Guild Wars 2

Maugetarr.6823:

Zodian.6597:

Maugetarr.6823:

Zodian.6597:

feliscatus.1430:

So, you can dodge a lot in between not damaging me? K.

Actually, sd 3 does do pretty good dmg (LS hits for around 2-3k), and rips boons from you. So you could be taken even more damage if you have might or fury uptime in your build.

So if you’re only hitting with LS to keep cycling to FS, and dodging in between and not throwing out any other attacks, what sort of DPS are you putting out? I mean, assuming that every LS and FS hits, how many do you get to use in a minute (or whatever criteria you’ve normalized this about) and boil it down to DPS.

without crits or evades (steady weps), you’re going to hit about 1.5k-1.65k dps. On average you’ll evade inbetween sd3’s, evade = .75s which means we subtract 25% of the original dps (we’re now doing 1.5k over 1.75s), which leaves us with 1.125-1.24k dps.
If we run soldiers amulet, we have 35% crit chance with fury (which you’ll have most of the time via boon rips and steal). Factoring that crit chance means 35% of the time that dps is doubled, over a 10s perior 1.125k dps becomes 2.3k dps for 3.5 of those seconds, we average that and find that 6.5*1.125k + 3.5*2.3k = 15.36k, we devide that by 10 and end up with 1.536k DPS
With zerkers amulet, we get 1.865k DPS -without factoring in the crit damage (+20%).

So to answer your question with a tldr:
1.125k dps without fury
1.536k dps with fury + soldiers amulet
and 1.865k dps with fury + zerkers amulet not including the crit damage increase of 20% from zerks amulet (it’s well over 2k)

Well that seems mediocre at best. What armor value is this against? I mean against a regen warrior the upper end of you DPS will probably equal out to 1300 (assuming you don’t poison him). Against a necro or warrior (assuming no healing+every attack hitting) that’s still going to drag the fight out to 10+ seconds which really starts to favor the field/aoe spam they can put out. Seems like everything has to go absolutely right for meh results. And off you fight a guard who likes wards you have to steal stability or you’re not going to be able to connect with a lot of those attacks. It’s the strongest weaponset we have (imo) but only if a good player makes everything happen exactly as planned while meeting minimal resistance.

hmm, i don’t know about that. Guardians usually have around 14k hp (I’m using clerics ammy for this example, i’m too tired to logg in and test everything else out for this scenario), and rely heavily on boons to stay up after their invulns are burned (heal/ult). This build should counter guardians and ele and engi especially hard because of the boonrip (these classes are very boon reliant). If they have 14k hp and we do 1.5k dps, asuming they have enough toughness to bring down our dps to 1k, it should still only take < 15s to kill them. Their heal block lasts 1.75s and has a 30s cd, their elite invlun lasts 3s and has a monstrous cooldown of 90s. Using their heal (5k heal) + elite should only shave off 10s from the fight, which might be enough time for their team to arive. This is all in mathematical consideration of course. Relative to skill level, a top notch guardian may still be able to stay up against an sd thief. Furthermore I think offensive guardian builds could beat it mathematically, since they rely on retal/blocking/burning and not necessarily direct damage it’s a tough fight though.
And the thing with warrior is, it’s a very timing oriented class. You have to land your important cc/burst skills to be efective in the fight. Healing signet is 397/second last time I checked (with zerks amulet) -if a warrior can’t hit you, you’ll outdps that regen. I’ve been playing warrior alot lately, it’s why I made this thread actually, s/d thief is the most annoying matchup there is. d/p is annoying too unless you bring zerker stance (blind spam op). But I don’t play LB, so I don’t really know how well that aoe field works against it personally, maybe it’s a hard counter, but think about it -if the only skill your landing is an aoe, should it really be enough to 100-0 someone?

Maugetarr.6823:

Zodian.6597:

feliscatus.1430:

So, you can dodge a lot in between not damaging me? K.

Actually, sd 3 does do pretty good dmg (LS hits for around 2-3k), and rips boons from you. So you could be taken even more damage if you have might or fury uptime in your build.

