@Stiv
My post said nothing about having trouble with dealing with Thieves, only that what I posted was not applicable to my Mesmer nor my Ranger (traps are AOE but not spammable and work differently). Most thieves are noobs that try to glass cannon … 2 shatters and you go poof and I’m very fast at generating illusions and shattering :-)
The thieves that scare me are the patient ones that will reset our fight until they win. After a fight has been reset 4-5 times I’m going to make a mistake and they get me … when I realize it’s one of these, I use my escapes to try to get away as the best I’m going to get is a draw (we both stop and bow to each other then move along).
Also, while half of those thieves steal into your Blurred Frenzy (see: noob thieves), the other half laugh as one of your defenses is now on cooldown. It may be a short cooldown but that’s more than enough time to be hit (even killed). Now you have to waste defenses on longer cooldowns if they do anything else “dangerous”.
I don’t see a big problem with using BF early. It’s tiny windup can get you killed if you don’t use it preemptively anyway. There’s always distortion which if you don’t use early is wasted on the 50% reset.
I agree with you on the reset thieves. The only way to kill them is to get them to run while on sword and having having swap and blink up and that’s only if you use GS. Not very good chance of that situation. At least their reset time is right around the Mesmers relatively short cooldown times so we are almost full power each round. Unlike say.. an Engie camping in a Supply Drop which is just something you wait out then freekill the engie.
@Stiv: Okay, thanks for that. Sorry for asking, but what armor set would you point me to? any power/precision/x-stats exotic?
For D/P I personally go full zerker (power/precision/critdmg%). Others would say a mix of zerker and knights(power/precision/toughness) and maybe Valk (power/vit/critdmg%). A really easy way to get full zerker gear over a bit of time is to learn Citadel of Flame path 1 and 2. You will make good money if you use %gold food. The marks can be spent on zerker armor and weapons. The money you can use to buy from TP or craft accessories. You can run path 1 and 2 multiple times a day, I’d say 3 of each per day max for me. That will net you well over 200 tokens/marks a from quest rewards and blue bag drops.
For the very short term, if you want that play-style just buy full green berserker gear off the TP. You will probably be surprised at how well it can do especially compared to your current setup. Someday you can use transmutation stones to skin your current armor on to whatever you end up with so you can keep the look.
No wonder people are whining about thieves, they run full glasscannon expect to survive a burst class… I just started an engineer a week ago, first stat i went for was toughness, thieves? I hunt them.
:O How could you hunt your own kind?
I imagine easily with a flamethrower, bombs, and/or grenades, lol!
You just answered your own conundrum of how to deal with us, I hope you know this.
If I played an engineer, you’d be correct :-)
I do not play an engineer.
None of the classes I play have spammable AOE unless you count my Mesmer’s sword and my Ranger’s sword/greatsword.
You have a problem killing thieves on your Mesmer? If I target them then MirrorImage+BF when they get to ~1K range half of them steal into BF and die to a shatter…
P/V/T isn’t bad but not needed on a Thief really. You want to kill stuff and we avoid damage from stealth, teleports and evades. If you aren’t set on the D/P playstyle, there is a temple vendor for karma to buy “rabid” rings/back/accessories/ammy (precision/toughness/condmg) Your armor is already the rabid stats. If you pick those up you have a good condition set do play P/D with the rune/sigil/food setup I mentioned above.
That will get you going quickly, then you can start building your direct damage set.
edit: don’t forget to buy a karma booster before you chug ur jugs!
Buy a full green zerker set and you will do better than with that set :P Your power is way too low for a direct damage build. That is like everyone having perma protection up against you at all times. If they also have real protection or some decent armor you will hardly tickle them.
If you really want that armor, get the same stats on all pieces and orbs and go P/D with superiors of sigil of earth + sigil of agony and runes of the undead. Use 40% condition duration food. That will give you a lot of con dmg and 50% duration for bleeds.
I’m a Thief and actually never died to another Thief hitting me even close to that hard even when they catch me first and unload everything before I’m able to roll away. I’m not full zerker though.
He’s a full GC Ranger. He made a post the other day complaining. Pointing out the obvious that Thieves make better GC than a Ranger. In full groups or larger situations GC rangers are fine but he’s trying to play a very group dependent Ranger spec on the small scale and QQing. Rangers have easy access to protection and haste things that just beg for some toughness while still allowing decent damage. OP needs to L2Spec for what he’s doing.
