Guild Wars 2

antidote.7201:

Blame Onslaught [onS] and Tempest Wolves [TW] from Blackgate, those guilds are actually responsible of the bad state of NA’s wvw. Transferring from BG to JQ, then TC, then YB, and going back to BG, with god knows how many accounts : that’s the only result we could have expected for NA.

If you’re a real wvw’er and looking for challenge, come to EU, the matchups are fair and people don’t follow the others like sheeps does

It’s almost like the masses who left TC due to the T1 invasion were right about a lack of loyalty coming from servers who have a long history of bandwagoning and making unfun and unfair matchups who ditch at the first sight of greener pastures.

BG is overstacked. It’s that simple. What do you do when you’re being farmed? Not play/fight because there’s no point in fighting something you can’t beat (especially now since HoT made WvW emphasize numbers way more via hardened siege, overpowered elite specs, BS guild upgrades, and broken gear options such as durability runes).

Until players no longer have the option of stacking servers/matchups, this issue will perpetuate and will continue to reduce the overall WvW population.

XTR.9604:

DeceiverX.8361:

Small scale and roaming are a joke with HoT’s awful profession and gear imbalances, so I wouldn’t even try to even bother at this point.

Sounds like an uneducated answer. My guilds whole purpose is small scale roaming, it can be anything between solo roaming and running 8 people, but generally its 4 to 5. I stream our runs and you can see pretty easily in my stream that roaming is not dead and if you can’t figure out how to play against or with the new elite specs, it is a L2P issue.

http://asphyxia.tv/stream-highlights/

Some of my stream highlights that I had time to highlight, most are just 1v1s that weren’t set up, they just kind of happened while solo roaming and there there is one that was a pretty fun where we had a 5 man XT group as well. http://asphyxia.tv/outnumbered-xt-wreckage/

Roaming is far from dead, it certainly isn’t what it used to be but it is still plenty alive and viable.

Shameless twitch self-promotion aside, it’s not that roaming doesn’t exist; I never said it was dead, nor did I say anything about the number of people doing it. I said it wasn’t worth doing, because it isn’t. It’s that in all seriousness, the fights themselves are garbage. The elite specs are way overpowered compared to core, and if you honestly are going to refute that to the public, you’ll probably get laughed out of any competitive format. Actually, if you think elite specs aren’t absolutely stupid in terms of power creep and struggle to beat anyone playing core, the issue is a L2P one, like you said.

In small-scale right now, either you run super tryhard cheese or get blown up by the (good) people who do. If you’re winning without cheese, your opponents are just bad.

To me, that’s no better than sPvP where build access is so limited by effectively the same measures (albeit for different specific reasons).

I’ve largely been there and done that. I’ve played the havoc guild that carried servers. I’ve fought 4v20 before and won using fair builds. The people who’ve been around the block long enough to really talk about roaming (and most of those have quit) recognize that small-scale right now is a pathetic excuse for a competitive combat experience because of blatant balance neglect and mass-playing of toxic, skill-less builds that people use in gank groups to pretend they’re good in ego-stroking circlejerks of self-promotion in attempts to justify fighting dirty.

If you like to play cheese, power to you, but it’s such a sad excuse for intriguing and thought-based gameplay to even warrant it taking a competitive nature outside of trolling.

The quality play of roaming is gone, which is the entire purpose of going small-scale. So I stand by my statement: Don’t bother.

Not seeing a problem when even paltry WvW loot has gotten me crafting disciplines to 500, ascended armor sets on several characters, and probably ten to fifteen stacks of the stuff on my characters and bank.

It drove up ascended armor in price to buy, but if you play the game, click some lootbags, and salvage stuff, you’ll have plenty in time.

Teon.5168:

Raf.1078:

Teon.5168:

Vova.2640:

Hopefully never…

Guess you didn’t see the poll…..

Guess you never saw the empty desert BL’s and EBG queued to the gills before?

Lol. Man, you guys are really sore about getting stomped in the poll, huh?

Not so much that as much as that this is the popular opinion among people who did leave and came back.

For example, and I know well I’m not the only one in this situation, my guild left because of DBL, came back because Alpine did, and has repeatedly said they will leave for the next DBL addon and come back when Alpine returns.

A ton of people who cared and would have voiced their opposition have already left. The people who liked the DBL or didn’t mind it are obviously the ones still here, so the entire prospect of the poll is biased and the results genuinely mean next to nothing; the damage has largely already been done.

Donari.5237:

Um … I was born in 1965. I’m a retired lawyer, no kids. I’ve been into F&SF and gaming since I was 10 years old. I’ve played GW2 since beta. I do love the cooperative nature of the game, especially after 7 years in WoW with all the node and kill stealing.

I get plenty of rewards without touching WvW or PvP. I even made HOPE, just had to buy the WvW/PvP tokens on the TP.

And y’know? People who truly care for cooperative interactions won’t mind that some people get rewards they can’t, when those people go into competitive play that doesn’t interest them. Cooperation means not worrying about keeping up with the Joneses.

Nailed it.

Further, consider the converse of the OP’s argument, the people who only PvP or play in WvW; These players have missed out on all of the rewards the PvE-only crowd has gotten access to pretty much since release, and had no real tie-ins to their gameplay to get fancy loot and things.

Legendaries and prestigious gear in GW2 are not rewarded to necessarily the best or most dedicated players to one particular format, but to players who are on the top echelons of all the game modes.

