Guild Wars 2

Narcemus.1348:

I wanna point out, the wizard’s tower was already in Kessex, just a different part of Kessex, otherwise like as well.

Sorry, Yeah its old location was technically in kessex. I should have said “moved to its current location in kessex.”

Intentionally left nameless so that you can accidentally “choose” your herald in future personal story content.

You know, you make some decisions, then you pick one of three people to travel with, and that person is suddenly “Oh, I’m glad you got my letters” and you’re like “Oh, that was you all along!”

Annd you groan “Why do I see everything in this plot coming?”

And the content writers do their best M. Night Shyamalan impressions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdhhQhqi_AE

Narcemus.1348:

Yeah, I saw him during the betas and freaked out to my guild mates.

Was he swinging a sword?

Honestly i think the political meaning of “guild” is its literal one. It’s a sort of worker’s union / business.

Our guilds are pretty much all adventuring guilds, a practice that has become much more popular lately, presumably after the tales of the exploits of destiny’s edge (seriously, listen to the children, guilds are the new Spongebob)

However other guilds likely exist. Despite the fact that player guilds can become rather large, the use in the world seems to be much smaller, like an exclusive club which does… whatever it does.

Personally, I prefer to think that the dragons simply ate the gods. This is why there have been several pantheons.

More realistically, that the connection between the two is that the gods search the realms in the mists for races with “potential”, abduct them, bring them to tyria, guide them, nurture them, and when the dragons are about to awake, leave. It’s as if they want to remove the dragons but can’t do it themselves for whatever reason, so they spend the majority of their time looking to find someone that can do it for them.

This would also explain why there are just SO MANY COMBAT ARENAS apart from any major realm, just sitting in the mists. The gods are shopping and set them up.

What they didn’t account for was something that likely hasn’t happenned before, that race striking an alliance with its peers to raise sufficient force and weaponry to actually do the job.

Lets face it, in the eyes of Tyria, humanity has had a pretty bad run of things. In the eyes of the gods? They killed Abaddon, re-imprisoned the titans, and assisted the envoys with Shiro. From the perspective of the gods, if this theory is accurate, humans look like a pretty good bet to them.

I think Jeff’s comment was kinda dead on.

Norn don’t exactly list “diplomacy” among their traditional qualities. Norn beat up dredge BECAUSE THEY ARE THERE AND THEY CAN.

There’s an event in one of the caves in the starter area i just discovered where:

because NOBODY TELLS A NORN WHAT TO DO EVAH.

Kerithlan.1659:

Ludovicus.7980:

Yes, something’s lurking in the mists…

Not to be a spoil sport or anything, but something is always lurking in the mists. It’s the mists’ modus operandi to have weird lurky things.

In the mists, having hugely horrible creatures born out of nothing try to escape into Tyria is what we call the status quo. Re: creatures forming out of nothing, see Razah.

Also, to clarify:

The underworld != the mists.

The mists are the space between dimensions, and quite literally where and how those dimensions, and indeed all things initially form in the GW universe.

The underworld, like Tyria, or the Fissue of Woe, or the domain of anguish, or the myriad tiny PVP islands, or the Hall of Heroes, is a dimension. Think of the WvW realms as “islands” in the mists and the underworld, tyria, etc. as “continents”

In fact I believe what technically ranks you as “God Tier” in the GW universe is the ability to control or utilize the mists as they are the base building block of everything, and possibly possess a consciousness of their own.

Whether its coincidence or purpose, the spoiler-free version of the answer to your question is that it is a fact (in that it is explicitly stated by content in the game) that Sylvari can not be corrupted by Zhaitan.

I think the bigger picture is what’s important here. If the six human “gods” have lost touch with the world, then Grenth may have lost touch with the domain he took from Dhumm. Balthazar may have lost touch with the Fissure of Woe. For all we know Dhumm and Menzies are currently in full scale war with one another over the entirety of the old domains of those “gods”

I mean, Abaddon is dead, and without their war against the six, those two have no reason to continue their alliance.

The shadow behemoth could simply be fallout from the weapons of that war. What is plainly obvious is that he’s an underworld creature of some kind, and that his place of origin is the underworld.

Basic rebuttal:

The Flame legion isn’t outcast for using magic. It’s outcast for being a deranged cult that believes it needs to recognize the supremacy of a higher power. The magic they use is a reflection of this belief, not the cause of it. They’re willfully enslaving some part of themselves to another entity in exchange for power. As a society they’re much closer to the Sons of Svanir than they are to other Charr, moreso when you consider that at the very least other norn have similar religious and cultural beliefs in terms of animal spirits wheras other Charr are athiests.

Those towers are an intentional lore black hole. I remember an interview wherin it was plainly explained that Ree and Jeff deliberately don’t explain certain things in lore so as not to have to “retcon” them later.

A good example is the Charr. The origin and society of the Charr, from the viewpoint of Ascalon, was never even touched the first time they were seen in Prophecies. This was done intentionally, as that information wasn’t important to the story of the players in that game, and thus attempting to explain it at the time would both remove the element of fear and ferocity from the race.

A similar black hole was Orr. Originally, there was very little known about Orr other than that it was once the home of the gods, and that it sank.

Fast forward to GW2. Now you have a blank slate of a lot of stuff players will recognize, but you have never given them any information on. This mean you, as writers, have a blank slate with very few boundaries, which allows you to write content without being confined to some half-considered one or two sentances in a piece of quest dialogue from seven years ago.

