Guild Wars 2

Would enjoy but only on necromancers and (semi-serious) thieves, as it would end up functioning too much like a 2h sword for most classes.

I’m a 5 signet warrior… with full rampagers and double sword + rifle so… yeah.

I logged in to the island but didn’t get to participate in the event as they had all finished… however the time frame for the event was still in effect when I logged in, yet I didn’t get DC’d but still got a chest in the mail.

A friend of mine got DC’d, but still got a chest during the evetn from an overflow, he then took a second character to the event and got DC’d again but didn’t get a second event chest – but did get mailed a second chest.

Another fiend got the chest from doing the event, but didn’t take any other characters in and wasn’t mailed a second chest.

Based on this it seems to be a case of: if you had a character that didn’t get the chest on the island during a certain time frame and you changed servers during that time frame then you get mailed a chest.

Well I found that to be pretty boring, nothing against your skills or anything but roaming while solo in WvW as a condition thief is just… boring to watch. Mostly because your fights are just the same thing over and over again; acquire stealth, use pistol stealth attack, avoid getting hit… not to mention many of your displayed opponents were pretty mediocre in their usage of skills and play style.

It would be a security feature, one of three (somewhat obvious) things could be happening:
1. If you save the card information but don’t access it for a period of time it could lock you out.
2. Card information is only saved for a limited duration of time, after that expires it locks you out.
3. The location based security feature that requires you to authenticate a new IP address for your account could cause your saved card information to be locked out to prevent credit card fraud.

It’s annoying, but a secure system is usually annoying to use… which is why it’s secure in the first place.

Wait… Opening Strikes is now fixes, I didn’t actually realize this until you mentioned it.

It seems that they also fixed the sword #1 for rangers, it now allows you to move/dodge/use other actions when you aren’t in a leap attack (which is fair enough given that you can’t dodge while using leap on other professions).

But it would be nice if ANet could document these kinds of changes so that players (who read the patch notes) can actually use weapons/abilities etc. that were previously bugged and now aren’t.

I didn’t complete the monthly in November because it required dungeon runs and fractals, personally I don’t have a problem with my not doing it because there are those that don’t do the WvW aspect of the monthly, along with the fact that the monthly seems to be aimed at encouraging people to participate in aspects of the game that could have low participation.

HOWEVER, it’d be nice if ANet gave us an option to complete x out of y monthly objectives rather that having it restricted to 4/4 preset objectives… and x/y total would fit in with their whole “play the way you want and do the things you want to do” vibe.

[Edit]: It doesn’t matter if it’s easy, I got my 50 WvW kills in 1.5 hours this morning, but I don’t expect other people to get them that fast, nor do I expect people to do it at all as not everyone likes WvW. In essence it’s not about it being easy or difficult it’s about the fact that we HAVE to do it to get the monthly rewards, as far as I’m concerned (these days) nothing is worse in a game than forced participation.

80 Ranger: 107 deaths over 292 hours
80 Warrior: 197 deaths over 117 hours (Gotta’ love that WvW)
80 Thief: 274 deaths over 310 hours (Gotta’ love that WvW and sPvP)

I have 3 80’s in full exotics
I’ve bought 1500 unidentified dyes from the TP just to get all the colors
I’ve spent over 30g on armor/weapons for cosmetic appeal
I’m 40% of the way to a legendary weapon (paid for most of the mats so far)
I haven’t done much by way of farming, I don’t do dungeons… most of what I do is WvW and playing the game.
Yet I still have 20g, the only thing I have more than most is time but I don’t play for more than 2-3 hours a day anymore and I still make gold hand over fist.

If you think the cost of way points is too high then you sir are doing something wrong, most players that think way point costs are too high will never get a legendary so sell your mats, vendor greens and blues, salvage whites (that aren’t leather), craft yellows and sell/salvage them, become a mechanical player and analyze your surroundings, play smarter. These are all things that you can do to make money… but they take time to do them and require you to have a specific play style… that of the analytical and mechanical player.

My 2c, if it requires “work” and I can’t be bothered doing it then I won’t do it… that’s how I view ascended gear.

WvW uses the rule-set of PvE which means that it won’t receive any PvP focused balance changes unless it gets segmented off into its own category.
Because of this it’s highly unlikely that the backstab thief will ever go away because the devs won’t nerf it (for PvE) as it’s not a problem, and in (s/t)PvP backstab is only a problem for lower brackets (hot-join 8v8) even then it’s debatable as you aren’t really doing anything for your team.

