Guild Wars 2

I prefer the pace of WvW. I find sPvP too much of a mindless sustain game insofar as most often people just don’t die.

Actually, we’re seeing it right now on the bunker druid. In sPvP, it’s just worse because pretty much every class does it and does it more effectively since power damage is nerfed as a stat relative to WvW.

Unlike sPvP, you cannot faceroll your keyboard and just tank incoming attacks aside from on a few select (and quite frankly, broken) builds. It demands a faster pace and prior to HoT, was way more interesting and diverse because of it; damage builds actually worked unlike in sPvP, but carried a corresponding amount of risk.

Here’s a pretty wild idea:

Balance the professions and redesign bad ideas.

Maybe people would be more inclined to fight if it was actually, you know, fun.

Balance is the worst it’s ever been, by miles; particularly so in small scale.
And even the blob meta is pretty horrible.

I, too, am hoping for a proper RvR game at this point.

I don’t think TC’s problem is a lack of backline at the moment so much as it is in general a lack of competent players and players in general. The fact that I’ve been in groups of 3 or 4 pugs which have been more effective against groups of 20+ than our seemingly new/novice tags this week indicates something is definitely different/wrong, and NA prime pretty much every day the past week has been us with the outnumbered buff.

The irony with TC is everyone got raged at for not playing a guard because a few weeks ago we didn’t have enough. So a huge number of backline and periph players rerolled with the massive nerfs to ele and thief into guards, and now there are too many guards.

There’s absolutely merit in running prominent builds, simply because they typically are bandwagoned and define the meta for the very reason that either they are just objectively stronger classes or make an optimal group. That said, being a novice at a dominant profession in large-scale combat typically causes performance losses over just being excellent at something outside of the meta. I’m a horrible frontline guard or even tank player in general, but when I played thief before the nerfs, it was very uncommon for me to not to down 4 or 5 people as soon as the groups engaged, or at least force the backline into scattering and thus not doing damage.

The thing about playing something that isn’t in the meta is that it actually does demand better play, because if it isn’t in the meta, it is by definition countered by more things at an increased likelihood than it isn’t. When doing so, one needs to be mindful of why it isn’t in the meta, and then find ways to exploit weaknesses in his enemy while not hurting his own members to still make it so he has an impact in a given fight to warrant use.

The case of some extra stability and a few seconds of protection on my guard versus four of five downed backliners on my thief was a worthwhile trade for most people I ran with who had a basic understanding of what I was contributing. The occasional claims along the lines of “sometimes I do a lot of damage and down someone on my own” or “I seem to be contributing a lot from my perspective” aren’t good enough. To play well outside the confines of what’s considered optimal, you need to match those performance benchmarks or exceed them and understand why. If not doing so, you’re already a liability, regardless of how it may seem. That’s why rangers are often so heavily excluded; I’ll be honest and be forthcoming saying it’s very easy to kill things, particularly in PvE, with a longbow ranger (I have personally soloed meta events like Vinetooth on mine). Many new rangers to WvW think that they’re contributing a lot because every so often they dump a big RF into a frontliner and he goes down. The symptoms of “sometimes I do a lot of damage and contribute just fine” end up from their perspective invalidating the even more concerning aspect of the fact their damage is invisible when it’s being reflected back into their own groups. With all the particle effects and general cluster of skills happening in the frontline, it’s hard to pick out when or when not to use such abilities. Many often go alone the premise of “it seems fine so I’ll use it” rather than holding off on the principle of “I don’t know if it’s fine or that it will be fine to RF right now.” A reflect can be used at any time. Your commander’s invuln might be almost over and the enemy might go ham on reflects as soon as RF starts. There’s no knowing. And a player that doesn’t observe this is probably going to get his allies hurt.

As they said, it the build in terms of general direction was hinted at above. Even the style and purpose of the character were hinted at in their post.

Cough

As a general aside, though, at least the druid isn’t thief. That’s literally worthless in organized ZvZ at the moment since focus groups are pretty useless from the sheer amount of defense and CC going around.

Nuzt.7894:

I hope so, I think you would be hard pressed to find a player in GW2 that wouldn’t like to be able to play truly whatever class they liked and still be efficient enough that it doesn’t drag down the large group play. HoT was a step in the right direction for medium classes but they did miss the mark.

By design alone, I sincerely, sincerely disagree. Literally everything about HoT was a step backwards in everything pertaining to WvW gameplay.

There’s a little bit of a flaw with your math there. If wells did a million damage, dagger did 1,000 and axe 10, the damage difference would be .01%, despite the dagger dealing 10000% more damage than the axe.

I’d say all it really needs is better sustained LF generation and/or a reworked AA chain to make it a weapon that’s not just used for pressing 2, 3, and swapping.

It does plenty of burst right now. A little LF utility gain outside of mashing 2 off cooldown would probably put it in a good spot without just being a strictly better dagger.

Blended traits are imho better design than totally isolated lines. It makes the process of selection and the decisions made much more significant. Imho, other professions are just too easy to build optimally because there are so many trait lines which clearly do not have synergy with all styles of play.

That’s the existing problem with CS on the thief; it only does one thing, and that one thing isn’t good enough to justify taking in most cases because there are dependencies elsewhere.

@ Imp:

I didn’t touch U/W combat early on since I hate three dimensional (air/water) free-movement combat in all games, but I do know that no such build has existed for the past several years.

There may have been stealth or something on the kit at one point way early on which would have interacted with the un-fixed Infusion of Shadow in 2012/early release (a trait which then also got removed entirely in 2015 even after being fixed) – which was broken at the time of/around release on every single thief build, anyways (until it was fixed). Otherwise, there’s really nothing in the kit that’d support such continuous evasion, and if there was, it hasn’t been around for a very long time.

elkirin.8534:

Firstly, why did 15 people chase it in the water?

Secondly, I agree we need some sort of insta death penalty when more than 10 chars hit a soloer. ie the ten drop dead.

The trick will be in preventing it triggering in zvz but I am willing to see a few errors if it prevents “stacks on the mill” style fighting.

I would suggest a 20 min sin bin timer room at the spawn as well but that may confuse newer players.

Clearly you have not played against a server like Mag, which pretty much only runs groups of 10-20 to take down groups of 3-5 enemies. Penalizing smaller groups is no way to structure WvW, and puts dis-incentives on running smaller groups, which have already almost totally died out with HoT and the nerf to guilds/small-scale build diversity.

Nomad full tank Druid with some shouts and GS makes a good “troll” frontliner and something I’ve seen a few commanders do, since it’s very tanky. Lots of sustain, front-line/commander-deployable water field + cleanse, backline protection via Guard, an invuln via SoS, and the evade on GS auto + GS 3, and the block on GS4 makes it very difficult to take down while providing quite a bit of utility. It does, however, bring no damage.

lmperdigao.2567:

The perma evade underwater thief build has been a thing since release of the game.
It was a huge problem in the old Raid on the Capricorn map. A thief could capture the underwater middle point and just evade to win. No one could kill it and capture the point back.
As very annoying as it is, there’s not much sense in complaining about it at this moment in the game. Underwater combat is broken beyond balance fixes. Only a overall rework could fix all of it’s problem.

