Guild Wars 2

I am looking forward to the culling fixes slated for March. If it is true that I will be able to see all players within range of me, this will be the single best change to go live since I first played the game back in April. It’s taken a LOT longer than I would have hoped to get here, but if it really gets fixed, that is all that matters.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Kintari.4172:

Daily quest systems are and have always been garbage. They are designed to cater to and retain QQ casual short attention span bads, most of whom end up quitting anyway.

Well that’s one perspective.

They also draw people to keep coming back to a game where there’s no subscription fee to guilt them into being active. Lest it be forgotten, daily quests showed up the last two . . . two? . . . years of GW1 as a means of “something to do to get people to go to older content and not just a few spots”.

Dailies in GW2 seem to be shifting from “here’s some stuff you can do, oh hey, have some experience karma and silver” to “get out in our game and try something different for a bit, there’s really a lot you probably haven’t tried yet”.

Introducing new players to content is a good goal, but there are better ways to do this than dailies, and most daily Skinner Boxes are more about pressing the lever and getting a pellet than they are about doing new stuff.

Some people play games to be challenged and improve, others play so they can shut their brains off, perform some boring repetitive easy task, and be rewarded for it. Dailies are aimed squarely at people in the latter camp, because these kinds of people find repetitive, rote actions with some form of positive reinforcement ‘fun’.

Daily quest systems are and have always been garbage. They are designed to cater to and retain QQ casual short attention span bads, most of whom end up quitting anyway.

I agree with the OP. It’s out of control. These events are just giant lag riddled farmfests now, even more so than they used to be.

Semi-afk farming 2 faceroll easy events should not be as rewarding as it was. Good change. Time to get your welfare checks somewhere else.

Amazing that anybody would think these things would go unchanged. If encounter design is the problem then fix the encounters, but spy kits needed this change.

All I know is I rolled through there for the first time since patch and saw a wipe in progress at Shelter’s Gate, with about 15 players already dead. For this reason alone, I support the changes.

Farout.8207:

VOLKON.1290:

What this change means is that WvW will become less fun for those people that will be required to be planted in towers and keeps to act as scouts, a role the NPCs were fulfilling fairly well with the old sword system. We have to dedicate people now to serve as NPC alarms effectively or lose structures to the hidden zerg.

ANet… it may be worth reconsidering.

This pretty much sums it up.

Except that white swords still tell you when a structure is under attack. If you were relying on orange swords for this pre-patch, you were doing it wrong anyway, since it’s entirely possible to take structures with a large group and never pop orange swords (at least until it’s already too late to mount a response), if you know what you’re doing.

I like the change. I’m not a fan of the map playing the game for players, so the new system seems like a good compromise. Structures still tell you when they’re getting hit, while it is up to the players to communicate all but very large open-field engagements.

Also, scouting isn’t limited to just sitting in structures waiting for them to get hit, although this is sometimes useful / necessary. If you don’t like doing this, try following large groups of enemies and reporting what they are doing. Very useful, and a lot more exciting than sitting in a tower, I promise you.

So what about heal spells, forms, shouts, signets, traps, etc … you mentioned items but these are abilities. Seems like an awful lot of the dreaded hot keys hanging around.

Anyway, I don’t really see how having the game decide which attacks to use for me, based on my movements, is an improvement over having direct control over both my movement and my ability use, with ‘style’ being a reflection of how I make those decisions.

Many abilities are even dual use offensive/defensive and it would bother me to have the game telling me in which context I can actually use it, since making this decision intelligently is to me one of the marks of a skilled player.

But to each his own I guess. I’m not hating on it, and I think it’s a good thing overall if games try out crazy new input modalities. I just don’t see the widely used action bar + hot keys paradigm as some game-wrecking plague, and I don’t think the combat system in GW2 was a letdown.

Whether or not a game uses ‘the trinity’ model is probably not even in the top 20 most important factors on whether or not I find it fun. The term has been around for much longer than gw2, and the ‘unnamed’ concept of tank/heal/dps even longer than that. No, it doesn’t bother me hearing the term.

Too many random tangents / complaints about stuff unrelated to combat mechanics, and not enough on how you think things should actually work.

Rather than continually referencing other games (not everybody has played the same games), repeating phrases like ‘hot-key gaming’, and obscuring the point with random brain-dumps (itemization in early BC WoW, your thoughts on the holy trinity or lack thereof, or the state of magic find and drops in this game), try going into more detail on how you think combat should work, and less on how you think it should not work.

1 out of 3. Great visuals, but poor storytelling and poor gameplay. Hope the next one is better, because the Zhaitan fight felt like it was phoned in.

Since the changes, invisible zergs still pop out of nowhere, and people still take ~3 seconds to render after leaving stealth.

In addition, friendly players and mobs now get culled into oblivion at even semi-crowded events.

Survey says: fail.

ArenaNet, I realize that there are more culling changes in the pipe that are supposed to make it ‘better’, but given the recent changes, I’m not sure ‘better’ means the same thing to you as it does to me.

Whatever process or metrics told you guys this latest version was ‘better’ should be considered highly suspect at this point.

DarkSpirit.7046:

To all you “lawyers” and “judges”, who offers your own free interpretation of someone else’s EULA/ToS (and some even added their own stipulations), I suggest you come down from your high chair and find out what ArenaNet really thinks.

