If they want to put more conditions into scepter auto, make it bleeding. Not, NOT torment. ABSOLUTELY NOT torment. It is the WORST condition damaging skill to put on AA.
learn to play
If these changes to mesmer scepter go through zax, you won’t even need to play the game. This is a terrible change to pvp on the scale of almost introducing perplexity runes into spvp.
This is a broken spec. This needs to go anet. This CANNOT be in such a great game that you have created. Don’t screw this up again. Make the auto attacks inflict bleeding or something. NOT torment.
Torment is the WORST condition you can place on an AA. The WORST.
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For example, wolf kd, drake tail swipe, moa heal, spider immob, etc.
You already have a button that controls it. The return to master button.
Shielded Mind is decent I really don’t have a problem with it, if it was just an extra stun break for yourself, then yeah it would need some love. However a group stun break is extremely strong.
well when you’re facing down two hambows, an extra source of stab is WAY better than just a simple stunbreak.
As they are right now, they are all pretty useless.
Yep. I wish I had an incentive to take something worthy of a GM title in the virtues line.
It’s hotjoin. Who cares about that.
The new players playing the game.
Guards that spam burning. Who would have guessed…
Lol, I know right? Guild Whine 2.
No condi clear at all.
Well then grab a guardian and pitch in.
you sure you don’t lose the burning when you miss? maybe i spend so much time on thief i assume everything that works on “charges” goes away the moment you mess up
Disregarding the block (as im not certain on that) it is an absolute guaranteed burn. Again, it’s very good to apply pressure in a teamfight. Even applying low condition damage, long lasting burning does a lot to generate pressure on a person. However most guardians activate justice right when they complete an empower so everyone who has the justice buff also gets 15 stacks of might – which also pulls a lot of weight for the damage.
Its second best ability to generate pressure in a teamfight next to combustive shot. Only because combustive shot is a much longer duration burn to many different targets and covers a massive area. On top of it all, its a fire field.
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i think part of the problem (and correct me if i’m wrong), is that virtue of justice is an offensive virtue, and the virtues line is mostly support. justice is stuck there for obvious reasons, but the only people that would want to buff their virtue of justice are the people that wouldn’t want to dump points into a support line.
Virtue of justice is one of the best ways, outside of combustive shot from the warrior, to generate pressure in a teamfight. It is a guaranteed burn that a person cannot dodge, blind, or (I believe) block. It’s a very good virtue even in a bunker support spec.
Ken, I probably would never take your first trait over Indomitable courage. I MIGHT pick shielded mind, but that would be a difficult decision and definitely not a no-brainer. Purity of body seems op. With full 30 points in to virtues, empower + Resolve has about a 45 second cooldown and heals you for about 5 to 5.5k health – essentially generating another personal heal. I would also try and avoid condition immunity like a plague.
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What is so frustrating to a lot of players, myself and yourself included, is that while there ARE classes and specs that have interesting dynamics and skillfull play, the game is effectively populated with certain classes and specs that are just the opposite; they are quite effective for very minimal risk or skill.
I should be careful when I say this, because overall I find the balance in this game to be quite good. However, in my opinion, the biggest standouts right now are warrior and S/D thief.
Warrior is a class that anet basically created to say, “You want to tunnel-vision an opponent and not worry about anyone else around you? Do you not want to worry about positioning? Go ahead Warrior!” They have the highest armor, highest health, and some of the most reliable damage in the game. They are perfect for pushing an enemy. On top of this, they get a skill that prevents 5 different ways in which people would typically be able to help any teammate against any other class. With one button press, they prevent immob, chill, cripple, fear, and blind. I should be fair to say though that, if you’re running a killshot war or greatsword war, these general rules significantly don’t apply as much – but only because their damage is not as reliable as any other spec.
Then there is the S/D thief which, for the very same reasons, is ridiculously hard to get them to back off of a target. It is a more active playstyle than the warrior – by far – but that still doesn’t change the fact that it is incredibly difficult to get them to back off from their target because evasion and dodges do essentially the same thing.
Thankfully both of these classes/specs are being addressed in the next coming patch.
Right, because against that kind of movement there is no good positioning.
Positioning does not mean, “I’m on a cliff, so you can’t get me.”
Positioning is the relation of you to your teammates, to your enemy, to your enemy’s teammates. It has a strong correlation to the different ranges on the skills in the game, and their peeling potential at given ranges and given certain conditions. This is a team game.
