Guild Wars 2

My feedback was stated. I’ll give you some feedback for these threads in particular, though, Gaile.

Add separate rules for feedback threads. Seeing a number of critical posts from the thread being deleted and users banned from no IP’s (like mine) that offer suggestions on where to improve, despite having some good things to say about the release (such that the feedback is genuine and not just rage-induced hate), defeats the purpose of feedback. If it’s all positive, the major blunders of what was done will be ignored or lose precedence, and you’ll be down on players in the end because those upset will have no voice, and will get up and leave.

The absolute, undeniable, and frankly rather astonishing ignorance and ineptitude represented by some of the profession balance changes need to be addressed, and quite frankly, need to be addressed sooner than 4 months. Several changes are game-breaking, and there has been no response to any of them.

I’ve never been more disappointed in a patch before, even in HoT, because at least in HoT, there was a sense and accomplishment through feedback of changing some of the incoming would-be tragedies.

@OP:
Pretty much need to disagree with everything on the list for being unnecessary power buffs that are really just too broken.

CnD doesn’t need a blind. Its issue is with consistency and not with punishing the enemy nor being safe enough. If the prospect of extra safety is desired, that’s what SA is for: durability/enemy punishment while gaining/staying in stealth. CnD needs to be a method of gaining stealth for all builds using OH dagger since it’s part of a weapon kit, and the main source of damage except on S/D comes from its stealth attacks.

AikijinX.6258:

Reem.3578:

Just came back after a while to discover this change.
Just when i thought we started getting to a better place…
You got my vote. This change was terribly wrong imo, and should be changed back asap.
I’m out of pvp until then… :/

(BTW: good to see you guys are still active! )

Nice to see you’re back, I myself took abit of a break, but slowly and surely getting myself back up to speed.

This nerf should split into 2 parts or optional, because this was put into place to balance and counteract the new Grandmaster Shadow Arts Trait. Rendering Shade. Anet should simply devise a plan where anyone who wants to use that trait, gets penalized with this 1sec ICD. While reverting the ICD back to the way it was with people not using the trait.

Does anyone agree or disagree?

I may create a new thread about this suggestion, and go into further detail. I would love discussion if ever possible..

-Thanks guys for your feedback, and bumps.

This would actually be a great idea and would open a realm of possibilities.

Mind if I link this to reddit?

apharma.3741:

DeceiverX.8361:

Warlord.9074:

Than why can’t didn’t anet just PVP split these runes like all the other Sigils and runes that they PVP split.

They don’t need to split. They need to merge to make balancing a reasonable thing to do. ANet can’t manage balance as it is. You really think they could do it multiplying the amount of balancing work that would need to be done by 2 or 3 times?

PvE stat allocation would be the best thing sPvP ever got. It’d nerf boon builds and buff scaling-based builds that currently suck.

Overpowered gear combinations/runes being removed from the entire game would be the best thing PvE and WvW ever got.

I’d be very careful about what you wish for. Burst builds in WvW do a lot more than in PvP as ferocity is much lower in PvP. You would likely see nerfs to backstab as well as most “burst” skills or combos.

The entire point is to justify boonless builds. Boons account for way larger of a percentage of stats in sPvP. By cutting skill coefficients, you end up with the same results as right now: a boring meta with slow gameplay that’s based pretty much on sustain and boon uptime.

If you think the format would be too fast, then why are more players interested in the speed of WvW combat than sPvP, and why is ANet continuously nerfing sustain builds? Why, historically, have people complained about bunkers but not full glass builds, even before the advent of the boon-based metas? Why not complain of glass, which could still one-shot-kill people in sPvP at the time? And especially in the case of the thief, the skills aren’t over-scaled for PvE and WvW (except AA chains, but blame PvE and HoT powercreep for that); scalar-based builds that don’t get carried by boons need to invest heavily in trait lines (like three full-offense ones) to be able to deal the damage so many people freak out about when they get hit by them. I can run a warrior on a defensive trait line and a utility one and still burst just as hard as a thief with two or even three offensive-oriented traitline configurations. Being able to react quickly and in a proper fashion is what defines and separates good players from decent players, and frankly, people dying quickly makes more sense from a viewership POV than infinite sustain builds that never seem to die, constantly spewing a rainbow of colors and effects, blast fields/finishers, etc. It makes more sense to see that the lone light armor caster-class got ganked by the assassin and died (or vice versa) than the two hitting eachother with the equivalent of wet noodles while boons, blocks, passive mitigation, and the likes while rotating a million skills carry the players into having an unbelievable amount of time to react. sPvP is Build Wars 2, and only consists of a very few select ones based on the imbalanced nature of the stat spread versus boon performance/uptimes, at that.

There’s very little sense of combat punishment in sPvP. The competitive builds due to the lack of raw stats available to scaling-based offensive ones are often very forgiving and quite frankly, uninteresting to watch. Remember the issue with the infamous 1v4 in the championship game with the Abjured in which for a portion of the game a member was literally unkillable and the point couldn’t be decapped? That’s no fun to watch, and for most, no fun to play, and strictly speaking, is why sPvP isn’t as popular as it could have been.

Swagger.1459:

JTGuevara.9018:

Swagger.1459:

JTGuevara.9018:

Let’s review our history. We lost Minstrels, Mercenary, Soldiers and NOW Clerics.

What’s the next amulet on the chopping block? Menders? Sage? It seems like every amulet removed is a defensive one. Do we just hate defense/support? Do we just like to spam DPS to death without a second thought? At what point, do we realize, that removing amulets will NOT solve the problem? At what point do we realize the OBVIOUS problem? Balance and HoT builds.

HoT builds simply do too much damage. The amount of conditions they pump out is absurd. With the removal of clerics, it’s even WORSE. Removing clerics did nothing but kill support builds and especially Eles. We’re killing builds, folks.

It’s not a “hot” problem… It’s that the developers do not make any serious reinvestments back to profession development. Anet obviously devotes very little resources to classes and the combat systems. The “paths of least resistance” balancing is what we get and that’s unfortunate because Anet could have one of the top fantasy mmo class and combat systems if the top made it a priority.

No, it IS a HoT problem, but yes I agree with your other point as well.

Hot was designed with increased difficulty in mind and the devs tailored elites to that content. The real issue is that CORE professions need improvement, not a “hot stuff needs a nerf”. The devs had the intention of squashing the zerker meta and putting more roles in the game, as well as filling some role and combat style gaps with each profession. It’s long process that they started not too long ago and they are obviously facing some “growing pains” judging by the profession patch notes.

I was a long time and hardcore pvper once, but gw2 broke that habit because pvp modes are messy due to the pve profession designs, pve combat rules, tons of clunky skill designs, poor combat UI, lack of playable roles, lack of development by the staff… The devs need to go back to square one and reenvision classes and combat here or it goes nowhere. Again, it’s not a “hot” problem, it’s a “the decision makers needs to care about the profession and combat experiences” problem, and devote some serious person power to make something good out of it.

Eh. Not really. Core still functions fine to beat the new content. I did it just fine, and as have others.

There’s already enough power creep, and it started emerging a long time before elite specs. The game was more balanced way back then because the classes were designed to not be so powerful back then. There were few passive abilities and overall, you could pretty-easily punish any build. They’ve since added a lot to the game and its combat, and with greater complexity comes greater difficulty in simplifying it in both the objective and subjective natures of multi-faceted design such as balance. Obviously those leading the balancing efforts are not capable of the task with the power creep and poor decisions we’ve seen emerging lately. That said, just adding more won’t get anyone anywhere.

I’d be more worried for small-scale. VShare actually got nerfed for large-scale since the application is lower than before. It’s only one stun per necro now, and multiple targets despite being in the same well pulse don’t get stunned. Devourer venom is also lower by a stack.

What will be stupid is gank groups of 5 thieves just endlessly chaining BV for their whole parties. As another user put it above, I feel bad for anything fighting Mag.

The change makes no sense; LV and Aura should have been combined into the master slot, with baseline cooldown reductions on venoms instead.

Terissimo.6852:

Just face it, d/d will be no longer viable anymore. I gave up long time ago and the sooner you do it, the better.

It was only ever viable in 2012. I stopped playing sPvP altogether because it was non-functional. It still had some purpose in WvW, and I built a reputation for being one of the few good enough with the set to actually make it function well enough to be acknowledged.

I’m not switching sets or builds. I’m switching games or hobbies. I have nothing but discontent while playing D/P or any of the other sets on thief. Thief’s gone downhill fast and hard since HoT, and I have no respect for D/P or Daredevil. D/D was fun, which is why I’m here to play games. Fun trumps competition and makes one determined to get better and enjoy the fruits of their labor. I’m not here just to win because winning means nothing in this game (even the pros laugh at the tournaments they’re getting paid to play in). If I only got joy from winning, I wouldn’t play video games lol. Too much grand-scheme loss in them to justify that one.

As far as people asking for thief nerfs, Azukas,, most esteemed thieves will admit Shadow Shot is wildly overtuned, and most thieves running D/P get carried by it. It’s why D/P isn’t affected by the stealth attack changes much; two Shadow Shots is more damage than Bp → HS → Backstab with better reliability and CC as well.

Cerby.1069:

lol i made the exact same point a couple days ago.

“Berserker seems kinda weak – thoughts” has some reasons as to why. I’m still with you though, id rather just be pressing 1 button given the berserker spam mechanics. Its really only useful 10% of the time to have it on 2 keys instead of 1. If we could keybind more than 1 button presses….binding F2+F1 would be the number 1 bind for warriors no doubt.

Download AutoHotkey, make a script so that F1 activates F2 and then switches functionality back to F1 on the next press, and swaps back on the second activation.

You still end up on one button, and don’t break the rules regarding one press -> one effect.

Some people prefer having the control over when they use things. Thief until 2015 says hi regarding stolen bundles/steal activation.

Warlord.9074:

Than why can’t didn’t anet just PVP split these runes like all the other Sigils and runes that they PVP split.

They don’t need to split. They need to merge to make balancing a reasonable thing to do. ANet can’t manage balance as it is. You really think they could do it multiplying the amount of balancing work that would need to be done by 2 or 3 times?

