the crazy gold price is caused by players exchanging gold for gems, but not many exchanging gems for gold. it is constantly in flux because the pool of gems is not infinite, as some people seem to think.
the rise this time is probably caused by the new glider skin being released, as well as the aviator sunglasses return.
They have release a lot of new stuff before and it didn’t go up this much. In real world economies governments have to step in sometimes to put a break on things. If a real world economy had such a rampant inflation it would crash. ANet needs to put in counter measures to fix the problem. One thing they could do is put buying gems cards on sale. People would rush out to buy them and the price of gems would drop. Basically if you buy an item on the gem store it’s doubled in price. Harvesting items for example now are the equivalent of 2000 gems compared to the prices 2 months ago.
Too bad this isn’t the real world, and ANet benefits economically from the situation so that they can afford to provide more innately free services?
With the constant stream of gem store items causing big gem demands, server transfers opening up, and the amount of gold going into players’ pockets now, too, from the changed dailies and dungeon adjustments, it’s a no-brainer the economy has massively inflated prices at the moment.
Having played and worked for a Korean grinder import for several years, all I can say is from experience this isn’t going to sustain peoples’ interest, especially now, when those who remain are largely people who like or liked the speed of leveling. In said prior game, ten thousand hours didn’t even get me close to maxing. It was a breath of fresh air being able to enjoy GW2’s endgame features without first needing to grind all the way there.
Even games which do feature such long progression systems now are failing rapidly because of them. Wildstar? Archeage? BDO? Quick bursts and lots of hype followed by mass migration away when people realize they don’t have the time nor do they care to commit the time to reach just the beginning.
That’s not to say GW2’s endgame doesn’t need some adjustments (dungeons and other earlier content really could use changes, class balance needs huge adjustments, etc.). Extending the grind isn’t fun, especially with the current level-gated trait and skill system, and making it take longer for people who’ve already made several characters and just want the 80 to do things on won’t achieve really anything. Plus, it doesn’t fix endgame boredom; the people who get there after all that grinding still have what exactly to do? Go grind just like they would have been leveling up? It’s not logical.
Random effects do not reduce the amount of determinism in a given fight; they only add to non-determinism. Player skill in a given environment is not something which can be measured in a deterministic fashion, though. Further, non-determinism would only allow for objective analysis of skill when not ill-timed enough as to change the immediate future, and if it benefited or adversely affected all participating actors equally. This shared response would measure skill between both to non-determinism. Unfortunately, the former goal of not being “ill-timed” is not realistically possible in most scenarios, especially when in (and approaching) dynamic environments like GW2 combat is. If winning a fight hinges on randomness, then there is no point in fighting at all; all combat would then just be a roll of the dice, for then even the concept of builds and theory would be purposeless.
No, a fight outcome depends on various factors when the human element is involved, such as how those participating play. There are others, at hand as well. I recommend you do some research on AI and game theory surrounding Agents and Environments. You’ll realize quickly that raw non-determinism caused by the environment or beyond factors controllable by the Agent(s) is not at all essential or in the case of competitive environments and modern games, likely not even a good thing.
I can tell you now that a large number of the early competitive players left the game entirely because of passive procs like fire/air sigils swaying fights in favor of those who strictly didn’t deserve to win. Heck, even League of Legends several years ago reworked its entire critical hit system to not use strict random number generation as to ensure that the distribution of critical hits in any given spread remained consistent with the stat, as edge cases occurred which weren’t consistent with the stat and massively swung the game. Even though this didn’t happen overly-often, it did enough to warrant a pseudo-randomness replacement algorithm.
In fact, I was dueling a guildmember today who quite literally won one of the duels solely because of an air sigil proc. While I will not discredit his skill (as he is quite good and was likely going to win the fight regardless), the lack of half of a second response time where my health would have not been at zero would be enabled substantial counterplay efforts such as evading the next attack and healing, re-positioning, granting immunity, etc.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
I think most boon stripping/corruption skills (aoe) probably need a substantial buff at this point in the game (WvW) with the level at which boons can be barfed out nonstop.
To be honest I’d like to see a significant reduction in the boon spam rather than buffing of removal. Most people don’t even realize how much they’re spamming protection, regen, fury, swiftness and 10-20 might.
Best example is look at an ESL when a teamfight happens, boons just shoot up and stay up. WvW just takes this to the extreme to show how utterly unbalanced it is.
Bingo. Why make boons only have a disadvantage to mass corrupt/strip? Just make them less accessible so that they’re small, temporary bonuses as they were intended to be.
the mesmer boonshare trait could have a cap on how many boons it shares, maybe 3-5, and exclude stab and resistance.
honestly i think all boons and condis should have a hard cap.
Ah yes, the classic "lets slaughter mesmers in PvE with myopic and absurd mechanic changes due to PvP and WvW concerns’ idea.
To be fair Pyro if the Devs hadn’t done such a terrible job with mesmer in PvE in the first place it would be a no brainer. Pre HoT they were reflect/portal bot only really useful for speed clears, post HoT they’re mainly quickness and alacrity bots. The rest of the utility? Pfft shut up and give me quickness so us real classes can do all the hard work.
I have been saying this in the mesmer sub forum, mesmer may be mandatory and almost a requirement for raids but that doesn’t put them in a good place at all. Something does need to be done about the boon share in WvW though, running around as a 15-20 man group with everyone but the mesmer on 2-5 mins of everything but resistance and quickness which are at something like 30-40s and never really dip past 20s is absurd.
Quite. If they hadn’t locked the profession into a “burst or bust” role with shatters innately (and instead put the associated damage/utility dependent on traits or weapons like every other class), mesmer wouldn’t be in the position of the gimmick role. Buff its sustained DPS and it becomes OP, the class can’t get more burst otherwise it risks being OP as well, and direct sustain via heals etc. is not really how it’s themed, so what’s left are a few gimmicky profession-unique skills which let the class be in demand but not have much going for it in terms of interesting play options.
While I mean not to derail the thread into a topic on the mesmer, boons and conditions themselves (especially with confusion and its mesmer-centric focus) face flaws that really need to be adjusted. The more we push for build wars 2, the more you see classes marginalized like mesmer and pre-damage-buff thief, because things like boons and effects can just replace entire other classes, and I still stand by the fact that the thief didn’t need a damage buff on its AA chain, and we shouldn’t be aiming to powercreep other builds/professions to try and offset the demand for boons.
We don’t need direct buffs on anything else to minimize the impact boons have, nor strictly nerfing boons so much as we need nerfed boon access to make having maxed boons all the time nigh impossible to do for an entire group.
Hey Gaile, has the though of multiple combinations per color been considered, such as three servers versus one, rather than a split 2 vs 2? This gives room for way more exploration and dynamism in the matchmaking while maintaining balance given the proper data.
My vote still sits on an AI to do it weekly and automatically with semi-randomness on the number of linked servers as to totally balance the tri-server matchup (so even the number of tiers is volatile to make for better matchups), so you don’t need to waste time trying to evaluate what heuristic data should be considered to make and map out the best matchups.
Or is that the grand scheme and the manually-performed matchups are just shaping the way it learns?
Faster rotations mean nothing if the matches aren’t balanced. A whole month is a really long time to go getting stomped or stomping. Without that kind of information aside from a general “loss of fairness” as a con (which is huge), I’m not sure if people can vote intelligently.
I’ll settle the debate on proc definitions:
Long story short, it’s disputed, depending on where your history lies.
