Guild Wars 2

Our ability to almost one-shot many classes has really stopped us from having a fair assessment of our abilities.

The fact is, all of our traits are “old” and in need of a serious revision like the Warrior underwent.

We have one source of reliable condition removal, we still have a large number of passive +5% damage increases, we have lackluster synergy between trees and rely on stealth for practically everything.

It’s hard to argue that we’re in a poor state considering our WvW prowess and sPvP abilities, but the class would benefit A LOT from a serious trait/skill revision.

I mean even our signets are half as powerful as those of others.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Josh isn’t gone, but his focus will be shifted. I’m not taking his job, he was actually filling in for me while I was gone. He’ll be around, and with us on Ready Up still, just won’t be as active on the forums or behind the scenes.

As for skyhammer in solo arena, we’re kicking around some ideas (definitely not ignoring you guys, just fyi). As of right now, we have no plans to remove it. We’re not quite convinced yet that the majority of our pvp population want it gone, so we’re trying to get metrics on that before we make any changes.

That’s because everyone who hates the map has just switched to solo-queuing in teamQ.

I recently made the mistake of doing soloQ again and landed in Skyhammer. I quit the match 2 minutes in because it’s an unbearable map to play.

Anyway, some hotter topics these past weeks were:

• The relative power of +/- 40% Condition duration food compared to all others (incl. traits).
• Thieves pushing all other roamers out of the PvP meta.
• Decap Engineers
• Downed-State/Rally mechanic possible reworks.
• Points-per-tick being a terrible scoring mechanism.
• etc.

I don’t really have a problem with this.

There are so many events and they reset so quickly, have very little direct rewards that it’s no surprise people ignore them most of the time.

And that’s ok. I still prefer DE way more than standard quests. I just dislike that they reset so quickly, removing any illusion of having a lasting impact on the world.

Champion trains however, I do not approve of. I don’t see why Champs need to respawn to quickly. Should killing a major foe last longer than 10 minutes?

I often have these misco-lags when it comes to certain abilities. Heartseeker especially, sometimes even Black Powder. But not really with Cloak and Dagger as it’s not really instant.

I don’t know, but the netcode seems kind of kittenty when it comes to queuing abilities.

Sometimes I’ll press a button and nothing happens, other times is triggers twice.

For an MMO veteran, all classes in GW2 are simple and easy to play.

Warriors are probably easiest though.

It feels like a WvW version of Skyhammer.

A map full of gimmicks and kittenty features that distract from actual PvP.

Now I’m glad they can use it as a testing ground for various WvW mechanics. That’s cool. But in regards to actual WvW, it feels very lackluster and confined.

The changes to Crit-Damage imply that the scaling of stats is a concern. So this may indicate an increase in level-cap, possibly tied to a new expansion.

It makes sense to have one expansion dedicated to each Elder Dragon.

Living Story is nice and all, but GW2 really needs some more fundamental changes to remain fresh. Changes that aren’t within the scope of Living Story updates.

Many of the big issues I have with WvW come down to the relatively small WvW maps.

While they keep the game relatively fast-paced, they also rob it of strategic depth. For example a part of why blobs are so popular is because it’s easy for a blob to cover an entire map. Waypoints mostly spare you a 30 second run and thus are only truly an advantage when defending.

Anyway, these issues are exasperated by the fact that especially the Borderlands map “waste” a lot of their space on useless stuff. You may disagree but I find the ruins to not really be a great addition and would rather see that land given a different objective. Something worth fighting for, but with a twist.

Up towards the north, the areas with the skrits and the centaurs are really “dead weight” as well and add nothing to the overall WvW conflict.

I think it would be great if these areas (ruins, skrits, centaurs) would be re-done and re-purposed into something that adds to WvW.

WvW maps are small enough as it is, we need to use every inch we can.

Guardians are not OP as bunkers, as they give up the vast majority of their damage to bunker.

But they make the game a lot less fun. Running in circles chaning your bunker cooldowns isn’t particularly skillful or entertaining and there’s no trick or twist to somehow burn down Guardians fast. You simply have to wait for their cooldowns to run their course which gives there team-mates more than enough time to assist.

Guardians are fine, but I think the extent to which they (and other classes) can bunker isn’t good for the game.

Less extremes overall (less instant-gibs and less excessive bunkering) would do the sPvP meta-game a lot of good.

