Guild Wars 2

yeah… im with you man, i mean, i love the game and play every day but find myself just standing in the mists chating for long periods of time because there is really nothing to do basically…

All I do now days and for the last 3 or so weeks is spvp and wvwvw. i sue to do tPvP but i do not dare to go in there without a proper group. Jon Peters said they didn’t want the game to be dominated by bunkers but yet… it is… due to the pvp model chosen, (control points) no team joins tPvP (even free) without at least 3 bunkers so yeah, it’s pretty much bunker dominated.

Most of my friends are playing Planet Side 2 waiting for GW2 to apply to them again, I’m not because i don’t like it and don’t have anything better to play so i keep login.

As I said I love the game and really want it to succeed and although im a PvP oriented player and don’t care about the character’s appearance, just stats I have bought gems because I believe the team deserves to be supported for they’re job, thats how much I like the game. I’m really looking forward to the next few months to see what happens.

One more thing, i remember reading some ware that Arena Net prefers to change the game little by little instead of huge patches, from what i’ve read on this forum there are at least 2 big patches coming in a 3 month or so timeline, and I ask “Why not implement what is ready now, instead of waiting to implement it all at once?”

I do not play BS thief and I have no problem killing them but I do see your point but you need to understand it is a trade off. High bust -> low survivability if the bust is to get nefed then mor survivability would have to be implemented to make up for the loss of dmg. Since shadow arts and acrobatics thieves are already very difficult to kill, with more survivability they would become like the immortal elementalists we currently have in meta atm.

What do you prefer? High bust and easy kill thief or an immortal one?

Humm I already have a job, I play for fun (and still own)

Not to mention that s/d is the only weapon set without a bust ability. The best damaging ability it has is auto-attack.

I play a thief as main and I have been all over the place, as in I have played A variety of builds and weapon sets, although ppl still think that BS is op they have seen nothing yet! xD

Although Arena Net’s devs say they do not want a game dominated by bunkers nor glass canons, so far bunkers DO dominate. No decent tournament team queues without at least 3 bunker build players.

Although the thieves do not have a bunker spec and due to stealth are bad point holders I decided to go as tanky as I could sacrificing a lot of dmg in the process.
I was the best thing I ever did! I can take the thieves BS+HS dmg and survive to stomp his face a few seconds later! I have managed to win multiple 2v1 and even 3v1 with the help of thieves guild (no thenks to they’re dmg but disruption that saved me from a lot of dmg) some professions like guardian bunkers and necro bunkers some times takes 2-3 minutes of combat but I still win. As for ele bunkers it’s a draw since we can fight each other for ever… This normally ends with the arrival of other players or with one of us giving us and just move away.

I love fighting other thieves, I very rarely lose and when I do is because I got outplayed and a /w complimanting them is in order or because I was cought with low HP cool downs and low on initiative. Btw the only thiefe spec that has any chance is the condition dmg thief (with d/d or p/d) thoughts are damgerouse! The others are free kills.

My advice is try various aspects of your profession and do s/t PvP up to rank 20, then you will see that the mith that BS thieves are op and warriors with HB are op and so on is false, with training and time you (like myself) will leard to predict what your opine t is going to do next and act accordingly.

Edit: this was the biggest post I have ever made on an iPhone keyboard o.O’

Sprawl.3891:

was it designed for HS to be a spammable gap closer that requires no skill to land on target?

if a thief spams HS as a gap closer, when he lands on the target he has NO initiative left to hit him besides auto attack, if you see a thief do that he is a bad players and if you are not you can easily take him down.

possante.8310:

what i want is a 0,25CD after animation end

Sorry man but no one cares about what you want…

Daecollo.9578:

I’d like a 0.25 CD on thief skills, I hate using two of them at once, thief skills should never que.

I had the same problem coming from an MMO were spamming was needed due to no ability queue, but with time you get use to it, just requires concentration at start, then it becomes automatic

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey guys,

Just to help provide some clarity on this, we’ll be releasing within the next couple of weeks a high level summary of our big plans for the first half of 2013 to help provide more transparency into our plans with the game going forward. This will include providing more details about our goals for the game, information about the stories and features that you’ll see in the Jan/Feb/March releases.

