Guild Wars 2

Supreme.3164:

Fighting against well played chrono power shatter and equilibrium revs that hit like trucks..can seriously test your resolve to learn to this class…plenty of deaths kitten but that feeling of accomplishment after you pull off that victory…after hundreds of timed dodge to avoid getting bursted down instantly.

The OP should try ranger against real players..but not matter what, people will cry for nerfs because they lack the humility to recognize their shortcomings

Just an aside, today I finally caved and gave hammer rev a go. I’ve been playing meta staff/sword for a while now and my mind was literally blown.

Just comparing weapon damage between rev hammer and ranger long bow with the exact same amount of power(2.5K) and (240%) crit dmg, the damage gap is so large, at times 3x higher. With amount of buff support(but for the party not just my self) and similar mobility, I cannot see my self going back to ranger/druid any time soon.

Some of these ideas are good some of them I do not agree with.

I do agree with some of the staff changes, some condi/hybrid damage would be good for the weapon. Honestly, I think poisons or bleeding is a better route to go than burning because we have various amounts of trait support for it. However thematically burning does work.

I do think that PBAOE lowers the skill floor as some other state, but in any intelligent group, they would already realize that were functionally a PBAOE heal/buff bot already. Our glyphs effects are all small area affects as well as the seeds that provide GoTL. Our main heal is already a PBAOE. I don’t see why people are against solidifying that. The only skill that should remain targeted is lunar impact.

Swagger.1459:

AF- Make CA a stance that is maintained until downed or killed. Once downed or killed you have to build up Astral Force again to activate and reenter form.

This can never come to fruition. There are so many reasons why. CA is fine in it’s state of being able to enter and exit it. To be permanently in it would require so much reductions both on bases and scaling. It would literally break various types of content including WvW. It would also lock us into being able to do nothing else. This is not a healthy direction for the elite spec.

Swagger.1459:

Provides natural stability to the Druid and pulses stability to 5 allies within a 360 radius.

Again, this would be straight up power creep. It would render the druid invincible while in CA. It’s just too much. That’s not even including the fact that it’s aoe. Combined with the above, you might as well remove cc from the game. Because it won’t be going off any more.

Swagger.1459:

CA 5- Remove the root and make this skill mobile. Add a 5 player, excluding the Druid, healing component that coincides with the pulse and final damage. Same 360 radius.

CA5 is currently a really good skill. It has so many uses, Even though it roots you. The only thing that could be better about it is it’s stability uptime. We don’t need to be mobile with this skill.

edit forgot to delete block quote.

Druid & Ranger don’t feel balanced. We have tones well designed skills, but absolute crappy scaling. The only thing were good at is kiting and ranged pressure. Which is where your frustrations come from @ OP. The only thing the meta build can really do is run around and stall for +1s. Druid is very unrewarding to play, and I feel it is generally only as good as your team mates are.

If you look at the rest of ranger aside from kite potential, its generally underwhelming.

• We have low tuned weapons. Two of our weapons are basically rendered useless because of the amount of projectile hate. One of those is our only good scaling.
• Our skills on weapons are mostly watered down versions of other skills on lower cool downs, it makes it seem like we do a lot but we really don’t.
• Trait wise your piggon holed into defense, because of our low scaling weapons the only thing worth while is traiting for defense.
• Then you look at utilities, again we have tones of great utilities, plenty of access to stunbreaks and condi clear, but none of really matters, because we cannot kill most targets on equal skill level.
• Boon wise we rely on this gimick of buffing up the pet then copying the buffs in order to be competitive.
• Finally we have unresponsive and low dps (if the pet can even hit the target) pets.

Ranger has a lot of shortcomings. Everything a ranger can do in an organized group dragon hunter can do and offer more. If you want to pew pew game play in a zerg roll a DH no one will blink an eye.

That said, ranger is more suited for roaming. You can easily flip camps, towers and win 2v1s with smart play. You can also make an entire server rage by keeping swords their on garri/keep for hours on end. Very few people can catch you, and if you learn various terrain tricks the only thing that might catch you is a thief or 10 or so people. At which point you’ve won.

Oh pardon my blondness. Missed that note in the patch notes. As hazy stated, they didnt update the map, so there was really no way of nothing! thanks!

The only two of my classes I enjoy atm are warrior and mesmer. It amazes me that anet thinks all this invuln is healthy while you can roflstomp people.

Really not happy with ranger/druid. Still want to tie the pets to a steak and burn them. Wish that the class could actually build for dmg. Has tones of crap weapons and traits still. We had this whole constructive thread about shortcomings and points that may be to strong, all we got was bugfixes and nerfs.

Thief not happy with. Obvious stealth attack QQ. On top of that d/p is still too good to pass up other sets. Requires way to much outplay some targets. Might as well afk if vs guard as there is very little you can do.

Its been over a month? what is so kitten hard about adding npcs into spawns of each area?

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I logged into WvW recently, and saw something that boggles my mind. How exactly did DB overtake both TC and BG?

A number of various factors:

You have the whole, attempting to stack TC debacle where a bunch of people ban wagoned TC before server linkings happened. In turn this caused a lot of TC guilds to jump ship(a lot of which now are on db). A few guild that come to mind off the top my head were JOY and BP which were both pretty big guilds.

Population wise TC and BG have both been unlinked for a while. For a good period of time they were also in a complete lock out. Thus they were unable to retain numbers with the amount of people leaving.

Then you have the actual match ups, where TC and BG have to fight the population of linked servers as unlinked.

Lastly, add the bandwagon ktrain on top of it. Every two months a new set of servers becomes the host for the ktrain in each tier. The way I see it, db/ioj has been selected to be this tiers ktrain until the relinks happen again.

TheHeretic.3529:

All of a sudden? DB has been creeping back up for a long, long time.

And you cant use the IoJ excuse, the pairings are based on population. ANet can lock transfers as soon as they need to. DB STILL wasn’t full until just 2 or 3 days ago. DB could be unlinked soon because of this.

And TC is still far overpopulated, despite losing.

That’s your opinion. Personally I see DB as the stacked bunch atm. With the exception of prime time, DB has ktrain zergs running in eb and our home bl all day. You guys dominate the 75% of the time when people are just simply not on. It wins you the match up.

I have to say this though, DB is nothing like BG. At least when we fight BG and show up with half the numbers we get ran over by them. In contrast DB either run away or fold like cheap cardboard despite out numbering 2-4 to I. I am not just trying to talking smack here, the kdr of every week speaks for its self, this is the first week DB has been higher than 0.7 kdr since hitting tier 1. Despite totally dominating the scoreboard.

