Guild Wars 2

Lux.7169:

Yeah, I’ve tried going with that trait too. I really want to make it work because in theory it’s so good. Regardless, I still keep going back to mug. Maybe one day I’ll convince myself to stick with MoD.

Using it on my P/D condition thief atm along with Hidden Killer. Since I don’t need to steal-stab anymore, Hidden Killer helps me utilise Krait runes by making sure I can precast BV into Steal, gain stealth, use sneak attack and pistol 3 for a huuuuge condition speak. MoD combined with Improvisation makes your opponents rage so hard. So hard.

Besides offering poison, healing and spike damage, Mug makes sure a lot of my combos land. Steal-stab, for example, fails a lot on moving targets when I don’t have Mug. Even for Heartseeker into Steal, you’ll need to make sure your targets are that much lower before you can use that. The 10 points in DA line also increase your power by quite a decent amount.
On the other hand, without investing 30 points into Shadow Arts, Shadow’s Embrace won’t help you against condition classes since Engineers and Necromancers will be spamming marks, nades and bombs right where you stealthed.
However, if you really wish to drop Mug for 10 points in Shadow Arts, I would highly recommend taking Master of Deception. The reduced cooldown on Shadowstep, Shadow Refuge, Blinding Powder etc. is really strong.

I think it might be cool if they increase rank gain to whatever they have planned but make them character bound instead of account.

The ICD increase is a start. But seriously, wtf are you thinking? Please don’t put these into PvP. Please.

Solo queue has everything you’re looking for in unranked queue. Just don’t care about your soloQ rating. As long as you aren’t playing an absolutely worthless spec and your rotations are fine, you shouldn’t drop all that much. Even if you do, it’s really easy to climb back up. Otherwise, try hotjoins. Say, they implement unranked queues that nobody gives two kittens about. What’s going to stop people from leaving whenever they want like they do in hot joins? It is going to be a much more frustrating experience than the current solo queue since people don’t have to worry about their ratings anymore. Not to mention further splitting the population.

kubetz.3058:

babazhook.6805:

(So that got me to wondering.
What happens if I am traited to venomshare and load that up on a team, pull from battle and trait another spec?)

I expect them to stay.

Nuuuuu! I really hope that isn’t the case. Actually, I’m quite confident ANet will make sure this doesn’t happen. There were issues in the past with Rangers swapping traits in the middle of PvP games so they could layer multiple traps, but those were fixed. Although, removing venoms from allies upon switching a spec sounds quite problematic to implement. Maybe they won’t allow swapping traits while your allies have the venom buff?

Lucem Ferre.9205:

Resilience of shadows offers nothing Different.. either you heal yourself when you are in stealth thats around 350 a tick with rejuv OR you take half of direct damage with resi.. and full condition damage.. The thing is, it OVERLAPS the usability of rejuvenation ..

Like I said earlier, the trait is supposed to be used to support your team, not for self sustain. Stop thinking “me” here, and think of the damage reduction you and your allies get when trying to resurrect your teammate. Guardians will usually use a shout/virtue while they try to resurrect so that everyone trying to go in for it (including the corpse) takes reduced damage. You can now perform this role even better with the 50% damage reduction to all instead of 33% along with applying regeneration, if traited (although there isn’t a way to remove that poison). Combine this with Mercy Runes and Merciful Ambush (even Haste, maybe) and it would be extremely hard for your opponents to deny that res.
And of course the traits overlaps. Surely you don’t want Rejuvenation and Resilience at the same time, do you? That would be quite broken.

for example, you spoke of cleave attack, as thief I have many better options to handle such situation than to sacrifice a full trait to get half direct and full condi damage

No, you don’t. You don’t have invulnerabilities or protection or warrior stances or instant reses to mitigate the damage on you while trying to resurrect an ally – this is what I meant by cleave damage. Thieves did have stomp denial via stealth, but they rarely ever resed themselves. After this patch, I can see resurrecting P/D condi thieves as an extremely strong and viable option.