To set expectations accordingly, the January release will be a relatively small release that sets the table for the stories and features we plan to roll out with the Feb/March releases and beyond. Also, there will be no new race, profession, or new region with these larger Feb/March releases. One of our major goals with these releases is making our existing world as strong as possible, ensuring there are reasons to go to all the locations in the world we’ve already built, and strengthening the core game we’ve provided. In saying this will be an expansions worth of stuff in these releases, we’re talking about the number of new features that will be rolled out across PvE, WvW, and PvP in early 2013, which usually you’d only find in an expansion for a traditional MMORPG.

More details and specifics to come in the next couple of weeks, but I hope that helps provide some more insight into what to expect at a very high level.

YES! Thenk you so very much!!! This is exactly what I wanted to “hear” (read)
Please fix the current game before adding more stuff, people need to understand that wile resources are consumed creating new content, the fixes EVERYONE is asking for will be delayed. Also it’s a known fact not to GW2 specifically but in all mmo’s patches always come with more bugs, for that reason we need to have a solid meta before introducing more bugs.

Again thank you and keep up the good job!

If you see the thief coming your way alone then yes its a L2P issue, if your ambushed in the middle of a fight or are caught right after one, with half HP bar and utilities on CD then there is nothing you can do, and don’t get frustrated by this, if it was any other glass cannon profession you would still die anyway…

I run the same spec (0-30-30-10-0) but i don’t use the signet for healing, nor the life stealing sigil on weapons, i chose to be a bit more “offensive”, but still can last a very long time and heal for quite a lot due to traits.

Since im constantly going into stealth I run with the trait that blins nearby foes on stealth, it prevents a lot of dmg to myself and my team mates.

Copy / Paste the link to a new tab or browser.

ArtemisEntreri.4138:

If you run S/D what armor and stats are you using? I’m a D/D thief and looking for other options out there. I can’t seem to find a good fit for my thief that can stand toe to toe with enemies and make it out alive. Medium armor + high toughness doesn’t seem to make much a difference. Even with Toughness/Vitality/Power gear I am still squishy it seems.

in s/tPvP i run with Ogre Runs, Berserker jewel. on my Sword i have Sigil of Rage and on the dagger the one that give +5% dmg (cant remember its name) and fire on SB.

on W3 i run with 4 Berserker pices and 2 Valkyre with ruby gems, the juwelry is a mix of berzerker and one that gives power vitality and crit dmg.

The survivability is not on my gear, i run with about 16k hp it’s in the traits you chose from Shadow Arts trait line, utilities, rotation and timing.

Adaneshade.2409:

The reason there are so few S/D is there are so few capable players. Most just want the easy way out.

1k times this ^

I use to play S/P, after the nerf i went S/D and love it! D/D thieves cant kill me 1v1 unless they find me with <50% HP and utilities on CD. otherwise they die or run away xD

I’m not going to repeat what every one already said but will emphasis that the Last Refuges should be replaced or “fixed” atm every one who wants to go into Shadow Arts is forced to take it. It saves me 2/10 times and gets me killed 8/10 due to Reveled.

Also Flanking strike’s second hit misses 8/10 times and is extremely slow, please make it “follow” the target (like HS) or a shadowstep behind the target instead of making a U movement only to miss if the target is not rooted / Stationary.

Can you please increase the difficulty lvl of the NPC’s that fight back? They are extremely predictable… Give them a better AI and specially different set of weapons. For example give daggers or a sword to the thief, give a great sword or a sword and shield to the warrior, give 2 daggers to the ele, make the necro condition dmg and so on.
This would help ppl train and learn hot to counter these professions. Yes it is different to fight a player and an NPC but still would help.

Tks.

Rezz.8019:

I don’t know how can they possibly add matchmaking system if pvp is already so dead. It would divide the population even more.

