Guild Wars 2

Thanks for the feedback so far, everyone.

Updates:
- Reverted Primal Protection to Companion’s Defense.

- Adjusted Tight-quarter Bowmaster from ignoring range increment penalties to reversing range increment penalties and reducing the effects of range increment penalties by 75%. 10% more damage to targets within 150 range.

- Eagle Eye removed from MM Master slot. Calm of battle removed. Eagle Eye moved to MM IV.

Nike.2631:

Putting weapons specific traits (Eagle Eye) on a minor trait is a no-no.

Now, if you wanted to put Spotter there, I can see the reputation of Rangers immediately improving game-wide…

Spotter would be too OP for a master default trait in the power line. As you noticed, I removed Calm of Battle and moved it there. Looking for suggestions for the master 15 MM trait now.

Rym.1469:

Nike.2631:

Putting weapons specific traits (Eagle Eye) on a minor trait is a no-no.

Now, if you wanted to put Spotter there, I can see the reputation of Rangers immediately improving game-wide…

This is a good point.

From myself: Adding F5, F6 goes pretty much around the concept of “less to click” concept (Although Engineers with multiple kits do the same but… Devs like them ^^)
and would not be accepted in any form. When I like the idea of allowing us to bind pet stances as optional, I’m pretty okay with how it works currently. One click to do isn’t that much. And most of the Rangers I know keep pet on passive to have better management of pet.

As for “Opening Strike” – I’ve never liked that idea. First attack for you and your pet should be just a flat crit from this minor trait. That’s all, end of the story. Messing up with a single minor effect across multiple minors is not the best idea. Especially if you place them in other trait trees.

One of the quick changes for Skirmishing and MM trees should be swapping condition duration gained from traits with critical damage. Should go well with Traps and idea of “Critical Opening”

Regarding the 6 pet action keys, I agree it’s a little cluttered, but it does grant players much better access to controlling their pets more precisely and using them tactically. The other two options aren’t really necessary unless you’re planning to use the pet in a more precise/planned-out way, and due to their setups, they shouldn’t be as heavily-spammed. The biggest adjustment would likely be for players needing to get used to pressing a different key for swapping. It also allows for combinations such as passive guard/offensive guard. It doesn’t remove any current features from this and I think simply adding two more buttons is a LOT less confusing than adding press + hold mechanics or other less-elegant solutions.

Regarding cross-line skills, it’s iffy. I understand there needs to be a degree of independence between trait lines, however allowing for some meshing does allow for some better synergy options, which can allow for traits and builds to be more elaborate while pushing new players into more effective and synergistic builds.

Opening Strike is a cool mechanic idea – reminds me quite a bit of getting a surprise round in D&D, which is very useful for ranged characters, and it’s definitely something unique to the ranger class and can be used to open a lot of doors to make the class feel a lot more unique. A powerful opening attack followed by good sustained damage keeps the opponent at a health disadvantage.

Fluffball.8307:

With Sigil of Energy and vigor up, you are already invulnerable 1.5 out of every 7.5 seconds. Now you’d have 4 seconds out of 7.5 seconds would have Aegis up unless you got hit.

If you’re swapping between greatsword and sword/dagger, that would just be a PItA to fight against.

Ah didn’t consider the sigils. Could be a bit of an issue then. Switch aegis with protection then?

Kal Spiro.9745:

Ignore Aegis on OS is interesting, but Ignore protection entirely is OP.

Hmmm. I suppose this would be the case for melee rangers, as for ranged ones it would be a mighty sacrifice to use this trait. Any ideas?

Prysin.8542:

Rangers have enough evasion as is.
Guard is a awesome tool, probably one of the more practical shouts we have, when traited.
Perma Pet Stow – No thanks. Not in any shape or form.

So you support guard? Unfortunately an overwhelming population of rangers supports permastow. Keep it in mind that a 30% increase in damage throughput isn’t enough to compensate. Ranger + pet still gets higher DPS even with the 30% increase, as currently pets account for 30% of our overall damage.

So of 100 damage dealt, the ranger does 70.
A 30% increase would yield 91, with no support effects or other decent abilities. It just makes the damage a little more consistent and gives players more choices on how to play. I think dealing less damage this way is a fair trade-off.

While I understand it looks pretty powerful on paper, it does only negate four attacks at best. Dodge the first attack, aegis the other, dodge the next, aegis the fourth. Protection might be a little bit crazy, however I don’t think the aegis bit is. It’s no different from Guardian’s Virtue of Courage Passive + Active on Dodging and has a much shorter duration thus making it less reliable to get off all the aegis but more reliable in that it has no real cooldown.

Keep in mind mesmer also has clone on dodge, and thief dodge is pretty crazy when you consider the capability of getting four dodges + 4 or 5 consecutive shortbow evades and then another dodge all while gaining around 2k range from your starting location.

Just bear in mind this isn’t on evade, too. It only applies to dodging.

The most broken use of this I could think of would be to utilize cleaving effects in a zerg to get endurance on kill to keep dodging, but that requires a lot of kills, and I think would be more applicable to trash mobs in PvE or megazerg WvW (doesn’t proc on downs, either).

Edit: I think I’ll remove the protection.

I posted this in the CDI but got no feedback or discussion due to the pretty crazy flooding of some other topics. Would like some feedback to refine this further.

Would like you to note ICD’s are missing on some traits. Please feel free to make suggestions.

Class Adjustments:
- Signet effects by default apply to the player (Remove Signet of the Beastmaster).
- Pets scale off of both player level and stats.
- Improve/Increase pet attack hitbox size/improve AI.
- Ordering a pet cancels its idle animation to proceed with the orders given to it.
- Pets’ base mobility increased by 25%
- Peaceful/Aggressive Toggle on F4.
- Switch pet toggle on F5.
- “Guard” utility skill removed. Placed on F6. Range: 2000
- “Relentless” ability added: Pets may be stowed permanently. The ranger receives a non-removable boon which grants him a 30% increase to damage to his attacks. Pets cannot be stowed or summoned while in combat.
- Pet F2 base skill cooldowns reduced by 20%.
- Increase base projectile speed for longbow attacks by 50%.
- Combine spirit effects with pets. Spirit skills renamed after various animals.
- -Beastmastery trait ranks increase pet stats more than currently.

TRAIT PROGRESSION CHANGES

Marksmanship:
Adept: Opening Strike: You and your pets have Opening Strike (Combined with Alpha Training (Master Marksmanship)).
Master: FREE FOR SUGGESTIONS.
Grandmaster: Stance of Storms: You and your pet gain swiftness and fury (5s) when applying Opening Strike. Apply Opening Strike while attacking from stealth. Remove Remorseless (Marksmanship XII).

Skirmishing:
Adept: Precise Strike: Opening Strike Always critical hits (Moved from Grandmaster Marksmanship).
Master: Hunter’s Tactics: Replace Furious Grip with Hunter’s Tactics (Grandmaster Skirmishing)
Grandmaster: Peak Strength: Increase damage by 10% when health is above 90% (Wilderness Survival Grandmaster).

Wilderness Survival:
Adept: Natural Vigor (Unchanged)
Master: Companion’s Defense (Unchanged)
Grandmaster: Tranquility: Upon killing a foe, gain 20 endurance.

