Guild Wars 2

Kitten, people, can we keep this civil? The discussion’s gone more towards personal dung-slinging than discussing the actual proposal.

EoTM and WvW are incomparable. Considering EoTM is pretty much played to be ktrained; the map layout is so linear that there’s really no other way to play except for blobbing, the experience and overall rewards are decent, it’s social, and most importantly, there are no worries or concerns over score, fights, and guild representation on the battlefield. It’s a huge clustercat of randoms not fighting for any common goal or common enemy, offers no tactical play options, and is too linear in its design to warrant anything but blobs, which isn’t even balanced; even if it was played properly, green would always favor a win, as it houses the strongest servers per tier. Thing is, EoTM is horribly-implemented and pretty much only played because it’s a loot/champion bag farm replacement that lets people level up quick. There are no dedicated WvW players there because the mode isn’t taken seriously, and frankly, doesn’t promote combat.

“Alliance”, EoTM-style, “globe,” or whatever other terminology is designated for a rework can’t be compared to EoTM. The maps can’t be instanced unless the instancing mechanic is changed heavily with variance in how PPT is calculated. That said, server pride is largely gone at this point with megaservers in PvE, and guilds move so frequently or have moved so often that it’s not like the guilds defining a lot of servers’ successes have been loyalists leading some kind of crusade for the glory of the server. It’s more about the glory of the team effort to win and pronounce your guild or group rather than just the arbitrary server name.

The big issue at hand is that the current model isn’t sustainable. We have night-capping being a huge problem, outnumbering being a huge problem, glicko acting too slowly, massive exoduses, maps that are too big or poorly designed for smaller groups, and huge resource disparities between tiers.

The only argument is maybe to prevent night-capping bu reducing the points for off-hours. But that devalues foreign players’ time. Imagine the frustration of flipping a keep but having the tick only count for 20% of the points it would be when you’re not playing. That just demoralizes a lot of the community, and frankly, would likely lead to stacked servers for foreign nations pushing for a common time slot to maximize PPT and their resources while negating enemy efforts during each others’ off hours than offering a good way to mix up the population and keep the fighting and PPT persistent.

A crude implementation of EoTM-like “alliances” following similar operations to current EoTM would definitely be horrible. But the current model is also failing substantially. We should be trying to reach solutions or identifying where problems are and how to fix those issues rather than just chest-thumping making claims one’s answer is the best and only way while solely ridiculing others for having differing ideas. Debate is awesome and promotes thought and analysis. Challenging intellect or capability is going to solve nothing more than not talking at all.

To be fair, Shadow Shot is the best use of initiative on D/P, and the success of D/D depends almost solely on CnD, otherwise it does worse damage and is less reliable while offering lower defenses and utility than D/P.

OP’s incorrect in that Vault’s damage is actually riding a 2.5 coefficient. It does strictly more damage than backstab as well.

Edit: Nvm, they fixed it no longer dealing 2.52

Had to verify just now.

Hilarious and absolutely fantastic. Slightly restored my faith in ANet despite piling doubts from the expansion.

All digital property existing in the game is solely owned by ArenaNet and therefore they are legally the only entity in a trade which can profit by the exchange of goods.

Is there a way for them to know? Unlikely. But that doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t suspend accounts just on suspicion alone. Accounts can be closed with or without reason or definitive proof. All a support worker needs is the inclination RMT happened, and boom, the accounts are gone with no way to get them back.

Legally, the only acceptable behavior is for both to be exchanged as gifts. As soon as this hits regularity, though, expect a suspension by being able to be classified as someone profiting or potentially profiting by ANet’s property.

People demanded a format requiring explicit roles as a “traditional” RPG may offer. This pretty much entails one tank, one or two supports, and the rest DPS.

So they made one.

And now the same people are whining that the number of tanks isn’t outnumbering the number of DPS.

I’m gonna say it straight: If anyone who suggested the idea of “traditional” style play thought it was going to happen to incorporate exclusively more tanks or supports, you have no knowledge on how optimization works or how people optimize their playing styles.

The best you could achieve is a slight shift in the “meta” that changes things from “all berserker” to “all berserker except the required players”. This is because people either:

A: Don’t want to spend time raiding and want the rewards faster because they nerfed the hell out of the other PvE options, or generally do not have interest in the content.

or

B: Most people are just copy-pasting the setup used by some min-max PvE players who play for speed runs. OF COURSE THEY’RE GOING TO OPTIMIZE DAMAGE. THAT’S HOW SPEED RUNS WORK.

Consequently, making the dungeon require x gear on y class is just as strict of a “meta” requirement as parties kicking non-DPS. It’s a zero-win situation and those who complained demanding for this kind of content are fools to believe in a situation where “everything is viable”. That’s not how game design or balance can even theoretically work when humans are involved. Actually, it’s provable that such design is literally impossible to achieve.

There will always be an enforced “meta”, be it game-design or community-driven. Always. Period. No objections. Even in perfectly-balanced games, they still exist and can encroach levels of meta-meta-analysis in regards to human psychology.

Do not think for a second this will ever be resolved nor achievable in full by ANet or any game company. If you’re not playing a meta spec, you’re SOL. The reason why dungeons were made to be completed by any and all builds initially was because of the principle that they could at least be completed by anyone and not required. This loosened the grasp to being upheld by the community, which as normal, analysis and reward-driven play lead to optimization. This leads to the norm, which leads to rejection when not followed.

A game-driven “meta” demanding stricter roles (raid content) forces the game backwards in its design towards exclusivity in content and ultimately destabilizes the game community and player morale as a whole. The player-driven “meta” will also still exist as a subset of possibilities allowable by the game’s designation. This leads to internal optimizations, and so on.

Anyone declaring that this is resolvable is arguing contrary to principles of human behavior and the study of game design. Objectively speaking, anyone stating this type of problem can be truly resolved is factually incorrect.

Thus, for those who begged and begged for a change and are now upset they are not able to fulfill the role they want to play: I have no sympathy.

And for those who just want to play their way and do not care about trying to resolve the problem: Complain about the design inhibiting all styles, contrary to the dungeon design, and play the old style of content, or quit. Look for others like you. There are many, and the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Fighting against the notion of an optimal strategy is impossible. Rallying to play cooperatively sub-optimally and allowing for the option to complete said content without designated roles or design is your only available option.

Disagree with both of you.

The rifle should be the first supportive weapon for the thief not featuring high damage or stealth attacks, and its specialization should focus heavily on the revealed mechanic.

We’re talking guns here. Loud, big, and not at all stealthy. The theme should be built around this. What better way than to start working with the other side to stealth: revealed. We’ve already seen some of this with Revealed Training, and revealed becoming a more common effect could make such a specialization highly useful. Why not extrapolate this more and promote self-reveal more when given bonus effects or abilities? This could leave some nice interplay with both non-stealth and stealth attack builds, and gives a lot of opportunity to inflict this effect to the thief himself and change the way this effect may work.

