Guild Wars 2

They said they were going to discuss balance next week. Do you expect an answer prior to that or did you post a thread for the sake of having your daily online rant?

Lol Eraz, thanks for sharing, but your stream is terrible.

That being said, you get almost nothing from crit strikes (and especially from No Quarter) if you play Pack Runes. Play Scholar or just play Deadly Arts.

You have to ask yourself, Brew Pinch, why an old trait like Diamond Skin is creating so many threads just now?

The problem with tempest is that the meta build has no problem mitigating power damage and keeping himself above 90% health. Diamond Skin before that was either useless because the meta was less about conditions, or trash because eles did not have the sustain to maintain their health above 90%.

Also, if you play condi, don’t 1v1 an ele. Either +1 or rotate elsewhere. You can’t expect to win every 1v1, especially if you play a build that is specialized (there is a reason why most good 1v1 builds are hybrid).

Drop the tinfoil hats boys. Soloq is just a bad system for team games, compared to dynamic queues. Even LoL dropped it.

Ooooooor in an ideal world, Anet could just adjust the odds of victory in the case you’re playing with someone from a different league. As it is, the games you get are too easy.

Do you actually get dishonor when you log out? I constantly swap professions mid game and the message shows, but nothing ever happened to me.

Cynz.9437:

Well pretty simple actually: for 4 pips you actually need to win games, meaning your win ratio is probably above 50% so matchmaking will make sure you will lose next games (unless unexpected happens).

Not this again… That’s not how odds of victory work! Let’s say, Bahir, that you have been playing for a while (which you have, since you are in saphire). Your MMR is now pretty stable. The system will try to find games where you have approximately 50% chance of winning. If you win four in a row by chance (lucky with comps/team mates), your MMR will rise, but just a tiny tiny bit, so assuming your MMR before the four games was correct, you will have something like 45-48% chance of winning your fifth game. You are just unlucky.

The problem you’re experiencing is that when you are in a league with people around your skill level, you need to rely on luck to progress. I would advise you to just play for fun, think about how you can improve your gameplay and rotations, and you’ll make it to ruby eventually. Good luck!

And let’s not forget the major offenders: asura revenants! We need standard character models for revenant. I can conceive that you could forget that sort of thing at release, but this really needs a hotfix given the fact that most pro league teams are running revenants.

A lot of negativity here. Actually, while thief in not really viable in higher levels of competition (which I’m sure most of the whiners are very far from), it can really carry in soloq, up to saphire/eary ruby. I played thief in saphire, soloq/duoq, and have lost maybe 2-3 pips only.

Basically, you want to play something that does a lot of burst damage, and that is very mobile. For example, I run a d/p build with Impact Disruption, Dash, Fist Flurry and Scholar runes. You don’t want to 1v1 anything on point (unless you’re really, REALLY forced to), but you want to decap empty points (usually far, and it works amazingly in low tier soloq since people have 0 map awareness), and +1 people in 1v1s and 2v2s.

Basically, to +1 effectively, you arrive on the edge of the fight, you wait for a dodge, and you then you steal into your burst combo. For me for example, I arrive in stealth, if my team mate has done his job the foe is just a little over 50% health, and I Basi Venom into HS into Steal into Fist Flurry. If you get the interrupt on Steal, the HS, and the beginning of FF, your foe is already super low. If you get the combo off he’s dead.

Rules: chose your 2v2 carefully, but you shouldn’t 2v2 that much. Communicate with your team mates to tell them to rotate to the points you decapped (otherwise there is no point), and make sure that your team mates know your role. Most games you lose as a thief are because of a necro or a DH thinking decapping far is a good idea.

Good luck, and enjoy the shadows.

That title… I don’t know why people still think that game developers play favorites. Hint: they want their game to suceed, and occasionally, they kitten up! Grow up.

Cynz.9437:

disabling elites in pvp would be much better temp fix~

What? Don’t you think daredevil is super fun to play, even if you need a lot of effort to pull it off? You surprise me.

Wait for the nerf. Be water my friend.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

to those who wanna try it though I say ’Don’t be afraid to try it, it might take a few matches to learn though but try it, there is nothing to loose’.

