Your argument’s logic indicates that we should all just embrace a notion in which sPvP should allow PvE gear, food, ascendeds, etc. and not be decided by an amulet system because completion of core content should supercede class balance in a competitive game mode designed to reward skillful play at PvP over PvE success, because there exists some degree of power increase at specific content type based on prior completion of any other given content type, relevant or not.
Nope.
Please counter-argue using the notion that new content should blatantly supescede old content in terms of raw power and that those not playing the new content should suffer for not playing it.
They’re both working on some zombie apocalypse game or something. One worked for En Masse as a senior manager and then left. Not really a fan of what’s come out of either.
This thread can outrun a centaur!
Beat me to it.
PPK will be abused by people with accounts/friends on opposing servers.
To be fair, I think this does deserve some kind of concern. Perhaps a cap on specific individuals giving a point is proper enough, because yes, I actually do think people have enough time to do this kitten.
Or ban people that break the rules. Hahahahaha. Yea I know nobody believes that one.
Funny that one is so quick to bash Yak’s Bend for potentially benefiting from the system when they have a k:d ratio of 0.78…
And now, I’m off to craft more superior siege to make a fortune.
Wait! Why?! Why would you craft superior siege? There’s no use for it in a dead game mode or am I wrong? O.o
Someone’s buying it.
Probably Yak’s Bend to overcome their crappy K:D ratio.
;D
Well, I wouldn’t be too surprised! But let’s keep the pvf to a minimum.
tl;dr ppters gonna ppt.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Your words prior were just placed too perfectly not to say it.
No.
ANet changed its communications and development policies shortly after launch because feedback was often given before releases or players were holding them accountable for promises they made about upcoming content they never delivered.
So they just stopped bothering altogether.
The entire company dynamic changed, so it matters not who develops or developed what. There is no feedback shaping development. Management and the developers themselves have no accountability and can have a field day with whatever they want, because we won’t get a chance to interject on incoming changes, because they’re often announced post-implementation/design and any “give us your feedback” posts at this point are pretty much entirely PR stunts to get people to shut up. It’s also the reasoning behind the vagueness of announcements, and the very fine print of “we never promised this” and other bundled features when content is released.
Consider all of the feedback recently that has been given on incoming content before it was released. Evaluate what actually got changed.
Nothing. Zero changes have been made to anything before releasing the content. Even when openly criticized by major streamers and community members – people they’ve put on their own company streams and endorsed – concerns are swept aside.
Kind of like a child when he doesn’t get his way, frankly. Just going on a tantrum after getting yelled at and doing the dumb thing he was going to do regardless of its merit.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
“Despite the fact the thief has no active cooldown system and can maintain very high damage outputs because of it without really needing auto-attacks as filler between cooldowns, and that the thief already has some of the best AA DPS in the game, we’re going to buff the AA damage because the thief is in a bad spot right now in PvE and raids when in particularly long encounters. It’s been made very obvious that the thief has no support, sustain, or intrinsically overpowered abilities or synergies which currently define how sPvP is played via the bunker meta, but we are too lazy to look into actually re-working or investigating any problematic design decisions and are instead just tweaking numbers we got from our QA players who only play PvE bearbow, hoping things improve.”
fixd
Oh no, they’re buffing thief AA damage to give them a purpose in raids, as currently we don’t deal enough sustained DPS to warrant a demand for the class there, either.
PvP balance? Yea it genuinely doesn’t matter. If you shout “ESPORTZZZZ!!!!!1!” loud enough, you won’t be able to think clearly on actual issues in the game, nor will you be able to hear complaints or concentrate on any legitimate criticism or PvP balance disparity.
Had I know it’d come to this I wish I’d bought a PS4 or Wii U for their amazing exclusives. Instead the $110.00 on the base games and ~$700.00 in gems feels like a waste.
I’m no exception. Usually I’m pretty constructive and will defend an MMO company having worked in the industry (it is NOT an easy thing), and player-demands are usually unreasonable.
Let’s just say Colin didn’t appreciate my feedback regarding HoT, though.
But really, I find myself putting more time into the boards than the game itself, because frankly, the game has seemingly steeped so such low levels from its former glory that the act of talking about it is more interesting than actually playing it.
“Despite the fact the thief has no active cooldown system and can maintain very high damage outputs because of it without really needing auto-attacks as filler between cooldowns, and that the thief already has some of the best AA DPS in the game, we’re going to buff the AA damage because the thief is in a bad spot right now in PvE and raids when in particularly long encounters. It’s been made very obvious that the thief has no support, sustain, or intrinsically overpowered abilities or synergies which currently define how sPvP is played via the bunker meta, but we are too lazy to look into actually re-working or investigating any problematic design decisions and are instead just tweaking numbers we got from our QA players who only play PvE, hoping things improve.”
or are the forums more thought-inducing and frankly more fun than the game itself?
The original WvW maps were co-developed with a pre-release batch of players designated to help improve and facilitate the design of WvW and its subsequent maps. Communication was extremely timely and developers were very involved in the feedback playtesters were giving to improve the experience. Many features were removed, changed, and added because of this, and lead up to what WvW was launched as.
Since we get out-right ignored and very obviously neglected by the developers at this point in the game (and have been since shortly after release when culling was fixed and the glory of WvW rang true), no employee will do the format justice; their map designers are incredibly talented. The Desert BL’s are amazing maps – just there’s a huge disconnect from what the players want and need – so they are the wrong solution to what are very real problems, despite being good solutions to other problems entirely.
ANet’s priorities and scheduling as well as its communications policies are a massive blunder. They started incredibly strong in the industry. I feel like we’ve been back-peddling since 2012, and now that the problems are so massive and ever-looming, they lack the staff and/or willingness to actually own up to their failures and correct those problems, let alone their business methods and content production methods which got them here to begin with.
They physically can’t return Acrobatics to what it previously was, however. The trait line itself had the entire identity and concept of the Daredevil solidified and operational. Extra power from the Daredevil would just push the build into being senselessly overpowered when combined or always individually weaker than possible when not. As long as the design intent truly overlaps in such a way, and other trait options do not and are not balanced in this light, there will be no happy medium without drastic conceptual overhauls, which frankly, ANet clearly shows they are unwilling to do at any cost to the game’s integrity.
Right, and those advantages are only applicable within the confines of the expansion content and can only be leveled via the expansion content. Or for Core Tyria, completion of Tyrian content.
Your argument’s logic indicates that we should all just embrace a notion in which sPvP should allow PvE gear, food, ascendeds, etc. and not be decided by an amulet system because completion of core content should supercede class balance in a competitive game mode designed to reward skillful play at PvP over PvE success, because there exists some degree of power increase at specific content type based on prior completion of any other given content type, relevant or not.
Elite specializations are game-wide and do not require the completion or investment of the expansion content. Therefore, they should not be innately superior to core specializations at non-expansion content.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Funny that one is so quick to bash Yak’s Bend for potentially benefiting from the system when they have a k:d ratio of 0.78…
And now, I’m off to craft more superior siege to make a fortune.
Wait! Why?! Why would you craft superior siege? There’s no use for it in a dead game mode or am I wrong? O.o
Someone’s buying it.
Probably Yak’s Bend to overcome their crappy K:D ratio.
