Guild Wars 2

Nero.8623:

First off: this game isn’t balanced around 1-1s.

If you’re going around trying to get into 1-1s as a warrior you’re doing it wrong. Wait until there’s multiple people fighting run in and 100 derps everyone around.

Learn how to engage before you complain. Hardly Anets fault that you don’t know how to play your class.

If you like a class— you figure out how to make it work. Not vice versa.

Why do these posts always have to revert to a L2P kittening contest? I thought the OP was rather reserved with his judgement and asked for some opinions. I see a few people here actually discussing and arguing in a polite way. Either giving tips about how to handle the situation better or voicing their opinion on the state of mesmer. Yet one out of every few posts is as impolite and arrogant as yours.

Wasabee.5031:

“- Mesmer : Slight nerf on the abilities to escape” I laughed when read this. Mesmer does not have great abilities to escape. And you asked for a nerf on abilities to escape?

Can mesmer get away with a team of 10+ people zerging on his back? No. Mesmer can’t even get away against 2, 3 good players that can time their skills to combo lock down Mesmer. Multiple professions can get away from 2, 3 good players and Thief can get away even in the middle of 10+ people.

Mesmer has the slowest speed base. If Mesmer has to spec into speed/Invi build, he/she had to sacrificed a lot of good stats to have speed/invis build. And even with speed/invis build, Mesmer still can’t get away from group of people.

I don’t know what kind of mesmer you are playing, but unless you are in a completly open space, you shouldn’t have a problem to kite people whatsoever. Maybe you can’t get away in a prolonged escape if you get caught, but that goes for any class. Thief only can do that with loads of initiative at his disposal.

It might be a tad different for me since I have low fps and seem to load people slower but also load slower myself on other people’s screen, but I’ve heard the same from people with better computers.

Azrael.1408:

I think fixing the other classes and some skills/traits is the way to go. Nerfing utilities of a class will not fix broken or non-competitive stuff in other classes. Currently all classes need some fixing in one way or another.

True, but nerfing doesn’t mean breaking or eliminating. It’s perfectly possible to limit the amount of get out of jail cards on a mesmer without ruining the class. I still feel it’s a bit like this atm :

- Mesmer : Slight nerf on the abilities to escape
- Thief : Nerf backstab damage, but increase or buff other options
- Engineer and ranger need a slight (to major) buff and some aspects also need a complete overhaul.
- Guardian is fine and warrior could use a slight damage nerf but is fine overall.

Not too sure what’s up with elementalist since last update. Feels like they can survive pretty good atm.

I tend to agree with most of what you said. And I don’t feel as it conflicts with anything I said. The difference is, a glass cannon backstab thief is very gimmicky and situational. Plus, every other thief build is rather underwhelming. Some classes have that one build which does well for the most part, but they all have glaring weaknesses. Mesmer lacks counters/weaknesses because other classes have a vast array of useless or less effective spells, which means they are stuck with a few cookie cutter builds.

So you are right, it’s less of a class problem and more of a game/other classes problem. But either they nerf the ‘bag of tricks’ of the mesmer, or they give other classes more ways to deal with it or give them more tricks of their own.

(On a sidenote, thief damage is getting nerfed and other parts buffed, I’m hoping for the best)

What nofo said. It might pull more people back into WvW if there was more to gain there, or if combat was faster. People are mainly put off by empty maps and long runs if they die.

Well, you naded them allright!

I agree. The fights in borderlands were actually so much more fun and organised. Would have been better to just change the effect the orb has. Either decrease it’s effectiveness or increase potential points by a percentage instead.

But we will see, maybe they will change other things aswell.

Mesmer is just rather annoying to level at the start, it gets better. They are fine in PVE, you might lack some AoE in dungeons, but that’s about it.

plasmacutter.2709:

you can’t spam 3 second invulnerability. it’s a very long cooldown on shatter, and it requires a melee weapon secondary that’s useless for ranged if it’s the weapon skill.

The sound of it is you are actually playing SKILLED mesmers if they’re using so many varied abilities at just the right time to beat you.

