Guild Wars 2

Dunno. Acro runs two or more passive procs on either IR/PR and HtC since those aren’t either just terrible or weapon-dependent, and assuming it’s played power. But then you’re kind of out of good fury, damage on LA, and a significant interrupt on SoH for denial.

Terissimo.6852:

As full zerk I was dealing 7k dmg with mug so it was kinda too strong as adept trait.

And that’s on the lower side either coming from a more durable opponent or a not-super-bursty builds. I recall getting mine at times close to 12k.

Changing mug to not crit was honestly one of the best changes ANet has made for the thief. It really was overpowered.

What he said is the contrary.

“If they improved thieves’ brawling, they would be forced to mute our mobility/reset-ability. There are more than enough brawler classes, we don’t need class homogenization.”

Warrior has excellent capability of dispatching thieves (especially D/D with the BV change to 1 stack), particularly the primal power builds running around. GS3 cleaves and resets which screws over offensive power D/D, and GS5 has a similar effect. HB → SoP → Rage → AD is enough to take a thief 100-0 in most cases if they get CC’ed, which isn’t too awful to do against power D/D since it lacks blinds to make these skills miss and needs to get in close for damage with objectively lower mobility. D/D power can’t waste initiative on DB for the most part, anyways.

In most instances, the warrior will just block for the CnD attempts causing wasted initiative for the thief on cast and no damage taken enabling more aggressive play. 9 seconds of invuln and an extra dodge later, and it’s winning the fight if the thief doesn’t pretty much reset entirely… to which the warrior will still have his blocks available and see a quickly-draining ICD on Defy Pain.

Thieves don’t need higher base health pools, especially now with Daredevil. A thief can build for health in gear by pushing more vitality, and can trait into CS to compensate. Or, it can just play marauder and do neither while getting the benefits of both while reaping even bigger benefits of huge damage mitigation on power-creeped-to-hell-Daredevil.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

Everything from HoT except power reaper is an abomination, daredevil included.

I hate the fact that you’re making a statement that I have nothing to say but to agree.

Are you really so callous as to think you should inherently disagree with everything I say because we disagree on other subjects?

Obviously I made that post because I don’t think that I should be inherently in disagreement with you on everything. Yet, here we are, in a disagreement again.

Not disagreeing or intending to be confrontational. Just kind of shocked that despite our previous bouts you’d think we’d never be able to see eye-to-eye on anything.

Azukas.1426:

Jana.6831:

No, azukas talks about condi as to him/her D/D is a typical condi set and was never meant to be power OR EVEN IF WE HAVE TO GO WITH THE FLOW AND STOP COMPLAINING ALREADY

Then I fought a power d/d thief and realized that your weaponset of choice actually has build variety.

See I asked this thief about how he makes D/D viable, and he replied, “You have to cut the cord from the SA trait line. It’s a crutch that bad thieves rely on because they have no reaction times.”

He the told me he runs Acrobatics, Trickery, and Daredevil.

That’s more of a crutch build than SA ever was. $10 says the guy runs IR, too.

Daredevil is the epitome of crutches for thief. Actually, I’d reckon it’s probably the most potent set of crutches out of every profession/mechanic in the game except for dire geared-condi mesmer.

In all seriousness, nobody gets to brag about dropping crutches until they move to builds like DA/CS/Tr.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

Everything from HoT except power reaper is an abomination, daredevil included.

I hate the fact that you’re making a statement that I have nothing to say but to agree.

Are you really so callous as to think you should inherently disagree with everything I say because we disagree on other subjects?

It was a big deal at launch and died out. The whole $60 deal was a big deterrent to most people.

When the core game went on sale for $10, it spiked again. And then died out after a while when returning to its normal price.

When the game went F2P and now anyone can just make a noob and hop in WvW running a second computer/client, it’s up from before relative to population size.

Thinking ANet is going to listen or care about profession/skill balance is unfortunately a waste of time.

Everything from HoT except power reaper is an abomination, daredevil included.

Mug could crit for a long time in 2012.

It was hilariously overpowered and was the reason they nerfed it to not crit. I one-shotted people repeatedly with it, or came kitten close to doing so.

No, mug doesn’t need the ability to crit. Steal cooldown reduction, particularly from SoH, should just be made baseline to help open up more trait lines from Trickery.

Passive procs and absurd defensive HoT abilities just need a nerf. Buffs on buffs won’t solve anything and will just make the game more stupid.

Ensign.2189:

DeceiverX.8361:

With the recent patches, I can safely say Thief = D/P.

Staff is perfectly playable and in my mind superior than D/P for solo queue, for similar reasons to why I preferred S/D pre-HoT – it’s better for contesting points and fighting even numbered fights, at a cost of lower burst and disengage.

I didn’t say Daredevil. Staff has better burst, anyways.

Jayne.9251:

So …. If somethings defended its avoided for an easier flip.

Eh you can see where I’m going on this.

It’s not wvw.

Going to have to sincerely disagree. That pretty much captures the NA experience for the past three years.

I hope EoTM keeps doing well. Maybe, just maybe, people will finally realize realm-based gameplay is the best-designed.

Attempting to create stable competitive environments by enabling change via transfers is conceptually not a good idea on multiple levels. Unfortunately, we’re too far deep to just remove transferring, and just removing transferring ultimately still leads to stale matchups with the tiered server system we have as it is.

