Guild Wars 2

At most, you can take 4x damage from DH traps as a thief if shadowstepping through the entire trap (2x hits) and then using shadow return through it or another trap as well (another 2x hits).

Otherwise it’s the same for all – teleports do not negate the traps. The only teleports which “can” do so are Infil Return during dodge with perfect animation cancelling or dodging during IArrow’s projectile.

Ziggityzog.7389:

Lol Gold t2 placement in both season 5 and 6 and i didn’t need to use a broken class to get there. Oh season 2 I went 102-9 so skill on my side isn’t in question. I’m sorry if your a fan of a broken build but i just bring reality.

Guard actually more of the Dragon Hunters is broken and its not a question it just is.

I want to say the OP meant DH considering his complaints about traps etc.
I don’t think anyone really refers to any elites by their proper name seeing as they might as well be the core ones considering how relatively useless core builds are in comparison.

jihm.2315:

ok guys thanks , ill try multiple dodges since defense means nothing in this game and probably will never mean

In terms of stats, this is largely intentional. Most defenses are meant to be active.

Conditions are just out of hand and have been for years. PvP is finally tasting what WvW was like in terms of damage throughput : durability in WvW maybe just before HoT.

You either play the meta or leave player versus player formats entirely. I personally took the latter approach and have since stopped playing GW2 in general.

It is being used in a way that is unintended in terms of its damage component.

It is also poorly-designed , but so is the entirety of Daredevil and almost every elite from HoT.

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.

I doubt this would be the case because that’s effectively the primary function of shortbow. Even ANet knows that.

Mobility and range in general are two things that without some very serious balancing and design considerations, do not often mix well.

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.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

The problem is the animation cancel. You used to be able to use daggerstorm then immediately dodge, then fight for the next 8-10 seconds with stability. With old lyssa runes on top (all boons for 5s on elite) and the fact thief didn’t need power runes for damage at the time, it was a little silly.

Making the skill give pulsing stab removed that functionality as the duration of each stack is short, and it’s probably the reason it got passed over here again.

This. On channeled abilities, it’s really not a good idea to allow for bulk-stacks.

RS3 and SotP were not channels, and both had very potent synergies with other traits/skills (BB and boonsharing options available on the ranger respectively) which would proc each time a stack was applied. It also made burst-incoming CC negate portions of the traits’ efficacy which in turn nerfed stability with how much CC there is.

DS needs to be pulsing at the end of the day, and for good reason.

Could have just been playing marauder/valkyrie. It crits enough, is far from glassy, and has quite good damage from the ferocity and power it stacks.

At 2500 armor, my build without might which runs 20k hp will crit between 2.5-4k on CG depending on opposing traits/defenses/etc.

As mentioned above, the causes are entirely profession-design. This has been known and confirmed by ANet years ago.

The game is too spammy with too many effects. Until that drops, the servers will always be laggy.

Not killing the player taking the camp goes against the spirit of the game (defending/taking objectives) and is probably the least-sportsman-like thing you can do. Ultimately, this is just how large-scale persistent combat environments work.

Whether or not that [design] is good for the game long-term is totally different.

That said, sending your group of 50 after a single guy repeatedly while he’s not taking something (just because he’s there) or camping spawn for the sake of slaughter starts reaching that limit of just being a jerk, unless retaliatory (a la spawncamping a your own BL border after a defense or reclaim of a keep from a very aggressive server; but that usually implies relatively large numbers from the enemies).

pointaction.4639:

Does not matter on peoples age. I work a normal job and when I have not able to play for while then come back and always find people complaining about something or saying something not nice to someone else in chat.

A lot of times these people do not work and have nothing to do but just something not nice to someone else in chat.

My word advice to those people grow up and get a life or job instead of acting like you woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

This is only a game and meant to be fun to play. So if you do the stuff what is being said in the forum just quit the game or grow up or get a real job or be nice and respectful of others trying to enjoy the game.

You can be critical of the game and other players and be successful and intelligent.

Typically the more well-thought-out responses are driven by older and more successful members of the community.

