Guild Wars 2

Junkpile.7439:

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

Junkpile.7439:

Well you can’t dodge thief first attack. First backstab is instant straight from stealth.

Said thief has already blown most of his action points, or shadow refuge, to pull that off without you seeing it coming.

If you saw a thief suddenly go invisible, you can pretty much assume he’s coming for you, and throw up a block.

Most thieves aren’t carrying around 20 seconds of stealth anymore.

Hell, tbh. Most of the thieves I’ve fought aren’t even wearing zerkers gear anymore. Backstabbing isn’t as stupidly amazing as it used to be.

As for the discussion, everyone runs tanky as hell now-a-days. Why are you trying to make that even worse?

I literally sat in a 15 man group’s bomb yesterday questioning “where is the damage”. I’ll tell you where it was, non-existent. They were just melee training and killing all the scrubs that don’t know how to dodge, and are running PvE gear.

The only class I even remotely fear in this game is a reaper, and that’s only because of all the boon corruption.

I don’t have blocks. So should i use mistform straight after thief go stealth?

As an ele you have the ability to negate almost all power thief damage by just camping Earth with Stone Heart.

If you see them stealth up, you can swap attunements and the backstab will get negated (technically blocked – including unblockable attacks – on any critical strike as it negates procs as well) entirely. Backstab is actually less-bursty than just using dagger AA after Shadow Shot. Strictly speaking, ele is probably the second best power-thief-killer in the game if traited to deal with them, following DH. FA played well hard-counters thief as well because it has mass AoE blinds which negate stealth attack usage and offers a lot of CC and huge burst numbers.

Anticipating the attack from stealth is an acquired skill that is also best learned by just playing a thief for a while.

Xtinct.7031:

Krispera.5087:

LMAO a condi thief player crying over condi cleanses.

Your build is like top cancer in PvP and WvW roaming, you have no grounds to cry.

Nice assumption, but if I take the time to post about my experience vs a vanilla LB/GS don’t you think there is something more to it than just getting outplayed?

I ended up switching to power d/p staff after my first two failed engagements as condi because I did notice straight away how consistent the removal was with saffron scented poultry soup (100% chance to remove a condition when you use a healing skill, +70 healing power). I was able to beat him as power much faster than I ever did with conditions. So did I really get outplayed on my condition builds? Maybe, or maybe his setup was carrying him to counter a condition damaging class.

You’re playing the condi build, mate. People need to go out of their way to counter you, in doing so they lose tons of power damage negation potential, and you’re mad?

Core ranger has okay cleanses but druid is infinitely better, and he’s running a kit that is the easiest for a condi thief to outplay.

I think it’s likely true you honestly got outplayed because you clearly don’t know how to yourself.

Again this is just a matter of build wars when it comes down to how well it gets countered or not. As is the case with most condition builds.

Against an off-meta pick? It’s basically an “I win” spec. Otherwise? It’s nearly pointless as far as advantages go.

Junkpile.7439:

We need more PvE players in WvW so we can farm bags.

FTFY

Toughness does what it’s supposed to. Ferocity scales damage after it has been divided by the armor rating of the opponent.

So if you stack toughness to turn a 1k base hit which would crit for 2.4k into a 500 base hit, the crit would be 1.2k which remains still cutting the damage in half.

Toughness works well with classes that have a lot of condi removal and in-kit sustain like ele and guard. Toughness tanks usually falter in kits with low condi hate/sustain like thief and mesmer.

I wouldn’t call DE bad, but just extremely inconsistent depending on your enemy’s build and the terrain. But that’s what a sniper is supposed to be. It either stomps or gets stomped. It’s definitely often not really fun for everyone involved fighting as/against one.

It’s more the fun-factor that makes it less appropriate for GW2 imho. Just doesn’t feel like it really belongs conceptually.

Raymond Lukes.6305:

Unfortunately we cannot give you all the details. It’s as simple as that. I’m not trying to be mean but there are details of the game and the studio we cannot share with players. Though… If you are really passionate about this problem we’re always looking for good people to join the team https://www.arena.net/#careers.

Oh, I wish – especially on the design-level. I think I’d work myself to death programming for you guys though. I may be decent enough to do my job well, but your team’s on a whole other level when it comes to implementation considering your track record for nearly-flawless releases :P.

It’s likely you might not read this, but being a programmer you’d get this more than say WvW designers that may be focused more on quick and dirty fixes for short-term issues: Has there been any discussion regarding an AI using in-game player data to compose matchups rather than based on WL/Glicko? It’d give a much better composition of groups for servers and could adjust for things like transfers, play habits (blob/solo, distributions over time, etc.), and even transfers.

It’d be a big investment and a lot to process in terms of data, but just wondering if the thought ever came up as I think it’s the best approach to a permanent fix which doesn’t forcibly uproot any existing communities.

The only instance where this is truly valid is the argument about the often-toted DX12 capability; the amount of time investment and cost to do this would be so large for such minimal gains (requires further optimization afterwards and most lag issues aren’t related to it; doesn’t affect actual graphic/polygon fidelity to make the game really look any better, changes system requirements for the game in general, needs multi-client options/DL server configuration/resources, etc.). For ANet, this truly would be a waste of time given the fact it really wouldn’t change much of the game and we can knowingly say it’d be a huge resource investment. Better to work on that for GW3 or future ANet titles.

