Guild Wars 2

Mahkno.7593:

DeceiverX.8361:

It’s not that. The daredevil is just conceptually lame and carries terrible players.

nah. lots of folks like the concept, and anyway ‘everything but my build carries terrible players…’ amirite?

If you say so. I know a lot of people aren’t fond of it (at least, at one point people who weren’t; they’ve all largely quit). When I can start winning massively outnumbreed fights by throwing on a trait line, and when many thieves take it off and can’t do virtually anything, I think there’s a problem.

Depends on purpose.

WH is great for small group fights due to the interrupt and swiftness access.

Dagger is amazing for large group play or aggressive power builds from the boon corruption and condi transfer which may not be run as much in traits and utilities.

Focus’s huge damage potential works well for 1v1’s.

Mahkno.7593:

people won’t be satisfied until thief has a cooldown on everything but crafting

It’s not that. The daredevil is just conceptually lame and carries terrible players.

Swamurabi.7890:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Anet believe JQ is competitive in T1 but in reality it isn’t. JQ is too casual thus the inconsistent for T1. It can also be that anet believe some absurd advise from some foolish JQers that JQ should go T1.

I look at it this way:

Anet gave JQ a chance. What happens afterwards is up to JQ to decide. The concept of “earning it” still applies I guess.

This only goes to show that population size/activity, while it does account for a certain “background PPT”, still needs to perform a certain amount of teamwork when teams are closer in size.

That’s assuming that the population algorithm Anet is accurate. Based upon the actions last week and the results afterwards I seriously doubt that algorithm is accurate.

We’ll see next week as Anet manually makes adjustments and we have BG/TC/Mag in T1, because as the week goes on it’s clear that while JQ might have deserved a shot, they didn’t perform up to Anet’s calculations and Mag is doing to the T2 match this week what BG did to the T1 match last week. Maybe by Monday JQ will tank their way out of T1 like Mag did last week.

It’s far too early to tell who belongs where.

And it’s not that their algorithm is wrong; it’s that it can be manipulated, and it currently is.

Not to mention population means literally nothing in the context of making fair WvW matchups. There are too many more nuances that are ignored that quite frankly until they aren’t, will result in unfair matchups either by poor matchmaking algorithms ignoring the reality of WvW player data, or manipulation of the algoritms by players.

Elite specialization (im)balance and concept design is absolutely awful. Easily my first complaint. The game is no longer even fun in most cases just because of how terribly-designed the elites are.

Mastery Points are not a natural means of progression because collecting the points to do things requires the collection of points in other things and so on, and collecting the mastery points themselves requires not mastery of one aspect of the game but deliberately going out of one’s way to collect everything. In essence, the very nature of GW2’s vision changed since release; I cannot advance what I want to and when, but instead am forced into a very narrow path by the game.

BrotherBelial.3094:

If you want to do some hard open world events, try to do Nebo terrace, I’ve never seen a successful defence.

My thoughts exactly. Hilariously over-scaled.

In all seriousness, though, if they nerfed the elite specs to not be as overpowered as they are compared to core, you’d see a substantial increase in difficulty in PvE.

Elite specs trivialize like 90% of the game’s content. I can even solo some meta event champions on these things that would be impossible otherwise.

Was gonna say, there are options for it.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

This has been mentioned time and time again. Thief needs 15 (or 18) initiatives base, low Steal cooldown, and Staff without spec’ing DD. Those are only real reason why Trick and DD became mandatory in most cases.

18 init would be way too much baseline, for one, and Trickery will be effectively mandatory so long as ToTC, LA and BT are still used in one trait line with no similar or superior options to any of them in other lines.

Trill, Lead, and Bounty don’t need a counter part since they should be the appeal of Trickery. Besides, other than Lead, the other two has alternatives.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Those are only real reason why Trick and DD became mandatory in most cases.

Wat.

You mean the third dodge, amazing cleanse potential on EA or huge additional damage, CV, effectively a second heal from DF, and either an effective immunity to immob/cripple/chill or easily-permanent stealth uptime were not good enough reasons not to take Daredevil?

3rd dodge should be put back in Acro. We had it there before and they should put it back. The other traits are right fit for a Elite Spec so if you like those, you can spec for DD. However, by removing the Staff from DD removes the mandatory aspect of DD. The only reason DD is preferred only because there’s no other Elites out there to choose from. If the Staff is unlinked to DD, many builds can use the Staff without needing for DD especially if DD doesn’t really fit into their build.

The only reason to ever drop Daredevil aside from ghost thief is if core trait lines get massively buffed (unlikely), ANet absolutely gores it with aggressive HoT-content nerfs (even more unlikely) or ANet power creeps the next elite spec to the point the thief becomes actually overpowered (also fairly unlikely).

Or add a new Elite Spec, which is very likely.

One would think that the fury access on ToTC which is one of the biggest reasons it’s taken would be in superior form in the trait line literally named Critical Strikes. CS only ends up superior if the thief constantly makes attacks and traits a GM into it. You’re comparing an adept trait with no competition in a utility line to a full investment in CS which is already considered bad in PvP as it is.

