Guild Wars 2

I don’t see much benefit.

Most major mitigation in the game stems from protection and % damage reduction effects. Any kind of armor-ignoring bonus would be unaffected by this kind of change.

The best thing that could be done is to just revert the ICD. On the meta builds as it is, there’s little reason to put much emphasis for stealth attacks, anyways.

Caius.8094:

This post was not about thieves… so please stop being offended at the slightest thing. This post was about stealth… DH (via runes), Ranger (via lb and runes and Smokeskale blast), Engineer (blast and pots), Mesmers (Esp Chronophantasm with its 12 clones, 6 sec evade and dodges, target loss). This post is not about being kitten or response to game play, it is entirely about Stealth as a game mechanic and it abuse and exploitable pattern by even the most mundane user with a NAGA or macro mouse. Troll another post but if you can;t help yourself at least stay on topic and stop being petty.

I think most of these kinds of remarks are responding to the ones which are quite literally calling the thief or stealth as a mechanic overpowered.

Even still, stealth isn’t OP. Other defensive abilities used with stealth are what is ridiculous – AKA what most other professions like the scrapper and druid are benefiting from.

Fay.2357:

You’re totally misinformed here.

Well…not misinformed exactly. You’re just not comparing things appropriately when discussing blurred frenzy.

Blurred frenzy provides ~5% dps increase over simply autoattacking with sword. (Trimmed for length)

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Dagger auto on thief is 1.6 coeffs per second and gives endurance and poison.
Backstab is 2.4 coeffs in a single hit from stealth.

Sword auto for mesmer is about 0.9 coeffs per second.
Sure blurred frenzy is also 2.4 coeffs… over 2.5 seconds which puts it at .96 coeffs per second.

First off, how can you say sword 2 is a decent burst but sword auto is bad if they are basically the same thing when it comes to DPS?
Second thing, that’s just base coeffs. Comparing a Dom, Dueling, Chrono to a Deadly, Crit, DD:
The Chrono maybe has a 5-10% bonus from traits affecting blurred frenzy.
The Dare devil will be around 40-60% bonus from traits. Swapping Critical strikes to Trickery won’t change much here. Even the damage just from bound will do more DPS than blurred frenzy in the end.

How could you possibly argue that blurred frenzy isn’t weak offensively? It’s one thing to say it should be weak because of shatters or something but seriously? You really think blurred frenzy is a strong offensive skill? It’s not even a learn to dodge thing. People can just walk out of it easily.

I’ll respond since I’m not one to shy away from admitting being wrong.

I didn’t really estimate the DPS of the skill to be as low as it is relative to sword’s AA. I’m no expert on PvE for the mesmer – I’ve only ever played the class in PvP and WvW – and when I did, I always found myself cleaving people down fairly well with BF. Anecdotally, the cast time always seemed to feel shorter. However, I’m also aware that BF doesn’t carry an intrinsically-high coefficient for its cast duration. That said, traiting FF and other damage stacking sources like vuln will cause BF to gain roughly a 10-15%+ increase in damage over the AA alone, and that’s assuming no stacks of FF were built; the gains widen if a few stacks of FF are already built when being cast.

Comments about it being so easy to walk out of… well, warriors still run GS and kill people with HB. Guards do so with WW, warrior/berserker with Flurry (same exact potential and duration as BF), thief’s Pistol Whip is a much easier skill to avoid since it’s so much slower and has a longer precast, and there’s a lot in the mesmer’s kit to more reliably make the skill land such as the finish on iLeap, etc. Setting up for multi-hits and timing them to ensure your opponent has no resources to use to negate them is critical to make them work. Chrono does have some issues in this respect because setting up that CC becomes more difficult from having fewer trait options (like Confounding Suggestions to make S4 Active a better enabler) due to the dependency on the illusions line for mesmer in general, unless it can be casted within GWell, though the cooldown is very long and not worth building around.

I think our opinions differ because we perceive the terms of “offensive value”/“offensive strength” differently. From the perspective of raw damage, yea, BF isn’t very strong, particularly not when traited. That said, I still value BF as a very powerful offensive skill. Yes, it’s not much different in raw damage from running around AA’ing, but the same is said about the thief and casting backstab (actually, backstab outside of D/D is a strict net loss in damage, and as far as why Thief DPS > mesmer DPS, it’s been explained), but there’s very little offensive value in running around AA’ing. 1spam doesn’t work in PvP because it’s easy to shut down – people can be CC’ed or counter-bursted or any number of things. I value BF as a powerful offensive ability because it offers high damage on its cast – and I guess the point that I didn’t make clear enough – is that it offers high damage on a cast that lets me get that damage in on my own terms, because it has innate defenses. I don’t need to care about what offensive cooldown my opponent my have available during those 2.5s, or preserve my own defenses to negate counter-burst/damage; for 2.5s, that BF is happening and I’m effectively immune to any response of my opponent. If my opponent saved CC to interrupt my all-in after burning his defenses on a shatter performed previously, he’s now got no answers to my next engage, and if I saved resources to make that engage have value as to prevent the foe from simply walking away from it – like a warrior saving Bull’s Charge for Hundred Blades, knowing his foe doesn’t have a stunbreak – then I have at my disposal a source of substantial damage that carries no risk while performing the damage.

