Guild Wars 2

The elite specs have already been confirmed as mutually-exclusive because they’d be too overpowered/dominant otherwise. I mean… they’ve already invalidated every core build except for a few niche purposes.

Most elites provide more than the functionality of two core trait lines on top of the additional class mechanics. The only outlier I really see here is Reaper.

Originally, one could dabbled into all of the trait lines, but you only had 14-traits’-worth of options, so you needed to make your decisions well. Needless to say, there was a ton of diversity.

Simplifying trait selection into three enforced lines was a horrible idea, as was adding extra GM options, and the elites themselves are almost all objectively poorly-designed.

Eleazar.9478:

Levetty.1279:

Eleazar.9478:

Before hot it was the main reason everyone hated on ranger, we were a selfish class

Then why were Rangers taken into dungeons for Spirits and Spotter before HoT was announced?

That was more like we’ll if your gonna go ranger…..

And that was one small role in one piece of content. And the rest of that saying everyone else could do it better.

This is just strictly untrue. For a very long time, the ranger was taken (much like the chronomancer) because the amount of group utility it offered provided the best possible damage increase party-wide. Until FT engineer was indirectly buffed massively via the condition changes and sinister gear, the ranger was an absolute staple in every speed clear group.

Fact is most of the ranger community was running berserker longbow with none of the utility in its build, and stood 1500 units away from the fight pewpewing with longbow while offering (and being offered) next to no support/utility. And when playing selfishly, it was and still is relative crap in terms of its damage output and the likes. Not to mention the pet didn’t have its health and PvE damage reduction yet, so it was useless to run BM. That’s where the stigma comes from.

As far as the next expansion goes, I hope ANet plans to discontinue sPvP and WvW because those formats’ communities will not survive another one with the competitive-format game balance and diversity continuously worsened as it has been due to HoT. No amount of suger-coating elite specs will increase diversity when so many elements of the elites are terribly-designed and just blatantly superior to every possible build path compared to core.

Frankly, and this is a conservative estimate, I believe more than half of the next elites will not be played at all in any competitive environment unless the current ones are absolutely and massively nerfed.

Quite frankly, I’m in the mindset of the OP as well. I almost always main the archer/marksman style in games, because it’s typically highly-mobile with lots of damage and very risk-reward-oriented.

Most of the ranger unfortunately doesn’t realize this, and most of the builds that have the aesthetic lack the mechanics to back up this style of play, or otherwise the aesthetic of the archer/marksman etc. for said style of play is lost. Unfortunately, I don’t think the pet will ever properly be decoupled from the ranger, because especially now, it’s more important than ever for a lot of functionality. Such a change would need to cause profession-level re-designs which, quite frankly, ANet has proven repeated unwillingness to do for even individual weapon skills/utilities/traits which are just poorly-designed as a whole.

Primarily why I proposed the Deadeye ._.
Or why I think longbow non-stealth build options on the thief would be a welcome and rather excellent addition game-wide.

Krysard.1364:

I think you’re confusing skilled builds with skilled players. The most skillful build is measured only with its deep mechanics, but you can determine when a player is more skilled by making him win with a worse build. So, if a thief playing a simple but underperforming A build wins a thief playing a complex but strong B build consistnetly in a PvP environtment, the A thief is more skilled, but B build is still the build that requires more skill (and probably why the B thief cant win A thief, cause he’s worse mechanically)

I’m not really certain I agree with this sentiment. D/D celestial ele had the most complex/deep mechanics (all those fields, finishers, number of skills, rotation timing, etc.) even when it was overpowered numerically, but once the player understood on a pretty primitive level on how to play it, they’d almost never lose a fight. I talk about contextual “impressive”-ness because I think that’s really what matters more to people. An celestial D/D ele from a few years ago holding a point 1v2 wouldn’t really make people impressed. The build allows for it, and it wasn’t difficult to really go wrong when playing the build because it was overpowered. In essence, there really wasn’t much notable play to really justify the player as necessarily being awesome. It’s why the pro games came down to thief and necromancer plays; the complex and intricate build of D/D ele couldn’t die and couldn’t kill anyone else, and it came down to smart decaps and mass boon removal. Now spin the encounter on its head and put a thief or necromancer holding a point 1v2 against two of those eles. All of a sudden that thief/necro player became way more skilled as a player.

Recall my mentioning of the concept of a barrier of entry for play methods as well as my discussion of the sheer number of variables. Such a case of “A beats B using a weaker but simpler build => A is the better player” isn’t very substantial because no variables are defined. If the barrier of entry on B’s build is very high while the barrier of entry on A is very low, and both are playing at very low skill levels, that is the expected outcome when considering just those variables. I mentioned the “average” case numerous times, because that’s what holds more weight, but the “average” case us tough to define because there are substantially more variables to consider when defining the “average,” which I’ve already mentioned is pretty much impossible to do to begin with.

So the only real criteria to go by often comes down to resources available to a given build and how numerically effective those resources are when compared to the meta and/or all situations, which explains the notions of coaching and theorycrafting and their prevalence in games as well. With these permutations and game-mechanics understood, it can be deemed on some level that winning with a build considered unlikely to win or at a strict disadvantage can only be otherwise described as simply being better than the opponent at that time, which if we assume the opponent is competent, we come to see as “impressive” when defying the odds. It doesn’t really matter about the complexity of the build so much as numerically the degree to which a given build is out-matched when contemplating all permutations of a given moment in combat. If the number of winnable permutations is small, we can say that the “weak”-built player must therefore be playing very well in order to capitalize on or even force those permutations to happen, and then execute while denying the adversary his.

rennlc.7346:

DeceiverX.8361:

It’s paradoxical in the sense that once the weak methods peak in their acceptable performance at a given echelon of play, there’s no advancement thereafter such that it’s impossible to prove the player is inherently better because the variables of the methods differ. Even if that skill gap is very tight or even favoring the weaker-method player when against peak-level or above opponents, there’s virtually no way to prove it unless he was to win a fight. In which case, the assertion about the peak is either wrong, or the player using the weak method is simply astronomically better than the other. More than likely, it’s the former (I.E. why the meta changes), rather than seeing huge upsets where professional-level players start losing to random no-names.

In other words, a D/D player is better than a D/P player provided he or she can consistently beat the D/P player. If the D/D player cannot consistently beat the D/P player, the difference in skill cannot be determined by this outcome alone because D/P is stronger. Am I understanding this correctly?

