Guild Wars 2

There are a myriad of ways to keep this from making matches unbearably long.

My opinion, however, is that this would not prolong matches by as much as one would think, because for one, the dynamics change (we’ll see more kills and more flips) and secondly, the perception that matches currently last long is not entirely correct to begin with in this context.

Only the matches that see a lot of node flipping and neutral node time can last close to the 15 minute mark, but these are the very matches that would not really get any longer under my system (because nodes are fresh all the time). Especially considering that kills will be more frequent and it’s in teams’ interest to attack nodes even if they already have one or if they are in the lead (simply because a fresh node is more enticing and preferable to an older one).

Right now matches also last as long as they do, because passive play is promoted. This would change. Matches that are over quickly would last a little longer, but those that take a while, would not take much if any longer than they currently do.

So, let me recapitulate this:

First you argue that thieves can not be in such a bad spot, because every top team runs with it and when I actually inform you that most of the top teams have dropped or are in the process of dropping their thieves and that furthermore none of the top teams with thieves have been as successful as those without one, you do a 180 right into a straw-man?

What are you? Lobotomized or simply a walking contradiction?

One more thing I’d like to add is that this would greatly go hand in hand with the improvements you are planning to make for node UI. Nodes would obviously have to display at what rate they are currently ticking for the players and the viewers.

My suggestion:

Introduce node point generation decay.

Nodes currently generate 1 point every 2 seconds, regardless of how long they have been in your possession. My idea would see you introduce an interval with 5 stages that gradually increases the time between the generation of points the longer a node is in one side’s possession (1/2s, 1/4s, 1/6s, 1/8s, 1/10s an 1/10s beyond that).

Flipping a node would obviously reset the counter for the other team.

By doing so we would achieve the following:

- More aggressive node attacks (conquering nodes; conquest)

Instead of seeing 1v1s on a side node, a team fight on another and absolutely no action whatsoever on the third node, players would be encouraged to fight over all 3 nodes, because holding two nodes for a long time generates less points than a “freshly” flipped node

- Less snowballing and the ability to turn matches around all the time rather than once

The dynamics suggested would allow a team to make comebacks when they decide to rather than watching a timer for a secondary objective. The team who just got wiped is encouraged and allowed to regroup without the feeling that the enemy team is generating a huge amount of points and thus an ever-growing lead for every second they are not actively engaged (not just engaged but in control of the node rather). The feeling of running against the clock would be greatly diminished.

Matches could go back and forth like this and a not be decided way too early, if you you happen to be 200 points behind. Currently this is almost impossible unless you somehow manage to turn it around 3-capping them and holding onto all of the nodes for a prolonged amount of time (in fact we very rarely see this happening).

- More emphasis on battles

By implementing my suggestion team members would finally not feel like they are wasting time on capturing a node against an equal amount of defenders. A fight over a neutral node would become worth fighting for, even if the side node’s have been captured by the opponent. Winning the node might take a while, but you are rewarded for the time spent with a fresh node that generates a greater amount of points with the possibility of capturing another fresh node after you have wiped the enemy team in a 4v4 for instance.

- Bunkering and DPS

Changing the dynamics would not make bunkering obsolete (somebody might be thinking that), instead it would encourage bunkers to be more active and defend different nodes during the match rather than sitting on a single one for the whole duration of it.

Not allowing your opponent to capture your old node may be important, but it may be more beneficial to move your bunker to a neutral node instead till your reinforcements arrive in order to get a fresh node and once again generate a sizeable amount of points rather than sitting on an old node while the enemy gets a fresh one (so instead of trading an old node for a fresh one, you gain the opportunity to trade a fresh one for a fresh one)

Also, since fights over a node that isn’t yours have become more important and you are not being severely punished for the inability to drop targets excessively fast by running against the clock, it’s possible that balanced builds could become more popular, as these are generally stronger in even numbered match ups that last an extended amount of time.

After what feels like a million games played, I’d like to make a general suggestion as to how to make conquest more dynamic, exhilarating and perhaps solve some of the issues connected to it with very little effort.

Instead of stating my suggestion first, I will list a few of the issues we players see and state regularly and which you may have been perceiving as well in the past 10 months. I will try and address them point by point, but understand that they are intertwined:

- Conquest feels stale

That’s something that many, many players have brought up and has definitely caused some of the playerbase to either abandon structured pvp or the game altogether.

