So yesterday I was on my Mesmer, scouting around to the northeast of Bay when I spotted a thief near the western edge of the ruins. He was over 1200 range from me because my auto attack didn’t hit him. Given that he had friendlies nearby, I chose not to engage and started moving back toward the NE bay gate. As I began moving, but before I could hit my look behind key, I saw the vulnerability icon appear, so I hit Decoy & prepared to Blink. Before I could activate the second skill I found myself down (still in stealth) and watched a thief running past me auto attacking. Eventually he came back & stomped.
Afterward I checked the combat log (pitiful as it is) to see what happened. This is what I found:
First attack: 17,252 Backstab
Second attack: 12,141 Heartseeker.
Given the range at the start of the encounter, I figure he must have used Infiltrator’s Arrow to close the gap, followed by a stealth ability, Steal, then dagger 1 and 2 in quick succession.
I have no sympathy for anybody who thinks that Thieves are not viable in WvW.
I’m calling bs
Attached is an excerpt of the combat log. I hadn’t taken any damage prior to the JQ Colonel’s attack.
I’ve actually got no issues with the fact that it happened, and I’m not calling for thieves to be nerfed. I’m just pointing out the ignorance of the thief players that think that the class isn’t viable in WvW.
This is the kind of lopsided build you have to run as a thief to get that kind of damage on a level 80 opponent. 11-12k health, no defensive utilities, no defensive stats. Thieves can cover distance very quickly, even with a 3 signet build full burst d/d build you can use infiltrators signet + steal and be able to do 1800 range onto a target almost instantly. But if you miss your burst you have no way of getting out, and if you miss your second cloak and dagger (which will take your last remaining 6 initiative) then you’re completely out of options. No weapon skills, no utility skills, no heal skill, no elite skill.
Going balls to the wall full damage glass cannon is an example of high risk vs high reward, but saying that this is an example of a viable playstyle is really stretching it.
So yesterday I was on my Mesmer, scouting around to the northeast of Bay when I spotted a thief near the western edge of the ruins. He was over 1200 range from me because my auto attack didn’t hit him. Given that he had friendlies nearby, I chose not to engage and started moving back toward the NE bay gate. As I began moving, but before I could hit my look behind key, I saw the vulnerability icon appear, so I hit Decoy & prepared to Blink. Before I could activate the second skill I found myself down (still in stealth) and watched a thief running past me auto attacking. Eventually he came back & stomped.
Afterward I checked the combat log (pitiful as it is) to see what happened. This is what I found:
First attack: 17,252 Backstab
Second attack: 12,141 Heartseeker.
Given the range at the start of the encounter, I figure he must have used Infiltrator’s Arrow to close the gap, followed by a stealth ability, Steal, then dagger 1 and 2 in quick succession.
I have no sympathy for anybody who thinks that Thieves are not viable in WvW.
I’m calling bs
It’s not bs. You are just another thief who doesn’t know what his own class is cabable of.
I run 30/30/10/0/0, d/p and d/d. Utils are assassin signet, shadow step, shadow refuge. The 10 points in shadow arts are all you need to gain perma stealth through d/p, which is very useful for instagib thief.
P/P thief vs warrior….warrior stands there, laughs while P/P thief pew pews them without actually doing any damage. Warrior health bar stays at max whole time.
I would recommend trying a setup (gear, traits, etc.) that can actually deal sustainable damage. It’s very common to see warriors melt in 5-10 seconds, and with P/P, there’s nothing they can do about it but try to run. Same with Guardians.
I wonder, though, how many players use P/P?
I very seldom encounter another P/P thief, but there are definitely those that play it and enjoy it. I assume most are just put-off by the weapon-set’s lack of mobility/utility, but I don’t mind. If anything, the more people complain about that, perhaps the better my setup will be “tweaked”.
I think it hints at some mechanics issues if the only weaponset that Warriors have difficulty countering is (arguably) the weakest and least popular one.
I’d say ranged just provides an advantage against non-ranged, and that’s why its damage is purposely inferior. However, for melee to survive (i.e., the warrior), they need to compensate and not just go full Berserker. Ranged, however, do not quite need to make this sacrifice.
As long as a P/P thief can maintain a gap, and the warrior cannot compensate quickly, the warrior will naturally lose. It’s no different than a Swordsman charging someone with… dual pistols.
Warriors can counter P/P, they just don’t want to because they rarely run into it.
How?
With a long bow skill that does 18k bleed damage and snares for around 6 seconds
been playing thief since launch, never had enyone asking me to roll warrior in any place.
Though you have to admit, some groups do indeed prefer the 1337 Zerker warriors and 1 Zerker mesmer groups.
