Guild Wars 2

I notice virtually no difference in combat with this trait activated.

Hit and run is the most successful way to play a the thief in WvW. With few exceptions a thief has to melee which makes taking on most elites and some non-elites very dangerous.

If you want to continue down this path, I suggest running in small packs. One thief is easy to manage most of the time, but two thieves can be a real problem even for some bunkers.

That PINK account has been around for years now and he has been reported so many times it borders on ridiculous. His account pre-dates the free to play HoT changes. At this point it is a running joke that this account hasn’t been permanently banned.

Once you know where to place catas, pretty much any tower is easy to take. Ballistas are line of sight so staff eles remove those with ease. ACs on walls are easily destroyed and those not on walls easily avoided.

Only Aldons in EBG is relatively safe as it has no natural barriers against keep counter trebs. Lang, Jerri, Vel are tough takes but there are places for catas that are extremely difficult to counter (back wall of Lang and Vel and under the bridge at Jerri). Every other tower is ridiculously easy to take by a larger force including those on the BLs.

YB runs several havoc squads across all the maps and many of those squads feverishly backcap anything they can. They still zerg but aren’t nearly as unified as BG or JQ in that regard. Getting people into TS on YB is actually a full time chore for commanders.

Having been on a lot of servers, YB is probably the most fiercely independent one I have been on.

A Dare Devil needs zero stealth to keep a waypoint locked up indefinitely. Their mobility is vastly more important than stealth. If it was only stealth, a stealth trap might actually work. However, an acro/dare devil thief is all but impossible to catch.

Add in the teleport hacks running by a guy on BG ([Pink]) and well you end up with the YB WP locked up for over half the day every day. A dozen people cannot catch that guy and no matter how many times it is reported he is hacking, still here after weeks. To rub a bit of salt in the annoyance, he has frequently teleported into the keep and destroyed siege.

One dude trolling a server and apparently Anet doesn’t know how to stop it. I feel like I need the Sword of a Thousand Truths.

For the love of the game, change the way waypoints are contested so that one player cannot keep a waypoint contested for hours out of the day by simply breathing somewhere near the general area of a guard. It is beyond annoying and sadly been part of the game since beta.

Gunflame is the ONLY non-channeled skill routinely able to one shot me. There isn’t another one even close to this one. I will say again that no skill on any class/build that isn’t channeled should have this capability. Zero. The fact that Gunflame has several other nasty effects (daze, 1500 range, burning, piercing, AoE) certainly doesn’t help the situation.

Some items worth reiterating: Many players believe Warriors need more skill buffs. Warriors do not have to go full zerk to maximize the DPS from this skill due to Burst Precision. WvW is more than just duels. In WvW players cannot see every shot coming especially at range so all skills should have some wiggle room.

Oh and if you are constantly dying to a thief, stay with the zerg when running a zerg build or update the build. Thieves are in a crappy state right now especially against pretty much any of the elites and some of the non-elites. This is why they got several buffs last balance patch.

Buy a booster or use a BDay gift and go to EotM then follow a commander around. Should be three hours or less to get that much with a booster running.

You can also do it in EB by following a solid commander around. The “trick” is to tag everything. You don’t actually have to be at a tower or camp when it flips, you just have to kill a guard and at some point when it flips you will get credit.

The ICD concept would be an improvement and a middle ground of sorts between the old way and the new one.

The main problem with most suggestions is that the changes would be game breaking either in small scale or large scale. The ICD does seem to work here as well. Small scale fights wouldn’t see OP stab (any more than they already do) and large scale wouldn’t be completely leave melee builds out.

revox.8273:

about gunflame, yes hits like truck but if u remove this, we as warrs will be completely useless since we melt like butter when endure pain wears off.
in a sea of red its hard as hell to see it coming so we own ur kitten , but in 1v1 we simply melt cuz we cant sustain enough dmg.

In no way am I advocating nerfs to a warrior beyond Gunflame. In fact I think the melee warrior needs some serious love (as do most melee builds).

My basic point is that a non-channeled skill under normal circumstances should never hit for more than 10k or so on a medium armored target. Players should always have time to react to a single skill finding its mark. Now if a player has a bunch of stacks of vuln, the attacker amasses 25 stacks of might or some other scenario involving multiple skills, then we should see big hits but only in that circumstance.

The red circles are a very valid point as well. Without them it is impossible to tell if the attack (when a player can actually see it) is friendly or not. I don’t think melee attacks such as cleave should red circle but long range non-targeted attacks should.