When we ask these players what makes it feel stale, the answers we receive are mostly that people are not interested in fighting over one of three nodes for prolonged times, as while they are being stalled on that node points are generated for the opposing team, because any nodes in their possession, contested or even undefended, keep ticking at a steady rate. The alternative of switching nodes once you have engaged has very little incentives, as all nodes are worth the same amount.

Furthermore, battles usually only take place on mostly one or two of the three nodes, while the third node is left open. Winning a long drawn out battle on a node and losing the one generating points for you in the process by a single player walking over to it and capturing it without any thrilling interaction, adds to that feeling.

- Bunkering and DPS

You have made it clear that bunkering a node is part of what you envisioned for SPvP. You have also come to realize that excessive bunkering is detrimental and thus has to be countered with a very strong emphasis on damage output in order to be able to debunker said node.

As a result in the past ten months we have seen and heard from pretty much everyone how this promotes extremes and limits builds to either bunkers or glass cannons and thus leaving very little room for balanced builds.

This leads to the realization that winning fights is obviously important, but it is not as significant as holding nodes (for which you need bunkers, as I will explain next) very quickly.

On the other hand this also means that, if you have to raise or keep damage so high to be able to overpower a full out bunker spec, everybody who plays such a dps build and who is obviously paying the opportunity cost for the appropriate damage output (in theory, but this post is not about class balance issues), will usually melt in the blink of an eye when targeted by a dps counterpart on the enemy team

- The matches snowball and it’s excessively hard to recover from a bad start

People like me who have been actively playing every single day and followed every discussion surrounding PvP or even those who have just watched the SotG and forums on a regular basis are aware that the designers are trying to come up with solutions to the above.

You guys want teams to be able to turn matches around, but you are attempting to do so by introducing more important secondary objectives (Temple of the Silent Storm is usually thought to have the best mechanic in that regard and if it isn’t ToSS it’s Legacy of the Foefire’s Lord for the last ditch effort sensation).

While I believe these elements can be expanded on, I do not feel that patching up a snowballing point system with a single huge table turner is the way to go. I can guarantee you that losing a match that you have dominated in terms of combat, because the opposing team kills the Lord with 4 people in down state, leaves a sour taste in every competitive pvp player’s mouth. Shout-casters may love it, spectators may enjoy it (because it’s easy to understand mostly and also very visual), but any team losing like that will tell you it feels cheap.

That said I will finally come to my simple suggestion and try to point out how it will affect the game and possibly solve or at least very much alleviate above issues (undoubtedly it will create new ones, just like any system would, as one can only project that far into the future).

There are many ways one could go about reducing AoE damage.

We simply can not forget that currently it’s not just the power based AoE damage that’s the problem but every single class having multiple AoE effects, be it debuffs, condis or damage that turn the battlefield into a visual and sensorial clusterkitten to be frank.

I watch all the tournaments and I have yet to see any team with a thief winning one (EU anyways).

For your information, those playing in the tournaments are almost entirely among these 50 ranks coincidentally.

sorrow.2364:

If Thief was that weak in PvP, I wonder why most of the top tier teams run one thief.

There are all of 4 thieves in the first 50 ranks on the leaderboards and 1 hasn’t been playing regularly, so I have no idea what you are talking about. There are more teams actually replacing their thief every day.

The only profession less represented among these 50 ranks is the warrior.

sorrow.2364:

Med.6150:

Yet you play necromancer, which, whether underpowered, balanced or overpowered in the past, has always been the most straight forward and easiest class to play up there with warriors.

Ignoring the blatant no-sense (don’t want to go deep into a which professon is hard and which isn’t), how does it matter something at all?

It matters in the sense that you made the wild assumption that thieves are whining, because they are bad, when you have been whining about necromancers, a class that just recently became “faceroll” without any added depth, for months.

I assume people should have told you to stop wanting to faceroll and get your act together instead of pursuing buffs.

sorrow.2364:

It’s just that Thief went to faceroll&win to a profession which needs skill to be played effectively.

That’s why people are whining. They want to keep facerolling.

