Guild Wars 2

6/6/x/x/x is not optimized for damage in any regard. See this thread for more info regarding my personal build and its optimization.

Valk/zerker mix, HiS heal, infil signet + assassin’s signet + signet of shadows + BV.

Traits are:
DA: Mug/Dagger Training;
CS: Signets of Power, Signet Use, HK;
0
0
TR: ToTC

ramocoolio.4120:

Anyone can play D/D burst.

Not sure if you’re trolling to be honest.
D/P and P/D are labeled the “meta cheese” sets for a very good reason.

D/D is the fairest set of the thief’s lineup and has the least amount of cheese with the fewest available useful skills. Anything pistol is noob-friendly and many of the people I’ve helped “learn to play” thief in-game after wanting help have moved from D/P to D/D because it’s much less gimmicky and admit D/P SA variants are crutch builds for less-skilled players and D/D’s upper potential limits/skill cap is much higher. I would further contemplate the use of SA for its condition removal but having no control over last refuge makes the entire line not justified for me. Stealth is essential at critical moments and being revealed because of a smart enemy requires gimmicks to compensate for it.

D/D burst thief’s skill is not in the damage yields but in surviving (especially signets). That said, it is the build with the best available quick enemy-dispatching potential in the game.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Personally, I think Ascended items are a waste of time, specially the weapons.

EDIT:
Found it: HERE"

The weapons are quite worthwhile in that the cost to make them isn’t very high for the gains. It’s maybe like… 50g to go form 1-500 and make the weapon?

Armor is not really necessary or rather doesn’t really warrant the price.

Care to elaborate? I see no real evidence supporting your claim.

Bryzy.2719:

BrunoBRS.5178:

Bryzy.2719:

Anyone saying the Ranger “won” the balance changes couldn’t be more wrong.

Most of the changes to Rangers have been needed since day one. They should always have been an integral part of the profession. As a result, Rangers have been considered the worst whole-game profession. This isn’t a “buff” for Rangers in the sense that it’s giving them an an advantage, because it’s not. It’s an update to help bring-up-to-par the Ranger profession, and even then it doesn’t address the profession’s core problem mechanic. After this update Rangers might be on a more level playing field in the realm of power builds, however until the pet mechanic is seriously dealt with I doubt we’ll see much of a change.

buffs aren’t about giving advantages, buffs are about bringing underused playstyles into the meta.

ranger got a TON of positive changes that should open up just as many new playstyles. the fact they’re not suddenly OP is a mark of a good buff, not a bad one.

so they won.

- “Buffs” are changes to an aspect of a profession that give it an advantage over how it used to perform.

- Rangers did indeed get a “TON” of positive changes, however they most certainly will not open up just as many new playstyles, they will simply improve on metas that already exist, like the Longbow/Greatsword of WvW and PvE, and the axe-based condi metas of PvP. Shortbow and sword, two weapons that needed particular attention, received none.

- Rangers have always under-performed compared with every other profession game-wide. This update is going to bring Rangers’ power builds one step closer to being on a par with other professions, though it will still be a way off the likes of warrior, thief and elementalist. How other professions are performing now – Rangers will be one step closer to that. However, other professions have been buffed, pulling further ahead of Rangers and maintaining that gap even after the balance patch has arrived.

- The only way in which Rangers would have “won” is if Anet had spent a significantly longer amount of time completely revamping the terrible pet mechanic and thereby transforming the whole profession. Additionally, Rangers haven’t won because other professions received buffs to things which are seen as unnecessary, like torment stacks to mesmer’s scepter AA.

There is a huge array of aspects to the Ranger profession – not including pets -that are still incredibly sub-par. Until all these aspects are brought up to speed, Rangers will not be “winning” anything. And if anyone wants to be finnicky and be all like “hurr durr what aspects?” then here’s a few examples:

- Terrible set of utilities compared to other professions
- Terrible group support (spirits are mediocre and take up all your kitten utility slots, and forcing you to trait for them if you want that kind of support to be any good – though pretty much terrible regardless for use in zergs)
- Terrible Shortbow
- Poor options for survivability in power-based builds (though ultimately like with everything else it’s down to the player…)
- Poor traits in general, a whole trait line that belongs somewhere else – i.e. traps
- The most decent traits we have are all in one line – marksmanship – and you have to sacrifice so many of them.

