Guild Wars 2

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c2XBKKmDrQ

Build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAqaVl0MptpdPx0J0PNxLhw1PvXn+t2LCMA-TlDBwAdViI5EAgV5EgHAAOVbyqkIlegi7Pw4QAkwE0ElgbOCA6UTQvmgAAIAczbucbO0kCAmJAA-w

I notice there’s been a lot of interest in P/P, so I decided to tinker around with a P/P build.

The build I’ve come up with is terrible for solo roaming, decent at most 1v1’s, and viable in team play for groups up to sizes of 10. It offers decent bursts from unload and a lot of utility from panic strike, body shot, headshot, black powder, and needle trap.

Although the weapon set is still weaker than the other weapon sets, I think P/P is unique in its ability to proc panic strike easily and quickly, while maintaining good ranged burst. Similarly, I think P/D lacks the same burst potential and also lacks the smoke field and spammable daze that P/P offers.

With 6 points in Deadly Arts and +40% condition duration food, you get +70% condition duration. This means each panic strike is a 4.25 sec immobilize, each needle trap is a 5 sec immobilize, and each (spammable) body shot is a 1.75 sec immobilize. In addition, 6 points into Trickery give you all the standard utilities of the meta builds.

This is my first video with commentary (apologies for the poor quality mic), and this build is very much a work in progress. I welcome all comments, questions, and suggestions about both the video and the build.

Your gameplay is smooth, but I feel there are just so many x/6/6/x/x D/D videos out there. Nonetheless, I think this is great for beginners who want to get into the weapon set but aren’t sure what goes on in the decision making process, so +1 to you.

Evalia.7103:

stowing is purely a cosmetic thing

No it’s not. It’s great for cancelling skills that are going to miss.

The venom cd reduction would be great if the 6th effect on Lyssa runes were correspondingly reduced to 40 seconds.

Never mind the listed bugs on scorpion wire, the biggest problem is that it gets “obstructed” if there’s a slight incline, an anthill, or a light breeze in the way. Also, when there’s a terrain issue, targets will often teleport back to their original position after being pulled. It’s basically a teef’s version of iLeap. Shame, too, because I’d love to use it if the bugs were fixed.

I’d like a reverse scholar rune:

1) +25 Power
2) +35 Precision
3) +50 Power
4) +65 Precision
5) +100 Power
6) +20% damage when your health is below 25%

As people have already said in the Adopt-a-Dev thread, it’ll be a disaster. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who thinks otherwise.

Please, don’t implement it.

1) Discourages the importance of zerg mobility and map awareness.
2) Benefits servers who can afford scouts in towers/keeps, which is usually the largest server.
3) Increases the benefits of having waypoints, which translate into helping the strongest server and hurting the weakest server.
4) Discourages responsive play and fighting enemy players. Way too easy for zergs to go around PvDooring things undetected.
5) Makes defending much more difficult and makes karma training that much easier.*

*Note: the fix to siege disablers isn’t to make defending against larger servers impossible altogether. The current “fix” is like tearing down your entire house because some curtains aren’t fitted properly. Adjust siege disablers accordingly, but don’t take away white swords.

The biggest con to P/D is that you won’t learn the positioning and mobility tricks that you need for every other teef set. Besides that, P/D condi is underwhelming against proper groups of size five and up.

There’s little reason to go D/D over D/P, but if you can land CnD’s consistently and can position well, D/D offers slightly more burst. Both sets contribute more to team play if you spec 6 into trickery.

Jeknar.6184:

• good group composition: GWEN or GTFO

This is the only point where I (kind of) agree with you. The GWEN meta is too strong at the moment, in my opinion. Still, the question remains: how many of each class do you bring? That’ll depend entirely on your builds, playstyle, and driver.

Jeknar.6184:

• understanding role-specific strategies: Warrior spam CC, Guardian spam boons, Necros spam wells and elementalists place the field the driver ask for. You can add a mesmer for a veil (optional).

Never mind the oversimplification, but you don’t even have the roles correct. Warriors are a pretty substantial source of dps, especially since a number of guilds started implementing zerk/shouts and axe destroyer warriors in their frontline. Warhorn is also absolutely crucial for removing soft CC’s from your team mates. Similarly, guardians are also a substantial source of dps/CC with mighty blow and zealot’s embrace. Ele’s play every part of the trinity with CC, support, and aoe dps. Nowadays, necros are doing anything but “spamming wells”. If anything, they’re busy trying to find the enemy driver for a corrupt boon.