Linked servers was the right idea. Just done horribly, because glicko W/L does not work for this kind of environment.

Thanks for the feedback, OP, but this is pretty much what people have been voicing their concerns of since launch. It’s even gotten better than it was, particularly in respects to loot/profitability, but quite frankly, more people care about the combat and fights at this point, and ANet is failing absolutely miserably at maintaining fun and balanced gameplay for the format. It’s been heavily-neglected for pretty much four years. Balance decisions are made arbitrarily with next to no basis or context it seems. The PvE team runs rampant with ridiculous items and things which break WvW more and more with every patch.

People aren’t worried about decline because of a lack of loot at this point. The game is so broken from ANet’s poor decisions they’re worried the format itself will eventually buckle from close to four years of repeated failure of ANet maintaining it at the benefit of other game modes.

As soon as an RvR game is released with good combat, WvW is dead in the water. That’s not something I say happily from the time I’ve put into this game and format, but that’s the common WvW-player perception of the game as it is.

Sindrener has a twitch stream for sPvP. That’s about it.

Most thieves worth anything gave up on the profession/game long ago.

JonnyForgotten.4276:

Also, try to not let the naysayers discourage you too much. If you have found a weapon you enjoy playing, then play it. Otherwise we WILL be a d/p only class, which would suck.

Good luck!

I was a naysayer for almost four years. I played D/D + S/D and skipped shortbow because of the fact I could work around it.

With the recent patches, I can safely say Thief = D/P.

Thief should be renamed to Dagger Pistol. Its the only usable set it pretty much has since the nerfs to the other weapons.

D/D condi cancer is also broken, but I do hope to see it nerfed massively at some point so people can stop pretending they’re good at the thief.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I like how all last week Mag was all “Mag incoming T1 hype” then DB drops down and now people are more like “why tf is a T1 server down here?”

DB are about the same as TC, they just have some better guilds and way more SEA coverage. They still have bad PUGs and not many roamers. At least FA has solid PUGs/roamers to compete with the rare times they’re actually doing anything. Most of the time they seem to be non-existent, though.

I want TC back, personally. Not the greatest fighters but they give it 110% and they don’t quit when things aren’t going their way. I enjoy that they always come back for more instead of wiping once or twice then hiding on a different map like a lot of servers do. I also enjoy that they don’t have a SEA blob like DB that builds 3+ Shield Generators to protect their 6+ Rams against all 5 of us defending our keep (what happened this morning). Because you know, it’s not over kill at all.

I respect you for admitting this.

That said, mag largely overestimates their skill, and expects that T1 is just more instances of disjointed smaller groups of players which their huge gank squads can trash. When real numbers get involved, either they wipe because an overwhelming majority play FotM OP roaming specs, or run away knowing they’re fighting fair and thus can’t win. Post-T1 invasion, when TC was disjointed and its community crumbling, they still got crushed in T2 after making another, separate T1 push. Mag isn’t ready to play T1. It needs to ditch its super-stronk-roaming-megagank “our KDR is best” philosophy and play organized if it really wants to win. And I can say now its roaming will collapse if it tries to, because far too many of its current players are there because they transferred when hearing about how skillful the small-scale was, pretty much being wannabes from when the server actually had really, really good small-scale players several years ago.

Honestly, all servers these day perform roughly the same on the individual level. Every server has amazing players, and every server has terrible ones, roughly in equal distribution relative to one another. The game’s just gone full-on numbers and coverage wars mostly.

Vayne.8563:

I’ve always hating tanking. Always. Tanking, to me, is the worst thing that’s happened to the MMO genre.

I mean the typical tank and spank scenario is you have a tank, who draws all the aggro and stands there, while being healed by a healer, while everyone else takes it down. What part of this is not completely contrived.

I’m sure Lord of the Rings would have been a much better book if Boromir stood there tanking while Gandalf healed him, and no one was actually in any danger.

Tanking is ludicrous. It’s a mechanic that should not even exist. Yes, it’s lovely to not be able to die. But you know, that sort of defeats the whole purpose of playing a game in which you can die.

I completely agree. It was done in D&D because it made the most sense on paper, and because it also made the game easier to design and play for people to get into. It’s not because it’s good design. Actually, most game designers will blatantly say it’s horrible design when looked at objectively. But it was kept alive through tradition.

And that’s just coming from the perspective of assuming the groups are easy to get.

The reasoning behind why I think tank/support players are upset is because that role simply isn’t needed, and it’s actually slower to find parties willing to play by the trinity ruleset than rushing things down with DPS builds.

In fact, they’re experiencing the exact same problem DPS players have with traditional trinity games; wait 5-6 hours for rare a chance of a party to beat the content. Meanwhile, tanks and supports would be scooped up instantly, because an overwhelming majority of players have more fun playing DPS, a fact cited many times.

The trinity itself is a hard-enforced optimization. You don’t bring a party of all-DPS to kill a boss in traditional games, because it wouldn’t be effective. In GW2, the players define the criteria for optimization in how to beat content. The concept of all-DPS is just a less-enforced optimization model; the trinity encourages the same and more restrictions.

