Guild Wars 2

TL;DR this patch:

PvE players:

“ANet, the DPS meta is stupid! I want to play a sustain build and be viable! We need roles!”

-> ANet makes Druid and Chrono support builds, gives Revs plenty of boon access. Nerfs ele’s dominance over DPS. The effects absolutely demolish the little integrity WvW and sPvP have left.

All Competitive players: “This game is a ****ing joke. You’ve got no idea what you’re doing.” -> Quit

-> Guilds start clearing “hardcore” raids easily with 3 people.

->ANet tries to do something to stop competitive play from outright dying while sales plummet from over-neglect and bad design decisions to the competitive formats for years.

The PvE players again:

“ANet why are you making me unable to deal damage and full heal/give my party peraboons/etc. at the same time?! I want my class to be good at everything and always in the meta! Being forced into roles is horrible! This nerfs are uncalled for!”

Competitive players: “The changes won’t actually really change anything. You’re still missing the problem despite us clearly spelling out for you many times.”

-> TBD: ANet probably listens to PvE at the last minute by tweaking numbers up, and the intended effects of the changes do literally nothing for diversity game-wide.

Aitadis.8269:

I don’t play boonshare much, but why is it okay for PvE to have 100% boon uptime but not for wvw. It’s a double standard the way I see it.

It’s making some people upset because it removes some professions from being in the optimal group setup. Unfortunately what they fail to realize is this is a fallacy.

The same people who are so interested in hardcore PvE are clueless when it comes to how metas and optimization against AI seems to work. The game will always be exclusive of certain combinations/builds just because the community deems it as non-optimal. And in reality, it’s not the game’s doing but the players. The entire point of hardcore PvE is optimizing groups regardless of the consequences to overcome some ridiculously exclusive content. True diversity is a lie in any PvE encounter, because forcefully “diverse” games are just forced optimizations.

Eragon.8234:

There are so many people on here complaining about the new balances before they are even here, let’s wait and until they are actually here before the complaining, they may not be as bad you think.

With ANet’s track record since HoT, it’s almost guaranteed to be worse.

I assume you mean Quickness and not Fury.

I imagine a similar trend, though. Changing SoI doesn’t really change much at all. It just kind of shows general lack of understanding of what’s going on in the game, since if access got nerfed, it’d hit the WvW blobs hard and still buff the mesmer in raiding by making SoI that much more impactful.

Granted, it’s not a total win for the mesmer since being a boon bot isn’t always a fun time for everyone, but it’s better than being nerfed and not actually really having an effect on WvW.

I only spoke for it being quoted as unkillable and easy. It’s moreso really only because of elites and defensive trait lines.

Take out DrD and SA and stealth ends up being quite a poor performer for the most part on the thief. There are very, very few thieves I’ve ever lost to which run neither, and most of the time it’s easily-attributed to a major misplay on my end. Core thief’s reset-enablers like Shadowstep and SR end up having pretty much the same cooldowns as abilities you’re likely trying to reset from, and resetting only really has much of an effect when the gain is cooldown advantage; a hard reset, unless long-lasting conditions are applied to force the opponent into staying in combat (and not cleansing) for a health advantage (which is difficult and rare), affects both players equally, which is why Sind and many particularly skilled thieves don’t just go for the OOC reset despite being more than capable of doing so when at a disadvantaged health state. Keeping them in combat with burned cooldowns and staying in stealth for quick ones like CV and initiative to refresh adds a lot more value than trying the fight over again. The mesmer sees better gains from hard resets than the thief, since its point-and-click teleport is on a substantially lower cooldown than the thief’s, and it has its primary burst tool as a 1500 range weapon, too.

Not to say one profession is better. The best-reset-approach is a bit different, is all.

And in particular, as we’ve concurred, the problems surrounding resetting for the thief are existent only on one weapon combination. Good luck trying to pull off non-OOC reset stunts using x/D against most of the meta without sacrificing major traits or utility skills.

Stealth might be a strong mechanic in the right hands, but on its own it’s far from game-breaking. As I’ve continued to mention, it’s moreso it being used in conjunction with other effects a little bit too well, or in some cases, just being a little bit too accessible. But the act of being hidden briefly in combat? I’d hardly say it’s excessive.

Even then I don’t think it’ll change much; run a few more mesmers and you have the same thing happening.

Boon access/performance is still the core of the problem.

puddintay.5786:

LoL you guys are wasting your breath. First I love the thief class. It’s fun, fast and almost unkillable with little to no skill required. Second Anet loves this class to death so forget any major nerfs. Lastly even though I love my thieves that I play its not fun. Little to no chance of death is just not fun to me. I can run out and strike for enormous damage, evade damage at my leisure all the while jumping around like a cricket with a staff and blinding the kitten out of my targets. If I make a istake no worry I can stealth off and do it all over again. So what if I only have 12-17k hits…I am never going to take too much damage because of my evasion, dodging and blinds.
I am not sure what kind of fix your hoping for but stealth alone will not do it. If you give too many classes to uncover stealthers for more then a few seconds you take away from the core of the class. Sure my engi can prevent stealth…so what a good thief will just pop away so far and fast you will not catch them….I can go on and on but the point is there is no fix they can or will do for balancing. They are decent at balancing but not great. I mean we have groups of 5-12 squads of thieves running around in wvw with a few mesmers to boot. Imagine what they can do lol.

bottom line is for me is I love the class but I like a challenge when I play a class. As for fighting them just avoid them when I can and if I fight them I just hope that I have some soe damage. It’s really imo the best way to deal with them. Meh to each his own. No changes are coming though that you will like.

