Guild Wars 2

I’d like to briefly point out that cleanse throws a nasty variable into this discussion.

Without cleanse a soldiers vs Dire battle will result in Dire winning hands down. A soldiers build with a lot of cleanse will beat the Dire.

Further, build matters a lot. Even if a build uses a lot of cleanse that doesn’t make it a good build (it still needs to enhance damage through trait synergy with the skills). All these complaints about necro keep mentioning power damage reduction traits. Maybe that’s your issue and not Dire? Blaming it on the armor is hardly fair.

I feel most of the complaints about Dire boil down to complaints about cleanse, class vs class balance, and the classic problem that some builds/players are simply better than others. It’s an illusion that everything is easier when you take out stat combinations. It’s actually harder because now all the condition builds that were using Dire swap to even higher DPS builds and suddenly everything gets “worse” because “condi builds are hitting harder than ever.”

I use Deadshot in pvp. It is more effective in small scale than Dire would be (at same amount of available stats). Even if Dire were offered I would take the Deadshot option. I take Dire in WvW so I can roam and survive being jumped by 3-5 people. Cleanse, toughness, damage reduction traits and mobility are what save me. Dire is just a factor I use because the meta remains power damage and so the toughness helps me out.

Give me Deadshot armor in WvW. See how you like it.

What kind of rewards, titles will be available in addition to the skins for tournament winners?

He said EST so probably NA.

I might be able to log on tonight for a bit around 6:30pm EST. Monday-Thursday I sometimes have 30 Ish minutes to play until I make dinner after I get back from work.

I also am much more free on weekends between 10am and 6pm EST, depending on when I’m cooking/shopping/etc.

Hi, welcome to the forum.

What build do you use? Glad to provide constructive feedback on how to fight this thief once I get some background info.

Running around in Zerg lag: “’Tis but a flesh wound!”

If I’m online when you are I can help. Issue is mainly I’m not usually online during the time frame you listed.

Good luck

You are mainly pointing to the evade frames. But the issue was his damage output not the build as a whole.

I personally think the evade spam is overtuned (along with the block spam etc).

As to 4K attacks…I see a lot of very close to 4k attacks if not in one hit then on the follow up hit half a second later. Power thief builds will erase 10k hp in 1.5 seconds if they are well built. The point stands that if he had been struck by a competent thief he would have died.

And you keep comparing instant damage to over time damage without any cleanse. The better comparison is damage over 10 seconds from both power and conditions with cleanse, the same over 30 seconds, and then over 1 minute. Each would probably be different outcomes in terms of which is better.

I ignored that part of what you wrote because it was subjective. I disagree with your opinion that 80 games is enough and 120 is too much.

I didn’t play that much last season and I got 120+ games in. If a game is 10 minutes long on average then 15 per week is 150 minutes per week or 2.5 hours of game time.

Maxing the WvW rewards is like 10-20 hours per week depending on rank. 120 games is nothing.

Placements are 10 games and before MMR settles mid to late season. The other 110 games reduce the number of people in top 250 who don’t deserve to be there.

The top 250 rewards are at the end of the season. No titles and glory for getting rank 135 on day 3.

More cleanse immunity means more burst required. Just so everyone here is clear about that.

Death Blossom bleeds are high duration but 450/tick (tell me if I’m wrong about the damage rate) for 10 seconds is 4.5k, if it somehow reached 20 seconds, 9k. One heal will be at least 4-5k hp if not more. How did you almost go down AFTER healing? And if you were running withdraw that would cleanse the bleed if traited for it.

And the comparison to power is laughable. A single auto attack or other ability can hit for 4-5k. His odds of outright killing you if he was on a D/P or even D/D build seems extremely high. You let it tick and didn’t hit your heal until you felt you “had too” which also seems like a strange decision to make.

At half hp, jumped by a competent thief, you will die (as a thief at least). That you survived with a scratch you felt comfortable letting continue to fester speaks more to your opponents lack of skill than anything.

I think it’s not guaranteed that the meta will shift to a net decrease in builds after removing damage based condition cleanse.

Conditions have a maximum DPS based on ideal application rate, duration and condition damage stats. This maximum is easy to calculate but is thrown off by the variable reduction that even an ill timed cleanse produces. This is much harder than just assuming a block will stop incoming damage completely (also why more unblockable spam is bad for balancing).

