No, that is exactly what you mean when you say “the condi-build never have to sacrifice survivability to gain the level of damage they can put out” — meaning that, for the survivability, you think there is “too much damage.”
No, you’re jumping to a wrong conclusion.
Let me put it this way.
- Power-build – 1,000 DPS – sacrifices toughness and utility to counter the armor damage mitigation
- Condi-build – 1,000 DPS – tanky, no sacrifices
Not fully true. Condition builds (aside from a few outliers) will typically deal lower damage than their power counterparts and will offer corresponding durability increases, or in the cases of dealing similar or slightly better damage, will be done on builds like Sinister and Viper’s gear which offer no defensive stats.
That said, conditions should be balanced around being negated by toughness or should consequently never deal optimal damage, which I think the latter was the original intention, but people cried so ANet felt a need to oblige.
A more appropriate analogy is something (anecdotal/simplified for the sake of argument) like:
Berserker = 2000 outgoing DPS per defensive unit, 2000 incoming DPS per offensive unit (1 : 1)
Carrion = 1500 outgoing DPS per defensive unit, 1500 incoming DPS per offensive unit (1 : 1)
Dire = (1200 outgoing DPS per defensive unit, 800 incoming DPS per offensive unit (1.5 : 1)
Against “evened” builds/stat distributions (PvE monsters). Against glass, berserker does better by a small margin. Against tank-built players, conditions are superior by a large margin.
For this reason Dire gear isn’t/wasn’t included for sPvP; it’s objectively too strong for its outgoing vs incoming damage ratio compared to others. That’s more or less where the problems truly lie, and removal of Dire would resolve a lot of complaints and concerns for WvW to say the least.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
As a signet thief I’d rather not see it push stealth. We really don’t need more of it on the thief as it is, and it really won’t do anything for signet builds at all.
I don’t really have an idea for one, though. All I can think of would be to let its active strip a boon or two on the next attack or something.
How is being ranked fifth out of nine on DPS alone (perfect middle rank) “close to trash tier”? To me, that speaks there is no busted mechanic in PvE going on for them (despite the case for WvW).
And the statements about sPvP are just blatantly untrue.
In most cases condition builds deal relatively better damage per unit of defense when compared to power counterparts.
This is especially the case with dire gear, which has the best damage output : damage negation ratio of all sets in the game by quite a large margin.
Sorry, OP, but your issues do not stem from the mesmer class but from your build simply not being cohesive. Mind Wrack is unquestionably the best burst in the game still, with high-investment mesmers able to get each wrack to around 6-7k per clone against squishier targets.
Pick power or condi; building into both on your gear won’t work in WvW. You’ll find yourself exponentially weaker in power if you keep the rabid gear, and in order to make condi work for damage you need to go all-in due to how conditions scale and the way you’re applying them. You’re not really overcoming most armor thresholds now, and your conditions aren’t overcoming most cleanses + heals.
Mesmer does lack personal DPS, but it has unrivaled burst damage, especially for its durability, with only the thief being able to shell out extremely similar damage over the course of a very short time frame, but such class/build mix is unquestionably squishier by very large margins.
@baba: As far as deep diving on power goes, you do have to be fast. You shouldn’t be taking more than one tick between the CnD and stab, if anything, as wells will not be dropped if you engage first, seeing as they have a limited duration, and putting them up preemptively is a waste due to their cooldowns.
If you are wrecking thieves with a condi thief build, they suck. Thief condi application is far below several other classes that run in sPvP. If a thief cannot handle another thief condi, they have no prayer of handling the other heavier condi applicators.
The first decent power thief that runs Escapists should annihilate most condi based thief builds given equal skill levels.
For WvW, P/P perplex interruption is actually quite good. Most things were dire can just out-sustain a thief, anyways.
Hyper-aggressive deep-dive works on power D/D but you need to be fast to Shadow Return/Infil Return out as soon as you get the stab off. It’s a solid way to force an engage or force your enemies to panic before an engage, often blowing cooldowns and dropping unnecessary AoE’s, while sniping a commander or forcing his heal.
Most things really just need downward toning tbh, and frontstabs should be punishable as that’s the intent with the frequency of the burst. Look pre-HoT and backstab was pretty much at the top of the charts.
More damage isn’t the proper response to too much damage on everything else. We’re already at a point now where things are out of hand.
I can’t speak for elementalist because it’s far from my best profession and the removal of the celestial amulet has thrown a lot of the “best” builds completely out of whack. I thought D/D cele ele was incredibly boring since it was just rotation-based. Engaging, maybe to some, but not my cup of tea (also it was really OP). I really like quick decision-making.
Reaper’s fun but condi reaper is OP. Power GS is enjoyable and pretty balanced overall if you play DPS.
Most of the combat unfortunately has backpedaled pretty substantially. I don’t recommend trying WoW or a WoW-clone, again, though. The combat feels horribly clunky compared to what GW2 offers. I tried recently to play a WoW-clone and was offline in less than a half hour.
You should give bound+steal combo with Basi venom into backstab (or frontstab – doesnt matter). A lot more damage if you’re successful. Take Agi Signet or Channeled Vigor so you can use dodges inplace of HS.
