Guild Wars 2

Check the link in my signature.

Just hoping it would follow similar design ideology.

Maybe, just maybe, I did inspire something, lol.

And how does a >1v1 work in P/P’s favor? It doesn’t because it doesn’t cleave. And okay you heal but you’re still healing for maybe twice as much while still taking substantially more damage from a lack of weakness applied to your enemies or are simply not healing as much because you burned initiative on dodges and applying WC via staff. And using your argument about the context of the heals, any thief not playing in and out in multi-opponent scenarios is either winning due bad opponents or losing.

The heal from Mug is independent from the damage component. The heal from IP only breaks even at roughly 15k damage put into your foe. It’s also just safer, and still results in a target dealing 50% less damage.

To get weakness from the staff, you need to burn initiative on WC. You don’t on DA. You get the weakness on steal. DA requires less initiative spent for the same measure of utility. There’s no denying that at all.

Someone gaining 1k hp per second from IP and SoM is fighting against people who don’t know how to play. Especially the case for power D/D where its mitigation is relatively bad and easy to counter and requires being up close. In and out is how you need to play the kit. IP can be okay on staff but it’s still marginally better than Mug in realistic environments.

No lie, triple unblockable attack signet D/D would be kinda crazy OP if given that change to AS.

By the time you heal for the same amount of health from IP as Mug, it’s likely you’ve already killed your opponent or have come close. Roughly 14k damage is required to heal the same.

You’re assuming Daredevil + CS + Staff while burning initiative and making oneself vulneravle during WC or WS traited over BT vs DA and all weapons/trait configs in regards to weakness application with what can be zero vulnerability frames during application while also applying cover conditions.

You’re assuming P/P unload for heals and the fact the player does not have projectile hate or blocks/negation where mug still heals regardless.

Yes, the healing is potentially better on CS but it’s almost negligible for how good the rest of DA is and how for every Mug roughly 14k damage needs to be dealt.

And it’s not that it’s intrinsically overpowered so much as it is anti-fun.
There’s a reason the PvP community in this game shrunk so much after HoT. Elites like the Daredevil simply aren’t as fun to play as or against for a majority of competitive-minded players. Most people do so out of necessity rather than personal preference.

The design is poor. It’s that simple.

anduriell.6280:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

I’m aware of Tyler’s posts, which if you read them don’t ever promise a 3rd borderlands map. I just wanted to clarify that nowhere in the polls did we say anything about creating a 3rd borderlands map, even though that is stated as a ‘fact’ over and over again on the forums.

relax McKenna, don’t need to be so defensive although i understand… in my opinion you are doing good with the general content of WvW. You are getting flamed because the general discontempt from the general WvW state, that actually the most grave thing is balance. Nothing to do with your works as right now actually.

Once balance is addressed and we as customers and player don’t feel cheated by the game mechanics, and all seems fair and the other teams that affects this game mode actually communicate and the forums mods are updated to version 2.0, you will notice how the general salt in this forum dilutes…

Sadly, there’s no way to impact any decisions regarding general balance until something in PvE breaks. There is next to zero attention given to WvW’s balance issues, and very little effort is made on making the design of the professions better for competitive play, and actually minimal effort to change balance issues has been ANet’s motto since 2012 via “low hanging fruit” fixes, regardless of the underlying needs for change. ESL players have made extensive complaint threads and during competitive events broken down the weaknesses of the game and why it was suffering/has suffered the fate it has in attempts to get resolutions from the profession devs. Nothing has changed. I sincerely doubt it’s that they’re unaware of the problems. It’s just that for whatever reason, someone doesn’t care enough to make it a priority.

We saw how important reworks are in how the ranger CDI made the entire existence of longbow a viable option for the ranger in the game and in general improved the class massively. We’re still on pre-rework-anything for 8 other professions five years later.

People shouldn’t be flaming the WvW devs, though. They really should be flaming the PvE devs for killing small-scale with the guild hall buff changes and the terrible excuses for balance and diversity we have at the moment.

sgeisi.5981:

Sviel.7493:

This sounds less like a battle between players and more like a competition to PvE harder than the other server. It would also be wrecked by coverage gaps.

That said, I don’t want to brush off your feelings of not having any impact. It’s certainly true that a single body in a zerg is just another foot to trample with. Smaller groups (~20) can benefit from strong individual members, but it goes haywire after that.

Personally, I never run with a zerg anymore. We may meet up for a common goal, but I try to stay on the opposite side of the map to ensure that we have eyes everywhere. It’s very easy for me to see the impact I have because things don’t flip when I call them out or drive off enemies.

I think the RTS side of WvW is there to be had, but you’ll have to leave the zerg to find it.

Well isn’t that what WvW is? A mixture of PvE and PvP? The majority of the game mode is killing NPC’s until the zergs run into eachother

And this is why the mode is effectively dead.