Ohoni.6057:

DeceiverX.8361:

Which is literally what I proposed >.>

Just rather than a whole new class of weapons (something I doubt we’ll ever see due to the amount of work it’d take), make the specialization weapon a rifle skinned as a black-powder-powered crossbow. Now you’ve got crossbows game-wide on anything with rifle for flavor reasons, and a logical way to introduce it.

A black powder crossbow is called a “gun,” and they are already in the game.

Not really. The bolt propulsion can still be done via a string. I was referring more or less to the pulling back of the string. Granted, the physics suggests no reason for this design to be implemented since it’d require a substantial explosion to generate the fore opposite the power stroke of the bow, which would be equivocal to just shooting the projectile via an explosion per a standard gun.

Though we could also just take approach of said skin from not having any detonation element to it at all. I only mentioned it for sound effect integrity being consistent across weapon skins/classes.

Launch, Day 1. Way back when there were a million humans being made and the centaur bridge event got upscaled into insanity. As you can see, I’ve made very few changes to my choice of utility skills over the years.

…and when my luck was good. Celestial Dye first drop ;D

(And for those who know me, the MH pistol because I wasn’t getting any dagger drops; the irony).

The latter; As you can see, I learned the ways of the mesmer, for a time. Needless to say, I was quite difficult to pin down with the combined abilities

I haven’t changed my wardrobe in years (although my stats have definitely improved!).

I’ll get a more recent one soon. Not at home so I don’t have any screenshots of recent play.

At the very least, a reduction on the /me emote range would be a good start.

Not to even stifle RP’ers, but I imagine that different RP groups often find themselves conflicting with each other despite being in different locations.

I really do believe a separate chat option/tab/thing would be the best, though. Legitimizing the RP community with their own chat options just seems like the best idea for everyone; this cuts down on trolls invading RP groups, and cuts down on the impact of trolls giving RP’ers a bad name by writing about disgusting things via /me.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Svarty.8019:

Jim Hunter.6821:

Svarty.8019:

Divinorium.8952:

Because forget about thiefs having no support skills, being naturally squishy and having no access to shield/invul/aegis whatever. Lets remove mobility because no one should be mobile.

It’s your choice whether to build to be squishy or not, but I have yet to see a thief wearing PVT because incredible mobility plus invisibility plus giant spike MORE than makes up for it and that’s a problem.

ummm…. didn’t you just say you wanted them to lose their mobility? And PVT gear would kind of kill those massive spikes…….
But at least they’d still have stealth right? That means they could…. um….. stand around not doing anything without you seeing them…..
So basically they could watch other people play the game….

Obviously there would have to be some form of compensation, but endless mobility is insane!

….You do realize the mobility is the compensation for not having the innate survivability of the other professions right?

Welcome to the thief forums the past three years before HoT was released :P

That said, Daredevil is designed horribly because I think on the conceptual level it plays too nicely with the rest of the extremely weak core profession, and gives so much compensation for next to no cost within the trait line. Dash and BD being on a 12s cooldown make the Daredevil stupidly difficult to punish by pretty much anything except DH. And these counters shouldn’t be so harsh. If I wanted to play Rock Paper Scissors, I’d do so without the convolution and subjective nature of the rest of the game. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can’t take the Daredevil name too seriously, because when I play it, I certainly feel like I’m doing anything except making risky plays.

The problem is it, like all else with HoT, feels like necessary power creep because the rest of the professions got so massively power-creeped in their specs, and respectively made a pseudo-RPS game.

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.

If they get rid of multiloot, sure.

Granted, I think a start would be to make a separate “tools” inventory panel that stores things like shovels/keys/etc. that ANet seems so keen on releasing with every LS update. This alone would save many people 10+ slots.

Which is literally what I proposed >.>

Just rather than a whole new class of weapons (something I doubt we’ll ever see due to the amount of work it’d take), make the specialization weapon a rifle skinned as a black-powder-powered crossbow. Now you’ve got crossbows game-wide on anything with rifle for flavor reasons, and a logical way to introduce it.

Svarty.8019:

The fact that you lose target (see targetting thread) when a character goes into stealth (a bug, perhaps?) makes it even more ridiculous.

If you didn’t lose target, there would be no benefit in having it.

If you can’t predict enemy movements or you’re building in a way that’s so hyper-combo that it demands vision all the time in order to function, the problem is pretty much on your end. Most single-target/targeted abilities track stealth if casted before the target disappears, and the stealthed target is still vulnerable to hitboxes, even on single-target abilities (like backstab), and can thus be killed even if invisible and untargeted if outplayed.

For example, if you cast Killshot on a target just before they go into stealth, you’ll still hit them despite shooting close to 3s later and not having a target, provided they stay in range and do not cycle 180 degrees behind you (which would cause KS to miss, anyways, stealth or not)

Most of the time, people struggling against stealth simply are not familiar with it. Play a thief (and do this for a while against a plethora of skilled opponents), and you’ll soon realize it’s not as strong as you think.

It’s only only out of hand when other defenses start being used in conjunction with it, like durability runes, blocks, etc.

Acro and Daredevil is excellent in WvW. Spec Havoc/Staff and you’ve got more damage coming from Daredevil than DA in most cases. Then you’ve still got cleansing options available via Acro and Signet of Agility, and many run generosity/purity on shortbow.

CV and BD are enough to make Daredevil have access to way more defenses than just an extra dodge every 10s/once on engage.

