Guild Wars 2

Kal Spiro.9745:

First off, why would you assume mechanized creatures are immune to dragon corruption?

Because all the other dragons’ powers indicate they corupt either living or dead organic matter. If they can corrupt inorganic matter, then Primordius could just corrupt the earth and stone and crush the dwarves. Jormag would have corrupted the mountains and sent them toppling on the Norns, etc.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Second, in what way is a lone Sylvari a Dragon Champion? I seem to recall beating her up pretty easily. Finally, why do you think she is actively following orders? Nothing she’s done nor said indicated that she’s is following orders. She may be being influenced, but she’s not following orders. So she’s doing things her own way, toward whatever end she ends up accomplishing.

That would be my point – it would be inconsistent for her to be a champion (or a minion) of mordremoth, considering the army she has been building.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Nope, it’s much, much higher than that. We have real metrics to observe these things.

edit: I’ve talked to a lot of people personally, and the feelings are mixed. I’d say it’s actually close to 50/50. Regardless, talking to random people is not a real metric for the consensus of the playerbase.

Look, we know how passionate some of you feel about this, which is why I’m talking to you about it and why we’re looking into options for what we can do.

OK, let’s assume the breakdown is really 50/50.

How is that an acceptable measure of quality?
You introduced some new gameplay, whether it be a new living story event, new PvP map, new WvW map – whathaveyou – and 50% of the playerbase don’t like it, and that’s considered “good”?

That cannot be the standard of quality ANet is striving for.

“Well this new feature will probably make half the players happy, and kitten off the other half?”
“Half? Wow – let’s ship it!”

That’s silliness.

Have you guys performed a root cause analysis of why people don’t care for Skyhammer? Because I can tell you right now: falling.

The falling mechanic in Skyhammer places an extremely high weight on stability and knockdown/knockback mechanics.
These mechanics were originally designed around the concept of pushing players off a capture point.

Not all professions were designed equally around access to stability and knockbacks. This makes certain builds/professions vastly more powerful than others.

But you guys know this. You know Skyhammer isn’t good for competitive play – otherwise it would already be in the tPvP rotation, which it is not.

Why not just fix the map:
– remove glass panels around nodes
– add retainer walls around nodes (prevent knocking off side)
– Move the cannon over the main map
– lower the altitude of the cannon so that knocking a player off drops them on the main map, but they receive falling damage (unless they spec into reduced falling damage – a-ha! a use for those fall damage traits!)
– give the cannon 2 firing modes:
– firing mode one: low damage, node-sized reticle with aoe knockback (dodgeable), slow charge, low cooldown
– firing mode 2: small (~240m-ish) sized reticle with insta-kill damage (undodgeable), fast charge, long cooldown

Two firing modes makes for more strategic gameplay – you can help a team clear a node, and if you coordinate stuns / roots, you can use the cannon to insta-gib a player

Supcutie – I’m directing this question right at you (and Helseth and Sensotix and other players at the high end):

Let’s pretend a balance team developer actually read this thread (ha-ha). What changes would you suggest (buffs and/or nerfs) to make Mesmers viable in the meta? To narrow the scope, let’s limit the discussion to, say, 2 Mesmer builds:

Standard shatter 20/20/0/0/30
PU 20/20/30

Command an army of mechanized creatures, immune to a jungle dragon’s corruption?

spoj.9672:

Ele, mes and warrior new heals are all good. The ele one I use full time. The mes one is situationally useful in a lot of places. The same thing can be said about the warrior heal. Its downright op in some places in pve.

The only time it truly is more useful than Ether Feast is in a situation where healing is not important, and you just use the heal to reset phantasms. That doesn’t make it a good heal – it’s just another utility at that point.

evilapprentice.6379

I’m not against some changes to thieves, but the above reads as “Let’s turn thieves into warriors with less HP, lower armor, and less sustain”. I’m all for lowering burst and spreading that damage out to other skills, so thieves hit consistently harder with less spike, but if you remove the teleports and evades on top of that, why wouldn’t you just roll a warrior?