Fluffball.8307:

Eval.2371:

That said the most impressive and useful thing I’ve ever seen a ranger do, is keep swords on our keep pretty much all of prime for about two weeks(if I remember correctly the guy was on yb at the time). With the amount of stealth, survivability and mobility this one druid had, it was very hard to catch him, and often when we did finally get him, there was 20 or so of us committed to catching him. He wasted a lot of peoples time, and killed a lot of solo people with various terrain tricks. Your useful to zerg by not being in it, but rather disrupting the hell out of thiers.

Asura with a dragon mask?

Yup that’s the one.

Kageseigi.2150:

You may hate the D/P playstyle, but you could use it just for the shadowstep, the same reason you use the Shortbow. Or you could still take the Shortbow if you wish. Take D/D or S/D or the weapon set of your choosing.

I’m not saying to delete the Shortbow, but perhaps it would necessitate improvements to it’s functionality.

[sic]…[sic]

Ps. If you can’t tell, I play D/P, but I’m sick of being stuck with it and Shortbow. So my intent is not to buff D/P. My purpose is to remain viable while taking another weapon set. I’m not asking for nerfs to D/P just so other sets become better choices in relation, I just want a simple change in order to make other sets a true choice to use along with D/P, not in spite of it.

Personally I do not like shortbow either. Despite the fact that it is our best kiting option, and one of the easiest ways to deal with reaper and warrior. For mobility purposes your not locked to shortbow. You can getaway with staff just fine. I prefer staff over shortbow as I find uses for all of the skills on the whole weapon, and I have absolutely no issues with running vault for mobility. Staff land speed is very similar over a full bar of initiative. The only real downsides to it is you can be interrupted during the animation and its not an instant blink.

I do agree with you and many that share the view of shadow shot being overpowered numerically and utility wise. I do not agree with your vision of what shadow shot should be.

The whole problem with rangers as other people have stated is they are not useful inside of a zerg. They have no clear identity; there is to much projectile hate for range to be useful other than poking the sides, healing power scaling is abysmal/the healing skills them selves are clunky, the rest of our support skills are greatly overshadowed by other classes that have more relevant tools and we lack stability and buffs to be useful at the front line.

What rangers are good at in wvw:

• Resetting fights
• Self sustaining
• Quick successive burst
• High mobility
• High pressure at range

Which leans to solid roaming and small scale fights. Honestly, to the average person looking to pick up ranger/druid for wvw, only do so if you look to flip objectives in groups of 5 or less. If your looking for zerg play dragon hunter is a much more solid option atm. Literally everything ranger brings to the group, dragon hunter can bring and more.

That said the most impressive and useful thing I’ve ever seen a ranger do, is keep swords on our keep pretty much all of prime for about two weeks(if I remember correctly the guy was on yb at the time). With the amount of stealth, survivability and mobility this one druid had, it was very hard to catch him, and often when we did finally get him, there was 20 or so of us committed to catching him. He wasted a lot of peoples time, and killed a lot of solo people with various terrain tricks. You can useful to zerg by not being in it; simply by disrupting the hell out of opponents zerg.

$50 is very absurd. 20$ is even a bit much and is the current gate.

The only real way to stop it is, to make it too pricey to change. A lot of people that bandwagon are in for the ktrain/easy bags. If you make the cost of transfer higher than the ktrain rewards, then you bleed out the band-wagoners

This is why people wanted frequent relinks, because it would balance out the populations more often, and raise the costs to jump frequently substantially(goes from 250g to 500g a month). Making it not cost effective to bandwagon, but obtainable to join a server that has friends on it.

The whole limit X dealio is problematic because people come and go. The active player base rises and falls, even in tier 1. You could be X limit and then have a fall off in interest leaving a server decimated because it cannot get new blood. In the same note a patch could stir up interest and cause a surge in players. If you tie it to the active base, then you could have servers go dark or to sleep as some people put it to gain more players.

It is not an easy problem to solve, because people look to game the system.

Zenith.7301:

I mean, how can any other offhand compete with offhand pistol when so much strong utility and offense is packed into that single weapon.

You’d be asking for power creep if we made another weapon optimal over offhand pistol.

I think a lot of people realize this, and wouldn’t be opposed to shaving of something like shadow shot on dagger pistol. The problem with D/D is all of its skills minus auto attack and heart seeker are unreliable.

You can have different rather than straight power creep.

Deathblossom for example is supposed to be a utility dodge, but is unusable due to it’s animation. A simple change to make it more like a bound or dash dodge, rather than a 3 part bounce would greatly benefit the set as it could be used in many different ways. A change like that wouldn’t be stronger, or more powerful, it would just needs to be functionally different and reliable than its current state. Currently right now it only serves a purpose as a a stalling mechanism for endurance so you can do what you actually wanted to do; close or widen the gap between a target.

This patch didn’t feel like a quarterly update. It felt like a QoL update. I feel mostly postive about the patch despite some of my negative criticisms below.Almost everything I feel positive about this patch was QoL or a bugfix. That said here is my critique of things.

Living Story 8/10

LS3 Was really good and well done. The art and story telling was amazing. However, it does fall short in the amount of content it brought as a whole. It is really not enough for people to do for 3 months. I was expected to be entertained for at least a week, not a few hours by the story. It feels no longer than some of the LS2 episodes, but from my understanding was supposed to be much larger. I do think I will run around the map a lot though, as it is fun to navigate and visually interesting.

WvW 1/10

Was expecting the scoring changes that we voted on two months ago to come this quarter. Utterly disappointed in this sense. As a whole WvW feels the same always. The mode still has all the same issues it always has. Skill lag and desync has been a lot worse since the patch. I am constantly seeing yaks under ground, or ghosting behind where they actually physically are. Downed players seem to glitch out and continue moving as well. That’s completely ignoring class balance around the mode.

PvP 6/10

Have not tried the new map, so I cannot comment. I am really glad ranked is back for off season.PvP still has the same problems: there is too much passive defense going around, there is still to much aoe going around, there is still to much cc going around.

I still think the whole split balance and deleting amulets are both wrong directions. Both effectively pigeon hole build diversity.l like to think that pvp needs to be opened up to an amulet + armor system for stats to increase build diversity.

Additionally another issue is the stat pool. PvP has issues of having low stats, so any kind of class that has % scaling gets shafted. It also makes the dependency on boons much higher because they scale naturally instead of at a reduced rate. I really want to see stat pools normalized across game modes so that skills stop being band-aided or destroyed for other game modes.

Class balance 4/10 (I should really label this communication)

I do not feel the changes were on point this patch, many issues that needed to be addressed were left untouched, while non issues were absolutely gutted.

I really wish anet would take the time and talk with players about what their thoughts are on the classes are. Many people view a lot of the changes as you guys threw darts at a board and we got what was landed on. A lot of other games take the time to make video discussing point by point some of the major changes and why they were done. When that’s done, I can still disagree with changes, but at least I can understand why those changes happened.