;D
This has a red post so it’ll attract more attention and discussion, heh.
Comprehensive thief ES idea:
Acro returned to its former state would push DD into being overpowered. Acro and S/D got nerfed entirely because it was so strong in the right hands. DD’s forgiving gameplay and lack of consistent tempo paired with high damage modifiers to stack with Acro’s former massive might gain potential would make Tr/Acro/DD S/D or condi D/D almost instantly the objectively best builds the thief could possibly have.
Shoddy design is what lead us to Daredevil occupying the same space as Acrobatics, and what is inhibiting the growth and fair buffs to core Acrobatics. Since ANet is definitely not going to be willing to scrap their glorious elite specialization brainchild, I suggest they delete Acrobatics and associated abilities entirely and replace it with a teleport-happy build called the Escape Artist.
I disagree whole-heartedly. There shouldn’t be any excuse for any given trait line option to be blatantly superior to any other. These decisions should be made during build construction for the style of play desired.
But if Elite specs should not be superior to the default ones then how do you justify the added costs in obtaining them? That’d be like saying that they should raise the level cap to 100 and you have to grind your way up there, but there isn’t actually any stat increases or new abilities available and level 80 characters would be equally as strong in all content.
You’ve literally just described the HoT expansion. lol
Correct. Thus the entire point of “Horizontal progression” – also a term mentioned by CJ and MO at PAX South – which was what was supposed to make HoT different from traditional MMO expansions; it was about completely removing power creep/any increases in power at all but meant to increase the breadth of styles a given profession can play or methods of specialization.
Will the thief become “extremely dangerous”? Transform from harmless fly to vicious predator? Predict your destiny and say what will developers bring to the table!
I think thief’s sneak atack dmg will be tripled and unblockable, also every weapons skill dmg will get +2 % (two) dmg bonus.
Okay,
No.
There’s really no justfication behind me dealing 50k damage backstabs in sPvP and almost 75k backstabs in WvW. Frankly, I’d probably just get up and leave the game because nothing would be able to live under a single second and would remove all counterplay.
The thief really doesn’t need more damage. It needs weapon skill improvements and trait adjustments.
In Colin and Mike’s own words on the announcement of the expansion at PAX South, the Elite specializations are not meant to invoke extra power or cause the profession to excel any amount further than combinations of the core specializations. They were announced and advertised with the design intent of changing the way the classes can be played.
That may be their intention at the time, but it’s clearly not what we got, and really it shouldn’t be what we got. Elite specs have a lot to them, you need to not only max out all the other traits and skills (which you don’t need for other trait lines), but you then need 200 HP on top of that to fully unlock them. For all the hassle involved, it really does stand to reason that they be clearly “better” than the alternatives. It would be pretty disappointing if they we just like “yeah, you can use them or not, whatever,” given all the cost.
I think that once there are several Elite specs out there the new normal we settle into should be that your build is defined by the Elite you choose, and the other five traitlines should be used to tweak that build, ideally with 2-3 possible combinations of them that will have a solid role to play, but some traitlines will be complete junk for certain Elites, and that’s fine. It’s only more of an issue right now since we only have one Elite per class, so the “junk” traitlines are complete junk, rather than just being useful to a different spec.
I think Elite specs should be balanced against each other, the Thief Elite #2 should not be stronger than the DD, but I think it’s fair for the DD to be stronger than the not DD, at the very least in PvE (I can see an argument for them to be equal in PvP, given that they want the F2P to be competitive and you don’t have to actually earn them in PvP).
I disagree whole-heartedly. There shouldn’t be any excuse for any given trait line option to be blatantly superior to any other. These decisions should be made during build construction for the style of play desired.
I feel a lot of the new elite specializations, Daredevil included, need substantial toning down, and a lot of the benefit they bring put into the core specializations as a compromise, to buff not only the diversity and issues with core specialization trait lines, but the viability of playing a core specialization in general compared to an elite specialization.
I don’t think that’s where they intend Elite specs to be, and now that I’ve had time with them, I don’t think that’s where Elite specs should be. I think that they should be objectively “better” than the vanilla builds, at least at their specific role. The value in the vanilla builds shouldn’t be that you can continue to just use them and remain just as good as an Elite spec, but that you can mix and match them freely, while you can only have one Elite spec at a time.
So basically you aren’t meant to run three vanilla trait lines anymore, you’re meant to select two of them that best complement your chosen Elite spec. With DD, that isn’t likely to include Shadows, with a “Shadow Walker” style spec, that might definitely include Shadows and maybe not Acro, stuff like that.
I think that balancing the core thief is less about making the vanilla build competitive with Daredevil, and more about making the vanilla build competitive with other vanilla builds, and therefore giving each of those traitlines elements that would be beneficial to future Elite specs (whereas if they focused on buffing the DD traits then they would be back at square one when the next set of Elites came out).
In Colin and Mike’s own words on the announcement of the expansion at PAX South, the Elite specializations are not meant to invoke extra power or cause the profession to excel any amount further than combinations of the core specializations. They were announced and advertised with the design intent of changing the way the classes can be played.
Consider if Critical Strikes was never a trait line. Or SA. These lines define a particular style of play or award benefits or apply synergy to using certain styles of play. Yes, some trait lines are “stronger” than others, but it’s the combination of many that defines a build and overarching style of play. DA/CS/Tr plays much differently than DA/CS/SA and CS/SA/Tr.
It is for this reason I distinctly argue that the Reaper is the closest-to-balanced elite specialization. It did what it was intended to do: change the way necromancer played. Reaper is considered as being objectively stronger than the base Necro in the sPvP and PvE scenes for totally different reasons; sPvP declares it stronger for condition application and stability in shroud in a format with an excess of CC, and in PvE, the Reaper lets the necromancer deal considerable cleave and DPS instead of intermittent single-target burst. Reapers sacrifice innate durability to maintain their damage, and sacrifice a strong ranged option for a more potent melee one. The core necromancer definitely has issues that should be looked into, such as potentially providing stability access in shroud for consistency in sPvP if the CC doesn’t get reduced, but the backline burst well-o-mancer is still an extremely strong build, and the base necro is definitely stronger as a counter-condition spec over the reaper.
In the case of the thief, Daredevil is just a straight upgrade to almost every trait line with next to no trade-offs. It also doesn’t carry the design change that the Reaper does; it’s functionally identical to Acrobatics’ intent, and is arguably better than Acrobatics was pre-nerf. The Daredevil simply doesn’t change anything for the thief in this regard, and therefore imho is poorly-designed and just as poorly-implemented for how it overshadows almost all other trait lines and styles of play through what is a more versatile and objectively improved arrangement of traits.
If all trait lines were designed this way, with global synergies and overlaps (as I have proposed in the past) with a bit of specialization, then there wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is that many trait lines are extremely linear in design, and half-baked implementation to resolve this by not reworking all existing trait lines and classes results in the E-spec disparity and over-dependence we have now.
I remember when thief was a major annoyance for tough autoattackers, stabbing them in the back and constantly recloaking. Now thief does his 19k burst rotation and gets stomped a second later because he cannot restealth.
Right, but the solution is not to turn back the clock, it’s to help better balance the Thief so that he doesn’t get stomped when he can’t restealth.
