Guild Wars 2

The last thing we need is a bunch of Max Payne lookalike thieves running around dualwielding Desert Eagles and a bunch of Engis with AWPs.

Isn’t it enough that we have wooden swords, slingshots and giant candy canes?

The extractor is only supposed to be used on items which you cannot salvage.

And as you note, that means gear bought with Karma or Ascended/Legendary gear. The former case (karma armor) has been pretty much made moot due to the Wardrobe and Soldier’s gear being available outside of karma/dungeons.

As for Ascended: It’s the freaking endgame gear, you’re not supposed to be swapping stuff in and out.

That thing is 100% defensive. Has high defense but extreme low offense. Basically a troll build.

Heck, just listening to what he describes about the build, he says nothing about killing anyone. For christ, he talks about reviving his teammates. He’s trying to play a build that does not exist in GW2.

• Mending: The effect is decent, but the healing amount is too low. Restorative Strength isn’t worth the investment, since you’ll want Dogged March and Cleansing Ire anyway.
• Defiant Stance is awesome in a zerg, but in a small group or 1v1, you’ll be toasted for using it.
• Antitoxin Spray: Healing amount is too low and it doesn’t remove Bleeding nor Burning.
• Healing Surge: Requires some timing, as you’ll want to use it at full adrenaline to maximize the effect. On the other hand, using it at full adrenaline makes the 30 adrenaline regeneration of it useless.

Your choices are pretty much limited to Healing Signet and Healing Surge. Signet is the go-to for most people as it offers the best hp/s and shares a weakness with Healing Surge in being vulnerable to poison.

Simon.3794:

@Olba
builds like 66020 already exist in PvE.
it’s already on battlemeta for quite some time

Of course they do, as builds that don’t swap weapons. But with Fast Hands natively, they could get both.

and it’s not crazy, and warrior is like no where close to top dps.

Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t still be a significant boost to our DPS. Which would mean they’d nerf other things, such as Berserker’s Power and Dual Wield Agility.

If anything, i would be asking for cleansing ire to be class mechanic. don’t you get it?

And how would you do that? You can’t just tack it onto burst skills and call it a day, that would be ridiculous.

Honestly, I think that Fast Hands is an essential part of a Warrior. It’s what makes playing a Warrior so much fun for me.

However, I don’t think that it should come to us naturally. Because let’s be honest, if you remove Fast Hands, you’ll only give birth to builds like 6/6/0/2/0. The last thing we need is more zerking. The change would be less for PvP, as a lot of builds already go 6 into Discipline for Burst Mastery, but there’s always the few people who don’t.

For example, I run 0/6/5/0/3 with Sword/Shield and LB in WvW. With this change, I would have little reason not to go 0/6/6/2/0, as the only thing I’d miss out on would be Warrior’s Sprint.

And yes, the same argument could easily be made for Feline Grace. It is a build-defining trait for S/D, after all. And fairly popular for D/P. Heck, I would love a native Feline Grace on my S/P setup.

Zefrost.3425:

Kill Shot should have it’s cast time decreased to that of rifle #5 knockdown duration.
Rifle #4 should apply revealed on foe.
Rifle #3 should give adrenaline per hit.

Rifle 5 has a knockback, not a knockdown.
Applying Revealed on a 15s cooldown? Yeah, nope.
You mean more than what it already does? You already get 5 strikes from the hits themselves, making it double that would be a single full bar of Adrenaline, which is kind of a lot.

The thing is, Feline Grace is one of the key reasons why a Thief can even be used in sPvP. If there was no option to go with a stealthless form of defense, a Thief could never defend/attack a point properly.

foley.3298:

The logitech. G700s got 13 buttons and the setup on that mouse seems to fit me well.
I want a mechanical keyboard with backlight and extra Keys on the left ‘close to WASD’
Is macro used offen i gw2 ?

Well, for mice with a lot of buttons, there’s also Razer Naga, Logitech G600, UTechSmart Venus, Corsair Vengeance M95 and Roccat Tyon.

As for backlit mechanical keyboards, there’s tons out there. For macro keys, your best best would be Corsair K95, Razer BlackWidow, Logitech G910 or Logitech G710+.

Finally, about macros in GW2. Macros are not allowed in GW2 in any form. That is, you’re not allowed to use a macro key to perform a series of button presses. You are limited to 1 keypress = 1 in-game action, which is mostly called rebinding rather than a macro.

You can do fine, especially at low levels, with a normal mouse and keyboard and I think it would be a good idea to get used to the game and get an idea of what more you want from your mouse and keyboard before you consider spending money on them.

While this is true, some professions have so many professional mechanics that a mouse with additional buttons can make playing much easier. And it’d be quite sad to see someone not play a profession that they are interested in because their choice of hardware is limited.

I wouldn’t necessarily say “overkill”, but neither the DeathAdder nor BlackWidow offer much that’s going to help you in GW2. This is because the DeathAdder is a generic mouse loved by a lot of FPS players.

While the DeathAdder is an excellent mouse, it’s still a very basic one, although with RGB backlighting and a good sensor. However, when it comes to mice, you should always prioritize comfort over extra functionality. The only exception is when you’re looking for additional functionality, such as more sidebuttons, which will alter your choices.

As for your keyboard: It will do nothing to improve your game. It won’t make you better in any tangible manner. The only thing that a keyboard can offer to you to make you “better” is higher key rollover, but that’s very rarely an actual issue. The primary reason to get a “gaming” keyboard would be getting a mechanical keyboard with a ton of features, as a lot of the non-gaming mechanical keyboards have little in terms of extra features as they are mostly sold to enthusiasts and typists.

Here’s a short list of questions that you should ask yourself regarding your mouse and keyboard:

• Are you left-handed?
• Do you prefer an ergonomic shape or an ambidextrous one?
• How many buttons do you want on your mouse?
• Where do you want your extra buttons to be? Left thumb? Right thumb? Under the scrollwheel?
• What are the features that you require from your mouse? For example, if you play older games, you might want the ability to switch your DPI so that your mouse cursor doesn’t go batkitten crazy due to lower resolution.
• Do you want a mechanical keyboard?
• Do you want media keys on your keyboard?
• Do you want macro keys on your keyboard?