In one boat, you have the P rogrammed R andom OC urrance – which for obvious reasons is % chance for an effect. This definition is traced back to WoW, and pretty much only to WoW.
In the other, you have origins coming from a deviation of Proc ess, which alludes to programatically the special processes invoked when a set of conditions are met. This definition has origins back to text-based MUD’s from the 1980’s.
So if you’re a WoW player, you’ll probably be more familiar with the WoW-specific RNG aspect, while those who didn’t play WoW will likely take definitions from other sources.
Still, it will be activated almost every time, due to the amount of hits even 1 player can land, since 25% activation when you land 30 hits with aoe and stuff, equals to 100% activation.
Not true. It’s still a 25% activation at any given hit. What you’re referring to is that it’s statistically likely to happen, since one in four incoming attacks should proc the effect, and this effect is occurring more than seven times over, escalating probability substantially.
However, this doesn’t mean guarantee. By your logic, flipping a coin three times would always result in at least one differing heads/tails, but we all know that you can flip a coin three+ times and get identical results with the other side never coming up.
Theoretically, one could take a million hits and not proc the effect at 25%. The chances are absolutely minute to a point of it reaching virtually 100%, however there is no strict guarantee it will happen.
From a PvP perspective, this is also why I dislike random chances on things. Most competitive games do away with them as best as possible, often moving probability-based randomness to a consistent effect that ensures said probability, such as “every fourth hit” and so on. This enables both parties in an encounter to respond to the effects and tailor their gameplay to mitigate effectiveness or capitalize on things at very precise timing. This is also why I particularly dislike on-crit effects like fire/air sigils, etc. Removing that predictability removes a substantial amount of skill from competitive play.
I pointed the hypocrisy in your post when discussing damage comparisons between two builds which feature overall sub-optimal damage output on one (P/D condi thief is good if played well, just it doesn’t deal that much damage relative to most other condition sets) versus one which has one of the best damage per skill uses in the game. To be talking about damage, that’s a huge disparity that ignores even the scope of dire gear.
Burzerker got nerfed because it was dealing 20k burn ticks early on. It’s a middle-of-the-road condition build as it is, which is why I pointed it out.
Yes, some conditions have a long term attachment. I played a condi S/S war extensively around a year ago. I have and “play” a separate D/D condi thief (I find it too easy in most cases and prefer the style of play of power). That said, there are very few classes who can keep up with the condition application of these builds. I’ve single-handedly stacked 30 stacks of bleeding on people. There’s some setup time, but everyone runs out of cleanses. There’s not one class in the game currently that can withstand pressure from a high-frequency condition build like D/D condi thief or interrupt M/M war. I don’t care what you play or how many cleanses you run, you’re not sustaining against those. Hell, there are even some which can facetank and out-sustain berserker damage outputs from a plethora of classes/builds.
There are a LOT of classes/builds that can sustain against a soldier’s-built anything, though. And that’s what this whole thread is about. The killspeed is lower, objectively. It’s less consistent, objectively. It’s often less durable due to condition trait lines often providing more defensive bonuses inherently. There’s so much to say about the Dire/Soldier’s split, and how the damage distribution is totally unfair.
I’ve moved my S/S war to a burn mix and frequently get 6-10k ticks on people after they pop their cleanses. Usually such skills have 40-60s cooldowns, and it takes only 10s to provide enough pressure from FoF alone to force two cleanses, which is often what people run at most, since they need to also run stunbreaks and other utility in their kit to account for fighting against power-built players, ganks, etc. It isn’t as bursty as raw power, but that’s kind of the point of conditions: DoT. If it conditions could burst so hard, then we would see zero purpose at all for playing power anywhere except raids for PvE, and in all seriousness, the PvP would be dead in this game. If you enable the long-term bleed, you can force your opponent into a no-win position and get the full value from conditions.
Honestly, Daredevil actually has some of the best cleansing if played properly via EA. Core thief is garbo, but DrD fares quite well. This shouldn’t be the case, however, since as we should all recall, elite specs are not supposed to provide innate superiority to core, so we shouldn’t be looking to solve the problems of condition imbalance through elite specs, either. This also creates more disparity per build, which as I also mentioned above, is not something that’s healthy for the game at all.
I ran dire once, for a day, on an older thief. It was pathetically easy. Virtually free kills. I played with my elbows and then literally my face towards the end, and still managed to kill some people. Granted, this was pre-nerf SA, but the point still holds. People have done similar feats, but with playing with no weapons, etc (this is more of a dire + perplex thing exclusively, though).
I still do not understand why you consider the possibility of normalizing condition damage and power-based damage to be unreasonable.
Also P/D is one of the weaker condition sets in the game since bleeding and torment got nerfed.
Two unloads is 12 initiaitve. Unload currently is also the hardest hitting skill on the thief and if traited for pure damage, capable of reaching what I do believe is the hardest-hitting skill in the entire game. It has close to 30% more damage than backstab and Vault, which I personally reach close to 20k with against squishy targets.
Thing is, this is burst damage. P/P has substantially lower DPS than Staff or MH dagger on the thief. Why? Because its autos are awful. If you burn 12 init for unload spam, that’s great, but the difference between staff AA and dagger and even sword MH versus the pistol are roughly five times better when the dust settles.
Run D/D condi. I personally get around 11k damage per Death Blossom. Shortbow CG spam enables 4k poison ticks easily if you build for it, not to mention they’re unblockable and AoE.
You’re comparing apples to oranges in your anecdotes, sae.
Again, you need to clarify what you’re talking about. Raw DPS, yes, power does more. Especially berserker. I said this multiple times above. Apply protection, and even the numbers you stated fall close to a tie in optimal environments. Since power scaling is exponential while condition damage isn’t, remove some of the modifiers, and power suffers bigger penalties, and the gap further closes.
Let’s look at a dire burn Berserker running Def/Tactics/Berserker with a longbow.
AA: 1k Burning (4 stack uptime, 2k ticks) – On the lower end compared to say a glassy GS build that might crit around 3k. Soldier’s gear is no contest. Advantage: Dire
Fan of Fire (5s CD including cast time) – 6453, 6 second duration, permanent stack maintenance on average: 4 (roughly 8k damage). For a .25 cast time ability on a 4.75s cooldown, this thing hits HARD. A full glass cannon Guardian can’t even touch this on 8s Whirling Wrath, with perfect hits on the full channel. More than berserker-built mesmer’s Blurred Frenzy (highest-hitting mesmer skill) except for maxed stacks on Ferocity from Fencer’s Finess on a 9.5s cooldown. Same as full glass 25 might stack Reaper’s Ghastly Claws, also on a higher cooldown. You get the point.
Cover condition/Blind on Arcing Arrow, also on a low cooldown of 9.5s
Pin Down (20s), built-in immob which for me had close to 20% uptime, 13k bleeding damage per cast. Now that’s a cover condition if I’ve seen one.
Combustive Shot (10s) – 16k damage minimum, permanent uptime with TTL and SoR.
Scorched Earth: (10s) 12k damage application per tick, up to four ticks. 5s Cooldown, two casts per Berserk, 66% uptime.
This is also assuming no Corruption charges, and this build features a passive proc heal for 5k, and heal on shouts.
