Guild Wars 2

As a guy with both an 80 necro and 80 mesmer, I really don’t think you’ll be satisfied if you switch. Mesmer is a much better profession for dungeons. You say they’re just useful for portal, but I greatly disagree. Mesmers put out quite a lot of damage, and that damage doesn’t suffer much from playing at range. Offhand focus pull is one of the best utility skills in the game if you know where and when to use it, and time warp is always very welcome even after the nerf. Mesmers also have a ton of active damage mitigation with skills like decoy, blink, distortion, perma vigor, etc.

The only thing necro really has over mesmer is some more health and better condition removal.

I really enjoy the fall invulnerability aspect of death shroud. It’s one of the very few benefits of playing a necromancer and gives them some neat, minor, unique utility. I certainly don’t feel jealous or angry about necromancers and their fall damage immunity when I’m playing my ‘main’ classes. More cool, harmless stuff to differentiate professions like that is welcome. Reminds me of the mostly worthless but still fun little “extra” abilities from back when I played WoW, like the warlock’s water breathing or mage’s slow fall. This game sorely lacks that.

First time I noticed that I had the Ascendant title and looked it up to figure out how I got it, I was stunned to find that apparently I was at the max pvp rank despite never doing pvp.

It’s pretty silly that these are the same. There aren’t even that many titles in the game, and yet we doubled up on one?

I find that my effectiveness of my heavily dps traited/geared thief during fights where most of the incoming damage isn’t telegraphed is fairly reliant on the competence/makeup of my team, much more so than my other 4 level 80 classes. If you’ve got a bunch of good players and a guardian who can keep himself and the rest of you alive in melee, you can really rip things apart. If your team is all too squishy/terrible to hang it in melee, then you’re gonna have a real bad time when you go in there with a couple daggers as the only melee target for mobs to hit, without anybody giving you protection/aegis/regen/vigor/etc. And that leads to shortbow kiting at low health, because your two dodges are not gonna be enough to bear the brunt of all enemy attacks.

Against non-champions you can tank things quite well if you switch to S/P though, which I do for some encounters. I rummage through my bags to change out weapons based on what’s coming up quite a lot as a thief, which isn’t something I need to do on other characters.

Terkov.4138:

I’d never say ranger is weak or sth if I didn’t read forums. You know what I mean

I think this is actually really important, because you get a lot of people who say that they feel perfectly fine and useful on their rangers because they haven’t played anything else and don’t have the perspective necessary to see how much less effective they are. You go into a dungeon, you do do damage that seems pretty good by your own metrics, and get excited when you help out your team with healing spring. What you can’t really see is how much more everybody else is doing. How much less they have to sacrifice to be on par or exceed what you can offer.

You can make sword kinda work if you really want, but it feels like the most awkward weapon in the entire game by a wide margin. A few people are going to stubbornly cling to it, but for the majority the autoattack chain makes MH sword extremely unappealing.

It might be okay if it was some niche warrior weapon that nobody used since there are plenty of other warrior weapons to go with, but it is a full half of the ranger’s melee options, and the other option is a very low dps set focused on personal defense which aren’t qualities that many people are interested in (you sure don’t see any mace warriors around, ever). It’s also a full half of the ranger’s options for dual wielding, so I hope you don’t like any of the offhand abilities.

An effective build is to go reroll something else. My guardian puts out some pretty hefty AoE damage at all times, is unbelievably durable, and provides the party with tons of condition removal, permanent protection, near permanent retaliation, a fair bit of healing, aegis spam, some bonus toughness, and can choose between some great niche utilities for things like reflection walls and group stability. Swapping to staff gives me even more group support. There is no aspect of him that feels weak and other than sword/shield, all of my weapons feel powerful and useful. I have tons of great traits and wish I could spend more because I want so many of them. I don’t have to rely on some stupid, squishy pet to not get killed or confused and am always effective.

