Guild Wars 2

Having just run an alt though there for completion, I’m in total agreement – I had a terrible time. It just made me want to log…

My problems:

- Dispersion of mobs is done in such a way as to ensure that you can’t go anywhere without aggro-ing something, and when you do inevitably you’ll pull some others too (it becomes incredibly tedious, even if you don’t find the fights very hard – you just end up wishing for them to GTFO your nuts and let you breathe for a minute). I ran through, dodging and praying nothing would hit me and knock me into combat mode, leading to inevitable chain CC and another fight I can’t be bothered fighting.

- Respawn rates are generally too high, this is true of most of the game IMO. I understand the mobs I just killed have to come back eventually, but I’d also like to explore and check out the places I just cleared rather than get stuck fighting off endless waves of respawns until I get bored and flee. I wouldn’t bother fighting vets/champs for this reason, their ads spawn back repeatedly.

- Now that the temple events tend to sit un-done the annoying mechanics of the God statues comes to the fore – they are incredibly annoying and make an already tough and treacherous task that much less enjoyable, e.g. I was going for a skillpoint underwater, whenever I went near it the statue would tear me up horribly – 400 damage and a bleed every half second (by my reckoning)… the other statues? Random fireballs and random unbreakable stuns – all while the half-dozen nearby Risen are chain-CCing you. Fun? No, and finding a crew to clear a temple is no sure thing anymore, sadly.

It seems the standard method now for attacking an Orrian skillpoint is to find the other guy on the map (sometimes there are even up to three people in one place!), and take turns pulling and kiting the mobs while the other channels the point – it works good, but I am not sure that’s how the game was meant to be played.

Game ain’t dead, Orr is – and it’s dead because it’s no fun, peeps only hit it to farm/harvest and the majority of events go un-done.

[quote=1144886;Mikey.1456:If you can find a way the counter that you win. Hmm i wonder how?? Cripple, freeze, stun, immobilize, knockdown, knock-back.
[/quote]

One Shadowstep negates any and all of that.

A better combo than Mug/C&D is Shadowstep/C&D, it has better range, gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card, and leaves Mug off cooldown for another combo straight after.

Not as face-roll though. Good Thief is nigh un-killable and murders at will, bad Thief dies like anyone else who comes unprepared.

ASP.8093:

So, what is it exactly that GW2 is supposed to learn from Dungeons & Dragons (3rd edition)?

That it’s systems should at least try to make a lick of sense, and have ways to be countered – right now a Thief who is on fire, being pecked by a flock of birds, and has a sword lodged in his skull can vanish instantly and be utterly un-findable (like in D&D you can at least search! And build to be good at spotting hidden kitten!) for the duration of the skill.

Nonsensical, undoubtedly. Whatever your opinion on D&D stealth, it at least nods it’s head in the direction of common sense.

If it’s someone I know, and is a confident player I’ll chill – but most people would prefer you just get in there and make em dead. Better safe than sorry. If I see someone getting jumped by a stealth Thief – I come at them hard and put them down without any pause or mercy, because Thief.

Dueling in WvW is complicated, and best done with a relaxed attitude

There’s some opponents I know by sight, and we’ll often split off our zergs and go off to have a fight somewhere alone, as far as I know we don’t get mad if our combat is interrupted (more often than not it is), we just commiserate with each other via emote.

Ohoni.6057:

You can’t. Need you to target them when visible
A lot of people will target you as you run in or get pulled to the edge and then you will get ctrl-t so that the entire group can target you.
Some pulls like tc of the Mesmer don’t require line of sight.

Fair enough, then how do you shake that? Getting whipped around when you can’t even see your enemy is not fun.

You don’t really – you can use stability/blocking/invulnerability (there is enough time to react if you see the focus Mez placing their line), that will work.

The range can also be surprising – y’know that high ledge by the lord in Wildcreek? They can pull people off that while standing on the ground. It’s a very useful tool during a siege, and is the best counter to out-of-reach arrow carts etc.

CD’s success in gaining first this week I think rests at least in part on finally (somewhat!) containing ND guild in CDBL during oceanic hours, once or twice we’ve managed to force them to come to EBG to save Lowlands at the 11th hour – respect where it’s due, IOJ’s night-watch are tough and dangerous opponents, but so are CD’s and we haven’t been out-muscled in days.

