Guild Wars 2

did they lower the channel time for it? I thought it was still around 2 seconds. and yes mantra healing is useful in pve…maybe worth a try in pvp with the toughness change, though it’s still got the issue of interrupts.

it never did, but it does still tp you when immobilized right?

I believe blurred frenzy also used to protect from condi damag (i.e. no ticks of bleeding while blurring). that is also gone.

This is just silly, retaliation is fine as is. Thieves have plenty of ways to deal with it, even if your specific p/p build doesn’t. I think one could make a good argument for why p/p is weak, and maybe this could be part of it. But honestly, you target an enemy, you can see the boons they have, and you can avoid attacking the one with retaliation up.

I do think it’s funny that you aren’t complaining about reflection…which I also don’t think is OP’d

I’m sorry Trejgon, but I’m not really getting your point here. You make a point of how your screen is all screwed up and you’re barely paying attention. And in the midst of this confusion causes minor problems for you? I think that’s the same thing we’re complaining about. When you are not playing well, vs a dedicated condition mesmer, confusion should not cause you minor irritation, it should kill you. It is that mesmer’s main form of damage, and the thing they’ve invested their whole build into, and yet all they managed to do is annoy a half afk ranger.

If it can do all that, what does it do to a character who is actually paying attention and trying? Well it doesn’t even annoy them.

Lord Trejgon.2809:

@Windwalker if 3-4 stacks of confusion is “meaningless damage” so why when I was using shortbow on ranger and had 4 stacks of confusion form some mesmer I nearly killed myself before I’ve noticed confusion?
aswer is simple – because it depends on some stats called condition damage and on how quick target is using skills (rangers shortbow autoatack is one of speed ones

and don’t forget that confusion damage ignore target armor – so considering that most players are packing more in toughness and really not so many in vitality it will be punishing very much…

So lets imagine a mesmer maxes out their condition damage and gets around 3k for that stat – which is possible with the right stats, equipment choices and food.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Confusion
the damage would be 65+(3000 × .075) or 290 per stack.
3-4 stacks at a time would be the average that mesmer could get on a single target, while 10 is possible on occasion. That would be between 1000 and 3000 damage per action, but condition cleans works well, as does waiting, because the confusion will go away and the mesmer will be waiting on cooldowns. now if you were pew pewing through 3-4 stacks of confusion, and lets say you had 18k health to start, you’d have to attack 6-18 times to kill yourself, meanwhile the mesmer would have to deal with all of that incoming damage (and I’m sure you do about 1k damage per attack)

The mesmer would do mediocre damage with auto-attacks, and may swap to staff to get some bleeding and fire to do some modest damage that way, but otherwise, this is a mesmer who is fully committed to confusion, and has very few other sources of damage. That build is very easy to counter and beat. Just wait out the confusion and you’re fine. Or you can attack through some of the confusion, especially if you do more damage than the confusion (with my thief on s/d I usually hit for 1.5k-3k on autoattacks, and I’m not a glass cannon build).

Take the other example, lets say someone wants to throw in a splash of confusion in a build with mediocre condition damage. Mesmers always have access to some confusion, since they can pop cry of frustration. So lets say they have 1.5 k condition damage, which is respectable. They may get 4 stacks of confusion on an enemy for 4 seconds every 20 seconds. Lets say its an average enemy that attacks twice through the confusion (not 20 times like your pew pewing self). That would wind up doing about 1.5 k damage.

Take the same example and lets imagine its an 8 second bleed instead of a 4 second confusion (since confusion is usually about half the duration of bleeds). If the 1.5k condition damage build got 4 stacks on you and you didn’t remove them, it’d be 3760 damage.

So as you can see, in every day use, bleeds are more powerful than confusion, and how often do you start to sweat because you have 4 stacks of bleeding on you? So the problem is mesmers can cause some bleeding, some fire and some confusion. But even taken together, it’s barely enough to make a condition build worth playing. You can almost always swap power for condition damage, and run exactly the same build (minus a few confusion boosting traits) and have better damage output, that is also more consistent and harder to counter. As it stands, condition builds on mesmers (both in pve and pvp/wvw) are more for novelty sake than efficacy.

I think the bigger issue is population imbalance. If populations are relatively equal, a double teaming situation will likely only be temporary. As a server succeeds and claims more territory, they spread themselves thin. This makes them ripe for picking by the opposing sides, and a double-team naturally happens to bring the sides in line. If the opponents continue to double team after the top team has been whittled down,and is hoarded up in a few keeps/towers, then this is a waste of resources for the two attackers, who are facing a tougher battle than they would have against eachother in other holdings. So the alliance should naturally break up at some point.

The problem where a losing team gets double teamed is a symptom of putting a low population server against two larger population servers. In this matchup, the low pop server is easy pickings always. therefore the logical progression for the winners should be to take keeps from the losing server first, until there’s nothing left, then shore up their home borderlands (and any weakly defended keeps), then go after eachother.

