Either play S/D with a very aggressive, offense-based build running something with CS using S/D to compensate for a lack of defenses, or run it in a tempo durability build with something like Soldier’s gear in SA/Tr/DD (a friend of mine did this with fair success while learning thief). I’d suggest my signets D/D + S/D build, but frankly without playing the thief for a few years it will under-perform and is not as mathematically sound as other possibilities.
Squishier DPS/LS Burst with Boon Hate:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAsYVn0MBFmilOBGOB8Phlxia+2/9jfbDLrO0bACgDA-TlCBQBA4BAUJ1A0n+Ass/oURhq+wgjAQWUWdGlgQ4EAshDBApAEUnF-w
S/D + Staff Brawler:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAsYWn8lCFmilOBePBkmiFkiyLHuhegrBCgFYO+r/+H-TlCEABAcEAcTTgTK/cXPACnAAuUCqo6PV8AA2f/hHOEAECw8CA-w
As mentioned, it’s not bugged, just a poor tooltip. I ran this once to get a bulk cleanse and was deeply disappointed when I learned that it wouldn’t help me in a condi-bomb situation.
Marauder is mathematically better – a 10% DPH loss for more reliability (especially since HK’s not being used, and overall DPS is up by a similar margin from critting more often) and so much more health is simply better. DA/SA/Tr was the previous meta even before DD. CS hasn’t been considered a worthwhile traitline in the competitive landscape for years.
As far as condition play goes, it’s been buffed massively through elite specs, and has always been an optimal source of PvP damage when looking at damage : defense ratios from strictly gear and build perspectives; celestial-boon builds were best countered by power builds, though, as these builds previously had the defensive stats to sustain out condition builds, and boon stripping was limited in availability and thus it was critical to kill the player in brief periods of weakness. With boon builds nerfed via the removal of many defensive stat combinations, increased boon hate from a variety of professions and builds, and changes to a lot of condition application abilities such as Death Blossom to boost viability and application, condi has been on the rise replacing the bunker meta because it simply plays in a similar nature and offers similar mathematical superiority.
Hey guys, below is a list of upcoming polls you are likely to see, in roughly the order you are likely to see them.
- Mixed Borderlands – Do you want a mix of Alpine/Desert Borderlands maps?
- World Linking Schedule – How often should we relink worlds?
- Deployable Mortars – Do you want to be able to buy and deploy Mortars?
- Deployable Cannons – Do you want to be able to buy and deploy Cannons?
- Repair Hammer – Do you want to be able to spend supply to repair siege?
Special Mention
- WvW Priorities – What do you want the WvW team to prioritize next?
- We’ll run this poll after completing major milestones with whatever feature last won the Prioritization vote. So in this case: Scoring Improvements.
BL’s: No. My guild came back to GW2 because alpine returned, and has stated they will leave when desert comes back. If we keep alpine, I keep my friends.
Link Schedule: I’ve said from the beginning this needs some kind of AI running the matchups to mix servers by various population, participation, timezone, etc. metrics to make balanced and fun matchups. The more often, the better, as this also fixes mass transfers and server stacking.
Deployable Mortars: You’d need to do some serious terrain reworks first, as this would give huge advantages to certain keeps/towers in respects to clearing siege. So absolutely not for now, and even then, it’s not a priority in the slightest.
Deployable Cannons: NO. NO. JUST NO. Siege-humping is awful and is a huge part of why WvW has lost a lot of excitement for many, especially with buffed defenses (looking at the desert BL’s inherently favoring defenders, shield bubbles being OP, etc.). No. This absolutely shouldn’t happen and would massively trivialize fighting even more than it already has. Nerf passive projectile reflection in the classes that have way too much of it (Tempest/Scrapper) and maybe raged play will see increased use in zergs. Siege is not the answer here.
Repair Hammer: Ehhhh… could be alright, but would need a lot of testing. This is one of those things that could totally break either offenses, defenses, or both. I can see this going both ways, ankitten ot sure if it’d either work out very well to help solve siege-humping issues or impossible-to-take objectives from too much turtling, or if it would just make defended structures even more impossibly immortal by letting defenders keep their siege and keep it safe.
As far as what’s next: Busting blobs and cutting queues. This can be done to some extent to get servers together to account for staggered coverage instead of sheer population, but I’d really like to suggest adding incentives for playing in small groups if not punishing or slowing down the momentum of an 80-man map queue. It’s unfun to fight because of the lag, unfun to fight because there’s very little skilled play often going on (it just turns into comp wars as fights get bigger), and really just emphasizes the importance of population, especially if we’re moving to a time-zone-based approach to scoring.
I wish there was more reasons to split groups as well, but with an AoE cap and no player collision there is very few reasons not to blob up.
With that said, this game mode runs on having a big player base and linking servers helped that greatly with that.
Actually I am wondering how the 5 minute ticks will impact this. In theory this should favor the smaller groups (at least in PPT terms) since taking a larger force to a smaller target would be less effective then taking 4 other targets at the same time. That should mean more work for havocs and soloers. In theory.
Not going to change the fact that the majority of the playerbase has a EOTM karma train mentality.
Nothing forces players to blob, they do it because they want to.
Us who don’t like blobbing all day are in the minority, years ago we were the majority but most of those players left a long time ago.
It forces people who work together to blob, If I can stand on Commander X and make his front line survive a lot more than it could do with just a skeleton front line, that’s what I’m going to do.
The reason most of those players left was because they realized this, maybe you will soon. If it was up to me, there would be no AoE cap just like ESO had none. That way smaller tactical groups can do things against blobs other than run.
Not taking anything away from smaller groups, they can win the score war but blobbing does things that it shouldn’t necessarily be able to do.
The problem is no AoE cap will probably encourage even larger blobs. The ktrain mentality isn’t going anywhere until it’s simply not usable, and boons are the most important part of the PvP formats, such that sharing and stacking is absolutely necessary. It’s not massive pugs groups winning WvW, in which case a target uncap probably would work (although we’d see even bigger performance issues/lag as a result); rather, it’s organized groups of 30+ and then some with pugs. The organized boon-share groups will have an even bigger reason to get more organized and bigger if they start taking more damage and thus need to share more boons, etc.
I don’t think there’s honestly a good solution to omniblobbing in respect to fights. Boons and strong cohesion let for some groups to bust zergs, but if these same people are in the blob, then zerg-busting isn’t and shouldn’t be possible. Strength in numbers really shouldn’t carry any disadvantages except for clumsiness in mobility, but the problem is structures don’t scale by attackers, and siege is hard and slow to build for smaller groups.
Really, the best way to bust blobs is probably on the objective-flip level by causing tower lords to scale much more aggressively in terms of health (it doesn’t need better damage to slow a flip) after about 5-10 people, and keep the scaling based on the number of enemies near the objective, not the lord, for a period of time. This would cause a 50-man blob to take much longer to take a tower than it currently does, making overall capture speed comparable to a group of maybe 10, and the scaling timer (which can have a large radius to account for manned siege) to prevent a blob from just dropping six catas and leaving for a group of five to flip really quickly; they have to commit to siege and take, or perhaps wait a period of seven minutes.