PvE stat allocation would be the best thing sPvP ever got. It’d nerf boon builds and buff scaling-based builds that currently suck.

Overpowered gear combinations/runes being removed from the entire game would be the best thing PvE and WvW ever got.

The proposal is shelved indefinitely in light of the 7/26 changes; I’ve taken a blatant disinterest in the game due to them, and I am not motivated enough to adjust the proposal. With changes to stealth attacks, some aspects of the Deadeye’s design are no longer functional to keep all core traitlines functional/good picks.

Retal doesn’t reveal.

I’d wish they nerfed the passive proc on perplex runes, too, though. That gave me more trouble than the interrupts often did. Good to see the runes getting nerfed after years of blatant dominance. Still not fixing dire/TB, though.

I was hoping they’ve have also nerfed durability runes. Too bad, really.

It wasn’t even good QoL aside from general gameplay. The profession balance/QoL was the most pathetic I’ve seen from them in years.

ArchonWing.9480:

It reminds of how so many nerfs in this game marginally hurt meta builds but kill off builds that were unfortunate enough to share some weapons or traits with the meta build as they assume that the thing being nerfed must be used in conjunction with other things. I’m sure a thief or ele has something to say about this.

Bingo.

I’ve played D/D power thief almost exclusively for close to four years, and never moved away from signet glass outside from experimenting to know the class better.

D/D power is a dead-in-the-water build with the changes to stealth attacks; it has no good skills in stealth except backstab, which since everything runs around with passive invulns/evades/blurs/dodges/blocks/cc/cleaves, leaves the kit with literally no answers. BV change also nerfed D/D since it can no longer get a reliable CnD from the unblockable attack after burning it on a steal engage. It’s got lower damage, lower reliability, and lower mobility regardless of build, now.

And yet D/P meta is fine because Shadow Shot is faster/better burst than backstab, anyways. Hey, they even buffed Bandit’s Defense to let D/P Daredevil be even easier!

I’m sick of being marginalized playing away from the meta. The meta builds aren’t fun to a point I’d just rather not play.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Chrury.4627:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Revealed is the opposite of Stealth…so it doesn’t belong in Shadow Arts.

I’m going to disagree with you there. Revealed isn’t the opposite of Stealth, it is an effect of stealth. The more times you break stealth, the more use Revealed Training gets. Shadow Arts helps this by giving a base duration buff on stealth, giving you more time to break stealth without it just expiring (preventing Revealed).

Hidden Killer from CS is more appropriate to be in SA than Revealed Training.

It is my strong opinion that the Revealed mechanic should also be abolished so we don’t have to deal with a nonsensical and gimmicky trait like Revealed Training.

I am not against Leeching going to DA because it makes sense, but if DA don’t want Revealed Training, they can just delete it (or make it baseline) and give SA a more appropriate trait.

No, the auto-crit skill belongs more in the trait lined named Critical Strikes than the one that provides mixed bonuses as a consequence of stealth.

I know you don’t like Revealed or stealth, but the mechanics are intertwined and should be. We had this disagreement before on my ES topic, and despite your strong feelings about Revealed, you are in the minority who think this way, because it’s both mechanically and thematically sound.

If SA provided multiple revealed-bonus trait options, it’d be suited best for the line of anything, as then the whole line would encompass all aspects of stealth play. It makes the most sense in DA at the moment, but leeching venoms makes more sense in DA than SA by miles, and RT can be argued to fit it both.

Of course, if they redacted the 1s ICD on stealth skills and put RT in SA, the Deadeye would make even more sense and be even more conceptually sound.

Real talk, most thieves didn’t go for the immediate backstab (most actually don’t even backstab since it’s a burst loss for D/P) and the ones who did often waited between 2 and 3 seconds to hit it. With SA out of the meta due to DrD, dodging on 2.25 made backstab very easy to avoid.

It didn’t need an ICD. Shadow Shot needed a nerf.

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

Dahkeus.8243:

Eh, it’s no big deal. I guess now you may have to pay attention when stealthing instead of just spamming backstab.

It is if you play D/D, where the only functional skill in stealth is backstab.

This is why the change is so stupid; it nerfs our weakest set even more than it was already underpowered.

I’ve given up.

ALL weaponsets are affected for thief not just D/D.

Not as badly. All other weapon sets have good or even strictly better skills to use from stealth. Power D/D’s only good ability while in stealth is backstab. The weapon set, out of an attempt to let it spec hybrid (lol, like that’s ever gonna be viable) is one-dimensional when it comes to stealth, and now objectively the worst set to have while in stealth, despite having the highest stealth uptime potential of them all. If your backstab gets negated by Aegis, invuln, blur, evades, or just from lagging a little you’ve just wasted six initiative on D/D, because it’s unlikely you’re getting another chance. The paired nerf to BV hurt the build even more, since now even CnD is unreliable as Mug will proc the venom and passive aegis/invulns/blocks/blurs/evades will fire. Now such a thief is down 6 initiative, left without stealth, CC, reliability, escape, and damage.

Quite frankly, there’s objectively no reason to play D/D right now except condi evade spam cancer Daredevil. I’d rather quit GW2 than be so embarrassed to put that and play that on my main thief.

D/D power is now in all regards, total trash. There’s not a single redeeming facet of the build now. I’m certainly shelving my thief and likely the game for a good long time because of just how bad it is except for spamming 1 in PvE.

Do what I do on my characters. Play ALL the weapons so I keep myself up to date. The only class I’m not really like that with is my ele. I don’t have much time on it tbh.

I’d rather play other games than play pretty much anything else on the class tbh. D/P is boring, staff is boring because DrD is boring, S/D can’t do enough damage to be fun, S/P is meh, I’m not a gunslinger to like P/P, P/D is condi cancer, and D/D condi is about as braindead as the game gets.

Despite proposing a rifle for my ES idea, I still wouldn’t play it. I picked rifle for a theme and because people wanted it (and now the concept for the IE trait and giving SA a source of aggression is dead in the water with the CD on stealth attacks) rather than my own interests. I played GW2 pretty much as a whole for D/D power and a bit for my glass cannon power reaper. Without the former or anything like it (not even close in the current game), I’d rather just not waste my time overall.

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

Dahkeus.8243:

Eh, it’s no big deal. I guess now you may have to pay attention when stealthing instead of just spamming backstab.

It is if you play D/D, where the only functional skill in stealth is backstab.

This is why the change is so stupid; it nerfs our weakest set even more than it was already underpowered.

I’ve given up.

ALL weaponsets are affected for thief not just D/D.

Not as badly. All other weapon sets have good or even strictly better skills to use from stealth. Power D/D’s only good ability while in stealth is backstab. The weapon set, out of an attempt to let it spec hybrid (lol, like that’s ever gonna be viable) is one-dimensional when it comes to stealth, and now objectively the worst set to have while in stealth, despite having the highest stealth uptime potential of them all. If your backstab gets negated by Aegis, invuln, blur, evades, or just from lagging a little you’ve just wasted six initiative on D/D, because it’s unlikely you’re getting another chance. The paired nerf to BV hurt the build even more, since now even CnD is unreliable as Mug will proc the venom and passive aegis/invulns/blocks/blurs/evades will fire. Now such a thief is down 6 initiative, left without stealth, CC, reliability, escape, and damage.

Quite frankly, there’s objectively no reason to play D/D right now except condi evade spam cancer Daredevil. I’d rather quit GW2 than be so embarrassed to put that and play that on my main thief.

D/D power is now in all regards, total trash. There’s not a single redeeming facet of the build now. I’m certainly shelving my thief and likely the game for a good long time because of just how bad it is except for spamming 1 in PvE.

(Fixing broken thread, see previous page for my feedback post)

Dahkeus.8243:

Eh, it’s no big deal. I guess now you may have to pay attention when stealthing instead of just spamming backstab.

It is if you play D/D, where the only functional skill in stealth is backstab.

This is why the change is so stupid; it nerfs our weakest set even more than it was already underpowered.

I’ve given up.

Seriously. It’s like they don’t even realize the set exists. ICD on stealth attacks was fair for D/P, but D/D has nothing to do when (because everyone and their mother has passive blocks/evades/invulns/blurs these days) the backstab whiffs.

Not to mention the BV change strictly nerfs reliability of D/D with mug/CnD no longer being unblockable, and venom play/running multiple thieves with BV up is redundant and strictly wasteful.

I’m pretty disgusted by the profession balance changes. Buffs to condi mesmer and barely touching scrapper/druid durability…. what the hell is this?

Azukas.1426:

You are hitting so many people that SoM can actually burst heal. Also you can use the signet for a quick 4k heal if needed because the CD is only 15 secs.

Try it out what do you have to lose?

Many already have and are speaking from personal experience, like I have. It just doesn’t work.

Zenith.7301:

A 4k heal is not a burst heal. My revenant healing for 15k+ with glint or Channel Endurance for 10k or Wash the Pain Away for 12k+ is burst healing.

And your signet of malice relies on you hitting people at all to heal, which is kinda hard when you’re getting tossed away by lines of warding and circles of warding and need to step to the side a bit to heal and then go back into the train.

Which is what I said; SoM is a sustained heal, and thief lacks the innate capability of soaking hits for periods of time to let that sustained heal work. Since it has to re-position anyways, it’s better off not bothering and playing withdraw for the strictly better burst heal and using its damage in marauder to pick off the back line while not standing in the line of fire for the frontline.

As far as ele goes, it has tools to do well on sustained heals such as mist form and the lower-cooldown teleport. It’s also got a real purpose in large-scale by providing water fields, fire fields, and heavy AoE damage/CC, making the build worth taking. A thief running SoM and utilities to proc it brings pretty much nothing to the table to win a given fight except a little bit of damage, making the party slot largely wasted, making the build a pretty sub-par front-liner.

Nomad thief dealing more damage than soldier’s guard is hard to believe and likely trait-dependent. DA/Tr/DrD might get it close, but soldier’s gear provides great stats for guards. If the thief has 25 might, maybe, just because of stacked damage modifiers, but because all the damage comes from modifiers, and without CS, there aren’t enough to compensate for the massive power difference, I think you’re overstating the thief’s damage output a tad such that traits would be what makes it even a remotely competitive game, which if you’re comparing it to the meta frontliner guard, a build like SA/Acro/DrD should be used, since frontliner guard isn’t meant to even really try and deal damage.