Not saying there aren’t immature/loser people in-game, though. There are a lot. Frankly, most of the immaturity seems to come largely from people between 25-30 with just kitten-poor social skills or issues who are more concerned with acting cool and young via internet humor rather than just being young.

P/P has the same problem of power D/D in that the damage was there (and was even before this buff) but the utility and consistency issues hold it back in most matchups.

Just bumping numbers will only create further-binary fights which is far less fun.

Swamurabi.7890:

The problem I see with the update is that there was only one instance where WvW was specifically mentioned.

Necromancer
Our biggest focus in this iteration for necromancers was that of Epidemic, in that its impact is too instant in most PvP scenarios, as well as its heavy toll on our servers.

It seems to me that if the sudden condition transfer from one skill taxes the server, what happens in WvW when one zerg hits another zerg and every skill adds a condition?

A three way fight in SMC caused lag in WvW years ago, before epidemic was meta.

Should the WvW version of skills have less conditions to improve WvW server performance?

The same is said about boons.

I’ve been saying this for a while because it was commented on by ANet programmers years ago, but server lag is pretty much entirely caused by effect and ability spamming (especially passive boons and condis) in ZvZ scenarios.

When we see cuts to mass condi application, mass boon application, and extended passives (which often apply these), the server lag issues will be mostly fixed.

Yet again, the problems lie in profession design.

I think Arc Divider’s radius is the biggest issue on the Berserker, particularly given it’s lack of windup or big tell as to when specifically it’s coming and how it reaches beyond the radius of dodges. Even if I know it’s coming and coming soon, there’s nothing I can do with that information aside from just dodging the attack itself.

Increased cooldown on HB would also go a long way. The condi build/damage mitigation uptime is a little excessive as well, though.

And while I think Choppy’s list is more well-rounded, I don’t really like the existence of any passive damage immunity effects, and am frustrated about fighting the M/Sh condi build from how many defenses it can load up on, but that’s just me. I don’t even mind Arenal Health so much for when a warrior takes total defenses during it to reset the fight. I like to know when I can bait cooldowns and then go all-in and commit for a kill, however.

I think 33% would be a better activation for DP, though. A full-nuke build could then still evade it by committing everything into one last final burst (mind you it still needed to get the berserker that low to begin with as far as cooldowns go etc., so the berserker was likely already out-played more than once given the healing from AH during other immunities), while other builds can at least not worrying about an immunity starting at 50% which will just get fully-healed by AH again.

How to beat a Daredevil as a reaper:

1.) Play power GS + A/D with Suffer in Spite/SR/R. You’ll need Speed of Shadows.
2.) Read Shadow Shot’s animation and dodge.
3.) When they steal combo you just cast Suffer to return weakness cutting their crits and dodge refill rate + applying chill, then Shroud -> 3 -> 4 -> 3 while they’re in melee to force Shadowstep and BP or they die.
4.) Slight chase to keep them willing to attack you and then nuke the hell out of them post-Shadowstep via Axe 2. Most will try to escape via BP -> CV and will likely be too slow and get nuked from the Spinal Shivers proc at half which will corrupt their ToTC boons as well.
5.) They’ll panic-re-engage or try to stack stealth in BP + HS to flee so swap GS and 4 -> 5 -> Shroud 5 -> Shroud 4. GS4 will trap HtC in Acro, so Charge into Scythe if you need to. Lay on the heat.

TheDarkSoul.1938:

You’re right, it IS concerning. I’d just prefer it if people waited until they knew something concrete about the Spec before they started kittening and complaining about it. I mean, let’s be brutally honest here – if it’s 1200 range condi oriented, people will complain. Heck, some people here reckon that just an AA + utilities would be OP at 1200 range.

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. Am I worried it MIGHT be that? Sure. But as I was said, I could quite easily go around the other proffession forums complaining about “maybe this” and “maybe that” and I’d probably get laughed at for all the same reasons I’ve brought up on this thread. The only difference here is that it’s Thief so it’s okay to complain about it, and it’s annoying.

Then there’s the fact that most of the complaints here are backed up by awful logic and a severe lack of knowledge of Core Thief in general, which winds me up something rotten.