But in general, if you find yourself in a situation where your combo fails then just shadow shot and spam 1. The idea is to get them to go defensive and use that time to restealth and try again. Remember to Shadow Shot -> Backstab before the shot reaches the enemy.
Just never, ever stand still not knowing what to do. Always be either in their face, laying down DPS or be restealthing or preparing to combo-burst.
How do you shadow shot into a back stab without it revealing you?
Cast the animation for backstab during the projectile of Shadow Shot. The projectile will land mid-stab animation and since all attacks in the game are hitboxed, the stab will land.
Unless you run bound, you get higher damage just spamming Shadow Shot, though; two Shadow Shots costs the same amount of initiative as BP + HS, and offers substantially more damage on top of blinds and the double teleport.
As others noted hit Shadow Shot and spam the AA. That combo is better than Backstab and HS which IMO is a bit sad.
Yeah, that really makes me sad. =\ It just seems so faceroll and cheesy. I don’t like that Thief seems to have become a one button spamming prof with the shadow shot and AA being a higher DPS value.
And I just won’t use bound. I’ve tried it and I hate the lack of mobility. Just doesn’t seem worth not having the condi clear/mobility/damage reduc from UC.
Such is the state of the game in general now. Most combat has been trivialized through power creeped damage/durability and passive effects, or very spammy, unskillful and rewarding abilities.
Which is why a lot of people were staunchly against the notion of releasing expansions for GW2.
In the modern gaming scene, these types of releases typically include low content quality and gimmicks with a pressure on monetizing annually by attracting new players rather than reducing churn rates through fresh and high-quality design since the gaming market has so many customers these days.
no one can speak for intent or design; mostly because we aren’t developers, but also because it can change.
how about poison stops preventing revival skills from fully reviving, and instead reduces the amount of health that they stand up with?
In all instances of my posts above, I did speak for the intent of design because I researched this information and was playing during the creation and formal discussion on the subjects from ArenaNet to the players.
As I said, arguing regarding these design decisions is quite literally arguing against the word of ANet when announcing these design changes and decisions.
I griped about this in another post but basically the last patch moved the thief further away from a player precision class and closer to a spam auto attack class. My suggestion is to revert the AA damage and increase the overall initiative. This gives the class more options throughout the fight without making auto attacks on par with initiative using attacks.
I would keep changes to sword auto as is as it needed a boost relative to staff and dagger in any case from a damage perspective. (it was just overall speed changes afterall). That said just boosting INI does not necessarily translate to more skill in a build. Stealth with d/p becomes easier yet.
DPS-wise the sword AA chain was better than the dagger’s, actually. HS spam while a boss was below 25% was what kept the dagger as the better damaging set, and this was only by a pretty small margin. To make things “balanced” properly they’d have frankly needed to cut down the damage per hit on the sword if they were to up the speed.
But power creep putting the thief’s DPS lower than most other classes with elite specializations either justified buffing the thief’s damage or nerfing others’ back into the realm of reason. Obviously ANet took the easier approach.
The thief didn’t need more power. Overall it’s in a pretty good spot with some room for tweaks. The other professions needed to be toned down, but obviously that’s not happening.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Most new decisions regarding gameplay and balance seem to push towards trivializing combat and reducing the dependency on skilled gameplay as a whole. People seem to be relishing the power creep and easy gameplay, so I feel like such a request is “out of line” with “popular opinion.”
kitten shame, really.
D/D condi is currently labeled as a laughing-stock noskill cheese build in the PvP and WvW communities. I’m sorry, but this is just the normal perception of the build by the public, including many people who actually run it to troll with.
And no, I think D/P shadow shot 1spam is just as cheesy and stupid.
I’ve run both builds and both do stupidly well to the point where I felt guilty playing them because it trivialized combat and frankly wasn’t fun playing as or against.
You could just not bother with the backstab since per unit of initiative it’s better just to use Shadow Shot since its damage coeff is so high.
It will make you a spamming scrub, though.
I’d rather see it just remove a condition on Reveal to give HK an in-between of sustain and consistency rather than just pure damage like on NQ or pure sustain like IP. HK is amazing because it lets the thief run valkyrie or more bruiser-based, but a lack of ferocity kinda hurts this and usually makes NQ the more appealing option, anyways, from permanent fury. This also has good synergy with SA for cleansing DoT on stealth and control conditions on reveal, and bumps DA/CS as a valid combination for damage with such cleanses, rather than feeling the absolute need to run SA/DD since our condi removal utilities are horrible, and shadowstep typically needs use as a teleport/stunbreak and is on a long cooldown.
The “10 vuln” idea I’d rather see moved to CnD, and has been something I’ve been toying with for a little while as a concept, such that it applies three sets of 5 stacks of vuln with different durations as to promote leaving stealth quickly for extra damage but being slightly better than right now for trying to sustain with stealth. It also bumps OH dagger’s viability a little to get a bigger backstab/overall numbers, and lets P/D condi tick a bit more on its first and second ticks while maintaining more long-term stacked vuln between sneak-attacks, while not pumping D/P or just buffing CnD again due to BV’s unblockable nature. Ideally we should be trying to cut down on unblockable backstabs as much as possible, as that’s a little un-fun imho.
