This is the one we use. Tough players get the Mistfire Wolf. If you have access to that, it applies burn stacks using your condi values. The ticks from it can be crazy good.
This build does have stealth gaps, but that doesn’t seem to matter much.
LOL – wrong Rune. It’s Rune of the Trapper.
Got to laugh, ANet has now significantly buffed Ghost Thief twice now.
Replace Caltrops (utility skill) with Spider Venom – especially if you are roaming with non thief or havoc. This also allows you to take Bountiful Theft which means you can occasionally pressure Resistance from Durability Runes and even make Revenants and Resistance Warriors run.
Replace Mistfire Wolf with the much better alternative, Take Root (for when you get revealed, you get immunity). And it synergizes with AoE Spider Venom too. Or just take Thieves Guild. Reaper of Grenth is super strong too.
Don’t use Shortbow unless traveling. Use dual Dagger/Pistol. That gives you the option to use Sigil of Geomancy without hassle on both weapon sets which is better than Malice (you also don’t need even more condition duration).
You can actually have too much condition duration if you are giving up significant significant condition damage to replace. Dual Needle Traps (with healing skill) covers the crucial Immobilize condition duration issue.
This is the build. Ghost Thief Link
Note, food choice is up to you. Condi duration food is the easy alternative.
I recommend either two traps (plus Heal and trap) or taking Blinding Powder for gaps where using Black Powder/Heartseeker is not ideal.
Don’t forget you are a formidable defensive damage dealer with Dagger 3 (blind)/Dagger Auto (poison/weakness) spam even if you screw up too. Also don’t forget Daze on Pistol 4 (if you are in a 1v1 situation) since if the target gets below half health and is struggling, the heal skill will be used.
Posting here so ANet nerfs this hard. It’s the most trolling no risk build out there right now and is good candidate to make traps utilities work differently on WvW only maps.
Ghost trapper doesn’t usually run trapper runes. All of the stealth comes from D/P.
Loving the people dont see it so they can’t play against it lines here lol
They don’t, though. There were so many situations in the game where he could have easily been taken down. Others like the mesmer lagging just gave him problems he had no control over. He outright mentioned its weaknesses during the stream. Which D/P could have had utilized. The fact he was able to land so many CnD’s throughout the match, and that he went relatively ignored despite pumping out some pretty serious numbers is a pretty big testament to this. You look at the way all the enemies fought and it pretty much came down to just outright not utilizing their kits properly to deal with him.
I’m not being critical of Sind here – he did very well playing in general because of his proficiency at the profession outside of the realm of D/D. His rotation game is good enough where I don’t think a few struggling fights would have lost them the game, anyways. I’m just stating that just because he won a game with it while not being a pro at the kit doesn’t really suggest anything about the set’s current viability in general based on how the enemies played.
As typical, solid gameplay on utility use and rotations, there are some nuances which can be improved which you largely mentioned such as using DB and nailing down the timing more, although this really isn’t much of a problem given use of the Daredevil, as the extra dodges aren’t that necessary. DB’s relatively unnecessary unless you’re running core thief, are in WvW against a very hard-hitting build or hyper-bunker, or are largely outnumbered. More worthwhile just to save the initiative in most cases.
The big criticism of the video I had was of the opponents. A lot of them seemed to have very little knowledge on how to handle D/D power or thieves in general; there were a lot of places where they could have shut down the kit much better and denied a lot of kills and pressure.
Nonetheless, fun to watch and good to see him playing some other kits.
The issue is they’re using points to feed into Glicko/using Glicko at all.
5-4-3 works if the servers belong in their respective tiers by keeping the PPT closer due to a removal of runaway games from nightcapping and the likes.
They need an in-house-developed, data-driven matchmaking algorithm that’s quick to adapt and change pairings, however, as well as a means for punishing players for moving around a lot.
Though honestly I think the bigger issue as to why WvW is shrinking is because the profession design and balance just makes the PvP in the game not fun in general.
admittedly this is pre patch but… If only this guy had had a light field, maybe then he would of been saved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmfp92Y_UtU&feature=youtu.be
Oh my. Those few times where the stars align and Mistrust goes absolutely mad…
pretty much. its easiest to do actually when theres more people around, more rupts=more confusion. its a great build for yolos but…. its very easily killable and stab does a lot of negative things to builds running mistrust.
however. when it works it works well.Which, if you think about it, is great balance for the trait and builds that rely on it. It has a clear counter through stab, but if it isn’t countered it can be absolutely devastating. However, that is tempered by the fact that the build itself is relatively easy to kill if you focus it down.
pretty much. The power of the trait is very strong, but honestly i don’t think it needs to be nerfed because as you said its balanced through other methods, being very easy to counter and through the fact that if you trait down that line you lose almost all sources of sustain. The build works very well in decently skilled hands, especially against idiots, but it faulters very quickly against people who know what there doing.
I don’t really think basing any build to be balanced based on a limited-access boon is a good idea.
Basically the same argument as ghost thief being totally fine because people can reveal it. Although even the ghost thief really doesn’t have amazing kill pressure. It’s more or less just a PITA that gets people only when they literally run no bonus health and zero cleanses at all anywhere in their kits.
It may be “balanced” because sometimes it gets shut down, but the game really shouldn’t be Build Wars.
But that’s just me.
@ DeceiverX
The ability to burst down a bad or surprised target doesn’t make a build good (otherwise your precious signet thief would be still good too, right?). Even if it can work in WvW. But all classes have the tools to avoid and/or survive most of your dmg while being able to counter pressure relatively safe. Especially common roaming classes/builds. Necro lacks that kind of “safe” pressure though, especially when build full glass. Shroud is supposed to provide it, but tanking just doesn’t work that well against the powercreep in form of high dmg, tons of cc and condis.
It’s surely a fun build though and i might try it myself.Spiteful Renewal as adept trait in spite was an accident i guess? Because both other traits would make more sense there. And wouldn’t air and/or hydromancy sigil with full zerk gear better than valk trinkets and accuracy sigils? I guess it is to maximise the ferocity gain from food, while maintaining 50/100% critchance, but the additional crit dmg is so minor, that air/hydro would definitely add more dmg to your burst and the additional 1k hp won’t do much for your survivability either.
The only reason signet D/D thief – particularly core thief (Daredevil can be made pretty playable here) – isn’t a good build is because it fails if you mess anything up, because it’s negated entirely by passive defenses, is hard-countered by the existing meta, and lacks the capacity to fight in any amount of sustained environment or conditions or CC, which every build, especially now, packs a plethora of. Most of why signets isn’t competitive is because the build shuts itself down. Unlike power reaper, it lacks tools to deal with an engage lasting longer than the initial strike. While such a reaper build has issues in very long, sustained fights, most WvW encounters don’t last long, between the fact that the offensive pressure/stats are just so much higher and the fact that people build to kill/flip objectives rather than tank and hold points as they do in sPvP.
Frankly, I’m an advocate against all forms of safe pressure. In many builds it just isn’t necessary, and I will simply get up and leave the game entirely if it becomes so essential that no build can function without it. It’s very overpowered right now and carries poor players, but for a majority of fights, it’s avoidable. And honestly, the actual competitive small-scale scene is dead, so losing a fight or two really doesn’t mean anything. Most of the “roamers” in WvW these days are generally poor players riding the “coolness” of the small-scale/roaming scene from years’ past.
Unless you’re looking to be a top-tier player in general (which is kind of a joke if you’re looking at WvW or even GW2 in general currently), build choice isn’t really too critical as long as it does what it needs to.
I prefer Renewal for outnumbered fighting. Bitter Chill has a low duration for longer fights where it’d even matter, and Talisman is worthless since I run without a focus, and quite frankly, most builds spam boons much faster than can be stripped unless you run a dedicated corruption build, in which case, you’re not going to be very good at the whole roaming thing. It’s not an amazing utility selection, but I think it’s the best fit for the build. The cleanse and baby heal are quite nice in longer fights as well.
