Guild Wars 2

Ensign.2189:

Condition damage is an incredibly powerful stat on a lot of characters.

The main problem it has is that against trash mobs they’ll tend to explode before your conditions have a change to do any work, while against actually difficult foes you run into massively hostile mechanics (half condition duration on a large number of champion and legendary mobs, frequent condition removal on top of that, plus dealing with the bleed cap) that severely neuter the effectiveness of conditions in any sort of team environment.

Condition damage is incredibly powerful when it’s not being held back by these limitations. It is incredibly powerful in PvP, where your enemies tend to not fall over dead in a couple seconds, giving your conditions time to work; similarly, you don’t get rocked by natural half or quarter condition durations that make your skills useless. Unfortunately the only place you really see something similar in PvE is when soloing world veterans, or 2-3 manning champions; when your bleeds have a chance to work on a foe that doesn’t fall over instantly, their power becomes obvious very, very quickly.

The advantage of normal damage isn’t that it’s mathematically superior, simply that it isn’t hated out viciously by the mechanics of the game.

I wouldn’t say “incredibly powerful” considering that even with everything working for the condition build the direct damage build will do more damage quicker. With conditions being limited by stack/duration there is cap on how much damage you can do with them. On my thief I can easily cap bleeds and the sad thing is that I could apply more. The obvious multiplicative advantage of Power x Crit % x Crit damage x % damage increase is a HUGE advantage. Condition damage is limited to condition damage(equal to power) and condition duration(equal to crit), that leaves crit damage and % damage increase unaccounted for.

ArenaNet built the game on poor stat base. If direct damage stats can scale so dramatically then survival stats need to be able to do the same. Where is the crit reduction stat? Or the crit damage reduction stat? They could do some really fun stuff like 50% chance to dodge when crit(damage is evaded). If damage is greater than 25% of your health heal for 25% of your health. The truth is that ArenaNet was so afraid of there being tanks and healers that they purposefully left the game unbalanced towards direct damage. This actually has a weird side-effect when certain classes with certain builds can build “tanky”, since the game isn’t balanced around tanks being possible they become broken(OP). If defensive/heal stats were balance those builds wouldn’t be an issue since they couldn’t win via attrition.

None of this is going to change in the near future, especially give the current rate of class changes(even if some of those changes are huge leaps in the wrong direction). The only possibility of it changing is with an expansion, but even then the devs would have to switch from their anti-tank/healer mindset(not likely).

The problem with berserker is stat synergy that is not available through any other stats. I mean Power x Crit % x Crit damage x % damage increases provides for some insane damage scaling and it should not be there unless the defensive stats scale equally. There needs to be defensive stat multipliers as well. Healing power should be a viable stat, but since ArenaNet is so hellbent on not having healers it’s pretty much a wasted stat since 9/10 it scales absolutely horribly.

Bottom line with ArenaNet is they have absolutely no idea how to balance anything. The sad state of class/stat balance shows this and every patch just reinforces this.

DrixTrix.7168:

the game is designed so when you select your class your playing the respective class who can then specialize in certain things.

when you level in WoW or any other MMO i have played you start off playing a bare shell of a class that is as boring as dog poo until you ’’unlock’’ abilities.

atleast with these classes you have the core weapon skills from the outset.

its the way the game is designed, you selct a thief you play a thief not something named a thief with ONE melee attack that acts as a tank until the un-nerfed continent.

i.e. a mesmer uses clones so from the outset your going to have to kitten well learn to use them not kill things with a simple purple bolt until lvl 30 while facetanking them.

The problem is that NONE of the classes are remotely close to balanced. I can fully understand someone picking a class and not quite understanding or liking how it plays, but for a good bit of these complaints that isn’t the issue. The issue is that some classes don’t even need to learn to dodge to be incredibly successful where other classes need to dodge, evade, heal, and repeat to even reach 1/2 of the success of the previous class.

I have leveled all but 1 class to 80 and the last one, a mesmer, is ~67. The warrior is the most unbalanced thing in the game. Run up 100b and everything dies. They do way too much damage, have way too much survivability(most base health and armor), and need to give up absolutely nothing to get it. The guardian is very survivable and puts out good damage(no where close to a warrior). I could go into detail on each class but suffice to say that some classes can be played with a ton of skill and will still be at a disadvantage in PvE. The traits just make things worse here because some are incredibly vital to make a class viable, further showing how poorly balanced some classes are.

Balance requires a give and take like you get survivability but you lose damage. ArenaNet has yet to figure this out completely and because of that the classes aren’t balanced. I mean who decided warriors needed the most damage, most health, and most armor? That’s simply bad design, the whole base health/armor system in general is poor balancing considering all classes have melee/ranged options and a lot of classes have the same options(Control, survivability, etc) but different base health and armor.

Vayne.8563:

Tommyknocker.6089:

Vayne.8563:

The problem is, most of the PVe content is so easy already in this game, why would anyone want to roll a profession to make it even easier?

Gold. If you can faceroll a dungeon in 6 minutes getting all the loot, then why use a class designed to take any longer. Sad but true; even if you prefer playing one of your alts, the warrior can be used to equip it for you quicker than you could do it yourself.

Because there’s more to this game for me than getting all the loot. Because those people who play just to get all the loot, over all, are less satisfied with this game than people like me. Because loot in general, as it works today, has pretty much destroyed the RPG section of the MMO.

I mean I know a whole lot of people who play games like Skyrim and Dragon age, and almost none of them are in it just for the loot.

So yeah, if all you want to do is farm, and farm and farm roll a warrior. If you want to enjoy the game in other ways, roll what you want.

You can do all the game has to offer AND get the loot you know. A lot of people will do both but loot is a major factor and with how ArenaNet has loot aquisition set up it’s only natural to pick the class that allows you to get through it the fastest. ArenaNet has turned everything into a grind. I can see all the dungeon paths and still not have enough tokens for a full dungeon set, I can do all the events in a zone and not have enough karma for a karma set. The same goes for everything in the game. You can see everything the game has to offer, multiple times in fact, and still have to grind for some gear/sigils/runes/etc. The warrior is the bar none the fastest farmer so people use them.

The fact that people will level an alt warrior just for farming shows how poorly balanced classes are. The amount of damage warriors can do in PvE compared to other classes is absolutely stupid, cannot be justified, and needs balanced. Don’t even get me started on their base health and armor. What makes all of it worse is that it’s incredibly obvious yet the devs buffed warriors in PvE last patch. Just compare warrior banners to ranger spirits and you’ll be left wondering if the class balance devs have a drinking bird doing their work for them.

GW2 is doing alright sales wise, but I think the major driving factor right now is no subscription and nothing new coming out in the near future. A lot of people are in a holding pattern waiting for a new MMO to be released and don’t want to be burdened with a monthly payment.

GW2 development is doing horribly though. I’ve never seen such terrible patches, class balance, and design decisions in my entire decade+ of playing MMO’s. They continue to restrict and segregate instead of expanding and integrating. With each patch the game has become less and less “play how you want” and more and more “Play how ArenaNet thinks you should”. I think if ArenaNet had described the game as it is now prior to launch, it wouldn’t have sold nearly as well.

It isn’t all bad though, I mean I love the event system in this game and having to go back to quest givers is not something I look forward too. The ability to just jump on and play without worrying about missing a quest giver, having to share quests, or run back to giver upon completion is a huge plus. Sadly though the world events can only entertain you so long without better retention mechanics in place.

Overall, I think once another big MMO is nearing release GW2’s time will be over. If those MMO’s don’t embrace more complex mechanics in order to retain customers they will be 3-6 month MMO’s before people flock to another new MMO. I don’t think ESO will have the mechanics to retain people for long, but EQ Next is supposed to be more sandbox-like so I have more hope for it. Titan is a toss-up considering what they did to Diablo 3, but we will see.

Needs and wants vary by what you’re talking about.

Life:
Need- Something you must have/do in order to survive(food, shelter, air, etc) and this can extend to things like work because work= $ = Food+shelter
Want- something that would make life better but is not necessary to survive.

However needs aren’t restricted to just life, they apply to everything you do and help determine what you do.

Games-
Need- Something you must have/do in order to continue playing
Want- Something that would make the game better but is not necessary to continue playing.

So the question becomes whether obtaining ascended gear is necessary for people to continue playing the game. The simple answer here is yes and no. It all depends what you’re playing the game for. A WvW player would certainly not want to be at a stat disadvantage so you can see how max stats would be a need for them. For others it could be making runs faster(makes them more bearable and they can continue playing longer). One of the biggest in MMO’s is just progression, since ArenaNet made the switch from horizontal to vertical it’s a need for many people who want character progression to get ascended gear.

Ask yourself what you need to continue playing GW2. What keeps you running dungeons, PvPing, WvWing, or just doing events. It will vary person to person; some might just need the social element, others need competition, and probably a dozen other things. It’s not really fair to tell someone what their needs are in order to play the game. If someone says they need ascended and feel forced to do things they don’t want to in order to get it, then that’s probably how they feel. What they need might seem like a want to you but that’s just your bias.

The biggest question now is what will ArenaNet do to allieviate the problems they have implemented(inflicted). When people feel like they are being forced to do things they begin to re-evaluate their needs, meaning they think about whether they want to play or not anymore. Since there is zero chance of the major mistake(introduction of ascended gear) being removed, the simplest band-aid is making it available through all currencies in the game. This way players can do what they want in order to fulfill their playing needs without feeling forced to do things they don’t want to do. Well there will be the exception of those that don’t want to be forced into vertical progression but again it can no longer be removed.

Shufflepants.9785:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

I agree to an extend. Though I have to point out that “It’s optional, you have HAVE to do it” is the worst excuse for a problem and I’m sick of hearing it.

Keep in mind that the entire game is optional.

Your grievance with the use of the word “optional” as an excuse to the problem comes from your misunderstanding of the exact use and context of the word “optional” when we apply it to things in guild wars 2.

