Guild Wars 2

May want to directly upload the screenshot in full size as it’s currently only viewable as a thumbnail, btw.

Like I said, depends a lot on builds/professions involved, and it’d need to be effectively a pure stance warrior with Balanced Stance as well.

I said it’s doable; not likely, and I think it goes without saying this post isn’t made from the top players in the world, not to mention sending a solo player to lord is usually indicative of a winning game, anyways.

Lordrosicky.5813:

DeceiverX.8361:

babazhook.6805:

DeceiverX.8361:

Mal.1670:

apharma.3741:

You could also take a leaf out of revs books and make headshot a longer daze but with kitten CD….

Either way this thread will be a salt mine, let me grab my popcorn.

Thief weapons skills don’t have cooldowns, so how would you even accomplish that lol

The way they did for stealth attacks; ANet doesn’t care.

2s ICD would probably make the trait plenty usable and hit spammers while giving stab-less/limited-stab professions like necro a little bit of relief.

I doubt there many thieves that spam headshot multiple times in less then two seconds. It just too easy to counter. If they are just spamming headshot without waiting to see if the opponent is trying to use (Which takes time) a skill all you do is stop trying to cast skills and let them spam. The damage is miniscule.

I play a thief mostly and will encounter these headshot spams time to time. I just stop using skills for a few seconds and am peferectly willing to have that thief burn off ini doing nothing.

In other words a 2 second ICD will simply help the bad thieves and do little to change this argument.

I was once watching a teamate in wvw fight a p/p thief. The theif died about 10 times in a row. He was fighting an ele while using unload and every single time the ele threw up a reflect kept firing. The ele used that tendency against the thief just as any class can do against the headshot spam.

Yes, and for the exact opposite scenario you cited; builds with limited stability and reflects for example have limited to no counterplay to it and take tons of damage while not being able to cast abilities or really do anything, either. As I’ve said repeatedly in this thread, the very nature of PI spam should be nerfed because it’s overly-punishing to builds already-susceptible to being interrupted. D/P has the tools to get around projectile hate and blocks as well via Shadow Shot, too.

Which is also why I proposed the 2s ICD; it negates the efficacy of just mindlessly spamming 4 and reduces the punishment via raw damage for chain-interrupting your target (the thief already has great damage from its AA) while not impacting reasonably-skilled play. This also lets PI achieve its full damage over a longer period of time against builds with more stab access or projectile hate while not really reducing the efficacy of its damage when used in most scenarios.

As intended, this is only supposed to hurt unskilled play resulting in efficacy due to matchup, rather than just being a strict nerf to the thief’s interrupt potential or reducing the damage on PI which depending on the tier of play is seen as close to essential.

A 2 s icd is worthless. Think about why for a second. You hit it once and they are dazed so you wont hit another for at least 2 seconds. If there is to be an icd it should be 15 seconds or something. If its a damage nerf then about 25%

I hope this is sarcasm, lol.

Spartacus.3192:

Auroraborealis.7310:

Its most ridiculous when you have a Warrior lord rushing because they can literally tank the lord and 2 other players simultaneously long enough to secure a kill.

So you are saying a 2v1 (2 players vs 1 enemy warrior) AND you had Lord and his soldiers helping you and you couldn’t kill the warrior before he killed lord?

I think that says more about the 2 players on your team than it does about the warrior or Lord.

or shall we chalk this post up as another one of those super exaggerations?

I mean depends heavily on cooldowns and the builds at hand. Stance DPS berserker can surely last long enough to get the kill during its immunity uptime. It’d burn everything to do so, but it would be doable.

Helps to know what type of content this is suited for. Acro’s a massive damage and offensive utility/killspeed loss compared to Trickery, especially since ToTC pretty much carries CS; your build has no fury save a terrible proc effect in CS that won’t do anything on-engage which largely defeats the purpose of moving to 80% crit chance.

P/P itself is a burst kit and does fairly low sustained damage since its AA is weak, especially given the lack of Trickery to bump your initiative gain substantially and since you’re losing more than 25% comparatively and lack on-engage fury.

I love YSIM – short cast, low cooldown, solid heal, great LF gen, does AoE damage at range. CC is weak imho just because it keeps you in combat with the vuln. It really doesn’t need it anymore considering how accessible conditions are now.

Vampirism should be self-only and lose the ICD on stack consumption and just have fewer stacks. This keeps the damage reasonable but makes it a potent offensive/sustained raw heal, with amazing synergy with axe, GS, and dagger with their multi-hit skills.

Cerby.1069:

@ OP, ur gonna love pvp bro.

Ur absolutely gonna love pvp thiefs. Vault spam over and over and over and over. They do it up to around 7 times in a row without blinking an eye. As a warrior running a meta build, I only get a single chance every 20-25 seconds to counter, and that’s due to headbutt. You land any other stun and they will immediately use one of their 4 cc breaks. With headdbutt you can land some serious condi damage if u trait, and that’s what lets you kill/break their cycle. Easier said than done though.

Other option is gunflame if ur a war, Its actually fairly easy to break vault with gunflames if you fire them as soon as they end their last vault (will hit them on their next vault).