Of course, you can definitely post snide remarks all you want.
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Actually thief can deny good positioning to other classes with ports
I think you don’t really know what “good positioning” means. Just because a person is up on a cliff doesn’t mean they automatically have “good positioning.”
Harbinger has a really nice starter guide. It’s at the top of the page.
I am astounded that the Developers didn’t know about this…
Well I know John knew about it a LONG time ago. He explicitly talked about team scouting once. Though it was very brief and it seemed he had mixed feelings over it.
So much fail in this thread. Get out of hotjoin and you will see very little to no MM or Turret builds. lol
To be honest I play more in hotjoin than I do in solo que (at least as engineer). What are some of the better alternatives in solo que?
You’re going to see some of the same stuff even in solo que, but that’s just because the communication in solo que is so poor so rotations are pretty laggy/non-existent.
People get away with tourettes engie/mm necros because they afk on point and hope people come by to try and kill them. They create a mini death factory that is really only good at that one role: afk on point and 1v1 anyone who comes by because their builds are pretty terrible in a team fight so they afk on a side point. Overall a team that has better communication, and rotation skills, can take advantage of that. So you don’t see it a lot in more co-ordinated play. That being said, they still shouldn’t be so prevalent in soloque and probably need nerfing; but anet stupidly loves buffing its ai builds.
I suppose it’s worth mentioning that taking Healing Breeze will make your allied healing rather powerful, but it’s not quite the best heal for your own survivability. Same goes for Tome of Courage pretty much.
I’m new to support guard, but this is what I’ve played around with.
Don’t use tome of courage. It’s not very useful. The virtues recharge on renewed focus is way better and helps as a secondary source of defense if you get spiked.
Generally speaking, if a person wants to run healing breeze, I think running focus offhand would be best as it gives you the personal block to make sure you don’t get interrupted. Also I recommend running with an altruistic healing build if you use healing breeze, as you have said, personal survivability with healing breeze isn’t the best but altruistic healing picks up the slack.
You get somewhat less condi clear than a virtues guardian, and you don’t get a secondary access to stability. Your virtues are on a longer recharge too with an altruistic healing build. But you’re tanky as hell and you get to use healing breeze which is boss.
I’m going to be completely upfront here and say that I’m new to the guardian class. I love it. To be more specific, I love virtues support guardian (thanks for the guide Ken). I find so many similarities in the guardian to the monk of gw1 – with a twist to it. However, it might be because I’m just new to the class, I think that one of the main aspects to the class is a bit underwhelming – or rather not as reliable as I think it should be.
In guild wars 1, if you played a monk in pvp, you rarely ever saw a monk spec into straight-up healing magic. Instead you got a protection monk which had primarily protection magic spells on his bar. The fundamental reason for this was because protection spells were:
- Protection spells prevented more damage than healing spells ever could counter-heal.
- Protection spells were proactive instead of healing magic reactive spells (i.e. prediction of where the damage is going to be instead of where it has been means more skill is needed from the player)
Healing magic (usually the only significant healing spell on the bar, word of healing, was used) was really only used to keep people topped off after a spike landed. The whole PR spin comment that they tried to remove the concept of looking at health bars instead of the game for monks, is an absolute lie. Protection monks, the most common type of monks in pvp, did not stare at health bars like this EVER. Instead they relied upon certain tells that the opposing team made on the battlefield – since they needed to be proactive with their spells.
In another hand, gw1’s combat was focused on ether preforming and action, or moving. In other words, you could cast a spell, or you could move. This basic concept formed a lot of how the combat functioned in gw1. The same can be said for gw2, where you now can move and preform actions. Similarly, the way a “monk” functions in gw2 had to change. Instead of straight up casting a protection spell and managing mana pools, we now have peeling mechanics and maintaining efficient cooldown usage in combination with personal skill of dodging, blocks, and etc. to straight-up prevent damage.
In my new experience to the class, the guardian has so much peeling potential to give people the breathing room and damage prevention they need. It’s a proactive way of watching the battlefield and knowing where you need to place that shield bubble to knockback and prevent ranged damage incoming to your squishy teammate. I also feel they should be top-dog at it, but some of their peeling mechanics seem a bit unreliable.
I’ll give a few examples.