If it is a violation then why did ArenaNet allow it? As far as I am concerned if ArenaNet allows it, it is legit, case closed. Too bad if it affects your personal gains in the TP.

What ArenaNet thinks is already very plainly spelled out, at least on the specific point of tools scanning client memory. Why do they allow it? They don’t. Things exist before they get removed / disabled / banned. This doesn’t make them ‘allowed’.

As far as the larger question of what kind of game this is and what degree of external TP access (or even automation) is acceptable to ArenaNet, I think a lot of players would like to know AN’s stance on this.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Kintari.4172:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Kintari.4172:

DarkSpirit.7046:

There are other ways to get that session key besides searching for it in the process space. You can grab it from the GW2 cookie store or you can grab it from fiddler (even though that would be a manual process but you can go through the hassle of writing a fiddler plugin). It is just that looking for it in the process space is probably the most reliable and simplest means of achieving the goal. The code is also published as open source to prove that there is no misdeed.

I looked for the part in the EULA where it said “scanning our app’s memory is forbidden, unless of course you could have gotten the same information from cookies or fiddler, in which case, scan away!” I didn’t find it.

DarkSpirit.7046:

The fact that there is a gem store itself to convert real life money into in-game gold is already a more blatant advantage than this little program.

Again with ‘advantage’. This is a statement of opinion, unlike the statement of fact concerning what is and isn’t permissible under the current EULA. Your ‘reasoning’ seems to be that the existence of a gem store makes any imaginable trading post software fair game for use. I doubt ArenaNet will find this convincing.

As far as “you can use the gw2spidy data provider” … yes. Are we really talking about gw2spidy / zicore configured to use gw2spidy? As you said, as far as we know, it has ArenaNet’s blessing. I thought I was pretty specific about what aspect of zicore is problematic.

And yes, it is up to ArenaNet to make the determination of what is and is not permissible, this seems fairly obvious. I’m simply pointing out that (a) they’ve already made that determination, and (b) there exist some apps which do things (at least in certain configurations) that are clearly not permissible right now, and zicore is one of them.

Again, unless the owner of gw2spidy lied, he has already received permission from ArenaNet to do so. A special permission from ArenaNet trumps the EULA or TOS as the company owns the EULA and not the other way round. Besides EULA are usually written in a way that is as general as possible to further the power of the company for which it serves. It is the official word from ArenaNet that is more important than your (no offense) or my interpretation of the EULA or ToS.

I think you need to go back and re-read what I posted, because this post makes it pretty clear that you didn’t understand it. Here’s a hint: gw2spidy is OK.

If gw2spidy is ok, then so should this program be ok as they use the same mechanisms to access the trading post server. Unless you are saying that only the gw2spidy owner has a special under-the-table approval, which can’t be the case.

If you still feel uncomfortable about the ToS/EULA whatever, then you can use it in the default setting of going through the gw2spidy api. And gw2spidy does the same thing in their back end.

How do I know that they are both using the same mechanisms to access the trading post server? Because the gw2spidy server code is already published open source, as is Zircore’s code: https://github.com/rubensayshi/gw2spidy

You’re making this more complicated than it really is. If you read/write the memory of a process making up GW2, and you do not have special permission from ArenaNet to do so, it is technically in violation.

I honestly don’t know what kind of agreement GW2Spidy has with ArenaNet, and I don’t care, because the relevant question for this thread is, “Does Zicore (when configured to scan memory) have permission from ArenaNet to do this?”

But just to humor your fixation with GW2Spidy, I’ll point out that according to the page you linked, GW2Spidy doesn’t actually scan process memory:

You can intercept the session_key by either using Fiddle2r to intercept the HTTPS trafic or using some custom tools to grab the URLs from share memory …
I’ve added a table to the database named gw2session and a form on /admin/session to insert the ingame session_key, it requires you to also fill in a ‘secret’ which is equal to what you configure in the config or not required on dev envs
…
I do have a small tool (provided by someone else) that quickly grabs the session_key (by seaching for it in shared memory) without much hassle, I won’t be sharing it publicly but you could consider joining the IRC channel and asking for it

In other words, the GW2Spidy admin backend will let you manually enter a session key, and here are a couple of ways to find it, including this nifty tool that isn’t actually part of GW2Spidy and wasn’t written by us that will scan for it. Interesting huh?

DarkSpirit.7046:

Kintari.4172:

DarkSpirit.7046:

There are other ways to get that session key besides searching for it in the process space. You can grab it from the GW2 cookie store or you can grab it from fiddler (even though that would be a manual process but you can go through the hassle of writing a fiddler plugin). It is just that looking for it in the process space is probably the most reliable and simplest means of achieving the goal. The code is also published as open source to prove that there is no misdeed.

I looked for the part in the EULA where it said “scanning our app’s memory is forbidden, unless of course you could have gotten the same information from cookies or fiddler, in which case, scan away!” I didn’t find it.

DarkSpirit.7046:

The fact that there is a gem store itself to convert real life money into in-game gold is already a more blatant advantage than this little program.