Absolutely. Additionally, it’s important to know just how few or many baskets you’re putting your eggs into; my Signet build has definitive and very extreme weaknesses, but also very definitive and extreme strengths. Building entirely around stealth should only imply that one faces massive penalties while out of stealth and needs to use the rest of their utilities, weapons, or in general game knowledge and skill to overcome obstacles, or simply accept losses or not anticipate a win. The more heavily you specialize, the more heavily you should be able to be countered by people built to counter that style.
Daredevil as a whole minimizes a lot of these counters (as per most elite specializations), and as I mentioned above, the existing AOE reveal effects coming from other classes are a bit overtuned for stealth-based defenses, particularly in the case of the thief relative to other classes which can maintain stealth. I staunchly disagree with the notion that self-inflicted Revealed is a bad idea, however. You know you’re going to be revealed if you make a build that focuses on stealth uptime AND attacking from stealth for burst, rather than attacking after stealth ends for continual poking and slipperiness. These are sacrifices that need to be made and considered, and are fully at the discretion of the thief himself, and can be taken advantage of not only during build theory, but even in the midst of combat. Sometimes rushing the backstab isn’t the best option, and it’s important to know when and why to think like that.
The class description itself actually states its defenses rise from evasion and nimble movements. Nothing about stealth.
I would like to see Acrobatics removed altogether, however, and replaced with a completely new trait line concept. Acrobatics and DD will never be able to be balanced because if they work well on their own, they’ll be overpowered in conjunction, but if they’re balanced for their use in conjunction, they’ll be individually weak.
DD was frankly a terrible design decision because of just how much overlap there is, not to mention the specialization is just straight power-creep on the entire rest of the class. Thief at the moment is in almost as bad of a spot through the sheer requirement of Tr/DD for a functional build because this combination is just objectively better than every other alternative by large margins.
Gonna copy-paste my proposed solution to help fix D/D thief. Not enough time for the patch by tuesday, but should be considered to help the set be more competitive. Dancing Dagger and Death Blossom are largely holding the set back by design, not implementation. Further buffs would just break the set and emphasize even spammer play than what is offered already on D/D 3spam.
Dagger Training Should apply poison to each auto attack at a 100% chance, and just the auto. Remove the bleed from Death Blossom, and put it on Dancing Dagger. Buff Dancing Dagger’s damage by 50% and remove the ability for it to hit the same target multiple times, and just have it hit the target and up to three nearby enemies.
Death Blossom should be reworked into a multi-hit evading lunge with better range than it has now, similar to Whirlwind Attack (Warrior GS3), at the cost of an additional initiative, giving the set more mobility and stickiness to compete with D/P and some evasion and disengage potential to keep it stylized in between S/D.
We can work on CnD (if needed) after these changes are absorbed, other balance decisions are made, and the community has a chance to work with them. As it stands, though, D/D will never be as good as D/P or even come close, and 3spam evasion condi bleeding is relatively boring and allows for little room for expansion.
WINTER 2016 ?? So it’s not gonna be any balance patch soon???
w/e i don’t kittening care anymore.
You do realize that winter is December to the March Equinox, right?
Marksmanship Opening Strike with a pet puts out 10 and RF another 10. How 21, I’m not sure, could be from Frailty or something, or perhaps a pet like the spider.
Scrapper damage is way overtuned for how durable the spec is and how much CC it can put out. Played one for a day, it was so overpowered it wasn’t even fun. 60k damage engages from range via target isolation and huge stunlock potential just trivialized combat entirely. Even hammer rev has more risk on it, and that’s just sad.
I feel like balancing was done for open-world PvE and raids. A lot of these changes are honestly almost pointless in intent.
I see no changes being made to fundamental issues plaguing classes or any effort for what are frankly necessary substantial reworks to many classes, weapons, and traits. QoL is good… if the things you’re working on are only under-performing by small power margins and the issue stems more from usability. This is not at all the case in the PvP formats. Blatant overpowering of some mechanics and poor design decisions are what stemmed this.
Right now the game is CC and invuln effects paired with wildly overtuned damage coefficients on weapon skills with a huge push for boons and boon sharing. They’re too common. Nerf break bars if you have to nerf CC. Put the damage into skillful execution of a class being truly built for damage. Put the durability into people actually building for it. Remove passive defenses. Remove half or more of the invuln and block effects from the game.
Everyone’s just sitting around immune to everything getting infinitely CC-locked and you wonder why PvP is boring to watch and play. On the flipside, you have tanks one-shotting people in WvW from overtuned damage values like giving the scrapper better damage than backstab on skills 3 through 5, or CoR wiping entire parties for 12-18k on an AOE against tankier players with a 2s cooldown.
I see very little changing for the sPvP scene and absolutely nothing changing for WvW. PvE players will cry about their hybrid condi longbow ranger not being optimal for DPS in raids or something, and then we’ll probably see that getting buffed three months from now.
These changes are too slow and too insubstantial if this is all we’re seeing, and the design intent is far removed from what’s actually causing problems in the game.
I don’t think AA damage is what we want or really need, frankly.
AA’s don’t do damage if your opponent is sitting there invuln for 60% of the time.
Combat trivializes to spamming 1 if it becomes too strong, and frankly, we have an initiative system designed for repeated skill use; why should we want or even need to spam 1 when we effectively have no cooldowns?
We already have some of the best auto-attacks in the game. Revenant is what really kills us in the race for AA DPS.
All I’m getting out of this is they’re yet again attempting to “fix” something that isn’t broken while not looking into what’s actually causing limited build diversity and overall class functionality to begin with.
D/D now truly dead, for the the edge of burst is gone over D/P, the stealth is worse, doesn’t synergize with DD, and will now deal the same DPS which D/P is objectively better at doing for 1spam via Black Powder.
It’s like they’re actively trying to trivialize combat and remove every ounce of skill that was once needed to play the game on any class.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Fair enough, the description does advocate agility and speed as an active defence. Which it arguebly excelled at pre HOT patch. But at the moment that very speed makes no difference anymore.
I’m aware that thiefs in the past without revealed and other classes made it an overpowered traits. But what I’m arguing is that having revealed while doing absolutely nothing else for thief, With so much AOE and pbAOE and stuns going on is absolutely not fine. What you are arguing here is that revealed was overpowered in the past when the meta was different. So therefore implementing it now would make it overpowered, BTW Why are you bringing scrappers and other classes here. Don’t strawman me. I’m arguing for thief. Self revealed on this is horrible atm.
Shadow refuge definately should be easier to access. this skill is useless atm, no need to have it become a ’’surefire’’ way. But with already the plethora ways to counter this, which became worse and worse espically now. I see no reason to make it so kittened that if u get pushed out, u lose all of your stealth and you get an extra fine batch of revealed. The Skill is also tailored so that u bassically have to sit inside, move out earlier and boom u just waisted a 60 sec to 48 CD skill. This skill is meant to act as an refuge. Having everybody and their mother go to town on our refuge is not ok. Remeber thief have almost no acces to stability, getting forced out of shadow refuge is incredibly easy to do. It’s not worth it’s long CD atm, maby in earlier times.