Guardian hammer seems to nearly be the absolute perfect weapon for peeling. You have a long casting aoe immob. A long-casting blowback. And an area denial skill. Faced one-on one, it’s very easy to see the hammer immob come your way because of the long cast time. However, if a person is tunnel-visioning a teammate of yours, it’s a lot harder to spot that cast time on the immob skill. The problem I find, and highlights the point of this thread, is that the immob is still pretty unreliable as the travel time of the chains is so slow.
Ring of Warding is plagued by the same unreliable problem as zealot’s embrace. It requires you to stand perfectly still to cast it.
Regardless, this doesn’t even address what you commonly see on virtues guardian build: Mace/shield + staff.
Shield is such an awesome offhand for preventing damage. SUCH a good offhand, I don’t understand why so many guardians complain over it. It has a knockback – perfect for peeling, and prevents a TON of ranged damage. Nades from an engie are futile to the simple cast of shield bubble. However I rarely find a reason why to explode the shield (that might just be because of my inexperience), but that’s besides the point. It’s a great, reliable way to prevent damage.
But then you look at mace and the only skill that can pass off for a peel is mace 3 and its pretty mediocre as it devotes a significant amount of time to just follow one character around for a block.
Staff 5 is a great peeling skill. It takes some skill to place the wall as well. Staff 3 is yet another mediocre peel for a 4 to 6 second swiftness boost.
Anyway, I wanted to ask the general forum on how they feel about the guardian peeling potential. I feel they should be the best at it – bar none. It allows for proactive damage prevention that is dependent upon keeping your eyes on the battlefield and predicting where the damage is going to be. However, it may be my inexperience, but I find that the peeling mechanics of a Guardian could be in a better, more reliable place.
If any notable spvp guardians want to comment and give tips, I would be so thankful for it.
I know anet is focused on pushing gw2 into the Esports realm but its disheartening to see team stacking and game leaving problems go on for so long. GW1 had a dishonor mechanic… why the step backwards?
In my opinion, hotjoin is something anet should have the closest eyes on in the pvp side of the game, because it ushers in the new players into the game.
One of the biggest problems with upper-level gaming in gw2 is the lack of players willing to put in the effort to learn the game. You see teams break up because of this. They seriously fight, day-in day-out, the same people every match. That can get rather stale. If this doesn’t occur, then it usually means they play against a team with significantly less experience than they have. This creates landslide games which are no fun for anyone.
If they have a close eye on making hotjoin a solid, stable place for new players to learn the game, then there is at least a better chance of them staying and motivating them to learn the game rather than just saying, “this is stupid” and giving up.
My first thoughts about this game was that it was a straight up clusterkitten. Once you practice a bit though, and learn the basic mechanics of the game, this becomes significantly less true as you learn to spot certain things.
In its current iteration, I’m almost sure new players are still getting that clusterkitten feeling about the pvp in this game – which isn’t a good thing. It needs to be more structured, in my opinion.
But repetition is the mother of all learning!
And insanity. Considering we’re dealing with anet here, i feel like we are barking at a wall.
With regards to Skyhammer, what if the panels of glass broke to a second level instead of insta-death? (At least the ones around home and far point) Make it longer for people to get back on point instead of just one-shotting them.
Usually I see people who want to run healing breeze, run with focus for the block. Focus also works well when trying to secure stomps though I generally think shield is better for stomping. I think shield is great and works well with mace, but have you tried focus? You also get a condi clear, another peeling mechanic (via blind) and some direct regen for the team. You lose out on another source of protection, an easy blind clear on one weapon set, and a super awesome don’t touch me bubble.
Also yeah, signet of energy works. It’s common to see support guards in spvp run two signet of energies on both weapon sets.
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There is already such control. It’s not guaranteed. It’s an aggression system that goes up and down through the battle.
Enemies switch targets depending on how the actions of individual players that raise or decrease aggression towards them.
But very few people notices such changes.
For example:
- Being closer to an enemy increases their aggression towards your character. You friends is going to be attacked? Use some leap to get right next to the enemy, they’ll often switch targets.
- If you pull an enemy towards you, chances are they’ll forget about their original target and switch to you.
- Enemies too focused on you? Have an ally deal a flurry of attacks on a target while you move away. Your aggression decreases, theirs goes up.
- Want to grab a party of enemies rushing in? Land a snare and stay between them, while the rest of the party stays away. If they can’t reach any other player soon, they’ll switch to you.