When we say that it’s “optional”, we mean, “you do not need to do this first in order to do or see any of the content in the game.” You do not need ascended gear in order to complete explorable dungeons. You may need ascended gear to do some later levels of fractals, but later levels are not considered new content, they are the same fights with lower tolerances on mistakes; ascended gear is not necessary for Fractals lvl 1.

Notice, this sort of system where the best gear is unnecessary to complete certain content is not present in all games. In vanilla world of warcraft, epic gear was not optional. There were simply some fights in the later dungeons that your group simply had no hope of beating without farming up epics from previous dungeons.

But in Guild Wars 2, the best gear (and the best skins) are not necessary in order stand a reasonable chance of defeating all the content in the game. Thus, they are optional.

This usage of “optional” is not the same at all as the “optional” you use when you say “the entire game is optional”.

You NEED ascended gear to progress your character to max stats. All the stuff you listed are usually things people do in order to accomplish the ultimate gamer goal, maxed out stats. If you can recognize that playing any game is a want, then you should be able to realize that inside of a want there are needs. If those needs aren’t met then the person no longer wants. With games one of the needs is character progression.

GW2 does horribly at cosmetic progression(worst armor design) so they added ascended. Instead of just making ascended gear have an agony slot and no increase in stats, which would make it truly optional to anyone not interested in fractals, they went for stat progression. Now people are forced to grind content(dailies, missions, fractals) in order to fulfill that ultimate gamer need of max stats.

When that need cannot be fulfilled in a fun/timely manner people will quit the game because they no longer want to play it. Blockading that progression behind grinds and time gates is absolutely poor game design trying to exploit the need for progression. Not only that it hurts character variety because people don’t want to try new specs/stats combos because of the time sink that is ascended. Laurels, commendations, and Pristine fractal tokens(least of the bunch) are terrible progression systems for a set of gear that should have never been in the game.

Raven Paradox.1860:

ArenaNet always has stated about the March 26th update that NO, that is NOT everything we’ll be getting.

WvW, and all of GW2, is an evolving game with evolving players. There will be tons of updates throughout the course of GW2s lifespan.

May I remind people that GW2 has been out for 7 months, still has a very active and large community, and has only 1 Elder Dragon available and has only introduced 1 extra map. This game has a long ways to go, and WvW still has a lot that can change within.

The problem is that ArenaNet has a finite amount of time to produce updates before people move on. They can promise adding 2 more elder dragons but if that takes 3 years and people are bored in the meantime, they will move on. After 7 months the WvW players needed something new monotony out of WvW and there simply wasn’t anything like that in this patch. Sure they added ranks but it’s still the same old zergfest against objectives that fall in minutes and don’t really matter.

Why do you think people keep mentioning Elderscrolls online? That’s the deadline for ArenaNet to fix WvW and give it some depth. ESO is promising a WvW experience as well. The major problem is that ArenaNet needs to produce a ton of new WvW content or alter old WvW content to create a new experience in order to compete with ESO because it’s a whole new game, a whole new PvP experience, a whole new combat experience, etc. Given ArenaNet’s current track record that is simply not going to happen. ArenaNet is not doing well in class balance and their content additions are weak, as evidenced by the new WvW rank system. Unless ArenaNet does some major class, WvW, and combat overhauls or additions then people are going to move to ESO.

Thrumdi.9216:

The problem isn’t WXP. The problem is the underlying mechanics of the game. (No healers, no trinity, downed state, 5-man limit to AoE etc.).

That is what creates the zerg. The rewards (like WXP) just amplify the underlying problem.

Solution? ESO.

I fully agree that the mechanics of the game are what support the current zerg play but I don’t think healers/trinity, downed state, or AOE limit contribute to it much. An increase in AOE limit will just make zerg vs zerg fights that much faster as the side with more AOE’s will win. It is a double edged sword, it might allow a small group to take out bigger groups but it also allows much bigger zergs to take out big zergs.

I see a few big issues that are supporting the zerg lifestyle. First there is no friendly collision detection, this is a huge negative that could easily keep people from running ikittenerg. The lack of character models blocking LOS, add this and watch as people spread out so their damage isn’t blocked. The keeps, towers, and even camps are way too easy to capture. It should take the better part of a day trebbing a wall to knock it down, but currently set up 3-4 trebs and you’re in within 15mins. The whole supply system allows people to just stop in, pick up supply, and leave without caring if it gets capped because they will just recap it when they need supply again. Make supply trickle in but allow players to pick it up(each player can carry 1 supply) at camps and deliver it to keeps/tower. The effect will be 3 fold, siege will be harder to build so it will need to be defended while being built, camps will need to be defended in order to continue getting a trickle of supply, and people will need to constantly run supply. That splits the zergs into defending siege, defending camp(s), and running supply.

In order to make zergs break apart you need to give them multiple objectives(best case) or negatives(worst case). GW2 just doesn’t do either and thus we have zergs running around.

As for ESO, that’s honestly not going to be a whole lot better. They already have a giant design hurdle in their alliance system. One alliance is going to be far more popular due to their races and they will be able to field more people at all hours of the day. We will see though, but I wouldn’t place all my hopes on it being a whole lot better than GW2.

I gotta say that I had extremely low expectations for this patch given ArenaNets patch history. I was still surprised at how incredibly lackluster it was. I mean the incredibly shallow and near pointless WvW “progression” system is not much of a WvW patch. I guess I was hoping they would add some actual depth and strategy to WvW but instead they just keep reinforcing the mindless zerg mentality. No Ascended available in WvW, in fact no new ways of obtaining ascended.

The class changes as always are 1 step forward and 3 steps back, making everyone wonder if ArenaNet even plays the game. Warriors getting buffed in PvE? Seriously? The blanket quickness nerf while needed in some cases has left rangers even worse off than they were. If you’re going to nerf something like that then you need to compensate elsewhere. They backpedaled on a thief nerf that was absolutely needed. Engineers, well just go read their forums.

I think we can call it, ArenaNet is officially the worst MMO developer for class balance and patching. Every major GW2 patch since launch has been failure after failure. The karka debacle, Ascended gear, laurels, guild missions, and now this. It honestly amazes me how each patch they take ideas that should be solid additions and completely mangle them. Where did the manifesto and pre-launch devs go?

Fay.2735:

I think people are misunderstanding the reason for why this armour was added and maybe should look more at the positive side of the improvement.

First people QQ that they have to do PvE to obtain the exotics with different stat combinations. So Anet puts in gear with different stat combos that allows you to stay in WvW yet people still QQ. Seriously if people rage quit because they got what they asked for but didn’t get a shiny skin that’s just sad tbh.

Sure new unique skin looks for WvW would be nice but that doesn’t change the fact that this is an improvement. I also highly disagree with putting unique dungeon skins in WvW. Those skins are for the those specific dungeons only. I’m all for more unique skins but current unique skins should stay with the places you obtain them from and should stay unique to that content.

So yes you get crappy basic skins but at least you get the stat combinations you need within WvW itself. Just like everyone I would love to see nicer unique skins for WvW and I’m pretty confident that they will in time but until they can invest resources into making these we at least have access to good gear.

In this patch you’ve received huge improvement in culling, you get different stat options for gear, you get character progression so you have a new purpose within WvW to work on. Maybe focus on all that’s been added and not what has not yet been added.

Things take time to develop especially in a game type that requires careful balancing/testing and there’s only so many resources that can be invested in various things. I sincerely appreciate the improvements we have received this patch and knowing they will continue to work on improving things is great as well just have to be more patient. The game only has been out 7 months and loads of content has been added/improved since launch and they will continue to improve all parts of the game.

As for ascended gear. Who cares about that unless you are into hardcore gear threadmill fractal grind. Those couple of extra stats aren’t going to make the difference between winning or losing if you aren’t a good player. If you want more competitive pvp you can do spvp. WvW at the end of the day is just a giant open world free for all, mostly casual pvp zone. Things aren’t controlled nor fair so who cares about about a couple more stats that mean nothing when majority of the time fights are uneven, this isn’t WoW where a couple of extra stats = win.

The fact that WvW from day 1 didn’t have unique skins and all the stat combinations was a slap in the face. The devs could have fixed it in a month, but they didn’t. Adding armor/weapons to a vendor is not hard and does not require 7 months of work. People are requesting dungeon skins now simply because it is abundantly apparent that ArenaNet is not going to make decent unique WvW skins. Skins are a reason that many joined this game, if they aren’t that important, as you suggest, who cares if the dungeon skins get used for WvW?

Culling should not have been in WvW, PERIOD. This was a giant design oversight and now you’re saying we should be thankful that they finally fixed it? ArenaNet should be apologizing to us, not us thanking them. Sure we do get new stats on gear, but it’s only 6 months late. The progression system is an absolute joke and once again should not have taken 7 months, it’s a simple UI and some passive buffs. But lets focus on what we’ve gotten before this patch: content removed because it was poorly designed and that’s about it. Yay? I definitely feel that ArenaNet has made WvW a major focus of their development(wheres the sarcasm font?).

As for balancing, have you actually played the game? The class balance in this game is laughable and the content they just added to WvW doesn’t even require testing to know if it’s balanced because the bonuses are so underwhelming. Even EB map isn’t balanced, so why in the world would balance be a huge issue now? The answer is that it isn’t and WvW just isn’t their focus.

Finally, the exact reason people want ascended gear is because the fights aren’t fair. You want absolutely every advantage you can get so if you are in an unfair fight you have a better chance at winning. The stats are negligible either, a berserker thief gets 8% extra damage per hit. 8% per hit might not sound like much but after 13 hits he has done 100%+ more damage, that gap will only widen with more stats. I’ve survived many fights because of the added health, healing power, damage, and survivability that ascended offers; Ascended is not something that can be written off as unimportant.

I wouldn’t even really place GW2 in my top 3.

The best thing that GW2 has done is removed quest based leveling, I love being able to just run around and do stuff without having to pick up quests. However I think they could have done better with that system. While having some of the big quest chains marked on the map is a good thing, I wish they would have added a lot of stuff that was unmarked and off the beaten path. I enjoy finding unexpected things and there just isn’t a whole lot of it in GW2, especially passed the starter zones(quality definitely goes downhill as the zones progress).

