Guild Wars 2

You guys are so incredibly awesome. Every single one of you.

Also, since the game is dying without ever having even taken off and required some skill, you’ll also all be able to tell your friends how back in the day, you were the kitten in GW2 for years to come.

nerva.7940:

Point capping is the lamest crap.

Amen.

Let’s hope future PvP developers understand that.

I am confused? Are you trying to make my case for me? Because if you hit for less than 10k with 25 vulnerability stacks, then you’re using diversion for even less than the suggested 2k extra damage…

You realize that even at max vulnerability, that’s 25% damage? You’re basically going to go from 8k to 10k on a combo. 2k more damage for 3 clones, a good amount of time and 30s CD ability, which you should always have ready for after the burst to interrupt the heal.

Mind boggling.

guza.6170:

Med.6150:

If you guys think that every developer on a team is supposed to know every single ability, then you haven’t played any MMOs before this one or just haven’t been involved enough.

He’s a balance specialist (their words) so i think he out of all ppl should know what he is balancing. I also think it takes more then just numbers and timing abilities and such to balance, they should spend some time playing tournaments, hotjoins, and watch streams of top teams playing to get the feel of what the balance is like ingame. From what i saw they dont have a good enough understanding of it.

I am not defending them, I just know that it’s not realistic expecting any developer (perhaps I worded it wrong in the post above), regardless of who it is, to know every single ability off the top of their head.

Take any other MMO and you will see the same level of competence (in regards to classes) and knowledge, so that it’s definitely not the issue or reason for the poor choices they have been making or the slow progression.

If you guys think that every developer on a team is supposed to know every single ability, then you haven’t played any MMOs before this one or just haven’t been involved enough.

I don’t understand how we can lump thieves and elementalists together, when TTD on a thief is ~3 seconds.

A tanky thief does not exist. Those thief builds that can escape most situations due to an abundance of stealth are not the builds we see in tournament matches and complained about on a daily basis.

The ones you see in tournament play are those who better check twice if their current positioning can allow them to actually engage.

Tournament thieves have 1 stun break on a 60s CD (granted it’s a two step stun break, however it’s used 90% of the time to get away, so that you actually only make use of the second step, if you can’t really help it).

Tournament thieves have no invul (and let’s be frank here, I don’t agree with invuls lasting longer than TTD against a single player could be).

The thief you see in tournament has very poor sustain and no instant stealth.

Now, I am in no way advocating that thieves are too weak (though this seems to be the perception nowadays, which I disagree with, just to state it again).

Thief burst needs to drop (burst in general across all glass builds in fact), but in no way are they dealing tons of damage and surviving easily, when compared to elementalists.

Xeph.4513:

Anyways all I can say is, I was very grateful to the devs for the experience and their patients.

Patients? Well, you may even be right, they are driving us all kinda crazy and I too start to feel the repercussions of that with all the desperate people asking me for advice.

PS: I am sorry, you guys did very well, but the silly jokes keep me sane, I suppose.

I do not believe there’s a reason to stay to be perfectly honest.

There are a few fundamental issues starting with the game mode itself, how a single dodge roll can decide whether you live with 80% health left or die and the snowball effect resulting from that very outcome, how basic features are missing and even if they will come, they will turn out to feel very amateur-like (like manually tracking QPs on forums, ladders that might show where you stand, but for all you know that could be based on anything, because there’s no visible rating).

Bad decisions like putting the 3-round tournaments back in, when it was obvious that people prefer the 1-round matches. The fact that they removed 3-team tournaments, because they were hardly popping in the first place, just to put them back in, then actually be surprised that they aren’t popping (again!)?

There’s a lot more that basically screams this game isn’t going to go anywhere.

Turning it around would just take too many changes and the willingness to do so first of all.

Thanks for deleting my post…I am gonna drink to that.

Fyi the exactly difference in damage between Air And fire sigils is 10%. Both have the same power contribution.