This isn’t a build just designed to 100-0 people and do nothing else, either, which is why I run Hydromancy at times. The chill procs when switching into shroud as well, which helps maintain stickiness/presence, bumps enemy cooldowns, and stacks life force and might from CV.
I personally prefer the extra health since it sometimes makes the difference. Shroud also scales on health which helps you stay in shroud longer when fighting as it’ll give you another hit or so before running out of LF, which can be a major deal. I used to run just berserker as mentioned, but there were numerous times when fighting that I’d miss a crit despite the 99%+ crit chance and die because of it. You’ll burst harder with air, but I also elect not to use the on-crit sigils because I think they’re stupid and offer no counterplay for my opponents, even if they make smart decisions.
If I were to drop the health to go Berserker, I’d run sigils of energy, personally. The extra dodges would probably make enough of a difference to justify them, since they also proc on shroud entry/exit.
Note: I originally referenced “DChill” above, meaning Chill of Death. I’ll be subsequently editing it.
It’s the same with all professions. Lesser-used lines are pretty much all ignored. Arguably the thief is in a worse spot; I want to say CS hasn’t had a change since the trait shakeup.
The reaper at least is currently quite strong (WvW), particularly its condi variant. The new DChill is kind of totally and completely bonkers.
I agree, I was expecting a bigger hit to all endurance gain (Endurance thief, minor in DrD, SoA and CV)
However the SoA I’m a bit.. How do I explain it, previously when it was 1 condi removal it required thought behind removing condis making it a little bit more skillbased to use, you had to think about what you condi cleared and how quick you were
…
(trimmed for post/quote length)Condi cleanse with previous SoA being more “skillfull” example:
Druid taunting you with pet you getting a quick weakness procc and you cleanse the weakness instead if you are to slow to blow the signet, similar stuff to this.Problem why they won’t revert the jump #2 which obviously was a very cool thing to use and made S/D being able to chase targets efficiently is that they also removed all kind of “jump” bugs, example being mesmer shield #4 where you can evade the clone and you could delay the clone spawning by jumping in shield #4, this got removed and that’s why I do not think they will revert the #2 jump thing.
Also you say that you want traits becoming baseline from trickery, I heard it many times but I think that traitline is so important as a thief in general that making prepardness baseline will still not help trickery being mandatory, for me personally I could never play without bountiful theft/Sleight of hand on any build I play wether it be D/P S/D S/P or Staff.
And if you would add Prepardness/BT/Sleight as baseline I think obviously that would open up to more diversity (people would play around with DA/CS/DRD or DA/SA/DRD etc etc but I think making those things baseline would also make thief pretty crazy strong hehe
The SoA change was a mediocre change for the Daredevil. I appreciate this change when looking at core thief, however. Aside from Shadowstep which would act as a primary stunbreak or sacrificing an entire line for SA/Acro which don’t remove control conditions while both struggle to cleanse a breadth of the DoT’s, the thief lacked no dedicated cleanse utility on a reasonable cooldown. I see it as a big step in the right direction to make the core kit a lot better.
It’s good to see that they are at least working on other jumpcasts to normalize things. IS/IR did add huge depth of play to the sword and was a pretty brutal change. That said, I don’t think it makes much sense mechanically to re-introduce it just because it was a weird interaction, and although balanced if not pretty critical to S/D’s usability at times, it was a bug. The 900 range bump is nice for IS, though I’m uncertain it’s enough. Most disengages are just as substantial if not larger, and the IR duration can’t change as it’d adversely affect the potential utility of the kit’s reset potential and cause initiative to be dumped for no good reason for fights the thief wants to commit to.
They’d need to do more than make Preparedness baseline for Trickery to change the need for it, I agree, and this is mostly just from BT, SoH, and LA; Pushing Unrelenting Strikes to on-steal in CS would help offset ToTC, but there’s little else to gain elsewhere that provides the very-much-needed utility TR gives, and just making so much baseline would be very excessive; 15-20k backstabs wouldn’t be too uncommon, and with all the utility the Daredevil has it’d be very oppressive.
I will say I think they should make SoH’s steal CDR baseline more than anything else if they were to do anything, or just merge it with baseline Trickery, and maybe take a stack from Bewildering to compensate. It’s not beneficial to CC players on-engage in many circumstances these days, notably outside of organized PvP where you’re not +1’ing consistently, which also contributes a lot to the dominance of D/P in general game-wide. I feel like most of the time I’d prefer to not have the daze due to some passive CC reflect or the likes.
As for the overall quality of the changes, nothing was really stellar, and the “buffs” to ghost thief and cheesy condi builds while not making them any more interesting definitely speaks volumes about ANet’s willingness to make necessary change for the profession. Most of the other weapons are still ineffective, and really none of them received anything at all.
I can’t understand all the QQ’g and crying and whining about HoT. I LOVE the HoT specialization lines. They made our characters awesome. Any kind of character improvement is welcome to me. And all I see here are people crying about take HoT away it’s too OP, it’s too strong.
The issue isn’t that HoT builds are fun to play and great but that HoT trait lines are near mandatory for most classes in order to compete. Prior to HoT and the trait line simplification, there were more build variations and more trait line options. Most aren’t complaining about HoT OP they are complaining that non-HoT is mostly noncompetitive.
Most are complaining the design of the HoT specs just isn’t fun to play as or against, and because they’re so strong it’s all that’s usable to have a good chance at winning.
They’re stronger, but there’s no point in playing a game if it’s no longer fun. That’s the big issue, and even the pro players have largely all come out with the same criticism of sPvP directly regarding the elite specs.
WvW only seems to be more active for those who were on low-tier servers prior to HoT. It wasn’t uncommon to have 100-man queues on the weekends all the way through T3 before its launch. A bulk majority of servers even with the links can’t muster that many players in general for reset. The population is way down, and it’s because of profession design.
They also run condi negation.
No. They are using cleansing, but the times of zergs using melandru runes, anti-condi food and vitality instead of toughness is long gone. Anti-condi defense is not a primary concern of those players.
Otherwise you’d see the opposite situation – everyone running anti-condi setups, and people screaming on forums that power damage is OP because it can down in seconds someone that didn’t spec against it.
Do you understand what the WvW meta is and has been and how combo fields and finishers work?
Because if you think that people aren’t running enough cleanses, particularly for group environments, you’re sadly mistaken.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Light_field
Most of the ZvZ choice abilities were taken to utilize these fields to begin with. Poison/Weakness maintenance shortbow thief was one of the premier ZvZ builds to play before people switched into more productive builds which even precluded the CG change.
It’s condi and it’s Karl. Is there really much else to say?
Bad design runs rampant in the game and we just saw very little about it see substantial change.
Yea, healing rev will definitely be meta in WvW. It’s absolutely bonkers how good it is between the boons and just the raw healing potential/alacrity.
If Ghost Thief survives through a full balance patch, ANet has completely lost touch with the game.
Anet Loves condi, in all forms. So don’t be surprised if it survives. lol.
And since sind says we’re getting nerfed, and since he primarily plays acro from what I see, I wont generalize that comment towards power DA. :p
Think i’ve heard it all. Me playing acro? I haven’t ever touched acro, think you need your eyes checked lad
Was gonna say AFAIK you’ve only ever moved to SA/DrD for defenses.
Meh patch for the thief, though. Needs reworks over minnor tweaks at this point. But I can’t say I’m surprised at all.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
It provides one more cleanse as SoA only refilled 100 endurance. Though meta Daredevil doesn’t run EA. Also, this change applies to the core thief, which is where the real impact is profound. The core thief now has a utility outside of Shadowstep that provides a bulk cleanse, which was a major issue with the core thief, so that it can now properly deal with both stunlocks and condition bombs rather than picking one or the other.
Unfortunately they didn’t fix cheesy builds like ghost thief and didn’t fix anything about OH dagger and the stealth ICD.
About what I expected with this patch for the thief.
Power GS reaper got buffed hard, though, so I’m happy since I’ve been playing it instead of thief since the stealth attack ICD killed off D/D lol.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Great changes for the reaper. The cooldowns were an issue, and they got addressed. GS got more utility rather than just more damage or mobility, which is great. Onslaught made to be a force to be reckoned with. Overall, great job.