Daredevil may end up being better than Deadeye, but I’m just excited at the prospect of playing something different. Daredevil is incredibly boring to play so I’m hoping that Deadeye will bring something more interesting to the table, like what your suggestion was. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking though.

Honestly, long range condi is probably the most frustrating thing they could give the thief in regards to WvW. In sPvP it won’t matter since it likely won’t be remotely as mobile and slippery as Daredevil – it wouldn’t get played. Condi probably won’t be leading DPS charts either, which makes the build “useless” for anything but casual PvE.

But then what’s the point of designing anything well if it’s intended for casual PvE? Although one could supply an argument that it’s clear that’s the intention of the devs given the current state of the game.

The way I see it is, if we just let ANet run rampant, we end up with Daredevil v2 in some other cheese/idea. If we don’t criticize the bad ideas before they seek development time, we end up with rifle power sniper, which honestly, isn’t really any different in terms of playstyle as say Killshot warrior or even in a closer semblance, combo power shatter GS mesmer. Both of these builds are pretty mediocre though, which is really what I’m trying to say; why develop such a niche idea with so limited scope of effectiveness when the amount of work required for it is so tremendous, and have the cases where it does work feel cheap?

I just see little reason in hoping blindly for the best rather than expressing concerns now.

Mongk.2467:

I am really hoping that deadeye isn’t the real name and it becomes a support spec. Isn’t impossible, there are healer shooters out there like Ana from OW or Spellslinger from WS.

Support rifle team! haha

Read my proposal. It’s both.

Just I doubt this is what we’ll see.

TheDarkSoul.1938:

Eh, I’m SHOCKED a post like this one was made. Seriously, shocked. /s

I think we’re all jumping the gun abit here (no pun intended). We don’t know ANYTHING about the spec, besides the rifle part + the rumour about it having one Dodge (which isn’t even confirmed to be true is it?)

So why are people ALREADY complaining? There have already been great examples of Rifle specs created by members of the community (Deceiver X’s Deadeye spec comes to mind) that involve absolutely none of this whole “one shot sniper” nonsense. Yeah, true enough that Anet doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to this stuff and I wouldn’t really be SURPRISED if we got some cheesy glass cannon BS. But the fact that before we know anything at all about the spec there are people calling us “trolls” and the like simply for getting excited about the possibility, however small, of Thieves having an actual ranged weapon that doesn’t just use skill 5 is stupid.

Wait until some actual concrete details get released until you start up bashing the spec for being OP and ridiculous, lol.

Yeah, but the very innate design of having high burst on this kind of kit is very concerning design-wise. IMHO, the complaints, pre-emptively, are largely justified.

Odds are we’re even getting rifle to begin with because half of the thief community automatically associates OHKO-style gameplay as a “sniper” is inherently fun or interesting because sniping. Expressing mechanical discontent now is at the very least better than post-release.

Frankly, if it has one dodge, then expect to never see this profession be played in any environment outside of WvW cheese for the sake of montage videos and kids freaking out because “ermagerd I just one-shotted three people” while sitting on a ledge in stealth. I made the call when Daredevil was first released that no other elite spec, unless made totally broken or changing the thief massively, will ever compete with Daredevil. If we see one dodge, this will hold true.

I’d like to think my proposal had some influence on ANet’s next spec since the name is the same, however I trust them to not implement it at all like mine. In hindsight, I’m questioning if going to the extreme detail I went into ultimately hurt the spec because ANet is too stubborn to copy-paste someone else’s suggestions regardless of their merit.

I catch thieves on my reaper.

Unless they go for a dedicated all-out sprint the hell away from me, the mobility, while there, isn’t usually any problem on most professions if played well.

TBTH arguing that “I’ve only ever played thief and I think it’s fine” is just as poor of an argument as someone saying they’ve never played thief and stating it’s overpowered.

Most people who’ve played other professions extensively recognize two things:

- Core thief is fair if not underpowered and very difficult to play/master.

- Daredevil trivializes most of the difficult aspects of the thief making it easier to play successfully with.

[The Daredevil] is not OP in the current game-state, but it’s definitely not fair relative to core GW2, like every other elite spec.

Many have already come up with that idea.