Jeknar.6184:

• and fast-paced decision making: The driver is the only one that do this… All the other are jsut waiting for the driver calls and answer that ASAP.

This might be true at low levels of play. But at high levels of play, warriors (maybe even guardians) need to decide when to break from the driver to finish off a low, whether to empower for self-heal or save it for regroups, when to pop virtues, etc. Similarly, your casters need to think about where they position themselves, and don’t even get me started on the periphery players, who usually end up carrying mid-level GvG guilds.

GOSU.9574:

Most of GW2’s “GvGers” never played GW1 GvG. It’s not even remotely the same right now, in GW2 it’s just a mini blob vs a mini blob. Facesmash extravaganza. In GW1 GvG you had maps like GW2’s pvp conquest mode. There were objectives, guild teams were designed and coordinated around achieving the objectives.

I guess in GW2 currently the objective is SMASHFACE.

You couldn’t sound more ignorant about GW2 GvG. I see people making this argument all the time, and they’re all wrong.

Yes, GW1 GvG involved objectives, but that doesn’t mean it’s better than GW2 GvG. Many people, myself included, hate point-capture and love death-matches. If Anet designed a 5v5 death-match game mode (like Courtyard, but without the point), I would spend all my time playing that.

Similarly, I probably wouldn’t enjoy a capture-the-flag or point-capture based GvG. I really just want to kill other people, without worrying about objectives.

And to call GW2 GvG “SMASHFACE” speaks volumes for your ignorance. GvG is all about good group composition, understanding role-specific strategies, and fast-paced decision making. Do you call for a mighty blow in your bomb or do you want to save it to blast water on a regroup? Are you confident your gank can win the periphery battle or do you need to position your frontline to support them? Are your casters being trained down or is your driver being sniped?

There are tons of strategic considerations that go into high-level GvG play. Sure, the meta is a bit stale at this point, but the better guild will almost always win. If GvG was indeed just a blobby “facesmash”, you wouldn’t expect there to be so much consistency in who wins. Instead, the exact opposite is a true.

Solori.6025:

Dragon rank really means nothing now.

What makes this sad is that people lost to a thief with no weapons…
especially that necro that stood in all of your traps and AoE’s…

I honestly feel like a pro watching these people play.

Well, yeah, high PvP rank doesn’t really mean you’re good at roaming or dueling, since PvP is about rotating quickly, having good map awareness, and holding points. However, having a high PvP rank does show that you’re at least somewhat competent at fighting other people.

That said, I feared the necro into the caltrops, and then scorpion wired him into the needle trap, making it easy for me to dodge on top of him. It wasn’t actually his stupidity that killed him there.

fumcheg.1936:

I have both dire/perplexity set and dire/krait set. Perplexity is good for 1vs1 fights which are pretty seldom in www. And only if you had success with landing your steal/interrupt. My best result was 18 stacks of confusion. It was 2 seconds fight. But that does not mean that Condi Thief is OP. That just mean that all these ppl do not know how to fight against Condi Thief.

And of course 5 successful fights of 50 (like in OP video) do not mean that Condi Thief is OP.

Eh, condi teef is pretty OP in small scaled combat, assuming the groups you fight aren’t running proper comps. At the highest level of play with proper groups, condi teefs are mediocre.

And my win/loss ratio is actually much better than you think. With 3 hours of footage, I have around 20 minutes of usable clips, and that 3 hours includes running around looking for fights, flipping camps, etc.. I’d say in dueling, my win ratio is anywhere between 30-50%, and in general roaming, maybe closer to 50% because I can run away.

Of course, with weapons, I can’t imagine losing unless outnumbered or really messing up.

Jana.6831:

I admit that I didn’t really get the purpose of this thread/video. To show that condi thieves are op?

There was no purpose other than to entertain. I regret that my snarky comment about condi teefs steered this discussion in that direction, but I’m glad you (kinda) enjoyed the video anyway!