Some of the achievement chests gave PvP skins. With the Wardrobe, you gained the ability to use those skins in PvE as well.

The issue with sending the data has nothing to do with how many bleeds exist serverwide.

Also, considering that our servers are sharded, someone in Queensdale has no effect on someone in Orr. Heck, with the Megaservers, people in different instances of Queensdale won’t affect each other.

The problem arises from the amount of data that has to be sent in real-time to all the players involved in a large boss encounter. Your suggestion would do nothing to reduce that load. What your suggestion would do, however, is double the bleed damage at cap and make it easier to condi specs to ramp up to full damage (since you’re doubling their starting damage and speed of application).

And the thing is, your suggestion wouldn’t work. You can’t “halve” odd numbers of stacks. Not to mention halving skills that are not part of a chain and only apply 1 stack already.

Radiobiology.6185:

Olba.5376:

So… your solution to MF is to nerf the percentage and make it apply to chests?

MF not applying to chests was obviously intended. Heck, people are already going totally bonkers over farming champion chests. If MF affected them in any way, it’d just make the brainless drones even more effective, which is exactly what we don’t want.

Also, you do not need to “better” reward older player in comparison to newer ones. That makes no kittening sense. If anything, the newer players should be the ones getting the better rewards, because they have nothing. The older players, on the other hand, have months, maybe even years of gameplay behind them, which already puts them on a higher ground in terms of in-game wealth.

Why is it strange that older players should get better rewards? It works the same way in real life, in a job for example, older and more experienced workers get a higher salary. Giving a higher or even equal salary to someone new doesnt make any sense at all.

How about we start with the fact that a lot of people play these games to get away from such things in their real lives? Whatever you think of that is irrelevant, so let’s not go there.

The thing is, the game has been out for 2 years now. One of the biggest problems with MMOs is their longevity. An MMO that has been out for long has an economy that is centered around the older players. These older players have all the advantages on their side: they already have their gear and they know all the things. Quite often, this creates a situation where many new players quit MMOs due to the amount of effort it would take to achieve some of their goals.

In real life, the older employees get the better pay for reasons that simply do not apply to MMOs. A more experienced player is already getting rewarded because they know the most efficient ways to achieve their goals. A more experienced player gets rewarded with faster, more lucrative farming in dungeons and elsewhere. And in case you think that everyone having access to the same resources means that everyone is already on a level playing field, you’re wrong: There are things which are not obvious unless you have considerable experience. And no, you can’t just grab a metabuild from a forum somewhere, as that won’t give you the required set of skills and knowledge to properly utilize it. In fact, a new player grabbing a metabuild is more likely to end up dying and quitting the game out of frustration as those builds always require immense amounts of practice and knowledge to execute properly.

I’ve been with the game for over 2 years now. I do not feel that I deserve better rewards than someone who would start today. In fact, if I ended up getting better rewards because of how long I have been playing the game, I would feel quite bad.

So… your solution to MF is to nerf the percentage and make it apply to chests?

MF not applying to chests was obviously intended. Heck, people are already going totally bonkers over farming champion chests. If MF affected them in any way, it’d just make the brainless drones even more effective, which is exactly what we don’t want.

Also, you do not need to “better” reward older player in comparison to newer ones. That makes no kittening sense. If anything, the newer players should be the ones getting the better rewards, because they have nothing. The older players, on the other hand, have months, maybe even years of gameplay behind them, which already puts them on a higher ground in terms of in-game wealth.

Boro.7359:

At this point Olban, citing Balance Reasons for a system that’s not only imbalanced, but also neglected for two years is ridiculous, given that the only changes were removing stuff from low-leveled characters.

So wanting to prevent further imbalance in an imbalanced system is somehow bad? So everyone should just strip naked, dance around the fire and howl madly because none of it matters anymore and we’re all doomed anyway?

And just to list what Arenanet has done for balance reasons, starting from right the first concept view we got into the game.
1: Weapon skills (rotations) linked to the weapon, no ifs, no buts, you take one weapon, you’re stuck with one rotation.
2: Free attribute selection removed, alongside free trait selection (as seen in the woodenpotatoes video somebody linked in the zerker meta talk thread right around the next corner)
3: Traits have been changed towards an even more restrictive system with the condensation of trait points, and further screwing up leveling characters.
4: Underwater combat skills locked until level 8. Seriously.
5: Weapon skill unlocks tied to leveling, panning out till level 10, giving us even less ways to play the character early game.

1. Rotations that only exist in PvE. And balancing in PvE largely consists of tweaking numbers. In PvP, using a clear-cut rotation makes you very easy to read, predict and interrupt.
2. “Removed”? How can you remove something that was never in the game?
3. That’s NPE. It has nothing to do with balance.
4. Again, that’s NPE and has nothing to do with balance.
5. Why the heck are you so stuck on complaining about the NPE when it does not relate to balance?

frostnuggets.6471:

Olba.5376, in response to the n. 1: I didn’t suggest that the minor traits themselves should be removed, nor that all of them are useless/weak. I think the way it works isn’t ok as it is now, because you are stuck with unchangeable traits. Think about it: you spend 6 point in a line, then you are stuck with 3 traits that, sometimes, you don’t want/need at all. It breaks build diversity and may result in balance issues.

Oh please. Breaks build diversity? You know the players in this game, they would take about a day to come up with a meta setup for PvE, PvP and WvW and then… nothing would have changed. Except that all of those builds would have gotten stronger. Which would apply to all the builds of all the professions in the game. Which would be a literal power creep. Which is kind of a bad, bad thing.

As for balance issues, I just finished making the point that being able to pick your minor traits in any manner (being able to choose a minor adept/master/grandmaster trait from the current pool of all adept/master/grandmaster minor traits of your profession or being outright able to choose any minor trait on any slot) would completely break the game. This is because traits are inherently build defining. There are tons of minor traits that are included in most builds because of how good they are.

Regarding n. 2, I think it would be viable with proper adjustments to the quality of each trait and the position it occupies. More builds, more freedom and less “stuck with bad traits”. Or maybe they could just offer more variation of traits per line.

Which would require redesigning the entirety of the trait system in the game. And that’s not only going to kitten off everyone, it’s almost most likely going to kitten up the balance for months.

If your goal is to get rid of “useless traits”, then say so. It’s a much easier goal.

