2) there is also a possibility were people could scam the bonus “even” fractals
There’s no system in place that limits people’s ability to do even-level fractals over and over if they please. And if someone was looking to quickly catch up, why wouldn’t they chain the faster odd-leveled fractals? You’re seeing the act of doing odd leveled fractals as some sort of horrid punishment that must be inflicted on people who want to increase their fractal level and this new system doesn’t require that, but all the new system is really doing is making it a choice between faster runs or higher loot runs like it should’ve been in the first place.
get rid of the ability to autotarget things with the game’s locking system. The distinction is subtle, but important, and far too many players still don’t understand the difference.
they should make just make thiefs visible but untargetable then.
Which has been suggested before, and would also “fix” stealth creating extra issues with culling. The main problem with it is that it would leave stealth useless in a deception sense against most skilled players. Some sort of middle ground would be most preferable.
Mobs tend to finish their current action when confronted with stealth and only give up and wander away when they finish whatever they’re doing and start their “what should I do next?” cycle. The problem is smoke bomb is so short of a stealth duration that you’ll either miss that phase entirely, or the mob won’t really have time to go anywhere before re-aggroing when you re-appear.
Your best bet is to time it to coincide with a shadow escape so you’ll be out of natural re-aggro range after you pop stealth.
All in all, it is a pretty sad #3 in PvE, but you can make it work.
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2. You can target the thief while they’re being culled. Stealth does drop immediately, allowing tab targeting even before the model is visible.
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Being able to target what can’t be seen is considered a bug. The main purpose of stealth is to keep you safe from being targetted/spotted and from being attacked directly by a non-aoe attack.
Not when it comes to culling it isn’t. You should be (and are) able to target people who are under the effects of culling since a culled player is not under the effect of any mechanic which should prevent it. Culling is not stealth and does not grant the benefits of stealth beyond no model being present.
And the only non-AE attacks that stealth prevents are some unique target-required skills like necromancers have. Most non-AE attacks work just fine against stealthed targets, stealth isn’t intended to stop attacks or reduce damage, just get rid of the ability to autotarget things with the game’s locking system. The distinction is subtle, but important, and far too many players still don’t understand the difference.
Serious question for the people that believe “stealth is OP”. Let’s pretend that stealth has
been abolished from the game: What can the thief profession do to protect themselves
from other profession abilities? (Dodging and running are standard tactics for everyone,
so those answers render invalid for this question)…Let’s see someone answer that
Same thing thieves do now, use superior mobility to dictate favorable range. It is useless hypothesizing what would happen if stealth wasn’t around to make thieves survivable when it doesn’t fill that role now unless your enemy is incompetent. Stealth isn’t, nor has it ever been, the primary reason thieves are hard to kill. Anyone can catch and kill a stealthed enemy that is less mobile than they are, and nobody can catch and kill an enemy that is more mobile than they are regardless of how well they can see them. “But stealth is how thieves survive!” is a strawman, stealth is heavily ingrained in most thief builds, but it isn’t the primary defensive mechanic.
Skill shots are fine if they take an investment in skill for a proportionately good reward. FS, by contrast, takes an investment in skill to not be absolutely terrible, and even then it isn’t very good.
FS lands about as often and reliably as anything else for me after learning to leave my camera facing alone or how to interfere with it right. It really only needs to lock out your own movement aside from dodging and lock on target until the second hit or animation is done like the ranger sword 3 and it will be just fine even for general player use.
The problem is: Given perfected use of FS, it is still a bad skill. If it was about becoming proficient for the payoff of a good skill this would be another matter entirely. Its only unique use is for hitting through block and removing boons, both of which it would do better if it was a single strike.
It’d be like if they added an aftercast to C&D where you did a little jig and got 3 seconds of swiftness. Would the skill be more powerful? Technically. Would skilled players still be able to utilize it? Sure. But it would become a bad skill nonetheless.
An ability with good player skill scaling is usable by a newbie and becomes even more effective in the hands of a more skilled player. FS is unusable in its basic form, and doesn’t become much better as you master it. Anything that tears control of your character away from you for an extended period of time is going to ultimately work against skilled use since it reduces choice and makes you predictable.
I used this ability once in wvw and it missed on both hits. I lol’d.
This is because Flanking Strike is one of the few abilities we have that actually takes skill to use. You have to aim it.