A thief with more hp, sustain and armor than he has now, but less hp, armor and sustain than a warrior, AND less burst, fewer teleports and fewer evades than thieves have now.

What kind of class is that?

Oh, a mesmer.

Nah , these aren’t real.

The developers would have to be the biggest group of idiots in the world to add junk like this.

kylwilson.9137:

I get serious Bongo Bongo (from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) vibes from this Mesmer elite.

I really dig it, I’d at least give it a shot.

More like Bigby’s Striking Fist from D&D.

Do the developers really want feedback? If so, then I have a story for them.

Before I played GW2 I used to play Rift. The PvP there was not as good as GW2, but it was decent…at first.

In the beginning the PvP was decent. Then the developers tried to balance the PvP.

And so they buffed warriors and thieves.
And the nerfed warlocks and pyromancers.

And so the game persisted. Players clamored about the imbalance that existed, and even offered suggestions on how to improve the balance.

And the developer response was the same: we have to be mindful of scope (though the changes were typically analogous to changing one or two talents). And they did nothing. And warriors and thieves rampaged over the battlegrounds.

That was about 2 years ago.

The other day I swung into the Rift forums and saw the same complaints. Nothing changed.

Today, in GW2, I see warriors are overpowered and still dominating the meta, as exemplified by teams like Cheese Mode winning tournaments with double warrior.
Thieves are the apex roamer class, pushing out Elementalists and Mesmers from the meta.

And I see ArenaNet doing nothing to change this.

I believe history will repeat itself.

Reslinal.2359:

I think WvW dev team is the worst among ANET teams in communicating with players and address real problems in game play. SPvP team got lot of heat but they actually do show up on forum to answer player concerns. WvW team just don’t talk at all and don’t even try to address the “elephant in the room” balance problems in WvW.

Well, I think you’re half right.

The Mesmer one is inferior to Ether Feast in every build.

I saw a lot of people using them initially, but no longer see people using the new heals. At least, not in PvP or PVE.

Still seems like a waste of resources.

Most of the new heals released a few months ago are, to put it mildly, not useful – nobody uses them in any builds. They either heal for too little, or are too easily interrupted, or have some ICD that renders them useless, etc.

So, if resources are so important (“Be mindful of scope”, is the mantra we hear from ANet), then why did ANet waste resources making all new heals that no one uses? If they want them to be useful, why haven’t they announced adjustments to make them better?

Right now, it looks to me like they wasted a lot of resources that would have been better spent fixing bugs and actually making changes that would have created some sort of class balance.

I have full confidence that, if the ArenaNet developers read this, they will realize the egregious error they have made and increase thief base health by 30%, and nerf elementalist base health by 20%.

I have full confidence the ANet balance team will read this thread, realize the grievous mistake they made and fix the problem by giving Shadow Refuge a 30 second cool down.

Don’t worry. The balance team won’t nerf thieves. They could give thieves one shot kill buttons and they won’t nerf them.

Sensotix has run this build in the past. It’s quite effective.

Allie Murdock.8152:

I said won’t be as active. Not that he’s disappearing completely.

Welcome back. There’s a thread on the Mesmer forums I’d suggest you take a look at. It has to do with Mesmers no longer being viable in the PvP meta (and yet continuing to get nerfed):

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/tPvP-Losing-motivation-need-pep-talk/first

skcamow.3527:

Ok, so it appears that Helseth, Sensotix and possibly Supcutie have all appeared to abandon mesmer in higher end tPvP play:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/sPvP-Helseth-Sensotix-Quit-Mesmer

Yes, and the moderators closed that thread on the premise that “2 players quitting a profession is not relevant to Profession Balance”. What a load of malarkey!

The 3 top Mesmers, and, undisputably, 3 of the top Mesmers in the high-end competitive PvP environment, all universally agree the class is no longer viable, and that is not relevant.

If that doesn’t tell you there is something wrong with ANet’s perception of the game, nothing will.