On top of an abomination of a pet mechanic, it’s still going to be looking bleak for a long time to come. Rangers ain’t won kitten.

That’s the problem. They’ve publicly announced they’re never actually going to even try to fix the broken pet mechanic despite knowing how much people hate it. This was made apparent in the CDI.

Rangers will always and forever be a broken, border-line unusable class.

Frankly, I think the best thing possible is for more people to try and push for thief to get longbow to fulfill the ranged/archer DPS role. It’s an even glassier med-armor so ANet can’t really justify their “ranged advantage” theory here as it carries more risk, Thieves have one less weaponset than their competition (so there’s a hole to fill), and do not have a 1200 range attack in their entire kitten nal since the shortbow range reduction over a year and a half ago. The set could/should be focused on long-ranged DPS and combat mobility while providing limited/no stealth access.

Dice Dragon.4326:

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

This game needs:

• Skills with counterplay
• Less passive play
• A game mode thats obvious and instantly understandable for viewers

Yet the game listed in op, is Dota, Which has tons of heros with passive stat walls, Turtle tactics, and extremely complicated mechanics(That believe it or not dont have to do with micro, Rather When to stack, farm, push, where to stand, where LoS is, Etc etc.) That is hard to get into. Being an Esport has little to do with how the game plays. As someone who for a while was in the “High skill” Bracket of dota, I very rarely needed to time crap super fast or use lightning reflexes/Abuse tells. It was “This dudes skill set is X, And he has items Y, he is capable of doing Z” You see an engie with a rifle, you already know what his first 5 skills are and you know what each kit he does, so you need to prepare for that.

Pokemon is another EXTREMELY complex Esport(despite it being casual id still call it an Esport) That has huge skill based play that are based less on Mechanical skill and more on match up knowledge. A good prediction in mons turns your bad match up into a sweep. You dont counterplay in pokemon, you prevent them from using their tools from hitting you.

I see so many complaints of “Passive play” When almost all high level Esport play abuses the fact of Passive stats.

Mao is extremely strong in league right now, You ant counter his heal, or stop him from farming. He is good cause he is a huge stat wall with CC.

Carries in dota are litterly just walls of stats used to run over the enemy after you get items.

MTG, the best cards are not Those with sick nasty combos and good abilities, a 4/4 vanilla for 2 is the best card you can get, because its cost effective.

Basicly, GW2 will never be a good Esport because its way to shallow and is based way to much on reaction and less on the substance of the game. Atleast from my experience.

To clear it up since I tend to ramble, GW needs more substance, and more emphasis on out playing my opponent in more then one way. Right now GW2 amounts to “My active defense was better played then his, so I win” Which is very boring to watch and has no depth.

And thus, why many, many people state this game will never be an E-sport, because you’ve effectively summed up the one major thing that all of those games have in common: Diversity.

As it stands, the game is far too unbalanced in sPvP and only a few select builds are considered usable. It has nothing to do with the reflex speed or anything of the matter as though these other games don’t have or need it – go watch faker play Zed – there is no real readable counterplay but he does find himself killed in MLG due to quick reflexes on his opponents’ behalf and build setups.

The issue with GW2’s sPvP is that because the pool of effective builds is so small – even in the very low tiers – all that the game actually boils down to is dodging and reflexes, for the gearing process/resource blocking strategies that exist in other games like League/DotA/Smite are not applicable. You can’t shut down a DPS character in sPvP by denying it early kills and getting “fed.” Even pokemon, you need to understand this diversity and try and dynamically learn how to counterplay your opponent. All you can do in GW2 is run a better spec and/or dodge better. MAYBE you can get a chance to change builds/utilities in-game, but that’s only applicable if your team comp would allow for such flexibility to create a dynamic environment.

Frankly, if food wasn’t allowed in WvW, I’d actually call it much more balanced, diverse, and competitive than sPvP. And WvW sells a lot more copies of the game than sPvP does, especially when the top dogs for E-sports/MLG are all free titles save Starcraft.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

On the plus side, at least we can run away better than any class still -.-

Depends on how you define running away. Land-speed-wise, gs/s warrior has superior mobility to the thief. Objectively, the only way to say they have the best running potential is if stealth is mentioned.

They’re both pretty facerolly.