About n. 3: yes, if people could choose ~~freely~~ which stat they wanted, it would become a mess. But maybe a bit more of control over those stats would be beneficial.

The thing is, our balance is based around those stats not being selectable. Some combinations of stats from traits are fine for one profession, but broken on another. For example, Precision and Ferocity being in the same line is ok for a Thief, but broken on a Warrior because the latter has better base defenses.

The only way I could see your idea working is if it was heavily conditioned. That is to say, stuff like:

• Being able to change your secondary stat from Condition Damage to something else if none of your weapon skills apply a damaging condition
• Being able to change your secondary stat from Boon Duration to something else if your character has access to very few boons
• Being able to change your secondary stat from Ferocity to something else if your Critical % is below some threshold
• Being able to change your secondary stat from Healing Power to something else if you have no healing outside of the Healing Skill
• Being able to change your secondary stat from Condition Duration to something else if your character has no access to conditions whatsoever

Of course, all of these would be completely and utterly broken in group content. Which is kind of my point: Either you accept the massive spike in power and upset in balance that would come with selectable traits and stats, or you just don’t do it in the first place.

Weapon swapping on elementalist would be OP as heck.

As for separate utility slots for weapon swaps, it would be broken as kitten, considering that Thieves would lose out on it (as they don’t benefit from swapping due to lack of weapon cooldowns), whereas Warriors would benefit the most due to having the shortest weapon swap cooldown with Fast Hands.

You might as well straight up suggest 6 utility slots. Which would be only slightly more ridiculous, to be honest.

Comparing anything to Kill Shot makes a very invalid comparison.

Pin Down was given a longer, flashier animation because it was too strong for how easy it was to land. If you want to land it, bait them dodges out of your enemies like a decent player.

You’re looking for the exact opposite of what most MMORPG gamers want.

For most MMORPG gamers, the holy grail is using a minimum amount of keys on the keyboard, with everything else on the mouse. There’s at least two reasons for this:

1. Most keyboards are very limited in the number of keys that can be pressed down at the same time. This means that you’re more likely to run into situations where what you’re trying to do won’t happen because your keypresses are not being registered properly. An example of this? Let’s say I’m strafing diagonally on my Thief and want to jump while channeling Infiltrator’s Strike. This would require me to press 4 keys at the same time. Not only would this be mega-awkward, it’s also beyond the 3-key limit of most keyboards, meaning it just won’t happen. Having at least one (or more) of these on my mouse would completely fix the issue.
2. MMORPGs generally use WASD for movement and the number keys and function keys for skills. For a lot of people, this feels unnatural. There’s two ways around it: rebinding to different keys or rebinding to mouse. Rebinding to different keys can result in the same situation reoccurring, especially when pressing multiple keys at the same time.

Whittaker.5692:

1. What should I expect in Guild Wars 2,
2. What should be on the top of my Priority list,
3. Which Race/ Profession combinations are the best (In your own opinions)
4. What should I do as soon as I emerge myself into the vast world?
5. And most of all, what should I do to maximize the fun out of this game?

1. Active combat. No healing or tanking. No raids.
2. Having fun and exploring the beautiful world.
3. The races in this game do not come with notable benefits. There are racial skills, but none of them are strong and only a small portion of them are useful in some very rare cases. Of note is that different races are of different sizes, which creates a different field of view and a difference in the animations. Norns are notoriously bad for doing jumping puzzles whereas Asura are popular for PvP due to their small animations.
4. Not buy gems with money.
5. Experience all of the races. Experience WvW.

We’d be back to Frenzy+100B and Haste+PW killing a lot of people before they could react.

frostnuggets.6471:

1- why are there minor traits? It is like you MUST have the trait X to be able to get the Y, even if you don’t need or want the X. It doesn’t feel good when you put 6 points on a trait line and you are obligated to stick to 3 unchangeable minor traits. So, couldn’t all traits work like the current system’s major traits? This way, you would be able to choose exactly the traits you want. Thus, more freedom and build diversity.

2- why to split adept, master and grandmaster traits? Sometimes, you really want the grandmaster trait X, but you don’t want most of the minor traits and the adept/master traits that come before. Or you want to equip 2 of the grandmaster traits of the same line, which is impossible. So, couldn’t the effectiveness of the trait be determined by the slot it occupies, plain and simple? For example: you have a trait X that gives you +50 power (example) if used at an adept slot. But, if you put it in a master slot, it would give you +100 power, and +150 for the grandmaster slot. This way, you would be able to have, for example, 2 master and 1 grandmaster traits (considering the current system and nomenclature) equipped, and their effect/bonus would scale accordingly to the slot it is equipped in.

3- about the innate attributes when upgrading a trait line. Sometimes, you don’t want that faster burst regeneration, or the increased boon duration. What if you wanted more power and condition duration, for example? Couldn’t those attributes gained from investing trait point be selected by the player, at least until a certain degree? Lets say i put 6 points in a line. This line allows me to choose between +X condi, precision, ferocity or power. This way, builds would be, again, more diversified and specific to the role you want to play.

1. There’s plenty of minor traits that are extremely useful. Adrenal Health, Fast Hands, Renewed Justice, Vigorous Precision, Inspired Virtue, Meld with Shadows, Feline Grace, Preparedness, Healing Ripple. There’s also plenty of useless minor traits and some that are a downright hindrance. Let’s say you removed all minor traits. What this would do is break a ton of builds and professions (Thief and Warrior in particular), while lowering the overall diversity of the professions. Another option would be to do away with Minor/Major classification and allowing you to select up to 6 traits per line as you please. This would break a ton of things, as you’d now be able to get stuff like 2 Grandmaster traits. On the other hand, if you simply allowed people to select each minor trait from the full pool of traits, it would still cause balance issues, not to mention that it wouldn’t fix the bad minor traits.
2. The split is for balance reasons. Currently, the traits are balanced so that you can only have 1 Grandmaster trait per tree or up to 2 Master traits or up to 3 Adept traits. And if you only have to put 2 points per line to get access to Grandmaster traits, you wouldn’t see any builds with 6 points to a traitline, you’d see most going with 2 in everything.
3. Yet again, those distinctions are for balance. In PVE, the most popular stat combination is Berserker. If you could choose your stat combinations, you would see everyone running with the same combinations. And yes, there are some combinations that should never happen. For example, Guardians getting Ferocity minor from Radiance would increase their damage output significantly. Ditto for Warriors on Strength. And what makes you think that a Steal-based Thief wouldn’t take Power as a major instead of Condi damage? The fact is, builds are made from the traits, not the stats. Changing the stats would amount to a massive buff to everyone, more so in some cases than others.

inneedoflife.5092:

You need to go acro, not crit if you want to be able to deal with condis

Can’t say that I love the idea of Pain Response as a way to deal with condis. Not that it’s any worse than a lot of the other suggestions. Just that something like Pain Response is very easy to force on cooldown if you know it’s there.

