Guild Wars 2

lethlora.1320:

Since thieves love hearing about how their buttons need nerfed, does anyone else feel like spear 5 is honestly over the top? The amount of time you can spend evading with this skill with certain builds strikes me as very silly. I’ve used it many times to simply sit on the contested Ruins node in Capricorn and just evade away and it lasts so long that it’s easy to keep the initiative coming with certain skill/trait setups and fill in the blank with dodge rolls.

Also, running into another thief doing the same thing is extremely annoying.

Normally I wouldn’t give this much scrutiny, but I rarely see water combat get addressed here and I feel like this is something that surely the devs would want to look at.

Why does everyone always look at one aspect of the situation and ignore the rest? Yes #5 is silly, but our entire underwater weapon sets suck hugely. It’s not like #5 is awesome damage wise, it just keeps you in evade mode.

As a condition spec thief I do not even fight in water. All my attacks hit for kitten. I have no AoE at all, just some lined up shots that hit for nothing. The other day I followed a ranger into the water that I had downed, whatever his downed underwater ability is, out healed my damage to the point that I just left, waited for him to come out and made sure he didnt get back into the water the next time. Had a guardian to a sliver of health, he ran into water and was healing and out dpsing me at the same time, again was easier to just leave the water but of course he just ran back to it whenever he was low.

Yes I can evade for a long time, but if I cant kill anyone it really is useless outside of point guarding in spvp. I think all underwater abilities need a review across the game, and rebalanced.

Jericho.4521:

I don’t like to gloat, but this nerf should have been seen a mile away by everyone. I’d also like to point out that there are plenty of other professions that were already pretty much bottom tier and received nerfs anyways going into release (cough necro, ele, ranger), so I really don’t think this will kill thieves to have to seek some new builds and slightly more complicated combos.

Necro, ele and ranger are fine, the problem with most of them is the person behind the controls.

Not to say those classes do not have issues and things needing fixed/tweeks, just like thief also has a lot of issues that are largely overlooked..

Oldgrimm.8521:

hmm if its defense vs offense, i think ill test it out myself in wvwvw if what suits me better, either offensive or defensive player

This is probably the best approach, so much is based on play style.

I do not think backstab build uses haste that much does it? Either way haste isnt the big damage issue with backstab build. The main spec to utilize haste would be pistol whip, and that build only has utility stealth.

Putting stealth debuff on haste would be pointless.

What I would like is condition armor that has cond/vit/tough, or a jewel type that has toughness strongest.

I go with cond/vit/power myself. There are certainly times I wish I had more toughness, but I tried mixing the gear up and was never that satisfied with it. Seemed like I needed to really stack toughness high, before I noticed a benefit.

If you are doing 1v1 then vitality in my opinion is better then toughness, if you are doing a lot of 1vX then I think the importance of toughness is increased as you are taking more hits as it is harder to dodge multiple people.

HackerTeivospy.2031:

Not that it is a bad skill, but I don’t like having shadow trap on my bar constantly in wvw, i’d rather have infiltrators signet for when I finally find someone who actually can do battle

I just put it on my bar when I am running away and get out of combat.

you should get different aliases for your domain name, like hackergate and bandwagongate

They still lose. Regardless of lack of death, the moment someone force logs to avoid dying, they lost the fight. They must re-log into the gaming, knowing they are now not only a loser, but an exploiter as well.

ako.8973:

The only real issue is that it impacts on the actual wvw zones. They should have their own queue/player limit that is totally separate from the borderlands or eternal.

Given that all sides have people in there and that they do not take long to do, they do not impact wvw at all.

The only problem in my opinion is that the chest timer should be account based, not character based.

The only time I care about double teaming, is when it makes no sense at all, just either out of spite or just plain stupidity.

Last night I had a catapult on an EB tower and got the wall down to 25% and 2 NSP folks start attacking me and trying to destroy the catapult. I killed them so it wasnt a big deal, but to me it makes no sense at all. Wait for me to get the wall down, then attack so you can go into the tower after I am dead. Or pull off and rally a group to take the tower once I do the grunt work. Those things make sense. Attacking the catapult and me before the wall goes down… no sense.

I see this a lot, seems very prone to specific servers. Some servers it is very rare, other servers very common. Yak’s Bend it happened all the time. Ehmry Bay does it a lot. Northern Shiverpeaks, only maybe once the entire match.

Seems like this problem is a bigger one for the winning side with lots of territory to have siege up on. Losing servers being stomped by 3x their number, their siege/upgrades are lost repeatedly, every time the zerg forms up to attack them. Seems like it works out.

@Kneemin – I have never seen that, I will test, thanks for pointing it out.