It’s just you’re going to find even more P/D users after the patch because nothing was done to it and D/P’s powder nerf is going to make a lot of people move by taking away a solid amount of the faceroll.

Loyo.8526:

Dancingmonkey, I think you are missing the fact that warrior has been in favor on all game modes with various builds. Its top tier roaming, top tier PvE, and so high in TPvp that some teams actually consider running 2-3 of them per team. Compared to necro that you would be lucky to see roaming solo/duo or even in Tpvp. . . It really doesnt compare.

Plus, Lich form was pretty much the biggest positive to running power necro in TPvP over other DPS classes. now that its been normalized, its a lot less effective and will most likely push it out of meta. While Warrior still has Longbow to deal with adrenaline change.

Lich form’s power scaling got buffed, though. It’s going to do the same damage over the course of the duration but just in fewer hits over less time. If anything, it’s a massive buff due to to the sheer amount of damage per hit it will be doing.

Loyo.8526:

DeceiverX.8361:

Necro’s DS buff is absolutely bonkers. Expect necros to start one-shotting people in WvW with relative ease with their autoattacks while in LF. I’m expecting somewhere along the lines of 15-23k DPH autos.

I cant tell if you are serious or just pulling a cruel joke.

Meant Lich form, lol. My bad :P

Mesmer easily. It’s not even disputable.

Torment on AA? I could care less about clone on-death effects or PU’s defensive bonuses/RNG. The fact that they put the single best condition in the game which has some of the lowest available access to it on auto for both a class AND all of its phantasms is just absurd. Ranger got a double-edged sword with RF, due to how easily it can be evaded now) and their uses (or rather, their lack thereof) will go unchanged in most formats of the game.

Ele got a pretty big buff to FGS. Not for PvE, but FGS 4 will on some builds hit harder than a glass thief backstab. With their incredibly high mobility and utility they’re be bumped even higher on the WvW spectrum.

Necro’s Edit: LF buff is absolutely bonkers. Expect necros to start one-shotting people in WvW with relative ease with their autoattacks while in LF. I’m expecting somewhere along the lines of 15-23k DPH autos.

The spirit bow active on guardian looks good but that’s about the only benefit I really saw out of that. I was hoping for some possible mobility fixes/cooldown issues on some of the weapons, but they really didn’t need much done.

Thief was changed, although only D/P got hit hard but I really couldn’t care less as D/P deserved it. The rest of the changes don’t seem very impactful, and the S/D change for LS was cool. I’m more curious than anything.

Engineer didn’t get a whole lot, but they didn’t really need a whole lot more.

War’s rework is good. Glad I can see more skilled play opportunities while not inherently reducing damage outputs.

Healing power P/P bunker blindspam.

With the incoming nerfs, no longer really viable, but absolutely freaking hilarious at the moment with how well it counters hambow and simply just lives through everything.

At first I thought a reduction on swapping would be OP, and then I kind of realized not much would change and we’d just see new combos and styles develop to account for some shortcomings. If anything, cooldown restrictions on the gains of certain on-swap effects would probably be a deciding factor. And initiative would prevent cooldown reset issues since the resource is universal.

It’s actually not a bad idea. Trying to counter-play would become a lot harder though, and might end up in more nerfs/QQ.

25 might stacking on a thief before engaging would require a 0/6/6/0/2 D/P + D/D build and 8 seconds of setup time and bad engage which will deal strictly less damage than 5/6/0/0/3 and leaves very little room in weapon utilities for anything but this kind of play.

There is no such thing as activating five signets because there is no elite signet skill.

Apparently sacrificing heal and all of your utilties is an exploit for extra damage. Who knew. I guess a greatsword/axe warrior with FGJ, Frenzy, and Signet of Might passive is exploiting, too, despite it being bad.

He’s just talking out of his bum.

It’s really just practice. You really just need to get the motion down and make it as fluid as possible. Additionally, the more time you give your enemy to react to you going into stealth, the more they’ll do to try and move their camera/rotate their character to prevent an easy stab.

I wouldn’t abide by the above advice because players can react differently to engages. Learning to turn will increase your stab reliability and will reduce the dependency on in-game systems or your opponent’s failures to take over.