So revised CnD would be something like:
Applies:
5 vuln (6s)
5 vuln (2s)
5 vuln (1s)
So HK gets a cleanse dissuading the need for pushing into SE opening up CD/LR in SA or giving SA awesome cleanses from stealth, drops dependency on Trickster as a cleanse depending on build, bumps thief’s condition cleansing overall which is relatively poor, makes CS attractive, and helps D/D get some extra damage over D/P with its lower utility.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Disclaimer: I dislike playing condi builds and have played power builds since GW2 launched.
Since the influx of thieves again in PVP after the AA buffs I thought I’d try to make a build designed to counter the other team’s thief.
So on my lunchbreak I was messing around and initially created a condi burst DrD build and jumped into two hotjoin games to test. It was full of thieves/Daredevils – perfect testing ground.
Oh my, this was the saltiest experience I’ve ever had in this game. I went toe to toe eight times with enemy thieves and obliterated them, once 2v1 on point. In turn they started verbal abusing me to no end for running cheese. I kinda expected that.
I ended up spectating most of them and to no surprise almost none of them had meaningful condi clears. Not as utilities and not as traits.
Seeing as most of my condi burst comes from utils (spider venom & impairing daggers) I only have one stunbreak/escape (ShadowStep) on a big CD. It’s an easy build to lock down.
How can players complain about other player’s builds if they do not adapt their own builds accordingly? Surely you must expect someone on the other team to have a condi setup.
Devoting your build to counter another and expecting them to somehow magically do better against you is kind of silly, frankly. You made your build to counter them by exploiting their weaknesses; you said so explicitly in your original post. How do they have the room to adapt their build within a match (where build modifications are not permitted to begin with) to a build they know nothing about (because you apparently designed said build) when their builds are designed to perform at best against the majority of the other classes (trying to adapt to everything)? All while the core class offers horrible condition cleansing…?
And then to expect them to not be upset when deliberately trying to shut them down via both combined builds and tactics with what’s basically and widely-considered as one of the most low-skill and cheesiest builds to play?
They might be in the wrong to talk trash, although you mention you expected it, but I’m sorry there’s no justification to calling foul play because they didn’t change their entire build and concept around a one-off match which in order to counter would make them pretty much horrible to other classes and builds.
This isn’t about adjusting but you frankly just tooting your horn or getting an excuse to call other players bad.
It’s only ever really been good just for mobility on 5. Pure ranged viability, P/P is better and has been, despite its weaknesses/past weaknesses.
In anything but sPvP I don’t bother running it because S/D is better for damage, in-combat mobility, and utility in my opinion.
Thing is, they nerfed bleeding when they made poison stack. Bleeding potency got cut as a result of a few builds getting a few stacks of poison, and because the primary source of condition damage output comes from high-stacked bleeds (they changed the cap so this could be offset by allowing more bleeds to be stacked as well), torment, and the buffed confusion, with buffed/stacking burning taking the dominant DoT condition. Poison access in general is low-duration/low-cooldown or high-duration/high-cooldown, and bulk application is quite difficult. The only real outlier here is MH dagger thief getting it on the AA chain, but frankly, the AA applies no other condition and gets one stack for 6s per entire chain, only DB applies bleeding, and the majority of the thief’s options are horrible to begin with. Otherwise, poison-uptime is best-upheld by elementalists with Sigil of Doom. A variety of sources that used to inflict permanent poison no longer can by the removal of stacking duration, making the condition act more prominently as a healing interrupt or brief boost in condition damage. High-stacking high-duration poison doesn’t really exist in the game except for Soul Spiral on the reaper, and even that is less than 30% uptime even with food and Viper gear in WvW.
And no, cutting heals for extended periods of time was the explicit design of the condition. It used to not apply healing reductions, but it was later changed to do so because there was no counter to healing and no benefit running the heals which cleansed conditions rather than just the biggest heal per time, and made healing always an off-cooldown thing.
2% per stack would be absolutely dreadful and de-value the condition to the point of it having no purpose. Burning out-damages it by more than a factor of two. Bleeding per stack does almost the same amount yet has over four times the duration potential on most builds and is the single-most accessible condition in the game (hello 20+ seconds of bleed per auto on war, 20+ seconds of 3 stacks of bleed on thief, 1 minute+ durations of several stacks from a corruption bleed necro, etc., etc.). Confusion’s damage per time unit is higher, and Torment’s is 50% more than bleed and poison while the target is moving. Even cutting heals is hard these days with druids and tempests running pretty much permanent condition removal, necros not getting substantial healing in shroud, thieves getting huge condition removal buffs on Daredevil, Revs getting a lot of resistance uptime, and warriors/berserkers being able to out-heal a substantial amount of condition damage via healing signet when such healing cuts are not applied.
Frankly, unless focus-fired by multiple people with lots of poison in their builds/classes, poison stacks will rarely go above maybe five stacks. In which case it’s not the heal cut that did the killing but being ganked by multiple people, and if the 2% figure was replaced instead of the static reduction, the heal cut is worthless and the damage for its accessibility sucks, making the condition strictly bad.
I didn’t compare poison to the damage of other conditions, initially. You did. You said it was strictly a better bleed. I disagree, because the conditions are wildly different in their accessibility and intent. I said that poison was designed to cut healing, which during the BWE’s when it got reworked, it was, per ANet’s own words and intentions. Arguing against that is arguing against fact.