So now, Charr aren’t really “all bad” (just the BAD Charr are bad) Charr were indirectly responsible for Orr, Charr have females and babies. This is a HUGE departure from the Charr race that we knew before, but it doesn’t actually contradict any information the playrs ever had access to, so it can be inserted in to canon without creating any plot holes (for better or worse)

Similarly, we established early on that the vizier was bad, was from Orr, and wanted to take over the world. Then, around nightfall area the lore team invented Abaddon for that storyline. Abaddon then became a catch-all evil diety, so lore decided the Vizier should be a worshipper of his.

So, fast forward to GW2, now you have a portrait of Abaddon in the Vizier’s tower in ruined Orr. Was the Vizier a worshipper of Abaddon when we first met him? Well according to lore he was. Was he a worshipper of Abaddon when that story was written? No. By simply leaving that space blank it allowed lore to knit him in to the larger picture of the lore later.

Those towers are similar lore black holes. We have never been given any information about them. It’s quite likely that a level designer thought they would look cool, then lore looked at them and said “I could see this being there for some reason we’ll invent later” Other Black holes include the Mursaat, Seers, a large number of sentient or semisentient humanoid races from expansion campaigns, the envoys, and oh yeah, THE EYE OF THE NORTH.

It has been said that Seer ruins exist in the world, and that we’ve probably seen them without knowing the significance of what we were looking at. Its also obvious that there are plans for the wizard’s tower that now hovers over Kessex because… well… they moved it to Kessex in stead of deciding it was destroyed. This indicates there are plans to actually use it eventually, and we probably won’t ever know anything about those towers until we mark their floors with our adventuring boots. Lore could just as easily fill the black hole with Tengu, or some super-lawful skritt race, or decide the jotun built them when they had language in their golden days, or invent a whole new race of bright pink seven armed monkeys with prehensile genitalia and say THOSE built the towers (and are also wizards of immeasurable power)

The point is they’re not going to commit to lore explanations until they’re already on the way to being implemented in the game (Or in a book, because WE ARE CRAFTING A SERIOUS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY)

So, yeah, theorize away. My personal theory on all unexplained phenomina is “Seers did it” until I’m presented with an official explanation. I haven’t been proven wrong yet shrug

As of right now, CD brought a pretty impressive early morning force all over the place and finished capping TC borderlands.

TC, outmanned in a ridiculous way in the monday AM gave it a shot at the garrison but CD’s forces simply overwhelmed our opposition.

Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us this evening. The up side is we get to blow up several maps worth of stuff XD

Arrow carts are fine. You’re complaining about arrow carts being used for exactly what arrow carts are designed for, a force multiplier for AoE antipersonnel denial.

You want to counter carts? Use one of more of the many longer-range siege options, or hell, just put together a golem squad. A server that spends 10g worth of golems can easily demolish a server that spends 50g worth of carts as long as the golem operators know how to use them.

Also note that you can (and should) spend your honor on siege, not your money. Save your money for repairs. Do jumping puzzles for blueprints. Save up blueprints and upgrade them in the MF for tough battles.

Thematically, i really feel that what defines the Thief is quite simply “being clever”

From the way that all of the current sets are designed, it seems the design ethos of the thief is simply one of unconventional tactics with conventional arms, which have been combined with some core systemic concepts. Thieves mitigate by evasion and stealth, and damage through debuffs or ambush.

That, combined with the lack of a 1200 range weapon option says to me that a debuff-heavy damage-light 1200 range weapon option rifle on the thief is just the way to go. Perhaps the entire “sniper rifle” concept is a misnomer, but rifle does simply feel like a better move for the class than a longbow. honestly, shortbow always felt like a weird option and Thieves in general are a sort of anti-ranger in theme. That said, the way the shortbow skills are set up makes sense. Thief shortbow skills are largely “clever” in terms of attaching payloads to arrows or performing “tricky” shots rather than more conventional methods of attack.

Similarly, the rifle with a heavy focus on single target conditions and boon rips just feels right for the class, because its so backward from the way that other classes use the rifle, and it keeps the sort of “sneak up and then MAKE TONS OF NOISE” roguelike sarcasm of action that the pistol and shortbow aesthetics have.

I like FrozenLuv’s version to be quite honest, though I agree that the #4, and indeed the entire concept of a “venom shot” for theif rifles seems unfitting and something that belongs on an engineer skillbar (which, incidentally, they already have in their pistol sets as far as cwaaazy ammo)

Take FrozenLuv’s version, reduce the initiative on #5 to 6, and turn #4 in to a channeled skill like so:

Skill 4: Clever Aim

Description: Size up your target, channeling an aimed shot that deals additional effects and costs less initiative the longer it is channeled.
Staged Channel, 1-4 seconds, roots while channeling, Reveals from stealth when beginning channel.
Damage: 250
1 sec – Vulnerability (5)
2sec – + Cripple (2 seconds)
3 sec – + Confusion (5)
4 sec – + Daze (2 seconds)

Cast time: Instant (when channel is released)

Initiative Cost:
1 sec – 6
2sec – 5
3 sec – 4
4 sec – 3

This allows the rifle-thief to use his mobility tools to “set up” somewhere not as noticeable, and then channel for a devastating debuff stack to support his allies or himself. Its a risky channel, and at lower levels of channeling does not pay off nearly as well as at higher levels, but does allow the thief to release the channel early if he comes under attack and still gain benefit for as long as he was able to channel.

I run PvP and PvE with a steal based condition build wielding a pistol/dagger combo.

