Blow up DH is solid but speed is an issue. Power Mes is strong but finicky. Either is very strong in a skirmish setting particularly DH. Two DH in competent hands are the toughest fights I get outside of Bunker Tempest/Any other class.
Stun Lock Warrior is one of the best power roaming builds right now. Not as good as DH in the fights but has more escape and moves better. Power Thief is still a strong contender but generally requires stealth to survive.
Some will run Ranger/Druid in power builds which can work but a lot of holes in that class that require exceptional play to cover.
Thats funny because i see everywhere necros.
Guardians and Necros dominate WvW right now. It isn’t even close. Guardians have dominated WvW in numbers since launch and have always been the ultimate WvW class.
Thieves are by far the most numerous roaming class but that is because they are fast and have some of the best escape in the game when they get disadvantaged. However, they are a minority class in virtually every other aspect of WvW.
My suggestion is to have commander confirmation of tactics being pulled. No commanders then X players on the map have to confirm. The confirmation window would be off to the side and optionally turned off in settings for those that don’t want to see it.
I know you can convert badges Badge of Tributes, but even 30k badges gives only about 250 g, which is very little considering the effort to obtain 30k badges.
I don’t think you can get that much for them these days. After TP fees you are probably looking at around 120g.
General state of WvW. Do you really think honorable players would play a game with this kind of small-scale meta? No way.
I don’t think the state of the meta has anything to do with treating fellow players with a baseline of decency. This is particularly true now that there is a good chance every couple months we may end up playing with those same players.
I believe we are all fans of the same game so we should treat each other accordingly… win or lose.
I have been on all servers except BG. I have fought against all servers. I move around for the best fights, different kinds of fights and to play with returning friends though they rarely stick around more than a week or so before they move onto a different game.
NSP Os Guild.
Random roaming, kittening people off, and one of the more solid WvW fight guilds.
I don’t see you guys playing (I am currently on SoR). When do you normally play?
I was on NSP a couple years ago and it was nice then. Unfortunately this week NSP has been siege throwing, corpse dancing, etc against targets that fought well or were grossly outnumbered at near ridiculous levels. Doesn’t matter much on my end but not sure I want to play with so many friendlies that feel the need to be an kitten after they win.
Power thief is being nerfed into the dirt. D/P is far less effective than it was a couple years ago.
Meta cannot be broken… certain builds can be OP but meta is meta.
As for general condi in the meta, yes it is strong but that is not what this thread is about… it is about condi thief. Condi thief is no stronger than several other strong condi classes.
High sustain builds are just as strong as condi builds if not stronger. Fighting a DH is managing massive DPS every second while hoping they exhaust their ridiculous numbers of blocks, invulns, etc. That class is by far the lowest skill floor with the highest effectiveness. It dominates skirmish, duels, havoc, zergs. Guardians have been the most dominant class in the game since pre-release and have seen so few nerfs compared to every other class I am not even sure they know what one looks like.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
I have been trying new guilds since mine collapsed but haven’t found a good home. Looking for a guild with mature players that don’t mind aggressive thieves (AKA the ones that have kittened off half the WvW population) and run Discord or similar. Ideally would like to find one that runs small havoc or gank squads. I play for fights and not big on constant PvD/PvE but don’t mind some.
Guild Server would need to be NA and open for xfer. Thanks.
Please test the dps from staff when you dash to the target and use the initiative for Vault attacks.
Unload is vastly more damage to a single target than just about anything in the game. It is a 3.2 Skill Coefficient (Vault is 2.25), costs 3 Init when everything hits (Vault is 5), 8 stacks of might (240 power). Those might stacks are easily 25% more power when maxed out. A player can easily drop 5 Unloads compared to 3 Vaults along with substantially more power on a significantly harder hitting skill.
On a single target Unload wins by a good margin.
You get a free exotic staff, but it has no Berserker stats to pick. And you can buy exotic pistols on the TP.