It’s only good underwater in melee-only encounters in a 1v1 due to spear 2 being a cheap evade. Shadow Assault is the most expensive initiative cost in the game and can only be used twice consecutively, with a two second delay after the second cast, and a five second delay each cast for every subsequent one. The thief will evade everything for a few seconds, and then get dunked if just waited out and punished. That is a LONG time to go without having anything to do.

Ranger and warrior are the real kings of U/W combat, and to some extent, necro if it’s a brief encounter, given life force due to death shroud being much better than most underwater abilities.

It’s borked, but I think complaining about thief’s U/W capabilities is a bit ridiculous in most contexts.

velocity.4621:

“does an untouchable and unkillable class in all battleground is really anet’s intentions for thieves, why something unkillable exist in terms of balance”

Yes, considering that’s the whole point of Daredevil.

ANet is just horrible at designing and balancing professions and that’s all it comes down to. They failed miserably on the Daredevil; it’s more of the same design of the core thief kit, except better.

That said, the thief isn’t OP (though Daredevil is stupid) – I can tell you now one or more of the following happened:

You either got massively out-played; or,
You played terribly; or,
You are exaggerating the truth a lot; or,
He was on a Nomad’s/tank build; or,
He was actually just hacking.

But no, seriously, defenses in the game – across all professions – since HoT are unbelievably overpowered compared to core GW2. Yes, Thief Spear 5 is an evade, but it’s not one which can be spammed for an extended period on its own, certainly not against 15 people. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was running Acrobatics as well to keep his endurance and initiative up with access to an invulnerability as well).

It’s not going to ever be useful in a blob unless the pet is removed and the class gets either meaningful melee damage or utility and a ton of invulns.

But that’s basically just warrior/guardian.

You could maybe justify its purpose running Nomad’s staff/GS or a staff as primary ranged damage. If you play using a longbow, you need to force yourself out of the blob and either way into the sidelines or simply not attack for the first moments of the fight. Reflects are everywhere, and a glass longbow ranger firing haphazardly into the enemy’s frontline and reflecting the shots into your own frontline is likely going to get an ally killed. That’s why people don’t want rangers in large-scale; too many of them play poorly for the blob and up being a strict liability. In an organized group, they can have have some pretty great benefits (big water field + cleanses, poke for pre-engage, substantial AoE damage on barrage, anti-backline damage output, long ranged interrupts/knockbacks for eles, etc.). However, if not heavily-organized and trained to play in this matter, however, you’re in all seriousness likely to end up killing your own allies.

On the converse, bunker Druid is currently the absolute best roaming build in WvW and by a very large margin. It has almost zero counters and can counter almost everything else.

Astralporing.1957:

Win10 however is definitely not an improvement, and not something i’d wish for anyone.

Also, from what the devs managed to say so far, the problems with GW2 engine not being that well optimized are in no way DX related. It’s the CPU main thread that would need to be rewritten. Graphical stuff is relatively fine (as long as you’re using 64bit client), the main bottleneck is outside of it.

TL/DR: no matter how big the DX improvements, they would be wasted due to inefficiency of the threads they connect to and w wouldn’t be seeing any improvement.

It’s the case of a better car in a heavy city traffic. You could have a ferrari, and it wouldn’t make your ride faster by a second.

Not sure about calling win10 a downgrade. I went 7 -> 10 and skipped 8 entirely, and so far I’m in love with 10. It takes some tuning to customize, and you pretty much need classic shell, but with a little fiddling in the command line and a program download you end up with the same UI and information sharing as windows 7 in an objectively superior OS from both performance and security perspectives.

A new version of DirectX would help a bit, as it’s got some strictly better single-core performance bumps, but the bottleneck does lay in the engine’s main thread and lack of parallel execution of code here which is a very difficult and time-consuming fix, and a risky one at that when it comes down to bugs and how much could really be gained; some code (though more implementation-specific) simply performs worse in parallel systems and there’s currently no way around it.

The upgrade to newer versions of DirectX is also very difficult programmatically. Aspects of design in how the API’s were to be used changed pretty substantially between versions, making this more difficult to make conversions and updates; it would require re-writes, and the time spent for programmers to learn the new API and its nuances. DX11 is notorious for being convoluted, which was the topic at launch as the upgrade candidate. Since DX12 is also new, and further shifted the paradigm of how the API is to be treated, and the performance bottlenecks are still really in the design of GW2’s engine itself, a port would be expensive, time-consuming, and very likely buggy. I don’t know of a single release yet that’s actually taken real advantage of DX12. It’s still new, and expert programmers on older versions are going to be able to crank out better performance and much better code out of older API’s than brand new ones for quite a while. Whether or not ANet takes that plunge is undetermined, but any changes to DX they make will have nothing to do with the Mac client in any way, since DirectX is a uniquely windows-only product. If anything, the Mac client would likely be taking the graphics gurus away from any DirectX changes, even if they were to be scheduled, which is unlikely in the near future.

ANet probably still plans on being a company after the next ten years or so. GW2 will monetize for several more just fine as it is. I don’t doubt they have plans to cook up something as part of their long-term business strategy, and it’s likely that next product which will be getting the bump to newer API’s as to keep their studio relevant. I wouldn’t expect that to even start happening within the next three to five years, and likely a few years of further development after that for the actual engine preparation and creation for their next big title.

At launch, they said they were looking into it, not that they were guaranteeing it. Actually, their programming lead at launch even came out and said it was unlikely to happen but they were trying, anyways.

This is like the millionth time people have said this.

So it’s not happening.

/thread

Gaile Gray.6029:

The difference between “constructive” and “non-constructive” can be the difference between “I’m still experiencing this issue” and "Get off your kitten, Anet, and FIX THIS!! "

Well, one will likely get you banned outright, and the other, if the subject matter isn’t totally and 100% constructive, I.E. the mere fact of identifying a problem in design or company dynamic, will still probably get you banned, anyways. cough

Onto more important matters, though, I have this feeling you actually typed out ‘kitten’ >.> One of these days, the niceness will subside, the cat will come out of the bag, Gaile! (Ifyouseewhatididthere)

Speaking of cat-chat filters, can we please get a push to just allowing the number forty five followed by an ‘s’ allowed? 133375p34k is so second-millennium :P But no, really, it’s quite frustrating when talking cooldowns and whatnot, and I’m pretty sure there are so many less-tact things to call people here that aren’t blocked that if someone really wanted to insult someone with it, they’d use other words.

Or just get reported by community members for abusing the edge-case of the filter, probably as it should be.

