Guild Wars 2

From all the MMOs I’ve played over the past decade I find the CC in GW2 to be the most frustrating of all.

This may seem odd at first since at first glance, CC in GW2 is of fairly short duration and not all classes have much of it. That’s true to a point, but only until you consider other factors.

1. CC duration vs. time to live.

In GW2 the time-to-live for your character depends heavily on your class and build. I’m going to base this off a 1v1 situation + some additional random AoE damage flying about (assume a node-team-fight with one guy targeting you). Soft glass-cannons (Thieves, Eles) may barely last 2 seconds in such a situation.

Compare that to say World of Warcraft, where every character could take a 10 second beat-down even while afk.

Now look at your 3 second fears or stuns in such a situation and compare it to the max. 6 second stuns/fears in WoW (with most being considerably shorter). GW2’s average CC duration is 100-150% of it lowest time-to-live character while WoW’s is 60% tops.

2. CC is fairly abundant on certain builds.

For the first few months of GW2, CC wasn’t a major focus for most builds. But now it is, especially in WvW where CC is the decisive key to many zerg fights. Nowadays PvP combat is all about CC your enemy as much as possible while beating him down with damage or conditions. Hammer Warriors are the pinnacle of this development but Necros and Mesmers aren’t that far off.

Fighting classes that have one or two minor CCs is fine. But fighting classes that have more…or just revolve around CC…is incredibly frustrating.

3. So much CC is AoE

This is probably the biggest difference to most previous MMOs. Most CC ins GW2 is AoE. Very little of it needs to actually be targeted as a specific target. Instead it’s enough to throw it in the general direction of your enemy and you will achieve the desired effect.

This is what makes node-fights and zerg battles such a clusterkitten and is a big reason why playing such content without Stability is very frustrating.

Ironically Stability, the only real counter to this CC spam, is most available to classes that are the biggest CC spamers.
__________________________________

If your favorite class has access to Stability you may disagree with my assessment. But play a class that has no such thing and I’m sure you’ll eventually reach the same conclusion.

So like most Thieves I play a Dagger/Pistol in WvW, occasionally switching to D/D whenever I get annoyed at Heartseeking into some random mob while stealthing.

I used to run with runes of the Scholar for obvious reasons but eventually acknowledged that I spent fairly little time above 90% HP and thus the bonus probably wasn’t paying off.

So I switched to Runes of the Ogre. And while the Pet does a decent amount of damage and spawns frequently enough, it also reveals my location when I stealth and is itself a viable target for Cloak and Dagger which really hurts in duels. It also isn’t all that effective in PvP situations with all the mobility and AoE going on.

So I am looking for alternatives. I’d much prefer Power-Runes because I run a Valkyrie build with high HP and Crit-Damage, but low Crit-Chance. That’s also what makes the Runes of Divinity less appealing.

The same question is extended to buff food. I’ve generally been a fan of Omnomberry Pies/Ghosts because they really do heal for quite a bit, especially during Daggerstorm. Getting healed for roughly 350 every few seconds is good in combat.

But maybe there are better choices I haven’t considered.

Because WvW is the only content that is intrinsically fun (despite occasional frustrations).

All other content either gets boring and repetitive quickly or is only “fun” because of rewards.

This is roughly accurate according to my experience. But I don’t see much you can do about it. They already give players more than enough time to turn up. In fact that 2 minute wait before each match is probably why people afk.

I guess they could punish everyone who has 0 points by the end of the match.

I don’t think any build in GW2 is very difficult to play, especially not if you’re used to playing other MMOs.

Most classes and Thieves especially evolve around a 1 or 2 trick-pony act and are fairly simple to play. Hence I find that GW2 has a comparatively low skill-ceiling given the limited opportunities each build posses.

Instead skill evolves more around situational awareness and knowledge of other classes and doesn’t really have much to do with your build.

DevonCarver.5370:

Dese.1382:

MiLkZz.4789:

Imagine you taking down 1 gate/wall of a a keep/tower. Imagine 50 people inside which ain’t that abnormal. Imagine they all chaining their aoe into the gap. Good luck walking through and surviving.

Aoe cap is there not only for the servers, but also because some things will be just impossible to cap and some classes will be rediculously OP. Like Ele and ranger, no. If aoe is unlimited, make healing unlimited aswel and all the other spells. But OOPS, we are back to 0 than…

So yea aoe cap is there for a really really good reason.

