Guild Wars 2

I think the only way to achieve true balance…

is a Roy for each profession

#cloneroy

nice. you just… took the issues and fixed them. always good to see.

if they’re gonna keep knocking our crutch out from under us, they really need to give us something else to lean on.

Sunflowers.1729:

Did you really suggest that CnD can’t be blocked or even evaded?

Thieves are in a good spot right now, for both PvP and WvW. I mean, if you had a class which could not only decap better than anyone else, but also 1v1 anyone, would that be balanced? I don’t think so. As it stands you can 1v1 some people anyway, but obviously it may be a waste of time and you should just go decap something else instead. Not because you can’t beat them, but because it’s just better to decap.

In WvW again you see that most roamers are Thieves or Mesmers (T1 NA, it’s about evenly split), showing that they are in a good spot. Venomshare is nice in zergs too. Note that you can use D/D in WvW, it’s pretty good there for the absurd burst potential.

What does need buffs are builds like P/P and S/D, not buffing the already popular and good builds like D/P (and D/D, which contrary to popular opinion does have a few benefits over D/P like faster stealth (for less init) and higher burst)

Edit: Disclaimer I play thief about 80% of the time, don’t pull that ‘you never play thief’ crap on me

Edit 2: What they should do is massively nerf thieves and mesmers so that their burst zerker builds are on equal footing with other zerker classes defenses (S/D ele, static discharge engi.etc), and give them more stat-based defenses rewarding them for building tanky. Like for example, a trait that says “every point of armor increases your endurance regeneration by x%”

well, that’s nice and all, but there aren’t so many point to decap in say… Arah.

don’t forget that not only is PvE a thing, it’s the single biggest part of this game by far, and even ignoring that, I’d say there are plenty of other things the thief still needs. condition builds could use work (tbh, and condition build without burning needs work), and we still have very little survivability. I don’t want to be melted by world/dungeon bosses just because I’m theoretically strong in PvP…

Demented Yak.6105:

Any weapon could give any play style.

Ultimately, it comes down to the imagination of the developers.

OP needs to chill out.

this

YuiRS.8129:

Black Frog.9274:

Melee staff is stupid. What could it offer that thief doesn’t already have? That’s what it comes down to really.

Defense and support options?

melee AoE, mobility that doesn’t drop you on an enemy’s face.

to be honest, the staff can offer thief whatever the devs want it to offer thief.

whether the devs want to offer thief anything good/new/fun is a whole other story.

MrForz.1953:

Sagat.3285:

Wut? Don’t you know how elite specs are supposed to work?

I clearly do. But the very fact that people pretty much eat eachother on that spec/weapon warfare tells that people don’t want the Thief, they want their own stuff and concepts to be approved by Anet and pick up the remains of the class, it’s ridiculous to witness. For the time being, why not go for Warrior if you want excessive brutality with a massive weapon?

I like thief. I like running Dagger/Dagger on thief. I like the animations.

I also, think, based on the available evidence, that thief will be getting staff.

I can’t – based on the lack of evidence, say if the staff will be good.

and while I’m happy with either Rifle or Staff, I don’t only want them, I simply enjoy having more options.

retailers tend to put up all sorts of placeholder release dates, so I wouldn’t count on it.

Grenth Weapons.

(also, make tear of grenth not terrible)

we’ve mad Balthazar (a.k.a. War-Grenth), Dwayna (a.k.a. Mom-Grenth) and Daydreamer’s (sorta meldandru(Tree-Grenth) inspired?)

it is time for the prince of Ice and Death to bring us pretty green ice weapons.

also, bring back the grenth hood. it’s grenth (always a win) and one of the better hood skins. 2-in-1

Meld with shadows needs improved. it’s seriously lackluster right now, espescially compared with Mesmer’s PU.

TheMurkMuffin.8213:

#teampistols for lyfe.

well, it makes no sense for the elite spec, but I can get behind this in general.

Metasynaptic.1093:

Hmm. Let’s see. Anet deploys Scarlett. She is universally hated by the player base, uniting them to defeat her. Sounds like the writers succeeded to me…

I liked Scarlet.

but she wouldn’t stop messing with my stuff.

RobbySpry.2671:

dsslive.8473:

because they’ll add more as time goes on?

Will they? Nowhere among the official publications or websites concerning HoT have i found anything that hints this. If you’re right, i think they should make this more clear directly on heartofthorns.guildwars2.com, as thus far they’ve just revealed one expertise per profession.

they’re only adding one per profession for now (read: with heart of thorns), with more to be added in the future.

plus,each class now has six specialisations, 5 core and 1 elite.

