Guild Wars 2

Blind only works on one attack…. waste that on an auto-attack, then burst when you know he’s in front of you. Not sure the issue here. To keep his Stealth, the Thief needs to wait ~3 seconds before using Backstab, to maintain Initiative regeneration. Then 3 seconds Reveal. Unless he is using C&D only and no other skill, at which point, you could self-heal that weak damage all day. So you have ~6 seconds between blinds from him going Stealth. Use it.

Don’t kite, you can’t kite a Thief. He’s saving his Steal for when you kite. Be aggressive, the best way to kill a Thief regardless of build is aggression.

No.

If I were doing S/D, I’d stack all those awesome Endurance and Initiative regeneration skills. People are just complete trash right now at this game and the high level gameplay is not even opening up.

With the 100% Endurance on Weapon Swap, the 3 Initiative upon Weapon Swap in Combat, the return of Endurance on dodge, and so on, you can literally be the land version of the underwater Spear #5. Landing hits and going all over the place in evade mode. Anyway I don’t even play it but maximize your build into it and I’m sure it will be effective. Remember the only 100% damage reduction comes from dodge/evade skills, and we have access to the most. Use em!

Using Daze into a Pistol Whip, is like having free half-second Basilisk Venom every time you are skilled enough to pull it off. They cannot move, or use any skills, and have to eat damage a little bit. Combined with an Immobilize, it turns into a 2 second Basilisk Venom where you get all your damage into that target with absolutely no recourse during the Daze. Good players will escape your burst. They will wait for Haste before using their stun breaker. They will eat the normal PW’s first couple attacks and dodge out. It’s meant for high level gameplay yo!

Although most traits do have some purpose, you are right, this one is complete crap. I think they meant to have it apply 5 stacks of vulnerability for 5 seconds or something, but right now it is the most useless trait I’ve seen and does need some help.

The only save I can say is against big boss targets. You’re not going to be Mugging that boss every 45 seconds right? If you have high crit, you can maintain 2-3 stacks of vulnerability.

Mug, say, 2000 damage every 45 seconds – ignore the stolen item because it’s the same regardless of build.

So it ends up being 44.4 DPS increase. Pfft!

Sundering Strikes against a boss mob, maintaining 3% increased damage, with 20-30 people doing 1000 DPS each.

This ends up increasing the damage output of a large group to a single target by 600 DPS.

For you solo, doing 1000 DPS, you will gain 30 DPS, with the added benefit being as soon as any other player is attacking your target, they benefit, gaining 30 DPS per person who is attacking your target using this model.

SO!

I take it back. Learn to play noob! This skill is AWESOME for multiple people hitting one target!!!

Working fine, but is anyone else finding it odd that you get this high bonus at the end of the week, rather than as a reward -after- the week?

As it is, it’s not based so much on performance but rather time.

You could get Autohotkey, bind your F-key to Numpad 7 or something random, and then make the script press Numpad 7 every time you attack. That way you just attack to loot. Problem solved! lol…………….

Quickness, allowing a 2 second Stomp, or a 2-3 second revive from Down depending on the incoming damage.

It may be on a proc-on-crit chance. It’s hard to tell, but I am interested and will check it out later, do some testing and let you guys know. Also, some mobs in the world don’t take affects from stuff. Try using it against the testing dummies in the Mist.

Yep, certain things hit you right after Stealth. In fact, all damage can still be incoming after Stealth. Stealth might break target, but almost all skills are not seeking attacks like in WoW. Still, some attacks are large area or channeled casts which will hit you after you go Stealth. The best thing is just to dodge after Stealth. Simple as that. Breaks all those channeling things and you evade all the attacks. Just get used to it.

There are skills called “stun breakers” which allow a good player to escape from a stun easily. For a Thief, it could be Withdraw, Shadowstep, Roll for Initiative, Infiltrator’s Strike (I believe this works too), probably more. Each class has some stun breaking mechanic.