Taobella.6597:

i can tell you i played d/d front line s/p front line short bow front line. flaws where thief get rekt is placement you run full zerker front line if you want. second you hit a choke or a closed in fight area your build instantly trash. regardless of how much you want to heal with it sorry.

knowing where and what you can fight is what will make this build. it will not work in chokes or lord rooms fights open field i would say it could do fine.

Almost exactly what I’ve said numerous times when it comes to real fights. You could be healing for 50k/second, and on a thief, it still wouldn’t be enough. A real blob will instantly trash a thief that stays on the front lines for too long or engages at the wrong moment (like being in the same location as the commander running an invuln guardian). A thief can stay there for a while if played excellently, but it absolutely needs to have a disengage and absolutely needs to use it in order to stay alive against large groups. Good positioning and timing are everything, and standing in the fire isn’t good positioning nor good timing. You can probably keep a thief in the front line for 90% of a fight. It just needs to not be there for that 10% when it’d straight-up die.

Nordom.3485:

Video games are generally something you shouldn’t be doing at all if you have any form of epilepsy, as far as I’m aware. Hell, simply staring at a screen is discouraged and I doubt you didn’t know that. When you willingly do something that can trigger your condition, then that’s on you unfortunately

As another epileptic in this thread, this just simply isn’t true. Epileptics need to avoid their triggers, whatever they may be, but there’s no real linking video games themselves to epilepsy. There are tons of different triggers, and these are really hard to diagnose. For all we know, it’s a very specific sense of disorientation that causes the OP’s. Some people get them based on certain combinations of specific frequencies of sounds, which can be very unexpected in most forms of media. I recall a past neurologist of mine saying he had a client whose trigger was his mother saying a certain and sparsely-used word, just because of the very specific sound she produced. He needed no medication and went 18 years seizure-free after she stopped saying it in front of him. Avoiding triggers like these, especially, say, if they come from a certain vehicle engine noise or something, is hard to do and very unreasonable.

People often confuse seizures caused from flashing bright lights with epilepsy, when in reality, epilepsy is the diagnosis of having two unprovoked seizures caused by literally anything.

For example, my seizures have no known trigger. I’m one of those candidates for the computer-in-the-brain surgery because the docs have given up trying to diagnose what’s causing them. They’re controlled perfectly on medication (albeit way more than what’s healthy for my body such that I’m likely to see kidney and liver failure earlier than normal, but needs are needs), but it doesn’t matter what I’m doing; if not on meds, I will have them at some point, even in the middle of the night while fast asleep if I forget a dose. I’ve gone into the hospital numerous times on no medication, had strobe lights put to my face, EEG’s, sleep deprivation, fasting, physical exhaustion… everything, just to even figure out where they start, and I’ve never been able to produce one (week-long sessions of monitoring for a perfect diagnosis are sadly not possible in the adult world, and in my case, carry significant risks). On the converse, I’ve had them only a matter of a few hours after missing a pill and just sleeping in late. Of many seizures I’ve had since diagnosed, only one ever occurred while playing a game or near the time of playing a game, and all I was doing was walking into a zone that I’d visited thousands of times before for hundreds of hours. Triggers are kitten ed hard to predict in some cases, such that many epileptics don’t know what triggers theirs.

A lot of people seem to be getting offended at the OP’s post. Stop being stupid. Yes, those being rude, you’re actually being stupid. Research before you talk. The OP was just warning people with epilepsy to be careful. A change wasn’t even initially requested, because yea, it’s a lot to ask for especially since epilepsy comes in so many forms with an infinite number of triggers. It was just a warning to help people who might have the same problems.

As far as driving goes, this is up to state/national law. How much is really too much to drink? Again, epileptics have different kinds of seizures. Some are so mild that they themselves typically aren’t much aware they’re having one. You can’t be stupid about the decisions you make, but people with epilepsy need to be people. I have a job as a software engineer and I need to go to work every day. I’ve passed the legal requirements, and have a perfect driving record. The accident rate among epileptic drivers is way lower than of just people who drink at all – which is most people – indicating that if the person has the clearance to drive, they’re probably actually safer drivers than most on a given Friday night.

The people playing haven’t had substantial issues thus far, and, are in fact people. We need to have fun in some way, and having maybe a seizure or two playing a video game due to a very odd case of the content being designed in such a way is better than going swimming at a barbecue and risking dying in the pool.

Dire and TB are mathematically wildly OP, though, and really should be subsequently removed.\, on top of a condition rework.

Passive confusion on taking damage from perplexity also should be removed (or more preferably, the entire rune set). Stupid to take so much damage just from the act of attacking. Durability would also be a warm welcome to see deleted, but ANet doesn’t have the courage to delete or nerf their precious powercreep expansion.

Aury.1367:

The speed up is just insane. I was autohitting a 7man group with my rev on hammer, they went down in like 3 second. they couldnt even do kitten. Its ridiculous. LIke 3-4 Hammers flew around per second. Cmon Anet, stop using potatoe servers.

I was on ranger. Let me tell you, rapid fire was more along the lines of instant-fire lol. Thieves were recovering 3 initiative per second. Was just totally bonkers and probably worse than the lag itself.

Though as some posters reporting issues have said about regarding 1-2 seconds, which is whatever under heavy loads if it happens occasionally, the skill lag last night in the T1 fight was more along the lines of 10-15 seconds/not casting altogether – I’ve never seen it as bad as it was such that I think the subsequent speedup came from the system clock itself slowing down from either backup or heat from the strain.

But it may be wise to look into some code optimizations or server infrastructure for WvW performance improvements. Or, more preferably, remove the procs from many abilities to reduce server load.

Anyone who played in T1 NA tonight for the fight for BG garri knows what I’m talking about lol. 10-15s skill lag for a good 40 minutes just because of the fights and then the subsequent several minutes of everything going at 3x speed server-side after the fights died down due to the servers trying to compensate for the delays (this was hilariously busted and is why I’m making this thread) indicates we’re not quite there yet when it comes to WvW’s performance handling large loads.

No, the OP asked if anyone has tried a decent one and proposed a build. The proposals thus far are far from decent, especially from the zerg-busting perspective. “It’s been done” on a build concept like what you proposed has never been seen, heard of, and quite frankly, probably never put to a real test in real ZvZ. Nomad builds, stealth res bots, and venomshare have all seen succesful play and use in large scale WvW, and none of the above frontline, because even these durable builds die quickly and can’t sustain against the incoming damage.

Some groups think 15 is a zerg. Depending on tier and server, that’s a havoc squad. SoM’s butter zone is probably a group of 15. At 10 people, the group will have enough vision and movement to avoid the field, and I imagine around 20 the numbers stop mattering because staying in the front line permanently likely means a dead thief based on incoming damage and the cooldowns required. Real talk, though, unless that other group of 15 is a zerg busting group, they’re likely running more damaging builds, and a marauder thief will get bursted down pretty quick. If a real zerg-busting group were to enter, the thief still has no chance, because it’ll be composed of better frontline-based professions and builds which are border-line immune to damage, and while the heals from caltrops and the likes are on cooldown, such a group will be organized and will focus such a thief down if it does not disengage. All it takes is a paltry 500 damage per hit from the 15 people (which is incredibly low and unrealistic), and said thief, despite all the healing, goes down in roughly five seconds considering conditions, including the 2s from IR, which depending on how long ago your friend ran this, didn’t even exist as a trait.

Cluster bomb isn’t the answer, and even 3 attacks per second on shortbow is difficult to do against good groups. Aegis/blocks, invulns, reflects, etc. in a pragmatic perspective, it’s not happening, since this also cuts out bounces from the AA chain. It looks good on paper; it doesn’t work in reality. To really get healing benefits, you need caltrops, which is on 30s, which can hit a maximum of 50 times, pushing the heal to roughly 7.5k at best over 10 second, which also assumes no poison or disables. HP/s, this is lower than what withdraw offers, offers lower burst healing, doesn’t cleanse conditions and comes with all the negatives of not being a dodge or reposition. Yes, SoM can outheal withdraw if it constantly maintains peak performance and is always-attacking with something, but that peak performance is so unlikely to occur when fighting against such large groups that it ends up not performing well.

I do bid you to roll a thief and dive a 50-man blob alone on a D/D power thief with no boons or support and try downing two people and tell me how well it goes for you. You don’t even have to play my build, which is DA/CS/Tr. “A few hits” is roughly 100k damage per second and enough CC to make a nomad warrior weep. If you do not play literally perfectly, you will die. I don’t claim to be perfect, as I die all the time in hilariously laughable Leeroy Jenkin’s style, but saying “building your gear right” to tank “some” hits is just ridiculous. CnD isn’t what keeps you alive, and isn’t easy to land in these environments, because CnD is negated very often between shared aegis, invulns, dodges, marks, traps, etc., and often times being careless will proc passives (like Protective Ward) that cause you to lose the capacity to fight well or simply fall over dead from interrupting your flow. No, careful consideration of when and where to strike keeps D/D alive. Reliably landing CnD is the trickiest part of engaging in such a way, and often where I fail and subsequently die the most. Using of all of the rest of D/D’s kit is needed to stay alive.

And to then have the audacity to make the claim that I speak from ignorance when your claims are such falsehoods demonstrating a clear lack of understanding of the profession (you mention in your first post in bold text you don’t play thief and to not flame you too hard for it, which initially I said only SoM was junk out of support for a disagreement of someone else saying literally what I said above because you still continued to claim it worked) and the actual reality of ZvZ and zerg-busting. I have a reputation (albeit a small one as I do not rep such big guilds and don’t record my play to brag about these trends often, and most of my previous WvW buddies quit with HoT/DBL’s) for frontlining a thief well. I’m trying to give the OP advice to do the right thing and not waste his time and frustration pursuing a build that won’t work except on paper. To attack me (and pretty much everyone else in the thread who has doubted or straight up disagreed with the build on the claim of ignorance is just foolish, when frankly, you yourself initially said you’re not qualified to discuss the matter.