The thing about the DH is that it is an easy class to play so the scrub level is high. Once you get past the typical scrubby players, there are some DH players that are absolutely devastating. It is a difficult class as an opponent to manage given equal skill and while it may not typically be as “bunker” as the current top dogs in the right hands bringing one down can feel near impossible without help.

The shortbow is mostly garbage except for its one awesome teleport skill. What it is lacking is the True Shot skill from the guardian. How the thief missed out on a big shot on one of their weapon sets is sort of astounding to me.

It is the best weapon a thief has for the current pirate ship meta in WvW and remains a solid way to “build stacks”. I would not remove its “bounce” for this reason.

Asrat.2645:

We do not perform poorly against eles and druids, we just cant kill them. They cant kill us either.

Skill being relatively equal, basically any build that doesn’t have to target their short range damage and has heavy spike is a problem for a thief. Any class that has heavy sustain is a problem for a thief. Any build that is bunker with decent AoE or cleave… yep… is a problem.

We can argue till the cows come home which build would win over another build. In my experience the best players driving the classes I mentioned will park a thief, run them off or a thief will attempt to tie them up until they can outnumber their opponent most of the time. A thieves method of attack is very limited and at the higher end those guys have seen ALL the tricks.

No. Absolutely nothing on a thief is required and most would say it is one of the weakest links on a team.

Sviel.7493:

@Straegen
Since Yaks now give +3 points on arrival, camps are worth more than walled objectives in terms of PPT.

I wasn’t referencing PPT, I was referencing WxP. There is little incentive for a roamer to defend a camp. I would also add the PPT portion only counts if a side doesn’t hold it for the tick. It is possible and likely that a faction can lose a camp and flip it back before it has any effect on the immediate score.

Sviel.7493:

Doubling the circle time would work but I was hoping to make it more interesting than forcing players to stand and do nothing for longer. Additionally, I didn’t want to make them take longer to cap for large groups as response time is a moot point in that case.

As I said earlier, if camps could highlight enemy players on the mini-map there would be a lot more players defending them. We can already see this at guard checkpoints as those are now defended more than camps. An added bonus is that the enemy dots show before a camp is even attacked giving players more time to react and they won’t write off swords as a skelk tripping the warning.

Ran into a Druid build yesterday that was nigh unkillable by two burst builds. Took four of us to drop them and they were dishing out a stable DPS as well. It was more bunker than a bunker Tempest with weaker DPS but still dangerous. I have seen this in PvP, but I guess it translates into WvW as well. Add that one to my list.

Anyone else notice teleporting out of this ability often knocks you down when the teleport ends. This thing is just too buggy and game breaking to exist.

It cannot be that difficult for them to data mine and find the outlier skills, traits, etc. Finding skills that are hitting for absurd amounts of damage, traits seemingly used in every build for a class or skills/traits that aren’t used at all should be what they are focusing on.

I get that skills/traits don’t exist in a vacuum, but some are just obviously broken/over used. Course I thought doubling down on AoE and long range damage was stupid but they did it anyway.

The hacker on BG from the guild PINK is at it again. I thought this person left or was banned long ago but the last few days they have been hacking into low lands, destroying the siege and teleporting all over the place. How one person can troll an entire server years after release is amazing to me. ANet should have put a honey pot on this teleport hack a long time ago and just outright banned anyone that access it.

I am pretty sure this is the same fellow from a couple years ago doing the same thing they did then probably using the same hacking method.

Alternating between all the classes lately just for fun and came to the realization that the Warrior should have some version of a Bandit’s Defense. A utility that is roughly 2s blocking with a stun break on a 15s timer and has an optional knockdown. That skill returns even faster with the right trait.

The warrior class is ever bit as melee based as the thief and given the massive amounts of CC, the warrior needs a faster stun break and access to a fast resetting sustain skill. Even the knockdown is IMO a better fit with this class.

Just a thought.

Exuberance isn’t in most players list but should be. It gives a nice health buffer for condi, a nice bump to precision and a solid shot into power. The only “wasted” stat on it is healing and that is a minor stat on the set. Paired with Marauder or Valkyrie/Zerk and it is one of the better defensive runes with offensive juice.

Thieves perform poorly against bunker Tempests, Celementalists, trapper DH, most Scrappers, bunker Druids, most Revs, Mesmers and Chronomancers. Even some zerk based Warriors are a problem as they can “accidentally” down a thief just spamming skills or nuke them from long range with Gun Flame.

The prime targets are wounded players, zerg builds, other thieves, kiteable necros/reapers and the other base classes not inlcuding Mesmers. They are also solid as +1.