I said this because slow was not designed to cut healing, because if it was, then it wouldn’t have been changed not to so quickly, and the effect is global to all animations. The spike animation slow might have been intentional (based solely off of revenant downed state, but I have no genuine factual basis for this argument other than inspection), and frankly, I don’t have an issue with it. The healing aspect slowing down, however, made no sense, because the animations for healing weren’t getting cut. To nerf slow and quickness simply made sense because the PvP meta was riding on these effects on top of invuln/block effects, pretty much making people either unkillable with fast resurrections or dead on down from it being so slow. These were unintended side effects, clearly, for if they were not, we’d have seen adjustments made to the skills which apply these effects via massively increased cooldowns, seen resurrection be made impossible while invuln, or resurrection abilities across all classes getting more quickness access. This isn’t the case, so I think it’s fair to say such behavior was unintentional.
Poison, mechanically, was designed to cut heals. And as such, despite offering some damage potential, it is largely used as such, because durations are overall weak and accessibility per cooldown quite low, which again, was also directly addressed by ANet during the reworks to poison, for they changed it to stack damage and not duration because they found that most fights just boiled down to everyone getting 100% poison uptime because every few hits would get a short poison duration and re-bumped the condition to maintain its heal cut for too long, or multi-hit attacks would stack ridiculously long poison duration and maintain it permanently. Most poison-applying skills are multi-hit with a stack being applied per hit on low duration, so instead cutting a heal via the condition requires better timing as per a pre-emptive interrupt, but the damage is maintained unless cleansed. This is how it was re-designed and what ANet said. Go dig through patch notes and blog posts, reddit, etc. if you do not believe me.
So with reduced duration uptime, the condition becomes easier to cleanse, making healing easier than it used to be. How is this problematic for a condition that per tick does so little damage when its durations are so short on the abilities meant to inflict poison such that it cannot be permanently maintained?
Your issue stems from the heal cut being applied in full from only one stack and seemingly high amounts of coverage. Sigil of Doom is the real reason this happens, especially on elementalists and engineers, since they can proc it each attunement/kit swap, not because of an inherent flaw with the condition design and the abilities which apply it. To ask for such a nerf would require a full re-design of poison in general to make access very high for stacking and nerf the damage per stack, which puts everyone back in the same place as originally with the whole condition-stack-cap problem by just inflating the numbers for no reason.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Abilities were not changed in their cooldowns/uptime to reflect the stacking DoT effect, though in order to make it a viable DoT, because poison application abilities with substantial duration either have substantial cooldowns, or have very low durations and very high re-application periods. Bleeding is high access with high duration but low damage per tick. It’s meant to be both a bread-and-butter condition for damage and coverage of other conditions. If you really want to talk about replacements for bleed, your argument is better-focused on torment, which for a variety of classes, is more accessible than bleeding and offers strictly better DoT in a majority of cases by a large margin.
By this logic we could remove all DoT conditions from the game since originally there was no condition damage stat and the effects the builds have via synergy with duration bonuses and control conditions is quite high, no? I mean just look at Reaper’s chill durations. It hasn’t been a problem all this time, though, so maybe they could change it just like slow and quickness, is what you’re saying. And I mean that through global changes by cutting chill’s duration on all sources.
Like I said, this was the explicit design of the condition, and durations and application sources were kept in check to make stacking huge amounts of poison not possible unless for very brief periods of time. The effect’s primary use still remains as cutting healing and was designed and is still designed around cutting healing.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
I don’t really follow your logic there.
If it was “since poison slows reviving then healing power should speed it up” then it would make more sense.
Quickness and slow affect the rate while poison would be affecting magnitude.
poison directly slows down revival rate, just like slow. worse, it can prevent revival skills from reviving
why does it need an opposite to make sense to you?
It doesn’t; that was the point of his post.
The purpose of poison is to cut heals and subsequently res speed. Quickness/Slow are blanket effects which cover any animation and are meant to be used on people who are up and fighting.
how are you so aware that slow and quickness were intended to only function on characters not reviving/finishing? it still affects downed characters. we went years with quickness affecting it until after they added its opposite: slow. how do you know whether poison isn’t the same and they just haven’t tackled it yet?
Because if quickness and slow were intended to truly affect res speed they wouldn’t have been nerfed not to. Quickness access has also gone up dramatically over the past year, and it was typically on builds which did not at all feature much ressing potential. It’s not comparable to mention it went unchanged for years on the basis the mechanic was not a boon/changed/buffed/got increased accessibility on-demand substantially over the past year.
And if poison wasn’t intended to cut such healing, it wouldn’t have been described as being a useful effect to prevent enemy resurrection and it wouldn’t have been an addition they gave to the condition in 2012; yes, poison used to not cut healing during the BWE’s before launch, so its heal-cutting was an afterthought they gave it despite it not originally having the effect. It’s had it all these years because it was deliberately meant to.
Dragonhunter isn’t a failed experiment; it’s a failed design.
It was mocked when first previewed and BWE1 showed that the idea didn’t hold water. In order to salvage it, Karl (the same guy now in charge of balance) buffed the crap out of the numbers while leaving the flawed underlying mechanics. That’s how we arrived at the current Dragonhunter. It’s a mess and needs re-designed.
He also designed Daredevil and Tempest.
Interesting that the fate of those two classes is pretty much identical.