HP: 27732
Armor: 3411
That’s a crazy amount of damage per skill in a given encounter, and there’s no way most builds meant to take on most other builds (I.E., diversity in the kit to handle condition builds, power builds, get mobility utility, offensive utility for kill security, etc.) can handle this kind of damage output. And this isn’t even competing for top condi damage. A perplexity mace build or generally just a mesmer can pump out significantly better numbers with more utility and defensive options.
I have yet to see condition damage DPS that comes even close to power DPS.
Maxed out with unreasonable buffs, most DPS charts I’ve seen show condition damage at most at 18k. What is power DPS at, 30-35k? These are in ideal circumstances but do give an indication that power DPS is, in fact, much higher than condition damage.
Your real issue is that conditions are designed with cleanse in mind. Also, by design, not all conditions are meant to be cleansed. Condition builds are designed to do damage via conditions…so naturally the cleanse rate will never be 100%. So DPS will always be unreasonably high if you have no cleanse. If you have average cleanse the DPS will be as expected, lower like soldier’s. If you have high cleanse or AoE group cleanse then the DPS falls to almost zero.
Soldier’s won’t do as much damage against high armor targets. Dire won’t do as much against high cleanse targets. Sure, you could remove cleanse from the game and decrease condition application/damage, but I have the feeling that wouldn’t solve the “problem.” People would still be in here talking about how half as much DPS, or even a quarter of DPS applied over time is OP.
PvE DPS is completely incomparable to PvP and WvW. The measurements also assume max boons/support from a perfect group composition, which favors berserker/power setups through scaling via bonuses to ferocity getting a little more mileage as opposed to conditions. The thief and ele builds dominating said DPS potential on keywords large, stationary targets (multi-hit/AoE attacks like Meteor Shower, Weakening Strike) are so incredibly useless in PvP/WvW that it’s obvious who runs their PvE gear when they play to a point of being one-shotted by medium-coefficient skills in some cases. Said condition builds you’re comparing to often have very little support from chaining utilities for damage, unlike their power counterparts, and thus have intrinsically more functional builds for a broader set of circumstances.
Yea, theoretically the maximum DPS on power builds is higher. That also assumes the target has no toughness, though. With just protection alone (again something found very often permanently on many classes now), the damage outputs match up, again, still insisting low toughness, as .7 * 30k = 21k ~= optimal condi DPS. Given a few aura removals, this will regulate as even a 10-15% loss to power matches them evenly. Further, most condition-oriented lines are strictly better on defenses than power DPS/crit ones, anyways. If you fight without boons at all, condi and power DPS is actually pretty similar across the build spectrum. Power just gets more DPS mileage, and it should, objectively, because it has three stats modifying damage output exponentially, rather than just one. Again, objectively, when looking at the required bonuses, power should actually be doing more relative damage based on the amount of dependencies there are to manage its superiority.
Your definitions of “average cleanse” are unclear and in some cases, totally untrue. Some classes have intrinsically more cleanses than others. Up until recently, the thief had only one way to remove confusion, which shared a 50s cooldown with their most important reposition skill, and still hits the thief for two skill activation procs just to cleanse it. Then you have classes like ele and necro which have huge amounts of innate cleanses and transfers on major and common build features. It’s not only physically impossible to reach this on a thief, for example, but would require quite literally every trait and skill to come close. In almost all cases, soldier’s DPS is lower than that of any condition build against any other build. Only in a few cases like fighting a bunker earth/water ele or tank druid will the stat distributions find themselves sitting roughly equal, because neither will be able to kill the opposition from just having too low of damage.
Again, even at a 50% cleanse rate of condition application – equivocal to 50% dodge uptime against power, and doesn’t require dodge foresight of incoming attacks, reducing skill dependency, (which is absolutely bonkers high), condition damage alone per attack (thus, dire) per unit of time regardless of context is strictly better than what soldier’s gear can achieve against a glass foe, and rivals that of Berserker facing protection. Yet this can be done on a build with two defensive stats, AND doesn’t get negated by protection nor high toughness, which as discussed, having permanent access to the former is common. Plus, application can deal its full damage to blocking targets and thus has fewer counters, as the DoT from previous attacks will be upheld, continuing DPS whereas power players hit short-term 0 values (which, if you didn’t notice, block access got way more common in HoT). In small-scale WvW, resistance isn’t even remotely as accessible as protection, and even in large-scale, it’s achievable only through certain comps via mass boon-sharing and AoE boon distribution methods, to which a few players will be vulnerable from mass corruption, and strips/corruption/boonsteal mechanisms are much more common in small-scale encounters, anyways, with an increased number of thieves, mesmers, interrupt builds, and typically reapers.
As per what has been suggested in light of your refusal to admit this stat combination is objectively overpowered, condition damage should be normalized with power and require or depend on to achieve similar DPS as berserker/assassin’s mix gear, three stats (say, maybe ferocity affecting conditions on crit and then setting toughness to negate condition damage). Further, resistance and protection should be normalized to be impermanent or removed entirely, and cleanses normalized across professions and builds more as to enable consistency when playing as or against condition builds, making encounters more about the fight instead of the build.
Just by reading this I can tell OP is fairly new and this is an L2P issue, not a balance issue.
I can tell the OP plays small-scale WvW (which is where we are in the forums). Dire is mathematically imbalanced to total absurdity for the damage it enables, and because everyone and their mother has permanent protection uptime these days.
If we for example buffed Soldier’s gear into Dire’s power-per-stat assuming a 50% condi clear rate on the enemy (which is absolutely crazy, btw), and then balanced the game by this, I could reach a 50k backstab on my thief in Valkyrie gear based on necessary power scaling, lol.
It’s not the best condition damage output – Viper’s gear is – however in most instances it comes very close, since it enables higher damage per tick via food and other conversions all things considered.
The stat combo is totally broken.
As far as burst vs conditions in the race for (above-mentioned) 10k damage, you need to look into application frequency and uptime potential. I can tell you now that any condition build is going to have much better damage uptime than correlating power builds. Conditions are very easy to access in the game, while getting huge-hitting power skills with the same degree of consistency often takes longer in the scope of cooldowns. There are some counterexamples, but not as many.
Synergy is fine, a broken OP group passive is not.
Passive? Which part of it is passive?
It’s a passive proc, have you even played this game?
Wtf? Really? LOL!!!
Passive are things like +100 toughness/vitality. Things that continuously add effects without any conditions to trigger. To call a proc that occur by fulfilling certain conditions as passive is…, lol, you really made me laugh so hard.
I guess that explains why you “argument” lack depths and don’t sound logical, more like referencing what other people are saying.
If you don’t have to use a skill or ability for it to proc , then it’s passive. If it wasn’t “passive” then you could control it.
That will be called active skill, right? Proc itself means random occurrence, you can even google the meaning and it will all say the same thing
Not quite. While you’re pretty much on the ball with the definitions, they’re not mutually exclusive. I’ll give you an example:
Skill X: For the next 10 seconds, all incoming critical hits heal you instead of damaging you. Cooldown 180 seconds.
This would be an Active effect (not permanent/high uptime) with a proc ability where only the condition occurs when a crit does; if the incoming damage isn’t crits, nothing happens at all.
Now we’ll make it a trait
Trait Y: Upon receiving a critical hit, it heals you, instead, and triggers Skill X. ICD 180s.
This would be a passive proc. The passive bonus of negating the next crit and automatically casting is there to stay, passively, as it requires no input from the user, but there is still a condition or proc for the trait to actually do anything, thus Passive Proc.