From a game balance point of view, the rifle should bring to the table lots of attacks to the vitals, disablement, and an element of surprise and ranged control that lets you support from a distance due to the class’s innate lack of durability while offering supportive fire to your allies while prepared to slip out of a fight if things get bad, as per thief style. The rifle should take on a blend of engineer-style gadgets and the thief’s preparedness to allow for a diverse set of abilities while not promoting super-cheese mega-deeps or burst like what is currently on the DH or revenant, but while keeping the feel of the nimble and quick gameplay the thief brings, and fully allowing the utilization of initiative to apply a variety of on-demand disabling effects to really lock down your target. I think we can all agree the DH and Rev right now doing what they’re doing are overpowered and not fun to play as nor against. I don’t want to see the thief end up this way with a rifle that just one-shots people or offers way too much sustained damage that’s unhealthy, and the initiative mechanic and ranged weapons make this very difficult to balance without making it result to what vault spam is for the Daredevil in terms of skill : damage viability.

I’m hoping to push out my comprehensive suggestion for the next elite specialization featuring the rifle in the next few weeks after my schedule calms down and I have more time to develop proper solutions to the last-minute holes I need to fill. Do not worry, though. The spec offers lots of damage capability, but not in the way you might be thinking. I plan on converging a few class mechanics that will offer a balanced and unique ways (and totally B.A.) way to play the first 1200-ranged-capable thief since the nerfs to shortbow.

Moving SE is kind of pointless considering MA if switched would still be the best option to use. LR and CD are pretty bad, so you’d just have SE → MA on every build running SA, anyways. No real change there. Unless the other traits get changed, it’s pretty much a non-issue, because the others are so horrible.

Frankly, I’m not sure why venoms are even in SA. I feel like they belong in DA and some aspects of the traits improved. Makes no sense for the venoms to be in the stealth line. Not really sure which trait should have the cooldown reduction. Aura is more useful/considered a better trait, though, and lets the thief take HT.

I’m pretty sure MWS is just meant to be an extremely good trait in general. There’s no reason to nerf /change it because x/D benefits from it better than x/P, considering D/P as a whole and x/P Daredevil are pretty much the best options the thief has right now.

I’m not sure if you’re new to the thief or aren’t aware, but MWS currently does work on all effects that gain stealth, including combo field use.

It’d also cut down on SR’s stealth duration, Hidden Thief’s, as well as Blinding Powder’s. That’s an unnecessary change that’d inhibit diversity by a large margin.

It’s only really good against ranged targets.

Real funny to see an incoming rapid fire, true shot, unload spam, or the likes and just walk up to the person shooting saying “NO” the whole time.

But yea, otherwise the skill is horrible for melee use.

“Catered to casuals”

Looks at guild hall requirements, gold nerfs, etc.

Yea, no.

