Guild Wars 2

Ilesyt.7084:

Yes I know VERY much how dzag likes to focus on Second and not on first and I think RoF is realizing that too.

It’s funny because you act like you guys don’t do the same. But it’s human nature to make some1 else responsible for his own misery.

Ilesyt.7084:

silvershadez.8421:

The real battle takes place for the second place between RoF and Dzag.

Lol you will regret saying that :p

When you played on a server like dzag for a long time you get used to not go for the first place. WvW balance is just screwed and thats so sad =(.

Looks like it will be similar to last week. The real battle takes place for the second place between RoF and Dzag.

You are getting desillusionary. We just battled for your spawn keep on EB for something like 30 mins now against both of you Miller and RoF. If I had the same mentality as you I would say you both just cooperated together so that you give us a hard time in taking it. Miller could say the same. It’s a poor argument accusing other servers for prearragend coorperation.

But no matter what I say you will keep believing that there is happening some evil conspiracy.

And yes by “giving up” just because you assume we cooperate people like you make this matchup boring.

For me it just looks you can’t handle to sit on the last place, but guess what: thats part of the game. We were last place for many times allready so i guess you have been. We still don’t have an unreachable lead before you. If you would stop complaining and organize some good groups you still have a chance. But let’s keep arguing how unfair everything is for you.

Bratwa.6582:

What is said and what is actually done are too different stories :P I never saw at this match that Dzarg went Millersborder and it is true that Dzarg claims in the Thread that they would attack both RoF and Millers, but in the same you also say you focus for second place, so easy said main focus is rof after all. I hope after saying everything what i have forgot to tell what was written in the german Thread, you may be happy now :=)

You are one good example why matchups are no longer balanced and look boring. You make pointless assumptions out of threads that maybe 3% of the WvW community has participated in, and in the end you just give up on wvw because of this.

I was in enough zergs allready that went for miller borderlands.

But the feeling that the other 2 servers are just playing against the own one is a feeling you get on every matchup. People try to find lame excuses of why they are at the last place, so this is the easiest explanation.

In reality the server with the best 24/7 coverage wins, which is in this case Millers. With the amount of people they have they should be 1 or 2 tiers higher then this. I don’t think dzag and ring of fire have that much different wvw population numbers. We all just have to deal with the situation and hope that the allmighty millers will have some mercy.

WvW is NEVER balanced. The population imbalances are there for almost any matchup I’ve had the pleasure to participate in, making those matches getting stale and boring because you just get the feeling you can’t win after like 2 days allready. We (on dzagonur) had this feeling several times allready and will continue having this feeling. It’s our curse for playing on a medium populated server, with low to moderate wvw participation. The same applies for you too obviously.

You really should be careful abusing the stealth on wall bug and frapsing yourself while doing so.

Also I have claimed keeps with some guildmates with 3man only without any probs. The key is distraction. On the lords: conditions are king.

You are definitely a good engineer so please don’t take this as a rant.

The title is a bit misleading =P it’s more like 1 ranger + 1 set of camp npc’s + 1 engineer vs 15 people coming in small groups of 3-5 each.

Also I don’t really understand, why you picked the flamethrower. It seems like you just use it to prevent people from selfrezzing with the fire field or other players from rezzing with the pushback.

I’m using a condition dmg variation of the 100 nades build (30/20/0/0/20) with bomb kit for elixir S and I feel this one is superior to the standard 100 nades build atleast for wvw (with condi duration food).

I can EASILY kill a buffed camp lord faster then any zerg I’ve seen. It’s great for AoE pressure and even elementalists (which have proven to be one of the thoughest to beat as a conditionclass) are a joke.

I used to be a 100 nades engineer similar to 5Gauges build and was pleased and succesful with it, but my performance went up significantly when I went the condition way. With the regular build I was struggling especially against foes that know about my weak spots. Some people are just too smart to get caught and in some cases I even ended up one shotting myself (ye i hate reflects).

For sPvP i still prefer 5Gauges build tho.

