You’re getting too hung up on numbers when it’s the concept that I wanted to debate.
Numbers are easy to adjust. Stealth can easily consume 1.5 Initiative per second or any other arbitrary numeric change you like.
It’s about the concept because I believe the Thief profession is flawed on a conceptual level. It’s not fun to play against for other as can be seen my the months and months of endless QQ on these forums and imo the profession doesn’t have enough depth to it.
The Thief has a very low skill floor as in you can be very successful with button mashing. I’d like a higher skill-floor that rewards skillful play more than the current system does.
Don’t get too hung up on the numbers. They are easy to change.
The best part about all the Heartseeker QQ is how bad you have to be to actually die to someone spamming it. Yea, I understand it can be annoying to be at 4K heath and have someone heartseeker you out of nowhere but that’s the nature of getting Arsjammed. It happens all the time and any prof can do it. Any burst build from any profession makes them stand out when you are outnumbered and requires the majority of your focus.
Now assuming you are talking about a semi 1 on 1 situation. If you are dying to heartseeker spam then you really need to evaluate your decision making, utilities and your dodge key.
When people talk about “Heartseeker spam” today they rarely refer to the Heartseeker spaming builds of the early days where players would spam it from 100% to 0%.
Spaming is chaining >2 Heartseekers after each other which isn’t all that ineffective if a target is below 50% HP.
Heartseeker puts a target under a lot of pressure considering how easy it is to use.
It doesn’t matter what is in the past for HS, and even still. What he says had merit to the past incidents too. Dodging will always make it a bad time for a HS Spammer.
But you can’t use “Dodge” to justify every imbalance in this game.
Dodge is brief immunity to everything. So everything can be dodged.
Thus everything is balanced?
You can’t argue like that.
The cost vs. effectiveness ratio is off when it comes to Heartseeker.
I wonder if he will reply back
Sure I will, but I will also allow myself to disregard what most people said because they clearly don’t grasp what constitutes good game-design.
Good game design enforces choice. Not only in the most obvious fashion like what path you want to take through a Dungeon but in every aspect and every moment of game-play.
What stats do you want on your gear? What do I want to do? Where shall I fight? Where shall I move? What ability shall I use?
Currently Initiative fails at this because it gives the player a choice between Damage and Damage. Most builds already limited the number of viable weapons skills and Initiative really doesn’t force interesting choices. Hence we are prone to spam.
With my proposal players would be making active choices about how to spend their Initiative. It’s far more compelling than simply Death Blossom, Death Blossom, Death Blossom .
No one uses DB DB DB…
Your idea simply won’t work for one reason:
-stealth on demand for next to no cost, with NO requirements attached to it (other then 2 initiative while FORCED to be in stealth).
Currently CnD does this for us at triple the initiative, WITH a component where we are REQUIRED to hit a target, as well as REQUIRING us to have a dagger in our offhand. While I would LOVE this idea, you have to think about what these changes would do to the class:
-BS builds would do a little less burst (I’m assuming mug would go away, and steal would become some useless utility), which is fine, but it would gain FREE stealth retreats/retries on demand, as well as either a daze or stun from the reworked CnD.
-P/D would get an overpowering buff, since they no longer need to get into melee to do damage/pressure, and can stack bleeds from 900 range away with ease (we could also go P/P and get an extra blind if we wanted).
-P/P would get a stealth on demand, which is good. Since it’s primarily a direct damage weapon now, it would make that set look like D/D, where it could be used in a condition build or direct damage.
-SB (yes SB) would become the ultimate kiting weapon. Immobilize ON DEMAND! HELL YES!
It good that you are looking at ways to alter thief mechanics, but this is not the way unfortunately.
Sorry, this was done real fast, I’m sure there are many more points to be made, but these were just the few that came to mind right away.
Sure it would affect different weapons sets differently but your feedback seems to be ignoring 2 things.
1. Reveal mechanic is still there. If you attack anyone from Stealth you can’t restealth for 3 seconds.
2. Being in Stealth will consume your Initiative. And if you chain your Stealth abilities too much you will replenish it slowly.
Say for example you’re getting ready to attack someone with a Shortbow. You Stealth (-2 Initiative) and open with Surprise Shot followed by Disabling Shot. That alone would drop you into the mid-range Initiative regen. If you continue burning Initiative you’ll find yourself in the low-regen spectrum and quickly find yourself unable to use stealth or skills.