Basically if you encounter an enemy of equal skill in an even matchup, the thief is often at a sizable disadvantage. Their biggest asset is running away.

My opinion on stealth is that it should not stack just refresh. The only modifier would be be from traits. Shadow Refuge and Sneak Gyro would need a minor rework but otherwise the entire concept of hitting someone from nowhere would effectively be done with.

Sviel.7493:

Even if players lit up in the camp, it would still flip before anyone could make it there. Additionally, the 30 second grace period on swords allows a group that moves undetected to clear a camp before a response, which is not something I want to get rid of. The goal is to slow down 1-2 man teams so that taking a camp is something that more often involves several players—in essence, I want more PvP in my WvW.

If the flip is too fast, double the circle time. Making the PvE NPCs tougher doesn’t encourage more player fighting. I get a lot more fights at sentries after the HoT change because players know I am there and the same or fewer at camps.

I would add that most of the time players don’t care to defend a camp since they get very little for it. Flipping a camp is far more WvW points. The number of times I have called for backup at a camp and not seen a soul only to see 5+ moments later to flip the camp after the timer expires is crazy high.

Like the video as we don’t normally see mortars as a mass kill weapon. I do wonder why it is that siege condi damage is amplified by a players condi buffs but power/ferocity does nothing.

The meta is certainly distilled into bunkers that can spam decent AoE DPS/Condi or hard core power builds that either blow up their target immediately or run.

Every other Elite spec is abusing the hell out of their trait lines and skills so no reason not to do the same. I would add the warrior has far more reasons to abuse Gun Flame as the rest of the class is pretty subpar currently. I would add that Gun Flame is very OP but in a strange way it is sort of balanced out on the warrior in PvP. In WvW, Gun Flame is just straight up evil.

Until stability makes a comeback, warriors will suffer as they are primarily a melee based class and the CC is currently out of control.

More PvE in WvW? I get what you are saying but I think a better option is to have players attacking a camp light up on the mini-map like they do near a sentry. Players should be defending the camps but almost nobody is going to sit in one to do that.

Nate.3927:

to hit like that with gun flame your target needs to basically be full glass or close to it and the warrior also needs to be nearly full glass

Warriors don’t need Precision to crit thanks to Burst Precision and Intelligence. I was running one yesterday that had 3k armor, 25k HP, 2900 power (before bloodlust), 225 crit magnitude. I was averaging around 12k which is thunderous considering I could spam the skill a few times, it pierced, dazed, hit multiple targets, landed from 1500 and always crits.

As for being a pushover in 1v1, that build certainly wasn’t. I dueled it about two dozen times and up close it was still very dangerous with decent escape. I was getting melted by condi which is something I am trying to figure out and once players got the hang of my timing it was a problem but in skirmish this thing was rocking and one shot hitting a lot of players.

I was getting hit with 15k+ Gun Flames with 2.5k armor… you don’t need to be full glass to get rocked by the skill. I think it’s damage is currently bugged.

I started playing this yesterday to see how Gun Flame works. What I found was a pretty substantial build but has some holes that I am hoping can be filled.

The build centers around not needing precision to crit, staying mostly at range and being durable enough to handle close up fighting. What is surely lacking is condi removal. I was able to mitigate it a bit but it probably needs more.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQJAURjMdQdH24BehAnIWUCsjsQA439mbHuFXl32x7JA-TVCEABdpE0gHAgUK/Y4CA8whCgp9HWU9HAOiAvprYzwAwIICigZmZmGRERIFQEjBA-w

Suggestions for improvement?

Shala.8352:

Also come back after you played gunflame in a blob fight to tell us if your dps was better or lower than when you played thief.

I did this yesterday. I used Valkyrie and Cavalier with Scholar so I was running with 3k armor, 25k HP, almost 2900 power and a 225 crit modifier. It used Burst Precision and Intelligence to keep the crits firing. I was melting players with this combo. I didn’t have any 18k hits but I was landing Gun Flame for 12k+ on most targets. I found quickly Signet of Might was crazy good with this build as I could cut through blocks easily.

The weak portion of the build was against condi and 1v1 fights were interesting. In a pack, I was lighting players up with little chance they could kill me.

DeceiverX.8361:

If you’re stabbing < 10k on a build meant to deal damage you’re messing up somewhere. Even without the signets 10k+ is very doable in WvW.

I was referring to backstabs in my combat log. I rarely see one against me for damage over 10k. As I also noted backstab requires more setup, isn’t as spammable, is melee, single target, etc. Gun Flame is WAY better than Backstab by a mile.