Again dagger 3 spam is not an exploit. the bleeding damage is not that much to cry home about. even with full acrobatics and a 5 times dagger spam. What you are arguing from is pretty much going off of the worst situation. Not what actually happens normally. This is ridiculous that we are even arguing wheter dagger spam 3 is an exploit. It’s even more mindboggeling that u argue that thiefs stealth shouldn’t be the only viable way to defend at. And now u are litterally attacking a skill that actually gives the thief evades? Come on man. Nobody atm takes a full dagger 3 condi spam anymore. It can be counterd in so many ways, cleansing,blocking invulnerabilties or the fact that thiefs spend iniative on thier spam making them low on it in the end, it really doesn’t contribute to much here. . This is getting ridiculous here.
You and I seem to have quie a different view on what is an exploit and what is not. Just because something can be spammed, or is repeatable doesn’t make it exploitive. Stealth is really the only game mechanic a thief is reliable on. But dodges? Hardly, Even with daredevil u actually need to tailor your build so that u can dodge even tough it was advertised as bieng an more physical sub class.
Shortbow is nothing wrong here. Again u argue against a facet of the thief what it’s meant to excell at: Mobility.
Do you want the thief to just be as every other class? So far u have argued against the thief mobility and it’s evades.
And if you are getting out of my posts that I die when i get of revealed because of my lack of skill, Rather then the other classes bieng just outright stronger, more sustain and cc’s on thier side and overall lack of defence. Then yeah I’m not sure wheter you really that experienced with thiefs as your posting style suggest. This is not a L2P issue when facing odds such as classes with insane protection uptime or migh, or invulnerbailties such as the revenant. Do you realise how annoying it is when u actually have a revenant almost down and he just goes into invulnerable mode and boom. U gotta start the fight again.
Or should only be the select few bieng capable of navigating through all of that mess be able to handle thiefs?
D/D condi 3spam isn’t considered “as good” because of just how punishing and overpowered the current meta is right now. I’ve played the build; it was absurd against almost anything not strictly in the current meta. I’ve been saying for years this would happen if they buffed the evade and didn’t change its conditions application, and it did.
SR’s effect is incredibly potent, considering it heals baseline and offers what is literally a full heal for a thief using Rejuv if you stay in stealth for its duration. We’re not the only class facing the CC problems; even heavy-stability uptime classes like guardian and warrior are being phased out by the sheer amount of CC in the game right now. That’s indicative that the problem isn’t with the thief so much as it is the rest of the game and how much CC is being dealt. Pre-HoT, SR was functional, it did its job, and smart players would both not use it in blatant melee range and punish players by doing their best to bomb/knock the thief out using limited CC options that actually could knock the thief out.
And yes, there are also too many invuln effects. The pro players are making fun of the game because of it. Giving the thief more passive defenses won’t solve the problem, though. If the problem at hand is other classes having too high block/invuln uptime, those classes need to be toned down accordingly in that uptime. PvP is about bunkering down and they’re letting classes just straight up not die through these effects. This is innately bad design and pushing for the balance around this ideology will not help the thief or the state of the game as a whole; if nobody can ever die, sPvP trivializes to who can reach the points faster.
You know, while I don’t think that the vanilla Thief build should be able to perma-stealth, I actually could see a place for some sort of “Shadow Walker” elite spec, one that includes things like being able to actively shed Revealed, and making it easier to stay in Stealth most of the time, with certain associated costs.
In any cast, I do not see “give us more stealth availability” as the solution to the class’s problems, so I’m not swayed by the argument “but the Thief class is currently busted, so let us have this.” I still think that the solutions to the vanilla builds come from tweaking how the vanilla build functions and making those elements more useful, so that all builds are more viable. Stealth should give you an edge in combat, but it shouldn’t be the entire basis of everything you do.
Not to start up old arguments, but my Elite Specialization concept proposal, the Deadeye, also already had this kind of mechanic built-in as a GM trait with a 20s ICD for this style of play with the Reveal-heavy aspects of the rifle and class mechanic changes. This was intended to synergize with stealth-heavy melee builds when played properly, as the changes to Steal would prohibit a lot of easy-to-execute exploitation of a powerful mechanic, and also allow for some pretty devastating offensive and defense capabilities for the thief when taken advantage of.
The core thief does need work. Daredevil along most of the new ES have trivialized combat through blatant improvements to old styles or simply better numbers at what already existed. I feel a lot of the new elite specializations, Daredevil included, need substantial toning down, and a lot of the benefit they bring put into the core specializations as a compromise, to buff not only the diversity and issues with core specialization trait lines, but the viability of playing a core specialization in general compared to an elite specialization.
As a whole, I think we can all agree passive AOE reveal-bombs are overdone and over-punishing to the thief. Tone down the AOE reveal, tone down the stealth on other classes, and we see the thief and stealth as a mechanic in a better place.
I have no qualm with the revealed debuff, and having played early release before it was implemented, completely agree with its implementation. Stealth was simply way too strong prior.
Frankly, I actually prefer having stealth, particularly long-lasting effects, have counterplay. I would distinctly argue that the stealth that other classes are getting, and the revealing capabilities of other classes compounded on the notion that stealth should be the be-all-end-all defense of the thief is what’s really hurting the class balance-wise when both encountering and comparing it to others. Stealth can be quickly dismissed with strong counterplay and high skill when playing against a thief. A scrapper or chronomancer, however, have much better mechanisms to prevent such countering, and arguably stronger in-combat stealth abilities.
I love the thief, but exploitative mechanics game-wide, including what the thief is able to do such as D/D condi evasion spam or D/P ghost, are overly-problematic and hurting the integrity of the game in general.
’’Experts at stealth and surprise, thieves can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air, or steal items from their opponents and use them as weapons. Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which can make them very hard to hit. ’ "
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Thief
And why shouldn’t stealth be the all end defence? It’s advocated as bieng thier specialty. speedphantoms and hard to hit in general. For that reason thier sustain is absolute crap. Bassically they are the fast guy who take lots of damage when u hit them. U act as if thief relying on stealth is a bad thing.
U act as if self revealed woudl al of a sudden make the thief devoid of counterplay even tough just so listed all the revealed abilities and admitting thier overal class weakness. How in the world can u be contend with thief when. There is so much ways to counter it already? Like seriously at this point in time there is so many launches and knock backs that even shadow refuge isn’t a surefire way.
And seriously D/D condi spam is an exploit? it uses 4 iniative for crying out loud and eve then it’s not even that impressive damage wise. in 10 secs it does 3 k damage, U stack 12 stacks assuming u hit them. And then u do it 4 times maximally and then only then u can do 1.2 k condi damage per second roughly which rarely happens thanx to blinds blocks and immunities.
Dagger pistol hits average now. there is atm noting exploitable about thiefs.What do you expect a thief to do? Be a kittening Chaith? the fact that u even have a problem with dagger/dagger evasion in a meta with so much aoe skill. Even channeled skills which lock u down on stealth really makes me think u haven’t played this game for as long as u claim.
there is nothing wrong with an class described for deception and trickery bieng reliable on stealth for defensive measures.
See the highlighted text. I see no such dependency on the description that stealth is the only defense the class should have.