It seems regardless of peoples’ answers, we’ve so far been in agreement in our unwillingness to declare winning with an advantage as especially skillful. Although this seems obvious, it also raises a question:

Is there no skill in determining what build is generally best and deciding to stick to it? I think you guys will agree there some skill involved, although maybe not very much with resources like metabattle and this forum available. If you do think determining the best general build is skillful, how do you differentiate between this kind of skill and the kind used in actual game-play?

I think that opens up a whole other can of worms. Game analysis and the development of theory and strategy is very different from acting on it.

In professional sports or really any similar game, namely American Football, there are many types of formations and strategies that can be theorized. These are developed by professional analysts/coaches etc. who crunch numbers, analyze plays, the game-state, etc. and look at them in comparison to any number of possible plays. These such team contributors are very unlikely to be those actually playing the game, as raw analysis coming from the players is unexpected for a variety of reasons, as would impeccable physical athleticism be unexpected coming from those doing the analysis.

Even in professional gaming, there are coaches and analysts who devise strategies and metas for the professional players to go by. Finding the most blatantly weak setup is typically fairly easy since it’s a matter of determining what will blatantly fail in the existing meta, or simply crunching numbers and cross-comparing skills and effects even in idealistic scenarios and then regressing towards reality. It’s fairly obvious for most to understand that D/D power is fundamentally weaker than D/P power for this reason; the number of scenarios which D/D can do better than D/P is very few, is marginal in its performance advantages in these scenarios, and these scenarios exist almost entirely out of the scope of the existing meta. The strongest builds will be the most difficult to uncover when considering everything and how that meshes to player-skill/preference/mindset/etc. I will make the sentiment clear, however, that a D/D player beating a D/P player consistently means very little, because the variables between said combatants are still numerous. The best expression for determining how skilled each player is would be to fight a large array of opponents, and then do so again on each others’ builds, and then comparing the results. Of course, even this isn’t perfect, either, since the level of experience against each individual opponent the second round through would be different than at the start, the barrier of entry on each build may be vastly different with each player having different baseline understandings/experiences with each others’ builds, etc… you can see why I said it’s nigh impossible to truly and objectively define skill.

They didn’t claim it broke immob, baba; they claimed it nullified the incoming damage thereafter to make the immob not an instantaneous death, which, depending on context, can be seen as true in some cases (and others not).

As for the latter, this is why I think Bound is a good option; an Acro Bound thief has the same damage modifier access as a UC + DA thief (assuming Improv), but more access to stealth. UC is much more approachable for more offense-oriented builds from the trait perspective, but bound paired with similar negation works quite nicely, too.

I don’t see why it can’t be a mix of both.

If the most “deep” build also has the lowest barrier of entry and can carry bad players, does that really justify an association to said set to the skill level of the player? No, because then there’s no trend to associate with.

A player who can win with fewer resources than his opponent is inherently the better player, because with the same or more resources, he would win otherwise and thus be intrinsically more skilled because the variables would be even.

The matter is defining what those resources are and their context in any given encounter. Conceptual hurdles and interactions between any two opponents will also vary based on each others’ builds and the likes. Defining universally what it takes to be “more skilled” by just a given weapon set combination is pretty much impossible as such.

What we can measure is the “skill” of the player given fixed contexts when compared to other players. Under scrutiny, there is typically a crude association which can be made between individual skill of the player and the viability of his chosen methodology when compared to that of the highest level of play, and then cross-comparing it to his peers at the level of play he is playing at and then doing further analysis based on the rated difficulty : effectiveness ratio of said method.

It also comes down to exploiting weaknesses and what is ultimately the amount of skill disparity between the players; the bigger the disparity, the more likely the “weaker”-method player is able to win, because he’s playing better. Those at the highest performance echelons will recognize the inherent flaws in the weaker methods and of course play for the most effective regardless of the barrier of entry, since they’re at the top and the disparity between them and their opponents is extremely low as to make non-viable methods simply not work well enough.

In the case of the thief, looking at the average case, sets involving the OH dagger for example may require more skill as such to play adequately – or to play as effectively as a given opponent playing something typically more effective – when compared to kits with OH pistol. This reflects back to the statement that typically, the player must have a larger skill advantage to perform just as well as the other when using a weaker method.

It’s paradoxical in the sense that once the weak methods peak in their acceptable performance at a given echelon of play, there’s no advancement thereafter such that it’s impossible to prove the player is inherently better because the variables of the methods differ. Even if that skill gap is very tight or even favoring the weaker-method player when against peak-level or above opponents, there’s virtually no way to prove it unless he was to win a fight. In which case, the assertion about the peak is either wrong, or the player using the weak method is simply astronomically better than the other. More than likely, it’s the former (I.E. why the meta changes), rather than seeing huge upsets where professional-level players start losing to random no-names.

So I think the better question to be asking is not what the most skill-intensive kit is, but rather, for a given context (level of play, opponent, environment, etc.) what the most impressive kit to be playing is.

Einlanzer.1627:

I still think that having so few skill and build options is a huge reason why a lot of people think GW1 was a better game. I’m not sure when game designers will realize that you can’t railroad players for the sake of balance and expect it to turn out well. Balance will never be perfect.

More meaningfully is that the disparity between “good” builds that may be relatively balanced among each other and “sub-par” builds that may also be balanced among each other is absolutely tremendous in this game. There are certain builds which mathematically cannot do as well in every area than others by tremendous margins. These builds objectively suck by design. And nothing has been done to improve them on the design-level.

Most of the decisions made have been insubstantial because they attack only symptoms rather than causes. Broken dynamics since release are still around because nobody is seemingly willing to actually fix them.

Pinko.2076:

Condi is a reaction to mitigation ramp. Condi became viable because mitigation is so stupidly good now, that small man glass groups just are not effective at all. Anyone proposing condi be nerfed when it’s just a symptom are asking for an EVEN SLOWER meta. Conditions are the last line to countering the main problem.

If you instead focus your attention on a world of non-HoT mitigation and healing, then glass comes back. Glass comes back, condi groups simply don’t have relevent ramp damage comparatively. The difference between now and classic GW2 re: condi usage is that glass groups kept condi groups in serious check if equal skill levels*.

*Also if people realized that Resistance is in no way a counter to condi. It was so much harder putting conditions on good groups that use actual cleanses. That actually requires more group coordination though so people will just keep thinking pumping Resistance will save them from epis.

