The initial reaction to a new feature is mostly positive.
Then people start to think it through, how it affects them and what changes it implies. That’s when the complaints start.
It’s normal and I wouldn’t give it too much thought.
Also don’t get too caught up on “general forum trends” etc.
Lots of nonsense in this thread… Lets make a simple comparison to guardian and necro
just to give you guys an example of why there are such big differences in HP pools:Necros have 1st tier hp pool. They have light armor, one teleport which requires a target other than that they have no mobility, little access to stability, even less skills to block dmg therefore they deserve all that extra hp.
Guardians have 3rd tier hp pool but access to aegis, skills that block dmg, teleports which require target and some mobility as well as heavy armor. They do not need higher BASE hp, they get their EHP from other sources like for example, aegis.
Now do the same comparison with Warriors and Elementalists.
-snip-
If anything that just shows how easy it is to abuse.
Downed-state creates such an artificial and non-intuitive combat environment that, contrary to your natural instinct, if your health is low when fighting an Elite mob, you want to add another minor mob to use abuse the rally.
You don’t want to “blow all your cooldowns” to burn him down, because that leaves you vulnerable. You actually WANT to down so you can abuse the rally system as a heal. It’s completely nonsensical.
In sPvP it’s often GOOD TO GO DOWN FIRST in a team-fight because the enemy has to expose themselves to A LOT of damage in order to kill you, especially if you’re a Mesmer or Ele that can delay a finisher for a while. They will often go down themselves in the process which allows you to finish them in return and use the rally.
It’s just a completely gamey and snowballing game mechanic. It works alright in PvE because mobs don’t care about you bouncing back to 50% life but in PvP team-fights are completely dictated by who can finish/revive who first.
It’s not about clever ability usage or good team-play, it’s about reviving and finishing at the right time. And that’s not fun.
I agree that cutting the stun is the most appropriate way to nerf Pistol Whip.
It sort of makes Headshot redundant, or at least very niche. I love Pistol Whip because it punishes people for rezzing in fight, which is already far too easy and rewarding to do.
But I can’t deny it’s an extremely powerful ability and that the Initiative regeneration during its cast-time allows for some very liberal use.
I have given ANet a lot of flak recently about their design-choices (or lack thereof) when it comes to class-changes.
But this new account-bound wardrobe is pretty cool, I can’t deny it. Making skins that much more manageable will make finding and experimenting with various looks much more seamless.
It may even pave the way for cosmetic progression where certain skins are tied to in-game challenges.
Until now I’ve been a guy who didn’t feel too strongly about his looks. But now I could see myself getting really into it.
I just wanted to let you know what this is appreciated, even by a critical poster.
I have asked myself the same question. Having differences in HP and Armor is fine. It’s part of being an RPG.
But the health difference is MASSIVE and I don’t think it’s good for the game.
It’s a whooping 70% difference between lowest and highest.
Armor in comparison has a fairly mild increase from 920 (light) to 1211 (heavy). That’s only a 30% difference and perfectly acceptable.
I think it would be much healthier for the game if they bumped the minimum HP from 10.800 HP to roughly 13.000 HP. It would really help Elementalists and Thieves gain much needed base-line survivability and might open them up to more build options that don’t require overpowered defensive skills. Guardians could do with a slight reduction in tankiness but wouldn’t need major changes.
Your rant is a little incoherent.
Let me just say this:
GW2 combat is then at its best when you have 2 semi-offensive power builds fighting each other. Not all-out glass cannons. Those fights are over too quickly. But something in between full Berserker and full Soldier.
You want to have a series of powerful but avoidable attacks and you want a little too and fro, not instant-gibs. Every participant should be able to use at least 10 skills and the fight should last about 20-30 seconds. That’s what I’d consider an ideal showcase for GW2 combat.
But looking at the current meta, NONE of the viable builds follow that mantra. You’re either full glass, killing people in seconds without giving them a chance to fight back, or you’re a nigh-immortal bunker that runs around in circles while tanking 3 enemy players. Or you’re one of these condition spamers that showers his enemy in a series of untelegraphed and unavoidable condition-attacks.
It’s obvious that all the bad parts of GW2’s combat have prevailed, while the good parts just aren’t viable. It’s a shame, because the ingredients are there but the recipe isn’t.
I tried it too and was expecting to like it more than I did.
The laggy servers certainly didn’t help but that was only a small part of it.
