Guild Wars 2

I’d gladly give up Moa for Illusionary Fiery Greatsword tbh; it’s such a useless elite lol.

Running 30 insp for shatter cleanse is bad imo. IP, IC and -30% recharge on shatters is just too good if your main focus is shatter. Like shimmerless said, just focus on avoiding the condi bombs and think about running MoR or Null (yay boon strip) if you feel you really need it.

There isn’t any food or weapon stats selected for the wvw link either.

I’ll be playing a lot less after the patch. You’d think doing quarterly balance passes would mean really awesome stuff that’ll keep the meta interesting for the 3 months you’re not doing anything, but nope; they just keep perpetuating the silly condi meta with little consideration for what the community unanimously agrees needs change.

Pretty sure they said the overall lower damage would only affect PvE and WvW in a blog post ages ago.

Dirame.8521:

Thief, Pistol Whip
Interrupt get a target on them and interrupt them as they start the combo, it’s pretty easy if you can see them coming. [Medium]

Should note that interrupting the stun animation doesn’t remove any initiative and obviously doesn’t put it on a 5 second cd.

Also, you should add Heartseeker to the list of leaps that’re easily interruptable. If you’re quick enough to remove the blind and manage to interrupt the heartseeker through black powder, it can be pretty devastating to thief.

Who actually uses Sic Em though? rofl

You probably won’t find a shatter build that uses both greatsword and staff. generally people like Sw/x for immob+blurred frenzy+mind wrack burst.

Osicat has a bunch of good roaming builds (here).

On repeat while I roam on thief.

• Clone generation without DE is poor; you won’t be able to utilize the condi damage of crippling dissipation and stacking loads of torment via Maim won’t be possible. Another note, all of your illusions are ranged and you don’t have any form of soft cc so it’ll be harder to land vital shatters on players who have half an idea on how to play this game.

• Carrion amulet is trash. The +power is crappy because direct damage needs precision and ferocity to be effective. This also makes 20% mind wrack damage a bad choice because your direct damage will already be terrible. Also, about Hoelbrak runes, your main source of might generation is Sigil of Battle, which only adds 4 seconds. You’re better off rocking Runes of the Undead with a Rabid Amulet to increase your overall condi damage by a fair amount. Trying to be hybrid just isn’t worthwhile.

• There’s no condi removal in this build. A necro decides to transfer your conditions to you and you’re screwed. I’d suggest dropping Signet of Dom for Cleanse Mantra or Disenchanter and moving the 10 points from Dom to Insp for Mender’s Purity and 1k HP.

I probably missed something really important, but I don’t want to think too much about condi shatter, but it’s just not viable in my honest opinion.

• Merge Protected Mantras and Mantra Mastery: -20% Mantra Recharge. Gain +100 toughness when channeling a mantra – Adept trait.

• Move/change Empowering Mantras: Increase damage by 3% for each mantra – Master trait.

• New Dueling GM trait Functional Mantras: Gain “Channeling Mantra” buff for 3 seconds. After 3 seconds, the buff is removed and replaced by the mantra charges. While “Channeled Mantras” is active, the Mesmer can do other stuff instead of holding their kittens for 3 seconds per mantra. “Channeled Mantras” is removed if you’re CCed while it is active.

Similar to how The Prestige and A. E. D. for Engineers works. You can channel multiple mantras at the same time while still doing other actions, but you risk being interrupted and all of your mantras going on the 5 second recharge. The current visual effect of channeling mantras would still applied while channeling that mantra so people can’t complain that it’s too hard to counterplay.

quercus.9261:

Mesmers are tough to level but it gets easier at 40. Go 20 in dueling and get clone on dodge when you can.

Keep in mind master traits will be locked until 60 come Apr 15 patch, lol. Yay mesmer leveling.

Not worth dropping DE or CI for this trait. I knew it wasn’t going to be anything game changing when they (indirectly) stated it wouldn’t affect thief weapon skills.

trooper.2650:

I am ignorant, but why do you say it only has effect with interrupting skills that require casting time? Where is it written?

Channeled skills go on full cooldown when they’re interrupted, so power lock essentially does nothing. Instant casts can’t be interrupted.

I love how they tried to push iWarden as a QoL change rather than a straight up bug fix. lolol

eldenbri.1059:

You can activate shatter skills with no illusions out, right?

