Guild Wars 2

Incurafy.6329:

The only reasonable option is the second one that you mentioned. Anything else is just stupid, in my opinion.

To be honest, I used to dislike Last Refute, but it wasn’t until recently that I realised that it has saved my butt while roaming in WvW far mire times than it has killed me. It’s actually not a bad trait at all, it just needs to work differently from regular Stealth.

Making a life-changing minor trait a major trait instead of a minor one, and replacing it with the essential Infusion, thus allowing the fans to pick it while not forcing the haters into having it, is stupid to you? You clearly haven’t seen stupid then. Just hit the back buton and read any other thread on this forsaken forum. Or take a walk. Suggestion 3 was obviously a joke.

Vital shot: Bleed your foe with a shot to the vitals. The icon: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/7/76/Vital_Shot.png

Disabling shot: Do an evasive leap away from your foe while firing a crippling. The icon: shot.http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/d/d8/Disabling_Shot_%28thief_shortbow_skill%29.png

And I mean to nitpick because this is quite silly.

Coldin.2840:

I personally wish Thieves had the ability to dodge while immobilized,

Yeah, if only thieves had withdraw, roll for initiative and http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Disabling_Shot_

Last Refuge is objectively one of the most hated minor trait in the game. The problem isn’t the design as much as it is its implementation. It works appropriately in situations where you aren’t actively attacking, but it’ll most likely kill you if you are. This is especially true of shadow arts thieves which tend to rely on stealth as a survival mechanic. Being revealed for 3 or 4 seconds against your will when falling below 25% health has to be one of the most frustrating experience in any game I’ve played, and this doubles up when you’re in the process of using cloak and dagger. And I’ve played solo queue in League of Legends, so that speaks for itself.

The fact that this trait hasn’t changed is at best reprehensible, and at worst dread-awful design that most likely illustrates that nobody actively plays a thief at anet. And as much as I’d like to see heads roll on that one, I’ll just casually stash away my frustration and strongly suggest possible changes.

Are you ready to have your mind blown?

Suggestion #1: Replace the trait.

No **** sherlockxygen? Just make it a major trait and replace the minor slot with something that pretty much everybody goes for: Infusion, Cloaked, Protector or Embrace. Or anything else really. Or no trait at all. We, good players won’t be forced to play with the atrocity, and the fans will get to keep their crapstain of a trait. It’s a win-win situation.

Suggestion #2: Fix the trait

How? Well, here’s a little gem for you: Mesmers actually have a way of stealthing despite being revealed. “What?” I can hear you yell at the monitor “Why the hell has this not been done before? Why does the non-stealth class bla bla bla better design bla?” I don’t know. Laziness, incompetence, rigging or sheer oversight. Who knows, who cares? The point is, the stealthing effect provided by Last Refuge could simply be changed to function like Decoy, in that it has its own special little fancy category that doesn’t consider or proc revealed. Note that Decoy will reveal you when broken by attacking, but the point I’m making is that this skill has its own rules, so why wouldn’t Last Refuge do so as well?

Suggestion #3: Delete thieves

Self-explanatory.

edit: Nice job on censoring “isn’t—its”. Above and beyond with fascism.

Happens when you shadowstep or steal while stealthed. It’s like the game forgets to give you your particle back.

asks guildmate to make post
thanks guildmate in post

?????????

Arganthium.5638:

Simplicity

Don’t say black powder because good warriors know that the range on their attacks is slightly more than the radius of black powder so they can avoid the blind entirely all while continuing to apply their constant stuns.

Radius, not diameter. c:

Just BP -> stand near the back of circle -> use range to your advantage.

Also, range in general and evading important attacks are both good ways to counter warrs.

Except the war can walk 2 steps and reach you there anyway

I thought of that too, I feel like they skipped on a nice opportunity to do something original.

Why do people do this? Why do you try to “hide” your build, as if it were some kind of top secret super revolution that’s worthy of the thief nobel prize? Why do you want people to whisper you? Are you looking for personal approval? Are you an attention seeking missile? I think you might be.

This is where the apparent negativity stems from. That attitude is really obnoxious. Especially since the build is absolutely not novelty. Changing 5 points doesn’t make it so either.