SWG pre-CU is probably my favorite MMO because it had great depth and dependencies on other players. The Chronicles of Spellborn had, by a wide margin, the best combat system in any MMO. It was simple but extremely deep, I wish that game had triple-A money backing it(RIP). GW2 has some great looking zones but as far as ambiance TCOS did better in that as well, it’s the only MMO to actually scare me(stupid howlers popping out of the ground for the first time). TCOS also had quests that were not easy to figure out and a really good story. As for PvP, DAOC did RvR better, in fact I’d go as far as saying even WoW vanilla AV 1.0 was better.

While GW2 is good, it’s not the best. The main draw for this game is the fact that it was B2P. If they had fleshed out combat/specialization more and added some depth to WvW/endgame, I’d say it could have been the best. Sadly though they didn’t. It’s not entirely their fault, sandbox games are hard to get funding for.

Heijincks.9267:

Ohoni.6057:

-snip-

If your guild has only 1 person, you should be able to do it too? No, it shouldn’t work that way the same way dungeons shouldn’t be soloable.

Also, there are many guilds out there who work altruistically with smaller guilds by giving them temporary membership to do guild missions. Yes, they exist. With that said, is it really such a big sacrifice to go out of your way just slightly to circumvent the “gating”?

We could fix the rewards so they reward everyone equally proportionally to the amount of effort poured in. But let’s put this in the perspective of the big guilds. There should be an incentive for guild building, that is, bigger rewards as your guild grows bigger, or else everyone would be in small guilds as there will be no obvious advantage to being in a big one.

That also includes rewarding people who aren’t in the guild. If you get the same rewards not being in a guild, what’s the point in being in one then?

More so, I don’t know why people are seeing this as bad news. It’s an obvious step BACK into the right direction. If this was any other game, the community will be completely indifferent. Out of every MMORPG I’ve played, GW2 has the most complaints with the most relatively minor issues. Could be a good thing though.

If ArenaNet allows a guild with 1 person in it then they need to also design some guild content with those 1 man guilds in mind. Otherwise you are forcing players to make up for shoddy game design. It’s as easy as allowing the 1 man guild to “sponsor” an event, just like banners. It allows them to feel like they are earning something while at the same time providing content to everyone around. Make the rewards for that event a world reward chest(1 guild event reward per day) so others have an incentive to do it. Let them pop the event while waiting on a dragon or something. Of course the guild that sponsors the event get their merits and all guild members, even if just 1, in attendance get their commendations. Problem solved, that took a whole lot of design work!

Why does everyone need to be in big guilds? There is zero reason for big builds except for WvW. Why are we now pushing to reward the big guilds and thus force people into them? The people in small guilds are there for a reason and do not want to mass recruit or join a big guild.

The big issue here is that ArenaNet is further backing away from what this game was supposed to be designed around. Remember when they said they don’t want seeing other players to be a bad thing? Well cut to people killing guild mission mobs ahead of you or standing around making a target harder. Remember when they wanted all players who participated to be equally rewarded with XP, loot, and event rewards? Where did that go in this system? The guild missions wouldn’t be so bad if you got the same rewards for helping another guild finish their mission, but you don’t. Now we are taking that a step further and not allowing smaller guilds doing a smaller mission to even get equal rewards.

ArenaNet consistently takes 1 step forward and 2-3 steps backwards. They need to go back to their philosophy of including EVERYONE and rewarding EVERYONE equally. Instead they are going to continue to segregate and gate rewards so that some people play just a bit longer, while others just flat out quit playing.

IF they want to salvage this small guild mission fiasco, all they need to do is reward 2 commendations and maybe 10s. I’d even go as far as saying the exact same rewards that the other missions reward with a few less merits. All the players doing guild missions be them big or small are putting in the same effort so they should be rewarded the same. Now some person in a bigger guild is going to say that’s just small guilds being entitled, yet most of their guild members “effort” is showing up where their leader tells them and killing a mob. Oh your mobs harder? You have more people. Oh you have to kill more? YOU HAVE MORE PEOPLE. What do the big guilds care if the small guilds are getting rewards too? It’s not taking anything away from you.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Thank you devs for coming up with this solution. The problem is that smaller guilds are by their very existence, self entitled, against working together, and extremely self centered. They want to achieve everything a large cohesive group can in less time and get the same rewards. You will never appease them because to do so you would have to destroy the game.

For the guilds that were only limited only by influence gain and are willing to work for their reward then this will solve the problem. If you were looking to be instantly handed all the perks of a large guild on the same time scale then you will hopefully continue to be dissapointed.

My guild has been able to complete T1 bounties, All tiers of Trek and T2 Rush with a 5 man group. This means any guild with 5 people can eventually all 5 guild mission types. I don’t know how many will be required for Challenge and Puzzle missions but I think being able to do even the first 3 mission types with only 5 people is quite accessible to everyone.

For T1 bounties you only need to kill 2 targets. There is no pre-scouting required, and since the bosses scale they can easily be killed within their time limits. There are a few bounties that are too hard to find in the time limit with only 5 players, but the missions are cheap to research and run.

Yes because the large “cohesive” groups worked far harder for their content roll eyes.

The small guilds have to work FAR harder for everything. They don’t just get 1k influence because 200 people they don’t know logged in. The small guilds don’t want a free ride, but we want some content we can actually do and rewards for that effort. The effort a small 5 man guild has to put into finding 1 target is exponentially more than a 100 person guild trying to find 2 targets. Big guilds having more people makes everything easier, each person needs to put in less effort because there are more people doing it. If there is anyone that thinks they are entitled here it is the big guilds who want to restrict small from gaining the same rewards even though the small guilds are putting in more effort.

hyjaxxx.1584:

you guys are forgetting that we are getting Class overhauls aswell. which is going to be pretty awesome. Also they have said that this is the first batch of skills for wvw.. we are going to be getting some Direct abilities in the future. and who knows…..maybe even wvw trait lines! Bunker Buster,wvw support ect….i cant wait! Anet has been pretty good with content and the such. im sure this will be no different.

The most you’re going to see in “overhauls” are some nerfs/buffs of a few skills, but mostly bug fixes. So if you consider the class changes we got last patch “overhauls” then yes, we are getting them. To the rest of us though we are getting underwhelming class changes coupled with changes that make us question whether ArenaNet plays the game at all.

I understand this is a stepping stone for WvW, but we already waited 7 months for this and it should have been in at launch. Unless they have a large amount of WvW changes in addition to this progression system, this patch will probably cause a lot of people to stop playing. This system should not have taken 7 months even for a single person to program, I mean it’s a basic UI and passive bonuses. WvW is stale and lacks depth, a progression system with passive bonuses like we’ve seen will not address that at all. Most people are not going to be revitalized in WvW by working towards taking 5% less siege damage. People want new maps, new siege, and new mechanics; without any of those this is yet another lackluster patch.

The major problem with the traps is that they almost always trigger on 1 enemy since it’s the first person to step over the line that sets them off. You can hit multiple enemies in the middle of a group though, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a TRAP.

The only major use I found for traps was running around with my ranger friend. Using the spike or KD trap in the center of his traps was quite amusing, especially on thieves. “Oh you’re going to backstab me? Now you’re on the ground dying”. They are also decent at stopping mesmer bombs through bottlenecks. I prefer caltrops over the traps though, tons more damage, hits multiple enemies for the duration, and a longer cripple. I’d probably use them more if they triggered multiple times(small cooldown between triggers and only 1 of each trap down at a time), but that would take ArenaNet a year to implement.

kenshinakh.3672:

Snip

How many hours per day/week do you play? While I don’t doubt you believe yourself casual, I think you are probably between hardcore and casual, like me. Doing 33+ runs in 10 days for a single dungeon, especially when a single run can take an hour on some of them, is well above casual. I’m not a casual by any means either, I don’t believe I’ve ever made that claim, what I’m saying is people need to look at it from the casual point of view. A gear grind is going to keep the closer to hardcore players playing but it will give more casual players the mentality of “Well I’m never going to get it so I’ll just quit playing”, I’ve already seen that with my friends.

If you quit GW2 today you are stuck behind a laurel time gate, meaning there is no way to catch up as new ascended gear is being released. Unless of course ArenaNet finally releases new non-time gate ways to get ascended, but they said they would do that months ago and it still hasn’t really happened. The gate is anything but small too, I mean you’re looking at a minimum of 2-3 months(90 dailies+2 monthlies or 80 dailies+3 monthlies). That doesn’t sound too terrible until you realize that’s just for 1 spec on 1 character. Every system that ArenaNet has added to get ascended is time gated or out of reach of a portion of the player base(need a bigger guild). There is no reason to think that any new way they make ascended available won’t be time gated as well because that was the horribly devised plan behind ascended gear. What people want is ways to obtain it through regular non-time gated means like dungeon tokens, karma, crafting, badges of honor, etc.

You’re also misunderstanding what the gear in GW2 was supposed to be about. GW2 was sold on the basis of easy to obtain max stat gear and hard to obtain skins. I absolutely want max stat gear easily obtainable so casuals and anyone else can have all the different specs they like as that is supported by the overall combat design. What needs to happen is more awesome skins that are hard to obtain, people won’t feel like they are sub par if they don’t go for them but if they want to look cool they will.

Sokar Rostau.7316:

snip

First off lets get a few things straight. There are 33 UNREWARDING dungeon paths. Doing more and more challenging Fractals? UNREWARDING. Going back and doing lower level zones? UNREWARDING. WvW is probably the most unrewarding thing in the game and if you’re having a bad night it’s actually punishing. Are you starting to get the picture? People want content to do that has a decent risk/time vs reward and there are so incredibly few in the game. The recent world boss loot just shows how badly people are starved for a decent reward when they flock for a RARE.