I run the equivalent of Maurader stats for condi in pvp. The stats aren’t tanky, just survivable enough, and come with decent condition damage / duration. For that reason I can say I would prefer the lighter stats in WvW if I wasn’t facing more than the usual pvp 1v2 in roaming situations. The damage is greater (or would be if the stats were equal with food and corruption stacks accounted for).

It’s the cleanse based Cold War that annoys me. Some people melt like butter. Others can build so much cleanse it is immune to conditions. No one should be immune to any kind of damage even if they build for it. Yet that is where we stand.

I’m not actually saying no cleanse should exist. But far less would make lower DoT builds far more consistent and viable.

But, and it’s a big but, only good players (including those who game the system) will be able to get on the leaderboard anyway.

For someone not on the leaderboard, potential wise, the 120 requirement doesn’t really exist.

It’s like a poor person complaining about a tax on millionaires.

Deceiver what is your opinion on significantly reducing cleanse for damage conditions and retooling conditions to balance around less cleanse and invulnerability generally?

Unless he was running a super glass thief with 11k hp and the combination of power damage and condi damage was enough to down him over time…

But really I’d be impressed if he was running a build that glassy and still managed to get killed by two stacks of bleed. That is something special.

Ill call bs on 2 stacks of bleed downing you. Also confused why he was able to use smoke clouds on a weapon set that lacks smoke fields.

Oops, I did the thing.

It’s also the start of the season. It’s not a hard reset but the skill mix will be greater early on. It’s also the middle of the week. A lot of people can’t play enough yet to get their placements done and settle in MMR.

Two possibilities. Either you are bronze skill wise or the things you think carry in bronze don’t actually carry in bronze.

Think of it this way. If you are the high MMR on your team and you are fighting 1v3 but your team is losing on the rest of the map…then you aren’t fighting the right people. Someone you aren’t fighting has a much higher MMR and you stomping his teams low MMR players isn’t helping because he can beat your team.

Let your team fight the ones you are beating up and go after the one or two beating your team.

Or you could be outmatched by the other team and it will settle down as people climb out of bronze.

The GW2 combat log rarely reflects the names of skills. There are so many times when I look at a log and see some skill that doesn’t exist listed as doing damage.

Much of necro life-force sustain relies on hitting large numbers of enemies. It’s what makes them good team fights.

I fight strong necros all the time with solid sustain even when being focused in a group.

I’m not sure you disagree with me. My point stands that the more mitigation you provide the more burst/spike damage is needed. Of course that applies to power damage and the evade/invuln/block/reflect HoT powercreep.

Cleanse isn’t meant to save you completely. And the reason conditions even need to burst you down between cleanses is because cleanses exist.

Think about it this way. Power based build can hit for 10k. Condition build can hit a combo of conditions that will tick for 10k. But cleanse lets someone reduce the conditions damage down to say 5k. Now they buff the damage so it can do 8k with cleanse. But that means the total potential of the condis went from 10k to 16k.

The more cleanse you ask Anet to add, the more conditions will need to burst you down between the cleanses to do any damage. So if you want to reduce condition burst you should ask Anet to remove condition cleanses and rebalance conditions—not add them.

The map mechanic really lends itself to decap while everyone is fighting over the extra points.

Thief: Steal

Now with a 10% chance to steal vital organs. Automatically reduces total health by 50% and grants thief a follow up ability “vial of salt.”

Vial blinds, aoe knockdowns and then sets everything in a radius on fire.

Foes slain by the vial are then automatically finished by a dancing moa ridden by an Asura wearing a cowboy outfit.

Exciton hits on something. In many group fights I focus more on immobilize than damaging conditions.

Who cares if I do 5k damage when I can help three other people land 20k damage they otherwise wouldn’t?

Yeah, the balance patch was a while ago.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-May-16-2017/first#post6597894

Of course Babaz plays condition builds. He said so in his post. You might want to try making actual arguments rather than attacking him personally because he plays some condition builds out of his many characters.

There are tons of power builds out there and many times I run into them in WvW. There are also condition builds but I can’t say there are more of them than power builds.

What classes do you fight in WvW most? Which of those classes are using condition builds? Which are impossible for you to fight?

The main issue isn’t that higher ranks earn rewards faster. The issue is that, at the lower end, the total time to complete the reward track for an average player is too much even for extensive playtimes. Getting high rank should be a marginal increase in speed. In contrast right now higher rank is significantly involved in whether a player has to play 10, 20, or 40 hours in a week.

