Guild Wars 2

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vengeance

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Illusion_of_Life

Prolly one of these.
My money is on the first one.

if you want to flip camps, you may want to consider throwing in healing signet and S/P. You can easily slot in caltrops and go to town with your sword to tank the camp.
Doing it with a shortbow takes long and leaves you vulnerable(plus with 2 caravans or extra guards, it will be a really tough nut to crack with a shortbow), S/P is significantly faster.

If anything, it’s too shallow.
Not enough strategic variety. For an Esports title, timing should be an important factor. There should be time windows, where x is strong, but y becomes stronger, the longer it drags on, etc.
You just can’t create a game, where some players dance around points for 10 minutes and the team, which dances better, will win in the end. An interesting solution would be making kills more meaningful. Lock out dead players for longer or make kills give more points. Then we’d see stuff like headhunter strategies clashing with checkpoint bunker strategies, with flexible roaming being the middle ground.

Balance itself was never a problem for esports. Conceptual flaws are way more devastating.

Someone also pointed out in some thread, that the extremes are too… well… extreme.
You got bunkers, which can not be killed by “balanced” builds and glass canons, which can one-shot “balanced” builds. Making the bunkers slightly less tanky and making the glass canons hit slightly less hard would actually do a lot to help build diversity(and thus maybe enabling more strategies).

DeWolfe.2174:

What I haven’t seen spoken about is character effectiveness. Because after these changes, characters with Celestial items will be weaker in comparison to other power builds. They’ll be especially weaker toward condition builds.

The percentage of a pool of points matters. The maximum crit damage percentage is only around the 120’s. Thus, 6 points is about 5% of the total pool. Because Crit Damage is a multiplier, every point into the pool is stronger than the point before. Making Celestial items somewhat character effective because they add additional crit. Now an additional 6 point in power, which has a pool well of 2500, is only adding 0.25% to the pool. Which is statistically insignificant.

I simply can’t see how adding such a miniscule amount to the base numbers is somehow equal to the character effectiveness Celestial items are right now. Which is already not very much!!

this is wrong.
Every point into the pool adds less than the point before did.
I made a spreadsheet and the ratio in the crit damage modifier(1 + 0.5 + (crit/100)) decreases with every step.
The first point of crit damage adds 0.66% to the modifier, the 130th point adds 0.36%.

When I roam as a thief, I tend to avoid engineers like the plague.
If I see an engineer approaching me, I typically run or at least don’t engage fully and always keep a good retreat option at hand.

that has various reasons. First off, it’s hard to make an engineer, which doesn’t “accidentally” have access to numerous control skills. Control skills make things hard for thieves, but let’s be more specific here.

Condition engis eat thieves for breakfast. As soon, as a thief got both burning and confusion as well as poison, he is pretty much toast.

Static discharge engis? In a straight up glass canon vs glass canon battle, the static discharge engi will win many if not all of the matchups. Dagger thieves just can’t compete here. Bear in mind, that a sword thief might actually have a fighting chance against an SD engi.

Nade or Bomb engi? Will just keep spamming his feet. Thief can’t engage without getting instantly vaporized.

Let’s go even further.
What kind of skills does engi have, which screw thieves over?
rifle: insta cast knock back, which can be covered with an autoattack to remove blinds, high burst against immobile targets with jump, root skill with net, big burst at point blank… This thing kills thieves by itself, alright?
Pistols: Conditions, conditions and more conditions. Needless to say, anything with conditions is bad news for thieves.

kits:
Flamethrower got an instant knockback, an instant blind and some great damage potential, while it can also deliver quite a big burning burst with the toolbelt skill.
It’s not that much of a threat, compared to the alternatives, but it’s still strong.

Tool Kit got an annoying block, some confusion application and a bleeding field, which can cleanse blinds effectively. The pull is icing on the cake, but can be quite potent.

Nades and bombs are the bane of any glass canon melees.

Turrets:
Turrets in general are a pain to deal with, cause as soon, as the thief becomes visible, the turrets will lock on to him and fire. Flame turret is particularly nasty, because… Well… It burns.

