Congratulations, you’re now attacking from 130 range.
Except then there’s no reason to run power builds.
See where this is going?
I’m next to positive void and dark bows were added before karil’s, as the barrows addition came long after slayer if I’m not mistaken. I was of the sort that did wilderness runs and stake dueling.
Though you’d never see a ranged tank play a dark bow. That was a PJ/safe-zone hugging pure build as tanks would run excal specials with a rcbow for the added defense with void to gain massive defense to the point where it would take > 99 attack to land a hit reliably, meanwhile running 10% increased ranged accuracy and damage from the armor.
Concept is interesting but it’ll never happen (obvious power issues aside mentioned above). ANet is never changing class mechanics. Talk to any ranger about pets and the personal responses ANet has given about reworking pets/ranger class mechanic. I’ll give you a hint: despite it being overwhelmingly the single-most demanded thing to change in the entire game (including all aspects of the game), the pet mechanic is going unchanged, formally announced by ANet on the basis that “they don’t want to change it.”
That said, I’m withholding judgments regarding increased ranger viability for the most part until the patch lands and things sift out….
Now, if some of those problems were looked at and addressed, I could definitely see the meta changing to include them. The problem is that they weren’t, and just giving the class more ranged damage potential likely will not be enough to warrant substantial demand or even their use.
they are already being used in GvG and ZvZ for piercing arrow assisting each other on enemy commanders.
I’ve yet to see a top-tier GvG/ZvZ guild look for rangers as viable DPS, even despite the benefits of piercing. It’s too vulnerable and provides too little utility.
Ranged tank. 99 Ranged/Defense/HP/Magic at 53 prayer with 104 combat with almost nothing in attack/strength. That change really screwed me over as when it landed I instantly hit the maximum level and there went my thousands of hours since elementary school of trying to perfect my build and do the game content without the rest of it as well as my hardcore PvP’ing career. Consequently, HP on armor led me surpassed by those who were simply richer and I just gave up.
I was referring to the whole build, not the combo. Stab is not the problematic part of D/P. Yes it still allows for d/p to gain stealth through a HS through the smoke field, but the pulse change is actually a massive nerf to the build as now other classes will be able to stand within the field and deal essential damage/use important skills rather than the thief just standing in it and being effectively invulnerable to melee attacks. A lot of people argue the thief can still be hit in melee from outside, but this is only applicable if he does not kite a mere 10 units within the field and stays exactly in the center the whole time.
To claim it doesn’t have an effect is just simply false. Yes it still blinds and thieves may still opt to press 5 twice, but it then subsequently prevents much more of the unnecessary sustain.
facepalm
Who the hell stands in the obvious blind field and tries to attack when you can easily hit the thief from outside of the field with melee weapons. Every class has a widely used melee weapon that can easily hit the thief in the field, so if they’re standing in the field they ARE the weakest link.
But the thing is you CAN. I literally just said this. The radius on BP is 120. Melee attack range is 130 on ALL MELEE WEAPON AUTOS. If you move a mere 10 units kiting inside and maintain the distance, ta-da, you’ve now just become unhittable for the entire duration of BP unless a multi-hit combo is used, in which case, you dodge and laugh at blown cooldowns. I don’t understand how this is hard for you to understand.
The problem lies in PvP, still, though. Imagine conditions with half the duration and twice the damage. Imagine how many ticks you find yourself getting off in PvP before your opponents can either react or their cooldowns are up. Now double that damage. Condi bomb would be utterly obscene.
There is an algorithm for aggro. It’s based upon a combination of player proximity to the monster, each player’s armor value, players with active defenses/blocks, top damage dealers, and who is currently attacking the monster.
Source: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro
So you can spec into a full tank, but likely you’re not going to deal enough damage to keep you high enough on the aggro table, especially with nomad’s. I mean imagine being in a fight, and there’s a massive guy tapping you with a pool noodle and a small guy with a knife cutting you constantly. Which makes sense for you to try and take down first?
And if it’s a knife on the big guy and a sword on the small one? Well, you’d have to try and size both of them up and figure it out while keeping both at bay, as the aggro system tries to accomplish with variable systems.
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Funny story, thieves can’t use infiltrator’s arrow to rapidly climb staircases in keeps in WvW. It’ll drain initiative and move them to their current location. I do believe the only classes without a teleport are the warrior and engineer, anyways.
The day players in Dire gear can out-damage me with a third of their armor and half of their HP is the day they should then give all armor a 25% chance on hit to remove a condition.
Dire wasn’t part of the base game because it provided too much defense for the damage. It was added for condi PvE’ers because the condition cap led them to having no defense and no damage.
ANet has come out and stated that the condition cap cannot be altered at the moment due to technological limitations for their budget. Every calculation for conditions is done server-side, including the time in between ticks, the damage they deal, number of stacks (per player calculated separately), and any modifiers attached to them (calculated per player, separately). Allowing for an infinite cap would not only break conditions in PvP (there would be quite literally zero reason to run any given power build in PvP/WvW), but it would also require entirely new infrastructure internally in order to handle these calculations safely without risking the servers crashing from say, a wbt with a high population. To “buy new servers” is a massive economic undertaking and would run ANet several million dollars to achieve.
