Guild Wars 2

Daecollo.9578:

ensoriki.5789:

inb4 bunker thief.
inb4 needacondtspectokillthisthief.
inb4 hekeepsremovingmyflippingcondis.

Looks at Guardian Board.
Comes back here.

What?

What he said. Perhaps in stead of protection add passive non-boon regen based on initiative like the warrior trait that regenerates HP relative to adrenaline? This makes sure you’re still relying on the thief’s superior mobility, and rewards the mobility and smart tactical strikes while playing mostly visible than just spamming down to zero initiative all the time.

Considering sword is all about smart tactical strikes I feel like a trait as game changing as this should encourage selective ability use and discourage init dumping.

Daecollo.9578:

Thieves with Healing Power are completely worthless (we don’t have many healing abilities, and P/W+Unload are our only high-hit-rate abilities, it should be buffed 80% like necromancers minion was, that thing heals for almost 950+ every ‘2’ seconds, along with all there other heals, with NO healing power.

“At an 80% increase I’d be quite literally unkillable, pushing nearly 2k heals while never stopping damage, on a build with 20k HP and 2700 armor with bleeds that tick for 130.”

Omnomberry Pie + Malice healed me for far far more, and I was hardly unkillable, you forget that thieves have the lowest health pool and some of the lowest armor. [I wear full Knight’s Gear.] (No access to protection or a damage reduction signet.)

P/P and P/W have no stealth, and stealth users don’t really benefit from Malice that much, they hit hard, but only hit once.

Remember, you have to actually “hit” for SoM to proc, unlike other things… So if the enemy dodges or is slippery like an elementalist, getting those hits off is much much harder then it appears to be.

Buffing SoM to heal for 926 and giving it an internal cool-down would also be in favor. (But that would just make people want to go into more backstabby nonsense…)

You and I have different opinions on SoM and healing power, which is fine, but I will say I’d be really sad to see SoM buffed with an internal cooldown. Speaking from personal experience, it works with a little healing power but it does make you work for getting the most out of it. In a vaccum, SoM is an underwhelming heal compared to the other two. In the context of a stealth build which stacks it with other passive heals, or a balanced S/P acrobatics build it’s actually pretty viable.

I’m not saying an 80% boost would make me faceroll immortal, but I am saying that kind of healing combined with stealth and mobility creates a build that’s more evasive and harder to kill than the bunker eles that just got nerfed. Yeah, I’d abuse the heck out of that, but it wouldn’t last, and it wouldn’t work long term the same way omnom didn’t work long term.

SoM tends to scale in to higher viability in larger target number situations, making builds which can use it properly much more adept in PvE and WvW but pretty lackluster in sPvP. It’s a drawback, and were the majority of my fights solo encounters I probably wouldn’t be using it. However, my build decisions are informed by the fact that I’m, pretty much always, in at least a three mob or player fight, where little quirks of SoM’s mechanic and its interactions with skills like dancing dagger, daggerstorm, caltrops, cluster bomb, and some others make it scale extremely well. Well enough that the healing power from my trait lines and one fully charged life sigil have made it consistently outperform the other two heals without significant investment in healing power.

On the subject of healing power, you’re right, we don’t have a lot of healing skills and it isn’t a good investment… unless you’re using SoM. Under the passive of SoM nearly every skill on the roster becomes a healing skill, and some skills become amazing healing skills when used in combination.

I’m not saying SoM is a good fit for every build under the sun. It’s a horrible choice for low hit volume builds like stealth backstab, and getting the most out of it literally requires a shift in both build and playstyle. Saying SoM is plain out bad (and the blood minion for necros was just plain out bad. A passive heal on a low attack speed pet that died all the time) is like saying d/d 3 is plain out bad. It’s bad if you’re not specced for it, it’s significantly better than your other options if you are. Assassin’s/Agility signet is bad if you’re a condition build for instance. Heck, pistol whip drastically falls off in utility the more enemies you add to a fight. Skills have best case and worst case scenarios. All skills are not equally useful in all situations.

That’s all I’m saying. Skills like SoM promote build diversity, but at the same time buffing it too much to make it generally useful to all builds would push those builds too far. Fundamentally changing its nature would destroy anything set up around it, the same way fundamentally changing a skill like backstab would. Better ratios? Sure. It might encourage healing power as a more desirable stat for more thief builds. 80% heal buff? That’s just a nerf waiting to happen.

The Champion groundskeeper event at the end of the cursed shore labyrinth is a fun event. I make my way down there and solo the event every time I’m in the area, but today it could not be completed.

Every time the groundskeeper is reduced to about 3/4 of his max HP, he instantly teleports underneath the terrain, where he stays until he has fully regained his HP. At this point he seems to lose all aggro and completely reset, as he goes in to idle animations (using his hoe on the ground) and doesn’t persue me if I’m not nearby (Typically fighting some of the other risen respawning in his room.

I fought him through about six such resets before I finally gave up and left the area.

I am dissapoint. I like killing this guy and was going to use it as part of my dailies. Please fix the groundskeeper!

Daecollo.9578:

Signet of Malice isn’t that great, it needs its healing increased by atleast 80% so S/P and P/P are more viable.

P/D benefits a lot more from the Stealth heal.

The reason S/P, P/P need improved signet of malice is because they lack a lot of condition removal because they don’t have access to stealth.

While I wouldn’t be upset to see the ratio increased on SoM I think 80% would be completely overdoing it. With just a life sigil I’m pushing 134 per attack, on top of trait heals for about 420 per c&d that’s a solid 1k heal every stealth attack, plus whatever I’m getting from stealth trait-heals. Not to mention the heal pulses from the birds on my mad king runes, every time something takes a tick from dodgetrops, or the stupid amount of ticks given when a zerg runs through a field of caltrops.

At an 80% increase I’d be quite literally unkillable, pushing nearly 2k heals while never stopping damage, on a build with 20k HP and 2700 armor with bleeds that tick for 130.

Yeah, it would be awesome, but it also feels like too much bunker, something that was just toned down a bit on the ele for a similar reason. Durable should be possible, but unkillable is a fine line, especially when we’ve got so many really good passive heal traits.

Remember that ratios exist the way they do to account for the entire picture. Sustain heals on any class/build are only as good as your investment in them. SoM is tuned the way it is on a thief specifically because of our trait passive heals, and because of our ability to continuously spam high hit-per-minute attacks.

All three thief heals are very good heals. Hide in Shadows and withdraw are situationally useful to soak big damage once on some pretty generous cooldowns. One’s got a stealth, and one’s got a dodge. These are really solid skills. Signet of malice is a little more tricky to use as its usefulness is in its passive effect, and in stead of a cooldown (because the active is just shooting yourself in the foot) the drawback is that you can’t one-button recover from big damage. You can come close however with some creative choices of gear, skills, and combo fields.