Overall the visuals were rather disappointing. The art-style was fine, but I found it hard to recognize stuff and the textures were often very, very dull. It’s hard to pin-point what exactly was missing, but I think the visual fidelity wasn’t quite there yet.
The core game-play was fine I guess, but didn’t feel as good as in GW2. GW2 has better feedback and combat feels more responsive. I liked many of Carbine’s design principles, but overall combat just wasn’t as fun as I had hoped.
I was disappointed that, just like in GW2, we don’t have a vast, open and interconnected world. Instead we have a series of levels and zones. How come we’ve regressed back from having Azeroth, Middle Earth or Rift’s entire worlds, back to zones and levels? Surely technology should enable even bigger virtual worlds.
Design-wise I really love what Carbine Studios has done. But unfortunately something is missing.
Maybe it’s the tedious quests I just can’t stand anymore (I do miss dynamic events) or the “not as awesome as I hoped” combat. I don’t know.
I was hoping this update would address some of them. Thieves for example have a number of really, really bad traits, like 5% Critical Strike Chance for ability no 3 or +5% Damage for Daggers.
Most Adept traits are better than that and yet these are Master level or beyond.
But alas, it did not seem important to ANet.
It does seem a bit excessive although once you crunch the numbers, it’s not THAT huge.
Example: I currently have 100% Critical Strike Damage bonus.
This means my Critical Strikes hit for 250% of regular base-damage. (50% base crit-damage + 100% bonus).
A standard Backstab would hit for 3000 normal damage, or 7500 Critical Damage (250%).
After the change my Ferocity will only be 70% Critical Strike Damage as I lose 10% from the trait line and 20% from gear. Now while this sounds a lot, it means my Critical Strike Damage has dropped from 250% to 220%.
So my 3000 Backstab is now doing 6600 damage. That substantial, but not game-breaking, especially if you account from various Rune and Sigil changes.
The difference between 14:1 or even 13:1 wouldn’t be very noticeable in actual game-play. A 14:1 ratio for example would mean 225% Critical Damage instead of 220%. Nothing to write home about.
^Sigil of intelligence crit remains after swaping away from the weapon that has it, it also remains if you leave combat.
To get into combat jumping down a ledge will do, so you can pre-load that, people already guaratee their CnD crit this way now. Not to speak of ambient critters and such.
Shooting with your bow before swaping to your daggers is the “conservative” apporach.Your comments above just illustrate you do not even really understand how the burst combo is done best.
3x 100% crit will be sick. especially with executioner on top….
Neither do you since none has been able to test it yet. I will reserve judgement on that Sigil until I experience it in practice. Could potentially be powerful but could also be incredibly impractical.
Yeah but you’re assuming I’m fighting a target dummy. In practice though 70% of my damage comes from Backstab. It’s also where I derive most of my burst and pressure from.
And let’s say I have 3000 non-critical Backstab that currently is multiplied by 250% = 7500 damage.
This becomes 3000 × 220% = 6600.
Now I add the 6% DPS from the new bonus and extra Power which brings me to 7000.
To be fair that’s a smaller difference than I was expecting. Noticeable, but not game-breaking, especially if you add the added DPS to the non-crits.
However you can’t theorycraft PvP. Burst is important, it ensures kills, it pressures enemies into panicking and blowing cooldowns. It enables you to capitalize on short windows of opportunity etc. So I think it will be noticeable.
Also, all other Rune Sets are being buffed too, so whatever I gained in DPS, may well be mitigated by the extra Toughness or Vitality on the new Rune Sets.
So overall the DPS loss is going to be noticeable but not as game-changing as the numbers might originally suggest. I can live with that.
But I was never hugely concerned with it in the first place. What has always bothered me more about this update is how Condition builds are escaping practically unscathed. They could have at least nerfed the +/- Condition Duration foods.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
PR and hype may get me to play an MMO, but the idea of it constantly evolving and me having a part in that is what keeps me hooked.
But never before have I partaken in an MMO community where the developers “did their own thing” the same way as has happened here for the past 2 years.
When you’re adding huge Living Story updates on a regular basis and new features every once in a while, how come the game-design, the class balancing, the ability design comes out so shorthanded?
I really don’t get it.
- I don’t get why the Devs were (until yesterday) perfectly happy to leave Decap Engineers “as is”, despite them basically ruining Conquest mode entirely.