They catered to people who have tons of time to devote to the game.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Ohoni.6057:

~~~ snip ~~~

I give you credit for attempting to bring psychology into the debate. I, too, have a background in psychology as well as business. While jealousy can have a negative impact on people who view the fortunate ones with envious eyes, that’s only half the story. Game designers have to look at the impact of player retention. The science to player retention in MMOs is to give players long term goals or goals that have a high replay value. Giving all players what they want achieves the opposite of this. Without goals, players will get bored. The counter to this is to pump out more and more new content. With Anet and their limited resources, they’re not able to bring out new content fast enough, so the only option left is to have longer term goals. The carrot on the long stick, so to speak. And you can also artificially extend the goals by putting in gates (i.e. once per day crafting).

In Guild Wars 2, or any other MMO, you have a wide variety of players. You have players who demand challenges. You have players who thrive in PvP. You have players who roleplay. You have players who want to collect everything in the game. And you have players who want the best items in the game for no effort. The latter is categorized as Entitlement. Among all groups and types of players, the Entitled player is the one that a game company doesn’t want to cater to. As stated above, once these players get what they want, and no longer have anything else to desire, they lose interest in the game. This leads down the road to quitting the game until more new content is released.

There has been debates on players quitting because they don’t get what they want. This is true. Some players who don’t get their way, or if the game doesn’t do/reward what they’re feel they deserve, they’ll leave. However, this group would have far less people quitting than the group of players who are bored. Using some made up numbers, it’s better to have 2 players quit over not having their way, over 100 players quit because there’s nothing left to do.

It’s definitely a balancing act. It’s also heavily dependent on the culture of those playing. I think it goes without saying that western players are more interested in getting their rewards sooner than those in the eastern market. There’s a reason that Korean imports usually fail in the west, and it almost always has to do with time investment/reward.

Goals definitely keep players around. Unfortunately, treadmills are risky. Time-gated completion is risky and can be a big turnoff for people with play schedules that differ from the target audience. Usually implementing these kinds of things isn’t advisable due to the potential of alienating customers. Of course, it’s difficult to create content that doesn’t both get rapidly consumed nor gated behind time or resource walls not available to many players.

The best way to go about a solution to maximize retention and prevent churning isn’t so much by adding new objectives but actually changing the rules of a game to create a new experience. It ought to be just as fair as the original from a numbers perspective as to prevent morale loss for flawed design, and should inspire more creativity and provoke more thought than repetition, just as the initial game did for the novice. While humans have a tendency to be completionists and hoarders, we are also intelligent enough to at some point learn we’re on a big hamster wheel. The approach of adding more goals is unfortunately not a sustainable way to run a game. As these get more and more obscene and removed from the core design or implementation of the game, more and more people churn.

The thing is, to create an environment where this approach on creating high or almost innumerable replay-ability is implemented requires a lot of resources and the design intentions of doing so long before implementation. Getting things like AI experts to implement PCG for the game is long and expensive, and proving mathematically that a game is balanced (as well as from a QA point of view with real people) is arduous and requires a lot of iteration and subsequently more development effort and money spent on resources.

Or, companies can just book the main stage at a games expo and announce the release a a re-skin of the current mechanics — chess with blue and green pieces — generate a ton of hype, and ride the waves of profit when all that was changed were some aesthetics.

Took me like five minutes to realize the difference.

Sure. Though it’s not changing the fact I think the plasma weapons look very silly.

Litego.4953:

DeceiverX.8361:

Should depend on the area you’re in and what you’re doing. If you’re in towns or general PvE, you should be over 100 frames on average.

I am over 100 FPS in those scenarios, that’s not the point. Point is I drop to 40 in other scenarios, and that should not be happening as I have no bottleneck.

Something’s not right if you’re capping 50% ram on the 32 bit client. Check your hardware and make sure all is good.

Use the 64-bit client as well if you haven’t downloaded it. I’d also recommend Win10 if you install classic shell as the OS itself runs better.

It’s not capping at 50% RAM usage, it’s just that I still have another 8GB to use, so it’s not a RAM bottleneck. The game itself was only using 3.3GB, and yes I am using the 64bit client. Windows 10 might help, but I still shouldn’t be having these issues on Windows 8.1.

The game is extremely CPU-dependent as most MMO’s are. Your fps drops are actually likely caused by your CPU not being able to handle the processing. Unbelievably, the CPU is holding you back much more than you think, albeit there’s not much you can do about it. Also make sure you’re not using your iGPU instead of the 980. Update drivers accordingly.

But as I mentioned, my CPU is only at 40% load, how can it be bottlenecking? The hardest working core was at 80% And yes I’m sure I’m not using the iGPU, and my drivers are up to date.

Check to see if your RAM is actually running at higher than 1800-2300 mhz. You’ll only get better performance out of the 6700k with high-end OC’ed ram (3000+). Otherwise you might be getting bottlenecked there a little bit. I noticed huge gains moving to substantially faster ram on processor-based tasks.

My RAM is running at 2400MHz, but they’re at fairly tight timings at CL12 to make up a little bit for the slower speed. Regardless, I’ve never heard RAM have any major impact on performance in any game, we’re talking around 1% here, at 40 FPS that’s not even bringing me to 41. I doubt it’s any different in GW2, and how did people manage before DDR4 then? As 2400MHz is already extremely fast on DDR3.

Otherwise, just tone down the dials a bit and tweak accordingly.

Changing graphics settings barely do anything. And I shouldn’t have to either. My whole point with this thread is that I can not see any bottlenecks in my system, yet the game is running really badly. And it confuses me, I just don’t get it. It doesn’t make any sense to me that it is the RAM. Are you telling me that you had a 6700K with slow DDR4 RAM, and then upgraded only your RAM? And that helped on performance?

I’ll just go in order because triply-nested quotes are irritating.

Applications are only allowed to use a certain amount of memory. I was asking you this because 32-bit applications physically cannot use more than 2GB of ram at a time.
Applications again will only store information deemed worth storing. Not all applications will max your memory out. That’s bad/risky design from a software development standpoint. Extra ram beyond 8GB these days is for allowing multiple application to run concurrently. I know little of Windows 8.1, but it’s possible there may be Win10 optimizations or optimizations within Win10 to improve upon these issues.

You’re bottlenecked on the fact your CPU isn’t running 10e*X times faster than it would need to be in order to achieve a noticeable difference. The performance hits are brought on by software limitations rather than hardware ones. Faster hardware can only help improve this so far. Thus, to overcome the shortcomings of software limitations of the game engine or programming algorithms in general, your CPU technically “isn’t fast enough.” Does that mean there is a hardware solution out there to make the game run seamlessly at 100+ frames? No. That’s just the reality of the matter. There was a game programmer who came on the boards to address this issue a while ago. You’re realistically not getting much better performance in high-density maps. At least not until there are some huge changes made to the engine and some programming paradigms within it. The game doesn’t support multiple cores because the engine was developed for DX9. Your processing capabilities on one core are severely inhibited from what they could be on multiple. Application and OS intervention can throttle CPU usage to prevent crashes or problems down the line.

In computer architecture, the bottleneck currently is RAM and hard drive access. HDD access is usually done upon things like loading screens to cache all possible things that will or could be visible to avoid the need to reference the hard drive. The GPU is just a math-box that runs extremely fast from bonkers pipelining capabilities. Higher speed ram will increase your performance, even if it’s not substantial, because in a system like yours, the only room for hardware to make a bigger difference is in the RAM. Otherwise your clock speeds pretty much do not matter as a fast clock with slow memory access is going to be just as slow as the memory access times. Do some research on the 6700K and performance measures with different RAM setups and you’ll see the difference depending on how deep you delve.

