Guild Wars 2

BikeIsGone.8675:

Bound basically encourages high risk / high reward gameplay, where you use your dodges aggressively rather than for defense.

I’d agree with this if it were true. The thing is, Daredevil itself is so safe and provides so much endurance regeneration innately that it’s really not even much of a risk. It’d then also justify the third dodge if there just weren’t so many easy-obtained, low-cost ways to recover the endurance.

@Azukas, why are you now a champion of Bound? I recall us having a heated debate quite some time ago where you called me out for even suggesting anyone would ever use anything but Dash in any environment.

babazhook.6805:

I want off hand dagger to play different then sets we already have and not just replicate the SAME things that other weaponsets do.

d/p has poison so lets give s/d poison. D/p has blind so lets give s/d blind is lazy game design. I want to play s/d because it different and not just a knockoff of all the d/p skills and abilities.

Poison and blind are bad ideas NOT because they would not be useful but because the other sets already do this to death. Even “steal 10 enudrance from first enemy struck” works better for me just because it helps change the gameplay from the d/p set which already poisons and blinds.

Yes and no. There needs to be some overlap between kits; the reason for D/P’s dominance is pretty much solely because there’s really no competition. 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.

Poison on Dancing Dagger is abstracted into a greater problem of enabling heal cuts for S/D because it deals less sustained damage. Of course one can take DA for this for a heal negation on steal, but unlike D/P, the pressure isn’t constant which has a huge difference. In the case of D/D, the kit lacks engage and pressure potential like D/P has from Shadow Shot, and lacks consistency like SS and the AA chain provide, while also lacking stealth attack consistency/usability unlike again how D/P can SS from stealth and achieve great results even if the backstab misses.

That doesn’t mean that we need duplicate copies of abilities, however. If S/D’s counter-sustain game is bumped, it no longer needs the poison application to begin with. If D/D gets a better engage and CnD reworked to be consistent, and stealth-attack alternatives provided, it no longer needs massive buffs to CnD which end up breaking the skill itself.

It’s the same reasoning I identified in my linked post above.

Beautilation.7915:

Make Cloak and Dagger put you into stealth without a target.

It’s called CLOAK and Dagger not DAGGER and Cloak, so why do i need to hit a person before going into stealth? dumb asf.

Because that’s what the word ‘and’ means? What you suggest would be “Cloak or dagger” which is no longer even appropriate since ‘Cloak and dagger’ is an actual term which makes the name a pun.

It’d be impossible to balance this, anyways. SA would innately allow permanent stealth, and Imagine condi ghost thief with permanent stealth uptime without a target required or a leap finisher needed. It’d make D/D and in particular P/D condi totally overpowered and be the single most cancerous and boring kit to fight in the game – so bad, in fact, that I’d actually demand every profession in the game get a new class mechanic that acts as a 600-range character-following AoE reveal with a 75% or greater uptime.

I’ll just repost this (since it’s a long post) regarding an overhaul of OH dagger.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Off-hand-Dagger-Discussion-Thread/first#post6427223

No-cast-time IR is just way too strong, particularly with Daredevil, since it’d allow an Acro/Daredevil an effective stunbreak/disengage on average once every 3s

OH dagger needs a much more substantial rework than baseline CiS on CnD and some extra poison.

I’ve said it many, many times, and I’ll keep saying it: CiS does absolutely nothing for the health of OH dagger or any kit using OH dagger except condi P/D thief since it’d act as a cover condition. Especially now, it has almost zero defensive value and does nothing about the biggest issue CnD faces which is inconsistency and lack of reliability. Unfortunately, OOC/non-on-hit stealth is overpowered.

Dancing Dagger is just generally a terrible skill and needs a massive rework with the kits in mind.

Korgov.7645:

DeceiverX.8361:

The irony being that 2-1-1 actually makes nightcapping contribute more to PPT than 5-4-3 or 3-2-1.

You mean contribute more to the Glicko rating adjustments, not PPT.

If you compare the nightcapper team and the second team, yes, 2:1 ratio is greater than 5:4 or 3:2. If you compare the 1st team vs the 3rd team, then the ratios are 5:3, 2:1 and 3:1. In that sense the night skirmishes (and any other skirmishes) are more valuable to win under 2-1-1 than under 5-4-3.

It’s a side effect, though PPT is still the wrong word I’ll admit; it ends up contributing more to a given score than the other models is more what I really meant. I probably should have been more explicit in my wording, but the glicko adjustment being based on the scoring is pretty much a direct consequence.

Overall, general correctness all around.

@Those talking about the philosophy now all of a sudden being the leading factor in why 2-1-1 is okay:

Really, the arguments about the philosophy of 2-1-1 favoring a team-up don’t really hold much merit. The only time it’s worthwhile for both servers to team up for more than a very short period where the gains for both are equal (thus different objectives entirely) and would need to be surefire wins… in which case, it was inevitable anyways since the #1 server would defend from one of the assaults, anyways, which ends up just giving one of the “teamed” servers a lead.

In which case, there’d have just been no merit to teaming up.

Not to mention, under ideal circumstances of the team-up where each server alternates first and third-place skirmish results for the entire week (it doesn’t really work this way, fun fact), both end up taking a 50% win over the “first place” server which results in artificial tier gain for both and makes matchups swing with tier hopping just like the pre-skirmish/link system. Then all three servers from terrible matchups and massive ganks implode and the players move to T1 when they open.

Which of course brings more people out of the lower tiers and makes more people in the lower tiers quit WvW, consolidating links, and emphasizing further transferring to T1 from others.

As a result of perfect teamwork, anyways, would you rather be a T2/T3 server in T2 fighting a T1/T2 server and struggling with occasional assistance from another T2 server, or be a T2/T3 server fighting two strictly-T1 servers solely because you worked alongside another crowd, which you won’t get support from anyone when you actually rise tiers because said servers already hold their own?

5/4/3 in such a circumstance puts all three servers now in perfect operating conditions at 4-4-4 or tied evenly, suggesting the “first place” server will stay exactly where it is and each server ends up with scores determined solely by PPK. Although, more realistically given a few first-place wins, they will eventually rise up tiers while the other two settle in their respective ones and enjoy what is an objectively more-evenly-scored matchup than what 2-1-1 can mathematically provide.

The irony being that 2-1-1 actually makes nightcapping contribute more to PPT than 5-4-3 or 3-2-1.

Skins/Aesthetics? Sure, whatever. Any amount of bonus power or capability? Absolutely not.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Haleydawn.3764:

I like the idea of adding unique or as you say “Legendary” pets. But only as an aesthetic, since pets are only used on rangers, their combat stats are balanced with the damage the ranger itself does. So adding higher stat pets will throw things out of whack.
I’m now thinking of all the unique/rarespawn pet skins in World of Warcraft I got before I quit. The spirit animals were amazing.

WoW solved this by literally making all pets equal DPS, and I honestly wish that ANet would do the same thing. It’s vaguely frustrating to try and balance out the power/condi/tanking nature of pets along with their utility.