The DD Staff the thief gets for free allows them to pick Marauder which is IMO better than Zerk even in PvE. Marauder has more total stat points than Zerk.
I suggest that certain tactivators have a confirmation system.
For example, when a player pulls an Emergency Way Point a message on the far side of players or commanders screens should pop saying something like: “Player X has pulled the EWP for Server Y Bay. Please Confirm/Cancel”. If several players or commanders Confirm it pops otherwise the message disappears in a few seconds. Of course players could turn this notification off in the options.
If you can’t beat them, join them. Sadly, condi is the meta and will probably stay for a while.
Meta is meta. If it weren’t condi, it would be something else. At some point players are just going to have to accept whatever the meta is and deal.
I do find it cathartic to discuss various specific OP aspects of the current meta (skills, traits, builds) but general QQ often reads as LTP or at least “Adapt To Play”.
For YEARS WvW was nearly devoid of rewards. Now that vets get some minor backdated perks some PvE newbs QQ.
They flip the circuit with the vet guards even when the daily isn’t up. Pretty much every day Alpine during prime has nodes flipped a color. I have started actively hunting the ruins but the fights are too easy most of the time to keep at it.
I have long believed competitive games should never have all or nothing skills. Invulnerability and Resistance should greatly reduce incoming damage but not fully exclude it. At the very least Invuln and Resist shouldn’t make a player immune to immobilize.
Strong condi thief builds are typically compromised in some way and do have an Achilles heel so to speak. I find Blow Up Burn DH, Condi Chrono and Chill Bleed Necros to be far more vicious. I’d rather fight a couple thieves any day over overlapping Necros dropping chill bombs with compound health bars.
What I would like to see is that the 2nd place server in a match has a significant reason to target the 1st place server rather than the 3rd place server.
Currently whoever the 1st place server targets frequently gets double teamed. This in turn causes said server’s players to get frustrated and often log out or just ignore any kind of defense.
If a server is winning and has the highest population during a skirmish, attacking them should pay big dividends since it isn’t easy to beat numbers. This might help make the game play a bit more dynamic. Currently it is just run over or get run over in most matches.
I did it the hard way, PvE. Prior to PiPs and Reward Tracks, there really wasn’t a better way. Now with the resource nodes at most objectives, the extra drops from Reward Tracks, WvW level chests, etc just takes time.
If you want to shortcut that time, do the resource run for 6ish gold per character per day. Takes about 20 min per run. You can also farm Silverwastes.
Seems several players are flipping a single node in the ruins even when a BL is q’d. I reckon this is for Pips or to keep their Reward Track moving. How about they get nothing unless they take Bloodlust at least when a map is q’d?
Seems a waste to let players PvE while others are trying to actually play the game mode.
With the current setup, the least populated server in a skirmish tends to get run over by the other two servers. It is simply easier to beat up “the little guy” and the rewards are easier to attain.
What if attacking the most populated server for a skirmish that has the highest score yielded substantially higher bonuses to the less populated servers? What if paper objectives rewards were cut in half and higher tier structure rewards were significantly higher?
I know it won’t solve the grossly lopsided fights but it might take some pressure off servers just trying to get by during that time.
Shadow Arts is about group support. You’ve got traits like Merciful Ambush (stealth ally on revive), Shadow Protector (grant Regen to stealthed allies), and Leeching Venoms (grant lifesteal to allies). It was even more thematic before when you traited to grant Venoms to allies, but it still retains that theme afterwards.
Take Venomshare out and Trickery has as many group buffs as Shadow Arts. Venomshare belongs in DA as does Revealed Training in Shadow Arts. I also think Quick Pockets and Improvisation should be swapped.
If they let me have a go with it, I would turn it into an enemy teleport with a 900 range. If the enemy fails a stun check, they get teleported to the thieves location and knocked down. No terrain checks. A reverse Shadow Step… a Shadow Pull if you will.