Nothing is stopping players from being able to perform traditional tanking roles in GW2. The stats, gear, and builds are there. The players are the only ones who define it otherwise. Don’t like the player-driven convention? Look to find players who like trinity style and join up with them.

GBEW.5947:

i play to get gear, Load myself with gold, and achieve near perfect stats.

I don’t see how anyone can say this isn’t winning.

It seems as if the term winning has been lost on the mmo community to be completely honest.

Or your definitions of what you think winning is are not in the majority. And quite frankly, if you are looking for a game where the grind is absolute, you’re not playing the right game. ANet has said many times convenience items will be sold. Not the power itself.

The gold trading feature is also not sold by ANet. Any gold transactions through it are defined by the players, ANet being an intermediary to moderate prices based on supply/demand. The gold came from somewhere; likely, it came from the people who had to take the time to get their ascended armor without purchasing anything.

Basically, you’re complaining about having the ability to “win” on your definitions despite the other people who are selling the money already having “won” potentially years ago.

GBEW.5947:

i would rather have a healthy discussion and get down to it as i would like to know your thoughts.

GBEW.5947:

Learn to read.

GBEW.5947:

?? how dense can you guys be? I can literally solve my biggest issue in game right now with my credit card. Yet it isnt paying to win? Wtf.

GBEW.5947:

So your saying don’t play guild wars? Uh no.

I was really trying to look at this and gather others thoughts however most of you just seem like flaming is your pass-time hobby so im just gomna go ahead and throw my opinions out there as fact from now on.

I’ll reiterate:

i would rather have a healthy discussion and get down to it as i would like to know your thoughts.

You’ve deviated fast. Seems to me you’re not looking for a discussion but instead just wanted to rally a ton of people behind you to try and scream P2W when in reality, the game is far from it.

By the gaming community’s convention at large, not yours, the game is not P2W. The people selling gold have probably already achieved maxed out everything and are just selling the gold for cosmetic items, because in their opinion, being the best-dressed is very important to them.

GBEW.5947:

i am now a firm believer that the guild wars community either A, Has no idea what they are talking about. Or B, simply likes to argue when their views are questioned.

No, you literally asked for a discussion, and were the first to break of that healthy discussion.

i would rather have a healthy discussion and get down to it as i would like to know your thoughts.

GBEW.5947:

the fact remains that this is pay to win in some peoples eyes and most have lost the meaning or concept on what pay to win is. Refer to sig.

And what is P2W in your eyes is not what the convention of P2W means. That’s not losing meaning or concept. I came from/worked for a popular game a decade ago which had massive stat variance and a literal endless treadmill of grind to being better. It has a system which you could buy characters, gear, money, account-bound items – pretty much anything – and these things were directly sold by the players, set at their own prices, with only a profit tax. Given roughly $30,000 USD, you could outfit a top-tier character. Given around $100 a month, you could be competitive in the PvP. And there was always a way to be increasingly better by spending more money, because the stats always got better, even if only by a margin of .1% (and sometimes as large as almost 200%), and someone was always willing to sell what they got.

And the game was open-PK, meaning people could deny you the ability to farm or do literally anything if you tried to get out of buying things by farming. And they did.

That’s Pay2Win. On your definition, and the community at-large’s.

GW2, you skip a bit of the grind if you spend money to do things. Okay? What does it matter, though? You said you look for optimal stats. Nobody’s stopping you. Ascended gear has fixed stats. They’re not different between players, and they’re never going to improve, and nothing new to power-creep it is coming. As soon as you reach ascended, if the gear grind is fun for you, then you’ve finished the game entirely forever. Time to go play a new game, because then what makes it fun to you is over. If it is what’s fun for you, why does it make you upset other people can do it faster? So what? If you have fun grinding, it means literally nothing at what rate other people play the game. They’re not taking away from your fun. You’re denying yourself fun because of arbitrary jealousy or them taking the “easy way” out of what is pretty much exclusively a time-gated experience. The real likelihood is they’re spending similar time to you, just doing different things, like WvW. Because in their eyes, they see PvP as what’s fun and what matters, and GW2 does an excellent job at keeping the power tightly-sealed at endgame.

To me, you’re playing the wrong game. If you want something about the grind with no shortcuts, go look for a subscription title. Anything that doesn’t take a monthly fee will be selling shortcuts, because that’s how GW2 stays afloat. They need to pay the bills. Better doing that than having expensive item malls which are strict dependencies to acquire the best stats at endgame, which is what most other titles offer. Because then that invalidates the grind, and skews every other facet of the game. That’s the convention of P2W.

“lol ur mad”

Because people do not agree with you, they are wrong and upset. Yup, you’re real fun to have a discussion with, particularly when you tell anyone (and now everyone) who disagrees with you that they’re just mad.

Honestly, if this was a troll, it’s quite the failure. I think the intent is to make other people upset and start flaming while losing their cool, not you

I enjoy posting long-winded replies, since I view the forums more fun than the game currently.

Azukas.1426:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Hey would never remove revealed then everyone would complain of thief op and engi op even more attacking while sitting in Stealth gyro

I shudder when I think of a scrapper w/out reveal

My thoughts precisely on why I know for a fact they won’t do it.

Pretty much more incentive for me to not play lol.