And considering all of the options here, if you pay attention, a condi spec can easily decipher just what means of condi cleanse a S/P carries:

• Pain Response has the obvious tell of granting Regeneration (something that Thieves rarely get)
• Hide in Shadows has the animation
• Sigil of Generosity can be spotted via condis that an S/P won’t have access to (bleeds, vulnerability, burning, possibly Torment)
• Sigil of Cleansing can be spotted via weapon swapping

And heck, even if you don’t put this much thought into it, Pain Response and Hide in Shadows (the two best options) are on lengthy cooldowns.

Zefrost.3425:

Reason #1 – Flurry
Flurry is the weakest warrior burst skill in terms of damage and/or utility. It literally does the same thing as hundred blades – you stun/immobilize the enemy while rooting yourself to do damage. Problem is, flurry is very weak. The only way I’ve found to make flurry do decent damage (still bad) is to reach 50% or 100% bleed duration.

Options on how to improve flurry (Take your pick)
• Add better power scaling
• Add evasion
• Increase base bleed duration from 2s to 3s

Flurry is excellent as a control skill, since you can stop the channeling and get a long immobilize on a short cooldown. As for your suggestions to improve it:

• Would make it too similar to Hundred Blades, Zealot’s Defense and Pistol Whip.
• Would make it too similar to Zealot’s Defense.
• Would make it too strong. It would have a base damage of 1,530 bleeds, but up to 9700 with a condi spec.

Reason #2 – Hamstring (3rd sword auto attack chain)
On every other class/weapon, the 3rd part of the auto attack chain does better damage than the 1st and 2nd. On warrior main-hand sword? Less damage and a useless 1s cripple.

Options on how to improve hamstring (Take your pick)
• Inflicts bleed and cripple
• Deals increased damage vs bleeding foes

Actually, Hamstring has just as much damage as Sever Artery and Gash. It also has a 0.25s channel instead of 0.5s. And the Cripple? Well, there was a short period where Leg Specialist did not have an ICD and it enabled people to permanently immobilize people with the sword autoattack chain.

Reason #3 – Pathetic Traits
Blademaster and dual-wielding traits. Blademaster is very useless and why are there 3 precision increasing traits in the same tier?

Options on how to improve blademaster (Take your pick)
• Gain ferocity when wielding a sword
• Chance to block projectiles when wielding a sword (strider’s defense copy/pasta)

Again, I don’t think that Blademaster is that weak. It has an obvious synergy with on-crit effects like Precise Strikes, Furious and Sigil of Earth. Also, the issue with changing Blademaster from crit% to Ferocity is that the latter does nothing for condi specs.

Personally, I think that your suggestions are a bit misguided. You’re clearly trying to make Sword a power weapon, something that it was never meant to be. If you ask me, one of the best things they could do for Sword would be:

• Sever Artery and Gash get 2 bleeds for 4 seconds each, instead of the current 1 bleed for 8s.
• Flurry gets 4/5/6 hits, each infliction 2 bleeds for 2.0/2.5/3.0 seconds.

Basically, I want Warrior to be able to put out more stacks of bleeds for a shorter duration. And for Flurry to be quicker and a bit stronger.

There’s no reason you shouldn’t be moving. You’re not an NPC.

Because percentages are relative.

Not sure what’s so “deadly” about Basilisk Venom. It’s a stun on a 40s cooldown.

I have the following:

• Q: Heal
• E/Mouse 3/Mouse 5: Utilities
• C: Elite
• Mouse 4: Dodge
• R: Look Behind
• Shift+R: Autorun
• G: Stow Weapon

Personally, I don’t like using modifiers (Shift, Alt) on keybinds because that results in at least 2 keys being pressed at the same time. If I’m moving, that’s 3-4 keys at the same time, making using my abilities impossible.

If I had my way, I’d have my dodge, heal, utilities and elite on the mouse, but that already requires 6 buttons which is a bit much, particularly since I don’t like the Naga and G600 types.

BurrTheKing.8571:

I have a level 80 Thief…but I honestly despise playing it. This is because the combination of the initiative system and weapon attack designs make the class feel “spammy.” Not matter what weapon set, the pattern is generally that one or two skills deal the damage and the rest are situational. Most builds you see generally stick in one weapon set and then have a shortbow for emergencies.

I’m in the exact opposite boat.

Coming from 1000 hours of Warrioring, I found that the initiative on Thief allows me to enjoy playing Thief because I don’t end up spamming autoattack or swapping weapons, the latter of which would only remind me how much better Warriors are at that.

Then again, I deliberately avoid builds that only use 2-3 of the 5 weapon skills. I quickly grew bored of x/D because you never use Dancing Dagger. On P/P, you pretty much only use Unload. The two weaponsets I would even consider for use would be D/P and S/P.

The problem is, it might be far too late to change Thieves so that the damage is spread out among multiple skills so that it encourages chaining them. I’m also not a Thief main and maybe those that are really enjoy this playstyle. For me personally, I enjoy fighting most classes in the game. I think an important part of balance is that not only is something fun to play, but fun to play against. Fighting a Thief that constantly uses the same sequence of skills (again, not their fault, the game forces it) isn’t nearly as engaging. While all classes have obvious combos, they generally have longer CDs. In addition, on other classes you are swapping weapon/kits/elements so you are seeing at least 2 different fighting styles.

While I agree that there is an awful lot of builds where major damage comes from a single skill (Backstab, Unload, Pistol Whip, Sneak Attack, Larcenous Strike), I don’t think that’s that big of an issue.