As you can see the problem doesnt come from a 3-way matchup or alliances. the problem comes from huge population differences between servers.

oh, one other suggestion, buff confusion damage, but make it possible to heal without proccing the confusion damage. I believe this was one of the issues that ANet saw with it, and I don’t think it’s a big deal letting people heal through it. We have stuns and dazes for that sort of counterplay anyhow.

I think the important thing to realize is that confusion, as it stands is marginally better than a bleed, if the opponent attacks every second, and that if they don’t it is worse than a bleed. This is fine, but confusion still works in all mesmer skills as if it is amazingly powerful, which is why it has such short durations. No one would run a weapon for occasional access to 9 stacks of a 3 second bleed, but that’s basically what we have with scepter.

On the other hand glamour builds were ridiculously overpowered pre-nerf. And Engie confusion builds, though gimicky and easily counterable, were also quite powerful and annoying to some people. So there needs to be some sort of balance. Simply buffing confusion damage/duration at this point will recreate the same problem. Therefore, I propose:
a) fixing glamours so that they only proc on 5 targets per 2 seconds. This would prevent them from giving tons of confusion to an entire zerg. The nerf was intended to fix this, but it made the build completely unviable, along with all other confusion builds. Limiting glamours as with other aoe is what is needed.
b) increasing the duration of specific confusion skills. If confusion is a conditional bleed, then it should have a duration in-line with bleeds. Not all confusion has to be equal. If glamours are potentially op’d make their confusion short duration (though maybe a bit longer than it is now). Meanwhile scepter and torch are awful, so make the confusion they cause last long enough to build a respectable stack.
c) buff confusion damage – it doesn’t have to be back to pre-nerf levels, but something moderate would be good. Anything that makes it difficult to attack through confusion would be good.

Mesmers have limited access to other condition damage in the form of bleeds/fire/the new condition. Other classes can easily max out at 25 bleeds on a single targets, whereas mesmers really can’t. So for other classes, like necros, access to other damage dealing conditions is gravy on a solid condition foundation (of bleeds/fears). Rangers and thieves have a similar situation. Those make for solid condition builds, because they can stack up bleeding for max damage, and then top off the damage with other conditions. A confusion mesmer just gets a bit of fire, a few bleeds and constant low levels of confusion or occasional medium stacks. High stacks are relatively hard to pull off. So essentially, a condi-mesmer has mediocre dps…hardly equivalent to a power build, and yet more easily mitigated (through condi-removal). confusion needs to represent a dilemma for the opposing player. If it doesn’t force them to stop immediately, due to threat of burst, then it should last long enough to get them to condition cleanse, retreat or start being selective in their use of skills to reduce the dps they are receiving. Personally, I don’t care if a stack of confusion does no damage to a player, if it forces them to react to me, I’m happy. As is, it does neither, which makes it useless, and as the center piece of the condition mesmer, makes the build as a whole useless.

@chaos and esplen
reading the back and forth has been interesting. I think chaos hit it on the head in that last comment, esplen’s build is a solo boon-stacking build with some boon-share thrown in. Chaos’s build is all about boon sharing.

I think there are many possible shades of grey between these two styles and it’s really great that they are all viable.

I also think it’s possible to play esplen’s build with team support in mind as the main focus, but it is just a matter of priorities in game. This fact makes it a potentially flexible build as it may easily switch from solo to support, by just altering the playstyle. that makes it good for solo-roaming in wvw, where occasionally you find yourself in a small group/zerg.

What you lose without inspiration is that fire and forget regeneration, which I love. Also the warden’s feedback is great defensively and offensively in wvw and pve alike. Again, how fortunate are we to have a profession where all of these variations on a style of play are not just possible but competitive?

cool ideas here. I already play variations on tanky boon/support, so I may give this a try too.

I also want to second your point about the super complicated combo. When learning the focus/retaliation combo, I found myself feeling like I wasn’’t able to do everything I was trying to do.

As you improve and get used to different pieces of the combo, the required skills and their effects, you learn to adapt your playstyle on the fly to suit the situation. For example, the focus retaliation combo is really nice, but sometimes a pain to squeeze in before a boon storm. However if you’re stacking up with a group and facing aoe, it is way worth it to get lots of retaliation and spread it around. Similarly, if the group is just trying to focus something down, a simple heal (proccing altruism rune) and weapon swap (proccing sigil of battle) and rune of inspiration giving 9 might and fury, is more than enough to help the party….even if they’re not getting any protection/aegis this time around.

so yeah, like the op mentioned, the optimal combo is there to show what is possible with the build, and as you go, you should learn to do each piece of the combo. Pulling off the whole, ideal combo takes some skill and practice, and if that is all you’re doing, it might be boring/frustrating. So mix it up, have fun and realize that pieces of it are more than ok.

as a thief, it makes for interesting play in wvw. when I pop a SR, opponents try to knock me out or aoe me. I try to dodge or move to the sliver of sr unaffected by aoe. It really is more fun this way for both sides.

mesmers use phase retreat as the new shadow return is described. It’s not as useful as blink (an actual stunbreaker), but it does allow mesmers to effectively protect themselves somewhat when stunned.

there are a lot of ways you can go for this, as indicated here and iin the chaos maestro thread. the focus reflect trait is super useful, but can be situational in fractals. I’ve run 30 in inspiration to get that and mantra heals before, but you can also do 20 in inspiration and switch between the two traits as needed.