If it were me getting banned, I’d just take my box back to the store and get a refund – doesn’t matter what their ToS says when you can’t read/agree before handing over money. Common sense in my country, consumer rights laws are pretty clear on the matter.

http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0091/latest/DLM311053.html

(effectively – any goods you buy are owned by you – sounds simple, but that’s what these ToS are trying to take away from you, selling you a ‘license’ they feel entitled to withdraw at any time, in New Zealand the retailer who sells you the product is liable for the refund if that license is withdrawn – then it’s up to them to beef with the publisher/whoever; this is why, for instance, LoL has a clause in their ToS specifically pertaining to this act and New Zealand-based customers)

Not sure what relevance this has to anyone affected – but my country considers this sort of thing immoral, and effectively illegal

Otherwise, Anet screwed-up in delivery, and it’s unjust for them to ban for such an ambiguous offence. For shame.

selan.8354:

yo CD person please have some respect as FA has been defending itself all the time.We have been zerged by both servers at the same time. And we were able to hold up quit ewell, so i’d appreciate a little respect in the forums. we might not have the numbers but we still fight hard , fair and good!

No respect for FA.. not sorry to say – go look at EBG right now, y’all been bushwhacking us all week – I haven’t seen you so much as hit a IOJ supply camp. Fueled by hate – welcome to competitive PvP.

Obviously I just speak for myself.

Daecollo.9578:

The problem is, nobody uses P/P, they would be using S/P or D/P.

Someone tell this guy that you get two weapon sets! Ok, fine I’ll do it – hey guy, you get two weapon sets!

I use black powder, swap-in shortbow right there in the melee and have some fun for a second or two.

I wouldn’t complain if the initiative cost was lowered by one or it’s direct damage was increased modestly.

Nate Rush.6970:

You’re getting off topic. This is about stealth being broken, which can only relate to thieves. Vigor and things of that nature should be left to the big boys that have to manage more than one thing at a time.

You’re right – but what we keep getting as counter-argument in favour of stealth is:

“boo-hoo, without our totally broken class-mechanic we will have no defences”

Here I come to say:

“wait a minute… you can achieve a rate of endurance regen which lets you evade just about any time you care to press the roll button, and have access to some of the best (non-stealth) evasive utilities in the game”

The worst part is that the Thief can easily have his cake and eat it too – I guess we should count ourselves lucky so many Thief players are such hopelessly clueless FOTM-abusing nubbins and haven’t seemed to figure it out yet.

frans.8092:

Ranger and Engineer have traits that grant them +50% endurance. It’s not Vigor, so I guess it stacks with Vigor, which they can get from traits like Vigorous Renewal.

Ranger heals have longer cooldowns, hence lower Vigor uptime, and overall lower total endurance regen than Thief. Engineer, as far as I know has no way to give himself vigor – if he does I’ll require enlightening.

frans.8092:

It’s Guildwars, not D&D.

No duh?

Everything about GW2 and effectively all other fantasy MMOs/games is a bootleg rip-off of systems and archetypes developed before most GW players were but a twinkle in their daddy’s eye.

Respect the O.G. – it has lessons to teach these pretenders to the throne.

frans.8092:

Docherty.8372:

So does Mesmer – but neither don’t get a trait which doubles their base endurance regen at the same time, like Thief.

Which one is that? The vigor-on-healing trait does require a heal skill activated (rather then being permanently on or crit-proc) which basically ties you into Withdraw as healing skill to make it useful.

Feline Grace returns 50% of endurance used post-roll, effectively doubling your regen, and Withdraw is my choice of Thief healing skill, because it’s kittening great even without being a particularly effective heal.

66% of the time (10 seconds vigor activated every 15 seconds) your base endurance regen is 200%, the other 33% of the time a miserly 100%. Only the Ranger comes close, and ultimately it’s 25% less efficient at it than Thief.

Roziel.5720:

Seriously what exactly have the teams been doing the last 3 months?

I think many of us feel by now that they don’t even have a WvW team, or if they do it’s a part-time intern they keep locked in a closet with a magic 8-ball to determine what design changes they implement.