As far as the OP goes, talking in old topics is probably fine so long as the content is still contemporary and there isn’t a duplicate discussion on it, near the top of the boards, either. If it’s a megathread, a returning bug of olde, or suggestion you’re updating (like what’s in my signature), I doubt you’d see any penalties. If it still happened, you can appeal, and if you get rejected despite filling those criteria (as in a previously-discussed major bug that’s now a contemporary issue after returning to the game), you’re probably better off posting about it somewhere else entirely.

I’d probably shed a tear if we got a pet as an elite spec mechanic rofl.

And not in a good way. The sole reason I don’t main ranger is because of the pet.

And maybe another because it would just pretty much serve as proof that I’d be able to validly claim myself as more competent at class development than ANet.

Cynz.9437:

There was post after post that can be summed into: “please nerf all viable thief sets (d/p especially) so thief is so crappy that Anet one day might buff my beloved d/d. I couldn’t care less that thieves had abyssal experience for seasons in pvp and that my request would doom them to even worse experience”.

Yes, i will defend the only set that keeps us barely viable in high tier pvp. It is not broken just because you hate it and just because your beloved d/d is suffering from devs poor choices.

Different philosophies. ANet has a history of actually doing something when a class is so bad it’s not good at anything. I.E., the ranger CDI and its effects on longbow, what happened to our DPS, changes to warrior post-hambow nerf, etc. Granted, I hated the change in respects to the dagger and staff seeing AA damage also buffed, but only because it offset the QoL attack speed love to sword due to it being so astronomically bad. Even P/P has gotten tons of love as compensation for all the projectile hate in order to make Unloads count for more. A lot of these are surface-level, though, and don’t really look into the cause of the problems to begin with.

See, if they nerfed Shadow Shot, and only Shadow Shot, how tremendously would it really effect the thief, particularly skilled players? I don’t think it would be that bad. It’d tone down D/P in-line mathematically and conceptually with other sets. To me, that’s not an actual problem. A dominant build in a generally under-performing class shouldn’t be what keeps the class from receiving adjustments. That’s poor game design and you know it is.

Likely the result of a nerf here would be that every poor player running the build would be at a loss. This means ANet, who pretty much exclusively QA’s and designs around the meta builds at low skill competency, would improve something somewhere, and since they’re so adamant on not undoing (bad) decisions, it’d probably go somewhere else more beneficial to everyone.

The way I see it is the thief community is never going to agree or see change if its members constantly argue from different build performance perspectives based solely on weapon efficacy. OH dagger is probably never getting buffed or reworked, because in all seriousness, the only thing ANet actually cares about with this profession is how D/P plays. It’s why it never gets hit hard by the profession changes while other sets get gored.

It’s not that D/P is inherently overpowered so much as I think a nerf to Shadow Shot would be enough to break the camel’s back within the low-skill tier of play to finally make ANet realize more needs to change.

And if I’m wrong? D/P players already pretty much getting rolled by the meta builds will continue to get rolled, and those who massively out-play their opponents still likely will continue to. If a nerf to Shadow Shot breaks the entire thief in general, then it only proves my argument as being correct in every respect.

Real roaming died with HoT. Lack of +5 supply guild buff killed most of the good guilds, and the amount of cheese and stupidly broken builds in the game right now made many more leave. I’d rather just blob, despite being a huge small-scale player for so long. The roaming scene behaviorally is unsettling and the builds and balance are worse.

Guild Arena fights with experimental builds or ones which aren’t just stupidly OP and broken are way more interesting. I can go for hours doing that with friends just because at any given time things feel fair and nobody’s a jerk about it.

Jana.6831:

DeceiverX.8361:

Jana.6831:

If you see a thief laying blind powder down anywhere, jump into the BP = they can’t stealth.

This is advice I cannot give. More often than not, doing this will get you killed.

For some reason I have never been killed when doing so – but when I didn’t do it.

They’re still going to get stealth, anyways, even if the HS hits.

The only way they’d reveal themselves is if they HS’ed again and hit you while being in stealth, in which case that’s just the thief being horrible and not knowing the mechanics of D/P.

Plus you end up blinded from BP.

Jana.6831:

Fat Disgrace.4275:

I don’t get it?

If you see a thief laying blind powder down anywhere, jump into the BP = they can’t stealth.

This is advice I cannot give. More often than not, doing this will get you killed.

There’s very little sense in trying for a build that will try and chase a daredevil down. If they’re playing a normal build, pretty much nothing but a druid running GS/Staff can catch up. If the daredevil runs away, it’s not killing you in that time, and if it resets, so can you.

Thus a daredevil that will be afraid to try and kill you is a build that will perform best. That doesn’t mean you can just go walking around killing Daredevils. The whole point of the specialization is damage mitigation since the amount of powercreep from HoT is so big it’s a necessity. Keep it afraid to put pressure on you and there’s nothing it’ll really do. Keep aware such that you don’t get ganked, and it can’t do anything no matter what.

I believe DH is an overstated counter for WvW. It melts thief in sPvP, but thieves can get the stats they need to actually function in fights in WvW. Traps are easy to negate if the thief goes in under the assumption traps are there. Shortbow and P/P can almost permanently kite the DH’s longbow.

The definitively best dueling build in the game right now is bunker druid. It also counters thief innately. It won’t make you better at beating thieves in general, however. Only playing one will. Berserker is also an excellent choice if looking into more interactive play, and PU condi mesmer before the bunker druid was the reigning champion of duels and shouldn’t have too much trouble against the daredevil, as dodges proc confusion’s extra damage, and the build supplies plenty of blinds and cover conditions to make cleansing difficult without SA, which most people no longer run.

Or you can simply get really good at the profession you’re playing. While daredevil is thief on easy mode, it still does to a degree depend on its play to succeed. A good thief building against the profession’s counters (Hello D/P-defensive DrD) is going to be very difficult to bring down. A core thief should melt to anything with HoT.

It should be looked into. I think the biggest issue it has is that it’s also just not really a good enough utility to take anywhere. It doesn’t do anything for poor land speed, it doesn’t work in GvG builds. It suffers from LoS and accuracy issues, and, quite honestly, I don’t really think anyone could find room in most builds for it, even if it did work as desired. It sacrifices a stunbreak, cleanse, corrupt, or well.

I’d sugggest giving it a stunbreak as a sort of counterpart to Spectral Armor to justify taking it as an aggressive tool for LF generation and pulls or a defensive one to negate a single CC. Spectral Armor still then has value as a stunbreak + huge LF potential gains + protection. This way Armor has more use against more enemies and works better as a strictly defensive tool with a bit of bonus offense through LF generation. It doesn’t really need a speed increase; it’s fine if it’s slow enough to react to, as we should be using it at a proper time to ensure a pull rather than spamming it hoping to pull someone in, but it shouldn’t be an ability which can just be strafed and whiff so easily. Same goes for scorpion wire.

Anchoku.8142:

Honestly, I would like to see profession condition mitigation nerfed across the board.

Wat.

Just wat.