About perplexity, you dont have those right now.. twitch.tv said after 15th April, runes and stuff will be common all over, so there will be all runes in spvp too i think.. I am surely waiting for that to troll in spvp ! ^^

Nah. Peplexity is an extremely unbalanced runeset and it will never ever be added into PvP in its current state.

Lucem Ferre.9205:

hey,

Generally Speaking,

Shadow Arts: Resilience of Shadows – Stealth you apply reduces 50% incoming attack damage (does not work against condition damages)..

this is NEVER better than Shadow’s Rejuvenation .. it heals direct AND condition damage !

Trickery: Bewildering Ambush – Stealing applies 5 stacks of confusion for 5 seconds.

This should ALSO have CD on steal like Sleight of Hand .. else its very weak as grandmaster.

Resilience of Shadows isn’t supposed to be “better” than Shadow’s Rejuvenation. It has a completely different use, mostly team support (think downed cleave reduction – more so than what a guardian can give out via protection). Bewildering Ambush probably isn’t of much use if you’re in WvW and have Perplexity available to you. In PvP however (where we don’t get to have Perplexity runes, and for good reason), it’s a really strong trait, at least in theory.

Updated the original post. Thanks for the feedback so far! Please let me know if I’ve missed any.

My personal thoughts:

Revealed Training – Seems really strong, especially considering the fact that it’s in the trait line that already boosts power by a lot. Thanks to initiative regen buff, one might not have to go with 25/30/0/0/15 for the extra initiative and could instead go with a 30/30/x/x/x for some crazy power hits. It would be interesting to see if people put this trait to use on sets besides dagger main-hand.

Invigorating Precision – I honestly cannot say how good this trait is at this point in time since it’s competing with Executioner and Hidden Killer, both of which are staples in various thief builds. I’d like to see if this can give rise to sustain based bruiser builds that utilise the new Assassin’s Reward along with this trait and Signet of Malice or Withdraw.

Resilience of Shadows – Crazy addition to the Ninja Nurse build. Combined with Merciful Ambush and other Shadow Arts traits, thieves could potentially have a lot of resurrecting potential.

Assassin’s Equilibrium – The only trait I feel meh about. First off, most acrobatic builds don’t make use of stealth a lot. And even if they do and are that deep into acrobatics, to avoid an incoming stun, one would rather dodge (since you have infinite of them) than blow their stealth to avoid incoming stuns. On the Ready Up stream, Josh talked about how you could use this to secure stomps. I’m not sure if that really works how he described it since in order to get revealed, you need to C&D and then hit your target which will cancel your stomp (except when you Steal to them mid stomp to trigger reveal). So I suppose it would have “okay” stomping potential when you can stealth and have steal up. Overall, I’d say this line could do with a better trait, but I might be completely wrong about this.

Bewildering Ambush – Great addition to thief condition builds. Good line to put the trait into. Considering that you can now put bleeds, torment, poison and confusion (as P/D) in one burst combo, it might see use in PvP.

Exciting time for the game overall, thank you ANet! The purpose of this thread is to list and discuss your ideas, suggestions and concerns about the new GM thief traits, as introduced in the latest Ready Up episode. I shall be compiling all the points in the original post so players and developers can have a general idea of what the community is thinking in regard to these introductions.

Revealed Training (Deadly Arts)

• There is a confusion over whether the 200 power procs on the hit that triggers revealed or after it.
• Can help the “one-shot” builds a lot, but still remains to be seen whether it’s worth replacing with Panic Strike for these particular builds.
• A good addition for PvE thieves.
• Good trait to have when you expect anti-stealth traps in WvW, especially with the new change where you can swap out traits out of combat.