Nature Magic:
Adept: Medicinal Herbs: When your pet reaches 20% health, cure all conditions and apply regeneration (5s).
Master: Rejuvenating Bond: Gain regeneration (5s) when your health drops below the threshold (75%). All boons and trait bonuses you obtain are shared with your pet (stat bonuses excluded) (Combination/Rework of Adept and Master Nature Magic traits).
Grandmaster: Bountiful Hunter (Unchanged)

Beastmastery:
Adept: Loud Whistle: Reduce the recharge on pet swapping by 20%.
Master: Honed Fangs: You and your pet gain power equal to 10% of healing power. Your pet heals itself (.1) when it attacks (Rework/Combine Nature’s Wrath and Carnivorous Appetite)
Grandmster: Beast’s Promise: If your pet dies and you cannot swap pets, your other pet is swapped to and revived at 50% health.

TRAIT CHANGES:

^= New skill designed to replace skill holes.

Marksmanship:
-^True Strike (Marksmanship X): Your Opening Strikes ignore Aegis.
-Removal of Beastmaster’s Bond and Signet Mastery.
-^Eagle Eye (Marksmanship IV): Eagle Eye moved from Marksmanship X to Marksmanship IV).
-^Pin Down (Marksmanship IX): Your Open Strikes apply 2s of Immobilize.
-^Marksmanship XI (Mighty Signets, credit to Nike): Activating a Signet grants 3 Stacks of Might and Signet recharge rates are reduced by 20%).
-^Tight-Quarter Bow-master (Marksmanship XII): Range increment penalties on Longbows are reversed and reduced by 75% at the appropriate stages. 10% increase in damage dealt to targets within 150 range using longbows (damage falls off at increased range, reduced the penalty at [now] long range compared to [current] close range.).

Skirmishing:
-Agility Training (Skirmishing VI): You and your pet move 25% faster. Toned down from 30% for pets only, stacks with initial bonus pet move speed to 50%.
-Trap Potency moved to Skirmishing VII.
-^Fleet of Foot (Skirmishing XI): Cripple’s duration on you is reduced by 30%.
Wilderness Survival:
-^Antivenin (Wilderness Survival XI): Cure two conditions once every 10 seconds.

Nature Magic:
-^Longevity (Nature Magic IV): While under the effect of a Spirit spell, your pet takes 50% less damage.
-^Animal Aspects (Nature Magic VII): You also radiate the effects of Spirits.
-Nature’s Vengeance applies spirit pet effects when the pet dies.

Beastmastery:
-Speed Training recharge rate reduction increased to 20%.
-Master’s Bond: Your pet’s attributes are increased further (Apply current maximum at all times).

Would much rather have seen a better archery-based trait in skirmishing. As it stands a lot of archer rangers don’t even go the 30 points because the GM traits are just outright bad. And this new one is no exception; actually, it might qualify as being one of the most useless traits in the game. If anything, Read the Wind belongs here more than in marksmanship.

Got my support. I have my sixth character hitting 1 year soon, and four others sitting at 20 from those scrolls. Every time I log in to level them, I lose motivation :P

Balekai.6083:

I still maintain that the way to fix the gap between zerker and other sets was to go enemy to enemy, boss to boss, instance to instance and rework enemy NPCs to use dodges, move out of AoE, strafe into line of sight instead of running around corners and using a lot more boons and conditions.

The problem for the one thousandth time is not Beserker armor or players. The problem is PvE enemy design being too simplistic and it being way too easy to stack and kill enemies before they do any major DPS themselves. If max DPS was not the most optimal means of killing enemies players would not use Zerker overwhelmingly. A 10% reduction in Zerker damage will just mean the most optimal way to do dungeons will be 10% slower, but still much faster and more optimal than having different sets/builds which will also be slower.

Basically it comes down to this:

Many sets are optimal in SPvP and WvW because opposing players use all the defensive and offensive mechanics available in the game to fight and win against other players.

This is not the case with Enemy AI in PvE.

What’s the most common sense solution?

Make enemy AI act more like players do.

Precisely. This change does nothing to solve the problem it’s been announced to try and resolve and only breaks WvW more. It has nothing to do with stat/gear/build effective power or the community so much as the dungeons not being designed to really encourage other styles of play and party paradigms.

Clear time should be positively affected by supporting players or soaking aggro. It’s not the case right now and I strongly suspect ANet has no intention to make these kinds of changes anywhere in the near future.

And as I mentioned, these changes would be successful without changing critical damage outputs. The ferocity change (in terms of its nerfs) does quite literally nothing but make the current problems worse.

SakuraJD.4720:

DeceiverX.8361:

….because 10% damage overall includes damage dealt by non-critical strikes, thus…

I’m sorry… what? are you dense? they’re saying the decrease to crit damage results in an overall loss, not that they are reducing POWER by 10%. non-crit strikes will still be just as powerful(or not, depending on your point of view) as they were before.

The 10% figure is for overall damage, not just for critical hits. This means that the reduction applying to critical strikes will be greater than 10% because berserker setups do not have 100% critical chance. I think you mis-read my post, because nowhere did I say non-critical strikes will deal less damage.

Black Scoutsman.5830:

Forgive me, as I havent read all four pages in this thread, but I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around the math and logic that the ferocity change affects valkryie and cavalier more than zerker. I’ll provide an example.

A valkryie and a berserker each hit a target 10 times. The valkryie crits 2 times. The berserker Crits 7 times. For the sake of simplicity, lets say each crit hits for 1000 dmg. After the approximately 10% decrease in dmg, in those 10 hits, the valkyrie loses 200 points in total dmg output for 10 hits. The berserker loses 700 points. Now granted, the overall damage of the berserker is still higher than the valkyrie, but it seems to me logic would say that the berserker is taking the bigger hit. Am I wrong??

Yes and no regarding these sets.
Players rarely run valkyrie/cavalier unless they have a mechanic, gear combination, or so on, that lets them crit more often, either through traits like Hidden Killer or other auto-crit skills/traits, access to fury, or simply just running berseker/valk/assassin’s hybrid sets. Without these bonuses, valkyrie doesn’t actually do anything – if anything, it just becomes strictly worse than PVT gear.

So yes, valkyrie is hit less hard if your build runs it vanilla as opposed to berserker due to it critting less. That said, these sets are usually reliant on builds with mechanics that heavily increase crit chance for a short duration repeatedly. Such is the case for elementalists, some rangers, and most notably, thieves.

As burst crit damage potency is reduced, the effectiveness of building around these gear combos also reduces. There’s less incentive to build into medium or 100% short duration crit chance builds and now more incentive to maximize it at all times to compensate for the lost burst and crit viability by compensating for it through auto-attacks.

Thus, players will make moves from valkyrie and cavalier’s to compensate for their “lost” damage, as before players used these sets to simply get some better defense to not die during their “downtime” periods.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Also, can we please stop this “my class didn’t get good stuff so you don’t deserve good stuff either” crap? It’s not Warrior’s fault that your class has problems. We’re trying to improve our class just like you wat to improve yours and that’s all that there is to it.

It isn’t about improving everything the same, though.

Some classes, I.E., the warrior, are inherently better than others, and also received better updates. To complain these updates aren’t satisfactory simply isn’t even justified. Asking for anything more is simply asking to add a larger margin of power and just doesn’t make any sense.

I mean did you read the OP? If you didn’t, here you go.

And to have the audacity to state the devs which have CLEARLY favored the class since release “hate” that exact class and not considering any other class’s problems (such as one being almost totally non-viable except for one build)? I think my reaction is justified, frankly. I want the classes to be balanced. This means no warrior buffs and a focus on rangers as per the community vote.

Ditch the RNG. Would rather see it every x attacks or something instead.

Or just, I don’t know, 30% more DPH in general as people have been suggesting for like eighteen months :\

Shouldn’t be playing D/D SA.

