I’m guessing the OP isn’t missing out on stealing feathers and gunk and instead wants some of the trait benefits from mug. There are plenty of options here such as
- miss out on the feathers and gunk
- don’t trait for mug
- trait for something safe like hidden thief or sleight of hand
- use a ranged weapon set that can move you back to range (so anything but pistol/pistol)
- use stealing as a gap closer to do more melee
If the stealing traits don’t suit your play style then don’t use them. Or change your play style. Don’t change the game when it isn’t broken.
Any time that you’re wanting to see the skill animations of an enemy you don’t want to have a big pet backside blocking the view. There’s no point having a big pet if your groups always tell you to stow it.
Use skills to avoid damage in dungeons. Use gear for damage. You don’t need to turn into a glass cannon but there’s certainly a line of thought that a ranger should really contribute to a group and not just hide 1200m away from anything dangerous in tough armor.
I’m not very expert at this fight but I see the use of walls/cavities etc as an exploit. Doing the fight as the designers intended seems too hard for PUGs, although maybe if they had to learn they would learn. The proper way seems to involve both NPCs, since one has the bubble and the other does some healing. However the aoe damage on them from the Colossus is so large that a group needs to really hammer out the healing with water fields, finishers, and so on. One knockback from the Colossus can wipe you out and this really favors stability classes. Getting behind the Colossus to avoid his aoe attacks seems obvious but he spins around so much that this is still dangerous. Groups that can manage defiant stacks will do a lot better than those can’t.
Dungeon – Solo/group? Temporary/permanent? Probably group temporary and lets hope it is good.
Merchandising opportunities – Buy more skins, buy the book.
PvP Arenas – Promising, lets see what can be done.
Skill balancing – Now that might be good. It’ll keep people on their toes for a while.
Asura would use robotic suits instead of prosthetics.
Remember that enemies are obstacles and can block your path even on evades.
The Order of Whispers will probably use the most unlikely possible method of passing messages, such as attaching coded messages to migrating dolphins. It will probably also be highly unreliable and impractical for doing anything else.
It’s actually quite a good place to do dailies with gathering, krytan events/killer, an easy jumping puzzle, kill variety, underwater enemies. Some of the camps can be cleared solo to get a group event done. A guild probably wouldn’t need many people to clear the camps and get the queen up.
“Also, I find it very weird that Logan does not trust the Lionguard.”
Logan is Captain of the Seraph and he certainly mistrusts the other factions in Divinity’s Reach (as seen in the human personal storylines). He can probably find plenty of reasons not to entirely trust the Lionguard and Ebon Vanguard too.
They should just remove rebreathers. They serve no purpose. They have no cosmetic value. They provide no customization. They are just extra gear to barter for and then stick a rune into. If you try to do anything interesting with your armor runes you need to copy it on your rebreather(s) as the mask runes are not used.
Whatever rebreathers were meant to provide they are not providing it. If they are kept in the game they should have meaningful cosmetics, no stats, and perhaps have a utility slot for unique underwater effects. The mask should provide the stats and rune as it does on land.
Whatever you say about these effigies they are part of a game update that is meant to be fun. They are clearly not intended to be challenging or intellectually stimulating. They add to the story but you don’t need many to get a feel for the story. I personally cannot see the fun in lighting 50 of these things and that is a bigger problem than how or when players do it.
I’ve done very little WvW but it seems to me than running through a zerg with a greatsword is a much better option than using the dancing sword. That animation needs fixing. So many people hate it and hopefully the other people will stop confusing “I’ve learnt how to reduce the awfulness of these animations” with “the sword is a skilful weapon”.
There seems to be a major world event related to each dragon at the moment: Shatterer, claw of Jormag, Tequatl the Sunless, Megadestroyer in the volcano, and presumably the great jungle wurm in Caledon Forest. This would suggest that the avatars of blight are agents of the jungle dragon.