Kardiamond.6952:

Well I think the worst downstate skill are :

Engineer, Necro and Ranger ( Ranger I just heard of, didn’t play them, but I know when I down a Ranger it will be easy to finish off)
…
Ranger : Pet can rez, but I don’t know much.

Ranger is fine, not sure why folks would group it as weak. Given that the pet stays alive and has different abilities to help the ranger via raw damage output or interrupts of a stomp, it seems fine and as appropriately annoying as most of the classes.

Necro’s #3 does huge damage, to much, imo. Happy to have it changed to another fear or interrupt of some kind, or something to do with their pets.

I think engineer is fine, guardian is fine, thief is fine, they have various tools and at least one interrupt, no outrageous damage output.

Elementalist could use an interrupt. The mist thing is pretty powerful, the only class in the game that can use a keep/tower portal while downed. I had a elementalist toss himself off a cliff on me the other day. I didnt get a kill, so I assume he didnt take fall damage and res’d at the bottom. I laughed, thought it was a nice use of the skill. I would move mist to #3 and add an interrupt to #2

Mesmer I think is the best in the game, to much damage potential while downed while at the same time being time consuming to cap. Needs an overhaul, imo.

Warrior should have the ability to get back up and fight replaced with another interrupt of some kind.

My view of balance for downed abilities is:

1) low damage attack: everyone regardless of class and stats should do similar damage with this ability

2) stomp interrupt: everyone should have a way to interrupt at least one stomp. It should be accessible soon after dying

3) utility: this is where it will vary greatly by class, but I think this should all be low damage abilities, heal ability, or stomp interrupt ability

4) heal ability, everyone regardless of build or class should heal similar amount with this ability

To me downed should be focused on staying alive and getting back up, not being a contributing member of the fight.

I think a section that would be nice to see is one that talks about collective effort and that a server’s success in WvW is largely linked to having people that are willing to guard and defend supply camps, run supplies, repair walls and doors, set up siege, etc.

This is a shared responsibility and folks need to take their turn at getting these important things done, rather then run from objective to objective.

hah hah, great video, made me laugh.

Suralin.3947:

SF really does need to build up its community. It used to be impossible to get into any of the BLs during prime time. Now we’ll be lucky if we can fill up the slots on just one.

While normally I am very critical of all of the people and commanders that ‘go missing’ the moment SF starts to lose, this week I have been impressed with what appears to be an increasing number of people ‘sticking with it’. Hat’s off to those that are still out there fighting.

Supersun.4603:

Radiodread.8469:

Yeah, 70% of the time I can’t quote from forums either. It is quite annoying.

Copy the address of the Permalink for the post you want to quote.
Paste it into your address bar.
Add /quote at the end of the address.

You are a rockstar!

Most of my complaints with downed, is the huge disparity of balance on the skills and the damage output by some of the classes while they are so called downed.

Any damage done is downed state should be done with the idea of ‘finishing off’ a target, ie they are almost dead and you can finish them off with some low damage hits before you die. 200-400 damage max in downed state, imo.

Balance the downed abilities. Change the ‘downed’ debuff so it still reduces the health you come back with, but when it stacks to three, the next time you just die, no downed.

I think the forums should provide random skill testing questions about each class forum before you can post. They would help folks learn about other classes, while prevent completely clueless people from talking about things they know nothing about.

I have no issues with people posting that they would like to see X fixed, as long as what they are saying makes sense, shows a general understanding of the class, and is informed by all the factors involved.

I like Paranoid’s suggestions: “Or just leave it exactly as is, have steal interupt CnD cast and have steal not apply bas venom.”

These changes would help fix that issue of being unable to avoid the chain, while still leaving it viable.

The blind from pistol #5 is great in PvE, but in PvP I found it next to useless, though it might be better in a p/p build where you can use projectile finishers to do ranged blinds.

Does anyone know if the vigor gained from bountiful theft stacks with food regen buff? So I have food that gives 30% regen. In my testing it doesnt appear to stack, just goes to a max of a 100% regen, does that fit with other folks view?

Went to test this, but couldnt find someone with boons, so asking here. Does the boon theft go to you as well as allies, the trait tooltip says just the allies so I was wondering? Also how does it deal with stacks? If someone has a stack of might for example, does it take 2 charges of might, or does it take the whole stack and something else?

Hope that made sense, thanks.

@Fitz I am not sure how frenzy → bull charge →100b is that much different? I think it is certainly easier to avoid 100b, but it is also easier to land without a positional requirement. In all my solo wvw fights I have died more to 100b then backstab. Neither happens often, but sometimes you just get caught in an unavoidable situation or with your pants down.