There’s nothing that’s really a true “waste” of time if it improves the product, but the real matter is about precedent and return for the labor. Money in needs to be less than money out. If we can definitively say some feature would be a huge time investment, such as dynamic PPT and matchmaking via data-driven AI that uses a huge number of heuristics to create balanced matchups weekly for WvW, it’ll take a lot of programming staff, and might only interest a smaller portion of the existing and potentially future playerbase. The same programmers could make some new engine API’s, fix bugs, and make performance optimizations that affect all players via new systems, stabilizing gameplay, and making the game into the future look and behave better, which keeps revenue happening for longer. Would such WvW change be a big deal in the WvW community and keep people playing the format and spending money on the game? Surely. The question is a matter of how much it would in the contet of the whole game. A business needs to recognize and prioritize that. Perhaps they’ll work on both projects with the WvW one in the background for developers who maybe finish early other tasks or use free time if they have an interest in AI on to fiddle with into the future until the precedent for the change overshadows other ideas.

Really, unless we know who works on what projects specifically, and the expected RoI of each backlog task ANet has, we can only at best make predictions. That said, there’s definitely a valid argument about which things should take precedent when factoring in all areas for desired improvement in the game, and stacking those against each other as a prioritized list.

From what I gather, most of the armchair devs on the forums here have no experience in the industry and further have little knowledge about it in general, and can’t distinguish what different people in the gaming industry actually do (engineer/content developer/artist/marketer/management/economist/etc.) and subsequently make a lot of downright untrue statement and assumptions about resource management and budgeting.

Not sure this is a good idea if done with hit reordering which otherwise becomes needlessly computationally-demanding (extra logic for elite spec/trait configuration/etc. which will slow down server-side game performance); they can’t quite do this as the early damage is essential to make a number of abilities work for desired interactions – from CnD and pre-casts + Mug to Hidden Thief + Mug.

Kalla as a legend needs to be redone from scratch. It’s… really not well-thought-out.

DE is a one-trick pony spec that is either has no counters or is the easiest build in the game to shut down with little counterplay from the DE. Removing casts won’t help the former, keeping it as-is won’t help the latter. The sniper concept is a bad idea for the thief, especially in WvW where people gang up with groups of thieves and just spam rifle nukes without ever getting into fighting distance. As predicted, this design is simply anti-fun, and will cause people to get upset and stop playing. Malice stacks in the UI are very hard to see, and the mechanic in general was not worth taking away Assassin’s Signet from core. You’d be better off scrapping it entirely and just reverting AS imho, as this also cuts rifle burst potential from DJ while upping its non-kneel killing potency. The trait line is way too tied to Steal and the Rifle. Overall the entire thing feels like one massive gimmick that lacks purpose outside of AA’ing for PvE raid DPS.

Soulbeast needs some pretty big numerical buffs to dagger’s power coefficients and some major animation love. The animations have massive delays/casts for almost meaningless effects. Pet swap in Beast Mode needs to be allowed. The Bird Beast Mode Skill 1 (gap close) needs a bugfix as it only travels 400 range instead of the listed 1200 while having an animation length for what should be 1200 – it has nearly a full second’s duration recovery animation lock at the end which is terrible. Stance cooldowns need major changes or huge cooldown reductions. Up power damage build synergy in the trait options, but tone down Sic ’Em’s bonus damage applied to self as compensation.

Spellbreaker MH dagger feels a bit weak but OH dagger feels bonkers. OH dagger skills regularly hit 10k+ in sPvP and 15k+ in WvW. Something like A/D will hit 20k+ damage per cast on engage, have a triple gap close on weapon skills, and be able to follow up with another 20k+ eviscerate while running invuln effects and the likes.

Scourge may need an initial delay timer on barriers that lasts like .25 seconds where the effect doesn’t immediately start decaying to make it better akin to dodging.

Syktek.7912:

[snip]Their individual players are braindead and easy to kill.

Said about most of these guilds. This isn’t the days of RG and the likes where you can fight massively outnumbered anymore. They field huge numbers and since HoT that’s about all that matters in making a guild carry a server. Catch one running alone and it’s almost always a free bag aside from the exceptional few who are immensely good which garnered the mass guild joins to make the blob big to begin with.

And I don’t mean in the context of builds for blobs/small-scale. Most members’ mechanical play is horrible when they’re alone or in a small group because they’re no longer being told where to stand/move, what skills to use, and when to use them. They’ll fidget around and burn cooldowns for no reason, spam, etc.

They could keep it at 900. They’d just need to make some tweaks to make it better at skirmishing.

Get rid of crossfire, two-chain AA one with higher power coefficient and the other with two stacks of bleed from all angles as a compromise for both stat distributions with boosted consistency at slightly lower potential max dps from condi if all back-attacks.

Poison volley made into the Ammo system (Ammo 3) with a tightened cone to make it less about getting hyper close to shotgun all hits, but reward the player for staying close by as a skirmishing set. Reduced Arrow count and Poison stacks scale with ammo value when casting (3/2/1), power coefficient tripled per arrow (1.8x/1.2x/0.6x current coefficient at shotgun value), poison duration up to 6s.

Quick Shot given Ammo 2 to keep it able to sustain close.

Concussion Shot cooldown to 15s with daze/stun duration at 1.5s from 2s.

Whole kit now works very well.