People managed because 40 frames is still a very solid number. I’ll tell you now that standard cinema films are recorded at 24 frames per second. If the game looks like crap, it’s because there’s variance in performance causing brief hanging rather than a smooth transition. This is again traced so software problems. Check background processes and prioritize GW2. Standard cinema film is 24 FPS. Long as you’re not overdoing the rendering, you shouldn’t have too many problems here.

I didn’t use lower DDR3/DDR4 on my new desktop, no. I did notice the increases when performing benchmark tests and tasks with high CPU usage with a lot of read/write tasks in programming. I haven’t done comprehensive tests playing GW2 because I don’t have any issues playing at 40 frames when in massive blob fights. I’ve also been playing less lately, and am currently away and thus do not have access to my desktop.

I believe shadows and reflections are done on the CPU for some reason. Try cutting them down and doing some testing.

Try limiting the FPS to 30-40 and see if anything changes. Lag’s usually more of a consistency problem than anything. Even down to 60 at max unless your monitor is a high-end one functioning over 60hz. Either way, at the highest, cut down the frames to whatever your monitor’s refresh rate is in hertz, +/- some for consistency.

BeepBoopBop.5403:

As a Thief main, I would gladly become a gimmick class if it meant I could fight on equal footing as other elite specs. Stealth doesn’t count as a gimmick anymore, reveals are too prevalent. Evades are decent, but without the vigor that old acro provided they are short lived. OP does have a point in that Thief’s role used to involve controlling Mesmer power, because no other class can keep up with Mesmer blinks/stealth. But now, Thief counters no one and is hard countered by like half the classes in the game.

There’s gimmicky and then there’s OP/cheesy.

A full-damage D/D backstab thief is gimmicky; its primary source of damage is through the use of one combo. But it’s not cheesy to play against; it has massive weaknesses and can be taken advantage of easily. It’s also not even close to strong, let alone OP.

Vault spam is gimmicky. Hell, it’s objectively better than backstab from DPS, burst, and damage per initiative over every other skill by a massive margin. It’s still relatively weak, though.

The thief is weak not because of gimmicks, but because of blatant power disparities between the classes. It’s also the same reason the warrior is weak; it’s a well-balanced class. And being well-balanced in this environment means weak, especially with sPvP’s stat systems. WvW, the balancing is much tighter despite a few odd cases in roaming.

It shouldn’t be a matter of rock-paper-scissors of classes but of builds, and frankly, gimmicks need to have major sacrifices. Yes, I can take a backstab to 17k in sPvP on my thief. But that also means I have no defense, utility skills, condition cleanses, or very little map movement, and will be a sitting duck if my opponent plays in a way to counter a backstab-built thief, or simply gets the jump on me.

There are too many immunity effects, conditions are in fact scaling rampantly, and not enough ways for making a build to counter others rather than entire classes getting massive power boosts for no real reason in the false assumption buffs and tweaking numbers make for more diverse environments. If the changes were rapid, maybe we’d see more diverse play, but balancing efforts come way too slowly, so optimal strategies establish well-before the next balance cycle.

The warrior is out-paced right now, and is best off with other classes being toned down, or some of its skills and abilities tweaked up. I see this as a two-way street for some classes being over-tuned and blatant disparity for some of the warrior’s abilities requiring numbers increases. That said, overdoing this would easily put the warrior into a position of being overpowered due to its relative ease to master and rather simple combat mechanics. Overtuning this would put us back in the first-iteration of healing signet-land or worse.

The thief is dependent largely on its style/build and the actions and build of the opponent. To compensate, thieves need more of a spread of abilities to cover all of their bases throughout all of their traits, and a lot of “functionally necessary” traits and abilities reworked and merged to create a more streamlined and holistic play experience rather than deep specialization and even deeper sacrifices made with wild variable extremes to become competitive or slightly better than other classes at one particular thing. Either we need to start seeing this occurring on other classes through the reduction of boon access, lowered base stats and improved scaling potential in conflicting-interest traits, and a change in the mechanics of trapper runes. stealth, and revealed for other classes, or the thief needs substantial changes design-wise to be competitive.

As such, I expect nothing to change; the developers are fixated on not making sweeping changes to classes nor are they willing to constantly push out changes to numbers in attempts to destabilize the meta and find a common ground. As CJ once said, they prefer to work on “low-hanging fruit” adjustments to balance. It’s unfortunate when the end goal of satisfying the hunger resides only some branches above.

I’d argue that if DS had access to some stability like RS, it’d be used more and arguably better than RS in PvP environments for power builds. Condi builds get screwed only because of the slowness of the attack speed from Dhuumfire and the lack of chill condition damage.

From a power perspective, the only real advantages to RS are the DPS/cleave and stability. Otherwise, DS offers better burst, sustain, control, range, utility, and durability due to it having three trait lines.

BeepBoopBop.5403:

epouvante.7392:

Do you realize that 5 energy on coalescence of ruin for 2 sec cd and 5 for phase smash for 8 sec is nothing? Where is the energy managment with just 5 energy cost?

+1

Energy might as well not exist for Rev moves such as those. They’re just insane spammable AoE Backstabs with CDs longer than the energy CD. This is like reducing Pistol Whip to 2 initiative and giving it a 5 sec CD lol.

Edit: Let me actually be accurate on this. This is exactly like giving thief 20 Initiative pool and Pistol Whip costing 1 initiative with a 5 sec CD. Oh and intiative is restored on weapon swap. This balance is some kind of cruel prank.

The irony is even backstab has a higher cooldown and lower damage than CoR.

Should depend on the area you’re in and what you’re doing. If you’re in towns or general PvE, you should be over 100 frames on average. I just built a PC with almost the same hardware (970, though), and even blob-surfing WvW do not dip below 35 on max.

Something’s not right if you’re capping 50% ram on the 32 bit client. Check your hardware and make sure all is good.

Use the 64-bit client as well if you haven’t downloaded it. I’d also recommend Win10 if you install classic shell as the OS itself runs better.

The game is extremely CPU-dependent as most MMO’s are. Your fps drops are actually likely caused by your CPU not being able to handle the processing. Unbelievably, the CPU is holding you back much more than you think, albeit there’s not much you can do about it. Also make sure you’re not using your iGPU instead of the 980. Update drivers accordingly.

Check to see if your RAM is actually running at higher than 1800-2300 mhz. You’ll only get better performance out of the 6700k with high-end OC’ed ram (3000+). Otherwise you might be getting bottlenecked there a little bit. I noticed huge gains moving to substantially faster ram on processor-based tasks.

Otherwise, just tone down the dials a bit and tweak accordingly.

If you’re from YB, and this trash talk occurred about a year ago, but sorry not sorry, it’s deserved. As of now, I have no idea.

Blatantly unfun “fighting” them when I was in T2/T3. :P

ReigaK.9572:

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

Berserker still has it’s uses but it’s not the end-all be-all of PvE endgame.

Various gears with healing power are useful for healers in raids (though using berserkers on druids still works) as well has things like celestial, rabid, etc. for tanks.

DPS people still need to be on Berserker or Viper gear

This is for raids, for fractals and dungeons it’s all Berserker or Viper

Hmmm okay. Still debating if I wanna buy Heart of Thorns. While I totally understand that beserker is useful for its high damage capabilities, I just honestly get tired of an ENTIRE group of beserker, it just isn’t fun to me IMHO. When I first started playing when it launched I tried to make a support/tank style that focused on healing/buffing/protecting and it was incredibly fun and satisfying to me, but it wasn’t viable at all and nobody wanted me and even if I got into a group it was just a rush run.

It’s always going to be a rush if you play with people who want to rush. Most people want to rush, because most people are bored of the dungeons and just want to get the reward at the end.

Kind of like signing your name. When you first learned cursive, you probably wrote it as neat as possible and put tons of care into it. Be honest, how close to an illegible squiggle is it now? Your handwriting’s gotten better, but it’s so boring and mindless the effort of putting a good job into it just isn’t worth it. That’s how a lot of players feel about dungeons, so long as they get what they need from it.

No matter what you do, where you go, optimizations and conserving time will always exist. That’s just human nature, especially on repetitious tasks. It’s why we have innovation.

I’d suggest if you want more casual runs to make a party in LFG stating “all welcome” , or perhaps post on the boards looking for a guild that does more traditional runs or doesn’t care about party composition. I’ve never had an issue finding a party as an “all welcome” party creator despite the fact I play DPS; and some of those parties have inadvertently been some of the fastest I’ve ever had because people actually knew their classes and did a good job playing.