My warrior deals an absolutely absurd amount of damage to 3 targets in melee while dealing pretty respectable DPS at range, can take hits very well, and gives the party great might/fury uptime, permanent regeneration over a huge radius, 15% crit damage, and 170 precision. And so on and so forth. There is pretty much nothing at all that a ranger does better than these characters, and whatever very tiny, specific advantages he has over them are greatly, greatly outweighed by everything else.

I’m not really confident that Hrouda has actually ever played a good class because while you can easily finish dungeons as a ranger, the effectiveness of one compared to something else is so unbelievably vast that the differences should be immediately apparent to anybody who’s touched them.

So whatever, just reroll. It’s pretty quick to level a new character if you do some of it through crafting. I suggest getting to around level 20 normally, then checking out gw2crafts.net to give yourself a bit of a boost through maxing out cooking, jewelcrafter, and artificing (or even more if you have money to spend).

wish.3102:

Volrath.1473:

Don’t use Hidden killer?…
I’m not even using my thief…

QFT, Im Guardian onry now, at least until thf auto attack rounds get set to 4 seconds.

Scootabuser.4915:

Survivability for a lot of player comes from skill, not HP.

Anyone can get snuck up on when their one stun breaker is down, or suddenly find themself against 3 people when there was only 1 before. Having enough HP and defense to survive some crazy GCs initial burst is important. My thf is set as 10/30/30/0/0, and uses PTV pants, body, hat and all divinity runes, berserker everything else. I find that to be enough.

This is a topic about long term DPS attack rotations. The OP even specified that it is about PvE, as if it wasn’t apparent enough.

Anyways, I’d like to throw in that I prefer Executioner over Hidden Killer, even though my crit rate is only in the upper 50s. Unlike Hidden Killer, it greatly benefits shortbow and the occasional sword/pistol swap. It helps when you don’t have any initiative and need to autoattack for a bit too (maybe you whiffed CnD, maybe you blew all your initiative on shortbow skills, maybe you desperately needed an evade and used Death Blossom). You also tend to have fury up a whole lot of the time with the prevalence of warriors using For Great Justice, as well as the extra crit chance from the new buffed banners, both of which also pull Executioner forward more than Hidden Killer.

It also helps that both gambling and bigger numbers are fun.

No. GW2 will never be an esport, and even if it was I would not be interested.

Dragons are something I can do without organizing a bunch of people or even without actively playing the game. I can be doing other, non-GW2 stuff and just waypoint over to autoattack when a dragon pops.

I absolutely would on my thief, necromancer, and guardian, at least based on their current builds. That’s obviously subject to change if I say, specced my necro into minions where I’d obviously want flesh golem or if I specced my guardian into virtues. Thief would take the utility any day though.

I wouldn’t on my ranger, but it’s definitely not because ranger elites are so incredible. It’s because I struggle to even find 3 ranger utilities that I want to put on my bar, let alone 4.

I would not on my mesmer or warrior. Not a chance. Although I wouldn’t mind ditching the mesmer elites when I’m doing something by myself. Time warp is not an incredible solo skill, especially now.

Morthur.3894:

I couldn’t possibly care less what my character looks like if I tried. After all I like to play MMORPGs and not dress dolls.

You are playing the wrong game.

Ralathar.7236:

So what I hear from this thread is that there is now room to buff thief in PVE in other ways.

They could give thieves three times the health, armor, and damage of a warrior, but our rotations would still feel like unpolished, awkward garbage.

CoF armor + whatever non-CoF shoulders you like + tier 1 or tier 2 cultural helm look good. You’d probably have to ditch the CoF gloves if you play a necromancer rather than an elementalist though, and it makes no sense at all for a mesmer. I guess you could also just go with the full CoF set but then everyone will look down on you.

Brando.1374:

just count and extra one one thousand and cnd again, Not too hard.

You’re right. it isn’t hard and I’m already accustomed to it. But it doesn’t feel smooth or polished and was a dps nerf to pve thieves for no reason at all.

This patch is utterly baffling.

People think thieves are too weak in PvE and too strong in PvP. Solution? Significantly nerf PvE thieves, do pretty much nothing to PvP thieves. Also this happens every patch.

