Nah, less HS spam is better.
Just nerf HoT and we’re fine for the most part (aside from OH dagger needing a major rework).
All weapon skills can be done midair with the right timing. Shadow shot as well, which will change the attack height and reduce the angle to make it less-likely to collide with debris and inclines.
HS has no benefit for jump-casting, however. It doesn’t actually leap the player forward or increase its range; if you jump-cast from a platform, it will have the exact same effect as doing so from the ground; no Savage Leap launches for the thief.
People take issue with it because their FoTM build that’s capable of doing everything well is outdone in one areas by one hyper-focused build that’s designed and played to do literally one thing in that area in only one type of circumstance.
Basically, they’re upset because any minimal amount of diversity is even possible, and then proceed to complain about how it’s unfair for something so incredibly niche to do what it was designed to do.
One necro with passive plague proc wins against that trap thief build. :/
Actually, no, it doesn’t; it has the hardest time of all professions against this build. Necro will always lose to ghost thief because all of its cleanses except Consume are transfers which depend on the thief being targeted or will easily miss/can be dodged through like Staff 4. Reaper doesn’t have the mobility or range to keep up, and core necro lacks cleaves and depends on a target to do anything.
They won’t do anything since it’s not a problem in PvE. If anything, I expect it to just keep getting worse.
Even considering the notion that they’ll do absolutely anything to directly benefit the game’s play-ability on the profession/design level is almost ludicrous at this point.
Looks like the entire guild finally showed up :P
It’s all thanks to the skills team, confirmed by ANet’s game programmers on reddit some time ago.
Basically, the game is so over-bloated with passive effects, on-hit effects, on-CC effects, on-crit effects, and the likes that when groups collide you have what used to be a bunch of skills and effects firing (every activation of anything needs to make a request to the server, things calculated back, sent back to the player, and so on) based on player-effect activations getting multiplied like tenfold on every cast, since now you’ve got most people running around with traits which reflect CCs back to their attackers and ones which proc on CC’s which provide effects which trigger other effects which may affect an ally which triggers his and so on, and with HoT cooldowns being so low, this propagation just keeps going and lags the server out more until a group wipes and it can finally catch up.
If the gameplay/builds were made to actually require player input for most of the things we have happening and the number of on-X effects reduced or all removed, we wouldn’t lag.
It’s not a problem the WvW team can fix and one which will never be fixed unless the profession team acknowledges the fact they’re killing their own game on so many levels.
I think before removing the free stacking ANet should look into reducing the amount of condis that 1 person can apply at once. Condi bombs are pretty powerful when you can apply a huge number of conditions extremely quickly. Seriously, when traited, Mesmer’s Cry of Frustration can apply Confusion, Torment, Vulnerability and Cripple in a single attack (and blind if you were to drop chrono line for dueling), and MW can stack that confusion, torment, and vulnerability up even further. And whatever Necro has going on, I’m not sure how many condis they can stack with 1 or 2 attacks, but it is a lot. I tend to agree a bit with @Blizzmaster here, I would rather see attacks apply fewer conditions, but the conditions are made more dangerous if you don’t cleanse them. So instead of a condi bomb involving 5+ condis, it might involve 2 or 3, but collectively it would be about as powerful as it is now. It would also make cleanses more important and more impactful without directly buffing them.
I agree completely. I’d also like to see more things cleanse a smaller array of control conditions like Chill, Vuln, Weakness, Cripple, and Immob, since both power and condition builds benefit from them, but condition builds benefit from them much more so since they get condition reliability via DoT pressure with excessive and spammable cover conditions (mostly HoT-only) while also ramping the duration of control conditions without any kind of split investment. A small array of lesser-used stunbreaks should remove immobilize or movement-impeding conditions, and the likes, while other not-as-useful utilities and traits could provide more targeted DoT cleansing, etc.
Showing your rank badge on the forums it would be much easier to weed out these threads. Come back when you’re in gold or higher and find out where the true power lies.
Fun fact, DH is dominating the highest tiers right now moreso than the lower ones.
Warrior and thief should be labeled as OP if you’re gonna look at the low tiers.
Effectively the same experience. Put into gold from placements and lost my first game which led me down a level into silver. I was put into a match yesterday (Silver 3) where two players didn’t even know that the game was won by by standing on points and holding them; both of them played ranged builds and just stood on the sidelines of fights/points trying for kills thinking it was a deathmatch, as I neutralized numerous uncontested points for them to cap and neither ever did.
The stealth attack cool down was unnecessary if not a direct ploy to force players to be completely dependent on Daredevil. It was a nerf to a class that did not need any nerfs to begin with. My tip would be for all thieves to band together to get Anet to remove it. But for some reason the community does not seem to care enough to do that, so i guess the cooldown is here to stay.
Nobody really cares because everyone plays D/P or Staff, and both of those kits don’t really depend on stealth attacks with buffed AA’s and other skills (even before the ICD it was a damage and utility loss to Backstab with D/P).
Combined with the BV I’m pretty sure it was a push just to make absolutely certain D/D power is no longer playable and to kneel to our condi 3spam overlords because Karl thinks it’s great design.
Permastealth condi thief.
Why don’t you just go ahead and uninstall, seeing as you’ve stopped actively playing anyway.
Lmfao +1
Seriously this build needs to be ended just as much as Sneak Gyro needs to apply revealed when leaving its radius per SR.
Coming from a signet player.
Was mostly straggler targets or unorganized groups not actually ready to engage. Most of the clips here were of people who were blatantly slow to react, and most of the commander-bombing came from the work of other players, such as DH pulls, mass corruption, CD burning, etc. None of these engages really showed anything meaningful about the build, the profession itself, nor of the player.
Basically, he played signets purely glassy in a way that’s not even remotely viable in any amount of small-scale or outnumbered/non-zerg play which can’t afford such a huge frontline/backline protection, nor a way which can take any amount of focus-fire, and only recorded the parts where he didn’t crash-land into passive CC reflects/DH pulls/etc., and didn’t secure any stomps, either. While it’s great to see D/D play and a thief being used properly as it can be done in WvW (for target sniping) where stats are higher which lets stacked multipliers work together properly, there was really next to no substance in this gameplay that screams OP or even… any real substance at all in general in the format. Most of those targets would have died anyways from a plethora of other sources or builds (a power shatter mesmer would have done more damage to these targets while running a strictly better build overall), and said targets probably would have died more consistently as well.