Yes. Ways to peel for your teammates should be far more important than any direct aggro manipulation. The game is more dynamic this way. Unfortunately most people say, “screw it” and wall los + fgs4 instead.
I like the virtues. f1 fits so well with empowering might and provides really good condition pressure for a teamfight – it’s a guaranteed 4 second burn. In a virtues build f2, combined with empowering might, will basically give everyone around you a 5 – 5.5k heal (about the amount of a personal heal) on a 46 second recharge which is great in a pinch. And f3 does a handy job at stopping follow-up damage after a stun to an ally. You see an ally get shield bashed by an axe/shield warrior and your other skills are not in range/on cooldown? Pop that virtue to stop that eviscerate. You need to give your allies some breathing room after they completely ate that Earthshaker? Go ahead and pop it.
Well I don’t know where other people are coming from here, but in sPvP, shield is pretty good. You can prevent A LOT of damage with shield 5. I typically use shield 4 when a teammate is trying to push a squishy target and to clear blind. Timing is definitely key on shield though.
I’ve said this in another thread, but i wish the more “offensive” weapons had better peeling capability. I feel the guardian should be king at peeling for other people and I’d like to see more reliable ways to do that on their more offensively geared weapons like sword (the blind is really nice), hammer (immob plus launch plus ring of warding), and greatsword (greatsword 5 for the pull).
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Vee Wee basically wants a decent pvp infrastructure. We all do vee wee. We all do.
One of the biggest concerns though, and something i can’t even wrap my brain around solving, is stopping the potential abuse. Nobody likes to be barked at by their teammates. It’s one of the biggest problems with other big pvp games.
Other than that though. Communication needs to be easier. A chat wheel with set dialogue and being able to ping skills is a good start.
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Although, the reason that this was possible, was that there were countless of interactions between countless of skills. in GW2, there is nothing of that, there is no Sever Attery -> Gash, none of the skills interact with any of the other skills in any way.
To start of right from the bat, I have to say im WAY more of a PvP player than a PvE player in this game. Simply because when I played my first dungeon and realized how there were such blatant exploits to beating it to the point where the most optimal strategy was to turn off my brain, I instantly said, “nope not for me.” I’ve had the game since launch and, to this day, no legendary and just your basic exotic gear + acended trinkets (no acended backpiece). But I really don’t care to get a legendary so whatever.
However addressing this quote, from a PvP perspective, this really isn’t the case. As player dependent skill becomes greater, it becomes even less of an issue as there are many different class combinations with different skills that can play off of one another. Sure there are “cheap” tactics in the game, but for the most part if a team took the time and put in the effort (which many in the pvp community don’t want to do – so much whine instead) were to fight the one-trick-pony groups, the team who put in the most effort will win.
Heck, in the early days of PvE, there were threads in forums saying how dungeon running is where the PvE game is at. The open world stuff was bland and uninteresting. In dungeons however, you were forced into a 5-man havoc squad to take on what was in there. At the time, people were trying to figure out the best ways to run through dungeons, and the lobotomy tools we now know today for dungeon running weren’t really played with.
From a present day PvE perspective however, I can certainly see the case for this. The ai is too easily exploitable and creates dungeon runs which require the least amount of thought possible to accomplish. Let’s face it, as an example, wall LOSing mobs + FGS4 kills virtually all things no matter what.
It’s important I say the words, “too easily” because, to a certain extent, it should be easy to take advantage of mobs. For example, if you use immob on a target and have a tankier class hit that target, there is a very good chance that the immobed target will switch aggro. That’s good game design. Instead what we get is wave after wave of trash mobs which are most easily destroyed by blatant ai exploitations. Ironically given the risk of the fight, where you can easily get 1-shotted by a boss or by a pack of 10 trash mobs, I completely understand why people turn to such blunt and direct tools to tackle such problems.
In a pvp comparison, it’s like I’m trying to play an entire game centered around the map called Skyhammer. In pvp land, Skyhammer is the symbol of everything wrong with the game – I’m serious on this. Nobody who takes the pvp in this game seriously likes Skyhammer. It involves a cannon that has a ridiculously huge radius that can 1 shot you while you’re fighting someone. Oh and you can’t dodge it. Also the map is filled with other 1-shot mechanics involving pushing or pulling people off the map. It’s not fun when you just want to fight other people.