I had a guy in my team back in saphire who was using something like that. Granted, saphire soloq is easy as hell, but it looked quite effective. I might try it in unranked. Thank you for sharing!

Shirlias.8104:

traps should have an “instanst” effect and don’t be permanent.

I agree. It’s not much of a problem with Procession of Blades and the spin to win, but the heal trap is a full heal no matter what when casted on point, even if you read it. That needs to change.

Terrorsquad.4802:

If you go DA/Trick/DD with Staff, I have no issues beating DS Auramancers, Bunker Mesmers 1v1 within 20s, honestly.

Good job. But you see, the two builds you listed are not 1v1 builds. If your build could beat a scrapper, a druid or even a revenant 1v1, then it would have some use as a side point fighter, but as it is there are better builds for the role.

Also, I think you’re exaggerating when you claim that you can kill a bunker mesmer in under 20s. At equal skill level it’s mathematically impossible if Gravity Well and CS are off CD.

Father Busho.2796:

Good job on providing a well formed guide however this build I just a generic scrapper meta build that can literally be played if a person is braindead.
Sorry, but a build spamming skills and from that gaining perma protection, swiftness, regen and 15+ might while having insane kiting/mobility AND damage is just wrong.
I would be must more interested if people actually still theory-crafted builds and came up with original ideas that are not copy-paste from metabattle…

Still, might be helpful to people trying to learn scrapper, gj.

What did you expect engineer players to do? Pretty much every one ran a version of this build long before metabattle and the pro-league. Engineer in general, and scrapper more so, is designed in a way that a lot of traits and utilities are non-negotiable. You can call it a “copy-paste” build if you want, but every decent engineer has realized for a long time that this build and its variations is the absolute best you can run in conquest. Get over yourself.

Shirlias.8104:

It’s not a “omg i can’t 1v1 dh”

It’s cause thief has no role

-Not a bunker
-Not a healer
-Not a Supporter
-Zerk dps deal a little more dmg than a bunker ( cause bunker have boons and armor and you as zerk don’t. It’s higher the Zerk one, but not that higher ).
-Can’t go 1v1 to contest a Point
-Can’t go 1v1 to fast solo a boss ( cause take to much dmg and have to lower its own dps to avoid dmg ).
-Can’t Rezz cause high dmg incoming.

Before we had to take down other zerks and help to debuff ( steal ), but now we simply can’t.

I still play only thief cause is the only class i like ( and the only who really pays for every single mystakes ), but actually the meta is not for us.

You’re describing thief exactly like it was when every team was running one. It could not 1v1, it could not hold a point, it could not support, it could not heal, it was the worst profession to solo lord on Foefire, and the meta DD ele had a far better sustained damage.

So what changed? The comps changed. Pre-HoT, you could run a snowball comp: you would take some bunkers/bruisers capable of holding a point for a few moment 1v1 or 1v2, and you would wait for a +1 of the thief, or a +2 of the thief and mesmer. It worked, because when the thief/mesmer duo jumped a foe, he was dead in seconds. Now that every profession has access to free damage (damage when invuln/evading/blocking, like DH, druids, mesmers, scrappers and revenants do so well) and a kitten ton of invulns/blocks/evades, you can’t kill as fast, and you are more likely to die to the unpressurable, uninterruptible skills the bunkers will throw at you.

If you add to this the fact that one bunker and one bruiser in the meta (mesmer and druid) have far too much mobility (Ride the Lighting was nerfed because of that, while druid staff #3 has three times less CD, evades, and heals), and that scrapper has a much more reliable stealth rez, you understand why thief is not meta anymore.

However, providing that all these new invulns/block/evades get nerfed massively, and that the bunker mesmer build gets destroyed (sad for build diversity I know, but necessary for comp diversity), thief will have a place in the meta again. You will probably still see thief-free comps (similar to the ones we see now, with revenants), but thief/mesmer will be back.

muscarine.5136:

Reason : everything you do some other class does it better. Even mobility.

No class is more mobile than thief. Mesmer can somewhat compete with Portal, but on a long CD. Whether or not mobility is sufficient to give thief a role in pvp is another matter.