Now as for the grinding, yeah the game is heavily grind orientated and for the exact reason above, poor risk/time vs reward. Everything in this game gives you a small piece of a reward instead of an actual reward. Do a dungeon and get 60 tokens that get you 1/5th a pair of pants, while in other MMO’s the loot might be random but the reward is always there every run. By the way it isn’t a few dungeon runs to get gear, it’s 33+, it is still a grind and if you don’t remember the tokens per run were increased because before it was 90+ runs. I can honestly say that in all the MMO’s I’ve played I’ve never had to run a single dungeon 33+ times to get all the loot I wanted. The reason you don’t see people complain about the grind much anymore is because they no longer play.

If I could get full exotics for 2g, karma set for 2k, etc; I’d actually have multiple sets of gear and I’d have my other 6 alt level 80’s geared as well. I’d actually try some weird specs and so would a lot of people. The game currently so constricting that people don’t want to try weird gear specs because that’s a lot of time to get the gear needed and if it’s bad then they are out a bunch of time/money. That is also a huge balance issue, but that’s another thread. I would also have done all the dungeon paths because currently they are a giant waste of time.

Another major issue this game suffered from is skins. People will go after skins because they look cool, the problem GW2 has is that so few skins look good or different. Why does everyone go after CoF gear besides it being easy? The gear that looks different. All the other gear looks terrible or doesn’t look different enough when compared to something you can buy on the TP for 1-2g. ArenaNet desperately needs to hire more armor designers and increase the armor/weapon skins in the game. Legendaries are proof that people will go after skins, but instead they abandon skin progression and go for ascended stat progression.

I think you need to ask yourself whether you want a game that is unrewarding but lasts long time if you’re willing to grind for those rewards or play a game that is decently rewarding but only lasts a few months. I’d rather play a game that rewards my playtime than one where I’m trying to piece together a reward. At least if things are rewarding I can come back anytime and have fun, if you quit GW2 now you’re stuck behind time gates if you want ascended.

You’re looking at this from the perspective of a hardcore(or near) gamer. Try looking at it from a casual perspective because that’s who this game was marketed to before launch, where it takes easily a month just to get exotic gear, you don’t always log in everyday, and reward is weeks/months away.

Thief traits are pretty good, if you want to see lackluster go play a necromancer, especially a power/crit build. Just having to go down 2 trait lines to get the 30% crit and 30% crit damage is bad, but on top of that most of the traits in those lines aren’t great, don’t go with a power build, or have zero synergy with other traits. Not to mention their weapon skills are usually split between condition damage, power, or non-damaging conditions, which further infuriates you when you want to go in one direction.

This game truly does not reward you decently for anything, the new chest loots were like an oasis in a desert. Why do you think people flocked to them? The risk/time vs reward on most other things is absolutely horrible. If they are nerfing this then CoF path 1 must be getting nerfed too because that is far better for money farming, although it makes you want to smash your face into a wall. ArenaNet’s biggest problem is not rewarding players, people don’t want to earn a small portion of token currency for their main reward. People want to get cool loot and this game does not deliver on that front, instead it’s here’s a breadcrumb! Soon you’ll be able to make a whole loaf of bread!

How about just making other things in the game lucrative as well? Give finishing any event chain a chance for a rare/exotic. Reward rares for events that don’t get run often. That would certainly spread people out to lesser played zones. Make some actual hard events that reward decent loot.

DanH.5879:

when the 25 max bleed stack limit is lifted, then you may dare talk
for pvp/wvw it may be good, but in pve when you also have a necro in the party, then your damage is severely reduced because extra bleeds are “dropped” without doing damage, not to mention if you have 15 sec and 3/4 bleed time… chopping the 3/4 part without any apparent reason.
until those 2 issues are fixed, bleeding thief is crap in pve unless he is the solo bleeder in the party. (fyi caltops alone tend to spam 10+stacks)

Not sure what this all has to do with my post, but I’ll assume you take my post as get a condition build. You don’t need a condition build to get health, armor, etc, I used to run a 18k hp 2600 armor all around build. Also in PvE you can build completely differently, you’re not going to be worrying about stealthing up on the boss and having revealed when it slaps a condition on you. In PvE you’re stealth condition removal will be up when you need it, except maybe a boss that slaps conditions on you every 3s but I honestly can’t think of one that doesn’t require people first missing a dodge or moving out of a red circle. Honestly, how is this nerf going to impact you in PvE? Are you spamming C&D on certain bosses? You’re seriously going to need to explain this to me. It’s clearly dungeon related since I already run a heavy condition build in world PvE and have no issues tagging mobs and getting credit.

Condition caps do suck and it needs changed, I’ve also posted against them once again since release, but that doesn’t change that thieves have plenty of condition removal and defense available to them outside of stealth. If you can’t get all of them while maintaining a super high damage berserker build, GOOD. You should have to make decisions between damage and survivability like all the other classes need to. Sure some of your stats might be wasted on condition damage to get vigor on steal, but now you can dodge a whole lot more. Also I’ll state now that I HATE the trait system, you should honestly be able to put your stats into what you want and then pick traits in addition to that. Stats shouldn’t be forced on you because you want a certain trait, but you have to work with what you’ve got.

My biggest problem with dungeons is them reusing most of the same stuff for each path. I mean AC you pretty much run to the same rooms, fight the same mobs, fight the same bosses with very little actually different. I originally envisioned these paths as seeing 1 piece of the whole dungeon, instead we got the same dungeon just a different slightly different version. Any rooms you cleared in previous paths would be clear for the next path, meaning no spider boss, Kholer and troll EVERY run. Instead if you killed spider boss & Kholer in path 1, their boss rooms will be empty and cleared in Path 2 should you have a reason to go through them.

If I did AC I’d do something along the lines of:
Path 1: Mopping up remaining ghosts(kholer), another ghost encounter, & Ghost room with ghost boss instead of the current one.

Path 2: They’ve found a secret passage and are going deeper but explorers keep going missing(spider queen), graveling horde attacks, and finally the gravelings are dealt with by killing the graveling boss(pick one!).

Path 3: With the gravelings defeated, excavation has continued and has uncovered powerful artifacts in a sealed chamber. The artifacts are cursed though and corrupt the excavation team(happens in front of you), As you struggle to overcome the horde of corrupt members by prying their artifacts away, 1 makes an escape. Each encounter after is basically chasing this person towards the entrance as they summon new enemies and set traps.

It’s not perfect but at least each path is very different.

Ruggan.4102:

1) Pain response only removes if the thief is already at 75% health and THEN struck with a condition… it does not remove at 75% health
2) The signet cures a condition for each ally nearby… this is true
3) Shadow step does as you say
4) Inf Strike assumes 1 weapon combination
5) The heal that you speak of is a stealthing heal
If you look at the abilities of a thief, they center around stealth… there is a reason for that… just like a necro’s abilities center around death magic and an elementalist centers around elemental magic. So lets take away stealth from thieves… what you have then? A warrior with little to no defense, toughness, vitality, or any other advantage… yup that makes loads of sense

Pain Response actually triggers when below 75% health and struck, which assuming we are talking about the ranger traps doing mad damage will get you below 75% damage and I find it hard to believe the ranger won’t be trying to hit you. The stealthing part of the heal doesn’t matter if you really need to get some conditions off you, you need to make that tactical decision just like guardians who have a 1per10 removal on their heal, do I heal and not be able to remove a condition? Or same thing for a warrior, do I heal and give up regen? The point was that if you want on demand condition removal without worrying about reveal, you have options. Heaven forbid that thieves don’t get everything in a single build.

Thief skills/traits aren’t all focused around stealth either, some deal with dodging/evading, some deal with stealing, and some deal with traps and others venoms. The thief isn’t based solely on stealth and all the thieves here complaining prove that stealth was far too powerful if it “breaks” the class for them. A good build tries to make use of multiple things, that is why the good thieves that use stealth in addition to dodging, evading, shadowstepping, traps, etc will not be majorly impacted while the “OMG STEALTH IS EVERYTHING!” thieves think the sky is falling.

Do you even have a clue what a thief can do out of stealth? A shadowstepping thief can make you want to pull your hair out. A dodging thief is stupidly slippery especially if they are condition based and using dodgetrops. I have 20k hp, 2600 armor, and a ton of dodging on my thief so your description of no defense, vitality, and toughness is PURELY your decision. Get some PVT gear, spec into acrobatics, learn to use shadowsteps, get a trait for vigor; the options are there but YOU aren’t taking them. Don’t get me wrong, the base 8k health and 200+ armor some classes get for no apparent reason is stupid, I’ve been posting about that since launch :P

Ruggan.4102:

Distaste.4801:

This stealth nerf is absolutely nothing. Heaven forbid you actually have to think about anything other than damage stats on your thief. The ONLY people impacted this are the ones that abused stealth to begin with. Otherwise those of us that didn’t abuse stealth won’t really notice it. I run with blinding power, shadow refuge and even C&D some myself and I know it won’t be an issue. I already space my stealths out, I don’t want to be that perma-stealth abusing thief that has zero skill outside stealth. Of course I can see why those that do abuse it are upset, now they need to actually learn to play the class and won’t see huge numbers because they will have to pick up some defense.

Yea but you have to keep in mind… the stealth line is what controls a thieves condition removal, stun breaks, buffs, and heals. So basically, if a thief uses cnd comes out of it and gets hit by oooh i dont know… how about 3 ranger traps where the ranger has condition damage trait of oooh… 1.2k… so the trap ticks a very nice amount of dmg… well the thief now has to wait 3 seconds for their Hide In Shadows to be of use even though it isnt on cooldown… wow yea that makes lots of sense. Lets keep a Ranger from using Healing Spring for an additional 3 seconds past the cooldown of the ability just because one of their trait line abilities gave them regen… wow the fire that would be fueled then.

Thief condition removal is not all in the stealth line, there is a removal in the acrobatics line(when hit at 75% health it removes etc), you have a removal on a signet(just 1 condition but it’s AOE for other friendlies), shadowstep will remove 3 conditions, inf strike return will remove 1 condition, and you also have your heal that removes burning, bleeding, and poison regardless if it puts you in stealth or not. Also a condition removed every 3s is not bad by any means, I believe the guardian trait removes 1 every 10, same for the ranger signet so I don’t think having to wait 3s to stealth and remove some conditions is too bad at all. Again I will say that thieves that relied far too much on stealth will actually have to learn how to play the class.

