Guild Wars 2

The current meta versus a Thief (if such a concept exists) is certainly not to spend 4 seconds massaging the ground to lay a trap that doesn’t really guarantee much other than seeing the Thief fly away with shortbow anyway. It’s far easier to reveal a Thief by just being an Engineer/Guardian/Revenant.

Well Power Block also applies Weakness which is pretty cool.

As for Imagined Burden, I really think the Might duration needs to be longer. I get better might uptime simply spamming Unload on my Thief – no trait commitment and it also does a hell of a lot more damage.

Clone death traits were interesting, but ultimately the community couldn’t deal with the existence of these traits so bringing them back would be…unwise. I think they would be rather underwhelming these days anyway compared to the rather large condi shatter burst we have instead.

And hey, if you want to play something akin to ye olde “sitting in stealth applying AoE conditions without being revealed” you can just play Ghost Thief.

Seems quite mean-spirited to deny those players access to a small amount of achievement points. But I suppose it’s good to hear Anet’s stance on how they want their achievement system to work. Although I think it makes it a rather stagnant system if there’s not even a small element of competitiveness to growing one’s AP total.

I actually think PPK should be reduced to 1 point and PPS increased to 3 (5 with ruins buff). There’s very little differentiating kills achieved by a zerg mindlessly mowing down smaller groups versus those that actually had to earn their kill. Securing a stomp should be far more rewarding.

I’m aware of the counters to Ghost Thief builds (just some cleanse, moving, AoE reveal) but it still doesn’t feel right that we can actually kill people without ever becoming visible. It just feels like a fundamental principle of the game has gone…awry. I remember when you could do a similar thing with PU Mesmer and clone death and that felt rather odd that I could just dodge roll and use phase retreat in stealth to pop illusions without being Revealed – although the damage was far less than what we can do with Ghost Thief.

It’s not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of the shockingly awful balance in WvW, but I always have that feeling that I’m using something broken.

roamzero.9486:

A regular condi Thief is annoying but not that OP, so it losing was kind of inevitable against the most cheesy thing that has ever existed in GW2 (condi Mesmer). Ghost Thief vs Condi Mesmer would have been more interesting.

The Mesmer would just take Inspiration and make the Ghost Thief’s burst irrelevant whilst the Mesmer wouldn’t be able to spawn any illusions because it wouldn’t have a target making the Mesmer’s burst irrelevant. It would be more of a question of who leaves the duel first.

I’ll be interested to see what Anet decide over this. In a world devoid of achievement hunter anxieties it wouldn’t really matter, but there are some people who are pretty engrossed with increasing their achievement “score” and generally ‘getting ALL the things’ and I guess Anet need to appease them.

Personally, I think Anet should just proceed with the current setup. I would feel rather selfish to deny some players achievements because the method of acquisition didn’t fit with what I think is the only appropriate implementation.

Something that applies Taunt might be nice.

I still think it’s kind of weird that Anet introduced a condition that forces players to run and attack a target and didn’t give it to the class that is all about misdirection and general mind-kittening. Apart from the colour, the symbol for taunt even looks like something you would see in the Mesmer’s specialisation panel.

Bear in mind that daze cannot stack whereas Slow can, so each piercing light proc will count. There’s no ICD on Piercing Light so there’s potential for some decent AoE Slow application from some stacked traps. Also, as far as I know, Slow will work through stability which has its obvious benefits. I suppose the trait is just potent in a different manner now.

Oh wow, those two nerfs to Chrono listed in the preview really were the only changes to come with this patch. It’s a pretty unexciting way to start a season.

No redesign of shortbow is needed. It is intended to be a kiting/mobility/utility weapon and it fulfils those roles very well.

If you want more ranged dps options you will want to have a P/P redesign which is intended to be our ranged offensive set.

Well the nerf to Surge of the Mists is a big step in the right direction. I really hope that you don’t stop there though as there are many other individual skills and traits that do far too many things at the same time without having to meet any conditional requirements. It just feels a bit detrimental to the flow and depth of the combat system.