ZyniX.3589:

Yeah I mainly use the Staff as a weapon thanks to deathly chill and shivers of dread from the Reaper elite. Now I hear deathly chill will get a nerf come Path of Fire release and I don’t want to be forced to play the new elite spec and use a Scepter because I never liked that weapon.

If you don’t like the weapons/style, have you considered playing a power build and advocating for improvements there?

Warrost.4895:

Acheron.4576:

i find it fun, opinions are opinions. if you don’t like DE then why not just stick with DrD?

I am sure some nerfs will help deadeye be a viable option to daredevil, and a reason to buy pof.

Lol, nerfs to what?

DrD is still very competitive with the rest of the game, if not still on the stronger side.

This is just how snipers need to be. If you’re not positioned right and everything doesn’t go perfectly, you’re dead. Else it ends up overpowered because then it’s safe and lacks counterplay.

Many people demanded this concept, and a number of players foretold of the consequences that come with this except kind of concept.

Warrost.4895:

babazhook.6805:

Orpheal.8263:

whats the point of a silly sniper class, when it ends up being more effectively played out with all other weapons, except the rifle??

A sniper class to have is only worth it and not a massive fail, when playing with a sniper rifle is in the end also to the most effective build to play with, because if you use any other weapons with a spec like this, then you don’t have a sniper anymore, but just only a generic wannabe something that is of nothing half and nothing full.

ANet localized the class for german basically “Sniper” (Scharfschütze)… and as a such it makes no sense to run around with Daggers n Pistols or with Swords, only due to the traits and utility skills/class mechanics making these weapons most effective with this Spec, when in fact the whole E-Spec should be designed around the fact, that they shold be played the most effectively with their designed to weapon – the rifle, because without rifle, there we have no sniper anymore, but instead just undefined nonsense.

Sort of like how d/p users all use Drd?

I do not get your point. A spec line HAS to work with other weaponsets or ir limits diversity and your suggestion all sets play better then Rifle in DE is simply not the case.

Rifle does what it was designed to do very well.

Being useless against any decent player/outside of open world PvE?

That’s what a sniper is going to need to be like in order to be balanced lol.

You can’t have a long-ranged 1HKO/nuke spec that retains high mobility and stealth that has synergy with a lot of defensive play patterns and build options without some kind of clunkiness or efficacy lost on the high end considering the abuse-case it promotes.

There’s a reason people advocated against the sniper concept. This what the design needs to be, otherwise it just ends up blatantly better than everything else.

Luclinraider.2317:

However, in just straight DPS race, rifle seemed to beat out P/P. With P/P averaging about 180K and Rifle averaging about 210K.

-

I think you have some flaws in your testing methods to get those numbers lol.

Yes, but it doesn’t put all if your eggs in one basket and get shut down as easily while it simultaneously allows more seamless negation rather than needing to depend entirely on that existing pool and further depending on that pool for outgoing damage as well.

Spectral Armor for example gets you over the hurdles and gives a lot of gains while allowing for further negation with barriers. The cooldowns are a lot lower which lets you negate more hits more frequently. At the higher end you can counter more things without shroud lockout, especially now with the removal of the shroud CDR from SoS.

I’m not saying the Scourge’s barrier implementation is fine, but that people proposing things like permanent barriers and major buffs don’t understand the concept of active defenses and have gotten to comfy with the safe play techniques in respects to negating damage which necro provides.

Tiresias.6473:

Obtena.7952:

So … Scepter is NOT useful for PVE rotations? I mean, there are lots of things this imaginary condi weapon COULD be, I’m asking what is driving the need or even the desire for it. most importantly, what would make anyone want to use it considering how good the scepter is at condi now.

Please don’t be obtuse.

Melee weapons build lifeforce faster. They typically build lifeforce on every strike including a big gain on the final hit.

Scepter build lifeforce VERY slowly in comparison to the dagger and greatsword.

I do believe that’s intentional considering if you’re in melee, you’re taking hits, and if you’re in melee dealing damage with a dagger or GS it means you’re not in shroud which means you’re taking actual damage.

Instead, the scepter, being a ranged weapon, can kite and play a bit more safely on the basis it is ranged, while applying permanent cripple to help aid in this. It makes little sense to give ranged builds more sustain than melee ones.

Strictly speaking, the LF gain is basically the same if not superior to Axe, which is considered a a fantastic weapon because it does what it’s supposed to: utility and ranged burst LF generation.

“Neco lacks active defenses.”

Gets huge damage negation that doesn’t depend on LF/establishing a resource foothold which is why necros get focused and get shut down so easily by being focused.

“14k baseline damage negation with big healing power scaling/BM synergy on high hp pool isn’t good enough.”

C’mon guys, if you play well it negates a huge chunk of potential incoming damage. Even if it needs some minor tweaks regarding baseline degen speed, the amount of sustain it provides is solid given just how ridiculous its condition bomb/boon application is. Barrier is active defense. If it buys you a few seconds per fight, you’ve basically got traited DH virtues which is great.

Sounds to me like people were getting too used to auto-30+ bleed stacks dire/tb reaper with huge shroud pools.

Maybe the Scourge (condition + healing support) just isn’t your style, either.

TwiceDead.1963:

Eval.2371:

Ultimately I find it fun to play, just not enjoyable to play against.

That’s just Stealth mechanics in-general. Stealth is never fun to play against, and it’s been that way forever, precisely because the whole concept behind it is to prevent opportunities of counter-play.

