timing between CB’s, even when you burst all of them, is more like 3-4 times what you said. You also fail to ignore that there are many melee skills that do exactly that anyways, and aren’t nearly as obvious as CB is… When was the last time you saw a thief spamming CB, anyways? I don’t know that I’ve seen one do it in the past 2-3 weeks.

• Disabling Shot- sure, ignore what I said about casting frames as well, I don’t mind. Just wasting my time.

• Choking Gas- or maybe it just means that the marginal benefit from using Choking Gas decreases to almost zero after you’ve used it once?

• Infi Signet- nice update you have there…

• SA VI- how is that a free hit? You’re getting at least one free hit from your opponent coming up to you using BP+HS or CnD anyways, how many do you need? And I don’t see why there can’t be a counter to ranged weapons from melee, especially when you need to work much harder to use stealth against a ranged opponent anyways.

• Stealth skills: “You’re not even considering the idea that they aren’t incredibly imbalanced”… I’m guessing that’s not what you were trying to say. As for stealth skills “not being fair”, they’re always fairly predictable (even if you can’t see your opponent), and stealth by its very nature allows you to damage opponents while they can’t do anything back to you without removing stealth. The risk is that if you even take 3, 4 hits maximum (unless they’re e_really_ low-damage hits overall), then your entire combo will be pointless because you’ve been hit by more damage than you’ve dealt. Condis still apply while stealthed, and you can use CC lines/circles and/or AoEs to damage thieves easily. It’s a tradeoff, so you’d better justify why these skills are supposedly “unfair”. In the meanwhile, you should also justify why skills like Surprise Shot (hardly more damage than the auto attack without the bounce and a relatively short 2s immobilize that has a noticeable cast since it’s an arrow that essentially pops up out of nowhere) are as unfair as Backstab and so should thus get the same CD as BS does.

• Crippling Strike- as I’ve said, there are no alternative abilities to any of these skills, and with their large aftercasts it would make sense that the last skill at least does a decent amount of damage. Also, if I recall correctly, one of the reason why the Sword auto chain is so powerful against stationary/barely moving opponents (and I suspect this is the case with all melee weapons) is that a continuous usage and striking of the auto chain will slightly decrease your cast times (more fluidity in your motions). Furthermore, if 2.5 seconds is too little time to be able to react to an auto chain, then that’s simply a skill issue. Players can respond easily to half-second casts, so a lack of ability to counteract a chain that lasts 2.5 seconds in its entirety is simply a player issue, not a game one. Your changes are only an attempt to make this game even less skillful than it already is, which defeats the purpose of experience.

• Infi Strike- I’m not even going to address this one until you tell me why you “should” only be able to access vertical mobility via things like the bumpers on SHammer. It turns this game into a two-dimensional one with much less dynamism than it currently has. As for the IR changes, you can already evade in whichever direction you want with Withdraw. You can just as easily put distance between you and your opponent with the current form of IR, except that that skill requires more skill as opposed to luck as you’re anchored to a single point that you have to use to your advantage rather than just evading in some direction and crossing your fingers that you get somewhere safe. Not to mention that this nerf would only further make the thief identical to warrior, which certainly isn’t the reason most of us chose to play thief instead. You also ignored what I said about the casting times, which would seem to imply that you in fact either researched them (which I presume from the fact that you bothered to research CS’s cast times) and have ignored what I have said, knowing it to be true, or you were too apathetic to research it at the same time you were researching CS, which implies that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about in the first place. Heck, if nothing else, just get somebody to video it for you- a friend or a guildmate, for instance. It’s really not that difficult… And if it was, then it would simply be best for you to stop talking about how IS has a “zero” cast time and is “completely unpredictable”.

jmatb.6307:

Don’t worry Swagg, this is good stuff. Smart, comprehensive suggestions go way over the average forum troll’s head

You’re one to talk, given the outcome of our last discussion. At least have the respect to contribute something rather than continue trying to flame me.

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

I still don’t understand how the class with the most armor and health can have a passive heal that heals for over 400 every single second, while the class with the least health and armor can at best (fully traited with everything) get 260 health WHEN USING AN ABILITY which of course isn’t every single second.

Not to mention- the best heal makes you extremely vulnerable for +3 seconds and is interruptable. Glyph doesn’t have as bad a cast but is overall very weak, ABrill is too unreliable, and Signet is just flat-out too weak.

This would be absolutely terrible for stealth builds and would be absolutely overpowered for S/X builds.

JonPeters.5630:

I was simply stating that the problem is we are not going to address the issues that the passive sustain is creating until we make the active use have a place in combat so even if it is not THE PROBLEM, it is the blocking issue.

Jon

Nerf the passive to 280 HPS (putting it on par with most heals) and buff the active to 4480 (224 HPS). That way the active is worth an instant 16s (80% of 20s) of the healing you’d get from the passive, and the passive benefits are enough to make up for the weaker active healing so that you get just a bit more health by investing your time, and you can take advantage of the time between when the active goes off CD and you use the active again.