Major bummer on seeing the stealth attack cooldown on the thief remain as-is. Given the passives and excessive number of defenses in the game, as well as backstab among other stealth attacks just not being mathematically worthwhile, it’s pretty much killed OH dagger for the thief entirely.
Are there any plans to give the thief’s OH dagger the rework it desperately needs to make it better while giving it a bit more than gimmicks? Currently aside from PvE DPS 11111111111511111111111151111111111 and using the extremely unhealthy and un-fun 3spam condi evade build, there is absolutely nothing beneficial about playing with an OH dagger as opposed to a pistol.
Unless protection starts giving 100% damage resistance and cleanses return all power damage dealt within the last X seconds, condis are at a disadvantage. If condis get nerfed, power should, too.
Note that condi users need precision to trigger on crit traits/sigs for a big chunk of DPS. Ferocity is just a thing to make power be better than condis DPS-wise, when not counting in cleanses and resistance.Most organized groups run 80% or more damage reduction to power-based attacks, while conditions are unaffected and ignore armor.
There, you have it. If condition damage was really more dangerous, all those people would be running anti-condi runes, food and traits and constant cleanses (leaving themselves a bit more open for power damage). They don’t do so. Why?
They also run condi negation. Are you unfamiliar with how light and water finishers work in blobs or the purpose of necromancers? The only reason condi hasn’t historically been played in ZvZ is because conditions were cleansed too easily by blobbing. Conditions have been the optimal way to play small-scale or solo in WvW since the game pretty much released, exacerbated by dire gear.
Recall the resistance boonshare meta? Yea, that was the only thing upholding power builds for WvW, and the builds haven’t changed because they bring pretty much maxed-out condition removal, anyways.
And maxed-out condition removal is still not enough.
The problems with condition builds stem from their durability from stat combinations. Remove Dire/TB and things become pretty much instantly fine.
Unless protection starts giving 100% damage resistance and cleanses return all power damage dealt within the last X seconds, condis are at a disadvantage. If condis get nerfed, power should, too.
Note that condi users need precision to trigger on crit traits/sigs for a big chunk of DPS. Ferocity is just a thing to make power be better than condis DPS-wise, when not counting in cleanses and resistance.
Most organized groups run 80% or more damage reduction to power-based attacks, while conditions are unaffected and ignore armor.
Currently, even in large-scale combat, condition damage off-tanks outright out-damage every power build option in the game unless it’s unorganized.
Looks super broken..
Also how can you do this for more than 30 seconds without killing yourself out of boredom lol
So it takes a nomad thief to make people realize how horrible the professions/HoT are/is designed for PvP/WvW now?
There’s a reason a huge number of WvW and PvP players outright left the game. Interactions like this are all over the elites. This is what it took to make the thief competitive. Everything’s just so busted it’s absolutely stupid.
I don’t think there are any genuine thief/balance advocates who suggest that condi trapper is a justified build. It’s not inherently overpowered because it can’t maintain pressure unless the opponent stays in the area to try and fight it, but it is the result of bad design decisions made about the thief, and it is very rewarding for how little skill it takes to play. However, it doesn’t justify the thief itself being overpowered because well… you can just walk away from the build. It doesn’t actually get kills if its enemies don’t fight back. Definitely a dumb build, definitely something people want to see removed, and it definitely has no place in the game, but it isn’t the result of the thief itself being intrinsically overpowered; it’s one exploit of one mechanic which people have been asking for compensation-based buffs at its expense for years. The problem is without some form of stealth or spammy Daredevil evades the class pretty much outright sucks, so something else needs to happen if nerfing stealth.
Of course, if you nerf stealth on D/P, you end up with the scrapper or mesmer/chrono having similar stealth uptime to the thief with more innate durability which is arguably a pretty big issue for the class, which is why I said above, all stealth uptime needs to drop across the entire game. It should be a quick de-target and a few seconds to re-position, nothing more.
It’s kind of like calling mesmer as a whole overpowered and unkillable because of PU condi (and that’s just a generally better build than the trapper). It’s unfortunately just not a good idea to make that generalization.
You can claim the Daredevil (which isn’t trapper thief, btw) is easy or too forgiving with some validity, and you can claim that there are many facets of the thief in its current state which are downright frustrating to play against. However to say the thief as a whole is easy and unkillable and overpowered is a bit of an overstatement, all things considered.
Condi trapper is a justified build. Most condi trappers do not permastealth. They use p/d for the sneak attack bleed apps and uses of torment off three.
The GHOST thief build is not what I define as a Condi thief trapper build. It only uses one trap So I can not see how it can be called a trapper build and the more dangerous versions of it do not use trapper runes. Added to that it does not even use weapons to apply damage, merely to stack stealth.
The principle mechanic inside that build is stealth stacking via d/p and I have spoken to that in the past. (you can in fact do the build with no traps and no trapper runes via the use of racial skills)
The names and labels people put on things are important because using the wrong defintions leads to unwarranted nerfs that do nothing to solve the inherent issue. Those nerfs then having broken legitimate builds, are rarely reversed at a later date when it found they did not have the desired effect.
Edited. I reused the label someone else was giving to the build without clarifying he meant ghost thief.
Longbow’s a valid concept – bow rogue has been around since D&D in the 70’s and was the weapon of choice in the game Rogue. Rifles are extremely loud and very clunky weapons to actually weird, which really does not fit the while mobile-stealth-mojo the thief goes by.
Just anything involving ranged burst without outright denying stealth when applying it is a strictly poor idea.
I still stand by the notion that if the thief were to get a ranged kit, what I proposed initially for the Deadeye before the stealth attack ICD would be its best-possible implementation on the conceptual level.
@jp
Grappling shot is frankly the only skill on the kit I can agree with :\ Melee auto on longbow would not be very useful, and stealth-based sniping has no counterplay in the game and is just un-fun for the most part.
While it’s implicit, I’d also make sure you mention that Sniper’s Stance only applies to longbow attacks.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
The notion that Condi is new or not intended as a main mechanic is patently false. The GW 1 Warrior learns to create “deep wounds” in there first minutes in the game.
Hexes are nothing if not conditions.
A number of classes and builds trade on conditions and would be out of the game if we returned to the old system of stack caps. It is wise to carry and use condi clear even though, yes, it will reduce your dps a bit.
When it came to GW2, the core game’s weapon skills before launch were designed to not have condition damage be an achievable stat in-game outside from Might.
What happened in GW1 doesn’t matter. This is a new, different game.
That’s just fact; you can go research GW2’s development (2011-2012) and you’ll realize that most of the skills and traits still in the game were not originally designed around the stat existing on equipment.
@Eremite
Against DH, I usually just switch in NCSY, open with GC to pop their aegis, dodge into traps with stability to trigger them, and then cast NCSY one-shot them with Soul Spiral which will proc a max-damage Deathly Chill in most cases from the boons. Unless they react quick with RF likely after burning their blocks, which also forces redundant/wasted cooldowns) their entire defensive kit is negated and the build packs enough damage to outright kill them unless they’re a condi burn guard or a dedicated tank (in which case the blocks are insignificant and you win the sustained fight from the LF gain, better mobility, and high damage ramp from Spite).
For the most part, your cooldowns are low enough to keep flickering Death’s Charge to maintain enough mobility with most professions/builds. Druids are a problem, but even thieves have lower sustained mobility than a druid building staff/GS/CS. You can pretty readily just run from these builds, anyways.
I don’t know, but I find myself very capable of being able to be proactive; the GS and Axe are fantastic weapons to make aggressive plays with, and given this spec, I’ve had few issues with people easily running away. Thief ports? Charge and swap into GS as he’s going to try and BP/HS and you can interrupt the leap with a well-timed Grasp. Maybe it’s just my experience on thief talking, but I find them to be the easiest targets to kill in 1v1’s for the most part.