Voxdeus.1034:

To the best of my knowledge, condition duration for any specific condition can’t go above +100%. So the increased bleed duration is wasted any time you’re using pizza, so I’d probably reconfigure the runes.

As to the “lolwut” comment above, 850 condition damage is more than sufficient to make conditions dangerous, and taking it higher would require either changing spec and losing boon duration (bad idea) or drastically weakening other stats.

Any build that involves concentrating on a single stat is probably going to be a poor build. This balanced build is much better than a build which maxes out condition damage.

No. I have a necromancer with 150%+ bleeding duration and it works. The 100% cap is a lie (atleast for bleeding).

purpleskies.3274:

silvershadez.8421:

Also the elementalist argument is invalid. We all know Eles have an ridiculous amount of condition cleansers. I personally play condition engineer and lately alot of condition necromancer and i have a hard time with eles too, even without confusion. Try to argue about this with another prof viewpoint. Alot of profs have less to almost no conditionremovals if they don’t heavily trait for it. And since we can get some ridiculous high condition duration in WvW mesmers can maintain 5+ stacks of confusion all the time.

-A guardian can easily cure conditions from their heal and weapons as well and has many light combo fields which cure (combo fields are powerful but few people use them).
-A necro can cure conditions or send them to an opponent or convert them into buffs. Their heal is better with more conditions.
-An engineer can use elixir gun which has the 5 ability which cures conditions, toss elixir r, elixir c to convert conditions and toss elixir c to cure, antidotes from med kit or healing turret. Super elixir, toss elixir r and u also make light fields which cure conditions. They also can use elixir gun to cure allies, and their toss skills listed cure allies as well.

On top of that 1 of any of the 4 can cure an allies easily as well, if you work together.

Untraited the ele/engineer/necro/guardian have the best and most access to cures. If you trait these become even better at curing but untraited they are very strong already. The other professions have access to cures but are a bit more limited outside of specing, eating or gearing, which is a weakness of the more offensive classes of mesmer/thief/ranger/warrior. But even those all have utilities that can cure and some even have condition removal built into their heals.

There is also food, runes and sigils that reduce condition duration/transfer conditions/remove conditions which everyone has access to.

Not anyone traits for heavy condition removal and the engineer lacks it without those investments. Elixir gun is crap so why should I waste a utility slot for 1 condi cleanser every 20 sec? The engineer is allready a tough class to play why should I gimp myself even more? And even if I bring all those cleansers there is still a chance it will cleanse the wrong condition / you catch me when I’m out of cleansers.

I wonder why you even bring condition cleanser as a valid argument as you can easily reaplly 4-8 confusion stacks as a mesmer without too much effort. Shatters aren’t your only source of stacking them you know?

Any good conditionspec will watch out for conditioncleanse abilities and keep their key conditions for after the enemy blew them up. Even an elementalist with almost infinite cleanse possibilities offers a timewindow where he can’t cleanse anything.
With your logic he just should wait out until his cleanses come avaiable again before he starts doing anything…

And no confusion doesn’t really hurt those key spammers, it hurts those classes that attack fast/produce multiple actions with 1 single button press. The 100 nades medkit button with 4 ticks for 1 key press was just 1 example. There are sure more.

I don’t think ANet wanted confusion to be a much stronger stun which penalices you even more then a regular stun/daze.

I’ll stop argueing here as I don’t see this going into any direction. Mesmers will say leave it as it is no matter what kind of arguments I can bring. I just dare you to play against those named mesmers with another class. I think this would greatly help you understand.

Not everyone would be happy. One example would be the famous elixir/HGH build. I personally would benefit from such a change. But as said not everyone is on the same boat, as not everyone uses kits.

If you look at confusion as a stun where you shouldn’t do anything then mesmer / engineer is able to perma stun you. Mesmer would infact be able to AoE stun a whole group of enemies and you call that balanced?

Also the elementalist argument is invalid. We all know Eles have an ridiculous amount of condition cleansers. I personally play condition engineer and lately alot of condition necromancer and i have a hard time with eles too, even without confusion. Try to argue about this with another prof viewpoint. Alot of profs have less to almost no conditionremovals if they don’t heavily trait for it. And since we can get some ridiculous high condition duration in WvW mesmers can maintain 5+ stacks of confusion all the time.

