Guild Wars 2

Because it’s a good baseline. Not only is it possible and semi-likely depending on your opinion, but you can use the numbers to interpolate damage against targets with toughness, protection, etc.

Furthermore, the exception context is not “non-Berserker”. It’s any build that doesn’t use toughness in particular. Hence Carrion, Valkyrie, and other gear compositions that have no/low toughness will also be hit with the same damage levels. Thus, that level of damage is more common than most Thieves want to advertise (if they ran with max DPS).

It’s the same discussion as why you don’t see Mesmers advertising that they can do 4k crits on their autoattack, 8k on their phantasms, or 12k+ shatters.

It’s enough to complain about the combo with realistic numbers. Something like 4k Mug crit + 7.2k Backstab crit + 1.8k C&D non-crit (no particular order) on a decently built character. 13k in nearly an instant is worth complaining about.

Glass on glass is more like 6.5-7.5k Mug, 6-8k CND, 9-14k backstab, just under 2k air proc.

In WvW at least, since you can get +110% crit damage without too much trouble. which you can’t in sPvP.

Once again Warhammer demonstrates that it was ahead of its time with game mechanics and filtered autoloot system.

Red Falcon.8257:

Rukia.4802:

At first I hated ascended gear

And I still do.

The whole system spits on the name of Guild Wars.

And yet it’s the only thing that keeps half of the playerbase from quitting GW2.
Sadly progression is needed for longevity.

Sure we could do with just 1m players instead of 3m, but I for one prefer to have an harmless progression if it means more players in the game.

How many players have left because of ascended grind? How many will leave?

Lol harmless gearflation. What a cute little slippery slope.

I wonder if I can kill a glass cannon Thief with double block alone. This merits further evaluation.

now, ready for the price? 98g- which isnt really that bad if you think about it. when the game first came out, it seemed impossible. but now that its 6months in, 100g really isnt kitten compared to everything else.

100 gold is more than twice as much gold as I’ve ever had.

Dailies are annoying as hell.

They should have weeklies that require 7x the grind for 7x reward. Except you only do them once per week fitting within your personal time management, rather than the asinine “dailies” model.

Edit:

“Weeklies” were one of the few good things SWTOR had going for it.

Suggestion for new gem store purchase in the title.

Make it happen.

Make ascended rings BOE so I can buy one from you for a few gold.

All good.

I have been playing since beta, and had head start access. Since launch the game has kept me occupied for 600+ hours over 6.5 months. I’ve spent most of that time doing something I wanted to in game, and then finishing up my dailies as my final act of the night.

I’ve been playing since beta and had head start access. Since the launch the game has kept me occupied for 600+ hours over 6.5 months. I’ve spent about half that time doing something I wanted to in game (the other half being crappy PvE grinding which I’ve barely tolerated).

Now ANet demands that I do more crappy PvE grinding.

If DE was made less potent as well as more accessible, perhaps we would see a breakup of this trend and encourage people to experiment with more traits. That is the idea behind the suggestion.

I don’t see a direct nerf to popular specs as a good direction tbh. The specs themselves aren’t really overpowered, and if they are it doesn’t seem to be directly attributable to DE.

Lol polluting.

Politics makes PvP alive.

Without proper angst and vendetta, may as well go PvE.

The problem is that BP in a P/P set isn’t half as good, and even if you manage to sustain it, you’re losing a lot of damage as there is no way to constantly use a 6 initiative skill while damaging with uses of a 5 initiative (with some recovery through multi-strike and criticals) and still keep some reserve for a 4 initiative interrupt when they heal.

How many of the opponents’ cooldowns do you soak with that 5 init?

Shrug.

You basically get free damage (not a huge amount, but mentionable), and the enemy loses cooldowns of one flavor or another.

You’re not going to win a fight via 511111111111111111111111111111. I’m not sure why so many Thieves think so linearly. It’s kind of silly.

Unload could too use something to to make it something else tan boring damage

Unload is not ‘just damage’; it is:

a) ranged
b) multi-hit (both good and bad)
c) multiple combo finisher (RNG)
d) low init per second

Mostly the first item raises it above pure vanilla and gives it unique tactical flavor.