As far as durability runes go, they’re mathematically overpowered. Actually, almost any rune that has protection access on it will be.
ok, so I think most people here will probably know alot more details than me right down to the microseconds of an icd in a xyz skill. but I feel that hot elite specs brought more damage to the fights overall, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be a defensive boost to counter these condi spamming, hard hitting hot skills. how about we nerf HoT damage before nerfing our defensive stats. i mean, its a bit difficult to compare situations and call op, because “op” is situational. i mean, there are different builds for different fights, whether it is that you are fighting 1v1, 10v10, 50v50, they are all different. i mean, a duelling build is different from a zerg build and also in turn different from a blob build. so before yelling op, how about you consider all these different situations. i’ll be amused if u said those runes are “op” in duelling situations.
Both offenses and defenses got buffed, often in unrelated builds. To claim that offenses got overbuffed so dramatically it warrants such overpowered runes, I’m going to have to disagree.
An example being that my core thief build is still the hardest-hitting one possible that’s still remotely usable in WvW. However, a DrD can get really close while getting huge defensive bonuses. We’ll look at some more, though.
Rangers got big buffs on defenses with Druid to a point where they went from terrible in sPvP to a very good bunker.
We saw the effects of bunker Chronomancer early on. Thankfully that got nerfed because it was literally unkillable if played correctly.
DH has a few passive defense effects, more healing, mobility, and CC over core guard with lower cooldowns on these defenses.
Warrior got more passive sustain via Berserker from a few commonly-selected traits.
Necro got tankier via Reaper if building into a sustain build, like DM/BM/R MM.
50% AoE damage reduction on Revenant (since the whole class is HoT content) stackable with others enables things like 80%+ DR.
Scrapper has a lot of stability and blocking/projectile deflection.
Tempest’s sustain options skyrocketed across the board.
The entire expansion is powercreeped by design.
Easiest to play in PvE as a new player and get a feel for the game: Ranger
Easiest to play in sPvP: MM Necro/Reaper
Easiest to play in WvW (blobbing): DH, hammer Revenant
Easiest to do well with across multiple formats for what the profession offers: War/Berserker, MM Necro/Reaper
It’s kind of subjective, though. I personally find the thief very intuitive, but that comes with experience playing glass cannons and assassins for 10+ years, even on tabletop games. It might not be strictly the “easiest” but approaching the skill cap for me was easier than on others (for example, I am the worst ele and guard in my guild).
As a first character, he should probably just do what interests him the most. Ultimately, being challenged (and dying) but enjoying the game and the class for what it is not only makes the experience more fun, but makes one a better player and teaches improvements and good habits before settling for what’s easy, which may lead to some bad habits.
…
Sure it may be easier for us current Engineers, but let’s not act like newer players are crazy for thinking Engineer is complicated to play, that’s just rude. ;-P
It really depends on the player. A friend of mine sampled several professions when starting, and found the engineer the easiest for him to play, with thief and mesmer being the two most difficult for him by a mile. He said the controls and kits were similar to some other game he played before, so it seemed intuitive, and he liked having the fairly cut-and-dry rotations/combos and simple ways/logic to respond to certain threats. The APM is up, but some people are used to that and like that style of play.
Really, though, it should be all about fun-factor. I think engi and necro are horribly boring to level up, and I’d have probably quit early if I didn’t do my homework on the thief (and was playing when I could trait Hidden Killer at level 10).
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
We agree that a fully in-game polling system would be better than the current setup. However, it’s a question of priorities. Is it better to spend months building out an in-game polling system, which would indirectly benefit players? Or spend that same time building features that directly benefit WvW players, like additional scoring or quality of life improvements? Perhaps that will be one of the options on the next prioritization poll.
Our current polling method still has high participation. Large numbers of players from every world vote in every poll. Also, we’ve noticed that once the total number of votes has reached a certain threshold , votes tend to stabilize, and doubling or tripling the number of votes tends to make very little impact on the final result.
Good stuff. If I may, I’d suggest you set up a wider array of options for the next one, if possible. While WvW has its format-specific concerns and necessary updates, there are some like balance concerns which really should get addressed, which often influence things like coverage/participation from people moving/leaving, etc. Obviously these impact and share space with PvE, so this is something that’d probably need to get moved to another team, but even the state of balance and the dynamic of how the game plays affects what may/could be implemented into WvW. It’d be a shame to have all this effort go into fixing the game mode, but still have some major and glaring issues with the gameplay of the mode itself tied to classes/stats/runes etc. go unchanged.
A big class concept CDI might be in order as to both identify what problem areas exist, and in what flavorful and reasonable ways these can be adjusted in their respected classes to fit all game modes.
Celestial isn’t that big of a deal in WvW.
Honestly, perplexity runes aren’t that bad, either, however the passive is total overkill. It’s confusion having the baseline DoT which is too strong in WvW, and dire builds being virtually unkillable depending on the class using it.
Dire really never should have been added. Perplex is manageable with a nerfed passive, but the combination of both on top of the passive confusion application is just ridiculous.
We can’t see any balanced adjustment until both conditions and boons are reworked significantly, though, as we have issues now with permanent all boons in the game, including resistance.
AoE conditions on the necro is corruption, though, Justine.
It just can’t keep up with it due to the five target cap and how quickly the boons can be shared and activated. A single party rotating all boons will be able to permanently maintain all boons way over what necros can corrupt, unless tons of necros are run, in which case they’ll probably just get run over anyways seeing as they have no stab/etc.
If they nerfed conditions and some of the condition runes, we wouldn’t need resistance, and protection duration as a whole is way overdone in general.
There needs to be a ton of work done for Boons/conditions to enable balanced play across the game. I doubt anything will happen soon, though.
Conditions and resistance as a whole need looking at.
Without small-duration resistance, conditions are OP, just like boons. If boon-stripping is made more accessible for builds not delving into conditions, though, the condition builds become more OP.
Boon and conditions systems as a whole need a lot of work to make balanced scale-able play. Right now, neither are, so the game isn’t balanced.
If they change matchups frequently enough and remove the server names entirely from WvW, you’ll see the server communities stay intact.
Instead of just spamming in map chat for everyone to join server TS, you’ll see people asking what server they’re from and sending more targeted and inclusive messages to get people involved in their respective server’s community.
Because if server populations themselves are the only thing consistent between varying matchups, then those people are going to be the ones you’re always going to be playing with.
Think about what’s different between old and current WvW.
Our forces are now much more organized, much more unified, and the matchups themselves are much more stable and balanced. This is what leads to stagnation and boredom.
If you eliminate some of that rigidity, and encourage players to join their respected communities rather than just being told to “get in TS, scrub” to be barked orders at by a guy leading 60 random other people, half of which may be from another server and thus may be volatile, people will move towards subcommunities/server communities they want to be with and will work towards securing the only stable community they have. For those who do establish a sense of community in the current semi-permanent linked way, come time to de-link the servers like they are now, the pseudo-permanence just leads to shattered expectations and fragmented sub-communities in the end.
If you go into a match knowing you’ll likely not see the same players again, or at least for a while, building communities becomes more personal and tight-knit.
This upholds profits for ANet by transfers for those who want to move to a community/guild, but prevents match-swaying via stacking; if a server/linked group is stacked, it’ll just get more opposition put against it, and such links can be broken and manipulated without anyone feeling substantial negative impacts on the community of WvW as a whole.
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It’s a low cooldown instant-cast ability that refunds 100% of base endurance, cleanses a condition, and does this to all of your allies, too.