Those aren’t 1337 groups because thief dmg > warrior damage. You still need 2 or 3 warriors for banners, but yes, thief does more raw damage in a scenario where your party already has warriors.
I think Guardian and Warrior need Stealth too, just saying.
Why not? They’ve already given it to mesmer, ranger and engineer.
On a more serious note, I’m not one to advocate that every class have access to everything, but the lack of burning is a serious hindrance for thief condi specs. How many effective thief condi specs do you see in TPvP?
If you said 0, congratulations, you are correct sir. The problem isn’t necessarily only solvable via burning, but it is the easiest solution, and the one anet might kitten up the least.
We don’t need more viable condi builds into this game.
Only other (glassy) thieves tbh, oh and mesmers with moa. xD From everything else I can just escape, even with my full glass thief, unless if I really kitten up ofc.
dude, thief is one of the best job for zerg v zerg. you are pretty much invincible with dagger storm even if your hp do drop or get boon stripped and CC’ed or w/e. just port out when it reaches 50%…
My troll shot rifle warrior really loves thieves who think that spinning makes them invulnerable…
Thieves however, were designed to kill things – Poor or nonexistent access to defensive boons (except vigor), no invuln skills, no psuedo-invuln skills, no blocks, low HP, dodgy/teleporty combat style with big burst… it is kind of strange when they can’t threaten a bunker. Seeing as LS was specifically changed to deal with boon bunkers, and was doing so admirably, it’s kind of strange for them to decide boon bunkers should have free range once again.
This is really just a general problem of Bunker Wars 2. Bunker is basically always stronger than most damage builds. Even then, thief is still the most viable tpvp glass cannon. Mesmer is okish too, as shown by Helseth who did quite well during the King of Mists tourny.
Some of you sound like thief is a high skill or brain class, which make me lol. The only thing you ever need to do as thief is mass clicking the stealth button then mass spamming auto attack. That "I have skill " illusion come from so many easy wins by auto attacking nooby players in stealth mode while they could not fight back for there was no hard counter. I suffered a lot from thiefs when I were a WvW noob, but once I figured out how to deal with them, Jesus Christ need to kill hundred crap thiefs to find a decent one. The lowest skill and dumbest class in the game in my opinion.
At least you can tell the difference between a crap thief and a good thief. Can’ t say same about warriors.
Additionally, init regen wouldn’t necessarily be faster – you can replace some of the minor traits with more interesting effects, resulting in specs that regen init at roughly the same pace which are just more interesting to play. You’ll note I specifically mentioned that traiting for heavy init regen in the current system would regen init at the same rate as in my supposed system with better base init regeneration – I’m looking to narrow the gap between traited and untraited and improve our traits.
I would prefer to do it that way. Make boring traits such as patience and quick recovery more interesting and perhaps add conditional initative gain to some (minor?) traits. Of course this all should be done very carefully to avoid giving too much initative gain, making thief just another “spam everything” class.
Even if it were the truth (which I don’t grant), that doesn’t excuse the behavior of the poster. I’ve found that people who go over the top instead of being measured about it, generally have less useful things to say, so I don’t pay as much attention to them. If you can’t stay grounded about proclamations of an entire company’s intelligence level, I sure don’t feel like trusting you on game mechanics.
It’s not an entire company lol. They have 1 or 2 guys in the balance team and that shows.
At least warriors are varied in terms of builds and play styles – unlike classes like Necros and other classes who are just clones of each other. Every Necro, Guardian, Mesmer, etc is the same in every match. This goes with many classes other than warriors.
This is only because they are so strong that it doesn’t really matter what they play. Most classes can compete against warriors only if they run their most powerful spec.
Average amounts of money. It doesn’t have to be as much as the farmer of pve does, but something would be nice. I think gw1 had it pretty good with those zaishen keys.
I can’t take seriously any post here that claims that “ANet has no clue how to balance” (which is against the rules, FYI), but I’ll assume that you were just caught up in hyperbole.
Why not? It’s the truth. They have came up with so many bad ideas* that it would be silly to say they know what they are doing.
*dhoomsfire, warrior stun spam, condition meta, skyhammer, bad matchmaking balance, wvw bloodlust bonuses and petting zoo to name a few.
Thief is still good in roaming (both spvp and wvw) and still probably the best trolling class. It is also a good pve class because of high dps. Why would you shelf your thief?
I’d argue that guard is actually the highest tier class in tpvp game. Succesfull “high end” tournament teams without guard are fairly rare. It is the only class that really is almost a mandatory in any “serious” team.