Yet you play necromancer, which, whether underpowered, balanced or overpowered in the past, has always been the most straight forward and easiest class to play up there with warriors.

stof.9341:

That’s because power isn’t viable anymore. What the heck, how can people even think that doing direct damage and getting countered by weakness, protection and the fact direct damage on ranged weapons is always weak so all the anti melee effects like laying fields of AoE death at your feat, cripples, disengages etc…

And on the other side you get necro and engineer that can AoE apply at 1200 range conditions that deal easily as much damage that melee power builds can reach. And for sure a LOT more than ranged power builds.

Even funnier, you got necros that nearly completely ignore block, in a 1200 ranged AoE package while melees have to always deal with that pesky guardian or engineer block block block block block block …

Edit : forgot blind too. Sure blind affects both melee and ranged skills but ranged users have a much easier time getting rid of it and not getting the condition on them in the first place.

That’s exactly what the issue is currently.

Range builds are way stronger than melee builds and range condition builds simply dominate.

- AoE damage is out of control, which favors classes that can stay away from it
- There is no downside to range (or upside to melee builds for that matter). Melee builds have lower combat uptime (time in which you effectively deal damage), no higher self sustain, they are forced to overextend and get cut off from their team’s support and they take much more cleave damage in the process and can’t really fall back and retreat against ranged builds.
- There is no difference in condition application whether your attack applying the condition has 130 or 1200 range. The risk vs. reward is out of whack here

What needs to happen:

1. Re-examine and adjust combat based on the following factors:

- Combat uptime for builds
- Self sustain
- Burst/sustained damage and the reliability with which it is delivered

Builds that require 130 range to operate effectively should deal more damage than builds that can do so at up to 1200. You don’t want to go over board here, however. Instead, builds that have lower combat uptime, should have significantly superior self sustainibility.

Right now there really is no reason to play melee builds. They can work, but they are at a disadvantage. Even power based range builds are at a disadvantage, because they are hit or miss and have to go through a ton more defenses (this is a good thing and should apply to condition builds to the same degree).

The only power build/class worth bringing right now is the elementalist, but that’s solely due to their high self sustainibility, superior range and a burst capability that is immensely high while being based almost entirely on instant skill combos.

You can’t. Dodging through it, gets you feared.

Azraeel.1238:

Now most of those same dumb kitten people are in the Necromancer’s forums crying about Spectral Wall fear, which can be easily dodged.

Except you can’t dodge through it at all.

Daecollo.9578:

one of the thief heals for example heals them for 80% of there HP

Sorry what?

Even if Shadow Trap was changed to a teleport, it’d be a really bad ability for the game.

Imagine it worked like portal for a second. You’d have to use it constantly to back cap a point and node defenders would either have to sit on their node the entire match or be forced to scout the whole area hoping they’d trigger it.

That’s really stupid for viewers to watch a guy running around in circles around a node for 30 seconds and guessing where the trap is before he can leave the node safely.

It’s a badly designed skill for the thief, for the opposing node defender and for the viewers as well.

Try to port from one side node to the other on khylo and you’ll see the issues. That’s about 7.5k range.

AoE and game mode are very detrimental to melee builds. The warrior’s strongest builds are close combat oriented just like thief’s, which is why these two classes can only be viable with great support, while range builds are more self sufficient.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Med.6150:

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

To the runes: I tested every rune in terms of dps-output. The most dps come from Divinity Runes. The Oger runes make a bit less dmg, but if the pet procs you acquire more damg than divin. runes.

Ogre is was better than Divinity in terms of damage, whether your crit or not. Easy to test with steady weapons and mathematically just as conclusive, as a net 105 Power and 4% damage is superior to 9% crit damage.

your right, i messed up here. I meant overall the div runes are way better as they support you in other stats too.

I think they are pretty even myself, but yeah those extra stats on Divinity are put to very good use by elementalists.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

To the runes: I tested every rune in terms of dps-output. The most dps come from Divinity Runes. The Oger runes make a bit less dmg, but if the pet procs you acquire more damg than divin. runes.

Ogre is way better than Divinity in terms of damage, whether your crit or not. Easy to test with steady weapons and mathematically just as conclusive, as a net 105 Power and 4% damage is superior to 9% crit damage.