- I don’t get why the Devs are so reluctant to nerfchange Healing Signet as skill that is entirely passive and offers no redeeming game-play qualities.
- I don’t get why frustrating traits like Last Refuge are completely ignored for years, despite killing hundreds of Thieves every day.
- I don’t get why Thief Initiative was revised in December. It didn’t change anything, nobody even asked for it and it didn’t make the game better in any way. It was completely arbitrary.
- I don’t get how we still have so many passive traits with no game-play involved in them when we’ve had over a year to sort them out.
- I don’t understand why it took so long to fix Mug, Perplexity Runes and other legitimately broken traits when the evidence was there for months on end (anyone still remember the 6000 Mug crits?)
Change is what keeps me in an MMO and yet for all the changes the world and content experiences, I have never seen a game-design team so afraid of it.
Yeah, if we didn’t have to wait half a year for even the most minor fixes I might actually be willing to “see how things evolve”.
But in ANet terms “see how things evovle” = 6 months of absolute radio silence with no changes whatsoever while one build ruins an entire game-mode for 5 1/2 months.
I will also add that most of the changes you announced don’t actually “fix” anything. They’re just random changes.
I’m not going to defend Pistol Whip but I will point out that Pistol Whip has been largely unchanged since release. Only recently, and briefly during the first months, has it been considered overpowered.
Ask yourself why? If the ability hasn’t really changed (they did clean up the aftercast a bit, but also fixed the stun-sigil scaling to 1.0 seconds) then what has?
Substantial boost to passive initiative regeneration.
Yeah but not regeneration in total. Pistol Whip used to benefit a lot from the +Initiative on Crit trait when it didn’t have an icd. I know it was less reliable but it gave you roughly the same net Initiative.
I’ll propose a different theory as to why Pistol Whip has become so popular. The meta has become so focused on node and team-fights, where revives and finishers dictate the out of a fight rather than actual skill, that Pistol Whip has found its niche to shine.
While Pistol Whip isn’t all that great in 1v1, it does excel at suppressing revives while still dealing massive damage. The interrupt + cleave damage make it the perfect skill to use against revivers, which is incredibly important in team-fights.
If there was no downed-state or if finishing/reviving wasn’t so incredibly important I doubt Pistol Whip would be an issue. Picture sPvP without downed-state where people who died…just died. Pistol Whip would be robbed of it’s unique moment of Glory. It might still be considered good, but since the game is exclusively about killing stuff at this point and involves no downed-state shenanigans, other builds may well surpass it.
Absolutely not! Just hearing the conclusion the devs reach at times leaves me baffled, unsure if they even play the same game.
I mean they weren’t even going to nerf Decap Engis, a builds that makes a mockery of Conquest mode, until they were cornered into it by the community just yesterday. I mean WTF?!?
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
I agree that the condition spam in this game is already horrible and is only going to get worse.
Condition spam is near unavoidable, poorly telegraphed and can only be countered by overpowered condition removal.
Every competitive player already runs -40% Condition food because Conditions are so massively overpowered and impossible to avoid.
In turn, every Condition spamer uses +40% Duration because this food alone is massively over budget. If rare Veggie Pizza got the same treatment as Critical Damage did it would barely add 7% Condition Duration.
And don’t even get me started on Dire gear.
Condition spam is just emphasizing the worst aspects of GW2 game-play and it’s only going to get more dominant.
I’ve seen QQ about stolen items(Remember the one about how ridiculously OP whirling axe was?), stealth in general, evades, teleports, damage… you name it, thief is broken at it. Poor condition removal, no protection, no stability (until the patch! lawl) and lowest base HP pool are all meaningless to the uber-broken thief who can kill everything and anything.
Yeah, ton of people are QQing about thieves, but when you look for those “what professions are giving you troubles” topics on different subforums you see quite a few posters saying they are eating thieves for breakfast (warriors, engineers, necromancers, etc).
Does. Not. Compute.
EDIT (so I won’t multipost):
Sigils are a little harder to predict but here too I don’t see a fundamental shift taking place since they affect all classes equally.
Having 100% crit chance on CnD/BS/HS will be a lot stronger than having those crits on rangers, SD engineers and some others.
Some professions doesn’t have several very strong attacks and/or cannot afford running around in zerker gear so I don’t think it will affect everyone the same way.