In any case, generally speaking I’d prefer if body shot dealt less damage and cost less initiative, while maintaining the same vuln stacks (or reduced the damage per shot by 60% and make it a spreadshot as you describe, with 1% per hit — however that makes it more of a melee-ish ability which I don’t care for with P/P). That way you could use it more fluidly as a debuffer without it partially negating your use of the debuff (by draining resources with which to deal damage).

I just spent 2 hours of my life in AC exp and it was the dumbest kittening 2 hours I’ve spent in GW2. kitten the dungeons.

Hopefully it’s that. I wonder if the second target will be hit for half damage or something. This way a player with pets can diffuse the damage a bit if they position well.

TY all for random PvE infodump.

Can the explorable modes be completed back to back? SideQ: can fractals? E.g. no lockout timers.

^

Agreed. That would be annoying as hell to get used to, especially with reflect abilities affecting spatial surge and the like.

If the new rewards include ascended gear, I guarantee that half of the “we don’t care” group would suddenly find themselves caring about retroactive points.

I’d prefer to randomly complain about dungeons on forums than actually do a dungeon.

Edit: I did AC story mode once with my guild and it stretched the limits of my patience for wasting time. Never set foot in one again DX.

I don’t think most players realize that Thieves will still be culled due to stealth. Hopefully the delay before they’re selectable / drawn will decrease slightly, but it’s not guaranteed, and there will still be delay due to culling even if they disable it for general world object information.

Edit:

Thieves should no longer randomly take up to 4-6 seconds to be selectable / drawn because of other culling, but there will still be an additional 0.5-1.5s delay due to the culling from stealth.

BUT since this game has yet to integrate diminishing returns on CC

Guild Wars 2 has the Stability boon which negates CC. Don’t expect DR on CC. It’s not necessary.

Edragor.9164:

---

PvPers in sPVP and WvW WANT rankings…NOT (only) RANKS!
Who (guild/player/server) in the last 15minutes…:
- did most capping?
- healed most players?
- How many deaths/kills happened?
…etc.etc.

Ranking won’t happen. ANet is developing GW2 with a heavy carebear philosophy. You can see this with the way they hide player names first and foremost. They don’t want anything that can lead to a personal competitive environment where players compete for kills, IRS, or other active achievements in WvW directly with other players.

In other words they’re trying to abstract the opponent “player versus player” aspect in WvW. Mostly this is to get more of the WoW PvE crowd in WvW, the same reason as why map completion requires WvW.

Pretty lame, but it is what it is.

Maladon.5760:

Why on earth would they release new content and allow you to already have achieved it?

It’s not new content.

It’s rewards and titles for EXISTING CONTENT that should have been there originally.

Gear, loot, shineys, and titles are not content. They are the result of content that theoretically stand in parallel with “player experience” and “fun”.

Dungeons suck.

P/P isn’t “GREAT” but it’s not as bad as people make it out to be.

It basically has 2 things going for it:

1. It’s the only significant range damage option for a Thief that can actually pressure an opponent.

2. Blind blind blind blind blind blind blind at very low cost.

The part that I find most interesting is that Thief players tend to forget that they have an offhand weapon set they can swap to in-combat for shifts in fighting. Thieves tend to use the off-set only for a specific capability (Shortbow escape).

Oh wait.

Use GS and Staff kitten And agree with Elasticity just because GS and Staff.

Sharper Images mandatory. Base build 0/20/0/0/20. Extending off that, probably pick up 1 weapon trait (whichever weapon you personally like to use as primary), and then consider other stuff (defense/utility traits in Chaos/Insp or IP basically).

IP could get your Might stacks up to like 15-20 or so sustained. Good kitten times. However, Chaos/Insp are a serious consideration because PvE Rampager has 0 defensive stats.

Well, if you want to suboptimise the burst of a build that already sacrifices a lot for more burst, by settling for just “plenty good”… I dunno, unless you really like Utility Mantras you’d probably get more burst (and more reliably, and often) with a conventional Shatter.

You’re not getting it: more than half of a 30/30 build’s playtime is usually at range. The third clone (if you spawned one via DE) tends to not make it to the target. Even if it does, it’s delayed by ~2 seconds. Regardless of whether it makes it to the target or not, the presence of the third clone reduces the damage of the first 2 ‘guaranteed’ shatters.

