Guild Wars 2

gimmethegepgun.1284:

Dasorine.1964:

Its only flailing wildly if you forgot where the thief was when he stealthed and his condition on stealthing, which if your not keeping track of then your not really pvping very well.

Okay then, so you swing once, hit him. Swing again, you hit him again. Is he in the same spot? Is he moving around to your right, your left, running away, what? It tells you jackall. Or: swing again, miss. Where did he go? Which direction? Did he just dodge your attack and is in fact still near you? You guess, hope you were right. Sure, experience helps make you right more often, but it’s still guessing.
Being forced to guess, not because of player action, but because of the game not giving you the information you need to not guess, is a terrible design choice.

They just stealthed, how did they do it? CnD off me?
Then they are still in melee range

where they high health or on their last legs?
if they were high health they are likely going for the backstab, that limits where they are going to be to a limited area, an area I control and can do something about

If they where on their last legs they are most likely trying to flee, they could be shadowstepping unless I noticed they used it in combat, if they have then they are most likely going to try and take the safest fastest option away from danger, that comes down to where your fighting, in an open field they will make a bee line away from me towards the nearest cover or towards friendly land, if im in a canyon or other pass then its directly away from me in one of 2 direction, if theres other people around its going to be away from them etc etc.

Its less guessing more environmental and combat awareness thats made a lot easier the moment you have access to CC and when fighting them when they are visible setting up things for the inevitable stealth. This is why new players struggle but experience players dont, and why thieves aren’t really present in high end sPvP and why I can roll a fresh character, jump into WvW at level 4 and kill thieves.

Its only flailing wildly if you forgot where the thief was when he stealthed and his condition on stealthing, which if your not keeping track of then your not really pvping very well.

Zenith.7301:

The point is, he can kitten up and get out. Another class kittens up, they die. You use your kits poorly on engineer or miss a prybar? Goodbye.

Only slightly better than others, stealth and the one or two shadowsteps are not a guaranteed escape against experienced players and of course because of the way the class is balanced its a lot easier to go down after a mistake than anyone else.

You keep talking as if stealth is a guaranteed escape mechanism which it is not.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Alright, I think I know where the OP is going with this. I main a warrior and I’m rendered useless in my downed state since all of my attacks are projectiles which need a target to be effective. Safe stomping for thieves is just another part of the game. It sucks when it happens but it’s not going away any time soon since it’s a fairly unique finishing mechanic for the thief. Blind, on the other hand, needs a nerf.

Actually projectile skills tend to all still work regardless of a target or not, its certainly harder to hit without using targetting but its still possible, generally the few ranged skills that have nearly no way to work on someone stealthed are those without projectiles that do their effect directly on the target.

I’ve not yet experienced a projectile based attack that cannot hit a stealthed target (their could be one I guess but non of the ones I’ve used or had used against me have been so)

There is actually a third issue but it isn’t thief specific and that is people drawing false conclusions based on certain happenings.

For example its possible in the best circumstances possible with team support (buffs and debuffs only) for a thief to hit 20K+ with backstab, now the circumstances that allow this are extreme and generally never going to happen in a real situation, but if it happens just once the player that experiences it starts using that as the baseline for ALL thieves, acting as if that is what all average thieves can do.

In the same way you have people that claim thieves have no risk and can escape regardless when in fact the few times thats happened the thief has been traited specifically to allow this and set up their utilities for that exact reason, any thief without that specific trait build and utilities would find themselves been stuck by a simple immobilize, but to that player that is what all thieves can do.

Then you have people that start combining the 2 and end up working off the assumption that thieves have 120 trait builds and 2 slots per armour piece.

This as said is not exclusive to the thief or even to this game, people will always start combining what is theoretically possible with specific builds together, heck I dare say their is someone out their that thinks warriors are OP because they can do 100blade full zerker damage while also building bunker.

And of course you have to add in a liberal amount of disregard for the penalties, sacrifices and limitations of such builds.