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

Don’t be stupid, with Torment and increased access to fear, Necromancers are now overpowered. Thieves are now the direct counter to Necromancers, since you can counter-apply torment to them, and use their own fear against them for big spikes. Not to mention your new spammable Deathblossom.

Please remove the thief class from your sig. We don’t want you to give advice to any thief ever. The counter to Necromancers is obviously to steal fear, then torment them with the incredibly awesome scale venom and fear them “for big spikes”.

Genius…I had to read that twice to actually believe somebody could write that.

Jinks.2057:

Uhh I can maintain 10 stacks of might on my thief. Also there is a period of time that you get 12 stacks.

That’s because you are not in combat and just leaping in and out of smoke fields permanently. A lot of good those might stacks will do you. As soon as you enter combat, you are not maintaining 10 might stacks (getting up to 12 I assume you actually run a 0/30/30/10/0 build, but that’s irrelevant in any case)

In any combat situation you’ll usually be able to maintain 4 stacks with a maximum of 6 for a brief time.

official.4658:

Im callin it right now Meta will be far point thief home point theif and proboly double necro gaurd mid

Thief is way too susceptible to CC for either role. Also, if you use Corrosive Traps, they will always know you’re coming.

I like your enthusiasm, but the hyperboles really hurt your argument. People saying that a 10/30/30 thief deals no damage are kind of ignorant, but so are those claiming that you can burst harder with with than 25/30/0/0/15.

Mathematically that’s just baseless and actually wrong, even if we threw a berserker amulet on you. You can not maintain 10 might stacks, you can however open on somebody with 10 might stacks by using Shadow Refuge. For the other 15 might stacks from signets or shadow trap etc. (10 actually since you insist on having ambush trap on your bar, which btw is totally random on what it spawns and while the melee one is great dps, the ranged one is just a waste of space, Signet of Power and Shadow Trap itself are not exclusive to 10/30/30 builds).

In essence you gain a total of up to 10 might stacks over a 25/30/0/0/15 thief (only if you initiate with SR as mentioned above), which translate to 350 power (~16% damage increase). Your base power is, however, 150 lower, for a total net advantage of 190 power or ~9% damage.

On the other hand you have an initiative pool of 12 instead of 15, which in itself means that your first burst will be seeing you land backstab with around 4 initiative left, because you have no Kleptomaniac (thus losing 10% from First Strikes) in addition to having no Exposed Weakness for another 10% damage loss compared to the 25/30/0/0/15 build.

Lastly you lose Thrill of the Crime, which increases yours and your group’s fury uptime, which will only add to the burst deficit I have laid down above.

I am not even touching on the Hidden Killer vs. Executioner part, because I was actually analyzing both builds with a berserker amulet. Soldier amulet burst dps would obviously be lower still.

I hope that settles any notion of 10/30/30 having higher burst capabilities. It will still deal respectable amounts of damage and have otehr advantages that we all know.

Many classes and power builds work with Valkyrie’s, especially those that either have a large base HP pool or superior sustain through healing or invulnerabilities.

Thief, for instance won’t work at all with Valkyries, because their HP pool is too small and their healing is mediocre (talking TPvP builds here).

In terms of efficiency in my opinion Valkyrie’s is however below the Soldier’s for most if not all classes. Valkyrie’s gives increased healing and crit damage, while Soldier’s gives HPs. However, if we look at what the extra 284 healing and the 15% crit damage translate to, it’s hard to justify taking Valkyrie’s over Soldier’s, unless you have a class/build that takes excessive advantage of these otherwise unimpressive stats.

The only one that comes to my mind is the Elementalist hybrid build with 2 arcanes. The extra healing and guaranteed crit from arcanes put it pretty much on par with Soldier’s.

To clarify, many heals have a stat contribution of 1 or lower (this rougly depends on cool down, cast time and additional boni the heal itself grants), so that whatever your #6 heals for, you’re mostly getting up to 284 extra healing from it.

Furthermore, while 15% crit damage seems to be a lot, one has to be aware of the fact that crit damage, like most other stats, suffers from relative diminishing returns, so that the Elementalist’s meta build (0/20/20/30; Phantaram among others uses this), will sit at a crit damage base modifier of 70% prior to runes and amulet/gem (a 1k non-crit will result in a 1.7k crit). Now it’s pretty common for Elementalists to either use Divinity or Scholar runes in that build, which will add 12 and 8% additional crit damage respectively for a total of 82/78% crit damage modifier prior to amulet/gem.

