Guild Wars 2

The reason the camera feels sluggish and unresponsive is primarily because it uses 3D position interpolation, not ‘mouse smoothing’ per se.

What this means is that the client calculates where the camera is ‘supposed to be’ based on user input, and then the camera moves to that spot over some (short but perceivable) interval of time, usually less than a second, but more than a single rendered frame. This is the behavior that people refer to when they say the camera ‘floats’.

This results in the camera always feeling ‘a little bit behind’ because it is in fact behind. It is always playing catch-up to where the user really wants it to be, except of course when the user is not sending input.

Other games feel more responsive because they do not do this interpolation, but rather calculate where the camera should be, and simply place it there, subject to collision restrictions, which is something the GW2 camera handles horribly, but a mostly separate topic.

There is a time and place for cameras that rubber-band like this, but for a game like GW2 (and I would argue MMOs in general), responsiveness is key, and adding in any kind of interpolation ruins the feeling of responsiveness.

The best way to do camera control for a game like this is to maintain the camera offset from character position in 3D polar coordinates i.e. pitch, yaw, and distance; use these to compute camera world space position every frame, and then perform collision checks on the result and adjust accordingly such that the camera doesn’t clip through the environment. The only interpolation that is OK in this case is interpolation along the vector connecting the camera position with the player position, i.e. animating the distance to/from the player. Everything else will make it feel sluggish.

If you guys (ANet) continue to use a solution that has interpolation built in, I strongly urge you to (1) offer a slider to control the speed of interpolation, giving a higher maximum speed than what is in place currently, and (2) change the interpolation to use an arc around the character rather than linearly interpolating between ‘camera position right now’ and ‘camera destination position’. Using an arc avoids some of the more disconcerting behaviors associated with interpolation, such as swinging in close to the character and then back out during quick turns. All that being said, removing the interpolation entirely is still the best approach.

TL;DR: interpolating camera 3D position bad and makes for laggy feel, don’t do it mmmkay

Well the good news is I got back in. The bad news? Looks like I was rolled back about 1 hour. Time to go re-do everything I just did I guess.

Nothing like running down a steep hill and getting 30s of stealth.

Players transferring into a server won’t always help that server move up in rankings. Because of the caps on population in WvW lakes, a large influx of players into currently highly-ranked servers would actually hurt the performance of those worlds in overall rankings. Given that they are already highly ranked, that might not be a bad thing, since it would have the effect of evening things out.

If I could take every one of our “less capable” players and ship them off to HoD, you bet I would.

It’s entertainment. If you don’t enjoy it, you are wasting your time. Luckily this is not the case for many of us.

bwillb.2165:

bluescape.9176:

bwillb.2165:

Honestly anyone who thinks pistol-whip needs a nerf instantly lose credibility. The only way you can die to that is if you’re practically afk, not moving at all. It’s a very underwhelming skill in PvP and out-damaged by hundred blades in PvE.

Can you not move while pistolwhipping? It happens at the end of it’s cast, right?

You can move, but it stops the ability if you do and doesn’t refund the initiative.
Here’s how pistol whip works:

1. casting time. Takes about a second to fill the bar. When this bar is filling the thief can’t do any other attacks and pistol whip is dealing no damage, nor has it stunned yet.

2. pistol stun. Thief smacks target with his pistol. target is stunned for half a second, but it takes about that long for the sword strikes to start after the stun animation ends. thief is rooted during this animation.

3. sword strikes. good damage, but if the thief moves they stop. takes about 2-3 seconds for the strikes to all hit

All true, only I would add that you can move (and Steal) during #1 and the ability will still go through.

Haste is certainly powerful in a PW build, but it isn’t a requirement. I don’t use it because it makes me feel like a sitting duck for a few seconds. I prefer the passive sources of chance-on-crit quickness instead.

