Guild Wars 2

Axe auto is complete garbage. Axe is there for the 3rd skill chill, splitblade at pointblank, and simply because it’s the only ranged weapon that lets you bring a second offhand.

Leo G.4501:

Zenith.7301:

Are you stupid, or have you not used the skill?

Are you stupid and haven’t used the skill?

Maul does not need a stationary target. It just needs a target that is in combat (so your swiftness speed is the same as the target’s swiftness speed). Yes, you can dodge the skill, but duh. If the skill was so fast and had no tells, do you think it’d do as much damage? Yeah, the skill can be dodged, but that window is less than a second. Just moving isn’t going to negate Maul.

Countless times. On targets in combat, and as sure as longbow arrows miss side strafing targets, Maul constantly misses targets on the move, especially in the middle of the zerg where you’re easily crippled.

And warriors have this thing called leg specialist. The closest we have to that is a utility slot or a pet’s unreliable F2. Ranger greatsword cannot keep a target from kiting you if they want to. All you have is swoop. Unlike mainhand sword, which has a perma cripple from auto.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Killsmith.8169:

One thing to keep in mind is that the skill coefficients are better on the warrior. I just did a little testing in the heart of the mists and it looks like the greatsword has about a .7 coefficient for the warrior’s auto attack, while the ranger gets a 0.55. That means they get about 27% more damage per point of power.

Hundred blades has a power coefficient of ~.55 on each of the first 8 hits and ~1.1 on the final hit. That’s huge. Maul, on the other hand, gets a 1.5 coefficient.

So to compare, hundred blades gets 5.5 damage per point of power, maul gets 1.5. I don’t think pets are ever going to pick up that much slack.

The thing that really makes no sense to me is that a class that reduces damage by dodging a lot has a bunch of skills designed to do constant mediocre damage. You can’t do damage while dodging, so if rangers dodge more, shouldn’t the skills be a little more bursty so they don’t hurt our damage as much?

Hundred Blades is a non-mobile channeled skill with an 8 second cooldown that relies on stun/knockdown/immobilize utilities to make it connect (which in turn rely on foes not carrying stun breaks).

Maul is a mobile, standard skill with a 6 second cooldown that also applies 3 bleeds for 6 seconds, while the Ranger also has pets at his/her disposal to help make up for the damage gap and provide utility.

This is a real apples to oranges comparison, especially considering that Maul isn’t the problem of the Greatsword. The low coefficients on the auto-attack chain and/or the fact that it can’t make up for the MH Sword’s higher damage and perma cripple are the issue.

Are you stupid, or have you not used the skill? Maul needs a stationary target as well to land. Try hitting a target with siftness and no cripples/chills with it. The delay on the hit makes maul VERY easy to dodge.

The same goes for Hilt Bash.

And what the OP is forgetting is that he’s not looking at traits and boon uptime. Tooltips won’t suffice, because a warrior can easily run 70% crit chance and additional crit damage from traits, keep up easily about 10-15 stacks of might, stack vulnerability on their own, high fury uptime, and all of his damage scales with power/prec/crit damage, whereas 30-40% of the ranger’s damage (the pet) only benefits 30% crit damage max, has no increased precision options — and is often dead in group engagements outside spvp.

As a ranger, in wvw and dungeons you will run with a high uptime 30-40% damage handicap.

And that 30-40% of your damage? If it’s not a drake, it does not cleave targets.

P.S. Greatsword auto is REALLY bad.

Ruggan.4102:

Zenith.7301:

Probably because they’re the only class that can escape anyone they want, even zergs if they want to.

An ele can’t RTL away if he’s rooted, but a thief can infiltrator’s arrow out of roots and can hit random animals to stealth away.

Basically, thieves can reset fights. Yes, thieves can lose to several specs, especially confusion or retal ones, but their difference with other classes is that they can still harass and disengage at will from even fights that do not favor them, whereas a necromancer for example is kittened if a competent thief catches him, or a mesmer is screwed the moment a d/d ele or engineer arrives.

Thieves can both chase and disengage the best of any class, and people resent that despite the fact that thieves are not great in larger team fights, so they mainly roam.

Yes, Thieves can hit random animals to stealth… oh no… a necro can hit random non entities like walls to gain health. And if a thief is hitting animals to stealth, they are running away… how do I know this… because no idiot is going to cause themselves more agro and attacks when trying to win a pvp fight… oh yea keep in mind… in WvW there are no “white” animals, they are all red and agro… so umm yea.

Infiltrator Arrow will get a thief out of root… yup you are correct. It is one of the FEW abilities that do allow for some kind of condition removal for thieves. Other classes have condition removal, transfer, and stability. Find a thief ability that gives stability… oops it isn’t there.

So let me get this last part straight… because a thief can run away, the thief is OP? If a thief is so OP… then why does the thief need to reset the fight? Doesn’t make sense.

LOL Dagger Storm. And if you complain it’s an elite, the same is the case for ranger and necro, and engineers don’t even get stability unless it;s a 50% chance fromtossed elixir S.

Condi removal costs a slot — your condi removal is bundled into your heal. And from stealthing with traits, which you can use frequently.

P.S. Thief resets the fight for the reason anyone else tries to as well. They mess up, get a key skill dodged, etc. Thieves can just reset far more reliably than other classes, with only ele and mesmer having close to the ability to reset.

Arganthium.5638:

Zenith.7301:

Fenrir.4237:

Grimwolf.7163:

Fenrir.4237:

Annoying to fight isn’t limited to Thief, stop being biased.

I hope to God you weren’t dumb enough to just say I’m biased against the Thief. Thief is my main, and anyone who spends much time on the forums should know that much.
I have an entire site dedicated to the Thief class.