First of all, let me say this: every player has at least one profession he/she just can not play. I, for example, could never play an elementalist, even though everyone is telling me that it is the most braindead class in the game. Thief has a very unique and complex role in conquest, so maybe you just need to learn how to play it. And yes, you will lose most 1v1s, it’s been like this for a while, and naturally it’s for the best: if thieves could play bruisers, why would we need to ever play other professions?

On the other hand, thief IS harder to play nowadays. I don’t think it needs a rework in the sense you mean. Thief needs to stay a glassy burst profession to keep its identity, and only weird roleplayers would ask thief to ressemble and elementalist: if I want to play a bruiser, I play another profession. But most of the other professions are over tuned, and will probably receive heavy nerfes.

Thief with daredevil is the funniest build I played since I started GW2, so for me thief is perfectly fine. The other builds are over the top, that’s all. And in particular revenant, since you mention it.

It’s excellent on d/p builds in pvp. In fact, it is the only build I find really effective in pvp right now. Sindrener, Vallun and Marvin are also using it on d/p thief, with great success.

You don’t understand Nick. Anet actually ruined GW2 pvp just now to allow myself and the other students to actually study for their exams instead of playing the game. Thank you Anet!

My pick for the best builds ever:

Recent:
- Shatter mesmer, with or without chronomancer, post June 2015
- Interrupt d/p thief post-HoT. Near useless now, but a lot of fun and very active
Older:
- Condi ranger with Mad King runes pre June 2015
- Axe/bow celestial warrior in summer 2014
- S/D thief
- Static Discharge engineer (RIP )

You just suffer from a superiority bias. Think about what you do wrong and stop blaming your team mates.

Radiantdawn.1856:

I mean, anyone could easily get on a separate f2p account to help lower a friend’s mmr. Even if he wasn’t doing it on purpose, it still seems slightly shady. Anybody in Diamond knows how the mmr works, at least to some extent. I think I’m more worried that playing with someone from Amber is more efficient than soloqueuing. Not to mention, 4 diamonds could queue with an Amber and get many Emerald or Sapphire. It just worries me. I just got to Ruby so I’m pretty afraid all my games with be stomps from people abusing matchmaking

Yeah… For that I would need a second account (preferably with HoT), and grind my way to rank 20 in unranked just to play with my real life friends, without being able to progress in leagues? I also would be unable to play the 9 different professions.

On the contrary, it’s fairer to play with your friends on your main account, cause you at least get saphire and ruby players against you. If I was to play against amber players… Now that would be exploiting.

Don’t look at contribution points. There will never reflect how well you did because of the many possible strats in conquest.

Dahkeus.8243:

1) Conceptualizing players as “good” or “bad” is not only overly simplistic, but also doesn’t do much to help you improve aside from either inflating or deflating your own worth (depending on which bucket you put yourself in).

2) It’s possible that you’ve reached the rank that best represents your current abilities.

3) It’s natural to perceive your team as usually being worse than the enemy team due to psychological bias. Don’t focus on this. Work with your team as well as you can and don’t let it bother you when teammates make bad decisions. Help them if you can, but don’t get caught arguing with them if they refuse to take your advice or get defensive. If someone rotates badly, just adjust your personal strategy as best as possible.

4) Some people abuse the MMR, but that’s not an excuse for your current position.

5) If you can, record some of your games and then go back and watch them to see what goes wrong and why.

Tl;dr – Focus on what you can do and not what someone else should have done. If your current approach isn’t working, try something else. Pips will come when you focus on being a better player and don’t get distracted by focusing on your pips or the shortcomings of your team.

This is probably the most sensible thing I’ve ever read on these forums. Thank you.

That’s dandy and all but… why on reddit? Hell, this is the official forum!

It is definitely worth coming back. Ok, we’re not that great in pvp, but thief still works very well in lower divisions (I only lost a couple of games in saphire solo queuing on thief) provided your team mates actually know how to play with a thief.

On the other hand, daredevil is in my opinion the absolute best elite specialization. Two of our elite dodges are equally viable, while feeling really distinct and looking amazing. The third one (the condi one) is decent in WvW, and also feels great. The new traits are incredible: daredevil has a lot of options and playstyles, and you have to make difficult choices that really affect the way you play. You can play damage on dodge, condition removal on dodge and staff to bounce in a team fight like a mad man, or take dash and PI to play a mobile interrupt build.