I don’t understand why GW2 relies on so many pre-determined stat-combos instead of providing players with the ability to create their own.

Currently we need almost a dozen incarnations of every item just to cover all the stat-combos and more are coming.

It has created an awfully bloated and non-intuitive crafting system instead of giving us something far simpler, flexible and intuitive.

Here’s what I mean:

Imagine there were jewels of every stat. Power is red, Precision is blue, Ferocity is yellow, Vitality is green etc.

Every exotic items has 3 sockets available to these gems. If you socket a stat into the primary socket, you get +101 to that stat, it you socket into a secondary socket, you get +72.

Obviously you can only socket each color once.

The end result is items exactly like ours, except that we can:

• Create any stat-combo we like. Developers wouldn’t keep needing to add more. If certain combos are undesirable for balance reasons (Toughness, Healing, Vitaility maybe?) then simply bar them specifically from being created.

• No more need for transmutation stones. Since armors are nothing more than skins really and independent of stats there’s no more need for transmutations.

• Easy to adapt. Ferocity is getting nerfed? Simply re-socket those jewels. No need to re-craft all you ascended gear.

• Jewels would feel like a nice reward (if dropped) as they’re always useful to somebody, unlike most random exotics.
  ______________________________________

Extension: I might even be interesting to have jewels with slightly random stats. So a jewels might provide anywhere between 95-105 when put into a primary socket, depending on the quality of the jewel. A perfect (105) jewels would be very desirable, while a flawed jewel (+95) would not.

Anyway, considering the direction gear is heading in GW2 this seems like a far more sensible approach than what we’ve currently got.

I do wonder sometimes if anyone at ANet has a comprehensive vision of what their Ascended gear system is supposed to be like.

I mean we have Laurels, expensive crafting, excessively grindy crafting, random WvW chests, Fractal drops and random loot.

It all seems a bit arbitrary really.

Could this mean that channeled abilities like the Ranger Barrage that would typically hit us contentiously even while in stealth are fixed too?

As if Mesmers didn’t have a hard enough time against Thieves, it seems like Illusions now die as soon as Thieves enter stealth.

Ouch, poor Mesmers.

I think as a general rule we should either have 2 offensive stats (Power, Precision, Ferocity, Condition) + 1 defensive stat or 2 defensive stats (Healing, Toughness, Vitality) + 1 offensive stat.

Also, should the primary stat be defensive, the secondaries cannot.

In general I think we need to discourage bunker builds as they’re currently too dominant and make the game stagnant and boring.

know this still includes Dire gear but the main issue here is the synergy between Dots and survivability and that would need to be fixed in other ways.

I was thinking about compiling a post about current Thief issues and was hoping to collect some input.

So what do you guys think are current Thief class issues in:

• General
• PvE
• WvW
• sPvP

For me personally I think:

• Fixing Last Refuge should be the top of that list.

We also need more condition removal outside of stealth and changes to many of our useless traits (Hard to Catch).

Then there’s more general, long-term stuff like the over-reliance on stealth that might be more long-terms issues worth fixing.

Anyway, curious to read your thoughts.

Form.8741:

I don’t get how Mesmer is an underpowered class, unless they nerfed phants by about 80% in the last 4 months…it’s an extremely GOOD 1v1 class.

Nobody’s disputing that, but the issue is far more complex than you’re making it out to be.

Just read the good posts in this thread and learn.

Vol.7601:

Dee Jay.2460:

I hate the reward system in this game.

There’s no correlation between risk/time and reward.

Instead rewards are almost entirely random and valuable items can be attained with a similar chance in just about any type of content.

Maybe this is a side-effect of “play as you want” because rewards are kitten everywhere.

Only in GW2 are 95% of your drops worth less than 5 Silver, 4.9% of your drop worth less than 50 Silver and maybe 0.1% of your drops worth more than 2 Gold.

And if you’re really, really, really lucky you might get the drop worth 800 Gold. And this is pretty regardless of which content you do.

And if 95% of you drops were worth 2 gold, you think that would make you richer? That means everyone else would also be getting 2 gold for 95% of their drops, leading to inflation, which is never good.

It’s not about the value of items. It’s about feeling like an appropriate reward.

Running Fractals for 2 hours and coming out with a bunch of greens sucks just as much as fighting a Wurm boss only to get the same.

