Guild Wars 2

Excalibur.9748:

i join the team with less thieves lol. more than 1 thief is just bad

Yeah, as soon as I have another Thief in my team I offer to relog on my Warrior. I have about 3 hours played on it compared to the 1800 hours I have on my Thief but am more valuable as a Warrior than I would be as a Thief.

Anyways, Thieves aren’t bad but I wouldn’t compare then to WoW Rogues. The game-modes are just completely different. Stealth isn’t even that great of an asset in sPvP and we can’t exactly stun-lock either (spam Headshot maybe).

Anyway, GW2 doesn’t ask much in terms of player skill when it comes to controlling the toon. Skill in GW2 is 70% situational awareness, 20% class knowledge and 10% character control.

WoW in contrast requires far more class knowledge (various proccs and abilities) and demands more in terms of control (30 buttons + macros sometimes).

borrok.9267:

Dee Jay.2460:

Junkpile.7439:

Dee Jay.2460:

But none of that is an excuse to have them being so ridiculously overpowered and dominant as they are in current PvP combat.

WWW forum. We should talk about www not wannabe sPvP in www maps. Conditions are underpowered in current www combat.

Nope they’re not. WvW isn’t just about running zergs because why then debate anything but Guardians, Warriors and Necros?

And Conditions aren’t underpowered. They can just be easily cleansed because every Guardian is forced to run group-cleanses because without them Conditions would kitten on everyone.

If Conditions weren’t so overpowered then maybe not every class would have to dedicate a third of their traits and a third of their utilities just to cleanse them.

As opposed to cond spec dedicating all of their traits to applying them?

What are you saying? I can’t make sense of your comment in this context.

My point is Conditions are overpowered to the point that stacking massive amounts of counters isn’t optional, it’s mandatory.

Before condition bombing was a thing, Warriors might have occasionally opted to play without Berserker Stance or Cleansing Ire. But not today.

Conditions have resulted in an arms race where due to their power, they have forced everyone to run massive counters. Everyone who does not stack these counters is completely steamrolled with little chance to fight back.

The irony is that Conditions builds might actually do BETTER if they were nerfed because people might feel less compelled to stack condition counters.

Maybe the odd Warrior might start running without Cleansing Ire or try Bullscharge instead of Berserker Stance. It might not happen immediately, but eventually it will. The meta evolves and if you make people feel less pigeonholed into stacking condition cleanses then maybe you might come out on top.

Assumption: People just die when reaching 0 health.

WvW – Zerging itself won’t go anywhere but survival will become even more important than ever. But without rallying at least Berserkers wouldn’t be a liability to their own team. Overall however it will strengthen the ability of well-coordinated teams to take out larger groups. This applies to guild vs. zergs as well as coordinated defense efforts.

Larger zergs wouldn’t just be able to constantly revive each other all the time making it easier to break them.

It would also increase the popularity of small-scale roaming since the downed-state is currently the biggest culprit for solo-roamers.

While I don’t think it would change WvW on a fundamental level or even discourage zerging a lot, it would emphasize skillful play and make defending more rewarding.

In PvE it would put in end to the “zerker or gtfo” attitude so prevalent today as again, survivability would matter. Playing Zerker would be something left to the truly skillful as even a simple mistake can take you out completely.

However it would also make many fights extremely frustrating because of their poorly telegraphed attacks.

However, as much as I despise the downed-state personally I think there are a few intermediate steps that can be taken to mitigate its frustrating and game-breaking nature.