These husk things seem to be used by the nightmare court and the jungle dragon. They look like big plant like equivalents of elementals/golems/zombies. Brute force with no brains. Are there any clues how husks come into existence? Does anyone know if husks have any affinity to any master, rather than just serving anyone who can create them?
A few days ago I was reviving a necromancer and healing him for 9 each tick in downed state, in combat.
They go invulnerable sometimes even if you’ve never attacked them from exploit positions. It really is a case of the mobs exploiting the players and yes it should be fixed instead of putting yet more dredge into the dredge fractal!
Do the story dungeons as they become available. They’re not easy or fast for new players but they are all achievable on level. You might as well leave the explorable dungeons for level 80 as they are harder. Since some people run the explorable dungeons repeatedly they want fast runs with everyone else at level 80, knowing the tactics, with good gear. You’ll get a better dungeon experience if you can go into the dungeons with friends/guild who can take time to explain stuff.
Leeching venoms only happens once per strike, so if your strike hits multiple targets you use multiple applications of venom and get healed once.
If we look at the AC revamp we saw
- NPCs being made more useful
- Reduced the health of big mobs
- Added group tactics to boss fights
Those were all in fact double edged improvements. It was good that the NPCs were useful but bad that they were necessary and died too easy. It was good that boss mobs died faster once a fight was under control and bad that you could kill mobs like breeders without needing to control them. Tactics were added to boss fights but they were buggy and pick-up groups don’t want to learn tactics so they exploit bugs instead.
For changes to dungeons I’d like to see less red circles, NPCs being useful and with reasonable survivability, better use of audio/vocals and less text, good use of cut scenes, no combat messages in chat window (as with Canach), far fewer bugs, bosses that are not exploitable through positioning.
Players need to set their own goals in this game but the game should provide some goals that are achievable. The random drop system doesn’t provide achievable goals. Players should be able to exchange any fractal skin with 25 pristine relics for a skin of their choice, and that could be done through crafting, barter, whatever.
I’m not desperate for skins and I’ve only got two of them. It annoys me greatly that they are both shields. The RNG system fails me as a semi-regular fractal visitor just as much as it annoys the grinders who want their specific skin.
Trahearne and the Pact are unlikely to be in the living story since this will reveal the personal story to players who have not yet done it. The individual orders and their main characters will be in the living story since it doesn’t reveal any personal story and these people are permanently visible in the open world already.
There are some uses for the traps in PvE where can see your enemies, know their moves, and know when you need the ambush or tripwire. Otherwise caltrops just seems much more useful to control enemies. There isn’t a trap build or any use for trap traits.
I’d be really happy to see this, not least because you probably won’t turn towards the loot to pick it up as you do now. That’s really annoying when you’re wanting to pick up on the run.
That probably isn’t as bad the spurious repeat of shortbow 3 that still isn’t fixed and probably won’t fixed any time soon.
Ok thanks for the replies. If nobody has a better suggestion it does seem like we are royally useless in this fight now. Sure we can stand behind a guardian, a ranger pet, or an engineer’s turret but that undoubtedly means were are worse here compared to a ranger, guardian, engineer, etc. I wonder how the developers think a team of five thieves would do this?
I managed to heal myself through a 20+ fractal the other day with healing venoms, unloads through the shadow refuge, etc, but I doubt that’ll be enough past 30.
I’m rather late onto this as I haven’t come across this fractal much recently. However are thieves just an absolute waste of space at Old Tom now, entirely dependent upon other group members to keep them alive?
Any advice appreciated.
I think first of all we should remember that this is a combat driven game. We’re not in the business of stealing anything from Zaitan or even stealing anything in the fractals. We’re in the business of killing boss mobs. The game concept pushes us away from the thief ideal before we’ve done anything, unless you’re a thief in the style of Conan the Barbarian. In terms of skills we’re not particularly close to an assassin but probably closer to an elusive ninja with our use of blinding, smoke, and shadowsteps.