D/D is a 25+/30/x/x/x set. Difficult, grueling at times, but out of playing all of the professions and all of the weapon sets and a ton of builds, it is in my opinion one of the most rewarding to pull off. D/D’s 3 and 4 are situational. Extremely so. That said, getting an on demand AOE cripple and another evade can be huge depending on your target. I personally know I’ve dodged a lot of devastating attacks with death blossom. Notably other thieves trying to stab me, and utilizing the blossom to get behind them and stab their backs :P

D/P is strong because it has get-out-of-jail-free cards (permastealth and blind field) and a very high fault tolerance when combined with SA. The damage is still pretty strong, but it can also be played well with good use of headshot. The set is straightforward but diverse and easy to use.

Nah, this is the true P/P build :P

Anything that isn’t a necromancer pretty much just cannot kill it. I had a TON of fun trolling a friend of mine who just made his mega-min-max guard build and pretty much 1v1’ed our entire guild and then couldn’t kill this. We dueled for around 35 minutes straight, and he didn’t die only due to his bonkers condi removal. I think he managed to get me around 35% hp once.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vYAQRAqa6Yl8MpopdPxzJ0PNRw9wpQtpaFoZ3DuKftC-zECBYiBEXMyk0BimO05RFRjtupIas6ZER16jYBAQAeP3T30Ngf+zf+zf+zCBIdNA-w

Nah, everything is fine, D/P is just a little too strong.

Kain Francois.4328:

15% is too random and unreliable. I thought GW2 was skill-based?

Nailed it.

Could be 75% for all I care. Would still rather take a more predictable lower number even as a ranger player, just so I can plan my moves better instead of relying on RNG.

MiLkZz.4789:

-Ranger
Bows can’t deal too much damage as that would make their range factor unfair. But the problem now is that people are at the ranger in seconds, melting them down. So it is kinda 2sided, you can’t buff the bows damage too much as that would make it unfair to some low mobility classes getting melted instantly, but on the otherside the bow on a ranger is almost useless as people are in your face smackin chunks of your healthbar.

Dunno. Bow damage could be pretty easily buffed. The ability to sidestep longbow shots outside (possibly) of the new skill makes it counterable at its strongest, and the amount of gap-close we have in the game is crazy. Rangers also only get one utility (Lightning Reflexes) which isn’t very good, and three skills, none of which are on the longbow and therefore would put them on weapon switch cooldowns (if you count the GS leap to jump away) to increase the gap between them and their foes. The biggest issue would be balancing them around WvW towers due to height advantage/relative safety, but much like some of the mobs/bosses in dungeons, there are ways to deal with obstruction/inaccessibility penalties on damage.

I’ve never had an issue against this skill. It’s extremely easy to beat due to how predictable it is. I actually switched my S/P thief to P/P because unload/ranged attacks net me a much more reliable combo than spamming 3 and hoping they don’t have any kind of means of dealing with it.

It has to replace Signets of the Beastmaster.

It’s a GM trait, not just a master.

Lolwut.

Apparently 100% maximum effectiveness on class mechanic isn’t very good.

But the ranger in a tree which already has 2 necessary GM traits which requires you to pick one just got one more to improve projectile speed so your attacks can hit a strafing target.

AKA something which should be implemented by default.

Meanwhile their class mechanic is total trash and will remain trash with no real other updates.

Like, really? Warrior arguably got some of the best traits lol.

Sekhmet.6153:

ozmaniandevil.6805:

I really think that those who are willing to spend some time actually farming have no problem making gold. If I have “x” number of hours to play and do only the “fun” stuff, I would probably be broke too (or at least feel like it). You have to be willing to farm something pretty hard to get rewarded in this game. Seems like that is the way of MMOs in general, though I have only played this one.

My son refuses to farm. He played the game; he did the events and hearts and personal story. He had no toons at level 80. He had no appreciable in-game cash. He gave up on the game because he never had anything good or “cool”. See the connection?

Which is why I agree with the OP. This is very similar to how my gf feels. She loves the game though and still wants to play, but she loses enthusiasm when she sees how much time and effort the game wants her to put in it to do some of the things she wants to do.

Even at 4 hours a day, thats 25% of your waking life every day. I personally have a hard time believing any game is worth that much of my time every single day. Obviously there are good ways to farm in the game, but I think there should also be more money sinks for very wealthy players so that the prices on materials and certain in game items don’t continue to sky rocket. Just look at screenshots of the TP from the earlier months of GW2. most items have had 300-500% increases in price, yet its still not necessarily 3-5 times easier to make gold.

Having said that, I realize things like legendary items shouldn’t be easy to get, so thats not my real issue. Mine is just how inflated prices have gotten on nearly any item that is even somewhat unique outside of a few exotic weaponskins that are between 1-10 gold on the tp.

I can see where you’re coming from and I’m all in favor of making game economies more stable and less grind-based, but you also need to consider something you mentioned here: You’re stating that the game is not worth a fair amount of your time. The issue is that if it’s not really worth your time like any other hobby, sport, job, you name it, why should it be so rewarding for no real investment? How do you keep people playing without making all of the “hardcore” items just total and utter grindfests which take hundreds if not thousands of hours rather than ones which just take a few weeks/months of moderate/low time investment?

Money has gotten easier to get, too. Dungeons used to not give gold on completion, LS has seen reward increases, and repeated runs of dungeons didn’t yield any tokens at all, so people were less capable of salvaging free exotic armors every so often. 1G used to be a substantial amount because a massive portion of the playerbase wasn’t acquiring around 4-10g per day every day. Almost all economies inflate in time. It’s a sad truth, but it’s true. Maintaining a 1:1 economy is extremely difficult, especially in games where there are so many ways to generate money from nothing (killing mobs that respawn, selling to merchants, etc.). Future systems will always be implemented to try and offset this, and the gold -> gems thing is a great sink and usually sees spikes around major sales, but unfortunately inflation is just inevitable.

Awbee.8405:

I’d really like to see some stats on gold distribution among players. I think the disparity is completely crazy, a few people hoard thousands of gold while most players are below 100g in total. It feels like a gold equalization should probably happen at some point.

I don’t know. Yea, there are rich players, but a lot of them flip markets and are usually the types who are the really rich ones in any game. Kind of like stock market players, frankly.

Getting money has become substantially easier, though. I personally had 4g when I joined back around december. Since then, probably averaging like 2-3 hours per day since, I’m at over 400 now and have maxed two crafting disciplines and crafted ascended gear. It’s really not that bad.

xallever.1874:

DeceiverX.8361:

snip

A one-shot (OHKO) mechanic breaks viability?

Not really.

If you give no way to get out of that mechanic (dodge, block, aegis, blind), then it shows that there is no single thing out there that is viable.

You’re saying that PVT has become unviable because of one-shot mechanics, but only if you require one-shot mechanic to be facetanked instead by PVT and then you think this is the definition of viability.

This is ridiculous because if you use both Berserker’s and PVT you will be able to finish all contents of the game eventually. That is viability.

An example of PVT being non-viable is when there’s a time limit and DPS check at the same time. But the content with time limit, such as in CoF path 2, has nothing to do with gear set-ups.

This isn’t what I’m saying, though.

I’m stating that PVT non-viability has nothing to do with game mechanics and entirely to do with how players want to play and how they want their peers to play.

To promote non-berserker viability, the game needs to be set up in ways where no-berserker players are rewarded (or the entire party is rewarded) substantially so that playing out of the DPS race is still capable of cutting down on time.