No, actually it will bring ppl back to sPvP.
It is so “dead” (as you say) atm because there is no mach making and ppl got tired of being constantly steamrolled by organized groups with VOIP, which gives them great advantage over pugs that hot join. not to mention the profession synergy and training that organized groups set up with specific builds to maximize they’re potential.

if there was a system were organized groups face each other it would be a lot more fun and competitive for them and pugs would be a lot more balanced and enjoyable.

so IMO when this system comes live, ppl will return to PvP and make it shine again

urdriel.8496:

Raise time between invis, now you have a 5 sec debuff, change it to 7-8 sec, thief fixed.

Fist, the “reveled” condition lasts 3 seconds not 5 (whitch shows how much you know about the thief profession) and second if this condition cd is to be increased then the thieves base HP and thoughness need to me raised as well since stealth is the thieves main defense.

hi,
I’ll go straight to the point

1) I recently discovered the wonders of S/D and I’m loving it! the only thing i do not like about this weapon set is Flanking strike… its just too slow and the second hit misses the majority of times, i know it has been “improved” by adding more utility to it but that was not its problem… its the “casting time” for the second hit that is the issue…
reduce its dmg is you want but make it faster… atm its a waist if init since we use it ONLY to remove one boon from the opponent and not for its dmg since it very rarely lands.

2) Pets/Clones/Phantoms chasing ppl wile in stealth… is this intended?! if not pls fix it. Wile you are at it pls fix channeled abilities homing on stealthed players… unless it is intended, if so pls tell us that it is!

3) AWESOME job! im loving every minute of your game!

Minibiskit.6158:

With your proposal I can see it being completely broken. Lets take this scenario.
Say a Thief has the blind on stealth trait. He steal-cnd-blinding powder-shadow signet-hide in shadows-refuge chains. With a 1.5 second duration per stack, you have now 9 seconds of not being able to land any attack? This is not the only example that could be used to stack a broken amount of blind with your idea.

If it had a cap on the other hand, it would be less useful then it is now..

As you well know there is reveled mechanic, that wont allow you to stealth again in the next 3 seconds if you attack from stealth and you wouldn’t be able to stack that much blindness since you cannot use all the abilities you mention at the same time, and since the stacks have a very small duration they will ware off before you are able to re-apply it again, also due to cap you would not be able stack more than 3 sec,

If the blind applied via the trait lasts 1 second you will be in stealth during that second, it will save you from being wile in stealth.

Now that I think of it, it would “fix” the channeled abilities following us though stealth since we could prevent part of the dmg for 1 second after entering stealth. (if traited obviously)

It would never be less effective than now… it would make the target miss 2-4 attacks instead of 1, how is that less effective!?

ZLE.8293:

Volrath.1473:

My suggestion is, if instead of having your target miss the next attack, it would make them miss all attacks wile blinded.

First thing that comes to my mind is Pistol offhand Black Powder Perma-Blind-Lock!!!

true, and i thought of that as well that’s way i added right after the sentence you quoted “Obviously this would also require that the blind duration throughout the professions be adjusted. (1,5sec to 2sec tops removable) also not stackable or stackable to a limit (like stealth) to a 3sec limit for example.” but thanks for pointing that specific skill up

ASP.8093:

This is how blind worked in GW1, more or less (90% miss chance). GW1 had way, way, waaaaay more spammable condition-removal, though. So, I’m not really a fan of this proposed change. Blind is still plenty powerful if you’re actually applying it often — and thieves are pretty good at spamming it, at times — or timing it well, like SoSing in response to that big telegraphed attack.

Unrelated to that criticism, though:
It seems to me like instead of coming up with special rules for stacking with capped duration, you should just recommend changing “stacks durations” to “stacks intensity”: each attack pops 1 stack of blind, but you can multi-stack blindness.

That would work too, well thought! But also some abilities/utilities should be tweaked to apply more that 1 stack, I like it!

Tks for your criticism and suggestion!

I guys, i made a post in the suggestion forum about this but would love to hear your opinions and diferent suggestions about this particular condition.

this is what I suggested:

First of all, this is how Blind is at the moment:

Blind: Next outgoing attack misses; stacks duration.

I would like to make a suggestion to change the blind condition, since at the moment it is the one condition that no one cares about… every one is looking out for every other condition so that they can remove it asap.