Black Frog.9274:

Melee staff is stupid. What could it offer that thief doesn’t already have? That’s what it comes down to really.

this is the problem.

what it offers or doesn’t offer doesn’t matter

rain doesn’t offer me much that a sink can’t, but if I see clouds, i’m probably going to get rain.

it’s not about what’s good.
it’s not about what we want.

it’s about what’s going to happen.

Reality. not opinion.

Waterseer.7089:

Sits in corner waving tiny dual sword Flag

Thieves getting something Mesmers had first? that’s the opposite of what happens.

Maugetarr.6823:

Sagat.3285:

uglydan.1638:

More likely they haven’t even started on thief elite spec.

If they take a break after Herald’s POI I’ll believe you.

Keep in mind they still have forge, berserker, and the druid that could all come before whatever we’re getting.

Edit: I think they’ve actually been on it for a while because shortly after they mentioned HoT, one of the devs at a convention said they were most excited for the thief elite spec, which leads me to think that we might actually think it’s pretty cool but the rest of the community might think it’s OP so they’re keeping it in reserve.

remember that this is from the post expecting Dragonhunter to be a crowd-pleaser.

take with many pinches of salt.

Maguuma Trailblaizer.

I didn’t do it for the title.

Yashuoa.9527:

Wolfric.9380:

Yes. Armor does not help against conditions.
But: Conditions can be countered by builds easier. So if the oponent is set up against it, you get a hard time, if not you often melt them.

What do you mean with this last line?

You mean if you do not have a build to fight conditions, well, than you get melted by one that uses them?

However there are probably builds who are good against condition builds, making it difficult for the condition build right?

for example, an enemy with a lot of toughness but little health will be melted by conditions if they can’t cleanse them, but some builds can cleanse them, some quite well. for example, Guardians running Contemplation of Purity can take all your conditions, erase them, and replace them with relevant boons (poison becomes regen. cripple becomes swiftness, etc) on burst-application condi builds, this effectively takes all your damage and turns it into megabuffs on the guard. there’s more or less nothing you can do against it.

Tyrannical.9348:

Took me a few hours to get a confirmation email, a day to get my goodies, still waiting on the free character slot for older accounts (last I heard can take up to a week)

I got mine after a day or two, but I’ve heard that they give those out on fridays (and I got mine on a friday, so there’s that)

Kalipos.6832:

We still don’t know thief elite spec so..
we still don’t know if the new thief elite spec brings some balance for as aswell and new mechanic to play with
thief is right now uncompleted imo

Elite specs should add to and expand upon the base class, but should not be required for the base profession to be valid. otherwise it’s a cash-grab from a bunch of jerks with no morals.

I’m now imagining a thief looking at a mesmer’s shatter skills going “Why the hell would you blow them up?”

TheLastNobody.8319:

I just want my condition damage builds to be useful. ;-; I love condition damage!

but condition damage builds are useful, just look at -

wait, did you mean conditions other than burning? because I think Anet forgot those exist.

style.6173:

Zaoda.1653:

style.6173:

I doubt they are doing another revenant announcement. If so, they have a horrible marketing group. It’s a bit of a groan at this point with the amount of revenant stuff lately.

Ummmm… Revenant’s the new class though. Compared to all the other classes who have been here since the beginning, and the fact that we don’t know every single detail about the Revenant yet, it kind of deserves the right to be talked about more often, lol.

Like I said… a horrible move on the ANET marketing department. The trick is to build excitement between now and launch. A smarter move would have been to balance the current trait lines and then add in the elite spec. With the announcement of the elite spec now, what is left to hype?

They should have discussed a different class this week. I’m personally sick of hearing about the revenant.

I don’t mind hearing more about the revenant, but it’s the only class without a following 3 years in the building. I’d say it’s the elite that had the least hype behind it (most of the hype concerned the base class, not the spec) and it would have been much better to post any of the others, espescially thief or warrior, who have the least info.

I’m all for shadow clones, if only to take something back from mesmers

Seabreeze.8437:

Tabootrinket.2631:

Oh my god, that would be HEAVEN (And we do lack burning)!!! For us I mean… but hell on the other side
(but basically the image represents what my thief would look like loosely)

Sabo, eh? Nice. They do have a couple of top hat skins, and with the plethora of coats the medium armor set has, you should be able to pull off that look pretty easily.

That’s One Piece, though. You should be careful about posting… you know…

<_<

>_>

…anime.

Because apparently that’s the only reason we want a melee staff. (shrugs)

I never even said I wanted a staff. just that it seems most likely.