In its prime, barely anyone played to PvE. A lot of the HoT maps and so on are mixed elements of PvP and PvE. For many, there is still far too much PvE in WvW, and many more have left because of it.

If there weren’t mechanical implications and justifications for keeping a lot of the PvE elements in WvW (basically just “timers” as lord health pools and so on), I think most WvW players would be supportive of removing the PvE elements altogether.

Or, rather, former WvW players. I don’t know anyone who took it seriously when the format was good that still plays the game.

Zero Solstice.9754:

I’ve been using Greatsword almost everywhere since it came out. The problem I think is in philosophy: Most people think that the Greatsword should be used as a DPS primary, when in actuality it plays most optimally as a Utility DPS secondary. If you treat the weapon like Staff, where it basically just exists to swap to, blow its cooldowns, go into Shroud to wait off the weapon swap CD, then swap back to your main weapon, then it tends to perform a whole lot better.

I can agree that Soul Eater is a hot pile, but I disagree that the weapon is “garbage that is unusable everywhere, even when it isn’t”.

Agreed. I think it’s the single best weapon the necromancer has access to in PvP environments, and have thought so since it came out. Its AA chain is good for landing a few hits for some quick burst before the slowness of the weapon starts to incur issues, with the occasional use of GD, but people expecting to cleave down waves with huge DPS or spam gravedigger into massive, consistent hits are simply not recognizing what the weapon is useful for and quite frankly amazing at.

The combo and utility potential on this weapon is hands down one of the best in the game. It’s not a PvE boss-killing hero of a weapon, but it wasn’t designed to be. You can’t and shouldn’t push top-tier damage on a necromancer so long as shroud offers as much stat defense as it does.

anduriell.6280:

EnderzShadow.2506:

Especially lame when you cast strength of the pack (no CC is going to stop my pet)
Pop Sicem (40% movement speed) and still people just run away.

Is there a reason a pet cant jump over a ledge, just like I can?

That in my profession has a name: Bad Programming Skills.

Good programming; low-functioning AI.

Though it becomes difficult to discern how to allow pets to jump and how to figure out the pathing. Even ANet’s existing pathing algorithms are okay at best for teleport-intensive professions like the thief which often fails to teleport for seemingly no reason. Similar pathing logic would need to be applied here. Most concerning is the performance hit would be expounded upon pretty massively given the nature of the need for potentially very large decision trees all contesting while performing shortest-path solutions.

And then you still have the issues where you have drakes jumping at all and birds being incapable of flying over most slightly-high-up surfaces.

I think one of the biggest issues with pet responsiveness is their auto-cast abilities sometimes getting in the way of mobility. The birds with their screech for example take several seconds to perform the animation before they’ll even start to move. Other pets operate similarly every few seconds with their default attacks.

I am aware. I speak idealistically as well in the above.

Even IP typically falls flat; there are few reasons a thief should be committing that much to a given fight while taking enough damage in the process to make it worthwhile. The mug heal is usually contextually superior given the style of the thief.

HK is largely a waste, especially now with Marauder/DrD runes existing.

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

A friend moved to the perma evade and he stated (was funny actually) that he feels dirty and noobish.

So it’s working as intended given the design of the Daredevil. At least until someone solos a raid.

In most cases the damage gained from Mug alone will allow better burst than what CS offers. People factor executioner as a 20% modifier too often without considering the fact its effect only takes place when the target is below 50% hp, which is at most 50% of a fight. EW cancels the gains from FS, so in CS you’re left with a paltry potential damage bump and either a 10% effective modifier and maybe some ferocity at the cost of DA. The only advantage to CS is maximizing any given hit’s damage value and overall DPS via AA’ing. Otherwise DA strictly deals more damage through Mug and EW while providing ample utility through heal cuts, weakness’s endurance cuts, and PS, while also providing excellent sustain from Mug’s heal and reduced incoming damage from weakened foes.

You’re largely correct in the state of the weapon which is why I largely gave up on the set/game as a whole. It’s bearable in some styles, largely contingent on the Daredevil, and in some encounters/matchups, but it’s very dependent on other aspects of the profession to cover for its blatant weaknesses. D/D can’t support itself unlike many other kits.

Sad fact is ANet’s rampant poor-design decisions – notably passives – can only be fixed by negating those decisions, not through changing and buffing other things.

Again, after years of playing D/D with precasts, without precasts, mixed-casts, dodge-casts, fancy turns, and so on, I never experienced this.

But I mean hey if it’s all good now, great!

…Except for the fact I basically quit the game lol.

Did they announce the change anywhere? I’m hard-pressed to believe an effort was made to fix the whiffs, unless it was some kind of weird network thing, as it seemed to hit different uses more than not.

