Guild Wars 2

That build was around before people started exploiting guard to climb walls, tho.

actually, before the desaster known as the big pet damage nerf, there was a build around, which used the active on SotW without having Signet of the Beastmaster traited.

Back then, there was no real leash range on pets, so your jaguar could pretty much go and rough up targets while you were sitting at 3k range. This gave birth to some gimmicky builds, which put all the damage on the pet.

There. I modified it a bit.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQJATBjEVN2VWs2Bi1j90nA1PMJOD+zoUmRFajB-jkCBYfQYLBBnBjgAiKAI1UQM5RZtoqIas6aYKXER1SBExYA-w

threw in some pieces of soldier gear to bolster the hp a bit, put 5 points from skirmishing and 10 from natures magic into wilderness survival for the protection on dodge and changed the offhand to greatsword(though sword+warhorn works too).
Also dropped the scholar runes, cause honestly, who stays above 90% hp against retal spamming gigablobs?

Swapped QZ for LR, tossed the signets for muddy terrain and a free slot, which can be used to slot:
-SotH when moving around
-Sick ’em, when facing thieves
-Protect me or Signet of Renewal, when things get rough

It no longer is a bearbow, it now is a three-tailed devourer with a surprise dog for whoever manages to get into melee range.

Things, which can be changed:
-remove another 5 points from skirmishing, getting martial mastery to improve the utility of the defensive sidearm
-drop piercing arrows or eagle eye for remorseless, when you expect things to get messy
-toy around with the third utility slot, as mentioned above

edit: skirmishing 20pt trait fixed

ghostchipz.2341:

How about

Harry, Ron and Hermione

Or HRH

How ’bout Fluffy?

Actually no, depending on when the keep was built and the properties of the cliffs, the current walls are reasonable.
Especially considering that second hill with a clear view on the keep, it would be a problem, not to have those walls.
That is not even considering that in a real keep. there would be the threat of people trying to scale the cliffs and throwing down ropes. That’s, why you need those walls as a place for guards to patrol. If the area is open, it can become a safety hazard really quickly and at the very least requires dozens of guards at night to keep the enemy from infiltrating the keep by scaling the cliffs.
You always want your walls to form a complete circle, no matter the natural borders.

Why are you still 55?
Is it, because you are also levelling many characters at the same time?
Did the same way back and was pretty much clueless and aimless for months.
Once you got your first 80, the pace will pick up. You will suddenly have goals, you want to achieve: Full exotics, a second set of exotics, ascended stuff, perhaps a legendary.
For the first level 80 char, these things are really big and seem far off, once you got your char to 80 and rolling, equipping additional characters with exotics can be done with mere pocket change.
My suggestion is: Find the character, you like the most and no matter whether you still like him after a week, just clench your teeth and grind till he is 80. Grinding to 80 can be done the fastest by crafting, followed by wvw karmatrain on fridays, followed by a playthrough of the personal story, which I recommend for someone who doesn’t have any 80s.
Having a level 80 character brings various benefits. Mainly gold, gold and gold.

What many people here are ignoring is the fact, that +40% condition duration is not only stronger than +10% crit damage numbers wise(even, if the character has 100% crit chance), but it also drastically increases the amount of controll, your character is able to dish out.
40% cond duration means, that 2 second immobilize is now a 3 second immobilize and that 5 second cripple is now a 7 second cripple.
Name one other food, which provides such a significant increase in numbers.

It’s not about comparing cond builds to physical builds here, it’s about comparing 40% food to other food.
If such high duration values are really needed, which I actually doubt, then the correct solution is to shave them off the food and place them somewhere else. The food as such is overpowered and it has been proven throughout this thread, while everyone, who’s defending the food talks about meta, condition builds in general, etc, but NOT about the food itself.

Especially seeing as the ferocity patch will bring down crit food to like +3% crit damage, it is of utmost necessity to also bring down the condition counterpart. Balancing the condition foods manages to both bring down cond builds to a similar level as physical builds after the patch, aswell as introducing a bit more equality amongst foods.

Also:

I don’t get this 40% condition food hate, direct damage gets 50% crit damage on default.

Of course, there is a baseline of 50% damage…
Else full knight gear would be utterly useless
Also, that 50% baseline crit makes +10% critical damage only that much worse than +10% cond duration.
1.6/1.5=1.0666
1.1/1.0=1.1
So a naked +10% crit damage increases the damage of critical hits by 6%, while a naked +10% cond duration increases the duration of conditions by 10%.
Now please don’t try to get into the comparison between fully stacked characters, it only gets worse for the crit damage, the higher the numbers go.
Thus, cond duration is already by itself way more powerfull than crit damage, not even including the added bonus of also improving control effects.

Let’s look at the auras:
Magnetic Aura: When attacked with a ranged attack, retaliate by reflecting the attack back.
-Enables you to stand toe to toe against ranged opponents

Shock Aura: When attacked, retaliate with hard cc.
-Enables you to stand toe to toe against melee ranged opponents

Frost Aura: When attacked, retaliate with soft cc, decrease incoming damage by 10%.
-Enables you to stand toe to toe against physical attacks

Fire Aura: When attacked, retaliate with burning and gain might.
-Enables you to… What? It has no real defensive value…

If you look at those Auras, you got:
Earth: vs ranged
Shock: vs melee
Frost: vs physical

so why not:
Fire: vs conditions?

Fira Aura: When Struck, retaliate by setting your opponent on fire. Reduces incoming condition duration by 30%.
Not like Ele got a hard time cleansing conditions, but ele still got a rather small health pool.