You’re partially right. PvP is not perfectly balanced and no game mode is probably ever going to be perfectly balanced. I do believe glass cannons are at a slight disadvantage like you do but conquest favoring bunker specs is pretty much a given. There is no doubt however that WvW is ridiculously UNBALANCED because of food/guard stacks/bloodlust etc etc.
Not even, though. I’d still argue WvW is more balanced in the grand scope of things. The fact I can go into WvW and run an effective GC spec through skilled play with no food or stacks and kill other players on max stacks and food, and then go into sPvP with the same build and deal less than 1/3 of the damage from the caps while retaining low health clearly demonstrate major flaws with the format and the limits on feasible diversity while shaping and “forcing” players into a particular meta or build path.
Yeah. Pve is just ball and burst. What i miss is an opportunity to every class to be good in any aspect of the game. Condi, cc, burst, sustain, bunker. A lot of players stop playing because they cant do his/her favourite game mode on high level with his/her favourite class
The same is applicable to WvW. I recently had to stop running with mine or reroll a new class.
@RS: I was also in that boat with a very special character of mine which also got destroyed in the change. Terrible shame what happened to that game, and just how absolutely massive the damage can be with sloppy design and failing to understand the game state and its players – a path ANet is dangerously encroaching with their current design philosophy.
I think as far as balancing goes, just being more daring would help a lot. I mean look at WoW, 6,8 million subs still, 12,1 mil max, and 10 years going.
And what do they do? They change tons of skills constantly, exchanging the entire functionality, merging them, splitting them off, removing them, adding them.Yes, this upsets the balance, constantly.
But, between the frequent wild swings in balance, the devs get very very useful input about what the actual underlying problems are. So over time, the WoW-balance-line slowly homes in on the target.
Ofc, being not nearly there after 10 years, and WoW still being easily best-balanced MMO I’ve played, might also bring you to the – IMO correct – conclusion that balancing MMOs is a futile task. I agree, complexity of combat + skills + classes + gear is way too high to be balanced or even close to balanced, no matter what.
Still, if nothing else WoW’s way of constantly re-mixing their classes keeps things more fresh.At it, ANet! Come on, try it a bit! The combat and it’s balance are stale from 2 years of neglect outside of ignorable miniscule sPvP-centric changes. Do something big. Give me 16 glamours as a Mesmer. Swap Clone / Shatter skills, making clone-generation the class ability. Make elites (across the board) low-cooldown super-power skills which completely define your current playstyle due to dominating it.
Will these work? Probably not! But you won’t get any input without trying it out!
And this is exactly the problem which I wrote in another thread. ANet is TOO AFRAID to touch anything because they’re so focused on e-sports, but the bottom line is that the more you touch the more competitive the game becomes. Why? Because then the meta doesn’t exist.
You heard me, the less meta there is, the more competitive games are. Look at all the major games in e-sports. Starcraft, League, DoTA. Yes, they have some metas in them, but they are very far from being set in stone. In the latter two, the 2/1/2 lane split early evolved into 1/1/1/2 into blobbing into lane swapping with now a meta that only really exists for the first five minutes of professional games. With starcraft, MLG players pull off strategies sometimes in the middle of a tournament that absolutely nobody has ever seen before nor expected to work.
These games also see near-constant tweaks and adjustments, reworks, and changes which can makes something go form awful to OP-meta-breaking in a patch. But that’s what they’re designed to do. When a change occurs and a meta breaks, players have to recreate strategies. They need to totally dive back into the game just like they did when it launched and nobody knew what was going on. And when the meta is broken or is constantly changing and nothing is set in stone, the game feels not only more fresh, but ultimately, more balanced. Players will not necessarily know what works all the time, and only months down the road perhaps will someone new discover something incredible. As it stands, GW2 is stale. And it’s not getting any better. ANet needs to stop with the promotional stuff for their “e-sport” which is unbalanced, stale, and lacks diversity due to a lack of necessary overhauls they’ve been ignoring instead for “low-hanging fruit” fixes which have accomplished nothing. Nobody wants to watch a sport where there’s no anticipation for a bizarre strategy or major play to win. And as this game becomes increasingly more stale for PvE players with the failing “balance” around sPvP, new games will emerge for both the PvE players and the PvP ones. ANet has the potential to make this one of the greatest games ever to hit the market, yet all we’re seeing are LS updates which frankly are too far and few between and nonsense e-sport coverage and videos from their studio about the game we already know about. They need to freshen up their game. They need to break down the walls they’ve been doing so hard to hold together which ultimately just hold everyone back and wish to make them leave even more.
I don’t quite understand the claims about how people say sPvP is balanced (and WvW isn’t) yet they can also safely say that a GC spec isn’t viable in sPvP when it is in WvW.
Actually, full on berserker isn’t even viable in sPvP with the strict damage caps it has. Your damage will quite literally remain the same running PTV on GC traits and therefore the bunker meta exists on the sole basis that GC countermeasure burst has quite literally no role or identity in the format. When entire build concepts or styles aren’t viable, your mode isn’t balanced. Maybe it’s balanced within the scope of the meta, but that’s just a horrible excuse.
