Guild Wars 2

TheOrlyFactor.8341:

Nova.2890:

And that is exactly why I left this game.

Yet you’re posting on the forums. o_O

He’s not the only one. I find the forum PvP better than what’s in-game at this point.

I came here for the PvP/WvW, stayed for the PvP/WvW, and quit because the PvP/WvW got spoiled by catering to PvE in its design. A ton of sPvP/WvW people have done the same and feel the same.

There is a sizable chunk of the playerbase (maybe no longer due to so many quitting) that quit for the exact reasons the OP has suggested. If I didn’t ever have to set foot in PvE, I never would have. I’m pretty sure my main character with 6k hours on it still has 40% map completion, with most of my characters having < 5%, and some only 1%.

Forcing people into a certain kind of content is the exact opposite of what GW2 was founded on, and quite frankly, what made it so successful at launch. Since catering mote towards one audience a la HoT, sales have rapidly fallen and that’s just that.

Taobella.6597:

being in combat reset from 2500 range to a physical hit. con keep you in combat until they are cleared.

I’m not really sure how it works, but I’ve definitely OOC’ed at closer than 2500. Max range IR (1200) usually does it within a few seconds of not being attacked/attacking.

kdaddy.5431:

Here is why i hated the elite specs and i had this opinion in beta when i wrote a few threads for WvW and PvP about it.

1- Boons
I do not know why they created so much boon spam. The rev alone just gives boons with no real thought process. Warrior got a ton of boons for going into beserk mode and a elite skill to get into it which means there was gonna be constant spams.

I head butt you to go beserk, i gain might, fury, quickness. Because of another trait line i gain might on weapon swap as well as a condi clear. This means i go into beserk mode to do damage with said weapon and then out of beserk mode i will sit in shield stance so i can again go into my rotation for more boons to do the most damage while playing defensively.

That partially covers A class when it comes to boons but boons use to have to be set up now we just get it from hitting 1 button and bam 25 stacks of everything.

2- Build Diversity
No matter where you looked build diversity became worse and worse in all games modes when HOT released. It was Bunker Wars in PvP with 3 mesmers and 2 revs on 16 Pro Teams between NA and EU. It was Condi Wars in WvW where classes played condi so necros could play epi off of them killing whole zergs in seconds with no counter play.

Now usually PvE is play what you want but not in HOT. The key to playing HOT is AOE and playing CC. Its why people complained about pocket raptors or X vet boss. I for one dont consider this skilled game play and i find it as acheap trick into forcing most players to play the same skills.

For raids you have seen the lack of creativity with revs, engys. thieves, necros and guardians not even having a role for the meta. At 1 point it was 2 mesmers, 2 warriors, 4 eles and 2 druids. You join a pug group and this was the team comp everyone wanted because it was easy play with very few down sides.

3- The introduction of Elite Specs
Bringing elite specs into a game that has been working very well for 4-5 years you would think Anet would allow its PvP players and WvW players to work towards elite specs.

Anet didnt do to include other game modes with the new abilities. This drove alot of people crazy at the start of HOT and/or players who paly multiple chracters and have to unlock it on each character.

4- The Future
Many have touched on this but Anet straight up ran out of ideas to me when they brought in HOT. Adding class specific traits so a class can use a weapon in that trait line is really dumb.

They needed to add new weapons in this HOT expansion so they werent just giving classes new toys to play with. We are getting to the point were engys have weapon kits they dont use and the next weapon coming out might be grenades. Like for ele who has elemental weapons (which they nerfed to the ground) such as axes, hammer and Greatsword. They are now simply going to give ele a sword, this just shows a lack of ability to incorporate new things into the game.

You need weapons that give meaningful changes to a class. This HOT expansion gave us spam especially on classes like thief with 5 dodge 5 and dodge. Who at Anet thought staff spams was a good idea? Or the DH traps F3- F1 pull into traps.

Elite specs shouldnt have been the be all end all, they needed to add to potentially different styles of game play in zergs, 5 man teams and 1 vs X situations in PvE.

Because they couldnt balance specs classes lost the identities they had for 4-5 years. Players were happy with the state of the classes before HOT, the only people happy now are those who really like raiding.

Anet dropped the ball hard imo for HOT, if they do the same for the next expansion many will not have a reason to play it.

Side note the story of GW2 has gone full GW2 EX-Machina please get that back on track for the next expansion

Can’t +1 hard enough.

Weapons should have been incorporated into the core specializations; elites just made into new trait lines for the sake of new options or to majorly change the profession itself and nothing more. Makes it super easy to balance around because then weapons are decoupled and so on.

Everyone who played a lot of PvP and WvW (especially WvW) will know build diversity dropped massively with HoT.

It’s that exact reason why I played and loved D/D signets so much; what made it exciting and demand skill is when the burst failed. You ended up with no utilities, no passives, and very limited stealth. Getting the failed-burst kill is immensely satisfying and is often well-earned.

In similar regard, I fought a power shatter mesmer probably around 16 months ago and still remember the fights; we dueled extensively for a LONG time. He annihilated me repeatedly on D/D (which many argued I was near the tops with), and continued to make a fool of me when I played D/P (which is usually the table-turner for those who simply counter the D/D kit). His play was flawless and the total set of skills that he played into his combo was somewhere around 60k damage within a few seconds. 7k damage on the Prestige alone. There were a number of duels where I straight up did not even touch the guy.

I picked my mesmer back up to test some things out, did some research to get a little more know-how, and the next few times I saw him around eight months or so later we were trading kills pretty evenly. Still really kitten ed good, but that’s the power of having good understanding of your enemy; I went from getting absolutely trashed winning maybe once every 20 fights to pulling closer to 50/50.

Granted, especially now, I would never recommend anyone taking D/D power into any fight against a reasonably-competent player on anything.

Cleansing Ire requires the burst skills to hit to cleanse if I remember correctly. The cleanse on-swap sigils may also require a nearby target. I’ve never run any, however.

If you are not regenerating health, you are in combat.

Someone can hit you once and be hiding right behind that wall and you’ll stay in combat because they’re still within the range. There’s also a small timer component after breaking the range. The distance is roughly 1200 or so before you can OOC from what I understand.

Watch for Mirror Blade and dodge to pretty much negate most of the damage and combo, or take Instant Reflexes and just laugh at the fact you can facetank it with a passive. Power shatter mesmer has the best possible burst in the game. That said, it’s a kitten ed hard build to play and recover from without a ton of practice (or macros, which despite being against the rules, so many are fond of using these days).

Most power shatter mesmers, like power signet thieves, cannot fight after they fail the burst. I’ve only seen a very small pool of individuals who continue to fight well and apply pressure (and survive, albeit mostly from the Chaos line) after their burst fails.

Honestly, aside from the Berserker (and to some extent reaper, though thief will have the advantage a majority of the time), most power burst builds can very easily be shut down by just knowing how it plays and how to beat it by exploiting its weaknesses. I suggest you look at gameplay and theory on how to play power shatter burst mesmer and then give it some practice.

Take and utilize D/P and it’s not too difficult of a fight 99% of the time because most of the mesmers playing it aren’t in the mindset to recover from failing to burst.

As I’ve said for years, and as you’ll see from every highly successful thief, winning on the thief comes from knowing the other professions and what they’ll do. If you care not to study everyone else’s kit, you will lose a majority of your fights unless playing something on the overpowered side.

