Guild Wars 2

No, the Devs are still confused and stating incorrect talking points.

JonPeters.5630:

Versatility for thief. We are giving every single thief build 33% more initiative to work with. We have said this a number of times, but clearly it needs to be said again. If any other profession was getting a patch note that said: Decreased cooldown of all weapon skills by 25%, that would be considered a huge buff. The way initiative works is obfuscating how powerful this change it, but please consider the value of this change when weighing thief changes in this patch.

Evidently you’re not reading the thief forums. Maybe if we say it where EVERYONE can read it, you’ll catch it.

*33% more initiative is not the same as a cooldown change to all skills. *

33% more initiative means that one skill can be used sooner because they’re all drawing from the same pool.

The average of every non-autoattack skill requires an average of 4.2 initiative.

The base regen is .75 initiative per second, means a single skill can be used every 5.6 seconds.
The new regen is 1 initiative per second, means a single skill can be used 4.2 seconds.

This is entirely different than lowering the cooldown on separate 4 skills, multiplied across a possible 2 weapon sets.

I hope you can fix your thinking before you make an unintentional but huge mistake.

Jon doesn’t get it. Or can’t acknowledge that he was wrong or that he misunderstood it.

Either way, our chances of an improvement to over-all thief play is looking grim if the mechanics of a shared resource pool aren’t understood by those making decisions.

Their responses have been inaccurate and a misrepresentation of the facts.

Bravo indeed. That’s …. better…. than…. no response?

We are increasing base regen by 33%. This is basically equivalent to a patch notes that says: “Warrior: Cooldown on all weapon skills has been reduced by 25%.”

No, this ENTIRELY false. It’s the same as reducing the cooldown on ONE arbitrary skill.

Dear lord, if you thinks those are equivalent….. we’ve got very little hope.

No, the math says it will NOT work as good as it currently does. Godangit, where is all this “the math says it’s fine!” coming from when I haven’t seen a single graph, formula, or even detailed synopsis of it actually being equivalent?

Jon, if this trait is specifically what needs to be toned down, then tone this specifically down and don’t hit traited steal and traited signets as well.

Pleases, come right out and say it: without specific traits, thieves in general had too little initiative regen, but with those specific traits, you think we had way too much regen. So you’re very significantly reducing this trait and fixing the bug in the initiative gain on re-stealthing while already stealthed.

Fine. Say that. Then we can discuss that. Don’t blow smoke up our butts and tell us that this isn’t a nerf. It is. But it may be reasonable, but we have to talk about it as it is.

And for god’s sake don’t go overboard. Don’t touch klepto or signet +init. It’s going to be painful enough as it is.

Can you say it plainly? Or are you too worried about the backlash?

Except the red names came in and state things that were internally inconsistent. And that worries me more than no red names at all.

hihey.1075:

For D/D and D/P it’s actually a huge buff.

I keep hearing people quoting the devs, “It’s a MASSSSSIVE buff!”, and yet anyone who does a modicum of math realizes that it’s a huge nerf and exactly contradictory to their stated aim of normalizing AND increasing initiative gain.

With 70% fury uptime, I’m usually at 90% crit chance, so I’m usually gaining 1 initiative every 2 seconds that I’m in combat from Opportunist, so that is a nerf of 1.5 initiative every 5 seconds. So they increased it by 1 every 4 seconds….Hrm, I’m still negative.

Any SINGLE initiative nerf is roughly equivalent to the gains on the innate regen increase. And there are what, 2 or 3 major nerfs and a couple minor ones?

Your Mathds are freaking screwed up.

Where are these Mathds? All I’ve seen so far is people saying, oh, it will be great!

And my rough mathds say that I’m looking at a 20% decrease in overall init and a significant loss of init when I’m trying to GTFO – using 2 or 3 signets and steal – I’m talking about spike init regen when you’re in trouble – goes from 2 each for 3 signets and 3 for steal for a total of 9 down to 1 for each of 3 signets + 2 for steal.

So 9 vs 5. With the base init regen of .75/second to 1/second, it’s a difference of 16 seconds to get back that difference.

I’m sure the mob of enemy players behind me trying to kill me won’t mind waiting around 16 seconds while I innately regen another infiltrator’s arrow that will save my life.

This is bull crap, pure and simple. There is so much more than adding up the amount of initiative per minute. How and WHEN you get it matter incredibly. Shortsighted and ignorant. That’s what this change is.

My ‘back of the napkin’ numbers, being a signet thief (Yeah, I know, shut it!) is -3 init every 15 seconds just from the signet loss (from 2 down to 1), and the opportunist on top of that…

The extra base regen doesn’t cover half my losses.

MASSSSSSSIVE MISCALCULATION!

Yeah, I mained a ranger before I started my thief.

I never looked back once. My thief is more “ranger-y” than my ranger ever was.

Survivability… are you kidding? I can count on no hands the number of times my ranger escaped a lop sided fight or being run over by a zerg, meanwhile my thief just lols it off and GTFO.

