0/20/20/0/30, staff + sword/pistol. Knight’s gear + Centaur runes. Gives you high survivability. Chances are that you’ll never die if you play it right. You bring along a nice multi-stun with the pistol and feasible strong shatters.
What surprises me more is that some of the achievements are bugged only for a part of the players and some other achievements for another part of the players.
It should affect the same achievements for all players. I’m starting to think that it’s the same for loot drops At least that would explain why I’ve only found around 10 exotics since release ^^
It’s not the bug itself that is “upsetting” me. I could care less if I have 50 points more or less at the moment. It’s just the handling.
Example: “We are aware of issues with the achievements. Especially for the lifetime survivor, which is not that trivial to regain as the others.” Bad. Bad Kitty. We sure hope that you’re aware of the problem. There’s been enough posts about it.
Instead, it could have said: “We have identified the cause of the achievement bug and are working on it. The fix should go live in the next few days.” or “Our dev team is currently looking into it and we will keep you updated about the progress.”
In addition, instead of just posting on twitter and then, a few hours later on the forums…
It’s just that their communication style has plenty of room for improvement. I mean, they manage to keep us updated on Facebook about every picture some player has drawn and every single kitten screenshot. But they tend to omit really talking with the community (except very rare cases).
So many, many, many times over; this.
Expectations management is the key to customer satisfaction. Lack of communication on their part now for this matter does have ramifications now for players. Whether it is dissatisfaction, players running around spending precious free/play time re-doing things they normally should not have to, gamers bad-mouthing the game or creating bad feelings for the company, any number of things — these things could be managed better by a simple regular update saying “We are still working diligently to fix this for you.” Or some such public relations ‘stuff.’
The point being is that many of us would be happier to have the solution itself delayed by the 5-10 minutes that expectations management would take each day, or each 6-12 hours, to keep us happy given what we have put in to achieve in the first place, rather than get a fix on a particular date.
It’s not that things break; yadda yadda things going to break in millions of lines of code moving from stage/test to production even if we did have a public live test environment where we could migrate our characters to view real time changes before they go live… Things would still break. Maybe fewer things, but things would in fact still break. But managing players’ expectations can keep spirits high, people still playing in the game, money still being spent, rage on forums down, it can work all sorts of miracles. Something that whichever management individual or individual with the power to make the choice to invest the time to perform the expectations management at ANet has obviously declared not worthwhile.
That’s the more grievous problem here, and what chips away at customer faith in the long run, in my opinion.
Exactly. I’ve played Guild Wars 1 from day 1. Sure, there have been bugs, there have been balancing issues, but it was lots more community centered. I can’t recall how often we’ve seen GMs online talking to the players and in general, it felt more like they cared. But at the moment it feels like “shut up, give us the money, so that we can completely ignore what our customers want and instead give them more content, badly designed big time events and don’t waste our time on bugs”.
I mean… there are bugs since the first beta weekend that haven’t been resolved yet. Use blink on a Mesmer while running and you’ll hover and not be animated. This is so ridiculously easy to fix, but nope…still there. But hey, instead we have an island full of crabs.
I don’t expect every little bug to be fixed right away. I just expect more communication. This achievement bug for example. It’d be nice to know how a fix that was supposed to fix crashing issues could ruin the achievement system. And it’d nice to know how long they think it’s gonna take.
There’s no harm whatsoever to update us with a little “Hey guys, we’ve encountered some problems along the way, it’s going to take until next week”. There’s more harm in no status updates at all.
And still a major lack of communication. As always. Since Guild Wars 2 they are like goldfikittenhe make a mistake, people complain about the lack of communication. Then they try a bit harder for a day or two and then it starts all over again.
They are working on a fix. That has already been stated. Why do people always want an update when there is nothing new to update? Should they stop all of their work every hour to ensure that you know they are still working on the thing they told you they were working on already?
They’re working on it. They’ll fix it. When there is something new for them to communicate, they’ll do so. Patience is a virtue, try it out sometime.