Invigorating Precision (Critical Strikes)

• Not useful for roamers in PvP as Executioner is still much, much better.
• May help increase thief participation in WvW zergs.
• Might be a good addition for a PvE thief’s survivability.
• Remains to be seen how strong the healing really is in practice and whether it is enough to replace Executioner and Hidden Killer in most builds.

Resilience of Shadows (Shadow Arts)

• Good addition to the “ninja nurse” build. With this trait, the thief has a lot of resurrecting potential, especially when combined with Merciful Ambush and Mercy runes.
• Not very good for solo-roaming WvW thieves as Shadow’s Rejuvenation is still a better choice.
• Gives thieves a role for WvW zerg participation.

Assassin’s Equilibrium (Acrobatics)

• As the Acrobatics thief depends on dodges instead of stealth for its defenses, stealthing and pre-emptively attacking in order to tank an incoming stun seems impractical.
• Trait has little stomping potential since in order to secure one from the stability, one has to stealth and Steal to the target in order to trigger revealed.
• A one-second stability implies a thief shall be “tanking” stuns, which goes against the squishy nature of thieves.
• A good counter to traits like Tempest Defense, Mirror of Anguish, Reaper’s Protection etc. allowing the thief to execute the burst combo with impunity.

Bewildering Ambush (Trickery)

• A good addition to PvP P/D thieves as they can now apply torment, bleeds, poison and confusion in a single combo, making for a good condition burst along with a decent amount of covers.
• The trait seems underwhelming for condition thieves in WvW as most would choose to take Sleight of Hand, which on a successful interrupt (Perplexity runes), is much stronger than this trait’s version.
• Might have good synergy with S/P builds, as the steal + pistol whip combo would no longer add a redundant daze on top of a stun and instead offers confusion stacks.

The QQ won’t stop. Play what you enjoy. Also, shatter’s a build with one of the highest skill ceilings and is in no way “meta”.

If you want to counter a decap Engi as a Guard, might I suggest playing a DPS (berserker amulet) Guardian with Hallowed Ground and Stand Your Ground instead of Meditations? You’ll hard counter the decap Engi, but it won’t be as effective for anything else, so I’d recommend to use that only when you know the other team definitely is running one.

Death Is Evil.8362:

My problems are all the same: getting random, but constant popups of error code 42:1000:9001:4170

This is all of about 10/20 minutes ago, too. The wierd thing is I that I can still play the game (though slightly laggier) but my guild chat nor LFG are working. Been playing since launch and no similar problems have occured. Super annoying

I have exactly the same problem. It started around 5-6 days ago. The game works fine (for the most part) except that I can’t access my friends list (they don’t show me the character names, just the account ones) or the PvP browser.

gesho.9468:

Rome.3192 no-one said anything about no init cost, ofc it should cost init.

So you want that the interrupts should cost the thief initiative while putting the skill on CD while for other classes, the interrupt just puts the skill on CD? Why the thief hate, brah?

gesho.9468:

especially i hate when you succeed in bringing thief down and then he vanishes in thin air.

Sounds like a player skill issue.

Hi, I play a thief and can confirm that interrupts causing the skill to go on a 3-second CD rather than draining my initiative would be a huge buff to the D/P weapon set I use (not so much for S/P users). My suggestion to all the forum theorycrafters is to spend some time playing the professions you make these brilliant suggestions for. This helps in two ways – teaches you how the class works (as clearly, you have 0 idea) and helps you counter it whenever you come across this class.
My qualm with pistol whip is the fact that it takes little skill to execute. As much as I’d like this FOTM build to be nerfed, you guys have to understand that as a thief, there really isn’t much you can do with most of your weapon skills, as not all weapon sets synergize as well as the current D/P does. Take a look at a few sets:

S/P: Good auto-attack, utility port for slot #2, good damage/CC for 3, .25 sec situational daze on 4 and a situational blind field from 5 (one you can still melee through, btw). The only option a thief has to pressure an opponent with this set is either the 3 skill or the auto-attacks.