Good luck, but a non-existent meta is unfortunately never going to exist. If the meta were healing and tanking, you might be happy, but DPS players wouldn’t be. Best to just look for people who care not about hyper-speed runs. There are a lot of people out there who don’t care about speed.

Edit: That being said, HoT is pretty unforgiving for berserker/DPS builds. Particularly raids. That said, the content in HoT is pretty lack-luster unless you’re after elite specs. Buy the cheapest package you can if you decide to do it, and as an FYI, you’re not pugging raids any time soon. They’re hard.

I disagree, Jayne. I think the attitude was relevant a while ago before megaservers and when communities were larger, but at this point, when you start as a new player, you have no idea what server you’re on or what those communities entail.

On the converse to your statements, I would argue that you’d see fewer guild transfers based on ditching for greener pastures. Unless there’s a good community reason for the guilds to move to another server, there wouldn’t be much of a reason to switch. Yea, some could try and stacks the odds to win for a week, but if matchmaking is a smarter system (as I mentioned above), and more responsive than it is now, it’s unlikely the matchup would stay that way. And if a guild to move away is so substantial to impact a server negatively, that guild spent tons of money to move one way or another. Either the guild itself can’t sustain the lifestyle, or many of its players won’t be able to pay out of pocket to do so, fragmenting the guild, and creating new communities for the abandoned members to join in turn. Guilds will take hits from this, and then learn not to move frequently.

And if a prominent guild does still leave, at least WvW doesn’t become dead; the server sees a population loss but can still maintain its fighting presence by being helped by the rest of the servers. This way, the remaining WvW community has some cover while it tries to re-establish itself rather than just getting demoralized and spiraling until a crash.

I was on SoR at launch. So I’ve been there. If you’re not familiar, SoR was the best server for WvW in the game before the free transfer opportunities. It had a massive guild fallout, though, which devastated WvW presence and leadership for the server, creating a period of dead/no WvW activity, slowly leading it down to T8. It hasn’t recovered well since. Had there been other presence maintaining the maps for a little while during recuperation, the server would probably be doing well enough for itself, still.

This way, servers end up a bit more stable in regards to their prominent guilds and communities, and transfers become more about communities themselves than winning the PPT war or getting fights.

It also lets new players to GW2 hop into the game and get the best experience for WvW. I’ll be honest and say that a lot of WvW players are not or were not recently new, and a lot of them started playing when populations were generally higher. Think of yourself joining the game for the first time for this cool thing called WvW. You select a random server because they’re all labeled as having good populations (and most of the upper ones are full), try it out, and… nothing. There’s nobody there. That experience is probably alienating a large portion of potential WvW’ers, and probably part of the reason why we’re a small percentage of the player population in general. Given more opportunity to have new people get better WvW experiences, the format would likely be growing or maintaining it population instead of shrinking.

That’s why it’s not an easy fix, and it’d need a lot of careful planning and refinement to matchmaking to pull off. But I suspect this is really the only way to revitalize WvW for the future. Adding in gimmicks or rewards will just make it a theme-park experience that eventually causes the current players to churn and new ones to not join.

The fine-tweaking of builds, better stat scaling, and possible diversity is what makes WvW much more interesting than sPvP.

sPvP, you see a class and pretty much know exactly what to expect because everything is so limited; class strengths and weaknesses are border-line predetermined because of how limited the combinations are and how poorly some stats scale in comparison.

WvW, you run into a class and have no idea what build they’re going to be, and even then, you have no idea on the scale to which it could perform. You only know what to expect after engaging or choosing not to, unless there’s some extreme roaming cheese style spec for some class. But that’s not unique to WvW; D/D cele ele was pretty much invincible in sPvP because of failure to balance the class, but ended up completely fair in WvW because other classes could get their stats to the levels needed to beat it out.

I’d probably switch games if WvW went to regulated stats. I love messing around with obscure combinations and tweaking heavily, sometimes even down to fractions of percentages. PvE is too boring to make that worth my effort.

There will always be one stat used by the masses deemed as superior; be it for damage or defense, when in reality only the pinnacle of players min-maxing their time for speed-runs will see noticeable differences. The masses want quick and easy clears. Stale dungeons lead to the easy part, so all that was variable was the quick part, and repeating those stale dungeons over and over again made players want the runs to end even faster, because they were bored.

There will always be a “meta” that focuses on optimizing efficiency. Always. And the majority of people will always be attracted to this ideology, moreso than ever, due to the lower rewards from these methods of playing and higher costs to sustain equipment and characters.

As such, there will always be a “berserker”; even if the mob difficulty was cranked up so heavily that playing in berserker gear was not possible for enough pugs, and the “stable” and fast run was done on dire, anyone not using such a combination would be considered a waste of time or not abiding to the oh-so-sacred pug meta.

Aw c’mon guys. How do you think we thieves feel about all this stealth nonsense and seeing it even on guardians ._.

Unfortunately, despite the Dragonhunter existing, I still believe that a long-range stealth-based nuking “snipe” build shouldn’t be able to exist, particularly at 1500 base range. It seems particularly broken, especially when considering the thief’s other existing damage modifiers. Shadow Rejuv would probably also cause some major conflicts with the Aim//Snipe mechanic, for it’d allow for some substantial overcharging of Aim, causing even a medium-damage attack to deal what is likely astronomical amounts of damage. With Expert Marksmanship, it’d yield potential for infinite charging while stealthed. That’s a bit problematic considering effects like SR give substantial stealth durations and would allow for scaling to get way out of control. Consequently, these types of adjustments would only really help the class function in WvW roaming than in sPvP, where is where the class is truly at a loss at the moment due to the lack of skirmishing and supportive options it has compared to the rest.

The rest of the kit also looks way overtuned; initiative refund on the auto offers way too much synergy with Sundering Strikes. Suppressing fire would strip stability rom anything, and a 12x daze lock is completely bonkers. Chaining this with Deadly Paradox would pretty much make the thief unbeatable in any 1v1 situation. Bewildering stride would also pretty much make the thief immune to a large portion of other attacks an effects for its duration.

Overall, the spec looks way too overpowered in almost every way. I’ll give you that the rest of the stances are creative, but if Reflex is meant to increase in duration, that’s just silly OP, and duration-giving unblockable effects on such a DPS/burst-based spec is too punishing to guardians not building full tank at that point.

I have a rifle elite spec idea developing but have been cut off from time to really polish it out.

I wholeheartedly agree with your speculation. To resolve the map situation and queues of combined servers problems are difficult ones.

Upping the map caps as they are unfortunately can’t be done to such an extreme. Framerates would plummet so harshly that it’d be playable. Not much you can do in terms of optimizations when there’s that much data to process and render, and server-side applications for processing this may bottleneck.

Do recall that I never stated these kinds of “alliances” would need to be created of an equal number of servers. You could end up having T1 against the rest of the game, and so on, but of course, this kind of matchup wouldn’t happen because the metrics would evaluate this as having queue problems among others.

I feel as though instances of new maps should open only if there are queues on all three servers, and subsequently allow only those queued in on the lowest-populated server enter.

This way, if populated imbalances from data from previous weeks ends up calculating reasonable matchups, the population differences shouldn’t be too substantial at any given time, thus only “alliances” with huge numbers disparities favoring them would be hindered, but that already occurs now on one map on reset night. Proper matchmaking could actually help solve the queuing problem. Of course, calculating PPT based on map instances is the next problem presenting itself, which is something I can’t really think of a solution for as of now.

Swift.1930:

Honestly, now I’m waiting for someone to try this and then come back here and say “TROLLZZ IT DOESN’T WORK”. There goes 6+ lvl 80 characters and (most) of the rewards of 2000 hours of gaming. Honestly, though, if time = money? You’ll pay the gems for the transfer. Seriously.

Edit: okay, maybe not most of the rewards. A lot, though.

