Guild Wars 2

If you play WvW, you’re following the crowd, UKADAM. Most mesmers play dire/TB condi because it’s one of the strongest small-scale builds in the game and one of the easier ones to play for small-scale. Mass-scale WvW favors power only because guardians provide tons of light fields and thus all projectiles going through them from the backline cleanse conditions, creating constant and mass cleansing. And now permanent resistance uptime is also achievable thanks to revenant and the new and totally OP gear/rune combinations from HoT.

In small scale, Dire/TB mes is pretty much the facerolliest build possible to play. Literally, there have been people who have fought and won using this build while playing with their faces to make fun of the people who think it’s a serious way to play.
It’s horrible in larger combat, but that’s just conditions in general.

You’re going to get trash-talked playing it, regardless of if you’re actually good or not, because pretty much all the scumbag gankers who get off on playing cheese have migrated to it these days.

Body Shot isn’t good because its damage coefficient is half of even Dancing Dagger’s existing one, so 1/4 of a bounce-hit, meaning it’s pretty much totally lacking the capacity to kill people, while Dancing Dagger on those bounces has a similar coefficient to CnD.

As a side note to the immob option, it does beg a pretty distinct question: How long would it last? I ask this because this is very important when considering matchups that aren’t strictly outnumbered situations but have more enemies, such as a mesmer or ranger.

Even with a fairly paltry 1s immob, A viper D/D thief or similar build running 100% condition duration could stack 2s immobilizes over and over, locking down a mesmer, MM necro, or ranger near-permanently (now add Panic Strike and Devourer venom) almost too easily. If the duration is reduced to a near-insulting .5s, though, you end up with P/D and S/D having strictly better immobs already in their kits. I fear this may create situations which wouldn’t be fun or dynamic, and without adding awkward ICD’s into the immob component of the skill (something that’s really not a good idea), I’m not sure it could be properly balanced.

I’m not an amazing ranger, MM necro, or mesmer player (looking at you, Eval, for ranger feedback), but I’d like any feedback from people who may be.

BV is good as-is. 60 seconds I think would put too much emphasis on making the skill require Venomus Aura, which for many, is not really desired. A 45-60-75 progression is probably better for the skills if they saw some adjustments.

Leave BV as-is or maybe even cause it to work on 3 hits with .75s durations to let D/D stab be more consistent while not really affecting most other sets or its use.

Dagger Storm should go down to 60s but see its duration reduced to 5s from 7.5s. This proportional cut allows DS to be more useful when needed with less remaining excess (all you really need to is reflect Rapid Fire and similar skills) and even be used more than once in a fight, while boosting its synergy with Trickster as a cleanse.

TG needs a lot of help, but I think the drastically-cut cooldown could enable the skill to work reasonably well with venomshare builds, as this enables more frequent use of NPC allies to gain the benefits of venomshare when no other PC allies are nearby or maybe perish while fighting. There may be more needed, but I’m very unsure as venomshare as a build I’m not a particular expert of and don’t want to over-buff venomshare..

lil devils x.6071:

Sir Mad.1092:

Serith.3712:

mtpelion.4562:

Lyp Sao.1375:

anet removing good things
will this help the game??

This will help WvW but will hurt all the PvE players who used WvW for quick crafting so we could return to PvE in the same place we left it.

Exactly……WVW is for WVW players, not a “quick crafting” stop for PVE players.

So basically, not having the 2 or 3 players we used to see around the crafting stations is gonna fix the queue issue? How exactly?

It is going to help solve the population balancing issues. This was not just about Queues, it was throwing off the numbers they used to determine which servers should be linked, and how much transfer costs to the server should be. The server that had the more players doing this, the more unbalanced their population would be. They do not determine population by the 3 you see there at a time, but over a longer period of time so all of the people who used them over that period of time. Even if it is 50 on a server doing it, that is 50 players offsetting the numbers.

Bingo.

That said, despite being an avid WvW player, I do wonder what they’ll do considering the WvW Artisan bonus only applies while in WvW. With crafting stations gone, will they replace this?

apharma.3741:

Deceiver, assuming you’re at 2583 power your mind wracks criting for 5715.5 for a 1 clones so that’s 11,431 and that’s assuming you’re getting the scholar bonus, no skill bonus and some 7% modifier from vulnerability. That’s a lot of maybes that can reduce damage by 25%.

Your mirror blades if they crit will be just over 4K combined and a marauder thief will usually be on 16-18k depending on how much they’re stacking on marauder. I myself am on 18k. Sure it will get me close to death but that is one hell of a glassy mesmer most likely going balls out on damage and they would most likely need a source of fury.

I was assuming 2-3 clones with a GS2 combo. The thief would also need to be playing Dagger/Dagger DA/CS/Tr or DA/CS/DrD (all offense options in DrD) to 100-0 a marauder mesmer in the same amount of time, and the latter build would have the same issues in respects to not having reliable fury. Obviously this kind of matchup is rare and a very hypothetical situation, particularly a thief running such a build. The contemplative “what ifs” exist on both to a fair degree, though. I think it’s safe to say both professions have the guns and the health using marauder in their power builds to deal very similar damage relative to max health.

It is likely you kept the mesmer build in respect to traits pretty consistent with a decent build. The thief cannot afford such luxury, and without running the above (using the existing meta), would backstab the mesmer for roughly 8k.

It’s a very small edge, and why I don’t think it changed the matchup much overall. But a small advantage is still a very small advantage when looking at the gains from marauder.

Urejt.5648:

in pve u use cs da and trickery best dps in the game now

Depends on the party and on the content. In a raid with a perfect comp, the thief gains nothing from Tr; DrD specced offensively with staff is the best possible, since it has 27% damage modifiers versus Trickery’s 15%, which under the multiplicative way GW2 damage calculations work, churns out way better numbers. In most cases, it’s going to be better than DA/CS/Tr for sheer damage output.

But yes, OP, the generation of spam 1 and done has been born. It’s been going that way for a while, and with all the passives and insane sustain in sPvP, using skills for damage has been pretty punishing for a while. Just the nature of the game, I guess. All competitive facets and interaction have been on the decline for a long, long time.

DB as I proposed above would also enable disengage options, however. I’m torn on the matter of Dancing Dagger’s double-bounce immob, only because like I said, it would be a bit redundant on sets like P/D and S/D to have two immobilizes on top of Panic Strike.

That said, Dancing Dagger is a reasonably good skill as-is. A simply higher damage coefficient puts us back to 2012 where pressing 4 twice into a group of enemies would down 2 or more quite often, so it’s not really reasonable. The skill lacks consistency and reasonable use-cases. I’d like to hope we can come up with something clever that can cause justification but not simply making it stronger or something which can just be unloaded onto enemies.

CnD spam needs to be punishable. BV provides unblockable attacks, and as such, making CnD unblockable and redundant and punish the Guardian too heavily. If you whiff, you whiff. 6 init is too much for the effect gained, and the skill should be a dependency for condition D/D just as it is for power. D/D is not fixed as a whole by just buffing CnD. Skills 3 – 5 need a rework in conjunction with some traits, too.

Shadow Shot needs a nerf. There is no justification for its damage output for how much the skill itself does. D/P players are often carried by this skill alone, especially since it and a few AA’s often is enough to kill people.

When comparing damage alone, the staff AA is still stronger than dagger AA. Staff AA is the best possible damage source per unit of time the thief has. D/D is also objectively better DPS than D/P because the OH pistol causes a DPS loss since pistols have lower base weapon damage than daggers. However, from a PvP perspective, there is little reason to need high DPS, just consistency and burst. Both Staff and D/P are dominant options available to the thief, however I believe staff requires more skill to perform as well as D/P in competitive environments, and it is highly dependent on the Daredevil; should DrD be nerfed, staff indirectly takes a hit, too, while D/P operates independently of the ES.