Rev CoR still hits harder in most cases and cleaves from range with a shorter cooldown than backstab.
When while home and far are defended, you neutralize mid solo without attacking while a DH and Berserker are trying to kill you while defending it, to then congratulate you on the outplay after moving away.
…and so you would kill thieves as roamers (only role they have) in pvp. Good that you don’t balance this game.
I run three different non-stealth thief builds that are potent. SA and Trickery while potent in their own way are not mandatory. Besides stealth stacking isn’t necessary to quality stealth play. Prior to the D/D nerfs it used to be a strong weaponset and didn’t need and rarely used stacking. IMO stealth stacking just breeds weak cheese play (see Ghost Thief for a solid example) and this also includes Mesmers not just thieves.
No other AAA MMO allows players to have massive stealth uptime both before and after an attack.
Did you even read what i said? Did you even read what you said? You want thieves to be slow in stealth. What is thieves job in pvp? To roam. How do they do it? Stealth up and run to other point while enemy hopefully can’t see them. If your suggestion would be implemented, thief as roamer would be dead and as a fighter they are garbage currently.
Nobody uses SA nor ghost thief in pvp – get out of your wvw mentality, jeez. It is not the only game mode out here and stealth stacking is not an issue in pvp.
@RegalRed.3720: that’s a lot of kittens there that made no sense lol
@DeceiverX.8361: how do you want thief to compete in current madness of HoT specs? Do you have any solution besides omg plz nerf this because i think it is faceroll? Won’t affect “good” thieves? You know what happened in s1 when thief wasn’t so great? All those “good” thieves were playing revs. If your suggestions would be implemented we would just see them reroll something else, backstab was kind of garbage and is even more garbage now after the changes. If you check pvp forums atm btw even dev told player to reroll from thief to something else if he wants to win games.
I also love how you base your whole argument on beating some random legendary/diamond thieves in duels. Pvp is not about thief duels….. /facepalm
By your logic, I guess we should also not request for DH nerfs ever because it’s not OP despite being faceroll easy and by far having the highest win rate per profession since it’s not demanding at all. We should never nerf anything if it’s low-risk : high-reward because that’d be unjustified.
The thief will never see improvements on the profession-level so long as D/P remains as it is. And quite frankly everything pertaining to HoT needs to be toned down. The game has no hope competitively if it wants to keep fueling this power-creep nonsense to cater to players who refuse to accept nerfs to enable more build diversity within their own professions.
Backstab was potentially the best single-target burst in the game pre-HoT. Again, comparing things to HoT content is kind of stupid when all of HoT is blatantly busted and needs to be nerfed, anyways.
The thief in S1 was better than it is now. It has just as much evasion and the same landspeed/point decap potential via shortbow (and better skills on D/P), and other professions had way less mobility to catch up. The profession has never been able to play a defensive game or 1v1 on-point except during the few months leading up to and after launch (when CnD, Crit Strikes, Mug, and Assassin’s Signet were massively overpowered), so it’s not like anything has changed since for the better. Daredevil just makes it less-prone to dying if the player makes a mistake and improves 1v1 potential… primarily for D/P.
Like I said, Shadow Shot and PI aren’t carrying the thief. It’s carrying bad players who play the thief which spam these abilities and keep the rest of the profession held back in balance passes. If people started whining about the thief not having any good builds because Shadow Shot and PI got nerfed, then either we’d see some profession-wide buffs that wouldn’t make every non-thief salty, or the majority of D/P players would actually need to learn how to play well.
You literally tried to attack my skill level by telling me to go play core believing it would be trash in combat. Considering the entire purpose of the thief in PvP is to not fight on even numbers, it speaks volumes about winning when fighting fair against measurably-good players, reflecting what I said about the majority of the D/P population needing to L2P.
Everyone and their mother played S/D because Acro was busted with it, particularly at higher-but-not-pro-level play during S2 from all the D/D boon elementalists, and the build at the time both hard-countered said meta via pre-casted LS engages with BT (stealing two sets of stacked boons and 3 duration boons) and wasn’t difficult to play because of it (and remember folks, this was during a time when a 25s cooldown was considered short and 50% prot uptime was a big deal).
D/P, however, has remained the best set, because even during the S/D dominance period, D/P was still almost exclusively played by the best thieves in the game because they knew it was still better. the kit does the role better and is better-suited in more situations. S/D got smacked around as soon as it dealt with a proper damage build, but those didn’t exist in the bunker meta because most people just copy builds from those who stream and win.
As far as telling me to play “core” D/P, the only thief that I run with any more purpose than screwing around doesn’t even have Daredevil unlocked. I’ve pretty consistently beaten Legendary/Diamond D/P Daredevils who claim to be amazing thieves by just using Shadow Shot and dodges at the right times on a core build. While I can’t speak for every D/P player (because it’s the best set also run by the best players), most of them are straight terrible and win fights solely via build strength on Shadow Shot’s damage coefficient and combined easy pressure capabilities or smashing the 4 key proccing PI with some AA chains between either when they run out of initiative.
Considering a proper +1 engage from D/P prior to the AA changes and nerfs to stealth attacks via the ICD didn’t even include Shadow Shot being used for damage (a la flight-casted backstabs), I don’t really see what merit your argument has aside from claiming that it’s justified in power creep. But I don’t stand for power creep anywhere, even on my own build/profession (thus my refusal of Daredevil/almost all HoT content), because I’d rather see good and balanced gameplay than anything that encourages mindless spam.
Which is why, most level-headed people, realize a 20-25% nerf in damage on Shadow Shot and a short (3s?) ICD on PI would probably remove a lot of the efficacy of spamming skills on the profession while having almost zero effect on actually-good players because the utility itself that solely makes D/P so strong wouldn’t be reduced at all.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
“The reason why people cry for d/p nerfs is because they can’t beat it on their hipster d/d buils. I am all up for buffing other sets but it is just stupid to ask for nerfs for only set that keeps thieves somehow viable in pvp.”