My resoning behind the build was basically “well, the steal line also gives me condition damamge, and stealing is fun”

This eventually turned in to

“Well if the vast majority of my damage comes from bleeds, those work if I’m not hitting”

to

“I can also be invisible and still bleeding things.”

The average fight with three or more mobs usually looks like so:

Size up pack, find most dangerous monster in pack (Note, ranged monsters are usually high on my list), steal to close gap, follow steal with C&D to stealthand aoe blind, and set up for sneak attack, review combat aptitude of stolen item. Fire sneak attack, fire three autoattacks, or a single dancing dagger if I need a bit of CC to deal with faster attacking mobs, or apply a combo field or tertiery effect with the stolen item to a non-current target.

Continue to go with CnD>Sneak attack to keep the bleeds flowing, and use the unstealthed window to pop whatever utility I need during the fight from other weapon or utility skills, applying CnD when the blind is most useful, using dodges, positioning, stolen items, or cripples to limit or in many cases completely halt incoming damage.

Loot, and laugh at how you took zero damage by causing every single enemy attack to whiff or miss due to blind. There are certain mobs that are exceptions, but it makes PvE a walk in the park in most cases, and dungeon groups really really like it when you spam blinds while also actually dealing a hefty chunk of damage.

Sadly, in events there’s usually a “tag the mobs” race so I pretty much just walk in to the largest pack of mobs and spam cluster bomb at melee range with my shortbow swap. This is boring, and also ineffective solo, but is braindead easy in zerg events when 20 other people are “tanking” for you.

Basically, what I’m saying is that Theives aren’t kittened in PvE, but because of the initiative mechanic theif skillsets are sort of by design reactive an thinking on the fly than the other classes I’ve tried. I dearly love my engineer, but the engineer really has a limited attack chain with very specific tools for specific purposes (but he has a lot of them, which is why it’s fun.)

Thieves in PvE tend to have a smaller number of tools with much larger potential applications. CnD stealths me, and stealth is a tool I can use for evasion or damage. Dancing dagger is a good burst multitarget with a good cripple. Its a tool I can use sparingly as a utility, or blow a lot of initiative on as burst damage to two or three foes. This trend continues with most theif abilities, or the way those abilities interact with traits or stolen items. You have, less buttons than a lot of other classes, but each one of those buttons tends to be a lot more multipurpose when put together with the “total package” of what you can trait and gear for. Warriors have the same number of buttons, granted, but warrior is a much different playstyle that says “I have this attack chain, I use it and things die”

Thieves can’t be played effectively that way in PvE, and can only be played effectively that way in PvP in a very specific burst setup that is still receiving nerfs.

Massive changes to the inherant functionality of weapons skills are a bad idea IMO.

For instance, when you talk about changing the functionality of C&D or body shot to a completely different effect based on P/P or S/D or whatever, you’re also changing that effect for other weapon combos.

Losing the vuln from body shot or the stealth from C&D would completely destroy the utility and playstyle on a P/D for instance.

If you’re looking at adjusting a specific kit, the skill to think about overhauling is always going to be the dual skill. Mainhand and offhand skills across the board are well mixed in terms of utility, and where its useful to adjust those is in terms of cast times, condition amounts/durations, damage, etc.

C&D is IMO perfect the way it is. Its a solid damage attack with a stealth component. Its expensive enough that if you want to spam it you have to trait for spamming it, and you’re still taking a pretty big hit to your initiative.

Body shot on the other hand could definately use a look. Honestly i think the skill would be fine with a whorter cast/animation time, or an increased vuln duration to make up for its long cast, but its got good synergy with offhands and teamplay. The way it is, it just takes too long to fire, and thus doesn’t give you the opportunity timing wise to get real use out of other attacks between body shots which forces you to only use it once (which is bad for theif skills and counter to the initiative mechanic) at the start of a chain, or to go “all in” with it to stack enough vuln that it sufficiently amps the damage of the one attack you have initiative left to use afterward.

I agree with people saying that venoms and traps could use a hard look. Venoms, even traited for cooldown reduction simply don’t have enough charges or a strong enough effect to be worth using in most cases. Lowering the base cooldown, or increasing the effectivness of everything but basilisk and immobilize venoms (which are quite good) is something that should be considered. I understand a lot of venom’s balancing is probably worked around venom sharing, but lets be honest here, venoms should be an attractive option in a non-share build as well considering that’s a slot you could have used for blinding powder, shadow refuge, haste, signets, or a number of vastly superior utility skills that are effective and useful with or without traits.

In addition, When people are sking for support, its pretty clear that trickery is already the theif’s intended support line. I’m one of only a handful if people that trait for 30 in trickery (because I love steal) And handing out a big stack of buffs with every steal, as well as ripping boons all at once is a great feeling. However, it can also only happen once every 30 seconds, with a full 30 points in the line, and the effects are often not up to par with support abilities available to every other class. 10 secs of a single stack of three buffs every 30 seconds isn’t all that supportive.

Trickery needs buffs that make is a lot more attractive in terms of support or target debuffing, as that’s where the trickery line is really going to shine. IMO Trickery specced thieves should be the undisputed masters of ripping boons. It just makes sense. Thief support play is all about debuffing the enemy. You should be seeing traits like “When you steal, or use a stolen skill, it also rips X boons” or “when you steal, or use a stolen skill, that skill also does X”

If trickery is the stealing line, and stealing is all about a quick fulcrum shift of battle, bump that up a notch so people are rewarded a bit better for choosing to spec in to it.

I don’t agree with the wizard idea, as elementalists are… well… wizards.