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Orpheal.8263:

Giving Warriors Claws makes so much sense (it’s absolute nonsense)

http://www.swordsandarmor.com/images/GAU-GN008.JPG
So, you meant to tell, that these can’t be used to knock someone out?

Those are just gauntlets, though. Not claws or dedicated wrist/hand weaponry.

I’d rather see the crossbow or some kind of big axe implemented if we’d ever see more weapons, though. A lot of professions could use either, while the claw and katar concepts are a little more specific in respect to who may use them.

Bleyd.9470:

MadVisions.4529:

I suggest to read my topic about the recent thief changes. Link in my signature.

Ok I’ve read your thread. It was informative. What about Critical Strikes?

It’s an underperforming trait line that makes too many sacrifices for paltry increases in damage and doesn’t provide enough reward in sustain against most of the meta.

CS is only “good” in WvW on builds dedicated to try and one-shot opponents. Since CS only modifies outgoing damage, and stats in sPvP are strictly much, much lower than PvE and WvW, the scaling-damage approach fails miserably, as 50% of a low number increase in damage is still a low number.

snaplemouton.1294:

Buffing Cloak and Dagger wouldn’t be a good thing. A stealth without any real CD is already strong enough. There need to be counters to it and that counter is reveal.
Last I check, the other classes can’t spam their reveal because they have a CD on it.
Dagger #4 isn’t meant to deal damage. It’s meant to cripple a foe at range.
And you didn’t mention #3, which is the most important part of D/D.

D/P is meant for power damage.
D/D is meant for condition damage.

Try this if you want to play D/D.

Not really.

D/P is meant to stack stealth and control between stealth, D/D is meant to have better burst and ways to stay alive while revealed.

D/D is just ineffective because DB and Dancing Dagger are strictly terrible skills for power when compared to D/P, DrD brought in free leap finishers potentially for D/P to get cheaper and more consistent stealth access, and CnD is overly-expensive for how difficult it is to land these days when half of the professions have spammable blocks, evades, invulns, etc.

D/P’s better because it’s pretty much carried by Shadow Shot and has utility coming from blind pressure and interrupt potential.

D/D is intended to be a hybrid set. As such, it should be dependent on traits for its performance. As it is, D/D condi’s baseline performance is too high due to how strong DB is in tandem with lots of active evasion options available via Acro and DrD, while power is dependent on high-risk/low-reward CnD, poor defensive options, poor chasing options, and lower coefficients and utility, and is thus dependent on building very heavily just for the set.

If CnD and DB took substantial overhauls to unify how the sets play more, while bolstering trait dependency on condi DD but upping its potential, we’d see both sets do well for themselves.

I’ll reference my post here for more specific details for how this could be approached:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Dagger-and-crit-strikes-tweaks/first#post6220602

These days, almost everyone has trouble without two stunbreaks or lots and lots of stability access.

Weez.6315:

when we´re talking about condi mes, so yea the thief has no chance

when we´re talking about power shatter against power dp thief it depends on the dodge trait mostly. Since Mesmer´s Mantra of Distraction got buffed along with the powerblock trait ages ago, d/p thieves were a joke for mesmers ( So i dont rly understand people who say thieves were a power mes hardcounter pre HoT =)))
Now with the Blast finisher on dodge, mesmers cant stop thieves anymore from getting into stealth, which turns the table.
But most thieves r using the mobility dodge anyway since its better for pvp/wvw roaming overall.

Id say a staff thief is very annoying for mes but with the right daze timing its doable.

In WvW thieves had much more benefit from the new HoT armor stats than mes (Marauder armor), since u cant oneshot thieves anymore with 1 burst (except for max dmg mental anguish) and thieves still do a lot of dmg

so yeah with the right setup thieves are back in a position where they can beat mesmers nearly reliably, but are far from being a hardcounter.

Tbh, a lot of thieves in the past who ran full berserker weren’t very good. Mixed Valk or full Valk gave the thief 14-18k HP (Marauder equivalent) and didn’t affect crit chance much. The zerk/assassins people running around WvW were kinda clueless and did less burst damage than the tankier ones. A good shatter combo should still OHKO most thieves in marauder, since good power mesmers I run into often shatter for 5k per clone. The same is not said about the thief killing a marauder mesmer, though at 20k hp, unless the thief plays signets. Mathematically it can’t happen without huge might and the benefits of playing an all-in build, which means even no use of Daredevil.

Marauder didn’t really change much for the matchup. If anything, I’d actually have to argue it favors the mesmer since it’s a burst damage loss for the thief while not really affecting consistency or health, but a consistency and durability gain for the mesmer, with marginal damage losses as opposed to berserker gear.

DGraves.3720:

DeceiverX.8361:

… actually, stat-per-stat, DPS is the least efficient way to play the game…

How do you figure? This cannot be true alongside this:

People will always pursue the most time-efficient option to beat the game.

Since no other resource but time is ever brought into question the only efficient way to play is through DPS. The Magi’s Warrior example swapped time for energy taking far longer but essentially standing around doing little to nothing quite happily. But since the reward system works off of time (Kills = loot, faster kills = more kills = more loot) there’s no real value to endurance/player-energy conservation (AFK gameplay).

Stat-per-stat efficiency means that in the case of taking and receiving damage, building full DPS is the least efficient when making exchanges from stats alone.

Time-wise, obviously optimizing damage is best. But that’s exactly it; you implicitly assumed the only optimization is based on time, which is what my post states when claiming this aspect of video games is often heavily-enforced by either a forced trinity system or a “meta” built around the game’s systems to typically optimize time.

Ryou.2398:

DeceiverX.8361:

People fail to realize that the trinity is literally the same as a gear check for an all-zerk meta, just that it requires different stats.

It’s not that other sets are weak; actually, stat-per-stat, DPS is the least efficient way to play the game, but as a compromise, it’s the most time-efficient if clears are done skillfully. There was literally a guy who soloed Arah on a Magi’s warrior and never dodged once, even on Lupi. The durable gear let him literally AFK/facetank the fight. It took well over an hour, but he did it.

To get more sets used, the fights need to simply be more challenging. Not through one-shot mechanics or anything, because that’s just another gear check. But through making the fights themselves more difficult on the conceptual level, require more thought from the party, and need more teamwork.

People will always pursue the most time-efficient option to beat the game. The pursuit of efficiency is human nature. Why waste time on things you don’t need to? There are only so many hours in a day, so people want to cram as much accomplishment into their time as possible, especially those who work and have families or have little time to play. A trinity does nothing to change this philosophy. All it does is shift it to require certain people of certain roles to meet certain requirements, rather than just being a free-for-all of people being told to bring DPS to make it go by faster.

People who usually play mmorpgs or rpgs in general are people who like to spend time with the game and content, besides if gaming is that much of a waste of time then why game at all? Rushing through content asap is not human nature, thats just people who dont know patience or refuse to smell the flowers. For the most part mmorpgs are meant to take time when you do group content and such.

I have never seen an mmorpg with so many people who prefer to cheese through things doing the same exact tactics over and over. Now im not blaming the design but im blaming the community.

Your blame is misguided, though. That’s just the thing. Claiming a trinity would solve anything is naive and frankly, not in line with principles of modern game design. It’s actually straight-up contradictory to what’s going on here. Maybe you’re new around here. It’s also important to note that ANet has done very little to uphold interest in its PvE. The PvE content in the core game hasn’t changed at all since somewhere around 2013, and dungeons and fractals (and menial, repetitive tasks )were/are the best way to make cash for the layman.