S/D: Good auto-attack, utility port on 2, good damage/evade on 3, situational cripple on 4, situational stealth on 5.

compared to

D/P: Good auto-attack, gap closer/finisher/leap on 2, gap closer with blind with good damage on 3, situational interrupt on 4, situational blind field and on demand stealth on 5 (the stealth actually helps this weapon set, so it’s not useless compared to say S/D).
A D/P thief would rely on everything from Shadow Shot to Backstab to auto-attacks and interrupts and blind fields to pressure an opponent. S/D or S/P on the other hand rarely get to use their other skills.
Now, in case of the weapon sets that are not D/P, if you interrupt the only damaging ability a thief has, that would be absolutely detrimental as that only skill that the thief is using does a lot for the thief. This would be okay if the other skill slots helped pressuring your opponent or defending yourself. But that’s really not the case.

Keep getting error 42s and 7s. Has been happening for the past 2 days. Cannot play at all due to this. Looked around the forums and saw a few people having similar problems. Is there an issue on my end?

Yes, I have the same issue and it’s reaaally bad. I can’t seem to stay logged in for more than 3 minutes at a time. Haven’t had this before and nothing has changed on my machine/router, with the ISP or in-game client settings.

Been having the same issue for the past day or so.

I bought this game while I was in the US and then moved to India. Lag is pretty bad. Things like skill activation times, weapon swap times etc. take a lot longer than what you are used to. You have to be extremely sharp and know what attacks are about to come your way if you have any chance of dodging them. Example – Eviscerate was suuuper easy to dodge back then, even if I stopped paying attention to what weapon set my foe was in, the leap made me instinctively hit dodge. Now, it’s extremely hard to dodge it as I have to basically dodge right when they are about to cast it, so it doesn’t hit me mid-dodge roll (yes, that kitten happens a lot). Even trebuchet shots, the dodges have to come way early than when the trebuchet hits you, or you’re kittened.

The evade frames are by design.

Thief PoV:

if (thief)
kill();
else
decap();

Simon.3794:

man, you play too much

Sadly, I do.

Over the past 24 hours, I’ve had seven(!) 4v5s, every one of which I was on the team with the disadvantage. As a result of this, I’ve fallen from rank 100s to ~80% in a span of a few hours. I play thief, and it’s extremely frustrating to play at a level where people just try to zerg from point to point. At this point, the ELO is just snowballing to a point where I feel like I might have to play a warrior or decap engi or something to carry my team. They neither understand how conquest works, nor do they try to follow chat instructions. I know leaderboard rankings don’t mean crap for many of you, but I just want to play at a level where I can enjoy playing my game, rather than getting frustrated at every other decision my teammates make. The culprit – 4v5s.
My question is this: is there anything in the works to fix this sort of thing? If so, how long do you think this might take?

PS: kitten skyhammer

A lot of the damage from the sword-auto attack chain comes from the last skill in the chain, crippling strike. And most players aren’t dumb enough to stand still while you land the entire chain. Hence, overall, the dagger’s auto-attacks will land more damage than the sword’s.

One more time. Can you PLEASE remove this from solo queue? Do you really want to make us beg for this?

If you’re playing tPvP, the viable trait lines atm are 10/30/0/0/30 or 10/30/0/30/0, depending on the weapon set you use. For either of those, you can never 1v1 a minion master on point. Try to make use of the terrain and kite the minions around. Shortbow has a lot of pressure. Kill the Blood Fiend first, if they use that. Interrupt the necro if he tries to summon the minions again once they are dead. Overall, it’s a pretty hard matchup and you really have to make sure you don’t mess up.

Neotko.3492:

Ok PLEASE EXPLAIN THIS!:

I have been PAYING CASH for gems ONCE a month (because I like to support the game)

This that PAYED CASH I bough keys for Black Lion Chests

That PAYED CASH USED on keys returned me arround 200+ Glory Boosters

NOW YOU TELL ME THAT THAT ‘PAYED CASH’ or that PAYED GEMS, or that PAYED GEMS TRANSFORMED IN KEYS USED IN CHESTS THAT RETURNED X ITEMS and some of that items are Glory Boosters that will just DISAPPEAR?