Interestingly, there’s also those utility goggles, hardly anyone seems to use, which grant immunity to blind.

bottom line, pretty much everything about the engi spells doom for the thief.

Some other classes:
Power necros are strong against dagger bursters but weak against pistol whip spammers.
Condition necros, on the other hand, just eat any thief.

Guardians have been mentioned as weak versus thieves before. Actually, theoretically, there is a build, utilizing loads of burning and condition damage gear. However, hardly anyone plays like this.

Mesmers are so-so. In a straight up duel, the mesmer got the upper hand. In a small group fight, however, the thief can ruin the day for the mesmer pretty badly. It’s not as much of a hard counter as it is the mesmer simply being the best 1v1 class.

Warriors are a joke. I’ve never ran from a solo warrior with my thief. Ever.

Rangers can be a pain in the kitten , but usually they aren’t. That’s mostly due to the ranger class being incredibly hard to play properly. A good ranger, however, will tear any thief apart.

Eles? Come on, who am I trying to kid. If the stars align, the thief will bite the dust and else the ele will. This matchup is rather hard to predict due to the ele skills being very hard to land properly. If most attacks find their mark, the thief is dead, else, the ele is. Simple as that.

Thief vs thief? If there is a winner, it’s usually the thief, I’d say…

Doggie.3184:

Still full Zerk for best damage. You’d only use Valk if you want to be 100% dependant on backstab, which will limit your ability to change builds. So if you make armor I’d suggest making Zerker and not Valk since it’s 100x harder to get than the trinkets.

You could toss wvw +5 power infusions into yer stuffz (if it has offensive slot) if you really wanted to and don’t care about Fractals.

for clarification:
I meant the ascended trinkets with zerk major and valkyrie “jewels”.
the +103 power, +50 preci, +18 vit, +8% crit rings would be an example here.

I really like the zerk+valkyrie trinkets.

Don’t go spammin’ pistol whip…

black powder shot → shortbow → blast it!
then rezz :>

I take it, you are talking about the regular D/P stalker trash, which keeps trying and trying till the stars align or you get bored of them and make a mistake.
If you are talking about seriously good players, possibly with 25/30/0/0/15 or 10/30/0/0/30 and probably D/D, who will slam into you from ~3k range with chained shadowsteps, oneshot you and blink back immediately, no single profession in the game will save you. If they want to kill you, they will.

On my D/D thief, if I see an engineer, I run.
I won’t check, what kind of buff food he has, I won’t check, what kind of stacking sigil he has, I will simply run like hell.(of course, if he has no buff food and no sigil, I will carefully take a shot at him to see, what he’s made of)

Let’s look at the possibilities.
Condition engi: duh… As soon, as a thief got both burning AND confusion on him, he’s toast.
Grenade/bomb engi: No way to backstab this one. He will just spam his feet and you got no angle to attack from.
SD engi: omgwtfbbq.
Tanky build: Have fun with that lol

Even with the new changes, stacking sigils will still create massive problems.
First off, you can put a stacking sigil into an underwater weapon and still maintain the stacks, when taking off your stacking weapon on land.
Secondly, you will lose all your stacks, if you have to swap in another weapon for some utility/speed buffs/clearing siege from walls and this weapon happens to not have a sigil.
Lastly, Engis and Eles, will probably still feel the impact of this change harder than other professions due to not having weapon swap.

Now, here is an interesting idea:
The sigils will only provide a bonus, if equipped.
Sigils can be interchanged and are compatible to eachother, so once you are stacked to 25, you can have a +power stacking sigil on one weapon set and a +precision sigil on another weapon set and when swapping, you will receive the respective bonus. You can also have both a +precision sigil and a +power sigil on the same weapon set and receive both bonuses.(however, you can’t have 2 identical sigils on the same weapon set)

If you take off the weapon completely, you still keep your 25 stacks, they just won’t have any effect. Once you equip and select your weapon again, it will provide the respective bonus again.

How it works:
Whenever you kill a foe with a sigil equipped, you will receive a “kill charge”.
This kill charge does nothing on its own. It will merely determine, how many attributes you get from stacking sigils. If you have, says, a weapon with a sigil of life on it, you will receive an amount of healing power proportionate to the number of stacks. If you swap to another weapon set with, says, a sigil of bloodlust, you will now receive an amount of power proportionate to the number of stacks.