Again with ‘advantage’. This is a statement of opinion, unlike the statement of fact concerning what is and isn’t permissible under the current EULA. Your ‘reasoning’ seems to be that the existence of a gem store makes any imaginable trading post software fair game for use. I doubt ArenaNet will find this convincing.

As far as “you can use the gw2spidy data provider” … yes. Are we really talking about gw2spidy / zicore configured to use gw2spidy? As you said, as far as we know, it has ArenaNet’s blessing. I thought I was pretty specific about what aspect of zicore is problematic.

And yes, it is up to ArenaNet to make the determination of what is and is not permissible, this seems fairly obvious. I’m simply pointing out that (a) they’ve already made that determination, and (b) there exist some apps which do things (at least in certain configurations) that are clearly not permissible right now, and zicore is one of them.

Again, unless the owner of gw2spidy lied, he has already received permission from ArenaNet to do so. A special permission from ArenaNet trumps the EULA or TOS as the company owns the EULA and not the other way round. Besides EULA are usually written in a way that is as general as possible to further the power of the company for which it serves. It is the official word from ArenaNet that is more important than your (no offense) or my interpretation of the EULA or ToS.

I think you need to go back and re-read what I posted, because this post makes it pretty clear that you didn’t understand it. Here’s a hint: gw2spidy is OK.

DarkSpirit.7046:

There are other ways to get that session key besides searching for it in the process space. You can grab it from the GW2 cookie store or you can grab it from fiddler (even though that would be a manual process but you can go through the hassle of writing a fiddler plugin). It is just that looking for it in the process space is probably the most reliable and simplest means of achieving the goal. The code is also published as open source to prove that there is no misdeed.

I looked for the part in the EULA where it said “scanning our app’s memory is forbidden, unless of course you could have gotten the same information from cookies or fiddler, in which case, scan away!” I didn’t find it.

DarkSpirit.7046:

The fact that there is a gem store itself to convert real life money into in-game gold is already a more blatant advantage than this little program.

Again with ‘advantage’. This is a statement of opinion, unlike the statement of fact concerning what is and isn’t permissible under the current EULA. Your ‘reasoning’ seems to be that the existence of a gem store makes any imaginable trading post software fair game for use. I doubt ArenaNet will find this convincing.

As far as “you can use the gw2spidy data provider” … yes. Are we really talking about gw2spidy / zicore configured to use gw2spidy? As you said, as far as we know, it has ArenaNet’s blessing. I thought I was pretty specific about what aspect of zicore is problematic.

And yes, it is up to ArenaNet to make the determination of what is and is not permissible, this seems fairly obvious. I’m simply pointing out that (a) they’ve already made that determination, and (b) there exist some apps which do things (at least in certain configurations) that are clearly not permissible right now, and zicore is one of them.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Kintari.4172:

Anything that reads or writes process memory is a clear violation of the ToS, regardless of how much of an advantage it does or doesn’t give you compared to other stuff. Zicore reads process memory to get the session key. It really is that simple. Will ArenaNet do anything about it? Anybody’s guess.

Does this mean I have to uninstall my virus scanner and leave my computer unprotected then? Because my virus scanner scans program memory from time to time and by what you said, it violates the ToS?

The fact that there is a gem store itself to convert real life money into in-game gold is already a more blatant advantage than this little program.

It isn’t ‘by what I said’, I’m just repeating what’s in the ToS — well technically the EULA. So ask NCSoft if you’re really concerned about your antivirus. I have a feeling you aren’t though, because you know it isn’t an issue. Once again, ‘advantage’ is irrelevant to whether or not zicore violates that particular EULA clause.

Anything that reads or writes process memory is a clear violation of the ToS, regardless of how much of an advantage it does or doesn’t give you compared to other stuff. Zicore reads process memory to get the session key. It really is that simple. Will ArenaNet do anything about it? Anybody’s guess.

Things like GW2Spidy and Gold Wars 2 are on the other side of the line. They use information available through the public API, and they don’t require scanning a process address space to get a session key. They also don’t have access to your user-specific transaction data.

helladoom.4317:

crawlerxp.1536:

I missed the part where it’s unavoidable. The circles don’t overlap enough so as to cause major problems anymore

Depends on the size of the group. With many people there, Grenth covers the entire floor with vortexes, making it very likely for the group to be wiped.
With a small team the chance for each individual to be caught in a vortex is significantly smaller, making the event easier in absolute terms.

I predict this will be fixed, after Anet has “gone forward” a couple of months.

Even when the ‘entire floor’ is covered in vortices, if you have full endurance and pay attention, you can almost always avoid getting portalled. The problem is a lot of people waste their endurance dodging things that aren’t vortices, don’t have any sense of when the vortices are coming in the first place, and don’t make any attempt to top off their HP before vortices.

Dasorine.1964:

Im all for challenging, but it has to be tuned for the area and situation it is in.

Right now Grenth is tuned for basically a 5 man group to do, if you introduce more its doable but only if your a well formed large group and yet its a world boss thats meant to attract a large portion of the zone to it. This means its going to have not only a group of knowledgeable players fighting him but a large portion of people who don’t know anything.

This of course shoves the difficulty so far up that the experienced players won’t be able to manage it and the new players not only won’t really get a chance to learn first hand (due to instant death and lots of stuff going on on screen) but they can actively fail the event for everyone involved.