Last time I checked mesmers were able to use skills and abilities, unless this has been stealth-nerfed recently then it should still be the case.

SteepledHat.1345:

Thief stealths.
Mesmer can’t summon phantsam or clones.

Mirror Images, Phantasmal Defender, Decoy and Phantasmal Disenchanter all summon clones and don’t require targets.

Thief blinds.
Mesmer still can’t summon phantasm or clones.

How does the thief blind? They are in stealth so their next attack will either stun/daze, bleed or backstab… otherwise they are doing it wrong, also see above about clones and you also have access to stealth.

Thief proceeds to kill mesmer by exploiting stealth/culling issue.
Mesmer uses it’s few AoE skills hoping to hit the thief.

So let me get this straight, the thief just magically kills the mesmer and the mesmer (you) do nothing? Sounds to me like this is a personal skill issue here.

Mesmer is downed.
Thief stealths.
Mesmer can’t use his down skill 2 since he can’t target.
Thief pikes.

So the thief uses shadow refuge just to get the stomp kill… fair enough as the mesmers downed #3 hits like a truck, also fair enough that the mesmer can’t target the thief with #2… when you consider the fact that the mesmer didn’t use any skills and abilities during the fight.

If you really want to find out what to do as a mesmer then roll a thief, go into WvW and get some utility skills and fight some mesmers, the you’ll find out that it doesn’t go the way you are suggesting.

Based on the image name (BwEda.png), it’s probably a bug from back in the BwE as GW2 release screenshots are default names as gwXXX.jpg eg. gw020.jpg which implies that it’s the 20th SS you have taken.

Back in my day I leveled my thief to 80 in 88h 39m with 41% map completion, but back then we didn’t have these things like “bug fixes” and “balancing of events” and such, we just played the game RAW.

P.S. Stabby stabby!

SameHH.1048:

Clever use? Any noob can perma stealth with theif there is nothing clever about it. But yeah, it isn’t cheating =/

Just because anyone can do it doesn’t make it any less clever.

Kaimick.5109:

Heartseeker – This is an amazing ability, I love it in PvE it is great for a burst and works great. Although in PvP we are seeing more and more non-skilled players running into a large fight and super spamming Heartseeker (which usally hits form 7 – 8k minimal of 6k) and then they stealth and run away if the attention even so much looks their way.

I’ve never seen a HS crit for 7-8k, but I’m sure it’s possible if you have 15+ stacks of might with a full 5 charges of Assassin’s Signet AND your target is below 25% health with glass cannon gear and spec, which means that 1 HS is usually enough to kill them.

Now if we break down HS we see that three solid hits on players preoccupied is minimum 18k damage which takes out a lot of the classes, some leaves them with 3k health some 6k health. I know Warriors have the Glass cannon (GC) builds that nuke things pretty bad, Although that is an activate of all 3 utility skills and he elite. Thieves hit 2 skills some times one, Stealth then 3x spam HS. The bad thing is I am not even sure how to fix this, as most good players do not use the HS build spam. I have been destroyed by good players that never use HS and if they do it is once. So how do we attempt to fix it?

Where the hell did you pull 18k damage from? A HS crit can achieve 6k easily and three hits of 6k would be 18k sure, BUT a 6k crit requires the target to be below 25% health and usually be a glass cannon. So if the target has 18k health and they start at 25% then they have 4.5k/18k health so how can the thief do 3x HS when one would be enough?

Stealth finishers – This is by far probably one of the cheapest and maybe over sighted things that thieves have. Every other class has the potential to be knocked out of the finishers at least once, weather you live form a successful counter is not the point. Thieves have a leg up on this, they hit stealth and finish their victims, not sure if this was to reflect the core ideal of the Profession or not but it is drastically unfair to all the other classes. I have on my Mesmer tried to stealth clone and finish multiple times and every time I come out of stealth. I am just thinking that Thieves should be removed from stealth when doing finishers. 9 out of 10 times if you have to be visible during the finishers and your get countered your still going to finish them the second time, just not seeing why they get to have a 100% success rate when other classes don’t. Guardians are the only profession that have a chance to protect against this.

Yeah this does suck, but then again they just used shadow refuge (a 60 second CD) to stomp you… that means they won’t have the CD for a fight in the next 60 seconds.