In relation to the lack of explanation, I am becoming increasingly frustrated when class forums. I have seen many interesting constructive threads about classes shortcomings and overturned points to have nothing come of it except bug fixes. I do not feel that arena net is actively engaged with it’s player base or understands what it’s bases frustrations are. Which in turn is causing a lot of people to become apathetic and cynical on the forums. Neither of which are good for communication or postive feedback.

kitten.5862:

Lucred.1802:

Hunter.4783:

1 day into the patch and there are already people who are qQing about dh. This time though it’s different.

Because the OP knows that if he dies to DH traps is most definitely his fault he saw says that his TEAMMATES are the ones who mess up and die.

So perhaps instead of nerfing the class because your team (and yourself ) can’t find the dodge key perhaps they need to learn proper pvp play?

So, within hours of patch multiple threads reporting that DH traps ignored block/dodge/skill-based evades/[anything not invul]. Surprise, servers go down for most of the day, come back up bug is “gone”.

DH traps were already rather deadly in team fights (where you have basically no way of dodging them, though this is true for all ground-targeted AoE), and are only 1 of 2 classes where they CANNOT BE SEEN AT ALL. It’s not like necro marks, and they’re far more damaging than druid traps. I mean, yeah, 1v1 you have about a 9000% chance that the DH is standing in the middle of his traps, but when he’s leaving them on a point and either going halfway across the map or just 20 feet away, if you have no idea they’re there you can’t dodge them. And yes, not every class has the option of basically permanent on-demand stunbreaks or condi cleanse, so they’re quite dangerous even with little or no incoming damage from the DH himself.

So when you pair the dangerous/annoying traps with a significant buff to active DPS on a DH and they went from being not viable in high-end PvP to being quite powerful.

There’s a reason why you’d go from seeing 1 every other match to most matches having at least 2 per team, something normally only witnessed with condi warrs and necros.

I’m not calling for a nerf here, but I really do think traps need a rework. The skill floor for being a competent DH is one of the lowest in the game (drop traps, stand in traps, touch no other buttons or movement keys, receive at least some free kills) solely because of how powerful their traps are.

You should not be having an issue with traps. They even have .5s activation time that dazes you which makes most players just instinctively dodge anyway. Learn, to, play

Daze is only if they traited for it. There are a lot of people that run the wings of resolve damage over it. You basically have to look for a little blue light that goes off when the daze isnt traited. It’s visually very hard see normally, and almost impossible with the rest of the skill fx going around.

The problem with traps, always has been and always will be dragon maw. Yes it does damage, but issue is the invisible knock down walls offer very little in counter play. Which keeps you locked into the rest of any traps, or damage the guard & friends have to offer. Minions can take the traps for you ahead of time so that gives 3 classes very good avenues to deal with traps. If you play any kind of class that does not have invulns for days, or can instantly blink out your goose will be cooked if you happen to step inside of one. It makes for a gaint noob trap on points and a very unenjoyable experience in teamfights.

Zelulose.8695:

D/D is kind choppy to use right now but so is s/d flanking strike.

lol. pistol whip is even more choppy. Flanking strike is pretty smooth imo. Depends on how you combo it.

@OP I don’t agree with a shadow step mechanic.

It’s been discussed over and over again. The problem with death blossom is that its uncontrollable. If it were just a straight line dash rather than the bounce, it could have a variety of uses, and help solve a problem that d/d has which is mobility.

Changing it to have function shadow step will just make it a battle between what’s better DB or SS between d/d and d/p. Where one set loses out solely because the other has better utility.

Guys, we got a buff!
QZ is 50 sec cd now…
Ranger is now saved. Were finally viable /s

I originally thought it was to facilitate discussion about the class and provide feedback. However, it seems all feedback, be it critical, constructive or cynical at this point falls on deaf ears. At this point I am having a really hard time to be constructive or even hopeful towards the class forms.

The latest patch is an exact reflection of this pattern we keep seeing. Many people pointed out various problems and suggestions in constructive manner in this recent thread outlining many of the various issues and short coming that plague the ranger & druid class. The only thing that came of the whole thread is an enlargement fix and some after cast reductions.

While the enlargement fix is welcome, the rest of the changes leave me lost for word especially the pet changes. We asked for AI fixes so that pets could actually hit targets and move with the targets. Instead we were given slight cool down shaves and after cast reductions that wont matter, because the pet is still not capable of hitting the target in the first place.

Welp, I as much as I hate to say it, I have 0 faith in anets capacity to ever fix the many broken elements on this class (even more so after seeing the sad attempts to fix rev as well…). Dear anet please when you do finally decide to start listening to your base and make positive changes that players ask for, please do.. send me an email. For now I think it’s best to take a break.

Looks like mace and sword are both the same weapon now, where nothing works.

Awesome anet. Keep it up. /s

@OP S/P is a lot higher skill floor to use. I would suggest learning d/p & s/d before dedicating your self to s/p. They are both much more forgiving sets. There is also certain opponents that s/p doesn’t fair well against, that dagger OH is a much better choice.

Learning opponents patterns and skills is essential for thief in general. As you need to know which skills to interrupt and dodge.Try playing all the classes take note of what the heal animations look like and what the big hitting skills look like. Try and get friends that have those classes on different races also show you how those animations vary from race to race.

Taobella.6597:

For WvW i run it more as a glass cannon you do semi high burst dmg with pistol whip simply becuase most of WvW is based around how effectively you kill someone to get next person.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQRAsa4an0MBFmilOBuNBkmiFeCT7M9DCAzHwHYF07IkFqCA-TVCEQBE4EA4QlfA8BAsRlgA4IA8vDCg70PIv9H8n6PkCIipWA-w

This is really interesting. Very similar to what I run .

Just wondering as I like a good duel, what server is your friend based on?

Was also in that fight. It was pretty nuts, I remember at one point it had to been a good 20 seconds waiting for my heal to go off. You could tell all sides were just reduced to 1 spaming and praying to hit things and praying other people were not on top of them.

When that keep finally fell and the 3 groups went separate ways, oh man that was funny. Things were busted for a good whole 10 minutes while the server seemed to overcompensate or just not validate. I’ve never seen initiative costs & cool downs just not exist, or auto attack chains as quick as one whole attack. It was like URF for gw2.

Heibi.4251:

Came across a fully upgraded Hills keep in Yak’s Bend BL today. And much to our surprise the ANeT tag was on it. And it is still claimed by ANeT. Last week we heard a rumor that the SOS server wanted ANeT to claim our Garrison to make a statement. How is this even remotely allowed?

1. ANeT is the administrator for this game.
2. Being an ANeT dev should be considered a privilege and it should not be used to favor any server.
3. ANeT claiming any objective in WvW shows favoritism.
4. Showing any favoritism of any kind to specific servers is extremely unprofessional.