It’s about the general lack of communication. Take a look at the profession specific forums. You can go 4-5 pages back without a comment from a dev (except ranger & thief, but for the ranger it’s just a “closing this topic” and for the thief it’s a very old comment in a very long thread).
And in this case here, it’d sure help to have a comment on what caused the bug. First of all, it’d be good to know how and why such things happen to understand why such a ridiculous and kind of random bug occurs and second of all, why such a thing wasn’t detected by automated testing.
It’s not the bug itself that is “upsetting” me. I could care less if I have 50 points more or less at the moment. It’s just the handling.
Example: “We are aware of issues with the achievements. Especially for the lifetime survivor, which is not that trivial to regain as the others.” Bad. Bad Kitty. We sure hope that you’re aware of the problem. There’s been enough posts about it.
Instead, it could have said: “We have identified the cause of the achievement bug and are working on it. The fix should go live in the next few days.” or “Our dev team is currently looking into it and we will keep you updated about the progress.”
In addition, instead of just posting on twitter and then, a few hours later on the forums…
It’s just that their communication style has plenty of room for improvement. I mean, they manage to keep us updated on Facebook about every picture some player has drawn and every single kitten screenshot. But they tend to omit really talking with the community (except very rare cases).
And still a major lack of communication. As always. Since Guild Wars 2 they are like goldfish…the make a mistake, people complain about the lack of communication. Then they try a bit harder for a day or two and then it starts all over again.
There should be specific areas or instances in each major city for that. I can understand how it’s not good to implement dueling outside of cities, but inside… of course.
Or at least a small PvP Map with just an arena and maxed out for 2 players so nobody else can join.
I’d love to see a post where you guys elaborate on what kind of fix caused this bug and how it got through testing. This is something an automated test can catch.
I mean, you guys are not keen on much communications about detailed plans and are completely silent 99% of the time on the profession specific forums, but at least explain this bug to give us some insights on why this kind of stuff keeps on happening over and over. One example is the fix that was supposed to lower drop rates for dyes and ended up crashing the party and guild system.
Before they start a test server, they should start reading and listening on the forums. Take a look at the profession specific forums. You can go back 5 pages for each profession and won’t find a topic with an answer from a dev younger than several weeks.
Do these other classes have high mobility and stealth? No.
Do guardians have the lowest health and only put out decent DPS when sacrificing a whole lot of survivability? Yes.
We generally don’t release patch information beforehand for the simple reason that things don’t always make it. Sometimes, we have to hold off on a feature at the last minute, and it’s better not to over-promise.
If that’s true, then you guys should change many previous patchnotes, as many trait changes you did are still bugged. This is contradicting.
With every patch it sounds more and more like a very poor Q&A, sorry.
Thanks for posting Mike. Would you mind answering another question while you’re at it?
-Is dropping siege blueprints for other characters to pick up an intended function? It seems very bizarre.
It is indeed intended (and bizarre). We would actually prefer to just make the blueprints tradeable, but there are a couple of funky code interactions that happen to make that impossible for us currently. It’s something we’d like to address at some point, but it’s not very high on the priority list currently.
Being a coder myself, I’d love to hear details about this one. At the moment I can’t imagine a single scenario where this would prove to take longer than a 1-minute fix.
You can easily tell when someone doesn’t play a Mesmer due to them thinking its all OP stuff with no effort… the skill level needed to play a Mesmer far exceeds that of most – if not all other class bar the D/D Ele bunker build.
We may be able to put out high damage in a few seconds, but usually once you’ve fired off your high burst as a Mesmer your left with very little else to cover your backside! We go down in a few hits, we have no real aoe’s to compensate if shatters had major cooldowns. What you see when you get hit by a mesmer is someone using everything they can muster to take you down as quickly as possible as we aren’t all bulky high def/high damage classes.
There doesn’t need to be cooldowns between shatters, using more than 1 in a row means we’re throwing out everything we have and leaving nothing in the bag, if we use them all and it doesn’t take a player down then chances are we’re going to die!
Of course Phantasms can spawn right on a target… most classes skills hit their target straight away, why should our skills wait around to die before they do anything? No phantasm should ever be able to get off more than 1 attack if the opponent is awake, they only take 1-2 hits to kill!