It’s the condi mesmers that are the ones you need to watch out for, mostly just because of their raw and asinine sustain in WvW from dire/tb when put in conjunction with the rest of their kit negating so much damage.

As a side note, to correct people in this thread, the thief does not innately have superior stealth to the mesmer/chrono. D/P daredevil or SA will, but aside from that, any other thief will see less stealth uptime than standard power shatter.

The limitations of the game engine are the source of the CPU bottleneck causing FPS lag. I’d be hard-pressed to believe the engine has anything to do with the server lag, as it is highly unlikely the engine is running at all on their back end.

As of even the last WvW blog post they outright said it comes from condition and boon calculations overloading the servers. The death of small-scale has resulted in more players blobbing which means even more calculations happening in the same fights negating any optimizations done. The engine itself – responsible for a lot of what we see client-side, shouldn’t be running on the back end or will play a very minimal role; this is all highly-streamlined netcode. The problem lies in the very nature of limitations of parallel computation and how subdivided their network architecture is.

It could definitely be cut down with specific optimization towards large-scale fights, but this is a massive undertaking for what would still be only imperfect gains, and could negatively affect performance in other scenarios outside of ZvZ.

Uh the servers’ hardware isn’t the problem in regards to lag. Issues lie in profession design mostly these days due to the massive amount of computational difficulty in performing so many inter-connected calculations all at the same exact time. Spam Wars 2 and the rise of resource-heavy builds like condi and boon spam are what lag the servers out. ANet has said this repeatedly and it is also why things lag in larger fights.

It’s only gotten worse because the blobbiness has gotten bigger. There used to be more people on the map not blobbing and those in the blob playing low-spam, low-boon power builds which are less resource-intensive than condition/boon spam ones in large scale. It got exacerbated largely with HoT for the former reasons.

Until they overhaul professions, this game will be laggy. Period. You can’t fix parallel systems issues with a “better engine” or buying more expensive/faster servers. The former is also insanely expensive and time-consuming to even make slight optimizations with because it pretty much operates on the hardware level in very complex codebases designed for parallelism. And the latter… well. it’d probably run a couple million dollars at least to make any noticeable dent, on top of some major code changes to reflect that new hardware, which is also expensive in both time and money.

Tourneys also burned people out a lot. Granted, they were also way too long.

At the end of the day, people aren’t playing WvW because the PvP in the game is no longer fun. The builds are boring and cheesy. It doesn’t “feel” good to play. People are not interested in playing for the sake of playing, and winning at a game not worth playing is meaningless.

Fix professions and the design of the combat to reflect more of core GW2 and we can talk. Until then, it’s pointless to make any other changes.

apharma.3741:

The weird thing is they nerfed things like stupid high dodges on thief in PvP because it was silly but left it in for WvW yet other classes and trait get unilaterally buffed/nerfed to stupid levels like deathly chill and the recent warrior nerfs.

Skill splitting was good but they forgot that things that are stupidly strong in PvP are quite often just as or stronger in WvW.

Ah well, it’s supposed to be a balance patch at the same time, who knows, maybe it will fix a lot of stuff but I won’t hold my breath as many people return, play then leave after all the rubbish.

This is why I’ve been opposed to skill splitting from the getgo. Most needed-splits are done because of underlying poor design, not due to numbers imbalances. ANet’s profession team is already not doing a good job with limited splitting, and did a poor job with no splitting prior to it. Why should we expect better results with increased complexity and nuance? I never could understand this logic.

If sPvP stats were upped to WvW/PvE and amulets broken down into parts for granular stat selection, then we could just see universal game balancing and wouldn’t have this awkward splits where misunderstood modes would only get further neglected.

ANet’s refusal to fix their poor design decisions (I.E. reworks and attentive reverts) has been the single biggest factor in what has made this game’s PvP scene crumble as a whole.

Celsith.2753:

You missed his point completely. Regardless of win or lose, it’s not a fun fight.

Something that people don’t seem to understand.

Combat is no longer fun or engaging. There’s literally no reason to be playing to begin with, rewards or not.

I’ve taken the liberty of quitting, as has everyone I ran with in-game. ANet just refuses to acknowledge their profession design is strictly terrible for the PvP formats at the moment.

Ryou.2398:

Oh yes guild wars 2 is dying suuuure, anet hey lets make an expansion instead of gw3 for a dying mmorpg ok fellas lets do it!

It takes a lot more money and time to make a new game than it does to make new content. At $60 for the expansion vs $60 for the new game, the RoI is almost guaranteed to be higher.

ANet will keep pumping out expansions for as long as they possibly can. Not to mention this game was supposed to last many years with many content updates, and it’s lost a ton of business from only one expansion so far.

The damage coefficient is high enough to make unblockable break a lot of things. Cut the damage coefficient and D/D power has nothing left.

Block access and passive defenses in general just need to be reduced to let the setup work.

Having it apply stealth on blind/block/whiff just promotes lower-skill play in general.

The issues with D/D largely lie on DB and DD. CnD’s issues lies with the rest of the game’s design, its initiative cost, and the stealth attack ICD quickly making it worthless when in conjunction with the above given D/D power’s dependence on Backstab.

Just another OH dagger thread, though. D/D is fine in PvE and therefore will never get buffed. ANet does not care about inter-profession balance.

PvP and WvW themselves in this game due to poor handling of professions are now just crap.

These are populations of merged servers. A vast majority, as predicted with HoT’s launch, have since left.

Pretty Pixie.8603:

The anti zerk sentiment wasn’t about making it unviable, but rather, to make condi a credible alternative. The current sentiment is that they went too far. Instead of an alternative, it has become the new Zerker meta.

The argument sounds familiar because it is the same argument. It was never about anti zerk or anti condi. It’s about pro diversity. Just because some people saturate their argument in hyperbole doesn’t mean the main argument isn’t sound.

What everyone crying failed to understand was that condi already was a viable alternative in PvE. Prior to HoT when conditions started getting totally out of control, there weren’t even raids. The notions of the “zerk meta” only existed in PvE dungeoning (condi was still dominant in WvW even then because stat-wise the sets are and have been mathematically stronger than power on a number of builds/classes). And the “zerk meta” only existed because it was part of the “optimal” clear speed in high-end speed-clear groups. People just copy-pasted what “pros” did because they either lacked the understanding the content could be done nearly as quickly and more consistently with any other gear setup, or simply got so bored of the same dungeons that they wanted to optimize their time to not spend as much time doing chores to grind gold.

The entire push for “fixing” the “zerk meta” is unfounded and baseless, and ANet’s decision-making towards attempting to resolve this in the name of Raids is equally irresponsible in terms of handling its game.

In most dungeon runs, players would never see the difference between Berserker and condition-based gear. It seriously came largely down to how players understood the content the traits they picked.

There will ALWAYS be an optimum. There never won’t be. Period. No game is or ever will be perfectly balanced to that level where two massively different approaches and formulae work in terms of a constant of time (which is based on many other factors, too) yield identical results. Speed clear groups will push hard for .01 seconds of increased efficiency. It’s that same pursuit that leads to metas to begin with.

As feared, buffing condition builds without major changes to gear stats and the builds themselves has completely demolished almost all integrity of PvP in the game. No matter what happens, there will be community-set PvE metas.