• For starter, use Rally – Dodgeball rules: I.e. One rally per kill. Whoever was the last person to damage the victim is the person to be rallied.
• Reduce the revive speed – 2 people need approximately 1.5 seconds to revive a downed team-mate. That is way too fast to be considered fair. Add diminishing returns to the healing-speed. So if 1 person can revive a team-mate in 3 seconds, 2 people need 2 seconds (not 1.5) and 3 people need 1.5 seconds, not 1.
• Accelerate finishers – Currently stomping exposes the finisher to so much danger in team-fights making it impossible for some glassy builds to pull off due to excessive AoE and splash damage. Reducing the cast-time to 2 seconds (down from 3) would go a long way towards fixing this problem.
• Make Elementalist (and maybe Mesmer) downed-state counterable. Currently all downed-state deniers have counters that allow for an immediate stomp. All except Elementalists and (to a lesser extent) Mesmers. Elementalists have the most overpowered downed-state as it allows them to pass gates into safety, making them virtually immortal in siege situations. Mesmers can be countered, but require a recast of the stomp which just further exposes the finisher. Both need to be changed.
• No more resurrection of defeated players on combat. Simply put an end to people constantly resurrecting each other. Resurrections of defeated players should be limited to “out of combat”.

Those changes would fix the vast majority of problems I have with downed-state without ruining it for other aspects of the game.

Junkpile.7439:

Dee Jay.2460:

But none of that is an excuse to have them being so ridiculously overpowered and dominant as they are in current PvP combat.

WWW forum. We should talk about www not wannabe sPvP in www maps. Conditions are underpowered in current www combat.

Nope they’re not. WvW isn’t just about running zergs because why then debate anything but Guardians, Warriors and Necros?

And Conditions aren’t underpowered. They can just be easily cleansed because every Guardian is forced to run group-cleanses because without them Conditions would kitten on everyone.

If Conditions weren’t so overpowered then maybe not every class would have to dedicate a third of their traits and a third of their utilities just to cleanse them.

NinjaEd.3946:

Dee Jay.2460:

I used to play S/D for a long time and still do. But it’s been feeling more and more lackluster by the day.

I should really give D/P a try but that build is even glassier. I actually liked S/D because it wasn’t entirely about bursting people down and instead allowed you to show some skill.

But if you only have one role to fill in combat you might as well fill it right.

1. on d/p is an incredible skill. I don’t even use #6+#2 to spam stealth, as its overused and quite honestly ineffective against people with half a brain. Its all about the #1-3, and its hella fun. I’d give s/d a try if I didn’t watch it crumble to pieces over the last 7 or so months.

I have played D/P in WvW quite a bit and know how good it is. I just haven’t really tried it in sPvP because up until recently I was reasonably content with S/D.

But assuming we’re talking about the 10/30/0/0/30 build here, what do we use to cleanse conditions?

I used to play S/D for a long time and still do. But it’s been feeling more and more lackluster by the day.

I should really give D/P a try but that build is even glassier. I actually liked S/D because it wasn’t entirely about bursting people down and instead allowed you to show some skill.

But if you only have one role to fill in combat you might as well fill it right.

It’s because thanks to Torment and a myriad of new Runes and Sigils every Condition class can build to apply 3+ Conditions via auto-attack…..and many more once they use additional abilities.

And all that of course coupled with the +40% Condition duration food…which Power builds have nothing remotely comparable to.

Oh and they can also build for maximum tankiness AND high condition damage.

In the early days a Condition-build might have been able to apply 5 conditions at any time. Today the same build can fill you up with conditions in a split second, multiple times per fight. And all that with barely telegraphed attacks.

To be fair though Conditions are broken on the other end too, by being useless in downed-state, dealing almost no damage against doors and bosses and being weaker in PvE.

But none of that is an excuse to have them being so ridiculously overpowered and dominant as they are in current PvP combat.

If I had to point out one major flaw in GW2s combat design then I’d point towards the downed-state.

But if I had to point out two, I’d follow that downed-state with the fact that roughly 80% of skills in this game are AoE. AoE as well as poorly telegraphed.

Just look at your classes and see how many traits and skills affect an area, rather than a direct single target. This is completely counter to what GW2’s active combat was supposed to be about where you could dodge incoming big hits and important CC.

This is no longer the case when practically everything hits AoE. The amount of “splash damage” in this game is unbearable. Splash damage is damage that you take that is not aimed at you.

But since barely any skills have to be aimed and players and instead have an excessively generous targeting rectile there’s no way to avoid it. Instead of saving my 2 dodges I have every 15 seconds for important skills aimed at me I have to waste them just to get close to somebody without taking damage.

