The unblockable is strong. With Clarion + Stowed pet and SotH you have 9s straight on engage with an instant cast if preserved so you can shoot right through a mid-rf-block from guard/war/chrono/engi/earth ele which is absolutely bonkers.
Power longbow running core ranger I’ve just been killing people nonstop. There’s a massive amount of damage that’s nigh impossible to stop.
I’d love to play s/d but I get destroyed by d/p thieves, anyone managed to win 1v1 core s/d vs DrD d/p ?
I did pretty consistently before the patch so I imagine things are probably better given the buffs.
Can’t confirm or deny at this point though since I no longer play thief.
So now instead of getting feared from corrupted stab every 7s you’ll get feared every 10s. I’d say that was a buff.
Why do ppl keep saying this. Look that’s assuming you’re fighting a condi necro, and assuming you don’t have any other cover conditions for them to go through 1st. And, most importantly, is only applicable to solo roaming under those situations. For zerging you should be running either wells back line or front line boon corrupt, and you’ll have access to a lot more boons (or should have) that the other team has to corrupt through to get to your stab. Running solo roam builds in a zerg is counter productive as a necro.
It was a very niche joke. I replied to a guy on another post, in which they were complaining about lack of mobility on necro. I said they just gave us effectively perma swiftness and anti snare on sos and they replied “but it will get stripped instantly”. So I applied the same logic to this thread.
And yet that persistent mobility and shroud cdr were what enabled reaper to absolutely demolish thieves if the reaper had any semblance of an idea of how to fight them.
Now you’ll open shroud and immediately get the swiftness ripped, the timer cut to gap close over time, and fewer activations for Charge.
To compensate for only a portion of the mobility you need to sacrifice >10% damage, burst potential, two utility slots, and then the active use of SotL.
It’s absolutely no contest and totally different from just having some stab or not. SoS is only better now if most of the time you spend moving is in fights without boon hate which are rare, or it’s because you’re not fighting while moving.
Friendly tidbit: If you jump and activate shroud while in the air, it doesn’t proc Spiteful Spirit or Weakening Shroud. Great for if you want a Death’s Charge or the new Swiftness but don’t want the procs to accidentally put you in combat.
Thanks! Even after all these years there are still tricks I did not know before.
This will probably be changed as S/x thief used to function as a no-return with IStrike with jump casts to enable chasing and they fixed the “bug.”
I’ll admit no problem I was wrong there but there was definitely a point where it didn’t grab the stack because I was going to use it given EA for a cleanse and it didn’t, so I still opted to Trickster.
Maybe just bugged at that point, so I’ll gladly admit being wrong tho.
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Dunno why I thought AF was Twin Fangs. I stopped posting halfway through to play a game of league and that obviously led to dastardly consequences lol.
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It’s only good if you PvE in low-power gear like Marauder.
Otherwise it’s complete garbage and the damage scaling alternative is better.
Or a bad build for the context. I’m terrible at ele but understand that pure glass Fire/Air/Arcane isn’t a good trait config for small-scale, which was why I also stopped playing ele :P
I think the main issue was that the ele was strong with all three despite not needing to invest really in any. Base healing on ele is better than druid and ventari rev, but those out-scale when built for healing. The same is said about tanking as a warrior/guardian, or (aside from AOE multi-hits) raw DPS like thief.
Does not change validity of concerns of whether or not the developers understand their game, however.
I’ve been proposing a tap DPS decrease forever to promote rams and skilled play and we get this lol.
If this patch overall in terms of WvW + professions doesn’t say that ANet doesn’t play their own game or even understand it for that matter, I don’t know what does.
If you have boon duration AF isn’t worth it because your base power or other modifier-accrued (or really lack thereof) damage isn’t worth ramping with the modifiers.
Especially since AF only applies to critical hits.
Actually I’d suggest to drop CS entirely because you won’t get that much good stuff from scaling crits; DA will be miles better.
