Guild Wars 2

Arikyali.5804:

My terminology may be incorrect, but aren’t one-handed curved single-blade swords called kodachi? I believe katanas are for two hands.

Dachi basically means sword, the prefix No- means long, the prefix Ko- means short. Both terms are similar to the european terminology Longsword and Shortsword. All used for swords of various types and sizes, mind that in Japan up to the modern age there was never such a thing as a “military standart issue” sword.

Katana and Wakizashi are usually used when refering to carrying a long and short sword as a pair.

The sword stance in game sucks for rapiers, you would never ever have the dagger foot and the dagger presented forward, the whole freaking point in basket hilts is that you can present the sword forward and close the direct line without getting your hand cut.

As much as I love rapiers, both the Italian and the Spanish looking ones, that stance just breaks my immersion.

So katana it will be for me.

As a side note: If you are interested in “real” katana technique google for the Iaido demonstrations at the Hakone shirne in Japan vids should be on YouTube, that stuff is as real as it gets without killing someone.

Do not go to Piken we are all evil, unfriendly haters here and we all suck at this game; go somewhere else.

Go deso or sfr all good players are there…

Pathetic!

Do not stand inside red circles, press 0 to enter daggerstorm on lich once 2 claws are in mid air, then press f to collect the bag.

Seeing the changes to stability and the consequences thereof got me thinking about protection aswell.

Personally I am in favor of those changes as they as they take away the permanent access to stability on groups of 10+ Guardians and Warriors and removes the ability for those groups to ignore a great number of enemy abilities. Timing and awareness now pays off while the old buff and forget mentality of the Guardian and Warrior train (I refuse to call it a “melee train” because all other melee based builds of other proffessions are not on board that train).

So that leads me to ask for the same changes to the protectio boon as were applied to stability, at the moment permanent protection is easily achivable stacking its duration like it was previously done with stability, I propose the stack mechanic of stability to be applied to protection 1 stack should reduce the damage of 1 incomming attack, like with stability this should have next to no influence on small scale fights but it would remove the ability of large groups to permanently ignore 50% of incomming damage and thus be able to sit in large concentrations of AoE effects while outhealing those. With this change we would further the idea of having to respond to what the enemy does instead of just ignoring that and stack in one spot.

Let’s embrace the “move or die” meta and finally ditch the “stack and buff in one spot” meta.

After about 3h of playing tonight my 1st impression is that all teleports seem to work more reliable and faster now, also I did not get a single instance of the root on teleport bug tonight (so I really hope that one is fixed). Also the changes seem to have fixed the “teleport into towers and keeps glitches” (atleast the ones I tested do no longer work). Some shadow return glitches seem fixed aswell.

All in all a change for the better in my book.

This was the single best change to the game up to date, bye perma stability, hello skillful gameplay, no more stack and ignore everything the other side does, totally and absolutely awesome.

No more “hey they are shooting at us with 2 catas, haha no problem we got perma stability”, zergs actually have to move now.

Flat 11/10 for this one to the people who came up with this.

I really should NOT anwser this, but I feel generous and I pity you for how pathetic you are asking me how to kill my favorite doll, uhmm I mean virtual action figurine, so here is the trick:

Stealth does not mitigate damage, you know this from your bearbow adventures, so what you do is you walk into the refuge run around and manually spam 1, if you hit a stealthed player the chain on sword 1 will progress (look at your UI) this way you can track your enemy, since your enemy will not want to break stealth you will get free damage in this way much more if you do it right than he regains health, if you find him this way you also can get a imobilize trap on him and keep spamming sword 1 on him.

Be conservative with your weapon cds and mind if he resets you also reset, generally do not cleanse to early and keep regen up as much as possible. Most likely this will end in a stalemate, you should not die to p/d condi or hybrids 1v1, if needed just open distamce and wait for your cds to come back.

In essemce: sword auto attcks hit like a truck to win get as many in as possible especially if he goes into stealth.

There you go free enlightenment for everyone, even rangers, I can overcome my bias just for you.

Some more thoughs:

I agree with the notion that increasing the flat damage to dagger attacks is a bad idea (mesmers and other low armor proffesions would suffer to much disadvantage if the damage would be increased so that it actually threatens guardians and warriors).

What we should get is a “armor penetration” trait linked to daggers like: Your dagger skills now ignore 30% of your targets armor. I would suggest this to be a master trait in deadly arts, replace dagger training with it. There should be a status icon on the thief visible that shows this is traited. This would allow builds specifically against high armor targets, without introducing more one-shot threats to low armor targets (eviscerate is bad enough, we do not need more of that).