Bunker is the meta because it deals near-optimal DPS while retaining immense survivability. If WvW rules applied (food aside), there would be no such meta.
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thief is the ultimate “all or nothing” profession. either we kill really fast, or we’re dead meat. either we completely null the damage coming to us, or we’re dead.
Looks at P/D condi… laughs
P/D is extra vulnerable on team fights because it sacrifices mobility/evasion and relies on stealthing often. different tool, same principle: avoid damage altogether.
Very far from the truth. I believe of all of the weapon sets available to the thief, P/D is the most mobile. I run it for the sole purpose of its rather astonishing mobility and effectiveness in 1vmany situations due to the sheer effectiveness of CnD’s detarget and the mobility/disengage at a very low cost SS offers.
Not really. in sPvP, not dying as a bunker build is the name of the game. If you hold your point, you’ve succeeded.
In WvW, it depends on the class. If I said I had a build for a water-based Ele that made them immune to all damage and could still drop effective water fields, I’d probably have one of the most loaded inboxes in the game. Thief, as a counter-back-line or back-line class, will take a lot of focus from enemies. What’s better, having someone blow their cooldowns on a tank or a squisy DPS? The former. Having the enemy in a zerg environment see a thief expecting hard DPS and subsequently blow their cooldowns on a tank is hugely detrimental to their fight at the cost of almost nothing to your own.
I’m not the first to try and work around with the healing power thief idea. I’d argue this player was successful:
Granted, my build is a non-stealth variant.
With HS, the damage in the middle tier is still too high. I admit I run my D/D thief glass, but my mid-tier HS hits for 8-10k. If it’s a finisher, then the damage should only apply on < 25% health, and the initiative cost should go down. As of now, it’s just way too much.
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I have no doubt in my mind that rangers will face an obvious DPS boost, and that RF, if it hits, will be absolutely insane.
That said, I’m withholding judgments regarding increased ranger viability for the most part until the patch lands and things sift out. I am inclined to believe that the ranger will not face heavily-increased viability in any format, though. While the changes are pretty big, the truth of the matter is that nothing was done to address the core class problems which make them less-desirable. Adjusting their burst doesn’t really change anything anywhere, though. It just makes them hit stragglers a little harder per unit of time. The longbow ranger still does not bring any form of party/group utility to a fight, still packs sub-par DPS, lacks survivability and has unreliable escape mechanisms. Not to mention it’s still hard-countered heavily by reflect – thus making it very undesirable in GvG, possibly even more so with increased damage – since it could now be very easily killing your own allies.
Now, if some of those problems were looked at and addressed, I could definitely see the meta changing to include them. The problem is that they weren’t, and just giving the class more ranged damage potential likely will not be enough to warrant substantial demand or even their use.
You are not squish if you can evade all damage including channeling ^^ with 5 possibilities to reset combat per minute.
food for thought.
no, you remain squishy.
thief is the ultimate “all or nothing” profession. either we kill really fast, or we’re dead meat. either we completely null the damage coming to us, or we’re dead.
so yes, it’s a profession with a bunch of evades and blinds, because the moment a hit slips through, we’re one foot in the grave already. god help us if a condi necro manages to land some attacks.
other classes can take those hits to the face and walk away, unless they’re eles/guards (the other two low base HP professions) on a glassy build. but thief only has the option of a glassy build. and those eles/guards also have active defenses of their own, on top of damage better mitigation.
so i’ll tell you the same thing i told OP: if thief mobility is so unfair, try playing one without using the mobility and tell me how long you last.
Not quite the case as it stands. My full healing power P/P blindspam grind thief actually has performed the best of all of my thief builds in sPvP. I’ve had dedicated duels go on for more than 45 mins against extremely good players (outside of a game, ofc), and I always win the long ones. The build pretty much doesn’t die and attritions so long for so well that everyone runs out of gas and simply can’t keep up with the slight decreases their health bars are facing. The thing is, it’s not at all mobile (and with the upcoming patch/nerf to BP, will no longer be as effective), but the point being that thieves can have great access to sustain by building for it and abusing some of their gimmicks as someone else mentioned above.
I’d like for HS to be changed, honestly, coming from a D/D main. I find myself frequently needing to spam it just because I lack enough to stick to my target for the longer fights, and I hate the fact that it’s just so cheesy in the damage department. Turning it into a more effective gap close with a higher initiative cost would I suspect help reduce the whole spamming problem it faces and severely cut down on permastealth builds while ultimately not changing much in terms of the overall effect it has when used in-combat as a gap-closer.
People are actually defending the ridiculously long balance cycle, that always changes NOTHING?
No, people are defending the balancing cycle itself.