While I don’t really agree with it, stating that the game needs to enable PvE/non-competitive players to get the best/most dignified gear in the entire game because of a dependency or two on things outside of PvE is a pretty big slight to those who exclusively play the other formats (and there are and once were a huge number of people who played only such formats).

Further, we’re not talking even competitive gear but instead BiS “Legendary”-rarity stuff. It’s not supposed to be attainable by everyone and is supposed to reward the best of the best. Unless one proves himself as being of that status (I.E. having such exclusive skins/content), one can’t make the claim that they’re as good as they say they are.

Frankly, the prospect of RNG on precursors is more infuriating to me, as there are times when new 80’s get their first exotic and it’s a precursor, while others struggle to get one after thousands of drops/forges/gold in attempts from hard work and come out with nothing.

Small scale and roaming are a joke with HoT’s awful profession and gear imbalances, so I wouldn’t even try to even bother at this point.

Justine.6351:

DeceiverX.8361:

But yea, all you really did was counter a normal thief with steal capabilities of D/D power.

I thought he was condi not power?

He was. But his stealth access is the same as a D/D power build and his damage just as dependent due to it coming from Sneak Attack, for you to use as a reference (since those are more common). A ghost thief would have never left stealth at all.

Likely most instances came from Panic Strike (again you were under half hp a lot), and it’s also very likely he was running trap on heal.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trappers_Respite

But yea, all you really did was counter a normal thief with steal capabilities of D/D power.

Edited above. P/D 2 probably being spammed (I thought you were referring to the actual skill Throw Bolas on the warrior/sentries from camp initially).

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Body_Shot

Yea, that wasn’t a ghost thief. That was just P/D condi.

Justine.6351:

Warhawk.7095:

Lol that first video you’re fighting Hugh, who doesn’t even run traps? A condi thief yes, but no trapper, and certainly no “ghost thief”.

Oh I thought when I was being immobilized I was eating traps. Or is that the bola thing I see once in a while?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Panic_Strike

Most of the fight you were under half HP.

P/D 2 is an immob a swell.

Cecilia.5179:

Jayne.9251:

Until they resolve bandwaggoning, there is no “fix” for uneven matches. All the OPs suggestion would do is delay the inevitable and cause mass chaos in the process.

The best fix for bandwagoning is to disperse the overcongested top tier severs that double what the current population cap is. So long as population isn’t exploited again, bandwagoning will never be as bad as it currently is.

DeceiverX.8361:

The biggest problem about opening up matchmaking to players, especially if free or cheap, is that it creates incentive to stack more. But then if you drive up prices, it makes it harder for smaller groups to even begin trying to assemble.

A wipe would only work by randomly allocating every player as an individual to a random server, but this would obviously destroy guilds and many sub-communities, which would also drop participation from WvW in general.

The only way to fix the problem is to link servers very frequently to a point where the only reliable allies are your server-mates (to increase server loyalty/community cohesion), and to allocate servers into mixed pools to balance the matches as best as possible, based on player data such as activity per time (AKA coverage), total combatants, number of fights, number of structure flips and their corresponding times, etc., even if this means doing something like having five low-tier servers allied together on one side versus two from T2 versus one from T1.

Without this kind of system, stagnation and stacking and/or the massive destruction of WvW and its communities is guaranteed.

Limiting WvW to one set of maps would drastically increase queues, and having 12 identical maps in one matchup is redundant. Splitting up every guild and community isn’t important when you can arrange with friends to pick a server you like the sound of. Wiping out the existence of the existing tiers, if only until top guilds form alliances, will make matches more competitive. Even if guild alliances exist, it comes down to player interaction and politics, which is more interesting than a giant of cluster of people stuck on the same server forever.

I don’t think you understand my proposal.

It’s not all-in-one or split evenly at all.

The number of tiers themselves would become volatile based on data-driven analysis using some kind of AI to automate the process, with some initial degree of RNG as to prevent stagnant matchups.

The entire concept of tiers is removed up until matchmaking is decided.

So one week the matchups may look like they are now with several sets of servers linked in pairs, whereas another week there might be a “T1” server matched against two other links consisting of several lower effective-tier/ranked servers each.

If things like population considerations and coverage are minded by the system (lots of data processing through a genetic neural net), there also won’t be drastically increased queues, either.

This random pairing and high volatility of the pairings which then are based on previous play-data prevents stacking in all forms, prevents tier-plummeting, and balances matchups dynamically week-to-week, overall decreasing runaway matches and stagnation/“Tier lock” while enforcing server communities to band together for their own personal ranks, and such communities would be the only things consistent through matchups.

Allowing matchmaking to be decided by the players reduces competitiveness long-term and reduces the number of active players in WvW as a whole. This has occurred many times throughout WvW history, and has all culminated in the same effect: a net loss of players, fractured communities, lower net competition, and overall increased bandwagoning and guild monopoly. Guilds are not fighting for resources and therefore have little stake in fighting each other aside from doing it for fun. As we’ve seen many, many times, once-competing guilds will often bandwagon to another server/alliance together to dominate the scene once bored of fighting each other and going nowhere in terms of match volatility. Loyalty to fight a dedicated enemy is nonexistent in this game, and thus player-driven matchups would encourage sprawling alliances and similar matchup deadlock.