Lol, I can beat d/p with my d/d build. . . all about the timing.
and yet it is mainly d/d players that beg for d/p nerfs~
rest of the pvp community is happy to see thief or two on enemy team – weee free win
I find D/P players usually easier kills than anything else on D/D.
The nerf requests for D/P usually don’t come from D/D players because they’re countered lol. It’s typically because D/P will always be the best set unless it’s just made terrible and generally speaking people from other professions find it dumb (spamming 3/4 for wins against professions without extensive multi-hit effects/stability like Necro, other thieves, etc. or those who simply dislike the amount of dependency on stability/boons there is in the game currently (AKA almost every pro league PvP player in recent years, including thieves)) and those who don’t like to play D/P don’t want to be locked into it for the sole reason it’s just so much better than everything else and thus the thief can’t see room for improvement profession-wide.
Plastering D/D players alone is kind of ridiculous when literally everyone not playing D/P or those who prefer other sets thinks the same thing.
Really going to need to question the above; if you’re playing thief, you’re doing it for the decap/+1 potential, which is pretty much exclusive to the profession in such competitive environments via shortbow, making weapon discussion on that level almost irrelevant; if you’re going to reroll, it should be done solely because there are multiple thieves and because someone’s not budging on switching.
Further, P/P aggressively hard-counters DH. If the thief plays reasonably well, the DH has almost no means of dealing with it at all.
D/P’s the best build in general and is the best pro-league competitive build as a consequence since it can deal with a plethora of situations and has great stealth and therefore +1 potential on top of good hard engage via teleports and disuption,, but adapting one’s build to specific situations can make fights a lot easier if the opposing team stacks a given profession.
Still having no issues.
If it didn’t then you would get pulled to the thief lol.
Correct, and it used to be this way. Developers realized a 900-range pull on no cooldown when against projectile hate/denial was actually kind of overpowered and unintentional.
I’m frankly surprised they haven’t just added a third invisible/no-animation “attack” that does 0 damage that inflicts the blind to make it able to be blocked.
I’d like to be able to disable all non-skill sprites and effects, including those from legendaries.
I like seeing what people have chosen to make their character look like and to play the game on maxed settings. I shouldn’t be having to battle the wardrobe team to determine what’s happening when fighting an opponent or group of opponents or seeing my framerate drop solely because they’re cloaked in excessive graphical effects.
A big artistic appeal to me when looking at the game for the first time was the nature of armor having a rather rustic and honest look to it. Pretty much since the advent of gliders, it’s gotten almost sickeningly close to the nightclub-level of effects most eastern games coat on their character models.
SB needs a few minor tweaks.
Increase porjectile speed of the AA by 33 percent Retain the bounce. Increase Immob from stealth by .5 seconds. This because stealth not too easily acheived on SB meaning skill can not be spammed.
On Choking gas apply TWO stacks of poison per pulse keeping the 2 second duration,
Choking gas SHOULD work as area denial. As is even if spamming it, the apps and durations are so low many can just stand in the field and ignore it.
Going to need to beg to differ, here. With Potent Poison and Expertise it can easily push close to 3k ticks, which mind you is at range and unblockable in an AoE.
Baseline it’s not good as a damaging tool, but two stacks would be pretty insane as far as damage goes, as a build like above would be pushing 4x 4s Pulses of 2 stacks or 32 ticks of poison in a very short period on no cooldown which can’t be blocked and acts as a poison field for others. To make it better at denial it’d probably just be wiser to extend the duration of the field, no?
I’ve been running A/D in WvW for a while now, and between the boon corruption, cleanse, vuln, and range burst it’s done very well for itself.
Particularly great with Chill of Death. GC will typically get your enemy to half and then proc a huge nuke and boon strip on top of that. I’ve found myself often killing Daredevils who get a bit too dodge-happy early on with one channel since ToTC will be active on their engage and they’ll take max damage from Chill of Death hitting three boons.
That’s 45 assuming it is hitting all of said targets, and assuming there are five targets to even hit at any given time. For single target, it gets one cast every three seconds in a sustained encounter (or really, once every four with the old initiative regen speed) and netted 3 stacks * 10s (30 ticks) as a result over this period of time.
A sword warrior will land five bleeds with no trait investment in the same period. At 8s base this yields 40 effective stacks. Innately 33% better. Then you look at Precise Strikes and Flurry and the bleed uptime skyrockets in comparison. Such a warrior pumps out more than double the effective condition damage in the end despite cleaving only three targets, which makes its “stack count” measurement still beat out the thief when DB hit five, and almost triples DB’s effectiveness when tied at 3.
Obviously ranger’s was single-target, but the attack speed on shortbow is so fast that such long durations would be excessive, plus such builds used to run double Sharpening Stone and Sharpened Edges which would proc often. It wasn’t a competitive build, either, due to the required back-attacks at range the build required prior, but it could permanently maintain well over 20 stacks of bleeding on a single target at any given time without considering its (no longer) effective 25s cooldown for 60 effective stacks of bleed via dual Sharpening Stone casts and not accounting for a bleeding-base pet like the hawk which stacks 2 stacks of 15s bleed every 6s without cooldown reduction abilities.