Stealth is FAR too powerful, that is what people are not understanding. It not only gives you a huge advantage offensively but defensively as well. The fact that stealth can heal you, remove conditions, reduce your cooldowns(regen initiative), increase your crit, give you might, and blind all on top of being able to pick your battles, ambush your enemy, and get away if things go south is imbalanced. What makes it even worse is that it is spammable via C&D and the initiative system. ArenaNet took stealth, which is already a huge balancing act, and dialed it up to 11.

The initiative system is inherently bad. Most decent theorycrafters knew this way back in beta, we had long discussion threads about it. Initiative allows people to spam skills and since C&D applies stealth that means stealth is spammable. As I already said though, stealth is too powerful. That leads us down the road of how do you balance C&D? One way is just placing a cooldown on it but that negates the purpose of the initiative system. The other is to remove the stealth completely and replace it with some other defensive mechanic. The final way is to move the cooldown that should have been on it to stealth itself to prevent the spam abuse. The choice is pretty clear considering they don’t want to remove the initiative system or put in a new defensive mechanic.

Bottom line, the thief has spammable skills with stealth attached to one. No other class can spam their 2-5 skills like the thief so it’s quite obvious why the thief is the only class that will be limited defensively for a short period by one of the things they can spam. If you don’t want stealth to be changed like it is then it needs to be 1-2 things. Either stealth gets removed from weapon skills OR the initiative system gets removed and all our skills get cooldowns. Until either of those happens stealth needs the revealed debuff to keep it from being abused.

Only once we get stealth back under control can we start to iron out the other issues that thieves have.

Yeah, they did nerf the drops awhile ago, which is why I stopped doing fractals. I used to get at least 4 rares a run(1 from each chest) plus cores/lodestones, but after the nerf I was lucky to get 1 maybe 2 rares. After 2 runs with zero rares I decided it wasn’t worth it anymore, especially now when you can do 2-3 world events and get 3+ rares. I have 8 characters(7 level 80’s) so I can literally spend all day farming world bosses.

Apfelschorle.6472:

I play many different chars – the Thief is one of them.
Imo just nerfing stealth is not that easy, because it changes alot. The playstyle is totally “destoyed”. You have no chance to reposition and barley no CC to compensate missing stealth.

I understand, that many ppl want a change. But just put “autoreveal” on every player that used stealth, even without attacking goes too far.
To solve this problem, they could remove the “blind after stealth”-Trait and put a small reveal, like 1 sec on players after stealth fades away without any attack. So permanent stealth/blind will be impossible, but stealth would be still usefull.

The only playstyles it destroys are the ones that constantly spammed C&D to stay in stealth. So if you liked just C&D→C&D→C&D then yeah, your going to have to actually learn to play the class. Most thieves though won’t have issues because they would actually use other skills besides C&D. The rest of the playstyles are pretty much untouched since they either already deal with reveal or don’t stealth enough for the reveal to be an issue.

This change is pretty much near perfect. It removes the thieves ability to permastealth, which they obviously didn’t want happening, but doesn’t impact any of the legit playstyles in any meaningful way. All the skill-less permastealth thieves will have to either learn the class as well as get some survival stats, or they will reroll to whatever class is next on the bandwagon list.

This stealth nerf is absolutely nothing. Heaven forbid you actually have to think about anything other than damage stats on your thief. The ONLY people impacted this are the ones that abused stealth to begin with. Otherwise those of us that didn’t abuse stealth won’t really notice it. I run with blinding power, shadow refuge and even C&D some myself and I know it won’t be an issue. I already space my stealths out, I don’t want to be that perma-stealth abusing thief that has zero skill outside stealth. Of course I can see why those that do abuse it are upset, now they need to actually learn to play the class and won’t see huge numbers because they will have to pick up some defense.

Lafiel.9372:

Just because you came from another MMO doesn’t make their opinion gold. As some have stated before, it’s only grindy if you make it grindy. I.e. you’re not grinding for stats but you’re grinding for cometics. Gearing yourself with full exotics can be done in less than a week. Gearing yourself with ascended rings can be done in a week or two at most. Gearing yourself with amulets will take a month and gearing yourself with accessories without a guild is near impossible at this stage. However, exotic accessories are not that much different to ascended ones. At the moment. I’m happily sticking to exotics mostly just cause I know ascended doesn’t make a significant difference (p<0.05). The grind is present when you want elite rare skins which are optional to the game.

First off you need to define which players you’re talking about. I think everyone who is talking about how there is no grind needs to list how often and how many hours per session they play. The casuals that play maybe 1-2 hours per day aren’t going to get exotics in a week and probably not even a month. They might average 1-2g a day and with just an exotic armor set costing ~24g, that’s 12-24 days not including runes, weapons, sigils, accessories, etc. Weapons is another 12g, sigils at least 4g, accessories another 15g, Do you see how this starts to add up? 55 days at 1g a day and that’s not even anything fancy. Maybe they want Runes of Divinity 6×8g, 64 days just for some runes.

Ascended rings in a week and two at most? You gotta get to level 10 first, at 1 hour a day that’s 9 days alone before you even have a chance at a ring. Then you need 20 pristine fractals as the chances of getting the ring you want is low, that’s 20 days. So 29 days for rings, a lot more than 1 week, 2 max. You are right about accessories though, without a big guild they are certainly way overpriced.

Now lets take dailies, 30 minutes to 1 hour each day. That’s ~15-30 hours for 1 item. In WoW vanilla(grindiest version) you could finish most raids in 3 hours. Just using MC as an example that’s 9 bosses, 3 items per boss, and 40 raid members. Leaving RNG aside that’s a 67.5% chance of getting an item every raid. In those hours of doing dailies you could do 5-10 raids, what should be equal to 3-6 items, but you get 1. Obviously accessories via laurels are much worse.

The biggest issue in GW2 is what happens when you want to swap specs? Now you need new gear; different stats, sigils, accessories, etc. For casuals this isn’t even really an option. 2 months just for them to try a new spec they might hate. I play more than a casual and I don’t even want to change specs because it costs a pretty penny. I actually just changed specs and because my armor has runes of divinity in it, it’s actually way cheaper to buy new armor/runes than to replace the runes in my old armor.

GW2 is grindy. It isn’t as grindy as L2, MU online, Aion, etc, but it is grindy. Remember this was supposed to be easy to obtain max stats and when it takes casuals 2 months just to get base gear let alone ascended stuff, I don’t think Arenanet followed that philosophy. ArenaNet needs to stop catering to the hardcore 30+ hours a week and instead make the game enjoyable for those with maybe 1-2 hours a night that don’t want to spend that time being forced into fractals, large guilds, or dailies just to get max stats. It’s already tough enough for them to get together 1 spec’s worth of gear so the current grind further boxes them in with their inability to viably chance specs.

If ArenaNet had any sense left they would make all current and future ascended gear available through all current means(IE Amulets/rings/accessories from karma) and redo their risk/time vs reward scheme because currently you never feel like you’re really rewarded. You only need to look as far as the new event chest to see how starved people are for rewards when they flock to an event just for a rare that they will most likely turn into an ecto.

Also I won’t even debate the whole forced or ascended not being necessary thing. It’s silly, playing the game isn’t necessary either so would ArenaNet like people to quit? All players want to progress because that’s what MMO’s are about. ArenaNet opted to change this progression from skins to stats so now people are chasing stat upgrades. By telling people it’s not necessary you’re basically telling them not to play the game because the main objective is max progression, which again ArenaNet made Ascended items.

Thesilentflute.8761:

People forget so soon what happened when this trash started in swtor’s illum with the gear changes coming soon it is setting up for a repeat of that type of pve’r caused pvp death.

Lets pretend for a second that these gvg matches are not a planed exploitation of the raised bag drop rates. There is nothing skillful about fighting outside the rule set and environment that the game master has established if anything it shows the opposite.

Illum was terrrible to begin with, not only was it small but SWTOR’s engine could barely handle 10 people fighting let alone more. Not to mention the faction imbalance made things 100x worse.

As for as skill goes, you’re wrong. There is plenty of skill involved in winning a straight up GvG, in fact more skill because outside factors aren’t an issue, there is nothing to blame a loss on except your guilds skill or apparently now a class-less skill-less WvW guild ruining the match. You’re trying to say that is more skillful to show up to an undefended tower, plop down 2-3 rams, and cap a tower? There is ZERO skill involved there. Don’t get me wrong, there is skill in reading the map, taking in scout information, and attacking/defending the right points at the right time, but a very large portion of fights are determined squarely on numbers.

They also aren’t fighting outside the rules or environment the game master has set. There is no rule that you cannot have a GvG fight. I also don’t know what environment you think they are fighting outside either since they are after all still fighting on a BL map. Even the offending guild didn’t break any rules, they just broke social convention and now there is community backlash. It’s not even like this is a GW2 specific social convention either, not interrupting a set-up match extends to well outside the video game realm. It’s like playing a 1v1 street basketball game when a 3rd person runs up, knocks the other 2 to the ground and dunks. He scored against the other 2 opponents but he looks like a complete kitten that no one wants to play with.

WvW is a PvP zone and you will get killed, but that doesn’t change the disrespect as well as lack of skill and class that knowingly wiping out a GvG match shows. Why any guild would make the conscious decision to do so is beyond me, now they are known kittens and a laughingstock of anyone that follows tier 1. I honestly can’t wait to see the jokes in map chat.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Thanks for the live stream. I’ve worked harder to succeed in some Lyssa events than it seems y’all had to in at least some of the encounters. The experiment proved what I expected it to prove, that skill trumps gear. I’ll take skilled players who don’t know their class that well over players who’ve played one class to 80 but mostly just stand in one place.

That said, I still think there should be hard and easy mode dungeons, with hard tuned up a bit from baseline and easy tuned down a bit. Why? The more a game offers to a broader range of player demographics, the better it is for the game.