Not sure on the name but Underwater skill 2 I believe – this is a great skill but even it PvE it takes away form the challenge and makes you almost god like. I have seen people in pvp get in the water and spam this one skill and evade all attacks while killing someone. There are ways around this by Sinking them or using an immobilizing effect, but the Immobilization effects have a CD. I am not sure in Arena Net planned for this to happen or not but players are becoming killing machines while being virtually invulnerable to all attacks. This in my opinion is the Ideal of Broken, Overpowered, and Exploitable. I watched a single thieve defend against 5 people at the Ruins just by spamming this button. What he wasn’t trying to kill the sharks were helping him and when he would get CC’ed he would break it by stealth or something of the sort.

The number 2 skill for spear is Flanking Strike, it hits hard, has a 3/4 second cast time and costs 3 initiative – bonus of 3 stacks of vulnerability.
So basically you aren’t even looking at thief skills for information while you are writing this… that would explain your erroneous information in relation to HS.

Partying with people during PvE content usually slows me down, as I play with the knowledge of what to do at any point in time and newer players (or people from my guild) can’t keep up with the speed at which I play.

Hell, even when I do group up I act the exact same was as if I were solo and if I’m being slowed down in any way I just drop the group.

with 1012 kills and 312 badges, of which ~100 were from jumping puzzles/map completion essentially means I have a 20% chance of getting loot from killing a player (or NPC) which is kind of low but fair enough I suppose, however as people have pointed out it would be higher if we auto-looted the bags rather than having them sit on the ground in an environment where we can’t necessarily get to them.

In WvW (to me) nothing is worse than having a bunch of bags on the ground near me while I’m in a downed state/dead.

The 200 skill points was relatively easy to get, however it’d be nice if ANet made the Bloodstone account bound rather than character bound, as I’ve swapped characters but don’t wish to get another 200 skill points on a different character.

The initiative systems doesn’t provide much consistency in regards to damage/utility, I would expect a skill with a cost of 5 initiative to do more damage/have more utility than a skill with a cost of 3, but this isn’t the case.

Many of the traps are lackluster and seem to only hit one target (many times not the target you wanted either), the tricks are OK although the cast time on caltrops is pretty significant for what it does and haste (quickness) should be removed from the game.

The utilities are used by too many thieves but mostly because the passive benefits outweigh the detriments of not using anything else.

The venoms don;t have a uniform UI layout (some have a hard coded number of strikes while others don’t) and their cooldown duration makes them pretty bad for anything except a venom build, there isn’t much reason to use venoms without 30 points into deadly arts.

Deception, actually I have nothing to add for deception skills because they are just good although I’d like smoke screen to have a lower duration and cooldown.

Our weapon sets have little synergy and no distinction, for example, pistols are bleed damage, swords are mobile auto attack damage and daggers are fast damage, instead they combine many aspects of each into a disorganized mess. For many weapon combinations the auto attack ends up doing more damage than the initiative skills AND it can provide more utility to boot, many of the 2-5 skills are but their nature gimmicks just waiting to be spammed because of the initiative system.

Steal as a class mechanic isn’t bad but due to its base cooldown it is comparatively terrible, case in point Shadowstep is a 1200 range ground targeted shadow step that also can returns you to your starting point and cure come conditions and its base cooldown is 50 seconds, steal is a 900 range shadow step that steals an item (too random to be useful in many cases outside of PvP/WvW) and has a base cooldown of 45 seconds. Sure steal can be traited to do things and doesn’t require a utility slot but our utilities aren’t well thought out so it doesn’t matter in the long run, what I’m getting at is steal is too much like other stuff a thief can do with other skills (and do better) which detracts from its power/uniqueness.

In conclusion, I think the thief could have been good if it didn’t have the current utility system OR if one or two other professions had a unique resource as well.

If initiative had of been thieves unique class mechanic and we had a number of function abilities to use it, while our weapon attacks recharged it (and had cooldowns) it would have been better, rather than all of our attacks having to be weaker because they can be spammed.

Was it worth it? No and it usually isn’t. But if the developers made it “worth it” then it would involve giving a fair chunk of power to those with a little extra money to burn.

I use 2x Kenshi’s Wing transmusted to berserker stats, mostly because I like large combat knives over daggers… especially weird flimsy looking weapons.

