I don’t even use it on gates; usually we should have rams anyway. It is rather funny to use on the opposite side of the gate though, downing the unsuspecting people who are right next to it. XD
WvW is very large scale and allows for a more “chaotic” sort of encounter. Due to the sheer amount of conditions and control flying around, not everyone has a chance to avoid HB or can be more easily blindsided with it. I pretty much never bother with Bull’s Charge and get a very high number of kills with the weapon in skirmishes, along with my rifle. Not really much to say other than that the results speak for themselves I suppose. Might not work for everyone.
Omnomberry Ghosts also do the same with a longer duration. Plus, they make you look spooooooky. =)
I never bother with sPvP (ever), but I actually do find Greatsword useful in WvW because it’s an entirely different sort of combat setting in many cases.
I usually run Greatsword and either Rifle or Longbow, depending on what exactly is taking place.
Haha, it’s pretty hard to miss a point blank Phoenix, yes. x)
stuffs
Yeah, mostly I was referring to the lower burst in that it is more difficult to land those sorts of moves against any human opponent who is actually awake. Pretty much anything works on NPCs. Love the burning and lightning spells though.
I wouldn’t say it quite has the same burst potential due to the lack of attacks like dagger’s Fire 3 and the quick auto attacks, but as far as enduring and easily outlasting your enemy, the condition damage fills the role nicely. You also still have access to dropping dagger Earth 5 on people from range and gain obnoxious instant attacks like scepter Air 2, neither of which require you to really be right up on your enemy. I’m still fine tuning the playstyle a bit so I’ll have to get back to you on its overall potential.
I was wondering if anyone else noticed this. I’ve heard a variety of loud, echoing bangs as well as have had to contend with the occasional loss of all sound, replaced by this eternal wailing like a siren. I’ve tried to reset all of my audio settings to default but it doesn’t seem to resolve the issue.
Exactly what Blackwolfe said, although I suspect you’re probably also getting at some sort of inconsistency in music volume itself, maybe?
I was running a 0/0/10/30/30 build in WvW last night with excellent success. While it lacks some of the mobility of D/D builds (mostly Swiftness), I found my ability to pursue enemies and harass them at range in the field to be very effective. Focus is on Soldier’s and Cleric’s gear mostly, with a bit of condition damage thrown in in the form of Carrion jewels and a matching dagger. Still tweaking it a bit but no deaths in hours of play with a nice stack of kills is good news, in my eyes.
I love instant cast attacks, though I’m not sure how much sense it would make for a water spell rather than air, haha. More Vuln might help it, or even just a slightly shorter detonation time. Sometimes it’s even hard to hit PvE enemies with it. <_>
What argument , you have none.This is about Thief’s gameplay not some game mode whit issues that I personaly don’t even experience.A game mode thats not even intended to be balanced that way.So what argument do you even have to claim Thief is not a balanced class.You have none.
So basically you didn’t read a word I said. Good to know I won’t need to waste my time with you anymore. Block.
It kills me that my own posts will be infracted while I stay on topic but respond sharply to people who fully deserve it, yet harassing lunatics like frans and people like this guy who contribute absolutely nothing to a thread are allowed to run rampant. I think I entirely understand now why the official forums have the reputation they do. I’m done with this thread.
Looking forward to whatever the patch notes bring.
I’d have to agree with the Trident being great. I’ve been messing with Scepter/Dagger in WvW and having yet another group healing option for the people surrounding me while trying to hold down the Lord’s room of Stonemist is great.
Shatterstone is bleh. I just throw it down to force them into moving as an afterthought if I’m about to switch to another attunement. Sometimes it even hits, lol
I do play more classes than just Elementalist, haha.
Anyway, I’d say D/D Ele (one particular style, not necessarily the class innately) has good mobility, yes. However, being able to run in any direction and gaining a huge head start on whoever you are fleeing from by virtue of their not knowing what direction you went is pretty good mobility in terms of escape also, considering the rather limited potential of most other classes in this regard. That in itself is fine.
I recognize that you are trying to avoid this argument because you believe your stealth inadequate (or perhaps it’s just the easy way out to point a finger at a different class instead), but in its current state, it is an extremely viable escape route, sorry. Assuming the culling problems are corrected, this may not be the case, however this is the state we exist in:
The problem as I see it is that the Thieves I have encountered have been in stealth for much longer than the three seconds you describe (or at the least certainly longer than the duration on their skills would suggest), to the point where I have watched them vanish in front of a group and despite multiple eyes scanning in a 360 degree radius, was never able to spot them again. This is not another “L2P” incident. If stealth is as short as you suggested, it should be an easy matter to spot the fleeing player to pursue.