Maw being made a bigger AOE enough to allow a dodge roll within it would probably put the spec into the realm of reason without really needing numbers tweaks. My issue fighting against DH’s is that once you’re mawed, you either have stability or an invuln or you straight up die. You can see the incoming True shot and go to dodge, but it means nothing since you’ll be CC-locked during the dodge and get hit by the ability, anyways.
A lot of the design in the elite specs is horrible, though. I think only the reaper is well-designed, but just currently its condi build is a little overtuned (power reaper is imho a very fair build). The rest are just straight up upgrades or conceptual failures forcibly implemented.
As far as the thief auto being buffed, it wasn’t really unheard of as even the necromancer pumped out better DPS on its MH dagger AA than the thief. Initiative makes long fights really painful for the thief (as low init means a ~20% damage loss on top of this) and so a small tweak upwards in its AA damage would make sense to keep it able to stay competitive with the rest
Is the margins to which it was buffed okay? Only in the scope of the new power creep. I think it goes without saying the elite specs pretty much boost core spec damage well over 30% for everyone. While it’s great to see the shift in power be pushed back into the core specs, it’s disheartening to see the power creep still keep going when right now we need to see a LOT of toning down on elite spec bonuses and general power creep to keep the core specs competitive. Yes, the changes to sword were big and much-needed and would have made it universally better than the dagger without downward pushes in damage, but this is what should be the intent of design for everyone; the game is out of whack because everything’s just seeing buffs over core, which weren’t design to handle all of this, and weren’t subsequently adjusted.
I like to believe that power reaper is the most successful elite spec released in HoT; it’s very counter-able but with AoE and PvE roots which the core necromancer couldn’t compete with, and even on the condi side, made Dhuumfire a good trait choice. It’s fair to play both as and against and packs a lot less utility or defense or burst damage than core necro. Obviously condi Reaper performs a bit too well at the moment, but the point is this spec actually did its job in changing the style of play for the class entirely, and for the power build, kept the balance pretty intact.
We really haven’t seen that elsewhere on the others. It’s pretty much just all buffs and numbers increases to different builds, deeming the “new thing” as objectively better than the rest. Clunkiness and mechanics haven’t really improved, just the numbers themselves, and that’s an issue.
The 970 will pretty much tackle any modern game. The whole 500 mb slower vRAM thing is largely untrue from the technical level and many optimizations have been made since release to make this pretty much a non-issue.
The 980 is a waste of money because you’ll be spending just as much for only marginally better performance at 1080p resolutions, and even then your gains at 4k aren’t huge. 2016/2017 marks the use of HBM stacked chips for GPU’s with Pascal’s architecture which in early testing already out-perform 4-way SLI’ed Titans per card. The 1151 socket will be used for a while due to new mobo architecture and feature support that has already been released on it or is emerging.
You could get a 970 and be more inclined to upgrade in two years with big pushes in tech, or you could get a 980 for bragging rights for two years and then still have the same reasoning to upgrade in the same span of time, all while spending double where instead you could have just gotten a straight-up better CPU and high-performance RAM which can take advantage of the DDR4 benefits of the new CPU’s and a better case with good cooling and USB 3.1/ type c connector support.
Thief/burst combo builds being anti-backline and winning fights is nothing new. It’s what the most successful GvG guilds did years ago even during hammertrain. If anything it’s less effective now than it used to be with DH traps and all of the new passive defense skills and huge boost to invulns that have been put in the game with time and HoT.
The next earnings report will be the interesting one, seeing as it better-depicts how players responded to the content after a few months post-release, and if ANet has subsequently lost paying customers as a consequence for content people didn’t enjoy.
But there is no way of telling. It’ll mostly only show gem store sells past last quarter.
In fact it’ll probably be decent just because Anet decide to sell shared inventory slot that I guess most people bought it.
To be totally honest with you, gem store sales are really the only things that matter on the basis that it’s indicative of general well-being of the game as typically people buy things worth paying for, and stop paying for them when they become not worthwhile.
We can also look at data compared to Q4 2014 and potentially Q1 2015 (before HoT was announced) and Q1 2016 and the trends in between these two areas (during HoT hype and immediate release) and what is quite likely devise whether or not the game has seen more or less commercial success based on industry-reported churn rates.
We should get some evidence next week from NCSoft’s earnings report. I would suggest people read the report itself first before reading interpretations of it from gaming websites.
Expect them to be very high. Recall that the expansion likely sold very well due to the sheer number of complaints about it. People complaining implies they purchased it and were upset with the quality of the content, but dollar signs are dollar signs and it doesn’t matter.
The next earnings report will be the interesting one, seeing as it better-depicts how players responded to the content after a few months post-release, and if ANet has subsequently lost paying customers as a consequence for content people didn’t enjoy.
The planning for the next expansion could either be the product of reaction to success or the reaction to critical failure in attempts to release new content in a better-perceived state than the first. Not uncommon for both extremely successful companies and ones which saw customer-reviewed product flops follow either strategy.