Moisttowlete.8074:

Also can anyone answer, I’ve been watching your videos. Can you hit backstab from a distance and “steal step” to target and still get the backstab trigger?

Yep.

The big issue I have with shatter is that the cool down starts when you press F1 regardless of when the shatter will actually go off (due to how smart the kitten clones are, you can’t even dodge away reliably, but you have to dodge into them, whether it puts you into a favorable position or not when doing so, because if you dodge away, they will just go off as soon as you have ended your dodge roll).

Secondly, due to the fact that the cooldown starts upon pressing F1, if you delay the shatter by running away, the next shatter will be coming 4-5 seconds after the first one, which is basically a lot of damage within a really small time window.

For an ability that deals that kind of damage, it’s way too easy to land, especially given the low cool down.

Conquest is for girls.

“IMHO – I think the healthiest thing for this game is to force team fights but have a way to prolong the experience.”

That exactly is the recipe for successful and competitive PvP, not just for GW2, but for any company that wants to launch a PvP focused game in the future.

I am confused about this thread. In fact, I am just going to drop two lines here and get the hell out of here, before my IQ starts dropping:

1. The 40k+ HPs video by FASTCAR: The elite skill Rampage was used, which temporarily increases your HPs (and other stats like Toughness) by quite a lot. Nice try.

2. Endure Pain (the utility) lasts 4s untraited and 5s with Sure-Footed. Defy Pain (30 defense trait) lasts 3s and is not affected by Sure-Footed at all.

lettucemode.3789:

So what is the problem with GW2 PvP only having one ranked competitive game mode?

I don’t think the problem is having a single game mode only per se but the game mode itself.

Conquest is like women’s soccer, entertaining in itself, but never to become highly competitive.

1. What about combat itself? What might have looked fine on paper 6 months ago, may be too strong now that players have learned to exploit it? Quickness (I have explained before how quickness is way more effective than it should be due to reaction times), AoE (barely anybody goes for finishes anymore, as it’s much more convenient and effective to just drop AoE on the downed player and kill their team in the process), Ress utilities (these have emerged due to how potent AoE is and how gameplay revolves more around managing down state than anything else currently)

2. Burst and bunker builds: Both ends of the spectrum require tuning. It’s not unusual for players to drop in a single second, just like it is possible for the same player to last 30+ seconds because of their sustain and a lucky dodge. This makes combat feel very random

3. What are your plans on improving statistics? Combat logs, death breakdown, damage done/received, healing produced/received. Anything that actually gives players and teams the means to understand what they need to improve on and why they are winning/losing against other teams

Nord.5360:

Hey folks,

It’s about that time again.

Date: March 14th, 2013
Time: 12PM PST (8PM GMT)
Guests:
ArenaNet Game Designers Jon “Chaplan” Sharp and Tyler Bearce
Xeph (EU) from Team Paradigm
Zoose (NA) from Nonstop Nonsense
Where: GW2Guru Twitch Channel

Feel free to respond to this thread with any questions or concerns that you would like to see addressed. I can’t promise that everything will be covered, but I do my best to represent a wide range of opinions, hardcore and casual players alike.

Here’s a link to our announcement thread on Guru.

If you feel more comfortable reaching out to me personally, feel free to shoot me an email at sotg@guildwarsguru.net.

Thanks guys!

Please do me a favor and make sure developers answer concisely and to the point this time.

If somebody asks what MMR system GW2 uses, we simply don’t want to hear 2 minutes of monologue about what other games are using as an answer (see the last SotG).

I don’t even care if what I hear is to my liking, I simply want clear answers to the questions asked.

It is definitely odd when you face premades solo, especially when there’s no way in hell those queueing with you could ever have a high MMR when their ranks are between 10 and 15.

The latest patch was definitely a step forward. Too bad we were standing right on the edge of a precipice.

This has nothing to do with the matchmaking rating and everything to do with solo queues not being separated from group queues.

Yeah, cause having a passive 3 condition removal on a 10s CD is obviously terrible. Truth is, no other class has access to more condition removal, let alone passively.