It’s not that difficult…

Most of the new healing skills are completely and utterly weak. The thief heal heals for too little for its insanely long CD, the ele heal is too unreliable, the warrior heal is far worse than HealSig, the guardian heal is too unreliable as well, the mesmer heal doesn’t heal for much even with 3 clones out (and certainly much, much less than HealSig does), and the necro heal has too long a recharge and relies too much on having allies nearby. A.E.D. is also unreliable for many of the reasons stated for other heals. The only half-decent one is Water Spirit, and that’s only because it even further encourages Spirit Ranger 1-spam builds.

Made a few changes; added some builds, changed others. I’m going to start adding notes referring to what I interpret as the meta builds for each weapon set, if there is one (which may not be the case for weaponsets like P/D).

• Pistol Whip- your “redistribution” of damage seems more like nerfs across all decent-damage attacks… A chain skill can be evaded and is far more predictable by its very nature, making PW much harder to hit with your changes. Furthermore, the 2-second time window between the first two hits is significantly less than the time window between auto attacks, which is a huge problem unless your opponent just wants to take a bunch of attacks to the face without moving or evading.

• Cluster Bomb- what? Melee-range weapons should be “high damage, very large AoE spike skills with very short cast-times”. That’s the reward of melee- you fight on your opponents’ terms with much less area to attack from, so you should, naturally, get something to compensate- otherwise, melee damage is absolutely pointless and ranged weapons should always be used. And you clearly don’t know how hard it is to land a CB on anyone more than, say, 500 range away…

• Disabling Shot- research cast times. They’re not “invulnerability frames”, and DS will often position you to some place that you don’t want to be anyways because of its basic linear movement. Not to mention- it has an incredibly obvious animation and does trash for damage.

• Choking Gas- the initiative cost is too high for the reward it gives to simply just point-click-spam the skill.

• Infi Signet- it allows us to SS stomp, stunbreak, instantly teleport, cast while using the signet, and use the z-axis. 2s stability and 2s protection and the RTL abilities are not enough to make up for this nerf.

• SA VI- the vast, vast majority of stealths, in practice, come from attacks. Time your auto right and you’ll at least be able to hit one of your attacks to remove blind due to aftercast on HS and CnD. It’s really not that difficult.

• Stealth skills- so you plan on amplifying our damage by severely nerfing our stealth skills? I might have considered some of your points about chain skills valid, but the fact that you’ve created a bunch of extremely weak chain skills in your notes seem to stand quite contradictory to such a position.

• Crippling Strike- a) (see point c about casts) b) I mean that the rest of the chain has no alternate effects. It’s significantly more difficult to hit the second skill of any chain than the first, and even more so to hit the third skill of any chain as opposed to the second (because of the small time windows between which you can use different chained skills)- not to mention that the weakness and cripple are too short to be able to stack it again before its duration runs out unless you’re playing practically stationary opponents- and c) have you ever actually used the skill chain before? I told you to research this last time, but apparently you’ve chosen to completely ignore Jumper’s and my research. Unfortunately I deleted the video that I took of the testing a while back, but basically what I did was test different attacks on golems with S/D in the Mists and recorded my doing so. I then slowed the video down to .1 seconds/second and marked the video at the times where the beginning of an attack occurred, the damage landed, and the next attack of any sort was started (aftercast). As it so happens, the animations on all three attacks in the auto for Sword have extremely long after casts, resulting from the continuous motion of the sword downwards and then up and back downwards (or forwards) again for the next attack in a chain. If I had the data still for these particular skills then I would certainly present them, but I can tell that you haven’t researched this because the cast with aftercast is certainly much more than .25 seconds. Also, Meteor Shower is an AoE across a large area that has a 1200 range on a long-ranged weapon and has a very, very different attack pattern. You seem to use Meteor Shower as your base standard for everything in the game, but you clearly fail to understand the extreme difference between this skill and the skills you’re comparing it with.

• Infi Strike- you’re completely nerfing vertical mobility so that we can only attack opponents across two dimensions. That’s a pretty significant nerf. As for cast times, you’re wrong. I do actually have data for this. While my sample size is not large, it is at least indicative of the actual cast time for the skill: between the time when the skill was used and the damage/immobilize hit, across four trials, I found a cast time (activation to damage) of 6.9, 6.7, 5.6, and 6.2 tenths of a second (I took a note about the 5.6 result, which came from strafing for that particular trial). The time between which a player activated a skill and teleported, respectively, were 3.2, 2.2, 2.1, and 2.5 tenths of a second. You clearly have a bit of leeway before the damage hits, and you can take advantage of this even more if you watch your enemy’s boon/condition bar, which has the Infiltrator’s Return ability marked on it when active. Not to mention- thieves, by their nature, follow a pattern in terms of their attacking and retreating, and knowing that, it is extremely easy to predict when one is going to use IS (IR to a lesser extent, however). Also, the retreating leap makes it infinitely more difficult to move along the z-axis as well, and the fact that it doesn’t “anchor” you to a specific spot makes its effects not only much less predictable (this randomness reduces skill required) but prevents you from trying to be “in two places at once”, which is one of the main attractions to any sword build.

adrianz.9672:

Wow, I’d love to see all of the calculations and research you did to come to these conclusions.