It also means that I mostly use a small set of “good” pets for their purpose, and the rest are neglected. Unlike WoW, where I could just use a Sporebat if I wanted, or I could swap to whatever random pet, provided I didn’t much care about the utility slot they filled.

Unlike GW2, where I avoid various pets because they are overall less “min/max” than others, so even if I like the aesthetic more of, say, dogs, cat’s gonna win.

Most pets aren’t taken for stats but their abilities.

Coming from a newly-mained reaper who used to almost exclusively play thief.

Necromancer and reaper both have the tools to kill a thief if the thief commits to killing the necro. Of course, this assumes the necromancer builds off-meta (gasp) and builds for a little mobility instead of sacrificing literally every trait and utility it has to pump out more condition damage or soak more damage. The daredevil in particular counters the meta condi reaper. Play power, play smart, play aggressively, and kill a thief. I usually charge thieves when on my reaper because I think they’re the easiest profession to kill. Druid, Berserker, and Scrapper are much more problematic because they have superior mobility and can commit to an engage/apply pressure back and also still deal more damage than they take.

You can’t provide all professions with the same mobility – especially when comparing the necromancer to the thief – due to other differences between the professions. The thief has no source of 1200 range damage while the necromancer’s core shroud AA on a power build can hit an upwards of 8k each, has great control and nuke potential on staff, and said necromancer has an effective health pool of 3x/4x the thief and substantially better hit-soaking capabilities.

It’s also important to recognize that it’s these differences which define the class’ use in WvW. Necromancers are heavily-utilized in group play, while thieves aren’t. The thief is good in small-scale, and the meta necro options are designed not to flourish in these environments but instead work as hyoercarries in group play, be it small or large.

With some blatantly overpowered aspects of the elite specs aside, I think there’s a great spectrum of which professions can do what. Elite specs were also intended to be designed to change some of these slightly – the matter is just right now the elites are massively power-creeped, and the game is suffering.

Typically speaking, especially with links, most PPT gain is based on coverage on off-hours. This is also why EU has closer matchups than NA.

5/4/3 ends up allowing for a server to have a much better chance of staying in the fight versus 3/2/1 and 2/1/1 because of its proportions favoring a lesser-magnitude loss when losses occur.

Again, there are two totally different arguments that are being made here, and both are valid to some extent:

Assuming no manual glicko re-adjustments, the 5/4/3 spread does stagnate matches more because the magnitude of losses is greater. This is still a problem with Glicko and why ANet needs faster re-adjustment windows, because things like stacking and transfers mess the algorithm up to near-uselessness anyways.

However, the advantage here is that the matchups will be closer in terms of PPT because the figures are relatively closer, thus from a scoring and PPT perspective, 5/4/3 is an objective improvement.

Fay.2357:

Justine.6351:

Hesacon.8735:

Justine.6351:

5-4-3 seems to keep the winner and the loser of a skirmish in competition?

Think about it carefully. The absolute difference between each place is exactly the same if it is 5-4-3 or 3-2-1. It is exactly as difficult to overcome a deficit in 3-2-1 and 5-4-3.

I’m not so sure that is true.

1-2-3 is,
First place gets 150% value of second
Second gets 100% value of third
Third gets 33% value of first

3-4-5 is,
First place gets 125% value of second
Second gets 133% value of third
Third gets 66% value of first

This is accurate. All the geniouses in this thread going on about the absolute difference between the scores have clearly forgotten that there’s more than one way to compare numbers. I suppose they think there’s no difference between a 50% pay raise and a $1 pay raise either?

Yea, posters saying that it’s the same are the ones that need to l2math – sorry, but ANet has its numbers correct here. A win which determines a server’s tier is based solely on the fact the server won at this point given manual adjustments, and is often the basis for transfers which are what really define how volatile a server is; not by how much or how little a server necessarily wins by, unless inspected by ANet, not to mention Glicko rates quality by difference, anyways, which is tightened up with the new numbers. To enable better matchmaking and closer PPT games, the 5/4/3 relationship does a strictly better job at tightening scores. To break even on a 3-2-1 distribution, the difference between the efficacy of skirmish wins breaks down much more in favor of the server that wins the skirmish since the relationship of a win from first to third is 300% whereas the 5/4/3 breakdown is only 167%, cutting the value per win down by almost half.

It helps prevent runaway matches much better while also strictly enforcing the same exact scoring differences if every server performs exactly the same as before and always performs at a first/second/third place allocation for every single skirmish.

The only valid criticisms are that it may make matches too stale and that fights still may not be even, although manual re-adjustments enforce this doesn’t happen for the former, and the latter will never change so long as people are so mobile in their transferring habits, anyways.

AikijinX.6258:

DeceiverX.8361:

Honestly, you should use speargun and give it another chance; it has a learning curve on Ink Shot but I think it’s one of the better skills the thief has underwater. I find it very strong and in general better than the spear, and in the event you actually need to fight, its power scaling on Deluge is devastating (identical to backstab), while also having decent AA power scaling and a permanent ranged cripple on 4. You end up not needing dash to keep an enemy within range and not needing it for movespeed by the nature of the underwater weapons not having so much spammable mobility as other kits on land.

Frankly I think U/W spear is only good for PvE or people who are deliberately going to stay in your face when underwater to let you keep dodging them.

Quite frankly Ink Shot in my opinion. (May be a matter of perspective) but I feel as though ink shot moves slower than my chances at getting a chak egg sac. Other times you use it (As in the projectile has been released from the harpoon gun), you get stunned or floated or whatever, and then the skill is cancelled, thus wasting initiative and my time

And honestly yes the numbers from #2 Harpoon gun are high, but if I’m too slow to even catch the person to use it, for instance a warrior in the water is EXTREMELY DEADLY and fast. I would just be wasting initiative again and time.

I propose they give us more underwater utilities but that would just be another “Thief buff” but a rightful one. But if not the added utility, let me have the ability to switch my dodges underwater separate from land. That’s what I’m stressing, harpoon gun vs spear is another topic I just added as side comments. I don’t see any harm in separating the land and water GM DD skills.

It’s not land-movespeed-level, but it does provide the best underwater sustained mobility in the game. As I mentioned, there’s a big learning curve.

One of the biggest advantages to it is that it can be casted and during its projectile before the teleport, you can still make attacks and move freely. In the case of U/W, you can start the fight using it, attack and pressure your enemies with the rest of the kit and coerce them into the finishing location or fire it in the opposite direction and steal for the engage while flanking behind them to send them in the same direction as your shot (giving you a free catch-up and then some if they try to disengage where you started), which if they turn-and-burn you like a warrior may, also gives you get a free teleport out without needing to stunbreak or teleport. Even if you’re CC’ed after you cast it, you still teleport when it reaches 1200 range, stunned/floated/sunk or not; it works the same as IArrow.