Nike.2631:

DeceiverX.8361:

And why are full-DPS parties a problem? If each individual is playing a selfish build and is skilled enough to kill the boss and act as an individual, why should they be punished for playing squishy DPS, especially if the gaps in potential for non-DPS builds exist due to inherent monster and level design flaws rather than number-crunching damage?

Because they’re NOT being punished particularly. For a strategy to become so wildly prevalent, the skill requirement actually has to be pretty low. To paraphrase Loki “If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.” Well, it’s not everybody but a lot of people ARE doing it. Not everyone who wears berserker and succeeds is actually that great a player and even this small change is going to make that more apparent.

Ferocity thus is is a failed solution – even before release – because even in the greater scheme of things, it does nothing to address the so-called problem that it’s designed to resolve.

If it did “nothing” we wouldn’t be seeing this level of outcry . We’ve seen people regularly arguing “well, now the 4 good zerkers can’t carry the cleric any more…” That is the sound of the slack being taken up, pulling the cords tight before another small change somewhere else uses that built-up tension to snap the current meta like a tree branch. You’re absolutely right: the damage nerf isn’t enough to change things… by itself.

It won’t be by itself before long.

We haven’t seen the rest of the balance pass notes for this patch. We also have seen them split up OBVIOUS components of the same change like reducing the availability of vigor to all profession over two patches.

It’s not about being high risk vs high reward on zerker play, though. People play these builds not because the skill cap is low but because the skill cap is the same for all builds due to the OHKO and similar mechanics implemented in so many of these fights. ANet has stated all builds should be viable in completing an objective. Full berserker “the best” right now not because the content is too easy but because there is literally no incentive to build anything else. PVT builds will die in the same one-shot skill as a berserker user, so why not just cut down the number of attacks the boss makes to prevent more OHKO’s from happening? This IS a valid strategy and shouldn’t be shunned upon. The problem is that building defensively/support-oriented has literally no benefit for both the individuals nor the party, for OHKO moves will drop tanks, support builds, DPS – anything, really – if they fail to dodge in time, anyways.

Berserker builds are already punished: you get hit, you die. The problem is that tank/support builds have the SAME level of punishment and no other skill cap necessary to work at maximum effectiveness. There’s no such thing as a “good tank player” or a “good support player” right now in GW2, because those roles have nothing to bring to the table and do not have any other kind of play penalties for failing on those roles.

People QQ’ing about berserker viability don’t understand the subject. Refer to crit builds for the problems at hand. Ferocity changes nerf precision/crit builds more than power ones. It affects some classes harder than others.

So no, the damage nerf doesn’t solve anything. Berserker will still be the best dungeon set. It will still remain the dungeon meta. Nothing will change except dungeon speed in the all-berserker parties. 10% is already a big number. People are going to be even less-inclined to invite other people of other builds, now.

I say it’s a failed “solution” because the only things which could resolve the problems occurring could and should be implemented independent of the damage reduction. The damage reduction aspect changes nothing and has no influence nor will be influenced by any other changes brought on in the future. Whether or not ANet has more fixes up their sleeve is irrelevant; ferocity doesn’t solve the problem it’s intended to, and we’ve already agreed that only other fixes will do this. Therefore why not just implement these other changes? Ferocity does nothing except destroy a lot of possibilities for WvW and further force people into the condi meta. The change is destructive and a failure because the alternative/required solutions to address the problems it doesn’t solve could work independently of ferocity.

The Revenant.4970:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

…

Don’t you go bringing reason into here! Are you mad?! People’s gotta take out their real-world aggression on this game!

I take offense to this, frankly. What you’re stating is that negative feedback is caused because of real-world aggression problems and/or personality disorders rather than any kind of thought or analysis on a subject or activity in which someone decides to invest their time into which has been changed in their opinion for the worse.

But back on topic:
I still do not understand the concept of why adjusting numbers and creating a scale with a nerf in mind is considered to be “normalizing.” Other sets without the stat will not gain access to it, so why then simply not just create the numbers to net the same results they do now?

And why are full-DPS parties a problem? If each individual is playing a selfish build and is skilled enough to kill the boss and act as an individual, why should they be punished for playing squishy DPS, especially if the gaps in potential for non-DPS builds exist due to inherent monster and level design flaws rather than number-crunching damage? Yes, the berserker/DPS meta is not supportive of diverse parties, but it’s the repercussion of having active damage mitigation and the developer vision of allowing for all content to be beaten without the “holy trinity.” Suppressing the efficiency of certain stats in hopes to make all stat combinations have the same damage yields is bad design and frankly is a problem pertaining to the monsters and dungeon mechanics rather than how stats work.

As it stands now, there’s little incentive to build all-defense or all-healing. There’s very little incentive to build all-support. That’s what the game was designed around. And because of this, players looking for faster money and faster dungeons want more damage. Are they in the wrong and should damage values subsequently be tweaked?

No. Why should they be? It’s their time they’re spending, after all. Who is to judge how they should deem they should spend it aside from themselves? Nobody. Requesting an all-berserker DPS party is a choice. Kicking people who aren’t is a choice. These players are going to min-max their time regardless of what’s in the meta. And if they deem content too slow, then they will get up and quit. Is that the mentality a business should be using in regards to their clients? Absolutely not.

Are players to blame for the toxicity for recognizing that one-shot kill mechanics are frequently used, and that to better increase chances of survivability, simply reducing the number of times they need to dodge such attacks is in their best interest?

No. These kinds of implementations are what’s toxic. What’s better, to defeat something before it can counter-attack (100% effective) or just hope your individual units are good enough to handle the attacks dished out repeatedly? The former. We’ve all had that dungeon run that goes on for hours because a few party members couldn’t get their act together. PVT, berserker, a lot of new abilities just instantly slay an un-skilled player. So then why bother running defensive stats at all? And that’s exactly the meta we’re in.

Just nerfing the best DPS to make content take more time isn’t a solution to this kind of toxic play. This requires mob behavior and dungeon overhauls. This requires supportive and defensive play to have a real impact on boss killing speed or control.

Let bosses be staggered, increase exclusivity on CC removal from offensive bonuses. Increase CC potency from bosses. Have healing be toxic and deal damage to enemies.

It doesn’t matter how much they nerf berserker/DPS builds. It won’t stop the meta and toxicity. All it does is remove diversity and remove the distinctions from players. All it does it put stricter guidelines on people and make kicking members from parties more frequent if one single wipe occurs. People will still want the fastest runs possible.

ANet needs to recognize this fact. That’s why ferocity is a failure. It’s a failure because it’s a clear representation that ANet doesn’t understand the real reasoning behind why certain behaviors are occurring in the game, and that they don’t have the slightest clue on how to genuinely resolve them aside from poking numbers with a stick hoping it’ll get better.

Admitting the cause of a problem is the first step to solving it. And so far, we’ve only seen promises of the future (note especially the ranger class – even from its conception if you trace the development process it went through) which have proven empty or simply inadequate. Ferocity thus is is a failed solution – even before release – because even in the greater scheme of things, it does nothing to address the so-called problem that it’s designed to resolve.

Malthurius.6870:

What is this nonsense about mobs with “auto kill” attacks? There is no such thing, at least none that can’t be avoided. If you’re dying to auto attacks a projectiles, maybe you should try knights armor.

Also, the idea presented here in the OP is a bit flawed.

Are you saying that because more power means higher base damage; losing critical damage will hurt low power gear with ferocity more than berserkers? How is that so? Since berserkers has more power, 1% critical damage is more valuable to them than to assassin or valkyrie. More power means more value in critical damage, not less.