Black Box.9312:

Arganthium.5638:

Black Box.9312:

Zanshin.5379:

You know, all I want is for the devs to start caring about the guardian.

Pretty much this. At launch Anet claimed that guardian was a pretty well-balanced class, and for the most part I agreed. But the game has changed quite a bit over the course of a year and a half, and just because something was working well at launch doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s just as effective after these changes have been made.

I don’t think that guardians have reached ele- or thief-tier badness yet (let’s be fair, they are at least a little balanced). Nonetheless I agree that the extremely large number of useless traits should be cut down.

I’m not suggesting that guardian is a bad class. It’s just been pigeonholed into a very limited set of roles. You can either build tanky and bunker with one, or you can go for a very glassy burst DPS build. There aren’t really any other viable options and there isn’t much room for a middle ground between those two polar opposites. Now take into account the fact that Anet has been rebalancing other classes to become competitors in these build categories and you have a problem.

No, I get what you mean. It has been pigeonholed, and a lot of that brings us back to the original discussion: because most Guard traits are useless.

Though I’d say that those “other” classes (warrior especially- highest base health, armor, best condi clear, and best HPS-that-you-don’t-have-to-spec-very-specifically-into-to-get make it the optimal class for virtually every role in the game) probably need nerfs anyways, since a lot of the competitiveness they have had with guardian in certain fields is only because they’ve been overly buffed.

Thief Shortbow 5? Seriously? This skill is 90% of the reason to even take Shortbow in the first place; the skill is otherwise terrible in combat except for positioning which requires, y’know, skill (a foreign concept you might have difficulty understanding).

Mobility, if anything, should be made greater in this game, because it allows for more complex and involved play that requires far more skill than this game currently requires.

Black Box.9312:

Zanshin.5379:

You know, all I want is for the devs to start caring about the guardian.

Pretty much this. At launch Anet claimed that guardian was a pretty well-balanced class, and for the most part I agreed. But the game has changed quite a bit over the course of a year and a half, and just because something was working well at launch doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s just as effective after these changes have been made.

I don’t think that guardians have reached ele- or thief-tier badness yet (let’s be fair, they are at least a little balanced). Nonetheless I agree that the extremely large number of useless traits should be cut down.

Swagg.9236:

THIEF CHANGES

Of course you want to completely annihilate the thief class.

• Stealth Skills: care to elaborate? This change would only serve to destroy all stealth-based builds. I have never had any problems whatsoever countering stealth skills across all classes. There’s no justification for this; it simply seeks to serve the worse players by making it far more difficult for even top-tier thieves to get any sort of advantage against them for the time they’ve put in to hone their skills.
  Sword
• Crippling Strike: As I’ve said before, this skill is a) the third in a chain that b) has no side effects already (such as condis) and c) includes skills with insanely large aftercasts anyways. Furthermore, Crippling Strike has a fair amount of windup for the amount of damage it does.
• Infi Strike: completely destroying thieves’ mobility. The usage of this skill, as always, is extremely predictable… Since the December 10th patch (actually, even before then, but now especially) I’ve had no problems whatsoever against S/D thieves with any class because I know the basic strategy to fight against them, much of which I’ve developed myself. This nerf is just trying to further drive the spec into ruin. Not to mention- the fact that you have to hit an enemy not only gets rid of some of the positional tricks that you can do with IS/IR but severely nerfs S/X thief’s main source of condition removal.

• Infi Return: another nerf to thief mobility, which was supposed to be one of the thief’s main attractions anyways.

• Shadow Shot changes: what? The shot in and of itself is already easily evadable, and spending 4 initiative just for a teleport and a single blind seems pretty poor. The marking ability only makes the skill even weaker (even more predictable), and the mobility nerf to the skill… Again, there’s no context within which you can justify this.

• Pistol whip: one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen. You basically have to hit a skill two times in a row within a 2 second time span and then you have to cross your fingers and hope that your skill with an incredibly obvious animation hits your opponent for less damage than Final Thrust at <50%. The counters for this would seem pretty obvious, but apparently not to you…

• Cluster Bomb: I’ve told you this before… The problem that any player has to accept who wants to fight from melee is that he/she gets to play by his/her opponent’s rules. This nerf to Cluster Bomb is a severe nerf to this tradeoff. Not to mention- it already has a painfully slow cast time.

• Disabling Shot: an already incredibly weak skill with a terribly obvious animation and vulnerability, needing a nerf? You certainly can’t control a point with this skill, and it’s only good for one, maybe two situations anyways. But hey, leap on the bandwagon…

• Choking Gas: this has no side effects outside of poison, the poison lasts a relatively short period of time (5s is much shorter than most people tend to imply that it is), and it has a fairly predictable pulse. Not sure what the logic is with this.