RedBaron.6058:

Thief is completely OP but they still complain…

Thief is OP post HoT? If you are dying to one thief, you either have zerg build or need to reevaluate your build. Thief has little chance against any of the bunker builds and is basically only good for cleanup these days. Given equal skill, a thief is very manageable for almost all of the elite specs.

My top 3:

Bunker Tempest. One of the most OP builds running. A skilled player basically requires 2+ equally skilled players to bring it down and even then it can usually make it to safety all while dishing out strong AoE and buffing everything around it.

Trapper Dragon Hunter. Sheer ease of play, trap spam and nearly impossible to melee against.

Gun Flame spam Warriors. The class isn’t OP, but Gun Flame is the most broke kitten skill in the game right now hands down. Any skill that can hit with non-channeled shots over 15k and nearly 20k, long range, dazes, pierces and is an AoE needs a strong nerf.

Prison CC should never have been put in the game. The only way out of it is with a teleport or stability… many builds have neither and some classes have very little access to either.

At the very least the ability should always be seen. I would add it should only knock a player down once then not effect them again.

In the olden days when this was a very common occurrence, servers in this position would take the week off in WvW by scheduling runs in higher level content. This kept players from getting disheartened, fattened up their bank accounts and created a more tight nit community. In some cases, servers actually rose to the challenge but that is exceedingly difficult and next to impossible in the current climate.

That is probably a bit more difficult to schedule with mega-server but my suggestion is still applicable. Talk to your larger guilds and do some raids or schedule some PvP play. It isn’t ideal but it can prevent a server from coming back with an empty WvW the next week.

As a WvW player, I don’t want PvE in my game mode. I am sure PvE players don’t want WvW in theirs.

History has shown that answers will not reveal themselves in this forum. There is a very slight chance a reddit post might illuminate a detail or two but most of the time we hear about it just before it hits.

RedBaron.6058:

LoL at the OP….a thief complaining about Gunflame…thieves want to run around in zerk gear killing everyone but ask for a nerfing of other classes so they dont die…

Just learn to play OP.

No skill under any circumstance should clock for 15k plus and certainly not one that isn’t channeled and at long range. None, period, zip.

Also, I play multiple classes not just thief. I only logged the damage from the thief cause that is what I was playing that day. Also I don’t run full zerk as I stated I had 2.5k toughness and nearly 19k health (Valkyrie, runes and a couple PVT).

As for spike damage the thief is not the biggest DPS class any longer and it isn’t even close. In fact I find the thief/Dare Devil under performing in almost every category except mobility.

A thief does not have a shot that hits this hard. Once upon a time it did but those days are gone. The biggest hitter on the thief is now Pistol Whip and it is channeled. Huge Backstabs require a thief to go invis, pop cooldowns, get close and hit from behind. Even then it is single target, doesn’t hit as hard, doesn’t daze, doesn’t apply 3 stacks of burning, doesn’t pierce and cannot be effectively spammed.

I very rarely see 10k Backstabs and the biggest I was hit with all night tonight was 8k… The big Gun Flame shots lit me up including several in the 9k to 12k range. A few more above that and at least two at 14.5k and a whopping 16.2k.

choovanski.5462:

the dude glows like a lightbulb then shoots a huge fireball

it’s pretty dang obvious if you’re paying attention to the rifle warrior, which you should be.

With several enemies flying around, seeing a shot that rings out in 3/4 of a second is almost ridiculously hard to do. Yeah if I can see them AND I have the juice to get to them AND they aren’t surrounded by a bunch of bunker spam… sure there is some counter play.

This ability hits fast, hits from long range, hits frequently (can fire more times than a player has dodges, blocks, etc) and launches from a class with the largest base HP and armor pool.

GW2 has needed in game GMs since release. Community sourced online GMs with power to report directly to ANet would also be a massive improvement.

I have seen a tremendous amount of hacking go completely unpunished in this game despite multiple reports. The old build trebs in unreachable places went on for months in T2. Killing lords under the ground, that went on for years.

Are you sure you aren’t getting nuked by an engi or mesmer. The thief/Dare Devil is one of the least scary classes in WvW right now. If you cannot take a hit from a backstab (the only big shot from stealth), you have no chance against many of the DPS classes rolling around.

The only advantage a thief has in the game at the moment is mobility. That is it. They aren’t the best stealth class, they aren’t the biggest hitters, very little sustain and they have near zero group capability. They can be particularly dangerous in multiples but any 2v1 situation is going to be rough going for the 1 (unless it is a bunker Tempest, Scrapper, Druid, etc).