As for short bow, it’s a guild short bow all the way because I’m original like that.

http://www.gw2armor.com/human/female/whispers/medium/display_looks.php

Is also a good resource.

Does the manifesto represent the game?
No, the manifesto represents the sentiments and philosophies of the development team at the time it was released, and as we are all aware things change over time.

To rebel against the additions to the game is to rebel against change, this MMORPG has changed the landscape for the genre but to have the game itself be static and unchanging is going against the change it made to the genre.

The only people these gear changes really affect are those that LET it affect them.

My warrior is my third 80, the moment it hit 80 I had a full set of exotic armor and weapons with green accessories, within 5 hours of it hitting 80 I was bored of it… if the gear is too easy to get then it just means that people like me will be bored that much quicker.

As a side note, I’m not interested in getting any form of ascended gear because it require me to run fractals… and I hate running dungeons in any form, no matter how good (or bad) they may be, years of WoW just turned me off of the concept of dungeons in ALL games.

Well after spending enough gems to get 10 chests and realizing later that I could have sold those gems and made the chests at a cheaper cost I was pretty disappointed, I got some shoulder skins (which IMO sucked) and some breathing mask skins (and I don’t look at my face underwater) as well as a bunch of fairly useless crafting materials… 10 chests and nothing worth the real money I spent on them, I probably won’t buy any more of these special chests unless ANet realizes that they need to put good stuff in them to justify the cost.

Oh and to the analogy of gambling, you never win in the long term as it’s designed to take your money away without reward, so unless you are saying ANet is deliberately taking our money with out proper compensation it’s not gambling… even though (based on the value of these chests) that’s what the are doing.

One time events with timezone exclusions are a terrible idea, if you MUST run them it’s better to run them over two days where the whole world can at least have some participation rather than the “epic and rewarding end” being missed by all the people who were asleep or having to go to work… we shouldn’t have to sactifice real life commitments just for a game and we shouldn’t have to miss out on the game because of these issues.

Not to mention the problems with DCing, lag across all zones (which affects the people not interested), the rewards being better than the mad king event but people didn’t do the karka event because the MK stuff was lackluster, the abundance of bugs.

Then there’s the execution issues, if you are in the habit of deleting mail because the game has trained you to just delete it if it contains no items then you wouldn’t know where to go for the event, much of the event seemed to be “kill stuff… kill lots of stuff for a very long time” but that seems to be what the game is all about in the end. The way the overflow system is set up provides easy playability with no queue times, but the fact that loot/rewards are overflow/server specific means that disconnection leads to a lack of reward, which is a direct result of having no queue and no system in place to put the player back in the overflow server they originated from.

Overall the event was pretty poor, many of the problems this event had have been seen on other MMOs like Rift, a sense of “our technology can handle it where others can’t” is just arrogance that many developers seem to have, one time events prevent participation by people from a variety of time zones which creates an excursionist environment and setting reward precedents means that players who saw terrible rewards for lots of participation in other events won’t participate and then get bitten when the rewards turn out to be good.

Conclusion: It was pretty terrible for your first “come and see if you haven’t played GW2 yet” event.

I had a similar problem in Australia, the event started when I was asleep and finished as I was getting ready for work, didn’t have the time to participate, pretty disappointed in the nature of one time events as they screw over those that aren’t in the required time-zone and those that don’t want to sacrifice RL commitments for a game.

At least some people, got to participate, due to work I missed out so now I don’t get anything because… one time events are a bad idea, they reward people in specific time zones (or those that can afford to participate due to lack of time constraints) and punish those of us who have jobs/lives.

Not to mention that for once you put some half-decent rewards in and many people suffered due to DC’s, lag, crashes, timezone differences etc, which really punishes your player base.

Those 5% damage bonuses are only really worth it if you want to try and cram the absolute maximum damage out of every attack, otherwise a 1000 crit will become a 1050 crit, and that 50 extra damage isn’t really going to do much.

Wasn’t PvP in the GW1 two months after release pretty terrible? Because that’s how I remember it, it took them months and months to get it to a good point… but maybe that’s just me and I remember things with patience not a sense of “now now now”.

Tulisin.6945:

Dacromir.6207:

S/D is still great for WvW. In fact, we got a small damage buff.

If and only if C&D was not your primary method to execute Tactical Strike.

What do you mean by that? the reason I ask is because the CnD damage wasn’t lowered in WvW which is the only reason I can see to make that statement.