Skill shots are fine if they take an investment in skill for a proportionately good reward. FS, by contrast, takes an investment in skill to not be absolutely terrible, and even then it isn’t very good.
its the stupid amount of stealth abilities thieves have in combination with the culling bug that gives them a massive advantage in any fight. A good thief can pop in and out of stealth before you even have a chance to hit them. They need to increase the revealed debuff to counter the culling issue. 3 seconds is not even close to being long enough, also AoE should knock them out of stealth if you are lucky enough to guess where they are. (most AoE abilities are on a long cooldown so its a fair trade)
1. You don’t need to target the thief to hit them with the exception of a few abilities (necro skills mostly).
2. You can target the thief while they’re being culled. Stealth does drop immediately, allowing tab targeting even before the model is visible.
If you’re relying on being able to both see and target a stealthed enemy to fight them, you’re going to be at a huge disadvantage to people that combat them without those requirements.
There are a number of problems with AE unliterally knocking thieves out of stealth, not the least of which are what you define as AE.
I would put forth that since WvW action affects far more people than PvE action, there is much greater profit potential in WvW in a service sense, even if PvE is clearly superior in a goods sense.
Are you trying to argue that more players take part in WvW than PvE? If so I wonder where you’re getting that idea.
There’s a lot of potential to capitalize on services in WvW, but few have yet bothered.
Explain?
Mercenary work, mostly. That is how other games have capitalized on a pure PvP method of making large sums of money. Make guild -> get incredibly good -> have people pay you to fight. There are other services markets that could be exploited, but mercenary work is the most obvious, and very easy to implement with GW2’s current server transfer paradigm. There are a few mercenaries that exist as-is, but there’s certainly potential there for some larger players.
The “players taking part” comment is mostly due to the fact that selling dungeon-running services can necessarily only service, at most, 4~ customers at a time, whereas WvW services markets can benefit (and therefore exact fees from) hundreds or thousands of players.
Stealth Skills
Thieves have access to skills that allow them to enter stealth mode, which renders them invisible to enemies. When in stealth, their first weapon skill slot is replaced by a powerful stealth skill. For instance, when thieves equipped with daggers enter stealth, they receive a skill called Backstab, which does more damage when thieves strike from behind.
That was taken straight from The profession description ON THIS WEBSITE… And it is not a base mechanic for the class? Hmmmm…..
No more than traps or signets, no. Stealth skills are a skill type, but they are not a base mechanic. They’re a type of skill you can specialize in, not an omnipresent feature of the profession that is ingrained regardless of skill choice. It’d be similar to calling banners a “base mechanic” of all warriors.
If they want to have stealth then they should have to sacrifice some burst.
How would you propose this be accomplished?
I have a good counter to it. And I actually think this is viable. If a thief goes stealth for too long fighting an NPC and actually just a few seconds the NPC leaves combat mode and starts to regain health… Same should happen with players… Thereby countering SOME of the burst and so on.
Stealth usually only lasts 3 seconds, either the timer for the person to leave combat is over 3 seconds, in which case it won’t affect the thief, or the timer for the person to leave combat is under 3 seconds and it is totally broken. And it’d still only work in 1v1 scenarios with no mobs around, since any other enemies engaged would keep someone in combat mode. Furthermore, it’d break combat off for the thief too, which would be utterly broken for hiding/escaping.
If they want to have stealth then they should have to sacrifice some burst.
How would you propose this be accomplished?
Look here for starters:
My personal vote is not to kill thief burst/stealth builds, but to just make it harder to pull off so its not just a matter of spamming a few buttons for a 2-3 second kill. It should take several rapid, various attacks, multiple CCs mixed in, key positioning (at least BS requires this), and timing (NOT SPAMMING) to down someone in several (5-6) seconds. But hey, I think most burst builds are OP in this game from many professions. I’d rather see lower damage skills with lower CDs across the board.
It’s really not a hard concept, and applying it to the thief would mean lowering damage on certain skills (mostly auto attacks including stealth skills, but also probably CnD and HS too), while giving their weapons skills (especially melee weapons) better CC and defensive tools (weakness, daze, and vigor come to mind), so they don’t get blown up when their burst doesn’t instakill everyone with less than 2000 T/V.