So if you’re only hitting with LS to keep cycling to FS, and dodging in between and not throwing out any other attacks, what sort of DPS are you putting out? I mean, assuming that every LS and FS hits, how many do you get to use in a minute (or whatever criteria you’ve normalized this about) and boil it down to DPS.

without crits or evades (steady weps), you’re going to hit about 1.5k-1.65k dps. On average you’ll evade inbetween sd3’s, evade = .75s which means we subtract 25% of the original dps (we’re now doing 1.5k over 1.75s), which leaves us with 1.125-1.24k dps.
If we run soldiers amulet, we have 35% crit chance with fury (which you’ll have most of the time via boon rips and steal). Factoring that crit chance means 35% of the time that dps is doubled, over a 10s perior 1.125k dps becomes 2.3k dps for 3.5 of those seconds, we average that and find that 6.5*1.125k + 3.5*2.3k = 15.36k, we devide that by 10 and end up with 1.536k DPS
With zerkers amulet, we get 1.865k DPS -without factoring in the crit damage (+20%).

So to answer your question with a tldr:
1.125k dps without fury
1.536k dps with fury + soldiers amulet
and 1.865k dps with fury + zerkers amulet not including the crit damage increase of 20% from zerks amulet (it’s well over 2k)

Errant Venture.9371:

This build has been around for at least 4 months, and this is all known information (that has been complained about for months). Thanks for reposting it for the 37th time, though.

Just wanted to make sure it was still being discussed! And jumper had an even more lethal build back then, which involved s/d+s/d and init/evade regen on wep swap. There was a bug where you could swap weapons right as you finished casting shadow assault and you wouldn’t get the shadow return proc. Basically it had more mobility than sb 5 when out of combat (you could basically blink from point to point lol). But the bug was fixed and we moved on.

feliscatus.1430:

So, you can dodge a lot in between not damaging me? K.

Actually, sd 3 does do pretty good dmg (LS hits for around 2-3k), and rips boons from you. So you could be taken even more damage if you have might or fury uptime in your build.

Mrbig.8019:

Blackjack.5621:

noone is using roll for initiative and you have 30% boon duration as thief

also s/d thieves don´t use any points in trickery

(I´m refering to the current meta build, not random builds palyed at low levels)

no doubt thieves have too many evades and you can´t reliably hit them, on the other hand they need surviveability, but they should take away vigor and help thieves to survive by using stealth

4s revelead up from 3 disagrees with you.

Thief mechanics will always be frustrating: evades, teleports and stealth are HATED by people, stealth in primis.

So if you buff thief stealth, people will rage even more.

There’s no way to stop the QQ, because aside proper balancing issues ( S/D is too strong balance wise) people will complain regardless.

Just like they still complain about mesmers.

Well, Mesmer and Thief class design as a whole is pretty f***ing terrible (for pvp) -let’s be honest here, lol. Mesmer’s have waaaaay too much access to clone spawns to be played the way it was designed to be played. I’m not saying shatter builds aren’t awesome, but shatter utilizing clones for their burst is kinda like double dipping. It seems like they modeled the class after shadow priest from WoW, but instead of separating apparitions and shadow orbs, they just said “this’ll be innovative, let’s combine the two!” -probably because they didn’t have the resources or desire to implement a UI tell for shatter’s build up. The result was pretty much a playstyle that confused the hell out of people then bursed them (spawned a bunch of clones, screwing up targetting, then shatter for large spike damage), which isn’t very fun to play against is it? Anyways, don’t even get me started with thief design haha, I’m sure we could argue for hours.

wish.1027:

All youre proving is that S/D THFs dodge a lot? Who didnt know that? I was expecting more!

That they can dodge infinitely, Dodging is supposed to be a decisive, timed, and limited mechanic -it’s supposed to be why gw2 requires more skill than other games. Being able to spam dodge mechanic defeats the point of having it in the first place. You might as well just give everyone passive invulnerability with short periods of down time, especially considering this takes essentially spamming only 2 buttons to achieve.

Requiem.8365:

Shouldnt this be 1 evade each 3.25s? With vigor you get 10% of your total endurance/s , so 20% of the endurance for one dodge roll. With the trait you only have to recover 65% endurance for the next dodge so 65%/(20%/s)=3.25s . So felince grace takes away 1.75s not 2.5s (which wouldnt make sense with the 3.5s anyways, guess theres a typo in).

Yep you’re right, I actually had it at 3.25 then changed it when I went back and edited. I couldn’t remember how I got there lol. Thanks for bringing that up, I’ll change it back.

So i’m bored, thought maybe it’d be fun to try and prove out how s/d thief is mathematically broken right now. Let me know if I made any mistakes!