The Dragonhunter seemed very new to the game and was basically just waiting for traps to come off cooldown instead of ever bothering to tab target you (hence no spear of justice or much use of longbow skills). That Dragonhunter could have killed you WAY earlier if they had just pressed a few different skills. But you essentially died because you reset the fight and started again without Shadowstep. Also a traited Dragon’s Maw can have a cooldown of just 60 seconds (which is pretty silly) so it’s possibly best practice to always save your Shadowstep for that one trap – you can dodge all the others.

Come to think of it, you could have probably won by just auto-attacking with shortbow and using choking gas to reduce healing. I’ve done that a few times.

Guild hall duels are kind of ruined by PvE rules such as retaliation hitting quite a bit harder and skills functioning differently (e.g. Blurred Frenzy doing 100% more damage) so not the best place for a proper duel.

I’d recommend just hopping into an sPvP duelling server

Stealth Disruptors were designed for revealing groups that had stealth stacked, hence why the trap can hit 20 targets. It’s not really there for specifically undermining certain classes in isolation.

I’m still waiting for those 20 target boon strip traps

A good summation of how GW2 has changed for the worse. I just don’t really understand the balance in this game anymore – it simply makes no sense. Almost every class can be built in a way that it has access to everything and opportunity costs (which make things fun and interesting) almost don’t exist in the game anymore. The combat has become a hyperactive mess of easily deliverable damage sources with a mountain of available active and passive sustain options. I really miss the thoughtful pacing that the game used to have.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Power Mesmers strength (or the return thereof) lies in the games overall mechanics. Adding more damage to Power Mesmer is a stupid way of bringing it “up”. Rather a reduction in stability access, aoe spam, condi spam, and other power creep problems related to the HoT debaucle are what’s needed.

This problem will never be resolved and instead will become exasperated with the release of subsequent expansions and Elite specs down the line.

This game suicided. Have a great day! (playing better games XD )

This is the sad truth. A damage increase on GS AA will amount to very little change (if any) to the viability of power Mesmer outside of one-shot montages of vacate NPC-like players. The fundamentals of the post-HoT combat system are against it heavily. The power creep of HoT dismantled and made many pre-HoT things utterly irrelevant – which is why we have almost zero build diversity. I just can’t see this being fixed because the power creep has seeped into everything. The game truly did suicide.

I can’t purchase the recipes for:

Steak with Winterberry Sauce
Winterberry Seaweed Salad

As the OP says, you just get a “Vendor transaction incomplete” message when attempting to buy them.

A lot of these counter skills work differently, so probably couldn’t apply your idea to all of them. But something like Illusionary Riposte could certainly benefit from an immediate daze upon blocking an attack. It would certainly add well needed survivability and control to a Mesmer using off-hand sword.

Also, it’s worth considering the value of countering the counter-attack itself. Seeing a Mes use Illusionary Counter whilst you attack and choosing to dodge the powerful counter-attack is quite rewarding. I wouldn’t necessarily like to see that removed.

Auroraborealis.7310:

There is no need for elaboration here. Condi mes is currently performing higher than it should given the amount of effort required. Currently condi in general is putting out to much pressure from most specs using this form of damage, however the mesmer is at the front of the condi parade leading strong.

It would be nice to get some adjustments to conditions before the next season, if not to all conditions at least mesmer because this class is where the condi type damage is currently being abused the most.

Engi is also dishing out too much condi pressure, but not many are using it so complaints are low therefore not problematic as mes. It also doesn’t have the sustainability of mes when using core condi engi spec.

Performing higher than it should given the amount of effort required?

…this is true for almost everything in the game since HoT was released. Hardly a reason to have something nerfed anymore. I’d say it requires as much effort as a bunch of zerker stuff I play. There’s very little demarcating condi and power specs these days, especially in PvP.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Simonoly.4352:

It generally feels as abusive as loads of other HoT stuff, although I think it frustrates people more because of the constant repetitious evades. I would say putting a cast time on Signet of Agility would be a nice way to offer some window for counterplay. You can use it whilst dodging to get more dodges which was fine in the old days, but a bit bonkers now I will admit. Not as obnoxious as other things though and learning to interrupt Vault helps.