Otherwise you need an aoe cc or damage spell/trap to counter vaults.

Its srsly lulz tho in pvp……thief just vaults over and over on one of the capture points and you can’t do jack.

Not running M/S or Taunt or any other number of low-cooldown CC’s? Warrior’s probably got the best chance at dealing with it tbh.

Except for the fact that nothing about this build is OP?

Literally every other profession in the game except ele can deal near-identical damage in strictly less time with fewer disadvantages with much more consistency.

@Simon, typically speaking, signets is not a Daredevil build unless it’s playing some kind of combo-staff concept. It’s typically a core thief build since sacrificing DA and Trickery are very risky given the fact it relies heavily on weakness and PS from DA to prevent retaliation and loses damage from mug, or loses its reliability from ToTC and initiative for finishes when leaving Tr.

Astralporing.1957:

DeceiverX.8361:

You can’t blame your community for making terrible demands/creating a bad situation

Of course you can’t. Especially since the community did not ask for that. It was only some voices that did, not the community as a whole. Granted, those were very loud voices, but they never represented anything more than a small subgroup of players.

You’re not wrong, but you still can’t do it.

Fact is, the mistake was listening, and the continuous mistake they’re making is they’re still listening.

PvE? Does it matter?
General gameplay? Worse, but this was the same when colin was on the team, so it doesn’t really matter.

Odds are, Colin was a scapegoat for the bad expansion which was created strictly from community demand for a “hard mode” power-creepy boxed expansion that people were demanding in droves, despite ANet’s very clear claims towards launch they had no intentions of releasing anything like one. You can’t blame your community for making terrible demands/creating a bad situation without a huge PR backlash, so you do the next best thing and save face by getting rid of the guy who maybe looked like made the bad call.

Seems like it didn’t matter much. There is definitely a developer out there who if they left would definitely cause amazing, positive changes for the game.

Seems like a lot of employees are getting hung up on this someone, though; I imagine it’s also why Josh left, too.

Wars don’t bring much value to blobs and frontline so you’ll get rolled as a downlevel/core specialization. Obviously even worse in 1v1/roaming.

EoTM on the other hand has always been the go-to leveling spot for many, and that’s seen no changes and is arguably in a healthier state than the current WvW lol.

ArchonWing.9480:

1. Fix Lag
2. WvW-specific skill balance
3. Fix Lag
3. Fix Lag
4. Fix Lag
5. Give us a legendary path
6. Fix Lag

Oh, and fix the lag.

Tell you what, if you do nothing but overhaul the engine by the time you release your next Heart of [whatever] expansion, I’ll buy it.

It’s all profession design, sadly.
Too many passives and procs and whatnot flood the servers with requests, exacerbated by bigger blobs since the small-scale scene no longer takes up portions of the map queue/number of players on the map.

But passives are essential for PvE players to not die to their requested hard content so we’re stuck like this forever.

Watched a video of CU and I’m very excited. The tech there looks awesome and they as a company are prioritizing GvG over everything.

Vault has the potential to deal more damage, but on any semblance of a good build, it dealt much less than SoTM.

Not uncommon to find revs in WvW hitting for 20-25k SoTM’s. A 25k vault is CS/Tr/DrD gone signets and running signets, especially without DA, automatically makes any build terrible for the most part.

XTR.9604:

I think that a lot of the builds you’re talking about are considered “high risk, high reward” builds where people had to build full zerk to do that kind of damage which puts them at risk of dying much faster themselves.

There are other cases like warrior that can go full zerk and still have excellent sustain, or go dire/rabid and do the same kind of damage from their initial condi burst and have incredible sustain lol.

Ultimately, it has been made pretty clear that burning damage isn’t going to be changed any time soon since people have been complaining about it since they made it stacking. Things like gunflame, 100 blades, ranger longbow 2, and a few other skills have been complained about for a long time as well.

To be fair, I think OP should check their own build, because none of my characters take that kind of damage and some of them are set up to be a bit squishier. I’d be interested to know what class/build you’re running to be able to tell if this is user error on your part or not.

If you’re running around in WvW, one key thing I like to try to build my characters around is trying to have 18k+ HP, 3k+ armor, and if it is a power build, 2500~ power without stacks, 200%+ crit damage and 30%+ crit chance. This is very easy to accomplish with a mixture of marauder, zerk, and cavalier on pretty much any class.

Unless playing a scrapper with bulwark gyro + prot or druid with bark skin + prot, every build in the game will take this kind of damage or more from signet burst.

The thing is, the build still sucks and most passives outright kill it; rev auto-taunt for example straight ends the thief before the CnD even lands since it procs on steal from SoH or BV on Mug, as this build runs no stunbreak or condition removal. The same as said for FoF DH getting free immunity to the backstab, CC mirror mesmer interrupting the CnD and backstab, static aura on ele interrupting the CnD and backstab, auto-shroud on DM necro free-soaking the damage, passive weakness on ranger negating 50%+ of the damage on top of bark skin + prot, passive DP on warrior, etc. The build is literally hard-countered in almost every way by passives alone lol, and since it lacks any utils and is playing D/D of all kits, it stands almost no chance when it comes to a fight.

