My unscientific study of the matter concludes about 50% of guardians wantonly abuse this bug.
^^ Above poster is right that necros are bad on clocktower but that has more to do with the bad design of clocktower than anything else. Let’s make the key point on a key map vastly favor classes with stability or knockbacks! Great idea!
This is just a semantic argument. Anyone with any integrity agrees 18k damage in 1.5 seconds is not good game design. Whether you tone down backstab itself or whether you remove assassin’s signet entirely or whether you stop allowing the c&D—→stealth combo to work are all basically going towards the same thing:
A spec which teleports to you from 900 away, stealths itself then kills you in less than 2 seconds is just not good game design whether there are counters or not.
Engi is definitely a viable bunker, and I’d put necro in there too. Although it is a bit dependent on plague, which is probably the best bunker skill in the game but only has 20% uptime.
Not to mention we also have 50% base uptime swiftness on medkit 5….
It should hit each player in the trail once and only once. That seems obvious.
Power double dipping isn’t a flaw… it’s a design choice.
The point of GW is FAST PACED PvP. By inhibiting healing and making toughness a remedial stat you put a timer on any given encounter. It gives value to choices made in combat.
Fast paced pvp is fine. 2 second TTK from a stealth isn’t. Sorry.
Uh you do realize he can just keep spamming backstab? It doesn’t matter if you dodge. Only bad thieves will get put off by that.
2 second TTK is bad game design but if a failed backstab actually took the thief out of stealth at least that would be something. But it doesn’t even do that. The only thing you can do is double dodge and hope that takes up the whole stealth window…but then he’ll just c&d again and repeat the combo and guess what? You just used both your dodges.
It’s a dumb oversight with the way the ability works. It needs to be fixed and I don’t think you’ll have anyone arguing it is a dumb oversight. The tooltip doesn’t say it works that way.
2 second TTK is bad game design. No amount of talking one way or the other is going to change that.
Even bust specs shouldn’t be able to output more than about 4-5k dps tops during their burst period. The damage the backstab thief combo puts out wouldn’t be a problem if it were distributed over 5 seconds instead of done in about 1.5 seconds.
In practical terms this means nerfing backstab and quickness. If you do that you get pretty much all the 2 second TTK specs.
This is the real reason they gave us so much swiftness.
what swiftness? engineers have a lot less swiftness than most classes.
not sure if srs 78910
I agree. But isn’t slot 2 napalm ball?
I sure think napalm ball is a useless skills, it provides less damage then the regular attack, and it misses ALL the time!
The DPS is substantially higher than auto attack when you hit both parts of the skill. It’s particularly good as an opener. Open with that then run forward hitting with number 1.
The negativity is basically just because guardian spirit weapons are better in almost every way – do more damage, can move, invulerable, etc.
I see a lot of wildly exaggerated claims flying around about thief damage.. whenever someone actually tests it and gets hard numbers, the damage is like 3x lower than what people claim they get killed by.
There are plenty of screenshots showing the high end of thief damage at round 15k, and it is average to hit for 10k.
Higher than 10k is usually due to superior bloodlust sigil which should be nerfed. It just snowballs too quickly.
Uh superior bloodlust is 250 power tops which at 80 in dps gear is about a 10% damage boost. Making you pretty clearly wrong.
Backstab is ok, assassin’s signet and quickness are not.
It’s absolutely silly we have to do all these elaborate work-arounds for an obvious and close to game-breaking problem.
OP is right. System is badly thought out and encourages 2nd and 3rd giving up on 1st and just fighting eachother for the scraps.
JQ isn’t even JQ any more. 50% of the people in wvwvw these days are glory hunting migrants who arrived 2-3 days ago.
dry toast pvp, harcore pvpers from daoc/warhammer bored. couple of ideas
in WvW
Posted by: Yukishiro.8792
DAOC wasn’t small but it wasn’t huge either, even by the standards of the time. EQ was always substantially more successful IIRC.
dry toast pvp, harcore pvpers from daoc/warhammer bored. couple of ideas
in WvW
Posted by: Yukishiro.8792
Downed state is a great addition to sPVP. I agree though it is problematic in large engagements and makes it basically impossible for a smaller force to really beat a larger one.