Is what I described merely the class working as intended? A developer would have to answer that. Either way, I don’t find it balanced, myself; if it is the unintentional result of culling, either that visibility problem must be fixed or the mechanic should be changed as necessary to better suit intended design as a workaround to how culling effects invisibility and a knowing Thief’s ability to escape most situations entirely risk free as a result. I don’t really see why this idea is being met with such strong hostility.
(edited by Sil.4560)
Well to be fair I’d actually like to see Thieves more able to hold their ground in a fight without needing to retreat to reset it. I think the fact that they’re sort of funneled into one build type causes this problem.
I don’t think it’s especially necessary to start with the Elementalist and come back to Thief. I would expect that Anet is assessing the balance of all of their classes, not just this one.
Now whether they can do it better…I’m not sure about that. Part of this issue may again come back to the culling but complete invisibility and being able to zip quite a distance away while under its effects is pretty powerful. Even as an Elementalist escaping a small group, I have to contend with things like immobilize and cripple while I’m in motion, simply due to the fact that they can see – and more importantly, target – me.
I think that’s kind of it, too. They need the option to be able to hang around and not be pretty much forced to run away. A part of this is probably because it feels like we’re funneled into certain builds, but the class as a whole is either “kill them immediately or run for the hills”. No other profession really is forced into that. Like you said, it’s not the greatest team mechanic in that regard which is what also bothers me about it.
Endure Pain only saves you for a few seconds out of every 90. It also only effects yourself. But then Warriors kind of get shafted on utilities anyway. >_>
Arc’s post is mostly summarizing my thoughts on the matter.
The use of ‘should’ is rather inappropriate here, the game is not designed to your wishes. That some may be able to run away from a lost fight with you may not be to your liking, but it’s just that, what you like or don’t like.
Here’s another one: What you just said should be understood as common sense. I’m not going to sugar coat everything I say with “in my personal opinion”, etc.
What it should be is determined by the vision of the makers and if the books are an indication of this vision, a Thief being able to get away from a nasty situation is part of that vision.
Obviously if this vision weren’t open to some sort of flexibility, they would not have created a feedback thread asking for player opinion on the matter. I gave my thoughts and some particularly vocal individuals don’t like them. Oops.
As to your complaint, your posts sound spoiled because of the use of ‘should’ where ‘_I (don’t) like_’ is more appropriate.=
Pot, kettle, black.
This is just more of the above, nitpicking on an inconsequential part of my post along with calling me a hypocrite – absent of any explanation, mind you – because you most certainly feel it discredits me somehow. As I said, I’m not going to sugar coat my posts. Don’t like that I use the word “should” instead of “I don’t like”? Tough kitten. Much like how you claim my view of the game doesn’t necessarily constitute what “needs” to be, your view of my posts exists under much of the same idea. Who the hell cares anyway? I doubt the developers reading this thread are going to be magically swayed into taking one course of action because I used the word “should”.
The most reusable source of stealth yields 3 seconds of stealth, 4 when traited for it. Not enough to disappear from sight without using the terrain, obstacles and height differences to break the line of sight, npc’s to get a new cloak from. Whether this is considered skill or not is up to the reader. Culling needs to be fixed, I don’t think anyone disagrees on that point.
Yes, this is why I said before that one or the other needs fixed. They seem to be having a great deal of trouble with the culling issue, so I don’t have high hopes in that regard. Thus I’m speaking under the idea that it won’t necessarily be fixed.
So, actually you did win the fight? He was chased off and the Dolyak saved?
Correct. Although it doesn’t really address the issue that they can hang around and fight until they know they can’t win, and still have a 100% escape route. There doesn’t seem to be much of any actual risk to the Thief.
(edited by Sil.4560)
XD
I would simply like to see it as more terrain dependent or something in that vein. I mean, when I think of a Thief, I don’t think of someone vanishing from sight right in front of me in the middle of a well lit, open field, much less for any prolonged length of time. We can blame “culling, not the class” all day, but if it turns out they can’t fix it in any meaningful way, something else has to be done.
As a frequent Warrior player, I have to second the above thoughts on the damage mitigation, and would like to add that it’s actually a bit ridiculous. One should not be able to go full DPS while still maintaining some silly innate safety cushion that basically makes them better Warriors. The fact that they can do this and provide a high level of support to the team says to me that something has to give, or Warriors need some form of buff.