Our new skills are also really cool. The channel heal, Fist Flurry, Impact Strike and Bandit’s Defense are all useful in their own way, and have very distinct animations that make you look like a martial artist. When the powercreep gets nerfed, we’ll have a blast in pvp.

The way you phrase it i strange. Yes, I want a rifle for next thief spec, providing I still play this game in three years, which is far from certain. No, if the next thief spec was announced tonight and it was wielding a focus, I would not quit the game. Why? Because I’m already having fun with a game where thief can’t wield rifles.

I depends on what you like to play, on which gametype you play the most, and on which Legendary you prefer.

If I were to give a Legendary to my thief, I would probably go with the Dreamer. It just got a cool stow animation added to it, and in my opinion this is an overall fun and original weapon. Plus, no matter what you play in PvP/WvW/open world, you can be sure you’ll always have a short bow.

If you’re more into conventional stuff, you can never go wrong with Incinerator. It’s shiny, has discrete yet good-looking footprints, and can be used in any game mode (you can even wield two Incinerators in dungeons/fractals, how cool?).

Sir Vincent III.1286:

A Thief is weak I agree, but more than one, so far not so weak. Thieves are like the Skritts, the more they are the better they perform. One Thief’s damage is easy to mitigate, but if it’s coming from more than one Thief, the target is often overwhelmed rather quickly — in my experience at least. And it can have a negative psychological impact on the target if they go down every time from the same Thieves.

Except that Skritts don’t compete for the same role. One thief can +1 and decap, but it’s so specific that you can’t do that with more than one.

DeceiverX.8361:

I agree with the OP and have made remarks in the past. Shadow Shot on D/P is also keeping the mainhand dagger from being buffed

What would you want to buff? It’s already amazing. Shadow Shot blinds, and allows you to follow your target even if it blinds. You can land a BS with it. The auto-attack is fast, hits hard, and apply poison. Backstab hits hard from stealth. Heartseeker deals a ton of damage if you land it correctly, and it’s a leap finisher (I don’t have to explain why it’s great).

Frankly, d/p is amazing as it is. The only real problem with thief is the total lack of condition removal, and the current meta composed of bunkers, evades and stun-breakers spam, passive stuns, and AoE damage.

Azukas.1426:

Agemnon.4608:

It has heavy initiative cost so the skill balances out. I notice some thieves using shortbow 5 to rush ahead to a node at the start and I’m like dude, you’ll need that initiative for your actual damage and debuff abilities.

Not being a thief myself I can support that thief player based on what can actually happen.

He’ll beat the opposing teams player to the node or arrive at the same time. This prevents Far from being capped, and since this isn’t pro league play it will allow your team to cap Home while stalemating Mid. A good thief player can ensure you start ticking points before they do which gives your team an advantage, and also get away leaving that enemy player at home to join mid.

So what that means is your team is currently ticking at home with an imminent 5v4 at mid b/c they have to finish capping home.

I get your point, but it’s almost always better to send a mobile bruiser (typically a scrapper) to far, since he can not only ensure the point stays decapped, but can also win the 1v1, or stay far for long enough to get a +1. Meanwhile, mid is a 4v4 (it starts as a 3v4, but by playing carefully and having 1-2 bunkers, it’s not a problem), far is contested, and close is ticking in your favor.

Ohoni.6057:

Emerald is just horrible. I’m in a constant cycle of two steps forward, two steps back, without fail. It’s just a terrible system. They need to redesign it so that you no longer lose pips for bad matches.

I found that getting a team (at least one or two friends) really helps passing through emerald. You can go back to solo queuing in saphire.

Same here. I also play thief. I think it comes from two factors. Emerald players are terrible, and are really hard to carry, especially with a thief. Once you reach saphire, they can at least hold themselves in a 1v1 waiting for you to +1, and they usually don’t go duel on far instead of letting you decap. However, they are still bad enough than a thief can still do a lot of work by decapping (noone watches points in saphire), and FOTM bunkers die relatively fast (I believe most bunker mesmers I encountered never played mesmer prior to HoT).