To reduce volatility, it’s considered good practice (playing D/D) to use Basilisk Venom before entering combat, and pre-cast Cloak and Dagger (dagger offhand 5) and during the beginning of the animation steal into the enemy. The teleport will move you while casting, causing you to instantly land BV from the CnD (or mug first if you have it traited), stun your target, and stealth you in one fluid movement, allowing you a brief window to reposition and land the stab. The faster and more fluid you are, the more difficult it will be for your opponents to react to the CC, use a stunbreak, and dodge the damage on time.

D/P is much more difficult to land stabs for when engaging due to the lack of quick-stealth combo and is made more as an in-between defensive set for high stealth uptime without the need of hitting another player/entering combat.

4/6/0/0/4 is not a truly optimized assassination/burst damage build. Nor is 6/6/0/0/2 or any 6/6/x/x/x variant.

My build is 5/6/0/0/3 and I can assure you that this build provides the absolute best possible numbers available on a given D/D backstab combo under valk/zerk mixed gear. The trait build is here:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQJAoIlsMpypNOxzpJaJktHt6lfv19RAA

Why it beats 4/6/x/x/x damage:

The 5-point trait Exposed Weakness in the Deadly Arts line provides a 10% damage modifier when the target is suffering from a condition. A rapid-action backstab after applying serpent’s touch and lotus poison will net a 10% increased damage modifier before the conditions are cleansed – not to mention the additional 50 power gained from the build. At best, a 4/6/0/0/4 build – or any other 4/6/x/x/x variant will achieve close to a 5% damage modifier through other traits without the bonus power.

Why it deals more damage than 6/6/0/0/2:

6/6/0/0/2 is a hard-hitting spec, but it fails to utilize the 5-point Critical Strikes trait First Strikes’ 10% damage modifier. With a signet burst build, a thief will be generating 11-16 stacks of might on engage (quad signets are a waste), putting the thief well over 3 thousand power. In WvW with proper food and gear, this number can start approaching the 4k number. Gaining an extra 200 power from Revealed training nets around a 5-7% damage increase. With Preparedness, a thief will have 13 initiative, and after a CnD will thus have 7 initiative, allowing for First Strikes’ 10% damage modifier to be applied even on the Mug damage portion, let alone the backstab, thus signficantly increasing the overall damage dealt by the combo by roughly 15-20% when the CnD hit is also included. Not to mention ToTC closes the +50 power gap from the trait stat points to only a difference of 15 stat difference power.

Why it’s better than both:

More damage, identical survivability, near-identical cooldowns on steal (it’s a 1s faster recharge 4 pts deep into Trickery versus 3s).

I’ve found extreme success with this in WvW roaming, but you NEED to pick your fights well. You will have matchups you can’t win, and should be paying attention to your enemies to see what kind of setups they run based off of what utility passives or stacks they might have. It is NOT a build you can just engage anyone with, and it’s extremely punishing for misplays. That said, the damage potential is absolutely incredible and this build can end fights before they even begin.

On an 80 beserker guardian to demonstrate the damage potential (more on lights/with food; sadly no crit on CnD QQ):

Apparently it’ll be increased by 140%.

Therefore 4k x 2.4 = 9600.

Burst FGS ele meta incoming, especially with a 25 vuln stacker.

Devildoc.6721:

Wyrden.4713:

Devildoc.6721:

Know what’s funny? Even with the nerf FGS is the best Elite. Firestorm and whirl are still good, and Rush and whirl will make it good as an escape tool in wvw.

Either way it’s by far better than Tornado, and Glyph of Elementals (unless you’re soloing, then Glyph is okay)

the glyph gets a nice buff tho, the elemental will have a 6 k heal on demand

In group content your elemental gets absolutely demolished, so no, not all that useful.

It can’t dodge, and scaled bosses/dungeon bosses do really high damage that pretty much is dodge or die.

Welcome to being a ranger, except that’s your class mechanic and they plan on doing nothing about fixing it :\

I plan on checking out a similar build post-patch, but I’ll be dropping MoC and putting just 5 points into skirmishing, putting the traits at 6/5/1/2/0. I’m stuck between various adept skirmishing traits. All of them have their ups and downs and none of them are very appealing for a power longbow build.

I also plan to move bloodlust to a secondary set, and will likely consider swapping both GS with energy and shortbow with sigil of fire, and main accuracy/air on the longbow. This should best-optimize DPS from the longbow, and the shortbow with fire procs can lead to a lot of tagging while fighting in groups to quickly gain those stacks.

