Guild Wars 2

Actually they don’t do it with Karma. Karma is character bound. Laurels are the only currency directly shared by all characters.

And I didn’t “imply” that it’s a bad idea because of lack of self control on my part. I said that it makes tracking whether you’ve gained or lost gold over the lifetime of a character incredibly more difficult.

For example, I start with a new character, and at level 40, I now have 3 gold. Currently, knowing that I never withdrew gold, I can safely say I’ve gained gold, and not wasted it on buying armor/weapons or crafting mats.

With your system, when I reach 40 and have 11 gold, I’ll be wondering if I managed to make some gold or spend more than I earned. Managing your gold may not be important to you, but it is to me, since I have so precious little of it and don’t want to waste any of it while leveling my characters (because the best spend gold is only for your lvl 80s, where you won’t be discarding any gear/weapons you buy in a day or two, as you do with leveling)

Hmm, agreed actually. Not a boon, simply a new Buff.
I’m going to edit my op, adjusting to your suggestion :P

Starbird.4029:

Mm. Going to focus on getting my Guardian to 80 and maybe using it to bankroll a thief up to a level where it starts being fun. D/D or any melee honestly just doesn’t appeal to me.

I’m under the impression that a Thief gameplay doesn’t become magically ‘fun’ at some level, but is rather ‘fun’ because you enjoy the mechanics and flow of combat.

I had a Thief at launch last year, but got angry and deleted it. A month ago I started a Thief again, and have been having fun with some D/P and SB skills. Though it still greatly annoys me at times, I think its a matter of your outlook on Thief (if you feel good about playing Thief, you’ll have fun), and a matter of trying out the weapon sets to see what fits you.

I’ve gotten in the habit of opening with D/P #3, get a few #1 hits in, wait for them to hit (and miss), then dodge roll back, hopefully in time to evade next attack. If they’re over 50% I use #3 again, and repeat. When they get to <50 or near 25%, I dodge roll back, then Heartseeker to them.

Of course those bloody Dredge and blindness immunity mess up my world something bad. As do champions who have 10% blindess effectiveness, so I’m forced to SB.

stof.9341:

I don’t see why you couldn’t just give Aegis. Do you seriously believe it’ll be more “OP” than the new boon you proposed considering the fact that :
- 1/2s of Aegis when you use some skills that take longer than 1/2s to execute cannot really be used to chain them anyway.
- even if you managed to get the boon to stack with itself, initiative shortage would break the chain VERY quickly.
- it would stack with Aegis itself as given to us by other classes.

Lastly, how is giving the Thief a 1/2s Evade boon instead of the 1/4s of evade built into some skills any different than just increasing the evade duration of the skill to 1/2s in the first place?

At first I was confused, but then I realized that you’re talking about. I meant to say a “1/2 second duration” as in “1 or 2 seconds” duration – which is entirely bad writing on my part. Fixed the original post.

I meant that the evade part would give a 1 or 2 second evade boon that won’t stack.
From there the rest my of my reasoning follows.

Draknar.5748:

[snip]
You have no right to complain if you aren’t actually trying to make money like everyone else. Those that have dedication and motivation will prosper, those that are lazy will not.

Everyone has a right to complaint, regardless of what’s going on.
I agree with you that it’s fairly ok-ish to make some gold in game. A few runs of dungeons (not even farming the same one like some do), or just some events in the Cursed Shores would yield some easy-ish 1-2g per hour, at casual gameplay rates.
And yes, if you have the luck, and patience (but mostly luck) to farm SAB, you can make some $eriou$ gold.

JubeiTM.5763:

What kind of evasion are we talking about? A dodge roll? Than it’s not ok if you are fighting on a ramp above a lava field.

I think the Thief already benefits from 3 dodge rolls (given the right trait selection).

No, I don’t mean that the boon would cause anyone to automatically roll (i.e. physically move).

I simply mean that while this boon is on, the next attack that would hit, is instead shown as ‘Evaded’ and the boon ends.

The thief can almost do three consecutive dodge rolls, and to be honest I have little trouble with dodge rolls. What I have an issue with is the incredibly short ‘evade’ durations on some skills.

I don’t suggest that this boon replace regular dodging (sorry RebelYell, I am disagreeing with you there).
I suggest that this boon be given on certain skills that currently have incredibly short evasion times.

My reasoning is this:

• Evasion allows you to ignore all hits in its duration. However on these skills with incredibly short duration (the under 1/2 second ones) more often than not end up being very hard to time and evade nothing
• This boon would make it so these skills would then allow 1 and only 1 attack to be ‘evaded’, without needing to execute the skill within half a second’s accuracy.

