Guild Wars 2

(continued from above)

Further, I do suggest starting with some general-estimate cooldown/duration ideas. I didn’t bother with skill coefficients or necessarily specific/balanced stacks/details until later on in my proposal when I started crunching numbers, but basic cooldowns or better descriptors to portray generally where you’re coming from help a lot when trying to understand the idea better. Descriptors like “short duration” and the likes are pretty vague; some may think short-duration quickness could be 2 or 3 seconds, while some may think of it closer to 1. In the context of a trait like Dig Deep, for example, the differences between .5s, 1s, and 2s are pretty massive, as the latter two could enable permanent quickness very easily, while the former, not so much, but may in fact be too weak at that amount. And then, again re-apply how boon interactions work with the rest of the game; does this become overpowered in a build running boon duration? Boonsharing in a group or x/y/z sizes?

As I’ve made apparent, there’s a ton to consider, but that’s also why you ask for discussion on these forums; you’re not going to get it right on the first try. I had friends preview the Deadeye and discussed it with them early on before the suggestion made it to the forums. I threw random trait and gear combinations together to make sure there wasn’t anything broken at times, and tried to iterate as much as possible beforehand. You’re very likely going to not consider some seemingly-insignificant edge case that breaks the build/spec entirely that someone else will, like what happened with the Chronobunker at release of HoT. Getting feedback from other people helps alleviate these issues before they start, but getting feedback to make changes requires a bit more specific information. Start generic -5s boon duration intervals and 3s condi duration intervals or something;, then iterate over this, making slight decreases each time (Quickness for example would be way too strong on these durations in this spec). Once you think you’ve got it, let the community take over the rest; if 5s of swiftness is OP and someone explains why, and how 4s would be otherwise fine, you’re now in a better spot and add another level of understanding to your spec, which might make you see things elsewhere differently.

nopoet.2960:

First off I’m actually a fan of the Deadeye. The class mechanic is a bit complex but it is one of the suggestions that I hoped would be re-posted.

Second it’s so cool that you actually thought though a build and saw some of the synergies but come on man, you know that there will be cool downs on those traits. I purposely didn’t put any numbers in my suggestion because those things have to be balanced and I wanted to present a high level concept without getting into the weeds. Just assume that perma anything would be balanced out. Although I will give you Dig Deep. It probably shouldn’t trigger unless you’ve used all of your ini.

Thirdly, the stealth ability is powerful but the duration is so short it only really functions as an interrupt and not a control. It’s really there to help with breakbars.

Thank you. I do hope that if the rifle is our next elite spec, it does end up being of the more trickster/gunner style than just a stealth-camping sniper. The Deadeye was a fun concept to develop out of it just simply being so different, and I think that its reworked mechanic seems more complex on paper than in actuality – it was also a bit intentional to try and shake up steal from just being “press button and teleport” to require a little more thought and combat investment.

Back to your spec, I didn’t really even need to think of a build when I listed off some concerns, though. Those were just the minor traits, the condi traits, and some consideration to what happens in PvP environments with one skill of the profession weapon just trying to play into the biggest strengths you made available within the line. As for implementation, it may or may not even be strong, but without specifics there’s really little way to know.

The thing to note is that ICD’s aren’t always a fun mechanic. I know we’re pretty far from this in the current state of the game, but it makes for much more interesting and fun play to know precisely when things will be able to into effect/trigger/etc. It’s reasonable for things like opponents’ major cooldowns, but when you start getting into managing every ~5s cooldown in your opponent’s kit and your own, the game becomes a lot less fun very easily when trying to win a given fight.

As someone who’s taken the time to try and balance out an idea, I’d suggest looking into other mechanics in the game (particularly ones you borrow) and how they interact with your spec. For example, I think Malicious Elixirs, and subsequently maybe elixirs themselves, needs to be changed; aura-share ele is a very strong build, and having the effects of a utility-type-bonus skill come from someone else would enable the spec to pick other utilities while still gaining the very potent effects of the trait. Extended condition duration would allow Bewildering Ambush or Spider Venom stacks to become excessive quite easily. These all need to be accounted for when making such a proposal balanced.

(continued below)

Power reaper struggles tremendously with condi thief, since you need the transfers to land in order for them to work, and in many cases it struggles against Daredevil in general if it’s played well.

Honestly, I don’t have a counter for you, yes, there’s a miniscue delay between DB casts (if they alernate DB/Dodge the gap is even tinier and almost nonexistent, and if they augment this with BD every 12s to mirror your bomb casts, you have no answer). I can beat most power thieves on my power reaper, but condi D/D is something I’ve found myself incapable of dealing with even when running absolute maximum possible cleanses, which aso often do not work since most cleanses on necro depend on hitting the enemy with channeled abilities. Reaper’s too slow to keep up with the evasion and speed of Daredevil generally speaking, and can only really win the matchup when the thief commits to damage and applying tons of counter-burst (which is why power thief is fairly killable).

If you try to open the gap, they’ll either close it or swap shortbow and apply pressure from range since the shortbow also offers plenty of evasion and condition damage.

When on my power reaper ganked by a condi D/D Daredevil, I usually just try to run to a structure or blob. Unless they’re in viper gear, you have full LF, and you just go absolutely all-in to try and kill them between the frames available on DB, you’re pretty much not winning the fight unless they’re just straight terrible. Reaper’s damage is too heavily-based on multi-hits to really do much, and Daredevil cleanses and heals when evading attacks.

Cerby.1069:

Make smc great again!

Vote yes for cannons!
Yes for auto turrets!
Yes for hardened gates!
Yes for guild aura!
Yes Yes Yes!

Just say yes to everything and it’ll all be great again.

Srsly tho i never bothered to vote for these since it sounded too dumb to even entertain the notion IT WOULD PASS.

Now that they are here and terrible though… I’m with the others! I’m definitely voting yes to bringing a troll into the community hierarchy. BLOW IT ALLLL TO THE GROUND!!!!

Anet doesnt care…disregarding dozens of legit community ideas and letting their own creative team come up with unthinkable abominations. Let ‘us’ troll ‘them’ for once…

SUPPORT THE CANNON! WE CAN USE IT AGAINST ITS OWN CREATORS! MAKE WVSW GREAT AGAIN!

Kinda flawed logic, here. Go with that route and here’s the logical progression of the history and future of WvW.

→ -WvW starts super successful and slowly declines.
→ WvW broken and unsupported – years of suggestions are made.
→ ANet starts looking into some problems.
→ Anet implements a feature nobody asked for.
→ Players hate it. If kept it’ll kill WvW.
→ Players think finaly killing WvW is a good idea to force people offline to get it re-done.
→ ANet polls second time, sees overwhelming favor in support and implements changes agreed supported by community.
→ Game mode totally and quickly collapses.
→ ANet needs to get its players back and doesn’t know how.
→ ANet associates player-run implementations and ideas/suggestions to be of poor quality or consistency due to the support of cannons and it killing the game mode.
→ ANet ignores or deliberately goes against other player-made feedback.
→ WvW is relaunched in ANet’s own vision with trends of neglect and being more broken since it had more players when it was.
→ Players salty their plans failed and don’t re-join.
→ ANet down in revenue and salty they don’t know how to support RvR.
→ ANet just shuts down WvW again and doesn’t bother trying anymore.

Just vote no.

Ayrilana.1396:

Astralporing.1957:

Ayrilana.1396:

Has the bolded been proven? Most groups that I have seen/heard that fail do so well before the enrage timer because of the mechanics.