Almost everything in your post indicates you actually have a lot to learn about the class. There wasn’t revealed in the game early on. It was really, really, really overpowered. With more classes getting stealth access, imagine a scrapper or mesmer bursting without being revealed. It’s necessary as a mechanic. What isn’t necessary is the number and ease of access of skills and traits that inflict Revealed without a cost; Sic ‘Em is a fine example of a skill which inflicts Revealed in a reasonable manner. Revenant, DH, and Scrapper, though, shouldn’t have so many options to do so that really don’t require much risk. Fair skills like Sic ‘Em which require a target wouldn’t work at all, because a thief that didn’t get revealed would chain stealth forever while performing attacks. This is how it used to be, and this was dumb. Especially so on other classes.
AOE’s/AOE CC effects do punish the thief. And that’s an entirely different problem which not being revealed wouldn’t help. I kill a lot of thieves while they’re in stealth. I die a lot while I’m in stealth. Not getting revealed after an attack won’t do anything in either the current meta or against competent players.
And Shadow Refuge shouldn’t be a “surefire way.” It’s meant as a long-duration stealth, and it’s meant to be countered in multiple ways. Other classes have overpowered stealth abilities. I’m saying that outright. It doesn’t justify even more power creep in the game, because every profession has been screaming “We’re underpowered!”, and has been buffed, and most majorly overpowered skills and abilities causing the core problems in the game’s balance have been unaddressed or buffed as a consequence. More buffs aren’t the answer. We’ve already hit the point where things are so power-creeped and have spiraled so out of control the PvP formats are being scoffed at by the professionals who play them.
D/D condi evasion doesn’t get countered by AOE’s. There is no delay or aftercast on the evades anymore. Spamming 3 is frankly just the same as being invuln assuming you don’t put delay in your input. D/P is still better-used in competitive games for its engage speed and utility for +1’s. Otherwise, D/D condi spam is better at holding points, better at team fights, and just as good at moving around the map. I’d also mention that conditions still tick through blinds and blocks, and the ticks can be made much more substantial if you actually say, build for the condition damage and use Daredevil evades properly. I’d also like to mention you can do it five times consecutively due to natural initiative regeneration occurring mid-animation, and a steal will reset an additional three. A build using Acrobatics will regenerate an additional four initiative over this duration. Paired with vigor, the dodges from DD, and DD’s endurance recovery, you can maintain almost permanent evasion uptime while dealing damage.
Shadow Shot continues to be one of the best skills in the game despite the thief’s relative poor performance as a class. It offers the fourth-highest damage on the core thief’s kit, first being unload, second being backstab, Third being larcenous Strike, it costs less initiative, is unblockable (counters blocks which are now a huge part of the game), blinds, and teleports. D/P is the most versatile set the thief has in regards to its utility per damage, so it shouldn’t offer peak damage such as say, D/D. It also already does more.
The entirety of what makes the thief competitive is effectively defined as taking advantages of exploiting a facet of the game or class’ mechanics. Shortbow 5 on initiative lets the thief be the most mobile profession in the game. If they nerf IArrow even slightly, thief as profession takes a huge blow here. If they nerf DD dodges, the profession no longer has necessary staying power. If they nerf unload spam, P/P as a weapon loses all use. The thief right now is getting by on gimmicky exploitation alone and not through good design or balance decisions, pertaining to not just the thief but the entire game’s classes.
Combat has been largely trivialized with the specializations and arbitrary buffs and lack of essential reworks necessary for the class and game to move on. Removing the Revealed effect will do nothing to help the thief except inspire more exploitative builds
with the end result causing the thief to gain nothing in the process in terms of use or viability.
All I’m getting out of your posts is you’re dying when you become revealed and not because of people playing well to counter stealth. If people aren’t playing well to counter stealth and you’re dying on being revealed, this isn’t a problem with Revealed being too punishing but you and your opponents not playing well.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
It doesn’t have one. At all. Daredevil dodge uptime both burst and sustained is objectively better, the damge is better, cleanses are better… there’s really no reason at all to play Acrobatics except for a condition D/D build spamming evades.
Such is life when the specialization is poorly-designed, implemented, and built on a concept and style of play already included in a trait line, particularly one which was already weak.
I have no qualm with the revealed debuff, and having played early release before it was implemented, completely agree with its implementation. Stealth was simply way too strong prior.
Frankly, I actually prefer having stealth, particularly long-lasting effects, have counterplay. I would distinctly argue that the stealth that other classes are getting, and the revealing capabilities of other classes compounded on the notion that stealth should be the be-all-end-all defense of the thief is what’s really hurting the class balance-wise when both encountering and comparing it to others. Stealth can be quickly dismissed with strong counterplay and high skill when playing against a thief. A scrapper or chronomancer, however, have much better mechanisms to prevent such countering, and arguably stronger in-combat stealth abilities.
I love the thief, but exploitative mechanics game-wide, including what the thief is able to do such as D/D condi evasion spam or D/P ghost, are overly-problematic and hurting the integrity of the game in general.
I dislike the entire concept and hate its implementation even more.
Daredevil play is spammy and gimmicky, and took away a lot of the skill associated with playing an Acrobatics build while providing what are objectively sheer numbers bumps and peak-performing utility. When playing Daredevil, I feel like my choice of best-move is almost pre-defined more by what’s on cooldown rather than what’s actually going on, and I feel like my opponents cannot be rewarded for skillful play by baiting dodges and playing mind games against me; the sense of “out-smarting” my enemy is completely gone with gimmicky evasion-spam or simply straight up more powerful abilities and mechanics. The tempo of Acrobatics is gone, and the class has turned from quick-decision-making into what I feel is largely just APM/spam which a lot could just be macro’ed, really inhibiting my enjoyment of the specialization and seemingly a design counter-intuitive to the core thief entirely, and as such functioning as a straight upgrade in power at the detriment of making the class require more complex thought and resource management.
Daredevil in essence feels lower-risk : higher-reward than core thief.
That said, all of the elite specializations feel wildly overpowered at the moment and I believe are objectively superior versions of their corresponding core trait lines except for power-built reaper.
I’d honestly just suggest running a support/tank Rev, nomad’s chronomancer, or nomad’s scrapper. You’ll need extra durability and invuln uptime as pugs are slower to blast water fields or simply just don’t. Imho, frontline reaper is rather weak on the defenses with the damage immunity effects at play right now, and a few CoR’s will kill your life force and make you effectively useless for diving into the fray before everyone else does.
For roaming, full zerk hammer sneak gyro. Done. Every skill except for elecro-whirl has better damage than backstab, and your engages are better than what a thief can offer via magnet pull, since you don’t need to dive a target and can instead pull them into you, helping when outnumbered immensely. You should be able to nuke literally anything and stunlock them into submission. Killed my full sentinel warrior friend in less than three seconds before he even made a dent in the gyro’s health.
Infiltrator’s Return. Since they’re only applying burn, this can be re-used repeatedly and the disengage allows for better sustain in general against core guardian.
Frankly, the only thing that really wont give you experience in the open world is grinding monsters in the same location. The game’s spawn rate decreases if you are nearby the spawn locations of creatures as to prevent bots and getting people trapped while also prohibiting the mob-grind playstyle.
Sword + Pistol 1 or Pistol + Pistol for weapon set 1 are considered very good leveling sets due to the defenses on Black powder, stuns, invulnerability frames, and good damage.
