Guild Wars 2

dubstax.9102:

I prefer to just leave a browser window open to the website as the overlay being in Java leaves much to be desired in regards to performance. It is a fantastic website with a great live map so kudos for the recommendation.

I don’t use any kind of overlay software or anything, so I have no measurable/anecdotal experience with performance losses, but depending on how the code is written, java code can match that of compiled C++. Java’s JIT compiler is absolutely amazing when utilized properly.

Sviel.7493:

DeceiverX.8361:

Scale damage based on charging time. Point-blank might be safer with fewer counters, but it’ll take way longer and likely the siege will get destroyed or reinforcements can be called in for the fight outside.

Imho, cannon and AC fire radius need nerfing to make ballistae more viable as anti-siege solutions rather than just humping tons of AC’s.

People will just build them point-blank and full charge for damage. Besides, it doesn’t solve the lack of interaction—it just makes things take longer. The siege still won’t get destroyed because there’s so little that can be done to hit it, if anything.

guilddabd

Easy fix: reduce radius of meteor shower.

Not only would that have repercussions in fights, but it would still not solve the issue as some of these placements are nigh impossible to target due to camera limitations.

It’ll take so much longer that the few mechanisms which can interact will likely be viable enough to take them out. Positioning is always going to be exploited no matter how one looks at it. The next complaint would be that a cliff way out in the distance is too high/safe, etc.

Scale damage based on charging time. Point-blank might be safer with fewer counters, but it’ll take way longer and likely the siege will get destroyed or reinforcements can be called in for the fight outside.

Imho, cannon and AC fire radius need nerfing to make ballistae more viable as anti-siege solutions rather than just humping tons of AC’s.

I’d like to point out two things before I weigh in:

• MO’s communication and willingness to talk here recently is a fantastic thing for this community.

• That said, his communication shouldn’t be taken for granted and we, as a community, shouldn’t be trash-talking in blind rage in his willingness to communicate. A good reason behind why ANet stopped communicating to begin with is probably for this exact reason. I’d rather keep the windows clean, thanks.

That doesn’t mean we need white-knighting, either. Criticism is the most important aspect of the process of improving something. That is, assuming such criticism is meant to help or try to help improve it.

We shouldn’t be arguing about the semantics of the expansion being half-baked. The community at large pretty much has come out since HoT’s release and has continued to state that the expansion was clearly rushed and shipped earlier than it should have, particularly regarding the design approaches themselves to many aspects of the game.
We don’t need an ANet staff member, regardless of position, to try and defend this product to make it look any better than it is; judgment for the most part has been passed already, and the addition of new content or adjustments to it is truthfully the only way to change perceptions of paying consumers. Coming out and saying it was a failure is definitely a bad business move, but I think stating the expansion was a success to the masses complaining is probably worse than silence. I applaud your first post, MO, because it suggests things didn’t work out as well as planned for HoT, and a lot of content in the game due to the change in direction needs tweaks. That alone would suffice for many.

I’m fine with legendaries being delayed. Frankly I’ve found most of them either excessive, ugly, and pointless gold sinks with the journeys as they are just being grinds.

I also don’t really care about the release schedule of these weapons. They take time and developers are assigned to a lot of jobs at once, and that’s understandable.

Really, it’s just a matter of business trust at this point. So long as everyone involved in the funding and production of the next expansion is aware that it likely will not sell as well initially/period due to consumer concerns regarding the integrity of content delivered vs statements made about said content, keep moving along. Live and learn. So long as a lot of the issues occurring in the game now get fixes in the near-ish future or temporary holdovers are delivered, it’s salvageable.

Good to know another pack is being worked on (despite my disdain for the current, I appreciate knowing what’s going on and what to expect). Make sure that before a date or estimated date is set or an announcement is made about promised features in the next expansion, that such content is effectively ready-to-release. The “when it’s done” attitude with updates regarding the status of development is typically much more appreciated in the end over a set date or “when it’s done” with no communication.
This way your stakeholders are informed development is chugging along just fine and can see the progress being made, but your studio isn’t hellbent on releasing for a specific target date and needs to scrap features or produce lower-quality content. It also lets you get player input on the design ideology of things early on, allowing you to iterate a tad before any kind of release blunders like with what we saw with Hero Points/elite specialization gating. Coming out and giving said numbers early or the process early would likely have changed that substantially in your favor regarding sales and reputation on HoT’s release.

Razi.6031:

You make some valid points. The only thing I would say, is just that it is laughable to suggest that thieves stealth camp. If a thief is staying in stealth he is equally doing nothing to improve the situation. That was the beef I had with your comment and nothing else.

Are you familiar with the condi “ghost” thief build?

I do main the thief, yes. But I also play primarily WvW, where every class runs stealth if it can. Even DH’s run trapper runes fairly often. Further, the thief not being visible for +1’s in sPvP and carrying as much initiative as possible in a fight is a big boon for the thief and the encounter he’s +1’ing. You seem to neglect that before Daredevil, SA was still taken for the +1 meta build/role; DD, like everything else done poorly in HoT, is power creep which I strictly disagree with.

I again was mostly against this change on principle that it effectively duplicates a grandmaster SA trait in a minor trait in the most-selected/highest-dependency traitline the thief has. All this does is further devalue the SA line and put further emphasis on Trickery, which is something people already think is considered as something which can’t be given up. In essence, it reduces diversity even further by pigeon-holing power into a specific build. This is something we should be trying to avoid at all costs.

As for the “revealed meta” – it’s more along just over-use of the mechanic on popular/already strong builds and skills rather than deliberate player choice to take such abilities with rising access to stealth on more classes (How many rangers ran Sic ‘Em during the period when SA gave might? None. Because it wasn’t worth taking the skill.) – it’s why I created the suggestion for the Deadeye (link in my signature) as a means to shut down the mechanics which shut down the thief, making the class have more leeway in terms of how it plays both in and out of stealth.

Your suggestion is trying to answer power with more power rather than simply suggesting the initial overpowered mechanic is overpowered, and/or a way to more creatively counter it while keeping the dependencies of the build low or encounters more dynamic.

And for that, I disagree with it in its entirety, which is all I said to begin with.

D/D as a set struggles against mesmers running popular PU (Chaos + Illusions) due to the plethora of ways to mitigate/prevent CnD without the thief burning massive amounts of initiative, critical utilities, or standing around waiting while getting pounded on.

It’s a lot easier on D/P where one effectively has the counters necessary to kill the mesmer; ranged damage/engage to avoid their blind on evasion/The Pledge blind (SS), channel interruption (Headshot), and on-demand sustained stealth at range to bait and negate skills like shatters.

Also, condi reaper is just straight up OP. Power is fine. Condi though is in no way a remotely balanced build against anything but thief due to Daredevil/Dash.

Why bother making such discussions if they’re intended to be so ridiculous they’re not feasible? Just bumps legitimate suggestion threads down further on the page.

Health and stat reduction ratios could in no way be feasibly balanced at 1:1. Way too overpowered, and even drastically-reduced ones would need a lot of math done per class to justify such cuts; not to mention the change affects power builds more than say, condition ones.