Doesn’t mean you’re not biased towards your own class. I don’t find Thieves annoying to fight against at all, I actually like fighting them out of all classes. I find it way more annoying to fight Ele, Mesmer or Guardian than a Thief, by a longshot. Idk about you.

Zenith.7301:

LOL, necro, “tons of dps”. That’s just too cute by half.

Know what’s even cuter? This right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4gXKLbrvMk
Learn your kitten bro before even trying to make fun of me.

Just wanted to say that this discussion is going to start to go off-topic. Stop picking the nitty gritties, seriously, this is a discussion about “Why idiots think Thief is OP” not about wether Thief is annoying or wether or not Necro having tons of DPS is right.

You consider rooting some noob who didn’t dodge dark pact — with an obvious cast time and animation-- on a well and spamming a supposedly “strong” autoattack “tons of DPS”?

I’d love to have some of what you’re having.

Where the hell are all those “LF Necromancer” posts in dungeon speed runs? Because I see none.

What about the “LF Thief” posts? In fact, a significant proportion of the GW2 community believes that thieves are extremely weak in dungeons.

Anyways, that’s not a good measure of how good necros are in dungeons. For example- perhaps nobody wants necros in their groups because of people like you, who say that necros must be bad in dungeon groups because nobody wants them in their dungeon groups. They see your comment, think “oh, well, necros must be bad”, and then try to keep them out of their groups, creating a self-perpetuating bias.

Rather, I like to look at necros from a more theoretical point of view. Necros are easily the second most survivable class, the first being guardians. Then, necros provide tons of mitigation via cripples, chills, fears, and blinds. On top of that, they can apply these conditions in an AoE, making necros even more powerful as a profession that can control the battlefield. Being so easily able to apply conditions, they necros can also mitigate enemy healing via poison, and do damage throughout lulls in fighting via DoT. On top of this, Minion Masters give NPCs a distraction that give others a chance to attack an open enemy. With Plague Signet, necros provide a way to remove conditions from friends, which they can use to heal themselves for more, or even to transfer them to enemies, which, with Epidemic, causes a mass of conditions that can easily overcome a mob.

No, necros don’t have the highest DPS, but they have the best DoT, control, and the second best tanking.

I’m talking to a genius who’s arguing thieves are weak in dungeon groups. In the very cof p1 farming official thread in the dungeon forums, the format calls for 1 or 2 thieves. In fractals thieves are essential for the dredge fractal.

I have a necro so my view is not theoretical. I just have 6 other lv80’s, 3 of them (mesmer, guardian, ele) which are far superior in the support and aoe side.

2nd best tanking goes to bunker classes. A bunker scepter ele can tank more damage in dungeons, as can an evasion ranger. So this is my cue to stop wasting time, especially with a person who would screw their group over by using minions.

Whatever you do, please don’t hide our kit backpacks with backpieces.

One of the biggest appeals of my asura engineer is watching his backpack details change in between kits. The whole backpack is very visually distinctive as an engineer, as much as the elementalist’s auras around his hands are.

They don’t use cnd to kill pets — they use it to get a free heal/condi removal/target drop. And you can’t stop it, compared to a no pet class which can dodge the cnd.

And what aoe/swinging will you do? Most cnd spamm thieves are p/d thieves, and last I checked they don’t stay in melee range when stealthing, and with the ease of cnd on melee pets they dont even need to stealth near you.

Fenrir.4237:

Grimwolf.7163:

Fenrir.4237:

Annoying to fight isn’t limited to Thief, stop being biased.

I hope to God you weren’t dumb enough to just say I’m biased against the Thief. Thief is my main, and anyone who spends much time on the forums should know that much.
I have an entire site dedicated to the Thief class.

Doesn’t mean you’re not biased towards your own class. I don’t find Thieves annoying to fight against at all, I actually like fighting them out of all classes. I find it way more annoying to fight Ele, Mesmer or Guardian than a Thief, by a longshot. Idk about you.

Zenith.7301:

LOL, necro, “tons of dps”. That’s just too cute by half.

Know what’s even cuter? This right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4gXKLbrvMk
Learn your kitten bro before even trying to make fun of me.

Just wanted to say that this discussion is going to start to go off-topic. Stop picking the nitty gritties, seriously, this is a discussion about “Why idiots think Thief is OP” not about wether Thief is annoying or wether or not Necro having tons of DPS is right.

You consider rooting some noob who didn’t dodge dark pact — with an obvious cast time and animation-- on a well and spamming a supposedly “strong” autoattack “tons of DPS”?

I’d love to have some of what you’re having.

Where the hell are all those “LF Necromancer” posts in dungeon speed runs? Because I see none.

LOL, necro, “tons of dps”. That’s just too cute by half.

Dasorine.1964:

Zenith.7301:

The point is, he can kitten up and get out. Another class kittens up, they die. You use your kits poorly on engineer or miss a prybar? Goodbye.

Only slightly better than others, stealth and the one or two shadowsteps are not a guaranteed escape against experienced players and of course because of the way the class is balanced its a lot easier to go down after a mistake than anyone else.

You keep talking as if stealth is a guaranteed escape mechanism which it is not.

It is if you chain skills properly. Not everyone is as clairvoyant as you seem to suggest. You’ve got 1 teleport, plus two from the bow, and a target drop from stealth to gain distance while you run a speed signet.

If you can’t get away with that, then good luck playing any other class. It won’t be pretty.

Other classes have to sti still if they get rooted. All you need to do is switch to shortbow.

Fenrir.4237:

Zenith.7301:

swinsk.6410:

Zenith.7301:

Probably because they’re the only class that can escape anyone they want, even zergs if they want to.

An ele can’t RTL away if he’s rooted, but a thief can infiltrator’s arrow out of roots and can hit random animals to stealth away.