Windows 8 as an example. MS readily and quickly moved to a new OS and is dropping support for 8/8.1 faster than any other OS in their history. Win8 sold appropriately well-enough (the company’s other investments were really the flops, also caused by the flop that was attempting to integrate everything with win8). When staring at product failure but not commercial failure, it is best to try and move on as fast as possible before your customers jump ship and redeem yourself. I chose the Windows 8 example because Windows 10 is a fantastic OS and Microsoft has largely redeemed themselves with it. Had they not done so, the company would have likely started seeing downward trends a lot faster than expected. ANet’s in a much more competitive environment with much less financial support. The road to redemption there needs to come much faster and be much better to stay relevant into the future for those still eyeing the game.
Don’t guilds have to work pretty hard to get these abilities?
So hard in fact it’s only feasible to achieve by larger guilds, which has in turn caused a large portion of the smaller, organized WvW teams to stop playing the format or the game entirely because of how grossly expensive and time-consuming the process is. Fighting out-gunned went from allowing some amount of freedom and cohesive play to be rewarded to quite literally disadvantageous and slower in every way.
i7 6700k at 4.4 ghz, GTX 970. I needed a re-build including new mobo and gpu recently so figured why the hell not.
Only in the absolute blobbiest or blobs where all three servers collide with map queues do I really go below 35-40. The lowest I’ve gone without a hardware-side issue affecting CPU performance is like 23 with everything on high/highest except Effect LOD and Shadows. I saw very little performance gains changing most other settings as those rendering ones are CPU-based for the most part and the code the game runs for these effects isn’t too demanding by modern high-end hardware standards like often the newest PC ports of console titles are.
As others mentioned, the bottleneck is the CPU, though. The engine just isn’t written to take advantage of multiple cores, and only so much performance can be gained going multi-core.
As far as ANet saying they would release the game on DX11, they said that “they would try to.” I have gone back at one point and found the thread, and nowhere did they make promises. Actually, they even said it was unlikely as none of their engineers were familiar with the platform. There was a client briefly, and it failed miserably because parallel system design can be substantially slower than using just one core if not quite literally written perfectly for it.
We’ve pretty much just capped out on clock speeds at this point in time due to heat issues with hardware. Only until something really revolutionary happens will we see big gains.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
It’s only logical the most durable and mobile builds become the best builds when the primary method of scoring points comes from not leaving a small area on a map which by design forces team fights frequently, so sustaining while outnumbered is pretty critical, and punishing deaths in general, as is traversing the map rapidly to make ganks happen faster.
^ Pretty much what I was going to respond with; DH’s can’t feasibly stack those modifiers as the dispersion is vast and quite self-destructive. I’ll also just point out it’s common to find Revs in WvW getting AA’s to hit for almost the same damage as most berserker DH’s True Shots due to their ample and substantive damage modifiers.
It doesn’t justify True Shot, either, but emphasizes that the hammer seriously does not need any buffs.
It was the right answer to PvE. Unless you want to argue the thief should be offering competitive support on top of its already-high damage potential, which is just ludicrous.
The issue is that the fixes needed for PvE are not the same ones as PvP until offensive stats stop being so horrible in sPvP, and that thief issues in PvP stem from limited trait choices due to vastly superior options (especially with Daredevil) and weapon sets which do not perform well compared to others/other classes.
And .5s will determine the outcome of a fight depending on the matchup.
PU condi has always had crazy good fight potential. There’s a reason it’s still a really popular WvW roaming build, and why for a while it absolutely dominated the WvW scene. The stealth dependency just makes it not very useful in conquest.
Except for you know, the damage modifiers, quickness, and might that the revenant has, pushing the weapon to be one of the hardest-hitters of the 1200+ range category.
Already has substantially better damage than even ranger’s LRS. Don’t really see a reason why it’d need it.
The thing is, I, and a few other people, would be fine with a 50% cut with alacrity IF they rebalanced everything around that.
And took a kittening hammer to the whole slew of mesmer skills and traits that are never used.The people on every profession specific forum, have suggested a whole slew of major changes that would actually make everyone interested in this kittening game again.
The problem is, that the player base is “happy” with a less-than-kitten patch.
“I’m happy with most of the changes”
I’m not.
The power creep is so kittening unreal in this game, it’s not even funny. And all they’ve succeeded in doing, is pushing it further.
Should a normal thief auto attack deal 4200 damage crits on a class with 17k HP?
Is this not absurd to anyone else? Because idk if you guys have noticed, thief dagger auto attacks are kittening fast.
I remember reading that in pve, without buffs or anything, the thief’s dagger AA has the highest DPS in game compared to any other weapon and any other class.
but I read that over a year ago, so they must’ve forgotten about it
Blatantly untrue. Thief sword AA out-damaged dagger AA. What pushed dagger into being better for dungeons/speed runs was heartseeker spam letting it out-damage the sword AA chain by enough of a margin when the boss was at low health when calculated for the fight as a whole.
And then they released the revenant, which put out almost 50% better DPS than the old sword on its AA chain alone and around 40% more than the entire dagger’s potential. And this was just from AA damage from revs hitting for 10k+ per hit.
So they nerfed rev sword and bumped the thief’s weapons because the sword was already slow on its animations for PvP (so dagger would nee love to compensate or be obsolete in PvE by a large margin, and because EXPANSION!!!!1! they buffed staff accordingly.