No, the OP’s not wrong; you can even contact customer support. When a RL friend of mine joined the game, and he joined a server I wasn’t playing on by accident without realizing the consequences, they told him that character deletion was/is/will be an option. That said, because the account was less than a day old, they did move him for free out of kindness for a newbie and respect for real friends playing together rather than having him go through the process of reaching level 10 again.

Having played on all tiers and currently residing in the middle, I agree with the OP’s perspective, though I don’t think implementation of such matchmaking should be based on just score, nor do I think the matchups should change so slowly.

Phantom raises good points. Communications issues would be pretty difficult to deal with if nothing else were to change. To create this kind of environment, WvW would need some substantial system changes. Matchmaking would still need to be decided by individual server performance on various metrics; total score, number of kills/deaths, objective flips, number of orange swords activated, population density graphing by time, PPT by time,, population heat-mapping, etc. Then an algorithm needs to be devised to try and optimize this and create a “balanced” match-up for color assignments. This way, if there’s a massive disparity globally, it can be resolved, instead of just +/- one tier.

There would need to be a server chat tab made available, server-only and guild-only commander tags, and various other things to try and cut down on communication conflicts.

Size is definitely another concern. We’d need much bigger map coverage/zones. These are other obstacles to account for differences is preferred playstyle.

That said, most of the people in the low tiers don’t necessarily like or dislike it. Most hardcore WvW players in the low tiers either jumped ship to other servers, or have since quit. The lowest of the low are so dead right now you might as well be playing slow PvE, which is why nobody goes into WvW despite the server PvE populations being reasonably high still.

Server pride is really just arbitrary at this point with megaservers. Half of the people you see out of WvW are going to be on other servers, and the only “reliable” people you’ll find are your own server-members, which you’ll notice stick with you time and time again as matches change.

Infusion.7149:

Keep in mind you won’t get any of the birthday presents and such. It’s not just crafting, exploration, etc.

This is a big one. I’m actually keeping ancient characters I don’t play or have paid to rename them/re-build them because I figured some of the birthday rewards would end up adding up in the long run.

As it turns out, I wasn’t too wrong with the 3-year present :P

The only true “solution” is EoTM-style matches of pooled servers based on a server-by-server performance metric. Granted, we’d need like five copies of the maps to fit everyone at reset, but this is the only way to ensure server pride (do well and you go up a “tier” to become more of a deciding factor in the matchups; only your server-members are permanent allies). This also makes guilds more pronounced as other servers start seeing various tiers’ top players, and the skill can escalate for guilds and crate good fights no matter what tier the guild is currently residing on/will not be held back by low population/interest or lack of off-hours coverage. Guild raiding becomes way more impactful this way, as your competition and allies are game-wide, so getting noticed can be a huge deal, and might help spur some more WvW play.

I know people want to keep their servers isolated and avoid anything EoTM-like (and I can’t blame you), but aside from the size concerns of the maps/performance and calculating PPT, it’s really the only good way.

Letting players/guilds create their own alliance networks unfortunately does not work, as proven by several games which have previously tried this mechanic; it leads to a ton of backstabbing and general poor attitude in the game, and rather than working together as a force to overcome a struggle with no way of backing out, often results in just stacking the tables to win easily and ganging up on others to maintain superiority.

The build would benefit more from PR, despite FS’s usefulness. Your stealth-chase/escape frequency is going to be low considering the amount of ranged/aoe cripple you have going on, the general susceptibility the build will have to burst condition application, and the lack of initiative you’re likely going to have, for any situation calling for FS is better fulfilled by shortbow 5, and your stealth access is determined by a skill costing just as much initiative with less escape/engage potential and overall bringing less utility to a given match.

If your utilities were stealth skills or you planned on using D/P and SA for decapping, I could see some potential for using it. Otherwise, PR’s going to likely be more useful for staying alive, and if you really need to close that gap, just use a heartseeker and your cripple/chill woes are over. Frankly, I’d drop trickster and use BT considering you’ve only got one trick on what’s still a relatively high cooldown that won’t be the real contributor to dealing damage, and stealing boons is probably going to up your reliability way more, likely offer more durability, and give your team a bigger advantage.

…Why am I helping spread this cancerous build?…

I played Fury/Trickster P/P doing it on one of my alt thieves going DA/CS/Tr with withdraw and NQ. Didn’t have too many problems except for monsters that dealt more damage than my max health.

Most of the champions and missions, aside from Balth, didn’t pose any issues. I would suggest not using a melee-oriented setup for the content unless playing a much tankier build in the form of toughness and vitality.

Dirame.8521:

I recently fought a Daredevil and I literally could not touch him with Reaper Shroud. Switched to DS and all of a sudden, he was eating pavement every bloody second.

And like Flow said, I mainly use normal Necro because I want 3 trait lines that I think are incredibly strong together.

The amount of CC that RS gives is good for downed cleave and team fights, whilst the instant fear and immob from DS is great for 1v1s or for CC chains on a single target.

Exactly. RS brings cleaving and straight DPS which the necro never had before, but when it comes to fighting something where focused fire is needed, the base necro is absolutely stronger than the reaper.

Really, the only thing holding the base necro back is stability access. Unfortunately I think giving base necro enough stability to not be eating dirt fairly frequently would potentially throw it into being OP due to durability and how it can chunk people so well.

That said, necro/reaper against thief can be a really good fight depending on build, and this matchup is pretty even. Good thieves can do pretty fairly against both, but it’s pretty much entirely their skill level that will decide whether or not they will win or lose.

You’re right on there being “sustain” options in every line, but many of them are huge sacrifices to make to builds or are just poor traits.

Mug healing going up gives the skill more strategic value rather than just damage.

Invigorating precision is difficult to deal with because it’s both extremely strong and a weaker option to pick from (For the CS GM’s) at the same time. HK being built into Keen Observer and a trait to remove a condition on stealth attacks might be a decent option, but I think this would likely require a lot of balance speculation, and possibly changes to HK and IP due to the potential overdose of sustain and burst damage optimization.

Assassin’s reward is horrible, and it’s a shame that DD and Acrobatics are basically the same; heal on dodge was a great idea but for the line trait line. This would also require a lot of examination as too much sustain here would let Acro/DD/SA become possibly night unkillable for landing a hit would be challenging enough as it is.

SRejuv is completely fine and one of the best traits in the game. Paired with damage reduction and condition cleanses, SA needs no more mitigation than it has. If anything, to buff some of the other lines, more might need to get pulled from here as to prevent the thief from sustaining too easily.

DD healing is alright. With the rest of the tweaks above it’d probably be reasonable as is.

Trickery offers a lot and I don’t think it needs changes, for if every other line offers some kind of equivalent sustain, there’s no need for 3x redundancy.

You’d be hitting harder using Vault. It’s got better damage than backstab.

The only thing keeping RS “better” than DS is the stability. Given better stability in DS, both would be about equal (DS a bit better for most purposes imho), just with two very distinct and different play styles.

@Squishy
Budget-wise, you’re looking at the same gear/stats combination, just with exotics (and no infusions), and using a sigil of Purity instead of Generosity. Otherwise the build relies pretty heavily on force/accuracy for crits, and scholar runes for extra damage. The food is cheap except the oils; you can use sharpening stones instead, but I would recommend oils as they bolster the damage substantially.

Unfortunately I have no gameplay footage. Not enough hard drive room to constantly video my play without constantly needing to delete the video and re-record every couple of minutes. I built a new PC with some more forgiveness (and Win10’s playback feature), but have had very limited time to play since building it and haven’t had a lot of good opportunities. Most matchups I’ve had the time to play on have either been my server getting spawn-camped from being heavily outnumbered, or blobbing and surfing the front line for funsies. I hope that when work starts settling down in the near future I can be playing a bit more and posting some info.

