Guild Wars 2

I still don’t understand this. If company policy stops you from being able to talk to us, then change the company policy.

The problems of not being to communicate are showing up time and time again. Take the commander tag system, for example. If we had known your plans for the commander system way back when you began, we could have told you ahead of time that your decision to charge 300g per colour was a stupid idea. Then, those poor 2 devs wouldn’t have to rip apart a packaged product to solve the issue on a weekend they could have spent at home.

Yes, you reveal what you’re working on when it’s ready, but at that point, most of the time, IT’S ALREADY TOO LATE. You can change something like the commander colors at extremely late notice, but what if there’s a major system overhaul in Week 2 or Week 3 of this feature pack that receives overwhelmingly negative feedback? Are you going to be able to respond to that feedback within a few weeks to reverse something that’s already totally integral to future clients?

This is clearly not working.

No matter how little or how much you communicate your plans, people are going to complain. We NEED to be able to reciprocate feedback more regularly in the development cycle to create a healthier game and a healthier community between the players and the development team.

Staying completely silent is actually ten times worse than a plan of action falling through. Even being vague in your plans is fine, the important thing is that you TALK. Stop shutting us out.

Domino.1359:

Following this post and the OP’s will certainly be posters saying “Anet doesn’t need to communicate” in which i’ll ask: why not?

I think it’s clear that we need more clarity when implementation is initially this poor eg. the commander tag prices.

Arenanet hear, but they do not listen. There is a clear difference, and this is the fundamental issue.

“You want x? Okay, have x, but have mandatory y as well!” Nobody asked for y or wanted y. y makes x pointless/ruins x.

That sort of thing. That’s not even including the total silence and resistance to talking about anything that isn’t about the current Living Story.

I’d like to preface what I’m about to say with this: I ADORE your game. I have easily poured thousands of dollars in to Guild Wars 2. I have over 10 Legendaries. I have 11 characters decked out in full Ascended gear with a 12th on the way. I’ve done theorycrafting for my main class (Thief) and made countless guides, dungeon videos and so on. I’m co-leading what I believe to be one of the friendliest guilds in the game and an AMAZING place to be. Including time spent AFK and talking to my lovable guildmates, my total game-time reaches 8,500 hours. Unfortunately, even someone as dedicated as I am has to stand up when enough is enough.

I’m angry because I care. I care a lot. This game introduced me to an incredible community and to the current love of my life. I don’t want to see you completely squander it for preventable reasons.

I am not entirely sure what brought us to this stage. I am quite concerned that it is the success of the game’s launch that has got to your head – I’m getting a smugness or a narcissism vibe due to this. Whatever the case may be, I think that you have completely lost touch with us, the community, and you completely fail to understand what we actually want.

For those you don’t know what I may be referring to, check the latest Guildmag interview (supposedly part 1 of 2).

While it is true that these questions are being answered by Devon Carver, who is the WvW lead (unfortunately), and might not have any idea about any other systems in the game, there is also an ‘End Game Systems’ designer talking. More importantly, rather than say “I don’t know anything about xyz”, we receive actual answers. Non-answers, so to speak. This interview derailed any notion of a hype train for any of us.

She didn’t disappear for me. She was quite clearly fighting the Mordrem until everyone was through the portal.

Atherakhia.4086:

And CnD is easily avoided, but you have solutions to that. Steal and IS for example.

Uh, no. People learned to see pre-cast animations for CnD and dodge a following teleport a long time ago.

evilapprentice covered everything else I would want to say. Besides, Rangers should be honored that Hunter’s Shot works as well as it does already. It does NOT need to be faceroll-levels of easy to use, more than it already is. If you misuse HS, you should uninstall.

Atherakhia.4086:

Auesis.7301:

If Cloak and Dagger, a highly-telegraphed melee skill that takes half of a Thief’s standard resource pool, only grants Stealth on a successful hit, why on earth do you think it’s appropriate for a 1200-range weapon to always grant Stealth on skill use no matter what?

It’s not like it’s even hard to hit to begin with…

Because the Ranger’s skill doesn’t crit for upwards of 6k?

Because the Ranger’s skill doesn’t facilitate a backstab?

Because the Ranger doesn’t have evade spam on every weapon set?

What a load of rubbish. 6k if you’re naked and have 25 Vulnerability and an Ele has given me 25 Might, perhaps.