I killed a hasted glasscannon thief in less then 1 second with my confusion bomb + #3 pistol skill on engi and thats just 8 stacks of confusion.
Try using confusion on an elementalist using tornado (or underwater whirlpool). They get like 5 ticks in 1 second. Thats an instant kill, even if you aren’t using condition gear.
Or how do you justify a 100 nades engineer getting hit 4 times with confusion for his only avaiable condition cleanser (which has a possibility to cleanse the wrong condition but confusion)?

There are lot’s of other examples why confusion needs a rework. And don’t tell me mesmers would be rendered useless. I personally play a hybrid mesmer (similar to Countless sPvP build) and I can keep up 10+ stacks bleeding, 4-8 stacks confusion and still do decent direct dmg. Most enemies die to my normal mind wrack combo allready. If they are still alive my confusion + bleeds will give them the rest.

I play an confusion mesmer AND an engineer (which is my main), which both have good access on confusion. It’s a killer for anyone not able to remove conditions immediatly or the careless ones. The reason it seems to tick from no action at all is because some profs have automated skills. For example if a guardian refreshes one of his virtues this is counted as an skill activation.

You may know about the 100 nades engineer build which is popular right now. If you use a sigil which procs on weapon switch this counts for a confusion tick. The weapon switch itself counts for a confusion tick, so does the spell created from kit refinement. So if I was to remove that confusion with my #4 medkit skill, which also creates 1 confusion tick i receive 4 ticks of confusion for 1 attempt to remove it.

In my oppinion the ticks need an internal CD. So that there can’t be more then 1 tick each second or maybe even every 2 seconds.

Well most people just can’t look past their own profession. No other class has received new interesting builds from any change. I play 6 different professsions (engineer, ele, thief, guard, necro, mesmer) and all builds I have known and used for any of them were avaiable from the start. Infact they just cutted down some pretty good builds by some restricting nerfs yet.

You guys need to stop seeing problems only within your class. It takes 2 minutes to analyse other profession forums and to realize that all of them have their own problems. Some got less some got more and elementalist definetly is one of the stronger classes (if played properly).

There is no prof with more then 2-3 (good) builds (infact not too much builds come close to the common D/D build). It’s definitely not an elementalist issue.

The same can be said about just any profession. No profession has much more then 2 outstanding builds.

There are different ones tho. I was doing well with a signet/aura build back in my first days and I don’t think it would be too bad now neither.

The problem is that alot of traits just appear pointless compared to our strong ones. I could list multiple traits here that no one would ever use and I’m sure most of you would agree on those with me, still they are still there making our decision which trait to use much more easy.

TLDR: It’s NOT solely an elementalists issue.

Giving us a deathmatch alone won’t solve any issues.
We need more incentives to do sPvP, tPvP or pPvP. Farming for armor skins (only avaiable in the mists) isn’t something that appeals the majority, especially since it’s some serious grind to get ranks past 30. I generally just played battlegrounds in other games and was convinced, that I would be doing mainly sPvP here. Now since I’ve reached rank 30 I never really logged back into the mists. It’s such a frustrating place and I feel like my game time is invested better in doing PvE (which i commonly don’t do in other games) or WvW.

More different modes would be a start, but they allready said they only want conquest, since it’s the most balanced (and most “entertaining”) gaming type.

As much as I agree that culling got worse for alot of people (including me) since last patch I really have to ask you:

Do you really feel it’s ANets fault that you have such long que times now?

This would not only be naive but completely delusional. If there is someone to blame, then it’s those players that transfer on the high populated / winning servers only…

You don’t need stealth to stay alive. I could beat a warrior with ease without stealth at any day. Just pick a D/D condi spec and time your evasive moves right. Theres nothing the warrior can do about it.

My thief is my tankiest character. No he can’t take a beating (like my guardian) he just avoids them with superior mobility and all those cool evasive moves.

