Guild Wars 2

Bhawb.7408:

There wasn’t a single “nerf” to blood magic. The only nerfs resulted from incorrect scaling with the newly buffed siphons, otherwise everything was either unchanged or flat buffed.

A flat buff? Care to share the numbers for that? Bloodthirst went from 50% to 20%.

My dagger #2 heals me a for a lot less than pre-patch, so I find it very hard to believe you.

Just roll a warrior or guardian.

You will be wanted in PvE, you will always have viable specs in pvp, and even if you do get nerfed, it wont be that bad.

Do not roll a thief, A-Net is nerfing every aspect of that class and buffing useless traits that remain useless.

Words honestly can’t describe my feelings toward this…

Allow me to be dramatic and say I feel cornholed by A-Net for the time I spent getting my legendary sword. I have always loved sword. I hated when they took the stunbreaker off IS, but at least that made sense. This is absolutely ridiculous. If you can’t use IS to escape CC, then what is the point? Why even use a sword?

IS was the most entertaining skill on the sword bar, and now it is just ruined.

I guess I can transmute my legendary over to my warrior alt I’ll be leveling, since clearly A-Net wants everyone to play one.

This is a good change, they made a good decision for once. Now give us back 2 boons on LS…

STILL no buff to life siphoning.

Vital persistence buff is the only one that even caught my eye. But even with that, what trait would we give up to get it..?

So basically Necro’s are getting nerfs with nothing done to address how useless they are in PvE or how bad some of their traits are.

GREAT ANET GUD JOB.

Oh and I forgot to mention another important thing for killing thieves.

Keep weakness on them. Half the reason I run dagger offhand is for the weakness, it is crucial for surviving against thieves/warriors.

Between dagger offhand and the trait in curses that auto casts enfeebling blood when entering DS, I can keep up weakness on thieves when they try to burst me, it helps a lot.

Maybe its because I main one, but I never have had issues with thieves. Not very many thieves have toughness on their gear, or vitality for that matter.

When Im playing power/dagger builds I usually run dagger/dagger – axe/horn. I have wells and spectral stunbreakers. I use mostly knights gear with a little zerker for crit damage.

I find that my high armor plus lots of DS uptime is more than enough to tank thieves, and my damage is high enough to burst them down quickly.

Axe/dagger #2 will track them in stealth if you cast it before they vanish, and DS4 hits them in stealth as well. Dagger root is great for putting damage on them, DS fear has a short cd so use that to your advantage.

I don’t always run with Golem, but when I do.. the charge > dagger root > horn daze > DS fear is a nasty cc combo on them, they will be forced to use shadowstep or another stunbreak, and chances are you will have damaged them enough to force a retreat.

I am not the kind of player that gets frustrated when a thief is able to get away. In my mind, if I forced him to run away, I won. He is not a threat to the objective at hand. If he comes back, either he will be too late or I will just squash him again.

Blood tree is a big disappointment. Even though most people called it useless I have been 20 deep in blood with my wvw power/crit spec for a long time. When stacking bloodthirst with vampiric, vampiric precision, omnom ghosts, and dagger #2, you can heal a LOT.

But with the recent nerf to bloodthirst… I just can’t justify it anymore. Better to go 30 deep in SR or 30 deep in spite.

I can’t believe A-Net. Blood was a poor traitline and they said they were going to improve it. What do they do? Nerf bloodthirst from 50% to 20%. F you! Make a crappy traitline crappier. Oh and buff warriors please.

Yeah its not very good. Even if lots of people use it in groups healing each other I wouldnt worry about it, it doesn’t remove bleeds.

My biggest gripe with necro survivability is in dungeons. We have no vigor and no aegis, we have no invulns. Our larger health pool helps, but not a lot. This is bad news considering we are supposed to be tanky as a means for defense.

In PvP, I find it extremely easy to survive on my necro. Toughness + DS and at least one stunbreaker makes us very durable. You are not supposed to be surviving whole trains of players for very long so Im not sure I understand what you are saying.

If you mean we need something like mist form or blocks then I disagree. Those classes have those, we have other stuff. Like epidemic… how many classes would kill for a skill like that?

I run 3k armor in wvw with a spec based around refilling my LF bar… It takes a lot to take me down.

I think it is the worst 25 pt minor in the game… I mean for the classes that I play it is no comparison.

25 pt minor traits almost always give you a flat damage boost or allow you to stack might in some way… Thief has all +10% damage traits, plus one that allows you to comfortably maintain about 6-10 stacks of might. Necro has a lot of +5% damage traits, one that converts a healthy portion of toughness into power, and then…

1 stack of might for 5 seconds… WHEN UNDER 25% health? And when you are struck?

