Guild Wars 2

I think you see a ton of thieves in SPvP and low levels, but they tend to taper off the higher you get.

Sounds a lot like every FPS I’ve ever played.

I feel that I can stay in melee and be perfectly effective on my thief, ranger, warrior, and guardian. Not so much with the engineer’s tool kit. That said, the block and caltrops offer some nice utility, and the toolbelt skill is pretty good if you pick up the electrical discharge when using toolbelt skills trait. I use it in my rifle build.

Leontes.7204:

The problem is similar to the Hundred Blades problem from before. If you look at it in a vaccuum, then yes, there are ways around Heartseeker.

What happens in real life 8v8 pubstomp pickup sPvP is that you’re winning a 2v2 on Graveyard because you’re pro-dodging all of their moves and then you take a Bull’s Rush-Frenzy-100B to the back, or a Devourer Mug-Haste-Pistol Whip or 7x Heartseeker while your escapes are on cooldown because you spent them strategically and were winning a fight because of them.

So, is the problem with the build, or the fact that in 8v8 sPvP you’re bound to have fight 3 of these guys at once, and 21x Heartseeker becomes impossible to beat?

I don’t think anyone argues that the build is better in tPvP than other proven builds, so the issue might lie in the game’s structure itself that these sorts of builds that require you to dodge them might actually be overpowered in large quantities without a healing class to prevent these kinds of spikes.

You’re fighting 3 people at once and don’t have enough defensive cooldowns to counter them all. I’m not sure where heartseeker falls into play here.

It does have some uses. It’s nice to buy you time to regenerate initiative in between black powders. A lot of the time you aren’t really putting that movement speed to a whole lot of good use in combat, so you may as well get an extra blind in there.

Hitting anything with an attack breaks stealth, and you get a debuff that makes it so you can’t stealth again for 4-5 seconds. You may just be experiencing the pop in issue that seems to plague populous areas like WvW and Lion’s Arch, where the game won’t draw other players for ages when they first appear in view.

Aside from sitting around waiting for my server to capture the WvW keeps I need points of interest/vistas for, getting to 99% wasn’t that bad. Did maybe a little over a zone a day, with the cities in one day. They go by pretty quickly when you’re focused on bouncing from point to point and ignore most of the really long escort/8 minute defense events, especially when I had a friend along for most of the ride which really speeds things up. Hell, Orr zones don’t even have any hearts to deal with.

I think you may want to consider getting a bit more experience than a single run of the first dungeon in the game before you start making guides. Just saying.

The passive is so great that it makes up for the kind of middling but still okay active. If you want terrible signets, take a look at the ranger. Got more than enough for everyone.

Saying that we don’t offer anything but damage is ridiculous, unless you grab a mainhand dagger and just spam 2 all day. Our damage isn’t even that incredible. Admittedly out of the other classes I’m only super familiar with engineer, warrior, and ranger, but I can pretty much match or exceed the burst of the thief just fine on any of those classes, and absolutely exceed the thief’s sustained damage on any of those classes.

As far as I’m concerned the primary strength of the thief is how incredibly slippery we are. If you don’t wanna die, you don’t have to, and you can get around quite quickly.

Sometimes I’m glad that I don’t really have much in the way of boons on my thief, because I don’t have to hear how well I could outrun a centaur every few seconds. My engineer does not have such luck.

This happens to me every now and then as well. Most commonly when I first load into an area, but still sporadically afterwards. Sometimes the sounds just won’t play at all. It tends to fix itself after 10 seconds or so, so it’s not really a huge deal, but it’s still a bit off.

Imspecial.3206:

I am using it untraited and I have never rallied ever

Mystery solved.

You’re complaining about bad burst skills and yet you bring up some of our best ones while completely ignoring the greatsword’s terrible burst ability? I don’t know what to think about this topic.

I’m a little unsure about the mace one. The hammer definitely has some large advantages over it, but the mace burst also comes out faster. I think it works pretty well with a Mace/Shield setup, where every single ability you have is a block or interrupt of some sort that you can rotate to keep yourself from taking any damage from a single target.