Eval.2371:

Jana.6831:

So, my bug, you guys know about it. I couldn’t land any CnD, my chance to hit with CnD and steal was at about 0-50%
I haven’t really been in wvw lately but my hit chance should be back to ~70% even with all the blocks – I might test this further but you don’t really need steal to land it, although it’s a higher chance, granted.
I agree on your last post btw.

What you are likely experiencing is one of two things:

Either your muscle memory is too early and your casting CnD to early or your experiencing client side lag. I’d say its likely the former.

---

I’ll add my two cents to the discussion here. I will preface that I am biased towards some of DeceiverX’s thoughts, as I am a guildie of his, and do frequently roam with him.

The whole problem with the ICD change is that backstab, tatical strike, hook strike and even shortbows surpise shot all became completely unreliable with the amount of passive effects going around. Blinds, blocks, taunts, invulns all take away the reward for the setup thats required to enter stealth, position, and then land the hit on the target.

The idea of adding shadow step to cloak and dagger just takes the challenge of setting up CnD out of the equation. It also makes offhand pistol and dagger to similar. While this change would be welcome for say on d/d it would create balance issues on s/d and p/d which both have really good position skills already. The change still does not fix anything with actually landing the stealth attack. All it really does is make steal and infiltrator signet redundant.

The blind on CnD idea would provide defense upon using the skill. Basically your asking blinding powder to be added to CnD. We already have tones of active defenses, be damage reduction while in stealth, dodges galore, or damage reduction via weakness/dodge damage reduction buff. We don’t need this. This idea does not solve either of the issues of landing CnD or landing a stealth attack. It just band aids failed CnD attempts.

Unblockable in the form its mentioned (making CnD its self unblockable) I feel is kinda the right direction with cloak and dagger, but it does do very high damage, and could be spammed. It would create a scenario where you could ignore blocks and stack vuln on targets. You could end up with offhand dagger becoming much like unload but in melee form. The only way this would fairly work, is to drastically lower the damage. Again, this does not fix the issue of being able to land a stealth attack.

Honestly my own thoughts are we need have a mechanic of some sort that make the stealth attack reliable to land now that we cannot spam them and only have one chance to land. We used to have this in the form of bv. However with the changes to make it only one stun it makes landing the stealth attack no longer reliable. I mean you can do it, but your really pressed for time to BV during stealth and make the attack. Also d/d does not have this option, as you need to bv to gain access to stealth.

I think the only viable and fair way of going about this is to make the next attack after CnD unblockable. It would allow reliably to set up a stealth attack combo with CnD+BV again. My only issue with this it does not help or fix staff/sb consistency with stealth attacks. It technically would allow you to spam CnD but a huge cost to gain 2 unblockable hits at most.

Another thought is to make stealth attacks unblockable as a base or trait, but honestly I feel like that is asking for way to much. Maybe this would be the right avenue if anet does go through with the bugfixes to hearseeker(being able to leap finish multiple times in black powder by adjusting the camera is considered a bug) in the near future. Then I could see this kind of change be balanced.

Edit: I think I am done editing.

Unblockable stealth attacks as compensation for the stealth attack ICD really doesn’t solve the core of the problem on D/D, though, which as you said is inconsistency. Not to mention D/P would still be the primary beneficiary since they have reliable stealth and would also have reliable gap close, blind, and backstab.

If they want to make stealth attacks reliable, they should do so by buffing HK to make them act this way. Instantaneous viability of Crit Strikes as a serious contender with DA and HK being made a half-decent trait in the world of power-creeped precision/crit availability on marauder gear.

Ultimately, the core of the problem is that the stealth attack ICD cannot really be justified without massively affecting other weapons for the negative so long as all the free passives and ridiculous damage mitigation exists. There’s just no way to balance the thief in respects to the rest of HoT content. The game is too power-creeped to actually do anything meaningful with the profession anymore with respects to game-wide balance. If you’re not x/P, you’re effectively done playing the thief; ANet can’t offer support to a profession which is doomed regardless of what it does to the profession, and likely is unwilling to make the game properly balanced out of fear of mass retaliation since pretty much the only people left in the rapidly-falling figures are those playing faceroll cheese. No point in screwing over the remaining paying customers in hopes of redeeming the since-departed ones.

Straegen.2938:

DeceiverX.8361:

Because for the integrity of the game’s balance as a whole, stealth needs downtime.

The side effect of Anet not managing Reveal better has been nerfing everything around it. I think the original intent was to move stealth to a more combat active roll rather than something players sat in for long periods of time. If that is the case, allowing stealth stacking was a huge F-up.

They did try to increase the Reveal time but rolled it back fast. I think they would need to overhaul the stealth weapon sets quite a bit to increase Revealed time significantly.

IMO I would rather have a 4s Reveal than a 1s ICD.

The intent was to make stealth less of an overpowered combat ability. Before revealed, D/D and D/P DA/CS/SA power thief near launch were originally the best PvP/WvW loadouts in the game. They had infinite stealth uptime and could deal damage permanently from stealth, via either HS spamming through BP with the old SA configuration, or infinite CnD chaining. D/D was seen as much better, since it had 20% more damage on CnD than now and permanent max initiative, all while maintaining permanent 12-14 might from SA and huge scaling damage from CS/DA.