Qaelyn.7612:

Thedenofsin.7340:

meichor.7809:

Sensotix have some great new builds (10/30/20/10/0 on youtube), give those a shot, they don’t have weakness against anything and give you great confidence on taking portal while not losing in fight survivability.

I can vouch for this. 10/30/20/10 can out-bunker just about anything 1v1, but it has so little team support that Portal becomes marginally useful. Played right, it’s crazy. The other night I had a condi-mancer repeatedly come to try to drop me on a side-node and couldn’t do it (I had Disenchanter instead of Portal).

Interesting. Anyone have a build editor link for this? I can’t make heads or tails of builds in videos.

I’m also cautious about getting enamored of any condition-based build until we see what Anet does to DE in a few weeks…

Supcutie.2538:

Thedenofsin.7340:

All this aside, I’d really like to know what role ANet has in mind for Mesmers.

Mesmer used to be very good at a roaming/decap/group support, but has not been viable since ANet buffed condition damage and buffed thieves almost a full year ago.

The condition meta has changed somewhat, but I still see thieves as just better for that role. In fact, if you watch any tPvP games with Helseth, you’ll see the current meta in action: the opposing team’s thief simply chases Helseth down the entire game and stomps him with impunity.

Since Mesmers really can’t run Zerker due to thieves, what should they run?

Yeah, he and I have started using sword torch gs with shatter traits and Halting Strike. Even though Thieves are better in the role, if you really want to play Mesmer the extra stealth helps deaggro the Thieves, hopefully allowing you to ignore them more or burst them out of stealth.

If torch was useful damage-wise, you’d be onto something. Like if iMage dealed more damage more frequently, or if he doled out revealed debuffs, it’d make Mesmers more useful.

Supcutie.2538:

The short of it skcamow, is that between Helseth and I, we have tried what we and many believe to be every possible variation that we thought could be viable.

PU Shatter, PU condi, regular shatter, confounding shatter, mantra shatter, phantasm, gs/staff gs/s-f gs/s-t, gs/staff, lockdown, clone death, signets, bunker/bruiser, others I can’t think of off the top of my head.
We basically tried them all in high end team play and we talked about it back and forth. I’ve compared numbers/ideas/theorycrafting between team mates and many players I trust and respect. Mesmers just simply aren’t a good choice, when you can be replaced by a Thief if you don’t have one (or play Warrior, Ranger, Guardian – the sPvP Holy Trinity.)

I still believe that you can be on a winning team with a Mesmer (relating to what Helseth said about how the competition is bad enough that the shortfalls of Mesmer haven’t become as apparent as they should be), but it’s a handicap that you don’t need and often means not getting first place when instead you can pick a different class to avoid losing.

It’s important to note that Mesmer isn’t underpowered, but rather overshadowed by Thief. Same problem with Ele – overshadowed by Thief.

The idea that the community isn’t innovative has been thrown around and that the lack of innovation is the cause of Mesmers being not viable. But I can assure you, my team has tried to accommodate me, and I have kept an extremely open mind about potential builds and Mesmer roles, doubly confirmed by Helseth (who has specifically tried for an extended period to make Mesmer work in higher end team play after myself and the rest of us kind of abandoned) and a few other Mesmers that I think can adequately come to those conclusions. Helseth knows that Mesmer isn’t ideal, but that’s what he wants to play and he has been able to convince his team mates to let him continue trying.

Hopefully the March patch brings some new wind into the sails of Mesmers, because currently if you want an absolute tier 1 team composition, core requirements don’t include Mesmer.

I don’t mean to get off-topic from the original post, but I think you could argue this is somewhat related to motivation.

If you want to play Mesmer currently, play it in hot joins and solo queue, but don’t expect to be able to win everything.
If you want to win in team queue, learn Ranger, Warrior, Thief, or Guardian.

This is 100% accurate. It’s a very good post. However, it’s abundantly clear to me the developers are not listening.

A casual observer of the game could watch a handful of tournaments and come to the quick conclusion that there are certain professions which are simply not represented in high end gameplay.

