That’s because everyone who used perplex before had an interrupt build. Now it doesn’t proc on interrupt anymore. Obviously, they’re going to consider it a nerf. Wait a few weeks from now and see if people come up with new non-interrupt builds that use perplex. I just came up with one on my permastealth condi build so I guess you can consider it a buff to trapper thief. Permastealth trapper thief is the last thing that needs a buff.
My build was an all around condi damager using Lotus Training and some other application along with Plex. I can say for 100% sure that this is a monster nerf to the runes. Outside of your trapper variant and perma-stealth, using a heal offensively on a thief is just too dangerous.
A Thief standing next to an opponent for 1s without the ability to dodge a blow is asking for it. Withdrawl is just hard to land consistently. Now if the Plex went off on activation not at the end of the skill, then it would be powerful particularly with Withdrawl.
It isn’t great for other classes either since most heals have 1s plus activation times and heals in general have their own tactical defensive timing. Stealth condi Mesmers are probably the best choice for these runes but other runes are probably a better fit.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
Can you imagine the rage if they changed Durability Runes after people have farmed days and weeks just to have 1 set?
That was their “downside” but now we can just straight up buy them in WvW. I am running five sets on different classes since the vendor change went in.
You’re not supposed to use any of those in the standard trapper thief build. If you get cced while in stealth 100% then that’s really your fault. You have 100% stealth and you have shadow’s embrace, not to mention how are people going to put the condis on you in the first place. No perma stealth trapper thief ever uses lotus or pressure striking for good reason.
I thought Pain Inverter revealed on Retaliation application which threw me off of the trapper variant of the build.
Does it trigger on mesmer mantra of healing? Is there a cooldown? If not…
It only works on an actual heal skill activation. No passive heals or other skills will trigger its effect. The other “suck” part is that it goes off at the end of the heal. Very few classes have a heal that activates in under 1s making the lag on confusion application 1s or more in most cases.
venom share as baseline ? I’ll gladly play condi thief now thx
Good luck. A thief has to give up most of their defensive sustain to go Venom which puts them in a vulnerable spot. Only two of the venoms apply damaging conditions and none in multiple stacks per attack. Add on that both Torment and Poison do nothing to help cover condition removal. If they had a confusion or flame venom, now that could add up to something more workable.
I agree mostly with ades.
Thieves are crap in PvP at least at the higher level play since other classes move nearly as good and hold a point better.
In WvW, thieves are mainly good in packs with other thieves where they can descend unseen and blow up hurt or less skilled players. Prior to the Plex nerf they could be vicious in 1v1 with condi but those days are mostly gone now.
+1
Requires asura tho… Dat pain inverter…
That build is toast against a decent player. No stun break, very limited condi removal, uses Bound instead of Lotus, doesn’t use Pressure Striking, etc.
WvW has always had meta builds many of which were ridiculously OP.
Prior to HoT nearly every roaming build had stopped because the PU mesmer was utterly dominating 1v1 and were incredibly slippery. Prior to the trait changes, thieves rolled over pretty much every build and could clock near 20k on light to medium armored players out of nowhere.
I cannot stop using Bountiful on my Stance build even though they are very expensive.
It was far more powerful for Mesmers and Thieves before this change. I ran it all last night in roaming and duels on both and it is now a marginal rune set.
Three stacks of Condi after a heal in a very small AoE area leaves the set mostly useless for a thief. Withdrawl is the only instant heal but it goes off where the thief rolls back to. Any other heal the thief has is near a 1s activation and means the thief has to be right next to whatever is attacking it unable to evade which is generally a bad place to be for a squishy class.
Mesmers got off a little better since they can plan out that heal offensively easier but it is still a straight up nerf to shatter builds that applied 5 stacks on easily spammable condi shatters.
Other classes have very little access to confusion and Plex only lenthens confusion duration and not other conditions. The rune set is mostly a waste on classes that don’t have access to confusion application beyond their heal.
Condi thief is on life support after the Perplexity nerf. I really do not see how to make it work efficiently now. Venoms are pretty goodin skirmish with the right crew but might as well bring a Mesmer that has better group synergy.
