The only way blind stomping fails is when they auto attack instead of interrupting.
Necro fear gives you 2 seconds to get your blind off, vs the fraction of a second for ranger, and the 1 second for engineer.
So I agree necro needs a boost; either a faster fear or fear that ignores (corrupts) stability.
I understand these skills a basically meant to never be used. At the very least they should be much more exciting; a nice surprise in case a player decides to get creative.
Example:
What would a thief wielding only a sword do? He would probably evade or parry before unleashing a devastating riposte. I should feel like I can duel melee mobs with this (the slower attacking ones anyway). Instead we get a “stab” that does less damage than simply auto attacking.
Repeater is strictly a worse Unload. Shouldn’t it be a single, carefully aimed shot?
The same with twisting fang; it is a strictly worse death blossom.
Hate being the “flavor police” but this seems like a huge failing where there could have been tons of potential.
I also love this skill and wish something would be done with it. I like your idea but I would change one part of it.
I think would be cool is if the first strike came out quickly (and position didn’t matter), and instead of giving you pathing, it just gives you free movement with evasion status to position yourself for the second strike. Then if you manage to get behind your target you get a better effect; or you can use the evasion to create some space (assuming you land the first hit).
Well I mean… it IS the thieves’ profession mechanic. Have you looked at their other steals? 4s daze? 10 second water combo field (hello blast finisher spam)? No other prof even comes close to a 13 second chill. The whirlwind can easily hit for 8k+ (thankfully it is nerfed somewhat).
Ok I’m still not sure what to do with the goo puddle or the boons from mesmer.
Great info guys. I actually gave 0 / 30 / 20 / 0 / 20 sword/dagger knights/zerker a try. Being able to steal => daze. blinding powder => daze, hide in shadows => daze, and CnD => daze ensured that nobody could ever save themselves in a team fight. The detection on tactical strike is EXTREMELY forgiving and shadow return (sword 2) has unlimited range, which is quite the trick. The autoattack damage with this setup is also very high (guardian high), so while I missed bursting, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought.
I did find myself always using immobilize before CnD, which made it easy but felt a little noobish.
Haha loving this; no trebuchet is safe any longer.
In my experience “tank” quickly becomes synonymous with “kiter”. Pack some swiftness if you go this route.
Shield is not very useful in dungeon compared to focus, because shield of wrath can fully block many boss combos (saving yourself, or allowing you to revive allies safely).
A good source of healing is a must. Monk’s focus or altruistic healing work if you don’t have any +healing in gear; selfless daring and regeneration work extremely well if you do have +healing.
There are many ways to get altruistic healing to proc if you use it — might on crits, weapon sigils that grant boons, virtues (with 5 points in virtues), hallowed ground (often overlooked), shouts, symbols…. even traits that grant a boon only to yourself work (though 80pts of heal doesn’t mean much)
Pack at least a stun break, judge’s intervention also gives you a teleport to get out of some sticky situations.
CARRY A SCEPTER. Many bosses virtually require you to use a ranged weapon; or have patterns that make them just flat out better DPS.
Strongly consider protective reviver over 2 handed mastery. Your damage is coming from autoattack for the most part anyhow; a few extra seconds won’t make a ton of difference. 10 seconds of protection and regen will, however, make quite a bit of difference.
I read your thread and addressed all of your assertions. You seem to have ignored every point I made because I didn’t spell them out simple enough for a 3rd grader to understand.
I even went as far as to explain why backstab doesn’t feel “backstaby”.
You can kill mobs faster than any other class, CnD> Steal > BS > blossom > leave. If the promise of one of the few abilities in the game to GUARANTEE crits is not enough to keep you playing; there’s no help for you.
I’ve ran up against a couple interesting thief builds in the past week or two. Mostly they are just annoying, and do too little damage to matter. With such a small sample, however, I thought perhaps I had just faced against some bad players, and wanted to find out of these builds are viable.