Wait a second, so is it possible to get party invitations and whispers from players on opposing servers?!
Yea because the PvE side of this game is not restricted by server. You can guest anywhere. Your friends list can have people from any server. All you need to whisper someone no matter the server is their acct name.
I hope they don’t fix this because it’s very fun and friendly rivalries are healthy for a game. For instance, last match-up there was a group of 5 players from the opposing server that were very organized and slaughtering our zerg, many times their numbers. On my Thief I started to harass them at inopportune times and tried to annoy them as much as possible. It worked, I eventually got a party invite from them to duel and such (lost terribly to one that swapped to a glam/blind/duelist spec). In the end, it turned out one of them was an enemy I knew from when I played Aion. It was fun to chat with them for a bit. That’s a big part that is missing from WvW is community/rivalry building with the enemy.
They just need to make this a feature. Add an option “allow enemy communication” Y/N then support it. Some want it, some don’t. Let the players choose. Anyone who argues it will promote x-realming, that’s already happening via voice and other means.
The reason Thieves have not had significant nerfs that no one here wants to hear is they are balanced at the higher end of the skill cap for all professions. They are OP at the lower – mid ranges that are common in WvW and hotjoin.
Anet developed this game with it being an E-Sport in mind. There is no reason to believe it’s not still a mission of theirs. You don’t get an e-sport by balancing your game around the general WvW zerg type population that doesn’t even bother to understand every profession and their mechanics.
I used to run S/D – D/D but changed to S/D – D/P. The reason is you will run into D/P thieves roaming and they are very hard to beat with S/D – D/D. It’s usually who is in stealth last wins and D/P just has superior access to stealth.
A good setup I like for either is 10/10/30/20/0 in full zerker. You still do good damage but 20 acro gives so many great things. Each trait is awesome and really worth the loss in dmg.
The way stealth stacks now is if you have less than 11 seconds of total stealth built up and do a stealfh action it will add to your total. If you have more than 10 seconds built up it will give you nothing. Also each SR pulse is a seperate stealth action.
Wait, dying as a class is an indicator of playing it to its full potential? I’m calling shenanigans!
Sort of. If you never die, why is that? Did you run instead of try to stomp a guy you downed in the middle of a guild group? What if you could have pulled off that stomp? Wouldn’t that have been better? You will never know because you didn’t try. Most of my Thief deaths are from trying to stomp when there are decent players around. Yea I die doing that quite a bit, but the times I pull them off and get away make it much better. Those are the types of memories that cause QQ posts on forums, not playing conservative and running away when you think you might go down.
Stiv, what you’re talking about is more “pushing your limits” or “testing your luck”. Everyone dies. With thieves it’s usually because they get too aggressive or their escape route ran them into a group of good players.
Whether or not you die is a poor indicator of whether or not you are playing your class to its fullest. If it was a good indicator of this, all those mouthbreathers out there are bloody gurus :-p
Pushing limits and playing to full potential sound similar to me I guess. If I find someone in a fully upgraded supply camp I could just leave or take pot shots and 100% survive. On the other hand I could do my best to down and stomp them with 15 mobs on me because why not? Maybe I never had a shot because that player could have beat me in a 1 on 1 duel to begin with. You never know till you try.
Some players seem to get joy out of just never dying I guess. If I put my mind to it I could run around WvW an entire night playing like a passy and never die I’m sure. The profession just has a lot of escapes that can be used both offensive and defensive (Refuge and Shadow-Step are perfect examples). I could save them 100% for defense and never die, big deal it doesn’t mean I’m OP. It just means i’m playing my profession none dimensional.
Wait, dying as a class is an indicator of playing it to its full potential? I’m calling shenanigans!
Sort of. If you never die, why is that? Did you run instead of try to stomp a guy you downed in the middle of a guild group? What if you could have pulled off that stomp? Wouldn’t that have been better? You will never know because you didn’t try. Most of my Thief deaths are from trying to stomp when there are decent players around. Yea I die doing that quite a bit, but the times I pull them off and get away make it much better. Those are the types of memories that cause QQ posts on forums, not playing conservative and running away when you think you might go down.