If you’re referring to superior Sigil of Intelligence then that’s pure theory in your head. It requires a weapon switch to activate which would require Thieves to run with double D/D with no Shortbow to get the desired effect. How many Thieves do you think are going to give up their Shortbow?
You also have to give up the additional burst gained from DPS Sigils like Air or Fire. So it comes at a cost.
As for the impact of Runes, I already use Runes of Strength.
Here’s what I gain:
25% Might duration
10 Power
25% Chance to gain 10 seconds of Might when hit, up from a 3% chance for 20 seconds of Might.
+2% damage while under the effect of Might.
On average I’d estimate this ensures me 2 additional Might stacks in most situations. So 70 Power + 10 Power and 2% additional damage.
How does this compensate for my Critical Damage dropping from 100% to 70% (50% from gear, 20% from trait-line)?
I’m not maths geek but I just don’t see it.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Yeah Lion’s Arch drew a lot of attention from farmers and I think the Champion Trains just haven’t bounced back.
You need a critical mass of players, at least 10 or so, to kick-off a train and often it just doesn’t happen.
I disagree.
I don’t see any of the Sigils making up for the ¬ 20% loss in Critical Damage we’re experiencing. I know this is a universal change but one that hits Thieves and Warriors harder than most since we could actually pull off near full Berserker in WvW.
The Rune and Sigil changes won’t make up for that. Runes of Strength for example are getting a mere 7% damage increase while under the effect of Might (up from 5%). Other Runes will follow suit and I doubt they’ll get anywhere close to compensating for the loss in Critical Damage.
Sigils are a little harder to predict but here too I don’t see a fundamental shift taking place since they affect all classes equally.
The most disturbing trend however is that Condition spam seems to have been reduced in no tangible way. I don’t see anything that leaves me to conclude Conditions builds are going to be toned down in any way.
Even Rare Veggie Pizza, the food that is 400% over budget, is escaping unscathed.
While I agree that all information should be relayed reliably and in a timely fashion it’s naive to expect Devs to take international feedback about general game issues.
Any issues French, German or Spanish players may have is surely experienced by English players as well. Time-zones aside I don’t see why EU players would have different problems or relay different feedback than NA/UK players.
But don’t feel bad. The recent balance-notes to the feature patch made it pretty obvious ANet doesn’t listen to anyone but themselves.
Revealed Training – Nice for D/D PvE builds but pretty useless for everything else. Doesn’t mesh well with any existing builds or play-styles really to be very attractive in PvP/WvW.
Invigorating Precision – Another trait for passive healing. Assassin’s Reward isn’t popular and Signet of Malice is highly situational. We simply don’t need passive healing. Any Crit-focused build is probably a glass-cannon anyway and they either get one-shot or kill quick. There’s no point in mixing Crit with sustain.
Resilience of Shadows – I’ll have to see how this works out in practice. Could potentially be quite strong, but you don’t tend to get hit in stealth that often.
Assassin’s Equilibrium – 1.3 seconds of Stability is too short to achieve anything. While in theory it’s an interesting trait I don’t see any builds or play-styles that could somehow put it to use.
Bewildering Ambush – Nice for condition builds that can’t afford Perplexity Runes. Don’t see it being used much by anyone else though.
No, Healing Power sucks. It’s not even worth it if you’re healing your entire team, let alone yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRnw05Boi8I&list=UUYUY9_i44IDNOs_Ja815mlA
Roaming just generally refers to running around by yourself (or in smaller groups if you’re a panzy) and picking off other roamers, capping supply camps and farming Dolyaks. There’s nothing really to it. Just do whatever you feel like really.
Roamers typically have slightly different builds than zerger, more focused on winning duels and small-scale fights. They tend to be much more offensive or condition-oriented.
Thieves make excellent roamers since stealth allows us to avoid and escape unfair fights and engage when it suits us.
Given the upcoming patch I don’t see a real alternative to condition-cheese. That means stacking up on Dire gear, Perplexity Runes and Rare Veggie Pizza and engaging in the most monotonous and boring aspects of GW2’s combat design. Condition spam…
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
I’m not going to defend Pistol Whip but I will point out that Pistol Whip has been largely unchanged since release. Only recently, and briefly during the first months, has it been considered overpowered.
Ask yourself why? If the ability hasn’t really changed (they did clean up the aftercast a bit, but also fixed the stun-sigil scaling to 1.0 seconds) then what has?