However I would really like the option to have less pretty and young characters. Charr have some amazing elderly and scarred faces, as do Norn, and to a certain extent Asura. Nobody has a really “heavy” body type though.

Honestly I think you could affect gear progression by using a variant of the “imbued” system from prophecies.

Remember, how the Mursaaat would destroy your face with spectral agony everywhere you went, and then you got your armor imbued? After that, you went back to those same mursaat and wiped the floor with them.

That was gear progression, but it was focused around the specific content you were progressing the gear for. You didn’t NEED the imbue in cantha or elona, and it wasn’t a base stats thing you felt like you had to have. It was only gear progression you needed to do the content it was designed to progress in, and it was easily achieved by everyone by simply completing content.

Ramp that up, lets say you want to be awesome at slaying ghosts? You can clear AC explorable and upgrade weapons and armor with a “rank” in ghost slaying. This “ghost slaying” rank would apply to any ghost anywhere, and it would stack with any similar potion-like ranks for other mob types. In this way you’re not chasing stats for the sake of chasing stats, but you’re optionally upgrading and specializing your gear against specific types of content you find interesting.

I am fully and completely against the concept of new playable races and classes.

Why?

Expansion content that does not expand what’s avaliable to existing characters is not an expansion. It’s a reroll. It’s essentially a sequel using a large chunk of the same content.

The weapon subtypes option is interesting, but honestly I’d rather see the weapon skills system simplified down to “Weapons drop with a specific collection of 1-5 skills which are revealed when the item is equipped(soulbound), crafters can craft weapons with any desired 1-5 for that weapon type, non-crafters can take two weapons to an NPC weaponsmith to move any skill from a source weapon (which is destroyed) to a target weapon for a small fee.” This more closely mirrors the current behavior of the 1-5 slots, which are unchangable and determined by what’s in your hands (weapons or environmental items) as well as creating increased utility for crafting and some fun loot options like aesthetic variants of specific weapon skills. Ex. Two shields may have “Shield Bash” and “Shield Bash – spinning” Functionally these skills do the exact same thing, but they have different animations. This adds some fun looting and rarity options to the weapon systems without creating a balance nightmare and capitalizing on the whole core anti-grind philosophy of GW2.

That said, things like new weapon types and new class skills for existing classes I feel are all great ideas. That’s how you expand content. You add content that people can do with their established characters. You increase their build options, and you give them something to strive for, whether it be a series of elites only learnable by completing skill challenges, or just a new list of traits that magically shows up. You don’t add Tengu as a playable race, you add what the existing people of Tyria stand to learn from them, or buy from them, or trade with them.

Taemek.1602:

You can still target these poeple and ethier teleport away out of range of the Finish Them! if your class has that skill or what ever other skills you have use of.

Again, you cannot do this with a stealthed Thief for obvious reasons.

As I mentioned earlier, stealth/mist/etc need to be greyed out Finish Them! buttons until you remove yourself from that condition. Simple.

No, you can’t target a stealther. As a matter of fact that’s the only thing you can’t do to a stealther. Believe it or not nearly every ability in the game can be used without a target. in fact, even if you use those abilities without a target they will still hit targets!

Yes, you can teleport out of a stealth-stomp. I play a theif. Smart players with a downed-move action always always wait 2 seconds and then pop it. This usually forces the finisher to burn a cooldown on nothing in order to finish you out of their protected state of stealth/invuln/whatever.

“Protected finisher” is a tactical decision available to every class, and always requires someone to burn a cooldown (or initiative, or both) for their stealth, invuln, mist, or whatever protection they are using. Which leaves them without that cooldown to fight your teammates.

If you’re fighting anybody in a 1v1 and you go down, your downed state is virtually never going to get you back up unless help arrives. On the extremely rare occasion that it does, the fight was already so close that you’re getting back up with a rally by downing that guy with a random lucky shot or condition you applied before you went down.

Personally, I always felt like the commander should have been tied to guild influence as a buyable upgrade in the art of war tree.

Put it as a rank 3 upgrade, unlocked as a slot in the guild interface. Have it cost a good amount (5-10k) influence, and allow guilds to only assign one commander at a time.

Thus, when you see a commander you know that at the very least they’ve either solo-guildfarmed a massive amount of inf (for a solo player) that they would have a good understanding of PvE event chains or WvW operations, or they’re in a guild that can field a few people, enough so that they would presumably have a ready supply of guildmates to command so you’d more often be joining an actual squad that’s already been formed than simply joining some random guy that managed to burn 100 gold.

I think being able to alter to order of your skill bar is a great UI improvement. Why stop at 1-5 though?

We know we have 5 handheld skills, a heal, 3 utilities, and an elite. Why not just allow us to put them wherever on the bar we feel like?

Simple, easy idea. Just add a detailed stats option to the hero panel for stuff like magic find, move speed, xp buffs, procs, etc.

Click button, get a list of all of those non-core stats!

Also note that the entire reason they don’t simply update the old armor sets to ingame sets and in stead offer them as gem options is because a large number of the old sets are quite thematically incorrect with Tyria 200 years later.

Would I like my combination of armors from my GW1 ranger on my GW2 theif? No, I don’t think I would. As cool as the 15k drakescale, elite luxon gloves, and all the other prestige bits I had were, they would look simply out of place in Tyria of today. Its immediately obvious when someone is wearing a gem skin from GW1 simply because they’re so out of place.