I still think this guide is far to biased and contains some questionable suggestions.

It contains some good bits but a lot is personal opinion and preference and some of it even confusing or detrimental.

A combat 101 guide should really focus on the mechanics and explain how things work rather than give opinions and suggestions as to what you personally feel is the case.

randomfightfan.4091:

Zenith.7301:

I doubt lobbying for warrior damage is the right way to go.

Warrior damage needs major nerfing.

100blades is 43k damage under best case scenario, but it’s actually main hand axe on warrior that outdamages warrior greatsword sustained with crazy autoattack damage. Mainhand axe for warrior auto can crit for as high as 5-6k, is faster than greatsword auto, and allows for offhand customization of skills to either bring cc or vulnerability.

Don’t ask for buffs because warrior damage is high. Warrior needs to be nerfed and it’s not good health for the game, especially PvE, when anyone can do warriors’ broken damage.

I think a buff weapons need badly is sword flanking strike. It’s REALLY bad.

I wasn’t asking for buffs, just want the smooth gameplay of my class back I didn’t ask for warrior damage, it was someone else earlier who said we have warrior dps. We CAN have the 2nd highest dps but we do not have warrior dps. Other people in this thread say it a lot better than me so I’d suggest reading a few posts from this if you want to get were I’m coming from.

tbh with out exceedingly low skill coefficients and the limitations of the initiative system I dare say 2nd highest dps is a bit of an exageration in general.

Zenith.7301:

Probably because they’re the only class that can escape anyone they want, even zergs if they want to.

An ele can’t RTL away if he’s rooted, but a thief can infiltrator’s arrow out of roots and can hit random animals to stealth away.

Basically, thieves can reset fights. Yes, thieves can lose to several specs, especially confusion or retal ones, but their difference with other classes is that they can still harass and disengage at will from even fights that do not favor them, whereas a necromancer for example is kittened if a competent thief catches him, or a mesmer is screwed the moment a d/d or engineer arrives.

Unless the thief is really determined and set up their utilities before hand for the express reason its not always that easy to escape, the moment your fighting someone that has learnt stealth isn’t a get away free card it becomes a lot more complicated.

The issue with players believing thief is OP comes down to 2 things, the first is stealth, this is a mechanic that is almost entirely based on the players at both sides, its one mechanical advantage is the anti-target lock system, which stops a select few moves, outside of that it is all about who plans the routes and such better, unfortunately in low tier and wvw this favours the thief, in higher tiers it favours the enemy.

Sure even the best person can’t always get the thief but once you know the general plays a thief can do while stealthed its not hard to prevent either their offense or their escape but it comes down to the players themselves rather than buttons pressed in game to counter or use the stealth well.

The second issue is the misconceptions about initiative, many many people see initiative as an infinite resource that allows endless spamming of moves, while it does allow a thief to utilize a weapon skill more than once initially once it is spent it is then equivilent to a cooldown. Granted at base regeneration rates the cooldowns tend to be 4, 5.32, 6.65 and 8 second cooldowns which is a lot faster than everyone elses which tend towards the 8, 10, 15, 30 pattern, however unlike those cooldowns all thief weapon skills share the same cooldown resource.

So while say a staff necromancer can hit hits 5, 4, 3 and 2 skill back to back and then each will have thier own individual cooldown a d/d thief attempting the same 5, 4, 3, 2 skill use would run out of initiative on his second skill (cnd 6, dancing dagger 4, 10 initiative spent, 2 left and 3 being the cheapest skill), and then as the necromancers skill recharges he can then pop them again and they would not effect the cooldowns of the remaining skill, but if a thief then popped his 3 point skill once he got that missing single initiative point all his weapon skills are now essentially on their full cooldown again.

Add to that the staff necromancer can then press ` and switch to a second weapon set that will have a fresh set of cooldowns to use while the staff ones cooldown while a thief swapping weapons still has no initative.

Are you unable to place those 7 trait points into any line? If so they it does sound bugged.

