We all know that the problem with D/D is CnD. There is no difference between D/P and D/D in terms of Backstab. The difference is that D/P puts you in a much favorable position than what you’ll get from D/D — but we’re talking about the ICD here.
CnD inflicts 3 stacks of vulnerabilty, so if the CnD hit then the backstab is a difference. But there’s more to thief than backstabs and SS is far easier to land than a CnD and also a teleport – that’s why the ICD doesn’t hurt D/P that much.
So its up to the communities to adapt to the changes, not crying about it.
The communities are a bit bigger than any guild – and more important. It’s up to the guilds to adapt to that.
But I guess you won’t get the point anyway.
Well, anet ignored wvw for the majority of these 4 years – and this thread isn’t really about population imbalance but guilds who transfer up and possibly destroy existing communities.
If Anet is to restrict a guild to a particular server and add consequences to their guild halls… then Anet is undoing their ‘casual’ approach in all their game modes. Why would pve guilds enjoy so much freedom in their realm while us as WvWers have to pay so much cost to transfer or enjoy a game mode that WE seek, we don’t want your selfish ‘community’ heroes to restrain other players from enjoying WvW however they want.
Because there’s more people than just guilds to wvw and some guilds like to destroy the fun for others – locked tiers, for example. This would be another hurdle so that people don’t move too casually as a big guild can have a huge impact – one left us and nearly destroyed our server with that. I’m glad they left, but still.
Yeah – whatever.
I’ll quote you next time so you can’t accuse me of being offtopic and confusing
ETA: And I guess you haven’t been around lately: we got the latest nerf because anet gave us “more group support” – that might be why I’m a bit allergic to that term. Also thief has never been about group support for me and I had a major fight with some guy because I dared to dodge out of his heal range when I was at 500 HP (had no idea he wanted to heal me and am usually good without any support anyway – but I’m a thief, I can’t stand around and wait for someone to take care of me).
ETA²: And now you can go back to topic. My take on that was: Nice idea but I don’t think it will help – although then we’ve got Mug, SRej and Driven Fortitude (as a minor) – it’s a bit too much already in my book.
The only thing in SA that was group support was VS, Shadow protector is neglectable – also good luck stealthing someone “Wooohoo SR, gonna run out of here, it’s creepy!”
I agree with the boosting damage thingy and I also agree that SA needs a major overwork – but calling “I steal life when someone has got vulnerability” “group support” is veeeeeeeeeeery far fetched.
ETA²: (I know): Calling SA “group support” is likewise far fetched. PvE doesn’t need anything SA has got to offer, wvw/pvp can probably make use of the “revive faster” minor, but in the end the line is really bad. Only “group support” it actually offers is that the thief is a bit tankier (longer alive) but a pro should do well without.
ETA: I don’t want group support, btw – I want to support by killing stuff faster.
do you people realize that anet wants bandwagoners? they pay for transfers
why do you think server linking is a thing and many of the links dont make sense? anet easily manipulates people into transferring to higher servers, then change link and they have to transfer again
Bang. Spot on.
No bandwagons – No transfer – No incoming for Anet.
I don’t think so actually..
Free transfers destroy everything, so they have to cost.
People on the forums demanded to have more players on their servers – and this (linking) was the solution. I can get more into that if you want me to :P
If anet were interested in bandwagoners a lot of the higher populated servers weren’t listed as “medium” right now.
For once I don’t blame them.
Mesmer would need to build completely for stealth to have any decent uptime. It’s funny watching them try to run once all their stealth is on cooldown…plopping out clones behind them.
My thief can 100% stealth with d/p if I felt like it. Usually I don’t bother because thieves can just spam evade for days.
Last time I tried thief stealth was capped at 18s – no idea if that changed but there is a cap.
Also thieves have to build for stealth too, but granted, they have a better uptime without it than mesmers without PU.
I don’t think you can “stealth 100%” and don’t forget that you’d need smoke screen and SR which is a gigantic red target circle contrahery how other classes stealth.
And yes, daredevil can evade like crazy, but I already said that even thief’s elite is OP, just like every other Elite. Just coming from a fight against an unkillable druid – that was fun. Not. But hey, balance and stuff.
ETA: If I say an Elite is OP I don’t neccessarily mean Elite vs Vanilla – Elites leave no opening, even if there were only Elites the game would still be a paradise for facerollers.