I was pondering using the Chaos grandmaster trait in a couple of ways with a phantasm build.
– Pop F2 and maybe F3 before casting any phantasms
– Whenever you use F1, F2, or F3 to shatter – go ahead and use the other 2

It still feels like PU is better, but it might be interesting.

Plus, regen when you pop distortion isn’t bad

You need illusions out to gain those effects, unless you’re traited for iPersona.

Chaos, Insp and Illusions are terribad. They’re all in the worst possible spots for their functionality.

Chaos: the condition and arguably secondary interrupt line, gets boons on shattering (2 of which are already in Illusions).

Inspiration: Clusterkitten of functionality. Buff phantasms, glamours, mantras, reflects, supportive shatter and now supportive interrupts! Yay, still not touching this line for pvp.

Illusions: 30 into the shatter line for 1 condition. I won’t say anymore on this one, lol.

Pvt Frosty.6973:

Also, unfortunately in life, balance is a state constantly changing. If there were perfect balance between all classes and builds, everyone would quit within a month.

It’s funny that you say this, because ANet only balance once every 3-4 months. Many more people do (and have) leave the game because of this.

I don’t understand how you can twist “Guardians are in good spot right now” to be negative. Your class is balanced. It’s in the spot where every class wants to be! Why would you purposely destroy that for the sake of ‘spicing it up’?

However I do agree that the lack of conditions does leave little room for condition builds to exist. Here’s hoping ANet address it in the upcoming feature patch?

Haha I love this! If you were using offhand sword instead of warhorn you’d have been even more OP!

Carighan.6758:

Uuuh, mine don’t? They stand there, turning in the direction of the stealthed player?

This is easy to test. Get a mesmer friend to cast an iduelist on you, summon a dodge clone and stealth before the clone attacks again. If you’re stealthed when it begins its next attack cycle it’ll attack your clone instead. I just did it and it went exactly as predicted.

It would’ve been pretty awesome to kittenslap some people though. Respect my authoritah.

DeceiverX.8361:

1.) Not really, though. Mist form is a stun break and has a duration longer than most CC effects, prevents new incoming CC effects, and allows for re-positioning. I’d argue that eles have it substantially better than thieves do in regards to getting CC’ed.

2.) Again, you need to focus more on how dependent thieves are on some skills. I’d probably agree with you more if it wasn’t the case that pretty much what allows thieves to actually work in combat is the fact they pretty much bank on the repeated use of maybe two or three skills and one type of attack pattern. If those other two were more potent in the particular builds they corresponded to (which is almost impossible due to how some weapon sets can play with various build types), then this would have more merit. Strictly speaking, though it’s like telling a mesmer they cannot summon clones nor use their F1-F3 skills for ten seconds. That’s a pretty big hit, don’t ya think?

3.) Right, so 3 seconds is more reasonable?

4.) Again, the problem lies in that the dependency is too big to shut them out of for such an extended period, and there are really no means of dealing with it. Unfortunately your example is flawed, too, though. Rapid Fire actually has strictly lower damage – by quite a large margin, even including the vuln stacks – than a longbow auto attack. Rapid Fire might seem like it deals a lot of damage, but it really doesn’t. Again, my point in that other classes have means with dealing with the cooldown whereas thieves can’t at all.

Again, another issue is that thieves have almost no access to stability, and aside from dagger storm, which cannot be used to prevent the loss of other attacks, requires the thief to build specifically for it, effectively putting only a few niche builds even remotely capable with dealing with such harsh penalties.

1. I have to disagree with you on this point. Thieves are, in my opinion, extremely well-equipped to deal with CC. While it’s not as blatantly obvious as “stun break and 3 second invulnerability”, they have capacity to completely mitigate and avoid damage/CC through teleports (shadowstep, infiltrator’s signet, infiltrator’s strike, shadow strike), blinds (black powder, blinding powder, signet of shadows, shadow shot), stealth (blinding powder, shadow refuge, hide in shadows, cnd) and of course evades (dodge rolls, disabling shot, withdraw, signet of agility, roll for initiative).