Problem with it being attached to the heal is that thieves can rarely pop a heal in the middle of a group. The range is crazy small so a thief basically has to heal right next to whatever is wailing on it. I ran it for two hours and was getting demolished by good players.
IMO a better compromise for Plex would have been for it to activate on the Elite. It would have a longer cooldown but at least be able to be used offensively. As it is now, hard to see a build in the thief line that can maximize its tier 6 ability.
Durability in skirmish is far more powerful than condi. I am getting nearly an 80% additional boon duration. Tack on the prot and regen spam as well as the added vitality then stack 2-3 players on top of each other… whew it felt like I was on a first year D/D ele. Running around with 25 stacks of might is evil. Watching a 20k Eviscerate land against a medium armor was just wrong.
T2 towers seem to be “blinking” between T1 and T2 again.
For some reason the Dredge got almost to WC then started walking north on air up to the cliff above the veteran scale.
Backstab is sometimes getting hung up and taking way more than a 1s cooldown when it misses.
I crashed three times tonight across two computers. Neither computer has crashed on GW2 prior to this patch in months. Both running the 64bit client on Win10 and Win7 64bit.
Anyone else notice any new or old returning bugs?
It is a pretty big nerf at least to current meta builds. Thieves and mesmers had remote interrupts which were easily spammable within the cool down window. Now that it is on the heal a player has to weigh the need for a heal vs applying 3 stacks of condi. I tried it on both my condi mesmer and my condi thief and their DPS output was significantly cut.
I wish it had been attached to the elite skill rather than the heal. Longer cooldown but more useful offensively.
Bad enough we got a series of condi mesmer buffs but Durability is still ridiculous in the current WvW meta. I get the Plex changes and they have been needed for a while but Durability… it is just as OP as the old Plex runes on bunker builds. It is ridiculously OP in skirmish.
Winner… Winner… OP is a Winner. Unfortunately that means we are all losers.
Played D/D since release and this is probably the worse the set has EVER been. Its manageable but now extremely difficult to land a backstab at all, due to no follow-up.
I would agree with this statement. I cannot remember a time D/D was weaker.
Good riddance to all perplex builds IMHO.
Not sure they are gone but probably for the thief. The build I was running was so OP, I deleted it off the forums and was basically trolling 3+ players with little worry of losing that fight. It took timing to make it sing but it was stupid OP.
I do really feel bad for you guys. Anet just kittening hates thieves and have no clue what to do with them.
Ehhh… some of us will just roll with a different meta class/build. My Stance, Boon Duration, Durability Warrior is stupid OP. Expensive to run but has been doing very well in 2v1 duels. Course I could just dust off my condi spam stealth mesmer… wonder if a decent fire build is doable now.
The Plex rune change is a big nerf to int builds but thankfully this effects Mesmers as well. No more remote shatter spam for Plex hits. Even when it does land 3 stacks is way better than 5.
It certainly neuters my very OP Thief int build. I like the AoE function of the runes but using a heal offensively as a thief is generally a bad idea.
Someone pointed out rightly so in another thread that this is a monster nerf for fighting other stealthed players particularly mesmers.
Stealth mesmers and perma stealth thieves just got a nice defensive boost from this change. No more head hunting blindly.
Actually its a significant buff to my mesmer LOL
I would stealth on my mesmer and the REALLY REALLY good thieves would just know where i was and BS me while we both were stealthed.
This change creates a scenario where thieves won’t actively hunt other stealthed players while stealthed.
This is a fair point. A stealth mesmer fight is already a difficult fight.
The longer stun and traitless share on BV is powerful and IMO better for skirmish play.
Backstab and Staff nerf is understandable but it is appropriate to buff D/D in some way regardless of these changes.
It doesn’t effect the AA so Backstap/spam AA works as it did before.
What it did change was if Backstab misses or is blocked and the player stays in stealth, there is a 1s cooldown. That is a fair change IMO. No more spamming Backstab until it lands without thought.