To be honest, “When struck, remove a condition” sounded just too broken

send em to me for my legendary and I send you 2 pieces of copper ore in turn.

;)

Your best bet is probably to watch the prices carefully and sell them at the right time.

Mochann.5298:

I actually bought a Commander Tag just to help the server out. There are times when there are no commanders on and things tend to go south from there if there is organized resistance. I got a tag originally just so people could rally somewhere and get some bodies in a ball.

Nowadays I’ve levelled up a bit as a commander, still mostly PUGs and not guild commanding, but I am on Teamspeak, work with the other regulars who are more experienced and know how to defend our towers, and I have had moderate success.

Don’t be daunted by not having commanders on board — buy a tag if you can afford it and use it well to help your server. It comes with its own rewards.

Buying a tag to help the server out is always a good thing.
I’m not fit for leading, tho, but I can provide some nice story: A couple months back, I stood up early and there was no commander around. There was that one guy, who just lead the entire zerg around. Said “someone gotta hold em together or they will scatter and do useless kitten” or something. I could tell on a glance, he was very talented, very spirited, had a good voice, etc. His decisions were almost always spot on and even, when they weren’t, at least he didn’t waste time thinking about what to do next, he just kept the zerg rolling. Later that day, some well known commanders logged on and seemed pretty impressed, too, as they just let him do his job, sometimes assisting by lending him a blue pin on the map and doing supply checks.
The catch: He barely had 1k arena net points. He had just started playing and barely equipped his level 80 mesmer. He had unimaginable talent at commanding, so I started a fund raising and ~4 hours of good leadership later, he had his commander tag. He still leads up to this day and has to endure stupid jokes like “we paid your commander tag, so your kitten belongs to us.”
Sometimes, you just gotta invest in raw talent, if you want to push your server. It’s not only about taking responsibility by yourself, it’s also about utilizing unused potential around you.

Quiggle.4215:

I think those who disagree misunderstand the magnitude of my suggestion. I am just thinking that building on the existing exploration bonus that is in the game, would be nice.

Actually, the change will impact champ farming, because I doubt, it will be implemented as a straight up bonus.
There is no reason to toss even more gold and drops into the economy. If this is implemented, the baseline drops will probably be slightly adjusted.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Altering loot tables based on time between kills would only bring forth problems. With WvW kills, those numbers are static, so it’s easier to code Player A killed 4 times = x WXP. Having multiple loot tables, or different scales within the loot table being accessed would be problematic. In addition to this, it would be completely unfair for players who log in at different times.

Example: The Claw of Jormag is killed on a server with high NA population. The mass of players who log in at the beginning of an NA primetime would get the best loot. But what of the other players who log in 1 hour later? Or 2 hours later? Why should they get lesser chance at loot when they’re killing the same boss?

So unfortunately, while your intent is good, this is a bad idea.

Jormag does not stand around, waiting to be killed. He despawns after 30 minutes anyway and the loot is static chest drops.
Where I see problems with this is for stuff like lyssa temple.
The morning shift might get insane drops off the priestess.
Basically, the system should only apply to champions and lower and leave drops from legendary mobs, as they are.
If there are other static champs tied to big world events with huge rewards, just promote them to legendary. There, problem solved.

Also, I think, the system needs tweaking.
Make it scale from 15 minutes to one and a half hour. After that time, it won’t scale further, before that time, the mob will mainly rop some guaranteed stuff and not much special loot.
However, mobs spawning during events would need some special treatment again.
Might be more complicated, actually

jportell.2197:

naphack.9346:

Churning earth is obviously far less obvious than any skill, the warrior has.

Totally not obvious. Not at all…. Not one bit.
Hey whats that ele doing just standing there for almost 3s?
Oh who knows he’s prolly special.
WOW THERE GOES MY ENTIRE HEALTH I did not see that coming… was that the ele?
No…. eles can’t hit that hard and none of their skills are telegraphed!

TL:DR.
Warriors are so UP because of their extremely obvious telegraphed skills.

Exactly this. Compared to churning earth, kill shot’s animation is rather subtle and hard to notice.
Let’s not talk about Dragon Tooth, Earthquake etc.

CMstorm.8679:

For the Norn Elite skills, maybe all the transformations could have a 45 second duration instead of 30 _and the skills could also do a little more damage. _

really?

A similar system is already used in WvW for players and in general for everything, altho, it only affects xp(and wxp in the case of players, possibly loot, dunno about that).
Expanding that system to actual drops would be highly welcome.
I actually don’t mind the bags as much, tho the champs in queensdale could be made to drop lower quality bags, if they have only been up for a couple seconds… More importantly, scratch any or at least most additional drops. It just doesn’t feel right, if you can loot rares and exotics on top of the bags for simply running in circles repeatedly. Take away the extra drops and possibly give a slightly higher chance to drop lower quality bags. That might do the trick.

Churning earth is obviously far less obvious than any skill, the warrior has.

Actually, sigil of Rage sounds intriguing, too, as the sigils won’t clash with weapon swap sigils anymore.

With the Ferocity change, some things about runes will naturally get mixed up.
Some runes will get reworked, and nobody knows, which and in what way, but let’s stay at runes granting critical damage for now.
As for, which values I am calculating with, I will use the 15 ferocity to 1 crit conversion, I derived from pvp items, as the lower border and a 21 ferocity to 1 crit conversion, which behaves similar to precision as the upper border.