You can’t run all berserker accessories as ascendeds are unique. You’ll need to replace the duplicate ring/accessory slot items with berserker + valkyrie to retain the offensive infusion. Doing this means you should also move all of the infusions to power except for one in order to truly optimize your DPS. I also recommend a sharpening stone to retain some bonus power but keeping the curry for the sake of cost efficiency.

Would like longbow the most, although if a new weapon were to come, a crossbow would be the ideal for me. Ranger is bad and will never be fixed as proper ranged DPS, and I’d like to play the high-mobility squish ranged DPS role in the game, and initiative and wthdraw with self-stealth for re-positions could definitely be the answer.

mango.9267:

Dear God. I watched this on 360p and was wondering which server would have that many people sitting on that many ballistas, with two omegas, and stealth/supply traps — all in a camp. But then the answer became obvious.

Had to up the quality to assure myself it was YB as nobody else does it lol.

Shortbow is your best friend against hammer warrior. Poison fields and lots of kiting will eventually kill them. Aside from this, there’s not much out there to really counter hammer/CC lock war in general.

The segment is poorly worded. The paragraph says:

“Then, all you have to do is talk with the Battle Historian NPC during the next week’s matchup to earn your rewards. It is important to note: You must claim your rewards in the week following the matchup in which they were earned. Rewards that are not claimed during the following week will be forfeited. Please refer to the table below to make sure you don’t miss out on your rewards!”

Followed by a table of “Rewards” which consists of the various items. One would then assume the items are the rewards and thus must be claimed within the one week period afterwards.

Atherakhia.4086:

Would the enemy be able to see this skin? It would certainly make Rangers more valuable being able to easily pick out commanders from a zerg.

Nothing will ever helps rangers in WvW blobs until they have a means of ignoring reflect/deflect on a utility, have fixed traits, and gain increased DPS numbers by allowing stow pets.

And none of this is ever happening as confirmed by ANet firsthand, so rangers will never be good in zergs.

You’ve got my signature.

style.6173:

Another way to look at this…. if few people transfer servers, ANET will increase the rewards for season 4. In case you didn’t know, the whole point of seasons is to drive gem sales from transfers.

Precisely this. It’s why there’s no penalty on transferring now. The more people move, the more they profit.

It’s really starting to drive me insane. They at release claimed to be a studio focusing on the player perspective but at the moment all I see is them trying to make a buck at the expense of good gameplay.

Ground-targeting would be fine IF zoom-hacking wasn’t already a problem in WvW. Now you have someone zoom-hack throwing the siege on top of a ledge or past a door and disabling everything.

I’d first suggest making this a thrown projectile, not just a point and click and place. This means zoom-hackers can’t throw it inside keeps through doors.

It’d also be smart to cut the radius down rather than try to buff other siege’s attack range. A ram not connecting with a gate in an animation but doing so for the damage makes little sense and would also only benefit attackers.

A 900 range ground target with a 200 radius effect would be very reasonable. A good cast could shut down a ram or two by defenders and bide some time until reinforcements come, and the close range when used by attackers, even considering zoom-hacking, would place the effect not going beyond the height of a parapet, meaning it could disable siege normally destroyed by attacking with ranged weapons.

If the implementation is similar to this, then it could be quite positive for defenders and warrant new sieging strategies.

I see. The items in the table are referred to as the rewards, but what they’re implying is that the tickets are actually the rewards.

Hvaran.6327:

u’re totally wrong. Burst is all ok as in wvw as in pvp. IT’s even particly underweithed in pvp or smallscale wvw.

DeceiverX.8361
Zergs run PTV or cavalier specs for durability. No effective zerg runs berserker or a DPS-optimized setup except for maybe a select few necromancers or elementalists, and the rest of which are running even tankier.

what do u call zerg? it’s randoms, so there is no “running”, each one runs what they want, but promoting pvt for 40+ group is totall madness.

RUnning tanky u need udnersiege fire or when u’re tired and hardly focusign, otherwise u must balance it enough and not 3400 armor 25k health guardians.

there is burning whine thread, not burst discussion thread.
Both are ok in gme, just seems some people got rekt by seperate.