Variables/Values
i/s base initiative regen = 1 init per 1.33 seconds =.75i/s (Initiative per second)
SC sword3 init cost= 3 (evade) + 2 (boon rip) = 5 init
cast time= 1/2s + 1/2s = 1s …= -5i/s
ER base endurance regen = 5%/second (10% with vigor)
H withdraw = 15s cooldown (10 seconds of vigor and 4 initiative from traits) vigor downtime = 5s, +.27 init regen/s
RFI roll for initiative = +6 inititative/60s cd = +.1 init regen/s
IS Infultrators signet= +1 init/10s = +.1 init regen/s
QR Quick recovery trait= +2 init/10s = +.2 init regen/s
Stl Steal= +3 init, 15s vigor 27s cd = +.1 init regen/s vigor downtime = 12s
Flg Feline grace trait = lowers cost of evade to 35%

totals
= 1.5 init/s
=infinite vigor up time as long as you steal at least once every 4 heals (you can steal once every 2 heals) or heal in between 2 steals (you can heal twice in between steals).
= 1 evade available every 3.25s, (with normal endurance regen it would = 1 evade available every 10 seconds, but we have perma vigor -which shaves off 5s and the feline grace trait which shaves off another 2.5s. also, evades last .75s and we are still regening them as they are happening)
= -5 init/s (cost of sword 3 FS and LS)

-5i/s+1.5i/s= -3.5i/s So, s/d thief actually looses 3.5 initiative per second spamming 3 after initiative regeneration is accounted for.
How convenient then that your evades take exactly 3.25s to recharge.

What does it mean? double rainbow? -nope
Basically, you can spam evades infinitely on s/d thief as long as you keep your endurance below 99%, your initiative below 14, and your vigor up (steal at least every four heals, or heal at least once between steals). Notice, Larcenous strike doesn’t have an evade attached to it, so you’ll still have brief .5s periods of vulnerability, but it shouldn’t really matter, because landing a skill in that .5s window is pretty much impossible to do on purpose thanks to the unpredictability of weather you will evade or flanking strike or heal or roll for initiative next. Basically, you have 4 different evades in your kitten nal, and 1 non evade, 2 of those evades are on very short (non) cooldowns, so your oponent only has a 33% chance at actually getting your non-evade in the first place, ontop of that they have to time the .5s window -which means begining the skill animation while you’re still in the middle of an evade (unless it’s instant cast skill).
Anyways, yeah s/d thief is pretty kitten broken right now haha, I guess the best counter would be to just drop condi fields on them, that way their bound to get the condi applied, but still you can just take lyssa runes and bass venom and cleanse if you really need it. + heal when using init trait + spamming your 15s cs heal should keep you up pretty well.
Here’s the build, have fun guys.

they already said no to this cas then there would be no point to buy their mobile banking/blt gem store things -pve players could just go to HoM for quick bank access.

Lux.7169:

For what it’s worth there was a group of us all watching one stream. I realize you’re asking for literal “viewers on the stream” because situations like mine apply to other games such as LoL, but a group of 7 of us watched most of the matches on a big screen in our apartment. We had a lot of fun placing bets on the matches and rushing to make twitch accounts to vote XD.

That’s awesome! haha

Gmtsai.6349:

Who’s better? Voz? Five Gauge? Ostrich Eggs? Answer is very obvious

better at what? mechanics, theory-crafting, winning?
Five Guage is a legend at theory and creating new builds -he created “100 nades” back in the day and was essentially the reason why the kit refinement trait was reworked.
Ostricheggs is in the top 4 most ranked game wins in both the NA solo and team ladder (over 2500 wins), and Voz just convinced some kid that Engineer -the most underplayed class in this meta (a class so frowned upon that Car Crash wouldn’t even let super play it in the PAX tourney, despite that it’s his main) is completely broken. They’re all pretty great, and all pretty well known for different things here on NA!

Voz is a pretty solid/well known engineer player, not many people can do what he was able to do against your team.

Lux.7169:

ahuba.6430:

uberkingkong.8041:

They went to LoL because they realized GW2 wasn’t esports.

like they have a chance at LoL esports lol

Jumper is rank 1 diamond or whatever the absolute top tier is. I don’t know my LoL terminology because I never played it.

Diamond 1, he had a peak elo of around 2500! He actually was on the team Subterfuge with Nientonsoh, who is now the top laner for CLG.
I think Zoose is pretty up there too (diamond league at least).
I heard Nero was in Masters league in SC2 for multiple seasons -even placing in regional tournaments, a lot of these guys come from pretty competitive backgrounds in other games.

Narcarsis.5739:

I may not be good, but I’ve been around since beta.

And so have Vyndetta, Skovos, Zombify, Taym, and Davinci.

you’re all good, most successful team on NA right now at least. And Skovos is a legend, the godfather of d/d ele ;p

Mrbig.8019:

longbow-hammer war always wins against thieves.

