On the thief forums there are plenty of players asking for stealth to interrupt a chain attack, since it currently does not. Play a thief for a while and you will find stealth does not make you in any way invulnerable in PvE or PvP.
If you think back to the Karka storylines, players were initially complaining about poor loot. Then there was big final event day with excellent rewards in the final chest. It was such a good reward that anyone who didn’t get it complained. Although the moral could be that players always complain about loot, I think it could also be a case of ‘wait and see’. The good rewards will come at the end not in the middle.
I think the delay in blinding foes is quite important. A cloak and dagger thief not also has blind on stealth delayed but will presumably not use blinding powder when revealed either. The difference between applying blind after 3 seconds and after 4 seconds is very important as the first two seconds are usually safe, the third is risky, and the fourth is dangerous.
The table is very nice but isn’t there a bigger problem that the boon durations just do not add up properly as soon as you start using them?
“The concept “it’s Dungeon armor” is an old concept in my opinion. If I like something I should be able to obtain it, without doing a thing I do not like to do. This is one of the basic concepts of GW2.”
If you want exotic armor you can get it in a variety of ways doing the things you want to do. You can get armor with a variety of stats. This allows players to be competitive in any aspect of the game and nobody is excluded.
If you want a specific rare cosmetic then there is typically one way to get that cosmetic look. Many players like this because their own cosmetics signify achievements within the game. Nobody is excluded from any game activity by their cosmetics.
Lupicus has different rules to pick different targets. He’s got a tunneling (melee) target in phase 2, some phase 2 ranged targets, a phase 3 chase (melee) target, a phase 3 ranged drain target, and probably some others as well. If someone is killed and revived they tend to still be the target for the same attack. Getting out of combat by standing far enough across the arena can change some of the aggro. Lupicus hasn’t tunneled towards my thief very often but when he did I had been the instance opener. Maybe that has something to do with it.
Thieves are not simple at low levels. Ranged mobs will always give you trouble if they put you in a crossfire so avoid those situations until you learn the class. However there are some tools in the weapon sets to help you get started.
As well as dodges you have evades on your weapons. You can also blind opponents in smoke. You can also stun opponents. You can cripple opponents so they walk too slowly to reach you. Shadowsteps let you instantly close up on a ranged opponent. The difficult part is that you have to time your actions and not use up all your endurance and initiative at the wrong times. Auto-attacks will help you out. Pistol/dagger is a nice weapon pairing for early ranged combat and sword/pistol is a nice weapon pairing for early melee combat.
Some people get builds from websites and don’t understand how to use them or when to change traits. They are sub-optimal. Some people work out their own builds and get plenty of fun doing so. They might stick with a build they enjoy, like I have, rather than get continually try new trait lines and armor sets to find out which is best. These people are also sub-optimal. You might not like other people failing to min/max but other players might like you min/maxing either. The game is there to be experienced rather than walked through!
It’s really poor design to give players one single tab for activate/talk/revive covering everything that you can do nearby. There should be options on screen for doing more than one thing if different activities are possible. You often don’t even get that one tab and have to move around or click around to get it. This is a core piece of the UI that is frankly just rubbish and is exactly the sort big thing that does matter.
Most mobs will succumb to gap closer, 100 blades, auto-attacks. I’ve only had my warrior at 80 for a few days and most the cursed shore has been done that way.
I’ve received a number of mail messages from the forum moderator, probably automated messages, to tell me that a thread has been removed/deleted and put into the trashcan. Unfortunately I’m not given the name of the thread and the link to the trashcan does nothing. This means the message actually says “We’ve deleted a thread you participated in but we’re not going to tell you which thread it was.”. It’s all rather pointless.
It is probably the COF1 farmers who drive the price of legendaries so high, out of the price range of players who don’t farm COF1 with speed runs.
