There are a lot of factors going on here but the fights in COF1 are generally quite easy and players don’t need to change many, skills, traits, or tactics for them. Straight dps can beat most enemies. Missed blocks and evades are not fatal, and even if they are there is usually an opportunity to get a downed player back up. Even if a couple of the players in the group have only solo PVE combat experience the rest of the group can carry them through.
Well I’m getting a little better at thief and I learned a couple uses for stealth using Cloak & Dagger, if I hit that I have just enough time to get behind them and do a backstab. Also it helps when I’m losing and want to run away.
Still, though, the thief feels weak to me in solo PvE. I die a lot, especially when I get adds. Also, in case I didn’t mention I’m new to this game, and this game feels more like a button masher than any other MMO I’ve played before.
BTW, I also started a guardian and while it may not kill things as fast, I’ve died only once in 8 levels. Do I just suck at playing a thief, or is this pretty much the way it’s supposed to be?
You need to be careful with the button mashing. Auto attacks are quite strong and you should try to kill with auto-attacks backed up by well timed use of initiative. Timing evades and stuns from the weapons will help and for that you need to know enemy attacks and animations. So yes the thief is quite difficult to play compared to other classes at low level. You certainly need to get out of any situation where you are in a crossfire.
Someone in Lion’s Arch tonight was shouting to find a buyer for his guild, asking for a moderately big sum of gold. This guild had enough assets for guild missions. Even if we assume this isn’t a scam, it still opens up a number of potential problems.
How bad are the problems that can be created by guild sales? Should there be any intervention by the designers to prevent it becoming more commonplace?
I’d go further and allow restoring of a full weapons set and trait combinations. Changing weapons and heal and skills and up to 7 traits before a boss fight, then changing them all back afterwards, is a dull administrative chore.
Thieves in guild wars are elusive rather than hidden. Short bursts of stealth and shadow step movement are enough to perplex enemies. It does all work when put together with helpful traits.
Aggro is dropped for all classes when you get out of an enemy’s engagement area. Stealth often gives a thief time to get out of that area.
If your group know why they’re stacking and what skills become stronger that way, then go for it. Stacking for no good reason will probably get you all killed.
A lot of guild wars is played with personal survival skills, probably you can’t rely on another player using a specific skill unless you talk to them or have seen them play before. Good groups will talk to each other and put together tactics where they maximize their skills and if that’s through stacking then that’s ok.
AC is now hard in that it is very unforgiving. If you don’t see a graveling about to spring so you get knocked over, you’ll probably find that you get knocked over again and again until you die. Kohler and the spider queen can deliver the same result in different ways. For beginners who are trying to learn the fights the unforgiving nature of the dungeon makes them never come back. Whatever the forum talk, people are just not enjoying AC in the same numbers that they used to do.
If you are looking for a design solution to your elitism attitude then you are probably looking at a fractal style design where the new players happily do their things in their group at their level, whilst the elites do their things in their group at their level. The CoF1 model where the new players and the elites mix, both wanting fast easy runs with high rewards, generates the negative attitudes.
Two elements of the GW2 design ethos are also coming together badly. (1) New players immediately have access to endgame content. (2) Skill is more important than equipment and itemization, leading to a big performance gap between high skilled and low skilled (or low experience) players. This means that new players can go into high end content with no itemization but also no skill and fail very badly, something that elites do not want to spend their online time dealing with.
Perhaps the problems here are the dailies. They are not thematic in any way. Although they promised to let you play in your own style and choose how to complete your daily, they actually do the complete opposite. They are sales executive’s addition to the game, not a fantasy designer’s addition to a game.
There’s some posts on the forum about AC being easy and whatever but if you’re going in for the first time at level 43, without knowing the traps, it will not be easy. The spider fight was always slightly testing for thieves since the repeated poisoning does hurt. I expect it will be worse for beginners after the revamp.With limited skills available you might need some support from the rest of your team. If a ranger lays down a healing spring then you can both stand there for cures and get heals from the combo field, but there are plenty of other ways to do things too.