This is not going to happen, though, just look at the game the imbalances between professions are by design and are deeply entrenched, they will only be more pronnounced and sharpend in the future.

Consider this: A zerker warrior in wvw will hit a zerker thief for almost 10k with eviscerate, the warrior’s 100 blades will down the thief, rush will hit 5k+. The warrior has better healing, more armor, better movement (meaning can out run the thief), and more hp.

Backstab will hit the warrior for max 5k.

I think backstab is totally worth it, thieves are dangerous, we can kill mesmers and other thieves (and the odd necro who gets caught without prestacked lifeforce).

Why people still think thieves are played for anything else than the style factor and the swoop sounds is beyond me. Face it, if you want to win do not play thief. And do not give me any “but the mobility…” nonsense thief mobility does not win a flower pot anywhere in the game.

Mini wvw transport dolyak, it carries all the stuff you “aquire”. Mine is called Betty III she is no ordninary dolyak, in fact she is a miniature giant space dolyak…

Nobody will be using shadow refuge as it is now come the patch anyway, with taunt and the new aoe pulls and pushes comming you will be hard pressed to put nothing but stunbreakers on your utility bar as a thief (I do not see thieves getting access to a lot of stability and or resistance in the cards).

Utilities in HoT will be roll for initiative, shadow step and infiltratory signet (maybe shadow trap), you heard it here first.

This will be awesome, guardians will be mortal again, 1 spam staff/hammertrains will get shred and priortity targets will go down (any fat char with a rucksack). I already love this. Now please increase the healing reduction on poison to 50% and add a anti boon condition (basically a inverted resistance). If you do that you might be forgiven for the intruduction of death knight 2.0, I mean revenant…

Look at that vid, point blank shot + rapid fire on a condition build (a clean opener from a power ranger will take about 18k) takes out approx. 50% of a thieF’s hp, rapid fire tracks through stealth and can not be dodged the proectiles will follow you while you are dodging and still hit you, you can also not teleport to avoid the shots because the proectiles still track you even if you teleport behind the ranger (watch the fight at the cliff by the sentinel ne of sm castle closely to get the best example for this). Burning is the only really dangerous condition the ease with which it is applied basically forces permant cleansing without a lot of stealth and investment into shadow arts the thief will not be able to keep up with this.

Those thieves did not understand what hit them and even if they did their builds are inadequate to handle this ranger.

To answer your question: Yes, thieves are that weak, you need more knowledge about the other proffessions to be successful as a thief and you have absolutely zero room for error. This is how we pay for our unique resource system and the utility we can have. The only proffession that is weaker than thieves is mesmer that is how mesmers pay for their unique mechanic and their lockdown potential.

Face it obectively thieves and mesmers suck, the ones playing at “high level” spvp (haha balanced pvp, play chess if you want that) get carried by their team both professions are played for style reasons and the players doing decent with those two proffessions would do way better with guardian, warrior or engineer.

Go to fsp or am absulutely no cheaters there, it is all just a problem with your isp…

I’ll take fgs you can have thieves guild instead, thx very much…

The difference in stats is not “tiny” it is quite substancial and will give you a reliable edge in close fights.

Anyone telling you anything different is either lying or an idiot.

If you can get it get it, trust me it will make a difference. Even just getting the chest and the pants ( the raw stat increase there is the greatest compared to the other slots) will make a notable difference. It will not guarantee your win but it will get you out of tight stituations.

Pretty interesting but in essence your build works because of sustained pressure from range, to be precise it works because of the iDuelist. Thieves suck at dealing with sustained pressure from range (that damaged being a channel skill makes it even worse), especially if there is also spike damage which needs to be avoided (in your case iSowordsman synced with the iUnload).

Basically the only option left for them is to go for a damage race and make sure they have stealth ready for the stomp, you can see that in your vid the players doing better are the agressive ones they faild to realise that the fight is not over with you in down state.
If they get rid of the iDuelist and press 1 more you will lose 1v1 a lot more than you win.

For what it is worth: All in all nice playing I like the s/s stuff you do and how agressive you are.

AOE CnD, you got to be kidding…

The whole thing is just a AoE version of offhand dagger with more damage potential and head shot on top, basically everything that is good from all offhand weapons combined with more damage on top of it.

Totally overpowered and making all the other sets obsolete.

