Guild Wars 2

Blinds should never be longer than 2 seconds per application and shouldn’t stack more than 2 times (like immobilize), so you aren’t forced to use AA or condi cleanse to get rid of them. Waiting them out should be a viable option – by the common sense of gameplay balance. Currently, good luck waiting out 5-10 second blind, especially on a melee zerker build.

With this change, and overall reduction of free blinds across the board, they should persist after attacking till running out of duration or being cleansed.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Choking Gas was literally melting people. The extra poison duration allowed for much higher stacks. Spamming CG would stack more poison than people could deal with, which is why it’s been reduced to current levels. It still hits hard, but now it’s more difficult to reach unmanageable levels.

The only thing it was melting were training golems. The skill is literarly balanced about fighting static training golems (not the moving one, too harsh opponent). As somebody above wrote, wisdom of balance devs is above frames of our tight minds.

Eisenwald.8562:

Regarding the 2v1 scenario, if you manage to down one of your enemies yes you can attempt to cleave the two of them. However the other enemy still up can easily disable you with a knockback, fear, stun, ect. (take your pick, everyone has over 9000 cc’s now’a’days) and res his ally before your able to get back on him.
[…]

If you are fighting two opponents that are equally skilled as you are, and they don’t make any mistakes, you aren’t supposed to stomp both of them. If you are fighting two noobs, you can still win if you use stability or an ability like elixir s.

I still upkeep, that downed state is not the reason you can’t win the first scenario, but the stupidly low skill floor / insanely high skill ceiling.

In general – bad moves are barely punished, easy moves are too powerful, and smart plays are not rewarded enough.

What we truly need is rising the skill floor:
- making certain abilities backfire (like make DH traps hit allies),
- removal of powerful passive procs (like free elixir s at 20% hp),
- opening hit frames after evades (including evades from weapon skills),
- making ALL healing skills possible to interrupt,
- nerf sustained regeneration, give us real attrition play.

and lowering the skill ceiling:
- introducing cast bars,
- fix strange skill queues that delay interrupts/weapon evades.

@Absconditus
You forgot, that a) ranked is offline, and b) ranked is not the only PvP option, and everywhere else you can’t normalize models. Personally, I don’t normalize them in ranked anyway, because it makes the game look ugly. However, if there was an option to only normalize asuras, then I would go for it.

And about ,,mind games and tactical usage of your skills’’ – I would absolutely love if it was true, but sadly, it isn’t. GW2 is a spamfest, too many combat actions are random and uncontrollable, especially in melee clutter.

@Quadox
I agree, some downed states are to effective at being ,,helpless’’, especially when the players gear for vitality and toughness. They would really use some standardization.

Downed state is not the reason you can’t win 2v1. You can pick some stability or skills like elixir s, and stomp without problems.

Problem is, skill floor in GW2 is very low, while skill ceiling is above human level. It’s just very hard to be very good at this game. Too hard. It takes cyborg skills to avoid all important attacks without cast bars, and to time all yours between plentiful evades/invulns/blinds/blocks – where 95% of these things are instant. Did I mention asura models?

… While in sPvP queue?

This is really boring. Before some genius introduced it, I would go for jumping puzzles or for sightseeing open world (including WvW) created by you friends from another teams. Now, as a dedicated PvP player, I feel like a medieval peasant whose world is limited by my horizon.

I know, this was introduced, because a player in queue would sink into some PvE activity, resigning from PvP, but honestly – cost of locking players in HoTM is higher than cost of queue delays. By the way, in the times when it was introduced, there was no queue confirmation…

By forcing people to sit there, you are actually losing the player base, which is teared between PvE and PvP. They would gladly play PvP more, but won’t, because they don’t want to sit in the boring, static HoTM for indefinite amount of time.

Running fist flurry+devourer venom is too costly. If you miss it (there is still quite high chance for that), you have no utilities, and utilities are kind of important on a thief. It’s better to pick only fist flurry and panic strike trait, then use it when it procs.

Tao.1234:

Anet is going to keep developing PvP around eSport, not around players.

This is exactly what they are doing, and what they will be doing.