Naturally, Divinity Runes will lose a lot of their appeal. They probably won’t degrade to garbage tier, but I don’t see them staying above 3 gold a piece. Probably more like 2 gold long term. 10 ferocity won’t even be equal to 1% critical damage.
Let’s keep in mind here, that the currently used alternative, the ruby orbs, will also lose a lot of their appeal, so people will probably still get divinity, if they simply want raw stats.

But let’s go on: There are runes with a minor crit bonus, for Example Runes of the Ranger and Runes of the Scholar.
If critical damage gets a rate of 1 crit per 15 ferocity, these runes will already lose some damage(8%→3%), if they follow normal rune behavior. If critical damage will drop down all the way to 1 crit per 21 ferocity, the raw crit bonus of these runes will be cut down from 8% all the way down to ~2.5%, again, if they follow normal rune behavior.

Now, which ones are the winners?

Let’s take a look at runes with critical damage as their primary attribute, namely rune of rage, rune of air and rune of the golemancer.
Assuming, the new runes follow a 25-50-90 scaling, those will get:
1:15 scaling of ferocity: Instead of the current 10% crit damage, we get 11% crit damage.
1:21 scaling of ferocity: Instead of the current 10% crit damage, we get ~8% crit damage.
Now, keep two things in mind: If the scaling really goes all the way to 21:1, the average crit damage of a player will be around 50%. Critical food, which currently provides 10% crit damage, will probably be cut down to 70 ferocity, too. So even in this case, the crit major runes will probably be your best bet, if you want a high critical damage(as they should be, actually).
Especially the runes of rage, which provide an extra 5% crit damage, while the player is under the effect of fury. I think, this one aspect of the rune will probably not be changed to ferocity, as I see no need for it.

So, basically, what the next patch will do is bringing the runes with minor critical damage bonus back in line and make runes with a major crit bonus actually worth having. My Ranger will cry about the loss of her Runes of the Ranger, but she will get over it.
I expect runes of the scholar, runes of the ranger and similar runes with minor crit bonus(wurm, eagle, ogre, etc) to fall slightly in popularity, while rune of rage and to a lesser extent rune of air will probably become more viable.

But that is all speculation, as nobody can know, what the next patch will do to underused runes. What are your thoughts on runes? What will be the next big thing?
Condition runes also come to mind, if arena net doesn’t bring cond damage down alongside the critical damage. A start here would be nerfing cond duration food.

hellsmachine.4085:

OP Tell that to the theif that killed me (warrior in full Knights gear) in 3-4 hits.

Why are people complaining about these miniscule nerfs? Try other games like AoC or D3 where they nerf your damage by half…

There are some things, which give me the giggles, when I am playing thief. One of them is the “tanky dude”.
You can be as tanky and sturdy, as you want, as long as your attacks barely make my spine tingle, I can just keep piling up those high damage attacks, utilizing my valk+bers combination to its fullest.
Before coming to gw2, I used to play Dota2 quite a lot. Dota2 sports a 5v5 pvp’ish sort of setup with a lot of strategy involved, but let’s get straight to the point: Tanks, which stack up hitpoints, armor and even spell resistance, for all I care, are useless in that game. If you want to tank, first improve your damage output and then get tanky gear. If you don’t pose a threat, you will either be ignored and left for later or the enemy will walk right up into your face and keep hitting you, till you hit the floor. The same applies to guild wars 2.
If you don’t pose a threat, anything and everything can kill you. There might be some need for poison to actually do the trick, if you got loads of heal, but as long as you barely manage to scratch my character, I can just keep autoattacking and backstabbing you, till you are below the heartseeker treshold and then make you pop.
There is no secret involved. If you have no means to kill me, but I can kill you, given enough time, why should I stop trying to kill you, just because I can’t kill you in one hit?
I’d say, get rid of some of those knight pieces. Having that much armor is overkill anyway. Throw in valkyrie. This has 3 benefits. First, it improves your vitality, which is important to survive burst attacks and conditions, second, it has power as main stat, instead of minor, which makes you hit harder, and third, it gives you critical damage, to actually make use of all that precision, the knight gear provides.
Actually, full knight is rather bad in terms of defending against a raw backstab build, or any physical burst build, for that matter. You may reduce the incoming damage by a lot, but you still don’t have any substantional health pool to fall back on. A thief stacked full damage can just chew through that armor and eat away at your tiny health pool. I get the thought behind reducing physical damage, while retaining a small health pool, so the healing signet and adrenal healing can heal for maximum efficiency. That may work, if you are planning on tanking a constant flow of physical damage, but as soon, as that physical damage is heavily front loaded, your heal just can’t keep up.

MrSilver.5269:

I built a full ascended celestial staff elementalist and run a support build for WvW. I spent hundreds of gold on recipes, mats, and quartz to build the entire set. The ONLY reason I chose celestial armor was the fact that I could do decent damage with a meteor/’nado combo because of the crit damage on the set, which has now been n erfed into oblivion. The power, armor, healing, and health on the set is simply below what can be built using other armor. The crit damage is what made it viable.

This change has left a very sour taste in my mouth, and I have shelved my elementalist as a result. My WvW guild can get someone else to drop water fields.

I suggest that others do the same.

Let the Celestial Staff Elementalist water embargo begin.

Please don’t use past tense, when the change didn’t happen yet.
Thanks.