Why would you need a follow-up attack like Backstab when you can go invisible from up to 1500 range, change position and, with the newly buffed Rapid Fire, shred the opponent to pieces for even more damage than Backstab without even getting close? Even better, why not use PBS after HS and immediately begin Rapid Fire so all of it is a guaranteed hit?

Evade on every weapon set? Of course, forgive me for using all those evades on P/D, it’s not like my entire lifeline for sustained combat is getting in to melee range and landing Cloak and Dagger which is easily dodged by any competent player.

The fact of the matter is, guaranteed Stealth from a single WEAPON skill is unacceptable. More than that, it’s a projectile skill, and you don’t deserve immunities from what projectiles are.

If Cloak and Dagger, a highly-telegraphed melee skill that takes half of a Thief’s standard resource pool, only grants Stealth on a successful hit, why on earth do you think it’s appropriate for a 1200-range weapon to always grant Stealth on skill use no matter what?

It’s not like it’s even hard to hit to begin with…

BrunoBRS.5178:

i suggested giving stability when shadowstepping, with a 10 second cooldown. that way, it’s useful on all builds, not only stealth ones, and it’s not like stealth builds are going to put so many points into acro to begin with.

Stability on teleport is what I would do as well, but 10s is too low. At least 15s.

Chokolata.1870:

You do not need to hit someone to proc CI. You just need to spend adrenaline. It will still work even if you miss, the condition removal that is.

No. Karl confirmed in Twitch chat that missing will NOT proc CI.

So, if I wanted to, while running away, I could spam 3 and be in a state of permanent evasion since I’m not trying to hit anyone.

Top kek. Totally going to do that to annoy people.

I can think of plenty of enemy types that will rip through the nerfed BP.

I imagine conditions will NOT be cleared if you miss. You are losing adrenaline, but I imagine it will not be the same as actually expending it on a skill use.

Black Powder’s nerf needs to be PvP-only, because S/P against trash is one of the main support attractions for the class. Other than that, everything is dandy.

Split this skill between PvE and PvP. That pulsing blind is one of the main facets of offensive support for PvE. It is INTEGRAL.

This is obviously a totally PvP-centric change and needs to remain as such.

Apart from this, every other change was good and I’m in support.

KrisHQ.4719:

Thieves could need their evades toned down, but to be honest I don’t see them as gamebreaking. Their dmg compared to their squishyness is a fine ratio, if their evades could just be toned down. A suggestion could be to give “Withdraw” as longer CD. That healing skill is ridiculously good for a 15s CD.

I agree with toning down evades, but I would prefer a different approach. Instead, I would change Feline Grace to give back 10 endurance instead of 15 on a dodge and see how it goes from there.

Timothy.7204:

Why is it that you get warning messages if you post anything negative about the game, yet when people totally insult other people for not being able to do this event, apparently that is just fine.

You get this every time. The people bragging about how great they are. More likely its how overpowered their class most likely is.

Ranger and Necro so OP.

But no, seriously, this fight is hilariously easy and nobody with a functioning nervous system should have trouble with it once the simple mechanics (which don’t even count above 1 hand) are known. Nobody is bragging about being great. One of my guildies is one of the worst players I’ve ever seen, and even he managed to do it on his Mesmer with little trouble.

I’m genuinely scared that we will never get content that is actually complex or difficult if this is the kind of standard we have to work with. OH MY GOD I CAN’T STAND STILL AND MASH 1, WHAT DO. GG ANET. vomits profusely

Also, what on earth is this overabundance of CC people are whining about? There are glowing orange circles to tell you what to avoid. Stability isn’t even needed…

Atherakhia.4086:

Wiki says the dagger auto chain is actually 2 seconds. Are you certain it’s 3? Because at 2, you kind of blew up your whole argument :/

The wiki does not include the aftercast from gaining Revealed from a Stealth attack ie. Backstab, which is already a good 0.375-0.5s before actually initialising the attack chain. Then, Lotus Strike has a short aftercast before Cloak and Dagger can initialise. Then, the wind-up for Cloak and Dagger to hit, which is also 0.5s. Go and try it for yourself. If you Backstab a foe, allow the chain to finish and then hit Cloak and Dagger, it will connect just as Revealed is finishing (if it is 3 seconds).

Wow, people actually found this fight difficult? Now I completely understand why Anet are scared of giving us actual challenges.