The first runs shortbow and does very little besides spamming dodges and shortbow #3 (since the patch). It is near impossible to time your abilities to land the first time you run up against one of these, so they usually take very little damage unless they get CC’d.
The second spams shadowsteps from the utility and sword #2 to move large distances, as well as (somehow) getting a decent amount of stealth and using the daze on tactical strike to slowly build up damage on target. This seemed to fair a bit better against me by escaping most things I tried to do and ditching my teammates by teleporting around so much; but still felt like it was just wasting my time.
Play any class with an instant “Block the next X attacks” ability (ie. guardian/elementalist), possibly invulnerability skills too.
Play any class with some good hard CC, thief has no stability, or good way out of immobilize.
Did I mention thief has no stability? (ring of warding makes a joke out of bad thieves)
Thieves don’t have good DPS.
Stopped reading here.
+20% damage to foes under 50% health.
Calling thieves’ highest damage ability (well, after caltrops) “pointless” means you need to wake up and take a good look at the tools at your disposal.
The game is (for the most part) balanced around extremes. Backstab is not going to be very satisfying til you start stacking +crit damage on all of your gear; which means high level exotics. Even then, it is still single target burst damage (ie. bad for pve).
Personally, after playing elementalist in pvp, it feels much more restrictive. Once you know your combos that do the most damage, you just use them over and over, putting everything on cooldown (some combo’s put 6+ of your damage ability’s on CD).
Just use the caltrops utility
Possibly also d/d 3 or sb 2
(edited by ens.9854)
Can people try to see the bigger picture and stop whining please. One buff and one nerf.
in Guardian
Posted by: ens.9854
This was a completely shortsighted nerf. 5 seconds on protection and retaliation makes sense, but 5 seconds of might? 5 seconds of swiftness?
Now half of the boons you get are simply not relevant at all; the regen probably wont even offset all the dots you are going to pick up. If I want protection/retaliation on a 60s cooldown I’ll just use virtue of courage.
What exactly DOES happen when a bunch of thieves stack up and spam blinding powder on each other?
Hmm for ele I do quite well just throwing up an arcane shield to stop their combo, followed by knockdown/immobilize and AoE.
You have to realize what kind of person the typical thief player is. Thread +1
Why do you seem to have a love affair with altruistic healing? It doesn’t appear to heal for very much (70hp?)
As guardian or ele I have very few problems against thief.
Guardian: Most fights end almost as soon as they start; I begin casting ring of warding and teleport to the thief, he is stuck without stability unless he is lucky and doesn’t walk into the surprise line and has a teleport ready. Spam whatever AE/spirit hammer skills and its over. Other fights I pop shield of wrath and absorb either half or all of his backstab combo, or use ring of warding + shield of wrath against DB thieves for the retal.
Ele: After playing ele, they seem like the most dangerous target for a thief… 2 Arcane shields, 2 knockdowns, mass aoe… do people really have trouble with their CDs available?
tl;dr Immobilize/knockdown are your friends
Don’t you still get the points for the winning team? AND it won’t balance if the score is near 500 or the time is almost up? Anet has gone further than they needed to already guys… it is just a random pub match after all…
Already listed in master thread full of profession breaking necromancer bugs
For some attacks I agree they could have made the evasion or distortion effects more visually obvious.
Yep things are getting flooded pretty much all day every day. Take away ezmode (ability to teleport mid CnD) and I suspect half the thieves will disappear.
I don’t really want the other team to be able to swap in a bleed thief to solo lord at a moments notice if they aren’t running one already.
Also, condition necros auto-win bunkers. Pity that necros die so fast to all the burst builds lol.
Except half of necros key abilities are bugged so badly that they are literally a self debuff on a cooldown.
Also good luck stacking any meaningful conditions on a guardian that removes 2 every 10 seconds, 1 every 20, and 3 twice per combat.
