Guild Wars 2

Maybe the pve jelly don’t use normal Might.
Since I steal stacks from people just fine.

The game should design itself to have more team fights and occasional splits then mostly splits and some team fights. There is too much 1v1 which emphasizes those who don’t excel in it and makes professions that are valuable to a team fight stick out less.

As it is now I think 1v1 balance should be important only because 1v1’s happen so often.

Part of the reason you have the diversity problems is because outside of the Rangers, generally speaking all the stunbreaker based traits are meh because
you remain stunned and/or theICD’s are just too long to warrant
Pair with this the lack of ability to see our ICD’s (which I believe will be worked on)
the lack of control over them (trigger on, anything).
Say ele Tempest defense is pretty nice, it doesn’t break stun, but the defensive mechanism will be pretty good against melee. However the ICD is really long so you can’t rely on it so going that far into air for that trait just doesn’t work if you’re trying to go outside of cantrips.

Similarly Thief’s Hard to catch.

Engineer’s automatic smoke bomb.

There is obviously more but I’m not very keen on general names of things I don’t play and I think I got engi’s name wrong :o

While I’m sure they’ll eventually touch on things.
I am saying if you made the anti-stun traits better, you’d open up more variety because people would feel less locked in to taking certain skills solely to have a stunbreaker. You see this with rangers. So much reliance on utilities specifically to combat stun curtails the ability to deviate your utils to do something else and similarly makes those trait lines that provide the effect less desirable because the anti-stun ends up looking like simply a filler trait not worth taking.

P/P’s issue isn’t traits.
It’s that it doesn’t play anything like the thief design outside of “single-target burst” of unload, which hits essentially the same as Illusionary unload with the little que that you can use it 3-4 times in a row disregarding opportunity cost.
Whatever tho, just keep buffing unload until 3-1 play works perfectly.
inb4imaliar.

Einlanzer.1627:

PearlGore.7419:

P/P just needs a leap finisher and Number 2 to not be useless.

No, it needs an autoattack that manages sufficient DPS so you aren’t forced into Initiative starvation desperately spamming Unload to manage mediocre damage.

Go ahead and preach this. P/P will still be a dumb as rock sitting duck set regardless.
At best you’ll push it to remain 3-1 play with occasional 4 use. Which is essentially exactly how it plays now.

Experts at stealth and surprise, thieves can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air, or steal items from their opponents and use them as weapons. Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which can make them very hard to hit.

Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage. They can be very fragile if you counter their stealth with area of effects or large stacks of conditions, but they trade this fragility in order to have some of the highest burst damage in the game. They are able to help allies through traps, venoms and the mobility to flank most encounters.

All the bolded is how they describe the thief.
All the bolded is what P/P lacks.
P/P is a thief set in name alone.
P/P will always bea joke as a result.
Drop the auto to 2k dmg a shot, hell speed it up 30% You’ll still be a sitting duck playing a bootleg Longbow Ranger with a thief.

P/P has a fundamental issue in it’s very design that is contradictory to their own vision of the thief in the first place. Improving the auto will not solve this, as beneficial as that may be.

Ah whatever, what am I doing caring about a weapon set that is thief in name alone.

inb4everythingimsayingisliesandcompletelyfalse.
inb4P/Phasmobility
inb4P/Pisagile
inb4P/Ptotallyplayslikeathief

MaXi.3642:

nothing against thiefs, but this is how ALL projectiles work, its good it now affects thiefs too :P

Im sorry wot?
Yes Ele’s Staff air 1 doesn’t home oh wait yes it does.
Mesmer staff 1….homes.
Shortbow 1, velocity is so fast it doesn’t matter literally to the point that it can track in stealth and hit people even if they quickly displace location, the displacement hit is also true for all gun auto attacks.
Longbow 1’s velocity is also fast enough that strafing doesn’t work until a certain distance is reached. That’s true for thiefs as well, but atm it is unless someone can find otherwise, the most strafeable ranged weapon.

Oddly enough it barely differs from the Rangers Ricochet, but that is left seemingly fine as well and does not have the same hit issues. Again making your “all” statemen false.