Meanwhile, totally forgetting, that these two things are in fact one, what results in not having eSports and not having players* at the same time.

*number of PvP players is growing, but their quality, not really

Ragnarox.9601:

lol you know when they cast spear of justice the pull will come next, even a child could see that coming…l2 dodge or use stability.

I’m all for instant kill abilities/combos as long as they can backfire into the user’s face if set up improperly. Right now, there is no punishment other than a single skill going on cooldown.

Backstab a multi target skill? I know, we shouldn’t mix reality with game mechanics, but this is plain stupid.

Backstab scales awesomly with basilisk venom and steal. Overall, it’s way more precise and less clunky than vault. A properly prepared backstab is much more devastating than vault – buffing it would only make things worse; especially during times when dagger/pistol combo is FoTM.

@up
We are either playing different games, or you are a mesmer, writing from another world dimension.

zinkz.7045:

Let’s see you can:

- Interrupt the initial 3/4 sec cast. <1>
- Get out of range during the initial cast, the range is only 450, and the typical Rev power build is very susceptible to condie based CC so they will have to burn through their resource using Phase Traversal to stay on builds that can actually kite. <2>
- Stealth <3>
- Move near a wall or something as the skill generally fails to execute near a large obstacle. <4>
- Block <5>
- Invurn <6>
- Dodge or evade to avoid a decent chunk of the damage. <7>
- Use protection to reduce damage. <8>
- Use retal or get confusion on them beforehand to add counter damage through their evade frames. <9>
- Use allies/AI/NPCs to split the damage. <10>

Yes nothing you can do…

<1> Because everybody has access to instant interrupt without weapon swap.
<2> Because he is going to cast it right at 450 distance, so you can simply step out.
<3> This one is obvious – thankfully, every class has stealth (of course, on demand, without cast time, on utility slot).
<4> 3/4 second is a lot of time to move behind some pillar, especially easy to pull off on LoF mid.
<5> Again, every class has instant block access (that doesn’t break on first melee hit). Those dagger/shield thieves should stop crying.
<6> Like above.
<7> Let’s burn 2 evades on a single skill, because we are all daredevils with 6 evade bars, and 12 seconds is enough to regenerate at least 3 bars.
<8> … Should I really keep it up?

Fix ideas:
1) make next attack a guaranteed crit on successful evade,
2) restore 1 initiative on successful evade.
3) buff damage by 100%.

Meanwhile, don’t forget body shot, which exceeds all limits when it comes to uselessness.

Don’t use venoms until they are redesigned. They are:
- boring,
- ineffective.

Unless you aren’t a total noob, you shouldn’t heal yourself when there is no chance for rally, and this ,,boredom’’ won’t last long.

Eisenwald.8562:

In a way I feel like I’m being trolled seeing as how THIS got a response rather than the other dozen much more valid posts that weren’t just about game design but even bugs.

Best solution for devs → never post on professions forums, because some people feel like being trolled or start to complain every time they see a red mark. Instead, stalk forums and make notes, or ask community managers to highlight for them the most interesting topics.

Actually, all such active defenses should be removed, or at least halved. It’s really annoying when you prepare an attack against some noob, and their passives negate all of it, without him even knowing what happened.

In other words, if your awarness is close to zero, you deserve to eat burst. And if it is too hard for you to survive, then either gear for defensive stats or ask here for tactics how to deal with burst as a thief.

In general, stats in this game need to be toned down from such extremes like berserker or minstrel. A fights output should be mainly influenced by timed abilities rather than raw stats.

There needs to be a univeral counter to bunkers just like downed state is a univeral counter to zerkers.

Kageseigi.2150:

Ps. Unfortunately, the Thief shall never reach its fullest Ninja potential until we are given MOUNTS. After all, what good is a Ninja without the capability to joust in style???

You can mount some charr, but only available to asuras.

It would be really awesome if we had a special bank-like tab for auctions with api. Then, you could sell more space and more capacity for gems.

Crimson Clouds.4853:
I think that the OP’s suggestion would require a huge amount of rebalancing. I think it would be a fairer suggestion to ask for more stat combinations that offer Condition Damage as primary.