Drop the elite spec. Drop defensive trait lines. The difficulty goes up. Daredevil probably put the thief on one of if not the lowest skill floors in the game (albeit the high ceiling relatively untouched at super-high levels of play) This is applicable to every profession, though.

Granted, the skill is ridiculous in how it combos with itself, but mostly just because boons are that much more ridiculous.

If boon access was more controlled, it wouldn’t matter. But it isn’t. And ANet’s unwilling to take the plunge and nerf HoT.

Rin.1046:

In the beginning it was Anet’s intention to make elite skills game changers. But over time, and for various reasons, they toned them down. I still remember a couple of the elites being very powerful and they definitely fit in the game changer catagory.

I remember a lot of complaints from the playerbase about various elites being too strong, and I suspect that was the main reason for the change in direction.

I am ok with elites being slightly more powerful utility skills, but I do wish they would revisit some of the cooldowns, because some of them really aren’t warranted. Some skills were nerfed but the cooldowns remained long. That really is my only issue with some elites.

I personally do not want super powerful game changing skills, because then it just comes down to who has their elite off cooldown and player skill goes out the window. All they need to do is balance some of the cooldowns to be more appropriate to how powerful the skill is.

This is a pretty noteworthy post: at launch, these skills were typically really, really strong. A lot of the PvP came down to whose elite was up rather than using the rest of one’s kit. It wasn’t particularly fun, as a lot of the mechanics were pretty abusive and just stupid, like how BV worked at launch in that if you got hit by it you effectively died, since it ignored stability and couldn’t be stunbroken from (and lasted longer).

Ben K.6238:

Balthazzarr.1349:

You can’t just go and start blocking so many people really. That’s not practical since even the trolls actually have useful information at times.

Sure you can – I have a couple guildies who blocked dozens on day 1. (Their block lists were already hundreds of people long, so that was hardly a surprise.)

Surely trolls are not the only ones with useful information. But even if they’re not blocked, I’m not going to show up to defend something if the only person saying it needs defending is some muppet whose word I don’t trust anyway.

Nailed it.

Nothing’s gonna change, lol. Blobs just run a few more mesmers for SoI casts and have the same effect.

The boons themselves and their accessibility are what needed the massive nerfing.

Bunker druids will just run a little more healing power to break even (and may even benefit).

As expected, the mark has been missed. It isn’t SoI or anything like it, but the problem is and has been forever that boons are just too easy to get and too strong in general. Blobs will just run a few more mesmers for the same effect, lol.

They’ll never touch their precious HoT power-creeped garbage, though, where boons are given out by pretty much just existing.

bluri.2653:

DeceiverX.8361:

Neat, though really what I think Sind proves tremendously here is the vast inadequacies of OH dagger at the moment.

Also, idk if the meta is different or not in EU but man there were barely any condition or bunker sustain builds being played in those videos o.O Running ID in most cases in NA is suicide in small-scale or 1v1.

I beat most bunker sustain builds, the mes is running illusion mirror image etc for full sustain, i also beat scrappers/druids/war too. The only condi build i dueled that i wont beat (no recording) is mes with scepter/staff if they are good enough, sure i cannot kill it but i can also survive for as long as i want cus of improv just rotating the cds (i dont need EA) for it.

Heres the engi duels (first a random condi one then the meta engi build)
https://youtu.be/T_0puJ6lLbg

Dunno, none of them seemed particularly durable (lots of immunities and whatnot, but not really tanky), and your damage relatively speaking isn’t that high.

Just my experience is that the overwhelming majority of people I bump into while roaming are running some kind of condition-bomb bunker in most cases, and I didn’t see any such fights. Your play is excellent, but it caught me off guard to say the least that you weren’t just constantly getting bombarded.

The random condi engi guy did almost literally nothing, though :s The fight to watch was certainly the scrapper who had a much better idea of what he was doing.

Most of the changes are unwarranted, particularly the ones to shortbow, for reasons explained above. The shortbow isn’t a PvE weapon and never will be because its sustained damage is too low. It’s got Cluster Bomb, but even a fast projectile won’t do much about the initiative costs and still low damage on its AA. For PvP and WvW purposes, the set is pretty much flawless as it is. Fun fact: Detonating the bomb does more damage if done within the target (getting the three hits) than letting it hit the ground, too.

For D/D, DB and Dancing Dagger both need tweaks. Dancing should absorb the condition damage and just be a three target cleave with normalized damage +50% and no bounces, and DB’s evade should be changed to a gap closer like Whirlwind Attack to give the set some better mobility and evasion since its out-of-stealth potential is horrible thanks to both of these skills unless playing cheesy condi D/D.

CnD still needs work, but that’s nigh impossible to resolve with the recent changes.

Fay.2357:

Not possible unless you find some mob for the Mesmer to arcane thievery a long duration stability from.