Honestly, I don’t think the profession needs to have much more mobility. There is some amount of mobility in the game at the moment on some builds which could afford to be toned down, instead, and the problem would largely dissolve. To make the reaper more menacing against mobile opponents currently, all they’d really need to do is just slash the cooldown on Grasping Darkness. It’s easily the best skill on GS and imho one of the best on the necromancer in general, but its cooldown is too high for how dependent the kit is on being in melee with its slower attacks. A fix to Spectral Grasp (and Scorpion Wire) would go a long way here as well.
As a side note, the linked build is my older build. I’m currently experimenting with something slightly different which trades around 10% damage for close to 30% more health. While the traits are the same, sometimes that 10% has meant the difference in getting a kill or not.
I dont get why you would play reapers onslaught over blighters boon on a roaming build.
Im using blighters+dura rune to get locust swift to 21 sec swiftness … so u dont need that kittenty signet.
Onslaught affects the channel speed on all skills in shroud as well, not just the AA. This makes Executioner’s Scythe’s windup faster, as well as Soul Spiral’s channel take less time to deal all the hits. This makes you much harder to predict since so many expect Blighter’s timings, and with Quickness, allows a full combo in < 2s. If you want to play glass and deal a ton of damage, building sustain is a waste of time. As mentioned by others, Death Shroud does not use the Scholar health rules and therefore the bonus damage can be fairly easily-maintained. The build primarily focuses on using Shroud as its main source of damage, with GS as a lockdown and counter-engage tool to keep you healthy. A/D’s a mixed bag of combo, opening damage, and kill security.
Scholar runes provide a large amount of extra damage given the bonuses to ferocity + 10% damage + vuln + mightstacking.
The signet has a lot of utility that often gets ignored; the lifeseteal component ignores Endure pain and other damage negation, for example, while it offers a very substantial heal in outnumbered situations or against say, chronomancers, allowing for a massive heal.
If you run WH, you lose out on the utility of the OH dagger (ranged AoE cleanse/transfer, corruption, AoE weakness. Since the build doesn’t run DM or Plague signet/CC in favor of the life force gain, healing, and lower cooldowns on YSiM/Suffer to push more emphasis on shroud flickers (and the former are more awkward in roaming due to the sluggishness of the skills themselves), while Suffer also directly hard-counters any DA thief since it can be used while stunned during an incoming BV’ed Mug and prioritizes the Weakness from Lotus Poison to which it gets sent back to them (reducing incoming damage and negating much of Daredevil’s dodge presence early on without burning cooldowns), deals some damage, hits stealthed targets, and inflicts chill. Not to mention, in the case of the thief and mesmer, both run boon strips which will negate any bonus mobility, anyways, making you likely just worse-off. The signet’s passive cannot be removed, and is offset by SoS in shroud.
Basically, while you gain swiftness, you screw yourself over in most matchups where the swiftness in terms of bonus mobility would mean something. When it comes to small-scale and highly-mobile foes like thieves, mesmers, and druids, Warhorn is more of a trap than a boon. In the case of the druid, for example, the Daze doesn’t do much due to their stability uptime and you’re going to have similar kiting problems with or without swiftness. The signet will also get more value since it can hit the pet and double-up as an extra heal if necessary, and most of your fight will be made while in Shroud, to which SoS gives you baseline 30% speed. More merit to Suffer also allows for cleansing taunt without burning a stunbreak, and if you’re lucky, also affecting the ranger, closing the gap and forcing a stunbreak on them.
It’s pretty straightforward: Take a necro and make it have competitive landspeed. Signet lets you keep up with any non-burst-mobility character via the chill on GD and GS AA, and in outnumbered situations, is an armor-ignoring leech that hits pretty hard given stacked might + second heal.
If they run, swap back to Axe and use UF for cripple and GC for ranged burst and LF generation for flickering Charge. It’ll either be early in the fight and proc CoD and rip boons and hit for like 4-6k while also chilling to recover distance or may be late enough to proc again if they start to flee when getting torn to pieces, doing another 4-6k, stealing boons, and slowing them down with chill.
If they see you flicker shroud and re-engage, GS4 saves you since it’ll negate their counterattack, since the blind will prevent them from landing hits. Careful with warriors, though you have enough tools for the most part to strip the resistance as soon as it’s stacked up.
If you’re in a group with AoE swiftness, Locust can be swapped out for Wurm if you need the burst teleport.
Axe 2 -> Soul Spiral with a CoD proc in there somewhere = Dead target. Onslaught affects any channels like Soul Spiral made in shroud making it + quickness extremely fast. Seaweed salad and the signet keep up mobility, SoS allows for more Death’s Charge flickering (7s cd 600 range leap) to maintain mobility with RP cutting down on soft CC, GS5 is an excellent pull for targets just starting to try and flee, VP + Onslaught are big resetters in outnumbered fighting or small group play which allow you to keep using charge every time someone dies, quickly catching up to people.
I’ll swap in a GS with Acc/Force or Acc/Strength with the bloodlust on the dagger at times depending on how things are going.
Druids are the most difficult matchup just because they also typically have so much durability and combined burst mobility. It’s honestly a sustain game with them trying to generate life force to stay in shroud to wait them out of their stability if they’re not permaboons and then CC-lock them with GS and CttB + Executioner’s Scythe while going to down. Axe3 and Dagger 5 are corrupts which you can time into CoD to corrupt many boons repeatedly to maybe take out any stacked non-pulsing stability they have left over to lock them down.
You can just make trades with thieves without an issue. As soon as they engage they just get nuked instantly if you’re in Axe with a soul spiral as the whole channel will finish in under a second and they’ll eat like 12k from the whirl + another 4-6k from CoD.
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Toughness tanks work as intended, though; lots of mitigation with little damage or inconsistent damage.
The irony is that toughness tanks already are the unquestionable gods of survival: It’s called Dire and Trailblazer gear which have main-stat condition damage. Even zergs despite having huge cleansing are running these kits now because condition builds just apply too many conditions too quickly for even the massive cleansing to keep up.
A majority of the mitigation at this point in the game comes from % damage reduction effects which hit power builds instead of condition builds.
For example, I can run take a build with almost 4k power and 241 crit damage with another +70% in additional bonus damage on a high-scaling coefficient and hit a condi scrapper or druid for 1k, which if glass would be 6k, which if not running the defensive bonuses would be well over 20k.
They’ve already removed stats from the game before, and have given out compensatory-select-stat item replacements. They actually did this when Dire gear was added to the game because Magic Find was removed. So everyone just rerolled into their preference. I don’t see why this couldn’t happen again. Not to mention dire/tb gear only dominate WvW; they’re deemed too overpowered for sPvP options and because they don’t pump optimal damage, aren’t used in PvE. It’s just bloat that makes WvW less-balanced for little to no justified reason.
Cleanses aren’t distributed well enough across build options for how accessible conditions currently are. If so many professions couldn’t unload 15+ stacks of varying conditions every few seconds, the notion has merit. The problem is when you have so many builds inflicting several different types of conditions very quickly over and over while still demanding things like stunbreaks and other utility from the opponent, all the while being inherently tanky.
And while I think just making power-based DoTs would have been a smarter solution earlier, it’d be a huge task to undo at this point. That much I’ll give you.
I wouldn’t mind conditions as much if they required a build to be a bit less durable to deal damage (I can engage with 6-8k poison ticks + 2k confusion + weakness on a thief or 8-12k burning ticks on a guard), but Dire/TB is really excessive in terms of its raw durability.
Going to have to respectfully disagree. Aside from a marauder warrior, my reaper 100-0’s any squishy-built character in the game with two buttons in a very, very short period of time. Soul Spiral alone normally goes well into the 12-15k range.
Mobility can be fixed in traits and utilities. Play outside the meta and it’s reasonable enough. You’re not gonna catch a runaway Daredevil, but I will say it’s kind of the point. You can definitely 1v1 it and win without too many issues if you build to duel and roam to account for these shortcomings, however.
