Guild Wars 2

For people who didn’t get the memo (like qqing thieves), traps aren’t for 1v1. It’s for anti zerg.

The supply trap is very useful for a defending force. Stealth trap seems way to difficult to get it down at the right time and place.

In other words hard core zerging T1 + karma trains full time for what 4-6 months? No thx.

It would be nice to have at least some WvW related requirements for the title though, like 10x less than the OP’s numbers. And then, say 50g, rather than 100.

This is obviously for zerg v zerg veil combat or thieves ressing mesmers. I assume it’s an AoE pulse type of reveal? Either way, traps for badges is a stupid idea. Even less well thought out than the AC buff… First, if they went in the direction they’re going, traps should be free and unlimited (not an NPC item) but cost 5 supply to place.

If they wanted to implement reveal effect, add it as an additional effect to one of the ranger traps, one of the thief traps, one of the warrior’s warhorn skills, stuff like that. Only on a high cooldown skill.

It’s ok DB are angry at everyone. DB is a bandwagon server and that seemed to be their ambition. KN is an ex-bandwagon server, whatever that’s supposed to imply.

Anyway I wish KN would recruit some more NA guilds. Mag is way too dominant in the tier. I guess I don’t like it.

Honestly if you reported for botting they will never see the report. All the in-game reports seem automated. If there’s a “big” report like hacking you have to do it through their support channels from what I understand. It’s extremely hard to get hackers banned but they do seem to do it eventually.

The Game Slayer.7632:

@zephyrus, you are not reading anything i am saying. at the end i said this exactly “The same old berserker thief is (A)annoying if theyre good or (B)boring if theyre bad.” They are boring because theyre so easy to kill, or they run away when they cant do anything. Im sorry you couldnt make that assumption, i thought that was pretty obvious, my bad. Yes, while many thieves will run a mix of things to help their hp and what not, the end result will always be high crit damage and crit %. That is the goal of almost every thief when it comes to armor.

Actually I responded to your claim that all thieves run full zerker except for condition.

Here’s a thief that does not run what you’re saying (from a week of clips):

It’s all knight and valk gear, prioritizing armor over HP. I actually improved on the defense and offense in the build after that point with divinity runes, ascended accessories, and a few gear switches. I haven’t even tried this build since the sword #3 boon stealing buff since I’ve been running conditions in the last few weeks. It’s not bunker-status armor and definitely not HP but it’s a bruser of a thief that can survive any class’s spike damage as well as prolonged 1v2 and 1v3 (1vX) engagements but with enough damage to get work done.

You’re only right that thief can’t legitimately go full PvT/clerics or a 2/3s defense stat gear. It’s because they don’t have the support or team healing skills to justify it. But that’s why there’s warrior right? 40k HP with massive armor and condition immunity? Check.

Travlane.5948:

i had 14.8k with my zerk gear (some HP in there so technically it wasnt true zerk. if it were the % wouldnt be 55 it would be somewhere around 70% less damage) my point is everything is soooo important with thief when dealing dmg…..no matter if u use soldiers armor and 30 in SA…ur still squishy. i could test that to prove it if you like :P but i hope my word is just taken at this point. took so long to do that first video. ok so the next step would be to test soldiers gear and a more “defensive” set of traitlines. im willing to bet theres an 75-80% difference in damage to full zerker and only about 11-12% less damage incoming. so if you hit for 1800 every hit in zerker with full offensive trait lines and take 1000 incoming dmg with that armor per hit……then if you compare it to soldiers with a defensive setup which should be donig about 80%less dmg = 3kittenage outgoing per hit now with the toughness formula im guessing its a total of aroun 12% less incoming dmg which isnt bad but its equal to 880 incoming dmg instead of 1000. and since soldiers has the same hp….its a net difference of 120 dmg per hit of 1200 per 10 hits.

so whats all this mumbo jumbo mean?

it means if you wear soldiers with defnsive setup you are losing 1440 dmg per hit and only gaining -120 incoming damage as the trade off. question is…. is THAT amount of outgoing damage worth THAT amount of dropped incoming damage?