No, you should not gear for condition damage at all with the greatsword.

Signet builds are awesome at low levels but utter garbage at 80. Losing all of those utility slots for a little bit of precision is ridiculous and I cannot comprehend why seriously 90% of level 80 warriors I see are still using that stupid thing. At least take one of those dumb signets off and replace it with For Great Justice. It’ll help you more and also help your teammates.

At 99% world completion, I can’t say I’ve had problems with it. Pretty easy to learn where your actual hitbox is after playing the race for a few hours. I don’t even think about the animation at all.

Aren’t Charr the least popular race?

I don’t mind it. We look way goofier when we’re stuck in combat and have our weapons sheathed, making us run on two legs.

I didn’t realize this was specific to skinny Charr, but yeah, this happens with a ton of shoulder slot items on my skinny Charr.

Skill #2 is constantly getting obstructed for no reason, or gets fired into the ground and disappears. Don’t even think about using it on a target that’s on a slight upward incline.

Devildoc.6721:

My suggestions on travel costs:

#1. Traveling to any major city, Fort Trinity, Order Headquarters, or Ebonhawke needs to be free.

You can already get to Ebonhawke and Fort Trinity for free. There’s a portal to Ebonhawke in the Rurikton district of Divinity’s Reach.

As for Fort Trinity, you’ll eventually do some personal story quest involving asura portals and defending the fort. From that point on you can go into the Order of Whispers base and talk to some NPC near the front which will let you into the portal to Fort Trinity. The Order of Whispers base is just a few yards south of Lion’s Arch.

corpsekin.4601:

same problem for leather, everything is a bandana over the mouth intill pirate, which instead of being a musketeer hat, like it is for everyone else, is a tiny cowboyish hat that just looks comical.

You did not just diss the ascalonian hat
http://i.imgur.com/8aHae.jpg

Another nice thing about smoke screen is that if you heartseeker through it to stealth + backstab as soon as you put it up, your revealed debuff will be gone before smoke screen goes away so you can do it again. If I had 4 utility slots, smoke screen would pretty much always be in there.

I feel like Norn is the best at funneling you in the right direction. It’s also very easy to navigate. The Sylvari and Asura areas look pretty but are probably the worst in this regard.

I find myself drawn towards the Norn and Human areas when making new characters, most of the time.

I may have a few issues with it, but Guild Wars 2 is a pretty great game nonetheless. Really been enjoying it and look forward to what’s to come.

I don’t like how we have extremely poor AoE capabilities underwater, making crowds (and c’mon, underwater it’s always crowds) a pain and tagging mobs for loot/xp/contribution even more of a pain. The spear doesn’t even have any AoE abilities at all.

Spear is also worthless when somebody other than yourself is being attacked – all you can really do is spam #1. Does it really need 3 evasion/block skills? #3 handles single targets just fine while actually pumping out okay damage, and #5 is nice for groups. I don’t see why #2 exists. Tow Line is also pretty bad at catching things. It’ll take you to them, and it will cripple them, but there’s a pretty significant period of time after using it that you cannot do anything at all rendering the whole thing pointless against stuff that keeps moving.

The elite situation is the worst. I don’t understand why I can’t use thieves guild underwater. Can thieves not swim? I seem to swim pretty okay.

I love being the guy who manages to just barely kite around some nasty champion for 8 minutes, throwing in damage/support here and there, and generally putting in 10x more effort than everyone else combined…and getting a silver.

My D/P thief is really, really good at mitigating the damage people take and burning down single targets. I can bring a lot to a group by blindspamming and focusing on tougher, more durable enemies. But I am far better off just running around autoattack tagging everything because I’m likely to get bronze/silver otherwise.

Are you kidding me? Grenade damage is insane and mine damage is good. Elixir gun doesn’t really strike me as a damage-focused weapon, and while I don’t think the toolkit is a great primary weapon option at least it hits pretty hard. I think this is less of a weapon kit issue and more of a flamethrower issue.

