Guild Wars 2

X T D.6458:

DeceiverX.8361:

X T D.6458:

The ideal solution would be to have specific skill balancing for certain things. For example confusion and retaliation scale differently in damage in pvp/wvw then they do in pve. This needs to be done with wvw in regards to stability. WvW is an entirely different gamemode then the other 2 and for certain things cannot be treated the same way. A one way fix all approach is simply idiotic and out dated. This doesnt mean there needs to be complete seperation of skill balancing for each gamemode. But for certain things like conditions, cc’s, boons, damage mechanics need to be treated differently.

Why don’t they just bump the stats in sPvP to reflect PvE and WvW? There’s little reason for damage builds in sPvP to be dealing less than 60% of the damage they do in PvE/WvW. This would at least unify skill kits for a first round of balance. I don’t get why people keep pushing for even more separation of stats and skills between formats; it’s harder to balance this way.

Really, the new system in terms of functionality in the core game is fine as is. The problem is the amount of CC in the game on safe weapons now. Initially, you ran a hammer on warrior for massive CC-locking. Now the best in the game for large scale is on a 1500 range burst damage weapon (DH LB5), with chronomancers also having massive ranged AoE CC potential from gravity well.

There’s too much CC in the game now to make the existing stack system work.

I think most logical would be to return to the old one-stack-stability buff, but cut durations from what they used to be, even if that means reducing the cooldown of effects which apply it. Stability is a powerful boon, and should be used and timed properly just as any other skill or effect. One stack also makes it easier to strip, as many strip and steal effects only remove one stack. The shorter duration also makes it mirror to an extent the effect large-stacking values already have in small-scale encounters.

This way the standard stand still -> empower/swiftness -> stability -> CHARGE!!!1! meth of playing is no longer around where tanks are immune to CC, but instead frontline players must evaluate when to use it; too soon and you won’t have it on connecting, too late and you’ve already been CC’ed by the enemy’s backline.

PvP works differently then the other 2 gamemodes. PvP is standardized to give everyone equal access to basic stats and upgrades. All your stats in pvp are determined by your choice of amulet, 1 choice of rune set, and sigils, there is no consumables or boosters allowed. This is why the mechanics of certain things are generally changed such as stability, confusion, retaliation. Furthermore PvP has the smallest teams with no possibility of increasing them in size beyond the fixed max, it is based on small team fights. WvW and PvE on the other hand can have hundreds of players on the same map. There are just certain things that do not work the same way in all 3 gamemodes and need to be adjusted accordingly, and like I said there doesn’t need to be complete balance seperation, jut for certain things.

I also mentioned in an earlier post about why the stability change was not properly implemented because it did nothing to balance it with the existing and incoming
amount of sources of CC’s in the game.

That’s the thing, though. There are strictly less stats in sPvP. I understand the point of having stats be on amulets (fun fact, the game’s sPvP originally had 6 separate ones as gear to reflect build diversity but this was scrapped for an unknown reason). External modifiers and the higher stats in PvE/WvW simply make some builds which don’t work in sPvP work fine in WvW, and make a lot of builds which are fine and balanced in sPvP totally overpowered in WvW. As it’s been made very obvious, WvW has more viable builds because of this, meaning there’s little reason not to enable sPvP’s stats to simply be higher to reflect PvE and WvW. From here, skills themselves can be balanced for all three game modes if something from a numbers perspective is objectively overtuned.

Small-scale encounters before HoT’s guild hall blunder made up a bulk majority of fights and PPT contributions. A lot of groups of 3-6 players are often fighting other groups of 3-6 players, reflecting the sPvP environment outside of cap-and-hold. Further, balancing around huge numbers of players is a moot argument for PvE where encounters scale by the number of players (not how PvP formats work).

Stability definitely does need adjustments, however, though the big culprit right now is the sheer amount of CC in the game. Duration-based is likely the only way to fix this for WvW, and cutting said durations from before is the only likely way to balance it for PvP. More stacks as discussed above is not a feasible solution, as then we end up with the same problems as before, and an even bigger disparity between classes which have it and do not have it, as then it justifies excessive CC potential.

Khisanth.2948:

… meanwhile in DS getting too many coat boxes and none of the other slots

You realize you can buy the rest, right?

X T D.6458:

The ideal solution would be to have specific skill balancing for certain things. For example confusion and retaliation scale differently in damage in pvp/wvw then they do in pve. This needs to be done with wvw in regards to stability. WvW is an entirely different gamemode then the other 2 and for certain things cannot be treated the same way. A one way fix all approach is simply idiotic and out dated. This doesnt mean there needs to be complete seperation of skill balancing for each gamemode. But for certain things like conditions, cc’s, boons, damage mechanics need to be treated differently.

Why don’t they just bump the stats in sPvP to reflect PvE and WvW? There’s little reason for damage builds in sPvP to be dealing less than 60% of the damage they do in PvE/WvW. This would at least unify skill kits for a first round of balance. I don’t get why people keep pushing for even more separation of stats and skills between formats; it’s harder to balance this way.

Really, the new system in terms of functionality in the core game is fine as is. The problem is the amount of CC in the game on safe weapons now. Initially, you ran a hammer on warrior for massive CC-locking. Now the best in the game for large scale is on a 1500 range burst damage weapon (DH LB5), with chronomancers also having massive ranged AoE CC potential from gravity well.

There’s too much CC in the game now to make the existing stack system work.

I think most logical would be to return to the old one-stack-stability buff, but cut durations from what they used to be, even if that means reducing the cooldown of effects which apply it. Stability is a powerful boon, and should be used and timed properly just as any other skill or effect. One stack also makes it easier to strip, as many strip and steal effects only remove one stack. The shorter duration also makes it mirror to an extent the effect large-stacking values already have in small-scale encounters.

This way the standard stand still -> empower/swiftness -> stability -> CHARGE!!!1! meth of playing is no longer around where tanks are immune to CC, but instead frontline players must evaluate when to use it; too soon and you won’t have it on connecting, too late and you’ve already been CC’ed by the enemy’s backline.

T3 is probably the fairest place to roam alone with moderate degrees of action. Below that it’s dead, and imho having no fights is no fun. If I wanted to kill PvE mobs, I’d go to PvE where the rewards are good.

T1’s often a blob, and T2 isn’t great for solo play. TC/DB offer few roaming players in general, and typically have solid numbers around the clock. FA almost exclusively “roams”, though it’s typically gank squads of 4-8 people who pick off solo players and run from actual small-scale unless running the dirtiest/most overpowered builds possible to ensure safety in play.

T3 has SoS and Mag, which when I played against them some time ago, offered good small group play, but not being in a small group and roaming alone often felt pointless because again it was often ganks, but mileage may vary. DH I know little about as I haven’t played on the server since it was failing in T5.

The lower-tier servers have the best roamers in the game, because that’s all of their force. That said, finding players to begin with on low-pop servers and managing to take objectives is painfully difficult most of the time.

Really it depends on timezone and what you want. Never-ending supplies of enemies you can go to T1/T2, small group play for T3, 1v1 and typically “fair fights” against highly-skilled enemies, T4-T6.

FogLeg.9354:

DeceiverX.8361:

Merged servers is frankly be the worst possible way to handle the WvW population issue as it only solves symptoms and not the actual underlying problems.

It does not have to be “merge”, could be some other way, but number of servers HAS to be reduced dramatically. And I am in one of the dead servers, which I always love and will never transfer away, but it’s still dead. Sure there are other stuff that needs to be fixed too, but the last servers were dying even before HoT.

You need to ask yourself why the server is dead, however. For about a year after release every map had a queue 24/7 on almost all tiers. Can we really expect the same exact number of players to be interested across all servers as they are now, despite dramatic format changes/pace changes and guilds potentially being overshadowed by other foreign guilds?

I’m not saying that any kind of population mingling is a bad idea, no. Frankly, I’ve supported complex developments of smart systems for dynamically resolving population and scoring imbalances between weeks and have suggested means of doing so several times, but this also maintained the integrity of each individual server.

Simply merging the servers will just cause a very short-term boost in population but historically in every competitive game which has done this, it has resulted in repetitions of history and ultimately net player losses across the board.