While the proposal is a good one, I still don’t see how going back to a 3-round tournament is even considered by Anet, when they actually moved away from it so that queue pops would be more frequent in the first place.

If we split it in solo and group queues, we’ll see the same issues we saw before, except that there are probably going to be even less pops.

I think they are very transparent. They aren’t doing a whole lot, so they aren’t “disclosing” a whole lot either.

Seems pretty consistent and transparent to me.

Evan Lesh.3295:

There are a lot of really cool things we could do with the combat log that would benefit the entire game. This could include making sure all combat events show up, color coding, and even skill links. This polish could be rolled into the death breakdown as well.

The more information you add, the better. It can’t be hard to implement filters for those who couldn’t care less.

What I’d like to see:

1. Each and every entry of an ability used by me and used against me
2. Death Breakdown to be accurate and contain every damage ability
3. Damage dealt and received on top of healing received and produced at the end of the match
4. Number of kills made by me and everybody else participating in the match. Total number of kills for my team and the enemy team
5. Ability to scroll back in the combat log farther than we currently can. I’d like to be able to go back after a match and be able to look up what happened at the beginning of the match
6. Status display in the combat log. I’d like to know whether I was disabled etc. and a simple line like “you died”, in order to separate battles easier
7. Critical hits, glanced hits should all be displayed as such (during beta critical hits would be displayed as “CRITICAL”, then you remove that out for no reason)

Since the shatter AoE radius is so terrible, nobody would complain, if they made it single target then, I suppose?

Let me Head Shot you a few times and tell me how you feel on that subject again.

We’ll make the first MMHO’!

Do you want to know the real reason why teams split up after a bad streak of losses?

The answer is simple: For various reasons that would require months and months of changes, you do not see progress, you do not see improvements.

It’s not the rewards that are the issue, it’s that there’s no way of telling whether you are improving as a player or a team. You lose and win games for reasons that are not displayed anywhere and that sometimes can only be retraced after a game (if lucky) and often these situations are also decided by luck (down state battle, rallying of team mates, a rezz utility, lucky interrupts, a 1v1 between points or at the trebuchet etc.).

We have an absolutely lackluster UI, incredibly weak combat log, a end of match overview of glory points earned (great way to judge performance right there) and a multitude of other vague pieces of information that give your team no way of analysing a game, be it a win or loss and expanding/improving upon that.

It’s no wonder people don’t dedicate much time or invest heavily into GW2 PvP.

In order to create a healthy competitive scene (not using esports in this context, as there’s no need for it), you want teams to want to practice. In order to practice these teams need to know what they need to improve on, where their mistakes are.

Ask these teams why they are losing and 9 out of 10 will either blame class balance or admit to not know why (if they are honest instead of just frustrated).

zone.1073:

You’re underestimating the amount of gap-closing and damage a Warrior is capable of doing within 5 seconds on a stationary target. Any Ele who would have saved Mist Form for a Bull’s Charge knockdown would have died in that situation.

I seemed to underestimate the amount of nonsense that can be used to argue apparently. I don’t care about how long that immobilize was, I don’t care about the damage you deal, there’s no way to spin that popping a 3s invul after a root and a dodge roll backwards (that alone took 1s out of the Mist Form) was preferable to actually waiting for the warrior to set up his burst and then Mist Form if needed.

That’s totally ignoring the fact that he didn’t even try to cleanse the immobilize, which thanks to you dodging away, he would have had plenty of time with cleansing wave. If that had failed, he could have at least pulled out some cooldowns out of you instead of misting right away, without being in danger at all.