Original poster is pretty much right. They have to get rid of free transfers to winning servers. Or else have a 1 week WvW lockout when you transfer to a winning server.
With some +boon duration or +swiftness duration you can also build up more than 5 seconds at a time so over time you can accumulate a decent buffer even if for some reason you can’t swap exactly on the 5 second mark. Not to mention of course throwing in things like medkit 5 or elixer b to get a bit of a buffer.
If you can hit a thief with all 3 chill grenades it is pretty much GG if they don’t have a conditional removal skill available. Especially if you have perma swiftness.
When everyone misses the point it’s a good clue your point is dumb.
sPVP is 8 per map. tPVP is 5. Competitive PVP in this game is designed to be small scale. Telling people to always bring 2 people to everything is dumb because if you did that you’d lose pretty much every map.
A roamer thief is viable in tPVP if not exactly overpowered. I think the complaints are that really that’s the only thing a thief can do in tpvp. Which admittedly is better than some classes (cough ranger cough) who have NO viable tPVP roles.
Turrets will often target through stealth so that’s a cheap but effective way to deal with thieves. Supply drop combines turrets with a ground target stun which is extremely effective too.
If you run constant swiftness + vigor you have enough dodges to really mess with them. Combined with all the blindness abilities an engi has access to you can make a thief have a very hard time ganking you.
Could just make the cast time instant couldn’t they?
The flame of flamethrower is sort of weird in the first place. There isn’t enough condition damage to make it a condition weapon, but 1s burning just feels sorta tacked on. Either it should burn on every tick and do less direct damage or it should burn for 2s on the last tick or it should just not burn at all.
what I’m saying is the burn is a 1 second duration because of how frequently you can apply it with flame jet (even more so if you reduce the skill recharge time) just by letting it run. It’s pointless to stack burn duration because of so.
wat
takes 2 seconds to do a full cycle. that means you have 50% uptime max.
Swapping to another weapon to use swiftness doesn’t take that long. It’s just clunky and awful to do but you feel like you have to to remain competitive.
I am not that upset about swap at the spawn zone. Swap outside the spawn zone shouldn’t be allowed.
If it’s intended, it needs to be less clunky to do. If it’s not intended, it needs to be removed.
Right now it falls into the catagory of “big chore but gives you an advantage.” That catagory shouldn’t exist.
While Thieves have Init, they won't be balanced like the rest of us
in PvP
Posted by: Yukishiro.8792
The solution is to do what Blizzard did with rogues in wow. Energy in wow started out similar to initiative in GW2. But over time Blizzzard shifted the system away from a “dump then wait” model to a more constant gameplay style where energy pretty much regenerates constantly at about the same rate you use it.
While Thieves have Init, they won't be balanced like the rest of us
in PvP
Posted by: Yukishiro.8792
honestly Yukishiro, i dont exactly agree, im not saying your wrong, but i question the validity of your statement. saying its imbalanced and always will be by design, but nobody ever explains this in detail.
The problem is that a gimmick based around being able to DPS dump in return for a period of weakness afterward is inherently hard to balance. If you balance it to make the DPS dump bearable then the class is kitten because it only does balanced DPS when it dumps. If you balance it the other way you end up with burst dps that is too high for that short period.
You see the same basic problem with balancing Quickness in this game. Right now DPS is balanced around not having quickness, which means when you do have it people die too fast.
Yeah that is obviously the smart way to go. Quickness and assassin’s signet need to be removed from the game entirely and I think you would see 90% of the thief whines go away.