There is a dev post flat out saying, in plain english, its there for the simple reason of server performance.

I will say it again. If the cap were raised performance would suffer greatly. That is why it hasn’t been changed.

While I agree that performance should be priority No. 1 (no one enjoys playing with lag) it does pose some serious questions about the combat design.

How come GW2 handles AoE comparatively badly compared to other MMOs?

It also poses the question of why there is so much AoE in the first place. I’d wager somewhere close to 80% of damage abilities have some sort of AoE component and so many abilities are some sort of AoE. Is this necessary because I don’t find it fun.

Minions, aka. AI surely exasperates the issue too when you have 50% of your targets being made up of minions. Surely reducing the number of Illusions, Pets and Demons must improve performance significantly. Maybe these aspects should be considered during further game-design iterations.

The lack of incentives isn’t really what’s holding back defense.

It’s the lack of effective counters to blobs.

Arrow Carts are the only tool in the shed capable of countering that massive blob of players knocking at your door. And even with ACs you need to reach a critical mass before they become really lethal. Until then people will continue to resurrect and revive their dead while under fire.

Then there’s the problem that walls are a straight-up death trap for anyone standing on them thanks to the massive amount of AoE and Necro-circles that are spammed on it. The walls are the most dangerous place to be rather and offer no protection to the defenders.

There is also no advantage to having an elevated position. the range calculation takes height into account so someone on the wall with 900 range can barely shoot at the foot of the wall. All someone needs to do to avoid his damage is to take a step back.

That’s the real problems.

ArkAngel.7940:

Spicyhash.7605:

I don’t mind it as much anymore. I alt-f4 any time I get downed and don’t rally instantly. I don’t care about repair costs or giving the other team points or anything like that, I just hate sitting there and waiting to die if nobody has immediately stomped me. it’s a waste of time. it is much quicker to just log out to character select/alt-f4 and log back in and get back into the fray then it is to wait to have your ridiculous downed health pool go away.

That is probably the saddest thing I’ve ever read in this forum.

But it’s true. Your respawn timer in sPvP doesn’t start until you are completely dead so it really is quicker to just skip the downed-state phase straight away if you know you’re not going to rally.

It is by far the most unnecessary, unfun, frustrating and imbalanced game-feature to ever grace the PvP scene of any MMO do date.

Your death are probably due to:

1. Conditions being down-right absurd at the moment. Not only are there so many, they are also easy to apply and tick for crazy damage numbers.

2. Everything is AoE. Be it CC, Condition spam or just straight damage. Nobody needs to aim anymore….just cleave your damage in the general direction of your enemy and win.

D/P is down-right better in most situations even if I hate the stealth-mechanic it relies on.

In either case make sure you’re running with the condition-cleanse utility rather than the “blind on stealth”.

Shemsu.8721:

Okaishi.8320:

Giving a specific class a counter to stealth is just stupid in my opinion, and I think it’s the wrong kind of counter anyway. For me it would make perfect sense to nerf perma stealth in a different way, perhaps like making it impossible to stack stealth for more than 2 or 3 times?

Fixing d/p perma stealth is so easy, add a 3 second icd to infusion of shadow, problem solved. They aren’t trying to fix permastealth.

Good point,

there are better ways to go about nerfing perma-stealth than adding a new utility to an unpopular ability.

Yeah, this chain-CC spam, especially with much of it being AoE, is god kitten atrocious.

Nobody likes being chain-CC’d and to be fair GW2 managed to avoid it on most classes, Warriors being the exception.

I mean 7 second stun-chains would be a hard sell in WoW, but at least there every class could tank another for 10 seconds. In GW2 your time to live is far shorter and a single stun can often be the end of you.

In that kind of environment such CC-chains as featured by the Hammer are impossible to justify.

Maybe make Hammers about more than simply AoE stunning your opponents until they rage quit.

Technically Dagger/Pistol is currently the “go to” Thief WvW spec, combined with either a 0/30/30/10/0 or a 0/20/30/20/0 build.

It has a series of advantages over the good old Dagger/Dagger as in it offers you a chance to go toe to toe with Warriors thanks to Black Powder and you can hide in Stealth near infinitely. It also doesn’t need a target to get into Stealth so you have a much easier time against other Stealth classes.