Boon access and condition spamming both need nerfs. Cleansing needs better inter-class distribution, but absolutely no way do conditions and their reliability need buffs by nerfing cleanses.

NuhDah.9812:

I’m not sure why I always felt like necro (at least the core one since I didn’t try reaper myself yet) had something what I’d call a more of a lazy play style, I guess I’m feeling this way since to me it feels more like a rotational, slower passed combat, with sort of a limited array of things you can do at a time. It’s powerful if played right, but the way it plays seems more like on the strategical side (like you bait your opponent, control his movement, kite around, get behind your minions, while loading them with condis etc.) then on the active performance side (with fast passed decision and movement). Reaper seems more on the active, but it still doesn’t feel as engaging as other classes… Not that I don’t like that sort of play style once in a while, especially if I feel like taking a break from thief and going on the totally opposite.

Don’t mind my probably incomplete description on necro play style I’m sure they have their secrets I have yet to discover and probably my view over them is a bit narrow. All in due time…

And now to go back on track… about the “low ttk” I mentioned above. I surely know you can extend the time to kill in endless fights, I’ve seen those kinds of 1v1s where no one dies for a long time if ever… but what i’ve been comparing it to were some of the previous games I played they had by default a high enough hp pool & inherent defenses that if you were to spec top dps on your class you would still need some amount of time to kill someone with the same gear level as you but also glass without them doing anything. I mean it was something on the order on under 10 seconds, but compared to GW2 where afk glass get’s down in less then a second… And to that longer ttk add specialized healers and tanks (as there is in the holy trinity games) and you get people that don’t go down even if you pit 5 people against them. And also the mentality that healers need to be privileged and unable to be killed by another dps if they both try hard, because they usually are the first targets in the match -. this is one step that invites imbalance in that type of games. I won’t go on any longer, I guess you got the point.

In GW2 your survival is very dependent on your performance, foresight, and knowledge of the game and your opponent. That’s why I like it cause you can’t afford to go to sleep if you don’t want to get downed in a flash. And this is also what the passives mess up in the game, but whatever. I hope I answered your question about my perspective on ttk.

I play necromancer very aggressively contrary to how most of the builds and styles suggest, and for that reason I probably am also not as good as I could be. I’m still getting the hang of the nuances, although there aren’t too many to grasp since I don’t run conditions, corrupts, or minions. There could be more in there to keep it a bit more explosive, particularly core necro, but I dislike warrior since it depends on its passives which I find uninteresting and I’m a horrible guard.

Different experiences I suppose. In the game I came from prior, if you didn’t even go as far as being in the exact correct location at the right time on some builds, you got one-shotted by pretty much anything, or literally infinitely chain-CC’ed if your timing was half a second off. Core GW2 slowed the ridiculous down a bit, but kept up the philosophy of fast-paced action and skill-oriented play.

I came up with something so absurd recently I’m unwilling to post it, share it, or even play it. It pretty much would get backstab nerfed if enough people caught on for how much damage it can do and how few sacrifices are made.

Blaq and Eval (two thiefy guildmates of mine) have come up recently with some very solid builds in terms of stat performance and overall strength. I still prefer raw power over ferocity since I personally believe it makes builds more consistent and thus better killers, but your mileage will likely vary depending on what you do, what weapons you use, and how you play in WvW.

emkelly.2371:

^Aside from the bit about Reaper, i agree with you.
+1

Really since the nerfs to reaper’s chill damage and mitigation on the minions, I think the spec is quite balanced. I main reaper now since quitting thief, and can fairly certainly say that the spec performs just as it should as a counterpart to necro. Condition necro/reaper might still be very strong for its durability, but that’s more of an issue with condition builds/stat combinations providing so much defense than the reaper’s design and skills itself. Even still, many esteemed necromancers are moving back to core necro since it does the job similarly well with better defenses and LF maintenance.

Except it does. Regularly. Especially when augmented with boons.

A thief not having at least 20% damage modifiers is playing a full-defensive build.

Trickery and DA alone push at minimum 25%.

Something isn’t right with what you’re saying.

Tested just now using standard DA/Tr/DrD using Marauder gear + Pack runes, 187 crit damage 2225 power, no stacks of Lead Attacks, no conditions, and no Executioner bonus. Heavy Golem has 2597 armor.

I then switched to Scholar Runes and CS using a Signets of power to get my stats to 3k power and reflect the precision/ferocity bonus of roughly 216% in WvW using a mixed berserker/marauder/berserker+valk build with 10 might. Still at 2600 armor.

On my actual DA/CS/Tr stacked thief built for damage which does actually run close to 4k power and 261 critical damage + 70% damage modifiers, the damage would calculate well over 8k per bound in WvW on 2500 armor.

I have no idea what you’re talking about in terms of bound dealing low damage. Sounds to me like you’re not actually playing for damage in your build… like at all.

Or, more likely, you’re believing the damage is what it is when negation effects like Frost armor, protection, and other mitigation are being applied by other specs.

In which case the problem is the mitigation (which is nothing new) and not bound dealing too little damage.

vicious.5683:

balance team doesn’t have a clue about any profession.

Fixed that for ya

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Dat moment when your temporal curtain landed on an ambient creature or some random npc walks into it, I don’t know if I should be amazed by my aiming skill or my stupidity haha.

Common problem on shortbow thief, too. Shortbow 5 has a PbAoE blind and does no damage, so you’ll go trying to teleport around to move faster and accidentally blind a critter without killing it, forcing you into combat :P

(Continued from above)

And that’s also why I don’t suggest simply buffing the thief or saying it’s okay to let poorly-designed skills be; letting poorly-designed skills be is why we’re here to begin with and why HoT and its content was such a failure. Massive design flaws and oversights went without response or seemingly any care about how much they would impact the game. If people are really going to try and make suggestions in hopes ANet will read them and take them seriously (which I doubt), it shouldn’t be of making claims that “we need answers to x new OP mechanic!” but should instead be focused on concession and looking into the deep details of design as to why specifically some facet of something is conceptually and mathematically unjustified and how to properly fix it in alignment with the rest of the core game.

At the end of the day, I want to play what I want to and want to win a fight against any given opponent knowing that I deserved to win because I played better than them. Not that my build hard-countered theirs. Not that my build is just really strong. Not that I got lucky. I want my opponent to have the same or similar chances of innately beating me as I do them, and to have them have the win if they out-play me.

That’s why I dislike the elite specs (aside from reaper, it’s very well-done and fills necro’s weak spots while necro fills the reaper’s weak spots perfectly), but also why I dislike Shadow Shot, Death Blossom’s changes, etc. They promote play that doesn’t really reward a lot of skill and makes distinguishing better players much more ambiguous because the kits themselves are just so dominant that when up against anything else it’s really hard to even tell who should have deserved a win in a fight.