Sadly, it will be Hero-Tron

No, it’s Zommoros, communicating from the Mystic Toilet!

Put it to a vote!

OP is right. Mist form downed state is too powerful.

However, this is not the time to nerf it.

I agree with the OP and posted along those same lines.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Mordremoth-painting/first#post3591814

If you are a champion of the jungle dragon, why are you making poisons and creating a machine army?

Trigr.6481:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RwKNkwcEZo

Enjoy

This is just a clear example that mesmer vigor and dodging is a far cry compared to other classes. Personally the fact that it’s being addressed before some of the other things in the game is pretty mind blowing. Although the video itself was made poking fun at this, it’s still a pretty important issue when it comes to mesmer. Not to mention boon rip, arcane thievery, bountiful theft, etc. If all else fails for you, make it more points to invest, not nerf the trait.

TLDR: Critical infusion needs to stay the way it is, I personally believe you guys didn’t think this through.

Countless

You are right, they did not think this through. The same is true about the other Mesmer nerf. Mesmers are not meta-viable, and, with these guys making the decisions, they never will be.

I like some of these suggestions – they make a lot of sense. However, they aren’t going to make Mesmer any more tournament-viable.

If you think the developers are actually going to buff Mesmers, you are sorely mistaken. The only way it would happen is if you tricked them into thinking they are actually buffing warriors or thieves.

Decap engine is incredibly strong, but doesn’t bring much else to the table other than that far node de-cap.

I think that the OP’s suggestions are actually quite good, and would trim down decap engie approrpiately.

HOWEVER…

I don’t trust ANet developers to make sane changes anymore. I don’t believe the developers play any classes outside of warrior and thief. If they do, I’d argue they actually don’t understand the mechanics adequately.

As such, I’d suggest they just leave engineers alone as-is.

BTW, I don’t play engie.

• Increase the attack rate to 4 seconds
• Replace Retaliation with swiftness (3s)
• Replace confusion with one of: confusion (3x, 3s), bleeding (2x 5s), or torment (2x 5s)
• Allow attacks to bounce back to target
• Increase base attack damage by 33% (from 244-324), improve scaling with AP
• Apply 1.5 seconds of revealed

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

MatthewMedina.5419:

Checkmate atheists?! Does that mean you believe the Elder Dragons…are GOD? :-P

If someone asks you if you’re a God, you say . . . yes . . .

Haha – this made my day!

I can only hope that she is only appearing to do the dragon’s bidding when she secretly plans to take up arms this sea of troubles and by opposing end them.

Edgar Doiron.2804:

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

Rox helped and brought a chunk of Teq’s tail to prove it.

Yep, I thought that was the tie-in, although weak, still a tie-in

However, Bobby explicitly said, " Tequatl becoming stronger (and Rox being present) are both tied into the overall LW story".

Rox’s presence is, albeit poorly, tied in. However, Tequatl becoming stronger is not.

We are only 1 (or 2) patches left before the end of the Living World story and there has been no mention of Tequatl.

Several months ago Bobby said:

Maybe I wasn’t clear in my other post. Tequatl becoming stronger (and Rox being present) are both tied into the overall LW story. More will be revealed later.

We only have 1, maybe 2, patches left before the end of the LW story and we have nothing that even smells of Tequatl.

Will Tequatl be tied into the overall LW story in the next 2 patches? Y/N?

Were there any optimizations for AMD CPUs?

I think I cracked the code. It’s weird – it has these same letters appearing over and over again:

BESURETODRINKYOUROVALTINE

My guess is Bobby got his wife to do the new voice parts, which scored him many brownie points with ANet for saving money and wife-points by getting his wife to be a star.

I have a similar thought:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Mordremoth-painting/first#post3591814

I posted this elsewhere, but thought it may generate more discussion here:

With the EOTM patch pending, I wanted to post my thoughts on Scarlet.

First, the questions.

1. What is Scarlet doing?
2. Why is she doing it?

First question: What is Scarlet doing?