I could sell you a thunderstone but I don’t think you have enough money for that.

But in relation to your question, the way things are shifting now it’s quite likely that SB or P/x will be the new in thing (pure speculation mind you). As to being better now, try a condition build with D/D or P/x I heard that they work really well, or you could go for the (very) slightly nerfed BS build, but in WvW the nerf is to stop DD from being useful… so to too much of a nerf really.

But aside from that, there aren’t that many builds for a thief, not even “viable” builds but just builds in general, mostly because our utilities are kind of terrible and our weapon combinations are… lackluster to say the least.

axiology.5807:

Coffeebot.3921:

If you’d read what I’d typed from the beginning then you’d have the knowledge that I already said that WvW is the only place this really affects, but the problem with that is the people who want to have the best stats in WvW will do the content regardless of what it is or where it is and the people that think they want the best gear (to “compete”) will try to get it before complaining about the difficulty.

• In other words, people who want to WvW competitively (because that’s what they find fun) will have to do the content so that they can get the gear needed to start on the WvW?

That is exactly what grinding is, and that is exactly what GW2 was against. Let me give you the quote:

“It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee. " – Mike O’Brien, Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto

Really? Because I interpret that as “We won’t require you to grind for levels” but it doesn’t say anything about gear OR levels, it just says a grinding treadmill… and that exactly fits what the legendary gear is… and the dungeons for gear… and the WvW gear (in relation to tokens) so really, it’s a bit late to complain about grinding.

Oh and competitive WvW doesn’t really exist, as there are FAR more factors than JUST gear which people seem to forget.

Fritz.5026

just for instance.

warrior 1 has 20,000 health, 1000 power, and 50% crit rate
warrior 2 has 22,000 health, 1100 power, and 55% crit rate

warrior 2 is 10% superior in the three listed aspects

you run those 2 combatants through a simulator and warrior 2 will consistently win the majority of the encounters. you cant argue that he wont.

its a mathematical fact.

Simulations are fine and dandy in a purely static environment, but simulations are comparatively mechanical in all aspects as they don’t account for individual skill (even if you use the caveat “assuming equal skill”).

Here’s an example; warrior one pops Frenzy, Endure Pain and Bullrush with Hundred Blades and kills Warrior two in 2 seconds, warrior two couldn’t do anything because warrior two doesn’t have any stun-breaker utilities.

We can play the argument/counter-argument game ALL DAY and it won’t make any difference, within one level of gear skill will always trump gear regardless of what simulations you run, because simulations can’t account for the human element.

Ryan.6951:

Coffeebot.3921:

(which doesn’t affect anything outside of one specific dungeon)

lol

So huge stat gains aren’t useful in wvw and pve?

I said for a PvE player which excludes WvW (as the person that I was arguing with said they were primarily a PvE player) and the PvE content is basically split into two section, dungeons and world content, world content is already easy with exotic gear, and dungeons can be completed with exotic gear just fine, adding more powerful gear will only make it easier which has no real benefit except for skins.

If you’d read what I’d typed from the beginning then you’d have the knowledge that I already said that WvW is the only place this really affects, but the problem with that is the people who want to have the best stats in WvW will do the content regardless of what it is or where it is and the people that think they want the best gear (to “compete”) will try to get it before complaining about the difficulty. In PvP content skill makes more of a difference than gear, and only PvP novices think they need the best gear to compete.

Crater.1625:

I don’t play WvW; all of my points are made primarily with PvE in mind.

Edit: For the record though, WvW should absolutely have the same skill/level/equipment availability as sPvP. In a perfect world, so would PvE – but I’m willing to tolerate having to level up, as long as it is to a permanent, fixed plateau, with a reasonable barrier of entry to have the maximum equipment.

If you primarily play PvE and are complaining about ascended gear (which doesn’t affect anything outside of one specific dungeon) then you are making a mountain out of a mole hill, “oh noes they added gear that has better stats, and that gear doesn’t affect anyone but me” is what it sounds like.

If you want the gear, you’ll do the content, if you don’t want the gear then you won’t do the content, if you do the content you’ll eventually get the gear whether you want it or not. Not having the gear doesn’t affect your experience outside of the dungeon (for a PvE player) and having the gear makes already easy (with exotics) content even easier assuming ~13.3% increase over exotic gear, but given that you can already complete all the content in the game with exotics you hardly NEED ascended gear, so what’s the argument really? That ANet added some gear with better stats than what you currently have and now you feel like you need to get that gear because STATS?