Any kind of thief.

Just the longbow is enough to kill any thief in a frontload 1vs1 fight.

Strange, hammer is like the most telegraphed weap in the game.

Hammer is pretty easy for thief to deal with, you can just drop a pistol 5 and dance on them. LB is a pain in the kitten for thief though.

offensive meditations guardian is the hard counter to gc thief. sw/f + sc/t
idk if the build still works, haven’t played it in awhile, but I remember it was like sooo many blocks thiefs and warriors couldn’t do anything to it. Terrible mobility though.

Xcom.1926:

I watched the whole thing from start to finish. Some of the matches were pretty good and it was a well run and well casted tournament. However, 1000 viewers during the finals isn’t going to cut it as “eSports”. I don’t even think we hit past 2000 viewers at any time during the tournament.

You don’t think so? 1000 is good enough for me, 1000 viewers, 1000 dollars, 1000 reasons to watch ;D
But srsly, the average viewer count for most esports tournies is ~10k right now (exclude Dota 2, and LoL, sometimes sc2 can bust out a 50k viewer count stream, but it’s getting more and more rare). 1-2k vieweres is a good number, much higher than any other mmorpg tournament is getting right now, and it’s a good start for gw2.
just imagine, there could have been no viewers.. that woulda been awkward! ;D

Zinwrath.2049:

Everquest next is boasting ground breaking pvp, but refusing to release information so hard to say on that one. But with fully destructible environments and a GW2 style combat system allowing full customization of over 40 classes, it definitely could one-up Gw2.

40 classes in PvP = balancing nightmare. Their “user created” maps look interesting though.

Wildstar is being built around its pvp format, and thus should have an easier time balancing. Already boasts arena, battleground, and guild vs guild style pvp game modes and uses gw2 dodge and hotbar mechanics, but goes even further to add more skill shot based combat.

Definately one to keep your eye on. My only fear is that it’s p2p and not so well known outside of the mmorpg community, if they don’t have some big marketing push planned before launch those servers might be pretty empty. -remember firefall? yeah.

Smite is picking up its population (showing insane growth over the last 6 months in its open beta) and is soon to be launched next month. Features alikeness 3rd person pvp with already 7-8 game modes and adding another soon. Also has a very easy to use control mechanic with FULL skill shot combat. (does not have a dodge bar though)

I was actually in the closed beta for smite like a year ago, tried so hard to like it and just couldn’t warm myself up to it. I was a pretty die hard LoL fanboy back then though.. Hope they figured out their combat system, felt like an fps moba back then.

And yes there is Hearthstone, the Blizzard version of Legends of Norrath from the everquest franchise. (will no doubt be more successful as blizzard has a way of taking SOE’s ideas then making them more mainstream much like they did with WoW from Everquest). It will definitely steal some thunder from other games.

Blizz actually has already announced plans to push esports for hearthstone, ironically this is like the 1 game I don’t have closed beta access to right now but I hear it’s pretty amazing.

Anyways, getting back on subject. Most of the top players quit in February, some came back for the PAX regional, then quit after getting knocked out of their brackets, I’m hoping they’ll be back for the October patch. And hopefully the October patch doesn’t suck!

lol i think someone from the pvp dev team got their hands on an alt account to use on the forums ;p
Look we know you guys are trying, don’t beat yourselves up about how the forums have been lately, like 90% of the pvp playerbase that actually has a valid opinion is on hiatus since pax cas condi+warrior meta isn’t fun to play. We still love you though!

#esports

Lordrosicky.5813:

10, Ele burst – too high, should be brought down. Promotes macroing and even more cheese. Solution to making ele viable isnt to give it cheese.

Which build exactly? cas fresh air is pretty good where it’s at in my opinion, ele is easy to counter -especially s/d. Just evade the fire grab, don’t stand under dragons tooth and you’re fine.

Lordrosicky.5813:

14, Lag – fixing lag matters. Lag is Op in this game. Most the games I lose is because I get dced for 2 mins start of every match. Winning from 3 cap and 100-0 down isnt easy.

Sounds like an internet connection problem on your end, if you have long load screens then it’s probably a hardware issue.

Lordrosicky.5813:

16, Healing turret – cast time too short. Cant be interrupted.

Low base heal, the counterplay here is that the turret itself can be killed. Maybe they could increase cooldown though, since everyone just f1’s it anyways.

Lordrosicky.5813:

21, Asuras – too small. Cant see them for kitten. Lame and should be nerfed/banned

Try tab targetting? idk what to tell you here, maybe play an asuran and get used to the character model so you can see it better. l2p issue.