I rarely lose fights underwater with speargun and almost never have issues running away. I think once you really get the hang of Ink Shot and setting up your positioning with it rather than trying to react or catch up, it proves an invaluable asset (plus provides heal cuts via skill #3). It’s an amazing kiting weapon, and I’d honestly love to play its kit on land if I could, and was part of the inspiration behind the development of the Fakeout Bolt ability for my elite spec proposal, as well as a big motivator in the general desired style of play for the Deadeye as a whole.

The problem I see with split evades, particularly for WvW, is that it’d allow people to play such things like D/P thief with bound for stealth and then run into the water for a second to stack swiftness from auto-switching to dash while getting weapon swap procs such as Sigil of Energy to allow for said swiftness to come at no cost.

Zenith.7301:

PvE balance in this game is a joke.

Better than PvP and WvW balance lol.

At least PvE has some semblance of the profession devs’ attention.

Zenith.7301:

Considering reaper shroud needs buffs as well for PvE, it does pathetic DPS despite being a resource you build up.

This is the very same justification behind why the thief got its asinine AA damage buffs, however. It’s also worth mentioning that before these buffs, the necromancer dagger AA chain did more damage than the thief could on its; the thief’s damage was bumped solely for raid viability because it literally served absolutely no purpose in PvE and was still in general pretty bad in PvP considering how low everyone’s cooldowns are with HoT which largely invalidates initiative.

More things just need to be toned down, with some weak areas of the necromancer needing a little bit of revision. Honestly, as far as PvE goes, I don’t think the necromancer in general can be balanced well due to shroud providing so much extra durability while yet it also fails to let the profession tank and doesn’t regen.

The thing is, Relentless Pursuit and such traits may not be amazing for PvE, and that’s fine. Different traits will have different strengths in different environments, which is kind of the point behind them. RP’s an amazing ability in WvW and sPvP, for example, while Nova is considered mediocre, and DM works wonders in larger-scale combat in WvW due to its extremely potent defensive options whereas BM isn’t sought after except on core necro since Transfusion has almost no value when on the front lines as a reaper being in melee, since it’ll pull downs into damage.

If they were to buff it, I’d probably just say adding 25% movespeed on top of its existing effects would be the way to go. sPvP condi bunker can still succeed with Nova, and while very redundant, it does help necro out in WvW by removing the need to spec SotL for chase potential and general mobility deemed so essential in the mode.

Anything which provides no experience means it’s not considered an actual leveled enemy by the game, such as destructible objects or weak adds. The same applies to all on-kill effects like Bloodlust sigils, etc. In most cases, this is done intentionally for combat balance purposes and encounter design.

I think a bigger issue with Onslaught is that it doesn’t reset abilities’ cooldowns which are currently in-use, including during their after-cast times.

So for example, cleaving a target using Soul Spiral or Death’s Charge while on RS3’s stability will not reset either skills’ cooldowns. This makes the resets in many regards counter-productive since typically those skills are used to get kills to begin with.

If they fixed that, I think the trait would be perfect.

Wargameur.6950:

I will probably say something wrong but isn’t ink shot + action cam a short bow #5 ?

Doesn’t even need action cam; it defaults to the vector of the camera in normal mode if used without a target.

Korgov.7645:

What do you miss out on when the enemy uses alt-F4?

Bonus PPK. Spiking gains more points when under the effects of bloodlust.

SlayerGT.6805:

@DeceiverX dude if you want “immersion” i think you should play call of duty lmao

Like did you seriously just claim having fat people as powerful heroes ruins immersion while we have had a dragon that was a literal entire jungle and plant people growing on trees and whole continents sunk and raised by magic and…. honestly literally anything you look at in this game?

But noooo inclusivity of this particular type, this one thing, is what would kill the immersion for “many”, ok

I mean yeah nice try bringing up other “unrealistic feats”. You, and apparently many, must have poor imaginations if those bother you too, and in that case you’re, again, playing the wrong game.

Or maybe you’re just fatphobic.

Uh…….

Exercise is pretty much the only way to lose weight, just saying, particularly cardio.

Unless you eat an exorbitant amount of very unhealthy food for the sake of gaining weight, you will get thin doing the amount of running and fighting our characters do.

I’ve already had this discussion before in another thread where someone brought up the sumo lifestyle as a means of suggesting it’s totally reasonable for very overweight individuals to be physically fit; turns out they’re actually terribly unhealthy in general aside from flexibility and strength (neither of which when exercised do anything about body fat) and specifically try to gain weight.

Proper example? Olympic athletes and other endurance performers often eat thousands more calories a day than what a normal human of their stature requires in other professions. Calories are a measure of energy which if we don’t consume or our metabolisms do not waste, get stored into fat.

Frankly, I don’t really care, personally, but a ton of people care about an immersive experience – it’s kind of the purpose of popular ENB’s like SweetFX and the likes, why people care about cosmetics, why people have complained about voice-acting quality which in most games doesn’t even exist, etc., and apparently me even raising that there’s a valid point in this reasoning makes me less of a person with a poor imagination and also a “fatphobe” which isn’t even a thing. I’m not afraid of fat people; two of my closest friends are obese and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest because they’re great people.

And despite being overweight they also recognize the fact that their low metabolic rate which made them husky out of the gates (nature’s a jerk – I can sympathize; I also have a chronic disability with no cure which has put me at a very large disadvantage, fun fact) isn’t solely to blame; they know kitten ed well if they worked out a ton they could lose it, because that’s how science works, and elect not to, because it’s their life and they’d rather spend their time doing other things, and that’s totally cool with me if they’re content with their decisions.

I’m not saying it’s easy to get in shape from being at such a disadvantage, either. It isn’t. But the sheer amount of exercise our characters do justifies a counter-argument on the conceptual level.

Plastering me with negative labels because I just disagreed with you doesn’t help you, or whatever you’re trying to advocate for, either. Frankly, it almost invalidates it when you default to name-calling.

Sarrs.4831:

I wouldn’t mind new body types. I don’t see why we’re flinging around shots like ‘fatphobe’ though. That seems like a quick way to get the thread locked.

And like everyone’s opinion, this is a valid stance you’re more than welcome to have. I decided to argue the contrary because considering the contrary is a part of critical thinking essential when making decisions or suggestions to make improvements or why people may disagree.

Frankly, I’m certainly not reporting what he said because I’d rather people see the post content for what it is and make their own judgments. Though I’m of the nature where I value free speech in its purest forms and only believe in involving authorities when things get way out of line and/or very targeted personal attacks solely designed to make the person feel bad. A false label of something that isn’t even a word?… It’s more comical than anything. Let the rest of the world be the judge of its value or merit of the accusation. I’ll gladly concede when my biology is wrong.

At the end of the day, the nail in the coffin is development resources are more responsibly put towards improving the game and improving revenue on those mechanics within the game (which are currently in desperate need of attention). As said, this would be a huge task given ANet’s past stances, and I’d rather see the integrity of gameplay as a whole be improved over something which only truly influences a small portion of players which could potentially cause revenue losses in the end.