It’s a simple solution which few games have done successfully overall, and is potentially more disastrous for the health of the game and format than doing nothing.

I speak strictly from the mindset of PvE/sPvP players who have tried WvW and did not enjoy it (thus the PvE/sPvP distinction instead of PvX), and further, that people shouldn’t feel the need to play a certain format due to an imbalance in rewards. We’ve definitely gotten the short end of the stick, but it’s in ANet’s manifesto that no format should be slighted in such a way, so there’s no justification for them intentionally trying to funnel people into the format who have tried it already and who have no interest in it.

There should be an incentive to try it for the sake of having a fun time and getting competitive rewards, not simply the best rewards. The incentive of beginning to try WvW is already there – mass-scale PvP combat – but retaining players is very difficult, and retention is clearly what is failing due to the overwhelming cost of playing the format with very little personal gain aside from just the sheer experience of playing, which for new players/characters does not enable experimentation with builds or other game systems as to promote character/account growth.

OP has a solid perspective as someone so new to the format, and I appreciate his efforts to make this post. It’s good to see people really thinking about the format in-depth. I would like to make a few clarifications, though.

The AC issue is problematic only because AC’s due to their placement are often not vulnerable to ballistae. The only way to really take down an enemy AC tends to be large-radius AOE’s like meteor shower, or simply, another AC. And often building an AC under AC fire is particularly difficult, considering it requires players to soak damage and the build site/friendly AC itself to also soak damage. This makes counterplay just strictly overly-difficult without just massive numbers.

Small group play was flourishing before HoT released. That said, since guild upgrades and the ability to claim objectives (ones which previously were available for very low entry costs, notably +5 supply) for WvW are so deeply locked away behind guild halls which costs several thousand gold to attain, small guild presence in WvW has effectively been removed entirely. Since guild upgrades are only feasibly obtained by large numbers of players or those with big resources, the only survivors are pretty much just blob guilds. The new BL’s also killed small group play through a disinterest of players and over-difficulty of offense.

Tick-based rewards would be a great idea if matchups were fair and if it was contribution-based. I feel like many would just enter WvW for the minute of a tick, take the loot, and then leave to whatever they were doing prior for free loot. Frankly, this would be very easy to bot/exploit. With these concerns, it may still be the best to keep it kill/objective based, though it absolutely does have its problems, as again, the biggest groups get the best rewards since they wrack up the most kills and most objective flips.

The only thing I can think of is if rewards improved based on the inverse of the number of nearby players and the difficulty of an objective. This way, small groups get their fair share if they can perform well.

Lords should scale up based on the difference of nearby enemy players, and capturing circles should also be a fixed time or with very, very little reduction in time per player.

I.E., if there are 20 defenders and 30 people on the offense, the lord should scale as though there were 10 people attacking it.

This way the lord is still quite killable and scales up if a keep has very few defenders, enabling a response, but the lord may die very quickly if a big response comes to defend, but also gives the response enough time to contest the circle if the lords melts immediately due to the above.

Tactivators should just be straight-up removed from GW2. Reroll into the old guild upgrade system and just have it parallel to guild halls. The effective removal of small guilds’ relevance from WvW was the biggest failure of the expansion imho.

Top priorities for me would be:

- Food which only has effect in WvW; take level 80 recipes, make them require no level, and give them no effect in PvE as to preserve to some extent the values of food economies. This could honestly be a separate NPC altogether with each tab featuring different stats for food selection. One note could yield several pieces of food, as we still need notes for siege. Right now it’s really nice to see all the siege floating around letting poorer commanders lead and followers feel no need to sell the siege/give it to the commander.

- Ascended trinkets/accessory-slot items currently not available with badges but only through PvE guild missions or mass ecto (WvW is highly guild-based to begin with, and getting ranks/notes is faster with a guild/fights/objective flipping).

- HoT-specific recipes, runes and sigils. There’s not really an excuse here.

I have to disagree with ascended weapons/armor because that is already feasible through WvW; I have taken several disciplines to 500 and lost very little gold in the process, and have effectively geared several characters in full ascended gear also only using WvW loot. If loot is buffed slightly to begin with, this won’t be an issue. PvE/sPvP players shouldn’t feel compelled to play WvW for optimal loot/ascended items just as we shouldn’t be compelled to play their format.

Warcry.1596:

Where was it even announced that one was happening at all? I missed that

Yea, I keep hearing this but nobody has said it’s been confirmed which leads me to believe it’s just speculation.

Merged servers is frankly be the worst possible way to handle the WvW population issue as it only solves symptoms and not the actual underlying problems.

Wow, that was fast. GJ ANet :o

Heibi.4251:

One thing that might curb these individuals would be to disallow Free-to-Play players from entering WvW. The hackers in question are rumored to be creating new accounts using the FtP system. So as soon as they get banned they just make a new account that costs them nothing.

I said this from the getgo. Give them access to EoTM if new players want to experiment with mass-scale PvP. A massive increase in spies/hackers/scumbags in general can be traced almost perfectly to when the game went F2P.

Wow, this is a great change to see coming, actually.

Might finally unlock all the elites now.

drunkenpilot.9837:

Two to three weeks after new skins are introduced, they’ve plummeted to around 50-60g on the trading post. Sure, they will generally gain value over time if you buy some and hold onto them, but it’ll take a period of many months before you see any big spikes in price.

This is the only justification. Farm keys once a week over a period of time for scraps, wait for near the end of a phase of black lion weapons while doing some analysis on the items and expected value, and buy one. Then hang onto it for a year or more. Sometimes, it can take an excess of two before the value spikes (like the tormented staff, which dropped in value for over a year since it came out until recently spiking huge).

The longer you wait, the more it’s worth. Eventually, sell the old stuff and you can keep repeating the process.

Of course, you do run the risk of buyers no longer playing the game as it decreases in popularity, so it’s important to maintain a nest-egg as well on failed investments.

Backstab is considered ineffective/wasteful for the sole purpose that too much power creep has been put into the game to the point where thief’s AA chains weren’t good enough to justify it as a DPS class in raids, despite even before HoT having the best single-target DPS in the game (aside from eles/exploiting the targeting bug on Ice bow/FGS/MS), and despite the thief’s high damage, it couldn’t kill the new professions even if using all of its initiative running full glass. So they fixed two problems with one “solution.”

This is why I fundamentally disagree with giving the thief strictly better options than it has now and claim that the place to start is by nerfing other professions, because power creep has invalidated most of the thief’s balance state to begin with, and we’ve always been behind this curve because there are blatant balance concerns with buffing various aspects of the thief.

OP should try a ranger. I solo HoT champions on mine because a tanky pet is literally unkillable in PvE if you maintain and swap properly. I’ve literally AFK’ed some hero point champions for a few moments to use the bathroom without a need for macros or anything of the sorts. Hell, my pet raven (pure glass pet) facetanked the arrowhead HP champion.

As far as DPS goes, tempest/thief/rev offer magnitudes more. They’re just much less safe to play if you play them full glass, since shroud can really save you if you get combo’d.

Condi reaper is busted in PvP, but otherwise the profession is pretty fair.

Fay.2357:

DeceiverX.8361:

Condi reaper can take out pretty much everything but daredevil with relative ease. Went for one day playing rabid condis and started winning fights vastly outnumbered because there’s just so much damage on the build. I imagine dire is borderline faceroll. There’s no fun in that, though.

He probably has overall weaker condition cleanse, though typically there’s an ele or two running with him these days which soak conditions.

Condie reaper will kill most anything that’s either unwilling or unable to run away from a build with the mobility of a 1 legged tortoise. It’s a very powerful build, but it’s really slow. Anyone that wants to run away will, and there’s not much you can do to stop them.

An inspiration Mesmer can fight condie reaper if they’re careful though. It’ll take a while, but the Mesmer should win eventually.