Most KB’s don’t have any sort of animation you could react to. It’s a guess and most will blow their two evades right away.
Well, my thief should just use his longbow knockback, I guess, lol.
My mesmer’s focus is great for this, it doesn’t have an animation, but the greatsword most definitely does as do most other knockback skills i.e. hammer warrior spins.
You knock them out during the 3rd second ftw. It’s even better if you stand at one edge and auto attack/aoe that spot and you have a good bet the thief is not on that side of the circle.
Why would I wait for the 3rd second? They’re gaining might and initiative on each tick, healing while stealthed, and removing conditions while stealthed. I knock them out ASAp if I have focus. Greatsword, it’s hit or miss. They can easily dodge.
My personal favorite on my memser when their SR far away from me is to fire up GS#5 then blink to the refuge so that the KB hits instantly when I teleport (similar to C&D+Steal). 90% of the time, it works every time.
That’s awesome … some of us already blew our blink when they jumped us with basilisk venom since the other options result in us eating backstab and other nastiness in the rear.
Also regarding the 2 init back on stealth, that’s trollspecing. Blind and con remove on stealth are much more powerful. Healing in stealth is mandatory.
It’s not just trollspecing. I’ve seen people with tons of toughness but not much healing and no reliable retaliation/confusion get whittled down by this crap.
1. Thief vs Thief who cares. Many thieves will still evade regardless to avoid normal damage, you know, because they take all of it while in stealth. GC wars can just GS3 thru the refuge and straight up murder a injured Thief if they aren’t spamming evades.
2. Because them getting another couple init and 700 more health and being knocked out is much better than you being predicable and trying to knock back instantly, getting evaded and giving them the full duration?
3. Not sure what your build is but for me, Decoy/Distortion/Torch#4/BF can all counter thief burst as well as blink.
4. I say it’s trollspecing because it’s not as good as the other options and is only good for spamming C&D or for D/P perma stealth trolls. Everyone says thieves heal in stealth, remove conditions and blind, they can’t have this too. You have to make a hard choice to run that trait and it weakens them against the players who don’t die to C&D’s DPS over 30 seconds. I would wager anyone that I could kill in trollspec I would be able to kill with any spec. No offense to that toughness dude…
Stealth is extremely powerful in that you lose target and can’t follow them either. Add to that the fact that it does so much for the Thief thanks to the Shadow Arts line and it get a bit ridiculous. When it comes to people pushing a Thief out of Shadow Refuge, most thieves are smart enough to dodge roll in their shadow refuge and/or stand behind the enemy that rushes into it to try something. If you don’t, I’m sorry that you fail at successfully using shadow refuge.
Why do you think I said not to blow the knockback right away? If a player with KB is next to a SR the only thing a thief can do is evade. Most KB’s don’t have any sort of animation you could react to. It’s a guess and most will blow their two evades right away. You knock them out during the 3rd second ftw. It’s even better if you stand at one edge and auto attack/aoe that spot and you have a good bet the thief is not on that side of the circle.
My personal favorite on my memser when their SR far away from me is to fire up GS#5 then blink to the refuge so that the KB hits instantly when I teleport (similar to C&D+Steal). 90% of the time, it works every time.
Also regarding the 2 init back on stealth, that’s trollspecing. Blind and con remove on stealth are much more powerful. Healing in stealth is mandatory.
For my Mesmer to reset, I have to blow some cooldowns. Often two against fast opponents (most anyone not a mesmer, lol).
Elementalist ride the lightning, blink, mist form. 20+ cooldowns.
Warrior is a different animal, i’ll give you that I can make a warrior pretty darn hard to stop … unless people are spamming cripple/chill/immobilize on him.
Thief simply stealths and is done. Thanks to Shadow Arts, Thief stealths and now they are removing conditions, gained might, healing, and maybe moving +50% speed.
The Warrior and Elementalist have speed but no stealth.
The Mesmer has stealth but no speed.
The Thief has both stealth and speed.
Thief cannot simply stealth and juke. Especially not the builds that are mobile like wars and eles. They also have to blow 1 or 2 utilities. Shadowstep and Shadow refuge combined are almost a guaranteed reset but that’s blowing two utilities with long cooldowns. If SR isn’t used with something like Shadow-step it’s easily countered by decent players. Players that don’t blow their knockback right when it’s cast counter it way more often. This also means that neither of these utilities were used offensively to try to actually kill anyone.