I noticed you didn’t say much about condi damage, I always thought you hated condi classes. Anyways, condi damage is pretty broken, every spell shouldn’t be aoe, aoe condi dmg should be halved, ect…
I agree with everything else, good post.

you could try soloqueue, even if you bomb the leaderboards at least you’d be having fun eh?

i use naga for utility skills and f1-f4, but the best skills to bind to it are ones that are instant cast because then you have more freedom over wasd keys, i try to bind f, r, q and 3 to skills that have cast times or that I don’t have to kite to use (eg; using a skill bound to f while strafing to the right is annoying lol, especially since we can’t use skills while jumping in gw2).

man that’s an old one! I think I’ve watched every single video on that channel, pretty awesome stuff. The writer (James Portnow) teaches a class on game design up here at Digipen tech -which I guess has had over 40 alumni work on gw2 last time i checked (fun little fact! lol).

we need builds that are harder to play! not the other way around. This is a l2p issue, and frankly a pretty easy one, imo ele/ranger are the easiest classes to play -3 kit engi is pretty complex but it’s easy too once you figure out the basic rotations!
gw2’s skill cap is already pretty low because of the lack of skills we can bring into combat in the first place, why would we want to dumb it down even more?

This subforum is filled with threads of suggestions and feedback addressing things we don’t like about pvp, but it’s hard to find feedback about the features we actually enjoy within our game. I challenge you all the stop and think of 3 things you actually like about gw2 pvp, and why you think that you enjoy these features. -this kind of feedback is important because it ensures that the devs see what we actually like about their game and don’t take those features out!

Mine:
1. The heart of the Mists (level scaling, vendors, ect..): this feature has RUINED the mmorpg genre for me lol. It’s so hard to wrap my head around grinding through a level cap just to be able to access PvP after playing gw2 -ESPECIALLY in subscription based games, where I know that they profit by keeping me playing. It makes me feel like I’m being ripped off -“you want to try pvp on a druid, mage, and warrior? that’ll be $15, grats on grinding 3 characters to max lvl over the past month, oh you actually want to play now? $15 more please.”

2. Combat: GW2 got mmorpg combat right, they went for a more action-rpg style, but they didn’t dip too far into that genre to where it felt like an mmofps (like forge or tera). Combat at it’s core feels more fluid and mechanically better than most other mmorpg’s out there. (disregarding modular things like particle effects and lack of cast bars)

3. Builds: a lot of people might disagree with me on this, but I love the depth of the builds system in gw2. I probably spend more time theorycrafting builds in the HoM than I do actually playing these days. The diversity, complexity, and depth of the builds system in gw2 gives players a sense of cleverness and control over the way they experience combat -and that’s a huge deal in an mmorpg (just look at WoW, people hate the new MoP talent tree because of how streamlined it is). Although cookie cutter builds are prominent, I know that those cookie cutter builds were spawned from the imaginations of individual players who discovered them over months of testing, and that’s pretty inspiring.

it had around 2k viewers, which is great for gw2. We also must keep in mind that it was happening at the same time as the GTA 5 preview streams (50k viewers twitch) and the League of Legends s3 world championships (~1mil viewers across twitch, azubu, youtube, and various other streaming services). Even I found myself switching between streams and only watching the matches I REALLY wanted to see!

S
+Warrior
Necro
-Thief (s/d)

A
+Ranger
Guardian

B
+Engi (balanced, but doesn’t compete well in this meta for its role)
+Mesmer (balanced, but doesn’t compete well in this meta either)

C
Elementalist

ensoriki.5789:

D/D was favored by many over D/P when the off hand dagger was a heavy hitter.

I’d like to see Db go lifesteal based or something along that line of thought and then just improve the velocity of dancing dagger before anything else

That’s fair, I’d actually really like to see something like that, i just hate how so many of the skills in gw2 pvp have like 0 counterplay opportunities you know? I can’t believe this thread has stayed in the spvp subforum this long anyways haha. I meant to post it to the thief class forum but was in a hurry to get off.

style.6173:

Definitely not a fan. Dagger offhand is not just for condi specs. I just want the damage increased on both dancing dagger and clock and dagger. That’s all it needs.