Pistol/Dagger might be more problematic to balance but it would hardly be more OP than it currently is. Currently it can stealth every 3 seconds practically forever. At least now there’d be a limit.
But I admit you might need something like Sneak Attack costing Initiative or “no Imitative replenishment during Revealed” in order to balance it out. I haven’t got all the answers but I think the concept in itself makes sense. That’s why I presented it here.
The best part about all the Heartseeker QQ is how bad you have to be to actually die to someone spamming it. Yea, I understand it can be annoying to be at 4K heath and have someone heartseeker you out of nowhere but that’s the nature of getting Arsjammed. It happens all the time and any prof can do it. Any burst build from any profession makes them stand out when you are outnumbered and requires the majority of your focus.
Now assuming you are talking about a semi 1 on 1 situation. If you are dying to heartseeker spam then you really need to evaluate your decision making, utilities and your dodge key.
When people talk about “Heartseeker spam” today they rarely refer to the Heartseeker spaming builds of the early days where players would spam it from 100% to 0%.
Spaming is chaining >2 Heartseekers after each other which isn’t all that ineffective if a target is below 50% HP.
Heartseeker puts a target under a lot of pressure considering how easy it is to use.
I wonder if he will reply back
Sure I will, but I will also allow myself to disregard what most people said because they clearly don’t grasp what constitutes good game-design.
Good game design enforces choice. Not only in the most obvious fashion like what path you want to take through a Dungeon but in every aspect and every moment of game-play.
What stats do you want on your gear? What do I want to do? Where shall I fight? Where shall I move? What ability shall I use?
Currently Initiative fails at this because it gives the player a choice between Damage and Damage. Most builds already limited the number of viable weapons skills and Initiative really doesn’t force interesting choices. Hence we are prone to spam.
With my proposal players would be making active choices about how to spend their Initiative. It’s far more compelling than simply Death Blossom, Death Blossom, Death Blossom .
It is frustrating a times to say the least.
I play a fairly durable Backstab build with 18.000 HP and 2200 armor and still get gibbed by untelegraphed auto attacks.
The blatant hate for melee classes in PvE is infuriating at times, especially when you compare it to the utter bore that is ranged combat.
Take the Ancient Cultist in the Cliffside Fractal for example. He has a leap attack which can be dodged if you’re at range, a forward top down smash and a 360 degree swing. All of these are telegraphed by a <;1 second animation that all look almost identical.
Yet one hit will take roughly 15-16k health off a Thief.
Great fun.
Other mobs are similar except that many of their attacks aren’t telegraphed properly or even at all. Sometimes you’ll be behind a mob and just BAM lose 15000 HP for no obvious reason.
Melee combat is this game is broken in PvE.
As a Thief you simply cannot go melee 100% of the time. You’ll always have to fall back to range and heal up before going back in. Until the next untelegraphed instant attack hits you for 90% of your HP that is.
If you’re hoping there’s some magic cure. There’s none.
I’m sure some posers will come posing there about how they play a melee glass-cannon Thief 100% of the time and that it’s all about L2Dodge etc. but after having done FotM into the 30s I can tell you that’s simply not true.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Thieves are hated because…
a) Stealth – Stealth is never fun to fight against. It allows the Thief to decide when to engage and disengage the fight. The other player is forced to react. Culling makes Stealth also twice as powerful as it should be.
b) Abundant Shadowsteps and mobility – Thieves can be hard to track and even harder to pursue. Stealth combined with lots of Shadowsteps make it feels like they can be anywhere at any time. Catching one is nigh impossible too.
c) Ability spam – Dying to a Thief spaming Heartseeker just feels really cheap. If a Warrior misses his 100% Blades he’ll have to wait for a few moments before using it again. A Thief can just press Heartseeker again….and again…and again. The fact that it’s a homing ability dealing well over 5000 damage at times…..yeah…it’s cheap.
I promise you people would QQ less if you couldn’t just chain one Heartseeker into another.
I want to share my vision for a redesign of the Thief profession. Based on my 750+ hours on my Thief and overwhelming forum feedback it is clear that a lot of Thief mechanics don’t mesh well within the larger context of the game.
The goal of this redesign is to present Thief players with:
a) more interesting choices in combat
b) a system that rewards resource management over spamming
c) a more universal Stealth system usable by all builds and weapons.