Brick Mantooth.9520:

I don’t necessarily agree on the height thing, it’s likely that the npc’s are larger just so you can actually click/see one when there are a bunch of other Charr around.

Why just Charr, then? My Human, Sylvari, and Asura are all average height on the slider and the vast majority of NPCs match up. Probably the same for Norn as well – mine’s a giant and NPCs tend to be a bit shorter, so I’d assume they’re about average. But not so for Charr.

I’m mainly specced for backstab, stealth, and blinds but that stuff tends to feel unnecessary. Most of my melee kills in WvW come from heartseeker spam since 90% of the time whoever you’re attacking will do literally nothing about it whatsoever except maybe hit you with a few basic attacks, or make a really halfhearted attempt at jogging away. If I get super unlucky they may use a single cripple and then start slowly, sloooowly backpedalling (or just stand there).

Maybe this is some quirk that only happens in certain situations – I deleted my asura engineer not long after discovering it. But it is to my experience that when running forward and using the flamethrower’s basic attack, asura characters point the weapon directly into the ground and you can only see a little bit of the flames. A pretty specific, minute issue I guess, but a bummer nonetheless, especially seeing as half the reason to use the flamethrower is because spraying fire all over the place looks and feels great.

I wanted to play an asura engineer but this one little thing actually completely turned me away from it so I ended up going boring human. Too late for me to reroll now, but a fix may save others some grief!

Daegranos.7451:

I can apply those debuffs myself with other skills, which makes the steal items unimaginative and boring to boot in my book. And the “10 seconds of all buffs” is the glob.
Other classes get something at their F1 which they can’t do with other abilities, why don’t we?

You cannot do all of those other things with your usual skills, and even if you could, the stealing versions cost no initiative and don’t trigger any cooldowns. You’re seriously going to argue that a super quick, free 3s stun is totally useless just because you can spend 5 initiative on pistol whip for a 1/2 second stun with a long cast time and only while going S/P?

Ranger does not mean ranged weaponry. Ranger is not a purely ranged class.

Daegranos.7451:

I’ve only seen 4 good stolen items (hairs for stealth, glob for buffs, mud for confusion and axe for crazy damage). It doesn’t exactly help that the stolen items can all be acquired somewhere in the world as an environmental weapon so our F1 skill doesn’t define our character where it does define the character on every other class, because every other class has access to the abilities we get on our F1.
Also the shadowstep is horrible if you’re using a shortbow or pistols.

Steal only becomes good if you spent traits on it, which is mindboggling.

Only 4 good items? You’re joking me. How is a nearly instant 3s stun not good? 10 seconds of all buffs? Invulnerability? Ten seconds of chill, when most chill effects in the game are like 2 seconds? A 360 degree AoE for significant damage on a class that depending on weapon setup can be very lacking in melee AoE? Refilling all of your initiative, which is something you steal all thekittentime underwater and allows you keep using spear #5 and remain invincible pretty much forever?

These are all great, and they aren’t even especially random. You eventually start to learn what targets will get you specific items.

Supposedly the hall of monuments pets are identical to their counterparts, just with different skins. According to the pet management window, however, the white raven and black widow have far less vitality than their default brethren with nothing to make up for it. Anyone know if this is just a tooltip error, or are they actually that bad?

The horrible utilities are maybe the worst aspect of the ranger. On every other class it kills me to only have 3 utility slots when I really want just a few more, whereas on the ranger I struggle to fill those slots with anything especially useful, let alone interesting.

This could be one of the most fun weapons in the game, but instead it is one of the most awkward and frustrating, alongside the engineer’s buggy flamethrower and tedious grenades. It’s not like you get a whole lot of other options for ranger melee either. Greastsword is the only other melee weapon and despite the name it isn’t especially great.

Just remove the animation lock. Considering that the chain cripples anyways it isn’t even useful for keeping on a target, while also making the weapon super unresponsive and extremely difficult to position yourself with.