It’s not only those that fail on enrages. It’s those that win by pulling off that last % of damage when the most of the group is already dead. Seen quite a lot of videos of those – and i know that all those groups would have failed if they had even 1% less DPS.

Not sure what you’re trying to get at as I never talked about failing on enrages.

I’ll add into that post though. Everyone is using the exact same builds and team compositions that are meta because only meta build are meta. So with all other things the same, what separates groups like qT from an average pug group on TS?

Because like you saw in this thread, the people at the top actually understand the implications of changes like these and can identify where the problems are, while the majority of the PvE community freaks out when something gets oh so slightly nerfed; see: revenant discussion.

For those who keep crying over PvE neglect and profession balance because of “e-sports,” this was the first ever WvW-based patch; it wasn’t for sPvP. WvW has not had any amount of legitimate profession tweaking in the history of the game. Not once has any effort been made on behalf of professions to make WvW more fun and fair. As a WvW-centric player, you have absolutely no idea what that has been like.

I mean, we’re what, two days into Halloween and the PvE backlash from a festival warrants executive decisions made by the CEO to remove potentially-abusive mechanics like DR. Not getting attention in spite of WvW, when you have/had exploits like Druid being able to jump over keep walls for the better half of six months, totally breaking the game? Are you kidding me?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Mad-King-s-Labyrinth-update/first#post6372596

And you know what? This patch was still pitifully poor for WvW because a huge number of changes didn’t go far enough. If they really wanted to balance the game as a whole, including sPvP, they’d have to up the raid timers and probably make them easier for the majority of pugs out there because DPS and damage reduction would plummet game-wide from the amount of support effects they’d need to nerf.

Conncept.7638:

…
How exactly they have they become worse at pumping out content with time? It doesn’t make any sense, if anything they should have been improving and developing a more consistent pipeline over the last four years.

One word:

Expansions

And to make the counterarguments before they even pop up:
- For HoT, ANet had more devs working on the expansion than working on the core game. ANet is confirmed already working on the next expansion. There go most of the devs inherently. Even the dedicated WvW lead dev was pulled to work on expansion content, despite the ongoing “WvW Overhaul” that’s ANet’s “primary focus after HoT” according to MO.

- ANet has objectively fewer people working on the game than they did at launch. They contracted a massive number of developers to release the core game, like most major game companies do. Odds are, they had people working on making the festivals for Halloween and Wintersday before the game even launched.

- ANet’s revenue is the lowest it’s ever been. HoT was such a failure that the expansion cut regular profits by almost half. If they haven’t laid anyone off, I’d be genuinely surprised.

- As augmentation to the points above, ANet’s parent company, NCSoft, criticized HoT sales being poor and ANet’s revenue also poor. ANet has been told that it must release more expansions, faster, to uphold profits from those who remain. Therefore, there is even more emphasis on developer efforts to new expansions, rather than the core game.

- The remaining content developers are already making new LS content and have been for the past several months/since HoT. Fewer and fewer will be working on the core game as the next expansion approaches, leaving just a small maintenance team to make small QoL changes.

So yea, there are plenty of reasons why the game has less new content, and all of them make sense.

Urejt.5648:

too late. next patch is may 2017.

Source? That’s bad even for ANet standards.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

DeceiverX.8361:

Nope. It’s not meant to be a CC; BV is. Its true power is the finisher, and there are plenty of guides out there on how to make Impact Strike work almost perfectly every time.

Like Dagger Storm and TG, it has a niche, and it can be an absolute monster of a skill when played into it. BV is more or less the all-purpose thief elite, but it doesn’t really excel at anything except providing CC.

…Except the IP chain has two hard CC in it. Isn’t what you said a bit of an oxymoron? But, I get what you mean and agree with what you say here to an extent. The skill is about finishing off, the CC attached with it is only supposed to help you do that.

I’m familiar with some of the techniques to land it, but in practical use, most of the gimmicks you have to use for it are already needed just to get to the point of lowering the health enough for the skill to be of actual use. The problem in my experience though is that the skill inherently fails on its delivery, 8 out of 10 times, even with these gimmicks.

And the biggest problem is that short little distance does squat to get you to the target. Uppercut also misses half the time because of simply walking away; a dodge isn’t even needed to negate it.

The skill is very underwhelming in use. I’m actually okay with the amount of stab and blocks, it’s not being able to land the chain from simple walking away that I’m not okay with. The stabs and blocks basically negate the CC on the chain, and with the amount of it available, the skill chain might as well not even have it. Sticking to the target is the biggest violater here. Making IP and Uppercut shadowstep and giving them a range increase would do a world of wonders for the skill.

It has CC, but that’s also dependent on your opponent not negating the attacks and disables weapon skills + needs to be cast in combat. BV prior to the change had pretty much identical disruption potential (now not so much) and made two attacks unblockable (also not so much now), making it’s CC much more consistent and enabled higher damage. The hits and CC are meant to happen on BV, while IS’s CC component is extra frill to again make an already-weakened foe (no stab or blocks/etc.) be more susceptible to an instant spike.

Again, its “use” is a finisher. It’s not a chain-CC-high-damage-burst+auto-spike on a 40s cooldown. You work for the down and get a spike for free, maybe with a little bit of extra if you have the opportunity to punish them. That’s the point of the skill. If it got buffed, there’d be zero reason to take anything else at all.

I have a feeling you’re not familiar with the techniques to make it land, otherwise you wouldn’t be requesting a buff to make it more consistent. I find the skill particularly strong in small-group play, which is what it was designed for. With the D/P meta, it becomes very easy to make the skills land because you can Shadow Shot/Steal/Step/IS/Trap the individual hits by stowing, use it halfway inside people like backstab, etc. Good positional play is necessary, as it should be, and as the thief was prior to HoT. Throwing in a shadowstep effect baseline would be pretty ridiculous since then positional requirements would mean absolutely nothing for what’s already such a powerful ability. We’ve already seen a huge drop on this with the Daredevil and most elites already. I can’t fathom making it even easier and dropping the required competency for consistent effectiveness even lower. It’s a good elite that successfully serves a very powerful and unique niche. It doesn’t need more.

It’s pretty contextual in the sense that the only issue that seems to plague necro (ha) is the lack of fixed LF on respawn. It’s harder to generate and sustain LF when already low on LF. When a necro has no LF, it’s definitely underpowered. When it has a lot, it’s insane.

Generally speaking, as far as pure fighting capabilities go, I’d put money on necro. I find my reaper is capable of quickly killing virtually anything except bunker druid an condi thief (I play power) solely because of the mobility.

I doubt many warriors will run it. The skill itself isn’t really that good.

Really, the things to be complaining about still are the ICD to stealth attacks and changes to BV.

The more and more patches that come out for the thief, the more I suspect they’re nerfing core stealth and stealth attack builds in preparation for the next elite. Wouldn’t surprise me if the next one indeed ends up as a rifle-based stealth-camping sniper, and we see all professions getting tons of reveal access to sweep thieves with as “counterplay”.

As I said some time ago, though, I think Karl just wants us all on D/D condi venom gank squads.

Xillllix.3485:

Xenesis.6389:

They couldn’t even put a little effort into actually making them player siege by having them take damage from conditions and a siege decay timer before releasing it?

GW2 is a game that was clearly focused and well conceived on release. Then, once the game was released, it’s like a different company took over and started to do random things, breaking things that work well (old trait system, condi cap, dungeons difficulty), making content that people would only see for a limited amount of time, and implementing things that aren’t needed (siege disabler) instead of improving what works (combat system).

The only thing that has been truly consistent is the quality of the graphic work by the artists. They clearly have a team making new maps (DBL) but what is the core WvW team of programmers doing? Is there even such a team? Where is the WvW overhaul?