According to Taimi, she is looking for something. That’s a safe bet to make. So, what is she looking for?

We are not sure. However, she has built:

• thumping devices
• machine minions
• airships
• mega lasers
• poisons
• drilling machines (presumably, based upon schematics in her office)

From this, I conclude she is looking for something underground.

OK, so what is she looking for? Really I only have 1 conclusion based upon what has been discussed (or not discussed) in GW2: a dragon. Using some meta-gaming, we know Primordius will be the last, biggest baddie, so ANet will save him until later.

That leaves us with: Mordremoth, the jungle dragon.

Mordremoth exists and is awake – we know this. However, we have not seen evidence of its corruption similar to what we have seen with the other dragons.

I hypothesize this is the case because Mordremoth corrupts nature from under the earth. It controls plant life and various earth-dwelling invertibrae (i.e. worms).

The 3 headed giant worm, I suspect, is a champion of Mordremoth. I also suspect the giant jungle worm is a minion of Mordremoth. If this is true, this means the jungle dragon has infected large, geographically separate regions across Tyria. (If the 3 headed worm is that big, imagine how big the dragon is!)

How has it accomplished this? I suggest it has done this subterraneously. I believe Mordremoth is some bizarre tree-like dragon that exists mostly under the earth. It has slowly spread its root system across much of Tyria, corrupting organisms along the way.

Now, is Scarlet working for the dragon or against it? I’d say against it. Why? If she were championing for the Dragon, then we would see her commanding an army of plant-like life and trying to acquire sources of magic for the elder dragon. Instead, we see her using the magics for her own benefit and building machines to do her bidding. That sounds pretty anti-Jugle Dragon, if you ask me.

Scarlet has been building an kitten nal of weaponry designed to kill Mordremoth:

• Flame legion weapons (fire is no friend of plant life)
• tunneling machines to dig deep
• clockwork machines (cannot be corrupted by Mordremoth)
• giant drills
• a super-poison injector
• toxic hybrids that may poison plant-life

If Mordremoth has corrupted much of Tyria and lies beneath the surface, then anywhere you stand may be on top of the enemy. So where does one fight from? Well, the skies! Here is where the Aetherblade ships come in. From here, Scarlet can attack with impunity, far from the reach of Mordremoth.

I think these thumpers aren’t looking for a single thing. I think she is mapping out Mordremoth’s root system (the ley lines of Mordremoth, if you will).

All roots lead back to the trunk. By mapping out the root system, Scarlet will pinpoint the location of Mordremoth’s core.

Now, onto question #2. Why is she doing this?

I have no idea!
What I believe, however, is that the remaining questions which I have not answered are tied into her motivation
Why did she go crazy?
What did she see in the Mists?
Why did she kill Omadd?
Why is she attacking Mordremoth now?
Why is she attacking the citizens of Tyria?
What do the steam creatures have to do with this?

I can only speculate that, while in the Mists, something got a hold of Scarlet and, when she came back, she wasn’t alone.
I’m guessing whatever came back with her is somehow tied to the Steam creatures and has a giant hair across its rear about all things organic.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Or is the enemy of my enemy my enemy?

Or what if, like a plant, Mordremoth has a root system.

…and that root system is spread across Tyria?

Arganthium.5638:

Thedenofsin.7340:

Arganthium.5638:

For crying out loud, you people… Helseth is a terrible Mesmer/person anyways, so it’s not like I care that much. I’ve played a thief since the beginning, and I can easily defeat them with my Mesmer. They’re not UP but Mesmers are easily on the same level as they are.

This is simply untrue. Helseth is quite good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYz9RbHHE4w

So let me see if I understand what you’re trying to do here: you picked out a SoloQ game that was already selected very specifically by Helseth and are using that as evidence that Helseth is a good player. Okay, sure, maybe we can let that go past. But how good were the other players? They all sucked terribly. They hardly made any offensive maneuvers against Helseth’s team, and their technique was absolutely godawful (not to mention- no idea how that thief was so easy to kill. If Helseth hadn’t played so passively/defensively… But I’ll get to that in a second.) They had three (!) guardians on their team. Two is certainly playable, but at three guardians you’re starving yourselves for diversity. The other team played insanely defensively (and they practiced extremely bad defense as well); the fact that Helseth stayed at the far point for virtually the entire game and outnumbered or had even numbers with the other team in just about every fight should attest to this.

