Guild Wars 2

Thats gotta be the fastest rev Ive ever seen…
Perhaps a phase traversal abuse?
Idk but if someone was using a ‘no collision hack’ or anything, I would be very suprised if they were stupid enough to make it that obvious.

Endownment effect.

As someone who has invested a serious amount of time into making balance concepts for this game:
I believe it is literally impossible to balance all three gamemodes at once.
It is already incredibly hard to do it for PvP only (srsly, if you didnt try to consider every skill, not just the ones you dont like, you have no idea how much work it actually is)
But making good changes in PvP in consideration on their impact in PvE…no way.

I would also like to add, that they actually did change effects for certain gamemodes only.
For example:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Smoke_field

Stealth duration not affected by Meld with Shadows in SPvP.

I just dont get why they were able to see the need for such few effects, but not for the game as whole.

I always have some problems if we dont get damage numbers, casting times, cd’s etc.
For example:
Takedown round: 4 Ini, 2 sec knockdown, 1200 range
Headshot: 4 Ini, 0,25 sec daze, 900 range
Now if takedown round had a 1,5 seconds cast time, thus could hardly be used to interrupt a skill the way headshot is, it might be balanced(+no PI without DD)
but how can we tell?

Otherwise:

-I dont think a high damage ranged stealth attack is a very good idea. From a logical and from a balancing perspective this would have to deal less damage than backstab from the front. Dealing more is basically not in consideration, dealing less will be almost useless.

-Assassination’s secondary effect is way overpowered.
In order to execute a finishing blow, you must hit your enemy three times in succession, from close range, with a total cast time of 2,75(normal finisher takes ~3 I believe), and 40s cd.
This one basically allows you to execute any downed from a safe distance with almost zero counterplay.(Unless your enemy can constantly maintain projectile destruction, which would be useless if you would use BV for unblockable)

-Force lense. 40% is too much. Remember this affects all weaponsets, imagine what a burster otp could do with a 40% damage boost.
As I told basically every other concept author I have commented on: base your skills around already existing mechanics. Assassins signet for instance which delivers a 15% boost for 5 attacks.

-Finally your heavy initiative consumption makes trickery mandatory for every build that wishes to use your lenses. That means 2/3 traitlines are already set.
Thats not exactly good for build diversity.

I dont know but:
If you have to forbid class stacking because everybody would do it if you didnt…doesnt seem ready for esports.
If your top streamer leaves the game on behalf of the reason that it is not competitive enough to make people want to improve themselves…doesnt seem ready for esports.
If your esl players troll around, play without ts or choose a random comp from a website…doesnt seem ready for esports.
If you hardly get any viewers, the main incentive for ‘pros’ is the money and 90% of the playerbase could theoretically farm the highest possible rank…well, you know.

I dont think gw2 could not become a good esl game.
Its unique and has a very interesting and fun fighting system with a lot of potential.
However they need to take a serious look on the game itself before they can consider pushing esports AMN.
A good sport is wanted, not forced.

Or we could just add boss attack sequences that group stealth offers the only reliable protection from.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Harbinger_of_Mordremoth_Outfit
That took me way longer to find than it should have.

Wiki

Completing the associated first-tier collection is required to purchase these items. Each item is rewarded from the achievement and this vendor offers these items as a replacement.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Grandmaster_Craftsman_Hobbs
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chest_of_Natural_Protection
Didnt make nevermore, but I think this is the item you are looking for.

Zelulose.8695:

Bump Thief needs a base of 15k hp no more no less.

Warriors kill any non vitality/toughness amulet thief with one skill.

If you want zerker to be viable, fix the game, not the class.

Volatile.8452:

Asrat.2645:

Pls do not give thieves more vitality.
We are literally immortal in pvp.
The only thing that keeps us controlled is the fact that we cant afford to stick to an enemy and deal damage.
Thats good as it is.

Immortal in PvP?

I facepalmed so hard I probably broke my nose.

Its a fact m8. If you die as a teef in sPvP, its your own fault.
@Silverbolt. No. Because every other class can be chased down or locked in place.
The only class that can chase a thief is another thief. Or maybe a rev if you are low on ini and health.