Of course, this poses a second, equally-difficult problem of then having issues where passing by a tower with a big fight guild going to defend an objective or press on in the midst of five people capping it would ramp the scaling into infinity and make the poor group of five unproductive, which would frustrate small groups enough to probably lose the desire to run in small groups even if it’s optimal PPT.
Tbh I think the most fair aspect of the mesmer is the damage output it has.
Low-cost durability and stealth access, passive CC reflection, and the defensive boon options from PU that most people run is more or less the issue when it comes down to trying to counter-burst; it doesn’t work to oppose a burst mesmer via burst.
This is more or less the result of a set of issues caused by poor design decisions with how traits interact with shatters and their respective damage independence from builds, as well as the overall poor options the mesmer has for defenses without playing into what are relatively unfun mechanics for everyone involved.
Conditions as like Boons need anyways a complete rework, and in some cases also merges to reduce the total amount of Boons as like Condtions, what would be a very good thing to do for overall Game Balance as like also for improving at the same the the Game Performance, due to the game having then alot lesser claculations to do in the background from all the active boons and ticking conditions ect.
And I disagree with you on that part with Anet having to remove certain Gear Sets for specific Stat Combinations. Why exactly should they do this???
Dire gear. Second-best possible toughness and vitality, best condition damage output, no negatives. CC-immunity on par with Soldier’s gear with more than 4 to eight times the damage output depending on build, which also ignores toughness. In essence, conditions would become the only way to play in the PvP formats, and we’ve already seen how disliked condition-oriented styles themselves are.
Further, it’s more logical to have it be armor-based rather than toughness, as warriors and guards should have a bit more stability than eles, mesmers, and necros, although the reaper’s success hinges on this almost entirely, and frankly its entire design supports depending on stability in shroud and having the capacity to build as a squishier front-liner.
Further, balance nightmares galore with trying to define how much break bar unit toughness should provide, and this kills consistency with a lot of weapons and skills. Many thief builds, for example, hinge on a stun from BV at the right time. Hammer warrior is functional because of the CC it has. A big part of some mesmer concepts is constant interruption with OH pistol and similar traits. Terrormancer was supposed to be a core concept the necromancer could work with, and PBS makes the longbow good on the ranger.
Really, stability just needs lower durations but with more frequent casts, and boon-duration needs some normalization. Getting three or four seconds of stability on a stunbreak with a 30s cooldown isn’t that big of a deal; there’s plenty of downtime, but it makes a build running such a skill have the capacity to combo reliably, and this way, there’s no pigeon-holing people into toughness and creating impossible balance environments, especially with conditions.
Forum bug fix 15 characters.
They’d have to rework conditions and remove several of the gear combinations as-is to justify a toughness-based break bar. Otherwise you’d have things like dire giving mesmers and necromancers, already very durable and high-condition-ticking builds able to facetank large amounts of CC and innately counter what are the methods to deal with them.
@McKenna Berdrow,
Instead of having only Boon-strip, why not have Boon Denial effects to really mix up the game’s metas.
New Skills I hope can be added:
Short Duration/Small Area of Effects but here they are:Thief/Daredevil -Shadow Shroud: Target foe cannot have boons applied to them.
3-5 seconds.Necromancer/Reaper – Well of the Profane: Foes in this well lose “X” Boons and cannot receive of further Boons.
If we could recycle these it could mix up the metas entirely and coordinate spikes and coordination, make classes less played even more dangerous and give some new playstyles. Just convert the skill durations over to GW2, Change Wording on Enchantments to Boons
We need less counter vs counter vs counter vs my 2 seconds of this vs your 2 seconds of that vs the other players 2 seconds of whatever…
More complexity layers are completely unnecessary, we need profession balancing separations between pvp and pve, and hard changes to certain combat rules and mechanics in pvp.
CC is way way way over done in this game and that’s what needs to change first.
Yes. Yes. Yes. +1
Start by reducing the absurd amount of CC available to everyone, then stability can be nerfed a little bit and in that way it won’t be as binary as it is now based on a big elaborate game of rock paper scissors.
its not about the stats, its about the skill balance
It isn’t, though. Most of the imbalance in respects to diversity is strictly numbers in the end, and this is why there is obviously more diversity in WvW than sPvP.
They could also just bring PvE/WvW stats into sPvP and unify everything that way.
The problem with PvP is the stats themselves are so innately different from PvE/WvW that coming up with balanced skills themselves to fit both formats is literally impossible.
The way I see it, why split balancing when the problem is the split in stats and simply just make a few tweaks to PvE and WvW instead of rebalancing each game mode individually, especially since there’s more diversity in WvW than sPvP to begin with?
Well originally they used to be the same with some minor differences like dire wasnt in PvP. However, a month after it was found that elite specs (namely chronomancer and tempest) with stats like celestial or sentinel virtually couldn’t be killed and games screeched to a halt. This was known as the bunker meta. Games almost always went to the timer with scores as low as 100-0 and teams would often give up as soon as a point was capped. Things got so bad that long time PvP veterans quit the game even when money was on the line.
Elite specs all provide defence inherently, with the slight exception of reaper, at no cost of point contestion loss. So, to allow for the progression of games, arenanet split the stats of PvP from PvE/WvW rather than splitting the balance.
It worked, pvp games aren’t a test of patience anymore, but it didn’t solve the problem of powercreep and powercreep is needed for raids.
I am familiar with the history of sPvP as I have been playing the PvP formats in GW2 since release and have been theorizing builds since then as well. No, the stats were never the same. I don’t mean amulets. I mean the actual amount of stats one gains; for example, a berserker build does around 60% less relative damage in sPvP than it does in WvW on the same target, just because of how scaling works on skills, weapon damage, applications to traits, and the strictly lower numbers.
This is also the same reason why boons are so overwhelmingly powerful in sPvP and so important to the format; each boon counts for a higher percentage of stats than it does in PvE/WvW. And while boons are absolutely essential in WvW and PvE to optimize outputs and are major factors in how a build performs, less boon-dependent builds have increased viability for content completion, as these boons are increasingly less-necessary since players hit innate stat thresholds by gear.
Powercreep shouldn’t be needed for raids, considering the whole point of elite specs is to make the profession no more powerful than core. Not to mention that PvE builds are and never have been good in sPvP. Defense is always and by design superior in sPvP in its current stat distribution because mathematically offensive stat-configurations are strictly underpowered in regards an even remotely-balanced damage : defense comparison in comparison to defensive builds and relative to WvW. This is why there’s more inherent diversity in WvW; the math behind the builds themselves forced by the current stat allocation is just too poor to justify playing any other way.
All skill splitting will do is change some coefficients to better-reflect what’s happening in WvW and PvE.
They could also just bring PvE/WvW stats into sPvP and unify everything that way.
The problem with PvP is the stats themselves are so innately different from PvE/WvW that coming up with balanced skills themselves to fit both formats is literally impossible.