@ Berkles Yeah I understand that. My point is that juggernaught as a talent right now makes very little sense. If it was in the same tree as the +15% damage talent it would at least make a little sense as a tanky trait. But again, if it’s a tank trait, why have it stack might? Flamethrower used in a tanky way involves rapid switching, not staying in FT for long periods of time.
The whole talent just makes no sense currently. The might stacking was obviously just a badly thought out bandaid to try to make the stability nerf not feel quite so bad. But it left juggernaught as a talent without a clear identity and flamethrower as a weapon seemingly designed one way but talented another way.
2 second TTK is bad gameplay. There are a few specific classes and specs where the TTK is just too high.
In general I think TTK is about right though. They just need to:
1. Remove quickness from the game
and
2. Nerf the thief backstab build
And a lot of the TTK issues would go away
While Thieves have Init, they won't be balanced like the rest of us
in PvP
Posted by: Yukishiro.8792
Initiative is inherently imbalanced and always will be by its basic design. It’s just a bad mechanic.
The sad thing is they had Blizzard’s years of experience to look at and they went and made the exact same mistake. Blizzard slowly and subtly changed the thief energy model from something that allowed people to dump to a much smoother more constant system. Arenanet ignored that experience completely.
It’s a dumb stat to have in the game. But it is so obviously dumb that I don’t think most people with an actual clue will care about it at all.
Killing someone in less than 2 seconds from stealth will be nerfed. It’s inevitable. It just isn’t good game design. Are there counters? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good dynamic to have in the game.
2 second TTK in an MMO is just bad design. Arenanet will realize this at some point and change thieves and all other classes that can have a 2 second TTK. There are a lot of dumb people who will argue in favor of 2 second TTK until the cows go home but they’re ultimately fighting a losing battle because that simply isn’t what the consumer wants.
Thieves will be nerfed. It’s 100% inevitable at this point. It’s not a question of whether it’s just a question of when.
There is a very small window between DBs where you can CC the thief but it is so narrow it’s pretty much a crapshoot if you’re going to get your CC off in that window or not. But that’s about all you can do other than tank the damage.
If you have a block ability it makes sense to put that up and either have them 1) waste ini or 2) stop DBing while they wait for the block to end, thereby giving you a chance to CC them.
Eh warrior bunker isn’t AWFUL but it definitely isn’t as good as the bunker classes you normally think of (guardian, necro, engi, ele).
Yep engis lacking good access to stability is probably the biggest downside of the class. Especially in a bunker role. You are also kinda hosed when you fight an attacker with stability because most of your bunkering tools don’t work any more.
If juggernaught is for a tanky build why is it 30 points into a dps tree and why does half of its effect go towards doing damage?
The ability just makes no sense currently. It isn’t particularly tanky, it isn’t particularly dps-Y, and it tries to encourage you to play the wrong way with FT but the reward (5-7 stacks of might, i.e. ~10% damage) isn’t close to large enough.
Nope. Doesn’t work like that. Doesn’t really matter that counters are available. People don’t like 2 second TTK. Whether it comes from a thief backstab or a warrior hb frenzy combo or whatever else. It’s not fun game design and if you design a game with 2 second TTK you will find most people arn’t very interested in playing it.
warriors are one of the few who are balanced, and most people agree.
If by balanced you mean “excellent for jumping noobs in hot join” then I agree, but the difficulty Warriors have finding groups in tPvP is evidence of their current lack of balance. If Warrior can do something, chances are another class can do it better. But that’s ok, I’ve switched to Guardian (like a lot of people it seems), I use my Warrior now for jumping noobs in hot join occasionally.
Well, look on the bright side. At least you’re not a ranger. Those guys are really sad right now.
But yeah I agree war is a little too good at jumping hot join noobs and not quite good enough in tPvP with organized groups.
You obviously don’t do much tPVP, where warriors often struggle to get into a team.
Warriors are good at slaughtering noobs, not so great at tPVP.
Warriors are pretty well balanced. If anything they are a little too good for killing noobs and a little underpowered for more organized pvp where they struggle to get into teams.