Extended stealth surely, but stealth in general isn’t necessarily unfun to play against. In this case it’s just pretty low-risk given the range, while keeping huge burst. Rifle Deadeye is basically an even further extreme of gimmick of signet D/D, except it plays in an even more binary fashion with even bigger numbers while leaving the enemy less-engaged.

Eval.2371:

As someone playing against deadeye, I am not upset about the burst, the damage the range. I am upset about the direction players are taking it.

The SA mark stow firing squads are just not enjoyable to encounter.
The people endlessly porting away with #4 is just shortbow 2.0
The stealth camp fire is real. It’s the exact interaction no one wants to play against.

As someone who has played it, it plays out very binary. You either land the pot shot(s) and get the kill or you get caught with your pants down and die near instantly. I don’t feel that it’s healthy gameplay, and ultimately is going to get core theif nerfed is many aspects.

Ultimately I find it fun to play, just not enjoyable to play against.

These things need to be factored in when designing the profession.
Ranged burst from stealth has been a controversial topic since this game came out, and we’ve already had issues with it with small groups of SA/AoE stealth thief + killshot warrior in the past.

Death’s Retreat.

The kit is weak in anything but max range scenarios. Why the heck would it move you towards your target?

I think it was more or less meant to give the ranger more options, particularly in cases where pets aren’t always helpful (larger fights/mass AoE) while opening up options for people who aren’t super fond of the pet concept. Most notably, this is helpful for large-scale WvW where the ranger has always been absolutely worthless, even moreso than thief.

Does it fill a role? Not really. Not for raids per se. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. People need to recognize what’s played in raids will just be numerically optimal. It doesn’t matter what the release timing is. If SB is or isn’t a part of the hardcore raid scene, that’s allowed to be okay.

Some classes, specs, and builds will likely get left out of a meta entirely because of it. I’d actually like to see less pigeon-holing by design in general. So long as a ranger has an option to be considered (and not just bad) for a piece of a content, I think that alone is a big step in the right direction in general.

I don’t like the druid, but I also don’t raid and would never try to force myself into a raid with it if it wasn’t wanted to even the slightest degree. And the fault there for not inviting a person by their build is mostly on the community at the end of the day.

Super disappointed with the bird pet gap close. I don’t know if it’s a bug, but it only travels like 450 instead of the listed 1200. Given the length of the precast and aftercast animations, I don’t think this ability is ever worthwhile to use because running is just as effective. At the very least, it needs 900 range and animation times cut in half to make the birds worth taking over other options.

Dagger needs either some damage or further utility love, no way around that. I know this isn’t meant to be a PvE/raid spec, but it’s low even for PvP/WvW standards, and simply the spellbreaker and most vanilla dagger options out-class it in almost every way. People shouldn’t be dependent on using Sic ’Em to get okayish killing potential when engaged in melee on a kit without crazy defensive utility like GS.

Soubeast feels like it’s nearly where it needs to be in terms of the concept as nothing screams overpowered/broken by design (maybe aside from quad stone skin/invuln), but I think it needs some numbers tweaks and some animation cuts to make it reach PvP usability where it was meant to be.

Volrath.1473:

nacario.9417:

Deadeye is a fantastic allrounder if traited properly! Key is to spec hybrid by going Shadow Arts (with standard Trickery), and build into stealth. The sustain you get from all your stealth sources through rifle 5, utilities, elite, and F1 is plenty enough to keep you moving around and surviving with Maleficient Seven GM (more selfheal). Be quick or be dead GM is good too, but can be much more random in case you dont land it, but you need every bit of sustain you can get to prolong the fight if needed.

One thing Im torn about is rifle 5 kneel, if we should be able to move around at much slower speed, as being stuck and having to dodge roll is new, but who knows..

Lastly, PLEASE CONSIDER making so that Skirmishers shot (rifle 2) doesnt require a target to trigger swiftness boon. This is a major quality of life change and I cant stress it enough how big it would be for us as roamers to get!!! Without it we have no swiftness upkeep inbetween A and B.

why would you move from A to B? you cant hold/contest a point just sit in stealth in a corner of the map and let do the work.

aw yeah you can shoot ppl to if you feel like giving up your location and give free points to the enemy team! \m/

It’s kind of like people who kept demanding a stealth sniper had no idea of the implications the concept has on the game and the identity of the thief.

Unfortunately, time and time again,with what we see from implementation in-game, we can certainly verify that neither does ANet.

Warrost.4895:

Problem are not the raw numbers of skills, the whole design is crippled and broken.

Well yeah it’s a stealth sniper. It’s GOING to be either horrendously broken and/or a complete gimmick.

This is what people asked for, and what a number of people tried to warn of. You can’t balance this concept.

As expected, lol.

YuiRS.8129:

Elxdark.9702:

Pyrophobia.6592:

Seriously, some of y’all need to chill. Just leave your feedback after you play the spec during the demo. There is still a crap-ton of time to change what they need to. Stop being salty.

This forum is like this they did the same for Daredevil, it’s going to suck, no damage wtf these dodges etc etc etc and now it is probably the best elite spec in the game.

Nobody knows if a spec is gonna be op or weak until you actually test it, let people say whatever they want. I’m sure DE will work with or without rifle and if it doesn’t then we still have daredevil so people just need to chill out.

Well, they buffed the hell out of Daredevil too. Removed aftercasts from dodges, gave Vault evasion… It will be a bit more difficult in Rifle’s case because it’s bad by design in PvP. It can still be good in PvE if they just crank the numbers up through the roof, sure.