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Don’t worry, i’ve read every word you wrote, even though anet will probably delete it soon. I was on the fence on whether to preorder the game or not due to this stupid gliding update. but after reading what you wrote and reminded me about how anet has treated us in the past I’m I’ve decided to pass on this expansion. If I wanted a gear treadmill grinding game there are better games out there that do it. And you’re right anet wants to see people like us gone. I used to enjoy the game for the same reasons as you, and I bought stuff off the gem store to support the game, especially for fashion wars. but with every single fashion thing coming out now being an outfit that you can’t mix and match, and/or being gated behind RNG chests, I’ve stopped buying gems.
Same. I’ve probably put a bit over a thousand bucks since starting which is more than a sub game, just because I really liked GW2 when it was good.
Since HoT, I’ve vowed never to purchase from ANet again until they fix what they broke. This includes subsequent games as well and expansions. I intend to hold myself to that. The game in its current state isn’t worth any amount of money to me. If ANet wants my money, they need to earn my trust as a consumer by providing a quality product and maintaining that product with quality.
Having worked in the MMO industry enough to see financial details of these kinds of games… people who are going to spend money on the game are going to spend it, required or not, regardless of what the gain is. It’s why their profits are way down despite putting more and more emphasis on payment. People would rather vote with their wallets even if they can afford the paygate rather than pony up the cash. It also cuts drastically into future cash flows; your new players are less-inclined to want to spend money, and really, the only people you’re going to retain are the F2P people who see this as the best F2P title there is, and thus won’t pay regardless of where they go.
What I really don’t understand is how ANet is just failing so hard at… everything. Every aspect of the game is going down the tubes in nearly every way, yet they had one of the best starts for a company in the industry in decades. What was going through their minds to make these kinds of changes, all the while thinking they’d be good for the future?
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Assuming you run high power, Twin Fangs will be substantially better than Assassin’s Fury unless you’re partied with a Herald pooping out fury.
Just figured I’d report that WvW provisioner Utility foods do not use the new stat conversion; they still scale from toughness/vit.
guard staff is a horrible weapon that is terribly outdated. I don’t know why ppl still run this.
Literally just for lootstick in WvW because it’s free ranged cleave for more bags.
Maybe people will actually dive with the tag, now, instead of just spamming 1 on heavies in the backline while dealing no damage.
The 25% number is pitiful and just nerfs power damage while buffing condi sustain lol. It’s 3 extra seconds.
What are you on about… It’s 8.3 seconds more now
Weird because it was lasting 10s yesterday.
The base drain is 4% according to wiki. Now it’s 3%
Which is again, definitely not what it was doing as of yesterday.
It was 10s from 100 to 0.
They really just need to make the movespeed on SoS persistent again. Swiftness gets stripped or stolen/corrupted immediately and you end up worse off than before either by giving the enemy swiftness or being crippled.
Need to factor in how much might you build around as well.
Might-shroud reaper gains almost double the bonus damage from CtD over the signet.
Considering the fact it’s a waste of a util slot as well (SA and Suffer come to mind as being very strong picks), there’s really no upside unless you plan to play triple signets, which is kinda bad.
The 25% number is pitiful and just nerfs power damage while buffing condi sustain lol. It’s 3 extra seconds.
What are you on about… It’s 8.3 seconds more now
Weird because it was lasting 10s yesterday.
Unless that changed in a prior patch it didn’t remove the full set of stacks when stab changed.
No, UC engage does matter because the UC dodge range chained with steal will be higher than Mark which if casted will subsequently miss the thief entirely. The DE then lacks escapes and its cooldowns such as its CC is higher than BD while lacking meaningful negation which the DrD can utilize.
DE is Crit Strikes v2 and CS is already weak for PvP encounters.
It always only stole one stack… It’s been that way since stab got changed to stack lol. Redacted; I was wrong.
The only thing that didn’t steal one stack was Larcenous.
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Lotus benefits all builds. Weakness is 50% reduced incoming damage. It’s free opportunity to make trades and subsequently win without needing to dodge or burn resources when not necessary. It also cuts endurance regen which makes outgoing hits more consistent. The rest of DA is also just bettter.
Again, I already said CS is better sustained damage. More than once. That much is obvious. But last I checked outside of condi builds and old s/x with old acro, tempo and sustained damage were not the thief’s viable means of killing opponents, especially now with defensive powercreep.
