Guild Wars 2

Thief is too easy to do well on even if you’re a terrible player. That is why you see 5 of them in every hot join. It’s an extremely noob-friendly class.

The real problem with retaliation is that it is too powerful against quick and compound attacks and not powerful enough against slow ones.

Engi has weird DPS fluctuations as you are leveling. Flamethrower is actually very good dps at lower levels, but it scales very poorly and starts to be bad around like 50-60. Grenades are always good, but become DRAMATICALLY better at 60+. Elixer gun starts out pitiful, but actually becomes decent DPS by 80 because many of its abilities scale fairly well.

But no, you’re never going to compete with a warrior 3 levels higher than you until you get to level 60+ and get 3 grenades. But that’s just life. Part of it (probably at least 20%) is your level difference. The rest is just the fact that warriors get extremely high damage abilities on their baseline weapons while engis rely on talents to boost dps.

It’s a viable pick for a utility for bunker build, usually with kit refinement chosen. You can put down 2x super elixer that way which is good for stacking ret and/or removing conditions, along with decent healing too.

As a primary weapon? Not really too great. Although some people say the scaling is actually pretty decent, especially on eg2 when used on 2 or mokittengets.

Anyone who was surprised about this has their head in the sand. Everyone knows backstab burst is going to get nerfed. It’s just a matter of when, not if.

Speargun is awful dps on the base ability. It has a couple of decent dps abilities but you should be weaving those in with grenades. I can’t imagine speargun is anywhere near competitive dps with grenades underwater, even post nerf, if you actually sit in speargun waiting for cooldowns spamming 1.

You need to look pretty carefully at what that % increase in bleed duration actually gets you. If you are using the traditional condition spec (i.e., not grenades) your bleeding sources are so low duration to begin with that you need to do the math to see if each marginal increase is worth it. You seem to do this in your original post.

It seems like the rub is you are getting 1 extra second of bleeding per auto attack going with more bleed duration. So I guess it just really depends on what you give up to get the extra 10%. If you’re only losing ~30 condition damage that is probably worth it.

I am not sure losing 50 toughness and 150 condition is worth it to get the added bleed duration. I would have to do the math on how much DPS that costs you, particularly with 100% uptime on burn, which scales pretty well (compared to bleed, which doesn’t). It would also depend on if we’re talking PVE, where conditions rarely get removed, or PVP, where they often get removed, thereby mitigating the value of +duration.

Trying to stack bleed duration on engi is sorta silly. Engi bleeds arn’t long enough duration or a big enough part of engi dps, even for a condition spec, in the first place to make it worthwhile.

Necros, rangers, condition thievse – there bleed duration may make sense. Not for engis though.

It’s fine if you use them within about 500 range or so. Beyond that they spread out too much and become rather ineffective.

Maybe it’s just how I play (badly) underwater but I always seem to be within 600ish range of the enemy anyhow when underwater so it usually isn’t a problem for me.

Heh your math is very wrong but it’s true grenades are probably the highest DPS weapon in the game right now. Especially if you count in grenade barrage as part of grenades.

Great video. The best part is how awful he is.

P.S. IMO logging out to avoid the deathblow should be a bannable exploit. I would report him. The problem is that anet’s bad reporting mechanics makes it hard to report someone after they’ve already logged out.

Of course I know how signets work.

The point is right now many of our talents do what you suggested – provide a passive benefit for equipping a particular utility skill (in our case usually kits). Juggernaught provies 200 toughness + might stacks for FT. Speedy kits provides swiftness on all kits. The 10 point alch talent when combined provides swiftness + vigor on all kits. There’s a talent that gives regen on all kits IIRC.

We already get two skills per gadget. I don’t think we also need to put passive bonuses on top of that. The current system works fine.

Is it odd engis don’t have signets? Yes, it’s odd. But that’s just life. We don’t have signets from a design point of view because we have both kits and turrets. Those don’t leave any utility slots left for signets.

“Siege is the counter” is practically valid but conceptually stupid. Why should siege bypass the aoe limit? If the limit makes sense it makes sense for siege too. It’s just a dumb inconsistency, just like AOE damage being capped at 5 but AOE heals not being capped is a dumb inconsistency.

The trait system accomplishes that right now. Speedy kits, kit refinement, vigor with speedy kits, regen with kit equip, etc.

This is the sort of thing that a competent PVP designer would have flagged within 15 seconds as a “no go.” That a “rich get richer” sort of buff like the orb buff is still in the game a month later, after thousands of posts worth of negative feedback explaining why it is such a bad idea, tells you volumes about the competency of anet’s WvWvW team.