The build will perform okay-ish at best in large fights (it still needs an escape/disengage to recover as it will not function as a full-time frontline; no thief can), and would have the capacity to survive fairly well as a periphery, however the party slot is a complete waste for true zerg-busting groups and doesn’t come close to reaching decent frontline standards.

XerMeLL.6042:

Please add a kill death ratio for every players in wvw, please anet. With weekly or monthly reset or permanent record.

Kind of impossible since the score is based on just deaths. A kill would only be creditable if a foe took 100% of its damage from a single person, for then just going by kill credit by tagging, a group of 30 could tag one random guy and each of them would push a KDA. Eles and AoE classes in zergs would have tremendous scores considering it’s common that on a given death they’ll rack up many, many assists.

I mean you’ll be running about as well as anyone can be, assuming OC’ed CPU and OC’ed RAM.

In player-congested areas, you’ll always have poor frames. It has nothing to do with hardware and is entirely due to the way the game engine is written. You’d need processors hundreds of times faster than the existing top-of-the-line to get any really major gains.

So if you want 60+ frames all the time with no stutter, no. Nothing will get you there, and playing on lower settings won’t do much for you, either.

Ensign.2189:

Linken.6345:

Why do everyone misstake optimal=viable…. every build in gw2 is viable

It’s more insidious than that. People mistake ‘optimal for experienced speed run teams doing speed runs’ for ‘optimal for everyone everywhere’.

Optimal speed run builds are not optimal for most players, even players trying to do the same content. They could be decidedly sub-optimal in a different environment – aka, if you’re not trying to raid, stop copying raid builds.

And even that can be expanded upon; far too many people copy the build and then don’t play it as intended or to its fullest potential.

There will always be a meta. The trinity system that so many people who hate the “full zerk” parties want so much is just the same; you’re forced into a role or style of play for optimization. The reasons the optimization exist are different; trinity demands it by game design, in GW2, it’s by player choice. The benefit to GW2 is that any build can complete the content. The pure-berserker ideology just came from the fact people got bored of running the same dungeon a million times and wanted to get it over with for their gold to go an enjoy playing the aspect of the game they really liked.

Frankly, I’ve never joined an all-zerk party for any dungeon, ever, despite the fact I play with such heavy damage. All-welcome parties were typically similarly efficient.

There will always be a meta. Always. There will be something mathematically superior at the highest echelon of play, and people in that category will use it, and then their habits will become famous and the sheep who want to walk in their footsteps will flock to it.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Says something is an exploit doesn’t understand the meaning of the word or that Anet want thief traps to function as they do….. Look up June 23 2015 patch notes they deliberately removed direct damage on thief traps so they do not cause revealed…….

I don’t think they were expecting such consequences though. Although they never do for WvW, and still aren’t (we’re never going to see WvW balance changes in mind ever again, with the split balance for sPvP/PvE that’s been mentioned as incoming).

Traps were adjusted because they weren’t usable on thief in sPvP since it camped stealth for the most part (back when SA gank was a thing), and thus countered a prime aspect of the class – stealth – which did things like prevent bacjstabs etc. OH pistol is still the culprit for enabling trapper permastealth, and trapper runes are just the icing.

Really, the thief traps should just get buffed, cause revealed when applying them (as is logical when setting a trap), and trapper runes deleted. Problems largely solved across the board. Luring an enemy then still can be impactful, and traps could have more use in sPvP with larger radii and the likes to get some +1 utility even if far away.

Azukas.1426:

Did you ever think that maybe you’re just not good enough?

I wouldn’t dream of playing a thief on the front line because I know I’m not good enough.

I speak for not myself but the thief majority and the best players in the game when I say such an idea isn’t doable in the large scale. I’m good enough to dive 50 people alone with the worst thief build/weapon set in the game, down two or three people, and often get away. I can’t speak for my skill because it’s hard to measure personal performance in mass scale. I can tell you, however, that at one point or another on most of the servers I’ve played on, I have been the talk for minutes at a time in TS by leading commanders and such players when I dive zergs alone and pull way more weight than most periphery and backliners do. Maybe I’m not good enough, as I admit I make mistakes often, but when when so many people who were and are such good players and so many people have theorized and discussed and tried this, all to no avail, it’s an indicator that such concept isn’t in fact “decent.” If a better-than-“decent” player is needed to get “decent” results against players which may be worse than “decent,” then the build isn’t “decent;” it’s deficient, which is what the OP asked for. It’s why I do not recommend my build for people to play, despite the fact I can beat most thieves; the build itself isn’t functional for most people and most purposes. I play it for fun and to excel in a very narrow scope of performance measures while testing myself to do more with less to emerge victorious when out of that scope.

—

Can’t really tell if you’re agreeing or disagreeing, baba. I used optimal numbers to demonstrate even at maximum performance the healing is poor, and stressed that it is very unlikely said math would be realistic. Unless you start doing things like using all of those abilities at the same ,time, the HP/s gain is fairly low, and still, would depend on the thief not being affected by poison for many seconds at a time, all while being dependent on the highest cooldown of the AoE skill used. What needs to be considered is that because the “good” healing from SoM depends on other skills like Caltrops and Dagger storm, the benefits of the heal itself are tied to the cooldowns of those abilities, which is what needs to be used to define calculating HP/sec. Without getting peak performance from multiple targets with AoE’s from SoM, or never not attacking quickly and cleaving, the heal is just simply less than withdraw. Even SV, which has great burst heal potential, loses to withdraw in the HP/s race when considering its uptime and susceptibility of being negated by blocks, invulns, etc. It’s because SoM loses both in respects to burst healing and sustained healing in most realistic scenarios on top of the fact that the thief has few or no windows of opportunity to totally regain the health that the heal isn’t usable. Even on P/P, which I played a cleric’s/dwayna’s leeching venoms tank build in sPvP some years ago with immense success, SoM was not good enough as a heal to warrant it uses; I still used withdraw or HiS (as it enables Rejuv) because the healing was simply better.

Yes, SoM can’t be interrupted, but all abilities which let it heal can be, and often quite easily can be. In WvW on the front line, a thief will be getting hit by a lot of CC’s. Caltrops has a full second cast time, and many such AoE’s have similar casts. Withdraw is the hardest heal to negate this way, since it has no cast time, and the healing happens on cast, even if the player is KD’ed by a wall or something.

It’s just not viable to make a thief frontline without either requiring some degree of retreating to heal up and get boons again, especially if busting zergs or peak performance are considered; it will objectively hold a group back, and it will not really reach passable play standards without resetting, which is what my original post said regarding the nature of how escapes will be required and that such a concept isn’t really functional. It may not die easily, but that frankly means very little in large scale. If you don’t die easily and the rest of your group does, you’ve only managed to mean less than a couple of extra points in the immediate future, rather than potentially providing enough to your group to have saved lives, which is why the support/boon meta exists, and why thieves can have a place on the battlefield if they’re both played well and built to kill the backline dealing the heavy damage and/or control.

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

I don’t think you understand what we are talking about here. We are talking about frontlining a thief only. This isn’t about popping in or out ganking backline targets. Its purely staying on the driver while zerg busting. In this situation Withdraw makes it harder to stay on the driver due to the roll (i’m correct that that’s the heal he’s talking about right?) Signet of malice if you detonate your cluster bomb hits how many times? If i’m correct it hits 15x in the middle of a zerg that’s 132×15.....1980 health back per cluster and its spammable. If you only get five hits it’s 660, and even if we go by that how many clusterbombs can you spam in 18 seconds?

The conditions/cc are covered by the boon sharing of resistance and stability. The 2800 armor rating with 17k hps along with -10% damage food and perma protection pretty much guarantees you’ve got serious damage mitigation.

Now I haven’t even talked about the caltrops part of the equation which heals 132×5 a second for 10 seconds that gives you 6,600 health.

I think you misunderstood the thread mate.

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

I understand the thread. I said it above: you can’t run a thief in a front line for extended amounts of time, especially in Marauder gear. Period. It’s not a matter of how much you heal over time or staying on the driver; you are always more valuable as any other class while front-lining (thus any competent driver will replace you out of group stability), and you will die instantly on engage without mass disengage potential. Nomad’s gear you’ll be able to tank some hits with protection, but again, what purpose does such a thief serve? Front-lining for the sake of front-lining, the class brings almost literally nothing, and any party you’d get invited to wouldn’t be a front-line crew, because again, those boons are effectively wasted and aren’t being compensated for with support. And by front-lining, you’re inherently gimping your group’s effectiveness, because the thief would be strictly more useful playing periphery, regardless of the size of the group. Nobody brings a thief to zerg-bust, anyways. It’s not good enough in outmanned play to mean anything since boon and inherently durable builds that can take 10-20k damage a second incoming are what define that. A thief can get prot from someone else and run that food, but so can a guardian or warrior or mesmer or necro, and have strictly better durability.

Regarding cluster bomb, no, the detonation can get at best 9 hit procs; the number of targets is reduced on Detonate to 3 with 3 bombs, and the capable range to get three hits on three targets would literally require the targets standing in the same hitbox while not moving, since the clusters have such a small radius; even landing nine hits in huge GvG is rare; otherwise misses strictly will happen. The AoE radius to get all three hits to land in the same target is roughly 50. This cuts the healing down by 40% minimum even assuming the best circumstances, to 1188. Now with this out of the way, each bomb would need to wait a 1/2 second cast time on top of the 2.5s flight time before detonation while at 900 range. Since detonate is a re-activation skill, the skill cannot be applied, meaning each cast is on a 3s interval, dividing the effective max healing per second to 396. So c bomb “spam” with one attack every three seconds at peak performance is only a little better than regeneration Big whoop. How many times has a battle been swayed in GvG by regen? Too few to count.

Similarly, Caltrops is used with a 1/3 uptime. The EHP gained thus becomes 220/second. Withdraw’s 4766 is 265 and has no dependencies. It’s strictly a better heal. CV is even better in most cases.

So basically, SoM gives you a little more than regeneration tick at peak, and caltrops on SoM gives you less HP/S than spamming withdraw off CD, which also gives an extra dodge and debilitating condition cleanse on top of an additional likely proc on DF, permanent vigor, and a DoT cleanse.