Yes it’s a 20s cooldown. But BV is 40s and nobody complains that it doesn’t enable enough damage for a kill. PvP is not a DPS race. It’s about mixing burst when your opponent can’t retaliate. This even includes condi play.
Again, CS doesn’t need the critical chance in HK. It’s redundant. Take NQ, have basically the same rate, and deal substantially more damage.
I’m not even sure ehy you’d argue RT. The trait is bad outside of PvE or ganking, especially on D/D which doesn’t have the AA freedom you think it does unlike D/P when playing against skilled opponents.
I know you want to tell me it’s all fine but I’ve never not played without CS outside of testing other builds or on my troll condi thief. I’ve calculated everything hundreds of times. In the PvP context, DA is and has always been substantially better and CS a DPS PvE traitline outside of acting as a crit-fixer, which again these days is rather pointless.
Daredevil just UC→ steals into range, blinds the mark and kills the DE with three autos lol.
The follow-up and cooldown-per-cooldown favors the Daredevil pretty drastically. Not to mention it’s more useful in general given the mobility, and longbow ranger with 9s unblockable attacks is more consistent with the same kind of damage with better range.
The 25% number is pitiful and just nerfs power damage while buffing condi sustain lol. It’s 3 extra seconds.
I just switched to DA and am amazed that it works better than CS – how does it work better than before the patch and better than DA?
As stated I did not use signets of power prior. in old CS Flawless stikes and side strikes were separate. There are now combined into one meaning you get the benefits of both in one trait. This is definitely an improvement as one or the other was weak on its own in old system.
The new trait stacks might whenever you apply fury. If you trait up multiple sources of fury (this including no quarter and unrelenting strikes out of same line) you can generate might stacking and the amount not insignificant if your build has some boon duration.
Now I have not used d/d power in a long time but the change to hidden killer should be much for useful to those builds as you not only get that initial 100 percent crit from stealth , but it lingers an added two seconds for followups. I think you well know that after a backstab a d/d thief generally does an AA chain and this means all of that chain and more will crit.
@Jana when you run the numbers DA is still better burst-wise and largely always has been via Mug. CS only accelerated damage via signets or from sustained damage from crits. The line is otherwise not good, particularly given DA’s utility and defense bonuses from Lotus.
@Baba D/D doesn’t benefit from HK any more than it used to, really. Unlike D/P the target should be finished off with the backstab due to CnD’s high damage. An AA or two would have otherwise been made crits from ToTC/Fury and Flanking Strikes, boosted by extra prec from SoA that a lot of people run. NQ is pretty nuch always better, especially now that marauder closes this power gap much quicker now than before due to the reworked sharpening stones scaling precision.
The food changes also nerfs Valkyrie indirectly as Furious Oil is no longer a thing which further plays into NQ and Marauder over anything core. PT is now a no-gain/no-equal for non-precision builds which again makes HK rather pointless.
DrD on the top end with AS in marauder will out-damage CS valkyrie ij both sustained and burst damage. CS actually has little use outside of PvE.
I just switched to DA and am amazed that it works better than CS – how does it work better than before the patch and better than DA?
As stated I did not use signets of power prior. in old CS Flawless stikes and side strikes were separate. There are now combined into one meaning you get the benefits of both in one trait. This is definitely an improvement as one or the other was weak on its own in old system.
The new trait stacks might whenever you apply fury. If you trait up multiple sources of fury (this including no quarter and unrelenting strikes out of same line) you can generate might stacking and the amount not insignificant if your build has some boon duration.
Now I have not used d/d power in a long time but the change to hidden killer should be much for useful to those builds as you not only get that initial 100 percent crit from stealth , but it lingers an added two seconds for followups. I think you well know that after a backstab a d/d thief generally does an AA chain and this means all of that chain and more will crit.
@Jana when you run the numbers DA is still better burst-wise and largely always has been via Mug. CS only accelerated damage via signets or from sustained damage from crits. The line is otherwise not good, particularly given DA’s utility and defense bonuses from Lotus.