And what’s stopping a thief from doing that while stacking stealth or shadowstepping during the channel negating much of the risk?

And if you force reveal, the risk will not be worth it in any competitive scene, or will be stat-wise way overpowered if balanced for small-scale when things happen to go right.

There’s no good way to implement ranged burst on the thief without either breaking the integrity of the class or making something the spec/weapon extremely over/underpowered.

Considering the best players in the ESL and most of the now-quit skill groups disagree, your credentials here are not too good.

Elite specs were never meant to e stronger than core. ANet’s own words, not mine, or anyone else’s. They failed that blatantly.

Before HoT, WvW was the most diverse format in the game. By absolute miles. “Trash-tier” builds were still usable if not competitive. Now you severely kitten yourself playing core on most professions.

The people who are left are playing in the delusion the game is okay. The population dropoff, which most most quitting players cite to unfun combat, has been real and only guised by linkings.

The point of elite specs is to change the style of play. Granted ANet failed here previously with Daredevil, that’s not the intent. A sniper, game-design-wise is the worst possible spec they could implement. Ranged burst on the thief is a terrible idea for how much innate mobility it has on top of its range. People playing lb ranger and rifle war have lower mobility, and Acro is basically the Defense line on warrior at this point.

Your post is frankly terribly misinformed. If you put attacks equivalent to backstab or vault on a ranged weapon people will be hitting twice as hard as glass GF warrior while having the safety of shadowstep and withdraw.

I already came up with the kit a year ago.
With all the skills, traits, utilities, and interactions (See signature).

Too bad none of the ideas aside from the name and weapon are going to be used lol. Shame, as I sincerely doubt the spec will carry the level of understanding of what needed to happen to make rifle usable and not broken.

Odokuro.5049:

Artaz.3819:

Desert BL is just one of many reasons for the WvW player dropoff.

HoT added effectively pay-to-“win” as you either pay for HoT elite specs (power creep) or you don’t win.

You can still play with HoT but you aren’t going to enjoy it when you are getting beat by HoT specs non-stop. Also remember that HoT vendors (runes, sigils, etc.) didn’t become immediately available when HoT was released either so there was a very prolonged period (giving many players time to leave) before some equivalency started to appear between PvE and WvW.

Hopefully, ANet has learned their lesson that the next expansion needs to have WvW equivalent rewards built in at launch or you are going to see the same devastating exodus as PvE rewards bleeds into player versus player environment creating haves versus have nots.

Elite specs are not, insta-win. Expansions are a common thing with MMO genre games, and ofcoarse they have content that is exclusive to them, they need selling points after all.

Aside from a very few select cheesy builds, they border-line on power equivocal to what most P2W games offer.

The topic has been discussed to death; by far and large, the majority of the WvW community agrees the expansion did way more damage than good.

And you can still make things work and work well in PvE and have them be well-designed for PvP. ANet has failed on the latter is the issue. Doesn’t matter how you tweak coefficients etc.

And the game was marketed as being inclusive to all styles and preferences of play, not with an emphasis on PvE, particularly when it comes to design and balance. ANet’s original intentions were the opposite. Now, not so much.

Lucentfir.7430:

I think people are still forgetting that HoT was more of a framework expansion than a actual content expansion. As in the content placed in HoT was more for future workings. and feature rich, Examples are Guild Halls, Raids, new skills/spec system(E-Specs), progression system, and Legendary Crafting(Precursor crafting). I definitely have my hopes up for the next expansion being more content rich now that we have good systems in place. A good indicator of this is also the quality of maps released through LS as well as story. So I’m going to say it’ll probably do better than HoT.

The people who lost interest in the game largely didn’t leave because of a lack of content.

Most people who have since left have left because the framework changes implemented have been objectively negative in regards to what this game was trying to be before the release of the expansion.

As for new maps being stale as discussed by people above, this is just because of the fact that these maps are designed to serve only one purpose: Act as holdover/new content. A new reward or shiny. A new thing – so people grind them out, wander back to their safe zones to show off their loot, and are bored again with no incentive to go exploring. The new maps are over-designed trying to funnel people around with very specific chains of events and story hooks and so on. Every aspect of the way the maps are designed feels like a grind, especially when considering mastery points and so on.