I think a number of the best thief utilities are fine even if they do not initially seem as good as other classes. Traps and venoms certainly need an improvement. Another thief problem is that we provide support with conditions rather than boons and conditions work poorly against champions and large numbers of enemies (fractal armies).
There were some comments on threads that praised the new AC. When more people replied with something other than praise the threads disappeared somehow.
It does make sense for the devs to avoid arguments on the forums. Perhaps they feel that if they give opinions on dungeons they might only get arguments in return.
A lot of the pluses of instanced raiding had a big minus along side. So it was great to have two to four groups of people working together and awful when you had the wrong number of people or people wanted to leave. It was great that the epic dungeons gave you hours of play but awful that the raid schedule destroyed everyone’s real life. It was great that people could come together in guilds to tackle the raids and awful that people were forced to join raiding guilds to complete raids.
In the end, the bad things outweighed the good things.
I think that when it activates it immobilizes all enemies standing on the trap at that moment. However you’ve always got to expect the trap to hit one target only since even predictable PvE enemies move slightly apart.
" Also, until they provide viable ways to make money in the game vs. time input that doesn’t involve playing the trading post, I say, why get angry about it?"
That’s a very strange argument. Almost everything you do in game makes money for the time spent. Your concept of viability is only in comparison to other things that can be done in game.
The new AC is fine as the third or fourth hardest dungeon but it shouldn’t be the first dungeon. It is unforgiving and makes it hard to revive anyone who is downed (wide poison fields, Kohler’s spin, graveling knockdown, etc). New players don’t get a chance to learn the fights because every mistake cuts off their learning experience immediately. It might be easy for experienced players but isn’t everything easy for experienced players when they know the tactics?
I suspect that a lot of PUG groups use dubious positioning for the path 1 and 3 boss fights and would give up without those. The path 2 boss fight is clever the first time but seems less so with each later visit. It would be ok if it wasn’t so buggy as well. Kohler is still usually skipped. The new troll is ok in explore however he’s also in story mode where he’s completely unsuitable. Put it all together and AC hasn’t got a clean bill of health yet.
The thief is a very mobile class and static traps fit badly. Caltrops are usually better. Smoke is far better tool for a static thief and traps do practically nothing to protect against mobs that are unaffected by smoke.
Rangers on the other hand can fight very well when enemies are coming towards them and the traps work. However the traps offer very little when a ranger moves forward into enemies and this is when the other ranger utilities also fail.
Various suggestions have been made for converting a fractal skin + pristine relics into a chosen fractal skin. That seems a better solution than just buying skins for barter currency since it keeps the value of item drops.
“Rangers are flexible and durable—proficient with the bow, yet surgical with the sword.”
If surgeons wield scalpels the way that rangers wield swords ….
Destiny’s Edge and the Pact will probably resurface in the next full expansion with the next Elder Dragon. The living story characters and the orders will stay in the living story. This will allow the two story arcs to be run in any sequence by the players.
“Simply put, DS is good but useless on Thief. We are Thiefs and NOT a Warrior. In what logic do they think we can survive 8sec getting stabbed by everyone?”
I suspect you are saying that it is useless on a PvP thief. It’s fine for PvE as a short distanced ranged attack with missile reflection. Missile reflection is a top utility even on an elite skill.
She does have an event where she fights the risen until you can tire her out.
I think there are too many exploits, like more than none, but there are some reasons for them
- Major boss mobs should be designed with attacks and movement that prevent exploits. This is nothing new in MMO design and is part of the requirements for a well designed enemy.
- Mobs glitch a lot. Players feel that if they frequently lose out from the glitches they should sometimes win from glitches too. That’s human nature.
- Some fights are designed to be so tedious that players regularly find new ways to exploit it. Anyone seeing the exploit will use it rather than suffer the tedium of the regular fight again and again. The general in the dredge fractal is probably the prime example of this. Having said that, players also exploit easy bosses and that really is just their laziness.
- Players who object to exploits can find themselves kicked out of a group easily so many players don’t risk that. The people who exploit are generally not the players who patiently discuss alternative strategies.