Does armor need a wider variation? Especially medium? Sure. However fashion has literally changed. I’d like MORE awesome looking variation on the themes we’re already exploring. Give me more awesome/sinister tricorn hats, hoods, and non-trenchcoat gear in medium. Also, can we get some hats that don’t cover or eliminate the hair? Give cloth some more non-robe-or-dress options. Give heavy… well heavy has a nice variation of ornamentation, but how about some more gritty/beat up/used looking sets?

How about more non-cultural cultural stuff like the AC armor. You know, what would armor for a Charr, crafted by Norn artisans look like?

As time passes and the pact against the dragons places these cultures closer to one another, it’s only natural that cultural overlap and trade will continue. Sadly, while its clear the art team is capable of reconciling this, such as with the pact fences and gear in Orr, we don’t really get any armor options that show off cool ideas like ‘So some Asura took solid Norn Metalworking, and added a few techamawhatsahoosits to it’ or whatever.

Clearly a lot more effort what put in to the cultural feel of NPCs in the world than it was in to the small portion of armor we have access to. One can find asuran styled, or charr styles, or norn, or whatever weapons, but if, say, an asura wanted a few bits of norn-ish armor simply because it looks cool, he’s SoL

This makes little sense. Let some culture bleeding and overlapping through and in to the armor designs and you’ll instantly have a lot more options for interesting armor.

I will happily take all of your quip precursors in order to spare you the emasculation of equipping such a girly weapon.

I like it.

Finished twice, then stopped because I realized I couldn’t salvage the runes from the slippers

Human Thief – No boosts
Sylvari Engineer – No boosts

Honestly the tower is hardest at the beginning and gets easier the further in you are. Took me a solid few hours the first time, figuring out the drop and the clock face on my own because I hate spoilers :P

A credit to the Priory. Seeking out and assembling ancient tomes and the like was the reason I joined. Watching a member do something wholly unrelated to “be escorted or die horribly” was refreshing.

Thanks for the good times Tassi. It would be nice if we could visit her in the priory HQ some time.

Pragmatist.1349:

I think it would only work however if condition duration does not have a cap, i have one question aswell. Does Condition Duration show on the tooltip of a spell? For example, if a bleed originally lasts 5 seconds and you equip an item granting 10% condition duration, does the tooltip then say lasts 5 1/2 seconds?

Sadly, no, it doesn’t update the tooltip, and I wish that would change.

If you’re going for a condition damage build you’re probably going to want carrion crafted armor, or the temple set that gives condition/crit

The crit on a condition build is only useful of your condition theif specs in to acrobatics, as otherwise you won’t have high enough crit chance to reliably proc your crit sigils. If you’re going for full on stealth as a primary defense I highly reccommend just crafting a full set of exotic carrion gear with undead runes for the extra toughness.

As the other posters have said, Theif has the option to play backstabby, but is actually very viable is survival and condition-centric builds that make heavy use of stealth.

I play a pistol/dagger condition theif, and I am literally incapable of killing people in seconds. What I am capable of doing is spending more than half of the fight in stealth, cackling madly while my target blows all of his cooldowns, condition removal, and dies anyway blind, poisoned, bleeding, crippled, and with whatever effects from the multiple things I stole from him.

In group PvP my job is simply that: force the target to blow condition removal or die. Then he has nothing left to escape the group with. If he runs from the main fight it is my job to track him down and make sure he dies via spammable and permanent cripples, poisons, and bleeds.

Does a non-backstab theif boast HUUUUGE damage numbers or measure kills in seconds? No. What you get in stead is the option of some of the nastiest and most reliable condition applications in the game, whenever you want them in stead of when the cooldown is ready. You get one of the most survivable characters in the game, rivalling a full tank guardian in its ability to just plain not die. The thing is, you have to choose to build the theif that way in stad of assuming that because your class says “theif” you should be picking up nothing but crit/power gear and traits.

Why does flesh golem last forever and theive’s guild not? Why does any class do X better than Y?

Steal is our class mechanic. It is the OMGWTFBBQ button, and the only one (ever) that we have. When we steal, we get something, and its usually a very powerful something because we don’t have shatters, or a pet, or another form, or a toolbelt, or a massive damage adrenaline skill, or anything else that doesn’t take up either our precious and limited initiative or one of our right bar cooldowns. We also can’t swap weapons to get more attacks, as initiative doesn’t care which weapons you have out.

So yes, I think a 3s AoE fear is pretty fair considering how unreliable our access is to it, and how vulnerable we are if we blow all of our offense within that three seconds. I party with a lot of necromancers, and the volume of fear you are capable of putting out if you build for it more than makes up for its duration.

Necro damage, however, could use love as could some of the numbers in terms of life force gain/use.

Also, this change completely destroys the pvp utility of several stealth builds that are not glass cannon backstabs.

I run a P/D condition build. I stealth and then immediately unstealth with my sneak attack once every five seconds or so because that is literally how the build is able to kill things. There are several non-burst theif builds like this that rely on the tertiary effects of a sneak attack as a major part of dps, survivability, or both. All of these builds rely on codition duration, which is carefully balanced around how often these builds can stealth to use the sneak to apply said condition again. By increasing the cooldown you are effectively removing all of those builds from play, and writing in stone that glass cannon backstab is the only effective theif build ever.

So now you need to rebalance every other theif skill around the new stealth. Which, honestly, is just silly when the correct response to this issue is fixing the rendering/culling issue that affects every person that has and will ever:

Stand in a shadow refuge or mass invisibility
use a mesmer portal
use swiftness or teleports to close distance to an enemy.