If you CAN place them then you have already unlocked what the manual unlocks.

They do not give trait points nor do they reset your trait allocation beyond the first use.

They are account bound and the stuff you can buy with skill points I beleive are all soulbound.

That said its less crafting more mystic forging that you use them with.

do we really need another troll thread?

SNAFU.2073:

I think it’s great when a person learns to play a class efficiently enough to make a group struggle to take them down, the real problem lies in the fact that there is no counter to stealth, no class has abilities to reveal an area or give true sight. To balance any great pvp based content, everything must have a counter to give advantages and disadvantages to every class in every situation.

but everyone has a way to kill and/or inconvenience the thief for the 3 seconds they are stealthed. Out side of that stealth and thieves in general don’t have enough to really warrant a complete hard counter.

if your looking at a legendary it might be best unless you know you can get em easily other ways (karma at balthazar cathedral or fractals etc)

Add in the fact that a thief can only just get in 2 backstabs in the same period and to do so requires either burning utilities or using up 12 initiative leaving us with just autoattacks while the 100b warrior has 3 more weapon skills on the greatsword alone and 4 more on his second weapon.

little ones you’d need to get the 250 to buy anything outside of the SAB instance itself.

As for what to spend em on, if your not wanting to save up for skins then it essentially comes down to what you want most at the time, crystals do cost skill points but once your 80 you get plenty, obsidian shards are obtainable in many ways now but you still need a fair amount and the usual way to get them does cost quite a bit of karma.

Dutch Rental.8360:

@yramrag i disagree ive seen guardians in wvwvw that can take on 6 people and walk away with minimum loss of HP ofcource it depends on gear/weps/traint and consumables

And enemy competence

guardian can solo as much as any other profession can.

The only things that pose a problem are those that are designed for groups (dungeons, most champions etc) but very few people can actually solo them and often comes down to player skill and experience than the class in those situations.

My idea:

Thief’s head explodes, instantly killing him and robbing the enemy of their kill, the last refuge of safety from people beating on you = death!

In seriousness though, just making it one of the selectable ones and putting anything else there instead would probably be the easiest system.

tbh it often basically comes down to the 2 soldier classes, guardian tends to get more supportive defensive rolls at the cost of a lot lower hp.

However you’ll find tanking to be quite hard to actively do tbh due to the way aggro is worked out and the lack of any actual threat control you either have to coordinate well with the team or hope the calculations fall your way more than not.

I don’t believe there is a cap on critical damage outside of what you can physically get, people have been running high crit damage builds for ages and the maths adds up to what they are achieving.

However the crit damage cap is often in reference to sPvP where you do not have access to stuff like food or a full set of accessories, at which point there is a much lower limit to what you can obtain to use in those fights.

hehe Im always semi joking when I state people think stealth is invulnerability due to their complaints that they can never kill anyone in stealth… this is about the first time I’ve ever seen someone actually think and state that they think its invulnerability… oh Im cracking up here, this thread is hilarious.

Stealth is not invincibility, it also is not protection against projectile attacks very very few attacks absolutely need a target to fire off, meaning the majority you can fire off in the direct and theres often a good chance you will hit, of course using a downed skill on someone who’s invisible, most likely blinded you and has an easy time positioning randomly means your unlikely to hit with that 1 cooldown attack unless you’ve made absolutely sure you know where he is and burnt any blind on your 1. attack.

we’re not really that high on DPS or burst, others have the option to far surpass us in both those aspects, we are at best “above average”

We also don’t have the best mobility, we have GOOD mobility but not the best, I believe that title still belongs to the elementalists.

As for versatility, again people like engineers and such have better overall versatility, we are at best above average again.

Initiative is about the worst weapon system in the game outside of the ability to utilize one skill repeatedly, everyone else gets far more skill uses back to back than a thief.

Stealth doesn’t work that well in competitive play as once players have learnt how it works its incredibly easy to counter almost completely, add to the fact it gives no real mechanical advantage (no damage reduction etc) means its far below that of say protection.