All those points are design issues. The software could have less glitches, more enjoyable fights, better group tools, and so on.
I half agree with the original poster. There is poor use of audio clues on many bosses. I noticed this the most for Simin on path4 of Arah who has different healing/timing during her fight but she always uses the same animations. She should speak and give audio clues towards her abilities. Lupicus should give an audio indication for stage changes too. In fact more bosses should have multiple stages and if/when they do they should have good audio clues.
On the other hand, there often doesn’t need to be a big audio clue for attacks since players can already deal with the current animations. I would prefer a fix to the graphical effects (burning) that can entirely obscure a boss, their animations, and even their facing.
Rangers have a number of problems in dungeons that good rangers can overcome but poor rangers do not know exist.
(1) At long range the ranger is out of the melee group and not sharing boons/combos with the melee group. All the ranger utilities do not affect the melee group when the ranger is at longbow range.
(2) Traps and spirits might help a defend against enemies moving towards a ranger but they do not help a ranger move forwards. Rangers have no skills for moving forward to assault a group of enemies.
(3) Ranged defense is the best utility and rangers have the wrong sort of missile defense (offhand melee skill with short duration and long cooldown).
(4) Pets either die too often or are not contributing dps/utility, leaving the ranger underpowered. It’s hard to position and move pets with just two commands.
Instances closing when the leader leaves? It’s wrong and indefensible. We know that, they know that, everyone knows that. It’s only a matter of time until it is fixed. It’s rubbish until it is fixed.
“I was just saying HM for dungeons, it wouldn’t really be difficult to adjust the stats of
mobs within, or even add a new hard mode path to each of the 8 dungeons.”
You will hit the GW2 design square on here. In GW2 you can avoid damage by skillful play and this is different from other MMOs where you tend to soak the damage with a tank character and heal up. The difficulty could be changed easily by changing the numbers in the equations for damage, heals, etc from monsters and equipment. In GW2 once a player can dodge then they can dodge and boosting monster stats creates boring high health pool bosses, one shot deaths, ridiculous numbers of enemies, and other generally unpopular designs.
“People used to actually skip EVERYTHING in dungeons, until Anet riddled them with invisible walls and sequence fixed most of them. At least we’re still killing the necessary stuff…”
No that’s historically wrong. PUGs skip more than they ever did before. There may be less exploits now but that’s good surely?
“Some people will always kill the least amount of foes needed to complete a task, especially if the foes in question don’t drop anything worthwhile.”
I think there is a problem here. Groups try to skip everything when in fact killing a few easy mobs can make skipping later mobs much easier. The average time spent in the dungeon decreases if you reduce the risk of the repeated bad skip. Killing the least amount of foes is not actually good time management. People think they are clever and skilful when they skip the maximum number of mobs but they’re actually not being very wise.
I think the original poster’s argument could be improved with the following thought. In GW2 players reach the top level of equipment quite easily and then need to set their own PvE goals within the endgame. Unfortunately there seems to be a big gap in effort between the basic goals, such as achievements or stat gear, and the acquisition of rare cosmetics, minis, etc. This generally leaves players unsatisfied with the time and money spent achieving their goals in game, whatever those goals may be.
You sound really entitled to have a legendary weapon. All those hours. Very, very, entitled to a legendary weapon.
If you’re saying that PUG players are making bad skips that have too much risk of losing lots of time then I agree. You can tell them that they’re making bad skips and they don’t listen or might even boot you. In game as in real life, you can’t fix stupid. A group of stupid together often think stupid is cool.
If you want to avoid the ‘fake elitists’ then this tool is now giving you a good way to do that. You can exclude them as much as they might exclude you. If the game gets a ‘throw everyone together’ lfg tool then you’ll get lots of groups of unhappy people.
I can’t spot his animations at all. Guardian fire really is an eyesore that obscures everything. I just put down smokescreens as a thief and then watch the group kite him out of 900m range. Doh.