The biggest problem about opening up matchmaking to players, especially if free or cheap, is that it creates incentive to stack more. But then if you drive up prices, it makes it harder for smaller groups to even begin trying to assemble.

A wipe would only work by randomly allocating every player as an individual to a random server, but this would obviously destroy guilds and many sub-communities, which would also drop participation from WvW in general.

The only way to fix the problem is to link servers very frequently to a point where the only reliable allies are your server-mates (to increase server loyalty/community cohesion), and to allocate servers into mixed pools to balance the matches as best as possible, based on player data such as activity per time (AKA coverage), total combatants, number of fights, number of structure flips and their corresponding times, etc., even if this means doing something like having five low-tier servers allied together on one side versus two from T2 versus one from T1.

Without this kind of system, stagnation and stacking and/or the massive destruction of WvW and its communities is guaranteed.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Dawdler.8521:

Jim Hunter.6821:

The downed state is a pretty broken system outside of 1v1’s, and players blobbing together already have a huge advantage over smaller groups, this would really give the outnumbered players a fighting chance.

Except this would make it even more broken in small scale. Outmanned is global, not local. IE you can fight 5v3 while technically being “outmanned” because there is a 70 man blob elsewhere on the map. Is that fair?

You’d have to change the outmanned system entirerly. Which they wont bother with.

I know how it works and I already considered that. If you are fighting larger numbers going down is a death sentence 90% of the time anyway, it will barely make a difference in those situations.

Ehhhh… multi-rally reduction hit small groups harder than people thought because often times people run utility to get people up while in small groups.

I recall an instance of a 6v20 my guild did. A few members and I went down several times, but good spike/cleave timing and coordinated resurrection efforts let us win the fight. Since none of us got finished, none of the opponents could rally.

Having a bigger group take that advantage just seems a little excessive.

The ON buff shouldn’t really need to exist if matchups were done better by using heuristic data of participation rather than just glicko scoring.

S/P is largely invalidated, though. P/P on Unload does way more damage with a much higher degree of safety, particularly when using DrD.

Do know that the “83k” you’re hitting is the total damage dealt among all shots from multiple unloads.

The game maintains a running tally of damage from multi-hit attacks based on the skill itself, and since there is no cooldown on Unload due to initiative, each additional unload also adds to said tally.

That’s not to say the damage from unload isn’t high – it’s got potential for the best damage-per-skill in the game – but you’re not hitting that much damage per hit, and thus, the DPS is lower than what other weapons can provide.

That’s very strange. In the video, you consistently missed every other SS as well. I just went in-game and tried to replicate it with no success; every skill (in sPvP as well) landed, no whiffed Shadow Shots at all, etc., even on the same golems.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

You’re out of practice, or lagging. I’m doing it in-game right now with no issues.

It doesn’t happen all the time, that’s the frustrating part. I have no idea what the conditions are and I cannot recreate the problem, it seems so random…and no it’s not lag because for everything else the timing is smooth then Steal will have a hiccup all of a sudden.

What I’m noticing is, there’s seems to be an algorithm or some function that figures out whether a Steal will produce a stolen item or not. Before they meddled with Steal, if the target is within range, even if the Thief failed to teleport next to the target due to terrain obstruction, a stolen item is produced. They “fixed” that but left an elusive bug.

As of when I was doing it earlier today, I was doing it repeatedly for around 20 minutes intentionally trying to get it to bug out or something; nothing happened.

When I mis-timed it and used steal too early, it immediately whiffed a moving target.

As far as the gif above, I’m not really sure what I just watched o.o

Yea, without running DA/CS/Tr or DA/CS/DrD or the likes, you’re going to see dagger do better since scaling will affect the DPH less than sword due to the multiplicative nature of it, giving attack speed the edge by that point.

Not to say OH dagger has its issues (S/D and D/D both have problems), however MH sword AA under “normal” PvE conditions on a DPS build should be much higher than posted above.

Mind sharing your build epoc? Your AA’s are still pretty weak, and in the video you didn’t have boons (which affect the results of scaling since sword has better coefficients and thus will take advantage of higher power values and more stacked damage-per-hit modifiers). The only thing I can think of is if you’re not built to get scaling damage to take advantage of the higher coefficients on the sword and are thus taking the penalties of lower attack speed.

The other possibility being that they didn’t buff the sword’s animation speed as much as they claimed, and the timings per attack are slightly off. I don’t often do such testing since I don’t PvE, but based on patch notes and what changed and historically the output of the AA chain on Sword, it should be doing better DPS on AA comparisons alone.

You’re out of practice, or lagging. I’m doing it in-game right now with no issues.

@OP

You’re probably just jumping the gun a little bit on the steal cast (maybe lag, who knows). If you’re whiffing FS/Steal you’re probably casting steal too early. It won’t hone the target after the position re-adjustment, so you’ll whiff. The closer you steal to the end of the FS animation, the more reliably you’ll hit, as then your opponent can’t move out of the end of the animation as easily.

JustTrogdor.7892:

Haha @ people arguing physiology in a fantasy game where, for example, a tiny Asura can wield a massive two handed hammer and smash a giant. Forum PvP because reasons.

Someone said it’d break immersion and explained why, counter-arguments were posed, and some facts were disputed.

Frankly, a “tiny” creature wielding a hammer and dealing huge damage with it isn’t that illogical. Give a ten year old a sledgehammer and they’ll be able to kill an adult bear given a good blow to the head (the dexterity of using such a weapon and responding to a bear being things they’d not have experience with, so it’s obviously not a realistic scenario).