For you P/D users though, I would like to see burning added to pistol #2.

don’t think damage has anything to do with it, pistol 4 and 5 are just so much stronger than dagger 4 and 5 for power builds -for defensive/control reasons mainly. Pistol 5 = hard counter to like all mele, pistol 4 = on demand interrupt. and yeah agreed on pistol 2

ensoriki.5789:

P/D supporting conditions is fine it’s put together better for that purpose and style even if it falls short at the moment.
It literally feels to me like they forgot that they ditched Twisting Fangs in alpha and kept the bleed on death blossom for the hell of it.
You’ve got a power based stealth attack with no utility attached to it (unlike Surprise shot/tactical) it’s completely power based. Your auto attack damage wise is comparable to the Sword power based damage excusing a poison which tips it over. Again mostly about power.
Heartseeker? Power. Dancing dagger? Power. Cloak and dagger? Power and sets up your power stealth attack.
Why the kitten is death blossom applying bleeds? So we can say it ignores armor? It wont do so on a significant value unless you get condi power in, which doesn’t go with the rest of the set especially given that the utility of D/D really doesn’t support it either. Just so someone can go invest in condi power and spam 3? Spec carrion to try and get the best of both worlds by taking condi power for one skill? kittening ridiculous.

tbh, thief design is kinda lackluster as a whole. Initiative without any combo system really just promotes spamming 1 skill and occasionally using 1 of the other 4 situationally -not to even mention weapon swapping in combat is pretty much nonexistent because of that, so everyone can just take the set with the most mobility (sb) in every build just to spam THAT mobility skill to get between points. They probably designed DB with the intent of having a defensive skill that wouldn’t do OP direct damage (it probly did in alpha, then ppl abused it and it got nerfed) – or they were just looking for a lazy counter to heavy armor classes like you said, idk. What they got was basically a skill that was too expensive (init wise) to even use in power builds, and a skill that was too OP in condi builds to lower the init cost of. I think the only future d/d will have in spvp is as a condi spec, unless pistol 5 gets reworked or bleeds are removed from DB and init cost is lowered.

ensoriki.5789:

More viable builds is a good thing in a general sense
Something like D/D condi? Nope.

what about p/d? I think that might be the stronger kit in the end anyway (at skill cap), especially if body shot (pistol 2) was reworked too.
Infact, what if body shot was changed to a mobility skill so every thief and their mom didn’t take sb? that might be OP though since p/d kite is already pretty strong.

tldr= bold text

ensoriki.5789:

Zodian.6597:

ensoriki.5789:

You are not going to be happy with the game if you start encouraging D/D death blossom spam to be more credible. Believe that.

lol any competent player with a ranged weapon counters db spam, new #5 and ranged #4 dps would give the build a fighting chance at least. DB spam is like beta meta lol.

You don’t even need a ranged weapon. I think the playstyle itself is dumb as kitten however and would not encourage it.

I don’t much care for the playstyle either, but it’s a build and the end goal should be improving build diversity no?

Mrbig.8019:

Excalibur.9748:

I hate it. I use #4 a lot in the S/D kit, and I know other thieves who use #5 a lot in the S/D kit.

It’s not about using it or not, it’s about efficiency.

If you use Dancing Dagger in a situation that isn’t slowing people down while backapping, you’re wasting initiative.

C&D is suboptimal at best, melee range, 6 ini: one of the few skills in the set requiring skill, yet not used due to being suboptimal ( tactical strike being so bad doesn’t help, either).

Yet OP suggested changes will just help condi specs, terribad at best.

Anyway, it will be moved to thief forum so who cares

Thief doesn’t even have condi specs right now, they’re a joke. Wouldn’t you rather at least the option of having them? You can’t create more than 2 viable burst damage specs for thief because of how its weapon sets are designed. s/d and d/p are meta, if we buff skills of any other weapon set then it’s just gonna nerf or buff the hell out of s/d or d/p. I feel like dagger 4 and 5 (4 more so than 5) are essentially just unused skills at this point because of the way the class is designed to roll off initiative in the first place. Remaking the skills will improve build diversity of thief in a way that traits will probably never be able to.

ensoriki.5789:

You are not going to be happy with the game if you start encouraging D/D death blossom spam to be more credible. Believe that.

lol any competent player with a ranged weapon counters db spam, new #5 and ranged #4 dps would give the build a fighting chance at least. DB spam is like beta meta lol.

Excalibur.9748:

Mrbig.8019:

Excalibur.9748:

I hate it. I use #4 a lot in the S/D kit, and I know other thieves who use #5 a lot in the S/D kit.

It’s not about using it or not, it’s about efficiency.

If you use Dancing Dagger in a situation that isn’t slowing people down while backapping, you’re wasting initiative.

C&D is suboptimal at best, melee range, 6 ini: one of the few skills in the set requiring skill, yet not used due to being suboptimal ( tactical strike being so bad doesn’t help, either).