Basically, it’s an assassination build, and only works when the target is unsuspecting/oblivious and on cooldowns… who knew.

XxsdgxX.8109:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Xenesis.6389:

Meh happened to me months ago, no one cared and it won’t change. Was down before I could react, basically only an auto skill would have saved me. Wasn’t even full zerk either.
Good luck with the balance crusade, I don’t see anet giving two figs about it.

Thief was within 1200 range of you unstealthed blew 4 long CDs to land two Hits, no different then most big hits that happen in WvW, it sucks when it happens but WvW will never be balanced, you will never see those numbers in PvP just because less stats and less damage modifiers. Fun fact you can get hit from a well setup maul for 18k in PvP the Ranger was super glass and died when sneezed on though, that was the biggest hit I have seen in PvP to date.

So far the classes I know that can land over 20k hits in WvW are Revenant CoR doesn’t need any setup just hit CoR and can easily achieve over 15k damage, Warrior with Gun Flame, Warrior with Arc Divider hits for over 15k easily, Ranger with Maul can hit for 20k with setup, and Thief running full Signet with setup on D/D with Berserker gear. I haven’t seen other classes achieve anything higher than these ones.

Huge difference is that Rev and Warrior have huge tells, AKA Telegraph on Rev and “Cast” animation on Gun Flame. The range only means kitten on blob fights, thieves just deal the damage from literally nowhere (stealth spam cancer).

Edit: And for Rev at least to deal above 15k+ crit against a glass build you pretty much need to have the stars aligned.

If you can’t recognize that there’s a thief in the distance bee-lining it straight at you out of stealth (because D/D burst mandates the build will not have OOC stealth), and is likely burning two teleports straight at you, and then engages you, hits you for huge damage on CnD, and then 3/4 second later you fail to dodge, block, invuln, get a passive, CC, or really do virtually anything to negate the obvious incoming stealth attack… there’s no saving you. I could have engaged you harder and faster on a necromancer and you’d have still died because you lack basic situational awareness.

Not to mention in almost every case this build runs core thief instead of Daredevil (I.E. terrible), and to achieve this damage, the thief engages you with all utility skills and elites burned just to get that damage (I.E. he’s one/two-shotted if you immediately stunbreak/dodge after the CnD, which is easier to do than when against a warrior since its combo burst has shorter cast animations and does it in an AoE which a dodge will not strictly negate from the distance of the attack, unlike how backstab gets entirely negated and puts the thief’s AA chain on an ICD).

Even Gunflame signet of might Berserker has less-obvious tells with less-available counterplay. D/D signets is literally one of the worst builds in the game.

And in ANet’s delusional mind they think everyone with the expansion wants to play the elites and that it’ll incite the free players to buy power via the expansion.

How are those profit margins working? Not well.

Crinn.7864:

Emdrix.6124:

Crinn.7864:

Emdrix.6124:

If you spam 4 or 1 you already ate a lot of damage because you did not blind anything and did not interrupt any key skills.

If you’re spamming 4 you should have interrupted every skill which would have included “key” skills.

Exception being warriors and rangers that are typically drowning in stability.

Not really. spamming 4 at the wrong time wont interrupt anything. U can spam at the start waste all your energy and not have anything left for the heal or other key skills

I was assuming a basic level of competency on the thief’s part.

Assuming basic competency from pretty much anyone these days usually gets you nowhere. We’re more than a year into HoT; most people still playing think the current game state is fine.

babazhook.6805:

DeceiverX.8361:

Mal.1670:

apharma.3741:

You could also take a leaf out of revs books and make headshot a longer daze but with kitten CD….

Either way this thread will be a salt mine, let me grab my popcorn.

Thief weapons skills don’t have cooldowns, so how would you even accomplish that lol

The way they did for stealth attacks; ANet doesn’t care.

2s ICD would probably make the trait plenty usable and hit spammers while giving stab-less/limited-stab professions like necro a little bit of relief.

I doubt there many thieves that spam headshot multiple times in less then two seconds. It just too easy to counter. If they are just spamming headshot without waiting to see if the opponent is trying to use (Which takes time) a skill all you do is stop trying to cast skills and let them spam. The damage is miniscule.

I play a thief mostly and will encounter these headshot spams time to time. I just stop using skills for a few seconds and am peferectly willing to have that thief burn off ini doing nothing.

In other words a 2 second ICD will simply help the bad thieves and do little to change this argument.

I was once watching a teamate in wvw fight a p/p thief. The theif died about 10 times in a row. He was fighting an ele while using unload and every single time the ele threw up a reflect kept firing. The ele used that tendency against the thief just as any class can do against the headshot spam.

Yes, and for the exact opposite scenario you cited; builds with limited stability and reflects for example have limited to no counterplay to it and take tons of damage while not being able to cast abilities or really do anything, either. As I’ve said repeatedly in this thread, the very nature of PI spam should be nerfed because it’s overly-punishing to builds already-susceptible to being interrupted. D/P has the tools to get around projectile hate and blocks as well via Shadow Shot, too.