Therefore it’s not even a consistent total benefit to DE a clone and throw it into the Mind Wrack mix, you’re likely to reduce the actual burst damage by a small amount — and you’re paying a trait slot for it?

If you’re skirmishing a lot in melee without disengage, then DE becomes more useful so you can sustain more types of shatters beyond MWs. Short of that … shrug? I swap it in to farm wolves to get my Bloodlust stacks up.

Note that a lot of my perspective on this assumed GS, which has basically the lowest cooldown clone generator. It would be a different story for other weapon sets.

After all this discussion though, don’t you think Deceptive Evasion is indeed too powerful a trait? Even if you don’t consider it “essential”, you cannot deny it almost always warrants very serious consideration.

Hard to say whether it’s ‘too powerful’. IP could be said to be too powerful. Sharper Images was “ALL THE RAGE” back at release. Warden’s Feedback is one of the most amazing single traits for utility. I’d say Warden’s Feedback is easily as ‘overpowered’ as DE or IP.

Furthermore, DE is pretty “meh” outside of combining it with IP, which is already 50 trait points allocated for DE to reach its “very powerful” point — ergo, mostly applicable to one build.

Bottom line is that DE is on the strong side of potency, but OP means it should be nerfed, and it doesn’t rise to that level IMO.

Something with Sharper Images and Shattered Strength.

Excessive stealth might also synergize well.

I was about to link the Mesmer bug sticky and make a snarky comment about people needing to read stickies. Then I read it and realized Taldren never actually listed the toolti kitten ue with all glamours as well as, IIRC, all stealths.

Basically abilities that have traits that say “<insert category of skills> last X duration longer” will tooltip for the traited value, even when not traited. E.g. the tooltip for Null Field lists the full duration if you had the 20% Glamour duration trait.

Same with our stealths and the +1s stealth trait, as well as Warrior Stance durations.

Sidenote: not sure if these tooltip errors are actually related, or if they err by exactly those amounts, but this was the common consensus 2-3 months ago, then shelved because if it took Blizzard a decade to fix the dynamic MOTW tooltip, then we shouldn’t hold our breaths for ANet to fix this dynamic toolti kitten ue.

Edit:

Ok this forum is officially absurd. I can’t even type “tooltip” ||| “issue” without the forum auto-filters connecting the “P” and “ISS” and adding blank spaces between the “TI” / “P” and “I” / “SSU” to fabricate some absurd attempt to get around the filter. Nevermind that kitten is pretty kitten far from kitten, kitten, kitten, kitten, kitten, kitten, or anything else that actually should be filtered.

As for Inspiration and Illusion GM traits… the two Inspiration GM are, again, nice, but I don’t think they compare to the benefits of 20 Dueling. Illusions… eh, Glamour builds already put 30 in Illusions, what are you on about…?

1. You don’t go 30 Insp for the GM traits, you go there to get multiple Adept/Master traits.

2. I generally disagree with Glamours being a ‘subset’ of condition builds. You may as well call IP shatter builds a subset of “power builds” — right along with phantasm army, Mantra 30/30, and every other build under the sun. But, it’s not something worth debating to any significant extent.

3. 20/0/0/30/20 is a valid alternative glamour-centric build. Hence finishing “Insp OR Illu”, e.g. whichever the player doesn’t have.

Regarding Mantra builds, seriously; if you’re going for DPS Mantra you primary goal is burst. If you don’t take DE what else are you going to take? And it’s not just about getting enough Clones out, it’s about getting those Clones out fast. You should know how important that is, especially if someone is AoEing down Clones.

You only need to get clones out fast every ~13 seconds. Ironically, Mirror Blade has a 4.8s cooldown and iB has a ~13s cooldown or w/e it was. Due the projectile delay of MB, both illusions summon at almost the same time. After a ~1 second delay for iB to do its thing, you can shatter immediately for a 2x shatter on demand with very little response by the opponent. Throwing in another illusion through any other means (prior MB, swap to iLeap, or swap to iWarden) will upgrade it to a 3×. Note that a 2x shatters is plenty good for a 30/30 Mantra build, since it will crit for >10k with glass gear.

I only use DE in a 30/30 when I plan on doing PvE (free tanking), or very heavy skirmishing with a low # of players (e.g. I plan to be soloing a supply camp when enemies inc). Otherwise, Mantra cooldowns are better, or Duelist’s Discpline with a Pistol OH.