The core of this redesign focuses on the replacement of Steal and reworking of Initiative.
1. Initiative
On a functional level, Initiative will remain unchanged. It will still be used as a resource for weapon abilities just like currently. However it will also be used as a resource for Stealth. As such, it limits how much Stealth can be used within a certain window and forces the player to chose between offensive pressure and stealth.
Also instead of regenerating at a steady rate of 1 point every 1.33 seconds Initiative will replenish faster, the more you have and slower, the less you have. As a guide line, Initiative should replenish as follows:
1 point every 1.0 second when above 7 Initiative
1 point every 1.5 seconds when above 4 Initiative
1 point every 2.0 seconds when below 5 Initiative
The goal here is to discourage ability spam without removing the choice. Players will be rewarded if they manage the resource well and starved if they dump it too quickly. Other MMOs have used similar resource systems to great effect.
Note: Some Initiative replenishing traits and abilities would require revision with such a system.
2. Stealth/Steal
Steal is no longer a base-line profession ability. Instead it replaces the current Infiltrator’s Singet and becomes a standard utility ability. Instead Stealth becomes the new profession ability. It would work like the current Blinding Tuft or Bliding Feathers you steal from mobs and Thieves. It would stealth you immediately until your exited Stealth either by attacking or pressing F1 again.
However unlike other Stealth abilities this Stealth would consume Initiative at a rate of 1 per second. This puts a cap on how much a Thief can stealth and forces him to chose between offensive ability use or defensive stealthing. For balance reasons Stealth would need a minimum duration of 2 seconds so people cant just dip in and out of Stealth constantly. The Revealed mechanic would function as usual.
-This Stealth mechanic would also require the conceptual revision of all other Stealth abilities. Cloak and Dagger for example would need to be altered (and lose it’s stealth component) while Shadow Refuge could remain largely unchanged.
-Initiative costs for weapon abilities would also need revision since Initiative is now required for both Stealth and Damage. Most Initiative costs would be lowered (except for Heartseeker).
-The Shadow Arts tree would need revision too as a few traits grant initiative while in Stealth. This would be imbalanced with the new system. Instead you could have traits that reduced the rate at which Initiative is consumed in Stealth.
___________________________________________________________
While we’re fixing the Thief there are a number of abilities that require revision:
1. Cloak and Dagger could provide a stun or daze instead of stealth.
2. Heartseeker is too effective and too easy to use. Limiting the range would be a good start.
3. Body Shot is just downright bad. Consider giving it a Snare similar to Disabling Shot. It would help the viability of Pistol/Pistol too.
4. Dancing Dagger is too expensive since the nerf.
5. Flanking Strike needs to work more reliably and could be more interesting (maybe allow us to Steal a boon)
6. Shadow Strike could use some improvements as well although it’s not fundamentally flawed.
Aside from major balancing issues regarding Stealth and Damage in PvP, Thieves have problems in other areas, most notably PvE where they offer comparatively little in terms of group support and utility as well as poor survivability (especially for a melee profession).
Traps offer real opportunity for improvements in this area. They could provide more long-term combo fields as well as useful effects. For example, maybe if traps didn’t trigger just once, but could trigger every 5 seconds or so a lot of their utility would become desirable.
But combo fields and multi-proccs are just some ideas on how to make traps more interesting.
I believe these changes, if rolled out and balanced correctly, would enhance the Thief profession making it both more engaging to play and also more interesting to play against.
I honestly don’t see the difference between a Stealth stomp and a Stability stomp.
Stealth stomps might not require a long CD, but they can be interrupted.
Stability stomps or Quickness stomps on the other hand are very hard to interrupt but require a CD.
Considering that Thieves don’t really have access to Stability outside of Daggerstorm I think it’s a fair trade off.
90% of Thief imbalanced are caused my rendering/culling issues.
I know it’s hard to separate the two but one is a technical flaw and the other an imbalance.
I understand the problem though. I too have seen Pistol/Dagger Thieves who will remain invisible 2 seconds after attacking, effectively leaving barely a second to react before they disappear again.
This also occurs in sPvP where Stealth seems to last roughly 1 second longer than it should.
Thieves are a problematic profession and ANet really needs to take a fundamental look at them. Nerfing damage here and there isn’t going to fix anything on the long run.
Address the cause, not the symptoms.
Both items prices are based on supply and demand. The price has nothing to do with how powerful of effective they are.