Back to PvE though, I’m certain that there are people out there who would try and argue that the game should provide some level of easy PvE runs because a MMO needs to have some stable farming measures so that people can buy their gear that they want/need. To them, I say look at where the economy was when the game first started, and look at where it is now. At the start of the game, you could buy 100 gems for like 10 to 20 silver. Now you have to spend double digits of gold. Just 3 to 5 months ago, legendaries were around 2000 gold. Now they are around 3.5 to 4000 gold. The inflation in the game is real. If you made the game somewhat more difficult to play, it would be easier for everyone to get what they need – as backwards as that sounds.
To the OP: I appreciate the thread. I don’t know why it was moved to profession balance page as that doesn’t make sense.
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And note that guard does not have the huge HP warrior gets, nor the mobility, nor the duration block instead of hit block or the low cooldowns.
If you’re trying to convince us that guardians have a difficult time preventing damage, you’re going to have one hell of an uphill battle.
Oh look, a plane is flying over our heads.
Heh, 30 strikes of stored combat equivalent time for a flat single target 4 second burn? That’s pretty funny you made me chuckle Vee Wee.
Vee Wee was comparing the engie to the warrior burn. Engie is well known to have its main source of damage as about a 5 second burn on a 10 second cooldown to only 1 enemy at a time. It wrecks people. Vee Wee was saying that a warrior should do similar reliable burning pressure but in an aoe effect (the largest fire field in the game, might i add) that you can still combo field off of.
It’s actually a pretty reasonable opinion.
Do not pay attention to leaderboard ranking in its current state, it will only make you angry.
^ This. Leaderboards mean jack squat. The only thing that matters if you want to establish a reputation as a “good player” is the amount of games you’ve played and not having an abysmally bad win/loss ratio.
Shield is actually a good offhand for what its intended use is. It doesn’t need changed. Offhand torch is pretty terrible, but that’s just because guardian condi damage is limited – as it should be. I don’t know what could be done with offhand torch. Ideally I’d like to see the “offensive” weapons of guardians to have the most reliable ways to peel for other players – bar none; not a single class should be able to peel for a person better than a guardian. A reliable way to say to the opposing player, “Hey I’m here, and you’re gonna have to deal with me first.” Hammer is pretty close, but needs more reliable ways to apply its skills. Scepter is pretty dumb and bad. The one saving grace it has is its reliable immobilize to setup some damage – damage setup is where this weapon should be good at. Speed buffs are probably not going to happen to guardian though.
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Traps allow you to create presence on point when you’re not there, but someone else is. Shadow Trap is a perfect example of this. Unless you’re talking about the ambush trap – its pretty useless for the same reason why thieves guild is pretty useless.
Traps have the potential to setup some nice damage. I would give them a shot if they removed damage from them so I can set them up while in stealth and so I don’t get randomly revealed when someone triggers it while I’m not there.
Infiltrator signet is still very good though, so I don’t know. Signet allows you to create a lot more offensive pressure and works sooo well with steal item skills.
Hey, I thought Tarcis’ s post was really well thought out and well reasoned. Not everyone will agree with his opinions and that’s fine, that’s why it’s an opinion, so let’s keep things civil shall we?
Good guy Ken has a good head on his shoulders.
Vs S/D I can’t really say what the best way to handle them is as I rarely play as S/D.
S/D is pretty much a no-go for a mesmer. It’s not as hard of a counter as necro is to engie, but its a REALLY hard matchup for the mesmer to take on. S/D is a terror at zoning and the additional ports they get + cleave + boonsteal + reliable damage is a nightmare for mesmers.
This might be a deal breaker for my original stance.
It’s a pretty poor change. Just lazy. If they want to have an easier time for the thief to get interrupted, then remove the projectile finisher on BP. Stand out of the field, then interrupt them when they jump.
Choking gas and BP changes were needed, we’ll adapt. It will separate the good from the bad.
If they were going to change D/P, I figured they would remove the projectile finisher on black powder and maybe the unblockable effect on shadowshot. The change to shortbow is whatever, who gives a crap. Just use it before you place iHouse.
But this just seems lazy, like really lazy, because it affects sooo many other weaponsets. If they think p/p is going to be played with these changes to black powder, they are going to be sorely mistaken.
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If they were going to touch D/P at all (which I really didn’t think they would), I figured they would remove the projectile finisher from black powder, and maybe remove the unblockable effect from shadow shot.
Not this. It seems lazy to me.