Which is also why I proposed the 2s ICD; it negates the efficacy of just mindlessly spamming 4 and reduces the punishment via raw damage for chain-interrupting your target (the thief already has great damage from its AA) while not impacting reasonably-skilled play. This also lets PI achieve its full damage over a longer period of time against builds with more stab access or projectile hate while not really reducing the efficacy of its damage when used in most scenarios.

As intended, this is only supposed to hurt unskilled play resulting in efficacy due to matchup, rather than just being a strict nerf to the thief’s interrupt potential or reducing the damage on PI which depending on the tier of play is seen as close to essential.

Randulf.7614:

How did the Kodan sail their massive ships into Frostgorge Sound, when the map above is mostly land and isn’t connected to the sea?

There are actually potential scientific explanations to this if Jormag is the cause of the cold; see: Beringia Land Bridge

Carry on, though, folks!

I have tested it multiple times on multiple occasions; the trait works.

It doesn’t display in the log because 7% outgoing critical damage as a modifier != 105 Ferocity or an update of 7% critical damage as though provided by 105 ferocity; all multipliers except for ferocity-stacking effects are applied in a multiplicative fashion after base damage, meaning that the trait would be in a constant state of dynamically-updating your character menu every time you received an extra modifier, stack on LA, etc.

It could use a re-wording, (something like, “Your critical strikes deal 7% more damage.”) but the trait is not bugged and works exactly as I described; it’s just conditional on critical attacks.

Rambitshouse.8712:

Jim Hunter.6821:

Woop S.7851:

There’s another one I’m waiting on called Blessed Online that allows customized skill system similar to the 8 skill bar system in GW1, holy trinity (healer, dps, nuker possible), you can set what skills to activate when you press 1 – 9 with specialization branches after you reach a certain level (for example Cleric -> Priest, or Cleric -> Paladin tank, still in beta, they’re revamping their skill system even more for NA release in 2017, check it out:

Custom skill system setup: https://youtu.be/UnzmzoDWF6I?t=8s
Realm vs Realm (custom build ranger): https://youtu.be/1_XaNSXpzSE?t=43s

Eval.2371:

I’ve been looking around my self, incase the 4th just does not cut it for me, any recommendations other than black desert and FFXIV?

It looks interesting but it’s being published by Aeria Games, which means it will likely turn into a kittenty P2W crapfest.

Agreed, looks unique but you go the website and see a girl in high heels with huge knockers with the cliche pistol. Just little hints like that make me think of boob and soul….I mean blade and soul. Just make a good game, same ole mmo cosmetic crap being released lol

Anet, you can go ahead and give me an infraction point now

Granted, Eastern players eat this stuff up. The same said about the P2W thing above with Revelations; P2W is not seen negatively in most Asian markets; even CH GW2 runs a random-box-heavy cash shop if I recall correctly. It could very well be just catering to their respective market to profit more.

With Aeria I’d be more worried about maintenance and in general, quality. They’re not exactly a company that makes games for the long-haul or games that are very good to begin with…

Dev of the year already won in this thread.

Better luck next time to the rest. Communication and proactive problem solving will do it

Cynz.9437:

well i play scrapper and necro pretty frequently due to constantly getting double/tripple thieves or 3+ DHs on enemy team and i think PI is fine given current state of classes

I would hope so considering the amount of passive stability and projectile hate the scrapper has.

Might as well be saying full-condition builds are fine playing as a DS ele.

Fixing forum bug.

Mal.1670:

apharma.3741:

You could also take a leaf out of revs books and make headshot a longer daze but with kitten CD….

Either way this thread will be a salt mine, let me grab my popcorn.

Thief weapons skills don’t have cooldowns, so how would you even accomplish that lol

The way they did for stealth attacks; ANet doesn’t care.

2s ICD would probably make the trait plenty usable and hit spammers while giving stab-less/limited-stab professions like necro a little bit of relief.

All % damage modifiers do not show up in the stat panel as mentioned. Test a few hits on something, OOC, remove the trait, and try again; you’ll be down on damage. Further, Flawless Strikes doesn’t modify the actual Critical Damage stat based on ferocity; it’s a fixed % increase of outgoing critical hits, which means it’s much more significant than the 105-equivalent Ferocity.

The thing about modifiers, and particularly in the case of the thief and the CS line, is that they get more effective the more you have since they’re multiplicative except for ferocity. A single trait for 7% will do very little, but combined with many others, the multipliers stack up in intensity, such that a thief running CS over meta DA and using Trickery and Daredevil with HM and Bound (odds are if you’re going CS you’re going for damage anyways) – assuming no ferocity gains for whatever reason – will have the following:

CS:
1 (base damage) * 1.07 (FlS) * 1.1 (FerS) * 1.15 (LA) * 1.07 (HM) * 1.1 (BD) = extra 59.3% damage (without the potential 30% critical damage modifier (on marauder amulet, for example) bonus based on ferocity factored; CS ends up providing much more damage overall).