We games play for fun Fun isn’t always productive, and thus, can be argued as a waste of time from a harshly objective point of view. Human nature is to inspect, invent, and improve, and to make menial tasks more efficient. I can speak for most people in that doing the exact same exact thing every single day, over and over, with next to no variation and expecting the same outcome, without looking to make the task more efficient, is not fun. That’s a very boring and truthfully soul-wearing job in most cases, and even that isn’t as scripted and similar in experience.

So we rush through the PvE content because PvE doesn’t change. It’s fun to take your time the first few tries. After a few years of doing the same thing every day for money, it gets real old, real fast. It becomes menial. And since it’s human nature to make menial tasks more efficient, people did. And then people who have been doing those menial tasks forever and were extremely bored of them started setting the bar at that efficiency.

The trinity is in no way different; you look for X number of tanks, Y number of DPS, and Z healers. You look for only certain professions who have optimal DPS, durability, and healing capabilities to facilitate the run. And then you check gear to make sure everyone can do the content, or kick the people who hold the group back. The trinity itself is very much a raw, hard mold on how to efficiently play the game in a specific matter of efficiency. And the requirements and expectations will perpetually rise as more people make the menial tasks performed by this trinity – this optimization – even further menial. You see, the berserker-only runs of dungeons are identical in philosophy; a non-berserker group could do the content, just as maybe taking another tank or another healer or maybe a party of DPS in a trinity-based game, but it’d be slower or subject to the individuals themselves over-performing at the expectation. It’s that the routine runs are indeed routine, and so people wish to avoid spending an excess of time on them.

There’s a reason why the grindy korean games that come to the western market all fail. It’s because the grind starts immediately, never ends, and frankly, is meaningless. It’s not that people are cheesing through things so much as people want money and want it faster so they can enjoy the things they do. For many, especially WvW players, this means grinding through PvE as fast as possible so they can get the money needed to play WvW and get back to the format they enjoy.

The game was sold as one which featured no trinity and where all content could be done by all players of all builds. The entire point was to get rid of the trinity, because that system is old, dated, and frankly, not suitable for an action-based game. It also inhibits severely what the developers can do in the future for its classes. Going against that is going against the foundation GW2 was built on. People trying to change that are honestly better told to play a different game. If it’s not the formula for success, then GW2 can fail and the lesson will be learned. If it has a market, it’s just not the game for those who want a trinity. Why? Because it wasn’t supposed to be made to be that way, and demanding such change is a slap in the face to the people who designed the game originally and to all of the players who have loyally supported that ideology so far.

I do recommend AutoHotKey for key remapping. Scripts which do more than one thing per button press is a bannable offense, mind you, but for things which can’t be remapped in the game’s settings or through device driver software, it provides a very easy way to re-bind keys to whatever you want.

People fail to realize that the trinity is literally the same as a gear check for an all-zerk meta, just that it requires different stats.

It’s not that other sets are weak; actually, stat-per-stat, DPS is the least efficient way to play the game, but as a compromise, it’s the most time-efficient if clears are done skillfully. There was literally a guy who soloed Arah on a Magi’s warrior and never dodged once, even on Lupi. The durable gear let him literally AFK/facetank the fight. It took well over an hour, but he did it.

To get more sets used, the fights need to simply be more challenging. Not through one-shot mechanics or anything, because that’s just another gear check. But through making the fights themselves more difficult on the conceptual level, require more thought from the party, and need more teamwork.

People will always pursue the most time-efficient option to beat the game. The pursuit of efficiency is human nature. Why waste time on things you don’t need to? There are only so many hours in a day, so people want to cram as much accomplishment into their time as possible, especially those who work and have families or have little time to play. A trinity does nothing to change this philosophy. All it does is shift it to require certain people of certain roles to meet certain requirements, rather than just being a free-for-all of people being told to bring DPS to make it go by faster.

mdee.5194:

This type of post comes up a lot and I wonder if its from people who havnt played a MMO before that has expansions.
HOT doesnt affect the original game in the slightest apart from adding gliding.
You arnt forced to buy HOT.
Even if you do and you dont like it like me , theres nothing stopping you from continuing to play the original game .
All you need to do is simply avoid the HOT zones.

If you play the competitive formats, you need HoT.

It has to do more or less with stealth causing icons and vision ti disappear entirely, and most 1v1 builds for sPvP are structured to play a fight via sustain rather than landing a killing blow. Being invisible also removes targeting and in general causes skills to miss.

basically, it’d let the thief decap for free and not be intercepted by really anything, or endlessly contest by trolling the outer rims of the points while negating damage through dodges spammable via DrD.

Having no capture presence is fine while in stealth. The problem of thief’s on-point viability extends almost solely from it not having the stats it needs to scale properly to deal damage, which it can do in WvW. Even Daredevil, designed to help the thief sustain better (and it does), is not sufficient for the thief to deal enough damage to kill sustain-oriented builds which simply have higher skill coefficients on damage and other effects.

If damage were to go up to PvE/WvW levels, the thief would do fine by bringing just enough sustain to not die, but enough damage to break down bunkery builds if played well. As it is, no amount of out-playing (within reason) lets a thief beat out a sustain build while keeping point presence in a strict 1v1.

The issue isn’t stealth, but again, rather stats for sPvP.

Most professions feel the same. In the case of the mesmer, the problem stems from that its class mechanic – shatter – provides a lot of innate versatility from the effects gained and PvP-oriented damage.

Really, shatter shouldn’t have been the cornerstone way to get damage and utility. As it is, if you buff the DPS of the mesmer, it’ll have too much burst and DPS potential. If you buff the sustain, it’s unkillable. If you lower cooldowns, there are concerns with both (bunker chrono). If you buff weapon skills, certain sets become way too dominant and probably need nerfing, or else the class becomes over-buffed.

The core of the issues with mesmer stem from its over-dependence on its class mechanic, but because that class mechanic is so strong baseline, it’s hard to enable buffs either to it or to the other areas of the class.

I won’t even go into detail the obvious disparity between power/condition play due to the huge buffs given to confusion damage and huge nerfs to playing power/crit for all builds since HoT, too.

The ability for the thief to perform in combat is the result of the sPvP/PvE balance split such that stats are lower in sPvP than they are in PvE and WvW, which causes the Thief to lose an upwards of 60% of its damage from its scaling not being any good, while defensive abilities get their fixed-number advantages to favor tankier builds.

It really has nothing to do with the skills or balance of the classes but is a result of the stat split causing reduced scaling effectiveness and over-promotion of boons since their relative effectiveness is increased vastly.

If they brought PvE stat amounts to sPvP and split the amulets into six parts, but kept the rune choices as they are for sPvP, the format would become almost immediately balanced, and the thief would have the capacity to fight well in 1v1 situations and even 1v2’s if out-playing the opponents well enough.

Proponents for balance-splitting between skills for the formats are ignorant that the very split itself has led to the poor state of profession balance, increased the time needed to make balancing decisions, and has exacerbated the poor decisions to all formats’ balance states, since at times it is not possible to balance them independently.

Go into WvW and look if you wish, the thief performs almost flawlessly in small-scale, and only starts losing ground in massive-scale battles due to its limited AoE boon application, which in it of itself is another balance nightmare.

EremiteAngel.9765:

I’ve been seeing more and more thieves losing a 1 on 1 fight against mesmers. Have the tables turned?
Are things more even now or do mesmers counter thieves in some way?

It’s important to note that the notion of the thief countering the mesmer only has existed in sPvP due to the lower stats on amulets. In WvW, both have historically had the damage in their power builds to kill each other pretty easily.

I wouldn’t say the tables have turned, but rather the thief no longer hard-counters the mesmer based on the current meta for both classes.

See, the thief used to wreck and could punish power shatter mesmer. Since everything is running condi, and the thief has historically had terrible cleanses (up until Daredevil the worst in the game) and confusion got over-buffed with the DoT/condition rework, the mesmer in its meta-build-state does a way better job at being able to kill the thief, particularly the chronomancer with its extra blocks and defenses.