Personally I’ve found that my overall survival rate increased when I experimented with speccing around it a little. Not because it’s better or worse than the other heals, but because I specced for it.

That’s the difference I think. HiS and Withdraw are about as useful as they’ll ever be right out of the box. Sure, you can scale them up a bit with healing power but it’s not a good investment for something that’s not healing you very often, and you’re taking them because of their “all this stuff rolled in to one button with a pretty good heal” mechanics. Especially with the CD change to withdraw they’re both nearly perfect in their roles and make a good case for thief having possibly the most diverse and useful selection of self-heal skills of any class.

SoM is exponentially more effective when you gear for it, favoring healing power as a replacement for some vit and toughness. It doesn’t have the one-button utility of the other heals, but the point is that it has some very viable build options, including S/P control builds.

I will agree with you about P/P needing… something though. It’s just a headless mashup of too-expensive control skills, one power/crit dump, and all that rolled in to a condition-based auto.

Daecollo.9578:

Drawing Guy.3701:

Ahhh, all these posts of “broken food that I completely relied on to not have to actively play is now fixed, breaking my build”. This supposed nerf has driven every aoe/rapid attack build to the ground. The simple fact is, these in of themselves are not “builds”, but setups that exploited an OP food and were reliant on that broken mechanic.

Honestly the thief has the highest combat mobility in the game. Almost every weapon combination contains spammable mobility moves, a ton of evade and blind moves. They have so much going for them to allow them to control a fight that I don’t see there as a bad weapon choice if traited right. The only thing is culling breaks stealth in WvW, so any build that doesn’t exploit that is comparatively weak now that the food exploit is gone.

Of course, you pretty much got rid of the rapid attack healing option, but that is ok because we still have backstab. Now we can all be the same!

Except you still have that option. It’s called Signet of Malice. The difference is that now you have to choose it as part of your build rather than having extra gobs of passive healing on top of what are already some of the best active heals in the game.

I don’t see a problem with that. Signet of Malice, with the attack timing of the thief, is still one of the most powerful sustain heals in the game. I use it religiously on my P/D and it’s actually even better on S/P. Believe it or not, thief builds in both PvP and PvE exist that aren’t all crit damage and evasion/stealth. Toughness, vit, and healing power actually do increase durability while sacrificing damage, just as they do on any other class. The bonus is that you can still make that sacrifice while losing none of your access to our powerful stealth and evasion-based active skills.

The difference here is that the pre-nerf food allowed you to sidestep any tradeoffs for the survivability it offered, on every build that was using it as a “main heal” an simply stacking zerker and playing glass cannon like it was a more balanced stat build, or worse, stacking it on an already defensive setup and becoming far more durable than was reasonable.

Since the fix, glass cannons are glass cannons again and balanced builds actually have more value compared to glass cannon backstab than they did before.

CassieGold.7460:

Delgan.8619:

You see I was always told to Salvage Blue items, you’d advise against it Popeurban?

I salvaged blues last month when I needed to hit 500 salvages…. usually I vendor them. I noticed a serious decline in my cash flow when I stopped hucking my blues at a vendor.

Flip side, high level blues can salvage to t6 mats, but so can high level whites. I say vendor them for the garunteed money, and let people who like to gamble on the results being better than the vendor price gamble.

This. The average white item at 80 is worth a few copper at a vendor while the average blue item is worth nearly 1s. I’ve found that they salvage with about the same resource rates, and than generally your resources from salvaging a white or salvage item are worth more than what you’d get vendoring them, while the vendor price for the blues is often better than the resources from salvaging.

Also, on the question of the cost of salvage kits, they’ll generally pay for themselves, but using anything better than a crude kit when salvaging low level items rarely pays off. Using a master (or mystic, if you have a few forge stones) is well worth the cost for high level items as you’ll start to see a really good return on things like ancient logs, gossamer, and ori.

It’s a fair point about magic find, but honestly MF gear is still perfectly viable to farm with, even if the “screen chests” would replace mob loot for event mobs.

The difference is that you wouldn’t be able to easymode aoe massive hordes of risen with little to no danger to yourself while doing it. That’s the problem with events they’re trying to fix. There are still planty of non-event mobs to farm, the difference is you’re not nuking 10 mobs every six seconds without even a hint of danger to yourself, but you’d actually have to work a little bit for your farm.

I feel like that’s reasonable, makes events fun and rewarding for the sake of the event, and allows better event scaling for more epic battles without those battles feeling like a waste of time.

In short, simply nuking penn/shelter or similar events all day wouldn’t be a better income than doing any other task, but rather players could do any number of events, dungeons, boss chests, etc. and experience a generally uniform reward to risk ratio. There simply shouldn’t be a handful of tiny corners of the world that are just plain better. Harder battles should reward better loot, and easier battles should reward less.

If you’re facerolling something like the old pen/shelter, you simply shouldn’t be rewarded as well as doing something that’s actually dangerous (Also, the new boss chests are awesome, but the events are still way too easy)

Notes say they fixed his chest to be properly lootable once per day but didn’t say anything about fixing what’s in the chest. I’ll have to check later so see if he’s handing out rares like the others now.

I see an opportunity to impress anyone nearby because they’re so big and gnarly looking, but so horribly easy to kill.

I’ll hop in on this. We do the megadestroyer all the time because it’s probably the most fun boss event in the game. We did him post patch and were a bit suprised to see his chest wasn’t updated like the other bosses.

Please fix this guy’s loot!

markic.4359:

people dont realize….like every good company anet is looking how to make more money…there are still plenty of people that work and dont have more then 2hours a day to play the game so they buy ingame stuff with rl money….
letting farmers farm all they want is not something that benefits them…
thats why they come with stuff like DR and nerfing best farming spots

DR is a lie….it doesnt stop or discover bots at all….who ever is botting…they will keep doing it with DR or without….it just stops farmers and hard workers getting normal loot all of the time.

eventualy after some time there will be more and more people leaveing the game and anet will have to do something to attract newcomers and old people back to game

i saw it happen with xx mmorpgs…so lets just wait and hope it happen soon

The whole “it’s because money and gems” argument is getting stale. Everything in the game doesn’t revolve around gem sales. Sales in the TP and the lunacy that is black lion chests revolve around gem sales.

They designed some events and a scaling system with a much smaller base of sample users before release. The found out really fast that their events scaled poorly, turning said events in to all-reward no-risk encounters. This is disruptive to the overall game design, and more importantly, just plain isn’t fun to play and in the case of some builds, is actually very frustrating for some players while being very rewarding for others.

When you have a car with four tires and one goes flat, you fix that tire. Not because you’re trying to sell the car, or because you’re a taxi driver, but because it’s a car and it’s intended to work in a certain fashion and it isn’t.