I’m not sure how you’re testing but it’s numerically impossible that you could lose 75-80% damage between zerker and PVT gear… You don’t need any testing, just compare the stat screen on two screenshots. Power is the main stat on both armors and the difference is you’re losing on crit power and crit rate (precision). These don’t account for 75-80% of your damage. You just need to look at the exact crit % and critical power % to see how much you lose.

You’re also quoting specific damage numbers and damage reduction numbers which is meaningless. The way armor works is if you double your current level, you take half the damage. In theory, if you could double both your armor and HP, you would have 400% more “effective HP”. Of course you don’t actually want to double them but the idea is, the lower defense you have, the more each additional point does for you. You’re saying it’s the opposite which is just not true.

Thieves that go full zerker and 30 30 x x x are bad (and only D/D or maybe P/P would do that). Not necessarily because they lack skill but because their build greatly limits what they can do (mostly 1v1 other zerkers). I think you can ask any experienced thief who has actually tried other builds and is at least semi-good. Just because a build happens to be the most common doesn’t mean it’s the best setup.

Unlike the OP, I enjoy fighting glass thieves though. Specially D/D.

@OP full zerker d/d thieves are super easy to kill. I can’t even think of an easier class and build to take down. You’re making false claims about thief without ever trying the class or build options. And yea, I’m going to tell you how to counter them because your method is all wrong. Beating a thief is like beating a mesmer. Your build is less important than your understanding of the class (which you clearly have none). You have to know it’s escape skills and the big cooldowns.

Once you know these, and you’re watching what the thief you’re fighting has used, after they have used certain high CD skills, you can know with 100% certainty, that if you catch them with X skill, and they don’t dodge, they will have no options left except to die. And that’s how you counter a thief: understand the class.

Regarding gear, there are gear choices other than full zerker that are actually better for the weapon set… Even D/D and D/P can run full valk with a huge boost in survivablity and get almost the same damage relying entirely on 100% BS crits (with Hidden Killer).

Unfortunately I ran full zerker gear the first week or 2 playing a thief. Every other build I’ve tried since then was so much stronger because there’s such a huge increase in EHP by going even a little more defensive. It’s relevant to note I don’t run D/D though.

Travlane.5948:

i actually ran a test in comparing (on video and posted) a thief with a 30 30 0 0 10 build and another thief with a 0 0 30 10 30 build and both with full zerk gear/accs. the 2nd build(more defensive) produces hits that average 715dmg per hit (used coyotes as a control) and the 1st (more offensive) build produces and average hit of 1545dmg per hit. thats a 55% difference in average hit. that is a total of 8300 dmg over 10 hits (about 8 seconds) aka an average of 1037dmg per second you are doing less just according to build.

This leaves you 3 choices:
1) Forced into Offensive traits + Berserker gear to keep dmg really high
2) Forced into Defensive traits + Carrion gear to go full condi/hp
3) Accept the 55% in dmg cut and pray you dont run into large groups and/or have enough juice to finish every class.

Wat? That doesn’t follow at all. You tested that offensive thief traits make a huge difference in damage (I assume for D/D because that’s the only case where I can imagine those percentages are true). Then somehow you conclude that, offensive stats are identical in importance to offensive traits?…

That doesn’t follow at all: the stats are the least important part of the trait tree. The only case where you need super heavy offensive traits and gear is D/D because it’s all burst and if burst fails or you get caught, its down in 1 combo. D/P can’t even do full offensive traits because it needs initiative for it’s offense.

Just switching a mix of knights and valk gear (keeping zerker earrings) gives roughly a 45% increase in effective HP to a thief. Again, the damage decrease will depend on the weapon choice but for S/D, for example, it’s very small. Investing in some vit and toughness, you will always get more % increase in ‘effective HP’ than loss in damage, unless of course its a gear choice that doesn’t have power as the main stat… (except for crit procs, power is almost twice as strong for increasing damage as precision, even for high crit damage). Obviously condition thieves have to go carrion because that’s their only legitimate choice so I won’t even go into that.