It’s a flawed design decision. You know what allows me to beat that good thief? My cooldowns. You know what the thief can do after he escapes? Reset the fight and come back at me quickly before my cooldowns are done or continue the cycle until I simply get sick of him, he gets reinforcements, I make a mistake after “winning” several fights.
It’s bull.
If someone loses a fight on another class, they die. They don’t escape and kill someone else nearby.
That’s just not true. D/D eles, GS/S+S wars and Mesmers can all reset. Both Ele’s and Engies can spec to be un cc-able with food and having any bunker can’t be stopped from running to safety. The ranger in the vid above outran an Ele as well and near water they are invincible..
If you can’t spec for or have weapon/utility mobility or stealth you aren’t playing a good solo WvW prof. Some profs and specific specs are just more group oriented.
Staff phase is unreliable because it requires ambient creatures at specific locations. Seems like quite an investment for unreliable mobility that consumes our resources, esp since the rune set might not be optimal for one’s build.
Unless something has changed.. you still port just no clone without a target right? It’s great mobility combined with binding the 180key.
Osi, doesn’t just 6 sec of swift every 15 suck compared to the Centaur? Or does dat dmg just make up for it that much?
the Ranger, when losing, dies. The Thief, when losing, simply finds a new target and kills it instead.
I think this is the cause of most of the QQ. You have to realize this is a design decision that the thief is based around. Anet has stated it many times. They are to be slippery and get away. People admit that they can own thieves, only if they would stick around. If a change was made so thieves could not get away. They would just be get rolled over and over by every prof because everyone can counter a Thief. Thieves specialize in killing distracted and bad players. If they were forced to stay and fight no matter what, they would loose to every equally skilled player out there unless other changes were made to give them access to immune and protection etc which is just more profession homogenization.
When a thief runs from you, get it in your head that you have won that fight. Who cares if he had to come back from a waypoint or from running out of combat range? Last night I fought an Ele on my Mesmer 1 on 1. The fight lasted a very long time because each time we engaged I’d get him down to 10% and he’d bail. I don’t have the mobility to keep up. I was trying to think of different ways to go about it next round but ended up making a mistake and dying to him after about 5 battles of him engaging then running. I don’t come to the forums and kitten about Ele’s mobility, I consider what happened more positive than negative. I forced him to flee ~5 times. Any of those times I could have gone back to a keep or whatever, I chose to say and fight because it was fun.
Rangers are just a different play-style and fill a different roll. No you can’t troll in the middle of 30 up-arrow bads on a ranger because they lack stealth. That’s what Thieves do.
Rangers can still be nasty 1 on 1 and are probably better in groups than Thieves. They can be constant ranged pressure that especially set up as glass cannon (with group support).
No, rangers can’t solo as glass cannon because they don’t have the tools. Probably the only viable solo full GC profs are Thief, Mesmer and War. First two have stealth and War has invulns and mobility to complement their insane GC damage.
I really don’t see this game as the type where each char has to balance with the next for each possible playstyle. Some are better than others at specific things. If your goal is to troll 30 bads then Thief is the prof for you. They do it better than anyone with poison arrows and trops. It doesn’t mean it’s OP, that build is completely ignoreable.
For me it’s playing a Shatter Mesmer and how it has changed the downed state from something I loathed to something I love. I found myself yelling at my friends mid fight “No don’t stomp!” because nothing is better than unloading a full MI shatter/BF combo into a downed guy with rezers
D/D ele is for sure the top build right now. I think Anet still has that on the chopping block. They took a chip out of it last patch.
I guess I just personally don’t care much about out of combat movement speed. It’s ok to have but not what really matters. What makes eles so fast is all of the no target required mobile abilities. The closest thing we have is Staff#2 in conjunction with binding the 180 key. If you use 180+Staff2, blink and Centaur runes Mesmers cover ground pretty quick but yea it’s weapon dependent just like focus. Staff is good for most builds though.
No one here is saying they are going to uninstall if thieves do/don’t get nerfed. It is however all over the boards that other people are feeling that way about thieves.