That is a solution to a separate issue though. Increasing TTK across the board is an idea worth considering, but it doesn’t have much to do with stealth or thieves “sacrificing burst”. If the new paradigm for a burst kill becomes 5 seconds for all professions instead of 3 seconds for all professions and the thief can still do 5 second kills, then the thief hasn’t sacrificed anything.
Currently I don’t even think hits on stealth people show up in the combat log on the attacker’s side.
They do, and it is exceptionally useful when hunting stealthed targets. A large portion of the population is either ignorant of this or unwilling to use this, and it serves to increase the already large gap in stealth effectiveness vs. people who know what they’re doing and people who don’t.
My question to you: Would you still feel mobile enough to drop SoS if you weren’t running a short bow?
With signet synergy and skill at using the active it can be a combat asset, but the vast majority of thieves aren’t using it that way, and the ones that are using it that way have enough skill to make other utilities better.
This is exactly the answer I was hoping to hear. Thanks!
I’d put it in the same vein as using no-offhand weapon sets to destroy people. If you’re good enough to make it work, you’ll do even better with something else.
When people see a thief going stealth for a few seconds, they usually spend this time using heal, because it’s the only thing they can do besides AoE. That means, C&D encourages them to heal, and tactical strike interrupts it. With shadow arts 15, C&D stealth lasts 4 seconds, and with acribatics 10 (fleet shadow) you will pretty much always land it.
So your point is that TS is better because people don’t know what they’re doing against thieves? When a thief stealths is a really terrible time to burn a heal.
I’ll amend my statement: Against a competent opponent, headshot fills the role far better because you’re proactively taking an action instead of hoping your opponent makes a mistake you can exploit.
By the way, in a straight out race, an ele with D/D can outrun a thief, especially now their signet matches the thief’s speed signet.
1. No, they can’t. D/D ele has superior mobility to your average thief, but your average thief isn’t using anywhere near all of their mobility tools.
2. If you’re ever benefiting from a speed signet then you let your swiftness drop, so you’re doing it wrong.
Well Flanking strike is one of the best (if not) the best sword skill so i really do hope they never change it. If at this point you haven’t figured out a way to make it hit 90%. you really need to go back to the drawing board and figure it out. even when it flings you in a random direction who cares. it gives you enough time to walk into range before your second strike starts.
A dodge, Boon remover, plus 1/4 More dmg then Cnd.
You’re, I believe, the second person I’ve ever seen on these forums that considers FS good. The only thing that FS truly excels at is spammable boon removal, a role it’d be an order of magnitude better at filling if it didn’t have a bunch of other poorly-implemented stuff tacked on. The damage is mediocre, even with the skill to consistently offset the poor tracking on it, and the evasion takes up far too small of a portion of the total channel time.
A 4 initiative strike that does FS’ damage straight-up? Awesome. A 4 initiative strike that does a weaker strike and removes a boon straight-up? Awesome. A 4 initiative strike that reliably evades in place with less damage? Awesome. Poorly implementing all three into one ability is like mixing steak, popcorn, and gummy bears and then expecting it to be good.
My question to you: Would you still feel mobile enough to drop SoS if you weren’t running a short bow?
Three things:
1. Decent Acrobatics synergy negates much of the use of SoS’ passive for combat purposes.
2. Heartseeker is arguably superior for mobility to shortbow’s IA in flat out speed. So your question should really be “if you weren’t running a short bow or a main hand dagger”.
3. Arguably the most useful attribute of SoS’ passive, its ability to be used for lazy long-distance travel, doesn’t require it to continue to be slotted when you’re actually ready to fight. There’s no reason not to slot in SoS any time you have to run a long distance and slot it back out for a superior combat utility when you’re ready to fight.
The debate about SoS usually ends the same way: With signet synergy and skill at using the active it can be a combat asset, but the vast majority of thieves aren’t using it that way, and the ones that are using it that way have enough skill to make other utilities better. The primary reason people slot it is for laziness, and that is just fine.
Which idiot would be paying 15g for that dungeon if you could also just do it in a good party? If you do want to give so much money for a spot then ok why not? It’s their own dumbness..
Price is all about supply and demand, though. 15g is perfectly reasonable if the person can make 15g faster than they could complete the dungeon themselves. While that is a high bar as it stands, the market dictates that it’ll continue to balance out until price hits equilibrium. If people are paying 15g but the work isn’t “worth that much” (IE, there are people willing to do it cheaper), more dungeon runners will join the suppliers and compete with eachother until the price drops.