The longest base stability duration is ~6 seconds. Boon duration caps at 100%, so the longest you can push that base to is ~12 seconds. Boonsharing an intensity-stacking boon only boosts the stacks, not the duration, so ~12 seconds is the longest possible with that comp.

However.

There is theoretically a way to get longer durations. There is a tempest earth warhorn skill that extends the duration of existing boons by 2 seconds. Let’s say you set up a conga-line of tempests running past a couple players with stability. As each tempest reaches the group, they pop the skill and then continue on to the back of the line. With swiftness, you should be able to get at least 3 tempests past the group per second. This means that they’ll be extending the duration of boons by a net of 5 seconds for every second your tempest conga-line is in action. If you run your tempest conga-line continuously for 12 seconds, you should be able to reach 1 minute of any boon.

I need to try this now.

Lmfao. Please post results and/or video. I need to see this in action just for the comedy of it.

No, that’s not how it works. The concept of Expertise would suggest then the game demands more cleanses than ever. That didn’t happen; condition application got increased when it launched. Such a stat only provides an answer to some builds, and then you have a very rock-paper-scissors answer to balance where either you run the condition damage mitigation stat and faceroll win agaist condi builds, or you don’t run it and you get absolutely demolished because your cleanses got nerfed.

If you’re going to utilize stats to solve the problem, it makes more sense to give conditions baseline very low duration and just mandate that Expertise see use game-wide, including core, and then just replacing dire gear with it, and then just have expertise be able to boost the condition duration cap up to say 4×.

This could even enable substantial tweaking with power damage coefficients on existing condi-only weapons and condition components to power weapons, since durations baseline could be made something like 1.25s – a single tick without expertise – while an expertise-heavy build could get 5s ticks, a substantial damage increase paralleling that of the difference between soldier’s and berserker gear.

Then condi play carries enough vulnerability in small-scale while its damage ends up unchanged in meta large-scale since people will just stat expertise to deal the same damage they deal now.

And then just let people get selectable stats on any existing condition damage weapons/armor they have, just like they did when replacing MF.

And all things considered, a set like TB would be the effective equivalent of Soldier’s while not just shelling out more damage against more durable foes for no reason.

Neat, though really what I think Sind proves tremendously here is the vast inadequacies of OH dagger at the moment.

Also, idk if the meta is different or not in EU but man there were barely any condition or bunker sustain builds being played in those videos o.O Running ID in most cases in NA is suicide in small-scale or 1v1.

Artaz.3819:

DeceiverX.8361:

And that’s what we’re gonna get lol.

Seriously, profession balance is never getting better until they massively nerf the power creep from HoT and remove half the runes and armor they introduced.

HoT power creep will be nerfed more when the next expansion happens – work with it.

If ANet nerfs/removes the Runes and Sigils, people will simply go to the HoT T6 Orbs/Maguuma Lily/Black Diamond, etc. So that is not the solution.

There is basically one specific HoT Rune (Durability) that needs to be hit hard with the nerf stick. Only Sigil of Concentration is somewhat OP but that’s only a problem because of other boon duration.

I would argue that Plate of Gnashblade Mussels food is far more unbalancing than any HoT sigil or other non-Durability Rune though.

The new gear-stat distributions are pretty game-breaking, honestly. 15% extra stats for no apparent reason on mixtures that are already very strong.

To be blunt, the only thing that makes a thief in stealth hard to kill while being attacked is Shadow Shot’s guaranteed blind, because the skill does huge damage and prevents fast-reaction turnarounds and punishment.

Stealth already is lost as soon as the thief deals direct damage. This applies to all classes, too.

Fight against OH dagger and you’ll realize how insignificant the mechanic can be, and how x/P is what defines the success of stealth on the thief, and because of the thief’s innate weakness as a profession in the current state of the game, what defines the success of the thief at all.

Mind you, I say thief. Daredevil is another story, but Daredevil will never not be played because it nullifies an overwhelming majority of the weaknesses the core profession suffers from.

Rising Dusk.2408:

This thread makes me sad.

• You can play and beat any content in the game using any build you want. (Including even raids)
• The ‘meta’ is decided by what minimizes risks and maximizes efficiency while still doing as much damage as possible, and varies wildly for different content.
• If you play with a guild group, you can play whatever you want wherever you want so long as they’re aware and cool with it (and if you find casual groups, they will be).
• This exact same thing happened in GW1 (DwG / Trenchway / Ursanway / etc) and happens in every other team game. People want to be efficient.

This post is only applicable to PvE. The OP speaks for sPvP and WvW.

There are some builds which mathematically cannot kill others in the PvP formats unless the target literally just doesn’t use abilities.

The difference in efficacy between builds is so ridiculous that GW2’s PvP environments are a running joke in a large segment of the MMO community.

The game was absolutely excellent around two years ago, aside from the D/D bunker ele issue. As Xil said, he’s late to the fun, because to be competitive, you’re not playing much straying off the meta, and some classes are more fortunate than others.

There’s a reason why the community voted to for the shortest possible time between links to begin with.

They’d probably have had great success if they preserved server names/turned enemies into an allied “color” for a nameplate and just re-did the pairings weekly to prevent bandwagoning.

But these things were said before and paid no heed to.