Yes, defenses are overtuned, but so are the HoT power damage options. You have abilities like True Shot and CoR that are 1200+ range dealing the same or more damage than abilities like Backstab which required melee range on a squishy class with a lower effective number of casts per time to pull off. You’ve got mesmers running nine clone shatters in rapid succession due to the reset options on Chrono. You’ve got Berserker running around with major damage modifier bumps compared to core warrior (if core warrior had access to Berserker’s damage modifiers it would kill shot for over 40k). Druid/HoT pet options deal tremendously more damage and apply way more pressure and utility than before with lower cooldowns. Scrapper hammer coefficients are several times higher than their core counterparts and have lower cooldowns. Daredevil allows for almost the same damage increase potential as the single most-damage-increasing trait line in the entire game with its weapon allowing a repeated, no-cooldown AoE version of backstab that does even more damage.

And then you have a plethora of passive and just poorly-designed traits in the game to punish people playing aggressively for no reason whatsoever (a la Heavy light).

Literally everything in HoT needs to be gored for this game to become even remotely balanced again, but that’s not going to happen because people would cry they’re no longer OP and the game doesn’t play itself.

Conditions are the future because they never got nerfed, because they ignore half of the ridiculous defenses in the game, and because they allow for a full defensive build to deal equivocal if not superior damage over power builds, which would otherwise be OP if not checked by HoT’s defenses without getting the HoT powercreep of its offenses nerfed correspondingly. Not to mention they’re balanced or weak in PvE which is what ANet balances around.

Cyril.7294:

Hello guys, i’m one of those returning players.. I use to play back during beta,
then came back and went away a couple of times.

during beta you could use all 5 specialization at a time but never use them fully if you did, selectable traits had no tiers. I guess it was near impossible to balance so something had to give..

but as it stands now?
Every class has one specialization that overshadows the others, that’s right i’m looking at you HoT. So what you end up with that every class is locked into 1 of the 3 specializations, so you end up with only 2 specializations left to pick from..

Is there anyone else that noticed this and feels unhappy about it?
Maybe they could add in cross trait lines from diffrent professions/weapons/utilities..

Discuss to your hearts content.
~
Unavailable Hero

On the level that it was at for launch or even the years surrounding it, diversity is DEAD. The pug dungeon community cried too much about berserker gear being the most efficient at speed clearing one-dimensional PvE content, so HoT catered to the audience to appease and enforce certain styles of play while blatantly disregarding the integrity of the game’s combat mechanics and existing stats. Play meta, play cheese (most of HoT/elites), or find another game. WvW had the most fluidity in balance before the expansion, and now it has the least, because absolutely nothing was done to consider balancing for it. Honestly, it’s not worth coming back to if you’ve been able to find other things to occupy your time. I cannot in any good faith recommend staying/playing aside from community reasons.

From the competitive perspective, the game is absolutely by far in the worst shape it’s ever been from an interesting gameplay perspective. Almost everything about combat now is just blatantly un-fun. Better-suited is to rename the game to Build Wars 2.

Yea but it’s undeniable the same people abusing them pretend to care about the integrity of the format, and ANet isn’t capable of recognizing bad design these days or doesn’t care enough to fix such bad design.

I’d also have to agree I don’t think this is black and white per the wording of the question. A primary example would be the use of “exploiting” the bug in Infiltrator’s Strike before ANet fixed it. I don’t think this is something as bannable, and quite frankly, we’d have been better off if it was just accepted by ANet because it added so much depth and necessary utility to S/x thief as a whole. It may not have been intentional and may have been a bug exploit, but there was really no downside except for some people being salty about S/x thief being able to chase/diversifying the viable kits on the thief.

In essence, before the fix, if the user jumped while casting the first part of the ability, they would be teleported to their target as normal, but the subsequent use of Infiltrator’s return would no longer teleport the player back to the original point when casting IR, and as such allowed players to exploit having an extra condition cleanse on a weapon skill for the next several seconds and could let them chain teleports with intermittent delays for the continuous casting and burning of IR.

While one could say this was exploiting a bug, it also required a lot of skill and understanding of the game to use properly; it’s not a ground-targeted blink, and jump-casting IS would lead the thief with no option to disengage (and costs initiative). If a thief chain-used it to rapidly catch up to an enemy, it could leave itself with no/little initiative upon actually engaging, and no escape mechanism should said enemy decide to just turn on the thief and fight back. It took skill to use effectively because it took an understanding by the thief of his opponent to know if and when to jump-cast.

However, there are also very clear exploits that go against the principles of the game which have no clear required investment of player ability, like abusing holes in mesh seams to skip content or glitch out of areas of the game, item duplication bugs/exploits, etc.

torben.1532:

you claim thief is useless in conquest? That’s obviously why a team with a thief won tournament of legends. Just as example

Nobody actually tried in the ToL, though, even the team that won admitted that everyone from all teams were taking it as a joke.

Shwyx.8190:

I’ve played GW2 on and off for some time and only recently got HoT. I’ve been playing (again) for around 2 months now. My feedback thus is from the perspective of someone still relatively new to the expansion and the game in its current form.

Everything I want to do is locked behind something else, often not even remotely related.

I need to finish event chains in order to unlock activities. I need to unlock (high) scores in activities in order to unlock masteries. I need to unlock masteries in order to unlock map elements, or means of travel, or QoL changes. And so forth, and so on. Layer upon layer of stuff I need to do first in order to do the stuff I want.

Two specific examples that really grind my gears:

A) At 61 mastery points spent, Gliding and Legendary Crafting are the only ones that feel “worth it”. Almost all others I only unlocked because I had to, or because they were a means to an end (Exalted Mastery for the specialization collections is the worst offender here)

B) Jumping puzzles. I am sick and tired of them. There are too many, a ton of content is locked behind them. From mastery points to legendary crafting … jumping puzzles everywhere. Why? I am playing an MMO, not some indie platformer.

To a certain degree I understand the design, since there’s probably an interest in promoting other game modes. But it increasingly feels like a chore. What happened to “you can have fun instead of having to prepare to have fun first”?

Real talk, most of the people who were displeased with the expansion left quite promptly after its release. You’re not going to see many older players who were enticed by the game’s launch ideology sticking around, especially more than a year later, who were of the mindset of preferring not to wait to have fun.

GW2’s gone totally-mundane-grindy-MMO now. Sales have dropped pretty tremendously despite all the cashgrab attempts since.