Black Frog.9274:

It’s an interesting video and an interesting premise. It doesn’t do anything for your argument about condi thief being OP. If you aren’t winning the overwhelming majority of the time, it’s hardly OP. What I found interesting about the video is that in most cases, your opponents made no real attempt to disengage and escape, which makes me think they were arranged 1v1s. Mobility and tactical retreat are part of the game too.

The thought is basically: if it’s possible for me, a so-so 1v1 player, to beat some competent players without weapons, this build is too easy to play. So easy to play that if I did have weapons, I’m sure I would win the overwhelming majority of the time.

And yes, some were arranged 1v1’s in that they were duels. In a duel, it’s distasteful to disengage or stall indefinitely.

yolo swaggins.2570:

And if they were running DPS then they were not attacking enough. But then again, they weren’t cleansing enough either, if at all. Alot of them were autoattacking air more than hitting their other attacks. Almost none of them switched weapons. Pretty much everything they did was lackluster.

Well, if they did attack a lot more, the confusion would be that much more damaging. Moreover, many of the times they’re not attacking, I’m standing on top of my caltrops or my trap, which they don’t want to run into. That’s part of the problem though. Feline grace + vigorous recovery, mug, sleight of hand, and withdraw already give decent sustain. Dire stats only make it worse. Add stealth on top of it, and you basically won’t die unless you mess up really badly or there are ten people killing you.

kiwituatara.6053:

All this while keyboard-turning and skill-clicking… I don’t even… what? o_O

When I play on my laptop keyboard, the alt key gets stuck, so I end up having to click. Incidentally, you can tell when I’m using my laptop keyboard and when I’m not by seeing when I’m clicking and when I’m not. I never keyboard turn unless my mouse bugs out.

Black Frog.9274:

So in this post you completely invalidate your initial claim “because condi teef isn’t OP.” You selectively chose videos in which you won and admit that anyone who is remotely prepared will either win or retreat. Weird.

Still, entertaining build.

It doesn’t invalidate the initial claim because I’m still winning without weapons (sometimes even against competent players), even if I did catch my opponents off-guard. I can’t imagine many other builds doing this weaponless, whether the opponent was prepared or not.

Condi teef is OP because dire stats and perplexity runes synergize very well with certain traits and utilities. This video would be completely faceroll and uninteresting if I had weapons on.

In the interest of full disclosure, the video was made from around 3 hours of footage, recorded within a 24 hour window. I did die a lot, but also won enough that I had to cut quite a few clips out.

I would also be willing to bet that if I had posted a video featuring the exact same opponents, but where I’m using weapons, the comments wouldn’t focus on how bad the opponents were.

Narkodx.1472:

LOL

mango stop defending these “PvPers” that you embarrass in these videos

I had to watch it again because I am simply so amazed how bad people are at this game

I’m just trying to be fair. For example, I dueled the d/d ele at the end of the video 3 or 4 times, and the fight in the video was the only one I won. It was the first fight, and I caught him off-guard with my playstyle/build. It can happen to everyone, including competent players.

By nature, these videos never do the opponents justice because I only select clips where I win. The opponents clearly make mistakes in the clips, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad players in general.

Looks like fun and I imagine it must be a nightmare for your opponents to call target.

That said, why do you waste your dodges for no reason? For example, at 12:29-12:35, you used up two dodges for no reason, one before you even entered combat. And at 14:17, you start the fight with no dodges because you wasted them while running there.

Evalia.7103:

mango.9267:

You can infiltrator return in place and keep using infiltrator strike to gap close. S/D chases better than any other weapon set for this reason.

Not anymore. from what I know this bug was fixed.
Besides that s/d sb still one of the best chasers in entire game, so don’t feed the OP.

Tested it just now. Still works. But yes, S/D chases fine even without it.

You can infiltrator return in place and keep using infiltrator strike to gap close. S/D chases better than any other weapon set for this reason.

Coloxeus.3480:

interesting gameplay to watch but what!!?? a d/d ele cant even remove condis?

Well, the uncatchable trait lets me reapply condi’s pretty quickly, and because d/d ele’s remove condi’s incrementally, I just spam dodge on top of them when I see them swap to water or using ether renewal. Also, caltrops pulse bleeds, and immobilize (from the needle trap) is usually one of the last conditions to be removed.