• Infi Signet: so what’s your problem with mobility, anyways? Everybody likes this skill how it is currently, this is just a terrible change.

• SA VI: if nothing else, this skill is pretty easy to counter just by swinging your sword once. You seem to have a major hatred for blindness, though your supposed “fixes” that you’ve listed out suggest that you’re probably blind anyways.

Can you give us a direct link to your build? That tends to be the easiest way for us to evaluate and solve your problems.

UPDATES

I tested the build out some more today, and I’ve made a few changes.

Vigorous Revelation (Inspiration III)- changed to Mender’s Purity. VR just wasn’t beneficial enough for me to give up the condi removal.

Illusionary Defense (Chaos IV)- though it was hard for me to give it up, I eventually decided that it was too much work trying to keep up 2-3 clones at all times just so that I could get the 9% damage reduction. As a result, this has changed to the more enemy-punishing Debilitating Dissipation.

Blink- this was a change I hadn’t expected beforehand- I’ve changed it to Mantra of Concentration. It’s simply more useful as a stun breaker, and the stomp assurance from it is great.

Updating build now.

Mash Hog.5672:

It seems like there are currently three issues with the Ele.

Lack of survivability, lack of effective trait-lines, and lack of effective skills.

The lack of survivability pidgeon-holes Elementalist into points in Water and Arcana which make it very difficult for Elementalists to expand their traitlines.
The lack of survivability also pidgeon-holes Elementalists to run cantrips which makes it difficult for them to use other utilities.

That, coupled with the less than stellar trait-lines and terrible utility skills that the Elementalist have been given make it so that the most efficient use of the Elementalist requires points in water and cantrips.

In order to push us out of these traits/utilities, they have been nerfed terribly but since Elementalists have no other useful traits/utilities to fall back on so they need to stick to playing with the nerfed stuff.

This is not the rule 100% of the time but this is the underlying issue.

This is, IMO, probably 70-80% of the problem with ele atm. I’d also say that some of the weapon skills are lackluster (long/obvious cast times, etc) and overall a lot of them seem to be fairly similar to one another. Eles also have absolutely godawful choices for healing- Signet heals for very little and requires constant damage output, Renewal makes you extremely vulnerable and has a longer cast than a mantra does, and Arcane Brilliance is too risky, only useful in large fights, and has too long a CD to make the risk worth the possible reward.

The one heal I didn’t mention is Glyph, and that’s because I think that Glyph of Ele Harm (pun half-intended) has the best risk-reward ability and is fairly safe compared to other skills. That being said, it’s still one of the worst heals in the game (it heals for 200 HPS less than HealSig does[!], and even when you’re attuned to water you still heal for around 150 HPS less anyways).

The fact that ANet has completely neglected these problems and/or been ineffective in handling them is just downright bad, and shows either a serious lack of experience or a deep stupidity on their behalf.

EDIT: also, do you mean Signets or Sigils? Because those are two very different things. o.o

If you’re talking about sPvP, then sure, most of my builds I’ve used in the past have gone without speed buffs.

As for PvE and WvW, it’s more split. Focus is a difficult weapon to fit in just perfectly into a build, but the benefits from having it are absolutely fantastic.

StickerHappy.8052:

I was wondering about your rune choice. why ogre?

That may also change in the future… However, Ogre is my go-to runeset for any damage build for a few reasons. First of all, all of the abilities are good. The power is always useful and the critical damage works well with my zerker amulet and precision from 20 into dueling. Rock Dog is just a decent AI to have around, and the 4% damage buff is amazing as well. Other runes (like Runes of the Mesmer) can be considered but aren’t that useful for this build anyways because (as in the case of RotMes) this build doesn’t use much dazing or stunning, just interrupts from Into the Void, and focuses more on the debilitation coming from Chaotic Interruption and the boons from Bountiful Interruption to truly “lock down” the opponent.

Umut.5471:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

@Umot: Perma-evade thieves got nerfed in the last patch.

They are still ridiculously op. if this is their nerfed version, i can’t imagine how op they were before… They don’t even take damage.

lulz. You’re clearly just bad at hitting opponents and taking advantage of the weaknesses of S/D, including chains, casts, aftercasts, evade durations being shorter than casts, etc. The last time I fought another S/D thief with my own, I did the vast majority of my damage with the auto attack. Simply knowing when to attack an S/D thief is all you need to be able to do in order to counter one. Flanking Strike does relatively low damage, and the positional implications of the skill along with its cast means that you can easily kill an S/D thief just by standing in place and swinging your sword. If you still can’t counter this, not sure what else there is to say other than L2P.

As for the actual topic… Diamond Skin was a really stupid change for multiple reasons. First off, it’s only good against condi necros anyways, which doesn’t do anything to help the currently awful state of eles anyways. Secondly, the idea of hard counters like this are bad anyways because they create an unhealthy game of chance where you just have to hope that your hard counter isn’t on the other team. Finally, it’s insanely annoying for condi necros in sPvP, where you’ll see a bunch of noob eles running Diamond Skin builds and the like just because they can finally beat a single class, which is all well and good but makes the game incredibly frustrating and pointless.