It is easy to make the mistake that, because a certain amount of money seems like a lot to one person, it is a lot to everyone. If you’re pulling in >50g/hr, paying someone else to run dungeons for you certainly seems like a better proposition than if you’re only pulling in 3-4g/hr.
PvE is a much faster way to make money / gear than WvW… MUCH faster.
I would put forth that since WvW action affects far more people than PvE action, there is much greater profit potential in WvW in a service sense, even if PvE is clearly superior in a goods sense. There’s a lot of potential to capitalize on services in WvW, but few have yet bothered.
If your suggesting that the loot system is in no way affected by their business strategy you are sorely mistaken. Why do you think they toned down the gold you received doing AC runs, people were making too much money.
/chinscratch
More gold entering into the economy = inflation. Inflation = better gems->gold conversion. Better gems->gold conversion = more demand for gems*. More demand for gems = more microtransactions. More microtransactions = more profit for ANet.
I’m not against the idea that ANet has and will take steps to increase the profitability of their microtransactions model via game balance, but the examples offered up to demonstrate this often make no sense. ANet has good enough business sense to recognize that it is more profitable to make a good game players will enjoy long-term than to cannibalize it short-term by making it terrible for a quick buck. Nerfing AC runs was a demonstration of this, allowing it to continue would’ve bettered ANet’s short term profit, but removing it gave the game better longevity and was a better longterm investment. They’re absolutely a business out to make money, but good business sense usually aligns with making the game better not worse. The idea that ANet tries to “keep players down” to profit off of microtransactions doesn’t make any sense.
*This would cancel out in the case of everyone making more money, but if only some people are utilizing a superior money faucet then the relative buying power of the average person goes down, increasing relative gold demand.
It isn’t just that, the 40 % endurance regen stacks multiplicatively with your 15 Acrobatics passive and it also allows you to maintain a lot more Swiftness-on-Dodge uptime, meaning you could more easily drop SoS for a better utility. If you took SoA instead, you’d get your lost Precision back, a condition removal, and more dodge to feed back into the synergy loop. Net difference is boosted offense, defense, and combat mobility at the cost of some passive mobility.
Playing S/D my main issue was people getting 1 step away and having S#2 set to return. Being able to swap to heartseeker is amazing for this.
Good job on using inter-weapon synergy to chase people, far too little of this in the thief profession because thieves don’t get as much from a swap as most.
One thing I’d recommend is looking at http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bowl_of_Orrian_Truffle_and_Meat_Stew for food instead of your straight power/prec food. It is probably more expensive, but if you’re already running Might-on-Dodge synergy it is game-changing. Also consider dropping 2 ruby orbs for a +20 % Might duration set bonus like Rune of Hoelbrak and a maybe even a Sigil of Battle (depends on how effectively you’re able to utilize Bloodlust, TBH). Sigil of Energy is good too, swap sigils are awesome but thieves rarely get to benefit from them.
Also consider that:You have 3 UI slots! Shadow Refuge is absolutely mandatory.Whoever claims opposite is re**rd.OK,that leaves you with 2 slots,and between Shadowstep,Assassin’s Signet,SoS,Inf Signet,Blinding Powder and Roll for Initiative there is just no place left for Ambush.
Except for some specific situations, Shadow Refuge is a crutch you use to pull out bad team mates out of their mistakes. It would be better to play without it if your group doesn’t need it.
SR has such a wide range of applications it is probably the only utility I’d still recommend taking even if you feel your group is good enough to not “need” it. In a pinch it pays for itself offensively with most builds, even if your group is the kind to never need any healing. Worst case scenario its potential to AE blind with cluster bomb makes it better than fully half of thief utilities even if it did nothing else.
Theives have an aoe projectile blocking skill and rarely do I see thieves use it. It completely befuddles me.
well tho there is no space left in skill slots i must have shadow refuge because my allies gets downed all the time at that boss, then i need 1 condintion removal skill (usually signet since it has lowest cd and the endurance refill is pretty good too especially there) which leaves us with 1 slot and thats usually the movement speed signet because for theif mobility = survivability
I was on board with your point until you hit the movespeed sigil. Unless you’re signet-synergized or actually effectively using the active this thing has no place on your bar. A large portion of thieves use it out of laziness and because they’ve become reliant on passive runspeed while leveling. There’s no problem with admitting you’re blowing a utility slot so you can be lazy, lots of people run convenience stuff, but you can’t act like you’re doing it in the spirit of combat effectiveness. There’s definitely room for projectile block on the bar if you’re blowing a utility slot on SoS.