It’s pretty difficult to get all that timed.

Just be glad they’re not playing thief or guardian. The skill they learned by playing such an overcomplicated class (mesmers) would translate into godhood if they used another, simpler class of equal pvp prowess.

Why do people always assume that their class is the difficult one or their playstyle the one that is superior to others? I play/played all 3 classes mentioned (one of the great things about Guild Wars one and two) and all 3 classes are pretty equal in difficulty if you want to master them. Everyone can instagib lesser players with thief, everyone can survive long with a guardian and everyone can troll with the mesmer. That doesn’t make them good players. The problem is that if you master some of the other classes, it’s not nearly as effective as mastering the mesmer. There is no high skill, high reward for e.g thief or guardian. Most are forced into rather linear and gimmicky builds to be reasonably effective.

If a mesmer presses certain buttons at the right time, he wins 90% of the time. I can’t say that about most of the other classes. To me that IS a bit of a game imbalance. I hope they don’t nerf mesmer damage, that’s fine, but definatly the survivability and control they yield. Either that or they increase the build alternatives for other classes.

EDIT : one more thing, mesmer was my main in GW1, but it’s really not as subtle as it was there. It does remind me of WoW frost mages tbh, but with more escapes.

Honestly dank, I have a friend who was utterly bad at the game. He was playing a mesmer and searched the internet for builds. One of them was a build similar to this one, both builds were easy enough to make him a nigh unkillable nuissance/force in sPvP and WvW.

I’m not saying that mesmer is a faceroll class, but the popular PvP builds are certainly no brain surgery. But your comment implies that the OP only uses one skill on his hotbar and by extention every other player experiencing the same problems when fighting a mesmer. It’s rather insulting to assume mesmers are outplaying most of the player base by ‘using all the skills on their skill bars, while the others use only one’. Because trust me, every class I play requires me to use all my skills, I haven’t find a gimmicky 1-skill-to-rule-them-all build yet.

When my friend, who I know is bad at PvP (he even admits it), is doing those things without any effort while laughing himself to death on ts, it sure does feel like a gameplay issue to me not a l2p issue. It’s little risk and effort, high reward at the moment.

You can’t backstab every second. I wouldn’t mind a slight nerf (e.g backsab crits), but atm it’s pretty much all the thief has going for it. Other classes are better at escaping or doing constant damage. All the thief has atm are its hard hitting crits and some nice support skills. Ranged is particulary weak, they need to revamp that before nerfing damage.

Nerfing the one aspect thief still excels at, might ruin the class. If they want to nerf it, they need to take a good hard look at a lot of other aspects.

EDIT : just read somewhere that they WILL buff thieves in other areas, might be a good thing then!

To be honest, when someone is saying that the endless kite possibility and escape artist tricks of the mesmer are a bit over the tope, it’s rather pointless to note that you shouldn’t ‘play his game’ or just ‘ignore them’.

That is exactly my problem with mesmers atm, they aren’t exactly massively OP or instagibbing entire zergs, the problem is that you can’t really force them into a fight and you have to try way too hard to catch them out.

In gw1 the mesmer was also the troll and annoying PvP class, but it lacked in direct damage and other departments. It’s great that some of that spirit is carried over into gw2, I just feel like the mix is a bit too strong at the moment. The escape options feel nearly limetless. Even at level 2 I was trolling entire zergs with my mesmer in WvW.

Okamakiri.8746:

Not really. While thieves do have AoE abilities, they’re quite lackluster in comparison to other classes, and especially in comparison to their single target damage. You could say something similar about all classes, as they all have their strengths and weaknesses. It’s only natural that players would try to capitalize on whatever the class excels at.

Not really. While thieves don’t have the best damage, they’re not lackluster in comparison to other classes. I’m not saying this to be mean, but this is so typical what’s wrong with the thief class. So many people playing it like they would play a rogue in WoW. Yet thief has so many unmatched utility skills for both himself and his party. Combine that with mobility and damage, it’s really nothing lackluster about it if you know how to use it.

I feel so useless in a lot of situations when I’m not playing thief.