But that wasn’t even the end of it. As I hinted to earlier, Helseth was horrendously defensive in his play. I can’t even begin to say the amount of time that he spent hiding away from or in defensive positions relative to his opponents. Just look at some of his plays; at the beginning of the game, he sat around away from far point for no apparent reason. It would have been understandable if he was legitimately trying to hide, i.e. with a well-timed stealth, behind an object, etc (though I doubt those techniques would’ve worked, at least against good play), but he ran head-on into that 2v1 anyways, so I’m not sure what kind of purpose he was trying to fulfill. Then, he spent almost no time on point. Unless I’m playing a stealth thief, I stay on point for as long as physically possible. Helseth was just dashing onto points and then dashing off. He’s not presenting a threat, he’s just randomly walking around. I doubt I need to emphasize his other plays; they’re obviously extremely defensive, even passive (when he’s just standing around doing nothing). That was a horrid video.

Your reply has illustrated to me just how much you know about playing a Mesmer competitively.

Thank you.

style.6173:

@OP: As a Mesmer, you shouldn’t be complaining about anything other than group support. Be quiet and hope ANET doesn’t realize that Mesmer is the best 1v1 class in the game.

Why? Because 1v1 is one of the game modes?

This post is full of misinformation and misleading information.

Arganthium.56381.

Guardian (specifically a Med guardian) and engineer can easily fulfill that role as well.

A necro with no access to swiftness could fill that role as well. However, it doesn’t mean they are any good at it. A guardian would be among the worst choices for roamer. Decap engies are good at a far decap, but have almost no team utility.

Arganthium.56381.

2. Thief’s weapon coefficients are, generally, abhorrently low. On S/D, the only attack that deals any significant amount of damage is LS, which misses at least 50% of the time anyways due to practical reasons.

Weapon coefficients have nothing to do with their role.
Thieves have the best burst damage in the game.

Arganthium.56381.

3. Not many thief builds have good mobility; that tends to be the realm of S/D, if anything.

S/D, D/D have the best mobility in the game, bar none. No one cares about other builds that aren’t used in the meta.
Thieves are the only profession that can literally cross the entire map of Khylo in 6 seconds.

Arganthium.56381.

4. Thieves are the most survivable out of all of those classes? They have the lowest base health and medium armor, not to mention that you have to go full zerker (in general) to beat other classes. 0/10.

You intentionally avoided mentioning everything that gives thieves high survivability. Evade? High vigor uptime? Extensive access to Stealth? 0/10

Arganthium.56381.

5. Even in 1v1s, it’s rare that thieves “dominate” other classes. Mesmers can easily go toe-to-toe with them in a sharp but unclear fight (probably with even chances).

If the Mesmer is running a team build (shatter GS/Staff), he is easy pickings to a thief 90% of the time. The best thing a Mesmer can do is run. Same is true for elementalists.

Arganthium.56381.

Non-bunker guards have a few tricks they can use to maintain a strong defense against thieves (I’d give my guard 60-40 or even 70-30 chances in light of this fact). And on engineer, controlling the enemy thief can give even a mediocre engineer good chances against a good thief.

And by the time the Guardian/engineer have reached the thief, he has already fully capped the far node, and in 4 seconds he will be back at mid supporting the team fight while the guardian/engineer is trying to recap.
Conversely, if a thief sees a guardian trying to far cap, he will be on top of that guardian long before he gets to the node. Hell, the guardian could be on the node decapping and the thief can get there before it’s fully capped.

Arganthium.56381.

6. If nothing else, there are many very basic holes in the defense and offense of thieves. That makes them extremely easy to counter, once you have the basic knowledge.