It’s a hotly debated class. There is a massive amount of media supporting those saying that thieves likely need a nerf even after culling is fixed. Some of those people play thief as their main. The people, like you, debating the other side, simply say to be “l2p” or make a video where they intentionally play like garbage and don’t even stat/trait for it right or take into account the context being described.
I.E. he has my respect not because he agrees with me but because he is willing to admit to something that could result in a class he plays being made weaker than it currently is while you, on the other hand, selfishly deny that there is anything really wrong with it. Your posts don’t even accept the potential that there’s an issue.
As I’ve said before in my other posts, I personally don’t have problems with most thieves, but I spec specifically to be able to handle them since I roam. I however see all the garbage going on in the rest of the game to other people, then I go test it myself as a thief, and I see that there is quite a bit of validity to those claims and that it’s really easy to do as a thief … took me 5 minutes to practically master the few things we see Thieves doing. Did I get owned 1v1 by actual “pro” thieves? Yes. Did I own “pros” of other classes 1v1 as a Thief after less than an hour of play on the Thief? Yes.
He mains a Ranger not the Thief and Rangers have always been screwed over by their Pets vs C&D. They refuse to make pets stow-able so they need to make it so when a ranger evades, the pet also gets the evade immunity frames. That way a Ranger can still spend endo and have his pet dodge C&D. That is a player skill based solution that would help rangers immensely.
Everyone has an opinion or an angle they are coming from. This game is very easy to create alts with. For every one person with multiple characters who has a 80 full exotic thief and says they need a nerf there are just as many if not more who say they don’t. They also happen to play a Thief along with other professions at end game.
Yea, it’s a bad counter to Killshot :P Maybe you guys know the answer to this since it’s sort of related. I mirrored a killshot the other day and it hit the War for 3800. Do you guys know if reflected abilities use our stats/traits/bonuses or theirs? I was hoping for a 13K instagib but was sad. I’m not sure if the war as just weak and didn’t crit or if it’s using my stats which probably would never hit that level of dmg without all the warrior mods.
I’m liking Centaur runes with Mirror heal. 12 out of every 15 sec you have swiftness. With a focus it’s perma swiftness.
I view this issue as a Memser weakness that is actually needed. The prof is good at so many other things. Mobility and in some cases condition removal are where it has holes that need to be filled with sigils/runes/food.
Are the Ele and Guardian not also good at a lot of things? Both of which can perform far better than we can over long distances, without 2-4 runes and a mandatory weapon.
You also have to consider that a Mesmer can’t do all of the things that make them a build-versatile profession. Builds tend to be fairly specific and focused, so even if we have access to a wide variety of them, we can only use one. If anything, our absolutely horrible condition removal is a significant enough disadvantage to warrant a passive speed buff of some sort. Especially considering it would only really impact our ability to move around the map faster. We’ll still be relying primarily on our skills for in-battle mobility.
Neither of them can stealth for one which is pretty big. Eles are restricted to one single build that is for sure the highest mobility in the game but they can’t do what we can with stealth and portal.
I guess having a 25% passive signet wouldn’t be a problem though. It would only hurt anyone who used it and got stuck in combat. There is no room to give up a utility.
I’m liking Centaur runes with Mirror heal. 12 out of every 15 sec you have swiftness. With a focus it’s perma swiftness.
I view this issue as a Memser weakness that is actually needed. The prof is good at so many other things. Mobility and in some cases condition removal are where it has holes that need to be filled with sigils/runes/food.
I play a Thief and a Mesmer and Thieves are fine. My Mesmer is much more powerful than my Thief. I get one person down on my thief and spend all my effort trying to stomp them. I get one person down on my Mesmer and I pray that 4 people try to rez and then blow them all to hell. People just complain because Thieves can bail on a fight most of the time (design decision – deal with it). My mesmer can’t run away as well but I can re-engage very quickly even with low health and be extremely dangerous each time. Different flavors.
Bads complain and always will. Yes, there are some specs that have a low skillcap (trollspec – P/D + SB) but others are much higher. The most complained about spec (glass cannon) is by far the weakest of the viable specs so that tells you something.
It would be a lot better if the big red arrow pointing at the Mesmer wasn’t there after #2. At least make people identify what Mesmer came out of stealth to stomp instead of the giant stomp me sign imo.
