Would you rather have a combined 3600 stat points or 3300 (WvW/PvE)?
Four stat gear has more total stat points by a good bit than three stat gear. This is the fundamental reason why Trailblazer/Marauder is chosen over Dire, Valk or Zerk.
True story, Bandit’s Defense is one of the highest-uptime blocks in the game, while providing a stunbreak and very low cooldown to pretty much negate in full most incoming burst combos, so he’s not really wrong by saying the Daredevil has tons of them.
A thief has nothing even approaching the rotational block of a Guardian or DH. Warriors, Engis, Mesmer, Rev all have more block uptime. The thief is probably 6th in block up-time out of 9 classes. Out of those three that it beats at least two of them have much stronger bunker variations (Ele and Ranger).
Thief: weakest in zerg play, weak in skirmish play and sub-par in duels.
What are they good at? Killing disadvantaged players and scouting. If you die to a thief, they were likely more skilled, defending player was hurt or the defending player was running a group build and got caught out in the open.
Only class that seems to be OP right now is Guardian/DH as it is considered one of the strongest classes in almost every mode of the game. It also has a ridiculously low skill floor for its effectiveness.
Bound is a damage multiplier… players wondering how they got clocked by a big hit need look no further than a player stacking up these percentages.
There is a reason running the score up on a team that isn’t competing at the same level is considered bad sportsmanship.
In some cases it is equivalent to a pro NFL team playing with their 1st string, when they are up by 10 TDs, against a banged up high-school team. Nothing wrong with doing it, just realize you are a kitten for participating.
I have a high rank for being an almost full time roamer and sadly I typically have to avoid glassy builds. This is mainly because a lot of players are rank hunters and will target the highest rank regardless of other circumstance.
However, the visible rank makes the game more interesting. The added dimension of being a trophy for many is both an honor and a burden that in the end adds in extra fun for both sides… even when I am griping about getting sniped on Discord.
Fix the contesting system (as in make it so that real damage has to be done to a wall/gate) then change the defense tactics to only work when an objective is contested. It won’t stop the abuse but it sure will slow it down.
Same with supply, don’t let it be pulled unless it will actually deliver its full supply to the objective.
Oh and whenever the EWP is pulled it should send out a link on team chat along with the name/guild of the user that pulled it.
It is an MMO with a lot of player connections concentrated in one area, it will have lag. Virtually every popular MMO is going to have the problem in various places in their game.
No, no, no. This was the same problem in GW1. Presets are the fix for people who can’t figure out builds.
No build plays itself even those with a low skill floor. Players can copy a build from anywhere and making that easier isn’t going to make them better players. Maybe before Google and internet search engines a person could make a valid point of this but that ship sailed long ago.
Concerning the toughness part, I’m more mitigated. Even if I think toughness reducing condition duration is a fair idea, that stat is linked to armor, which feels irrelevant for conditions overall.
I believe the OP is saying power is mitigated by toughness + base armor and only toughness (not base armor) would reduce condi duration. The idea has been floated a few times over the last couple years and IMO would be an improvement.
Those that have been here since the beginning have a pile of level 40 scrolls also.
Marauder and Commander armor also have 10% more stats than 3-stat gear, but people don’t come crying on the forum about them, only about the condition ones.
They should. Marauder has almost completely replaced zerker for most players “in the know”. Why run Zerk when you can deal almost the same DPS with several K more health?
Very well put. Damage output across the board has escalated wildly since specialisations and HoT were introduced. I too am constantly in shock at the damage I do now. Pre-specialisations I used to have to run full zerk to get the damage numbers I can get on my Knight’s/Marauder’s/Captain’s/Zerk mixtures I use now. It’s pretty mad, but then none of the grand changes that have been made to the game since 2015 have ever taken into account the impact it will have on WvW.
Damage is actually down from launch. One shot kills were a very real and constant issue at launch and that got much worse with Ascended for a brief time. They semi-fixed that issue when they removed stats from trait lines. That same change removed some of the trait double dipping that was happening as well. Damage normalized somewhat then HoT came out and amped it back up again with more multiplier options along with much stronger condi builds. It still isn’t where it was though.