Being good at a Mesmer takes huge amounts of effort, its all about skill, timing and knowing your limits, where not a 1-2 button spam class like others out there that can pull of major damage with no effort at all.
If nothing else, Mesmer’s should be buffed in ways that make non shatter builds more desirable to play, right now its one of the very few ways to get any damage out of us so that’s the build everyone uses!
Quoted for truth. I’d like to play something else than the burst shatter spec in pve, but I have no choice if I want to keep up with other classes.
Try 20/0/20/0/30, with Cleric armor and Staff/Sword/Focus. High survivability + decent damage.
In my opinion the thief is now the weakest character in the game, it has less health and less damage , it has the weakest crowd control options, 1 skill that has a 1200 range, etc.. But what is really ticking me off about these changes is now I have to completly change my build which means new armour and more gold I don’t have.
Less health? You mean the same amount of health as guardians and elementalists, but still with higher armor than elementalists….
Let alone balancing the thief in general.
Highest burst damage + highest mobility + stealth and now you want to remove the cooldown on weapon swapping while also having NO cooldown on your attacks….. seems legit.
Don’t get me wrong, I love assassin classes. In Gw1 my main was an assassin and I really hoped the thief to be about the same in Gw2.
I mean, the thief is a THIEF and not an assassin. He should use tricks and acrobatics, but the included high DPS is just a joke to balancing.
That’s not a huge can of worms, that’s a truckload of cans with dragons in them.
And lowest health pool, don’t forget that!
You have the same health pool as guardians and elementalists. I don’t see guardians or elementalists QQ’ing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love assassin classes. In Gw1 my main was an assassin and I really hoped the thief to be about the same in Gw2.
I mean, the thief is a THIEF and not an assassin. He should use tricks and acrobatics, but the included high DPS is just a joke to balancing.
Let me first say that i completely agree that no CD on weapon swap is a bad idea.
However when you stay that “thief is a thief and not assassin” you are completely wrong.
Thief in GW2 was originally developed as Assassin,and then almost at the end of the developing changed to Thief for purely roleplay reasons:namely Assassins are bound to the continent of Cantha.(There are 3 continents:Tyria,Cantha and Elona.)——>Thus the Thief birth and the hasty-not-so-well-developed Steal skill.Just to justify Thief’s name.Replace Steal skill with Shadowstep(in all it’s glory) and you will get the original idea of ANet.But you still can see the Assassin features in Thief class:Scorpion Wire,Caltrops,Smoke Bomb,Many masks e.t.c.Also Assassin in GW1 had equal burst builds and also the opportunity to choose from hundreds of skills.Also the high DPS is not only thief priority in GW2.Every class can scramble at least 1 bursty build.
Just pointing,that the “thief is not assassin” point is not valid.Peace.
That’s what I meant. In the end they didn’t “plan” it as an assassin. But as you said, there are still many skills left that resemble the assassin features. And these have to go.
The boarder land’s puzzle is fair game. It’s your own fault if you die there.
The beast arena at EB how ever. A different story there.
The beast arena is difficult, I admit that. Even more with siege weapons. But it’s fun and challenging.
If I have to go through the arena with enemies on the top, I’ll try to pull them down and get up there.
If I’m up there, I’ll make a portal, jump down and try to kill the enemies down in the arena before my portal runs out of time. I think it’s fun, on both sides.
Sure, getting killed or zerged down or camped isn’t fun in the first place. Just try to overcome the challenge. Or just do something else until the JP is clear.
. If that type of behavior is not allowed anywhere else in the game why is it allowed in WvW?
Because there’s a PvP solution to your PvP problem.
How does that make any sense? I wouldn’t be in the PvP content if I didn’t have to be. Really I guess I don’t have to be but does that mean I shouldn’t pursue a legendary weapon because people think it is funny to camp out and kill people 30 on 1? 30 on 1….Really?? How can you even feel good about that? The JP is the only reliable way to get badges or else I would just follow the Zerg and it wouldn’t be a problem.