@Baba D/D doesn’t benefit from HK any more than it used to, really. Unlike D/P the target should be finished off with the backstab due to CnD’s high damage. An AA or two would have otherwise been made crits from ToTC/Fury and Flanking Strikes, boosted by extra prec from SoA that a lot of people run. NQ is pretty nuch always better, especially now that marauder closes this power gap much quicker now than before due to the reworked sharpening stones scaling precision.
The food changes also nerfs Valkyrie indirectly as Furious Oil is no longer a thing which further plays into NQ and Marauder over anything core. PT is now a no-gain/no-equal for non-precision builds which again makes HK rather pointless.
DrD on the top end with AS in marauder will out-damage CS valkyrie ij both sustained and burst damage. CS actually has little use outside of PvE.
Don’t let the change to VP fool you. The power build is still junk. It lacks movespeed and shroud flickering from SoS and the swiftness is easily stolen or corrupted, and the duration of shroud only got extended by 3s with the change, not the halfway mark like the 25% number implies.
VP needs to be at 50% and SoS as it was, sorry. Otherwise this is just a condi buff and power is still garbage.
It’s still not going to mean anything with SoS deleted lol.
The movespeed and shroud cdr needed to be boonless/persistent. Shroud now lasts 13s instead of 20s, which is still crap for SR.
You can get an expansion refund before it launches. I’m happy I waited.
I will tell you the same thing I tell my QQ guild mates when their builds get nerfed/changed…
“It sucks having a build get nerfed. Some people remember my scrapper build that was far from meta but was my build… no else that I have ever seen in WvW or PvP ran it so it was my baby, but it was nerfed. I was devastated as I poured a lot of time/energy/gold in gear/food…etc. Instead of crying/venting on the forums, I did what any smart gamer does and I Adapted. I made new builds for my toons and found love in a few classes I threw away before. Learn to adapt. Stuff changes. Git gud with another build or class and you will find something else you will enjoy. It may take time so patience is vital, but it will happen…now…WHO WANTS BACON?”
I was dual maining into power reaper. Those are honestly really the only two builds I enjoy.
The latter this patch basically got removed from the game, so yeah. I’ve run pretty much every possible build in the game and prior to yesterday I only really enjoyed at most three of them. I’d rather actually just not play than adapt at this point because there’s actually nothing left to adapt to.
Use a different variant
Shadow trap (traited) 15 stacks of might.
The new fury trait (which is sick) will replace Signet’s of power (which is now useless).
There is your 25 stacks, plus fury.If you didn’t play since the patch it’s not surprising you would think the change to Daggerstorm and Signet’s are garbage. before i tested them i would of agreed with you.
(The signet change is horrible yes, but like i said, it’s replaceable now)s/d thief’s are going to be monster’s if this new traitline has boontheft like the rumors say. count yourself lucky that most s/d thiefs are running some ridiculously condition spec atm.
*Edit had 20 instead of 15
The might is regained but ASignet is lost which negates most of the gained damage from this activation. I was already running 3.3k power without might so the bonus power is basically pointless as it accounts for only a small portion of outgoing damage via power.
I tried running shadow trap a long time ago. It’s a trash utility and only procs might on trigger and has much too large of a cast time which unless you’re in sPvP doesn’t happen and sucks for playing a nuke build, especially when frontlining WvW zergs without stability.
There really is no replacement unless I play to optimize further into a one-trick which negates the ability for thr build to function outside of ganking which I dislike doing and find boring. D/P can get the same performance but I absolutely hate playing the set – which is why I moved to reaper to begin with.
ANet is completely and totally clueless in their balancing. Really aside from the thief things that were intended to be improved got net-nerfed HARD.
I co main a thief and a necros
Deceiver does as well and D/P is pretty much unaffected by this patch whereas D/D took another hit.
my point was that op is sitting here acting like they ruined the class, necros players have a right to kitten right now, I hopped on me thief and it felt the exact same as it did yesterday
If you didn’t play CS signets it was all buffs.
I played berserker SoS power reaper as a primary since HoT. Power necro is equally dead from the nerfs from inadequacy or in this case, downright removal from the game.