Now, of course, this is a huge step down from the current system, but remember, that numbers can be changed. I like the concept better than what currently exists and definitely better than the half-baked concept, which is about to come. Obviously, those sigils would need a slightly stronger attribute bonus to still be worth being picked over other alternatives, but at the same time, you’d no longer be restricted to one kind of stacking sigil or could even do crazy stuff like focusing on different attributes with different weapon sets to a much larger degree, than you can now.

yodog.4208:

MATCH the OPness of warrior and ranger.

Stopped reading right there.
The game is heading into a good direction, but food still is in dire need of rebalancing.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Eh, I think most people say condis are cheesy because they can’t be bothered to bring appropriate condi cleanse. “But I need utilities X, Y, and Z”. Well, then you eat condition damage. “But I need traits A and B, otherwise I lose out on damage.” Well, then you eat condition damage.

I don’t feel bad for these people. Before Cleansing Ire and the new Zerker Stance, I used to run my Warrior with Runes of Lyssa and Signet of Stamina both specifically to manage condis. Runes of Lyssa boons were ok, but I saved it so I could use it to clear condis. I sacrificed other utilities like Endure Pain or Bull’s Charge (depending) in order to bring Signet of Stam. I didn’t complain.

I’d say your condi build is more “easy”, less “cheesy”. However, it’s less easy if you fight someone who can deal with condis, but often the condition pressure allows a Condi Necro to keep up pressure against mobile/target breaking opponents whereas a Power Necro can have trouble in that regard. That’s the only reason I’m calling it “easy”.

At the end of the day, play what you have fun with, regardless of complainers.

@Shaogin: Two health bars, GG imba Necro survivability.

What cr should my friggin thief bring?
The only active condi cleanse, I got is signet of agility, which removes 1 condition.
Another one is in the shadow arts line. I don’t like the lame playstyle of hiding over and over again, till I win the fight because my opponent got bored to death. I wanna stand straight in the enemy’s face and beat him down quickly, so shadow arts is kinda ruled out.

Oh, and there is Hide in Shadows… Guess, I gotta put that 30 sec cd heal on my hotbar and die every time I get immobilized or crippled, because I got no withdraw on my bar.
Well, my thief still got an easy solution. If I got the initiative, I can just kill the condition user faster, if I am running away, I will use my shortbow 5 to create some distance or die trying(mostly the latter), but this is perfectly fine. I never built my thief to survive by shrugging off attacks anyway. It’s about keeping the distance and striking when ready.

Actually, conditions are not THAT op. What’s op is the +40% duration food.

Let’s compare it to other values.
Cond food gives +40% duration as the primary attribute. Other food got +100 of an attribute as the primary attribute.
So we could deduce here, that 40% duration equal 100 attribute points…
…Until we remember trait lines, where those 40% duration would equal 400 attribute points.
So we got a food here, which provides the equivalent to 400 attribute points as primary stat?
There is food, which provides +200 of an attribute… For 30 seconds after a kill.
This thing right here, however, is simply insane.
Speaking of other food, there is other food, increasing the duration of conditions. This time specialized in increasing the duration of only a single condition by 15%.
Fifteen. Obviously, increasing the duration of burning is way stronger than merely increasing the duration of all conditions, so the 40% on the much weaker all condition food is justified.

Once you look at these numbers, however, everything fits right into place if you replaced the “40” with a “10”.
The cond duration will have the same conversion ratio as the cond duration in the trait lines and you will have the choice between increasing the duration of a single condition by 15% or of all conditions by 10%.
If you are still not convinced, take a look at runes.
All condition runes: 10%
Single condition runes: 15%.

new #2 skill, which ignores the toughness of the target?
heck, I’d even mule my ascended mats, which pretty much stuff 3 entire bags on my ranger back to another char and rock ranger again.

It is already a reality that certain races mix well with certain professions and especially for norn and asura, there exist builds, which only work with them as race, like for instance a MoC based interrupt ranger just is not complete without technobabble.