2(+4; they’re basically the same point). Every class is dependent on their skills going off at the right time; thief is unique in the fact that they can do their skills multiple times, but it shouldn’t mean they are exempt from the regular rules of interruption because their resource allows them to do this. In saying this, I also have to disagree that thieves are reliant on using the same skill multiple times. While it is effective in certain instances, such as finishing off an opponent with repeated heartseekers, it is my understanding that initiative was designed with the intent that all skills would be useful used in conjunction with the others (pls don’t mention d/d 3 I just couldn’t, lol), similar to how the other class skill bars function, but also having the option to apply quick burst such as the example I gave. This is my primary reasoning for why normalising the way interrupts affect thieves and in doing so adds more depth to combat. Specific 1-button playstyles that are considered cheesy, such as S/P Pistol Whip spamming, would become manageable and allow for some counterplay, but if played properly well can still be just as devastating as it is in its current state.

3. Agree, 5 seconds is too long; 3 seems more reasonable. Before I conclusively state my opinion on it though, I’d like to hear the devs’ reasoning on the upcoming livestream.

To address another topic you brough up:

Again, my point in that other classes have means with dealing with the cooldown whereas thieves can’t at all.

Would you mind explaining what means other classes have for dealing with cooldowns that a thief doesn’t?

DeceiverX.8361:

1. The cost of being interrupted on GC thieves is pretty much insta-death. I’m pretty sure that’s about as punishing as it gets.

2. One could argue that losing half your resources for no gain would also be considered a pretty mean trade-off. Dunno about you, but losing 6 init and then also going on a 10 second cooldown on a skill which requires constant use just seems silly OP.

3. That’s not to say I don’t agree or disagree, but I think a flat 10 seconds is crazy. Would make a lot more sense to have the timer increase by like 3 seconds flat for all skills to keep it potent but not blatantly overpowered, especially since a good lockdown mesmer really doesn’t have much of a counter except for thieves as it stands.

4. This at least keeps them in a not-so-hot position, but doesn’t totally destroy them. Telling a D/D thief he can’t use CnD for 10 seconds is literally game-breaking and might as well just give mesmers a skill that just kills the target if it’s a thief. The same goes for S/P, D/P (although I hate D/P builds even as a thief and think they’re totally broken and deserve more nerfs), S/D, P/P, and so on.

1. The same can be said for any glass cannon spec though (besides warriors). Just look at elementalists. They have the lowest base HP and armor, no stealth/spammable evades and no massive gap openers. When they’re caught, they’re just as boned as a thief.

2. Except in my post I specifically made sure to mention that interrupting a skill wouldn’t deduct the initiative cost; only put it on a cooldown. This holds for true for the other 7 classes.

3. I agree, increasing the interrupt cooldown by an extra 5 seconds is absurd. Infact, the base cooldown for ranger’s Rapid Fire is 10 seconds, and traited 8 seconds. So this easily interrupted skill will not only completely stop a major portion of damage, it will also put it on a longer cooldown!

4. I agree that locking a thief out of CnD for 10 seconds would be extremely detrimental to the class to an extent. However, like I discussed in the OP, this would solve the issue of 5-trigger-happy offhand dagger thieves being able to immediately re-use CnD with little-to-no punishment, which is true for every other class. To use the same example, interrupting a ranger’s rapid fire will remove a major factor of their damage for 5-10 seconds.

While this sounds harsh, I personally feel it adds another layer of skill to combat by coercing you to think about covering your important casts with stability or baiting certain cooldowns to avoid being interrupted in the first place. You can find countless examples of this in high-level tpvp play, which also explains why interrupt mesmers are not an issue for these players and do not have a definite place in the current meta.

This thread is now about Ele GM trait vs Ranger GM trait.

Oozo.7856:

Being locked out of your heal for 5 seconds is punishment enough. 10 seconds? That is an automatic win against some of the classes. Just from interrupting a single heal?

Bad.

It’s an automatic win against bad players. Good players will cover their heal by popping stability, opening a gap, stealthing, CCing and baiting cooldowns.

I main an interrupt mesmer. It’s awesome. With the announcement of the upcoming grandmaster traits, I squeed so much when I saw that it was tailored to my exact build! It’s great that ANet is finally getting around to buffing the more active specs, so mesmers aren’t so pigeonholed into running PU condi, the build which is copping a lot of hate.