This also assumes the thief is never being hit by poison Such a build requires permanent poison-free status to heal as well as it’d be able to, which is still awful. The healing on the skill is only reasonable at best if played on a pure healing power build with lots of attacks, and even then, it’s still awful for GvG, because even brief poison still hard-counters it and the other heals scale better.

If it were to get ganked by a proper periphery, it’d still die in maybe three seconds or less. From my thief, probably on engage.

I understand you’re trying to promote an innovative concept, but I tried running a build like this close to three years ago. Hell, I even ran an unkillable full healing power P/P venom build in sPvP, and still didn’t take SoM, because the healing was still too poor. Many people have tried to get the signet to work. With the cast time, it’s not even good for signet backstab (which I main and have tried to make this signet work for years). SoM is just a horrible skill, and has no place in pretty much any build at all for any reason.

You really don’t know what you’re talking about from a group combat PoV. Look up boon share mesmer and Revs then understand your not even worrying about 1/2 the stuff you say.

You just refuse to believe a thief can frontline, but it can be done. In this meta of boonshare a thief can REALLY work because its brain dead in the effort department to cover the thief with stability/resistance/protection/etc.

I’m not saying it’s the best class for the job i’m just answering the OP’s question about frontlining a thief as a Daredevil. It is possible with the right set up.

I genuinely don’t think you do large-scale enough and as a thief to understand that it’s still going to melt in real fights, and that especially in zerg-busting groups, the build is a strict liability and thus will be kicked or rerolled. You don’t bring a class that can’t output tons of support to a zerg-busting group, because the group will not let you run with them. The OP asks for a decent front-line thief. To be decent, it has to perform to a certain measure to warrant its use. You’re insistent that your suggested idea using SoM is some kind of amazing concept when it’s been tried before, tried now, and still sucks. SoM is junk from healing, junk from reliability, and won’t be a good choice to help the rest of the force. Caltrops/Shortbow isn’t even optimal for healing; S/P is, as it can get up to 40 procs on PW. It still isn’t a good build, despite the fact people have tried to make it work for so long.

If you want to take a thief to the front lines, you need to have disengages and get in there at the right time, and just simply be a good player. You don’t need to sit back and watch half the fight end before jumping in, but for those one or two second moments of high-impact, crazy damage where sentinal/nomad warriors melt and every guard in the GvG is popping invulns and mass-cleansing, a thief isn’t staying alive, unless the enemies aren’t running real large-scale numbers or are disorganized and not playing the right classes/builds. In such a case, if your group is in order to get the thief the boons to even have a small chance, you’ve already won the fight and the thief is a nonfactor.

I spend substantial amounts of time on the front lines on my thieves. I say substantial, because those disengages are critical. Even full nomad SA/Acro/DrD thieves who play dedicated res bots will tell you that they can’t stay in the front lines and live, despite having another 25% damage reduction from RoS and better passive healing from Rejuv from the SA line.

Azukas.1426:

DeceiverX.8361:

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

I don’t think you understand what we are talking about here. We are talking about frontlining a thief only. This isn’t about popping in or out ganking backline targets. Its purely staying on the driver while zerg busting. In this situation Withdraw makes it harder to stay on the driver due to the roll (i’m correct that that’s the heal he’s talking about right?) Signet of malice if you detonate your cluster bomb hits how many times? If i’m correct it hits 15x in the middle of a zerg that’s 132×15.....1980 health back per cluster and its spammable. If you only get five hits it’s 660, and even if we go by that how many clusterbombs can you spam in 18 seconds?

The conditions/cc are covered by the boon sharing of resistance and stability. The 2800 armor rating with 17k hps along with -10% damage food and perma protection pretty much guarantees you’ve got serious damage mitigation.

Now I haven’t even talked about the caltrops part of the equation which heals 132×5 a second for 10 seconds that gives you 6,600 health.

I think you misunderstood the thread mate.

p.s. S/P and S/D are not good frontline weapons btw. S/P roots you in place which creates a problem with staying on your driver.

I understand the thread. I said it above: you can’t run a thief in a front line for extended amounts of time, especially in Marauder gear. Period. It’s not a matter of how much you heal over time or staying on the driver; you are always more valuable as any other class while front-lining (thus any competent driver will replace you out of group stability), and you will die instantly on engage without mass disengage potential. Nomad’s gear you’ll be able to tank some hits with protection, but again, what purpose does such a thief serve? Front-lining for the sake of front-lining, the class brings almost literally nothing, and any party you’d get invited to wouldn’t be a front-line crew, because again, those boons are effectively wasted and aren’t being compensated for with support. And by front-lining, you’re inherently gimping your group’s effectiveness, because the thief would be strictly more useful playing periphery, regardless of the size of the group. Nobody brings a thief to zerg-bust, anyways. It’s not good enough in outmanned play to mean anything since boon and inherently durable builds that can take 10-20k damage a second incoming are what define that. A thief can get prot from someone else and run that food, but so can a guardian or warrior or mesmer or necro, and have strictly better durability.

Regarding cluster bomb, no, the detonation can get at best 9 hit procs; the number of targets is reduced on Detonate to 3 with 3 bombs, and the capable range to get three hits on three targets would literally require the targets standing in the same hitbox while not moving, since the clusters have such a small radius; even landing nine hits in huge GvG is rare; otherwise misses strictly will happen. The AoE radius to get all three hits to land in the same target is roughly 50. This cuts the healing down by 40% minimum even assuming the best circumstances, to 1188. Now with this out of the way, each bomb would need to wait a 1/2 second cast time on top of the 2.5s flight time before detonation while at 900 range. Since detonate is a re-activation skill, the skill cannot be applied, meaning each cast is on a 3s interval, dividing the effective max healing per second to 396. So c bomb “spam” with one attack every three seconds at peak performance is only a little better than regeneration Big whoop. How many times has a battle been swayed in GvG by regen? Too few to count.

Similarly, Caltrops is used with a 1/3 uptime. The EHP gained thus becomes 220/second. Withdraw’s 4766 is 265 and has no dependencies. It’s strictly a better heal. CV is even better in most cases.

So basically, SoM gives you a little more than regeneration tick at peak, and caltrops on SoM gives you less HP/S than spamming withdraw off CD, which also gives an extra dodge and debilitating condition cleanse on top of an additional likely proc on DF, permanent vigor, and a DoT cleanse.

This also assumes the thief is never being hit by poison Such a build requires permanent poison-free status to heal as well as it’d be able to, which is still awful. The healing on the skill is only reasonable at best if played on a pure healing power build with lots of attacks, and even then, it’s still awful for GvG, because even brief poison still hard-counters it and the other heals scale better.

If it were to get ganked by a proper periphery, it’d still die in maybe three seconds or less. From my thief, probably on engage.

I understand you’re trying to promote an innovative concept, but I tried running a build like this close to three years ago. Hell, I even ran an unkillable full healing power P/P venom build in sPvP, and still didn’t take SoM, because the healing was still too poor. Many people have tried to get the signet to work. With the cast time, it’s not even good for signet backstab (which I main and have tried to make this signet work for years). SoM is just a horrible skill, and has no place in pretty much any build at all for any reason.

SoM is junk sad to say, Azukas, even coming from an all-in SoP main. Even if you managed 10 seconds of continuous procs on 5 targets, it barely out-heals Withdraw (and would pretty much tie given Driven Fortitude), which also cleanses conditions and provides another evade. Marauder is also very testy, for it’s really not durable enough to let a thief stay on the front lines against a group of skilled players or larger numbers. Soldier’s/Cavalier’s is probably the best approach to do be consistently durable, and I’d recommend S/P over staff due to the invulns paired with built-in condition cleanses the set offers paired with an additional port in/out if needed (especially to retreat behind the crazy amount of walls of denial, test of faith, fear, etc.). S/D also offers a ton of utility as it can spike down guards/blocking classes since LS is unblockable, and the two boonstrip can be huge in getting initial downs or spiking a comm.

Typically it isn’t ideal to stay in the front lines for extended periods of time on a thief. While I often engage as such and lead the charge to penetrate a backline and get some early downs, you’re going to lack the staying power that other classes will have, and will be heavily-dependent on boon-sharing to stay alive if you plan to stay constantly attacking. Further, IP is rather underwhelming as a whole, especially since your build will be consistently dealing low damage to the beefy targets you would be going toe-to-toe with on the front lines, and lacks the punching power to really mean anything when playing periphery or anti-backline.

Zenith.7301:

DeceiverX.8361:

If you have 3600 armor and the associated boons and are losing half your health, I can tell you that you’re running no HP. In which case, a full combo coming from a build investing in two (maybe three) damage traitlines should only be dealing half health.

Shadowstep has a 50s base cooldown and is used as a condition cleanse in most cases.

You have to be actually bad and have no mobility or range to let that control a fight. As a rev, a few AA’s from hammer will down a thief, and you have the mobility in shiro to keep up with it.

Aside from dire condition builds or ghost thief, you beat a thief in WvW by out-playing it, and once you know the nuances of the class, it’s not tremendously difficult to do in most cases (obviously there are always going to be some players who massively out-perform you/me/anyone).

There are definitely balance tweaks that should be made in both directions, such as cutting down Shadow Shot’s effectiveness per initiative/cast, however the problems with the class are pretty inconsistent between formats as Eval said above due to the scaling-based nature the class offers (Backstab has a lower skill damage coefficient than many new skills introduced with HoT). On the converse, there are some things within the thief that are strictly terrible and need substantial changes, such as OH dagger’s pitiful state, and the relative uselessness of the CS trait line due to the huge power-creep from offensive boosts to the thief baseline in other mixed/utility trait lines as well as huge defensive power creep to most professions since HoT, including the thief.

This has nothing to do about a match up. I used a medium HP plate class as an example of an HP sack to demonstrate how thief damage is not just “fine”.

Thief damage in WvW on a single target is simply the best by a mile, so let’s not pretend like thief is some mediocre profession for WvW roaming.

WvW is virtually flooded with daredevils, I’m not allowing you this pity party.