It’s pretty obvious commanders should be chosen through some sort of election process rather than just be something you buy for 100g. But that wouldn’t generate money for a-net from people buying gems to trade for their blue pin…

Grenade has better damage and utility than any other kit. It isn’t just you. The problem is the kits are just badly balanced.

You can do other builds and do fine but the math is pretty clear: grenades blow everything else out of the water.

It’s hillariously bad design that the best way to break even in WvWvW is to just PVE flipping objectives and avoiding actual player vs player combat at all costs.

Almost nobody is going to be able to make money from killing other players in WvWvW. The math simply doesn’t support it. Trading objectives, however, is quite lucrative and easy. Great design there.

Dual pistols is bad on engi too. Not unviable, but definitely weaker than either rifle or pistol/shield.

If you don’t like how they look don’t spend the hundreds of hours and gold to get one.

Anyone who leaves a game because it’s time-consuming to get a cosmetic weapon skin they don’t even like has some serious issues.

I think the my little pony bow is hillarious and one of the best items I’ve ever seen in an MMO.

The comment about godskull exploiters wasn’t just a general comment about the % of the wealth they still have.

The point is that when the godskull exploit was fixed the amount of precursors coming into the economy went down. Therefore naturally driving up prices. At the very same time, the people who used the godskull exploit were left with an inventory of precursors and/or huge cash reserves they could use to buy up existing precursors and relist them for large profits.

The point is that the godskull sploit was just a huge snafu no matter how you look at it. It set the initial price of precusors at an artificially low level, causing a lot of anger when the price “spiked” suddenly. It also left the sploiters with massive cash funds they could use to further inflate the market.

I sat around behind a computer for 300+ hours to get my legendary pixels. This is a very manly thing to do so I demand to be rewarded with manly pixels, not girly ones!

Good grief.

Siege is the obvious counter but it isn’t really clear you shold be required to build siege just to beat people who are clumped up in one place not moving at all because of questionable AOE implementation.

Either boons and heals need to be limited to 5 targets or aoe needs to be unlimited. I’d vote for the former probably.

Stin.9781:

I dont even need Sr for that… you can just use smoke bomb and few blast finishers for 15 seconds invis if i want . Diffrence ? none by the time im out of invis my innitiative wil be full again and Smoke bomb cooldown is shorter by 50%. Things like this always existed however its easier to achieve with SR now. Some players know nuthing of combos so just keep blabing.

That at least requires an initiative dump…but I agree it’s problematic too.

Engi can do something similar.

What really ought to happen is stealth duration ought to reset rather than stack. I.e. you drop a smoke bomb, blast finisher = 3 seconds stealth, 1 second later you blast finish again = reset to 3 seconds stealth instead of going to 5 seconds stealth.

The mechanics of blowtorch are really not fine. It just doesn’t fit with the other pistol skills AT ALL. It makes no sense to have a melee range burn on pistol 4.

If it was 900 range it would make plenty of sense: you pick shield for survivability or pistol for a 4th condition without having to spec for it. At 200 (effective) range it is totally out of place on pistols which are clearly a ranged weapon in general.

Reliable stability would be the holy grail. But I don’t think we’ll ever get it.

FT is not competitive damage. There’s just no two ways about it.

It does fine in any situation where you don’t need competitive damage (bunker, wvwvw to some extent, non-dungeon PVE).

I use it in PVE for farming sometimes just because it’s very easy. Just hit 2 from 600 range, follow in with auto attack and circle strafe till mob is dead. But it’s definitely not competitive when eeking the most damage out is required.

The overpowered part is what the OP said, not in the in-combat use. That’s ok and counterable like you said.

The only counter to spawn-point SR is portal which is another “bring the class” skill that really doesn’t belong in the game.

Kill shot is actually exactly what a very high damage skill should be: slow, distinctive, and requires power-up.

If you get hit by kill shot you usually deserve it. There are rare exceptions, but the vast majority of the time it’s your own fault.

If only all the insta-gib skills were similar…

By bad I thought I was clear I meant bad for the game, not bad as in underpowered.

Both of those skills do more to ruin tPVP than almost everything else combined. The guardian gandalf staff skill is problematic too, but only on a few areas.

Portal is bad. So is shadow refuge. They are both garbage “bring the class” skills.

It is a classic knee-jerk fix. Which is funny because it took them weeks to do. Really doesn’t inspire confidence when they wait around for a month and then do something as lazy as that.

Ele 2 needed work but what it DIDN’T need was to be swapped with ele 3.

Only read to post 50 or so, but @ alcopaul:

No, gold sellers don’t get their money by playing in game. Gold sellers get their money by stealing the accounts of people who buy from them, taking their gold, and reselling it to another person who is hopefully dumb enough to use the same password on the gold site as their account, thus perpetuating the cycle.

They also use bots, hacks and anything else they can find.