Given the low CD of Mantras and the fact that it doesn’t take into account the channel time, I don’t think it’s very important.

It is equally useful to DE in general, and moreso for various situations where fast Diversions / Distortions are not in high demand.

I blame the last few pages on overmoderation.

If posters could simply say what they really feel about FEAR, and others simply say what they feel about the GvG ‘duel’ area, then we could resolve all these things in 3-4 posts instead of 3-4 pages.

Then we could all be happy killing each other in peace(s).

Stating that “the build uses Mind Wrack, hence DE” is a rather poor line of reasoning. As I said before, a naked Mesmer can maintain sufficient illusions to 3x MW on cooldown. E.g. any build can churn our clones for a superpowered Mind Wrack -or- Cry. DE is only required if you want both (or 3x Diversion into 3x MW), or fast 1x Distortion / Diversions.

All other builds are, let’s face it, comparatively rare and generally aren’t as well-rounded.

“All”, like Glamour and Ret Tank? Right. While Mantra and support builds are both uncommon, glamour is relatively popular in WvW considering how many stacks of confusion I pick up when I walk through any Feedback on the battlefield nowadays, and the Ret Tank build seems like a good candidate for flavor-of-next-month, since everyone likes not dying.

The only reason Glamour builds don’t take DE is because they’re forced to sink 20 points into Domination for Confusing Enchantments

If I had an extra 20 points for no reason in a Glamour build, I would plug them into Chaos for Staff cooldowns and/or GM traits in Inspiration or Illusion. The build doesn’t rely on mass shatters or on-death clones. Also, the gearing is neutral to precision, so Sharper Images isn’t any sort of priority in general.

There’s no question that DE is potent, but it’s only essential for builds that F1-F4 all the time, or intentionally flood clones, which are both not surprising.

Yea Air runes with Mirror. Decent enough uptime and way better than Centaur for actual fighting. Looks entertaining.

It’s only optimal for IP shatter and clone spam/on-death builds.

It’s not optimal for Ret Tank, Mantra support, Mantra dps 30/30, glamour spam builds, other random hybrid Inspiration heavy builds, etc.

Your perception of “most” is skewed towards fotm IP shatter builds.

Deceptive Evasion is not an essential trait. It’s just very good for shatter/clone spam builds, which is the most common current build.

Back when everyone and their brother ran phantasm army, Empowered Illusions and Sharper Images were critical picks (not to mention 15/15 Chaos/Insp).

Not a big deal.

It’s not hard to maintain full 3-illusion shatters on Mind Wrack cooldown without DE. You just have to time your abilities well. DE enables you to execute full 3x MWs along with full Cries and bonus Diversions / Distortions.

DE is good, but it’s a crutch and a bit overrated. When the flavor of the month changes to a non-IP shatter build (and non clone spam), DE will be a less popular.

This discussion inspires me to mentally exclude the consideration of how slow hoofing it across WvW will be without Swiftness and use Sword/Sword again.

Because iSwordsman is a kitten beast. And Riposte hits like a freight train too.

I remember a long time ago around the end of beta I first ran a S/S sPvP build using IP shatter and stuff. Had some awesome burst back then. First time I experimented with iSwordsman + iLeap + Swap + Blurred Frenzy + Mind Wrack + Power Spike (Mantra of Pain) bursting. Good times.

In a group situation, people aren’t paying attention to damage they receive from retaliation and confusion, so its far easier to do large chunks to people, the same concept behind why the glamour build works in larger groups.

Yes, bad players stack up 14 confusion into a Feedback, but we have to have a minimal skill level we’re talking about, because otherwise all builds can go naked into WvW and 100-0 the terribads out there, and discussing the point would be a waste of time.

If a player has a moderate healing capability (insert random Cleric shout warrior example, or hybrid Cleric/Knight’s or something, or even Knight’s base with Divinity stats stuck in wherever possible), you’d have to basically time a multiple confusion stack + ret into a flurry of their attacks on you after you’ve softened them a bit. Anything short of that and they can just heal and stand there. And that’s on slow reaction. I mean, with any reasonable reaction you’re talking a player who stops to heal at 70% and reconsiders the confuse and ret (or should), and there’s basically nothing you can do to stop them from bailing.