There’s a massive difference. The time it takes to execute changes versus the process are nothing alike. Compare GW2 skill updates and balancing effort frequency to that of say, League of Legends. One happens every 4-6 months, the other, almost every two weeks. Does this make the balancing process of League different? No. It just means they’re faster at doing the same thing since more effort goes into keeping their game balanced, and they put forth an immense amount of effort to do so. They are also willing to do as I said (make sweeping changes to particular champions (or classes)) when they see a broken mechanic or dynamic rather than trying to merely fix “low-hanging fruit” fixes first before even considering what needs to be reworked as ANet does. This doesn’t make the aforementioned cycle any different; it’s just their means of execution.
That’s the problem with ANet. They’re using a model which for all intensive purposes works well. The problem is lazy and in some instances just downright poor execution and handling of their game’s balance state, kind of as though they’re not using any kind of analysis to gather data for their balancing efforts and are instead just taking shots in the dark based solely upon occasional views of community feedback and “problems” that exist solely in the eyes of current competitive tPvP’ers who abide by a meta.
I’m quite sure Caltrops reveals Thieves as long as you’re standing in the Caltrops. If you have conditions on you, then yes, the Thief won’t be revealed, but that’s… kind of hard to “fix”.
It doesn’t, simply because we have a trait that drops Caltrops everytime we dodge. If it dropped stealth through it, the trait and skill would never get used, much like most of the traits and skills Thieves have. The nerf to Choking Gas pretty much destroys all usage of the weapon outside of blast finishing, since Choking Gas was already a waste of initiative if you weren’t in stealth. Now it’ll never be used since we can’t even keep stealth up while using it, so the weapon is pretty much dead.
Not even close. Shortbow will remain the primary utility and GvG weapon for the thief for as long as Infil Arrow, cluster bomb, spammable evade on 3 + reposition + cripple and a massive AOE poison field are part of the weapon (effectively everything the set offers). The shortbow will remain one of the ONLY effective weapons in combat with a substantial number of enemies solely because of the poison field. Choking gas is an absolute game-changer because it pulses heal cuts, and actually triggers SoM which when used on 5 enemies + trick shot will yield about a 1500 heal/second. Just because you can’t condi spam poison in stealth doesn’t mean the set is “dead”. I also want to point out that the new damage aspect from its impact only reveals if it hits something, so if you use it and your allies coerce/knock an enemy into the field afterwards, you will remain in stealth. The weapon is very far from “dead.”
What I fail to understand about this topic is people complaining about mesmer condi removal. I’d argue they have some rather impressive removal as opposed to some of the other classes. They’re one of the few that can actually negate condi burst.
I was referring to the whole build, not the combo. Stab is not the problematic part of D/P. Yes it still allows for d/p to gain stealth through a HS through the smoke field, but the pulse change is actually a massive nerf to the build as now other classes will be able to stand within the field and deal essential damage/use important skills rather than the thief just standing in it and being effectively invulnerable to melee attacks. A lot of people argue the thief can still be hit in melee from outside, but this is only applicable if he does not kite a mere 10 units within the field and stays exactly in the center the whole time.
To claim it doesn’t have an effect is just simply false. Yes it still blinds and thieves may still opt to press 5 twice, but it then subsequently prevents much more of the unnecessary sustain.
1. thieves don’t really have that many other options besides stealth due to lack of protection, stab, heals etc.
2. entire defensive tree is built around stealth
3. next patch will force majority thieves either quit game, reroll other class or run condi… so enjoy… althrough i have a feeling ppl like you will come back to forums 2 days after patch and qq how OP condi thieves are
Number 3 is the biggest problem I fear with the upcoming patch. ANet did a fantastic job with properly balancing blindspam D/P stealth stab, but did absolutely nothing to tone down the ridiculous monster that P/D condi is. As D/D, I hate fighting against both builds, but universally P/D is much more effective.
This is not the only example on this forum of people complaining about a class where it is strongest while the players who main that class reference where the class could be improved.
I really think everyone can get on board with making mesmers better where the class lags behind others, while simultaneously not making them crazy OP in 1v1. I’m not sure how to go about doing that myself, but it seems like an obvious middle ground.
Nailed it. A massive issue I have with mesmers lies on targeting. You try and tab cycle to the real one, but while doing so the GS clone whirls into you and your tab cycle resets on it. Now you’ve been hit (for probably a significant chunk of damage or conditions), and you need to keep cycling your targeting until you finally get on the real one – and then just as you do and begin you cast your skills – the mesmer drops into stealth and you’re left over with the same mess as before.
This is the real issue. Thief stealth is much less problematic because as soon as it drops stealth, you can easily re-target the thief. With the mesmer, it’s a matter of desperate clicking and tabbing (and clones bodyblock on spawn when they dodge, too), just to get the correct one in your sights to attack even though you know precisely at all times which the real one is.
Consequently I also believe that chain stealth and high stealth uptime builds should be punished, especially ones which can deal damage while invisible/untargetable, such as condition caltrops thieves and the PU mesmer builds. These have extreme potency in small group situations, and frankly, are just unfair. The upcoming change to Choking Gas to reveal is a step in the right direction, but ultimately it won’t be enough.