Just look at a typical Necro or Engineer doing their thing. Unaimed, untargeted damage and CC going out all around them.

And this is exasperated by the fact that unlike most MMOs, GW2 has no negative consequences for excessive ability use. The only limit is a cooldown and those are mostly very liberal or can be rotated around via weapon-switches. There’s no mana, rage of focus that would otherwise limit the mid-long term use of abilities.

Imo this has led to the least interesting, spammy and one-sided MMO combat I’ve seen in a game to date. And that’s a shame because the ingredients for greatness are there.

Itt we list our favorite activities, from good to bad.

• Southsun Survival
• Crab Toss
• Keg Brawl
• Sanctum Sprint

Imo Southsun Survival has the coolest actual game-play. It’s well placed and exciting, albeit a bit random at times. It’s just a shame that 80% of the time you join a game you spawn as a whisp and can’t actually partake.

Crab Toss is a fun brawl even though it gets excessively overcrowded towards the end. It too is mostly decided by who spawned the soonest.

Keg Brawl is ok, but you spend the majority of the time either running back and forth or being chain-stunned by crowd-control. Most games are also very one-sided for whatever reason. I think, as one of the oldest activities in game, this one would benefit most from a quick make-over.

Sanctum Sprint is just tedious after doing it so many times since it has very little player interaction in practice. Most of the time you start late and don’t actually race people head to head. Instead it just becomes an excessively long but easy jumping puzzle. The abilities you can use on each other aren’t really that cool either.

Yes, I agree to an extent.

ANet has a habit of cramming too much crap into a too confined space.

Imo Crab Toss should top out at 8 players, 1-2 Karka and never have more than crabs running around.

You can chain it 3-times but you can’t spam it. It also does really crappy damage so I really don’t think it’s OP.

1: What mode do you prefer

Overall WvW just because it’s the most community-focused and diverse aspect of the game.

2: How long have you been a thieve?

Launch

3: Compared to when you started, how long can you stay logged on to your thieve?

About the same. 95% of my play-time is on my Thief.

4: If you started a thieve now, would it be as much fun as launch?

Honestly, the core Thief game-play really hasn’t changed much since launch and neither has the fun-factor.

5 : Do you Agree with direction of the balance team?

Only in the most general of terms. But as soon as it comes to specific changes I think ANet misses the ball almost every time. They nerf what doesn’t need nerfing, change what isn’t a problem and ignore things that have been broken for ages.

Balance now isn’t any better or worse than it was during launch.

The next Living World update is on January 21st. That will begin the last Chapter of the Scarlet arc which will expand over the next 4 Living World updates.

It’s unclear if any of these Living World updates will contain any balance changes.

You must know ANet by now. A balance update more than once every 4 months is clearly too much to ask.

This is especially worrisome because they promised a big feature update at the end of this Living World chapter, which conveniently coincides with the launch of TESO.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if we were stuck without balance changes until this “feature update” in April.

A Thief can’t bunker, especially not if the build relies on Stealth.

Currently the two popular specs for competitive play are a 10/30/0/30/0 Sword + Dagger build that many evolves around constant evades and pressure from Larcenous Strike.

And 10/30/0/0/30 Dagger + Pistol which is a very offensive high-pressure build focused on burst and interrupts and mitigating via Black Powder.

For starters I’d say the S/D build is more forgiving as it gives you more time to adapt. D/P ist very “balls to the wall” and only truly effective if you know your role and place.

Essentially this is just a P/D play-style with a Power build.

You resort to S/P very rarely and even then mostly for non-essential stuff. P/D is clearly your preferred weapon of choice even in situations where S/P might have actually been quite powerful (like against that Warrior).

In general I’m not very impressed by P/D videos because they’re all the same 1-trick pony just messing about in various different situations. The fact that this build has Power instead of Condition Damage doesn’t change that fact.

But I will credit you for being kitten good with hitting Cloak and Dagger even in chaotic situations.