Asking for more is way out of bounds without bumping that cooldown into the stratosphere. The core thief lacks burst condition cleansing, and really needs ways to get access to it that doesn’t overpower the DrD, but asking for an increase in potency on SoA is not the right place to look for it contradicts the above goal and in it of itself isn’t justifiable.
This is another fail design from ArenaNet: elite specializations should give professions something they didn’t do, something new, but everything we see are just the same things, but in a over 9000 manner. What were the truly original concept of elite specs that really added something new to its respective profession? Tempest did?
This is why I firmly believe that the Reaper is the only truly well-done elite spec. It definitely changed necro, and core necro and reaper are both usable/preferable in various scenarios.
The rest? Unfortunately they did very little. And that’s why I even made the suggestion for a thief one in such detail (see signature) as in the off chance a dev sees it, it’ll maybe help impact the state of the game in a positive light.
Unfortunately the design of ele is supposed to be jack-of-all-trades, according to some of the early profession videos released by ANet. I’m all for eles having a swiss army knife kit with the option to adapt to a battle, but that’s the thing; they should be options. Strict rotation play is the result of fields/finishers creating boons, which have been diagnosed as being the dependency making the ele so binary in its performance.
If ele got only a small bit baseline but got a lot of mileage out of their trait choices which could operate independently of boons and strict rotations, the class would be easier to balance as a whole, and boons could also subsequently be re-looked into for the whole game for game-wide balance, rather than being coupled to the elementalist’s viability in general.
I don’t think the reaper added something new to necromancers. But chronomancer did. The only thing wrong (that I see) with chronomancer is that it should’ve been a supportive spec, but it has extremely good capabilites of dealing high dps and also sustaining conditions. Chronomancer, imo, is the most solid and original spec concept.
Reaper changed almost everything about necro. Strictly speaking, the necro is just about the only core spec that has remaining viability on the basis that reaper isn’t better; it’s just so wildly different that it enables both specs to have their niches and not overlap. The necro is very slow and very clunky with a fair degree of fragility from lack of stability access, making it a strict backliner, while the reaper plays like a warrior and has the capacity to drive the front line and dive deep into its enemies.
Everything you’ve mentioned about the chronomancer in this post is not true. Chrono has the lowest DPS in the game and has the best support in the game. The damage output in the form of burst is buffed via CS, but in all honesty, this doesn’t change how the chrono is played as opposed to core mesmer, since CS has such a short duration. Most mesmer mains will tell you that Chrono CS encourages spamming abilities and doesn’t at all change how the profession really handles combat in any sense. The shield changes a lot, but even then it’s fairly similar to OH sword, except that for the most part it’s seen as being better.
Siege on the boat has historically been usable and has also been done since it can reach further areas of the keep while not being able to be hit by the outer edges of large ground-target skills since it’s in the water. Though I’ve not tried to use any such siege since before ABL was brought back, so if it’s changed/bugged/whatever I can’t tell you.
Official word on siege trolls (spies used to cap an area’s siege by placing useless siege inside important structures) is to report them via the bot report option. I imagine that this is applicable for tactivator trolls.
Strict spying is hard to manage as often communication to enemies occurs out-of-game via TS and the likes. I don’t know ANet’s official report stance on this. That said, wasteful tactivator pulls are something they can track and will have the logs for doing, so it’s not just wasted report space.
A WvW troll flag would be nice, though. Dishonorable play is hard to have on this level, though, since people will use that feature to try and ban people who jump on corpses and whatnot, which while a really rude thing to do, isn’t ban-worthy or anything, and would flood support rather than just passing through really bad stuff.
Anet, Please delete Theif or do something with its cheating skills! Macro-cheating thief can use 8 skills in 0.3 sec. And kill 3 enemies in WvW within 15 sec.
Triple-instant-actives on 7/8/9 (available to all professions), weapon skill, and F1? I’m not really sure how you’re getting 8 skills, since all weapon skills have cast times, BV is a channel, and all heals will interrupt existing animations or also have cast times/channels.
Really, guardian is the only class which can activate the most abilities all at once seeing as virtues have no activation speed. Although doing so is a pretty terrible idea.
As far as dealing damage, again, almost any profession given the right build in WvW can kill three enemies in 15 seconds given the right build. Actually, my reaper can kill five people in just one skill if they’re not tanky.
And how is this even related to the thread?
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This is another fail design from ArenaNet: elite specializations should give professions something they didn’t do, something new, but everything we see are just the same things, but in a over 9000 manner. What were the truly original concept of elite specs that really added something new to its respective profession? Tempest did?
This is why I firmly believe that the Reaper is the only truly well-done elite spec. It definitely changed necro, and core necro and reaper are both usable/preferable in various scenarios.
The rest? Unfortunately they did very little. And that’s why I even made the suggestion for a thief one in such detail (see signature) as in the off chance a dev sees it, it’ll maybe help impact the state of the game in a positive light.
Unfortunately the design of ele is supposed to be jack-of-all-trades, according to some of the early profession videos released by ANet. I’m all for eles having a swiss army knife kit with the option to adapt to a battle, but that’s the thing; they should be options. Strict rotation play is the result of fields/finishers creating boons, which have been diagnosed as being the dependency making the ele so binary in its performance.
If ele got only a small bit baseline but got a lot of mileage out of their trait choices which could operate independently of boons and strict rotations, the class would be easier to balance as a whole, and boons could also subsequently be re-looked into for the whole game for game-wide balance, rather than being coupled to the elementalist’s viability in general.
As long as the ele can have access to such a breadth of abilities and boons, and that boons are as overpowered as they are, it won’t have diversity in its competitive builds.
Nerf boons and buff scaling while putting stricter emphasis on buffing certain attunements through traits, and the class can be fixable and have a degree of diversity.
I sincerely doubt many people are willing to take boon nerfs, and I doubt ANet is willing to put in the surrounding work to make boons balanced for the rest of the classes just to fix ele.
I thought boon related problems only existed in large scale WvW boon stacking which mainly consists of Mesmer and Revs?
I don’t see your point. Ele boons has been toned down already, particularly protection uptime. If you nerf boons, it will hurt Eles more than any other classes as they have other viable builds. You’re pretty much doing the same mistake ANET has been doing for years – Nerf a viable build to make other builds “viable” which has failed over and over again.
That’s what I’m arguing, though. Eles need more baseline potential or trait investment payoff. Right now, the ele gains very little from investing in trait lines like fire/air because it’s overly-dependent on boons to carry its stats. With boons being the metric to balance the elementalist, any effect which nerfs boons nerfs the ele. Celestial ele was OP because boons got the ele to have highest-tier of all stats because it gains a bit of every stat from its boons. Boons themselves provide huge bonuses which allow for holes to be filled. There’s a reason why thieves are considered squishier than elementalists despite having superior mobility and more armor; the ele by protection alone (something the thief doesn’t have access to) has an effective 50% more health all things considered.
If you nerf boons across the board, and bump up scaling potential via trait investment, builds no longer can do well at everything. This enables a re-balance of the elementalist to not depend on all stats/attunements and can specialize, while having some degree of utility from its other attunements, just like every other class.
As far as nerfing a viable build, celestial ele was grossly OP before the removal of the defensive amulets, and every single high-tier player who played during that time is going to tell you that. The profession dynamic was totally overpowered because of a combination of gaining a little bit of everything with mathematically better numbers off the celestial amulet on top of a broken profession dynamic which stacks a little bit of everything via boons resulted in a profession with uncontested best stats in almost everything on top of swappable utility for almost all situations.