Balancing consists of the following steps:
1. Collect Data.
2. Review Data to see if Balancing is required.
3. If required, propose solutions.
4. Determine if solutions meet your goals, are realistic, and do not significantly impact other areas of the game.
5. Select a solution.
6. Develop the solution.
7. Test the solution.
8. Revise the solution if anything comes up during testing.
9. Test again if revisions are made.
10. Repeat 8-9 as needed.
11. Release Balancing changes.Start over at step 1.
They can skip steps 1 and 2 in some cases by playing the game and seeing what creates unhealthy play patterns ie. player can’t react because there is no way to avoid something/they don’t have enough information. This goes for most cases, they are (hopefully) professionals at this. Another thing is listening to feedback and looking graphs if they got them, sure
Step 3 only occurs if there is something detected so it’s fairly obvious
Step 4 is the reason why PvE and PvP should be balanced differently. There is absolutely no need to lift your hands up in the air and say you can’t do something because it would affect another aspect of the game if those aspects are easily separated
I doubt the existence of 6-10 even existing in most cases. A lot of the changes aren’t too well thought out and we don’t have a public beta testing going on where they could even gather the data required for revisioning the changes. Most of the changes are numerical anyway and not new mechanics so the ‘development’ doesn’t actually take timeIt sure as hell doesn’t take 6 months to figure out 5% tweaks to skill damages. I do appreciate the big changes WHEN we get them but as for balance updates, they don’t really help the balance much at all. The patches are too infrequent and the balance will be skewed in some other direction in just a few weeks at best, causing the game to be pretty much dead and stagnated when it comes to innovation for more than 90% of the time
I’m sorry but while your intentions are good and it’s undeniable ANet is extremely slow and very inefficient with their balancing timeframes, this is probably the worst analysis on a form of revision and development cycle (like the SDLC) which are considered absolutely essential in modern day practices and are arguably law in their respective fields.
The REAL problem with ANet’s balancing tendencies is that they keep trying to find “low-hanging fruit” fixes to try and number-tweak the classes into balances without making any impactful changes to the game. The problem is that some of the issues that persist and have persisted in the game simply are not “low-hanging fruit” fixes and require major overhauls. Ultimately ANet I believe knows this, but is choosing not to perform these types of reworks on the basis that they do not wish to make tweaks which may have an effect of impacting players negatively, and do not believe that overbuffing in attempts to resolve problems with the possibility of immediate hotfixes is feasible. The issue with this strategy is that for years they will dive into “low-hanging fruit” fixes, and eventually the time will come when they discover they absolutely have to perform major reworks, in which case they’ll have to make such changes and then for the next several years maintain “low-hanging fruit” fixes all over again for the new overhauls which they could have just done from the get-go and used the same timeframe to perfect them.
If max stacks were at 15, that would mean in 3 kills you’re fully stacked. It might not be broken, but there are sigils that have effects once fully stacked. Keep that in mind.
As it stands, in WvW and PvE, 25 stacks is 25 kills. There are easy mobs to kill to get these stacks and then you can use them against harder mobs (or players).
In PvP, you actually only have 5 stacks. Reducing the total stack count to 15 would bring this down to 3. See first paragraph for unintended side effects.
In WvW, 25 stacks is also 5 kills like it is in sPvP. That said, the 25 number is pretty fair considering stats generally speaking are higher in WvW by a significant margin. Nerf stacking sigils and nobody would use them since in all honesty, there are better choices out there.
That said, I believe stacking sigils should be modifiers and not fixed bonuses.
Like Bloodlust is 15% more damage when stacked up, perception is 10-15% crit chance, and so on, so that you’re seeing less of the whole tank with bloodlust as compensation issues.
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The same with ranger. You can get fury, except it’s only accessible if you pretty much don’t use the crit strikes/ferocity line, in which case, why do you want fury?
Name other skills your characters have that that have 2 negatives happen when you miss? Other characters simply have a cooldown…
Gladly.
Thief:
Steal: Gap close/escape/damage/heal/poison (heal cut) to prevent target from full healing the burst/weakness (to not die on retaliation efforts)/venom all wasted. Still goes on ~30 second cooldown.
- Evade or aegis on steal nullifies some people’s entire builds such as signet burst to the point where missing just outright kills you.
Cloak and Dagger: More than have of your resources are now gone and you may now only use one skill immediately after. You have also now not used stealth and are probably taking substantial damage and may not be removing conditions or healing, and are now out of both the high CnD damage application and critical steal attacks.
Unload: Initiative drain with no damage attached to it, the second unload not enough to actually do anything substantial in a fight.
Pistol Whip: Initiative drain, self-root, long pre-cast = dead thief.
Ele:
Like really, half of your skills. That said, they’re often not hard to miss.
Ranger:
Anything longbow must trait 30 into MMS to get RtW to make the weapon function at all, except rangers are punished even more than warriors with the projectile speed with reduced damage and lower reliability and less interaction at close range (PBS and HS will just not even work in most cases due to bugs) and have no usable fields, whereas warrior longbow functions better and more reliably at close range, which many players/classes/builds try to get into in order to kill you anyways.
Any pet skill – or even, their entire mechanic. Some of these are indispensable an are the sole justification for a 30% damage loss class-wide. Whiff one of these and your whole build premise can be nullified to the point where you just lost the fight.