Was going to say, there were serious animation aftercast issues with DrD during the beta weekend they had last time that made the whole kit pretty much worthless. They cleaned up the spec to the point where it just became OP like the rest of the elites, because big surprise, the concept was ill-thought-out.

Deadeye suffers from the problem of that it’ll either absolutely demolish someone with zero means of counterplay and at range, or it’ll just get absolutely rolled because the concept in it of itself isn’t well-thought-out for PvP encounters/making PvP’ing as and against it fun and engaging for all parties involved.

When it proves to be as inconsistent as it will be, the tears will come. Though the PvE players will sing praises as the amount of damage coming from the thief from Tr/CS/DE will be absolutely bonkers on D/D power.

Going to have to agree. Acro may be somewhat passive relative to most of the thief (IR/PR/HtC/DS are all solid traits and features of the line), but to say it’s weak is pretty far off. If not for the nearly necessary utility in DA, I’d have run CS/Acro/Tr long ago when they made the first revisions to it in 2015.

You really didn’t understand my writings on DA to claim that I made a statement that it’s only good for four seconds of every twenty. I did the exact opposite.

I’m not even sure why you’re talking about Dire thieves as though they give me issues when it wasn’t a discussion in this thread, and rarely did I struggle against them on my thief after switching to S/D for the cleanses on IS/IR and when Trickster’s condition cleanse was added. And to make the claim that CS in a sustained fight not running heavy cleanses via DrD and SA is going to out-trade an equally-skilled Dire/TB condition thief is just ludicrous.

Asur.9178:

DeceiverX.8361:

All the HoT elites still need to be toned down towards core.

Ah, you’re one of those.

Interesting how I still see you around here, even though you made a big deal about being done with thief quite a few times.

The HoT elites still do need downwards tweaking. They were supposed to provide no additional power over anything core. They were marketed and sold on that premise.

Doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the profession as a whole or that I don’t know enough about it to answer questions and make clarifications for those who want to play it.

The thief is one of the most interesting professions, and I do like to talk builds and make optimizations.

You can ask my guildmembers, if you’re really so inclined. They’ll tell you that I mained reaper for most of the time after HoT, and that after initial testing of the last patch, I’ve not played the profession and have no interest in going back if it remains like this.

I mean if you so want me to leave the forums, you can fill out a form and submit it to my inbox for further review and one of our staff will review it.

Stand The Wall.6987:

DeceiverX.8361:

Shroud is a potent defensive tool when paired with high toughness and vitality as incoming damage to shroud health is halved and it scales on vitality.

getting hit isn’t active defense. active defense is block, blind, evade, invuln, even interrupts to a certain extent.

Active defense is pressing a button in time to not die.

If you react to incoming damage with zero-cast-time shroud to absorb it, that is active defense. The same exact thing as dodging.

What you’re asking for is an active defense which negates the entirety of a hit or a given set of hits. If you want those, you have a well and OH dagger on necro has a ranged AoE blind to do so with, on top of two dodge rolls to negate any major serious incoming attacks, most of which are telegraphed as it is (mesmer GS shatter combo for example).

And again: If you’re having trouble with LF, use a weapon that actually gains good LF. Every 20s on A/D + GS I fill 60% my max shroud pool from just using three different skills with no AA’s or traits or anything dying. That’s equivalent to saying a profession with a second heal that heals for 12k every 20s is weak.

Necro/Reaper is weak because it’s dependent on existing LF to get moving, and because it lacks mobility to stick to its targets (worse than ever now due to the SoS changes) while not having the means to counterplay some defensive capabilities of other professions.

Give the necro a few more aggressive tools and it immediately becomes universally good outside of PvE DPS. But like the mesmer, this can’t be made top-notch because of its class mechanic as then it’d otherwise be very overpowered mathematically.

Famine.7915:

DeceiverX.8361:

People seriously need to do research on this before posting about it.

It’s not servers lacking speed that’s the issue; it’s profession design and the huge amount of proc effects, boons, and conditions which all need to be calculated, ticked, and updated/kept track of all firing off as interrupts half the time. ANet has come out and said this… more than once.

Yes we all know why the game is tolling the hardware so much. But if you find the bottleneck and give the machine more of what it needs for the task at hand, then you extend the threshold. Machine is lagging because a resource is running low? Allocate more. But we have no idea how these servers are established or what they are running and it’s not something they would tell us.

It is up to them to solve the problem how they see fit, but it would be nice if something was done after all this time.

It doesn’t matter how fast this kind of system is. I assure you, they’re using some of the best enterprise hardware for the task, because they supported a lot more players in a lot bigger fights near launch and these issues weren’t nearly as bad (and culling had no effect on calculations). If there is too much happening at the same time, there’s only so far you can go hardware-wise before it starts being massively cost-prohibitive or downright impossible (usually the latter), and getting more form it takes huge amounts of time and effort on the software level, which would be a tremendous undertaking on the scale of probably re-writing a massive portion of the game engine since this would be changing how the game is processing, storing, and retrieving just about all of its combat information.

In which case they’d likely be better off releasing GW3 for new systems in terms of cost:benefit because at least that would garner more investment and financial resources to back the endeavor.

I’d suggest you do some research on parallel systems programming and distributed computer architecture before acting like this kind of adjustment would be an easy, cheap, or fast fix, or if it’s even possible within the realm of ANet’s budget on the tech side of things alone.