People think warriors are absurdly strong in PvE and very weak in PvP. Solution? Buff PvE warriors and drastically nerf PvP warriors.

People think rangers are total garbage all around. Solution? Nerf them all around.

But at least we get one hour of living story content that is indistinguishable from a hundred forgettable personal story missions where you follow an NPC around, plow through a few packs of normal mobs while half asleep, then kill a couple veterans. Hooray? Woulda gotten a lot more mileage out of putting the new NPC hair/armor/weapon skins in the gem store and not bothering with the sleep-inducing mission stuff that people do one time to clear up the clutter on their UI, then forget about.

While we’ve got a bunch of good math info going on here – is using pistol whip a dps loss over sword autoattacks?

Running past mobs is honestly more fun than killing them. Bonus points for it being faster.

LionZero.3479:

Not gonna read through all this, but i defenitly prefer the extra reveal second over always revealed.

Yes, you would prefer that, because you are a PvP thief. The very thing they tried to nerf, but ended up nerfing PvE thieves instead for no reason.

I keep jumping back and forth between builds on my purely PvE D/D thief and the crux of them always falls down to whether I want the 5% dagger damage + 10% damage vs targets with conditions trait, or Infusion of Shadow (gain 2 initiative when stealthing). Changing builds rearranges more than that, but these are the main points.

I find myself running out of initiative fairly often when going with the 15%, whereas taking Infusion of Shadow lets me keep up the CnD + Backstab chain much more consistently. But 15% is a fairly significant amount of damage, It’s very difficult to tell which ends up doing more, and by how much. Anyone have any opinions on the matter?

Sifu.6527:

phor.7952:

Darkjoy.3092:

All I hear is a bunch of selfish thieves that don’t use blast finishers. Should of rolled warriors. Good thieves will be primarily using SB to give might and heals and will use dagger when needed

Because there should be only one viable build for each class, right?

There are other builds that does not rely on stealth. Right back at you and the OP!

I used to primarily run a non-stealth S/P build.

Then they nerfed that in PvE based on PvP balancing which it had little effect on, too. And hey, forgive me for playing a thief and wanting to use one of its primary mechanics. If I just wanted to stand there in place slapping 3 targets with a melee weapon, I’d get on my warrior who does it far better.

I’m getting tired of people responding to clearly PvE-focused comments with a bunch of PvP-related nonsense.

Closing up the hole was a good idea. Closing up the hole without decreasing the butcher’s health was a bad idea.

It’s a very, very easy fight that takes faaaaaaaaaaaaar too long, even if you make sure the protection totem stays down. At least it went a bit quicker when everyone could just lay into him in melee without a care in the world (although even then it was fairly slow because his health is ridiculous).

High health only adds difficulty if the boss is actually challenging (and even then it’s a pretty lame way of doing things). If you gave Lupi more hp, he would be tougher because you’d have to go that much longer without messing up. The butcher? You have no chance of losing to the butcher. His health pool just makes him tedious and sleep-inducing.

As a guy with a zerker warrior who knows many dungeons extremely well, I go out of my way to avoid the gw2lfg posts asking for PROS ONLY and NEED ZERKER WAR. They tend to be pretty unpleasant people and are often also terrible.

I have most of the Arah armor set on my necro which I got pretty much entirely with pug groups of people I didn’t know, and I think I’ve wiped on Lupi twice. Both times we respawned and killed him immediately after. Lupi is one of the few really good bosses in this game and I would hate to see him get nerfed for the crime of not being another “stack up, time warp, and melee dps” encounter.

Race: Charr
Sex: All
Class: All
Armor: All quivers, including the new one worn by Rox

Quivers hover very far away from the backs of Charr. A slight bit of hovering is understandable and okay, but these things are in orbit. It completely ruins them. I’ve only got a screenshot of the preview window, but it seems 100% accurate to the actual in-game Charr I’ve seen using these.

Considering the same thing happens for Rox, it’s safe to say female Charr are not immune to this issue either.