You speak as if other professions has no access to Dodge/Evade/Vigor.

What people who complains about evasion is missing is that, when the Thief evades, they do no damage. Now compare that to professions with Aegis, Invulnerability, Blocks, Resistance, etc. While they avoid damage, they dish out tons of damage back. That’s where these thing gets imbalance and where the Thief is force to chain evades just to survive while doing zero damage at the same time.

I acknowledged that other builds are more obnoxious but I was being specific to the Thief build in question which is the topic of the thread.

There are quite a lot skills available to Thief/Daredevil that allow you to evade and do damage. It’s quite an important part of the class.

It generally feels as abusive as loads of other HoT stuff, although I think it frustrates people more because of the constant repetitious evades. I would say putting a cast time on Signet of Agility would be a nice way to offer some window for counterplay. You can use it whilst dodging to get more dodges which was fine in the old days, but a bit bonkers now I will admit. Not as obnoxious as other things though and learning to interrupt Vault helps.

Highlie.7641:

Yup this proves how low the skill floor has gotten.

Nothing against you OP, we can tell by your portals/ blinks that you know what your doing. but this video proves arena net’s kittenation.

Fire and forget due to a poorly thought out super speed mechanic on phats.
When you screw up use your over abundance of Blocks, Evades, invulnerables.
High damage Aoes, AOE CC’s.

You don’t play a mesmer, the mesmer plays you.

And they wonder why everyone quit..

And again: nothing against you OP, but this game is kitten.

Whilst true that power shatter Mesmer is easier to play now than before specialisations were introduced, there are far easier and more viable power builds on almost every other class since HoT was introduced. Your complaints seem more appropriate when speaking of the game in general.

Full ascended zerker still works a charm in WvW for some delicious burst. I usually go for zerker or marauder’s or a mix of both with a piece of knight’s to top up my toughness a bit – whatever fits. You’ve got everything you need for that.

I don’t really recommend Dire as much anymore for anything other than making some duels rather trivial. It has little to no impact in group fights, especially when the groups you come against have any sort of idea of cleansing rotations. You can easily focus down Revenants though if they get too far away from their support, but that’s about it. You will of course survive for days but you won’t be offering much support or overall damage so you will often feel irrelevant. A mistrust build can be interesting, but then you have to worry about everything having stability as well as groups cleanses. It would be far more optimal to go for a hyrbid build if you want to use conditions – you can still have great survivability but with actual decent burst and utility too. Dire Mes just doesn’t have much of an impact in WvW anymore.

Boonshare is still a relevant build option for organised group stuff but I don’t think the investment is really worth it anymore. I’d argue that you’ll be just as useful in group now with a good choice of utility and elite.

10K?! Pfft. In WvW I get 12K crits with my Vaults. Can legitimately kill a group of people with a couple of Vaults. WvW damage numbers FTW!

It’s pretty funny when you learn how to interrupt Vault though. However, Anet (and the wiki) provide no assistance for learning when you should attempt to interrupt powerful skills incorporating evade frames, so expect some frustration as you learn to find that sweet spot for the interrupt whilst the player you are trying to interrupt just rotates through skills wildly without a care in the world. Rewarding gameplay is somewhere there, but I can’t quite see it…

Best power shatter video I’ve seen in a long time. Respectful of my time, saucy editing and Leopard form – everything you could ever want.

I think Thief is one the classes that suffered most with a change to the pacing and nature of the game. Although D/P has been the optimal set for a long time now, you could still get S/P, S/D and D/D to work and be meaningful. Now they are just totally redundant weapon sets because they just don’t have the pacing to keep up with anything else. Anet needs to either overhaul every single weapon in the game to be as relevant as HoT things or they need to reduce the pacing of the game to allow the methodical nature of other weapon sets to prevail. Auto-attacking and shadow shotting on D/P or Vault spamming on staff is all that Thief is now – it’s incredibly banal.

- Get rid of unnecessary tedious things in WvW, such as the -50% damage on siege and guards/lords.

- For Anet to continue redesigning the desert borderland to optimise the WvW experience.