If we take Phantaram’s build as an example (Divinity runes), he will then add a Valkyrie’s amulet and a Berserker gem to it for a total of 102% crit damage modifier (1k regular hit translates to a 2020 crit). If we now were to replace the Valyrie’s with the Soldier’s your crit damage modifier would drop from 102% to 87% turning a 1k regular hit into a 1870 crit. Applying simple math we can see that the 15% crit damage modifier translates to an 8% damage increase on a crit (and only on crit, as regular hits will do the same with both amulets).

Phantaram’s base crit chance with Divinity runes is 20%, which will top off at 40% on attunement switch thanks to fury. So Phantaram is dealing an extra 8% more damage 40% of the time at best and dropping 5.7k HPs for it (13855 instead of 19545) due to his amulet choice.

A trade that would be nowhere close to worth it given the fact that condition damage can not be mitigated and that many classes will deal extra damage or trigger devastating effects on you when you drop below a certain % of HPs (on top of being generally more susceptible to burst), if it wasn’t for the very strong access to healing this build has and the auto-crit on your instant burst.

You’re not alone in that, though AoE still punishes classes that have to go right up into the target’s face much more, so that simple redesign of nodes, won’t cut it.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Look, the problem isn’t just engineers. It is eles and shatters too. When combined the level of AoE is just insane. I think AoE should be toned down significantly like they said to promote more interesting and skill based combat.

What happened to this AoE nerf? I dunno…

Amen.

AoE should have a drop off. The first target should take the full damage and any target on top of that should receive 20% less damage per every target past the first one (5th target takes a total of 20%). There are other possibilities, but this would ensure that AoE abilities still did the same damage they always did to a single target.

The real problem is not the burst of some classes (which is quite high still however and should probably come down), but the fact that some classes have unavoidable burst (be it condi or power based), because the abilities used for it are instant and can be performed at any time.

Things like traits that deal potentially 4k+ damage when they proc (Incendiary Powder is just not going to trigger if you evade, but just apply on the next hit) or arcane skills and lightning strike can not be avoided realistically. You can only anticipate the latter and cleanse the former.

This adds randomness to PvP and makes dodging or smart juking much less of a factor, because there’s no animation to watch for when doing so.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

As far as I heard, S/D gets a debuff (if the patch-notes are true). I think a big point for the dissappearing HGH-Build is that Teldo showed us how efficient a Kit-Engineer can be, though ppl tried on their own and realized it. And the influence of these players is definitely higher than ppl think.

It is and I touched upon that in my post. People follow the trend setters. Nevermind the fact that this “Kit-Engineer” was no new invention or the fact that there was a very specific reason behind the switch to that build.

People also tend to greatly overestimate the impact of builds. As long as you don’t majorly screw up in making your build, it’s far less of a decisive factor for a winning team than many other things.

However, due to the very nature of this game’s pvp, most people can not gauge their own, let alone the performance of a team mate in terms of effective value leading to victory or defeat.

In all my years gaming I have never seen this much uncertainty before so that it comes as no surprise that we see people copying builds from others who are “more successful” as much as we do, as that’s the only measurement that is tangible. Often times these very builds are not optimal, yet they are still copied and trusted blindly.

Ostricheggs.3742:

DevO.9854:

I’d prefer Signet ressing like they had in gw1 that would save a lot of this.

They do have this and it is very prevalent. The problem is that a lot of rez signets on a lot of classes are simply lackluster.

Ironically enough, the necromancer’s is probably the best one right now but no one runs necros because they’re pretty bad, so illusion of life takes the prize

Illusion of Life is much better than the Necromancer rezz really:

- Shorter cast time
- Shorter cool down
- Ignores poison – (god knows why)
- Everybody in the target area becomes invulnerable for 1 second, whether they are down, up and kicking or rezzed (4s invul in this case) – (once again this is a divine mystery, because it doesn’t make any sense)

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Yep the Grenade-Damage is crazy. Why ppl stopped playing HGH? Because S/D.