Maybe the appeal of Pistol Whip roots from elsewhere.
But I’m not going to deny that an ability that combines a stun, evades and nice cleave damage is problematic.
I’d be happy if the game didn’t constantly de-select my target for some reason (and I’m not talking about stealth).
I was really hoping for a revised scoring system as I thought it was generally agreed that the points-per-tick system was lackluster.
I was really hoping this “feature patch” may give us more condition-removal options outside of Shadow Arts.
But alas ANet thinks giving us yet another version of Signet of Malice or Assassin’s Reward is somehow more valuable.
/sigh
It’s going to get even tankier.
Burst damage is going down significantly, survivability is staying largely the same. Having Berserker Accessories will be less desirable so many may opt to go full Soldier.
Few Roamers aside from Thieves and the odd Warriors run full Berserker anyway and that won’t change. In fact many of these builds may switch to Condition builds.
In fact Conditions are going to be the big winner. With survivability going up, Conditions will become increasingly important while Condition builds themselves have less burst to fear.
I can already picture zergs stacking Dire gear and Perplexity Runes instead of their standard Bunker stuff. I know Condition cleanses are abundant in zergs but even they have cooldowns.
Either way it’s going to get much cheesier and tanky than it already is.
Anet has decided to discourage active, telegraphed yet avoidable damage in favor of passively applied condition-spam. It’s like they’re pulling a 180 on their own design principles.
Yes, there is a 45 second cooldown.
The reason why Lyssa Runes are considered so good is because they give every class the means to deal with massive condition bombing. A condition dump of the likes of Signet of Spite would normally put an end to most classes that do not have access to a full cleanse.
Lyssa Runes allow them to counter it with their ultimate. The 4-piece bonus also happens to be quite nice, especially when used in conjuncture with a low-cooldown heal such as Withdraw.
Overall it’s a great Rune Set that helps compensate for a weakness in class design. Thieves especially love them because they can capitalize on all the benefits. They have the low-CD ultimate, a low CD heal and no means to wipe conditions outside of constant stealth.
Having “all boons” for a few seconds is really just a nice bonus and not the reason most people opt for Lyssa Runes.
I argued the same point about Initiative encouraging using only the most effective skill. And often that’s only 1-2 skills.
But while that is certainly true it’s not the end of the argument. What is considered “most effective” should change at any given moment.
D/P is a great example of a weapon-set where all skills are useful and rewarding to use. It also has to pay attention to Initiative and can’t use it as liberally as some other builds.
D/D build for example only used C&D, Heartseeker and Backstab not only because they deal the most damage, but because the other skills are so useless. Neither Death Blossom nor Dancing Dagger has anything to offer a D/D build.
P/D is in the same boat and also only uses C&D and Sneak Attack, aside from the odd no. 3 attack.
S/P actually uses all skills as well. It just happens to be that 90% of the time Pistol Whip is the skill of choice because it does 3 important things: Interrupt, Damage and Evade.
I think if done right, Thief Initiative can be a much more engaging mechanic than cooldown management. Unfortunately it requires all skills to be valuable and resource-management to matter.
With the December update ANet actually made Initiative Management easier and more seamless than ever which made skill-spam just that much easier.
Same story here.
I was getting sick of being lumped into matches with 3 other Thieves and rolled a Hambow to switch to when necessary. Copied and pasted a build from the internet and after 1 hour I felt like I had “mastered” the class.
To be fair though, skill in Guild Wars 2 isn’t very class specific. If you can play one class well, chances are you’ll be decent on all others as well.
Guild Wars 2 was built on the concept of active combat and avoidable damage.
Pets and Conditions go entirely against that concept and encourage passive-play instead.
That’s why the more GW2 moves towards such game-play (and it’s already incredibly strong) the worse the game gets.
You can tell that as long as a Power build is fighting another, it’s fairly interesting. As soon as one parties goes for Condition builds it becomes a cheese fest.
Normally I’d agree,
but this is the only significant balance update we’ve experienced in the past 4 months ad it completely ignores some dire imbalances that really hurt the game. And none of that is affected by Ferocity or Rune-changes.
If we had regular balance updates and the impression that the Devs actually had a clue about what to do then I’m sure things would be different.
But after 6 months of decap-Engi cheese, excessive condition spam, Hambows, petting zoos and Thieves it’s time for change. Significant change. And that simply isn’t happening.