Either way, I realize I am wasting time.

ilJumperMT.4871:

Nothing to see move along, L2P Issue. He doesnt even know that Mirror Images is a Stun Breaker

Not that I think he played it well (he admitted to that already) or that he’s a good player, as it’s hard to tell in GW2 (nor is it required), but you should learn how skills work before you flame somebody. He couldn’t have used Mirror Images to break the stun.

zone.1073:

If you noticed, he was immobilized at the beginning. My immobilize lasts 5 seconds, and I would have killed him in that duration if he didn’t Mist Form. So, I basically forced him into a bad situation, and forced him to Mist Form. [Hands rubbing together like an evil genius ensues]

Not to take away from your victory, but there’s no way you can tell me that Mist Form was smart with a straight face. You immobilized him and then did a dodge roll backwards. Is that how you usually set up your burst? By immobilizing and dodge rolling away?

Why would he Mist Form with that large a gap between you and him and the fact that you dodged away, widening the gap.

Let’s call a bad decision what it is, please.

Mrbig.8019:

Med.6150:

Mrbig.8019:

If you try to use mind wrack without any clone up, you don’t explode, but guess what, with distortion it works.

I’d like to know from aNet if it’s intended or not.

What do you mean by that? You can Mind Wrack without clones, just like you can CoF, Diversion and Distortion. Whether that is actually balanced is another question.

It also does seem odd that Distortion is an invul classified as evade, but still gives the invul message, when being attacked. A mesmer can basically invul their way through a lot of punishment without ever having their point decap because of that.

If we take a look at illusionary persona description, it say “SHATTERING YOUR ILLUSIONS reproduces the shattering effect on you as well”.

Basically, if you don’t have any illusion up, you shouldn’t be able to reproduce any shatter effect.

According to the description, it’s a bug. A gamebreaking one.

I get what you are saying and I can not disagree with that line of reasoning, I was merely stating that it’s working that way for all of the shatter abilities.

Mrbig.8019:

If you try to use mind wrack without any clone up, you don’t explode, but guess what, with distortion it works.

I’d like to know from aNet if it’s intended or not.

What do you mean by that? You can Mind Wrack without clones, just like you can CoF, Diversion and Distortion. Whether that is actually balanced is another question.

It also does seem odd that Distortion is an invul classified as evade, but still gives the invul message, when being attacked. A mesmer can basically invul their way through a lot of punishment without ever having their point decap because of that.

Blackmoa.3186:

It is super funny to watch you imply, that you basically only got killed like that, because the thief was not playing a “meta-build” with haste for their backstab and thus distortion running out right before backstab was executed.

Just as information for you: thats not what happened, the Thief just spammed Backstab until distortion ran out.
YOu know, if teh atrget is invulnerabel you don’t destealth and so you couldnt care less as Thief

I think you wanted to quote somebody else, because that’s exactly what I said:

“As long as you have distortion up, a thief will be able to spam backstab and not drop out of stealth.”

Oni.5429:

Legit!

Fun fact:

Vs standard thief burst that invul was perfect, the lack of haste made the guy simply luck out and have the combo hit after the distortion. (It’s not like he was waiting, note the ’’invul’’)

For somebody as outspoken and self-opinionated as you have become, you certainly know very little about how the game works. It is super funny to watch you imply, that you basically only got killed like that, because the thief was not playing a “meta-build” with haste for their backstab and thus distortion running out right before backstab was executed.

Here’s a tip: As long as you have distortion up, a thief will be able to spam backstab and not drop out of stealth. So haste or no haste, the dude was/will be sitting behind you in stealth and mashing 1 repeatedly and since your distortion lasts a second and basilisk venom lasts 2 seconds (yes, I know the tooltip says 1.5, it’s still 2s), you will always eat the backstab by reacting like that.

Nope, they do not stack.

This game does a pretty good job at pointing out its own flaws. It doesn’t really matter what builds you play, how effective it is, how well you play, as long as you are aggressive and have access to good mobility in your setup.

That’s point capture mode for you.

Trap builds are strong against GC melee builds (these will have very low combat uptime against such a ranger, while the conditions trickle away), whereas BM builds are stronger than trap builds and against any kind of attacker or defender on top of it. As for why rangers are strong, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out, though it seems like many still do not see it.