I know people like to believe that HGH popularity has diminished, because of S/D thieves stealing their might. It’s a load of rubbish, don’t believe it. S/D thieves were not constantly taking Engineer’s might stacks and just one shot-ing everything (most of the time you wouldn’t even get their might stacks).

Reality is that HGH was and is a much more specialized build than the “node-defender”. HGH is considerably weaker in 1v1 (I know people still think this is a team game, but the smarter ones out there might have started to understand how 1v1 on side points tip the scale) and HGH can not defend itself as well when assaulted.

That feeling of pretty much being helpless and relying on your team mates to peel for you in an excessive manner, started to drive individual engineers away from the HGH build, which had the effect that other engineers just blindly followed the “old made new” engineer trend.

As far as thieves go, I am seeing fewer and fewer teams employing one these days, S/D or otherwise.

BlueprintLFE.2358:

Of course a thief is going to stand there and cripple the warrior. Sword and dagger thieves laugh hard at warrior now, porting in hitting a few times then porting out crippling the warr, flanking strike to evade all damage, larcenous strike to destroy our only decent offensive elite.

I don’t want to go into the whole S/D thieves dominate warriors and what not, but if a thief can really perform the whole autoattack chain on you, then you simply need to learn to recognize animations. In the time it takes to get the cripple on from the autoattack chain, the warrior has killed you from 100 to 0.

The cripple also lasts 2 seconds fyi.

My 40 second utility skill (Bull Rush) is completely shut down by some class’s auto attack (their sword spams cripple). Making us completely kited at ease. These skills are thrown into almost every weapon set and are ALWAYS present in fights.

Excuse me but are you referring to thieves? (You must be, because the only other class with a cripple on their sword auto is the ranger) I can promise you that no thief is going to stand close to a warrior and keep him crippled with autoattack, that’s just not happening, because it’d be foolish.

Now I am not saying that warriors are not completely screwed over by chills and cripple, but that’s a) mostly coming from the range classes/builds in the team fight and b) a problem with the game itself, because it favors range builds so much.

Combat uptime for range classes is so much higher than for melees, it’ not even funny and on top of it you don’t even take a fraction of the damage a melee does. The only way to kill them is to “train” them, which means the melee is hopelessly overextending while taking all sorts of damage while chasing and usually killed in the worst spots but even if you manage to get them down, you lose so much time before you get to the next guy, that the guy you just killed is half way back to the node already. because not only did you have to recover from the HP loss, but you also had to close the newly created gap.

That’s a huge flaw with the combat system and not with the warrior class. The warrior class just happens to be one of two melee focused classes by design.

Allowing melees to endlessly stick to their target isn’t a solution either, however, due to the nature of how skills are designed (and that’s a good thing). Power-based skills and playstyles (not so much condition-based, which is another huge flaw in this game) are designed to deal a lot more damage than ranged ones. Though balance in this regard has not been achieved at all yet and if we ever want to see good competitive PvP, this needs to be addressed.

How to address it? The theory is simple:

1. Make sure that, both, power and condi-based builds are vastly more effective in terms of raw damage when they require shorter range to deliver their damage than if they can do so from 900-1500 range

2. Don’t simply give melees the tools to sick to their target or range classes to stay away indefinitely, but actually balance the scale by adjusting the sustain (healing, active/passive defenses) these two disctinct playstyles have access to.

You want to create an equation that gives more sustain to classes that have lower combat uptime and less sustain to classes that have a higher one. Unfortunately right now it’s pretty much backwards and those classes that we see playing range builds in the current meta have much more healing and more if not similar evasion than those who have to constantly chase their target.

The %increase in damage through additional power is still the same, no matter what the coefficient is.

As a thief all I know is that if these patch notes are real, the developers are either listening to the wrong people or just clueless. The long anticipated boon-hate mechanics for thieves took 3+ months to implement and they lasted all of 4 weeks, because there’s simply no way to keep playing S/D with the changes to Shadow Return and Larcenous.

But that’s not even the worst part. I can somehow understand a knee jerk reaction and nerfing S/D because of all the complaints, but how in the name of all that’s holy can you go and buff D/P like that.