Lately I’ve found myself moving away from mantra heals. I’m already giving them regen, protection and aegis…if the party is decent, they shouldnt need that level of consistent healing.

Basically, at this point I’m running a standard phantasm build, but I have runes of altruism and sig. of inspiration. I also swap between idisenchanter and idefender. for me its a good hybrid of support with decent dps.

the great thing is sig. of inspiration and runes of altruism make mesmer supporty with a variety of builds, so feel free to try any variation or tanky-shatter-phantasm/support.

Tulisin.6945:

Traits are the main problem that venoms have currently. Venom traits should be removed, not added. Venoms will never be useful to a majority of thieves when they’re balanced around taking every venom trait and building around them. I’d rather see malleable and useful venoms that every thief can integrate into their playstyle than a single viable venom build that loads up on them while everyone else ignores them.

interesting point. since everything has to be balanced with venom share in mind, venom share builds wind up being mediocre, while taking a splash of venom in a build is just pointless. I like where you are going with this.

alternatively, I think venom share should be moved to trickery. seems oddly placed as is.

I was all excited about the proposed changes, so I crunched some numbers:
As it stands, confusion is marginally better than bleeding if the opponent is attacking once per second, but it’s also harder to apply and shorter in duration. The proposed changes in condition damage for scepter (from 50 to 200) increase the damage of confusion by about 10 (yup, that’s it) per stack per action (in pvp/wvw – it’s laughable in pve anyway due to low rates of attacks)…Now scepter also will supposedly give some torment, which again is like a weaker/stronger form of bleeding depending on the opponent’s action. So what we’re talking about here is scepter gives us access to 3 conditions (with traited dueling bleeds). None of these conditions last long, nor do they do significant damage on their own, no matter how badly the enemy screws up. And when you combine them all in a build designed to maximize them, they’re probably still lower dps than 25 stacks of bleeding, which is easily achievable in other classes.

So, not the buff I was hoping for.

I’ve read through these notes and the thief notes (my toons). I find it fascinating how people react on the forums. A mixture of, “wow, this makes x possible now!” and “dang! they nerfed my cookie cutter/op’d build!” I think it really highlights the differences between players. Some want to have a working build, tune it and then focus on twitchy reflexes. A massive change like this only hurts those guys, cos a dominant build won’t get an obvious buff, while it may get nerfed (or competing builds get buffed making it a de facto nerf). Meanwhile other players are tinkerers (like me) and like trying out new build ideas, and playing the game in less obvious ways. This kind of change is like Christmas for those players as we get to go back to the drawing board and design a whole new set of cool builds. I personally am looking forward to dusting off my scepter and torch!

the problem with venom share is it uses the player’s own condition dmg stats, so only condi-builds would shine with it. and you wouldn’t make a condition dmg based team due to max bleed/torment stacks.

though I guess if you had a team that could easily get a few people to 25 bleed and 25 torment it would hit them like 38-63 stacks of bleeding dmg, which is sick.

Fade.7658:

Torment isn’t going to do enough damage to control movement though (a stack of 3, even doing 200 damage per stack won’t encourage people to stop moving on it’s own), but if you’re referring to using it in conjunction with other means, then, yeah, it will help.

for the skill to be at all worth taking, it would either need to be on a reasonable cd, or apply more than 1 stack of torment per hit, or have the torment last a long time. There isnt enough info to determine that. Assuming the end result is respectable enough to warrant a skill slot; you can imagine a condi thief dropping caltrops and this, then spamming death blossom (with its new low initiative). creating a dilema for the opponent with movement (stay and take ticks from caltrops, or get out and take more dmg from torment), and when they do get out of the caltrops, using scorpion wire (on its new lower cd) to pull em back in.

regarding stuns – I believe Anet is trying to make stuns into thief kryptonite. so when people qq about thieves, everyone can just say – did you try stunning them?

This has the effect of making glass thieves much more vulnerable, which does something to counteract the other buffs that make them potentially more deadly.

The other buffs make non-glass thieves (like condi-focused and power-focused) more viable though and the stun changes won’t hurt those builds much (since they can survive a 2 second stun). I think that’s their goal; spread out the thief player base into interesting variations. And make full glass builds require more skill to play (i.e. saving the evades for the stuns).

