Guild Wars 2

I know that this isn’t entirely on topic, but since you’re talking tourney ideas… something I think could be a repeating deal is the idea that we bounced around of a draft tourney of “amateur” players (with a strict rank cap) coached by higher ranked players.

That would give a lot of newer people exposure to a tourney scene without getting crushed by premades, and might inspire some new teams to form up and practice. They would get coaching, and every team would have a varied class comp.

I don’t understand what dueling would prove. Who built the better 1v1 build? Grats that you have WvW friends that are good. Never did I say everyone in WvW was bad, just that the majority are. I’d say the same about hot joiners in spvp.

Perhaps the better way to have stated it would have been… don’t talk about WvW here, because the format is too different. P/D may work in WvW, but is less effective in tPvP. They have to stealth too often to hold anything and they do all their damage from one easily removed condition, in a system where everyone typically has some form of condi removal. That and there aren’t chickens standing around for easy CnDs

As fun as the SOAC tourney was, I’m not sure how I feel about single profession tourneys being played out over and over.

They can’t really ever be anything more than for fun. There are inherent limitations to single profession teams where they will always be disadvantaged against another. If these get done too often, you will see people start complaining about balance when they shouldn’t. This will happen even if you tell people not to, especially if it’s streamed with lots of viewers.

That, and the novelty will probably wear off as well. One time would probably be fine, but I hope it’s not repeated.

I was about to write up this big response to several of you in this thread, but then I realized that I probably shouldn’t take the troll bait.

There are a lot of misinformed people here.

If you think Thief is OP, I challenge any of you to take the class into a tourney match against actual competent players. Despite popular belief here, you actually have to be good to be worth anything.

And please don’t talk WvW. 95% of the players there are terrible.

If you want to see how TDM would work in this game, hop in one of those 3v3 servers. Fights are over in a minute, or two tops, due to no dedicated healer. It’s essentially over after the first stomp, and then you have to wait on the team to beat down the guy who spec’d defensive. Sometimes you get fun fights, but it typically always comes down to whose comp counters the other harder.

I agree with the solo queue. The custom arenas and spectate mode were good first steps, and they are allowing us to pull tourneys with lots more viewers than we’ve had on anyone’s personal stream. I feel like it’ll improve, but by how much I don’t know.

We’re live in 1:30 and have had 2 thieves who had to stand down. We’ve replaced one, but still need 1 more to have a full team. If anyone sees this last minute and wants to play, PM me in game. It’s all in fun, and any skill level is welcome as long as you can take coaching!

Hey guys, we could REALLY use 1 or 2 subs for this! I know this is last minute, but if anyone wants to potentially sub in if one of ours doesn’t show, please let me know here or in game.

So much misinformation. Thieves are still run and effective in higher end tourney. They require a whole lot of finesse though, once you get past the mindless hot join phase. Anyone can burst. Positioning is king if you want to be good.

Looks like we have our five for Saturday, but if anyone else wants to play don’t hesitate to sign up. We did have to bring in a sub on Thursday so it would be great to have 1 or 2 for this one as well.

Just to clarify I have Lux from yesterday, and 4 new people: Wasdica, Kinjax, Arctu, and Seraphixation. I will try to catch the new people sometime tonight to discuss builds.

Thanks for all you thieves that played last night, it was a lot of fun. We had a tough matchup right away against eles, almost pulled off a win on niflhel but ended up falling 0-2. We made a strong comeback and won against the mesmers in our consolation match though!

We need a couple more new signups for Saturday. If you do want to play, please try to be available at least 30-45 minutes before the tourney. We didn’t have much prep time before our first match thursday, and it’d be great to have a bit of extra time to get our builds and strats together.

Rerroll.9083:

JESUS CHRIST.

I knew it was a huge work to get to the top but after seeing this… omg

Can someone integrate the graphic and tell me how far am I being r49 after 8 months.

Who is the genious in arenanet that had the amazing idea of implementing this system?

You’ve got about 7 years to go

I’ve thought this for months, and actually transferred to AR right before free transfers ended to get into an active mists. I would be totally ok with this happening.

In NA…. The “top” players have no reason to make set teams. They just have a pvp friends list they use to find people they are comfortable with that are online. And if you don’t know many of them, good luck getting a competent full group to regularly play with.

There are some people outside that group that say they want teams (see LF team sticky). I’ve found that a lot of these people really just want a group to play with a couple times a week and don’t really want to commit to a practice schedule. On top of that, most of them are unwilling to be the initiator to form up a new one.