NuhDah.9812:

(Trimmed for post length)

I’m glad you enjoyed the content of some of my other postings. Do realize that I heavily steep my arguments in mathematical analysis and conceptual breakdowns of processes of game design. I don’t come here to scream OP because I lost to something. I come here to objectively and definitively say after analysis why something is either generally overpowered, underpowered, or poorly-designed. Whether or not I supply evidence is pretty dependent on how new the discovery is; I’ve re-iterated the same points so many times in the past that I get sick of re-typing and often the people who know it, know it, and the people who don’t dont. Of course, reasoning with someone willing to listen makes me much more willing to discuss my findings at-length.

That said, I do want to distinguish myself from the PvE-optimization-overlords and theorycrafters from guilds like those in DnT; I pay little heed to PvE and typically do very little math on optimal rotations, silly synergies, etc. which define that meta. It’s not particularly easy or more importantly, fun, for me to optimize those figures, and I’m not knowledgeable enough of the nuances of PvE like boss attack intervals/timers/etc. to formerly declare I’ve found optima in that, and the analysis behind what makes great DPS versus a fun and fair matchup in PvP are very different, anyways.

I do agree with what you said for the most part, although the TTK argument is kind of situational depending on matchups. Specifically, the TTK for other classes against the thief has drastically fallen down due to the absolutely crazy-high damage coefficients that many HoT abilities received. Professions like the DH got skills with half the cooldown and double the coefficients of others on their core kits.

I question the lens and perspective you’re looking through to an extent, though.
I disagree that the reduced TTK mentioned is universal, particularly when looking at other classes. Since durability also went up correspondingly, in many cases, quick and aggressive matchups have turned into particularly long ones, such as fighting a mesmer, which historically had access to only a little bit of sustained defense from BF and Distortion. CS effectively doubled the sustain resistance on top of providing an additional sustained block and heavy CC on the shield. DH’s aegis trap is similarly potent in terms of massive blocks. Druid has very high healing and mobility, and a sustain-built reaper will be much more durable than what was just the BM/DM/SR necro. Scrapper is just immensely durable for really no apparent reason. Adrenal health supercharges healing and sustain for the berserker over the warrior, Daredevil is at absolute minimum able to negate substantially more damage than core thief just on the extra dodge alone, and then you realize the benefits of CV + SoA + EA + DF shove the thief into having better sustain than most of SA and Acro combined, and even tempests got pretty big defensive bonuses from sheer percentage damage mitigation increases, and we won’t even talk about the revenant being able to reach 100% damage reduction.

Then factor in durability runes, Marauder-style gear that just gives extra stats and sustain for no good reason, 10% damage mitigation food, etc. etc., and you end up with situations where the absurd damage coefficients which could one-shot people without HoT builds are offset with so much damage mitigation that the fights against two HoT specializations take just as long, if not even longer, than before, with double the amount of cheese and less than half the number of viable builds.

The fact we’re seeing the thief – a profession praised for having little to no passive effects – one which even demanded that its one built-in passive be made optional because it messed up active play – get passive invulnerability after-the-fact of HoT is clearly a demonstration of how screwed up the defenses are in the game right now.

(Continued below when post interval expires)

If you’re in sPvP, use Marauder trinket, instead. The Berserker trinket is a poor performer across the board and marauder has more stat points on it by a substantial margin, because HoT.

Welcome to the WvW blob meta. Nothing new to see here.

General HoT powercreep, though. ANet gave every new elite absolutely stupid damage coefficients and tried to offset them with stupid mitigation. Even thief now has access to 10% + 25% + 10% + 10% reductions via SA, daredevil, and food.

I think the fundamental difference in opinion comes from the notion that you believe the other specs are well-built. I don’t. I quite honestly believe the integrity of the game hinges on nerfing that power creep, including Daredevil.

Look to pre-HoT build viability in WvW; pretty much anything could be run on a thief with at worst moderate success. Even if the class demanded more skill than others to get that success with, that’s totally fine for what it was in general capable of. Aside from massive condi bomb dire builds, I never really felt pressed against anything, and if I played well – and at times I didn’t, for nobody’s perfect – I found myself being able to beat pretty much whatever I attacked, generally speaking. The lack of viability in sPvP stems from the amulet system and stat gains not jiving well with damage multipliers which are the primary way to achieve damage on the thief rather than anything inherent with class design, skill coefficients, etc.

The problem I see with Shadow Shot is that it’s one of those poorly-designed mechanics which prevents the rest of the class and its builds from getting much love. Because it’s such a problem child and is already overly-rewarding for its use, I see no reason to cut its damage and turn it into primarily a utility ability.

You shouldn’t have too much trouble with it in open world for HoT. When I made one of my thieves Daredevil for the first time, it was a berserker crit P/P unload build, and that was even before the buffs to unload; I didn’t have too much trouble soloing the champs in VB and AB. Use the range, evades, and teleports like Shadowstep on the thief to your advantage, and you should be totally fine. I’m not really sure what kind of content you enjoy doing, though, so be wary MH pistol in general is not a very good weapon for raids and might get you kicked, but P/P works everywhere else in PvE quite well. It’s not the fastest for clearing groups of mobs since it lacks AoE, but it isn’t particularly difficult in PvE and mobs can always be kited pretty easily.

I don’t really have much of an issue with it in most cases. There is a time to use stealth and a time to dodge, and in some cases, a time to just eat the damage (this is the hardest thing to do and until actually taking it the hardest to know if it’s even okay to do). Knowing when is a pretty big determining factor in what defines a highly successful thief.

My only gripe might be druid staff auto since the beam lasts so long and tracks stealth unnecessarily well, and that isn’t even a complaint about the damage but the persistence of the cast causing one’s location to be given away.

Eval.2371:

DeceiverX.8361:

If you want to play thief at a level of performance that won’t make you log out furious every half hour when you’re up against decent players using the more powerful builds in the game, you’re going to have to give up D/D power. There’s a movement to S/P and some P/P plays at the moment featuring similar or better burst damage which with Daredevil works similarly and typically exceeds the performance of D/D substantially.

D/D condi is still somewhat viable tho. It’s not for everyone. Same deal with S/P.

Honestly, if OP wants the d/d style of play and still want to be more reliable s/d is still somewhat viable. I know you went that route before kicking the bucket on thief.

Yea but you and I both know well D/D condi is gross to play and play against. It’s a broken kit that needs a rework because when played well in WvW it pretty much roflstomps whatever you throw at it without it needing to try very hard.

I simply just ran both D/D and S/D at the same time, something I can’t recommend doing now. S/D was a replacement for shortbow since it offered a bit more utility while fighting for my needs and preferences. I was particularly keen on the unblockable attack on LS for matchups with block-heavy builds like guardians, scrappers, and wars. But that’s because I also run so much damage and play so commitment-heavy that an LS crit would likely execute players taking defensive/last chance/recovery blocks. S/D as a main set is pretty whittle-heavy with intermittent spikes from AA3 and LS. It’s not really like D/D in the respect that its strength comes from a few seconds into the fight rather than as the fight starts. It plays well with Daredevil currently and that’s about it, and even then it’s mostly due to the boon rip wreaking havoc in the meta.