The problem is how do players obtain that skill level. The problem with AC now is that there are so many mechanics that are not forgiving in the slightest. It makes learning the skills needed for dungeons a huge exercise in frustration. Didn’t know the traps after spider queen 2 hit you? dead! Didn’t know spider queens poison kills you in a few seconds? dead. Didn’t know about the burrows spawning tons of gravelings? dead. Didn’t know flamethrowers kill you super quick? dead. Didn’t know the boss stacks confusion on you? dead. Didn’t know you couldn’t avoid the rockfalls? dead. The list goes on and on.

Everyone is approaching it with prior knowledge and experience. This video does answer the question of if a level 35 group is able to complete the dungeon(although they did it in all masterworks if I read correctly which any new 35 is unlikely to have), but it does not answer if a group of new level 35’s can reasonably complete the dungeon. People forget when the game released the truckload of deaths that came with learning the original AC, even then it was overtuned for new lvl 35’s and that’s why most didn’t run it and those that did came back with horror stories. It took people learning the dungeon teaching others to do it and those in turn teaching more. Only then did AC become easy, but learning it certainly took more than a few deaths.

If they want to make dungeons difficult that’s fine, but you need a learning curve so it doesn’t feel like you’re smashing your head against the wall. They also need to figure out their risk vs reward because I know I certainly don’t do dungeons because of the time it takes to get a decent reward.

This is the build I’m currently using in WvW. I roam with 1-2 other people, if I joikittenerg I usually pop on a shortbow.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.1|8.1h.h9.8.1h.h1k|a.1h.h9.8.1h.h1k|1c.712.1h.712.1c.714.1h.714.1c.73.1h.73|211.0.211.0.311.0.1j.62.1h.62.8b.62|0.0.u34b.k68.k37|31.e|57.5a.5n.5b.5v|e

I go 3 pieces of carrion and 3 pieces of PVT, I find doing a bit less damage but being tankier allows me to survive long enough for conditions to do their work. I also use celestial stuff since all of those stats will benefit me, plus it makes swapping builds easier. I use bountiful theft, the vigor is awesome when paired with dodgetrops. Not to mention you can really hurt some class builds by yanking away their protection, swiftness, might stacks, etc. 50% faster movement while stealthed just gives me more mobility, can’t be removed from me, and when paired with a full duration shadow refuge means no one will catch you. I also use the condition removal while in stealth, it removes 1 condition upon entering stealth and 1 3s later, which combined with the 50% speed means you should be able to reduce cripples/chills on you when getting away. The condition removal at 75% is nice, but I can stealth multiple times inside of it’s cooldown, it doesn’t remove cripples/chills/confusion so I use the 2 initiative per 10 there. You can try using the faster initiative regen in stealth which is 1 per 3s, but that requires staying in stealth to regen. Anything less than 3s doesn’t count, since most of our stealths will be 4s we will only get 1 tick making the 2 per 10 better imo.

Things to remember with D/D or condition builds:

1. D/D is better at group fights since DB will hit multiple enemies.
2. DB costs a lot of initiative so spread them out. You don’t want to see your 9 bleeds from DB all canceled on the first condition removal.
3. Caltrops are awesome, fight in them when possible or use them as area denial/CC.
4. Caltrops do not break stealth when dropped so you can stealth into a group, drop them, and get out while they do work or just start the fight.
5. Caltrops cast time, like C&D, is not interrupted by steal.
6. In WvW always steal from critters before you get into a fight It will give you an ability to stealth+blind, basically it’s a free blinding powder you can use at the start of a fight to close the gap and you’ll still have your steal cooldown up. If you run P/D on swap this means you can open with Stealth pistol #1 for 5 bleeds, 3 bleeds from Sigil of Geomancer on swap, and 3 bleeds from your first DB for a total of 11 bleeds to start the fight. If they remove them then you’re ready to steal and drop 2-3 more DB’s.
7. Save your steal until after you’ve DBed once, it will give you 3 initiative.
8. If you’re being kited switch to shortbow(or pistol) or just run away, kiting is the bane of D/D since you’ll have to wast initiative to cripple them which means less DB.
9. Take advantage of situations: If a friendly or enemy player goes down then use Caltrops on them, it will severly hurt enemies from spiking/rezzing OR keep them away giving you or friendlies time to spike/rez. The same goes for DB, anytime people group up for things like spiking/rezzing it’s a good place to DB. People know to AOE Shadow refuge so it’s usually a great place to drop caltrops.
10. When in doubt, run! You’re not invincible

Silver.4798:

Snipped for post length

I think you’re playing a condition thief wrong. You don’t want to spam DB unless you know they are out of condition removal OR you can nail multiple targets with it(even if the bleeds are removed the damage you’ll do vs 3 targets is equal to that of a full duration on a single target). You also try not to steal to your enemy to start the fight, steal will provide 3 initiative back, so almost an extra DB. D/D condition is not for 1v1 fights, it’s for group skirmishes where you can put bleeds on a few people, it does alright in 1v1 but that is not it’s strength.

You also miss P/D as the major 1v1 condition build. Pistol #1 can stack 5 bleeds alone and it costs no initiative. The stealth pistol #1 will stack another 5 bleeds. All of your initiative can be used for C&D or escapes(pistol #3). You also cannot be kited since it has a 900 range. 5-6 stacks for an average? try 10 or 12. In 20s with an average of 10 bleed stacks that’s 20k damage not including all the damage you do putting those bleeds on.

Caltrops are also far from the primary means of stacking bleeds. They help in stacking bleeds but they are more of an area denial and CC. They are extremely hard to see(especially in the heat of battle) and by the time you notice you’re in them you’ve got 4-6 stacks of bleeds on you. A good thief is either going to force you into them(standing in them vs melee opponents, keeping them between a ranged opponent and backing up) or if you don’t go into them then the thief has gained time to regen initiative and other cooldowns. They are also invaluable for slowing dowkittenerg, heck I used them just yesterday on a garrison wall to slow dowkittenerg so the friendly zerg could get away. I also used them in another zerg vs zerg before the battle started to cripple their forces, do decent damage, and possibly use their condition removal cooldowns up. That sets the enemy zerg up at a pretty big disadvantage.

Condition builds have all the options except burst dps a dps thief has but more. All the things you list as options a condition thief can and will do, except maybe the smoke one unless the thief is running P/P which gives up C&D. I don’t know what utilities you think condition thieves use but I run blinding power, caltrops, and shadow refuge. I can stealth just as long as a DPS thief, have more health, more defenses, and more toughness.

BS thieves have 2 things going for them, Burst damage and stealth. The problem is that if someone survives the burst damage all you have is stealth. A BS thief out of stealth is dead, they have zero survivability. An intelligent player, as you mentioned, will not have many issues dealing with stealth either so that further lowers a BS thief survivability. BS thieves are incredibly easy to deal with if you can take 1-2 hits. Heck I just toss out caltrops and it ruins their day. They are good at picking off low health players, but most experienced players will kill them. My buddy and I loved using traps to kill them, he would put down the ranger fire trap and I’d drop the thief KD trap, here comes mister BS thief and now he’s knocked down and burning to death lol.

I think you also overlook utility skills. I like to run bountiful theft(stealing gives vigor for 15s and steals 2 boons and gives them to all nearby allies). Not only is the vigor awesome(more dodgetrops!) but being able to remove boons is invaluable. Enemy speeding away? Not anymore! Guardian tossing up protection and regen? Nope! Got 15 stacks of might? Now I do! Thief doing dagger storm? No more stability!

Kazuhiro.5809:

The fact that you can “stack up” ability casts just murders me.

“Oh kitten I used one death blossom too many, oh kitten now I’m gonna just use a dodge to get out, oh kitten now it’s telegraphing an attack and I have no dodges”

I have the ability queue problems too, most MMO’s have taught me to spam keys so breaking that habit is hard. They need to add a .5s slop timer so any ability presses in that .5s after an ability is used aren’t counted.

Yeah the lag is quite insane. You can actually tell when the enemy zerg is nearby because of the skill lag. Even back at launch when WvW was full on most servers I don’t remember the lag being this bad, it must be something they did last patch? I’d almost guess they reduced the number of servers per cluster handling WvW as a cost cutting measure since most matchups aren’t anywhere near maxing out. However T1 is maxing out and it’s causing serious lag. Yesterday at JQ BL jq garrison I couldn’t get off a single ability, must have been about 5 minutes I ran around before suddenly getting yanked 2000+ yds off the keep lords roof to splat on the ground.

I’ve got 7 80’s and 1 lvl 33 that I’m leveling with my buddy. The easiest to level were the warrior and guardian, the worst to level was the ranger(like pulling teeth!). I did it mostly to become familiar with all the classes for PvP. I now use the guardian for all PvE stuff and my thief(1st 80) for WvW. I did spend a lot of time on my necromancer(2nd 80), but the traits and lack of cohesive builds is too frustrating.

Kazuhiro.5809:

Distaste.4801:

Caltrops(utility) are a fairly big AOE, stack bleeds(yay!), and cripple. Get those things off at a choke point or inside of an enemy zerg and it really hampers them and does a good bit of damage. If you can keep an enemy in the caltrops, those caltrops alone can keep up a 10+ stack of bleeds. So they are a powerful area denial if people avoid them, they disrupt movement if they pass through them, and a killer if they sit in them.

Wait wait, “real” caltrops build up bleed stacks while people stand in them?

What the Faust am I doing not taking it? Thanks for the tip. Here I was just using “dodgetrops” as I hear they’re called to help me kite veterans and such nonsense.

Yep they get applied if you stand in them. They also apply 2 stacks of bleeds per second. In PvE(without my food) I like to do DBx3 then drop those babies and stealth, kittenaikittennit, and you’ll see 25 stacks of bleeds for awhile. Makes you feel good inside!

Hjulstad.6317:

Been thinking about get a condition set for my thief ever since i created it but was always affraid that dd condition build would lack to much damage in wvw.. How much does your bleeds tick for *? And do you feel that you actually Bring anything to the table in 20+vsXX ? Been playing S/D with pvt gear with Ruby orbs and also went D/D with same gear for abit..