Sure nerfing them it down to dragon style difficulty would be extreme (mainly because they left far too many safe spots in those fights rather than most of the mechanics themselves) but there really not balancing it for what the target audience is currently.

If they want to maintain its current balance they need to stop it just being an openworld boss and make it so that groups of the size that actually get a challenge without ridiculous odds can face him without the threat of random people messing it up, such as instance it or at least collapse the tunnel behind keeper at the start of the fight and warping any defeated away (he is the undead priest of the god of death after all) that way it weeds out the people there just trying to kitten a box of loot and allows the people who actually bothered learning the encounter from having a fun, challenging event for possibly nice rewards.

On TC he gets beaten multiple times daily by pugs, usually with a group 10-20 in size. He’s fine for an open world boss. All they need to do is address the Jonez issue, add a door to the event, and buff the loot, and it’s good to go.

Max-level open world DEs should be hard. There are plenty of faceroll easy DEs already in the game for people who want to do exactly that. It’s entirely OK if there are some DEs that you can’t just roll up to with 20 other people you’ve never met, and win on the first try.

When I go to Grenth and 5 people die on the first Ice Spike cast, and then another 5-10 on the first Portal, and none of them have any idea what hit them, the problem isn’t uplevelled shades.

If you want to see a mechanic that makes an open world boss next to impossible with randoms in the area, see Kazzak 1.0 — this is what an ‘unpuggable’ world event looks like. Vortices and upscaled shades are nothing lol.

Dasorine.1964:

crawlerxp.1536:

The only problems with it, as I see it, are that it requires coordination and strategy and is placed in an overworld area where legions of uninformed players can rush in and botch the deal—which is just the nature of the beast, I suppose

To me therein lies the issue, the encounter is actually somewhat fun with lots of little nuances that can be taken advantage of (such as lower ceilings in many places) but no matter how well designed something is it all amounts to nothing if you they place it in an entirely inappropriate setting.

Grenth, as it stands now, would/is a great 5 man encounter, requiring coordination between players and control over agro and positioning, however it is not in a 5 man encounter area, therefore it becomes terrible as any semblance of balance and control is thrown out the window with it being open world, specially with a fail condition that can be instantly triggered by 1 person (a warrior can run in, hit grenth and drag him to stairs = instant fail for the entire server by 1 person)

So as great as it is they need to rethink something about it, either the fail parameter (remove the death of keeper being able to be influenced by just a single person) or the encounter balance (tone down how much the shades scale up with extra players/make defeated players not effect it)

I mean you wouldn’t but something like say the claw of jormag event in a 5 man dungeon as while it would be perfectly possible to do it would take forever as its balanced for a large number of players. This is exactly the same sort of deal.

Jonez getting instagibbed needs to be reworked simply because it creates the possibility of deliberate griefing, but everything else should stay. Grenth is the only high-level event I can think of where you can’t just roflstomp your way through it by bringing way more players than intended, and I think ANet should consider that a success.

More troubling than failing an event a few times before winning is seeing these supposedly epic encounters reduced to yawn-inducing snoozefests that run with the regularity of a bus schedule. Guyz y no jormag spawn yet? How long window???

These events need to be a struggle, and the rewards should be buffed to match. The Grenth event is completed multiple times daily on the busier servers, and yet people still call it too hard?

This is why the Grenth event could use a door. One that closes at the start of the event, and reopens upon its completion (success or failure). This one change would eliminate both last-minute freeloaders and graveyard zerging. If you aren’t there for the start of the fight, you have to wait until the next attempt.

New Grenth is best Grenth. Learn which circles are which, and watch his casting animations, and you can take practically no damage from Grenth himself.

The loot is certainly not worth it, but I run it because it’s actually challenging enough now to be fun.

Don’t water it down. Buff the rewards to match the effort / difficulty, and add a door that closes each attempt to prevent graveyard zerging and freeloading, but don’t water it down. It’s fun watching 5-10 people take a dirt nap on the first Ice Spike / portal cast every attempt. Who really wants a boring boss fight with no risk of dying that gives garbage loot?

Ratings reset will be counter-productive and result in more people leaving. It might sound reasonable until you look at the data, at which point it becomes clear just how bad an idea this is.

Unnecessarily subjecting the WvWvW population to 4 or more weeks of ridiculous matchups is a very high price to pay … and for what exactly? A new formula maybe? Short of coming out and saying, “we’re definitely changing the formula, and we absolutely have to reset the ratings as a result”, there seems to be little basis for resetting the ratings.

This is a terrible idea ArenaNet. Please abandon it.

When a queue isn’t really a queue, is it any surprise that the limit … isn’t really the limit?

Culling is certainly no better with the recent changes IMO, and possibly worse. Getting tired of dealing with it for 5 months now, and tired of the fanboy posts about how it’s such a hard problem we should all shut up about it. Fix it.

runeblade.7514:

It is actually easier to get this daily by going to the Temple of Grenth.

I could, but it’s much more satisfying to watch level 5s in Queensdale get steamrolled by bandits. Especially when they think I’m going to help, ha!

Although I have to admit, patch night’s Grenth was pretty entertaining, and I spent a lot of time there.