If you want to see dungeons as you work up to 80 then you could stick to story modes. They’re not easy first time through but they are achievable. By the time you get to genuinely easy dungeons you’ll be most way to 80 anyway.
I’d say that the shortbow was pretty much fit for purpose. It only lacks range.
Key game content can also be designed that is bad for thieves. Anything more demanding than the fractal jellyfish could show thieves to be very weak underwater. In fact, underwater thieving is not where it should be.
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Going round every corner of the game and saying “this event has less loot than the best event, lets increase the loot here” is eventually self defeating. At the moment the chest loot from world events is too high for the effort and skill involved. It needs to be less than it is now, perhaps balanced so that fractals are just about worth the effort.
Even once you have a good pistol build you might find yourself doing more damage in melee with sword/pistol, so keep that in mind as you develop your play style.
I just did that CoF path 2 room with my thief this afternoon. I don’t often use caltrops with the signet of malice but it worked great there.
Rangers seem like they have great aoe but can fail badly in those mass melees with mobs on every side. The longbow is only good for the rain of arrows and needs to be swapped out immediately afterwards.
You’ve also got some combos there if you need them. The rangers could melee in their healing springs and the thief could drop bombs for area healing on top of them.
So because dagger/dagger has no interrupt, mechanics should be changed so that thieves can use stealth as a solution to everything? Just pick the right tools for the job.
Just cut the BS. There is a huge difference between continuing an attack and homing a channel for the entire duration of stealth. I don’t expect mobs/players to stop doing whatever they’re doing as soon as I stealth, but I do expect them to not auto-target me and continue to follow me with their attack as I frantically try to avoid it in stealth.
Well yes you are expecting mobs to continue whatever they are doing while you walk around them in stealth and backstab them. Don’t try to avoid continuous attacks with stealth. Don’t blind them as that only prevents one lick of damage. Evading round them will probably only miss a couple of licks as well. Aegis will prevent just one lick of damage. Learn to play and use an interrupt.
Lets think about our flamethrower mob who has started burning people before you into stealth. Does he (a) stop burning (b) burn where he thinks you are © follow and burn you?
a) Stealth becomes an interrupt. Other targets could be in the aoe and they become protected by your stealth. This is bad.
b) Stealth now lets mobs waste their attacks firing into empty air when they should be attacking other enemies. This is bad and gives stealth too much advantage.
c) Bad for thieves but we understand stealth, we know it doesn’t interrupt attacks, we deal with it.
I can see your point of view but you are not in the core audience for fractals. Fractals are targeted at the the players who are short of content and want something to put their time into, day after day. You can put as much time as you like into fractals going up levels pretty much until you hit your own limit. It can become the top level end game content.
Fractals are not designed to be quick and easy for players without much time, but inevitably those players want the same rewards as the players who do invest a lot of time working up the levels (as always). In this case the fractal rewards are account bound so you do only need one character at a certain level and you can share the rewards across your account. You can also get the ascended items through dailies and crafting so nobody is entirely excluded.
The cost in relics for the rings seems expensive but you get plenty of rings from the daily chests. The barter relics provide you with a specific ring of your choice if you are not satisfied with the looted ones.
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I like the idea of an off hand torch but I’ve no idea what it would do that wouldn’t just copy the ranger. Seeing bandits with torches always made me want one.
Using map features for exploits – yeah this a bad feature of GW2. It’s not a new problem in MMOs and I don’t know why dungeons/mobs/skills were designed with loopholes to allow this. So first responsibility lies with the designers. But I also just don’t understand the the players. Time spent in MMOs is meant to be fun. If you don’t think it’s fun to fight these boss mobs without exploits then just why are you playing the game? The barter tokens and in game stuff is just not worth your time if you’d rather not spend your time within a dungeon doing dungeon activities.