Yet OP suggested changes will just help condi specs, terribad at best.

Anyway, it will be moved to thief forum so who cares

It wouldn’t take a lot to make dancing dagger something worth using….TC basically just deleted it in exchange for burning!! (even though there’s no reason it can’t cripple and burn at same time)

I don’t like it.

reason it can’t cripple and burn is because then p/d would be too strong @ kiting. you might get away with a cripple and burn on explosion, but then it’s overkill for d/d condi set -which is countered by kite.

Jamais vu.5284:

New Dagger 4: costs 3 initiative, .5 sec cast time, 900 range
“Dragon Dagger”: Throw a flaming dagger at your target, apply (low damage) burning, after 5 seconds the blade explodes doing a small amount of damage and applying aoe (higher damage) burning to 5 enemies within 300 range of target.

What the hell is this? Dragon Dagger? Burning? Why? This isn’t Elementalist, and D/D is everything but a ranged DOT set.
Dancing Dagger needs it’s activation time and projectile speed buffed. That’s it.

p/d is a ranged set though. Have to keep in mind other sets like i said in 1st half of the post, p/d wouldn’t play very fluid if their ranged 4 was turned into mele. new 5 skill would help offset the need for dancing dagger in the s/d kit, while the new 4 skill would give thieves viable options for condi builds without affecting s/d too much. no one uses d/d for burst anymore (it’s mathematically inferior to d/p), it would be cool to rework dagger offhand to promote more build diversity -even if it IS condition builds (I hate condi meta as much as the next guy, but I have faith condis as a whole will be tuned down soon). And I’ll change the name to something more fitting just for you.

Dagger is pretty inferior to pistol OH except in s/d and p/d – p/d is a joke build (stealth spam -we’re trying to give more stealth counterplay right?), and s/d doesn’t really utilize the dagger 4/5 skills -basically just spam 3 and occasionally 2 for escapes (sometimes dagger 5 is used for escapes).
So why not rework the dagger offhand to open up more viable builds? The first thing to keep in mind when balancing for thief is that pretty much every weapon belongs to 2-3 different weapon set combinations. Because of this, we have to be very careful with which abilities we give to an offhand set without making another set extremely OP -eg; we give dagger 4 a 1 second stun to push up d/d wep set, but now s/d is even more op. The answer to this dilemma is by giving the skills effects that will only improve the sets that need improving, and not affect the sets that don’t need improving/nerfing. We do that by giving dagger 4/5 skills that improve their viability in p/d and d/d condition builds.

My proposal:

New Dagger 4: costs 3 initiative, .5 sec cast time, 900 range
“Kerosene Dagger”: Throw a flaming dagger at your target, apply (low damage) burning, after 5 seconds the blade explodes doing a small amount of damage and applying aoe (higher damage) burning to 5 enemies within 300 range of target.

New Dagger 5: costs 6 initiative, 0 cast time, 600 range
“Criminal Bond”: Chain yourself to your target for 4 seconds, if the distance between you both exceeds 600, the chain breaks and applies cripple to your target and regeneration to yourself, target suffers from poison as long as the chain stays intact.
“Break Chains”: Break the chain and enter stealth, your target gains swiftness.

This would give both p/d and d/d some pretty interesting options for condi builds, without making s/d any more or less effective. “Criminal Bond” synergizes well with Shadow Strike on p/d, and also well with Death Blossom and Heart Seeker, it would also still give s/d players access to stealth for interupts and escapes in a way that give their oponents some options for counterplay -unlike cloak & dag.
“Kerosene Dagger” is a way to sneak burning into the condi thief’s kit, while also including options for counterplay against it.

thanks for the preview, i hope we can expect more previews like this in the future.

It’s late and I have a million things to do tonight, so im going to just cut to the chase here. Basically, for me the most annoying part of watching a tournament in GW2 is not being able to follow which skills the specific player I want to follow is using in a team fight (and even in 1v1s sometimes) due to generic animations and sometimes particle/npc clutter. A solution to this issue would be to add semi-transparent skill icon floaters above each character’s head in observer mode.

Basically, a player presses a skill – that skill’s icon appears over their head at 100% opacity as the skill is being used/animation is going off – after skill animation ends, skill icon over characters head floats towards sky and opacity fades out (dissolving) over ~1.5 seconds- skills that get used quickly together stack vertically and fade out in the order they were used – after 3 skills icons are stacked, the opacity fade/float out duration speeds up to compensate and avoid cluttered icons.
auto atack (1 skill) gets no icon.

another solution could be just to add the skill icons at the end of the player hp bars in each party window, I think that’s what they do in WoW these days for their tournaments -it’s not as good in my opinion because it has viewers focused on the party windows rather than on the game itself, but it would be better than nothing.