You still get to deal with the stealth attack ICD and most of the BS in the game, though. Now you just miss your stab instead of the CnD lol.

If they remove the damage component from CnD then the set loses equal viability as then D/P retains superior damage potential as well.

As Laela mentioned, passives are a big issue, but there’s no proper resolution unless those passives get nerfed. A skillful blind or similar denial that isn’t on a passive shouldn’t be punished by CnD just hard-countering them and allowing bad D/D players to get free hits/stealth when inflicted prior.

Ramoth.9064:

Straegen.2938:

Ramoth.9064:

Actually its a pretty hilarious non-MM necro killer build with pul impact. headshots, distracting daggers, headshot again. hilarious at silver/bronze

I think the point is if you can land 4 ints with Head Shot, you don’t need three more. Besides a player can take Bandit’s Defense and get one of those interrupts with a 2s knockdown along with a stun break and a block mechanic.

Basically either Headshot gets the job done or a player is fighting a build where Interrupts are difficult to land (evasion builds, perma-stab, high stealth). Adding more interrupts as opposed to more utility is almost suicidal.

Hilarious builds are supposed to be just that, hilarious, nothing more. Though if we are beig serious its probably for D/D builds.

Even then D/D is better off running EA since it has Death Blossom for cleanses. And D/D itself is just kind of terrible, anyways.

The skill could probably have merit but compared to Headshot and the other amazing utils accessible to the thief (Shadowstep/SoA/BD/IS/BP) it’s really not worthwhile to bother using even outside of the meta.

Xtinct.7031:

DeceiverX.8361:

Xtinct.7031:

Straegen.2938:

I have been playing with a Venom/Trap build with high stealth and it is nuking most players right now. The ability to condi up a player passively is very strong and unblockable. Its rotational condi is stronger than Ghost Thief as well. Not as annoying to fight against but more deadly.

Yo, how are you landing the traps on moving targets with the delay? Or are you laying the trap and kiting someone to hit it prior to your weapon burst.

Use teleports during the trap-laying animation. Shortbow 5 at max distance can also be used since the projectile has a flight time and the trap can be casted during the arrow’s flight and laid on impact (which has no animation since the arrow has already been shot), which if it’s on a player, will trigger the trap. Then kite using P/D’s powerful disengage via Shadow Strike, etc.

yea man, that is how it used to work before the activation delay. Now, 1 sec must pass after the trap has been layed down for it to trigger. So even at a max range SB 5, 1 sec still must pass after you reach your target. Thus making it unlikely for you to have the trap instantly land and activate at location of the target’s feet, unless you teleport ahead and plus 1 sec of the moving enemies path….that is the only way I can see it working.

Forgot that they made this change. Still likely doable given it at least plants at their feet and you can likely kite them into it without much issue.

Fixing the forum.

Xtinct.7031:

Straegen.2938:

I have been playing with a Venom/Trap build with high stealth and it is nuking most players right now. The ability to condi up a player passively is very strong and unblockable. Its rotational condi is stronger than Ghost Thief as well. Not as annoying to fight against but more deadly.

Yo, how are you landing the traps on moving targets with the delay? Or are you laying the trap and kiting someone to hit it prior to your weapon burst.

Use teleports during the trap-laying animation. Shortbow 5 at max distance can also be used since the projectile has a flight time and the trap can be casted during the arrow’s flight and laid on impact (which has no animation since the arrow has already been shot), which if it’s on a player, will trigger the trap. Then kite using P/D’s powerful disengage via Shadow Strike, etc.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

Thief should not rely on ranged. I don’t understand why people why to spam the same skill over and over at ranged (unload) rifle will probably be the same thing

And that’s the thing; there’s nothing inherently wrong with relying on range – many people like myself vastly prefer the playstyle – I’d have never rolled a thief if there was a proper mobile archer in the game.

What’s wrong is just giving something a distinct advantage when being at range and having it be difficult to lock down and it having melee potency such as the thief’s existing damage and defensive capabilities via dodges/Daredevil.

Ranged damage play requires a very high degree of risk when caught. There’s very little one can argue to promote a more potent ranged option for the thief in its current setup without making it overpowered.

Either major kit reworks are in order, massive nerfs need to happen (bad) or it needs to come in as an elite spec.

AikijinX.6258:

DeceiverX.8361:

AikijinX.6258:

What we need is our blasted 1500 range steal trait back (Long reach).

Like.. Why was it removed. At All.

And a good majority of you guys are talking about combining utility skills, and Sword #2’s to fulfill that 1200 range OP was requesting, but are not realizing you guys are primarily talking and advocating for WvW/PvP (Not so much PvP) What about PvE. For instance Jormag. Why should we be the only class that cant hit Jormag from the range everyone else hits him with, instead we need to go into the frostbite, and get a couple hits in from a closer range and then cleanse and repeat.(That’s if we don’t want to use the charrzooka gun, or what ever it’s called). There is other PvE content as well, where Thief falls short in range.