It’s true that most of a thief’s defense is not from stats and rather, from skills+traits but maxing full offense is very inefficient stat-wise (in terms of effective HP gain vs damage lost).

Not just backstab, any attack from stealth should reveal ON-Attack, not on-hit. This would make dodging, blocking, and aegis vs a stealth thief useful. I was actually going to make a thread on this.

Wen Jie.8920:

I’m not sure about this, but i think it could be that only one server on any map can have the outmanned buff at the time, even if the other server is outnumbered almost as badly.

That’s easy to test and not true.

I think you have to be outnumbered 3:1 on the map from any single side. It may not be that high a ratio but something close.

BobbyT.7192:

Zephyrus.9680:

The funny part is how many people think the thread was serious because a thief can CnD on a semi afk zerker build in the middle of 10 players.

I don’t think even half of the responses here realize he couldn’t do a single attack except for CnD or else 3s reveal would get him instantly killed.

Yeah, if the ele was paying attention or knew what she was doing (kinda giving TC some credit), i’m sure they could have dealt with that thief.

If you look his stream, he has a video of him on his engineer beating two thieves 1v2, what is he doing that a group can’t do?

The difference is he was just trolling with CnD. If he actually attacked from stealth he would have been down in seconds. CnD alone can’t kill someone unless they’re afk and not moving, as happened for half that video. Zerker build too of course.

But then there’s responses wondering how he didn’t get reveal debuff while “backstabbing” (s/d doesn’t even have backstab), or about 10k burst being a lot…

The funny part is how many people think the thread was serious because a thief can CnD on a semi afk zerker build in the middle of 10 players.

I don’t think even half of the responses here realize he couldn’t do a single attack except for CnD or else 3s reveal would get him instantly killed.

So I take it he trolled and someone cared. No need to bleed out all over forums. If it was uncalled for, apologize and carry on.

I’m still curious what the anti-stealth mechanics will look like. I’m guessing that is the reasoning behind reverting the 4 second reveal nerf which was a lazy nerf anyway.

OP failed to explain his reasoning. Party in WvW allows friendly duels, fight clubs, and chatting to your opponents. Some of the few joys of WvW, apart from killing each other.

Lets remove a random social feature from the game for no reason…

Well presumably people in WvW oriented guilds will play WvW more consistently and also be more dedicated while others will just play when they’re done with their PvE or, as the YB poster said, when they feel like it. I always get the impression YB are much more laid back about their WvW. I believe Kaineng also stated they only have 1 serious NA WvW guild now.

Both KN and YB also seem to prioritize EB like this screen from last night when I got on (Mag EB zerg was moved to KNBL). Mag prioritizes borderlands and I’ve noticed if Mag BL is in serious danger, pretty much everyone on every map will know of it if they are needed.

The OP’s question/alternative is almost as stupid as Anet’s meta: Would you rather treb war or try a ninja with rams/golems? The answer, btw, is neither.

I’m all for AC’s countering zergs. But atm they counter everything except trebs. I would rather have a balanced siege meta that doesn’t REQUIRE treb wars or else ninjaing with rams. I would rather have ACs that don’t counter every other piece of siege except trebs AND zergs as well. If they countered either zergs OR siege weapons (but not both) that’s fine.

Traps… I have no idea. If they counter zerg balls that will be cool. If traps counter everything, that will be stupid. Pretty simple actually, it’s called balance.

Jinks.2057:

So you decided to ruin Fight Club and got ran over for it

Now you are posting about it asking anet to punish those players who decided to use thier $60 they spent differently than you.

Shoulda just left it alone mate

That.

and15characters.

Yes it should. This is what everyone was asking for over and over…

Repairing is essential but also boring. As such, it most certainly should have a WXP reward attached.

Stupidity and/or sabotage will lead to the demise of keeps/castles/towers. WXP reward for repairs is entirely unrelated (repairing already gave exp and title progress). As such, stupidity isn’t a reason for not having good things.