It’d also be useless in PvP and PvE and would have pretty impractical uses in WvW since in these formats you’re almost always that close to another enemy, so justifying its use without it being blatantly overpowered on a per-situation basis would be immensely difficult.

The prospect of marking a target is a good idea, and is something a guildmember of mine (inspired by my Deadeye idea) is working out his own concept of involving a similar system.

Razi.6031:

DeceiverX.8361:

Razi.6031:

A simple solution that might not be too OP. Add another buff to the Preparedness trait;

Initiative recharges 20% faster.

Since almost (I’m guessing a lot of ) thieves take Trickery primarily for that trait, it wouldn’t be a bad idea or too OP to add something like that to the trait line.

This promotes camping stealth and effectively replaces Rejuv, so I’m going to have to disagree with it entirely.

So It’s ok for scrappers to stealth camp to oblivion but God forbid I stealth camp for 3 seconds to set things up or buy time for lets say a cooldown on my heal.

Thieves don’t stealth camp anymore… that was good when we got might in stealth from SA.

And by this logic you think it’s okay for the thief to do the same.

I disagree with it on principle and firmly believe scrappers and most other classes need drastically cut access to stealth, and thieves’ access should also be made no longer permanent.

Because I’d rather see proper mechanics development on all classes than ones which promote passive and repetitive styles of play due to an overwhelming surge of power creep.

EBG is fine. All BL’s on all tiers, however, are dead.

Not uncommon for five people to take fully upgraded garri in T2.

First make sure the screen brightness mirrors that of your environment. Too many people play in the dark and that’s really strenuous on your eyes.

If you’re experiencing pain and stress from playing the game, however, you should simply stop playing the game when you experience these phenomena. Simply, there’s no way to get as much profit and not play as much. But RL matters more, and if you’re not enjoying yourself, you shouldn’t be bothering.

Games are for fun, and the only real reason to play them should be for fun.

Razi.6031:

A simple solution that might not be too OP. Add another buff to the Preparedness trait;

Initiative recharges 20% faster.

Since almost (I’m guessing a lot of ) thieves take Trickery primarily for that trait, it wouldn’t be a bad idea or too OP to add something like that to the trait line.

This promotes camping stealth and effectively replaces Rejuv, so I’m going to have to disagree with it entirely.

Jana.6831:

Romu.1352:

nice, you have salt, i will bring lemons, now we only need tequila!

I usually roam alone, flipping camps and dollys. When i am drunk then i usually play in zerg.

As i told, i feel comfy, it does not mean i kill everyone : D
It means i have some mistake rooms with my high HP, toughness and evade skills and same time nice condi damage.

So yeah, for myself, my personal opinion is that thief is fine.

Do you meet any players along the way, or do you base your “thief is fine” experience on PvE in WvW/EotM?

I play signets and have no problems killing other players in WvW except for the passive CC abilities most classes have now. Most invulns can be baited. Given a second stunbreak most encounters wouldn’t be too bad. And typically my losses stem from me making a mistake or the opponent simply just being trickier and catching me.

Thief just sucks in sPvP because it’s a scaling-based class but the stats are too low in sPvP in order for the scaling to be meaningful. Sad truth is it will never be a good class in the format without being OP elsewhere unless stats are changed to let the class scale as it needs to.

Remove all the passive CC effects from other classes and the whole class becomes much more solidified.

Loboling.5293:

Definitely no to headshot buff. A change to assassin signet could make the full signet burst build even more silly. (kind of weak right now though) So maybe a buff would work there, but I’d be worried about complaints from all the guardians and mesmer getting blown up in wvw. Not sure I like unblockable effects on thief to be honest. (outside traps)

I really think thief needs an overhaul of many of it’s less used skills. However, taking the meta and making it stronger should only happen once they nerf necro, rev, guard, engie, and bug fix (ele). Once these classes are brought back to earth, I doubt any of the thieves meta skills will need changes, and the focus should be on helping things like Tripwire, ambush trap, signet of shadows, ice drake venom, shadow trap, etc. So many skills just never get used, and it would be really great to find a place for them.

Edit: I wanted to add, I thought of a skill I would like unblockable on: cloak and dagger. Or decrease it’s initiative cost.

+1

Some classes in WvW have more viable builds than the entirety of the viable builds in sPvP. Every class is also good in WvW and almost every build can be made good.

The exotic/ascended gap is overstated. I beat ascended players on my exotic-equipped alts all the time using strictly “sub-par” builds. Think it’s a problem? Play better. Ascended gear will NOT carry you in WvW. Food is augmentation or covers weakness. Pick one. It helps blur lines between stat selections and gives a finer amount of granularity in build-making. Just because someone runs X food doesn’t mean you should, and one can play using second-tier food like Hardened stones for a drastically reduced cost with performance losses suffering only the fractions of percentages.

Marauder isn’t even close to valk/zerk considering it operates at just a bit over half the ferocity and lower power, causing it to scale much worse on itself. Both valkyrie and berserker sets offer superior DPH by a substantial margin. Marauder isn’t exclusive to sPvP, either. Some people prefer that extra ferocity and/or health at the expense of precision.

Big numbers tweaks to Predator’s Invigoration (heal) and a small bump to Black Bolt’s damage coefficient due to early mathematical error on my behalf. Damage was slightly too low.

I doubt Colin had much to do with it. He directed the entire game. All of the content, the planning for the future, and the management of how the teams function, etc. was his decision-making. Class design and implementation details were probably something he didn’t do much with aside from approving them or maybe giving some feedback.

Jana.6831:

I never bothered with the stealth uptime – I’m saying it since I crashed this forum: I don’t have time to wait for my stealth to run out. But then again; I’m no D/P thief.

Thanks for the maths, but now I’m puzzled why pvp has got that much different stats than the rest of the game apperantly.
So yes; those who know what they’re doing probably have the best build with this in pvp, but it’s still pretty useless in wvw, especially when alone – even though that ogres were technically the allies of this unfortunate thief who beat me to ~half life before he appeared.

Precisely. And frankly, it is this reason why I believe WvW is more balanced. Stats and scaling are actually borked in sPvP considering the act of building for critting is counter-productive in most cases when looking at stat efficiency. The extremely low stats and non-nerfed boons are what contribute to a boon-heavy meta and why celestial stats/defensive builds were so strong; offensive styles are punished more than they should be.

Why they just don’t boost sPvP stats to PvE levels is something I don’t understand. Then they’d be able to more effectively balance and normalize all three formats, and diversity would skyrocket as a consequence as it is in WvW.

Asrat.2645:

DeceiverX.8361:

The poison is really weird, though. It seemed to be in sync with vuln gains from Deadly Trapper, but there’s no way to apply poison that quickly from traps.

I believe I can explain that. Look at how constantly the posion and chill is reapplied. I think, that thief might have been using reaper of kittening grenth.

Completely forgot about that. Yup, that’ll do it.