DA (Improv):
1 * 1.1 * 1.15 * 1.07 * 1.1 = extra 48.9% damage.

So the 7% figure ends up turning into a multiplier of an additional 10.4% The more you stack, the more substantial the gains become.

Ferocity, like what you see from the effects of Practiced Tolerance and NQ, is additive. Because of this, it also means that the more you stack, the less effective point-per-point it becomes. All professions have 150% base critical damage. Marauder amulet baseline puts the thief to 187.3%. The increase in damage isn’t a relative 37.3% like the other bonuses mentioned above, however; the real difference is 187.3/150, or roughly 24%.

From the gains from CS, assuming NQ is used, the gains move to 201% from PT and then from there 217.67% from NQ under fury. Holistically, this is only a 45% gain in damage between crits and non-crits from baseline – the entirety of your Ferocity stat contribution yields less damage on critical hits than your other combined modifiers alone!

This is why % damage modifiers need to be handed out sparingly; a profession with tons of access to increasing-damage modifiers can end up hitting harder in Soldier’s or sometimes even Sentinel’s gear by stacking offensive traits rather than taking Berserker-type gear and stacking defensive ones. Add boons like Might into the mix and things get out of hand quickly. The thief is balanced in this regard since it lacks substantial might access (also why it’s weak in sPvP but strong in WvW since its base stats are higher from gear letting those % increases scale harder) and because aside from LA and EW, these all require pretty big build commitments/sacrifices. However, you can quickly see how others with lots of might (Ele/Herald/War/Druid/Reaper) could get way out of control if given such multipliers, as they also have more power to scale damage from.

So while insignificant on their own, small multipliers play a huge role in defining CS and the thief’s damage in general (also why the thief has some of the best DPS in raids, since it achieves simply more potential modifiers than other professions).

The thief : mesmer matchup favored the thief more in sPvP than it did in WvW. The argument used to be based on the mesmer being squishy since power ran berserker amulet, as did the thief, and the thief could much easier get the jump on and subsequently instantly kill the mesmer. Condi wasn’t as strong as it is now and was dependent on extended fights from PU which would cause lost point control.

Chrono obviously changes this and the Daredevil in this matchup stands at a wildly-swinging measure of performance mostly based on what builds are being played.

A good mesmer will and should absolutely annihilate a mediocre thief in WvW. Good vs good… it’s a big toss-up that really favors neither.

Thanks. I haven’t looked thoroughly at the API’s. Really surprised to see dye color there, though I guess it could be legacy from pre-wardrobe in case someone wanted to make a previewer.

Nothing new. Profession/elite spec design failed us so we’re in the state we’re in. The combat just isn’t fun.

4k PI is definitely doable. Not the result of the meta build in most circumstances per se, but easily doable considering it only requires like a 7.5k backstab crit -equivalent of power given marauder amulet.

So like DA with Executioner + EW and Bound + Lead Attacks on Trickery will get you there with no problems.

Weakness is too powerful of an effect to apply as an AoE and be re-applied so quickly. AoE reveal is also completely excessive; stealth stacking for all professions – scrapper, mesmer, ranger, and including thief, need nerfs, not more forced reveals.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Also something needs to be done about the clone spam.

Give Phantasms 50% damage reduction vs aoe and cleave, and only take 100% damage when focused. Reduce all attacks and condi ticks on Clones to 0 (so they cant be killed, yet can be hit). Then remove clone generating traits such as DE and Illusionary Reversion. Thus the dependency on these silly traits is gone, and all clone generating is time gates to weapon (and utility) skill CD’s. The potentcy of shatters, or the timing thereof, is thus limited to clone generation (or lack thereof), and propper balancing of these skills, and mesmer damage sources can easily be balanced.

Like, duh!

Yes and no. A problem to consider is even dagger AA’s cleave now. And it’s possible to stack a substantial amount of clone-health bonuses which would make them closely-durable to most core ranger pets. There’s no melee non-cleave weapon currently in the game. Further, Chronophantasma would pretty much always keep mesmers locked into the Chronomancer since lower access to clone generation would prioritize double-shatters/clone protection even more than currently.

OriOri.8724:

DeceiverX.8361:

Yannir.4132:

Somebody said in a different thread that they should remove passive damage ticks from confusion and apply more damage on the active part, and AFA I can see that could work IMO. That would effectively be a nerf for both condi warrior and mesmer, which are currently among the best of SoloQ builds.

The hilarious part is that used to be how confusion worked; it did massive damage on skill activation but only on skill activation, and mesmer didn’t have access to spammable torment on clones, either.

The PvE community whined it prevented condi mesmer from dealing big damage in dungeons on bosses that attack slowly, though, so ANet made it one of the best DoT’s in the game lol.

As far as OP goes, these suggestions are the wrong way to go about a lot of things without first massively nerfing everything else related to HoT. Tbh, only minor tweaks are needed at most to make most of these problems no longer exist, but the massive issues for other classes are much more obvious and require much more attention.

Confusion and torment are still only mediocre in most PvE scenarios.

For dedicated DPS-condi builds, yea, though tick per tick it’s one of the best. Torment is ineffective because bosses don’t move when people stack since it’s only better than bleeding when the target moves.