I was excited as I was reading the description for the new trait, until I got to: “This will not affect skills that have no recharge”. Wot. Besides auto-attack, there’s only one other set of skills, nay, one class that isn’t subject to cooldowns on their weapon skills. Thieves. I have a major issue with this. This trait will require mesmers to drop either Chaotic Interruption, the, crux of most interrupt builds out today or Deceptive Evasion, the bread and butter trait for every PvP build that uses clones in some way (read: every build).

So, we’ve established that an awesome trait requires losing something else, and it’s understandable. The problem I have is when a single class can completely ignore that grandmaster trait because they play that class. There is no counter play to it. Not like there is for condition specs fighting a Diamond Skin Ele. If you’re running the new trait and you come across a thief, interrupting his weapon skills will not hinder him in the slightest. “But Renny.6571, if you interrupt a thief’s weapon skills, he loses the initiative, which is basically a cooldown!” Wrong. Another member of the PvP community recently made a thread containing a video highlighting that most interruptable thief skills are not subject to initiative loss when they’re interrupted. In this same thread, he modestly chose to disregard discussion about thieves not being subject to the cooldown increase component of the Chill condition. Which is another topic itself that completely astounds me that it has been in the game for over a year without so much as an acknowledgement.

“So Renny.6571, what are you suggesting? ANet completely nerf the hell out of thieves and make them unplayable?!” Again, wrong. Stop making asinine comments random voice! In a perfect world, I’d love for ANet to remove initiative and rework thief skills to be balanced around regular cooldowns, but we know this will never happen. So my next suggestion would be to subject the interrupted weapon skill to a 10 second cooldown, the same as every other class, but not remove the initiative cost of the skill. My reasoning is this: the new grandmaster trait boils down to ‘you interrupt the skill, it goes on a 10 second cooldown, regardless of your class’. And in a way, it makes total sense. If thieves lost the initiative of the skill, it’s essentially a cooldown for all of their weapon skills, this is wrong. However, subjecting the skill to the regular 5-10sec cooldown from being interrupted? It solves the aforementioned problem and also stops thieves from using that same skill immediately after the CC expires, which amazingly keeps in line with every other class in the game!

I know I’m jumping the gun about a month early on this post, and I’ll look like a complete idiot if ANet decide to reveal information regarding this exact subject in one of their upcoming livestreams/blog posts, however I still feel that this issue needs to be more widely recognised. So, what do you guys think about interrupting/chilling a thief? Or the initiative system in general? And please, try to keep this on topic and flaming to a minimum!

OP sure gonna look silly when he realises his mistake.

This thread is now about longbows.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

This how you should look at it.

Old: At .75init/sec, it takes 16s to fill a 12 init bar, 20s for a 15 init bar.
New: At 1init/sec, it takes 12s to fill 12 init bar, 15s to fill 15 init bar.

At the 15 init bar level, that is a 33% boost as they’ve promised.

Yeah. The point of my post was to highlight that initiative regen is a lot faster than it was pre-patch, even without any traits or utilities.

Lordrosicky.5813:

PeepMeDown.5017:

i must of missed that. I hope its good and not skyhammer part 2.

It is a new map called “Tightrope” Each team tries to get to the other side of the tightrope. In the end only 1 guy survives and he wins the game for his team.

The entire rope breaks after 2 seconds and there’s an auto-firing cannon that does a knockback too!

LordByron.8369:

I disagree Illusions being AI,

They are nothing more than skills…they track a player and deal damage every X second.

They don t do anything else.

They don t change basing on opponent action or anything they just keep doing the same stuff.

AI is a different thing…

They’ll run off and go attack something else if their target is stealthed at the moment their attack is recharged. That’s.. good.. right…?

iWave, Mirror Blade > Diversion. OP pls, do you even mesmer.

Me Games Ma.8426:

Wow… there are builds in my mind which just became extremely awesome :>
[6 4 4 0 0] would be one for sure
What’s next then? There will be 4 other new traits for us. I’m afraid of having a chaostrait that can’t compete with PU and an illusionstrait that can’t compete with IP but I’m really looking forwart to Dueling and Inspiration!

Dueling will be some kittenty mantra buff that no will ever run; I guarantee it.

scabrous.7835:

Put me right if I’m wrong but somebody did the maths of old ini+traits vs new ini+traits and it came out that we actually have lower rate of overall recharge.