Abbehemoth.2471:

It’s great! I can ajsdksghhdga asjdlga hfasjkduyaio uasiydouia asuidyaosuy ahsgjaksjagjk.
Look how points this post and also this thread is. This must be the 73512896th attempt of being funny about this, keep it fresh!

Thanks for the bump!
EDIT for: look how points? post make laughing now

Kain Francois.4328:

What.

You can get this easy by rezzing NPCs, y’know.

There are not enough faces, or palms, in the universe, to express how I feel about this post.

It’s great. I’ve always preferred to just stand by and watch players get owned by mobs, now I actually get rewarded for not stepping in and helping, as long as I rez them after.

When I used to find players AFK in the woods, I’d rez them over and over just so their armor would break. Something I thought couldn’t get any better, just did!

I also dislike those events where you have to defend NPCs, now I can just wait for them to get wiped out and complete the whole thing.

It’s great to know that my playstyle is finally being recognized by ArenaNet!

Maybe you could elaborate on why you think the split version is worse?

Good read. About SoW root … something tells me that the root on Symbol of Wrath exists not for balance reasons, but for aesthetics. Basically, it looks like an artist came up with a cool animation for SoW, and it just so happened to be an animation that only looks right if you are rooted.

Line of Warding may suffer from a similar issue. I don’t recall offhand what other race/gender animations look like, but for a norn female, LoW actually lifts you up quite a bit into the air, and I can see how this might look odd if the player could continue moving. This is also the case with Empower, though I think the self-root on Empower is more justifiable.

I feel like game balance considerations should always dictate whether or not an ability self-roots, but I’m not sure that’s the case with these and a few others. Of course, it’s entirely possible that everything was made this way deliberately, but I think it’s more likely that at least some of these self-roots are art-driven, because they don’t make a lot of sense from a mechanics standpoint.

Ideally the abilities would get updated and the art changed to reflect the new state, but I am not hopeful.

Thief burst potential is still pretty stupid, but as plenty other posters here have noted, Guardian has a range of tools to deal with it.

Full disclosure here, I started as an 80 Thief, rerolled to Ele for WvW, and play Guardian in structured.

Those hits on the OP do seem unusually high, my ele runs with half as much armor and gets hit for about 20% less than what he posted typically, by the same kind of cheesy thief builds. You could argue that this proves that armor is worthless, but I get the feeling we’re not seeing the whole picture.

Just 5 points in Valor would have negated the entire backstab for 9,665 damage, without requiring any reaction on your part. I suppose it’s possible that you have that trait, and the Thief got a lucky flame burst proc or something of that nature to eat it, but it’s impossible to tell.

If you believe armor is not useful, try running a build with full vit and low armor and see what you think.

The fact is, every player of every class has to deal with certain cheesy burst combos that exist in the game right now. Part of learning to play my ele was developing the muscle memory to mash Mist Form whenever half my HP mysteriously disappeared for no apparent reason, and developing the discipline to keep it in reserve for just those kinds of situations.

Regardless of the state of balance, getting better right now includes learning to activate block/invul/blind skills in sub-second time when a combo like this starts. Focus 5 and/or Shelter are practically made for exactly this situation, and being able to fire them before a Backstab lands is well worth practicing.

For a good laugh, the next time you 1v1 against a Thief, see how many attacks in a row you can completely negate at the start of a fight, just for kicks. It’s a terrible way to manage your cooldowns, but it is funny, and you may learn a few things in the process.

Point defense with sword is fun. Sword is less about raw offensive power than it is about anti-kiting and ranged anti-burst. In this scenario ZD is pretty decent — the damage is just a bonus.

Sword also gives you a 10 sec CD LoS ignoring teleport back into the capture circle if you get knocked out of it. If you slot Judge’s Intervention as well, it’s really hard to cheese the point from you with knockbacks + CC, which is what I find a lot of people tend to do once they figure out they won’t be able to kill you outright. This is pretty clutch, especially on points like Kylho clock tower, where 1 well executed knockback + CC can basically cost you the point.

Sword is also excellent for sniping stomps, since you can just flashing blade to them, stomp while they are blind, with a 2nd blind in reserve (Virtue of Justice) with 5 points in radiance.

Sure, ZD is a little clunky. I wouldn’t mind if it got streamlined / buffed a bit, but it has its uses even in its current state. It’s a lot easier to land against opponents who are forced to stay inside one of the smaller capture circles.

Also, when using ZD offensively, I tend to wait to use it, rather than FB → ZD immediately after teleport. A lot of people will instinctively move or roll away as soon as you teleport to them. I look for targets that have burned their dodges, or that other people have CC’ed / snared.

Kardiamond.6952:

@Kintari

Well Engineer won’t hit you for 20k with this combo, I really doubt he did it one shot hehe.

This combo only one shot low hp and glass cannon. A 23k guardian with 2.6k armor shouldn’t go from 100% to 10% with one combo

16k damage on low armor is prolly a good number!

OK, that’s good to know. I am pretty sure the engi was involved somehow, because I kept seeing these butt-puckering spikes over the course of several matches every time he was around. He was probably just coordinating with a friend or something, good for him. Still, this looks worth reading up on.