P.S. If you are getting hit by rev hammer autos, it’s you who has problems. It;s virtually the slowest ranged weapon in the game, and the moment a rev switches to hammer is the moment you can all in him as hammer has no defensive skills whatsoever and he’s stuck in it for 10 seconds.

Rev vs. thief match up is stupid easy for thief after all the phase traversal/UA nerfs. Kite with shortbow evade spam when he tries to melee, the moment he tries to hammer you burst him down.

Phase traversal pretty much drains their entire energy bar on shiro swap so all they can do for the next several seconds is autoattack you, and your autoattacks>theirs.

Are you kidding me? It has everything to do with the matchup and the builds being played. Are you running around alone like an idiot stacking 15 might for a signet thief running BT to steal your boons and hit you with 4k power? Signet stab is gonna hit you hard. Meta thief won’t unless you give them your boons and can’t dodge from a stealthed target (dodging stealthed players is a L2P issue unless they remain in stealth for a long period of time, in which case they don’t have your stolen boons anymore to hit you with, and aren’t damaging you). Signet stab doesn’t have any escapes or cleanses. On the converse, meta thief does. Period. I’ll gladly show you the difference between what builds mean on the thief in respects to how much the damage differs. If you’re taking an 8k backstab at 3600 armor with what should be near-permanent protection uptime, you’re getting hit by full signet glass Meta thief doesn’t hit that hard against full glass medium armors in most cases, so either you’re being massively outplayed and can’t deal with thieves, are lying outright, or are against a build devoted in its entirety – burning all utilities, movement, no DrD, etc. on engage – just to one-shot you, and it can’t do so. Not to mention SoH from steal against a glass thief should auto-taunt passively and let such a build die instantly with no escape mechanism. Revenant has a passive, built-in anti-thief mechanism in a commonly-selected traitline.

Gunflame war hits harder. That’s also a fact. Shatter mesmer hits harder, which is also a fact. Murellow longbow ranger or interupt Maul ranger hits harder, which is also a fact. Offensive GS reaper on a GD crit hits harder, also a fact. This isn’t even up for debate: Backstab is in most cases in PvP environments actually a sub-par damage tool and only gains such potency when invested entirely in it. That’s not even up for debate, despite he “but it hits so hard so it’s OP!” claim you’re making. What you’re arguing right now is the same as saying shortbow condi ranger is OP because it can stack a ton of bleeds/DoT and you happened to die by one because you didn’t use your tools to beat one, despite how easy it is to do. Every other profession right now has an objectively better standard for damage, and you’re making a fuss about balance on an edge case in a scenario in which you deliberately got out-played. Frankly, it’s more logical to complain about thief damage as a sustained DPS in the organized PvE context than in WvW.

“Damage” as a descriptor as you have said lacks context. DPS? Burst? Because the thief only has top-tier DPS, not burst, unless playing signets, which as I mentioned, you should not lose to, considering other professions have objectively better burst capacity unless the thief runs an entire build devoted to one attack per combat, runs no defenses at all, no stunbreaks, and no cleanses (and lacks Shadowstep despite you complaining about that, too), while also running what is regarded as one of the most under-performing weapon sets in the game (D/D power), and full-combos you while having to be not in stealth on engage – again, a failure on your behalf for lack of general awareness or response. I play and main D/D signet stab. I’ve been playing it for close to four years straight, and it is literally not possible to make a thief hit harder than mine by a margin of less than 4% if I were to sacrifice a heal for SoM on engage. As such, I can also tell you that the number of WvW-based, active signet D/D players remaining in the game is probably under 50. I beat thieves all the time despite having worse mobility than a revenant and similar DPH. In fact, I find power thief to be one of the easiest matchups in the game when playing any profession, including reaper. It’s not inherently a L2P issue so much as it is a L2Thief issue; you can be an amazing player and get destroyed by a mediocre thief every fight if you’re not understanding of the profession and how it plays. Dire/TB/Ghost condi is another story, but that’s because conditions are OP. You need to learn the profession. The damage is very easy to control if you’re both a good player and know how to play against it.

PT and all subsequent rev attacks have lower cooldowns than Shadowstep. Your problem is getting kited if you’re not running hammer or are too slow to swap into it, especially given a projectile deflection built into the weapon to prevent most of being kited. We’re talking 50 seconds. If you faceroll your keyboard and burn your energy spamming skills before the thief burns SS and can’t PT while generating energy from combat, you’re being outplayed. DTH when it swaps and comes in for the engage, as either then it has no damage or gets hit by a CC.

Frankly, the shortbow discussion means nothing. A thief can only get four casts of evasion and then has zero resources to make any devastating attacks or engages. If the thief is sustaining against you with evasion, the problem lies in Daredevil being designed poorly (which I have said many, many times, and is the basis for my next ES proposal because I’m so put off by it); the problems aren’t the damage output, then, which defeats the entire complaint you’re making, considering thief used to have even more relative damage before HoT.

It’s not about the damage. Core thief has more damage than DrD, and other professions got boosts to their damage and defenses with HoT.

Thieves roam because they synergize with themselves nicely. A gank group is going to run lots of group stealth to prevent spikes and high burst to focus enemies down before they die. The class has a history of being a roaming/solo style, and DrD and recent changes to Acro made the class tremendously easier to play than core because of so many extremely forgiving abilities which let bad players not die as quickly as they used to. That’s why you see so many people playing it; it’s not that’s inherently good (condi mesmer is way stronger, especially in small groups), but people are flocking to a class that got very forgiving abilities added to it since the learning curve is basically gone from playing reasonably well. It’s not the damage that makes DrD so common and difficult for many to beat. It’s the freebies the class has access to in terms of staying alive. That’s why I (and many others) don’t struggle much against them, either; I know the kit, I know how to beat it, and I know that in most cases, the person behind the other thief is typically inexperienced and gets carried by Daredevil’s forgiving nature.

It’s one thing to say the thief is too strong because of its evasion on DrD – I’d actually agree with you – but it’s just truthfully and objectively incorrect to make claims the damage is overbearing and that Shadowstep is responsible for the thief being impossible to kill/easy, especially when considering what other professions are capable of.

And thieves are supposed to be the best duelists, and rangers were supposed to be the best ranged profession for years and weren’t up until the huge longbow changes, and warriors are supposed to be the most mobile; we’re seeing how accurately ANet’s capacity to balance the game around that initial vision and in comparison is going, particularly as to what’s optimal.

The biggest issues I have with druid at the moment are separation of pet stats, and the general power creep with HoT pets paired with the sustain the druid has. The fact boons are so OP in general and that the druid can bounce them so readily between it and its pet encourages just downright frustrating builds that spec super tanky and still deal pretty high damage. I won’t discredit the OP for playing well, though.

Boon reworks are needed game-wide, and couping build stats to pets would let the class be out of the awkwardness of having too much or too little damage or sustain.

Not really sure how that thief was “unlucky” though. You’re traited to deal with them from Protective Ward and despite being D/P.

Fay.2357:

Azukas.1426:

If you are running with an organized group in WvW you basically run what the group leader says and keep your mouth shut.

You are there to win,as a team not selfish desires. When you solo roam you can run w/e you want.

Ultimately this is more or less accurate unfortunately. It’s also why organized WvW groups generally regard people that want to play mesmer for them in the same rarity as unicorns.

It’s kinda that way with most of what’s objectively good, though. Most mesmers who enjoy the role are typically people who like playing support roles and think the aesthetic is cooler than the ele. Being told not to play a thief for example, versus playing a boring utility mesmer is kind of the same thing for those who like that style of play.

That said, a lot of people who do complain on the matter are typically pugs running with their server’s pug commander, or aren’t in a guild or running consistently with a group to prove their worth when deviating from the standard. I say this from a plethora of personal experience where some commanders have recognized that my overall contribution on my thief vastly outweighs having an extra warrior or ele, for downing two or three people before the sides even collide in a fight gets very early momentum either by forcing burned cooldowns, and spooks the remaining enemy backline.

Overall, if you’re in a zerg fighting other zergs of relatively even numbers and are not a critical player, run what you’re good with. If you’re zerg-busting and are way outnumbered, you absolutely must play team comp because of the numbers disparity.

Zenith.7301:

Eval.2371:

alchemyst.2165:

If you’re referring to our damage, it’s fine. Honestly we don’t need any more buffs to it.

If you’re referring to range, it’s the same melee range as any other class.

Totally depends on the context. Most of our damage is from % modifiers

WvW: thief damage is fine.
PvE: thief has some of the best single target dps.
PvP: theif hits well below average.

Why do we hit low in pvp? because a lot of our damage modifiers are % based, and with lower stat pools overall we suffer.

What OP should be asking for is flat damage modifiers.

Thief WvW damage is far from fine lol. A single vault/backstab still does half a revenant’s health in a mug combo with a revenant having 3.6k armor and marauder’s armor with cavalier trinkets.

And thanks to shadowstep you are never dying against anyone in WvW unless it’s another thief.

If you have 3600 armor and the associated boons and are losing half your health, I can tell you that you’re running no HP. In which case, a full combo coming from a build investing in two (maybe three) damage traitlines should only be dealing half health.

Shadowstep has a 50s base cooldown and is used as a condition cleanse in most cases.

You have to be actually bad and have no mobility or range to let that control a fight. As a rev, a few AA’s from hammer will down a thief, and you have the mobility in shiro to keep up with it.

Aside from dire condition builds or ghost thief, you beat a thief in WvW by out-playing it, and once you know the nuances of the class, it’s not tremendously difficult to do in most cases (obviously there are always going to be some players who massively out-perform you/me/anyone).

There are definitely balance tweaks that should be made in both directions, such as cutting down Shadow Shot’s effectiveness per initiative/cast, however the problems with the class are pretty inconsistent between formats as Eval said above due to the scaling-based nature the class offers (Backstab has a lower skill damage coefficient than many new skills introduced with HoT). On the converse, there are some things within the thief that are strictly terrible and need substantial changes, such as OH dagger’s pitiful state, and the relative uselessness of the CS trait line due to the huge power-creep from offensive boosts to the thief baseline in other mixed/utility trait lines as well as huge defensive power creep to most professions since HoT, including the thief.