And who thought that lowering Panic Strike’s ICD from 60 to 30 seconds was a good idea? Do you realize that this is a 5.2+ second immobilize on pretty much every single target that happens to drop below 50% (in reality targets will get immobilized when they are at maybe 30%, because it doesn’t trigger on the hit that takes them below 50%)? It was borderline overpowered with a 60s ICD and if anything I expected this to go up to 90 seconds some day, but I guess I was wrong.

Then they go and buff Signets of Power. Do I have to remind you guys over at Anet that just a few months ago you were trying to reduce the burst damage and now you are increasing it again? Furious Retaliation? You must be kidding. Pretty much every thief thought that a 10 second Fury on a kitten ICD was already quite strong for a tier 1 trait, yet here we are lowering the ICD to 30.

You are pushing people to play an all out glass cannon spec that, if it happens to fail to down somebody in a blink of an eye, it leaves the thief without any defenses.

I am wondering whether you guys want the forums to crash from all the “Backstab” rants.

KrisHQ.4719:

Imo that is good news, but I guess people are dissapointed if there are not huge balance fixes, new gamemodes and maps in every single update.

You act as if they were doing anything remotely close to that every other patch rather than every single patch. Fact is, we haven’t seen any of it yet, nor is there any indication for it to ever happen.

Oni Link.4621:

@kaplis / @Med: You may notice that the title of the topic is “new hope?” with a question mark. I’m not expecting a revolution but being pessimist about all updates will not help you; it will just make your mood worse

I am not a pessimist about updates, I simply think that people expect too much no matter what they end up doing, because while some classes may improve, choices will still remain very confined within the trait system and the basic issues of the current PvP.

I’d be much more thrilled if they tackled issues like AoE, bunkers, burst, downstate and team synergy and team work in fights. As it is right now, you can only support with a very limited number of bunker builds on specific classes and those who aren’t bunkers, who can actually support (still in a very limited way) are either built for 1v1s on side nodes or heavy burst or AoE in order to weaken the enemy team as much as possible before going into down state in team fights.

It’s basically a system that promotes bad habits (like knowing you are about to go down and simply going all in in order to weaken the enemy) and thus negates anybody trying to make a difference the opportunity to do so beyond the scope of self sufficiency.

Oni Link.4621:

Yea but this time it seems more “concrete”. It is not “some fixes”, it is “wide-scale revamp of traits and utilities for every profession”. This is why my hopes are bigger this time :P

You’re setting yourself up for another wonderbra experience.

Pyriall.5027:

Saying that S/D is about timing and postitioning when your choices are between skills that dodge, an evade (that is a heat seeking missile), and a teleport/cc break/immobilize is just plain laughable.

I could tell you that you can spam Shadow Shot on D/P and have a shadowstep (unblockable) to target that blinds and deals more damage per second and comepletely invalidate your statement. And that’s not even the best skill on D/P.

Do you play thief?

Anybody believing D/P is harder to play than S/D needs to get themselves hospitalized.

S/D is all about timing, positioning, constant pressuring and survival without stealth. I used to play D/P before D/P was even a consideration and it is, to date, the most complete weapon set for the thief class. There are less than 15 keys to press on pretty much any class in guild wars 2, so that having options like you do with D/P (on demand daze, stealth, blind and gap closers), results in having an advantage over builds that only use 10 keys but simply do not have access to anywhere close to these options).

Stealth is a huge crutch and you only notice it, when you don’t have deliberate access to it. D/P is what I would recommend to any beginning thief, because it is, bar none, the easiest and most effective weapon combination you could choose on a thief.

Anybody telling you differently has an agenda.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

i dun want it removed though.

And you had to make a whole thread about that?

Ostricheggs.3742:

And about the ranged thing, there’s a kitten good reason why people don’t only bring engis and necros to a team. It’s important to actually get the opposing player downed first without dying before you cleave.

People bring Engineers and Elementalists (S/D) as their main DPS now (on top of Mesmers obviously, but that’s another story). Anything else comes afterwards and considered to be sub-par. So yeah, over here on EU, the meta has strongly shifted towards range dps classes with massive AoE.

Arganthium’s analysis is spot on. Especially the range and channeled attacks part, that are way too effective counters against S/D.

cottage.3274:

the fs/ls spam build can do 7 in a row before using roll for initiative and can do it with little time for recovery before you can do it again.