Any class can build for maximum damage and maximum defense (within the boundaries of their class of course) and any hybridization of that. However, given that the stat pool is limited and it all comes at a certain opportunity cost, they are opening themselves up to weaknesses.

The fact that ranger pets have their own stats, independent of the ranger’s, means they do not expose themselves to such a weakness. They can build their ranger to be very sturdy, while their pets deal the necessary damage. By doing so you automatically invest your pointd into the optimal stats too, as pet stats are paired with healing stats and condition stats with toughness.

As a result you will have respectable condition damage on a sturdy character with great power damage to accompany it, so that you are well suited and prepared for any situation

I honestly have no idea how anyone who has every played a PvP game could disagree with what Mufa has been saying on downstate and AoEs. Hardly anybody stomps anymore, unless they are forced to, because stomping basically puts you at a disadvantage due to all the AoE and damage focusing on the downed target.

This is why rezz utilities have become so popular, this is why AoEs have become so popular. If your team has to stomp to secure a kill and your opponents do not, you have lost the fight. Most bunkers I know are more worried about dying while rezzing stomping than when they are actually being attacked. Do you honestly think this makes sense?

And this is not even touching on the subject of imbalanced down states.

10 days in PvP and this guy has understood what most can’t seem to. Just because you’re winning or exploiting this ridiculuous mechanic better than others, doesn’t mean it’s good for the game or rational.

Why do we have messages for “downing” people on the lower right corner of the screen, when it’s meaningless? Have you ever wondered? Makes you think that down state was never intended to be as critical as it is to “winning” a fight.

If you are of the opinion that down state is necessary to counter burst classes like I have read many times, then take a step back and think, perhaps you will realize that you’ve got it backwards and that maybe burst and bunker builds are way too extreme and need to be adjusted, so that down state can be thrown out of the window.

I watched it all and I felt like I learned nothing. It’s hard not to get mad, when you watch a show that lasts over an hour and has a few key issues pop up every now and then just watch them never be addressed directly.

There was no useful information in there.

The whole theme to pretty much every topic can be summarized like this:

Host and/or guest: “So matchmaking is in! We wonder, could you tell us what it is taking into account right now?”

Devs: “Sure! It’s pretty much what you can expect. I mean…it’s pretty…pretty much, well it’s going to pretty basic…say if you have 4 people that are good and one that sucks, your aggregate rating is going to be lower…we are also looking at cohesiveness of your team, right? Say 5 individuals queue, they are more likely to be matched against another 5 individuals rather than a team of 5 queueing, I guess?”

That part and pretty much every other topic that could have been remotely interesting was simply killed by answers that either made no sense (you guys realize that you can’t queue as an individual in paid, right?) or were not answered at all.

I didn’t hear anything concrete on:

- AoE damage. How it’s affecting the game (more below to that) and how it’s going to be reduced

- Downed state being more important than anything else in terms of fighting. Why is this acceptable?

- Rezz utilities. Do you realize what happens when an ally goes down? Instead of trying to revive your team mate, everybody just drops their AoE on him and use their rezz utilities. As a result, you have put lethal pressure on the enemy team who was trying to stomp and thus standing in the AoE and your previously fallen ally is back up with more HP than anybody else on the enemy team. Great design!

- Time Warp and Quickness in general

- Thief vs. Thief match within the match

As long as you don’t understand and address above issues/topics, you are always going to be seen as being out of the loop, Jons.