Bit confused on this. Is there some attack you can do twice in stealth?
Typically, a thief attacks, damage is done and a reveal is applied that is longer than 1s. I am sure I am just misreading the text here. Wonder if this effects traps.
The change isn’t a big deal but like most here I would like my laurels back since those can only be earned by playing daily.
Switch your armor to Commander, pick up Mussels Gnashblade food, Bountiful Sharpening stone, use Sigil of Concentration and then take Heightened Focus.
Afterwards watch everything around you die quickly while you remain relatively untouched. The boon stacking is epic allowing for the build to remain extremely tanky from both condi and power while hitting so hard they won’t remember last week.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
In WvW, GS Axe/Sh stance warriors running Durability runes are probably one of the strongest meta builds going right now. They are almost unkillable and hit like a truck. They also work well in small scale, skirmish and large scale play.
Not many builds are “immune” from thieves but that one relatively is.
I completely abandoned the Zerk trait line as it is generally weak in WvW. The stance boon stacking variant is godly right now though. I was dueling in 2v1 duels last night against skilled fighters with relatively high effectiveness.
It is no surprise that passive traits that automatically activate active skills are almost universal on meta builds.
Main purpose of thief is mobility and +1
It must never be a beast in 1v1 with its current superiority in mobility.
I can understand lots of thieves would appreciate…but this would create an imbalanced situation.
Mobility and stealth are a thief’s defensive sustain. It is like saying warriors shouldn’t hit hard because they have heavy armor, blocks and invulns. Besides there a several classes that can easily close the gap on thief mobility.
Basically ANet nerfed the thieves overall burst and then we all watched the thief completely fall out of high level sPvP and become a pack hunter in WvW. A class that isn’t good in large scale or skirmish play should excel at small scale play.
Like P/P, Staff does usually descend into using the same skill over and over again. In a 1v1 it’s fine for some more skill exploration, but in a group fight Vault and then Vault again. This can work and Vault does enormous damage, especially in WvW (11k Vaults are recurrent on a full zerk build) but as soon as someone knows the interrupt window for Vault (like myself) killing a staff Thief begins to get trivial.
If a player cranks up the build above and spams Unload and Vault they will kill crappy players but melt to good ones. If a player masters the utility of each weapon, the build becomes very deadly with high utility (immob spam, immob removal, cheap stealth, blind spam, easy weakness, hard hitting AA, interrupt spam, knockdown, etc).
The build is a might and evasion generating engine that is ridiculously hard to hit and with Bound becomes incredibly dangerous just being around it. Bound does about 60% the damage of a full on Vault and tacks on a 10% damage bonus.
Many players won’t progress beyond just hitting 5 until they or their target dies but that is why those players opt for the pure DPS of other lines outside of Acro. Players looking beyond simple button smash play can find surprising depth in this build.
Tough road for the thief class these days especially in sPvP. HoT brought strong bunker classes which hold points extremely well. Also HoT brought classes that move in a straight line nearly as well as the thief so its decap capability isn’t as awesome as it once was.
Basically the class has become a +1 in unranked and mostly dead in ranked play.
I don’t think the group we were fighting were roamers to begin with, they were people simply trying to defend the camp and their numbers kept growing throughout the fight as they were asking for help in map chat. Again, video was shared because it was fun. Even finally dying in the end was fun.
Basically roamers kept piling into N camp until they had the numbers to grind your team down. Had your team reset and hit with a turn and burn, you probably could have kept fighting until a commander with a small zerg showed up.
Kudos for hanging in till the end and letting them have a “victory” but nothing really to learn from the video IMO.
There are quite some threads about this already, and no one are really near any good solutions to it either. We just don’t have the metrics to really say anything.
Fair-weather players, school schedules, time zones, guild moves, etc make aligning matches very difficult. There isn’t an easy answer. The only “fix” is to leave the Server v Server system which is fundamentally flawed in every game that uses it but that just isn’t going to happen in a game where WvW is a side show.