The problem is Daredevil will never be not be used because it’s so strong by design and implementation relative to the core thief and its capabilities. It effectively fills all build holes in the core thief’s design. It offers substantial damage, condition cleansing, evasion, mobility, stealth access, blocks, and CC. A nerf to stealth nerfs every non-daredevil out there (and stealth is mostly a problem on professions which it wasn’t designed around or due to problem gear interactions/implementations like D/P Bound Trapper), and likely all subsequent elites, and I think it’s safe to say that core thief is at the bottom of the food chain right now by a fair margin.

I don’t have any issues with stealth. I have issues with many effects that stealth brings. You should never be rewarded for camping it on anything, such as a thief taking SA with Rejuv (and once permanent 10-14 might before they removed said trait), defensive boons on PU with the mesmer, disengage + ranged advantage on ranger (and superspeed on CS druid), and major bombs/CC/AoE’s/gyros from a scrapper.

Like boons, stealth accessibility needs to be limited and very difficult to stack and with clear sacrifices in order to be balanced. We’re not seeing this on anything in either boons or stealth, and it’s creating a lot of unnecessary hate that won’t be resolved until major revisions to these mechanics are performed.

Sword has low sustained damage. Its burst is quite respectable considering BF hits as hard as backstab does – I’m not really sure how you can argue that BF is weak offensively. I ran a S/S power weapon-skill-based damage build not too long ago (just before the power creep of HoT since anything core built power these days is pretty much irrelevant) and was frequently able to get BF to go to around 8-9k in sPvP.

It mostly just suffers from a weak AA and phantasms not being useful with all the cleave in the game and general loss of effectiveness compared to most that came with HoT. 1v1 it works quite well, still. The big thing is you need to trait heavily into sword to make it half-effective, and mesmer in general just lacks sustained damage due to the shatter mechanic inhibiting it.

If I were to come up with the mechanics behind the Mirage, I’d change the mentality behind phantasms to be one of substitution/faking the opponent out and clones as more or less a defensive mechanic with little to no damage component, and then reward the player a stacking personal damage bonus for brief periods after shattering/sacrificing them. This way the mesmer can build up damage over time by still using shatters while gaining the benefits of the short-term defenses while building up this damage bonus, but not need to keep up AI minions to maintain good damage, which will just get immediately cleaved in most scenarios. Like a mirage in the desert, the longer you let it draw you in, the more difficult of a pickle you find yourself in.

But we’ll see if that’s the approach they take. My guess is condi AoE application or some kind of summoned environmental thing equivocal to spirits or turrets; I have little faith remaining in ANet in terms of coming up with balanced and creative solutions to profession design.

Fixing the forum bug.

Sir Mad.1092:

DeceiverX.8361:

If they copy-pasted my idea, that’s about the only way it’ll work.

I truly admire your modesty, mate.

Ha. Just saying, there are so many arguments which work against the idea of ranged damage, especially burst, on the thief that without serious mathematical and conceptual consideration into making it cohesive with everything about the profession, some facet of the design would be implicitly flawed. These issues have been discussed repeatedly over time.

Even now, my proposal does not work with what is already in the game just based on what changed last patch. My point is that it’ll take that level of consideration to make something balanced, let alone something people would be willing to play.

And I’m going to say it straight: I think I did a better job designing what I proposed than what ANet came up with for the Daredevil and most of what was included in HoT for others’ elite specializations, because there is more substance and consistency in the math for what I offered than what was released with HoT. By many objective means, this is provable.

The ICD did almost nothing to the meta build because of how it plays. It’s almost always better for D/P to not bother with a backstab and instead just AA from Shadow Shot. The ICD hurt non-meta builds much more substantially, particularly D/D power, since its only source of good damage hinges on the stealth attack. Which since BV got its stacks reduced, prevents setup on even CnD, causing in most cases wasted initiative + no stealth and even in the event it lands, the backstab will typically miss and go on ICD, which cannot be casted again in most cases since the ICD is applied after the ~1s of animations of backstab.

Every facet of running venomshare got objetively nerfed, from damage to utility to group utility to control to even the application AoE radius. The prospect of building into SA for sharing venoms is a total joke, and the major benefits of building into VS such as major group healing and might and CC all got nerfed.

Like I said, the weak sets and builds got nerfed, but not really what’s already in the meta.

The thief works excellently against newer or disorganized groups that may not be running the optimal/dominant sPvP builds, just because the mobility and point disruption is enough.

That said, particularly at the high echelons of play, the class is inherently shut down by organized play for the most part due to the nature of sPvP and how stat systems are handled in it.

It’s a very tough number to predict.

The implementation of the megaserver system gives almost no means of actually predicting player population health within the confines of a static unit of measurement.

If I had to take but just a guess, it’d be that on any given day the number of unique logins probably hovers around two hundred thousand. That said, based on economic trends, I would be inclined to believe this number has fallen from close to double or triple that of roughly a year and a half ago, and is likely still on a quick decline.

Skill lag has little to do with overall population in WvW itself nor with networking. This is also why there was next to no skill lag some time ago/near launch when the player counts were higher. And before someone says we didn’t see it because we had culling at that time: no; culling has nothing to do with skill lag and won’t help it. Culling is done to help improve graphical performance by not rendering things. The server resources are still keeping track of the players and their locations.

Lag is worse now than ever because:

- There is more incentive to get increasingly bigger blobs in WvW than before with the way the professions are balanced and how the game mode is structured at the moment/the collapse of small-scale with HoT.