Q: Are you not in the least concerned with the impact of Time Warp but also quickness in general?
Specifically Time Warp almost certainly decides group fights in favor of the side using it. Quickness, however, seems to be a problem in general as reaction times are virtually a constant, while abilities under quickness are sped up by 100%.
I’ll give an example in order to explain what I am trying to say with above statement:
Assume you are getting targeted by 3 devastating attacks with an animation time of .5 seconds under the influence of quickness. For clarity I will also assume reaction for the targeted player (he might be busy handling a situation) to be .8 seconds. Under normal circumstances, this player would get hit by the first attack and be able to evade attack #2 and #3. Due to quickness, however, he would get hit by all 3 of these attacks, which amount to .75 seconds of execution time, since his reaction time remains constant at .8 seconds.
Analyzing the situation, the targeted player just took 3 times the burst, just because of quickness cutting execution time in half. I think we can agree on the fact that many, if not any, classes out there, will be dishing out devastating, lethal in fact, amounts of damage, if they are able to apply 3x times their regular burst for whatever reason.
Q: Assuming you follow the current meta in the EU, you may have noticed that when both sides utilize a heavy burst thief (regardless of whether players deem this to be balanced or not), there’s a high chance that the thief coming out of stealth and actively participating in the fight first, is going to put his team at a disadvantage, as he’s most certainly being taken out instantly by the opposing thief.
As a result these two thieves usually play their own 1v1 match within the match itself. I honestly believe that this is not the way matches should be played or decided (4v5 on the map for 20+ seconds usually means you lose the team fights or small skirmishes on a node).
On the other hand, many thieves seem to be of the opinion, that they need to be as glassy as they are (and thus being easy preys for the opposing thieves), simply because there’s no other way to neutralize certain bunker builds on the enemy team in any timely fashion. These bunker builds, being as strong as they are, will undoubtedly cost you the match, if they manage to stall your team on a node.
Are there any plans for reducing burst damage and survivability and bring both ends of the spectrum down a little, in order to address the inherent issues? If so, what specifically are your goals in this regard?
You may be aware that while burst is simply based on chaining devastating attacks in the least amount of time possible, survivability comes in different flavors. While usually survivability equals high sustain through healing, there are professions/builds that become as survivable as they are by means of excessive damage evasion and/or damage negation, so that any changes would have to be targeting all of these capabilities.

daydream.2938:

Idk i dodge backstabs all the time. So, i mean i dont want to comment on human reaction times. but, i manage to get out of the way frequently and i do paids.

though of course i dont my fair share of them either, depends if i see the theif coming or not. One thing that helps alot is if your team always calls out eyes on the thief so everyone knows where he is .

Nobody here is claiming that backstab can’t be avoided. The point is, when you avoid it, you either anticipated it or it was executed in >.5s. I get out of backstabs all the time, when people try to cloak and dagger, steal and then move to my back to stab me. But that usually takes >1s without haste.

Narcarsis.5739:

Med.6150:

hharry.1967:

Human reaction time is actually 200ms.

I hate reading this and I play a thief myself. Human reaction time is not 200ms and everybody claiming that should actually read the whole study on on it, including the difference between auditory and visual stimuli.

Reaction time for visual stimuli is ~200ms, however this requires the subject to have their finger on a single key

Fix your keybinds. My thumb is always on Shadowstep, 100% of the time. 0.5 seconds is more than enough time to react, and you can react in less than a fourth of a second if you know that something is coming. Things like this are the difference between good and great players.

You insist on making this about “skill”, when it actually is about human reaction time. Every single time somebody claims they react in whatever ridiculous amount of time they make up, it’s usually because they simply perceive it as faster than they actually are.

You can press Shadowstep in 0.2s, if the thief is coming towards you with Basilisk Venom up (of course this means you will just press that key without actually moving your mouse to any sensible spot on your screen while doing so), you can’t press Shadowstep in less than 0.5s, if you are already engaged in combat and you are getting jumped. If you believe you can, you are imagining it

Either way, if you are in doubt, record your games and time your reaction times. That will take care of any misconception.

hharry.1967:

Human reaction time is actually 200ms.

I hate reading this and I play a thief myself. Human reaction time is not 200ms and everybody claiming that should actually read the whole study on on it, including the difference between auditory and visual stimuli.

Reaction time for visual stimuli is ~200ms, however this requires the subject to have their finger on a single key and actually KNOWING, there’s about to appear a visual stimulus. However, most people do not have the patience to actually read further or comprehend how such a test is meaningless for any real discussion about reaction times.