Crater.1625:

Because:

1) None of those tiers except Exotic has ever been positioned as 100% of maximum power. If the game had launched with only White, Fine, Masterwork, and Rare, and ArenaNet was just now introducing Exotic equipment, I would have exactly the same reaction.

2) The functionality of Exotic gear is relatively easily obtained. I could stand to see it lowered, but 1.5-3g per piece for a cheap (ie: crafted) Exotic piece of equipment is easy enough to obtain that I can grit my teeth and push through the grind.

In comparison, Ascended equipment 1) Is being introduced after Exotics are already established as the top tier of equipment, meaning that the introduction of Ascended equipment is a functional downgrade to every piece of existing equipment in the game. If Exotics are now 100% of max power, they’ll be 90% once Ascended is in the game; if Rares are now 90% of max power, they’ll be only 80% once Ascended is introduced, and so on. And 2) The amount of grind to get one piece of Ascended equipment, from all the information we’ve been given so far, is, at the absolute minimum, on par with the amount of grind needed to get an entire, full set of dungeon equipment. That’s more of a grind than I would ever put up with for a non-cosmetic upgrade in a game.

So based on what you are saying, you care about what stats are on your gear, and given that the only place that has ANY relevance what so ever is in WvW I can conclude that you are primarily a WvW player.

Welp, I didn’t see you on the forums complaining about people having exotic gear while you only had rare gear, and based on what you said it’s because exotics were the top tier of gear already present in the game, the problem with not complaining about the rare/exotic difference is that as soon as ascended gear enters the game it will be the EXACT same scenario as rare/exotic and again, the only place that that had a difference was WvW, but due to the nature of WvW never being able to be balanced (even remotely) it’s a non-issue.

So as far as I can tell, you are complaining about ANet adding gear to the game that has better stats than exotics but the only way (at present) to get it is through doing some content… well how about that, you have to play the game to get stuff for the game? Just like the monthly achievement it’s completely optional, and just like the monthly achievement if you want the reward you’ll do the content regardless of what it is.

Lastly, the only element of the game this affects is WvW and if you want to have the best gear in WvW (because you have the mentality that stats mean everything right?) then you will go get the best gear regardless of what it takes, if WvW isn’t what you primarily do then… there’s actually nothing to complain about because it doesn’t affect your experience in the game in ANY way, shape or form.

Last I checked nobody was complaining about the gear progression from fine – > masterwork -> rare -> exotic, so why are you all complaining about ascended gear? Is it because it’s gained through a dungeon… that everyone can enter (and aside from that we know nothing else) because as near as I can tell having ascended gear is only useful in the new dungeon and possibly WvW, and in WvW nobody is complaining about people running around in exotic gear while they have fine gear so it’s not going to be much of a problem in 2 months when it’ll be the norm.

It’s like people are overreacting to assumptions with little to no evidence to back up their overreactions… and if I remember correctly that’s one of the favorite hobbies of people on the WoW forums, you know… the people who play the game some of you are comparing GW2 to.

By proxy if you are complaining about something based on pure speculation then you are already half way to the WoW mindset, so you may as well do the deed and go all the way.

Well… the profession changes were pretty poor given the time from the last patch with changes, and the fact that most of the changes were about improving underwater combat in time for the new content is also pretty poor.

[edit] Not that anyone will read this but; a lie is defined as a deliberate attempt to mislead, given that there is no information that ANet was deliberately attempting to mislead its customers you can’t say (with any authority) that they are lying to you without bending the truth is several ways.

Their development philosophy seems to have changed over time and no one can fault them for that, least of all the entitled players whinging about ANet lying to them.

Against a glass cannon build, CnD will now hit for ~2k less (depending on specific build and utilities), so you can still get ~10k BS and 6.5k steals, now with 4.5k CnD, so the overall damage goes from ~18k (average theoretical number) down to ~16k, overall it’s a pretty poor nerf to sPvP and no change to WvW (where most of the complaints were coming from).

This is one of the most baffling changes I’ve seen in any MMO I’ve played, it didn’t solve the problem in any way it only lessened the problems effects by ~10% (due to no change in WvW).

So much for “we are lowering thief spike damage and compensating them in other ways.”

