There is a lot wrong in the OP suggestions:
- Water with traits allows for health regeneration. Our equivalent is tied into stealth.
- You cannot steal non-boons with the sword, e.g. Armor of Earth (lolrly).
- Agility is much harder to use effectively due to the inherited constant endurance.
- Stealth does not give stability or invulnerability, you can’t just stomp with it.
- Shadow Return eats into initiative. Better condition remove is tied into stealth.
- Longer cooldowns? Ele have 20 skills on the weapon alone. Oh please…
Some more:
- Cleric thief is an amazing bunker and more sturdy than Ele, but requires stealth for health.
- PVT thief is a decent bunker but requires stealth for health.
- We have stealth regeneration boon, stealth regeneration ticks and initiative to health.
Everything is tied into stealth. In sPVP, we lose capture points because of it ;-)
To address some ‘standard thieves’:
- WE DONT NEED INVESTMENT IN CRIT/CRIT DAMAGE TO DO DECENT DAMAGE.
If you’re good at playing the thief, you’ll still be very powerful. Just.. don’t be glass. Realize that you have to have a lot of knowledge about the class and other classes to dodge, but the potential is amazing.
We don’t excel because of stealth, but we can beat bunker builds in sPVP. The problem is that we need to use stealth and that gives the defending point to the enemy because stealth is not allowed (pure BS, IMHO, it should be stealth OUT OF COMBAT doesn’t make the point capture). So, we’re useless in sPVP as it stands, other than being annoying.
Can anyone help me come up with one for WvW/PvE? I know It’s sub-par. But with what we DO have, what kind of build are we looking at?
Blind and minimal damage. You won’t need the stealth traits as you don’t have a reliable stealth.. and every possibility to regain health is tied into that. I honestly can’t come up with anything other than pure glass cannon(s) with haste and mug damage, and praying for the target to die prior to you dieing. Berserker gear, focus on damage for Unload and critical rate for unload (there are traits) with the 10% additional gun damage.
No escapes, no dodges, poor stealth, not very good overall.
Depends on the implementation, can we see the traps or not? How accessible will these be? It will also affect Mesmers, using Veil to hide a zerg moving in, or one running for a portal. Also, eating supply seems terrible to use at gates. “Let’s build rams” — poof, gone.
That guide is covering all aspects of almost every piece of gear, trait, utility, sigil and rune that works for the Guardian. It is all about understanding the aspects of the Guardian gameplay and tailor your configuration to your preference.
Personally I like pow/vit/tough but you need to consider your role. Are you going for dungeons? Vitality is pretty much wasted and you can get a better stat. Or are you a front-line commander in WvW making the push? You pretty much want full toughness and optionally vitality.
There is nothing that is perfect for every situation and every gameplay style. Choose.
BwahahahahHAHAHAHAHAHA! Mesmer! Hahahahah… heh… heh… good one. After the recent patch, mesmers have fallen to the bottom of the barrel. Nerfed six ways to sunday.
It improves as you level up, yes, but the most solid advice I can give you is that you need to use blind. Blinding negates all the damage and you have a near-infinite supply of it using an off-hand pistol (Black Powder). It is an area-of-effect so you can pull a bunch of monsters into it and hit them all at the same time with it. Your main hand is your choice, but the auto-attack of sword hits like a truck on multiple targets and works well. Branch into defense traits as soon as possible, you want to get higher initiative gain asap to keep up blinding even more.
Dredge are your worst fear (cannot be blinded), bring a buddy.
Guardian is still one of the ‘God’ classes, closely following the true god class, the Mesmer. However, the Guardian is ridiculously easy to play with an incredible power in both PvE and PvP, and has an arsenal of amazing utilities for WvW. Compare that with the somewhat stronger Mesmer, which is worse in PvE, and more difficult to play effectively, you have the winning class that is both easy and powerful. The other two ‘God’ classes, Elementalist and Thief, have been constantly on the receiving end of the nerf-bat, and whereas an Elementalist vs Guardian ends in a stalemate, the Thief has to sacrifice a lot to deal with the durability and boons the Guardian has. That again requires more skill and tada, we end up at the Guardian being easy, fun, and powerful in any situation. I imagine that once there are more counter-abilities to the Guardian, people will gradually start to move back to their favored class, after being forced to roll something else for the sake of having a chance in a fight. :-)
Don’t use a glass cannon, and the thief is extremely viable. If you want to play it as before the patches; pressing the C&N button, followed by a steal and backstab to win, then the thief will be extremely lackluster. The most powerful traits are tied into defense and vitality, giving us almost infinite initiative and a massive amount of health regeneration. The new changes to the sword allow us to rip boons off the strongest 1v1 characters, the Guardian, Mesmer and Elementalist. You just need to adapt, I actually feel much stronger with the latest patch due to the boon removal we can perform now.