LA offers more front-loaded damage than DA as a whole does (or better damage in general unless Executioner is used), and almost as much as CS, and it’s a minor trait in a utility line, so there’s literally zero build investment made.

BT’s boon-breadth removal is difficult to beat anywhere, unless again you also take a deep investment into SA and stealth attacks by using RS, which with the stealth attack ICD is nigh impossible to make work on most builds or against most classes at the moment. So basically, to gain the benefits of Tr, you need to run CS/SA/Acro and still suffer from the initiative penalties of not doing so, no steal cooldown reduction, and no CC play, while also needing to be in combat for an extended period in order to start breaking even rather than getting the benefits on-engage while doing the entire +1 role better because of its gains being on-engage.

Staff is hardly mandatory for Daredevil.

Daredevil has more than one extra dodge due to ET, and Acro didn’t have three raw evades, and Daredevil carries more with CV mixed in as well.

I don’t think any elite spec unless made massively overpowered will phase out Daredevil. Daredevil is too conceptually powerful to be replaceable unless the thief/next elite just ends up being mathematically overpowered.

Not really. I don’t think you understand just how ridiculous daredevil is.

The thief is only an “under-performer” in sPvP because of the amulet system. I’ve proved it countless times that no matter what happens to the profession, it will be mathematically inferior because of the amulet system’s stat distribution/allocation system and how scaling vs static bonus effects do not perform on a similar level as a consequence.

WvW, where the thief has access to the stats it needs to scale properly, however, is a totally different story. The meta build should be stabbing roughly 8k on heavies there. Hyper-aggressive builds, for example, start stabbing closer to 20.

I kept getting ganked last night in WvW on my core thief/main build/character that I’ve put several thousand hours into. So I switched to my daredevil.

Running around 2/3 of the health of my main character and using exotics, I started winning 1v4. Then 1v6. Then 1v8. It got to a point where I couldn’t kill anyone on the sole basis that their resurrection speed and group sustain was too much such that I couldn’t finish anyone, and with a few more people I eventually did start wiping from the sheer number of incoming DH pulls.

Daredevil as a profession/elite spec is tremendously easy and forgiving to play. Of all the elite specs, I’d argue it’s probably tied for first if not first in how high its skill floor is.

And everyone knows backstab is terrible and a waste of effort with the ICD, and even before that with the raised AA damage it was still not worth it. And in sPvP, even before that with HoT giving all professions backstab-level damage coefficients on normal abilities it wasn’t worth it, and before that with the AoE cleave and sustain-amulet builds running rampant it didn’t deal enough damage to justify taking the risk of going all-in to try and land an unreliable skill. Shadow Shot or PI will in most cases do similar damage but more reliably and with attached control effects.

shagwell.1349:

The fun part is that BG has a 30 people queue on EB right now and is running with 2 pins.
No queue on TC or JQ.

TC was running the Outnumbered buff on all maps last night except EBG. Mid-reset.

I’m pretty sure this will be another vacation week because there is literally no way we can keep up.

Doam.8305:

Ayrilana.1396:

HoT maps may have been smaller when viewed from the world map but they had considerably more going on within them than core maps.

Hot maps may look smaller and they may seem larger due to it’s vertical nature. However a simple look at the first map shows the problems with that statement within minutes of exploring. Most of the ground floor you can’t explore nothing but veins that will instantly kill you. The mid is filled with holes to allow people to get to the bottom pockmarked across the entire map it creates a series of hallways. The top area is are a few floating land marks in the clouds with primarily empty skies. The amount of non traversable or empty space along with constant narrow passages more than puts the original maps above them. Even more so that we can glide in the original maps.

Even desert borderland falls flat due to locking people in paths among other things

+1

The repetitive if not down-right frustrating nature of the use of vertical map structures that wasted such a tremendous amount of space severely limits exploration and versatility within the design of the maps. A huge amount of time and effort was used just to create functional maps based solely to sell the gliding gimmick that was probably the only beneficial aspect of the expansion itself.

This is going to be intrinsically biased because the people who have been made upset have largely already left, and left a long while ago.

Frankly, I’d much rather play the game without anything that came with HoT.

Chaba.5410:

Spurnshadow.3678:

I’d say, we have half of the population we used to have, but were still considered full.

Because in the past BG was “overstacked”.

Not only that, but every server’s populations have dropped massively since HoT.

T2 right now is roughly the same in terms of coverage and population is T4/T5 pre-HoT.

kash.9213:

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.

I would dodge spam because I have bad aim until I get close enough to pull their shirt over their head and blast them point blank. Some of us have to build around our strengths or lack thereof.

Which is fine, but a build should never carry a player. What you described was a tactic, not a build.

Overcoming said weakness would be equivalent to putting a lens over the gun to amplify the beam due to said bad aim, which gives an innate advantage and makes the game less fun for everyone except the lamer who only gets off from winning with ease.

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.

All of the times you miss with it would be the times it would crit is why

I think it suffers from the problem of “OMG I’M LANDING IT 14K SUCK IT” → “…it didn’t crit…now I just got wasted.”

Wait, you mean spam-able defenses aren’t fun and aren’t good design for GW2? Who’d have ever thought?!