Not sure what ANet was thinking, if it was thinking at all, which I am beginning to suspect may have been the case.

I know that there are a lot of others like me that have been calling out for a nerf to HealSig, but most of them seem to suggest insane 150-200 HPS nerfs. Sykper, the reasons you listed out are precisely why I’ve been suggesting to nerf it by somewhere in the range of 20 to 50 HPS, at least for starters.

Over the past few months, I have increasingly gotten the feeling that class viability is determined to a large extent by three different variables: base health, base armor, and basic healing ability. This would explain why, for instance, ele is at the bottom of the class hierarchy. Its healing skills are all absolutely godawful, it has the lowest base health of all classes (though the same as thieves and guardians have), and it wears light armor. Eles can get some degree of healing through the Water trait line, but the amount of investment required to get the necessary healing is extreme, the damage output and utility from any water skill set on any weaponset is lackluster, and even the healing itself that you can get from the Water trait line is fairly disappointing as well. On the other hand, warriors are the best in all three of those areas: they have the highest base health, they have heavy armor, and their healing is absolutely excellent. Rangers have medium armor, average base health, and pretty decent healing, so it’s no surprise that with the brain-dead Spirit 1 spam specs they’ve become a pretty good class (though all of their other builds are worse than the optimal builds of most other classes). Engineers are the same way, which has lent to them being as powerful as they are as of late. Anyways, I think you get the point.

As a result, the best course of action would almost certainly be to nerf HealSig by just a small amount. I personally believe that HealSig is something like 40% of the problem with warriors right now (where Cleansing Ire accounts for another 25%, Adrenal Health for 5%, Stances for 10%, the high base health combined with heavy armor for another 15%, and everything else for the remaining 5%). Since it’s so delicate, it’s clearly best to nerf it only by a small amount for starters, and then by more until warrior is balanced.

I supported the buffing of warriors back when they were the worst class in the game, and I wouldn’t want to see them return to that state. However, HealSig clearly needs a nerf and I think a small one would be just fine, at least to see the effect it has.

First off: if anything, this build is at least a fun build. I haven’t had much time to mess around with it yet, but it seems relatively theoretically sound and I have had a good bit of success with it.

Secondly: the main problem with not having had enough experience yet with this build is that I can’t tell you precisely which traits and utilities are best for this. As a result, I would not at all be surprised if some of the traits that I took were second-best traits that, while good, are not entirely optimal. As I continue crafting this build, I’ll fine-tune it as reflected by my sPvP experiences.

So, that being said… I present… My build!

Chaos Void (UPDATED as of 16 January 2014)
Q: Why use focus over, say, /S or pistol?

Although the focus is a pretty good utility weapon, it’s probably about equal IMO or just slightly inferior to offhand Sword for Lockdown builds. This is because Illusionary Riposte has a much shorter CD than Temporal Curtain does (even when traited). However, there are a few things to consider. First off, Into the Void is a “pure” AoE. Counter Blade shoots a projectile in a line that can Daze its targets, but opponents do have to actually stand in a linear pattern in order for it to work on multiple targets. Into the Void is different; up to 5 targets in a range of 600 of Temporal Curtain will be pulled by the skill, which is extremely helpful for guaranteeing an interrupt and/or CC’ing multiple targets. Furthermore, however, Temporal Curtain has a longer range than Counter Blade has- TC has a 900 range and an additional 600 range with Into the Void.

Some other useful things about TC: it can reflect projectiles with this build, which can give you a nice shelter to hide behind for a period of time, it’s a Combo Field, and it grants swiftness to allies and cripple to enemies that pass through the field (unfortunately, the swiftness is more or less “bugged” if you’ve ever used TC for swiftness before, but it’s still more mobility than mesmers can get from just about anything else). The most important thing about the skill, IMO, though, is that once Temporal Curtain is up, Into the Void can be used any time with a fairly instantaneous cast. This matters because it means that you can interrupt somebody on a very important cast, which you can’t do quite so much with Counter Blade (due to its slow animation and projectile nature). This extra bit of flexibility is a major boon for a Lockdown build.

Finally, there are many other tricks you can do with Temporal Curtain, such as cliff pulls, pulls out of Shadow Refuge against thieves, and the like.

Q: So what are the other big ideas behind this build?

I don’t like playing with the meta. I’m a rebel. The result has been an extremely non-meta build (no offhand Sword, Confounding Suggestions, etc, etc) that I’ve tried to make as effective and fun as possible. I feel like this is potentially a high-skill build that, while non-meta, can still be very good.

UPDATE (January 15): I should also mention- Illusionary Membrane works very well with Phantasmal Healing.

Q: What changes are you considering to make for this build in the future?