SamTheGuardian.2938:

• For solo queue players- Add routines to match making so that it is aware of current meta builds and near meta builds. Make it so you never have one solo team composed of all Elite Spec metas against a team that’s running mostly outdated builds. Or at least when these matches happen pip distribution at end of match considers the leverage Elite Spec heavy team had.

I liked a lot of your ideas, but this one seems difficult to implement. Meta changes by the week, you can make a ton of variations to a viable build keeping it viable, or change one trait and break it. In addition, certain meta builds don’t stack well. Finally, certain meta builds perform amazingly in competent, organized teams, but won’t work in soloq. If your idea was implemented, dragonhunters and reapers would be god tier in soloq, since noone can decently focus them and the MMR of their opponents would be lower than theirs.

There is a system in the MM that prevents profession stacking. The rest of the solution to this problem must be found by the players. Every player should be able to play two or three builds to be able to counter comp rapidly, and if you run a subpar build, you must be ready to do more work to win.

I don’t care that you can grind through leagues, as long as skilled players progress faster. In way, that’s the case: the people you see in Legendary division are mostly good at the game. And you probably noticed, if you are good, that passing through emerald and saphire was super easy, compared to bad players forced to wait for a lucky win streak, or to abuse the system.

It’s not perfect however. I would like to see the pip system stay, but with MMR taken into account a bit more, for example by influencing the number of pips you gain for a win/lose for a loss. The idea is the following: if your MMR is higher than the average MMR in your league, you lose less pips when you lose, and you win more pips when you’re victorious. That way, you’ll reach the division you really belong to more easily.

Azukas.1426:

How are you left on mid alone? It doesn’t take 4 ppl to kill 1 thief

Can you tell that to some of the team mates I get please? Thanks in advance.

I can confirmed, thief is amazing versus bad players. I stormed through saphire losing only 2-3 pips playing thief solo, just because at this level, you can have a decap on far pretty much whenever you feel like it. That or one tempest decides to stay close all game to prevent you from decapping, turning the rest of the map into a 4v5.

The only times you lose is when a stupid necro or guardian decides to push far all game and die, forcing you to teamfight on the other points in equal numbers, which is never a good idea.

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

But over committing to far, and then blaming the team for losing 3 v 3 mid when you could have +1’d, is kind of your fault.

It depends on what you call over commiting. Figthting on a capped point or in a clearly bad match-up is over commiting, but if you’re a scrapper holding a tempest there for an infinite time (or even killing him), you’re helping your team a great deal. It’s your team’s fault if they can’t win a 4v4 mid (after your home capper has arrived).

So, first of all, you can expect some people to come here and give you pieces of advice such as “play a meta build” and such. But you don’t have to worry about that yet: play what you feel comfortable with.

Your strategy makes a lot of sense: you’re not super useful in team fight with this build, and you’re definitely a worthless +1 in a 1v1, but your build looks good in 1v1 and capable of keeping a point capped. So playing home holder is a good idea: with blink, you can prevent a decap from most builds. You could also try to play Portal to prevent any decap, and to offer a useful team utility.

Supporting mid (opposed to decapping far) is a good option with your build because you have a couple of useful team fighting abilities: mainly Chaos Storm, Gravity Well and the Illusion traitline. To be even more useful, you could try to use Medic’s Feedback in the Adept tier.

Good luck. Congrats for being willing to improve.

edit: two answers posted at the same time, two very different points of view :P

Vapour.7348:

What was the incentive for NOT resetting MMR?

Having balanced games. MMR is the number that indicates how skilled you are relatively to the other players, determined by your capacity of winning against lower MMR players, and your tendency to lose against higher MMR players. Resetting it would mean a few weeks of completely random games.

fumcheg.1936:

So you suppose other ppl must care and build their game around you just because you don’t want to switch to a normal class (most probably because you don’t know how to play other classes)? Well you DO deserve the attitude you get.

I’m sure, since we’re talking about ranked, that you play the game with a competitive mindset. If that’s the case, yes, you need to adapt to what your teammates are playing. If I have a necro on my team, I am ready to peel for him when he gets focused and CC chained. If I have two DH, I will try to provoke large teamfights rather than 3-node scrims. If I play thief or shatter mesmer and I have a shatter mesmer or a Glint/Shiro revenant on my team, I’ll roam with him/her to quickly burst node holders. The list is long, and being a good soloq player means having the tools (including playing different builds/professions) to adapt to every comp you get. How do you expect to win? By zerging mid? How is it working for you so far?