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I’m not sure if I understand you correctly, but I think you’re talking about the fact that in action cam mode you have to be pointed almost directly at a target in order for some skills to hit it, even if you have the target selected. I’m frustrated by this too. I’m not against your idea but I’d like it for a start if skills would just fire on a selected target no matter which way you’re facing.

Yes, the “hit box” which is the area that determines if the crosshairs are on target or not are fixed. With a lot of skills it doesn’t matter since they are AoE, self target or melee. The ranged single target skills are very unforgiving with the current system.

Holding target might help but could break other aspects of the Action Camera.

The Action Camera is pretty fantastic except on a couple skills. What makes it less effective than Auto Target at the moment is that single target skills such as Steal have a much smaller “hit box” than Auto Target. In a PvP fight with an enemy jumping around everywhere it can be difficult to line up a single target shot.

What would be great is to allow users to adjust the size of the Action Camera hit box. That way I could increase its size and not have to be quite as precise.

My guess, something is bugged with this skill. Its numbers on the wiki should not be consistently producing these size hits even with a perfect zerk build.

As for “countering” this. You can counter just about anything in 1v1. However this is WvW and seeing every shot coming when it is more than 5v5 is virtually impossible especially in skirmish where shots tend to hit from all directions. Even if you did counter this thing 3-4 times, they still have a couple more to hit a player with and that assumes you are only fighting one of them.

briggah.7910:

hey if a few professions have a 1 shot button then I want one too.. Correct but I shouldn’t expect to get hit with high numbers yet I still do.

This is the only non-channeled skill that can one shot me at least that I have found.

Infusion.7149:

How much armor are you running , I’m guessing you were on thief?

I normally run 2400-2600 these days on backliners because of CoR and Gunflame…

On my necro I tried going 2200 armor , with the 22Kish HP and I believe I ate some 8K+ trueshots and 10K+ CoRs

I mentioned it above… 2.5k armor with almost 19k hp (fully buffed). I don’t run glass most of the time. Several different players have been whacking me with 15k to 18k Gunflames and I did not have vuln or anything running. The CoR double hits before the patch could hit for upwards of 12k but that was a bug. I don’t even know how the light armor/low hp classes manage this thing.

Cerby.1069:

Your problems really seems to be that you don’t know how to counter it. I would defer you to the many posts above that shed light on this. If you seek more info, just go to your class subsection and ask for help there.

There is no counter to something that can effectively one shot from a very long range. The counter is to run a completely different class, get used to occasionally dying to it or wait out an inevitable nerf which could take months. I have already adjusted to the heavy bunker Tempest and trapper Dragon Hunter meta (as in avoid it) as well as pre-CoR double hits. I will adjust to this as well… just sucks that clearly ANet kittened this one.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

IMO, nothing should ever have the power to 100-0 in one attack no matter how squishy you are. 99% of your life, ok, but not 100%. EVER. My favorite so far was a thief that BS me out of nowhere for 14+k… that is quite the auto-attack…

Agreed. No skill should down a player instantly from any class. I haven’t been one shot by a thief in a LONG time.

Just for some comparison… Backstab doesn’t hit as hard, requires the player to be stealthed, they have to hit from behind, they have to be right next to the player, it cannot be spammed, they have to be complete glass (which is much glassier than a warrior can get) and even then it is single target and again doesn’t hit for as much.

Gun Flame pierces up to 5 targets, is an AoE, applies 3 stacks of burning, hits from 1500, is a finisher, has a 5 second cooldown and on a class that has easy access to multiple blocks/invulns, the largest HP pool and wears the heaviest armor. It is stoooopid OP.

Zephyra.4709:

You have not stated whether you were zerging or roaming so judging by the DMG logs with the pictures provided I’m going to assume you were on your Thief and that you were 1 vs 1’ng this gun flame warrior.

Skirmishing all day. Generally when I get hit, it is from a blind side or from long range. Seeing a 1500 range hit wind up in the middle of a 10 man rumble is REALLY difficult. In a solo fight, I am sure I can handle Gun Flame.

Generally after a big shot, I have time to react but not with this thing. I go from near full health to downed instantly. No other class in the game right now can do this at least on a non-channeled skill. I haven’t been hit by anything else even approaching these numbers. The worst part is this attack blasts a half dozen times in 30s. Even if I manage to duck 5 of the shots, the sixth one has been finding its mark.

BTW I am not typically a glass build. Today I have been running over 2.5k armor and 19k hp so full glass could easily see north of 20k hits.