Would you rather have them remove the jumping puzzle and you have to earn it by actual pvp? I only did a few hours of world vs world, and unlike what you said badges actually drop in pvp. Just very slowly.
Maybe I’m not being clear… if I go into a JP and fight an invader one on one or 2 on one or 5 on 5 and I lose… fine! I don’t deserve to finish the puzzle. I should try again or move on, play more, get better etc…. no problem.
What I am saying is that it is GREIFING when 30 people from a Guild camp an area and kill people that are obviously just trying to get a reward from a puzzle that has no bearing on the WvW score.
I am not complaining because I got out played in PvP… I am complaining because it seems to be an acceptable pastime for Guilds to go out and harass other players for fun.
Be happy if a huge group camps the puzzle.
1) just come back into the puzzle another time.
2) there are now 30 people missing on the actual battlefield.
Yep. Love to put together a team of 5 people and then take over the jumping puzzle. The only difficult point is the arena. But as a mesmer it’s kinda fun to pull down the guys above and give them a beating and teach them not to mess with my reward chest.
But, I think siege weapons don’t belong in the jumping puzzle.
Let alone balancing the thief in general.
Highest burst damage + highest mobility + stealth and now you want to remove the cooldown on weapon swapping while also having NO cooldown on your attacks….. seems legit.
Don’t get me wrong, I love assassin classes. In Gw1 my main was an assassin and I really hoped the thief to be about the same in Gw2.
I mean, the thief is a THIEF and not an assassin. He should use tricks and acrobatics, but the included high DPS is just a joke to balancing.
That’s not a huge can of worms, that’s a truckload of cans with dragons in them.
Seriously? Make thieves more OP?
Consider a… Warrior, with Sword/Mace, Sword/Shield. If he swaps, he still has cooldowns o the sword skills.
I think: Swap cooldown is fine as it is.
You already said it: you have no cooldowns on your skills. Other professions do. If I cast chaos storm on my mesmer, then switch to Sword/Focus, wait for the swap cooldown and then swap back, my chaos storm is still on cooldown. And you guys don’t have that kind of problem.
Sure, I’d love to fight a thief that can constantly switch between let’s say…D/P and P/D to use the burst skills….. no, actually I wouldn’t love that.
Thieves can’t 1 shot people. It’s three damage abilities. If you get downed before the backstab even hits then you deserve to be dead all the time, due to clearly not using any defensive stats.
Ah….thank you good sir. If you die fast, then you need more defensive stats? Well…how about this: a glass cannon thief doesn’t need to stealth all the time. If he wants to survive a longer fight or incoming damage, he might need to consider less damage and more defense.
Fact is: every class has a tradeoff between damage and defense. Thiefs….don’t. High damage and easy survivability? Please
You know, I think thieves are Kitten op as kitten. Yes…I do. They are all out of whack with un-godly damage and cna surive even with it. They just have the tools available to them. As an ele, with heavy Toughness and Vit, and still go down like a rock against and theif. And I condiser myself a good player. I held a tower against 10 invaders(who had siege) until reinforcements arrived. i was able to buy some decent time and keep the foes off the tower long enough for someone to mas a group to help the tower. I also won’t say im the best, I am not by any means. I am if anything average. I use a staff even.
I know im easy pickings for a Thief. Heres what I don’t get though. Why is that a thief can get blasted with AOE…but never get revealed. Right there should be the fix to this major problem. If the Theif is useing the stealth the get away..Hes gonna have to be smart. He get’s hit one time with a blast of fire and bam his 5 seconds of stealth is gone like that.
Or if you don’t wnat that. We should be able to see the “Numbers” of damage as we hit the thing in stealth. If he runs through a lava font, I want to see the numbers tick above his head. Even if he doest go out of stealth, that should give me some “indicator” of where he is.
Also that whole belife of “Just aoe the entire place, it will die eventualy” is a Kitten lie. Anyplayer with a scrap of grey-matter can avoid aoe. I mean its a big red Target. Also, our biggest damging aoe, and the only one that really has a chance against the theif is Meteor shower(since it has a large area and hits many targets)….Yet it requires us to float in the air whilst they kill us.