Also, celestial is getting buffed not because of this change hurting their damage more than it will hurt berserkers, it’s because the only reason anyone runs celestial right now is because it has higher critial damage than any other gear set right now. When the change hits and this is no longer the case, no one would want to use it unless they did something to it.

This change is going to bring berserker closer to assassins. Assassin’s gear is taking a hit, yes, but berserkers is still taking a larger one.

10% critical damage from 2000 power crits lost > 10% critical damage from 1600 power crits lost

TL;DR What the OP is implying seems wrong mathematically.

Unfortunately I’m going to have to disprove your statements. Relative to berserker’s, everything else just gets worse.

Here is the math which proves my math correct (I made a similar topic ages ago and made this post in another section about the changes to thieves in particular). As the numbers go up, the value of precision subsequently goes down.

And for valkyrie: 450% crit damage on a 10% crit chance is worse DPS than 150% crit damage on 100% crit chance. Precision is what makes critical damage worth taking.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/So-why-are-they-nerfing-thief-damage-again/page/2#post3685695

Also, celestial gear doesn’t have the highest crit damage of all of the sets. It’s tied with berserker/valkyrie/assassin’s. They’re buffing celestial gear because a lot of people cried about it. Not enough people are talking about precision or hybrid-precision builds because they’re simply not as frequently-played. Most people running celestial gear are thieves which are people making compromises based around their class’s hp pool or indifference on styles of play.

Also regarding the posts about this being only the first of a few implementations, I have one statement:

You seriously believe ANet has a good track record with balancing play?

Nobody should be switching to berserker if they aren’t already. This is about berserker/DPS builds and those who already run them.

Because those players are going to switch to condi, quit, or keep playing damage-based DPS.

And the ONLY choice by an extremely large margin is berserker to maintain such damage values on the last of the above options.

Berserker does get nerfed, but it gets nerfed the least of all of the offensive sets.

Until mob behavior is changed, the best defense is a good offense. A lot of bosses have auto-kill mechanics, regardless of defensive stats, or just deal s much damage that stats attainable in-game currently cannot negate said damage effectively enough to reduce time spent killing. Condis will not be appealing in PvE/dungeons, especially not when they share stacks from different players.

So the point of the thread is to point out the logical flaw in the ferocity nerf. It literally accomplishes nothing. It makes a meta set less appealing, but still the best for those which already use it. It’s in the meta because it’s the best, and sooner or later people would recognize this, anyways, making the patch accomplish absolutely nothing and possibly make people waste a lot of money on gear.

The patch is about condi viability and support role viability in dungeons. Nerfing critical damage isn’t going to accomplish anything in regards to those subjects.

DeWolfe.2174:

knives.6345:

It’s “easy” to gain gold in this game – that’s why others have many of them . You just need to tune your activities into correct ones.

In other words, you can’t play to have fun or play as you want. The dev’s want you to do x,y, z, (all instances) and flip the TP. Everything else will keep you poor.

And I don’t want to ever work in the real world but I also want to have infinite money.

But that’s not reality. Anywhere there’s competition, there will be work for luxury. If you’re not willing to work for luxury, MMO’s in general are not for you. You’re not the only one wanting to buy a limited-time item. And there are a lot of people who have wanted to for a long time and have been saving for it.

The game was developed to allow for money and experience to be made almost everywhere. I’m not really a PvE mob grinder, so I went to WvW a few nights ago. I made 16g in three hours from killing people and flipping towers in a small group. CoF P1/p3 combined take an hour or less, netting you around 5-6g on average.

At the very least ANet has made many solutions which allow you to get to the stats of other endgame players with minimal effort. Most MMO’s don’t give players that kind of hand-holding.

If you’re looking for a low-investment high-reward game, I’d look into single-player titles. Skyrim’s considered a good one. If you’re looking for nothing more than an online chat room with avatars, there are many services on the net that provide exactly that.

Only applicable to dungeon crawling and zergs, though. Condis are already strictly better in WvW/small groups PvP.

And again, nothing actually changes here. People will just run berserker more, and berserker groups will still deal more damage and still be better for dungeons than any other group composition.

Depends on what you’re analyzing frankly.

The sPvP thief build meta is very solid whereas other forms of PvP, such as WvW, are very different. 30/30/0/0/10 is a trash build in sPvP but someone with this build (or even better my personal 25/30/0/0/15 one) can prove to be extremely, extremely deadly on the WvW field. The sPvP meta 10/30/30/0/0 is pretty resilient to chill, whereas pretty much anything outside of a SA build won’t be. Increasing the revealed time also inhibits P/D rejuv builds in sPvP – which makes it a major direct counter to high stealth uptime, and S/P is scrubby and should only ever do well against baddies who can’t dodge, as a mobility penalty already prevents dying to PW spam.

For 100% crit chance builds it’s 16-17%.

For gearing, it’s 15%.

See
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/So-why-are-they-nerfing-thief-damage-again/page/2#post3685695
for the extensive math.

More detailed math provided here in a non-theory scenario:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/So-why-are-they-nerfing-thief-damage-again/page/2#post3685695

I created a thread on ferocity over a month ago also detailing this problem. The nerfs are heavier to thieves and precision builds than berserker builds, though.

Actually, it’s best to be playing berserker after the update. All other DPS sets unless modified will be strictly worse in all regards.

The reduction in mobility is already pretty potent seeing as it applies to gap-closing effects. 66% reduction in regen for what’s necessary for all skill use is bit severe.

I’d rather see it applied to reveal time, bumping it to 5s.

Substance E.4852:

Well, except for Read the Wind. All marksmanship GM traits are crap and it prevents us from taking 2 master traits.

Yea… I’m pretty sure RtW is the worst of the three.

Seeing as unless you want to argue with SoB allowing me to get off a 25k stealth-tracking burst, or Remorseless allowing for quick 7k spikes on unsuspecting targets every few seconds, that projectile speed won’t do anything except maybe help with some reliability issues trying to hit stragglers on keep walls who know I’m shooting at them.

Would much rather just see a massive reduction on HS’s higher-end HP damage… by a very large margin. I think it’s unnecessary and would solve a lot of the spam-kill issues with it. Would be nice if it did:
(current damage at < 25% hp * 1.25) * (1.01 – (target’s current health percentage as an integer / 100)).

So a HS at a full-health target would deal 1% of its maximum damage. Yet as a finisher for a target at about 25% health, it would deal approximately the same as it does now, increasing over the number slightly below 20% but dealing less when above).

As honestly, when a warrior or an ele or mesmer runs away, I need to spam that skill just to catch up. The skill’s design aspect to catch up to opponents is not compromised here, and it works as intended to finish off weakened targets.

Stampede.5308:

I think that Anet simply wants to make an end to the word “Speedclear”. No game I played have boss encounters of 3 seconds.

And this still does nothing to solve the problem.

So the same run now takes 3.3 seconds. Oh my golly-gosh, a huge increase in time spent!

It doesn’t solve the clear time/berserker requirement meta for dungeons, but it also has adverse effects on WvW and solo play, while also reducing build diversity and overall valid build choices/stat paths.

Mob/boss behavior/movesets needs updating and their stats changed, and stats need to scale more exponentially. Inconsistent scaling on stats : damage (or mitigation) is BAD. It prevents growth implementation but also makes it so that content is very difficult to balance towards allowing for variable builds. It also encourages players to optimize around the steeper curves instead of building for scenarios or other builds. The berserker meta exists because of a combination of factors, which include poor/un-updated mob/boss behaviors, cheesy mechanics/one-shot kills/passive un-mitigatable DoT effects with inefficient support skills and techniques as well as inconsistent stat efficiency curves favoring DPS over survivability also heavily influenced by the above.