Ohoni.6057:

Oh, yes, I don’t mean to diminish their accomplishments, I just don’t think that aspect of play is good for the game. Players should obviously use whatever tactics ANet allows them, I just think this is a sort of tactic that needs some better limitations or counters.

IOJ also knows how to counter those tactics – they garrison their possessions with multiple players/siege and react quickly with their main zerg to any reported attack. It’s very effective and very simple, and FA/CD just don’t do it enough.

Remove ‘superior’ class of siege weapons.

Remove JPs completely, or make them a seperate instance which does not use tickets from each of the main maps (this can resolve a lot of quarreling and frustration).

Fix terrain exploits. Hurry up about it.

Shout-outs to the IOJers who left two Omega Golems in Bays at CDBL when we re-capped it on new year’s eve. Was not sorry at all to lay them to waste =D

But really, I mentioned before how terrifically organized some (not all!) IOJ zergs can be – we can either learn from them, or continue to lose our keeps in record time.

Auesis.7301:

Guardians can potentially access Vigor permanently, simply by landing critical hits, and not having to blow a healing skill.

So does Mesmer – but neither don’t get a trait which doubles their base endurance regen at the same time, like Thief.

voidwater.2064:

I don’t really see a clean way to address all of these issues in GW2 without a complete rework of the class. I think it would have been better if the developers just kept the assassin from GW1, a burst+mobility class without stealth.

Basically, this – the whole thing apparently went wrong on the design board, long before the first line of code was written.

What do I mean? Well, look at the roots of this class and it’s abilities – in D&D, look at how stealth is implemented there:

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Stealth

What do we notice? It’s a very complex system with many checks and balances – not saying this is appropriate for GW2, but it does demonstrate the regressive and utterly nonsensical implementation of stealth in GW2.

Here it is less an interesting and flavorsome system than it is a crude client invisibility hack.

I hate to sound mean, but GW2 designers are inexperienced and unimaginative, and need to go back to fantasy-gaming school and learn the lessons of systems developed over the span of decades and millions of hours of play.

Auesis.7301:

our access to Vigor is pitiful and hard to use synergetically

I wouldn’t call potential 66% Vigor up-time pitiful. Considering you (can if you want) get Feline Grace as well, does any other class get faster/more endurance regen? Not that I know of.

Being that I use Withdraw as my heal skill I feel my access to Vigor is quite satisfactorily synergistic (FTFY).

Achetypically (I’m thinking D&D – the grand-daddy of all fantasy RPG games) the Thief can go Acrobat or Assassin, not both at once. You want to have your cake and eat it too.

Daecollo.9578:

Oh never mind, I guess I was just fighting an incompetent thief.

Yeah, any Thief who backstabs for that little is rubbish, I don’t care if you have protection up – that is pathetic damage, and your engineer is a laughable excuse for a ‘tank’.

Sorry, but cherry-picking one single attack from some random random PUG PvP, which to any experienced Thief is obviously not optimally tuned, is not going to convince anyone.

Daecollo.9578:

Docherty.8372:

Rayya.2591:

So over all kill shot is not an win button

Even worse – if you come up against a good player with a reflection skill it’s a one-way ticket to self-pawnsville.

Or you could just simply stand up and not use kill shot when you see reflection skill activate, its not like kill shot is slow or anything

You’re not wrong – this is a good example of counterplay which makes combat exciting. The BS Thief runs no such risk.

Auesis.7301:

They don’t have the defences or the mitigations to survive any error, barring their few and far-between stunbreakers and abilities to land stealth and cleanse conditions (if they are specced in to stealth at all).

That shows what you know I guess, Thief can be built to break stuns and remove conditions all day long (certainly more than any of the other four classes I play), no stealth required.

Infiltrator’s Strike breaks stun and removes a condition, no C/D at all. And that’s just one skill, add Shadowstep, Withdraw, Roll for Intitiative, Signet of Agility, Infiltrator’s Signet etc – you can fill your hotbar with stun breakers and condition removal – and all those skills add other utility on the side – evasion, improved precision, initiative regen, teleports etc. Get the drift?

Rayya.2591:

So over all kill shot is not an win button

Even worse – if you come up against a good player with a reflection skill it’s a one-way ticket to self-pawnsville.