Tabootrinket.2631:

Gray.9041:

Tabootrinket.2631:

Personally, when I think about it, there’s really no weapon I don’t want to see on my thief.
But, yeah my preference goes to the staff (The upcoming skins for it look great). I’m pumped

does this mean staff’ll bring burning?

Oh my god, that would be HEAVEN (And we do lack burning)!!! For us I mean… but hell on the other side

if I’m honest, I don’t really want burning. I’d much rather have Poison and Bleed (which fit thief much better) be half-decent.

but failing that, call me Fire-Fist Gray.

Mordachai.1896:

Basaltface.2786:

i just wanna kill him and take the sword that should be mine… and i cant even use swords nor do i like the design very much but thats besides the point. I (we) killed zhaitan, without me (us) he wouldnt even have made it through his own god darn prophercy, he was what.. like 20 years in orr and didnt map it out to find where the place is to do his kittening life mission? He took the place of my mentor tybalt who i adored as a character and then got the audacity to just straight up lead the pact without any military knowledge unlike the god darn iron legion centurio (me) in his shadow who does his dirty work? Yea… i better get him as a boss fight and it better be long, hard and rewarding and i better be able to use a finisher at the end and loot his sword from his corpse…

He was named Marshall of the pact for a reason. As the only person that had a connection to all three Orders without actually being a member of any, plus his knowledge of Orr, he was the most likely choice. Besides, you volunteered him for the duty yourself, dont complain now;)

Also: He thought the place to do his “kittening life mission” was in the Royal Tombs. Unfortunately he was wrong. Perhaps you need to pay a little more attention to the dialogue;)

while I don’t want to kill him, nor take caladbolg, I would point out that trahearne makes sense as a manger of the three orders, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily got the tactical or strategic knowledge to command the pact. on top of that, our support for trahearne was entirely scripted, so you can’t pin it on us.

I agree about the Reaper and the Dragonhunter (especially the name. come on.), but I would have to disagree on both the tempest and the chronomancer.

the chronomancer was not a massive difference compared to mesmer, but it felt to me like the most of polished of the elite specs. it wasn’t too powerful, but it was new, interesting, and possibly the most fun to play.

tempest, on the other hand, brings nothing new to the Ele, the overcharges leave you as a sitting duck, and the shouts were lackluster at best. I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it, and I still feel like it’s the worst elite spec to date.

having something as an option rather than forced on you is just a good idea in general +1

Tabootrinket.2631:

Personally, when I think about it, there’s really no weapon I don’t want to see on my thief.
But, yeah my preference goes to the staff (The upcoming skins for it look great). I’m pumped

does this mean staff’ll bring burning?

Serious Thought.5394:

I was going for the current purposes, not meta per se but more how people have successfully used them. I have not seen any successful( nor made) D/D condi. P/D is better by leagues (bleed, immob/vuln, torment, cripple, vuln again).

Sustained dps might be a thing, problem is the thief defensive options (not skills, traits) are LIMITED at best. I don’t think thats the plan, and if it is mass hysteria and exodus will probably follow before anyone attempts to figure it out. Burst dps might be a thing, and if it that means daggers will be 100% obsolete, so again hysteria/exodus. Condi stacking is p/d and no way will staff be condi. Control and Evasion are where I see it working with low to minimal damage- probably stun from stealth and a dodge spam attack similar to pistol whip? And again defense. All they can do at this point is turn staff into a REACTIVE set, but sword is reactive already right?

Not trying to shoot you down, just playing at what I see happening that doesn’t outright murder another weapon set. And all I see if control, evasion, and defense as a mixture. Probably control/defense. Personally I won’t be excited on this as I already stated I’d love GS or sword-offhand, however I’d be even less hyped if it turns out to be support. Thief is never support, EVER, for any reason. Honestly trying to wrap my head around how we datamined a staff and who said that’d be a good plan? I can’t put any conceptual ideas to making it work without either obsoleting a weapon set (s/d is pretty close to gone) or fulfilling a niche that is anti-assassin. =/ Not to mention we are the last reveal, so we get less ideas and less hype potential. =/

Super worried. Need community help to figure this out. I am not complaining (intentionally, I might be without realizing), I just need to know. Tired of waiting and using my admittedly empty noggin to figure this out.

a mixture of dps and evasion could work – the sustain comes from the evasion. but I think the main issue isn’t with what the elite spec/staff could do, it’s what the base profession has to build on. thief has numerous issues, which should have been addressed long ago. if any one of these issues was fixed, that’d open up a ton of viable options.

to be honest, I think you’d be able to find issues with any elite spec weapon, because the base class just isn’t where it needs to be.

so the last time we spoke to them, they discussed splitting 1 skill into 2 parts, which – to my knowledge – didn’t happen?

also, a smoother version I found elsewhere:

I’d say it could cover a number of areas. firstly, I think your appraisal of current weapon uses is narrow. for conditions, I’d say dual daggers is better (poison on 1 and bleed on 3, also cripple on 4 if we’re counting non-damaging) than pistol main (bleed on 1 and immobilise on 2, if we count non-damaging ) but that aside, i’ll try and see what the staff could bring:

• Sustained High DPS – like a warrior’s greatsword.