Skipping I see as a risk vs reward issue. The thing you are risking and getting as a reward is your time. You are rewarded by spending less time if you skip well. You risk a lot of time if you skip badly. It’s a player decision and I think designers allow it on purpose. I don’t like skipping much since it does favor experienced players too heavily and there already seems to be a big gap between how difficult dungeons are for beginners compared to experienced players.
The sigil seems rather pointless. What are rangers meant to do when their bow gives them 5 seconds of invulnerability? Rush into melee with a sword and exe for 5 seconds and then rush out again and refind their bow?
The stats should not be changed to please your personal optimization. Power, Vitality, an Toughness are useful to most characters in some way even if they are not optimal. This bow is used by other classes as well as rangers.
Agree with the original poster. The ‘auto-attack is your own fault’ line doesn’t fool me. It’s bad design and should be fixed.
I think the original poster has some good points. The dailies are very contrived and there are a number of other game elements with poor concepts. On the other hand the open world event systems are very good compared to other MMOs.
I’ve never understood peoples dislike of the trinity system, it works and it is fun being able to say “yes I fulfill this role and I do it well”
If you want to do something in Guild Wars, lets say a dungeon, you just need the players to turn up and play. You don’t need to wait around for a tank, or a support, or a healer. Players do not have to change classes because other people need them to play a class other than the one they want to play. It doesn’t matter if 50% of the players on a server all want to play a thief, they all can and they’re not competing over a limited number of spaces in each group for a medium armor role.
The difficulty with providing a solo/duo mode for dungeons is that players take that as the easiest option and groups for story dungeons will vanish entirely. This is what happened in other MMOs. Given that the personal story works as solo content, regardless of the story dungeons, I’d rather see a group finder tool solve all problems creating groups everywhere. I cannot believe that across a week, across all servers, there will not be enough people to run story mode dungeons. I’d rather see new dungeons developed rather than any tampering with the story modes, since the story modes are generally good dungeons.
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Elementalists are not the only class that want to swap weapons out of combat. I play a thief and routinely myself often changing weapons sets as I go through dungeons, such as sword/dagger with shortbow to dagger/dagger with pistol/pistol. A Lucky elementalists can load one weapon set from the bag to get 16 new skills, assuming the other 16 are not good enough. A thief has to load two weapon sets from the bag to get 10 new skills, assuming the other 10 are not good enough. Elementalists do not need any extra hand holding here. Play other classes and you’ll see that your cup is at least half full.
If a ranger wants to use an off hand weapon then you get a choice of axe (range) or sword (melee) for the main hand. The main hand axe works best for a mobile skirmish against a small groups of mobs. Bows tend to be better for longer ranges, single target dps, or very large groups. The axes work well at triggering combo fields.
In my opinion the axes are not there as a main weapon for all content and lack good skills such as an interrupt or evade. They are still fine for a weapon swap with choice of off-hand.
“One of my guild mates had a great idea about this though, since i noticed this with ranged attacks only his theory was that any range attacks launched while not stealthed but not yet landed when you are stealthed will still hit you after you stealth. I know for a fact that they would miss pre patch but perhaps this is a bug/glitch added with the new stealth rules.”
This was always the case. A flamethrower mob would even turn and burn you while you moved around it in stealth. It’s bad but there are different problems with the mechanics if this doesn’t happen too.
Personally
- I don’t like the armor or weapon styles (CoE has same design but with glows)
- I think groups of dredge are dull. They all look grey and they feel grey. Mining suits do add something by looking different and they need more stuff like that.
- Designers seem to think that more dredge is more fun, but it isn’t. Their variety of attacks means that there’s little point thinking up new play styles to tackle an encounter – you just need basic group tactics. The more dredge there are, the less interesting the play becomes.
- I like the communist revolutionary storylines but they don’t translate into interesting game mechanics. Some dredge should be ‘more equal than others’ and be identifiable and interesting.
- Path 1 causes the game to crash.
- Nobody becomes an adventurer to kill moles.