My previous post was just pointing out why people might tend to hate thieves.

People hate thieves because they are by far the easiest to learn and play, due to initiative instead of CD’s. Other classes have to be way more cautious when to use their skills, while a thief ain’t in that much of a trouble even if he makes 1 wrong decision.

Yet they are one, if not the most effective class for multiple aspects and that with minimal effort.
BTW: You say you can’t support? Shortbow has the best on demand blast finisher ingame and I hope I don’t need to explain how important those blast finishers can be.

Classes based around a stealth mechanic will ALLWAYS be on the witchhunt. You just have to grow some thick fur for that. Still in this game stealth is the most overpowered one I have ever seen in any game. There’s literally no counter to it. In other games multiple classes had either improved stealth detection or could get the rogue/thief/whatever you call them out of stealth. Any other game atleast gave the enemy a chance to see them when they were facing in the right direction and were close to them.
On top of that stealth won’t break on damage, you even blind nearby foes / cleanse conditions when entering or heal yourself if traited right. Stealth currently is a one trick pony. Where other profs have to use so many skills to achieve the same you just have to press 1 button.

But the biggest issues people have with thieves in generall is their attitude and denial.

The reason thiefs and especially stealth is that strong in this game is because there is basically no single counter to it like we used to have in other games.

Shadow refuges is an easy way to die? Pick blind on stealth, that gives you 5 blind ticks from refuge only if enemies are “dumb” enough to stay in your range. AoE from distance then you say? Most AoEs from distance have such a long traveltime/activation time that they hit once at best. The only counter to refuge is a way to knockback or pull the thief out of the radius before the 5 seconds are over. But alot of those skills have long activation times/are on weaponsets you won use for anything else/ or need a target to hit / be even able to activate.

A thief using that common P/D spec can just take out anyone he likes, even if he is in the midst of a zerg. I did that several times myself allready.

The only possible way to bring him down (if he is skilled) is to blind/aegis/dodge him in the right moment (so he wastes initiative on a missing cloak and dagger) but even then a good thief won’t use CnD on you but a mob around you (which itself can’t evade/blind/use aegis). If you then catch him unstealthed maybe with a root (unless he has shortbow and/or shadowstep which most thiefs have) and some good direct dmg you will eventually get him downed. Don’t even bother trying to take him down with conditions. Alot of thieves run either HiS (Heal), Shadowstep or the condi removal in stealth or all 3 of them.

Caltrops don’t drop stealth, so does shortbow #4 venom cloud, giving him some tools to even further stack more conditions even while in stealth.

This spec is the easiest and cleanest to play and takes little to no knowledge to get used to it. The real problem are all those synergys (heal while in stealth, blind on stealth entry, initiative regain on stealth entry making him basically never run out of ini) and Shadow Refuge.

Thiefs currently focus too much on stealth, most even rely on shadow refuge to be “viable”.

In general Shadow Refuge is the most unbalanced thief skill yet. Most complains are just because of that single skill and they are totally justified.

Thief is strong enough even without that skill and far from balanced (in my oppinion) even if you tune down SR.

But don’t expect them to agree with me. Those (especially the ones that never played any other prof yet) will reject what I just sayed.

DanH.5879:

glass cannon = 30/30/0/0/10 + bersekers, you are using a bunker build my friend
no offense, but i do way more damage than you do on fractal mobs 30+ !

but yeah, glass are not viable anymore, bunkers are, nice videos too

If you consider that DMG as bad then you surely never played another prof yet. Even tho it’s a bunker build it creates bigger numbers then most of my glass cannon builds on my 5 other professions i play on lvl 80 in wvw…

Thiefs sure are getting more and more delusional.

Support is the onliest thing thiefs lack right now.

For me they have the best defense ingame (most evades, longest stealths, most teleports), burst damage (both in AoE and single target), one of the best condition specs (P/D) and the best mobility (next to eles).

If you give them even more support (next to venom share) I soon wonder why you should play any other class. We could also rename this game into Thief Wars. The day thiefs get such a major buff out of no reason we truly know where the devs want this game to be.