That’s true, but they can actually hold a point and not die like flies. We could possibly see people gladly subbing in a gs war in place of a thief since it could potentially be less risky to do so, and warriors are pretty much THE class that needs the least amount of teamwork to get stuff done – so they can definitely hold their own.
Warrior GS burst is being changed to aoe burst skill. This means Warrior has another source of a reliable condi clear for Cleansing Ire. GS is also the main source of mobility for the Warrior. Will Thieves be replaced by Warrior in a team lineup now?
all this
You’re not fooling anyone vee wee…
If you’re facing a D/P thief, you ether want to try and land an interrupt into a spike right before they enter stealth, or you want to: camp out near your clones, try to get them to front stab you, and then follow-up with a shatter. If you camp near your clones, the spike time is reduced significantly. it also helps to know that the period of attacks your clones will use is roughly around 3 seconds, so if the thief is going in and out of stealth frequently, then you can bet he will be punished for revealing himself as your clones/phantasms will most likely insta-attack.
The biggest problem you’re going to have is if the thief gets wise and starts using shortbow. It will wreck your clones, and their evasion 3 skill will pretty much make your pistol phantasm attack useless. 1 dodge roll + a disabling shot will negate virtually all damage from your pistol phantasm. proper use of poison via steal and shortbow 4 will make healing a pain for you. and the biggest source of direct damage on the shortbow is a nice jucy clusterbomb to the face. usually it’s paired up with a stealth attack via shortbow to immob you or a port via steal or infiltrator signet. You can use staff to time a port right when they try and clusterbomb you. You can also use diversion to interrupt it. proper use of blur is absolutely necessary. try to save your port via sword 3 to dodge attacks.
the biggest strength to mesmer in a fight is the ability to swing the fight into their favor. try to always be using your defensive structure as part of your offense.
in general, “this guy:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nADHVzc9y8g” gives good general tips.
My two biggest complaints (and why I really don’t play this game too much anymore) is the snail-like pace development of the pvp infrastructure. It took them about a year and a half to get decent descriptions on traits, and I’m not going to hold my breath on having them be able to develop any reasonable way to structure their pvp system when other games already have a great system right from the get-go. And, ironically, I’m tired of all the whine from players in every other game about how whatever class I choose to play is overpowered.
Thief is a brain-dead assassin-style class that serves to hard-counter the dedicated healer.
Excusing the general vapid undertone to this entire post, no it doesn’t. Thief exists to do, in general, three things: They provide the least amount of opportunity cost to pushing far point. They have the capability to create +1 advantages in small teamfights. And they serve to punish players who are out of position tunnel-visioning a teammate; to peel them away from your teammate. They are not a “brain dead assassin style class that ‘counters’ a healer.”
Without the dedicated healer, the thief just moves about the field and murders people who are looking in the other direction or just murders people in general because that’s what they are designed to do and there isn’t a player on any team that is designed to prevent this.
This made me chuckle a bit because it reminded me of dota1 in the old days. People were absolutely furious that ganking existed in the game. If you ganked in dota1, you were the scum of the earth. After all, there is no dedicated healer in dota. At best, any healing in the game could be compared to the healing capabilities of guild wars 2 – as support healing used so you can endure a fight longer.
It has never been so much a matter of “Thief is overpowered” as it has been “Thief has no reason to be in GW2 at all by virtue of basic class-centric (hard-counter) balance logic.”
Again Swagg, you create these opinions and try to apply them as a universal statement on game design.
Since GW2 is balanced around hard-counters (not that that’s a good thing; it’s actually a very lazy and uninspired balance philosophy), it makes no sense to let thief just dangle out there as a hard-counter class despite the fact that the mechanic which the thief is meant to hard-counter doesn’t actually exist in GW2 in any real way.
Of course there are matchups that are harder than others. This exists in every game and it creates an environment that promotes teamwork – it is a good thing.
“What is this, September 2012? That statement hasn’t been true for a long time now. The only real full zerk classes that struggle against thieves are Ranger, Elementalist and Mesmer. Even so, It doesn’t mean they can’t win against it.”
I think this is basically it. The reason why people run with zerk thieves is because of their natural skillset is best suited for their role and for the team. With zerker specs on your team, you cannot just sit on two points in this game and get kills. The reward for killing people just isn’t high enough. Instead you need to play for three points to snowball. You don’t even need to have the third point capped, just neutral state to snowball. It just so happens that thieves have the best range of movement to easily travel between points the quickest. For the same reason why guardian is ran as a support – because of its natural skillset demands it. It is true that certain specs get eaten alive by thieves, but that’s true for all classes. Certain common specs have strengths against other setups than others.