There are a few, actually:

Illusionary Defense: in spite of the fact that this trait seems to be only very rarely seen nowadays, I do believe it is in fact a good trait in that it can significantly reduce the amount of damage you take even with only 1 clone (with 2000 toughness, a 3% damage reduction is a meager but still useful 60 toughness). I find the idea of actively amping up my defense a very charming one, particularly when compared to the passivity of the current sPvP meta. However, I may choose to switch to the more mainstream Debilitating Dissipation in the future.

Blade Training: not much to say about this one. I just have to evaluate its usefulness against Phantasmal Fury. However, the utility from Sword skills 2 and 3 make it unlikely that I’ll change this trait easily.

Vigorous Revelation: this trait, admittedly, doesn’t work extremely well with Illusionary Defense, but it grants extra vigor for you and your teammates when you absolutely need it. It may be replaced by Mender’s Purity in the future, however, which would have the additional benefit of allowing me to more easily free up the utility slot taken by Arcane Thievery for another utility. I would not at all be surprised if this trait was in fact swapped out for MP in the future.

Arcane Thievery- I might switch it to Portal in the future; I certainly will if I end up taking Mender’s Purity. However, right now I feel uncertain about getting rid of condition removal from my build.

Q: What game modes can this build be used with?

sPvP and WvW, not so much PvE.

Thanks all,
~Arganthium~

Chicago Jack.5647:

Don’t ever use skill 4 (its terrible and just eats up your initiative needlessly) and, in only excluding very rare occasions, don’t use skill 5 (it is also just an initiative drain). The aftercast on cloak and dagger makes tactical strike (stealth hit) virtually unusable. Instead, approach using something like 2 + steal, then use flanking strike, 1 + dodge (only the first hit in the chain though, since it has an extremely short aftercast), and larcenous strike + dodge. Your role as S/D is to provide constant pressure on a target. It is a high sustain dps build able to contest points – which is rare as a thief.

That’s not entirely true. Dancing Dagger is certainly a useless skill in anywhere from 95% to 99% of all situations, but there are a few very rare situations where it’s useful. Two, actually. The first is when you need to deal ranged damage but your weapon swap (presumably SB) is on CD and you can’t use Infi Strike for whatever reason (maybe you’re capping a point). The second occasion is when you have IR up and just need to deal that tiny bit of extra damage to down an opponent, when your secondary is on CD and you don’t know that you have the time to IR/IS before your opponent heals or you take a significant amount of damage. The third and final occasion is when you have a downed opponent nearby and are letting him/her bleed and he/she is trying to heal, and all the while you’re capping a point. In those situations, the downed heal interrupt that you can get from Dancing Dagger can be helpful.

Of course, the skill in and of itself is still pretty terrible.

Excalibur.9748:

Arganthium.5638:

Excalibur.9748:

s/d still works fine but it’s not godmode anymore so people think it’s trash… funny huh?

If you put a pro on a trash spec, it can appear to be fine….

I feel like a lot of the people that I’ve seen still playing S/D are the hardcore players that would stick with the weaponset no matter what.

.

Are you saying that no matter how much they nerf the set there will still be people playing it? Are you guys that stubborn? lol

We just love the weaponset :o heck yeah we’re stubborn.

Doesn’t make ANet’s decisions any better, though.

NOTE: I’m speaking from an sPvP point of view here.

Personally, I think that bombs and grenades should be nerfed and made less spammy (let’s be honest, they’re turning the class into the most spammy class in the game), and that Incendiary Powder should be nerfed as well. Magnet and Gear Shield should both be nerfed by reducing Magnet’s range from somewhere from 600 to 900 and Gear Shield should be reduced to a 2s duration. Healing Turret could use a slight nerf. In return, I think buffs to the Inventions line should be made so that turret builds become more viable. I’d also like to see some of the unused utilities buffed (specifically Battering Ram and Throw Mine, along with the turret utilities, though only slightly).

In buffing turrets, I think that to avoid what has recently become a problem of over-reliance on AI, the turrets should become more reliant on player input in order to be effective- for example, you could move/turn turrets by hotkeying controls that allow you to independently control and switch between turrets in order to improve their positioning and overall effectiveness (though this change might be too complex to ever occur).

That’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

Go play an ele and make a video. Come back when you’re done.

Eles are by far the worst class in the game at the moment. They most certainly aren’t able to become “virtually unkillable”, even in WvW, and… Sustained burst? Really? Not only does that not qualify as burst, by definition, but that’s completely untrue anyways. You clearly have never played the class before.

Arcturus.8109:

Qaelyn.7612:

And this is why.

I’d say that rank 1 ele is much worse than empty space. Not to mention rank 8 mesmer. So actually you was like 3.5v4 or so.

Depends on their WvW experience. It’s obviously not the same thing, but it can give a player the useful reactions and basic understanding of classes that can be used in order to win a game.

Excalibur.9748:

s/d still works fine but it’s not godmode anymore so people think it’s trash… funny huh?

If you put a pro on a trash spec, it can appear to be fine….

I feel like a lot of the people that I’ve seen still playing S/D are the hardcore players that would stick with the weaponset no matter what.