Plus, forum PvP is more balanced than the PoS state of the game balance right now in GW2 xD

I’m all for equality but if they let male armors be as skimpy as some of the female ones, I’d be a little fearful of all the max-size max-hair male norn trolls running around in less than tighty-whities and boots.

The expression “Put a shirt on!” exists for a reason :P

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Ganathar.4956:

Diversity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in this case it would be completely immersion-breaking. With all of that fighting and running around, I can’t see any character being chubby.

In Japan, Sumo are some of the healthiest and athletic people on the planet. In wrestling, The Big Show can do a moonsault.

Those are pretty loose definitions of healthiest and most athletic. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not just fat, and many of the most muscular people in the world have large guts, but this claim is pretty untrue. They’re in amazing shape for their size, but only because of the work they do and dedicating themselves entirely to maintaining that size through dietary means as well.

Per Wikipedia:

“The negative health effects of the sumo lifestyle can become apparent later in life. Sumo wrestlers have a life expectancy between 60 and 65, more than 10 years shorter than the average Japanese male. Many develop diabetes or high blood pressure, and they are prone to heart attacks due to the enormous amount of fat they accumulate”

Doing a backflip is also considered much easier than a front-flip, per the words of professional gymnasts and slopestyle skiers/snowboarders.

Unless you’re living for the sumo lifestyle, you’re not holding onto that weight with the amount of cardio our characters do in-game.

I’ve personally gotten Shadow Shot to hit for over 10k in WvW. The unblockable blinding teleport component for that much damage is absurd and most reputable thieves know it.

S/D is in a good spot imho. The set can deal damage if you build for it, get lots of sustain if you build for it, and has quite a bit of built-in utility that lets it enable pressure-based play, cause boon builds to fumble a lot with recent buffs to LS, and can kite pure-melee builds very nicely.

Of all of the weapon sets for the thief, I think D/D is in most dire need of a rework.

1.5k? 1.7k? Those numbers make absolutely no sense. Even my non-crit sword and dagger AA’s per hit on most things hit an upwards of 2-3k. Those numbers are extremely low, and the sword’s better scaling will yield better results with large boon quantities as well (which DPS is often measured under since DPS only matters in PvE where large quantities of boons are mandated for use).

Straegen.2938:

Shinjiko.1352:

then a quick sic em and he literally panicked as I saw him trying to HS into the BP over and over trying to stealth. I only wish sic em was an aoe reveal like the scrapper one as that would have made it even funnier.

It should be. More abilities should proc a forced reveal. Stealth in the game isn’t broken but the general lack of counter play is. Fortunately ANet seems to be adding a bit more here and there. Hopefully they add a bit more.

It’s tough. On one side of the fence putting in more revealed shuts down the core thief pretty much entirely, since the core profession gets its cleanses, heals, mitigation, initiative, and overall deception and viability from stealth (largely SA traitline, no longer necessary since DrD replaces and does better than literally everything in SA). Unless the core thief gets a substantial rework and the new elite enables stealth-less play without just spamming evades like DrD, asking for more things to reveal the thief innately over-punishes the class.

On the other, stealth as a whole is out of control (now huge durations on engineer with tanky gyros that punish killing them), and frankly, more revealed is arguably a necessary addition to the game in concept with classes that don’t depend on it getting huge power spikes.

I think traps should just have a damage component and reveal a stealthed thief, since thief traps are awful in general in respect to their radius/hitbox; they could take on solid power coefficients without issue and give sPvP thief a little better point control or fight assistance without needing to be there to engage in a fight.

BordeL.1283:

babazhook.6805:

Defensive counters are counters. We have had people able to attack out of stealth since this game began but apparently this just goes over peoples heads.

When a thief uses SR or DP with HS to set up a stealth so as to do a backstab the player that faces such an attack reacts defensively. They throw up a block, they dodge even as that thief is stealthed. The randomly move about so as to make it harder for a backstab to be set up and minimize the effects.

I can so the same thing with one of these stealthed thieves and the consequences of missing my counter are far less less that what happens against a set up backstab. This is not rocket science. Far more damge comes from a BV initiated backstab followed up with AA attacks then can come from any of these so called Ghost Thieves.

I do not have to see my opponent to counter or mitigate his attack. End of story. They can not kill you if you use a few simple COUNTER measures.

I could not care less if they hard to kill. I can go out and kill 500 other players in the game. it not required I be able to kill everyone. If someone tries to attack , misses and runs back into a tower to save himself after every attack. I do not feel the need to hang at that tower until I am able to kill him . I move on.

Maybe it’s my already biased opinion against how stealth works in this game that shows, but there’s a difference between fighting a player that might go in and out of stealth to reposition/set up a burst backstab (where, as you said, you can react defensively considering the 2-5 seconds of stealth) and someone that you can never target for the kitten whole fight. This also means that the only information you get from your enemy is if he’s alive (still hurts you) or dead (downed in front of you) and semi-position from the AoE/fields.

Ghost Thief is the only class that can misuse perma stealth while dealing damage. Maybe it’s situationally used now, but what if in another balance update Anet decides to bring up caltrop damage or make tripwire 5target, etc? Will we say “oh now it’s too strong, ghost thief is wrecking the game”? Better cut the crap while it can’t be utterly abused.