Daze has no such thing, it simply prevents the guy from doing any skills for the duration. Very powerful in the right hands.

Let’s break it down for the new guys:
- Immobilize: Character is unable to move or dodge. Current action is not interrupted. Can use skills, can teleport, can attack, can go Stealth, can go into defensive forms, can pop defensive skills, can be broken with Steal, can be broken with Stun removal skills.
- Stun: Character is interrupted, unable to move, unable to use some skills. Cannot use weapons to attack, cannot dodge. Can use certain escape utilities or stun breakers.
- Daze: Character is interrupted, unable to use any skills use skills which have a cast time or AOE ground target effect for the entire duration. Can move and dodge normally or use instant-cast abilities including ‘stun breakers’.

You can see how Immobilize is good for slowing a fleeing target, Stun is useful for keeping someone in place while you bash on them forcing their stun breaker to be used, and Daze is useful for preventing your enemy from doing anything for a while, as well as interrupting their abilities, triggering a long internal cooldown for a skill being interrupted.

4s Mace Daze off Guardians is awesome, and you hit them with that before stomping them to prevent their knockback.

Well, the normal Skale Venom Utility applies 3x Vulnerability and Weakness for 15 seconds duration over 3 hits. Basically makes the enemy do less damage to you while he takes marginally more damage.

If you attack something, does it get a debuff? I will check out the vendor later as I wait for WvW to let you know more in detail what I find.

Nothing to see here folks, just another poor suggestion placed in the wrong forum. Move along, move along.

Oh but it’s so hard not to L2P everyone!!!

33% Poison duration “woop de doooo” yes, sometimes you won’t need this. However considering with Deadly Arts, Steal applies a 10 second Poison, and you can get enough traits to stack duration up +100% and more, it makes it very viable for making sure your enemy is not able to heal effectively. Poison isn’t meant to kill anyone, it’s meant to reduce their heal. I know you want to Poison a bad player and watch his health go from 100% to dead in 60 seconds, but that’s not it’s use. Use it to keep good players from using their heals. This also means the Poison from your Dagger autoattack Lotus Strike lasts longer. I mean come on, tons of use as is, and just needs to be placed in the right hands.

Daze is not well understood by normal players. It shuts down the use of all skills for the duration. So if you Stealth, apply Devourer Venom, Tactical Strike with Daze, and then Pistol Whip (maybe even haste?) you have a completely helpless player for half the time there. Or just use it for the Daze. 2 seconds where the enemy can move but not cast anything is so powerful. The ability itself seems to revolve around denying the enemy attacks. You get a single denied attack – the Blind – if you’re bad and hit in the front. You get 2 seconds of no incoming damage from that player if you are good and Daze him. In a stand-off kind of fight against good players, this can be used to great effect. It’s not as ‘sexy’ as big numbers from Backstab or the Pistol stealth skills, but it’s very tactical in use, thus the name.

Stack it with another friend’s Daze on the same target and come on.

All skills look ‘just OK’ solo. Combine with others for amazing effects.

Think he was hiding everyone’s for some reason, no idea why either though.

Did I not fix this already?

Vendor? Location? What it applies? Vague?

The answer is that it sucks and is scary. Just like in WoW when you spent 6 months getting great gear, only to find out there’s about to be a patch which invalidates all your hard work, any changes to a class in GW2 is the same effect. You will have to re-learn a play style you worked hard to perfect if they make any changes. So I dread reading patch notes where there is any change to any class. Change will happen, but the light being shined upon us might cause it to happen sooner than later. We’d prefer to remain out of the highlights and just be hidden in the background. Fortunately, a lot of skilled players pick the Thief because it’s made to shine with skill – like every class, but moreso with the Thief because of a large lack of AOE damage – and so there is a disproportionate number of awesome Thieves running around stirring up trouble.

Cloak & Dagger, by the way, you can have small periods of un-stealth because the 3 second cooldown just happens to be the exact length of an autoattack chain for the Thief. So as soon as Lotus Strike is casting, he preps C&D, and goes Stealth a second later. 3-4 seconds Stealth, Backstab, 2 seconds autoattack, 1 second cast on C&D, and restealth. 3 in, 3 out, repeat for as long as you have initiative.