Most capable thieves no longer play the class since Daredevil is a total conceptual failure and the power creep from HoT is so real that the mindset of the profession as it once was is no longer a valid way of playing the class, and the learning curve and barrier of entry for the profession with the Daredevil got flattened tremendously, since it has very few resource problems and basically takes all the good things from multiple core trait lines, improves them, and combines them into one nice package.

Since condi mes used to hard-counter the thief, and now the Daredevil has good cleanses and condi mes got buffed in its damage, the matchup between professions themselves is pretty balanced, assuming the use of meta builds. If you look to core condi mes vs thief, the condi mes still wins, just as how core power thief has an advantage against core power mesmer.

Truth be told, condi mes has been the best dueling build since 2013, and still did not get countered by thieves (due to their massively limited cleansing pre-HoT).

Phyrak.7260:

Eval.2371:

Little late to the party, but I agree a lot with decieverX has to say. The problem with OH Dagger is CnD really punishes to much you when you miss it, it’s hard to land without casting it with steal (or shadowstep/infiltrator signet). Which forces d/d into a really binary play style where you have to save steal to land CnD instead of using it for utility such as interrupting or stealing boons. Personally I think dancing dagger is an amazing skill. It is a great slow/cleave, it is a potential projectile finisher and has an ok damage coefficient.

From my perspective I play a lot of S/D and some of these buff ideas would make it very OP. Buffing OH dagger to much or in areas like boonstrip, or gap close would make s/d way too strong. I think some fair buffs that wouldn’t make sword or pistol main hands OP are:

CnD would benefit from:

• a lower cast cost
• Better damage coefficient

Bouncing dagger could benefit from:

• A lower cost (eg 2 init, but lower the cripple to 2 sec).
• A mechanic/proc effect that rewards multiple hits (eg if the target has cripple on them the get hit by bouncing dagger it immobilizes them instead).

Lastly, I feel that a rework of death blossom is needed. The skill is completely lost in the kit because of how much dodge we have now on daredevil, it’s currently just another dodge to spam, but it lacks control and really meaning out side of a spam condi build. I thought about a dash/doge idea as change, which is frankly what the weapon set needs. It would be a much more tactical and a useful change but it would be to much like sword in a sense(it would just become sword 2.0 aside from boonsteal).

So, perhaps giving death blossom a blink which has been a point of various discussions above?
- if death blossom used, then next strike deals xyz condition sorta thing?

What of CnD?
Letting one get stealth without the need to hit a target may be useful
OH pistol does that with a cost of either endurance with specced dd or heart seeker – would making cnd a selfish stealth help to set up for a harder hitting backstab comparative to the shareable smoke field of OH pistol?

I’m just trying to metre what would be good for bringing dd back up to par with other weapon combos

As was mentioned prior by another poster, revealed does need to come down to 3s in sPvP.

If you combine the above (blink on 3 and no-hit stealth), you essentially end up with a strictly more efficient version of D/P aside from the interrupts.

Death Blossom basically turning into a Death’s Charge-like skill paired with an evade (needs no target to work but can work with a target) which does increased/reduced damage based on proximity to the target (so more damage when close, less when far) would probably be the rework needed to fix DB for D/D power. However, this doesn’t really fix the condition build. The pairing of damage and evasion really needs to come apart.

If we analyze the difference between condition and power D/D, we realize that condition play doesn’t require a damage-oriented build, even while maintaining better defensive stats and utilization of frequent evades to deal damage. The bleed on DB needs to go. To compensate for the difference in build ideologies and the removal of the bleed from DB, I’d suggest the Dagger Training trait also cause CnD to cast Skale Venom. This causes intermittent and superior burst condition damage dealt, but requires D/D condi a bit more skill to play effectively between utilizing the evades and stealth from the tools provided by OH dagger. DT also gets purpose for D/D power builds, too (although mug is a very good option nonetheless), since Scale Venom applies (edit:) vuln and can ramp more damage in PvE. While this enforces more use of DA, it also turns DA into the go-to traitline for damaging condition builds, and creates some DA/SA synergy for condition thief and slightly buffs venomshare builds running OH dagger.

I think CnD taking a reduced initiative cost to 5 initiative is probably the best solution overall to the skill itself in terms of affecting its reliability and usefulness to the set. The initiative system allows us to re-cast if needed, but since it’s easy to miss, unblockable is redundant from BV and not really a fun mechanic, and fixing the core of the problem requires substantial reworking of other professions, the best and fairest way at the moment is probably just giving it more accessibility. I don’t agree with more damage, because for those who have played WvW, the difference in coefficients is pretty substantial, especially when the thief has the numbers to scale into big damage. As a result, CnD hits quite hard. Bumping its damage, especially since the skill is an enabler for more damage (Backstab, proposed condition build changes) kind of removes the purpose of setting up a backstab itself, as many D/P players are now doing, since using enablers like Shadow Shot repeatedly or AA chains is more worthwhile. Deviating into this territory doesn’t seem like very good design without begging for nerfs or more awkward balancing states.

I can also get behind the bounce-utility proposition for Dancing Dagger Eval mentioned, rather than looking to just boost or normalize damage. Again, DD once had double the damage it has now, and for single hits, it was fine. It was the repeated bounces that caused the skill to have a crazy total coefficient. Either it needs to see damage upped and bounces removed, or see utility gains from hitting multiple foes. I’m on the fence on both, as S/D and P/D both have immobilizes in their kits, so I’m unsure if it’s essential for even more immobilize application.

eNeRgOo.5463:

DeceiverX.8361:

cptaylor.2670:

Would be nice to see a few gay male couples though. I feel like every corner I turn I’m running into a lesbian couple.

There’s that norn in HoT.

Typically F/F is less taboo.

Show me him !

Sometimes I think lesbians are less taboo, because of bunch of men who watch lesbian porn and their dreams that are not going to happen – Then it seems to me like we’re under some kind of their dictatorship. We still have a long way before us, sadly.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Norn_Savage

As far as why it’s less taboo, that goes a long, long way back. Even biblical references explicitly define only gay male relationships as contemptible in Leviticus, mentioning nothing of women. Some would argue two of the thing you like is often better than one as well :P

Old habits are hard to break, I guess. My philosophy is that it’s none of my business to care to interject on another’s preferences so long as such relationships are responsible ones and all parties understand and the significance of intimacy and agree with it.

Sorry Oprheal, but your post indicates that you’re really unfamiliar with D/D power thief or thief as a whole or are missing out on huge design and balance concerns when looking at the rest of the kit and the numbers.

For one, they never nerfed backstab. Never. Thief damage used to be so good because people used to run squishier builds because defensive options were not realized as being strong or were not buffed to be objectively too-strong in comparison to damage-based specs.

Backstab damage is “low” because sPvP stats are low, and the thief’s damage comes from scaling modifiers, not just raw stats and static power stacking like pretty much all boon builds do. Most other professions have just been power-creeped massively to a point where their normal weapon skills have higher coefficients than backstab because of the innately high defenses and lack of scaling options within the confines of the profession (but often these have boons, which is problematic). Give boons to the thief running damage and its DPH/DPS rises to be some of the best in the game regardless of what other professions try and do.

Further, D/D has way more opportunity to outplay its opponents than D/P. From the design perspective, the set should actually have fewer play/technical counters than D/P; almost everything about D/P is telegraphed, and as such, can be mitigated with good play. D/D suffers from the problem again that defenses have been overbuffed, and the actual damage on Cloak and Dagger itself has been nerfed massively, while Shadow Shot has received buffs and no damage changes, turning it objectively better.