It really depends on how the OP plays or played D/D in the past. You had so many different styles of players on the set a while ago that I can’t simply make a recommendation inherently. Is the OP the type who played SA/high stealth, or aggressively and often out of stealth like me? Or AA Acro evasion? Did he try to maximize burst or go for the longer fights with resetting and teleports like Shadowstep? How dedicated to D/D was he after the fight started?

And of course, it also depends on how serious the OP is about winning fights and how he plays WvW in general.

It really is up in the air. I can’t in good faith recommend D/D power generally speaking as a primary loadout right now, particularly given the state of the game and the changes from this most recent patch. There’s a line between something being an under-performer and suffering so much that it’s just not worth getting so invested in trying to play particularly well, especially when against good opponents.

Carighan.6758:

DeceiverX.8361:

All adding roles does is constrain viability while doing nothing to affect the theoretical existence of optima. It is on this pretense I argue roles are a bad design feature; being barred from a party by playing out of the confines of the optima is not a flaw in game design associated with the roles or lack thereof but rather a flaw with the community likely caused by a flaw in another system elsewhere, such as what implicates the community to push for fast clear speeds (stale/unresponsive content, rewards scaling, etc.).

While I understand the underlying idea, it is IMO a bit utopian. It won’t really work out that way in any real game. Look through how many iterations WoW went, and every time they ended up reducing choices again to at least balance the 1 chosen spec per class.

It’s possible, but not very likely. Not if content is supposed to be non-trivial.

Correct me if I’m wrong as I only played WoW for around two hours, but the fundamental structure of WoW already alluded to or included roles in its classes, though. Ultimately, making a perfectly-balanced game on this scale in terms of the number of variables in effect for online gaming at any give time is pretty much impossible. You’re always going to find optimizations somewhere in many respects. The real matter isn’t so much as perfecting that global balance on the permanent level but rather ensuring anything works. The only truly balanced game will have effectively no inter-player or match diversity. Obviously for the health of a given game outside of the intrigue of game theorists, and particularly in RPG’s, diversity takes precedence. There is such thing as balancing for numerical perfection and a meta and balancing for diversity.

Really, the way it’s done properly is balancing for diversity on the conceptual and major levels, and then doing small and regular tweaks to gameplay to persistently disrupt the meta from even really existing. You’ll see more successful games are often willing to make slight tweaks very frequently. Even in a tightly-balanced game, it’s not going to be perfect; theorycrafters will find the optima if the slight tweaks cause a dominant build to start being non-optimal (don’t confuse this with non-viable), a new and people will gravitate to play whatever is deemed “best” even if by extremely small margins. Then the numbers get tweaked again, and the process continues repeating until things get increasingly more and more refined, and if not, they get reworked due to impossibility of balance.

Nobody should care about the existence of a meta or organization in PvE. It’s going to happen, regardless of what ANet does. Berserker stacking or durable facetank, it’s arbitrary. All that really matters is that all styles are usable and in some respect play into achieving the goal of completing the content in a relatively similar amount of time.

That’s really where ANet failed in respects to the root of the cause of the PvE meta; there was no incentive or reason for people to feel like they contributed as anything other than DPS + stacking. Smaller adjustments to dungeons to reward durability and the likes would have gone a long way.

As far as such diversity in balance in a non-trivial system… that’s subjective. The entire basis for the previous dungeon meta was about time, not about making the content trivial. If trivial completion was the goal, we’d have seen a dire/magi meta. The purpose of a role-based system ends up actually trivializing content, since even the theories of optimal performance are predetermined for the most part, and are used as the basis for QA to ensure the content can be completed. One needs to really ask himself if content designed for roles is inherently really any less trivial than what it could be without them. I’d like to think there are many ways, both mathematical and design-level, which could be used to more strictly-enforce non-trivial encounters with non-role-based systems.

Blue Hare.8612:

Alexander.6250:

Thief:
1) Ambush: Summon an npc that deals super low dmg, how very useful!
2) Thieves Guild: same problem: the thieves are just underpowered.
3) Ice drake Venom: 4 seconds of chill isn’t all that great.

Supposedly there is a condi build in WvW that uses thieves guild, venoms can be shared with summons so you get a pretty good condi bomb. It basically triples the effect of poisons.

It’s not really anything new; the old skool venomshare builds of the day used to run it with P/P. It only somewhat works in 1v1 fights and it’s still pretty match-up dependent. Foes with decent cleave will one/two-shot the AI’s. Imho, if the CC component was removed from the summons and the duration reduced, I think it’d be good enough to just drop the cooldown massively to like 75s, as 180s is really long and often not seen as worth it, especially now that venomshare builds got nerfed.

I feel like a lot of the list is either debatable or missing skills. For the most part, anything not running the meta is pretty underpowered. There are tons of skills and traits people never use on anything, and I wouldn’t get hung up suggesting fixes because ANet doesn’t care.

Power D/D is not a viable way of playing WvW at the moment at the higher skill echelons, regardless of how you configure traits and gear, and in all truth, regardless of how good you are at it. This is especially more apparent as you build further into higher damage and build higher-risk.

It will let you kill poor players and some squishy builds, but the stealth attack ICD/BV changes/HoT defensive powercreep have put the set into being so disadvantaged that even I stopped playing it – which meant for me, stopped playing thief altogether.

I’ll be totally honest, the video posted above was against such rather poor players. The play was overall fairly solid with a few nit-picky minor mistakes, but that’s about the best it’s going to perform at. Deeper analysis into the video demonstrates that Daredevil was essentially mandatory, and the Berserker had many opportunities to outright end the fight and never delivered.

If you want to play thief at a level of performance that won’t make you log out furious every half hour when you’re up against decent players using the more powerful builds in the game, you’re going to have to give up D/D power. There’s a movement to S/P and some P/P plays at the moment featuring similar or better burst damage which with Daredevil works similarly and typically exceeds the performance of D/D substantially.

I don’t argue much with people in-game, and I’m not really sure why you’d assume I argue with my own server members regularly, or what the RP sub-community has anything to do with it. Typically exchanges in-game come from either enemies who jump on corpses in ganks (enemy or ally, I think it’s rude and brings a disrespect to the community I’m in/format I’m playing, and almost everyone who gloats to their enemies is typically playing FoTM) or win via cheese FoTM builds and aren’t willing to fight with anything but. I like to let them know they’re running cheese when they are, even if I win, and that to get better as a player, you need to deviate from crutches. Most of my debates are made here, because all too often people come here to complain the thief isn’t strong enough and needs huge and sweeping baseline buffs that strictly speaking are unnecessary and excessive. The same people who make these absurd requests and claim to be good players are often unaware of where the real problems in the profession lie, and why their suggestions make no sense, and if and when they do try another build that doesn’t revolve around the meta, find themselves grounded when consistently losing and playing under-performing sets which cannot be rightfully buffed without over-buffing D/P. This is especially apparent when playing against other thieves. In non-meta matchups, they usually lose promptly by being out-played, and against another meta build, they really recognize the weakness of the core of the thief and its unused other flavors.

