Because Anet wants you to actually understand what you are doing with your ele and use your resources reasonably rather than spamming skills as soon as they are available.
as opposed to using every skill that’s off cooldown in your current attunement, swaping and repeating the process? because that takes so much more awareness. (spoilers: it’s about 3x as braindead) -
Anyway, the real reason is that removing the cooldown adds too much hidden power. It’s the same reason weapon swapping for every other class ever has a cooldown.
no movement speed buffs ever stack at all
you have a 10% trait and a 25% signet? you move at +25% speed
dumb as hell if you ask me, but what can you do
btw, no, I’m not saying that they should just straight up stack. getting like +110% MS from stacking speed buffs would be a bit ridiculous. but if like, you take the highest and then, say, half of any additional buffs, that would be nice.
fire shield is hilariously underwhelming
as is flamewall
literally the only thing good about fire shield is that it has no cast time. its effects are meager at best. increase the burn duration to 1.5 and the shield duration to 10 seconds, and then you have an actual skill.
freezing gust is also awful. a whole 3 seconds of single target chill. and no other effects, including damage (more or less), on a lengthy cooldown. wow.
several months ago (like 8 of them, before I stopped playing this game), one of my favorite things to do was solo Orr on my 30/20/0/0/20 full berserker/rampager (masterwork armor) staff (exotic staff) ele
All areas, mind you. melee or ranged enemies mattered not. Ele has too many ways to avoid incoming damage of all sorts.
I usually died several times trying to solo some of the group events, though.
I have almost never been successfully pulled by scorpion wire
one WvW session I got scorpion wire’d 3 times, and two of them involved me getting knocked down but not moving any notable distance, and one I think nothing happened
My own success rate with the skill seems to be somewhat higher
I have almost never been successfully pulled by scorpion wire
one WvW session I got scorpion wire’d 3 times, and two of them involved me getting knocked down but not moving any notable distance, and one I think nothing happened
My own success rate with the skill seems to be somewhat higher
If a might stacking build stacks might while doing other things, it should be fine, but there’s certainly no point to going out of your way to stack might. For example, using phoenix to not hit any enemies so that you can get might because none of them are inside the fire field, is the worst idea ever
staff has enough of a traditional mage feel for me
It’s just more speed focused than power focused, overall. instead of every spell being like meteor storm, you just have a few of those and then a bunch of faster spells that you chain together to get your massive damage. Staff definitely does tons of damage; it’s just that it’s easy to dodge it. If it gets any buffs, I want to see that aspect improved. Improve its ability to hit evasive targets.
So, let’s use our story-telling imagination here: You’re bleeding like a stuck pig and turn yourself invisible. Does the blood that hits the ground and separates from you remain invisible? How about your vomit from the poisoning?
uh yes, obviously
if it didn’t, you’d be able to see the blood while it’s in me too
make pulls work consistently
Scorpion wire (and some pulls other classes have) bugs out so much it’s stupid
and make self pulls not just inflict the pull status. That’s awful. Stun myself? please. I pull myself to my target, but then because it’s just a pull, I’m stunned for a short while even after I arrive. And if I have stability, the skill does nothing at all. This is mostly a problem with underwater skills, but I think the elementalist’s magnetic grasp still has a few of the issues.
I don’t understand why they even cull in the first place. Instead of culling the player completely, send a scaled down version. I’d rather see a generic stick figure with “THIEF” plastered across the face than be attacked by an invisible opponent (that doesn’t get revealed)
or even simpler: If a player is culled from your client, you should also get culled from theirs. not a total fix, but it certainly helps
backpedaling is this:
topic title: “this is unfair”. no indication of joking in first post
later in topic after everyone calls him out: “oh it was just a joke”
as long as the thief doesn’t have the revealed debuff (lasts 3 seconds) and has stealth abilites off cooldown or has enough initiative to use the stealth abilities, he can stealth. A thief can build to be able to stealth every 3 seconds, or even to stay in stealth indefinitely. Of course this comes at the cost of damage and other things, but it can be done.