And again, nothing changes the fact that D/D has gone without major design changes since before the game launched when conditions as a primary source of damage literally did not exist, unlike every other condition weapon I’m aware of that received substantial changes into launch. Many weapons were designed to be “hybrids” and none of them are. DB is coincidental and nothing more. It was/is good due to its evasion and it had good sustain + pressure mix for some PvE encounters back then, and it got made better, but I can absolutely assure you it was never intended to be made as a primary source of damage for D/D in its original design because it’s tied to the evade frames, and hasn’t had the reworks necessary to make its kit cohesive for bringing to anything except open world (in which case anything works) and a few niche encounters (and frankly P/P and S/P have historically had much more success at these same ones). Condi D/D isn’t a PvP build because its solely-dependent on a punishable (especially in this meta) and extremely repetitive attack to deal damage, and is only strong in cases because of said attack being an evade. Get rid of the punish frames and it turns into being something objectively overpowered with no counter; keep DB as it is and the whole kit is forever weak. Such design to me screams that it’s consequence of enabling the condition build and ANet’s known bullheadedness of not wanting to change skill functionality getting in the way of reworking it since it would change a build some people are attached to.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Condi shortbow ranger and sword warrior both provided the same or superior amount of bleeding/DoT application compared to D/D thief. If we’re talking “used to’s”, Uncatchable and Caltrops on what was the standard DA/Acro/Tr build (from better vigor and old FG) provided almost the same amount of bleeding as dumping all initiative on Death Blossom. It wasn’t so much D/D itself but the fact a lot of conditions like burning and poison didn’t stack, confusion was on-hit only, and Torment didn’t exist. It wasn’t a good build; the only merit DB and subsequently D/D posed was the evasion, and from a raw condition damage perspective it’s been relatively mediocre or poor for PvE forever.
I can’t say you’re correct in the set being designed as a hybrid one. Strictly speaking, D/D, unlike every other condition-oriented weapon, saw no kit concept changes or revisions since pre-release, which did not have condition damage as a stat in the game; DoT conditions as originally intended were small amounts of “true” damage dealt over time (which is why there is no defensive stat for them and why the ticks ignore armor and most effects) to help assist more durable builds, ones with more innate sustain, and to act as potential execution skills for extremely-low-health targets which used negation like blocks off cooldown. Ultimately, all sets that were not changed since their inception were designed as power sets. If the damage source wasn’t on the evade and was placed on another skill, DB would have either been reworked a long time ago, or everyone would still be complaining that the skill has little use and is weak, just like Dancing Dagger.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
101 on dueling thieves no matter what build u run, when the fight starts, dash -> dodge twice, bound -> bp, dodge. Using ur super BP steal hs bs aa combo and now u lost 9 initiative, put ur bs on stealth cd, missed ur steal, and i dodged all of it.
Right, you’re math is off because the net initiative used is 7.
No BP (6 initiative) + Heartseeker (3 initiative) = 9 initiative wasted. Here’s where this kitten gets funny.
1. You think all thieves run SA with DP. lol
2. The biggest travesty….you don’t even know they axed the trait that gives you initiative on stealthing.ROFLMAO
Yes this mesmer knows more than you
tsk, tsk, Steal refunds 2 init thanks to Klepto…keep laughing.
EDIT: By the way, before you respond and embarrass yourself, this is what I’ve posted.
I pre-cast BP before Steal so I land on top of you blinding you before HS -> stealth -> BS -> AA. You’ll have no chance to interrupt any of that.
If you’re stealing after using initiative at any point in a given fight, Bounding for stealth becomes strictly more efficient on all resources in every way over casting BP → HS.
The thing is that hybrid weapons do not work without trait investment on any build unless their primary purpose is utility.
D/D is fundamentally as it stands, and always has been from its original inception, a power-based kit.
While I heavily believe in decoupling traits from weapon skills in terms of cooldown reduction, damage modifiers, and the likes, if changing how the kit performs and making it good at either is something that’s sought-after, decisions that are fair and fun in this regard are nigh impossible to make without breaking something somewhere. Make DT baseline and D/P condi overrides D/D. Put other sources of condition damage on weapon skills and you end up either potentially making power builds get too much extra innate condition ramp, or end up making one skill still optimal for its condition application and causing the build to going back into spamming just one skill for its damage. This is especially problematic for Death Blossom because it also has built-in-negation.
In all honesty, the current gains from DT aren’t worth it in most cases for the damage gained. It’s better to play full-turtle Acro/Tr/DrD on D/D condi because it just gains more from spamming more evasion, and the damage loss given the bonuses of Acro is negligible or even non-existent outside of PvE due to the initiative recovery and vigor increasing Uncatchable uptime.
The changes to the rest of the kit I’ve proposed are net improvements for D/D’s utility, so like almost all other builds in the game, trait choice comes down to wanting to play offensively, defensively, or utility-oriented. D/D can still work well without choosing to use DA in this case as well; the aforementioned kit provides higher burst bleeding than currently at less initiative, just it deals less potential sustained damage on a target that doesn’t cleanse, which is realistically in most cases a direct buff to D/D’s potential damage output as it is, since odds are the 10s-long bleed stacks will be cleansed well-before maxing out, anyways, and the current build, unless running Lotus, will not have any worthwhile access to cover conditions, while my proposed one would via cripple, further assisting the build. Further, the damage coefficient potential has been massively increased on these abilities; builds running some power like Carrion or Viper will see dramatic increases in raw power damage to help offset this, turning the kit into a more hybrid-friendly one while not just encouraging wasting initiative. Since the evade and group-fighting is also better, it allows for skilled players to maneuver well and utilize the kit in full to avoid more sources of damage better than currently, rather than just evading into opponents due to the lack of re-positioning potential on the kit as it is making such attempts futile. The DT change just makes that burst application much deadlier from both DoT and utility perspectives at the expense of likely losing a defensive trait line option somewhere. In essence, it’s the same tradeoff most builds make when deciding on whether to take Acro, SA, DA, or even the lowly CS.
Honestly, the only problem with CnD right now is the lack of reliability. It doesn’t need any extra amount of gimmicks, extra punish, extra evasion to opponents trying to punish, etc. And that’s coming from someone who plays his entire build solely dependent on landing the skill once or twice per encounter. Overbuffing it or just making changes to CnD alone will do absolutely nothing for the kit except make it seem more unfair in the few situations it can win in, rather than making the weapon more useful to use in a broader range of encounters, which is the reasin why D/P is so dominant to begin with; it doesn’t have a weak encounter scenario relative to the others.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
It really depends on what you want to do, and how serious you are at wanting to be the best at doing it.
If you’re truly concerned with playing at the very pinnacle of performance at the absolute top-tier, you should probably heed some of the current warnings, although things change over time so it’s up to you, really.