For example, I still play S/D in sPvP. I think I’ve seen Hype playing S/D in sPvP (if he plays the little asura that I think he plays, then I can tell you he’s definitely a dedicated or at least good S/D player as well, if I can call myself a decent S/D player)… In fact, Hype is the only other person I see consistently playing S/D in sPvP. I see a bunch of scrubs running around with it and getting completely wiped, some decently respectable players who can use the weaponset to put him/herself on par with the average warrior, but there are very few people that are still getting good results with it. The result has been that only the very small percentage of people that can use the weapon set effectively are continuing to play it, which has led to the common delusion that S/D is in a “fine” place at the moment.

If you took an average player and placed him on an S/D build, no matter how good the build would be, that player would very likely be completely annihilated by his opponents. It’s turned from a meta spec to a “pet” weaponset that only those of us who absolutely love Sword/Dagger still use with any great frequency.

PowerBottom.5796:

Atm, I’m blown away by how strong Venom-Share Thief is:

- Some of the best burst in the game (flanking Strike/Pistol Whip + Devourer Venom)
- Probably THE BEST Teamsupport in the game (5k AoE-Heal with Skelk Venom, tons of CC with AoE Devourer Venom and Basi Venom, AoE Might-Stacks, AoE-Lifesteal for your Teammates etc.)
- Very high mobility, high AoE-DPS in Teamfights and insane against downed Players —> usual Thief-stuff…

Here’s the build I use if any1 is interested:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsaVnkElaarJSnwfaCZrQPx9wChqnS7xNZTxEA-TsAg0CnIKSVkrITRyisFNsYZxsAA

No Idea why it isn’t FotM yet. :P

El. Oh. El.

I know that this thread is 6 months old, but I just wanted to say that thief’s Skull Fear has a painfully slow animation. If your opponents can evade/interrupt it before it occurs, it’ll often still be canceled because of some random stun from, say, Chaos Storm.

Kagamiku.9731:

Is that video supposed to be some kind of joke?

1st fight 2v2 (lose) You probably would have lost 1v1 too considering the other warrior dropped half your life in two hit!

2nd fight you’re chasing someone with an orb and by the time they reach the point they have 1/3rd their life. Not exactly impressive you killed them at that point.

3rd right – you managed to down a bad necro but he ressed and you proceeded to die shortly after.

4th fight – utterly molested by another warrior 1v1. That healing signet really let you facetank damage considering he killed you in 10 seconds flat.

5th fight…? Downed a necro that had 1/3rd health by the time you got to him.

Are you trolling me? Where in any of that video does it show the OPness of HS.
It shows you being molested in 2v1’s and the only legit 1v1 you had.

Thanks for confirming to me you should not be taken seriously.

LOL I assume you not only didn’t read the description to the video, but you seem to be over-exaggerating and failing to see the bigger picture.

For example, at around 12:45, I have a 1v1 with a Mesmer on Bear. The point is not that I downed the mesmer- that much is obvious and the reason for why it happened isn’t too hard to discern either (he was carrying the orb, at least at first). However, if you watch my health bar, it’s not until the mesmer’s dying breaths (when he knows he’s about to be downed, so he goes all-out) that he actually manages to get me under 20k health. For a class that’s supposed to be warrior’s worst matchup, that seems pretty strange to me.

Of course though, that’s not all. Right after that fight, a necro and a warrior 2v1’d me (before my useless teammate came up to be a rallying point for the other team), and yet I didn’t even get under 50% health before he came along. I facetanked Whirling Blades and 100 Blades and I didn’t even fall under 50% health. Consider that I’m running Zerker’s w/ Soldier’s jewel. On a thief, I would almost certainly have taken lethal damage, but here I was able to shrug it off relatively easily.

The fourth fight, granted, wasn’t nearly as good as I hoped it to be, but you’re still missing the point. I took the entirety of a 100b and didn’t die, which would not happen on any other class save a bunker guardian.

Outside of that, there were many situations where I was able to fight on-point because I was healing for as much as I was. I played effectively (I decapped and capped points, all of my teammates seemed to serve only as rallying tools for the enemy… I saved them from what should’ve been a loss at the very end of the game that I nearly managed to convert to a win), and this is given that this was my third tPvP match with my warrior, which should really be considered the first since my first was a 4v5 (not shown) and my second was a 5v4.

If anything, the only problem I had was condition removal, and that was primarily because I was running Rifle (which is the worst weapon for CI). And yet, that I still managed to facetank as much damage as I did would have been miraculous on just about any class, but was completely normal for my warrior build that ran zerker amulet.

Stop looking at the kills (which seems to be your main fascination across all the forums) and simply look at both my effectiveness in capping/decapping/holding points and my ability to facetank damage. Then got on a thief build and take a direct 100b in its entirety to the face, and then tell me that warrior isn’t OP.

Kagamiku.9731:

Oxygen.5918:

Red Raven.7824:

There already is counter play towards healing sig. It’s called poison.