You can also sit there and C&D a single target, timing the next attack to hit right after the Stealth fades. Not too efficient use of Init, but works for keeping full Stealth.

My strong recommendation for anyone fighting this kind of Thief is to never stop attacking, and gain some distance. If he has no target to hit, he has a much harder time using Stealth.

You don’t need to target anyone to do damage. Stop thinking you have to target to do damage. This is not WoW. You can cast all abilities without the need of targeting. If you know the Thief is around, why are you not swinging. Pay attention to your auto-attack chain skills, if the Thief is stealth the chain still continues, so you can ‘know’ where he is. Yes it’s like fighting an invisible man sometimes, you just have to know how to counter his mechanic, just as you have to counter everyone else’s. Just like fighting a Mesmer, 1/3rd of the time you have to sit there and do nothing to avoid killing yourself with Confusion, for a Thief you have to watch your own bar for hits and even unleash burst when the chain auto-attack starts to increment.

I may soon add L2P in my signature and post blank posts to respond!

@bwillb +1

@OP
Really he wasn’t running away he was just re-positioning. I don’t know any Thief who runs from a Ranger.

Winning by 100% more points. So OP.

It’s just you. Your CPU is cramped. You need to give it some Motrin.

Well presented response. And as others have stated, and I’m sure many others feel, thanks for taking this kind of firm stand. I’m sure you will make some minor tweaks, but the current game is fair. Just because 2000 people fought for every inch of land they capped during that time frame does not mean the 200 people at 5am PST capping everything on all maps are less important. They should have to ability to compete at whatever level that is. If the level presented to them is a non-existent enemy force, the server matching will eventually balance itself out. At some point, most servers will end up being pitted against servers with similar prime-time rotations.

Even then, 5 people with no enemy opposition can cap everything in any map. So the real focus is maintaining a 24/7 presence if you want to be a top server. If you want to compete – you have to, as a server, find more players, recruit more players, or stay up late and play.

All the work you put into getting all the points during prime time US to wake up to a huge loss? This game is about fun, not work. Get over it, you had fun, you won.

We’re the only class able to use the same skill multiple times in a row. That’s what initiative is. It’s not ‘mana’. It’s choice. Pure and simple.

Cooldowns are ‘mana’ using that example. Time being mana.

Good players will burn cooldowns on one weapon, then swap to their other weapon, burn cooldowns, and swap back, repeat. But no one is there yet.

Stab is OP you just don’t know how to use it. Makes up for any stats in the right hands.

Just a reminder how it works; additive not multiplicative:

Normal attack: 1000 damage
Critical attack base: 1500 damage
Critical attack with +50% critical damage: 2000 damage
Critical attack with +100% critical damage: 2500 damage

So if you put every single item you have into Critical Damage, your crits are basically free second attacks of the same ability! If you normally hit for 2k Backstab, a base crit would give 3k damage, and adding + 100% critical damage would give a 5k backstab. Thus like getting another free 2k backstab. Or just + 150% damage… think of it how you will!

And due to being a glass cannon, you will die just as hard.

The Might only stacks to 12 by the way for the Trait you mentioned. AOE only affects 5 people, so you can’t affect 100 people, and it’s not perma-stealth. It’s spending 30 seconds setting up a stealth where you could be off doing something better. Stealth only stacks to 25 seconds max, no 1 minute stuff like you said, same as Might only stacks to 25. Retaliation not sure. Swiftness has no cap it seems and my warrior friend has had 5 minutes of swiftness as he uses the runes.