Shortbow is considered as an excellent weapon for set 2 as it provides the best AOE and evasion/defensive combat as well as high movement speed and a ranged advantage.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
I would rather keep condition removal primarily attached to traits and utilities or supportive weapons in general across all classes because rather than solving the core problems, it would put emphasis on specific weapons to gain or lose viability based on the meta alone. Generally speaking, pushing away from invuln/immunity effects would be a healthy design decision for the game, and I don’t really think it has much of a flavor/design argument for the thief except for reduced effects for poison. That said, I do think we need more condition removal opportunities in other trait lines outside of SE, Trickster, and EA, and in particular, tied to under-used or under-powered niche utilities clearly overshadowed by others in regards to the current meta/styles.
Putting such immunity on x/P or CnD in general would put an excess of defense for other weapon sets; S/D would get immunity to conditions on top of a repeatable cleanse on top of extreme synergy with Daredevil/EA and potentially the Shadow Arts trait line. Being immune to conditions, hitting for damage, stealthing, removing a condition from SE, and cleansing a condition via an evade, and then potentially cleansing another condition on IR is just overkill on what is already a slippery and mobile build. For x/P, the lack of dependency on getting into melee range or just the overall hurdle of balancing the skill to be as fair as landing CnD would still push D/P over D/D.
They tried initially to incorporate Resistance to the thief in Acrobatics in the patch they gutted it as how they announced it in their preview concepts. Resistance was going to be given to the thief upon being revealed in GI, which was excellent for staying power. However, it was then changed to 90% health, and then changed to not give DoT mitigation due to expressed concerns of being overpowered. I partially agree with the decision on the basis that resistance is an extremely powerful effect and should be kept in check; the Revenant meta in sPvP is built around this boon entirely.
Pushing more stealth is also not the answer; the thief can never gain viability in sPvP if it is in stealth. Before HoT and the 6/23 changes, I ran a P/P + P/D healing power venom build bunker in sPvP. It was incredibly durable, to a point where I could out-sustain D/D ele, but also camped a lot of stealth in times of need, such that solo-defending a point was extremely difficult as eventually I’d lose the point from necessary stealth for cleanses. As such, pushing for high-stealth uptime will force the thief into the +1 role further and more people away from using the ability. If balance hinges on the ability to mitigate conditions on a weapon set by high stealth uptime, then our stealth-less options take a subsequent hit and we get nowhere for our solo fight capabilities.
We could put absolutely massive benefits to CnD and buff its ratio to absurdity and it’d still not be viable; the problems with D/D across the formats stem from its lack of reliability in landing and the utility the rest of the set has which pales in comparison to D/P and lower mobility than S/D. Getting in between the two is conceptually a design focal point, and pushing reliability on CnD and our backstab/stealth attack and overall usefulness of other skills will be what determines the success of the weapon set overall across what should be a constantly-changing sPvP meta.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
The change to Death Blossom’s evade frames was one of the worst things they could have done. It sucked as a skill, but keeping the condition application was not the necessary change at hand. I’ve been counter-arguing buffing evades to DB for years on the claim it’d result in 3spam cheese, and now it’s a competitive build. How the thief’s integrity for quick decision-making has degraded…
Dagger Training Should apply poison to each auto attack at a 100% chance, and just the auto. Remove the bleed from Death Blossom, and put it on Dancing Dagger. Buff Dancing Dagger’s damage by 50% and remove the ability for it to hit the same target multiple times, and just have it hit the target and up to three nearby enemies.
Death Blossom should be reworked into a multi-hit evading lunge with better range than it has now, similar to Whirlwind Attack (Warrior GS3), at the cost of an additional initiative, giving the set more mobility and stickiness to compete with D/P and some evasion and disengage potential to keep it stylized in between S/D.
CnD could be made unblockable and I don’t think people would care. A blind won’t help this set or the thief because CnD’s issues stem from reliability and not extra effects and defense in stealth. If you’re getting hit as soon as you enter stealth playing an OH dagger, you’re not dodging properly AND your opponent is good, so you should be punished. Shadow Shot already is, and there is so much block, blind spam, evasion, and invuln in the game right now that little would change. Shadow Shot is already unblockable, does more damage, always performs the teleport, and blinds. I see no reason why CnD should face such low reliability seeing as it costs more initiative and is a forced melee-range in-combat stealth versus BP can be used OOC or combo’ed off of Bounding Dodge for what is the same initiative cost due to lacking the need for HS’ing the leap. Anything more, such as “this skill cannot be negated via invulns/evades” or some kind of OOC stealth would be overkill and overpowered, as the set is designed to be used full melee, and there are some very balanced and reasonable abilities made around the invuln effect such as guard’s RF. I do fear the ability may be too strong against Aegis for guardians if implemented as unblockable, however, so I can see it taking a further damage nerf but applying substantially more vuln for a short duration to compensate for backstab, or just giving a damage modifier buff afterward for a subsequent attack, also buffing S/D’s burst potential via FS -> CnD -> LS. Also, DH massive-aegis-spam already hard-counters thief immensely, so getting into that Aegis could be very helpful. This leaves concerns with evasion S/D Daredevil dealing too much damage and getting a lot of condition removal/defense, though.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
I was being constructive. D/D is crap, period. Yeah yeah, maybe it has single target highest damage, I don’t know, but it give you no utility whatsoever. Staff gives you aoes, plenty of dodges/escapes, blinds.
If you don’t have the xpac you will be subpar (of an already subpar class lol), you need to be aware of that.
Acrobatics line is crap, you shoul definitely go as you said, crit/DA/trick.
Staff offers better damage than D/D. D/D is objectively the worst set on the thief at the moment except for condi 3spam bunker cheese, and it is the worst set because of Death Blossom’s incompatibility with the rest of the kit.
Odd. I know I have done it before and have seen it done o.o
CURRENT VERSION: 2.1.0
Specialization Name: Deadeye
Specialization Weapon: Rifle
Mechanics changes:
Heavy use of Revealed effect for prolonged periods of time, Steal changed to Stygian Charge//Skirmish, Use Stolen Item changed to Stygian Hunter transform ability. Stance utility skill type.
Specialization Goals:
CLASS MECHANIC CHANGES:
F1 mechanic: Flip skill: [Stygian Charge]//[Skirmish]
[Stygian Charge]
Dash forward and refill your initiative in a flurry of smoke, then making your presence known to your enemies. Gain stealth for the duration of the dash and replenish initiative, and then become revealed for a duration based on your total initiative. Turns into Skirmish while under Revealed. Effects of Steal are applied to the closest target within a small radius at the end of the dash.
- Range: 900
- Steal Effect Radius: 130
- Initiative Restored: 6
- Combo Finisher: Leap
- Revealed = (1.5 seconds per initiative (max 20s)
- Cooldown: 20s
[Skirmish]
While activated under the effects of Revealed, your next dodge roll costs no endurance and is changed to a fast-moving dash.
- Duration
- Range: 400
- Evade Duration: 1/2 second
- Combo Finisher: Leap
- Cooldown: 10s
F2 Ability: (Transform)
[Stygian Hunter]//Exit Transformation
Manifest and equip a large shadowy crossbow to slay your foes. Can only be activated while under the effects of Revealed. Expires when no longer under the effects of Revealed. Gain new skills. Utility skills can still be used.