Quite some questions and I bet most of them will already be answered if im done writing.
Regardless:
1)I dont really understand the question. All damaging conditions have certain values for base damage (without any condidamage) and scaling damage. So a certain condition will do a default damage with 0 condamage stat, and increase as you raise the stat.
2.1) From my understanding every tick you apply is unique to you. The mob suffers from 2 stacks of poison, but the game knows which one you applied and which one another player, they all tick and scale as if they were individual.
2.2) Answered above
2.3) I dont get what you are trying to say
2.4) If you dont play a condi build, every power based attack will deal more damage. The damaging conditions are simply not viable. Blind, weakness, cripple are ofc useful.
Depending on what fields you use they can however serve as combo fields for condi users.
3) No
4.1)Im not sure if skills have a priority to remove conditions, if they have so they will probably tend to remove damaging conditions first.
Could also be based on the skill concept.
The question would be: why does that kittening 16 stacks of confusion always get removed after the 1 stack of bleeding?!
4.2) Yes. if you get less than the tooltipped number of conditions removed, its either a bug or an issue with your eyesight.
4.3)Im pretty sure it would, if im not mistaken its even QandA’ed in either one of the entries in the wiki.
Logically: both are seperate effects, there is no reason why they should cancel out each other. Worst case the rune effect could be triggered first, preventing the convertion.
4.4) The entire stack of condition is consumed, but the amount of stacks does not change anything about the applied boon.
Due to the fact that every converting skill has a unique spreadsheet on the wiki whilst boon corruption is normalized, the convertion is probably unique for every convert source.
5)No
6.1) Yes
6.2)The idea was to increase the threshold for damaging conditions to an unwritten ‘unlimited’. A number that will never be reached so every condition gets to deal damage.
7)The evade moves from mobs are probably not dodges and therefore have no endurance cost.
Not every evade is a dodge.
However the second effect, fumble, can prove extremely strong in pvp and pve.

The question is:
Do they only need to tell us what they want, or themselves.
To me it doesnt seem like they would even know the answer.
They are appearently trying to have their cake and eat it too, and they may not even be aware of that.

TheDevice.2751:

Asrat.2645:

Its not like you were the only class with a weaponset that cant be used in certain game modes…or at all

Actually I really dont know of the others. Honestly, if you can bring up some examples I’d have a better idea.

Thief:
d/d useless on power builds
p/p nice gimmick, nice otp, actually always inferior to alternate options
p/d useless

Elementalist d/d unviable in pvp
staff unviable in pvp

Warrior
Rifle useless
Longbow useless in pve
Axe useless in pvp
Warhorn useless

Ranger
Shortbow useless in pve
Warhorn useless

Guard
Hammer useless
Staff useless in pvp

Engi
Shield useless
Rifle useless

Mesmer
Greatsword useless in pvp
Everything offhand but shield unviable (at least in pvp)

Revenant
Oh sword useless

Those only quick observations by going through the build editor.
If you want a complete or accurate list you only need to go to mb and put all weapons that are not part of a ‘meta’ or ‘great’ build on this list.
Actually necro might be the only class where the elite weapon is not top tier.

Not esl. Or organized teams. The kind of people you meet on the streets. And I didnt really see a significant difference between the average amber and the average legendary.
Well, maybe a noticable distance, but nothing more.
And I would stick to it. You can certainly win against any rev, warrior, necro, ele. Thats 4 classes, 50%. The other ones are harder but doable.
Tho I do admit that a lot of times a duel is either too risky or too long to actually make sense, but you could do it.

I dont get that melancholic type of thief that wants to twoshot everything with cnd combo again.
-The class has perhaps the highest skill ceiling, but it pays out.
-You have to play tactical and get rewarded for it.
-I can beat 50(+)% of all classes in 1v1 reliably
-I can not directly contribute to the team fight, but I do not have the desire to do so, and a thief popping in at the wrong moment can be devastating for the enemy team.
-I can be wherever I want, I can engage and disengage every fight, am basically immortal and extremely hard to counter.

Of course the class lacks diversity in builds and playstyle, just like every single other class out there.

But seriously, what else do you want?

Krait, anyone? Jumping animation might get tricky.

Pls do not give thieves more vitality.
We are literally immortal in pvp.
The only thing that keeps us controlled is the fact that we cant afford to stick to an enemy and deal damage.
Thats good as it is.