A 10% reduction in damage throughput and destroying stat combinations is not how normalizing stats is done. Normalizing is examine stat effectiveness formulae through existing in-game scenarios and attempting to equalize them.

Did you read my first post?

Berserker sets are less effective than before, yes, but Assassin’s/Valkyrie’s become even less effective relative to berserker than they are now. This means the only set you can run as a DPS build is berserker because everything else for DPS got nerfed even harder. All it does is nerf berserker a little but kills everything else to the point of uselessness.

So now what you’ll see are squishier, easier to kill parties from now on. DPS players will not play PVT/support. I know I never will, and I really don’t care about party composition because I don’t die in parties. DPS will still do more damage than condis and tanks, thus meaning faster clear times = more demand. Condi bunker is also the best in WvW, further making this change totally bonkers. All you’ll see is less damage from the other sets relative to berserker and more people thus running berserker to compensate for it.

This “solution” only makes the problem worse and doesn’t actually do anything about the real problem.

Jerus.4350:

I don’t see how any of this would change the honestly pretty great setup they have going for us.

They could add an instant lvl 80 thing to the gem store. They could have a full gear set box in exotic form.

They could do just about anything they want that in other games would be P2W.

But in GW2 it won’t be, because if you simply play, earn gold, buy gems with your gold, you can do and get all these things by simply playing the game. Until the option to buy gems with gold disappears nothing will truly be P2W, or even if you want to classify something as such… there’s no issue as again you can get ANYTHING by simply playing the game thanks to that conversion.

The problem with this methodology is inflation and demand. GW2 is far from the first game to implement this system, and if power in any form becomes purchasable in such ways, you see the value of gold decrease per dollar, for then the out-of-game currency becomes the preferred transaction model and the standard for most of the game’s economy. This example has occurred in R:BF already. The in-game currency used to be worth a fair amount of USD. Over time, new patches, and IM implementations, the value went from around 100k currency/$1 to 20 million currency/$1. That’s a massive increase and almost all transactions made are/have been done with out-of-game currency except for trivial sales due to the demand for having out-of-game currency.

I understand that’s the intent. The problem is that it hurts berserker builds the least of all of them and forces precision-based ones into running berserker stats in order to just maintain viability that would still even be less than post-nerf berserker.

The change just makes absolutely no sense at all. If they really wanted to encourage support/control builds, they should have implemented a new stat/gear option which incorporates increased endurence regen or something, available only on the sets with more supportive/tanky stats.

It has to do more or less with just how much is going to exist in the GM areas of Marksmanship. I think if this went to skirmishing you’d see no complaints and a ton of people running it, and it would help immensely with longbow QoL. That one GM slot in Marksmanship already has cornerstone abilities that are all essential for remote class functionality, so putting another one there gives only the appearance of fixing the problem while dangling a carrot in front of everyone while they know they cannot afford to take the trait.

This is something I suggested over a year ago. It’s a system which should have been implemented from the start just for convenience and not requiring the occupation of additional inventory space.

Azukas.1426:

Dee Jay.2460:

Shinjo.6092:

Dee Jay.2460:

Arlette.9684:

Dee Jay.2460:

I don’t think this change would achieve much given how fast Initiative replenishes.

This! They need to make stealth a more limited mechanic. Been guaranteed the first hit in the fight alone, is a huge advantage. The proposed change with the initiative just won’t cut it. Either let BS drop stealth even if it’s dodged/blocked etc. or they can go for the whole initiative refund deal on dmg but the initiative cost needs to be increased so that it actually penalizes the thief if he fails to hit.

You know I’ve always felt that having Stealth drain Initiative made way more sense in this game than what we have now. Force Thieves to chose between offense and defense and not get both in one.

You want to stealth? Sure, go ahead, remove conditions, blind, heal etc. But your ability to dish out damage will be severely kitten for the next few moments.

Want to apply serious pressure? Go ahead, but beware you won’t be able to stealth for a few moments thereafter.

Isn’t this exactly how stealth is implemented right now? You can use stealth defensively but you won’t be able to attack since it’ll take you out of stealth, and you lose all the defensive goodies. You want to attack? Sure. But now you are revealed and won’t be able to stealth for the next few moments.

No, generally you want to stealth as much as possible since the stealth-attacks are also the most powerful.

P/D builds are the best example where anything aside from Sneak Attack does pitiful damage.

Currently stealth has both offensive and defensive benefits and Thieves aren’t forced to chose on over the other.

I don’t even thief but even I know that the P/D 3 skill hits like a truck in a Power thief set up….heck it’s torment is an insane damage source for the condi set ups too.

Do you even thief because I highly doubt you do making these statements.

No disrespect, but that’s right there is a dead give away

I was going to say, Sneak Attack is arguably one of the weaker skills in P/D, actually, on par with Dancing Dagger. I know I am personally able to apply brief immobilize, 5-10 stacks of vuln, two 1.0 scaling longrange attacks (effectively a backstab) and 10 stacks of torment to people on my P/D thief in less than three seconds excluding the 5 bleed off Sneak Attack. If that’s not crazy, I don’t know what is.

(Quoted Posts too long)

1.) They can be well-prepared to prevent it… if they again give up large portions of their build/utility slots to CC prevention. Infil signet and shadowstep are considered poor utilities and are rarely run, only exclusively used as dedicated bailouts if necessary due to how easily CC can ruin a thief, for many other utilities offer much better synergy and overall are simply better choices for a thief. Infiltrator’s strike is no longer instant-cast, can be interrupted in both teleporting and returning, cannot be used while under the effects of CC/does not stunbreak. Shadow Strike isn’t a stunbreak. If a CC is landing, it will hit them at the end of the teleport. Blind accessibility is good for prevention, but again I’m not disagreeing with x/P blindspam. Almost all of the mentioned spammable blinds require immense build investment. A thief running all blinding utilities and blindspam traits with pistol offhand is going to outright suck. Prevention options don’t necessarily imply accessibility.

2/3.) Far from it. Initiative was designed for the sake of repeated skill use. It’s why there are no cooldowns and why the overall casting cost comes from a resource pool. It allows for repeated use of some abilities to an extent, and managing that resource is the critical difference between good and bad thief play: if you don’t all-in at the right time, you might not kill your target before he kills you; conversely, if you all-in at the wrong time, you have no access to your remaining skills. Instead of skill use being mashing 12345, play becomes much more like 12-12-12-3 or a substituted 4 or whatever based on situation. Your damage, utility, and so on is defined as a thief and comes from a certain sub-rotation usually consisting of different abilities being used together repeatedly (or just repeatedly). Whether or not this is “cheesy” is irrelevant. This is how the class was designed to play, and frankly is the only way to play. Some skills and builds are just more potent than others, notably in the form of 10/30/30 D/P permastealth (complaints justified) and DPS S/P pistol whip (which honestly is a trash build and something people shouldn’t be complaining about due to how easy it is to avoid the damage). It’s why I agreed a +3 second value is much better than the suggested flat 10 second cooldown. A thief will then go to 3 seconds, which can be somewhat justified. 10, which isn’t absurd for the rest of the classes due to their already-existing cooldowns, is just overly-harsh for thieves because it shuts down all build paths for the entire class by getting off one interrupt which is likely to occur due to the necessity in recycling a few select abilities as mentioned above. Interrupting at all will likely be on a core skill and break the entire class longer than it can survive for.