I think stealth should stay. Theives need some sort of defenisive menouver. Despite there high evasion, they also need stealth. I would be kitten mad if someone got rid of my mist form for example. But I think it’s a simple fix of “If they get it it reveals them, or it shows the damage tick above them”….Both of which gives a good player an Idea of where the theif is, and puts some fear back into theives. Also good theives still will be able to avoid the aoe..but at least it weeds out the strong from the weak.
I’d rather the damage ticks then a full reveal. If you’ve played any high level PvE, you know how insane the amount of AoEs in an area can get, and I doubt one would complain about thieves stealthing there. (I mean I know shelks can be annoying but you don’t see forumers waving pitchforks at them)
Because skelks have a larger cooldown on their stealth.
Anet gives you EVERY skill you need to kill a Thief. They give you heals, they give you stun breakers, they give you invincible rolls and they give you stuns, immunities, and immobilizes. Your troubles start when you stand there letting the Thief control the fight. You have 3 seconds where that Thief can’t stealth, he can’t do anything but take damage from you. If they’re glass cannon, they will DIE in those 3 seconds IF you take your head from out of your azz and lock them down.
Hm, if I’m not aiming for glass cannon, I need to exchange some damage for survivability. So the 3 seconds are NOT enough to kill the thief. Yeah, right. In the 3 seconds where he can’t stealth, he still has dodge rolls and other skills to survive. And if the fight gets critical for the thief, he just stealths and runs away.
“Ooooh, but we need stealting. We need to get out of fights to survive.” Ever considered that it’s the same for other classes? Take an engineer, or a ranger. If it gets critical, they too want to get out of combat, but they can’t. Where is the problem if revealed gets 1 or 2 more seconds so that you actually have to face off the enemy you started fighting with?
The main problem is: if any class goes glass cannon, it’s trading survivability for power. Except….thieves. Can escape whenever they want to. 1 or 2 seconds on revealed…that’s not THAT harsh. You can manage that. Like many thief players are always putting off our concerns: l2p.
How do people have trouble killing thieves? I play guardian and a thief has never ever owned me or come close in wvw. With my hammer I immobilise knockback and use #2. Skill which that skill alone takes out half the thieves hp (especially if it crits for 5-6k). Also if a thief stealths don’t just sand still, move around so it’s harder to backstab. Most thieves I face either die in 5 seconds or stealth and run like little noobs while my hp is still above 90%. Learn to play your class and you will realise thieves are pretty weak.
Ever considered other classes aside from guardian? As Mesmer I’m running a toughness build to survive a thief’s burst. Can I kill him? No… he stealths, gets away, comes back.
Can I kill other classes? Sure. Takes some time and skill, but I have a fair chance against every class except thieves. They maybe can’t kill me instantly, but I can’t pose a large enough threat to kill him before he walks away.
Dred, nice work-around but the problem remains, why gift an overpowered ability to just one class?
Well, Mesmers can also stealth. But: with long cooldowns inbetween. The stealth is fine. The permastealthing of a thief is just annoying.
A few days ago it took us 12 people to kill 1 thief in the jumping puzzle. He backstabbed one person, stealthed, got out of battle without problems and attacked again. We never caught him. With longer cooldowns inbetween it would’ve been possible.
If 12 people can’t kill 1 guy… then all 12 are either total noobs or the class is just overpowered regarding this mechanic.
Longer cooldown, could make thieves absolutely worthless at everything but quick kills to single targets. Any hits to stealth does hurt a bit to burst builds, but it hurts non-burst builds 10 times worse.
Well, if you go glass canon, you need to consider being fragile. Stealthing all the time and escaping way too easily just isn’t being fragile. Consider a glass canon shatter mesmer. If things don’t work out….well…kitten.
But if the fight goes on way too long, the stealths definitely need a longer cooldown. Maybe +5 secs on the utility skills or +1-2 secs on the revealed. That’s not that bad. But it gives other classes a chance to actually catch the thief.
Dred, nice work-around but the problem remains, why gift an overpowered ability to just one class?