A) You should come over to the thief forums for this
B) You should probably not make rework suggestions on the class just…just now.
If you think the staff has ‘not great’ damage, dust strike is ‘crappy’ and ‘passive’ or ‘longer’ stealth is a good idea, you have a lot to learn.

Its not like you were the only class with a weaponset that cant be used in certain game modes…or at all

Did they actually manage to patch that exploit back in there?
Anyways, if they banned people for skipping the effigy, half the playerbase would not be allowed into the game.

If it was a Ddos, it would have stopped. Nobody pays for a kittening botnet for hours to disable a single player in some game.
As for your isp…They have a sample size of probably a few hundred people+ extensive data and determine a lot of them are having problems.
You ask one friend and based on that assume they are wrong…

Are we talking pve or wvw?
In pve your solution is named invigorating precision.

No, usually you decap. It is very situational, but consider the following:
-A cap takes way longer than a decap.
-If an enemy is ignoring a decapped point, they loose. If they retake it they loose too.
But if they are recapturing a fullcapped point, they dont really loose anything.
The best situation for a fullcap is when the rest of the map is onesided.
If you win everywhere they arent going to miss you in the fights.
And if your entire team is dead already, you cant do anything about the other two points and might aswell secure your victory on this one.

But as long as there is any fight that you could turn around, you go there.
The most improtant thing is to gain momentum, and you dont do that by capping uncontested points.
Decapping forces your enemy team into doing annoying kitten they dont want to and requires almost no effort from your side.
Its almost impossible to stop a thief decap from happening, a thief fullcap is almost impossible to make happen.

ESKan.6782:

If you want strategic venom usage and control precisely how many times you attack per swing, don’t equip sigils that add RNG to that.

If you have broken your leg you shouldnt go to the doctor, you should just drive a car.
What kind of logic is that?

Would second that.
I dont really play scrapper, but a rev is much more reliant on their team, especially the healbot.
But your assumptions arent really fair. The average rev cant play their class, the average scrapper can.

Dawdler.8521:

Asrat.2645:

Its not ‘skill’ thats lacking, its the tactical element.
The ressource management.
The punishment for spamming.

That’s not tactics.

Having the right player in the right spot at the right time with the right support.

That is tactics.

And guess how you win a match that’s based around holding points?

Having the right player in the right spot at the right time with the right support.

Ergo it cant be tactics that’s lacking.

No. thats strategy. Well, based on my definition.

Instead of a ht I would much appreciate every class agining a more clearly defined role.
So for example a warrior should feel most natural to build on either full \m/ tank
or a brutal ‘close and personal’ kind of damage dealer.
If we found a way to predefine a set of fitting roles for each class without enforcing them, those roles could be balanced against each other and create a much more controllable system of balance.

As I said. Its not like we had a ‘no skill’ game, but it is very different now.
The current ‘skill’ in gw2 is mostly maximizing your strongest skills for highest uptime or strongest effect, maybe keeping a cc for the interrupt.
Its not ‘skill’ thats lacking, its the tactical element.
The ressource management.
The punishment for spamming.
In fights between damage dealers it is less of an issue, but when bunkers get involved…
The bunker only rotates and tries to get every boon and every heal possible. The bunker buster just spams all damaging skills. There is no use in timing them, since the bunker does not use timed damage denial, but constant. And if you dont attack them with your maximum strenght all the time they reset the fight.

Oh and to both you guys: Everyone can give up. I have much more fun writing alternative concepts and putting essays about powercreep up on the forums ^^

Envy.1679:

Anet is credited with discovering the bullkitten

Heh, yeah I made one of those too. I think i even used the same horns.(edit: no I didnt)
But dont forget about the godkitten or simply the kittening.
I mean: what would a kittening even look like, does anyone want to imagine?

Just to make this clear: no matter what combination of skills you have, this is a buff, not a nerf (unless you consider a recharged healing skill more useful than a recharged utility skill)
I made like 3 or 4 different tables and interpreted the data in every way I could think of, in order to prove this was actually a nerf.
But no matter how you look at it, this would be a buff and so I eventually rested my case.