It isn’t fun. It’s also why people have been suggesting to remove trapper runes from the game, as the ranger (and now even DH) does the same thing pretty much.

The poison is really weird, though. It seemed to be in sync with vuln gains from Deadly Trapper, but there’s no way to apply poison that quickly from traps.

The less of it the better imho.

The big issue the thief has is that once it loses stealth, the class as a whole performs very poorly, and since stealth is tied to initiative, once the thief loses initiative (and stealth) it just does even worse.

I’d rather see other classes’ access to stealth nerfed than ours buffed, and then give the thief a proper way a play without depending on stealth (see Deadeye ES suggestion).

Asking for more power and power in stealth/access to stealth will not solve the problems with the class or the issues surrounding stealth.

Jana.6831:

DeceiverX.8361:

DA offers better burst than CS since mug and shadow shot combined are a backstab. No need for CS reliability, either, as Marauder is the only viable amulet choice. Tr is necessary for more shadow shots and damage with Lead Attacks, fury, disruption, and boon removal, and DrD takes on defenses such as condi cleanses, more evades, etc. Overall it’s the most functional build the thief has, especially with buffed AA.

That said, I’d argue WvW is more balanced than sPvP because more builds are viable and because offensive stats are so much more deadly/higher, letting CS scale like it needs to on order to do well.

Ok, so the damage in pvp is lower, that much I know, but you can’t always wait until someone is at 50% and be eaten by cleave in the meantime. I doubt that SS plays that much of a part in thief’ pvp gameplay (Sinderer uses it, yes, but he is better than most he really has a “perfect” timing) – so in the end it’s a build that 1% of all players know to use while the rest succumbs to AOE. And it’s completely useless while solo roaming (I wish at least that information would be somewhere on metabuilds).
And you know it, deceiver, I’m a noob, break down how exactly the damage of Mug and SS equals a backstab (with CS).

And yeah, I can’t argue about CS being better in wvw – but that was kind of my point: people are running this build everywhere cause they don’t know its purpose.

ETA: And for those who haven’t realized it yet: I made the long turn back to topic.

You’ll cap at around a 6k backstab in most PvP games if you run both DA and CS, so without either, it’ll usually hover around 5k. It’s not that damage is lower, it’s just SO much lower than in WvW because of how low power and critical damage values are. There is so much less ferocity in sPvP that critting frankly doesn’t mean that much, especially since most players require the use of Marauder (lower power and ferocity) over berserker.

DA, on Mug/SS: (1.5 + (1.31 (SS) * 1.8733)) * 1.1 (EW) * 1.2 (Exec) * 1.11 (Lead Attacks) = 5.7934

CS, on FS/PT/NQ: (2.4 * 2.1853) * 1.07 (FS) * 1.07 (Lead Attacks) = 6.004

So yea, CS on a backstab wins, but by a margin of a whipping 4%. In essence, Mug/SS in sPvP is effectively a backstab.
Further, the damage reliability favors DA since its non-crit damage is guaranteed to be higher (2.81 coefficient) in the event backstab doesn’t crit. If HK is taken in CS, it loses the damage challenge as well.

In WvW, where ferocity and power stats are much higher, the act of critting causes mug to be overshadowed quickly, making CS the clear victor for damage output. But this ONLY starts occurring when ferocity gains increased potency and power values are also higher.

Before the MH dagger AA buffs, Shadow Shot used to be the optimal damage output for the thief due to its low casting time and high coefficient. It was strictly better than even bothering with backstab, and had tons of extra utility. It’s barely even a timing thing, either, just because it’s so cheap and is so fast. D/P (and the thief as a whole) is carried almost exclusively by Shadow Shot’s effectiveness. The stealth uptime honestly means more in WvW where SA and extended stealth is considered more useful.

DA offers better burst than CS since mug and shadow shot combined are a backstab. No need for CS reliability, either, as Marauder is the only viable amulet choice. Tr is necessary for more shadow shots and damage with Lead Attacks, fury, disruption, and boon removal, and DrD takes on defenses such as condi cleanses, more evades, etc. Overall it’s the most functional build the thief has, especially with buffed AA.

That said, I’d argue WvW is more balanced than sPvP because more builds are viable and because offensive stats are so much more deadly/higher, letting CS scale like it needs to on order to do well.

Reddit thread up. Tell your friends!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4az6s7/inspire_the_devs_full_thief_es_suggestion/

Asrat.2645:

-Your changelog says you decreased weaponrange to 900 on some skills, the document itself doesnt reflect that. I wouldnt really like it either.
-In general range is missing for tracer
-I would recommend you to also put subsequent, longer posts into spoilers, like I did with my first one. We have enough wall of text in here.

• Says to 1200 from 900.
• Just updated the skill, not even changelog-worthy :P
• Will look into it. Admittedly that’s pretty much discussion and I’d rather leave it kind of normal so people don’t feel like they need to click a button to read anything and everything in the thread.

Jana.6831:

Ok, good to know, no these 4 condis aren’t cleared anymore and yeah that hampers with thief mechanics massively “Woohoo a 2k backstab ‘cause I can’t get fumble off and the duration is ~a felt minute – great, I don’t have other stuff to worry about”.
ETA: I will try confusion again when I can, but I’m 99,9% certain that torment isn’t removed. Would be great if someone else could test it in wvw or pvp and wvw – need to find a friendly enemy to do some test runs and that might take a while or won’t happen.

I did use dash, but as a D/D power thief I don’t really evade attacks – I really would have to relearn thief and completely change my playstyle to make DrD work on D/D – or any other line besides SA. SA and DrD would be solid to get rid of conditions, but then I would lack damage and also the reduced cooldown on my heal, on my beloved elite and on steal and the only interrupt I have.
Still, I think some kind of reversed SE (per pulse) would be nice to have in another traitline.

Maybe D/D is just outdated and really needs utility on the weaponset – either way all the evade reliant traits still wouldn’t work with (power) D/D. – Even if I do use death blossom, which I do, it’s maybe once or twice per fight. Condis are applied a lot faster than I would be able to get them off. And since I’m that close to my opponent I often dodge rather randomly, so a lot of my dodge evades would “miss”.

Yea, I’d check up on that. I know HiS doesn’t cure those conditions, but it never did and is something I’ve also advocated for, since HiS was developed to just remove DoT’s, which confusion initially wasn’t, and torment was not released until a year after the game was.

As far as learning a new style of play, even those three dodges would be sufficient cleansing for the most part. You could reap the benefits during stealth by dodging an AoE and cleansing by SE, while doubling healing from SR and DF. Also consider a sigil of Stamina for blobbing; refilling endurance on kill + EA would make you really hard to keep conditions on in a larger fight. I run it on my zerg characters and let me say it’s fantastic (dodge-spamming reaper is really funny to watch disengage with perpetual rolls :P). You’d only be missing around 5% damage or so with DD over Trickery since Havoc Mastery could cancel out most of Lead Attacks. You’d only have two total evade-reliant traits, and more resources to keep evading (50 endurance on steal) while replacing effects from other lines. D/D is dated, but nobody can agree on how to fix it.