Conditions like Bleeding, Burning, chill, confusion, cripple, fear, immobilize, poison, vulnerability and weakness need to be removed because they directly have influence on battle in hand, they all can get you killed (along with retaliation on your opponent).

Blind make you miss the next attack, who cares?! you next one will hit and the next one and the one after that… Most people don’t even notice that they have been blinded…
Unless you are lucky enough (not skilled) to blind your target before he crowed control’s you, otherwise its just pointless to use blind, every class has they’re burst dmg spread throughout a rapid sequence of hits, missing 1 is irrelevant, dodging makes them miss a lot more that 1 hit.

My suggestion is, if instead of having your target miss the next attack, it would make them miss all attacks wile blinded.

Obviously this would also require that the blind duration throughout the professions be adjusted. (1,5sec to 2sec tops removable) also not stackable or stackable to a limit (like stealth) to a 3sec limit for example.

• Would (in my opinion) bring blind in line with all the other existing conditions.
• Would take skill to use it at the right time to avoid a burst or participially avoid it.
• Players would have to remove it or dodge away until it wares off instead of hitting “1” once to remove it.
• Would bring more variety to the table (since it’s just ignored at the moment).

I believe it is a realistic change and possibly not to hard to implement.

I didn’t expected to get this big but i tried to be as clear and detailed as possible.
I hope you enjoyed the read.

Hi,
First of all, this is how Blind is at the moment:

Blind: Next outgoing attack misses; stacks duration.

I would like to make a suggestion to change the blind condition, since at the moment it is the one condition that no one cares about… every one is looking out for every other condition so that they can remove it asap.

Conditions like Bleeding, Burning, chill, confusion, cripple, fear, immobilize, poison, vulnerability and weakness need to be removed because they directly have influence on battle in hand, they all can get you killed (along with retaliation on your opponent).

Blind make you miss the next attack, who cares?! you next one will hit and the next one and the one after that… Most people don’t even notice that they have been blinded…
Unless you are lucky enough (not skilled) to blind your target before he crowed control’s you, otherwise its just pointless to use blind, every class has they’re burst dmg spread throughout a rapid sequence of hits, missing 1 is irrelevant, dodging makes them miss a lot more that 1 hit.

My suggestion is, if instead of having your target miss the next attack, it would make them miss all attacks wile blinded.

Obviously this would also require that the blind duration throughout the professions be adjusted. (1,5sec to 2sec tops removable) also not stackable or stackable to a limit (like stealth) to a 3sec limit for example.

• Would (in my opinion) bring blind in line with all the other existing conditions.
• Would take skill to use it at the right time to avoid a burst or participially avoid it.
• Players would have to remove it or dodge away until it wares off instead of hitting “1” once to remove it.
• Would bring more variety to the table (since it’s just ignored at the moment).

I believe it is a realistic change and possibly not to hard to implement.

I didn’t expected to get this big but i tried to be as clear and detailed as possible.
I hope you enjoyed the read, and also that these reaches someone from Arena Net that would spend 2 minutes thinking about this suggestion

what were you expecting? the thief is on a very good state atm. Stealth still needs to be fixed (channeled abilities following though stealth and pets/clones/phantoms also following though stealth) aside from that i think were very strong as we are.

Imo just make it NOT trigger reveled.
Otherwise replace it with something new. Don’t have a suggestion for it right now but I’ll think about it :p

this happens A LOT in EB’s jumping puzzle.
imo if someone Alt+f4, the character should stay in game for another 10sec instead of insta disappearing, this way the person(s) who managed to killed them gets rewarded for doing so.

Inforus.2835:

This is being addressed: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Map-Stuck-is-back/first

it’s not only on pvp… in Fractals for example, if 1 person gets an endless loading screen wile changing instances, we have to RESET the hole thing and star over because when he/she logs back in they will be outside the instance and unable to rejoin the rest of the group…

I have never suffered from this problem although most of my friends have.
After the last patch on November 15th i get 2-4 endless loading per play session and sometimes a crash were everything freezes and the screen turns black, after these crashes when im trying to log back in it crashes again but with a white screen…

Last night was specially annoying since we were trying to do some tournaments and we almost never had the full party up, if it wasn’t me then another of my friends would get an endless loading when pressing the “respawn” button after he had died…

It wasn’t like this before the patch…. can you please fix this asap?! atm we lost all interest in tournaments for obvious reasons….