There is a “stow weapon” option in the keybinds menu, put this on a easy to reach key. By using this option your weapons are manually put away all attacking is stopped by this this also ends all channeled skills like daggerstorm etc. use this.
This will however not stop projectiles that are still in mid air so be carefull with those especially if you have riccochet traited the bouncing projectiles can reveal you.

I also recommend to disable the autoattack in wvw and press all attacks manually put aa on one of your mouse buttons, it takes a while to get used to but it is very reliable and avoids delay in your other attacks by “half-finished aa”.

Making wvw a better place for everyone, one bad badge at a time…

I will answer your questions in the order the were asked:

1st That guy better be good or he is dead meat.

2nd Hmmm, maybe he could win if he plays all out shatter and gets the jump on me…. Nah.

3rd I do not use stuff like strategies and tactics, I react to what happens.

4th Anything with mainhand sword is basically an I win button for the thief (with the exception that an all outshatter mesmer can win if he gets the jump on the thief). Sword 1 chain cleave basically hardcounters the clones and still hits the mesmer.

5th none really just do not play D/D power as thief.

6th Mesmers need serious buffs. 1st invisibility needs to stack like stealth. 2nd clones and phantasms need to be usable without a target, they should be summoned and aquire a target as soon as the mesmer aquires a target. 3rd cd on portals and timewarp need to be halved. 5th Illusionary mage needs to do damage, and all “projectiles” need to have their speed increased to the level of long bow projectiles. 6th Blink needs a 1200 base range.
Bugs need to be fixed…

(edit) P.S.: I wish do add that the whole mesmer vs thief thing is just a example of a underlying balance issue in this game, AoE is way to efficacious untargeted skills are way to efficacious and missing those does not get punnished hard enough.
Sword 1 chain on thieves vs shatter f1 is just 1 minor example, it is like 90% of all ele skills vs backstab, or the entire kitten nal of Guardian AoE spam vs anything D/x can do on thieves.

oh yeah and…

P.P.S.: Do not go D/D it sucks, as hard it is to admitt that but it is true, it lacks the interrupts and controll D/P offers and commes down to being a one trick pony, the only thing it is good for is killing upleved charakters.

1st if you do not have a set of full ascended gear do not chose a build without defence options, you will constantly face players with a very significant gear advantage and get killed.

If you are running with exotics go into shadow arts and play defensively, ignore all the idiots telling you otherwise, if you are at a stat disadvantage you need the defensive options to outplay your opponents.

Use shadow step and roll for initiative you need the escape options again remember you are at a stat disatvantage.

You can get enough power and crit chance by buff food you do not need to go into critical strikes use 0 0 2 0 6 as a basis and go from there, mug will help alot you will need the extra healing, trickery is very good fully trait steal there. Embrace of shadows is almost a must if you do not have someone around who can cleanse the conditions for you. consider 3 into deadly arts aswell the weakness on poision will allow you to stay on your target without taking to much damage after steal backstab openers.

Good luck.

P.S.: If someone tells you to not do something because it is not “skillful” that is probably exactly what you want to do… Why because it will work and make you beat the “skillful” guy. Always remember the winner is the guy who is alive when the smoke clears.

Zero Day.2594:

:/ Wonder if warriors will get the IWINBUTTON specialization.

That would be a nerf actually, they would have to press a button as compared to now they just let healing signet tick.

6 into Trickery is generally a very good idea in wvw it is way more important to be able to shut down priority targets on demand in wvw. In samll group engagements in wvw the enemy has the luxury to disengage and wait for cds to come back (hide in the zerg till mistform is up again for eles e. g.) just going for distance and reset happens quite often aswell, as a thief you want to make kitten sure that does not happen.

Since you can get enough raw stats by guard stacks and buff food your damage will still be good without going deep into DA or CS this actually gives you more build choice than you have in spvp. You can pretty much take what you like consider however that survival is paramout. I really recommend shadows embrace, if you are running shadow step and shadow refuge consider master of deception aswell.

If you like to hang around in enemy controlled keeps (especially sm) try decent into shadows.

Also make sure if you are roaming alone that you comfortably can take a camp alone quickly and can disengage and survive if some enemies should show up while you do that.

(regarding your question about warrior eles and resets)

You will never ever kill a decent ele or warrior who is built for sustain 1v1 in wvw they can disengage and reset at will if you chase them you will have no ini and cds left when you finally catch up and die, ppl do not have to stay on a 800 diamater point in wvw.

…………………………….Bye!

Depens on what you want to do. For PVE those slots do not matter you either dodge or die. For WvW get vit.