Just a mention that the programmers are totally unrelated to what content gets released. They just make engine features.

It’s the designers or the people above them that are proving a total lack of value. ANet’s programmers are actually probably some of the best in the industry and have done an amazing job so far with the game.

kash.9213:

DeceiverX.8361:

The fact is, this is stupid. Almost everything that changed the game in this patch was stupid and seemingly the byproduct of massive obliviousness.

I’m not disagreeing with you, but you think every thing stupid. I want to be around when you’re actually super pumped about a change.

You’re rarely going to see me hyped for anything not yet released. Especially not without details on design and implementation. I’ve been on the company-end of MMO’s. Needless to say, in this industry, there’s way too much talk, too much keeping quiet until too late, and too much hype about nothing.

I was “super pumped” for HoT early on. Heck, I pre-purchased the expansion and bought an extra character slot solely for the reaper because I was so impressed by how fun it looked. I think there’s some bias when placing me against it considering how poorly-received many aspects of it were/are across the board by pretty much everyone. I had faith in ANet to fix the problems. They didn’t stick to their guns, and I’m put off. Not sure about you, but I haven’t been impressed by anything they’ve done since the reaper preview/release. I’d like to think I’ve got legitimate reason to have little faith or satisfaction left in a company when being continually disappointed for almost a full year by people doing my dream job

afrocrusade.4253:

DeceiverX.8361:

SNIP

The manner of your typing is what’s pedantic. You say 10 words in 10 sentences. Brevity=soul of wit, blabla.

I’m not trying to be witty or entertaining. I’m trying to prove a point.
One does not prove anything without an extensive explanation. Otherwise the reader ends up either unmoved if rightfully skeptical or foolishly believing someone for no reason. I’d like to assume those reading what I have to say either are or would rather be in the former group.

afrocrusade.4253:

DeceiverX.8361:

[pedantry intensifies]

Running into a raid with 10 engineers should not work for obvious reasons.

The need for healing and dedicated healing is present. A need for buffs that make a certain class viable is also present.

The fact roles exist and some classes fail to fit that role is not a lack of diversity, it’s simply stupid. Raids were not “play how you want” they were “play the best strategically.” Raids have a great deal of diversity. The nullification of two, three more classes from the raid scene, or simply making them even weaker than they were, is nothing short of dumbness.

Having a healer thief with an engineer pulling aggro in cleric’s gear while you have 5 nomad warriors and 3 soldier’s necromancers should not get you through raids. Sorry.

Really? Because that’s highly contradictory to the entire basis for wanting raids and speaking out against the berserker dungeon meta, which is why most people pushed for raids. See, the berserker dungeon meta was exactly the result of people playing strategically and optimally. Call it mindless, but devising the concept of stacking was something that people had to organize and develop. If you played around the early stages of the game, absolutely nobody did it. It gradually caught on because it was a viable tactic. And so was running full glass. It’s Anet’s lack of response to changing dungeons for years that let it get stale, rather than an inherent need for raids.

And these tactics were preserved because the intent behind them was to maximize reward per unit of time. There’s a video somewhere of a healing power warrior facetank soloing Lupi, no reflects, no real skill use, just eating the damage and hitting. If the normal dungeon was designed to provide constant difficult fights like lupi (excluding cheese solutions like reflects etc), do you think there would have been more tanks in the dungeon meta? I do. I do because I think they would have saved pug groups time on average and made runs more consistent; it’d only take one tank to carry a run. What about survival encounters, but really brutal ones, like CoF where instead of elites, everything that spawned was a champion. Or a boss that started out ridiculously strong but got exponentially weaker as time went on?

But they wouldn’t and shouldn’t have been a requirement to complete the content, either. Like the berserker meta, the prior raid meta, and the next raid meta, all such metas are and should be designated entirely by the players. You can take 10 bunker druids into a raid and clear it. It’s mathematically possible to do so except maybe one or two bosses, and even many of the timed ones can still be completed this way. But there’s a huge fixation on certain comps because people want to find the most efficient way of clearing the content now that it’s been figured out, or simply take the words from the pros (who do the aforementioned) and copy them for best results.

And as far as roles and designated requirements and optimizations go, many argue that forcing those kind of requirements is what should define a well-designed raid. I don’t, but consider why we have raids and who wanted them. Those demanding roles did. You just mentioned one instance of an optimal party group applying to all raids. That’s not good encounter design. That in it of itself has just as much diversity as any other possibility, since any given point in time, there will only be one combination to perhaps fulfill, which may result in convenience for those who like to play those roles.

If pursuing the optimum is all that matters like you said, then these kinds of changes should be preferential, actually, since shaking up the meta requires people to figure things out again. There will be to some degree experimentation. I’m not suggesting the specific implmentation ANet made here was good – far to the contrary, actually, as I think they did an absolutely abysmal job for a featured balance patch – but being upset the meta changed is literally a fallacy unless there was true diversity beforehand, which there clearly was not, and is seen in the professional world of game development as a pragmatic impossibility.

I’m not being pedantic but trying to get people to wake up and realize that there’s never actually going to be a balanced meta in PvE, and asking for perfection and diversity while criticizing a change in the meta is a fallacy in itself.

That’s why one can be upset with PvP/WvW changes to balance, because these player-driven encounters have metas which have the capacity to evolve without ANet intervening. Frankly, it’s when these things don’t change on their own, that ANet is failing. And these things aren’t, which means there are indeed fundamental flaws in design and implementation game-wide.

All the PvE players, screaming for roles, demanding that the berserker meta is the devil and support should be made viable, while the entirety of the PvP and WvW communities spoke out against the notion of roles and buffing support because it’d break the game.

So they buffed supports and as expected, the game broke.

But there was still a hard meta and exclusivity in PvE/Raids because the optimal performers/comps were discovered. Chrono+Rev was so strong it was a mandatory requirement for pretty much every group. Everyone else got upset. What happened to the prospect of organized play, and difficult content? Yea, it didn’t exist; groups were clearing raids with just two revs and a mesmer. The meta changed, but nothing more. There just happened to house more classes that had some excuse for use in a very strict build or role. But the actual build diversity? It was never there.

So they “fix” the game modes that got actually broken by the badly-designed elites/support concepts, and people are back to whining about how there’s no diversity.

There never was diversity, and there never will be. There will always be a mathematical optimum. That will always be and stay the meta in PvE until nerfs/buffs happen and some other profession/role/identifier is thrown under the bus to the benefit of another. People keep failing to recognize this. That’s why the game is play-however-you-want, and why raids can’t be super-ultra-role-focused. Because that entire concept is a strict meta which kills diversity. It’s only convenience if your preferred style of play/role is in demand at that time. Otherwise, diversity in PvE is a mythical, impossible thing to have in this game, and the entire existence of a meta is solely to blame on the community for wanting to clear faster than clear consistently.

Really, if you want to talk about a poor job, talk about the PvP formats, which despite the “balance” are still totally and completely borked because ANet’s profession devs are so removed from them that they do not know how to tweak the professions or content to actually undo the poor design decisions they made when appeasing PvE players.

Aury.1367:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Aury.1367:

Oh yes, because skills like essence sap arent OP enough which arent still nerfed, and since doubledagger was already back on the rise, it now does 20% more dmg.

Double dagger Condi is on the rise not power completely different, D/D power is not used outside of a handful of people.

viper uses both, and yes there are oldschool DDs around like hell.

Funny as I haven’t seen another legitimate D/D power player in months aside from the occasional clueless noob or guy in gank groups of 3+ thieves just wanting to get combo ganks while not needing to use an actually good kit due to ally presence.