The way I see it, why split balancing when the problem is the split in stats and simply just make a few tweaks to PvE and WvW instead of rebalancing each game mode individually, especially since there’s more diversity in WvW than sPvP to begin with?
Meh used to have trouble with thieves so I rolled 1. Pretty easy to kill thieves accidentally now that I know what they’re trying to do.
This is honestly the best advice I can give. To really know how to beat a thief, you need to play one and learn its nuances.
Can we get medium armor […] that’s not a trenchcoat, and is sleeveless?
How about this?
Oh oh! Someone else plays pathfinder!
Good stuff. Glad to see these kinds of breakdowns, especially with the honesty in regards to numbers. Most people insist they’re never having the upper hand.
I will need to look out for you to do some tag-sniping, though :P
Axe is fantastic for small-scale or 1v1. It’s great in engage to build some more LF, and GC is a great finisher for people running away. OH Focus lets you chase a bit better with Spinal Shivers on fleeing foes and can be a huge nuke/power engage with the boon rip. Focus skills are also 1200 range if you need it, too. Staff is irreplaceable for larger fights, though.
Yea, learning melee is important, but there is no substitute for being able to beat thieves into the dirt by channeling a high-damage Ghastly Claws before they stealth as to prevent them from resetting and healing. Vuln Stack synergy on AA is also great if you run Decimate Defenses, and is still otherwise just icing on the cake for extra damage when entering Shroud.
I stand by my theory in which a primarily Valkyrie build reaches optimal performance for power CS builds in the PvP formats. If you’re not running CS, Marauder is the only way to go, and the only second option in any PvP format. There is just too much resilience in the game in general right now to justify berserker stats in anything but PvE.
(Re-)Improved damage on Dancing Dagger and a Blind on Cloak and Dagger.
Would help any weapon set using the Dagger off-hand massively.I like your idea about the synergy between #4 and #3 though… That’s actually very interesting. But how would that Mark behave with Sword or Pistol for a main-hand?
Flanking Strike/Larcenous Strike and Shadow Strike are already good in their own way…Did you know that once upon a time, within a couple of months of the game going live, dancing daggers had its damage reduced by 50% because mesmer clones and ranger pets died and got the players killed fast from 4 spamming?
Yea…except, they later buffed both of those, but forgot to un-nerf dancing daggers, cause….nobody gives a kitten about thief.
No, it wasn’t about ranger pets or clones dying. The actual rangers and mesmers themselves were dying because Dancing Dagger dealt an absurd amount of damage when it bounced back from the clones etc. It wasn’t uncommon to hit someone for 10k+ with this ability, which for obvious reasons is OP.
…and got the players killed fast…
It’s okay, I understand that reading comprehension is difficult and one must always try to appear right and very knowledgeable over others.
Btw, you can still hit upwards of 8-10k on zerker builds. Nothing has changed in that regards.
It’s okay, I understand that opening a sentence by criticizing another’s reading comprehension capability is a pretty common condescending thing to do on the internet in an attempt to make oneself look superior and the other inferior.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a matter of reading comprehension. I deliberately disagreed with what you wrote based on how you wrote it. You can still kill mesmers and rangers by spamming 4 if you dump 16 initiative on it on a glass cannon build and they take the hits, and they still die quickly. Your statement says it was nerfed “because mesmer clones and ranger pets died” as your primary reason grammatically, “and got the players killed fast from 4 spamming” is no different than how it is now; to which I disagreed for why it was nerfed; it got nerfed because it was killing some players like glass thief or ele with one cast, maybe two. Two casts of the same ability in a row is far from spamming, as per the purpose of the initiative system. That’s why it was OP, because it didn’t even need to be spammed; it just killed people, because it had a better coefficient than backstab.
So if your intent was to say that the skill itself was overpowered because it was one-shotting people, and we’re in agreement on that, that would be your writing in which we should be discussing inadequacies, rather than attacking my reading. Please do not criticize my reading comprehension when that is very far from what your post states, and to which I simply clarified why the ability was nerfed, rather than attacking you personally.
A lot of total BS that is completely being misunderstood.
I’m sorry, but almost all of what you have been claiming for the past several pages has been completely false aside from the mentioning of a few random statistics which promote that the DX12 API is faster than DX9 in certain hardware configurations. That said, this has nothing to do with why the game runs poorly. This is the engine not being written in a way to take advantage of multiple cores for performance gains. Simply adding DX12 API calls will do nothing.
DX12 will do absolutely nothing in the game’s current optimization state. Nothing. Zero. Anyone claiming there will be some magical performance gains has clearly no knowledge of parallel computing and writing code for distributed systems.
This is an expensive, difficult, and slow-moving fix which would probably take years to complete. You’re better off asking ANet for an updated engine for GW3, because it’d probably take that much staff, that long of a time, and that much funding from investors to complete.
Please, go read up on Shavit and Herlihy to get the basics down before you talk as though you’re some kind of parallel systems expert.
Your game won’t run much better on any laptop currently on the market. Clock speeds haven’t changed much for laptop computing purposes.
You’ll only start seeing big gains in the expensive custom-built desktop market, and even then, they’ll be small in terms of FPS in crowded areas.
I love the GS as-is. Only thing that could be changed is Soul Eater such that it’s not terrible. Swap it with Augury of Death to the Minor slot, and push healing on all GS skills for self-only, and it becomes instantly viable while not paling in comparison to DD and CV.
Guardian here. Used to like dueling people before HoT. I’d do ridiculous things to try to keep from getting back stabbed. Stand with my back to a wall. Turn frequently. Dodge at odd times.
…I don’t even worry about those in fights anymore. It’s the 10k Vault I watch out for
Sorry if that’s a buzz kill for ya, but yeah I literally don’t even think about BS when fighting theives now because of this crazy powercreep
Core Guard/Thief matchup was fun. It was a test of the Guard’s capability of keeping tabs on the thief/learning how the thief plays to do well, and the thief’s to keep distance and engage when the moment was opportune and try to blow the guard up.
Right now it’s just not really fun as DH counters core thief and DD counters core guard, and DH/DD fights are basically who runs out of gas spamming their abilities first.
I’m not really fond if it. It requires LoS, it’s unreliable and it’s a dead utility slot in most cases. Most of the time, you’re not going to cap one uncontested point and immediately move back to another uncontested point; typically there will be a defense there.
If from a WvW perspective (or pve) the numbers are overstated. There are people who just feel that anything Condi is not skill based so anytime they lose to a condi build they complain about how “out of control” the build is. It the same people complaining over and over again about a build rarely used, giving the impression they are rampant in numbers.
Except a lot of the people complaining have tried these build and stopped playing them because it’s so easy it isn’t even fun.
I have literally 1v10’ed on my condi D/D thief. There are videos of people playing the build with their face because it’s so easy and overpowered (to think condi mesmer is worse…). A number of the people I’ve taught how to play power thief well have previously played condi and have admitted most condition builds take next to no skill after being exposed to playing glass builds and subsequently losing close to every fight they partake in for months on end when against reasonably skilled people.