But I think conversation on your habits and build styles regarding SA and D/D and disputes over Daredevil use to solve your problems may be going on a little bit long for this topic. I’d like to keep on topic regarding the elite spec here, and we can discuss the rest in another thread.

Asrat.2645:

Yeah. Ok. my table looks much better now. Im gonna attach it again and then delete some of my previous posts in order to clean up. The calculation I did for the burst build was plain wrong.
Reference table(wip)

I need confirmation about noxiuos fumes. Right now it looks like 6 stacks of each 2 seconds are applied a total of 2 times. (1 original, 1pulse).
This would even up in a quick 5k/6s poison damage. Given the way the skill works, it is not completely broken, but its strong enough to ask, if its intended.

Coefficient data looks much more accurate (although it’s 3:30 AM for me and I barely looked at it at this point), though your dagger MH builds should be tied for both or favoring dagger due to the dagger’s higher weapon damage.

You’re correct. The pulses are 2s apart with 2s poison durations and 1s blind durations, and the combo field lasts three seconds, so only two pulses occur. This is intended to give condi DE some pretty rapid AOE poison burst stacking, but at the cost that it simply can’t be maintained for an extended period. My concerns lie of a DE using it three times consecutively, however, applying extensive poison. I may need to cut the poison stacks or put a cast time on the ability to prevent lots of overlapping spam.

Jana.6831:

That was just the explanation why I’m even running SA although I think the traitline is a mess. And actually I also think that SE is a mess – when I’m hit by condis it’s often 5+ and not all of them are intended to be cleared, that’s mostly 2 or 3 of the 5. An additional one I can get off by using withdraw which works every 15 seconds, so I’m stuck with at least one (ETA: Depending on the condis I’m stuck with removes trickster one condition when I use withdraw – If I’m hit with immobilize and whatever condis withdraw removes as well, it’s them and an addional one – but the chances that I can get the conditions not cleared by SE anymore off are really low).
The most annoying condis right now aren’t removed by SE: Confusion, Torment, Fumble and Fear. Your revealed would help with that but it can only be seen as an additional help, the condi cleanse for thief would still be too little. = Thus I don’t run DrD.
The problem again is that I’m a roamer and zergling – and don’t want to run away from anyone.
It’s not really the fault of your suggested traitline, it’s the fault of the botched SA line and also of how “condis work” – so maybe yes, all condi clears thief has got should be buffed, even your’s to “per pulse” probably.
I can’t compete against a condi build with CS, T, DrD, with CS, SA, T I can.

That’s a bug if SE doesn’t remove confused or torment; it’s supposed to and says it does in the tooltip. I haven’t used the trait in ages, so I can’t say I know if this is true. I do hope that gets fixed if it’s still bugged/is bugged, and it’d probably help fix the line massively.

CS/SA/DrD should have better condition cleansing than CS/SA/Tr, however. Unhindered + EA has allowed the thief to pretty much be able to ditch SA as a whole for its cleansing needs since it gets one cleanse per second via evades this way, which is better at burst-removal than SE. Thankfully Daredevil doesn’t need to be considered stacking with the Deadeye, as only one ES can/will be used at a time. Otherwise I’d likely have to nerf DE’s cleansing options.

Just trying to gather insight and make the traitline as universally useful as possible without replacing any others.

I don’t recall any of these coefficients changing, however. Typically wiki info is relatively correct. I find it best to often test things using backstab as a basis as I absolutely know the skill coefficient is 2.4 and have repeatedly tested it and confirmed it is still 2.4 using the official damage formula. This will crit around 7k on the medium golem using HK instead of NQ, so with NQ the results would push roughly 7.7k (as the gains from NQ are additive to ferocity gains from gear, since ferocity is calculated out all at once). The 0.6 damage coefficient adequately reflects what would be about a 2k damage AA chain on the rifle.

The 3.0 coefficient is out-dated and I made a mental math mistake. The 0.35 coefficient per stack over eight stacks applied by Stygian Assault will result in a total of 2.8 assuming all eight hits land. Between Stygian Assault and Ink Splatter, the total damage will be 3.6, which is roughly 11% more than unload.

As far as the synergy with reliability on interrupts, sigil of impact, etc., all intended ^^

I’ll be updating the OP significantly in the near future right now, cutting down unnecessary aspects of the post and streamlining a lot of the text in the document in preparation for its move to these forums, while making it a bit more readable.

Jana, recall the purpose of the Deadeye is to create new means of playing or adjust for similarities in existing styles. Since it’s not power creep, unfortunately I can’t simply make it be able to replace SA/Tr entirely. However, do recall that the cleanse-on-reveal mirrors that of the old SE (just inverted) and that it will operate on the same amount of conditions cleansed per unit of time, that initiative regeneration through Stygian Charge and Ceaseless Aggression displace the effective need for the initiative component of Shadow Rejuv (albeit through playstyle adjustments and/or small trait/utility skill investments), and the Concussive Rounds rifle abilities would enable a quick engage during the daze projectile period as a replacement (again albeit slightly worse) than SoH. Sacrifices always need to be made to achieve something, and it’s a matter of picking tools that are fun to use and get the job done just well enough to call it successful.

Thanks for the feedback/build Asrat! Spoiler text might just be too big is why it won’t work.

The unblockable attack on Stakeout is definitely excessive with it offering permanent stealth and casting fear and likely daze. I think removing that alone will help considerably. I’m also going to increase the initiative cost to 6 such that it won’t maintain net positive initiative in permanent stealth (This was too punishing for the skill methinks), and I will be adjusting the fear duration on target to 1s as well as making the PBAoE radius to be much smaller.

Either all of my coefficient data is wrong, or yours is. The rifle AA damage coefficient (0.6) is about 20% more than the pistol’s (0.5) based on my coefficient data. Brief testing in sPvP has me critting 1.6k damage AA’s using DA/CS/Tr with Assassin’s Signet (so 15% more damage via lead Attacks) using identical gear and with the Marauder’s amulet. The rifle should be achieving roughly about a 2200 damage crit at a 1s interval when vuln isn’t applied with such a build, making the lowly pistol AA DPS substantially better even against optimal rifle DPS. Quickness access is really what makes the weapon deal steady damage comparable to the pistol, with the interrupts and sustained pressure/presence intended to give the set enough longevity.

I’d check your coefficients. Your numbers in your spreadsheets are massively different from what the wiki has and what my own testing has resulted in (as I did checks to make sure the wiki numbers were correct or closely resembled some paper-math I did), and the calculated damage output is using a formula I’m not really sure is consistent with the game’s.

I also made a really stupid mental math mistake or typo or something which led the total coefficient on Stygian Assault to be higher than intended. I may move around some coefficients on Stygian Assault/Ink Splatter, and I might also even buff Stygian Assault’s per-hit damage (not Ink Splatter), although WvW balancing has me believing otherwise in that the skill combination might be a bit too deadly. While I wanted the skill to have a fairly easy-to-dodge mechanic which would cause the burst to be negated via dodging the first component, it may combo too nicely with BV and may have too much damage frontloaded on Ink Splatter, as it’s effectively 1.17 backstabs, although one whiff of a single bolt and it does less damage than Unload automatically.