As I’ve said, I don’t mind the damage. I mind:

- The fact that they can run triple invuln with no cast time.
- Multiple effective heals on very short cooldowns via AH.
- The fact such massive single-hit burst damage exists at long range.
- The fact this massive single-hit burst damage inflicts CC and is on a profession which allows for a sustained period of unblockable attacks.
- The fact the animation for the projectile on GF is based on character model size and has the same sprites as anyone with The Predator. A tiny Asura with a legendary skin shouldn’t have zero distinguishable tell on such massive damage.

Lol D/D power has been dead for years. Unblockable CnD will not do much to make it better. The kit lacks utility and is shut down by the stealth attack ICD because the rest of its kit is crap on the conceptual level relative to the power creep of the expansion and overall potency of D/P. DB and DD would both need reworks to re-enable the build, the condi community would cry if that happened so it’s not going to.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Jerus.4350:

Yeah that skill not activating and blinking for a minute is just server side skill lag that you can’t avoid.

So the consensus is that having a good CPU is good, but nothing will fix a T1 blob fight? If that’s the case, wouldn’t Anet have upgraded their server farms by now? In any case, I appreciate the feedback. I’ll cancel my order and request a much much cheaper gaming laptop.

For skill input lag, yes. This will never be fixed because there is nothing ANet can do about it until they increase cooldowns and massively reduce the number of proc effects/good proc effects in the game. Some time ago the programmers came out and said that it’s all about concurrency issues related to these effects, and no amount of hardware that they could obtain will help reduce these loads.

Reaper getting CC’ed proc fear which procs multiple other on-interrupt effects like FoF, and the same fear procs chill which may proc boon gains which procs blighter’s boon gaining health, meanwhile the FoF procs Communal Defenses which procs Altruistic Healing which also proccing another Blighter’s Boon on another reaper, meanwhile that same initial reaper may go to 50% hp and proc Auto-Spectral Armor which causes incoming hits to proc life froce gain, and this perpetuates over every profession in essence. One call – a CC propogated into a ton more all at the same time. Because these all need to be processed in order, adding more servers won’t do anything in most cases, since this order needs to still be maintained as a serializable set of instructions across the platforms, which could potentially make the input latency issue even worse.

And that doesn’t include the normal processing of other combat-related artifacts like dealing damage, cooldown timer management, etc.

And of course, there are a ton of other function calls which need to be made to determine the values for everything (boon duration, condition duration, food ticks and other food-and-sigil-based procs on top of the networking latency between hardware devices to try run these calls in parallel.

Now multiply this by roughly 200 and keep doing it every second or so. It’s very easy to overwhelm a system this way. Literal millions of instructions needed to be performed in fractions of a second and all that data returned in proper order, too, and then networked out. It’s too much work for a system to do since the amount of resources necessary to offset some of the problems would be way too costly to ANet (if even feasible in general) for just a WvW-related issue that only occurs based on how the players are playing the game.

Unfortunately ANet profession developers have a fixation on making skills and traits overly-convoluted and filled to the brim with proc effects, and the only format affected is WvW, so I doubt we’ll ever see improvements. Based on the nature of the HoT elites, I would expect it to steadily get worse as more power creep and self-playing-professions are introduced.

Silverbolt.2301:

I do like how majority of the responses here has missed the point made by a mile. I guess I had higher, yet misplaced, expectations from the forum community.

Thing is, you missed the mark on this by several years.

GW2’s WvW skill requirements have been a relative joke all the way since the removal of Magic Find as an armor stat.

Lexander.4579:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Only problem with this is all classes(bar Reaper) can infinitely pressure since they have defenses that allow them to wait out their CDs and reset the fight as well, and most classes have answers to Thieves, evades are blocked by Wards; Stealth is Countered by AoEs,Channeled Attacks, Reveals; Interrupt Spam is countered by Massive amounts of Stability/Passive Stun breaks/Cc Reflects; Thief Burst damage countered by Passive Invulns/Blocks/Heals.

Thieves aren’t a godly immortal class as you make them out to be, they have big flaws and weaknesses in each build, D/P just has the fewest flaws and has better tools than the other builds.

im not describing thief in the light of strengths of other classes, especially in the light of power creep introduced by HoT specs and post-HoT buffs to core specs/utilities

im describing thief’s stand alone design and in no way i have implied that thief is a godly immortal class as you try to mock me, if anything i actually mentioned the many flaws of thief that forced players to adjust to the uninteractive and unfun d/p playstyle

if thief wasnt a poorly designed profession we’d never have thief meta being stuck on its current d/p iteration that is only viable because it severely limits thief’s opponents options

if thief had real combat strengths there would be more fun and interactive options to play thief closest to such options currently are staff and s/d but even those arent anywhere close in their power level to other classes mostly because of the archaic baseline thief weaknesses that include low base stats, weak profession skill and initiative mechanic

And I disagree with this assertion due to the fact that all existences of the thief’s meta builds have effectively been in response to what the rest of the game is playing, and the profession’s usability has pretty much solely depended on the other professions’ balance state/the competitive meta.

Many components of the profession are well-designed. The problem largely consists of issues with the rest of the game that punish the profession more than not due to its good design.

@Emkelly, thieves were NOT well-designed or well-implemented at launch. Not at all. We came really close with some aspects pre-HoT, but a lot of that has been invalidated with decisions moving away from said good design or just the nature of elite specs in general invalidating most of the core game and consequently our well-designed core kit that currently stays afloat due to the power creep provided by the poorly-designed Daredevil.

Lexander.4579:

DeceiverX.8361:

Lexander.4579:

thief indeed is full of terrible design as a squishy class that is meant to instakill the opponent without counterplay or otherwise get killed instantly

the meta d/p stealth-scrubbing only makes that issue much worse and the addition of HoT options (dodge spam and PI) didnt make it any better, just added some powercreep on thief to make up for powercreep on other classes

The insta-kill builds only do so when they devote their entire build to a single attack and lack any meaningful mid-fight potential, and quite frankly, in most cases they need to catch their opponent off-guard while not paying attention. Such builds usually aren’t even D/P, anyways. Mesmers, Warriors, and DH’s all bring equivalent or superior burst with objectively better mid-fight capacity.