Every single other one is a one-time deal.

This will be the same.

Sheesh, use your noodle.

Are you familiar with discovery? It’s the top tab. Add all 3, combine, bob’s your uncle.

Yup. If I want to spend points on my alt, I have to refund them on my main and THEN spend them on my alt.

Otherwise as soon as I burn out on my current main, screw it, I’m done. No way I’m grinding another 300+ wxp to be on the same stat level as everyone else.

SoR here, 60% roam, 40% zerg in EB. It’s hard to guage my play time, but I have about 200 yak kills on the achievement, most solo. 102% magic find, if that affects it.

I didn’t even know there WERE casks. Maybe I’m hitting DR or something weird…

This is an old bug, and they have never bothered to fix it. At least we know now how to fix it. LameTerror is right – go “talk” to the workers.

As I have seen 3 thimbles and zero kegs, with about 30 hours a week in wvw since they were released, I can only assume you play 24/7.

The rest of us are still working on our basic wvw abilities on our first character.

So yes. Account wide would be beneficial and make very good sense for 90% of the population that, you know, sleeps sometimes.

“I’ve heard tell of JQ, SoS and BG commanders talking to one another and agreeing to move their zergs in a specific way. I don’t know how they know each other is commanding, but the results are obvious: the zergs cap around one another, constantly exchanging possessions.”

I’ve only been on SoR for a few weeks, and I’ve never gotten an indication of this happening (3-way communication). There have been “understandings” between a pair of sides for a mutual benefit, but never a 3 way, which, contrary to popular belief, is always ghey.

JJBigs.8456:

Hello. Id like to direct you to the thread about WvW being more alt friendly which an official response was recorded on. Its on the frontpage. This might help you in your search for information about helping level up your alts/account

Hello. I’d like to direct you to the past year+ of ignoring customer feedback, promising productive change and delivering something entirely different from both what was requested and what was promised.

The “alt changes” will, at the very best and fairly unlikely, be account-wide queuing. Most likely, it will be something completely extraneous that has zero affect. There is also a small to medium chance it will be a raised middle finger.

I’m stacked power/crit damage, and if I pop steal for fury, I’m usually at 80% crit chance or something like that. Haven’t checked in a while.

But anywho, if I’m stacked bloodlust stacks and guard leech, my cluster bombs crit for over 7k, and it can be spammed 6-8 times, depending on the +1 initiative gain on crit.

It’s pretty close to OP

Yay for fixed matches! Half makes me want to transfer to TC to throw my weight behind them for a win against JQ.

Hopefully whoever goes up against JQ from T2 has the sense to 2v1 that like your mom.

Then let’s do the opposite – log in, clog the heck out of the servers, and tick off the PvE’ers who are AP hunting :P Valid form of protest?

If they can’t further screw up balance with it, it’s unlikely that it will get added.

You know, priorities.

There are different difficulties on each side. I’m on SoR right now, and I have about 2 hours to play a night. Right now at least half of that time waiting in a queue, and when I do get in, I’m lucky to be able to find a yak on the map that isn’t lagged halfway across the zone. There have been no keep captures on either side during any of my time online.

So it could be worse You could be in T1.

I feel like the JQ people posting really haven’t digested the original intent of the topic.

And they sound like 13 year old boys. Oh well.

Confused that this hasn’t seen a red name acknowledgement….

Anet needs to invest in

A) Better hardware (easy, but $$)- scale up)
B) Improved parallelization – scale out – being able to add more servers. That’s probably above the pay grade of everyone they still have working on GW2.

It’s not going to happen. If WvW type warfare is your bread and butter, we should just hold a collective wake and move on. The resources for a solution are not available.

I don’t have a good memory, and the fact that I have to run around to 8 different NPCs for each character for information that should be shown on the gaddang crafting screen is ridiculous.

Having your pet on passive can help too – I can’t count the number of times an other-wise well placed backstab was eaten by the pet rather than the pet’s owner.

Self-sacrificing little critters… SNIFF So loyal…

Are you on Yak’s Bend? Was the thief a little red asuran?

Might have been me. If so, you did a decent job – I had to reset the fight.

I do feel your pain though…. a ranger was my main til I got sick and tired of OP thieves. And so I rolled a thief and named him Tired of OP. Sadly, it’s really fun =/ and I haven’t played my ranger much since.

That being said, I’d suggest playing a thief for a bit and learn what really hurts.

Frankly, it’s insulting. Luckily I usually get it done without trying while roaming in WvW.

50 Luck… wtf.

Full condition warrior can drop 12 to 18 stacks of confusion for 15 seconds which will do approximately 2100 damage per action. My thief’s autoattack sequence (4 hits in ~ 1.25 seconds).

Works out to 8.4k per autoattack sequence, or in other words, you can kill yourself in 2 seconds flat. Just autoattacking.

That’s not broken at all.

Holy cow Mantis, I could not have said it better myself.

Why are people focusing on Trinkets? 160ish extra stats? Why you ask?