For PvE/raids it makes sense because the thief has zero group support in raids and was pre-patch in a worse position than mesmer and necro used to be in for dungeons due to the competitive nature/requirement of raids while offering quite literally nothing to the group. Of course, defending these buffs in the name of the PvP formats makes no sense and quite frankly no thief in recent history asked about AA damage buffs at all. Most just wanted nerfs to the absurd power-creep damage coming out from HoT on other classes, like DH/War/Scrapper/Rev/Druid/Chrono/Reaper one-shotting the thief while boasting ridiculous invuln/block uptime, AoE CC, and more AOE reveal than ever.
The issue stems from class design more than balancing. There’s no diversity because everything is tailor-made for the meta and ANet is very unwilling to really re-design classes and mechanics because the community doesn’t know what it wants. Tons of people playing different builds wanting different things to happen from those builds with huge power disparities between builds makes substantial changes impossible without huge backlash, but makes numbers tweaks really not fix any of the problems.
The mesmer’s GS AA chain does gain benefits from physics pushing it to around 1400-1500, for an unknown reason. DH for some reason gets a lot.
So no, both weapons are “1200”, but physics carries such attack range further on both, modified differently by different physics.
If you had clones in front of you, DH bow AA gets a slight reset on its range if it hits a target and punctures into another; on my ranger running marksmanship (~2k range), I’ve had DH’s out-range me from this arc resetting due to targets being somewhat nearby me being pierced though.
Probably explains the divide; OP should mention PvE or PvP/WvW, as Soul Reaping is much, much more useful for the PvP formats as two autos can out-DPS pretty much all weapon skills in the short-term when cleanses get involved, as those burning ticks can regularly reach over 1k per stack.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
With SA traited it was quite easy to do already with D/P using just SR. The evasion covering the init cost lets this work without needing utilities.
Soul Reaping. The big debate IIRC stems more or less from Spite/Curses as the third, really.
It’s pretty well-known in the guardian and thief communities that DH directly counters all thief builds and play choices, though, and that a DH losing to a thief lost due to a massive skill disparity rather than by one just being a bit better than the other.
BV buffs helped for D/P burst but that’s about it. If the DH is aware of the thief, he’ll still hard-counter it. Core thief vs core guardian is much more favoring of a relatively even split depending on skill and build choices.
DA isn’t a 30% damage bonus since at average it nets 20%, and 15% is overdone for a defensive trait line (which is why Daredevil is found on every single build right now).
SA and Acro are just out-classed right now because Daredevil is just objectively better on critical defensive aspects of both lines while giving core thief more synergy while not forcing a style of play, and it buffs damage. Nerf the power creep first before making buffs, or else we just end up in situations where combat and builds are trivialized by a lack of difficult decision-making.
I agree with the premise of the OP but others attesting it are right in that it would reduce diversity if other skills and builds remained in their current states.
Shadow Shot needs its damage cut and/or initiative cost upped. Reworking Body Shot into something more useful would probably be enough to justify the leap removal for P/P. S/P’s kit is in such a weird spot that I’m not sure what could possibly be done to help it out outside of PW buffs, but I’m skeptical of that due to the evasion frames.
I agree Bound D/P is a horribly frustrating set to play against and very boring to play as, and it does offer way too much synergy on the set, but only removing the bound wouldn’t accomplish that much with making changes to other weapons.
The Stronghold map is just too small and too simplistic is the big issue. There really isn’t that much depth or strategy in the game mode because there really isn’t much of a purpose to winning a fight or rotating the map when you can just summon things to do the work for you.
This is why I prefer conquest maps. I have some guild mates of mine that will not even group up unless Stronghold is unchecked, cause of how much they don’t like its play style.
Thing is, with just a slightly bigger map, another lane, and self-healing lord while OOC, the format could play quite well.
It’s kind of funny when I started pvp, I hated conquest because I hated fighting on points. Then I was excited to hear they will come out with Stronghold. But then they manage to make stronghold boring too, hated having to grab supplies and too many zerging. Then I go back to conquest as the map designs are more balance and encourage 1v1 or 2v2. I now prefer conquest over stronghold. Of course, I’m hoping they could come up with a new pvp design that discourage zerging while not forcing players to fight on points would be perfect.
The Stronghold map is just too small and too simplistic is the big issue. There really isn’t that much depth or strategy in the game mode because there really isn’t much of a purpose to winning a fight or rotating the map when you can just summon things to do the work for you.
It’s a change most thieves frankly didn’t even want. We got it because we were getting out-DPS’ed in raids by such margins and bring no support to the table. Unfortunately it just makes the profession easier to play and reduces the incentive to play well or use the very poor skills every other weapon but D/P has, as if D/P wasn’t easy and boring enough to play.
“In my opinion D/D is the most mobile set as none of the skills is rooted”
And yet you never said “in my opinion”. Which was my point. On multiple occasions, however, you did make this claim as fact with no basis for the observation until questioned.
“YOU’RE A LIAR YOU’RE PLAYING MARTYR RAGE RAGE RAGE!!!!”
Are you sure you’re fine?
My point exactly. To me, not coming up with an intelligible reply or being able to discuss this as adults, recognizing hypocrisy is quite telling. If you wish to call it rage, so be it, and I’ll let that delusion prosper just as much as you wish for it to. After all, this is your thread which other people are observing. Mind you, your reactions to a debate resulting in “RAGE RAGE RAGE!!!!” again speak volumes of your willingness to discuss these matters like an adult.