Now let me describe to you how the other shortbow in the game works, since you only play the easy mode classes. Ranger shortbow at the same power as thief hits for roughly 40% of the thief shortbow dmg. Add in that it hits ONE TARGET, and is prone to being strafed (as much as you would love to call it homing it most certainly is not). Given these factors, i would say that the thief shortbow effective range right now is about 500 (based on my personal experience with it thus far) which is about 55% max range of the thief shortbow and 42% max range of ranger shortbow. The damage discrepancy, the bouncing effect of the thief sb and rate of fire differences basically even out as the ranger shortbow shoots about 1.5 times as fast as the thief (i think 2x might be pushing it, but close). In my opinion it doesnt get much more balanced than this when looking JUST at the autoattacks.

Ranger’s shortbow deals less damage, because they can have a bird,cat or dog simultaneously smashing you in the face. Meanwhile they’re stacking bleeds and because of the hybrid nature of their weapon see more effect from Might for the benefit of their weapons damage. Que in faster activation and velocity and it’s not even a constant.

However forget the ranger shortbow.
Look at their Axe.

Since when is headshot bad?
Sure you didn’t mean body shot? srs.

It’s pretty close. Once dancing daggers gets reworked/buffed.

Ele, engi, Ranger
Guard
Mes
Thief
Necro
War

What real stunlocking is there outside of the warrior, there really isn’t.

^ I don’t mind. If I can get evade frames, am happy camper.

They should increase the range of spirits passive effects
Range is too small so you want to generally have them traited for movement instead of having them as powerful totems. This doubles in making them basically get in harms way because you need them to be so close relatively to get under their effects. Instead of being able to say “If you want to counter this effect, go Find my spirit.”

Pretty lame but what can you do, want a ranged option and there is 3 options. P/P is a thief set in name alone. P/D got too much power put in 5-1 play, not enough anywhere else. SB still the most diverse and usable of em all.
Unless you want to slot double melee.

Phenn.5167:

What I find so funny is that the Devs stated (in the April SotG) that they thought the BASE DAMAGE of thief attacks was too low, necessitating heavy investment into certain traitlines in order to get competitive damage.

…errrr, the base damage is low because the Devs themselves nerfed it into the the ground. I truly don’t understand the logic here.

They nerfed the base damage in response to combinations thieves were doing and basically went around nerfing the external combinations by hitting the weapons.
They nerfed Pistol Whip in response to hasted pistol whip gibs at release, then they later nerfed quickness obviously this leaves Pistol whip in a nerfed state.
They nerfed Cluster bomb because the aoe was strong, granted it was considering Shortbow doesn’t really “rely” on anything to be efficient.

CnD and the like were nerfed partially because of Cnd-Mug. Mind you had they nerfed Mug to begin with, those nerfs may not needed to of happened or could have been less drastic.

Essentially they didn’t want (it appears) to nerf our utility skills/traits or we’re very cautious about doing it so so they hit our base damage instead.
Now what always should’ve been nerfed has been nerfed, and we’re left with damage issues. Where Dancing Daggers is a pretty bad skill, Cnd isn’t as monstrous and the vuln stacks aren’t enough of a steroid.

“New” Rangers have been trolling game since January or maybe it was December can not recall which.
With ele toned down and Ranger slightly improved. People are likely just flipping out of immediate response to patch notes.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

ensoriki.5789:

Wtf is vincent talk about.
Put the evade second?
You’re nuking your own defenses.
Lol wot.

Did you even read my whole post?

Oh, why I even bother responding to you…

Second attack – (dagger) FS – Cost 1 init – evade and stab – from side/behind

Post was read. Criticism was made.
Do you even read?

evilapprentice.6379:

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Drawing Guy.3701:

The signet use should still have a sacrifice, but I agree that the active of the Assassin’s signet needs work. I personally find the 3 attack boonsteal to be a pretty genius idea.

Um no. That would mean an S/D build will be able to 100% boon denial.

Are you guys even thinking this through?

You can already go 20 points in trickery for Bountiful theft and get almost the same functionality – it’s about choices. If you wanna roll 20 trickery, assassins sig (my boon stealing version), and S/D, you’ll be a boon stealing monster, but you’re dedicating a utility slot, 20 points in trickery, and your weapon set to just being a boon thief.