If you do not have knowledge of when or if a stimulus actually may appear or if you have to make a choice on what key to press depending on the stimulus or you are perhaps reacting to another stimulus, while the second one appears, reaction times go up exponentially.

If you had 3 keys for 3 different stimuli for instance, and you’d have to respond to each one in a specific way, you’d not get CRT measures of <0.5s ever.

I honestly don’t know if pure strafing is actually a good idea in GW2. I do know, I couldn’t get rid of it, even if I tried. Never seen a game that handles strafing as poorly as GW2, since it slows you down as much as backpedaling for some reason.

The fastest way to move around in combat is probably a combination of just moving with your mouse (RM + LM), while holding your strafe key at the right time to get LoS on your target before the ability fires.

Defektive.7283:

Med.6150:

Defektive.7283:

Advantages:
Constant Burning ticks of 1000-1200.

More like 500, but okay.

Apologies, let me explain.

Non-crit ticks are for 500.

Critical ticks at 1000-1200. At a 70% crit rate, thats more often than not the standard damage you’ll be dealing.

I don’t think you are talking about burning. You’re probably talking about the explosions from Combustive Shot (tooltip doesn’t state this, but you get 5 ticks every 2 seconds including the initial one). Burning (the condition) ticks for up to 500, if you stack 10+ stacks of Might and it can not crit.

Defektive.7283:

Advantages:
Constant Burning ticks of 1000-1200.

More like 500, but okay.

It should be clear to everyone (devs included), that the QP system can not be maintained. The sole idea of an inflationary currency defeats every economical logic. QPs are generated and never spent and even if at some point they are going to be spent, prices can not be adjusted for the currency that has already been released and the new earners, in order to be fair.

Q: Are you not in the least concerned with the impact of Time Warp but also quickness in general?
Specifically Time Warp almost certainly decides group fights in favor of the side using it. Quickness, however, seems to be a problem in general as reaction times are virtually a constant, while abilities under quickness are sped up by 100%.

I’ll give an example in order to explain what I am trying to say with above statement:
Assume you are getting targeted by 3 devastating attacks with an animation time of .5 seconds under the influence of quickness. For clarity I will also assume reaction for the targeted player (he might be busy handling a situation) to be .8 seconds. Under normal circumstances, this player would get hit by the first attack and be able to evade attack #2 and #3. Due to quickness, however, he would get hit by all 3 of these attacks, which amount to .75 seconds of execution time, since his reaction time remains constant at .8 seconds.

Analyzing the situation, the targeted player just took 3 times the burst, just because of quickness cutting execution time in half. I think we can agree on the fact that many, if not any, classes out there, will be dishing out devastating, lethal in fact, amounts of damage, if they are able to apply 3x times their regular burst for whatever reason.

Q: Assuming you follow the current meta in the EU, you may have noticed that when both sides utilize a heavy burst thief (regardless of whether players deem this to be balanced or not), there’s a high chance that the thief coming out of stealth and actively participating in the fight first, is going to put his team at a disadvantage, as he’s most certainly being taken out instantly by the opposing thief.

As a result these two thieves usually play their own 1v1 match within the match itself. I honestly believe that this is not the way matches should be played or decided (4v5 on the map for 20+ seconds usually means you lose the team fights or small skirmishes on a node).
On the other hand, many thieves seem to be of the opinion, that they need to be as glassy as they are (and thus being easy preys for the opposing thieves), simply because there’s no other way to neutralize certain bunker builds on the enemy team in any timely fashion. These bunker builds, being as strong as they are, will undoubtedly cost you the match, if they manage to stall your team on a node.

Are there any plans for reducing burst damage and survivability and bring both ends of the spectrum down a little, in order to address the inherent issues? If so, what specifically are your goals in this regard?

You may be aware that while burst is simply based on chaining devastating attacks in the least amount of time possible, survivability comes in different flavors. While usually survivability equals high sustain through healing, there are professions/builds that become as survivable as they are by means of excessive damage evasion and/or damage negation, so that any changes would have to be targeting all of these capabilities.