Thief: (let us buff your weaker areas to compete with the other stronger areas)
The Daredevil specialization has largely taken over the Power-based gameplay that used to be the domain of the sword, so we are giving sword (and sword-related traits) an enhancement in order to ensure it has some unique utility to offer. Tricks and signets are also receiving several changes to help them compete with the very powerful utility skills offered by deceptions and physicals. Finally, we are also reassessing some traits that we felt were either lacking in power or not offering enough diversity in choice.
Necro: (let us nerf your stronger area to make your weaker areas a competitive option)
One of the biggest changes for necromancers in this patch is the change to the Vital Persistence trait. Previously, this trait reduced the rate at which life force decayed while in shroud and was too powerful compared to the other two traits in the same tier. We’ve changed the functionality of this trait in order to provide a different option that is easier to track and is more competitive with other traits in the same tier.
What’s funny is that they completely obliterated all purpose of ever playing any of the signets on the thief, and in turn heavily nerfed the niche purpose CS had in PvP environments as well.
It’s clear: ANet has no interest in balancing their game but is fixated on nerfing core to sell their next expansion.
I’m not buying it. I said I’d stop purchasing anything from ANet until they fixed the blunders from HoT. I intend to hold myself to it because the game is quickly moving further and further to the point where it’s not worth the time or money investment, nor is ANet deserving of the funds for releasing such a low-quality product in terms of how mismanaged it is.
This change really hit power reaper too hard. There is so much boon corruption going around that the swiftness is pretty much immediately corrupted or removed which makes the trait next to pointless. Chill application isn’t a primary focus on power reaper, either (LF gain and damage are), so the capacity for the build to close necessary gaps is simply just almost entirely removed. Add fighting professions like Berserker and Daredevil which boast a lot of sustained mobility, and our already-existing hard-counters counter us even more.
The change is really just too much. The reaper feels incredibly clunky now and mostly incapable of chasing down targets it otherwise was able to prior. SR in general just feels pretty poor with the effective removal of VP, too.
Pretty big bummer. With my thief build gored into uselessness I was hoping the reaper changes would be interesting, but it feels worse than before by miles. Looks like on to ranger for now.
I use Crit Strikes far more often than I use DA, Acro, or SA. These changes don’t effect me what-so-ever, soooo…maybe there’s no reason for you to run Crit Strikes with whatever build you were running. D/D, was it? I don’t see that changing very much from this…unless! Oh! Were you running the all signets Basilisk Venom -> CnD -> Backstab 1HKO build? Oh nooooooo, but that build was so engaging and full of skillful plays! What ever will you do now!?
Bye. HF with whatever next 1HKO build you feel like trying to champion.
I mean yeah if you only gank when outnumbering the build is boring, but I frontline zergs so it’s extremely engaging because one mistake kills you. Popping all signets is a bad way to play the build as it was unless you knew you had the kill, anyways. Granted I wouldn’t expect anyone who doesn’t play it to really know how to make it work in most fights.
“I’m done with thief.”
We’ll see. I remember you claiming similar things in the past, yet… Here you are.
I actually quit the game instead for like eight months, then played power reaper because it’s more fun.
I picked up thief maybe a few days ago for shiggles and good times, but at this point I’m definitely gone from it.
There is now absolutely zero reason to run this trait line or these utilities from the single build path it had prior. The line now offers less burst than DA and DrD. Fixed-bonus power is terrible on CS except for AA’ing in PvE and crit-chance increases are entirely redundant with HK and NQ basically doing the same thing.
Assassin’s signet and really the entire concept behind SoP is now worthless.
NJ ANet, you’ve managed to totally kill off the single most underpowered thief build and make it even less-rewarding and weaker than it was.
HF on Deadeye, which is now re-hashed Crit Strikes, lol. I’m done with thief.
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It’s more dependent on your enemies than anything else. The kit is wildly inconsistent, despite being the most fun of pretty much anything in the game. As Creed mentions, the powercreeped HoT elites really put the kit at a major disadvantage.
You’ll need to be good at thief in general first before you start having mild success. Even then, it’s flaky based on who and what you engage. You’ll need to accept sometimes on more aggressive builds that you’ll die literally from someone’s traits or build, and there’s not much else to do (unless they’re just terrible).