It was and still is a big deal.
Everything else is just so power-creeped that it doesn’t seem to be a big deal anymore.
I guarantee you, just from knowing how Anet works, that the new expansion will nothing at all like HoT. Anet has always been hyper-reactive to crticism. Always.
I can’t speak to that. However, lest we miss who is pulling on the puppet strings and who is dancing, note that NCSOFT announces to investors that they need another expansion, and ANET shelves the popular Legendary crafting indefinitely and moves the people to the expansion, to speed it up.
But you ignore that fact that NcSoft has been claiming an expansion was coming soon since the first report after Guild Wars 2 launched. You have a data point of 1 and your’e trying to draw conclusions from it.
NcSoft has always said an expansion was coming even when Anet didn’t say it and wasn’t actively working on it.
From past experience with the company, I don’t think NcSoft has too much control over Anet. For example, for ages, people said the reason Anet had their silence policy was due to NcSoft. Yet NcSoft owned Wildstar too and they didn’t have a silence policy.
No, I think that Anet would have done this anyway, as a response to the vocally negative reaction to the first expansion and the fact that it didn’t meet expectations.
What you said only supports his argument in that NCSoft controls the inevitable flow of content out of sheer business logic versus how ANet plans to operate.
It’s an amazing interrupt and isolation tool for small-scale. If you need to close the gap, get in with PT and pull the foe back out with grasp. This makes it unblockable as to pull guards/warriors/scrappers/mesmers out from blocks and combo into your damage nicely.
For PvP, it’s good right now because of the low skill ceiling letting people spam evades during condition application via DB. On power, it’s the weakest weapon set and frankly quite weak overall.
Get rid of the fact it currently evades while pumping condition damage and as a compromise buff its net condition access without needing to spam 3 as to make it vulnerable to taking damage, and all is good such that the utility on DB and OH dagger can be improved for power without numerical buffs.
I saw it as a compromise to power builds considering right now the per-bounce damage is low, while if it hits the same target again, the damage is quite high per initiative. The bonus damage keeps it good for a ranged finish on power builds while the lack of bouncing keeps it consistent and fair for condition use.
This lack of credit for loot is apparently true for all condition damage in WvW, of which necro marks appear to be 100% condi damage with bleeds, horrors, poison, etc.
:facepalm:
Am I way off, even though it has been brought up before?
Yes, sad to say. Wells, especially WoP have amazing power scaling.
As far as marks go, they’re triggered only by people up. However, if you cast a mark on someone downed, and another player walks into the mark, both players will get hit, even if one of them is downed. Once the mark procs, it doesn’t matter if they’re up/down.
So cast them on people standing up, cleave the downed, and all is good.
I don’t play engineer for this reason.
Problem with D/D is that people can’t agree on how they want to play it due to its hybrid approach. Power players want/need a changed DB, condi players don’t like CnD and backstab weaving which the set features for power play.
Dancing Dagger can’t get buffed unless it stops bouncing, and will remain continuously pretty terrible, and obviously changes to HS aren’t really a good idea.
Because of the increased Synergies which would makes Thieves more unpredictable?
or
Because of this System making Thieves a more skillful and complex to play and understand class like Enginners with all their Weapon Kits and Toolbelt Skill Synergies ?
However, you have to admit, my suggestion here would make D/D truly unique compared to the other Weapon Sets and with the many Synergies, there would be provided for all sides something, power builds, condition builds, hybrid builds – they all would find among thise Stigma Effects something from that their builds could benefit in the moment of the fight when you attack a foe that you have marked with Assassins Promise with a Stigma, so that for a brief time those Snyergy Effects can improve your skills. Also these Synergy Effects would be really helpful to make absolutely underused and boring skilsl of the Thief directly alot more fun and effectful, because of their Synergies, don’t you think too???
Unnecessary complexity in design, however, is not seen as necessarily good design; in my honest opinion (and among many people in game design), a reduced number of skills or rules with a far degree of depth makes games innately more competitive as when all of the pieces are known in advance with a certain degree of predictability, it showcases player skill much more as a measure of thought. The simplicity of the skill kits on the Thief and of the Warrior and core Guardian (before HoT, mind you, where now the design for almost all specs is objectively poor), was what separated the good from the bad players of these respective classes.
The engi and ele have always had fairly low skill ceilings and their rotation-based play doesn’t really do much in terms of requiring more skill, so much as it does require muscle memory for rotations and proper timing on swaps. While this takes skill to do, it is incomparable to the gameplay style of the thief, as it operates on an entirely different set of gameplay skills from most other professions. Strictly speaking, people mostly have their preferences in classes largely due to the preferences in how they play. Making the thief more like the engineer innately and not through a specialization is a big step backwards. I’m not saying I disagree entirely that thieves should be barred from some of these mechanics, but more simply, I disagree that this is the answer to the problem plaguing a specific weapon set, because that weapon set affects the core thief, which is very far from your proposal conceptually.
The problem with D/D is that while all of the skills have a degree of synergy, there are problematic skills from a design perspective. MH dagger is not functional without the stealth from CnD (otherwise D/P is better), and the stealth from CnD is very prone to being blocked/dodged/invuln’ed etc. (which is even more common now with HoT) while the set provides very few defensive benefits. Dancing Dagger can’t be balanced properly unless it undergoes a big design change to stop bouncing, and DB is overpowered in condition build implementations with no other skills on the kit being useful, and on the converse, is not cohesive to the power set’s kit due to the lack of mobility the set has as a result.
If I were given permission to fix D/D, I’d do the following:
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
(Re-)Improved damage on Dancing Dagger and a Blind on Cloak and Dagger.
Would help any weapon set using the Dagger off-hand massively.I like your idea about the synergy between #4 and #3 though… That’s actually very interesting. But how would that Mark behave with Sword or Pistol for a main-hand?
Flanking Strike/Larcenous Strike and Shadow Strike are already good in their own way…Did you know that once upon a time, within a couple of months of the game going live, dancing daggers had its damage reduced by 50% because mesmer clones and ranger pets died and got the players killed fast from 4 spamming?
Yea…except, they later buffed both of those, but forgot to un-nerf dancing daggers, cause….nobody gives a kitten about thief.
No, it wasn’t about ranger pets or clones dying. The actual rangers and mesmers themselves were dying because Dancing Dagger dealt an absurd amount of damage when it bounced back from the clones etc. It wasn’t uncommon to hit someone for 10k+ with this ability, which for obvious reasons is OP.
It would be cool if they made a supportish specilization that focused on debilitating conditions. Basically a thief that can do a ton of aoe weakness, poison vulnerability and blind being its main source of staying alive.
You actually inspired me with that. I made one like that, but still have to type it up. Still have to type it up, look for a “Sabatour ES.”
So… like this?
>.>
If you play the build long enough, you can be quite successful as a power D/D player in WvW because you have the scaling from stats needed to make the build work, which is physically impossible in sPvP.
That said, it’s strictly worse than D/P and requires a lot of practice to be halfway decent with.
Dont like personally the proposed system with the proposed effects.