We’ve had a quite similar thread recently and the OP was advised to first try his thief in PvE – I would give that advise too.
Try D/P with Valk Armor and Zerker accessory – Metabattle advises everybody to go zerker and to learn thief as a zerker, I don’t think that’s productive.
The build I saw over there seemed pretty solid, though – you can use that. http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Thief_-_D/P_Roamer
There’s also videos – I guess they will teach the basics of D/P.
Watched a few seconds of Yishi – that video must be very very very old, but it still teaches the basics. Just know that your #3 skill is the most powerful you’ve got.
I’d be surprised if you don’t get the hang of it =)
It isn’t the trapper runes that give the thief high stealth uptime, they help but if a thief dropped trapper runes they would be invisible for 99% of the time.
Yes, rune of the trapper happens to synergize very well with thief. Better than with Ranger and Dragonhunter. However game developers should theorycraft this before they get the rune into the game. If something annoying like perma stealth trapper thief happens, then you try to shave the rune, if that doesn’t work then you remove the rune from the game instead of adding more powercreep that hurts all thieves not just those who use the stupid rune.
Still “what”, or is it clear now?
It’s not thieves that are the problem it’s high stealth uptime and high mobility that are the problem. However since blobbing is a thing and said blobs will chase down 1 person halfway across the map I think at this point we can all agree we all created the problems in some part. Thieves just have the highest stealth uptime and highest mobility at the same time as being lethal.
No idea what exactly your point is, but mesmer and engi outstealth thieves..
If you’re on GH still surely you must have run into that AMOK group with stealth and super speed coming out of their backsides?
AMOK are rather easy kills, no idea if there’s something special about them – haven’t seen anything so far.
PS: Roll a thief, please – you sound as if you’re telling a fairytale “thieves can be invisible 99% of the time, we need reveal skills because without them we’re lost and all those blobs chasing a single thief across the map don’t do it because they’re stupid, stealth makes them do it!!” OH MY!
Fought a perma stealth condi trapper thief in wvw today. Good fun.
While crap like this exists reveal traits are necessary.
They aren’t – those who are responsible for reveal traits are also responsible for rune of the trapper – just that the reveal traits destroy all mainhand dagger thieves – I hope you get the point.
And it’s funny that you guys still think that thieves are the problem in this game.
Those were awesome on ebay server. Now all long gone
We still have these nights for our pugs.
Funniest was ele night as our commander just behaved like usual and leaped into the melee groups of blobs. He survived like usual and I ran behind him, like usual, to save his butt, like usual.
The fun isn’t gone everywhere – we still have tons of it.
Unload does “more damage” than rapid fire because a thief is able to chain attacks.
If you measure the DPS of ranger LB and thief P/P you’ll probably find that the ranger does more DPS.
Second: Daredevils are the ones who are able to evade everything, but every other Elite is able to block or CC “everything” – and they’re doing the same if not more damage than a thief’s backstab or vault or even chained unload.
Mesmer and Engi nowadays outstealth a thief and they don’t have a gigantic red circle (SR) – they can just pop into stealth and run faaar away.
Also we’ve got Rangers and Dragonhunters who can make use of rune of the trapper as well – I don’t like this rune, but alas, I know to just go away if I meet a perma stealthed trapper thief.
We also have reveal skills in game which completely negate one of our traitlines.
Long story short TL;DR :
This balance patch didn’t destroy wvw but what is destroying it, is that there’s no balance at all and that we’re still dominated by faceroll elites.
If you look at how easy other classes gain stealth and I guess they have no restrictions if they “miss” a hit (which are all aoe and not single target hits anyway) – then this nerf is absolutely unjustified.
It’s fine in PvE, although it occurs there too, it’s not fine in buggy and laggy wvw (and maybe pvp).
I’m glad they’re working on it but it might never be 100% and now all those mindless facerollers have an even bigger advantage.
The problem with the satelite servers is that they aren’t allowed a community – they can’t grow anyway, they’re some randoms who are being thrown into a random server and pulled out the next week.
If I were on such a server, I’d transfer to a bigger one.
They will never admit this was a mistake – this will never be undone.
But in the end: With the dragon pvp thingy patch in 2015 my thief was crippled – I was unable to land a hit. Before that my D/D win rate against any opponent (engineers included – I couldn’t beat them, no matter what) was at around 97-98%. After that patch it was at ~70% – I couldn’t hit especially thieves anymore “Haha, look at that noob with his incinerator”.