D/D’s innate synergy is also poorer even when it does get stealth access, and lacks consistency because its weapon skills prevent it from properly following-through for kills. Increased availability of blocks/blurs/invulns/aegis etc. has reduced the once-solid performance of CnD in respects to its consistency.

Your proposals do not improve D/D much to D/P.

1. Buffs to HS and backstab are shared with D/P; making the relative strength of the weapon set (which is the real problem as to why it’s not used) the same or even worse than D/P. Faster initiative regeneration again does nothing except also buff condi DB spam builds, which is already a very competitive option for the thief, and does nothing to solve power D/D’s design flaws or close the gap to D/P.
2. Backstab already hits hard enough. We should be encouraging people who want to play a 1HKO build to actually play and build around it, instead of providing the profession tons of innate buffs. Not to mention general “armor piercing” is pretty awkward, considering often times backstab itself is negated more by protection than armor values. This problem is also only limited to sPvP; thief in WvW deals sufficient/high damage on backstab and thus does not need an increase.
3. Again, this change to HS won’t affect D/D’s relative poor performance to D/P and thus would either get the thief nerfed as a whole as a consequence, or require huge nerfs elsewhere. Plus, so many buffs to HS emphasizes spammy play which is absolutely not what the thief is meant to be about. Repeated-cast capability? Yes; to adapt to a situation as-needed due to low defenses. Spam for optimal yields? Absolutely not.
4. There’s almost no recovery animation on DB as it is. This was largely resolved several months ago. DB needs the movement utility, not HS, since DB is unique to D/D and only D/D. Adding more bleeds is also not necessary, seeing as a single thief can get roughly 30 stacks of bleeding going for extended periods of time with the right build, and again, D/D condi is already a very strong fighting build. It doesn’t need more; rather, it needs more usable abilities instead of just mindless DB spam for lots of free evasion and damage.
5. Blind on CnD negates part of the purpose of Tactical Strike’s frontal attack, and also negates CiS. Landing a CnD is already quite punishing; there’s little reason to make it even moreso. Again, the problem lies in the consistency of CnD landing in the current state of the game, not about its ineffectiveness once landed; if it hits, it’s already the most efficient stealth access in the game per resource.
   Dancing Dagger cannot get boon theft, since S/D already steals two boons and requires 6 initiative. Dancing Dagger would be very OP, especially in the current meta, and would decrease the purpose of FS/LS even existing on the sword dramatically. Again, the issue with DD is its consistency; if it bounces, it does lots of damage; if it doesn’t, it does very little. Removing the re-bounce component and upping the damage would make the skill much more usable. Conceptually it doesn’t need that much, maybe a few stacks of vuln to have better synergy with D/D’s aggressive nature.
6. No, revealed needs to exist, unless all of the stealth mechanics in the game get a massive rework and the thief gets a huge damage nerf and utility nerf across the board, on top of an effective redesign of most of the traits and the SA line entirely. Again, backstab already hits really hard. There’s no reason for it to not reveal, since getting damage while being in stealth (I.E. the ghost thief and PU condi mesmer) are very problematic and toxic builds which cannot be balanced easily and are conceptual failures. It’s not realistic to make this suggestion in the state of the game and would drastically overpower thieves if it made it through.

Further, buffing Shortbow’s capacity to deal damage would require utility nerfs, to which the weapon really wouldn’t do well with. It’s taken so often because its utility is so good, despite horrible damage. I believe the thief needs a ranged option, but not in the form of shortbow. The shortbow will always be a staple in sPvP so long as the thief lacks the capacity to hold a point (and thus will depend on its utility for +1 and decap purposes due to IA), which again, comes largely from how the stat system in sPvP screws the thief over exclusively, since the stats are lacking to let the thief scale properly.

They are in a good spot for the most part. Most other things are just crazy OP instead.

Exedore.6320:

Ithilwen.1529:

I think that ANET is moving in the right direction by adding sustain and lengthening fights. Now you need strategy and cool down management. I remember when the main strategy was: “sneak up on somebody and burst them as fast as possible.”

ANet is moving in the wrong direction. This is power creep. If damage was too high before, the correct move would to be reign it in – not start an arms race.

The problem with HoT specs is that they have so much sustain, they can screw up multiple times by using it poorly, but still survive. When mistakes and poor decisions don’t matter, PvP loses almost all its appeal.

For a healthy PvP experience, there always needs to be the question of “Do I use it now or save it?” With HoT specs, the answer is to spam it because it’ll be back soon enough and you can spam other stuff in the meantime.

This. So much this.

Previous game I played, some skills had 10-15 minute cooldowns. For some people, that meant once in a GvG of 200 people. The typical high-yield abilities capable of killing someone hovered at around two minutes. There were more skills, but the pace was determined by how you timed your skill use. There were no rotations, because you’d be on two to five+ minutes of consecutive downtime if you did, or you’d be way too slow when your opponent had a brief gap opened.

This let fights turn longer if the players were both really good, but let people also get completely executed since getting one/two-shotted wasn’t impossible from a number of builds, either.

Powercreeping GW2 professions via elite specs isn’t the way to go, especially since it indirectly nerfs core builds which aren’t the best options based on pseudo-required trait lines or utilities. This just reduces the number of options in the end.

I actually think the pacing in sPvP is still too slow. Because people don’t die fast enough with the lowered offensive stats/damage potential (an upwards of 60% from WvW depending on profession/build), it over-punishes the value in building offensively, and thus, as compensation (and as we’ve seen in HoT), elites get tons of innate/high-damage abilities but even more buffed defenses to compensate being incapable of bunkering.

Not to mention that boons themselves are imbalanced between sPvP and PvE/WvW, such that the weight of each boon in sPvP is way more significant than WvW since again, the stats themselves from gear/amulets are just so much lower in sPvP.

cptaylor.2670:

Would be nice to see a few gay male couples though. I feel like every corner I turn I’m running into a lesbian couple.

There’s that norn in HoT.

Typically F/F is less taboo.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Xenesis.6389:

DeceiverX.8361:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I’m actually having fun in this current match. All 9 servers that are against each other atm, rofl.

Gate Of Madness, Ferguson’s Crossing, Sorrow’s Furnace
Crystal Desert, Borlis Pass, Kaineng, Eredon Terrace
Darkhaven, Ehmry Bay

The blobs are insanity.

Which is exactly what the format needed: uneven pairings to compensate for differences in individual servers and tiers. I’ve been vouching for this kind of chaos for years, as this is how it was at release, and was genuinely fun. Super serious? No. But fun matters more, because fun keeps people playing since it’s the point of playing games.

Now, if the pairings were redone by other factors such as online presence over time, number of fight events over time, tag uptime, and so on, and then balanced around that data rather than glicko, we’d be looking at some pretty crazy matchups, such as having tons of low-tier servers versus one in T1, and the likes.

It looks like DH/EB are going to be the but end of this joke for 2 months. Probably the effects of t8 servers not wanting to be up in tiers, but wasn’t expecting a 2v3v4 matchup, seems like the wrong servers were chosen for the 2. I’m throwing out that theory out about wanting even servers up and down the tiers. Maybe the 4 servers will manage to break the t3 ceiling.

We’ll have to see how the week plays out. It’s the weekend and a brand new match up, that is sure to bring out all the PVX fairweathers. The blobs are real but the talent was kitten near non existent, I’m pretty sure the majority aren’t WvW regulars and won’t stick around for the next 2 months.

The other half of my suggestion/theory was contingent on very short term pairings such that things wouldn’t stagnate and the intrigue would pretty much always be there.

Yea, T1 servers will remain dominant and more effective with their unity on their own server, but these kinds of matches make the low tiers action-packed and volatile enough to be really dynamic and interesting.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I’m actually having fun in this current match. All 9 servers that are against each other atm, rofl.