Hey there Tarnished Coast and lands beyond. I’m the leader of The Papacy on Tarnished Coast. If you play on TC, or if you’re in WvW’s tier 2 you may have seen us around now and then.

It has come to my attention that a large number of people would like the rewards from guild missions, but don’t have the time or resources to devote to unlocking them, don’t want to leave their own guilds, or don’t want to become part of a large guild. We get it. We’re a small guild ourselves and wouldn’t dream of changing that.

We have dreams though, and those dreams are to complete guild missions. Your dreams are all the fancy things on the commendation vendor. I figure between the two of us we can get some of that done.

We’re moving up the Economics line, and we’d like to present the unguilded, small guilded, or just plain greedy a very simple option:

You’re all invited to join us as event participants. We don’t care if you rep outside of events. We don’t care if you contribute influence. We don’t care if you leech. Our guild will have a few more people to do these events with, and you will have a pressure-free opportunity to get the guild commendations you’re after (and also experience the content)

The current Schedule is:

Public Access Guild Bounty
7PM Server time (10PM EST)
Mondays
Tarnished Coast Server
Rally in Lion’s Arch

• If you’d like to participate in guild missions with us as they become available, simply submit a PM to me via these forums. I’ll add you to the roster as an Event Participant. I also may write you a poem. In my head. In broken sixth grade french.
• The Event Participant rank is a pressure free rank with no permissions other than representing, which you can use just for the mission rewards and then turn off if you like.
• We ask only that you treat other participants (and actual POPE members) with respect whenever you’re in our guild chat. If you become a problem in chat or actively work against mission goals you’ll be removed from the event participation roster. Also, I’ll say BOOO very loudly and make you feel ashamed of your behavior.
• Missions will be held on weekends, with times noted in the guild MOTD as soon as they are available to us. You are not required to show up, and we are not required to wait for you.
• You are neither required nor expected to represent any time you don’t want to, nor are you required to pay or donate anything you don’t want to (You can if you want though. That would be swell.)
• Missions will be unlocked as fast as we can gain the influence. This will be exactly as fast as we gain it and no faster. If you want to help speed it up, that’s fine. If not, that’s okay too. If it’s not progressing fast enough for you, we understand if you remove yourself from the roster.
• We understand that we are not your primary guild, and we don’t expect to be. Similarly, don’t expect us to afford you permissions befitting a normal member of POPE. You’re here for the missions only and we’re happy to have you. Think of yourself as a friend of the family. An awesome friend that kills things for that family. Like a hitman that owes someone a debt of honor, or a psychopath.
• If you do decide you’d like to become a full member later, there will be an additional review. This is not an open recruitment, it’s simply an opportunity for those who want to do the missions, and for us to have some extra help on them while compensating those that help fairly with the rewards.
• There may occasionally be non-mission guild events, to which you’re also invited. These events may include acts of abject stupidity, cake, ice cream, free loot, certain death, Quaggans, PvP, PvE, WvW, and a number of other elements too numerous to mention. Said events will also be marked and scheduled in the guild MOTD.

Spread this message to anyone you think might want it, and stay tuned to this thread for updates on our upgrade progress and event schedules.

I think it’s got a decent handle on both sides of the coin. As irritating as Traherne is, the last leg of the personal story (orr and onward) is pretty darn serious. The ambient conversation in the world is usually light because… well… look where you are. When something happens it’s very obvious to overhear event criers because the entire tone of the voiceovers changes.

It’s a joke to us now… but can you honestly remember the first time you were standing around, looking at a big megalaser, and then heard someone say “There’s something in the water…”

I think the general levity of the NPCs in peaceuful circumstances makes a good contrast to the seriousness of combat. I think the general tongue-in-cheek with the pact in orr feels appropriate because they’re an entrenched army humor is a common device among soldiers to retain their sanity.

Plus, imagine the ambient NPC conversation if it were dead serious all the time. What would they talk about, and more importantly, would you even care what they were talking about?

insanemaniac.2456:

why are you people trying to farm vets in open world pve when 3 dungeon runs will more than meet your quota or spending any amount of time in wvw will get you 2 parts of your monthly without even trying

dont you get bored w/ farming

Because the hylek cave farm was faster than three dungeon runs… or one urban fractal (or trying to get that fractal to spawn)

Literally took about 10 minutes. For the OP, that’s 10 vets per minute, with a party of five though.

Also, some people don’t like dungeons and are asking for an easier option. Some people don’t have a full party for instances and they can run the hylek cave with less people or alone.

Arimahn.3568:

PopeUrban.2578:

Arenanet doesn’t consciously design “farming spots” because they don’t want you farming in “spots” they want you farming via “adventuring” as in, going out, running around, looking for different events to do, and doing them because they’re fun, or because they’re next to that resource node, or because you hit them on the way to a merchant.

Which would be perfectly fine and acceptable to people if it wasn’t for the fact that Orr as an endgame zone is still awful, even with the changes.

Players always try to find the path of least resistance to a given problem. Except, in this case, it felt more like the least tedious path.

Oh I’m not disputing that Orr doesn’t have a lot to differentiate itself from every other zone mechanically. I’m one of the people that liked the old mob density, and I really liked (when they worked) the warpath event system… and I thought more could be done with that.

There’s a big ‘ol thread about using WvW dynamics in PvE endgame and I like it’s tone, although a lot of it’s specifics are bad.

The point here is that yes, people will always find the path of least resistance (FYI, it’s now autoattacking world bosses… and it’s awesome) but when you’re staring down something like the farm events that have been one by one fixed and you get mad when they get fixed I find it’s a very selfish outlook.

People upset over the plinx fix, or the new penn/shelter fixes are mad that their literally too good to be true farming spot got nerfed. They don’t care what’s actually good for the game or what makes the entire game fun to play. If all of Orr was the tunnel area… you’d be kitten You’d say “Hey, this map is horrid there’s nothing to do but farm these waves of mobs” (Actually, people do say that about Orr already, although it isn’t exactly true)

When you look at something as obviously broken as penn/shelter farming you should know that it’s going to get fixed. Those new AoE circles? Those Champs? Those are an attempt to make content that’s more resistant and fun to complete. This is a good thing. The loot? It sucks, but it only sucks because event rewards in general suck. Comparing aoe farm loot from one event to another (and the new events scaled as such are really other events) are what led to these event farming hotspots in the first place. What we need is an across the board buff to event rewards to make every event feel rewarding. Karma is already in a good place with the jewelry boxes, but items and cash are in the toilet.

Keiran.1896:

The hylek cave in Caledon Forest.

If you have some friends, achievement done in 5 minutes.

This cave is loaded with veterans. Every mob in it is a veteran, with the exception of one champion. It is literally a cave full of more veterans than you can kill before they respawn with a party of five people.

There is no “waiting to respawn”

If you’re posting in terms of veterans you can count… you should stop in.