Don’t give me the argument that they get to the play the game as well. Of course they can and should. But playing should be the end of it. Taking part in a servers claiming, which gives that server an advantage in the objective should not be allowed. Again, favoritism.

ANeT, please explain to those servers that don’t get your favor as to why this practice is being allowed.

Seriously get off your entitled horse.

There are a lot of anet employees actually enjoy the game they make. They are people just like you and I. Yes they have an arena net guild. Yes they make and use siege just like any other player. It shows absolutely no favoritism as there are numerous employees on many different servers. In WvW running around with an anet tag or putting it on anything you might as well have painted bulls eye on it/them.

Zenith.7301:

Eval.2371:

alchemyst.2165:

If you’re referring to our damage, it’s fine. Honestly we don’t need any more buffs to it.

If you’re referring to range, it’s the same melee range as any other class.

Totally depends on the context. Most of our damage is from % modifiers

WvW: thief damage is fine.
PvE: thief has some of the best single target dps.
PvP: theif hits well below average.

Why do we hit low in pvp? because a lot of our damage modifiers are % based, and with lower stat pools overall we suffer.

What OP should be asking for is flat damage modifiers.

Thief WvW damage is far from fine lol. A single vault/backstab still does half a revenant’s health in a mug combo with a revenant having 3.6k armor and marauder’s armor with cavalier trinkets.

And thanks to shadowstep you are never dying against anyone in WvW unless it’s another thief.

Yea, and a single rev sword auto does about a third of my health(or my rev hits for 5.5k on most thief’s); what’s your point? (I could even add that staff 5 is an instant kill for many glass builds too) I don’t mean to start a kittening contest. Damage is over the top in pretty much all cases in wvw because stats are inflated by food and infusions. Thiefs damage is inline with many other burst classes in wvw.

Still the consistency issue of how much damage we have is caused by the gap between stats in pvp vs wvw/pve. Flat modifers over percent ones would bring thief more in line on both ends of the spectrum. It wouldn’t solve the issue but it would make it a softer gap in pvp and reduce abuse cases in wvw.

A lot of people have frustrations with condition damage for many reasons the past season. I totally agree in many senses that there needs to be some better counterplay or some reductions. Even if either happens next Tuesday there will be still be an underlining problem with conditions damage; it is hard to cleanse the condition you need to.

I think that cleanse priority would help solve many frustrations players have.A lot of times you cannot cleanse the condition you want to or should be cleansing because of soft cc or other minor stacks preventing you from cleansing.

The whole idea of skills having priority tied to skills is not a new concept. For example thief has a boon steal priority it takes the most important boons first. Why couldn’t condition cleanses also work like this? Why can’t they cleanse the most debilitating effects first?

What I hope to see in the future is something similar to boon steal prority; but implemented for conditions where the priority for removal is something like:

Immobilize> Highest Current Stack over 5 > Confusion > Poison > Burning > Bleeding > Torment > chill > other soft cc

What are other peoples thoughts?

edit: just a small aside:

I think anet do have a faulty workaround to this problem. They introduced a few skills/traits that clear all conditions accross the board. Basically they made get out of jail free cards to mask the problem not fix it. For obvious reasons, we cannot have a lot of these types of skills/tratis or it would trivialize conditons across the board. I don’t think asking for more of these full clears is a good idea nor does it solve the intial problem. Honestly these types of skills could removed if something like the above was added.

Jeknar.6184:

Crapgame.6519:

Honestly, just remove gear options from WvW and treat it like sPvP. Set amulet, runes, and sigils. Probably make balance 100 times easier.

And ruins people who like to mix their armors. Not everyone run a full set of the same stat combination you know? My scrapper for exemple have a Knight’s Hammer, Marauder’s Armor and Celestial Trinkets. Tell me which pvp amulet would give the stats I gain with this combination of equipments.

This. It’s impossible in pvp to get the amount of stats that I want in certain builds. The problem with the pvp setup is the lack of customization. Your stuck with those stats, you can’t min max, which leaves you cookie cutter builds. I can’t get the balance of power, precision, ferocity, and vitality in the pvp system even though there is multiple amulets/runes that give me the avenues to go about those stats.

I’d be fine with it if they gave us an armor, amulet, rune, weapon, sigil setup tho. At least that way you could have some semblance of build diversity.

Hexinx.1872:

We tend to stay away from objectives unless there is something to fight there, but not everyone plays like you or me. Some people like to capture, upgrade, and defend a tower and scout or whatever. All the power to them. This game has many varieties of play styles in WvW. Limiting it to one sole purpose will never happen. But that doesn’t mean we can’t go out and find our fights, or play the way we prefer to. Some days it may take more time or effort to find the battles, other days the battles are plentiful.

Whole post is really good. But yea, I totally agree different strokes for different folks.

I am also on TC. I am one of these people that burn through siege disablers. I use them all the time, because I am the one who spends time taking those camps, walking those yaks, calling out those blobs and defending. Why? because its fun, it is where you find most of the small scale fights. However, often I am greeted with zergs and that is just the nature of tier 1. Still that doesn’t mean I am going to roll over. I’m going to fight tooth and nail with everything at my disposal until an actual approachable fight is there.

Frankly on the topic of wasting peoples time. I can totally make the case that Zergs destroy my preferred type of game play. They make hours of walking yaks seems pointless, flipping camps & defending a laughable joke. Fighting them is impossible without calling for large amount of backup. The only way to stall for backup is a siege disabler. Your 35 seconds of sorrow equates to nothing compared to the 2 hours I spent walking yaks on bay.

I get that it frustrates some people that they can’t just get there bag, or ppt because of siege disablers, but in contrast it frustrates me even more to have to stall a blob of 40 people solo and its only for 35 seconds. If the people placing the siege had half a brain they would spread it out and aim in the same spot. To the people that argue that you are looking for fights, I can see that if you just opened up the objective and waited, but to just storm the place and port afterwards just shows how disinterested you actually are in fights and how interested you are in sweet succulent pve bags/karma.

The only way I’d be happy if they removed disablers is if in turn they gave us a tool that forces a zerg to split up. I’d love to see a mechanics introduced that have no target limit but scale damage based on the number of targets in an area. That way I could actually fight back rather than using this crutch of a delay item.

Don’t agree your idea. It would destroy the only effective game play that counter zergs, which is to split up and simultaneously take objectives with small or solo groups.

The only way I’d be fine upscaled camps is as they are in their current itteration (they go up in difficulty as the camps/objective upgrades) or increases the difficulty/scale of them mobs based on the amount of players attacking the objective. Meaning more players more mobs, slower ktrain less empassis on blob play.

Also there should be a rare easter egg where if the entire population of a bl shows up at and objective it should spawn the all mighty legend MO him self, who proceeds smacks the lot of them with his mighty hammer. Which causes insane amounts of skill lag and mass d/c’s.

yea, there are to few ways to edge people on.