I think the biggest issues reaper has right now is the fact that GS isn’t quite where it needs to be as a PvP weapon due to its high cooldowns for its powerful-but-mandatory utility, and that the stability uptime is perhaps a little bit too low.
Yes and no. Small-scale prior to HoT heavily featured tanks, supports, etc. mixed in with damage and burst. Not uncommon to have seen between two and three eles in a small scale group with a guard, two thieves, a mesmer, and a necro or warrior to round things out. This was done to ward off defenders while taking structures and to win fights like 10 vs 15-20.
10-man havocs wouldn’t beat blobs consistently because of the simple fact that there was some emphasis on squishy play to get those bursts in. Unless the numbers are/were even, running a few thieves and target snipers like rangers and mesmers is a strict liability in larger-scale.
10 thieves is just Mag’s “skilled roamers” who pretty much just camp stealth to gank 10v1 to keep their KDR high. Sadly since small-scale is absolutely dead in WvW due to the destruction of everything good about it, this is pretty much what’s left. Most of these types of players aren’t very skillful and are very afraid of fighting similar numbers, anyways.
Sorry to say he’s not cheating as far as I could tell, this is just HoT powercreep being dumb and why the Daredevil is probably the least-inspired, worst-designed elite spec made.
This is why so many people quit the PvP formats with HoT. Every elite spec is like this, and the game just isn’t fun to play now.
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I don’t think there are any genuine thief/balance advocates who suggest that Ghost thief is a justified build. It’s not inherently overpowered because it can’t maintain pressure unless the opponent stays in the area to try and fight it, but it is the result of bad design decisions made about the thief, and it is very rewarding for how little skill it takes to play. However, it doesn’t justify the thief itself being overpowered because well… you can just walk away from the build. It doesn’t actually get kills if its enemies don’t fight back. Definitely a dumb build, definitely something people want to see removed, and it definitely has no place in the game, but it isn’t the result of the thief itself being intrinsically overpowered; it’s one exploit of one mechanic which people have been asking for compensation-based buffs at its expense for years. The problem is without some form of stealth or spammy Daredevil evades the class pretty much outright sucks, so something else needs to happen if nerfing stealth.
Of course, if you nerf stealth on D/P, you end up with the scrapper or mesmer/chrono having similar stealth uptime to the thief with more innate durability which is arguably a pretty big issue for the class, which is why I said above, all stealth uptime needs to drop across the entire game. It should be a quick de-target and a few seconds to re-position, nothing more.
It’s kind of like calling mesmer as a whole overpowered and unkillable because of PU condi (and that’s just a generally better build than the trapper). It’s unfortunately just not a good idea to make that generalization.
You can claim the Daredevil (which isn’t trapper thief, btw) is easy or too forgiving with some validity, and you can claim that there are many facets of the thief in its current state which are downright frustrating to play against. However to say the thief as a whole is easy and unkillable and overpowered is a bit of an overstatement, all things considered.
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Conditions should be nothing but debuffs (like boons are buffs), not a source of damage by any means. Once they realize it this game will become 10000x better.
Why?
Ever played any other game, basically? Plenty have damage-over-time effects and they work fine. Only… their devs don’t try to make them glorified DD-skills.Yeah, plenty and i dont recall any of em having so stupid mechanic like gw has. Some have “dot” effect skills but you know difference between them and gw conditions? These dot effect are treated like a normal attacks which ofc deals delayed over time damage but they arent associated with some weird kitten like condition damage, they dont ignore armor, you cant raise/lower their duration and they dont bring extra utility.
For example imagine backstab dealing all of it current damage over next 3sec rather than doing one big spike. It would still get reduced by toughness, -% traits, protections and be based on power damage not some weido condi dmg. Thats how it worked in my all my games i played (and i played games for well over 15 years). You couldnt cleanse it but they wouldnt tick for ridiculous amount of damage either and its very very rare for them to have additional effect. See the desing flaw now?
Conditions has to go in current state along with that ridiculous “condition damage” stat.
I’m not normally one to agree with Burt, but he did nail it here.
I don’t understand why there exist high-scaling DoT conditions. GW2 originally didn’t have a condition damage stat; the DoT on conditions originally was meant to be a minor supplement aimed for helping tanks chew through some toughness. People wanted DoT build options, so ANet went the lazy way and added them in by buffing condition damage potential.
But this wasn’t enough DPS for PvE since the coefficients needed to stay low since they ignored defenses, so they got buffed, and can be used with tank stats. And here we are.
If they just made power-based DoT skills and let those crit and so on, I don’t think there’d be much of an issue. Want to play a DoT damage build? You still can. You need to be similarly squishy or invest in some power as your power/burst counterpart if you really want to deal awesome damage. DoT flair/utility can then be merged into power-burst kits enabling more hybrid styles and more cohesive weapons and traits in general. Trait lines could get reworked to have more synergy and diversity within them without needing to cater towards split stats or weapons. The need for cleanses drops and spammable condition clear access such as light field finishers could be reduced, and this also makes supportive-disabler-type builds that pump out weakness, vuln, and poison for example much more viable for group play in PvP environments as a result.
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Colin’s working for Amazon, now. He left shortly after HoT released.
And come on, this is ANet and WvW; promises mean almost nothing.
And I looked up the posts from this “Decieverx” person you mentioned. Judging by their thief-related posts, they are an advocate for D/D power signet builds, only able to play Cloak and Dagger/Steal/Backstab burst, and whining about shadow shot when they can’t instagib other thieves. This is not a credible source for your claim.
Lol man.
I’m not here to brag, but attacking me because I have a balanced stance on the matter is ridiculous. Truly a sad day when people on these forums of all places do not know my forum name when it comes to the design of the thief.
It’s not like I’m often cited as the authority on power D/D or have been for what’s been a few years, or am one of the more vocal and knowledgeable thieves on the boards; nah, I’m just totally biased because I’m not defending my profession as being totally fair against people claiming it’s overpowered, even when I still largely disagree with them. Nope, I’m just a random no-name whiner who thinks his precious insta-gib build is all that matters, despite a long history of people coming to me to get help on playing D/D well, regardless of utilities or trait selection.
Why am I not (particularly) famous? Because power D/D is and has been garbage pretty much since close to release, and I hate playing OH pistol in general, so I’ve avoided sPvP with it altogether, and because I don’t have an amazing MLG record, and because I’m not a streamer. I play signets for fun and for an extra thrill, not to be good; just as why I play power D/D regardless of how bad it is, and why I advocate doing more for the lesser-used weapons while dialing the game in general back to keeping it fun for everyone involved. I’ll mention I’ve also split my time on S/D the past two years or so, and now play power GS reaper because it’s more fun than the frustration D/D power thief is worth bothering with.
And so many necromancers/reapers complain that the thief is overpowered. I’ll tell you now, a couple hundred hours into GS+A/D power reaper, and the kit vastly out-performs anything D/D thief is capable of performing except for strictly running away.
Fun fact, power GS reaper is also considered terrible in PvP environments because it’s not a reliable killer with AA and spamming its skills off cooldown. Too slow? Only when you don’t AA cancel or actually utilize its slowness to bait things. Who knew.
If I want to win when playing a thief, I play D/P, and there are quite a few people out there who can testify as soon as I equip an offhand pistol I immediately start winning pretty much all other struggling fights I may have been having, despite having put only a few hundred hours into the set versus over four thousand into just D/D alone. Obviously top-tier players like Min, for example (I’ve never fought Sind, and I know I’d lose) give me plenty of problems because I won’t deny I’m not as mechanically good as they are.
It doesn’t take a top-tier player to know how the game works, though, and while implementation takes an eye of scrutiny to determine how well-balanced a game is on the numerical level, it’s not particularly difficult to recognize what’s not well-designed. Sustained stealth and the entirety of Daredevil + pretty much every aspect/elite spec from HoT are all for the most part terribly-designed. I think the lone exception is the reaper because it actually did its intended job as an elite spec by mostly changing how the necro plays, not by how good it is (albeit some slight numerical power creep to make it even remotely competitive these days).