I’m no where near an expert in PvE, or even like it in general. But When you think about the proposal, you need to bring into account all game modes, and all types of scenarios.

Thieves either get nerfed, or forgotten in each balance.

Long Reach was made baseline in 2015 ._.

It’s mostly a balance concern with damage + mobility + stealth. Even the druid with its fairly low base weapon damage is a kiting nightmare for most people given its mobility and stealth access. It’d be way too much on the thief without definitive drawbacks.

Frankly, attacking Jormag isn’t even supposed to really happen. P/P bursts also work well, particularly with Dash’s long-distance evade.

That was the whole point of my elite spec proposal, but oh well :\

Long Reach was 1500 Range, not 1200. The 1200 is baseline.

And would you mind explaining more in depth how OP a mere 1200 range on Shortbow AA and P/P AA would be for the game, for all game types, not solely WvW, or 1v1 mindset. I’m totally fine with P/P #3 Unload not having 1200 range, I know that would be problematic.

Forgot it was +600. For whatever reason I always saw it as +300.

I guess it was just unclear which weapon or how the ranged attacks would be implemented.

All of shortbow at one point was 1200 but the landspeed component on IArrow was deemed (and rightfully so at the time) overpowered. It’s one thing to give the thief 1200 range on the shortbow AA for the sake of tagging and a whole other beast to give it something that’s a viable 1200-range weapon without some major sacrifices.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

DeceiverX.8361:

Death’s Charge is already so strong that I’ve been running Onslaught since the reaper’s release just for the consistent resets on it.

If you want to buff anything at all about RS, it should be RS3, by either a QoL change to allow it to be casted during Charge, or by increasing the stab duration slightly and upping application responsiveness.

I’d settle for RS3 not interrupting your auto attack. Stability portion, not the Fear.

That’s largely what I meant; it has no cast animation but requires idling at the moment as though it has one. The fear component has no cast at all.

Death’s Charge is already so strong that I’ve been running Onslaught since the reaper’s release just for the consistent resets on it.

If you want to buff anything at all about RS, it should be RS3, by either a QoL change to allow it to be casted during Charge, or by increasing the stab duration slightly and upping application responsiveness.

Usually I’m not one to agree with Cynz, but I don’t think you read what they wrote.

The Daredevil is pretty much the sole source of your problems, which they advocated shouldn’t be where balance is based off of – elites shouldn’t be the baseline.

The benefits you’re describing come from four different trait lines mixed with what are widely considered as trash weapons. The lone exception of an evade-heavy kit that isn’t godawful is the staff. The rest of the kits are inferior or downright no-good.

And HoT specs deal WAY more damage than vanilla, sorry. I think the thief is the lone exception which only loses a few percent. The rest have astronomical gains either in DPS or PvP burst/damage uptime.

Most of the problems with the game right now are design-level, often leading to un-fun gameplay scenarios (Daredevil evasion/forgiving nature compared to core + passives in reworked Acro, 450 range Arc Divider, Mesmer’s over-dependency on shatters, DH damage negation uptime, Warrior/Scrapper’s passives, Druid’s raw sustain, reaper’s condition access/application capability and durability, etc.)

AikijinX.6258:

What we need is our blasted 1500 range steal trait back (Long reach).

Like.. Why was it removed. At All.

And a good majority of you guys are talking about combining utility skills, and Sword #2’s to fulfill that 1200 range OP was requesting, but are not realizing you guys are primarily talking and advocating for WvW/PvP (Not so much PvP) What about PvE. For instance Jormag. Why should we be the only class that cant hit Jormag from the range everyone else hits him with, instead we need to go into the frostbite, and get a couple hits in from a closer range and then cleanse and repeat.(That’s if we don’t want to use the charrzooka gun, or what ever it’s called). There is other PvE content as well, where Thief falls short in range.

I’m no where near an expert in PvE, or even like it in general. But When you think about the proposal, you need to bring into account all game modes, and all types of scenarios.

Thieves either get nerfed, or forgotten in each balance.

Long Reach was made baseline in 2015 ._.

It’s mostly a balance concern with damage + mobility + stealth. Even the druid with its fairly low base weapon damage is a kiting nightmare for most people given its mobility and stealth access. It’d be way too much on the thief without definitive drawbacks.

Frankly, attacking Jormag isn’t even supposed to really happen. P/P bursts also work well, particularly with Dash’s long-distance evade.

That was the whole point of my elite spec proposal, but oh well :\

Zephyra.4709:

Had an old turtle beach set years ago, thinking of picking up Razer Kraken Pro – anyone got opinions on it?