Nobody wants to be swarmed with green items from a chest when you could get the same from farming trash-mobs for 10 minutes in Orr.

Is it really unreasonable for big chests to reward multiple rare items, with a higher chance of exotics, rather than dumping more green stuff on players.

Is it unreasonable for a 1-2 hour Fractal run at level 40+ to reward players with at least one exotic item at the end? It’s not like exotics are rare. It’s just that they are handed out at random.

I hate the reward system in this game.

There’s no correlation between risk/time and reward.

Instead rewards are almost entirely random and valuable items can be attained with a similar chance in just about any type of content.

Maybe this is a side-effect of “play as you want” because rewards are kitten everywhere.

Only in GW2 are 95% of your drops worth less than 5 Silver, 4.9% of your drop worth less than 50 Silver and maybe 0.1% of your drops worth more than 2 Gold.

And if you’re really, really, really lucky you might get the drop worth 800 Gold. And this is pretty regardless of which content you do.

My Mesmer has become my primary PvE character because I like how well it supplements a group. Also reflects are pretty awesome.

However there are a number of annoyances that are tied to Mesmer mechanics that cause me grief.

• Illusions spawning and attacking on their own. – Often I’ll be fighting a mob in the world and after killing it, will still be stuck in combat for a few seconds. This is normal. However should I dodge during this second, Deceptive Evasion will spawn an illusion which will then attack the nearest enemy, for no reason, thus keeping me in combat for longer.

• Temporal Curtain has a similar problem in that while it’s supposed to speed you up with Swiftness it will often get you stuck in combat too because some mob decides to walk through it, thus triggering combat and nullifying the benefit of Swiftness.

• The bug with Phantasmal Warden not attacking has been reported a number of times. I assume this will be fixed soon, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

• Can we please have a trait that resets our Phantasm cooldown if the Phantasm lives less than 4 seconds? (Excluding Shatter of course).

• Why are Phantasms tied to a particular target, rather than being temporary minions? It’s such an non-intuitive mechanic to have Phantasms die once their target dies and really gimps Mesmers in certain situations where targets die quickly.

• Why can’t Phantasms be summoned against invulnerable targets? I noticed this during the Marionette fight with the Mine-layer champion. I was stuck on the platform with another Mesmer and together we couldn’t put out enough DPS because we couldn’t summon Phantasms before the actual target became vulnerable (which only lasts 6 seconds).

Anyway, I like the class but feel the whole Phantasm/Illusion mechanic follows some sort of weird and non-intuitive mechanism that doesn’t make sense and gimps the class unnecessarily.

The popularity of Zerkers comes down to game-design issues, not the actual gear itself. So despite the nerf, nothing has actually changes about the attractiveness of building for max. DPS.

And Zerker is still going to offer that regardless of the change.

The only thing it might change, is if survivability is actually a concern to you. Then it might be more attractive now to switch out the odd Zerker piece in favor of a Soldier item.

Well apparently Fear is a condition too, despite losing control of your character.

Are Thieves the best DPS/burst assist roamers in the current meta?

I’d say, arguably yes.

But are they OP?

Far from it. Both build rely on a crutch for survival. and die near instantly without. Both builds also have very little in the way of condition removal and thus are very high risk builds to play.

S/D draws its survival from constant evades and teleports from Infiltrator’s Strike while D/P relies on the blinds from both Shadow Shot and Black Powder. Without these skills, both builds would be worthless.

So I don’t think nerfing them directly is in any way justifiable.

Instead however I’d like to propose the meta move away from excessive bunker builds and give more room to balanced DPS builds instead of the highly specialized ones we see currently.

Mesmer for example are formidable in 1v1 fights but their class mechanics fail them once things get a little more clustered. Eles rely too much on various boons to survive and given how powerful boons are, so is stripping them.

The solution isn’t further nerfing Thieves, it’s about making them meta more attractive to builds that aren’t either
a) bunkers/sustained DPS
or b) fast and bursty roamers.

Yeah, GW2 has by far the worst stealth mechanic of any MMO I’ve played.

And I say that as a Thief.

Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep and night Mordecai.

The irony is that the Ferocity change might actually be a DPS INCREASE for most low-level dungeons due to how down-scaling works.