Would like something more effectful, that makes D/D a strong tactical choice over the other Weapon Sets that are more about mobility, cleave/CC on demand and boon control.D/D should give thieves a Weapon Set, with that they can be more unpredictable due to many possible synergy effects that should come from the Weapon Skills as like also your choice of Utility Skills you use.
Would personally like it more with effects like this that my imo significantly more sense, especially in such close melee combat as like you have it most of all times with D/D
AA) Double Strike (Each Attack hits now twice, similar to the Attacks of the Assassin in GW1) > Lotus Strike (merged now with Wild Strike) > Assassin’s Promise (New AA Finisher)
Assassin’s Promise Attack a targeted foe with Assassin’s Promise, dealing damage and causing 3 Stacks of Vulnerability, leaving additionally a “Stigma” at your hit target.
As long as the Stigma is there for the duration of 5 seconds, will cause any other Dagger Skills of the Thief and utility Skills Stigma based Synergy Effects.Stigma of Agility = Activates when using Heartseeker on a stigmataed foe, granting you for 2 seconds Quickness.
Stigma of Blood = Activates when using Deathly Bloosom on a stigmataed foe, letting you leech life secondly from all hit targets that you caused to Bleed as long as they are bleeding
Stigma of Speed = Activates when using Dancing Daggers on a stigmataed foe, the Dancing Dagger becomes flying alot faster (+33%), becomes unblockable and lets you shadowstep to your target. The Danging Daggr won’t cripple in this case, but daze the foe and removes a Boon, if the target had more than 3 Boons.
Stigma of Twilight = Activates when using Cloak and Dagger on a stigmataed foe, Cloak & Dagger will AoE blind then also additionally foes and you won’t get revealed on attack number one, but now first on your second attack from stealth, and the Stealth Duration is increased by 50% if you used the skill on somebody who was stigmataed from Assassin’s Promise’s passive effect that can’t get removed, its duration must run out
——Stigma of Venom – Scorpion Wire: Activates when using Scorpion Wire on a stigmataed foe, Scorpion Wire will have in this case 25% reduced recharge time and will additionally poison and cripple the foe, after it has been pulled to you, which will be stronge,r so further the distance was, givign this way the poison more time to increase quickly in stacks. if a target gets pulled from max distance, will you gain also a random Venom Effect as if you would have used that Venom Skill
Stigma of Torment – Roll For Initiative: Activates when using Roll For Initiative in near of a stigmataed foe, you will cleanse then Torment and Confusion. If you had at that moment these Conditions, will receive stigmataed foes in your near then these Conditions.
Stigma of Slowness – Haste: Activates when you use Haste near stigmataed foes, then you will slow and cripple nearby stigmataed foes.
Stigma of Pain – Caltrops: Activates when you use Caltrops and stigmataed foes run into their effect area, whenever a stigmataed foe receives Bleeding Stacks from Caltrops, they receive also Vulnerability and lose protective Boons (Protection, Aegis, Vigor, Stability, Resistance)
Stigma of Assasination – Ambush: Activates on trigger of Ambush by a stigmataed foe running into the trap, the stigmataed foe will get taunted by the ambushing Thief Minion, whilethe Thief Minion receives in this case Quickness, Protection and some stacks of Might.
Stigma of Shadows – Shadow Trap: Activates on trigger of Shadow Trap by a stigmataed foe running into the trap, you will gain Initiative additionally and you gain Stealth now, so that you can surprise your victim directly with a Backstab on arrival instead of shadowsstepping to a fow and havign to waste then first a cloak and dagger for Stealth, with Stigma of Shadows you shadowstep already stealthed to the stigmataed foe.
Stigma of Penetration – Needle Trap: Activates on trigger of Needle Trap by a stigmataed foe running into the trap, the trap then in this case will deal now more damage and has increased range to up to 10 Targets nearby of that foe and causes additionally now also Slow
Stigma of Surprise – Tripwire: Activates on trigger of Tripwire by a stigmataed foe running into the trap, the trap will recharge then faster and affected foes will get revealed and weakened now additionally when among the trap triggerers was a stigmataed foe
Stigma of Toxity – Skale Venom: Activates when hitting stigmataed foes with Skale Venom active. A stigmataed foes will suffer additionalyl on Poison and Blindness
Stigma of Weakness – Ice Drake Venom: Activates when hitting stigmataed foes with Ice Drake Venom active. A stigmataed foe under Chill will deal 10% lesser damage to you and the foes conditions on you will expire faster.
Stigma of Absorption – Devourer Venom: Activates when hitting stigmataed foes with Devourer Venom active. A stigmataed foe hit by this venom will get its Endurance absorbed by you by 50% per hit, as you gain the absorbed Endurance by 25% hit per hit.
Stigma of Paralyzation – Spider Venom: Activates when hitting stigmataed foes with Spider Venom active. A stigmataed foe hit by this Venom will also get stunned on application of poison, as also when it gets removed by the foe, before the poison durarion could expire by itself.
Stigma of Darkness – Shadow Refuge: Passively active for stigmataed foes the moment you activate Shadow Refuge, stigmataed foes become secondly blinded the moment they enter your Shadow Refuge and periodically also receive Chill.
Stigma of Rogues – Shadow Step: Activates on usage instantly, if in the target area was a stigmataed foe, then you will steal from that stigmataed foe, even if your Steal is currently filled by a Steal Skill, as if you would have used Steal on this foe, all Steal effects will also happen like you traited your Steal to work. The difference is, your current Steal Skill wont get replaced, you will be able to use the skill twice!!
Stigma of Retreat – Blinding Powder: Activates if you blind with this skill a stigmataed foe. Bliding Poweder will under this effect turn after usage into Shadow Step allowing you to perform a quick retreat away from your foe if needed, including Shadow Return.
Stigma of Distraction – Smoke Screen: Activates on usage of Smoke Screen, if a stigmataed foe comes nearer to the Smoke Screen – summons two Shadow Clones for 10 seconds of you that will attack any stigmataed foes which try to get close to the Smoke Screen or go through it. These Shadow Clones attack mainly stigmataed foes and can’t be targeted. 8turns this skill practically into a spawn gate of shadow clones if stigmataed foes get too close to it)
Stigma of Seals – Signet of Shadows: Activates on using the Signet on a stigmataed foe, the moment you use the Signet, a random unused Utility Skill from the sitgmataed foe will be sealed off, until your Signet of Shadows Skill has been recharged.
Stigma of Sabotage – Signet of Infiltration: Activates on using Signet of Infiltration on a stigmataed foe, the shadow step towards you foe will cause also Weakness to a stigmataed foe, while it will also deactivate all layed traps for you from a stigmataed foe and instead will turn the traps to harm the stigmataed foe instead if he runs into them in hope to lure you into them, thinking his traps still work for him…
Stigma of Fear – Assassins Signet: Activates on usage of the Assassins Signet, all nearby stigmataed foes will deal 15% lesser damage for kittens and if your last empowered attack hits a stigmataed foe, then this attack will cause Fear for 2 seconds, 3 with additional added Torment, if that last attack was a Backstab.