If anything, supply from camps should give double WXP though seeing the lazy nerfs and buffs lately, I don’t think they could actually code it that way.

Veldan.4637:

Zosk.5609:

I still see a lot of them being fired from safety?

Weird, cause when I’m defending a tower, I always notice that the first thing the enemy does is run to it and kill any ACs with wall aoe. The only ones that survive are the ones behind the gate on ground level, and those can only fire at the gate. This is also the reason I’ve been recently using catas / trebs more, cause you can actually place those further back where they don’t get killed in the first 10 seconds of the siege.

As long as it’s so easy to take them down with wall aoe I don’t mind ACs being more powerful. Then at least it might be worth firing it that 2-3 times before it’s destroyed.

That is weird. Because not even counting Hills or SM, there’s tons of spots on keeps and towers that you can put an AC that can hit outside and no one can even see it from the outside, much less hit it. Even more now I’m sure with the range buff.

Except for PvD, catas were already the meta over rams entirely due to ACs. Now they’re buffed and its like… “Wake me up when the trebs are done” gameplay.

The cheapest piece of siege should not be a counter-everything siege. Assuming walls are taken down, now defense is just about building moar ACs at chokepoints, right? Oh wait, that’s how it already was before the buff. Now its just abusing broken mechanics for loot bags.

I think this is something warriors needed. Don’t forget it’s huge stat/gear investment to get condition immunity.

I would much rather stick with soldier runes and shouts to make my condition removal AoE.

AC should do no damage to other siege weapons. At least with the #1 attack.

Either that or the buff should only happen when outmanned.

The cheapest piece of siege SHOULD be one of the weakest and certainly not able to counter almost any offensive tactic.

Chessrook.8643:

Underpowered and never useful, or overpowered and abused horribly? Which is worse?

What kind of fail set of alternatives is that? It shouldn’t be either of them.

Also I would beg to differ on AC being underpowered before, considering 17 AC = 1 Golem in cost. They didn’t have a problem taking out rams before the buff either.

I think the random thread merge deleted my post but as I was saying…

The fact that, out of the blue, they buffed ACs by over double their former power for no apparent reason already should indicate someone calling the shots really doesn’t have much of an idea what they’re doing.

How often, in any game, for something that’s already balanced, do you see it randomly boosted by over 100%?

I’m 100% in favor of changing the zerg blob meta but… More towards roaming/strike teams… Turtling and treb wars is definitely not a desirable meta unless one side is outmanned…

pulsecodesgnl.3470:

Zephyrus.9680:

The fact that, out of the blue, they buffed ACs by over 100% for no apparent reason already should indicate someone calling the shots really doesn’t have much of an idea what they’re doing.

How often, in any game, for something that’s already balanced, do you see it randomly boosted by over 100%?

I’m 100% in favor of changing the zerg blob meta but… More towards roaming/strike teams… ANET why do we want treb wars???

When did 80% become over 100%? Lol…

When you factor in the range buff it’s over twice as powerful. Would you not agree?

If you didn’t break any rules who cares… False reports just reflect on the ones who reported. I assume they actually didn’t do it though. I get annoyed too if someone comes and interrupts a duel between me and a friend on another server.

The fact that, out of the blue, they buffed ACs by over 100% for no apparent reason already should indicate someone calling the shots really doesn’t have much of an idea what they’re doing.

How often, in any game, for something that’s already balanced, do you see it randomly boosted by over 100%?

I’m 100% in favor of changing the zerg blob meta but… More towards roaming/strike teams… ANET why do we want treb wars???

I was going to write a longer post about what I think they were thinking with the arrow carts + 30 second contest delay but I’ll just say this:

Changing something that’s already nearly balanced by 50% (e.g. confusion) or 80% (arrow carts) + 4th skill + range is way out of whack. They could have at least reduced ballistas to the same cost as arrow carts since you’re not going to need ballistas for a choke point now.