Shadow Shot is the core of the problem from design and implementation backgrounds.
It prevents logical balancing of MH Dagger and OH pistol, which are under-performers respectively on the core thief when not combined. S/P and P/P were and are considered poor kits when not using Daredevil. A kit should not be made-or-broken by an elite spec’s GM trait. MH dagger’s DPS buffs were unwarranted to D/P because then the skill floor in respects to class efficacy was lowered and backstabs punished. I made the claim thieves would largely stop using stealth attacks when ANet buffed MH dagger AA, especially on D/P, since already Shadow Shot out-performed a frontal use of backstab, and the quicker recovery animations would yield that SS -> AA would deal better burst than a well-set-up SS -> backstab. I made this claim because of the math behind it. And look where we are. Most claim stealth attacks aren’t worth it, for the exact reasons I mentioned above, even without the stealth attack ICD. If Shadow Shot got nerfed, it’d stop being the go-to ability for damage while just providing free gap closes and soft CC increasing the relative safety in play. On the mathematical and design levels, the thief can’t see changes it needs because the efficacy of Shadow Shot dominates the weapon set and the weapon set dominates the thief.

I’d like to mention I’m not mad, or speaking from the perspective of entirely a D/D thief. I’ve played pretty much every thief build out there. At one point, I ran a Cleric’s Dwayna’s healing power build in sPvP and went undefeated in duels in that environment, because I did out the math as to how such a build would be overpowered in sPvP. And it absolutely was. Of course, this is due largely to the sPvP stats while massively weak in WvW. That was cheese that went under the radar. I’m speaking the results of my objective analysis of the mathematics and systems behind the game and what underlies the thief. I’m not calling D/P itself cheesy. I’m saying Shadow Shot is breaking the profession’s ability to grow and be fixed, and that what could be qualified as excessive or cheesy use has disproportionately little impact on how well the profession performs when compared to other sets; it consistently performs better because of this single ability, almost regardless of the skill of the player or even how it’s used.

As far as uniqueness to what I ran… not really, no. Because I played so massively away from the meta and as a result didn’t even run shortbow, the things that I did on the thief overall aren’t compatible with a comparison to just D/P. If you were to analyze the combinations of weapons I ran individually, there was objectively nothing advantageous about them except for the cleanse on IR on MH sword when compared to D/P. Every play I could make on any given weapon I used, I would have been able to either duplicate or have done functionally better with the same result while using D/P.

NuhDah.9812:

(cut for length and because triply-nested quotes is messy and I don’t feel like dealing with it)

I’m not sure how you could surmise D/P’s advantages come from killing only squishy targets. The main reason why D/P is played in sPvP is because this statement simply isn’t true. That’s only applicable to S/P and D/D power.

D/P is on the better end at killing tankier targets than other sets also because of Shadow Shot, actually. High coefficient, gap closes to maintain pressure, and soft CC to prevent the few meaningful counter-attacks, and a better net throughput in damage in most cases than most other sets since the AA is so hard-hitting. I’d argue S/D is probably the best tank-killer only because of Larcenous Strike being able to apply boon ripping that often constitutes most of the effective sustained damage mitigation in the game currently. D/D, P/P, and S/P’s only existing possible gains over D/P are squishy targets, since neither set has the sustain to justify use in the existing meta, since they’re so burst-focused, and even Bound can offset a portion of this from just having OH pistol for S/P and P/P, and P/P’s plight is great in PvP environments only due to rampant projectile hate.

You’re not running a build with actual damage, and Shadow Shot for you is hitting harder than options available to other professions/builds that invest all of their traits and gear into full glass damage. A 4k 900-range gap-close crit with no might on a high-armor target coming from a utility-defensive build is considered to be huge. That’s the kind of damage I get on my full-berserker, full-damage-built-traits 25-might + 25 bloodlust third Reaper Shroud AA on my reaper when against a warrior.

You’re playing a relatively-power-geared build under the standard utility Daredevil D/P build with DPS-oriented gear (not DPH, mind you), and aren’t actually building for damage in your traits. If you use Shadow Shot primarily as a gap closer, anyways, I don’t understand why you’d be upset with its coefficient dropping. As it is, Shadow Shot is better than backstab when taking into account the stealth attack ICD, intiative costs of gaining stealth and the damage from backstab, casting times of these abilities, misc effects, and the overall damage dealt when factoring in post-Shadow Shot AA’s.

(Continued below)

I’ll toss this nugget in as well, something I said as to the nature of why Bound shouldn’t be considered as an important part of the OH pistol’s kit, and thus, I don’t think should provide stealth, and rather that other weapons need a re-investigation:

Basing OH pistol’s utility based on Daredevil’s Bound is short-sighted.
When the next round of power creep comes to the thief in the form of the next elite specialization, what then? Will all X/P players, particularly S/P, find themselves at a loss since the new shiny will prevent them from gaining stealth access and thus be stuck with a not-as-viable kit? Then what? Ask for changes to make BP just innately give stealth? Then what of OH dagger? This is obviously a slippery slope.

Speed of Shadows, Vital Persistence, and GS5 largely solves the mobility problem. Depending on your use-case, It’s typically just Nike warrior, bunker ranger (mostly a problem imho because if/when I do majorly out-play them and catch up and get some damage in it’s tanked/sustained right on through) or a thief deliberately running away with shortbow that I find myself unable to catch and kill. Otherwise, I usually can pursue or close the gap just fine against anything else.

You have to build heavily into mobility to get the reasonable roaming speed/chase potential, and I don’t think many people do it. It’s a fair trade-off, though, since the profession is meant to be slow, and packs a major punch in toe-to-toe fighting. it’s not ideal, but it’s suitable. Builds meant for speed should probably out-run a reaper/necromancer, anyways.

Sartharina.3542:

Stitch.1794:

TheNecrosanct.4028:

Stitch.1794:

Chad.6104:

Invisible bags are useful but when you switch out two one handed weapons for a two handed weapon one will go in the two handed weapon slot and the other will go into the first open inventory slot, which means it’s possible to sell it. I sold an ascended weapon to a vendor once when my game lagged during selling. I got it back because I reviewed my sales to merchant but a don’t sell mark on it would have stopped that.

You just need to leave a space in your inventory after the two-handed weapon – if you swap a two-handed weapon for a main and off hand, the main hand will go into the space vacated by the two-handed weapon, and the off hand weapon will go into the space to its right, if empty.

Except, any loot you get automatically fills up the first available space. So this only works if you don’t get any loot. If you’ve been running around for a while and want to switch a two-handed weapon to 2 one-handed weapons, it’s highly likely that space you trying to keep free is already filled up with something that dropped for you in the meantime. So your suggestion doesn’t work very well in practice.