The shadowstep is really useful and some of the stolen skills are great. Most of them are at least good. The only one I think is a really useless piece of crap is the 60s bleed that requires melee range and barely does any damage.

Engineers have a lot of buggy junk but we’re by no means underpowered. Yeah, turrets blow, but every class has utilities that are awful.

You can get more gems for your gold now than when I bought my bank slots, and even back then I thought I paid a pittance for them. And I don’t know why anybody would need to buy bag slots. I’ve been using 8-slotters from around level 10 to level 80 and despite having 400 leatherworking I haven’t felt the need to upgrade them, let alone buy bag slots. Karma vendors/merchants are absolutely everywhere and you can instantly send all crafting materials to the bank from any location. Inventory management is absurdly easy.

If you want the Hall of Monuments stuff, it isn’t cut off to you just because GW2 has been released. You can still play GW1 to get that stuff. Maybe you don’t like GW1, refuse to play it, and won’t get those rewards, but I’m not sure I see the issue there. Seems about the same as me hating the dredge dungeon and refusing to do it, and not having access to the dredge armor because of that.

This seems like a little bit of an oversight, especially considering we’re already most of the way there with the option to hear in-game sounds when alt-tabbed. WvW queues can be pretty long, so being able to alt tab and listen for a sound when you’re good to go seems like an obvious addition. Just a little ding or something would be fantastic.

I tend to spend my time picking off stragglers, getting into melee brawls when it seems remotely viable, and spamming shortbow blast finishers into ally combo fields which is actually really helpful if you do it in a water or fire field. Rangers with healing spring are my best friends. I’m also pretty much completely impossible to kill, and end up dying maybe once every 3 hours when I do something dumb even though I primarily play melee and tend to attack anyone on the edges of an enemy zerg. It’s just so easy to get away as a thief.

We aren’t the greatest WvW class in the world, but we’re okay.

alocay.2450:

Well technically the engy only has 3 useable weapons :P (rifle, pistol, shield). Gotta keep in mind those utility skills.

My primary alt is an engineer because they have fantastic variety in weapon skills, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. Kits are weapons too, and toolbelt skills make up for the loss of a utility slot. I actually find the class to be kind of overwhelming if you take a bunch of kits because of the vast amount of options available to you at any one time. Certainly not a problem that the thief has.

Grenades are powerful but they’re also unbelievably tedious. I can’t use them for long periods of time because it drives me crazy.

Yeah. I love my thief but I’ve had to start playing alts just because the weapon variety is a real killer. We have very few choices that are further limited by trait and gear selection.

That said, there aren’t many current weapons that would seem very fitting for a thief. Offhand sword is a possibility, but would look kind of awkward with a mainhand dagger. Offhand torch, maybe? Not exactly stealthy, but GW2 thieves aren’t especially stealthy in the first place, and it fits a saboteur kind of angle. Longbow doesn’t make a ton of sense, but with so few current options I can imagine most people would let it slide.

Turrets being able to crit won’t change anything. They’ll still be garbage.

You guys misunderstand. It’s not that Charr aren’t tall enough, it’s that the middle option on the character creation slider is very small by Charr standards. All NPC Charr have that slider set quite high, so if you pick anything else you end up being a runt. Average on the slider does not mean average height.

I’ve only noticed this happening when having certain weapons unsheathed, like the shortbow and hammer. It also doesn’t seem to happen when jumping up inclines.

I made a short video of this to show a friend back in beta: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsFbsD7JVgI

Flanking strike is pretty terrible compared to our other options. I don’t know why someone would use S/D. And having any weapon setup be bad isn’t so great when we already have such an incredibly limited weapon selection.

The teleport is so incredibly useful for staying alive in dungeons and pvp that it’s ridiculous. I only really find thief downed state to suck when you’re completely alone, because otherwise you are crazy slippery and have the ability to get into a good position to res yourself or get ressed by others while attention goes elsewhere. So no, I feel the opposite. Dealing with the downed states of my other lowbie characters sucks after playing thief so much.