Looking at my pip gain in silver—between 33% and 50% of my total pips are due to my rank. If I was in gold I would be earning over 50% of my pips from my rank. I also play a fair bit on outnumbered maps because I solo and group roam more often than not to support my team. The largest pip gains are outnumbered (largest share of pips earned) followed by slightly less pips from rank.

The problem is multiplicative. I get 2 pips per tick at silver. In the time a bronze player earns 60, I earn 120. Gold earns 180. Platinum earns 240.

The reward track assumes players will earn “enough” pips at a certain playtime per day.

3 pips per tick is 40.27 hours
5 pips per tick is 24.16 hours
7 pips per tick is 16.9 hours
9 pips per tick is 13.42 hours

Roughly 10 hours of WvW per week to max out rewards seems reasonable. Maybe even up to 15. So in the 8-10 pips per tick range. Say you average 2 for skirmish position, 1 for loyalty, 2 for rank and 2 on average for being outnumbered sometimes. If even a middle ranked player can’t max out the rewards in a reasonable period of time there is a problem.

Not all players should max out the reward track each week. But low rank players need to see middle rank players maxing out rewards within a reasonable time as a incentive to rank up. It is hardly good motivation to tell a new player “if you just get 2000 ranks you can maybe max out the rewards in a week if you play 8 hours.”

I also think it is poor manners to tell other players how they need to suck it up when the higher ranked players can get full rewards merely playing 8 hours and everyone else has to play two to three times as long. There is a legitimate problem here.

At least hybrid.

Actually they removed Soliders and Dire from sPvP to reduce bunker meta and promote a faster rate of kills (though HoT brought some bunker back).

The reason to take Dire as a WvW roamer has far more to do with needing to survive 1v3 or 1v4 long enough to retreat. Sure, I’d spec for more damage but I find in many situations survivability is more important (harder to kill people but I’m not running a one-shot build—if I one shot you that’s on you).

Just reminding everyone that may venture into PvE at some point. Most encounters with breakbars will increase the damage done to the NPC right after it is broken. Choking gas, as a pulsing poison field that will help allies stack poison can consistently apply 400 breakbar damage over each fields lifetime.

That is to say: CG fan apply as much damage as fear, per second, multiple times over.

Please CG responsibly.

I’d just add that you aren’t doing damage if you are dead. Invest in your survival and you will do more damage too.

The time it takes to earn the tickets will more than result in a thousand or so ranks.

Actually, I thought about it last night. The outnumbered bonus applies to roamers who seek out maps with fewer zeros to dodge.

Roamers were traditionally unable to gain ranks and so don’t get the bonus that higher ranked players get (up to +7). So if you are a roamer you will more often get the +5 outnumbered bonus.

This is actually a brilliant solution to the complaint that roamers are disadvantaged under this system. I joined a BL and played a bit. More than half that time was spent outnumbered. This rewarded me for sticking around in the BL and doing havoc work.

There are a lot of tanks power builds that dish out lots of damage. I’ve fought many of them.

In sPvP I’ve fought many more people who actually run balanced builds that. An handle conditions. In WvW I apply FEWER conditions (due to skill split) and people melt much faster. It’s not that I have stronger stats in WvW (I do), it’s that they never cleanse or evade or block.

And these are not “new” players. Veterans who should know better die to stuff that would be shrugged off in sPvP.

Do necros apply too many conditions? Is boon corrupt too strong? Maybe that is the conversation we need to be having.

There are pvp guilds. At least in NA.

There is a timer bar around the condition. The active part is the skill they used to apply the condition. The counter play of block, evade applies. You can also cleanse or use resistance. (I count transfer as a cleanse).

Damage over time is damage over time, not some unfair bonus.

What you described are trade offs. Just having a “cleanse” isn’t enough so many skills do multiple things.

Take your EA example. Cleanse on evade. Your evade is still valuable as an evade. Signet, you evade a few times then get hit with condi, now you get both endurance back and the cleanse. Or you get just endurance if no condi is on you. It makes the skill flexible. Shadowstep is also both teleport and cleanse.

I didn’t read the rest of your wall of text. I presume your complaints are fairly generic so I’ll post my usual replies: (1) fee builds only spam two keys and kill anyone with any degree of experience, (2) condition cleanse has an inverse relationship with damage spikes—the more cleanse in the game the more condi needs to spike you in order to deal damage before you get killed, (3) condition damage is meant to kill you and isn’t going to be removed from the game, (4) condition damage builds, specifically, may be over or underpowered just like power builds and if you have a complaint about a build you should speak up specifically rather than generally, (5) post your build and get advice on how to do better as a first step.