And demand isn’t based off how powerful and effective they are? /facepalm
Demand may be, but supply is not.
I’ve made dozens and dozens of Ruby Orbs during my playtime but have yet so lay hands on a single Superior Rune of Divinity.
Even so, I’m still not convinced it’s working properly.
It’s great fun fighting your way through the fractals for hours only to have to give up just before the end because ANet just can’t seem to get kitten done properly.
But hey, at least you fix a money making scheme within a few days. Good to see you’ve got your priorities straight.
Cliffside: Fixed a blocking bug where the cultists would not reset correctly on party wipe at scale 10 or higher in the final boss fight.
Quoted from the patch-notes it’s still not true. Cultists won’t reset properly on a wipe, especially with the top two seals. If you wipe once there’s a very slim chance you’ll beat it because every side will have roughly 10 Cultists just waiting to near instant-gib anyone in range.
Great fun…
Well with Revive Orbs it should be practically impossible to fail any encounter or event.
I’m sure the Dynamic Event system will evolve over time. Currently most events follow a very rudimentary system.
But like Quests in other MMOs the Dynamic Events will eventually evolve and offer more than your typical kill and collect events. Just give the designers more time to get comfortable with it.
Burst Damage: Deals Damage instantly and can’t be countered once applied.
Condition Damage: Can be cleaned but continues doing damage even when disengaged.
Those are the Pros and Cons of Burst vs. Condition damage. None is conceptually better than the other.
Both items prices are based on supply and demand. The price has nothing to do with how powerful of effective they are.
Ruby Orbs are cheap because they are abundant. Scholar Runes are rare in comparison.
That’s the reason one is so much more expensive than the other. Nothing else.
It’s not required but you need to know your way around the dungeon so you don’t get caught with your pants down.
Having voice-com for your first few runs is nice as it allows you to quickly grasp the puzzles and mechanics spread throughout the dungeons.
Difficulty wise Dungeons may seem very harsh at first. I remember the QQ when people stepped into Ascalonian Catacombs for the first time. It wasn’t pretty.
But once you grasp the game-mechanics and know your way around dungeons they become drastically easier. More so than even a WoW dungeon.
Zergs are simply the lowest and least tactical incarnation of WvW PvP. They require little in terms of tactics and coordination and are very accessible.
Than in itself isn’t a bad thing as it gives casual players a way to contribute.
It is problematic however when zerging becomes the most effective way to play and when certain game-mechanics like rezzing encourage you to zerg.
Currently the LFG website is the best way to pug FotM: http://gw2lfg.com/
Someone posted a screenshot of level 64 the other day.
They don’t usually last long enough and tend to apply redundant effects.
While combo fields can be useful, using the relevant abilities when needed rather than looking for combo possibilities is better 99% of the time.
You should be able to toss 4 into the Mystic Toilet and have a chance to get one you actually want.
Maybe even a chance for an infused one.
This Rune set is still not working properly.
While the 6-piece bonus does actually proc occasionally now including the corresponding visual effect (Mistform) it doesn’t do so reliably.
I’d wager that the effect procs maybe 10% of the time.
Instead however it occasionally procs in downed state, when you reach 10% health there.
This is bollux. Please fix this thing already. It’s well overdue.
It’s not like we haven’t being saying this for the past 3 months…
The fact that this is probably the 100th thread on this matter, stating the same arguments and even reaching a more or less general consensus, and yet ANet has neither commented nor altered anything about the downed state is what’s really ruining my confidence in the company.
This is a crucial game-play element which could be vastly improved by simple changes but instead the prefer making random and unfounded changes to professions.
The PvP Knight’s set (Vitality/Power/Precision) would be incredibly valuable to a Thief in PvE – not as a full set, mind you, but as something you’d be thrilled to use several pieces of. The same goes for the other very low HP classes, Guardian and Elementalist.
Unfortunately it’s only available in PvP. PvE gets Toughness/Power/Precision instead, which is great for Warriors and decent for Rangers, but not so great for anyone else.
It’s the only really gaping hole in itemization and something I’m hoping will be filled at some point in the future.
There are quite a few ways of attaining a "Soldier’s (P/V/T) set via PvE.
The Ascalonian set as well as HotW both have a Soldier set available. I believe Sorrow’s Embrace too.