SO… My cash, that you got for my ‘support’ to the game, will be returned to me on LESS ITEMS ?

In what world is that even possible?

You say you donated for the betterment of the game. This new change is exactly for that. Where is the problem?

Tachii.3506:

I say it allows “skillful” play without the option to cancel, since you need to be aware of your surroundings before you use it.

Well, the primary use of the Withdraw skill is to cleanse immobilize. If I’m caught with one where using a withdraw would cause a fall or reposition me back into a zerg, that’s counter-productive to what I take that skill for, considering I can’t change or control the direction I’m headed once I’ve been immobilized.

Withdraw is a great skill as is, but it would be nice if we could have the option of stopping the roll short by using stow weapon. Being able to control your position displacement would help a lot in promoting skillful play. Also, you wouldn’t suicide while trying to heal in maps like Skyhammer and EotM. It already works if we weapon swap in the middle of it, but you don’t always have that option.
I apologize if I got the wrong section for this.

It’s on all servers. Can cofirm Foefire as well.

1. Elementalist
2. Ranger

If you play on the US server, message me in-game. IGN: Nitschei

You have to be in combat with the person for it to work properly. If you’re trying to use it in Skyhammer, use headshot or dancing dagger or surprise shot before you use it to guarantee a pull.

A little background info again, so you know I’m speaking this from experience- I’ve been playing thief (and only thief) since a year and a few months. I’m rank 64 in sPvP and top 100 in both team and solo queue.
Again, I’m not saying you’re taking out these 5 players, but it is very much possible to stall a group of 5 as a perma-stealth thief. If you can’t do this, you’re likely not a very good one (or your opponents are extremely competent, but let’s be real here). Like I said, in sPvP, perma-stealthing isn’t a problem because you can’t afford to not “do anything”. In WvW though, you will have players complain about thieves being OP because here’s what happens when other classes face a group of 5 – they either get downed to get displaced back to their spawn, or they have to run and kite away the group. In case of a thief, I can hang around their group all the while stealthing, all for kittens and giggles, and leave when I decide I’ve had my fun. Maybe even take a couple caught out of position. And this is regardless of how squishy I’m built. Do you not see this as something that’s imbalanced?
Your argument that thieves are squishy/low HP, blah blah isn’t necessarily only valid for thieves. Try playing an elementalist. They suffer with the same low HP (while also having lower armor). Sure they may have some burst healing if they choose to go with healing power, but thieves do get a lot of dodging through the acrobatics trait lines and evades on weapon skills along with it. Actually, try playing a berserker elementalist or whatever stats you use on your thief and tell me if it has the same survivability to damage ratio as your thief in WvW.

I see so many thieves defending shadow arts claiming it’s the thief version of being “tanky”. In every 1v1 scenario, a S/D acrobat and D/P trickery can hold its own and escape when outnumbered. Having tankiness along with massive burst and amazing condition removal along with great mobility and escapes isn’t really how a class is supposed to be. Please don’t use warriors as an example, as they are broken atm because of this very fact.
If you go berserker as a thief, you cannot expect the same tankiness a soldier’s/cleric’s guardian has. If you can hold a group of 5 people off by perma-stealthing, when you also have the ability to disengage and/or burst, there’s something wrong with that picture. I’d love to see an argument otherwise.

PS: I’m talking strictly WvW here. SA isn’t strong at all in sPvP as you can’t afford to leave your team in a 4v5 while you remain in stealth for long intervals.