The strong and possibly build defining racials are:

Asura: Technobabble, Pain inverter. Radiation field is somewhat strong, too but not necessarily build defining.
Human: Dogs. These things kick some serious kitten . Also got access to active condition removal.
Norn: Elite forms.

Mesmer: Asura(moar interrupts)
Ranger: Asura(moar interrupts), Human(somewhat reliable CR and an elite which comboes nicely with the surplus of snares, the ranger possesses), Norn(well, there is that 25k damage oneshot build with bear form #5)
Engineer: Norn(at last some useful elite for roaming), Human(at last some useful elite for duels)
Guardian: Norn(elite for roaming)
Ele: Actually pretty neutral. I’ve seen some eles rocking Leopard, but honestly, FGS is almost as good and more useful outside of escapes.
Necro: Norn(Elite for roaming), Asura(some access to confusion)
Warriors are pretty neutral, as are thieves.

As you can see, many of those classes work pretty well with the norn forms in case things go badly. They either got lackluster elites or no built in escapes, or even both. Norn elites are not that bad utility wise(well, you at least get a launch attack) and can be used to escape from bad situations.

About invis + shadowstep stomping, it can be countered by:
-necro staff 5 on the downed body
-making the downed player invis
-throwing a banner before the stomp can finish

If you want to guarantee a stomp, you probably need a mesmer and a ranger. Ranger applies revealed with sick’em, mesmer drops time warp and goes quickness invul stomp with a blink on the hotbar.

Yeah, let’s talk mesmer lol
invis stomp? check.
invul stomp? check.
stability stomp? check.
blink tracing stomp? check.
double blink stomp? check.
blind stomp? check. Coupled with invis on prestige.
quickness stomp? while impractical, still, check.

yeah, the problem is definitely the thief lol

infantrydiv.1620:

Ickorus.4518:

Honestly the entire longbow doesn’t make sense to me, it’s a totally unfocused weapon; what they should do is rework it into a long range AoE weapon and give us a rifle to use as a high damage single target weapon.

This^

They could take literally every skill except for #5 on Longbow, put it on rifle, and then give us a brand new longbow ideal for skirmishing and wvw with more AoE.

There is one problem with this sentence.
Longbow.
Skirmishing.
Historically, the longbow was a heavy range weapon.
It is a weapon designed for stationary long range warfare.

If Asura got an advantage, it’s not that animations are hard to see. The animations are the most ridiculously exaggerated ones over all the races by a wide margin. if anything, animations are easier to see on asuras.

The advantages, Asura have is about dodge rolling.
Test it yourself, when fighting an asura. How easy is it to keep track of the movement of, say a Norn vs how easy it is to track an asura.
A dodge will move an asura by a distance like twice his body size. So you, who was tracking something tiny with your eyes right a couple of seconds ago will have difficulties finding him again, if there are some flashy spells going on. On the other hand, a dodge roll of a norn does nothing of that sort. Actually, the edge of his new location will overlap with the old one.
That’s the problem, when facing asuras. Their positions are hard to keep track of. The skills themselves can be spotted far easier than when a Norn makes the same moves.

Don’t compare Racials to profession specific counterparts, unless almost any profession got a decent counterpart. The idea about racials is NOT that your Ele might take kormir over cleansing fire, it’s that your ranger gets an active condition removal or your interrupt based mesmer gets another instant cast interrupt(technobabble)

It’s not about replacing profession skills, it’s about filling holes in your profession’s skillset or stacking up similar skills.

Let’s look at the elites.
Asura(considering, the racial utilities here are quite strong, the elites can be on the weak side, so it’s not THAT bad)
Melee Golem: Garbage
Range Golem: Slightly better than garbage
Hazmat: You call that a skill? Roleplay value

Charr
Charrzooka: Better than no ranged weapon at all. On professions with decent ranged options, it’s garbage tho.
Warband Support: Roleplay value/some meat shields in case, your profession got no summons
Artillery: Say, what?