Gate Of Madness, Ferguson’s Crossing, Sorrow’s Furnace
Crystal Desert, Borlis Pass, Kaineng, Eredon Terrace
Darkhaven, Ehmry Bay

The blobs are insanity.

Which is exactly what the format needed: uneven pairings to compensate for differences in individual servers and tiers. I’ve been vouching for this kind of chaos for years, as this is how it was at release, and was genuinely fun. Super serious? No. But fun matters more, because fun keeps people playing since it’s the point of playing games.

Now, if the pairings were redone by other factors such as online presence over time, number of fight events over time, tag uptime, and so on, and then balanced around that data rather than glicko, we’d be looking at some pretty crazy matchups, such as having tons of low-tier servers versus one in T1, and the likes.

Some of those reviews, particularly criticizing management and leadership as the primary concerns are on the older side. Almost all of the praise seems to come from past work experience with the company (GW1 and development for GW2).

Since there is heavy praise for the past, and MO has been there from the start, I think it’s fair to say it’s not him.

Part of me suspects it could be NCSoft’s interactions and creeping presence, but another suggests that it could have been (though not entirely) Colin mucking things up, particularly with what’s said about the “directors” and project leads being totally incompetent. This would also explain the departure after the blunder of HoT.

stephanie wise.7841:

any system run at the speed of the lowest performance component in the system and this is always the hard drive so consider a faster hard drive consider ssd pretty cheap also. adding memory can also help buy a 64 bits system it can use a lot more memory then 32 bit(3.5gb) gw 2 as a 64 bit client now. for graphic card that do not have their own memory it use 45 % of your system memory also be aware of that.

gw 2 is not optimize yet for multi core cpu but some of the other games that you might want to use can be so get one any way. even if the game does not use it it can split other task being done on the system. also with windows 10 and dx 12 game that are optimize in the future will use that.

also intel cpu i7 have integrated hd graphic on board and with dx 12 there is something new that can make use of all your graphic card on board what ever size or brand.
it is a feature that game dev will have to enable for it to work.

follow the link you will see the difference of using this.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/DirectX-Developer-Blog/DirectX-12-Multiadapter-Unreal-Engine-4

You probably know that DirectX 12 is designed for performance.

What you may not know is that the same design decisions that make DirectX 12 so performant also make it incredibly power efficient. This allows you to play all of your favorite games on portable devices without having an uncomfortably hot device on your lap or as much of a need to carry around a cumbersome power adapter.

Nothing made in the last eight years is running less than four cores, though. 32-bit systems are far from industry standard.

Hard drive will only really affect boot time on the pc itself and loading screens in most cases, which frankly only matter for super-enthusiasts, especially since Win10 boots so fast even without an SSD.

Hexinx.1872:

ASUS all the way… been on my ASUS laptop since launch, and no issues. I do however still have a win8.1 operating system and refuse adamantly to change to win 10 …. (here’s me waving my middle to MSFT).

I generally play in WvW with heavy battles and no issues.

I think MSI is the better manufacturer these days. So far of 4 ASUS products I’ve had, all of them have been faulty, RMA’d, and I’ve been given used/refurbs as compensation (because the technicians couldn’t fix them because the parts themselves were manufactured poorly), rather than new models, despite being under warranty.

I advise ASUS customers of older models not to update to Win10 because ASUS is a horrible parts manufacturer when it comes to supporting their off-warranty systems’ drivers, too. Pretty much if it’s > 2 years old, forget about new drivers for a new OS.

Windows 10 is amazing from a tech POV and with Classic Shell and other utilities and when opting out of MS data collecting, becomes a strictly better Windows 7.

If you play on a G75VW or similar model, however, you will have no good drivers. ASUS has yet to release drivers for Win10 on these “older” machines (I did a factory reset on mine with a Win10 upgrade a few days ago, drivers are in a horrible state/non-existent for some things).

As far as the OP goes, single-core performance is pretty terrible on most laptops, and the game isn’t GPU-heavy. A gaming laptop will do decently, but there is no close comparison to a desktop running at double the CPU performance, especially with OC’ed RAM and increased cache sizes. An everyday laptop will probably get you above 30 frames in low-population areas, but that’s heavily-dependent on how your laptop cools and if it has a dedicated graphics card or not. Intel’s pushing hard with new on-chip GPU’s to a point where even entry-middle level dGPUs are losing ground fast.

You’d be able to get an ASUS G75VW from 2012 or so or similar for fairly cheap these days, but be aware of the Win10 problems. You’ll easily spend ten hours working with drivers to get basic functionality, and that’s with no guarantee from the manufacturer it’ll continue working.

Backstab only underperforms in sPvP because the cast time and setup doesn’t become worthwhile. WvW, the skill hits very hard and doesn’t need a damage buff. Again, this is an issue only because sPvP and WvW do not have normalized stats as they should, as WvW allows the thief to have tons more combat potential from its damage potential due to the higher stats and better-than-average damage modifiers.

Shadow Show isn’t a good basis for comparison because the skill is objectively OP. If Death Blossom got the mobility (some kind of lunge/gap-closer) for catch-up that D/P has, the set would be in dramatically better shape and up the skill cap but also counter availability to D/D conditions by enabling the animation/distance to be extended and thus dodged easier, but allowing the set to re-position better (think working like Death’s Charge on the reaper).

Unblockable CnD is nice, but the change to BV already nullify a lot of the purpose and proposed utility. Initiative cost dropped to 5 or even 4 is probably the best approach to let the set have consistent stealth access uptime while not negating counterplay opportunities and allowing its power build to utilize more thorough use of Death Blossom and Dancing Dagger to avoid damage and re-position during a foe’s periods of invulnerability.

D/D isn’t really meant to be about stacking stealth from its design, though. It’s more about the viability in options while not in stealth via evades and AoE damage application (well, what should be on Dancing Dagger). x/P is meant to stack stealth.

I actually kind of think a shadowstep on Dancing Dagger would be a nerf more than a buff. That range is critical sometimes when aiming up or down structures (since using the physics to your advantage can get the daggers going for > 2k range).

Damage buffs can’t really be afforded for it, either. It’d work in sPvP (with nerfs; those numbers are crazy), but absolutely not WvW. Signet stab 100-0’s most other squishies, so it’s not really about the damage but really that the rest of the kit has poor utility and low reliability. This disparity is caused because of sPvP’s horrible raw stats and having the thief’s damage already come from multipliers, though. Normalizing the two would be best, but people keep chanting for separation of balance or whatnot when the solution lies in unifying the two formats.

Normalizing and buffing DD to hit harder but not bounce, DB getting a shift to provide combat mobility and simply either reducing the cost of CnD or increasing its consistency would do the set wonders.

Some people love playing support/healing roles, OP.

No, the game wasn’t designed to have any profession fill those roles. If that was the case, ANet lied in its manifesto and failed miserably.

The true goal for the game was that any comp could beat any encounter, which we saw with dungeons.

Since people raged about the “zerk meta” ANet implemented hard roles for professions to perform in raids.

And now we have support-based builds based on an open-ended framework which gets enforced due to the design of the content.

See, what people kitten ingly failed to recognize is that any role-based design is strict enforcement of a player-driven meta; that’s it. It doesn’t make the roles any more enjoyable, it just enforces the dependency and puts more strict emphasis on having the correct comp.

People brought this on themselves demanding for these roles to be mandatory in play or have such an emphasis put on them; there will always be a meta, and people will always enjoy playing in certain ways. That’s just how things work, because pushing for efficiency and recognizing and subsequently following patterns and procedures for success is human nature and part of intelligence.

DeWolfe.2174:

If we tried to spread out there wouldn’t be enough on the maps. People have been utterly delusional for the past 3 years with this same rhetoric. There wasn’t enough players for 24 NA server’s then and certainly we don’t have enough for the 4 paired now.