On the down side the entire Stealth mechanic (combo field + leap) is very convoluted and prone to nuisances like accidentally leaping into certain targets and getting revealed. In general it’s probably the most unintuitive Stealth mechanic in game.

But I have no doubt it is currently superior to any Dagger/Dagger build out there, simply because of the importance of Black Powder and Headshot in the current meta. I mean even just being able to interrupt revives is worth a lot.

I’m more surprised someone at ANet obviously thought finding 10 random locations on a map was considered engaging game-play and worth a random achievement.

I mean really?

I don’t really feel the game deserves it but apparently it meant a lot to the devs.

It’s just that I feel balancing overall and the game-design haven’t really progressed well over the past year.

I just wish they’d drop the whole RNG element from the salvaging process. It makes finding yellows very unrewarding if you are left with nothing to show for them.

Afaik you get roughly 8 ectos for every 10 yellows you salvage. But then you get 2-3 ectos for roughly 10% of them meaning roughly half your salvages are duds.

Why can’t they just say “right, 1 ecto for every salvage”? Isn’t there enough RNG involved in finding the yellow item in the first place?

In general these abilities all just further increase the offensive aspect of WvW while giving defenders even less incentive and time to actually try and defend.

Yay, thanks to all these damage increases towers will now drop in 30 seconds instead of kitten now an enemy zerg couldn’t get there in time even if they wanted to.

I could get behind this if they removed player trash damage (or at least ranged) but I don’t see that happening.

Breaking down the problem it’s clear that there are issues with stealth.

But Stealth in itself is not broken or overpowered although I agree it is poorly implemented.

Stealth does not make Thieves disappear. In fact they will die in Stealth fairly often especially given how excessive CC and AoE is in GW2. With very few abilities actually needing targets and AI reacting instantly to stealth-mechanics it’s not nearly as powerful as it could be.

The problem is two-fold.

1. Stealth does too much.
-Stealth makes Thieves invisible.
-Stealth increases their movement-speed
-Stealth heals Thieves.
-Stealth can increase their Initiative regeneration.
-Stealth blinds people nearby.
-Stealth sets-up Backstabs, the biggest burst-attack in game.
-Stealth cleanses Conditions every 3 seconds.

Now depending on the build, most Thieves will have a number of these abilities tied to Stealth. It just makes Stealth incredibly powerful and stealthing as frequently as possible becomes necessary for success.

2. Thieves rely on Stealth.

Given all the benefits of Stealth it is no surprise most popular Thief-builds somehow involve the frequent use of Stealth. Evade-spam being one of the few exceptions to the rule. That’s because Thieves are completely nonviable without.

Take Adrenaline from a Warrior and he can still function reasonably well. But take Stealth from a Thief and you are left with a squishy melee-class with no redeemable qualities.

I’d actually like to see a good and more well-rounded Thief build that didn’t just rely on a single-gimmick or synergy-abuse. But given the mechanics ANet has put in place I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

PS: I also don’t believe the currently popular Dagger/Pistol build was ever purposefully designed with the current play-style in mind. It just evolved as players were forced to adapt to an increasingly CC- and AoE spaming environment.

Because let’s face it, creating a combo field and leaping through it 2-3 times is and extremely convoluted stealth mechanic.

Arrow Carts are the ONLY weapon that even gets close to countering Zergs. Nerfing them would just encourage more and more zerging which we have enough of.

In fact plenty of times Zergs still can comfortably rezz their dead while under AC fire, something that shouldn’t be possible.

If Arrow Carts don’t have a proper counter, except for more Arrow Carts, then that’s a different problem.

Knote.2904:

Rama.6439:

I love it, you get champ bags, rares, blues and greens, and you still complain, lol.

You PvErs are some piece of work, gimme, gimme, gimme.

You’re ridiculous.

Risk/Reward is screwed up and is a problem.

There’s no risk to the PvE side of this game.

I bought the Lover after the Karka Event by selling all my T6 mats I had at the time.

Paid off because Precursors were really “cheap” at that time and T6 mats were expensive.

I paid 130 Gold for it iirc.

I assume these complaints are centered around the stat-increase aspect of the buff, not so much the “get points for finishers” aspect.

If that is the case then I concur.

In general I like the changes although the new map elements don’t really mesh organically with the rest of the map.

That said, the Bloodlust stat-increases are absolutely unnecessary and I have no idea why ANet went ahead with it despite early complaints. Getting points for finishers is reason enough to want the buff.