Stigma of Regeneration – Signet of Agility – Activates on using the the Signet of Agility, nearby stigmataed foes lose for the time your Signet needs to reload their class based passive over time regeneration effects that come from either skills or traits and you gain Regeneration plus the skill works for that moment then also as Stun Breaker and removes instead of only 1 then up to 3 Conditions.
Stigma of Revenge – Bandit’s Defense: Activates when blocking with this Skill attacks from a stigmataed foe. Changes the retaliatory kick attack from a 2s knockdown to a powerful revengeful launch away and you receive Retaliation and Protection.
Stigma of Hallucinations – Distracting Daggers: Activated on usage against a stigmataed foe. These foes hit by Distracting Daggers won’t be able to hit you, their next attack that would usually hit you will be auto evaded through small blinding powders bags that were attached to the distracting daggers causing Blindness to them short before the attack would land due to the powder from the daggers causing hallucinations to the stigmataed foe.
Stigma of Death – Impairing Daggers: Activates when hitting a stigmataed foe with this attack, the effect from imparign daggers on stigmataed foes will be double as strong, if the stigmataed foe is under 50% health.
Stigma of Aggresivity – Fist Flurry: activates on usage of Fist Flurry against a stigmataed foe, using Fist Flurry agaisnt a stigmataed foe will grant you stacks of might for each attack that lands, fury and Super Speed also for every attack that lands.
Palm Strike will stun a second longer and Pulmonary Impact will deal increased damage against stigmataed foes.
I don’t play engineer for this reason.
Problem with D/D is that people can’t agree on how they want to play it due to its hybrid approach. Power players want/need a changed DB, condi players don’t like CnD and backstab weaving which the set features for power play.
Dancing Dagger can’t get buffed unless it stops bouncing, and will remain continuously pretty terrible, and obviously changes to HS aren’t really a good idea.
You get killed by confusion damage when you try to cleanse.
This. This is what absolutely irks me about confusion.
If it didn’t damage on dodge or cleanse activation, it wouldn’t be so bad. The fact that you literally will die and get punished from trying to counter an effect directly because it also counters the counter is absurd.
Really, it’s just perplexity runes that are the biggest offender (passive proc 3 stacks from being hit, passive CC reflection/CC, AoE CC and CC overload from elite specs makes it VERY easy to stack huge confusion just from runes). Get rid of those runes and most of the issues vanish. Get rid of these and dire gear together and all WvW-related condition issues for the most part vanish, too.
These sets aren’t even useful in PvE and aren’t accessible in sPvP because they’ve been labeled as too objectively OP since their release, so I see little reason to object.
I would still say the right condition cleanse and redistribution builds can still be hard counters to these two types of conditions. Nevertheless I would somewhat agree with the sentiment that both of you are trying to get across. Only if we did not get some of these new “easy to manage,” support builds we have from HoT. Everyone talks about how easy it is to play the Reaper in order to rack up damage. However the abilities that the Druid and Tempest have at their disposal makes it harder to see this line of logic. Furthermore we have a new boon called Resistance as well. Not to mention that Sigil of Generosity is so dirt cheap after last Wintersday. Even somewhat advance players know how to utilize light fields properly in order to wipe out their conditions.
In my opinion Confusion and Torment conditions are no where near as powerful as their GW1 counterparts (Hex’s Backfire and Empathy). Due to them being having a smaller amount of ways to counter them as hex spells. Even the daze condition felt drastically more powerful in GW1 then it does in GW2 (in a pure CC form). Especially when it used to paired with GW1 epidemic skill. I digress though.
Finally if they did nerf these two conditions, by removing their passive damage over time function. Then they will have to increase it’s base damage function overall. Which in turn would make things worse, then what you believe they are now.
That’s the irony, though; they used to deal more damage before when activated properly. Confustion damage per skill use before it was made DoT was way more than it is now. Even torment’s on-movement effect got nerfed substantially because its no-movement DoT got massively buffed. In essence, you used to be able to pretty much tank a condi mesmer by playing smart and taking few actions and movements. There wasn’t enough uptime on their conditions and cooldowns were high enough which opened windows of opportunity. Of course, this still destroyed small-scale since you could permanently maintain an impossible-to-deal-with level of confusion and torment from two sources.
Viper’s and Expertise paired with skill power creep as a whole have led to the ability for these builds to not have an effective counter, though, and corresponding cleanses haven’t been buffed to reflect this.
You need a stunbreak for power burst mitigation, a cleanse for condition application, and maybe an intermediate or combo-oriented skill for your own build’s function, and elites are typically just overall utility for the profession. People making claims which more cleanses need to be run clearly either run very passive builds with lots of auto-proc effects or simply don’t run balanced builds which get shut down by the absurdity that currently is the condition game.
I’d also like to mention they removed Antitoxin heal, which was one of the best ways to deal with these two conditions.
“The performance of HoT was not as expected. We learnt the lesson.”
“A second expansion is in work and will be released as soon as possible.”
Oh the irony…3rd times the charm hopefully…
I’m very far from a white-knight, but this essentially only means they’re not going to intentionally withhold the next expansion or announce features they can’t deliver in advance.
We’ll have to see what happens next to really determined which lesson, if any, was truly learned.
I’m pretty sure MO coming out and giving everyone with the expansion a free level 80 and gear to go with it on top of a permanent shared inventory slot with an apology on the basis that the expansion failed to deliver promised content on top of repeated first-hand account from NCSoft execs stating the expansion was not as economically successful as planned in the moths afterwards in respects to whether or not the expansion was a success in the eyes of the players is really up for debate.
Don’t get me wrong, I give the developers credit for their hard work and really want to support them financially and with morale for doing their best (props to the team working on WvW right now, I love the efforts being made as of late), but claiming HoT is a resounding success is just a blatant lie.
I don’t know; condition cleanse[snip]
You get killed by confusion damage when you try to cleanse.
This. This is what absolutely irks me about confusion.
If it didn’t damage on dodge or cleanse activation, it wouldn’t be so bad. The fact that you literally will die and get punished from trying to counter an effect directly because it also counters the counter is absurd.
Really, it’s just perplexity runes that are the biggest offender (passive proc 3 stacks from being hit, passive CC reflection/CC, AoE CC and CC overload from elite specs makes it VERY easy to stack huge confusion just from runes). Get rid of those runes and most of the issues vanish. Get rid of these and dire gear together and all WvW-related condition issues for the most part vanish, too.
These sets aren’t even useful in PvE and aren’t accessible in sPvP because they’ve been labeled as too objectively OP since their release, so I see little reason to object.
Removing content is NEVER the right solution.
If you remove things out of the game, this will create only ALIt of anger, frustration and disappointment for players, which have invested alot of time and effort to get these things, to the point, that for 100% sure this change of removing content from the game ultimatively results only in one thing!MASS PLAYER RAGE QUITTING.
Is this seriously what you want???