I mean, what the hell are they thinking? That isn’t even worthy of a 5 or 10 pt minor trait. It is useless.

I have played a lot of 30 spite specs, both condition damage and power, and I can honestly say that I have NEVER noticed the existence of this minor trait. If it weren’t for the power of spite grand master traits, no one would even consider going more than 20 deep in spite.

Garbage trait, absolutely terrible.

30/30/10/0/0 D/D for single target/bosses. Backstab – Auto attack chain – cloak and dagger – backstab – repeat.

S/P for trash, or shortbow for mass AE.

I have always liked s/p so I still try to use it. I started slotting devourers venom and basilisk venom just to land pw’s and it works most of the time.

I don’t think warhorn needs a buff. Then again I almost always run the improved warhorn trait. The damage is great, it generates a lot of life force, and the cripple is very nice too since I melee a lot. Swiftness is a bonus to me.

As far as the daze is concerned… yeah it could be better. The main thing I would ask for is for it to be instant. Its hard to interrupt some casts when you have to cast your daze. But with the trait I believe its a 3 second AE daze on 25 sec cooldown.. thats pretty nice.

I do use dagger offhand more often in pvp, but that mostly because I find weakness to be essential for killing thieves and warriors, and the condition transfer to be extremely helpful in all match-ups.

Its not full celestial, but P/D hybrid builds are pretty good in wvw, they deal more damage than full conditions, with slightly less survival.

I can’t really vote… I don’t like either look really. I want to say the one on the right, but the colors of the armor don’t fit the skin/hair at all, and the boots don’t match. But I really can’t vote for the one on the left, because I don’t like the hat, or the big thick coat/boots.

So… I guess the one on the right.

Sorry, last post from me, but this is more what I mean’t. High armor, high crit chance, decent power/crit damage. Use wells to burst/strip boons. Gain life on crits from food really helps survival.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNBHhZakRrSPbTTjePhApYXqlIFHzyQ9YdgnPE-jgCBYgCiYLJjgQRjwAkIAIBqIastBFRjVXDTdiIq2bgIqWIAzjBA-e

For dungeon trash, I use sword/pistol for the AE damage, the frequent evading from pistol whip, and the AE blinds from pistol #5. When used properly even in full dps gear you should be able to survive.

Now bosses are a different story. A lot of times in dungeons you are asked to stack up against a wall and burn down a boss(or champion), and since you cannot effectively blind them, that leaves you with evades, which at best will only be active half the time, leaving a big window for you to get 1 shot.

I don’t really have any tricks for success here. I just try to stick with my backstab rotation and hope that my frequent stealthing keeps aggro off me, and hope that the guardians do a good job of sharing aegis/protection(like they should if you are using the stack strategy).

Those things are definitely worth noting, but every spec in any game has little things like that. Things that separate the average or above average from the masters.

What I am talking about is the actual mechanics of the spec and the options available to you. Also the risk vs. reward.

P/D is linear, rarely even makes use of the weapon swap function, and in my opinion is very cheesy. It is a safe build, with much less room for error compared to D/D, S/D, even D/P.

Compare the playstyle of P/D to a thief using S/D and D/P. With the first, you have great survival, steady damage, lots of escapes, but if you can’t kill something, you’re done.

The second thief doesn’t have that issue because he has options available to him, choices to make when playing. He could boon strip or evade with S/D, he could burst with backstab, he can tank melee opponents with black powder, or chase casters with heartseeker or infiltrators strike. He has the tools to setup effective combos with his weapon skills, and either die or profit from it.

Bottom line is, I am not trying to say P/D is completely ineffective, or takes zero skill. What I am saying and what I believe is that P/D is much more forgiving than other thief specs, that it requires less skill to be effective with, and has a lower skill ceiling or has less potential than the other specs. I would define P/D as a one trick pony spec. When you fight one, you know what their plan will be and how they will try to kill you, because they can only do it one way. Positioning and timing is apart of every pvp game, you can’t claim those things as factors when talking about a certain spec.

HS damage on targets over 50% is low already, no nerf required.

Jeff.4680:

I love the thought of Mordremoth being behind all this. Just please, for the love of God, do not try to link Scarlet to Mordremoth. I will seriously cry…

Just kill her off, and use it as an example of “What not to do” in the future. We’ll act like she never happened.

So much this. ^^

Water combat on my thief is absolutely horrible, I despise it. On my necro, I feel very powerful underwater.