I agree with you on the problem. There is no reason to form a set team, so it would be nice if incentive to do so was built in by Anet. We can whine and complain all day about it, but I believe a lot of it also falls on the shoulders of our community. If EU has a decent team scene, why can’t NA get it together as well?

I’m considering trying to form one up myself. Solo queue is just too frustrating, to the point where I bombed my leaderboard rank on purpose to see how it is at the bottom. You’re either high enough to solo against premades, or low enough that you get leavers and afkers in most matches. Casual queuing with friends is hit or miss. It’s much more fun having a set group to play with every day.

Good survey. Interesting to see that most people think Rangers are the most powerful now when very little actually changed about them. Probably a combination of a meta shift and the fact we just had spirit watch as a tourney map + ele nerfs on that map.

Seems most are fairly happy with this patch, warrior changes were not enough, and also that Anet needs to get on top of a solo queue now.

Thedenofsin.7340:

I don’t think it’s fair to punish people who are inactive for a month at a time. Arenanet doesn’t seem to have any issue with letting gameplay-breaking bugs sit around for a month before releasing a fix – I don’t see any reason why a high ranking player can’t sit on his rank until ArenaNet fixes some problem they introduced that adversely affected his/her gameplay and, ultimately, his/her rank.

Seems reasonable to me.

I can’t name a single other competitive game with a ladder system that is widely played and has no sort of decay.

The big two right now, SC2 and LoL (dota 2 does not have a ladder in place), both have something to handle this. LoL has a decay system that kicks in after 4 weeks, whereas SC2 has a bonus pool that gives bonus points to actives. I’m pretty sure that even WoW has seasons with resets, and I think maybe they just introduced something like a bonus pool?

No reason to go into it already assuming it’s a loss. I have a few interesting ideas for this matchup.

Yea Team Thief

I’ll be coaching this tomorrow. I’ve talked with about half of you already, but for those who I’ve missed, I will try to be available in game at least an hour before start tomorrow to talk builds and strat.

No it’s not.

Some of the best thieves in the tpvp scene run bursts as 25/30/0/0/15. That has been the go to burst spec for months.

Boon steal builds and sword builds in general don’t run anything in SA either.

There are good builds that do use SA, I’m not arguing that. However, some of the other top builds don’t touch that line at all.

I’m talking competitive thieves here though, not your average hot join or newbie tourney thief, not your typical WvW roamer thief that stomps underleveled and undergeared people all day. You are not pigeon-holed into putting points in SA.

Anyway I feel like this is pretty off topic, so I’m going to leave it at that.

I’ve gotten 2 abyss dyes from pvp, and several other rares worth a gold or two each. I feel like I win this thread. Incidentally, that seems to be the start and end to all my gw2 luck.

Travlane.5948:

20 in shadow arts is like a staple for thief….run in all the best builds and like 80% of all builds in total.

That’s not true in pvp.

I’ll see what I can do this evening, I might have 1 or 2 I could talk into it, and I can ask around on AR.

If you are wanting the actual players to be less experienced to encourage newer players into a tourney scene, it might be better if I coached instead. I don’t mind either way though. We can chat later in game if needed.

Bas, I am actually pretty experienced and could coach the team / devise our strat if it’s needed. r42, 1500 tourneys played as thief, high on boards when I’m not yolo queueing. And if you prefer them not to play, I’d be willing to step down to do it if someone wants my spot.

I see you have Jumper on board, but I’m assuming he’s gonna be busy casting this. Caed or Cruuk are the only other alternatives I can think of, but no idea if they’re involved or even want to be.

If you have trouble getting a 5th thief, I can also probably pull a friend in.

@Leadfoot – They don’t have constant evasion spamming FS. They are vulnerable just as often as they are not due to LS. You just have to time your attacks against them. I don’t play a bunker so I can’t give you details, but that kind of thief is specifically built to counter bunkers that rely on boons.

@Ivis – I agree a burst thief is more dangerous in general, but I was responding with that bit of advice for someone playing a boon heavy class against a s/d thief. And I also agree that condis are good against s/d thieves if you can stack a variety of them and if they actually land through all the evades.

Rangers are a tough fight for a thief. As someone who mains thief and alts ranger, I can probably give some advice to you. If you are playing spvp, there’s 2 types you’re going to see…

Bunker BM rangers are very common recently. They typically run 0/10/30/0/30 or 0/0/30/10/30 with some variation of SB, GS, or S/D. This means their pet hits like a truck and they can still build completely defensive. As a thief you really shouldn’t ever die to this, but you may have trouble killing it.