Currently Crit-Damage, despite being a fixed percentage, is down-scaled in low-level content. So where you might have 110% normal Crit-damage, you only have 40% in Ascalonian Catacombs.

Your effective crit-chance however remains roughly the same.

Assuming now that Ferocity will use a similar down-scaling formula to Precision it could mean that your effective crit-damage isn’t down-scaled nearly as much as it is currently. So your 110% crit-damage at level 80 would still be about 110% crit-damage at level 35.

Ergo you’ll have yourself a DPS increase in every non-80 dungeon.

Abaddon’s Mouth made sure fixing this bug is a top priority.

Thanks Abaddon!

Well it depends on a number of factors.

1. What type of content are you doing and how familiar are you with it?
2. What weapon-set and build are you using?
3. Is there anything else that might be relevant?
4. Are you considering the incoming Ferocity changes?

Personally I like to have about 15.000 HP in PvE content. That avoids most one-shots while still leaving room for DPS. Weapon set is Sword/Pistol most of the time as Black Powder is great for mitigation and Sword great for cleave.

I’m still a little undecided on what the best way forward is although I agree that mixing Zerkers and Soldier’s gear is idea. I’d probably stack 2-3 Soldier items into my Berserker set and see how that feels.

“Cheese” is a term people use to label tactics they consider cheap.

I.e. they are either hard to counter or easy to use and exploit.

In Starcraft 2 Protoss players could cannon-rush enemy bases which was considered cheesey for a long time as it exploited the fact that Protoss could port in structures at any location, even if this was in the middle of the enemy base.

It was hard to counter if you were caught off guard and scouting was really the only effective measure against it. Other races had similar tactics and it wasn’t unbalanced. It just felt “cheap” losing to such a simple trick.

Stealth is generally what people feel is cheap about Thieves because it’s so frequently available and provides so many benefits. I sort of agree, but it’s not the Thief’s fault they were designed with so much focus on stealth.

Sounds like someone is seriously kitten that I don’t recognize his master skills.

I played P/D back when Wild Bill made the build popular and what drove me away from it is utter boredom. But whatever, I can farm P/D noobs all day.

And I don’t even need to stealth that much. I play S/D enough in sPvP so your point is moot.

And lol for you pointing to stealth. A dangerous D/P build won’t have the ability to perma-stealth and if played correctly, doesn’t need to.

Travlane.5948:

Dee Jay.2460:

Thief is in a decent state and not THAT much has hanged.

The QQers like to exaggerate the nerfs when in reality, their impact is very limited.

WvW actually sees a wide spread of D/D, D/P and P/D builds, with the occasional wild-card in there. sPvP has both S/D evade-spam and D/P daze-burst going for it and we are still appreciated for our burst and mobility.

The only thing we’re really excluded from is zerg-fights but that’s probably never going to change.

-snip-

The only nerfs that truly still hurt are the range nerf on Clusterbomb and the change to Infiltrator’s Return.

Imo they still are completely unjustified.

That clip was a terrible D/P Thief who used his Black Powder exclusively for stealth when the true strength lies in being able to melee people.

And P/D, as said, is the most skill-less and forgiving build you can play.

How can something be OP and still require skill? Easy, being OP is about having excessive potential and yet harassing this potential still requires good situational awareness and skillful play.

P/D is essentially mastered if you can reliably hit people with Claok and Dagger. Voila, you’ve mastered the build. Now roll with Dire gear and never die to anything while spaming the same move over and over again.

D/P on the other hand takes a little more finesse, partially because Initiative management is a factor, all skills are useful and you can actually fail (as displayed elegantly in your clip).

I’m sorry I offended your favorite little chesse build. But chaining Sneak Attack endlessly against every enemy you encounter doesn’t make you awesome.

I think the game “loads” you character into downed-state for a second.

As in it actually replaces your normal player model with a downed-one. I guess this invulnerability period is an unelegant solution to prevent any oddities during this brief transition.

Stuff like being hit by CC or other control effects probably caused weird issues so the invulnerability covers that.

RedSpectrum.1975:

Dee Jay.2460:

AskTheDust.7384:

how do you jump with HS for not a full range but only in an area of a circle from BP?

You angle the camera upwards and so only leap a fairly short distance. It works reliably but is fairly inconvenient to do it combat.