Really this thing needs some major love. It has no information. Tell us when we go down, when we die, when we rally, when we stomp. Tell us what effects we get and give, let it scroll much further. Some of us like to learn from each death and the current combat log is just… not good.
In a build with 50% crit chance, sigil of air is better than sigil of force. Much better. 50% guarantees that it triggers twice every ten secs. In a build with lots of power/crit dmg, as usually are the builds with 50% crit chance, sigil of air gives you easily 1.5k dmg per hit, or 3k every ten secs. For sigil of force to be that powerful, you will need to do 60K dmg every 10 secs, so that a 5% increase will result in added 3k dmg. I dont really think you can do 60K dmg every ten seconds. Even if the target you are hiting as sindrome of down+cerebral palsy. That would mean 6k DPS. A sword autoattack chain (which is the most dmging part of the set, if you discount flanking strike, as most do) takes 2.4 secs to complete, and is nowhere near doing around 14.4K total dmg on a regular basis. So, in light of this very magical evidence, i use paralize sigil + air.
It’s better on average I’m sure. I just don’t like rando. I’ve gone long stents without it procing and of course those are the ones that stand out in my mind. I also like to just know exactly what it’s going to take to kill someone with say 10% health instead of knowing on average what it will take.
The main thing that screws Mesmers vs C&D spamming thieves is the dodge roll clone. Even if you go to dodge C&D they will hit your clone. To deal with this you got to manage your F1-4 and try to use them every time they try to C&D. Also, don’t use clones outside of a burst combo.
Especially vs P/D you can’t leave phantasms up they just get free stealth. Try to just ranged auto attack them until they come in for a C&D then dodge + one of the shatters at the same time. F1 whenever possible they will get hit by both your clone and you and hopefully loose 6 init. prioritize F1, F2, F4, F3 in that order . F3 will not cause them to lose any init, it will just stop them so use that last, then repeat with whatever is up. If you are sword, you can also just swap to BF when they come in for a C&D. Just do it early because C&D hits from farther than you would think due to latency and BF has a tiny wind up time to invulnerably. This isn’t ideal because you are locked out of range for 10 seconds and you don’t want to be melee since you won’t know when to time dodges of C&D.
Hopefully you have a GS or focus to knock them out of refuge and you should have a decent shot. If I know there is a pesky troll thief and I see him coming, I’ll actually quickly just turn off the dodge clone trait because it makes them 10x easier.
My Mesmer just got full exotics and stating doing real WvW right as this patch hit so I have no before patch knowledge of what the zerker did. It does seem to do very good damage. If it did 3x the damage it’s doing now it would be ridiculous. I’ve seen it take 1/3 or more of a GC Thief’s life in one whirl, did it really used to 1 shot people or close to it?
I did S/D – D/D for a while but switched to S/D – D/P purely because if you run into a D/P 1v1 you will loose if you don’t have access to non C&D stealth. Assuming you both blow all your utilities and avoid each other’s C&D the D/P will win due to self access to stealth in the end since bursty thief vs bursty thief is all about the stealth dance.
Distortion blocks all damage with the exception of previously applied status effects ( conditions) and the agony hits from jade maw, which I haven’t managed to block yet. If you ate the full channel of damage with distortion actually running, you encountered a very strange bug.
Ok cool thanks. More likely user error and it was down or something and I thought it was up.
What about necro wells? I know they can go through some other immunity effects like Ice Block. Maybe a ground based condition that’s already active when you hit it counts as a previously applied effect?
Does distortion block subsequent channeled attacks if you hit it after the channel begins? Last night I ate a full Ranger longbow channel after hitting distortion as I saw the first arrows coming but it seemed to do nothing.
If that’s how it suppose to work it’s strange since Mirror will reflect partial channels. Maybe I was just seeing things because it would make distortion much less powerful…
Would be great to get fixed. 3 ^ 2 ^ 1 in that order of priority. #3 makes the skill unreliable. The only workaround is to be right on top of them when it’s used which sort of removes half the utility from the skill.
I do para/force. I’m not a fan of randomness and also recently decided I didn’t like stacking either, I’m just too lazy and want to be at full power when I first step out to WvW. Also for places like the JP where you can’t pre-stack.