Day Capping is ridiculous but falls short of Primetime Capping. I see so many people capping stuff during US primetime hours that it is really discouraging to play during that time. You cap something and a lot of times the enemy just takes it right back! What is the point! Obviously there needs to be something where when someone caps something, it’s theirs forever. This whole back-and-forth thing is just stupid. It’s also not fair to the night capping crew when they took everything during the night and then all of a sudden it’s daytime and now everything they had gets lost! It’s like no point for the night capping crew to even bother because the next day they lose everything again and it’s back to square one. Obviously something needs to be changed and I really think we need permanent invulnerability buffs for everyone so we can just dance and pick flowers and not be bothered by this.

Another fun option is finding that Ranger in the middle of a zerg attacking your tower/keep. Then with 1-2 Thief friends, you all Steal to him, Dagger Storm, and drop the Tree. You then do Healing Bolts to allies in the area, allowing your zerg to plow in, and keep your other Thief friends at high health during all the AOE.

@Fury

This is a sport bro? It isn’t? Then why all the fairness tears?

There are solutions out there.

Kiiinnndddaaaa maaakesss sense….

Like, you get 15% more health with all 3, but all walls, siege and doors take 15% more damage as a recourse. I could see that. Lets you even kill off enemy siege with your own faster if you get it up in time to exchange equal numbers of shots.

But really, not having the orb FORCES you to zerg, which is the correct strategy, and to coalesce and take out targets as a massive force which has no need for buffs. All the 3 orbs do is make my 5 man groups that much more effective at taking out 10 man groups.

Aza.2105:

ImProVocateur.5189:

So when dominance is shown in Basketball or Football, we can all assume its exploits or the sport is broken?

Talent shows.

Nah its the equivalent of a football team scoring touch downs when the opposing team only has two players. Then calling yourself the champ.

No, it’s that equivalent, but the two players are the only one the manager was able to get on the field, and the rest of the team are sleeping, and the manager is just bored and doesn’t feel like recruiting talent to play the game. Instead, he yells at the referee “What the kitten man!” and throws up his arms. After the loss, they all go back into the locker room and blame the other team for fully manning a team correctly. They complain about how unbalanced the game is, making the manager feel like he’s just doing the best he can. The manager doesn’t want to work hard, put in long hours and recruit the 9 other players he needs for that time period. He’s happy that his little league team is competing just fine and daydreams of coming in third for a participation trophy.

Yeah I find professional Football, you know, NFL, is very depressing to the losing players. As soon as one team has a 10 point lead, they get all demoralized and just stop trying. So they just lose. I propose that we eliminate score-keeping in Football. The goal will be who has the most fun. Pink socks will be required. Players will need to wear man-bras and not show so much skin. Those tights need to be made baggy because it’s too revealing. Dreadlocks should not be allowed, because some people are racist. If you have to play on turf, you can’t wear cleats, you have to wear flip flops. The football itself needs to be made out of recycled toilet seats. Referees need to be renamed Cheerees and blow party favors instead of whistles. The Fox dancing robot is too harsh and needs to be replaced with a Carebear who loves us. The point is, points are bad, so don’t have points, not even this post should have a point.

By the way, this ability can and is easily dodged just by changing direction. It’s not an auto-hit. I have learned to listen for the specific sound of this ability to simply change movement direction and avoid the attack without dodging or anything special. When you cast it, you lead the target, so all the target has to do is pay attention to negate this kind of thing.

If somehow you’re stealth, up close, and able to unload Dancing Dagger for 5-6 seconds without the guy reacting, he’s dead as I said even if you facerolled.

Are you on Crystal Desert or Dragonbrand? Were you that Guardian in Dragonbrand last night who came at me while I was rezzing a friend? We were laughing so hard as I sat there reviving and you were throwing everything you had into trying to kill me. I remember saying on TS, “Oh no the burst!” and everyone rofl’d. I managed to rez two of my group before you got me down to ~3k hp. After my low-health stealth kicked in, I healed, and it looked like you only did 40% damage, but it was like 75%.

I’m geared to take less damage on purpose, and although it’s underwhelming being sub-80, it just means you need to stick to the zerg until you get 80. It’s a learning process too, for example, if someone is rezzing, you’re about to be facing 2 players, so not a good choice to stick around if you’re not 80 and geared yourself.