/s

Nenshoukarasu.6598:

DeceiverX.8361:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

This has been mentioned time and time again. Thief needs 15 (or 18) initiatives base, low Steal cooldown, and Staff without spec’ing DD. Those are only real reason why Trick and DD became mandatory in most cases.

18 init would be way too much baseline, for one, and Trickery will be effectively mandatory so long as ToTC, LA and BT are still used in one trait line with no similar or superior options to any of them in other lines.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Those are only real reason why Trick and DD became mandatory in most cases.

Wat.

You mean the third dodge, amazing cleanse potential on EA or huge additional damage, CV, effectively a second heal from DF, and either an effective immunity to immob/cripple/chill or easily-permanent stealth uptime were not good enough reasons not to take Daredevil?

The only reason to ever drop Daredevil aside from ghost thief is if core trait lines get massively buffed (unlikely), ANet absolutely gores it with aggressive HoT-content nerfs (even more unlikely) or ANet power creeps the next elite spec to the point the thief becomes actually overpowered (also fairly unlikely).

stopped at permanent stealth….
either you haven’t played thief at all or you are just a troll … there is no such thing as permanent stealth.
with d/p you can get a max of 3 stacks stealth (which are ~5s tops because of animation time and so on) after one attack you get a debuff (revealt) which makes you immune to your own stealth. revealt lasts 3s in pve and wvw and 4s in pvp.

oh and before you ask no there is also no perma dodge either.

thief requires the most ammount of playerskill to use. thats not what balance is…
all a thief can do is cap/decap a point and looking for a 2v1 or an enemy on max 50% health.

a thief should be more like an assassin… a 1v1 class … its kinda dumb to have a thief as useless leg man (english isn’t my 1st language dunno if thats the correct translation tho). everyone can win in a 2v1 or against an opponent with 50% health.

You only end up with revealed if you make an attack from being stealthed.

With Bound and D/P, it’s very easy to maintain 100% stealth uptime.

Vayne.8563:

Lexander.4579:

looks like their oldest game makes about as much money as all the games released after it together

Lineage breaks all the rules. It’s been called the WoW of Korea. It failed in the West but it’s so popular in Korea that it just keeps making money, much like WoW keeps making money. People have invested so much money into it over the years, they’re not likely to stop playing without kitten ed good reason.

I want to say it’s more along the lines of it was released here too early and managed poorly for the Western market. Open-PvP usually doesn’t work as well here, and takes a lot of tight managing to do well. A big blunder can kill a game like that if mismanaged a bit (See: R.OH.A.N.: Blood Feud).

Sir Vincent III.1286:

This has been mentioned time and time again. Thief needs 15 (or 18) initiatives base, low Steal cooldown, and Staff without spec’ing DD. Those are only real reason why Trick and DD became mandatory in most cases.

18 init would be way too much baseline, for one, and Trickery will be effectively mandatory so long as ToTC, LA and BT are still used in one trait line with no similar or superior options to any of them in other lines.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Those are only real reason why Trick and DD became mandatory in most cases.

Wat.

You mean the third dodge, amazing cleanse potential on EA or huge additional damage, CV, effectively a second heal from DF, and either an effective immunity to immob/cripple/chill or easily-permanent stealth uptime were not good enough reasons not to take Daredevil?

The only reason to ever drop Daredevil aside from ghost thief is if core trait lines get massively buffed (unlikely), ANet absolutely gores it with aggressive HoT-content nerfs (even more unlikely) or ANet power creeps the next elite spec to the point the thief becomes actually overpowered (also fairly unlikely).

EA alone is easily the best cleanse in the game. The only time it struggles is against a do-nothing condi mesmer since you cannot proc it on AI/clones, but CV and DF with Mug should give you enough sustain to out-last it.

Was gonna say I can get it to 30k with few issues in WvW.

If anything it needs a damage cut considering its initiative cost…

OP, you realize that Vault easily has the potential to be the second hardest-hitting single-attack ability in the entire game, right?

Some levels yes, some levels no.

Part of me wants to go back to the days of old when literally nobody had access to it or permanent move speed bonuses except thieves, and the effect didn’t exist on runes. The other part of me knows how frustrating moving that slowly is like.

Amulet enrichment is definitely no-go, though. Way too little sacrifice for such an essential part of gameplay.

Probably the corrupted set as a whole (I dislike the impermanence behind the AC set as I like them either having blue flames or not having blue flames, but not both since it doesn’t match up with base skin colors/aesthetics), though I think Gallant is a close contender as well.

ITT: Proof of why when you make a game with good combat systems that’s genuinely fun to play on the mechanical level that encourages multiplayer and PvP, it will age well even without content updates.

Also see: Old school RS’s sales figures versus RS3. Quality gameplay mechanics > all other features and updates.

The others are destroying this game because its fundamental systems are not terribly supported in favor of new content gimmicks.

Caedmon.6798:

DeceiverX.8361:

shagwell.1349:

The only real broken thing in wvw roaming is thieves. Condi, perma evade, paired with stealth, condi cleanse, etc.
It’s not fun to fight them at all. They either run and reset 10 times or they condi bomb you while being impossible to hit.