I borrowed from a friend for a day and hated every second of it. Sound quality and noise reduction are truly magnificent, but they were the single most uncomfortable earpieces I’ve ever worn. Didn’t fit well over the ears and created a lot of pressure/rubbing and were very, very hot.

He loves them, and it might be worth sampling, but I find elongated ear openings the best way to go in regards to comfort safety.

vesica tempestas.1563:

^^ You hear lots of people blaming devs for design decisions here and there, or difficulty, or not being casual friendly, but the reality is this is the best answer you can get – it doesnt appeal to someones personal taste. If everyone was honest enough to simply admit this there would be no arguments about HOT +1

On numerous occasions I’ve gone into mathematical detail and contemporary game theory and objectively proven most of the elite specs are being badly-designed content.

One can have opinions on the map structure, or story, or what else, but many mechanical features provided by HoT have objectively been poor decisions and have objectively been failures based on the surrounding evidence and statistics. So far, I’ve also been 100% accurate in my predictions of ANet’s income post-expansion, coming directly from the perspective of a market analyst and former game co-manager.

I’m not here to bash the expansion – I’ve already done so on other threads – but such a blanket statement is simply untrue, particularly since the most fundamental pillars of gameplay – profession design (fun-factor) and numerical balance (fairness) – have had their integrities so savagely violated.

The difference is most notable in the PvP formats.

If you play in those formats without an elite spec, unless on a very few set of specific classes/builds, you instantly become absolute trash. There are very few core builds that come even close to viability. 9/10 times you might as well just play without traits is how big of a difference it makes there.

Until they nerf the elites massively, there’s nothing to be done. More powercreep will just kill the game outright.

joneirikb.7506:

Don’t really mind them myself, but I guess you could replace “Retreat!” with “Move Out!” which makes sense no matter which way you’re running.

This is a good solution for Retreat.

Save Yourselves! is a great skill in its name, especially given how it works. It really shouldn’t be changed.

I really like my Turtle Beach Stealth 450. It’s got a dumb name, but the sound and capture quality are excellent – if not a little too good, and it’s held up well for almost two years. Unless you’re a professional audio capturer/recorder and really need the best of the best sound quality, it’s more than enough, and runs way cheaper than most other headsets at just $100. I average a recharge maybe once every few days, too, despite almost always having music going, gaming or not. Controls are easy to manage and once used to them feel natural. Build quality is acceptable for the price. Doesn’t feel as solid as the z300 and other premium sets from sennheiser or razer, which I had prior (the transmitter randomly died on it), but I think this has to do more with it being designed as lightweight and unintrusive as I’ve come to respect the materials and build quality decisions over time. it isn’t as feature-loaded as many premium ones, but it does what its intended to do and does it really, really well.

It’s also insanely comfortable – more so even than the z300, and definitely more comfortable than any razer product I’ve ever demo’d which often get too hot or don’t sit well on/over the ears, which I think is a major part of buying a good headset. The removable boom is also nice if you like over-the-ear headphones, as it can then do double-duty (plugged in).

It only has two cons:

You really need to buy a longer usb : micro usb cable for recharging it. Unless you have a laptop or never plan to charge it while using it, the one they give you is only a paltry three feet long, and is not satisfactory for most purposes. USB cables are super easy to find, though, and aren’t expensive.

The built-in voiced responses to changing settings or turning it off/on. I don’t need some random woman saying “powering off” or “microphone muted” loudly in my ear when I’m fumbling about.

Otherwise, it’s a truly wonderful device.

Gaile Gray.6029:

atheria.2837:

When WvW “tiers” are respected again, if ever, by Anet and the manual glicko additions and subtractions stop, then this type of posting will be few and very far between compared to now.

So, keeping to the topic of this thread, and not the side comments being expressed, you’re essentially saying, “We will post reasonably about other players and servers/worlds once the devs [do XX or YY]?”

The topic — again — is player-to-player conversations. With that in mind, whatever parameters you set for improved forum member behavior towards one another cannot be fulfilled by ArenaNet but only by forum members themselves.

Like I said, for many, the forum PvP is more fun than the PvP is in-game.

Until the game itself is worth the attention, and the community given reason to focus on the game, it’s just going to inherently leave people frustrated. And then when civil and heated arguments take place and people get banned for very poor reasons, they get even more frustrated. We saw it earlier in this thread. I ‘ve personally been targeted by a number of users explicitly trying to take my posts out of context to get me banned, with no action taken against them. And while at the end of the day this isn’t excusable behavior, it is caused because people are bored and devoid of reasons to care.

It’s not that people are just strictly upset and placing the blame entirely on ANet. That said, one need to ask why the community is now suddenly having major issues with this problem; a lot of it ultimately falls on the shoulders of ANet’s negligence. I’m not trying to excuse or justify any of this behavior, either. Just that this is the truth of the perspective of the players, and that nothing will really change until things do to give people a reason to care and nurture the community again.