ArchonWing.9480:

Why would you delete them? Just put something else in the shared inventory slot. Put them on each of your characters, unless you have more characters than kits; in that case leave 1-2 in the bank for swapping.

Sure it’s not as convenient as putting it in the slot, but you gain something else.

Was about to say the same thing. And for new or replacement characters, just move some of them around from ones you no longer play much to prevent duplication.

Unless you frequent a whole ton of different characters and need copper-feds on all of them for whatever reason (buy a silver-fed for the shared slot instead if the infinite-use is so important?), I’m not really sure how this can really be seen as a bad thing.

You asked why, I gave you the reasons, coming from someone who solely played WvW for small-scale fighting for several years. And doing “OK” in a 1v1 on a core spec (undefined with different viability measures per profession and based on its opponents) is very different from performing in small groups of < 10. I do “well” on a core signet D/D + S/D thief which is arguably one of the worst builds in the game bytoday’s standards, and you know why? Because the skilled small-group play just isn’t here. Most “roamers” these days are/were second-or-third-rate players who got huge power spikes that lowered the skill floor for their professions with HoT and think they’re amazing now that they’re also winning some fights because the real competition got up and left.

And unless you want to disagree with an overwhelming majority of the top-tier players in the game, HoT’s profession content is poorly-designed and not fun to participate in. Toker himself wrote a lengthy thread on these very forums which essentially stated that he doesn’t actually enjoy the game because of it and only plays for the money at this point. And I would be very interested in seeing you beat out the top players in the world and call them rallybots, just saying.

The thing was, small-scale used to not be a numbers game. Hell, even large-scale wasn’t a numbers game – go look up guild Red Guard WvW videos – they win frequently when outnumbered two or three to one. Arguably at one point more mechanical skill was involved while skirmishing in WvW than in sPvP (obviously missing the macro game element that sPvP has which pretty much defines good players from poor ones there with a very different meta and strategy foreign to manny WvW players). An organized group of five running off-meta builds could take on ten or more if they were good and coordinated. I had numerous encounters with my old guild in which we fought groups of 15 or more and won with no more than six, and I still played my terrible off-meta thief build in a group in which nobody ran even close to the meta.

What’s left of WvW wants easy wins. Rewards got half-decent. Legendaries are locked behind reward tracks for the GoB to help entice PvE players who really just don’t care about the mode to play. My guild, like many other small-scale guilds has transferred down tiers numerous times – I’ve been on almost every server on NA at this point – just to keep the fights even-numbered and interesting. There was often an esteem where the lower-tier (T3-T6) servers had better players just because the existence of blobs was negligible outside of reset and that the bulk majority of players in the lower tiers ran smaller, skilled organized groups. This is why Mag still is riding the whole “skilled-play” hype years later in T1 with a weird obsession with KDR even though it’s really no longer why the server built a reputation; it was the best small-scale server some years ago with a profound K:DR in its early years from good players, and intentionally kept itself locked in T3 and under to keep the fights good. It could have pushed to T2 and maybe even with momentum T1 multiple times, but it didn’t, because the bulk if its players didn’t want to move up and fight ktrains and be associated with the blobbiness of the high tiers, because while 5 can kill 10 semi-organized ones or 15 disorganized ones, 5 can’t kill 30 organized players. A lot of the people on Mag currently are second-rate wannabes trying desperately to live in the shadows of their predecessors, and this transformation has been slowly happening for a bit over two years where some originals got bored and left to greener pastures, bringing out the toxicity and trolliness of many there, or bringing other such players to the server.

The lag is caused by blobs and largely also from HoT enabling skills which flood requests to the server like mini-DDOS’s every time a massive fight happens. Without a buffer of small groups not participating in blobs, more procs bounce off each other all at the same time. Queues didn’t get increased, populations are lower than ever, and the blobs at times are no bigger than how they were in T1 years ago when the lag lasted only a few seconds. This explanation was also provided some years ago on reddit by a game programmer who said the small spikes T1 was experiencing weren’t fixable without profession review as a consequence; and it’s just been exacerbated since the expansion.

You see those groups because the actual small-scale scene is dead and what’s left are mostly just ganking scumbags who think their 5v1’s are great play. Most of the organized small-scale scene strictly left the game with HoT. It’s why numbers were down even before links.

Since you’re really asking for examples, though:

- Terrible small-group game/profession balance made small-scale combat itself just not fun.

- HoT gear powercreep.

- DBL prohibiting small-group effectiveness due to slow flips and favoring defense.

- Time-based auto-upgrades negating havoc effort (it’s back to yaks but still problematic for taking towers with small groups due to free supply without consequence favoring defenders).

- Extra bonuses to defense via guild buffs to stacked or PvE guilds.

- Siege effectiveness changes favoring larger groups/hurting smaller ones.

- Nerfs to guild siege.

- Watchtower effect reducing need for distributed networks of players enforcing bigger blobs and preventing small groups from slowly contesting and flipping objectives.

- The cost of scribing/ +5 supply being locked behind 3-5k gold.

- Sentry area reveal increasing map traversal speed or denying free movement from blobs/other larger groups.

- Boon buffs/amplification.

- Profession/gear design tweaked into no-risk, no-penalty builds forcing numbers games/denying most out-play win potential due to the nature of builds.

- Worsening server lag out of consequence for large blob fights occurring elsewhere due to the HoT powercreep and for reasons above causing lost skirmishes where effective skill use is critical.

… the list just keeps going on and on.

Links just exacerbate these issues but give the appearance WvW is healthier than it is. Really, though, server loyalty means far less than so many give it credit for. I mean, look at all the issues rising around match manipulation/transfers in T1 today. People just move where the grass is greener and always have and will. Links themselves aren’t the cause of the omniblob problem; omniblobs exist because the 20+ players running organized small-scale on a map before are no longer playing for the reasons above, and the only ones left who play WvW are zerglings looking to ktrain/PvD for lootbags, which lets the comm on a queued map get another 20 followers instead of people going to run havoc and the likes.

Which of course makes the lag worse and makes small-scale groups even less effective and less-interested in playing the game.

People transferred constantly before linking. Blobs got bigger because of HoT killing off small group efficacy in every way possible.

Equilibrium.1035:

I wasn’t aware tht GW2 is that big on historical accuracy? I mean, you can accept a body type on female humans that literally leaves no room for internal organs, giant horned furries and tiny science rats, but fat people? nooo, how ahistorical!

Idk man, this just kinda feels like you follow the “Fat people? In MY vidya gaem? NEVER!” sentiment, and that’s kinda not so nice of you, bucko

Or it has to do more with the fact that our GW2 characters pretty much spend their entire existence doing cardio and strength training. I can’t imagine any substantial number of GW2 players being able to run for multiple hours on end in difficult terrains and the likes.