Also, speaking of thief vs guardian, I once fought a guardian for an entire sPvP round as a defensively built thief. It was kind of amusing. (we weren’t on a point)
It adds another 3 second burn
…but since burn stacks duration, all that does is make the burn 3 seconds longer. so your 9 second burn is a 12 second one, and so on.
Ever since my elementalist reached Orr, I’ve been 30/20/0/0/20 staff. I changed from a more defensive build (30 in water) just to try it out, but I ended up liking it a lot. full offense gear also.
But if by 30 fire build you mean never swap elements, then that’s not going to work too well. I spend more time in fire than any other element, but it’s probably about half my time. then 25% earth, 25% air+water.
fire traits: +5% damage to burning opponents, +10% damage in fire, and longer fire fields (haven’t played ele since the might on fire cast trait got buffed)
air traits: bolt to the heart, and then either the aura trait, or one of the two glyph traits.
arcane: elemental attunement, blasting staff
taking the 10% damage trait means you miss out on another trait that could also boost damage, so you can’t just pretend pistols have 10% more damage than swords
I just took those numbers from the wiki and thought they were reliable data, matching my impressions on the skills.
That means I’m going to test the actual autoattack time and compare it to the pistol casting time from myself.
Please do, and post your findings. I’ve re-checked it multiple times, so I’m sure it’s accurate, but verification is always nice.
Pistol Whip also has less DPS than the sword auto attack. All this is telling me is that the sword auto attack is really strong.
thief sword auto is about 9% stronger than ranger sword auto, and warrior axe auto is about 24% stronger than thief sword auto. unless the recent triple chop change affected the dps
hopefully that helps!
The channel time for sword’s chain is two half seconds. Total of 1.0 seconds. The 2.52 seconds for sword’s full chain already includes the after delays. Unload’s dps at base stats is around 808/2.35 = 344. Sword’s is 975/2.52 = 387.
The channel time of the sword autoattack takes into account only the timeframe needed to land the full damage. This, obviously, doesn’t take into account the aftercast delay of the last sword hit.
No, 2.52 seconds is the number I added to the wiki from doing dozens of trials timing from the time the third hit makes contact until the next time the third hit makes contact.
I sat there autoattacking a target dummy and pressing the lap button on my stopwatch every time the last hit of the chain connected, and then I took the average of all the “laps”, got 2.52, and added it to the wiki.
I wish thief did have ranged burst. It doesn’t have anything of the sort. All of thief’s burst is melee. I actually don’t know of any actual burst other than mug C&D backstab. Everything else is just dps about on par with autoattacking. except heartseeker at low health. And haste. Haste makes everything burst.
What I would do is remove (or severely weaken) haste and give thief more actual burst options. We don’t really have but one despite the class supposedly being about burst damage.
unload actually takes around 2.35 sec from one attack to the next. The channel time isn’t the only time.
There is an aftercast delay to every skill in the game.
The aftercast is something like 1/4s, but anyway every skill is affected from this aftercast, the autoattack chain also. This doesn’t change anything.
The channel time for sword’s chain is two half seconds. Total of 1.0 seconds. The 2.52 seconds for sword’s full chain already includes the after delays. Unload’s dps at base stats is around 808/2.35 = 344. Sword’s is 975/2.52 = 387.
2. Haste is not an issue, it is mitigated by invuls for X seconds, blocks for X seconds, CC, dodges, etc. Haste is simply L2P issue. People complaining about bullrush/frenzy/100b just do not know wtf they are talking about.
note that I’m talking about the developers balancing around haste, not about how players deal with their opponents using it
Hm, I just checked with ranger and warrior. It looks like it’s normal for arcing projectile skills to have 300 more range than listed.
Ranger bow has 1500 range (1200 listed)
warrior rifle has 1200 range (1200 listed)
warrior bow has 1200 range (900 listed)
edit: elementalist staff has 1400 (1200 listed), for fire and water. earth is like 1300, and air 1200 (air doesn’t arc). so it’s not entirely consistent.