WvW is just doubly-kittened for having PvE balance, which is kind of ironic, because two years ago, it had the most diversity of all the formats because it had PvE balance which enabled way more builds than before.

ANet’s entire handling of professions, skills, gear, and so on are a sad joke at this point. It’s one of the worst mishaps of a triple-A western-made game title I’ve ever seen. The sPvP and WvW communities alike recognize there is no future in this company for those styles of play as it is, and despite GW2 being an amazing game, the combat is so borked right now almost everything on the market in regards to PvP is more enjoyable.

S/D was strong because it could precast FS before engage, wait on initiative, and engage with LS, and at the time (and still now if it were left unchanged) hard-counter a majority of the meta bunkers due to its boon hate and unblockable high-coefficient hit. Acro was mostly what set the kit as the potent dueling kit, but nerfs here and to baseline vigor efficacy pushed it defenses while the hit-dependency on FS made it incapable of delivering burst, dealing much damage, or providing high-impact engages.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

The bulk of the salt about Thief comes from WvW, not PvP. PvP thief was never a problem.

It’s in WvW that Thieves/DD too often have a risk/reward ratio that is kittened and a very annoying play style to fight against.

In WvW it is a completely different animal and a lot of the salt there is legitimate IMHO. Not in PvP tho.

That heavily depends on the build. It’s mostly DrD-specific at this point given Ghost Thief being deleted due to its abuse in PvE (thankfully). There are definitely PITA core builds, but for the most part they can all be shut down pretty easily. Daredevil itself is just much more forgiving, and people in general have higher defenses given Marauder amulet etc. which makes thieves in particular a lot tankier than normal. Since the Daredevil emphasizes its incapacity to be locked down, and a lot of people run “second chance” (or “third chance”) utilities/traits, punishing one is also a lot harder.

I think a big thing in WvW is that most people when unfamiliar with a class expect similar behavior to sPvP or use sPvP strategy/numbers as a basis for trying to understand how to play. The thief’s skills and so on have horrible base values and excellent scaling, which makes them a lot deadlier in WvW where stats are higher (AKA not horrible like in sPvP) and builds much more granular allowing for more min-maxing and optimization. This lets the thief actually bring a serious punch if built for it with a lot more oomph than sPvP. So when people read “just facetank/ burn it instantly, or ignore it” as PvP advice to deal with thieves, there’s a lot of concern when thieves are suddenly doing way more than they “should” in PvP.

No capture points/countering mobility and stealth are also major factors. They can utilize the whole field in WvW and take advantage of their mechanics rather than being pretty limited when it comes to fighting tactics in sPvP.

Lahm.7056:

A necro crushing in small scale requires good teamwork and peel from allies

Lmfao, no.

And how you proceeded to talk about durability when you end up with one of the tankiest stat distributions in the game (Dire/TB) and the highest base health and a second health pool with the best cleanses against what’s already a condi meta is just laughable.

The DC change in (WvW), much like everything else condition-based in general on top of that, is completely and totally overtuned.

Jski.6180:

It has nothing to do with wvw why condis keeps getting buffed its because of raids. Nothing in GW2 atm is because of wvw its all about raids i think even open world pve has taken a back seat to raids.

This.

Organized PvE now trumps all design and implementation decisions for balance in the game.

It’s a kitten ed shame, and a massive, massive failure on behalf of ANet, but it’s the truth.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I agree, Holl. A lot of other people disagree however because they don’t want their easy mode taken away from them.

As a long time Necro main, of course I don’t want Reaper nerfed in to uselessness. Something needs to be done about the current state of condi Reaper in WvW, though. Anyone logical should be able to see that it’s overtuned at the moment and needs a couple shaves.

Nobody vocal will ever support you.

Rational thought and the greater scheme of profession balance and integrity of design mean nothing to this generation of players, especially in WvW.

Honor fighting is dead and has been for a long, long time. It’s just a FoTM cesspool at this point and Necro happens to be the current favorite.

Just look at condi mesmer. It hasn’t seen a build change in over three years and has been broken this whole time.

Martym.6971:

DeceiverX.8361:

Martym.6971:

Fighting on nodes is of no consequence to Thieves with access to stealth.

You literally just lost all credibility here with this sentence.

I don’t even need to re-defend my stance; your blatant lack of understanding of the profession speaks volumes.

I am sorry you cannot understand context of discussion like your friend here. Sure there’s disadvantages to Thief, but Thief has ways to work around them. You’re just as bad as your butt buddy here. Thief can milk stealth on nodes to be of less consequence to their class as simply dying like other classes must do. Maybe you guys are bronze league.

Choppy.4183:

@Martym.6971

Lol, k. Whatever you need to tell yourself is fine by me. The rest of us know otherwise.

The rest of all 3 of you. Lol k? You’re all intellectual children with an IQ of 10 who cannot understand conversations, overexaggerate statements made in conversartions to mean something they never meant, then run off without defending the page of garbage and lies you spew. You’ve still lost all credibility, and you have yet to defend a word you have stated, explain your bull hockey on page 1, or establish a means of evidence for your claims. Oh but you will try to figure a way to lie and manipulate your way out of this one as well amirite?

JusticeRetroHunter.7684:

Martym.6971:

…I stated only for Thief and the nature of the class is why this is the only class designed for 1v1s…
You have already lost all credibility long ago, so I am not speaking to you further.

To be honest, you had no credibility from the start, by saying thief was designed to 1v1 any class…

@ your bottom paragraph, I literally stated this in my response. Wasting time? This is subjective if the opponent also wasted the same time to defend the node not capped. Sure you would be a moron to go around 1v1ing capped nodes, but giving up uncapped nodes? That just speaks volumes for your skill level and expertise as a Thief.

Other classes can disengage, that’s fair. But the argument is about Thief, and not all classes run away without even engaging. You’re trying to establish equality in your argument on disengaging, then also establish equality in class balance based on this fallacy, when the classes are nothing alike, and are balanced differently.

You all have stated the same thing over and over again, Thief was not designed around 1v1, then given no proof otherwise. If it is how Choppy stated, and Thieves were designed around Conquest, and everything else is a fallout of it, then explain to me why he considers them sub par in Conquest. The sole thing being nodes?

Well if Thieves were designed around the ability to acquire nodes with mobility, then why are their skillset for 1v1s? Why are they according to Choppy, balanced for Conquest and suck in Conquest? You have yet to explain this. As HitIer says in Mein Kampf, “Repeat a lie long enough and it becomes the truth”, which is exactly what you are doing making claims without proof, when Thief being the best 1v1 class is my proof.

This company may have intended balance for all classes in Conquest in the beginning, but all classes are not designed to be balanced around Conquest after they have tinkered with them. So if Thieves are sub par in Conquest, then why are people screaming for nerfs if Thief is sub par at the only method that this company balanced around? There’s so many flaws and circular logic on all of your statements it baffles me that you actually believe what you type.