Is it really that hard to remember a build? I get that convenience is nice, but wouldn’t it just make the whole copy builds from metabattles even worse. People wouldn’t even need to look at which traits they take with a build saver.
GW had build templates which makes build variations much easier to manage. No reason GW2 shouldn’t have shipped with them since swapping out gear and traits can be a serious pain.
As for players copying builds, who cares? It is not like a build plays itself in most instances. I would rather players that need help get it. Besides most builds on meta-battle are fairly generic and typically not hyper-optimized.
Try this near 5x multiplier build for an evening:
Durable, decent escape and its opener will easily clock for 5 digits against all but the most hardened opponents. Blocks aren’t typically a problem. Condi pressure is an issue but this is an alpha strike build and has enough removal/health to hit an opponent and get distance. Black Powder/Dodge/Steal/Backstab while at full health for max effect. Reset if it doesn’t land clean… irritating to fight against and outright deadly to almost all players. It will two shot many a build not rocking 3k armor or lacking damage reduction.
There is a Power Mesmer build that hits just as hard.
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Condi is borked with this all or nothing design. Dire isn’t broken but it does take advantage of the condi mess. Trailblazer along with most 4 stat gear is broken as it has 10% more stat points. One piece here or there isn’t much but 10% in every slot is. A player would almost have to be a fool to invest in 3 stat over 4 stat gear in many cases.
On topic, I’m not really sure how dying quickly removes the competitive nature from a game considering often times the most competitive games (Various FPS titles, League, DotA, etc.) often feature content and promote quick player deaths.
FPS and MOBA games are closer to sPvP in design which oddly doesn’t have the power amplification problem because of the gear limits and the number of external power amplifiers.
FPS shooters have small maps, short trips to the action after respawns, a level playing field and typically everyone is equally brittle. A player may die more but they will kill more as well. Overwatch is a good example… a player may be inexperienced but they can still win a fight and improve.
In WvW a typical new player has almost a zero chance to win against an average skilled player in a meta build in WvW much less those that are skilled. Add in gank builds and getting out of a players keep can be a trick for a new fellow.
Problem with macros is it is difficult to gauge intent. This puts game companies in a tough spot. They want players to enjoy the game and even create 3rd party utilities that make the game more enjoyable but don’t want players to effectively cheat. It is easier to ban them in the ToS and turn a blind eye on anything outside of blatant cheating. However that policy can change on a whim and since it is in the ToS any macroing no matter how benign can put an account in jeopardy.
A macro that remaps a key isn’t disallowed. It gets murky with the quality of life macros such as those that auto-double click to open boxes. Macros such as the Combat Mode are definitely in a very gray area as they do have keys that do multiple things but don’t really give a combat advantage. Macros that do rotations or farm, definitely wrong.
Use any macro at your own risk is what it boils down to.
Why is it that DH skills work and use terrain to instakill, but for every other class you only see path not found?
Scorpion Wire for the thief has been busted since launch. Seeing the DH get a far more reliable pull as a class mechanic and SW still untouched is definitely a snub.
ANet continually prioritizes Guardian and now DH over pretty much everything else. The Guardian has dominated zergs since launch and it has remained almost completely unchanged in that regard. DH was added in and even after a couple rounds of nerfs is still the easiest to play with the highest effectiveness in WvW (and sPvP).
The one benefit from being in school when they used to cover your hands so you couldnt look down and smack you with a ruler if you tried to peek. I learned to play games better because of that typing crap.
Lol! I learned to type in high school on an IBM Selectric and had to take a turn on a manual. I even had to learn to code on punch cards… wowsa. Definitely showing my age.
I don’t agree because additive scaling or simply raw numbers makes optimization and the emergence of overpowered abilities and skills too strict and too confined.
Blowing up players in a second or two creates a very unfriendly environment for new and casual players which are necessary for the long term health of WvW. In most sPvP encounters there is a back and forth that allows a newer player to learn. Most of the time new WvW players are dead before they know a fight started with little time to learn and adapt.