The idea was to give players who don’t want to roll S/D or 20 points in trickery a way to steal boons – Anet has mentioned (and with this patch proven) that they want warrior and thieves to go in a different direction – losing a bit of their “general damage” in favor of abilities that specifically target bunkers – boon stealing and boon hate.

Still just an off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion though, would perhaps need tweaking.

They’ve basically done it. The only thing missing is boon removal on utilities. To provide the option there otherwise it’s fine.
You have a weapon set for it, a trait for it, just missing utilities which they could probably do with traps for instance.

If you go S/D you trade general damage for your boon prot. If you go trickery you do the same, even more so since S/ and D/ (except blossom spam) get basically no effect from trickeries condition damage.

Don’t know what you talking about Big with sins signet being too good. New signet of agility is straight up delicious. Just what the doctor ordered.I’ll have to test it but leeching venom buff makes venoms a bit stronger for thief and allies so that’s a good benefit too.

Haste should def get a change to lose all endurance. They got to start bringing the stun breaks in line with each other so they are credible as stand alone then compliments to Shadow step.

Hopefully dancing daggers and P/D get some good buffs. Maybe they’ll divide shadow strike like flanking strike.

As well as cap buffs and use the trebuchet.

They increased the multiple and am lazy just want a number I can check.

It’s dumb as all hell.
Brb Jaguar is the only one who can use their pet ability in tandem with Sick-Em.
Sure we’re all Scared of Birds massacring us but srs..

Pope.1469:

Kultas Sunstrider.9218:

the fact is that this kittening mechanic should not even exist in an MMORPG. For god’s sake, this is not an FPS game, I can’t decide where to shoot, I just target a player and use my skill

I’d be fine if ANet made all ranged autos homing, so they could only be obstructed by terrain, blinded, or evaded. Not this poorly understood middle ground where if your target changes direction suddenly, your attack misses and says “out of range,” or “obstructed.”

What middle ground.
At certain ranges they are basically guaranteed hits, as the range deepens it becomes possible to strafe.

Trick shot travels so slow that the range between basically guaranteed and strafeable is short hell. It’s basically a 600 range weapon atm that occasionally hits at 900 range.
Which I wouldn’t mind if other professions followed suit.

Travlane.5948:

with p/d you use skills 1 and 5 ….rarely 3. i mean you CAN use all ur skills but 90% of the time ur using the same ones to maximize initiative via benefit. you can poison on sb with skill 4. but the bleeds+dmg is like 5x more dmg with cluster bomb skill 2 for same amount of initiative. :P all depends on situation but maximizing effect per initiative …..gotta use same skills……d/p and s/d use them all decently varied.

Yup. In any /D set when the stealth attack is strong you end up just doing 5-1, heartseeker being exempt since it’s cost effective. S/D was the same until they nerfed Tactical. P/D gonna stay 5-1 majority of the time until the other skills get better and/or sneak attack gets toned down. Legit.

Iove.3902:

But seriously, it’s my favorite set. I loved using the evades to make a warrior feel sad.

Now we can’t chain the evades Q_Q.

Game is out for 8 months.
Only now using 5 skills on bar.
Dagger 4 still sucks.

What they did is really cool and creates some awesome scenarios but
FS not being cancelable hurts survivalbility
The 2nd hit being unblockable kind of damages counterplay against it and it does hit hard.

viability-notstanding

If they let the chain cancel with another press and improve Dancing daggers it’ll be in a better place but enjoying myself.

Got tossed in a 8v8 wot.
Please add this functionality for may/june patch.

But then you lose the FS spikes we were doing before.

Wtf is vincent talk about.
Put the evade second?
You’re nuking your own defenses.
Lol wot.

Please no^.

People are going to try S/D partially because most people have been using D/ for awhile and they’ll want to try a little difference.
Some will stop if they aren’t getting the results they want, others if their team doesn’t feel they’re putting up enough.

Didn’t say anything about loosing choice.
Said “ability to cancel”.

the duration is fine. You aren’t used to it.
You get quite a few plays you can do simply because you have that buffer time with Infiltration.