There’s a lack of intent on keeping those areas really permanent, prominent areas of the game. Just feature the new content. A new ride at the themepark, and move on after a few goes.

One of the most brilliant displays of map design for an online world I’ve seen came from a game I played years ago where even in the very starting maps, moments away from where your character spawns, they put higher level content that had persistent purpose to higher levels. In a level 10 zone there’d be a huge marble monument with a huge neutral level 50 boss at the center. As you’re leveling up and circling around the structure while monsters increase in zone level, higher levels would be all over the place trying to kill the boss or PvP over the kill. This kind of design gave life to all of the old maps through these kinds of features – a world where people would develop new reasons to go back and re-play through old content, be it through some kind of rare item drop that spawned some special encounter for game-story reasons, bosses, misc. quests, etc.

The maps are so modular due to the payment model behind them via LS unlocks that ANet can’t do this, and there’s a distinct lack of interest in building the world to feel living and realistic when the content is designed to just be churned out over and over.

It’s not that they needed to split balance. I think doing so typically creates a more complex and more difficult-to-maintain game-state and confuses a lot of players with mixed results from certain expectations when learning the game in PvE.

They just needed to make more centrally-oriented decisions on what would work for design. The instant-no-tell CC/burst and so on shouldn’t exist even for PvE reasons. Even though it may be permissible, it doesn’t make the design any less bad.

Asur.9178:

messiah.1908:

i doubt rifle and pvp will meet . 1500 range for a thief where as the arena has lots of obstacles and line of sight combine with block, reflects will result in the same d/p meta for thief which gonna be lame

if so and we get rifle thief will have less access to stealth and more reposition skills with shadow step or evade (but evade belong to DD)

lets wait and see

Exactly; absolutely NOTHING will change for thief, PvE or PvP. They will still bring kitten for support, and continue being the selfish class they have always been. D/P will CONTINUE being the top dog for life.

Rifle and Longbow are literally the LAST weapons thief needed from specializations. They will add nothing to the class, nor will they change the way thief is played. This is yet ANOTHER instance where ANet is catering to the whining children in the forums and reddit without thinking it through (if the leak is accurate – I most certainly hope it is NOT).

Now, if thief got GS (a large part of me wants this tbh – there’s so much potential here) or sword offhand, or something along the lines of those…there’s far more potential; but, judging by how late in the development it is, and the likely accuracy of the leaks, that is not going to happen. So, we have to live with a specialization that allows us to afk auto attack world bosses.

Go read my proposal, then tell me it brings (or would have brought) nothing new.

It’s just we can’t expect ANet to implement it well.

More visual clutter… great.

Day by day this game is just constantly going in the wrong direction away from what it started so gloriously as.

So… after a year of telling people to run SoS, now people are starting to run it and are finally killing mobile professions >_<

C’mon people!

Yes a good druid will kite very well, though I also chalk this up to mentioning the build used here in terms of utilities isn’t particularly amazing for taking on druids. Most went pretty unused. Shouts, given the pets as another target, are wiser and offer better sustain/LF gains.

It doesn’t matter given the mobility the profession has. And any respectable damage coefficient turns breakable extremely easily.

People neglect to understand Vault can reach well into the 30k numbers. Even a paltry 2.5 coefficient is so breakable with how many damage amplifiers the thief has access to.

Unless you outright punish the thief, a no-tell nuke is a terrible idea, and BP as a utility with Shadowstep are still enough to break the class into being a free-win-or-free-kill based solely on specs.

If DE’s rifle is burst-oriented, it will either be blatantly overpowered or be useless compared to DrD. That’s just truth.

The problem is the design execution of the specs and the content of the format themselves, rather than a lack of roles.

The fact you have no-tell huge nukes, a total excess of sustain in a mode only meant to defend points, over-potency stat-wise on some stat combos and their respective synergies to certain specific builds, almost no cooldowns on a number of kits, powercreeped abilities into insanity, etc. breaks PvP. A lot of the tactical elements and resource management that determined skilled play in the past are no longer a part of the game through poor design.