Their composition is pretty far from overpowered so dunno what you guys are whining about, also stacking boons has been meta since the game came out. “Boonshare” specifically refers to mesmers and normally involves stacking quickness/resistance.
A group on comms alone nearly doubles the effectiveness of the group. Besides boonshare with a Tempest, Guardian, Warrior, Scrapper, etc is meta. Throw in Durability runes and boonshare happens auto-magically.
The “whinning” is that someone posted a vanity video of a fight they should win.
+1 for the swords popping sooner, but I think the marking/flag scouts should be an upgrade.
Marking players significantly increased the amount of fights at scout flags. That marking system creates far more fights and that is just a good thing in WvW. Why lock a feature that creates more fights behind a guild upgrade?
Its not solved because they dont exist.
Except for a few people which run full bunker ele or stealth condi theif which shoot you couple of times hide and run away there is nothing to fight.
BS… I roam about 3 hours each day and log over 200 roaming kills each session. I find all sorts classes and builds to kill. Go to your BL and defend those southern camps. In any tier you will not be bored for long.
Aside from ascended items that are extremely rare drops, virtually nothing that drops is worth having.
Wait until you are 80, buy exotic and fill in with ascended gear as you find it. It is worth leveling up your crafting to make ascended weapons as those hit harder. Logging in every day (even if you don’t play that day) will generate laurels which are best spent on ascended amulets and accessories from the laurel vendor. Ascended rings tend to drop somewhat frequently and far more frequently than any other type of ascended.
The T4 match is egregious leaving players that are looking for less blobbing nowhere to play. It might be OK if CD wasn’t so stacked but at the very least they should have moved up after the first week.
I have gotten to a point where I can solo flip a camp just as the swords on the camp pop. That is FAR too late unless someone is basically already very near the camp.
Swords on camps should pop the instant a player (and not a PvE creature) hits or is noticed by a guard. Even better in my opinion is if camps worked like flag scouts where players were instantly marked.
Still a 6 person group, I haven’t counted but we probably got 30+ kills in that 5 minute fight. We also didn’t take the camp, we finally got wiped before being able to lol.
When we run five deep it generally takes 10+ to even make a dent. Even then they better be pretty decent players. Between our Tempest and Guardian running Durability, it takes a small army just to drop those two and the buffs, fields, AoE flying off them just grinds most builds down.
The videos are hardly worth posting because unorganized roamers running solo builds rather than skirmish builds just aren’t a real contest nor are they meant to be. I think that is what most on here are reacting to… a video of a skirmish crew on comms hitting roamers.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
Dire and Plex are probably one of if not the most powerful roaming set out there right now. My current build is nigh unkillable in a 1v1 with only a few builds able to bring it to a draw.
Course Durability runes on pretty much anything is just as OP.
We are into this now what, 2 or 3 years?
The score system was poor before linking. Post linking nobody has any idea how strong or weak a set of linked servers will perform. Using prior scores that have no relevance to a current match is stupid.
Gank groups farming in N Camp is one notch above spawn camping. Killing roamers with a skirmish crew isn’t much of a challenge. This is especially true when they siege it up.
Nothing wrong with blowing up the camp and moving on but against non-comm, unoptimized roaming builds you should win that fight every time.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
This still… good lord this class is an easy kill for some builds and easy to move past by any decent player.
Don’t bring a knife to a trap fight.
“winning” in this context implies some gain. There is no “winning” in wvw on a large scale as practically nobody considers the score any measure of a servers success. The rewards also suck outside of PvD farming or blobbing neither of which are “wins”.
At this point WvW is simply an activity with no stakes.
i can think of 6 spots off the top of my head. with 1 of em being literally impossible to defend while in towers (which is klovan).
Almost all towers have a weak spot but some are annoyingly so since hitting the ground underneath the wall damages the wall. Veloka (under bridge) and Langor (the cliff side) are particularly problematic.
That said, it is part of the game and probably shouldn’t be changed at this late date. I do wish Klovan and Wild Creek had spots that allowed for better counter siege course it is offset by Aldons and Jerri being the most difficult to take when a server defends well.
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