Something tells me that this patch will be a big disappointment for a lot of people.

BabelFish.7234:

Step one, stab opponent, step 2 open blade inside opponent (ouch!) step 3 twist and pull blade out of opponent. I actually got the idea from The Jungle Book.
Roll overlaps with charge.

Yeah my bad, meant 1.a not #2

I did ask for help, now provide some or shush you critic! :p

Constructive criticism is what turns a good idea into a great idea, however I’m not in the business of providing ideas, only fine tuning other peoples ideas. But I get the feeling that you don’t really want constructive criticism of your present idea so i shall refrain from providing anything further.

BabelFish.7234:

It’s a fantasy game dude, the practical application is there but its not suppose to be realistic.

But if that’s the case then why not go all out and say you’d like to see a sword blade attached to a chain attached to a pistol attached to a spear? After all it’s a fantasy game dude, it’s not like the realistic practical application of weapons gets considered… right?

Nothing wrong with the katar though, just the parry idea isn’t great (a dodge/roll would be more fitting with the style of use) and the whole scissor blade effect just doesn’t work unless you use the cop-out argument of “it’s magic!” A rethink of the 1.a skill would help the general idea along, and you would also need to come up with 6 #3 skills and two skills for #4 and #5. Although the theme of the weapon is more fitting for a Cantha expansion (Asian theme) than being in Kryta (European theme).

Not saying the idea is bad, just saying you need to do more work on it before it’s even close to good.

Ah, a katar, fair enough but it begs the question… why do your have a skill #3 when that is dependent on the MH and OH, shouldn’t you have at least six skill #3s (assuming you want the katar to be OH capable).

Also, the katar you describe isn’t functional atleast according to this “After India was colonised by the British, numerous katar were made for the European collectors’ market which placed little value on functionality. Among these were the scissors katar with two or three blades that folded together, appearing to be one, until the handle bars were pressed together, when they opened out.” from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katara_%28dagger%29 and “Typical targets include the head and upper body, similar to boxing. The sides of the handle could be used for blocking but it otherwise has little defensive capability” from the same article, which begs the question, how does one parry if the weapon’s real life counterpart has little defensive capability?

Something tells me you saw the weapon and thought it looked good but didn’t put any thought into practical applications.

Bring another thief or warrior, or ranger, or mesmer, or guardian, or… you get the picture, this game isn’t about a one on one fight in the boonies, you DO actually occasionally surprisingly need some teamwork every now and again.

“I got BSed by a thief but the rest of my team killed him and he couldn’t finish me off so… I win I guess”

Ok, so you have +50% downed damage, and the target was a glass cannon elementalist, you definitely scored a critical Lightning Strike, I base the glass cannon ele off of your 2k crits with ToK (and the fact that mine crit for 2k against glass cannons), but the highest LS crit I’ve managed to get is 4.9k with the +50% damage… which still stumps me as to how you got a 9.8k crit. TO THE DATA GATHERING ROOM!
[Edited after testing: 2]

WIZBASKY.6894:

anyone know exactly what they have in mind to nerf these power houses of dps, 50% reduction in damage maybe? would be a small step in the right direction i think.

I think if you leave thief dps alone and just remove stealth, so we can see them coming that would be enough to balance them.

DPS is a short hand form of Damage Per Second and thieves aren’t a DPS powerhouse, they are a spike damage powerhouse… big difference.

Don’t forget that they are increasing our sustained damage when they blunt our spike damage, so if they nerfed BS by 50% damage, that damage would be added in some other form to our sustained abilities (most likely auto-attack damage) or some form of debuff to opponent.

The end result is that over a 5 second period we will still produce the same amount of damage but our damage will be spread over 5 seconds rather than front loaded into the first second and then having us do nothing for the next 4 seconds.

I’d like to believe that it’s because offense is what most people enjoy and rewarding defense equally makes the offense people have less enjoyment, which would be bad given that most casual sPvPers are likely ro run offense builds and be offensive etc.

But in reality it’s probably a case of ANet wanting to avoid botting in sPvP while they work on an anti-botting system for sPvP without making it really crappy for everyone while they do their work.

The image is good for comedic value, but the message isn’t, mostly because anecdotal “evidence” doesn’t prove nor show anything beyond peoples ability to be incited to have a crowd reaction to stuff that they don’t like/perceive to be a problem regardless of whether it’s an actual problem.