Or on an elementalist that loses 3 every 5 seconds from attunement swapping + w/e.
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This works much better with permeating wrath + supreme justice, check it out on the pack of test dummies in HoM, stacks like 10 seconds of burn using passive virtue only.
If you’re not an engineer, stay on dry land. It is hilariously clear that there is little in the way of balance; I don’t really find this to be a major problem, because as long as my gear was up to date, I fared well enough in underwater pve to make it through anyway
It appears that the probability a mob will aggro onto you is related to your armor (toughness?) value in some way. ie. higher armor = more aggro. This has let my dungeon group cheese many fights because i can often kite over half the mobs even while doing ZERO damage to them besides an occasional tagging shot.
It is unlikely that it is related to health pool or damage, thieves do not get mobbed in the same way, and the only non-guardians getting much aggro off me are also running toughness builds. Some mobs do, however, choose one target and stick with them til they are dead or downed.
In the past I have heard that people have heard that the devs made guardians specifically get more aggro than other professions, but I don’t have any confirmation.
Sidenote: I find this to be a rather elegant solution for the ‘tanking’ role. It lets players who build toughness make use of it, and takes away the need to micromanage a hate list just to be effective. Doesn’t make a lot of sense as far as AI goes though
Already listed in the necro bug thread alongside countless other profession breaking bugs
Nothing wrong with condition dmg on guardian. Just keep binding blade (5) on them, have eoung burns for upkeep in your build, and keep the mobs in your symbol (4). Added up that can tick for 1k easily. Given you are lvl80 ofc.
Burning will tick for over 400 without adding any condition damage; you lose FAR more than 600 damage per second by not spec’ing that into crits or power. I’m not saying burning is worthless; but most classes that CAN spec conditions are getting a much bigger payout. Plus there will always be cases that you have an engi or ele with you and your burning wont stack anyhow.
You will never feel like you are doing good damage in dungeons, everything has TONS of health.
Purging Flames and Bow of Truth should be dropped; they are mainly for condition removal, which is not a problem in dungeons.
Condition damage is not a viable stat for guardian in general—guardians will get the bulk of their damage from basic auto attacks, and you should plan accordingly.
If you find you are generating a lot of aggro in dungeons (has something to do with armor values), use blinds, blocks, and healing to mitigate damage. Greatsword has a great blind, and virtue of justice can be traited to blind. This is often not enough for some mobs, where you need to dodge or strafe out of everything they do, no matter what your build is.
In general, the glassier you go, the more you will have to rely on block/blind/evade/dodge to keep yourself alive. This does not always go well in dungeons because fights last a very long time, so it is not advised to go full offensive gear.
As a guardian player I often feel a little impotent when I run up against a engineer or elementalist that is clearly bunkering a fight better than I ever could. Can somebody do a comparison between the strengths of different bunker classes? I hope this will also help clear up a some of the vagueness inherent in the recently popular bunker hate-threads.
eg. Guardian spirit weapons can let them excel at bunkering 1 on 1, or vs ranged (30 second ranged immunity, anyone?), but lack any serious group CC.
Suggestion: Give Altruistic Healing max targets, increase heal amount
in Guardian
Posted by: ens.9854
You can spec virtues to apply boons to your teammates, and shouts do the same. When you have 25 teammates….
This is just coming very close to a bunker build. The problem you run into is that defensive boons are in general much stronger than offensive boons, and you sacrifice a lot of potential to grab those and make them meaningful (+boon duration gear, for instance). This can still be great on offense in pve/dungeons, however.
If I had to guess, +damage for each boon is probably around +1.5-2% for each TYPE of boon (not each stack, and possibly not counting stability); which would make it equivalent to other professions. This is good, but still amounts to a hassle because, really, the only reliable way to stack a lot of boons is “Save Yourselves!”; which has an ungodly cooldown.
10% damage under Aegis is mostly a cute trick to add to burst builds, because attacks apply to blind and shield of wrath first before taking off your aegis; so you can get off a good combo in the meantime.