Basically a Deathknight is what most people here are dancing around.

Well there is still hope that ANet may make stats exchangeable in the future. But for now Agony Resistance is the main reason to get Ascended Gear so that’s what it should be based on.

If you aren’t familiar with dungeons you won’t be doing yourself or your group any favors by insisting on melee.

Melee combat is higher risk/reward and shouldn’t be attempted until you are both comfortable with your class and the content. Until then resort to Shortbow and/or Pistols.

And while I know that Daggers are a Thief’s signature weapon, you should really consider using Sword + Pistol in PvE. Black Powder allows you to basically auto-attack any non-champion mob to death with no threat to yourself. Even when fighting multiple mobs.

And the cleave damage means you are often dealing much more effective damage than you ever could with Daggers.

Imo Sword + Pistol is way more effective than Daggers in 90% of PvE situations. Try it and find out for yourself.

If Acrobatics were changed as follows:

Fleet of Foot – Remove a Condtion every time you dodge.
Assassin’s Reward – Heals you for 100 for every point of Initiative you use.

I’d give it a serious look. But until then it’s not getting more than 15 points.

I doubt this was ever an intentional design-decision.

But it’s how abilities work. Once the target is acquired even stealth wont stop it from firing and hitting.

It’s most noticeable on Volley since it’s the longest channeling ability I know. But too be honest, I think it’s kind of kittenty. I think ANet would change it if it was easy to fix because it’s completely counter-intuitive.

Before the next balance patch I want to make a statement about how to go about nerfing things the right way as opposed to just nerfing.

An example here is Healing Signet. I don’t think anyone here doubts that it has a nerf coming its way, and that’s fine.

But if ANet just nerfs the straight-up healing numbers it misses out on an opportunity to add some depths to the ability. Because aside from the raw amount of healing, the passive nature and lack of counters is what really make Healing Signet so powerful.

So instead of just nerfing the numbers I’d much prefer to see conditionals attached to Healing Signet, just like with most other passive heals.

For example, what if Healing Signet scaled from 200-400 HPS depending on how much Adrenalin you had (similar to Adrenal Healing). That way a Warrior would have to chose between using his/her burst skill or retaining a high HPS.

Or what if Healing Signet healed more, the lower the health of the Warrior is. 200 HPS while above 66% health, 300 HPS while above 33% health and 400 HPS while below 33% health. That would reward opponents who save up their cooldowns to burst down the Warrior.

Or you could have it heal more, for every condition applied to the Warrior. For example lets assume the base-healing is nerfed to 300 HPS, but you gain an additional 25 HPS for every condition applied to you. This adds negative synergy to stuff like Berserker Stance and Cleansing Ire.

I’m not saying my ideas are great. But I’m trying to make a point that every nerf is also an opportunity to add depth to the game.

On a similar note it also poses an opportunity to address more general problems. Let’s just accept for a moment that the game suffers from an abundance of AoE and cleave damage that is often not even targeted.

When Necromancers have their nerf coming it would be best to do this in a way that also helps mitigate the aforementioned issue. Making skills more telegraphed, limiting their cleave components etc is often far better than nerfing their straight-up damage.

It does seem entirely counter-intuitive to have siege be so vulnerable on walls. In fact walls themselves are more dangerous to defenders than attackers.

I don’t believe this was ever intended to be this way. It’s just a side-effect of how AoE targeting works.

Currently, unless you know exact spots, Siege on walls just gets destroyed instantly by AoE. Placing them behind walls really limits their firing range.

But this is just another thing on a long list of stuff that needs to be addressed at some point.

For PvE this is largely true, especially if you are very familiar with the content.

But I do remember when the game launched and MANY people struggled with the dungeons. But yeah, as people for more familiar with the game paterns evolved and what seemed difficult before is now either skipped or bursted down.

Given PvE’s emphasis on dodging as the main form of damage avoidance this isn’t surprising. No class is really built to take the damage bosses throw at you so you might as well go full DPS. At least that add something beneficial.