It’s rotations and builds or forget it, largely. In action-based PvP, this is the penultimate mark of failure. Sadly, the PvP team had no way to control professions; all of profession design and balance is handled solely by PvE designers and no input from others matters.

You must always expect slowness when looking at major software project development. As a software engineer, people massively overlook how difficult these systems are to develop. Now add in asset creation (art etc.) engine changes, changes to loot tables and animations for monsters, placement, testing, and so on.

The thing is, even prior to HoT, people wanted different maps, but very few people wanted PvE-centric events and overly-difficult-to-attack structures with limited map mobility in general. Nobody asked for a huge paywall on guild upgrades for WvW. Nobody asked for new stat options on gear – because we already had that through granular stat selection on an armor-by-armor basis. PvP should have reverted back to the gem system; there’d be no need to have done this. Nobody really wanted new overpowered runes or sigils or food items etc. It’s just bloat.

A lot of good has come in the WvW changes in respects to WvW-specific changes. The problem at its core is still profession design and balance keeping the game itself and the combat from being fun.

Nikkinella.8254:

^Didn’t the ESL players also say the only reason they still played was the money, and that combat wasn’t fun anymore because of all the overpowered crap from HoT? This isnt just a map issue. It affected spvp as well. And Anet thinks its a success because RAIDS! slowly claps congrats Anet, you killed off 2 of your gamemodes to stroke the kittens of 1% of the PvE population. Huge success!

Yes. The forum posts on the subject coming from the pro players themselves were also deleted and the users infracted for a period of time.

With ESL out of the equation nobody is taking PvP here in any amount seriously. It’s not fun, and these players will move and largely have moved to other games.

Until ANet recognizes their game is just not fun to play outside of smashing mobs, the PvP scene (including WvW) will keep decaying rapidly.

That’s just the be-all-end-all.

Palador.2170:

I could see a mechanical reloading crossbow as a new skin for a rifle, with a new sound and projectile effect. Smaller ones might even work for pistols. But on its own, a standard crossbow is very clunky and slow compared to what you can get with a normal bow or firearm (as they’re shown in this game).

Flintlock guns were way less efficient for accurate shots, but that’s besides the point.

IF in the very unlikely event they took my Deadeye concept as the thief as-is without scrapping the whole notion of SHF, such a “crossbow” in the flair of Van Helsing would be the ideal type to make a skin for as the elite spec weapon.

However, it just looks like a generic sniper and will likely break the game given the thief’s mechanics.

Went full-generic-Asian RPG especially with all the overdone particle effects and silly weapons/armor and I’m honestly disappointed. It’s no longer got that great rustic feel.

I doubt it’ll be make-or-break any more than the first one. I wouldn’t call it appealing to super-fans, either. I’d call it appealing to those who didn’t play this game for the PvP. PvP and WvW, as expected, died with the expansion. The landmark falloff is obvious at this point. It’s been slow, but it’s how it’s gone.

Those content with HoT are going to like the next one. The reasoning is because the next one is being catered towards those exact players, because they stayed, and because ANet already knows what those players want, and because ANet can stay profitable on those players.

ANet would be suicidal to try and re-convince the mass of betrayed players to come back. That’s a gamble and may just upset the players which liked HoT. They failed on the first try with a lot of time to develop the first expansion. The second expansion has been announced for just over a year, now, and we’re looking at maybe a two-year interval between when expansions are released. That’s breakneck speed for a company with so few developers.

HoT already broke the game for many, including me. Until they go against the grain of the first expansion and back to the game’s original manifesto, I’m never buying from ANet again, regardless of the state of one of the leaked elite specs being almost identical to a proposal I made. The product at its core is no longer good enough.
The original promises are pretty much entirely all broken for why I signed up to begin with. ANet’s practices are not good enough to warrant trust in their development reliability or attentiveness in gameplay improvements, either.

For the past two years, it’s been QoL at best. Sweeping changes that have been necessary for five years have not been made still, because ANet is insistent on making changes to “low hanging fruit” (quote CJ) problems which are symptoms and not causes.