I feel like the game needs a better, more detailed UI than anything else. I’m trying to get into PvP right now, and the biggest stumbling block for me is having to fight with the UI.
With the Necromancer example there – why do we need to see names and stuff for the pets without clicking on them? I’m new to PvP, but I haven’t run into a situation where I felt like I really needed to be able to pay close attention to enemy pets – more often, it’s the Ranger or Necromancer I’m after, not their pets.
And at any rate, if ArenaNet do want to curry favor with the whole “esports” thing, the best way of having a successful esports game is to make it as newbie-friendly as possible. League of Legends and Dota 2 would not be where they are now if they weren’t both very welcoming to new players.
I feel like GW2’s PvP is pretty close to being that kind of welcoming, but as a newcomer to PvP… the UI is just awful and really makes understanding what’s going on difficult.
They are welcoming yes, but dota 2 for example, still has a steep learning curve.
its 15 seconds, blowtorch has an CD of 15s and to be effective, the engineer need to be in an melee range <200.
Don’t let him get close or dodge if he gets close problem solved.
And do you want to tell me, that you run into an enemy with 100% health and every skill on CD? There are alot of skills and traits to remove conditions.
And if you are not able to build that way, voila there is the counter-build of yours
Yea totally. Stun warrirors aren’t a problem at all. Just dodge when they come close D;
Why not fire the kids in Anet and let the grownups who have had their fair 20 years in designing games step in and take over? Lol. Sometimes a new team would do this game good. And yeah, that was a long shot but I think most people got my point.
You do have a point. Their team is obviously not very experienced… So many silly mistakes.
Against a glass cannon perhaps. But try against a bunker with protection up. You will hit less than 5k.
Try pin down against anyone, anyone at all, because they all have cleanses. It’s the same issue. You’re either talking about with defense, or without, you can’t have it both ways.
Naturally. However, while both ks and pin down have about the same potential damage on a target with no defense, the condition user can himself remain very tanky unlike the direct damage user who has to be full glass.
Generally though, power damage is higher. Go through and take a glance at each weapon set.
Pin down vs KS is an outlier, and that’s primarily because warriors have so few covers, making condi warrior sub par in general. Pin down simply doesn’t deal as much damage as KS in real play, and it’s one of the few examples that are on par under ideal circumstances, along with some of the torment and burning abilities.
Yes, ofc full zerker deals more dps than any condition build, I’d say even most pve players know this. It should be noted though, that in pvp the tankiness of the condition player gives him indirect offense as he doesn’t have to worry about getting hit that much. Zerker players have to play more carefully and so generally can’t land their attacks as often as condition players.
Against a glass cannon perhaps. But try against a bunker with protection up. You will hit less than 5k.
Try pin down against anyone, anyone at all, because they all have cleanses. It’s the same issue. You’re either talking about with defense, or without, you can’t have it both ways.
Naturally. However, while both ks and pin down have about the same potential damage on a target with no defense, the condition user can himself remain very tanky unlike the direct damage user who has to be full glass.
Yes when fighting real targets the situation appears that you run out of cleanses (but it will never happen that you have no toughness from your amulet).
And this whole thread is about that conds are too strong in these situations in which you have no cleanses. That’s all.
If you have no cleanses and get hit by 1-2 wrong abilities you are kittened and that shouldnt be the case and that’s unbalanced compared to power abilities.
OK, so you want to talk about real situations, which is fine. Can’t really quantify that though. There are builds that just don’t run out of cleanses, there are builds that have barely any. It seems likely to me that you’re running with barely any, since you clearly have a real kitten for condis.
Kill shot will not do that much damage in spvp. You hit around 13k to 15k on glass cannons, but that requires you to be a full glass cannon as well. You also need to build all your traits over the burst dmg to get that high damage, and even then it’s possible that you do not crit.
Nah you’re doing it wrong. I’ve hit over 16k even without banner of discipline up. You’re almost correct about the true issue though. Condis need precision and expertise along with malice, but they don’t need nearly as much precision as power builds. Replace half the toughness on rabid with 15% expertise (making it a berserker equivalent) and see how quickly people swap to it though.
Against a glass cannon perhaps. But try against a bunker with protection up. You will hit less than 5k. On a typical pvt warrior in wvw, my full burst (136% crit dmg, easily 4k+power) ks warrior still hits less than 10k even if they do not have protection.
Duuuuude!!! That’s the whole point – potential dmg – so no cleanse!
I think you might be getting it very slowly.
OK, so you posted an ability that will never do as much as killshot, but hypothetically can. Well done.