Daecollo.9578:

Funny, back stab only hits my engineer for 3k. look at post above.

Oh please… stop embarrassing yourself – you haven’t discovered some secret nobody else knows about – you ran into the world’s most incompetent Thief -_-

I renounced stealth skills and went into lab, came out with this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsaVlYmiOncS4E+5Ey2jKUn4J9D0UPDuyqA

Lots of teleporting (3600 range worth, in fact – over double longbow’s range), stun breakers and condition removal. Uses the excellent sword control skills to lock down, and uses evasive moves to survive/defend.

Withdraw is IMO the best Thief healing option: short C/D, excellent evasive move that scrubs some of the nastiest conditions (immobilize/chill/cripple) that can be applied to you in prolonged fights. With Vigor on-heal you can spend 66% of your combat time with Vigor up – add in Feline Grace and you’re very very dodgy indeed.

High initiative regen in order to be able to use Headshot every time your opponent channels his heal, and just to hang in prolonged fights in general (no stealth crutch – you need to use skill to live).

I use Knight’s/Valkyrie armor in WvW (all my characters have some combo of these on), using zerker weapons (sigils are personal preference – I like to have boon removal on-crit and 5% damage), aim for 40-50% crit chance, +50% crit damage, 17k HP, >2k armor.

I have Thief runes atm, but they are left-overs from previous build, not yet decided if I want to change it up.

Not glass, not bunker – still competitive/viable.

Xae.7204:

Daecollo.9578:

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcMzM9mMgoLMMgoMM0xax0ckqmcoz8khT70z7070c7kIM70V7ow370m

Follow that directly, you will be a TANK that can put the pain on any thief you come across, flamethrower is the thieves WORSE nightmare? hes stealthed but thieves are ALWAYS in melee range, so if he stealths just flame and run in circles until your combat log hits something.

Your almost dead? Switch to heal kit, heal for full, repeat, he will eventually have to run away.

El.
Oh.
El.

You have no clue.

Seriously, I’m cross posting this to the Engineer forum for laughs.

You take conflicting talents. You take broken talents. You ignore good talents. Seriously, this is the funniest thing I have seen in a week.

What exactly did you expect from a Thief player who tries to claim he’s not OP? These guys are FOTMers, and will defend their crutch to the bitter end.

A full-power Thief is not intimidated by 30k HP – I speak from experience – the Mug/C&D/BS combo can hit for up to and over 20k even on full-bunker specs, then it’s a matter of two more landed heartseekers (up to another 10-15k) and nobody will survive. Nobody, hear? I never met a player I couldn’t own with my Thief (even if occasionally I need a second bite at the cherry – simple thanks to stealth).

With quickness on it takes a couple of seconds max – and let’s not forget we aren’t at some LAN party, we’re dealing with undetermined latency of anything up to a full second.

As a D&D player, I’m quite familiar and comfortable with insta-kills, the difference is that they have hard counters in every single case – maybe it’s unfair to compare a game/system that’s been evolving for 30+ years to this game been out for a few months, but the designers need to pull their heads out of their butt for a moment and act before this becomes Thief Wars 2.

Save my Thief, nerf her

The non-stealth heal skills only have a 15 second C/D, combined with regen-in-stealth (stealthing at will, of course) and a tiny HP pool it can appear to be an alarming amount of healing.

That’s how my Thief started out, and looking back, considering how clueless I was about everything, I had a lot of success in PvP running P/D, D/P – possibly too much.

Lordryux.9785:

Docherty.8372:

Karolis.4261:

And there is no big red circle under caltrops.

Yes, there is (this people, is how much your average Thief player knows about his own class).

It can be easy to miss in a typical WvW clusterkitten because the effects are subdued in comparison to other AoEs, which will overwhelm the teeny thingys lying inert on the ground with explosions and smoke. But if it’s the only thing on the ground near you you’d have to be utterly incoherent to miss it.

Good skill, makes things like Ranger traps look pretty shabby – because it’s diameter can’t be straight-up rolled over and ignored, you’ll stub your toe on the edge if you try go through the middle.

It’s how I afk’d my way through 80 lvls of dreadfully tedious PvE content – drop caltrops, run around in circles inside the AoE. This is a good example of the skill required to play Thief effectively – i.e. none whatsoever.