So no, it won’t break GW2 or ANet. We’ve already “hit” that mark; it just won’t revitalize the other aspects of the game which many people quit over which are already failing and failing hard.

Swamurabi.7890:

Lahmia.2193:

Sylvyn.4750:

How much of the population drop was really related to DBL though versus the unbalancing effects of the new elite specs and the resulting OP boonsharing meta that was also introduced with HoT?

Well considering when people talk about HoT almost killing WvW, the talking point is always the maps rather than the power creep.

Sure the DBL map was bad, but at least you could go to EBG.
It was the sum of the parts that finally did it for most.

PvE grind to unlock elite specializations, for some of us that was nine times.
PvE grind for the entire guild to get your WvW upgrades unlocked, when you should have at least started with what you had unlocked prior to HoT.
And when you did get to play WvW it was the Pirate Ship Meta.

I remember pre reset where you’d look over at each BL portal and see one or two guilds per portal. EBG was mostly empty. After HoT it was mostly EBG.

This. DBL was the straw that broke the camel’s back for most small groups, since small-scale got ruined in every way in regards to combat, and then the maps were also just made crap-tastic, too.

The biggest drives for quitting were elites and new armors/consumables that required huge farming as well as the sheer cost of guild halls. Most WvW players are broke as it is.

Until they fix professions/elites, there is zero hope for the format, or in sPvP. It’s not fun to play even while disregarding all the flaws with WvW as it is.

Hexalot.8194:

Palador.2170:

I think that the real problem here is that the devs don’t understand WvW players. They thought they did, and when they tried to give them what they believed they wanted, it went sour very quickly.

This is akin to petting a cat, and getting your hand burned. It’s painful, and more than a little confusing. It makes you reluctant to try it again, because you’re not sure just how it went so oddly wrong, so you don’t know how to avoid it happening again.

I think this guy really gets it (a pve’r of all people lol).

But instead of reaching out to the players or figuring out why the cat burned your hand to begin with after attending the wound, ANet has instead just chosen the path of alienation.

Something along the lines of “If you don’t succeed, try; try again.”

We have made it very pronounced why their first attempt failed. The entire PvP landscape has made it very obvious why the formats are failing (99% from profession/elite spec design/implementation). Until the entire game and professions see dramatic changes when under the lens of general gameplay health, we’re looking at a no-win situation and PvE will only ever increasingly be a valid format.

I hope you like raids. Because that’s where the future of the game is going in its entirety.

As someone said, the forums are much more fun than the actual game, and pretty much have been since HoT. ANet blew it huge on the elite specs, gear changes, consumables, and so on. It felt more like a WoW expansion thinly veiled by just not increasing the level cap.

Turk.5460:

coro.3176:

I never claimed to be able to dodge or block every stun. I try, but I’m certainly not perfect. I also have other tools at my disposal, like blind, immobilize, cripple, etc.

My complaint about basilisk venom is that I can’t ever dodge it and can’t ever block it. If I eat a shield bash. That’s on me. I should have seen it and defended. If I see a thief at 1200 range with venom up, no amount of skilled play on my part will prevent that damage – not even a stun break. I’m still going to take the initial interrupt + first attack before I can react. You can’t say that about too many skills in the game.

Is Basilisk Venom the only instant (by technicality, at least) stun in the game?

No. Interrupt power mesmer can chain-CC with zero tell at 1200 range, and SoM Gunflame warrior inflicts Daze on GF which is also unblockable. Scrapper CC’s from Gyro will keep you guessing just as much as a thief will. Terror Reaper with YSIM can shroud skill flicker for multiple no-tell unblockable AoE fears which lack casts.

All of these options have lower cooldowns.

BV is hardly overpowered if looking at this from just the perspective of the person complaining they can’t block the CC component with some kind of miraculously perfect play. Everyone needs a stunbreak in small-scale.

Still doesn’t change the fact that OP is right that most of the gameplay is now cheese. A lot of people, myself included, have gotten up and left for greener pastures if they wish to PvP.

vier.1327:

What else the WvWers wants?

Balanced and fun gameplay. Unfortunately the profession team as no interest in fixing problem systems/design.