It’s disappointing because the prospect of change is what keeps me engaged in MMOs. But the changes ANet seems to consider worth-while are nowhere near what I consider important.
I mean last December they revised Thief Initiative without actually achieving anything in the process.
It depends, Stability is highly situational and while the lack thereof can be frustrating at times, we can still work around it.
In general you want Stability in zerg-fights to survive the Hammer Train. Then again Thieves don’t really join zerg-fights, at least not in the thick of it. Leave that to classes with more innate durability.
We tend to crowd-surf around the perimeters of a zerg fight on pick off targets 1 by 1.
Aside from that Stability is often needed to secure finishers. But again we can often work around that with either Black Powder, stealth-stomps or Shadowstep stomps.
Sometimes it would be nice to have access to Stability in Shadow Refuge but at least there’s clear counter-play to that ability.
Because Forums are a place you go to complain.
In fact let me ask you when the last time was you had an in-depth discussion about a topic where there was nothing wrong?
Positive discussion isn’t constructive or interesting. There’s only so many “ANet is great” threads you can read before you start skipping them. If you want that kind of stuff, go to reddit.com/r/guildwars2. They always upvote fluff content and downvote people who talk badly about the game.
Because for a map that prides itself a PvP map, it has surprisingly little PvP.
It’s more PvE actually because the environment (and the gigantic space-cannon) is your biggest enemy.
Essentially it’s a map build around cheesing other players, rather than actually fighting them in a competitive manner. In that regard it fits perfectly to Guild Wars 2.
There is nothing wrong with the devs not being amazing players. In fact it would be worrying if they were. What is concerning is their lack of understanding of the game and lack of realisation that they should listen to players who play at a higher level. Maybe if they solo queued in the top 50 eu for months they would realise what decap engi has done to the game. That won’t happen so we are left with a game where unskilled specs will be all that is pushed. Because those are what help unskilled players to compete. Which maybe are popular with pve players that the devs want to seem to make this game for.
To clarify this is not to criticise the devs too much. But I just think they should be way quicker addressing the specs which ruin the game. And I think they should have more humility to listen to what we are saying is OP/lame/not fun. I also don’t really understand why they dont understand their game. Because it seems like karl, roy and jon sharp and all the others do actually know way more about the game than we give them credit for. They are smart guys doing a lot of good stuff. But that never seems to filter through to nerfing lame/unfun specs. Which displays a lack of understanding which otherwise doesn’t make sense.
Amen,
I’ve played a number of MMOs and I am used to developers displaying an in-depth understanding of the game and mechanics when they talk. When Ghostcrawler had something to say about WoW mechanics, regardless of whether your agreed or not, you listed.
When Dustin Browder had something to say about Starcraft 2 balance, you listened.
When Marc Jacobs talked about balance in DAoC, you listened.
Because more often than not what these people had to say proved insightful and, given a birds-eye view of the product, made perfect sense. You might not have agreed with every point they made or with every fix they employed but it showed they understood the game-dynamics.
Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO I have played where I literally face-palm whenever the Devs have something to say about balance. Sometimes I feel like they are playing a completely different game for their experiences to be so vastly different from mine.
I play all aspects of the game on a regular basis and I for the life of me cannot fathom how the developers reach the conclusions they reach. Almost all class and balance changes over the past year strike me as completely arbitrary.
And then stuff that NEEDS to be changed, stuff that literally ruins the game (decap Engis), is completely ignored for months on end.
Depending on how the feature patch plays out, this will be the first MMO I give up on solely because of the game-play developers themselves and not for content or technical reasons.
I’m not opposed to the Ferocity changes. I think they are a bit extreme but not unjustified.
The extent to which you could stack Crit-Damage was a bit broken. Everything over 100% Crit-Damage was not fun. 12.000 Eviscerates 10.000 Arcing Arrow 10.000 Backstabs etc. were not fun to play against.
But for all the extremes in burst, it was all avoidable (to an extent). You could dodge big hits if you paid attention and knew the classes. They also paid for their burst with very low survivability.
Conditions on the other hand do not. They are largely passive, hard/impossible to avoid or dodge and don’t force the player to sacrifice survivability in order to get them. They are already a cancer in this game and they will only get worse.
PU Mesmers, Engineers, Condition Thieves etc. all have a low risk/high reward game-play that evolves around constant pressure from conditions. A Condition Thief that can hit targets reliably with Cloak and Dagger has literally mastered their build. That’s all it takes.
