Guild Wars 2

PolishSausage.1279:

I just want to point out how hilariously ignorant the people saying Thieves are fine sound. They’re probably the ones that spam the near perma-stealth bull and take cheap shots on people, then run like scared children at the slightest hint of any real danger.

Fact of the matter is, stealth needs to be nerfed so that they actually have to COMMIT to a fight, instead of having an easy escape tool that they can spam whenever. Just increase the time period that they can’t stealth to a more reasonable frame. I mean, one of my friends plays a Thief, and even he agrees that they’re a broken class simply because they have a spammable Get Out of Jail Free card. It should not take five people just to make sure one Thief doesn’t get away.

In before kitten Thieves try to deride everything I just said.

You’re quite right, Thieves are not fine. However, I think we disagree on the reasoning behind that statement.

I’ve never understood people who insist that thieves should, as you say, “COMMIT” to a fight. The whole niche of the Thief class is infiltration and guerilla warfare. Stealth is our main survival mechanism. And, considering that our base health is 10k—so we can’t survive as Warriors can—but we have neither the incredible aoe or single-target condition damage of an Ele, stealth is also our escape mechanism if we get in over our heads, as we inevitable will at some point during PvE or PvP.

Without a stealth mechanic that fulfills that role for survival, what exactly is the point of the class? To require us to “commit” to combat, as Warriors do, it would likely require a complete overhaul of the class.

I think that Thieves are not “fine” because with each series of nerfs, the builds that have taken the most punishment are the builds that do not rely on gimmicky stealth and backstab crit techniques. The dagger offhand skills received 50% and 33% damage decreases, respectively, leaving players with the option of a pistol offhand. That change opened the door for the Black Powder + HS + Backstab combo that is gaining popularity, and the “perma stealth” build that so many people are complaining about, although that build seems to do little practical damage.

For stealth to receive the nerfs that everyone apparently wants to see, we need compensation with the shadowstep mechanic to be able to survive—which would allow us to teleport away anyways, as Assassins in GW used to do. Or, everyone would have to cede serious profession alterations like better ranged damage, more evasion, and an invulnerability mechanic like Shadow Form.

I see a lot of threads with stealth counters, like “damage should end stealth” (no, really, that’s one of the circulating suggestions) or condition A should end it or condition B should reduce it.

You know what the best counter for stealth is? Damage. Stealth =/= invulnerability. I’ve been downed before by warriors swinging their giant greatsword dick around. Especially in Shadow Refuge, which puts up a giant floating house icon for those people that missed the circle on the ground.

Other types of stealth give us 3 or 4 seconds of invisibility. That’s not a very long time, especially since that’s all we have to get away from someone who’s actually searching for us. 3 or 4 seconds is not a long enough duration of time that it really deserves a reveal mechanism that we will be able to do absolutely nothing about.

The Thief niche is infiltration and subterfuge. We don’t have the massive aoe or condition damage that eles can explode with, and we don’t have the survivability of warriors. If stealth is nerfed to the point of uselessness, then what exactly would be the point of Thieves?

This seems like a refreshing change, and well thought-out.

As it stands, P/P is an incredibly underwhelming weaponset with no access to stealth—you know, our main survival mechanism—and condition damage through bleed stacking, which is arguably the easiest condition to shed.

It would also be nice to see a weaponset actually get a substantial improvement. I’ve been getting disheartened with all of our weaponset nerfs, especially since my favorite used to be s/d.

This actually happens to me a lot: I’ll remain in combat mode long after it should have ended, even though my weapons are put away, I’m not moving, and all of my skills are off of cooldown. It prevents me from using waypoints or using vistas, which is extremely irritating when I’m mapping.

I usually fix it by logging out to character selection and logging back in.

It would be nice if skills in general worked differently in WvW, much like the PvP versions of skills in the original Guild Wars. It grinds my gears when otherwise much more helpful/interesting skills have function changes to oblige the WvW crowds.

Thank you, OP. Your post was very lucid and provided a lot of information.

I became really attached to S/D when I started playing sPvP. It was more tactical than D/D, and—in my opinion—it required more active brain cells to use effectively. I liked the challenge of it. It was fun. Now I find myself getting frustrated because I’m essentially running out of initiative before I can do 75% of the damage that I used to.

I feel like I’m being forced into either changing my weapon set or changing my class. That’s a very demoralizing feeling.