I went with half my accessories having vit or toughness and my boots/mask/gloves being Valkyrie. I got one condition ring to replace and still not sure what I’m going to do with it though. Might go for the emerald knight one (toughness, power, precision).

I have 2k power and 43% critical strike chance unbuffed with 10 points in deadly arts and 30 in critical strikes, I have 2251 armor and 16.5K health. So far this seams like a perfect trade of survivability for damage. Might want some more critical strike chance though, but it doesn’t seem to go up as much as I would have hoped.

EDIT: I’ve been switching out runes and I’m at 5/6 divinity atm. If I play dagger, I’m still doing over 10k backstabs on squishies

Haven’t really played P/P in ages, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I thin P/P for single target and SB for aoe is a pretty solid choice for a PVE build. They synergize really well and are both rather safe weapons.

Tulisin.6945:

Asum.4960:

Want to play support? Nobody picks a Thief for that.
Want to play control? Why would you pick a Thief?
Want to be tanky? Thief is probably the worst decision on this you can make.
Want to be mobile? Thief is good here, but not the best. But being mobile alone isn’t doing anything.
Want to do damage? At least the Thief is pretty good here.

I have no problem with the assertion that many thief players enjoy playing the thief a certain way so there are a majority of thieves that take on one particular role.

That said, I hope you do realize that the thief can fill all of these roles (and more) excellently. The profession isn’t inherently only able to be played one specific way, that is a community decision. GW2 has been fairly successful in its mission to allow every profession to fill a variety of battlefield roles. The thief is an extremely malleable profession that can excel at a lot of things aside from quick assassination-style play.

So true! We aren’t even the best at DPS tbh, but we might be the best at filling different roles without losing much effectiveness. Some of our utility skills are rather unique and extremely useful!

13k backstab would mean you are rather squishy afaik. I’m not completly glass cannon, but I hit between 7-9k on things with more toughness. So if you can survive this, you got a chance to do something about it.

Nice shell! Coo!

I’m sort of enjoying playing the market from time to time. It’s not like it’s THAT easy with the 15% fee. Make mistakes and you lose money.

But it’s sort of faster than griding and I can watch series in the meantime. This way I can actually play the game when I want to instead of spending time on farming gold.

You got a point there, would be indeed better to just increase the options per skill slot in the main bar. Even 1 or 2 extra choices would increase the possible builds dramatically.

Ooh, sounds like fun! How about a jumping puzzle tournament!? You both get dropped in one and need to race it

Hey mate, check out my post above for some suggestions I posted. I agree with most of what you said, so would love to hear your opinion.

The game is still rather new, but from what I’ve heard and experienced, a lot of people are bothered by the fact that endgame is rather grindy. We were told that it wouldn’t be.

The problem seems to be that it’s more rewarding to farm a ton of mobs with MF than it is to do anything fun. So what’s fun in this game? Well it’s pretty obvious that mostly DE’s, WvW, jumping puzzles and sometimes dungeons are the things people consider to be enjoyable.

So why not make these more rewarding? I’m not saying it should be really easy to farm by doing a small event, but atleast make some difficult and long events more rewarding than they are now. One idea I had was to let every event give you 2 random items depending on the difficulty, the average time you need to complete it and the character’s level. Even low level area events drop something for higher level people, not quite as good as what you would get in higher level areas, but almost there. To even things out, you could perhaps even give some cash instead in the lower levels if the person doing the event is past a certain level, or improve the vendor price on those items.

This would mean you could play with low level friends and still make some progress towards the endgame. Or if you wanted faster progress, you could go do events or hard puzzles.

EDIT : One other thing, one of the strengths of GW1, besides it’s PVP, was the endless possibilities when it came down to making your build. The options in GW2 are not as limited as in a lot of other games, but it’s still nothing close to GW1. I know it’s a tough thing to balance, but what if people could take a few skills from other weapon sets in their main skill bar. It could work if those skills lost some of their effectiveness if they aren’t native to the weapon you are using. Perhaps combining classes for a hefty penalty like in GW1?