It can deal immense damage in a very short period of time, but it’s also the easiest kit in the game to shut down. DA/Acro/Tr with Marauder gear is probably the best way to approach core. The passives in Acro help the consistency issues the set has a lot and make it much more difficult to counter. That said, it’s still weaker than D/P by a large margin.
CS/Tr/DrD is also good but you really can’t use Bound; the AoE damage will take you from stealth more often than not, which given the fact you pretty much will depend entirely on said intermittent stealth to function, is a huge loss.
The only time D/D does things D/P cannot is raw burst-on-engage against very unsuspecting targets without the right passives. Mostly backline players in blobs and the likes which aren’t kitted to take damage. Something like DA/CS/Tr signets with SS or S/x IR disengage can make for some major plays, but it does require the most skill of probably every kit on the thief (if not the game) to pull off consistently in straight 1v1’s or if things do not go well and your burst fails.
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The unblockable is the most significant part of BV for D/D. I’d actually remove all CC components from my thief as a D/D player if possible just to avoid passive proc effects which get applied on-CC.
Without BV the kit is basically worthless.
Quite frankly if you’re looking to instant-kill someone on D/D, just play signet Daredevil because it’s allowed to be tankier, it’ll be more consistent, and will deal more damage on engage than DE.
We can share similar mentalities but ultimately ANet keeps implementing pretty poorly-designed ideas (also see the next mesmer spec). I was really hoping (and tried) to get ANet to consider the more aggressive ranged style of play for its second elite spec that didn’t just involve 1HKO mechanics, but it is what it is.
I think HoT marks the landmark where ANet has pretty much moved in the direction of builds being cheesy gimmicks more than anything else.
There would be no counterplay if they couldn’t see the mark.
Given the fact the snipe will already likely have a > 1.0 coefficient, we’re looking at a legitimate sniper build attacking for >20k at 1500 while removing boons, applying conditions, and dealing damage.
While being reflected back at you or damage absorbed in the process while giving this mark.
Basilisk venom makes the shot unblockable and thus cannot be reflected. The DE elite is next to worthless on rifle considering the kit already has permanent stealth for the initial attack and 1500 range to prevent death via cleave.
Or just follow-up with a double-damage backstab instead of camping rifle and laugh when you stab for 25k through their proj deflect.
exactly what I was thinking, deadeye is better for d/p and d/d since the elite skill is more useful for both setup. Steal>C&D>backstab>elite#1>backstab>Elite#2>backstab 1111111 dead in 2 sec before anyone got time to react.
DE is way worse on D/D power than even core thief. D/D depends completely on BV to ecen remotely work.
Only D/P can benefit, but even still it’s got a lot more to gain from DrD imho unless your opponents are very poor at reapplying boons and are also nearly immobile.
There would be no counterplay if they couldn’t see the mark.
Given the fact the snipe will already likely have a > 1.0 coefficient, we’re looking at a legitimate sniper build attacking for >20k at 1500 while removing boons, applying conditions, and dealing damage.
If there is too much cc then nerf the cc, not just buff stab.
I don’t really see why this concept is hard to grasp.
To give a better answer, I’d need more info on what things you feel are good or bad.
It’s not that I didn’t like what the XPac brought, that’s just when I happened to leave the game and start playing other games, as a few of my friends had left GW2. I was in a guild at the time that was very hardcore w/ practice times and roaming WvW for big points to flip or looking for other GvG style fights. Didn’t really feel anything was particularly bad per say.
GvG and small-scale are pretty much entirely dead. If you came for organized skill-play, look elsewhere, sad to say.
If you just want a casual spam-keyboard-and-blob or really enjoy playing the FoTM cheese builds, you’ll be back at home. Most of the experimentation and tactical play has gone to the wayside, however.
Now I don’t know how much things have obscured over the years since I don’t really pay that much attention to the organized scene anymore since my guild quit and what such people are talking about these days, but I do know over time the differentiation in the terms of ‘Roaming’ and ‘Havoc’ have blurred. If these definitions aren’t any longer accurate, feel free to clarify, but I find people use them interchangeably and you can never really tell what they’re trying to talk about.