The simplest, cheapest, and most-sought-after fix is changing professions to not be so computationally-demanding.

Elxdark.9702:

ehhh no, you’re completely wrong.

it isn’t 5,520 per pulse lol, it is 5,520 total for the 3 pulses and 7,320 if endurance is full.

DE heal is fine, stacking malice is really easy so you will always get the full heal and also it removes conditions.

I would lower the cd to 25s but it’s a good heal skill either way.

This. CV isn’t a 15k+ heal lol. Thief baseline has only just under 11k hp. No class has a heal for more than its max health. It just procs extra health if on any of the pulses you reach full endurance.

A 10k burst heal is absolutely bonkers to be honest – that’s better than To the Limit and shares the same cooldown, especially given how much of an advantage the Deadeye starts a fight with given its range and stealth.

CV is still questionably overpowered considering what it provides for how much it heals. All the HoT elites still need to be toned down towards core.

Holland.9351:

I’m with Lazze on this.

Signet of the Hunt needs the new active. It’s now a good alternative to other forms of movement speed.

Signet of the Wild just needs another active. Give it back its stability, but with a 0s cast time.

+1. SotH is an amazing utility now because of the change. While OP’s idea makes sense thematically, it’d be even worse than before.

SotW just needs a new active. Really, it’d be nice to just have the old ability back.

For PvE? Yeah never been optimal DPS because of low weapon damage coefficients. Blame the forced pet free tank and crazy range of the longbow.

For the PvP formats? They’ve been pretty dominant except in ZvZ since HoT, and with the last patch, they can be played anywhere. Berserker longbow is a strong build right now, and looks to be stronger with Soulbeast.

jcbroe.4329:

DeceiverX.8361:

jcbroe.4329:

The devs today bragged SO MUCH about how proud they were of their technical accomplishments that they forgot to make sure the mechanics were worth the tech they developed.

But did you really expect anything differently of them? The pasy two years have proven mass ineptitude from the professions team.
I can say with absolute certainty my Deadeye was/is more compatible and healthier for the game than ANet’s. I think Soulbeast is one of the better-designed PoF specs and elite specs in general despite the lack of synergy with two lines because it at least offers some new stylistic differences and buffs some previously-bad builds.

With the amount of time they’ve had to develop and perfect the design, to not even get Fresh Reinforcement as a minor trait?

Unfortunately, I did end up expecting better.

I’m all caught up on responses, we’re having a double conversation. I agree yeah lol.

Haha yeah this was getting messy, especially as I made edits :P

quote=6703025;jcbroe.4329:]

The devs today bragged SO MUCH about how proud they were of their technical accomplishments that they forgot to make sure the mechanics were worth the tech they developed.[/quote]

But did you really expect anything differently of them? The past two years have proven mass ineptitude from the professions team.
I can say with absolute certainty my Deadeye was/is more compatible and healthier for the game than ANet’s. I think Soulbeast is one of the better-designed PoF specs and elite specs in general despite the lack of synergy with two lines because it at least offers some new stylistic differences and buffs some previously-bad builds.

jcbroe.4329:

I’ll take proper mechanics and design over power creep any day.

I don’t think we should get both, I think we should get a properly designed spec.
We can talk balance after we get proper design implemented.

You’re preaching to the choir. But aggressively-built petless ranger is a concept people have been demanding for years. If this can deliver that much, it’s a minor success just from that alone, because at least it brings something new to the table.

Does the game need major trait and skill re-designs? Is ANet’s professions team doing a poor job? I definitely think so. But let’s face the fact we’re never going to get major change with a positive result from this team. It’s why I’ve stopped purchasing from (I do not intend to buy this expansion) and why ESL dropped ANet as a company.

jcbroe.4329:

The devs today bragged SO MUCH about how proud they were of their technical accomplishments that they forgot to make sure the mechanics were worth the tech they developed.

But did you really expect anything differently of them? The pasy two years have proven mass ineptitude from the professions team.
I can say with absolute certainty my Deadeye was/is more compatible and healthier for the game than ANet’s. I think Soulbeast is one of the better-designed PoF specs and elite specs in general despite the lack of synergy with two lines because it at least offers some new stylistic differences and buffs some previously-bad builds.

Maybe the intent is to have a longbow ranger with 15s of unblockable attacks and 20+ seconds of damage immunity not have access to permanent 25 might? Just a thought.

I think dagger is meant to be condi. That is a very low number for AA pressure, however.

I think the big gains from this elite are meant to help out MMS/WS/S builds by providing extra utility more than buffing the damage and sustain of NM/BM ones. The druid vastly helped the latter.

What we’re possibly seeing here is that this elite spec actually delivers on changing playstyle while not changing power. Consider the power level of core ranger. I think SB enables some of the more mediocre builds to be potent relative to core. If HoT elites remain OP, that’s not unexpected, and subsequent nerfs to them would be better than just releasing more OP elites.

SoP isn’t the issue, really. Assassin’s signet’s change destroyed the SoP build and made the utility worthless while doing nothing to really improve the traitline’s usability.

Outside of just sustained damage for PvE the line really just doesn’t have much of a purpose or identity anymore.

P/P Unload spam and some other niche builds got some buffs but still aren’t really any better than before in the greater context of things.

Like how the Deadeye will be, especially with the rifle, these builds are remaining very much binary in their performance given capacity to either instantly shut someone down or instantly be shut down (reflects etc.).