The obvious tradeoff here is that the boon would make evading an attack easier, but would not allow evading multiple attacks (which is currently unlikely with the skills that give under 1/2 second evasion)

MrForz.1953:

long range invisible assassin. Make a Warrior.

Are you seriously suggesting that a Rifle warrior is like a long range invisible assassin? Surely, sir, you are not!

Either way, I don’t have strong opinion on Thief with rifle. Though in my opinion the Rifle itself is (quite contrarily to real world) the weakest in-game weapon that, sadly, does not seem intended to ever be used as a main weapon.

I disagree with this suggestion.
Whenever I play a character I make it a strict policy to not take money from my bank, and to keep the character as self-reliant as possible. I do this because it’s otherwise too easy to burn up any saved gold.

If all my gold was shared, I would have to track exactly how much I started with, and would just be more annoying.

Bank access is easy enough as it is (Especially since you have full bank access through any crafting stations as well), leave it as it is.

I suggest introducing a short-duration buff (say, 1 or 2 seconds length), that does not stack in either duration nor intensity that, simply put, causes the player to “Evade the next attack”. (note: original suggestion was to make it a boon, but as stof has suggested, it would introduce some problems. A better idea is to simply make it a buff along the lines of Stealth, Distortion, Endure Pain etc.)

My primary motivation for this is having played a PvE Thief where the incredibly short evasion on some skills (as small as 1/4 of a second evade), coupled with the slow execution (casting) times of those skills make them almost impossible to use properly as an evasive skill.

Nine out of ten times, when I try to evade using a weapon skill I end up going too soon or too early – where ‘too soon’ and ‘too early’ are a matter of under half a second. Coupled with occasional lag, my survivability with those evades has been worthless.

Making the Thief evade skills apply this buff would allow those skills to be useful for short term evasion, and would be far less powerful than Aegis – as I suggested no stacking, whereas Aegis stacks duration.

Ruggan.4102:

[snip]
With the changes you suggest, I would hope the thief would then have a Hit Point Base higher than a necro (which it is currently tied with)
[snip]

Necromancers actually have the highest hp, along with Warriors. (base 18k at 80)
Rangers, Engineers and Mesmers have the medium HP. (base 15k at 80)
Thief shares its lowest HP with Elementalist and Guardian (base 10k at 80)

The thing is, Guardians wear heavy with a ton of defensive/heals, and Eles are far more mobile and ranged, as well as having access to some tanking skills. Thus in terms of survivability, Thief falls on the bottom.

My guess as to how ANet wants us to play Thief:
Do quick bursts of damage, then avoid/evade/stealth from enemy and then burst again.

It’s great in theory, but it fails miserably in PvE where the burst is mediocre at best, and where taking on large mobs is common (yet extremely hard with any stealth builds)

In PvP/WvW, where doing damage to one target is significantly more important, the Thief can do allright, if played exactly as ANet wants it to be.

I see very little other viable options for a Thief build – no amount of points invested in Defense and Vitality would make the thief significantly more survivable – and even if they do, without a glass cannon build, the Thief’s damage output in those builds is laughable.

I was under the impression that conditions that stack duration already work like this.
To quote the wiki:

The effect from the source with the greatest intensity will be used for calculations for the duration of the effect. If there are two unique sources of Burning, the effect with the greater condition damage value will be used until that source ends, at which point, the intensity from the second source is used for the remaining duration.

I’ve seen a number of other people bring this point up when they talk about the fact that condition duration is often useless, since other with higher condition damage may be present and your condition might not even ‘tick’ in that case.

Briefly mentioned here (and I keep mentioning it everywhere)

Vital Shot has a fire rate much slower than its listed 1/2 second. This makes it:
a) Far less powerful than a very similiar Ranger Shortbow skill – Crossfire
b) Lying to the player about its damage output

To be honest, I don’t think that will ever be ‘fixed’. I think the Vital Shot mechanic is indicative of the current state of the class, and since every other person in pvp kittenes about Thieves, the class will only see nerfs, and no buffs.

Doesn’t matter what we say really.

No other class will be made to exceed Warrior’s damage output because that’s the way ANet wants it.
Who are we to question them?

A concrete note:
Pistol Main Hand skill #1: Vital Shot
This skill has a ‘cast time’ listed as 1/2 second, but is actually significantly longer (0.74 sec by some accounts).