The scary thing is that mesmers supposedly are getting buffs to interrupts, and have some decent ways to cause stuns, so you can expect to see some stunning mesmer builds.

regarding weakness, it got a much needed buff, but thieves got more limited access to it. I think in the past it was considered a poor man’s chill, and so it was fine to let thieves have it. Now it stops a burst, so it’s got limited duration. Thieves can still use it, but they need to anticipate the burst a bit. And it makes for more interesting play/counterplay. I weaken you, then expose myself hoping you blow some cooldowns or initiative, then you notice and wait it out, but that gives me a chance to go on the offensive.

one thing I find strange about the new change is that now almost all the venoms affect mobility (except poison). Not sure why they chose this, but it seems odd. It does encourage saving venoms, rather than using them all at once, since it lets you draw out movement control throughout a battle.

the buffs to d/d seem to create a new kind of tanky/condition build option. That was already there, but with the changes to SoM, deathblossom and steal, you can do stuff like run up to a zerg, steal to the middle, caltrops, death blossom spam and then dagger storm before cloak and daggering and stealing to another part of the zerg.

dont wanna get my hopes up too high, but there is some cool synergy in these changes. finally thief might be viable in zerg v zerg without just being a poor man’s ranger.

Tulisin, you do a good job breaking down the individual meaning of different changes, but I disagree regarding vulnerability. It is not a bad ability at all, it’s just body shot never got enough vuln on a target to see its uses. If you look at Osicats videos on the mesmer forum, you’ll see that he does a double shatter move. The first set of shatters only dazes and applies 25 stacks of vulnerability (the build traits for this). The second shatter uses mind wrack and kills the heavy target golem at 80% health.
My point is just that small amounts of vulnerability may seem worthless, but 25 stacks is great. The problem with bodyshot before was that by the time you got enough vulnerability to be worthwhile, the vulnerability was wearing off and you were out of initiative/health. This change sets up a new style of thief that spikes by attaining might/frenzy and vulnerability. For example, it may be viable to run p/d and d/p in the same build now….set up the spike in p/d while kiting, then roll for initiative-steal-cloak and dagger/swap to d/p/backstab, or swap to d/p and roll/powder/heartseeker/steal/backstab…

you also mentioned that anet was ambivalent about the initiative system. I think it’s because spamming a single op’d skill isnt fun for either anyone (on the giving or receiving end). I think what Anet wants is for people to have the option to spam skills, but for optimal play to require some thought, varied skill use and resource management. That then separates the pros from the noobs.

what thief hates ranger pets? they’re a free cloak and dagger. And they help the shortbow get another bounce. keep em coming.

As far as thieves qqing on other forums, maybe this post belongs on those threads. I’m sure there are a handful of whiny thieves out there, but honestly, I (and I imagine 95% of the thieves on this forum) never complain about another class being OP’d. As others mention we get enough qqing about thieves here. I just try to learn to counter it. So the person who made a mistake here is you, by taking something one jerk said and generalizing it to all the people who play thieves.

The changes to shadow pursuit and steal are super powerful. having a 1500 range is amazing for steal, and the lower recharge rate makes trickery based dagger builds viable. Shadow pursuit as described is also ridiculous. Not sure I buy that these changes are real, since it’s just so many things at once, but they did say it was a big overhaul.

Garh.6728:

Thieves are just annoying:

1. As a guardian I tried to stop a thief running and set up a Line of Warding. The thief used Dagger Storm and was able to go through.
2. I just had a 2vs2 against two thieves. So one thief went down and just before we were finishing him off, the other thief used Shadow Refuge (or whatever it was). So both thieves got invisible, the one was revived and they were able to escape.

That’s a lot of fun, right?!

1. the description on line of warding is not clear…
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Line_of_Warding
that makes it clear that what it actually does is knock people down….so stability (given by dagger storm), nulifies it. If the thief knows your own skills better than you do, that’s good for him.

2. As a guardian you have access to aoes that could have damaged the thief…knowing exactly where the thief was while he was resing could have given you a second kill. You also have access to a pull, pulling the thief out of the refuge reveals him (and interrupts the res). Also take that same scenario and reverse it, two thieves vs 2 guardians and one of the guardians goes down. There’s a pretty good chance the second guardian could survive and get the res off too. Thieves just go about it differently.

not at all unfair, the thief is rooted in place and very vulnerable. Even stealthed an observant player will know what’s happening and can hurt/kill the thief. without stealth, thieves wouldnt be able to get stomps in (except for tp stomping). Then stomping during battles is only possible for bunker builds, which thieves dont really have much access to.

Also regarding tp stomps, mesmers can do them as well. they can also pop distortion for 4 seconds of invulnerability. Oh…they also have access to invisibility.

not at all unfair, the thief is rooted in place and very vulnerable. Even stealthed an observant player will know what’s happening and can hurt/kill the thief. without stealth, thieves wouldnt be able to get stomps in (except for tp stomping). Then it only favors bunker builds, which thieves dont have much access to.

I’ve noticed a similar thing. one thing that I think is contributing on my server (TC) is the uneven matchups. From my side, everyone is bored and just looking for a fight. So when those swords show up, everyone on the map converges and you get a 40 man zerg or more. On the other side, people are tired ofbeing whiped by massive zergs so they start zerging up too…making sure to have a big group before venturing out.