Norn(they could do with longer durations, honestly)
Raven: Terribad. Buff plz
Wolf: Good, while it lasts. More sustain than any other transform skill in the game. Should have some sort of stability from a skill and it would really be able to tank stuff.
Bear: Decent for a burst with charge
Leopard: God mode

Human
Balthazar: God mode
Grenth: It’s a decent skill, honestly. Lacks some serious impact, tho, so players will often grab higher impact skills. Good candidate for cooldown reductions.
Melandru: Honestly, any skill of the avatar has some serious value and impact. It suffers from the roundabout way of doing things.

Sylvari(these are all good skills, yet they lack impact. All of em are candidates for a lowered cooldown)
Dog: Decent pet
Root: Decent invul skil
Spirit: I have yet to figure out, how strong it is exactly on this one. Soneone enlighten me.

About all that Favoritism:
Any character on a profession with weak elites will be more flexible in wvw, if the character is a norn.
Roaming Guardian? Try norn.
Roaming Engineer? Try norn.
Roaming Necro? Might be possible with norn.

sonic.7592:

Wow so much rage here.
I’m a casual player and I really like this change. I admit I am pretty new to GW2 but these changes bringing me more and more to pvp.
I think people writing here are pvp cracks who enjoy to calculate and doing the maths behind.
I mean how do you actually create your builds? Do you f.e. just change the jewel and then started to fight and afterwards researched the battle log for changes?
I pretty like when changes are visible. And for me it is rather visible if you only have to focus on changes in a certain direction, f.e. skills and traits.

You basically make a build by playing it.
You have an idea, maybe to exploit a specific trait, maybe to fulfil a specific role, but you start with an idea.
You select your traits, make your choice of stats and try to find good runes to complement your build.
As it’s a new build, you are not familiar with, you may die quite often. However, at that point, you don’t really know, whether it’s a flaw in the build or just you being stupid. So you simply beef up your build by throwing in some hitpoints or make your attrition build a bit more aggressive by slotting in more damage. You basically try to put on some bandaid with the jewels, so you can properly test the build for flaws.
Changing the jewels is the easiest way to make a build more stable, because you can round up the often times pretty onesided stat distribution. Swapping runes or traits, till you find something, which works by chance, is a bad thing. You are basically guessing at that point. The mixed stats from jewels will allow you to make the build a bit more playable. At this point, they are basically training wheels. You can examine the flaws of your build easier, when it’s a bit less of a loose canon.
Changing stuff wildly is, again, not how you should approach things. Mix jewels, till you find something, which works, then stick with it and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the build. Before you try to fix the weaknesses by swapping in new runes or changing traits, you gotta consider, whether this will destroy any strengths, you may want to keep.
Then, you just test the new setup. Usually, having a full amulet is stronger than mixing(read: your build is more streamlined towards one goal), so you may want to put back the original jewels, once the build becomes stable enough to do so.
On the other hand, however, there are builds, where the jewel will stay in forever. Instead of a bandaid fix, it may be build defining here to have that little bit of extra whatever.

Swapping out jewels often times does not happen in order to fix weaknesses of the build, it will often times be an attempt to make the build playable, so you can properly examine it and fix its flaws.

where’s the slots for underwater weapons?
gg anet

Ascended weapons on power builds make the biggest difference.
Ascended trinkets won’t make much of a difference after the upcoming patch, right now, it’s a big difference, again, on power builds.
Armor makes no big difference, as does ascended stuff on non-power builds.
Whether those burns tick for 1320 or 1400 won’t matter all that much. but as for power builds, you are looking on a difference of as much as 8.5k vs 10k backstabs.

The main points, where ascended stuff is different:
-crit damage on trinkets(till upcoming patch anyway)
-weapon base damage

that being said, I still have to craft ascended daggers for my thief.
My Dreamer comes first, tho.

I don’t get your problem anyway, just keep a stacking sigil in your underwater weapon and you are free to swap your weapon out…

Prysin.8542:

Corrupt Boon, Bountiful Theft, Null Field, Sigil of Nullification, Mind Stab, Larcenous Strike – they all rip boons, some better then others, but they all do it. Capitalize on that.

helps against a gigablob of 40 stacked heavies…
This game got some seriously good counters to large groups with all those wall type skills, yet nothing to stop boons on a large scale from going bonkers, while stability makes all those wall skills nearly useless.