Just another skill that will kill you by revealing you, especially with the lag that is so common in this game.

It will have the same problems as last refuge has now and be unusable with projectile weapons since you will never know if you still have projectiles in mid air (especially with bouncing or piercing projectiles).

It will be nice for stealth ressing though…

EoTM airstrikes and all the other stuff from EoTM in all of wvw please.

You know the dragons might have a point in what they do, tabula rasa might be the way to go after all, cleaning the world of all the morally deprived low life so the world might get a chance with a new start might be worth it…

After 1h of getting knocked around in the mystery cave by effects hitting miles outside the red circles, and effects that are way off the animations, by effects that thanks to server lag ignore dodge rolls, I have decided to skip this episode.

To bad the story gets destroyed by bad encounter design and proffesion imbalance I can only imagine how a guardian or warrior will laugh about this content but for proffesions without stability or invunerabilities this is just rng getting knocked from one aoe into the next and so on.

And on a final note stuff does not get more “epic” by doing it several times in the same encounter.

and the unfinished area above:

and down there looking to the upper parts of the jp

Edit: Wrong screenshot!

In continuation of my previous post: I managed to get there, so here is some exclusive footage brought to you at the expense of my lovely sylvari thief’s precious live.

Orangensaft.7139:

Bazzoong.7145:

Thanathos.2063:

Well, I’m even more interested for the next patch now.

By the way, is it a dead end over there or could there be a place for a portal to another maguuma wastes area?

There is another “unfinished” area south of this with a huge cave and a canyon called “Quarrel Gully”. I guess this is where the story will continue, also behind the stone gate through which Caithe and Foalain dispeared there is a huge area that looks unfinished.

The huge cave that you describe is the end of the new jumping puzzle and already accessible
so the area Quarrel Gully is already accessible in a normal way

but i agree that the other parts of quarrel gully (not the cavesystem) could be a place for future content

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

There’s a better spot that I’ve not seen in videos yet. Break out in the same spot then cliffjump south until you’re in the southern middle part of the map. You’ll see a giant circular flower with gaping teeth and huge lights shining on it. Reminded me of Audrey or the plants in Mario games.

are you sure that that is not just the Amber Bossroom plant??

Novuake.2691:

How the kitten did you get there, been trying to break out/in there for weeks but no dice..

there are 3 ways out! keep on searching
and i will test a 4th one now maybe it leads to something
———————————————————————————————————————-

They also added new stuff faaaar down under the map … probably a new cave for future updates that has yet to be finished
see screenshot

Yeah, several interesing objects floating beneath the map…

The reason why I think Quarrel Gully will be expanded is because there is also an inactive skritt tunnel if you follow a small path along the wall at the final p chest. I think that it will let you go further up in that cave in the future.

Thanathos.2063:

Well, I’m even more interested for the next patch now.

By the way, is it a dead end over there or could there be a place for a portal to another maguuma wastes area?

There is another “unfinished” area south of this with a huge cave and a canyon called “Quarrel Gully”. I guess this is where the story will continue, also behind the stone gate through which Caithe and Foalain dispeared there is a huge area that looks unfinished.

Thanathos.2063:

Its more looking like a big yellow plant.. you know, one of those who look like they got scales all over.

Those are actually honeycombs, you can see it well close up there are also bees about them, to be seen on the “detail” screenshot as “yellow and brown specs” around the honeycomb.

and a detail…

So this is what the dragon is hiding: Nightmare Pods and honeycombs…

Hi there,

since you will probably not have full ascended gear very fast you should consider that the game is “balanced” for fights between players that have that level of stats on their gear, being at a gear and stat disadvantage you will not be able to win fights that come down to a “pure damage race” so focus on utility which will allow you to "outplay " your opponents.
I advise 6 points into trickery with thrill of the crime, bountyful theft and sleight of hand strongly because of this, also 2 points into shdow arts for condition removal on stealth are pretty mandatory.
Starting from this you can pretty much spent the restof your trait points to your preference, a lot of interesting options exist even with traits that are commonly looked down apon, like for example hidden thief which is really helpful with d/p, or decent into shadows which is great to have if you play hide and seek while outnumbered.

Do your own tests on trait combinations, most stuff is way better that people usually think and most “meta builds” are not as good in wvw as people make them appear.

My complaints are:

The “boss” is totally imune to crowd control (blind crippled imobilisation daze etc nothing works), it oneshots you with next to everything.

This leads to: Spam shortbow 1 and evade everything for the entire fight. All other mechanics become irrevalent, totally and utterly a boring fight.