I doubt you’d be ready to be in the top tier anytime soon, anyways, though, so I recommend just doing what you enjoy.
Just remove trapper runes and it’s gone. Easy solution and then guard and ranger don’t have stealth anymore so balance is restored a little bit more.
Not entirely. Ghost thief just abuses D/P’s permanent stealth access. It only makes it require slightly more skill to pull off (which isn’t much).
Death Blossom: Surge forward (450 unit travel distance), resulting in a spiral of (3×0.3) strikes while evading attacks. Inflicts 3 stacks of 6s bleeding upon landing to nearby allies (130 range).
Ever play a reaper? Yea, this is basically a mini Death’s Charge but made an evade instead of projectile deflection (well, and not a leap and dealing less damage).
Results:
Huge utility and mobility gains to D/D power while providing awesome evasion and engage/disengage potential, with some solid on-engage damage to boot. It’s still no Shadow Shot, but this combined with the new Dancing Dagger provides a huge boom for 7 initiative for a 2.4 damage coefficient on a good-feeling, fast hard engage + bleeding + cripple. The end-damage hitbox also allows for extra evades during stealth while not being revealed if casted away from your opponent. it’s not unfair, either, since that damage takes a few seconds of setup and animations to let your opponent respond if they can.
Big mobility and burst bleeding gains for D/D condi, despite lower DoT. I know what you’re thinking about the DPS loss, but I have answer for this, too. To compensate, we’ll let those thieves who really want to make condi D/D truly a master of the deadly arts be more rewarded for playing better; we’re changing Dagger Training, too.
Dagger Training: Your dagger attacks apply 2s -> 1s poison (yea, 100% chance).
A simple change, but a huge one. This makes D/x condi have way more opportunities to deal damage without depending on RNG, and really amps up those aforementioned condition damage abilities. D/D condi can now combo for damage! DD (1Poison) -> DB (3 bleeding 3 poison) -> Lascerate (melee) 4 bleeding 1 poison) = holy moly that’s a lot of damage. While the durations are all shorter, D/D condi can now deal a little bit more damage while requiring a little bit more from players to really get all that damage in.
So where were we? Right, CnD – the problem child. Based on how the profession could be played right now and what’s left on the list, I actually don’t see a problem with just cutting the initiative cost to 5, upping the vuln to 5 and have it last for 6s to allow more of them to be chained better in a sustained fight, and then calling it a day. No crazy unblockable stuff necessary, since the mid-fight potential on OH dagger goes up so much, while just a little bit of accessibility tweaking to CnD makes it more usable but not excessive.
Fixing the stealth attack ICD to .25s (account for animations this goes to 1s) would improve pretty much everything about the usability of OH dagger as well, particularly for D/D.
Hope you didn’t find this too long to read :P
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Despite being one of the primary D/D advocates on these boards for the past four years, I don’t really think there’s a good fix out there for OH dagger via CnD alone without changing other professions or other elements of the kit. I’ll propose the latter, in full, below.
I’m going to be speaking from a PvP/WVW perspective only here, because not much will change in PvE unless MH dagger auto and staff auto get nerfed.
If we simplify the needs of the kits respectively, we get the following list of what we want as results:
S/D: A little more utility and pressure love. It can’t burst at all to make engages meaningful enough to stay in the fight for long. OH dagger doesn’t really play a big role in the kit at the moment, and is weak for having these two low-impact abilities. It’s essentially carried by IS/IR and FS/LS.
P/D: An unknown performer at the moment dependent on how the changes to SStrike fly.
D/D Power: Meaningful utility, meaningful damage sources not dependent on CnD, meaningful purpose.
D/D condi: More depth in play, higher skill ceiling to keep it viable at more levels of play.
Problem Skills:
S/D: Dancing Dagger
P/D: Unknown
D/D Power: Backstab, DB, DD, CnD
D/D Condi: None really because DB covers all needs of the kit, just not as well as those needs could be covered in general (So considerations for enabling more skills for condition play).
Since we know CnD is a tough nut to crack, I think we should consider saving it for last and doing a re-evaluation at the end.
We’ll therefore start with Dancing Dagger.
For S/D and power D/D, the skill simply lacks good use-cases. It costs too much and doesn’t deal enough damage unless it bounces. Even for the condi builds, the cripple is almost meaningless in the current state of the game where everyone’s hyped up on resistance, mobility-impairment reducers, and superspeed and gap-closers/openers. It only really serves as a form of AoE cleave. For condi, the cleave isn’t meaningful. So we need to make it so.
Upped consistency and damage for power + increased usability for condi =
Dancing Dagger: -> Fan of Blades // Lacerate: (0.6); Cost: 3 // 0; Target-required, target-centered AoE. Removed bounce -> general AoE.
Fan of Blades: Range: 1000. Throw a spread of daggers at your target and up to four additional nearby others (450 radius), crippling them (3s) and inflicting the Daggerstruck Effect (5s, with caster source). Gain 50% additional movement speed when moving towards one of your Daggerstruck foes.
Lacerate: Retrieve your daggers from your Daggerstruck foes, with varying effects based on their proximity to you.
(130 range): (0.9) Rip your daggers from your Daggerstruck foe(s) within range and inflict 4 stacks of 3s bleeding and 3s cripple on those afflicted.
(900 range): Reel in your daggers from your Daggerstruck foe(s), inflicting 2 stacks of 3s bleeding.
What this resolves:
Utility and burst for S/D – Movespeed gains, enemy movespeed reduction, and extended cripple potential while providing synergy with IS/IR for generating the quick ability for consumption of Lacerate to get in and start the fight with enough pressure to stay.
Mobility Utility and AoE and utility improvements for P/D – It’s freebies, at this point, although it may warrant a nerf to SStrike due to the extra condition pressure and enabling of SStrike more often from the bonus mobility.
Mobility, utility, non-stealth damage source for D/D power. 3 initiative for 1.5 scaling when in melee going from ranged to melee. It’s no Shadow Shot, but it’s enough to give D/D some gas when not able to backstab while not needlessly burning excessive initiative to be able to do something useful.