The filter is not the issue.
Whatever you personally think about it, whether you find it necessary or stupid does not matter.
They think its neccessary and its their website.
The problem is the oversensibility. Simply allowing alternate forms of a ‘bad word’ if they are accompanied by other words would be sufficient.
As if anyone would use ‘randomwordAfiftyfive’ to circumvent the word filter.

Ellie.5913:

Asrat.2645:

(I was being ironic)

Oh my bad, I have trouble understanding what you are trying to say most of the time for some reason >.<

Probably since english is not my native language and I draw 80% of my language skills from forums, games, movies and southpark. Nonetheless I try voice my opinions in an ‘educated’ way and like to use complicated words and grammatical constructions.

(I was being ironic)

No, sry it isnt that simple.
Numerical fixes will help, but its mechanical fixes that need to happen.
And the actual ‘last patch’ nerfed a skill that has been fine for years in order for the elite mechanic to go unchanged.
I would agree that with the quarterly update they tried to slowly adjust some core specs to be more in line with the rest in order to increase core viability and diversity.
Unfortunately they approached this with buffs, once more leaving me most afraid of what they actually think this game needs.
Needles to say they failed. So far I dont see any mesmer or ele successfully running the new stuff. Its good that they are careful and dont overbuff, but with the current update frequency its going to take them years to achieve desirable results.

Behellagh.1468:

I’ll leave this here.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/There-is-Luck-and-then-there-is-RNG-Luck/2924633

Wow. So it has been worse…
The letters ‘st’(I guess)… is this filter list generated automatically? Hard to believe anyone with a brain would have indexed that? (this is also a way you can insult people without utilizing cats)

Well. Im pretty sure it helps deescalating.
Putting swears in a funny context takes the edge of them, but I think they are overdoing it.

Wolfric.9380:

We and anet has to sacrifice new specs and classe, because it will make the mess greater and harder wo work out…. They should focus on other contet not new classes in the next expansion. But i fear this is somthing we won´t bring into the minds of Anets marketing …

Well that part I completely disagree on.
This is not related to powercreep, but the introduction of moar elite specs is the best way to save build diversity.
A lot of the recent patches have shown pretty clearly that they dont want to bring elites back in line with core.
That suggests that in the long run you select 2 traitlines from the core pool and 1 from the elite pool (because 3 core will always be inferior)
So either they change their attempt entirely, or they have to introduce new elite specs to make the current ones less mandatory.

Actually I just think they wanted to make us happy and dint know how.
With hot, they introduced a mass of new shiny toys.
Interesting and inspired ideas to revive the community.
It was basically following a ‘bigger, better’ brighter’ schedule.
Unfortunately they didnt realize, and have not realized to date, that this was not what we needed.
Bigger, better and new is fun for one or two months, but when things start to settle you may start to see the flaws with it.
Looking at one of my favourite sites I can spot a bunch of psychological reasons that make it hard to consider to revert such a decision.
And im not even sure if just ‘going back’ would solve anything.
No. they arent ‘bad’ devs or designers. They made a decision for the sake of marketing, it has payed out in short-terms, and gets worse and worse in the long run.
And cognitive errors like the loss-aversion effect are preventing them from rethinking that decision.
I think it is important to let them know that we are actually willing to sacrifice some of the new shiny toys, if it helps creating a fun enviroment for gaming.

What about alternate animation sets?
Dont get me wrong, I love most of my current animations, but some of them dont fit specific styles.
For example the basic idle animation for holding two weapons.(hf)
It is not bad. It looks somewhat agile, it is relatively realistic and not an ‘anime stance’
I like it on paper, but in pratice it looks kinda akward with certain weapon types and weapons.
And if you possess ad infinitum it is annoying to see it almost horizontally to the ground because you bend your back so much.

In conclusion:
As cool as thief animations are on a dirty rogue, as soon as youre trying to create an elegant duelist, they fit less and less.

This is an interesting question. Mid season unranked matchmaking was pretty good, despite a beginner here and there most people knew what they were doing, nobody gave a crap about builds or team composition.
We just played what we liked and it worked.
Whilst in ranked we had ‘mmr hell’ we just played the game and had reasonably close matches.