As for thieves’ guild on the grawl fractal, Dagger Storm applies about the same hit volume while having a much shorter CD, no channel downtime, and damaging adds simultaneously.
Thief is a good class, but a selfish one, which fits ideally in either pvp or roamer/soloplay pve.
This is more due to play style choice than due to the profession. More thieves choose to play focused on themselves because thief support is harder to pull off.
Most of your post is generally true, but it is all behavioral instead of mechanical. Thieves aren’t mechanically worse, but your average thief is worse because it takes more input to get the same output.
Whether this is a good reason to play something else depends on how much effort you really want to put into it.
Thieves aren’t fun in PVE.
…
I’ve tried as hard as I can to not be a stealth dagger dagger player, because that doesn’t excite me, but some version of dagger dagger really seems to be the most effective and dynamic.
Using a backstab build in PvE is a labor of love. It isn’t effective enough to justify doing it unless you really enjoy the play style. You were on the right track before with S/P for PvE.
As for some other points mentioned in your post: You can synergize pistol with condition damage but you need to take P/D and abuse the heck out of the only good pistol condition attack, Sneak Attack. Shortbow doesn’t require multiple targets to effectively do damage, but it does help, and even if you don’t try to burst with it it has incredible utility.
Your point is well taken about thieves utilizing the same skills repeatedly though, especially auto attacks. The direct comparisons all weapon skills get via the initiative system means thieves end up using whatever tool is best for the job over and over instead of cycling through cooldowns because they have to.
It doesn’t. In GW2 for the purposes of “on heal” triggers the only thing that really counts is actively utilizing a heal skill. As Frans said, it’d be utterly broken if an effect balanced around (at minimum) a 12 second CD was able to be triggered off of an effect that can go off a dozen times in one second in some situations. You’d have literally unlimited initiative all of the time.
Why post unrelated information to his thread? Look at the list of abilities he used, does that really look like p/d? If its P/D just make them miss CnD twice and they have no init.
Well, he listed “HB” and “Discharge”, neither of which are thief skills in English. I can only conclude that he’s playing in another language and the translations are different. HB could be HS (Heartseeker), but Discharge?
He used the same names elsewhere on the forums, but heck if I know what he’s referring to.
Unload is easy to explain. It takes forever to use so you naturally pull in a lot of initiative regen during the time it takes to burn an Unload. High hit volume also means Unload will usually pull in 1 bonus initiative from the crit trait line proc. Added together you can expect to regen 3~ initiative during the course of Unload, making the actual net cost a mere 2 initiative. Now getting off 5-6 of them with a pool of 12-15 initiative doesn’t sound so hard, does it?
Heartseeker is less about the skill itself and more about the play style and mindset of people who spam Heartseeker. You said 7-8 in a row, which would be 21-24 initiative over the course of 5/6 seconds. Accounting for initiative regen over those 5/6 seconds would give a pool of 16-22~ initiative. The gap is easily filled by taking the Init-on-Signet trait which allows you to eat your utilities for more initiative. If your goal is to spam Heartseeker you’re obviously going to go for these kind of traits.
You can’t just look at the pool of Initiative as a hard cap on spammability, you have to look at how much is going to be regenerated over the course of spamming those skills. If you can push initiative regen up beyond what it costs to spam a skill and sustain that amount of regen, you can spam a skill forever.
Okay seriously? Warrior 100blades can do 28k Damage… No one is calling for a nerf. I have gotten burned down by a warrior faster than any thief… Mesmers MW with illusionary persona and blurred frenzy will also destroy you. Engineers have supply drop plus a bagillion weapon skills with their kits. Necros have those fiend thingys and can throw a bagillion conditions at once plus FEAR you right off a cliff to your doom. guardians can pass EVERY single boon available to their allies. Ele’s like engineers can have a bagillion weapon skills and D/D have insane burst dmg as well. Thieves have stealth (the base mechanic of the class) Rangers have the LONGEST range weapon in the game plus insane damage with the GS.