The bug that causes the issue you’re having with stealth affects a lot more than just thieves, and a lot more than just stealth. If we were to take your suggestion we’d have to change the function of every gap closing, stealth, portal, and teleport in the game. Its the equivalent of duct taping the side mirror back on your car in stead of just getting a new one and attaching it properly. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather that sort of thinking not be where balance patches lie, by admitting some bug wins so you just code around it.

Shadow refuge grants a lot of stealth, and different sources of stealth do in fact stack up to a maximum duration of ten seconds. SR itself (if you don’t attack and remain in the AoE for the duration) can grant that alone, but other ways that are good to extend stealth are using cloak & dagger followed by one or two more cooldown stealths.

This will blow your cooldowns, but it will let you stack up a solid 10 seconds of stealth. Also keep in mind there’s a shadow mastry trait thieves can take that extends all stealth abilities by 1s.

In the case of WvW and sPvP there’s a rendering issue that makes characters sometimes take much longer to render than they should. This is most noticeable on stealthers, who leave view and then need to be rendered again, which can cause an effective increase in stealth, as they are technically unstealthed, but the victim’s client hasn’t unstealthed them yet.

This issue is also responsible for many WvW deaths by ‘phantom zerg’ which literally pops on top of you although it should have been visible from a mile away.

If you’re seeing a theif that remains mostly in stealth, chances are he has an offhand dagger, and has trated pretty heavily in the shadow line to extend his stealth times and gain 2 initiative for each stealth. If you use just cloak and dagger and your 1 skill, and never miss with cloak and dagger, you can keep this up almost indefinately, unstealthing for your steak attack, remaining out of stealth for around 5 seconds, and then using cloak and dagger to get back in stealth again.

I run a pistol/dagger build that does exactly this, and its very rare that I use my stealth cooldowns when I’m not already in stealth for this reason. Often I want the cooldown stealths ready for escapes, so covering the activation with a cloak & dagger stealth is the best way to retreat, as it uses my full stealth duration from cloak and whatever cooldown I’m using.

Many humans fled from ascalon to kryta, fleeing the Charr after the searing. They lost a pretty annoying prince with bad aggro control in the process. The refugees that survived the trip from Ascalon established a settlement that endures to this day. Mostly. When it isn’t under siege by centaurs.

For a sawed off look, maybe try an Ogre pistol?

http://www.guildhead.com/item/31726/ogre-pistol#.

Cempa.3645:

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mckMzc0z0MMxvMMMxvMx0GG0mRboscR

Using this build at the moment and I do not use Infusion of Shadow and have yet to come up with any issue with Initiative mainly because I use Initiative exclusively for C&D.

Obviously the choice of which major trait to use can and should always be changed depending on what you are doing -should go without saying. In solo play or group play, roamer or DPS assist. PvE group play or Orr farming and so on.

As for Runes what are your choices? Undead?

I personally use undead, because I’m not traited very defensively, but for a more defensive build like yours you might want to try 2x krait/centaur/afflicted for a massive buff to bleed duration. As for infusion of shadow, the reason I like to call it a must is that while you have enough initiative for C&D without it, the ability to have a enough to use the occasional other ability for cripples, weakness, shadowsteps, and other utilities tend to add a lot to survivability.

That said whatever works for you works. I highly reccomend infusion, but a lot of people recommend a lot of traits that don’t jive with certain playstyles, and just doing something because someone on the forums said so is always a bad idea.

I can totally see how it wouldn’t be an issue with your build!

2 afflicted, 2 krait, 2 centuar, Agony on the weapon is an excellent call.

Also, don’t discount a full set of undead runes. The toughness>condition damage set bonus is actually quite good when combined with the right gear/foods and results in less overall DPS, but more compact DPS as well as some variant gearing and trait options and of course more survivability. If your build traits heavily in to shadow arts, you’re getting a pretty nice chunk of condition damage out of undead runes.

P/D is the spec I’ve been using for quite some time, and it pairs well with a variety of swaps. P/D is a heavy condition pressure spec that favors survivability over burst while leaving a pretty sustainable initiative pool for adapting to changing combat conditions. With proper runes and use of C&D it can maintain 6 stacks of weakness and 10+ stacks of 110+ damage bleed indefinitely, and apply these endlessly, as well as liberal application of blind. If you played a condition pressure ranger in GW1 you’ll feel right at home with this build. It excels at making opponents waste condition removal and engaging multiple targets.

This can works well with several trait specs, but its weakness is a lack of sustainable AoE and burst. Like a GW1 condition pressure ranger it is a build that works best in support of heavier burst teammates, ensuring the target burns through condition removal, then applying cripple and massive vulnerability stacks (literally capping vuln with initiative to spare) in a quick burst to ensure a solid kill.

Its very flexible trait-wise, though you’re going to absolutely need at least 10 points in shadow mastry for infusion of shadow to lower the cost of C&D to a spammable level.

If you’re looking for burst damage, P/D won’t give it to you, and building it for straight power isn’t very efficient, but P/D does an excellent job as a thief that can stick it out in a prolonged fight, which is something that most burst builds lack.

Mine looks more like:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYEQRAqY8YlUmCN3eS6E+5EBnCjmUvHkdsmVTxNtJA;TIBgyyuEcJ5S1liLqmMNJay2krJZTrOGBcKYvwrgpIA

That’s P/D with a S/P swap. Most people don’t quite agree with the 30 in trickery, but daze on steal is simply too good to go without for the way I play it. Its basically a free C&D, no questions asked, which usually translated to a free Sneak Attack as well. It also turns steal in to a clutch interrupt, and the extra condition damage really helps capitalize on the condition duration increase from deadly arts. Not only that, the damage boost from 25 trickery turns C&D in to a pretty nice chunk of damage.