Stealth seriously needs some sort of fix. To me, honestly, the idea of being able to go completely invisible for long enough to retreat half a mile away and reset the fight whenever you please is just absurd. There need to be some sort of stealth revealing skills, or tracking skills, or something. I must have chased some Thief around for ten minutes last night on my Elementalist in WvW because he could just go completely invisible and run in some random direction whenever he started getting pressured.
He couldn’t do enough damage to threaten me, but I imagine against any other class that doesn’t have the same healing/mobility potential as an Elementalist, it would be even more annoying. I’ve seen them pull the same crap when they get jumped by a small group – there’s absolutely no danger to them because they can just retreat any time they like and there’s nothing anyone can do to detect them.
Going completely invisible in broad daylight in front of half a dozen people doesn’t make any sense to begin with. I thought I was fighting a Thief? Or does he have the One Ring?
I’m okay with griping about RNG. This is why I pretty much always sell my rares. I like certainty.
I like the way it looks:
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/3170/lwcava9.jpg
Just have to get the right aesthetics for you.
This is hilarious. I love making people ragdoll.
Someone bought a LOT of gems? ^_~
Didn’t read most of this thread because I don’t have much faith in people on this subject. I wish there were more options for the female armor which don’t make you look like some basement dweller’s fantasy. Don’t we have enough of this in pretty much every other game out there?
Thank god I wear heavy armor, although the unnecessarily exposed skin on female characters that does not appear on their male counterparts is rather silly, considering the frequency of it. Another example of how we’re utterly desensitized to the idea of a double standard, I guess.
I sincerely hope they become Mystic Forge items or some such. RNG for things like this is such an outdated system. Why is it that I can drop either dozens of gold coins or thousands of Relics into making an ascended back piece (not to mention infusions), yet I have to brainlessly hope for some random chance if I want a ring? It doesn’t make any sense.
Don’t even get me started on how it’s yet another gamble to get the ring your build uses in terms of stats. I’ve found two rings in I-don’t-know-how-many runs. Both of them are useless for all of my characters.
I don’t even remember finding it myself. I had the event open for people about a week ago or something; I had not realized that the key was so rare. o_o
It blows me away how they can have created this massive world for exploration and play, yet people disregard it all so that they can trade forts back and forth every hour…to each their own I guess. I suspect, however, that this is why they decided not to make the rewards on par with PvE – they don’t expect you to play only that game mode.
I couldn’t disagree more on the anonymous names thing. One of the only things that makes me ever want to play WvW is the fact that the enemy can’t identify you. People are unnecessarily hostile in PvP. I don’t want to get adversaries or enemies because people online are total kitten. The further I am separated from their inflated egos and insecure, trakittenalking nonsense, the better.
Just wanted to pop in to say: [“For Great Justice!”]
Really though, it would kind of be cool to be able to turn off character voice clips sometimes. Not just for shouting, but like those obnoxious NPCs that stand near crafting stations and repeat the same line over and over and over. “Ideas are like cream” …grr.
So some people who didn’t participate get chests, some people who got a chest get chests, and some people who didn’t get a chest then still don’t get one now. I’m not sure what kind of system they implemented, but it doesn’t seem very accurate…
I don’t play Warrior for the ease of it that people find. I do it because if you’re also playing as hard as you would when playing a different class, your potential is enormous. I usually play a mage in games, but I enjoy the warrior class in this one. I want to feel like a powerful hero and Warrior delivers.
It is crazy hard to see sometimes. I’ve heard from some colorblind people that the red circles aren’t even visible to them. Ouch.
I also wouldn’t mind them being filled in somehow to better discern the area of the attack. Might be useful!
I only have any trouble with Orr when I first got there right around the launch date. That was because my gear sucked and I didn’t know what to expect. Also I was running solo. Now I feel like I can solo the world. I do. Most of safe passage through Orr is just knowing where to run and when to dodge to make enemies fall on their face instead of pull you.
I like playing the zone now. A part of me wishes that the Risen would roam in groups though, rather than just dotted every fifteen feet.
“We don’t want you to grind.”
=> Makes repetitive dungeon requiring blind luck and heaps of tokens to advance in.
Should we really balance explorable dungeons around the performance of min/maxers? I don’t think so.
This – and I love to optimize my build, even.