For starters, you should choose between air and fire – not both. They share cooldowns. Fire is probably better; the AoE is nice versus mesmers and anytime there’s more than one target, it becomes more valuable than air at the cost of something like 10% less power scalling. Accuracy is OK on offhand, however, I would get force if you run hidden killer. If you think you can get away with it, have a weapon set (short bow is where I like it) with bloodlust and switch to it when you’re about to land kills to stack it up.

Hey, I know these guys. They are OK. Free bump.

Venomous aura should just be caked into venoms themselves.

The problem with p/anything has a name: “body shot”. It’s a dreadful skill that is never going to generate more damage than straight up using Unload, even with a full party. Why? Vulnerability is such a passive condition to generate for any class – with many 1-attacks passively granting up to ten stacks, and many traits to generate even more on crits or under other conditions. It’s even worse in PvP than in PvE, and it’s even worse for condition builds until vulnerability starts working for conditions as well as direct damage. The duration is also trash – 3 seconds, really?

>That would be nice but its really not necessary its already pretty decent. More vids of p/p domination otw ;p

Yeah, because killing underleveled players without a clue is the most riveting of experiences.

I play as a full zerker thief roamer. It’s possible, but you need to play accordingly – carefully, obnoxiously and taking advantage of everything you can. Check it out, it,s in my signature.

Steal signet of rage’s boons and shadow return to avoid movement/damage skills.

Here’s bits of streaming against a warrior that wanted to get a few duels through: http://www.twitch.tv/oxygg/c/2391332

One good thing to do is cloak and dagger from the back while the target is immobilized by infiltrator’s and can’t turn around.

Here’s another one I guess http://www.twitch.tv/oxygg/c/2391312

swinsk.6410:

That thief prob was using d/d or s/d. It’s funny this warrior is complaining about heartseeker when blind is what really kills warriors. Tells me this guy hasn’t got a clue what is going on and he’s probably never stepped foot in spvp.

Hi swinskie

also, yeah. Heartseeker doesn’t even deal more damage than autoattacks unless your target is under 50%. If you get – which I highly doubt – HS’d to 50% in the first place, then you need to capitalize on the fact that the thief is out of initiative. Bad player, moving on.

Kilger.5490:

Lets put it this way, its the worst of the other 5 point minor traits, excluding perhaps barbed precision (2 second bleed… really?)

You must be out of your mind. For a condition necromancer, that’s 450 damage. Tell me if a jagged horror can even deal that damage over its unaltered full lifetime.

I’m fairly certain myself that the “first” finisher you see when dropping the mark initially doesn’t count. Try using spectral wall and dropping it there, and see if you get chaos armor. It never worked for me unless I had a nearby enemy to blow up the mark.

DS also technically takes its power from toughness since less damage taken is more or less like an increase to your LF pool. It just won’t affect conditions, to which necros aren’t specifically against receiving (not with 3 ways of transfering them and spiteful removal, and of course, consume).

Toughness is still better than vit in almost all cases.

The problem is that they’re worthless without traits. Skill categories should never be worthless unless traited into – they should all have baseline efficiency. For instance, conditions aren’t worthless unless traited into. In fact, they’re about 40%-50% as effective as a condition build, depending on how much cdamage you can gather. Jagged horrors probably aren’t even near the 10% mark of a minion master’s own.

More issues arise when you’re “forced” to pick them due to the fact that they’re one of the very bad and unversatile minor traits in an otherwise very good traitline. “Want to improve your staff? Here are some worthless minions, and 20 toughness you’ll never benefit from!”

Retaliation deals decent base damage. It’s also not too good versus C&D unless the thief happens to be a pistol thief, which you don’t care for. C&D tends to be heavy spikes, not fast spikes like unload or pistol whip, unless it’s the aforementioned sneak attack. Which is more like tickles.

Winterfell.8915:

10/30/0/0/30

As you can see the daze on steal is amazing when ppl are stomping with stabilty. n4 daze when ppl are almost dead and trying to heal :P

And the burst its just a fun build with a 20 sec steal.

hf

Everybody wants to be somebody lol

Daze can’t interrupt with stability

PP will suck and continue to suck as long as it has body shot, and as long as it’s a bad mash of condition damage and direct damage without any relevant defensive option.