I agree with you that other things need to be balanced, such as uber boonspam; perma booned is in the same category than perma stealth in my book ( if you can protect yourself all day, why not stealth all day), but let us go in the right direction.

Sorry if i make big paragraphs, i get like this when there’s somebody brilliant enough to produce counterarguments. Cheers.

That’s exactly it; why wait until it’s too late to fix something that’s already conceptually broken. Even if not broken in implementation, the fact of the matter (as many have said) is that the ghost thief is imbalanced on the conceptual level.

There needs to be a huge re-balance of boons and conditions and their respective accessibility, too. I think I can speak for most people playing WvW that boons and conditions are in no way balanced at the moment, and neither can be fixed independently of the other or without consideration of the other. We’ve seen boon and condition access proliferate explosively since HoT, and the core game is lagging behind on mechanisms to deal with it. Since a vocal (or once-vocal before quitting) majority of competitive players are arguing that HoT has power-creeped the game in a negative way (even the pro league sPvP players on official GW2 streams have complained during the streams and interviews), it’s also only logical that this come in the form of a mass-nerfing and re-balancing of HoT elites/gear parallel to the core game.

Sorry Hantu, but WvW is by far and large way more balanced than sPvP. There is absolutely cheese in WvW and such cheese definitely has no counters or is totally broken (though this is mostly a gear/rune/sigil thing going on right now since HoT gear powercreep is total BS), but pretty much anything can be made to some degree functional in WvW while in sPvP there are builds which mathematically and objectively fail to work and cannot work because of the innate imbalances in sPvP by the lower stats and forced hand-holding of character builds via the single-stat amulet system exacerbated by poorly-balanced classes/abilities game-wide.

The only aspect of “balance” in sPvP is that the meta builds are typically balanced to each other, but if you don’t play in the strict meta, you’re looking at having next to zero impact on any given game or fight because the basis for these builds is steeped heavily in mathematics which deems with very obvious conclusions that most builds are strictly not good enough.

WvW, you can ramp your stats to get what you need to scale properly and build your character to achieve a much finer level of granularity in stat selection such that no stats are wasted. Doing so increases viability of less-powerful builds. These may not be ideal, but within a reasonable level of out-playing your opponent, you can create fights which you will win which you’d otherwise not be able to do in sPvP.

I’ve had a bit of time to look in-depth at the Deadeye, now.

Incoming changes

I intend to adjust and tweak wording to cause any mobility effect such as Shadowstep to break stealth while using Stakeout. Permanent stealth is fine, but must have absolutely no mobility, and Shadowstep would just enable frustrating or downright trolly play. Further, I need to create a mechanism to prevent a Deadeye from taking down keep/tower lords in WvW without ever being revealed by repeatedly applying Noxious Fumes and not taking aggro while the lord dies.

Power Deadeye

There’s not really an easy way to perfectly balance Wicked Abandon at the moment with a small numbers tweak. I’m going to revist the skill coefficients in the next few days for the entire kit to determine how these tweaks will interact with the new Lead Attacks and make the call to adjust either skill coefficients or WA itself. I’ll also be comparing the core thief trait lines and how they interact with the skills to make sure nothing really funky happens.

Reducing base coefficients normalizes the kit to work with Trickery/LA in a more cohesive fashion without making the damage output when stacking modifiers excessive, however this could create a false-dependency for Trickery, which is something I really want to avoid.

Reducing the damage increase on Wicked Abandon balances it in line with pre-LA change Trickery/core thief while being used, but subsequently reduces incentive to use the skill at all.

Condition Deadeye

The condition damage bump to LA definitely changes the state of balance on the condi variant of the build, especially considering the damage output potential on Noxious Fumes when building to stack poison damage. Since 15% isn’t overly-substantial, I can’t make a reduction of a stack of applied poison and be done with it, as this is a disproportionate nerf. I’m looking to reduce the applied poison of Noxious Fumes by one stack, but compromise with increased bleeding and/or vulnerability stacks elsewhere.

Based on OP’s ideas

See Wicked Abandon for my Deadeye concept, link in sig. I think that’s the kind of implementation you’re looking for in regards to stances and draining initiative, as well as fight-commitment capability.

The name or aesthetic of the Samurai itself doesn’t really fit GW2 well. I think it would be more fitting for rangers, particularly given the historical significance animals (dogs, horses, etc,) had on how the Samurai functioned as primarily cavalrymen or as skilled archers. For the most part, Samurai were not historically fast in combat and were Japan’s equivalent to armored Knights. Entertainment has painted them in a very factually incorrect light. The thief model of being deceptive, high-speed and with elements of surprise, dirty tactics, and stealth, really doesn’t include any amount of what the Samurai represent.

While I agree that elite specs should change aspects of the core profession, I think this is trying to make the thief fit the identity of a guardian a little too much.

Saku Joe.2857:

Not to mention the sword AA dps still inferior to dagger (before you say its wrong, go and try with same attack power on a non-critable dummy), and less interesting for a pressure set (weakness and crip 2s VS poison 7s and 10 endurance).
Sword needs a real buff. All i ask is a smart buff not sth making the set OP or exeedingly accessible..

I want to correct misinformation in this statement.

Purely sword AA DPS is and has been better than dagger DPS since the game’s launch. That said, it’s barely noticeable as it’s around a margin of 2% last I checked.