Now, I gotta clear up some myths here:

1) “the server is dead.”
From what I can tell, Kaineng is far from dead.
I’m from Europe and I gotta say, Kaineng should be pretty much fine. Look at Vabbi. THAT is dead. A couple days ago, we had a bug with our Lion’s Arch on Drakkar Lake, preventing us from leaving the map and causing massive lag, so our guild guested on Vabbi for a bit. Went to the Shatterer just for the lulz. It was prime time. Not a single soul there. In LA, you could see like 10 guys idling around in front of the trading post, 3 at the mystic forge. The rest of the map was pretty much empty. Again, that is prime time… On a Friday evening. Went over to Queensdale just to check out the champ train and there actually were a couple people, but still nothing substantional.
THAT is dead. As long as there’s still people playing PvE, it’s not a matter of being dead, it’s a matter of lacking motivation.

2) “You need at least 4-8 good and dedicated guilds.”
The number of guilds, you need is…
…ZERO.
Drakkar managed to pull through the dark age, when there was a mass exodus of guilds on the back of a single guild, which mainly organized the pugs back then. There actually was no need for even that guild. All it took was a couple motivated and inspiring commanders. You gotta do some organizing. Get a dedicated teamspeak for the server, advertise them to your pve population, get some motivated guys to be commanders. You don’t need guilds. First and foremost, you need people, who are willing to stick around and keep coming back, even when they get pushed into the dirt.
The players need a perspective. That is worth way more than any guild. During season 1, Ruins of Surmia learned that the hard way, when they fought Drakkar. Sure, they had the strong guild groups, which could wipe the floor with us, but Drakkar with barely any organised guild groups just had the motivated public zerg. People just kept coming after being wiped and whoever left the map to farm in PvE got replaced by another fresh and motivated player.

My advice is: Man up. Looking at the map of your matchup, you have a solid grip on your third of eternal battlegrounds and you still control some parts of your homelands. Start from there. Rebuild your server while you defend your stuff. Don’t try to do anything big, just take small steps and try to get people motivated. It’s not about holding objectives for points, it’s more about showing your people, that there are still people willing to fight and die for their server. It’s about sending a message.

If that’s still not convincing, just take a look at this:
http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/map/1290
they are still fighting back in spite of the odds. Vabbi’s biggest group is typically around 10 players. Was the saddest thing ever, fighting them in season 1. We fielded Zergs of 50-60, while having a metric ton of small roaming groups and at least one scout per objective, while they had… Well… The small 10 man groups, who sometimes came out of the spawn to retake garrison or the spawn towers. But they still got their pride and they know kitten well, how to fight. Those 10 men can wipe 20 players from other servers without breaking a sweat. They will fight to the last and jump at any exposed weakness mercilessly.
If you want to play WvW to be a winner, go ahead and leave the sinking ship. But I can assure you one thing: WvW is not about winning, it’s about server pride. Even if someone paid me the transfer and offered 2 or 3 legendaries on top of it, I’d still stay on Drakkar.

Zaxares.5419:

The scrooge that I am, I just give one copper on those days. XD The Sweaters are worth more.

Now that the event is nearly over though, I’m curious as to who’s in the lead now.

I give away sweaters, because I like the responses.

The problem with crit damage in its current form is exactly this. It’s totally arbitrary numbers.
Look at Buff Food: +100 power, 10% crit damage? Other Buff food gives 100 power, 70 precision, for example. I’m pretty sure, they won’t put the ferocity up to like 150 points on that one, so go figure.
Look at the other crit damage stuff. Many of them are crazy overpowered in comparison to armor pieces. Mostly due to Arena Net wanting to have round numbers.

Enenion.8127:

naphack.9346:

So, how does a minion master/ranger/whatev stop the thief from stealthing?
It’s hard enough to keep a thief from using cloak and dagger on pets right now. A ranged CnD without cooldown just asks to be exploited.
A CnD thief always has to get back into melee range, so you can predict his positioning. The only drawback of the bp thief would be having to stay within 900 range of any ai controlled entity to re-stealth safely.
Also against multiple players: Do you seriously suggest a whole group of people performing a simultaneous dodge, because some smoke field happened to appear on the ground?
Personally, I don’t see much problem with D/P right now. There should be some more skills, which apply revealed, tho, because to me, last refuge is far more deadly than any cc or damage source, an opponent possesses. Admittedly, my thief lives on the edge, which is partly responsible for last refuge getting into my way so often.
If D/P really is such a big issue, I’d agree with the proposition to make players unable to hit opponents with HS and still getting stealth, although, it would ruin some of my usual dungeon rotations.

A minion master, ranger, or mesmer would have the exact same options to stop a D/P thief from stealthing than they do now, interrupt them while the skill is going off, plus any form of Blind/Block/Reflect would cause the shot to miss and therefore not stealth the thief. This change increases the options others have to prevent the stealth and increases the thief’s burden to time the skill correctly for the stealth.

The fact that the skill has no cooldown is irrelevant as it cannot be spammed to maintain permanent stealth. If you use it while in stealth the damage of the shot will reveal you, so you won’t get any benefit from the stealth the shot would give you.

The change is not meant to change the overall playstyle of D/P but to increase the effectiveness of P/P and S/P, both of which could use better access to stealth. D/P would be pretty much unchanged by this proposal, only there would be more counterplay added to stop the thief from stealthing in the first place.

the difference between then and now is, that now the thief has to spend 3 more initiative to gain stealth.

Vargamonth.2047:

I’m really confused about this.
During the livestream devs said numbers won’t going to change for sPvP. However, in some thread about “new amulets for sPvP” we got an official response implying that Ferocity could allow amulets with it as primary stat to exist.
If Ferocity exists in sPvP too, I don’t get how are they going to keep overall numbers unchanged. Critical damage is just not equally cost effective for amulets, jewels and traitlines.