And there was zero way to counter it except spam AoE’s, which given the old Rejuv’s healing and crazy damage the builds did, wasn’t really doable.

So they got rid of the insane power of the builds by introducing revealed, since stealth thus would be made into a primarily defensive and tactical mechanic, used as a dependency for setting up powerful stealth skills.

Even with the dismissal of the builds that were run during this time, not having revealed would break the game, particularly the scrapper, since it’d give the engineer ridiculous stealth access with no revealed downtime, and the thief would be functionally quite similar and still very broken for how low-risk it would be to play.

Honestly, I just don’t understand why they added the 1s ICD at a time nobody cared to complain about it… years after people claimed it was an issue.

If you’re playing power reaper without shroud, you’re doing it wrong.

Gegarace.1245:

ps. pls don’t tell me to stop playing thief, it’s hurt.

Frankly, that was going to be my advice.

I did, despite putting four years into D/D power.

Condi is such an overpowered way to play it’s not even fun. It has no counters and the hilarity of just being immortal dies out within like a half hour.

Hybrids don’t work unless you play heavy boons and can maintain 25 might and permanent fury with PvE traits. They’re always out-performed even at optimal performance by just playing into one stat, unless the only metric measured is DPS, in which case, going condi defeats the purpose of those intentions in almost all cases/encounters.

With the might stacking, Unload hits harder than PW, and its 5s initiative cooldown dealing roughly 80% of the damage of RF at zero might at 60% of the casting speed means chained unloads always beat out the potential damage output of any ranger. Given actual traits to play damage, unload without might on a single cast can also rival the damage provided by any single RF even at full pewpew arbitrarily-25-might-stacked power longbow ranger.

I’m not talking about DPS. I actually proved to someone doing all the math out even before the buffs to P/P, that unload-built thief does higher DPS than RF-built ranger in all cases, and can achieve similar numbers per cast on similar builds.

If you play without a build specializing in damage, of course the higher coefficient is going to do better burst. But that’s like pretending True Shot often hits harder than backstab when played by burst builds; it doesn’t. Not even close.

Because for the integrity of the game’s balance as a whole, stealth needs downtime.

Unless you’d prefer the more traditional approach, where even more professions and builds simply have abilities which can entirely negate stealth and therefore hard-counter such builds much more than currently?

Because removing stealth demands either nerfs to the thief’s stealth-based capabilities, or more counters. You’re never again getting pre-revealed thief or anything even close to it. It was brokenly overpowered to a point that even dire condi D/D 3spam doesn’t hold a candle to it. Quite frankly, I’d rather see fewer hard counters and more soft counters in the game, so Revealed is something you need to live with. If you want to unleash on your opponent, you eat the consequences of needing only three seconds’ worth of durability. That’s something very easy to achieve, particularly on Daredevil; if anything, it’s too easy for my tastes. The benefits of being a “specialist in Shadow Arts,” a claim made entirely by you and exclusively by you (nowhere is this in the profession description nor the feature of how thieves play mechanically) include the capacity to maintain permanent stealth uptime, subsequent large burst, teleports, and a plethora of other tools other professions do not have access to either innately or/nor through any kind of deep trait/skill/build investment.

You reveal yourself because in broad daylight you emerge to gore someone by shoving a dagger through their back and firing a ridiculously loud pistol. I’m sorry, but absolutely nothing about stealth attacks in almost every build except S/D, nor skills across really any kit that deal damage make any sense to enable the thief to remain in stealth.

Quite frankly, I think all pistol skill use should apply revealed. The only reason the guns aren’t as loud as they should be is because people would either be deaf as a consequence, or unable to hear anything else to to its relative silence. Add many thieves to a scenario firing guns, and you’re looking at something so loud the group’s location should be displayed on the minimap for all players to see.

Removing revealed doesn’t solve the problem and only buffs D/P further ahead than the rest. Drop BP and just bound/HS spam to victory.

I know you’re adamant about removing revealed, but it’s an essential part of the game currently for general profession balance across more than just the thief, too.

Removing revealed would massively cut the skill floor on the thief (and it’s already ridiculously low as-is on the daredevil) and would do literally nothing to improve high-skill play potential.

Unload would need a damage nerf.

It’s the best burst per unit of time in the entire game when it lands.

RedSpectrum.1975:

Cynz.9437:

It has been like this since HoT come. Became more obnoxious since everyone and their mother plays DH now.

They hit so kittening hard. I was literally having an existential crisis. What’s even the point of this class outside of WvW stealth roaming? Besides mobility, every a thief can do another class can do better. Even then I had a Mesmer somehow catch up to me (which I have them props for).

I just kind of gave up because of it. Discussing the game is pretty much more fun than playing it these days, because ANet doesn’t know how to balance or develop professions anymore it seems.

Sarrs.4831:

DeceiverX.8361:

When you play D/D power thief for four years and accomplish amazing feats on it, moving to a real profession like the reaper is refreshing due to its relatively insane difference/superior in capabilities across the board.

dd thief is a hybrid set, not a power set, tho

‘power necro is better than an incorrectly used weak set on a different class’ power reaper really raking in the high marks

Playing D/D hybrid is about the worst you can play it.

Both sides raise good points, such that I can’t really argue much with either. One way or another, I’d rather see more spawns or reduced prices on making the food buffs in some respect.