And because of this very fact, people say it kills their immersion when they see a panda-bear 7 foot tall norn male doing feats of acrobatics and sprinting around every second, or some twig-thin female one-shotting people swinging a greatsword twice her size.

But no, clearly this is just people being anti-fat instead of looking for an immersive experience, and demonizing that perspective without asking for why they feel this way is definitely helping your cause.

It’d be a tremendous development effort for something that arguably kills immersion for many, and quite frankly, wouldn’t see as substantial of a return as other major developments such as new wardrobe armor options (non-outfits) which require rigging as well.

Granted, we’re already in Anime Wars 2 with the sheer number of absurd particle effects, glowing items, and wings running around the game so perhaps there’s some justification in saying it’s not even worth trying to care anymore…

You can get it up to twice if you immediately use it when gaining stealth; otherwise it’s once-per.

Nothing good becomes of merges, speaking as someone on an “edge server.”

Every game that’s really needed to do them has pretty much failed, and has failed because the whole need for merges is due to an inherent failure or failures elsewhere in the game.

WvW’s trapped under a frozen lake. It’s terminal and it’ll die sooner or later. The question isn’t how to save it but what identifying what caused it to get there to begin with, and maybe at the least fix that.

Dinas Dragonbane.2978:

I still miss the 8 tiers. In server linking the blobs got bigger and the small groups…mostly disappeared.

It has little to do with linking. Everything about HoT killed all incentive to play with small groups. Literally, every single facet of small-group gameplay was systematically either removed or destroyed.

The linking just exacerbates the problem because the few dedicated groups that run in the name of a server (this is way fewer than you think; most small-scale groups have extensive legacies of transferring to get better fights) are given even less of a reason to bother.

Honestly, you should use speargun and give it another chance; it has a learning curve on Ink Shot but I think it’s one of the better skills the thief has underwater. I find it very strong and in general better than the spear, and in the event you actually need to fight, its power scaling on Deluge is devastating (identical to backstab), while also having decent AA power scaling and a permanent ranged cripple on 4. You end up not needing dash to keep an enemy within range and not needing it for movespeed by the nature of the underwater weapons not having so much spammable mobility as other kits on land.

Frankly I think U/W spear is only good for PvE or people who are deliberately going to stay in your face when underwater to let you keep dodging them.

And unless they provide me with fourteen separate amulets, I’d just downright leave and never look back.

Even if the optimal-play balance field in WvW is off compared to sPvP, there is objectively an increased number of viable builds way outside the meta.

And odds are things would still be terribly imbalanced no matter how they split it considering most of the broken stuff in the game now is on the conceptual level regarding skills and traits and has nothing to do with stats.

In this game-state you’d just kill diversity in the name of what’s an already-horrible and extremely stale game-state due to bad design and lack of follow-up coming from ANet to actually make kit changes.

I was assuming “instant port” was referring to being able to be used during CC, as IR used to work exactly this way in the past; you’d teleport and stay CC’ed because it lacked a cast, which by far and large is how most (if not all?) instant-cast abilities work in GW2.

As far as the second remark, it’s already a 1/4s cast; this was done again solely to make the ability not instant-cast to prevent mid-CC retreats which was deemed overpowered. It’s extremely quick on the disengage; it just has aftercast frames which delay other skill uses thereafter for a shorter period. And the removal of these frames won’t really help the kit for its disengage potential since these occur after the teleport (and thus once you’re disengaged and hopefully out of range), anyways. It also already has a disengage range of 1200; the same as maxed shadowstep, so it’s actually very good at running away as it is. The problem with sword is its lack of capacity to apply pressure to literally anything else but a stationary boonbunker.

The kit lacks viability in most cases on the conceptual level due to the removal of the tempo of PvP and how FG allowed it to fully maximize this tempo-style play since HoT, paired with what’s just ineffective burst damage when looking at how much is necessary to down the new elites and given Marauder’s amulets and the likes where even damage builds are tankier than before.

It’s not strong in more open encounters because it lacks chase/vector-mobility potential unlike how it used to given jump-casts. The beauty and strength of the sword was that it could keep re-applying pressure and completely negate someone from disengaging it while it slowly whittled down their health. It was a duelist build with jump-casts because it could force a 1v1 to keep happening for a prolonged time.

The changes in sPvP to increase its engage range and immob duration help this, but it’s a far cry from being as utility-oriented as it was given the amount of -mobility effects, passives, blocks, resistance, and get-out-of-jail-free cards so many professions stack at the moment with the elites, which makes IS’s lockdown utility much less impactful, and given the state of PvP in general, something that’s relatively unattrative for both a team and the thief itself.

Nikola.3841:

DeceiverX.8361:

Kills should be determined by one death = one kill to the player/server with the most damage against the target. A 5v1 provides one kill allotted to the player who dealt the most damage (and loot is dropped for all who contributed as normal), just as a 1v1.
.

Even better, give loot to only 1 player, and only 1/5 wxp to each…it worked like that in DAOC and (except on relic raids) people actually tried to avoid their own zergs, not join them…that made for a pretty healthy 1vs1, 8vs8 and zerg scenes without need to make separate game mode like spvp here

Despite being an advocate for small-scale and seeing more damage-oriented builds, I don’t think this would really work given the cost of playing the mode and how ktrainy the game mode is now; it’s also not really something in the spirit of GW2. Players interested in good fights pretty much all left, so this’d probably just make things worse for the WvW community in general.

Nikola.3841:

Digikid.7230:

Nikola.3841:

Lol, guildie on twitch just tried to take BG home tower in mag bl with 3 people, got steamrolled by 40

Your guild could ask for a gvg if you cared so much about fighting even numbers, did that ever occur to you?

I don’t care, I just find it hilarious someone bragged about KDR…of course you have good KDR if all you do is mapblob

I always blame developers, never players for taking easy route to win

Nothing new here. Started with “roaming skillgroups” of 10 who ganked with 2:1 numbers skyrocketing KDR.

Mag used to have great players but honestly most of T1/T2 fights exactly the same and is pretty much entirely a numbers/outnumbering game. It’s the same reason TC (despite being there) has such a massive KDR in T2; we’re blob-heavy compared to most of the other T2 servers even when not trying super hard for a win.

Kills should be determined by one death = one kill to the player/server with the most damage against the target. A 5v1 provides one kill allotted to the player who dealt the most damage (and loot is dropped for all who contributed as normal), just as a 1v1.

Compare the number of deaths in Tier 1 to each other and it’s less of a blowout than almost every other matchup across the other tiers. The rate of deaths is roughly the same.

Profession design/balance. The game should be renamed to Build Wars 2 because it neither has anything to do with guilds warring in the broader scope of things, and winning fights in the context of competitive PvP and WvW is pretty much entirely build-dependent.

It’s just not fun to fight other players when so many broken mechanics exist that remove so much of the skilled-play elements from the game, and so many blatantly overpowered/underpowered designs have stayed so long without attention which negate the potential for tremendous diversity game-wide.