Yet nearly every team runs with a thief. And with the aforementioned players switching, every team will run with a thief.

Arganthium.5638:

For crying out loud, you people… Helseth is a terrible Mesmer/person anyways, so it’s not like I care that much. I’ve played a thief since the beginning, and I can easily defeat them with my Mesmer. They’re not UP but Mesmers are easily on the same level as they are.

This is simply untrue. Helseth is quite good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYz9RbHHE4w

Frenk.5917:

Seems like a lot of people haven’t played a thief.

• Steal has to HIT in order to gain the desired ability. An evade or a block would prevent the thief from getting “consume plasma”.
• Steal has a range. It means a thief doesn’t ALWAYS have “consume plasma” when fighting mesmer, beucase it has to hit and in order to hit it requires the mesmer to be within the range (this means that if there’s a mesmer in the other team it’s not like the thief instantaneously gain the “consume plasma” skill).

Basilisk Venom.
Or, just use stealth.

Frenk.5917:

• Runes of Lyssa does pretty much the same thing, with both upsides and downsides (it cleanse all conditions, is on a longer cd, it doesn’t require a hit etc, etc.)

Runes of Lyssa is also overpowered. Thieves typically run with 6 Runes of Lyssa as well, which gives thieves 2 means of acquiring ALL boons on short (35,45) second cooldowns.

Frenk.5917:

In conclusion, to the one who said “If you were meant to have all boons in competitive play, don’t you think you’d be given an option other than stealing against a mesmer?” I’d like to suggest to check how Runes of Lyssa work.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Constructive-thoughts-Lyssa-runes-nerf/first#post3587551

If search worked I could probably pull up a dozen more threads just like it.

BlackBeard.2873:

The problem isn’t even Mesmers being weak – they aren’t. It’s 100% that thieves are just too strong. Eles need to have some of their mobility back, mesmers are in a decent spot, and thieves NEED to be toned down.

The problem is that the thief class mechanic is damage avoidance – and they are the BEST at that on top of their #1 mobility. When your defense is avoidance, why bother taking defensive traits/stats/utilities? If you get hit a few times you will still die, but giving up offense just increases the clock the other guy has to kill you.

Thieves have to be given more mandate to take some defense, and need to be rebalanced such that they don’t auto-win vs. any other dps-build. I think tweaking some of their strongest utilities could do the trick (signet of agility, shadow-step, shadow refuge) to take some survivability away from otherwise full-glass specs.

^This. Insightful post. You’ve hit the nail on the head.

Another idea would be to introduce thief counter-play to classes which compete for the same role. For example, Lightning Touch and iMage both apply 2 seconds of revealed.

Based upon the changes made to the game, I’d venture to guess the developers are too frightened to nerf thieves (and warriors), most likely because they are one of the most played classes.

Terrahero.9358:

Just a thought, but wouldnt it be better if Portal was just completely removed? Or just PvE only?

Its really strong in wvw, really strong in spvp. Sounds to me like the potential of equiping that utility skill is holding the profession back.

I think you are implying the developers would rebalance Mesmers if they removed Portal.

Based upon track records, that’s an assumption I would not make.

I’ve already seen Sensotix’s videos as thief, and I’d say he’s adapted pretty well.

It’s just sad.
No elementalists
no mesmers
a smattering of engineers
thieves everywhere
double warriors teams (Cheese Mode) winning competitions left and right

I honestly don’t have the faintest idea what ANet is trying to balance around.

evilapprentice.6379:

Thedenofsin.7340:

IN MY OPINION, it’s overpowered in today’s game.

Oh, that’s much different.

I disagree.

I’ll even go so far as to give you a reason.

Steal is a thief’s F1 class mechanic – If you’re going to complain how powerful it is, go ahead and compare it to attunements, burst skills, shatter, etc etc etc.

I’ll go so far as to argue your reason has no merit.

If ANet changed Steal to 1 Shot Infinite Range Insta-Kill you’d argue it was not overpowered because it’s the thief’s F1 class mechanic.

Your reason holds no water.