You guys at JQ got it so bad man, I feel for you. Most be horrible.
How do you think it feels for the servers who aren’t doing so well? People were still getting organised on my server to perform better at WvW, but now all the opportunists are going to the servers that are doing a lot better at WvW. This basically means that we are heavily outnumbered in most matches. Like 20 people against an entire army.

But yeah, you guys got it bad.

Severfang.6147:

Suddenly unable to login. I already disable my firewall. Still cannot login.

Error code 42:6:3:2060

Yeah, it’s not just you. It’s the server

Good to know I’m not the only one, I was already trying to fix it. Couldn’t log in to the forums the first attempt either.

@CF Skyy : Yeah I do feel like I lack vitality. You think vitality on my jewellery would be sufficient? Or should I take a superior rune with it aswell?

The extra boost to power and vulnerability traits were one of the reasons I changed from trickery to Deadly. I wasn’t using poisons, but I realised that the combo field on my shortbow (which I use a lot) has a poison.

I’m currently running 25/20/10/15/0, 25 in deadly for the reasons above + the 10% boost on enemies with condition, 20 in critical because… well its pretty nifty, 10 in shadow arts for the condition removal and 15 in acrobatics for the extra dodge and swiftness on dodge.

Thing is, I feel like my damage really isn’t all that much better from when I was still running 30 in shadow arts. And eventhough the shadow rejuvination only healed up prolly about 1 or 2k iirc, the toughness/+healing and traits still helped with how much you can take.

I’m still not sure though, it could have been my imagination, but it felt like I’m not really lacking damage no matter how much I spec in shadow arts. Ideally it would be best to spec for condition damage with a shadow arts build I presume, but I prefer it as an addition to my normal damage because it can be bad in certain situations.

EDIT: If I got time I might even test how much +healing does to shadow rejuv lol, would be incredibly strong if you could heal up lets say 40% of your health in 2 or 3 seconds everytime you go stealth

Thanks for the feedback guys! I know the pistol is about single target damage, I wanted to create a build which has both survivability/utility and damage. most of the time I’m using my shortbow for damage because of the range and aoe. But when things get tense you can switch to the P/D and still do somewhat decent damage. Or do you think it’s not worth it? I actually wanted to focus less on condition damage and more on physical damage, the only reason I went with trickery is for the extra initiative. But that might have been a bad decision, since I lose 100 power.

I’ve been playing with condition builds a lot, but I wanted to try and create something which is useful in more situations. A lot of time to condition damage is wasted because of the bleed stacking limit. Plus damaging constructions is a pain in the *.

I’ve been playing around with a build similar to this one and so far I feel like I add so much to a team that other classes can’t. I can reset aggro on teammates a lot, I can revive safely and sometimes survive insane situations. But yeah, the damage could be better, so I’m trying to up it. Last night I was doing a dungeon, most of my party got instagibbed, thanks to my thoughness and (albeit moderate) vitality I survived with a flikker of health (my stealth went up due to the massive damage). I then evaded the boss his attack, called out the thieves guild, evaded another attack, stealthed and proceeded to revive my entire team. With most of my previous builds I would have been one dead thief.

@CF Skyy : I didn’t know most of those facts, so thanks for that! Saves me the dissapointment from finding out myself hehe. The fact that the 100% crit only works with the first shot sort of defeats the idea behind my build, which is a shame. So do you think that taking 10 points from critical and 10 from trickery to put them into deadly would up the damage?

I see your point when you talk about toughness, which is why I’m thinking about getting some runes which add enough toughness, since it’s inherent to the shadow arts trait line, it might be better to just roll with it, or does that seem like a bad idea?

Anyone? Some feedback would be appreciated!

Kudos to you for owning up to your actions and apologizing for them, I respect that. That being said, isn’t the necromancer rather strong in pvp? Perhaps not so much in WvW but probably in sPvP?

So I’ve been trying to figure out a great thief build that combines survivability yet still let’s you dps well.

Shadow Arts doesn’t get the most love, but I think it could really compliment a P/D + SB running thief. I feel my biggest weakness as a thief in some group are conditions and being exposed to random hits. P/D works wonders when you can go stealth as often as you can while shadow arts lets you remove conditions and heal up while stealthed.