I wrote the support, multiple times, I wrote on the bug forum, I wrote it 4 times in this forum – and hey, they fixed it last week THANKS I mean it. Just that my thief is dead now anyway – but I do enjoy being able to hit pve mobs again.
It would be awesome if anet really had a team taking care of all professions and balance. There’s so many bad ideas in this game which would’ve never happened if there were people who knew the classes and how they interact (as enemies and allies) – you can’t always satisfy the PvE crowd or noobs who complain about stealth and then go on to roll a thief “This is so much fun” but they won’t come back to the forums to admit they were wrong.
ETA: The reason I put up with the dragon bug for so long was that no one believed me and everybody said they had no bug. I tried to fix my pc, I got a new internet connection, everything.. I really thought that I had some ageing boost and now really was too slow to play thief properly.
The server linking alone puts a huge strain on all of us – can we please not forget that community is a huge factor in wvw and I guess that is Jayne’s initial point anyway – too many new faces can destroy any functioning server.
Because people would quit ? They wouldn’t be bandwagoning.
It really would work, those who don’t like it would leave, those who stayed would be locked on whatever server they chose for the rest of time. Conclusion … no more bandwagon.
Yes, but no more people to fill any servers – you can then merge servers with the problem that sever a has got 150 people left, b 100, c 80 and d 110.
You can however delete all servers then again and people have to decide to which they want to go – everything all over again. I guess that would be the point where all wvw players would leave the game anyway.
This wouldn’t work anyway, whether or not you want it to happen – you took the time to type in a solution that won’t work. And I explained why it won’t. The why: a lot of people really think this would be a solution.
There is only 1 method to stop it and the community would be outraged.
Delete all server names, make everyone choose between 9 servers, lock the server selection once they get to a certain population forcing people to go to the other 8, keep locking them until populations are relatively close. When it’s all done, do not allow transfers ever again.
And what if x players of server y decide to have a break, if x players of server z quit and so on. You can’t solve population issues by blocking transfers. I would have quit altogether had I been forced to stay on any server I didn’t want to be on anymore. We could replace players who quit the game with npcs though.
There were some good “solutions” here. Locking guild upgrades to the server the guild was created on would be one – but after a while each guild would have multiple fully upgraded guilds on several servers, but then again most guilds have a rather short lifespan. The other thing is, make skill count again, that should happen anyway, in my opinion.
But I have to add that I’m glad one guild left us. I still kind of like them but they were just too huge and blobbed/blocked everything. And no one was allowed to run with them.
Can you guys please ask a friend for duels while you’re using other sets than D/P so you can finally understand where the “nerf” is coming from? Take someone who knows how to play though.
ETA: And actually this would be something anet should do. We shouldn’t be the ones responsible for balance in this game but it seems we are.
“I suggest a nerf which is actually a huge buff”
Well, ok, then, why do you claim it would be a nerf?
And it doesn’t help other sets one bit, just that we better take D/P as our second set = everybody becomes a D/P thief – mission accomplished.
ETA: Unfortunately the fun we once had in this forum is long gone, otherwise I’d suggest we make a contest: Everybody thinks of a buff they’d like to see – I’d like a rainbow when I’m doing CnD e.g. – and we flood the forums with these great suggestions and see what will be in game 4 months from now. The winner gets 500 gold.
The root cause of bandwaggoning is man-power rules everything in WvW.
You’re right and I’d love that to change buuut
I have been on IoJ, 2,5 years ago – we ranked up from 16 or 17 to 9 within 2 or 3 months. And that attracted more bandwagoners than we could handle.
ETA: If numbers weren’t that important anymore we’d see an influx on lower servers, because “zerg busting guilds” would try to make a name for themselves. The problem with that is that it’d still need good/very good commanders and those are rare. So maybe bandwagoning will be a problem, no matter what.
One way to fix this problem is to use the highest populated server costs for all linked servers.
Free accounts start out on the low populated servers. So you can just set up another free account and delete it until you are on the server you want (I’m not saying that I know someone who does this all the time).
Even if they transfer their accounts to the linked server because of the lower costs they will have to transfer to the next linked server a few weeks afterwards if their goal is to stay on the “big” server. So actually what you proposed is already there – it costs them a lot.