I already did. As have many others. You’re a hopeless case by being so argumentative when literlly every experienced person here is telling you that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Which is the exact mentality of what I went into with my proposal.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

your last point ruins core thief witch is not to blame here at all. blinding powder is perftly fine as it is, shadow refuge has been left behind and needs a complete remake because as of the game age, and the amount of reveals going around no 1 is going to take sr wven if it was on a 30 sec cd.

edit, this post was aimed at dx

No, it only affects D/P on core and x/P on bound Daredevil. OOC stealth when it comes to weapon skills is only achievable given an OH pistol. You also seem to neglect to consider that I said this would also require reworks and tweaking to make work. Such sloppy changes would be a bad idea, and also why I said that because the work would be expansive to properly fix, ANet wouldn’t do it to begin with.

But even just running with why the adjustments themselves would be okay on the conceptual level:

Cut the cooldowns of both utilities in half, maybe even changing SR to two pulses and down to 20s cd. Both can be utilized differently OOC. SR on a lower cooldown would see a lot more use in sPvP from allowing a thief to pretty consistently move from point to point in stealth without needing to burn initiative or dodges leaping Black Powder if looking at the current state of the thief, and cutting out the innate stealth and normalizing D/P and the rest of the kits to have some better in-fight potential could bolster its +1 potency across multiple weapons or even profession-wide in the case of D/P. Then the trade becomes more fair for a utility for surprise +1’s and in turn the profession gets better at fighting not needing to depend on a preset selection of utilities or traits which frees up a slot. Win-win for every set if this is done correctly.

Thief has been held back in terms of generic buffs mostly because of D/P’s self-sufficiency. D/P’s dominance in core is also largely due to the ineffectiveness of everything else because D/P benefits from almost every possible buff as well, keeping it ahead. Changing the way stealth is accessed out of combat in general across all professions would free open a lot more weapons without just strictly nerfing D/P itself or the thief, while enabling numeric adjustments and some concept changes elsewhere which are not reasonable at the moment due to interactions with D/P.

bluri.2653:

even ifu remove dp sd would be absolute d o g p o op in spvp anyways. id rather play condi dd over sd cus u wouldnt do anything, u already hit like a wet noodle before and now after air/fire is gone i bet u cant even kill beasts on forest

Definitely one of the big disparities between sPvP and WvW is S/x damage. S/x performs quite well in WvW in deft hands; my LS usually crits over 10k for example, which being an unblockable boon rip is very potent.

In sPvP it definitely suffers from a slower/lesser degree of burst on-engage which negatively impacts +1 potential, and again will pretty much either provide the boon theft and unblockable hit on LS to create a down if the enemy is lowered, or will likely have limited effect. It’s a little more consistent than D/D power, but not by much, and D/D power is already pretty terrible in general, especially for +1’s in respects to its poor engage speed and lack of OOC stealth.

knyy.6427:

DeceiverX.8361:

And the same kind of safe damage is applicable to every profession in the game when it comes to cooldowns though. Except the damage is safer than from most other professions in this case, and quite frankly, we don’t know enough about the rifle to determine if those other sets are required or not. Unless the weapon is a gimmick, it will have the capacity to replace elements of others essential to the thief. All depend on high cooldowns to get some kind of major effect. The defining line at hand is about risk/reward and safety of damage. If there was a skill with a 5 minute cooldown that auto-killed a target in sight, it would be stupid, no?

Again, you’re making assumptions about the rifle’s mobility and stealth access. We can’t confirm that this will be heavily limited, and it’s something people are advocating for ensuring don’t – particularly in conjunction with burst – to avoid cheese. And that’s precisely it; nobody has the ability to provide proof on anything but simply state concerns that things very well could get out of hand.

I paralleled this to Ghost Thief above, which while it wasn’t explicitly overpowered, was not healthy for the game. I express similar concerns about the rifle and burst damage without major tradeoffs. There’s really nothing to argue here because we’re talking about the potential for things to go awry, rather than what we expect to.

Expectations of the implementation being poor can only be based on ANet’s track record. I personally think theirs is terrible when it comes to profession design, including that of many aspects of the Daredevil and thief.

Well you make assumptions yourself too. At this stage we can only assume and theorize about what will be, cause we simply can’t. But from the same person who leaked some pictures it had been said that the new elite spec is all about positioning and not stealth.

I assume Thief didn’t had a long range weapon yet because thieves have high mobility and stealth. If you take away the high mobility and part of stealth, it is save to assume that high dmg wouldn’t be op on the rifle. There could be so many systems to avoid that.
For example: reveal buff on rifle skills or class mechanic, unique buff which increase the dmg for every second you are standing still etc.

Ofc you can write down your concerns, but you are just assuming rifle is high dmg at range with high mobility and stealth.

I’m not disagreeing with you. In fact, I support the notion and quite frankly, the basis of the Deadeye which I proposed was utilizing massive revealed uptime as a tradeoff for ranged damage.

Peoples’ fears, legitimately so, are that the profession won’t have major tradeoffs when gaining access to what could be a damaging weapon.

Basically, it’s people identifying what could happen and saying they’re against that specific possibility because they know such a combination would be too strong. I don’t think anyone here (at least not that I am aware) is making the strict assumption or guarantee the elite will feature high damage at range without consequence and outright calling the spec implicitly overpowered. At least not anyone with a shred of understanding of the profession. It’s just the speculation leads to concerns because it’s easy to break this concept without a fine degree of detail and very strong understanding of the thief as a whole.

That’s all I’m trying to say; if we make assumptions, we need to recognize they are just assumptions, and that the criticism of the elite can be specified towards those assumptions of concern.

The very notion of the thief getting a rifle or ranged isn’t worrying in it of itself. I wouldn’t have suggested the Deadeye to begin with if I thought it was.

The concern lies in implementation details of what can easily go wrong if proper attention isn’t paid to the profession in the context of the elite, and that its design be made to be healthy and interesting from all perspectives.

The overwhelming majority of suggestions involving rifle as the next elite spec for the thief all featured some kind of stealth sniper concept. That IS concerning because it isn’t healthy for the game and will likely be difficult to balance just based on the design alone.

The assumption from many, based on the past five years of playing thief, and design of the HoT elites, is ANet will screw up without some kind of input otherwise.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Just a reminder; they gutted Acro to make way for Daredevil. Acro was supposed to be what DD is now (i.e. Feline Grace and the 3rd dodge). Without DD, P/P is severely kitten and surely be tossed out given how broken the other professions are even without their Elite traits.

Sure we can run CS/Acro/Trick, but that is no way near the same level of viability with DD. With that build, there’s no access to stealth other than using heal and utility skill. That right there is a 50% nerf to P/P’s defensive kit.

At this rate, P/P will never be viable unless they change direction.

Except for the passives carrying Acro at the moment which are so good people are sometimes taking it over Trickery and the fact they’ve repeatedly buffed Acro since HoT’s launch to make it a much more appealing line. It’s redundant with Daredevil if you play it as an evade spammer, but Acro is far from gutted in general given the potency of IR, PR, etc. in the current meta.

Taking a P/P build to spam evades is just dumb as it is. It’s a skirmisher’s kit, not a defensive/evasive one.

Everything P/P needs from Acro were used to create DrD instead. Dash is really good at maintaining distance. Not only it removed CC, but it also apply Swiftness and damage reduction — which fit perfectly in a skirmisher’s kit. Besides, evade spam is counterproductive and I was not suggesting that.