Our QA group was able to do this, but I have received many reports about her healing while stealthed being way too high. I’ll ask our QA to give it another pass with different characters/builds to see how they fare.
I believe the sparks threat management, their behavior with pets, their interactions with traps etc. are all far more fundamental problems than how much the boss heals.
Simin is a poorly designed encounter because the mechanics themselves are so frikkle, not because the boss is somehow hard.
Anyone who isn’t switching out abilities on a “per encouter” basis isn’t using his/her max. potential.
I for one am constantly switching out my utility skills and I’d expect the same from any Thief. It takes 2 seconds so there’s really no reason not to do it.
Unlike Warrior 5 Singet builds there isn’t all that much utility and synergy to Thief Singets. Sure, you can get the odd might stacks and some other nice effects but overall they’re fairly weak.
So yes, while the guild guys probably did have a point their actions are still kinda dickish.
I can understand kicking people who perform poorly but kicking based on a build alone is meh.
It depends a lot on…
a) what build you’re playing
b) what build the Thief is playing
I’ll list some of the most popular Thief builds and highlight their weaknesses.
1. D/D Backstab Thief, often (but not always) a full glass-cannon.
These are the Thieves that can almost instant-gib other glass cannons, especially if they catch them off guard. Their Steal + C&D + Backstab can deal over 15000 damage in a second.
However they are very susceptible to crowd control. Their combo requires all attacks to connect and so a single stun or knockdown is enough to break their momentum.
I found Hammer builds counter these Thieves quite effectively, but you need to be quick and ideally catch them before their attack combo. A single snare, root or stun can be enough to break their momentum. And then it’s basically over as they rarely have more than 14000 HP.
Generally speaking though, Thieves are very susceptible to CC since they don’t have Stability and often opt to run without a CC breaker.
2. Pistol/Dagger aka. Stealth-Thieves
These are the hardest to beat 1v1, especially in WvW where Stealth skills last 1-2 seconds longer than normal because of rendering issues.
You’ll need to have a lot of condition removal to beat them. I’d also advise using ranged combat since their build relies on a Cloak and Dagger melee attack in order to Stealth. If you deny them the ability to melee you you’ll drop their DPS by 60% because their biggest hit is one they can only execute from Stealth.
The best thing here is to wear them down at range and then go for a Charge + 100 Blades kill once they’re around 50% HP. Also save your Condition Removals until you have at least 5 Bleeds stacked on you (normally right after their Sneak attack).
3. D/D Melee Bleed builds, aka. Death Blossom spammers.
These guys like to spam Death Blossom while kiting you over their Caltrops. Their passive healing can be quite strong as well.
The best choice here is again, to deny them melee range since their ranged weapons are typically quite bad. Get your rifle and keep them at bay.
They too are typically very susceptible to stuns and crowd control so make use of that.
TL;DR – Stuns and CC as well as knowing when to avoid melee brawls are the best ways to counter Thieves.
Singed,
A Thief
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Got a regular, non-infused ring from the Jade Maw yesterday at level 24.
Nobody got any ring from the Jade Maw daily today at level 26.
That pic looks like your average Mesmer rather than anything Thief related.
But yes, the lack of weapon variety is pretty daunting.
I too have a soft spot for Spears/Nagitatas etc. but I’m not sure how much of a Martial Artist a Thief really is. He’s more of a Rogue archetype than a Monk/Assassin/Ninja Archetype.
Difficulty and tedium are two very different things.
Learn to tell the difference.
Take the Harpies in the Asura Fractal for example. They are not a difficult hurdle to overcome, but they are tedious.
A difficult challenge requires a lot of skill and commitment to overcome, a tedious challenge just requires a lot of time.
This is from both pugging and guilding various 20+ FotMs.
Hard/Tedious to Easy
1. Dredge – takes long and Dredge are a pain to kill. Depending on the path you’re forced to wipe at least once. At least the loot is nice.
2. Cliffside – also takes fairly long and requires some coordination. At least the final boss is fairly easy now that he’s been fixed.
3. Grawl – This depends on the group. Personally I don’t find the final boss that hard but some groups make it impossible to beat. Guardians and Agony Resistance make a big difference here.
4. Svanir – The battle vs. the Blizzard is tedious and takes longer than the rest of the fractal combined. Not hard…but the constant knockbacks make it really annoying.
5. Asura – Again, not hard but incredibly annoying due to the Harpy knockdown. It’s funny for the first dozen times but then it becomes a drag.