Which is why I think I can sum up this thread in a nutshell, as it’s also applicable to warrior/berserker, and this applies to pretty much everything:

Dealing enough damage to end a fight while at the same time negating enough damage to not be ended/pressured is just bad design.

That pretty much counts for all classes with any invuln/block uptime.Thief/necro not counted.

It counts almost all of them, if not many elements of the Daredevil to to its easily-spammed evasion/Instant Reflexes addition and some of the Necromancer via elements of shroud (although designed this way and made fairly fair as a compromise due to the weaknesses of the non-shroud kit).

The amount of safe damage just needs to be reduced one way or another. It’s excessive and quite frankly is killing the game.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

The poll has ended! The final results are:
60.1% WvW Scoring Improvements Phase 2
39.9% WvW Matchmaking Improvements
This means that the WvW team’s next big priority will be adding rewards to Skirmishes and improving the Skirmish UI. Thanks to everyone who voted!

Please start adding “neither” or “none of the above” options to the polls. I’m pretty sure UI and rewards improvements won solely because 1U1D is no longer a valid means of scoring such that the integrity left in WvW would be disrupted to a very large magnitude.

There are absolutely urgent, major changes that need to be made, but none of these have representation in the polls and nor do players have a means of conveying they have opinions in other territories.

Aeolus.3615:

DeceiverX.8361:

Unless things changed, if the spear lands the pull cannot be dodged or negated in any way except stability.

dodge, blinds?

Altough i would not matter if instead of fix, Anet change the skill for somehting else.

It ignores them; if the spear part lands, there literally is no counter unless you happen to get out of range before he presses F1 again or have stability.

Hexalot.8194:

DeceiverX.8361:

Unless things changed, if the spear lands the pull cannot be dodged or negated in any way except stability.

If you use a movement skill (Warrior Great Sword dash for instance) that puts you out of 1200 range while still hooked by the spear, you won’t get pulled in.

Yes, although I assumed that to be rather obvious :P

henchmen.1856:

X T D.6458:

Staying in a higher tier requires staying competitive, a lot more so then in lower tiers because the need for coverage and population is greatly increased. Every server has the same issues trying to fill coverage gaps, trying to replace players that leave, stop playing, etc. There is just a constant need to take care of these issues in higher tiers. The last thing wvw needs is more burnout and less people playing, regardless of what tier or server. Nobody is forced to come up here, those that do have their own reasons usually because they want a more active competitive environment, but again it requires constant work in order to maintain that level of competitiveness.

Let me translate:

We, the number 1 server, don’t like that we have to put in effort to remain #1. Every other server has less coverage than us and suffers more than us but why should they get help by being open and not us? There is a constant need to maintain our bloated population and who cares about other servers who also have to take care of their smaller populations. The last thing wvw needs is for BG guilds to be forced to leave so that we can recruit more when we should be able to keep getting more and more people from other lower population servers. It’s good for wvw overall if lower population servers keep losing people because they want to come to BG and be in a “competitive environment” where they win every matchup without even trying.

It’s also a logical fallacy.

In essence, he states because they’re the best, they need to put in more effort to maintain being the best, but cannot do so unless they push harder to recruit more people to continue to be the best because then it will reduce the amount of work and overhead to be the best.

If you’re not able to be the best as you are, then you do not deserve to be the best at that time. If there are struggles, they need to be attended to and either overcome, or the weakness recognized.

T1 is not competitive. It hasn’t been for a very long time. Absorbing players from other tiers to offset the burnout coming from T1 doesn’t actually do much in terms of burnout; those on lower tiers just end up burning out like those on the higher tiers would have since they end up fighting the losing fight and needing to allocate just as much effort to carry their own server, even if populations are smaller.

I can say with extreme confidence that it is more strenuous to play on a lower-tier server from both resources and time perspectives than high-tier ones. The burdens of WvW rest on fewer shoulders while defensive play is more difficult and more money needs to be sunk into resources to maintain the points. Stacking only accelerates burnout as a consequence.

Unless things changed, if the spear lands the pull cannot be dodged or negated in any way except stability.

shagwell.1349:

The only real broken thing in wvw roaming is thieves. Condi, perma evade, paired with stealth, condi cleanse, etc.
It’s not fun to fight them at all. They either run and reset 10 times or they condi bomb you while being impossible to hit.

Which is why I think I can sum up this thread in a nutshell, as it’s also applicable to warrior/berserker, and this applies to pretty much everything:

Dealing enough damage to end a fight while at the same time negating enough damage to not be ended/pressured is just bad design.

How many times do I have to say it.

CiS does almost nothing for OH dagger/CnD. You can dodge during CnD’s animation and negate an attack while gaining stealth just like the blind. All it does is make landing CnD more punishing. But CnD isn’t weak because it isn’t punishing (okay it is now with the ICD on stealth attacks but that’s still unrelated to CnD); it’s weak because it has horrible consistency and costs too much initiative to likely miss/get blocked/invulned etc. and for then the same thing to happen to its follow-through with the stealth attack ICD.

In this game state, baseline CiS will do literally nothing to make OH dagger better. It’s about the least-useful change possible.

Reduce/remove the ICD on stealth attacks, cut down the number of blocks and negation effects in the game, put it to cost 5 init, and bring back two-stack BV, and CnD is fine.