For comparison the very similar Ranger Shortbow skill Crossfire ends up having a much faster rate of fire, and since it has identical direct damage ends up doing far more damage. This is on top of the fact that (we are assuming) Ranger skills are balanced to be ~60% of their damage output since they have a pet.

Yargesh.4965:

Games seem to bring out the robe/hooker wear look in designers. I don’t know why.

You don’t know why? Seriously?
Sex sells. That’s why. It’s not ANet’s fault, it’s not our fault, it’s just the reality of.. reality.

Dasorine.1964:

do we really need another troll thread?

To be honest, I don’t see this as a troll thread.
I see it more of a “mock those thief haters who demand outrageous things because some thief kittened up their day”
Not entirely productive, but sadly the demands here aren’t too terribly far away from real demands…

Piogre: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_find#Notes
See also the section below notes titled References.

Can’t tell if serious….

Humorless.1573:

naphack.9346:

It is called stealth, not “memory erasure” or “mind control”. You only get out of their sight, doesn’t mean, they suddenly forget about everything which just happened. We’ve had enough of such poor stealth implementation in Oblivion and Skyrim.

Haha, are you really suggesting that skyrim’s PvE stealth system isn’t a thousand times better than this joke arenanet made of it now?

Wait, what was that? Someone just took a shot at GW2’s stealth system! Fan out and search for him!
…
…
Nah.. Must’ve been the wind.

:D

Edit: Tbh, both systems suck for their own reasons. But both systems were designed with different premises: Skyrim’s system only works on NPCs, while GW2’s system works on both NPCs and PCs.

I think if they ever add Guild Halls, the Guild Calendar should be a giant projection (ala Asura style) in the main Guild Hall instance that allows players to see upcoming events.
It would give a purpose to a guild hall outside of “some place that our guild owns”

Maybe because the bosses you mention – Jungle Wurm and Behemoth – are in the starting zones.

Can I remind you that not everyone out there is an ‘elite’ player like yourself, and thus these people may have a hard time playing those events? The Behemoth throws around huge AoE attacks that are dangerous to the appropriate leveled players, but these days due to being overwhelmed with a mob of 80s, and lag, those rings don’t really show up that often.

If it was up to me, I would make all the starting zone World Bosses’ guaranteed rares be a max level of 40 (or so) as to still attract some higher level players to give them a rare, but to deter the huge crowd of 80s that are only there because they salvage the 80s rare+ into ecto (And wait for that one incredibly rare drop from some bosses)

Faeyd.5094:

I was in WvW on my thief last night and small scale fights were vs all Guardians, engineers and elementalists. I saw on enemy thief I think in 2 hours – and she exploded hard.

Obviously you only saw one because they were all perma-stealhed, and one-shotting one of your guys every second with backstab/perma-stealth combo.

(oh, and the one you saw that ‘exploded’ – turns out that ‘exploding’ is just a decoy animation played when a thief decided to enter perma-stealth )

/sarcasm

Griswold.2054:

you don’t need any expert player to prove some class is op, im not that allmighty expert player and feel op on my mesmer

That sounds like something you should be posting in the mesmer forum.
I don’t see you presenting any evidence that Thief is OP in the hands of a regular player. I am a regular player, and I have not felt like I was OP.

See, the feeling I get is that you want Thief nerfed because some Thief messed up your day, you couldn’t find a counter to his tactics (that’s not the same as “there is no counter”), and now you feel like every player who plays Thief should be punished for something they didn’t do (namely – ruin your day)

Couple of things:
1) I think this thread should be stickied
2) I think you should link to a few “starting new thief” threads, like these ones here

Griswold.2054:

I do not care anymore if Anet fixes the thief or not. But all those thieves denying and trying to defend their op’ness is quite annoying.

You don’t care, yet here you are in a thread doing exactly what you said you don’t care anymore. Don’t act like some sort of victim, it’s a discussion – and what do you expect by the way – for every thief to throw up their arms and agree with you? Maybe you think Thieves are OP, but I don’t think they are. Maybe I’m not the greatest Thief player in the world – but that’s just the point – if Thieves were truly OP, you wouldn’t need a Thief expert player to make it feel OP.

Griswold.2054:

Mesmer is in good hands as op as a thief …

There ya go – I don’t think that when a profession “in good hands” becomes powerful (and I’m still arguing your over-powered point) should be punished. Good players will be better than not-so-good players.