So, either they “lied” to us (they’ll attempt to keep things as unchanged as possible, but that won’t be 100% possible) or the damage formula is going to suffer substantial changes. Probably a combination of both.

They can adjust ferocity to have the same crit damage gain for spvp.
The reason for this is, that PvE items got totally arbitrary crit damage stats on them, with trinkets and small armor pieces being the ones with an insane crit conversion.

Ex. Full Berserker’s (PvP):
823 power, 644 Precision, 329 vitality, 20% crit

Full Berserker’s (PvE):
1087 Power, 745 Precision, 71 Crit

Now, there is some vita in there, but we can assume the following:
The PvP equip got two minor stat with the third split between vit and crit, so the crit will be the equivalent to (precision-vitality) stat points.

So 20% crit in pvp equal 315 stat points, while 71% crit in PvE equal 745 stat points.
1% crit in PvE is equal to 10 stat points, while the same 1% crit in PvP equals 15 stat points.
This is mostly due to trinkets and jewels having such absurd crit damage, which will get corrected in the patch. PvE crit damage can remain untouched, while the
PvE gear will be brought back in line.

According to this calculation, a conversion rate of 1 crit damage for 15 ferocity seems highly likely, as it makes things more equal between pvp and pve.

Seeing, as they probably don’t want to affect spvp all that much, the critical damage modifier will probably be 1.5+x*ferocity, where x is any ratio, Anet regards as balanced.

Might be a tad bit broken, but I like it, because I love stomping things with my little asura.
I just don’t think, it would be a good idea to make the trait double the damage of Rampages Autoattack chain.

I don’t see Healing Signet destroying the class. As a heal, it’s just one option out of many.
Honestly, I recently found myself going back and forth between Adrenal Surge and Healing Signet a lot. Healing wise, the signet got an edge in drawn out escapes and when using siege weapons, while the surge is king in bursty encounters.
As a passive component of builds, the heal/sec of signet is just too high.
I just hope, they reduce the base heal and don’t touch the healing power scaling.

Geiir.7603:

Cynz.9437:

Arkantos.7460:

Cynz.9437:

Arkantos.7460:

Vi Au.8341:

I believe there is a easier way to solve this problem. keep pistol 5 as a smoke field but change the order of priority of hit than stealth. So the chain would look like this: Black Powder – HS – Stealth – Hit.

It would be similar to how cluster bomb would reveal you if you blast a smoke field and hit a foe standing in it. This would allow thieves to stealth, get away regen or w/e but it would allow the opponent to counter the stealth by standing in the field.

I think this would allow for more interesting play from both side

but tell, how would that solve the Problem getting permastealthable?
thiefs would simply do the Hs+BP Combo on open field and stacking stealth again.
the new Change would simply prevent beeing permastealth because you cannot spam /stack stealth by using 6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6

@Cynz:
and what could be the most possible Thing they do after stealth…
indeed pressing 1 and then pressing 3 … dodge this ….and doing same Thing again or switching weapons…. dodge this

except to get backstab off you have to be in melee and behind the target, gl doing that while being chilled and crippled and your enemy having perma swiftness

it is way easier to dodge backstab than pistol channeled attacks

im sorry my english is lacking here, but to deal with the second one:
to dodge enemy BS is easy and also dodging channeling pistol attacks, because you can hear it and you know they are very expenxive initiative skills, so enemy cant use them very often and you have also the Option to simply interuppting them

you can’t always interrupt, because attack comes before target appears; by the time you get your interrupt(which also has cast time) the spell is already executed

channeled spells ARE harder to dodge than 1 simple attack simply because channeled spells have longer execution time and you would need 2 dodges mostlikely when for BS you would need 1

blinds also don’t work so well on channeled spells because only 1 tick will miss

there is reason why ranged attacks usually do less dmg than melee: ranged attacks are safe, ranged attacks don’t have such hard punishment for bad positioning; ranged attacks on thief don’t don’t get affected by chill/cripple

the only downside of ranged attacks is reflect shields but not every class has access to those w/o gimping themself out

i understand people want everyone build be viable in pvp but it is not possible, besides let’s face it p/p is probably the most braindead weapon set on thief; the only reason why it is not so popular in pvp is lack of moblity

P.S. i main thief myself btw

Alright, let me explain my idea again.

The chain of the skill should be like this:

• You press 5 and the Black Powder activates
• You can now see smoke around the thief as it is today and the field is already there.
• The thief starts a1/2 second channel where he aim at his target (you can clearly see this and prepare).
• The shot is fired.
• If the shot connects the thief will get stealth in a similar fashion as Cloak and Dagger.
• Not sure if I want to keep blind on the projectile, but the field should still pulse blind as it does today.

This skill work like the rangers longbow #3. It’s impossible for the Thief to stack stealth with this skill since it deal a little bit of damage. If the thief spam the skill he will simply get revealed because of the damage. The thief can’t chain stealth in open areas as it will need a target to gain stealth.

Since this is not a channel of several attacks it won’t cure any blind if the thief get blinded before the projectile is shot.