What I find funny is that I don’t stealth nearly as much with my D/P weapon-set as I did with my D/D build.

-snip-

I agree and I don’t think I ever called D/D skill-less. That’s something I reserve for P/D.

It’s just that D/D skill revolves almost completely around movement and positioning and has very little to do with skill use. D/D fights are almost the exact same, against every enemy. That’s why watching D/D videos gets rather stale rather fast.

D/D is also faster-paced, meaning you can kill faster, but also die faster. This makes it a higher risk/reward spec to play but also means you completely overwhelm many enemies without giving them a chance to react. If fights are decided by two consecutive Backstabs, how much room is there really to show skill?

D/P in contrast may be more OP, but it also gives the enemy a little more chance to fight back (if he knows how). It also doesn’t require nearly as much stealth and that, as we all know, is what people hate most about Thieves.

I actually like the idea of transfering Conditions with Dancing Dagger. But the ability would need some sort of cooldown, probably tied to a trait, because being able to spam that wouldn’t be fair.

But I think it’s imperative the Thief gets some more base-line condition removal options and isn’t solely reliant on Shadows Embrace..

Yeas, making the faster would be especially appreciated.

AskTheDust.7384:

how do you jump with HS for not a full range but only in an area of a circle from BP?

You angle the camera upwards and so only leap a fairly short distance. It works reliably but is fairly inconvenient to do it combat.

What I find funny is that I don’t stealth nearly as much with my D/P weapon-set as I did with my D/D build.

I still remember roughly a year ago, when this ability did some pretty massive damage against targets with AI. The old Dancing Dagger would be god-send in today’s world that is populated by minion masters and spirit rangers.

Anyway, my point is that ever since that nerf a year ago, Dancing Dagger has become one of the least used Thief-weapon skills on all weapon sets. No Dagger off-hand build really makes frequent use of it and it’s hard to justify as a weapon skill.

For one, the 900 range and slow projectile speed really limit its ability to stop an enemy from fleeing.
Then you have the relatively high cost of 3 Initiative for which it provides very little.
And then there’s the thing that a Cripple really isn’t all that important to a Thief, having so many gap-closers and mobility skills.

So I really think this ability could use a review. Maybe add some more interesting utility to it, buff the damage and/or lower the cost. It would be great if all weapon-sets could at least get some practical use out of all their weapon skills.

Thief is in a decent state and not THAT much has hanged.

The QQers like to exaggerate the nerfs when in reality, their impact is very limited.

WvW actually sees a wide spread of D/D, D/P and P/D builds, with the occasional wild-card in there. sPvP has both S/D evade-spam and D/P daze-burst going for it and we are still appreciated for our burst and mobility.

The only thing we’re really excluded from is zerg-fights but that’s probably never going to change.

Terravos.4059:

-snip-

You are right of course. There is a larger issue with conditions as in adding more, boosts the effectiveness of already existing conditions.

But all that doesn’t change the fact that by any standard applied within the game, both +/-40% Condition duration are far, far too powerful. They just don’t make sense.

Food should matter obviously, but it shouldn’t matter THAT much.

Remember when Omnomberry Pie had no cooldown and Warriors could use it to heal something like 500 HP/sec? Yeah, that was nerfed too, with good reason.

KarsaiB.9475:

That’s a whole other issue. Lyssa needs a change, as many other things in this game. For the sake of clarity, let’s only talk about lyssa on this thread.

Point being, Lyssa Runes themselves were never OP and still aren’t.

Getting all boon for 6 seconds is nice, but not amazing, even with a 45 second cooldown. Thieves can steal that from Mesmers and it doesn’t turn them into killing machines either.

Getting a random boon when you heal is nice, but again, not amazing.

The reason why, and the only reason for their popularity, is for the full condition cleanse. The ability to cleanse everything has become a necessity in an environment where every node fight will have you spammed full of conditions within seconds.

Conditions being applied so generously, in AoE, is what is truly broken. And this has nothing to do with Lyssa runes. Fix condition spam and you automatically “fix” Lyssa runes in the process.

Lyssa Runes are essentially the sPvP version of -40% condition duration food which is becoming increasingly common.

Yes, in the grand scale of things Ascended Gear matters very little.

But it is one of the few things you as a player can influence. And as such, many try to give themselves the best possible cards. There are so many other elements outside of player control that skill and positioning will always matter more than gear.