I found that the only way to reset this situation is:
1) Log out, log in again
2) heal yourself and kill the nearest mob you can find.

Amins.3710:

2 Main Issues:

1) Culling
2) Can use Full zerker build and still have the same survivability and very little downside compared to other classes that have to spec for survivability (at the cost of dmg).

Sorry I have to disagree, despite what non thieves say, thieves DO sacrifice survivability when going glass canon, just as they lose quite a lot of dmg when specing for stealth control or “support” (yeah the thieve profession has very little support but there is something there).

masztipapa.7519:

Backstab thieves can kill almost anybody in a second, thats a serious issue with the class and the other thing that bothers me is the initiative system. Add some diminishing return (so noobies dont spam heartseeker for win -.-), like it only does a third of its original dmg after the first use for like 2 or 3 seconds.

imo if the Mug traid gets (his dmg reduced it will be worthless) replaced with a new trait, this will reduce the amount of dmg output from a BS build thief in a short period of time.

As for HS spammers, most experienced pvp players do not dye to it, in fact is very easily counterable. Puting it in your terms, only noobies die to HS spamming noobies.

Personally I am enjoying the thief class very much, the only thing I would like to see changed are poisons and traps… imo the poisons do not worth a utility skill and traps just don’t fit in any of the thief’s play style (including ranged specs)

Also i would very much like a clarification on the following matter since it has been reported many many times since beta and nothing has changed, i don’t know if it is to hard (or time consuming) to fix or if it is actually working as intended.

Its about channeled abilities (some pets and clones) following thieves wile in stealth.
imo the caster, after loosing target should continue channeling towards the direction the caster is facing and not follow the lost target. BUT if it is working as intended i have already learned how to deal with this so, its not to bad.

A replay from a dev on this matter would be highly appreciated.

I was not smite, that i know, and now that you mentioned it it was probably the GS auto attack and Whirling Wrath… that killed us…

Hi all, I have been playing GW2 since beta but had played very little with this profession, now i rolled an alt to have more pvp options.

Last night i was playing with some friends at the jumping puzzle in EB and there we encountered a Guardian that played really well! grats to him, he was a white char from Desolation server in EU.

We eventualy managed to take him down but he lasted a lot versus the 3 of us, he could heal himself a lot, and managed to take some of us to down state a couple of times due to good dps (i noticed on my combat log that he was spamming the same ability but i cant recall what it was…).
we are full exotics and were thief, ranger and mesmer (none of us plays glass canon).

I noticed he was runing with scepter/shield + Great sword.

Since im very new to the Guardian profession, can some one give me an idea of what build he was probably running with? I would love to try it out

Tks in advanced

imho i think the nerfs were well implemented and needed, im also very happy with some buffs, specialy Blinding powder and Scorpion wire.

I thought they were going to make venoms and traps useful (which they didn’t) maybe next time.

overall I’m a very happy thief.

i cant see the build for some reason

Error: Bad link

Imho, the nerf was needed and it doesent feel weak, for me at least, i can live with the dmg it does atm, I just would like its init cost to be reduced by 1 or the cripple condition increced by 1 or 1,5 sec to compensate for the high init cost.

other than that small detail im very happy with the changes to the thief profession.

Was hoping for a lot more for the Ranger though, also nothing was changed about bunkers unfortunately…

all the builds pre patch are still viable.
venoms and traps are still useless but scorpion wire is AWESOME for both pvp and pve

eXs.6210:

best news is no BS nerf… not fun that dancing dagger got nerfed but largely not too awful… I was expecting a major nerf-bat…

i agree with the dmg reduction, it was ridiculous but they also should has reduced its cost by 1 init imo, other than that im a very happy thief

go on! reroll clothies pls

Patches always come with bugs, ALWAYS, I’d prefer that they reduced the number of EXISTENT bugs in game atm before adding more bugs to it.