Frankly, I’m amazed. This was like Hello Kitty My First Boss Fight. The only way I could excuse people having trouble is a lack of motor function…or arms.

Anyone claiming that S/x is anywhere close to D/D for single-target DPS is misguided at best and maliciously deceitful at worst.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bAcpwAdwB24CxK_Ziy8ygISUHCkQepLfRMh2_PtP52o/edit#gid=1883199869

Unless you find a way for S/D or S/P to reach at least 10.7k DPS on a single target in optimal conditions, you have an entire catalog of research against you. Throwing around wiki articles with vague descriptions and not bringing any proper numbers or evidence to the table is going to get you nowhere.

If that is no life, then does this make me a zombie?

Lifestealer.4910:

Good, thieves dominated the meta for too long. Hopefully anet makes them useless for the next two years to balance the time period all out.

That is not how game balance works. That’s just being a bitter little child.

Wow, some people find this really hard to believe.

Best service I ever received.

During beta, they actually WERE affected by chill. It was a slaughterhouse. They couldn’t fight anything that had any amount of chill. This was reverted for a reason.

Same applies to the initiative, too.

I’m holding out for our balance pass. Both Engi and Ranger changes were quite thorough, so I’m pretty hopeful for ours, too.

Thousands of fictional characters are created just to die for the sake of drama, and you’re offended because…? Because this particular plot device character happens to be female? That’s the impression I’m getting.

People will find agendas in everything, I swear.

Sagat.3285:

Auesis.7301:

Atherakhia.4086:

I was under the impression that D/D was the goto Thief DPS set with pistol only viable on trash.

That’s right – S/P against huge trash groups in high Fractals (the most time-consuming element in that area) is one of our greatest strengths and one of the things that differentiates us from Engineers with maximum glass grenade builds (that can quite easily match S/P and get near D/D’s potential in an AoE setting (around 1k DPS less), partially from the damage itself and partially due to the huge Vulnerability stacking potential). Those blinds are a HUGE portion of our utility that makes us desirable over alternatives, as well as the Smoke field used to blast through long Stealth runs eg. CM. There will be very little merit to bringing a Thief when an Engineer is perfectly capable of bringing Smokes to blast.

People are heavily underestimating how much the loss of that blind is going to hurt PvE Thieves. I don’t think any of the suggestions here have come close to mitigating that loss. I’d be okay with and agree with a lot of these changes eg. Dark fields and so on, but only in a WvW or PvP setting.

Not sure GW2 is the type of game with different settings in the 3 modes but yeah the pve factor was forgotten. We are not proposing changing all blind fields on thief just BP but I can see how S/P will be affected but not to that extent. Usually Smoke Screen and SR provide enough stealth duration.

I’m barely talking about the Stealth here. My focus has been the pulsing blind on “just” BP. “Just” is far from the word I would use.

The middle ground for me would be to keep the pulsing blind but change it to a Dark field to prevent Stealth abuse. Taking away the blinds is a GIGANTIC no-no. Only the Finisher should change, otherwise the adverse effects are far too great and will perhaps never be rectified.

EDIT: Also forgot the bullet that uses the Smoke field to blind a distant target. That should be a feature of the Dark skill as well (distant blind).

Atherakhia.4086:

I was under the impression that D/D was the goto Thief DPS set with pistol only viable on trash.

That’s right – S/P against huge trash groups in high Fractals (the most time-consuming element in that area) is one of our greatest strengths and one of the things that differentiates us from Engineers with maximum glass grenade builds (that can quite easily match S/P and get near D/D’s potential in an AoE setting (around 1k DPS less), partially from the damage itself and partially due to the huge Vulnerability stacking potential). Those blinds are a HUGE portion of our utility that makes us desirable over alternatives, as well as the Smoke field used to blast through long Stealth runs eg. CM. There will be very little merit to bringing a Thief when an Engineer is perfectly capable of bringing Smokes to blast.

People are heavily underestimating how much the loss of that blind is going to hurt PvE Thieves. I don’t think any of the suggestions here have come close to mitigating that loss. I’d be okay with and agree with a lot of these changes eg. Dark fields and so on, but only in a WvW or PvP setting.