This is why I keep my invisible bag at the bottom – the spare spots for swapping to two-handed weapons only get filledwith junk when I’m completely out of space.

But then the off-hand weapon gets punted to the first available space.

Frankly, I think the developers need to make it so that Invisible Bags are always last to fill with junk, and immune to inventory compacting. – They’re the bags you put your important stuff in, and it’s, from a player-convenience perspective, best to have that at the top of the screen so it’s readily available as soon as you open your inventory.

This.

They could do it as a crafting/MF recipe, too. Invisible + Oiled (reverse precedence) + Equipment-rarity-priority. Exotic rarity bags would assume exotic-ascended gear as prioritized.

I recall a game programmer on reddit stating it came from the raw amount of events and routines needing to be handled when such groups collide. I do believe he said all the proc effects in the game (on-hit, on-health % trigger, etc.) cause substantial computational delays and bog the system down. To me, that makes sense, as there need to be a ton of interrupts being called, everything probably gets queued, and the system slowly tries to backtrack and solve things while maintaining proper time. That’s also why the lag isn’t just stuttering/stopping and teleporting like it would be from a network problem, but the entire game, including animations and the likes, seem to slow down and then speed up afterwards. If you were around for the TC/BG garrison fight a few weeks ago, there was a multi-minute period after the massive slowdowns and lag that animations and all things associated to game ticks, such as cooldowns, movespeed, etc., all went at around 3x the speed. It was quite humerous as I was playing a ranger, such that the entirety of RF would cast in less than a second.

Now, why the profession devs keep on adding more passives and proc effects is the part that drives me up the wall since it’s more than just bad gameplay design if it’s true.

Simply, they don’t. Or they run Blinding Powder and blast the smoke field with a stealth skill to gain 6s of stealth, use shortbow’s blast OOC, use SR, blast or leap Smoke Screen using shortbow or MH dagger, or from an ally, or run alternate set D/P for stealth attack/ganks. P/P and S/P aren’t really designed to have stealth; OH pistol has plenty of disruption, MH pistol has a brief immob built in to help get the Unloads working (which with recent buffs has absolutely astronomical damage), and the benefit of 900 range. Pistol Whip as an attack from stealth is one of the most devastating possible, since it inflicts a stun and the damage of almost 1.5 backstabs on top of an immunity evade. And it’s on MH sword such that it has a proper disengage via IS/IR if it finds itself in trouble.

And then it adds another 10% damage for the already-hardest-hitting abilities on the thief. You can build quite durably or not invest in much damage and still get 20k Pistol Whips and Unloads in WvW, while doing so for Backstab requires all three trait lines and all utilities burned for signets to do so.

There does need to some love for the less-used sets, but I think the leap finisher was a lazy idea to try and blanket the real problems and it again continued to give more options/advantages to OH pistol (particularly D/P) to keep overshadowing the OH dagger, which is already in a bad place.

megilandil.7506:

in advance, i dont play thief in pvp.
theres a litle question to thieves theoricrafters:
thieve must be alwais a burst duelist? others clases moved their role trought the diferent metas but thieves no, ¿the real problem of thief is no viable build or closed minded thief comunity that not explores the other roles?

It all comes down to boons and defenses.

The thief has very limited access to boons (which is why post-release balance the class has never been OP; boons are what make builds OP in almost every case), and very limited access to sustained defenses, like a shield block, mesmer’s distortion, endure/defy pain, RF, etc. This makes it difficult to stay on a sPvP point with, especially since the points are small, and due to the thief having a low-tier health pool, prevents the thief from soaking damage or leaving the point to not die, since that enables a decap.

Up until Daredevil, the thief had the worst cleansing in the game, too, so even one condition build or control build could ruin one’s day entirely. The only solution was running Shadow Arts to cleanse 1 condition every 3s while in stealth. Since stealth also doesn’t count towards point capture, staying in a fight and actually contributing to the team was virtually impossible, especially since the profession has some of the lowest damage output yields when not traited for damage or modified heavily by stats and boons. Since the thief gains all its damage from scaling bonuses (% increases), rather than fixed ones (like might), and sPvP amulet stat values are lower than they are in PvE, which the coefficients are balanced around, the thief’s damage-scaling ends up being less-worthwhile than only a few stacks of might, since fixed-bonus power advantages cover a more significant chunk of stats than modifiers do. This is also why boons are so powerful in sPvP and always have been; they’re disproportionately stronger than they should be by the mathematics of stats themselves.

While the Daredevil took away the stealth-dependence, it as well as every other HoT elite spec came with massive power creep such that the small boosts the thief needed to stay competitive with the core game were overblown, and as were all the other professions’ tweaks and changes.

NuhDah.9812:

DeceiverX.8361:

…

Anyways, I still don’t get why you have to trash d/p in every single post you write. Is this the only way you have to vent off your frustration of the general thief situation in the game? Do you hold a grudge against someone who uses d/p and always beats you on your favorite set?

No, it’s just this is what is ultimately holding the profession as a whole back. You can’t balance thief when D/P is left as it is, and Shadow Shot provides a massively disproportionate amount of damage and utility for its initiative cost, allowing strictly worse players to achieve more than those excelling in other sets.

As far as fights go, it’s not DB or any specific server. There are going to be really skilled people on every server, regardless of tier. I’ve just found that typically speaking, the more bandwagon-heavy a given server is (something Db just went through) it typically attracts worse players looking for the ktrain blob. Admittedly, I haven’t personally witnessed the lower tiers in action since before HoT, and I understand the expansion made a ton of small-scale players leave, which typically housed all the skirmishing skill (GvG/ZvZ and skirmish approach combat in much different ways). It could be my expectations are still too far in the past.

Even without signet casts, my Shadow Shot hovers close to 6-7k on average. You’re probably not playing for that much damage is why. Nonetheless, the skill itself is grossly imbalanced, and it’s not uncommon to find thieves who play in small groups which indeed do just spam 3, and the efficacy of the skill itself is enough to really prevent any proper retaliation efforts to the point where if they played almost anything else except D/D condi, they’d be in a lot worse shape. It upsets me that the weapon is effectively universally good at everything, and ANet can’t really make some significant changes anywhere to help other builds while it remains so dominant.

I will admit, I do find a lot of D/P players overly-smug. A lot of people claim they’re a lot better than they are, and that so many claim the pinnacle of play when even in their best of moments nuances are often missed and misplays are made, often covered up by the weapon set. It upsets me the clearly-and-obviously best weapon set is the benchmark used to judge thief as a profession for the developers, rather than looking at design decisions of the class in general or realizing just how astronomically better it is than the rest in most instances.

Samug.6512:

All reasons aside, I think I remember somewhere someone from ANet saying before HoT came out that Elite Specialisations are not going to be an upgrade, was that really a thing?

That was the intent, quoted from the CEO himself.

Obviously this did not hold true in actual implementation.