Basically, thieves can reset fights. Yes, thieves can lose to several specs, especially confusion or retal ones, but their difference with other classes is that they can still harass and disengage at will from even fights that do not favor them, whereas a necromancer for example is kittened if a competent thief catches him, or a mesmer is screwed the moment a d/d or engineer arrives.

I fought a condi/confusion mesmer the other day in wvw.

We dueled like 4 times and I lost all 4. I almost killed him once but the confusion+bleeds was too much even for shadows embrace.

Thieves are not OP. They are just frustrating to zerging noobs who feel entitled to stomp roll anything they see because they are 100 and you are 1.

That’s dumb. Why would you choose to die when you can disengage, wait for him to engage something else/blow cooldowns, and then kill him?

There is no reason to die as a thief. Nobody can win all their 1v1 setups, but you can decide which fights to participate in.

Ego got you stomped. Good thieves don’t care about the ego boost of fair 1v1’s. They care about making it alive while everyone else is dead.

So what if they disengage? What about it? Is it really that big of a deal? Why is it?

I honestly don’t see why if ever it would be a bad thing for you neccesarily if a Thief disengages. He can avoid every fight he wants, and? What’s so “OP” about being able to disengage a fight? You lose nothing, he loses nothing (Except for losing time if you’re going to be stupid and chase a Thief as a non-Thief, even as an Ele).

+1 to everything Dasorine said aswell. In higher-tiers it becomes a game of who can outsmart the other when the Thief is in stealth, of which favors the Thief, which it should, as the Thief spent the rescoures to go into stealth.

The point is, he can kitten up and get out. Another class kittens up, they die. You use your kits poorly on engineer or miss a prybar? Goodbye.

Dasorine.1964:

randomfightfan.4091:

Zenith.7301:

I doubt lobbying for warrior damage is the right way to go.

Warrior damage needs major nerfing.

100blades is 43k damage under best case scenario, but it’s actually main hand axe on warrior that outdamages warrior greatsword sustained with crazy autoattack damage. Mainhand axe for warrior auto can crit for as high as 5-6k, is faster than greatsword auto, and allows for offhand customization of skills to either bring cc or vulnerability.

Don’t ask for buffs because warrior damage is high. Warrior needs to be nerfed and it’s not good health for the game, especially PvE, when anyone can do warriors’ broken damage.

I think a buff weapons need badly is sword flanking strike. It’s REALLY bad.

I wasn’t asking for buffs, just want the smooth gameplay of my class back I didn’t ask for warrior damage, it was someone else earlier who said we have warrior dps. We CAN have the 2nd highest dps but we do not have warrior dps. Other people in this thread say it a lot better than me so I’d suggest reading a few posts from this if you want to get were I’m coming from.

tbh with out exceedingly low skill coefficients and the limitations of the initiative system I dare say 2nd highest dps is a bit of an exageration in general.

It’s not an exaggeration. It’s the 2nd highest, maybe closely followed after by mesmer, but it’s still 2nd at the very least single target.

Warrior just outclasses everybody by a ridiculous degree for some reason. I don’t get how some classes can get 3k autoattack crits at best when another class can double that and then have a skill on a 6 sec cd that does absurd amounts of damage, and aoe to boot.

randomfightfan.4091:

Zenith.7301:

I doubt lobbying for warrior damage is the right way to go.

Warrior damage needs major nerfing.

100blades is 43k damage under best case scenario, but it’s actually main hand axe on warrior that outdamages warrior greatsword sustained with crazy autoattack damage. Mainhand axe for warrior auto can crit for as high as 5-6k, is faster than greatsword auto, and allows for offhand customization of skills to either bring cc or vulnerability.

Don’t ask for buffs because warrior damage is high. Warrior needs to be nerfed and it’s not good health for the game, especially PvE, when anyone can do warriors’ broken damage.

I think a buff weapons need badly is sword flanking strike. It’s REALLY bad.

I wasn’t asking for buffs, just want the smooth gameplay of my class back I didn’t ask for warrior damage, it was someone else earlier who said we have warrior dps. We CAN have the 2nd highest dps but we do not have warrior dps. Other people in this thread say it a lot better than me so I’d suggest reading a few posts from this if you want to get were I’m coming from.

Yeah, the issue is that they haven’t moved to make wvw follow spvp rulesets instead of PvE, so pve thieves get screwed by stealth changes.

It never made sense to me why confusion or stealth or crit damage caps follow pve rulesets in wvw instead of spvp ones…

It’s like dd ele RTL changes, was fine in pve, but due to wvw it got changed.

I disagree about making stealth more available though — the problem is the other dagger skills need boosting. Why is leaping death blossom so bad? Because condis are really bad in pve while good in pvp.

I don’t find cnd>backstab spam to be fun on d/d. I wish thieves were encouraged more like the gw1 assassin and use skill chains instead of spamming a skill or two.

swinsk.6410:

Zenith.7301:

Probably because they’re the only class that can escape anyone they want, even zergs if they want to.

An ele can’t RTL away if he’s rooted, but a thief can infiltrator’s arrow out of roots and can hit random animals to stealth away.

Basically, thieves can reset fights. Yes, thieves can lose to several specs, especially confusion or retal ones, but their difference with other classes is that they can still harass and disengage at will from even fights that do not favor them, whereas a necromancer for example is kittened if a competent thief catches him, or a mesmer is screwed the moment a d/d or engineer arrives.

I fought a condi/confusion mesmer the other day in wvw.

We dueled like 4 times and I lost all 4. I almost killed him once but the confusion+bleeds was too much even for shadows embrace.

Thieves are not OP. They are just frustrating to zerging noobs who feel entitled to stomp roll anything they see because they are 100 and you are 1.

That’s dumb. Why would you choose to die when you can disengage, wait for him to engage something else/blow cooldowns, and then kill him?