Mobility, utility, and damage distribution for D/D condi. I know you’re thinking this is OP, but this ability carried big gains to other sets. As such, we’ll need to change Death Blossom a little bit.
Onward to fixing what we just potentially broke, and to keep the train going, fixing D/D power, too.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
7.) A player can react to skills that they know might be coming, but the initiative system prevents forced chaining of AA’s. At any time, a thief can cancel their AA chain and use another skill, and since Triple shot or uncharged Focused Shot could be used repeatedly forever when considering natural initiative regeneration speed. This isn’t predictable, and further, even if it was, you leave channels an impossibility dependent on RNG for boon stealing; if you keep successfully stealing stability with RNG procs, the opponent would never be allowed to channel. That’s just silly.
I don’t think you understand how Super Speed works and why it’s advantageous, nor are you reflecting on the concern of mine which would allow a Rogue to easily maintain permanent super speed at range. It’s overpowered.
8.) I am aware it’s random. That’s why I think it’s a poorly-designed idea, but mostly think it’d just be overpowered. A Rogue steals to a warrior and ends up with Endure Pain, Berserker Stance, or either SoM or Balanced Stance. All of these are OP on the thief’s core kit, even. To a mesmer, he gets portal, blink, SoI, or a mantra, all of which are extremely strong. I don’t think you fully understand the mechanics behind on-swap effects to think this isn’t abusable. There are more examples, such as Conjured Weapons. How do those work as well? You claim below to make them weaker, but that kind of defeats the purpose of using them, considering that they’re not all that useful in PvP environments outside the sheer mobility on FGS. With multi-level utilities, you’re getting one random ability from the kit you got randomly to begin with. I think you should research these abilities more. So stealing a facet would still provide the passive and active effects? This would be overpowered from the passive alone, and be weak on the active unless the cooldown was low, but then this would be overpowered on abilities taken from other professions which have much higher cooldowns (like another Shadowstep).
9.) I don’t think ANet is capable of deciding what is overpowered considering our game state.
What’s Yours is Mine Now (Acquire SoI) → IBttO → Kill → Cast SoI = All Boons Shared + all boons extended in duration *Concentration. Repeat this for multiple Rogues on the same target → Long-duration all-boons on kill + shared wealth = worse than SoI mesmer. Or instead what if it stole Mimic? 2x All Boons at full duration. Bottom line is it’s pretty broken.
Not to mention the prospect of tweaking every utility skill in the game and balancing them for the thief/Rogue for its own copies is a very unrealistic amount of work to ask for.
1.) The amount of power creep in Daredevil is astronomical. Making it baseline would just be silly and quite frankly, terrible for the game. Yes, it’s thief 2.0, but so is chronomancer to mesmer, scrapper to engineer, berserker to warrior, in most cases DH to guardian, etc.
2.) There have been counters to boons and buffs since day 1 and were very hard counters. Might/Fury/Vigor (and +damage buff effects) → Weakness; Protection → Vuln; Healing/Sustain → Poison. Buff effects are also not an issue considering these can’t be stacked between multiple professions and rarely have an influence in the PvP scene. The real problem is exclusively with boons and it’s only this way because ANet has not kept boons limited to short-term bonuses as originally intended. If boons had only a 20-30% uptime, we wouldn’t be having this problem at all. This isn’t something that should be fixed in a single profession; the entire game needs a huge boon re-evaluation, because then you’re going to run into the same problem as with Daredevil and the likes: it becomes an essential component answering the power creep that will never become non-essential by the current nature of the game.
3.) Controlling of traps is highly situational and limited to a weapon skill specifically. Currently this profession offers the single most increases in damage over every trait line and more than most of them combined. If I chose to run this over DA on my thief, for example, I’d be able to reach 30k backstabs on targets with 3k+ armor with no need to even bother stacking Disarmament. Anything outside of a max-tank high-tier base health profession would die to CnD or Shadow Shot – no backstab needed. Further, refreshing venoms in an environment with Quickness would still move such a condition build to top-tier damage since venom application from allies is now baseline and comes from the users’ condition damage. All I see here happening is permanent maintenance of venoms which is blatantly overpowered.
4.) Your traits do not reflect controlling traps; your traits buff traps. The only element of countering traps in this profession is on the longbow, not even on your utility skills (where they belong)
5.) It’s too good when stacked with Trickery and especially so for how much damage and utility this line provides. I don’t think you’re actually understanding how OP this spec concept is and some of the numbers behind what you’re suggesting. If not the third dodge on said merge with Daredevil to base thief (which is pretty much the point of the spec), what would they merge, then? And I am aware that elite specs are incompatible. It doesn’t stop this from just being excessive and exacerbating excessive dependence on this trait line.
6.) RNG proc effects are widely-considered bad design, especially for GW2. People have quit the game over them in mass quantities, particularly with HoT. Adding more won’t be healthy to the game as a whole, and especially to the thief profession, which depends almost entirely on controlling a fight as it needs to. All it does is massively improve the low-skill potency of the profession while making skilled players’ play feel inconsistent and binary. No thanks. You’d be better off by just saying that the skill interrupts channels, then, rather than inflicting Daze (as these are two different things – see Rune of the Mesmer, etc.) No, I think permanently resetting venoms would be the optimal way to fight, since either it would lead to permanent and persistent immobilize for power builds while letting weapon proc effects deal the bulk of the damage, and it’d allow for condition builds to maintain capped poison and near-permanent immobilize in group scenarios. Mind you, this is just assuming this doesn’t apply to Basilisk Venom, otherwise you’d have permanent CC uptime because again, baseline venoms are shared to one’s entire group, now. I see no other purpose in using almost any other weapon skill on the longbow at all, frankly.
I hate to be the one to shoot down this idea, but I tend to be the only one around here not encouraging game-breaking additions to the thief.
While it’s great recognizing boons are too strong, I don’t think this issue should be resolved in an elite spec. The Daredevil should absolutely not be merged with core thief. Like all HoT specs, the Daredevil needs massive nerfing to keep it niche like the use of a trait line, nothing more, nothing less, and to add a little bit of a difference in style of play otherwise.