So, how does a minion master/ranger/whatev stop the thief from stealthing?
It’s hard enough to keep a thief from using cloak and dagger on pets right now. A ranged CnD without cooldown just asks to be exploited.
A CnD thief always has to get back into melee range, so you can predict his positioning. The only drawback of the bp thief would be having to stay within 900 range of any ai controlled entity to re-stealth safely.
Also against multiple players: Do you seriously suggest a whole group of people performing a simultaneous dodge, because some smoke field happened to appear on the ground?
Personally, I don’t see much problem with D/P right now. There should be some more skills, which apply revealed, tho, because to me, last refuge is far more deadly than any cc or damage source, an opponent possesses. Admittedly, my thief lives on the edge, which is partly responsible for last refuge getting into my way so often.
If D/P really is such a big issue, I’d agree with the proposition to make players unable to hit opponents with HS and still getting stealth, although, it would ruin some of my usual dungeon rotations.

Justice.3608:

Nike.2631:

What exactly are you doing with transmutation stones on trinkets…?

Sigh reading comprehension…..

With zerker trinkets getting a larger nerf, it makes a lot more sense to use non-zerker trinkets, i.e. soldiers. As a result, if you still want crit dmg, you have to now swap in zerker armour pieces. Hence, if you want to keep your look you need transmutation stones and if you don’t want to lose your AR you need the de-slotter. Therefore, ANet gains more cashshop sales from nerfing, at the risk of losing more players.

wut?
if both armor and trinkets have an equal ratio of other stats to crit damage, it doesn’t matter, where the crit damage comes from.
If you are worried about not dealing enough damage, transmute that tanky chest piece to zerk.

Let’s just look at it from the other classes view.
Let’s take a warrior. Full soldiers weapon and armor, full zerker trinkets, for example.
If the crit damage gets normalised, the crits of that build will deal significantly less damage. On the other hand, a thief, who typically runs a mix of zerk/valk will lose less overall damage. Most crit damage comes from trinkets and people got used to build characters this way. In a glass vs glass setup, it will be less damage on both sides and in a glass vs tanky situation, you will suddenly realize, you are far less fragile with the new ferocity.
The only thing left is to bring down condition damage, too. In all other situations, it will merely decelerate the fights slightly(or accelerate them, as opponents may build slightly less tanky, seeing as squeezing out some baseline damage from a tanky build will be harder with the change to trinket scaling).

Actually, you guys are overestinating the impact of the crit damage nerf.
It will hit those tanky specs of other classes, which relied on slotting crit damage in trinkets way harder than it will hit classes with a full crit setup(like, for example mixing valk and zerk).
The biggest impact of the change will be ascended trinkets with crit damage.
Basically, opponents will not be able to deal as much damage with tanky power specs anymore.
As long as both run power builds, the thief builds will still come out on top. The problem is condition builds. Let’s just hope, the nerf to cond damage comes alongside the crit nerf, or I will run around with my cond ranger till things have settled for a bit.

I only want Rock Dogs

Xenesis.6389:

The combination of having hard to get/replace gear, entire stat change, pushing to condition damage instead, 10% damage reduction, make this a really kittenty situation. On the other hand it nerfs thieves and their spike damage so I’m all for that :P

But the silver lining is I’m going to assume any gear that have crit damage % on it will be able to choose another stat combination, much like they did with the magic find % gear, unless they’re going to be real kittens and not even allow that.

Why would they do that? It’s not like the crit damage got outright removed from the item.
Back then with MF gear, the problem was that they couldn’t just slap on a rangom stat or leave the gear at 2 stats, so they had to offer the stat change. MF gear was used for a very specific purpose around that time and it could no longer be used for that purpose. This time, however, things are different. Crit damage is not removed, it gets rebalanced… And the gear still serves the exact same purpose(dealing damage) as before.

how about raisind the allstat ratio by 5% to compensate for the loss?
will make celestial slightly more tanky and slightly more condition based, tho.

Traps are currently not all that useful.
While shadow trap can potentially give insane strategic advantage and abmush trap is sometimes used in PvE to bolster dps, the other traps are pretty much lackluster.
I feel like traps should keep their “niche” role, where they are something, you’d put on yout hotbar, when you need them, rather than having whole builds revolve around them(hi ranger), but currently, there is no real reason to do so.

To start the discussion:
What if Needle Trap also applied 4 seconds of revealed to the target? Would the skill be used to block entrances to sieged towers and ward off portal bombs in WvW or would it still be garbage tier?

I thought of an interesting rework of the Downed penalty to reduce the impact on zerg fights.
Instead of reducing the hp when downed, it should reduce the max hp of the character.
So downing someone 2 times will mean, he only has about half his original hp any any backstab/treb shot/eviscerate can oneshot him from “full” hp.
The Revive orbs do something similar, so why not apply the same principle to downed?

Malevil.2104:

Another essay about how is berserker gear bad for game but still not a single valid argument how passive stats combination and defenses would make game more challeging compared to active defenses which berserker setup uses.

Face the harsh facts, timing you dodges, reflects, aegis require you to watch whats happening around you. Toughness and vitality adds only more margin for your error . Passive defenses dont add anything it term of required skill from player.

What game needs in terms of diversity is imo reworking how conditions work, not making passive defense stats more required.

You got it backwards.
It’s not about passive defense making the game more challenging, it’s about more challenging content(and challenging in the right way, not hit or miss one frame dodges of instagib setups) making passive defense more valuable.

fadeaway.2807:

Interesting to note that everyone gets annoyed by light fields.
Do they need buffed?

nah, the problem is another one:
Light fields are strong. Very strong. No1 denies that.
But look at this:

Dark field – 5(6) sources
Ethereal Field – 6(8) sources
Fire Field – 15 sources
Ice field – 2(5) sources
Light Field – 17(20) sources
Lightning Field – 3 sources
Poison Field – 6(11) sources
Smoke Field – 5(7) sources
Water Field – 4(10) sources
numbers in brackets also account for unreliable fields like the ones from downed or pet skills.