And with the elite, the best condition cleansing in the game, two extra dodges at no cost, mobility-penalty negation at no cost, permanent swiftness at no cost, a block+stunbreak+cc on a 12s cooldown, extra healing at no cost.

Daredevil and the AA buff pretty much defeated the entire purpose of playing with any degree of finesse, and the changes for the stealth attack ICD and BV blatantly punish it.

Nike.2631:

Ghotistyx.6942:

On the subject of sniping with a Rifle. Early in beta there were skills (Meteor Shower was one) where the skill changed the longer the skill was held down. This mechanic survived in siege weapons like the Trebuchet and Catapults. In fact, such a skill has already been used Sniper Shot

A Thief, upon stealthing, could gain access to the sniping skill. The longer it was held down the more powerful the shot becomes. However, a fully charged shot might last longer than stealth. Such an idea would be both similar and different from Warrior’s Killshot while keeping the theming of the Thief. It would certainly make for interesting interactions with current and future traits.

I have to agree that the sniper spec in the Snowball Mayhem game had some really thematically strong abilities for a “long range rifle”. And while it’s a great place to start, it also DIDN’T have a bunch of the Thief Profession’s strengths to leverage those abilities into an OP abomination.

Really, Elite Spec design is about style more that rocketing directly to the top of the charts.

As it’s been made apparent, a mid-range option that isn’t strictly optimal will be objectively useless.

Granted, “style” was only properly achieved on the reaper – the rest of HoT is so powercreeped – particularly in the case of the Daredevil – that unless the next spec is just totally and absolutely broken, it won’t be played. There is very little they can give the thief to justify not taking Dash/EA/BD/Third Dodge/healing for so little damage loss. Even my super-ultra-ego-maniacally-self-cited idea doesn’t hold a candle to the merits of the Daredevil except to buff niche builds.

Major damage for consumption of initiative would find itself requiring multiple nerfs to the core thief without additional risks and tradeoffs. Given a 25% damage modifier if dumping the full 15 I could push out a 20k Shadow Shot pretty easily in WvW.

And I’d rather not see the core thief get further butchered just because of new elite specs.

aandiarie.7195:

Also I heard they may get rid of wvw quickness, do something to boonsharing, tone down condi, and do something to Rev.

Lol.

Yea, right. I sincerely doubt ANet’s balancing team is aware enough of the state of WvW to even do half of those. I won’t even speak competence.

I’d expect core ranger and thief nerfs because ANet, druid and core elementalist sustain buffs to compensate for those two losing some edge in PvE since last patch, condi mesmer damage increases because mesmer DPS in PvE is too low, DH stability increases since the golden-child profession is not as viable in top-tier play in sPvP to stomp people with, war resistance toned down because ANet doesn’t like how durable it is, and necro boon hate up to keep them still relevant in sPvP by making them do what they do better and not improving what they’re horrible at.

Oh, and cata splash damage radius reduced for the big WvW balancing change as to help people defend objectives when outnumbered.

Seems more in line with the track record than actually fixing major issues.

I couldn’t help but burst out laughing when I saw it.

So I just assume ANet is giving up on the esports scene now since there’s then literally no way for teams to advance together lol.

babazhook.6805:

Yes I tried HIS but found it was not all that efficient for my own playstyle. The Cooldown too long compared to withdraw and I hate having to stealth for a heal and seeing the SE do nothing because the HIS already removed those conditions. Added to that I just can not afford an interrupt.

Since I use trappers respite I also like the fact I can use withdraw to kite then stand behind the dropped trap as a sort of safety valve allowing more attacks to get in.

Yes this IS a trap build and uses multiple traps. It not a ghost thief.

I use Shadow trap on this more and more and find it very useful. In P/d I find I use all of the skills with regularity. CND for stealth. The Cripple albeit much less than the others, shadowstrike with regularity, that CND to stealth and apply vuln and Body shot for immobs and more vuln. With the traps also aplying vuln I can get some decent stacks on.

I do agree CnD can be hard to land at times and think INI paid for the given outcome is rather steep . Stacking stealth off the d/p set is so much easier and I can see why so many use that route.

As to S/d and its CnD, I found with that build I did not rely on stealth as much. The benefit on the attack is just not there and I would rather just port out and back in.

Generally speaking CnD has issues. Too difficult to land | too expensive | consumes BV over the stealth attack, and OH dagger itself has issues with the stealth attack ICD since in most situations while using an OH dagger on any kit it’s not worth using 2/3/4 if the intent was to attack from stealth, since the skills are so different than what most kits offer.

I personally love Tac Strike. It has amazing value to either CC and interrupt someone and open windows for FS/LS or deny a bomb via the blind. Different strokes, I guess, but I’m not fond of IS/IR since the change.

Jana.6831:

Serious.7083:

Jana.6831:

ETA: Btw you don’t need stealth removal skills, but the game and its players are that dumbed down that they think they do. What’s even worse is that they’re too lazy to even use them SMH.

True, what we need is all of the stealth removed from the game and see if you really need it. considering all of the other options thieves have I think you will get along fine without.

BTW I didn’t comment on conditions, that used to be far too weak.