As someone who plays games in general pretty much entirely for the PvP, GW2 just doesn’t do it because the profession designers have downright failed [me].

The only real “needs” for ascended gear are on accessories (big gains and relevant in PvE and are free/cheap, anyways) and weapons on power builds since the base damage increase makes them offer a small but noticeable increase in damage.

Armor’s kind of whatever in most cases. It’s more effective to spend the money on better food 9 out of 10 times.

Correct, and subsequently very low static stat gains, which creates a big disparity in performance between WvW and sPvP since the stat allocations in sPvP are lower and thus there is less to multiply while static gains have a bigger relative impact on builds.

Across multiple abilities, yes, but BD when compared to every other ability has the best block uptime in the game as well as substantial extra utility at little to no cost to the thief’s build in general.

Frankly, the profession shouldn’t be blocking anything at all, but whatever.

steelheart.7386:

My main problem with these nerf calls is that Warriors have had all these abilities for quite awhile and now that its solo queue Warrior are suddenly op. In none of the first four leagues seasons were Warriors all that popular. All of a sudden we go to duo and solo queue and there are Warriors all over the place. Is the problem truly Warriors or is it the way they are designed really strong for solo pvp? Are we sure we are going to stay solo and duo queue only forever? A-net has to be careful. If we are going to stay solo and duo only imo Warriors need a nerfs of some kind because they are extremely self contained (lots of self healing and condition clearing) for a form of pvp with very little coordination. If we are going to go back to being able to group with 3+ im not sure much needs to be done because like I said they really were not meta league seasons 1-4.

It’s a combination of buffs and abilities the Berserker has which can make it overbearing. Considering most of its power stems from Arc Divider/Skullgrinder/Resistance uptime/Double EP + DoA stacked with blocks and Adrenal Health, it ends up with supercharged abilities and defenses with the capacity to deal a lot of damage. In essence, the same problem the scrapper had and to some extent still has.

Unfortunately nothing short of changing the way these abilities work will really improve things in general as I feel like largely the warrior is a win-hard-or-die profession right now just based on its kit; it’ll either be dominant or weak.

I’d just prefer for it (and mostly Shaemoor) to just not be Kryta #2 where the dumb LS mechanics and monsters stayed and stayed for no reason.

LA is very generic and soulless now, but the other Human-area-invasion actually left broken game mechanics there.

Jeknar.6184:

Aury.1367:

Cygnus.6903:

He said utility, not food.

exactly. so utility: -20% and food: -20%, that would be a start.

Why there should be a -20% duration utility when the utility that increase duration is only +10%?

“balance”

Probably something along the lines of Expertise inflating the duration stat more than necessary while there exists no counter-stat to it.

But what do I know >.>

Yea there’d be almost no reason to run bound except for maybe acro staff (and that’s even debatable) and some non-dagger OH pistol kits, and even then, for the extra damage and immob denial they’d probably just take UC since it also lets them kite better on P/P and gets S/P better disengages and mobility.

True story, Bandit’s Defense is one of the highest-uptime blocks in the game, while providing a stunbreak and very low cooldown to pretty much negate in full most incoming burst combos, so he’s not really wrong by saying the Daredevil has tons of them.

Game’s just full of bad design decisions all over the place since HoT.

Stand The Wall.6987:

jump cast trick was dumb and should stay dead because it was a bug. I think if sword 2 port was instant but didn’t act as a stun breaker then s/d and s/p would become a whole lot more viable. maybe nerf the immob to 1/2 sec. to give sword more chase maybe make the return last only 5 sec.

It added a ton of depth and utility to the kit. A bug, maybe, but it made the sword a viable secondary weapon and gave it much-needed missing chace.

Frankly, I play sword almost entirely for IS/IR allowing me to teleport out halfway or almost entirely through a fight. With kitten duration on return I’d never touch sword ever again.

IR used to be instant and it was insanely overpowered. It’d be a no-cast 1200-range disengage + condi cleanse on initiative; that’s just way bonkers all things considered.

The best they could do is probably have Flanking Strike be split into different skills based on whether or not you have a target nearby; a small lunge for 3 initiative or something if you’re not close enough to a target to hit them with it – like only 300 range or so, (enough to close the gap as the target is just starting to run away) – while remaining as-is when a target is nearby.

TehHobNob.4687:

ich.7086:

100% crit from stealth is on CS now, SA has the juicy Rending Shades now.

I’m now having one of those back in my day moments. Thanks for clearing that up lol.

I’m pretty sure HK has been in CS since before the game even launched o.o

Anyways, marauder is the optimal stat choice for a few reasons:

1.) It just has more stats. Yes, the raw number of stats gained on Marauder/HoT gear when you add everything together is more than the core game ones. It will always net you efficiency; it’s why you lose only 8% damage or so and gain an upwards of 50% more health.

2.) CS is a pretty terrible trait line – especially when considering HK. Daredevil when speccing damage does almost the same amount given its modifiers, while also providing a ton of utility, and Mug with EW in DA provides about the same gains you’ll see on a fight-to-fight basis in PvP environments while netting better burst and self-healing.

3.) Not being allowed to dip into more than three trait lines prevents taking a point or two in SE and ignoring most of DA, so CS is proven to be wasteful since it lacks utility and is only marginally better than DA for damage. Trickery and Daredevil for most builds are pretty much mandatory.

3.) Moreover about CS and HK, There really isn’t much of a purpose to using anything but Vault on a single-hit burst build (since it hits harder than backstab, AoE’s, evades, closes the gap, and costs less initiative than all similar abilities); damage power creep since HoT has AA chains in pretty much everything but P/P and S/P enabling faster damage/burst damage, too so the on-crit reliability for the big backstab and the likes isn’t really a thing anymore. Pressing 1 and saving initiative for utility/defense/Shadow Shot is just strictly better.

4.) Since AA’ing is so potent, the crit chance from Marauder gear is very important to maintain, as do so offsets any need for any use of the Crit Strikes line for PvP/WvW play; for Vault builds, Daredevil runes work fine since it dodges so often, anyways, and again, bursts harder than what Backstab can do.

5.) Things are tankier and passive, so fast-kills from high-power builds usually prove ineffective anyways. Most professions have some sort of passive burst-denial and most professions are very durable as well since they are also typically at-squishiest in marauder gear with either permanent protection/damage reduction of some kind and more baseline health.

6.) They put an ICD on stealth attacks even if they mis in any regard, which also disables AA use, and due to so much free defense, it makes backstab no longer worthwhile since it will rarely land, plus as mentioned the AA chain/s just do more/better damage outside of specialized builds.

So while you’re right in that Valkyrie gear does provide higher DPH potential, it’s ultimately overshadowed in next to every way by Marauder just based on how the game has changed.

On-demand and sustained stealth on all kits including in other professions should be removed, and then the kits reworked and the thief at its core improved. The problem isn’t that the other kits need to be more like D/P but D/P is just powerful on the conceptual level while the rest are underpowered in their implementation, too. It doesn’t help ANet keeps adding in synergy to exclusively the OH pistol, intentional or not (either way, poor design).