GrahamW.5397:

DeceiverX.8361:

It really just boils down to the fact that the game mode’s PvP is less fun than the forum PvP these days.

The WvW team isn’t really at fault here – at least for the past year. They’ve done a fair amount to at least try to help things move along better with what’s within their authority.

What doesn’t help is that we know there is deliberate negligence coming to the format from upper management. We as a community know that previous WvW devs were pulled from their development tasks here to go help improve the flow of other content areas, notably PvE.

It doesn’t help that there’s the blatant and obvious disconnect between the management that controls these decisions and the community itself – MO’s infamous “WvW players enjoy PvE” quote.

It doesn’t help that the entire contents of a featured expansion only did damage and nothing more to the format out of this disconnect, and how testers were not from the WvW community.

It doesn’t help that the gameplay is anti-fun in the PvP scene, both in WvW and sPvP, because of the elite specs’ design failing to reach standards of players involved in competitive play in favor of “fun” for PvE with a lack of design towards PvP environments. The fact that pro league and ESL players in the PvP forums make non-insulting feedback threads condemning the state of the game to try and get ANet to realize what they’ve done, and then for us to watch those posts get deleted and their accounts banned for defacing and insulting the company says a tremendous amount about what actually gets communicated. These posts still exist on Google’s archives. People still reference these things because of how kitten ing they are.

It doesn’t help that historically more damage has been done to this format every patch than good.

There comes a point in time where people who enjoy this community and what the game had to offer no longer find the game worth their time. And yet they’re still very passionate about either the matchup or the format or whatever it is. So in their frustrated boredom they’d rather be part of the community and talk a little smack than sit wasting hours in a game that is simply not fun to play.

Because frankly, that’s what it comes down to. The game is just no longer fun. It’s rampant with a compounding set of poor design and implementation decisions. The disconnect is real and quite obvious. WvW isn’t being taken seriously game-wide, and I think that’s one of the biggest problems. People have played uneven matchups for years. Things didn’t really start going south until after HoT. We’ve consolidated servers and there are still less people active per matchup than before. Most of it has nothing to do with matchmaking and population.

Most people, myself included, have just given up hope entirely. There’s more joy in cat-posting here and just not caring than there is in playing the game itself. That’s a problem. And one which has been totally ignored.

The game is still plenty fun, but lack of communication and slow, inconsistent and sometimes seemingly abandoned/non existent updates make it stagnate and will drive people away. Whenever we ask about it the threads just end up locked and we never get any real answers. Ofc people are going to dissipate in an environment like that.

A lot of the recent mass-quitting has little to do with communication and more to do with the game just not being fun.

If ANet never spoke nor interacted with us but landed every patch flawlelessly in terms of improving WvW and/or the PvP experience, I don’t think people would be complaining much because there wouldn’t be much to complain about The no-communication policy wouldn’t be a big deal because obviously the players’ interests were making it to the game, anyways.

The lack of communication is nothing new, and nobody should be expecting that to improve, or base their decision on leaving or staying because of it.

It may reduce morale and may make people feel more of a reason to stop bothering, but at the end of the day, what makes people leave is the game just no longer being fun for them.

And what makes them not come back (as many haven’t done) is the game just not being fun in general even after taking time off.

It really just boils down to the fact that the game mode’s PvP is less fun than the forum PvP these days.

The WvW team isn’t really at fault here – at least for the past year. They’ve done a fair amount to at least try to help things move along better with what’s within their authority.

What doesn’t help is that we know there is deliberate negligence coming to the format from upper management. We as a community know that previous WvW devs were pulled from their development tasks here to go help improve the flow of other content areas, notably PvE.

It doesn’t help that there’s the blatant and obvious disconnect between the management that controls these decisions and the community itself – MO’s infamous “WvW players enjoy PvE” quote.

It doesn’t help that the entire contents of a featured expansion only did damage and nothing more to the format out of this disconnect, and how testers were not from the WvW community.

It doesn’t help that the gameplay is anti-fun in the PvP scene, both in WvW and sPvP, because of the elite specs’ design failing to reach standards of players involved in competitive play in favor of “fun” for PvE with a lack of design towards PvP environments. The fact that pro league and ESL players in the PvP forums make non-insulting feedback threads condemning the state of the game to try and get ANet to realize what they’ve done, and then for us to watch those posts get deleted and their accounts banned for defacing and insulting the company says a tremendous amount about what actually gets communicated. These posts still exist on Google’s archives. People still reference these things because of how kitten ing they are.

It doesn’t help that historically more damage has been done to this format every patch than good.