I forgot to include the variety of issues with the stealth and stealing mechanics, but it looks like those have been included in enough other posts that I’d be giving a +1 anyways. Hopefully the above post of mine at least contributed something.

I’m not altogether sure that I can contribute any new information to this thread, but this is what I’ve noticed (most of these have already been mentioned):

Two-Handed Weapons
Shortbow:
I love the mobility of the shortbow, but Infiltrator’s Arrow, arguably the best movement skill in the class (and one of the most expensive in initiative) is very unreliable across uneven ground or gaps.

Mainhand Weapons
Sword:
Tactical Strike does not always blind/daze as it is supposed to; occasionally the other effect will happen even when my thief is not placed for it.

(with offhand dagger) Flanking Strike does not target correctly. I feel like the underwater equivalent is more reliable.

Dagger:
Heartseeker does not hit reliably.

(with offhand pistol) Shadow Shot does not teleport reliably, particularly over uneven terrain.

(as an offhand weapon) Dancing Dagger (at least in my experience) will go out of its intentional range when it bounces, thereby aggroing mobs that you didn’t want.

(as an offhand weapon) Cloak and Dagger does not apply stealth consistently.

Aquatic
Spear:
If the first counterattack of Nine-Tailed Strike misses, it seems that all consecutive attacks will miss, even if you are in range.

Although Tow Line pulls and cripples the targets, there is a large delay between the end of the pull and being able to move your character again. While this may be intention, I feel like this delay is so long that it rather negates the entire purpose of the attack, since by the time you are able to move again, your target is already out of range.

Other Skills:
Scorpion Wire always seems to knock the target down upon impact, but it only has a very untrustworthy pull rate, especially over uneven ground or in PvP.

This is not so much a bug as a complaint, I feel, but I do not like the house that appears over Shadow Refuge. I feel like it’s like waving an enormous flag telling all melee classes that you just stealthed there, so they should run around in a circle randomly swinging their weapons to down you.

Another complaint, and perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but I feel that the skill description of Basilisk Venom should be more specific about what it does. Saying that it “turns the foe to stone” doesn’t do much in the way of explaining what effect that has on the foe, or for how long that effect is in place.

I’ve done a few personal story quests on my thief (up through lvl 52-ish) and I didn’t find any of them impossible, just tedious and difficult. I have two major complaints with personal story quests:

1. Useless NPCs. Claw Island was irritatingly hard (in the OOW storyline) because Tybalt and Trahearne did almost no damage. They would also happily charge off to add more unnecessary Risen to my conga line of kited mobs. By the end of that mission, I would have happily punched Trahearne in the face.

Evidently, my NPCs were also amazing at dropping aggro. More often than not, I was running around trying to kite 4 or 5 Risen with a shortbow. I would also regain any dropped aggro immediately after resurrection or appearing out of stealth.

2. No prep time for special weapons. The quests with unique weapons just don’t give you the necessary time to read the skills, and (usually) you don’t have any trash mobs to experiment on before a major boss battle. You just have to ram your face right into the boss’s fist and hope you can recover quickly enough to beat them.

On a less-related note, whoever said that thieves were disadvantaged underwater: lol. Just lol.

I feel like the disconnecting thing is a problem in multiple areas.

I’ve gotten a bug in sPvP before where I get in the loading screen between death and resurrection, and have to close my client and reboot. I then lose all credit for the match I was in because I get sent back to the Heart of the Mists.

I’ve also disconnected or had client failures during events at various levels of completion, and go back in to find that I received no credit for my participation. This is even more frustrating if it was a hard event, or the event was almost over.

I understand that this issue might be difficult to fix or might never receive a fix at all, but I hope they can find some kind of solution for it. Losing credit because my client crashes is one of the most aggravating things in the game.

I apologize if this is a duplicate post in any way.

Swimming around in Valslake in the Snowden Drifts (on the Sea of Sorrows server), I noticed a few bugs with the Quaggan, specifically with the event “escort the quaggan emissary to the kodan camp” (part of the Kodan Claw meta event).

The event NPC is spawning inside of a rock. Although he can be attacked and potentially killed by stinging jellyfish, he does not move out of the rock and proceed on his way to the kodan camp.

There was also a Northern Refugee quaggan marked with the merchant icon and [title], although they did not have a merchant window available.

I’ve also started to get a sound bug with the attack charging sound that some mobs make (ex: ettins before they club smash) when I’m running around the middle of a PvE zone.

I always look around, thinking I’ve aggroed something, but there’s never a mob around. The noise is just occurring randomly. It’s making me paranoid.