Have you ever considered playing another game?
Because what has happened because of all the whiners is that a good portion of the players have quit because their class has been destroyed.
And if you think that equipping Sic Em is way too much for you, then better don’t try to play thief, otherwise I would recommend it so you rethink your “thieves can live without stealth”.

Daredevil can live without stealth. Core thief, not so much.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Eval.2371:

maddoctor.2738:

The question is what kind of support can a Thief provide? Might? We have PS Warriors. Quickness? We have Chronos.

Here is where I chime and point out thief is the only class that does not have a passive aura. Thief is also a class that has been struggling with party support and sustain. I honestly think a siphon as a aura, or siphon as a group mechanic would be an interesting and relevant way to make thief more attractive for groups and help out in other game modes.

Maybe revamp Venoms to be actual Auras.

Like how they should have been all along? Preposterous!

Gotta appease raid people with 1spam for deeps, though.

Like all the professions, though, HoT took the finesse out of the game for the thief and gave it mechanics that make it probably the most spammy of them all.

WvW variety has sunk about as low as sPvP. The powercreep from HoT is so massive the core and more diverse builds that may have been slightly less effective before are just pitifully bad now.

The state of profession and gear design in the game is probably one of the worst I’ve ever seen. There are Asian imports whose developers don’t even speak English that do a better job at figuring out how to balance the game in more timely ways than ANet.

If you’re looking to PvP – don’t even bother. Talking about the game on the forums because it was once so good is more fun than actually playing it in its current state, to be honest.

apharma.3741:

…trimmed for length due to 5k character post limit…

To be fair, ranged multi-hit burst available on skills like MR pretty much hard-counters bark skin, since the first clone will take off the reduction and the rest will hit for full damage, and the weakness is applied within only 240 range.

If stealth is intermittent, single-target abilities work fine. All ranged attacks in the game regardless of weapon, if made against a target before it enters stealth, hit the target. So long as it happens even as the pre-cast is starting, the abilities will land. S/X ele suffers from the matchup profession-wise because its primary source of damage comes from gimmick options in traits like FA, it doesn’t deal with being blinded well, and it pretty-heavily depends on using a lot of skills in rapid succession with a preset rotation. Rotation-heavy play can be countered by a lot of good thieves (particularly on D/P) to begin with, and since the Ele in general lacks oppressively busted stats and the thief isn’t nerfed in WvW like it is in sPvP due to the way stats on amulets work, there’s a lot going against the ele. S/X ele is only really countered by D/P or Bound PH pistol from the thief being able to recover and position better while running the ele dry or a hyper-aggressive boon-rip evasion S/D build. Against OH dagger or core thief not running D/P, S/x ele arguably has the edge from AoE blinds.

Sindrener is indeed an incredible player, and in WvW, the thief is MUCH better off than it is in sPvP. There’s a reason the class has stayed played in WvW for years despite being considered so poor in sPvP. Put simply, relative to other professions’s losses, the thief just by entering sPvP loses an upwards of 25% of its damage. On more aggressive, damage-oriented builds, this number (again, this is relative to other professions’ losses) sees almost a 50% decrease. This is attributed solely to the amulet system, boons, and its interaction with how the thief achieves its damage. Mind you, I’m not going to talk down Sindrener – he’s the best in the game for a reason, much better than me – but it’s very important to keep this in mind when taking different perspectives of sPvP players and WvW players. The fact that until the recent changes I was able to see fantastic success in WvW playing what’s been long-argued as the single worst thief build, without the Daredevil (and so bad in sPvP I moved to classes with < 50 hours on them with much better results) kind of exacerbates this. The thief is certainly capable when it’s being played on an optimal build in an optimal environment by the best player in the game, but such a situation begs whether or not that’s really and truthfully an adequate representation of the class itself in multiple environments.

As far as ghost thief goes, trapper runes aren’t the main issue, although generally speaking, I dislike the rune, and they do exacerbate an issue which shouldn’t be one, which is high-mobility and stealth uptime on builds that in all honesty shouldn’t have it.

And how mechanical skill means absolute jack in the current iteration of the game in most cases.

But it’s been that way since like… forever in sPvP.

I vowed to stop as soon as HoT launched so abysmally lol. I’ll change my mind when ANet does.

nerovergil.5408:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Off all those that don’t wish to farm? Some players have more cash than time. Some, more time than cash.

I doubt raising the cost of Gem Store items would go over well. The exchange rate is set by the players. It’s probably fine, as is.

anet can have your money and cant have your time. You having more time is not beneficial to anet

On the contrary; a lively community and a large number of people in support of a service makes businesses that much more successful.

League of Legends didn’t become so successful because it tried hard to monetize from its customers. It became successful for doing exactly the opposite, and prioritizing its community over all else at the early stages of its release.

The same is said about Amazon.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

@ deciever
I get what you’re saying. It’s just that vault and bound are also evades and both do more damage than blurred frenzy. So both have better dps. Better cd and better “offensive value”.
Overall point stands. New mesmer elite spec deserves more personal damage instead of illusion based damage.

Vault has extensive aftercast non-evasion frames during its animation, and Bound does strictly less damage than BF; it can only physically compete on a build running something like DA/CS/DrD signets versus a mesmer not traiting for damage on BF. I’ll be first to admit that I think vault is overtuned, too, since it’s got the highest single-hit damage coefficient available to the thief, over backstab (the wiki is wrong; coefficient is 2.52).