There is no reason to die as a thief. Nobody can win all their 1v1 setups, but you can decide which fights to participate in.

Ego got you stomped. Good thieves don’t care about the ego boost of fair 1v1’s. They care about making it alive while everyone else is dead.

Probably because they’re the only class that can escape anyone they want, even zergs if they want to.

An ele can’t RTL away if he’s rooted, but a thief can infiltrator’s arrow out of roots and can hit random animals to stealth away.

Basically, thieves can reset fights. Yes, thieves can lose to several specs, especially confusion or retal ones, but their difference with other classes is that they can still harass and disengage at will from even fights that do not favor them, whereas a necromancer for example is kittened if a competent thief catches him, or a mesmer is screwed the moment a d/d ele or engineer arrives.

Thieves can both chase and disengage the best of any class, and people resent that despite the fact that thieves are not great in larger team fights, so they mainly roam.

I doubt lobbying for warrior damage is the right way to go.

Warrior damage needs major nerfing.

100blades is 43k damage under best case scenario, but it’s actually main hand axe on warrior that outdamages warrior greatsword sustained with crazy autoattack damage. Mainhand axe for warrior auto can crit for as high as 5-6k, is faster than greatsword auto, and allows for offhand customization of skills to either bring cc or vulnerability.

Don’t ask for buffs because warrior damage is high. Warrior needs to be nerfed and it’s not good health for the game, especially PvE, when anyone can do warriors’ broken damage.

I think a buff weapons need badly is sword flanking strike. It’s REALLY bad.

Sol.4310:

I won’t be describing how I do it, its not just tactics its knowing when and how with what build you run, tactics are different with every build I run + there allot of bad ranger build getting around these forums and people honestly believe there solid builds.

Ok, remain vague if it suits you.

Wethospu.6437:

You really should focus on what you put on your argument. If discussion is about fractal bosses then you shouldn’t talk about Subject Alpha or CoF. Honestly, seems like you are constantly trying to set up a straw-man argument. Intentional or not, it makes arguing with you bit annoying.

I would like to ask you one simple thing. Does your party full-melee Captain, Shaman or Dredge/Ice Elemental? For me, that sounds very nonviable meaning you need to have people at range and can’t have everyone at melee. If that’s not anti-melee, then what is?

The warriors and guardians in my party melee alongside my d/d ele. Mesmers for some reason should have an easy time meleeing (they have the most short cd melee defenses in addition to permavigor), but they seem to love their greatswords so they rarely come in.

It’s a matter of comfort. Those who have learned the patterns feel safe meleeing tend to do so. Archdiviner in Cliffside is very tricky to learn, but now our guardians and warriors do it consistently. Sometimes our thieves do it as well, but a thief is much more punishing than a warrior or guardian if you take a hammer smash to the face.

And then pretty much the caster classes, while having melee options, still seem to skew to ranged weapons because said weapons are what they deem “caster like”.

If we have to pinpoint an instance in which we’d rather begin with some ranged damage, it’s the dredge waves at 48. Dredge resonant’s multiple shockwaves will put the hurt on you by then, as they hit incredibly hard and at higher fractal levels it’s tons of dredge you have to fight at the same time.

Ascalon trash is also incredibly anti-melee if the charr warband npc’s don’t take aggro. All it takes is two mages or a mager or a warrior or two warriors to 2-shot you, even a defensive guardian.

If anything, I find trash groups at higher fractal levels to be more anti-melee than any boss in terms of times I’d rather put my double/daggers away and go for a more defensive scepter/dagger.

Kindread.9481:

Group play is great for me, my damage is sub-par, but the group I run with LOVE the nearly constant protection boon, the perma Regen and Fury and the added Burn condition from Sun Spirit is great with some +condition duration. Not to mention several ways to rez people (Spirit of Nature and Search and Rescue)

I don’t worry too much about Might, as the Warrior and Guardian keep that boon up for us pretty consistently at 15+ stacks.

Great spreadsheet btw, printed both out!

How are you giving them perma prot? Stone Spirit has a 10 sec ICD and the duration is not even close to 10 seconds.

Perma regen? That’s what an elementalist or guardian do with shouts or switching to water attunement.

Sol.4310:

Thief’s can’t perma stealth anymore and heavy stealth builds are garbage…..

Tactics do what I did ask a good thief to let me train vs him to understand how they work and worked on finding a weakness or combos that work against them.

I spent hole week in SPvP duelling thiefs just to learn them. WvW sure there stronger but so are we.

LR or Signet of renewal and a sword is all you need these days to beat your avg thief.

I personally use Signet now over LR as it help with condition remove and team support and its good vs condition thiefs let them spam stack you then just wipe it and with right skill set counter attack.

They can spam cnd still in wvw just fine. Your damage uptime on them vs how much they regen while stealth makes them a real pain in the kitten

You still haven’t described what these tactics are. If the thief doesn’t want to die, he won’t. He can reset the fight however much he pleases. The best you can do as a ranger is deny them killing you, but I don’t consider that a victory.

I thought I would like barrage, but on a zerg with retaliation it’s absolutely re—-ta——rded that using a single Barrage will wipe out 40% of my health because the retal tics are per waves and damage inflicted.

What people also don’t figure into evaluating rapid fire is that it has a start up animation before the shots fire, a dead space where you’re not auto-ing so you need to factor that DPS loss.

Rapid Fire seriously needs a damage increase or needs to deal the same damage over a shorter channel.

Long Range Shot, like mesmer greatsword, should entirely remove the lower range damage and just have the max damage be a bonus at 500+ range while a bit of increased medium damage range stays<500.

A large part of the issue with longbow as well is the lack of cripple, which means less pet uptime on moving opponents. pet swiftness will not make up for it, and it doesn’t help that pets stop in place to do attack animations and let opponents create distance they have to close again.