I would switch out Pure of Heart for Two-Handed Mastery—the healing from the trait is pretty marginal and guess what? The first time your aegis is removed you are at full health!
For PvE I would consider putting 5 more points into radiance (or 10) to recharge virtue of justice on a kill. If you aren’t paying attention this synergy slips by easily; but for a group of foes you can easily spam this skill 5+ times in a few seconds, negating enormous amounts of damage for your team.
Suggestion: Give Altruistic Healing max targets, increase heal amount
in Guardian
Posted by: ens.9854
In practice it’s not situational at all; with a simple build I can regularly tank an entire wall or zergfull of players; and if one happens to be particularly intelligent and tries to ruin my empower, so what? It probably already healed me for 4000, and I have at least FIVE other instant 2000 pt heals to keep myself alive (plus a signet), before I go back to spamming staff/shield dodgeroll heals.
I mean I want support to be possible but… this is clearly not scaling properly.
I think you might enjoy this.
Armor is Power/Vit/Tough (Aurora karma for 4 pieces, invaders for 2) with melandru runes. Jewelry is Knights orichalcum. Sword/Focus are berserker’s for added burst (burst is shield of wrath => wait 3 seconds => begin zealot’s defense or whirling wrath => judge’s intervention)
You have high survivability thanks to stacking toughness and being able to teleport into a fight; one of the highest mobilities over land (some swiftness, leap, 2 teleports to target); and hit hard enough to matter thanks to crit damage and crit chance on traits. You will still need to carry a scepter for sieges, however.
They are on the same timer.
When SoR refreshes, you could lose a condition in 1 second or 9 seconds later.
Also I don’t think combat has anything to do with the timer; I have seen conditions removed almost immediately when somebody opens up on me.
(edited by ens.9854)
If you’re spamming HS it’s actually very hard for anyone to get distance on you. A chill or cripple isn’t enough on its own to be able to get distance against a HS spammer, you also need an immo or stun or a gap creator of your own.
Or, you know, they could literally just shadowstep ONCE and have FULL initiative to do whatever the hell they please with your bloody corpse. Not that i’m trying to turn this into a debate on whether teleports are OP (they are, but almost everyone has them).
@Shukran
I have no idea what your post is saying because half of it is completely unintelligible. If you did not read my post past the first line, I was in fact DEFENDING thieves, not calling them OP
EDIT: Also I agree with Wolfe; gap closing is not in fact a problem. It has counters, and costs initiative. If the thief has full initiative and CAN spam it; he either used a utility or came late to the fight anyway.
(edited by ens.9854)
Suggestion: Give Altruistic Healing max targets, increase heal amount
in Guardian
Posted by: ens.9854
This trait seems wildly unbalanced; from nearly useless in spvp to dramatically overpowered in WvW, compared to its partner meditation trait that provides a pretty consistent amount of healing. Currently it provides about 80 health per boon per teammate, and procs mainly off of each shout, each virtue, and FOUR times off of staff empower in addition to its natural heal.
Estimates:
3v3 sPvP fight:
Shouts & Virtues: +240 healing each
Staff Empower: +960 extra healing
25 player WvW zerg:
Shouts & Virtues: 2000 healing each (400 for those with target limit 5)
Staff Empower: +8000 extra healing
This is all in addition to the intrinsic healing of the skills (regen, virtue of resolve, static heals); plus whatever boon proc’s a person might be running. Boon proc’s normally aren’t an issue because of their limited range anyhow.
I don’t think it is intended to give guardian what essentially amounts to an extra 3 healing signets in WvW, while at the same time be outclassed by taking monk’s focus and smite condition in sPvP for a 2000pt heal on a 16-20s cooldown.
Giving this trait a target limit and healing value so that it is still superior to monk’s focus when in a group (5-10) or through specific high rate boon specs would bring it nicely into line.
