Guild Wars 2

Simply, our initiative is meant to be our substitute for cooldowns. So why do we have weapon swap cooldowns like every other class that needs them to not abuse weapon cooldowns?
I think that making thief weapon swap much lower, such as say 1 second CD, at the cost of maybe 2 initiative, would make the class play a little more unique, without overbalancing us since we can’t spam our (supposedly) powerful non-auto abilities, but we can be more flexible.

Hybrid.7059:

Uhhh, if this is such a massive issue for you, why don’t you just hide the chat? Think about it, even going off of my experience from almost 3 years of playing this game, pvp chat has been useful about 2 times.

No no no no no.
Do not EVER hide the chat unless you are playing purely with people in voice chat who make up the WHOLE team.
There’s this thing called COMMUNICATION which is impossible without a means to convey information. It tends to win games.

Yep, that’s already the only way to engage trap rangers and specced burn guards. Condi Ele’s are even worse since they’ll engage you whether you like it or not.
Or Thieves could get condi clear worth a kitten …

Interesting thought on the arcane swapout, I had mostly been thinking in terms of solo play and 100% fury uptime from swaps, which is the arcane line really kicking in. So I guess the question is how much can you rely on group buffs from other classes?
The arcane line also has the lovely boon uptime buff, which I was thinking of combining with (painfully expensive) strength runes for a build which should build might might and more might (stacking it every time I go through fire faster than it decays), and the fresh air should probably give me 100% combat swiftness as well.

Well, burn may or may not be in too good a place right now, but it’s certain that we don’t have the clear to deal with it in any meaningful way. Doubly so if it’s paired with any other condi-such as bled from ranger traps-most of our condi clear is a single condition at a time.

Basically I really enjoy the S/D so what I’m going with is an arcane air fire Fresh Air conjure, and I was wondering whether Assassin or Zerker should give better damage results and why?

Play trap ranger. At least from the ranger end, I win 1v1 nearly every time. Harder when you’re attacking, but you need to dive onto point and start laying down the traps and evades.

Engi already has RNG skills. You don’t want them.

I’d definitely not recommend cele for that build. Cele is normally for builds that have a balance of condition, healing on traits, and direct damage. That build is all direct damage.

You want optimism? Thief is the most mobile class.

This thread basically sums up how bad thieves are, assuming all the advice was given in good faith.

So, with the addition of another condi-heavy build (warrior elite) I think a real look needs to be taken at the lack of thief condi clear. Currently we have some small condi removal on our heals, and can trait into via tricks. We have no pure condi removal, and our traits require using multiple of a single type of skill that is severly underwhelming.
Either that, or taking slow condi clear while in stealth, which requires not using the trait that GIVES cooldown reduction to most of our stealth. Genius.
Especially given the number of AoE condi applicators in the game right now, thieves need more condi clear. I’ve been on both sides of the fence in this one-I play a trap ranger and I normally spend half the game laughing as thieves run off because they’ve run out of condi clear. That’s when they don’t simply melt. Burn guardians are another great example, they can just swing wildy and throw down flaming symbols, and if you even try to blink in and out, congrats! Enjoy your burn stacks.
Thieves as a profession are meant to reset and come back when conditions are better suited. However, most of these AoE burns have lower cooldowns than we do.
So, quite simply, thieves need more condi removal, both active and passive traited.

Play burn class, laugh at thieves forevermore.

Thief does have a few uses outside "+1"ing but they’re normally tied to specific setups (like shortbow bouncing across maps, ties to specific weapon set and init usage), or are easily countered (burn guardian against 95% of thief builds).
Overall, +1 to the thread.

bhagwad.4281:

Federer and Nadal are two of the politest sportsmen I’ve ever seen.

Their tennis rivalry was the most legendary ever.

So no…you do not need to have trashtalk to give the audience a great time. What you do inside the court (or match) matters – not out of it.

This. So much this. Federer especially, but both of them hugely polite, respectful, and amazingly humble for people on top of the world, and yet their matches drew crowds like no others.
You don’t need trashtalk for a good rivalry.

Not even close to those 2. Axe 4 is 2 hits in one. Most hammer skills are large AoE’s. if you want me to jump on my warrior and find every skill with reasonable multihit potential I’m not going to, but the number of skills that can generate huge numbers of hits in a single skill use is not short.