• Burst DPS – it exists, but the only thing better than redundancy is redundancy

• Decent condition stacking – something we don’t really have, D/D and P/D only have about 2 damaging conditions each, and burning’s the only good condition now anyway (much as I hate the fact)

• Control. pistol offhand only has daze. (blind’s not really control) we could have a knockback, a knockdown, some kind of uncrossable barrier. none of which we get right now.

• Mobility/Evasion – again, sword has some. we could get dashes, distortion, full evades (troll poll perhaps?) or even an unrelenting assault-style high-movement move.

• Defensive – the staff could have blocks, grant protection/aegis/heals. defense is one area the thief is incredibly weak.

or Anet could surprise us with something else entirely. we won’t know until we see.
the other point is that the staff could easily be made to do any of the existing things better. we’re not really great at anything more than burst DPS, so we could see improvements in almost any area.

no problem. the whole systems is a little complex, so it’s impossible to be perfectly clear with the little space they have.

uglydan.1638:

As i’ve said before, Anet could give us a Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range and it would still suck. The same goes for any staff/other weapon.

All the nifty toys and abilities other professions are getting is due to the fact that the devs doing the balance enjoy that profession and actually spend time with it (and are familiar with the mechanics/traits).

We get a dev who goes two weeks without touching his thief.

as I mentioned elsewhere, it’s refreshing to see Roy Cronacher doing the sort of stuff for revenant we’ve never really seen on thief. is there any way we could… convince him to join the dark shadow arts side?

(sadly not serious…)

yolo swaggins.2570:

Oh my god…. I’m sitting presenting my argument and information and explaining why they are valid and all you guys can do is cherry pick, twist words and flat out attack me and my associations simply because you can’t reinforce your points.

Nice job looking out for the profession.

all we’ve being saying is that there is more evidence for a staff on thief than any other weapon.

Evidence for staff†:

• elite specialisation training background datamined

• specialisation-exclusive staff skin matching the above image has been datamined.

• other information within this datamining has proven correct, with the reliability of the datamining increasing with each announcement

Evidence for other weapons†:

Evidence against staff:

• no two specialisations can have the same weapon, and druid gets staff
  this was never stated officially, anywhere. also, the reveal of the Herald just downright disproves it.

†this counts only information obtained from arenanet or arenanet products within the last 12 months

and you’ve explained some examples in which you think it would be bad – an opinion, which has no bearing on the fact of which weapon we’ll get.

none of your arguments – if they could be called arguments, and I’d say they’re opinions at best – are valid, as there is no supporting evidence of any merit.

no-one’s cherry picking. we’re addressing your (lack of) arguments. that they’re so easily debunked is hardly our fault.

we can reinforce our point – that staff has more official evidence suggesting its inclusion as the thief elite specialisation’s new weapon, because that’s a scientifically quantifiable point, see bullet points above. Alder’s razor very much applies to this discussion – only the quantifiable matters. our supposition is easily quantifiable. your irrelevant opinions are not, and so have no merit to the discussion.

we’re not attacking you. our comments make you look like a person who’s incapable of accepting that their personal opinion doesn’t have a major part in the (most likely past) actions of a major company, but that’s because that’s exactly how your actions on this thread portray you.

and no, we are not “looking out for the profession”. that’s not the point here. the point, as is clearly illustrated above, is this: there is a quantifiabley greater amount of evidence that the unrevealed thief specialisation will have access to the staff, than to any other weapon.

you can argue my assessment of your responses. you can argue the validity of the staff on the profession. but that the majority of evidence supports thief staff you cannot reasonably argue – the numbers do not lie.

but you’ll try anyway. so go ahead, make my day.

yes to both. there is the character slot given with every copy of the ultimate or delux editions, as well as the slot given to those playing before the HoT announcement if they pre-purchase.

Janderson.4670:

Was just wondering if u were going to add in the revenant elite spec?

not OP, but this is an interesting point – the revenant elite spec is the first not to use the same character as their base art – we’ve got a very differet looking norn/sylvari (depends who you ask) to the human art, so there’s a little confusion on that one.

yolo swaggins.2570:

Shadow.1345:

So what you are saying is that all the rifle hype before the datamined image was found shortly after the June 23rd patch made ANet change their mind and implement staff instead?