…but obviously class/skill/combat balance is by far the most pressing issue in WvW. It’s really not right anymore.

GhandiBot.6257:

being able to put out good pressure and damage while playing passive due to low CDs on defensive skills.

That’s almost every single class in the game and I agree it’s horrible.

It’s a pretty easy build to ignore for the most part if you carry a bit of cleanse and you can even kill it with a stealth disruptor/Engi/Revenant or a Gravity Well bomb – but these require the ghost thief to be almost completely braindead so not entirely reliable.

Still don’t really think the build should exist though. Although it’s a testament to Anet’s struggles to work out the “traps on heavily stealth dependent class” conundrum. Obviously the correct answer was to never put traps on Thief, but whatever..it is Halloween after all!

Well you pretty much worked it out on your own with your flipside comment at the end. ED does indeed have more damage and does not need to be traited to do damage. Even when traited, SV does significantly less damage than BD and that damage difference increases even more when you factor in Devastation traits. However, although SV has no damage baseline, it does heal more overall both traited and untraited. So they’re pretty well balanced when you take all those things into consideration.

But the recent change is good for the game overall though. In fact anything that is applied to an attack (even from sigils) that is blocked, blinded, evaded etc should be removed. If someone has a Doom sigil proc ready for you and you dodge the attack that would apply it to you, that Doom proc should be lost until the next weapon swap (unless this is already the case and I’m just mad?).

PierPiero.9142:

Toasa.1236:

“Dueling” Condi is lame as kitten.
Another full noob who cant Play any power class.

Another full noob who play without condi remove …

I wouldn’t bother attempting to fight a condi PU Mesmer with D/D Thief. Whenever you try to land CnD you’ll just be interrupted or eat a condi burst. D/D Thief isn’t viable against anything these days (outside of bursting squishes down in your first CnD-Backstab rotation) and is just free food for a condi Mesmer. D/P and condi Thief do far better, but I think you probably already knew about that

I generally do not engage a condi PU Mesmer on my own when on my Thief unless I have Trickster and Escapist’s Absolution, but even then you’re fighting one of the best 1v1 builds in the game using a class that doesn’t excel much in 1v1s anymore.

Junkpile.7439:

Simonoly.4352:

The Cannons hit through gates , so now you can destroy all those rams at half the cost of a trebuchet. It’s a bit silly really.

Yes and that is good thing.

Yes making rams completely useless is definitely a good thing. One siege weapon in, one siege weapon out.

The Cannons hit through gates , so now you can destroy all those rams at half the cost of a trebuchet. It’s a bit silly really.

Jeknar.6184:

Gotejjeken.1267:

Blah blah something decapitate, bsomethong something vault. Oh wait, condi is broken?

You forgot Arc Divider, Coalescence or Ruin, Test of Faith, etc…

I pressed Unload earlier and it put an Elementalist in downed state from 90% health. I hope they nerf Necro bleeds to compensate.

Scorpion Wire is how I manage to pull people out of stacked melee blobs in WvW and burst them down. It’s pretty nifty and on a short cooldown. My main problems with it are indeed the terrible tracking where your target can easily strafe away from it without even realising and how how body blocking prevents you from pulling your intended target. So better tracking and a pierce would get my vote.

But I do like the boon ripping idea. Just wouldn’t want to see it buffed to the point where it’s as ridiculous as Spear of Justice.

Well the majority of power based builds in the game are just as mindless now (more so in some cases) so at this point choosing condi or power is just a matter of what’s your favourite low skill flavour.

Gaile Gray.6029:

To help compensate for these general reductions, we’ll be increasing both damage and a few different baseline boon durations.

This is a good sign. There are certainly things that only perform well under the current boon uptime that will suffer with a nerf to Mes and Revenant if not buffed.

It’s for the best really. Walking next to a Mesmer and having 30+ seconds of resistance and a couple of minutes of protection thrown onto you is kind of silly. The only alternative to this would be to increase boon strip in WvW, which would be unfair in cases where boon uptime isn’t ridiculous.