Also, get your exploration achievement while you’re there, and enjoy the puzzle (that does not even require jumping)

Since the above poster didn’t, I’ll give you some directions:

The POI south of falias thorp waypoint. There’s a secret door. You can look it up on the wiki or figure out how to open it yourself.

• I don’t farm, but when I do it’s rarely solo.
• Everywhere
• Varies day to day, averaging 3-4 hours a day (less on weekdays, more on weekends)
• 4-8 gold a day

Making money ain’t hard to do casually.

• Vendor your blues
• Harvest everything
• Use your greens in the mystic forge
• Use Magic find food. Even 30% MF from food only makes a huge difference in the overall quantity of greens and even whites you get from drops.
• Salvage! Salvage every salvage item and white piece of gear you come across. Use the best kits you have access to.
• Don’t horde resources. Liquidate them. If you don’t need a resource, TP it.
• Be aware of the market, some bags are worth more than the average contents.
• Know the price of ectos and determine if it’s a better bet to sell or salvage rares.

Do these things and you won’t be making the “fastest” money in the game, but you’ll be making enough to get whatever it is you want reasonably quickly, and you’ll do so playing whatever content you want. I do mostly open world events with guildmates with the occasional dungeon/fractal or two a week.

Mungrul.9358:

I’d like to raise another point here.
I’m not that interested in the Ascended reward for this content, or the potential of receiving a legendary pre-cursor.
I’d just like to have more content to play with my guild. Not with someone else’s guild.
It’s not about the reward. It’s simply about having more game to play with my friends, and I’m being prevented from experiencing this content with people I know and love thanks to arbitrary gating mechanisms.
The bounties sound the least interesting if I’m honest. The Puzzle though? ArenaNet only need to check the logs associated with my account to see how frequently I play jumping puzzles. I love ’em.
And the guild rush looks a hoot.

All of this exciting new content, locked away from my guild with no likelihood of ever being able to access it. If we do want to play it, we probably have to rely on the charity of larger guilds.

Utterly ridiculous.

That was basically my point. By locking this stuff in an arbitrary linear path they completely removed any sense of individualizing guilds or allowing guilds of variant sizes to tackle content with variable participant number requirements. They removed any point in having research trees at all. Guild missions are a linear upgrade path that retroactively makes every single guild unlock a linear upgrade path.

That’s like suddenly deciding you have to level a ranger to 80 before you can play a thief, and then level a thief before you can play an engineer. You removed choice and individuality from the system.

It’s not about the influence. The influence is fine. The missions should be a rward for climbing all the way up a research line. That’s simply not the way it works.

It’s about having to unlock things your guild may not be able to accomplish because of size before you can access things you can. That’s just really screwed up.

CobaltSixty.1542:

You would kitten a brick if you knew the kind of shutdown mesmers (and necros to an extent) could bring in GW1. Especially to a melee profession.

Confusion is tame in comparison.

Oh they were AMAZING against casters too. Mesmers were just the one class that could perfectly shut down anything if they built for it (but sacrificed being able to take down other things in the process)

I’m gonna cast a – nope
Well maybe a – nope OW
Well what about the… wait why is that on cooldown when I didn’t use it?
Well maybe I’ll just wand him to… wait why am I getting hurt when I wand?
And why am I also blind at the same time?
AND WHY IS THAT GUY USING THAT SPELL I CAN’T USE BECAUSE IT MYSTERIOUSLY WENT ON COOLDOWN?

At least you can clear pretty much all of GW2 mesmer annoying hex effects with one button… and you have your own button.

A: A guild nemesis would be freakin’ amazing. Just a random guy that has a higher chance of showing up when you’re in the open world to mess with you the more buffs you’re running.

B: As for the personal nemesis… I’m thinking it’s that consortium loudmouth that split everyone’s ears during lost shores. You know the guy… CITIZENS. Think about it -

*Is not present in personal story
*Is completely unforgettable to everyone who ever met him (which was everyone that played during lost shores)
*Is extremely, annoyingly sassy
*Is someone you want to beat up
*Is connected with some part of the existing content (The consortium is relocating refugees)

That’s not to say the consortium is RESPONSIBLE for the alliance but… you know, the consortium wasn’t responsbile for the karka either… technically…

I don’t think you guys get it. The point of events is that they all have roughly equivalent challenge and reward for the zones they are in. The point is that you shouldn’t feel it’s a good call to stand in one place and do the same stuff over and over again.

Plinx, penn/shelter, centaur bridge, etc. were outliers simply because of their design. Any event that hinges around large waves of enemies was originally designed to make the challenge a large wave of enemies, not designed to be a better source of loot. Sadly, the scaling was never right, so the largest waves of enemies simply drew the largest waves of players, which completely trivialized the events and turned the mobs in to worthless pinatas.

Arenanet doesn’t consciously design “farming spots” because they don’t want you farming in “spots” they want you farming via “adventuring” as in, going out, running around, looking for different events to do, and doing them because they’re fun, or because they’re next to that resource node, or because you hit them on the way to a merchant.

This is why they limit rewards from the same dungeon path, and this is why they’re making events scale better.

Now, there ARE problems with the implementation of vets/champs in event scaling however. Basically, the point of events was always meant to be the event rewards, not the mob loot. However, the event rewards have always, always, since launch always sucked. Thus, people used certain events as a farm for the drops.

The scaling needs to stay challenging, and I’d like to see the new penn/shelter scaling experiment proliferatred throughout the game, but not if event rewards aren’t boosted to account for the fact that gasp you might actually fail some events now.

You know those “screen chests” you get when you do zone completions, monthlies, and dailies? Why not just attach one to events, and make event-spawned mobs not drop loot at all? Then you’ve got a perfect system where people are actually doing events to… finish the event rather than to farm loot. People that want to farm loot can still farm loot from ambient mobs where the spawn and drop rates are tuned to what Anet obviously considers reasonable.

Yes, you used to get more loot from penn/shelter. No, that wasn’t the point of penn/shelter, and it was obvious it would get fixed eventually.

IMO events should simply be more rewarding than the mobs they spawn, which would encourage people to do events they like in stead of the events that are just a good farm.

I really do enjoy the changes to loot though I agree that it might be best if it were normalized to count the chests per account, and not per character/server, and more importantly the world bosses need to be given the dungeon treatment and actually reworked to challenge the players playing them.

I did six bosses today, and at all six bosses, for the first two I attempted to play them as I had been when we’d been seeing numbers like 5-10 people. Then I realized the extreme lag masically limited me to autoattacking with the occsional skill actually firing off.

Then I realized I was getting gold rewards for standing in one place and autoattacking.

Then I realized I was getting really good loot for standing in one place autoattacking.

And this is on a condition built pistol thief, in an event where the bleed cap never stops being full.