I guess the question for impact is does Daze = Stun? Still, force gives you 5% at all times so I like that. Basically half stack of bloodlust at all times with no effort.
The thieves who doesnt think so, blame it on lack of skill for all who cant cope with thieves, which is, it seems the majority of the playerbase, which leads me to conclude the essence of the discussion is indeed, if you dont roll a thief, you need to L2P…basically
The reason it’s a L2P issue is new players in both WvW and sPvP hotjoin get rickrolled by GC thieves left and right. They come here to vent with suggestions like “dots shouldn’t allow stelath” and “Damage should break stealth”. Things that show a complete lack of understanding of this game’s stealth mechanics.
In all honestly, if you don’t at least try every class in sPvP or level it to 40 in PvE or so for more gated learning of the profession (so you can read every utility and trait and fully understand them) you are nerfing yourself in any form of PvP in this game. Most people who have thieves and play them regularly also play other professions. This game is very alt friendly (at least until every ascended item is out). The reason players who have 80 Thieves don’t have trouble beating thieves is because they know the mechanics. It’s the same with every other prof it’s just that the Thief is the most different (resource based instead of CD, stealth and steal) relative to other profs and very noob vs noob friendly. It’s not until higher skill levels that the Thief is more balanced.
Just because you are fighting scrubs that can’t tell whether someone or something has a weapon equipped doesn’t mean the rest of us are, and it also doesn’t mean that the rest of us aren’t having issues with our core mechanic being bugged. Just because you say you are fine.
Could you please clarify what evidence you have that I’m fighting scrubs ?
I believe the Mesmer core mechanic to be shatters…….could you please clarify how this bug effects this ?
I would suspect from the lack of attention that both of your threads are getting from the Mesmer community that most Mesmers, not just myself are managing fine with this bug……perhaps your struggle is a learn to play issue and you are trying to blame on a bug due to the fact you find this fact hard to believe ?
It’s not game breaking or anything, just annoying. I have two friends gearing out mesmers to have exactly the same char model, armor and weapons as mine for max confusion, this is a hit to that idea.
Mesmers have work around. Food that clears con 100% on 15sec reflect heal. Generosity on GS and newly buffed x/Torch traited for CD reduction and con removal. Together with just… being a Mesmer… I hardly notice conditions.
The problem are in cooldowns. I can reapply conditions between the 16 second (Guardian), and the long 30 second cooldowns. I can apply a lot of Bleeds, Burning, and Poison between those cooldowns. Not to mention the other conditions. The Theif is the only class that doesn’t suffer from the 66% reuse on skills from Chill that the other classes do. That’s why I try to have as close to a permanent uptime on Chill that I can on any of my classes, and the primary reason I dominate Elementalists.
Not sure what class you are playing? Guard? The good Ele’s I’ve fought all have like 80% condition duration reduction anyway so none of that stuff matters :P I think Engies can pull off 80%+ as well.
Sure chill CD reduction doesn’t hurt a thief but same goes for a root on an Ele. It never sticks (it’s suppose to be their big counter). Just part of profession dynamics imo.
Don’t root the Elementalist, you Cripple, and Chill them. And there seems to be a hard cap to how far you can reduce the duration on conditions, because I don’t see them fall off as fast as you’re suggesting. My Guardian is a Meditation build designed around removing Conditions, and even I still see conditions a lot more than you’re saying.
See my sig for the classes I play.
Maybe they aren’t popular in your matchup. Anyone can get 65% reduction using food (40%) and Melandru runes (25%) then Eles can spec Geomancer’s Freedom which is another 33% reduction on Cripple, Chill and Root. They literally just run right through those conditions.
I’ll run some tests, but I’m pretty sure there is a hard cap to condition reduction.
But can we drop the nonsense. Your Elementalists are no better than mine, and mine are no better than yours. Everyone practically uses the same builds listed on the forums nowadays.
I guess it can just be one or two players that makes it noticeable. One engie and a couple ele in particular I can think of. All had -40% con duration food going but I know for sure nothing would stick to them for even a second. So that’s my anecdotal.. let me know the results of your test, I can’t find any info anywhere about a cap.
Mesmers have work around. Food that clears con 100% on 15sec reflect heal. Generosity on GS and newly buffed x/Torch traited for CD reduction and con removal. Together with just… being a Mesmer… I hardly notice conditions.