Good to see this. I was about to post asking the same question myself. Playing on a guardian with 23k hp 2.6k armor and getting dropped from full to 10% in the blink of eye was … let’s just say I wasn’t expecting it at all. Looks like I will have to learn what this is.

covenn.7165:

tigirius.9014:

We have two classes and only two that have 1 shot abilities.

We have three classes that can three shot enemies all the while keeping their tremendous defense and vitality in the process.

I can see a glass cannon thief perhaps one shot killing a glass cannon elementalist due to the light armor and being in the lowest health pool. A full exotic/80 glass cannon ele has around 14k health.

A full glass cannon ele can kill another full glass cannon ele if they are setup a certain way, have stacks, and actually hit the other glass cannon with churning earth. (assuming the other ele is too stupid to move out of the area during the 4 second channel or simply count to 3 and hit the dodge button).

Are there other things that can do over 14k to someone in one hit (regardless if it is a 4 second wind up or not like churn), again assuming their target is a glass cannon ele with light armor, base toughness, and 14k health?

I think almost any class can both three shot or be three shotted if they are in full glass cannon gear. There is a huge difference between hitting a cannon ele with 14k health and 1200 toughness compared to hitting a p/v/t ele with 20k health and 1800 toughness for example.

Unfortunately there are far too many people running around in zerker gear to do high damage numbers, that turn around and whine about being 3 shot by someone.

This isn’t really a thread about thieves, but I would just like to note that a gc thief can burst 16k+ in 1 – 1.5 sec against a balanced PVT ele with 1500ish toughness and 18-19k HP. So no, it isn’t strictly about gc vs gc and what happens there.

I see it happen on my ele all the time, and I do it to others on my thief.

Saying that players use too much AoE on certain weapon sets in GW2 is like opening a hamburger joint, and then saying that people eat too much fatty foods. Just doesn’t make sense.

Well, I see that [GODS] is getting geared up for war! What’s wrong, don’t like playing catcher as much as pitcher?

Saweth You Him.9047:

I’ll continue to say the only three aoes I mentioned are the only ones which need to be nerfed. You need aoe to destroy enemy arrow carts. You need aoe to disturb the enemy front line enough for your melee to close in(Otherwise they get tab targeted and focused down). You need aoe to suppress your flanks. In my opinion aoe in WvW shouldn’t be nerfed because it can be used to dominate a capping circle in sPvP or ai in dungoens, both of which I could care less about. Maybe it’s time to partition abilities amongst the different areas of the game to preserve the fun in each one: Dungeons, sPvP, WvW, mindless farming. I have probably taken more damage from cannons/catapults/arrowcarts than any player aoe. The only aoe that has ever completely dominated me from a player is the theifs dagger spin. And group retaliation counters most channeled aoe.

So while an aoe nerf is being discussed armies of 20 golems are still being portaled to reinforced gates and destroying them in 3 seconds with time warp and capping a tower or keep much faster than the waypoint resets so no oppurtunity for resistance can be made. And then the golems are waypointed to safety. 2000 supply worth of siege portaled to a gate then waypointed away.

LOL. Couldn’t have said it better.

Sometimes, you can smell a $#!@ sandwich being made a mile away, and it really isn’t necessary to take a bite out of it in order to find out what’s inside.

I think the reason the devs shared the information they did in the livestream was specifically for the purposes of gathering feedback, so it’s a bit odd to me to see players telling other players that giving feedback is not appropriate because the changes haven’t yet come to pass.

This is generally what test environments are for, but without a proper test environment, the entire population of end users becomes the testers, so it shouldn’t be surprising when some of them start to give feedback on things that are in the pipe, because that is after all what testers do.

Nobody really wants a cesspool of hastily-written, poorly thought out, fragmentary stream-of-consciousness type rants, but that is what forums are, and it’s something that we all have to deal with until somebody figures out a way to just magically separate the good from the bad.

If I think a change will be detrimental to a game overall, I’d rather see it dumped in the trash bin than pushed live, only to possibly be rolled back or fixed 6-12 months down the road, and I will not hesitate to make this known.

The fact is that rolling back changes is something that mmos generally really don’t want to do, so once a change goes live it’s likely to stay there unless it’s absolutely gamebreaking. So it’s better to stop that before it happens, which means some way of community input into the pre-release process is pretty critical.

Navzar.2938:

edit: as for meteor shower v arrow cart- meteor shower has a 4.25 sec cast time and 30 sec cool down and 1200 range.
Arrow carts can be fired continually and have 2500 range.

Yeah, I was going to say this and you beat me to it. Fun fact: arrow carts used to hit a LOT harder back in beta. Remember that? LOL … bodies everywhere

Zonzai.2341:

As ANet and several posters have already said, THERE WILL BE NO ACROSS THE BOARD AoE NERF. Read the kittened thread for kitten’s sake.

Right, they said there will be no “blanket nerf to all aoe”, which is in direct contradiction to what they said in the livestream, which is that they would reduce the effectiveness of aoe “across the board”.

Clearly their idea of what they think they are doing is changing, but the criterion that they will be using to evaluate whether or not a particular weapon set’s AoE abilities need nerfing has not changed.

So it’s understandable that classes like Elementalist are freaking out because this proposed change appears to have come straight out of an Excel spreadsheet as opposed to playtesting, with little thought for how this will actually impact the classes.