Necro:
Lich Form: Well, you just got instantly focus-fired and killed if you missed your damage.
Marks: They’re still on the ground not doing anything and your cooldowns are still real. Welp, there goes that idea.
Wells: Welp, you just lost utility skills, damage, and the cooldowns are up.
Guardian:
Activating Virtue of Justice.
Mesmer:
Shattering clones still causes shatter skills to go on cooldown, and your clones are destroyed.
Those are just off the top of my head, and I certainly expect there are plenty more. I don’t really know enough about engis to explain anything in particular, but couldn’t think of anything.
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I’m beginning to appreciate Accuracy + Bloodlust the most as a WvW player. I think with the update, however, I’ll be moving bloodlust to an offhand (I can’t decide yet on shortbow with fire for triggers for stacks or gs for the gap close/escape). If I don’t retain bloodlust on the bow, it’ll definitely be Accuracy + Air.
To play an archer focused on ranged DPS and mobile combat as I have done so for over a decade and in some games have taken the #1 position in the game at the role.
Unfortunately I was displeased with the results here and re-specced a thief, and have been enjoying my assassin which can burst extremely well and retain excellent combat mobility.
Kiting means that you do pressure damage during your movement.
Sword does absolutely no pressure during retreating.
Stop assuming that Kiting=Disengage.
Actually, doing damage has absolutely nothing to do with kiting. Kiting simply refers to maintaining distance from a target while involved in combat and forcing the target’s position to be displaced. Therefore disengaging potential is therefore directly a form of kiting if the target follows.
Kiting = disengage but disengage != kiting.
What’s your trait setup like?
It’d be pretty OP. Withdraw + LR for 1.5 seconds of straight dodging + stun break + condi cleanse and the added benefit of “see ya.”
If you’re already in stealth it will reveal you. It’s not a bug. The problem with the trait is that it’s mandatory and people have no control over whether or not they can take it.
The teleports are funky. I know using Infil Signet + Steal can do the same thing in that stealing will reset you to the location of infil signet sometimes. I’m not really sure why it happens, but I think it occurs if you cast the second teleport too quickly after the first, as it’s only then do I see it having issues sometimes.
Well that’d just be overpowered. The whole point of the trait is to make their revealed timer vulnerability less vulnerable so that a thief doesn’t just do a backstab and insta-die from quickly and heavily-focused CC lock. Thief already has one of the most reliable stomps in the game through using blinding utilities. Good use of smoke screen can pretty much guarantee a successful stomp. Conversely, you can also just use this new trait combined with mug and beginning the stomp from stealth such that for the first part of the stomp you’re invis and may simply not be hit, and then using mug will reveal you for the stability for the rest. A combination of the two will actually guarantee you a stomp on anyone, since the steal/mug teleport can let you move to a downed thief/mesmer during the stomp animation and let you pin them after they move.
At the low levels, Signet of Might (passive) + For Great Justice + Signet of Fury (passive) will yield you the best results for increases in damage. Ultimately, the ferocity from the banner is just not very useful at the lower levels since you won’t be stacking a lot of it (Ferocity is useless in small amounts), and needing to deal with the banner/move it is also just frustrating, and the might stacks from FGJ will yield more damage than the ferocity will. Not to mention the precision gain from banner of Discipline will be way overshadowed by long duration fury.
Not as low as you think.
Sorry but I disagree, the chances of an enemy using a blocking ability in between FS and LS are minimal… not to mention that the buff FS/LS receved in december made in an anti-bunker build that now is hard countered by bunkers… ironic right?
Note: I played S/D for a long time but changes spec and weapon set about 2 month ago, this nerf does not affect me directly but I can’t agree with it since is simply counter intuitive, it makes no sense having an ability that cant be blocked as a 2nd in chain were the first attack can be blocked….
It’s just about stealing aegis and preventing people from pre-casting it before entering combat with IS to get unblockable burst damage with a boon strip, free dodge and an escape all in one rotation before the enemy can really do anything. Which mind you, could also just be repeated again. The revamp keeps the skill mostly used as an extra dodge paired with some dual utility. Good players will now also be able to chain FS dodges by purposely not hitting their enemy, or getting a free double dodge effect with the aegis/boon strip (but not steal) on the first FS.
All I see this change did was increase the effectiveness/skill ceiling and diminish effectiveness for those spamming 3.
My other input above aside, my best advice to learn how to counterplay a thief is to actually play one. I know it might seem frustrating to go through, but that is genuinely the best advice I can give. Playing the class for a while and learning its ins and outs can give you a really good feel for what your opponent will do, where its weaknesses are, and what you can do to shut them down by capitalizing on those weaknesses. Thief isn’t so much choreographed on animations such as a hammer/greatsword warrior or other predictable things like rotations on an ele but a choreographed approach to situations. These reactions to situations are what you need to really understand how the thief plays, and ultimately no amount of advice from others can have you better understand it than getting in those situations yourself.