Pure defensive amulets had to get removed because sPvP itself is also mathematically broken. The change from crit damage to ferocity nerfed berserker-stat oriented builds innately by close to a 20% damage loss with no compensation, and even prior to this, bunker stats were mathematically superior when analyzing damage dealt : damage taken. In a format that emphasizes holding points, prioritizing defensive stats in this way was/is a no-brainer. If you don’t die, you don’t lose. We saw similar trends with bunker mesmer in early HoT.
The problem is ele is designed to be a jack-of-all-trades class dependent on getting a lot of different stats up and accounting for the difference with boons. This dynamic is impossible to balance without making the ele explicitly overpowered or underpowered mathematically, or hard-countered or a juggernaut in respects to the meta.
Until eles get definitive attunement selection as defining their build and see big bonuses to individual attunements from traits while seeing less general bonuses and boon acquisition, the class is mathematically not possible to balance properly. It’s not that I want to nerf every meta build (although forceful meta shifts are widely considered by professionals in the competitive gaming industry as being critical to maintain interesting gameplay, even if the game is currently mathematically balanced). The fact of the matter is the profession dynamic is broken as a result of boons being designed as being too strong and too critical to the profession.
As long as the ele can have access to such a breadth of abilities and boons, and that boons are as overpowered as they are, it won’t have diversity in its competitive builds.
Nerf boons and buff scaling while putting stricter emphasis on buffing certain attunements through traits, and the class can be fixable and have a degree of diversity.
I sincerely doubt many people are willing to take boon nerfs, and I doubt ANet is willing to put in the surrounding work to make boons balanced for the rest of the classes just to fix ele.
I’ve never felt a dependency on the weapon…
I’m inspired. I’ll definitely give it a go with out it for a bit again. I’m sort of irresponsible as a thief and try to do too much that someone else should be doing anyway so I’m likely just inflating my perceived worth in those areas, mostly I just need to let other builds fill the niche they’re more suited for.
It definitely changes style of play a little bit, but I find the sword an incredible if not superior alternative for WvW. I personally like S/D as it provides me with consistent damage, evasion, and boon stealing to better-deal-with those pesky eles and engis, since I run Trickster over Bountiful Theft, although that’s more due to me needing a cleanse since I play core thief over DrD. A DrD could most certainly do just as well with S/P, depending on preference of cohesion with other traits.
In sPvP the shortbow is critical for its mobility, but for WvW, if you really think about combat effectiveness and what getting to a destination across the map a few seconds sooner means, it really doesn’t provide any more value than another weapon/set all things considered.
What we need is incentive to have an alternate combat weapon. No weapon swap cooldown would be a great change imo, since we’re tied down by init. D/P Staff or P/P Staff could freely swap and BP+Vault to stealth for example.
Need an ICD on Quick Pockets, then. Otherwise infinite initiative and that’s real bad on something like D/D condi or X/P trapper/perma-stealth, say. Even then I’m not sure if it’s a responsible idea. It just seems like it gives the thief a little bit too many options in combat.
Though I did propose an ICD already in my elite spec suggestion >.>
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Can also get the blind on shortbow 5, and get all of the mobility benefits for point capture, and get better zone control and condition output per initiative via CB and CG. I’m not really sure what the reasoning behind the staff is outside of maybe getting some burst from a sinister/viper-geared player, but even then I’d opt to carrion as you said for durability, and dagger AA provides better damage output if it was really necessary.
necro staff 1 replace by necro downstate 1
Lol. Holy overpowered batman. That thing does absolutely absurd damage.
Change AA to be more reliable (somehow, as they’ve already bumped projectile speed double of what it used to be) since the damage per hit is already decent enough, better power scaling on MoB, reduced cooldown on CB to 12s, and reduced CD on RM to 25 and I think the staff would be in much better shape. Right now it suffers from a problem of “place marks and swap to a real weapon” since it has long cooldowns on its somewhat impactful abilities and only has fair damage on Putrid Mark or from having tons of setup on stacking MoB, which is beaten out by only a few seconds of scepter AA’s.
DB can achieve over 4k condition damage per application while offering almost three times the number of evades as its power variant while offering the highest possible amount of slipperiness, stunbreaking, and healing of all competitive thief builds.
It is quite frankly mathematically superior even in 1v1 in units of damage per cast and consistency, and is the best build possible build on the thief when analyzing damage output per unit of defense.
The build isn’t overpowered because it doesn’t have a purpose in sPvP at the very high tiers. The +1 role is better-fulfilled by power on the sole basis that burst damage is better-suited to finish off a struggling/disadvantaged foe than condition pressure over time, and for point-holding control, there are strictly better bunker builds out there, which take precedence in team comp when being as immovable as possible is so important.
The problem I have with D/D condi is that it’s just so easy and so one-dimensional that it isn’t fun to play against and isn’t really fair to play against. An opponent with half a brain is going to have the capacity to get better performance with it than he would with almost every other build in the game at his skill level, and there’s a pretty staunch ceiling for how well it can be played because it either gets countered or doesn’t, which often comes from the opponent’s build and to what degree of skill they have directly superior to the condi thief’s.
It’s the same reason I have a strong distaste for DH, Scrapper, and PU condi mes; it’s very safe and isn’t really fun or fair to play as or against. Even if the damage was put into a separate skill like a reworked Dancing Dagger (just as I vouch for nerfing Shadow Shot’s damage because I too think this ability’s raw numbers are over-tuned for its utility) and even buffed, it wouldn’t be as big of an issue, because at least there’s some decision-making in respects to if and when to spend initiative on damage or defensive action, and gaining some diversity in skill use. Hell, even DT could probably cause a few poison stacks every backstab, just to reward and encourage players to diversify skill use and give incentive to smarter and dynamic play.
I’ve never felt a dependency on the weapon in my few thousand hours of WvW play. I’ve been running without shortbow for almost two years now, and to those who I’ve worked with in WvW, after mastery of a few other weapons, they haven’t either. And this goes from everything from solo roaming to organized duels to periph in a blob to frontlining a blob (which I do in T1/T2 zergs and have a reputation for doing well with). I don’t change my build for anything, because it isn’t necessary in WvW.
Yea, it’s handy for map sprinting OOC, but you don’t need to take it to combat encounters, and in most cases, if you know what you’re doing, you can achieve near-identical landspeed on S/X with IS jump-cycling. Sheer landspeed doesn’t mean much unless you’re a zergling who died. If you go down in a small group fight, you wait it out for your team either to succeed the fight and res you, or wipe, in which case you’ll be held back by your slowest teammate when regrouping, so there’s no point to having shortbow. If being the group’s engage, running a sword is actually strictly more advantageous, as then you have an escape + cleanse on IS/IR to save on a shadowstep and costing less than IA and having a better disengage range.
In all honesty, I only find the shortbow attractive for playing backline in large blobs for CG, or strictly running away, because it’s easier to do it with than S/X.
Problem is not only sb5. Issue is we have only 2 ranged options which is sb and pp. PP is kind of joke in pvp and is huge ini dump. SB offers range and utility. I think if thief had more ranged options we would see less sb?
It’s not even this. It’s the dependence on vertical mobility because the thief has to play a decap/+1 role. So in respects to sheer mobility, the weapon can’t not be used in sPvP.