Unfortunately, the damage modifiers have become an escalation race that has limited diversity. Meta builds mostly have to go bunker, condi or push heavy into damage multipliers. Those players not running meta or pre-meta typically come on the forums and complain about how OP XYZ is or quit out of frustration.
It’s not impossible to evade it. I don’t know about if it’s unblockable or not, but I know you can deny it by: Dodging the spear, Dodging the pull (tricky af, but works) or Stability through the pull.
The Spear can be dodged but once it is attached the only way out of that pull is range or stab. The problem is in a zerg there are often a dozen plus DH all trying to pull drivers and high ranked players. It is fairly common to get 5+ pulls and suddenly a player is the ball in a pinball machine. Even worse when it happens on terrain and suddenly you are shot into the air and die from falling damage… which is far more common to me than getting killed by a Mesmer Moa.
I don’t know, I think that AoE attacks, like everything else, are best when they are diversified. It could be good mechanic wise if AoE skills were reduced to allow 1 or 2 classes to have huge access to relatively weak AoE skills. Their strength would be in pressuring lots of players at once, but they wouldn’t have enough individual pressure to kill anyone paying attention. Diversity is always good.
AoE should be an anti-stacking measure. Problem is ANet made it spam-able and overly effective even with the cap. The current design limits diversity (everyone needs to have the nukes), creates an enormous calculation load on a server and forces ANet to cap AoE because of those problems.
Had AoE been on long cool downs and designed to be special class defining attacks, their game engine would perform immensely better, visual clutter would be massively improved and AoE would be more strategically relevant. Today AoE is just another rotation skill in many zerg builds rather than a tactic used by organized groups to destroy stacked enemies.
AoE in this game was a fundamental mistake and I very much believe if there is a GW3 with WvW a mistake ANet will rectify.
Condi is ridiculously effective against golems. However in golem packs of that size you are probably just going to lose. Not much you can do when an enemy is willing to burn 500g worth of siege to take something. IMO, do your best, enjoy the fight, take out as many as you can and recap if you lose it.
With CS it’s only 90 seconds and if you get pulled, moa’d and immobed it’s prob gg and once you go down you get punted back killed sieged and frog tea bagged on there’s no saving you m8
Average number of times I die from getting Moa’d in a month: < 1
Average number of times I die from getting compound pulled by DHs in a month: too many to count.
DH having access to a 1200 range pull on a potentially 30s timer was a poor design decision by ANet. At the very least it needs to be blockable, evadable and 600 or 900 range.
It wasn’t a problem at launch because people were abusing boonshare, no conditions can cut through the unlimited spam of resistance.
In some ways Resistance is part of the problem. Load up player running Resistance with condi, corrupt or strip boon, Epi, watch a bunch of players die immediately.
Damage Modifiers are the real culprit here. They are multiplicative meaning they amplify each other. No big hitter that I know of can pull off massive shots without them. They should have been additive or better yet removed and replaced with straight power additions.
nerf burst
nerf tank
nerfbat loves all
Which is what is rolling in sPvP for better or worse.
They should remove or expand the cap when they remove 99% of the AoE spam. I would bet a big regret of the design team is building in too much AoE. It frags server performance, greatly limits the size of player fights, generates mostly unskilled play and reduces group dynamics since AoE is the best DPS in the game even with a 5 cap so groups basically have to roll with it to be effective.
There should have only been 1 or 2 AoE skills mostly elite skills on most classes and they should have been treated as class defining skills. Had they done that Anet would have likely doubled or more the performance of large scale game play.
It is too late… too many of us have grinded to earn our gear to start losing it. I already suffered through the guild reset where our guild lost every upgrade we earned. I don’t think I would make it through a reset that removed some of the gear I spent a lot of time acquiring.
Don’t allow players to stack stealth. That fixes most of the issues with stealth.