So the passive CC negation, swiftness uptime, passive anti-condi-bomb or invuln, (allowing Shadowstep to be used solely as a double-time mobility tool) vigor and improved vigor for sustained beneficial endurance refueling to avoid incoming damage, and either a GM that improves initiative regeneration or provides immobilize hate or extra healing based on dumping initiative is somehow bad on an initiative-hungry set which needs to tempo dodges. Particularly when fighting condi, there is no better single trait line available in the core thief, and even EA requires being in range (thus not kiting) to cleanse as it is.

Literally everything about Acro has excellent synergy with P/P.

Daredevil being forgiving and overpowered compared to all the core lines does not change the fact Acro is a very strong trait line for P/P.

The problem with S/x, especially S/D is its lack of stealth and favoring towards other initiative-heavy skills makes its roams/engages pretty predictable in terms of where it’s heading. Bound Daredevil can make S/P work but it requires considerable resources to do so.

MH sword is fairly potent in WvW although the lack of chase potential since the IR bugfix does inhibit the weapon’s more widespread success. D/P counters more things, particularly other thieves, and has excellent matchup consistency. While S/x can make some builds and players immediately need to run for the hills in fear when in good hands, its success isn’t as widespread or as easily-achieved with D/P.

Honestly, I’d like to see OOC stealth access be limited to Blinding Powder and SR exclusively with some cooldown reductions on those skills to make them have more utility, and more generalized buffs to the profession to keep it useful, but this would require a lot of reworks and tweaking, so ANet isn’t going to do that.

Martym.6971:

Fighting on nodes is of no consequence to Thieves with access to stealth.

You literally just lost all credibility here with this sentence.

I don’t even need to re-defend my stance; your blatant lack of understanding of the profession speaks volumes.

Gravedigger already hits stupidly hard.

It’d probably need to do something about attack speed and/or LF generation, possibly involving chill given a nerf to CoD. CV and DD are both extremely strong traits, however.

Martym.6971:

DeceiverX.8361:

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

DeceiverX.8361:

Daredevil is really forgiving relative to core.
Condi in general is really forgiving.

So you can see where this is going.

Until they round out most of the elite specs and not make them overpowered, everyone’s gonna be salty. But this is extremely unlikely because it would require major overhauls and ANet doesn’t do those.

A slight correction for you btw Choppy; the old Nike warrior actually had higher landspeed than the thief unless the thief ran an entire build of gap-closers and initiative restores (really bad for anything but strictly moving around, unlike Nike Warrior having some potency from Strength/Defense traitlines), at the cost of no vertical mobility. Depending on what environment you were in, this was a back-and-forth between the two. Obviously it now favors Daredevil in all environments.

Daredevil is a bit more forgiving relative to core.

Fixed it for ya

Wouldn’t go as far as to say “really” forgiving but due ot the extra dodge (with effects) does make it a bit forgiving.

To a new thief, maybe.

Several thousand hours of core D/D power and Daredevil almost puts the game on autopilot for me, frankly. It’s incredibly spammy. I don’t even find it fun.

Maybe better now with the cut endurance gain access from sigils and base from Daredevil, but comparatively speaking, unless comparing to pre-nerf ghost thief, the spec allows for massive misplays to not be immediately punishable by death and allows for a lot of minor misplays with relative impunity of facing those consequences.

I am glad you finally achieved in thousands of hours what it takes DH, WAR, and other classes a matter of leveling to 80 to achieve. Thief OP. Nerf skill.

Surely the disparity of skill vs time investment vs skill cap time investment is completely balanced in your eyes and warrants more nerfs to Thief, to make it tens of thousands of hours before they can play on the same playing field as other classes. /sarcasm

I never said the profession was overpowered. I said it’s easy compared to core.

And it is. Just like every other elite. The notion of outplaying by winning with a thief in it of itself is largely gone in general.

Thief used to require a reasonable degree of skill and knowledge to pull off very unique and very potent maneuvers. Daredevil massively reduces this and simply makes the profession more frustrating than anything to fight against for those not extremely familiar with the profession’s limitations while allowing the thief to survive occasional major misplays or beating opponents playing perfectly for how to beat a core thief but not the Daredevil who may lack the resources to beat them (most other core specs).

Daredevil, pretty much no matter how you look at it, is a dumbed-down version of the thief. It’s not overpowered, but that skill floor is way lower than it used to be, and the reward almost the same across most levels of play.

And the same kind of safe damage is applicable to every profession in the game when it comes to cooldowns though. Except the damage is safer than from most other professions in this case, and quite frankly, we don’t know enough about the rifle to determine if those other sets are required or not. Unless the weapon is a gimmick, it will have the capacity to replace elements of others essential to the thief. All depend on high cooldowns to get some kind of major effect. The defining line at hand is about risk/reward and safety of damage. If there was a skill with a 5 minute cooldown that auto-killed a target in sight, it would be stupid, no?

Again, you’re making assumptions about the rifle’s mobility and stealth access. We can’t confirm that this will be heavily limited, and it’s something people are advocating for ensuring don’t – particularly in conjunction with burst – to avoid cheese. And that’s precisely it; nobody has the ability to provide proof on anything but simply state concerns that things very well could get out of hand.

I paralleled this to Ghost Thief above, which while it wasn’t explicitly overpowered, was not healthy for the game. I express similar concerns about the rifle and burst damage without major tradeoffs. There’s really nothing to argue here because we’re talking about the potential for things to go awry, rather than what we expect to.

Expectations of the implementation being poor can only be based on ANet’s track record. I personally think theirs is terrible when it comes to profession design, including that of many aspects of the Daredevil and thief.

Climbing a ladder is not intensive when it comes to range of motion and mobility. I can climb a ladder with a 150lb weight strapped to my leg.

Not to mention, this set, is extremely high-quality and designed light. Depending on the time period and location, things were much, much heavier, and much, much more restrictive.

Pope’s quote was all about how characters move in the game and how it reflects absolutely nothing like what it is to wear that kind of gear. He never says you can’t move. Nor did I.

At 1:25 and 1:28 the armored guy proves my point about overhead arm-lifting during jumping jacks – he can barely get his hands vertical. The video shows that armor can be moved in, but to someone who actually wears it and knows its limitations, it does not do a good job at demonstrating its weaknesses outside of a few places where you need to be looking for the details. Yes, you can be mobile, no, you can’t be anywhere even close to as mobile as our characters are. That’s what people are claiming and even without knowledge of how mobile you can be in armor, it’s correct when compared to the rest of the game. It simply does not matter.

And your quotes above prove what I said above… the options need not be taken in any kind of historical or realistic context whatsoever. Gladiators weren’t armored because the point was to kill and maim for a show. If that’s part of a character’s backstory – to be the unscathed champion gladiator, well, maybe in PvE it’s okay he has some defenses.

Frankly, if armor took away stats, I’d be fine with the notion. Fact is you still miss out on a ton of offensive stats without wearing it.

Which is kind of the mechanical point to why your refusal is ridiculous; Power/Precision should be thus boosted when not wearing armor innately. But it isn’t, because that’d be dumb. So your whole defense, mechanically in respects to the game itself, falls apart here.

Why you were disagreeing with the option to begin with just doesn’t make sense; the element of “realism” in the game is laughable as it is when you take everything into consideration properly. Knowing a little bit about armor not totally hindering mobility is moot when you look at the athletics our characters perform. Unless you want to argue that the game should move to full-realism combat, there’s zero logical reason to say players should be penalized for having, as you defined, “appearance and background story” in the confines of combat, when already, players should be for just about every element of the game when it comes to armor.