That said, I totally agree with what the mesmer should get next on the ideological level – a source of personal damage that isn’t dependent on killable AI. To make it work, they’d need to make the new elite replace shatters in a way that reduces the innate bursting and utility the mesmer has on its kit. High innate personal damage and the access to shatters as they are would in all seriousness be excessive in the PvP formats.

Leo G.4501:

DeceiverX.8361:

Kinda why people are suggesting a /rp chat option, though. This way if you like to look into it, you can enable it, and if you don’t, you can disable it.

You can already do this.

DeceiverX.8361:

And then excessive use of /me and RP-related content in non-rp chat can be seen as spamming, and constant use of unrelated talk in the middle of someone’s rp monologue while in /rp can be seen as interfering/spamming as well.

So basically, you want to be given the moral highground to rule over /me and /say? Because RPers would and should still utilize it if they deem it relevant.

DeceiverX.8361:

So if it’s enabled by default, nothing changes in respects to getting new people into /rp, and quite honestly, the only people upset by the options are just people who want to be the center of attention of people who honestly currently do not give a kitten .

I’d assume some RPers would be upset because they’d request more tools to aid in RP like emotes, filters and chat organization tool, not a channel they’ll get reported for not using 100% of the time.

I’d personally prefer the devs keep the status quo instead of /rp if only because if they’re going to use resources to help RP, do it right or just don’t bother at all. Apparently, RPers are happy enough without added reasons to alienate, report and shun them further.

To clarify what appears to be misunderstanding the point is to isolate /me in the form of RP without affecting /me for general purposes. I.E., the /me command would be usable within the /RP chat option and only show within the /rp option, rather than default global chat. You can currently disable all emotes, no more, no less. What non-RP players are asking for is a way to block out the RP without simply disabling emotes and say chat, since those have value for other communities as well. Not so much just a separate chat channel but an entire filter based on whether or not said channel is activated. It’d effectively be a chat subset.

I’m not stating this as strict benefits to RP players but rather how both sides would likely see benefit. The separation here would offer fewer reasons for other players to isolate and report RP’ers; whatever happens in RP chat stays in RP chat, and then players who aren’t interested either disable it or have no right to report (within reason due to subject nature), since they’d need to be in the RP chat to begin with to see it. This cuts down on the frustrations from both sides where you have people reporting RP’ers for spamming or crude comments while non-RP’ers ruin the immersion of RP without being able to be told off for interrupting, since RP lacks its own ability to shut up say the normal say chat of those intervening.

The only reason why anyone should feel abject to this is exhibitionists wanting to showcase their RP to the entire world, which like I said, for an objective majority of players, do not care about. So what difference does this actually make aside from allowing the stopping of nuisances on both sides?

And why nobody takes the game seriously anymore lol.

Hell, even the thief has a passive invuln trait on it now.

I think you mean, “Make it possible to catapult Asuras into walls.”

It’s an OH pistol problem when it comes to permanency, but also one perpetuated via Daredevil. Leap finisher on Bound still puts DrD into a situation where it’s almost always advantageous for literally half of the weapon combinations, even if not running Dash, which is the better of the two.

And Dash itself enables even poor play for the thief in general when it comes to getting stealth. Dash allows for thieves who get caught via immobs etc – inherent counterplay to stealth – to simply escape unharmed without needing to cleanse. Basically, the amount of skill required to play semi-competently plummeted hugely and the number of available aggressive counters to deal with the thief dropped tremendously.

ANet didn’t think things through. They’ve now got a hugely rewarding mechanic that once had very definitive counterplay in a situation that seemingly doesn’t have that much. I still don’t find it particularly oppressive, but that’s also because I’ve got years of experience on thief. Still, I find myself often shaking my head when playing against Daredevils because I know I out-played them, was in a position which would execute any core thief, and was simply unable to solely because of the elite spec. There are respectable and good players I’ve dueled who even admit their wins have come solely from this difference.

The fact is, stealth isn’t really punishable with the daredevil. It’s not that stealth is OP, but again, the surrounding mechanics used in tandem with it are what make it more infuriating than anything to play against.

Jana.6831:

DeceiverX.8361:

Daredevil is extremely easy to play. I’d actually say meta Daredevil is probably the easiest build to play in the entire game at the moment.

Core thief is a whole other story.

True, but even daredevil can’t cut through all the blocks, passive blocks, boons and sometimes ridiculous sustain.

It still doesn’t justify any of it, nor take the fire from those saying stealth as it currently is trivializes a lot in combat on daredevil – because it absolutely does, and they’re not wrong for saying there’s a ton of reward for next to no opportunity cost.

You’ll never not see the daredevil played, unless ANet massively power-creeps their next elites every time they come up with a new one, or massively nerfs daredevil and buffs core thief and nerfs half of the rest of what was released in HoT.

Kinda why people are suggesting a /rp chat option, though. This way if you like to look into it, you can enable it, and if you don’t, you can disable it.

And then excessive use of /me and RP-related content in non-rp chat can be seen as spamming, and constant use of unrelated talk in the middle of someone’s rp monologue while in /rp can be seen as interfering/spamming as well.