Most existing abilities and traits across the game need substantial changes; unfortunately this is very unlikely to occur given ANet’s love for non-competitive profession design.

duster.7013:

1. The cooldown is longer than 15s due to rampage

2. Play warrior sometime. They are mediocre if you play well, and trash if you drop the ball. You can either spec for mobility or killing. If you go power for gs mobility you cant kill anything if they are skilled. Condi is not mobile.

If you’re going to go accusing people of not knowing what the profession is about you should probably know that the meta build runs a 10s cooldown on Berserk itself where Arc Divider has a 3.5s cooldown and can be repeatedly used during Berserker uptime and to not confuse the name between the profession mechanic and an elite.

And that the warrior doesn’t need to be mobile in PvP given rangers, mesmers, and thieves are all much better-suited for decaps and recaps, anyways since the warrior is meant to be sustaining/tanking a point.

But that’s just me.

Black Scoutsman.5830:

I really like this build and the video. Literally the only problem I have is after playing so long with the extra initiative and using steal tactically, I have such a hard time with initiative management with only the base. Especially with CND taking so much initiative, one miss is deadly. How difficult of a transition was that for you?

Kind of why I predicted UH in Acro instead of DS; I personally would see it as a bit redundant given Dash, and it’d only take three dodges in six seconds to end up with the same initiative expense as Trickery, gaining only more efficiency as you continued to fight and dodge, although DS can be majorly beneficial depending on matchup and for disengages/re-engages which is again a playstyle thing (I pretty much never fully disengage from fights with D/D equipped).

Kind of personal preference on how active you are on initiative skill use; I for example play much more aggressively than the OP and thus end up using substantially more initiative.

Moonsinn.5382:

I’ve sat silent on this for too long. This skill is breaking pvp. It does too much. It’s a hard hitting aoe that chills and bleeds. Plus they use it in teamfights and stun everyone for 2 seconds and get 10 stacks of 10 seconds of stability, allowing them to mow over the whole team in reaper shroud, decimating their opponents.

And you can trait it to siphon life and reduce the cd to like 58 seconds. This is unacceptable! This absolutely needs to be nerfed for the good of the game. I’m seeing 2-3 necros on a team just /laugh at opponents that melt without being able to do anything. Everyone knows this skill is broken, which is why necros are the first to be targeted in team fights.

Anet please:
1. Increase cd to like 180 seconds at least

2. Reduce the stun time to 1 second and stability to 1 stack of 4 seconds for each target.

Or

3. Cut damage in half and radius to 240.

Thank you

I’d +1 for henry bait but that might actually cause the devs to listen and nerf it lol.

Either way, some good luls in this thread. Shame he didn’t respond :P

Pretty much comes down to needing to reduce the radius of Arc Divider (Why the hell is a super-low-cooldown melee skill 450? Even Soul spiral on 10x its cooldown on a channel on a profession with limited stability that can lose the skill mid-channel from incoming damage with that ridiculously-big scythe is only 300), but also reworking warrior’s kit around not depending on stances and having stances not be as forgiving as they are.

Warrior’s issue right now is the fact its kit is too simplistic and weak to be effective without some very broken mechanics like Arc Divider, Skullgrinder, AD, and stances. Take those away and you’ve got something pretty much non-functional with no tricks up its sleeve.

But of course, it’s also stupid that there exist any builds (I.E. pretty much every elite spec) that have the capacity to play very safely by being able to soak a crazy amount of damage while also dealing a ton of it simultaneously.

Behellagh.1468:

ThomasC.1056:

• Elite specs : a good idea, but frequency is ridiculous. Moreover, people complain about them that they caused the power creep, and the lack of diversity because they’re supposed to be mandatory in most builds. A rationale explanation is ANet wants people to buy HoT and so made vanillia average. I’m not discussing whether this is true or false, but I’m just underlining it’s not a compliment.

That is the presumption of players, especially those in PvP and WvW who had no concept how to counter the new sub professions. Plus it takes a while to balance something new Vs something that’s been around for 3 years. Pretty sure it was never ANet’s intention to supplant the core professions from PvP and WvW as it smacks of P2W.

• Desert Borderland : the whole ruckus last summer about removing it plainly from WvW speaks for itself.

The original version of the DB map were horrible in terms of travel and the periodic capture the flag mega cannon event which one shot all loser keep gates simply wasn’t enjoyable. ANet introduced the current DB map just before they were swapped out, for a while, which significantly improved the ease of travel across the map. I think the current 1 DB, 2AB maps is helping to ease WvW players into the newer DB map since the original is often pointed at as a primary cause of the drop off of WvW game play.

The thing is even novices can fairly easily point out why the elite specs are more powerful than core; this isn’t something as subtle as a lack of experience, but in many cases it is very clearly and obviously a better idea to always have an elite traited. Very few builds, none of which are particularly fight-capable, can manage well enough without them. In most cases it’s not even a numbers problem but just the way the professions were designed; there were going to be major problems and many of the new aspects of the elites are just strictly un-fun.

WvW has had a huge fallout for many reasons. DBL killed a ton of interest from mid-size (~15-20) groups due to the map traversal and difficult-to-siege keeps, and small-scale havoc died out mostly from locking +5 supply behind a several-thousand-gold paywall and making structure flips more difficult (particularly in the DBL) while providing silly bonuses which made going after structures with said small groups overly-difficult like what-once-was spammable banners, watchtower, etc., and all of these types of groups were negatively impacted by the relative lack of diversity and power creep which made most fights simply uninteresting while promoting massive-blob play.

That build is nothing new and one of the first I came up with. Taobella’s also done it, except with more damage. And still, it doesn’t mean anything. If the point is to suggest dying quickly reduces the competitive nature of a game, we can agree that the argument supporting the claim is null, because those games are strictly more competitive despite enforcing these aspects even more. Not to mention, running from keep to smc takes almost the same amount of time as running from base to outer turrets in league.

And a massive portion of the damage (1.07 * 1.1 * 1.1) comes from Daredevil alone which we’ve already been over multiple times; it’s not about inherent burst but the safety of doing so. DA also provides better combo-burst numbers; Daredevil is better for single-hits and makes play safe enough to make work.

But that’s still a problem fundamental to the Daredevil and the staff. It’s too safe compared to the core game, just like how DH is, and how Scrapper is, how Herald is, how Berserker is, how Druid is, and how Chrono is to their respective core specs. All of these professions can achieve massive burst damage as well.

D/D power core thief for example does plenty more damage in the same amount of time as your proposed staff build (almost double), but I think it’s safe to say D/D power is a trash kit right now played only by loyalists because it’s just way too difficult to pull off successfully without getting instantly annihilated. Why? Because it’s risky and very far from safe, and when your opponent is good, it has massive problems as a consequence.