I will also say that despite whatever praise some people are offering the shortbow, I find its damage lacking completely against other classes like warrior and thief not only because shortbow doesn’t have built in bouncing like thief shortbow, but because the whole ideal “pet will make up for damage difference” doesn’t hold up as the pet dies in any zerg scenarion (on our servers we easily meet the majority of zergs at 40+ people), and if you are defending on a tower the pet won’t stand on a ledge with you and shoot from range because it doesn’t have the pathing or ai — so it sits there dumbly and you’re handicapped by 30-40% of your dps not being there.

Sol.4310:

Rangers shouldn’t have much of a problem vs thief’s. It’s all in the tactics, pets when I’m fighting a thief do most of my damage just by knowing when to use them and force the thief to fight your tactics and not his own or you will lose and feel like they cloaking and making your pet look stupid.

So what do you do when a thief perma stealths? Because you sure as hell are not going to put a dent on a thief that removes conditions and regenerates health while in stealth.

Makes me really sad people would actually be stupid enough to kick your thief from groups. Something tells me they haven’t had an amazing venomshare thief or a good thief that knows how to use shadow refuge and projectile destruction.

haviz.1340:

Thing is, you don’t have to dodge arrow and captain’s agony, staying at range suffice.

For the captain, yes. For the shaman, he can force you into many situations where you need to dodge it. When elementals come out, if you don’t have a guardian or mesmer during phase change, people actually have to watch out for the arrow. If you need to walk across to rez someone, you have to worry about the arrow. If the shaman gets close to one of the captives, and you need to reposition him, you have to worry about the arrow.

And quite frankly? You can try sidestepping but it’s not always reliable, and why would you take the risk for your group when all it asks is that you press your dodge key in a predictable interval?

If I play scepter/dagger ele, or dagger/dagger ele, which are much better for this encounter than staff? I have to use close range abilities, so I have to worry about the arrow. If I’m an illusionary persona specced mesmer? I want to get close for a mindwrack.

But in the case of fractal 48, you have to stay alert and dodge unless you want to go down from agony. At that point it becomes mandatory to dodge agony for everybody.

The ascalonian general and mossman may be anti melee, but the majority of bosses are not. And so I was surprised by the dismissal of claiming fractal bosses as multifaceted because supposedly they all favor range.

What about Subject Alpha? What about CoF in general?

And is it really high risk when you learn the encounter? Sure, you have to stay alert, but for example once you learn Subject Alpha it’s kind of a sad cake walk, and the same can be said for the grawl shaman boss and dodging his arrows.

I think people pay attention to the rewards more than the risk, because with time risk goes down, and the reward is easier to obtain consistently as people get familiar with content.

I think part of the problem also is how you have one melee weapon and one ranged weapon that are good and flexible, while the rest are all niche uses. The greatsword is a very flexible weapon on the warrior, part of the reason it is used over the mainhand axe despite mainhand axe doing more sustained damage. The greatsword simply can do more things. You can say the same thing of the elementalist’s staff versus the ele’s scepter.

Maybe they should actually commit to introducing objective variety in fights and making some weapons not so universal compared to others so each fight generally tends to favor a specific weapon usage. Some fights might require a high mobility weapon, while others need the weapon with burst — some bosses are weaker to condition damage, while others are weaker to direct damage and whatnot.

I don’t think my 3-4k melee crits are “little damage”. If he gets in melee range and I hit him in stealth, I will outdamage his healing.

And the point isn’t to call the pet when he’s stealthed. The point is calling the pet before he can stealth. They’re not going to stealth while offensive — they normally stealth after they’ve popped their attacks and want to go defensive — that’s when you pop jaguar stealth so after they’re done popping their attacks they have a harder time at going stealthed.

Granted, it is pretty crap that pets cannot be commanded to autoattack in place like a player can to add pressure to a stealthed target.

I’ve advocated for cnd not to affect pets, because it its absurdly good and penalizes ranger’s main mechanic. But it hasn’t been changed, I don’t think they quite frankly give a kitten about thief stealth spam considering people in wvw forums have been asking for changes for months and nothing has happened.

So you have to work with what you have, and using these strategies allows you a better chance at success. It won’t make the fight any less obnoxious, and the thief can just run away and come back to harass later, but at least you can give him a hard time about it.

haviz.1340:

Zenith.7301:

The majority of fractal bosses allow 100% melee, which translates to an encounter that favors melee. The ideal is that you would have encounters that benefit different setups, but so far the majority of bosses can be melee’d safely when you learn to dodge their attacks.

Just because ranged is easier for inexperienced people does not make it BETTER for range or that the fight is biased in their favor. They might beat the content, but do so inefficiently compared to an experienced group of melee builds. That’s the current trade-off.

Something that allows for melee doesn’t mean it’s favorable for them. You every post seems to indicate you think my opinion is that melee is too hard. That’s wrong, rather I’m expressing my concerns that ranged is too easy, even for inexperienced people. There’s just too much difference in difficulty between those two approaches while the reward (cleaving doesn’t matter against bosses) for taking more difficult one isn’t that much higher.

Oh, and warriors don’t do few times more damage with one ability than other classes. Take into account casting time and other important factors.

End of offtopic and congratulation again!

See, you keep insisting that i´m implying you say that melee is too hard or that melee is too hard for you. I think your skills are long established in these forums, and quite frankly didn´t get the hostility as if I was condescending to your skills.

I just disagree with the idea that the game goes out of its way to penalize melee. I just believe melee has its big payouts with fair setbacks. If melee is going to be undeniably superior when properly performed to range, then I don´t mind it being exposed to punitive measures that might inconvenience the player more.

Wethospu raises a fair point in that you can reliably win with ranged. Maybe they ought to adjust that. But if they´re going to make ranged jump through the same survival hoops, then they´ll need to lessen the gap in damage and cleaving that melee has over ranged.