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The pistol offhand is actually holding you back a bit depending on the matchup. While its CC is nice, thieves are pretty slippery and you might just get killed. They’re also not targetable by it when they’re in stealth.
I suggest considering sword or focus offhand. The CC the focus provides can really screw up a thief’s combo/stab and also act a solid interrupt that affects stealthed thieves. Sword 4 is a fantastic skill which will nullify a stab, deal damage, and generate a clone for an edge on shatter for when the thief comes out of stealth next. A mid-leap swordsman will track a stealthing thief, too, so you can possibly better read his position.
Burst doesn’t exist in sPvP. Like really, especially compared to WvW where the crit damage scaling cap doesn’t exist.. If you want burst, I suggest looking into dagger mainhand or P/P. S/D was designed as the more attrition-based set. Frankly, I’ve had pretty fair luck with P/P in sPvP for bursting. What S/D can now do is play a substantially better defense if it chooses to while still tactically cutting away boons and ultimately grinding an opponent down through multiple forms of counterplay and lockdown while remaining mobile.
I’m sorry that you can’t use #3 for your dodge and damage anymore, but I think this change is designed to do exactly that, while re-enabling the attrition S/D evasion builds but simply giving them extra utility and more depth as the split on FS was designed to do to begin with rather than just giving S/D spammable burst damage.
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And this is what I keep iterating. While obviously not as good as the old FS for the evasion part, the revamped skill will make this style of play possibly return again. I for one really liked it and dropped m S/D thief when the split was made. I’m now really reconsidering moving back to it.
Even if people see it as a buff its really not going to do anything but cause more QQ and lead it to another nerf….. So my question is why go through the trouble remaking something that didnt need remade into something people may possibly wine about more than they already do? “UGHH 3 SPAM CHEESE L2P BADDIE” basically the same thing many people already see now…. So the point in the nerf is???
I was thinking, they literally re-introduced a mechanic they were trying to get rid of on shortbow. The #3 spam. This is only going to get worse. I see the aftercast butchering already incoming.
The problems they had with SB3 wasn’t about dodge spamming but the combination of dodge spamming + range + reposition to further increase range + added cripple/cripple spam which couldn’t be cleansed due to the re-application of it. Simply, this design made the skill stronger when spammed and didn’t carry much reward for not using it only once or twice.
So this revamped S/D allows for an evasive style but prevents really any damage or huge repositions from being performed/condis applied/boons being stripped during the process of just dodging. The old FS was the same thing as the part 1 of the new skill, and it had no problems. They simply just wanted to make the skill have more depth to it, which is what they now have, seeing as it can act as a chain evade source – or – a source of damage and boon stripping.
I just hate the fact SotW makes me so big. I stick out like a sore thumb in fights with it on, so I fear with rangers becoming better DPS in the patch, we might just get focused like necros in Lich Form rather than ignored due to already-weak damage/burst.
I think a safe comparison of the effectiveness of the GC longbow ranger is something like that of a signet burst thief running something like 5+/6/0/0/2+. Your disengage will not be very good once you get into combat, but the damage is very high, and getting the jump on someone gives you a solid chance to kill them. The thing is, once you unload, you’re idle for a few seconds without much left, so you need to pick your encounters well.
I like the damage reassignment. It increases reliability on GS, allowing for different utilities to be chosen, and if anything will increase GS’s burst potential. I think this is pretty fair with the adrenaline rework, and now wars aren’t running godmode stats/modifiers while doing nothing with their adrenaline skills.
The class becomes more engaging and opens up a lot of new builds.
Warrior didn’t really get buffs. Warriors will now have to actually use their F1 and manage their class mechanic properly to deal damage and the builds running 6/x/x/x/6 for 15% damage/crit chance are nullified, making their stats inherently lower, plus the adrenaline drain on OOC really hurts their uptime a lot more, and adrenaline consumption on skill use prevents the silly OOC blasting effects/mobility. Not to mention as the person above me stated, CI won’t trigger.
The BP change? THANK YOU. Seriously, anyone playing dagger mainhand against one of these just finally got some counterplay. The skill ceiling also increases and people might actually have to time their casts on BP for an interruption blind rather than just dropping it and sitting and kiting inside of it while their init regens.
S/D didn’t so much get nerfed as it did tweaked to better fit the initial vision of what S/D was supposed to be. FS with a de-target can now let skilled thieves have permanent uninterrupted dodges as they did with the old version, while cutting the initiative costs for evasion thieves. Spamming 3 will now be an effective tactic, but not one that will simply kill your foe with high damage coefficients and take their boons. Actually, I even prefer this, as I used to run an evasion S/D thief and dropped it because of the split on FS’s evade and being unable to double evade with it which forced me into a hole in that I had to play S/D a certain way.
And are people really complaining about power ranger getting buffed? I mean come on people, the class is absolute crap as it stands, and has seen no major buffs, changes, or glory since the game’s release. Engi might have been over-buffed in some departments, but what was buffed doesn’t really synergize with the current meta, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Guard probably won’t get anything, and I have a feeling ele will probably face some nerfs in some of the more blatantly overpowered aspects of the class since the changes this past spring.