In all seriousness, D/D power thief is weaker than power reaper/necro. I feel nigh unstoppable most of the time in the PvP formats playing full berserker A/D + GS reaper even before the buffs, which were considered trash-tier necromancer weapons on a low-performing class.

D/D condi is easymode and busted, but as it shows, ANet wants to just keep buffing it. The future of the thief is clearly mashing 1/3 on most builds, and any amount of finesse is just punished for no reason.

A few days ago I took D/P into WvW out of frustration due to a group of D/P gankers.
In around four seconds, I killed them all, Shadow Shot hitting an upwards of 9k each cast without using signets. I didn’t bother backstabbing, interrupting, or actually really trying to do anything but mash 3 and 1 after engaging from permanent stealth.

The profession right now is a massive gimmick when it comes to its weapon skills and player placement.

Correction, the entire game right now is a clustercat of gimmicks that seem to override any amount of skill dependency we once saw in the core game. It’s very disheartening to realize there are Asian games whose developers speak no English who can do a better job at recognizing what is and isn’t good design for its Western market than ANet.

I even ran celestial amulet on mesmer and thief lol.

Having that many more stat points when forced into low-stat distributions as it is and no build granularity is just generally ridiculous. It’s the same reason everyone runs HoT-amulets; more stats = better.

Yup. I need to constantly drop my thief these days since it got forced into a boring build/spec and its kit nerfed almost every patch since launch while its cheesy builds keep getting buffed.

I love power reaper but sometimes the counters are too real and get to me.

And ranger I just rage at occasionally because the pet mechanic is dumb.

kash.9213:

Balthazzarr.1349:

haaa.. finally something to really troll with… should be fun setting up cannons on high places and so on…. well, if we’re not going to get great changes to WvW at least we can have some fun for a while.. :P

Edit note: less health and less damage than normal cannons in keeps and towers… so they might be a lot like arrow carts… not that great.

If it’s fun, how is it not great? It’s just a piece of equipment on a test run and it’s at the start of Halloween stuff, not a big deal. People in this forum get emotional though and every little thing is a tragedy and will end the game forever.

There are some people like me who do as little PvE as possible, including skipping holiday events, just to play WvW.

The fact is, this is stupid. Almost everything that changed the game in this patch was stupid and seemingly the byproduct of massive obliviousness.

apharma.3741:

How’re mesmers supposed to keep up?

With a 6% damage buff to the 2 lowest damage parts of its auto attack!

Woooo

Oh and 100% buff to blurred frenzy o.O

Hey, that’s a pretty massive bump all things considered. Definitely not the correct direction, but this is ANet. Aside from powercreeping bunkers and condition builds, they don’t seem to be very good with the whole direction thing.

Inb4 tons of confusion by other players as to why BF does “no damage” in WvW/PvP but hits for 30k in PvE.

Ah, the merits of split balance. Mesmer is going to be one of the first to live in the chaos that discussion about the class will become, though you could argue that’s been the state of the thief for several years…

Lol, the ICD remains.

ANet is trying way too hard to push condi OH dagger, and for the most part, nobody actually cares when the rest of the class is broken.

No nerf to durability runes, no actually significant gameplay fixes.

Almost exactly what I expected, ha.

Seriously, this patch feels like it was generated last-minute based on some sporadic reading of the forums while trying to do as absolutely little as possible to negate the major game-breaking decisions they’ve made in the past.

Must be the easiest job in the world to be on that team…

Snowpea.5469:

Damage you deal to your team is doubled back onto yourself.

Imagine how this would stop mega-zergs focus firing single targets. Your archers and AOEs would have to use some intelligence and not fire into melee. You could still fight when outnumbered, defend gateways. It would probably open up an otherwise pretty boring WvW experience to new and interesting tactics.

Worth a try?

Nope, nope, nope.

This encourages outnumbering even more. The enemy when outnumbered needs to deal objectively more damage overall than the larger group does, indicating that it will need to heal objectively more while also potentially taking damage.

Thus, since it has fewer resources in numbers, it will be incapable of keeping up, as the big blob could just have every member perform a single, non-life-threatening AA on the smaller group and it’d probably be enough to instantly one-push the smaller group, which would be incapable of out-healing it and incapable of dealing damage back.

No, it doesn’t. There are plenty of ideas out there that feature the rifle as being high-octane/non-sniper (cough-see-my-signature-for-what-could-have-been-cough).

That said, this proposal is pretty crazy busted. The prospect of permanent super speed and quickness on yourself and permanent slow on your enemy when using perplexity runes via Dizzying Speed + Dig Deep + Fleeting Confusion + Malicious Elixirs + Destructive Shot, plus interrupts just makes this full-on silly.

Seems just a little bit too difficult to deal with since the re-application process of all of these effects is just so easy.

Reaper Alim.4176:

Well not to defend the hackers. But more times then not they are usually disgruntled gamers. Maybe yall stop acting like kittenboys and emoting and siege finishing solo roamers after yall 30 v 1 them down. Or my favorite spawn camp these guys. Less of this would actually happen.

Nothing ever good comes from getting a laugh out of making some one else salty. In the end you end up the loser and make threads like these because ANet can’t deal with these players.

I’ve never once done this to someone else unprovoked, and discourage this kind of behavior as well.

But absolutely nothing justifies cheating. It’s one thing to be angry. It’s another to sacrifice the integrity of the game/mode/community.

SkyShroud.2865:

Most likely they glitch into it. DBL has a lot of glitch spots and anet obviously didn’t fix them.

I’ve seen it most predominantly in EBG. And it’s clearly not glitching in a lot of these cases.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

had some scouts say “50 people inner hills. lord 10%”

Even this has value, though, particularly to opportunistic commanders and small groups.

Knowing where the enemy blob is and how much time you have estimated to take an objective makes a huge difference in what a group may or may not be able to do.

SMC at 10% with a 50-man blob during prime time could mean up to 20 minutes of the enemy being occupied if the zerg gets there in time. Quick verification in chat or TS can verify if it’s actually lost or not. If it isn’t a 5-man can go flip their hills and another group of 15 SMC while the two titanic blobs are stuck with their attention to the impending fights and maybe are forced in combat to prevent WP’ing even if they get a call-out.

But if hills is known to be lost, however, it can send the major force to a T3 tower or potentially-other impactful goal elsewhere, rather than trying to be opportunistic with no info and setting up a rush for a major objective that the enemy would also be able to defend in time, doubling the losses via the loss of territory and possibly PPK.

(Also on TC)
Had a very infuriating fight with a guard from JQ yesterday that kept teleporting while in downed state and healing. Applied enough pressure with range to prevent the res eventually, and as soon as they knew they couldn’t win, an exploit was used to not give kill credit.

The official unofficial hack report button (coming from Gaile) is to use the Bot report option when reporting a player.

A lot of these accounts are throwaway F2P ones people make while using VPN’s or spoofed IP’s. This prevents ANet from actually banning them, and they suffer few to no repurcussions for being banned on the account.

Along with an increase in spies, this is my biggest reasoning as to why F2P accounts should not be allowed in WvW. Let the legitimate trial-users try mass-scale in EoTM and see how they like it, and if they do and want to WvW, they can buy the game.

Now mass-use hackers are cut down dramatically because they’d need to shell out $60 per account to throw away when hacking, and with matchup rotations so volatile, spying/trolling is also less likely and would also result in the need for buying an excess of accounts to do so with, making it unfriendly to most players.