Can I just point out that removing the pulsing blind from BP and/or the Smoke field would completely cripple the majority of Thief PvE utility and survivability as a consequence? A full glass Engineer is already extremely close to our maximum damage output AND can apply far more Vulnerability alongside the limited Stealth they can apply (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bAcpwAdwB24CxK_Ziy8ygISUHCkQepLfRMh2_PtP52o/edit#gid=1883199869) – without these combat utilities we will be completely obsolete. The two are competitive right now because of utility (lots of blinds + more stealth) vs. massive Vulnerability stacking and other versatility eg. Fire fields. That won’t be the case if this change happened.

If this is the way it has to be to balance WvW or PvP, then there HAS to be a split or the damage to the class will be beyond repair in other game modes.

I’d like to not be stuck doing CM and only CM for the rest of my life since that’s the only thing I would be good for competitively, ever.

Season 2 brought back half my guild. I don’t care about anything else.

So, you would also scrap the entire Shadow Arts line as well then, because pretty much all of it operates around using Stealth while in combat. Both types of regeneration, condition removal, blind, initiative gain, all of it now useless.

Arikyali.5804:

loud, noisy…set off alarms everywhere.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unload

No lag for me.

/15 char

Alexphos.6302:

Am I the only one getting tired of “click then sell, click then sell” method on the Trading Post or am I doing it wrong :|

Either way I think it would be more convenient if there was check boxes next to each item that we click and then we can sell them all with one click at the end…

A slight problem with this kind of feature is that prices will change in real time as you’re using the TP, so you might miss something in a long list of selections.

It could work but you’d have to keep an eye out in case a buy order falls through or something.

All great ideas. +1

Getting this after patch too. Nothing else in the game lags at all. The cooldown begins and is visible for a fraction of a second before the actual stolen skill appears to replace it, and this can sometimes REALLY mess up a fight against a Guardian where I want to trigger the Daze immediately after a Steal, etc.

Whatever the Shadowstep check is doing, it’s holding up a HUGE amount of processes for the skill.

Personally, I would just turn Unload in to a flip animation with evade frames, and shorten the cast time.

Strength is fine for WvW when you’ll most likely be running PoI or HA to stack up for yourself, but in dungeons someone else will most likely be doing the stacking for you (an Ele or Phalanx Warrior), but more importantly you’ll be probably using Signet of Malice a lot of the time, and it’s very easy to maintain 90% HP with it, making Scholar superior.

Nike.2631:

Actually the existence of a build that is ‘optimal’ (as in superior to all other choices) across a large range of encounters is pretty much a sign that it needs to get stepped on/nerfed because that’s the product of bad design .

Looking realistically at how game balance works, there is always going to be SOMETHING about a class/comp or encounter that is the optimal approach. I hope you’re not proposing a feedback loop where we continuously nerf whatever seems to be the best option in a given circumstance until we’re left with…well, pretty much nothing.

Arikyali.5804:

Wasn’t there a pvp setup with traits and stats, that actually worked with HS spammage? It was a troll build, only used the mainhand dagger.

No. It should never “work” against anyone. If they actually die to it, they should uninstall the game immediately.

I love when Thieves spam HS. Free kills.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Auesis.7301:

My number one question is – what has your Warrior philosophy moved on to? Your previous philosophy was that they should be strong with AoE damage and control, but vulnerable to conditions. Now we have Cleansing Ire and Berserker’s Stance. What happened there?

the original philosophy is still there.

cleansing ire does not help against signet of spite condition spam.

berserker stance have 8 seconds duration while 60 seconds recharge, the warrior will still go down fast to massive condition spam.

sure, with cleansing ire, they may be able to deal with individual conditions (1 – 3) without much problems but when all 10 conditions come together when berserker stance is on cool down, or if the warrior did not equip berserker stance, they will still melt away easily and steadily.

do you even play warrior?

Do you play Warrior? It’s my 2nd most played class and I have zero problems with conditions in almost all situations in tourney play.

I’m not saying Warriors are completely invincible to conditions, but they are not weak in any sense against them anymore. They are EXTREMELY good at dealing with them, far beyond around half of the available professions at the moment. The rate of condition removals per minute rivals PoV + AR Guardians.

I find it funny how you have to resort to “OH WELL SIGNET OF SPITE.” News flash, SoS hurts EVERYONE. SoS is insanely strong. Even when I get hit by SoS (which is rare since it’s quite easy to dodge when you know the tell), I can still recover pretty easily. In fact, if I see a Necro on the enemy team I have Signet of Stamina prepared just for them. End result is that I either can almost ignore the Necro or he turns out to be a Lich Form spiker so the condition worries are irrelevant.