I think changing Steal so you cannot front load cloak and dagger would increase the ability to avoid the backstab chain. Not by a lot and only if your cc break was up, assuming venom is being used.

I think the problem isnt necessarily backstab, its the chain which can be put together very fast, all putting out large numbers. Also as long as the rendering problems for stealth go unfixed, I do not think the true glass cannon nature of the spec is truly realized.

I ignore the tooltip and just go shoot something with auto shot turned off, count the ticks. Another recent thread at a good bit of math in it to help optimize your duration statcking.

^ resident warrior troll, keep on flailing your GS about and QQing about everyone else

I expect backstab to get a nerf yet, perhaps the damage on steal as well. The problem I see is how do you nerf abilities being exploited by heavy glass canon stat stacking vs builds that do not stack offensive stats. Steal by a non glass cannon spec does mediocre damage.

Same for abilities we steal, whirling axe nerf for example. As a non glass cannon spec, I now just ditch axe. It does so little damage for my build, that I take more damage using it then I dish out. Pre-nerf that was fine because I didnt take a lot of damage using it.

I think people overstate the effect of orbs. No question that it has an impact and I agree it needs changing, but I think the effect is far more psychological than actual. This is certainly not the reason everyone is losing.

Mesmer stealth has the exact same effect for rendering that thief stealth does, same as portaling. Perhaps they are not complained about as much because of all the clones and phantasms, folks just dont realize they havent loaded yet.

I think the real issue is this change actually going to fix anything? If a server hopper is looking for a winning match, they are likely waiting a couple days, say till saturday or sunday, to see what is happening in the different match-ups. How is a 7 day transfer going to change that rotation?

All I wanted is that folks have to commit to a match, before it starts. So whatever period you transfer in, you cannot WvW for that session. So if you transfer on friday morning, your good for that night when it flips. If you transfer on monday, you gotta wait till friday when it flips. Simple, straight forward.

With the right conditions I get mine up to about 130 a tick, normally around 110.

This skill just doesn’t fit well with the others. If it had a stun break with it, so you could use it to break stun/immobilize and then shadowstep back, that would be good. As it stands though it’s initiative costs is way to high for its limited use, I almost never use it unless I am trolling a warrior by not using stealth at all.

Thrym.9436:

DAOC was a great example of how AOE can work without a cap………..and it proves that having a cap is invaluable.

You didn’t have to be smarter. You didn’t have to play better and you weren’t more skilled than your opponent. You where in ventrillo(or teamspeak, people still used it in the way back machine).

Some guy played a healer that had an AE stun. A couple, maybe more guys played spiritmasters, and maybe you had a couple of warriors with guard on them(guard would block for the recipient of the buff).

Healer ran in room, dropped the AE stun, Spiritmasters PBAOE’d the whole room down so fast that everyone was dead before the first person could even whine about it(I played shaman, the other integral class to tag along for this ride, and there where times we’d snag 50 kills before the animation on my disease finished).

The days of games balancing to make this possible are over, and good riddance.

First one of the big problems in your description was casting speed, not necessarily just the AoE. Second, the turtle favors even less coordination and the zerg, personally I would rather reward the group of five charging 50, then the reverse.

This game needs zerg busting tools.

I am starting to think the posts above by EB folks above, about NSP being dysfunctional are correct. For some reason this afternoon they pushed into red, instead of blue, interrupted our defense of a tower against blue, took the tower from us and then promptly lost it to blue.

So not only did you not accomplish anything, you gave more territory to blue… awesome job.

Perhaps we should call it off hour capping instead of night capping, as time of day really doesn’t matter, what does matter is that there are blocks in the day when one team or another has mostly uncontested access to the map. This is part of the game, it is a reality until such time as Anet does something about it, and it is not the servers fault the opponents have no population at those hours.

SF, my server, has an epic ability to abandon ship the moment there is a sign of a loss. All they needed to start that ball rolling is waking up sunday to see how many points were gained in off hours, something we have never been able to do or compete with.

I took the attached screenshot on sunday morning, before SF had really woken up, and about an hour before we took most of our EB section back. I thought it was a funny reflection of SF.

On friday we will have 3 commanders per map, most of which I have never seen before, many yelling or doing things that contradict other commanders. From now till the end of the week we will have Terror, Nova Scotian’s, CL and a few other die hard guilds and people out there fighting it out, trying to make things happen and play WvW for the fun of WvW, not the scoreboard.

Notensack.9268:

Niim.9260:

how old are you that you haven’t mastered the basics of telling the time?

Supersun that would fit better as I went to bed just before that, that’s 2 am my time on the east coast. At around 4 am PST EB was ticking at around 625. Couple hours after that NSP seems to have woken up and stomping over the map.