Instead of spending most of theyre time designing new pices of clothing they should be fixing the kitten bugs… this is not the “Project Runway”

It’s desapointig to see so much content pushed into live wile live still feels like beta… There is mo much stuff to fix, new content should NOT be a priority at this moment.

Fix the game, bring it out of beta, then develope new content…

Normaly new content comes with new bugs and I think we all agree the we have more bugs then we can handle atm we don’t need more…

Derkzey.5416:

Volrath.1473:

I have the feeling that they are going to nerf the abilities that we actually use and compensate us by buffing the stuff we do not use like most venoms and all the traps.

We will continue not using the crappy stuff that they will buff, keep playing with the ones that got nerfed wile not being able to complaint about it because the answer will be “yes we nerfed the hell out of you but we buffed this couple of useless crap for you”

But by buffing the “crappy” stuff it might make it “useful”. Like what if it made the damaging poison (not sure what its called) be a different “poison” which allows it to stack intensity and not duration. or something, I don’t actually know but buffing the tools of a class after giving a damage nerf increases the required skillcap which means that all the theives who are saying “it takes skill to be a theif” can be proven right or wrong when it happens. to be honest I would prefer the skills which aren’t much use because they are underpowered to be buffed so we have a more diverse arsenal I am currently trying out a D/P P/D build build around getting in laying a poison and a few bleed stacks then jumping back out to range to hit them with pistol shots I think it might work but I will need to do some more work on it before I pull it out of my “testing” I still need to decide which skills to use with it to make it work.

No point… In a few days there will be lot of changes..
As for the pistons and traps, they have been “improved” before and the improvements were minimal keeping the abilities useless, tbh I doubt they ever will usefull in competitive/casual pvp.

Specially traps, The base design of them does not match the profession and the benefits from them to the profession playstyles are none.

Poisons are simply week, easy to remove and are far from giving any meaningful advantage to the thief profession.

I seriously doubt that they will ever be any good specialy the way a-net balances things, nerfing hard and buffing in sprinkles.

I have the feeling that they are going to nerf the abilities that we actually use and compensate us by buffing the stuff we do not use like most venoms and all the traps.

We will continue not using the crappy stuff that they will buff, keep playing with the ones that got nerfed wile not being able to complaint about it because the answer will be “yes we nerfed the hell out of you but we buffed this couple of useless crap for you”

Realistically, ppl don’t though fireballs from their hands nor survive a “head shot”, they don’t miraculously resurrect when ppl rub their belly for a few seconds…
Realistically after betting back stabbed you will be in no conditions to follow anyone even if you could see them…

You should look at stealth as an “invisibility” and not “hidden” in plain day light on an open field or under water or a “blind” with smoke or a powder in your eyes that temporarily blinds you and any one around the thief.

this is a fantasy game, lets keep it that way ok?

“thieves contribute a lot to they’re raid groups in wvwvw besides spamming blasts in water fields”

“venoms are awesome, I use them all the time!”

“traps are awesome, they fit very well our profession, I use them all the time!”

“channeled abilities do not follow me wile in steath”

I approve as well, very well thought

if those are ppl that whine about thieves trying them out them its good! they will find out the hard way that the thief is not as good (OP) as they thought.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just wanted you guys to know we’re looking at this specifically right now. We will probably bring down the raw spike DPS for some builds, but we’ll be careful to increase other areas to compensate.

pls keep in mind that by nerfing burst specs (thieves or not) you will also be indirectly buffing BUNKER specs since as is, it takes 3+ ppl to take down a bunker speced profession, by nerfing burst, bunkers will be alot harder to kill.

Not trying to convince you not to nerf dps but just reminding you that bunker specs will also need to be looked at BEFORE nerfing any dps specs.

Arheundel.6451:

….Just a simple reminder….

What get abused….get nerfed

when you get constantly nefed you have no choice but to look for other viable options to keep being competitive.

hum… never thought about that xD

I do not play glass canon and this my be enjoyable. my gear will help too.
Tomorrow after work ill give it a go. now im off to bed xD