Is anyone beginning to suspect that no, I don’t believe Thieves ought to be ‘left alone’?

He means because of rendering issues it takes sometime for that caltrops circle to come up so infact thier is no circle for a good amount of time till it fully renders up then u finally notice it. lol

What I quoted is exactly what he stated, there was no qualification or explanation, and even when you put words in his mouth, he’s still wrong.

The circle doesn’t pop when you use the ability, but when the caltrops settle (they fly in the air and fall to the ground, it takes a half second or so – that’s when they start doing damage. Normal latency affects this of course, but I’ve never noticed rendering issues with any AoEs etc.

Spakpak.7260:

maybe GW2 is just not right for you.

You’d hear this a lot from sycophants in another game recently… what was it? Hmm… oh yeah – SWTOR.

Welp, people took that advice to heart, and the game sank like a stone. Long story short – this type of comment is worse than useless, it is counter-productive and totally asinine.

Nate Rush.6970:

In his defense, 4 seconds of invuln is a lot more skillful than 4 minutes of find the invisible man.

One of these things has a 60 second C/D, the other can be spammed indefinitely (I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out which is which); if that’s supposed to be an argument in favour of the current state of stealth… well, I’m not convinced.

And yes bunker eles have issues too, but that’s another thread… I hope?

I’m just gonna be frank – it’s bad design, it’s an extremely powerful ability and there’s no hard-counter whatsoever (yeah, every day I kill a bunch of Thieves while they’re in stealth – PvP players aren’t all bunnies, I predict when the FOTM-er is gonna freak out and pop it, and use a channeled attack, I can track him that way – if he lives through the damage recieved) – no need to be surprised that people get upset, not sure I have much more to add that hasn’t been said a hundred times before, in this very thread.

Hax.6217:

I always call a target for myself and mesmers are a piece of cake =D Ctrl+T and watch why he gets all mad he cant split to avoid you….on the other hand baddie mesmers always move after they make illusions making it really easy to pick em out of a crowd of confusion.
While they are downed like everyone said red arrow above their head is a dead give away.

Skilled Mez does not care whether you mistake his clones or not (and assumes that you are not fooled) – they are walking bombs, nothing more – I always laugh when anyone starts chasing my idiot clones (who probably run off to attack nearby mosquito or something), like “Really?! Someone fell for that?”

Since a single quad shatter is often enough to blow up glass Thieves completely I’d advise you to respect the clones somewhat more than you seem to – in some cases they are more dangerous to you than the Mez themself.

Be aware that the Mez downed auto-attack stacks confusion, and an active downed clone will double it – it’s important to note that if you just auto-attack them to death you could find yourself in hot water very quickly. I have been struck down by Thieves on my Mez, and flat-out killed them from my downed state (when you’re glass you’re glass, don’t spam attacks when they stack confusion on you).

If you sleep on the downed Mez his 3 button summons a phantasmal Thief who will heartseeker you for quite respectable damage.

Stealth stomping is the clear answer – if he can’t target you he can’t use his clone/phantasm on you, otherwise be aware of the potentially very dangerous confusion stacks and don’t spam attacks if you’ve got it on you (it’s worth repeating).

Karolis.4261:

And there is no big red circle under caltrops.

Yes, there is (this people, is how much your average Thief player knows about his own class).

It can be easy to miss in a typical WvW clusterkitten because the effects are subdued in comparison to other AoEs, which will overwhelm the teeny thingys lying inert on the ground with explosions and smoke. But if it’s the only thing on the ground near you you’d have to be utterly incoherent to miss it.

Good skill, makes things like Ranger traps look pretty shabby – because it’s diameter can’t be straight-up rolled over and ignored, you’ll stub your toe on the edge if you try go through the middle.

It’s how I afk’d my way through 80 lvls of dreadfully tedious PvE content – drop caltrops, run around in circles inside the AoE. This is a good example of the skill required to play Thief effectively – i.e. none whatsoever.

Is anyone beginning to suspect that no, I don’t believe Thieves ought to be ‘left alone’?

zen.6091:

S/P is only viable as a burst.

I could hardly disagree more – look at the control options you have – cripple; immobilize; stun; daze (a high velocity, insta-cast, ranged daze no less); AoE blindness.