Other classes have better means of fighting back because their other weapon skills/abilities synergize better and are often useful in themselves. Think of thief builds:

What’s D/D without CnD?
P/P without unload?
D/P without HS or Blinding Powder?
S/D without shadowstep or Flanking Strike?
S/P wthout Pistol whip?

A sitting duck for 2000, Alex.

It’s just something we can’t raise concerns about yet. We have no idea how it’ll play out, and frankly, it just makes more sense to keep it as it is for now instead of stating it’s unfair that thieves get special treatment. As I stated, a thief that gets CC’ed in this regard would become literally useless. I’m not sure if a style of play which gives an entire class no recovery options upon landing one effect of many is both fair or even desirable for the sake of the game.

Don’t feel like reading? Here’s the summary:

FEROCITY INHIBITS BUILD DIVERSITY

Again, now that it is confirmed that obviously ANet refused to pay heed to this topic earlier, I’m re-raising it from the dead in hopes to spur more discussion before implementation or to note necessary reworks.

The bottom line is that this change reduces critical damage. Okay, working as intended, right? Absolutely not the case. This change is designed to affect berserker builds such that their overall effectiveness in PvE is toned down slightly. Okay, that’s fine. But the real problem is that precision builds are not compensated in any way for this, because 10% damage overall includes damage dealt by non-critical strikes, thus meaning the penalty on critical strike damage is going to increase by a significantly larger margin.

What does this mean? It means the value of precision even further decreases. Precision-oriented builds are established to get high critical chance to bolster DPS against low-toughness foes. That said, since crit damage is multiplicative on power, precision-based builds already deal less overall damage output than power/berserker based builds. When the modifier becomes reduced, all that happens is in order for players running high-crit chance builds to work as effectively as they are now, they need to build into more power at the expense of some precision. What does this mean? All precision-oriented builds must be forced into using berserker gear to retain their existing damage while losing their high crit chance.

And if celestial gear gets buffed out of this zone… does this not then encourage players running anything except berserker to run celestial because it offers the best returns? This is absolutely foolish.

Non-power based critical damage sets need to be re-evaluated. Ferocity needs to be implemented in significantly raised values in sets like Assassin’s and Valkyrie’s in order to retain their current set values (which are far out of the meta and already considered mediocre for both DPS and/or survivability) such that the only build choices beyond this point are not just berserker’s and celestial.

Renny.6571:

DeceiverX.8361:

1. The cost of being interrupted on GC thieves is pretty much insta-death. I’m pretty sure that’s about as punishing as it gets.

2. One could argue that losing half your resources for no gain would also be considered a pretty mean trade-off. Dunno about you, but losing 6 init and then also going on a 10 second cooldown on a skill which requires constant use just seems silly OP.

3. That’s not to say I don’t agree or disagree, but I think a flat 10 seconds is crazy. Would make a lot more sense to have the timer increase by like 3 seconds flat for all skills to keep it potent but not blatantly overpowered, especially since a good lockdown mesmer really doesn’t have much of a counter except for thieves as it stands.

4. This at least keeps them in a not-so-hot position, but doesn’t totally destroy them. Telling a D/D thief he can’t use CnD for 10 seconds is literally game-breaking and might as well just give mesmers a skill that just kills the target if it’s a thief. The same goes for S/P, D/P (although I hate D/P builds even as a thief and think they’re totally broken and deserve more nerfs), S/D, P/P, and so on.

1. The same can be said for any glass cannon spec though (besides warriors). Just look at elementalists. They have the lowest base HP and armor, no stealth/spammable evades and no massive gap openers. When they’re caught, they’re just as boned as a thief.

2. Except in my post I specifically made sure to mention that interrupting a skill wouldn’t deduct the initiative cost; only put it on a cooldown. This holds for true for the other 7 classes.

3. I agree, increasing the interrupt cooldown by an extra 5 seconds is absurd. Infact, the base cooldown for ranger’s Rapid Fire is 10 seconds, and traited 8 seconds. So this easily interrupted skill will not only completely stop a major portion of damage, it will also put it on a longer cooldown!

4. I agree that locking a thief out of CnD for 10 seconds would be extremely detrimental to the class to an extent. However, like I discussed in the OP, this would solve the issue of 5-trigger-happy offhand dagger thieves being able to immediately re-use CnD with little-to-no punishment, which is true for every other class. To use the same example, interrupting a ranger’s rapid fire will remove a major factor of their damage for 5-10 seconds.

While this sounds harsh, I personally feel it adds another layer of skill to combat by coercing you to think about covering your important casts with stability or baiting certain cooldowns to avoid being interrupted in the first place. You can find countless examples of this in high-level tpvp play, which also explains why interrupt mesmers are not an issue for these players and do not have a definite place in the current meta.

1.) Not really, though. Mist form is a stun break and has a duration longer than most CC effects, prevents new incoming CC effects, and allows for re-positioning. I’d argue that eles have it substantially better than thieves do in regards to getting CC’ed.

2.) Again, you need to focus more on how dependent thieves are on some skills. I’d probably agree with you more if it wasn’t the case that pretty much what allows thieves to actually work in combat is the fact they pretty much bank on the repeated use of maybe two or three skills and one type of attack pattern. If those other two were more potent in the particular builds they corresponded to (which is almost impossible due to how some weapon sets can play with various build types), then this would have more merit. Strictly speaking, though it’s like telling a mesmer they cannot summon clones nor use their F1-F3 skills for ten seconds. That’s a pretty big hit, don’t ya think?

3.) Right, so 3 seconds is more reasonable?

4.) Again, the problem lies in that the dependency is too big to shut them out of for such an extended period, and there are really no means of dealing with it. Unfortunately your example is flawed, too, though. Rapid Fire actually has strictly lower damage – by quite a large margin, even including the vuln stacks – than a longbow auto attack. Rapid Fire might seem like it deals a lot of damage, but it really doesn’t. Again, my point in that other classes have means with dealing with the cooldown whereas thieves can’t at all.

Again, another issue is that thieves have almost no access to stability, and aside from dagger storm, which cannot be used to prevent the loss of other attacks, requires the thief to build specifically for it, effectively putting only a few niche builds even remotely capable with dealing with such harsh penalties.

It’s a tough call, frankly.

Regarding people stating that “but you have condi cleanse/heal/regen/stealth all in one!” you must be aware that this requires very high trait investment in Shadow Arts. Thieves build this way in the meta because the power lines in general are not rewarding enough, and thief base HP/defense is too low to really do anything but spec for defense. The difference in stab damage between a 10/30/x/x/x thief and a 30/30/x/x/x thief is negligible. This has more to do with build issues and insufficient damage scaling formula on stab thieves moreso than just stab damage being too high. Some kind of exponential scaling to make the damage ramp as it does now when building closer to 30 power is what needs to be considered, for a 200 power difference in the scheme of things as they stand makes almost no difference at all. Consequently, just nerfing the ratio on stab damage does nothing but only make more thieves move into these cheesier build archetypes which rely more heavily on blind spam/stealth builds. There are many GC non-stealth-heavy thieves out there, and I know as one of them, not entering a fight at the right time literally mean nothing more than losing. Yes, I can kill some people (berserker light armor builds) before they can react sometimes, but if I don’t plan my moves, I will lose. It’s that simple.

The solution is undeniably better than the ones which state to remove stealth upon evade/block. The availability of blinds (especially other thieves) and aegis is astonishing. To simply lose because of class/build matchup and not because of anything you could have done to counterplay it is just rather lame.

That said, this idea is still rather difficult to agree upon. Stab builds are already pretty counterable through skilled play and just knowing the class well (mostly referring to D/D here, D/P is a whole other monster), so adding in extra costs may prove difficult to balance. I like the idea of active counterplay – even as a thief, because I like testing myself – but I don’t necessarily know if it should be something as brutal as blowing resources on already missing your spike opportunity.