My personal favourites are downing people by throwing siege at them. Mailing people the good ole humiliation dye but that requires to much effort.

Staff is good in pretty much every situation. The only thing it sucks at is disengaging. Which is why a lot of people use it with x/pistol in the other set. I don’t think the skills are a problem, its a pretty loaded kit:

• Staff auto is good dps. Hook strike(from stealth skill) is a wonderful knock down, that lets you set up vault or weakening charge and a full auto combo. Great for making picks in group play.
• Weakening charge is amazing burst and weakness. Pairs with steal to spin in place.
• Debilitating arc is an instant cast evade and cripple. Which you can use ignore after casts on things like vault.
• Dust strike is a 3 impact blind, that can hit up to 3 targets. Wonderful for stomps and screwing up other peoples combo’s.
• Vault is great aoe damage and mobility for chasing people.

Most people only ever understand and use auto attack and vault. Which sounds about where OP currently is understanding wise. I have absolutely no problem roaming with staff in wvw. I’ve even run frontline tank builds for zerg play in the past. OP honestly if you want to improve using staff and are on NA I have no problem giving pointers in game. Send me a mail.

joneirikb.7506:

• The primary reason and use for the “Outnumbered” is Warning. Not to make you able to compete with enemy numbers.
• The small numerical bonuses are there mostly to reward those that still dare the dark waters.
• When you’re severely outnumbered, the general best idea is to start Roaming, which one of the others described very nicely in another thread as “being as annoying as you can”. The best way to “fight” against an overwhelming size enemy is to frustrate them, Send 1 guy to take every camp on the map at the same time, start cataing towers in 1-2’s and force the enemy to split up to deal with you. They will usually just get bored or frustrated and leave.

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That aside, the why we can’t have stat boosts or other goodies on “Outnumbered”.

Because of how the "Outnumbered works for the whole map, adding stats or other advantages to it will create a lot of unbalanced situations.

• If Server A is karma training at Bay on Server B’s ABL. And Server B has a scout at NEC when a Server A roamer attacks the camp. Server B Scout will have an unfair advantage in stats, on top of the camp guards, vs Server A’s roamer that might have nothing to do at all with the group at Bay. The lareg group at Bay might even join the map in the middle of the fight between the scout and roamer, and mid fight give the Scout an advantage.
• Same situation with a 5 vs 5 havoc group from both sides, meeting to fight over SET, while Server A gets a large group joining the map to go to Bay.
• Zerg Busting or other very organized guilds that specialize or train on beating larger groups of un-organized enemies. So Server A has 20 players in Server B ABL, and Server B has pulled a zerg from EBG to chase them out numbering 40. The Server A group has trained, uses voice com, runs specific builds, classes, squad setups to maximize group synergies, and in general specialized themselves on killing twice their number of unorganized players. And all of a sudden they’re getting EXTRA stat bonuses as well ? In this case the 40 pugs are the guys that needs that outnumbered buff!

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Further reasons why this just doesn’t work:

The difference in player skill. Going to use number 1-9 to simplify player skill for these examples, where 9 is top and 1 is bottom.

• 5 Server A Defenders at skill 5, defends a tower against: 10 Server B Attackers at skill 5. And the outnumbered buff roughly boost so that 1 person equal 2 enemies in relative stats. This is fair and even, this is the ideal situation and how people that want a Outnumbered buff to work.
• 5 Server A Defenders at skill 3, defends a tower against: 10 Server B Attackers at skill 7 (Organized guild group, that also likes to PvP). With the outnumbered buff still boosting roughly 1 defender = 2 attackers in stats. At this stage the outnumbering buff doesn’t really do much at all, it will make them survive a little bit longer, or 1 more might be able to run away. The difference in skill between the sides means that the stat difference matters that much less.
• 10 Server A Scouts at skill 3, tired of being ganked by enemy roaming group, gangs together to ambush and kill them as they attack a tower. Server B has a roaming group of 5 players at skill 7, they’re not very organized, running random roaming builds, but are in voice-com. In this case the Roamers would be able to pick apart the Scouts without the Outnumbered Buff, but in this case they also have the stat buffs, and will completely dominate the poor scouts.
• I have seen a single roamer (my crazy guild leader) charge solo into un-organized groups of 20, kill 10, down a few more, until they finally manage to kill him. Had he gotten an outnumbered stat bonus in addition to this, he would have taken all 20 solo. Is that really what you want ? (This would be 1 Roamer skill 9, vs 20 zerglings skill 1)

Edit: Just figured out how to make proper bullet points!

underrated post. Been a long time since I have seen someone who actually knows what they are doing.

All I see in here is… WA WAAAAA WAAA! I didn’t read the patch notes! How dare anet make me play WvW!

Well ya know what. They gave us a heads up. Yes it was buried in the patch notes, and it’s no ones fault but your own for not reading them. No matter how you justify it. I know plenty of people that did and bought theirs before hand.

On the note of I don’t want to play wvw! Tough. It’s a legendary weapon and requires elements from all gamemodes. Maybe you pve people will finally understand the pain that primarily WvW people have suffered since the start of the game with having to go to an unprefered game mode to farm needed items to reach goals they want.

Honestly if you don’t like it sell your mats and precursor and buy a completed legendary off the tp.

alchemyst.2165:

If you’re referring to our damage, it’s fine. Honestly we don’t need any more buffs to it.

If you’re referring to range, it’s the same melee range as any other class.

Totally depends on the context. Most of our damage is from % modifiers

WvW: thief damage is fine.
PvE: thief has some of the best single target dps.
PvP: theif hits well below average.

Why do we hit low in pvp? because a lot of our damage modifiers are % based, and with lower stat pools overall we suffer.

What OP should be asking for is flat damage modifiers.

Some very good posts in here.

I too share the same thoughts as a lot of people here do. WvW in a whole seems to be a game mode without direction, an attempt to bridge the gap between pve and pvp as a few others have said.

For me WvW always been has and will be about open world pvp. Fights with other players. Yea, objectives are strategic things for balling your opponents up to get good fights. Siege is an ends to mean to stall for reinforcements for a fight, or a means to open up an objective to force a fight. I think the biggest problem of WvW that there is to many pve elements to objectives with to many rewards. In turn it causes passive reward farming focused game play, instead of the rush of fights that most people enjoy.

Meaningful rewards have always been a problem with wvw. Up until recently the rewards of the mode have been a consistent joke. Thankfully the reward track makes light of the situation of rewards and the heroics vendor/provision has made gearing a little more easier. Still there is work to be done to make the game mode have meaning. Currently as a server, a guild or an individual player there is nothing to work towards. Even winning a match our current reward is gated by leveling up, and is the same boring loot that we normally get. Why do we have not unique guild hall decorations for winning servers? Why is there no rewards of resources for players to contribute to upgrading their guild halls for wvw? Why is there no value or reward in defending an objective? I mean I get bag for taking a tower, but absolutely nothing for defending one for 15minutes. I could go on. Instead, the most rewarding play of wvw, to be frank has the least amount of pvp, or wvw for that mater, its senseless objective farming focused on bags from pve elements. That needs to change.