Change your mindset, practice, and try to understand how conquest works. Understand that the main difference between you and good players is not in pressing your skills, but in effective rotations and carefully picked fights.

Oh: and if you respawn, you’re not forced to always go mid :P

Cygnus.6903:

I get what you’re saying, but the trait works so well that in practice i think it’s pretty awesome as is.

It’s funny you should say that, because my reflexion was inspired by the roaming build you published here a few days ago (which is awesome by the way, thank you). Typically, on your build, Eternal Champion pulsing stab prevents you from getting not only your might and stab procs, but also your RR procs.

nacario.9417:

Its sad to see all the negativity thieves get beforehand if the theif is actually good. Thief can carry in its own way if the person has ace map awareness, thats the thief role

On the positive side, I’ve never received as much post-game compliments. People just assume that a game with a thief on your side is automatically lost when you have a thief on your side, and that your thief must be a demi-god for winning, when really thief still works decently under certain conditions. That or they feel like top players for “carrying a thief”.

It’s bugged. I’ve had troubles with skill queuing since HoT. Basically, you should now learn to use your skills only when you need them. It’s really annoying.

edit: the skills on which I experience the worst skill queuing issues are on hammer, so that may be an oversight when designing the weapon.

I think something is wrong with our GM trait Eternal Champion. First of all, the might it gives is risible: it should be at least five stacks (I would even suggest 10), for a much longer duration (8s currently), because of how situational the application is.

Secondly, I feel like the skill is working against itself. If the purpose of this skill is the idea of a warrior constantly breaking stuns to empower himself, then why does it give pulsing stability in berzerker mode? I would much prefer seeing this pulsing stab removed, and turn the trait into a pure stun break trait (giving for example 10 stacks of might for 15s and 2 stacks of stab for 5s, which wouldn’t be too much for a GM trait).

Doggie.3184:

Sorel.4870:

Urejt.5648:

friednly reminder thief is trash, but god way to tank mmr

My MMR won’t tank! Halp! What am I doing wrong?

Maybe that’s cuz you already tanked it hardcore before those victories. :P

Thank you, that must be it. How silly I was to worry!

Urejt.5648:

friednly reminder thief is trash, but god way to tank mmr

My MMR won’t tank! Halp! What am I doing wrong?

muscarine.5136:

Typical game.
Also, you forgot the usual slow kitten necro (or whatever but in the case of a necro it’s even more laughable) who for some reason decided it’d be in his team’s best interest to spent 75% of his time crawling to far, 15% of his time dying there, and 10% respawning, while stealing one of the thief’s main job which is to rotate and decap far soon as the pressure allows him to.

I’m so freaking tired of having to explain such basic things, 90% of my games as a thief, to people who then complain useless teef because they basically destroyed my role in the team comp and have absolutely 0 idea of how they’re supposed to synergise with a thief in their team. Ok that’s probably too much to ask, since to begin with they can’t understand respawn snowball.

This. DH, necros and revenants are the worst offenders for some reason. Not only does it take a lot of knowledge about Conquest to play thief right, but you also need to have team mates who understand how to play with a thief. And since these players will never play thief, they’ll never improve and we’ll be stuck with them in our queues.

Redfeather.6401:

babazhook.6805:

Again it sure would be cool were we able to switch in combat on the fly and i find all three of those elites useful. Even in a Condo build there a bit of a choice to make as dash can be useful there and it is nice to be able to put the SB away.

It kind of makes me angry that our profession mechanic is 1 endurance bar, and it’s the grandmaster traits that completely outclass the profession mechanic.
Would have been so much better if profession mechanic included dodge type swapping beside the steal icon. Then the grandmaster traits could be used to do what other professions grandmasters do.

I think the original idea (before the ridiculous powercreep) was that specializations were not suppose to be insanely better than core specs. It’s ok to have them be better in practice just because they compensate what was previously a weakness of the class (like Scrapper with melee presence), it’s another matter when it’s just an OP version of a traitline. Dash and Bound feel like GM traits, and they are actually among the only traits in the game to have a very obvious animation. How cool is that?