And then you’re ignoring the PvP side of things where players heal and burst-damage is about more than the raw DPS. Burst means pressure and pressure kills players. And 5% more or less does make a difference here. It can mean the difference between downing someone and him getting through another heal.

And then you’re ignoring Ascended gear, which next to the weapons, adds both a little extra damage and/or survivability.

Almost every ZERKERS ONLY111!! run I join turns into a right disaster. Now I avoid them like a plague.

They have stopped awarding Glory Boosters as Glory is being retired as a currency for PvP. Hence why we have such a nice Glory Vendor at the moment.

But they never actually actively removed the ones you already had. So unless you used them yourself I wouldn’t know where they might have gotten too.

I am still working through my stack of roughly 110 Glory Boosters and am currently down to 70 now.

I’ve never met a Thief who spams Headshot exclusively. Even myself I only use it to interrupt heals and revives. I mean it costs 4 Initiative and deals no damage. It hinder the enemy as long as it hinders me. If a D/P Thief uses it twice it already means he can’t use Black Powder for the next few seconds making him a vulnerable target.

D/P Thieves themselves also tend to be fairly glassly unlike P/D Thieves who run around in full Dire gear with Acrobatics talents for extensive dodges.

P/D is by far the most forgiving spec for Thieves and the easiest to play “well enough”. You have endless dodges, full Dire gear with max. Toughness and Vitality and enough Initiative to cover any Cloak and Dagger you might miss.

I mean with 15 Initiative and only Cloak and Dagger to blow it on you have to try really hard to waste it all.

For PvE, don’t even bother with Condition builds.

• They deal less damage.
• They lower the damage of other condition classes due to stack limits.
• Conditions are already generoulsy applied from various attacks without the need to spec for it.
• They offer no benefits over Power damage.
• Even with a team of full Power builds it’s rare to see a boss without a full bar of conditions.

In PvP however it’s the exact opposite.

Make it so that you don’t get spammed full of conditions by every auto-attack and I will stop using Lyssa Runes.

Do we have a deal?

Yeah there are ways to penetrate the Blinds but they aren’t readily available or themselves have counters which makes them hard to use against a skill that can be used constantly.

Take a Warrior with melee weapons for example. Sure, he can use Berserker Stance but then I just kite away and chill in Stealth for a while, waiting for it to expire. After that, there’s really not much he can do. Hundred Blades will still deal some damage as will Blade-Trail but they’d have to be full Berserker to put out enough pressure.

When I fight another class I often feel I beat them because of the Black Powder mechanic more than anything else.

Paulie.6215:

K U T M.4539:

Atherakhia.4086:

Tim.6450:

there is a cap for condition duration it’s 100%.

And it should be 40%.

50% seems good, as it’s the current max you can get in spvp.

Fine with me as long as crit damage is also capped at 50%. Deal? I thought not…

It is actually. Crit-Damage starts at 50% base-line and can then scale up to somewhere around 120% currently.

After Ferocity it will probably cap close to 100%, which would make it the 50% increase you proposed.

Mordecai.6318:

P/D counters D/P if you play it right. Perma daze D/P thief? What? Why would anyone ever spend any time trying to do something thats not possible?

P/D counters jack kitten, least of all D/P. All D/P needs to do is spam those Blinds and P/D can’t Cloak and Dagger.

Any time I run into a P/D they either lose or run away because they realize they can’t win. It’s the same when fighting D/D Thieves but at least they can occasionally still instant-gib you through Black Powder.

I agree that D/P is generally the best Thief WvW weapon set.

But unlike P/D cheese it actually requires skill to play well and active Initiative management which no other set requires. D/P is the only weapon-set in which ALL weapon skills are useful and require careful and times use. You can’t spam all the skills or you’ll run out of Initiative real fast.

That what sets is apart from other weapon sets that typically only use 2-3 of their actual weapon-skills.

I agree that the near constant Blinds are probably OP but at least it takes skill to play, resource-management and is less bursty than D/D.

And oddly enough, despite its power only about 30% of Thieves I encounter in WvW run D/P. Many still use D/D and P/D, both of which have an easier play-style.

That’s a hen/egg problem. People stack massive conditions counters because conditions are so abundant, easily applied and powerful.

Make conditions less so and people will stack less counters because other choices become more attractive.