Lastly, something that has always made me scratch my head is why there is very little support for communities to build them selves. Everything about the game mode is meaningless due to the anonymity of both your allies and opponents. Nobody knows who defends or makes contributions to the server, the only people that do get recognition these days are commanders who aimlessly lead ktrains most of the time. Which is why many guilds and players endlessly server hop; to look for a place where they can make contributions and be recognized for doing so. GvG is basically dead because of the lack of support for open gvg fights and recognition of them. So at the end of the day we have no community because of anonymity and lack of support. That’s completely ignoring the whole issue of guesting, which is a whole layer of anonymity causing community issues.

WvW is meaningless because it doesn’t have community support, it does not have good rewards, nor does it rewards encourage good fights what is what people enjoy the most about the mode.

Sarrs.4831:

these builds are instantly countered when you run appropriate condi removal builds, you can literally ignore them because they have no pressure

Agreed with this sentiment. You can walk away from most condition builds, and they can do nothing really to you. If in the event they try to chase you, they will waste precious cooldowns opening them up to being bursted down.

Condi clear has very limited options on many classes so taking the condi clear you need is sometimes not possible. Even on some the classes that have insane clearing capabilities (druid and dragonhunter) it can still be a problem, after repeated bombs which is common with the surge of condition users. In some matchups it does not matter that you clear an entire bar of conditions, you will have them all right back on you within seconds.

One of the issues with condi in wvw is the sheer amount of application in aoe format. It’s just too many high stacks of application from to many sources. I do agree that players that get caught out should be punished, but the number of stacks on some of these skills/damage is a little bit insane.

Another issue is condition damage and expertise don’t mirror the power ferocity relationship that power builds have. Power based builds are reliant on getting their gains from ferocity from crit chance. It forces the builds to be more rounded out, requiring three stats, instead of two. Which forces them to choose between offensive and defensive stats. Condition damage does not do this, because precision and crit chance are soley extra opportunities for more application. If expertise were properly mirrored the duration increases from expertise would only be applied on crits, but its not, its currently just a raw damage increase. Condition build’s don’t have to round out or choose between stats because of this. Which allows you to pick up defensive stats.

Xenesis.6389:

Josh XT.6053:

DB always gets so close to the top then implodes 2-3 weeks later, so lets just see what happens.

They probably will if they get stuck in t1, cause a lot of their guilds are currently not built for the blobs like BG and TC has (even if some of them did come from t1 before). But seems like JQ is recovering from it’s NA plague, so that shouldn’t happen anyways.

I don’t know about that. It’s been a very interesting week. Atm there is only 15k between last place and first (with db currently in the lead). Db do have the numbers it seems and a lot of ktrain /omni blob going on. There have been numerous times where I have had to jump from tcbl to eb just to grab people to stop a db zerg on bay again. I do agree with you tho, eventually they’ll get tired of being bag farmed. Hopefully not.

Urdfexe.9147:

Eval.2371:

Condition damage needs to do as damage as power does without ferocity. Expertise should only affect condi duration on crits.
Protection needs to be universal in reduction.
Toughness needs to be universal in reduction.
Condi clear and Resistance need to go.

Until we get the above, they will remain an abuse case.

Fixed that for you.

I can agree with this as well.

I don’t agree with #1.
I do agree with #2. I personally never understood why expertise is constant addition.

Power builds have always relied on precision to get their ferocity gains. Without percision/critchance ferocity use useless. Power builds require a balance of 3 offensive stats. Why isnt condition damage like that?

Condition builds have almost no requirement for crit chance in builds. It’s pretty much just extra application on crit. I’d love to see expertise a gains seen only from crit application(meaning the skill applying the condition would have to crit). It would make condition builds round out as well, forcing them into three stat requirements over two. Meaning they would have to shave off some of the tankier stats instead of getting the best of all worlds.

I really enjoy my revenant. It’s a love hate relationship with condi: I love the animations and how the skills feel on my tiny asura, but hate all the bugs. I recently swapped to power, and while I don’t enjoy it as much, it’s been a lot of fun. Anet landed the nail on the head with our skills.

I just really wish they would go over a large majoirty of a bugs, fix them, and also change a lot traits that have no practical use.

Condition damage needs to do as damage as power does without ferocity. Expertise should only affect condi duration on crits.
Large stacks on ranged aoe skills need to be lowered.
Protection needs to be universal in reduction.
Toughness needs to be universal in reduction.
Good condi clear needs to be more accessible via traits that improve utilities.

Until we get a good combination of the above, they will remain an abuse case.

Totally agree that siege play sucks and it’s over used. But its a necessary evil. It’s the only real counter play to combat large gaps between group numbers. Until zerg busting is reintroduced some other way, ac’s in particular need to stay as is.

The change your suggesting would take a lot away from defenders & scouts which are both rare these days. Changing it so these kinds of players get no loot or ppt for their defensive contributions(who already don’t really get much loot or ppk) would deter a lot of people from continuing to do so, making them join the ktrain blobs which are the one the largest problems of wvw.

That said, if they made wvw, as you envision it, without doors and pve mobs to hold objectives, it would be a lot more enjoyable. A conquest style capture/holding system for each objective that could be contested at any time would split up the player base stop the ktrains, and force fights both small and large scale. I can get behind this idea.

lil devils x.6071:

Eval.2371:

Ya know, there is a lot of people that share you opinion. Personally I don’t. I actually prefer the new map. I used to think I was a minority. However, after the poll not to get rid of dbl and now to rotate it I can clearly see, that there are just a lot of loud people like you are the minority that just don’t like this map period.

What players actually voted for was getting a new WvW map ( not the DBL) was better than getting no map and that playing part of a game all of the time was better than playing a whole game part of the time. This was due to 1) Anet said they would not make an actual WvW map unless players accepted the DBL, 2)they knew the game mode would be destroyed if they had to have 3 months of DBL alone.

The objective of updates should always be:

• To increase game population
• to increase player satisfaction
• To Increase game longevity

What players voted for was to keep the desert borderlands. Then to rotate mix it in with alpine. Players make all kinds of speculations and all have their own unique motivations. To be frank, you say you rep other peoples thoughts a lot. You’ve said various things about other polls and then were proven wrong by the majoirty results. Your cynical attitude about wvw is draining to read thread after thread. Please just say your piece and stop trying to be the communities ambassador.

Anet said many things that they would try: to make another map, to fix it, to leave it as is, to delete it. Up until those two polls the whole issue of what to do with dbl has been undecided. That’s what the polls are about, its feedback to help them make decisions.