A few years ago, ‘roaming’ was referred to as a small-scale crew dedicated to scouting territory far from the blob and killing other players in groups of 1-5 (depending on coordination/build) in any and all locations in the map. Most of this was done with 1-2 players. In roaming, objectives were not prioritized; the work of a roamer was to simply kill players and stay moving around the map to to report enemy activity. If there was a camp in the area, a solo roamer may elect to take it, but it wasn’t considered an utmost priority given the speed of solo clearance possibly warranting a response from other solo players or small groups. Roaming often consisted of thief/ranger/mesmer due to their otherwise lack of utility for the ZvZ fights.
‘Havoc’ traditionally was kind of the flipside; a small group usually of 3-8 players focused to work with deliberate synergy with the main zerg for the sake of PPT. Havoc squads had deliberate objectives in the best interest of PPT and cut down on as much excess bulk in their groups as possible to take virtually any structure desired at a reasonable pace. Denying supply via taking camps on cooldown, backdooring keeps, clearing T3 siege-laden towers for the blob to follow up with for an assault on the keeps. etc., or simply clearing out other small groups of roamers or havoc squads and being a general annoyance to divert attention or to keep spawns safe were some of the major goals for havoc groups.
Small-scale is mostly dead in GW2 because most of the existing profession design does not encourage fun or even skilled gameplay in small-scale. As OP mentions, it’s doubtful at best that these means of playing which have taken drastic cuts since HoT will ever be revived due to the changes which adversely affected the identities and efficacy of these players, particularly the Havoc scene, which quite frankly inadvertently housed a majority of the active and recognizable small-scale players, even if they didn’t use the label.
As the OP mentions, this is intended to be a fun way to play; the issue, and why so many people quit, was because those who fought in the mindset of havoc, which was intended to be useful, found themselves at huge deficits across virtually every aspect of the game, from the guild hall/buff level, tactivators, increases in un-fun and cheesy builds, nerfs to core, etc. Like the sPvP community, havoc groups were goal-oriented and focused on results. After HoT, a lot of the utility of the groups was removed, and in the context of profession design and balance, so was a lot of the fun.
What I find is mostly left of small-scale is gankers which is mostly the bile of the small-scale community that has no intention to really be productive except to take a larger number of players, typically with lots of stealth and FoTM builds, and focus down individuals or smaller groups, who flee at the first sight of a potentially-losing encounter. These are the guys who spawncamp and don’t move much around the map unless it’s to run away from being killed by a group of similar or slightly-larger size.
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Kills in OS do not count for PPK.
Correct in that they do not currently. Like the loot negation, this too was changed.
My point wasn’t about WvW issues being ignored entirely, but rather this kind of behavior is nothing new and that these types of things need to be considered in advance during design before pushing out implementations.
Can someone explain to me why everyone hates the Deadeye so much already when noone has even tried it?
Because people on the forums are never satisfied fully by anything that’s outside of their own personal control. This includes profession development and video game mechanics that do not follow that individual’s personal playstyle to the “T”
I think it’s more along the lines of people suspecting DrD to be an objectively better specialization in all or most areas of the game compared to DE.
DE has to sacrifice mobility for damage, which is new but questionable to some. Conceptually that works fine, but when you look at the numbers DrD seems to have comparable DPS that’s also AoE while also staying mobile.
Malice can produce an inherent +21% damage increase on a single target, but it takes time to ramp up to that cap. DrD has an inherent +27% damage increase all the time to everyone he hits, targeted or not.
There’s a potential build for DE that can make it an effective Might bot that can perma stack 20 stacks of might easily, but there’s question if it’s worth taking over a PS warrior.
People are upset because the DE just looks like it doesn’t do what DrD, or other classes, can’t do better.
My biggest gripes with DE are that the gameplay looks anti-fun for opponents, which is something that needs to be considered in PvP-friendly games, and due to its design, looks very one-trick-pony-ish (either insta-kill something or die or be a boon/boon rip bot) while offering definitive favoring towards certain specific weapons or kits. It feels as though the spec was made without a lot of thought or understanding of both the thief nor the general flow of gameplay for PvP/WvW. At its core, the DE is going to be either useless or overpowered in very specific regards because of its design being poor and very one-dimensional and lacking consistent synergy with the core thief.