- Increase in proc and passive effects on skills, traits, and runes being used causes a massive amount of events to be fired as soon as large groups engage. The propagation of events and interrupt routines puts an excess amount of strain on the servers’ computational resources which may not be able to be improved due to the nature of concurrent systems programming.

In essence, without massively cutting down the number of players allowed in WvW, the lag cannot be solved, and is attributed to the byproduct of poor design on the profession/game systems level that was largely introduced with HoT. Hardware cannot fix concurrency-related issues that occur on the software end, unless said hardware infrastructure is improved to an infeasible margin (and even this is likely out of the limits of our current computational limits due to the coupling of the events rather than just distributing resources and load balancing).

messiah.1908:

DeceiverX.8361:

messiah.1908:

DeceiverX.8361:

I did say damage. If they want to provide 1200 range support, that’s a whole different can of worms.

They won’t nerf elites or their weapons. The entire concept of a sniper is so flawed it’d either be grossly OP or horrible. There’s no in-between. They’d more likely compensate by removing the damage and other such problematic elements from the core profession, instead.

they key word is SLOW high dmg. so maybe you can burst from range but only once. thus you will have to use your mobility and stealth to go someplace else.
i dont see how it can replace the meta D/P as even p/p with more burst cant with all the block and reflect around…

so w8 and see

Here’s the thing.

Slow damage sources are very difficult to give fair coefficients to. This is even moreso apparent on the thief, where we have so much scaling damage potential. Trait selection alone can cause Backstab values to differ by margins of over 10k damage. And that’s just the difference, on a skill that has lower coefficients than most signature moves that came with HoT. Who knows about next expansion.

Reaper GSAA3 and Gravedigger hit for huge damage, and are awful for PvP environments. The damage isn’t bursty enough for its slow speed to make it really worth trying to get those hits. If the same is true about how the rifle would be, either it’d just not do enough damage and not be usable, or it’d have substantial damage and would be absolutely broken. I can tell you now, if given Shadow Shot’s damage on a skill at 1200 range, I could beat literally any build in the game using rifle, even if it costed 6 initiative to use. There’s so much reset and mobility potential on the thief from stealth alone that any such intermittent burst would be crazy for the amount of sustain offered

Back when shortbow was 1200 range, it was insanely strong, despite having horrible damage. Very easy to win fights without ever taking a hit.

If there’s sniping with stealth, then we just have ranged backstab/stealth gunflame. And honestly, that’s not fun for anybody to play against, and it takes elements away from the core thief. It also does the whole daredevil thing all over again of pointless powercreep and massively reducing the skill floor of the profession to a point where there becomes very little distinction in it of itself.

Without ensuring tradeoffs, the class and whole game just turns into a faceroll experience. I’d rather try and promote having that kind of stuff not happening.

i think it would be like kill shot of the warrior 1.25 sec to do high dmg
imagine 1.25 sec standing in place for a thief….

and not slow animation like the necro GS

sniper as a theme means every shot counts. if you miss you get spotted and 80% get killed… so after you take your 1 shot you have to reposition yourself. you have to be silent, sneaky lay in place for days for the perfect shot. do pee in you pants…. i stop here (i was in the military)

assuming marauder amulet:

blind spot AA – you blind shot the target for 1 sec 1.5k dmg 3/4
pin down – your shot cripple and slow your foe for 4 sec – 4 initiatives – 3k dmg
demoralize shot – evade backward 900 ft – 4 initiatives -1k dmg
smoke support – putting smoke field around the target area which block attacks for 2 sec – 5 initiatives
relocating bullet – shot and shadow step to that location. you are revealed for 1 second s – 6 initiatives
F1 – while not moving you get accuracy stealth and after few sec you can use F2 sniper kill shot . you are revealed after taking the shot
after 1 sec – range 900 2k dmg
after 2 sec – range 1200 4k dmg
after 3 sec – range 1500 8k dmg

On what trait configuration? Current meta in sPvP? Because arbitrary “feels good” damage numbers on the meta non-optimal-damage amulet mean absolutely nothing on the thief, where the current meta builds don’t even run close to optimal damage output, and long range makes such builds very easy and very safe.

Further, you can’t tie a rifle skill to the class mechanic. What if the thief decides not to use the rifle? He gets a snipe shot nuke coming from… Sword/Dagger?

Further, such damage in sPvP on the existing meta build is astronomical. I could make said spec hit for 30k+ per hit in WvW.

The imbalance on the mechanic itself is also far from the mark; to have any counterplay, it’d require being revealed before dealing the damage. Otherwise one could just stack stealth with D/P or use BP/SR and snipe someone down with an unblockable nuke via BV, all of which having no tell. Being in stealth and bursting from such substantial range with the ability to shadowstep is just too powerful.

I’ve never experienced DS not hitting players which aren’t my target.

Granted, I haven’t used DS in probably over two years.

I’m not really sure either, since reflects don’t need it and the skill’s a target-less AoE.

Well, it doesn’t help much that Guard is Karl’s favorite class, and that he doesn’t play the thief.

Zappi.8307:

DeceiverX.8361

The problem is the ICD doesn’t take into account the long pre-aftercast animations on major skills like backstab itself, which some weapon sets like D/D power are extremely dependent on.