This is going to be a meta-changing event in a very unbalanced way (relative to other siege). What will be the point of rams now except to ninja? If they had increased ram damage by 50% or decreased AC damage on siege weapons TO 30%, that would have made some sense but no…

Except for servers with recent big population changes, the current matches are the most balanced they could possibly be. I don’t see the point of resetting tiers as it would just ruin most matches for weeks.

Well +1 from me and nice description. But SEA/EU times are extremely balanced in the current T3 from what I’ve seen and that’s rare and very good for all 3 servers.

You guys need NA most IMO. Specially if [RE] is leaving (I hope they don’t) it’s going to be a big hit in your NA power.

Any NA/SA guilds looking for extremely balanced and competitive fights in T3 without the mindless blob wars of T1 and T2 should strongly consider Kaineng. You will get epic fights but still be able to cast skills.

More importantly, their bandwagon has passed on to DB and elsewhere and everyone left is probably not going to give up just from a little bad weather.

Not being greedy but I would like Kaineng to stay in T3 forever with Mag and YB =P
Fights are so balanced this week.

Well there were multiple karma trains run this morning on YBBL and KNBL with 0 resistance. All 3 keeps were taken each time and no one showed up to defend. Was strange.

Agreed. I’m hoping Kain stops losing guilds and stays near their current strength… You guys are a lot more fun than DB (2.0) and have a large but not absurd oceanic population now.

Interesting how it’s turned out. My predictions for DB 2.0 last week was T2 #3 and it seemed their own wasn’t even that but I see they’re actually gunning in #1.

Kaineng is clearly not coming back to T2 and from the T3 thread I’m seeing more and more KN guilds transferring, to DB I believe. I don’t see the appeal of transferring to the #1 server in a tier but to each their own.

I hope T2 stays stable since KN’s night coverage is a lot less ridiculous than DB’s in terms of numbers. T3 is a lot more fun.

In the OP’s tactic, I would guess the thief is using d/p perma stealth which isn’t an exploit. Maybe an issue that needs to be dealt with though.

wads.5730:

Zephyrus.9680:

Good fights from yesterday holding Mag EK against a much larger Kaineng force (this video just has 2 of them) and other things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saZ7BLOsQv4

Spin2Win, don’t hate. I’m new at condition thief too.

i like how you kept running into guardian walls over and over

Somehow every single static field too… Those things are magnetic.

Good fights from yesterday holding Mag EK against a much larger Kaineng force (this video just has 2 of them) and other things.

Spin2Win, don’t hate. I’m new at condition thief too.

I have to say, 50% seems way overboard for a nerf. I never really had a problem with confusion mesmers. Condition removal or else… doing nothing and its off.

It’s those shatter mesmers that are insta-killing me, not that its OP either, you can see it coming.

Q: At which time is there mostly dueling going on?

Any time there’s players on. There’s scheduled fight clubs that I always miss so most of the duels are just players I approach 1v1 or they approach me without immediately attacking. If you approach someone 1v1 and don’t immediately attack, then bow, if they bow back it’s a duel. That’s how most of my duels happen.

Q: Where is the dueling going on?
Behind the mill for organized. Anywhere for unorganized.

Q: Are there alot of people to fight?
Sometimes, usually not.

Q: Why do you choose to duel people in WvWvW?
Fun and/or practice.

Q: Do you communicate with the enemy.
Bow always or it’s not a duel. And/or party and arrange it beforehand and chat after.

Both Maguuma and Yaks Bend (NA T3 servers) have lots of duelists.

Off to the races… Here’s my predictions for the next few weeks, if not months:

DB 2.0 will become solid T2, rising one position to be 3rd just behind FA (they won’t drop back to T3).

Kain will be the new leader of T3 though Oceanic/Asia power, though by a smaller margin than DB 2.0.

YB will widen the gap from SoS to remain in T3.

Mag might be initially excited by new blood in T3 but is essentially the same as YB in coverage and since everyone needs to sleep/work/school/live or at 2 out of 4 of those, we’ll still stay at the lower middle of T3.