Warriors have a huge number of multi-hit skills already. Either from AoE attacks or from attacks like offhand axe 5, Greatsword, 2, etc. This laready gives them massive adrenaline gain. While your changes make sense, they would allow warriors to cast tier 3 adrenaline skills as fast as the CD would allow, removing the point of the adrenaline mechanic. One way to combat this would be reducing the gain from many of these skills, either by fractional gains, or increasing the size of adrenaline bars (and skills like signet of rage that are designed around X amount of bars.)

Sword dagger thieves. Very sticky, very hard to actually pin down for damage.

Dishonor is being brought back in some way with HoT.

1) “Ignore them until it goes away” is a terrible solution.

2) These people drag your MMR back down anyway.

I’m sure blacklists come up quite often but with the introduction of dishonor I really think it needs to be said. Sometimes you run into people who will deliberately ignore your calls, leave you in the middle of teamfights, and are just terrible team players in general. Recently I’ve had an awful spate of these, to the point of leaving matches.
This got me thinking, that with the dishonor system, I’m the one going to be hitting penalties for these people deliberately throwing matches. I’m sure everyone has had similar experiences, though, and I think that a blacklist so you’re never matchmade on the same team as these people is needed, since currently the ONLY option is leaving a game.
Yes, you can downvote people, but you can be sure that these people are going to downvote you back no matter what, as well.
I can’t see any real abuse of a blacklist, since if you misuse it you’re going to run out of players to play with (and especially if you use it to blacklist decent players). We need this if the dishonor system is going to be worthwhile.

Trap ranger. It’s one hell of a duel and you need to be awake but in my experience it normally comes out on top.
Rough build was sbow, s/d, trap/survival utilities.

Revenants are hugely weak to crowd control. Hope you’re good at tells and dodging. (Oh wait half the CC doesn’t have tells!)

Most heals are not 4k though. In fact I don’t know any that are 4k unless you misuse them badly, like do engi turret without overcharge and then destroy it without a field. So you’re making a false comparison by putting that number up. If we take my PvP engi build, I have no healing strength whatsoever and pull 5.5k plus buffs, which you can trait for condi removal and extra buffs. On a 20 second cooldown.
Also I hope none of your Shiro attacks missed or were blocked, and you’ve spent twice the time (in fact more since they’re longer casting times) casting heals as I have. You’ve also used up profession energy which means one less utility or weapon usage.

So congrats on pulling 7.5k on a roughly 30 second cooldown, that has conditional dependency and requires specific setups. It’s bad healing.

Yes, I agree especially with the energy cost on weapon skills, since they already have cooldowns comparable with other classes and it really restricts your utility usage.

I guess overall the problem is that it requires extreme specs to be even viable at single purposes and doing so removes anything else-survivability requires almost no weapon usage so you have utilities, and takes away all your damage output, and going offensive renders you the most vulnerable class in the game.

I played last beta weekend and have been trying it out both in PvE and PvP this weekend.

Overall the class is complex to use with multiple resource and cooldown management, and many skills that seem designed to be used with other skills.

In PvE you can get some decent rhythm going but damage is still disappointing without building for it, and you seem very vulnerable to bursty enemies (like the enemies in the story preview) unless you bunker build very heavily, in which case you struggle to output any damage.
For a class with two heals it feels less impressive than most classes single heal, especially the Assasin’s healing, this seems simply terrible.
The Assasin healing requires you to precast before you engage, or waste time casting a non-instant heal in combat. This means that you either waste potential healing, or that you can easily get in an emergency situation before your healing starts to take effect.
Demon form healing synergises very well with the other abilities on the toolbar, however, and while slightly more complex to use effectively, I think it works well.
Weapon set swapping suffers from being an afterthought, in that each weapon set possible feels very clunky when you try to build together-especially since the largest damage source is burns and torment, which are only available on a single weapon set.

Coming to PvP, Revenant has been hugely underwhelming.
Single target abilities are few and far between with low damage (even when I was using strength runes with might stacking), and the AoE abilities have massive tells.
You also suffer hugely from any form of control, be it blinds or KD’s or stuns, even after building specifically keeping these in mind. These are also very easy to cast on you while you’re winding up for the attacks worth landing, which means at best you bet stunned and interrupted, or even worse you get blinded and waste the entire ability.
[Edit]You also have very few reliable stunbreaks, making you even more vulnerable to these abilities.
Weapon sets also have little synergy, with weak singletarget skills and slow AoE’s, resulting in little consistency of role.
Finally, your movement abilities have far too short a range compared to other classes, and cannot be free targetted to give mobility. This is especially glaring combined with your lack of swiftness options, and your lack of movement traits.