The best defense against libel is truth. There’s no ad hominem in my post. You are objectively pompous, and you are objectively abusing intellectual veils to promote subpar playstyles. Just edit/remove your build.

When upset, proceed to mad hominem. There’s zero correlation between player skill or knowledge and server. You should know that mister science math guy. Actually, I take that title back. You aren’t really anything but defending a questionably awful build behind a fallacious logical veil.

Hence my planet analogy. Do you get what I’m saying here? You ignore so many variables that no amount of spinning numbers in your favour will make up for this build’s deficiencies. There’s no point in arguing the details of a generally flawed premise. At best, people will ignore you. At worse, you’re misleading newer players. The latter is unacceptable.

I think that this build has more potential than Jumper’s, in the same way that the planet Jupiter has more potential than Terra because it weighs more.

Math is everything… right?

“My build finally explained”. Yeah, finally! As if anyone had been waiting for that. As if anyone “owned” builds.

The level of pompous, gratuitous and foundationless self-glorification displayed by Arganthium here is off the charts. Why this thread is given any attention at all is beyond me, though calling out a better, actually known, player may be quite the original way of finding a brief spotlight.

Technobabble. This is how I’d qualify this entire… thing. Lots for words, lots of veiling pseudo-maths, lots of unfounded assumptions. How does it feel to hit like a wet noodle, by the way?

I mean, the guy runs sigil of air without any critical hit chance for crying outloud. Oh, but oxy, I have like 15% lol! Snap, you got me.

Thanks for the answers. Most correlates with my findings, notably 1) and 2).

thread title.

Same question with lingering curses.

Chill could simply affect initiative at 1/4th the rate it’d affect other classes cooldowns. Why? On anyone else, 4 skills is the most chilled can affect.

So, about a ~17% reduction on initiative generation.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

This is an intended effect for the Superior set. For balance reasoning we cannot have 3 sets of 15% boon duration.

So you give it a useless/ bonus instead? Does anyone really care about chill duration? Is chill duration even remotely as impactful as boon duration or, hell, any other condition duration?

edit: lmao, less and bo is censored, so I can’t write “useless and bonus” together. When your politically correct ****** filters start hindering basic communication, it’s time to review them. You aren’t protecting anyone.

Because necromancers are dark.

Hi, I’m a new 80 necro’, and I’ve decided to adopt a condition-based build. But I’ve hit a wall: I am unsure whether to run a rabid weapon with undead runes for maximized damage, or a giver’s weapon with lyssa/mad king/x for maximized duration. However, I’m not looking to be given a strait-up answer of “this is better”. I’ve played the game long enough to analyse the benefits of both setups, HOWEVER, I run into issues when it comes to how exactly the mechanics function.

Assume the following setup:

Spite: 30%
Giver’s weapon: 10%
Runes of Lyssa x2: 10%
Runes of the Mad King x2: 10%
Veggie pizza: 40%

Total condition duration bonus: 100%

Master of Terror: +50% on fear
Lingering Curse: +33% on scepter

My questions are:

1) According to the wiki, Lingering Curse allows your conditions to be extended beyond the 100% extra condition duration limit. Is this information true?

2) Does Lingering Curse provide a boost only to scepter-generated conditions, aka, the bleed/poison from the Blood Curse chain, and the bleed/cripple from Grasping Dead only or does it provide a boost to all conditions applied while wielding a scepter (such as those provided passively by gear, such as Sigil of Earth, by traits, such as Dhuumfire and Barbed Precision, and offhand skills, such as Enfeebling Blood)?

3) Seeing that Lingering Curse may allow conditions to bypass the natural +100% limit, does Master of Terror function the same, in that it could be used to generate +150% duration fears?

4) How are partial ticks truly calculated? I remember reading somewhere that a 1.5 seconds fear would tick once on the first application, and twice on the second, and then back to one time… etc. Is this the case?

5) Given that 4) may be true, is this also the case for other damaging conditons (bleed, burn, poison, torment)? This makes all the difference in terms of the importance of breakpoints.