It also simply puts the entire #1 skill, including AA, on ICD on top of the cast animation. A lot of non-thief players don’t realize the pre-post cast animations for Backstab total almost .75s per stab attempt. The ICD puts it on almost a 2s cooldown. With revealed, that’s longer than True Shot and CoR, which are both ranged and have higher coefficients, the latter also being an AoE. You’re locked into either waiting out the duration of stealth in most cases since at absolute best you can get two attempts, or not using the best burst/damage option at that moment in time. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, except in the current game-state, landing a backstab is both sub-optimal for the thief to do, and in many respects, overly-punished for even trying.

Since they also nerfed BV, consistency for bypassing Aegis etc. also got dropped massively. Again back to the D/D argument you’ll see many people making, CnD no longer lands from BV’s nerf with mug procc’ing BV and thus passive deflection, and Backstab no longer lands if perchance CnD is used with BV over mug because passive aegis and blind is all over the game. Most counter-CC and single-hit negations come from passives when being CC’ed. BV’ed mug procs FoF or any other such passive causing CnD to whiff. Okay, remove Mug (DA, a “required” traitline on the thief) from the equation, but then you have it still being procc’ed before CnD because of SoH (Trickery, also a hard requirement trait line), which forces daze on steal and offers what used to be baseline steal cooldown reduction (AKA, a requirement). So now you remove two of the best traits on the thief to do what? BV a non-reduced cooldown steal/CnD chain without Mug, just to get a backstab? But now you’ve popped FoF or the passives via the BV on CnD. And backstab can’t land from the ICD.

Thank god I’m not alone on this thought. If they want BS to have 1sec ICD if it misses, they should’ve taken the huge aftercast into account. Right now backstab is just a weaker, single target and melee true shot.
Since you also touched on the nerfed basi venom stacks, in my opinion Steal shouldn’t proc BV at all. With the meta trickery it should steal 3 boons, stability and aegies being prioritized. The boonsteal should happen before anything else, not Mug proccing BV before stability/aegis are removed and the whole transformation into stone doesn’t work.

The change of 2 BV stacks to one has completely messed up my reliability to precast BS and then stealing into the enemy as Mug procs BV into the stability/aegis and then the BS eventually misses aswell because it’s not unblockable anymore. The same applies to CnD.

Setting the boonsteal to No.1 priority of Steal would give the ability to use our damage we’re capable of doing to full potential.
I don’t want thiefs damage to be buffed, I want QoL changes so I can apply the damage I should/am able to do.

Steal doesn’t proc BV innately. The damage element on Mug causes the proc to fire. If you switch out of DA or run another trait, you’ll get it for backstab.

The thing is, it’s not worth doing. Mug and Shadow Shot combined do basically the same damage as backstab, and don’t need to be applied from the back. Not to mention mug’s a heal and about the only good minor trait choice for power DA builds.

And of course, this only solves the problem for D/P, which can backstab on the BV attack. For D/D, you’ve still got the CnD dependency, and assuming you’re still traited out of Mug, which while BV might let that land, the backstab still won’t. So you’d have just been better off playing D/P with mug, anyways, since Shadow Shot does more damage than CnD alone.

In essence, what was a very functional grouping of skills ended up hurting diversity in ways which make no amount of sense, while effectively just not changing the relative efficacy of the already-dominant one (since Shadow Shot + AA is already faster burst than trying for the backstab and costs less initiative).

messiah.1908:

DeceiverX.8361:

I did say damage. If they want to provide 1200 range support, that’s a whole different can of worms.

They won’t nerf elites or their weapons. The entire concept of a sniper is so flawed it’d either be grossly OP or horrible. There’s no in-between. They’d more likely compensate by removing the damage and other such problematic elements from the core profession, instead.

they key word is SLOW high dmg. so maybe you can burst from range but only once. thus you will have to use your mobility and stealth to go someplace else.
i dont see how it can replace the meta D/P as even p/p with more burst cant with all the block and reflect around…

so w8 and see

Here’s the thing.

Slow damage sources are very difficult to give fair coefficients to. This is even moreso apparent on the thief, where we have so much scaling damage potential. Trait selection alone can cause Backstab values to differ by margins of over 10k damage. And that’s just the difference, on a skill that has lower coefficients than most signature moves that came with HoT. Who knows about next expansion.

Reaper GSAA3 and Gravedigger hit for huge damage, and are awful for PvP environments. The damage isn’t bursty enough for its slow speed to make it really worth trying to get those hits. If the same is true about how the rifle would be, either it’d just not do enough damage and not be usable, or it’d have substantial damage and would be absolutely broken. I can tell you now, if given Shadow Shot’s damage on a skill at 1200 range, I could beat literally any build in the game using rifle, even if it costed 6 initiative to use. There’s so much reset and mobility potential on the thief from stealth alone that any such intermittent burst would be crazy for the amount of sustain offered

Back when shortbow was 1200 range, it was insanely strong, despite having horrible damage. Very easy to win fights without ever taking a hit.

If there’s sniping with stealth, then we just have ranged backstab/stealth gunflame. And honestly, that’s not fun for anybody to play against, and it takes elements away from the core thief. It also does the whole daredevil thing all over again of pointless powercreep and massively reducing the skill floor of the profession to a point where there becomes very little distinction in it of itself.

Without ensuring tradeoffs, the class and whole game just turns into a faceroll experience. I’d rather try and promote having that kind of stuff not happening.