I call a “zerg” a large group of players. I expect them to be organized running GWEN builds under a skilled driver in T2+ WvW. I don’t mean to sound elitist here, but your lack of WvW experience/experience on high-tier servers is showing. Running what you want might work under some times of the day when guild groups are not around on some of the lower-tier servers, but unless you’re solo roaming or doing small havoc at the higher tiers, you’re playing dedicated GWEN roles. Most players will be using PTV or Nomad’s with support-based traits. Simply, if your entire blob doesn’t have a constant 25 might, you’re doing it wrong.

The news article on the 2014 WvW Fall Season mentions ticket rewards will be granted each week and must be spent within the week following the matchup when they are distributed. The totals listed are 200/150/100. That’s great and all, but the new ticket rewards now prevent anyone from getting the Mistforged Hero’s weapon at 300 tickets, even if a server wins first place.

With my experience in game support, even if game support or even the higher-ups with more advanced in-game tools can’t get access to making these DB-level+ modifications, when there is a large-scale issue like this, it’s good practice to notify the DB team to perform such modifications to the database and not penalize players for something which was not their responsibility or their fault.

A friend of mine has proven celestial venomshare as a very effective aggressive support build. I suspect Carrion + Apothecary will prove to be a very effective build after the patch. When paired with a group of five, a venomshare thief can execute 105 procs of leeching venoms. This yields absolutely astronomical burst potential for your party from LV with well-timed casts, and can easily sustain your party’s health over a battle, as each player will be healing for above 10k per person, meanwhile applying a substantial number of torment stacks and poison for heal cutting, chills, interrupts/hard CC from BV, etc. Meanwhile, the VS thief also gets 10 stacks of might over this duration for a period of time, and can use TotC for party-wide might, fury, and swiftness on engage.

I think the main issue with venoms is the lack of potential it has for individual play, and how deadlocked a VS thief is in traits in order to make them effective. With some streamlined traits to allow more diversity, the utilities could probably take off and have much more of an effect/presence in the game.

Souldestructor.9576:

Necro’s don’t have much survivability,

Whatever changes they make to help the survivability with Necro’s is needed.

I seriously don’t think we’re playing the same game.

Necromancers are BY FAR the class with the best durability. Their durability is not the reason why they’re not picked for PvE, and is one of the biggest reasons they’re part of the GWEN meta because they can just facetank anything. The reality of the matter is the necromancer lacks group support and individual lower-cooldown damage to warrant their use. As it stands, their competitive DPS comes from lich form, which while absolutely absurd for DPS’ing high health targets (by far the best in the game outside of FGS’ing which I don’t even consider PvE or a particular asset of a given class’s balance/PvE damage throughput), has too long of a cooldown and necromancers’ DPS outside of LF is pretty dreadful.

Necros face their PvE issues because they’re a bomb class on high cooldowns built around sustaining until their bombs are ready again. With dungeon design just being a test of who can drain HP bars the fastest, I doubt they’ll ever find themselves in the PvE meta until encounters are focused around such styles of play. Giving the necromancer anything to warrant their use otherwise in support or damage would subsequently put them above other classes in all regards and would force other classes in the same position necromancers are in now.

Most PvE problems come from poor dungeon design and have nothing to do with class imbalances. The necromancer is one which is arguably one of the best classes in PvP-based environments due to the above-mentioned nature of the class.

QQ shouldn’t come from the class being underpowered but because of bad dungeon and PvE mob design which doesn’t support the play style of the necromancer when groups are trying to optimize their clearing times.

The issue doesn’t rely in revealed as it does the SA line having too many useful effects that the entire class lacks elsewhere, such as any form of in-combat stat defense and most notably, condition cleansing.

If more condition cleansing was added to the class, SA would be a very niche trait line, and revealed would be a hard counter to stealth-based builds. That’s totally fine. If you build to hard-counter stealth, stealth-exclusive players should have a window of vulnerability.

The problem, though, is that thieves can’t get access to important effects without being stealthed. Given slightly better condition cleansing through more trait lines or simply by adding some cleanse effects to existing utility skills, the whole stealth and Shadow Arts debacle wouldn’t be an issue.

Zergs run PTV or cavalier specs for durability. No effective zerg runs berserker or a DPS-optimized setup except for maybe a select few necromancers or elementalists, and the rest of which are running even tankier.

When any other class can reach 80%+ crit rate with higher stats across the board, I don’t think it’s unique to thieves lol.