-NOTE: The Improvisation trait will cause a reset of the cooldown of the transformation ability when Stygian Charge is used.
- Cooldown: 6s
Skill 1:
[Black Bolt]
Shoot a shadowy crossbow bolt at your foe.
- Damage: 0.75
- Increment ¾ second
- Range: 1200
Skill 2:
[Cheap Shots]; 3 Initiative
Shoot three bolts in rapid succession at your foe’s weak spots, making them briefly helpless.
- Damage: 0.5 (Eyes) / 0.4 (Gut) / 0.3 (Shins)
- Blind (Eyes): 2s
- Vulnerability(4) (Gut): 3s
- Cripple (Shins): 3s
- Range: 1200
Skill 3:
[Fakeout Bolt]; 4 Initiative
Shoot a bolt high into the air above you. Inflict confusion to a target that it lands on. Teleport to the location if it does not hit a target.
- {Ground targeted}
- Damage: 0.01
- Ground-targeted
- Confusion(4): 3s
- Radius: 130
- Flight Duration: 2s
- Range: 1200
Skill 4:
[Wicked Abandon]
Gain extreme potency of crossbow attacks for duration while initiative drains rapidly. Natural Initiative regeneration stops during the duration. Effect also ends upon initiative reaching 0.
- Duration: 4s
- Revealed: 8s
- Drain: 2 Initiative per second
- Damage increase: 25%
- Bleeding(2): 5s
- Poison(1): 1s
Skill 5:
[Stygian Assault]//[Ink Splatter]; 5 Initiative
Release a debilitating stream of inky, magical bolts from your crossbow, marking your target with Black Ink with each hit.
- (Debuff Effect) [Black Ink](6s): Apply 1 stack of Black Ink.
- Attack Duration: 1.5s
- Number of shots: 8 × 0.1 (0.8)
- Range: 1200
[Ink Splatter]; 2 Initiative
Transform the Black Ink coating your target from your Stygian Assault into spikes that impale them, dealing massive damage to them and less damage to nearby enemies.
- Damage per stack of Black Ink: 0.35 (max 2.8)
- Damage to nearby targets: 0.2
- Radius: 150
- Number of Targets: 5
- Unblockable
- Range: 2400
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
Regarding your “gunslinger” archetype, I posted a comprehensive suggestion for a rifle ES which gives the rifle particularly good abilities without just being the “OP killshot sniper” and fundamentally changes the way the profession plays. It’s still a work in progress, and I’m not sure it fits the “gunslinger” bill as I think it’s a bit too specific (I think “Gunslinger” implies P/P + rifle), but I figured I’d toss a link here, since your thread seems to have attracted much more attention than mine did.
The thief has several fundamental design problems which have led it to be difficult to balance and a great framework class for exploiting overpowered and un-fun mechanics. ANet, rather than re-designing, has simply tweaked numbers and given the thief massive buffs and dirtier, spammier play through Daredevil as compensation.
Daredevil as a specialization is pretty much pure power creep + cheese-mode built on the principles of Acrobatics without the associated risks or real concern for timing or resource management. In two words I’d call it spammy and gimmicky. It covers a lot of the missing utility and damage from various trait lines combined in one nice low-investment package, while sporting lots and lots of invuln uptime through spammed dodge rolls and buffed evasion on a variety of weapons.
It’s objectively the strongest the thief has ever been and massively overshadows the core thief specializations in all facets of sPvP.
sPvP in general has boiled down largely to a battle of team compositions and how well players can rotate their skills rather than through improvised gameplay fighting tooth and nail for a win. The competitive builds are exploitive, using or featuring poorly-designed mechanics with limited or no counters, and as such opportunistic gameplay as the thief once featured and as was the definitive way to succeed in sPvP/WvW is out the window.
Nothing will substitute being a better player; a very good thief will beat unskilled players at other classes given proper builds. Unfortunately what constitutes skill for the specializations and current state of the game is completely different from what the class was meant to provide or how the original combat mechanisms of the game and subsequent core specializations worked. As such, you’re seeing complaints about relative weakness since the vision and prior style of the class is no longer a way it can be played competitively.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
It still should.
Guild Wars 2 didn’t raise the expansion. You can, in fact, still compete without having the expansion. Therefore, Guild Wars 2 is less pay to win than any of the competition.
Again, false. You did not reply to me so maybe ill make it shorter this time. WoW releases expansions that will not punish you directly for not buying it. GW2 does.
How does this punish you for not buying it?
…
Guilds and Guild Halls? They blatantly removed features from the base game and gated them behind HoT.
Guild halls removed all benefits a guild could have and removed benefits a guild previously had unlocked, gating the same benefits behind thousands of gold and can only be accessed by leaders with the expansion. New benefits for guilds are also completely obscene in WvW; these benefits are so incredibly massive that server populations have dropped by a full tier’s worth of WvW participation status game-wide. Full/Very High servers are now down to High status, and the number of organized guilds playing within the format who are incapable of getting the funding for the obscene expense that is guild halls are incapable of performing at necessary benchmarks to succeed as they did prior to HoT.
PvP is a complete mess at the moment. Not a single “core” specialization can make it into the competitive scene, and even the weakest of the new elite specializations fail to deliver on the promise of what was supposed to be not a clear advantage from the CEO himself by being innately stronger than core specializations that are intended to hard-counter them. We have seen many professional players call the elite specialization implementations “unbalanced”, “a joke”, “rubbish”, and “destroying sPvP”. We have seen top-tier competitive teams withdraw from the format/game announcing their withdraw based entirely on the imbalance of the elite specializations, bugged gameplay, and overall pitiful attempt to create a fun and exciting environment promised from HoT.
Dungeons and non-HoT gold-earning methods have been nerfed, new stat combinations in HoT are blatantly superior to the old, and all new developments to the game have been formally been announced as requiring the expansion.
There is an absolutely definitive and game-wide requirement of the expansion, otherwise players without it will be blatantly left in the dust due to what can be measured as objectively poorer methods of success across all game modes.
Dancing Dagger
Body Shot
Choking Gas
Aimed Shot
Crushing Blow
Tremor
All of ranger shortbow
Hunter’s Call
Illusionary Riposte
Magic Bullet
The game has been out for a long time already, and is in a completely different realm. Looks like it could be fun, but I’ll let some reviewers do their jobs and take a closer look at the company after a month or two when the high of new-release starts wearing off and they start putting things for sale in their cash shop. I’m not sure if I should feel more confident or less confident if localization took almost five years.
I mentioned above Ankle Shots’ effect has a 10s ICD on a 3s duration; Ankle Shots gives the ability for pistol attacks to apply cripple for 3s. Just this ability to do so for some reason has a 10s ICD, making the effect rather pointless in comparison to say, PT.
I played P/P gunslinger thief for over a year competitively before the buffs to Unload, and dual-mained a ranger from release to before HoT. P/P thief outputs better DPS numbers and also can out-burst RF by chaining unloads in the same time frame.