Really, all this profession does is deny what’s OP directly from culprit mechanics and then re-distribute it back to its allies. Anyone running without this spec is blatantly screwed in a lot of cases, and anyone running with it will depend on having more of them than the opponent for denial pressure. I see this as quickly being the worst arms-race profession in the game in a lot of ways, and its design suggests it either provides way too much power when against boon-heavy opponents or insubstantial power when against foes without boons. Something that’s OP only by encounter designation is unfortunately not good design because it isolates certain meta possibilities and/or then simply becomes no good thereafter.
I have to criticize trap synergy because that’s already done in DA. It isn’t good design to have these kinds of interactions happen twice for only one type of ability, not to mention Unblockable traps with increased potency + trapper runes that don’t reveal while running DA and SA with higher base initiative rivaling Preparedness would only perpetuate problems with trapper builds.
A lot of this is really, really OP, though, too, if not even more so than Daredevil.
Innate +2 initiative is too good. Synergy below with Tr.
The AA on longbow alone is OP. Venom reset proc with only Devourer Venom slotted + Expertise = permanent immob on the enemy. Unblockable daze is just unfair because then this prevents cleanses, meanwhile causing stat reductions and boon penalties to opponents. Even with just Spider Venom, it’d be the best PvE damage in the game, and probably the best WvW gank build while running perplexity runes for interruption on AA + stat denial.
I like the concept of Triple Shot but I think it’d be too strong; a build running this and Trickery would maintain permanent use of the ability and Lead Attacks without issue. The concept of having a “second AA” is cool, but either it’d be too weak compared to the normal AA chain of the weapon, or be too safe.
Rogue’s Agility is excessive since it’d make a thief running Acro/Tr/Rogue immune to all soft mobility impairments like cripple and chill since superspeed overrides these, and permanent swiftness from Acro with ToTC in trickery + Pack runes would be very easy to achieve, with DS providing an immob removal as well stacking into this effect.
Copying utilities is creative but poses huge problems mechanically. Random stealing could allow for huge-cooldown, high-impact abilities to be taken (like Portal), abilities which would be blatantly overpowered on the thief if stolen in general (another blink, Endure Pain/Berserker Stance, Bane Signet, SoS/SotW, another thief’s Shadowstep, etc., and it has a lot of mechanical incompatibilities:
- What would happen if the Rogue stole a “Pet” type skill? Is it just useless? The pet skills applying to themselves would also be too overpowered (see: Sic ‘Em bonus damage)
- What about Engineer utilities which have a heavy emphasis on replacing weapon skills and have dedicated secondary abilities on the player’s profession bar? Without access to those secondary abilities they could be very weak, and further, kit-swapping would proc Quick Pockets which would enable huge initiative restoration against opponents with these types of abilities due to the lack of ICD on it (consumption of kit (3) -> stow kit (6) -> legitimate weapon swap (+9).
- What happens if you steal a Herald’s Facet? So does the thief now have permanent Superspeed if running Rogue’s Agility?
Further, your elite would allow for thieves to combo the above into 15 straight gained initiative off an engineer, PLUS allowing for the stealing of Sneak Gyro from a scrapper, if that wasn’t punishing enough on top of also disabling theirs (their reveal access).
Further broken, you’d have thieves now with access to Rampage, Moa, Renewed Focus, Lich Form, and good luck catching a thief who steals FGS from an ele…
The boon sharing with I’m Better than the Original with Concentration and utility steals would also be pretty broken in the case of stealing something like SoI which shares all outgoing boons as well, or even Save Yourselves.
It’s flavorful, but it’s really not aligning with a lot of the mechanics in the game and seems wildly overpowered even on the conceptual level.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
If it’s an AoE it covers wholly different functionality, not to mention SStrike requires already being in melee range while DD doesn’t. Yes, it’s the same condition, but it’s like trying to say that Grasping Dead doesn’t belong on Necro’s scepter because its AA already inflicts bleeding, the same said about Splitblade and Winter’s Bite on ranger Axe, or DT being based on poison despite the thief dagger AA already applying permanent poison uptime.
As far as unblockable CnD, I want it and don’t. I recognize totally how it could break a lot of aspects of the thief, yet at the same time it’s only weak due to said consistency issues.
On Off hand dagger I think making the CND unblockable could put it over the top.
Agreed. OH dagger is largely doomed as long as the number of blocks and invulns as high as it is, though.
Wait, you mean putting all of the first-place servers together shouldn’t have a clear bias?
These are the kinds of decisions we get for WvW development.
Now think of them developing things for the global game of which they give even less consideration for WvW.
Because I don’t think the profession team pays enough attention to the under-used or under-powered skills and abilities in the game to even know what to change them to.
CJ sometime in 2013 said they always look for “low-hanging fruit” fixes first for all things related to balance. That philosophy is a major flaw in the team’s dynamic that I don’t think has ever changed.
During the ranger CDI, all complaints about pets and asking for pet-less builds was dismissed by the team as “not aligning with ANet’s vision” despite being the single-most requested change since the start of the game for the profession and one of the most requested changes of all time overall for all of the professions.
I also don’t think the profession team communicates with the other teams aside from the PvE one to discern what is and isn’t good design or what does or doesn’t need to change. Especially with HoT and thereafter, most things pertinent to profession design have had zero interaction with the competitive-format players or any amount of respect for what people want from combat, have had only numbers changes, have had next to zero contextual justification, and have only changed dynamics in PvE speed-clear groups due to their lack of substance.
There have been necessary skill and trait design changes since day 1 for pretty every profession and they have been complained about since day 2. We’ve seen no willingness to go there so far; not much reason to suspect they will be in the future.
that would make a ranger into a warrior.
The old problem was that a ranger was basically a warrior with a pet. I do not know enough about druid to comment.
Not really, especially at the time when RF had double the cast time, longbow autos had a 100% miss chance against skilled opponents, the traits were terrible, etc., and there wasn’t such thing as gunflame berserker for a true ranged profession. A change in profession mechanics could easily allow the ranger a unique martial platform. Many people proposed preparations from GW1, as an example.