Stealth is not the base mechanic of the thief profession, Steal and Initiative are. Of the weapon sets accessible to the thief, nearly half don’t have organic access to stealth (the vast majority if you count non-viable weapon sets). Stealth is a play style choice and an excellent specialization option for thieves, but it is not a base profession mechanic.
Yes, all professions can burst people down in a couple seconds with the right gear/spec, the main difference is that thieves can be more mobile when doing so. If anything is overpowered in WvW, it is mobility, not stealth.
Why post unrelated information to his thread? Look at the list of abilities he used, does that really look like p/d? If its P/D just make them miss CnD twice and they have no init.
Well, he listed “HB” and “Discharge”, neither of which are thief skills in English. I can only conclude that he’s playing in another language and the translations are different. HB could be HS (Heartseeker), but Discharge?
He used the same names elsewhere on the forums, but heck if I know what he’s referring to.
Maybe ANet should license dungeon runners. Potential buyers could check to see if the seller is licensed, and have piece of mind. One substantiated complaint of kicking someone, lose your license.
ANet probably isn’t going to do that, but an enterprising player could certainly create a bonding service for dungeon runners. Just have to find a trusted intermediary like the people who do the off-TP Legendary sales. Tax evasion by mail trading adds up on >1000g transactions, afterall.
this is BS. to do 7k damage takes 4 hits from a gc. With any char thats remotely tanky, it will take 7-10
Unless the thief is exceptionally tanky, this is very unlikely, mobs in PvE have more defense than your average WvW thief. It is entirely possible that they’re in the small minority that is actually relying on stat-based defense, but it is a good bet that they aren’t. There’s a very good reason most thieves don’t stand around and take hits, but Shadow Refuge forces them to do just that or forfeit the stealth benefit. Any any glass cannon only averaging 1.5K/hit is a bad glass cannon or using a very weak attack skill.
I keep hearing the market. Thats a silly argument in a fantasy MMO.
A fantasy MMO that used its largescale high-volume economy as a major selling point?
Most of the dungeon rewards are untradeable, because obviously the devs didnt intend them to be marketed.
Arguing developer intent is a slippery slope that unilaterally declares that things are the way they are because that is the best and intended way. The exact same argument supports the existence of dungeon slot selling, legendary selling, etc.
One of the many reasons that P/P isn’t very good. Luckily Headshot is not tied to pistol mainhand, so it isn’t really relevant in evaluating how good Headshot it.
Is Tactical Strike strong? Sure. But it isn’t as good as Headshot for the quick interrupt role simply because Tactical Strike requires way, way more setup. Try as you might, you cannot react to a 1 second channel by using a combo that takes over a second to execute, even if you were pre-positioned for it. TS may be a better skill, but it isn’t better at this role.
Every Thief claims the " counter" to stealth is to just AoE because you can still take damage while you are stealthed and yet you also claim that AoEing things you can’t see is wasting your CD.
The difference is that the former is bad advice and the latter is the truth. AE is a bad counter to stealth in most situations and “every thief” that claims that is what you should be doing to counter stealth it wrong. “Still taking damage while you are stealthed” has nothing to do with AE damage and everything to do with the fact that stealth doesn’t prevent damage and for the vast majority of GW2 skills there is no required target. The best use of AEs against stealth is to drop them on yourself as a deterrent, but they’re in ineffective use of resources if you actually want to pressure or kill a stealthed target.
the no-offhand pistol #3 actually has better damage than p/p #3 (according to the wiki, no idea how it scales tho…)
Unload is bad, but it isn’t that bad. Unlike most multi-hit skills, Unload actually lists its damage per hit instead of cumulative total. So on the wiki it hits 8 times for 101 damage per shot, whereas Repeater (pistol no-offhand) hits 5 times for a total of 405, or 81 damage per shot.
good luck on that. i just turn arround in refuge and you will have no clue in wich conner of it i am in. Drop 7000 hp in 4seconds you need at least 4 lucky blind hits. Not to mention that i got 65% of hp downed (stealthed for 12 sec more) and i will rally unless you continue hit me, but you will have no clue if i am downed there or i left for a cigareth
Shadow Refuge is tiny, it isn’t hard to cover, you don’t need “4 lucky blind hits” to do 7K unless you’re very low-offense. As for not having a clue about whether you’re hitting your target or have put them in the downed state, just read your hit notifications.