I think the original poster is right. I’m not sure there’s an easy change to the culture though. It’s prevalent across the internet and I often read worse things in response to a basic women’s sport report than I do GW2. Any offenders will have no respect for anyone who tells them their behavior is wrong.
“Roll for initiative should be able to dodge in any direction. "
I’d just be happy if it didn’t randomly throw you into the worst place possible when you’re using it after a knockdown. If you’ve got the skill slotted and are using it in the right situation then it should work well.
Nobody becomes an adventurer to kill moles.
The shadow step portion of steal is actually glitchy and will sometimes not move you at all if there ground rises slightly. You can also steal complete rubbish, such as a stone from an earth elemental. Use that and it’ll get thrown and reflected back onto you and knock you down.
Part of the slow F2 activation is when the pet moves within range of the target and then does the skill. This makes sense for an attack but is silly for an F2 buff. The pet can also sometimes want to finish its own attack skill even if it again means chasing a target.
Would it be possible for the jungle dragon to still be asleep, and only providing a malign influence through nightmare for the time being?
I agree with the original poster. Dailies are treadmill content. They break all the lore and storyline found within the game world. Players do not complete them by doing activities they do in regular play. They are chores. They prevent players logging on and playing the way they want to play. For many players the dailies do not offer alternative advancement since the alternatives are not accessible, such as guild mission rewards for people who aren’t in large guilds.
I think thieves are hard in the early levels. You can’t do the clever thieving until you have some more traits and skills. Find a few simple things that work (blind, cripple) and then experiment more once you get some traits.
I’m guessing that the big underwater monsters for group events are going to be extremely dull (spear 5) or near impossible.
There’s more options in that build for you and you can switch the shadow arts I-VI traits around as needed. You might even want to try out pistol/dagger for kiting as well.
One difference with the dailies is that if you decide in the future to use some laurels, you can’t get them immediately. If you want an option to spend laurels in the future you need to do dailies now. Thus the daily grind begins.
It’s exciting adventure to travel the1st time, the 2nd time, and so on. It’s a reason to quit the game entirely by the 30th time, 31st time, and so on. Seriously!
“Still, if i wanna play both fractals lvl 40+ and WvW, why do i have to overwrite (AkA waste my laurels) those infusions to get the agony res one for just 75 relics which takes 1h to get (and not 5 days)? "
Swap rings. Don’t use the same one for both.
There are also the traits shadow’s embrace and fleet of foot. If you planning to enter and exit stealth frequently then shadow’s embrace becomes quite useful.
For dungeons, you are offering very little utility to the group. This might not be a problem if you swap your utility skills frequently and make good use of shadow refuge, smoke screen, caltrops, venoms, whatever. This would mean that some of your signets get sacrificed and there’s certainly enough damage in your build that you don’t need to rely on signets.
There was another MMO where thieves could pickpocket money from mobs. Nobody took a thief in their group because players thought it was coming out of shared loot. Iit didn’t actually matter whether the rumor was true or not. All your suggestions there will hit the same problems. Players will resent thieves for doing something other classes can’t do, taking something that might not be theirs, or getting more for the same work. It’s all the reasons why thieves aren’t liked in the real world really and it’s an easy design decision to edit these features out of the game.
I ran my brand new engineer out of the black citadel and I saw a periscope and thought I’d have some fun trying it at level 2. I was definitely under level since it was in a level 3 area. It was shooting me 164, over half my health. I could evade a few times until it went into a recharge position, and shoot it a few times for 6 damage before it started up again, then I had evade back out of range. Rather than spend the next half hour there I decided to something (anything) else.
(There might have been some more fun there if I’d actually opened up some more weapon skills since the number 4 skill was ranged attack reflection. Shame I didn’t know that at the time).
Stealth offers a thief exactly the same protection to a channeled attack as to an instant attack. Don’t be the target when it activates. Remember that a channeled skill is static for a long period of time, it offers no defense, needs the right facing, and it can be interrupted. This already makes them frequently weaker than most instant attacks.