It should be redesigned to a stack based system imho.
Skills apply x stacks for y seconds. Incoming disables take a stack off the stability with the shortest remaining duration. Basically, it won’t help you to charge straight through 20 stacked static fields, but it will still stop that back breaker from breaking your back.
With this, traits and skills could be redesigned completely.
All those plague, tornado, etc grant 3 stacks of stabi every 3 seconds for their duration.
Foot in the grave, for example, can now apply a single stack of stability for 10 seconds, so the trait would allow you to have full uptime of a single stack of stability by toggling death shroud.
There can be lengthy single stacks and short burst full stacks.

as I don’t want to stick around forever and reset fights, till I win by some diceroll, I typically avoid going full sa.
I found 10/30/0/0/30 d/d to be quite enjoyable. You got that low cd long range steal, which can strip stuff like stability and protection and that big backstab to toy around with.

Just wanted to mention another use of the trait:
You can cast meteor shower and swap to earth, while casting, giving you some nice resistance against some collateral AoE, you might need to shrug off, while you are channeling

if that trait was made…
I just say signet auramancer.

Zutha.5091:

So what happens if a thief’s trait is said to Guarantee a crit hit, but the ele trait says you can’t get crit hit?

Will the game explode?

you can’t critically hit obstacles with that trait, either, so why should it work on ele?

WARSaints.1502:

TROLL!!!!!

number 2 should not be a trait.. should be a AI FIX!!!!!!
Number 5 is ridiculously trolling….. why would ANET do that? Making Rangers even more useless to ourselves…

what are you talking about? these are legit and confirmed.

dead serious

20/30/0/0/20

pistol(blood)/pistol(accuracy), sword(fire)/pistol(accuracy)
DA: sundering strikes, combined training
CS: pistol mastery, combo crit, new trait
T: Thrill of the Crime OR Flanking Strikes, Ricochet.

I’m currently using a similar build(with executioner), using some makeshift equipment(loads of valkyrie stuff in there) from my backstab build.
I can imagine it doing fairly well with oil, leech food and a healthy mix of assassin, knight and zerker gear.
As for dungeons, you just fire away with your pistol against soft targets, while you pistol whip everything, which comes in large packs or with devastating AoE, which needs to be evaded. In WvW, it’s fairly fragile.
It works both in dungeons and small scale WvW, but I have yet to gauge the overall efficiency, especially, once executioner gets dropped for the new trait, it might be surprisingly stable in wvw. For WvW, you may wanna drop sundering strikes for mug, tho.

pretty sure, they stack additively.

how about tacking it onto that semi-useless GM trait, we will be getting?

Actually, a modern soldier carries more weight than an armored knight of olden times.
Not even that, in the case of the armor, the weight is distributed way better. As plated armors are customized and optimized for the owner anyway, there is not much resistance, when moving, too. It would take time getting used to the armor and you’d have to learn some different sprinting techniques, but don’t mistake people in plate armor for slow. Of course, slower than a man of similar training with leather armor, but definitely not slower than the speed of an untrained person.

Obviously, there was specialized armor for heavy penetrative power, like for charging into spear bearer lines or experimental armor to stop bullets/bolts from penetrating(crossbows and muskets still punched right through, so that idea was abandoned) But normal armor was not as much of a hindrance to the user, as you’d think.

If you want healing power, celestial is probably your best bet.
Still, the prospects don’t sound THAT overwhelming.

As of the upcoming patch:
1. Grab alt weapon with bloodlust
2. Put Bloodlust sigil into your underwater weapon(it’s 2 handed anyway, so it will get an extra slot with the patch)
3. Kill stuff
4. Switch to main weapon
5. ??
6. Profit!

Such awesome.
Much amaze.

hwy does a flat 25% crit damage loss result in a flat 25% damage loss?
Unless for some weird reason, your skills only deal your critical damage bonus as damage, there is still the base damage and the base critical dammage to take into account.
Let’s just day, you had 100% crit chance and 100% crit damage before, and lose 25% crit dammage now.
Your attacks will deal 100% + 50% + 100% = 250% damage before and 100% + 50% + 75% = 225% damage after.
The total damage loss equals: 225/250=0.9, so you will lose a flat 10%.
For an all-in crit build, the damage loss will probably be closer to 13%, but that’s still far from the 25%, you claimed.