I am inclined to agree about the resetting/running part (especially again if the mesmer is running PU to enable those escapes), though it is quite easy to overload most classes with a crazy amount of conditions depending on how you build the reaper. Meta mightstack frostfire doesn’t do well in engages where running away is possible, but a curses build can pack a devastating amount of conditions and follow through fairly well. I recall mine frequently ticking for bleed/torment/poison/chill damage well over 7k per second after only a few seconds in combat. Realistically the mesmer cannot keep up with the cleanses, and won’t have the damage to kill a condi build (save sinister/viper) through its health and shroud combined.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

DeceiverX.8361:

Then shortbow becomes useless and the thief gets access to a ton of extra mobility.

In essence, it’s just straight power creep for the profession as a whole.

If stealth is given on F3, then it invalidates the use of smoke fields/CnD/many utility skills with again what is unnecessary power creep.

Just because the class description mentions something doesn’t mean that the entire class should be based around it. By sheer desriptions alone, eles should have the highest damage per hit in the game, warriors should be the most mobile (not thieves), guardians should be pure tank and support only, and rangers should feature archer-only gameplay with extensive adaptation (not featured in the class).

Not to mention the thief description doesn’t even mention initiative or not having cooldowns, which is one of the most significant aspects of the profession.

The problem is that thieves have to waste a lot more resources than any other class to get into stealth, which will majority of the time not even work. If opponent positions in Thieves Combo field, CnD needs to hit for it to stealth you, which is negated by all of the blocks, invulns and evades in game.

Yet Mesmer has the Prestige which gives 3 sec stealth, burning and blind on 30 sekittenraited CD doesn’t require the Mesmer to hit the target to enter stealth, compared to Blinding Powder which gives 3 sec stealth, blind and is on 40 sec. Cd and takes up a utility slot.

It’s not power creep it would be normalizing gameplay, again every other class with stealth access doesn’t have a full trait line alley depended on stealth they have 1 -2 traits max that use it and even then those traits are better than the equivalent Thief traits. I.e. Prismatic Understanding 50% longer duration and random Boon vs Meld with Shadows 1 sec duration increase.

and if you are worried about invalidating CnD then suggest remove the on hit part for CnD to provide stealth.

Just some food for thought. And recap

When a class is supposed to utilize stealth more than others yet is penalized more so than others to even try to enter stealth i.e.

Have to waste more resources, to include Initiative(effectively putting other skills on Cd),

Relying solely on combo fields which will more often than not cause self inflicted reveal if in combat even if you aren’t trying to attack opponent due enemy Ai, destroy able environmental ,

self inflicted reveal if you even step outside of SR, not even counting when knocked out of the small Aoe stealth field, or from the reveal spam brought on by other classes

having to rely on a skill actually hitting target to enter stealth,

there in lies the problem.

That doesn’t mean the mesmer has better stealthing abilities. More reliable if not next to anyone maybe, but better? That’s not really reasonable to say, considering all of them have casting times and very long cooldowns with the same base duration. To gain a lot of stealth uptime on a mesmer, you need to run two trait lines, one specific weapon set, a full bar of utilities oriented explicitly for stealth, and an elite explicitly for stealth. Frankly, if a stealth-based mesmer gets hit by reveal, they’re worse off than any typical thief. I’m not justifying the amount of reveal other professions are capable of putting out, or the amount of blocks and invulns (I think both of these are way overdone at the moment), but your claims are strictly inaccurate and are a poor basis for comparison.

The mesmer has strictly less access to stealth. The thief can maintain it permanently, meaning that overall the thief’s access is objectively better, even if “harder” to gain access to.

The thief is a “master” of stealth because of the rate at which it can regain it, because with DD, now every single weapon set the thief has possesses the ability to acquire stealth, and can do so for an extended period of time. You’re comparing weapon skills with cast times to utilities which don’t have any. Your basis for comparison is relatively poor and is examining these abilities in a vacuum. Again, warriors are supposed to be the fastest class based on their description. Why don’t they have the 1200 range teleport/rush? After all, we’re not anywhere supposed to be able to hard-engage in our description. And frankly, even our description mentions that our core of defense is meant to be evasive-oriented, based on the following tidbit:

“Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which can make them very hard to hit.”

There’s just so much one can take out of context this way.

I’d rather see revealing effects nerfed and blocks/invulns cut (especially passive ones) than see the thief buffed so dramatically with weapon skills being effectively invalidated. The game’s power creep is way too crazy right now. It’s driving people away from the game at an alarming rate, and despite the thief’s weaknesses, it has a solid foundation that’s weak just because everything else is so overpowered at the moment.

While I lack the ability to cite any source by ANet on how aggro is gained, it is important to note that there is a distinction between damage dealt vs damage dealers in the party. Top damage dealers are not necessarily going to take aggro for dealing the most damage in the past; however, top damage dealers by nature, so long as they continue to attack, will deal the most damage per unit of time, which is confirmed as being part of how aggro is measured. If they stop, their priority is lowered, which is also often tied closely to proximity, as often people only stop attacking when out of range.

That said, I believe there has been substantial community testing/response on the matter, and that it has been relatively agreed upon that armor value is taken into account for considering aggro in most typical encounters. How those weights are valued, however, is a different story; some encounters may have a very low weight assigned to this, while others may have very high weights assigned (Mossman).

It’d be nice if it just acted as a stun like Static Field instead of forcing the enemy player back into the center. This way it still punishes big groups pretty harshly, but doesn’t make it literally impossible to leave for players without stability access like necro or thief, which still get knocked down even if teleporting out of the ward after leaving, or prevents any teleport mechanics not as a stunbreak to instantly fail regardless like Infil Arrow, Steal, Infil Return, etc.

MadRabbit.3179:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

In addition, a party member bringing a party-wide toughness buff (i.E Banner of Defense) will increase the aggro generated due to the fact that mobs are programmed to prioritize players with high toughness. So with the additional toughness plus the amount of damage you’re doing, it can pull aggro really fast and it will be harder to drop. There was a time when Warriors do a massive amount of DPS with GS while having the highest toughness — they were the ultimate tank because you can never pull aggro off of them. So yeah, toughness is bad for Thief in group scenario.

Just curious. Has this been established being true now outside of raids?

I know this is how it is in raids, but it’s been debated a lot how much this is the case in open world and dungeons.

I was actually going to make a comment on this when I saw your post earlier mentioning aggro mechanics, but figured it wouldn’t be brought up.

Yes, initial aggro is based on a combination of proximity, armor, and player-output damage as a means of splitting aggro. It’s why the taunt condition is frivolous (especially with break bars). I don’t recall a period where this wasn’t the case.

As reikken mentions, though, a party-wide banner will not do anything to favor giving the tanks aggro on the basis that it’s not a modifier but a static value. If anything, it would favor pushing aggro to the DPS based on how it’s weighted, since the bonus from a banner would increase the DPS’s armor disproportionately to that of the tankier players’ in the group, especially if it’s simply strict multiplication.

In simplified terms, consider players A and B:

A has 1 armor and 100 DPS
B has 100 armor and 1 DPS.

If aggro is measured by armor * DPS (assume weight 1 and cancel out identical proximity), then

A’s aggro = 1 * 100 = 100
B’s aggro = 100 * 1 = 100

I.E., they’re even, just commutative.

B, the tank, drops a banner providing +5 armor to both, skewing the math.

A’s aggro = (1 + 5) * 100 = 600
B’s aggro = (100 + 5) * 1 = 105

Obviously it’s not this extreme, but such defensive bonuses of static values will result in A taking more aggro than before, potentially causing the effect of a banner to be harmful to a party if it is necessary for aggro to be maintained by the tank.

Then shortbow becomes useless and the thief gets access to a ton of extra mobility.

In essence, it’s just straight power creep for the profession as a whole.

If stealth is given on F3, then it invalidates the use of smoke fields/CnD/many utility skills with again what is unnecessary power creep.

Just because the class description mentions something doesn’t mean that the entire class should be based around it. By sheer desriptions alone, eles should have the highest damage per hit in the game, warriors should be the most mobile (not thieves), guardians should be pure tank and support only, and rangers should feature archer-only gameplay with extensive adaptation (not featured in the class).

Not to mention the thief description doesn’t even mention initiative or not having cooldowns, which is one of the most significant aspects of the profession.