As a game mode it’s really suffering. Major balance issues are kind of driving people away so the scene appears to have shrunk. You can still have some fun here and there, but literally everyone is running a build straight off metabattle now, even in the lowest divisions which is so dull. I would recommend taking a look at WvW too if you’re interested in coming up against more variety and having some more wiggle room for your own build needs. But I must warn you that WvW has some even bigger balance issues, so it can get rather frustrating.

Stealth isn’t much of a problem anymore apart from the “Ghost Thief” which I would be surprised if Anet intended for such a build to exist especially as they nerfed Choking Gas to prevent the very thing that you can still do on Thief now. The problem is, sorting out that Thief build could have disastrous consequences for the health of Thief traps. It would probably be best for Anet to leave it alone.

Conditions just aren’t going to be nerfed, especially in WvW where their impact is minimal at best. In the grander scheme of things, with the supposed WvW directed patch coming up, we’re more likely to see significant boon uptime nerfs and some changes to Dragonhunter, the class that truly does rule much of WvW right now.

You still take damage in stealth. You concede a point in stealth. You take damage and can be CC’d whilst casting wells. After activating the Sceptre Block you are vulnerable landing the counter or you have to dodge and not use the counter. A bunch of other cast times that can be interrupted and offer a burst window. In a real encounter where you have to modify your rotation in response to the the scenario you can’t just rotate through defences like this unless all you intend to do is delay a player off a point – at which point no one is winning anything. I wouldn’t worry – this won’t be nerfed.

Could troll some people with the rotation but you’d be better off picking something way more efficient for the job, such as a double staff endurance Daredevil that truly has almost no window for damage.

I find the best way to counter the melee zerg is to disperse so they can’t run over/bomb multiple targets. This does require that the majority of players in the dispersal group can handle their own because if the zerg tries to run you over, you need to be able to escape and reposition. There was a great video a couple of years ago now where someone recorded my server (Gandara) deploying these tactics to exhaust a tightly stacked melee group and kill them. It was a good example of how it can work, so I hope it hasn’t completely vanished. We deployed the same tactics last week and its still effective, despite the horrible resistance uptime.

I’ll be surprised if SoI will be the only thing up for the chop when it’s not even needed for crazy boon uptime in WvW. Herald and durability runes will likely also see some sort of change. I hope Anet make this a WvW change only though.

I’m guessing this is purely on a 1v1 basis. As soon as the multiplicative effects of multiple AoE cleansing come into play conditions become swiftly irrelevant. It’s a strange matchup because the resistance uptime on Warrior is pretty lengthy but the Mesmer can almost always wait it out. Your success will mostly depend on how much kiting room the Mesmer has and also how patient the Mesmer is. Although rifle Warrior does pretty well against condi Mes and I recommend giving it a go.

Exciton.8942:

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Dmg condis have never been meta in zerg fights, even after the condi stacking changes (which was pre HoT and pre boon spam meta). Resistance is mostly used to combat soft cc – and because it is easier, if you can just ignore all condis, instead of having to cleanse them actively. And even if condis would become zerg meta for once, what would be wrong with it after almost 4 years of power meta?

Exactly this and I don’t see condition becomes meta even if resistance is completely removed from the game.

Some ppl are underestimating a coordinated group’s ability to cleanse conditions and sustain health. It is very hard to apply spike condition damage like power and healing can offset the slow-ticking condition damage.

The only conditions ppl fear in zerg are control conditions like immobile and chill. Many profession nowadays have traits to deal with them.

These are the most valid analyses of the rumoured change. It’s all about ignoring as much CC as possible and resistance with stability allows this. AoE condi remove has always been enough to make conditions mostly a minimal threat in larger fights. It’s very easy to counter a group placing all their bets on condi bombs, with or without resistance. I think we might see some groups attempting some more heavy condi shifts but will likely revert to a more efficient power bomb playstyle.

I imagine meta blobs will remain mostly the same but some choices will have to be made regarding Mesmer’s role in particular and we won’t be able to rely on pre-stacked resistance to completely ignore conditions. So it will be like it used to be when you had to bring some cleanse and understand what water and light fields are.