So if it’s enabled by default, nothing changes in respects to getting new people into /rp, and quite honestly, the only people upset by the options are just people who want to be the center of attention of people who honestly currently do not give a kitten .

A lot of games with stealth allow it to be gained during combat, though. Even games like BnS and League, both.

GW2 doesn’t allow people to keep attacking while staying in stealth. Only the condi trapper build and PU mesmer, but again, this isn’t a problem with stealth itself but mechanics being used that simply don’t interact with it, and the effective exploitation of condition damage access on non-damaging abilities.

Daredevil is extremely easy to play. I’d actually say meta Daredevil is probably the easiest build to play in the entire game at the moment.

Core thief is a whole other story.

Mikhael.2391:

I couldnt be bothered to read all of this defending of stealth. No class should be able to do damage while in perma stealth and thats it, stop complaining of how thief would be bad etc etc coz best thiefs i know dont run that broken build. It does not require skill (if any of u thiefs think ur that good) its a simple matter of a "legal"exploit.

You do realize that thieves cannot deal damage while in stealth and that the only build which can do so is a build (D/P condi trapper) which most people here already are calling cheesy, right?

Again, my argument: Stealth isn’t the problem. It’s other things used in tandem with stealth access that are, I.E. damage, durability, mobility, boons, sustain, etc.

Then HS will just be spammed even more, and that’s attempted solution for only one weapon (sort of, since D/D then still gains zero benefit).

apharma.3741:

DeceiverX.8361:

Fat Disgrace.4275:

could say the same about all of the automatic and or passive buff/defences too, i thought this was a game to play, not the game playing it for you.

This gets me more than anything.

“The revenant is open – I’ll punish him with some CC!” -> Autotaunt -> CoR + Surge = Dead.

“Just baited the warrior’s Endure Pain – Time to hit him hard and finish him off!” -> Defy Pain/Dead or Alive -> Taunt -> Dead

“The mesmer just burned F4, BF, and blocks – CC and punish!” -> Mirror proc

“Let’s fight that ranger” -> Auto-weakness

“Gonna get the jump on that DH and he won’t know what hit him” -> FoF

“…Guess I’ll just burst down the necro” -> LG/US

How interactive. There are more, but this just generally sums up how the game feels at the moment.

Camping stealth should be punished or simply not possible, but complaining that the mechanic itself is OP (especially the thief lol) rather than the surrounding mechanics that are definitely game-breaking seems a tad foolish when stealth played by any non-abusive build can be beaten (and beaten badly) just by playing well.

Some of those are definitely not as bad as you’re making out, Rev and DH I find the worst though as they not only have the anti CC (Rev gets it on 75% of the CD as everyone else wtf?) but also have a lot of stab and plenty of blocks, invulns or semi invuln states so as to be for all intents and purposes immune. A lot of that comes while dealing damage too which is straight up bad.

Ranger Druid certainly doesn’t need auto weakness when they have protect me, Druidic Clarity, Celestial Shadow, Ancestral grace, sword and dagger evades and the extra weakness sources they can have. However core ranger would need that trait so as to not die to a stealth gank.

That’s really the problem, when a class (either mesmer or thief) can jump you for between 10-16k while using a daze/stun to force you into a stunbreak you do need some form of auto protection from that initial attack. Especially when those classes can port 3000-5000 range in a few seconds and escape with ease.

However with stealth camping in it’s current state or should I say stealth ganking, I can’t honestly say every single one of these should be removed. It would be ideal for a lot of them to be more active but not while stealth is in it’s current form and that is to be untargetable, unseen (removing counterplay deliberately put into skills via long cast) and with no penalty for extended duration for ganking.

Honestly it would be nice if everything was toned down and scaled back so fights took a little longer naturally instead of taking longer because the vulnerable windows are so short and far between. A single auto proc trait isn’t a big deal to me and can be healthy but not lots of them while also having excellent mobility, extended blocks/invulns, evades and doing damage while doing them

In the case of druid, do not forget about Bark Skin (minor) and Shared Anguish (the only good major), also applicable to core ranger since these are both in WS. Saying ranger is susceptible to burst is imho a pretty poor argument since their already-amazing trait line allows for such low-investment passive CC negation and 50% damage reduction on an opening hit or two. I find myself on my full berserker ranger almost always escaping being bursted, and quite honestly, only dying to thieves when being stuck to by Shadow Shot spam, because I don’t run staff or HoT pets to enable a disengage. And that’s a problem I’ve been arguing over religiously for years :P

I played a glass cannon no/low-stealth D/D thief for the better half of four years and won most of the times I got jumped by other thieves. Not to say stealth camping ganks are fair and fun, but the impact passives have (particularly against the more fair builds) on the game is pretty tremendous and quite honestly, just as frustrating, and in all seriousness, the need to react quickly in this game is under-valued. The fact my opponent can be perfectly capable of seeing me, not playing well enough to actually notice me, and then be unpunished for being taken by surprise from behind is quite silly.

As I said, permanent stealth shouldn’t be possible anywhere, as good awareness should let you be able to see any incoming opponents from a far distance, even if they might be able to close that gap very quickly. OOC stealth is imho poor design in general on pretty much anything that can inflict burst damage. Get rid of the possibility of ganks which don’t have counterplay, and the need for passives drops immensely. But it only becomes fair when both of these things happen.