Go to WvW and the weapon itself becomes highly unnecessary, because the thief can go toe-to-toe with other professions with any other weapon set and doesn’t need to worry about decapping a point across the map ASAP. The problem is that so long as the thief has access to the best mobility, and so long as the decap role is part of the sPvP meta, they can’t buff the thief for combat because then everyone would just play thief. The inverse is also true.
More 1200 range options would be nice just to fill more play style opportunities. More options alone won’t change dependence on shortbow for sPvP; they’ll just enable more options for the other set.
The issue stems from the design of sPvP more than anything.
You’ll have less success spamming 3 on D/P meta than you will on D/D condi, and even then, you’ll have decent success spamming 3 on D/P meta.
All builds and classes require fair timing and can be countered in some way. It’s the threshold of how good of timing is needed and how many counters there are and how commonly those counters are used that determines how strong the build is.
Even if Shadow Shot or Infil Arrow got nerfed, it’s not going to make D/P Shortbow less viable in sPvP, and even if they buffed the damage on a few D/D skills, it won’t improve power D/D’s viability in any format.
Used to be any objective was a solo affair. However Anet beefed up the lords. Flags and Camps are still easy mode although T3 camps aren’t a pushover. Towers can be easy to difficult depending on class/build and tower rank. Keep lords are tiresome with huge health bars and often dangerous particularly when the keep is upgraded.
I haven’t solo flipped a keep since the upgrades but I am guessing I would struggle with the respawns and prolonged fight not drawing any attention.
I was gonna say they buffed keep lords massively with HoT (so yes, Puck, it should have taken substantially longer), and frankly any build capable of sustaining against it solo is probably not going to have the damage to kill it and take the flip before enemies realize you’re there and defend it. They were pushovers earlier as I took a few keeps with very limited help, but going for them now is nigh impossible unless you’re against really incompetent defenders or have no opposition at all.
T3 camps are actually scary if you’re not built to take and deal multi-hit damage with lots of stability and mitigation. All the cabalist/guard CC gets pretty out of hand :P
It also gives roaming groups’ efforts some protection for a tick if timed right, which is free, guaranteed PPT safety, making the progress not worthless to a big ktrain.
I do remember the days of the necro runs before RI was changed. Marks would deal damage, too. Camps flipped so fast that pretty much nothing ever got upgraded because you’d only get maybe one yak for a camp flip as it’d re-flip again within the minute, usually.
DB doesn’t want to fight on the lord because the pugs/bads will wipe and not move, and Mag doesn’t know how to fight on any scale beyond 10v<5 and thus won’t engage.
So it’s an awkward stalemate because both know they’re trapped if they make the aggressive play.
Inb4 rage, but everyone knows this is how these servers fight.
Tough call if you’re referring to fight potential. Core thief really has no place in sPvP, as it really doesn’t have the capacity to go toe-to-toe with any of the elite specs, as the core specs which it can fight counter core thief via their elites (looking at you, DH).
I’d probably say the previous DA/SA/Tr D/P meta build is still the most functional core thief build, but again this is designed to cap uncontested points via shortbow’s mobility and maybe gank to create an outnumbered situation if there is nothing to rotate to. As far as sPvP goes, you need HoT/Elites to be a functional combatant, and really shouldn’t be playing thief or DrD at all if you want to hold points and fight at the highest echelons of play.
P/P’s a gamble. If you’re against a team that doesn’t stack eles and scrappers with all the reflects, the set does better, safer damage than every other weapon set and offers some pretty solid control, defense, and combo potential into other weapons. Unload is in all respects the single hardest-hitting ability on the thief, and has the capacity to be the single hardest-hitting skill in the entire game.
If it’s paired against an over-abundance of reflection, though, it’ll have major issues.
Everything counters DA/CS/Tr in sPvP. It has no strength because CS is objectively weak in sPvP since amulet stats are too low to let CS get the damage scaling it needs to be worthwhile in the slightest bit. It also lacks meaningful condition cleansing, or will lose BT from Tr trading Trickser for a cleanse, and thus will be extremely weak to everything boon-based (almost all of sPvP since boons are objectively stronger than they should be in the format due to the lower stats).
In any fight in the scope of a normal, high-skill sPvP game, the thief will underperform against all classes built for the format’s current meta. It can beat (mathematically) some flavor builds or dueling builds, but nothing currently being used in standard high-level play. Defenses, passives, and CC is overbuffed on the elite specs to much that especially core thief is a strict liability unless it isn’t fighting and only decaps/caps uncontested points, to which a DrD does it better, since it’s more mobile and more durable.
That’s almost entirely build-dependent and you’ll get wildly-swinging answers based on skill levels of the thief and its opposition. Pre-HoT, I ran a healing power P/P build that was almost literally impossible to kill in a 1v1. The powercreep from HoT nullifies this entire concept, though.
Are these players of equal skill, and to that extent, what are we talking about relative to the majority of other players? Pro-league players? Diamond? Amber? Is this straight duels or 1v1 within the scope of a normal sPvP game? There’s a huge spectrum of what can be considered effective or ineffective based on a ton of different factors.
All I can suggest is to get more eyes on your gameplay and to record your play to review and see what you could have done better.
As far as getting top scorer or some other metric data, there’s really no way to measure your performance as a thief without often being a liability in some respect. Winning the game and being a cause for it is often the only benefit you’ll really be able to measure by. Boosting outgoing damage numbers in terms of team placement or something isn’t going to verify you’re a better or worse thief, because that’s not what the class does in sPvP. Almost anyone can get top damage on a thief. But doing so often comes with most deaths and being a total liability to the overall game’s score.
Really, without a video breakdown of your play with people critiquing your play and decisions as the game unfolds, there’s little anyone can suggest to improve.
If you want to get better at the thief or sPvP as a whole, play other builds, professions, etc. to better learn about their nuances so that you can increase your fight effectiveness should you be forced into one or be a potential point-saver in a critical make-or-break skirmish for the game. Otherwise, you really shouldn’t be participating in combat much because our combat effectiveness in sPvP from a mathematical perspective is fairly poor.
It’d be too good at that point, able to be reduced to a 28s cooldown for entire map traversal.
Same deal with mesmer ports, though. You need to have good teamwork and communication to make the skill work. And when you do, it’s conceptually very, very good. So I’m going to have to disagree with buffing its defenses or making it less risky to activate.
If they’d fix some of the odd pathing issues that come from the skill and remove/reduce the long channel on Destroy Shadow Trap (with no target), the skill would gain a lot of value while upholding a fair degree of risk but with huge reward potential. This risk can be mitigated with a lot of awareness and communication, which should be upheld across all powerful skills and professions in general, though. We should be pushing more ways to make skilled plays, not fewer with rather mindless responses or no consequences.
Unless they stealth-nerfed backstab, it’s still there. You just need to build for it, in which case, there’s no issue.
It procs after the effect which reveals you. So directly, it doesn’t.
However, if you perform a Mug while doing the Backstab animation, you’ll get revealed by Mug which will proc RT for the outgoing backstab. It’s very risky and in most cases not easy to do. It’s better-suited for the outgoing AA chain since it does so much, now.
To make CS good? That’s tough, because its lack of viability extends almost almost solely from issues pertaining to sPvP and the profession itself rather than specifically the trait line.