Bottom line is that it just kills slow. If the target is healing above a minimal degree, the killing is going to be very slow and thin unless they unload into your face.

kittenos Vant.4182:

Any specific build you’re thinking of for Cond. Dmg/V/T equip? Aside from the obvious “Immortal” from this thread.

That set of gear doesn’t current exist in game IIRC.

However, it would be effective as a tank build because condition damage scales very well at low stat levels (high power scaling tends to require precision and crit damage to out-scale conditions). It would simply be a non-Sharper Images build. Virtually unkillable with armor-penetrating sustained damage? Yes please.

Due to the way the Mesmer class is set up, Mesmers tend to output a lot of hybrid damage, so a Cdmg/V/T set of gear is more to abuse with Thieves or Eles that can output more “pure condition” damage.

A pretty ideal stat spread for Mesmer mechanics abuse would be Condition damage / Power / Vit. In other words, Carrion with T instead of V. This setup would enable high powered Confuse and Retaliation, and still have the toughness to make getting hit manageable (Carrion is pretty kitten potent, but you’re soft with no Tough). Note that Mesmer already have high base HP, so the Tough is significantly more valuable than the Vit.

Of course, this abuse is why it’s not available in the game. If that stat spread were available, I would totally run that with an Unlimited Clone Works IP Shatter spamthekittenall build. Infinite Confuse, perma Ret, high armor, moderately strong iWarlock hits, 5k Prestige, 4k Blurred Frenzy. Unstoppable.

Warrior Sword mainhand would also be pretty kitten strong. Thief P/D would be completely unstoppable (although they would need some supplemental Vit to deal with burst conditions). Some Necro specs would be insane.

I will say this though, @EasymodeX.

Definitely. But you can’t really kill anyone that turns around and walks away, or who’s not attacking you (presumably in a group situation).

You’d probably have a hell of a time killing anyone with any measurable healing power / heals in their build and backed by any toughness. Well, as long as they don’t shoot a barrage of stuff into you + the iDefender, but I would consider that a major error.

Hehe I crafted my own back when they were cheap.

I tend to swap between various traits:

- Stealth on 25% hp
- Sword cooldowns
- Mantra cooldowns
- Deceptive Evasion

For pure siege I’ll tend to use stealth and Mantra cooldowns. For partial skirmishing, I tend to use Sword and Mantra cooldowns. For heavy skirmishing I’ll switch to Deceptive Evasion, but that’s rare.

Generally speaking, for sieging or any large-scale, terrain-heavy situation, clones tend to suck with LOS/pathing, so DE becomes pretty ‘meh’. Keep in mind that both GS2, GS4, and Focus5 will all spawn on/near the target, so you’ll tend to use those for more reliable shatters.

That looks eerily like a 30/30 Mantra build.

Only comment is that I’d choose different 1st/2nd tier Dueling traits. Shrug.

Oh, and personally I use Scholar runes because big damage = big hootus.

Ah, irrelevant?

Yes. Quite irrelevant.

Indulge me by considering the following:
1. Legendaries are PVT. (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Legendary_weapon)
-They are not for casual pickup. People have spent long play periods before obtaining them.

Yeah I had those confused with the precursors. Regardless, the Legendaries are 99.9% skin, and 0.1% stats.

You’re still about 10 miles from establishing a link between the stats of legendaries and their cost.

2. Invaders Exotic Gloves are 238 badges of honor. Someone will have played a fair amount of W3 before buying just one piece, let alone a set.

Your point?

As I said before, PVT makes sense for WvW gear so that random players that have no gear strategy won’t implode in 0.2 seconds in WvW. Players that live for more than 3 seconds in WvW will generally have a more fun experience in game.

3. All armors have at least one of the “big three (PVT)” in their stats. (I think)

Condition / Healing / Boon duration?

What’s your point here? Almost all gear has at least 1 offensive stat (in this case power), with a random mash of secondary stats — which happen to be defensive about half the time, because half the remaining stats happen to be defensive. Shocking coincidence.