And just so you get this, I’ll repeat this again:
I’m not defending Thief’s OP, because I don’t think there is anything OP about it, and Thieves have a steep learning curve to become good! Being a good player should not be punished!

Agreed with everything Teofa said.
/signed

Griswold.2054:

ZenonSeth.5739:

You mean like the nerf they already gave it by changing Revealed to be 4s?
Have you ever played a thief? Do you know how difficult keeping up invisibility can be?

in most cases its not that difficult

So you get angry cause of one guy has learned his profession and can use it really well – and now, of course, you want to not just punish that player, but also punish everyone else who plays thief.

learned his profession? thieves are easy to play as it is, easier than most classes (not that they are that hard either), but thief is probably one of the easiest at least in world vs world
right now i feel, allmost all classes are punished for not playing thief (or mesmer) in wvw (zergfest excluded), the effort you have to take to kill a thief is much more than for him to kill other classes

ZenonSeth.5739:

You sir, are a hateful man, and need to learn to accept that some people just play better than you. (not me though, last I went into WvW with a thief I was killed in four hits)

i believe a lot of people have problems with thieves that even when they “outplay” the thief they gain nothing, besides as a thief you can compete with players above your skill level at least in wvw

Hey, I’m not Thief expert, but at least I’ve played the profession – it doesn’t sound like you have, tbh.

There are 2 utility skills that grant stealth directly out of combat (barring any combos you may try to pull off). The longest one grants 15s stealth where you have to remain in the same area for 4s or lose your stealth. The recharge on these utils is 40s and 60s.
There’s also a healing skill that grants stealth, that also has a 30sec recharge.

Other skills that grant stealth are combat skills, and Steal. Steal has a recharge timer as well, so it can’t be spammed. Combat skills require you to engage an enemy while visible.

Every time you engage an enemy from stealth there is a 4 second period where you can be freely attacked. Given that thieves are quite squishy, 4s could be enough to target, disable and even down a thief if people know what they’re doing. This is also a counter measure to spamming stealth.

Thieves are not easy to play in my opinion. Out of all the professions I’ve tried, Thieves are the easiest to die, in my opinion. Or at least, I have not seen a profession that can be killled more easily.

Read these very forums to see how many people are having a hard time. Yes, some people are kicking kitten with Thieves, but it’s my guess that any profession has people who have become really proficient at it – and thus it feels like the profession is OP, where in fact, it’s the player that’s become OP.

Devata.6589:

There are a lot of people (including me) that complain that in WvW thief’s are to ‘strong’. With strong I mainly mean that the combination of very fast and invisible makes them very hard to kill …
[snip].

(phrase bolded by me)
Very Hard to kill != invulnerability.
Yes, I read the rest of your post, but frankly, that first sentence shows how your title is just grossly misleading and made sensationalist so you can get your ways.

Thieves are supposed to be very hard to kill.

As has been pointed out, you can aim with ranged shots etc – you just can’t tell if you’re hitting the Thief – as was designed.

This is not a bug. It’s the Thief class – and some people play it well. Try playing a Thief to see how well you’ll pull it off before complaining, and misleading everyone by calling something an “invulnerability exploitable bug” – which it is not.

Chess Jurist.3580:

[snip]
Something really needs to be done about this, whether they give invisibility a huge nerf like they did quickness, or do something about keeps, towers, etc being contested by a lone thief.

You mean like the nerf they already gave it by changing Revealed to be 4s?
Have you ever played a thief? Do you know how difficult keeping up invisibility can be?

So you get angry cause of one guy has learned his profession and can use it really well – and now, of course, you want to not just punish that player, but also punish everyone else who plays thief.

You sir, are a hateful man, and need to learn to accept that some people just play better than you. (not me though, last I went into WvW with a thief I was killed in four hits)

0.74 seconds for a skill that is suppose to be 1/2 second cast is just a plain lie. At least it should say 3/4 seconds – unless they round DOWN – in which case that’s even worse, since it means every skill out there could potentially be 1/4 of a second longer than given.

I don’t know why animation needs to take precedence here – animation should never take precedence (though I believe ANet already knows this). I’m not sure what system they use to animate the characters, but most animation speeds can be controlled.

Bottom line, if a skill says 1/2 second, I don’t expect it to be 0.74 seconds cast. And if the balancing was based on that 1/2 second assumption, like it looks like it was, then… wow

GummiBear.2756:

This would still be vertical progression which is NOT meant to be in the game

My first suggestion was simply to add more skills that have to be reached via some difficult journey and paid for with skillpts. That would not be vertical progression imho.