Their regen comes from signets and traits, and what boons they have are generally shorter duration, so a D/P thief fares better here than a sword thief. Whether or not you win comes down to how hard you can keep up dps pressure and how well you can avoid the pet.

The pet is very vulnerable to blinds, so make good use of BP with the pet as the target. You can stand in a BP field and avoid every pet attack. Alternatively if you are taking too much damage, try to kill their pet right after they do a swap. This’ll put their main form of dps on a large CD.

They usually run birds or cats, sometimes canines. Birds pose the biggest threat in the form of huge burst. If it lands, you’re gonna be hurt. Cats have heavy sustain but are easily countered by blind. Canines are more annoying than anything, but are also more sturdy.

If they use troll unguent, don’t waste a large amount of initiative trying to drop them with that up unless they are already near death. Instead focus on keeping the pet blinded.

Trap Rangers are still viable and, IMO, the more dangerous of the two to a thief. I have more trouble against them than bunker BMs. Although they go down much faster, they are a big threat to kill you before you can get the job done.

A sword thief will have an easier time of it than a dagger thief. If they are sitting on a point, assume there are 3 traps on that point and assume there will be 3 more after those are triggered. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BURST THEM ON POINT. The traps will kill you.

As a sword thief, inf strike to them and immediately back out, then wait for the traps to expire. At that point you can fight them normally and be relatively safe. Just don’t ever let them get your flank.

As a dagger thief, it’s gonna be tough. You’re gonna have to blow a shadow step or a full dodge bar to trigger the traps and not take a bunch of damage. If they have another set already up, you’re in trouble. You can’t out dps them from range, and if they have 2 trap sets you’re best off running. If you do manage to bait the traps without going down, they are susceptible to burst.

Leadfoot.9071:

Is it just me or is S/D builds with init regen and near constant evades just ridiculously powerful? It seems to me it completely counters HGH engineers and bunker builds based on boons. How is it possible to counter an S/D thief that is constantly evading and stealing boons like this? I’m not complaining here, I’m honestly curious about how experienced players are handling these guys!

It’s only powerful in the hands of a good thief. I’ve seen many a bad thief attempt it and do poorly. That said, a competent thief is dangerous with the right S/D build.

TBH you’re gonna have a hard time if you run lots of boons and expect to 1v1 it. The build naturally counters that, and works very well against HGH engis and ele/guard bunkers.

Honestly I’d suggest getting help from a teammate. This thief, like every other, is susceptible in team fights where they are focused by multiple people or where aoe is flying around everywhere.

S/D works, it’s just a change in mindset and a little difficult if you are used to D/ builds. It actually has a decently high skill ceiling.

There is some good advice here already, but here’s my 2 cents.

I’ve found you can play it in 2 ways. If you want damage, you have to go zerk amulet glass cannon. Anything else is viable as team support but lacks the damage to take down sustain builds alone, and has a hard time keeping up with glass cannon from an equally skilled player.

Going gc leaves you vulnerable without much stealth, so you need to complement the build with lots of evasion. Things that work are initiative regen for more FS, withdraw, roll for initiative, shadow step, signet of agility, etc. The acrobatics line is very nice for this. I like going at least 20 in that with vigor on heal (withdraw, lots of vigor uptime), and quick recovery. Points in SA seem a waste.

Practice dodging efficiently (many, many people waste dodges), practice using inf strike efficiently, and you will be extremely annoying to fight. With a 2k+ power, 40%+ crit build, you can still put out solid damage.

As for actual builds…. I see and have fought lots of thieves running what Jumper posted, but I haven’t seen a single one play it well yet (aside from Jumper himself). Don’t expect to pick it up and instantly become GodThief. If you are playing tourney, I can’t imagine not using shortbow. The mobility is just too good, and a thief can’t stand up on point in a team fight for long, even with an evasive sword build. You need SB for those situations.

Outplay them.

As a D/P tpvp player, I can and have beat every type of thief that is seen in tourney, including other D/P thieves. It just comes down to playing better than them. There isn’t a set thief build that is guaranteed to work.

There are some good tips here though. Some more…

Learn to anticipate backstabs and dodge appropriately, imagine where you would be if you were the stealthed thief, and have an internal timer in your head of when they might pop out.

If you are running a sword build, make liberal use of infiltrator’s. Good S/D thieves that jump around and have an evade heavy build are among the tougher ones for me to fight.