Maybe they ought to take the approach of other MMO´s where some fights favor one setup, while some favor the other. Melee do better single target, movement heavy fights — and ranged do better in fights with multiple target and environmental hazards. some variety is ideal. I don´t think it´s there, though. I find the majority of encounters in this game allowing me to sit on melee, especially on my mesmer-guardian-ele, and i just don´t see the point of range on these encounters when i can save myself some time and have that extra spare time to do other activities I might like in the game.

People just need to use their auto more and call their pet to them when you predict a thief to go for the cnd.

Greatsword is pretty great against pd thieves because you have all the dodges you normally do, plus the projectiles block from number 4.

Against the pd thief, always save your dodges for either cnd, or the sneak attack. Don´t dodge anything else. The majority of their damage is sneak attack damage.

Also, a well timed immobilize or knockdown will put pressure on them. It makes them either to use infiltrators arrow to get out of the root, which means they can’t cnd or use their pistol sneak attack before they pop out of stealth.

Also, use your jaguar´s stealth. They can´t cnd a proper timed stealth jaguar burst so easily while you empty your bow on them.

Imo condi bunker specs are useless against pd thieves because you need the pressure to bring them down. ironically some of the best counters to pd thieves is a backstab burst thief, because pd thieves grow stronger when they can drag out the fight. You need to keep pressure and land big hits constantly.

Just go boon duration runes. As long as you swap attunements after using cooldowns you’ll have fury pretty much most of the time, and if you know you’ll need to hang to an attunement just switch to water and pop frost aura for a longer fury duration from zephyr’s boon.

There are plenty of staff eles in wvw. Staff ele is more useful in teamfights than dd ele anyways.

randomfightfan.4091:

Geikamir.6329:

The debuff is very needed in WvW, so I doubt it.

no it wasn’t, their 1st idea of revealed every time u get out of stealth was needed. 4s revealed wasn’t

Yeah, thieves keep telling themselves that. The rest disagree.

Not that it will make a difference when you have infiltrator arrow and shadow step to disengage whenever you kitten and the opponent can do nothing about it unless he’s a thief as well.

Phaantasms at the very least crit for around 5-6k on berserker nontraited, and you have to couple them with shatters/landing a blurred frenzy.

Point is, of all the things to complain about eles, burst is not one of them. If anything, burst on all classes should be more conditional and piecemeal like the ele so it isn’t so ridiculously lopsided like “ha! mug+backstab there goes half to two thirds ofyour health!”

Yeah, mug/backstab might be easier to dodge when 1v1, but on a group fight it’s very easy for a thief to land it.

Arheundel.6451:

Zenith.7301:

Med.6150:

Great post, but I really think the OP and others underestimate the impact and potential of non-bunker Elementalists and very few if any of the proposed changes are going to affect those, if we start increasing the base heal and simply lower the healing coefficients.

You take an elementalist with a Valkyrie’s amulet and the common 0/20(15)/0/20(25)/30 build with 2 arcane abilities and you can potentially deal 10k damage instantly to any glass cannon without them being able to react (switch to air for Electric Discharge, Lightning Strike, Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave). In fact you can even do all that while performing a dodge roll.

I really don’t want to punish a class more than necessary (while I do believe that bunker elementalists are too strong, I am not convinced that they are the strongest build to play currently in terms of sheer impact in fights), but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that not only can you have 4 instant damaging abilities on a low cool down like described above, but that 2 of them (3 if we include Arcane Shield) are utilities that auto-crit and thus can deal great single and AoE burst damage regardless of your crit chance.

If you want to crit on an ability, you’re supposed to invest in crit chance.

?

Arcane blast/wave both hit for around 3k a piece under best case scenarios, Lightning Strike for about 4k. Arcane utilities have 20-30 sec cd. It takes a mesmer 12 seconds or less to deal more than that in cooldowns, and the same applies to thieves.

And the efficacy of this combo all relies on the opponent not dodging/invulnerability any single one of them while being glass cannon. You can’t pull this combo on a thief that goes in and out of stealth, and if you’re dealing that kind of damage it means a thief can likely kill you in a mug>backstab>heartseeker sequence.

If the opponent has any decent amount of toughness, the ele will die. Scepter has garbage sustained and requires heavy team support compared to dagger to land his hits.

Arcane wave : with 2104 Power, 48% crit dmg, 44% crit chance on light armor golem = 1980 dmg at 30s CD…dunno where the 3k dmg come from, it must be against a pure glass cannon with base toughness 916

Yes, and in WvW. Most people in spvp now run some semblance of toughness o that number will rarely happen obviously.

I was just annoyed by the sheer exaggeration of s/d ele burst when ele burst is among the easiest to dodge/mitigate compared to something ridiculously broken like mug.

And by saying not using mainhand, he means rifle. Because pistol is one of the wvw engineer’s main arsenal.

JonathanSharp.7094:

randomfightfan.4091:

In that case when do we PvE thieves get our 3s revealed debuff back?

Maybe so. We’re debating it.

If it’s a PvE change, it will be absurd in WvW, where thieves are already one of the strongest if not the most popular class for roaming.

I think it’s time to change the WvW ruleset to share spvp limitations, like a hard cap on crit damage bonus at 60% and using the spvp formula for confusion, which is pretty broken against players with the PvE one.

Med.6150:

Great post, but I really think the OP and others underestimate the impact and potential of non-bunker Elementalists and very few if any of the proposed changes are going to affect those, if we start increasing the base heal and simply lower the healing coefficients.

You take an elementalist with a Valkyrie’s amulet and the common 0/20(15)/0/20(25)/30 build with 2 arcane abilities and you can potentially deal 10k damage instantly to any glass cannon without them being able to react (switch to air for Electric Discharge, Lightning Strike, Arcane Blast and Arcane Wave). In fact you can even do all that while performing a dodge roll.