Bold claim that has no factual basis. It’s mathematically impossible to do 7 FS/LS in a full cycle.

RaynStargaze.6510:

I probably won’t make you change your mind, but that is no longer true. Shadow Return has a 1200 range now, meaning that, even if it works, you will still most likely be in range of any ranged profession. Stealth is much better for disengaging than Shadow Return.

Phaeton.9582:

Range dps has an advantage from a reactionary perspective, but if your fast enough to get on top of downed players warriors can have the best cleave off CD. Also res abilities can be an excellent counter to comps that just kill in this manner, as they often lack the sustain to stay up long themselves.

I can’t remember the last time I have seen teams run with more than Illusion of Life as rezz utilities and that’s pretty much present on both sides (mainly because we don’t see many necros anymore).

Warriors are very rare in TPvP and while they do have very good rezz/stomp denial, they will die instantly, if they start 100 blading a corpse, but you mentioned that already.

But that’s exactly what’s wrong with down state. Down state promotes mindless AoE and heavily favors specific setups. As soon as somebody goes down, whether it’s on your side or the opponent’s, you see AoE rain down on that body like no tomorrow.

This is an accepted way of “team fighting”, but in my opinion it’s simply bad design, because AoE is way too strong (obviously this is the root of the problem, but other than the promise of reducing that from a couple months ago, we haven’t seen a single change in that direction. In fact some single target abilities have since then been turned into piercing and cleaving attacks) and the only semi-counter is not to pile up.

This is much less a problem for professions who are playing range builds than it is for those who have to get right on the body to make sure it’s not being rezzed up. Usually the team fight is won by the team that can drain more resources from the other team in the rezz/stomp battle over a fallen team mate and that is utterly ridiculous.

If you manage to pressure your opponent hard enough in such a battle, you will then have the upper hand, even if you lose a team mate before them, because you will kill/weaken them all at once and thus preventing the enemy from reinforcing the node.

Right now, what you really want is a bunch of ranged professions that can cleave any downed player to hell and back. If you manage to kill them all, great, if not, at least you won’t be taking much damage, because you are nowhere near the downed player, so that you can keep reinforcing the node till you win.

Inverted.7439:

Lol, so blinding powder is bad now? even though if you lay down a blinding powder and use cluster bomb it’s an aoe stealth ? Jeesus, learn your class before you rage and say it needs a huge buff.

That’s Black Powder…look up Blinding Powder again.

There are two aspects to consider when using flanking strike and larcenous strike:

1. If you use larcenous immediately after flanking strike you actually cut the animation short giving you quite the element of surprise. Your larcenous will hit before the actual animation is completed. By doing so, experienced players (experienced in the sense that they are watching for animations when they dodge) who do not know that will usually get hit by it, because they end up dodging too late

2. If you follow up with larcenous strike immediately, you will not be able to get a slice in and inexperienced players who are actually randomly dodging larcenous as soon as you activate flanking, will end up evading larcenous as well

That’s just some random information I am throwing out there for thieves to consider.

I think most players erroneously assume that builds with a lot of options are harder to play. Truth is having so many options allows you to adapt much easier, so that it’s actually easier to play a versatile class like an Elementalist or a Bomb-Engineer.

Take Teldo’s build for example. Not only does it offer huge 1v1 capabilities, it is also very forgiving, because it has access to superior sustain, CC, defensive stats and utilities as stealth combos than most if not all the other classes. The pressure this and other Engineer builds apply through passive trait and non-trait procs is immense and easily source of most of their damage. You miss your hits, your procs don’t go off, ICDs do not incur…Your next attack hits? Alright, there we go 6+ seconds burning, a couple of bleeds and a poison proc for good measure (and everything at range). Quite forgiving and equally effective.

I also believe Teldo to be a good Engineer, but I do have to wonder why using a smoke field and a blast finisher is considered to be anything more than routine. We see D/P + Shortbow thieves use that same combo (Black Powder, switch into Shortbow and use a ground targeted cluster in the midst of the team fight, while sitting at 2k armor and 14k HPs), which is three times harder to pull off, yet it’s not even commented on and even dismissed as “trivial” at times.

Mrbig.8019:

Improvisation instead of Dagger mastery for the 10% damage after stealing, keeping the stolen item).

Wonder who started that rumor.