Bloodlust already accounts for 25-35% of the overall scoring. Having increased stats is just uncalled for.

I find it slightly annoying just how fast AI reacts to a player de-stealthing.

That would be…..instantly, much faster than any human could ever react. The split second you drop out of Stealth is the moment all those Ilussionary Phantoms and Hunter-pets go charging at you.

The player should at least be forced to reacquire the target before minions activate.

This is twice as annoying because minions certainly don’y react instantly to someone going into Stealth. Instead you have your usual 1-4 second “stealth delay” where you’re still getting hit by channeled abilities seconds after entering stealth.

Not cool.

Destiny.6738:

It’s because of the devs – for sure. Even they have little ressources, they just use them completely wrong. They wasted a lot of time for creating skyhammer, just to give an example. Dev’s are not even playing their game, so how should they know what’s wrong in PvP? (they could know, by listening to the community, but…they just don’t) So please, don’t expect any big changes for the next patch.

Yeah Skyhammer is a big “kitten” for sPVP and an obvious sign that ANet doesn’t understand their own game and community.

Either that or they purposefully ignore them like they did with the Bloodlust stat-buffs.

sPvPer in general prefer maps without too many gimmicks. But Skyhammer is nothing but a giant gimmick littered with pathing issues and terrible design decisions.

I mean it’s ironic considering how much ANet seems to love the concept of “verticality” but how few of the actual abilities work with it.

This issue notoriously occurs when using Stealth, which is ironic because Stealth should really help you avoid and escape combat.

It seems to be less of an issue in PvP and WvW too, but in PvE it’s really annoying, especially in Jumping Puzzles.

This really does need to be fixed.

If I don’t take damage and don’t deal damage for roughly 10 seconds, consider me out of combat.

Dual Pistols + Ricochet pack quite the punch during Tequatl.

Far more than any other class I know of aside from Eles Ice Bow.

Yeah, just looking at some of the abilities tells you that conditions today aren’t what they were designed to be.

Basically any ability today that doesn’t remove all your conditions isn’t worth it because they are so easily applied both passively and AoE.

Look at Singet of Agility for example, a Thief condition cleanse. It removes 1 condition on a 30 second cooldown.

You can picture how useful that is in the current meta game.

Yeah, they really need to find a better solution for conditions in PvE, especially if they continue with their current focus on PvE raids.

But being a Crit-heavy Power build isn’t so much better either, especially if you rely on Crits for certain proccs.

They really should just make bosses normal mobs like everything else instead of treating them like objects.

I must admit that I find the 3 vs. 4 seconds of “Revealed” to be really jarring when coming from WvW into sPvP.

The timing of Stealth is essential to a lot of Thief builds and timing is based on “feeling”, rather than looking at your condition bar.

And having two different “Revealed” timers is just bad to be honest.

Considering that none of the Stealth-heavy builds is all that popular in sPvP at the moment I propose the return to 3 seconds “Revealed” in sPvP. The more mechanics that work identically in both sPvP and the rest of the game, the better.

The title basically says it all. For a game that appeared very “anti-raid” originally it’s surprising for them to have created what is probably the biggest raid-encounter to date.

I mean Sparkfly Fen is essential locked at 130 players (roughly) and you need coordination and practice to prevail throughout the encounter.

Doing the fight without our typical raid-preparation is essentially “pugging” the boss and absolutely futile. In fact this Tequatl encounter (and the previous Clockwork events) made me despise the overflow server system.

That said, this Tequatl encounter is probably the best argument for having “real” raid instances in GW2 because doing it was the most fun I’ve had in a while and one of the few “kitten yeah” moments of success I’ve enjoyed throughout the game.

So in case you ever want to give real raid-instances a try you have my support.

I was thinking that the trait trees do somewhat limit the potential of GW2’s character system.

So assume for a second that trait-lines didn’t exist and you could pick any combination of 7 Major Traits and 7 Minor traits (or 6 Major + 8 Minor).

The passive stat-bonuses would be customized separately.

Well first if modern MMOs have taught us anything, then that players will go where the rewards are, regardless of whether it’s really “fun” (incidentally getting good reward equals “fun” for many).

And this is the biggest flaw with sPvP as it has no real rewards.

The whole separation between the sPvP world and the normal world has just alienated a lot of players because anything you do in sPvP is ultimately pointless for the progression of your character.