I really don’t want to punish a class more than necessary (while I do believe that bunker elementalists are too strong, I am not convinced that they are the strongest build to play currently in terms of sheer impact in fights), but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that not only can you have 4 instant damaging abilities on a low cool down like described above, but that 2 of them (3 if we include Arcane Shield) are utilities that auto-crit and thus can deal great single and AoE burst damage regardless of your crit chance.

If you want to crit on an ability, you’re supposed to invest in crit chance.

?

Arcane blast/wave both hit for around 3k a piece under best case scenarios, Lightning Strike for about 4k. Arcane utilities have 20-30 sec cd. It takes a mesmer 12 seconds or less to deal more than that in cooldowns, and the same applies to thieves.

And the efficacy of this combo all relies on the opponent not dodging/invulnerability any single one of them while being glass cannon. You can’t pull this combo on a thief that goes in and out of stealth, and if you’re dealing that kind of damage it means a thief can likely kill you in a mug>backstab>heartseeker sequence.

If the opponent has any decent amount of toughness, the ele will die. Scepter has garbage sustained and requires heavy team support compared to dagger to land his hits.

Remove attunement swap/evasive arcana heal procs from signet of restoration. Tone down passive condi removal and make Cleansing Fire a 30 sec cd so that eles have more active condition defenses. Water attunement at most should remove one condition on switch, and the condition removal on granting regen should have an internal cooldown.

Ether Renewal should remove conditions only every other pulse.

If you’re gonna touch water spells, it needs to be split. It’s fine and necessary in PvE. Also, if the effectiveness of the water heals for the group is decreased, water attunement will become useless since people only use it for the heals — the autoattacks and damage abilities on water attunement besides staff 2 and cone of cold are really bad.

You also need to evaluate that ele damage outside arcana might stacking with duration runes is absolutely terrible, and a large portion of sustained survivability comes from renewed stamina for vigor, and elemental attunement gives on demand protection..

Scepter in particular has horrible sustained, and if you want to prop up air for spike you build for power and your fire autoattack (incredibly slow and next to no direct damage component with mainly burning) and earth autoattacks (small direct damage and 3 bleeds, a condition based auto) become useless while water autos on every weapon are always useless and weak.

/shrug

OK. Have fun with someone else.

I think the bigger issue is the boon duration runes stacking. 30% extra boon duration from trait line is OK, but it cannot stack with the 40% from boon duration runes.

Quite frankly when the ele runes without using boon duration runes, his sustain drops substantially.

There’s also this issue that the ele, with its low base HP, is simply to bipolar to play if you don’t have any points in water. 12-14k H kitten uicide if you get caught without cantrips.

I’ll also say that the offhand dagger’s issue isn’t mobility/cc versus focus — it’s the damage. Your big burst tools are on offhand dagger, with flame grab, vurning earth, and then the cc that lets you land them.

Ele sustained is pretty bad if you use the focus. You’ll do no competitive burst/sustained without offhand dagger, especially scepter.

Try landing a dragon tooth or shatter stone on a target without CC, and trying killing a target with scepter autos alone — it’ll take forever.

And fire attunement on the focus is horrid, while the cc tools, unlike the dagger are single target while having similar cooldown to the dagger aoe ones. Flame wall is outright pathetic.

Is that bitter sarcasm I see on a forum?

The majority of fractal bosses allow 100% melee, which translates to an encounter that favors melee. The ideal is that you would have encounters that benefit different setups, but so far the majority of bosses can be melee’d safely when you learn to dodge their attacks.

Just because ranged is easier for inexperienced people does not make it BETTER for range or that the fight is biased in their favor. They might beat the content, but do so inefficiently compared to an experienced group of melee builds. That’s the current trade-off.

Your theory only works when you don’t consider the idea of thresholds on effectiveness.

Wethospu.6437:

So I need to get out of melee-range (stop using melee) but it is not anti-melee?

Is the game anti-rez because it stops you from rezzing people by dropping deadly aoe on top of them?

The two options carry inherent penalties. Melee does considerably more damage sustained and to more mobs than range, but has to undergo risk or threat of death to be balanced against range. If you’re able to just sit on a boss and with learned dodges achieve near 100% uptime, what’s the kitten point to going ranged?

Komuflage.2307:

(Worth noting is that I don’t often play in pugs) I’ve played with pretty

This is your issue. Initially they designed explorables for only organized groups, but since, unlike gw1, you can’t just buy the explorable armor like you could Obsidian or DoA weapons by farming othjer content for money, they’ve made the armors and their exotic stats more available for people who PuG.

They also solely concentrated the reward system on explorables, while story gives nothing but crappy blues and a rare helm on the first victory, so it was unrealistic to expect the pugging population to stay content with just doing story.

Wethospu.6437:

Zenith.7301:

Wethospu.6437:

2. I have never been able to dodge both hits (so I block the other one) which makes it even nastier (maybe my timing is just off). Also his Meteor Shower is great area denial.

I don’t think warriors have perma vigor via vigor on crit traits like mesmer, guardian, or ele (and engineers can get easy vigor from toolbelt traitline plus elixir traitline).

What my warrior mate tries to do to mitigate this is he runs warhorn on secondary.

Warriors may need to back out more, but they deal in one ability or autoattack what it takes some classes two or three usages to deal in damage, so if their damage is going to be supremely better I don’t mind their uptime being lessened — they’ll just have to settle with using a rifle or longbow for a bit before jumping back in.

Melee with a guardian, ele, or mesmer — which are the classes I mostly play-- however, is very doable outside Mossman cheese. Mossman cheats everybody, though, just less if you are ranged.