Your bleeds will tick for 100-113 give or take depending on how much condition damage you stack. The key is getting condition duration or more importantly bleed duration. You can use 2x Centaur runes, 2x Krait runes, 2x Afllicted; each 2x bonus is 15% bleed duration, so 45% total. Then I use super veggie pizza for 36% condition duration and 1x Sigil of agony for 10% bleed duration. That’s 91% total, so death blossom bleeds will last for 19s. If you stack 12 bleeds for 19s that’s 22k+ damage.

In 20+ battles you definitely are useful, more useful than backstab thieves imo. Caltrops(utility) are a fairly big AOE, stack bleeds(yay!), and cripple. Get those things off at a choke point or inside of an enemy zerg and it really hampers them and does a good bit of damage. If you can keep an enemy in the caltrops, those caltrops alone can keep up a 10+ stack of bleeds. So they are a powerful area denial if people avoid them, they disrupt movement if they pass through them, and a killer if they sit in them. D/D DB can hit 5 targets so that’s some decent AOE in the middle of a zerg vs zerg battle and gives you evades while doing it. P/D is more single target condition but is incredibly hard to pin down and kill.

Condition builds also have far more survivability via more dodges, more toughness, more health, more condition removal, more utility, and depending on the build more mobility. If you want to do a crit build you need to go down the crit line because it’s hard to make up that crit and crit damage, that line doesn’t offer much utility or survivability options though. However in the condition damage line I get to remove enemy boons(invaluable) and give them to allies on top of giving out vigor(more dodges!). Utility and survivability in 1 trait!

Here is my build if you’re interested: http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/thief/?7.0|8.1h.h9.8.1h.h1k|5.1h.h9|1c.712.1h.712.1c.714.1h.714.1c.73.1h.73|211.0.211.0.311.0.1j.62.1h.62.8b.62|0.0.u34b.k69.k37|31.e|0.0.0.0.0|e

You can swap out the celestial stuff for carrion or the ascended gear with condition damage/vit/toughness/precision. I just prefer celestial since I do use all the stats.

In WvW it’s actually really good for a D/D condition thief. Doing DB over it(whirl finisher) will put confusion on all nearby foes, get 3 stacks on people and suddenly it’s ~1k damage per skill on top of the 1k+ bleed damage per second. It can certainly ruin peoples days.

I haven’t really fought a P/D condition thief with my build, it’s probably a losing battle since a 1v1 is to the strengths of a P/D build, but here’s my thoughts.

1. Stealth into him(blinding powder), use shortbow #1 while in stealth to immoblize for 2s, switch weapons then DB.(if you use geomancy sigil he will now have 6 bleeds on him).

2. He will probably try to dodge, Pistol #3 away, or C&D dodge through him if you can to drop caltrops(if he doesn’t dodge his strike shouldn’t connect so no teleport/stealth and now he is bleeding more and crippled), steal(if he got away) and then DB if he hasn’t dodged again. Use the stealth you stole and repeat #1(minus BP).

3. Using the remove conditions when hit at 75% health trait is probably a good choice for this battle along with the remove conditions while in stealth trait. It gimps your initiative regen, but he is a condition build.

4. Try and use caltrops to keep him bleeding/crippled. They have a big radius(240, as big as your shortbow poison shot) and last 14s on a 30s cooldown. You can either fake running away to pull him into them, stealth then drop them on top of him, or just drop them and hope he hits them. If he uses shadow refuge then drop them in the circle. If he uses C&D a lot then drop them and stand in them as much as possible while trying to dodge it.

5. Save dagger storm to buy time for cooldowns to come up. If he is smart he will stop shooting, if he is dumb well you just did more damage to him and now your cooldown is up.

6. Time Stealths for when you have a decent number of bleed stacks on yourself to best make use of removals. If he stealths then dodge! If not be ready to remove stacks of bleeds!

7. If you cannot DB then switch to short bow and try to keep him out of stealth.

Remember it is an uphill battle. You want to stay melee but by doing so you give him easy access to C&D+5 bleed stacks.

I’d also point out that it’s unlikely a backstab thief would win this fight either. Backstab thieves are incredibly easy to defeat if you can survive the initial burst. With 20k hp and 2600 armor it’s not that hard. A single caltrop drop can ruin a backstab thiefs day, then it’s just poison their shadow refuge and watch them run. At 10k hp they drop incredibly fast.

I should first say that I usually run around with my ranger friend so that influences my builds. I actually changed from a full berserker build to a all around build and now I’m using the 0/0/30/20/20 DD build.

With the proper runes/sigils/food you should be able to put out a ton of damage. At 100 damage per tick and a 12 stack of bleeds that’s 1200 a second, with 90% bleed duration and DB you’re looking at 17k damage just from 3 DB’s and remember that can be on up to 5 enemies. Now tack on caltrops(utility) and that alone can keep an 8-10 stack of bleeds on an enemy while they stay in it.

On top of all of this you can have 2600 armor, 20k hp, more dodges, longer stealth, stealing boons, vigor, and more heals.

D/D vs P/D is a tough one and it will come down to the fights you get into. D/D is better for small skirmishes because DB is an AOE and has a small evade on it. D/D’s weaknesses are that you need to be in melee range to attack and that it takes a bunch of initiative to use DB and if those bleeds get removed you can’t reapply right away. Also on the initiative front you can’t use C&D whenever you want since you’re using your initiative for bleeds. You also get a poison here too which can really help against healing targets. Daggers also make better use of caltrops imo since you can drop them right on your targets instead of needing to lead them in.

P/D on the other hand is stronger in a 1v1 especially against melee since you can kite them, you can constantly keep reapplying a bleed for no initiative cost, and have C&D when you need it. The weakness of P/D is you can’t apply your bleeds against multiple enemies, don’t have a poison without swapping, fights take longer due to having to stack bleeds longer and not having as many stacks, and you can really hurt yourself on any target that uses reflects.

As for caltrops on dodge, its a preference thing. They aren’t as good as the utility caltrops but a bleed is a bleed. In WvW they really can help with getting away. If you use bountiful theft that 15s vigor+dodge returns some endurance means you can do a whole lot of dodging, pretty good for d/d when you’re out of initiative and still fighting in melee range.

You’re other options are thrill of the crime(main option), but fury doesn’t help much unless you’re going for a precision condition build, 1 stack of might is meh, and swiftness is good but we already get that on dodge and stealth if you use the 50% speed in stealth trait. Flanking strikes doesn’t increase condition damage. Instinctual response is a good survivability trait but you can’t control when it goes off which often leads to wasting it. So caltrops really aren’t that bad of an option.

My tips for most fights would probably be spacing your DB out when you can. That way if they do condition removal it’s not all 3 at once. Wait until after your first DB to steal if you can, that way you get your 3 initiative back. Get Caltrops(utility) if you haven’t been using them, they apply 2 bleeds per second and cripple. I run with blinding powder, shadow refuge, and caltrops. The run speed signet is nice but I can get runspeed from dodging/stealth.

Maestro.5376:

This. Arenanet doesn’t design their dungeons around shoddy gearing, and especially not EX dungeons. They design them around proper gearing and preparation. So saying that AC Ex should be doable with a team that is undergeared is like saying a Major League Baseball game should be winnable with a team that uses all plastic bats.

That’s all fine and dandy, but designing a dungeon around being well geared is extremely poor design for a low level dungeon. You see dungeons while leveling up are usually designed around an average gamers gear at that point, which for most is a hodge podge of current level gear and lower level gear. Gearing up for a dungeon at level 35 is a huge waste of time/money considering in a few hours of play you’ll have out leveled that gear and replaced it.

You’re trying to equate this to a professional league baseball game when it should be a neighborhood pickup game. In a pickup game you play with whatever is available(trashcan lid is 2nd base!), including a plastic bat. Pickup games are how kids learned to actually play the game and the same is applicable to AC. AC should be where players learn how dungeons work and is doable with average gear and average specs. The second you need to have certain gear, certain specs, and/or certain classes the design has become incredibly bad.

If you guys wanted to actually test with average gear it’s quite easy. Level up to 35 without using the TP. You can use any gear you loot and you can only craft gear with the mats you find/harvest on that character. That would be an average players experience.

You’re not going to see stealth changed(if at all) until after the next big patch. If stealth is still an issue after culling is removed then you’ll see changes. Personally, including stealth at all was a bad decision as it is always unbalance-able in any MMO. Instead they should have given us more evades, allows us to mitigate damage but without the giant balance issues of stealth. If we had an evade mode instead of stealth it would certainly make backstab damage a lot more fair.

Heijincks.9267:

Alarox.4590:

Jrunyon.3012:

Alarox.4590:

At the same time, this doesn’t add anything to the game’s enjoyment (which we’ve already concluded is the priority in playing any game).

Wrong. It doesn’t add anything for you

Stop being selfish.

Finally, someone who can tell me how this makes the game so much more fun (I’m serious). Go on.

I can think of several reasons.

1. It gives the hardcore players incentive. They don’t care if there’s vertical progression. They want power. Ascended does that for them.
2. Ascended is still a new thing. Its application hasn’t really developed yet other than for FoTM. This lays out more potential in the future.
3. If implemented correctly, it would give all players a sense of progression which is… really important when it comes to MMORPGs. Anet admits their mistake in the implementation.

The main problem with ascended isn’t the fact it exists. The problem is its implementation. The existence of exotics goes against the manifesto too if you read it in a different light.

1. Gear progression gives an incentive to ALL players. All players want to progress their characters as far as they can go. The problem is when progressing their characters becomes nearly unobtainable, the players feel they’ve advanced as far as they can and quit. So while currently the hardcore players as having a good time chasing ascended, casual players are jumping ship because exotic is the best they can obtain without grinding fractals, laurels, or guild missions. This is a small positive to hardcore players and a GIANT negative to the rest of the players.

2. It has no more potential than rune slots, that’s all the infusion slots are being used for anyway. All they needed to do was introduce offensive, defensive, and utility rune slots, no ascended gear stat hike needed.