There is nothing going on at the background (Just Windows 8, Skype and Guild Wars2). The game consumes about 21~23% CPU, out of the 4 available cores (3.21GHZ/core). Temperatures are at 50~60 degrees Celsius and remain in that area. Memory consumption is at 50% (~2GB out of 4GB). There are more than enough system resources to consume, but GW2 doesn’t even begin touching them. It just staggers along when I rotate. Side note; Bioshock Infinite at High runs smoothly. This is not my rig being bad, it’s something in the GW2 code since the update.
It is the reflections. Try that and see how it goes
In the recorded video reflections are disabled. Reducing all visual options gives no change in the performance decrease that is observed when turning the camera. Note that I used to be able to use ‘Best Appearance’ configuration, minus AA and Reflection, and hadn’t got any issue whatsoever. There’s just something terribly wrong with camera rotation.
Deactivate reflections, reduce shadow quality, this will help u big time, other than that, u probably need to buy a faster CPU or wait untill Arenanet fix the client resource management.
Have you watched the recording? I can fight monsters and run around the world just fine. It’s rotating the camera that is an issue. When I go about running over the map, fighting monsters and exploring without rotating the camera I keep at a stable 30FPS. When I rotate, I drop to ~8FPS.
The performance decrease feels like each mouse event causing a frame render, rather than letting the usual rendering process continue while altering the camera angles based on the mouse movement input.
I have an issue with the recent update. Rotating the camera severely impacts the FPS. When doing anything, such as moving through the world, or engaging in combat, the FPS remains stable. Here is a video (Recorded at 20FPS due to Fraps); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x-VNq5UzQA this demonstrates turning camera after a single monster kill. Is this a (confirmed) bug?
I’m in the same situation. Haven’t played since January and didn’t have issues back then. I just installed GW2 again to check out the GW2 changes and my average FPS is 15 when moving the camera. It became utterly and completely unplayable.
Win 8 64-Bit, AMD Phenom II X4 955, ATI Radeon 5700
It was very processor intensive and GPU intensive depending on your settings. Essentially, instead of people appearing and disappearing, you froze for a second or two (sometimes much longer) depending on how quickly your computer was able to process all the information that was just thrown at it.
Correction; AION has a deferred loading system in place. The stuttering you’d experience was due to the character information packet which would cause each model piece to be selected and added to the character instance. The actual loading and combining of the model was done on a deferred basis, but that game could load a large volume of information from the file disk at once. AION also created caches for models completely decompressed and thus devoid over file seeking and decompression (as opposed to GW2). The amount of bandwidth consumed was very intense due to character states being re-send at regular intervals, which was much worse due to Chanter mantras spamming the line. In Gelkmaros it often happened that you’d encounter one another with 200 on 200 (without exaggeration, as damage tracking tools clearly highlighted) without as much as stuttering.
Generalizing encounters from my point of view (since January patch):
01. Enemies start appearing, prepare for combat!
02. Approaching.. I’m nearly ready to attack these unaware dudes!
03. They DISAPPEARED! Was there a thief… NO!
04. kitten my health is going down FAST, there were only two dudes?!
05. Ah there they are! These two dudes finally re-appeared!
06. Oh crap, they aren’t attacking me, my health is still going down hard?!
07. More people spawning in?! There are 6?!
08. “Would you like to respawn at a waypoint?”
09. Complain a lot on guild channel.
10. I’ll be back tomorrow, maybe, and see if a ninja-patch is in place.
Repeat every other day or so.
Well let them whine, I gona laugh if my warrior gets buffed. I can troll even harder in WvW than.
Apparently you and your crew are so formidable that you can pull off the most awesome attacks ever. Now consider changing all your warriors to Guardians, Thieves or Mesmer. You just became the ultimate god team (judging by your worlds and the actual improvement of switching classes).