Ensign.2189:

Unlike every popular competitive game out there, GW2 is not self balancing. People don’t have the tools to find the counters and stabilize a meta. It all has to be designed and balanced, specifically, by the team – because builds are so locked down with so few options. I don’t think there’s a balance team in the world that could pull that off – there are too many moving parts and too many specific interactions that you have to get right, and the only way to make that tractable for human beings to do is to vastly simplify the problem.

Hence one build per class, not all of which are viable. It’s not ideal, but given the systems the game was built upon, it’s the best anyone can do.

You had me until this part, but it’s this part I’m going to need to disagree with tremendously.

You talk about tools and tradeoffs, and how some builds and concepts simply just don’t have them. The existence of a build that makes so few counters and has next to no tradeoffs is horribly designed and consequently horribly-balanced. Many of these issues stem from strictly numerical systems which don’t really need to be looked at on the combinatoric level for balance, and many of the game-breaking problems that have lingered in GW2 for so long have been obviously flawed and abusive of things which clearly were not meant to be.

I would argue that MTG has a much deeper degree of mathematical complexity than GW2 combat does. Obviously there’s the subjective nature of the freedom of movement and flow of time, but arguably those properties can be largely boiled down to player skill. Compared to the computational and rules-complexity of a game like MTG where the strict number of mathematical breakdowns of rigid structures, GW2 is actually quite simplistic, since so many interactions are independent or trivial. It’s not possible to create perfect balance because of discrepancies and gameplay mechanisms which end up folding in on themselves by being both imbalanced in practice due to subjective and arbitrary measures of player-input “skill,” despite also being perfectly mathematically balanced (see: RNG).

There will always be optima, and that’s something people need to come to terms with. Some facet, be it mathematical or not, counterplay-based, or what have you, of some aspect of some gameplay element will be dominant. This is the entire principle of the metagame. A well-balanced system, however, will have small margins between options which are both non-optimal and optimal, while also constantly enabling the rotation of new things in and out of the optimal state between/independent of tier of play. It’s this readjustment that GW2 is missing; without intervention, many systems in the game are fundamentally broken on design and/or mathematical levels to a point where they will never be phased out, and one further, some are on the other end of the sprectrum that they will provably never be optimal without equally massive changes elsewhere to warrant their exclusive use deliberately shutting down all other possibilities.

The entire system of a lack of fluid kit development is even pretense to argue that the design and balance in the game itself is poor; if there were no dependencies within builds (particularly traits), the amount of available diversity and fluidity of counters in the game would skyrocket, even despite current massive problems to some kits which strictly prevent their use.

On a totally unrelated note, to those saying thief needs to maintain Lead Attacks for DPS, this isn’t true. Optimal damage output doesn’t tun Trickery since Daredevil provides more damage capability than Trickery.

jewishjoyride.4693:

Whether you like it or not match up knowledge is a large part of what makes a skilled player skilled. It’s what informs his or her decisions in preparing for the match, rotations during the match and then what skills to use or plays to make once youre in the desired match up. In fact I’d argue that a lack of knowledge regarding matchups is what catches players off guard and fuels the success of the non meta builds that are out there. What you suggest as far as what you consider makes a pvp player good isn’t actually that the base their play less on match up knowledge but that they have knowledge of every possible matchup in the game ever. That’s a pretty high skill floor indeed!

Skill is almost solely determined in PvP games by the capacity to adapt and have that knowledge at any given time for any scenario. A player that knows a few select builds says next to nothing about the quality of player; this is the sole reason chess is timed.

You’re confusing skill floor with the skill ceiling. A perfect player will know all of the builds and possibilities. A new one will know none of them. It doesn’t require any more knowledge of the other professions to perform on a semi-functional level on any given one of them. The thief stands as a half-exception, but honestly that has more to do with imbalances within the class/sPvP amulet system more than anything.

It ends up being no different from the current sPvP scene; low-tier play has more diverse builds running around because the people in low-tier play either do not care about the meta or are not aware of it. Innately the argument that allowing more builds => higher skill floor is invalid on the sheer principle that this is already how it is at the lowest echelons of play, and the meta stabilizes more and more as one progresses upwards. Good design dictates either an inconsistency between what is considered good across tiers of play or simply consistency of a degree of diversity. GW2 lacks this in pretty much every game mode, indicating design flaws are rampant.

jewishjoyride.4693:

If you have 1 or 2 really strong builds per class, let’s call them archetypes or roles, then players can better predict what they’re team is capable of relative to the opposing team.

I disagree. My enemy should not know how to beat me as soon as he sees my profession icon. I shouldn’t be able to know the same against him, either.

jewishjoyride.4693:

Again 3 months is a really solid balance cadence, not just for pvp but for the game as a whole. In that period of time, without balance changes being made, you will still see players at all levels of the game tweaking builds to better counter specific comps or get faster clears or whatever. If you want to talk about balance and other game modes it’s probably also going to be important to note that changes to the actual game mode have as important an effect on builds and comps as actual balance changes do. Heck, just sticking to pvp look at how differently each map plays!

I’m not sure what you’re getting thse claims from, but 3 months is considered horrible cadence if the meta does not change. Minor fluctuations in how people approach the game should be happening almost every month, if not new strategies on a game-by-game basis shifting rapidly. We’re almost a year in with next to no changes in the overarching meta since HoT, and almost four years in with next to no changes in the overarching style in terms of how people approach PvP. Competitive GW2 never took off for this sole reason: the meta is simply too stale to make the game interesting to play on that hyper-competitive level, and the gameplay is too stale in terms of its balance to make people want to watch it, because every game looks pretty much the same.