As mentioned, though, it’s not stealth itself that’s necessarily the strong mechanic but stealth paired with things like burst damage, mobility, sustain, etc. that makes it seem so strong.

Yup split it up into multiple. Should put the same stats in PvE on them as well.

Cause then you balance PvP and WvW at the same time. Who would think such a thing possible?

When ANX beat ROX to go 3-1 last week. Ridiculous. I can’t believe Peanut threw so badly.

Oh… wait. GW2 has e-sports? Wait. How?

Silverkey.2078:

Silv.9207:

What’s the problem with powercreep?
I think that with that definition you mean “dps meta”, then what’s the problem?

No, I don’t mean DPS meta. Power creep is not only damage creeping, it is everything, the list being given above. You have an increasing amount of damage, only countered by a increasing amount of block/evades/heals. An increasing amount of CC is countered by a increasing amount of stability.

It is very much a “Red Queen’s race”: you have more of everything, so the balance is still respected. But the enjoyment has decreased because everything relies more and more on unfun mechanics.

The obvious proof to the power creep is the fact that the pre-HoT meta builds are now unviable. They didn’t receive a nerf, many even got buffed, but they were just absolutely outgunned by HoT stuff.

The people will always be unhappy about the game meta, but this one is the best we ever had.
7 classes totally viable plus a necro useful to boon corrupt and die and a elementalist able to be a really good bunker/supporter, still if everyone think it’s the worst class atm.
It’s seriously the best meta we ever had.

I said that before. The balance is the best it has been for a long time, maybe ever. That does not change the fact that pre-HoT meta was more fun by a large margin. In a sense, we now have a balance between 9 equally broken specs.

Bingo. The fact is, the only existing “balance” is within the confines of the meta. It’s not that the game itself is balanced, but this current meta is. The problem here is that the current meta isn’t changing.

And from the experts, that’s objectively bad design. The entire concept of a metagame is to play into the weaknesses of one’s opponents broadly speaking. A well-balanced game would see this constantly shift around without developer intervention. A perfectly-balanced one would be so dynamic it’d almost mirror the expected result of there being no metagame – where everything is viable. When the meta doesn’t change, it means there’s something going on behind the scenes which is definitively obscuring the possibility of a diverse game – an imbalance between what’s currently being played and what isn’t.

The biggest objective/selling point of GW2 was to allow players to play the game in any way they wanted. That’s where its player base came from, and why there was such a potential for competitive PvP; a well-balanced game featuring a diverse potential roster to allow for huge upsets by going against the meta is precisely what makes the competitive scene to interesting to watch in most games; the pros play on a whole other level when it comes to changing things on the fly and being on the forefront of emergent play strategies.

Because the power creep is so massive in HoT, and because the core specs within themselves and relative to one another (which is why there’s a profession limit in pro league games; ANet knows the game lacks balance and the sPvP team’s answer to this was to just plug leaks where they could) are imbalanced, we’re left with an unchanging meta and very strict guidelines on how to play. Simply, this isn’t fun, and this stale gameplay turns people off from wanting to play in general.

cranos.5913:

DeceiverX.8361:

Or just make PvP stat amulets not have different stat amounts than what’s available in PvE.

Because this is honestly the biggest thing that kills diversity. Certain builds will be functionally amazing in PvE and WvW and horrible in sPvP just because the way scaling abilities work. Raw stat bonuses and low modifier investment in favor of defenses (AKA boon builds) are almost always blatantly better.

It’s already proving way too difficult for ANet to balance let alone one format, and I sincerely doubt they’ll get three right, particularly since each is so vastly different.

As multiple sources state, creating more areas you need to balance around just makes the game realistically way more difficult to balance.

It’s really easy to balance PvE. Don’t touch it. Split any and all changes they wanna make. ezpz

Yes, but the PvE crowd cares so much about the balancing of speed-clear raids that it’s something that ANet can’t just ignore. I mean recall how many berserker gear dungeon complaints there were before…

And WvW and sPvP are worlds apart in terms of balance. Unless they normalize the two, they’ll always be balancing minimum two different formats.

I think there’s no better example than the state of the thief, which in sPvP is atrocious in fights, but in WvW is quite formidable. You can’t just buff it profession-wide because then it’d be silly strong in WvW, but you can’t base its usability in WvW to justify doing nothing about it in sPvP.

And with boons providing so much of a player’s stats in sPvP, the meta will never really change to anything except boon-bunker/boonhate. It’s still bad in WvW with passive boon runes like Durability, but not even close to what sPvP is like in respects to boon-dependency/use.

Or just make PvP stat amulets not have different stat amounts than what’s available in PvE.

Because this is honestly the biggest thing that kills diversity. Certain builds will be functionally amazing in PvE and WvW and horrible in sPvP just because the way scaling abilities work. Raw stat bonuses and low modifier investment in favor of defenses (AKA boon builds) are almost always blatantly better.

It’s already proving way too difficult for ANet to balance let alone one format, and I sincerely doubt they’ll get three right, particularly since each is so vastly different.

As multiple sources state, creating more areas you need to balance around just makes the game realistically way more difficult to balance.