Now, keep in mind that the fire fields will mostly be cast on your opponents, while the light fields belong to support skills cast on the own zerg and you will get the picture.
There is simply an abundance of light fields on the battlefield and you can’t walk half an inch without having someone drop a light field on your feet. Taking away the combo field from half of those skills would only do more good than harm.

But let’s keep it at that because we are straying way too far away from the topic at hand.

ozma.3498:

I would recommend simply having ALL possible combos go off when somebody uses a finisher. For example, you have a fire field and a light field on top of each other and somebody does a whirl finisher. As a result, you get both burning bolts and cleansing bolts.

There are so many drawbacks to the whole overlapping fields thing. I don’t feel that allowing all combos to go off would be too overpowered, and it would promote things like stacking might in the middle of a boss fight with a fire field, without the Guardian’s hammer auto attack light field getting in the way (for example).

The Problem with this is group stacking, especially in world vs world.
There was a time, when there were turtle zergs, stacking at one point and shooting down anything in front of them with concentrated ranged damage.
Granted, back then, arrow carts did a whole lot less damage, but the main thing is, it would not have mattered at all.
What they did back then was exploiting an oversight by the devs, where the heal on shout trait of warriors(and many other shout skills, but the most broken thing was in fact the heal trait) did not have a target limit, so 50 men standing at one and the same spot, while spamming “FOR GREAT- ON MY- SHAKE IT OFF!!” would be constantly healed by far more than any ballista or treb could deal damage.
With this change, we’d essentially get that meta back. 50 guys stacking atop 5 water fields, 5 light fields, 10 fire fields and a couple ice and eternal fields for good measure, so every blast heals for 5k, grants frost and chaos armor, retal, 25 might stacks, while every projectile heals for 5 conditions, inflicts 10 seconds of burning, 5 stacks of confusion and a very long chill.
It wouldn’t be good for dungeons either. You’d see even more stacking, this time packing as many combo fields as possible and as many finishers as possible.

Arpheus.6918:

I think they could change the CD to 20 or 25 sec cd BUT if the high heal occurs the CD is increased to the 40 seconds.
That way Engineers can live with the really weak heal and get a strong heal when they would have died. After that strong heal the enemy anyways has alot of time to kill the engineer until the heal is back from CD.

You might have caught on to something here.
Even getting the short straw might not be the end of it for you, if the cooldown is shorter.
Basically, the heal will have 2 possibilities:
1) You eat a big hit and get a giant heal spike, AED goes on a long cooldown
2) You don’t take quite as much damage as you thought, get healed for a bit and got the AED back sooner.

Combine this with some improvements to the toolbelt skill(no1 likes aftercasts, they are stupid and take the action out of the game) and it might be a solid solution to the current problems with AED.

fadeaway.2807:

stale.9785:

I mentioned this in another thread, but I’ll throw it here, since it fits.

- make toughness far more important. IE: make damage mitigation important. What we have is encounters where the bulk of the enemies do almost no damage, and bosses operate on 1-shot mechanics.

What we need are encounters where the “trash” mobs deal upwards of 1k damage on cleave attacks, others give retaliation to themselves and their allies, and more are de-buffing the players. Seriously – a change to mob design would change the entire meta. If debuffing mobs, clearing conditions and controlling mob movement became as important as dealing damage to the enemies, well, the “dps dps dps dps 111111” meta would just die.

What’s the point of active dodges, blinds, blocks etc if mobs hit frequently and mitigation (aka passive play) is required?
You’ve just removed a core mechanism of gw2, removed skill play, and promoted passive play.

You need to choose, when to dodge, what to dodge and how to dodge, instead of just operating by “big multi-attack incoming, use dodge. After this, another attack comes, pop aegis, so you can keep hitting.” If all there is are one shot abilities, even the dodging core mechanic becomes trivial, because utilmately everyone can do it. You see the attack, you dodge, then you keep on hitting and hitting and hitting, till the next overly exaggerated one shot mechanic is fired at you, where you dodge again.
In pvp, you get hit by small attacks left and right and use your dodges whenever you need a brief second to set up a bigger attack or your enemy throws a big attack. Something like this would work for PvE, too. It would force players to use their brain for once.

I have to note that the OP did not refer to Asura being cute, but about the trend for Asura to try to be as cute as possible. As you pointed out, Asura are cute by nature, but the tendency to show off with looks rather than intellect is highly alarming.

Just thought about a funny idea: What if a bunch of players stack up right on top of the skritt to shield him from snowballs?
Bonus points, if they equip stun-response traits.

Let’s look at fixed lists.
The most useful setup for WvW will probably be:

Blast:
Fire>Water>Ice>Lightning>Light>Etereal>Poison>Smoke>Dark
Leap:
Water>Smoke>Lightning>Ethereal>Ice>Fire>Light>Dark>Poison
Projectile:
Ethereal>Light>Fire>Ice>Dark>Water>Poison>Lightning>Smoke
Whirl:
Ethereal>Dark>Light>Fire>Ice>Water>Poison>Lightning>Smoke

Now, let’s simply assume, this is the order, which was set and the whole zerg is running this order.
Enemy contact, zerg fight rolling back and forth, LBow warrior throws a f1 for massive damage, enemy zerg runs out, commander wants to regroup.
Keep in mind that fire field on the ground. With the current system, they could simply ignore it, throw their own water field on top of it and begin to heal, because the water field would then take priority.
However, the problem is not solved by switching up the order, a ranger desperately needing his self heal(which is tied to a water field) might screw up your retal stacking or might stacking,
Speaking of retal stacking, if the commander actually WANTS to stack retal, things will get complicated with fixed lists. Having a fixed order would really mess up many situations, where long lasting fields are still on the ground from any situation, where their use might have been justified or not. Fact is, they are there and dropping your own fields on top of them won’t do any good. So zergs would have to not only avoid enemy fields, but their own ones aswell.