TL;DR, Daredevil isn’t overpowered compared to the rest of HoT, but like all things HoT, it’s poorly-designed and massive power-creep over the core game, and should subsequently be nerfed or outright reworked/removed alongside everything else. It’s gimmicky and dumb and lowers the skill floor massively.
Further, stacking stealth on any profession (a la trapper build with D/P), including the thief, should not exist. Sneak Gyro in concept is absurd. Mesmers shouldn’t have access to as much stealth as they do. CS and Smokescale leaping + Hunter’s Shot shouldn’t exist simultaneously with little investment on druid with such low cooldowns. If it’s really a problem for the thief, more universal buffs to the thief should be made elsewhere, because it’d help every other non-stealth kit and make the profession more fun to play against which is good for the game as a whole.
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hypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehypehype
Why?
It is just a balance patch, it ain’t that big of a deal. Or to be more precise it is better to be cautiously optimistic than overly hype.
Why even go that far?
At this point it’s more worthwhile to just be expecting disappointment and then be excited and happy if anything good happens.
I dont even get if this is an actual complain or just a sarcastic rant, because the argument is flawed regardless. What if that 10 man gank group is a boon share meta running guild? Whether its a “GvG guild” (lol who even does GvG nowadays) or a “roaming guild” is irrelevant.
Boons vs boonstrip has always been completely out of balance and the larger the group, the worse it gets. But it doesnt matter if the “boon share meta” stays or goes. Boons as a concept is flawed because it’s thrown around like candy even without boonsshare. It should be very short term play-counter-play based. Oh so a player try to attack you? Pop 5s swiftness and 2s protection to counter it and become more mobile so you can launch a counter attack. Not already have 2 minute of swiftness, 30s vigor, 30s fury, 1 minute regen and then press a button to achieve immortality.
This. it’s not boon"share" that’s a problem, but that boons themselves are way out of control. They provide way too much in terms of raw stats for builds that just don’t/shouldn’t need them, and are too-easily made permanent.
They were intended to be short-term benefits, especially if you look at the original direction of their design based on how ANet talked about them in teaser/release videos for GW2. They’re not at all this way currently, and only stability and to some degree might (5 power/stack) have received changes, and so many skills and abilities/traits just give them out for literally no cost at all and maintain them very easily.
I think necro/reaper and core thief do the best job at handling boons. Limited durations unless speccing deeply into them, such as sacrificing a whole line for might on the necromancer in Spite to offset low baseline profession damage, or taking a combination of CS and Tr traits for the thief to uphold permanent fury while attacking, and neither of these boons in their context of their professions are really overpowering.
Fixed some tooltips, maybe arbitrary numbers changes to some kits to change the PvE speedclear meta to make it look like they’re keeping busy.
Until they do major reworks to everything HoT and most of the core game, we’re not ever seeing improvement.
What other effects do these other “short” cd ports have? Because blink has no secondary effect, lightning flash just does less damage than a single autoattack and doesn’t stunbreak unlike shadow step, and phase traversal is not a ground targeted port nor does it stun break.
So please tell me about these mystical short cd ports with multiple effects you’re talking about.
Oh, right, you’re full of it.
Some classes are not so reliant on stunbreaks because they have an ample supply of stability and rarely get stunned. The need for a stun break on a warrior is hardly the same as on a Thief. A thief very often requires two and more because ONE not enough whereas I can trait Zero on my Warriors utilities and do fine.
By the way my warrior has STOMP which is a stun break, applies stacks of stability , does very nice raw damage , can interrupt up to 5 opponents at once while proccing sigil of draining on each, this all while he immune to conditions via resistance. It is also a blast finisher and a multiple knockback. Talk about “lots of things in one”
That is on a lower cooldown then is Shadowstep, which by the way can very often not be used as a cleanse because it means porting BACK to get that cleanse which very often means back into a maelstromn of AOE that will kill you.
Oh and if that not enough, I can trait stomp to break Immobs. Indeed there a number of utitlity skills one can enhance with secondray traits and abilities that make thm far more useful then they first appear on paper. Shadowstep, outside traiting for a lower cooldown via a trait rarely used, is about as good as it can get.
The only classes who have ample stability are warrior and guardian. So, try again. anger has a 60 and 90 sec cd on stability, one of which is their elite.
Revenant, no stability unless a single 3 sec stack after dodging by speccing into the garbage retribution line that nerfs your damage by more than 20% (you either give up invocation stunbreaks on legendswap or shiro’s sheer damage modifiers).
Mesmer’s only stability is on a mantra nobody uses because it’s garbage as with most mantras that aren’t mantra of distraction.
Necromancer ample supply of stability? lolololol most CC susceptible class in the game, only stability on a long kitten cd reaper shroud skill whose stability is removed the moment you leave death shroud.
So please go peddle this spiel that only thieves get pinballed around.
In fact, with shadowstep, hard to catch, and bandit’s defense, you’ve got some of the best CC breaks in the game.
Meta ranger has permanent stability uptime, as does scrapper, and rev has very high uptime as well.
Many power shatter players also run MoP since it hits for several thousand damage and has a very low cooldown, plus no animation, plus range, plus channeled toughness on-demand, and deals damage regardless of stability which so many professions have so much access to.
The necro I’ll give you. The stab nerfs to reaper shroud weren’t justified as harsh as they are imho.
Really, though, mesmer and thief both have similar sustained mobility. Shadowstep is overloaded, but there aren’t good alternatives in the core class unless you look into sacrificing entire trait lines just for condition cleansing, both of which are passive and pretty boring. Daredevil is a problem, but it’s a necessary problem given the game-state as it is. When was the last time you were afraid of a core thief outside of condi trapper? Probably not since HoT. Daredevil made the class too hard to pin down, and they made Acro a passive line because it was literally the same concept as Daredevil with near-identical implementation.
Daredevil/Thief 2.0 is a very easy and forgiving profession to play relative to core. But pretty much so are all elites.
Overall, though, the thief is pretty much fight or flight. A thief running away won’t kill you. If he resets, you should also be resetting, and most of playing against thief and beating it is understanding how it may reengage and when.
Is it overpowered? Not particularly, but is it badly-designed? Absolutely. But Shadowstep isn’t the culprit. Daredevil is. And no, the remaining thief stunbreaks are all pretty much terrible. iSignet is the same as blink but requires a target and doesn’t do anything during its downtime, and the initiative is 1/10s uptime. Mantra if Concentration is actually just flat-out better as a stunbreak, and you said even that’s terrible. RFI is probably one of the worst stunbreaks in the game, typically enjoyed only by people running some kind of gimmick.
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Condi shatter is a lot easier to handle then the older pu non chrono as a thief tbh.
Are people claiming thief it self is op or jus d/p? I sometimes see power d/d and s/d but they don’t get much hate at all.
D/D is mostly a one trick pony with not a whole lot going on outside of a “teleport onto a guy with precast C&D and backstab” sure it’s an instagib on anything remotely squishy if you can’t see them but that’s about it. By can’t see them I mean someone who is hiding round a corner to teleport or in a small scale fight where you don’t know it’s D/D yet.
S/D I honestly have only seen maybe 3 thieves in WvW running S/D since HoT so have no idea tbh.
The rest of the dislike comes from how apart from shadowstep thieves have very low cool downs on thier skills. Adding on the ability to be immune to all soft CC and get away from absolutely everything except another thief or druid longbow if they start rapid fire at close range as they try to run. It’s like a lot of other HoT specs there’s very little risk and a lot of reward vs anything that has moderate to high risk.
This is from a power shatter perspective though where even 0.5s lapse in attention will mean death. There’s just so little risk in the meta builds now vs non meta and all classes suffer, it’s especially hilarious seeing people act like berserker, DH, scrapper and rev are not part of the problem.
Same for everything though. D/P Daredevil and to some extent staff are pretty overloaded while the rest of the thief is straight garbage being a gimmick at best unless there’s a serious skill disparity.