Should a L43 be putting a L80 with gear on his toes? It can be done, but less often 1 on 1. Plenty of large sub-80 groups push us off a little, that’s how those two died in the first place.

I’m actually on the same boat. I once hit steal and the enemy exploded for something like 300,000 damage against a Mosquito. No one ability should be able to put out that much damage. I didn’t even have 3 Orbs. I agree with this fix.

Um, score update? Isn’t this known to post scores in every page?! Hehe thanks.

From a Thief and small group perspective, I’d have to make a list based upon targets I pick out due to their lack of damage avoidance and/or usual squishy builds. That way any focus fire is dealing the most damage, and zergs melt away to a 5 man.

1. Ranger – By far the class that will eat the most damage we put out. Some of their abilities can slow you down, and a good elite root, but they will eat all the ranged attacks, and can be shut down from moving themselves quite well. If they stay in the back, they’re fine, however.
2. Elementalist – Usually they’re all going burst spec, so they’re quick to down. Some remember to use their Mist form and some other kind of escape, but they are usually either too bold or too defensive, and get killed very quickly. A few good ones out there though, but not many.
3. Warrior – Some can take a lot of damage, and some can dish out a lot of damage, however any damage we apply as a group will stick. They have a couple short duration invulnerability moves, but because they lack great escape mechanics, as soon as you apply the first burst and they try to run, it’s over.
4. Engineer – Actually decent at running away while doing damage, but overall they will take a lot of the damage output. They don’t down as quick, but they still go down.
5. Necromancer – Although relatively squishy, their form change allows them a full health bar. Combined with actual heals, they can take a lot of up-front burst, transfer that damage onto our team, change forms, and just soak up tons of damage overall. Not hard to down, but not something I want to focus if there are other targets around doing more damage.
6. Guardian – Some decent burst, a little tanky, some good damage mitigation and healing. Not hard to take down if you can interrupt them a little (go Steal!), but their knockback abilities are very disrupting if there’s a good fight going on. So I don’t want them popping those bubbles while we’re in the middle of a fight, and when they go down they get another AOE knockback, so it’s a lot of time wasted on the ground.
7. Thief – Not hard to get down by any means, but I’m not going to target this guy right off the bat. He’s going to take enough AOE damage, and he’s got some tricks like Dagger Storm to cut off some of his incoming damage. The main reason is, the Thief can stealth and completely run off the fight if he wants, meaning all damage into him might have been wasted. If I see one blow all his initiative though, or his stealth, and stick around, he becomes a target.
8. Mesmer – Same as the Thief in terms of escaping, however the main reason I try not to focus them first is because not everyone is on top of distinguishing the Mesmer from the clones. So although they can go down quick, I’d rather put damage elsewhere before focusing them. Usually I will focus them after they blow all their AOE abilities trying to help their teammates – that way they have little defense when our whole group switches to them immediately.

No perfect class, just the ones who can expect to be the target first. And it’s not to say Mesmer is the best by any means, or that Rangers are bad. Just that in common engagements, this is what you will see.

HoD/SBI/JQ was the fun matchup. This week JQ is where ET was. And it’s just a population thing as has been noted with charts and practicality. I find now there’s no one on to kill here late night. Good thing because I get to sleep on time. But I did enjoy those late nights fighting players who had decent forces out and about every hour of the day, even if at the time we had no presence.

It would even make sense to make them mini-WvW areas queued separately from the actual WvW. The combat there is fun but doesn’t help the points.

Highest I’ve seen is 193 or so per tick. Yes legit. And no the secret can not be known!!!

Hmm edit stopped working. Anyway I was going to say about Dancing Dagger, it is powerful but that’s the point when the time is right. If you see two squishy targets next to each other, and you manage to get crits, you can do 2x 4k damage on each. Yes, that means 16k damage in one shot, and yes that means a Trickery spec player can get 4 of those off, stacking 84k damage quickly if they all crit. You could, alternatively, faceroll on your keyboard to kill those same undergeared targets who don’t know how to dodge. So it really doesn’t matter if you can achieve high numbers against rabbits. They don’t bite back.