First field takes priority is a desaster, too.
The longest lasting combo fields are CPC, Hallowed Ground(10 seconds, traited 12 seconds), WoR(10, traited 12), Healing Spring(10 seconds), Well of Blood(10 seconds).
In a zerg fight, that is an eternity. How can you know, your commander won’t want to stack might, where you just used your healing spring to not die from the accumulated burning on you? As soon, as someone throws a stupid field, which happens to have a higher priority, the entire zerg will have to move out of this field.
In the current system, if someone throws a light field over your water field(for example a necro, using well of blood), there will be another water field at hand to clear the situation. Just overwrite it with something useful again and you are good to go.
With oldest field first, you might have to either wait 10 entire seconds or move out of the area entirely in order to get those blast heals. This means, communicationg the fact, you move out of the area because of a bad combo field to your entire zerg and hoping they follow through. And hoping, you got the time to group a second time and get blasting this time around.

My suggestion: First improve the current mechanic.
Own fields>party fields>rest.
Then pick the most recent.

If this is not enough, allow the player to group the fields in 2(read: TWO) categories: Wanted finishers and unwanted finishers. The game will try to trigger the ones in the “wanted” category before triggering the ones in the “unwanted” category.
If there are multiple fields of the same category, again, most recent field gets priority.

Regarding the subject of asuran cultural values and asuran intellect being compromised by bookah influence, I have to share your concerns. My ears are standing to no end, whenever I witness some mentally impaired member of our species running around, sporting pink, styled hair and frilly clothes.
Maybe our society has become too liberal. All those skritt-brained college rejects are trying to prostitute themselves by appealing to bookahs, rather than doing important work. You can say what you want about the Inquest, but at least, they keep their people in line.
Maybe the problem runs deeper. We don’t have to struggle to survive anymore. People are getting too soft. Even with impending doom from the dragons, half of tyria being torn by war and whole landscapes being razed periodically by Scarlet’s Minions, things in Rata Sum are awfully quiet.
Because the fight for survival plays no role in this world, travelling is conveniently done using the waypoint system and once you get to a certain point, it’s not even remotely challenging to take down a dragon or two, as this stagnant world doesn’t seem to chane quite fast enough, the only thing left for them to do is make themselves look better.
I have yet to find a way to kill them off for good, but whenever I encounter some “cute” asura in the mist wars, I will first demonstrate the superior capabilities of my intellect before crushing their worthless brain with a bronze dolyak statue.

Pathologist Noma, College of Statics

Xillllix.3485:

Are you sure it’s hard enough to play an ele? They sure didn’t seem to think so when they gave us this new “healing skill” that doesn’t heal much unless you damage 5 targets, for which it will heal 20% more per target if they don’t block your heal, which in turn will then heal more but only if you manage to cast a water field under yourself before and don’t get interrupted in the 1 sec long cast time.

I mean Arcane Brilliance (or whatever it’s called) should win an award for the most uselessly complicated healing skill in a video game. I’m quite sure they will look at it in a few months and wonder why they implemented such a complicated healing skill for the most complicated class to play.

It is pretty much the only heal skill in the game, which doubles as an additional attack while also being a blast finisher. Combine it with water fields and you are good to go. I’ve already seen pvp builds, which make good use of it.
Compared to the ranger spirit, it’s far from useless.

do NOT go something like 30/30/10.
15 in wilderness survival are essential for protection on dodge.
You can go 30/25/15/0/0 or 30/20/20/0/0. The first one is more range-centric, with a bit more damage, the second one is a bit more defensive giving access to traits for your sidearm, which is either the greatsword(defensive sidearm) or sword+warhorn(aggressive sidearm). 30/15/25 could also be an option, tho I don’t have numbers on whether the 10% extra damage on the initial burst(same bonus as scholar runes) is worth the stat loss from not having the 5 in skirmishing. I don’t think, it is.

As for traits, steady focus is a must, the rest of the marksmanship line is up to your preference. There’s a ton of good traits in there, so pick any 2 and you are fine.
from wilderness survival, nothing beats the reduction in fall damage.

Runes: Runes of the Ranger. Don’t bother with scholars. Retal and siege will get you below 90% regardless, while ranger runes provide a permanent 5% boost.
Alternatively, just stuff ruby orbs in there.

About skills, muddy terrain is one of the best, if not the best skill, you can get. Having that on demand AoE immobilize just makes kiting and zerg fighting that much smoother.

Pets: Your best bet is probably a combination of devourer+dog. You can run the classic three tailed devourer and have an on demand knockdown in case someone wants to get close.

Also, if you want to play, go play, if you don’t, then don’t.
It’s not like you need to pay fees or anything. Just play when you feel like it, as long as you feel like it.

Just look at the cost of those ascended pieces. Most WvW players will probably rather sell the Damask to make up for their low income through WvW than go for that negligible stat increase.
Exotic is still the go-to armor and the ascended users are few and far between.

Now, Ascended weapons and trinkets – those actually make a difference.