6. Ascalon – Trash hits fikkin hard but other than that, it’s quite easy thanks to the friendly NPCs. It also drops nice loot.
7. Jade Maw – Agony Resistance check that’s easy to overcome though. Virtually impossible to fail.
8. Underwater – Krait groups get very large but other than that, it’s easy. Squid boss is super boring and very easy. Almost no worthwhile mechanics and just a drag to DPS down, even when using the cages successfully.
9. Swamp – perfect Fractal imo. Quick when well executed and a fairly challenging boss fight at the end.
Yeah yeah I know all that but there still comes a point where a designer of a dungeon encounter has to decide how much damage a specific attack should deal.
“Please enter the amount of damage Fireburst should deal” might be the prompt.
The designer knows he wants to make the ability dangerous without one-shotting anything but glass-cannons.
What number does he enter?
10000? Then Warriors and Necros will just yawn.
15000? Then you’ll be one-shotting 80% of Thieves and Elementalists
18000? Then Warriors and Necros will be scared but everyone including Rangers and Mesmers is getting one-hit.
Especially when you factor in different mitigation values (Eles for example can achieve quite a lot of mitigation while Thieves cannot) it seems like an impossible balance to pull off.
And this is showing in PvE.
The Burrowers in AC do the same. It’s really annoying.
Sure, you can get a stun-breaker but it’s always one of these things your forget until you’re chain-stunned again.
Of course as a ranged DPS this is nothing you need to worry about. Just continue watching TV while avoiding red circles and you’re set.
It does suck that you can’t effectively kill a larger zerg.
Picking of single players is useless since rezzing is so abundant.
Gw2 has the only PvP I’ve seen where you can PvP for half an hour without actually anyone dying.
Only allowing resurrections (ergo rezzing defeated players) while out of combat and lowering the downed HP would go a long way.
Agony of course is % based so it evades the issue. <—- fixed that 4 you (learn how % work)
You cant compare classes like that, this game has different mehanics than other games.
-each class has different mechanics,resources,abilities,mitigations
-nobody forced you to spec glasscannon
On a personal note it sems you dont understand your class well (i asume that you re a thief).“Point being, PvE is impossible to balance when you have such huge discrepancies in player HP. Agony proves this point since you were forced to scale it off %. " that proves that you dont understand % matematics (its not meant in an insulting way), what this means is that actualy it doesnt mater how much hp you have 10HP or 10kHP, if you have , lets say a dot wich reduce your health my 25 % , both the 10 hp & 10kHP will drop to 1hp in the same amount of time … all in all agony its the most neutral dmg, it is unafected by gear, spec, class. It is only affected by the player skill.
I have no idea what lead you to believe I didn’t know how Agony worked. But it’s hardly the only source of damage in this game.
Agony just proves my point that you can’t have abilities that are equally threatening to a Warrior and a Thief when one has twice the durability of the other (factoring in armor as well). That’s why they resorted to a non-mitigatable, %-of HP scaling mechanic rather than a fixed damage value.
I think it would serve the game well if we didn’t have such a drastic difference in base-line survivability. It would make things easier to balance and less frustrating on the glass-cannon end and less boring on the tanky end.
Yeah, there is a rather sparing difference between the look and style of the Legendary Greatswords (and arguably some others like the Hammer, Sword etc.) and all the other Legendaries.
While taste is subjective some weapons don’t even have particle effects or footprints. They are virtually indistinguishable from regular weapons when not in use.
This has been happening in MMOs since like forever.
It’s the reason most guilds only recruit 18+ aged players.
I must admit that even as a very experienced dungeon runner I’ve paid very little attention to Defiant. I know it exists and it limits the CC vs. bosses but I never played much attention to the details of it.
I agree with the OP though. It’s not an intuitive mechanic and I think it hampers the games potential. I think CC should play a bigger role in PvE but that’s impossible when you have such a clunky mechanic like Defiant.
“Viable” is a sketchy word in this context since without cutting edge PvE content “optimal” performance isn’t really required.
Anything can work effectively and P/P is no exception.
But damage, or at least Unload spam was never really a problem for P/P. It’s just that everything else was rather lackluster.
Vital Shot is slow, Body Shot is nigh useless, and Black Power is more suited for melee than ranged.
Overall P/P always has, and always will pale in comparison to the Shortbow. But you can still get far with it.