Which is what everyone with a reasonable head on their shoulders was saying would happen, anyways. The change to make confusion a DoT was honestly just a bad choice.

Fixing the forum bug.

apharma.3741:

Moises.2196:

apharma.3741:

Moises.2196:

Most people on the forums say they are ok with nerfs to their class if the other classes get tone down as well, so why not start that discussion and try to figure something out that works to better balance all classes in a way that we can all agree? I’m trying to change the conversation to a more productive one. All you have to do is see Cynz reaction to these nerf suggestions. I promise that if you included toning down all the other classes while asking for a nerf to thief Cynz and others would be more willing to compromise.

Editted it down to the part that’s relevant not because of any underhandedness.

The thing is I’ve seen a lot of nerf mesmer threads as well, it’s not until you explain that a mesmers shield is the highest cool down block for duration in the entire game that people start to realise maybe it’s not actually imbalanced.

Anyway as I’ve said many times as well a lot of HoT things need toning down, I posted in the mesmer section a long time ago how I would reduce the class to how I thought the elite spec should be.

I can’t find it but I’ll give you the gist of it, no continuum split, alacrity mesmer only mechanic, less quickness and even then chrono would be a trait line that would be a good option in many cases. However it would be utterly attrocious if every other class was left the same way and I would expect some seriously deep nerfs to others as well.

The point is moot though as ANet clearly showed with the first 2 balance patches that they would rather change core aspects than nerf the power creeped HoT specs and the clear imbalances within them.

I agree with this 100%, and yes I feel that if the community had these discussions we would be able to come to an agreement across all classes and player base, but anet keeps going at it the wrong way. I’m hoping that if we have more discussions like this where the community can agree on nerfs and buffs than anet might eventually see what we are really asking for which is a balanced game that is fun.

The thing is mesmer wouldn’t be in a great place with the above suggestion (though it would bring the elite spec in line) as they still have pathetic sustained damage due to balancing around clones and phantasms. It might also delete them from PvE and WvW roaming would be back to core mesmer most likely because stealth is so OP there.

Even nerfs on this level to other classes doesn’t really help as there are deep seated issues within the classes. HoT pets for ranger are way too tanky in 1v1s but die super easy in team fights, ele does not have anything but support builds as they don’t have the tools to be a roamer or a bruiser anymore, thief having bouncing off the walls crazy mobility but no ability to be a team fighter. That’s just to name a few.

Thing is, this was to be expected as soon as we saw a PvE-oriented design focus.

People have been screaming for dedicated roles forever. They’re now set in stone in their design, and as expected it’s had a huge negative effect on the game.

As a side note, chrono shield block cooldown is kinda weird. On one hand, it has the highest cooldown in the game, but on the other hand, CS enables it to have the highest effective block uptime of all shield blocks in the game. Mesmer I think suffers from the most inherent design flaws (particularly due to the trickery of balancing chronomancer; we’ve talked sustained damage before and as you said the limitation is clones, which buffing baseline damage makes mesmer (especially chrono) do too much potential burst and sustained damage in PvP environments).

I’d really like to just see a big step away from the trend they’ve followed and make the nature of the game much simpler; to deal damage, you need to attack and make yourself vulnerable on some level; to negate damage, you need to stop attacking and defend. Aside from a very select few weapon skills like Pistol Whip, Blurred Frenzy, and the occasional major cooldown like Endure Pain or well-timed Virtue of Courage every 30+ seconds. Nothing or very little should be able to do both at the same time without some very serious investment/pre-cast animations.

Probably would rework your opinion, OP.

Most of the examples you cited are either misguided or downright wrong despite the fact I agree with your premise.

Really, the game is just too bloated with freebies right now. Passives, procs, and the likes are all for whatever reason now extremely potent, on very low cooldowns, and punish skilled play made by the opposing player.

Whereas prior, you had great example skills like Hard to Catch which was a free auto-stunbreak and on a 60s cooldown on a profession that had limited expendable stunbreak access (since Shadowstep is the only good condi cleanse on thief). Now you have it on half cooldown with refilling endurance + another trait in the line that makes it invulnerable on a 40s ICD and a passive immob cure on its GM, too.

Every profession is like this now, and it’s made GW2 just less interesting in general since you never know how to approach combat aside from very strict rotations on optimal kits which try to negate as many of these builds as possible, rather than utilizing skilled play to enable them to work against most things.

Yannir.4132:

Somebody said in a different thread that they should remove passive damage ticks from confusion and apply more damage on the active part, and AFA I can see that could work IMO. That would effectively be a nerf for both condi warrior and mesmer, which are currently among the best of SoloQ builds.

The hilarious part is that used to be how confusion worked; it did massive damage on skill activation but only on skill activation, and mesmer didn’t have access to spammable torment on clones, either.

The PvE community whined it prevented condi mesmer from dealing big damage in dungeons on bosses that attack slowly, though, so ANet made it one of the best DoT’s in the game lol.