I’m thinking of picking one of these up, but the (unreliable) preview window shows it floating pretty far off my charr’s back, likely due to the hunched stance. The new kawaii uguu~ nekowaifu living story NPC is wearing one and it seems to have a similar problem, but she’s a female so I’m still not 100% sure if it will look that terrible on my male character. Her quiver is also a different type that we can’t get which complicates things.

Anyone have any experience with these things wearing pretty tight armor? Screenshots would be preferable, but anything is fine. They’re pretty expensive so I don’t want to blow a ton of gold only to find that it’s hovering half a foot away from me, but I also don’t want to write it off until I’m sure because if it does work out it would improve how my character looks drastically.

edit: After poking around a bit it looks like I found my answer.
http://i.imgur.com/CTCPG.jpg
Hopefully this gets fixed.

Honestly it’s less about the damage for me so much as it is about how awkward our attack chain feels now. It synced up perfectly before. The class just feels less polished now.

Please ditch this nerf and go with the supposedly more harsh one you had planned instead. The one that was actually much less harsh. Preferably without making us deal with this for another few months.

darkace.8925:

Vargs.6234:

darkace.8925:

Kneru.8014:

But you can use Death Bloss…. that’s a condi skill.

So yeah, I concur, if you’re not lining up for a backstab, it’s pretty much HS or #1 spam. >.>

This post alone illustrates the kind of short-sightedness I’m talking about. You completely discount D/D because you’re CnD Backstab combo isn’t as effective as it used to be. And you completely discount the possibility that D/D can be used for anything other than CnD/Backstab.

My D/D evasion build is proof positive that there are more uses to D/D than just CnD/Backstab. And even if it weren’t, CnD still works. It’s not as effective as it used to be (i.e. it’s not as overpowered), but it still works. You’re striking me as the kind of guy who wants it all without having to work for it.

Great, so your particular gimmick didn’t get nerfed. What happens when it does? Acting like you’re working hard because you run a subpar build is also really quite the joke.

Suppose they do nerf my build. Suppose they nerf Death Blossom, Feline Grace, Fluid Strikes, Power of Inertia, Vigorous Recovery, Uncatchable, and Bountiful Thief. If I find the build still works, just not as well, I’ll continue to run it because I consider it a fun build. If it doesn’t work at all (this is not the case with CnD), then I’ll adapt. Simple. As. That.

But the fact that you consider the evasion thief a “subpar” build says to me that you don’t really understand much about this game. I’m guessing the only reason you even play thief at all is because you heard secondhand that they were one of the best WvW classes in the game, huh?

I chose thief before beta was even announced and never pvp, but thanks for your strawman assumptions I guess?

darkace.8925:

Kneru.8014:

But you can use Death Bloss…. that’s a condi skill.

So yeah, I concur, if you’re not lining up for a backstab, it’s pretty much HS or #1 spam. >.>

This post alone illustrates the kind of short-sightedness I’m talking about. You completely discount D/D because you’re CnD Backstab combo isn’t as effective as it used to be. And you completely discount the possibility that D/D can be used for anything other than CnD/Backstab.

My D/D evasion build is proof positive that there are more uses to D/D than just CnD/Backstab. And even if it weren’t, CnD still works. It’s not as effective as it used to be (i.e. it’s not as overpowered), but it still works. You’re striking me as the kind of guy who wants it all without having to work for it.

Great, so your particular gimmick didn’t get nerfed. What happens when it does? Acting like you’re working hard because you run a subpar build is also really quite the joke.

Henrik.7560:

Auesis.7301:

Henrik.7560:

Cry more, you cant see how overpowered you are, you deserve it. Finally those poor defenseless classes who take 6k, 5k, 8k (and if manage to survive) go “what the heck” then they get another backstab and die.

This isn’t even a PvP discussion, and you’re bringing your incessant whining in to a place where it is not warranted.

You are the reason I hate the MMO community in general. Shoving your nose in areas of the game that you are clearly completely clueless about and pretending that you are even slightly knowledgeable. Your complaints are not even SLIGHTLY relevant here. Go cry in sPvP or WvW forums instead. People like YOU are the reason PvE elements fall to pieces.