Rym.1469:

Worst of all, Ferocity is a flat nerf. That’s the main flaw. It doesn’t nerf full-zerker builds. It nerfs ALL Power builds.

Juggermancer laughs at your pathetic understanding of a “power build”.

Ok guys, let’s get one thing straight.
This 10% increase is not the same as any other 10% increase.
There are many 10% damage increases in various trait lines, but this trait will possibly end up giving a much stronger damage increase than the 15% from the power line.

All those + x% damage bonuses are additive. This means, all the + x% are summed up, and the result is used as a multiplier for damage.
As people running max dps builds typically stack up those bonuses(for example rune of the scholar + sigil of force + various traits), a 10% damage bonus will ultimately increase the total dps by ~~6% tops.
This trait right here is nuts, because it increases everything by a straight up 10%.
10% more condition output(10% more bleeds, 10% more vulnerability) from auto attacks, 10% more damage output, 10% faster stuns, shorter attacks to fit in dodges more easily, etc.
The fact, it is in Arms is not as bad, as people make it out to be. If it was in any of the current mainstream lines, it would probably end up too powerful.

You guys forget one thing about rousing resilience:
You can’t calculate it as “overall reduction over a minute”.
If you feel the need to stun break, it’s because you are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some baddies are ready to pound on you and they will all launch their big attacks, trying to burst you down, before the stun wears off.
I can imagine that trait to be fairly useful in hammer train vs hammer train fights.
There is another problem, which is worth mentioning: If you want to make full use of the trait, you need to drop cleansing ire. Basically, if you got that trait, your cleansing ire will compete heavily with last stand for that master tier slot. With this trait, last stand will basically read:
“whenever you are hit by an incoming control effect, gain stability, swiftness and 1000 toughness instead.”

Jabberwock.9014:

-Protection on attuning to earth from elemental attunement no longer reduces as much damage.
-Extra tougness in earth from earth 5 minor won’t reduce as much damage.
-Obsidian flesh is not as useful since it doesn’t prevent as much damage.

learn2math.
Those things stack multiplicatively, unless there is some hidden mechanic, which I missed, where protection reduces normal damagge by 33% and critical damage by 50% or something.
Protection will always reduce damage by 33%, regardless of whether it’s a crit or not. This means, your opponent will have to deal 50% more damage to ultimately kill you.
The same applies to toughness.
I mean, if there is a thief trying to backstab you, you don’t say “I won’t dodge this, because then my protection boon won’t be able to reduce as much damage and go to waste”. No. You dodge the f out of there or try to make him face-stab.

Also to the guys complaining about having no damage output in earth attunement: For WvW, try lightning hammer. You could probably just stand there, pounding at your enemies’ hammer train as long as you got some decent gear and no zerk rubbish.
probably Ether renewal, Lightning hammer, armor of earth, lightning flash, fgs. For weapons, either a staff or s/f, depending on whether your group has enough elementalists.

For pvp, it will probably come down to a s/f build, if you want to bunker. Got additional condi cleanse in earth, some invulnerability to tap in before switching to other attunements and some extra toughness from the barrier.

For PvE, you don’t want this trait anyway.

Actually, I like invigoration precision.
People just get the wrong idea and try to incorporate it into some current builds.
Consider it in a p/p build with ~75% critical chance, signet of malice, leech food and possibly a sigil of blood. You’d just stand there, face-tanking elite mobs.
It’s a good trait, because:
1) it gives the thief survivability. Exactly the kind of survivability, thief kinda lacks: One which doesn’t need ptv gear or anything to be worth a thing or requires you to drop your attacks. You can just keep pounding. Having 25 stacks of bleed? Keep pounding and look, who’s standing last. Weakness? Try dodge rolls with fleet of foot and keep pounding.
2) it has a nice touch, as it encourages you to stack precision over crit damage/power. Getting some Assassin pieces never seemed so tempting.
3) it synergizes with other on-critical-hit stuff. Mainly opportunist, but also stuff like leech food, leech sigils(if they are still on crit and not changed to on hit).