Dagger’s issue is its relatively weak skills on 3 and 4 for power builds and terrible utiltiy in most cases when compared to D/P.

Death Blossom needs to be reworked into a mobility-based dodge, split the condition pressure from it into Dancing Dagger, and up its projectile speed.

Put an ICD on Daredevil’s ID trait and now D/D is in a much better spot and much less cheesy for condition builds.

It is in fact intended. They hit you with the start of a channel. You take the brunt of the skill because if it wasn’t a channel it would have hit you normally.

You can still dodge the damage and shadowstep behind them to force the beam off of you.

Dovkan.3519:

You don’t think there’s such thing as an excellent ranger in a WvW zerg? Have you ever seen a frontline druid in action? There aren’t many of us but the sustain and support we bring is very powerful. This entire thread focuses on zerker druids with longbow which isn’t what any competent druid should be running at all if they want to seriously ZVZ these days. Build frontline with minstrels/nomads/clerics/soldiers/etc… The pet isn’t dead weight. Brown bear can invuln, and clears condis from 5 in a 600 range. Smokescale gives an aoe field that can be blasted for stealth easily on the group, and is quite tanky. Could go on about Grace/Etc..

My original post specified longbow. The 5000 character limit and missing post bug ended up with my late-night rewrite missing some content. There are excellent rangers of course, though I stand by the claim I do not think the profession has any inherent value within a zerg over any other profession; the exceptions of course being as I mentioned those players who make up the very small number of edge cases that can provably provide more value than running what’s in the meta. That said, the ranger/druid are very easy replacements to make due to the play patterns they support and lack of unique options within what is effective in ZvZ. Rangers still have plenty of value within WvW in general as I said, just not within what would necessarily be a ZvZ engagement.

Jim Hunter.6821:

DeceiverX.8361:

And then you have the ranger/druid community getting up in arms about how it’s not fair their favorite build isn’t viable and to then start blaming the commanders and serious WvW players for being mean when they get kicked…….

Just want to point out there have been a number of ranger mains in this thread pointing out that rapid firing into a zerg doesn’t make ranger good in ZvZ’s, myself included.

However rangers are fantastic for harassing the kitten out of their back line and cutting off the players trying to run back to the fight. It’s funny as kitten to tap the enemy keep and position yourself in the path back to the fight, if the zerglings try to fight you can easily keep 5+ busy without a problem, if they just try and run past without rescuing their buddies you will kill a good 50% of them or more.

Blanket generalization for the reference to the community, my apologies. I should have specified “many” in the ranger community doing so.

And that’s something entirely different from ZvZ, though, unless the opposing group is simply out-played and lets their backline get so easily flanked by periphery forces. As I said, rangers shine in small scale and are absolutely amazing at it. Cutting off small groups of reinforcements from getting back to the blob is one aspect of this style of play which like I said, still brings value to WvW.

Hmmm….

Maybe around 15? I’ve been on most of them in NA. I’ve financed a lot more helping move people around, though.

The first several came down to non-WvW/score-specific reasons; finding friends from other games or RL friends or whatever on other servers (especially pre-megaserver) and building a small community where we could all WvW together.

Most of them came from the endless cycle of transferring down because 10-man havoc was useless in T1/T2 (and a long time ago, T3/T4), and helping bringing the server up a tier or two when they start winning and make the decision and effort to push up, and then get demolished when they go too far and get demoralized and quit has put me through a lot of moves. Slow glicko would lead to weeks/months of stomp matchups with no support otherwise thereafter, so pretty much unless I/we decided to stop playing WvW (which is why I/we played the game), we had to move.

Then with HoT and small-scale totally dead and player counts low on anything that wasn’t T1/T2, a few moves to test the waters to find the right server to play as a solo player since my entire guild quit the game when DBL came around.

I have a feeling I know what this thread is kind of projecting, so I’d to state now that I think during all of the moves, I’ve only ended up transferring up three maybe four times. One of those was the collapse of SoR a bit after launch unrelated to WvW, another moving from FC to DB after a crash from the main guild leaving to JQ that we knew would never be overcome, and the third that I recall being my most recent move to TC since I was on T7 post-HoT in the original DBL’s with no roaming or blob scenes and no guild to back me up to take objectives with.

Continued from the above, I do not think there is such a thing as an excellent ranger in WvW zergs. I don’t care how good the player is. There is too much visual clutter to even know half the time if your hits are going to get reflected, and standing idly waiting/unsure is literally worse than not being there in most cases, since you’re probably taking someone else’s boon priority who probably could be more useful. Stripping Aegis as true said does nothing but potentially help the enemy since revenant CR procs won’t happen on CoR without blocks and negation. The pet is dead weight and purposeless by far and large in ZvZ. Stealth is insignificant because it means you’re not attacking.