…One shotting anyone, no matter which profession should NEVER be an acceptable form of game play…
Well technically this isn’t true, my guardian has taken full combos from glass cannon thieves (which is my own fault for not using stunbreak > knockback) and easily lived to kill them. I think the point you are trying to get at is that thieves alone make every other burst build obsolete; not every build ever.
Last I heard they were “working on it” low priority. What that means? Nobody knows… might have to wait til expansion time.
+20% damage to foes under half health.
Nobody has mentioned this yet?
If a thief with this trait gets you low, OF COURSE they are going to have an advantage. It doesn’t matter what skill they use, it will seem OP.
Chill and cripple both effectively stop heartseeker gap closing. And if a thief gets on you with full initiative when you are low health, you will die! ANY burst with 100% health and cooldowns will be able to finish you just the same.
If you have ZERO awareness, YES the backstab combo will land, and your reaction time will be too slow to stop it. Part of being a skilled player is finding out your opponents builds during the game, and getting your reaction ready ahead of time. Use stability; be prepared to use a stunbreak when you see the thief go d/d; dodge if you have 0 other options.
(edited by ens.9854)
I have been having success using knight amulet/zerker jewel and superior fire sigil with a marks/DS build in spvp; more success than with a condition build. Recharges life force fast so you can really grind players down over time.
Condition necros basically nerf themselves to all hell by going into DS; which is completely unintuitive. Either ruin your damage or ruin your survivability? DS needs some alteration. (instant fear is OP though).
Shadow refuge is one of thief’s key utilities in pvp. It has let me cloak and revive teammates countless times (and is responsible for much of my rage when a spamming noob breaks the stealth i give him and gets stomped). There have also been several occasions that it has allowed me to self-rally by popping it before I go down due to the healing and extreme stealth duration (bug?) it gives if you do not move out of it. Many players give up and leave, or you can try to get yourself to an awkward corner where they wont aoe you.
Yea it looks and feels lame to use, but those are its only problems. Many people think you can dodge its auto attack by side strafing — you can’t, if they are still in range they will be hit even if it is a mile away. Sure they can escape the projectiles by fleeing more easily, but that’s the price we pay for being the toughest melee profession.
The damage is fine and completely comparable to our melee weapons because of its high rate of attack and lack of delay between chains (less dmg obviously, because it is ranged). It is not fair to compare it to a 2 handed weapon with 5 skills; consider what people have said — if you want more damage take torch and throw fireballs that hit like missiles. Anybody who stays in range of a guard (that is not defense spec’d) and is taking hits from the orbs will quickly find themselves in trouble, and the multiple hits / low CD from scepter 2 will proc virtue and crit abilities very reliably.
Still… make it look less like a magical tennis racket
Thief has no stability + you has 5 teammates = ?
No really, some simple readiness on the part of you and your teammates can solve quite a bit. Downed state is already a terrific counter put in place to prevent burst from being OP. Even if nobody sees the thief coming in, somebody should still have time to AT LEAST interrupt his stomp. If you do see him (and you know he is running backstab) well, I say good luck to him, he will most likely have to bail and leave his teammates to fight after you interrupt him.
Holding back 1 weapon skill or utility as a counter is not unrealistic.
Permeating wrath doesn’t “burn the ground” it just applies the burn to everyone around you.
Also Focused Mind is the proper trait to take for many builds, if they don’t use shields primarily. Being instant is more than just having 0 cast time, it means you can use them literally any time; even while flying through the air and stunned and dazed or in the middle of attacking. You will notice it saving your skin more often than you imagine (well, if your meditations heal).
Elite focus is always worth considering. Tome of Wrath is one of the most powerful WvW elite skills of any class; and this not only gives it 50% longer duration, but allows you use skill 4 twice before it ends.
No time right now to continue. Also, how did you choose which traits to comment on? You neglect a lot of KEY guardian traits.