The problem are in cooldowns. I can reapply conditions between the 16 second (Guardian), and the long 30 second cooldowns. I can apply a lot of Bleeds, Burning, and Poison between those cooldowns. Not to mention the other conditions. The Theif is the only class that doesn’t suffer from the 66% reuse on skills from Chill that the other classes do. That’s why I try to have as close to a permanent uptime on Chill that I can on any of my classes, and the primary reason I dominate Elementalists.
Not sure what class you are playing? Guard? The good Ele’s I’ve fought all have like 80% condition duration reduction anyway so none of that stuff matters :P I think Engies can pull off 80%+ as well.
Sure chill CD reduction doesn’t hurt a thief but same goes for a root on an Ele. It never sticks (it’s suppose to be their big counter). Just part of profession dynamics imo.
Don’t root the Elementalist, you Cripple, and Chill them. And there seems to be a hard cap to how far you can reduce the duration on conditions, because I don’t see them fall off as fast as you’re suggesting. My Guardian is a Meditation build designed around removing Conditions, and even I still see conditions a lot more than you’re saying.
See my sig for the classes I play.
Maybe they aren’t popular in your matchup. Anyone can get 65% reduction using food (40%) and Melandru runes (25%) then Eles can spec Geomancer’s Freedom which is another 33% reduction on Cripple, Chill and Root. They literally just run right through those conditions.
The thing about thief con removal trait is it’s still based on hitting someone. Hide in shadows doesn’t really matter because it already removes most stuff. So blinding powder and refuge are the only con removals on demand without hitting someone. Refuge opens you up to a counter (luck based on dodge timing) so you are looking at blinding powder (which many don’t take) as the only sure thing along with Hide in Shadows.
People who block/immune/dodge C&D also stop the thief from blinding/healing/con-remove. It’s a huge part of fighting one. I love running into a trolly thief in the open field. Wait for them to use their heal then I mass invis everyone after second and you have trolly thief just either standing there or a refuge pops I get to try to punt him from. Then they eat a nice little burst combo and it’s time to either be bad and die or shadow-step and try to run away.
Basically the entire shadow arts line is only super erserm if people allow you melee them or fight near mobs.
Don’t forget combo fields that give stealth.
Oh yea d/p. I just go stand near those. Get hit by a Heartseeker at full health and revel them. Teleport near it to really surprise them.
Mesmers have work around. Food that clears con 100% on 15sec reflect heal. Generosity on GS and newly buffed x/Torch traited for CD reduction and con removal. Together with just… being a Mesmer… I hardly notice conditions.
The problem are in cooldowns. I can reapply conditions between the 16 second (Guardian), and the long 30 second cooldowns. I can apply a lot of Bleeds, Burning, and Poison between those cooldowns. Not to mention the other conditions. The Theif is the only class that doesn’t suffer from the 66% reuse on skills from Chill that the other classes do. That’s why I try to have as close to a permanent uptime on Chill that I can on any of my classes, and the primary reason I dominate Elementalists.
Not sure what class you are playing? Guard? The good Ele’s I’ve fought all have like 80% condition duration reduction anyway so none of that stuff matters :P I think Engies can pull off 80%+ as well.
Sure chill CD reduction doesn’t hurt a thief but same goes for a root on an Ele. It never sticks (it’s suppose to be their big counter). Just part of profession dynamics imo.
The thing about thief con removal trait is it’s still based on hitting someone. Hide in shadows doesn’t really matter because it already removes most stuff. So blinding powder and refuge are the only con removals on demand without hitting someone. Refuge opens you up to a counter (luck based on dodge timing) so you are looking at blinding powder (which many don’t take) as the only sure thing along with Hide in Shadows.
People who block/immune/dodge C&D also stop the thief from blinding/healing/con-remove. It’s a huge part of fighting one. I love running into a trolly thief in the open field. Wait for them to use their heal then I mass invis everyone after second and you have trolly thief just either standing there or a refuge pops I get to try to punt him from. Then they eat a nice little burst combo and it’s time to either be bad and die or shadow-step and try to run away.
Basically the entire shadow arts line is only super erserm if people allow you melee them or fight near mobs.