Jana.6831:

Anyway, on topic of the GoB:
I do wonder why they made it this way.

Because ANet knows well that without a huge influx of PvE players, WvW’s statistics would show their efforts for fixing the game mode are largely too late and are not actually fixing the problems, but rather symptoms.

This way, after mass departure from HoT, they can make claims that population levels are fine, despite the fact that other audiences of players are being strong-armed into the format to make investors happy and players feel like their developments are going well.

OriOri.8724:

Zenith.7301:

Unfortunately for us, we don’t get to be Kasmeer and keep our illusions around as minions after a mob dies.

Which is why mesmers have such crappy ramp up and their damage dies the moment a single mob the illusion is on dies.

I wish we could be Kasmeer, but I doubt we’ll ever be a functioning mesmer like Kasmeer is.

They won’t even fix our garbage autoattacks or make Cry of Frustration not utter garbage, what makes you think they’ll bother with larger mechanical undertakings.

In fact, they were so lazy about fixing core mesmer issues like mobility and phantasms clashing with shatter DPS, that they shoved all the fixes into the chronomancer traitline.

Kasmeer is OP mesmer. She can place portals that don’t time out. She can have her illusoins stay out after a battle finishes. She can place portals somewhere other than where she is standing as evidenced in multiple LWS2 episodes. Countess Anise is another one that can actually change your appearance. It would be so cool to be as strong as these two are.

Most NPC’s are stronger than players. I mean, Logan has permanent invuln/proj reflection and doesn’t die to falling damage, Caithe gets stealth attacks and doesn’t break stealth, Rytlock was just OP and now is even moreso… have you seen Canach’s bomb kit? The list goes on.

We’re pretty average people in the end who happened to be in the right place at the right time through most elements of the story.

It’s still somewhat usable in WvW. I still run core D/D power thief, but mostly from stubbornness. It’s not that you feel like you’re being countered by everything, OP; you actually pretty much are.

Daredevil is straight up power creep like everything in HoT. It’s a requirement to stay competitive and made the class way easier and more forgiving, but if you value fun with moderate success over winning all the time, you can still get away with core D/D if you can consistently outplay your foes.

On many low tier servers, they certainly did exist. Again, I refer to this as population bleeding, and it’s far different from the mass exodus that definitely occurred with the release of HoT. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy because of bad matchmaking, though. The “hardcore” WvW players would move up tiers to get with more populated servers to get more action, which left the low-tier servers with few people, which for those new people interested in the format, they’d see the appeal of high-tiers and the cycle would repeat endlessly.

Strictly speaking, population was out of control since release with the stack-enablement of servers (especially early with free transfers) and slow glicko-based tier system. Population imbalances based on coverage also dictated server tiers as well, which further gave players an incentive to stack based on coverage performance as well. Without coverage, even well-performing servers during their prime (apparent early on in the game when all servers had queues to WvW) would be incapable of winning. Since glicko is slow to adapt and people don’t like to participate in runaway matchups, they’d just simply move to greener pastures, be it other servers, or entirely other games.

WvW in terms of its innately bad matchmaking design caused its decline and slow bleeding. With no attention to fix the flawed design for three years, of course it would bleed players, particularly as the game aged and thus the churn rate would be higher than the new-player acquisition.

We still haven’t seen any changes to matchmaking. The population problem diagnosed with “merges” is a symptom of the problem, not the actual problem itself. Population disparity or lost interest isn’t people being bored of WvW so much as being bored of the matchup and runaway scores every single week with no movement because glicko is too slow to adjust to dynamism. It’s because the format’s matchmaking itself is flawed in design, and we’ve seen no attention or care to fix it, even when the solution using AI techniques exists and ANet had even at one point had a world-famous game AI expert working for them during the development of HoT. Until matchmaking is redone, it doesn’t matter what ANet does; WvW will still bleed players.

And even despite this, there were still many people playing in the high tiers. Did you ever see anyone in T1 complaining that the format was dead? No. There were queues pretty much every primetime every day before HoT. The low servers were dead for reasons I explained above. But now even the high-tier servers are not full anymore. There are definitely less people playing WvW than pre-HoT. That’s not up for debate, and there is a lot of evidence of massive groups of people leaving citing the sole reason for departure being poor design brought on by HoT. These are first-hand accounts, not just maybes.

HoT killed off a large number of players from the “hardcore” WvW scene. This is also why you’re seeing a huge influx of inexperienced commanders/guilds running rampant even on T1 servers, and the GoB-dependency for getting PvE players into the format is there just to try and mask the massively damaged population since HoT.

Vayne.8563:

Excellent Name.9574:

Are You saying that there was free server transfer at the HoT release? That would explain the server merges then indeed?

No. I’m saying at launch of Guild Wars 2, due to the fact that guesting didn’t make it into the release, that everyone loaded up on the top servers until they were full.

The population problem in WvW is years old. Therefore it can’t be due to HoT, because the problem preceded HoT by at least a couple of years.

The population problem in WvW is an old problem, not a new one.

HoT didn’t do WvW any favors with the new map, but that’s another story. The population problem existed before the new map drove WvW players away.

And WvW has come back a long way since then.

Again, server mergers in WvW (and only in WvW) have nothing to do with HoT.

I’d have to disagree to some extends. If they didn’t start making sweeping changes to stop the bleeding and get a few people back into WvW (also putting PvE requirements like GoB in the reward tracks to make people join), it’s very arguable HoT killed WvW.

It was definitely bleeding quite badly before, but the mass-scale exodus from the format at or near the release of HoT permanently reduced player populations. Servers that were once full are now not. Queues are shorter across the board for previously-populated servers. Tons of guilds have quit entirely solely quoting HoT-only content such as the guild halls removing all upgrade progress and the DBL’s themselves (before you say people have been voting for the inclusion of DBL, the data is skewed to favor it since most people who were against it (a large number) have since entirely stopped playing GW2).

WvW’s been in dire straights for years, but HoT was a killing blow. We’re seeing some attempts to resuscitate it, but it’s questionable if they’ll work into the future. The classes are still terribly imbalanced, the gear combinations are still swinging builds wildly, and the sheer powercreep has tremendously hurt the format and peoples’ willingness to consider it seriously.

DGraves.3720:

Sartharina.3542:

Mathematically speaking, pure DPS specs reduce your TTK slower than it reduces enemy TTK on you, is what he’s saying. So, speccing out of Berzerker would increase “Odds of Victory” – but those are hardcapped at 100% regardless of build (Unless you suck at the game. But the meta doesn’t care about people who suck at the game. It’s tuned to the best).

Is this true for all armor classes though? I’d have to scrutinize the math… I don’t think that it works like that since toughness is a linear flat percentage per point. But that’s another thread.

tolunart.2095:

DGraves.3720:

Why do armor classes exist in this game again?

Fantasy games have embraced the Dungeons & Dragons mentality for so long – mages wear cloth robes, thieves wear flexible leather, warriors wear sheets of hammered metal – that games without it are the exception, not the rule.

I thought GW2 was trying to be the exception. :p

It holds true for almost everything. You’ll see some exceptions in the case of some rather extreme-scaling builds like a thief running DA/CS/DrD, but otherwise, it should hold. And while yes, the game is designed for active defenses to be enough to not die to everything (which is what I said initially regarding breaking the norm and allowing all players to beat the content), the PvE meta is only going to adapt to the way people wish to most consistently/quickly beat the content. A forced trinity is a strategy system designed by the game maker, where the group composition in its exactness is a sub-optimization made by the players. This sub-optimization constitutes just as strict of a player-driven meta as anything else.

For those who’ve played a bit of League of Legends, ask yourself the following question: Why is the established meta 1 top, 1 mid, 2 bottom, and 1 jungle? Why not 2 mid? It’s objectively no different in terms of the distribution of players, and could pose several advantages from a strategy POV. It’s 2 mid because that’s just how it is, and you’d see a failing bot lane otherwise. This isn’t a design flaw with the game inhibiting diversity of how people may distribute themselves; it’s rather a player-made optimization that has shaped how the game is played entirely, just as how people take and desire certain gear combos, classes, and the likes for certain content.

Ultimately, the choice is yours to play whatever you want, and you’d still succeed. Actually, you’re mathematically more likely to succeed deviating from the meta. The only constraint is an artificial time limit the community itself has set as time has progressed in order to advance the optimization further.

And that artificial time limit on completion time is the result of the content being so stale and the mechanics are often very straightforward (especially apparent in older, non-updated areas like dungeons). The desire to be doing anything but running DPS isn’t really there, because people have mastered the content and in many cases, are truly bored with it. As such, time of completion is the only thing that matters to people, because they’d rather not spend 35 mins in CoF even if nobody went into downed state or even low health, and would rather spend 10 with maybe a death or two.

And before you jump up saying that maybe death isn’t punishing enough, that’s not really a proper solution, because then you’d have the “average” player no longer be able to complete the content when playing DPS, or have DPS builds be punished on the individual level if he dies for perhaps a tankier player failing to maintain aggro if the player-meta deemed that’s how the content should be played. Not to mention early players would struggle immensely with the content being so difficult. Go try dungeons in berserker gear in blues and greens like the original players, and you’ll see a tremendous increase in difficulty (albeit for the wrong reasons); why punish new or early-release players for wanting to play DPS and being so squishy, then? That seems just as flawed and would have instantiated just as strict of a non-DPS meta for a long period of time, in all likelihood.

An optimization will always exist, unless everything is determined solely by wide-margin RNG, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of an action game; the optimization is either the result of the developers forcing a trinity/role system (not what GW2 is trying to do at all and as you said, is something I also think is a concept stuck to the “norm” of DnD-era RPG’s), or something made entirely by the players to get a consistent and acceptable yield in respects to content completion.

The only way to remove the issue is to have a perfectly-designed system have in all states the same output yield (time in this case) for all inputs (player classes and builds). This would be a tremendously difficult task to achieve and would be defined as a perfect game, which for theoretical reasons pertaining to game theory, does not exist when any human interaction is involved whatsoever, and is only doable on an extremely small scale with no dynamic inputs.