I like to solo-roam or small group-roam, and the game has gotten less fun, since relatively even matchups are hard to come by. I spend a lot of time looking for a fight, but then cant engage because I’m way outnumbered (because they waited in spawn until they had the numbers).

so now I am confused…what is this post even about?
Is it a debate on fashion?
Is it about damage output?

I’m kind of feeling like this could all be summed up here:
“warrior smash everyfing!”
“ouch!”
“Thief op’d”

we know how this plays out right?

No they’re not….here’s why…
Yes they are!
No they’re not….
jumping puzzle video!
…
I already had a post deleted because it responded to something here that was deleted…I think we should just let this rest. We all know that only smart people play warriors, so we clearly have been outsmarted by the clever warrior. Let’s just vanish in a puff of smoke….nothing to see here. Nothing at all…

One of the great things about this build is the mobility. The frequent dodges make perma-swiftness possible without any extra gear (and no need for signet).
The high initiative makes spamming shortbow 5 easy.
Recharge and vigor on healing lets you turn around and use heal and roll for initiative to move forward fast and then have refilled shortbow.
Shadowstep for good measure.

This build can run faster than most things, and has good access to stun breaks. This is all important because stealth is harder on it.

Very neat build / video…been playing around with S/D myself in WvW but I’ve gone with half power/toughness/healing power and half zerker gear, which is a nice balance for me. I like Nime’s suggestions too, especially since you’re stealing fairly often, and have lots of pts in condition damage already, getting those cripple/bleeds from caltrops and the poison on steal will do a lot towards bringing the opponent down, and reducing their ability to escape/heal.

Regarding the spawncamping from TC, I want to appologize for my server. It really is not classy. You guys got dealt a raw deal, and we shouldn’t be rubbing your noses in it. Personally, I make an effort to take the camps/towers and then either defend them or leave and look for another fight. I don’t try to push all the way to spawn.

That said, I do get why it is happening. On the TC side of things, I logged in today, saw that all the borderlands were almost all blue, then saw a bit of red on SoS. I got into queue there, since I wanted a fight, then I went to CD borderland to roam around while waiting. In my roaming in CD borderlands, I helped take a camp. Looked at the map, saw another camp was green and raced there just in time to see it flipped by 20 people. I followed them to bay where they built 5 golems to use against sunnyhill tower. That’s right, golem rushing on sunnyhill that is defended by 10 guys who we outnumber 2-1. Why were they doing this? Because they are bored…there are no battles to be had. As a solo roamer, I can’t even take out a camp, because there is barely anything to take. I can protect yaks, but really what from? And what for? Our keeps are already fully upgraded? So I waited in my queue for EBG for 30 minutes and then got into an actual nice fight with CD, defending a keep. me and 4 guildies held it off from 20 CD for a bit. We mentioned in map chat that it was going to go down, and people in the big zerg were like, “that’s fine, we’ll just take it in a few minutes anyway.” The CD zerg grew to 30 and made for an interesting fight when our zerg arrived. But the CD guys started getting whiped and retreated to their spawn. So now what are people to do? Well after being one shotted by a defender, I realized that we were at their spawn, and me and the guildies decided to try our luck vs the few SoS camps in EBG.

So my point is, there is probably a decent amount of spawn camping happening and I appologize for that. Again, it is not nice and makes the game annoying for the opponent. I imagine for you guys it must feel like adding insult to injury. I just want you to get that from our side, we just want a fight, because there isn’t much out there. It’s certainly a different kind of problem…you guys are no doubt getting frustrated. Meanwhile we are getting bored.

I’m not pinning this on CD, SoS, or TC. It’s all the matchup’s fault. Our populations are so mismatched that of course we can’t give you consistent fair fights. And so the fights dry up entirely, and WvW gets boring and people look for whatever fight they can find, even if it’s at spawn. It’s not really fun for anyone.

cerberus.1937:

^ NO again I wonder if you can read bhagwad.4281 I SAID STEALTH, BLOCK, INVUNERABLE, CLONES, MASS SINGLE/AOE DMG, SPAM CONDITIONS, IMMOBALIZE, AND THE CHEASIEST MOVE IN THE GAME MOA MORPH! You get all that this time or go I need to say it 5 more times you you to get it if your going to try to insult someone at least get your facts strait. You got way more cheese then thief and your proud of it; that is the funniest thing I heard all day. Mesmer complains about honorable duels; lets take away your stealth, clones, and phantasms and see where that leaves you, oh wait we don’t troll your forums.

hehe…I actually read the mesmer forums too, as I play mesmer, and they get some thief trolls, including one that was arguing about focus-pulls being overpowered.

Bottom line is those trolls have more in common with each other than with the majority of players on the classes they play. They would rather see all of the variety taken out of the game, than have to adapt to different challenges posed by different class mechanics. And that’s great, there are excellent and perfectly balanced games out there for them. Try Quake.

eldain stenlund.4306:

nahj.2870:

A thief that traits/gears for pure defense will have higher armor than a warrior that traits/gears for pure offense.