But in sPvP the entire game-mode favors bunkers builds and ones with lots of staying power.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

wow why zero score? O_O

I blame the Elementalist.

Wow I didn’t think I’d see a quality WvW clip of a Thief again.

But this is some quality stuff.

At first I was thinking he’d just cheese around by spaming Dodge. After all S/D is one of our strongest 1v1 specs. But this guy is excellent with his timings, his evades and weapon switches.

Extremely quick reflexes too, I’m honestly impressed.

Lopez.7369:

That’s fine. The developers have my feedback, so I’m content with what I’ve said.

If you want to learn more about high-level play, look up some streams.

You can’t balance a game simply around the best players.

You have to account for low risk-reward and cheese builds as well.

Balancing the game for the top 5% has never made game more fun and successful.

Since December 10th I’ve been observing this bug on a regular basis when summoning the Phantasmal Warden. Rather than attacking the mob straight away the Phantasm will just stand there idle rather than attack.

Sometimes it starts attacking after a few seconds (instead of right away) but often it just doesn’t do anything.

I didn’t observe this bug much before December 10th so I assume it has something to do with it.

I was expecting this thread to be a year old.

I was disappointed.

What’s wrong with nerfing Healing Signet? It’s the most powerful heal in game, it’s passive and it’s on an already durable class.

People were demanding a nerf before December 10th and they still demand one now. ANet can’t avoid it forever although their reluctance to do so is baffling.

The mobility itself wouldn’t be that much of a problem.

But coupled with Healing Signet, Regeneration on Immobilize, and their high resistance to conditions makes them able to get away alive, even at 5% HP.

That’s not ok. Basically as soon as the Warrior decides to run, he survives (assuming he has the right build).

Big Tower.5423:

D/D has highest direct damage. Nothing else matters in a pve sitation.

It does actually.

I’m still not sold on the fact that D/D does that much more damage in PvE compared to S/P.

At least not in practice when you account for the odd Frontstab and other DPS losses. S/P on the other hand can spam Black Powder for easy mitigation, extremely useful when your group stacks, and Pistol Whip for the odd interrupts and DPS during boss-fights.

When I compare damage numbers between Sword and Dagger mainhand, I’m not sure the difference is as large as people make it out to be.

I bet if there was a damage meter in game, that S/P would out-DPS D/D in 9/10 dungeon runs. And that’s not even considering the mitigation coming from Black Powder, stuns and constant Weakness application.

I think it would certainly help since animations currently just aren’t distinct enough.

Currently duels are often decided by who, by random chance, could dodge what essential skill.

But I don’t think it would change much about group combat that remains a massive AoE spam-fest.

It does seem more pronounced compared to what I have. Yes Disabling Shot among other Thief abilities has always been rather “laggy”.

A lot of abilities on the Thief seem to suffer from similar lag and will often not react at all or with half a second delay. I’m not sure what the problem is. For a while I blamed it on my WLAN but even after using a cable connection it didn’t improve.

I think it’s something about the engine and how it doesn’t do well with movement-altering abilities. They seem to strain it a lot.

Great data and it kinda confirms what I’ve been stating on these boards.

Warriors and Necros make you win.

The whole stomp/downed-state mechanic is just so game-breakingly bad I’ve given up all hope for good PvP in this game.

It makes fighting while outnumbered effectively futile when a group of players, no matter how bad, can just instantly revive each other within a second. Let alone the fact that getting off a stomp often takes much longer than the fight itself.

Glass-Cannon Ele dies in 3 seconds but it takes 10 seconds to stomp them and 1 second for their friends to revive them. That right there is the pinnacle of this idiotic PvE mechanic.

I’m not sure it discourages people fighting in general but it certainly discourages fighting when you’re outmanned. Even if you outplay them by a margin they still just get to revive each other indefinitely.

At no point have I gotten the impression that PvE balance is even an afterthought.

I mean there’s no benchmark for PvE performance anyhow. No DPS meter, no test-fight, nothing. Warriors and Guardians have been the “go to” classes for PvE ever since launch and nothing has changed about that and it doesn’t seem like anything ever will.