Condi reaper can take out pretty much everything but daredevil with relative ease. Went for one day playing rabid condis and started winning fights vastly outnumbered because there’s just so much damage on the build. I imagine dire is borderline faceroll. There’s no fun in that, though.

He probably has overall weaker condition cleanse, though typically there’s an ele or two running with him these days which soak conditions.

EremiteAngel.9765:

DeceiverX.8361:

For one… use food buffs :P

First fight at 5:20, you should have released from Shroud on his disengage and healed. He burned his gap closes and SR, so he would have had to make it very apparent he was going to re-engage you. This period would have let you maintain better health and apply ranged pressure and regen life force in his moments of weakness.

Fight two you were just way too aggressive and left shroud when he didn’t burn any of his utilities, giving him a lot of options to quickly kill you with little risk.

The third fight near the 6:00 mark, you chased him while he had Shadow Return available, which would cause any engages you make to be wasted.

You’re very predictable in how you combo RS 3’s fear into Executioner’s Scythe when it comes to repeated duels, so this gave you away a little bit for the rematches. I’d also suggest maintaining the stability for a bit longer so incoming CC’s get negated, as you’re going to want to be able to apply as much melee-range pressure as possible.

1) I don’t have spare gold for food/buffs lol. I have an expensive side hobby of creating many new toons and dressing them up to post on GW2 Style : http://gw2style.com/look.php?id=11063

2) TY for the great tips! I never even noticed that I almost always chained shroud 3 with shroud 5. I am definitely trying to vary my fighting style so as to be more unpredictable since we mostly fight the same few roamers in WvW. I’ve been doing the noob way of varying my looks instead of my fighting style so they don’t catch on and figure they are fighting the same person lol. But I should really learn to fight differently XD

I’d suggest running not-top-tier food. Hardened Sharpening Stones and pretty much everything but seaweed salad and Squash Soup will reduce your bill massively; 40 hours of play is reduced to like 2g – manageable by blobbing for a little while – and still gives hefty stat bonuses.

Typically I wait too long and miss the fear on my use of Shroud 3, but unpredictability is really the best way to kill any thief, which manages to help in the regard that while Daredevil has an innate advantage over the reaper and in an evenly-skilled matchup heavily favors the DD, one can overcome the hurdle by giving them a false sense of safety and then punishing them hard for it. Thief durability is almost strictly limited to reacting /predicting your enemy, so mixing up weird combos and throwing unexpected skills into the mix where applicable can work out well assuming you don’t burn important cooldowns frivolously.

Fay.2357:

DeceiverX.8361:

As far as glamour goes, again, gutted for dueling. Still the most powerful mesmer build in group play WvW and is frequently sought-after.

That’s awfully disingenuous. Nobody cares about a glamour build, they just want veil and portal on demand like they always have. You could be naked with no weapons or traits and still be just as useful as long as you veil in front and portal when told.

Not really. A lot of commanders explicitly tell mesmers to run glamour builds, because all of the skills are conducive to group fighting (as necro wells are), and TE is a very powerful effect to give frontline forces. Null Field and Feedback are way better to have for the front line than say, MoP, and Portal is typically a slot-out-while fighting; slot-in-for-surprise skill since it has little value in fights with 800-100 people engaged, particularly with pirate ship.

I’m not following the statement of diminishing returns on power. It has effective exponential scaling with critical damage and stacked modifiers; quite the opposite of diminishing returns. Ferocity is the first stat to start experiencing DR if it makes sacrifices to power and toughness reaches certain thresholds.

The great debate over zerk/marauder is fairly context-sensitive and depends heavily on group composition and on a per-encounter basis. Fights with forced dodge roll tempo (think Subject Alpha in CoE) will always favor berserker getups, as the Marauder counterpart still dies if not making the DPS sacrifice of dodging, however ones which enable the player to take more sustained hits offset by a healer will favor marauder (and potentially a valkyrie/zerk mix even) to full berserker.

For one… use food buffs :P

First fight at 5:20, you should have released from Shroud on his disengage and healed. He burned his gap closes and SR, so he would have had to make it very apparent he was going to re-engage you. This period would have let you maintain better health and apply ranged pressure and regen life force in his moments of weakness.

Fight two you were just way too aggressive and left shroud when he didn’t burn any of his utilities, giving him a lot of options to quickly kill you with little risk.

The third fight near the 6:00 mark, you chased him while he had Shadow Return available, which would cause any engages you make to be wasted.

You’re very predictable in how you combo RS 3’s fear into Executioner’s Scythe when it comes to repeated duels, so this gave you away a little bit for the rematches. I’d also suggest maintaining the stability for a bit longer so incoming CC’s get negated, as you’re going to want to be able to apply as much melee-range pressure as possible.

Shadow.1345:

DeceiverX.8361:

Honestly, if they’re unwilling to make a tooltip adjustment, they’re clearly unwilling to take into account community feedback, which defeats the purpose of this whole initiative. I can only be optimistic, and as mentioned, this is only inspiration, not to expect ANet to port this whole thing as the next elite. A single if statement is quite literally three to five lines in this case per conflicting trait, which is just string substitution. Having personally worked in some game engines, this is a REALLY simple thing to do if the feature is supported (which we know it is in GW2’s engine due to dynamic damage/text updating of tooltips). I don’t mean to dismiss your argument, out of respect for what you’re mentioning, but I really don’t think this is a valid concern in regards to what’s necessary for upkeep of the profession or subsequent elite specs in general.
I actually see it quite concerning if they’re not going to make tooltip adjustments for classes such as the mesmer, however, as a lot of wiggle room for the class hinges on their shatters.

As far as sweeping changes go, I was thinking more along the lines of changing vanilla traits’ functionalities to be cohesive for the sake of an elite.

Changing the functionality of Improvisation is exactly what I have bolded from your statement. Just because the effect effects the same skill slot doesn’t make it not a change, it is still a change to the functionality to be cohesive for the sake of an elite.

I have worked in game development myself as well and I understand how incredibly easy it is to make that happen but just because it is easy to do doesn’t mean they will do it or want to do it.

Either way, you’re having fun with your thing and I have given you feedback on it. You seem to be intent on seeing it your way so we will just have to agree to disagree and go on about our day.

Improvisation’s functionality isn’t being changed to the client, which is where the confusion begins and likely why ANet doesn’t want to make such changes. Just the wording would be set to change. It will reset the cooldown on F2 (Or from core thief’s perspective “Use Stolen Item,” just as it does now. A functional change would be making Improvisation grant cooldown reduction/double-casting on skills F2 and (specialization-specific F3 skill).

It’s really just a matter of whether or not they would be willing to make the adjustment to tooltips, which I haven’t been able to locate where they explicitly stated they would no longer make tooltip adjustments or mechanics changes with elite specs that would require future tooltip adjustments. I am willing to make adjustments, however the specialization is so entrenched in these systems that I don’t believe changing them would be realistic within the confines of the specialization concept. I appreciate the concern, and if you have any ideas on how to decouple the mechanics while disabling steal as a mechanic due to balance issues and flavor reasons, I’ll gladly consider them.

Vincent,

Revealed locks out only one defense mechanism, stealth, and hard-counters one trait line option, SA-built-stealth (however revealed does absolutely nothing to affect venomshare, a major contender for this trait line). It doesn’t do anything about the other defenses. It is not a be-all-end-all “you lose defenses” debuff. Period. End of story. Anyone dying solely because of SA not giving them passive defenses while in stealth is a bad player. I understand it weakens the thief and counters the trait line when specced a certain way. But again, so does boon corruption to arcane elementalists, and unblockable effects to a guardian, which you also completely ignored. These kinds of effects exist for every class and pretending they do not is ridiculous.

Weakness also hard-counters Acrobatics, since the entirety of Acrobatics at its core is effectively about increased dodges via vigor and increasing Vigor’s potency. Having weakness doesn’t mean much still for Acrobatics, because it can still use stealth as a defensive mechanism, or simply wait out the duration via other defenses. In likeness, a stealth-built thief can simply Shadowstep away from combat and re-engage once a revealed debuff if applied by another player expires.