- It does require some work at rebalancing, but it could be rebalanced within a single patch for all classes at the same time, followed with minor changes in the future. Adding more stat combinations would slightly increase diversity, but at much lesser extent than my proposition, and wouldn’t solve the problem of pure power/condi weapon sets.

Kirschsahne.2081:
And i am saying leave everything like it is.
We don’t need any rebuilding at all. Period

Okay… ?

Godmoney.2048:
I’d argue you misunderstand GW2 in a fundamental way if you think weapons are strictly tied to Condi or power.

Mesmer scepter is very much a condi weapon but I can easily use it in a power set up just to have the block and clone generation.

GS on mesmer is a Power weapon yet works great in a condi PU set up.

Utility is all that matters on skills.

I would literally quit the game the day they messed with Condi or power.

- Everybody who spent at least few months at level 80 and bought rare or exotic gear can confirm existence of pure power/condi weaponsets – anyway, it can be proven just by reading tooltips. If you use condi attacks without condi damage or power attacks without power – it doesn’t work at competitive level. You are free to do so, though.

Is suggest to simply invest into power to increase general damage output and then pick other stats to personalize it, like [crit chance/crit damage] or [condi tick rate/condi duration].

Then, with berserker gear and, let’s say, mesmer’s sceper, you would still deal less damage than with GS (because of no condi tick rate and condi duration), but the difference wouldn’t be so huge, and it would be viable at competitive level.

… instead of condition damage stat. Condition damage would be changed to something similar to ferocity – for example, conditions ticks faster for each point spent.

Why the suggestion?

Many weapon sets are dedicated either for full power of full condi damage. It is pretty much impossible to successfully play ‘power sets’ while having condi gear and vice-versa. For example, playing double sword warrior or pistol/dagger thief with power gear is too punishing. This creates too many restrictions in chosing weapons a player would like to use.

If conditions scaled with power, we could discover new gameplay strategies without even adding new available weapons for each classes. ,,New’’ old sigils would be available both for condi and power sets. This is especially profitable for PvP, which begs for fresh air for literarly ages.

What problems would it create?

Some builds that already stack power and have high condi damage from conditions would be too powerful (for example: guardians, engineers). That should be fixed by reverting dreadful intensity stacking, both for burning and poison, which should be done anyway.

There might be other problems with total damage output, but adjusting actual numbers is not the point of this topic.

Any feedback is welcome, especially for ,,problems’’ part, which I might not cover entirely.

The goal of future PvP seems to be increasing its population at any cost. Dumbing down the gameplay seems to be the perfect way to attract newbies to PvP, but it is also absolutely irritating for veterans… And without veterans there is no e-sport, what makes me wonder what’s the point of this move, because everybody knows the devs want to make GW2 e-sport.

We shouldn’t be forced to sit in HoTM while in que, so we could enjoy 9999 of already done jumping puzzles outside of it.

It was like that in past, but probably some PvP devs decided to pump PvP population (or partially solve ‘4v5’ scenarios) and banned it.

The only way to remove drama in GW2 is to ban everybody in the game.

To partialy remove drama, ban a random portion of players.
Or make some irritating features, like random chat mutes, so they leave on their own.

However, the idea of putting players from same server together, or at least prioritizing them, is an interesting idea. By playing with familiar people, you create social bonds with them (unless you are antisocial), and that’s what about MMOs are. I am not sure, but it might be already implemented.

The entire weapon set could be pretty much fixed by replacing ‘body shot’ with an actual skill that does something - quite surprising nobody mentioned it yet. Ricochet isn’t needed here, unless you want AoE in PvE environment, but even then you should use shortbow instead. P/P is a single target nuke/control set.

I can agree that after changes to condi stacking, either bleeding or burn should be removed. Or restore old duration stacking.

Torment and confusion in the current state seem to be redundant aswell.

@up
You can’t make such player swaps in tournaments. If you want to do this, then play hotjoin.

The balance is at such tragic level that no wonders people leave after facing all those FotM rerollers.