Utility cooldowns are pretty standard outside of the Daredevil ones which are just absurdly low for whatever reason, though this is the case with every elite. Understand that the mesmer has pretty high cooldowns but its utilities are also typically much stronger per cast as stand-alone abilities. BV’s probably one of the big exceptions in regards to low-cooldown utilities, but depending on the matchup it can have more/less impact than others.
It pretty much comes down to stealth stacking and ease-of-play on the elites, though.
It depends on your environment. Group PvE it has low damage and thus isn’t good. sPvP is so boon-heavy the scepter’s corruption is basically mandatory, and in WvW it’s an amazing power weapon if pairing it with a melee alternate like GS or dagger.
the most innately durable professions in the game provide top-tier damage.
Lol.
Necro defensives are non-scaling. Great against things that deal low damage like trash mobs, terrible against anything with real dps.
% damage mitigating effects such as protection gained from Spectral armor and the bonus mitigation from Rise! are more potent the larger the incoming hit is.
The effective HP on the class is also roughly 2-4x that of all others given shroud.
What? Why would % based damage migration be more potent for a large hit? Many small hits together and a big hit will both deal the same damage after reduction if, of course, the damage before migration was the same and the migration was % based.
I am aware of this, but the original claim was non-scaling modifiers would be worse. They aren’t.
If for example you take a 10k blow, 33% from prot would reduce it to 6.7k.
The formula for damage dealt is based on the enemy’s power * weapon damage * crit * misc. modifiers / your armor.
In order to reduce damage by 1/3, you’d need to increase armor by 50%, or roughly 1k for a full glass necromancer. 50% would require double armor, and so on.
the most innately durable professions in the game provide top-tier damage.
Lol.
Necro defensives are non-scaling. Great against things that deal low damage like trash mobs, terrible against anything with real dps.
% damage mitigating effects such as protection gained from Spectral armor and the bonus mitigation from Rise! are more potent the larger the incoming hit is.
The effective HP on the class is also roughly 2-4x that of all others given shroud.
If Necromancer has 2x to 4x more EHP than any other profession, then it stands to reason Necromancer gives up 2x to 4x more EHP than any other profession. This is a four and a half year old discussion and is why Life Force generation (and capacity) has been increased over the last several years.
There are other ways to mitigate damage than sucking it up in shroud. Minion Master builds are particularly tanky not because of Death Magic but because minions divert damage from you to them. A minion constitutes a wonky kind of damage immunity skill where you take no damage at all as long as your opponents ignore you and attack the minion (and you avoid AoE). Almost every profession has pets but Ranger, Mesmer, Scrapper, and Necro have pets that do very well at reducing incoming damage, so long as the opponent cannot lock onto the playing character and minimize the pets’ effectiveness.
Which is what I’m getting at. And that damage mitigation, outside of spectral armor, works in shroud as well, which keeps the EHP proportional.
The necromancer has the same problem the mesmer does in a different way; it can’t see huge buffs due to its class mechanics interfering with its viability in offering damage, unless the mechanic itself is replaced with something that doesn’t provide defense (in the mesmer’s case, it’s damage coefficients due to the innate burst potential and invulns on its shatters).
Necro for all intents and purposes should be middle of the pack so long as it gets the bonus defenses from shroud. Otherwise if it offered substantial damage output it’d negate the need for a lot of other professions and put them lower in the rankings at more things.
I’m not opposed to the necromancer having options for damage, but the shroud mechanic as it is, like other durable specs, forces it to not be a top-tier damage-dealer by design for the sake of game balance.
the most innately durable professions in the game provide top-tier damage.
Lol.
Necro defensives are non-scaling. Great against things that deal low damage like trash mobs, terrible against anything with real dps.
% damage mitigating effects such as protection gained from Spectral armor and the bonus mitigation from Rise! are more potent the larger the incoming hit is.
The effective HP on the class is also roughly 2-4x that of all others given shroud.
Most people are going to say they liked HoT because the people that didn’t have left the ones that remained are typically don’t care either way, liked it, or stick to the core maps.
HoT was bad however S3 got me back into the game to a degree the drop in the player base both in game and in these very forums is enough to show that HoT was poorly received. Most of the people I knew left with myself included and some of us came back do to recent events but your still looking at a loss from HoT shown by there quarterly reports as well.
Basically this; you’ll get good feedback because at this point we’re over a year in and the majority of the reasons why people left have not been addressed in the slightest bit, so for the most part, the people who were upset pretty much all left the game and don’t care.
My play time’s probably down to like 10% of what it was pre-HoT. I’d actually spend $60 a month – the whole retail price of the game – for april 2015-era GW2.
And like many others, my gem purchases are down to literally 0%. Never hashing out cash to ANet again unless they fix what they broke. And we’re looking very far from it.
This is especially apparent in the PvP and WvW communities. The game has never been even close to as dead as it is now in these formats, and these formats are dying very, very quickly as a direct result of HoT.
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It’s design; you’re not going to see one of the most innately durable professions in the game provide top-tier damage.
Take PS out of the equation and the necro is just objectively a better warrior.
>>>When you look at what makes certain kits viable or strong – and/or why a single one is dominating, the dominating factor needs to either be toned down, or have other kits provide similar functionality or have better, compensatory alternatives. All of the buffs to the dagger have pretty much come in MH form, and the game-state as it is really inhibits the OH skills from working effectively.
This statement in particular is just SO WRONG. If you break it down into its fudamental meaning it is saying In order to have balance we need to take the set that “works the best” and have other weapons act in the same manner . Taken to its logical extreme we might not as well have different weapon sets or for that matter different professions. It not a thoery of game design that I can agree with. (if this not your intent in the statement please clarify)
I think you should re-evaluate what I wrote again. I said nothing about copying mechanics directly but am talking about the very high-level concept of why certain things are superior to others and providing mechanisms to allow them to compete for measures of utility – the yield of efficacy of a given mechanic on a given actor.
As of now, we have a few kit options with high utility when compared to others for reasons much more than numbers. Looking within the identity of what the profession is and should be capable of in this optimal state and then distributing some of that with more emphasis on other styles of play is how to achieve a balanced and diverse game-state.
The thing is, we’re also playing an MMO and not just a hyper-balanced strategy game. It’s important to recognize the significance of aesthetic and playstyles being driving factors in what’s generally decided as balance; there will always be a hard-set meta, and the real matter is defining how well any given player can deviate from it while not losing tremendous efficacy.
Given the lack of complexity and restrictions on it (Limited ability slots/raw mechanics, stat restrictions dependent on game type, game type restrictions, etc. (read: complexity vs depth in games) of this game-state, we’re not provided with many options to take very abstract routes or ones which simply add more complexity to the game to achieve new identities. Certain aspects of the game – and this applies to any game out there – are confined to the rules of the game itself and will this have more/less overlap depending on the number of viable methods of play are desired.
If you push too much emphasis on breadth of balance, you have redundancy in higher level constructs (professions themselves), which is seen as a very bad idea to do for the sake of diversity on the broader scale due to the whole nature of aesthetic which is often how we define balance (and why we never talk about a game being balanced when only one construct (profession) is viable, no matter how many options within it exist which all may be equally so.
If you push for depth in diversity, you’ll ed up with no redundancy on the lower-level construct levels (weapons/traits), which enforces a strict meta of one option for each higher level construct there are regardless of how many higher level constructs there are. We’re currently leaning more towards this way with the professions right now due to HoT.
A healthy mix of both needs to be blended. High-level design concepts like the very nature of “mobility” or “damage” or “sustain” need to be balanced individually towards their low-level implementations (coefficients, hitboxes, etc.) and then cross-compared to other options to allow for the enablement of as many possible combinations as possible via a mix of slight redundancy and “appropriate” power differences on the more granular level.
So as a concrete example, the nature of applying poison on Dancing Dagger isn’t intrinsically a good way to handle the high level concept/problem of boon-less sustained durability preventing S/D from getting kills, but making S/D more evasive/defensive and bursty may not satisfy its needs, either, as it may be stepping on other kits’ toes or may lead it to have very finicky performance based on niche roles.