The AA pressure in SHF shouldn’t be 3k in sPvP, so the sustained damage shouldn’t be as potent, either. The ranger’s Long Range Shot coefficient at its most significant penalty is 0.70, and I also went into sPvP using a near-identical setup on a ranger to confirm the damage output: It was critting a steady 2k on the light golem and 1.7k on the heavy with 6 stacks of might to compensate for Revealed Training use. Missing around 7% damage from a lack of No Quarter (Exposed Weakness and Flawless Strikes offset by Steady Focus and Ranger/pet Opening Strikes), the SHF AA damage per crit should only be hovering around 2.4k as intended without Wicked Abandon, which is very similar to the ranger’s LB auto at maximum range under the same test circumstances.

I’d take a look into your skill coefficients you’re using and make sure you’re on-par with the damage formula by estimating what your thief damage should be and then going testing things out. That might help clarify some potential confusion and make sure we’re on the same page regarding what might be OP :P

Hey, I’ve lost a few people on my walls before. I know well I tend to ramble. :P

Hook Strike’s damage coefficient is listed as 0.65 per the wiki. Smack’s is 0.6, so either the wiki lies or you recall the coefficient is lower than it is.

Yea, I wasn’t really thinking of Alacrity as lore-significant. I don’t follow the GW2 lore much at all (I’m almost always found in WvW and admittedly skipped most of the cut-scenes in HoT for the one character I played the story on), so I was using it purely as a concept. I’ll have to do some reading up on that to see just how tied to the mesmer it really is. This is why I want feedback ^^

Interesting idea on PI. I’ll run some tests later when I do out the ability mapping again as I mentioned. The accumulated stacks stay until the end of the skill’s effect (as of now). I’ll see if I can reword it to clarify that.

Take your time. As of now I mostly just need to generate lots of attention. The more people take this suggestion seriously, the more legitimate the proposal is and the more likely a dev is to actually take a look. I mean not to brag, but I have put forth a lot of effort to complete this idea, and I think it’s good enough to at least deserve a look-over by one or two of the devs. We’ll see if the rest of the thief community agrees.

Asrat.2645:

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Thief sniper qould be more likely to use the rifle.
But es enthising as the idea is, when you actually try to develop a specialization concept basd on the ‘sniper’ idea you wont come up with anything cool.
I’ve been thinking in that direction for a while and: it would simply be impossible to maintain the classes’ feeling with a long ranged weapon. It would therefore be very difficult to implement the new traits and skills to fit the existing ones.
With thief having an infinite access to gap openers if they want to, anything that allows them to attack from a safe distance is also extremely dangerous and potentially op.
Last but not least there is the initiative system.
Lets just imagine a hard hitting, sniper rifle burst skill: it would be spammable.
Now lets imagine a sniper rifle without a hard-hitting burst skill: Its not a sniper rfile anymore, is it?
I also find the idea of rangers fantasizing about a sniper longbow extremely amusing.
Ya know: a couple of pot smoking ranger hippies under a tree, and then one of them says:
‘Guys…we should get like…a bow…with ranged attacks’
‘brief moment of silence’
‘Yeah’
‘Totally’
‘Sure could use that’

Have just seen the deadeye thread for the first time. Appearently it is possible and therefore disproves my entire point. Havent had the time to look into everything in detail yet, but it seems to be good, really good actually.

:D

Seriously I do recommend thief players who really care about the profession to check my thread out. It is a lot to read, but it’s completely comprehensive, with skill coefficients and everything. The more eyes refining and discussing the idea, the better.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Suggestion-WIP-The-Deadeye-ES-Suggestion/first#post6046130

Asrat.2645:

There are a few things I noticed:
Relentless hunter.
-Alacrity should stay mesmer specific, i would recommend a static cd reduction
-No icd. totally devastating considering you can use the skill every 5 seconds but the boons last 10 seconds, fury is already a heavily used boon, giving us a 100% uptime with one trait is relatively powerful.
Expunge
-Might aswell apply resistance. Enables counterplay. But go with 2 or threee pulses of resistance so a single necro boon corrupt on this ability wont win the game automatically.
-Also I think you can slightly lower the cooldown, compared with existing pure condi cleanses, its rather high.
Predators invigoration
-maybe a small initial heal, as most abilities of that type have
-alternatively you could add some endurance, since you already called it ‘invigoration’
Ceaseless aggression
-better version of rfi, but thtas fine since rfi isnt exactly in the spot where it should be.
Massacre mastery
-A skill only to synergize with your main heal only for pve? I doubt many people would use that, but cant say I have a good alternative at hand.
Smack
-pls compare to Hook strike

I really like your concept by the way. There are some skills that are just plain ‘cool’
But even more important. A lot of times while reading, I was like: that could be op, and X in combination with Y could be op. Or first I could use A as a setup for B, going into…
But everytime I ended up admitting, that you already considered the option and negated it. The way your mechanics flow into each other, it is relatively hard to exploit any of them.

I’m going to address everything here so prepare for a wall. I will say thank you (and thank you Jana, you’re below) for the feedback right now before you potentially lose interest if you don’t reach the end :P

Small/short bursts of self-alacrity was something I was hoping to give the Deadeye as a means to reduce the cooldown of longer stances and a way to offset steal cooldown reduction effects from Trickery in order to reward the class increasingly for staying in combat through repeated re-applications of revealed and swapping in and out of SHF. I saw that the peak uptime given no use of Improvisation would be around 40%, with improvisation pushing the value alternating a bit between 40% and 66%, yielding a total cooldown reduction between 16.7% and 22.2%, allowing a DA/DE build to cover around half to two thirds of Trickery’s purpose when playing around utilizing the Alacrity from the trait in its fullest, thus pushing the likely cooldown on Charge to roughly 20s – almost identical to that of steal on a Trickery build. Further, this also explains why a few of the Stances’ cooldowns feel like they might be a little high; a build has the capacity to reduce stance cooldowns and all existing utilities by around 30% when combined with traits affecting these cooldowns. This also explains the fury/swiftness coverage as a replacement for ToTC and the initiative mechanic love the trait line brings; I hoped to be able to bump any given trait line, including Trickery, out of being required, something which Daredevil ultimately fails at doing.

I completely agree that long-duration/AoE alacrity is something which should be mesmer-specific. That said, the thief doesn’t get that much with the mechanic as it does not affect initiative restoration, and the mechanic helps push the thief’s utilities into more rapid use potential without just power-creeping cooldowns to be increasingly lower. Because alacrity doesn’t affect their weapon skills or initiative regeneration, I can’t see any reason why any mesmers would be woed by this implementation. I may tone down the alacrity duration to 1.5s from 2s, but I feel like removing the effect altogether could break a lot of desired synergy, and nerfing it to 1s would be overly-substantial. Let me know how you feel about this.