There’s a disconnect here, and that disconnect is that the boss events are now rewarding enough, but because they’re properly rewarding, they’ve drawn enough players to make them trivial to complete. This further enticed people to game the system by using multiple characters, guesting, and a host of other tricks to speed up their boss kills per hour and pull in more loot than is reasonable.

The chests themselves are fine, but the events, or zones, or something needs to be adjusted to prevent these massive and visually impressive bosses from being less challenging to the people fighting it than your garden variety champion. Furthermore, there need to be limits in place to prevent people from gaming the system as extensively as they are able to now.

Three Pounds.2359:

PopeUrban.2578:

Turai Ossa is, in fact, so awesome that an entire section of the afterlife is devoted specifically to proving oneself worthy of walking with the guy.

This.

Does anyone still remember playing him in the Bonus Mission Pack? The guy is so giant and awesome and just slaughters entire armies of undead single handed. He is in fact so giant that he even has “giant stomp” equipped.

That was an awesome mission with an awesome bar of skills for sure. I think I’ll go play it again right now XD

It’s disturbing to say the least. Note that the flame legion are supervising a dredge workforce, so it’s not an alliance of equals.

In all Liklihood the flame legion may have made a power play on the dredge somehow and begun enslaving or simply employing them them in a larger play for wayfarer foothills in order to effectively backdoor the Black Citadel.

Basically, i feel like the endgame here is the dredge, under flame legion control or employment, digging a tunnel in to the citadel, or even possibly digging an artificial sink hole to just dunk the citadel in a single action.

Meanwhile, the Norn get caught in the crossfire, or the agreement is specifically “help us dig a sinkhole under the Black Citadel and we’ll help you take out the Norn”

Gonna have to go with Turai Ossa on this one. I mean, he’s the original Ghostly Hero. When you go to the HoH, you fight for the privilege of escorting him to his place in paradise.

Turai Ossa is, in fact, so awesome that an entire section of the afterlife is devoted specifically to proving oneself worthy of walking with the guy.

Rurik is a close second though.
Invented hundred blades
And not the post patch sword=AoE version, or the GW2 flashy-but-kinda-meh attack version, but the version that filled more adrenaline builds with pure ultimate power than any single sword skill in the game.

Kuishen.6140:

Blacklight.2871:

The reason you can select just some of the achievements to qualify for your daily is so that people wouldn’t feel forced to do activities they don’t like. If there were additional significant rewards for completing all of them, then people would feel the need to complete all of them, and we’d be back to square one.

Achievement points are significant to certain people and I’m not particularly happy with being forced to do WvW (a pvp gamemode) for PvE achievements, I also know people that aren’t happy they should have to create a new character or shout for help to do the Personal Story Achievement part of it.

They need to remove the Personal Story Completion achievement from Dailies completely and if they insist on having WvW be a part of the PvE Dailies then they need to change it to something other than player kills.

Options could include: 5 Guard NPC kills, or 2 Supply Camp Captures, or 3 Guard Flag Captures.

Those type of objectives can be done independent of how well your server does in WvW, aren’t dependent on being skilled in PvP and are relatively non-invasive.

They also encourage people to actually play WvW correctly instead of zoning in and asking where the zergs are and running with them hoping to get some kill credits.

I don’t think you get it.

The whole point of “Do five of eight for your daily award” was specifically so that the could add things like WvW kills, story, crafting, kill mobs in zone X, etc, without forcing you to do them. That’s exactly why all you get for going above and beyond is just a few achievement points and a little XP. You’re meant to pick five, but you get a little something extra for doing… a little something extra.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

I’ve never seen a bot at the pen/shelter locations. Ever.

The events are perfect now? Spawning that many vets and champs is perfect?
This isn’t a freaking temple, with a (now crappy) chest, it’s a normal run of the mill DE.
Champs and loads of vets don’t make any sense here.
They only exist to make it a lousy farming spot, to drive people to other parts of the game. To further punish people for not moving around.

They are using nerfs to herd us around the game.
They are nerf-herders.

To paraphrase an old saying, When the only skill you have is a nerf-hammer every problem starts to look like something that needs to be nerfed.

If this is the new scaling system, it’s garbage. It’s not even worthy of being stuck in a lit paper bag to be left on someone’s porch.

I think you missed the part where these events are the test run of the new event scaling that will eventually be applied to all events. Basically, Arenanet wants all events to scale appropriately to large player counts, and they’re testing the water with a few popular ones because that’s where they know the most people will see and experience the new scaling.

Also, temple chests got buffed, as did most world boss chests. It’s now extremely rare to not get at least a rare from shadow behemoth or maw, not to mention the higher level dragon events (though somehow megadestroyer got left out)

Loot and event adjustments are not something that went wrong in this patch.

I understand why the story is going this way, but I’m also fairly certain hilarity will ensue.

Try talking to the Consortium refugee coordinator in LA.

“Why are they going to Southsun Cove?” (player)

“Because… paradise!”

The system unfortunately cuts off the tail end of this conversation:

“Yeah, did you tell them about the giant killer crab monsters tha-”

“PARADISE! OAK PANELED!”

Should be a fun time in southsun for we adventurers.

-To foster a greater sense of progression and reason for character classes to exist, character classes will now be challenging to earn as well as master, and must be earned and mastered in a specific order.

-Experience gain has been limited to one half level per character per day.

-You may roll a character of any class and level it to 80, but purchasing training tomes for one class will not be available until you have completed purchasing them for the previous class.

-Added four new elites to every class

-Added a new level 80 training tome to every class, which must be purchased before learning the new elites.

Tinboy.7954:

Miss Pink Floyd.9730:

This is just my opinion, of course. The new scaling system now unleashes Champions and many more Veterans, and it ruined the farming. Many people getting downed, too few normal mobs.
It would have been much better if the mob normal mob numbers were increased, and perhaps one Champion. I asked for scaling, but this is NOT what I had in mind.
Personally, I would rather have it the way it was before, than the way it is now.
The quantity of drops seems dismal now.
What does everyone else think?

I liked it the way it was before as well but it was also way easier to hit DR with it. Also, the vets and champs are alright if you are in a group but still nothing as amazing as before. However, the biggest problem is killing the champion mob which takes a long time and have the countdown timer end on you with the mob disappearing. It should at least autokill the mob and give you the loot if you did enough damage. It sucks when you hit the champion mob for like 40 secs-1 minute and you get nothing from it.

I don’t think it should auto-kill the mob, but I do think the behavior of certain events where the mobs flee then vanish afterward could be adjusted to just having them flee, and make them vanish only after they’re out of combat. This would ensure people can at least finish killing something as gnarly as the champs.

I think the point of events was never to easily farm them for a quick inventory’s worth of drops, and the events were simply too easy to complete before.

I think arenanet made a good call here by attempting to balance the events for larger groups of people.

I think it encourages people to get out more in stead of hanging around the same three locations.