Now, between the seasons with all the ’competitive’s flooding back into unranked most matches end up being very onesided, duplicate classes are being blamed for losses and, in contrast to what you would exspect, there are a lot more bad players around.
Worse yet, nobody takes it serious.
As soon as a team gets stomped at mid someone stopped playing or started raging.
I have seen a pug team afk’ing the entire match because they had a dc.

In other words: when ranked was available, they had matchmaking problems due to a lot of bad players.
When ranked became unavailable unranked started to have matchmaking problems due to a lot of bad players.
Strange coincidence.
But of course ranked is competitive. Only the best even go there. Worse players are scared of the competition and rather train then farming the extra rewards and the meaningless ranks.
(lol)

DaikonSamurai.6714:

What bugs me is we can’t have any hats. I mean, I can have a hat. But as soon as I give that hat to anyone, it doesn’t matter if it’s my Dad’kitten, Mother’kitten, sister’kitten, brother’kitten, friend’kitten, girlfriend’kitten. They all magically turn into kittens!

And now everyone I know has a kitten sitting on their head and they’re looking rather disapprovingly at me… Nobody mention my hat! :o

As a side note… I really want a kitten hat headpiece now plz…

This. Is amazing.

Build: I would probably swap staff master for escapists absolution, execution for improvisation or both. You will find that utility and sustain, especially on staff is much more helpful. Some would probably even consider pulmonary impact.
Rune of the daredevil is no good, you already have a high critchance with marauders and fury.
Vampire, wurm, scholar(probably not scholar, staff doesnt fight on full health)
Signet of agility >>>> infiltrators signet. I’d also advise you to try channeled vigor over withdraw, to find out if it suits you better, but both are very good.

Shortbow is usually a good choice. And as you get experience playing the class you will find yourself using the shortbow in combat more and more.
Staff is one of the weaponsets that can partially replace the utility offered by sb, you can try out different weapons. p/p for example could work, but your initiative managemant will be crucial.
Just try some stuff out, but you will probably return to sb.
I would not worry about stealth. There is simply the stealthy thief archetype and the acrobatic one. Stealth is a strong asset to our class, but not mandatory.

Your choice of weapon skills is interesting. Usually we start by spamming vault before we discover the depth of the set.
Vault is a strong skill. High damage, evade, gap closer, gap opener.
Its also somewhat of a skill shot because your enemy can easily evade it.
If you are about to use vault, dont face your foes way. Make them think the last youre going to do is jump on them.
Dusts trike is probably the second strogest. You can use it to attack enemies at range, suprise proccing basilisk venom or sigils. You can use it to blind them when they attack you or you can use it to bling them prematurely, so they wont just attack you.
If you can spare the initiative, a 3-4 times spam of dust strikes can deliver suprising amounts of ranged damage, especially against other thieves.

All in all the stronges advantage of this set compared to other thief builds is the kiting potential.
Just as any thief you are basically immortal, but you dont have to fully disengage, you can stay close to the point without getting caught, proving a constant threat.
You have amazing abilities to deal with aggro, but it will require you to go into full defense and stop attacking.

I didnt really know where to put this, move or merge it as you wish.

Yes, the kittens, and I did actually write kittens.
The censorship of words is already ridiculous but at least understandable.
-As if anyone would die from being called a name on the internet. The mods are already monitoring cyberbullying, and if you want to actually hurt someone, you will find a way.
-If I see the word ‘bullkitten’ I certainly dont know what its substituting for.
-Some word bans are simply not neccessary. Most can hardly be considered insults.

But all of this is not even the issue. Its their forum, they can ban whatever words they like. And if it actually prevents someone crying for hours for being called names by a stranger, alright. The positive effects will probably outweight the negative.

My problem is the stupid filter that actively tries to find masked insults and then kittens everyday sentences.
One of my favourites, taken from the thief forums:
30 sec(conds) untraited ->
30 sekittenraited
Or this one:
Who-—responded/resorted/retired/recalled/rewhatever ->
kittenponded
Or how about a cooldown of 55 seconds ->
kitten cd

Now this is what I’m having a problem with.
It stops us from having a dialogue, renders perfectly normal sentences unreadable and worst case can even make people think they have been verbally assaulted.
I dont ask you to remove the profanity filter or anything, but maybe you could just accept the fact that people will always find ways to insult each other and remove all the masks that stop us from talking.
And you might want to consider that a—-55 is already not as ‘powerful’ as the original word. Given the right context a kitten can probably be more insulting.