On to of that, it is almost impossible to carry a team in sPvP. You just need that extra buddy to spam attacks everywhere, preferably AoE. Even a guy who installed the game last week is a valuable team member.

Kocoff.7582:

They should add a mechanism in which the Stunbreak triggers 10 seconds after the Quickness triggers or something, or simply: turn the stunbreak into a stability boon.

And maybe also add 25 might stack while we are at it?

The trait is absolutely fine and needs no changes. Devs simply linked Haste to this trait to make it simplier for them. Maybe a little bit lazy, but it works as expected.

@Pino
GW2 is mainly a PvE game, while CS and LoL are pure PvP. It has its core game mechanics more or less right.

What’s wrong with PvP in GW2 is enforcing the competitive atmosphere, limitting player’s freedom while also failing to actually reach that kitten ed e-sport level, wasting manpower at wrong area. The entire e-sport concept is always created by community, not game developers. If the game is good, tournaments will suddenly appear everywhere with ‘private’ cash pool.

Meanwhile, we still don’t have easy dueling system, and simple 2v2, 3v3 arenas with ladder – core elements that keep veteran players active; and without veteran players there is no e-sport.

You mean, you just want to buff this trait by 100%, because, why not?

@BlackBeard
Absolute truth.

When condis no longer serve as attrition attacks, that means something is very wrong with game design.

Personally, I have a feeling like devs have no idea what are they doing right now; introducing random changes in so-called ,,buff-nerf rollercoaster". This might look like working nicely, but for longer run veteran players will notice this and leave.

Block of text, and nobody ever mentioned Death Blossom? These suggestions can’t be taken seriously…

Each source should be able to apply only one stack of burn (stacking duration), but each source should have their own stack.

For example, a single player can put only 1 stack of burn, but if another player joins they can stack burn up to 2 stacks, and so on…

Same thing should be done with poison. In some cases, intensity stacking is even a nerf, because poison is supposed to be used as anti-healing utility rather than damage dealer.

@Ithilwen
Just because mesmers have been somehow underpowered for long time (were they?), it doesn’t mean they are free to become overpowered now. This has nothing in common with balance, and we would like to play a more-or-less balanced game.

Devs took a big step with new trait changes, what created tons of new problems, not only with mesmers. Hopefully they could bring a balance patch soon to stop people from facepalming and quitting PvP.

blarghhrrkblah.3412:

I’m personally not really sure what they should do with Deadly Blossom.

It should deal power damage equal to ~70% of pistol whip plus that stupid bleeding which nobody needs (poison would be better). Also, the evade should be 3/4 second, just like withdraw, leaving a small window to hit the thief upon landing.

FIXED.

It should be like this since headstart; I don’t know why such heavily underpowered skill made it through tests for such a long time.

A very professional charr thief.

I think this game needs less uncounterable things like blur or random aegis/blind procs. Priority for thief should be 1) fixing bad weapon abilities, 2) making condi/celestial stats playable.

If it is really such a big deal to code instant sword strike after dagger strike, then I am totally out of arguments…

Before new expansion I would like to suggest removing ‘two part’ thing from the ability, and bringing it back to single piece. There should be just one important thing included – sword strike must be immediate like dagger strike, without any delays.

Right now, if the thief hits something, the evade is locked. It shouldn’t work this way as the survivability is already under acceptable level.

Additionally, the sword strike (boon stealing) should deal bonus damage when the thief successfully evaded an attack. The evade must be somehow rewarded. Maybe a guaranteed critical hit, allowing to drop ‘absolutely must have’ marauder amulet if played smart?

Also, death blossom begs for change since headstart, but that’s another topic.

PS: I know the devs wanted to convert all dual abilities to ‘two parts’, but that’s a bad idea if the abilities also serve for defensive purposes, while thieves have terrible passive defense.

DHawk.2687:

dp does need some kind of adjustment imo, i think the blindfield and the fact that you can just heartseaker through it stale, boring and a bit too strong compared to all the other thief weaponsets, not even mentioning the shadowshot and daze

No, there is simply a problem with other weapon sets, all of them have the same problem in common – at least one junk weapon ability. Dagger/pistol have all weapon abilities functional and useful. I have no idea why devs keep it this way for such a long time.

d/d – death blossom, dancing dagger,
s/d – dancing dagger,
s/p – black powder (no initiative to use it besides stomps, PW used for everything),
p/p – unload, body shot, no synergy for black powder (like above),
p/d – body shot, dancing dagger,
… and …
d/p – fully funcional, great synergy between weapon abilities.