I’ve been playing thief for more than a year now (mostly spvp) and I recently started roaming in WvW. A shadow arts thief doesn’t kill me regardless of the class I’m running, but it is really fricking annoying having one follow you across the map, stealthing away when you try to fight, all the while looking for a buddy or two to take you down with. So yeah, I agree, shadow arts is way too forgiving and needs a nerf when it comes to WvW, but for sPvP, it’s a really lackluster trait line and could do with a revamp. Jumper’s idea of Shadow Arts trait focusing on going in and out of stealth rather than constantly staying in stealth was a pretty good suggestion imo. There’s more counterplay involved against such builds with interrupting/evading their stealths that way.

Just had three Skyhammer games in a row. It’s not fun for me, and unfortunately i’m at the point where I’m going to start AFKing my future Skyhammer matches, and then it won’t be fun for any of the other 9 people either. Hope I can count towards the metrics to give you a better idea of how opposite of fun this map is when you have to play it in solo queue.

Lucem Ferre.9205:

Also, could you please explain what you mean by “glory boosters now stack upto eight times” ?

You can stack 6 of them to activate the buff for 6 hours straight. The timer does not tick while you’re offline. It’s really convenient if you only PvP.

1. Nope.
2. Did you miss the glory to gold conversion NPC that we had during the Wintersday living story? Buying Wintersday presents to sell them on the trading post used to give a good amount of gold per glory. Otherwise, you can spend the glory crafting dyes to make an okay amount of gold if you’re not interested in leveling other toons. Have you purchased all the cultural armors for PvP? In your situation, I would personally recommend you hold on to your glory as there might be a chance that another NPC like the Wintersday one is added before they finally get rid of glory.
3. You should use your glory boosters now (they stack up to 8 times, I think). There shall be an announcement before they decide to get rid of glory and glory boosters, and you should have enough time and opportunities to spend the accumulated glory before the finally get rid of it.
4. Nope.

Daishi.6027:

Locuz.2651:

1] What MMOs did you play that had amazing classbalance in pvp?

2] What MMO did you play that had no fotm spec/class in pvp?

Pre-renewal Ragnarok online.

Sonic Blow assassins were pretty kitten overpowered in that game.

Sars.8792:

Also think about warrior with fast hands ……… battle/geo+doom/earth every 5s then get 2x procs…….will be like having 4x the sigil procs they have now……. lots of op combos using fast hands lol.

Those sigils have internal CD of 9 seconds. If that weren’t the case, elementalist attunements and engineer kits would probably be more of an issue than warrior fast hands.

If you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t be playing the game. If you are, that’s reason enough. What’s the point of the forum post?

Are you serious? Why is this thread in the structured PvP forum? Next time on, don’t watch the show. Read the summarized notes.

Hi, the new hambow warrior build that I personally use is:
20 Strength – Great Fortitude, Distracting Strikes
0 Arms
20 Defense – Dogged March, Cleansing Ire
0 Tactics
30 Discipline – Signet Mastery, Destruction of the Empowered, Burst Mastery
with Lyssa Runes, and Fire/Force sigils. Utilities: Healing Signet, Dolyak Signet/Endure Pain/Fear Me, Berserker Stance, Balanced Stance.
That being a said, a lot of these traits are optional and can be swapped out based on personal preference. A lot of warriors also have other variants of the trait setups, the only thing common in the traits being the 20 points into the defense line for Cleansing Ire. Play around and see what works best for you.

Would you be willing to participate (y/n)?
Yes.

If yes, how much would you be willing to pay to enter (5/10)?
Yes.

Do you have a team (y/n)?
No.

If no, would such an event create incentive for you to find a team to compete with (y/n)?
For sure.

What region do you play on (NA/EU)?
NA

aussieheals.6843:

Rome.3192:

You’re definitely not the only one.

Those graphics setting are sad

I play on a macbook. Get off my case

Divinity.8041:

Doesn’t nightmare require rank 80? he is 29

Buy the nightmare box off the glory vendor. Salvage everything. Use a sliver as the recipe and hope for a crit.

You’re definitely not the only one.

Black Powder/Smokescreen + Unload.