And then you have the ranger/druid community getting up in arms about how it’s not fair their favorite build isn’t viable and to then start blaming the commanders and serious WvW players for being mean when they get kicked or when people tell them to swap. I understand people want to play how they want – I got kicked from a GvG guild for just being a ranger when not in WvW, and the GM was totally in the wrong to do so, but the fact is simply that the profession itself is not good for ZvZ in most cases, and serious commanders want to win. They’re taking time and spending tons of money on siege, talking over voice chat for hours on end with total strangers to lead them to have a good time. If you can’t deal with the fact that maybe they don’t want to lessen their chances of winning because it’ll make it all meaningless, all I can say is that you’re either so selfish or self-absorbed you’re not the kind of person I’d want to play alongside with in any circumstance.

Like I said in one of my first posts, you either to prove your worth as people have with some degree of conformity and purpose by either accepting the weakness in your kit/build and using it in other ways or changing it to conform with what the commander wants you to (I personally have commanded subgroups alongside the main blob of non-zerg built players to take smaller objectives, scout, and distract the enemy while the main group fights or takes keeps etc.) or become the lone-standing exception on your server at an appropriate time. Unfortunately for longbow pewpew ranger/druid, I simply don’t think this weapon in the current game state will enable anyone to prove their worth as such just because like I said, either you’re attacking/supporting or you’re not, and if you’re not attacking/supporting, you’re pretty much a waste of a party/squad slot in mass-scale.

It’s basically thief syndrome except thieves all know they cannot put up a meaningful argument as to why they should be taken in zergs (in the current meta with HoT powercreep and nerfs to controlling venoms, that is). It isn’t fair, and it sucks, but you can’t blame commanders. You can blame ANet for putting in too much projectile hate or making LB/ranged damage too safe, or pets contributing to bad habits in PvE, or so many other things, but you can’t attribute getting kicked or being the target of scolding to re-roll when blobbing to misconduct by commanders/players in general.

Or, you know, the longbow itself is designed poorly to work in large scale combat and those insisting that it isn’t have a poor understanding of large-scale combat, and that boons and tanky boon builds, and subsequently the bunker druid, are actually just objectively overpowered when in small-scale.

Mokk, this thread isn’t about small scale fights. It’s about blobs. That’s why the OP is upset and why commanders kick rangers and druids. In 50v50, if not played by an excellent player who deliberately does not run longbow (which in it of itself is like what, 5% of the ranger playerbase currently in WvW?), it strictly hurts the zerg. A longbow ranger/druid that plays poorly is the single worst thing that can be invited to a blob, even worse than a thief that plays poorly, which offers no support and will instantly die as soon as groups connect.

People aren’t talking about rangers/druids who might “give a good fight” or 1v3 and win on occasion. Quickry usually wins 6+v1. Bunker Druid is literally the best small-scale build in the game right now. Not “okay” not “decent” and definitely not “bad”. In small-scale, it is one of the best if not the best builds to run when roaming alone or in very small groups unless being obnoxious like mass-stealth condi mes ganks, but that’s another story.

The overarching WvW blob meta is so much more substantial and strict than small-scale play. If not for the stealth attack ICD applied to thieves, I’d still be using the single worst thief build in the game, playing without Daredevil, and still killing people. Small-scale is overall fairly loose (though dueling is horrible atm) when it comes to balance and the impact of the “meta” on it. Simply put, every and any facet of the ranger/druid can be replaced by somethinh else, done better, when in WvW blobs, and people playing longbow shooting into reflects and killing their own allies have put a stain on the profession. Stop playing longbow and play a proper build to augment what the zerg needs, and you’ll probably stop getting kicked if you just tell the commander upfront you’re not running berserker longbow pewpew.

kamedin.4698:

I either hope there are no April Fools Joke because they was never funny or there is a toggle that lets me turn it off.

This. Bobbleheads made me literally almost throw up, Aviator was just annoying as heck. I didn’t play during both weeks after logging in and seeing what was going on.

I loved the patch notes from last year, honestly. They were genuinely funny. That said, they might not be as funny considering how very real “jokes” may be considering the current state of professions >.>

It’s a good skill when you get it to work well. It needs a build and style that work with it, though. Pathing issues and the simple fact I’m never in stealth long enough to cast it without being hit by CC have pushed Infil Signet (with its shorter cooldown and more useful disengage if an opponent doesn’t trigger the trap) as my go-to dedicated engage ability. Shadowstep is absolutely the best, but that doesn’t get me damage :P

babazhook.6805:

I tested some more last night in combat WvW. I am now 80 percent sure It steals full stacks thus getting you all of that might. Might IS buried under those others and reapps happen so fast with some classes it can be hard to get at.

As such this does add offensive potential to the SA line.

I do agree that it not all about the might. I am really liking how frequently I can load up stability. With stability on I can avoid all manner of knockbacks, pulls , stuns and dazes.

Good to know I need to start actually testing things myself in depth again even if I’m not going to use said changes; so much of the early consensus from others claimed it only stole one instance of boons that I just went with it.

Muchacho.2390:

DeceiverX.8361:

Grasping Darkness is amazing when used properly, but it suffers from the fact mobility skills are on such low cooldowns. Cut the cooldown in half, and now you’ve got a menacing means of keeping your enemy close by, better chill application, better LF gain, and better CC all wrapped into an ability that takes some skill to use properly.