I did reduce the durations of fury and swiftness gained while entering SHF from 10s to 5s. You’re absolutely right that the 15s durations there were way too much, and stacking Trickery with ToTC and the durations from Relentless Hunter seemed excessive. The permanent fury is an intended behavior as a means of also reducing dependencies on No Quarter for the uptime, allowing IP to be selected for CS builds instead, but requires much more active play. Further, the real gains of NQ (16.7% critical damage) are lost as a tradeoff. Critting is a big part of the thief, and permanent mobility was something the class features in a variety of ways, and was originally supposed to be strictly better at than the rest of the classes (at release, the thief was the only class in the game which featured a passive means of gaining 25% mobility/permanent movement speed increases via Signet of Shadows). The duration adjustment here (5s + 5s) will prevent the Deadeye from having permanent fury/swiftness inherently and prevent it from being inherently better than ToTC or FS in Trickery, but can maintain both boons permanently via combinations with other traitlines. It’s a powerful trait, but it doesn’t quite stack up to the gains from the rest now. The costs to take it are also relatively big, as the competing traits here are rifle range and big sustain for acrobatics-type builds. It’s definitely not one-trait-fits all, but I hope to make each trait feel powerful but not necessarily overpowered in the context of others as well as the greater scheme of the thief and overall balance in general.
Thanks for the input so I could get this fix for RH through.

The decision over Resistance/Buff on Expunge is one I’ve been constantly debating and re-examining. On the one hand, I want its cooldown to be lengthy; the Deadeye has some solid condition removal options available between Skirmish and core thief abilities, and I want to finally give the thief a real, reliable tool to deal with condi bomb other than Shadowstep, which often gets used as a stunbreak. The recent push for boon theft, stripping, and corruption bumps across the board has me worried that a few stacks of resistance might not be enough, especially in group environments, where the spec is supposed to be much better at. I’m not really sure what a fair number is for Resistance in this case, as too many stacks will make the effect the same, but too few makes the utility not necessarily strong enough. It’s effectively a miniature, DoT-only Berserker Stance at the moment, and while I’m not fond of the kind of blatant copying of warrior skills, its shorter duration and control-susceptibility make me want to think it’s fair as-is. I’ll keep giving it more thought, and please let me know if you come up with any ideas to improve upon this idea better. The skill needs to be condi-bomb rejection effectively once, maybe twice, per encounter, and that’s really about it. All of the built-in cooldown reduction if traited and used well could lower this to about 30 seconds, which I think is quite powerful for the effect, so I don’t think there’s much of a need for that. Thieves still need weakness to conditions. They just need an answer somewhere to massive DoT bombs.

Predator’s Invigoration has been the single most challenging ability to balance I’ve toyed with on this project. I’ve buffed, nerfed, re-buffed, re-nerfed, and nerfed (again) this ability so many times that if I were to keep track of each instance of change made to this ability, I’m pretty sure I’d be on version 10 by now :P
I initially gave it a self-heal, but realized that it’d simply just become a better version of Signet of Malice at that point. I want to keep the skill quite risk-intensive, similar to Litany of Wrath, which only has a 1.6k base heal on it. Since we offer so much more damage potential, have Invig Precision giving another 15% crit damage as healing, and this is a group heal, I’m not certain I can justify simply making its self-sustain better. What I’m thinking about doing is buffing the healing applied to allies to be more substantial while scaling with Healing Power, giving a small percentage of healing power as percentage converted as outgoing healing. This gives the heal more of a purpose in the support-niche it’s supposed to cover while making its use require solid timing but have a big payoff if done correctly. I’d like to give this heal a lot of potential, but also a lot of potential to be screwed up massively. Let me know how you feel about improved outgoing healing towards allies as a compromise. There’s a bunch of endurance regeneration in traits already, and I don’t want to overstep the bounds of the trait line as to make it be able to replace Acrobatics, particularly since Withdraw is the heal Acro-built thief should likely be pushing for.

Ceaseless Aggression is a compromise on RFI. I think RFI’s cooldown should just be shifted baseline to kitten , but that’s besides the point. It’s not about getting bulk initiative right now, but about doubling up over a period of time. The net gains per cooldown are higher, which is intended, as CA will not allow a player to simply gain an additional and immediate use of Noxious Fumes or any critical high-initiative ability. Much like all of the stances, it’s intended to have its optimal use be when the player predicts or forces an future scenario that will occur within the course of the next few seconds. If timed poorly, though, it’s effectively a wasted utility slot, and competes with a stunbreak, which is what I’m trying to push regarding making educated decisions on what to use and when.

Massacre Mastery admittedly might need some work. This is a big gain for a support-oriented thief since it’ll cause healing power stacking into levels of insanity, letting Predator’s Invigoration get some massive gains. I like the prospect of getting more support and sustain pressure through more kills, but you’re right in that the utility in itself feels a little bit lack-luster. I’ll re-map out some of what the class offers later today to see if there’s an unintended void it could possibly fill. Maybe something which extends the duration upon each kill in order to make it more sustainable in PvE and sPvP. There might need to be some tweaks made here. Again, please let me know if you come up with anything.

I just nerfed Smack after making some brief comparisons to Hook Strike. It now Dazes from the front and KD’s from the back, with a unified 2s duration. Despite offering slightly lower damage, it doesn’t deserve to be universally better at Knockdowns with the class in its current state. Plus it also makes more sense; hit someone from the front and they’ll be recoiling but not down, hit them hard from behind and they’ll be on the ground in most cases. I had it better initially as Impossible Escape did not exist upon early class creation, and the rifle also self-inflicted Reveal with the AA chain, so stealth would be much harder to get access to. Glad you caught this as well as it must have slipped by me with the dedicated work I was doing to traits and tuning coefficients recently.

Thanks again for the feedback and working with the spec. I’m glad you liked the theme, as it’s something I tried really hard to make sure fit the class, the game, and a bunch of what people wanted. The big thing I wanted was mechanical cohesion, so I’m glad that’s working out well so far. Ideally these changes should get people excited to see the new and awesome things they can do, but should be balanced enough to make people realize that while new and awesome, they won’t break the game.

Definitely open to suggestions and proposals for improvement so long as they’re trying to iron out some balance kinks or solidify the spec more as a whole without power-creeping.

@Jana

The core thief does need some cohesion love (especially in CS and SA regarding ability functionality and playstyle cohesion, respectively), and it’s been something I’ve been advocating for a while. It’s really hard to do in a balanced way without getting rid of someone’s favorite style of play or build, and I think ANet’s hands are tied right now. I have a feeling that we’re never going to see substantial core spec reworks, which while saddening, can be viewed positively in some respects such that new developments don’t need to be rebalanced/redesigned totally based on substantial changes made to the core ones, and thus the odds of breaking something with a change to the core specs decreases.