Piken is more active than most servers below it, and the rest is national servers, your prolly better off in T1/2 until they relink. At least there’s fights during prime, just not many queues, apart from EB pugs and anyone who bothers tagging and the rest of the day if people tag, otherwise it’s pvd and ktraining.
I’m a bit uncertain what you want to tell me.
1) Piken is T1
2) Deso is T1 and an international server
3) I don’t want to transfer
4) I have been to Piken briefly
5) Lower tiers on EU aren’t dead
6) Piken is nice but not that special, in fact no one can be special nowadays
7) Bandwagoning can become a problem – that’s why I wrote here.
Tie guilds to a single server. If you move a guild, start all over in building a guild hall and gaining advancements. And make transfers cash only as you suggested, so trading stacks of ectos for guilds stops.
Do we have bandwaggoning on EU? (genuine question) I know it has been a huge problem on NA where things are differently.
Yeah, we’ve been infected for the past six months.
Then play worse, Piken!
I get the problem. My first server partly died due of it – too many strangers who think they knew it all.. No easy solution, I guess, but I’ll think some more about it.
Do you still have any gvg guilds left? Ash is still on Deso, right?
Well that’s the whole point. Capitalize on player’s attachment to their “main account” and let them rationalize whether it’s easier to just buy a new account. But then you have to go through the hassle of levelling up.
My stalker is now on his 6th account to visit me in wvw – tell me about it.
If people want to hijack things they won’t bother the levelling.
I still think that making wvw a healthy environement is the way to go, not punishing people who think they’d be happier elsewhere.
Ok. Then I’m very lucky as I can run with any closed guild (I don’t join the squad) on my server and have never been kicked out of any squad. And I have never read that anyone isn’t welcome – but I can well imagine that it is different on other servers.
People are talking about PVE in the context that balance patches designed for that mode are also being applied in WvW. Most people want anet to do separate balancing for WvW, or at the very least apply PVP balancing to it.
Link wasn’t – and you have a point but if this thread derailed to talk about what PvE raids need it would’ve been rather useless – because nothing is easier than tweaking PvE mobs.
Wow, threads on these forums are getting worse and worse. Seems like most of the people that aren’t completely stupid have either left or stopped bothering to read this crap. I think I’m not far off myself. There’s maybe 5 people here that are laughing about the ridiculousness of the OP and other comments while the rest are totally convinced it’s accurate. I don’t know if it’s all new players or if it’s the kind of players elite specs have bred but very little about OP’s post or many of the comments after it are even close to true.
A good argument. Might have been a bit better if you had said what you think is wrong instead of just calling everybody “stupid”.
In the end: it’s very hard for a player to judge what exactly on another class is OP. I know that daredevil is and I know that warrior/berserker is from reading the traits alone. But other than that – no idea, I just know that combat in wvw is out of control.
The counter question: You seem to think that combat in wvw is fine (I’m not entirely sure because your post is very vague) – then why is wvw dying? Because we don’t have portable cannons yet?
It would be if the pvp team were the ones who balance this game – otherwise you just have more damage in pvp and fewer possibilities to buffer it as you can’t just mix your gear – which would then lead to the exact same scenario.
We could revert pvp to how it has been ~2 years? ago though.
ETA: I know that I’m not to be taken seriously, but anyway:
We’ve had groups of players 1 vs 1 ing around SM (castle in wvw) all the time – I see a few here and there still, but that’s rather rare – people avoid to duel each other nowadays as no one really can take the damage – we’re basically all thieves and hop in and out of all fights. Don’t think wvw is balanced as it isn’t. And the hopping in and out is the reason why it doesn’t really matter what class, build or gear you have as long as you’re good at escaping. You can however roll a warrior.
I don’t really get why you guys hijack your own threads – why are you talking about pve (I guess that’s squads) and pvp now if you want balance in wvw? Then say what you want and need in wvw, screw the other modes.
And yes, some more frequent and reversible balance changes would be appreciated.
You didnt think hard enough. The powercreep began long before HoT when the entire stat system changed from part build based to entirerly gear based, especially ferocity. This allowed classes to go to extremes with no sacrifices.
I didn’t think hard enough right. Where exactly?