No way they’re making it to T1 with 400 players. I’m predicting they’ll be solid T2 as 2nd or 3rd. But probably behind FA so 3rd.

I still think its tier based. Even in queued maps it’s very mild in T3 and only happens in the biggest fights. At least for me.

Maybe it also depends on how many other big battles or events are happening on the server (or the server that’s hosting that WvW map).

InfamousBrad.5879:

What if none of the servers in the tier has 24 hour coverage?

At the risk of making this personal — and I want to stress that I am the least angry person on my server about this — we’re from a server that just plain has no coverage for about 4 hours every weekend night and about 6 to 8 hours every weekday night. Not only will there be fewer than 10 people in WvW at those times, there may not be more than 20 or 30 people on the whole server, period. (This morning, during that time, a friend of mine tried to do the Claw of Jormag PvE event. It drew about 8 people.) One of the other servers in our tier has the same problem … during an entirely different time block.

What that means in practice is that there is about 8 to 16 hours a day when one of our two sides can simply show up, any time during our half of that time, and erase all progress in the other side’s home borderland in an hour or two, tops, counting the time to build the golems. But it doesn’t give us any way to hold those positions once we take them. So it doesn’t change the net score, at all, at the end of the day; all it does is cost both sides a couple of dozen gold a day in having to upgrade their keeps and garrison all over again, every day. And that time spent escorting dolyaks to rush the upgrades back in is boring, boring gameplay, and it’s a heck of a cash sink (so I guess it’s deflationary), and it increases personal resentment on both sides, and when it comes to either providing fun fights or having a winning strategy, it’s pointless. In our tier, at least, we’d probably be better off without it.

It’s the same in T3. Everything flips overnight. I’m not seeing how that relates to golems though. If it’s PvD time a ram will do the same thing, and costs 17 times less.

The whole point of golems is to beat the response time, right? Not to take objectives when there’s going to be no response regardless.

It’s GOOD for WvW just like ninja catas or ram teams. Hopefully it teaches you why pure zergs with no roaming/scouting is bad. Or why the inability to communicate across maps will lose you objectives.

I think the ability of a small but organized group to ninja objectives from a clearly disorganized and zergy opponent is fun, yes.

It’s fun defending Against golems as well and knowing your opponent has golems on the map and having to watch for them. Keeps things exciting.

greyblue.4962:

Honestly, it seems like there’s still the opportunity for this game to have an attitude of sportsmanship. No need to have a CoD-style troll fest.

Which you clearly have, asking if it’s bannable…

You can’t prove spying and TS/Mumble/Vent, obviously are 3rd party programs. If someone is really dedicated enough to transfer to another server or have a second account there, there’s no way to prove their intention. That’s just going to be their contribution to the cause.

Sabotage, on the other hand IS bannable. This was already officially stated in other threads (too lazy to find).

I was actually looking for the alleged hacker that a DB poster screened but the post went poof. Our mod is a busy bee.

Lol saiyr beat me to it.

400+? http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/35/20

In that last week you had with Kain, looks like +275 was your All time record. Then you had some consistent times with +35 – +60…

Your SEA crew may or may not be rusty from lack of competition but they definitely have the numbers. The real issue will be with your other times.

You guys have fought TC and FA (and Kain) plenty of times (next to Mag) and, all else equal, should know how that will go. I don’t know if DB has gained in other coverage areas but you’re doing much stronger this week. Could be Mag was just excited to be out of T4 last week and now its back to the normal routine.

Nice to have a Dev response (no pun intended).

Problem with rewards is that it promotes zergs and nothing else. It’s actually more profitable to let an enemy flip a tower so you can karma/wXP it back 5 mins later. It’s more profitable to run a zerg of 50 over a supply camp for the wXP rather than just sending 2 or 3 people (or 10 with no supply) to take it. Same issue with roles like defense, supply running, or dolyak guarding. The reward system works against smart/elaborate strategy in WvW.

Glad it’s being looked into.