Pretending like the state of the game in PvP and WvW is good right now is nothing more than pretending.

Sartharina.3542:

Regen stacking would be great, and allow it to help counter condis on a lighter note. As it is, regen is so terrible that the developers have been forced to add regeneration-that-isn’t to the game instead.

Not sure if that’s a fair thing to say. There are benefits and drawbacks to simply tying the effects to boons. Quite honestly, I think the powerful boons like Protection, Resistance, and Quickness should get removed as boons and just become static buffs as to prevent them from being stackable and affected by duration bonuses. But this also has a gain which prevents them from being capable of being stripped, corrupted, or stolen.

ANet balancing for WvW isn’t gonna happen.

Nor is the likelihood of them doing anything about runes of durability any good.

I did say damage. If they want to provide 1200 range support, that’s a whole different can of worms.

They won’t nerf elites or their weapons. The entire concept of a sniper is so flawed it’d either be grossly OP or horrible. There’s no in-between. They’d more likely compensate by removing the damage and other such problematic elements from the core profession, instead.

It’s too easy to access currently to enable it to work like that. You have things like Healing Spring, some options on thief via SP, the potential absurdity that would be a blob of BM Cleric necromancers in large-scale combat casting MoB with staff (permanent AoE 10k health per second heals), PU breaking mesmer substantially, and engineer and ranger just having way too much access in general.

It’s a neat idea, and one which would probably help make Regen not horrible, but it’d require a massive overhaul of access to it. That said, boons themselves need a huge rework as it is, because they’re just way too strong.

I’ve seen more Charr than male norn thieves. [Rat] is a guild that’s just Charr thieves if I’m not mistaken.

Depends on what you played and what format you played in.

Since PvE balance doesn’t matter, I’m going to assume you’re looking to PvP/WvW.

If you don’t own HoT, don’t even bother.

D/D power – Worse
S/D – Worse
Anything Crit Strikes – Worse
Venomshare – Worse

D/D condi cheese – Strong
D/P – Unchanged
P/P – Buffed into insanity only countered by the gross amount of projectile hate in the game
S/P – Better with elite spec from innate stealth capability with OH pistol.

It’s not really much different than before. Thief (Daredevil) is just easier to play since the elite spec lowered the skill floor tremendously and made the profession way more forgiving.

But the powercreep from other professions is still real so it’s not like the thief got any better per se. There’s just less diversity.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

Cygnus.6903:

Napo.1230:

I’m already feeling the rage from a rifle thief. Pew pew massive crits from range and all that stealth and gap creation you can do, ouch.
Be a real good opportunity for anet to bring a new dimension to thief, if your gonna range you forfeit your slippery ness.

How would thief ever forfeit that, though? Our class mechanic, our utilities, hell, even a lot of weapon skills will always remain slippery. Unless they add something like ‘with this elite you can no longer shadowstep’, thieves will Always be slippery. That’s without even talking about stealth. For sure, the rifle won’t get an option to enter stealth by itself. If it does, the damage will be pathetic to compensate.

I actually like the idea of rifle for thief.

Even if the rifle doesn’t have stealth so it does good damage, there’s trapper runes and stealth utilities to consider. I’m pretty sure SA is going to get reworked/nerfed to the floor to make way for the elite spec, simply because there’s not many more things you can add to thief while keeping it thiefy.

That said, 1200 range does sound nice. Although they could just as easily make pistols 1200 range when traited again, and not bother with the spec at all lol

Like I said, the only way to provide thief with a form of 1200 ranged damage that’s even remotely balanced in small-scale is what I proposed via the Deadeye.

If they offer any amount of ranged burst and stealth, it’s pretty much GG for the class since it’ll have to be nerfed so grossly it’ll be unplayable.

General damage/sustained DPS and mobility is one thing (like berserker druid). Damage, mobility, stealth, and burst damage while maintaining those advantages is a whole other beast.

Kocoff.7582:

I want the source… even if it’s a rumor. I want the link.

Also, this.

No reason to consider it true until evidence is provided. The “they said” quotation from messiah is curious, though.

Most “real builds” are cheese, since that’s about all that’s being played by everyone on all professions these days.

There are some builds which just will not work well, though.

If they copy-pasted my idea, that’s about the only way it’ll work.

But even that’s pretty much unusable unless they revert a substantial amount of the recent changes.

A burst sniper is horrible by design and is totally unwanted. from both the perspective of it not being fun to play against and not very useful to the thief in general.

pdavis.8031:

Thie question is would you rather them push out a “balance” patch right away, or take their time and do a much more complete patch?

Seeing as quality from ANet’s balance team is almost completely unrelated to the amount of time between patches because they don’t know what they’re doing… immediately.

C’mon, by now you must realize ANet doesn’t prioritize important aspects of core gameplay.

…and having the attack rarely land isn’t unreliable, particularly when considering the change to BV?

I can’t do it either, and I prefer holding RMB down, but to each his own.

Almost everything in all formats has been dropped in favor of boons. They contribute a vastly disproportionate amount of stats for how accessible they are in general, let alone the extremely strong ones like Quickness and Resistance.

Zenith.6403:

DeceiverX.8361:

There are a lot of rangers that haven’t gotten past the open-world mentality of just unloading at a distance

In case you didn’t know, longbow’s autoattack Long Range Shot deals more damage when fired at greater distance. That’s why you see rangers firing at distance and not coming to melee range to hold your hand.

