Those 5% damage bonuses are only really worth it if you want to try and cram the absolute maximum damage out of every attack, otherwise a 1000 crit will become a 1050 crit, and that 50 extra damage isn’t really going to do much.
Pretty much this. Unless your build is stacking multiple damage boosts to unleash hell all at once upon your enemies, straight up +damage traits tend to be lackluster.
I’d love it if I didn’t have pointless/redundant traps as a thief.
I’d love it if ranger wasn’t so underpowered.
I’d love it if Warrior wasn’t so boring, and simple.
I’d love it if Necro didn’t have so many bugs.
I’d love it if my Mesmer had decent AoE for PvE.
I’d love it if my Guardian had a weapon that was decent at range.
I’d love it if my Elementalist wasn’t forced into extremely specific trait lines, and builds.
People have been complaining that they hit too hard with their spit attack. It might just be because I’m a guardian and have easy access to projectile reflect attacks, but I have no trouble with them at all. (I’m not a bunker build, I’m in junk gear with 11k hp and 2.2k armor.)
They usually open the fight with their ranged spit attack thing (which is what eats your health), so as soon as you see them charge that up (takes about 0.5 to 1 seconds) hit any sort of shield or reflect ability. You’ll take very little/no damage, and if you can reflect projectiles you’ll damage them instead.
After that attack is gone they won’t use it again for another 15-20 seconds, by which time they’ll probably be dead. They deal very manageable damage once that’s out of the way.
I personally thought that a lot more people would be doing that than there apparently are. When I hear stories about engineers and warriors eating pavement four seconds into karka fights it makes me worried. If anyone else has any tips (regardless of how common sense they might be) then please post them here so that others have an easier time.
Yeah outside of Mesmer and Guardian, I don’t think anyone else has access to an instant reflection ability like that, let alone one at all. Other classes shouldn’t get shredded just because one or two, or even potentially three, can protect against it while the rest have to eat the damage (Which is a ton, it takes like 8k away from me).
The only one that actually has no option for this strategy is Necromancer. Everyone else can at least — with minimal effort — block, reflect, stun, interrupt, etc the young karkas. Some do it more easily than others (such as elementalist and guardian), but almost all of them have at least some option.
You don’t have to eat the damage if you change your setup according to the encounter you’re facing. That’s how the Guild Wars games work. You can’t just use the same 8 skills for everything. (Edit: wrong game, same 10 skills)
Just a note: Blinding powder is terrible, because the channel will still track you through invisibility, and daggerstorm is once every 90 seconds.
You complain that one type of skill (channeled) can track you while you are in stealth.
Do you think that if i start to Unload against a warrior and he pops Shield Stance the channeling should continue trough it,because it’s already started?
Or trough Guardians Bubble?
Or trough Engineers Shrink?
Or trough Mist Form?
Why this classes have such abilities and suddenly Thief doesn’t?
…..Well because he is given Stealth to help him prevent damage(not to help him change clothes w/o being seen).And thats why we all think it isn’t intended.
And BTW it isn’t one type of skill.Leaps like HS and Eviscerate also hit you if the guy have autotarget Option enabled.
The Thief’s stealth isn’t invulnerability and I don’t think it should be treated as such. All the profession abilities you listed are still affected by bleeding, poison, and burning conditions, so even those have weaknesses.
You really aren’t understanding it. The problem isn’t “we take damage while under stealth”. The problem is “attacks that start channeling before we stealth home in on us.”
There are no complaints here about taking condition damage while stealthed, and none about being hit in general.
Considering how many hits it takes to kill someone (with all classes, not just rangers), and the way everyone swings their weapons, I think its safe to say all weapons in the Guild Wars universe are made of hollowed out plastic.
A thief can be tracked through stealth for ~5 seconds by a ranger using rapid fire, and continues to track even if the thief is dodging the arrows in stealth.
There’s no way this is intended. In the game world, what kind of explanation has this making sense?
If the purpose is a gap closer, then it’s completely useless.
D/D Heartseeker is better for closing gaps, costs less initiative, and hitting escaping (likely damaged) targets. It’s also more reliable, as you will always leap, even if you miss, but if you miss a dancing dagger, then you’ve only wasted initiative.
they didnt get totally stomped on literally come on and aswell most people they are going full condition or full glass cannon anyway from the get go. honestly ive been on my thief for a while in WvW and spvp and i can hardly see a difference in damage. on the things that were. nerfed. its true that dancing dagger got hit hard. but if u go glass cannon spec. u still can hit pretty kitten high eithier way so u really dont notice it.