The initiative system gets wasted on Thieves because there’s so many weapon sets that have at least 1 skill that is considered useless. When does a power D/D use Death Blossom? When does S/D use Dancing Dagger? When does P/P use Body Shot? The great thing about initiative is that you can use the same skills in a quick repetition, making weapon swapping a choice rather than a necessity.

A lot of the “issues” with Thieves come from people insisting on playing with Stealth. S/D is popular in sPvP due to the way the mode works against stealth, but outside of that, most people seem to consider Thief synonymous with Stealth. Stealth in turn pigeonholes you into Shadow Arts and stealth skills (Backstab, Sneak Attack, Tactical Strike), which make for repetitive combat.

TL;DR: You don’t need to change the core of Thief gameplay, just make all of the non-stealth skills worth using.

Zevix.1479:

Warrior is a bit of a rampager, so why not reward them with a “kill streak” like game play mechanic?

Adrenaline decay begins 3 – 5 seconds after Out of Combat. Keep a portion of your adrenaline on Burst Skill if it kills/downs the target.

It would reward Warriors for better planning their Bursts and still be able to hold on to their adrenaline a little longer while moving to the next fight.

It would “reward” you if your idea of “better planning” means “never use burst to finish off an enemy”. Which is the direct opposite of the current model.

Actually it was to fix that they had no penalties at all to how they used it or didn’t use it. Like missing their burst didn’t use up any adrenaline, and that they could hold adrenaline for a minute.

I think that you’re lumping all the simultaneous changes to adrenaline under one reason and making a mistake. Punishing warriors for not using their adrenaline at the end of a fight makes no sense. Fast adrenaline decay only prevents you from opening most fights with a burst combo. Which is perfectly in line with ANet’s stance of not wanting fights that end before they start (what they said about nerfing Quickness).

xXBurningEmberXx.6085:

evilapprentice.6379:

WvW of PvP?

If it’s WvW I can’t help you.

If It’s PvP, which amulet, what runes? When you say Signet, do you mean assassin’s with the 5might stacks on signet use trait?

Link your build and it’ll be much easier to answer this question.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAoaVl0Mp0pNOx7J0PNRPBtdAi9D4MCXwznEFA-T1BBwASOCAYV+B4RAkXDDy9HgcCAOrEEA-w

1. Your traits are a mess. x/6/6/x/x is a typical WvW build, but that’s defensive. If you want ALLDEMDAMAGES, you pretty much need to go 6/6/x/x/x.
2. Your runes are defensive. That’s also majorly hindering your damage.
3. You’re not using the Might-on-Signet use trait.

Something like this. A quick numbercrunch gives me around 8k average for Backstab, assuming that you have the 25 Bloodlust stacks and pop all signets for 15 Might.

Healix.5819:

Do you like carrying up-leveled players through level 80 content? Because that’s what it would be like. People would turn on “hardcore” mode and spam 1 while following a zerg, further increasing their rewards, which is already multiplied compared to doing the exact same content without a zerg.

That kind of sounds like one of the arguments that were made against MF when it was still a gear stat.

And your tone is reminiscent of the so-called “elitists”.

If they wanted to implement GW1 style hard mode areas, they should have done it with dungeons. Dungeons should have scaled for 1-5 players and treated as explorable mini areas rather than 5-man dungeons. It would have made them more popular at the very least and added a lot of content to the game. Story modes for example could have been a part of the personal story, rather than an optional dungeon related to it. Adding something like vanquishing to a dungeon would be easy.

Oh but story modes are part of the personal story already! You know, Zhaitan and stuff!

The way I see it, a Thief is a havoc character. Bursting down people or killing people who are low on health. Taking camps. Killing Yaks and Sentries.

In my opinion, a Thief is not fit for unorganized zerg play at all.

For most of my time on GW2, I’ve been playing a Warrior. Out of all weapons on a Warrior, I fell in love with Sword. Power-based Sword, to be exact. Eventually, after a lot of thinking, that lead to me making an Ascended Sword, as I figured I could use it on my Thief as well.

For me, Thief has always been a profession that I really wanted to play, but simply sucked at. D/P ended with doublecasting Blinding Powder on accident, D/D was boring (as I found myself rarely using #3 and #4) and S/D had me evading myself off of bridges to an untimely and uncool demise.

Well, as it turns out, I love the spec that I dreaded the most: the completely stealthless S/P Steal build. However, looking at that, I don’t see that much condi clearing. I doubt that Shadow Return and Infiltrator’s Return are enough to deal with heavy condis. So the question is:

• Am I missing something? Is there some useable condi clearing available that I am just not seeing?
• Is using Runes of Melandru and Lemongrass Poultry Soup really enough to handle condis?
• Am I just supposed to not be able to handle condis?

Ohoni.6057:

Sure, but we can’t know that without knowing what the intended distribution is meant to be.

The thing is, it’s not really fair to expect ANet to release drop rate info. Firstly, we don’t even know how a single subset, such as exotic daggers, is organized in the tables. Secondly, in the event that they released such a list and it was of a readable size, you would instantly have people raising hell about drop rates of their preferred items being too low. And that would drown out any valid discussion by sheer volume, which is an extremely undesirable result.

We can’t give feedback as to what’s “right” because we don’t know what “right” is meant to be. All we can do is give feedback on how things FEEL to us, and ANet can decide what, if anything, they wish to do about that. If we note that it “feels” wrong to receive zero of a desired item when other players seem to be getting several of them

And here you’re showing the same problem again: “Bad” drop rates mean different things to different people. Some people think “bad drop rates” is all about precursors. Others want more exotic drops. Others focus on the quantity of items they are getting.

There’s also the subset of people who take into account the time used to get those items. That’s one thing the drop tables cannot reflect accurately. These people don’t necessarily care about the absolute quantity of items they are getting, they only have eyes for the quantity/time aspect. And if you ask me, these people should be ignored, at least as long as we have a full RNG system. Unless you’re literally documenting every single drop you’re getting over thousands of drops, it’s all meaningless, anecdotal “evidence”. You can’t just take a deck of cards and pull out 5 card hands for 8 hours straight and think you have a good sample of all 5 card hands.

The way I see it, there are two distinct groups of people talking about drop rates:

1. The group of people who complain about not getting that one drop they desire.
2. The group of people who complain about not getting as many of the desired drop as other people.