Stealth is not a soft interrupt to a channeled skill. Neither is blind, aegis, or a single dodge and they don’t need fixing either. Use an hard interrupt to counter a channeled skill.
CoE isn’t a bad dungeon and has plenty of good/fun features but it isn’t run that often. It looks great. Ignore the typical forum chatter saying that everything is easy and anyone who doesn’t find everything easy should learn to play. CoE is one of the dungeons that will eat you and spit you out if you don’t know the tactics. Plenty of groups go into CoE with partial knowledge of tactics and still find it pretty hard. Specific reasons why people don’t go into CoE might be:
- the gate can be contested and you can lose 15-30 minutes opening it
- there’s a jumping puzzle and that’s trivial for some and impossible for others
- Subject Alpha – repeated boss who is different on each path – a tough boss
- plenty of champions who are not difficult but have way too much health
- puzzle/tactic bosses that can take a long time to get right
- runs take longer than the fastest paths elsewhere
- experienced players can’t keep new players alive
Three types of interactions seem to be available in the game with nearby objects – greet/talk, revive/stomp, and use/repair/activate. When more than one of these options are available then each type of option should be present on separate tabs so that a player can choose which they want to do. At the moment only one tab is shown no matter how many actions are available, irrespective of their types.
As soon as you think about the interface for these actions it immediately seems badly designed. You should immediately be able to use a nearby item even if there is a person to talk to nearby. You should immediately be able to revive a nearby character even if there is an item to loot nearby. Players should not have to move around within the vicinity or target a click on a specific item amongst many, just to perform basic game functions. The current user interface is failing.
A further suggestion would be to have the target of the interaction listed on the interaction tab. It would be useful to know which player you are reviving or which object you are picking up. I’m willing to accept one improvement at a time however.
Realistically, the fractals have to end somewhere. Anybody who has reached level 50 in fractals has already spent an incredibly massive number of game hours in that dungeon. There is no argument to say that fractals haven’t provided those players with enough challenge, entertainment, or anything else. Whilst the most dedicated players may feel let down, players who consume game content at a fast rate always exhaust all the content available in MMOs. Designers cannot fully cater for those players even if they wanted to.
This argument about fractals reminds me a bit about the world record for playing Donkey Kong. The player had to complete the levels of Donkey Kong and then since the game continued back at level 1 the player had to do all the levels again, and again, until the record for the longest Donkey Kong game was broken. Perhaps fractals at level 50 should just keep going and never return to the jade maw or the gateway so that players can challenge themselves with fractals for as long as they want to, setting records of stupidity as they go. It makes as much sense as increasing the fractal limit.
Saving and restoring trait settings would be really useful. Including side skills and heal skill would be even better. I’m happy to change my own weapons and other equipment.
http://www.simpsoncrazy.com/lists/blackboard
The previous link got kittened for openings . html.
A support thief will typically inflict conditions rather than share boons. There are a variety of ways to get cripple, blind, poison, weakness and they’re not restricted to one build. Support skills such as caltrops, shadow refuge, and smokescreen don’t really need special traits either. Venoms are quite weak without help from traits such as venemous aura. Traps aren’t used often enough to need specific traits.
If you want a suggestion then try running with 30 points in shadow arts to give yourself options on stealth, venoms, and deception skill cooldowns.
The Norn explorer Romke was attempting to circumnavigate the globe but was trapped in Orr when it rose from the depths. This is part of the personal story.
I suppose this raises a question though. Where do the Norn have a port?
I expect that it will be left in its own timeline, so that a new player can complete the personal story and living story in either order with no continuity errors. I think the living story specifically has new characters for this reason.