Then there’s the entire failed reward-system with gazillions of items, salvaging, crafting, glory etc. and all for items you don’t really need or want.

People who do sPvP have nothing to show for it in the rest of the game.

And then there’s still WvW which provides many with their desired PvP fix, but in a much more varied and interesting context.

If you want to encourage people to sPvP give them rewards that are worthwhile for the entire game, not just the micro cosmos of the mists.

-Give sPvPs access to unique skins that are only attainable in sPvP and do carry over into the rest of the game. If someone is awesome, they should be able to show it.

-Make sPvP less about item-juggling. Legendaries already introduced the tech for changing your stat-combos on the items. Introduce the same for sPvP Gems.

-Drop the whole convoluted sPvP crafting system and glory system. Instead have the winners get a regular Champion loot box as a reward for winning a tournament map.

-Reduce the 2 minute wait prior to every tournament match. It’s tedious and everyone just tries to ignore it for as long as possible. Drop it down to 50 seconds or so.

I wholeheartedly agree with the OP.

PvP combat in GW2 is comparatively shallow and doesn’t have much counter-play to it.

I know people ask for dueling a lot, but let’s be honest, dueling in GW2 is a pretty sad experience. Much of the outcome is dictated by your class and build rather than your personal skill.

In contrast I do have very fond memories from dueling in WoW. Warrior vs. Frost-Mage was one of my personal highlights. It had abilities countering each other, skill-baiting, fake-casting etc. Everything that makes a good duel.

GW2 doesn’t have that and won’t ever have it to the same extent given the game-design. But Elementalists are closer than most and their class design should serve as a template for others.

These changes certainly changed the dynamics of WvW which is good, since it was getting a little static. I’m curious to see how the Bloodlust buff plays out.

But I too agree the stat bonuses weren’t necessary.

That’s not quite what I meant.

Of course players build their characters around having certain boons at specific moments and that’s fine. It’s not the players fault that boons and conditions are so liberally used. It’s the way the game is designed.

Take a hypothetical situation:

I face an enemy that has Protection up. This is a 33% damage reduction.

I have an ability at my disposal that can steal a Boon.

Now typically my decision process would go something like this:

→ Shall I waste a GCD to remove a Boon or use it to DPS instead?
→ Is this a difficult enemy and is it worth blowing my cooldown on this or shall I just ignore the Protection?
→ Maybe I should hold on to my ability until I need to steal a Boon for self-preservation.

Now in GW2 I do not think like that because based on personal experience, even if I do remove Protection, it will be re-applied somehow, from somewhere in a matter of seconds.

Just join a hot-join as a Spectator for a few minutes and observe a Node-Battle involving 4 players. Check their Boon bar and you will see various Boon constantly being applied, especially if a Guardian or Elementalist is around.

Applying Boons happens so quickly and seamlessly that I often don’t even notice.

Conditions are in a similar boat.

They too are applied very liberally, often via auto-attacks or passive AoE effects. “Weakness” isn’t the condition you use to mitigate the damage of a dangerous melee class. It’s not an active decision. It’s something you apply passively via your auto-attack.

Originally it was my impression that Boons were supposed to replace your standard buffs with a more active “in combat” decisions. But this has resulted into an abundance of passive Boons and Conditions effects due to the limited number of skills available to players.

Or to put it in other words, how relevant is the ability to steal 1-2 boons on a 30 second cooldown in a world where Elementalist, Guardians are rolling practically all the available buffs nearly all of the time?

I feel like you missed my point entirely.

Advent.6193:

Nah. They didn’t forget that one. It’s more that folk are in arms about a fully mobile anti-stealth maneuver. But, yes – the sheer amount of things that you can do to yourself and get de-cloaked by “accident” is kinda silly.

Yeah, I hate how contrived the whole Revealed mechanic is. I understand why it exists but god kitten it’s so fickle and sensitive to all kinds of things.

I didn’t like it at first either but it grew on me after a while. It takes a bit of getting-used to but it’s still our most viable sPvP build.

While it’s still too premature to judge my general feelings are:

The Borderlands revamp and the Bloodlust mechanic are good.

The stat-bonuses associated with Bloodlust are very bad.

evilapprentice.6379:

-snip-

You make a good case. While I do think there is merit to what I stated you have convinced me that the lack of focus on the weapon-sets is the bigger issue.