There comes a point in time where people who enjoy this community and what the game had to offer no longer find the game worth their time. And yet they’re still very passionate about either the matchup or the format or whatever it is. So in their frustrated boredom they’d rather be part of the community and talk a little smack than sit wasting hours in a game that is simply not fun to play.

Because frankly, that’s what it comes down to. The game is just no longer fun. It’s rampant with a compounding set of poor design and implementation decisions. The disconnect is real and quite obvious. WvW isn’t being taken seriously game-wide, and I think that’s one of the biggest problems. People have played uneven matchups for years. Things didn’t really start going south until after HoT. We’ve consolidated servers and there are still less people active per matchup than before. Most of it has nothing to do with matchmaking and population.

Most people, myself included, have just given up hope entirely. There’s more joy in cat-posting here and just not caring than there is in playing the game itself. That’s a problem. And one which has been totally ignored.

I’ve only had it happen when they teleport during the DC cast towards when the final hit damage would be dealt. Otherwise I think the skill is one of the most consistent gap closers in the game.

Yannir.4132:

Helly.2597:

My vote would be to make it back to something similar to how it was at the launch of HoT where chill does damage itself. That way simply stacking more chillmancers isn’t always the most optimal and has a damage trade-off.

But that’s exactly why it was changed to its current iteration, and while we have splits between game modes, that won’t affect the core functionality of a trait/skill. That means they can only play around with duration, cooldown and number of stacks. If they change it back to chill doing damage again, that change will affect it in all game modes. And that would gut condi necros in pvp and pve.

Yea but they only balance for PvE and condi reaper was getting shafted there because of conflicting chill stacks, so it won’t happen.

Operating on the pretense they’ll do anything for WvW in terms of class balance and design is setting yourself up for disappointment.

The only thing I find really justifiable to nerf on D/P is Shadow Shot’s damage or its initiative cost. But I’ve been arguing that for years. The AA buff was pointless but clearly ANet isn’t lowering anyone’s damage. No sense in lowering just the thief’s and not other professions.

Even the stealth access isn’t intrinsically overpowered so much as it is bad design. It’s not fun to play against. Stealth as a whole needs a rework in this game.

While D/P might need marginal shaving, the other kits suck because they’re both numerically worse and most importantly, their design is just bad. Most kits have little diversity within them and are very one-dimensional. If you just move to buffs on the numbers level the thief will either be overpowered and boring or just terrible and worse than it is now through a lack of D/P.

At the end of the day, most weapon skills and a lot of traits need substantial reworks and better interactions with the rest of the game to enable more build diversity. The elite specs need dramatic nerfs and changes in general as well in order to re-enable a lot of core. Fact is ANet isn’t willing to put forth the effort, and frankly, nothing will ever improve until they do so, regardless of their numerical/effect tweaking.

So long as there aren’t definitive penalties for utilizing range such as a slowness in mobility, no stealth, or big damage cuts, I think the profession as it is is likely better off without.

If only there was a way to incorporate it well…

Also add acro’s initiative gain on evade into the mix and natural initiative regeneration and it ends up being pushed to five consecutive evades per 15 init with cast times factored in. QP and Kleptomaniac push a recovery back to 5 and the two signets and endurance on swap will keep the thief (using bound which looks very similar to vault) pretty much infinitely able to dodge.

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

DeceiverX.8361:

There should just be more opportunities for the thief to capitalize on being revealed, and many of the stealth traits should be changed to be applied upon gaining stealth, not just staying in it. This would let thieves balance stealth/reveal play well and reward not camping either styles which is largely either unfun (stealth stacking) or one-dimensional (reveal stacking for extra bonuses). A reveal skill should be used to deny stealth and nothing more, not to just shut down a majority of an existing class. And that class should have the opportunity to combat the further ailments of being revealed if it hinges its build on stealth.

One single revealed-oriented trait (RT) competing with one of the best traits in the game (Panic Strike) for an ounce of extra damage isn’t doing anything for anyone outside of PvE DPS environments. That was what I was trying to accomplish with my elite, but ANet insists on further punishing attempts to reveal oneself.

Zomg i would LOVE to have both.

Also, I would suggest to add something to teh Shadow Arts traitline to make it more used in non-ghost builds…

Second Chance: No cooldown on failed Stealth Attacks.

This would make some DPS builds consider using SA for this alone.(or hell, get rid of the CD to begin with)

This was the entire premise of my Deadeye elite spec proposal. Some community members unfortunately do not want this out of blatant disinterest in any amount of use of the Revealed mechanic, and the idea gained little momentum as a result.

Unfortunately I no longer see what I proposed as being feasible given the stealth attack ICD negating much of the consistency of revealed-and-re-stealth-based builds, since a failed stealth attack to reveal oneself then requires the burning of initiative on another weapon skill to trigger the effects, which innately hurts the profession’s usability. Simple buffs to the effects can’t resolve this, either, as then it ends up overbearing when it does work. I think this would be the most balanced and fun way to both play as and against the thief, but many disapprove of the notion of not just camping one or the other.