If you miss an evade or get pulled at the wrong moment by the tentacles you are done for, pretty one dimesional if you ask me.

Story instances being a concentration test where you are fighting the latency for several minutes and your only task is to evade everything while spamming skill 1 is not my thing.

The game has lots of interesting combat mechanics (especially if it comes to thieves) why suddnely remove all those and reduce encounters to a one dimensinal “just dodge everything and hope the lag does not kill you”?

Here is my take on it: The master of peace had a plan to bring the egg to a place where it would weaken or hinder mordremoth (dragons and probably also their eggs consume magic after all so the plan is to cut mordremoth’s food supply somehow, remember how we did it with the mouth of zaithan). However he failed since the sneaky path he wanted to take was already blocked by the morderem, lying in his death throws he wanted to tell us the plan (one that caithe perfectly understood and saw comming) but caithe thought giving the details of that plan in one of mordremoth’s strongholds surounded by his minions listening might not be a good idea and neither would be discussing the matter, so she finished him and ran with the egg in her “troubled hero” style.

HOWEVER YOUR GOOD INTENTIONS SISTER DO NOT MATTER HERE, THE FREAKING EGG IS MINE, YOU DO NOT TAKE MY STUFF UNPUNISHED!

She said “no time to explain” and then you hear the dagger “dink” attack sound she defintely killed him and took the egg, SH E TOOK MY EGG MY PET DRAGON TO BE, ROOBED, THE kitten, SHE WILL PAY FOR THIS.

This is no longer just about saving the world and stuff, this is personal, the only person who deserves a freaking pet dragon is me…
I was planning to rule the world with my pet dragon and my army of skritt pirates and I will not have my dream taken away from me (sob!).
And I do not even care why she did it it’s mine and you do not take my stuff even if you are my older sister.

The justification is not having access to protection and blocks and next to no access to stability.

You can choose either evades or access to the stuff mentioned above, give me protection and stability or a damage imunity and you can have feline grace, good luck…

edit: counter play is counting to 3 instead to 2, counter play is different from " a counter", if you throw chess concepts like counter play into the discussion of “gaming” you better understand what you are talking about.

P/P no thanks…

but that stat combo might bring D/D back 00446 or 20246, mark my words!

The problem with the runes of evasion is that the effect triggers at the end of the dodge roll (actually after the dodge is executed) and so it is really hard to land the crippling strike reliably, it also tends to mess you up because the effect can reveal you if it hits anything (includeing critters in wvw) and even if you manage to hit with the effect you can not reliable control which of the targets gets hit by basilisk venom if there are multiple targets in the area of effect.

In short I tested those runes for some days when they came out and came to the conclusion that they are hindering more than helping (and tracking the cd is next to impossible in the heat of battle), playing against your own runeset is not enoyable.

We all know that there a re massive differences is wvw population on the servers and that this often discourages people from actually trying to meaningfully participate in wvw since they understand that the population disadvantage can not be overcome and that they are probably just going to suffer and that any “investment” will not get rewarded.

To motivate people to actually get invested I would like to suggest compensation for that investment by using the outnumbered mechanic better.

1st the mechanic needs to be extended to the whole of wvw counting all 4 maps as one. All players on all maps participate so the mechanic needs to be based on the comparisson of all players logged into wvw across all 4 maps. The bonus aswell needs to be spread across all 4 maps.

2nd the bomi need to be drastically increased, I am thinking at least 300% magic find, gold, karma bonus etc. if you are outnumbered 3 to 1.

3rd additionally rewards for succesfully completed wvw obectives should increase with fewer people tagging said objective (this hopefully also will incourage splitting into smaller groups). For example an obective tagged by 15 or more should give normal rewards being tagged by 10-15 should give 50% more rewards, being tagged by 5-10 should give 75% more rewards, being tagged by 1-5 should give 100% more rewards.

Tage and Rom are carrying so hard here, clearly not decided by the “better” thief and clearly not decided by the “better” memer.

I honestly belive that this would bring d/d back, so it is not going to happen after all the effort to ruin that set. Also the evade used to be longer it got nerfed since it was actually possible to reliably evade attacks with deathblossom which can not be. Basically it was the same as with sb3 (which also got nerfed on evasion duration). We are supposed to evade on 1/4 a sec (minus lag and animation delay) with unreliable pathing just because “tribulation mode” is inherent to thieves not using a sword.

So forget about it. Go copy the s/d spvp heros spam 1 and have fun.