Because I don’t think the profession team pays enough attention to the under-used or under-powered skills and abilities in the game to even know what to change them to.
CJ sometime in 2013 said they always look for “low-hanging fruit” fixes first for all things related to balance. That philosophy is a major flaw in the team’s dynamic that I don’t think has ever changed.
During the ranger CDI, all complaints about pets and asking for pet-less builds was dismissed by the team as “not aligning with ANet’s vision” despite being the single-most requested change since the start of the game for the profession and one of the most requested changes of all time overall for all of the professions.
I also don’t think the profession team communicates with the other teams aside from the PvE one to discern what is and isn’t good design or what does or doesn’t need to change. Especially with HoT and thereafter, most things pertinent to profession design have had zero interaction with the competitive-format players or any amount of respect for what people want from combat, have had only numbers changes, have had next to zero contextual justification, and have only changed dynamics in PvE speed-clear groups due to their lack of substance.
There have been necessary skill and trait design changes since day 1 for pretty every profession and they have been complained about since day 2. We’ve seen no willingness to go there so far; not much reason to suspect they will be in the future.
Email support that we want Ascended armor and weapons in WvW with WvW currency
This will achieve literally nothing except getting you banned from the boards.
Support has absolutely zero influence in what happens with development unless it’s bug fixes. It’s like insulting the cashier that your product was defective while refusing to return or exchange it; it’s not their fault, and not much they can do about it, so there’s no reason to be ruining their day.
Source: I worked in MMO support.
I’d rather see them sooner nerf boon access game-wide, but that’s just me. You shouldn’t be dependent on a specific set to counter an innate flaw in the game’s current design.
If they give Dancing Dagger a condition, I’d rather see it be made into torment with the cripple kept but with no bounces and just a static AoE. Change Dagger Training to 1s duration but at 100% chance. Up the power coefficient again on DD to compensate power builds for no bounces. IF they did this, however, as mentioned above, they’d also need to rework Death Blossom on D/D to be a more functional evade for both builds. You can’t overload Dancing Dagger innately with torment or poison, either, since P/D is a functional build now, too, and already provides excellent condition pressure.
Blind on CnD will do nothing to improve CnD. The skill doesn’t do well because it’s inconsistent; of all the blocks and invulns in the game prevent the stealth from working. It’s not any good not because it doesn’t have defenses tied to it or extra unnecessary punishes. You can already dodge on the trailing frames during CnD’s cast and get both the stealth and the evade, and passive blind would nullify the purpose of running CiS. I’ll be honest, a lot of the people requesting the blind on CnD are not true masters of the kit and are upset they can no longer run SE + CiS + Rejuv in SA for three layers of punishment and sustain when camping stealth as much as possible.
The orbs? No thanks. There’s enough hacking going on as it is. No need to encourage more.
Actually enjoyable PvP would be a start.
do you mean they arent capable of fixing hacks and that is why orbs arent back? so hackers won?
They are. But fixing these kinds of things is extremely difficult and takes tons of time and resources in most cases.
There will always be people ahead of the developers in regards to exploiting and cheating in games. It has prevalence and continues when the developers don’t care.
If it hasn’t been made apparent to you yet, ANet does not care about WvW.
The orbs? No thanks. There’s enough hacking going on as it is. No need to encourage more.
Actually enjoyable PvP would be a start.
@Rauderi
Why would it tick off people that invested into those stats if they added the stats to be included? They wouldn’t have to change anything besides adding the stats to the “all stats” calculation
because all the values would need to get reduced to account for the added stats unless you are just asking for these things to get buffed
Why? It’s not like Celestial is a good stat set in PvE (it’s not even close to be mediocre). Adding Concentration and Expertise without nerfing other stats would not change that in the slightest.
It might have been different in PvP, of course, but Celestial amulet got removed from that mode completely, so it doesn’t matter.So, no, you wouldn’t need to reduce anything
Except for, you know, it’s still pretty busted and usable in WvW.
If they want to buff all-stat gear spreads, they need to massively nerf boon access, first, so that people aren’t running around with huge amounts of every stat.
Reading new patch notes.
+1
Profession “balance” “changes” have hollowed any appreciation for ANet I had left and have fostered a lot of frustration for WvW.
Those walls negate all player movement past them, though.
Recall that walls need to be able to be jumped off of, projectiles shot through/over, etc. There’s a massive difference between PvE and WvW in this regard.
WvW would be no fun this way, anyways. Everyone would just travel by gliding because then they could largely avoid combat or be meanwhile invulnerable to melee builds.
When it comes to raw combat, you’re going to be the weakest link on teams when playing enemies at your skill level while playing a thief. It’s the weakest profession in combat currently in sPvP. Note the distinction of sPvP here.
A good thief can potentially carry a game not because of fights but because of its point and rotation control. +1’s are icing for when there isn’t something to do because your enemies are spread thinner than your allies (allowing you to make a fight outnumbered). If you can’t decap/cap uncontested points and can’t +1 or fight, it means your team is losing when outnumbering your opponents, and is simply going to garner that loss in most cases.
It still shouldn’t proc of AA, That’s my biggst issue with it.
Boy wouldn’t it be nice if that’s how the on-interrupt effects worked.
Still waiting to see what the full updates show but if this is it then its yet another middle finger pointed straight at all the wvw players from anet.
To see anet finally putting in split skills is a great thing and something that most of us greatly appreciate. To see them ignore wvw during those split skill changes is something that, unfortunatly, alot of us wvw players have become used too. PVP first …wvw right at the bottom of the pile.
Anyone who thought they were going to balance around WvW with split skills is ignorant of how ANet does its balance, JS.
Once that BP is on the ground, you cannot stop a Thief from going in stealth [whether they go by Bound or] by HS.
…What the hell did I just read?
Before HoT, you literally beat D/P thief by interrupting the leap finisher on HS because it’ll waste the field and cause a 8-initiative burn for nothing. That’s why Bound is so good for dueling where interruption is more focused – you can’t interrupt it because it’s a raw dodge!
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
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