The two groups have different opinions on what to do with RNG as well. The first group wants drop rates improved on an absolute level. The second group wants the outliers (“lucky” and “unlucky” players) dealt with.

They can also work it the other way, by having some situations where you are guaranteed one token, but might also receive a few more, most people wouldn’t complain too much about that.

If we go with a token-based system, I think we need to have high volume on the tokens. Tokens don’t suffer from the space limitations of stacks, so that’s not a problem. Higher volume also means greater precision for smaller samples, which is always desirable. After all, the difference between 0 and 1 is relatively far greater than 10,000 and 10,001.

So? Do people in the top bracket deserve to be making a lot more? If they do somehow nerf that, then maybe those top bracket people would make less, but one, that would likely be better for the economy as a whole since it would mean that the wealth would be a bit less concentrated, and two, they’ve already done well enough for themselves under the current system, so they shouldn’t complain too much of the golden dice get taken away, they’d still be out ahead of the average

The thing is, the people in the “top bracket” are only in it in one tiny subset of items. Someone who has gotten multiple precursor drops in a short amount of time is not in the “top bracket” in the same way as someone who gets a lot of generic exotics. And no, you can’t look at this from the perspective of gold either, since that isn’t always applicable (not all drops are sold) nor is it a constant (markets determine the prices).

From what you said, it kind of looks like you believe in some hidden “account luck” value that determines all of your drop rates forever. I sure hope that’s not the case. From a purely statistical point of view, the people on the top of the bracket are identical to the people at the very bottom: they’re both statistically unlikely events. Saying that someone “deserves” to be at the top because of “luck” is not only ridiculous (luck is not an attribute of a person), but disrespectful as hell since it’s equivalent to stating that the people at the bottom “deserve” to be there because of “luck”.

Joshoowa.6940:

I’m super new to GW2, but as I’ve been watching a lot of Log Horizon (Anime) I decided to be a thief, becauase it’s the closes thing to a ninja/assasin I could think of.
At some point I got a pistol from an enemy, and realized I could dual-wield it with my dagger, the problem is all my attacks are based on the gun.
Even when I get close to the enemy, I’m still shooting the enemy while my dagger just looks pretty.
What I’m wondering is, how do I properly use dual-wielding and set my skills the way I like them.
I" know nothing haha sorry ^.^’j
Thanks to anyone who can give me advice

For Pistol and Dagger, you can swap them around. What you’re using is Pistol in mainhand with Dagger in the offhand. You can swap them and then you’ll be using Dagger as your main, with a pistol sidearm.

Though personally, if I was making a Thief based on Akatsuki, I’d go with with Sword/Dagger. Or even Dagger/Dagger.

Tadsoul.6951:

the recharge were suppose to long to make more boon stripping useful

Which would literally make those traits useless. Professions that have boon stripping have it on cooldowns that are far, far lower than 30s. And of course there’s the fact that in some cases Swiftness would be a lesser sacrifice than Might, Protection, Stability, Regeneration, Retaliation.

You could make it something like:
Signet of Insertname
“Grants 5s of Swiftness every 5s.”

DrAntagonist.8623:

1. Why is there an Edit Account button if it only opens a webpage?
2. Why does the Black Lion Trade always show the same symbol whether it’s 1 copper, 50 gold, an item, or a combination?
3. Why is there so much empty room for currencies, and only Gold and no-one-gives-a-kitten? Why are there no Laurels, or Karma, or something actually used?
4. Why is there no automatic salvaging (of rarity, can use, etc.)?
5. Why does ArenaNet remove unachieveable achievements, but keep the bag slot lock there forever?
6. Why is there no auto-loot?
7. Why is there no ‘never pick up junk’ option, or ‘delete all junk’ option?
8. Why does hitting escape cancel moving? Hitting anything cancels moving, why can’t I change my options while autorunning?

1. Because they chose to have that functionality on the website rather than in-game?
2. Because you would need a ton of symbols for the possible combinations? Just a simple “order of magnitude” set, you end up with 3 symbols for currency, 1 for items and 3 for combinations. That’s confusing as kitten.
3. The empty space is created from the width of your inventory. The Gem count is flush left whereas the gold is flush right. Adding other currencies would make the UI inconsistent and kind of ugly.
4. Because that would result in tons and tons of complaints about people accidentally salvaging things.
5. Because they might add more bag slots in the future?
6. Does pressing one button really kill you inside that much?
7. Because there’s an option to sell that stuff at every trade NPC? And because we have bags so that we can filter junk items there?
8. Because Escape cancels everything?

Blude.6812:

Ayrilana.1396:

Blude.6812:

Ayrilana.1396:

Blude.6812:

John—-just a single concept is needed to guide the team—-Fair and equitable for all players.
I believe you understand the current method is neither.

How’s everyone having the same chance as each other not fair and equitable?

I’ll just quote the OP, Mr J. Smith!
“Here’s the premise. RNG is evenly distributed on aggregate. On an individual level this means that while almost everyone falls into a reasonable range in the middle, there are outliers on each side of the distribution that are either highly rewarded or not rewarded at all. These individuals become sample cases and spotlights for experiences that maybe shouldn’t exist.

Please remember to read the 1st post carefully and in in it’s entirety.

Please remember to read up on general statistic and probability carefully.

Everyone has the same probability of getting a drop under RNG. There’s no differentiation between accounts/characters other than MF. If an item has a 10% chance to drop then everyone has that same chance to get it. Since they have the same chance, this means person A getting two in a row would also mean person B has the same chance at getting two in a row as well.

As far as your quote of John’s, nowhere did he state RNG was unfair and unequal. He just stated that there are likely to be outliers but everyone has the same probability of being that outlier.

It is enough that there is a recognition that RNG is a problem for some and extremely generous to others. Hopefully they will do something about it.
Moved to whiteknight ignore list.

You don’t need recognition for that. Random distribution is not the same as even distribution. But if you look at what most of the people who complain about RNG are saying, they’re pretty much always comparing themselves to someone who gets more stuff than they do. I have never seen anyone complain that the RNG is fubar here because the poster is getting more drops than a lot of people they know. See the problem there? You literally have no way of knowing whether you’re getting your data from an average user who simply chooses to compare themselves to the few “luckier” outliers, or someone who’s an outlier themselves on the lower end.