Also, you yourself said D/P was easy and it is – it’s actually a no brainer and I don’t want to discuss it again.
To make it simple: Shut up =)
I did claim the set is easy. I made the claim the set is easy and over-performs almost entirely because of Shadow Shot’s damage. I did not claim the set was “easy” for any other reason at this time, and base my solution on adjustments to reduce the skill floor and maintain the skill ceiling of the weapon set/class. I identified the problem, argued my stance on why I have such perceptions, and proposed a solution. But this doesn’t make me a hypocrite, because as you mentioned, I have supported many endeavors which “destroyed” the class because I expect the class to be played at the highest level of skill, rather than balancing towards lower-common denominators which results in high-skilled play leading to stagnant optimization which leads to low-skilled play following carbon-copy ideologies which leads to polarized balance. I vouch for solutions to game-wide and class-wide problems, with the intent to solve the problems identified rather than targeted and oddly-placed power bumps in hopes such adjustments will result in enough power to destabilize short-term optimization to create the illusion of balance and not constantly re-iterating over these decisions in the future.
See, if arguing on the premise of “easy”, it is only proper to assure that the one making claims is arguing other combinations are “easy” whilst setting his basis for comparison at the highest possible difficulty point within reasonable context; for then subjective balance ideology of what constitutes “easier” becomes more objective than any arbitrary location on the scale of ease-of-use relative to potency as studied through metric data and what can be observed on the design-level. My point is, the basis for your insults rests on flawed logic and hypocrisy.
As far as “shutting up” goes, again, this is my point proven regarding my perceptions of your handling of this debacle. But I’ll hold true to my word and simply will no longer reply to this thread unless called for, and I’d rather not be the source of unnecessary stress in someone’s life should they on an open forum feel the need to dismiss a community member.
Carry on~
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Death Blossom also forces a movement pattern
No, only thing is you fly through the air, you can stir which direction you want it to be. If you use S/D #3 and want to go forward you first have to swerve to the side..
plus FS can be used in stealth
So I can’t use DB in stealth – good to know.
Mobility is not uniformly defined by casting speeds and roots. Doing so would be ridiculous and would be a blatant lie.
So, I lie when I say “to me D/D is the most mobile set in this game” ok then.
“I like cookies” “That’s a lie!!”No offense, but you really have issues – let go.
It’s actually the most mobile set thief has
I think after 2 years of D/D and 14 chars (of which 5 are D/D thieves) I can really say that.
Funny how you insert “I think” when initially these claims were not made with these statements, or really, any kind of language suggesting this was of your own perception or through how you reached such conclusions, which is what stemmed the disagreement to begin with. I asked for an elaboration and discussion. When others commented disagreeing with such assertions, your immediate reaction was not to instead defend the argument but reinforce your authority or belittle their own experiences, and when I inquired with counter-examples, you maintained your stance on a personal definition of mobility which strictly speaking based on the Merriam-Webster definition, is far-off from what your claims entail.
I am not disagreeing with your right to have an opinion but your proclamations which have no justification.
Unwilling to admit a mistake your argument has boiled down to personal insults as it often does via claims of “elitism” in that I have spoken lowly or have pushed for nerfs to Shadow Arts in the past claiming that new thieves using the line will learn on crutches and if never breaking free from it will never get better at the profession holistically.
If you find D/P easy then I congratulate you. I see a lot, I mean a lot, of bad thieves and frankly I’m one of them. The amount of AoE alone makes thief (of any stripe) challenging for me. Having said that, I enjoy the challenge.
D/P is the easiest set thief has got.. If you already know thief then D/P shouldn’t be a problem for you.
Interesting how you claim D/P to be the same way in that it’s easy and yields high reward, yet you’re forming these assertions on the basis that a thief claiming his own lack of knowledge/skill would need to have some prior mastery of the class to justify the combination being extremely low-risk high-reward and subsequently nerfing the weapon set to improve core thief. What you’re saying is, in order to understand the strength of D/P, a player needs to learn by taking off the training wheels, and informed conclusions can be reached this way.
Also known as you’re posing quite literally the exact argument I did regarding why the original SA trait line needed to be nerfed, and yet the entire extent of a large portion of your proclamations for D/D being weak stem from not than inherent design flaws with the skills and traits themselves, but rather getting the bonus power the trait line once offered.
As I had said in the past to you as well, if you learned to play without SA, I did to the people I taught how to play the profession, then then the “nerfs” would have largely been buffs, too.
I do have issues with your willingness to play martyr and then immediately proclaim yourself as being above certain subjects and argue subjects which you suit to your agenda, refuse mistakes, twist words, and call names in a completely hypocritical manner.
And on a side-note: you can steer FS. De-select target and learn the camera angling adjustments. I use it for forward movement quite frequently while chilled and crippled because its lateral movements can be steered with distance coverage identical to Death Blossom’s but with smaller hit-boxes or curved paths for swaps for setting up backstabs or target stickiness in stealth.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
I proposed something very similar when the Daredevil’s kit was announced and used it in one of the beta events. I ran P/P and Shortbow using Bound, though, as to get reliable stealth within P/P for a bit extra pressure and sustain with SA and the mobility/escape potential Shortbow has when in a bind or revealed.
It’s a very potent dueling build.
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