I am aware of the ranger’s kit. I was a thief/ranger dual main at one point, and have been an advocate for the class for years; almost all of the QoL changes I suggested in the ranger CDI made it to the live game.

Being at 1500+ ranged away plinking at heavies running massive damage mitigation and bringing no support into a blob means diddly squat. You’re better off in melee range with lower damage providing water fields and boons.

Zenith.6403:

DeceiverX.8361:

The commanders know when a player is good on a ranger, thief, or anything, really so long as you’re visible, but they can easily check their damage logs to know precisely when someone isn’t good and hurting the group, and it’s the easiest to determine it as a ranger, because not many professions are so capable of killing their own allies while having that damage recorded in logs.

I’m not too familiar what stats commanders see, but I haven’t yet found a way to kill my allies when playing ranger. Is this another passive-aggressive whine from you “if Timmy wasn’t playing Ranger and was playing banner warrior instead we wouldn’t have died – he killed us !!!”

As said above, too many rangers just spam AA and RF into reflects, which some organized groups keep up permanently. The damage is reflected and doesn’t bounce between reflects, causing it to come back to your own allies. You quickly end up melting anyone not prepared to dive deep popping invulns and blocks at that exact time. Quite literally, rangers kill people. GF warrior and revenant are better-used for ranged damage because CoR isn’t a projectile and Gun Flame can be made unblockable/unreflectable with Signet of Strength.

The lack of understanding you’re displaying here and complaining about people kicking rangers for this reason is exactly the point I made above, demonstrating why people kick rangers. Easily 3/4 of the rangers in WvW play longbow and easily half of those do not understand why the set hurts more than helps.

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.

Xenesis.6389:

So uh, how did you guys think groups handled conditions before when resistance wasn’t around and boon shared to no end?

The amount of condition access and damage since has increased so much that I don’t think a few light fields and purges once per fight are going to do be enough to negate it.

That, or we just see a pure revenant meta.

Would argue it’s more noob-friendly now more than ever before. Daredevil single-handedly pretty much put the skill floor below core warrior imho.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-July-26-2016-1/first#post6270415

All the weak weapon sets got nerfed more, stealth attacks nerfed, Venomshare got nerfed, etc.

Yea, they’re just broken. WvW’s pretty much in a horrible game-state at the moment and in all seriousness GW2 as a whole is due to just how broken the game balance is. Pretty much play cheese or GTFO.

There’s a lot of talk about splitting balance. Many others and I have been advocates for changing the amulet system in sPvP, and normalizing everything else, instead. I’d like to further delve into this and help other players understand why the decision to split balance between formats is a poor one.

Below is from the Game Design Director of Riot Games in the recent AMA regarding balancing between different formats and levels of play. While this thread is talking about balancing between different formats and not different levels, most of what is said is still applicable:

…it leads to a place where we have two versions [of champion] with different damage coefficients and maybe even different rules about how his [mechanics] work. On top of violating all of the four points I raised above, it also creates that many more opportunities to introduce bugs to the game.

Splitting balance more isn’t going to help with much. It’ll also make what’s regarded as an already-difficult-to-watch experience in the current sPvP format even more confusing when professions, builds, skills, and traits perform differently in different environments. You shouldn’t be making your own players confused, and should be trying to create as much consistency as possible to let pure spectators enjoy watching the game. We already see the effects of the stat divide in terms of raw profession capability between sPvP and PvE/WvW, with each having a drastically different approach to combat environments based on profession-capabilities alone. Riot’s stance on splitting balance between any audience is that it’s simply not a good idea to allow for the game to grow and flourish. It makes spectating more difficult and the game more confusing for the community, and it makes balancing efforts take more work and be more confusing for the developers, and be strictly reactive with tweaks and buffs/nerfs than letting cross-game decisions potentially affect the meta and strategies.

Further, it also inflicts the community with a lack of assistance between groups of players. When isolated, the community becomes more internalized and less willing to cross-game. People end up less friendly, and communities end up more isolationist. This isn’t healthy for the game or the community at large.

Finally, split balancing just creates more work and overhead. A really cool idea to solve a problem in one game mode or echelon of play simply might not apply to the other. This ends up hurting both groups in the end, for cool ideas have to get rejected just because of some obscure if not arbitrary difference between audiences.

To cut down on confusing systems and reduce overhead while simply just making the entire game more consistent, it’d be wise to evaluate revising the amulet system in sPvP to provide the same number of stat points available in PvE/WvW, and to allow for the inclusion of more stat subdivision in builds in sPvP through allowing for whole sets of armor/weapons/accessories with their own stat selection options, particularly if build presets are going to be further emphasized, as this reduces the time overhead between switching builds while also giving players more granularity over their builds (enabling more diversity) and subsequently opening up more options.

I’m pretty sure if a ranger itself does not contribute to a kill, it doesn’t get loot or kill credit. Almost positive this was debunked a while ago. Any other such action is just botting and thus nothing would change.

No sense in banning people for being AFK. Even AFK players make the game in cities look healthier and boost player morale and revenue.

As far as discerning types of disconnects… never a good idea. All such ways are exploitable. Cheaters will cheat; there are people out there who effectively put their network connection on a light switch toggle to force a hardware disconnect in some games which treat them differently from logging out.