Draygo.9473:

Where did the devs specifically say they would nerf an aoe weapon that only does aoe?

I’ll say it again, Trick Shot is not single target damage. It hits up to 3 targets. The only single target damaging ability on shortbow is #3, which is your ranged snare, high ini cost and low damage. The short bow is an AoE weapon.

Draygo.9473:

While they are talking in general terms about aoe abilities vs single target, clusterbomb falls into that category.

I also think you underestimate the damage clusterbomb does. The thieves in my guild use it point blank, and its the go to ability for dealing with any situation where your enemy is likely to take the hit. If they want to mash a group of people its cb, cb, cb, cb, daggerstorm to let init recharge, cb, cb, cb while running lifesteal food to maintain survivability while your doing that. Cluster bomb does a very high amount of damage, its an offender. For shortbow thieves skills 2-4 hardly get used.

The reason I bring it up is because I think its a skill the devs are likely going to change based on their criteria. It wont be the only skill, but its far better than whining on the forums about how staff eles are going to get nerfed to oblivion.

Do you think any ability on the staff ele bar needs a damage reduction? I don’t really see it.

But I see other classes when they have aoe options vs single target options where they are preferring to spam the aoe over and over with no consideration to tactical play. AOE skills with channels might not be changed at all, as it locks you into casting it, but the fire and forget or fire and spam aoes might be changed. (I do see staff 5 being changed to you have to continue the channel for it to continue to drop, right now it seems unintended you can cancel the channel early and still get the damage)

I don’t ‘underestimate’ the damage that cluster bomb does, because I played shortbow spec thief in WvW for the first 3-4 months of the game, and I know first hand what kind of damage it does — there’s no estimation involved. I was crit Cluster Bombing people for 8-9k pre-nerf while most other thieves were still oohing and aahing over Jinzu’s burst backstab build, or sword/pistol + haste cheese builds.

I’m not really interested in getting dragged into yet another Cluster Bomb debate, that topic can go on just fine without further input from me, but when the devs in their livestream say this:

“We feel like right now AoE, in World v World as well as in PvP, it probably is a little bit too strong across the board. So we’ll be doing a major update to all the AoE skills to kind of bring them back in line a little bit”

… It’s pretty ignorant to interpret that as “Oh hey we’re going to nerf Cluster Bomb, and maybe some other stuff too”. And just because they come out and issue vague and contradictory ‘clarification’ on the matter, doesn’t un-say what was said initially.

No, I don’t feel like any elementalist staff skills need a damage reduction, which is precisely why I would object to a developer saying or implying that they do. Or maybe you believe that the expressions “all the AoE skills” or “across the board” don’t include staff?

Why should I believe that what they want to do is different from what they say they want to do? Unlike you, I will take what they say at face value. I am not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say “They can’t possibly be that stupid”, having played enough games to know that it is in fact possible for developers to make huge screwups.

Usually the way it goes is, I eat maybe 7-10k damage right off the bat from CnD + Steal combo. Sometimes I’m stunned from BV. In either case, pop Mist Form immediately before they get the backstab off. If you eat the backstab you are in big trouble, if you do not, you are in good shape. I run 18-20k hp in WvW, but a glass cannon thief opener can get me to 2k or less if they manage to land the backstab, and it’s tough to recover from that kind of deficit.

So you just got mist form, which means you also got regen and vigor (you do run 30 water right?) Start running while in mist form, swap to water for the heal + regen (you do have points in arcane right?), use #6 heal while in mist form if still low. Once mist form ends (still running), drop water #4 right on top of you, drop an Ice Spike just a bit in front of you, and dodge for the Evasive Arcana water heal (you do run 30 arcane don’t you?).

Still running, drop water 3 and run thru it, swap to earth. Now you have protection.

At this point, you have to make a decision as to whether or not you want to stay and fight the thief, disengage, kite back to friends, etc. You are in earth attunement, so if you choose to stay and fight the way it usually goes is drop your cripple and eruption on top of you, and then earth #5 to root them near it. If you manage to land the root, immediately swap to fire and Fire #2 on top of them while they are still stuck there, Fire #4 away from them, Fire #3. Static Field around them (or around you if they are closing) + Air 2, etc etc.

Now it can go either way, and a lot of thieves will just turn and run or stealth away because they are used to easily picking people off.

It reads like a cookbook recipe but it really isn’t, and depending on what attunement you are starting in and which attunements are on cooldown, you have to improvise. But the basic pattern is always the same: 1) interrupt the burst combo, 2) create distance while healing, 3) kite + kill. Mist Form with water traits is the best anti-burst by far, and for that reason I keep it in reserve for situations just like this.

If at any point they pop Thieves Guild, that’s a good time to swap to earth real quick and hit earth 3, the ranged thief mob will damage itself and the melee thief will pull itself to you and knock itself down instead of pulling and knocking you down.

As far as ways to prevent them from restealthing, you simply don’t have the tools as staff to do much about this. You can drop a lava font inside their shadow refuge, you can fire dot them before they stealth (but their heal will remove it), you can try to root them, or blind them with Air 2 before they CnD, but really, staff is not very well equipped for this. D/D is quite good at dealing with stealth, staff, not so much. A lot of thieves don’t slot stun breakers because they run Assassin’s Signet, Shadow Refuge, and then usually Blinding Powder, so a well-timed Static Field when they are low can give your group the opportunity to dogpile them.