Anet has chosen to agree with the polls(which I’ll add, they don’t have to!) and say they will make an honest effort to follow through on them. Which will do all three of the above that you listed. You have to realize for the base its a net gain. You can’t appease everybody which is why I stated the next point.

lil devils x.6071:

Eval.2371:

If it bothers you that much, just avoid dbl. If it angers you that much that you want to quit, the quit already.

If everyone I know that has voiced they hated the DBL quit, the game would lose thousands of WvW players instantly. I think you misunderstood the poll results.

Telling players to leave rather than voice their opinions does not increase game population, player satisfaction or game longevity and is counterproductive to improving the game. These results do not mean players are happy with them. It means since players could not get what they wanted ( have a new map without the DBL or a whole game all of the time) they chose to settle for this instead, knowing the problems that will come with it will not be easily resolved.

I’ve already gone over the community ambassador bit… Bottom line, if you don’t enjoy something don’t force your self to play it. By all means do voice your opinion. Be critical, be constructive about what your perspective is, how what we have isn’t working and move on. That’s at least productive and useful both anet and the player base.

Sadly I never see those kinds of responses anymore. What I see instead is way to many people participating in a circlejerks of negativity because things didn’t go their way and no one gets anything from it, it just makes everyone tired. Spewing constant negativity about how people force them self to play gamemode that they don’t enjoy is not going to make an enjoyable experience for anyone. All it will do is make anet tired, and they will give up on this game mode again and make players that actually enjoy wvw to leave in droves. I’d rather those kinds of people that are not enjoying the game mode to say their piece and move on(and hopefully comeback if things look appealing to them) so the rest of us can enjoy what we still have.

Edit don’t know why I used rotate, meant mix.

Leaa.2943:

This is absolutely terrible and it is even more terrible that players choose to vote in this plague or cholera poll. It will be a flat out punishment to be the server that gets DBL, which in the end most likely will influence the outcome of the MU.
Might not be a big thing in NA, but in EU were the top tiers are constantly changing, it will hit like a truck. The server with DBL will have so many disadvantages and the rest of us will pile up on ABL maps.

I can not even imagine how this pull came about or how it can be thought of as a good pull. But ok lets go through this again and watch the server with DBL rage for not having players or waypoints or any sort of tactic. It will be fun time to watch the rage flow in this forum again. sarcasm if anyone missed that

Ya know, there is a lot of people that share you opinion. Personally I don’t. I actually prefer the new map. I used to think I was a minority. However, after the poll not to get rid of dbl and now to rotate it I can clearly see, that there are just a lot of loud people like you are the minority that just don’t like this map period.

If it bothers you that much, just avoid dbl. If it angers you that much that you want to quit, the quit already.

Josh Davis.6015:

Trigr.6481:

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Balancing SPvP individually——-

- This is probably the single most important change that the SPvP community needs whether you realize it or not. Not only does this make sense, but since SPvP is already isolated, not one change you make here effects the rest of the game. The way it currently works the devs expect us as players to think about the rest of the game before giving changes to a specific game type, however this way of thinking will never create good balance and the reason why is the majority of changes people suggest are obviously only made and will work for Spvp. WvW and PvE are very different in terms of balance and changes for one often conflict with the other two making the change almost meaningless to begin with.

The Lesh Prince recently developed some tech that makes skill-splitting more feasible than it was previously – you’ll see some PvP (and PvE) splits in the next balance update. It’s important to understand that changes will still need to be global, but we’ll definitely have a bit more flexibility moving forward.

Keeping parity between modes when possible is important to us – but when it’s not feasible we’ll look at splits.

edit: that clickbait though

I look forward to the split changes and to see how they work out.

Personally, I think it is the wrong direction. I feel that anet will never be able to balance pvp properly until the stats and scaling match pve & wvw. I feel that split balance will only create discrepancies and confusion between modes like we had before where anet puts bandaids on problematic skills( or runes or gear stats) rather than adjusting and fixing issue to make them use able across all game modes.

DeceiverX.8361:

As a side note to the immob option, it does beg a pretty distinct question: How long would it last? I ask this because this is very important when considering matchups that aren’t strictly outnumbered situations but have more enemies, such as a mesmer or ranger.

Even with a fairly paltry 1s immob, A viper D/D thief or similar build running 100% condition duration could stack 2s immobilizes over and over, locking down a mesmer, MM necro, or ranger near-permanently (now add Panic Strike and Devourer venom) almost too easily. If the duration is reduced to a near-insulting .5s, though, you end up with P/D and S/D having strictly better imobs already in their kits. I fear this may create situations which wouldn’t be fun or dynamic, and without adding awkward ICD’s into the immob component of the skill (something that’s really not a good idea), I’m not sure it could be properly balanced.

I’m not an amazing ranger, MM necro, or mesmer player (looking at you, Eval, for ranger feedback), but I’d like any feedback from people who may be.

In regards to duration, 1 or 1.5 seconds would be fine. As I outlined in my post above its a 6 int sink, for the immobilize. It’s very costly, but d/d does not have much it can spend on to begin with.

As for your whole abuse cases section, the only potential issue I see is with pulsing cripple skills, things like volley, or locust swarm. Caltrops is a possible issue.

As for a perma imob thief, I don’t see it being an issue, because many classes have traits that remove or drastically reduce the duration and the only two that don’t (guard and rev) have good access to tools that reduce/remove the effect. For ranger personally, it would be absolutely a non issue as we have loads of potential skills that remove conditions and two good traits that deal with the effect ( Natural Stride & Evasive Purity). The only two classes that I could see struggling with this is guard, and thief.

DeceiverX.8361:

DB as I proposed above would also enable disengage options, however. I’m torn on the matter of Dancing Dagger’s double-bounce immob, only because like I said, it would be a bit redundant on sets like P/D and S/D to have two immobilizes on top of Panic Strike.

.

If it were to work as I described above(consumes cripple and applies immobilize) you could only get the imob if you landed two dancing daggers, or got a repeat bounce onto the same target or if your target already had cripple on them. I don’t see an issue with possible application, solely because getting the proc would be either be costly initiative wise, or would be a reward for a skillful bounce between two targets. Both cases would not allow for repeated lock down, as cripple would need to be reapplied (huge init sink), or in the other case the targets would move apart, seeing as one is rooted and one is not.

Both the weapons sets you mention already have the means to immobilize & kite. So yes I agree with you; it would be somewhat redundant on s/d, but it would still be welcome. For S/D having another option would be better in some cases(eg you don’t want to return yet but want to chase), but both options would be costly. P/D I agree with you; the set wouldn’t gain much because body shot is a more reliable and cheaper method to get the lockdown. That all said it would be very useful for d/d as it would allow the set engage or disengage for 6(or 3 on skillful aim) initiative.