Old: 7.5 (base) + 2 (Quick Recovery) + 1 (Infil Signet) = 10.5ini/10sec
New: 10ini/10sec (base)

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vYAQJAqok0Mh/JJCuHONpNtTBXjPA-zUBB4iBMTtIasVRFRjVJjIqWpEjUAwsGA-w best build

Please don’t ask for power creep on guardian. They’re in a kittening awesome spot right now. If anything, ANet should try to bring every class other class to the same level as guardian.

Grandmaster trait that doesn’t affect the weapon skills of the only problem class an interrupt mesmer should have. Awesome.

Ramiel.4931:

As always, the mesmer in PvE is forgotten.

They are taking the whole pvp esports thing too far.

You’re forgetting Mesmers in PvE aren’t in as bad of a position as they are in PvP…

The only problem class for me on my interrupt mesmer is thief. This trait doesn’t affect thief weapon skills, and I’ll be forced to drop either DE or Chaotic Interruption for it. Not worth.

It’s surprising that they make a whole new GM trait for interrupt builds AFTER being presented with the knowledge that 1/2 the thief weapon skills don’t cost initiative or go on a cooldown when they’re interrupted and they go ahead and launch this ship and specifically state it won’t affect thieves. :\

Small wall-of-text inc, mostly about PvP/WvW balance. Not sure if this is even relevant to the topic. huehue.

I think there are two main issues people have with these infrequent balance updates which need to be addressed:
a) Making drastic changes out of the blue and providing no solid reasoning as to why such changes were made. It doesn’t need to be an entire page worth of explanation per change, but rather a simple paragraph that applies logic and understanding of the current meta. An excellent example of this can be seen here

b) not giving us a chance to read and give feedback before the patch goes to the live servers. Providing a place for players to view upcoming changes and respond with well thought-out and structured responses (similar to the CDI threads) would resolve many qualms people have and allow for a more settled release. The community has already demonstrated, from the leaked patch notes of previous updates, that it is able to provide superb discussion, feedback and suggestions (among all the QQ and complaints), which only falls upon deaf ears as they are, after all, leaked patch notes. To me, it only makes sense that this approach would be taken when you’ve opted to do quarterly balance changes and refuse to make tweaks to class balance beyond fixing legitimate, game-breaking bugs.

lol’d. Good joke OP.

More Mesmers you say?

Not me personally, but my guild visted the ArenaNet office while roaming in EoTM..

The real T1 gvg heroes.

McFribble.2349:

1. Honestly, the only thief build that requires a lick of skill is Sword/X.
2. Dagger/X or Pistol/X is stupidly easy to win with.
3. If only Shortbow was viable, though.

1. Sword/Pistol disagrees with this statement.
2. Pistol/Pistol will not harm a naked bearbow ranger.
3. I’m not sure if this was sarcasm, but Shortbow is extremely viable.

Tao.5096:

Tell me how good healing and stealth is vs warrior who knock you down for almost 10 seconds?
In the mean time he does stack various debuffs on you and pop boons on himself.

Come on, I want a clear solution vs such situation which isn’t rare, it is quite frequent.

Shortbow 3, Infiltrator’s Signet, Shadowstep, Black Powder, dodge rolls.

You’ll only ever get “knocked down for 10 seconds” if you’re standing still because your dog just chewed through your keyboard cable and someone punched a hole in your monitor so you can’t actually see what’s going on ingame.

Dee Jay.2460:

Thieves need more interesting traits that somehow interact with abilities and mechanics and less traits that just add a certain amount of passive damage.

Idk what you’re talking about.
- Deadly Arts: buffs venoms/steal and gives you more condis.
- Shadow Arts: buffs the hell out of stealth and gives you better hp regen.
- Acrobatics: buffs dodge rolls/condi cleanse.
- Trickery: Steal. ’Nuf said.

I excluded Critical Strikes because it doesn’t really buff anything except damage, and yet most builds go the full 30 into it, so damage traits must be pretty coveted.

And of course, there are increased passive damage traits sprinkled around, mostly in the minors, but why are you complaining? I’d KILL for traits like that on my Mesmer.

Open world events such as Wurm and Teq. Can’t think of anything else.

My halting strike does 1k – 3.5k @ 2.3k power and 95% crit damage

Where is p/d shadow arts dire thief on this list.