A thief that traits/gears for pure offense will have lower armor than a warrior that traits/gears for pure offense.

Meanwhile, a warrior that traits/gears for pure defense will have higher armor than a thief that traits/gears for pure defense, due to the innate bonus from heavy armor.

It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. You’re attempting to apply RP/classic trinity rules to a system that prioritizes player choice over predetermined class roles, or at least tries to. A player that chooses to gear themselves defensively should have higher defensive stats than a player that chooses to gear offensively, regardless of armor class.

wich in turn makes armor classes useless to have overall.

just give us all.. “armor”.

They hate trinity.. dps – healing – tank speciality.
And yet they have classes to fullfill those criterias…

And since they dont want trinity, but still balance for it…
The game gets imbalanced. (pretty logical).

And the result is people gets kitten ed of.

A-net should realy make up their mind.

Heavy armor vs light armor or even medium.
heavy armor should always win in naturaly higher defense..
no matter how you gear the other two.
This is pure logic… trinity or not.

That is pure logic but you are ignoring very important things specific to the real world as well as this setting.

1) Heavy armor protects more than medium armor. This is true. But heavy armor was not always desirable in warfare. Heavy armor is heavy, and without cavalry, it would wear out armies and force them to march slower. Medium armor allowed for much more mobility, and didn’t fatigue the wearer as much. Neither of these are really modeled in the game, so making drastic differences between the two in terms of protection don’t matter as much.

2) This game assumes that magic is real. This really matters, because weapons and armors are imbued with magical inscriptions and runes and sigils that either add to the weapon’s ability to pierce armor, or armor’s ability to absorb damage as well as other things. Because of this, it is possible to imbue cloth armor with powerful magic that makes it more protective than steel. Yet steel being sturdier, can still be imbued with similar magic, and wind up more protective still.

It is pure logic…this game is set in a magical world, therefore magic rules apply, and armor/weapon material is not the sum total of the damage that a single warrior can absorb or receive.

Also, in the real physical world, in a fight with a heavily armored knight, a knife could one hit kill the knight, especially if that knight was not paying attention. There are many important and vulnerable parts of the body that only really need one good cut to completely kill a person. If someone armed with a stilleto managed to sneak up on a knight in armor, they could probably easily get through one of the many weak points in the armor and kill the knight in one hit. Armor helped prevent that in the chaos of battle, but in real battle, a hit either kills you, or wounds you, or it doesn’t. It doesn’t “do damage” and let you keep fighting as if nothing has happened until you take enough damage to die. That’s video game logic…so please stop trying to apply flawed and inaccurate logic based in the real world to a video game set in a magical world.

sorry just want to clarify, that was meant as a silly joke. please don’t take it seriously. <thief player here.

I think we all know that in a d/p vs d/p fight, the thief would win, or get away without dying, because thieves are overpowered and should be nerfed.

Lokki.1092:

Actually they can. Here is a great video showing what damage a thief can do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJTJOB0DXTo

The 3 attacks (usually with a proc) can land within 1 second. This is generally too fast for a person to react to giving the feeling of a 1 shot, or dead before I can fight back.

1/3 of the classes in the game have a base 10k health, and getting over 18k health is not only tough for them but harmful to any other stats. But would that matter?

This thief is dealing 26k damage in less time than is reasonable to think someone can react to. this is on top of the fact that generally when you encounter a thief you are already engaged or otherwise in a position not in your favor, while completely in their favor.

So it can be done.

often? Not at all. But they don’t see that they see I got one shot by that thief again! RAGE!

That scenario never actually happens, because that build is UNPLAYABLE. It is full glass on the glassiest class with no defensive utilities, and minimal access to stealth. There really is no reason to consider a build like that a threat except to afkers, who can be killed by anything. That build cannot go head to head with anything else because they will see it coming, and can probably kill it with ranged before it even gets to them. You could also make a similar build / video for most other classes, including warriors. That would have nearly the same access to stealth (or lack thereof), and be slightly more survivable.

The obnoxious thing is people will complain about permastealth, then post something like this. as an example of the OP-ness of thieves…but the two are not possible on the same build so this video means nothing.

eldain stenlund.4306:

Evilek.5690:

The difference is that they had a stealth for 3-4 sec with trait and in wow infinity.

I whouldnt mind thieves having infinite stealth.
If they nerf their insane burst, and give classes ways to reveal it, and reduced their movement speed in stealth.

But if thieves have infinite stealth.. they should only have 1 skill to vanish, with CD…

Right now. stealth is supreeme king in pvp.. wvw. untouchable.

supreme king in pvp? There are virtually no stealth based thieves in high level pvp because you can’t cap/contest a point while stealthed. There are a few people in tpvp playing thieves using a very difficult to master, evasion based build. For the most part, in tPvP thieves are almost as useless as warriors. maybe you encountered some stealthy thieves in hotjoin, but it really is not as useful a build as almost any other in that setting.

not to mention, the time zone issues would make those matchups not very fun either.

the thing about thieves in general is it’s hard to build an effective tank. Damage without traiting and gear is just not impressive at all. The only way to really do this is a condition build, and most people agree that they’re gimmicky and not as good on thief as on other classes.