Still, you do have a point in that d/d ele is the toughest matchup for this. If they kite away and heal up, there’s very little I can do about it.

mompen.7952:

What is your opinion on Bountiful Theft (BT) vs Flanking strikes?

Vigor and boon is nice, but so is also 5% dmg on the back/sides of the enemy.

Thinking I will try BT as one will get a nice fury from TotC which will get my critical chance up to 66% with my current setup 2/0/6/0/6 (rune of the pack).

What about fury runes tho (superior rune of rage)? One doesn’t have the best critical strikes with this kind of setup, and will make almost 1/2 of your backstabs dealing lower damage, so why not “abuse” that fury we get from TotC? You get +30% fury duration, a 25% chance of getting fury (30 sec CD) and +5% dmg while under the effect of fury.

I think bountiful theft is a must. One of the best traits for team utility, especially when paired with sleight of hand. The bountiful theft/mug/sleight of hand combination is one of our only answers to the boon spam/heal bot meta. And nothing is funnier than stripping a d/d ele’s (supposed) perma-protection/25 stacks of might.

Runes of rage are also a solid choice, but I prefer pack because it allows me to maintain perma-swiftness, in addition to (near) perma-fury, in combat. The swiftness is especially nice because d/d requires you to position extremely well and move very quickly. I think if you go without critical strikes on d/d, you need either rage or pack to compensate. Which one you choose will come down to personal preference.

I play 20606 with d/d. 40-50% crit chance, pack runes, thrill of the crime, and fire/air sigils means you’ll still do very solid damage, with good sustain and team utility.

And d/d still does well against rangers (as all teefs do). Pets make for a very easy CnD target, and you have a ton of gap closers.

However, I think the meta is at a point where there are certain builds you just won’t be able to kill running the standard x66xx Yishis build (various guardian builds, d/d ele, condi warrior, etc.). If you want to play d/d teef, I highly suggest investing 6 into trickery.

yolo swaggins.2570:

From what I saw, the only reason why those players lost were because they were bunkers fighting a condition bunker spec. While the bunkers were not dealing much damage, they were dying to the conditions that bypassed their toughness. So not only were they not dealing much damage but their armor didn’t matter. Basically the players who were losing were fighting bare.

You couldn’t be more wrong here. With the exception of the condi necro/PU condi mesmer, everyone else was running some DPS build. The reason I don’t take much damage is because full dire gives a ton of health and toughness, and acrobatics (vigorous recovery + feline grace) makes it so that I can avoid most telegraphed bursts.

Zero Day.2594:

It’s impressive how bad those people are at PvP’ing… truly impressive. They should write guides on how to be like that.

:/ If you run over traps and or stand in your opponents AoE fields or let your self bleed out… well you desire what you get.

Eh, you’re right in that it would be very easy to counter if opponents knew that I was running caltrops/needle trap. However, I caught a number of them off guard, and 6 in acro means I’ll be able to kite around and into them very easily.

Also, the needle trap + caltrops + scorpion wire + dodge is actually a pretty solid combo. Sometimes I wait till both of their dodges are up and I hit them with that, forcing them to stay in the bleeds.

Justine.6351:

Many “roamers” “suck”. Not everyone who roams is an spvper/dueler. This video is a legit example of everyday opponents no different then all those other roaming montages we see.

Like I said, some of them are actually solid players — just caught off guard. Perplexity still makes it very punishing if you make mistakes.

Sorrowsthief.6472:

I wouldn’t say overpowered I mean in a dueling since it works great but I mean how often do you fight one versus one out there in open world before u gets adds of 3and4 people. Builds like this are meant for duels and roaming 1vs2 and such. OP to me is game breaking. I dont see this build breaking anything, it may make people cry or rage quit simetimes but it doesnt break the game. My advice to u is find a few friends and quit crying about clever builds that make u claim OP!

I actually agree with you here. P/D condi is pretty useless against group sizes of five and up, assuming they run a proper tryhard comp.

However, P/D condi is still very strong against groups that aren’t running proper comps, which are most groups in WvW. Moreover, dire + perplexity make the set very easy to play, with very high reward for very little risk. In my opinion, Anet shouldn’t allow this kind of build to exist as it is.