Dagger just has better overall DPS by a large margin because of heartseeker spam at low HP and backstabs at high HP with quick recovery animations into the AA. From a pressure POV, sword was historically also better before condition builds were made so overpowered and AA’s buffed into infinity (rarely would good thieves get through their whole AA combo before the ridiculous damage increases) since it effectively acted as a permanent-uptime 25% damage reduction negating crits on top of its evasion, boon stripping, and lockdown between IS/IR and auto-cripple.

The sword isn’t weak at all so much as defenses right now are so overtuned it only feels like it lacks damage, especially since it has fewer meaningful damage options than the dagger or staff with less reliability and higher initiative costs.

Welcome to the NA meta for WvW. Condi builds only. Sad truth is condi mesmer does even more damage which in a strict 1v1 is even safer to play.
You misplayed a bit standing in caltrops and your speed was pretty off, however you had no control over the confusion application and would have died in a similar fashion from the active damage from blink, as you’d have procced more damage this way and still taken substantial bleed while not hitting the confusion on your cleanses.

Just remember what the condition players say: “Run more cleanses, it’s that easy!” Yup, you need to dedicate your entire build to cleanses to stand a chance these days, and maybe then you’ll be able to last through the burst. Oh, and you’ll also need to make sure you dedicate an infinite amount of supplies to building supply traps around you.

SarahWitter.2317:

I’d like to reply to those who are saying that making this set account-bound is “a money grab.” Please keep in mind that we make the same amount of revenue for each BLC weapon skin that enters the game through MTX regardless of whether or not that weapon skin is later resold on the trading post.

The currency exchange is a player driven market and as the gem-to-gold exchange rate has increased, the trading post value of BLC weapon skins hasn’t kept pace. That leads to the common complaint that it feels bad to buy Black Lion chests for gems, because it seems as if they’re full of things that you could have bought more cheaply by converting your gems to gold instead. It’s not our goal to make you feel like a chump for buying chests. After all, by buying chests, you’re supporting the creation of the content that everyone plays. So it’s nice for there to be account-bound things in the chests in addition to the other tradeable items. With a lot of the chest contents, it’s not possible for them to be account-bound, because for a lot of things you’d be screwed if you got dupes and couldn’t off-load them to friends or onto the Trading Post. By putting the skins on the Black Lion Weapon Specialists we support those who have stored tickets and still have a combination of account-bound and non-account-bound items in the chest, as we did before today’s release.

This set of purely cosmetic skins still can ultimately be acquired either by purchasing them or by earning gold in the game and trading it for gems. If you like getting skins from the chests that can’t be obtained more cheaply through the trading post, use your claim tickets on these weapons. Or if you prefer tradeable skins, use your claim tickets for the other weapon sets, or acquire those weapon sets by trading for them with other players who bought them with claim tickets.

We on the dev team want to thank you again for taking the time to share your views with us.

I’ll be blunt and say that the prices haven’t scaled with the conversion ratios because a lot of the recent skins have been low-demand, and the valuable ones aside from the early skins have been re-released with no warning (chaos skins, for example) such that those involved in skin trading have largely stopped bothering to try and uphold their prices and value. For a simple example, I saw some BLTC skins fall an upwards of 90% of their value when made more accessible in terms of bolstering RNG rates or making them return. The skin economy right now as a whole is still suffering from these inconsistencies and massive price swings that seem to be coming with increased frequency due to decisions from ANet.

Thing is, there aren’t enough individuals crazy enough to drop the amount of in-game money necessary to reliably generate skins from boxes with the conversion rate so high. There might be a pseudo-increased demand for luxury gem items, but the RNG gating turns a lot of potential prospective customers into people not willing to bother. And if this market was affecting or affected by the value of gems and gold, then we’d see sell-price TP offers skyrocket to match the inflation, or we’d simply see lower supplies and prices would fix themselves naturally to the highest buyers. Further, the availability of the skins on the TP led to large amounts of gold being deleted altogether, which directly helps curb the gem : gold conversion rate, while account-binding them does nothing except hope people charge more gems and lower the demand. Sad truth is you probably won’t see non-regular buyers pay real cash for gems, so that demand is likely not going to change. Further, changed dailies and upped rewards since HoT have inflated gold incomes. We haven’t seen any “must-buy” skin sets lately aside from a few select ones from a few select sets, so the skin economy hasn’t reacted naturally to the inflated gold prices.

A lot of the skins lately have been similar in concept and appearance to earlier ones. While new meshes are great, the lack of weapon-dying vastly inhibits demand when two sets of skins look so similar in both aesthetic and color.

This shouldn’t be a matter of the gem : gold conversion ratio, especially when it favors those who buy gems and convert into gold (as this is direct revenue for ANet) while still making item accessibility reasonable.

And if it was a matter of generating revenue from people pursuing skins, normalizing the price in gems for a skin would be the best way, rather than locking the sets behind RNG boxes which strictly do not profit, which people will become increasingly aware of.

There are a lot of things about the approach that simply don’t make sense except for trying to monetize more heavily per customer. I fear this will both earn less revenue long-term and will also adversely affect player mentality as well as totally destroying a sub-economy while enforcing trends which will always lead towards the high-paying customer. In a game where aesthetic value matters so much, this is a very dangerous move for the long-term.

zinkz.7045:

You know the funny thing is, this isn’t even the most AIDS thief build in WvW, go get a sigil of draining, then between steal, headshot, distracting daggers & pulmonary impact proceed to roll face across the keyboard…. remember the days when thief took at least a bit of skill… long gone, just like this game mode.