Some gear has changed slightly since taking this screenshot, but the damage is quite similar and I haven’t deviated from the core build or gear stat dispersion. Obviously stacks for an additional +100 power are no longer around, but it really doesn’t matter much when you start approaching the 3.5-4k mark. It’s a really fun build, though, and frequently poses a challenge when you fight competent players who react out of the backstab/prevent it or see you coming and can survive the burst. Once you’re out of ammunition the fight becomes a struggle to stay alive long enough to find a good opportunity and hammer them down again. Shortbow resetting and running away is boring :P

Ario.8964:

Okay so with a possible reduction of revealing effects I could let this one go. But overall we are in agreement that there needs to not be an instant counter to such a huge skill? Though I could settle with each pulse of sr removing 2-3 sec of reveal as a counter to the counter if that makes any balance sense. That way the skill isn’t rendered useless but it’s effect is reduced as it doesn’t stack as high stealth as most thieves intend to with the skill.

Okay I can see your point on that. So if it was left as it is but some other defenses got buffed would you be on board with that?

The reason I suggest reductions on reveal skills themselves is because putting SR as a counter to the skills meant to counter stealth as a mechanic just funnels more thieves into needing to use SR; we should be looking for solutions that bolster build diversity and general fairness over just sheer power creep on skills that are already considered strong. We’re seeing more revealed because more classes/builds are using stealth; cut the stealth from other classes and there becomes less of a need for revealed, allowing for revealed to be required less or yield such substantial gains, allowing for nerfs to access or buffs to the thief’s stealth. This way, all thieves benefit instead of just those using SR.

Again, I think more healing added to mug could be a start for defenses. I think it’s fair that the class is punished for not avoiding the big hits, and good on our enemies for bursting us and playing into our weaknesses. Just like we slip through their cracks and defenses to land a hit, they should do the same for our active defenses, and if that hit is a big one, we should be just as punished. Giving the thief extra healing in the fight from steal allows the skill to be used in a wider array of circumstances while keeping the thief sustaining against hits that shouldn’t really matter; dodging True Shot and such skills should be rewarded, and the thief should be able to recover better from taking a few autos or random AOE’s from other classes when it has steal available and can use it as a bit of an extra heal if need be.

I see. I think there just need to be fewer revealing effects in the game, especially if suggestion 1 is followed or stealth access in general (PU, trapper runes, the scrapper drone) sharply reduced. Someone waiting to use an ability for SR deserves to see the thief at the least or potentially get it revealed, but I will agree the accessibility of revealed right now for how it functions is too high, especially on AOE’s.

I don’t think a 5% reduction on mug would cut it. 5% of 12k is only 600. 11.4k is still a ton of damage to be dealing out at instant speed. I get that the damage might feel underwhelming for its cool down on a non-hyper-burst build, but critting would put this over the edge without substantial nerfs, which really just begs the question of why not leave it as it is or just maybe increase the healing to keep steal a valid sustain mechanism while engaged in combat to bolster the thief’s skirmishing potential.

Not necessarily more damage, no. I used skills like Body Shot and Dancing Dagger as examples, because those skills are relatively underwhelming not because of damage but because of what they offer in general. Body Shot applying a longer immobilize, Dancing Dagger a higher projectile speed and longer range, etc. Infiltrator’s return could go back to an instant cast… these are the kind of upward-tweaking ideas the class can really benefit from. As I said earlier, increasing damage/stat values is not the right approach at all.

I’m suggesting for traits that there should be more overlap; you pick Trickery or a few traits in CS for fury If you want it. There are damage modifiers all over the place. But there’s no offense in SA or Acrobatics like there used to be, and no condition cleansing anywhere else. As I said, for thieves to maintain their offensive potency, they need two trait lines for it. But this sacrifices defense. For defensive/sustaining capabilities, they also need two trait lines. These options are distinct and separate as it is in regards to the trait lines themselves and offer no flexibility. A necro can cleanse conditions in multiple trait lines. It can get extra durability in a variety of ways, as well as gain damage in a variety of ways. A guardian can spec DPS in multiple trait lines through a variety of trait options and/or cleanse conditions in a variety of trait selections. A ranger can stack might from plethora of traits and techniques, or stack bonus damage, or play tankier through various options. The thief has no capacity for diversity when assigning traits; you either pick cleanses from SE, or you don’t have any/many. Either you pick DA or you don’t get much disablement. Either you pick CS or you don’t build for crits.

SA providing trait options for getting bonuses upon being revealed or CS offering a condition cleanse option over just straight damage, or DA offering endurance regeneration after interrupting a foe or something… These are arbitrary and off-the-cuff examples of diversifying the trait lines to create more overlapping for flexibility within the class, no buffs necessarily needed to numbers, just improved availability of doing different things.

At first I was wondering if this list was going to be somewhat reasonable. Then I saw #2 and #3. I couldn’t keep reading.

SR reveals when leaving it because that’s how it gets counter-played. It’s already seen as one of the best utilities in the game. I really don’t understand why people demand this skill be buffed not to reveal. Most people don’t position it correctly and get out-smarted in positioning and question why a massive radius AOE stealth for a long period of time isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. Your opponent played smart as you should expect them to. It’s common to kill another thief in SR as a thief because you know what they’re doing. It’s the same thing just from other classes or ways of dealing with it.

No way should mug be able to crit again. I know mine hover around 4-5k as it is. That would one-shot most of the dwellers on this sub-forum or come close, and could be done from stealth at a 100% crit chance.

Jana.6831:

Cynz.9437:

after doing some raids and pvp with rev, ini is NOT issue and this change won’t do anything for thieves

what thieves need is dmg boost and way to get through defensives (prot/invuls etc.)

also they REAAALLLLYYY need massive buff to team support capability (be it boon share, heal etc.) otherwise there is no point to bring them anywhere

i am running atm on rev doing 12k AAs alone while sharing might with everyone, blasting fields is history~

Initative is a problem – I said it in another thread (in case someone wonders he’s heard that before) :

I watched an old video of a D/D thief recently, he was running 26600 = 12 initative.
And after a while I wondered why he really only used CnD and BS (and rarely Dancing Dagger) – because he couldn’t affort anything else.
But the initative is what brought us the problems we have: We can “spam BS”, so we were made glassier and glassier and were more and more forced to be “endless stealthed”. And then they brought revealed traits/skills as a counter and gave other classes better stealth- that is the part I don’t get.
If they now gave us a longer reveal so we couldn’t spam stealth + BS we would basically have a cooldown system – which we kind of already have when forcefully revealed.

The irony is that backstab isn’t the powerful aspect of stealth; the defense when in SA and repositioning are what make the whole notion of stealth and subsequently attacking from stealth strong.

This is why I disagree with the notions of both that it is wholly an initiative or stat problem; the problem is with the underlying design of our trait spread and how we interact with our skills. There are absolutely merits to both arguments, and some of the ideas are definitely causing problems. Just throwing more numbers at the problems won’t ever solve balance concerns, though.

Just giving the thief lower initiative costs or more initiative doesn’t solve the defensive problems of the class; to get “decent” defensive options, two defensive lines need to be taken. For competitive damage, two offensive. I’m not saying the thief should be able to stack everything it could want in one build, no; the issues lie more in that to be on the stat-level of most other professions, two trait lines are needed for any given one way to compete per one trait line of theirs.

What each trait line needs to do is offer a spread of abilities that can appeal to every build. I’m not saying it’s easy to make these changes, but these are the tweaks that need to happen. There needs to be more overlap between the trait lines, as many others offer from other classes, but with each just offering a bit of flair and some playstyle differentiation. Trickery offers this kind of diverse toolset to the thief; even with preparedness baseline, this trait line would still be awesome due to the diversity and overlap it brings; it synergizes naturally with every build because it offers something to every build, from boons from CS and acrobatics to condition cleanses from SA to disablement from DA, with the flair of stealing boons and bolstering initiative. A lot of the traits that could open up doors in other trait lines are also just weak, or simply don’t fit very well.