Would i be welcomed in high levels fractals and dungeon runs? If i ran mainly rifle and longbow.
No, you wouldn’t. A warrior with just range is terrible for damage. It’s nice if you do some support (banner/shouts), but damage is the real reason you’re in the party in the first place. You can easily be swapped out for someone else, like a Guardian, Mesmer or a melee (support) warrior.
When roaming, enemies appear to be loaded faster than before. With some random model I don’t seem to place (placeholder, perhaps?). Once I assume the game is done loading the actual model, the player disappears entirely for a good 4-5 seconds before reappearing somewhere else entirely with a loaded model. You’ll miss fights completely, which is just insane. Can’t you just give us the option to STOP loading models altogether and just use placeholders? We don’t care about how our enemies look, but we care about their positions and actions.
@OP: If you die in a 1on1, you did something wrong. You don’t have to, you can just walk/teleport away. This is why people hate thieves, even with the annoying stealth and insane damage, we can engage and disengage whenever we want. Waiting for the appropriate time to strike (again) will leave us victorious no matter the opponent. Use some survivability if you can’t anticipate your enemy very well yet. Once you do, you can go glass cannon and not have a care in the world..
This is why I have a Thief for PvP, instead of a Warrior. No matter how great you are, you’ll just lose against cookie-cutter builds (Mesmer, Necro, Guardian, Thief, Ele, even a half-decent Ranger/Engineer) with a Warrior.
WvW Solo/Roaming
I haven’t seen a really powerful build posted for this, but the principles are similar to the dungeon build, with one big exception: Healing over time is not enough against burst, but great against bunkers. You’ll likely run Shouts (with Solder runes) for condition removal and drop Adrenal Health for Mobility skills breaking immobilization (Whirldwind Attack, Rush). Being snared is your doom, and blinding is your enemy. Once you get a little more experience with this oh-so-typical Greatsword build, you might want to invest some time in getting to know Axe/Mace (Consistent DPS + CC) and the Hammer (CC) to vary your attack pattern and match your preferred playing style further.
It can potentially spread the benefits to other people, but realistically speaking, that doesn’t happen much. It seems to be running through the player list and checking if checking if that player is in range, so once you’ve got it applied, it doesn’t randomly jump to another person because of the list.
I wouldn’t give up your Guardian for a Warrior because all support fun has been destroyed, no matter what class, due to that AOE limitation (both offensive and defence, actually).
I hope to see the patch introduce reduced damage for the amount of people hit, and reduced amount of healing for the amount of people hit, as to avoid the STUPID tactic to have 20+ players stand on top of one another just to avoid AOE damage. It’s a ridiculous state of affairs.
When I bring a thief with me in a dungeon (I play Warrior to dungeons), I have just a few requirements that the thief should fulfil. First and foremost, the thief has to use blinding skills. Blind is one of the best damage migrations in the game and the thief undoubtedly has the best blind abilities in the game. Second, use stealth where appropriate. You can use it to lose aggression, save friendlies, resurrect and move past annoying points. Last, but not least, ensure you are sturdy enough to avoid getting downed in a single hit. Doing less damage then your absolute maximum, just don’t become an annoyance (because dead people don’t do damage and waste other peoples time). If anything is annoying, it is having to resurrect your average Thief/Ranger several times per boss. Hope this helps~
Why do you think the Guardian is the most OP class there is by the way?
The Guardian has, in my opinion, everything. Survivability is top notch, with an amazing amount of damage. A different class that attempts to rival the survivability can eventually come close, but sacrifices everything — a Guardian does not. Proper usage of utilities allows for amazing combat tactics and even better boons (which a Thief loves to steal — but does so in a wrong order!). Virtues can be utilized in fantastic ways, and the low HP is actually a godsend (because you have so much migration and possibly even -43% damage). Do you know how demotivating it is to wear a Guardian down only to have him pop his standard heal and get up to 100% again? Retaliation is nuts against enemies that hit often. Guardians just lack in range (which they make up with bindings, pulls, teleports and some ranged skills) and their elite skill -- but if you’re human, you can use the OP Hounds of Balthazar.
Truly a demonic class as your opponent. If don’t know how many Guardians actually play the different classes, but when you do, you quickly realize there are just a few viable PvP classes (Thief, Elementalist, Guardian, Mesmer) and the (bunker) Guardian is likely to be at the top of the food chain, followed by shattering tank Mesmer and the uncatchable condition thief.