Conditions are mechanically broken in PvE and that too was never a concern.

PvE is simply irrelevant to any balance debate in this game.

That leaves sPvP and WvW, both of which are fundamentally PvP content. So I see no reason why both should follow different rule-sets. If something is balanced for PvP it should apply to both WvW and sPvP.

Having different “Revealed” timers for example is just annoying.

Generally speaking D/P counters all Thief build pretty hard that rely on Cloak and Dagger. Those constant Blinds break any effective use of Cloak and Dagger.

It’s probably overall more effective than D/D too although the difference isn’t as big as it was before December 10th. Now that D/D can use Cloaked in Shadows as well both have access to frequent Blinds.

Both can do quite well with D/D emphasizing damage and D/P emphasizing mobility and Blinds.

Personally I like the D/D play-style more as D/P always send me into a rage-fit when I accidentally Heartseeker into a critter, thus breaking my Stealth.

I’d say the kill/save ratio of Last Refuge is about 50/50 with me.

It’s much more problematic with Dagger Offhand than any other weapon due to Cloak and Dagger. It’s not nearly as bad with Pistol Offhand although it can still be annoying.

Either way it needs to be changed, either like Decoy in so that it ignores Revealed or replaced completely.

I found it ironic that there were Wildstar adds displayed in the background on twitter.

I wanted to share my take on certain builds and where they stand. If I don’t mention a specific build that it’s probably because I haven’t encountered it enough to give it a fair opinion.

This is for sPvP mostly, based on SoloQ and TeamQ experiences. Things are different in WvW where the +40% Condition food among other things makes a HUGE difference.

1. Overpowered

• Warriors, more specifically Healing Signet. It’s the best heal for almost all builds and has the strongest HPS of any passive heal in game. Unlike other passive heals it also doesn’t have any conditional attached to it. It ticks always, all the time. Without Healing Signet Warriors would just be strong, but not really overpowered.
• Necromancers, both the Condition bombing build and the Minion Masters. Personally I think Minion Masters are especially strong in 1v1, but slightly less useful in group-fights. However Necromancers popular builds definitely carry them into the top tier.
• Spirit Rangers, this is borderline, but the fact that they can instantly self-rezz and are so easy to play really makes them overpowered. If they got away with less passive play and auto-attack spamming, caused less screen-clutter and couldn’t self-rezz I’d find them much more acceptable.
• Engineers, more specifically their Condition Bunker builds. These are rare outside of TeamQ but kitten are they overpowered. Nigh unkillable even by multiple players and able to apply significant condition pressure. Not ok.

2. Strong

• Guardians, both Bunkers and well-played DPS Guardians. I was tempted to put Bunker Guardians as overpowered considering how much punishment they can take and how imperative they are to Conquest. But at least they pay the price of having to give up almost all offensive power to do so. I’d like to see them Bunkers being slightly squisher in favor of slightly more DPS.
• Other Necromancer builds. I feel that a Necro is always useful even if not following a FotM build. The conditions, the AoE pressure and the ability to take quite some punishment are invaluable.
• Thief, all popular builds. I think Thieves have their niche and can fill it in multiple ways. S/D and D/P being the most effective means. While their role is limited they do fill it quite well and require slightly more attention than other classes. It would be nice if Thieves could fulfill other roles too, but that’s something of a 1st World Problem.
• Mesmers are a borderline case again. They are generally quite good but again don’t have a field they excel in. They have some strong builds but nothing quite as overpowered as some others. Other builds are just generally average. I don’t really PvP much on my Mesmer so I can’t give much quality feedback.
• Engineers, non-bunker builds – I’ve always felt Engineers have a lot to offer and is a valuable asset in all situations. I don’t know specific builds but they certainly don’t suck.

Average or worse

• Elementalist – I can’t really comment much on them since they underwent some major changes recently. But in sPvP it’s a class that has never caused me trouble nor felt all that useful compared to others. Currently there aren’t any situations in sPvP where I’d like to have an Elementalist over….say a Necromancer.
• Non-Spirit Ranger – Rangers that don’t use the Spirit Ranger build are rarely much of a challenge. Maybe the players I’ve met were just bad but they don’t really seem to have any unique strengths to help define them.