Paying like 2g/hour for utility food because I can’t make very much of it over the course of an entire day is kinda nuts.

egzius.9031:

Bruno.3812:

It would mean years of little or no content for GW2 while they make it

So it is confirmed that they are making GW3.

…

Brilliant. Take my +1.

PW + Steal/BV is an invuln to all trap damage and huge multi-hit damage + CC which will cleave though the fragments proc and all aegis applied.

IS/IR also gives a sound disengage option if casted without a target before the dive.

RedSpectrum.1975:

How did D/D get nerfed again? I thought it was already dead? I also am aware of the Stealth attack CD

That’s primarily how it got nerfed. Power D/D’s only good skill is backstab, and the ICD starts post-animation and aftercast delay, so without SA, you get one try to get it to land per stealth.

Which with all the blocks an invulns, it’s ridiculously hard to gain stealth, since CnD never lands because opponents negate it so easily or even passively.

And since they made BV single-stack, CnD is no longer unblockable after a mug, thus making the build even more inconsistent on top of buffed defenses on all professions with HoT.

All the while, D/P can stack stealth with no target/OOC, has a plethora of amazing abilities to use if BS misses and goes on CD (and typically BS isn’t optimal against skilled opponents kitten has a better coefficient than frontstab), and gets a better stun/burst damage reward for landing backstab and spamming AA.

Insidion the Insane.9752:

Gotta give it to the necromancer community, we seem to never run out of people defending power necromancer’s continued mediocrity. This is why we can’t have nice things.

When you play D/D power thief for four years and accomplish amazing feats on it, moving to a real profession like the reaper is refreshing due to its relatively insane difference/superior in capabilities across the board.

The 600 range engage when reusable was enough to keep it useful while not overbearing, and the 1200 range disengage is huge at times for certain things like kiting GS warrior, D/P thief, or even DH, so I’m going to have to say I think it’d end up hurting more than helping.

Honestly, if they only want it to be used once every 15s as an engage, the range should be doubled on the engage and the skill normalized to 1200.

You can’t trait to replace Larcenous. RS only works if the stealth attack lands, has a cooldown, and is not unblockable.

S/D got gutted from its chase potential, which was a big part of the kit.

Source?

Not sure if I need a good laugh or a good cry.

You say that, but then need to realize they’re massively overpowered on the mathematical level, and there’s a lot of profession bias.

They’re so easy to play as-is I pretty much don’t respect anyone playing condi, regardless of how good they are.

Jeknar.6184:

Xillllix.3485:

They removed the cap on conditions and then buffed them crazy. It’s like a mad-scientist experiment gone wrong and we are the test subjects.

I don’t think I’ve seen conditions go over the 25 stack cap outside pve except when a rev or guardian use the skill that pull all condi to themselves. Condition application isn’t THAT kittened.

I do this consistently on D/D condi cancer thief. I can pull around 20 stacks of confusion and torment pretty easily on a mesmer, too.

…Running double the health and close to double the armor, with much easier kits to play.

It’s really f***ed.

sorudo.9054:

Bruno.3812:

The reason they abandoned Guild Wars to make Guild Wars 2 was because Guild Wars was a lobby game with instanced maps and they wanted to make a full fledged mmo.

Anet confirmed many times that the instance part was by design, it has nothing to do with the inability of making it non-instance based.
better yet, GW2 is pretty much the same, limited player count per shard, small areas instead of a true open world.

For performance reasons, because the engine and graphics libs aren’t optimized for large player counts since it’s based all on GW1’s core.

Jeknar.6184:

EremiteAngel.9765:

I train and practice so that I don’t give them the chance to go ooc. Training and knowing how and when to burst is the key.
If a thief resets a fight against me, I count it as my loss. I let him escape.

Unless your signature is outdated, I find hard to belive that you actually do that as a reaper, honestly… Necro is problably the slowest class in the game.

I do the same.

I absolutely insist most reapers are clueless on how to beat the thief or really anything that moves in WvW, moreso than that the thief massively hard-counters reaper. Druid actually has a much scarier move set when it comes to mobility access, betted ranged damage, more resilience, and almost as much stealth uptime available to it. You can typically expect to know exactly when you’ll be engaged and disengaged by a thief if you play and study the thief for a while. Obviously the reaper has a mobility disadvantage, but it’s not as huge and glaring as most people seem to insist. If the thief is good and built for disengages, he’ll exploit this. But I assure you most thieves do not do so, and in WvW particularly, most thieves are not built for disengagement, because other builds on other classes are built for much more aggressiveness and chase potential than you see in sPvP.

Most reapers aren’t built to be quick, either, and think they’re going to AA people to death, which is the reason why they can’t do much. Try speed of shadows, try onslaught. LEARN GREATSWORD. Try making a real, hard-hitting, “I’m going to f*** you up” reaper build. Let yourself get engaged and prep for that engagement, rather than trying to run a thief down. Keep your aces pocketed for when you use them to just win the fight.

It would really trivialize a lot of the tactics and emphasis on communication, while also enabling the trivialization of scouting by parking characters in towers and the likes rather than using the guild buff.

I’ll pass. Not paying attention to the world space should get you killed, rather than just needing to look at a minimap.