It’s a joke just how far these conditions builds can get carried with so little effort, all while stacked with maximum Toughness and Vitality.
With burst damage being reduced by 20% in WvW and PvE I doubt you’ll even notice the nerf to Healing Signet.
The nerf to Pin Down does seem a little unnecessary though. It has a long cooldown already and lasts…what? 1.5 seconds?
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Ok assuming those ranks are actually true and reflect your personal skill-level then I have no idea how you can sit back and do NOTHING again for the next 6 months.
You may not have realized this, but there ARE other games out there. And if this patch doesn’t at least move in the right direction with some bolder changes than what you’ve shown then I won’t be around to see them when you eventually do realize that we were right all along.
Because in the long run, we the community are always right. You just need too long to realize that.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Anything, nothing?
One interesting idea would be to combine the two elements together.
Have a rare, in-game skin that requires some sort of difficult achievement to unlock, and then offer it to the exclusively to the player for Gems.
Say, only if you’ve completed all the Wurm achievements do you have the right to purchase the rare “Wurmkiller” set for 600 Gems.
It would facilitate both parties. It would offer exclusivity as well as real income. The only down-side is that it would only be accessible to a fairly small audience. On the other hand even cheap kittens like myself might feel compelled to purchase them if it was tied to an in-game achievement.
To fix that issue they could add an option to buy that rare set with a much higher price but without the need of unlocking it.
Well that undermines the whole prestige concept, even if it is a hefty price-tag.
Spec PU,
stack Dire gear,
Perplexity Runes,
+40% Condition Duration Food,
and condition-applying Sigils.
Go to town.
And this my friend is one of the fundamental problems with in-game stores.
I’m in the same boat as you are. I (generally) don’t care a huge deal about looks unless my looks mean something. If for example, there were unique skins only accessible to sPvP regulars, I’d wear that.
Not because it looks cool (which I hope it does) but because it means something.
Unfortunately this type of progression, or cosmetic reward, always clashes with the financial desire to sell it directly to players instead. The problem with selling it directly though is that you immediately rob it of any associated in-game value.
Other games experienced similar issues, most notably WoW when it started selling mounts directly to players, something which to that point, had been reserved for achievement hunters.
I can’t really complain though because Guild Wars 2 is excellent value for money and has very fair monetization. But it does devalue the game to an extent.
One interesting idea would be to combine the two elements together.
Have a rare, in-game skin that requires some sort of difficult achievement to unlock, and then offer it to the exclusively to the player for Gems.
Say, only if you’ve completed all the Wurm achievements do you have the right to purchase the rare “Wurmkiller” set for 600 Gems.
It would facilitate both parties. It would offer exclusivity as well as real income. The only down-side is that it would only be accessible to a fairly small audience. On the other hand even cheap kittens like myself might feel compelled to purchase them if it was tied to an in-game achievement.
Caed’s build probably works well for him, but for the average shmuck I really recommend S/P (with an identical build) over D/P. It gets results easier and more reliably.
You might not be able to 1v1 other Thieves quite as well, but that’s not your job anyway.
As Ghostwolf said, your job is mainly to kill stuff and decapping far point when you have a moment to spare.
That means most of the time you should be rotating between mid and home, helping kill whatever comes your way. It also means going for objectives like the Lord, the Trebuchet, the animals or the various Boons on temple.
Important things to note are:
- Don’t get caught in lenghty fights off-point when you’re behind. Only fight when you have something to gain, even if it’s just time (like when you have 2 points and you want to keep the enemy occupied).
- You’re not a 1v1 hero and don’t play as such. Yes, Thieves do well against some classes, but we can die really quickly if caught at a bad moment. Don’t push far point while it’s defended and don’t make the match about 1v1s against other Thieves.
- It’s ok to run away. If you push far and something tanky comes to defend it, just go away. Only fight if you can win. If you can’t win, don’t fight.
You won’t even notice this nerf with the changes to Ferocity.
In fact, Healing Signet may feel even more powerful than before now that incoming burst damage is reduced by a good 20%.
Rally is just a massive snowballing mechanic.
1 rally/death would be bad enough by any standard, but GW2 has everyone rally off of a single target. It’s just baffling.
Team-fights are decided by stupid finishers rather than combat skills.
Isn’t 250 Power more than 5% DPS to most builds?