Completely removing a build which had some semblance of tactical utility for pin-sniping (D/D signets) while providing no such other options or meaningful utility elsewhere is kind of silly.

I’d have been okay with a reduction in quick-kill mechanics if people seriously were adverse to them (though PW, Unload, and Vault also then need a nerfs), but they’d have needed to give CS a lot of power elsewhere in the utility/consistency departments.

It should be substantially less damage as your maximum gain is 2% more in modifiers in trickery, but you lose on-steal fury reliability and the 15% modifier from Assassin’s Signet which vastly overshadows the gained power.

People seriously need to do research on this before posting about it.

It’s not servers lacking speed that’s the issue; it’s profession design and the huge amount of proc effects, boons, and conditions which all need to be calculated, ticked, and updated/kept track of all firing off as interrupts half the time. ANet has come out and said this… more than once.

Hannelore.8153:

All I ever hear about is waypoints.

Did you know for the first three years of the game all I ever heard about was how much waypoints cheapen all content? In fact, in the original dungeons, you didn’t have to wait for your party to die to revive so people simply waypoint-zerged the encounters-this is still done with major events and world bosses, removing any sense of danger from them. This is why the whole motto of GW2 open world content became “if you’re full dead then WP”, because its cheap.

After many years ArenaNet finally started listening to the players and destroying some waypoints, and having less in new maps. But just like all changes-then the other side just starts complaining endlessly that they have to spend 1-2 mins crossing a tiny map even with the ability to FLY.

Its just getting rediculous now, let it go. Yes, we know that you want to do your content a few mins faster so you can spend more time arguing on the forums that the game isn’t easy or quick enough for your liking yet.

I really, really recommend that people try playing the game. I mean, really play the game, as if you were a new player, on a new character, and everything was new to you. You will walk away with it with a completely different perspective. Playing it for too long as end-game warps how you view everything, it changes how you approach everything, it makes it so that you can’t always see the better.

We have completely sacrificed immersion in this game for cheap returns.

I love WP’s as they are: you’ve already gone there, and unless you’re keen to explicitly explore every corner of the map, being able to skip the running after experiencing the map the first time is nice. It’s a good thing to make people get that experience to begin with, however. It’s fresh content, and there are people whine all the time about not having enough (though I’d rather have less new content and more refinement of old content/systems).

Your argument regarding “acting like a new player” doesn’t really hold up in regards to mounts/PoF, though. PoF is an 80-only expansion. If people haven’t figured out combat enough to traverse some open-world areas for just one time after going through the base game, HoT, and then starting PoF, that’s not a problem transportation mechanisms should be trying to fix.

Rashagar.8349:

Euthymias.7984:

My main concern is that its going to be heavily “requested” for nerfs simply because people wont know how to deal with the potential options it may present. Black Bear’s Endure Pain and other bunkering strats becoming prevalent would also get people whining about “too much sustain!!1”. =/

Can you imagine how heads would explode if “bearbow pew pew” becomes “meta”?

Now I just need to go take a long shower for using the phrase =P

I actually think it will, even for WvW blobs.

MMS Black Bear + Owl is 15s of power damage invuln, great cleanses, massive engage/disengage, a second heal, and roughly 12s of unblockable piercing attacks from 1800 range with longbow with great boon sharing and condition cleansing if all the traits work as they suggest. It’s basically the best you can do against guardians. This makes pin-sniping trivially easy and makes for a VERY tanky backline that if engaged on can pretty much just tank through the damage and fix a lot of the condition cleanse issues a lot of other backline has.

There’s some serious power in this spec. I think people are too fixated on the loss of meta BM bunker and the low damage coefficients on the BMode skills to really recognize the gains in utility this has.

It might not be a super aggressive PvE DPS spec – druids will probably still be better for organized raids – but to say the very least, it looks kitten ed strong for the PvP formats.

^This too.
Without footage idk if anyone can give you a definitive answer but there are a lot of ways this can occur.

D/D is power in optimized PvE since it brings higher damage per hit than D/P due to the OH dagger’s base weapon damage being marginally higher than the OH pistol’s. It has more damage offered with a faster output in terms of burst and cheaper stealth since CnD + Stab is 6 init versus D/P’s stealth combo requires 9. MH dagger AA coefficients are the best source of damage on the thief for power and if traited into Dagger Training are a major source of DoT as well for conditions. The remainder of D/D condi just pretty much mashes 3 in most of PvE for further bleeds.

If you intend to seriously PvP/WvW as power, don’t bother with D/D unless you intend to be at a massive handicap and die a lot. Nearly five years of D/D play and I still would slot D/P to beat opponents I found tricky – the divide really is that substantial in efficacy in PvP formats. Play D/P or Staff as a primary with shortbow (PvP required) or S/P (can be done in WvW) as a secondary. Condi should run (P/D or S/D venoms) + Shortbow. D/D power is the weakest PvP/WvW loadout by a large margin, and D/D condi can be countered hard unless you play it reactively. If you’re aggressive, don’t bother with D/D as a whole for PvP/WvW.