“If you spec glass cannon you really don’t notice it.”
So many things wrong.
33% reduction on CnD is taking the total burst down from average of 15k to about 13.3k.
The damage was never the problem with the theif burst, it was 3 abilities hitting within half a second being almost impossible to dodge.
Dancing daggers never did that much damage in the first place, it was used as an evade/bleed stack, so its kinda meh anyway.
Stack bleed? Evade? I think you might be thinking of death blossum. Dancing dagger is dagger #4.
the thief class is a low risk, high reward class. it has some of the highest burst and condition damage available with some of the best ways to avoid retaliation or just avoid combat altogether if things are not going their way. to compare it to mesmers or guardians is just being ridiculous.
though when you ask me to define competitive game i have to assume you are just trolling.
Well considering TF2 has a competitive base that eclipses Guild Wars 2, I don’t see how you could call this competitive, but not TF2. It’s also especially strange because there are notably less thieves in tPvP than sPvP, and more guardians, and mesmers.
Also, consider the goal of sPvP, and how effective a thief is at achieving those goals.
How useful is a burst damage class compared to a class that can hold a position for long periods of time, or allow their team to get from one location to another extremely quickly?
the things that pass for logic on this forum are always amazing.
do you honestly think the thief class would be so popular if it wasn’t so powerful?
personally i hope the patch moves the class towards a more balanced position. low risk + high reward is obviously broken which is why the class is so popular.
edit – also comparisons to warriors are always so genuine because warriors can turn invisible to avoid retaliation and teleport across the map when things are not going their way.
In TF2, you’ll see a large number of spies, and snipers on a 12 man team when you go into random pubs. Usually 3 or more of each.
In reality, a well put together team of 12 players would have one sniper in most situations, and have one spy who goes on and off.
People rarely care about what’s really effective. They play what they feel is “cool”, or “leet”.
I love my torch, with offhand training, bonfire’s radius becomes much bigger (about as big as an untraited flame trap), and the 6 second burn on #4 is nothing to scoff at either.
Bonfire also acts as an 8 second fire field, allowing your teammates to use it for a great boost to their damage output either via blast finishers for might, or projectile/whirls for more burning.
According to some screenshots from Reddit, Jon Peters showed up in the Heart of the Mists, and said there was “about 5 pages of changes for the professions alone” with the most going to the engineer, and the least going to the mesmer (which implies everyone is getting tweaked in some way).
Assuming the typical D/D glass cannon? Traps n’ torches. There’s also a trait that gives protection if you get hit by a single attack for more than 20% of your health, heavily mitigating the burst combo.
You wouldn’t even need DPS classes, as Conquest is about point control. You’d just play 3x tank 2x healer with knockbacks and roots. Once a point is yours, it’s not going away.
All your complaining stems from how Conquest is designed to favor extremities rather than more balanced specs.
Sure but also remove the ability for every class in the game who can either stealth / invuln or stability stomp.
Hint: Every single class has one of these methods. (maybe not necros, dunno never played necro).
Necros can gain stability from death shroud, immediately leave it, and stomp an enemy, though it requires a grandmaster trait. Not sure if they have another way.
I bet my money on backstab comkittenf+shortbow nerf, some traits are gonna be reworked (bettered, i believe), gunslinger (p/p) will be buffed, i hope sword gets some love (looking at you flanking strike), prolly some degree of nerfing to the death blossom bleeding (i hope so,its so lame it gives me chills),i expect some more defense OUTSIDE of stealth (protection, stability),and,obviously,i expect a huge QQ 5 minutes after the patch goes live, with ppl complaining the nerf wasnt near enough…
Im smiling already!!
Add in trap buffs that won’t really do anything, and that’s what I feel will happen in a nutshell.
Before each battle, they tab through several different targets, looking for warriors for the whirling axe, which since then has lost the evasion. None of them are level 80.
And again, if there was one or two decent players in that zerg, that strategy wouldn’t be viable. They constantly escape situations where they would’ve died if the enemy knew how shadow refuge, and stealth worked.
A) Not one person targeted in that video was level 80.
B) When the enemy clearly has no idea what they’re doing, it’s worthless in terms of balance. We see a total of 0 people attack into shadow refuge, letting them constantly get away from situations that they wouldn’t be able to escape from with one or two decent players of any class in those zergs. Whenever they use dagger storm, everyone also still fires projectiles at them, making increasing their damage output several times over.
C) Multiple changes to the thief have been made since september, and the metagame has shifted greatly as the playerbase’s average skill level has increased since then.