There are three ways to avoid being killed by a thief;
or play just about any strong bunker build… trying to kill an bunker engi or tempest even in pure glass is nearly impossible against a decent player.
As noted thieves can get over 3.2k armor and well over 20k while dishing out strong condi burst. They can get close to those numbers with strong power shots using Dare Devil runes.
Staff would be my second choice since we get an exotic Staff for free with DD unlock.
P/P is way more damage against Single targets now. Chaining 4-5 unloads with 25 might stacks is super easy in PvE.
The fields seem to cover each other and other fields cover it as well. Not sure about the Wiki but from our runs it seems to work like every other field in that it only the top field works.
The main advantage to having multiple thieves doesn’t seem to the extra CG but rather the extra Venoms and always having a poison field to finish through. One thief probably won’t bring a 15 man group down much but multiples probably will.
Could work on a P/P SB build but I find utility Runes such as Lyssa have been working much better in WvW.
Exuberance with the right oil and gear is the tits.
It was OP and now kinda meh. In WvW it is stupid OP. If CG lands on a target after a full steal shot, said target is dead most of the time. The interrupt can stack a ridiculous amount of damage.
I run Viper armor and Trailblazer weapons/accessories. I run a blow up build though and isn’t meant to stick around. I used to run Dire instead of Viper but find the extra punch on Steal, Impacting and Draining is more fun than the survival. Watching LB Rangers fall over in 2s is pretty fun.
Without Dare Devil, you are pretty kitten unless you run a condi build. Anything with offhand dagger is relatively weak compared to other weapon sets. ?/D can still work but just doesn’t have the utility and requires significantly more precise play.
The only invuln that really irritates me is on the Mesmer. The class shouldn’t have high evade, invuln, stealth, blocks, etc up time mixed in with clones.
The passive Warrior invuln is a bit much but only a bit.
This looks like a good idea until a top tier server tanks two weeks in a row and gets to play in T3 and T2 for a couple weeks… oh wait that is already happening without any need for tanking.
WvW vets should get faster PiP rewards because for 4+ years rewards in WvW were non-existent. Keep telling me how unfair it is when I had to PvE for years (which I don’t particularly enjoy) to fund my WvW play.
PvE and to some extent PvP have been swimming in better rewards for years. WvW players finally get some love and some come in here QQ’ing about fairness. Typical.
They’re already the most OP spec IMO.
Wha?????
That is a bold claim on a class that isn’t particularly good in a zerg, not great in skirmish, kinda meh roaming and gets routinely destroyed in duels.
Rev DPS builds dish out massive boon share making the other players in their group hit significantly harder. Thus the total group DPS with a Druid will never consistently equal a Herald in that same group. The sustain from a Druid isn’t particularly better than a Rev either.
Large scale play isn’t about big spike but about chosing builds that strike a group balance between sustain and damage. Revs and Eles are anchors able to dish out solid DPS and add significant sustain to an entire group.
Like all medium armor builds, Druids are too much of a compromise centered around self. Not enough field spam, not enough AoE and not enough group buffs.
At the very least auto-block players that post multiple click links jamming up chat.
My blocklist increased with 137 people just since the Feature Patch.
This for me as well. I have blocked more since the patch than years before it.
TS when it is disciplined is great. However very, very few are and most of the time all I hear is yammering while I am concentrating on my rotations, defensive positioning, enemy reads, etc. It is typically a distraction for me with commanders yelling, people talking over other people or having some fairly inappropriate social conversation.
Too many people need to fill silence with useless words so TS often becomes a public toilet of conversation.
BTW Roamers and Havoc Squads contribute more to the tick than zerglings by a mile and don’t need TS to be highly contributing members of a matchup community.
(edited by Straegen.2938)
This. And to trait for applying the conditions, the guardian sacrifices a lot in terms of being able to effectively fight a group. So, no, it’s not an exploit, it’s not op, it’s not hacking. It is, in the current wvw, a legitimate tactic with upsides and down.