Doesn’t matter what they do if the act of PvP’ing itself isn’t fun. Even the ESL players were only hanging around to get paid. Many publicly announced that they actively disliked combat in the game since HoT due to the elite specs breaking the PvP environment/balance/“fun-factor.”

Most of the issues would solve themselves if people still wanted to play to fight. What’s left of WvW is mostly PvE players and ktrainers who couldn’t care less.

Mathematically since the AA damage buffs it’s no longer worthwhile for damage, and the ICD on stealth attacks if and when they miss kills most incentive to use it or try to bother at all.

The change of BV to one attack also made consistency drop as auto-proc passive negation will force any Mug + Stab combo to miss as well.

So at the end of the day, it’s usually not worth trying, unless you know you can get it to land.

The rifle is fine if it doesn’t nuke. Shortbow at 1200 with all the mobility it had was hardly OP for actual combat as it was, but was just too strong on escapes/captures. Less so now, even.

But that’s why I proposed it as a ranged utility weapon with low damage coefficients. Any amount of ranged burst potential without massive consequence (a la mandating that all heavy ranged damage come from extended self-reveal) will do more harm than good in general.

Anyone asking for this to be a sniper or trying to make it a sniper is neglecting to consider fun gameplay game-wide and is only endorsing the mentality of the previous expansion/why the PvP environment is in such a sad state.

It’s also why I’m very skeptical about this whole thing, and see it more comedic than anything; unless ANet takes pretty much my exact implementation, this is doomed to fail, and fail hard it will. I sincerely doubt they’d be willing to take the entire concept as it was without making any major adjustments.

For the thief to have the rifle, it needs to be implemented in a smart, cohesive way that takes the whole game into consideration, particularly PvP. Anything else will be game-breaking.

Wargameur.6950:

Jugglemonkey.8741:

Tbh I’m mostly just happy about being able to use my predator rifle after they gutted rifle engi, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to this spec. The idea of rifle thief kinda bores me.

That said, Deceiver’s proposal was one of the more fully developed and balanced ideas put out there, so I’d have no problem with it becoming reality either. If someone enjoys it and it’s not horrendously OP/UP, it’s a win tbh.

Maybe DeceiverX is a dev and fooled us all ^^ The last Anet’s strategy to post things in the thief subsection ahahah :p

Trust me, I really, really wish this were true. I’m at least glad the concept was appreciated.

I know so many people say they could manage professions/the game better, but having put my money where my mouth is, I genuinely think the game would be in a better state if I were able to say I was a dev for ANet, despite [being a game systems designer] being my dream.

The only thing we can do is hope the concept is similar. Just because it has a rifle and is named the Deadeye does not at all mean the concept will be the same or that it will be nay good whatsoever. My proposal was good on the mechanical and design levels, and wasn’t just determined by “rule of cool.” The notion of a sniper build path for the thief is terrifying when looking at the greater state of the game.

If they can’t recognize this I think the last amount of integrity the game’s combat system/balance has, especially for the thief, will be shredded.

Fixing the forum – see previous.

Amante.8109:

If the rumors are accurate, then Karl is forgiven.

Just that it has a rifle? Hardly.

I may be in a position to be the single most appreciative player in the game but even I am kitten ed hesitant to believe that the Deadeye will be any good because I’m near-certain they butchered what I proposed and just took the name/weapon.

If they didn’t, he’s redeemed for letting the job get done by someone who knows how to design the profession the way it needs to be. Though that’s improvement by sidestepping and not actually getting better. It also still demands no other professions get power-creeped and the HoT specs also get nerfed since what I proposed was actually fair.

Dying? Wooooah man your guild lasted forever if yours is just going now.

Patch day of HoT killed ours.

Raiding is a far cry from a measure of skilled gameplay but rather just knowing the mechanics of the bosses and playing the right builds.

For complex mechanical gameplay you’d have needed to have played the thief before HoT in sPvP or WvW. The PvP has since turned turned into a joke in this game, though.

If mounted combat is in WvW I will absolutely be 100% done with this game, though. Even if my elite spec suggestion is exactly what they implement (although that’s looking pretty unlikely based on trait icons/skill names).