ANet has avoided gear that has theoretically overpowered combinations at first glance (Condition damage / vit / tough, Condition damage / tough / healing power, Power / Condition damage / Toughness) and has only slowly been adding a few of those to the game. I could be speculating too far though, with ANet just being lazy / incomplete in their release itemization.

4. [Big Picture Alert] – Anet is always walking a tightrope of fun/interesting stuff for people to play and having balance between the multitude of options.
How do you balance scales? With standard weights.
I conject that PVT is the “Golden” standard that Anet uses when developing other options, based on the above two points.

That’s quite a gigantic stretch. I bet ANet uses the Mesmer class as the “Golden” standard for class balance because Mesmers have Portal. Makes about as much sense as what you said.

As a random aside, how do you factor the part where Precursors have Berserker stats? Is Berserker the “Silver” standard?

What about the part where Soldiers gems don’t exist? How can Soldiers be the “Golden standard” when it doesn’t even have complete itemization in this game?

Nothing will ever, in total sum, be “better” than the standard of PVT, because that would then prove unbalancing with other things in the game.

What the kittening hell?

Sorry, but Berserker kittens all over PVT when you don’t get hit.

As a general observation, condition damage + v/t kittens all over PVT when the target has 100% Protection.

Traits/Weapons/Skills, try to play his style of game. I’d bet he notices very little difference in end outcome (Him alive, opponent(s) dead). I’d also conject he could handle more opponents it that scenario, albeit taking longer to finish them off.

Unless his opponents actually have heal on their bar. I’m not sure if you realize this, but the Ret Tank build of this thread is actually pretty terrible at taking supply camps* and otherwise killing anything that doesn’t want to die, because it has low direct damage output. Like, really low.

• By terrible, I mean slow, because any build should be capable of soloing supply camps with sufficient player skill.

While I agree that Theorycrafting is a mental game, understanding the underlying game mechanics/balance is important.

You’re missing the giant elephant in the room called “low damage output minus healing x mitigation = exponentially high TTK / exponentially low real damage output”.

Nevermind the general concept of condition damage builds working poorly with power gear (e.g. spec – gear synergy).

You’re pretty weird, bro.

I’d bet he notices very little difference in end outcome (Him alive, opponent(s) dead). I’d also conject he could handle more opponents it that scenario, albeit taking longer to finish them off.

I’d wager he would have a lot more opponents who walk away without dying, or who get rezzed by teammates. You have some sort of major tank fetish going on.

Wtb pre-nerf Adventurer Runes and Sigil of Energy, whatever the endurance refill was.

Unlimited Clone Works ftw.

Personaly, I’d change this trait (or add another) to either “allows you to [dodge] while channeling mantras” or “gain 3.25s aegis when channeling mantras

Aegis while channeling Mantras is actually very interesting.

AcidicVision.5498:

Well, 40 laurels by just playing the game, and 50 ectos from TP or salvaging rares you get by playing the game.

The only grind I see is the one you put on yourself. You can get your ecto from pent/shelt runs and Plinx over and over again. Ill get mine from fractals, the rehauled AC, and another dungeon or two.

Your way is grind. My way is fun and lends progress to multiple goals. Perception vs. reality is a kitten.

I’ve picked up 2 laurels and 3 ectos in the last 2 weeks of “playing the game”.

It’s a kitten terrible grind.

It’s a shame ANet’s gone down the route of gearflation.

1. Why are all legendary weapons PVT? Why does “Invader” armor exist for WvWvW?

1. This point has little to no relevance.

2. IIRC Legendaries were Berserker stats.

3. Invader armor exists so that random casuals who randomly pick up armor with no intent of optimization or customization get railroaded into a higher-survivability build setup so they last longer in WvW and have an improved game experience.

4. Theorycrafting is great as long as it’s anchored effectively to reality / uses realistic assumptions where applicable, etc.

The % damage loss from downgrading the base weapon damage on the GS multiplies the damage loss from power, and prec, and crit damage %.

Help me understand how +15.712 translates to dropping rating?

You basically want to shatter in the middle of the animation of your 4th illusion attack, when you have 2 additional illusion attacks about to be off cooldown. Cooldown assessment includes weapon swaps.

So, yes you want to weapon swap pretty often. If you use 11111 more than twice in a row, you’re probably doing something wrong, unless melee range is prohibitive. In that case you’ll probably use a bunch of GS1111.