People these days seem to insist that winning itself is what defines skill rather than the context of how a player won.

Lol. Wow. Just wow.

Seriously ANet, that’s really pathetic.

So now we’re cash-grabbing and with a game with no sense of balance at all. Might as well pick up BDO or another Korean grinder ’cause GW2 just lost its edge.

If you play conditions you’re in luck. That’s about the only thing usable for roaming now because the profession and stat balance is so pitiful.

I’d rather them be doing something to get a feel for the state of the game rather than be forced into blob/low-impact mentality of spamming 1 and doing absolutely nothing at all.

If anything I don’t think they’re trying to play high-impact enough. When they’ve been on my server, they’ve always been in the blob following the primary tag; I’ve never seen them join tagged havoc groups or fight small-scale. I think it’d give them a lot to learn about the format as a whole.

No, it’s still healthy population- and revenue-wise. I mean, all games really start dying as soon as they launch, since they won’t be around forever.

The dev pacing is very concerning, though, particularly coming from profession and mechanic balance. That needs a lot of involvement and we’ve seen basically none since HoT, despite there being many conceptual imbalances and poor design elements in the game which have gone unaddressed for ages or were introduced or exacerbated in HoT’s content.

I’d be “worried” (I’m not really playing now because the imbalance in the competitive formats, the reason I play this game at all, is just so pathetically horrendous) if we see a truly big Western-market game start getting into late stages of development that takes a similar design approach to GW2 but with much more emphasis on competitive play. Right now there’s really no good competition.

I would support this, but not for the PC in open-world. Too unfriendly to the game and its lore, as well as its direction. It would be a funny addition to see the Charr have races on the bikes on a track similar to how Moa racing worked, or have a PC-controlled minigame of the sorts.

And then they could call it NASCHARR.

;D

Dire stats does not enable “an extra attack or two” over a power configuration capable of dealing similar damage. The toughness alone is about 50% more damage mitigation. With the EHP from the vitality, it’s roughly three to four times as durable innately as berserker, and again, most traitlines supporting condition builds have more innate defenses than the ones used for raw power damage.

Play Cav vs Dire. One will get one/two-shotted by a power-burst build, one will lose half its health at most. And the tankier one will deal better DPS and better burst.

Also, if you’re comparing toughness by armor-provided stats only, yes, dire makes up the difference between light and heavy Too bad this isn’t how gearing works. The entire set (seeing as accessories and weapons account for around 60% of stats) accounts for roughly three times this value. Further, this has very little to do with anything, seeing as the heavy/light/medium professions were all designed to have corresponding damage outputs to their defensive capabilities (ele and thief in first, necro and mesmer towards the bottom due to innate durability and innate burst damage/durability as class mechanics, respectively), which even now is upheld.

So the claim for removal of dire and TB because they do mathematically too much damage per durability is exemplified either by intentional skewing of data on your end, or incorrect math.

Put in perspective, the difference between dire and carrion is roughly the same as giving a class 100% uptime and un-removable protection. Against berserker gear, it equates to having permanent protection and Rite of the Great Dwarf stacked together, which many are calling wildly overpowered for large-scale.

Please, do tell me how it is then logical for such a set to exist when the damage output from carrion and dire is almost identical. The same is said for Rabid, and mathematically, all power options.

Thanks for the update. McKenna. Still slow if the only metric being used is population or rank with basic glicko. Really, more metrics need to be analyzed such as player participation scheduling, and the use of lots of heuristic analysis might only then support well-structured matchups. I fear just adding/reducing time between matchups won’t really change too much unless other factors are considered.

Two months is still a very long time and enables people to stack at their leisure. This is worrysome and something to also keep an eye on.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The maximum number of times a Thief can use DB and Vault is 3 times in a row. After that, the Thief has to wait at leat 5sec before he can use the same skill again. From this point on, the Thief can use only use the same skill once every 5sec. Unless the Thief waits for full init bar, which is a 12sec CD for DB and 15sec CD for Vault, you won’t see the same skill used in a row anymore.

In other words, this notion of “Thief spam” is utter nonsense and it’s the source of what the misinformed Devs believes thus they keep on nerfing the Thief’s initiative gains and refuses to lower down the cost of each skill — on top of nerfing the Thief’s overall damage relative to the current meta. For once, they should stop looking at the numbers and actually play a Thief and balance the profession based on their first hand experience.

You do realize natural initiative regeneration occurs while casting skills, right? Plus You have a lot of people playing Acro on D/D getting an initiative on each dodge, plus initiative on steal. DB only costs four initiative, so on natural regen alone you’re looking at 3 and then almost immediately after a fourth.

All said and done, if you’re not fighting a static target, you’re probably able to get around six or so consecutive DB casts in a row without considering other potential utilities like RFI or IS passive. If you play correctly, you should be able to approach 100% evasion uptime between mixed dodges and DB casts unless you walk into CC.

I will be resigning myself from the game I think though for now.

Just encountered a full dire druid. I’ve got 4k power, 230 crit damage, 80%+ additional damage modifiers, backstab for 3k, took perplex passive.

Hit one trap, took the interrupt from perplex, comboed into PBS interrupt, bleeds from roots and RF fell over dead despite having 20k hp and stunbreaking and cleansing the trap to get out.