You can easily prove it yourself. go to a test dummy or anything you can attack that doesn’t move
use any 900/1200 ground targeted spell, see where its max range is. use pistols, see how far back you can go before your shots are out of range. use bow, see how far back you can go before your shots are out of range.
Signet thief is pretty good. I’ve been using a FOUR signet build lately, coupled with Signet Use (-20% cooldown, and +2 initiative on use) and Signets of Power (5 stacks of might on signet activation). The signets have good active effects anyway. I use signet of malice, agility, shadows, and infiltrator’s.
The actives on agility and infitator’s are great. AoE condition removal and endurance refill. If that’s not party support, I don’t know what is. And then a shadow step with a stun break that has half the cooldown of the other stun breaks.
I sometimes replace shadows with something else since it’s not that strong in combat
Anyway, this lets me pretty much spam as many initiative skills as I want (like all the disabling skills that cost initiative. daze lock is a favorite of mine), and the man can’t keep me down.
Not viable. Having 900 range with our shortbow makes it no optimal. I tried to base a build only in shortbow and mobility and well it worked quite well but its not optimal.
Shortbow actually has 1200 range. It just doesn’t automatically re-use trick shot once you’re outside of 900 range
2. Even sword skills that are initiative costly like pistol whip do not have much higher dps (if at all) than sword auto.
that’s because pistol whip stuns and evades (and got nerfed. see next line). Unload does nothing
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the problem is haste. Haste + dps skills is too good if the dps skills actually do good dps. Therefore they’re balanced to suck at dps without haste.
The sword chain is melee. And you have to stay in melee to get the big juicy third attack. So I think it should be better than ranged attacks, even your “initiative dump” attack — because you have to put in more work to make it work.
P/P could use some changes, but I don’t think Unload necessarily needs to hit harder.
Sword chain also is AoE and inflicts status effects. and of course takes no initiative. It’s less about being ranged vs melee and more about unload being bad.
How about this: Trick shot does slightly more dps than unload to a single target when there are exactly two targets (and of course it’s also doing damage that second target).
Alternating between trick shot and cluster bomb does about as much dps to an isolated target as unload does (does slightly more damage, but some is bleed, and it does slightly less without the bleed damage. unless you can hit the target with all three parts of the exploded bomb every time, in which case it does a lot more dps). And as noted, warrior rifle skill 1 outdpses unload, at base stats. But the majority of the damage is bleed, so the scaling is hard to compare.
I don’t think unload needs to hit any harder though, but it definitely needs to have a shorter channel time to do the damage it does do, because that dps is weak.
It feels like thief’s damage is balanced around haste, which really sucks for all parties involved
Where did you get this from?In SPvP from 20 thieves,10 are BS,3 are P/D bleed,3 are S/D,3 are P/P and 2 are D/P(at least this is what i observe).And only PW and Unload builds can benefit from Haste.Backstab builds have the optimal UI setup as following:Shadowstep,Assassins Signet,Shadow Refuge,i don’t see place for Haste.
P/D also don’t need it because they do steady damage,not burst.
not needing haste actually doesn’t have much bearing on damage being balanced around haste:
Either it has very little synergy with haste (and is therefore already balanced around haste being used with it), or it has synergy with haste and is balanced around haste being used with it. The “spend initiative to do dps” skills don’t do much dps because they do a lot of dps with haste
uh? Unload has incredibly low damage variation compared to most skills
The more hits a skill does, the more the number of crits tends to the average
(Hit once, and it’s all or nothing. Hit 100 times and damage won’t vary by much. maybe 45 crits one time, 53 another.) So yeah no, you’re pretty wrong there.
and… of course the idea isn’t to make P/P better at AoE than SB. lol. It’s just to make its AoE not completely worthless. Ideally it should be super awesome single target with a little bit of AoE. The problem is that it’s mediocre at single target.