P/P is decent overall (best burst damage per initiative and can be nearly free wins in some matchups) and can be played either way, but P/P + Shortbow can be countered extremely hard by reflects and projectile hate; M/S + GS power stance warrior will walk right over you if they play well, and water-reflect ele can be literally immortal to such a build if built to be a bit more durable. I don’t recommend loadout as it can get both you and your allies killed by a competent opponent with the right build. Double ranged is usually not a good idea.

sorayuki.8906:

While we’re on the topic, could someone explain to me how a 15,528 critical Vault is possible ? ( See screen shot )

It’s not hard to do. DA/CS/DrD or Tr/CS/DrD specced offensive into damage modifiers can reach this without too many issues. Especially now with CS’s sustained might-stacking. Vault has the highest damage single-hit skill of anything on the thief and consequently has the potential to be the hardest-hitting single attack of anything in the game.

Screen is slightly dated as it’s going to be losing around 10-15% of its damage given the massive nerf to Assassin’s Signet. That said, you could hit for slightly more damage than this before, and this is only self-buffed (screen credit: Taobella).

http://i.imgur.com/sQyJTzp.jpg

It’s especially doable even without any precision at all if the thief was running HK which now provides 2s of flat-out 100% crit chance from being revealed after attacking from stealth. A number of players did similar things with Daredevil runes as well with spamming evades back when SoA was 100 endurance and CV not nerfed, either, as those as a 6-set bonus also give a 100% crit chance on a single attack after using a dodge in combat. Given only a few hits aren’t vaults, something like base 34% crit chance (mostly valk) with 20% from fury and another 7-14% from CS and possibly another 7% from a sigil of accuracy puts you at around 70% without speccing too deep into precision. If he has Signet of Agility on (likely), there’s another 8.5% on top of that while the signet passive is in effect.

I’ll make a mentioning that Berserker will hit harder than Valkyrie in terms of DPH due to the changes to food scaling from precision and not vitality.

HS reveals when it hits anything, including ambients, if you’re already stealthed. Ambient creature damage isn’t displayed in the game for the sake of cutting down on visual clutter (since these can be seven digits).

It also has a hitbox on the dagger for the entire animation, including the non-attack portion of the leap. If someone stands right behind you and jumps while you begin the cast, you’ll actually become revealed from the dagger hitbox passing through them in the initial leap frames when you start jumping since the dagger is brought behind you. If there was anyone near you (including a flying ambient), it could have been this.

Could also just be another stealthed thief denying your stealth. Did you get attacked by one right after?

Impact.2780:

There have been a few viable PvP builds without trickery in the past. Back in the early days of GW2 when you had the ‘carry’ role, which was a glass burster that defended your bunker from being spawn camped or ganked between points. Obviously, it was usually a thief, and that build had two variants: 25/30/0/0/15, and 25/30/15/0/0. A year or two later there was also a viable S/D build which ran 10/30/0/30/0. There were also other non-trickery builds (which were actually more common than 30 trickery) which were just not competitive.

That said, today, you are right that the skills are balanced for an extra 3 initiative and 2 initiative returned on a successful steal. I don’t think the devs did so with that in mind, though, because it wasn’t always necessary. The design of thief is such that it has skills to use as and when they are needed, but it cannot do so forever. It needs to manage use, thereof. With the changes to traits and skills, introduction of new conditions and now new weapon bars and trait lines, various circumstances force you to blow initiative just to get past a defense or stay alive before you’ve even really engaged. This is good, of course, it makes for fun and interactive gameplay, but it does force you into trickery.

The proposed solution is the obvious one, and it was requested a lot during the major overhaul before heart of thorns was released, when a lot of classes were having numerous traits made baseline – in some cases even the more powerful traits.

I disagree about Dead Eye requiring Trickery, though. It looks designed to replace Trickery for a ranged-focused build, and there is a very strong looking utility skill which can return up to 5 (or 7 if traited) initiative, along with recharging mark and breaking stun on a 30 (I think) second cool down. Most of thief’s damage comes from auto attack – at least, in power builds. The skills using initiative were always used primarily for defense, gap closing or finishing. If you’re ranging, you’re going to have less need of those abilities, and if you look at them on the wiki (bearing in mind they are of course subject to change), at the moment, most of them have the same damage as auto attack; it’s just the effect that is different. Melee builds, however, that wish to take Dead Eye will still need to take Trickery to be competitive.

One of the things you need to remember is that back then is that there were a number of traits that provided a lot of initiative recovery. CS had one, SA’s was straight overpowered for a long time, and Acro’s was pretty good, too. Really, the only builds these days not running Trickery use Acro since the initiative gain can be good enough with Daredevil’s extra evasion.

The thing is that Trickery is so good because every trait option is strong and often provides things that other lines just simply can’t do. Thrill of the Crime for example is just strictly better at applying Fury than Unrelenting Strikes in CS. Uncatchable is huge for condition builds. BT is some of the only boon removal we had until recently, and the steal cooldown reduction is basically essential to power builds while confusion on steal is fantastic for conditions. Then there’s the persistent 15% damage modifier which not even CS offers, and obviously the initiative source traits which for the most part, the whole profession is balanced on.

Rather than just making a whole ton of stuff baseline, I’d rather see other traits changed to reflect what makes Trickery so good in the lines which make sense. There’s no better example than Unrelenting Strikes. Have it apply on steal instead of being a passive proc. It gains the utility from ToTC for a primary hit, and now a build running CS/Acro can effectively replace the trait.

I think the only thing that really must be made baseline is SoH’s steal cooldown reduction. I’d love to avoid eating some kind of big passive CC-reflection from its tiny daze such as rev taunt. Otherwise I think these gaps can be opened elsewhere.