I’ve had this problem. Arc Lightning is the most consistent, but I’ve also seen this issue with other skills, particularly Air Magic. Ride the Lightning continues after it should stop and sending me into walls, objects, or mobs, and a lot of others leave my hand crackling and my character in the casting pose when the skill has already ended.

On a related note, across all professions I’ve had problems with my buttons on the skill bar sticking and continuing to pulse as if they were active, even after I’ve used them. The only way I’ve found to get this to stop is to use the skill again.

I’ve had the same problem, and it’s been a persistent problem since game launch. Usually, I can fix it by swimming away from the mob. They will swim back to their start point and then start chasing me to reengage.

Incidentally, if I’m on my ranger, my pet can usually keep hitting the mob with no problem.

I have a sound bug that’s not WvW related—every now and again, when a ranger runs past my character with thier pet, the sounds that the pet makes are 10 times louder than everything else. The pet’s footsteps on the ground, particularly.

It’s not a huge problem, but it is rather startling because it happens unpredictably.

miya.5160:

The nice thing about GW1 was that it slowly prepared you for the difficulties ahead. It trained you. You weren’t surprised when you hit a wall. You knew, at the very least subconsciously, that it was coming. That’s the way I want Guild Wars 2 dungeons to be.

As it stands, a lot of people are disgruntled. Dungeons are too hard for players who are less skilled, dungeons are too easy for people who are, and there’s not a lot of middle ground.

That’s a problem.

There’s a lot of flaming in this thread, so I would just like to say that I wholeheartedly agree with Miya. Dungeons do not scale well to either newcomers or to 1337 groups.

AC is a level 35 dungeon. Thirty five. Can anyone AT lvl 35—in lvl 35 gear—actually do that dungeon? If not, then why is it a lvl 35 dungeon in the first place? On a similar note, I remember seeing someone asking about TA in the Lion’s Arch map chat yesterday. She asked what it was, and someone told her it was a lvl 55 dungeon, but no one would probably take her unless she was lvl 80. If no one can find good groups for these dungeons at the level requirement for them, then the dungeons should be rescaled.

My recommendation would be to have unlockable modes for players that get progressively higher with each new difficulty level. All players in a group must have a difficulty level unlocked in order to attmpt to run it (like Hard Mode in GW).That way, dungeons can provide a new challenge for 1337 groups, and have an entry level that is appropriate for beginners. Instead of having armor for each level, maybe accompany the completion of a certain difficulty with a title to acknowledge the accomplishment.

I also second the suggestion to have certain dungeon elements randomized with each new entry, so you can run the same dungeon level multiple times but still have different experiences each time. Maybe randomize mob spawns/types, boss spawns/types (like we had in the explorable areas of GW), mob and boss patrol routes, trap types and spawn points, and maybe random side quests that give extra bonuses like buffs.

Update of this issue (for me):

I was PvPing in the Mists with a friend. Whenever we played on different teams, he usually managed to kill me. This was partially because he could see me while I was in stealth. He could also still hit me with all of his attacks.

Whether stealth is supposed to dodge or not, that was incredibly frustrating (although he thought it was hilarious).

Also in the Mists, I discovered that the necro downed ability to siphon an enemy’s life will still seek and take effect on a thief in stealth.

Third, it has been argued if stealth is supposed to act as a dodge or not. I have noticed that in PvE, it will. If an ettin is about to use one of their aoe club smash moves, I can pop stealth and it will miss me. However, in PvP, the guardian aoe moves will not miss me. I do not know if stealth works this way by design or if that is simply a glitch, but it’s worth noting regardless.

Okay, I think communication is breaking down in this thread.

We can all agree that stealth is supposed to effectively make you invisible, right? Right.

Greyfield’s point is that stealth is not acting that way. Arrow volleys and spells will continue to home in on you when you should not be on their radar. This is not logical.

In order to get around this problem, you must dodge immediately after using stealth. If you dodge, then you are burning part of your valuable stealth time so that you don’t get hit by something that shouldn’t be able to see you. This is wasteful.

No one is saying that stealth should act as an automatic dodge or shield. It should, however, immediately remove you from line of sight. As it plays out right now, it does not. That makes it a broken mechanic.

This was highly educational for me, since I’m getting ready to start running dungeons with friends and I wasn’t really sure what the thief role was supposed to be in group pve.

Thanks bunches; you saved me from being “that nub.”