I agree with you though that vertical progression should NOT be in the game, however I remember someone from ANet once saying “We didn’t say there would be NO vertical progression” – so your comment that it’s not meant to be in the game isn’t quite correct.

rozcinana.7249:

ZenonSeth, I’m curious if the guild you’re talking about told you in advance that they required repping?

No, they did not. I joined because I saw some of them talking about a Friendly social guild in one city. I wasn’t told they required repping all the time.

The funny thing is, I wasn’t part of another guild or anything – I just made a new toon one day, forgot to ‘represent’ and got a whisper that I should start representing. Annoyed me greatly.

+1 – I also found this out today after some posts on the Thief forum.

I know there’s rounding involved in the tooltips, but it’s actually quite disturbing, especially comparing those two skills – in theory they are near identical – Crossfire has 300 more range, and 3 sec bleed, while Vital Shot has 4 sec bleed. However, in reality, Vital Shot is significantly less powerful.

Yeah, you’re right. It should be Humans, Asura, Sylvari and Norn vs Charr. Take Ascalon back!

You think you have it bad? Go find a Medium human armor that isn’t a trenchcoat or variation thereof. There’s one. That’s it! I don’t want my thief to be wearing a freakin trenchcoat!

But, as per the “time for new armor” thread – ANet is unlikely to release new armors soon, since with 6 pieces per armor, times 3 armor classes, times 5 races = 90 pieces of armor that need to be designed to release just ONE armor set….yeah..

Wow, someone on here actually cares about saving an engineer and recommends having ‘fun’ instead of constantly, angrily posting things like “That build has 2% less dmg! lolnoob”

Sadly, after reading these forums about how much FT sucks, and I should stack might and do nades all the time, my engineer playtime has decreased. Where the eff were you guys then huh?

Toast, go read the huge debate on this in the Human forum if you’re interested in some very good counters to your argument.

For future events: How about a 2 faction divide where Humans, Asura and Sylvari unite to fight the Norn and Charr? Sound good? Good.

…hmm I need to do my daily when I get home today….
Though I think part of the reason why these items take so long is to keep them rare and not common everyday things

Why are quivers ascended items only?
Why not give high level non-ascended quivers to those of us who don’t want to grind FoM, and make the FoM ones ‘cooler’ as OP requests!

It’s almost crazy that Rangers don’t have quivers available to them at all

I was in one of these guilds. But I didn’t give a hoot.
What are they going to do? Kick me? Their loss – because if they did, they would basically be saying "we prefer no representation as opposed to occasional’

It’s obviously within their rights to kick me if they wish, but it’s also within my rights to tell them to bite me.

You can actually dodge through those sonic blasts. Just as soon as you see the blast start from the periscope start dodging. At close, near-melee range you have to anticipate a little more, but I think it’s a wonderful way to train your dodging abilities as a player.

Annoying? Yes.
Need to be removed? No.

DanH.5879:

skill 1: banana slap/ 2nd slap/ insert banana into eyes (blind)
skill 2: banana throw
skill 3: banana whirl (b/b)
skill 4: banana split (ground becomes slippery)
skill 5: banana eat (gain health)

Only object to #3. Should be:
Banana wave: Wave your bananas in the enemy’s face, causing confusion

A Banana wielding Thief?
Sounds even more OP than a Torch Torch Thief (aka Arsonist)

Though B/B Thief doesn’t have the impact of a T_T Thief :/

You mean Countess Anise ?

Okra.8376:

[snip]
Conan didn’t need a shirt. Why does my little plant man need one?
[snip]

I fully support the “Shirtless Plant Conan” initiative.
However, I don’t support the "Shirtless Xena Initiative.
Shirtless options for males-only should suit your needs fine, right?

Actually now that I think about it, since weapons are also tied in with Traits, and their trait system seems quite statically designed, I highly doubt that any profession will get new weapons.

Maybe they’ll give the Thief a Red Button skill. Seems fitting with the motif of their changes.

Ok, how about permanent +stat boost potions?
Something like this:
+1 [stat] Potion (account bound) = 100 skill points

Kinda equates the idea that if you have a ton of Skill you become tougher/stronger/etc.

naphack.9346:

T_T Thief

Now we need Torch mh/oh just so when someone says “What’s your prof/build?” I can say “T_T Thief”

Burn The Evidence! – nice skill name, fitting for Thief

I like, though I doubt it will be given to Thieves.

But.. aren’t you missing Torch/Torch dual skill?