CS gets all its damage from boosting the damage the thief deals via scaling outgoing damage by percentages (Flawless Strike, Sundering Strikes, PT, Ankle Shots, Ferocious Strike, NQ), which typically also gets modified through other trait lines as well. In PvE and WvW, this lets the thief really push its stats to new heights, as multiplicative stacking leads to the thief getting huge damage potential over static values like a few stacks of might or static effects from other professions (think Revealed Training).
Since stats are so much lower in sPvP, as well as with the stat distribution choices available being unfavorable to the thief due to the lack of granularity in build-making (especially post-Ferocity changeover some time ago), scaling become less effective; 10% increased critical damage is less-preferable to +175 power from might.
DA provides a very strong mix of utility and damage through poison and weakness applications, lifesteal and damage on mug, finishing potential on executioner or utility on Improv, and a choice of either utility on Panic Strike or damage on RT. All said and done, it also has good stat synergy with marauder gear, as it gains tons of durability and the high precision offsets the need for HK or the CS line in general.
Pure utility lines like SA and Acro are obviously and intentionally better for defense and utility than what CS can offer, which makes sense.
So while more damage seems like the logical solution, it isn’t for the sake of PvE and WvW. CS already is the hardest-damaging trait option available to the thief for PvE and WvW, because the scaling gets to work in these environments.
The big issue with CS is that it can’t stand on its own, and isn’t comparable to other trait lines, while the thief effectively only has one choice of trait line, since Tr and DrD are required for PvP purposes for the most part.
So first and foremost, as well as general thief viability in sPvP, put PvE/WvW stats into sPvP and do away with the over-simplified and impossible-to-balance amulet system. This normalizes all formats in the game and thus lets ANet balance skills with the same damage outputs across different formats without worrying about the consequences of scaling tweaks across different formats. There’s little overlap between these formats in respects to builds, anyways, just because of how things play (I don’t see many druids in sPvP or WvW with Water Spirit, etc.).
I think a few things would need to be changed with Trickery to allow its use:
Preparedness baseline, Sleight of Hand’s cooldown reduction on Steal baseline. This pushes Trickery out from being a hard requirement to more-or-less optional for burst specs.
For CS traits themselves:
Unrelenting Strikes buffed and altered. Right now it has a 40% Fury uptime after a foe is taking a hit after already being taken to below 90%. This is meant to enable people to build a little bit away from precision mandating critical hits. It sadly doesn’t do that on engage, though, which is the most important period of time for the thief while in combat in PvP. Move it to 10s of Fury on steal like ToTC to also help push away Trickery from being totally necessary, but also enabling its uptime to near-permanent if taking ToTC with CS and Trickery (thus freeing NQ) to loosen coupling among traits. NQ is cool, but only because of the ferocity bonus. The permanent fury potential due to +2s duration boosts is honestly pretty terrible, especially for a class which hinges on stealth and sometimes not attacking every so often.
Signets of Power: Passives still on effect while on cooldown, or at least for Signet of Shadows. C’mon ANet. SoS was supposed to be the only mobility boost signet in the game for a long time, and this change with reduced dependency on Trickery for swiftness access lets signets become quite menacing. Ele even has this ability already.
Side Strike: Change it to 7% increased critical chance baseline, 14% if from behind or the side. Helps push off the need for HK and gives CS a potential little bit of durability love without just giving it innately more defense while needing to uphold a certain level of skill and back-stabbi-ness.
HK: Cure a condition upon critting in stealth. This gives CS a single condition cleanse every few seconds. This promotes the CS-style of play by rewarding players for entering and then immediately exiting stealth in an aggressive way, also supporting D/D play a bit more with cheaper stealth (eating the consequences of higher revealed uptime), and also gives SA thieves a little bit of consistency in condition removal with SE in stealth removing DoT’s while HK can cure control conditions like Weakness, immob, etc.
This pushes CS into the more in-and-out of stealth aggressive style while sporting some options and damage boosts for non-stealth players like Sundering Strikes, NQ, and IP, while giving SA builds consistency options and a reason to perhaps play a bit more aggressively depending on the current battle circumstances, which is how the thief should play.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
That’s honestly really cheap for a PC.
While I won’t disagree that the engine needs an update for code optimization reasons to be able to boost the performance and graphics capacity of the game in general for entirely different reasons, your PC by price alone really doesn’t warrant such claims that the engine is the problem; consoles in fact have substantially worse hardware and graphics settings than typically their PC counterparts, and especially on the high-end, have much worse performance in the same titles, even at reduced graphics settings.
And here I am with several thousand hours in the game with on my highest-map-completion character, a whopping 42%.
I can’t speak for whether or not we should reduce the time needed to get individual legendaries, as I am not a collector, but I will say that I can definitely get behind ways to achieve the gifts, precursors, etc. through means other than just repeated exploration of the same stuff on each character. Getting thousands of kills and captures in WvW, winning big in sPvP, achieving some dungeon or fractal status, leading hundreds through meta-events, or perfecting raid techniques should offer players a similar reward for their time, as some people, like myself, absolutely detest completionism in exploration. If I climb a mountain, it’s for the view and the experience of the journey in the way I did it. It’s not to get familiar with every rock or noteworthy aspect pointed out as being noteworthy by someone else.
Most others above have provided good insight. Shadow Shot is optimal burst in terms of reliability, and it is the best burst if you have quickness from the faster aftercast, so there’s very little reason to use backstab unless your opponent has no idea you’re there to come in for a backstab. You can also linger in stealth for a few seconds after BP -> HS, re-position to your opponent’s back, refund two initiative, and SS -> backstab while the projectile flies to path into the target for the backstab so you don’t miss. Shadow Show is egregiously overpowered for the damage and effects it does and how cheap it is, though. While effective in use, learn how to ween off of it through smarter play as the above posters have mentioned. If it gets nerfed, and I hope it does, a lot of thieves who think they’re good will start losing a lot more to simply better-skilled players.
In current balance state, don’t try and 1v1 in sPvP. You can do it in WvW, but that’s because the thief gets all its damage from modifiers (like +% damage). Since stats themselves are so low in sPvP, the thief does disproportionately lower amounts of damage than other professions in the format, while doing more in PvE/WvW. Until this is normalized, the class will be mathematically either superior or inferior on the numerical level, and most of the power creep coming with HoT has had a lot of direct counters to a good portion of the core thief’s kit and strategy to promote/enforce the use of Daredevil. Go for uncontested points and only enter fights you absolutely know you’ll win.
Further, only combo if you’re playing a true combo build. A lot of thief players get hung up on stringing abilities together into rotations. It doesn’t work. You need to think about what abilities will give you the best chance of surviving at the current time, rather than pumping out huge damage. Unless you’re playing something like signets or a S/P crit build, you shouldn’t be focused on strictly aggressive play.
Use your kit in full. As someone mentioned, tunnel-vision will kill you. Do not be afraid to target new foes or terrain to really throw people off and re-position heavily. Doing something like Using Shadow Shot or Steal to another enemy just to shake off the one currently hitting you is an essential part of the profession. Keep an open mind on all of the effects and possibilities you have at your disposal and try to learn about your opponents’ playstyles and patterns as fights progress. Look at their combo/rotation use, their movement patterns, and really try to predict what they’re going to do next to work a strategy in advance. Fighting another thief, you should consider using steal after they do, as to rip the boons they steal from you back from them and to take theirs, etc. Over time, the nuances will become learned and will eventually become second nature. You’ll realize people as a whole play pretty similarly, and can use your experiences to be faster in reaching decisions and anticipate what to do.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
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