Blinds I have to admit are great, only down side is there for 1 hit only and need constant application, application by moves that do no real damage which has a big effect on our damage even more.

The rest of the stuff is at best flavour and does nothing to actually make up for the shortcomings specially as most of its not unique to a thief.

Yes a thief can build defensively but even if they go all out bunker they are still going to be far FAR behind basically any other class that decides to do the same and in return for this lack of defense we have some mechanics that utterly fail to be anything but negatives in competitive conditions and pigeonhole us into pub stomping hotjoins and WvW farming.

Couple with the fact all out damage is balanced down fairly far below everyone else because of the supposed advantage they all give… well we just aren’t that well set up for competitive, Im sure there will be some thieves that will be able to do ok even with all these advantages but ok isn’t good and at some point they will come to a roadblock that they simply cannot pass either because of the dodgy mechanics and balance of the thief or because of further nerfs for WvW and hotjoin.

of course you’ll generally not have any initiative left come actual fight time :P

Removing the items each release is silly, even if its just from the vendor leaving them to be found in the appropriate world inside the SAB

If the SAB ever becomes permanent (and it would be silly to put in a lot of work and not have it at the very least reliably reoccurring) what would happen?

Im really not sure where the sort of thinking comes from that removing things from older content makes newer content more special.

I know when the first expansion comes lets remove the original content to make the new expansion extra special! because that would make sense at all… sure SAB content isn’t as major or as expansive as that but the thinking seems to be the same.

You make the new stuff the bigger focus sure but you don’t actively remove the older content people would still want.

As others have said, if you just remove the items from future versions they will eventually not be in the game (granted it would take a while).

Would mention though that it would only happen like that if that thief or that elementalist had stacked more condition damage than anyone else, as they don’t get any inherent boost to the condition damage, if they are applying it constantly but have even 1 point less damage on their conditions yours would pop up.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Effect_stacking for the stacking information, the example for the duration stacking is basically exactly what you where asking.

1) Its the person using the skill that gets calculated, so in that case Player A’s healing power.

2) If they both apply 2 seconds of regeneration at the same time then player B will have regeneration for 4 seconds, for the first 2 seconds it will heal based on the highest person healing power then the last 2 seconds will be based off the other persons.

basically if your stomping and they teleport away you fail the stomp, not sure in regards to the stealth, it at least stops you starting a stomp but not sure about ones that are in progress.

The main thing discussed about thieves and stomping is their ability to cast the stomp while invisible in the same way others can do so while they are invincible or under stability etc

though the original idea was to apply the burning when you first cast the venom not when you apply a charge of said venom to the target.

precisely, it allows them to almost guarantee the stomp moves successful completion.

But you’ll run out of utilities before they run out of cleansing and while they can wipe your stacks of bleeds if built right your going to be constantly reapplying them until they run out of cleanses etc.

Randomly putting a single instance of a condition somewhere won’t help condition builds as they’d need to maintain it to see any real use out of it and wont help direct damage builds cos “lulconditions”.

I mean that way isn’t quite as useless as our chill access but it wouldn’t really be worth it for I dare say the majority either.

yeah caltrops allow you to hit 25 stacks, however thats only around 6 seconds every 30 seconds you’ll hit the full 25 at base durations.

And of course only works if the target stays in them.

Golioth, no thief can hit 25 stacks of bleeds and keep it there, your looking at 10-15 at most outside of brief periods of 25 when burning stuff like caltrops.

Other people also get similiar spikes and such but on top of that they tend to have more damaging conditions in total as well.

And of course once you throw in another condition its already going to be nerfing the bleed stacking ability due to initiative costs or utility slots taken.

because its not enough burning in a reasonable fashion.

Unless your loading up on full venoms thats 10s of burn every 45 seconds if you DO load up on venoms thats 40s every 45 which is only appliable in PvE as in PvP anyones going to cleanse it off in the first 5-10 seconds leaving you out of utilities and no more burning for basically a minute.