Shadowstep (sword 2) is cheap enough to spam almost constantly, is an un-interruptable gap-closer, breaks all stuns, and removes a condition… oh, and it immobilizes on-hit – something most builds struggle to counter.

Headshot is the terror of anyone trying to use a channeled ability – oh, you try to cast a heal on yourself? pop Trying again huh? pop Don’t need to worry about leaving it off cooldown for a special occasion, spam away.

Black powder shot… well, it’s a smoke combo field, projectile combo finisher, and AoE blind, do I need to elaborate more?

Pistol whip is a fine interrupt (stun), and it’s many hits (9 IIRC) are quite handy for proccing on-crit effects (like initiative regen); as a ‘burst’ skill it’s… poor, might as well auto-attack. Hasted it’s downright inescapable.

As well as being extremely difficult to pin-down and put conditions on, some builds are utterly helpless against the S/P Thief, and burst damage has squat to do with it (doesn’t hurt though!). Feel free to stack that Vit/Toughness and initiative regen traits, you are quite competitive and survivable even in the complete absence of any stealth skills whatsoever.

Thief class… Anet’s designers tried really hard – that is apparent. It’s not working out – they need to take it back to the drawing-board, ASAP.

L2P helps, most Thieves are bad and easily crushed by people who know their gimmicks (being familiar with the sound-effects helps when you’re being 2-spammed by some invisible jerk).

BUT, that doesn’t excuse kittenty design – the culling issue is major, Thieves rub salt in the wound, as they are – I hazard to guess most who yet remain in WvW are somewhat tolerant toward culling in colossal zerg battles – less so when a Thief vanishes without a trace contrary to the rules of the game (yes, even in a fairly small crowd, stealth and make a little distance on your opponent and you will never ever re-render, we all know it), and when he takes the opportunity to come back at you once again with the most powerful alpha-strike in the game? People get upset.

The issue will not disappear (at least not until they ‘fix’ culling – but are any of us holding our breath on that? Really? That bird flew the coop, the people who couldn’t accept it are long-gone).

I am somewhat in agreement with OP. No I am not a fan of the ‘trinity’.

My beef with the trinity was that it inspired dreadfully boring gameplay where groups of people spend minutes at a time wailing on some not-too-smart mob possessive of grossly inflated HP and damage.

Anet ditched the ‘trinity’ but forgot to change-up the style of gameplay, leaving us with occasionally frustrating difficulty spikes, incomprehensible aggro mechanics, and a struggle to remain conscious and engaged while we afk auto-attack yet another trash mob (like in trinity-based games before this).

Yeah, it’s merely my personal opinion – but the PvE in this game is tedium personified, particularly in dungeons – no, I’d rather not waste my precious gaming time whittling-down the unreasonably large HP pool of effectively harmless trash mobs. Honorable mention to the ridiculous respawn rates in the open-world.

Look to Demon’s/Dark Souls for an RPG that manages to achieve a satisfying degree of challenge in combat while still being…. fun.

I hope the debacle in CDBL last night serves as a wake-up call for our server (CD), it was a bit like watching a train-wreck… IOJ had out-manned up at one point, yet still held us off our three keeps!

Yes, they swept the map with indomitable numbers to start – but that doesn’t excuse the horror-show that followed, all too often an assault failed, I’d check my map and see commander icons all over the show – we own virtually nothing and there they are, capping undefended supply down south while IOJ laughed and built a WP at Hills. A waypoint, on our friggin BL.

Finally, the few that remained showed some fortitude and made an Alamo at Dawn, ran the yaks etc, and the worm turned – in other words, played ‘right’. Much respect to the guys that were there and fought on through the disappointment and beatings – you are all stars.

On the other hand, I’m quite impressed by IOJ’s play – they were extremely efficient and well organized – they’d smash our paper gates (yeah… CD, we need to talk about the guys who claim keeps/towers and run off to PvDoor without bothering to upgrade/fortify) at the garrison in under 30 seconds flat, and five minutes later have a truckload of siege set up ready to repel the counter-attack. Assessing our performances side-by-side is like night-and-day.

Need to pick up your game CD, there ain’t any excuses for how badly that went all-round.