Snow.2048:

As it stands, this is just another nerf to those who wish to go full divine! If I want to be holy and equally imbued with all stats, they should let me!

You are misunderstanding the reason behind why 14/14/14/14 is so op.
If you commit to one trat line, you don’t have points in another trait line, thus creating holes.With 14/14/14/14/14, you avoid any overspecialisation. It can also be called the suck of all trades.

brb, drafting a crit immune zerg buster hammer ele.

And about lightning rod:
I’ll laugh so hard if lightning rod combined with wall/static can deal damage to an unlimited number of targets in zerg fights.

14/14/14/14/14?
such a broken build. I’m actually glad, Arena net fixed it, so ppl can no longer exploit this op stuff.

Actually, the only thing left to balance things out is a nerf to condition duration food down from +40% to +10% and maybe some changes in condition scaling.
As for roaming and fighting opponents, which are NOT geared towards conditions(which need a nerf), just consider one thing: Your damage might be lower, but your opponent will either dish out less damage, too, or be less tanky to compensate for the loss of damage.
Many players run soldiers or knight armor with zerk trinkets right now and exploit any other source of critical damage with ricidulous overscaling(like crit food). These players will be affected by the change way harder, than the all-in glasscanons out there, so in the end, even with the change, it will even out in the end.

Shiny Lion’s Arch Model!
Stuff, stuff, stuff!

Nightmare.1234:

their been a lot of speculation around the main dragon behind scarlet’s plans (good intentions or bad)

I don’t think, her intentions can be measured in “good” or “bad”.
From what I take, her intentions are pretty much neutral. Her actions, on the other hand…
Let’s not talk about her actions here. My take on her plans is, that she simply wants to shut up that annoying voice in her head. Mordremoth seems more likely, but it might not even be a dragon at all.

Actually, the biggest problem with stealth is not the stealth itself, it’s the traits, which boost stealth.
The problem is, especially on the thief class, that there are way too many traits, which promote staying in stealth for ages.
A simple solution would be just making those traits a bit more bursty.

Let’s give some examples:
Shadow’s Embrace – Remove conditions while in stealth; 1 cond per 3 seconds
becomes: Remove two conditions when entering stealth

Fleet Shadow – Move faster while in stealth; +50% move speed
becomes: Gain super speed for 4 seconds when entering stealth

Patience – Periodically gain initiative while in stealth; 1 per 10 seconds
becomes: Gain 2 initiative, when attacking from stealth

etc.
Such changes would promote active play instead of sitting in stealth and waiting for things to unfold.
I’m actually not that sure about Shadow Rejuvenation and Patience, because honestly, there should still be something, which benefits from staying in stealth, but I love the idea of making the condi removal a bit more active.

First off, this is in no way comparable to the MF change.
Back then, an entire stat was removed from gear. They could not simply replace it with something different, cause every player, who got that gear simply got it because of the mf stat. They’d use that gear to farm t6 materials and other goodies or get some extra drops out of whatever they were doing.
Typically, they’d have full condi gear and full physical gear already, which is why simply changing the gear was not possible.
Now let’s look at the current situation: Trinkets, food and small armor pieces with critical damage will have some of their crit shaved off(mainly trinkets).
Let’s not mention celestial gear here. I acknowledge, that celestial is a serious problem with this change. In case of the Zerk gear, they just get rid of some numbers, which were chosen totally arbitrarily and bring them back in line with other gear. Right now, there is absolutely no reason, not to get an ascended ring with crit damage, if you go for physical damage and there is absolutely no reason, not to have those small armor pieces provide crit damage, either. The chest and other big armor pieces can be made soldiers, if some tankiness is required. Same for the weapons. That’s, what we call min-maxing.
Ascended armor will actually take only a minor hit. We are talking ~4-5% crit damage, which might be shaved off. The trinkets will take the big hit.

Also, I guess 95% of the guys, who are calling for refunds here, will choose full zerk again, once they GET their refund.
The whole thing is silly. You want max dps, you get zerk. That much hasn’t changed. You might want to toss out those divinity runes, tho and get runes of rage instead. With the crit portion being changed to ferocity, those will actually be STRONGER than they are now.