SA would be overpowered without Revealed. SE would be a passive cure 1 condition every 3s – best in the game; Hidden Thief is permanent 50% move speed – best in the game; RoS would be a permanent 25% reduction in damage stackable with protection – best mitigation in the game; Rejuv would be permanent passive healing bordering on Healing Signet and an effective 25% cooldown reduction to all weapon skills. Alternative, BP + HS spam would be the fastest blind applicator in the game to a point where even standing near a smoke field by a thief would be dangerous out of low counterplay.

You claim the Deadeye doesn’t provide an answer to being revealed. So what you’re saying is defensive stat increases, teleport skills, and long-ranged DPS to maintain pressure from a distance are not good things to have while revealed? You mean these concepts which have been explicitly not given to the thief and historically removed on the sole basis that they are so strong because of the thief’s core kit having too much synergy with these mechanics isn’t a basis for arguing that the Deadeye offers solid compensation for being revealed? I’m sorry, but that claim is foolish. The intent is to allow the profession to be able to reveal itself considering SHF only lasts as long as the Revealed debuff and is only accessible while revealed. This is done because the strength of even remotely good 1200 ranged damage is so powerful with the thief’s core kit, and that there are potentially devastating consequences to balance if left to working with stealth.

Also, no, stealth is not the thief’s profession mechanic. Steal and initiative are. Arguing that stealth must be the feature of an elite spec because the class description of the core spec says so is also invalid. If going by profession descriptions, then warriors should be the fastest class in the game, since it states that the warrior relies on speed. The thief mentions this nowhere, so why are we supposed to be fast? The Elementalist states that it does “massive damage in a single attack” as compensation for its low durability. Why then is the ele the tankiest profession in the game, and why do we hit harder per attack than ele? See, profession descriptions are borked, and game design goals change. Arguing that this idea isn’t flavorful because it plays with counterpart mechanics to stealth, which thieves have ready access to, is like saying we need to buff elementalist DPH to be the best in the game and make warriors by far the fastest profession. That’s silly and you know it.

Yes, the specialization is designed to self-inflict Revealed for those building around SHF. Just because you have skills doesn’t mean they’re always useful all the time. The mesmer only gains benefits from performing certain shatters based on its build and as the opportunity rises within combat. I’m not sure how you play thief, but clearly the intent and style of the Deadeye – a committal-based approach to decisions with proper tools to act on commitments – is going over your head by design concept. Your suggestion of a teleport-oriented specialization is demonstrative of this lack of understanding on the fundamental level; the Deadeye is not intended to promote conventional thief style play of low-commitment decisions, such as how the Reaper fundamentally changes the way necromancers approach combat.

The Daredevil has just as little stealth play within the specialization (actually it has objectively less) than the Deadeye. The mesmer has had access to the mechanic since beta, and since release, so have rangers and engineers. Just because they are “experts at stealth” does not mean that everything about the profession must be oriented around stealth and feature only using stealth. Further, intermittent revealed access can only be gained through making an attack from stealth; I.E., the spec still depends on it and can benefit from it at any moment it has the revealed effect, but may choose not to. Revealed is the counterpart of invisibility via stealth, and arguing that the counterpart is not part of the whole of stealth mechanic is simply incorrect; otherwise, revealed wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t at first have been only acquirable through making an attack from stealth.

CnD with SA has a 100% stealth uptime. Also, at release, Reveal only was applied when making a stealth attack, NOT attacking from stealth. At release, D/D was so common because a SA build could infinitely chain CnD (gaining the benefits of Infusion of Shadow which have now been merged to Rejuv) without ever needing to be revealed. This is literally what you’re proposing, because with this idea, a thief could still permanently chain CnD for infinite stealth, because initiative regeneration continues while stealthed. This is a strictly bad idea, and frankly, almost demonstrates your lack of knowledge about the kit as it is. Backstab is also not commonly used unless a foe is being very predictable. Shadow Shot does more damage than a front-facing backstab, and I’ve had extensive theory discussions about the skill as opposed to Shadow Shot in the past. Jana understands that in the context where CS isn’t used, Shadow Shot is always better to use while paired with mug for a +1 in terms of damage safety and consistency and support effects. Really, backstab isn’t that great, and now that MH dagger has been buffed, the aftercast delay on backstab versus the damage on SS make burst engage and DPS favor Shadow Shot use even more.

Comments about Impossible Escape being useless are also invalid. DE/SA with Hidden Thief would enable a Charge to have its Revealed cured by Hidden thief, and then CnD would then stealth. Frankly, DE/SA enables more consistent sustain for stealth weaving builds through bulk initiative restoration than anything else right now. The only loss is builds which camp stealth, in which case, it’s not advisable to be using a specialization option focused on revealed if one never plans to become revealed. This isn’t meant to be power creep or solve all the problems of the core profession like DD did, but provide options to promote other builds. Don’t like being revealed? Then don’t play Deadeye. It’s that simple. Because this mechanic is so tied to the thief, and because it is simply a hunter role featuring high mobility and synergy with stealth, it is not suitable for the ranger (nature magic/pet use/survival) or the engineer (technologically assisted), since nothing else about the kit borrows any synergy or flavor from either professions.

You again clearly demonstrate you have not put forth the effort to work with this design, because you’d have realized there is no pigeon-holing anything into the Grit trait because it’s a minor trait. It comes with the Deadeye as a non-option. You strictly just get bonus toughness while revealed for being a Deadeye. Meaning you don’t need to feel pigeon-holed, and frankly, this acts as a means to take damage reduction to mirror that of the effects from RoS while being more forgiving to glassier builds and less overpowered to tanky/troll builds due to format-specific balance concerns. Further, you advocate so heavily for SA, yet this is the trait line with the fewest viable options within builds, and most powerful, pigeon-hole oriented abilities on core thief due to high dependencies of condition cleansing via SE and sustain on Rejuv paired with crappy alternative options unless building venomshare.

Quick Reflexes is there for D/D and similar builds. Again, you seem to have not actually cared to try to look into this proposal and work with it. Seeing as every few seconds you’ll be using backstab as primary damage because D/D lacks Shadow Shot and thus gains the revealed debuff, it gives D/D an extra dodge for free every 10s, gives it super speed to catch fleeing foes (since D/D lacks strong re-engage/chase like D/P, again via Shadow Shot), and refunds endurance, which can be stacked with the effects from Wild Strike, making D/D get more evades on top of Death Blossom’s evasion potential, while also cutting down on initiative use spent on performing skills like Death Blossom and CnD which over time wear down on initiative.

You also seem insistent that every thief must engage with Stygian Charge. There are many teleport opportunities available to have SC work as a mid-combat skill to keep the thief going, especially again if Impossible Escape is used, which would give a thief substantial initiative resources to keep fighting and not need to camp stealth waiting for initiative restoration.

There are traits for every weapon and every build. They might not be super-strong-must-haves, but that’s part of making a balanced specialization. It’s a specialization; it’s not a must-have. You’re confusing this with buffs to the class you’d like to see rather than giving the thief new options and methods to deal with some of the new styles which have opened up for other professions which have made the thief indirectly weak, such as the Dragonhunter.

Your protest of Revealed not being good for the thief as a mechanic does not belong in this thread, and frankly, is your only valid basis for argument on the elite spec. If you have no other things to say aside from the fact that you dislike the Revealed effect and as a consequence disagree with the proposal on that basis, I strongly suggest you stop posting in this thread as our discussion is leaving unfriendly walls of text and is deviating away from the core discussion of the specialization other than a few comments about synergy among certain weapons. Further, if you wish to discuss synergy or believe there is a flaw in synergy or design of the profession as systems exist within the game, simply post on that subject, and we can discuss the issue as an isolated topic.

On dire condi, yea. But condi is busted and boring :P

Glass reaper is quite squish to burst, and the mentioned-mesmer’s damage typically exceeds 25-30k per shatter combo, and even if dodged, he typically gets off at least the mirror blade from stealth with fire/air procs for around 7-10k.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

I’m seeing at least 10 uplevels in that blob…probably did miss the tutorial.