I think adding any number of normal mobs does not increase the challenge of events past a certain point because of the large amount of AoE avaliable to players. Shifting them to vets and champs, adding mobs with large siege attacks, and other such challenges was really the only way to ensure these events are still challenging rather than a braindead farm fest.

Arod.3982:

Hellspawn.4836:

Arod.3982:

Guild missions were created and aimed for large groups to do. There is plenty of content that small guilds can do already. If small guilds should be allowed to do this large group content, I should be able to solo all dungeons.

So is it fair that my 2-10 member guild be able to do this content with ease???

That is 100% incorrect Larger Group DOES NOT Equal more Challenging in fact its considerably easier. Heres the Numbers to prove my statement In WoW Theory crafting 10 / 25man.

In 25man Raids 2 Tanks 3 Healers 20 DPS if 1 DPS died thats only a lose of 5% man power on a boss fight.

In 10man Raids 2 Tanks 2 Healers 6 DPS if 1 DPS dies thats a lose of 17% man power

In GW2 Everyone is DPS Hybrid if 1 Person dies thats a lose of 20%!!! man power

Plus this is the first real content patch and its not easly accessiable for smaller guilds thats 100% UNFAIR

I never said it was easier, i said it was content designed for large groups. So its unfair that you cant solo dungeons either.

You can (and people have) solo dungeons.

Also, this isn’t about the barrier to entry for me. This isn’t about the fact that the content is gated. This isn’t about the influence costs.

This is about turning the upgrade system in to a 100% completely linear path, which is contrary to its original design.

Before this update, you spent influence in a manner that best fit your guild. You had options. Don’t need that extra 100 slots in the guild bank? Don’t buy it. Don’t ever claim in WvW? Don’t research the buffs and buy boosts/banners in stead.

The missions, and their costs, are fine. What isn’t fine is that the system is completely linear. You’re forced in to upgrading crap you don’t want, and unlocking mission content you don’t care about in order to access the mission content you may actually want to do.

This is contrary to the entire purpose of having multiple upgrade trees in the first place, and this is a problem. This is a linear path rather than a set of horizontal paths.

Adding a tier 6 to each line and putting a type of mission or two at the end? Fine. Guilds can, as they did before, decide which researches are best suited to their membership, and work toward one type of mission at a time. The rewards per week limit is still there, researching and completing two types of missions will still make the third one go faster, but guilds actually have a choice.

In the current system, there are no choices. There’s nothing special about your guild. Your guild follows the same upgrade path as everyone else, does the same missions in the same order as everyone else, and in the end it does nothing to increase overall guild effect on the game.

Stark has a point, and that point is that often well reasoned and formatted complaints about new systems are drowned in a sea of:

NOW I HAVE TO GRIND X

and

YOU SAID PLAY YOUR WAY

I’ve posted my thoughts on the system. I don’t agree with gating the content behind a single tree rather than letting each one have its own “ultimate unlock” in the form of guild missions.

I’m no less excited about guild missions. If the requirements are reworked, that’s fine, but rest assured that if it doesn’t happen this week it’s simply not going to. At that point you can either whine about it for months after it’s already clear the developers have commited to it (See: Ascended gear) Adapt to and live with the new system, despite its percieved flaws, or vote with your credit cards after stating how you feel about them.

We banked influence, liquidated some things, and are holding that influence to see what happens with this. If AoW>Bounties>Now Your Other Upgrades Count is the way things are, that’s what we’ll be doing. We’ll Complain among ourselves about it but rest assured in the knowledge that everyone else is subject to the same system.

The best you can do is state your opinion in a feedback thread (preferably worded calmly and reasonably) and then decide if the thing you disagree with is a dealbreaker, or if you’re willing to put up with the one crappy thing you dislike on virtue of all the stuff you do like about the game.

Celtic Lady.3729:

So, if a large guild begins an event on the landscape and others come along and participate, do they get any rewards at all for playing or is it just the satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped a large guild, that doesn’t need any help at all anyway, finish their event?

Or have I misunderstood and all the guild events are instanced, so this is a moot point?

If its not your guild mission, you get the same rewards as you’d get for a normal event. If it’s not a combat mission (rush, puzzle) you get the chest at the end like everyone else.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

*We would also like to make every guild upgrade line valuable to every guild.

The problem is that you’ve made every line aside from art of war less valuable by locking every type of mission behind the initial completion of bounties. You haven’t made art of war more valuable to the players most interested in the guild missions. This line has the exact same WvW fort bonuses it has always had. You’ve simply tacked it on to the front of the system so that they can’t do any of the other mission types until they’re done researching bounties.

You haven’t added value to War for guilds that didn’t find it valuable before. You’ve removed value from every other upgrade tree from the mission system, because without upgrading war first, none of their missions can be unlocked.

Furthermore, you’ve done it without adding anything at all to War to reward the single manditory upgrade line behind which all missions lie.

This is a bad implementation. it makes no sense to gate the whole system behind a single upgrade line, and only then allow the guild to choose where to prioritize. Either make it linear or make it nonlinear.

rootnode.9546:

PopeUrban.2578:

The costs in influence, per tree, are fine, but the idea that you have to do bounties before picking anything else doesn’t make much sense.

What makes L1 bounties so special that everyone simply has to do them in order to get other mission types they desire?

It does make sense. As of now, the bounty missions seem to crash the client for everyone in the mission. If this is full of critical errors, imagine what the other mission types must be like. It’s a virtual still working on it access gate.

Source: https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Gildenmission-Kopfgeld/first#post225117

Well at the very least when we start them next month they’ll probably be patched then, hehe.

I’m not bemoaning the progression here, but I am bemoaning the homogenization of guilds and their upgrade paths. Whatever happened to the idea that guilds were allowed to focus on the trees that were important to them? On the surface this system does a pretty good job of varying up mission types per tree to represent their upgrade path…

Until you look at the commendation requirement setups and realize that the multiple upgrade trees are now effectively tiered in to “Do these trees in this order to unlock these missions in this order”

That’s sad.

What could have been a system that, at launch, saw a lot of different guilds doing a lot of different types of content based on how they had prioritized their upgrades is in stead a system that has everyone complaining they have to research Art of War. Furthermore, the guilds most likely to do said missions at all are the exact same guilds that probably haven’t researched that tree at all.

This isn’t “making every tree valuable to every guild” it’s, literally “Making the art of war tree a mandatory upgrade for guilds that never claim things in WvW, and make all of their previous upgrades null and void in the mission system until they do so.”

Art of War was on my list anyway. I wanted the guild siege. What I don’t like is being told I need to upgrade it before I can run Rush or Trek or other things my members were a lot more excited about than bounties.