Achey.3612:

technically engi doesn’t need a weapon either. kits are MORE than enough for them. so i dont get the point in this.

Lol, thief utilities are nothing like engi kits. Obviously, it would be a bit of a moot point to do this on an engi. A thief without weapons is waaaaaaaaay more handicapped than an engi without weapons.

Sorrowsthief.6472:

Sad to say that was my engi toward the end. Was very sad when i saw i got beat by a guy with no weapons. Op or not what was your build or trait spread. Id like to troll a bit with my thief

Hey, good fight, and no need to feel bad about it because I actually won against quite a few solid players with this build. Like I said, if I play well and my opponent gets even a little careless, perplexity still makes it very punishing.

Here’s the build:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQBVSzkan28E3mQ/0E0Ek3X5LlRrA0dUOSfB-TVREABIoE8Ilf4o+Tx7PAg5PRBATA-w

I’ve begun experimenting with some alternative traits as well. For classes that don’t apply a ton of conditions, I could take Hard to Catch or Master Trapper in place of Pain Response. Similarly, for a class that doesn’t rely on boons as heavily, I could replace Bountiful Theft with Trickster. For general roaming purposes, however, I find the above trait spread to be ideal.

fumcheg.1936:

celestial condi p/d

…P/D is terrible in PvP.

The most popular builds are 26006 or 20066 using D/P or S/D respectively, with SB on swap. 26006 with S/D has gotten some attention, and, recently, 60206 with Panic Strike has become the flavor.

fumcheg.1936:

well of course your enemies are really bad, but nice video anyway.

Actually that’s not quite true. Some of them are phoenix/dragon ranks, and almost all of them are in established WvW guilds. They’re not the best players in the game, but none of them are new to PvP.

Condi teef is at a state where if you play well, and your opponent gets a little bit sloppy, you can almost always ensure a win in a 1v1.

Hello, all. We’ve seen it done with single weapon, we’ve seen it done with fireworks. Now, we’ve seen it done with no weapons!

Because condi teef isn’t OP

Thieves are in a good place now. Not OP and not UP. Build diversity is still pretty limited, but that’s another issue entirely.

I don’t get the point of this thread, but to humor you, pistol whip also has a long starting animation and a non-negligible ending animation, during which you’re completely rooted and open to counterplay.

In all honesty, I would trade the stun of pistol whip for the faster and smoother blurred frenzy animation.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Change Shadows Rejuvenation into Night’s Watch.

Grants Aegis when entering stealth.

…that would be so OP. Please, god no.

Lorus.4218:

of the system working well because according to glicko this week should not even have happened. NSP has upset the tournament predictions 3/4 weeks and is coming 2nd in silver straight out of being in bronze.
This weeks shows a deeper complexity of this game, which is what keeps it alive and interesting. Glad to have experienced the week and the tourney personally, and hoping to see many more great matchups to come. NSP pride!

Eh, let’s be honest, YB handed NSP 2nd place during the matchups where they were together. This accounts for some of NSP’s “upsets”.

Regardless, I do give NSP props for beating SBI and DR. That is actually quite the upset!

All of Silver League is watching your matchup. The winner of the T4 matchup will determine the placements for a number of servers not in your matchup.

Thieves are the best poised to escape entangle. Any blink will escape it (steal, infiltrator signet, shadow step, infiltrator arrow, infiltrator strike). Any stealth will escape it. You can CnD the roots (seriously, just hit 5 if you have an offhand dagger equipped — don’t even have to aim). Withdraw will cleanse it, as well as shadow’s embrace + hide in shadows.

Entangle is pretty much useless against thieves.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Pretty standard necro builds, however two things didnt make sense to me.
Triple wells has hoelbrak with no might stacking
Sustainable high damage has hoelbrak + reapers might but no vital persistence

Anyway thanks for sharing.

Your team still provides a lot of might. Hoelbrak is popular because it’s a power rune that gives -20% condi duration.

Siege disablers need more counterplay mechanics. Right now, the only way to counter them is to spam projectile denials. However, the animation is so small and the cast time so fast that you have to pretty much predict when they’re coming.

1) Bigger animation. Make it a flaming fireball or something.
2) Slower travel time. Maybe something like Guardian’s staff 2.
3) More counterplay. Perhaps blinded players also miss. Or have interrupts eat up the 10 supply but fail to apply the trap.