Don’t worry about ascended weapons, it’s only 6% bonus DPS
Don’t worry about ascended trinkets, it’s only +160 stats
Don’t worry about guard leech, it’s only +200 stats
Don’t worry about applied fortitude, it’s only +2500 hps
Don’t worry about Bloodlusts, it’s only a maximum of +900 stats to your opponent

Dear god, this is the very definition of stat creep. Being 80 with full exotics should be roughly on par stat wise to anyone else, but we’re no where near close to that. I’m on Ebay right now, and I have seen horrible behavior by some elitist Maguuma. I see legendaries, full guard stacks, full sigil stacks, and 3 stacks of borderland bloodlust on the maguuma and none of that on the poor ebay’ers. Even if skills matched up there would be no contest.

It’s just bullcrap. Do I personally have most of that? Yes, but I also moved from a Tier 1/2 server to get away from ridiculousness, and I play too much. For casual players, going into the borderlands is just glorified suicide. The difference between a full exotics player and a fully loaded players is 1500+ extra stats, 2500 extra hitpoints and 5+% DPS.

This applies both to new players as well as alts. Am I going to go on an alt with no guard leech/fortitude and no ascended weapons?

Hellsno. And neither will most of us.

Do you actually get the chest associated with the level or JUST the level?

Just like being able to respec your wvw traits. It destroyed months of regret for purchases that were poorly made due to inadequate skill descriptions.

That regret was part of why my thief was the bitter, soulless, baby rabbit killing SOB.

And now it’s gone.

I hope you’re happy.
/rant off
Really – how is it game breaking to have some way to respec your wvw traits?!?!??!?!!?!

It should be whoever gets the most Glicko points and not points :P

weak blast finisher?!?

I run 25/30/x/x/15, (for the extra initiative, but other than that, heavy power/crit build), and I can spam 6 or 7 cluster bombs that crit upwards of 6.5k on non-upleveled characters.

It’s a freaking awesome finisher.

Congratulations, you have gotten better at resurrecting obsolete topics! (100)

Didn’t you get the memo? It’s only fair to give the winning (read: more coverage/numbers) side additional stats.

Anything else would be unbalanced.

No, just someone in a balance Tier (Tier 1).

Everyone BG/JQ/SoR needs to be banned from the conversation on Bloodlust.

No one is asking you not to use them. What the community in general is asking is for them to be brought in line with other rune sets.

It’s hard as a D/D thief. I die a LOT. But I simply refuse to play a P/P or a P/D thief who is invisible most of the time. I’ve played against it, and it’s the furthest thing from fun.

Heck, I even avoid the sword, because the jumping all over the place can wreak havoc if you have sub-par ping, any server lag, etc.

At least I’m visible 90% of the time – I think it’s a fair trade for having the toughness of tissue paper.

I pulled that same rotation on another warrior and I took about half off. I’m not sure what the difference is, but I’d like to find out.

I’ll be starting a warrior tonight.

WOOOO!!!! Score! A thief angel gets his wings every time a QQ thread starts.

Let me guess. Was this a little asuran thief, all in blue?

Yeah, that was me. My build info – which is pretty much boilerplate for a dps d/d thief:
25/30/x/x/15
Running signet use = 5 stacks of might
Zerker armor + scholar runes
half zerker half valk trinkets
1 ascended zerker dagger, 1 exotic, Sigil of force
25 stacks of bloodlust.

I went all out on you – popped 2 sigils (one being assassin’s signet) for +10 might, and you can see the rest in the log.

So for the record, this is pretty much the max I can do. Plus I’m sitting at 13k hps, which is almost 7k less than you. I die fast.

That being said, I came here for advice on starting a warrior, because I’ve had my butt handed to me by some warriors recently and I want to give it a try.

Cogswick.5236:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Tom Gore.4035:

Even counting that, you should still have enough… Give or take a few. That’s 250 champ bags, a crapload of karma, some gold and a ton of WXP chests.

Only thing that might be tight is the Dragonite, depending on your mix between keeps and towers.

Well and what about all the mats needed to GET to 500 in the profession….

Salvage. I leveled up Weaponsmithing from 400 to 500 with the Orichalcum and Ancient Wood salvaged from the blues and greens from a few Scarlet Invasions and dropping not more than 10g in the TP. Even if you’re having a hard time getting to 400, the borderlands are full of resource nodes for various levels, which also conveniently helps out when you’re trying to craft some Deldrimor steel or Spiritwood planks.

Lies. I did the same thing, and burned through a whole stack of ori ingots. Just because some (like me and you) saved up a crapton doesn’t mean most people, or anyone who is newish to the game will have that.

You just don’t get 750 oricalcum ores from salvaging.

Positional lag is not fixed. The visual is somewhat better, but when using skills reliant on the position of other players, it’s still borked has all get out.

@Arkanfel: You’re in one of two balanced matches. Your experience doesn’t come close to mirroring the experience of 75% of the other servers.