I think the odds of me finding a PUG which can: a) have the right combination of DPS, b) have access to both Explorable mode and an uncontested dungeon, and c) be willing to play the dungeon in the first place…is pretty low, sadly. I have plenty of contacts who run dungeons, along with their contacts. It’s still nearly impossible to find a group that satisfies all of these conditions.
When I finally do get to run the dungeon, I’d just as soon avoid this boss altogether because it’s not fun. It’s just really long, especially when people have to start running nine million miles from the nearest WP for no discernible reason.
(edited by Sil.4560)
But that wouldn’t be in the spirit of the grindy treadmill at all!
Hilariously, the Crab will now follow you into the other boss room, or at least it did with our group. We were forced to go back and kill it altogether.
Anyway, I think most peoples’ complaints about the Destroyer boss is that it’s so repetitive. It’s not that an overwhelming number of people don’t have the skill to do it if they try, despite what so many elitists among us will be quick to assert time and time again. It’s the fact that you’re basically repeating the exact same action every 15 seconds or so for an amount of time that makes players begin to wonder how much longer they have to keep dragging out the fight.
A lot of people want their dungeons to be active. Subject Alpha has some problems, but it can at least be said that he’s more…interactive? Destroyer is less fun and more “oh, time to drag myself through this again”.
The RNG basically killed off what little desire I had left to do Fractals. I’m not going to spend hours of my time to come up with nothing because nobody has been creative enough to implement a way that isn’t just blind chance.
This is the kind of thing that makes me consider not even bothering with my monthly this time around – I just don’t want to do Fractals.
I did this with a PUG post-patch last night. One person ended up leaving partway into that room, no doubt after realizing that killing the boss would take some absurd length of time. Honestly, it was too long before, now it just makes people avoid the path. It’s a good thing they supposedly fixed path 1, or the only one people would even bother with is path 2.
This problem has made WvW all but unplayable for me. It is so frustrating when the only thing that kills me is some problem like this that I can’t even control. As our buddy Plinx would say, “I can’t stand it!”
If something looks horrible to me, you can bet I won’t wear the look. Some of the cooler looking stuff isn’t even that expensive. I used to wear full T3 for the looks, but I’ve been seeing so much of the same all over…so I changed it up. I’m happy with how I look now, and the overall price isn’t even that much for the skins:
I’ve had people offer me the exotics they’ve gotten from their area completion just for helping them get an especially frustrating skill point, vista, or both. I refused the offers but thought it was rather interesting how willing people are to “tip” for help. It’s true that I help other players simply because I want to; I don’t need paid and often the friendship of the other person is reward enough. Mailing the WP fee is a nice gesture, however.
I have to admit the fact that one portrait is off-screen is something I noticed. It doesn’t bother me by any means, but I found it kind of funny that there are eight professions in the game but the horizontal list shows seven. Anyway, totally agree that it would be cool to have something showing them all standing together. Nice suggestion.
Super, so down the road we’ll get to have even more reliance on an item which we can only expect from RNG. The ascended gear is the only reason I’m even doing this repetitive dungeon – after not getting one I feel like I just completely wasted my time.
Cross posting this from another thread asking for builds in PvE, as I don’t really change much when I queue for the WvW battlefield:
I play 10/20/0/30/10, Greatsword/Longbow. I use a mixed combination of armor and accessories (a mixture of Knight, Berserker, and Valkyrie) which balance survival with high overall damage. My runes are 2 Water, 2 Monk, and 2 Hoelbrak for epic boon duration; the longer and larger the battle, the more Might I have, seeing the peak 25 very often.
I run “Shake It Off!”, Endure Pain, “For Great Justice!”, and Signet of Rage most of the time, as the shouts offer great utility and also are traited to heal me and anyone near me. With the boon duration, this gives me permanent and constantly increasing Fury, at least 11 stacks of Might before even engaging an enemy, and constant Swiftness. For my recovery I prefer Healing Signet, but it’s up to you.
I find this build also rather effective at WvW – about the only thing I will sometimes swap is the Longbow for a Rifle, and occasionally throw Frenzy in for utility if I need to take out a troublesome ballista or some such. Swapping the first trait of Tactics to Leg Specialist is also rather handy for WvW at times to really ensure you are difficult to escape.
I dunno, I still find it pretty easy to Kill Shot a squishy Ele on a wall down in one well placed shot when I’m buffed, haha.
I really like the Rifle in WvW – I’ll often use it in small groups or in field battles for high damage to single targets. Longbow has a good place too though, and I often switch the two depending on the size and speed of the battle.