I tried searching for a while but didn’t see it. Someone did this a year or two ago and a friend sent me the link. Most search results were people making faces in the character editor (which there are tons of for some reason), so a lot of the results were diluted.

In sPvP the thief will always be weak in 1v1 until stats are changed or the entire class design is redone. Period. Scalar-based damage strictly does not work with such low stats. If you go into WvW, the tables turn and the thief is capable since it can scale as needed.

I can consistently spike a group-oriented guardian in WvW. Full sentinel, nomad, whatever. It doesn’t matter. And I run core thief DA/CS/Tr signets. That shouldn’t be a build winning against our supposed hard-counter. Power DH gives me some trouble when played well due to the passive aegis preventing the reliability of my backstab, but still, it is not a particularly awful matchup like people often complain it is. A lot of thieves get hung up that when they Shadow Shot into a DH they get burned by the traps he’s standing on. Re-think the engage and everything goes nicely. As a power D/D main for over three years now, I can say that a large portion of the source of complaint from people who have tried to play D/D power is a lack of expertise with the set and using its abilities to their fullest. That’s not to say DH isn’t strong against the thief or that D/D isn’t weaker than it should be, no; it’s that a guard needs those invulns and blocks to stay alive against virtually anything, especially an offensively-minded thief. If CnD was unblockable, I’m almost absolutely certain I’d never lose to a guardian in a fight ever again. If it ignored invulns, it’s need to see its initiative cost put to at minimum 10. Like any other weapon skill, if a guard sees it coming, he deserves to get the block if he times his virtue or shout well for a clutch aegis. A high-hitting stealth-gaining ability is not exception, even if the set is relatively weak.

Shadow Shot does too much damage. I’ve actually OHKO’d people with it in WvW. I’ve fought other thieves with relative success using only that skill and no AA. The best thieves in the game will tell you the ability is overtuned. People don’t like playing D/P because this skill is a crutch that lets bad thieves do way better than they should. It’s single target, but so is Heartseeker. And Shadow Shot has a coefficient rivaling the damage of < 50% Heartseeker, with double the effective range, an unblockable blind with negatable attack into a backstab (unlike HS), and a shadowstep component. It’s simply too much for its initiative cost. At 6 init? Okay, I can see it. At 4? No way.

Regarding staff DPS, I speak for group environments where DPS actually matters; the staff is dominant per hit when also paired with a plethora of other modifiers. I don’t mean to say the gap is large – it isn’t – but it still is there.

Checking in on the matter, of course. I perceived the immob as only occurring on a bounce-back, not just if the target is immobilized. The latter may be a necessity as cripple is quite accessible from a variety of classes, and perma-immob in caltrops is really, really deadly.

Daredevil wouldn’t have an issue with it, but core thief would. The same as said about even guard and DH, since the DH has solid means to escape immob or simply deal damage from afar. I’d be more worried about mesmer getting hit hard by it than anything. The bounce radius is quite large, so I’m not certain it’d be more skill-oriented to land the immob, but rather, just universally a good idea if people are grouped together.

As a consequence, the init cost may have to go up to 4 as Straegen said. This incites a little bit more of a raise to the skill floor (as I get bounces very, very often) from the initiative management POV, which is also offset by the reduced cost to CnD as suggested above. Even CnD’s cost may be arguable as coming down to 4 so long as the ability doesn’t see increased potency itself.

Alright OP, I’m going to speak from a Thief/Reaper split main POV to help you along here. First, I need to ask you a few questions:

Are you a core necro or a reaper?

Are you power or condi? What build?

What weapons do you run?

Do you die to power or condition players more often? Have you fought against other professions extensively in duels, or mostly just these?

While stealth is a powerful mechanic (and one intended only to be so accessible to thieves and a little bit of mesmer), it’s likely not the reason you’re losing these fights. Aside from trapper thief (condi cheese) and PU condi mesmer (also cheese), none of the aforementioned can kill you while they’re in stealth. Stealth isn’t the mechanic that’s causing you to die unless you’re simply getting confused and hung up on it. It is disorienting, but if you’re playing well, it’s not what’s actually causing your opponents to outlast you directly.

Really what’s causing you to not be able to get the kills is their mobility and counters.

Thief shuts down the reaper quite well, especially if you’re building for chills. Daredevil negates most movement-impairing effects like cripple, chill, and immob just by dodging. Core thief also has withdraw which can cure disabling conditions nicely. Simply, the entire profession is designed around negating damage by not being hit, so it’s going to be able to kite you around, especially since you have limited ranged options, and even moreso if you’re not running Speed of Shadows, since Signet of the Locust doesn’t provide mobility in shroud.

In all seriousness, the Daredevil is your worst matchup as a reaper. Your capacity to fight will be entirely dependent on their ability to play well. If they know how to shut you down by using their speed and kiting potential, you’re SoL. You only pose an advantage when playing a power/damage-heavy build and they try to hard engage. I find myself in very binary situations when I play my berserker reaper against thieves: either the thief isn’t good and tries to melt me and they die in a single Soul Spiral (stealthed targets still take damage so AoE’s are great), or the thief knows how to kite me and I simply can’t keep up at all. It’s sucky, but it’s the truth. Much like how you can walk over warriors, eles, and classes/builds meant to take you head-on, the daredevil is meant to whittle down your shroud, leave you with no options or way to keep up, and kill you. If you play conditions, you’re slower, but should have defensive stats to sustain better. Constant pressure from scepter and LF management is really what’s needed to keep them hesitant to engage.

This is the advantage to running core necro; shroud 1 has ranged and can potentially zone out the Daredevil, and you’ve got a gap close teleport on 2. That said, it’s a difficult and risky way to go, as good thieves/daredevils will be able to beat you unless you start really nailing down the hurt.

Most roaming builds will run tons of mobility because they need to traverse the map quickly, and because they’re trying to take out or delay people running back to the blobs/fights with slow GvG builds. The reaper struggles as a whole with fast foes, so even against ele and war who know how to beat it, you’ll find yourself kited. Don’t tunnel-vision and keep your cool. If they’re trying to reset and kite you, do the same. Don’t sit around and waste shroud anticipating an attack, either; it’s not going to happen until you have no LF left.

Druids, eles, and sccrappers are boon-dependent and have a lot of blocks and/or reflects (especially scrappers). Corrupt them and kill them. Don’t try and play the sustain game with these classes, because they’re going to win it With that, it’s best to use Reaper’s Onslaught over Blighter’s Boon on the reaper, as the extra damage output will help tremendously. Recall that the scrapper has to get up close to kill you. Use that to your advantage, as their stealth is only gained by being in proximity to their drone. Focus the drone either with aggressive play with a ranged weapon early or engage the fight hard with AoE’s, and be ready to corrupt and hit them hard and fast. You need to get them to commit for their damage, and you need to be ready to kill them or come close as soon as they try. They have the mobility advantage, but if they misjudge you and over-commit, you have the upper hand. Be sure you have stability for the end of the drone’s life bar as when it dies it will CC. Do not get over-aggressive from the blocks and invuln from elixir S.

As a core necro, be mindful of the amount of reflects the ele and scrapper have. They’ll have them frequently and readily. It’s thus important you get around these defenses, to which I recommend using A/F (power) or S/F (condi), and even works excellently on Reaper. Both do not have projectiles which can be reflected on their AA chains, and provide boon removal or corruptions to negate their advantage as soon as they engage, while providing excellent vuln application, some degree of soft CC, and in the case of Axe, burst-LF generation and high burst damage from Ghastly Claws.

Mesmers are difficult depending on how good they are, similarly to thieves. While a bit slower, they have a much better ranged game, which can make them more difficult to keep up with on a reaper. Most mesmers run aggressive condition builds featuring incredible confusion and torment access and a lot of power-damage mitigation, so having transfers is excellent for the fight. If you run staff, it’s advantageous to get stacked up with conditions, clear the frequent blind application with an AA or Mark og Blood, and transfer it all back to the mesmer using Putrid Mark. Such mesmers will often kill themselves due to limited cleansing options, and this will open up possibilities of hitting them with chillblains and whirling the poison field with Soul Spiral as a reaper to deal as much damage as possible to them and their clones, or Life Transfer/Tainted Shackles as a core necro, since their limited cleansing likely burned from the transfers will enable you to either lock them down with the immob. The order can be switched around as to burn their cleanse via the immob and return their conditions back to them to kill them as they try to run away.

GS + A/F is great for fighting power players, Staff + A/F for conditions with the transfer on Staff 4 and burst on Axe 2 and Focus 5.

Overall, the problem the necro has with roaming-based builds is being zoned out by these builds via superior mobility and range, rather than stealth itself. Even while the enemies are stealthed, they’re moving and doing their best to re-position in a way that gives them distance to you. It’s best to try and predict where they’re going to go next while stealthed and consider the fight from their perspective as well. The art to beating stealth is truthfully to play a class that uses it (I do recommend the thief as it will teach you the best), figure out some of its nuances, and work to beat the players rather than the mechanics.

EremiteAngel.9765:

dardy.4571:

Condi Mesmer wrecks thieves in WvW – They’re practically my targets. Too bad I run like I’m carrying a turtle shell.

is this still true in the current patch?

daredevils seems to be able to clear condi a lot better. Not sure if there were any changes or just people building condi clearance into their builds, but my condi builds can’t kill DDs that easily anymore.

Daredevil provides thief with a good cleanse. Escapist’s Absolution elevated the thief from being incapable of fighting condition builds by and large to having a means to kill them. Pre-HoT, the best cleanse the thief had was either camping stealth and resetting (letting the mesmer also reset) or burning Shadowstep’s second-part skill, which for obvious reasons, the skill is is often saved as a stunbreak and would cause double-confusion damage since both activations of the teleport would deal damage.

Condi mes when played somewhat properly still counters the Daredevil by using cover conditions to force EA to not cleanse well, since at best it gets one per evade (1s ICD). Every evade also deals confusion skill-damage to the thief, which while Driven Fortitude (also 1s ICD) helps negate some of the damage, often isn’t enough when you consider the torment DoTs coming in as well.

Daredevil is huge powercreep to core thief, but condi mesmer is still a very dominant dueling spec and should at its worst be hovering around a 50% win.