And then to get PM’s with the audacity of talking trash when I fight 1v3 the entire person’s guild who play power builds and win, nope. Done with that mentality.

Toughness has a huge effect on power-based damage. The problem is ANet doesn’t know how to implement power-based damage, because they keep giving people access to static +power bonuses and 25 might. Make it come from scaling bonuses, and all the problems vanish entirely.

Boons are wildly over-accessible and negate pretty much any incentive to pick a build other than a hybrid/new-stat allocation with durability runes and passive defenses.

If you run 2k armor versus 3k armor against a thief or scaling-oriented class, you’ll get even bigger damage reduction than than 50% because of how damage modifiers are applied.

I love the pace of WvW – there’s a huge amount of diversity in builds, whereas in sPvP the forcefully-slower pace has resulted in only a very few select, often cheesy builds working to any extent at all. Right now I will say that condition application (almost entirely in the form of immob, burning, and confusion), boon application, and CC are too easy to come by from most elite specs, and the new gear options are straight up mathematically imbalanced. Pre-HoT balance was almost flawless in WvW. Now we’re really far from it (although still not as kittenPvP).

Liston.9708:

Dinas Dragonbane.2978:

I’d love to know how many people will end up transferring from servers like Kaineng, Anvil Rock, and Eredon Terrace to their partnered servers Yak’s Bend, Blackgate, and Tarnished Coast.
I shouldn’t really be surprised if it’s an astronomical figure.

2 of the 3 (BG/TC) are full. I hear BG may open up when GW3 goes beta……

Indeed. The only reasonable move would be AR to YB, since nobody’s allowed into BG or TC.

Definitely nobody is moving to BG any time soon, though. Even on TC we were outnumbered-buffed for hours last night during NA prime. I really miss T2.

Rekt.5360:

Jack Skywalker.5674:

Warriors get melee staff in next xpac:))))

That’s pretty much the only weapon left that would make sense with the class. I bet they’re gonna give us a staff with meditation utilities.

Nah. They already did staff monk for thief.

I would expect shortbow just to make totally sure the class’s new weapon is really, truly ineffective.

Working as intended. LoS is just as important to some other classes and builds for viable defense as it is to us for avoiding damage. Don’t have a clear shot? Don’t use Shadow Shot. I prefer it this way as it discourages spamming it as often as people do.

The only LoS tweak I could suggest for the thief is to have backstab not get LoS’ed if in range if your target – note, this would only apply if you have the person targeted. In the case of fighting a necro, mesmer, or ranger, you shouldn’t get punished by an unpredictable AI running in between you and them while in the middle of an animation to a single-target skill, considering you got the positioning from an innate disadvantage, anyways.

Shadow shot, though? Nah. It’s already way overtuned.

You’ll figure it out as time goes on and if you take the time to hone your skills. There are so many small nuances and little tricks that really only come from playing and both figuring it out and over time talking with other people and absorbing little tidbits and things to improve upon your play.

If you played glass staff ele, you’ll probably be pretty familiar with the durability of the class. You will need to be a bit trickier, however, since rather than just trying to open the gap and nuking them or retreating into your team, you will need to close it at some point to take them out. Knowing your enemy as well as exactly what kind of abuse you’ll be able to take/how aggressive you’re allowed to play from a numbers perspective is a pretty big deal in terms of how you’ll perform. That’s really just a matter of experience, though.

Advice for sPvP: You can’t play the class like an ele. Your 1v1 potential is poor, so it’s important to remember that you need to do your job of neutralizing enemy points that don’t have defenders and simply moving on. You don’t need to capture them, just neutralize (unless there’s nowhere better to be). You’ll likely lose the strict 1v1, and you likely won’t succeed when making a fight turn from say a 1v2 into a 2v2. Your job is to decap and disrupt ticking points without resistance and to make fair fights unfair, not to try and level the playing field.

For WvW, you can do whatever you want. The class has its necessary damage because it gets all its damage from scaling effects instead of static source like boons. Since sPvP stats are innately lower than PvE/WvW, your scaling means less (example if you have 1k power, a +500 power bonus is going to be more impactful than +40% damage, but at 2k power, the +40% damage bonus is 60% better).

apharma.3741:

Either way if resistance is changed then revenant will need a bit of an overhaul as mallyx suddenly becomes almost suicidal with pain absorption. The entire class would be woefully weak against conditions without the option to pick a trait line that counters conditions as much as say engy which is supposed to be weak vs conditions.

My thoughts exactly. If Mallyx didn’t self-inflict it might do better, and we’d also need to see pretty hefty nerfs to confusion and burning, with condition application in general being toned down across multiple professions/builds.

As someone mentioned above, it’s really just accessibility on strong boons that needs big decreases. We’re seeing so much access to things like low-cooldown high-duration protection and stability, aegis spamming, etc., that a lot of the content is trivialized into who runs more boons, especially since scaling is so out of control with the elite specs. Consider the mes vs thief matchup now; is consume plasma’s brief resistance access swaying thief vs condi mes into unfairness right now? Not really. Permanent applications of boons, however, break things pretty significantly.

We need to see more thief/necro levels of boons where they need huge build investments to achieve and cannot readily maintain them without sacrifices on some end, not to mention the stacked/upheld boons here are typically weaker. Even 25 might is mathematically weaker than any access to protection, swiftness won’t win a fight innately, and fury, while good, is very far from being as good as protection, aegis, and resistance.