Basically they need to revamp the class abilities underwater, they currently are very limited and some classes are just terrible.

If you want to use it in wvw I would go with knights gear (toughness/power/prec) and slot berserker jewels in the armor and accessories so you have decent crit damage and some extra power.

That is a great balanced setup for defense/offense.

Lol, for that amount of damage, not only was the thief a glass cannon, but so were you. In which case I would have to say that is a terrible example of how thieves are okay in wvw.

It might be fun to instagib random clothies who run no toughness once in awhile, but you wont be contributing to your team because a slight breeze will down you, and you wont be able to engage in actual battles.

I am not saying thieves don’t have viable wvw specs, I can think of several. But the burst thief example is not one of them, and if you get downed by one, it is really your own fault.

That build would be more suited to power based damage than tanking. You could make it tanky with toughness gear I suppose.

If you are going to be running wvw I recommend using warhorn on your offhand, great skills for movement, AE cripple, and an interrupt.

Our stun breakers are fine as they are. Spectral armor, spectral walk, and well of power are great abilities to have on your bar in wvw.

Nex.2450:

Awesome video.

I, like you, enjoy the P/D weaponset, and can appreciate the skill involved in it. Also have loved the addition of torment to #3, and now the immobilize to #2. While they are all situational, they have added a bit more variety to the set.

I don’t think I’ll contribute to this discussion on the most “cheese” thief build, because its utterly pointless, but I had to laugh at the list of cheese compiled by Frowny.

Anyways, once again good video! Too bad you’re EU, would have loved to do a couple duels.

Would you mind briefly explaining what you mean when you say the ‘skill involved’ with P/D? I am genuinely curious, because to me, it is an extremely simple set. Landing Cloak and Dagger is the only thing I can think of really…

You can kill people with it obviously.. but it is much slower than power builds. When you get some bleeds stacked, at in poison from steal/spider, torment from shadow strike, and confusion from perplexity runes… P/D can take people down.

But the point is, normally it is way too slow to kill anyone, and good players often run lots of cleanses and know how to simply outlast it.

P/D is great for surviving, but it can’t really kill good players, the damage is too slow and cleansing removes it.

That’s why 90% of the P/D videos you see are fighting up-leveled, or really bad opponents, either that or the enemies are just ignoring the thief, as that is probably the best thing to do against p/d. Honestly the only good P/D videos are the ones that Wild Bill made specifically showcasing him fighting players with legendaries and none up-leveled enemies. But even then, P/D is so linear that is is hard to watch. Auto… auto.. cloak and dagger… stealth regen, sneak attack! … auto… dodgetrops, throw in utilities once in awhile. /yawn. At least with D/P or S/D the decisions you make can get you killed or counter your enemy, P/D is always the same.

P/D is very durable though, since you don’t need to always be in melee, and it has both high dodging and stealth regen. So it is basically a condition bunker, but the problem is that is has basically no AE like other condition bunkers, so it is pretty useless.

You still use full rabid? Not a mix of rabid/dire?

oZii.2864:

Stx.4857:

The part that makes terror build OP is just the combination of dire gear + access to burning, bleeding, torment, and poison all while fear is ticking. I personally think that burning should be removed, and we should have another way to apply torment.

I see dire gear brought up alot when talking about terrormancer or P/D thief also. I was running a hidden killer build on my thief for about 2 days and the softest target are always terrormancers I would always average 8k+ backstabs on terror necromancers.

I actually never ran a hidden killer build usually went 0/20/30/20 2.6k armor is squishy! Mathematically we know dire will survive longer than rabid but it isn’t that much difference between the 2 in a terror build. Dire gear helps my P/D thief out much more than by necro since 30 points always go into the toughness tree.

I don’t use full dire, I like to keep my crit at around 30% for dumbfire and bleeds. But the added HP is great, I feel like a tank compared to rabid’s 18k.

As for p/d thieves, I feel dire isn’t necessary on them at all. They have plenty of survival already, better to have the added damage from carrion.

30/20/0/0/20 is great for WvW.

It is the better build for smaller group battles, solo battles, and it can still deal nice pressure in large battles simply due to how fast we can apply conditions plus epidemic.

Epidemic alone validates the build in WvW, nothing can cleanse groups that fast.

It really isn’t that overpowered. Compare 1k damage per tic to how much damage warriors do while keeping you stunned, or a thief performing a backstab combo on you while you’re stunned.

The part that makes terror build OP is just the combination of dire gear + access to burning, bleeding, torment, and poison all while fear is ticking. I personally think that burning should be removed, and we should have another way to apply torment.