Carry an extra set of armor and switch two traits before sieging. Even if they get caught with Guardian runes and those traits set, they are still very effective as Guardian runes are healing runes also. Basically they lose about 10% survival to destroy siege and gain passive damage.
Necros and DH both have a mechanism to apply conditions to an AC. Some guilds actively run multiple of these builds so ACs last only a few seconds.
Venom thieves with the new Shortbow changes are worthy of consideration. Extremely durable, buffing 30 stacks of poison every 25s and Choking Gas is a serious problem for zergs that cannot keep 5 stacks of poison off continually.
I am not saying it is a replacement for true support classes but it augments nearly as well as Reaper now. It certainly can shut down a front line once the interrupts start.
You are premising the damage done by Choking gas upon remaining in the field for 4 seconds and standing in multiple fields.
With Viper, the total tick after a steal, Basil and choking gas is upward of 10k. The poison is more than 8 stacks after a steal/CG/dodge by a good bit along with Confusion, Weakness, Bleeding, Immobilize, Torment and Cripple. The total dump is well over 20 stacks.
Good players can handle one maybe two load ups but few survive the third (25s per dump). Average and below players might as well not even be in the fight.
When transferring, looks like players lose the week they transfer and the entire next match as well. So if you move, prepare for up to two weeks without Pip rewards.
Not complaining just informing.
A dedicated WvW is a player that spends most of their time in WvW. In particular those that play almost daily. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.
or…. get a Blood Ruby Backpack in a few days and spend 100 unbound magic to reset stats when needed. Legendaries are cool and all but we can get the same effect for a fraction of the cost.
There is no real meaning to ranks in WvW besides the backpack/armor anyway.
True enough. The loot might be a bit excessive on the backlog but its not like WvW has ever been particularly loot heavy.
SB changes are fine. All it means is people can no longer just sit in the AOE field and ignore SB damage as they used to do.
If I see the SB circle go up , I get out of the area and damage received minimal for the amount of INI spent by the enemy (just as I do for other AOE effects). SB now works for area denial. Prior to changes people could just stand in the field and ignore the same. SB is now a valid weapon choice and not there just for infiltrators.
Just as it was with DH traps time is needed for people to adapt to the new CG. I still see people stand around in it swinging away at an enemy.
If DH traps triggered Sigil of Draining, Impacting Disruption and Pressure Striking every second, they would be OP too. With Basilisk, it just starts getting ugly fast. Plus it eats right through stab, break bars and Resistance while ignoring the condi still procs the Drain and ID.
I’ve got over 2k tomes, it’s not a good idea
Same, but it would get me from Mithril Knight to Diamond Major really fast.
Unlike WoW, the difference between exotic and ascended is fairly minor. For condi builds, the difference is very minor. The big difference is in the base damage of the weapon on power builds but even that isn’t particularly debilitating. In WoW, being under-geared is very difficult to overcome.
Besides, ascended Jewelry can be bought simply by logging in each day or doing some simple PvE dailies or WvW Reward Tracks. Ascended Weapons and Armor can be crafted quickly with gold.
D/P Power Stealth Thief, Condi Chrono Mes, Condi Thief (several variants), Stun Lock Warrior and Blow-up Burn DH seem to be the current roaming meta builds. In an outnumbered fight, Condi Chrono Mes has no equal. Sure they aren’t high on mobility but they are slippery, dish out heavy condi burst and are extremely durable. They are also very strong in skirmish play.
There are some Power Mes, Chill Necros and some Rev builds that get the job done but they are not as prevalent. Some roll with Druid but they either have to be super tank with stealth or somewhat glassy to be dangerous. The trap build can be surprisingly nasty.
Play meta or die to inferior skill. Condi builds are meta. If they nerf them, then some other build will be the new “OP” meta. We can gripe all day long about condi’s but that is the nature of meta builds. Course the SB changes on the thief are OP.
Wasn’t that long ago boon spam was just annihilating everything in large scale… and that is still around just not as OP as it was.
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