I foresee DE being kind of like a P/P or signet thief build where it can stomp players who don’t expect it or aren’t built to deal with it, but will immediately fall apart when opponents are, while DrD will closer-rival the consistency and utility of the D/P situation we have now.
And like P/P and Backstab and PW and the likes, you can’t just buff DE to fix its inconsistencies; the flaws are in the underlying design of it or opposing kits because it can perform extremely well.
Whether or not the spec itself with launch as being OP or UP is irrelevant. What matters more than anything else is keeping the general GW2 gameplay fun for everyone involved and creating better platforms which can allow for better and more modular tweaks to balance.
In its implementation for PoF, the DE fell into the trap of the “Sniper” concept which despite getting proposed a lot by players, is not good design. ANet seemed to go with the “rule of cool” versus healthy game design decisions in this case, and that gives a huge negative outlook on their future decision-making coming from the PvP-oriented community at large.
The lack of good design is what caused PvP on the pro level to fail and multiple teams to quit prior to it. Just because something “seems cool” doesn’t make it a good idea.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
This isn’t anything really new. When they introduced buffed loot/loot on OS and PPK there were entire guilds in mag (that were also reported a lot) which camped alts in OS to farm kills/bags/ppt.
I’m not really sure how this type of larger-scale behavior could be fixed, but it’s not exactly anything new.
It certainly wasn’t just Maguma. Not by any stretch of the imagination. If you actually look up some of the videos of this, it was entire servers in 3-way collusion doing this, and Anet saying it was fine.
So, a single guy running his alted-multiboxed accounts to kitten kills is certainly ok.
Again, if you have a problem with him doing so…..go kill the alt or main. It’s in your power to do so. That’s way less effort that posting here about it.
Fair enough. There was a lot of tier shuffling at the time and I didn’t see anyone in my server’s other matchups doing it, but I won’t claim this was one-sided.
My point still being that these things usually don’t get the attention they deserve and such moves have been made by people for a long time.
It’s because in Europe we tend to have VAT, which is a sort of tax that’s included in the listed price (so if it says €20, it costs €20).
In USA they may or may not have a sales tax that I believe is added onto the listed price (so $20 with a 10% sales tax would cost $22).The lowest VAT rate in the EU seems to be luxembourg at 17%.
$1 is around €0.85 at the moment.0.85×1.17=0.9945, so actually $1=€1 for the listed price seems perfectly reasonable at the moment, you’re “overpaying” about half a cent per dollar.
Yes, you may be able to pay less by buying from a state without VAT, it may even be legal to do so without paying import taxes (for instance when it’s cheap enough).
But it’s totally reasonable for a company to convert $1 to €1, they get to keep about the same.That’s what I wanted to write. The € price is including the VAT while the price for NA doesn’t. It seems to be cheaper but it actually isn’t for most states.
Idk if you could just buy an american Key for PoF because I believe that NA-Keys can’t be used for EU-accounts .
Depends on the state. In many states, if you purchase a digital service from a business that isn’t located within that state, there simply is no tax.
I can see the argument about the VAT causing ANet – or really as someone mentiond above – Digital River, their payment partner – to just simply write it off – If the lowest tax is 17% it’s already breaking even there – if anything, it’s actually causing ANet to take a bigger loss than USD at anything over 18%.
It’s still the best there is for what’s current, but there definitely have been better games than what it is now.
My overall thoughts on the matter are:
1.) Pre-HoT GW2
2.) ROHAN: Blood Feud during 2008/early 2009 (500+ people pvp’ing for literally days straight was amazing)
3.) ESO, BnS Faction Battles, and current GW2
4.) The rest
I think GW2’s flaws in terms of WvW reside almost entirely due to mismanagement. There needs to be more development thought placed in effects of gameplay decisions in PvP/WvW rather than strictly PvE.
This isn’t anything really new. When they introduced buffed loot/loot on OS and PPK there were entire guilds in mag (that were also reported a lot) which camped alts in OS to farm kills/bags/ppt.
I’m not really sure how this type of larger-scale behavior could be fixed, but it’s not exactly anything new.
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