As far as OP goes, these suggestions are the wrong way to go about a lot of things without first massively nerfing everything else related to HoT. Tbh, only minor tweaks are needed at most to make most of these problems no longer exist, but the massive issues for other classes are much more obvious and require much more attention.

I moved to TC solely to be in T2. Since the T1 push it’s mostly been unfun and overly-straining on a lot of leadership.

We’re not stacked enough to be competitive in T1, and prior to the stacking we did get, we were a perfect fit for T2 trading first/second place with a few servers.

Vavume.8065:

DeceiverX.8361:

Vavume.8065:

DeceiverX.8361:

Vavume.8065:

Kocoff.7582:

Who agrees with me?

Especially Throw Gunk. (Stolen Item from engineers)

Throw gunk is useful for condi builds, however I do find the Rev slow to be useless.

I really hope you’re joking here. It’s insanely strong and probably one of the best stolen items o.o

Screenshot no might, down 200 power from lack of bloodlust stacks versus an NPC in heavy armor. The damage is insane.

I was speaking from a personal standpoint, as a condi thief I find it useless.

Assuming you’re running Expertise, you should be getting an upwards of 2s slow per attack which is also crazy good.

You would need 100% duration for 2s slow, which I don’t have, and even if I did I would still think 2 sec slow was hardly worth using, opinion tho right.

S’pose, though with Improv this also doubles suggesting between 3-4s which is a very long slow time for people to be taking penalized animations and channels.

Imho the Ele’s Ice Shard one is the worst just because it really does nothing against them given their cleansing or even a large number of classes most of the time with all the chill hate/negation/reductions/resistance. Mace Head Crack is also up there on the list as one of my least favorites since DH’s just have a massive excess of blocks to a point where it feels like it’s not valuable during the fight.

fluffdragon.1523:

Straegen.2938:

DeceiverX.8361:

Hate to break it to you, but the thief was way worse pre-HoT. Daredevil carries the profession so hard it’s ridiculous, even with the power creep on others.

The thief’s big nerf came with the trait rework when they removed stats from trait lines and forced builds into taking entire trait lines rather than partial ones. Prior to that (first couple years) thieves were a serious force particularly in duels and a lot more fun to play. The Dare Devil line brought back some of that feel but added a ton of strong builds in other classes to contend with.

+1, because kittening THIS.

I’ve been upset about it for a good year now and have been fighting to recover a build that can no longer be done because it was both removed from the game and made less viable because of stat splitting.

I lost 300 Vitality, 7% Precision to Vitality, endurance-on-dodge, and boatloads of swiftness that helped me kite around foes and deal with 1v3 fights against tougher mobs with relative ease. And that’s just from the old Acrobatics line. And then there was Shadow Arts which gave me even more defenses for a dual-dagger build with blind-on-stealth and longer stealth duration (and some 50 Toughness and Healing Power, I believe) which made breaking combat for more viable. Now it’s either re-gear my thief and hope to make ends meet by undercutting my primary force of healing (Invigorating Precision), or grind the disaster zone that is HoT and try to find the ebony orbs needed to make a full Marauder set.

And while I may run Daredevil for the damage and durability boosts, it feels like I’m just taking “the rest of Acrobatics.” Not a new trait line, but one that I had before they turned it into a half-baked husk of itself. I might not PvP (I am seriously bad at it regardless of game), but it’s a shame that the “build diversity” we were promised turned into “Daredevil or bust.”

The stats are all recoverable; change a few pieces of armor to compensate, and this even includes non-HoT content; you were at strictly lower stats elsewhere beforehand since they increased the stats on weapons and armor proportionately to the loss of stats from traits. Based on your post it sounds like you played D/D CS/SA/Tr before in which case you’d be up 300 power in DPS-oriented gear and are probably with more ferocity and precision/crit chance. My stat spread is actually strictly better with the stat decoupling from traits; I have more of everything than before. Odds are other professions with trait lines that didn’t provide much in terms of stats (like 300 healing power) are just functioning relatively better with more obscure builds than before since they’re no longer taking a huge stat loss for good trait investment.

PT I’ll give you, and I do think the change was rather aimless, probably to offset the nerf to critical damage output with the ferocity change. That said, it’s avoidable via Valkyrie/Marauder gear in a few spots, and will leave you off better than before in 90% of cases.

Old Acro with old S/D was overpowered prior to HoT in the state the game was at the time. Sad truth. Daredevil just amplifies it and is bad design, something I’ll also not deny. That said, the thief/daredevil is still plenty viable in 1v1’s in all formats, and Daredevil makes fighting a wider breadth of professions much easier overall and is much harder to shut down than the old Acro build.

Thieves are less durable in SA because the healing got nerfed on Rejuv and the line is missing its secondary +300 healing power (something you’re coincidentally not complaining about) which you could have specced into. However, in the old state of the game, SA did way too much and covered terrible players, similarly to how Daredevil does in most cases these days.

D/D – and OH dagger in general – just sucks because of the state of the game. I’m a D/D power main (or was before I rerolled with the stealth attack ICD) so I feel you, but the decoupling of stats from traits is not to blame for this; the powercreep from HoT and the stealth attack ICD are.