The poor design stems mostly with Daredevil rather than any issues with core thief. Unlike most of the other specs and professions, the thief actually needs to make substantial build sacrifices to achieve what it’s trying to do.

what you just described is basically d/p thief, which has nothing to it but spiking with backstabs and stealth-scrubbing both being garbage designs, after HoT thieves gained also p4 spam and bullcrap AA damage but neither of those serve towards mid-fight ability

and you can hate daredevil dodges all you want but its just an extra HoT survivability that every other class also gained, all the issues thief has are about 3 things: base stats, initiative mechanic and profession skills (steal and stolen skills)

No D/P thief in this game is one-shotting anyone playing a reasonably good build without the opponent simply not paying attention, sorry. And any such build that can even come close isn’t to be considered even close to a reasonably good build, either. Anyone can build a profession to take advantage of getting the jump on someone not paying attention, either. My reaper can even deal almost 25k damage in a second. Rest assured, I absolutely know what I am talking about when it comes to the thief’s capacity to deal burst damage.

The Daredevil is poorly-designed because it fills in the gaps of only a few poorly-implemented/designed features of the profession. By far and large, the thief is excellently-designed because everything about it is fair. There is no build capable of doing it all, and the sacrifices made are huge for every build when compared to any given potential area of expertise achievable by the profession’s other builds.

There are some niche-exploit builds which are badly-implemented or exist and are strong for reasons beyond the thief, however the core profession is about as fair as it gets. Daredevil on the other hand is just needless, boring power creep that reduced available build diversity to keep the profession up to speed by letting the profesison abuse its core kit options and giving it some freebies.

The only thing poorly-designed about the thief is the ICD on stealth attacks. That’s it. The rest is entirely at the fault of other professions getting too much or not enough while lacking meaningful build options when dealing with either those blatantly superior options or lack thereof.

The thief isn’t overpowered or overly-strong because it’s fair, unlike most of the rest of the professions and builds currently running around in the game.

Because the animations for the Daredevil’s/Revenants staff animations all make sense when using the skin.

Hand placement matters a little bit when it comes to animations.

Swinging a scythe around by just the end is laughable. Tying animations to a weapon would be stupid for PvP/WvW, and reworking GS to hold the blade halfway down while twirling it around would be even more ridiculous. And no, just because half-swording was done does not make it a reasonable justification to have in a video game for offensive cleaving animations.

The only way to enable such a thing is to create a new weapon group available to various professions, but that’s extremely unlikely since the concept is a niche one and it’s a massive amount of work to actually implement when considering all the skins/sets in the game that would need to be released.

Good thieves don’t care, bad thieves get stomped, and the rest of the professions end up not abusing a mechanic that they shouldn’t be able to abuse to begin with.

I don’t see the problem with them.

Except those wouldn’t work as GS animations lol.

While it’s a really cool weapon and all, I just don’t think it’s really reasonable, especially since changing animation choreography has huge negative implications for the PvP environments.

Lexander.4579:

thief indeed is full of terrible design as a squishy class that is meant to instakill the opponent without counterplay or otherwise get killed instantly

the meta d/p stealth-scrubbing only makes that issue much worse and the addition of HoT options (dodge spam and PI) didnt make it any better, just added some powercreep on thief to make up for powercreep on other classes

The insta-kill builds only do so when they devote their entire build to a single attack and lack any meaningful mid-fight potential, and quite frankly, in most cases they need to catch their opponent off-guard while not paying attention. Such builds usually aren’t even D/P, anyways. Mesmers, Warriors, and DH’s all bring equivalent or superior burst with objectively better mid-fight capacity.

The poor design stems mostly with Daredevil rather than any issues with core thief. Unlike most of the other specs and professions, the thief actually needs to make substantial build sacrifices to achieve what it’s trying to do.

I never understand the hate for Logan, honestly. Yes, he turned his back on his guild, but he’s probably one of the most productive members of DE in our PC’s time. He’s pretty much single-handedly responsible for a large portion of why things so far have gone so well, frankly, when considering the effects of keeping the White Mantle in check, saving Rytlock, his ridiculous stand at the end of the Core GW2 story, etc. The path of redemption is long and hard, but he’s doing his “best” (filter) and doing a pretty good job, all things considered.

Logan had an ultimatum. Be absolutely certain that his beloved would be killed, or chance his friends not being strong enough to fight without him.

Would DE have just turned around and said “forget it” if Logan had died or been removed from the fight previously, anyways? Probably not, Snaff would probably have still died, if not worse. The only thing that’d have been different is Zojja might not be bitter at Logan because she wouldn’t have had someone to place the blame on if one of her loved ones died, like if Jenna would have if Logan put his guild first.

And quite frankly, it’s telling of the perspectives on the world between the races; how utilitarian the Asura and Charr are while Humans and Sylvari put massive weight behind their feelings and how love binds them (a la Caithe and Faolain).

No, Braham is absolutely nothing like Logan. Braham doesn’t have an ultimatum to make. He’s just being a self-centered kitten.

Indeed. Condition breadth has been the thief’s biggest struggle with cleansing since launch.

Pretty much comes down to what Baba said, though HiS is pretty terrible for non-stealth builds due to its cast duration.

Since I can’t seem to edit the above post, your speed is quite good, however that’s no longer enough with HoT since so many abilities and skills no longer have cast times or animations associated to them. Work on your timer management a little bit and I think you’ll be in a much better spot against nearly everything.

As Sind said, BV on engage, or headshot twice to proc the Aegis/(HD) FoF. Working around FoF pieces is one of the trickier aspects of the fight.

A lot of this fight came down to managing timers or potentially knowing what the DH does. Quite frankly, this DH was not particularly good and a combination of misplays on your end accumulated into the loss.

You fought way too aggressively when engaging and were too predictable on the OOC; for the most part, DH’s offensive-trap cooldowns are shorter than yours, so letting them heal is going to hurt you more than them in most cases. If you re-watch the video with cooldowns in mind, you’ll realize the player pretty much used everything on reset the majority of the fight, and you did a lot of engaging when running only one stunbreak without consideration for Maw. Towards the end of the fight he was deliberately baiting your engages by facing away from you, not chasing, etc., expecting that you were going to keep trying until you got the kill, which you did. Mind games can be especially important here; keep their timers in mind and stealth/re-position to a vantage point to see what they do. If they’re impatient, they’ll wander off traps without cooldowns up yet, letting you get free and relatively safe engages.

If and when you decide to hard engage, it’s almost always better to assume traps are laid and just dodge/teleport through them and stealth while keeping them in combat. Most of the damage taken came from you trying to DPS-race the DH while standing in traps. Even just a second when multiple traps are stacked is typically too long. For this, I also recommend taking BD when fighting DH since the low cooldown stunbreak and block negates a lot of what they’re able to do, since you can match F1 and all of their traps while negating the damage.