Tao.5096:

OP seems to be a ranger who got boosted after last patch and lost to shortbow auto attack thief in 1v1.

Dear Anet

I’m requesting an IQ Test upon thread creation in all forums to reduce amount of whiners.

Thank you

Do you hear that woooooooooosh sound?

In Silver, the “for the fights” servers, in my humble opinion, are CD, IoJ, and NSP; all three field a decent number of 15-20 man guild groups and good roaming populations. Ironically, the servers most poised for T2, your “for the fights” tier, are YB and DB, who are probably the least “for the fights” servers in Silver.

kelmax.6549:

If you are talking about zerging, I feel really important as a mesmer. I can hide in keeps or towers and port my friendly zerg in, portal bomb another zerg, or put veils down if the commander calls out the veil.

Portal and veil are basically the only utility a mesmer brings to a zerg. For the rest of the fight, you’ll probably be playing on the periphery ganking squishies.

Ele, on the other hand, brings just about everything to a zerg: aoe damage (meteor), aoe CC (static/chill), aoe sustain (two water fields). Not to mention the fields they offer, along with the ability to self-blast those fields.

Honestly, 2v1’ing the stronger server is a better outcome than what usually happens: both stronger servers farm the weakest server for easy points.

2v1’s have happened numerous times in the past, and it’s not “cheating” in any way.

3 seconds of protection on reveal is incredibly OP, especially if there’s no ICD.

Being revealed by getting knocked out of Refuge is fine. There are fairly established play and counterplay mechanics to Shadow Refuge.

I think the better solution would be to give opponents the ability to see stealth targets instead of revealing the targets themselves.

EnderzShadow.2506:

Maybe the ghost can come up with some ‘Brilliant Mind’ type equation that will certifiably rectify and quantify the magnitude of our magnanimous propensity for troop contribution. Cmon Fay, bust out the chalkboard and theoretical physics

Honestly, I have two conflicting lines of thought on this matter.

One is pretty straight forward. I think you are all wrong. You can’t see the value a mesmer brings to a group because it isn’t obvious and you’re too obtuse to recognize it. Min maxers tend to exagerate the obvious and diminish the subtle.

Two, maybe I’m completely wrong and showing blatant bias and favoritism to the class I play.

/shrug

That was one of the most pretentious and verbose posts I’ve ever read.

Lol, not sure what Silver League has to do with this. Roaming isn’t THAT different across the tiers. There are zergs and roamers everywhere.

Hamster.4861:

Pre-patch, Maxed out Mortar Masters were able to target with the barrage shot, and then leave the mortar to turn itself and launch the barrage.

If a master tries to do this now, the mortar will bug until they get on it for the whole length of the turning and firing of the barrage shot.

+1, this is the bug.

I posted it a couple weeks back, but it got no attention, as the Asura 7-series golem was getting all the QQ.

Mortars are still bugged for those with full mortar mastery.

I’ve played on a lot of servers, and Mag has hands down the best pugs in NA.

Part of the reason I’ve quit pugmanding is because the pugs in T3/T4 just feel like crippled kids compared to Mag’s pugs.

Einlanzer.1627:

With that in mind, buffing Vital Shot would not impact P/D as much as it would impact P/P, and even if it did push the set over into OP territory it would be simple to tweak Sneak Attack to compensate.

NinjaEd.3946:

Idea Make the skill function for either p/d or p/p. For p/d you can continue to secure a CnD and also fire off 5 vuln stacks and a little more. For p/p, you can stack heavy vulnerability stacks causing unload to become stronger the more hits it makes. As compensation for the buff, the range is slightly reduced with the idea that you’re shooting giant bolas from your pistol which is questionable on its own.

Idea Relocate power into the auto attack since p/p doesn’t regularly have access to sneak attack. Relocated bleeding to sneak attack since p/d does have regular stealth access which can utilize it. Basically give the effects that each set has access to the most into the #1 skill.

I think all of these ideas miss the point. The problem with p/p isn’t the damage, which is honestly fine. The problem is the survivability. Even if you buff p/p dps, you’d end up with something like a killshot warrior, which does good burst damage, but is focused down extremely quickly.