CC is tough to address without going down a very slippery slope. My suggestion is that when CC is removed a “CC Resistance” stack is applied. Each stack would reduce incoming CC duration for a short duration. Get enough stacks and CC would have no effect until the stacks timed out. This would prevent chain stuns and allow zergs to mix it up more.
Condi… whew that is a mess all its own. I would also add damage modifiers should be additive not multiplicative. Most of those monstrous semi-one shot hits are from damage multipliers amplifying each other.
The combat log is about as trustworthy as a rich politician. Far more likely the attacker was just fast. I type just over 120 words per minute with decent accuracy and about 80 wpm being careful which translates into a lot of input per second on an MMO.
I guess if you got rid of all the 1200 pulls and moa it would be ok. The necro corrupts are a pain but whatever.
Moa is on a massive cooldown. A DH has a pull that is unblockable, unevadable on a 20s timer.
Vault’s a weapon skill, not a build, and it’s overtuned (risk:reward is way too high). And there’s no line… someone started a thread about Vault, so that’s what’s being discussed.
ANet should not try to adjust individual skills without looking at the whole picture. That is my primary point in this tangent. If Vault was so OP it would manifest in an OP build. Staff thief isn’t OP. Sure it is a big hitter in roaming but struggles in most other areas and is at best an average build to fight against barring outside factors.
Staff thief is a mobile big hitter but a build that gets nuked frequently by any number of other builds. Most players just don’t see the downside because they don’t play the build… instead they focus on the paper stats of the skill or the handful of times a thief caught them at an advantage and used it to blow them up. Which is EXACTLY the scenario the OP described.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
Thief has very little overlap so even though it is a strong DPS build it isn’t buffing the players around them like every other class can.
I have longed believed guilds should be able to register as a mercenary guild and be assigned to servers to help balance out a fight.
So your complaint is:
“this skill is OP because a guild used it to spike me”
Going to quote myself:
“I do not disagree that it requires good composition for it to be highly effective which is why it is not outright OP but once composition is attained the skill is way over tuned in the right hands.”
The problem with Epidemic is that it can use a Damage Over Time mechanic to one shot up to 5 players. Conditions in my opinion should not be one shotting players.
One player should not be able to disrupt an entire server this easily and certainly not easily disrupt a keep that takes hours to upgrade.
At the very least a thief should have to kill a guard…. the very least.
As for the class, it is nigh unkillable if it is built to not-die. It may suck at killing players but it won’t go down easily or at all. Also if a server does kill a thief, it can be back contesting in less than 2 min.
I would buy it even if it was a gem item.
It is a strategy and a valid one. It is also fair since both sides can do it with equal measure.
If there is a problem is that a huge number of DH zerglings have a built in pull as a class mechanic… hmmm… who thought that was a good idea?
(edited by Straegen.2938)
DB does better than CD in SEA/OCX. – http://wvwstats.com/timezones. Of course, match that up with CD and FA. FA being #1 in 3 TZs. Like, what’s going on, ANet?
Like I said, go play on DB during NA Prime and let me know how you like it… this week I am sure it is particularly painful. Far, far worse than CD is having it.
You seem to think Vault is fine. I say Vault carries bad players, allowing them to punch way above their weight.
The build just isn’t that effective in actual game play. Scrubs should be scared of it but pretty much every one else sees it coming a mile away and knows how to deal with it.
Playing the thief class is typically a harsh experience for most players. Other thieves particularly above average ones cannibalize their own at highly effective rates. Nothing about the class (outside of stealth stacking) is easy despite the constant complaining in the forums. Sure they are a pain for a few seconds and can sprint off… often right into another thief that isn’t on near full cooldown.
If we are looking at risk/reward builds, several are way in front of Staff thief. Most people get grumpy because they cannot catch one, got blown up while they were hurt, are running a poor solo build or a pack of them scorched them while they were trying to get to a tag then log on a gripe about it.
Epi isn’t going to be dropping 5 players in a second or two.. The player hit by epi would be downed before epi finished casting.
Please see my post a few above yours – I gave several examples of what is actually capable of inflicting the kind of condi bombs you are describing ( hint, its not epi).