6) Given that 4) may not be true, would non-damaging conditions, (chill, cripple, weakness, etc…) still apply their effects for quarters/halves… of seconds? For instance, would one see the benefits of a 1.5 seconds chill versus a 1 second chill, whereas one wouldn’t see it with a 1.5 seconds bleed (assuming again that 4) isn’t true)?

I know that this is some heavy stuff, but one of you may know. If this remains dead, I’ll do the testing myself.

I’ve experienced that problem a lot as well. The issue is how revealed works, not necessarily the short bow. “Fixing” trick shot would only be a temporary plaster, because other skills (pistols, anyone? dancing dagger?) can also pop you out of stealth if you cloak mid-flight.

The solution is simple; the game just needs to check whether or not you are stealthed when you attack.

In other words…

Revealed Triggering

-Trigger: An attack is made from stealth // typical revealed trigger
-Trigger 2: Leaving the shadow refuge aoe // its counter, less known trigger but still one!
-Trigger 3: Revealed by anti stealth // the wvw trap

-Condition: Succesfully hits target (hostile or neutral)
-Condition 2: Attack was initially made from stealth // this is our key point here, this means that unless the attack was made from stealth, revealed will NOT proc from the action section

-Action: Apply revealed debuff to thief
-Action 2: Remove stealth effects
-Action 3: Revert 1-attack to non-stealth version

etc.

Zacchary.6183:

I think Quick Recovery should be:
– Gain 1 initiative every time you use a Skill that uses initiative.

Just makes more sense to me.

That’d probably be too good on certain skills, but notably heartseeker.

As for QP, Quick pocket is a good trait, but swapping can be akward just for the initiative gain. Say you’re using dagger dagger versus some stationary boss. Your offweapon is short bow. If you’re initiative starved, you’d want to switch, but using a short bow for 10 seconds would be a large DPS loss. Using it with the same weapon set allows you to really get the most out of it… but you sacrifice much flexibility.

I love the trait, however. One of the better designed ones in terms of tradeoffs and stuff.

Warriors have a permanent +25% speed with melee weapons with only 10 points into bursts line, and tons of mobility with GS. They aren’t slow anymore.

You’re not seen if you don’t suck

Master of Timespace.2548:

Oxygen.5918:

Seth.4927:

Oxygen.5918:

Permastealth builds are stealthed for 4 seconds (3.5~) before C&D’ing back into stealth, so either you overlooked this, or don’t understand the mechanics. Either way, it wouldn’t do kitten, and would only nerf Shadow Refuge’s initiative regeneration side effect.

Thought I made it clear, but I’m referring this change into the D/P weapon set where you can drop the smoke field and do 3~4 Heartseekers in it (each costs 1 initiative each due to the trait) and thus attaining a “permanent stealth”.
x/D gameplay really shouldn’t be affected, thanks for the input on SR.

That isn’t what permastealth is, though, even if you “made it clear”. Don’t twist definitions. You shouldn’t misuse terms.

What? It d/p sure can permastealth in every sense of the word.

It doesn’t yield anything, unlike C/D every 2.5/3.5 which does in fact deal damage. That’s the major difference. Why the **** would anyone complain about heartseeking through black powder? If you miss heartseeker and hit someone by accident, you lose everything and your life. It makes no sense to post about this

Seth.4927:

Oxygen.5918:

Permastealth builds are stealthed for 4 seconds (3.5~) before C&D’ing back into stealth, so either you overlooked this, or don’t understand the mechanics. Either way, it wouldn’t do kitten, and would only nerf Shadow Refuge’s initiative regeneration side effect.

Thought I made it clear, but I’m referring this change into the D/P weapon set where you can drop the smoke field and do 3~4 Heartseekers in it (each costs 1 initiative each due to the trait) and thus attaining a “permanent stealth”.
x/D gameplay really shouldn’t be affected, thanks for the input on SR.

That isn’t what permastealth is, though, even if you “made it clear”. Don’t twist definitions. You shouldn’t misuse terms.

These don’t include base skills changes.