I don’t know about removed. But there definitely could be changes made for the better. As mentioned above, ambient-creatures-only would be welcomed imho, since mobs in general offer a lot of strategic value for teleports/target-dependent skills and the likes (as mentioned above the above).

I’d really just like to see the Ascalonians around blue keep thinned out, though. There are just so many there (and dealing AoE ranged damage) that running out of the keep is an excessive hassle in low-mobility builds when on time-critical things.

Nope. It’s not meant to be a CC; BV is. Its true power is the finisher, and there are plenty of guides out there on how to make Impact Strike work almost perfectly every time.

Like Dagger Storm and TG, it has a niche, and it can be an absolute monster of a skill when played into it. BV is more or less the all-purpose thief elite, but it doesn’t really excel at anything except providing CC.

You’ve effectively described half of my proposal in the sense of changing profession mechanics. I think this is the best approach of all. The reaper is the most conceptually sound elite spec because it changes major function over slight tweaks or additional mechanics.

I’m pretty sure what Eval meant primarily is that having just an elite spec change the design of how the thief performs on its most basic levels and getting it to change the profession’s use-cases entirely is a very difficult change given the thief’s mechanics and current design. We’re seeing this kind of runoff already with the Druid enabling unexpected-outcome builds that offer abominable amounts of sustain and lots of damage. A lot of this has to do with baseline sustain capabilities and impressive mobility the Druid offers via the staff. Giving things like sustain and burst damage are simply very difficult to give to the thief without getting into gimmicks, because on the fundamental level of design, the profession is fairly complete and well-done (only some implementation-level things are lackluster, many of which are not the fault of poor design on behalf of the thief, either).

Good design should never exclude prior game mechanics or force players into making false choices. This is particularly why I prided myself in my proposal’s design – there’s not a single build in the game that the rifle, profession mechanic, and trait are incompatible with when in isolation, and none of the builds were particularly dominant over the others aside from some potentially-numerically-necessary tweaks.

ArchonWing.9480:

So are we still trying to do half measures instead of just separating the modes instead of screwing over one game mode to fix problems in another? And end up doing nothing as a result? If revs and mesmer boon share is too good in WvW, then just nerf it in WvW. No?

Why even bother?

Because having a split is a major reason why we see imbalance.

sPvP is already balanced differently than WvW and PvE because the sheer amount of stats and stat diversity available are simply less than PvE and WvW. What doesn’t work in one format works wonderfully in another.

There doesn’t need to be a split. ANet would just be overwhelmed with things to adjust (as if they aren’t already), especially as more elite specs are released. They need to actually normalize the formats better. PvE balance seriously doesn’t matter so long as the content can be completed. All this complaining about the PvE meta doesn’t mean crap. You will find a group doing literally anything playing on literally anything. You might not be optimal, but if you beat the content on a sub-optimal build, it doesn’t actually matter. There will always be a mathematically-superior meta in PvE and it will never change until professions are nerfed or buffed, because encounters don’t change and can be broken down into literal formulas. So long as can group can complete the content, it shouldn’t matter. PvP areas, not so much, which is where the precedent of good design really matters.

And that’s the other major reason why we see vast differences between formats: the actual skills and mechanics themselves are often terribly-designed or implemented. ANet has a staggering number of reworks to do, because some things like certain weapons, traits, etc., will never actually be good regardless what they do, until totally scrapped and re-worked. If balance is split up and everything “seems” good, it just makes it a much more difficult knot to try and untangle unless the skills and mechanics themselves change between formats. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to rest assured that my weapons skills are the same when moving between PvE/sPvP/WvW. That’s just not possible if they take the split balance approach without just adding objectively more work; if they’re going to re-design something, doing so in ways that won’t break any given format is easier than trying to manage re-designing the same mechanic into three different ones between the formats, which may propagate more balance work and demand the same process over and over.

The absolute best thing they could possibly do right now is put PvE stat-selection options/values (aside from food) into sPvP, remove Durability and Perplexity runes altogether, and then work on re-designing terribly-designed mechanics to function between formats.

In essence, then you have a very narrow view of what you think the rifle should do conceptually and there’s no sense in arguing the merits of whether or not it could even be feasibly implemented.

And for the tradeoffs to make it play differently, I’d love to see details. So far all I see is stealth-nuke-gunflame being said. That will do literally nothing for the profession. It’s non-constructive because unless there are added layers of depth while somehow compromising core thief functionality (I.E. also deadlocking the profession into the specialization weapon and a style of play in particular, likely shutting down certain trait lines) but still allowing all builds to work, then the idea in its entirety is nil.

I have no interest in a shotgun-style idea, but only for mechanical reason in that mid/close-range is something that the profession already has an excess of, and 1200 range is something it could use. It wouldn’t be a gameplay or balance concern. I just don’t have any interest because I don’t really see what dynamic it would add to the thief. I wouldn’t care if they gave us a longbow for 1200 range and then a shotgun spec in another (i personally view this more suitable for the ranger, though, as some kind of “Big Game Hunter” spec or something, but that’s just my opinion). I don’t want or need to be a sniper, and so far the only suggestions for implementation have been either contradictory, overpowered, and/or gimmicky.

Your opinions for calling the entire appeal of the rifle as being a long-range sniper are your own perceptions and only your own perceptions. Conversely, I have absolutely zero interest in the prospect of nuking from range. It basically would take the build I play right now and merge it into some easy long-range burst combo spec. No thanks, I’d rather see people earn their damage by taking risks.

If you’re only going to ever be sold on a 1200+ range “Sniper” stealth-burst concept, there’s no sense in even trying to debate whether or not it’s a good idea because regardless of the evidence presented, there’s no convincing you, otherwise. Without a full design to tear apart, the only thing that can be said is that it’s not good design for the many reasons stated earlier in this thread.

If I’m not mistaken, you play P/D? The way I understand it, P/D has much better success with it since Sneak Attack is multi-hit and will let it dodge around Aegis or the trailing end of channeled blocks. Single-hit attacks find themselves with a bit more difficulty getting the proc aside from a player that casts BV after getting stealthed to make the attack unblockable.

Odds are they’ll be outside the trap radius/line once it lands, though, unless you just happen to get the angle right where the trap and their movement direction vectors are collinear.

My bad on the Pressure Striking trait release. Just double-checked and it was indeed in June. ANet announced the changes in April before actually implementing them, and I was just going by my discussion dates.

Venoms, and caltrops were around since launch and was also what he heavily depended on. He also ran uncatchable.

Correct in a sense. He ran SA/Acro/Tr.
Spider Venom + Caltrops + Uncatchable + Perplexity runes, lots of evasion. Can’t kill a permanent stealth thief without cleaving, and if you stood there taking the damage he’d just wait for stealth to dispel right behind you and keep applying pressure via dagger AA and keep dodging (via vigor and dagger AA refunding endurance) applying caltrops. If you attacked, you got flooded with interrupts on Headshot and confusion stacks, or he’d just disappear back into stealth when getting low.

It worked quite well, frankly.

P/D was better, and I never said D/P was the best (I actually said that it wasn’t), but D/P condi was a playable build like anything else outside of optimal builds, and better than most of the non-meta options.

Wargameur.6950:

babazhook.6805:

One I just encountered today that I was not aware of. I am not sure how it can be applied to give an advantage in game but it was sort of neat.

I had set a shadowtrap some distance away from where I later got into a fight. I had a warrior with rifle pew pewing me from range so used Daggerstorm to reflect. As I was doing that he switched to melee and charged. Meanwhile someone tripped my shadowtrap so I clicked the pursuit. I had thought it would interrupt my daggerstrom but I poofed to my trap and when I reappeared I was still in my daggerstorm with 15 might stacks.