The rest of the build is constructed around a slightly burstier condition damage setup, prioritizing lowering the cost of C&D and keeping initiative high. While its certainly capable of blowing a lot of initiative in an attack chain, I find that the sustain this setup gives me is far more preferable, ensuring I always have a lot of defensive or offensive tools at my disposal while making use of C&D + Sneak attack for the bulk of the damage.

The P/D swap is for opening fights when steal is down, blind-spamming with C&D + Tactical strike, and otherwise being annoying and hard to kill if the fight turns sour and my defensive cooldowns are gone.

“Buy why poison?”
Poison’s damage pales in comparison to bleed, but its real utility is the extra might stacking and weakness combined with poison’s heal reduction. It ends up being a really versatile skill that works well as an opener, or as something to hold back until later in the fight and used defensively for survival. Not only that, in multitarget situations combining that poison with a quick spam of dancing daggers adds a good bit of extra mayhem before unleashing the dagger storm.

All in all I like this build a lot. Unlike a lot of different things I tried, I don’t feel like my thief is stuck with “blow all cooldowns and be useless for 40 seconds”

I actually do the event from the other side of the room from the bridge, behind the elemental, at the top of the stairs. Back there its a bit easier to spot and deal with the ember spawns for me, lots of room to maneuver, etc. There’s also a lot less visual noise to distract from spotting AoEs

For the folks saying its too hard for new players, I hadn’t really considered it but you’re probably right. The thing is, where do you draw the line between “thing 80s will actually go back to the zone to do” and “cannon fodder to teach you how to play the game”

A big part of the game is the idea that the majority of the world has something to offer at 80. An equally big part of the game is just plain easy. If there was any concept of gradient difficulty in terms of zone level I’d agree a lot more, but the fact is that nearly every zone has those one or two things that are just plain harder.

I think we should keep these, but maybe tag the events differently to tell players that they’re actually difficult. Like you’ve got the [Group event] tag… maybe something like [Elite event] to notify players that the content in front of them is probably going to require their a-game and at least level appropriate gear?

I’d hate to see the fire elemental nerfed to the ground because I really do think its a fun event and something rewarding to do at 80 as I more often than not pull a 74-80 rare or two from the end chest. Should it get a small adjustment in the reaction time on the meteors, or maybe the fire damage to make it slightly less one-shotty? Sure. Should it be made as easy as the boss at the end of your tutorial? I don’t think it should.

For everyone complaining that this event is tantamount to IMPOSSIBLE, its simply not true. It’s a challenging event and should set the difficulty bar for all world boss DEs. Mechanically its right on par, and the only adjustment I would really see warranted for this event is giving an extra .5-1 second telegraph on the meteors. Their damage is pretty reasonable as a DoT, but combined with the knockdown it’s a touch too twitchy. Just a sliver more time to react to them would take thing event down to “hard” from “super hard” for most players.

Personally I’ve completed the event twice with zero deaths, and on average I might go down once or twice, and have a 50-50 chance of catching a rally or dying completely.

The strategy is pretty straightforward:

1. Quickly down adds and try not to pull more than you have to. The embers are very weak in terms of HP, and recting to the quickly can usually remove them before they can cause too much trouble in terms of massive AoE fields.

2. Split up! The larger the cluster of players in close proximity to one another, the more the event likes to drop multiple meteors in that area, greatly increasing the liklihood you’ll end up in a no-escape situation.

3. Protect and res downed players! One or two guys on a downed player, along with that player bandaging can usually pick him up in seconds, and heal more than the DoT hits for. This doesn’t mean to go stand in a fire, but players that go down usually do so on the edge on an AoE, leaving them in a position where it is possible to help them up without catching yourself on fire.

4. PLAY DEFENSIVELY! Remember how I told you to pick up downed people? As soon as you hit F, watch like a hawk and be ready to dodge instantly if another meteor drops. if you don’t have enough endurance to dodge, don’t do anything that’s going to impact your mobility (like ressing). You’re not doing anyone any favors by joining that guy on the ground. This event requires you to see and react to adds, ground targeted meteors, and the occasional ground-tracking fireball. One of these things alone is easy to deal with, but when you lump them all together your concentration is paramount. Don’t worry about your damage rotation. The elemental does not heal and has a massive enough pool of HP that as long as you can keep yourself alive you can easily grab gold autoattacking the elemental and using your cooldowns/initiative to wipe out adds.

5. The Dead are DEAD! Like a lot of the harder PvE in the game, it simply takes too long to combat res fully dead players. If you see someone that’s completely dead, ignore them. If you yourself are completely dead, waypoint unless the event is almost over. This is simply a fact of the game. Combat ressing dead people is supposed to be nearly impossible in most situations, while combat ressing downed players is usually achievable in most situations. The fact that large zergs make ressing the dead doable in the majority of very easy events in the game doesn’t change the fact that ressing the dead is almost always a waste of time in any of the harder content in the game.

I agree that stealth’s interaction with channeled, targeted abilities seems inconsistant with the way channelled abilities behave without a target. I’ve also observed bouncing abilities to “seek” stealthed entities, which again seems a little off to me.

Should people who actively spam the general area have the ability to hit a stealther? absolutely. if you’ve noticed I move to the left after stealthing and line up an attack to that position and hit me, you deserve that hit for playing well, and I deserve to take it for being predictable.