Other than that, it comes down to dodging cloak and dagger so they waste their initiative and don’t get stealthed. Even then, they have plenty of other ways to stealth, including cloak and dagger on things that won’t dodge, like mobs or even structures lol.

If they are pistol/dagger (which is nearly every thief that is shooting at you, pistol/pistol is rare at least as a primary weapon set), cleanse their bleed stacks over and over, and when they stealth, count to 2 and a half, and then dodge twice, or better yet, pop earth 3 if it’s up and then laugh. You’ll never kill a non-AFK p/d thief as staff, but they shouldn’t be able to kill you either, because they lack burst.

Draygo.9473:

Terra, stop pointless overacting and give specific feedback.

This is the problem: People using aoes effectively against single targets when they have the OPTION of single target attacks. (staff ele does not qualify, staff necro does not qualify, thief shortbow qualifies)

So Terra, do you think clusterbombs usefulness compared to other shortbow abilities should be addressed? Right now its more efficient for the thief to clusterbomb a downed enemy than it is to attempt a finish as a shortbow thief, while doing large amounts of damage to anyone attempting a res.

This is not correct. First off, since Trick Shot bounces, in the case of 1 rezzer it is often better to just Trick Shot spam the rezzer, since they will get hit twice.

Second, the frequency with which you can fire Cluster Bomb depends on how far away you are, the closer you are to the target the quicker you can spam it. So if you’re going to stop someone from getting a downed player up, you really need to be pretty close to them, or your Cluster Bomb dps will be laughable. This gives them the option of, you know, hitting you back.

Third, shortbow Thieves often choose dpsing the downed player to finish them not because it’s quicker (it’s actually slower in most cases), but because it’s safer, and more reliable than attempting a stomp as shortbow Thief — if you’re built around shortbow, you’re not very good at stomps, and your options for interrupting revives are limited at best. Your survivability is built around mobility, meaning it goes out the window when you self-root for a stomp. Meanwhile, a backstab Thief has the option of either stealth-stomping the downed player, or just insta-gibbing the rezzer. The shortbow is undeniably better at AoEing down groups of players trying to rez a downed player, but it’s often the case that you can’t actually do enough damage and they all just get up and walk away. Anyway, the idea that we’d need to nerf a weapon built for AoE because it is good at AoEing groups of players down is strange to say the least.

Finally, if the problem were with Cluster Bomb, the solution should be to fix Cluster Bomb. Nothing the devs have said indicates that they believe this is specific to Cluster Bomb, and everything they have said points toward AoE in general.

Draygo.9473:

I think the devs are seeing a problem that some aoes are so much better than single target abilities on the same weapon that you would rather aoe than attack the ressing or downed player with single target abilities.

One example of this is theifs clusterbomb. It so outclasses the other weapon skills on a thiefs bar that most thieves will prefer to clusterbomb spam if they can, single target? clusterbomb, lots of target, clusterbomb. I think the devs want to make it so you are more efficient to use single target attacks against single targets, than an aoe against a single enemy.

The whole idea that people will “just spam their aoes” is false, because most if not all of these have cooldowns. Not surprisingly, thief is the best example people can come up with for so-called aoe spam, because their aoe damaging ability lacks a true cooldown, since the class works on initiative.

Anyway, as a shortbow Thief, the way you kill stuff is by laying down your poison field, which also weakens them for an insanely long period of time (You did take Lotus Poison, right?). Cluster Bomb while above 6 ini because you get a damage boost that way. Trick Shot as filler and for initiative, refreshing poison field and kiting as needed.

Incidentally, this isn’t even a case of AoE versus single-target, because Trick Shot hits multiple targets too (bounce).

So no, Cluster Bomb doesn’t “so outclass the other weapon skills on a thief’s bar that most thieves will prefer to cluster bomb spam”. There’s still a rotation, and mindlessly dumping all your ini into Cluster Bombs will usually only get you a quick trip to the respawn point, since your escape abilities #3 and #5 require ini too.

ArenaNet, could you please explain what this change means for weapon sets that feature strong AoE but weak single target damage, for example Elementalist staff?

“For some weapon sets, the AOE options may be too strong compared to the single target options, which is what we aim to address.”

“If your skill does 10 damage to a single target, if you have another skill that has the same opportunity cost but deals 8 damage to 5 targets, the AoE skill is better – we don’t want you to use AoE skills on single target mobs.”

Taking what you said at face value, the logical conclusion is that Elementalist staff AoE skills would be nerfed to something like 50% of their current yield, because that is the magnitude of nerf required to achieve your stated goal (i.e. making AoE skill damage against a single target lower than single-target skill damage).

JonathanSharp.7094:

For some weapon sets, the AOE options may be too strong compared to the single target options, which is what we aim to address.

So let me get this right. I run staff elementalist in WvW. You propose to nerf Lava Font, Ice Spike, Eruption, and Meteor Shower … so that I can spam auto-attack more?

Do you see why this has some people concerned?