“I’m trying not to make this a whine thread, but I find that the mobs and bosses in many of the dungeons are just damage races. A lot of the bosses in fact aren’t overly dangerous but they just take 10 minutes of spamming your most damaging skills to kill them. "
The designers need to be careful that they don’t go the other way and leave mobs with too little health. A friend said to me the other day that nobody interrupts the breeders in AC any more and he’s probably right. The breeders die too fast to need an interrupt, meaning that their health was reduced too much in the revamp. When high dps can negate skills and support then the really game does become too damage focused.
In my opinion, thieves are a balanced dungeon class. Bad thieves can get themselves killed quickly and often however. New thieves are quite often poor since dungeons play completely differently to open world. This probably creates the bad reputation.
Common sense can spot an exploit quite easily and that’s the end of the matter. An account is not going to be banned for anything on the borderline and there really is very little on the borderline.
Venoms are ok when traited and poor when they’re not traited. This means that the base skills need improvements and new trait benefits to give different bonuses for using venoms. The big culprit here is venemous aura since designers have to balance a 1x venom with a 5x venom (or x10 with residual venom) and that is always going to be problematical.
A second problem with venoms is that they do not scale up when facing armies of opponents, such as dredge. Most boons will scale up and be effective against the whole army for their duration.
Venoms have problems but they’re certainly not worthless. Skale venom is the weakest since most venom using thieves can inflict weakness with poison. The traps seem too situational and I’d certainly get rid of shadow trap and turn that into a trait ability.
All the other skills and pretty handy and a thief wouldn’t really be a thief without them.
DC Heroes online had a summary for each instance so you could see the damage and healing for each character and the overall time taken. If the team was fast enough they could get a speed achievement. You could tell which dps characters were pulling their weight and who weren’t. It suited that game. I don’t think it would suit guild wars and the teamwork needed to tackle dungeons.
Thank you for those replies. They are helpful.
So the nightmare court appear to be rejecting their parental morality in favor of self determination. Their selfishness leaves them vulnerable to whatever fears are revealed to them through the Nightmare. Presumably they act based on their fears rather than their hopes and also expect others to do the same, leading to a society where the powerful seek to dominate through slavery and sadism.
“My experience is that Queen Spider causes more wipes than most of the end bosses. I admittedly can’t put my finger on what exactly it is.”
One of the problems is the persistent, high damage, extremely wide poison fields that the queen lays down. If player is downed in one of those fields then other players typically cannot go near enough to revive, making the encounter very punishing.
For the burrows room you have lots of little gravelings plus a few larger gravelings who leap and cause all the problems. The leaping ones don’t actually do much apart from leap so if you can neutralize that one attack, with blinds or interrupts, you’re just left with a much simpler problem of killing gravelings.
Yes the new AC is a much harder dungeon for new players than the first dungeon in most other MMOs. The good news is that player skill (experience) makes an incredible difference in character capability so as you get more experienced the dungeons will get easier and easier. If you can get past the spider queen without too much trouble then you’re already better than many pick up groups.
There seems to be two lines of argument here. Firstly, the living story has a lack of substantial content so far. Secondly, all the content is going to be wasted once the event is over. Perhaps those two thoughts are not unrelated. There may be repeatable content at the end of the living story that becomes permanent once all the scavenger hunts have been cleared away.
There’s a big learning curve going from open world thief to dungeon thief and I’m afraid you’re squishy until you’re near the top of the curve. Situationally, smoke screen becomes a top tier skill. Situationally, withdraw becomes an excellent heal. You’ve just got to test things out. There isn’t one solution to everything.
To get started, stick with the shortbow and then look for opportunities to ghost into the edges of melee when you feel safe and you can contribute. Try not to burn all your endurance on dodging when you’ve got evades/shadow steps available from skills. Look for opportunities to keep mobs under control with blind and cripple.
I think there is a problem with the reflection skills scaling upwards too strongly in more difficult content. If, for the sake of argument, the walls had a 10k limit they would still be a strong protection skill and a strong damage skill. If you gave the caster a chance to channel the skill for the duration to ensure it didn’t break (even over the 10k limit) then perhaps there is more decision making there too.