EremiteAngel.9765:

am I the only TC player worried that with the exodus the guilds, we are going to drop to T2 or T3?

We can’t even compete in T1 with BG and DB now. We even lost to JQ the last match up.

Probably not.

But I’m happy to see us finally eat the impact of welcoming mass sums of fairweather T1 bandwagon players. We were T2, and should have stayed T2. Maybe server leadership will understand that every server who’s ever welcomed them has actually fallen because of welcoming them.

Raids and leagues catered to only a very small portion of the player base.

Obviously, general balance means way more.

I should have been more clear in referencing that Quaggans are what have adapted – they’ve also even culturally surrendered their rage to be more cute and cuddly. That happens for a reason.

For small dogs, we have a symbiotic relationship with them, and as mentioned above, we’re also the gatekeeper. A guy with an ADORABLE puppy is probably going to likely get more conversation with passing ladies talking to him about is puppy than a guy with an angry-looking rottweiler. Or how people who give massive amounts of money to charity are seen in better light by the public, and thus may become more popular and likable. You know where it goes from here. Or perhaps it’s a therapy dog, or one for epilepsy… or a plethora of other reasons. All of them help with the preservation of someone’s suitability to reproduce, one way or another.

It’s not an obvious symbiotic relationship, but it is there.

Gehenna.3625:

GreyWolf.8670:

I don’t want less time between paying $50. I want the same amount of content for $50 in every package that costs that. HoT did not provide the same quantity for $50 that Core did.

Do you want GW2 to survive for a few more years at least?

They have to get their income somehow and apparently it’s not working that well at the moment.

And even despite HoT, the numbers for the period during HoT’s release state that between 67 and 75% of all generated income came from gem purchases, not box copies of HoT.

ANet didn’t need to make an expansion, and actually started losing revenue when they did, and never started making more after they released one.

@apharma:

And quite frankly, I’d like to think it’s okay for someone who excels at the profession to be rewarded in doing the only thing the profession is mechanically capable of doing at the moment: killing.

The matchup lists really shouldn’t exist at all imho. It’s always pretty much been a matter of assumptions based on the meta which is derived from popular builds. The thief is no different in this respect, but the dealio is that it has different builds which do different things which get countered at different levels and by different classes. There really isn’t a be-all-end-all meta thief build at the moment across all skill levels, since currently any such build can be countered by different things, and can do certain things better than other builds, which of course changes based on the context of the match and the opponents’ builds. There are some dominant ones, and ones which are objectively weaker (D/D power, being the prime example when compared to D/P), but even this is finicky.

I’m going to say now that quantifying precisely what a favorable and unfavorable matchup is in respects to any given thief is quite difficult to do. Because the class is so skill-driven and thus has a massive performing curve, paired with a massive amount of potential choice in build paths, it’s kind of all over the place. A thief can build to handle pretty much anything specifically, down to even the opposing player, but this is a very far cry from building to handle most things, or as something abstract as power versus conditions. The breakdown of even this could swing wildly based on how they decide to try and counter said conditions or hits, and isn’t as sweeping as just “this is good against x universally”. The thief isn’t really balanced as a consequence, but just scattered tremendously in its capabilities with so many odd little nuances that make it hard to place what it can and can’t do.

This design is definitely an oddball in that not all of the other professions are really designed to perform this way or handle performing against something designed this way. It can make encounters seem very binary both ways; if the thief’s opponent is rotation-based, and the thief knows the rotations and how to counter them, and has a build capable of countering them, then the rotation-based player is effectively at a loss.

I think this is the reason why Ele and Engi are also so hard to balance, being either tremendously overpowered or underpowered, too. Rotation-heavy play ensures more or less rock-paper-scissors design with some degree of skill, which by many is considered poor design, exacerbated by the possibility of more dynamism from other wildcards like the thief, which by build may or may not have the guns to counter it, be it through skill or build. Of course, if this design is kept, then the rotation-based actors are going to be at a strict disadvantage, since their effective skill ceiling and potential will be out-done by those with more dynamism, even if not countered by build, allowing the dynamic class to succeed in objectively more scenarios.

This is the scenario I think we’re in, and why there’s a problem in respects to balance game-wide. As a means of keeping rotation-heavy builds viable, they’re potential-stat-wise overpowered (Ele, Scrapper, Druid, and to some extent, warrior), while dynamic builds, like the thief, have some of the worst innate stat capabilities. Of course, this then creates a very odd scenario of the skill requirements and stat advantages of each profession, and how to handle the requirements of each, not even considering the mechanisms of the sPvP game mode which further confuse the balance on both numerical and conceptual levels.

In my opinion, the most skilled player/person who plays best should win in a PvP setting. Of course, this is then contrary to many facets of the existing game’s design (in that the thief, for example, may require objectively more skill to play at a level of competency than a rotation-based class), and thus, begs the question of how to handle the entire conundrum.

Nuzt.7894:

Ok so to sum up how this thread is going to go down so you don’t have to bother reading updates.

-Non thief players will agree or disagree and say they beat them all the time because 90% of thieves are baddies or they get rekt by them all the time because they are worse then the 90% of baddy thieves.
-Thief players are going to disagree because most of them are terrible.
-The other thief players are going to say their main class is X and they don’t play a thief and that you are wrong because they beat thieves all the time on X class.