I dont think grasping darkness is that amazing (though it is certainly one of the better skills on greatsword). In general pulls arent good due their buggy nature but grasping darkness is even worse. Its really clunky to use and walls behind your opponent can prevent it from working. Yes with some practise you may be able to handle the clunkyness and with smart postioning you can avoid the wall bug but honestly why bother when you can just run some condi build or dagger/warhorn not to mention that there is no real way to prevent the usual pull bugs we also have with spectral grasp (e.g. opponents get stuck in the terrain and dont get pulled all the way to you).

Also why does projectile hate work against it? I dont think gaint claws from the ground should count as projectiles.

But yeah fix the clunkyness and the bugs and it becomes amazing.

For you idea of half the cd… sounds tempting.

The walls issue only occurs when it hits a wall that has the “no valid path” effect. It would be nice to see fixed for general QoL, but I don’t consider it too major in most cases. Spend a while playing the thief and the issue becomes a lot less sporadic as you learn what objects/placements will/won’t work, and jump-casting can also help negate some of the issues as well (like pulling from structures above you).

You can free-aim it without a target, too, and it always tracks to your current position, even if it changes mid-pull. If you can’t get a good line, just de-target → cast → re-target while re-positioning for the better line and it’ll work consistently since it’s an AoE that hugs the terrain unlike all other pulls which depend on the target. The hitbox is bigger than the visual which further makes it further consistent if you happen to misjudge where you’re enemy might be, too.

I had an excellent fight against a thief yesterday while using GS (100-0 flawless despite being jumped from stealth) which I was going to post to the necro boards to showcase how GS can be used well. Unfortunately GeForce Experience decided it was time to update precisely during that fight and the replay feature got disabled >_< He wasn’t an amazing thief you’d find in the pro league, but his play was pretty consistent with what you’d find running around in WvW.

Either way, my biggest issue with the weapon currently is reusability of the stuff to close that gap. The reaper/GS doesn’t really need a ton of mobility (I swear by speed of shadows for this reason) so much as it needs the capacity to re-apply its disablement in a given fight. Grasping Darkness is on the same cooldown as Spectral Grasp right now, yet it has half the range and just a bit over a quarter of the LF gain. You get pretty much one off every combat, and being such an essential skill to the design of the kit, it shouldn’t be that way.

Yea, they could give the reaper raw mobility via GS, but that doesn’t fit the design of what the GS is supposed to do. It’s supposed to be slow and menacing and fit to the strength of having your enemy nearby. We shouldn’t be sprinting around like buff warriors with big swords chasing our enemies down; that isn’t necromancer. We should be much more diabolical and forcing those engages.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

To avoid going around in circles as it’s clear you are one that will disagree with me lots here, lets just agree to disagree.

It’s clear that either:

a.) You don’t main a druid who searches for zerg fights and can force a push by downing half their frontline (this alone carries my weight)

b.) You just don’t care and are set on your own concept of a druid (which is perfectly fine, to each their own)

c.) You are just unaware as you have yet to come across a good druid that is NOT running a meta build, therefore not knowing what they are capable of (as I am also aware that meta druid builds are not that great in ZvZ fights…but I also never run meta…custom builds ftw)

Either way, looks like we are going to have to agree to disagree. Either way, fight a good fight mate

There is no druid build capable of “downing half their frontline” unless their frontline has all decided to afk and lets you free fire on them.

Taking it as a literal sense, then yes you are correct, however if you take it for the slight exaggeration that it was meant (as in I can down many frontline, thus helping the push to a great degree) then this stands true.

Again, many people grab a meta build and I am not arguing that all druid builds are capable of this feat that I am claiming, however to say that all druids are not capable of this feat is expressing either how many people use meta builds, thus not built to help much in a ZvZ, therefore helping create this misconception (its like saying all guys/girls are the same…which is untrue), or it got to the point where people have a permanent bad taste that it doesn’t matter how well a ranger/druid does as they will be dismissed against regardless.

Either way, I’ve been thanked from many people for doing what I do and it brings me great joy to be able to down 5 ppl at once despite the lack of strong aoe. As stated, I will just keep doing what I am doing. If you are red, you are dead, plain and simple

Any who, round and round we go so TAG, you are it.

My statement stands.
Ranger/druid can self buff for a large burst on a long cooldown but for a zerg fight you’d need GS to ensure it connects and it leaves the ranger extremely vulnerable because of the traitlines and blown cooldowns it requires. Longbow doesn’t work against organized groups. Too many of our weapons lack cleave and have low dps.

Yes rangers can go glass and rapid fire into a pug zerg but the second a few players get organized and start rotating their blocks the ranger is kittened.

The ranger is fine. The ranger’s frontline is what’s kittened :P

smurf, barrage doesn’t really do that much damage to a frontline or zerg-based group. They should be out-healing it almost passively. Again, I think this issue is a lack of understanding of just how far organized play counters the longbow and makes it self-inflicting in most cases.

Way too much mobility on a spec/profesion that’s designed to not be crazy mobile. GS necro ends up more mobile than D/D thief, lol. Seriously, Death Spiral would be better off as as a replacement for Death Blossom.

Gravedigger is fine as-is, maybe could use some LF gen to reward players for taking the time to cast it and land it.

Death Spiral is fine as-is. Nothing crazy, nothing weak now, either.