3. Again go back to #1, not all players currently have feasible access to ascended. ArenaNet might have admitted only implementing one way to get the gear as wrong, but they STILL haven’t fixed it and have in fact continued with their original bad implementation. Last patch they added amulets with, surprise surprise, only one way to get them. This patch they added accessories with guild missions(only available to those in a big enough guild) as their “main” way of obtaining them. Laurels are a time gated nightmare that put any player actually using them to obtain ascended months behind. Laurels also force you into completing dailies everyday, for months, on top of taking up 30mins-1hr of your desired playstyle. If a players has 1 hr a night to play they are doing their daily and not much else.

Ascended brought NOTHING to the game that couldn’t have been better implemented by using really cool looking skins(something the game severely lacks). Heck they could have added new stats, runes, sigils, or stat combos. ArenaNet needs to learn that too much stick and not enough carrot leads to people leaving and never coming back. Wait until next patch, I’d bet money they add an ascended item to WvW and the PvE crowd goes ape-kitten over it.

Instead they need to just make all ascended gear available through all current means of obtaining gear: crafting, Fractals, karma, WvW, dungeons, guild missions, and laurels. If they do that at a decent price(not 2 million karma per item), everyone will be happy. People won’t be forced into doing things they don’t want to, they won’t be concerned their small guild can’t do guild missions yet, they won’t spend their small amount of playtime doing a daily for laurels, etc. But ArenaNet won’t do that and will continue trying to force players to do certain activities for certain ascended pieces. I well and truly hope that they added ascended weapons to WvW, the outcry will be insane!

BG will continue to fight win, lose, or draw. Always have and always will. Hopefully the lag gets fixed soon though, that certainly makes WvW unenjoyable currently.

DeathPanel.8362:

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

this is not true since the time gating is actually making it impossible for new players to get to where old players are no matter how much they play.

Lol “time gating”.

Wrong.

It’s called progression. There’s nothing preventing new players from getting to where the old players are if they put in the play time.

*20 dailies and 1 monthly nets you an ascended amulet.

*A week or two of running exp dungeons nets you a full set of armor and weapons and enough gold to either craft or purchase a full set of jewelry.

*A few low fractals runs nets you enough relics to get the +5 AR infusion for your ascended amulet which is good enough to carry you through to fractals 19 with little to no issue. (By which point you would’ve had enough relics to get more ascended items for more AR)

Therefore, your statement of:

“time gating is actually making it impossible for new players to get to where old players are no matter how much they play.”

is totally wrong, and not to mention nonsensical.

Actually, you are the one that is wrong.

Time gating is making it so players have to play a certain amount to achieve a goal. In this case a minimum of either 30 dailies or 20 dailies+1 monthly is a time gate as it will take you a minimum of 20 days. Fractals are the same for rings just to a lesser extent. You could get lucky and get your rings in a minimum of 2 days(after achieving lvl 10), or you could take up to 20 days of doing the lvl 10 daily for pristine fractals.

Now you assume that ArenaNet will not continue releasing new Ascended gear and that gives new players a chance to catch up. However, that is not the case. If a new player starts today, gets rings from fractals, and the rest from laurels. He will never catch up to an old player unless ArenaNet puts the new ascended gear on a seperate time gating system or removes the gating entirely.

Here is the example if the next ascended item next patch is also available via laurels.

New player will need: 30L for amulet+80L for accessories+40L for the new item
That’s a minimum of 110 dailies and 4 monthlies.

The old player will need: 40L for the new item
30 dailies and a monthly.

The new player is behind by 80 dailies and 3 monthlies. But now a month later another item comes out! The new player is still behind 80 dailies and 3 monthlies. As long as ArenaNet continues to release new Ascended gear for laurels at a steady rate the new player will NEVER catch up to the old player. Heaven forbid the new player wants to change up his spec and get new gear, he will fall further behind.

So I will ask you, how is a new player today going to make up the 70(?) laurels old players have already made? The answer is they cannot. New players will only ever catch up IF a new time gating system is added for the next ascended items(IE laurels aren’t used), ArenaNet stops adding ascended gear(not likely considering we knew there is a full set+weapons), or the time gating is done away with.

ArenaNet needs to stop time gating Ascended gear, well they shouldn’t have added it in the first place. If someone wants to grind it out in a day then let them, but time gating it only hurts new players and players that want to try new specs. In their attempt to keep vertical progression players running on a treadmill, they are killing new blood and build variety.

Brangien.7462:

to the OP, Yes I agree that experienced players that are below lvl 80 can go through this smoothly.

It took my static group 15-25 minutes longer per (With kholer and troll) run vs the average 80pug zergfest.

of things to note.

1. Gravelings won’t death tackle you now (Thank god, i hate slotting all break frees)
2. Path 2 end fight took the longest.
3. Low level groups who want a speedy run aren’t meant to take on kholer/troll they both add ALOT on the timer killing them individually.

To those who say its impossible, its not only the group’s skill level but YOURS, get better, learn the fight mechanics, gear appropriately.

You don’t walk into a Advanced Physics class and immediately pwn the exams with a pink ink pen to fill a scantron. You study, practice, and bring the appropriate writing items for the material to get a good rating .

Same goes for dungeons, no study, no practice. Dead weight, pulls team down, then fails because you’re the weakest link. If you have no time to learn it, watch youtube videos of the AC runs, its basically your cheatsheet.

You’re missing the entire point, most of the people are not talking about experienced players. This is the ENTRY level dungeon, nothing in the game prior to this dungeon prepares you for the dungeon. You’re preaching about studying, practicing, etc but this is the entry dungeon…there is none of that before the dungeon. Unless of course you want new players to wipe 20 times per path trying to learn it and quit the game. This is not a raid where you need to study strats and watch videos, it is an entry level dungeon. AC needs to be tuned to be friendly towards new players and currently it is anything but.

If we go to your physics example, you don’t walk in the door and get your final exam on day 1. You get taught lessons by your professor, homework to re-enforce those lessons, projects for applying your knowledge, and quizzes to help gauge what you are lacking in. AC is currently a final exam on day 1. You don’t know anything, you were never taught any of this, and the only thing that awaits you is failure and a large bill.

Does no one remember first leveling up when no one knew AC? It was a TERRIBLE experience. You certainly couldn’t pug it and expect anything less than a giant repair bill. I know my one friend didn’t do any dungeons after that purely because it was traumatizing and the rewards weren’t worth risking the repair bill/waste of time. New players should be slowly introduced into these dungeon mechanics instead of pushed off a cliff.

Reminder!* I was talking about new level 35’s. Not an experienced player that has hit 80 done AC before and is now working on an alt.

ArenaNet needs to make a decision about dungeons. Either they are going to be very hard but rewarding(piece of good loot each run) or they are going to be easy but you need to run them a lot. Currently they are hard but also not rewarding, that is what drives people away from dungeons. I know it’s the reason I don’t do more dungeons. You don’t have much fun in dungeons, they take up a good chunk of time and you certainly don’t get rewarded well enough for them. Whoever thought it was a good idea to make people run a dungeon dozens of times to get a set of armor is masochistic.

The gating is just poor design. They need to put in some dynamic events/dungeons that are hard but also reward really well. Currently the major flaw in this game is how poorly it rewards you for doing anything. Dynamic events reward you less money than it takes to use a nearby waypoint. The karma you gain from events is pretty much worthless since it seems they aren’t going to do anything with it. Skill points are pretty much worthless for anyone not after a certain crafted weapon/legendary. Dungeon gear requires grinding a dungeon over and over again for tokens(a pair of dungeon pants takes 5 paths! In other games I could run a dungeon 5 times and have pretty much all the loot I wanted from there barring a rare drop).

They need to take out the grinding of currency and actually give rewards. Expand the stats, create new stat combos(CD, toughness, vitality!). I would rather they go the route of diablo 2(getting too much loot) than going the eastern MMO route(grind for everything). I’m waiting until the next patch to make my final decision considering that I like WvW. If they mess up that patch and add further gating I’m done.

Signet of malice ticks on every hit for like 120(more or less depending on healing power). If you’re talking about dungeon or fractal PvE then you need to know that most mobs will smash your face in for 3k+ every hit. So if you could melee them you need to be doing 3k healing every 2-3s to stay up. Signet of Malice is good when there are a lot of enemies, but against solo big hitter mobs it’s very lackluster. If you are going to run signet of malice then make sure you get caltrops, they proc signet hits.

I couldn’t comment on sigil of life as there might be spots in dungeons/fractals where it is useful, but on bosses it isn’t going to provide any healing. Sigil of blood just doesn’t heal enough either. Perhaps sigil of blood+Omnomberry ghost+signet of malice?

The major problem you’re going to have to deal with is health. Even with toughness the mobs will hit hard so you need more than 10k hp. The more health you have, the more ineffective your heals become.

If I was making a PvE thief build I would put 30pts in shadow arts. Get the heal allies when stealthed, blind on stealth(or condition removal), and regen health while stealthed. Then slot blinding power and shadow refuge. This way you have a way of gaining health back at a decent rate and breaking aggro so you can heal. I would probably also go 20 into acrobatics for condition removal or initiative regen.

I probably haven’t answered half your questions, but go to heart of the mists and test out of builds on the Npc’s there(they should dish out plenty of damage to show you your healing capabilities). I’ve never found a vampire/healing build that worked for the thief in dungeons/fractals, things just hit too hard and we heal for so little.

Pinkus.2860:

Such a positive outlook on the situation

Gotta go with the trend ArenaNet has given us each patch. Ascended has always had large time gates placed on it(rings were actually the lowest). So it’s only natural whatever ascended item they add to WvW will take at least 20+ days to get, perhaps a new WvW daily and currency? I joke, but also shudder because they’ll probably do that.

ArenaNet has also been alienating certain players each patch. At first it was WvW and Dynamic event players with forcing them to do fractals. Then it was forcing Dungeon players to do dailies. This patch it was WvW players(new dailies are hard to complete in WvW most days), dungeon players, and small guild players. Obviously next patch they will alienate dynamic event players and dungeon players.

Just saying that going by the patch trend I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I think after the patch you might have a bunch of people asking for it to be reverted, somehow they always take a positive addition and mangle into something that hurts the game.