It’s not as bad as people make it seem either. I personally feel I have a 50/50 chance to take down a terrormancer on my thief, and I know that stun warriors countered the necro decently(at least pre-stun nerf). Some builds just get hard countered by condi necroes and thats no fun.

I just wanted to share one of the funniest things I heard yesterday in WvW.

Someone in map chat was complaining about thief burst, and during the conversation they said:

“Even on my Necro with 28k HP and tons of toughness, a thief still three shot me with heartseekers while in stealth”.

Made me laugh really hard because he kept swearing it happened and he can do it too on his thief. Saying that you don’t become revealed when attacking from stealth over and over yata yata.

Anyone else have funny experiences like this?

albotelho.2931:

If a class has mobility, high damage, high survival, it becomes OP and boring… thieves know about it (thieves dont get mad just kidding with you guys).

Aka, warriors lol.

For wvw I like 0/20/30/20/0.

You have great survival between stealth healing/condition removal, and near perma vigor/extra dodge from acrobatics.

You still have high crit/crit damage, but the main thing you lose out on with this build is the 30 pt crit traits.. 100% crit chance backstabs or +20% damage on low hp enemies are both very strong. But I am willing to sacrifice those for the added survival in wvw.

For gear I would use full berserker accessories, zerker weapons, and berserker shoulders, gloves, and boots. For the helm, chest, and leg slots I would go with power/toughness/vitality for added survival, you don’t want to be full glass. Divinity runes are the best for overall stat gain(since you like the vit/tough too), but you can use orbs too.

With this build, I would recommend using Dagger/Pistol, and offset being Sword/dagger. With these, you become extremely flexible, and not many builds out there will counter you. I do swap in shortbow sometimes when Im in a larger group or around a keep.

I also recommend using the oils instead of sharpening stones, because your crit rate will be a little low.

Zacchary.6183:

Stx.4857:

Errant Venture.9371:

Stx.4857:

Errant Venture.9371:

Running a DD evade spam build while speccing for power is beyond dumb.

Sometimes experiments fail. Sometimes they yeild impressive results. Never hurts to be creative.

But thank you for being useless!

Useless? Lol just think for a minute and you don’t need to experiment. You’re burning initiative on a low-damage attack in order to spam evades…but then you won’t have initiative available to burst with. I’m halfway through a Ph.D. in physics, and if one thing’s for sure, you don’t waste time and resources doing a physical experiment when a thought experiment will yield the same results.

D/D is obviously designed as a condi skill, and anyone with an IQ above 20 can see that spamming it doesn’t make any sense for a power build.

Assuming it would be spammed instead of being used situationally is your first mistake. This build has tons of initiative regen, so its less of an issue than you’re making it out to be.

I’ve already tried it and I can tell you that using d/d for evades isn’t a good idea unless you plan on taking advantage of the bleeds. You can hybrid to deal damage as well as deal condition damage and still use dealth blossom as an Evade and Counter.

I do, however, believe that errant could have responded a little better.

Some people are just kittens, no biggie.

My goal was to try and make an evasive backstab build. If it can’t be done so be it, but I just started with this. I completely understand that death blossom is initiative inefficient to be used for basically just the evade and minor damage, but like I said this build has tons of initiative.

In the end it might just be a waste considering you need to cloak and dagger to backstab anyway, so shadow arts would be better anyway but.. yeah.

Errant Venture.9371:

Stx.4857:

Errant Venture.9371:

Running a DD evade spam build while speccing for power is beyond dumb.

Sometimes experiments fail. Sometimes they yeild impressive results. Never hurts to be creative.

But thank you for being useless!

Useless? Lol just think for a minute and you don’t need to experiment. You’re burning initiative on a low-damage attack in order to spam evades…but then you won’t have initiative available to burst with. I’m halfway through a Ph.D. in physics, and if one thing’s for sure, you don’t waste time and resources doing a physical experiment when a thought experiment will yield the same results.

D/D is obviously designed as a condi skill, and anyone with an IQ above 20 can see that spamming it doesn’t make any sense for a power build.

Assuming it would be spammed instead of being used situationally is your first mistake. This build has tons of initiative regen, so its less of an issue than you’re making it out to be.

messiah.1908:

which are your evades? only DB which does low dmg and consume your initiative points.
maye go for perma dodger with perma vigor, Signet of Agility, Roll for Initiative, Withdraw

Yes, thats one of the things that doesn’t work so well is using death blossom in place of flanking strike. But the damage of death blossom isn’t really the point, you just use it for an extra dodge.