The simplest difference between a truly random distribution and an even distribution is that the former can and should have clusters. After all, evenness is a very simple, very obvious rule, which is the opposite of randomness.

In the OP, John outlines three different approaches to non-RNG drops. In it, he specifically mentions the two most often mentioned approaches: First would be implementing a counter for “unluckiness”, which would keep track of your “unlucky” drops and act once it hits a threshold. Obviously the issue here is measuring the “unluck”, as different people will think differently on what is an acceptable level. Worst case scenario? It gets implemented, but the threshold is so high that most people give up before reaching it.

Second would be implementing a non-random token system. For this to not fall into the RNG pitfall, you’d have to make it so that you always get a token for a kill. The downside here is that people will find the easiest monster to kill and farm them instead of the tougher ones, unless you give the tougher ones a disproportionate amount of drops.

Personally, I am most interested in the third option that JS laid out. That is, altering the the current RNG function so that the outliers (in both directions) are less likely. Naturally, the problem here is that the people who are in the middle won’t feel any change and the people in the upper portion will feel a negative hit. And I would be willing to bet that a significant portion of the people who claim to be having bad drops are actually in the middle, just that they know some people who are in the top bracket.

Iason Evan.3806:

There is an issue though when converting gold you earn to gems to buy what you want on the gem shop: Inflation. The amount of playing I have to do now as opposed to a year ago has increased a lot. I don’t know the actual percentages but it feels like gems purchased with gold have gone up 100%.

Actually, if you look at it, you’ll see that not only is the price increase very linear overall, but that the price of Gems in terms of Gold has roughly tripled in the past year.

Also, since the rising of Gem prices is linear, that means the change is constant. That already tells you that things are under control. After all, you can’t expect Gems to not inflate, since the supply of Gold is infinite. Having a linear price increase is the second best possible scenario and far, far better than the next alternative. Namely, exponential increase. Now that would mean everyone is screwed. On the other hand, achieving the best case scenario of a logarithmic growth isn’t feasible without extreme regulation, e.g. far, far stronger, completely unavoidable coin sinks and some gem faucets.

I for one know I don’t like having to earn twice as much gold due to inflation to get the same type of thing on the gem shop that I got last year. It’s understandable that this is one of many causes for the game feeling less rewarding along with RNG being so skewed toward the house.

Things have to increase in price. If they don’t, that means that the supplies are being generated and taken away at the same pace. And that’s just not feasible, since you can’t have everyone paying the same expenses while the amount of “income” varies greatly. The other option would be variable coin sinks, but that’s not going to work, since the richest people in the game have all of their wealth in goods rather than currency. Not to mention that making sure that no one cheats by sending their currency away would be impossible.

Kitt.2567:

I can understand your 2nd point but about 1st point, do you consider warhorn conversion is totally random conversion that we cannot select what we want to convert and those thief and guardian does not always inflict only blind at one time upon us? For guardian they spam pretty much burning and for thief probly poison not just blind. So converting fury by using warhorn ON PURPOSE is pretty much impossible, or you just stand and do nothing until get blind to convert only? Therefore longer fury duration is needed as it is hard to just sit down and wait for blind. 3sec is just too short, and warhorn skill def have cooltime.

1. See Thief use Black Powder (very obvious, they kittenING DISAPPEAR afterwards)
2. Run into Black Powder for 2s to get Blinded.
3. Use Warhorn
4. Get Fury.

It’s very easy to do if you know anything about the skills of your opponent. A D/P Thief has two primary means of blinding you through Black Powder and Shadow Shot, both of which are easy to spot.

The same applies to Guardian, as their Blinds come from the Sword teleport, the the Focus attack and GS leap.

And warhorn skills does not convert stun or daze effect into boons, they are cc but not conditions, only fear that necro would do into boons. they pretty much spam fear actually with many other conditions, including corrupt boons that convert all boons into cond. Even though fear is applied and if we could use warhorn while in fear, you dont know which cond warhorn would convert, fear shoudlnt be always first one to be converted, as it is totally random conversion that game system determine.

The thing is, you can’t set a priority for cleansing like that. For someone, cleansing Bleeding before anything else is priority. For another, it could be Poison. In some cases, it’ll be Fear.

Warhorn is bunker line weapon, and this bunker job need stability by any chance but sadly no for warrior, yes for guardian unless you sacrifice one shout into balanced stance. Meanwhile, guardian heal a lot more than warrior’s do with their staffs and mace shield and shouts, virtue and elite healing tome skill as compared to warrior’s just 3 shouts or just regen banner, and they even have stability also, and granting a bunch of protection as well. Warrior bunker line need some kinds of buffs for this reason

You’re not looking at this from the right perspective. Guardian bunkers with boons, because that’s how they support their team. Warriors support their team with DPS and offensive boons, so their bunkering has to come from somewhere else, otherwise you end up with Warriors having every boon under the sun.

Kitt.2567:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quick_Breathing

1. If you look at blind converted to fury, it only grant 3 sec since converted.
I think this is something wrong, almost no one will have any benefit with only 3 second of fury. increase it up to 9 sec just like others.

2. fear to stability, but no one can use warhorn skill while in fear unless stance. I do not think warhorn user would have stance in their build though. This should be done something different, like, warhorn skills becomes useable while in CC effect. anyway warhorn is in bunker line so there must be some kinda of “treatment” against to fear.

1. That’s not going to happen, considering how prevalent Blind is. Your argument about “everything else” being 9s also doesn’t apply, since Protection and Stability aren’t 9s either. This would be a particularly nasty problem against Sword Guardians and D/P Thieves, since you could pretty much cleanse blinds at a pace where the conversion would give you permanent Fury.
2. The point with Quick Breathing converting Fear to Stability is in Warhorn being an AoE weapon. You can use Quick Breathing to convert Fear on a team mate to Stability. Everything doesn’t have to be made for solo situations.

I wouldn’t say that you have truly explored the world until you have done some of the more significant forks in the Personal Story. Mainly all of the racial bits, the Order part and the Skritt/Quaggan/Hylek stories.

That is, unless your definition of “explored” is having been to all the places. Ask yourself: Were you there physically and mentally? Do you know the central storylines in each major area of the game?