If there is such a drastic need for being at 1200 range, a pet going into melee will surely die. Also, the pet truly does negligible damage. In an encounter that truly needs ranged attacks, anyways, that pet is going to be swapped so often it’ll be missing out on half of its attacks which deal maybe a few hundred damage to a given boss. I wont speak for the HoT pets because those pets have massively overtuned damage like most of the HoT specs are blatantly overpowered. I think it’s safe to say in regards to power builds, Revenant PvE numbers are off the charts and nothing will ever even hope to compare without massive nerfs or buffs somewhere along the line. As a frame of reference, a Rev does around four times the damage of a longbow ranger… using just its auto-attack. If you seriously want to contribute to a WB in terms of damage output, you’re not doing it correctly by playing ranged damage. Also of note, P/P thief will deal less damage than dagger MH thief. This is again, because ranged damage, by design, is meant to deal less damage than melee attacks.
I wasn’t discussing 1200 range. You said “unload is relatively weak” to the ranger, making the claim that the longbow ranger crushes P/P thief in DPS numbers. I just demonstrated above that not only is this claim false, but the ranger can only become even competitive to the P/P thief in DPS when playing at 1200 range, and as soon as he gets closer than that for party buffs, as soon as people stack vuln instead of himself and the thief having none, he automatically loses his damage edge to the P/P thief, and if he does get closer, he also loses his capacity to dodge otherwise again, losing to the thief.
Ranged weapons are meant to deal sub-par damage as opposed to melee options because of the nature of combo fields and buffs/boons, and for PvP balance to prevent players from perching on a ledge and just 100-0’ing other people. Hammer Revenant is currently ruining WvW by trivializing fights by dealing what are currently AOE backstabs to blobs of players. Giving the thief 1200 ranged competitive DPS or huge burst does absolutely nothing for the class in PvE and breaks the class in sPvP/WvW. It’s why I designed the Deadeye the way I did, and why I gave the class a high-investment, short-term transformation ability to get 1200-range DPS/Burst without breaking the class entirely in terms of its balance, while also giving the rifle a unique role and give condition builds some love without playing cheese like D/D evasion spam or P/D SA stealth camping, while giving the thief PvE/Raid usage by allowing it massive interruption potential to quickly bring down break bars to double or triple the entire party’s damage output.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
At one point in the past I did run a SA/Acro/Trickery P/P Cleric’s interrupt blindspam healing venom build. It was extremely effective because one venom on an unload was an instant full heal.
Trait changes and the new specializations killed it, though. Unless you’re playing D/D condi evasion cheese, you’re not sustaining.
You can expect that in any mixed community, for every PvPer complaining about something, there are ten to a hundred times as many non-PvPers who are upset about something, but in no way interact with the forums or other public outlets.
Source for this information? I only know the claim that a “small” portion of players take to alternate media to make complaints. As far as I am concerned, there is no evidence and has been no evidence of such a claim that PvP players are 10 to 100 times more likely to complain on external media about a game to its developers over non-PvP players. Additionally, a factor of ten for a range is absolutely massive, particularly when discussing percentages.
They didn’t remove the trait for extra damage on the pistol. Ankle Shots is there and continues to be there. Unfortunately they did change it such that its effects only work on burst situations since it has a 10s ICD and a 3s duration. It also competes with PT which is more consistent albeit provides a slightly smaller damage modifier.
Two unloads is better than a rapid fire. If you build a thief to spec for damage, such as DA/CS/Tr or CS/Tr/DD, one unload will deal comparable damage to a rapid fire. The thief has the best damage modifier access in the game, despite the Druid being able to achieve close values. Two unloads will absolutely and undeniably deal substantially more damage than an RF, which is the longbow ranger’s absolute best DPS. In the minimum cooldown of a RF recharge via Quick Draw + Lead the Wind playing Longbow + Longbow on a ranger, you can theoretically achieve three RF’s on average every 20 seconds, or once every 6.67s due to the cooldown on swapping weapons.
At worst, unload can be used every 5s flat due to the rate of natural initiative regeneration. Pushing RFI, Infiltrator’s Signet, Kleptomanic, and Quick Pockets, a thief every 20s regenerates 2 + 2 + 2 + 6 = 12 initiative running a mirror set of P/P + P/P as the ranger running double longbow. So over the course of 20s, we can see the ranger performing three sequences of RF (and this decays for the worse as the fight time increases due to the swapping dependency for the ranger to proc Quick Draw), and the thief, never using Unload unless at maximum initiative, would be able to perform 4 unloads baseline at 1 init per second + 2 more =6 unloads with an additional 40% of an unload ready.
Also of importance is the Ranger’s capacity to ever RF at complete maximum of 10% extra damage from vulnerability; this offsets the penalty from Lead Attacks in the Trickery line.
Factoring a cancellation of Steady Focus to Exposed Weakness’s 100% uptime being generous to the ranger (assuming the ranger never needs to dodge or is never targeted at 1200 range and can fight from complete and total safety), a Druid-built ranger using SotW and GoE can only ever modify his damage via a 1.2 and 1.1 modifiers respectively at 13.3% uptime and 30% uptimes. Therefore the average damage modifiers are 1.0266 and 1.03 for the ranger.
The thief in Executioner’s average modifier of 10% extra damage per encounter alone provides more damage. Back to Crit Strikes, however, the thief gains an additional 7% off of Flawless Strikes (we’ll also assume this thief can stay over 90% health, but he’s allowed to dodge unlike the ranger), 1% net on Ferocious Strikes per encounter, but he also gets the ability to maintain an innate 13.3% more critical damage via PT over the ranger AND an additional 16.7% critical damage modifier from permanent NQ uptime while also having better innate critical hit chance and permanent fury uptime than the ranger, which the ranger of said build is physically incapable of doing, netting a 30% increase in critical hit damage. The net result is a compounded total where the thief at hand in terms of raw coefficients pumps on an average hit over 20% more damage than the ranger. This again is also assuming the ranger gets his 10% damage modifier from Vuln, which we’re also assuming is not capped and is solely influenced by the classes themselves. A given unload by the thief at hand will deal approximately 80% of a Rapid Fire per unload while retaining maximum initiative. Burst-wise, the thief wins favoring almost 60% more damage from these two skills compared. What’s left is the auto-attack, which the longbow ranger wins, only while at maximum range. The thief’s pistol auto-attacks will deal roughly 80% of the damage of a given 1200+ range Druid longbow auto. However, since Unload’s damage is favored so heavily over RF’s, and based on the skill-downtime mentioned prior, this gap is closed entirely as the fight progresses due to the thief’s Unload damage dealing so much much damage over RF due to its frequency of use.
We can assume the pet deals negligible damage on the pretense that the above situation occurs in a vacuum; if other players provide vulnerability or a warrior with a greatsword or D/D ele is brought to stack might, the thief unquestionably does better DPS numbers because key advantages the ranger has will be negated entirely, and the thief will be in range of the stacking effects for 25 might (750 power; the thief is now guaranteed to deal more damage per second including its auto-attacks) whereas the ranger will be required to be out of range to gain its advantages from not needing to dodge and maintain its longbow damage. Going in closer, the ranger immediately loses its edge on its Auto-chain and subsequently loses all advantages it has.
As soon as the ranger stops playing Longbow/Longbow Quick Draw RF, the thief wins the DPS race through one set of P/P alone and the trickery line.
So how exactly do you want the rifle to do amazing DPS? Autos that hit for 6k+ baseline at 1200 range on a .75s delay? That’s just OP.
(edited by DeceiverX.8361)
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