Also if that were the case then why hasn’t ricochet been reimplemented after all those pages on that one thread as well as all the other times it has been mentioned? What about the queuing issues with solo vs. premade and queuing outside of HotM? Why hasn’t all the hype or lack thereof changed that?

Instead of putting words in people’s mouths, you could be using that effort and time to making staff look more appealing.

that’s not his job. also, whether staff looks appealing is irrelevant. I could spend days convincing everyone of the perfect skillset/traits etc for rifle, but it’s all moot if they reveal staff. what’s done is done, and it is no longer in our hands – if it ever was.

how much you do or do not want staff is so infinitely irrelevant I don’t think I can begin to convey it – but the short version is that your wants will not affect what thief gets at this point.

is there nothing we can do? is there no developer out there who wants to work on the thief? who wants to get involved, and try and fix things?

Sagat.3285:

it seems they read forums it’s just matters how long it takes them to understand it.

it just seems like a great way of dragging everything out, if not making things worse.

Sagat.3285:

Revenant is getting so much attention because it’s new give it 3 years and try to say that again look at ranger lol. It’s still not 6 months post patch so I’ll wait like we usually do.

I realise that revenant’s not in the same place, but the whole communication they’ve got going, that’s what I’d like to see more of, and I was just hoping we might get it round here.

too much to hope for?

Volrath.1473:

last time a dev dared to enter the thieves den he got Backstabed.
since then they only enter in stealth and leave before they get Reveled…

while I appreciate the references, I’m not liking the message. we don’t get any dev attention at all?

I was wondering – how much real dev interaction is there where thief is concerned? I ask for three reasons:

• thief is, most people agree, in need of a fair number of serious changes, which don’t seem to have been addressed in what could be years.

• I had to go back 20 pages to find a thread with a dev comment on it, and said comment was a clarification, not feedback, not acknowledgement.

• after seeing the excellent work Roy Cronacher on the revenant – the discussions going on, the feedback from both players and developers, and the general speed with which concerns are addressed, I really think this sort of thing is exactly what the profession needs.

so how much interaction do we get? and what’s the chances of getting anything like the latter point above?

I hear this guy’s popular on this thread.

yolo swaggins.2570:

No, there isn’t anything that even hints towards melee staff not sucking.

yolo swaggins.2570:

And there isn’t a single person who really has proven that isn’t the case.

…I – I don’t…

what?

of course there’s no evidence it won’t suck. there’s no evidence it will suck. there’s no evidence of anything, because we know nothing about how it will work

at this point, the only relevant question is what not how, and the evidence for what leans further towards staff than anything else.

yolo swaggins.2570:

Shadow.1345:

This thread has pretty much changed to an argument between yolo and sebradle which is pretty much just sebradle saying “evidence points to staff” and yolo responding by throwing himself down on the ground in the middle of the aisle and throwing a temper tantrum. Can we just get a mod to close this?

EDIT: @yolo The dev team and the use of a melee staff are not bound by your imagination and what has been posted. It’s a videogame set in a high fantasy realm, it has the capacity to do anything the dev team makes it do.

Then staff is bound to suck and players are going to continue to stick with d/p SB. Maybe the spec traits would work enough for thieves to use it. But it doesn’t change the fact that staffers want to look cool over making the profession better. So if we get melee staff and it ends up how staffers wanted it, it has a high chance of turning out exactly how I said it would. And when it does, I will remind you guys so the same crap doesn’t repeat itself (hopefully).

so because Anet isn’t doing exactly what you want, thief staff’s gonna suck?

really?

really??

really???

Yalora, I get what you’re getting at, but your example – in and out of GW2 – aren’t really correct.

the elder dragons would be much closer to your description of regional bosses:

This is a villain who spreads their evil across a worldly region or a large part of it, like Tyria, Elona or Cantha .

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

This is an end of story Villain who the players will hopefully overcome in the end

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

This should generally be the highest level of Villain that most players should ever meet.

these all sum up the elder dragons quite well – the highest level villains we meet, whoe we fight and defeat at the end of the story after they spread their evil over a large part of the worldly region.

I would also not compare scarlet and shiro. they were very different characters whose strength lay in very different areas. take away their troops, and that difference becomes abundantly clear.

also, Grenth is not a demi-god any more, he’s a full-on god, and possibly the only god to earn the title (looking at you kormir) also, he’s not evil per se.

Plexxing.2978:

We are the bad guys. We’re trying to destroy forces of nature.

we’re the good guys. nature started it. we’re finishing it.