That Agony was a l2p -issue. Went there solo and fixed my timing (bit unsure what Vigor has to do with my timing though).

Could you give some tips about Meteor Shower? What do I do when it covers entire melee-area?

Vigor helps with grawl shaman in the case he constantly wastes arrows on you, or when elementals pop up and you need to dodge an incoming focus of their attack to not go down, or when you need to dodge out of a meteor storm but still want to have enough endurance should he choose to shoot you after the storm.

For ascalon boss you get out or use Endure Pain during his meteor storm. Chances are he will cast it at other people a lot of the time, and not necessarily on you.

The point was that the anti-melee mechanics claim is exaggerated.

haviz.1340:

Thank you for that thorough explanation, though it wasn’t the point. I’ve never said it’s hard for me or for anyone else. I’ve said they have severe anti-melee mechanics. If you range them it’s almost faceroll, if you melee them you have to step up your game. What we need are the bosses with anti-range mechanics.

Also, I want to see how you melee champ grawl shaman without spamming aegis.

Champ melee grawl shaman has a spinning kick animation to his melee attack. If you’re a d/d ele it won’t even activate due to the increased range

The anti-range mechanic is range doing considerably inferior damage than melee, and the majority of ranged autoattacks don’t cleave. A ranger’s bow attacks that cleave are barrage on a 30 sec cd, and poison spread on shortbow, which does no damage whatsoever. Mesmer is berserk phantasm and shatter, both over 10 sec cd. Ele only has staff with fireball and air auto, and while they have good aoe skills, if you’re not using fireball your sustained cleaving is far inferior to melee cleaving and sustained.

Pretty much every speed run done of any pve content uses melee. You rarely see “looking for x class or spec that excels at range”, for a reason. Competent melee are far more desirable and efficient to a group. Range is a fallback and tool mostly used in WvW.

At this point I just think he’s taken off the mask and admitted his trollish glory.

haviz.1340:

1. Shaman’s arrow – just press a and d in random order.
2. Captain’s agony – hits twice in melee, 0 times in range.
3. Dredge/elemental boss – can’t melee them without high degree of communication, at least permanently.

Never said perma retal is anti-melee.

1- Everyone dodges the shaman arrow at 48. It’s kitten easy, his only real attack, which he pauses to do. I specifically go d/d on my 14k hp berserker ele to do this encounter because d/d aoe burst is ridiculously good for elementals. If you have access to vigor, you can dodge the arrow without fail. If you don’t, orrian truffle meat stew food with 40% extra endurance regen will do.

2- What’s so hard about dodging the captain’s agony? When he sets his staff sideways, you double dodge. The rest of the time you can melee him mindlessly as he mostly uses storm and flame wall on ranged.

3- Are you serious? Dredge elemental melee is ridiculously easy. The dredge warsuit pauses to do a double stab, which you dodge out of, and he does this attack only once in a while, giving more than enough time to dodge while you backpedal or side strafe.

On the ice elemental, you only need to move out of his ice trail stomp (which you don’t need to dodge, plenty of time to simply walk out of). He does a ground poun which takes about 1-2 seconds of raising his hand to the air and do an aoe agony which you dodge — this attack happens seldomly, easily about as often as the warsuit’s ground pound agony attack. The second attack you may want to dodge is ice spike if circles are surrounding you, otherwise you have plenty of time to move out of the circles before the agony ice spikes come down.

I thought you would actually mention the Mossman, since he’s really the only boss who melees rapidly and hits hard while doing so, in addition to throwing agony axes while he’s stealthed so you can’t see the animation. But the Mossman is a broken gimmicky boss anyways that you just need to bring blocks/immunities on for two people to rez at the same time or keep wolves low throughout the fight to rally.

Wethospu.6437:

2. I have never been able to dodge both hits (so I block the other one) which makes it even nastier (maybe my timing is just off). Also his Meteor Shower is great area denial.

I don’t think warriors have perma vigor via vigor on crit traits like mesmer, guardian, or ele (and engineers can get easy vigor from toolbelt traitline plus elixir traitline).

What my warrior mate tries to do to mitigate this is he runs warhorn on secondary.

Warriors may need to back out more, but they deal in one ability or autoattack what it takes some classes two or three usages to deal in damage, so if their damage is going to be supremely better I don’t mind their uptime being lessened — they’ll just have to settle with using a rifle or longbow for a bit before jumping back in.

Melee with a guardian, ele, or mesmer — which are the classes I mostly play-- however, is very doable outside Mossman cheese. Mossman cheats everybody, though, just less if you are ranged.

Adaneshade.2409:

Mesmers have way more access to stealth than you guys are letting on. Is it as much as a thief? No, but it’s still quite a bit, in addition to clones no less.

4th skill on Torch offhand
Decoy
Mass Invis
Veil
Desperate Decoy (V Major Trait in Dueling)

Who uses torch? Who uses desperate decoy? Who uses mass invis in spvp versus time warp or moa? Who uses veil in spvp?

That’s like saying warriors have great aoe with cyclone axe — the only problem is no warrior uses double axes in the format so making that claim is moot.

haviz.1340:

Yes, bosses with perma retaliation and heavy anti-melee skillsets are great examples of multifaceted bosses.

What are these anti-melee skillsets? Until his fiery greatsword phase, which at 48+ rarely happens anyway, you can melee all you want if you are any good at dodging agony — and you should be good at dodging agony by 48+. I hope.

What other anti-melee boss in fractals are you referring to?

And perma retal is anti-melee? My scepter ele on air attunement (the only non-miserable auto on a power based ele) and greatsword mesmer beg to differ, as does any ranger using shortbow or rapidfire. Try using arc lightning on this boss and see how quickly it depletes your hp versus using d/d.

Mesmers and thieves make ranger pets sit dumbfounded all the kitten time.