This is what I first noticed. WvW was totally different then, and I don’t think it’s an accurate measure of the class itself/the glamour kit being that OP. Upon reaching 80 and gearing up, I recall an instance of winning a 1v13 on my glass cannon thief. The players were worse and weren’t as well-geared, despite being an uplevel back in the day being less punishing than now since traits were acquired much earlier.

That said, my first guild did run five mesmers out of only fifteen people for what was the most insane portal play I’ve witnessed (LONG LIVE THE PENTAPORTAL!) , and glamour was absolutely bonkers.

As far as glamour goes, again, gutted for dueling. Still the most powerful mesmer build in group play WvW and is frequently sought-after.

I mentioned WvW, Azukas, because if you just buff the mesmer as it is now for the sake of PvP, it becomes wildly overpowered in WvW. Strength in all formats typically affects balance adjustments, which is why the thief and warrior are not buffed despite their fairly blatant under-performance in sPvP, and why of all things, the thief received an AA damage increase as a “balance” measure and the warrior got QoL love on the rifle. Since the thief was sub-par at everything due to the revenant taking all of its roles, ANet decided for Raiding’s sake to buff the thief’s damage to make the class at least have some purpose in some format, and gave the rifle love because it was medicore in WvW, pretty terrible in sPvP, and useless in raids. All three modes are considered while balancing, and this is why the game isn’t balanced in any format. Unifying stats to PvE levels in sPvP would enable ANet to balance everything for higher stats and take scaling into account, and thus could balance all the formats at once. Seeing as there’s around 60% less damage in sPvP than in PvE and WvW for “competitive reasons,” the game won’t be balanced properly and asking for changes will have no yields so long as a build is useful or strong in one format.

I believe he runs Mimic and often uses it for Blink – he’s extremely mobile. Without Staff 5 or Warhorn to burn his Mirror of Anguish, GS 5 and Grasp (good luck landing either due to how unreliable these skills are), you’re likely not catching up. I’ve only fared well on my reaper against this particular guy when I’ve gotten kill credit mid-fight off his guildmembers to reset Death’s Charge after a fresh Blink due to Onslaught. PU condi will want to stay in your face, baiting attacks and movement while you try to flail around and kill them proccing confusion and taking extra damage from torment; this guy doesn’t since he’s power-shatter, making the matchup for a reaper pretty poor overall.

Thinking about druids, I did actually beat him once, though on a build which couldn’t really be a more aggressive counter, so I don’t really consider it much of a victory. GS for its block with Railgun longbow + Bristleback, Sic ’Em, Signet of Stone, Lightning Reflexes, and RoA worked as disabling his protection access and mitigating his escape efforts via Sic ’Em after playing highly defensive in GS with signet of stone for him to burn cooldowns to no avail, swap longbow and pewpew while he tried to flee.

That said, it didn’t work a second time. He paced his blurs and defenses between stealth periods, preventing Sic ’Em from really having any use.

On a side note, the guild is EV, not EVO :P

Shadow.1345:

Improvisation: ((You can use stolen items twice. One random skill category is immediately recharged when you steal.))

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Improvisation

It says use stolen items twice, not use stolen items twice or reset F2 skill.

Now I understand that could be changed easily. I understand how object oriented programming works. However it says use stolen items twice. If someone was on a F2P account or just simply didn’t buy the new xpac then the change on the tooltip should not be there to accommodate a new elite and I’m fairly certain they won’t change it for a new elite. Nor do I think they are going to add an if statement to check to see if you have the Deadeye elite line selected for it. They already said they didn’t want to do stuff like that and if it has to add something from what it already says it does that probably correlates to what you refer to as a sweeping change.

I’m not trying to argue with you. I’m not saying all of this to be a kitten, I’m pointing out an obstacle so that you’re hard work on this doesn’t go to waste because of that.

I understand and appreciate the concern. Ultimately the hard work has already been done. The entire specialization hinges on the mechanic, and frankly, would need to be entirely redone.

I haven’t been able to locate where it was said they do not wish to rename or adjust traits in the core kit to reflect those of the elite specializations. I did some digging in a few videos, and while I didn’t watch them in full, I did a considerable amount of skipping around and found no such declaration. Honestly, if they’re unwilling to make a tooltip adjustment, they’re clearly unwilling to take into account community feedback, which defeats the purpose of this whole initiative. I can only be optimistic, and as mentioned, this is only inspiration, not to expect ANet to port this whole thing as the next elite. A single if statement is quite literally three to five lines in this case per conflicting trait, which is just string substitution. Having personally worked in some game engines, this is a REALLY simple thing to do if the feature is supported (which we know it is in GW2’s engine due to dynamic damage/text updating of tooltips). I don’t mean to dismiss your argument, out of respect for what you’re mentioning, but I really don’t think this is a valid concern in regards to what’s necessary for upkeep of the profession or subsequent elite specs in general.
I actually see it quite concerning if they’re not going to make tooltip adjustments for classes such as the mesmer, however, as a lot of wiggle room for the class hinges on their shatters.

As far as sweeping changes go, I was thinking more along the lines of changing vanilla traits’ functionalities to be cohesive for the sake of an elite. I might make another thread or PM some ANet folks to clarify this, as this would be very important to mention for the sake of the ES-suggesting community as a whole, since if tooltip updates are not possible to reflect profession mechanic changes, then most elite spec suggestions will be invalidated.

Vincent,

Your entire basis for argument is that a trait line is countered by a mechanic.

By this logic, Weakness needs to be nerfed because it reduces the effects of Vigor and thus locks out the class from properly maintaining benefits from the entirety of Acrobatics.

SA has high stealth synergy. Again, I’m not disagreeing with you that giving other professions availability to reveal the thief is a good idea. I’m disagreeing with your statements which are claiming revealed in it of itself is a bad mechanic. Not having revealed in general, but instead, only detection, would result in massive balance concerns for SA regarding its defenses and offensive capabilities being overpowered. Your proposal makes little sense in the context of the class itself and only gains validity when examining extra power acquired by other classes. The Deadeye is intended not to be a direct answer to being revealed by other professions, but instead provide an answer to being revealed by other professions. Making the claim that Sic ’Em is overpowered is ridiculous. The claim that revealed needs to be changed entirely because of a few overpowered skills and abilities is inherently flawed and should be targeted towards those few abilities.

As far as your claims about me not playing them or being familiar with the thief, I play D/D and have since release of this game. I have been around when Revealed wasn’t here. I am blatantly admitting that I was overpowered when the mechanic didn’t exist.

As far as synergy with MH dagger goes, you’re not reading the spec in detail, but are whining about the revealed mechanic being used because you do not like it. I explicitly created traits for direct synergy with SA which effectively nullify the self-inflicted revealed debuff. Via Impossible Escape, the Deadeye enables some of the single most powerful synergy that has ever existed with MH dagger. It literally offers the ability to backstab twice consecutively, completely skipping Revealed altogether. This spec has been approved and critically acclaimed by MH dagger players. You’re not reading the details and are condemning the entire idea because it utilizes a mechanic which you do not like. I’m sorry you do not like the revealed mechanic, but it is a necessary addition to the game, and enabling the mechanic to have more depth and give the thief as a profession a less-binary role in terms of performance in and out of stealth, while effectively reducing the potential intent by many players to even take or use revealing abilities to begin with. You slot massive boon stripping and corruption to deal with an ele; you slot reveal effects to deal with a stealth-oriented thief. Again, I’m not vouching for accessibility on revealed, but that the mechanic, if properly given means to give the thief a fair chance in combat during this period, is one which can have a positive effect on the game as a whole.

All elite specs will feature a weapon. I built this one with the rifle because it is the most-requested ES weapon by thieves. I also did it to give the thief a support weapon and potential support role. I wanted to generate mass appeal and give the thief a way to change its style of play, and not simply buff it, which is what elites are intended to do. Revealed-oriented play is something the thief does not have access to doing right now – you say so yourself that the thief is too easily shut down by it – so claiming that this pigeon-holes the thief is ridiculous, especially since this build surrenders stolen items and one if its best teleports to gain initiative and a self-reveal effect. As for the Deadeye doing the same thing as the core thief and Daredevil, via “another way to do DPS,” you’re simply mistaken. Everything about the specialization is a DPS loss compared to Daredevil or what core thief can do. Everything. There is quite literally zero reason to take this spec if DPS is desired. Absolutely none. Nada. It’s been balanced to deal sub-optimal DPS. That’s the entire point. And that’s why it’s something new. Frankly, at this point, I’m convinced you have not read or even thought about the details of this proposal. If you wish to make more comments on this topic, please read up on it and give it some thought. It’s because of your effective ignorance to the options I’ve put into this spec to enable such play opportunities that I believe your feedback has not been worth it so far.