Bare in mind that any nerf to the overpowered classes automatically makes the other better. Currently balance isn’t terrible, at least not in sPvP, but it does require some attention. WvW however is a different matter completely.

Most classes are very simplistic in GW2 and just tend to rotate cooldowns. Engineers and Elementalists have a little more going for them as they have a more complex class mechanic. But even they are mostly limited by cooldowns and little else. So there are still fixed “rotations”, they just require more attention.

In the scope of overall MMO class complexity though all GW2 characters rank rather low.

Just play tPvP like everyone else.

• More points
• Better rewards
• No 4 vs. 5 (only very rarely due to DC’s)
• No Skyhammer

I wish I had realized this sooner, it would have saved me a lot of grief. But teamQ is essentially the new SoloQ now anyway,

I think they’ve been deliberately holding back on expansive changes so they can release them all at once to retain players once TESO launches.

I hope we will see quite an extensive rework of some mechanics. Maybe a new weapon-set for most classes, a rebalance of traits, reworking of condition mechanics, new PvP game mode and others.

Ther’s plenty of aspect ANet can improve to retain players during the launch of TESO.

Then again, GW2 does not really “complete” the same way other games do. We pay no monthly subs so ANet doesn’t require us to play in order to turn a profit. Those most likely to switch are probably the ones who don’t buy many Gems anyway.

Following TESO is going to be interesting. Apparently it has a 200 Mio. $ price-tag and yet many players have voiced their discontent with it. Then again it has 3 way PvP and people are hungry for new MMOs after the drought of the past years.

Haven’t really had a major launch since SWTOR (excl. GW2) and we all know how that went.

Yes, reduce it to 300 HP/second and see how that goes.

Alternatively, find a different mechanic. Something like “heals more the less health you have”. That way it heals 400 HP/second when blow 33% HP, 300 HP/second between 33 and 66% HP and 200 HP/second when above 66% HP.

Might make it a bit more interesting.

Here’s more, these areas used to be densely populated.

Sorry, I had uploaded uncensored pics.

Anyway, this wasn’t a question about farming, I just thought it might have to do with the next Living Story update. Then again, maybe it’s a bug.

It’s still odd how consistent it is.

I like Deadly Arts up to 15 points but everything after that just sucks.

It’s a shame really because the passive damage increase from Power is amazing but the traits are just so poor. Venoms are a niche, especially for Power builds and the cooldown reductions etc. just aren’t that great.

The passive things like +5% damage are just weak in general and shouldn’t ever be considered. I mean 5% damage increase for a single ability….almost every Sigil and trait is better than that.

Ok so I’ve just replaced my Beryl Orbs with Runes of Strength and am actually impressed by the DPS increase.

I recorded a series of Backstabs against Karka and had them average around 5000 with the Beryl Orbs (112% Crit-Damage).

With Runes of Strength the Backstab damage increased to roughly an average of 5200, which is substantial against softer targets. Auto-attack damage increased too. It just goes to show how much better Power is than any other DPS stat.

Frankly I think that anyone who think Powermancers/Dhuumfire Necros are fine hasn’t seen how ridiculous they are in action.

I don’t buy it Travelers Runes being so important for a Thief. Activating Signet of Shadows takes 3 seconds when not in combat so the whole-over-land travel speed argument isn’t valid. Also consider how much time someone else is buffing you with Swiftness.

Since I spend my time about 50/50 between solo-roaming and zerging I just don’t think Traveler Runes are as great as people make them out to be.

• They are worthless when you have Swiftness.
• They are only useful when not stealthed when you have Fleet Shadows. A Dagger Thief typically spends 60% of a fight in stealth.
• Signet of Shadows can always be switched in for longer overland travel.

So really the benefits of Traveler Runes only apply to a very small niche or if people are too lazy to switch out Signet of Shadows before a fight.