Death Blossom spammers spam Death Blossom mostly because there is no other melee-Condition damage attack.

Sneak Attack spammer spam Sneak Attack because there is no other decent ranged Bleed attack.

A more clear-cut (X/Y is for Condition builds, A/B is for Power-builds) would probably address a lot of my complaints.

Celestial gear afaik is only really a viable choice for Elementalists and Guardians, i.e. classes that scale well with all of the stats.

Thieves do not benefit much from “all stats”.

Instead you’re going to have to chose either a Power or Condition focus with the Shortbow. You can’t cater to both play-styles.

If you prefer Power-build I’d probably go for Berserker stats since the Shortbow has sufficient defensive capabilities and scales well with the stats.

if you want to focus on Condition stats, “Dire” might be the right choice, depending on your build.

When originally conceived I believe Boons and Conditions were meant to be actual decisions made by players.

Something along the lines of…

“Oh, here comes a dangerous melee foe, better apply Weakness”.

Boons were probably designed under the same premise.

“Ok, the Boss is using his fire breath. Better trigger Protection.

I believe this is what it was meant to be like. But instead the game has evolved to a point where both Conditions and Boons are constantly spammed.

It seems like every auto-attack chain applies at least one Condition, sometime more. Powerful Boons like Protection are tied to abilities you can use every few seconds (like Dodge), ensuring a really high uptime.

I don’t recall the last time I ran a 5 man dungeon and the Boss didn’t have ALL possible conditions applied to him, even without a Necromancer.

When running with Guardians you also have all kinds of Boons rolling on you all the time. Most of the are applied passively and are never and active decision.

I feel this is a flaw in game design as given the potency of Boons and Conditions, they should be active decisions.

When I chose to strip a Boon from an enemy, this should give me a brief upper hand. But in most cases the target, be it an enemy player or a Dredge, will just have the same Boon up and running two seconds later.

Looking at some of the abilities like Singet of Agility that will remove one Condition (if solo) and is on a 30 second cooldown it’s obvious that this was designed around the original mantra. But how useful is such an ability in today’s world where a Necromancer can apply 6 Conditions within a second without even targeting you?

It seems like one design approach is clashing with the other and you need to decide which one to follow.

Should Conditions and Boons be tactical elements or something that is passively spamed in order to boost your effectiveness?

In either case changes are in order.

S

Warrior – Their combined durability and ability to constantly AoE stun is overpowered.

Necromancer – Again insane survivability combined with constant fear and a ridiculous amount of conditions being applied AoE.

A+

S/D Thief is pretty decent but the only Thief build that is remotely competitive. All other Thief builds are significantly worse.

Guardians – The only thing fundamentally broken about Guardians is their insane survivability, much of which is based on their constant boon-spaming. No class should be able to tank 2-3 enemy players for an extended period of time. Conquests exasperates this issue to an extent.

A

Ranger – Their Evade spam build is pretty strong and probably closer to A+ levels, but in general the class is roughly where it’s supposed to be.

Engineer – This has always felt like something of a wildcard to me. Some Engineer-builds are really powerful, others are not. Seems to depend a lot on the player too.

Mesmer – The rate at which they spawn Illusions is a bit excessive at times but other than that they seem to be ok. Given their utility and class design Mesmers will never really be “weak”.

Elementalist – The past weeks have been a little rough for Eles and you don’t see many in sPvP. I still have a hard time calling them underpowered however given how strong they are in WvW. I think Eles would be fine once Necros and Warriors are brought in line.

B: Most other Thief builds

Give it time guys. I have no doubt we’ll find effective ways to farm Tequatl before the months is over.

Over the past year GW2 zerging has conditioned some pretty bad habits like not respawning after you died and a general ignorance of combat mechanics.

Tequatl 2.0 is challenging this a little. It may be a bit overwhelming at first but I’m sure we will adapt.

Tequatls shockwave visuals and coding seem to be a little out of sync.

The wave actually hits you a good half-second before the animation hits you. This makes timing your evades a little unintuitive.

Yeah I don’t get why they went ahead with the +50 stat buff on Bloodlust. The buff was desirable enough even without the bonus.

Nobody I communicate with actually want those stat boni to even exist.

evilapprentice.6379:

-snip-

Of course I exaggerated a little. But at the core it’s still correct.