Traps need to be improved, and “trapper” style needs to become viable. It’d be pretty fun, at least, if Tripwire and Needle trap didn’t overlap so much. A trait (or even base change) to reduce their cooldowns by ~33% and improve their damage wouldn’t be too much asked.

Venoms need to not be reserved to one gimmicky build. Spider venom applies too much poison which is unnecessary because we have 50 ways of applying it, and it often gets removed. It needs to deal less poison and have base damage added to it. Something like 200+pow*0.05 per strike.

Then, a new trait needs to be made to improve the duration of conditions on venoms. Drake a joke, so is untraited devourer, and it would improve the torment condition on Skale (which will probably be underwhelming, mark my words).

Assassin’s signet’s active is a damage loss. Who made this?

Last refuge needs not to apply revealed.

Permastealth builds are stealthed for 4 seconds (3.5~) before C&D’ing back into stealth, so either you overlooked this, or don’t understand the mechanics. Either way, it wouldn’t do kitten, and would only nerf Shadow Refuge’s initiative regeneration side effect.

Yeah, it’d probably replace flanking strike, and Deepseeker could provide a leap finisher for the new Ink Bomb.

and harpoon shot

Puru.4217:

-9 tailed strike: It’s good, i completly disagree with you about this skill, if anything i’d like to see more counter skills added on this class in the futur, be it underwater or on land.

My explanation against it is that it feels very warrior-like (in fact, warriors have an ~exact copy of the skill); blocking doesn’t feel thiefly. It’s poor thematic. It is a good skill (both in usabilty and concept), but not for the class.

If anything, it could be changed to something where the thief “blurs” or prepares to move until an attack is made against it, dodging out of the way when attacked and hiting the target from behind for damage, providing some additionnal evasion. Now, THAT would be a thief skill.

stinkypants.8419:

Oxygen.5918:

1) a few random players within the aoe do, and your charges are expended at the rate of 1*number of players hit. It sucks.

2) same thing

Wait… why is this a bad thing? Seems legit to me…

Spreading your charges over 5 people isn’t nearly as strong as getting them on a single person. Individual venom durations are too weark for you to want to spread them. 1 second chill? 2 sec immo? Woopty doo.

OnyxGryphon.6037:

I’m sure you would, as the only way JQ in it’s current state can compete to stay a top tier is to 2v1 BG.

I’m not denying that BG is doing very well. However, my premise supposes that 2v1’s are naturally bound to happen against the bigger of the three, simply because they’d own more stuff to capture. It has nothing to do with “allying”. You seem to interprete this differently, however. JQ is still T1 material – just not first place anymore. We’re a PvE heavy server, and whenever there are events, our PPT dips. The proof is the Super Adventure Box. For weeks we’d been leading feriously our PPT, and when SAB hit, we suddenly became third or second for an entire week. When SAB lost its novelty, JQ hit #1 for a few weeks again, until Molten Facility. From then on, it was #2 or #3, simply because events were chained (MF, Southsun, and now, Dragon Bash – later, space pirates). Shrugs.

swinsk.6410:

Thieve is pretty OP under water if played right.

Roll for the init + withdraw will get you across the entire lake almost, certainly out of clip range.

Infiltrators signet for regen, spam 5 and never get hit.

Under water fighting is terrible in this game no matter what class you are.

Absolutely, however, the video wasn’t really meant to cover balance.

I tried writing something, but it sucked. So I made (streamed) a video. It’s pretty long and moves along slowly, but pretty in depth, and not shallow at all. Puns not included. Watch it and comment. It’s worth it, for thieves glory.

http://www.twitch.tv/oxygg/c/2424808

The main points include:

1) Skill redundancy
2) Bad stealth-breaker skills
3) Doesn’t feel thiefly
4) Skill unoriginality copied from ground skills
5) No means of stealthing
6) Senseless/lazy utility selection
7) Poor design (condition vs. power)
8) Lack of combo fields and finishers

1) a few random players within the aoe do, and your charges are expended at the rate of 1*number of players hit. It sucks.

2) same thing

Dodge cloak and dagger, that’s the core of the build. No C/D hit? The entire SA traitline becomes useless, and no sneak attack. If you die to 1 spam, you need to review your life as a GW2 player.