Try considering DE traits like 2/3 – 2 – 3 for your SA/CS/DE build while running Ceaseless Aggression, Shadowstep, and SR. I think you’d have enough initiative regeneration to compensate for the lack of Trickery, and you’d be less SoL while revealed after each backstab via increased toughness, control condition cleanse on reveal pairing with DoT removal on SE, an extra stunbreak if necessary, and even the amazing potential of recovering from being knocked out from SR or deciding to just leave it entirely and re-enter safely after AoE’s get burned on it from Impossible Escape. Work with it and I think you’ll realize you don’t need the rifle at all to make the line worth taking depending on your build.

Also, who doesn’t love some good ol’ CnD -> CA -> Backstab -> CnD (cure reveal) -> CnD (stealth) -> backstab right after the other, which only D/D could do due to its initiative cost and low casting time?

Yea, it was confirmed they started development for it recently. A potential 2016 release was mentioned, and is why I care so much as to try and get this idea off the shelf ASAP.

I’m not really following your statement about the existing traits not being included. Last I checked, the only trait with questionable use is Improvisation, which I touch upon in one of my blurbs as potentially having some use. It’s no game-changer, but it has some potential.

As far as your character goes and said references, seeing as I’ve never played on your server, the humor is over my head entirely.

Thing is, they’ve already confirmed the next expansion and that implies another set of elite specs. All we can do is try to promote balanced suggestions so that we don’t get anything more blatantly overpowered. The last thing I’d want to see is stealth GF war v2.

Edit: The balancing team clearly has some issues making sound design decisions that shake things up without introducing tons of power creep. Even if they might balance out the current iteration of specs, the next ones are coming, and are likely coming soon. I’d rather not wait until it’s too late to make proposals but plant seeds early. As I said, I doubt this idea will become the next ES. I just wish to inspire the devs with thinking a little more unconventionally to open up a wider spectrum of roles the classes can partake in without needing to just make straight-up improvements to the core ones.

I’m also trying to shape the “rifle pls” idea into one which is coherent and good for the class. I frankly would prefer other weapons entirely, but the community is heavily driving the rifle thing right now. All I can do is try and springboard off of that to gain momentum with a good idea rather than try to force a poor one. It’s the same reason I want people experimenting and breaking this suggestion if possible. Inspiring that conversation can lead the devs to know what not to do through this testing ground/thought experiment (if they pay attention to this at all).

As far as the “bad-cat” thing goes; I think the pun about the “kitten” filter went over your head :s

TRAITS

GENERAL BALANCE AND POLISH:

Whew. Finally over. Please let me know how you feel about the concept below. Also, to keep track of everything, I’ve broken down all the info into three documents:

This is a copy of the WIP document with EVERYTHING.

My design logic, principles, and neat interactions where I discuss the kit.

Changelog. Stay up to date with any adjustments I make or check what adjustments I’ve previously made.

WEAPON AND UTILITY SKILLS

No way. I regret purchasing it to begin with. My guild quit because we collectively couldn’t afford the benefits of a guild hall/get back the upgrades we used to have due to our fairly small size, WvW died with horrible maps/mechanics, my source of in-game gold disappeared with the nerf to dungeons, and the classes are so imbalanced and power-creeped I’m amazed we haven’t seen more balance hotfixes because it’s a complete joke right now. We won’t even talk about the amount of blatantly unfinished content that was supposed to come with the expansion that still isn’t available. It’s sad to see that they’re already working on another expansion and yet they haven’t even finished the first one due to missing features that were promised to come with it.

Frankly, I’d have returned HoT on day 1 if ANet wasn’t going to close my account entirely if I were to return it. I feel bad for anyone who wasted $100.00 on the deluxe package.

Except some boon removal only removes one stack of stability even now. Its behavior is very inconsistent, and frankly, a lot of skills that supply stability need to be buffed for the PvP formats due to the massive increase in CC made available with HoT.

It got nerfed because of boon removal and boon theft punishing it too much and CC being effectively useless otherwise.

A hybrid approach would be nice; stability should remain a stacking buff, but only should be removed via boon corruption or removal, one stack at a time. In doing so, stability stacks would need to be reduced on a majority of skills which supply it, the pulsing-application skills see an increased increment timer, durations made slightly shorter to enable better counterplay and prevent instances of “lol I’m immune to your build”, but see reduced cooldowns in turn as to prevent boon theft/strips from being too strong.

Ogre.3124:

OP, what is wrong with you? Clearly a necro well bomb with no organization required is good for getting rid of the pirate ship meta.

wait.

This actually promotes PS because even frontline tanks do not have enough stability to move through a field of the gates, let alone the traditional CC effects. If you get caught in one of these as melee, it’s effectively a free kill since you can’t stunbreak it, and as such, more frontline players are increasing dependence on a defensive/ranged weapon.

Removing the bounce and making it like static field would be a big step in the right direction. As it is, you can get trapped between the edges of two of them and get stuck in an infinite bounce-knockdown combo for as long as the duration is up, which if multiple DH’s use lb5, can be pretty much the entire duration of a fight.

Throw gunk is a fantastic finisher. It’s great for preventing downed state healing via its pulsing damage and poison application, and also frequently pops blind, enabling some safe stomps. It’s also fantastic for comboing condition play via either physical projectiles or whirling with D/D condi (despite the fact I hate the build with a passion). You can cast it with no target and have it land on your feet for no projectile reflection/prevention and get free chaos armor.

I’d argue it’s a really weak stolen item mid-fight because of projectile reflection on scrapper, but the gear proposal would be even more damaging/less useful for that exact reason.

Depends heavily on how you play P/P. Unload spam, you’re probably best off running shortbow or S/D for disengage potential and control. S/D sets up combos via IS/IR to allow for a cheap initiative disengage after getting in and firing off your burst, shortbow gives you better in-combat sustain and utility.

From most-important to least-important:

1.) Reversion from Desert(ed) BL’s to Alpine or identical design. An overwhelming majority of players straight up hate the maps and would rather just not play. The keeps are too large and too convoluted, over-emphasis on chokes leads to stagnant fights where nobody engages, map gimmicks such as zerg stealth, barricades, etc. inhibit fighting and slow down movement too much, especially for small groups. Keep and tower lords are overly-difficult for small groups to take, even if uncontested. The difficulty and slow speed of movement/accomplishment of frankly anything makes small group play and solo scouting play next to pointless.

2.) Previously-existing Guild upgrades reverted in cost and the new upgrades removed. The new WvW upgrades are absurd, ill-thought-out, and frankly, almost universally disliked. The extensive gating of significant buffs such as +5 supply (essential for small groups) and absurd gimmicks such as banners, airships, etc., have even further fractured small group play. A majority of small guild have disbanded or quit the game entirely with these changes. They need to be much more accessible as to promote more players getting involved in WvW with their own communities. Titanic blobs are fun, but small group play is necessary to PPT and prior to HoT contributed heavily to a server’s success. This empowered more players to enjoy the game mode at whatever speed they wanted to.