Sadly ANet is fixated on its intentions with the thief and is not willing to make concessions for the sake of general gameplay improvements and build diversity.

The problem simply lies in the nature of capture-and-hold.

If you buff the thief’s combat potential like many want due to its fun mechanics, it becomes way too good at everything. But if you nerf its mobility it has zero purpose.

There should just be more opportunities for the thief to capitalize on being revealed, and many of the stealth traits should be changed to be applied upon gaining stealth, not just staying in it. This would let thieves balance stealth/reveal play well and reward not camping either styles which is largely either unfun (stealth stacking) or one-dimensional (reveal stacking for extra bonuses). A reveal skill should be used to deny stealth and nothing more, not to just shut down a majority of an existing class. And that class should have the opportunity to combat the further ailments of being revealed if it hinges its build on stealth.

One single revealed-oriented trait (RT) competing with one of the best traits in the game (Panic Strike) for an ounce of extra damage isn’t doing anything for anyone outside of PvE DPS environments. That was what I was trying to accomplish with my elite, but ANet insists on further punishing attempts to reveal oneself.

Rambitshouse.8712:

ProDecius.2609:

Vermillion.4061:

cele is the new thing on necro, TB/Dire outdated.

idk, your much squishier and the power, precision,ferocity, and healing power are going to do all of jack kitten, but that has more to do with how power damage sucks ass atm with any class. Maybe, I have a set of full ascended celestial, I might try it out, tbh though I’ve also heard a lot of good players dismiss cele necro on several occasions, but hey why not. Any chance you could link me a build for cele stats? if not that’s fine, I’m sure it’s not rocket science.

I run mostly power necro with a mix of celestial trinkets. Works very well with death shroud, no reaper necessary. You’d be surprised by the little boosts you get form celestial that come in handy.

I honestly don’t know why players run dire necro, it’s quite boring and autopilot mode. New ghost thief if you ask me.

You answered your own question.

If people wanted to play skilled matchups that weren’t faceroll-easy, everyone would still largely be playing core specs and non-HoT-stat gear.

Fact is, at the end of the day, people just want to win.

I’d rather have fun, but that’s also why I stopped playing the game. And why most of the pro players also did.

Well when you gank 10v1 you get ten kills added to your KDR with no deaths.

Honestly, Mag’s players are no better than anyone else’s in all reality. Their small-scale is just more organized when it comes to tags and bags, and is a lot more persistent.

Unless the thief is particularly skilled, if the reaper knows how the thief works it’s usually a relatively safe kill.

Been destroying them pretty much since I picked up reaper seriously on a berserker power build. You just need to know not to go chasing them. Suffer pretty much wins fights on its own, too, since it’ll send the weakness back which hits their endurance and crits.

We need less stealth in the game, not more.

And that’s coming from an ex-thief.

If you need to change core functionality the elite spec ultimately is a design not worth pursuing. As mentioned, good elites should be as compatible as possible while negating any need to rework existing lines. We can’t expect the profession developers to rework existing skills that need reworks. I really doubt they’d be on-board for an idea that would require a substantial rework to the core bits as well. It’s this reason why I gave up on the Deadeye’s development after the stealth attack ICD; some minor incompatibilities were introduced (particularly the stealth attack ICD), and there’s nothing that can resolve them without depending on an undo of some of these changes.

Even my posposal took a lot of flak for just putting an ICD on Quick Pockets equal to just under the baseline weapon swap cooldown (which thus has zero effect on any core game element whatsoever) which is necessary in order to keep the spec itself balanced.

Caedmon.6798:

The lag was noticably lower when they lowered the server cap and where stabi was not a pulsing/stacking boon yet.

Since HoT, there have been a lot more proc effects in the meta and many more players blobbing in one huge cluster due to the death of small-scale and havoc, on top of lower cooldowns and more cleave happening ant any given time. This would naturally cause a lot more congestion of events being fired.

On more than one occasion ANet has come out and said it has nothing to do with networks but event propagation on their servers. If it were a network issue it’d be just local to certain players within vision of the fight; the often-cited complaint of major skill lag affects all players on the map regardless of location, and this explanation also explains the skill speedups that often come afterwards. If it was network-related, things wouldn’t speed up.

It’s very possible that some skill lag can be caused from network problems, but to say the infamous “skill lag” aspect of WvW blobbing is network-related just doesn’t seem to add up unless outgoing communication from ANet itself is being bogged down… but I sincerely doubt that considering all events happening at all points in the game on all servers in all map instances are also going outbound in the same way, and the population is way lower than it used to be, suggesting this is really, really unlikely.