Sly.9518:

You are under the assumption Stealth attack on Rifle is going to be high coefficient like Backstab, with nothing to go on that, people are crying before knowing anything concrete, it’s stealth attack could be pure control for all we know or a Condi Stealth attack, and againthief has to give up two of its main three survivability mechanics, without DrD it loses all the Evade potential and high mobility from a dash, without SB it loses its high mobility vertical and horizontal, if it doesn’t take D/P it loses its High stealth access, You are basing a combo that can only be done once every minute on baseless numbers…..

Again SR will not break a Rifle on Thief especially since Any good player can force reveal a Thief in SR with any number of Cc affects or Reveal skills.

And yes Druid burst with LB can easily 100-0 anyone from Stealth if built for it between The roots they can apply and pressure from their Rapid Fire and their main pets with Knockdowns and other CCs. It’s quite easy to do especially if you get the jump on someone. And they don’t have to sacrifice mobility or stealth access to do any of it.

A 1.2 coefficent is less than CnD. Backstab numbers on any skill on the rifle will straight up break the entire game. That’s what people are afraid of and why people are voicing their concerns.

I’m going even further by demonstrating why even fairly mediocre coefficients on the rifle can be absurdly strong with very low risk involved in playing it. That’s what all the contention is about; people want the spec to be rewarding but not cheesy and not overpowered. It’s almost impossible to do that by giving the thief’s rifle even respectable/middle-tier damage coefficients unless major tradeoffs are made. That’s why people are already expressing their concerns. It’s not that they think “OMG RIFLE OP” but rather that it can easily be overpowered or result in cheesy play, or be totally useless. It’s hard to make it a viable pick without breaking something.

My numbers were baseless, and quite frankly, very low, but just as baseless as suggesting people aren’t allowed to show their concerns with the design before release. See, it doesn’t matter if the set is even overpowered or underpowered. It matters if it is in any way useful or if we’ll see something stupid and cheesy like Ghost Thief V2.

Unless you play full glass, the druid plays full glass, does not run the roots for extra damage, you do not evade, and the druid full-combos with full boons, RF will not one-shot anyone. More than 20% of full-berserker SoTP stack core ranger which packs more damage than druid used to come from Fire/Air procs. RF hits hard but these days it’s a far cry to say it’s a 1HKO in almost any context.

You both need to re-read my post; I said P/D only suffered from kit identity issues within the confines of sPvP.

It’s a strong skirmish kit and always has been, but it ultimately fails to do what the thief is currently as a profession designed to do (per ANet’s own depictions of mobility and ganking) based on sPvP).

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Just a reminder; they gutted Acro to make way for Daredevil. Acro was supposed to be what DD is now (i.e. Feline Grace and the 3rd dodge). Without DD, P/P is severely kitten and surely be tossed out given how broken the other professions are even without their Elite traits.

Sure we can run CS/Acro/Trick, but that is no way near the same level of viability with DD. With that build, there’s no access to stealth other than using heal and utility skill. That right there is a 50% nerf to P/P’s defensive kit.

At this rate, P/P will never be viable unless they change direction.

Except for the passives carrying Acro at the moment which are so good people are sometimes taking it over Trickery and the fact they’ve repeatedly buffed Acro since HoT’s launch to make it a much more appealing line. It’s redundant with Daredevil if you play it as an evade spammer, but Acro is far from gutted in general given the potency of IR, PR, etc. in the current meta.

Taking a P/P build to spam evades is just dumb as it is. It’s a skirmisher’s kit, not a defensive/evasive one.

I’m not so sure. The recent love to P/P could make it quite potent without Daredevil per se. I see little incentive to need to run DA such that a CS/Acro/Tr build focused on more conventional mobility and kiting would be quite good and deal substantial damage.

I think the bigger issue is that pretty much any kit without Daredevil (or any weapon set on any other profession) is harshly gimping itself by just not running its elite. P/P probably gains the most from the elite of the thief weapons, but I don’t think it’s safe to call it useless when discounting Daredevil. It’s binary like D/D power, but not intrinsically bad. What makes it binary is most of the other professions, and in the case of D/D, its overarching design in respects to the stealth attack ICD. Both sets are designed hybrid and consequently also suffer a little bit because of it. Similarly to MH sword on warrior and effectively every other hybrid weapon ever made.

I think the lone exception here to the elite spec rule may be D/P given SA or something, but I mean it’s D/P which has always historically been very cohesive with core traits/gameplay styles. Even still, Daredevil is a pretty substantial boost in a lot of ways over SA.

D/P’s kit is just very diverse, initiative-efficient, and in general way better at a lot of things that are essential in the core strategy of playing the thief versus the other sets.

Staff was/(is?) good but as a skirmish set at best. It’s pretty easily shut down by good players who know how to counter it (and running what’s in the meta).

Power D/D and P/P are binary kits that have limited skill diversity to approach different scenarios. D/D condi is decent but mostly so from condition builds themselves being way out of whack right now in most formats. It’s similarly not as good at fulfilling the role of what the thief is designed to do and works as skirmisher set like staff. P/P is hard-countered very easily with projectile hate and suffers from being over-dependent on a few abilities or traits. If countered, just like power D/D is by blocks and mobile adversaries, it’s countered very harshly.

P/D is somewhere in the middle but again suffers from a lack of kit identity within the confines of sPvP and in WvW is generally just a dueling/1v1 kit, boosted artificially in efficacy from condition effectiveness as a stat/gear options.

Ranger burst isn’t even close to what is capable on the thief and you know it. And many will argue druid is incredibly strong as a roamer when in reasonably good hands due to its mobility. Remember how many times CS and other druid skills needed to be nerfed because it was broken? And it was broken from a single trait mostly, which was a pretty easy target. So then what on the thief, if given the capability in this design takes nerfs? Core thief or the spec? I doubt they’ll rework any aspect of the spec’s design because the problems are design-level. And as soon as that happens we just have Daredevil #2 with a different weapon. And as far as the druid, it’s not capable of dealing such damage while moving, either. It’s one or the other. It’s a great kite profession, but a far cry from just a mobile ranged damage dealer.

I’ll even use an example where it’s a stealth attack with thus a cooldown and dependency with only a 1.2 coefficent making it burst pitiful in comparison to most other kits.

D/P stealth -> Swap -> Rifle Burst from 1200 -> SR immediately trailing reveal as enemy comes to engage -> Shoot burst projectile of stealth attack -> During projectile airtime Shadowstep to force reveal early -> Shadow return into last tick of stealth on SR -> Burst

Easily between 20-30k damage without being touched by opposing melee nor using any other skills in the process. Even if we assume a paltry .6 base attack damage coefficient at a .5s cast time, you can squeeze between 10-15k in extra damage from AA’s. That’s incredibly safe damage with a lot of escape potential if need be, considering the merits of SS and SR in their own right. Again this assumes no skill use for further damage nor utility, either.

Now trade some damage for Acrobatics and the thief becomes nigh impossible to lock down from Uncatchable while retaining a double stunbreak teleport and ranged pressure all with the possibility of entering stealth at any given point in time.