3.) More responsive matchmaking, and a smart, data-driven AI to look at ways to merge servers between weeks to invoke better matchups across all tiers using individual server data points contributing to the success of the server/color’s performance the past week. This way top-tier communities and those of similar play patterns stay together while server integrity is preserved, and low-tier and desolate servers can get some help to improve their coverage hours and overall bolster population between weeks. These also help mitigate server-stacking which typically damage the communities which get left behind.

4.) Better rewards across the board through reward tracks, reworked defense objectives, and more affordable superior siege. Reward tracks would allow for players defending structures to get nice rewards over time by completing defense events, while not just handing out loot. Defense participation should have more meaningful scaling, be it through refreshing siege, building siege, killing attackers, and repairing structures. Players contributing to fortifications and maintaining them should be rewarded substantially due to the nature of the job, but not simply get free stuff for AFK’ing in a tower. Reward tracks would allow for this to be done with each track featuring a different defensive goal achievement, and for offensive players, rewards tracks could be used to gain more siege and more consistent rewards for a lot of fighting/capturing success. Superior siege should be easier to acquire and be purchasable via BoH. Superior siege is used in all environments, and again, the bigger the group, the more affordable it becomes. Normal siege has its uses in supply-constrained scenarios, and deciding between which to build should be a strategic choice. Supply cost reductions on normal siege may also be worth investigating to promote its use.

5.) Autoloot. In large and small fights, there’s nothing more irritating than needing to either spam the loot key the entire fight, or simply take a gamble on winning the fight and then run over the battlefield to collect loot, or simply lose all of the spoils on a wipe.

A lot of guilds have shuffled around within T2 and have moved into and out of T2. The DB/TC fight going on now is one of the closest and most interesting I’ve seen in a very long time, particularly when running NA prime.

Friday at 5pm PST/8pm EST (the original time) is still preferable for NA for me. Fridays are still better even if necessary at 6/9, however the 7/10 hours are simply too late for EST players or even the few EU who stay up for an hour or two on those nights.

Even if it did, it’d still be < 1% gains which means in all likelihood like a < .4% increase in damage.

I.E. for every 1000 damage you do, you’d deal an additional… 4 more. On a 10k damage backstab, you’d deal 40 more damage.

While something to consider for the sake of bugfixing, it’s definitely not a substantial fix that would really mean anything.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Liston.9708:

T2 is closer in ppt and that keeps it relevant for some if not many. I know I know who cares about ppt – the casuals – fair weathers do.

Last week YB won by more than 110k and 130k. YB leads by 70k this week – meanwhile, t2 was 25k last week and 3k this week.

Our guild leader has mentioned these numbers the last few days, but I don’t even trust those numbers tbh. do they include npcs? Is higher kill count faster pvd door train flipping BLs back and forth?

On the other hand, would it really hurt to increase the matchup variance at this point? I don’t think so….

Closer, I don’t think so. FA is currently 100K behind TC and DB. That is not close. FA is the smallest of the T2 servers as far as population and lost a whole bunch of players due to the current state of WvW.

T1 is closer than T2 as there is more around the clock coverage. In T2, FA does not have any SEA coverage so DB and TC just come along and K-train everything.

TC lost its OCX coverage as well, and during EU prime it’s often running the Outnumbered buff.

FA’s NA presence is what basically died and what’s keeping it behind. An array of PPT hackers being banned last week (see reddit) had led to DB and TC to hold objectives longer than normal; T3 towers are no longer being flipped instantly by random people flying over walls, and subsequently no longer needing to put people in towers to defend them from people flying over walls has led more people into playing aggressively.

Massive negligence to WvW as a format by ANet is the real culprit, though. There’s no denying the decisions made with HoT have led the format and WvW participation as a whole to be substantially lower than before.

Expect to see the good stuff sold later on; this way, ANet can get money from people who jump the gun on sales on items that normally don’t sell and then again on new items or high-demand ones late into the month. If they sold high-demand items early, their later sales would likely take losses as the content would be less desirable and many would have already likely spent up to their normal or even expected budgets for the month.

I do not understand why so many people complain about the GS. I think the weapon works really well for what it brings. I think a lot of people over-use or try to put too much emphasis on using gravedigger. In my opinion, it’s the worst skill on the weapon.

GS5 works really well with practice. It’s a little finicky if enemies are on small/elevated platforms, but scorpion wire and spectral grasp make the skill feel very easy to land :P I’ll mention that it doesn’t need a target, either, and will fire off at max range/over terrain without one, so this can be used to increase reliability.

I’ve found myself preferring gravedigger use early on in a fight as the cooldown even without the reset is short, and you can move around while using it. Engaging someone with gravedigger either forces an early evade or gives you a massive advantage very early on. 5 -> 4 -> 3 -> shroud on the escaping target is also really useful, as the combo can prevent two separate escapes, blind twice, and deal substantial damage, all while preventing your target from having any chance of winning if fighting on top of GS4 due to the sustain it offers from persistent blind and whirl-finishing the field from Soul Spiral.

There doesn’t need to be a trinity to create balanced design. A substantial amount of “balance” is subjective as really what constitutes game balance is the result of a utility function applied to a certain perspective (build, strategy, etc.) applied to gameplay scenarios, and then doing analysis on the results. Since said function is going to be limited in scope, and the problem space of the potential scenarios infinite with a dynamic environment and non-deterministic potential behaviors, there’s no real way to truly balance these kinds of complex games – only rule-creating super-AI’s with tons of heuristic data could come close. Only numerical games with much simpler mechanics can be balanced in this regard. The notion of a trinity doesn’t make a game much easier or more appropriately, fairer to balance so much as it designates a fixed optimization scheme under which game design and balance simulation can be performed under, while also enforcing social aspects of the game under a common and easy-to-identify scheme for improving marketability based on early RPG frameworks which were able to be balanced around due to their lack of dynamism etc.; in essence, it’s simply an incorrect assumption to believe a “trinity” is necessary or even preferable, for then the argument can be extended to include such a statement that all dynamism and strategical differences within the game should be reduced to nothing until mathematical proof can verify all strategies are optimal. Approaching higher levels of design via psychology, and philosophy, extensions even inclusive of some mathematical models such as inductive proofs to verify balance integrity could be ruled out, and implicitly-popular design may skew data metrics used in simulation, or may need to rule-out balance in the name of what can only be coined as “fun factor”.

As far as the topic of thief balance is concerned, the issues stem mostly from an inherent problem with the sub-par utility of some weapon combinations compared to others (D/D vs D/P is the big one as they also have largely-similar styles of play) paired with skills with dis-proportionate initiative costs for their potency (Body Shot 4 initiative, Shadow Shot 4 initiative), fluctuating initiative values/forced Trickery trait choice inhibiting even remotely-justified skill-initiative balancing, which compounds the previous problems, and lastly, a lack of essential trait/utility effect overlap to enable a wider array of builds to being “usable” by creating false-options through definitive needs, such as Daredevil or Shadow Arts for effectively any and all condition cleansing.

Most of the innate concerns with the thief’s state of usefulness (and subsequently wildly-swinging usage and wildly-swinging public perceptions) are due to design decisions on the fundamental level with given traits and skills rather than numbers problems.