Initiative needs some examination, but I wouldn’t argue it needs more. More initiative just promotes spammy play by using the same objectively strong skill over and over. There’s no need for more Heartseeker Heroes or Shadow Shot Saviors. Nor is there justification for more vault spam, evasion Condi death blossom spam, infill arrow spam, etc. There are a lot of skills that are pretty much never useful, or at least to their initiative costs, so working those numbers out or even reworking/exchanging skills from one weapon to another might be in order.

If thieves are to get more initiative innately and potentially better skills, I see no reason not to add another mechanic to initiative: skill use costs extra initiative per consecutive use. This way, things like Body Shot and Dancing Dagger can get substantial buffs like they need, and a lot of skills can be tweaked upwards. It promotes being tricky, adaptive, and unpredictable like the class is supposed to, and punishes people who abuse the mechanic by building solely into the most overpowered skill at the time and doing absolutely nothing but using that skill, even when others are situationally more useful. No hard cool down enables that double-heartseeker finish, or whatever may be necessary at the time, so long as initiative is managed well.

Yea, low-hanging fruit fixes are to make thieves more durable and get more initiative, but these do nothing to calm the fuel for the complaints which have gotten us nerfed so many times in the past; either the stats end up as too much and we overbear another class or dominate a build, or we end up still-too-weak and need more tweaking. Doing all that tweaking will leave the game’s balance integrity worse off and the class design still suffering in the long term though, and end up requiring just as much if not more work to maintain properly.

It’s a bit different, but signet stab isn’t much of anything new. I’ve been running it for around two or three years now for WvW play, and the occasional sPvP run.

It hits like a truck, and is absolutely tons of fun to play, but it’ll never be a good build the way the classes are balanced and how sPvP promotes tankier builds while cutting down on available power and ferocity.

Better damage will come from more signets, and IS helps on the engage immensely. Comboing teleports is awesome and really takes your foe by surprise when you’re half a mile away and then when you’re on top of them the next second. I’d recommend almost anything over BP for sPvP as you’re missing a stun break and aren’t playing for stealth synergy. You should be popping out of stealth immediately to boost your burst per time and give your enemy less time to react to the burst. No SA penalizes you for stealth, and you’re lacking a stunbreak. RFI, Shadowstep, and IS are best here, depending on your needs/desires. Best damage (in regards to consistency) comes from IS due to the low cooldown and might with a teleport engage you can chain into steal.

Better skirmishing will come from S/D or S/P. Shortbow is definitely the better +1/decap weapon due to the mobility, but the sword offers awesome fighting utility. I heavily recommend it for WvW. I initially played a S/P intelligence sigil concept a while ago when Executioner was in CS rather than DA and took it over HK. Since the split, there’s no need for that, so I can focus on better damage sigils.

Infil Strike is great to pre-cast before engaging → swap to D/D and engage. After the burst, if the enemy is still up or predicts it/attempts to counter, just swap to S/x and teleport back, as the return distance is up to 1200. This gives you some reset potential, condition cleansing, and lets them blow cooldowns. S/D is also a lot better to use while revealed IMHO, and lets you cleave things like minions, turrets, clones, and the likes while packing a lot more CC. I like S/D for the boon strip and evades as well.

Trickster is an amazingly helpful trait to put a DoT cleanse on Withdraw so it consumes cover condis like cripple and chill.

This is my exact build I’ve been playing for quite a while. Note that I primarily WvW.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQRAoY8Yl0MhKnYjTwzJw/EHwEkPNxpN7Os8UoTQAyAA-T1CBAB7pf4SVP67gAUpaInpEEr9HlKAcCFySZVKaYY4IFEwDAIAACwNbz2sNDOv5Nv5Nv55m38m38m3sUACqzC-w

A lot of WvW and salvaging the materials from dead corpses. Unfortunately that method is rather kaput with WvW in the state it’s in right now.

I mean it has a damage coefficient better than backstab, costs less initiative, and has no stealth/revealed pre-requisite. It’s objectively the best DPS the thief currently has, and is also an AOE with movement and a short evade built-in.

There’s mathematically no reason not to spam it, especially since the rest of the staff is pretty horrible.

Gramp.7482:

Arent thief one of the highest, if not the highest single target dps? Whats with all the thief are weak threads lately?

Every class are qqing that their own class is weak. Just play what u freaking enjoy. Every class is weak every class needs a buff

From a sheer numbers point of view, you’re way off the mark. That’s the unfortunate truth.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

I’d be willing to bet that the damage was on a downed enemy, given the large number and the two vaults in a row with virtually no damage taken in between.

Either way, pointing to one skill and saying that the damage is good does not somehow make thief as a whole ok. Unless you want to say that bearbows have always been OP as well, since damage was never their problem.

Actually, bearbow’s damage was their problem. It was mathematically optimal DPS and burst to autoattack. None of the skills provided any amount of reasonable burst to deal with classes with sustained damage resistance. Even the thief could have eaten a RF and maintained 75%+ health as long as it was in stealth with rejuv. The damage was horrible, and the longbow autos due to the projectile speed at the time, extremely unreliable and easy to dodge. I’d like to point out that almost all of the suggestions I made on the ranger CDI have made it to the live game and have bolstered rangers’ viability massively as a consequence. Still not OP, and RF had a lot of QQ (and might still be overtuned for how well the class can now stack might, but I think that’s more of a might-stacking problem).

In the case of the thief/DD, the underlying mechanics and the deliberate design to rotate around only a few playstyle designs paired with a lack of skill and mechanic creativity in those skills have led to design stagnancy which has in turn resulted in poor balancing efforts through numbers-tweaking alone.

Without massive overhauls and rapid, focused iteration, the thief’s representation will continue to be binary in regards to blatant power disparities, be the effectiveness overwhelming or underwhelming.

There are very few raw number adjustments that can be made to help truly balance the class and increase its consistency, and I think the lack of dev inspiration involved in the class (the primary developers and almost the entirety of ANet’s staff do not play or even touch this class) to make it designed better on the conceptual level has created a scenario where they’re simply not knowledgeable enough to make these necessary changes while understanding the fact that number tweaks are not the right answer to the problem.

The result? Silence, much like the rest of the developers who are failing at their devices (guilds, WvW), because they know they can’t provide meaningful discussion and lack the inspiration or resources to learn.

This cycle is perpetuated by the deliberate lack of communication and discussion with the community to get a better understanding of topics they don’t know about. These teams appear to be operating on assumptions and theory not backed by informed inspection of the real world.

We saw the results of what proper communication can do for a company when the developers are not informed; the ranger CDI. This development led the class from being completely useless at almost everything to well-balanced in almost everything. Unfortunately this trend has failed to continue in a proper way with efforts being put in so many different places for all the wrong reasons.

The sad fact is that until new developers are found with an excruciating passion for the classes they play, or ANet changes its communication policy, nothing will change. The problems will continue to persist, maybe on another class, or a particular game mode, or whatever it may be, but without dedicated and passionate staff with a diverse set of interests and experiences, and lots of community interaction, the advances made will be minor at best.

Doggie.3184:

Reminds me of how much I want a Kung Fury headband for my Thief.

YES. YES. YES.

This absolutely needs to happen.

Beautiful, OP. +1

Maugetarr.6823:

DeceiverX.8361:

Not like it’s pretty much agreed upon that vault and BD are overtuned in their damage and the rest of the staff and the entirety of the thief is horrible or anything…

Woah, a 2.25 multiplier on a skill that can be walked out of is overtuned?

They’re fair-sized AOE’s and offer both repositions and evades. Recall that flanking strike has been repeatedly nerfed because of this, and almost everyone agrees the first iteration of flanking strike (not the one with boon removal) was overpowered.

2.25 Coeficient on the wiki is wrong; the damage is higher than backstab’s and that has 2.41. Vault’s should be approaching close to 2.5 and Vault’s is 1.31; better than Cloak and Dagger.

So yea, I’d argue those two abilities are wildly overtuned in their damage as an attempt to compensate for the horridness that is the rest of the staff and the class in general.

The newest thief build is called playing a Revenant. Designed especially for HoT.

If that’s any indication on the state of the thief…