This build would use withdraw, quick pockets, sigil of energy, quick recovery.. and have near perma vigor.

I realize you cant evade as much with death blossom as you can with flanking, and the damage is worse, but the point of the build is to obtain the burst from backstab as a trade-off. Heartseeker is a good gap closer too, and the added damage from HS helps make up for the loss of damage on flanking/LS.

Errant Venture.9371:

Running a DD evade spam build while speccing for power is beyond dumb.

Sometimes experiments fail. Sometimes they yeild impressive results. Never hurts to be creative.

But thank you for being useless!

Zacchary.6183:

d/d conditions.

This build is power/crit. Its a backstab build that uses more evades and less stealth.

What do you guys think of an evade build that functions similar to S/D but with dagger mainhand instead?

I was messing around with a 0/30/10/30/0 build the other day, and I thought maybe there was potential there.

Pro’s = Backstab burst, heartseeker as gap closer, more access to stealth.

Con’s = Lose condition removal and teleport from sword 2, lose boon steal(even 1 is still useful), lose a little evade efficiency(flanking/LS is better for evading than blossom).

I’m sure there are other trade-offs, but just the burst seemed like it would be worth a try.

1) Raids. Teq showed us how fun large battles can be, now lets make it a raid so we dont have to deal with overflows/gathering hundreds of players/afkers/trolls/guesting.

2) New maps. For the love of the divines, give us new areas to explore/quest in. So many areas on the map we have yet to explore. More heart quests, events, skill pts, everything!

3) New class skills/weapon combos. The classes are getting a little stale. Compared to the number of skills per class in GW1, what we have now is pathetic, give us more and make them fun!

4) Class balance. The class balance in this game is terrible. Stop with the warrior buffing, they are already gods. Make Necro’s and rangers worth something in pve, like anything useful. Buff ele’s in pvp, give mesmers reliable condition removal, stop nerfing thieves in pvp because bad players cant counter them, thieves are near useless as is.

5) A real living story. The current Living story is crap. What the living story should be is similar to the reliquary event from the current halloween patch. It should be an on-going storyline done in the same fashion as the personal story, but it can be done in a group. And please, make it have to do with the orders of tyria and the elder dragons, enough with crappy villians, hobo robots, and some random super nintendo.

I hate to say this.. but just roll a warrior.

A-Net has made it very clear that the warrior is their golden child. It is a strong class that keeps getting buffed, meanwhile classes that are broken in some areas receive no fixes, or are continuously nerfed for some reason.

Warriors can literally do everything depending on how you spec, and they are good at it all. Damage, mobility, survival, cc, healing, buffing, you name it. And they are also easy to learn.

You basically have to use devourers venom if you want to land a PW…

Which sucks because that means 45 sec cd for burst. You can also try stealth attack with shortbow > PW, could be a good opener maybe.

Infiltrators root doesnt last long enough to use for PW either.. QQ

Whatever class can use a scythe ill reroll instantly lol. Thief would be really cool, but Id rather have it on my necro.

I think making any skill in the game un-dodgable is bad design, but that doesn’t change the fact that this new stealth counter wont really make a difference.

Who cares. /shrug

The problem with Tequatl is that the entire difficulty of the fight comes from organizing your raid and not from the fight mechanics.

Compare what it takes to prepare for Tequatl to a boss from other games. Other games you can grab your raid(25-40 people), ride/port over to the zone and take him down. In GW2 in order to beat Teq you have to find a server(sometimes hijacking an overflow), get all your players into parties to invite people over, and then sit and wait for an hour to an hour and a half, because if you try to just go kill him when he spawns you wont get into the server.

Teq should have been a raid, it would have made everything so much easier and more enjoyable. None of this overflow crap, no hour long waits doing nothing, no guesting fiasco, no turret afkers/trolls.

jsduke.6537:

Stx.4857:

I don’t want to take the time to go over all of your points and why they don’t make sense, so I’ll just say that your logic is very different than most and leave it at that. I’ll also post this simple equation.

New content + old content > New content

My arguments make sense once you understand what the Living World is. Go read those interviews I posted. Don’t reject Living Story until you know what it is.

I know what their design philosophy behind LS is, but that is irrelevant to this topic. This topic is a discussion based on player opinions and perceptions of LS.

Temporary content is bad design no matter how you slice it. Simple addition…

New content + old content > New content

I would rather have a scythe but since those don’t exist in this game, I’ll settle for a Greatsword because Twilight is the only remotely Necroy legendary.