I’ll still mention that mesmer at its baseline bursts just as hard in a shatter as a CS-built thief, how warrior, ranger, and rev can achieve basically the same (and potentially more) burst damage as this thief and even similar or bigger modifiers (ever see a 40k Maul? I have, 30k even in sPvP), and how inflated the coefficients and might-stacking are on DH and scrapper.

As far as newbies in WvW go, if a new player is upset about the run back, it means he’s far away from his respawn point, and if he is going to run far away from his server’s third roaming alone while not being good at the game… he should be expecting to die, anyways, as it’s just as likely he’ll be getting run over by a blob of 50 people for being in the enemy third and doing anything substantial, anyways.

And if he’s being ganked at the keep, he’s not walking very far, and can take any number of other routes out of the keep to avoid being ganked. Otherwise it’s just a lack of willingness to avoid being farmed/lack of interest in learning how to get better by looking at the damage logs and figuring out why he’s dying.

The meta builds for any small-scale are all condition builds or low-burst. Not a single combo-burst build is in the meta, because all of them under-perform when against skilled players. All of them.

And if he’s actually being ganked, why should a new player even have hopes of winning a 1v2+ against more experienced players? He shouldn’t, because otherwise it suggests he’s just being carried by his build, which means he’s actually playing something overpowered.

Basically, everything you describe suggests either a scenario where a new player either thinks too much of himself, doesn’t care to learn how to improve (so he’ll never be any good in PvP environments), simply isn’t playing the game with an ounce of strategy in mind, or is just a contradiction.

Burst isn’t the problem. Safe, spammable burst is, which is the argument I’ve been posing since the first thread.

Lordrosicky.5813:

DeceiverX.8361:

You can follow them with Flesh wurm and spectral walk which are both on the same or lower cooldowns, or just a ranged weapon. If he really wants to disengage, he could just shortbow 5 or stealth away, anyways, which the class also depends on.

The thief is cornered into Shadowstep because most of its utilities outright suck, and it’s the only 2+ DoT condition cleanse on the entire class, anywhere.

It is an extremely strong utility, but there are so few good ones and the class in such an odd balance state it’s either mandatory or just excellent because it’s better with the rest and there are better alternatives in the rest of the kit.

I would swap any utility on any class for shadowstep in a second. It gives you everything in one skill. It is vastly OP compared to every other utility in the game.

And I’d trade Shadowstep for Suffer!, Plague Signet, and Spectral Armor or Rise!. Heck, there’s even a thread circulating on the necro forums made by necro players about how generally speaking, necro has the widest array of viable utilities of every profession right now.

And necro does have tools to kill power thief. They just don’t exist on the condi meta build because it can’t counter-burst and the thief will just run when it starts getting low (since it’s holding a necro on-point suggesting either it’s holding a scrapper there as well (and allowing a 4v3 on another point for his team, or holding a the likely-critical necro from a 4v4 teamfight elsewhere). Play power and if you play well with the right loadout you should be able to deal with them fairly well. I find thieves are typically on the easier side of matchups in 1v1 scenarios when playing power reaper.

And I’m not denying that Shadowstep is incredibly strong. The problem is that outside of Daredevil, which really only includes BD for great utilities, most of the thief utility skills are awful outside of very specialized builds (AKA not viable in PvP), and a lot of the thief’s kit is too heavily-dependent on it to function without it. Again, it’s the only burst cleanse anywhere on the profession, and PR’s both not in the meta unless playing staff acro vault spam (often seen as not a great build with the potential to have disastrous matchups) and it also fails to cleanse potentially-devastating conditions like weakness and confusion.

If you want to suggest buffing other utilities on the thief and/or the profession itself at the expense of Shadowstep in ways to keep the class useful, be my guest, but pretending like the class would be fine if this were nerfed heavily is just asinine.

@Helseth, trying a little too hard to troll. Might have had some bites on a 0.5s cast but 2-3s made it pretty obvious lol.

I’d even be fine with something like Condition damage/toughness/expertise as a means of having a bit more aggression to power builds while keeping weak to conditions due to the lack of provided health.

The existence of two or more defensive stats while dealing incredulous amounts of damage thanks to condition powercreep for PvE have made these builds just totally excessive.

And they’ve been on the fringes of being overpowered for longer than the condi buffs have been around for.

Dire was never even part of the release-level game; it was an afterthought when they removed the magic find stat from gear and wanted to compensate people with something new, and conditions early on were under-performing generally speaking since torment didn’t exist, burning and poison didn’t stack, and confusion wasn’t a DoT, so it made sense as a kit for non-bleed-heavy builds.

These days, though, since conditions just deal so much damage and ignore armor, there’s really no justification in keeping the kits around.

They already removed a type of stat combination before (on what was something fairly expensive overall) to implement dire; there’s no reason they couldn’t go back on that with the same exact process.

And no, Thomas, condi builds currently burst almost as quickly as power ones; I can achieve a 6-10k tick in < 2s on guardian and my reaper’s soul spiral frequently ticks for almost 3k within a two second window on a berserker build running no condition damage at all. My thief can get to 20k bleed ticks and 8k poison ticks in less than ten seconds – or 5k+ ticks immediately on engage, with most of the bleeding being unblockable. There are also a huge number of damage reduction effects in the game at the moment which only effect power damage; it’s not uncommon to find people taking > 70% damage reduction on permanent or near-permanent uptime. An all-in 20k power burst gets quickly turned into 6k and is left with substantially higher cooldowns than the 8s-and-under cooldowns you find on skills like Illusory Counter which deal > 10k condition damage.

Acrisor.8097:

Please do not start the hype train. Please do not even dare to fuel it.

When first expansion was released, the hype started from these discussions, and after release people started complaining on forums about price, bugs, features they did not like, professions overpowered in PvP, graphical glitches, WvW maps, game balance, and so on… even though the community started the hype all together.

Please, stop asking for a new expansion. If you continue on this path, you are sending marketing team messages like this: “we got money and we desire a new expansion”. Stop pushing developers in turbo-programming-mode, because we all know where this is going.

However, this is just a thought. If you do want a new expansion, keep giving them ideas and fuel for this hype train. But be warned: be careful what you wish for, because you might get only some of it, with a big price.

I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re almost a year late; ANet’s formalized that there will be another expansion coming almost ten months ago. I made the proposal linked in my signature solely because they announced another one, hoping it’d get popular as a basis of inspiration due to how poorly-designed most HoT content is. Obviously the potential release date is way off, though we have no info on what’s coming, and it very well could be shortly after the next LS episode. The hype train was not good for HoT; I think MO recognizes they better not overhype and under-deliver the next one, which is why things are quiet.

Yes, it’s a bad move, and I’m probably not going to buy it after the blunder that HoT still is until that itself gets fixed, but NCSoft demanded they profit more because HoT under-sold, and demanded it be done with more, and more frequent, boxed expansions.

Once the players started pretending en masse that a boxed expansion was going to be good for the game in 2013, there was no stopping it. It was originally not part of the plan, and it never should have been. Too late, though.