I have a pretty good idea about how this could look, there’s an indie mmofps called forge that kinda does something like it in their combat to make up for lack of cast bars (btw, we need those you know -this is a pvp game, not skyrim). Anyways, idk how much this would take to put in, but I think it might be worth at least looking into -set a video editing guy up with some easy 1v1 footage using observer mode, put the camera at an angle thats easy to work with and have him add in a concept animation for this. I was actually saving this post -going to do the video prototype myself and post it, but its taking me too long and i have like no time these days + i feel like with all suggestions, giving them sooner is better than later.

in the tunnel by gate there is an objective on that map that spawns at 8:30, if someone takes the objective their team gets all 3 points.

supcutie celtic playlist = #1
http://www.pandora.com/station/play/1602950875364087177

Ixl Super Ixl.7258:

Team Sync is definitely one of the best teams in the game and is the best team in NA. They are all great people, We have had a lot of fun hanging out with them,
It wouldn’t have been the same if was another team. All of them are laid back and fun to hang out with "EVEN Davinci ".

We will definitely be seeing a lot of Scrims between [CC] And [SYNC] in the future!

All of the matches was very close, Specially Khylo! You guys almost gave me a heart attack!

Next rivals : zombify vs Posi

I’m glad you guys had a good time as well! I wanted to ask your team for interviews at the after party but you were all sitting down eating dinner and I didn’t wanna be rude! haha
Hope all of you had a good flight home!

Meet the members of team Sync! -except Twerp (he was busy) and a short interview with Zombify at the end. There’s also some footage of the event itself in the video.
It was pretty awesome to meet these guys (and everyone else!) IRL! We had a lot of fun covering the event

Click here to watch

Extended Recap of GW2 Championships @ PAX

Happy patch day! -eSportsGaming.net (ESG)

Appreciate the post Chap! -looking forward to tomorrows patch.
PS: Props for the radiohead link, good song

Barret.4095:

man did you get to go to pax itself?

Yep, just Saturday though. We were supposed to cover the LoL tournament but our press passes got mixed up due to some miscommunications between Riot, Pax, and us (esportsgaming.net) unfortunately!
I believe all of the GW2 tournament competitors had 4 day passes to pax though.

Went to go do some interviews with Sync @ gameworks in Seattle earlier. When I arrived, I found them hanging out with Nyjacky from team Curse -we also got to hang out with tsm, clg, and c9. Pretty fun night!
(top pic) left to right = nyjacky, caed, vyndetta

it’s a shame carbine decided to go with the p2p monthly fee business model in the first place, on top of that they throw in that “credd” system and the game is starting to sound a lot like a pay to play, pay to win cash grab. I’m not gonna talk about this much on the gw2 forums, but I’m very disappointed about Wildstar.

good post man! -and good info for people looking to get into thief.
To add a bit, here are my rules for capping far:

• Thief is more valuable as a defensive roamer (between mid-home bursting targets that don’t see you coming).
• If there is a fight on home (you’re 2 capped) and at least 4 of the other team are on your home node, this means either mid or far is open, go cap the free node. If the fight is in your team’s favor (your team has more ppl), go help clean up that fight faster then zerg mid with whole team.
• If there is a 5v5 at mid and their backpoint is doing more for their team than you are doing for your’s (it’s all tanky people in the teamfight and you can’t land your burst effectively), go backcap far. This is a “gambit” -you sacrifice a lesser resource for a greater one by aggroing the bunker back to far. Once he engages on you, simply disengage and get back in the fight at mid. If he stays mid and your team looses the fight, cap the point and rush towards the other side of the map to D up home and groupe back up with your team for a push on mid, usually you’ll be a player or two up because one of theirs went back to cap far and if they assault home, you can outnumber them and put them on a rez timer before rushing mid.
• If you know that the backpoint player is terrible and that you can burst him down quickly and there is nothing else really going on (no team fights), go for it. But other than that, unless far is a free cap (no one is on it), you should never really go for it.

If they just plop a bunker engi or fear necro or ranger on home point, just ignore it and win the mid fights by calling your bunker in for a 5v4, if they send one to your home node just ignore it and win the now 5v3 then just send 2 back to home and take the guy out then recap. Rotations is just a numbers game, and as a roaming DPS it’s your job to make the tactical decisions that will allow your team to outnumber theirs in as many fights as possible.