To do a shadow step, no matter which one you use, never breaks your current action.

Correct if it has no cast time. The manual reactivation of the trap when teleporting early prevents this since it has a lengthy cast time attached to it.

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t buy in to the idea that a Thief must be as mobile as possible to be competitive. Yes, the current Thief meta tactics rely on mobility to zip around, decap empty places, +1 fights out of nowhere, etc., but there’s nothing that says that this is the only way that a Thief can ever contribute to a team. If the new Spec is worse than DD at doing what Thieves currently do, but is better at providing Thieves some other role on the team that is also valid, then players would have no issue choosing the style that they enjoyed best.

It’s not just the existing meta but a design in how the profession works such that it’s the only thing it has going for it. There’s a reason almost every pro team dropped thief for rev; the mobility wasn’t good enough and its +1’s are worse. Teams need a decap player, and ANet balances the thief to be capable of that role.

There’s never going to be another role unless the profession is massively buffed into being blatantly OP, or forced into combat in a different context that doesn’t allow for stealth and resets or some major cost. The reason the thief can’t do anything else is because it’d be too overpowered to allow for something like a point-holding durable guardian get more mobility, better burst, and stealth on demand. A sniper isn’t going to do anything at all for the thief except make it +1 in a different way, which is going to be worse than what the Daredevil offers because the thief needs to both +1 and decap points, which the entire concept of the sniper would presumably fail to achieve. So unless they make the sniper just as mobile (if not more to compensate for poor +1, since projectiles are generally weak at the moment), and make the spec astronomically more durable than it needs to be, it won’t be used since the Daredevil is going to provide better mobility, more consistent +1, and better escapes/defenses.

Ohoni.6057:

And I assert that without such an ability, there’s just no point to the concept at all. It would be like if they gave Warriors Greatsword, but only as a soft condi, support heavy option with no real DPS to speak of. It’d just defeat the entire purpose. So I think there should be no question whatsoever of if the Sniper build should have at least one “huge damage on a single ability,” that should be taken as a given. The question is what to do to balance that ability with the rest of the class in a way that’s fun for Thief players and also tolerable for everyone else.

This massive burst shouldn’t be the only tool in the Sniper’s kitten nal, they should have plenty of other things they can do during a fight, but it is the most iconic and necessary.

And I assert there’s no point to the concept at all. Ranged burst from stealth is bad design no matter how you look at it. Even the indicator would make the profession way too easily shut down by competent players, and it’d wreak all sorts of havoc on the less experienced ones. We’re seeing the same thing from DH right now. Why would you want the thief to be in this spot, since it’s inevitably going to result in either hard counters to the profession or nerfs?

Of course it’s not the only tool, but when such a ridiculously strong mechanic is used as a weapon skill, you need to balance the entire rest of the elite around it. Tell me, specifically, what those tools should be. Come up with the design, and I’d more than happily point out every little flaw and issue with it until either it’s perfect or you recognize that the design isn’t actually good. With this kind of ability, you effectively pigeon-hole yourself into compromising the specialization for all other weapons except the featured one. Then if you put it on the mechanic, what’s the point in using rifle at all, exactly? As then you’d have better melee with D/P and even more absurd resets on shortbow alternate. Now you need to re-balance and re-design with these possibilities in mind. I’ve gone through this process repeatedly already when I laid out the design for my proposal. Stealth sniping while originally on the list of possibilities, had to be immediately nixed for more balanced, interesting, and quite frankly, more fun gameplay for everyone involved. Get in the mindset of other professions and playing against the elite right now as whatever you play. Now consider playing against it only as a core-game build. Does it seem fair? If not, keep trying over.

Ohoni.6057:

If they can’t get that much right, then they shouldn’t bother with Rifle at all.

So basically you’re saying if they don’t make the spec a 1500-ranged-gunflame sniper, the rifle shouldn’t be used at all for an elite spec, ever? Seems ridiculous to me.

messiah.1908:

why rifle should be sustain on point or point holder? its range common
also anet already several times state thief is fast +1 class and hardly will be support or tanky

to be good with rifle thief will need unblockable attacks simple as that. other wise it will be same as p/p

There’s no reason an elite couldn’t make the profession more capable of holding points.

P/P’s not amazing in this sense since BV can’t apply to a whole unload. Granted, BV stunning any channeled block will interrupt it and drop the opponent’s block for the rest of the Unload, which has the second highest skill damage available to the thief.

If you add more to it with such a low-risk weapon bursting in a single skill (within the confines of BV), it leads us into “Unblockable ranged nuke from stealth on a highly-mobile class” – and I see that as pretty bad design.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

(Cut for length)

1.) The point I’m trying to prove is that I’m not dying running around with a massive handicap to my opponent when doing this. 25% less stats on a weapon set I never play that’s seen as easily-countered still running CS/Tr, and I can perform better. Mind you, that 25% isn’t actually 25%, either; that’s 25% before factoring in all of the damage modifier reductions as well that come with working with lower base stats. Basically, it’s taking an sPvP build into WvW, and we all know how poorly the thief does in sPvP solely because of these stat reductions based on the nature of the profession. Now give your enemy more stats, too.

2.) I don’t think it had much to do with the game being new later on. Permanent 14 might is pretty stupid on anything. SA with Assassin’s Signet (after the changes) was breaking the 15k stab mark, and still would, meanwhile never leaving stealth aside from making an attack, having healing signet levels of sustain, and roughly the same damage as pure-offensive builds. It might not be OP these days because of the power creep from HoT, but it definitely was absurd then, when Sic’ Em didn’t reveal and there were no revealing skills in the game, either. I spoke metaphorically.

3.) I personally never saw RfI used by anyone but P/P players. The S/D players I encountered went IS/SS/[BP/SR/SoA/DV] with maybe some slight variations, since RfI effectively was purposeless both before and after the changes to FS/LS for different reasons.

4.) I don’t have a style on my build. It just deals huge damage when I want it to. I play it from solo to small group havoc as a means of priority-elimination to zerg frontline.
You’re missing a few details on how D/D signets functions, so I’ll clarify:
– RT is pointless since the power gains are negligible, and it only has value if you continue spamming after a failed burst. That will get you killed in most cases, and even Executioner has little purpose for the same reason, since if after the CnD the target is > 50% it’s not activating for backstab, and if the target is below half from CnD, the benefits are wasted since they’ll be put in downed state from the backstab anyways.
- The extra damage modifiers on DrD offset the lost damage from Mug or the inconsistency issues clarified below.
- Mug matters on the context of BV because passives and auto-procs often cause CnD to not hit when the target is inflicted with CC and the unblockable attack is wasted. Even with SoH forcing the proc, the loss of mug enables CnD to get the unblockable attack, netting more consistency for the follow-through backstab.

5.) The skill matters when playing against good players and tankier builds when the build fails, and that’s when it’s most fun. You have to massively out-play them if and when the burst fails, since you’re stuck then with no utilities, cleanses, stunbreaks, teleports, and are down on initiative. This is what makes the build fun, especially when being first to enter combat against multiple enemies, since you take the all-in panic damage coming from them and need to respond with just weapon skills and the two normal dodges. No cleanses, no stunbreaks, unlikely stealth; you need to get creative on how to stay alive. It can end a 1v3 in a matter of seconds without needing to chain stealth and reset etc., but the demands of perfect play in these encounters are much higher. It might be “cheesy” if the opponent isn’t running a stunbreak, doesn’t have stability, and is slow to react to losing a substantial chunk of health out of nowhere. But if all those conditions are met… what exactly is the justification why they should win, then? I mean yea, if all you do with the build is gank half-braindead solo players who are unaware, there’s not much room for growth and it’s a relatively easy build to play, but I can’t really think of an excuse as to why that’s not the case on virtually any thief build, considering P/P would be just as effective since Unload and PW do almost the same damage as CnD and Backstab combined.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Reh.5986:

protection affect condi dmg.