Shortbow not listed, because it’s always chosen as secondary weapon for shadowsteps.

This is why d/p was pretty much always top weapon set with exception when s/d and d/d were overbuffed with larcenous strike and backstab mug combo.

@choovanski
Engi was always a solid class, with many tools making it possible to deal with changing environment. All classes should be balanced like engineer.

You didn’t get magically good since this patch – majority of other builds got nerfed to oblivion by enormous power creep. Engi will be always more or less okay thanks to the good class design.

choovanski.5462:

if it was this easy we wouldn’t see so many QQ threads about rampage and being insta gibbed by mesmer, and burning etc. the game is a lot more punishing now and you have to play better than you used to. i like it tbh.

One of the biggest bullkitten I have ever seen on this forum, excluding obvious trolls.

PvP turned into arcade game, diversity removed, skill floor and ceiling with ,,meta’’ builds is almost equally low, and you can’t be successful without exploiting clearly OP things.

The only people who can be happy here are FoTM rerollers, people who don’t care about competitive side of PvP, and to lesser extent these whose class got ,,blessed’’ for the next few months…

This patch is hands down the biggest disaster the sPvP ever seen. The only thing rewarded in the PvP right now is using a proper build, and, to lesser degree, teamplay. Any kind of quick reactions and timing is overshadowed by spam. It is still possible to outplay some newbies, but it just doesn’t feel rewarding anymore, unless somebody is a fan of arcade games.

Is there somewhere a ready commerce items database which I can use for my own goals, or do I have to collect the data all by myself? It would be great to have all prices for the last 2 years or so, just like the other commerce apps do.

Who cares about poison damage? Choking gas is an utility tool to block healing, not to deal damage, even if you have condi build. It should apply minimum 9 seconds of poison base with initial hit, without any pulsing.

Anonymouse.4760:

LOL
it must suck to suck

I used to be top 3 in solo queue, but what a ,,pro noob’’ like yourself can know. I guess you also play with your eyes closed and hands tied behind chair; teach me master.

so either the sd thieves you have seen are all blind or have the reflexes of a turtle.

Played against this guy who used this build. Simply trying to keep high evade uptime instead of evading only hard attacks, running away or abusing LoS when out of endurance and initiative for evade spam: http://intothemists.com/guides/3740-sizers_build
Of course, that’s a good playstyle, but it doesn’t really take more reflex to play than any other build out there.

@Anonymouse.4760
You are making yourself look silly if you say evading isn’t mainly about luck or spam in this game. I’ve encountered many good acro thieves since headstart, and I have yet to see one who doesn’t spam flanking strike and evades empowered with vigor.

It is totally understandable as many important animations are too hard to watch, and instant casts can kill you. It takes to be a computer to evade all of these. Difficulty above human level.

To be precise, this patch simply revealed flaws in GW2’s combat structure. The s/d’s idea of evading attacks and counter-attacking is awesome, but it is not possible to evade attacks, when the attacks are:

1) instant and hard hitting (can be cast even while casting some other ability);
2) short-channeled, animations almost invisible, and hard hitting;
3) hard hitting and can be freely spammed without any drawbacks (aside of putting them on short cooldowns), not exposing the spammer for counter-attacks.

On top of that, auto-attacks put weapon’s evades like flanking strike on global cooldown, making it literally impossible to precisely time an evade. We can turn-off auto attack, but then our damage output drops by 80%.

Conclusion:
If you think that you can skillfully evadade attacks and this way gain upper hand in a fight, you are going to hit a wall of reality. In ~80% of cases, evades in GW2 are about luck, what means playing an ,,evade build’’ is not about timing evades, but about keeping ,,evade uptime’’ as high as possible. This is why nerfing feline grace won’t fix the problem, but only make people annoyed.