Anet should remove all damage because balance is hard.

That is how that sounds.

Staff 5.

2/3 dodges in Daredevil.

Shortbow auto is aoe via bounce.

Not as strong as some other classses options in many cases.

If you think you should survive 40-50 people all beating on you…I have some bad news for you.

No.

More population also is a higher rate of WvW xp gain.

I’m about 1000 right now. I roamed a lot and didn’t farm eotm so I’ll have to grind it out if I want the rewards. But that’s fine because if I focus on it I’ll probably gain that in the time it takes to earn most of the currency needed for the reward. Probably more if I pick up the weapon skins (got shortbow during tournaments but want some of the others).

See Odokuro’s response for a textbook example of what I mean.

So I want to compliment the sharp rise in WvW participation that has come out of this patch. I know it will die down, but we may actually get less atrophy given the rewards and people who try it out and stay for the battles.

Playing in an enemy BL was a lot more fun than usual. The fights were more varied and the need to watch out for roving zerg parties was exciting for me as a roamer. In a larger group the pace of battle was quick and lots of options existed for zerg busting as newer players flooded the field.

The newer players, on both sides, are a breath of fresh air. Queues will die down and servers will be re linked and unlinked as needed. For now I’m just enjoying the population and the kills.

Going forward I hope we can introduce a third borderland and revamp the Obsidian Sanctum to grant a reward to the server who holds the end of the jumping puzzle.

Cindition cleanse and resistance/boon spam have meant conditions spiking people down is necessary to do any damage. Also it has meant that boon corrupt skills have become more prevalent and deadly (more boons than ever to corrupt).

If Anet wanted to they could remove damage based condition cleanse from the game, rebalance the condition cleanse for movement control effects, and normalize condition damage on a build by build basis.

Then that would treat duration as the equivalent to critical damage (by increasing the total damage over time that was possible with condition damage stat as the power equivalent).

This would be a reduction in skill requirements (less need to manage condition cleanse for yourself or for those you are attacking with conditions) but overall might balance out the complaints from people who think “more cleanse” equals less condition damage. It does, but it also means condition damage needs to spike people down before their cleanse kicks in.

It’s a vicious cycle that only gets worse every time Anet adds in cleanse and buffs conditions to compensate.

I wouldn’t mind fighting longer fights without cleanse. It would be less frustrating for me to not have to deal with zero damage periodically even if I did less damage in bursts. But would you, anti-condi activists, really be ok with that?

Woe and terror, a thin blue chain
Upon a fleeting form
Woe and terror, all is vain
For less we mourn,
Cast fear aside
Behind our god, oh line of sight

Also, duration increases are nice on some sigils for condition specific increases. For example you can increase poison duration and take greater advantage of the poison on the shortbow 4 – choking gas.

Don’t forget to include some vitality in the final mix. Having at least 16k hp is probably ideal. More depending on the applicable circumstances.

Rank 1-1000 are rewarded by bonuses to supply and siege, etc. rank 1001-2000 are rewarded with special armor.

Seems fair…although roamers who never farmed rank get disadvantaged a bit.

You may consider taking advantage of some Daredevil skills. Several of them can provide either damage or stun or both. Even distracting daggers gives you the option of quick stun/pulmonary impacts even without the offhand pistol and using initiative. CV is also one of the best heals if you can use IS to leap out of the fray to heal.

Damage in sPvP is a bit different since the recent sigils update. A lot of sigils for damage were removed. That said, pack as many multipliers into your runes and traits as you feel comfortable with. Scholar Runes and DA with executioner is a pretty common choice in general.

As to fighting style, draw them in the opposite direction from where you entered the fight. Then give them whiplash by teleporting back in the direction you came from. You may not need to play stealthy but you should try to disorient your opponents regardless. If they are flustered they will make mistakes.

Be very aware of your surroundings. Ranged attacks will find you and kill you if you don’t have a way to deal with them. Line of sight is the most powerful (and free to use). You will have less problem with me Lee because you have a two way teleport on your weapon. Having ways to deal with ranged attacks will go a long way to improving your survivability.

You should not think of thief as for tanking in the middle. Even without stealth you will need to play hit and run with sword.