We can’t assume anything about the nature of rifle, such as self-inflicted reveal, mobility cuts, evasion drops, etc., because people made the same kinds of assumptions regarding the Daredevil in regards to what the thief gained; turns out, there effectively were no sacrifices made at all when taking Daredevil, similar to DH, Berserker, Druid, and so on.

As soon as we start making assumptions things will be well-designed with legitimate drawbacks, we’re begging to be let down when they aren’t there.

It’s why I’m naturally opposed to the rifle being a damaging weapon without major consequences and why I’m suggesting the very notion itself is concerning.

Up until the last patch staff had almost as much mobility as shortbow, as well as a tool to remove mobility-impairing effects built-in.

It also depends a lot on environment; mobility in terms of the shortbow is way more important for sPvP than it is in say WvW. Stats and damage are also much higher in WvW. If something is designed to deal burst damage in sPvP, it’s often excessive in WvW. Not to mention that sPvP forces close-range fights for point control, while WvW allows kiting and such to be utilized as much as possible. This is a big difference in terms of what can be considered fair.

I still do not suspect the implementation will be good. BP, SR, and Shadowstep alone are enough to break ranged burst, and if they totally remove stealth and mobility as parts of the thief’s kit when using a rifle, nobody will use it except to cheese. There’s very little room for the rifle to be useful while not being either overpowered/cheesy or underpowered, unless making it a potent support weapon.

We’ll see what happens, but I would expect Daredevil to stay in the meta until Expansion 3 unless the traits for Deadeye are even more overpowered somehow.

I do because I couldn’t have capped out the maximum possible amount of damage thief can deal without doing so.

On every other character, I’ve just bought WvW ones. It’s very, very rare, but sometimes the 300 HP on armor will keep you alive, or your damage numbers may be just barely enough to nab a kill.

Grimheart.2853:

PopeUrban.2578:

Grimheart.2853:

You could just take off your medium armor chestpiece to achieve the same results, and expirience the magical feeling behind completely unprotected torso yourself, in practical combat.

The mechanics of the world literally do not care what you’re wearing. Some of the skimpiest chest armor in the game is “heavy armor” and grants more defensive benefits than medium armor.

Also, you can just put on an “outfit” and the entire concept of armor goes out the window anyway. I wear “heavy armor” on my “acrobatic” daredevil all the time thanks to this mechanic.

Also, giant norn and charr in actual heavy armor roll all over the place like olympic gymnasts.

This is not a world where the words “practical” and “combat” should be used in the same sentence.

True, my statement is merely an act of mockery, made in order to tell my opinion on making an invisible chestpiece being moderately silly. Bare feet, cleen face (no helm), non-covered hands, no extra shoulder armor is moderately-to-mildly reasonable in certain cases, while an entire missing chestpiece with only underwear/bare chest to show is just kind something you don’t even put effort into developing in the first place. Also underwear, yes. That would look silly too. Mostly underwear is the most silly factor.

In fact, even if adding something like that, that should be the point of going full clown-fiesta and adding the invisible leggings to the pile as well.

By the way, I’m not sure how much you know about armor, but I know enough that a proper set of heavy armor Doesn’t make you an almost immobile fullmetal coffin, and you can run, roll and even get up on a horse in it. And well, norn are strong, and charr are both moderately strong and agile, so no idea how those two races grabbed your attention from everyone else, especially when there’s those noodle-limbed cabbages running around in plates-n-stuff.

As someone who fights HEMA and SCA:

There is never, ever, an advantage on a battlefield to being without full protection, ESPECIALLY the helmet, gloves, and boots/greaves. These are the areas most prone to being struck in combat at any given point in time, and some of the least resilient in terms of being able to take a blow. Your torso is surprisingly hardy; it’s just not fantastic at taking penetrating or acute forces in its upper regions (a la stilettos and flanged maces). Your wrists and legs are basically twigs when taking a hit from even the flat of a normal broadsword.

The only advantages posed of wearing less or lighter armor in extensive combat is strike power and range of motion. But even something like “light” (15oz) leather pauldrons can massively cut one’s range of motion.

That said, you’re absolutely wrong here about how much you discount speed: A real set of actual (non-fantasy-BS-collector-trash) armor weighs a ton and impedes motion incredibly. Protective pauldrons will prevent one from being able to lift his arms straight up and erect. You can “roll” (mostly using momentum to carry the maneuver to force glancing blows and to get lower while retaining some degree of mobility – not as an act of agility, and you WILL have troubles getting up at speed) and “run” (comparable to jogging without, and demanding a TON of energy), but with armor on, you’ll be nowhere near as fast as someone without it.

However, doing anything more than strictly honor-dueling with a single broadsword for the wielders will always and immediately favor the person wearing a full set of armor, and if it came down to it, someone wearing a set of gauntlets/helmet/greaves would likely run a lower risk of injury and higher success at winning in such a duel than his opponent only wearing a cuirass and plated leg armor, instead.

At the end of the day, the game is an RPG with fantasy and whimsy. I’m more concerned not so much with how much clothing people are to be wearing but rather in what way it’s portrayed. Excessive particle effects and the likes ruin a lot of the game’s atmosphere. A chick in a brown halter top going for the barbarian aesthetic wouldn’t really phase me. Options are cool, so long as they’re not invasive.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

DeceiverX.8361:

That said, who really knows with ANet’s engine. Supposedly development for collections take months just to pump out a single one.

Because they have to test all the facets of the collection. It would take longer if there was any sort of Pity meter, because they’d have to implement it on the 100s of existing 1-use-only items and any new ones.

I don’t know if ANet’s code is well architected, if the configuration management is solid, if they have robust change management policies. I suspect there’s a lot of room for improvement.

But even if all of that was perfect, making small changes in Enterprise systems is a lot more complicated than making major changes in a small program. It’s almost certainly never as easy as we think it should be.

That just assumes they only use acceptance testing methods as a means of verifying the integrity of their code. Well-made unit tests and some good design and the entire process can end up automated. The only things that should need to be tested this way in such an inefficient manner are of changes in design (not applicable), new code logic (not applicable), or new assets and physics interactions (not applicable), for these can have unpredictable interactions with some of the more internal workings of the engine and are much more at the mercy of suffering from a lot of weird scenarios and unexpected interactions.

I work on enterprise systems for a company with around 22k employees for a living and am the Advanced Technology test lead. If ANet can’t get a grip on testing a few DB event calls they have serious engine-server architecture or business structure problems, and their talented programmers’ skills are largely going to waste.

Given the nature of the general quality of software and game stability as opposed to most others, I’m going to assume these guys have it nailed down. Doing something like this would be far from monumental.

Astralporing.1957:

DeceiverX.8361:

Odds are doing this will just further-diminish what’s left of the community. Though one can never really tell; ANet seems fixated on the high-end PvE scene.

One does not preclude another. Just look at the results of Anet’s former fixation on esports.

I don’t doubt it; I mostly meant it on the rhetoric of what they think that kind of audience will want.

And sPvP was never going to ever be competitive given the amulet system and the fact that the professions were not balanced by the PvP team; PvE and general profession design have and still have all priority in making said adjustments, and according to ANet itself, operates entirely independently with little interaction with the PvP team. Just based on company dynamic it was doomed from the getgo; forget the poor streaming options.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

DeceiverX.8361:

It’s not hard to code a pity timer unless you want to make the formula really complicated with some kind of weird logic or something.