Watch 0:20 – 0:26 again. He dropped defensive cooldowns for Protection and it was very close to timing out. Had you waited another second or so, I think you would have killed him on that engage as he had nothing up and was slow to react on weapon skills.

You can Shadow Shot dodge through Shield of Absorption (0:40) since it’s unblockable, and the knockback should not send you out of the radius.

The 1:00 engage was a great example of getting in between his cooldowns, but you lingered too long as ToF was coming off cooldown – the rest of his traps were unusable still and were casted on the ready for the final part of the fight.

The misplays at 1:26 were really what did you in.
You probably already saw the major error at 1:26 in that you let him OOC heal fully while you were still 2/3, and, as said, he used his traps immediately off cooldown; at 0:08 he placed Maw at the start of the fight which hit you and almost killed you in conjunction with other traps, and surely enough 75s later it was placed again when you were facing away from him resetting. For this I recommend always keeping an eye on your enemy when doing a hard reset. Dodge without directional input sends you towards the camera, and you can bind a “rear view” to the keyboard via the options interface to keep an eye on what’s happening behind you. Knowing there had been traps placed, odds are you might not have engaged as aggressively.

The MH sword and shortbow are also great tools to use against DH’s who have deployed traps when you lack a stunbreak. While the thief has been able to camp one weapon set for a long time for combat, this is no longer the case with a lot of elite specs, especially the DH. For shortbow, get just outside of trap radii, cast IArrow behind the DH, and immediately dodge into the traps to trigger them. If done correctly, you’ll trigger the traps and immediately teleport away behind the DH before the majority of the damage from them is dealt, since the shot has a projectile component, and being behind them also negates the ability to F1 or use longbow skills to CC you and deal damage. IArrow’s projectile if shot will still teleport you even if CC’ed by the likes of Maw so that you don’t get blown up without an out. For sword, pre-casting IS and then timing the pre-cast of IR into a dodge + steal or other gap close will allow you to teleport in, evade, and teleport out with no animation lock frames, triggering traps and disengaging without taking damage, either.

There are also some positional and general play tips you can improve with that I noticed with this fight; you consistently came from the same directions (and as such were not that tricky to keep track of), you didn’t really keep track of your opponent’s boons or buffs/debuffs, and didn’t really utilize interruption or combo-hit effects taking advantage of projectile flight durations to negate aegis and get more oomph from your engages.

It’s very formulaic in most cases, anyways.

I’d actually argue that the core thief, aside from condition cleanse access, is excellently-designed.

The problem is many of the other professions/mechanics, particularly elite specs, aren’t.

Zero Day.2594:

DeceiverX.8361:

kash.9213:

Some people like particle effects, some people like animations. It’s a build like any other, would you rather play lazer tag all day?

Like real-life legitimate Laser tag? Hell yea I would. It’s too cost-prohibitive to do that, though.

Yeah the cost of alcohol beverages really add up….

Wouldn’t know; I don’t drink.

The Laser tag place nearby charges like $20 a match, though.

Spook.5847:

Deaths.9165:

@Automa.

First of all.Yes their are tp bots and Goldsellers. They make through Flipping Gold and sell the Gold for RL Cash.

So consider an ACC costs 25-50 euro if it is a new and fresh one. BUT an lvl 80 empty character ACC costs on Black markets less then 10 Euro. Cause ppl dont like gw2 and want to get rid of their acc.

So thouse Flipper Gold sellers buy for 10 Euro an ACC. Flip on tp. Make Gold worth for 100 euro. Sell Gold for rl cash!

A Win situation of 90 Euro.

The account gets banned. They just buy another acc for 10 euro and make their profit of 100 Euro. The bot customisation doesnt change. Just the acc changes.

So ANEt can bann hundrets of ACCs. They will just buy another 200 acc and keep botting as long as they make profits. This is an extremly professional bussniuss we are talking about. And we as legal playerbase cant do anything against it. Oh we can, just dont buy GOLD from GOLDSELLERS. As long as they make their profit they will keep on.

I have talked to few Goldseller flippers. They do with just 1 bot 5000gold each day! When they sell thouse gold for rl cahs u can considere how profitable this is. And usually thouse are China sellers.

U just have to deal with it. ANd stop flipping as a legal flipper.

Second. Their are more then 7 Million GW2 accs. Lets considre their are 1 Million active players left. Lets considere 100.000 ppl play at same time at any time. And 1000 of them are flippers like u who flip 18h a day. U flip with 1000 ppl who look like u for profitable flip items. on that item.

So u are not just fighting against never ending bots. U are fighting against a reasanable number of other flippers.

GL in ur task.

Exactly so.

And, this is also done with just about every commodity for the same end (albeit not for just bots, though), thus inflating the end prices to regular consumers. No sane person can argue that a commodity passing through more and more hands gets cheaper as a result (assuming no further refinement – using mats to craft something should of course increase their value – something that isn’t always true in GW2). large players also throttle supply, just like Opec does.

The only sure way to control it is to “nerf” the ability to manipulate the market, or to at least make doing so on any scale of consequence so costly that it becomes self-defeating.

It does in the sense that it’s a massive gold sink such that income injected into the game via things like PvE and the likes has more inherent value to players receiving the rewards over time. Boosting the price of commodities ends up making highly-valuable items more achievable for non-TP barons since they can sell those commodities at higher price points in a market with better-curbed inflation.

Granted, there’s no way it’ll keep up with the injected gold, and it does hurt newer players, but the argument can be made that it can help people, although this is only really true for the sellers’ commodity market.

It might break immersion a little, but it’s a HUGE play-ability boon.

Fixed-trajectory-based vector jumping is really bad for platforming/movement-heavy games because it makes precision jumping either too difficult/impossible or requires a slowdown/specialty systems to allow it, and more math which adds more to server loads.

Who’s to say he hasn’t studied you all these months and is now beating you when you were beating him, or that he’s not sharing this oh-so-good-secret with ANYONE and therefore you do not know who it is?

This post is nonsense.

As far as insta-buying goes, it’s valid long-term to max out quantity of an item expected to spike in value; for example, with the introduction of the wardrobe, the mass-consumption of low-cost dyes, speculative flipping investments via the skin market, speculative investments based on drop table/game changes, new releases, zones, consumables, etc.