But if ANet just finally would balance all aspects of their game’s combat system and woudl take all aspects of it more into account when balancing things, nothign of existign content and player efforts just would get removed…
The content would still be there under rebaölancing all aspects of gameplay from the combat system, but under the changed mechanics wouldn’t they be anymore by fas as much OP as they are right now, due to conditions beign out of control, dealign too much damage, without that players can do anything to effectively reduce the damage, except of using buff food, that makes builds in WvW even far more overpowered in both directions and is currently the only way to keep the out of control conditions in check by using the stuff that reduces significantly condition durations.
by reworking the attribute system and adding meaningful defensive effects, while fixing toughness and vitality to become more meaningful, while Expertise and Concentration get fully integrated into the balancing of all boons and conditions, that would by far more affect positively the whole combat system of GW2, than it would do with just removing content – removing content is the simpleminded LAZY WAY of getting just rid of the problems in WvW.
Thats how I do see it.
Anet has reduced massively the toal amount of skills for all classes, so that they would have it alot easier to balance all classes in the game and to make compared to GW1 it also simpler to splitt properly the balancing betwene all modes so that all skills can be separately be balanced for all game modes.
Seperate game mode relative class balancing is the only way how I see how all parts of the game can be balanced, without that ever any game mode gets negative cunwanted chain reactions due to some made changes for a skill or a trait, that were made to fix for a specific mode, but affcted also negatively other game modes.
Its the only way how Anet get completely get rid from this problem, a game design problem, that should never ever exist in my honest opinion.
Thats why you have in the end also different game mode,s so that each of them gets individually balanced, because if you don#t individually balance all skilsl and combat system relative mechanics of the game, then there is absolutely no reason at all to have even different game modes, when in the end they share all the same balancing of the combat system.Then we would need no pvp equipment systme, everyone would just play pvP with their PvE characters and equipment.
I doubt it hard that you or anyone else would find THIS would be funny for a single second, when you would get outplayed in PvP, because just someone else had better equipment than you, due to making out of all game modes just one big unifyed thing where skills, traits, upgrades and class mechanics don’t get individually balanced for each game mode.
In WvW its not a big deal if someone has better equipment than you, because you can get outnumbed anytime with the amount of players to make up for the difference of each individuals player character’s power and equipment.
ANd PvE is ruined when you use stuff with PvP balance in mind, because its then usually too boring/uneffectful for PvE to be useful at all.
Thats why all game modes need seperate balancing, because all game modes require different aspects.
PvE skills need some kind of powercurve, so that you get also some kind of character progression feeling, which is somethign, that woudl make skills for PvP play too poverful and unbalanced.
Its something that would make also WvW clearly again unbalanced, because of the masses of players for which these kind of skills aren’t designed for, because these powerful skils are designed for enemy, which dynamically can scale in power and especially health like huge sponges, so that fights last long enoug, that hundreds of playrs can get participation for battles, which eagin is something that happens only in pvE and not in anyother game mode.Its impossible to measure everythign by the same yardstick here, which is another reason why its time, that ANet finally individually should balance all game modes with their concrete oown skill, trait and upgrade effects, so that when Anet specifically wants to change something on the PVP balance for instanc,e that no other game mode has to suffer from these changes as a chain recations, due to skills all sharign the same effects in all game modes.
Sure, this is absolutely no tiny task to taslk about, it will take time, but once anet would have done this great step, it would be a great step towards reaching overall game balance for the whole game, that will last and that won’t be directly destroyed again with douzens of chain recations just with the next coming balance patch that made some changes of skilsl that got shared among all modes with the same effect, where the change is for mode A perfect for mode B absolutely terrible and mode c could care less or also has either tears of joy or frustration, how anet coudl dare to ruin in most cases someones most prefered game mode, due to destroyign someones personal most like builds, or making something else not possible anymore due to the changes in any of the three modes.
Come on, I’m not talking here about something, I’m not absolutely sure about, that many peopel here i nthe forums haven’t already experienced with anet over the past 3 to nearly 4 years since GW2 exists!!
I’m talking here about facts, that mostly everybody has experienced here already, thigns which will keep on happening, as long ANet doesn’t start with balancing all modes individually by 100%
Until this doesn’t change, we have a neverending problem here, and i somehow kind of feel its all the time this kind of box of pandora, which ANet just fears to open, because they know, that it would be alot of work to do to bring back this game on the right track, from where it would become for all modes alot easier to keep them balanced, because nobody would have to worry then really anymore, if any of their changes they currently work on will negatively affect any other game modes and cause here in the forums everywhere MASSIVE dissatisfaction among the players to the point, that many maybe permanently leave the game due to the changes that affected in the end more of the game, than what Anet intentionally wanted in the most cases.
Removing bad content and design is a critical part of doing good business and running a good game. Things get reworked because they’re bad. I’m asking for the removal of two problematic aspects of gear with a full refund for every player, which they have already done in the past for reasons justified due to bad design with no viable replacement options. The only reason there are complaints about condition damage is because of the attempted split in balancing between formats being ineffective at actually resulting in balanced play. We’re here because of that problem, not as a consequence of any others. Your above explanation is not specific, not based on math, and does not cover how to actually solve the problem of an inherently flawed design. It instead tries to work around it, which is strictly not sustainable into the future. I would argue adding granularity and the enablement of hundreds of builds in sPvP by the use of PvE stats due to massive scaling differences is very far from removing content. This only can’t exist now because of dire/perplexity, which have historically been deemed as too overpowered to be included in sPvP from a strictly numbers perspective, not even from a meta/profession/pacing one.
The irony is that WvW is actually extremely well-balanced right now aside from a few runaway builds in small-scale which is quite literally dire perplexity on a few classes. Builds differ wildly from format to format. If you took a PvE trait/gear configuration into WvW you’d get laughed out of the format, and vice versa. Separate balancing doesn’t do anything different because it’s the concepts of the builds which make them objectively ineffective for certain styles of play without even needing to consider the math. It’s not that it’s impossible to balance the game modes at all, because the skills are used in such different ways in that there’s often very little overlap. And to have such a massive upkeep to make everything viable with so many different changes and interactions, that’s a nightmare begging for balance issues. The mathematics to balance the formats would be absolutely out of control in themselves, and maintaining each format separately adds needless layers of confusion and complication; why should any skill work differently between formats? That makes very little sense.
It frankly boils down very often to numbers games on both ends, where in PvE it’s group DPS efficiency per unit of time with a little bit of specialization into durability or some support/break bar (to bolster DPS) and in sPvP it’s a ratio of sustain versus damage output in a given circumstance by removing counterplay. I have several mainhand weapons running the same stat combinations but with different sigils just to change minute aspects of my build for better performance in different WvW environments. Recent dueling in my guild arena swapping out PvE trait lines for PvP ones let me go from losing almost every fight to winning almost every fight, despite the fact that my stats or strategy didn’t really change. It’s all about context.
A raid build for PvE will be vastly different from a WvW blob build which will be very different from a WvW small-scale build, which much more closely mirrors the fighting scale and style of sPvP, which, as mentioned, balance favors WvW on a much better level because scaling-based builds are actually functional.