Playing all three points does certain beneficial things for a team with some zerker specs in it. The beneficial effects really all revolve around forcing your opponent into doing something. In general I find it does two things: Playing all three points forces your opponent to rotate, and it naturally creates smaller fights. Both of these things generally create the healthiest environment possible for zerker builds. Zerker builds generally can out-rotate heavy sustain specs, and zerker classes ability to contribute to fights drops significantly with more bodies involved – it just becomes too risky. So you’re going to have trouble getting your two sustain heavies + 3 zerker spec team to work if you’re trying to just play 2 points and get kills, if you’re faced against a more sustain setup. It gets riskier as time goes by because your team is forced to screw up less or things will fall apart.
Any other zerker spec ether struggles against thieves (fresh air s/d ele is as fragile and as bursty as an all signet thief but instead with wayyy more utility for the team), or other zerker lines wrecks face, but the natural skillset of the class just fits other roles better to help fill in the gaps for the team (zerker engie hurts, but they have a better skillset, and can contribute more to a team, as a roaming all-rounder).
I think the reason why we see people play sustain specs is because sustain specs, at the very least, allow you to endure on a point long enough for your teammates to show up. At the very best, it allows you to 1v1 people as easily as possible. So many solo que builds focus around afk’ing on point hoping someone comes by to fight. Solo que is an area where communication is absolutely horrid so the lag time between a fight starting and support arriving is longer. People WILL exploit that lack of communication.
(edited by Chicago Jack.5647)
Lopez, it took them about a year and a half to get halfway decent descriptions on the traits in the game. Don’t hold your breath.
On a serious note, clearly they have much of the development team working on the living story over anything else in the game. Maybe this is the problem with the concept of a “living story”. It slows down production on the rest of a game.
(edited by Chicago Jack.5647)
Then after fighting this Long Bro Warrior for 6 minutes waiting out his defy pain, stability and Berserker stance he finally fell and I was the victor. “An excellent start to this match” I thought to my self as I aquired my first kill of the game.
Only to look up and realize that they had back capped our home point and won the mid fight. Effectively demoralizing my Team Que tourney team and won the game with minimal resistance.
Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I once fought a guardian at our home point to steal his mace crack. Me and another squishy pushed to mid because there was a solo warrior there. I bassied up, and was able to basically stunlock the guy for about 5 seconds. While he’s running around like a chicken with his head cut off, his passive endure pain procced. “No big deal,” I said to myself, “I’ll just autoattack him to maintain poison on him and he’ll die in no time.” After about 3 seconds, his friends showed up and destroyed us all. The end.
Ahh the classic, 3-to-4-man-rush-far-to-dominate-and-create-panic-then-hope-they-trickle-into-their-home-point-death-factory technique. It works pretty well in solo-que when you have a lot of burst classes and the opposing team has a guardian (and you don’t).
(edited by Chicago Jack.5647)
D/P thief vs Utility Goggles is the Hardest Hard counter I’ve ever seen in this game.
To be honest, it really only hard counters a one-trick-pony build you see commonly in WvW. So I’m personally okay with it having a simple counter to it. The real issue to these counters is how it plays into the 2/6/0/0/6 build. Fortunately trickery d/p doesn’t rely so heavily on stealth as an SA build, but it DOES use stealth. If this skill, or other skills like this, becomes a “thing” we’ll probably see more s/d thieves in WvW. Hopefully, on the spvp side of things, all this means for D/P thieves is more time in shortbow.
In a fight with an engie, you usually heavily rely on shortbow anyway. Also, there is quite a sacrifice for an engie to take utility goggles over elixer s. Warriors have a way more commanding presence than a thief.
What you would commonly see in a teamfight is a person stealthing a person more appropriate for ressing, and then have the thief put pressure on the engie because nades hurt on anyone just facetanking them while ressing. So it’s not like the engies are most likely going to get free harass.
This is especially disheartening for me, because I prefer D/P over S/D or S/P.
I’m with you. D/P is just way better than S/D or S/P and we definitely don’t see many D/P players as S/D players in spvp, but I’m still waiting to see the other changes before I make up my mind. Regardless, I play way more dota than guild wars now-a-days anyway.
(edited by Chicago Jack.5647)