Don’t buff protection. It is already a very powerful boon and buffing it would just buff protection heavy builds, that definitely don’t need to be any stronger. If you want a boon that works vs condis like protection, nerf resistance to only give 33% condi dmg reduction instead of 100% and then increase access to this boon.
Or just nerf protection access across the board which would be an indirect buff to power builds.

DeceiverX.8361:

The amount of damage-mitigation effects in the game right now disproportionately favor tankier builds and condition specs, however. A lot of strong condition classes at the moment (mes/thief/necro) that don’t need to crit run tons of boon hate (since those are already in the meta, anyways), and every condition build applies conditions way faster than cleanses can be applied for the most part. The lone exceptions being perhaps bunker druid and SA/DrD thief.

Condi mes usually doesn’t run any boon hate, condi thief only has Bountiful Theft (often on higher cd than in power builds). Condi necro has decent boon hate, but relies on allies to be really strong.
And yes, the current meta favours tanky builds, but this doesn’t mean conditions are automatically favoured (even though condi builds are typically tankier – statwise). You named only 3 strong condi classes, what about the other 6? Maybe there are more things that play a role other than tanky (dire) stats.

As a correction about the mesmer, PU condi usually runs AT or NF as its primary cleanses, and both rip boons nicely which is why they’re run. Berserker, DH, and revenant also have excellent condition builds currently.

It’s not so much that I think conditions are OP but that the mechanics surrounding why they’re so successful make them stronger than they should be. There’s a disproportionate amount of hate for power at the moment, and you’ve got some condition bomb builds able to on-engage getting DoT’s for 4-6k per second while running amazingly tanky stat configurations.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

Just something to note, having stealth and a long range damage skill could be more balanced than you realise, simply because taking this elite spec locks you out of daredevil. So what you should be thinking about is what would core thief look like with a rifle. This has several repercussions:

1) Mobility and evades will be significantly lower than what most thieves are probably used to by now.
2) Reveals are probably going to mean death for this spec, which combined with the lack of defenses on core thief means any druid with sic ‘em will likely hard counter this build.
3) You can’t play pulmonary impact for interrupt damage, so if the spec is CC/support based it loses that damage source.
4) This build will have zero condi cleanse outside of stealth, due to not being able to take EA from daredevil and core thief being too reliant on SA for cleanse. See 2 on reveals.
5) Rifle thieves will have to take that spec, leaving a choice of two from DA, SA and trickery. So it’s either going to be glass or lose significant damage modifiers to gain condi cleanse and minimal damage reduction.
6) I’m assuming that the ICD on stealth attacks was implemented with this elite spec in mind (think of the acro nerfs while daredevil was in development). So if we have a long range sniper, I’d bet that it’s boon steal will be deliberately limited, making aegis/blocks/protection/reflects much more useful vs this build.

So, if they make the rifle DPS based, they simply have to avoid giving evades, mobility or massive damage modifiers in the elite spec traits. Making the traits support/CC based (with both a power and condi line) but the weapon DPS based would be an interesting way to introduce more builds, while leaving limits on the power of a glass rifle spec.

Ranged core thief isn’t much of an issue. I understand that the thief will not have access to Daredevil, which is why I don’t think any subsequent elites they make will be used in competitive play, unless it’s somehow made even more mobile (which I doubt). The issue is whether or not we’re seeing huge damage on a single ability come bundled with the rifle as part of this “sniper” concept that people keep asking for.

While the sacrifices to take the next elite are going to be many for the Daredevils out there, and you’re correct about general viability, the question with weight is whether or not it’s equally-bad design to make an entire weapon and potentially elite spec a gimmick. Camping in stealth bursting people from range isn’t particularly engaging, and quite frankly, coming from the already-core-thief perspective, just seems like another case of upgrading the core thief rather than providing different ways of playing it, which were the initial specialization design goals, and ones which I still think should be maintained.

Zodryn.4216:

DeceiverX.8361:

Zodryn.4216:

Rocky, you keep referencing P/D D/P as the best condi set, which has never been the case. For one, D/P is a power set.

Oh, I beg to differ.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvVA4K7OFrE

Might not be the best, but D/P is functional on every build for all types of damage/defense.

You’ll notice that

1. He’s using SB alt
2. He’s using interrupt traits for the condi damage on D/P, which didn’t exist until last year

D/P was absolutely not used pre HoT (and still isn’t usually) for condi damage. P/D D/P would be a waste because you use different traits and utilities for each play style and you really don’t have initiative for both either. The point stands that SB is and has been the best alternate weapon, and P/D D/P just doesn’t make sense.

That being said, I’m all for different builds. I even have a S/P hybrid interrupt build that works similarly to the one in that vid. If you think P/D D/P is fun, go for it. I’m just saying it was never the best condi set. Most things have stayed the same or similar post HoT.

Edit: you also said D/P is better than D/D because of the poison AoE. SB has the poison AoE, D/P does not. Unless you’re referring to Lotus Strike, which isn’t AoE.

It was still used for the stealth; one of my old guild members ran a heavily D/P condi setup several years ago, and everything the guy in the video is using except the Daredevil was there well-before HoT by six months or more.

The Poison field thing was said by Rocky, and not me.

Zodryn.4216:

Rocky, you keep referencing P/D D/P as the best condi set, which has never been the case. For one, D/P is a power set.

Oh, I beg to differ.

Might not be the best, but D/P is functional on every build for all types of damage/defense.

Jim Hunter.6821:

I’m fine with 1 rally, I rage quit when I’m fighting 1vX in a camp neither of us own and the other player gets rallied several times because I can’t get a stomp off with his buddy wailing on me or killing off a guard to get him up.

But that’s really just a problem with how forgiving the stupid rally system is. You really should only get the downed state every few minutes, anything more than that and you are being hard carried by that idiotic game mechanic.

I think starting health penalties in downed state should just be more severe each time you down. You don’t lose enough when chain-rallying at the moment. The third down while in the same instance of combat and you should be slain outright, no 4/5/6 tries.

While the tech is there to do a replacement of all gear type of X to a select-stat equivalent like they did with MF, and while it’s in all seriousness the best option if not required for things like durability runes, I doubt they’ll have the courage to do it.

Really, I expect a little stirring, but I sincerely doubt anything substantial will change, because those substantial changes are about the only way to fix things; we already know they’ve pretty much failed on the whole boonshare front.

Or the number of times I’ve died getting caught by bolas while being chased and trying to avoid the players’ skills -.-

martin.1653:

Ok, then call it ‘Long-range-gun-guy’ so it won’t be associated with 15k crits. People here are making funeral for the spec before it even got announced based on assumptions like yours. Spec could be bleed/vuln/utility oriented, not pure raw killing power.
Gunflame already does unholy crits, but it’s balanced nevertheless. Sure, you might be the unlucky zerker eating the load every once in a while in WvW, but many classes have easy access to one-shot combos without too much hassle. But there is usually large caveat to that – they are one trick pony and we all know one trick ponies aren’t really meta.