So building for survivability with gear doesn’t really work, but the thief’s strength is stealth. the first second or two of stealth, the thief is still vulnerable, but if they keep moving and dont get ccd they’re safe. Thieves also have good burst damage. The combination sets up the berserker thief playstyle. The goal is to use stealth for survivability and to aim for spending as little time out of stealth as possible. To do this, and still win fights, you need to down people quickly, which requires a high damage build. So you try to down people, stealth, wait down someone again…etc. And thats why berserker thieves are actually quite survivable.

The downside of course is that tanky thieves aren’t really an option, as everything seems to be balanced with berserker thieves in mind.

I was just running around with my tanky thief (high shadow arts, toughness + healing gear), trying to decide which heal to take, when this warrior pops out of nowhere and in like 2 hits has me down to 200 health. Nerf warriors! Seriously though, warriors can hit for just as hard as thieves, and do it on a consistent basis (i.e. it’s not “burst” when coming from a warrior…it’s just an attack). The thief has a burst combo on a long recharge, paper armor, stealth and nothing else. The guy got you while you were stomping, so I imagine a slow reaction from youm you also have a berserker build, and I’m sure you could have taken the thief with something more tanky. Hammer warriors give me a hard time as thief.

The problem as I see it is people think that they should be able to min-max their stats and still win all battles. Thieves are a natural counter to glass cannons, but glass cannons can also easily kill thieves. So if you want to play a glass build in wvw, just know that you are living on the edge. If you like that, great! But have some class, and don’t immediately qq just because WvW doesnt play like CoF.

one other thing…you may want to look into specific guilds on the servers you’re into, as they will really make a difference in your fun. Make sure theres at least one decent sized guild that suits your style – if you roleplay, or if you are a very serious competitor, or casual joker…you want a guild that works with that, and that will shape your wvw experience.

this new ranking system makes this tough to answer. each server will find itself in uneven matchups for a while, so there are going to be unfun elements. I would personally recommend against the top 3 servers (SoR, blackgate and jade quarry), since you’ll face queues and will mostly be in massive zerg fights (or if paired poorly- you’ll be looking for opponents to fight).

the next 3 are a good balance IMO as are the three below. When you go to the lowest ranked servers, you’ll be one of relatively few people in a big borderland…which can be boring IMO (may as well just play pvp if you only want small population matchups).

The only complaint I see over and over is that stealth makes thieves be:
1) unkillable – since a decent thief can usually get away – if they know it is a bad situation.
2) able to reset a fight easily.

First off, you can say both of those about rangers, eles or mesmers, who have very good mobility (especially when running away from a bad situation) as well as great protection and heal options. You can also say 2 about guardians.

I think people get annoyed by thieves because there is a low skill floor, and a mediocre thief can still be kind of annoying. They don’t realize that even if it does take a lot of skill to do what a thief is doing, the opponent doesn’t always see it. Because new players don’t see what the thief is doing, they feel like they either win or lose a battle, with no control over the outcome. They don’t see the narrowly timed dodge while in stealth that saved the thief from an attack that would have killed it. They also don’t see the unused (because of it’s long cooldown) shadowstep that has been sitting on that bar, just waiting for an immobilize. They don’t see the careful thought that went into picking out an injured target to use the burst on. They don’t see the long cooldown on that burst, which forces the thief to retreat if it doesn’t work out well, because staying in the battle is suicide. They really don’t understand how glassy thieves are (even when built tanky) and how important it is to build glassy for survivability because shorter battles are safer battles for thieves.

For thieves in wvw (the only setting where they are at all strong) shadow arts really is the only way to be consistently survivable. Evasion/acrobatics are great in small groups and 1v1s, but in big battles, these builds are not consistently survivable. Also making a build like Jumper’s s/d acrobat build – which apparently is doing great in pvp, makes you still vulnerable to a large group and aoe and you lose a lot of mobility and access to stealth, so solo/small group roaming becomes much riskier, since a larger group can take you out, and zerg vs zerg is just out of the question.

The point about zerker gear is really important for people to get…a thief has decent dps if they build glassy, even when not bursting. But in order to be doing damage they have to be taking damage. If a thief does not build glassy, their dps really suffers, but they still go down relatively easily. So having a glassy burst build is actually more survivable than a tanky build. To put some ballpark and very unprecise numbers on it, the glassy burst build might have to hit the opponent 6 times for them to go down, and then has to worry about dodging/avoiding maybe kittens from the opponent. They might be able to survive 2. A tanky build might be able to survive kittens, but it will need like 20 hits to get the opponent down, which means it has to still avoid damage from 10-15 hits – this is not to mention allies, which will pile on the thief the longer the fight goes.

been playing with venom share in wvw, and it’s different, but I like it. the venoms are great cc, and adding it to your group is useful. not sure if it’s as useful as bursting down an opponent though.

just throwing it out there, for those p/d enthousiasts…if you went power instead of crit (what?). You’d be getting lots of power+condi duration which would go nicely with p/d. You also get venomous strength. Which lets you add in venoms so you can stack poison/weakness/whatever on top of your bleeds. Say you have 2-3 venoms, thats 4-6 stacks of might that you can get up-front, on top of your 2 from weapon swap and what you get from stealthing/dodging. If you lead with dodge + cnd, then swap weapons and hit 1, you’d have 12+ stacks just in time for that stealth attack with all those nice bleeds/extra conditions.