I run thief in WvW (yes, you can start to hate me) and a Guardian is usually something I tend to avoid attacking. I can’t believe these screen shots were taken against something that should be considered a proper Bunker-build, because while we can do a good amount of damage, it won’t be at 21K. I often run with another thief and a good bunker is not even killable with the burst of two thieves, let alone one. Since then I made a Guardian and it’s a breeze dealing with thieves on a standard PVT blind bunker build. I don’t know how you got these numbers, but that’s just surreal.. Guardian is the most OP class there is (And I play all, except Necro).
I’ve leveled ranger, mesmer, guardian, and thief to 80 and thief was by far the fastest.
Guardian decimates everything without thinking, Ranger has insane condition damage with traps and mesmer zerker destroys even champions with little effort. I’m surprised you thought thief was the fastest, I much preferred the other 3 due to their insane power. Auto attack shortbow and nuking is still pretty slow compared to them, but a lot better, for sure.
Your build is way too focused on damage. Damage is great, but you don’t have to have the maximum achievable damage if that means you’re going to die. Balance your traits around survivability. You mentioned using a banner to support, use Discipline, but trait it to give permanent regeneration. You also might want to use Adrenal Health (+120hp/sec), which adds some toughness as a bonus. Last but not least, use life steal food to take advantage of your high critical rate.
CoF is pretty easy using a supportive build. I usually run with another Warrior, whom uses a Banner configuration while I run a shout configuration. He uses Berserker, while I use Knight. Since I have more toughness, I always get aggression so I’m the designated tank. The room with the acolytes is pretty weak, you can even kill everything when your allies have a decent build too. If not, just whirl through and regen. Also, I’m mixed supportive so not the highest damage possible, but still run 6.30m~7m for P1.
Elementalists are great when they have a decent support build (Aura sharing, Fire Shields, Fury, Protection) but the problem is that almost nobody runs that. I personally don’t want Rangers or Thieves in FOTM, while they can be extremely good, 99.99% of the players is terrible. Same for Elementalists, better just filter them out by class altogether.
Elementalist is not viable on high level FOTM. It is a lot of fun to play, however, but if your intend is all dungeons — then stick to either Guardian or Mesmer.
No class can 1v3 unless the opponents are bad. Warrior can win against bad players too, sure, but against an equal skilled enemy of an opposing class you make very little chance. Of course we’re assuming that you and your opponent both know each others class through and through, at which point Warrior cannot do anything to win.
In PvE the thief is pretty boring to level, and pretty weak. I used pistol/dagger to spam blinds and have a semi-easy level experience. The thief really becomes strong at 80 with all traits and gear, before that, he’s useless.
Help me out here if you have good suggestions to improve the build; mash-up time; I dropped 15 points from Arms and putting 10 into Power for Berserker’s Power and added 5 points to Defense for Sundering Mace. This gives me 7% less critical chance with a little more Power, meaning that my survivability has been hampered. I have easier access to Vulnerability (permanently 8%) but normal attacks don’t give Vulnerability, nor do I have a semi-permanent Vigor (Whirlwind Attack) and have lost a lot of Might. Overall I feel much weaker and less durable, what can be improved?
I have repeatedly stated that I’m all up for trying trait configurations to make Axe an effective primary weapon. I still haven’t found anything that comes even close to this particular GS build for dungeon running (have you read and tried it at all?). I always have to sacrifice either Adrenal Health or drop Arms causing Vulnerability/Bleed stacks on critical hit (31% chance per hit) to be gone, which lowers damage by 10% (25 Arms) and reduces survivability (Life Steal). The Axe also has less hits per second, meaning less triggering of all our amazing on-critical effects.
Please do suggest a good trait line that makes Axe/Mace better than this GS build. I’m all ears!
The trait configuration required to make an Axe/Mace an effective weapon combination is not team orientated at all. You will sacrifice team utility and your own survivability to make it have a better damage compared to a GS. That is great for player-versus-player combat where you can burn through utilities and do as much damage as possible to kill your enemy, but (higher level) dungeons have longer fights and much harder hitting enemies that require a team that has synergies with one another. Is this build better than MH Axe? For dungeons, absolutely.
. I can troll even harder in WvW than.