Well, Mesmers can also stealth. But: with long cooldowns inbetween. The stealth is fine. The permastealthing of a thief is just annoying.
A few days ago it took us 12 people to kill 1 thief in the jumping puzzle. He backstabbed one person, stealthed, got out of battle without problems and attacked again. We never caught him. With longer cooldowns inbetween it would’ve been possible.
If 12 people can’t kill 1 guy… then all 12 are either total noobs or the class is just overpowered regarding this mechanic.
And the crying continues, even when Anet finally comes out and tells you guys how it is, how they want the class to be, you still search for more excuses as to why a Thief is OP and not just you sucking at the game.
They are not how they tell us they want the thieves to be. They need permastealth because they are squishy? Tell that a mesmer. Light armor and no stealth. I don’t have anything against the stealth mechanic, but it needs a nerf. Revealed needs to be increased. Either permanently by 1 or 2 seconds, or slightly increasing during the fight. Rest is ok.
Rolled up a thief. By lvl 24 (all in wvw) it is clear this class is broken. The only times i have been downed is when i stop for a teammate who over extended. Otherwise the fight ends when i say it ends. I get away clean, even if i try a fight i can’t win. There is no risk at all. The wild swings at nothing are quite amusing but stealth is a hard counter to everything. It is not hard to dodge enemy attacks in the first place. It is even easier to dodge when the enemy can not see which way you are moving.
Every other class has to risk being downed when they initiate combat. Thieves can just reset the fight. That i think is the source of the problem. Stealth done wrong yet again. When will companies stop adding a stealth class? Anet didn’t even bother to add a counter to it at all.
Yep. Thieves need to get some sort of punishment for longer fights and stealthing often. For example making revealed 1s longer after every stealth until the thief is out of combat.
That said, they can still immediately restealth and run away.
but as a mesmer
So let me get this straight
or not , please be kind and explain. Thief can imediatly restealth after you kick them from the house" shadow refuge" with 3 seconds reveal debuff – however as an mesmer :
you cannot stealth to run away
you cannot cast moa on the area they stealth
You cannot portal to run away
So what exactly got the thief, and mesmer don’t cause i saw glass cannon mesmer kill players in 2 seconds. They got the burst ,they got the stealth , they got disable (special mention MOA), they got knockback on area, and as an bonus they got clones as well
No, you cannot moa the stealthed area, as moa is a player-targeted spell, not ground-targeted. Plus, it takes about 1 second to recognize the real mesmer. Whereas it’s almost impossible to tell where the stealthed thief is. Yes, Mesmers can stealth, but a) not that long, and b) not permanent and not without loooong cooldowns.
I wouldn’t mind if the cooldown between the stealths would increase with every single stealth and cools down if they are out of combat. This would be fair enough. The longer the fight, the greater is the risk for the thief. Just like any other class. If he’s in for a long fight, then he should have packed for a long fight.
If thf’s are being annoying, then they are doing their job. Time to stop looking at thief as a “Punching Bag” cause you cant kill one. Look at your own class and figure out whats great about it. Anet just basically handed you the way to kill a thief on a silver platter.
Conditions and Aoe’s. Also, Stun/Root bam bam bam dead…. Just cause some of us use “One trick pony” BS builds doesn’t mean we all should suffer the nerf “QQ’s” We are fragile and mobile. Figure out the counter. It’s easy. Oh a glass cannon thf killed you in a few hits.. well, if you are a glass cannon build yourself, what did you expect? I’m a thf, not a BS Thf, i have 18k hp, And very rarely does a bs thf get the best of me. Learn your dodge and time it. Other than that… i honestly don’t know what to tell ya.
Yeah, you are sooo fragile. 2 days ago we needed 12 people with AoE to hunt down ONE single thief in the JP.
And as a Mesmer….well, you mean I should use the 1 AoE skill with horrible CD?
I don’t have a problem countering a thief. They rarely kill me, but killing them?…. The cooldown on stealths needs to be increased, so that they actually have to plan it.
At least that would explain why I’ve only found around 10 exotics since release ^^