Now my opinion, a good thief should win every 1 vs 1 they come across. The ability to reset fights at a whim makes for no risk and all reward for any competent thief, the problem is there really isn’t that many competent thieves.

This is extremely naive.

Rauderi.8706:

Well, Darwin’s thing of “survival of the fittest” actually indicates more than just adaptability. The “fittest” as described is who can give the most groin-kerpow and make mucho niños.

So out of the quaggans that are alive, just assume they’re really good in the sack. Or pond. Or wherever quaggans do it.

Excerpt

hide spoiler

M: Oo. Oo. Oo. OooOo~
F: OooOo, Oooyeah, Ooyeah, ooo, OOOOOO~

….I may be a little tired and off my meds. :P

One of the best posts I’ve ever seen on these forums.
+1 good sir, and hopefully many more to come.

For real, though, survival of the fittest just means it can stay alive somehow as a species.

Many see them as cute and defenseless, and thus protect them from threats. All they need to do is pretty much reproduce.

No different than your small dogs of today, really. The breeds are wholly dependent on humans to stay alive, but they do, because they’ve adapted to be cute, cuddly, and loyal friends, with all their shortcomings handled by more capable species.

This is known in biology as symbiosis.

I mean, hell, we’d all be dead without the small bacteria that live in our bum-holes that eat away leftover dung, because our own poop would infect us and kill us without it. The bacteria isn’t exactly amazing on its own, though, and wouldn’t survive in nature.

Zenith.6403:

DeceiverX.8361:

Then like I said, you’re in the wrong genre. You’re looking for a single-player experience in an MMO. Communities of players run MMO’s. Ancient games with no new development efforts still get played because of the community backbone (private servers, smaller games, etc.).

Here’s the thing: if communities run MMOs, why is there barely any focus on community? WvW goals are WxP ranks, achievements and reward tracks. Single player goals. When it comes to single player goals, games designed to be single player games should give better experience. Old RTS game Warlords Battlecry II has various difficulty levels where the AI really gives you trouble as you’re conquering the world map. 12 races and 20 hero classes should give something for every playstyle. I annexed this territory, this is the bonus it gives me. I put skill points to craft just the kind of hero strengths I want to have.

Back in GW2 I’m constantly wondering what impact my presence in WvW has on my side. I’d like to see where my side players are going. I’d like to have some kind of “high score” list who has killed most players and defended most towers. Chat is the only social feature they’ve bothered to put there…

And I even said it, WvW is poorly-supported by ANet. And yet it lives on because of its community. Literally, it’s gone without getting updates almost as long as many MMO’s stay afloat their entire lifetimes. That’s unheard of. The community has kept it going, and the prospect of organizing, working together, and winning as a community is what keeps it afloat. You can’t win WvW on your own. And that’s why the community in it has been so loyal, but also has been feeling left so slighted when there are clear flaws with its implementation and nothing has yet been done to fix them. It’s not about player visibility or mechanical things to see players. It’s again, about the community. The reliable pugmanders that tag up for seven hours a day to lead their servers. Fun event nights for WvW to de-stress and laugh. GW2 doesn’t need facebook integration to make a community; the GW2 community will make itself, and infrastructure will be established by those who wish to lead. It’s why pretty much every server has a running TS.

WXP decides rewards and is a metric for personal progress. That has to be personal on some level because of its nature. You can be with a group of 30, but non-instanced rewards suck – fighting over WvW rank chests and the like would probably destroy communities from the inside out. The rest of the game abolished them for this very reason.

A high score list would just push for excessive competition within a server. It’d lead to more trouble than it’s worth. Don’t feel like you’re part of the crew? Either try and be helpful in some way, and work to be a part of the community, or simply chose to deal with it. Ask yourself if you actually matter grand-scheme in the MMO. You don’t. That’s the point. This is a community. This is a game of thousands, if not millions, of people having at one point played it, and you’re just another name, like it or not. Giving people a reason to get behind something is entirely different, though, and unifying people into a community is a critical aspect of these games in general, as the communities keep people playing, and playing together.

If the underlying mechanisms that keep the game fun to play start failing, however, then it’s much easier for people to start leaving, and as a consequence, once people start, the rest follow in droves.

Greedy because we had the capacity to use two melee sets functionally well? No. Most professions can achieve this.

Unlimited use? It was at best three or so consecutive casts followed by then having zero initiative to do anything – the IS/IR both still needed to be casted, and was thus a 600 range teleport for 5 initiative – objectively slower-moving than shortbow, and not as good for engaging as Shadow Shot from both initiative and range POV’s. Running double melee also prevented the thief from having ranged pressure/poke after a disengage (which could not be achieved with just sword unless other targets were provided), and thus has a more difficult time when being forced into ranged combat. Because of this, skippable IR was at times critically mandatory to catch up to professions such as druids, which have tremendous burst-mobility and ranged damage. Simply now, it’s just not possible to run double melee from most angles of combat due to melee’s innate weakness, nor is it possible to have the chase potential necessary to do keep up with fleeing targets.

In it of itself, it was 25% less movement per initiative, with the dependence on casting IR, slowing down the process with those casts overall to a substantial degree. Its landspeed hovered somewhere in between Vault and IArrow.