This is untrue for 2012 and early 2013. Every server close to launch had queues in pretty much every WvW zone.

People aren’t interested in de-stacking themselves, though. We’ve seen from HoD and overall general player attitude that player-driven free-transfers result in the worst-case scenarios.

Really, everyone’s out for greener pastures because some system implementation or aspect of WvW has failed those interested.

You can be on the forefront of innovating and min-maxing, but truth be told, others will probably run what you’re running, either from figuring it out for themselves or talking to someone else who did.

I claim myself as a thief who’s been on the forefront of signet D/D since 2012, but to claim ownership of the build is kinda ridiculous seeing as ANet made the synergy and Yski was much more vocal about promoting it and also figured out effective ways to play it early on.

Tbh, the first duel had a good moment when you stabbed the guy during his stealth with BP, but on the converse, he was kinda dumb to try and repeatedly stealth with it in a duel against another already-stealthed thief. Shadow Shot carried your engage and pressure because you got juked really, really bad throughout.

While melee is certainly doable, the mechanics of HoT definitely promote range. I soloed the champions HP’s (before they got nerfed due to the monstrous difficulty) in HoT on a poorly-geared alternate thief (core thief, mind you) using P/P with almost no issues. D/D made things a lot more difficult for next to no reason.

I actually AFK’ed some of the fights on my ranger, though that’s more or a pet issue than anything, as the pet could go a solid few minutes of facetanking hits without dying.

HoT isn’t friendly to melee at all, but it isn’t impossible. This is more along the lines of the design of the monsters just being poor (big surprise here /s) than anything, though.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Been thinking about this for a few months and have a write up on an elite spec idea that wasn’t finished. I might just post what I have tonight even if it isn’t fully done.

Silverkey.2078:

For me, there are a few roles which I would like to improve on. The first example is phantasm-free sustained damage. Sadly, I don’t see how this can be done at the elite spec level, so I feel this should be fixed at the core level (as usual see my suggestions in my signature).

I don’t think they will do a rework at this point. I think the best place for a DPS buff to Mesmer is an elite spec. Since Chrono keeps getting base Mesmer nerfed, I’ve accepted the elite spec power creep. That isn’t going to change. Base mesmer won’t get buffs or chrono will ruin it even more.

Loony.3714:

We have pretty great burst but our sustain is really lacking. While im not sure how to accomplish this, and personally enjoy the support role, I think a damaging role should be next.

Levetty.1279:

Mad deeps.

Doubt they will do a big phantasm rework for an elite spec (or ever) but with a combination of traits, replacing F1-4 and a new weapon something decent could happen.
…
Not sure on utilities but we will need swiftness, condi cleanse and depending on the weapon and what they do to shatters with the spec we will need more aoe.

So idea I had:
F1 and F2 are now pulsing AOE. Burst is lower but the sustain DPS becomes higher. This also means the elite spec can buff phantasm/other mesmer damage more without making them “OP” in PvP with high burst and sustain DPS in infamous 6/6/6/6/6 builds.

Example utility: Illusion of Weakness: 1 sec cast time. Gain self weakness, current phantasms do 30-40% more damage for X time. Would be mostly useless in PvP but gives a nice buff to PvE dps. Other utilities would be selfish in different ways.

Pistol/Pistol: Heavily focused on interrupt and damage with little defense. With DD it would be an interrupt/DPS snowball weapon set.

Pretty much exactly what needs to happen. Simply, to buff DPS to make mesmers be able to fill that role, the innate burst and utility tied to the class mechanic needs to go and be filled with something to enable more damage per unit of time while not just pumping out more numbers on top of the existing burst-heavy kit.

Even things like just summoning illusions themselves would go a long way, which is frankly where I think F2-F4 in terms of design should have gone to begin with, so that the class could allow for numbers tweaks and trait/utility adjustments to balance burst vs DPS vs sustain without the mess of just having a bit of it all tied into the kit innately.

XTR.9604:

I wonder if you people realize that there are other servers outside of tier 1 lol.. Blackgate is only a problem for YB and TC. No one else cares, and if you don’t like fighting them – go transfer to a different server. Really, all of the complaining about Blackgate when you’re willing to do nothing about it is getting old. I can’t go in to a WvW thread without seeing someone crying about fighting Blackgate.

Come on down to T2 or T3, it is a lot more fun than T1. I can personally vouch for that as someone who was on Blackgate and transferred to a T3 server that became a T2 server (Borlis Pass/Fort Aspenwood.)

True story, I joined TC when it was in T2 (like pushing 7-8 months ago now before the stacking) because the fights in T2 were fantastic and overall the scoring and populations were pretty even with TC’s reduced numbers. Remember those < 15k leading score weeks? That period was the most fun I’ve had in years of WvW.

The problem is politics and transfers get in the way of this enjoyment. People get bored and shake up lower tiers while transferring down, throwing a wrench in everything.

Nobody wants to disperse and lose. That’s why you can’t have players make the decisions of who fights who/goes where without having very rapid re-adjustment of matchups to remove the incentive from stacking.

I’m pretty sure my data is way skewn since I’m one of those people who will keep charging head-first into unwinnable fights in WvW just to see how long I can last.

Also, when I first joined I was so scrubby at combat it’s awful. I’m pretty sure I died a few hundred times in the leveling process going into over-leveled zones and story content since I didn’t understand how this game’s gearing tiers and level systems worked (the game I came from you fought mobs 10-14 levels above you most of the time).

As you’ve found out, shortbow is used mostly for competitive formats for its mobility. Cast it upwards underneath/up cliffsides and structures, and many will let you skip having to platform. This is pretty essential when rapidly moving around the PvP map, since you won’t be defending points or staying for fights in most cases. The shortbow itself is only particularly required in sPvP; it’s not really needed for WvW (though many recommend it for its utility and map-traversal speed), and certainly not for PvE unless your party needs more blast finishers (which is situational by comp).

As said above, if you detonate the cast of CB as the bob enters your target’kittenbox (close to the ground), the combined damage from the multiple attacks will deal more damage than the single bomb. However, you will miss out on the blast finisher, so it kind of depends on the situation, as blasting a water field and healing yourself/allies can mean much more than just getting a marginal damage increase.

Jana.6831:

Straegen.2938:

I ran into a buzzsaw of a D/D, Staff, Acro build. They basically used D/D as an up close killer, Staff for mobility/AoE damage and used CnD on guaranteed stealths. Worked really well but the skill requirement is clearly high.

Don’t know if you mean “they used CnD when they knew they’d have a guaranteed stealth” – no CnD is guaranteed since June last year (and even before) thanks to all the blocks and passives – one of the reasons D/D is dead. The guy you saw got lucky against whoever he was fighting.

Not even this so much due to the buff to BV, but in the case of a CnD → Backstab combo, by the time you do have a guaranteed CnD/Stab and the passives, blocks, invulns, blurs, etc. are burned, the thief is either dead or out of gas on initiative having needed to spend it all on evades with DB, disengages, etc.

The set suffers from consistency issues and relatively under-performing skills compared to D/P and staff. The huge push to DB D/D condi and continuous nerfing to its power build either directly or indirectly have let the set deteriorate in its uses in sPvP in particular, since even its huge burst build options have next to no viability due to low power/ferocity scaling in sPvP from amulets and a high emphasis on defensive builds.

Straegen.2938:

briggah.7910:

yea roaming is pretty bad nowadays. any fight i win it is because my build is cheese and any fight i lose is because my enemies build is cheesier than mine.

I think that is how it works in most if not all competitive modes in games where players craft their builds. Call it “Build of the Month”, “Munchkin Build”, etc it applies in almost every case for games like GW2.

I remember Munchkin Builds all the way back to the 70s playing DnD with a dart throwing Ranger that was basically unhittable and dished ridiculous damage which is not so different than several GW2 builds.