A spec featuring tons of teleports like you propose is better left for another thread. And frankly, it better have a compromise as to why it effectively just gives MH sword more of what it offers already or completely replaces the need to use it. Actually, most of the discussion about revealed itself and your proposed replacement mechanic is completely off-topic from this proposal. I understand you may not like the revealed mechanic, or the spec concept itself, but I am designing this specialization on existing game systems, seeing as I have no authority to suggest major overhauls to the way stealth itself is handled, and frankly, very few players have qualms with revealed itself (and often the players who do are the ones which propose asinine buff suggestions), but rather have problems with the mechanic being applied by other professions so readily.

Please, do read the spec. Make some builds, and explain why you think certain aspects are either too weak or not strong enough or simply conceptually not sufficient within the context of the class or current game scenario based on what you make and the trait/skill interactions at hand. If you wish to campaign a change to the revealed mechanic, post a new thread on that, and let that discussion ensue.

Shadow.1345:

Quick Pockets and the change to Improvisation, which as you stated was a change from from how it works with Steal to suit the Deadeye mechanic.

Granted it is easy to change the tooltips and changes have been made for clarification where it was done badly before however they also have stated they don’t want to have to change core traits in the future to accommodate new elites. I’m not trying to knock your idea but wouldn’t it make more sense to approach it from the stand point of not making them have to change those core traits to accommodate?

Overall, though, my opinion that a sniper type of elite suits Ranger way more than Thief. Snipers in the military have survival training, tracking, camouflage, etc., which really suits the Ranger more than a pickpocket (thief). I’d rather see the new elite bring a new role, like support, that focuses on the shadow magic, like how Druid focuses on nature magic. The thief really doesn’t need a new damage role because people can’t learn to dodge properly. It needs to be able to bring something new to the table that helps the Shadow Arts line because Acrobatics, Deadly Arts and Critical Strikes already is helped by the Daredevil elite.

You’re welcome for the input and thank you for debating me on the points in a respectable fashion.

There’s no needed change to Improvisation. I just mentioned that it will affect the F2 slot for SHF instead of having no effect, which the tech already exists and doesn’t actually change anything on the core thief. The stream refers to making sweeping changes that affect the core thief’s kit; Improvisation affecting the F2 slot/SHF doesn’t change anything about the core thief, and the ICD on quick pockets does literally nothing except prevent an exploitive case with the low cooldown on SHF changing weapon skills, which again, has quite literally zero impact on the core thief or daredevil.

The Deadeye isn’t really a damage spec. The rifle is almost a purely supportive, and both its heal and a utility skill are dedicated to synergize on direct group healing and sustain. The rifle operates as a means to rapidly deplete break bars and provide vulnerability and CC from afar with overall low potential damage. The concept of a sniper/damage dealer honestly shouldn’t exist, especially on any class which has access to stealth. This is why I also made the rifle have synergy with the Revealed mechanic; there is no feasible way to enable the spec to “snipe” a target from stealth to low health.

This is why I’m not really following your reasoning; the changes made don’t actually have any effect on the core profession or any others. I’m not asking for changes to modify the core thief but instead some balance tweaks which only affect the Deadeye.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The big difference is that stealth detection doesn’t prevent Thief from using their defense mechanic — Revealed, on the other hand, completely locks the Thief out if its defenses. I assumed that these facts are obvious.

The main issue here that seems to be being overlooked is the fact that Revealed locks Thief’s defensive mechanic. Imagine how squishy Guardians would be if they are locked out from generating Aegis, or Elementalists locked out from using Water attunement. Even for a short duration of 3 seconds, it will trash the game play of those professions. Due to the lack of other defenses that Thief has, locking stealth via Revealed is poor job in solving a very simple problem.

If the problem is chain stealth, the solution is stealth detection, not Revealed.
If the problem is hard hitting stealth attack, the solution is cooldown not Revealed.

Not really, though. If you can see the thief, it doesn’t matter if he’s stealthed. I can walk up to a detected but not revealed thief and still kill him in one attack. The defensive nature of stealth is only not having complete knowledge of where the thief is. That’s it. The thief also has a wide array of tools to deal with being revealed, such as rapid access to blind, and spammable evades on a plethora of weapon sets. Revealed is like a debuff which would cut healing by 50% like poison, but couldn’t be cleansed which could kill an elementalist if they depend on water solely for sustain and don’t use any other abilities in their kit (L2P problem), or a warrior or reaper using utilities or a thief using BV or LS on S/D which make their attacks unblockable. The answer to this that the guard has is invulns or simply getting out of the way of a combo, which they can do with relative ease. If they don’t, they die, which is also a L2P issue.

The suggestion of being seen but not revealed frankly doesn’t make any sense in the context of improving the thief’s QoL except making stealth attack access available while visible, but seeing as most people don’t even bother with backstab anymore, this doesn’t really change much, and being able to counter the effects of being seen is a much stronger and viable answer to Revealed than just giving stealth attack abilities the ability to land, which would also likely miss before stealth would expire, considering one can dodge roll out of the way of a “detected”-but-stealthed thief’s attack when he gets close.

I don’t even count tempest because if building remotely tanky it literally is next to immortal without a group of 10+ without boon corruption, but one boon corrupt will cause it to die relatively easily to most things.

EremiteAngel.9765:

As a power Reaper roaming in WvW, I find it a lot tougher to fight PU mesmers (both condi and power versions) compared to chronomancers.
Are Base PU Mesmers still the King of Roaming?
Chronomancers don’t really come close to PU Mesmers in my experience…

I fought a PU Mantra base Power Mesmer from FA EVO guild, i think his name is Andy or something, my record against him in like 50 fights is 50 losses. I won zero times. Zero! He is extremely skilled and I got no chance against him.
Against less skilled base Mesmers like those in my video below, I still find them much harder to fight compared to a Chronomancer =/

I have also fought this particular mesmer maybe 300 or 400 times (though his name escapes me as well), and dueled him extensively in attempts to beat him after being constantly rejected while playing a breadth of classes, doing my best to run hard counters since he was PPT’ing our camps one day, and have repeatedly taken down his guildmembers outnumbered many, many times when he is not there. Every fight where he is involved, however, has pretty much been a strict loss without many others there to take down his passives from the Chaos traitline so I can get in and simply kill him. Alone, he’s similarly devastating. He plays full berserker and is next to impossible to kill without single-target damage that will one-shot him. I’d say I lose about 90% of the time on every class and build used against him. He is by far and large the best mesmer I’ve ever seen in the game, and plays an order of magnitude better than most I’ve seen stream in the ESL, including Helseth. He only runs one mantra, though, MoP.

I play a similar reaper build when I’m not on my thief, and a good chrono can easily shut us down with the amount of blocks and lockdown available to them. That said, there are very few actually good chronomancers, and PU/Chaos is absolutely the better roaming option since it has so many goodies meant for the small-scale, and it offers a ton in terms of defense like permanent protection uptime.

You can run Ins/Chaos/Chrono and also do very well, however. Though I’d argue chrono is a little better for larger encounters due to alacrity and the ability to reset important skills like veil.

It wasn’t even backstab/damage that was the problem; they could have nerfed coefficients. It was endless chaining of CnD which led targets to not even be aware they were being attacked or from what angle, that was.