A warrior group-mate last night stacked all defensive stuff and at times had 10 people bashing on him while he just downed them one after another. Cheering at yourself for killing fresh L1 characters and glass cannons in WvW is not all that rewarding.

A quick edit: At L79 with my Short Bow I was doing 200 damage per shot. I remember this very well. At L80 and upon buying a single Exotic Short Bow, and spending 2-3 gold on all rare gear, I began hitting 600 and criting 1300. So if I’m going up against a L79 with PvE found gear, heck, 3 of them, I’m going to down them all unless they are very skilled – and a few I’ve seen are at least OK.

I got everything I wanted playing Tribes:Ascend just playing the game. I was happy with the learning curve and never felt like I was losing because some guy had a perfectly balanced weapon that I did not have.

I’ll answer your last question with a question.

If 40 people got the buff, and steamrolled another 40 man group, and then the losers all bought the buff, and then engaged the enemy again and lost again, does that mean it’s pay 2 win, or learn 2 play?

It’s Pay 2 Benefit, not Pay 2 Win. Tribes is not a good example. Stop taking things to the absolute extreme! Left minded tools I tell ya /rant! 10% is a boost not an IWinButton!

Oh yeah and to clarify, if you can spend gold to get an exotic, is that Pay2Win in your mind? Because you can spend gold to get these buffs. You don’t need to buy anything.

I haven’t paid a dime yet, and somehow, I have a couple of these items. Seems to me like it’s play to win, not pay to win.

Now I suppose there’s someone out there doing 75 gems / hour rolling buffs for 8 hours a day, 600 gems per day, or 2 gold per day, or ~$4 per day, in buffs, because he absolutely cannot live without those buffs….

And I salute this man! Please buy more!

Don’t you guys target the folks with buffs over non-buffed players?

Ah wait, I found the problem. You guys are confusing Pay2Win with Pay2Benefit.

Ahhhh I see. Liberals and their mindset. Thinking that 10% bonus is just so unfair it ruins the game.

There were games that were Pay To Win, meaning you literally could BUY a weapon which did so much more damage than any normal found in-game item that you won based upon the sole fact that you could buy this weapon. This is terrible for those who don’t want to pay into the game, and great for the kids who like killing people with no money. Pay To Benefit means, yeah you get some bonus, but it doesn’t break anything, it’s not working in sPvP, World vs. World is not going to be a $100,000 tournament (well, maybe…), and if you can’t manage 10% more skill to overpower his 10% more damage every now and then, well, sell some gold and get the damage bonus yourself. It’s not like you have to use real money for it anyway.

If you had 10% more cash in your wallet right now, would that really make a huge difference?

There should be a thread…

Where one person talks…

And it goes like this:

“Gah! My server score is way down right now!”

“Ah ha! My server score has a fighting chance right now!”

“Oh yeah baby! My server score is winning right now!”

“I’m tired! My server score is falling behind right now!”

“Gah! My server score is way down right now!”

So awesome to have a game which understands freedom. Servers fighting it out, and some guys want it to be ‘fair’. Haha… so funny…

Problem is, there are a lot of people this way not just trying to ruin a game experience: ’it’s not fair they have more people, more organization, more strategy, more gold, more karma, more siege, more map knowledge, more gear, more weapons, more thieves, more warriors, more engineers, more consumables, more guild buffs, more free time to play, more powerful computers, make it fair or I am going to cry!!! They’re also out there trying to ruin a country.

@silvermember
I find your last sentence reversed. If all you want to do is have fun, then yes the current WvW is interesting, but if you are doing it to win, then really what’s the point?

Do you get epic loots at the end?

Do you get your name written on the hearts of your enemies?

Do you get to pillage enemy towns and take their women?

You get fun out of it.

The point is fun.