D/P is and has been conceptually busted for years. Anet keeps buffing it, and has nerfed every other set, directly, since release.
I agree with the busted part (stealth stacking particularly) but the buffing thing not so much. Outside of the AA buff not sure it has seen a significant buff in a long time. The ICD on Backstab was a pretty serious nerf IMO.
It hit D/D harder; the Daredevil was pretty much made for OH pistol and making D/P in general just better and much safer, while AA’ing was already the way to go for D/P since the init wasn’t worth the stabs, particularly in this meta.
ITT: People think the thief as a whole is overpowered because of D/P daredevil.
Please, when was the last time you were genuinely scared of a D/D power build, a S/D build, or just a core thief in general? Shadowstep is strong and one of the best utilities in the game. Most other thief utils, similarly to the mesmer, are just terrible. The Daredevil ones and synergy the older, crappier utilities have with Daredevil are what push the profession to craziness.
D/P is and has been conceptually busted for years. Anet keeps buffing it, and has nerfed every other set, directly, since release.
Every meta build needs drastic nerfs and reworks for the most part. The reaper’s probably in the best general balance state right now, if not even then a bit strong.
I don’t main thief anymore, swagger. I’ve pretty much been maining power reaper since HoT released.
Thief has an advantage against reaper, but it’s not as ridiculously bad as many complain unless they spec for no mobility and then try and chase. The thief absolutely has to engage to deal enough damage to kill a necro unless if playing P/P because its only other sources of damage come from melee attacks. A power reaper can kill a thief 100-0 in under two seconds as well as keep pace enough if the necromancer decides to build for it. I do it very frequently because after years if playing the thief I understand the significance of its weaknesses and how to exploit them. Who knew, knowledge of a profession would allow for an understanding on how to beat them.
Mirror its disengages and be ready for re-engages. Watch the terrain for BP rings. Have a weapon available which can deal with a melee engage and punish the thief – I prefer GS – and keep your fingers ready to stunbreak and keep track of how long ago it last BV’ed.
Power reaper can shut down an engaging thief at every turn if it decides to play a more aggressive build. I see too many necros and reapers complaining they can’t deal with thieves when they themselves don’t try anywhere in their build to provide counter-burst, good stunbreaks and mitigation, a stealth-tracker, a ranged kit, or bumped mobility. Daredevil is cheesy and forgiving in its own right, but it can be dealt with quite easily on the build-level in most cases. It has advantages, but it’s like whining that DH doesn’t auto-shut-down meta necromancer.
If you want to criticize class differences based on certain aspects of superiority, I’d assume you’d make the trade of giving up life force and shroud for more mobility, correct? Because that’s pretty much what you’re requesting.
I really think you need to reread my comments in the thread, particularly the one above your post.
This is not about who can kill who in a duel thread, it’s about movement based skills. Would you understand more If I said disparity in access to movement based skills between Druid and Necro? Or Warrior and Necro? Or Druid and Engineer? Or Warrior and Ele? Or Guardian and Necro?… Those questions starting to ring a bell as to the topic?
Again, read the post above yours and absorb it a bit more please.
And there’s enough mobility and catch potential on the reaper if you play it right; again, this is a failure to build well; my reaper can chase down warriors and thieves fairly well and keep up in sustained encounters. The difference between a necro and a thief is that the necro has better tools to deal with hard engages while the thief is inherently better at burst-mobility disengages to avoid the negatives which come with engaging. If anything, the thief’s engagement tools on D/P are overtuned from Shadow Shot allowing it to conserve its mobility for strictly disengages, rather than its raw mobility alone.
The only scenario to suggest mobility is overpowered is in the context of a fight where you can’t catch someone; otherwise it’s all irrelevant. And the reaper, the most notorious profession having issues with high-mobility targets, has access to that mobility.
If you suddenly handed out tons of movement to the necromancer and others alike, you’d better be ready for astronomical nerfs to the necro in pretty much every other area, or tremendous buffs to everything else for the most part.
The specs play differently, and I don’t really see why or how this is a problem.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
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Problem with the obscenely hard hitting skills are a rather small number of skills (backstab, vault, coalescence of ruin and arc divider for example just of the top of my head).
Dire and trailblazer are hardly a problem outside of condimes which talks more about that build problematic than anything else (ghost thief would keep ghostthieving with basically any statcombo that had condidmg).
They could nerf these skills in WvW alone to a reasonable degree(they recently split balance between gamemodes). That way fewer of the uncommon builds would get nuked.
Backstab is and has been a damage loss for a long time, and it has roughly the same damage as True Shot. The level of sacrifice to make Backstab hit as hard as it can is pretty much exactly what rangers can do on Maul – except Maul can be made to hit for 40k whereas the theoretical max on Backstab assuming all the conditional modifiers are met, namely executioner, is 27k on full-zerk idle ele in exotics with no damage reduction. Both share very similar cooldowns.
Arc Divider, Vault, CoR, Electro-Whirl, Headbutt etc. are just HoT powercreep that pushed skill damage coefficients through the roof for no reason.
And Dire/TB are problems on every profession in WvW. TB warrior, druid, scrapper, and burn DH (on top of the mesmer) are all terrifying builds that are very difficult to shut down due to how many hits they can take during their periods of sustain downtime. Mesmer is the most obvious example because it has good stealth and mobility for resets and is most-affected by the sustain, but every other profession benefits just as much, and ghost thieves gain a ton as well from these stat options because this way they won’t die to cleave or can afford a few misplays/take a few hits on what’s already an easy, low-risk build.
Condi mesmers are not a problem in PvP, Condi wars are killable, no ghost reefs to speak of. Hmmm oh yea the stats are actually balanced
Has nothing to do with stats, which is the funny part.
Condi mes runs perplex runes most times (deemed too overpowered for PvP) which is a major culprit, Dire/TB gear also deemed too overpowered for PvP is why both builds are excessive.
And condi mes is run in PvP, especially at the high tiers. PU condi roamer isn’t because much like ghost thief, and totally unrelated to amulets, stealth builds achieve nothing for PvP because point captures need to be made out of stealth, and the format isn’t about just getting kills.
If they removed Dire and TB gear from the game, WvW would be objectively better-balanced than sPvP due to the enabling of more build diversity strictly because of higher and more granular stat values/combinations. It’s the only reason I rarely sPvP and instead play WvW – my off-meta not-amazing builds can be at least played reasonably well in WvW due to granular stat tweaking and are strictly terrible in sPvP.
So that’s where all the YB players went…
This is pretty much the norm for NA, though, and has been for several years.
I don’t main thief anymore, swagger. I’ve pretty much been maining power reaper since HoT released.
Thief has an advantage against reaper, but it’s not as ridiculously bad as many complain unless they spec for no mobility and then try and chase. The thief absolutely has to engage to deal enough damage to kill a necro unless if playing P/P because its only other sources of damage come from melee attacks. A power reaper can kill a thief 100-0 in under two seconds as well as keep pace enough if the necromancer decides to build for it. I do it very frequently because after years if playing the thief I understand the significance of its weaknesses and how to exploit them. Who knew, knowledge of a profession would allow for an understanding on how to beat them.
Mirror its disengages and be ready for re-engages. Watch the terrain for BP rings. Have a weapon available which can deal with a melee engage and punish the thief – I prefer GS – and keep your fingers ready to stunbreak and keep track of how long ago it last BV’ed.
Power reaper can shut down an engaging thief at every turn if it decides to play a more aggressive build. I see too many necros and reapers complaining they can’t deal with thieves when they themselves don’t try anywhere in their build to provide counter-burst, good stunbreaks and mitigation, a stealth-tracker, a ranged kit, or bumped mobility. Daredevil is cheesy and forgiving in its own right, but it can be dealt with quite easily on the build-level in most cases. It has advantages, but it’s like whining that DH doesn’t auto-shut-down meta necromancer.
If you want to criticize class differences based on certain aspects of superiority, I’d assume you’d make the trade of giving up life force and shroud for more mobility, correct? Because that’s pretty much what you’re requesting.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
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