Compare that to the perma burns people can already get that can be reapplied around the same rate they could be removed… well..

I mean a condition engi can keep poison and burn up permanetly, keep a stack of around 10 bleeds at least AND have around 80% uptime on confusion.

Compared to a condition thief who can keep poison up and depending on the build maintain 12 bleeds with the odd burst of more from caltrops.

And thats just the damaging conditions, others have just as much if not more CC as well.

basically yeah, though poisons not that big a loss :P

In general any time there is more than 1 condition dealer both sides are going to end up most likely loosing damage.

Rhanax.8314:

Who knows whats happening to the poor little princess, while we are all twidling our thumbs waiting for the rest of the adventure to be released. I could see stretching out over the whole month of April. Like a world each week in the month.

https://twitter.com/Lord_Vanquish

Keep track of the poor princess while you wait for the next world to get released.

Selver.1307:

1100 condition damage = ~603 damage a tick on burning / sec.
603×10 = 6,030
6,030×4 = 24,120

Even assuming they aren’t idiots and have a cleanse… I think it’s a bit much.

so 24,120 damage over 40 seconds every 45 seconds, if cleansed its xdamage over however long it took to be cleansed every 45 seconds at the cost of all your utilities and your elite.

Compare that to people that get to have a permanent up time on burning at the cost of equiping their condition damage weapon with a reapply time of anywhere between 2 seconds to 10 seconds depending on who is applying it.

Yeah the thief one is totally to much.

Personally I think it would be a terrible way to do it simply due to the next to no way to maintain the burn for any real length of time outside of PvE.

Arganthium.5638:

Einlanzer.1627:

It really has little to do with your build; it’s exactly like Dasorine said above:

Thieves are exceptionally weak defensively, and that’s about it. They are at or near average everywhere else.

/sigh

That’s completely wrong. It’s like telling me that a bunker guardian has the same defensive capabilities as a GC guardian, that a Minion Master Necro has the same defense as any other necro. It’s just not true, not in the least bit, and if you believe otherwise, then you simply have not played a defense-based thief build yet.

While someone built to bunker will have more defense than someone of the same profession that isn’t built to bunker they will both have access to the same defensive measures in general (GC guardian get access to protection and aegis just like a bunker one) the difference being the amount between them.

That doesn’t change the fact that those defensive measures are much sturdier and more reliable, specially in high end competitive play, than say stealth, blinds and evasions.

there isn’t a direct limit to them, it depends on the gear, though at level 80 your primary stats (vitality/power/precision/toughness) will all be 916 base.

Then full ascended+exotic equipped you can have upto +1095 to one stat and +728 to 2 others

So one stat is upto 2011, add in 30 in the trait line effecting it and your at 2311.

You can then get higher with boons/foods/traits and such which makes them wildly differ from profession to profession.

Of course you got to factor in if your trying to raise a secondary stat (healing power, condition damage etc) you don’t get the 916 base.

with intensity stacking, newer replaces older and you get ticks for however many of your bleeds are still in the stack (all condition stacks are tracked seperately)

With duration stacking it takes it in turns, if you apply 5s burn then someone applies 10s of burn then you apply 5s of burn for the first 5 seconds you’ll see the tick based on your damage, then they’ll get 10 seconds of it ticking from their condition damage (you don’t see this tick) then after you get 5 more seconds of it ticking from your condition damage.

So in general Bleeds get the biggest penalty for having multiple condition dealers in (as they actively get replaced past 25 regardless of how much time they had left or which deals higher damage), duration stackers are less penalized specially over a longer fight but are still less effective in general with multiple applications from different sources.

Tbh I wouldn’t worry too much, its fairly rare that you end up in a team with more than just yourself as a condition applier and those times you do well your still bringing some direct damage and other utility, your damage will be less but not so much that you’ll not be able to complete the dungeon at all and of course it almost guarantee’s permanent up time on those conditions on a target while solo you may not quite reach it.