There aren’t a lot of keeps to bang on for a night crew when you have 395pts a tick at 8pm EST. When you maintain a lead like that it will close a 2k gap in a few hours. So no, you did not go to bed with a lead, you went to bed with a deficit.

I never said I had a lead, I am from SF, we haven’t had a lead since the first night. When I went to bed at just before 1 am EST, NSP still had a lead. I have no issues with night crew, my issue is with people that pretend that it isn’t happening.

I could do without siege being placed in the jump puzzles, but otherwise everything is fine. Even siege I can work around, just a pain at times.

Cant speak for NSP, but if I know SF at all, they were down 20k and all up and quit for another week. Granted we cannot, nor have we ever, been able to compete on the nightcap front, so the match will leave us in the dust either way.

Notensack you clearly have never had kids as your comment makes no sense, and how old are you that you haven’t mastered the basics of telling the time?

Supersun that would fit better as I went to bed just before that, that’s 2 am my time on the east coast. At around 4 am PST EB was ticking at around 625. Couple hours after that NSP seems to have woken up and stomping over the map.

Go to sleep with NSP in the lead, wake up with EB having almost a 20k lead. Sorry our doors didnt put up as much of a fight as we would like, we been talking to them about being more responsive…

To bad, it was shaping up to be a nice match.

WvW is great because it provides an opportunity for all kinds of play styles. Some folks like to run around in giant zergs rolling over everything. Others like to run in small groups, or solo. Others yet like the challenges of a jump puzzle and the PvP that goes with it.

While I appreciate that not all aspects of WvW appeal to everyone, I think it is important that they are there. I for one love the jump puzzles, keep them as they are.

Supersun.4603:

NSPs population from what I’ve seen is significantly larger then the other 2 servers population.

Didnt seem that way to me. Maybe a bit more, but after Yak’s Bend my vision of what significantly larger means, is totally skewed.

25k/23/20k for NSP/EB/SF respectively, everyone has an orb I think.

Fights have been good, getting better solo fights then I got last week with Yak Bend 3 orb baddies, though I had a 2 orb EB fail called Danger Zone from Tyme guild force log on me last night. Ironic name considering his skill level. Was having a good fight with a NSP guardian in front of redlake this afternoon, but takes to long to kill a guardian in my spec and a bunch more came along and added on the fight. Not sure why folks continue to attack when they get friends, if I am having a good 1v1 I always pull off is someone joins the fight, guess it is my DAoC upbringing.

Back and forth battles have also been good, SF lost bay to a backdoor while defending the front door, was a good move by EB.

Week is young, but its better then last week so no complaints.

Ianervan.3415:

I started doing this after seeing others. But I only do it sometimes, like when fighting a thief who does his perma-stealth kitten over and over.. I’m sorry but I don’t feel that deserves any reward. Same when invisible zerg jumps on me. I’m not going to pay repair costs because the game is broken.

Advantages to ALT+F4 strategy:

• You pay no repair costs
• Your enemy gets no badges

When you login back to the game you’re dead but a good trick is to be in one of the big towns when going into WvW. In that case you don’t need to wait for others to rez you. Instead, you use one of the waypoints in that same town, which costs nothing. There isn’t even a loading screen.

Maybe WvW isnt for you? Lots of great PvE games, you should check them out.

This game does not have spawn camping, I wish people would stop crying about something fully within their control.

I think it is supposed to work like in the first example, in reality it seems bugged and while I do not think it works like the second example either, it certainly doesnt seem ‘even’ either.

If Anet provided us with any zone tools like /who we might help them find out what it is going on, but for now its just a guess.

Anatax.3905:

Yak’s Bend get ready on Friday night cause you are going up against Darkhaven and we’ve won four in a row, and taken powerful guilds from our enemies. This last week VIP joined us from Northern Shiver Peaks and they are strong as hell. We have two huge alliances and about 15 commanders ready to lay into you and our other enemy as well. I remember how you outnumbered us when last we fought this time around the numbers will be even, and we will have solid leadership working to take you down. Good luck and see you on the Battlefields!

Guilds jumping from other servers is certainly the best way to build the long term health of your server. We all know they wont leave again.

I asked about how you can complain about spawn camping the citadel if you can exit at almost any point. The response was that there is only three ways back ‘inside’. Which makes no sense to me, because they didnt move to use a side exit either, but far as I am concerned this game does not have spawn camping, just stupid people camping.

I have had TOG folks defend bots at the skrits as well. No proof, dont care what you do, just letting you know.

Well you get to fight the 10 with 40 then, because that is the situation. Have fun