You could easily rebuild your old build, exactly as it was before. It doesn’t mean it’ll be any good because the rest of the game is powercreeped and D/D generally is a worthless piece-of-trash weapon combo for power now thanks to terrible profession design and the stealth attack ICD.

Vavume.8065:

DeceiverX.8361:

Vavume.8065:

Kocoff.7582:

Who agrees with me?

Especially Throw Gunk. (Stolen Item from engineers)

Throw gunk is useful for condi builds, however I do find the Rev slow to be useless.

I really hope you’re joking here. It’s insanely strong and probably one of the best stolen items o.o

Screenshot no might, down 200 power from lack of bloodlust stacks versus an NPC in heavy armor. The damage is insane.

I was speaking from a personal standpoint, as a condi thief I find it useless.

Assuming you’re running Expertise, you should be getting an upwards of 2s slow per attack which is also crazy good.

Being in the air has no effect on DH traps.

Normal dodges are jump-dodged because they have an extra evasion frame. I don’t think the Daredevil ones carry extra frames, though I haven’t tested it/can’t confirm it.

Vavume.8065:

Kocoff.7582:

Who agrees with me?

Especially Throw Gunk. (Stolen Item from engineers)

Throw gunk is useful for condi builds, however I do find the Rev slow to be useless.

I really hope you’re joking here. It’s insanely strong and probably one of the best stolen items o.o

Screenshot no might, down 200 power from lack of bloodlust stacks versus an NPC in heavy armor. The damage is insane.

Nova.2890:

DeceiverX.8361:

Would love to know how the OP got his data. Unless looking into the game’s code itself, there’s no way of properly getting the data.

Can also be tied heavily to your monitor’s coloring depending on contrast.

I recently changed monitors and on one of my characters was running a very sweet mixture of black and grey.

Turns out to most people, I was actually running black and… basically less-dark black and looked ridiculous the entire time.

It would be a simple matter of taking screenshots and using the eye dropper in Photoshop. Your monitor will have no bearing on the actual hex values of the color

This isn’t accurate, though. Meshes, normal maps, and even texture filters on top of in-game lighting and effects like shadows and light source colors change the displayed colors based on environment and equipment used.

Unless you pulled up the colors from the game’s files itself, this is strictly inaccurate. If anything, the purest “white” will actually not be the one that looks so on the principle that light sources will most-heavily modify the displayed color.

The monitor comparison was meant at an aside to those making comments about what looks the “most white” being a perception of the user.

apharma.3741:

I did no such claiming, go back and read what I put, I said they had not nerfed thief traits. The reason I said that is because they haven’t (though as deceiver said the changes to venoms can be seen as buffs or nerfs) nerfed a single trait however I am more than aware of the ICD on stealth attacks.

I want to clarify: I did not say the venom changes can be seen as buffs. If we’re talking traits, venoms were objectively nerfed; in the context of venomshare builds, they were also nerfed, too. It was a PvE buff and a ganker buff (dumb) on builds not speccing into it. Otherwise it was a strict trait nerf and build nerf because they removed a substantial amount of the support potential from the traits themselves/the build itself and did not compensate for it.

In an ideal world with a large player base, you wouldn’t be afraid to drop because there would be better matchups.

Frankly I think the entire notion of displayed ranks should just be dropped in favor of just having better matchups on the personal level. Display just the top 50 to the world and I don’t think anyone would care. This way, nobody gets arrogant nor upset when being in a league they don’t belong in, and you don’t have a system where people who just play a lot can grind their way to being the “most skilled.”

Would love to know how the OP got his data. Unless looking into the game’s code itself, there’s no way of properly getting the data.

Can also be tied heavily to your monitor’s coloring depending on contrast.

I recently changed monitors and on one of my characters was running a very sweet mixture of black and grey.

Turns out to most people, I was actually running black and… basically less-dark black and looked ridiculous the entire time.

Simonoly.4352:

Lexander.4579:

Simonoly.4352:

I remember when Thief countered Mesmer so hard that it was often just a hinderance to have Mesmers with you during a team fight as they basically just served as boon bot for the enemy Thieves

yeah right because there was a time when thieves were a meta must have class that can be stacked

Weird response. But nice to know.

Unless he’s referring to like week 1-2 after release when they were actually overpowered because of a few abilities being release with interactions the dev team didn’t see coming, it was sarcasm, lol. Aside from launch, the thief has never been stacked and has been at most a one-of.

MadVisions.4529:

gunk is a powerhouse. now you can actually land it, not like before. It has a strange bug with turning while cast messing up its destination, but overall its really handy.
It could only be better if it would be unblockable aswell.

as for stolen items in general, i think they are brutal OP if you run improv. The only one that gives me the FacePalm is the druid one having cooldown. It has no offensive use, water fields dont stack effect, i dont see why this skill has to be the same no matter if u use improv or not.

It allowed for mass condition cleansing and was deemed OP because of it.

The irony, amirite?

Yea, it’s pretty easy now. Daredevil’s pretty massive power creep that removed most of the difficulty (and optimal DPS is now pressing 1).