OP, there’s no guarantee it’s the same person. There’s no guarantee it’s even a bot, especially given the fact you’re letting periods of hours go by between checking. If it was instantaneous (I.E., < 30 seconds), I’d be more inclined to believe you, but you have no idea what’s happening in the meantime.

You’re sitting on 12k gold in cash and are upset, currently making blind accusations in public that there might be someone outdoing you, and because you are being outdone, they’re automatically breaking the rules.

Honestly, that’s one of the most self-centered and unbelievable attitudes I think I’ve seen from anyone in this community.

Quite frankly, if you’re investing in highly-volatile items, odds are it’s many people with the same trend information. And odds are you’re investing in highly-volatile items, because you’re unwilling to share what you were even trying to buy and sell.

A friend of mine in real life solely plays online games to play the economies in them. He wrote a script to query sites like gw2shinies and compile the data into sets of spreadsheets tracking prices hour by hour a year at a time (and some longer term quarter by quarter data for each, too), and then another program to perform volatility reports and determine which items to invest in based on his own criteria from several years of experience. His “Play time” consisted of hours of checking prices repeatedly and ensuring sales were going well rather than “playing the game” if you will. As I understand it, he was an economic baron in EVE despite having never entered a ship. There are people who simply do minute-to-minute checks on their investments to make absolutely certain they will get the sale and not take losses.

Odds are you’re just getting out-done by numerous other people looking at the same highly-volatile item that have more time on their hands and better acquisition to the items themselves. And typically, if the item is volatile and a common item identifiable to many, when the item is both a Buy/sell within the same period, it indicates a massive price disparity and consistent demand with a price increase reflecting that. This will make most normal players recognize that they can get a better deal later if they think the inflation is flipping, or it will make more people panic buy/sell and thus people will be more prone to undercut you and buy the lower-cost items up quickly.

There is no better alternative in sPvP. Shortbow currently is what overall makes the thief worth even bringing to thw format.

Correct. Further, if this was not the case, it would suggest that if the balancing was actually done just for procs of RS, the ICD would have been applied trait-side to begin with.

The change on all levels lacks any coherence.

Primers are still less efficient in gold than just buying the materials and crafting them.

Welcome to the costs of playing WvW for the past few years, all with less rewards. I know I’ve personally sunk around 800g in Furious Oils.

Unfortunately it’ll never be resolved. ANet wants to keep these prestigious short-term consumables expensive for whatever reason because catering to their daily log-in-rewards-type crowd means more to them than those actively playing the game.

RS doesn’t even need an ICD since it only procs when the hit lands/deals damage, which would normally reveal the thief for 3s/4s and thus be an effective ICD, anyways.

I see this as either preliminary “balance” for their next elite spec which will end up not having the Revealed debuff (#balance) or them just being absolutely clueless as to how stealth attacks really work.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

I’ll just reiterate what I responded to to begin with:

Alatar.7364:

DeceiverX.8361:

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what’s being said here, but the Daredevil can do a ton of damage while dodging via Lotus and Bound.

Nobody uses Bounding Dodger unless he is out of mind. Lotus is the only exception, used only by Condi builds. Unhindered combatant is the only one for 90% of Dardevils

I then broke down why the resources are not a big concern and why people think the tradeoff is good. Even if people personally do not like to use Bound, it has purpose, god players make use of it, and it’s not as resource-hungry kitten many people may initially expect when using good play techniques.

Vin, what you’re not factoring in in respects to extra dodges for stealth is the use of things which grant endurance.

Endurance Thief + CV + Signet of Agility + Sigil of Endurace puts that extra dodge “cooldown” at much lower than 10s, not to mention the increased likelihood of people running BD or Impact further increasing endurance regen. On-demand endurance is easy to come by. On-demand initiative is limited to (equally) steal, RFI which is +1 init/10s and Infil Signet also at +1 init/10s. While no perfect substitute for HS, it comes very close in its effective cooldown, and enables more initiative use for offensive or defensive ability use spread throughout a given fight.

I still stand by my original claim in that people in fact do use both and for good reason: Both dodges are excellent and roughly equally strong assuming OH pistol is played.

Even with all those things factored in while watching someone who uses them, I still see the wastefulness of it when Bound in used to go in stealth when using HS makes more sense and D/P has always been effective even without Bound. The Endurance regen doesn’t really explains the pick of Bound over Dash. The only real difference is that Bound grants 10% dmg (and maybe deal damage when lucky) while Dash prevents 10% damage (besides the fact that it’s hard to CC).

The videos surely shows that Bound look good, but you can also see in those videos that those who they are fighting doesn’t really know how to fight against a Thief. They dump conditions on the Thief and allow the Thief to cleanse them by auto-attacking. The Bounding Thief relies on players like this to survive, but against good players, they will watch the Thief DoT to death by completely denying the Thief of cleanse and covering their conditions with weaker ones.

There’s no convincing you that multiple HS casts don’t make more sense.

Your original argument was based around wasting endurance – the 10s cooldown claim – versus initiative, which are arguably equally-accessible in terms of their effective cooldowns.

Bound doesn’t just look good, though; it works effectively for what it’s designed to do, and it allows for things which simply cannot happen on the core thief, like letting S/P and P/P get sustained stealth access and bump already-high damage. Dash in essence is the old Acro build in a nutshell, while Bound is half-SA half-DA. I think you’re stuck on trying to find the better trait of the two when in all reality it’s heavily matchup and play dependent. You’ll see inherently more Dash players in sPvP due to the mobility bonus it has, while you’ll see a very even split if not favoring Bound these days in WvW where said mobility often doesn’t really matter.

Denying a thief its EA cleansing isn’t unique to bound, either. Frankly, playing to deny EA cleansing is even more significant when against Dash players since cover conditions like Cripple/Chill will be cleansed allowing EA to proc more DoT effects, while Bound players can still be overwhelmed with relative ease.

If nobody believes it they have no authority to be talking about damage coefficients or general balance for the profession, as they subsequently haven’t done the testing or math to actually verify this number is easily possible.

On an actual glass opponent, it’s not hard to deal more than 30k.

Can confirm, Suffer! was removed from my Reaper’s utility slot.

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

It could be that these skills were changed somehow either in appearance or skill traits duration etc. Sometimes in games the skills will be removed from skill bars if they had any change at all. Altho, this is the first time I’ve seen this happen in GW2. Could be just a bug. Just re-equip the skill.

Never seen this happen before with utility changes in the past.