I get it, you’ve probably had some success with this tactic, but you haven’t done it because of some kind of Shadow Refuge brilliance, you’ve done it because whoever you were fighting was either very bad or very inexperienced. Shadow Refuge is one of the most powerful and malleable thief utilities, but the way you’re using it is the equivalent of strangling disabled people with a longbow.
Ascended gear from fractals is unfortunate and shouldn’t be used as a pretext to expand on it and introduce it to other parts of the game.
The cat is out of the bag and Ascended gear exists, it offers advantage in WvW, and will continue to expand in importance as more Ascended slots are added. Unless one of these three things ceases to be the case, there’s definite “pretext to expand on it and introduce it to other parts of the game”, as you put it. It either needs to become attainable outside of running Fractals for it (even by simply removing the soulbound tag), or it needs to cease to offer advantage in WvW.
Not really, because farming gold is mindless in most cases and that 2h dungeon run can take 5h or more (or even fail apart completly) with an unskilled group.
Which is why dungeon running, a higher-skill “job”, if you will, is valued at a higher per-minute/hour “wage”. The market works all this stuff out on its own, given enough supply and demand.
If they actually wanted to incentivize objective-based combat then they’d reward not only taking objectives (sort of done already via structure champion loot), but holding them as well. Passive rewards for continuing to hold onto objectives, like hourly chests, would go a long way towards encouraging fortification and defense, but the current WvW landscape wouldn’t really support it for a number of reasons.
Brainstorming here, but a hybridized system wherein enemy players drop keys to chests that are spawned in keeps could ensure that WvW participation is required to reap “passive” territorial rewards. WvW’s “The only thing that matters is the overall score” reward system is very bad for morale, whereas if defending a single keep, tower, and supply camp can bring in passive benefits there will be people willing to fight a battle even if they know they won’t win the war.
stealth cap is 10 seconds now, you can still chain stealths one after the other for longer stealths, just cant store more than 10 seconds worth.
Mostly true, but the cap is 15~ seconds, you can easily test it by hitting Blinding Powder and Hide in Shadows while standing in a Shadow Refuge.
Grizledorf is also right that you can permastealth, you just have to keep adding on more stealth as it ticks off, you can’t “bank” more than 15 seconds.
I assume that player-dropped loot is tightly controlled due to the potential for consensual farming. I also assume that there is some kind of heavy diminishing returns on killing the same guy over and over to prevent this, but I haven’t tried it.
Still, even with how bad the loot is it’d probably be quite profitable for 50-man guilds on opposing servers to have badge swapping nights where they all get naked and die to eachother in an organized fashion. The GW2 system means they don’t even have to go to spawn, just let one guy revive everyone and repeat. Pretty sure if player loot was anything like, say, level 80 PvE mob loot, we’d see this 24/7.
I would accept a balanced mechanical stealth counter in the same sense that I accepted more professions getting a 25 % runspeed signet. The good ones don’t need it, and the bad ones will be weaker at actually fighting for having taken it. If everyone gets a utility skill that reveals one use of stealth (or a short duration), it’ll be easier for good thieves to get kills than it is now, and harder for bad thieves, there is really no downside here unless you’re a bad thief.
Exactly, I thought it would be really clever to give the ranger and really the ranger alone a couple stealth counters, like ability to track them, or their pet hunts them down….something. It would in very least close the “stealth loop” of rock-paper-scissors.
(while simultaneously buffing the under-used ranger win/win)
Then necromancers should be given the ability to corrupt the rangers pet and fully take control of it, using it on the ranger to kill him.
Thieves should beable to steal warriors weapon and leave him helpless as the thief beats on him with it.
Guardians should beable to encase the necromancer in holy fire and leave him stunned for 10 seconds so he can’t do anything.
Mesmers should beable to trick the guardian and make all of his damage against him against his clones instead.
Warriors should be able to ignore the elementalists stuff because its for sissys and stomp em.
Nice balance, right?
Those are all drastic examples because your definition of a “stealth counter” is pretty drastic. There is a pretty wide range of things that could be done to create a mechanical stealth counter that would help the stealth fighting meta instead of weakening it. “Stealth counter” means so many things to different people and most of the ideas are straight-up bad, but that doesn’t mean all mechanical counters are unreasonable.
Same should happen with players… Thereby countering SOME of the burst and so on.