I should have had the option to say “Well cool, we’ll start doing rush and you guys can tell me which type of mission you’d like to start unlocking next”

They would have said, almost certainly “BOUNTIES!” and we would have happily marched up AoW while enjoying and perfecting our first type of mission.

In stead, I’m stuck saying “Uh, sorry guys, remember when we did that massive farm for the guild bank? We need to do another one to unlock bounties, and we need to do bounties to unlock rush.”

“So no Rush?”

“Not this month guys.”

I simply don’t understand the logic behind there being a “master unlock” to the whole system, placed in one specific tree existing guilds may or may not have.

The costs in influence, per tree, are fine, but the idea that you have to do bounties before picking anything else doesn’t make much sense.

What makes L1 bounties so special that everyone simply has to do them in order to get other mission types they desire?

Why not just scrub the commendation costs on the L1 versions of all the other types, and let guild pick and choose which type of missions they want to prioritize from the start in stead of forcing everyone in to a single mission type before allowing any choice of the others?

Bounties in AoW is fine, but why force people to do bounties before unlocking rush, trek, puzzle, etc. This is just going to make bounties completely overfarmed and not very much of a “hunt” at all, as every single guild in existence on your server will all be after the same handful of NPCs

Next week mapchat will have it down to a science.

This “master mission type” makes no sense. The ascending tiers per mission type, and placing missions in various trees makes sense. Requiring guild merits to unlock higher tiers or “advanced” versions of similar content (Bounties>Challenges) makes sense. Locking the whole thing behind one specific mission type from the jump makes no sense.

If anything, I wish the game had more random champions. People hate Karka. I kinda wish most mobs were more like Karka. Hard at first, but easy once you’d practiced fighting them and learned their patterns. Running in to a random champ is like a little xmas present for me. It starts a mental game of “can I do this, or do I need help?”

I think about what I know of other mobs of its type, have I fought this sort of champ before, does it have help, etc. etc.

When suprised by random champions DURING a fight I run away and then engage this decision making process.

I learned things about my characters by taking on these random champions. Things I often wouldn’t have figured out as quickly otherwise. I’ve made friends (and indeed those freinds have become guildmates) as a result of these random encounters. I still have vivid memories of getting nearly plastered by some big mean thing, only to be saved by some random person taking aggro, who I then ressed after I got up and together we killed the thing.

I think there aren’t any instances in any zone I can recally where some champion completely impedes progress so i’d say just leave them as they are. They’ve added a lot of fun and triumph to my experiences, both solo and in groups.

I’ve found, with the rising value of rares, that the 20% chance at a yellow has made me much more money off of my greens than vendoring them.

Double recommend if you’re going for ectos.

Remember, it’s still the mystic forge and random is still random, but honestly, with all of the blues i vendor I feel like I can gamble 4s (vendored) worth of greens on a potential 30+s payout and generally come out ahead of what I was making when I vendored greens.

Crest/Seals are upgrade components that are only naturally looted from chests found in the world. They do not come in rarities higher than rare, and are most commonly found in minidungeon and jumping puzzle chests. Most commonly, a L80 opening chests receives at least one green crest, but rarely you’ll loot a rare crest (seal)

The “upgrade” recipie works from a pool of all similar level upgrade components, this pool includes gems and seals. MFing green gems/crests will sometimes result in a yellow seal, as will MFing yellow gems.

I do a lot of JPs, and due to the fact that the green crests are largely useless I always MF them. This has supplied me with a pretty healthy stack of many rare seals, as well as quite a few extra orbs.

Think about it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t play the TP, but has half a brain to get a fair deal.

I don’t have any need for ectos, so I sell rather than salvage rares. This is the “safe” money, as I’m not gambling on how many or few ectos I may be able to sell off.

Given that rares are a niche-flip market due to the vast number of levels, prefixes, and suffixes, I can be sure that simply clicking “sell to highest buy order” can often knock my profit margin by as much as 20s in some cases.

So when I sell I check the difference between buy/sell. if its reasonable (within 2-5s or so), then I’ll just sell to the buy order. if it’s an obvious flip (e.g. Obscure L79 rare with 30 buy orders at 15s below the sell order) then I know I can make better money by undercutting the flipper by a few silver and still sett the item within the hour.

I’m not focused on my profit percentage. I honestly don’t care. I’m not against people playing the market and I always smile a little bit when I encounter an obvious flip as such because I know there’s some enterprising individual out there risking a big pot of money for a bigger payoff. I like that that exists in the market.

However

I want the money for my rares fast, and I want roughly what they’re worth, give or take a few silver. I don’t bother with the 1c undercut game because in my experience it just results in me spending more time playing the market against people who actually enjoy playing the market. I’ll go for the 1-5s undercut because I’m still getting very near the market value of my item, but I’m still selling it within the day or even hour.

This allows me to make solid money from drops and the MF without actually needing to play the market and worry about my profit margin. Which in turn allows me to spend my time doing things I enjoy, like getting more drops.

Anyone complaining that slots became more expensive in gold needs a head-check.

The purpose of sales, from any retailer’s point of view, is to drive sales by reliance on the idea that increased volume of sales will overshadow the decreased amount of income per unit. In brick and mortar operations, there are often other factors that predicate sales, like an overabundance of stock, or a supplier of raw materials/good holding a sale of their own.

The sale, like every other sale in the gem store, is expressedly for the purpose of driving players to purchase gems.

The currency exchange was put in to the game to create parity, and to ensure that players who really wanted items from the gem store, but couldn’t afford to or simply didn’t want to buy the gems with real money had a method to do so. The system was set up to place said exchange rates based on supply and demand, and, to my understanding, left alone.

It’s no small wonder that the market spiked during sales or limited offers. These are the times when items in the gem store are most desired by players, and a large portion of those players will attempt to negate or shave off their RMT transactions by tossing in a few gold.

Expecting arenanet to account for the gold market in gem store pricing and sales makes no sense. The currency exchange actually loses potential money for Anet. Building in failsafes to prevent it from doing exactly what it is designed to do (track the relative value of gold/gem conversions and facilitate anonymous transfers from a global pool) would wreck the utility of the transfer market and wreck the financial viability of the gem store in one fell swoop.

People that expect to get all the things they want from the gem store without actually ever buying gems with their own money aren’t quite understanding how the gem store is intended to work.

It’s an optional RMT market for convenience and flair items, with an optional supplementary gold sink thrown in so that the guy who’s too broke to buy gems can afford a black lion kit, karma booster, or transmute every once in a while when he really needs one. It’s there to give those players an option to turn an RMT purchase they may not otherwise be able to afford in to a longer term gameplay goal.

It’s not a system that’s intended for you to get everything avaliable, or even everything useful on the market in any short amount of time by gold transfer. Expecting the system to be “gated” against spikes to be “more fair” to gold traders is missing the entire point. Gold traders are part of the system simply so that the system isn’t completely locked behind a paywall. Gold trading for gems is designed specifically to reflect supply and demand, and during sales it’s a sure indication that it’s working correctly.