So what you’re saying is in 3 seconds, sigil of Air can provide something like a 20% boost in dps/burst at best.

But Sigil of Rage can provide a 50% boost in dps/burst.

Air/Fire are actually more about sustained damage increases rather than burst damage…

P/P healing power blinding bunker is real (although not so much after the patch).

Nobody expects it and nobody can beat it until they bring friends.

Diamond skin is absolutely insane.

I don’t think so. Without effective burst damage, all you’ll find is tankier bunker builds like you see in sPvP since burst isn’t viable due to stat caps. And that’s not only boring and restrictive on build diversity, but I think people are confusing massive might stacking on classes/builds that shouldn’t be and “burst” classes/build setups. Like is that D/D hyper-burst thief that enters a fight with no utilities a real threat outside of a 1v1? Not really at all, no. Is that guardian with 3k toughness and 3k power a threat in any given situation, though? Yea.

The only thing rangers don’t suck in is open-world PvE, in which case yes, they are by far the best class just because pets can soak aggro so well, mob/boss AI is bad with pets, and the pets can take a LOT of hits before going down.

But the rest of the classes perform much better in everything else. Giving them a little burst and some more access to damage won’t hurt the other classes too much, either.

LordByron.8369:

meteornado removal is the end of the few ele dps still playing WWW.

But its fair because WWW is only for necros, waterspam eles, warriors and guardians.

How dare people play other professions….

Fixed that for ya.

It’s not just longbow. It’s Hambow in general. Warrior misses earthshaker due to a really well-timed dodge? Well, better just wait 8s and try again without actually needing to land other hits or build up the resource.

coglin.1867:

Roe.3679:

I don’t find it unreasonable that strong skills also require immobility. Could you imagine a mobile hundred blades? Or a mobile meteor shower? It would be crazy and those skills would need to be toned down to compensate.

Imagine it? They used to be that way…………
No one is suggesting they did or did not need to be toned down, I am simply suggesting that forcing immobilization upon the player was not the was to go about it. I simply feel it is counter intuitive to the games mobile combat design

BobbyT.7192:

wouldn’t it be a little overpowered if it allowed u to move also?

No, I do not feel it would be at all.

Yeah, I have no idea why you have to be immobile to cast churning earth or meteor shower. Part of what draws my attention to this, is how they are changing it with rangers long bow skill “Barrage”.

Magnetic Wave is a longer duration, reflects, cures 3 conditions, is also a blast finisher, has a lower cool down, and doesn’t force immobility.

I actually think it’s particularly good design. Have you not seen caveats? These skills are absolutely game-changing at points and should require such penalties. You can still cancel the animation early and get a few hits, too. If anything the ranger’s barrage skill is one of the least useful and least-deserving of an immobilized channel state.

Losing defenses for enabling major offensive bombs is clever – especially when mobility is defense. I commonly relate to the ranger class of R:BF, which had the best ranged DPS implementation I’ve ever seen in any game, but the ranger there had no defenses except for its absolutely incredible mobility – it ran at an effective, stackable base speed 40% faster than the fastest mounts available in the game (get hit and you die, however) – but it never really had an exceptional form of damage, either, except for a skill combination which yielded absolutely massive burst damage potential to the point it could shred tanks with ease… except this damage combo immobilized the ranger for ten seconds. Ten seconds of immobilize on a class frequently one-shot killed. That was a huge sacrifice, but one every single ranger made and made do with because it had such a great yield, and nobody complained about it because it was balanced. One mis-play and you waste everything and die (classes frequently could perform hard un-cleansable perma-CC-lock or 30+ seconds of it), or you could take out one or two critical players. How you played and worked around the caveat of the skill (knowing when CC cooldowns were on for your foes, exact attack range of other skills, etc.) was what made good players succeed. It had almost nothing to do with class matchups.

50% damage reduction isn’t enough. Dunno what server you play on or how your GvG is like, but I’ll state now that in T2 and higher – in order for pets to survive, they basically need to no longer be combat entities with the lack of synergy/interaction they have and the lack of active defenses. And even then, the responsiveness is so poor on the latter that it’d just be impossible.

Eh. What they instead need to do is remove some of the long pet idle animations. This is especially apparent in birds, where the bird will not move (even if commanded) until it finishes its very lengthy flourishing idle animation.