It is a problem. You can work round it by removing auto-attack. It probably does still need a fix since it doesn’t fit the theme of the class (let warriors turn off auto-attack, cutting down their dps, to get out of beserk rage). It’s probably not going to get fixed soon since players can work round it and there are much bigger ranger problems to solve.
The problems may stem from the strong ranger healing of pets. At the moment pets die too quickly from aoe and agony. Perhaps if they survive longer they will provide a low skill method of ‘tanking’ bosses as the healing kicks in. The middle ground may be smaller than you think (so letting the pets survive against some bosses will let them dominate other bosses). I certainly know that my ranger can solo a lot of open world champion mobs, using the pet in a traditional tanking role.
Yes, with me it was tallest Norn female available.
Maybe if you complain that your own name is offensive they will change it to something else?
Kiting is when you run at a distance from a melee mob and it never hits you, but in the meantime you are killing it from range. You don’t want the mob too close or too far, and it follows you in a line, so it’s vaguely like flying a kite. You can try this with a shortbow but you won’t do enough damage on your own.
If you want to attack in melee and stay safe then you’ve got plenty of options as a thief. Smoke, pistol whip, cloak and dagger, can all be made to work. If you’re wanting to use an off hand dagger then get traits from the shadow arts line to help you when going into stealth. You’ll be able to use either a sword or dagger as main hand.
I believe I had the same thing. The first time I thought I had just missed it. The second time I thought I had been too close to the rocks and my camera view wasn’t zoomed out far enough to see it (both times). Third time, again near the left side rocks, I was getting suspicious of a bug.
I’m surprised that nobody has yet mentioned time. Time is the currency that players put into the game. When you are soloing you need to consider whether 10% better magic find is better than stats that let you gather loot (kill) faster, especially if it is more than 10% faster. Moving into dungeons the equations change.
Let’s suppose that because one player is wearing 5% magic find, a group wipes just 1 more time in 100 attempts at some content. Across all the visits, each player in the group now spends 101% of the time they might have otherwise spent, plus repair costs. The player with magic find is getting 105% extra loot, or probably much less than 105% since coin is unaffected, and chests, and barter items. Why should the other members of the party be happy with that?
For completeness, I’ll add that Call of the Wild can be blocked (not matter what auto-attack you have). So if you see a mob blocking and decide to use this buffing skill you might still get dazed by a block response, for example. It would be interesting to know if it triggered confusion and other shield/combat response effects.
I can remember EQ quite well. EQ is the game where the class in most demand was the cleric. The most demanding task for the cleric was to count the seconds until the healing skill needed to be pressed again, and again, until the raid boss was dead. It started all the bad design that GW2 is trying to break. One of those design flaws was the reliance on itemization over skill. However since GW2 has such a big difference in capability based on player skill, dungeons cannot be created to meet the needs of novices and experienced players at the same time. There is nothing to be learnt from a veteran player saying that the starter dungeons are facile compared to highest end raid for the most hardcore players in an MMO. I hope he isn’t the sort of person that the ANet developers are listening to.
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I think that GW2 has a quite different skill differential compared to some other MMOs we’ve seen in the past. In some MMOs you could swap one Paladin, say, with another and know that they would both do the Paladin skills in much the same way and do a job for a group. This is not true in GW2. This is probably what leads to the different perceptions between players of how difficult the dungeons are.
This disparity might make it difficult for Anet to make dungeons that cater for all skill levels, however they’ve just got to do it. Some dungeons, or some paths of the lower level dungeons, should be at an entry level for beginners to learn their skills. If they designed each dungeon so that the easier paths were longer, and the difficult paths were shorter, it would probably please everyone.
“You want the introductory dungeon to be hard for everyone new? That’s a great way to get players to mass exodus the game.”
No. Challenging means that new players go in, face a challenge within their limits, and can find success if they get beyond beginner status.
I think there is a big disparity in the comments in this thread since GW2 is a high skill game. All players need to watch animations, react, move, and plan. Monster knowledge, class knowledge, cross-class knowledge, skill knowledge, weapon knowledge, trait knowledge, it’s all important. A high skill player can perform immeasurably better than an unskilled player.