TLDR: Gem store sales don’t consider the cost of gold/gem conversions, nor should they. The gem store is a RMT-First marketplace and is handled as such while the gold transfer option is a player driven market and, like the TP, is handled (or unhandled) as such.

Also, daily achievements sometimes randomly award selected black lion items, including transmutation stones.

ComeAndSee.1356:

Healing power doesn’t scale very well with Thieves. Our passive self-healing skills have low scaling multipliers.

In my experience the multipliers are pretty fair, as our passive self heals are quite a bit more spammable than those avaliable to other classes. On average, a thief heals more activations per second than any other class when he’s using any other heal than his #6 active, and, honestly, the base healing amounts for HiS and Withdraw are already quite good, especially when you factor in the secondary effects.

Assassin’s reward
Water field spamming
Signet of malice
Shadow refuge+lifesteal combos from within it

If the ratios on these were much better, they’d be pretty overpowered due to how frequent the activations are.

Bull Zooker.1672:

is there any other techniques/builds that dont necessarily use the signet of malice and tricks to proc it?
I am going to try the above techniques for sure but was hoping to find some more fun/interesting ways to heal during fighting, I dont mind kiting as a thief but dont want to depend on it as I am a very annoying ‘in your face’ kind of player.

anything else you guys think ive overlooked? traits, skills etc?

I’ll direct you to this thread, where we talked hard numbers and skill combinations for thief healing. This information should be fairly useful regardless of build ro skill selection. Enjoy!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Thief-Self-Heals/first#post948836

If you really want to kill it:

DPS the first pet, saving your big damage cooldowns until the ranger swaps it.
When the swap hits, blow your big CDs on the second pet to annihilate it.
Enjoy your new pet-free ranger target.

Honestly though, its much easier to just ignore the pet, dodge any problematic CC skills it uses, and wreck the ranger.

I’d take a crossbow as a 1200 range thief weapon. Doesn’t even have to have any aoes. Just give it some nice single target control abilities and maybe a built in pull on #5 for 6 initiative.

Don’t discount signet of malice as a healing source, especially if you’re stacking other passive healing sources like venom heals, and are using multihit setups like sword or pistol mainhands.

Remember that the SoM heal actually stacks with things like leeching venoms and assassin’s reward, and if you’re invested in healing power (personally I run a sigil for 250 and it does the trick) and playing a thief properly by avoiding as much damage as possible you’re looking at a large return in passive healing.

SoM and Assassin’s reward are the only heals I run on my P/D setup and it’s extremely rare I go down daggerstorm is kinda magical with this as every bounce counts as an attack, and thus a heal, so DS is commonly reserved for defensive purposes. I’d imagine if you added leeching venoms to the mix, as well as even more healing power gear than just 25 life sigil stacks you’d be even more durable.

Kasama.8941:

Stiv.1820:

2 stun breaks and a condition removal within 20 seconds.. usable with any weapon set. Also can get on top of stuff without short-bow requirement. Instant 1200 range movement to catch someone or get away. It’s got to be our best utility for PvP at least..

How often do you really need two stun breakers in a row (let alone one)? Shadow Return on the sword also breaks stun and removes one condition. Roll for Initiative also removes cripple, chilled, and immobilize, while giving you 6 initiative on top of the stun removal. You already have Shadow Refuge to get away, and Steal (which can be traited to have 1200 range) plus weapon skills for chasing. I don’t see how Shadowstep is needed, at all.

Shadowstep is nice, but in builds which have another reliable shadowstep (any sword or SB swap builds) it’s not always a better pick. I originally switched over to RFI because it benefitted from reduced tricks cooldown, but as I used it, I found that I ended up much more survivable with RFI rather than Shadowstep due to its initiative return and substantially higher utility in multitarget engagements due to its long evade.

A standard “disengage” when i had SS equipped was usually:
180, target shadowstep (I use single click ground, so I had to eyeball range), swap, infiltrator’s arrow.

This left me with shadow return, and pile of lost initiative. At times shadowstep would end up blocked by random terrain features, or just plain not work reliably. While I’ll admit that in certain situations the double stunbreak nature of the skill was helpful in combat, when I simply wanted to scrub shadow return it was a little frustrating to use.

Standard disengage with RFI:
hit RFI, dodge backward, 180, swap, infiltrator’s arrow, dodge X2 (I’m traited in acrobatics and use energy sigil on my SB)

I found that this was much more intuitive, as the backward nature of RFI let me pull the 180 after I was already out of harm’s way, and more importantly, RFI always made sure I had enough initiative to pop at least one infil. I also tend to get better use out of it in combat these days as I’ve had a lot more experience in proactively dodging stuns, and RFI makes an excellent clutch dodge to chain in to more attacks. If steal is also available, it’s not uncommon for me to be bottomed out on init, hit rfi, hit steal directly after, and be right back in the fight with a nearly full initiative bar. This, I found leaps and bounds more effective than having two stunbreaks. That full initiative bar means I can use any number of reactive strategies for what comes next.

oZii.2864:

Keep in mind that carrionish version of those amulets and rings are on their way. They stated they plan to add more stat combos similar to what is already available.

I play p/d and personally will hold out on the amulet and 1 ring. I will purchase one of the tough vit condi damage rings though or accessory. Don’t want to completely lose all power rofl.

The jump in condition damge will probably be minimal if you add up all the amulets and rings and accessories for all the pieces.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AguEzkdPhmNhdFFaMkg2MUxOSU9RS3ZLX2FpbHNmSGc#gid=0

Take a look at that (not my creation) you will see you need some pretty good jumps in condi to really have a major damage increase to bleeds.

My guess is ascended > exotic by about 6-7 points on your bleeds. Would you really want to dump that much power for 6-7 points on your bleeds?

Depends on the build really. Mine relies heavily on might to offset the loss of condition damage experienced when I went with mad king runes (because birds+Signet of malice is a beautiful thing)

When I originally swapped to MK from my old Undead set, I experienced a new loss in damage. i moved some traits around, started stacking might, and realized that with the new setup the overall damage, when I worked at stacking might, was actually improved significantly. There are other considerations at hand here, obviously, like that power is a core stat of MK runes, or that my build is specifically prioritized around condition damage rather than duration for our group’s condition stacking strategy.

However.

Once I grabbed the Cond/Vit/Toughness asended neck and rings I received a substantial increase in both dondition damage and survivability on my build ( around 10 or more per tick once I have my consumables running and a normal amount of 6 might stacks ), and a negligable loss in power damage (around 100-200 per second)

In total, when I did the math, the total DPS was actually better in my case. The bleeds, once stacked in the 10-20 range covered for or exceeded the lost power damage.

Your results may vary, and I wish there was a version without the precision on it though.