About Panic Strike … apparently if you hit someone below 50% with Scorpion Wire it won’t pull them if you have that trait. I tend to just PW, Steal, PW again, which is nice since the steal can happen during the 2nd PW cast, and the extra damage (4-8k crits) is welcome. I also prefer to shadowstep to them rather than pull since the pull can be evaded. But Scorpion Wire is good and fun as hell to use.

Infiltrator’s Arrow could benefit from its behavior being a bit more intuitive, but the requirement that there exist at least 1 walkable path between the start and finish is a sensible one and should stay. They could maybe adjust it to go over/around small obstacles better.

Most likely the game client is doing a pathfinding check to see if the destination is reachable whenever you use it; there’s probably a maximum number of paths and maximum path distance that will be considered during this check.

That being said, you could take IA completely out and Thieves would still be the most mobile class in the game, so the thread title is both hilarious and absurd.

I use shortbow, #1 does great multi-target, cluster does a lot of damage, and having a poison combo field in groups is money. Plus you get another evade (#3), and the teleport.

I’ve played around with pistol builds briefly for PvE but couldn’t find a reason to stick with them. Maybe someone who has one that works really well can chime in here.

For shortbow, going 20 or more into Acro works wonders for survivability. The only thing is it’s active survivability, it’s still up to you to avoid getting hit, you just have more tools to do so.

I use withdraw for healing. It’s my “oh crap” button, as the above poster mentioned. It works great, only time it’s annoying is fights on ledges or catwalks, where you have to line it up to not roll off.

Roll for Initiative the only way for Thief to remove cripple? LOL. I’ll give you 2 more: Withdraw, and/or spec for Fleet of Foot. Weren’t you complaining about not enough survivability or ways to ‘instantly avoid damage’?

Then of course there’s your condition removal abilities such as Signet of Agility or Shadow Return, which, while they won’t always remove the condition you want, are certainly capable of removing cripple.

Anyway, the problem I have with threads like these is that they really are your run-of-the-mill “qq my class is busted” threads, thinly disguised as “let’s talk class balance!”. You expect to come in here, tell a bunch of people that they really aren’t doing well with their Thieves, and get helpful feedback in return? Then when people do give suggestions anyway, you make up reasons why that doesn’t work? How can you expect to ever fix what’s wrong with this kind of mentality?

If you have any desire to play the class at all, you should be hoping that the problem is you, because that is fixable without ArenaNet’s intervention.

Why would I spend any time at all trying to prove to you that it is a viable class, when you would clearly rather believe the class to be broken, and not your playstyle?

If you were serious about getting better, you would have posted your entire build/weapon/skill setup and asked for advice, rather than simply claiming to have tried them all and found them lacking, and then calling for buffs.

The general rule is, if you can see it, and you COULD walk to it, then you can arrow there. You can cross gaps with IA as long as there exists a (somewhat shortish) path around the gap that you could have taken.

Scorpion Wire at keep assaults = hilarity. I swap it out for something else when roaming / running from 30 player zergs, but I wish I could keep it on my bars all the time.

Used correctly, shortbow thief is godly, especially in WvW. I feel like a walking siege weapon. I don’t really see how you can be complaining about being useless in sieges.

Heartseeker isn’t that bad to go up against. You need to have some mobility / kiting / escape utility in your setup though. For example, as a shortbow thief, I use dodge (traited for endurance return so you get 3), disabling shot, infiltrator’s arrow, withdraw, and 25% passive run speed. If you rotate these properly, it is extremely difficult for a HS thief (or any melee for that matter) to stick to you.

Steal is amazing. I run sword/pistol. Infil Strike in, Pistol Whip, target usually dodges away about 1/2 or maybe 3/4 of the way through. Pistol Whip again, Steal back in (that’s right, you can steal DURING the Pistol Whip initial cast).

Traited with Mug, I’ve stolen for 8k+ before. Whatever I steal from them is just icing on the cake. Although the warrior aoe and mesmer buffs IMO are the best and I tend to go for them.