As much as I love the idea, I was wondering : where would the damage come from? Basically as a thief conditions and crits do a ton of damage while your regular attacks tend te be less overwhelming. Besides the vulnerability trait, I found deadly arts also rather underwhelming. So I was thinking, wouldn’t this be workable :

http://www.gw2db.com/skills/calc/thief#0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|30|1731|1719|1196|30|2198|2199|751|0|0|0|0|10|1711|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|0|

Switching out to cloacked in shadows when you feel it can help out your team
Consequently focusing on the following stats :

- condition damage
- power or toughness

I’m not too sure about precision, the idea is to attack from stealth with pistols as often as you can so is it still worth the extra mile if you already have 100% crit from stealth? The idea is to take on smokescreen and hide in shadows to make it easier to keep up the extra 10% damage when above 6 initiative + allow u to stealth from range more often. Plus with trickery you can use stealth to get in, melee stealth yourself and get the extra initiative for the damage bonus or a soon’ish stealth

So what are your toughts? Including on which stats you would stack or prioritize?

So I’ve tried some more D/D, works pretty great. Only problem is that it devours initiative very fast. I’m going to level with it once I hit level 40 and I can get the “20% chance after a critical strike to get +1initiative” and the one from trickery.

Yes. I’ve been using SB since I heard it’s the safest thing around with decent damage. I’ve been playing with loads of different setups aswell. It’s not like it’s going bad, I’m playing mobs a lot higher level than myself, I’m just trying to figure out everything about this class so that I can better pick my gear and traits.

I think I’ll stick with P/D condition damage when I need to. I like playing S/P aswell, but I think I might need to know a bit more about which mobs I can’t take on with this setup. Like knockdown or those mobs that hit everything around them even when they are blinded.

Seems to me that P/D is much more effective with low traits and S/P catches up when you get more traits (when you get plenty of initiative and toughness/vitality traits to make your S/P build more durable)

Still, S/P sounds a lot more plausible as the best solo build for harder mobs like Darklor said. I’m not too far in the game, but it feels to me that the pistol whip, headshot and black powder add something that can help you get in melee range with some enemies.

I’m sure D/D has higher damage and is just as evasive with the average mob, but how do you deal with spells or abilities that are nigh impossible to dodge out? With S/P you can pistolwhip them or headshot them and interrupt it.

Just trying to understand what D/D would do in those situations (which are pretty common so far) to be better at it than S/P with an initiative build?

EDIT: P/D seems to do pretty well aswell, only ranged are harder cuz no blind

Isn’t D/D more risky when you are trying to fight hard to avoid or untankable mobs solo? I can see a P/D or S/P & D/P being really good solo because with P/D you can apply conditions and evade + stealth and with the others you can almost permablind with enough initiative.

I would think P/D or SB is the best option for hard hitting or multiple targets solo while S/P can do the same but kills faster while being less durable.

Or am I gettings things wrong?

I think maybe my problem with S/P was that I didn’t take initiative traits or skills yet?

Wouldn’t P/D be better than D/P for leveling solo? You don’t have the blind, but you have more stealth. Or should I be able to go stealth plenty with D/P aswell?

I’ve heard a thief get’s a lot of damage from conditions, does D/P have enough of those by itself or should I make sure to get some poison in utility?

Hey!

I’m rather new to the game and I’ve been playing a thief up to level 17 now. I’m just wondering what’s a good survivable setup for a thief while leveling?

First I went P/P, I was very survivable but the damage felt a bit low. Now I’m playing S/P and occasionaly switching to a SB. Thing is, if I use my pistolwhip, I get hit atleast once even if I blinded all the mobs around me. I feel very squishy in prolonged fights (running out of initiative) or if I make 1 mistake. I haven’t taken traits yet, still figuring out how.

Is P/D, P/S or D/P better for solo leveling? I assumed that it would already go a lot better if I make sure to stack condition upgrades and traits aswell?

Thanks in advance!