Cool change didn’t think it be two boons good stuff..
But can you make this thing cancel if you double tap so I can use Flanking again?
The new flexibility is great but because of the mechanics of chain skills certain situations are actually harder to survive now… wot?
It doesn’t feel exactly like I’ve netgained survivalbility but instead that I’ve gained conditional survivalbility and otherwise had it decreased.

Tried the double tap, tried storing weapon during both animations. No dice.
Feels bad man. I can’t stay on a point as long.

Fade.7658:

S/D is going to be seen quite a bit. Larcenous strike does the same damage as Cloak and Dagger. Open with Flanking Strike, do the cloak and dagger, Mug and then F1 ability, then follow up with Larcenous Strike. Not quite as bursty as backstab, but will hurt more than the old FS.

Pretty negligible.
Since the damage is the exact same, you could have prior used FS and Mugged during the 2nd hit. Then hit 5 if you want. At which point if they’re alive you daze, and can inf strike and auto/fs. The only difference is kind of when you can CnD and in certain situations (protection) you’ll deal less now because you can’t strip it first before your 2nd hit :o.

Fair trade off for the improved usability however, though I miss my evade spam Q_Q.

New?

Hotfix Potent poison as well

What invulnerability do warriors have? I thought they had negation.

I’ve been manually aiming when I see them do that. Srs.
Only because I know they won’t do it properly.

Im so used to old Flanking strike I forget to press Larcenous.
It’s a cool change but my muscle memory is completely out of sync with how it plays now Q_Q. Im still trying to evade cancel Q_Q.
I hope they bring back the cancel in a subsequent patch. I miss my evades.

245 days.
This is how long Potent Poison has sucked.

The only change I ask is that they let me cancel larcenous immediately. Miss my dodge frames something fierce.

Overall cost is the same but now allows for repositioning before the 2nd attack hits. I’ll take that.

You could move during the 2nd hit of Flanking strike to position yourself the entire time. Not that it matters since its in the past now.

Good job.

People already just mimic.

Does this mean I can be on red team, toggle myself as a spectator, quickly see what blue is doing and then join the game again?
Or if I have died while waiting to respawn, go to spectate then come back after getting field awareness?

30/30 0 0 10 is the fun way to play.

What is the delay between spectating and in-game, is there any?

Mrbig.8019:

Vence.6974:

Lol plz a good S/D thief will beat a good D/any thief any day simply because when you combine sword with some acrobatics, you literally become the fastest profession in the game. You’re the most agile with infiltrator’s, FS, withdraw, shadowstep/roll for initiative. You can get to anywhere really fast assuming you have a shortbow, and even without it, you still have high endurance regen, swiftness on dodge, and infinite teles. Not to mention, you do extremely high steady dmg with your auto attack and can strip (soon steal) boons at will. The really kool part bout this spec is its ability to sync well with any utilities you prefer (deceptions, stealth, signets, and even traps) yea thats rite, traps too because infiltrator’s teles you too an enemy and while they’re immobilized, just set the trap and watch it activate instantly.

Hello, i welcome to you Black Powder.

It’s a pusling blind field, pulsing blind every sec, basically S/D rate of attack.

A simple blind field totally neglects 90% of an S/D thief damage, due to how slow sword attacks are. Better if i do not mention Flanking strike.

If a D/P thief loses to an S/D thief, he’s simply bad.

Nah, horrible.

Nah, he should change proff or uninstall.

A lot of people need to uninstall then.

50% more damage….
50% more damage.
50% more damage
50%.
50%.
50%.
Think my head just exploded.

Im curious how much longer Mantra of Pain has before they nerf it. Post April 30th it’s certaintly stronger than Mug in terms of burst and situationally was already. It’s just as instant and due to RC’s and cast times it’s still on a shorter recharge.
Not that Mesmers take it but with that stronger push towards putting Mantra’s on the map if it gets in the limelight I give it 3 months.

Well if anyone remembers the post, when they nerf MoP remember Ensoriki saw it coming.

Also what in this game removes 1 stack of anything?
Is there seriously any condi removal that removes 1 stack or any boon removal that removes 1 stack? I don’t think there are any skills that work like this lol. Bountiful and Flanking already remove full stacks, Arcane thievery removes full stacks.
Spinal shivers removes full stacks. Sigil of nullification removes a full stack.