Gold sellers are not your unemployed neighbor who plays 16 hours a day. Well, maybe they are, but he’s playing 10 bots at once while stealing the accounts of 4 others at the same time.

Bombs actually do pretty competitive damage. The problem is just that grenades with the grenadier talent do even more. Until you get that talent bomb kit is the highest damage kit single target or aoe.

Lol blowtorch is garbage in wvwvw. The only place it has any value is in 1v1 situations. Why on earth would you close to 400 range on a zerg just to put a few k of burning on 2-3 people?

Pistol offhand is just bad no matter how you cut it. There will always people who like every skill set, no matter how bad it is, because it’s what they’re used to or because they have some weird emotional investment in using bad skills and being “the one” who gets it.

Doesn’t change reality, though. Pistol offhand is poorly designed. The skills do little to complement the way pistol should play.

It stacks with normal regen, which is why. If you wanted perma regen that didn’t stack with normal regen that would be acceptible but I think most eles would prefer the current implementation…

I’d like to see it changed to a 900 range attack that gets a bonus based on how many conditions are on the target. Make it something like:

300 damage, 900 range, 120 radius
IF target bleeding: add 3 stacks of bleed (6 second duration)
IF target burning: add 6 seconds of burning
IF target confused: add 3 stacks of confusion (6 second duration)

It seems to me the tradeoff should be between survivability with shield and enhanced condition-based DPS with pistol. The problem is right now blowtorch just doesn’t provide all that much of a DPS boost unless you arn’t traited or utilitied to be able to burn using other means, and it requires you to close to melee which doesn’t really fit with the design of the build.

I can see what they were thinking when they designed the skill…give engi access to burning through P/P. I have a feeling they designed it before they designed traits and utilities though, which give less awkward acecss to burning and radically diminish the value of blowtorch.

It’s just ridiculous how it works right now. Thief apologists love to talk about risk vs reward but the risk is so low right now with this ability. Blinded? Doesn’t matter, just keep spamming 1 and you can still backstab them! Did they anticipate your backstab and dodge? Who cares! Just hit 1 again once they finish their dodge!

Regardless of what anyone thinks about backstab damage it is just indefensible the way a failed backstab doesn’t remove stealth.

Illegal gold sellers charge that price because 75% of their clientele are certifiable morons who use the same login and password to buy gold as they do on their account. Meaning the gold sellers just steal their account a few weeks later and sell that gold to some other sucker.

It’s a pretty good gig. Dependent only on a constant supply of morons. And there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of those.

It is very strange how you solo up to the last mission then have to get a group of 5. Makes very little sense.

If you can reliably keep 3 targets burning in PVP using blowtorch, props. I can’t. I would be dead very quickly. And if I were looking for AOE damage I would switch to something that is actually better at that.

In my experience blowtorch is just badly designed. With a pistol condition build it is both awkward and unnessecary vs a single opponent to be trying to close to melee to use it. In an aoe situation it alone isn’t enough to make you want to get close to 3+ enemies and if you have piercing shots it’s probably worse dps than just spamming 1 from 900-1200 range instead if you’d got 3 targets to ping off.

I’d much rather be able to use shield 4 and 5 to mitigate or reflect 10kish damage than have to try to get up close to hit someone with blowtorch for only marginally more damage than I was already dealing from range.

Plague signet’s tooltip now correctly states:

“Active: Using this signet sometimes does nothing.”

lol @ boxface

Ideally you would be able to activate medkit drops using the interact key within ~100 range as well as activate them by running over them physically.

Engi shouldn’t have that much trouble. If necessary slot the condition removal on elixir use trait. Or just use elixer gun + kit refinement to do the removal for you. Don’t stand in the trops and you should do ok. Especially if you can time a knockback right to hit as they are landing before they can start the next DB.

Pistol offhand gives you one questionable damage skill that is largely redundant with typical condition specs which don’t have that much trouble keeping burning up and one surprisingly long CD rather ineffective control skill.

Shield gives you block, daze, stun and reflect. Isn’t hard to see which of those two is going to be more useful most of the time.

I don’t think gold is all that big of a deal in wvwvw given how uesless gold is at the endgame in general.

But it is a little odd how focused wvwvw is on gold sinks. It doesn’t seem right that spending money is such an integral part of the experience.

No offense but your original whine sorta shows what you problem is. Anyone who thinks warriors were bad in wow or vanguard were bad in SWTOR is most likely their own biggest problem.

Based on those comments you would feel useless and outclassed no matter what class you play.

It has to do with elevation. If your target is at a different elevation than you the fail rate is very high. If it’s more or less flat the fail rate is very low.

Offhand pistol is bad compared to shield or rifle. Don’t think anyone who has played the class for any length of time disagrees.