Nightfall is probably the best skill on GS currently. GS is in a weak spot only because I think its cooldown is too long. Bring the cooldown to 20s base and it should help make the GS struggle a lot less.

Grasping Darkness is amazing when used properly, but it suffers from the fact mobility skills are on such low cooldowns. Cut the cooldown in half, and now you’ve got a menacing means of keeping your enemy close by, better chill application, better LF gain, and better CC all wrapped into an ability that takes some skill to use properly.

I’d rather see them utilize pulls and effects to bring the enemy to you rather than raw mobility. If the reaper wasn’t too inherently slow to be an effective melee without a trait and utility skill or gear investment, Spectral Grasp would be much more viable utility option, and fits perfectly with the concept overall.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Liston.9708:

Chaba.5410:

I think this thread exemplifies the challenge Anet has with regards to getting guilds that want new members to move to smaller servers.

Agreed – we only see it every single week….. And every single week the answer is move or whither – the guild’s choice….

and most guilds would rather whither than move. Which is why adding a bunch of small servers and no incentive to move would be a waste of time.

This, and most guilds don’t want to make the wrong choice and end up on a server they can’t carry/win with because they’re not as big or as good as they think they are. Half of the time as soon as they start losing they start withering out, too.

If ANet is keeping a sort of tally or something as they go through this thread, I would like to mention I changed my response since I misread the OP. I’ll be changing my vote from option 3 to none/alternative proposal as outlined prior.

Xenesis.6389:

Swagger.1459:

Anet is not linking US and EU.

You wouldn’t physically link the servers, just the scores, everything would still be separate as it is now. All you would need to do is combine the scores to make it a global score.
As a quick example:

1. Dwayna – Blackgate/Jade Sea = 118k, skirmish = 53
2. Balthazar – Ft Aspenwood/Abaddon’s Mouth = 103k, skirmish = 40
3. Melandru – Maguuma/Vizunah Square = 101k, skirmish = 39

This wouldn’t really solve anything, though. I’d argue it’d be worse than links now. The quality of matchups wouldn’t improve for anyone. You could be T8 NA and linked to T1 EU and end up winning a week you get absolutely demolished if your link does well, or vice versa. Your score would get inflated and your pairings would get thrown off based on people who aren’t even involved in the matchup. Is “winning” while being camped at spawn really something that we should promote?

Nor does it solve any population imbalance or real gameplay issues. It’s just a scoring fix on the numerical level, but so is just simply not having scores at all.

I personally like it as it is. I get that the OP wants to make necro better, but the whole point of necro is to be taking the hits and just being okay with it because you’re one with death, in essence. Giving the necro a virtue-style kit effectively turns it into a Guardian v2 except strictly worse until other things get changed, in which case there’s just a problem of duplicate classes and one will just be better than the other.

I think the only two issues with it are that necromancer in general should respawn with a reasonable percentage to get started so they don’t get denied the opportunity to negate even some amount of damage or use some important abilities, and that life force accessibility needs to be upped across weapons and skills. In my opinion, all attacks that deal damage should provide LF. Arbitrary gains only on one or two skills per kit are kind of silly because then certain weapons become innately better at generating the essential resource over others, and those weapons may or may not even be good on their own to accelerate the necromancer into a position where it can genuinely fight well.

Shadowstep.6049:

@Deceiver: you really don’t understand what i write, do you?

Apparently not. Care to elaborate so I do, or are we just going to leave it there?

Kite.2510:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
THE GAME NEEDS A MASSIVE REBALANCE OF ALL ATTRIBUTES AND THEIR USEFULNESS!

Right now, it’s simply designed wrong!
99% of the important meta events that mater depend on strict timers, thus requiring huge dependency on DPS builds and the rest of the content being just more fun to be finished faster regardless, thus limiting the usefulness of the Defensive Supportive builds for rare and specific Raid and PVP situations.

That would be ok for any other MMO but GW2 isn’t designed that way.

• For starters, there is no gear treadmill (the acquisition of rarer gear doesn’t require gear of lesser rarity, and the rarity of each gear doesn’t represent it’s numbers) and the gears are designed around you getting different stat combinations instead. So having content that requires high DPS is pointless when nothing stops you from investing on the most aggressive stats from the getgo.
• Then, the majority of the content is non-instanced, so the situations where you can rely on other ally players having some specific non-dps build to tacle a special situation are very limited.
• Third, most of your defensive options don’t scale with your attributes, with the Downed and Dodge mechanics being the worse offenders, and the unstackable boons and the CCs come close afterwards.

With the above in mind, I would rather have “Guild Wars 2: Enhanced Edition” as an expansion, as it’s a lot of work that has to be done, far beyond the level of a seasonal future patch.
For the time being, the more I play, the more the above problems become more clear. And I already made suggestions on the issue.

Besides the above, not having story chapters missing or being unfinished would be nice.

The irony is that in the PvP formats, full DPS is the worst way you can possibly build, and even partial DPS is only semi-viable on one or two professions. Tank is much better.

PvE problems stem solely from a mix of bad encounter design and poor/predictable scripted “AI” that allows playing DPS to be easy, paired with a community mentality that everything needs to be killed as fast as possible for getting the most loot per hour.