You’re almost as bad as Columba. Please leave. Now.

You are the one who doesn’t see it. Thieves can’t do that sequence since their stealth is debuffed for once, and by the looks, you are unhappy that i am happy about being nerfed. Nah, im not sooking, im crying for joy that they got nerfed!!! You don’t understand how overpowered you thieves really are.
And yeah, I know you are a thief, any other class wouldn’t whine the way you did.
~Bye! I won’t be reading your next post because its just gonna contain more whining!

This changes nothing in pvp. You have no idea what you are talking about. This nerf effects pve far more than anything.

Icealen.3802:

Isn’t it a little premature to be offering “opinions” on the first day of a patch? I mean, how in the world anyone could have insight into whether it’s better/worse, etc., on day one is beyond me.

That’s kind of like voting in the President on Tuesday morning and then on Tuesday evening saying “Well, now that President Obama’s been in office for 12 hours or so, what are your thoughts on how he’s doing”. Kinda silly, isn’t it? Ya, I think so too.

Except for the part where nerfs in an MMO video game are immediately apparent, while pushing forward government policies takes months if not years, yes, they are totally exactly the same thing.

darkace.8925:

Vargs.6234:

It was a really stupid nerf that hurt PvE thieves…

This nerf hasn’t hurt my PvE thief at all.

I’m going to repeat something I said back when life-steal food was “nerfed” (i.e. balanced): if you build your character around a single skill, trait, boon, or consumable then you’re setting yourself up for a aggravation should the day come your gimmick build nerfed.

Can you please explain to me how “being a D/D thief” is a gimmick? You can call any build ever a gimmick by your criteria. You’re basing your build around something? Oh man, clearly a gimmick. Instead you should just throw your traits around at random into things that don’t synergize in the slightest! I should have known all along.

Really, what are you suggesting here? To deliberately come up with awful builds, because bad builds probably won’t get nerfed? Except they often do get hit with collateral damage anyways, so even that doesn’t work.

It was a really stupid nerf that hurt PvE thieves much more than PvP ones, and messes up the timing of thief rotations in a really weird way that makes the class feel much more awkward and unpolished. Anet does not think this stuff through at all and probably have about as great an understanding of the class as all of these people rejoicing over a nerf that won’t stop them from getting killed by thieves in pvp at all.

I love having my kind of middling class nerfed again and again solely due to some pvp stuff that I and the majority of players do not participate in, especially when there are systems in place to separate pvp and pve skills but they go unused.

First I ran D/P. Then they nerfed that for pvp. Then I ran S/P. Then they nerfed that for pvp. Then I switched to D/D. Now they’ve nerfed that for pvp.

My banner warrior is stoked about this patch though. I already felt like the highest contributing member of whatever group I was in, but I guess I needed more? Okay.

Thieves and rangers really needed PvE nerfs, guys. All the other classes felt really left out when they were getting kicked out of dungeon groups to make room for these two classes. Anet once again shows that they are completely in tune with the community and have a wealth of common sense.

Thanks for buffing my already exceptionally powerful and useful banner warrior though, I guess? I don’t really want to play this boring class, but if you insist…

I like the titles, but I don’t like that some tags end up being 3 lines long. They come out as
Character Name
[GILD]
Title

The extra line for the guild tag is a bit excessive and looks very silly. Guild tags should always be tacked on to the end of the character name for a total of 2 lines.

Warrior buffs, ranger nerfs.

It’s honestly hilarious at this point. Anet has become a parody of themselves.

Getting rid of the salvaging achievements is a step in the right direction, but dailies still ruin it. Looking at someone with a high achievement score doesn’t tell me they’ve mastered a whole lot of aspects of the game, it just means they log in for 15 minutes to finish their daily every day and haven’t taken a long break from doing so. They could have hardly done anything else at all in GW2 for all I know. It isn’t exactly impressive.

As time goes on it’s going to get even worse. The regular achievements you get for actually achieving things in the game will be a drop in the giant daily bucket to the point where you might as well just rename achievements into “dailies completed”. Hope you aren’t a new player that cares about achievements. It makes me really not care about them.