Yes, an Evade spam build will actually use all his abilities frequently….well except for Dancing Dagger and sometimes switching to Shortbow is viable too.

So while the reality is slightly less cut and dry than I presented it the flaw about Initiative still is true. Initiative lends itself towards spammy game-play because it rewards you for investing it in the most effective way. And your most effective move is rarely more than 1-2 skills, depending on your build. Hence Death Blossom spam, Sneak Attack spam, Heartseeker spam, Evade spam etc.

Maybe this is a side-effect of only having 10-15 skills to work with and maybe other classes aren’t much better with their “rotations”. But when I dodge a 100 Blades from a Warrior at least I know he won’t be able to use it again in the next few seconds.

Give it time,

the buff is new, the Borderlands just got a revamp and naturally most people are drawn to what is new and interesting.

While I agree that adding the stat-bonuses was unnecessary I do think the Bloodlust buff was a good addition to WvW. I may be wrong but I won’t concede that a day into the new patch.

There are a number of thief-specific issues I’d like to point out that range from somewhat annoying to borderline frustrating.

1. Ability responsiveness

For some reason some abilities, like Infiltrator’s Strike (and return) and Cloak and Dagger can be very unresponsive in sPvP. With unresponsive I mean they simply don’t trigger when you activate them or only with a slight delay.

Oddly enough this seems to affect the Sword + Dagger combo more than for example, Dagger + Dagger where the responsiveness seem fine. I don’t generally have ability lag with any other skills except for Shadowsteps/Teleport skills.

Infiltrator’s Arrow is equally unresponsive at times at it sometimes feels “laggy” despite no other abilities showing lag-symptoms.

On that note, Infiltrator’s Arrow seems to feel “snappier” in sPvP with a regular bow compared to The Dreamer I use in regular content. Could it be that The Dreamer has slower projectiles?

2. Shadowstep reliability

Quite frequently I’ll use a Shadowstep like Infiltrator’s Arrow, see the animation and pay the Initiative cost, but no Shadowstep occurs. This is really annoying as Infiltrator’s Arrow is a very costly ability. I’d like to see a change in that if an ability won’t work, it shouldn’t trigger. Similar things happen with Shadowstep occasionally, as in it will trigger but your character won’t move. In today’s world of constant AoE CC spam this is most often a death sentence.

So please improve the reliability and pathing of Shadowsteps.

3. Stealth vs. Channeled abilities

This is one of the most frustrating things to have to deal with as a Thief. I understand that all MMOs have had a certain delay when it comes to de-targeting stealthed enemies. But GW2 certainly takes the cake. I can accept being hit by the odd ability up to a second after entering stealth. But in this game I’ve been hit for up to 10.000 damage by a single channeled barrage of arrows that started AFTER dropping Shadowrefuge. I’m talking about being hit by channeled skills 4-5 seconds after entering stealth. That’s not cool.

With virtually all abilities being either channeled or AoE I really wonder just how useful stealth really is in straight-up fights.

4. Auto attack behavior in stealth

I’ve come to accept that PvP combat and auto-attack don’t go well together. Especially not with a Stealth class. But it’s a shame really because it doesn’t have to be that way. Then again I can’t count how many times my momentum was ruined because the game insisted I should Backstab a wall….constantly. It got so bad that I couldn’t stealth on a wall with Daggers because it would automatically auto-attack the wall and thus break stealth. I mean we can’t even damage walls with regular attacks so why this anomaly?

But Backstabbing walls isn’t the only issue. I’ve had it in other situations as well, especially when using Shadowrefuge while wielding a bow. Often my character will decide to fire another shot, even after initiating stealth and thus ruining it in the process. Very frustrating. Given how spammy GW2s PvE content and zerging is I’d actually like to play with auto-attack on, but the lack of “attack suppression” when entering stealth is a deal-breaker.

5. Getting stuck in combat for ages due to stealth bugs

This is really annoying, especially in jumping puzzles where many jumps are downright impossible while in combat. The pinnacle is that there seems to be no internal reset timer. I can literally stand in the same place for an hour and still be “in combat”. This has been an issue since launch and still hasn’t changed.

If you insist on filling Jumping Puzzles with mobs then at least make stealth “de-combat” reliably.

6. Last Refuge

Much has been written and complained about this trait and all with good reason. For every time it has saved me it has killed me at least twice. This really needs to be made an optional trait or changed.

Thanks for reading.