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I for one love the flanking strike changes. I almost always use flanking strike to dodge, when I run out of endurance. Now I can afford another dodge on top of my dodges, while i dodge.
Dodge-ception.
I’m in the same boat. For those that remember the old FS, which didn’t have a second skill portion, the skill was an unbelievably powerful tool used to prevent taking damage and force an opponent onto their cooldowns. Simply, I think this change allows for the evasion thief to make a new presence, and also gives such a thief a boon strip and source of on-demand damage for when they don’t need to dodge. If anything, I suspect that the particularly skilled S/D players will conceive this as a buff.
I will agree, however, that 2 boon strip should return as compensation.
Love the offhand pistol changes. I understand I’m in the minority here, but it pretty much removed the incredibly low skill ceiling the skill had and will now require more counterplay efforts by D/P thieves than just pressing 5. While it makes me sad my unstoppable healing power/blindspam tank troll thief won’t be permablinding people anymore, it makes me happier that I won’t be permablinding people anymore simply because the effect was too overpowered and too easily applied for how little effort it took. BP’s initial strike blind is what keeps the skill good, and with warrior’s adrenaline skills blowing adrenaline even if they miss, a well-timed BP can nullify their combo on cast and still leave some residual while allowing the caster to stealth or reposition.
Cleave on dagger is fantastic and a really nice QoL change.
S/D I actually really like. The skill cap just shot up a lot, and chain evasion thieves can make a return to the game whereas larcenous always found itself in the way and burned unnecessary amounts of initiative. Some compensation would have been nice in regards to perhaps stripping two boons like it did before to make the skill have that sense of impactful duality based upon how it’s used.
Ricochet isn’t bad. I’m not really impressed, either.
Venom sharing again, a nice QoL buff, but ultimately the entire functionality of venoms in their design needs some work. P/D venom condi is going to be even more brutal with skelk venom, though on thieve’s guild/allies.
Choking gas is alright. I see why they did it, but the shortbow has seen too many nerfs across everything. Ultimately I think this weapon needs some reconsiderations, for all it’s really good for at the moment is the heal cut portion of choking gas, and maybe cluster bomb. It needs to either return to 1200 range or see damage increases on CG/TS to warrant the weapon’s success as an evasive ranged set.
Invigorating precision will always be sub-par. I believe it honestly belongs in either another trait line or in the adept level. Simply, the healing is too small, even on cleaves/AOE skills, and the competition (HK/Exec) is way beyond this skill in usefulness as those traits define entire builds and styles of play.
So overall these changes aren’t bad. I really, really do like the BP/Sword changes as they add a lot more depth to the class and builds while raising skill ceilings, but a lot of the intended buffs were simply not enough, and the CG change/fix ultimately hurts the shortbow a lot more than it needs since every skill on it has now been nerfed extremely hard.
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Rangers, Engineers and Elementalists have, IMO, the highest skill caps. The thing with Rangers however, is that people treat their pets like meat shields and nothing else. It would be like if an Elementalist never used any of their F skills and just did #1 with staff all day. Sure, you’ll do damage, but there’s so much more to explore that you’re being ignorant about because a few weapon skills do decent damage and you’re too lazy to figure out what else the profession has to offer (none of this directed at OP btw.)
So, remember not to neglect your pet. It’s not just there to soak up damage, use it actively and learn to keep it alive. Play with the different weapon sets and utilities and you’ll find what’s most comfortable for you. People can think that Rangers are bads all they want, there’s a hidden skill cap with them that if understood, will make the player a massive threat to any who challenge it.
This is about zerging, though. And as I mentioned above, rangers bring literally nothing to zergs that another class can’t do better.
Anyone who insists that any other thief weaponset is better than D/P has clearly never played the other weaponsets.
D/P is the most frustrating, easiest, face-rolliest, and overall scrubby build in the entire game. Yep, I think hambow warrior takes more skill, has more counters, and is generally more difficult to play than D/P thief. D/P blind-stealth spam is a downright insult to a lot of this game’s mechanics and makes thieves appear way stronger than they appear to be when played with other sets.
Best thing you can do is challenge them to use D/D if they think they’re good at dagger mainhand and/or just ignore them.
It is because u r a D/D player and D/P is strong againt u.
D/D is way better in outnumber fights, and is not that hard to use as u try to sell to us.
There is always some one saying cheesy this cheesy that . . . and is always the hard countered side.
I’ve played both. D/P is so much easier it’s not even funny. You have everything you need and more in your kit while having arguably the best method of shutting your opponents down built in.
The only reason I prefer playing D/D is because I prefer the assassin style. Simply, all that the set has more to offer is more damage. It has less reliability than D/P while obviously missing out on the bonus blind utility and chain stealth without needing a target/OOC. I know my P/P blindspam healing power thief has almost no problems in 1vMany situations because the blind application is just too high for opponents to actually do anything while I troll around until more people come and wipe them.
Whether or not I get shut down/hard countered is irrelevant. D/P is strictly stronger because it shuts down so many builds and styles without actually being dependent on particularly skilled play but through the sheer amount of application of certain mechanics it yields.
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