What p/p needs to be viable is some kind of mobility or stealth mechanic on the 3 skill, perhaps an evade or a shadow step.

Straegen.2938:

Without Ferocity, precision is only used to proc and gen might. There are a small handful of builds that revolve around this design but most direct damage builds have to overcome toughness which is a direct inverse to power. Attacking a condi build running Rabid with a low ferocity power build is coming to a gun fight with water pistol. Sure you might be able to drown them with that super soaker but chances are you will bleed to death before that happens.

The extra damage from fire + air procs more than compensate for giving up ferocity. A ton of power builds now run Knight over Cavalier, including SA+trickery thieves, half of the dps warrior builds, dps shout guardians, d/d eles, and more. What ferocity they do get is usually from whatever Berzerker pieces they have on. 180%-185% crit dmg is entirely sufficient nowadays.

Einlanzer.1627:

Ugh, I wish everyone would stop focusing on Unload so much for improvements to P/P. The problem with the set is that a.) Vital Shot sucks, and b.) other skills already can’t compete with Unload.

The problem is that you can’t buff any other p/p skills without also buffing p/d and d/p, which don’t need to be buffed. Unload is the only way to “fix” p/p.

The game isn’t balanced around 1v1’s. In group play, shadow refuge has very obvious counterplay mechanics involving targeted aoe’s and knockbacks. And in group play, if the thief is just going to sit in the full refuge stealth duration, he’s contributing nothing to his team for upwards of 15 seconds.

John Corpening.9847:

You guys beat me to it. After last week’s positive discussion on siege trolls I wanted to bring up the topic of population imbalance and ideas that you have on it.

There are a couple of ideas already going in this thread:

• population caps
• merge servers
• Battle Groups

I’d like to join in this brainstorm with some questions on these. For merging servers, how do we determine who gets merged? Where would we merge them to? How do we maintain any sort of world pride or identity they have? How do we handle potentially merging with your mortal enemies?

For population caps, how do we deal with the longer queues on the worlds that can field enough people? If it is dynamic, would players be able to manipulate it? For example, our world is ahead so we all agree to not play WvW so the other worlds are capped down and can’t counter us.

For Battle Groups, Asglarek mentioned more details are on the way. I’d love to hear more.

I’m approaching this as a brainstorm. The topic is “Approaches to correcting overall population imbalance”. I know there is a related topic of 24 hour coverage but I’d like to keep that as a separate conversation for now.

Please keep this friendly, constructive and on topic. We had a really good discussion on the siege troll thread I’m hoping we can kick around some ideas and have another great discussion here. Feel free to add additional ideas that I didn’t list out but please make sure they are on topic.

Thanks,
John

I created a thread a while ago about population caps that saw a fair amount of discussion (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Proposal-decrease-the-player-cap-on-WvW-maps/first). I still support the idea for all of the reasons listed there.

Alternatively, server merging is probably the best bet, but you’re likely to get a ton of lower-tier pride members crying foul in the process. I think the reality is that 24-27 servers is just too many for the current game population.

If you were to merge servers, the best way to do it would be to get rid of X number of servers (preferably the T1/T2 servers) and then open up free transfers across all the remaining worlds.

Roe.3679:

mango.9267:

Roe.3679:

Straegen.2938:

Condi does not have to trade off 3 stats for damage only 2. Power players have to take Power, Crit AND Crit Dmg (the now nerfed Ferocity). If condi builds had to go three stat and ANet eases up on the food, then parity would be achieved. As it is now any heavy DPS condi build either stacks toughness or vitality. They can stack both and take a relatively minor hit to overall DPS.

Condition duration, condition damage and precision equals 2 stats. Learn something new every day!

Condition duration isn’t a stat you can get in your armor/trinkets, and a number of builds don’t need any precision to deal good condition damage. It’s undeniable that condition builds give up little to no survivability while maintaining high dps.

However, a mix of bunker and power builds is still superior in group play from 5v5 upwards.

Giver’s stats have been in the game for some time, you should probably know about those. Additionally, power builds don’t need precision to do “good” damage, either, since soldiers builds have always out damaged dire builds.

Only Giver’s weapons add condition duration. My post specified that you couldn’t get that stat in your armor/trinkets. Power builds do need precision, but they don’t need ferocity that badly.