Honestly, it was a huge mistake making confusion tick for damage regardless. I can see the original confusion as a mechanic to tone down mindless skill spam but what’s the point when it’s getting heaped onto you relentlessly and you’re taking damage anyway? This seems purely like more PvE changes draining into WvWvW. And I’ve said it a million times, torment has no place in such a fluid, action oriented combat system. In a game with cripple, chill, immobilize and weakness, the addition of torment leaves me scratching my head.
I’m not a big proponent of nerfing things hard in this game, especially the blanket statements like “nerf condi”, but what you typed here I can agree with. Those specific things need reworked/changed in those ways. I play all classes in pvp and wvw and know when something is pretty broken. Condi chrono is especially strong because of the crazy re-application of the confusion and torment. I’m not saying nuke it hard, just a rework. Dire with plex runes, food and stacks is crazy in duels and small man wvw. It’s just dirty. And not in a good way.
I have no problem with any other condi build or actual condi tbh, and that’s coming from a person who atm doesn’t use any condi builds(i love fat crits).
This. Condition builds seems pretty balanced right now except for condi chrono/mesmer.
Condition perplexity berserker is also absolutely busted. That said, I have also agreed with the principle that confusion and torment dealing so much innate damage with so much stacking potential really does require a substantial change on some level. The issue is that so many classes also have access to substantial confusion or interruption potential, often also loading cover conditions making it difficult to cleanse the real damage sources coming from a rune set.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Instead of putting so many special rules into WvW, Orpheal, why not just port the stats from WvW into sPvP and balance the game as a whole using PvE stats? This bolsters diversity in sPvP through build granularity and promotes way more builds in sPvP which are not mathematically viable, but are in WvW due to how the math behind stats and scaling works.
Then we’re left with a unified game state which balancing can take place without needing to worry much about the consequences of decisions being made in terms of how it affects one game mode versus another, which is often a dividing issue in balance in GW2 due to the separation of the formats, and likely why balancing pace is so slow.
Remove dire/perplexity, deemed too overpowered for sPvP to begin with from WvW by replacing all instances of gear with the stat combo/rune combo to “choice of any stat/rune selection” items (they did this already for Magic Find when it was removed) and everything is resolved for the most part.
Just remove rune of perplexity and tone down mesmer condition application. Simple fixes that would improve the health of small scale combat SO much, and not affect large scale combat.
+1
Dire mesmers have to go. No build should be able to insta-stack 15 confusions + torment while being so survivable.
+1
I agree, nerf conditions because 3 power burst specs won’t instagib you if they focus right?
Sure condition Mesmer is annoying but decent condition cleansing, line of sighting to prevent sceptre 3 goes a long way. However generally I wouldn’t pick the fight unless I was at a camp or something that needed defending, just a waste of time fighting it as you can be there for 10 mins without anyone really winning.
Btw are you still running base ranger Babou? Saw you the other night and thought you weren’t using Druid but might have been mistaken.
If you mean 3 burst players focusing you, you deserve to die no matter what build you are using when focused by 3 players lol. Although these days that doesn’t seem to be true for condi mesmers and mindless AoE shatter spamming.
If you meant there are 3 burst builds capable of instagibbing a full dire max toughness max vitality any class, please state which ones you THINK they are. The only one I can think of is full signet zerker d/d thief, which is a one trick pony and will probably die to the passive 3 confusion stacks from perplexity.
Not even possible on signet D/D if the mesmer runs Chaos. I play signet glass and have literally zero potential to improve my damage output without being heavily-reliant on RNG such that I can claim that I am at least tied for the title of hardest-hitting thief in the game/hardest-single-hitting player in the game.
It’s literally and mathematically impossible to kill a chaos-traited (which is assumed because that’s what the build runs) dire condition mesmer without getting into multiple seconds’-worth of combat. Literally impossible due to passive procs. And then to be punished for attacking them from passive procs from perplexity runes, and then take passive DoT from a confusion designed to punish attackers and attempting to burst them… that’s just ridiculous. Mind you, we’re talking situations which an entire build is being dedicated to one-trick ponying burst damage on a single attack. Why should condition builds, designed to win a sustained fight, be able to sustain against burst, and consequently out-burst most other builds it in the case of the condition mesmer?
Removing dire perplex solves almost all issues with conditions and turns them fair.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Like others, I’ll have to say that the exploit should be fixed in the sense of exploitation (especially the ones recessed into the keep), but there should exist some kind of “safe” treb spot to build at the forefront of spawn which can only hit the towers, which uses normal siege/world rules for damage, and thus can be countered unless given shield gens, in which case… all the momentum gained is strictly for towers, and then new trebs need to be built to siege garrison from the towers, which is intended behavior.
I bought the expansion. I just don’t like the Daredevil as a whole.
I don’t see a reason why a new way of playing a profession, rather than just a level cap/skill bump should justify a change in what’s good or not for the long-term. I get that it’s better to release new content as OP to hype/boost sales a little and then nerf, but to maintain imbalance suggests incompetence and causes people to lose faith in the development company as meeting their needs as a whole.
I doubt they’ll do anything for reasons Pope Urban mentioned. Even if they did, I’d be fine with them scrapping Acro, merging over some traits from Acro to DD, nering/buffing a few things instead, and just giving the thief a different-style traitline (Why not say, revealed for the toe-to-toe build, or much better condition synergy? Or both, since DA has synergy with both of these?)
I agree entirely with the OP, though. DD is spammy and really deteriorates the thief as a profession. A lot of the buffs lately have also been promoting spammy play instead of skilled execution in play, such as AA increases and the changes to LA.
People need to stop pipe dreams of thief rifle being some sort of stealthy sniper kit. it is never going to happen. If thief gets rifle, […] it’s not going to have great burst potential. Rifle will likely be in a ranged spec with lots of CC.
So… like this?
Sniping from stealth itself is conceptually overpowered unless the damage is paltry.
Force lens is hilariously overpowered and I’d be backstabbing for 30k with it lol.
This spec also doesn’t take into account on steal effects like mug, and would break on Quick Pockets.
Intended to reduce omniblob ktraining the bl’s every few hours and to promote yak sniping.
WvWvW lack of balance is sick….
Cool bug screen shot. Make sure you post it to the Bugs section of the forums. Your server is only ticking 2(60)? Though. The keeps, towers, and camps don’t add up to the full values.
I’m wary on the Last Stand mechanic.
Yes, population falters on the leading days to a reset, but when it does, it allows new commanders to try and get started up and lets the big runs take a break. I question if this may lead to potential commander burnout or rising commanders to be shut out of trying to lead.
Similarly, it may still cause deadzones on the day before Last Stand takes effect, since the points for that day truly don’t matter that much. Keep an eye on this.
I like the prospect of Skirmishes promoting off-hours play in what I believed to be a critical part of scoring: maintaining upgraded structures. Even in dull off hours, the contributions of low activity but maintaining objectives can set the precedent for servers to win big (or similarly have marginal gains) in prime time.
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