My number one question is – what has your Warrior philosophy moved on to? Your previous philosophy was that they should be strong with AoE damage and control, but vulnerable to conditions. Now we have Cleansing Ire and Berserker’s Stance. What happened there?

Wow, who brought a Necro to this thread?

^^ Never stopped, I just lurk the forums most of the time unless I feel super-obligated to reply to something

Everything is viable. Everything is NOT optimal.

Key difference.

:3

Do I get a cookie? Or a restraining order?

Trickery | Grandmaster | Shadow’s Misdirection

“Smoke fields reflect projectiles.”

I don’t even care how broken this would be. The thought is hilarious.

Lux.7169:

OIIIIIO.7825:

Arganthium.5638:

Apparently, 2 0 0 6 6 sucked up until a month or two ago as well, and now everybody thinks it’s amazing in spite of the fact that very little changed about the build itself (outside of Runes of Strength)…

I would like to add there are other changes that affected the rise of this build that you may not have considered.

One of which is the nerf to Critical Damage.

Pretty sure everyone here is talking about PvP and not wvw…
Meaning crit damage wasn’t affected.

Critical Strikes gives 300 Ferocity instead of 30% Critical Damage, even in PvP. In total it lost 10% Critical Damage.

Arganthium.5638:

Nobody owns builds
I’d love to live in a world where that was the case, but unfortunately most of the GW2 community seems to disagree.

Okay, look at it this way. If someone took the 20066 build or a slight variant in to a match, no single sensible PvP player would say that you were “copying” Sizer, in the same way that no sensible WvW player would say you are “copying” Yishis if you take x66xx.

Nobody is claiming that Sizer created and owned the build when they refer to the build as “Sizer’s build”. They are simply relating to the fact that Sizer uses it, because Sizer is popular and people know who he is, and thus could recall the build faster. Yeah, it sucks for you, but that’s the way the world works. Popularity is everything in this medium.

You’ve kind of doomed yourself with this thread. I get that you’re annoyed, but you really should have risen above some of these replies instead of the hostility I’m seeing. Just responding with things like “you just suck” does not help your cause in any way whatsoever.

And another thing – as OIIIIO said, it is more than just Runes of Strength/Power of Inertia. Ferocity reduced the Critical Damage boost from Critical Strikes by 10%, meaning there is less to lose by deviation. Fire and Air can now be used together because of the cooldown splits, meaning it is possible to get back some spike potential of 6 CS in other ways while getting better shutdown utility from the other trait lines.

Yes, the build itself has barely changed, but its relative position in the meta due to other changes, and thus the possibility of more widespread use in tournament play, has changed. The build was never bad and never sucked.

After the feature patch came out, I immediately created and posted a video guide with the new optimal PvE build for Thieves. This setup happened to be the exact same one that DnT would come up with a couple of days later, and that garnered much more attention in the long run because DnT are a popular name in the GW2 community so it only makes sense.

Does that mean they “own” the build? No, and neither do I! So why do people refer to it as the “DnT build”? Because a lot of people know who DnT are, and thus will instantaneously recall the setup in question. Popularity works wonders for a frame of reference in players’ minds, but that doesn’t somehow equate to ownership.

You should be happy that the build you promoted has been validated, as I was. Seeking to claim ownership of it is childish.

To be painfully honest, almost all high-level builds in this game can be attributed to common sense. Most knowledgeable players are going to be able to slot together at least the framework for builds that work in a current or recent meta. Nobody should be pretending that they are some sort of genius innovator when it comes to buildcraft in this game.

I will say one thing, however – back when you were heavily promoting 20066, Air + Fire (combined) and the new Strength runes weren’t a thing. They are a heavy, heavy influence on how well this build works at high level competitive play. Not saying everyone was right to criticise the way they did, because 20066 has always worked pretty much everywhere else (hell, I made it up on the spot for some WvW shenanigans a bunch of times).

Moreover, how is this a PSA?

It’s not a ghost town, it’s just an ordinary map with ordinary population thanks to the blessing that is the removal of the horrific champion train that ruined the experience for pretty much every new player that came along.

Pack up, go back to FGS and stop whining like a baby.