For example, Kohler has an animation and you need to dodge. Simple? A less skilled player cannot just spot the animation and dodge – they need to plan to have endurance or an evade skill ready – they need to watch Kohler’s start of animation – they need to know how long the animation takes – and then they need to execute the dodge at the right time (not too early or too late). For someone new to dungeons this is enough challenge. It does not need summoned ghosts that are really difficult to manage for anyone new to the game with no cross-class knowledge whatsoever.
Essentially, the introductory dungeon needs to seem really simple for skilled players, and challenging for beginners. There probably isn’t anything in between due to the nature of the game. There do need to be introductory dungeons since the gap between unskilled play and skilled play needs to be bridged somewhere. If this means that the introductory dungeons should provide less barter items for level 80 exotic armour then that should be the design decision.
Venoms are badly designed at the moment. They are too weak and generally not worth a slot when untraited. All skills should be worth a slot without traiting. On the other hand, venemous aura has this massive potential that is hardly ever realized in game play, which again must give balance problems. Not a great piece of design.
Your main question was where the damage comes from? Weapons give damage. If a dungeon is easy enough that you only want dps then any vaguely sensible set of skills and traits will get you through, some faster than others . If a dungeon is hard then you generally need to survive and control a fight. The group will provide enough damage together to kill things as long as you have control of a fight. This is where venoms have a role. Hit a small group of mobs with ice venom, they all stay grouped together, and your warrior steams in and flattens them. That’s group work.
Black power is effective against targets within the smoke and not effective against targets outside the smoke. That’s correct. You can still use the smoke field for combos and they may help you. A thief has plenty of ways to work around the perfectly reasonable limitations of one skill on one weapon, not least to shadow step directly to the ranged enemy.
The damage output of smokescreen is not really relevant. Many weapon skills in many classes do less damage than auto-shots. They are there for utility and support, just like black powder.
I’d agree with your comments about CM. Interesting trash encounters are good but you don’t want your leave players needing to deal with special attacks from every trash mob in large group. That’s too punishing for people coming into dungeons and learning them. It also punishes classes that rely on skills for defense as they can’t get the right skills done for everything, at the right times, with the right traits, until they’re very familiar with the fights.
Pets inherit agony resistance from their owner. It’s patently obvious that this needed and it’s only a matter of time until it’s done. So it should be done next patch.
Pet survivability in AOE or dodge intensive content. Either fix this or stop creating content with so much area damage.
I don’t think that thieves are bad in PvE but an amount of PvE content is not thief friendly. As soon as you see an army of 20 dredge coming down a tunnel towards you in a fractal the weaknesses of dodge/evade/stealth become apparent, skills like venoms become marginalized, and weapon choices are gone. PvE doesn’t need to be designed with such big groups of enemies however.
If play in open world PvE then the Ranger will be fine and you can do your personal story and have fun. If you go into dungeons or fractals the pet will die too often or become ineffective if you preserve it, making the ranger less effective than classes who are not balanced around having a pet.
The clearest example is probably agony in fractals. Players can gain items that protect them from agony and players can dodge agony attacks. Without these defenses the agony attacks are fatal. The game has been designed so that pets have no defense to agony and pets cannot dodge agony attacks, so agony is entirely fatal to pets. It’s a blindingly obvious broken mechanic for rangers.
I find the dredge to be some of the dullest enemies in the game. I know they are meant to be uniform but their general lack of identity, bar the mining suits, is dull. I expect the variety of their attacks is meant to promote interesting play but since you can’t play many specific tactics against a group of dredge it seems that the most average strategy of damage/protection works best. The more dredge you face, the more average your tactics need to be, and the more dull a fight becomes. This makes it even more perplexing as to why dredge dungeons are full of fights where you just see more and more dredge. More dredge does not make for more interesting content and this fractal is a prime example.