Only to a degree. The better-designed a game is, the less ridiculous these edge cases can be.

All games can be broken down into mathematical equations or graphs. Complexity increases the difficulty of doing so, but it’s attainable. Even basic math and relatively minor graphing can provide pretty obvious demonstration that most of the new content in GW2 is totally imbalanced, without even needing to get into the subjective risk/reward analysis which is often data-driven.

XTR.9604:

Please tell me what is wrong with sharing my videos that help further prove my point? Why is that “shameless twitch self-promotion” exactly? Because it disproves your point while linking to my twitch stream that proves mine???

It was initially a half-joke, because you’re responding off-topic to what I said in my original post and using yourself as the golden standard of how to play WvW. As you just did by saying a majority of people are trash. As you did for calling me out saying I have L2P problems or implicitly attacking my longevity here (I’ve also been here more than three years), and so on. Your guildmates pretty much spam your guild’s stream every post they make on these boards. The egoism is getting annoying in all honesty, and I’m not the first to say it.

I watched your videos, mate. The footage honestly wasn’t amazing-OMG-impressive for highlights. You’re good and all, but that’s not highlight-worthy play. Especially the O/N video with [EviL]. They barely even fought aside from a few rangers pressing 1 and 4 every so often, often being so stupid as to target the more durable of your party members who have a plethora of reflects and mitigation. It was cool and all, but hardly a nail-biter-ICan’tBelieveThatJustHappened.jpeg

It’d have taken a decent thief or half-decent play by one or two of the many druids in the video using SS and CC to shred your tempest. It didn’t happen, though, because your enemies weren’t any good.

Like I said, the roaming is there. The skilled play is not. So what’s the point if your opponents are so sub-par? What’s the point if everyone just runs cheese with no counter (and tempest is very far from that category, mind you)? Or if something is totally imbalanced, everyone knows it, and ANet lacks the willingness to fix it? It’s one thing to min-max to be hyper-effective in something. Such shouldn’t come without tradeoffs, though. That’s what happened in HoT. We’re pushing more or less Build Wars 2. That’s not competitive for an action-based game and for those who build to take advantage of those features, but have mathematically low chances of winning based on build decisions. That’s why I hate sPvP.

XTR.9604:

Everything roaming is running cheese right now, the idea with roaming is to maximize your survivability as well as damage.

The early premise of roaming and havoc was to take objectives while the enemy main groups are occupied, and/or to occupy the main enemy group as best as possible if confronted, such that the main allied group could take objectives. It let small, organized communities have a distinct impact on the WvW score, empowering them, and pushed the overall success of the server. The incentive of doing it is to get good fights that aren’t karma-trains/lag-out-blobs using the build diversity available in WvW to create such dynamic environments.

I’m not going to tell you how to play, because that’s none of my business, but how exactly to build one’s character in the concept of roaming has no universal definition. If it was to just run the most OP builds and maximize the damage output per unit of defense, again, why not play sPvP where the entire game mode is catered to doing so and is designed to reward the players who do it best? Because of theorycrafting? C’mon, most people can optimize stats. That’s why sPvP is so rigid and frankly, so boring. The more people push for zero-tradeoffs, the more stagnant and boring the game gets. And that’s what’s in WvW right now, which is why I said for the guy not to bother. The dynamism is pretty much all gone. It’s not that I haven’t put in the effort to take advantage of what’s available; it’s that what’s available is mathematically overpowered and I’ve identified it as such because I’ve put in the effort.

We all theorycraft, mate. I’ve put in probably half of my playtime’s-worth of doing so myself at this point between the analysis, plotting, and scripting play simulations to check for consistency in my builds. It’s great and all that people do it, and is also why sPvP has a huge number of problems since it removes this granularity, but these days with HoT, it’s not really difficult to find something semi-optimized and totally overpowered. I play what’s most fun – which often comes playing at a disadvantage – because I like the challenge. A build that’s implcittly harder to play, has more counters, etc., should just be that much better at what it does than its competition. That’s not the reality right now; the lowest-skill builds are the objective best, and people are getting carried by builds with the new HoT content, rather than playing well. The core game had a lot of sacrifices made as a compromise to most professions and builds. This no longer holds true, so weighing these decisions often becomes much easier or negligible as a whole. That’s why I personally loved to play small-scale WvW. Because it actually rewarded skilled play proportionally. Because unlike the frontline omniblob or sPvP, it wasn’t just about the numbers, as much as they helped. It was about being better than your opponent, and fighting tooth and nail in a fast-pace environment for a win.

It’s fine to disagree. It’s the notion that you pinned my negative outlook on WvW to incorrectly-implied perceptions of what I said by blatantly not paying attention, and then accused me of playing poorly for making claims that the quality is no longer there/elites/gear combos are busted OP, and stating it all as fact as though somehow my formal analysis means nothing because of some anecdotal evidence of a few fights you’ve had that I find is ridiculous and shameful. It’s not about the stream, but the egoism, instead.

kiwituatara.6053:

Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365:

Turamarth.3248:

Djahlat.9610:

Channel skills like Rapid Fire don’t track strealthed enemies, it’s been changed well over 2 years ago

No.
If the skill is started while the thief is still visible then the attack will track him into stealth.

This. And thats with all channeled targeted skills. Unless you move behind the target, then it’ll stop… again unless it’s the Berserker fire sword thing.

I think channel attacks don’t track if the user is using action camera. I haven’t tested it out, but a few people in the ranger community have complained about it before.

Correct.

However, AC has benefits to stealth as well; you can begin casting RF and hit and manually follow a stealthed enemy, rather than just having no arrows spawn due to not having a target (most single-target channeled skills will not generate the attacks at all without a target).

So AC is better if the target is already invisible and you know where the foe is, but worse if you start the channel and the foe stealths in the middle of it.

Unplayable in sPvP, somewhat-to-none in WvW. I genuinely think you’re best-off just running full-offensive traits to make use of the burst. D/P does better at resetting, staff better at all-in, S/D better at tempo, P/P better at burst and safety.

Pretty much anything but condi is largely unplayable in WvW at the moment unless your opponents are playing power or are just bad, though.

No Walking.6349:

Anet, I haven’t played GW2 in a while, but after having put almost 3k hours into it over the years I still follow it here on the forums and on Reddit. You’re losing a lot of players because of these two things.

1. Prioritizing balance over fun. Fun > balance, always. I’ve seen you guys nerf things that people were having a BLAST with over and over again for years now simply because a small number of people whined that it was imbalanced (EotM, OS, Capricorn, dungeons, etc). Stop doing this.
2. Catering to the hardcore crowd. What percent of your player-base raids? 10-15 percent? Yet you still pump out tons of content for them and none for your majority player-base. Stop doing this, cater to your big populations, that’s casuals, WvW, and SPvP players.

Just thought I’d let you know, since you seem intent on wrecking this great game more and more with every patch. I’ll be watching, playing other MMOs, as will many others. Hope to enjoy GW2 again some day if you guys can get it on the right path.

Number 1 shouldn’t be a problem. Having some things being distinctly OP or weak is definitively bad. Consider all the mesmers and rangers who got kicked from LFG/dungeons before HoT. Their definition of fun is playing the class. The classes were (and still are) poorly-balanced and thus they were not invited to do fun content. Often times, balance = fun, as imbalance impedes it tremendously.

The problem is ANet is straight-up awful at class balance and design. Balance by nature within some set of tolerances is subjective and varies at certain levels of play. The fact that there are mathematically overpowered/underpowered builds/gear options/etc. by massive margins and simply flawed designs suggests a lack of competence.

Balance is also often easier to do than making new content. It takes a lot less effort to tweak some numbers in a game engine and recompile some scripts than it does to make new assets/scripts/animations/textures and the likes.