Poison doesn’t counter healing sig in any more way than it counters other healing skills.

In fact, I’d be tempted to argue that it counters healing signet less than other healing skills, because it needs to be kept up constantly to reduce its overall output by 33% while it can only be on for the split second required to receive healing from other healing skills.

You’re wrong.

It counters signet more than other healing skills because whenever poison is on you the healing signet is reduced and thus your HPS becomes reduced as well. Poison does very little to affect other healing skills as long as you pay attention. Because you can cleanse the poison before using the heal. A good player is going to make sure he is able to activate his heal when poison is not on him.

A good player may have to use his heal even if he has poison on him.

There are very few burst heals in the game that cannot be countered by a well-timed poison because most heals have a significant casting period.

The longer you wait between condi cleanses (perhaps you ran out of them), the longer the time between heals and the lower your HPS becomes anyways.

A lucky poison at the right time will completely cut a burst heal by 33%. However, a poison on a warrior with signet will only cut healing by 33% for either the duration of the poison or the amount of time between heals. In, say, a 50 second fight between a warrior and an Ranger using Troll Ungent (though it could apply just as easily to other heals, specifically Ether Feast, Mirror, Glyph of Ele Harmony, sometimes Ether Renewal, any activated healing signet across any class, Heal as One, Elixir H, A.E.D., Med Kit, Healing Turret, all of Warrior’s non-HealSig healing skills, Well of Blood, Shelter in some circumstances, Litany of Wrath, Healing Breeze, Hide in Shadows, and Skelk Venom), you’d hypothetically only need to poison the ranger twice for a maximum of 20 seconds in order to completely reduce the ranger’s healing by 33%. For a warrior, however, you have to spend 100% of the fight with poison on the warrior in order to reduce the warr’s heal by 33%. Even so, if you look at the math, you find that HealSig still heals for 52 HPS more than Troll Ungent does. So basically, if you poison a ranger for the full 20 seconds of his healing in a 50 second battle where he heals twice, the ranger still heals for less than a warrior who has been poisoned for all 50 seconds of the battle. That’s absolutely insane.

It also doesn’t help that warriors have arguably the best condi removal in the game.

Basically, all of your suggestions are either counterable with good play (or even just spammy play), are completely negligible anyways (such as the Ranger vs Warrior example mentioned earlier), will hurt the player trying to use them (often significantly), or are completely unrealistic. As a matter of fact, HealSig is the best counter to poison in the game, simply because of the fact that in order to completely reduce its effectiveness by 33%, you have to keep up poison constantly on a warrior. This isn’t true of any other class in the game.

Combined with the highest base health of any class (except Necro, which has the same base health but wears light armor anyways) in the game and heavy armor (7-14% damage reduction), Healing Signet makes warrior by far the toughest class in the game. Oh, and, by the way, how am I supposed to apply poison to you on, say, my guardian? Even if those poison sigils existed in sPvP, they certainly wouldn’t help to totally reduce warr’s healing. In fact, the effect would be fairly negligible.

Until next time… A video of how OP HealSig is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzmeI22dCWE

Yeah, let’s remove thief’s only real unique mechanic because the damage coefficients on the vast majority of thief skills are significantly lower than, or require multiple hits to be larger than the coefficients of other skills, or, in the case of skills like Larcenous Strike, are chained.

Let’s remove Sword thief’s main source of condition removal, thief’s mobility, because we can’t handle a resource system that encourages players not so much to spam all of their skills, but (in a perfect game where all thief skills were usable, which unfortunately is not the case for many thief builds) to resourcefully use skills tactically and positionally in order to grab an advantage that can be used strategically for a crushing win.

Let’s nerf stealth, damage, skill, mobility, condition removal, boon countering, evasion as a sole source of damage mitigation, condition application (which is already virtually nonexistent), skill, flanking ability… Heck, if such terrible ideas as these actually pass, then this game will arguably become one of the worst-balanced games ever.

Thief suffers greatly for having initiative- it lacks defensive mechanisms, high damage coefficients, decent condition application and removal, team support… Among other things.

Believe it or not, not everybody wants to play a faceroll class, and removing initiative would not only destroy thief but it would permanently remove any remaining thoughts of how much “skill” this game requires.

I’ve been a floater for a long time now. Would be great to finally join a guild where I could do something… (Mesmer is my second most-played class, behind thief)

Name: Arctu the Noble
Server: Eredon Terrace, North America’s worst server
Playstyle: sPvP with a dash of WvW
Role: Oh, jeez… Um… Put me down for either instructor or tester, I’d be glad to do either.
Playtime: ~4-5 pm MST (3 pm PST) during the week, ~10 am – 1 pm on the weekends

EDIT: thanks for accepting me into the guild.

Torment is fine. Unlike other conditions, it has the blessing of not being insanely spammable, which is a good thing because it keeps you from just spamming your skills to stack up infinitely high numbers of condis. Please, please do not ever suggest to put Torment on Sword auto again, though…

Trust me, this is one of the most hated bugs in the game… -_-