Now for this:
The general potential damage of a condition applying attack is way higher than that of a single power attack
Kill shot will not do that much damage in spvp. You hit around 13k to 15k on glass cannons, but that requires you to be a full glass cannon as well. You also need to build all your traits over the burst dmg to get that high damage, and even then it’s possible that you do not crit.
The true issue is how easily the massive potential damage of condition based skills is aquired. You do not need to sacrifice defense at all.
Lol really? not even close to true at all. Conditions have always been strong just not quite as strong as power. Now they out shine power in every single way possible.
Once again, math. Half the threads on this forum simply wouldn’t exist if people would bother to learn a little bit about the game before posting.
Conditions ignore many damage reducing factors, such as protection, thoughness, damage reducing traits and weakness. This greatly adds to their potential damage.
I once did 20k mug combo, 10k worth of autoattacks and 2×8k heartseekers on a necro in WvW, and still lost the fight. It was wvw aye, but the point is, they can face tank almost everything.
As I read through all these complaints about conditions… I have to laugh… None of you have ever played OUTSIDE of sPvP have you? Conditions are a joke in every part of this game, there is so much condition removal, stack limits so more than 1 condition player is not needed, and if the main complaint is about Necros and now having torment (really? Thief/Warrior/Mesmer apply Torment easier). How about leaving your 5v5 and try some WvW where it is 10 vs 50+… I guarantee as a direct damage you will at the very least hurt someone, as a condition build, well, hope that none of the enemies are running a Warrior, Mesmer, Guardian, Thief, Elementalist, Engineer, Necromancer, Ranger (yes all 8 professions)… Warrior removes conditions with every shout, Guardian has several ways to cleanse from teammates, Mesmer can now remove conditions in an AoE as well with Mantra’s. Necro’s consume them or transfer them or turn them into boons, Ranger has his spring, Ele has always been pretty decent at removing conditions (especially bunker ele’s), Engineer can turn all conditions into boons as well, or remove on elixir use/throw, and Thieves seem to be able to just remove all conditions in stealth thanks to bugged traits.
For sPvP, try getting a team together, you will never have to worry about conditions again… Bring a Mantra Mesmer, a Guardian, a Shout/Warhorn Warrior, a Necro, an Elixir Engi, A Ranger with healing spring, even a Staff or Bunker D/D Ele… As for the Thief, they only good at removing from themselves.
Best of Luck to all of you, try different builds, it’s the only true way to learn counters. Not to mention, this Balance Patch, added a lot of Condition Removal support. You just have to know where to look for it.
You wouldn’t intentionally screw your team over in a competitive sport, so why would you do it in a competitive video game?
Because in sports there are good rewards for winning and because I care and respect my team. In gw2 soloq however, there are no rewards for winning and one plays with complete strangers.
Also, it’s common for pro hockey players to jepordise victory simply because the can’t stand an opposing player.
But the goal of PvP is to win, not lose or “play with honor and lose knowing you didn’t cheese” or whatever other crap scrubs think of
If you truly think that way, then you should use all the hacks and cheats avaible. The point of pvp is to win, not to “play with honor and lose knowing you didn’t cheat”, right? Well, DDOSing the voice coms of the opposing team has been a viable strategy since dawn of online gaming.
Your example of hacking people’s communications and using extreme exploits is a silly one because winning by violating an End User Agreement is stupid. They’ll catch you and you’ll get banned pretty much every time, especially if the stakes are high.
You actually wont get caught. This game doesn’t have anti cheat system and so cheating is everyday thing in WvW. Hell, you have been able to res through doors since day 1. If winning is all you want, then you shouldn’t hesitate using this tactic*, but if you want to have fun, then you probably should not use it.It’s the same thing with op cheese builds: they give you advantage, but probably make the game less interesting.
If you truly play to win, then from a game theoretic point of view, there is no reason not to break rules whenever the risk vs. reward ratio is good enough. It’s still lame and takes the fun out of the game – exact same thing as with abusing cheese builds.
You wouldn’t intentionally screw your team over in a competitive sport, so why would you do it in a competitive video game?
Because in sports there are good rewards for winning and because I care and respect my team. In gw2 soloq however, there are no rewards for winning and one plays with complete strangers.
Also, it’s common for pro hockey players to jepordise victory simply because the can’t stand an opposing player.
But the goal of PvP is to win, not lose or “play with honor and lose knowing you didn’t cheese” or whatever other crap scrubs think of
If you truly think that way, then you should use all the hacks and cheats avaible. The point of pvp is to win, not to “play with honor and lose knowing you didn’t cheat”, right? Well, DDOSing the voice coms of the opposing team has been a viable strategy since dawn of online gaming.