Finally: This is urgent. With all the time I lately spent on the forum im starting to replace cursewords with kittens while still thinking a sentence.

Im trying to respond to this, but its really hard to put into words what I want to say.
All of what you just said you should probably tell Anet, not me.
If you have a game with perfect balance. Unfortunately that is not the case.
The current meta is soemwhat fair, but not balanced.

And the last statement goes against my most basic beliefs im afraid.
If there is a problem you work to fix it. You dont ignore it.
Supressing symptoms of a disease is not enough. Its the cure you should work towards.

-First: Im pretty sure I never attacked you. Maybe in the very end when I decided you were hopeless.

-Second: How can you say this taking into account what you posted? How can you give a class 15 stacks burning on AA and not call it ‘powercreep’?

The stuff of vertical and horizontal edit, sry: progression is actually very interesting, but I dont get what you want to tell me. How exactly is it related to what I say here?
What im trying to explain here comes down to the following:
1000/100 =/=100/10 (The expression is correct mathmatically, but not intuitively)
Or in other words: if you increase the size of the eiffel tower and the size of paris by 100%, you dont have the same city.
This has nothing to do with neither vertical nor horizontal progression as far as I can tell.
But im going to read up on this, maybe it does. Game design is always interesting, psychology even more so.

SuperKorean.7345:

I totally agree. Healing mechanics in this game makes this game extremely forgiving.

a) Could you do me a favor and put this in spoilers? I want to keep this readable.

b) This is a simplification. Healing is a symptom of the actual problem.
The first question should be why all the healing is needed in the first place.
Healing to a certain point is also extremely healthy for the game, it just should not become a main mechanic of damage migation.

Oh and: thanks for the positive feedback. I rly didnt expect to get bumps for the sake of bumps. Its good to realise I dont just live in a world of self made problems and confirmation bias.

Wolfric.9380:

Well written. The only thing i think is that the impact of the (counter) build should be very strong so an average player with a build countering another should beat a top player.
So that team/build composition serioulsy matters and we see a lot of diffrent teams. A part of build diversity and strategy/tactics. Bringing a game down to reaction spam loosing skill management and tactics i a very bad thing for a large player based game.

A rework of the game is not needed. It mostly number tweaking and a few skills might be reworked. It more or less comes down to the will doing it and the dedication of someone living up for it 100% and not as a resource that gets 10% worktime on game balacing. Also interfering with classic sales pushing strategies like power creep in new expansions seriously impacts this diversity.

I do believe a rework is a much easier solution than the alternative.
There are more than 150 skills and traits that need immediate rework/replacement for various reasons, I made an alphabetical list for an earlier version of this document.
But those 150 changes, even if performed perfectly, will require subsequent adjustments in order to work correctly again.
And of course they will also impact other, non-fatal traits that only needed minor numerical adjustments before and eventually let them spin out of control.

You certainly put this into your very…unique style and expression.
But it is by no means wrong.
Tho I would not change the healing skills, I would change everything but the healing skills.
The healing skills should be the only reliable source of healing for a non-healer ((Healer?Bunker)?Gw2)(meh. the forums repeaedly removes the mathmatical expressions and replace them with ?)

I would not start to redesign the current game. To get rid of the powercreep we need nothing less than an overhaul and combined with their update policy it would just drive more players from the game in the stages of flux and uncertainty.

1. Make the game in its current state playable and fair (mostly done)
2. Create PTS and start a much larger, much more experimental, alternate route of developement to adress underlying issues

This mirrors what you might do in some medical treatment cases.
First you fight the symptoms and make sure your patient wont just die.
But as a second step you start diagnosing and curing the disease. And you eventually deploy experimental treatment to test samples before you release it to your patient.
And no, whatever test mechanic you currently have, its not enough.
Pts can already be fixing a lot of QQ by giving us the beforementioned ‘illusion of control’
Trust me: the most frustrating aspect of the game and forums alike is if you feel helpless.

Oh and regarding those who are fine with the game as it is:
-They could actually be right and convince me
-They could be wrong and become supporters
-They could be wrong and ignorant (in which case I dont care about them in the first place)
Dont see a possible negative outcome here.