While I largely agree with you zinkz as to what the state of combat has devolved into, the nature of running this build does require organized play and good management of abilities. A pug using this build will quite arguably be less impactful and beneficial than gasp a longbow ranger who understands the concept of projectile reflection.

I claimed such a concept (although suggesting Portal and Veil + MI/Moa over Blink and SoM) as being a reasonably powerful ZvZ option a very long time ago but got laughed out of whatever thread I was in for claiming that the mesmer can bring worthwhile utility if it actually bothers to try and gets people to play into its strengths. I’m glad to see something like it working.

The concept is a cool one, and I’m glad to see more people running more out-of-the-box builds and succeeding with them.

Because it wouldn’t be fair or fun to play against, as it has been mentioned.

Frankly, HoT brought way too many instant-cast abilities. If anything, there need to be less in the game as a whole.

Also OP’s claims are just largely incorrect. Weak damage only in sPvP running a defensive build. The issue of not dealing enough damage has more to do with other elites negating too much of it rather than the thief not dealing enough.

Have core life blast inflict 2 torment for 1s. Enough oomph to let it be viable but not overpowered when combined with DF. The scepter trait’s effects are also applied in shroud. This way it doesn’t affect the reaper and gives the slower attack speed on LB a bit of love.

More massive condition application is simply not a good thing for the game right now, and a “pure condi” shroud isn’t warranted considering Reaper shroud is by a large margin better for condition builds over power ones.

The vault would be dealing well over 20k if against someone with 2600 armor as well. Core killshot also deals more damage.

The problem with GF is pretty much the limited tell/cast time it has and how innately durable the warrior can be while running so much damage. The damage component otherwise isn’t really an issue.

emkelly.2371:

(Cut for length)

I think you misunderstand some of what I wrote, and I think it’s also important to note that my stance comes directed from a Power perspective. While condi D/D is a build and a viable one in WvW, it will also never seen pro-level play because again its kit is way too one-dimensional and dependent on what is quite frankly a relatively gimmicky style of play. DB and the condi D/D concept would need to be redone anyways in order to enable it at that level.
I said (or meant to convey) that D/D (in its power state) isn’t able to see pro play just because the skill gap required to play that much better than your opponent to make it work is just non-existent at that level. A D/D player can absolutely out-play other thieves and scoop a win, but he simply just needs to be better than his opponent, and by what’s typically a fairly large margin. As far as fighting me (I don’t remember ever fighting you, sorry :s), I often have my good and bad days and matchups are finnicky, so results can swing wildly :P

The elites largely are horribly designed. A lot needs to be changed, frankly. Regardless of stance on the status of utility or versatility in general, what can be said is D/D suffers more from the HoT content than other sets, even when compared to other professions’s options.

The biggest problem with D/D as you said is it lacks the utility and/or options. Frankly, if you look at the design underlying OH dagger and then compare its kit options to OH pistol, and then compare the subsets of differing MH weapons, the conclusion to be drawn is that at the end of the day, there’s very little way to make OH dagger balanced/competitive without changing DB. The kit suffers from poor mobility, unreliable stealth, unreliable damage, unreliable or pointless utility, poor disruption, and lack of any group support capabilities (allied leap/blast Black Powder for stomps, for example). While I think a nerf to a lot of the HoT content and tweaks to the skills as they are (particularly CnD and the stealth attack ICD) would go far in helping its consistency issues, it still suffers from a very poor engage which is the majority of what the thief should be focusing on in its fighting kit for + 1’s. Unlike D/P and the S/X builds, D/D lacks the capacity to soft reset on-demand and lacks general engage speed to get on point and + 1 with a relative degree of “safety” so to speak. Given some bonus mobility rivaling that of Shadow Shot and an improved evade, DB could let the kit succeed much better in the hit-and-run + 1 game while not being arbitrarily punished by passives, AoE’s, etc. that Shadow Shot often gets around, and let the thief soft-reset via this mobility rather than depend on stealth via BP+Leap (or a mix of both from CnD), say.

The sustain issues are also highly-based on a mixture of sPvP amulets and the HoT power creep, as well as the nature of sPvP in general. The thief at its core isn’t meant to be inherently durable outside of stealth, which poses a problem when holding points. With the mobility access and quick damage it has, I don’t think this will change, otherwise. The thief should bring enough sustain to fight effectively in a duel or maybe 2v2, but beyond that, it shouldn’t be holding points for multiple seconds when strictly outnumbered.

Your last point again is still largely an sPvP/stat issue. Frankly, when I play to win in WvW/Arena/etc., I rarely use my signets on engage, and I never use SoS unless desperate. A good half the time when I fight others, I find myself winning without using at least two utilities, sometimes none except for Withdraw and BV. When the stats are there to let the thief scale, it doesn’t need to unload everything to win a duel when outplaying the opponent. The problem is that again, the profession ends up needing to depend on these abilities because the margin for error due to the nature of stats in sPvP and how the profession achieves its damage is lower. The issue revolves back to D/P being superior however not because it has less margin for error, but because when that margin for error is so low at the pro-level play scene, it often boils down to simply using D/D is too much “error” to make it work for reasons mentioned above.

Exciton.8942:

Play D/P thief, problem solved.

…and how is this pertinent to the thread?

I’ll just reiterate what I responded to to begin with:

Alatar.7364:

DeceiverX.8361:

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what’s being said here, but the Daredevil can do a ton of damage while dodging via Lotus and Bound.

Nobody uses Bounding Dodger unless he is out of mind. Lotus is the only exception, used only by Condi builds. Unhindered combatant is the only one for 90% of Dardevils

I then broke down why the resources are not a big concern and why people think the tradeoff is good. Even if people personally do not like to use Bound, it has purpose, god players make use of it, and it’s not as resource-hungry kitten many people may initially expect when using good play techniques.

Vin, what you’re not factoring in in respects to extra dodges for stealth is the use of things which grant endurance.

Endurance Thief + CV + Signet of Agility + Sigil of Endurace puts that extra dodge “cooldown” at much lower than 10s, not to mention the increased likelihood of people running BD or Impact further increasing endurance regen. On-demand endurance is easy to come by. On-demand initiative is limited to (equally) steal, RFI which is +1 init/10s and Infil Signet also at +1 init/10s. While no perfect substitute for HS, it comes very close in its effective cooldown, and enables more initiative use for offensive or defensive ability use spread throughout a given fight.

I still stand by my original claim in that people in fact do use both and for good reason: Both dodges are excellent and roughly equally strong assuming OH pistol is played.