I crafted the Dreamer last week and while it does feel like a great accomplishment I was rather disappointed by the lack of visual effects.
I picked the bow because it was the only visible choice for an Asura. Most other weapons would have been indistinguishable due to their small size.
And while the rainbows are nice, the lack of coloured footsteps or any kind of particle effects surrounding the bow are really disappointing, especially considering how abundant they are on other Legendaries.
I do ask why was the Dreamer excluded from having these unique and identifiable weapon effects?
Who decided it was ok for most other weapons to have footsteps and particle effects but it wasn’t ok for the Dreamer?
Seems like an odd design decision…or maybe just oversight.
Wait, wait, wait…
There are tons of pictures and videos out there of people showing off their Dreamer. You mean to tell me…that you set out to craft a legendary, and didn’t even bother to take the time to see what it looked like? I call BS to that. You knew what you were getting before you started this undertaking.
Of course I knew what it was going to look like. It still doesn’t change the fact that it’s rather disappointing, all things considered. I had also hoped they might patch in the effects later since it still seems like an oversight.
I mean the Legendary staff has some very pretty and subtle rainbow particle effects that would suit the Dreamer very well. Footprints seem like a give too.
I really wouldn’t mind seeing some copypasta applied here.
I actually disagree,
Exploits and (uncommon) Bugs don’t need further exposure.
But… press B, enter any battleground, use portal to lion’s arch = free waypoint.
Great job not reading the OP. Please continue contributing your valuable input.
On topic: There is literally no reason as to why waypoints to Lion’s Arch (and the other capitals) shouldn’t be free.
It should happen and until it does I’m using the Mists.
Wait, how did a thread about Guardians essentially being Monks 2.0 become a kitten contest between Thief and Warrior DPS?
I guess “the internet” happened.
I should be thankful I got here before we reached the inevitable discussion about Hitler.
When designing boss encounter and abilities, what amount of HP and Mitigation do the designers assume?
I mean they must work of some sort of assumption.
Agony of course is % based so it evades the issue somewhat.
I’m still curious though how designers find a balance between a Thief glass-cannon with 10800 HP and 1700 Armor and a Soldier Warrior with more than double those stats.
Point being, PvE is impossible to balance when you have such huge discrepancies in player HP. Agony proves this point since you were forced to scale it off %.
Other MMOs used to have similar discrepancies in player HP but most ended up normalizing player HP to some extent. An 80% difference in base HP is too big a gap imo.
Reading these comments I have identified 1 key issue that will forever plague Thief balancing.
Stealth
Stealth is one of these things that seems impossible to balance properly for all three game environments (PvE, WvW and sPvP).
In WvW Stealth is currently twice as effective as it should be due to culling/rendering issues.
In sPvP Stealth functions more or less as conceived and works well as both offensive and defensive utility.
In PvE Stealth doesn’t add all that much survivability and is mainly used as a damage source (for Backstabs).
Without fundamental changes (like the ones I proposed earlier on itt) it won’t be possible to balance Stealth for all three environments.
I wanted to provide feedback regarding the Snowball Mayhem PvP mini-game.
Personally I did not enjoy it despite some good ideas.
I identified two major issues and a few minor ones that impair the fun factor.
1. Map design – The game mode is essentially CTF…except instead of stealing a flag from your enemies base you have to get it from the middle of the map. Given the respawn location of your team it basically means the carrying the Gift gets increasingly easier, the closer you get to the drop off location. On the other end, it’s very hard for the enemy team to catch up to a player who’s already got a head start.
This is really a pretty fundamental design flaw. Good PvP modes make it increasingly difficult the closer you are to your goal or, like classic CTF, find a middle way.
2. Selfish Achievements – Nobody cares about winning or losing. Everyone just wants to farm their Achievements. Yet instead of encouraging team-play they reward selfish behavior. I prefer to see a Gift carrier next to me go down so I can take and deliver the Gift rather than save his kitten The other achievement is also just a Snipe the Gift carrier contest which only has 1 winner.
Not a great idea for a game that supposedly encourages team-play.
Then there’s a few minor issues.
-Picking up a Gift from a downed player is really fiddly since you always get the “revive” prompt instead.
-Heavy Assault class felt pretty useless considering how important runspeed is (yes, I know about the weapon switch).
Overall a well intended experiment that would have benefited a lot from a little more revision.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)