This does mean that the might on crit sigils don’t matter as much, maybe replace them with something like sigil of ice.

General Secretary.3476:

What Venom related trait / effects are shared by Venomous Aura (SA XII)?

Conidtion Damage
&
Conidtion Duration
of the Thief character are not shared, correct?

How about traits like:
Potent Poison (Increases poison duration by 33%)
Lotus Poison (Weaken targets for 3 seconds whenever you poison them)
Venomous Strength (When applied, venoms grant 2 stacks of might for 20 seconds)
Residual Venom (Applied venoms last one extra strike)
Leeching Venoms (Steal health when triggering a venom. This can only occur once per strike)

Are these effects applied to allies?

And when a thief share Spider Venom with another player (e.g. an Ele) who land an AoE which hit 5 targets, that Ele used up all 5 Spider Venom strikes, correct?
If Leeching Venoms works on the Ele too, will he get the 5 heals in 1 AoE?

Edit for extra question:
If a thief share venom with another player dealing the same condition, say to share Ice Drake Venom to an Ele who use Freezing Gust, will the Chill stack?

Basilisk Venom and other stun don’t stack, correct?

Thanks.

I’ve been running a venom share build, but I’m not sure about some of them either. I’d check the wiki for more info.

Venomous Strength (When applied, venoms grant 2 stacks of might for 20 seconds)
Residual Venom (Applied venoms last one extra strike)

I know those get shared. The others, not sure about…my guess is not.

regarding aoe – you can test this yourself – shortbow will use up all your venom in one or two shots due to the aoe. Each victim is one venom charge, until you’re out.

chill stacks duration, as does immobilize. The stone, I don’t know if it stacks, but either way it is great. having multiple people using it will give a really nice opener to a small group fight.

The video doesn’t really prove anything…nobody is actually doing anything. Only one toon is actually aoe-ing, the rest are just standing around and it’s a 4 v 2, which could go worse vs skilled players in any other 2 classes…so it doesn’t really prove that thieves are opd. For example, vs a good mesmer and ele, you guys might just have died instead of running around aimlessly.

I just started playing a thief venom-share build in wvw. My goal is to be group-friendly, and ok at 1v1s. I’ve noticed a few things –
1) I can’t get away nearly as well as my standard stealth build, since all my utilities are venoms, so I have to be choosier with my fights.
2) I am very good at killing permastealth thieves (especially when in a group).

The trick is all the cc, spamming all my venoms means my (and nearby allies) attacks temporarily cause chill/immobilize/poison/weakness/stone. I just have to hit a thief once, then when they cloakittenep spamming aoe on their location, since I know they probably haven’t moved. Then I wait for the body to appear. I’m still new to the build, so I’m sure there are better ways to run it too…And I’m not the only one either.

Necros, and other classes with lots of cc have similar tricks that really do work well, usually forcing thieves to retreat or die. In the case of your video, if they were trying to stay in the keep, the retreat would eventually mean leaving, which is a victory, whether or not they die…the mission gets accomplished.

I think wvw population needs clarification too. For me, the best metric would be total/average wvw player-hours in the prior week.

Xillllix.3485:

capmasterflash.5690:

False. An ele with decent toughness and skills can hold their own against a thief 1v1.

… Sure some bunker D/D ele can survive a thief, but about 5% of experienced eles can bring one down – and only sometimes. Meanwhile a relatively unexperienced thief can bring down any fully ascended-gear non-bunker ele in 2 seconds.

That same inexperienced thief can easily be brought down by one or two ele aoe skills.
I think your point may have something to do with relative skill floors and caps for both eles and thieves? I haven’t played as ele, but I’ve heard that it has a pretty high skill floor, meanwhile, you’re right that thief has a relatively low skill floor. So there is probably a noobish-mid skill level where thieves outperform eles. Then they both have high skill-caps. And at that high level (that I’m certainly not on-so I could be wrong) I believe eles are superior – hence their relative population in pvp (also stealth doesn’t help a thief as much when trying to cap a point). Personally, as a moderately skilled thief, I’m pretty good at surviving in general, by running away and choosing my battles but in a comitted duel, I tend to lose to eles.

Immolator.5640:

- To add insult to injury, the walls can not be destroyed by 1-spam, which as we all know goes against everything WvW stands for.

I love this…1-spam is everything wvw stands for?