I suspect it would be more challenging than you imagine, because it’s hard to define what should increase, or consume, the pity timer. Is it just the skins, or also miniatures? Does the timer count for each individually, or does getting one reset it for all of them? Do you count only the super-rare things, or also rare ones?

eg: it’s not necessarily just code complexity, it’s the business rules that you need to define, that make this challenging.

Can be made for collection items which are again tied to the account, as these RNG drops were what the OP made the thread about.

Yeah, doing something for the entire game is nigh impossible, but drops that are only ever useful once per account and aren’t tradeable and are already specially-defined for collections and so on wouldn’t be that difficult to implement in all sense of the word.

That said, who really knows with ANet’s engine. Supposedly development for collections take months just to pump out a single one.

Just because you’re 80 doesn’t mean you’re good, geared, invested, and/or skillful.

Especially when they’re literally giving out free max-levels and tomes like candy.

It’s not hard to code a pity timer unless you want to make the formula really complicated with some kind of weird logic or something. You could do this almost entirely within the confines of most enterprise database languages with a few lines of code and a new table or two (which will be what is used in binding data to accounts characters to begin with as well as what drives rolling loot tables as otherwise these could easily be hacked) and while only ever needing to insert a single line into the game client’s source code just to make the call (and/or replace whatever lines for existing calls there already are), which is a very minor change in terms of shipping patches and can be entirely devoid of any logic which effectively nullifies most possibilities of outstanding bugs or weirdness.

My guess is things are RNG because RNG keeps people playing longer. Anet knows if rewards got handed out, people would just rush to completion and the smallness of the community involved in the content would show itself while punishing new players or ones caught behind.

Shortage.5427:

armaduras.8972:

I really hope not. I have 4,300 hours logged into the game currently with five sets of ascended and five legendary weapons. I am more than happy with the gear provided.. and it would appear that the model would be for new stat sets rather than armor sets. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get the ability to ‘Bless’ Ascended armor too.

Every tier of gear you add to GW2 only increases the stress on inpatient new people… and new players really are impatient. I’ve personally watched over twenty people join our guild, play the game for one to three months, progressively, and then simply quit once they start researching the time needed for ascended gear. Everyone wants the best, even if it isn’t needed. Legendary armor is going to be more than enough of a blunder in the same regard.

Yes but you also push away the people who wants this stuff. From my 60 in game friends and 30 followers only 3-4 are online. Also games such as BDO and BnS seem to have stolen lot’s of people from GW2 because it felt a “Waste of time” or rather “Too casual for me”. The more you restrict the people the easier the get bored.

Also it’s a MMORPG game. There is no MMORPG without some type of grinding or gear progression. It was fun till i reached 1600 hours and completed everything.

It all goes back in the box, and move on a diffrent game?

To be honest i saw the new expansion leak and it was amazing. But now i am wondering if it’s worth that much.

Of all of the people who have left (~75 friends I talk to) and maybe 200 followers who I’ve talked with before they quit when saying goodbyes, and myself, a gear grind was not the reason we stopped playing the game. I think you’re actually the first I’ve seen to request this. When ANet announced they didn’t have any intentions to release new tiers after ascended, most gear-grinders left as it was.

Odds are doing this will just further-diminish what’s left of the community. Though one can never really tell; ANet seems fixated on the high-end PvE scene.

I was going to say run while you can but it’s already too late. Don’t use the 80 boost because you won’t be good at the game and will probably die a lot. Level at least one character naturally or somewhat naturally. Sadly, you really did miss out on the glory days of this game.

Enjoy it for what it is. If you like to PvP or had plans to play WvW I have some disappointing news for you…

P.S. The story won’t make any sense since you weren’t online for the LS episodes which are the leadup to what happens in HoT. You’ve also missed the post-expansion episodes which further continue the story.

Svarty.8019:

TheDarkSoul.1938:

Do I want it to be some cheesy one-shot “sniper” build? Nope, I think that’d be boring as kitten and I wouldn’t touch it with a stick.

… because a cheesy one-shot melee build is so much more interesting.

jk .. I know it takes two-shots to kill people.

A number of classes and builds can get away with One-hit kills. It’s not a massive number, and many can definitely one-button-kill or two-hit kill, but it’s doable depending on both one’s build and the enemy’s.

Having it happen with relatively low risk (range) + stealth + shadowsteps/mobility is just begging for problems, though. If on the design-level it takes nuking into account, the spec will always be underpowered or overpowered with no in-between.

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

DeceiverX.8361:

Daredevil is really forgiving relative to core.
Condi in general is really forgiving.

So you can see where this is going.

Until they round out most of the elite specs and not make them overpowered, everyone’s gonna be salty. But this is extremely unlikely because it would require major overhauls and ANet doesn’t do those.

A slight correction for you btw Choppy; the old Nike warrior actually had higher landspeed than the thief unless the thief ran an entire build of gap-closers and initiative restores (really bad for anything but strictly moving around, unlike Nike Warrior having some potency from Strength/Defense traitlines), at the cost of no vertical mobility. Depending on what environment you were in, this was a back-and-forth between the two. Obviously it now favors Daredevil in all environments.

Daredevil is a bit more forgiving relative to core.

Fixed it for ya

Wouldn’t go as far as to say “really” forgiving but due ot the extra dodge (with effects) does make it a bit forgiving.

To a new thief, maybe.

Several thousand hours of core D/D power and Daredevil almost puts the game on autopilot for me, frankly. It’s incredibly spammy. I don’t even find it fun.

Maybe better now with the cut endurance gain access from sigils and base from Daredevil, but comparatively speaking, unless comparing to pre-nerf ghost thief, the spec allows for massive misplays to not be immediately punishable by death and allows for a lot of minor misplays with relative impunity of facing those consequences.

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

DeceiverX.8361:

They have even more tools to beat thieves and high-mobility classes in general when running GS.

No lie, Eremite, in a lot of those fights, you could have outright ended them with a single well-timed GD. Staff did almost nothing for you a majority of the time.

tbh any fights where a GS reaper are involved are not as hard as condi or even axe (range dps). GD is really strong, thats no secret, but it’s too telegraphed and slow so its easily avoidable (the nerf to warriors headbutt got nothing on GD’s clunkiness). If Aney sped GD up a bit, then maybe GS can be viewed as a more serious DPS choice.

GS is valuable for its control, not its damage.

A necro playing GS as a primary damage weapon will suck. You need to play it like interrupt mesmer and utilize shroud and a ranged weapon (Axe) to make it potent. My point wasn’t that GS was better than Axe, but that GS was better than staff in a kit with an Axe.

If you play it as a disruption and debuff weapon it is literally the best PvP weapon available on the necromancer. So many people think GD spam or of it as some kind of crazy damaging weapon. Its AA 1 and 2 have value and have been sped up massively, too.

It’s also why I said staff wasn’t worthwhile; I’ve been running A/D + GS for a very long time and of all professions, thieves are the easiest to kill by a country mile due to how GS can shut them down so well. Staff really poses itself to be disadvantaged against mobile foes, which most professions, especially roaming ones these days, are.

Yes, the thief if played flawlessly will win and out-reset, but that’s just what the profession does. Perfect power reaper play can apply similar pressure and make similar gains on a thief resetting when it comes to WvW.