There are very few thieves who have problems with being revealed after using an attack from stealth. Honestly, I am against chained stealth as a concept entirely, and I think the ability to chain stealth is a big part of the reason why the thief is a terrible fighting class, because balance becomes half-subjective. Without the revealed mechanic as the basis for the Deadeye, the numbers would need substantially more ambiguity and the fighting potential of the class if not based around spamming evades would need to be cut somewhere else massively; simply the thief would need to lose its access to any sort of burst or damage through strict, forced, specialization-invoked penalties. I’d rather not just straight-up nerf the thief to enable other styles of play. Further, this is a suggestion about subsequent design to inspire the developers for the next spec, not to address issues with the core thief. Doing so has already proven a nightmare since pretty much no two thieves can reach a consensus on what they want out of the class.

I also do not understand why you believe that stealth detection is any better, especially when you suggest that it could be made an AoE. That effectively is revealed. The only difference would be that Rejuv would tick, as even target loss is pretty pointless considering most abilities cleave, and the new action camera enables many target-requiring attacks to no longer need a target and simply be shot at the desired location, also kind of ruling out any benefit.

Plus, it makes no sense why one couldn’t call a target or target a visible foe one’s self. He’s visible to you; got beat him up.

Revealed is fine so long as imposed revealed by other classes is more controlled. The thief being able to access it himself and apply it to himself is really not a balance or conceptual concern, and part of the point of the Deadeye was to give the thief a reason to play in a way which allows and even promotes the thief to committing to a fight with little effective way to just reset on a whim unless fairly substantial build sacrifices and adjustments are made to do so. Revealed is an excellent way to feature and mechanically ensure this. This also indirectly nerfs the use of revealing skills, as doing so could potentially give the Deadeye substantial access to SHF without needing to combo into it, giving it direct savings in terms of initiative to gain extended access to SHF. It does little to affect self-inflicted reveal from the thief itself, and also enables really good use of the abilities which do reveal the thief to have their desired impact, but simply takes the significance away from these abilities from always being useful/impeding at all times.

While it’s likely they will be added,

I really hope they’re not.

I’d like to see them gone in general, frankly.

Nomad Druid running GS/Staff is pretty insane.

Thelgar.7214:

Dusty Moon.4382:

Chaba.5410:

jason.9548:

Lol, I will continue to do what I want and t3 your ebg
keeps because of the current double teaming from fa and db. Also I might add that db will back stab fa which is funny.

Double team what? Not when TC has TORK and CERN consistently ignoring TCBL scouts. No one needs to even try to make a double team. LOL

Is this post serious?

TORK only uses siege or runs – they don’t fight and CERN prefers taking BL’s that aren’t manned, so they don’t like to fight either – Disco of CERN will fight, the other CERN commanders not so much.

I transferred from TC to FA about a month ago. I’ve run with Zog and TORK, and they’ve always been willing to fight, even outnumbered and in the shadow of enemy siege.

As far as double teaming, I’ve seen DB and TC double team FA garri, with TC pulling off to let DB cap. I’ve yet to see a double team as a resident of FA, unless you’re counting hitting the backline during a fight when we happen to come across one. And then we’ve just hit whoever was closest and went on to try to kill everyone we could.

As far as server stacking, my grandfather made his living as a gambler during the depression. I was raised knowing that stacking the deck is cheating and there is nothing worse than a cheat.

I’ll also note that calling cheating ‘server politics’ doesn’t make it any better.

I can’t speak for the BL’s since I don’t play on them, but every time I’ve been following Zog and we go for FA’s keep in EBG, DB seems to always follow us to steal the capture/farm both servers’ bags. Then we’re either trapped in the middle or are simply losing people as what happens in trying to take a keep, and need to just run away, putting FA now in a further-weakened state against DB’s full force.

It’s the smart move for DB as it gives them the best chance at taking a keep, but not one we’re trying to incite (Again, applicable only to EBG; as far as the DBL’s go, I haven’t got the slightest idea).

Check for karma venders/heart venders as you level up. Otherwise it’s just bad luck.

Nicholas S Lin.6187:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Make them accessible to all races through a skill unlock on the hero panel, with the limitation that you can’t mix and match across races. So, for example, if you are using Asuran racial skills, you can’t also use Sylvari. Opening them up to all races means that ANet can bring them up to the level of real skills. Not flavor.

How would this be an improvement? My suggestion was to make the races matter, be different, unique. NO sharing of racial-skills. A human cannot use a Charr skill. An Asuran cannot use a Sylvari skill. To me a player character should be restricted to race/racial faction (for humans one Avatar-human racial skills set only)/profession.

That’s the point.

Imagine if you wanted to go play in a raid or something and the party requirement was “Norn only” or “Human only” or a WvW raid with “Sylvari Only.”

It de-values any existing characters you may have which aren’t part of a specific optimization, effectively invalidating them, regardless of your capacity to play or build for the content.

They’re free utilities and intended solely to be used for flavor.

Now, if every race’s set of utilities had identical effects but different flavor elements (humans have avatars but norn maintain semi-druidic animal effects, asura use some kind of device, etc., then they could be buffed. Otherwise, absolutely not.

*If only

I came here for a discussion about logical reasoning. Left disappointed.

While not running Deathly Chill I’m pretty sure you’d deal more damage just running full zerk in all honesty. For a full GS combo with every skill landing taking your foe only to half, you’re better off in zerk gear, seeing as Death’s Charge itself will often already do that. Gravedigger hitting a squishy target will likely just outright kill them, as per what happened to this ele.

Celsith.2753:

Chaba.5410:

DeceiverX.8361:

Even HUNT was TC-native before going to FA, and according to Celsith herself she was sick of the attitude and simply wanted to return to her home server for the community.

Sick of what attitude? The guilds that ran in EBG that HUNT hung around quit the game for BDO and The Division. I’d rather Celsith speak for herself here.

We aren’t TC native. I do have an alt that has 1.5k hours played on TC and that helped us make the decision where to go – I already knew I liked TC.
We left FA because we saw the writing on the wall when several guilds quit. It was SOS I was sick of

Cel

My apologies. I must have confused you mentioning your past play time on the other account when you said you had previously played on TC. Hope I didn’t unsettle you or your guild with that statement above.

Crise.9401:

DeceiverX.8361:

It makes sense for it to only last a few weeks if there are slated changes coming in the April patch which could potentially break it, as was mentioned by ANet themselves for not keeping it as a permanent feature. I’d rather have the April patch than permanent SAB, to be honest.

While you are absolutely correct about potential incoming breaking changes, when you put it like that and they just spent a relatively long time fixing SAB, it’s a huge shame to think that it will be broken in but two weeks time… even though no matter how small scale the update to SAB itself was, fixing it must have taken longer.

And if this is true now, why would the commit to do the same thing each year. Yeah SAB may be a wonder of creative thinking under the hood prone to breaking because the engine was designed for an MMO not a platformer… but if they have any sense now that they have commited to an yearly thing, it doesn’t make any sense to keep deliberately breaking the thing either.

They may have made some adjustments to get it to cooperate better in the future, but may not have the assurance nothing will break within their strict timeframe of an April release of the update, and as such, are not taking the gamble. It’ll probably justify the festival as a yearly event with lots of hype around it as well.

Duke Darkwood.4237:

Crise.9401:

It does suck that its only here for two weeks though, for the first time it was around whole april, and same might be true for the second time it was around… can’t recall the specifics on that.

The original release lasted, yes, all of April 2013.
Back To School lasted from September 3-30, also 2013.

The Box did not make an appearance at all in the years 2014 and 2015. (Understandable in the latter case; they were going full-bore at getting HoT done.)

It makes sense for it to only last a few weeks if there are slated changes coming in the April patch which could potentially break it, as was mentioned by ANet themselves for not keeping it as a permanent feature. I’d rather have the April patch than permanent SAB, to be honest.

Chaba.5410:

DeceiverX.8361:

My point was to convey that the notion of TC being this huge bandwagon server for tons of guilds to megablob T2 is just ridiculous based on first-hand accounts of the reasoning from the only guild I do know transferred.

Personally, I’ve only seen one new guild move to TC, Kazo (I’ve come to learn that NEON is not xfers, but a split from CERN). TC had way more guilds in NA a few months ago and Kazo hasn’t exactly replaced those that left TC.

Kazo is TC-native. They didn’t transfer in. Seriously, we have new guilds, but very few new people.