And I don’t really get what you mean – yes the ferocity patch made every roamer run around in zerker, but I guess the reason was that tanky gear made them too weak, they had to be glass cannons to have a chance to kill their opponent. In least in my case this was so – have been soldier’s before the patch, valk/zerker afterwards.
With sPvP changes Anet has also made it very clear that you are not allowed to be tanky/healer, you are supposed to build for damage.
Well, they just introduced a trinity and the pvp team is not responsible for the balance in this game – it should be kind of obvious since we still have all kinds of stats in wvw wheras pvp is heavily restricted.
ETA: In case you mean I didn’t think hard enough because “I forgot the ferocity patch”. It had it’s own problems, yes, but I was talking about GvG guilds in the paragraph you quoted. Most of them left because they can’t work around the nonbalance since HoT anymore.
How about we make it like in the olden days? SS damage is nerfed, initative costs increased.
CnD damage is increased (to what it has been).
SA gets might on stealth back, CiS moves from grandmaster to a lower tier, SE becomes a minor.
I have no idea about P/P actually.
ETA: And yes, the problem is that thief against any other class is crap, in most cases. But you won’t come around a D/P nerf if you want to balance thief vs thief – buffing all other sets would just lead to another powercreep as D/P really is powerful.
Would it be to simply normalize the stats between PvP and PvE/WvW, giving more damage/sustain to PvP? Or to give counters against passives? Or something in addition to or something different entirely?
In case you missed it: The pvp team is kind of revolting right now. I don’t know too much about pvp but it might well be that some amuletts were taken out in protest this patch because there was nothing more the pvp team could do as they would have to work on the traits to which they don’t have access to.
So I guess we’re all sitting around with our popcorn on the lap and wait for something good to happen.
I mean, Karl is now the head of the balancing team…
I LOL’ed hard at the Elementalist comment. Sure they can still be tanky AF but there’s no way they’re gonna tank/outheal a 20 man zerg. They’re just most probably only tanking when they have Obsidian Flesh ready then runs away and hides when it’s on CD. Too much exaggeration won’t help.
And that’s exactly why players shouldn’t be the ones that balance a game – would be great to finally have a balance team with at least 9 pros (one each class) who are paid for playing this game in pve, wvw and pvp.
The moment we have our first balance patch made by these pros in will be the moment I’ll buy the equivalent of HoT in gems.
“Thief main, Thief main..”
The other day I asked a buddy of mine how wvw is on NA. He’s from my first server, transferred to a T1 server before the merge when he finally couldn’t pretend anymore that things were going uphill – so he’s on a T1 server, a warrior main actually. He got used to EotM when things were going bad in lower NA tiers. He told me EotM was dead and I said that that is weird, because I expected wvw to be dead before it. He said that wvw is bleeding players like crazy. I asked why he thinks that is. He said: “Balance sucks, also we’re all doing too much damage”.
Maybe it is because thieves hoped for a proper balance patch the most and actually, although Daredevil is just as annoying as any other elite, it still is UP in comparison of other elites. Don’t be fooled to think that there’s any balance in this game at all, just because you main something different.
Haven’t been in the gvg scene since forever, but I guess there’s not a lot of gvg guilds around anymore and they are a good indicator whether or not GW2/wvw is balanced. A lot quit soon after HoT and I don’t think any of them came back.
ETA: Actually, after I thought some more about this:
Remember GvG guilds which were the reason why we have Arenas in Guild Halls? Just that no one uses them – kind of sad, isn’kitten If you think some more about it: HoT destroyed GW2 – because everything that came with HoT just killed the game. In my opinion it really is the (lack of) balance that causes all the problems we have now. Back in the day open PvE was actually challenging, but we need all kinds of powercreep now so people can live through the HoT maps (nonsense, you can well do without) – which is destroying the rest of the game, but who cares, right?
Well it would probably help if some people didn’t keep going around saying things like thief has no passives
Can you quote me where I did this in this thread?
You can also list the passives of thief in comparison to all passives of other classes if you like though – the problem still says the same: there’s too many passive blocks in this game.
However there are many classes that have passive stuff it isn’t just thief. I think it’s engy that currently has the biggest list atm with thief, mesmer and possibly necro (base necro) as the lowest offenders.
And now I’d like you to list the passives of thief in comparison to any other class.
With that I mean true passives and not “enhancement traits”.
You can however make a list of true passive and enhancement traits – comparison of 2 classes.