WyldKat.4712:

Bleeding, poison AND burning? Don’t you think that would be a tad excessive?

Every single thief would go condition damage and stealth while people blew their cleanses. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some fire. And poison. And bleeding. As long as it’s not me. But yeah, there’s probably a balance reason why this didn’t happen before now.

Not really considering most other people that have decently viable condition builds have access to 3 or more damaging conditions, even the devs once stated they wanted to give us burn but apparently this was after they decided rangers should go around setting fires in the middle of the woods with their flame trap.

problem is if you design it based on people complaining rather than based on how the profession is actually designed then you end up putting in something that just doesn’t fit, never used by actual players and quoted by the idiots that have never played thief as “how it should be done” regardless of whether its actually feasible at all.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Effect_stacking

Basically you all contribute to the 25, once 25 stacks are hit any new ones will overwrite the oldest ones.

So if you stack 15 of them and then someone stacks another 15 themselves you’ll have 10 left on the enemy, they will have 15, if you then apply another 5 you’ll STILL have 10 on and they’ll still have 15 but it will now be 5 – 15 – 5

This means multiple condition users basically nerf each others damage out put unfortunately but apparently thats all the game can handle.

but no one would use it at all with those costs, you’d have to trait trickery just to get 3 attacks off, then your out of inititiative and doing sod all damage for the next 7ish seconds unless you also trait for even more initiative regen which of course reduces your overall damage still.

The weapons have to be useful in some shape or form in many situations, your idea’s would only really work in a group situation if the thief was trying to go support.

Wickedluck.9248:

way OP it ll never happen if I go full venom build I would have 15 venom strikes at 10 secs of burn that is over 2 min of burning add that with a short bow aoe and venom share 5 people could take out a 20 man zerg even if it were 2 secs it would be op.

when CAST not APPLIED meaning when you press the venom utility your target gets burnt, meaning at best 4 applications from 3 utility and BV.

Tbh in that form it wouldn’t really be that good, rather just add in a new venom “salamander drake venom”, “Your next 5 attacks apply Burning for 3s”

Though even that would give a terrible uptime on the burn.

I still wouldn’t get any hopes up until it actually makes it into the game… they’ve sort of shown how things can change on a whim from something they are “thinking about/debating” to what actually gets in game.

the idea of a thief using torch isn’t actually that bad a one, bandits and smugglers would get lots of use for night time dealings/cave hidey holes etc, then you got the acrobatic/circus based thieves that could be fire jugglers etc etc.

That said that autoattack is powerful weak even if it is quick (half the time of dagger and about 1/4 the damage)

And the initiative costs are a bit out of it.. all of them seem to cost 5-6 inititiative?

Wheres the 3 cost number 2 skill, the 4 cost number 4 skill and the 6 cost number 6 skill?

Dual skills are generally 4-5 depending on power but those others tend to be that amount for a reason (to get them even close to how other peoples cooldowns are and to allow the thief more than 2 attacks in total in some fashion)

Sounds like confusion got you.

As for what they are designed for, well they are training for the bounties, they are I believe the same as the full bounties just less targets and different reward (inf to help get to the unlock of actual)

So the design is still for guilds in total, the smaller guild will generally have more issue with them, but that said they should all be “doable” but as some have had large multi-teams struggle it comes down to how well you work together and such.

want my monkey nail club and flaming super sword already!

The problem is all our defense comes from evading the damage be it via dodging, stealthing and hoping the enemy doesn’t just keep attacking or trying to blind constantly.

All of which are finite even in the most evade orientated build there will be times when you’ve blown them all or you’ve simply been immobilized.

Compared to anyone elses actual damage reduction which they get on top of evasion and can often keep up fairly permenately and such well… we just aren’t in that good a position defense wise, to make up for that we are supposedly more lethal but even that often equates to slightly lower then some and they are still thinking of nerfing it even further.

In general fighting we are fine, heck in low tier we are fairly potent but when it comes to truly competitive fights we are going to start falling behind against those that have more favourable mechanics and design.