However the idea of stealth is to remove the enemy’s ability to know with certainty where you are. In fact, from the enemy’s perspective that is literally all it ever does. Traited bonuses to stealth aside, the core function of stealth is the become invisible. The core function of becoming invisible is that people don’t know for certain where you are Channelled strikes and bounces seeking stealthed targets allow people to know with certainty where you are and for this reason I’ll agree that stealth seems broken in this regard.

Its difficult to give advice without knowing anything about the character other than armor.

Carrion all the way. My P/D build is a bit different than yours at 20/0/20/0/30 but I also use carrion gear with undead runes on it.

However, another attractive option (IF you’re running my stealth/blind/bleed/repeat build) is going 2x Afflicted/Centaur/Krait runes. This pushes your bleed duration through the roof, and the extra ticks of bleeding you get from the duration increase have a large effect on overall damage.

Stealthed entities (including theives, mobs with stealth, mesmers, or anyone effected by stealth through outside skills or environmental weapons) Are completely invisible to enemies, and can not be directly targeted, but can be hit and take damage from all attacks.

Attacks fired before the target stealthed that have any sort of seeking behavior will still seek to and hit the invisible stealther. In addition any skills with auto-seeking behavior (mostly skills that ricochet to multiple targets, after they hit the first target) will still auto-seek stealthed entities.

Finally, remember that most skills can be “blind fired” without a target, and these skills will still hit stealthed entities they collide with as well. This includes all melee, projectile, and aoe attacks. If you attack the location of a stealther, you will hit and deal damage to that stealther.

These mechanics are universal in PvP and PvE

Honestly, the more systems and content added to incentivize playing a single character the better.

There’s nothing wrong with playing alts, but something that has stuck in my craw for a really long time in MMOs is the concept of “expansion” content often resulting in a larger proportion of “roll a new character!” than “Here’s stuff to do with your current one!”

Alts should always be a player choice. If I want to play something else I should have the option to do so. However, our characters in MMOs are supposed to exist in living breathing worlds. When those characters are forced in to a more limited “shelf life” in order to expand the breadth of content for new characters I find it’s a very sad thing.

GW1 did a great job with expanding content through the multiclassing system. Every campaign gave you not the only ability to roll a few new classes, but gave you a huge amount of profitable ground to discover on characters you’d already played, as well as unlocking two new secondary classes with literally hundreds of skills.

GW2 does a great job with its level adjustment system, which has the effect of making every area of the game somewhat fun and useful for existing characters, while providing an extremely variant experience for alts.

The recent changes to a lot of soulbound stuff was a good move for alts, but the concept that anything should be easier (or just as easy) to achieve via rolling more characters than playing a single character is a harmful one.

Alts should be a choice a player makes because he enjoys playing alts, not a choice he makes because he feels it is a systemic imperative in order to get things done (especially things that will ultimately benefit only one character)

Thus I view any post with “this is unfair to players who play a lot of characters” with a lot of skepticism. I don’t want to see a game in which players feel compelled by necessity to roll characters they may not actually want or like to play in order to efficiently get things for the characters they do like to play.

If you’re playing alts on a fairly equal schedule, why are you worried about legendary crafting at all? its a long term goal that can only benefit a single character and as such its perfectly reasonable that it must be achieved by a single character. If you play that many alts that equally, why are you doing it? I’d guess you’re doing it because you enjoy playing different characters. You made that choice and you’re not complaining that it takes longer to level all of them up to 80, or that it costs more to equip all of them with nice exotics are you?

Asking for legendaries to become a sort of “all my characters” achievement is like asking for experience to apply to all characters on your account no matter who earns it. Its not a currency, its a single item usable by a single character, and its intended as a long term goal for a single character. If you prefer to use alts to help that goal along that’s fine, but realize that at least part of any “legendary” or “epic” achievement by nature needs to reflect intense effort by its holder alone.

If you went down and mobs just decided “okay, that’s enough” there wouldn’t be much incentive to keep from going down, there would be no reason for other players to protect you or help you up, and PvE would be just insanely easy.

Down is supposed to give you a chance to recover from failure, and to give your friends (or random other dudes) a chance to help you recover, and a chance to pull off a satisfying play to snatch life from the jaws of defeat. It is not, however, supposed to guarantee these things. As a theif one of my most satisfying group fight plays in PvE is to drop a shadow refuge on a downed player, and then get him up while we’re both stealthed. This is a fun play because I actually get to save someone and because the use of my skills matters. If mobs ignored downed players, none of the traits,runes, or skills that are especially good at reviving downed players would have any use, nor would 1-3 on your downed bar.

Aggro targeting in GW2 is a lot like aggro in the first game, its not supposed to be something you can predict or game (even though it was very easy to break the system in the first game with distance, corners, or just a squad of necromancer minions) in order to make you time your defensive cooldowns and consider your positioning and health at all times. If mobs laid off you as soon as you were down they would be awarding your failure.

You have to talk to the Priory researchers, and get the lady to read from the book. normally it will open a portal and a single mob will come out, but if the shadow behemoth event has not happened in the last three hours it will trigger the event chain that will eventually summon him.

Rieselle.5079:

Actually I think it would be better if you lose your spot when you die, and have to requeue. (when you die you get 120s to wait for someone to rez you, if noone does, then you get disconnected from WvW and go back to queue.)

This will make the turnover in the queue much faster and let everyone have a chance at playing more quickly – the wait times will be much reduced. Just dont die.

Would also drastically cut down many player’s tendancy to zerg suicide at objectives until they’re busted with large groups. I like it.