Yea, and GF is balanced why? Because of its huge visual tells. Take those away and it’s ridiculously overpowered. Oh wait, that’s what stealth conveniently does.

martin.1653:

And since you mention perma stealth, tell me please how would rifle thief have that? If there isn’t stealth skill on the weapon itself like CnD is, then there will be little to none stealth with the spec. And pretty sure they wouldn’t give smoke field access to rifle (and even with it, you can’t leap as you won’t have Daredevil).

In close range people would probably just switch to D/P and finish the job rifle started.

That’s exactly it, you answered your own question: D/P + SA already achieves permanent stealth uptime. No elite spec needed, best melee set already used as alternate or even as the main weapon aside from engage. Just stack 12s of stealth and swap rifle OOC. Permanent stealth and crazy engages.

So then what, force reveal on the snipe? Then it’s pretty horrible without synergy to reveal, and if you provide that, now you’ve got what I proposed to begin with, except moved to a rework of the profession mechanic for more diversity/flavor, since then D/P and Rifle aren’t both effectively required.

Quite honestly, anyone thinking the Daredevil won’t ever not be meta unless it’s massively nerfed/new content is ridiculously and game-breakingly-creeped is vastly under-valuing the Daredevil.

S/D’s ability to chase targets was removed, and it lacks meaningful damage in sPvP due to the nature of how the thief gets all of its damage from % modifiers. Since the stats in sPvP are inherently lower than WvW, this means % modifiers are less effective than + fixed stat bonuses, and since S/D lacks meaningful pressure and has high initiative costs in general, it’s not able to get in and burst or CC a target well, since it lacks the stats for the former in most cases and the kit doesn’t provide much in the other department, since Tac Strike depends on CnD which is too unreliable in the current game.

For sPvP, shortbow is pretty much a requirement. For WvW, whatever you find yourself wanting works in most cases. There are always going to be moments where you wish you had a different weapon as your alternate, but that’s just the nature of the game.

The amount of damage-mitigation effects in the game right now disproportionately favor tankier builds and condition specs, however. A lot of strong condition classes at the moment (mes/thief/necro) that don’t need to crit run tons of boon hate (since those are already in the meta, anyways), and every condition build applies conditions way faster than cleanses can be applied for the most part. The lone exceptions being perhaps bunker druid and SA/DrD thief.

Conditions are harder to negate existing state of the game with so many blocks as well, since condition application abilities almost always do more raw damage per skill, even without factoring targets with high toughness, than their power counterparts. A block too late without a cleanse means little versus missing the block on one power-based attack.

Since 50%+ damage reduction isn’t all that uncommon in WvW, even if power builds can still out-damage their condition counterparts, the innate durability of condition builds heavily favors condi specs in terms of being more consistent in most cases and inherently easier to play based on raw durability and the nature of their kits (condition specs typically have more passives than power ones).

martin.1653:

Why people keep assuming that rifle will be 1 hit kill weapon? That would quickly cause backlash from community and devs would have to nerf it patch after patch until it will be trash level and people finally happy.
But something with the power of warrior rifle with increased range is completely fine (keep in mind how squishy thieves are compared to warriors).

As someone mentioned before, rangers have 1500 range and nobody is really complaining about it, so why should thief be any different? Gap closers are in game for a reason. Shooting from stealth? Anyone (and I really mean anyone) can do it provided they manage to enter stealth (and we all know thieves aren’t special when it comes to entering stealth). It’s nothing special, and you get revealed after your hit.

Many of you already complaining about spec without even seeing it in action and without even knowing we will get rifle as next weapon.

Typically the association to a “sniper” involves firing one shot and killing your target right then and there.

Doing this from stealth is just busted. Bring a full zerk berserker GF friend maximizing damage into WvW, have him run SoF or other major adrenaline sources, and play pure support to give him stealth in combat. Seems strong, right? Now give the warrior permanent stealth access and no need to build adrenaline. That’s effectively the sniper concept in a nutshell.

A comparison to the ranger isn’t a proper one, either, since it both has less scaling damage sources for its bursts than the thief does, and its bursts are all primarily multi-hit channels, revealing the player from stealth and allowing for the enemy to dodge and negate most of the damage. A single burst from stealth doesn’t allow this.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

Stop saying crap like this. It’s only lowere skill floore (as you say) if you abuse the hell out of IP and BOUND. Just because you play close to 1 shot d/d builds that are probably jusy as low skill floor and that DD line didn’t really give your build any improvements makes me think you’re just nip picking and blaming the trait line because 90% of thievs have moved on and changes their way of play (more like forced to). Dash has made things a bit easier sure, I no longer have to worry about imbo/cripple but even back in the day people run things like withdraw and or rfi wich over rides that anyway.

Back on topic, stealth thieves aren’t much of an issue as they use it to fight to its more predictable but seeing (or not) that druid and scrapper has a lot of sorecs now I think stealth will go no where.

I’m actually referring to Dash. Bound is exploitative on OH pistol for stealth (something imho that never should have been implemented), but I don’t really have an issue with stealth. Dash just makes the game easier, objectively.

When I can take an alt Daredevil in rares with no runes playing the lowly P/P with meta utilities and beat people I struggle against or lose to on my main build, and win solely because of the capabilities of the trait line (massive evasion uptime, rapid stunbreaks, immob/cripple/chill immunity, and blocks while I don’t need to care about conditions), I’m sorry, I’m going to blame the trait line. Take off DrD and the game becomes way more difficult. Get rid of HoT entirely and the game becomes fun again. People run it because it’s huge power creep and a necessary evil to match the rest of the BS in HoT. But the power creep provided is so tremendous without making any substantial stylistic changes that the thief immediately became very easy to play somewhat effectively with. The ceiling didn’t change much, but the floor did. What can now be argued as benefits coming with a high-skill-floor class, such as stealth, the ability to repeat skill casts, and fantastic mobility, are much more difficult to justify when the profession becomes so difficult to punish and so accessible at the lower echelons of play.

What you’re saying is literally the argument people were giving in 2013 about pre-nerf SA while camping stealth not artificially making the thief way better than it was, and depending on trait configuration, a total crutch. Pretending like it wasn’t back then is just being silly.

Nobody ran RFI before Daredevil except some pistolero heroes who wanted to spam Unload more. The cooldown was too long to really justify using it in general, and IS provides a much better stunbreak + gap close and if not cast, the same amount of extra initiative. Withdraw is just universally an amazing heal while the others have pretty substantial issues due to their niche purposes.

As far as bias goes towards the Daredevil because of my build, no. D/D Signet burst actually improves with Daredevil. Daredevil over DA offers more damage via bound and HM on engage, a more consistent engage due to not having mug trigger BV before CnD (and stab before the change) provides better sustain since DF gives D/D inherent sustain via DB evades, and provides the build amazing condition cleanse otherwise not possible when playing signets, and an extra evade to boot. Actually, Daredevil is an objective improvement on Signet D/D over DA and makes it substantially easier to play. I continue(d) to main core thief because I just don’t find the Daredevil fun more often than not solely because imho it gets rid of many of the challenging facets of the class in general, and in particular, the build I play. I’d actually argue Daredevil is a strictly better upgrade for signet burst than it is to the meta build when looking at how well it’s capable of performing relative to without.

I played signets for the out-of-stealth play, anyways. I found the extra challenge before the HoT powercreep relatively fun, especially against other thieves and power builds. Some people want to play cheese for free wins. I want to punish bad players to end the fight quickly and be in an all-out brawl with the medium/good ones. Making every fight epic makes the game more fun, which is why you’ll never see me run the meta on anything.

I understand you’re willing to make personal attacks because you likely savor the Daredevil’s design, but if you’re going to try and claim I’m biased, please, make your claims based on some kind of fact that I can’t easily disprove.