They’re working on that with signets. How far they’ll go? Likely not very. They want the ranger to play with the pet. So I doubt we’ll see them justifying rangers not needing to have their pet pull weight (albeit the fact they can’t in most combat situations).

They really just need to overhaul the class. There’s only so much they can “tweak,” and the community knows what it wants (as does ANet).

MonMalthias.4763:

Everything I just said.

Absolutely freaking nailed it. Most good game design yields increased reward for increased risk and thus things without a “risk” have repercussions which need to be considered. In an ideal world, RNG does not exist – because one can not evaluate and make calculated counter-play efforts towards RNG except operating under the pretense something will happen – which for an action-based game, is really not a good idea.

And the person above me: Absolutely. A game succeeds when it’s constantly giving players a reason to play and keep being invested. LS isn’t enough – especially since it doesn’t actually change the gameplay at all – it’s the same thing with a different name, done maybe a little differently. Giving players a reason to be engaged in something is achieved by giving them options and tools to build with. I still swing my sword the same way I did two years ago. The same with every class and every weapon in every encounter. Nothing has changed but the enemies.

You forgot to mention rangers, which by far have the worst class mechanic in the game and will always keep them broken.

nearlight.3064:

As long as the fan boys get aroused over the idea of double daggers, this build will persist on … thief for that matter, regardless of any nerf.

Uh what? D/D thief is rarely celestial in anything except sPvP and is so in sPvP only because of stat caps which prevents D/D thief from properly utilizing more damage-optimized builds.

The problem remains ease of might stacking and very little reason for elementalists to put trait investment into any other trait line seeing as their attunement line is mandatory with none of the attunements being particularly good individually, and an ele might as well just stack defensive bonuses when all that might comes so easily.

So really the attunements and their subsequent trait lines need some reworks before the elementalist will find itself in a balanced state with build diversity.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Be careful with what you wish for. After a year of complaining that warrior was the lowest ranked profession in Pvp, A-net in one patch buffed warrior in a way that has seen them dominate ever since. Even with 3 successive patches toning down all their skills, and another patch on the way that will see them toned down, it has become apparent that sweeping dramatic changes are not always for the best. Players are so used to the new warrior now that many will resign on them again after this patch because they will feel puny again. It is best we don’t see the same thing happen to ranger and instead implement solid, but limited changes over time.

The issue is that ANet does poor maintenance on their sweeping changes. Massive overhauls are necessary sometimes. Ignoring them on the basis that at release they could be excessive is a terrible idea when approaching a subjective subject as balance, especially when ANet has the potential to change or revert such changes instantly should they feel the need.

ANet just simply doesn’t follow their changes well, and because of it only opts to fix “low-hanging fruit” problems. The sad fact is that in the ranger’s situation, this will never be enough due to fundamental problems with the class which they even admit exist because of hardware and programmatic limitations but outright refuse to do so because their “vision” of the class differs from what the class needs to be, which is only achievable through major, sweeping changes.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Atherakhia.4086:

I also don’t see RF doing the same damage in 2 fewer seconds is going to dramatically shift the way things run now. Especially in PvP.

Exactly this! RF doesn’t kill you pre patch? Good, it wont kill you post patch.

Actually this isn’t true.

As it stands now, the skill takes too long to cast that hp/sec skills and regeneration can actually cause RF not to deal enough damage to kill someone. With the damage shifted to a subtantially smaller time frame, the amount of healing allowed within the time frame diminishes. Example being a thief in stealth with Shadow Rejuvenation or a healing signet warrior with regen, or a mixture with ele’s water attunement regen. Not to mention the possibilities of blasting water fields during the cast time, etc., which may cause RF to net too little damage per the time it takes to cast.

This also includes bursting through casting animations. Nobody’s saying the gross damage dealt to a target by RF in the time frame is increasing. It’s the fact the net amount of damage dealt by the skill compared to healing effects will do so.

Lostwingman.5034:

I’m pretty sure the devs have shut down the idea of aggregate stacks as not really abating the server overload problem.

Bingo. The problem lies in that the server would have to do too many calculations and too much bookkeeping. Simply adding new “tiers” does nothing to resolve this problem and only adds even more calculations and bookkeeping since the damage still needs to get calculated out on a per-user basis and maintained.