If you are D/P vs D/P, either a little extra in SA or some form of initiative regen can give you an edge in a drawn out fight. You can outsustain a 25/30/0/0/15 if you dodge their big hits and are running something like 10/30/30/0/0 or 10/30/10/20/0.

I would highly suggest going into a custom duel server and just practicing against a willing D/P thief over and over. I’d even help you out myself if you want it and I’m available.

Game needs seasons, a ladder rating separate from MMR, and a ladder reset every couple months at season end.

See: Every popular competitive game out with leaderboards

87% means you are ranked higher than 87% of the players on the leaderboard. Top 1000 is something like the top 7% or so.

Your rank is determined entirely on win or lose, what you do in match doesn’t matter. You have a hidden MMR (matchmaker rating), which is what the leaderboards are ordered by. The amount you gain or lose from a match depends on your MMR relative to those of your opponents’. Your rating is not based on pure W/L or win percentage, only MMR.

If you enjoy the class and its style, stick with it. It’s not nearly so bad as people make it out to be. If you need help with something, don’t be afraid to ask. There are plenty here who will give you advice.

Thing is the build really was pretty solid even before the patch, it just wasn’t as widely used or known.

That’s the funny thing about patches. Devs make a small change and everyone jumps on it like it’s some brand new god-build, even if it was pretty good before. Same goes for nerfs and people’s overreaction to them. For example, the thief mug nerf. People thought thieves were doomed to oblivion, but d/p still works fine.

To be fair, I have a bunker BM spec and I find them pretty easy to play. Also, I think most rangers avoid LB because they think it’s inferior, not because it’s hard to use. Props to you for giving it an honest shot though.

I honestly don’t think they’re that OP. They can excel against a lot of builds 1v1, but they can fall apart pretty quickly when they are focused in a team fight.

If a ranger wants to bring more team support, they can always play traps. It’s nice to see a class actually have multiple viable builds.

buddypls.5296:

When I browse the thief forum, I always see people saying that D/P is much better than D/D. Why is that? If I go D/D and run 0/30/25/0/15, with Infusion of Shadow, Hidden Thief, and Hidden Killer, I can pull off constant high damage backstabs. If I need to escape, I can use Shadow Step, Shadow Refuge, or Roll for initiative. CnD with Infusion of Shadow and Preparedness allow me to keep my initiative high, as well as frequent stealth. Does the pistol have some kind of huge benefit over dagger offhand?

D/P can do everything you listed, and also has the utility of a gap closer with a blind, an on demand daze, and an excellent blind field in BP. The stealth is also on demand and doesn’t require you to hit a target.

For D/D, deathblossom is worthless outside of a condi build. Dancing daggers is arguably worthless as it is hard to land, and the cripple is 2s if there’s only 1 target. CnD requires a target and a hit to land. The only upside to the set is that CnD stealth uses 3i less than BP→HS for stealth. However, you can stack 8s stealth with BP→HS from a full ini bar.

DISCLAIMER I wouldn’t recommend this build for anything serious. I threw it together if you really, really, reaaaally insist on the thematic approach of a gunslinger.

It’ll work in pve. Everything works in pve. But people may mock you.

http://tinyurl.com/bq6wgnd

Spam 3 for damage, weapon swap for initiative. Haste for faster pew pew shots, use signet of agility to get your endurance back if needed. Switch in shadowstep for a infiltrator’s signet if you are concerned about condis or mobility. Use whatever sigils and runes you prefer. Don’t use this build seriously.

We need more things like this in NA, even if it starts small or takes a bunch of effort to get off the ground. The NA scene really needs something to give people incentive to form up actual set teams. So, I hope this does take off.

The big problem currently is that, unless you’re a part of the “in crowd” of the super puggers, it’s nearly impossible to find 4 other people willing to commit to a team with a set practice schedule. I’ve tried lately, and it sucks. More tourneys or a custom league system might help fix that, but it would be slow going at first.

Honestly as of right now, in terms of actual turnout, I think your draft tourney idea would go over better in NA than a set team tourney

Looks like its mostly NA now. I’m in for this one. I’d imagine a full thief team would be pretty struggsies against most of the rest, but it’s all in good fun

Also, your ele signup link is wrong.

I don’t even bother in spvp unless I’m on voip with them. If not, 9 out of 10 times they will break it.

Unfortunately this game does not have a large streaming community, but there are a couple of good spvp thieves that stream occassionally. They are pretty cool guys, and I’m sure if you popped in their channel they would be willing to answer questions for you. I find streams much more interesting than video montages, since they are all live and interactive.