Zenith.7301:

tomwjd.8172:

As somebody mentioned earlier, this is only the case because the current pve meta takes into account of really high quickness uptime from boonshare chronomancer.

With that said, you need to take this issue to the pve discussion or the chrono forums because most other professions are in the same state at the moment when it comes to meta pve rotation (raids, fractal, dungeon). Take DH rotation for example: camp hammer and spam 1.

In fact, you shouldn’t even try to justify thief mechanics and game play based on pve because pve in general is faceroll. In high level pvp settings, you will note that thief has probably the highest mechanical learning curve compared to other professions and requires pinpoint player interactions to be successful.

If you want to press other buttons other than 1 and feel rewarded in pve, I’d recommend engineer.

Only problem with that suggestion is nobody wants engineers in raids.

People already barely want daredevils in raids and they compete with ele on DPS but lack the group utility. Engineer is like 5k DPS behind daredevil and suffers from the same lack of worthwhile utility to a group.

And it won’t be the first time a PvP guy calls raids faceroll. I could say the same of playing a perma evade/stealth thief cheese build in WvW or grabbing a PU condi aids mesmer in PvP. Definition of faceroll.

Or I could be a MOBA elitist kitten and scoff at MMO PvP. None of them are useful positions.

Tones of people want good engineers in raids runs, they provide the third highest dps, and the highest condi dps (Ignoring epi bounces).

Sad that you have to result to belittling to prove a point. You sure showed him. Sounds like your burnt out… try taking a break.

Marauder has two advantages regardless of profession, it has higher percision which in turn means higher crit chance (not really a problem on rev given our fury effectiveness is doubled) and the vitality allows you to be staying up and additionally provides more offensive stats when using furious maintenance oils.

Marauder stat wise is superior than berserker. That said, it does do less dps than berserker. Simply put marauder is better for all content other than raids and dungeons.

Phyrak.7260:

What of the discussion above of making bouncing dagger a port?
That is to imob or cripple an area and port to it – as a persuit tool?
Compatiblely, this may potentially hit less targets but it does open up more movement on dd

Especially considering the lack off available to dd

I’ll reiterate again, d/d whole problem is that it cannot reliably disengage. It’s too costly to not to and too costly to do so. Adding a gap close wont change that.

The problem with adding any kind of shadow step or port is that is effectively the function of off hand pistol with dagger. Giving dagger of hand any kind of port mechanic will just make the two weapons functionally the same. Meaning one will always be useless(more than likely dagger as its got way less utility).

Dancing daggers is already an amazing chase tool, as you can throw 1 of them between two targets and get 6 seconds of cripple (which is plenty of time to close the gap and regain initiative). Adding an immobilize effect as I suggest above for getting a double bounce would allow you to disengage, or chase. Meaning the whole focus of disengage is not longer on the shoulders of landing cloak and dagger.

Zenith.7301:

This is crazy. What kind of terrible game design makes a free, spammable ability be better DPS than a spender which takes out half our initiative bar.

It’s not like utility is an excuse, since while Vault offers a wonky evade, the auto offers reflects.

Thief as a whole has its auto attacks do more damage than the rest of its weapons kit on every weapon(staff is no magical exception, pistol is but i’ll get to that later), and frankly that’s fine. As our skills are all readily available which allows for skilled play by properly using our initiative for utility instead of damage. A lot of our utlities support this as well by further increasing our damage, rather then providing defensive options or party support.

Zenith.7301:

You need to shift out DPS from these autoattacks and back into initiative spenders across the weapon.

If you want initiative dumps for damage: pick up pistol pistol, unload is totally focused on that. Trickery has lead attacks which supports this kind of play as well, and argueably d/p does this as well, as shadow shot is more dps per initiative than a properly set up cloak & dagger backstab combo.

Main hand pistol is a primary example of a weapon that has had all its damage shoved into its initiative skills; not the auto attack, and its widely agreed that the weapon sucks. Pistol main hands whole problem is that that the game play is one dimensional because you have to choose between damage and utility, you can never do both and thief needs both given how squishy it is.

So no this is not a good idea, if anet were to change to this style of play, they would have to buff the class in so many other areas just to make it viable. You would be effectively buffing a class because you’ve nerfed it to make the skill cap higher. At that point you might as well just rebuild the entire class.

Zenith.7301:

Both revenants and thieves are in this weird scenario where several of their spenders are either DPS neutral or DPS losses compared to spammable skills. This is not good game design.

This also has the side effect of degrading the skill cap differences in PvE. A skillful thief with proper initiative management was the sign of a good dagger/dagger thief over one who misused initiative and lost modifiers.

Now the skill difference between two thieves in PvE is who can land bounding dodges on a boss, as the other part of their rotation is just auto attacks.

Here’s the thing, thief and rev have a low skill floor in pve. Both classes were built around fighting players(engaging, disengaging, & burst) which is where their true skill caps are shown. In all honesty if your looking for high impact skills or complex rotations for pve you’ve got the wrong class.

I do agree with you that anyone can do a lot of damage by doing very little in regards to both classes. Additionally I agree that you don’t get substantial gain on the higher end of the skill cap but it is more dps for both classes. That said the higher end of the thief skill rotation on staff includes 2 weakening charges between dodges . It’s pretty demanding to do effectively, requires a lot of positioning knowledge(which always has been the difference between good and bad thiefs) even without boss mechanics. The thing is people do the auto attack rotation because its safer and easier.

Little late to the party, but I agree a lot with decieverX has to say. The problem with OH Dagger is CnD really punishes to much you when you miss it, it’s hard to land without casting it with steal (or shadowstep/infiltrator signet). Which forces d/d into a really binary play style where you have to save steal to land CnD instead of using it for utility such as interrupting or stealing boons. Personally I think dancing dagger is an amazing skill. It is a great slow/cleave, it is a potential projectile finisher and has an ok damage coefficient.

From my perspective I play a lot of S/D and some of these buff ideas would make it very OP. Buffing OH dagger to much or in areas like boonstrip, or gap close would make s/d way too strong. I think some fair buffs that wouldn’t make sword or pistol main hands OP are:

CnD would benefit from:

• a lower cast cost
• Better damage coefficient

Bouncing dagger could benefit from:

• A lower cost (eg 2 init, but lower the cripple to 2 sec).
• A mechanic/proc effect that rewards multiple hits (eg if the target has cripple on them the get hit by bouncing dagger it immobilizes them instead).

Lastly, I feel that a rework of death blossom is needed. The skill is completely lost in the kit because of how much dodge we have now on daredevil, it’s currently just another dodge to spam, but it lacks control and really meaning out side of a spam condi build. I thought about a dash/doge idea as change, which is frankly what the weapon set needs. It would be a much more tactical and a useful change but it would be to much like sword in a sense(it would just become sword 2.0 aside from boonsteal).