I’ve been leveling a lot of characters to 80 recently and I honestly like it way more now than on release. Shortly after the game came out every event was a ridiculous zergfest and you never fought things so much as you desperately tried to spam aoe skills to tag stuff before it all dropped dead instantly. Scaling also made it so these events went on for an incredibly long time.

Now it’s pretty good. You see people here and there, but it isn’t a giant, ravenous locust swarm of players anymore, at least on Maguuma. This stuff is fun with 1-5 people. Not so much with 50.

I use one that covers my feet on my necromancer and it’s perfectly fine. Definitely not huge. Realistically my character shouldn’t even be able to fit into them.

I guarantee creating these big encounters takes a lot of development time. It does not at all seem worth spending that time on making some more boring zergy dragons so that low level characters have a different boss model to look at as they sit back and autoattack. GW2 has so many issues that this seems like just about the absolute lowest priority.

If you really want more world boss events, go ahead and spend the whole 2 weeks or so it takes to reach 80. Then you can line up for the mindless, afk-inducing chest dispensers with everyone else.

I’d honestly only feel like they were starting to approach “maybe worth it” territory if they were 30s a pop. 2g? You’ve got to be kidding me. I blow a lot of gold on stupid, pointless stuff that I never use without a care in the world, but black lion keys are really, really pushing it even for me. The contents of those things are very rarely anything but extremely disappointing garbage that I end up destroying immediately. Every now and then you might really luck out and get a black lion salvage kit which is marginally better than the 15s master kit, and I already have tons of them crowding up my bank.

Don’t even get me started on paying real money for them. Might as well set your wallet on fire.

Just did a guild trek for the first time. I liked it a hell of a lot more than bounties, though I still don’t care for something so reliant on tabbing to third party websites to complete. Also not really a fan of getting absolutely no personal reimbursement for it. Not even anything to cover the waypoint costs.

This stood out for me very quickly as well. You never feel very far away from an outpost. Even in Orr, there are pact camps scattered all over. In other zones, there are heart NPCs and their buddies everywhere. No place in the world feels dangerous or remote. I’d really like some zones that are significantly more cut off.

No health degeneration would make this trait even -worse-. At least right now I can tediously wait around for it to die if I want to sneak past something , or get into a fight where having pets is a huge liability, or get into a situation where I’m going to want to break combat mode asap.

I’ve stopped putting points into death just because I hate this trait more than any other. Sorry, staff major traits. I know you’re (barely) the best of a bunch of terrible options for my PvE condition necro, but I really don’t want that worthless jagged horror tagging along so i guess I’ll just shove all these points into blood magic even though everything there is kind of garbage. I would rather have no minor trait than the jagged horror.

Katai.6240:

Honestly, after you get your Amulet, there’s really no point in doing the dailies. It takes 20-days + monthly to do that. After less than 3 weeks worth of work, you never have to look at Dailies ever again.

What if you have more than one character? I have 5 80s. That’s a lot more than 30 laurels. What if you want an amulet with a different stat spread so you aren’t tied to one build forever, because respeccing is a thing people like to do in MMOs?

I just set my mouse’s thumb button to hit both 1 and 7. Whenever I click it in to do a normal attack, I also use For Great Justice. The only thing that’s a bit of a pain is switching to another mouse profile when I hop on a different character.

Another useful one: a macro to very, very quickly double tap f1 on necros, for the fury after death shroud trait buff. Or autofiring surprise shot off your toolbelt as a rifle/static discharge engineer, similar to the warrior’s FGJ thing.

Thieves have pretty good traits. Not everything is stand out spectacular, but on the whole I can always find stuff I want. In terms of good trait trees, I’d say they’re on the high end. Meanwhile, my condition necro can put 30 points into curses, 10 into blood, and then have 30 trait points that may as well not be there because there is literally nothing at all I want. Not a single trait. I also wanted to play ranger on release but decided against it, partly because the traits are so incredibly bad. And don’t get me started on elementalists.