Off the top of my head for NA….
Jumper – http://www.twitch.tv/loljumper
Caed – http://www.twitch.tv/narcarsis (good but streams rarely lately)

And a couple others you might sometimes see – Cruuk (hasn’t streamed in awhile, twitch.tv/nosuchthingashalfwaycruuk), Ace (forget his stream link)

If a thief team is formed for SOAC, and I’m allowed, I will also be streaming that on Thursday (see my sig).

I’ll do it

IGN: Nèttle (è is alt+138)
Day Available: Thursday and Saturday
Record Capability: Stream (see sig)
NA or EU: NA

Nebilim.5127:

You cannot stop the esports!

Fantastic.

You win the thread.

It happened to me in tourney. I’m pretty sure I caught it on stream too.

I had one match where this happened this weekend. We were pretty confused for the first minute

A problem with P/P is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Vital shot seems to fit for a condi build, and isn’t awful in a P/D bleed build with its stealth burst. But in P/P you don’t have much stealth, so the auto becomes very meh. Unload seems to suggest a straight power build for single target ranged damage. They don’t synergize well together. Body shot probably just needs a rework.

Currently it has some rare situational usage against pve bosses that require ranged where unload spam beats the aoe damage of SB. It’s never seen in pvp play unless it’s a joke build or someone new that doesn’t know better.

Einlanzer.1627:

Body Shot – swap with headshot, make it cripple/vuln hybrid
Head Shot – swap with body shot, improve daze to 1/2 second

The entire thief spvp community would rage so hard if that ever happened

Standard 25/30/0/0/15 or 10/30/30/0/0 works both for D/P and D/D. Really any trait and utility setup is interchangeable between the two, unless you’re playing some cheesy D/D death blossom spam build.

The difference in the two is that offhand pistol brings much more utility, and you have on demand stealth with D/P as long as you have the ini for it. All the blinds in D/P also let you sustain fights better if you want to build for that.

Katsumoto.9452:

It doesn’t outburst D/D. However when you think about it you don’t miss an enormous amount.

You lose CnD but you gain an opening HS. The damage difference is a wash in spvp where CnD was nerfed for damage. I’m assuming it might have a small lead in WvW, but I don’t play that often enough to know. Just about the only advantage to D/D burst is that it uses a little less initiative.

The biggest hurdle isn’t a guild or a voip server, it is letting new players know that these resources exist. Outside of spamming map chat in the mists, I don’t know of a decent way to do that without some built in help from Anet.

Arc, I’d be willing to join as a mentor both for my class and for general tourney strats. I’d even rep when I wasn’t playing with anyone else to help new players with questions, and advertise it on Anvil Rock if you aren’t already on that server.

Just yesterday I saw a couple new people on AR asking for a pvp guild exactly like this. I felt kind of bad that I couldn’t direct them anywhere.

Personal rank is a worthless gauge of skill. They could be good, or they may be a zerging hotjoin hero, or they may be a bad player who has played a ton but never improved.

Leaderboard rank is not much better (on NA, can’t speak for EU). Until it is split for solo and premade, and a decay put in place against people who play on multiple accounts to preserve rating, it isn’t an accurate skill gauge. Currently this is just a board for who has the best pvp friends list.

You can premade your way entirely against pugs to the top 200 easily. You can also just as easily fall from the top to the percentages from a string of 3 or 4 unlucky solo queue losses.

Unfortunately many people still look at both and assume all high ranks are good and anyone low rank or not rated in the top 100 are bad.

A guild would be good, and if you are trying to do that you should also consider inviting people who would be willing to mentor new tourney players, and give them a rank denoting that for everyone to see. The issue with this approach is that new players would not know such a guild existed unless you advertised it all the time, and even then it would only be seen on one server.

I honestly think it would be a decent idea for Anet to consider building in some functionality to help new pvp players. Perhaps create a region wide pvp newbie chat that is auto-joined in the mists. Give high ranked players the ability to flag themselves as mentors, and a way to see a list of all online mentors and the class they play.

Retaining and attracting new players is vital to helping the pvp scene pick up. In the meantime, I suggest you more experienced people try not to rage too hard at the low rank you might get in your solo/partial queue. I know it can be frustrating, but we don’t want to scare new players off of pvp.

FYP…

Pixels.6532:

Today
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Random_Arenas
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Team_Arena
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Tomorrow
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hero%27s_Ascent
————————————————————————————————————

Down the road
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_vs_guild
————————————————————————————————————

Those are my thoughts, would definitely need to be fleshed out and tweaked, but I think that would satisfy just about everybody…