The problem with adding new stuff is that you simply cannot create it at the pace the players can (and will!) exhaust it. No matter how hard to try, you’ll always have some people who will have done everything within a week or two.

Other than that, adding new professions would be quite unlikely, since there’s a lot that goes into a profession, such as having a unique subset of the weapon useable (no two professions can use all the same weapons) and balancing for PvP, WvW and PvE. And of course, as soon as you add a new profession, people will keep asking for you to repeat it, which just makes the situation worse by adding more skills to the pool to balance.

You might want to keep some of them in stock for an easy (and free!) Monthly Masterwork Crafter achievement.

As pointed out, Riposte is meant to block single attacks whereas Shield Stance is meant to block a flurry of attacks. As it happens, single big damage hits are more common in PvE and flurries of smaller damage are more common in WvW and sPvP.

As an example, let’s imagine that you have two skills, A and B. They both deal 5,000 damage, but A deals it in a single hit, whereas B has kittens for 1,000 damage each. In this situation, you end up with the following scenarios:

1. Riposte against Skill A: Completely blocks all damage, 15s cooldown.
2. Shield Stance against Skill A: Completely blocks all damage, 30s cooldown.
3. Riposte against Skill B: Blocks only the first hit, resulting in taking 4,000 damage.
4. Shield Stance against Skill B: Blocks all damage.

So really, the way to make Shields useful in PvP does not require changing Shield Stance at all. You can just make some of the high-damage single hit skills into multihit skills. The advantage here is that your suggestion for Shield Stance would make it one of the most OP defensive skills in the game as it’d be a 3s immunity against physical attacks on a 15s cooldown, which you might recognize as being identical to Endure Pain having a 15s cooldown.

Kitt.2567:

1. While guardian’s Renewed Focus now becomes meditation skill that heals and grant fury, you did nothing on warrior’s warhorn skills since patch. I know warhorn is great in wvw but i am spvp user. and this warhorn work badly in spvp. you could grant at least stability also as warhorn is at bunker line.

Meditations healing requires a 30 point investment. And have you looked at the other Elites that a Guardian gets? The tomes cannot be used in water and replace your weapon skills, making them pretty useless.

The thing with Warhorn is that traiting for Quick Breathing is in a direct competition with Cleansing Ire and most people wouldn’t even consider making the trade. However, Warhorn makes a perfect compliment to a Shout build, because Shouts take 30 into Tactics to begin with and have their core traits in the Adept and Grandmaster tiers.

It’s not that Warhorn needs to be improved, it’s that Dogged March and Cleansing Ire can replace most of the functionality (clearing condis and movement impairments) without requiring a specific weapon. Heck, if you beefed up shouts somehow, you’d see people running around with Warhorn all over the place. And in case you haven’t been to WvW, most Warriors there run with a Warhorn.

2. Rifle is probably the most nerfed one since patch. they removed bleeding then grant double adrenaline only if you hit the target that is 4th skill’s vulnerability is applied, but who would you use that 4th skill that much? (the cast time of 4th skill is too long and not effective at all, low damage)

You’re conveniently forgetting that Vulnerability can be gotten from other sources, such as Rending Strikes from the same Arms traitline. Sadly, it competes directly with Crack Shot.

If you ask me, now that Rifle doesn’t have bleeds anymore, I’d move Crack Shot over to Strength, allowing people to do something like 2/2/4/0/6 to get Crack Shot, Rending Strikes, Cleansing Ire and Burst Mastery for a pretty solid setup.

The worst nerf, Kill Shot, which is the hardest one to make it hit in this game, now lose all adrenaline when it misses. Torment nerf is nothing as compared to this. Do something man do something. This killshot is actually the one in need of emergency repair but no one seem to care since most people uses longbow instead.

You say that after how long of Arcing Slice being useless? Heck, a lot of people agree that even the new Arcing Slice is useless because of its low damage.

But hey, if you want to fix Kill Shot, there’s two ways to go about it. You can either shorten the animation or make it less obvious. The former would make it harder for people to time dodges and getting out of range to cause a miss, but wouldn’t do anything for the misses that you’d get due to blinds. Changing the animation to be less obvious would be an overall better help, but it could easily end up on a course like Pin Down and Skull Crack, which were given a more obvious animation and increased cast time, respectively, mostly because the animations were hard to tell in some case, Asuras being a major source of complaints.

Cina Reas.6938:

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t a level in an MMORPG conventionally marked by an improvement in character stats. If that’s correct them GW2 has less than a third of what was included in the original game!

Reading the wiki I can only see 14 points during experience gain, at which the character improves attributes, plus 10 intermediate points in which the character could improve via traits.

I guess I should be happy that I played to 80 when it was possible.

We used to get stats, skillpoints and traits on most levels.

Once in a while, you’d have someone come on the forum and say that they don’t feel that the leveling experience is serving its purpose due to the level scaling we have in place.

With the change to leveling, ANet didn’t change the amount of stats or skill points you get, they just lumped them together once every few levels. The result is that when you do get them, it usually comes with a significant change (your base stats are significantly increased and you get a bunch of skill points), instead of trickling to you slowly.

The same was true for trait points: When we had 70 points to allocate, anything that wasn’t a multiple of 5 was only a tiny increase in your base stats. Another downside of the 70 point system was that new players were particularly susceptible to spending trait points in ways that wouldn’t unlock a new minor or major trait (such as spending 3 points instead of 5 into a line).

From what I can see, the stance that ANet is taking with the change to leveling has the following points:

• You should spend time familiarizing yourself with new things whenever you get them.
• Getting skill points should open new options for you.
• Getting trait points should open new options for you.

Retaliation is not a condition, it’s a boon.

Also, if you want damage immunity in a zerg, your best bet would be Defiant Stance as it makes even retaliation heal you.

The thing is, Endure Pain was never a true invulnerability. It’s always just made you immune to direct physical damage.

It wouldn’t make much sense to have a flame that does not function as a light.

So… are you looking for a way to make 1 button do 3 things? Or are you trying to press 3 buttons at the same time?

The former would be illegal in the game due to the macro rules in place stating that 1 button press can only amount to 1 action. The latter would be an issue with the hardware (most likely USB as a whole, actually).