There may be other combos that can do it but tRex has used this Epi trick to drop me like a rock on multiple occasions.
1. Load up an immobile target such as a necro, guardian, non-shiro rev. For our wombo combo this ends up being like 15-20 poison, 10ish burn, 15ish bleeds, anywhere from 10-20 torment, some confusion from corrupting retal, and all the other nondamaging conditions.
2. Press Epidemic (multiply conditions for however many necro/reaper use it)
3. Stow weapon and watch everyone die.
I suspect it got even easier to pull off thanks to Resistance.
My point, and my only point, has been that the risk:reward ratio seems far off from what’s reasonable. 10-11k is a truckload of damage to deliver in a single hit (not the most in the game, but still a lot), and being able to drop three of those in succession for aoe damage and evade on 66% of the cast time seems borked to me.
In a vacuum you would be right… the skill reads like beastmode. However the skill doesn’t live in a vacuum. Thieves in a “fair” fight are easy to fend off or outright kill. The outcome of Vault for a thief just doesn’t live up to its paper stats. If Vault were so beastly it would be wrecking good players with regularity without needing a handicap. As it is now, it takes superior skill to make it even remotely deadly against an average player outside of hitting them while they are hurt or at some other disadvantage. The same can be said for something like Gunflame as well.
From my perspective I care more about the effectiveness of a build on the meta more than a single skill from a single weapon. Is Vault strong, yes. Is the build its attached to particularly scary, no. For me that means nothing needs to be done since any nerfs would further weaken a mediocre build in the current meta.
They are all “viable” but as mentioned above. Condi Chrono, Stun Lock Warrior, Bunker Druid, Bunker Scrapper are all fine choices with fairly soft learning curves thanks to mobility, durability and/or stealth.
Heralds and Tempests in the right hands are often surprisingly good at roaming. However getting to the stage where a player can mop the floor with a good fighter takes a while.
DH has a low skill floor for an effective build making it easy to play but mobility hampers it. Necros are the worst mainly from mobility but also because they are so easy to kite.
If you think it is bad on CD off hours, go play on DB during NA Prime. Servers carried by off hour play are the worst in my experience.
But your way of explaining maths is not rational. You thinking that 60% of all players are terrible or equivalent of mentally disabled cousins doesn’t prove kitten. Stop taking everything so seriously
What I am saying is that most of the good players are sitting at Legendary and Platinum playing other Legendary and Platinum players. Most of the try hards, don’t play much or up and coming players are at Gold or below. The pool of players is of shallow skill/play time by comparison to the players above. The only time a Gold sees those really good players/builds is when they go on a winning streak. Once a player moves up to Platinum and Legendary they are going to consistently see good players in good builds most of the time not half of the time or less.
Not knocking the build or the player and I doubt many on here are either. What is being pointed out is that a good player in a horrible build can get Gold (as in it can beat below average players most of the time and still lose to decent players most of the time) so we really don’t know right now if this build is actually performing well beyond consistently killing scrubs which as pointed out any number of sub-optimal builds can do.
I run Staff and Pistol Pistol. Staff is great against most mobs and Pistol Pistol is solid against bosses that aren’t melee friendly.
Few things… you will have Fury up most of the time so 100% crit is a waste. Pump more points into Power and let the crit set at 80% if you want to crit most of the time. Scholar is probably a better rune choice in that case.
Take these traits: Staff Mastery (you will want the extra dodges), Havoc Mastery (way more damage), Hard to Catch (GI is pretty crappy), Pain Response (some condi clear is good), Withdraw or Vigor is a better heal without Shadow Arts, Shadow Step over Fist Flurry.
Put Energy and Bloodlust on your SB and UW weapon. Force/Air or Fire on you Staff.
Switch your food to Asparagus and Sage Salad. That 8% while moving buff is stupid strong with damage modifier stacking.
I prefer Pistol/Pistol Staff in PvE but SB is fine just not great against some bosses.
Did I miss the “build” part or is it in the vanity video somewhere?
I really hope this post was meant as a joke…
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