I could maybe see a 1 init cost on the sneak skills, otherwise dealing an auto (being unable to attack would just be horrible), but 2 might be a bit overkill.

The cost of being interrupted on GC thieves is pretty much insta-death. I’m pretty sure that’s about as punishing as it gets.

One could argue that losing half your resources for no gain would also be considered a pretty mean trade-off. Dunno about you, but losing 6 init and then also going on a 10 second cooldown on a skill which requires constant use just seems silly OP.

That’s not to say I don’t agree or disagree, but I think a flat 10 seconds is crazy. Would make a lot more sense to have the timer increase by like 3 seconds flat for all skills to keep it potent but not blatantly overpowered, especially since a good lockdown mesmer really doesn’t have much of a counter except for thieves as it stands.

This at least keeps them in a not-so-hot position, but doesn’t totally destroy them. Telling a D/D thief he can’t use CnD for 10 seconds is literally game-breaking and might as well just give mesmers a skill that just kills the target if it’s a thief. The same goes for S/P, D/P (although I hate D/P builds even as a thief and think they’re totally broken and deserve more nerfs), S/D, P/P, and so on.

NinjaEd.3946:

Op, if you want SA nerfed, give us something in return. You realize how dependent some builds are for SA right? Only reason thief CAN run full glass cannon, is because of SA. Not that its recommended, I find little to no trouble with glass thieves except in numbers but really, you can’t call imbalance when you are out numbered…

Give stealth thieves a reason not to stay in stealth for 10+ seconds and reset fights, and then we’ll talk. Oh btw, we have to be in stealth for that regen, and its still less than warrior’s Healing signet. Even if they nerfed it the 8% or w/e, and that’s a grandmaster trait in the healing trait line. 300+ hp/s looks like a lot because we have the lowest health pool tier, so its no wonder why it looks like we take a few seconds to get back to full but it ain’t hard to take us down to low. Just sayin, they don’t call it glass cannon for nothing.

Uh… no?
SA’s only half decent when you invest heavily into it. A true GC build won’t be heavily invested in it. I run what I suspect to be GC at 25/30/0/0/15, and have no problems being as squishy as I am. A SA build running rejuv/etc. will also have fairly decent armor ratings.

As per the usual, I’m going to summarize the complaints by stating the following:

D/P is the problem due to its inherent access to high stealth uptime, blind spamming, dagger mainhand’s no real incentive to run high power traits, etc. With food and buffs, yes, a 10/30/x/x/x thief CAN hit a 10k stab (on a light armor target). I was personally hitting 12k’s with my previous build without food which had only 20 points invested in Deadly Arts.

The problem isn’t simply nerfing dagger mainhand’s damage output, either. The power trees, as I have also mentioned in the past, also just need to be more rewarding across all classes for damage. Strictly speaking, even with ferocity nerfs/changes incoming, there’s little reason to play power without crit damage/crit chance, and the modest bonuses the trait lines provide, especially when examining the thief’s grandmaster skills, is simply not worth speccing into because that 50 power and garbage effect can be offset with food and be better spent elsewhere for more utility/survivability or even damage in other lines.

Grimreaper.5370:

Wait to cry after the patch… There are 40 new traits, meaning rangers might be able to pick up one trait which MAY synergize well with faster arrow projectile trait. We’ll be able to find out more tomorrow at noon on the guild wars 2 twitch channel. Also many of you don’t seem to keep in mind no one can go 30/30/30/30/30. That being said this new trait on mesmer doesn’t sound like it will make them more OP, just different.

But you know the reality of it.

There are 40 new traits…

But 33 of them will be for warriors.

Sube Dai.8496:

Did any of the 3324 posts in the CDI suggest this change?

This is a joke. A merged Eagle Eye, Piercing Arrows, and Quickdraw would be worth a grandmaster trait…for both bows. Not this crap.

Man it is so freaking frustrating…every single patch…

I did, except I stated for it to be included by default, as would be remorseless and signets of the beastmaster after implementing additional replacement traits which would increase viability everywhere and make power/precision longbow work.

Looks like all they did was notice the phrase “faster arrows” and thought it would be a good idea to make it a GM trait because why not?!

Sir Vincent III.1286:

DeceiverX.8361:

This would certainly be one way to fix the issues:

When a thief enters stealth (from not being in stealth), it gets a debuff which lasts the duration of the stealth skill. When this timer expires, the thief becomes revealed regardless of current stealth status for a duration equal to 75% of the skill’s duration.

So you pop aegis/bocks/evades and they’re still revealed for 3s after whiffing the attacks and cannot just re-enter when it expires because they didn’t land a hit.

Now you stop stealth-stacking, permastealth, regen builds, etc. and could then arguably make more changes to the class which would buff the non-meta builds not reliant on these mechanics. It then also raises the skill ceiling and makes stealth very useful but not something considered “cheesy,” for blocking becomes a valid strategy.

You do realize that this will break Shadow Refuge to a pile of garbage, right?

Gah! People with no sense making balance suggestions is infuriating.

How so? The cost of an extremely prolonged period of stealth – not to mention the incredible condi cleanse, water field, and healing this skill can provide if used in combat should have appropriate penalties attached to it.

SR then becomes a choice utility instead of a mandated one, which should be a goal for all utility skills. If you don’t have a specific use for it, then it shouldn’t be occupying one of your limited-quantity skill slots.

Such a long-lasting skill also shouldn’t be used on the basis that it can act as an on-demand disengage to then be used as an immediate re-engage. Its extended duration implies that it be used sparingly to either disengage from a fight to run away/revive people or engage from a far distance, throw off attackers, etc.

To enter combat entirely invisible is frankly cheap. Simply, giving the thief this possibility isn’t totally unfair, but moreso is for his entire party which doesn’t rely on stealth. Refuge now becomes much more of a utility/support skill rather than something spammable good in all situations all the time. It raises the skill cap on its use and makes the skill much more fair, while also complying with the guidelines to try and reduce permastealth/stealth spamming builds.

This would certainly be one way to fix the issues:

When a thief enters stealth (from not being in stealth), it gets a debuff which lasts the duration of the stealth skill. When this timer expires, the thief becomes revealed regardless of current stealth status for a duration equal to 75% of the skill’s duration.

So you pop aegis/bocks/evades and they’re still revealed for 3s after whiffing the attacks and cannot just re-enter when it expires because they didn’t land a hit.

Now you stop stealth-stacking, permastealth, regen builds, etc. and could then arguably make more changes to the class which would buff the non-meta builds not reliant on these mechanics. It then also raises the skill ceiling and makes stealth very useful but not something considered “cheesy,” for blocking becomes a valid strategy.

It makes more sense to just have revealed take place after the end of the first stealth skill’s duration to prevent stacking and to also have it go into effect at the end of stealth even if a skill is not used rather than having it apply on block/miss. Frankly, Aegis and blinds are so easily available on top of all of thewars that run shields for tanking everything that stab thief would be borderline unplayable and wouldn’t actually solve a large number of complaints targeted at thieves’ potential to so easily burst down squishy characters, especially ones using mug/BV.

Permastealth/stealth spamming is definitely a problem, but it’s not unique to thieves, so simply having revealed take effect if a thief whiffs a hit doesn’t necessarily solve the inherent problem with permastealth. PU mesmers, one of the most overpowered builds in WvW,does not even need to actually attack or leave stealth at all to deal its damage.