I’m actually surprised people seem to not know about this. I was using a similar build since launch and destroyed groups of enemies with it within WvW, while being untouchable in sPvP for most scenarios. There was just nothing else the enemy could have done but turning the other way and take a run. I’m certainly not bragging here, I’m just pointing out that design issue to give thief that much evasive resources.

I think thief is the onliest class, that can tank/kite all those mobs in CoF path 2 (where magg places his bomb) from 0 to 100%.

Seems like most people can’t look beyond that glasscannon or P/D image the thief has right now.

What kind of gear/jewelry do you use? Which runes/ orbs and sigils?

TY in advance.

I’m testing your build right now and it’s pretty good. Allways underestimated coated bullets trait.

I just can’t watch your video since I’m from germany and it was restricted for us, so forgive me if I ask you something you may have shown in the video.

The onliest thing I kind of miss in your build is the permanent movementspeed increase from speedy kits. What do you generally use to not allways fall behind?

Well I just changed my gear from power/prec/crit% to condition/power/prec damage, and did put in shrapnel in.

My dmg has gone insane since i did so. I can now easily stack up to 20 stacks of bleeding, keep up poison in the same time + a pretty solid burn every now and then from the incendiary proc trait + some confusion too from pistols.

It seems like the change to shrapnel made this actually possible for me. I never felt as deadly as I do now tbh. So I wont jump on the flame train.

As someone who just finished his 5th lvl 80 char I think I can draw you a good picture of this class.

First of I started playing a thief to lvl 80. Got bored by facerolling people and those (probably easiest) gameplay.

My second char was aimed for a bit more of a challenge: an elementalist. There was literally no single good spec known about the ele, when I started this toon. I had lot’s of fun playing it, as it was way more challenging compared to the thief. Soon I found out about a really great spec and ele is now my main in all areas.

But im not that kind of guy who plays just 1 class (i completely abandoned my thief back then), so i started lvling a necro (because people said a power necro is impossible to play back then). Even tho necro is tougher to play then a thief it was way more simple then my ele. I still had fun playing him, but theres not so much depht within the necro just like with my ele.

So now i was starting my engi. I allready knew about the grenade spec and that it was highly effective in PvE + WvW when I started him. Still I had a blast playing it. It was as complex to play, maybe even more then my ele and gave me that challenging gameplay i was looking for since I’ve finished on my ele.

My 5th char after that was a mesmer (which isn’t a bad class, it’s just again way easier to play then i like it to be).

What I want to say is that you shouldn’t look for the prof which get’s you the easiest kills. You should go for those that generate the most fun for you. The grenade nerf was hurting my build hard. Still there is room to adapt (even tho I have to completely rehaul my gear now). No matter how hard they are gonna nerf the engi or ele: I’ll keep on playing them until something more challenging arrives.

As much as I love your idea of helping us out finding a new build as fast as possible it would be awesome to atleast see some gameplay for that build.

I don’t get the idea why people do videos where they read tooltip descriptions. A build creator would have done the same with less effort for you.

ZLE.8293:

I wish i was able to do such “miracles” with my thief…Would i bother you too much if i ask you to upload a video of yours?Just a single full map video,uncutted,unedited so we might learn something from your “perfect defense”?

My comp sucks for recording. If you still insist on watching something similar to my spec then go and have a look at Slic’s “Yippie Kye Yay 6” video. He has a similar playstyle + spec, except that I tend to use only Withdrawal as my main heal and some different major traits + caltrops utility + refuge.

I rarely die in a wvw scenario when being heavily outnumbered while I’am alone. Most of the times I die i kitten** up with a cloak and dagger (going into a blind or aegis), which is mostly my own fault. I can even go 2 vs 1 on decent players while playing sPvP with this. Can’t reproduce that on my other chars (Ele, Mesmer, Engi, Necro) tho.

In the same moment the devs kept calling the thief is considered the class which should be the most slippery and hard to catch they also mentioned shortbow being too strong as for the current state.

The true curse is the ignorance of thieves who think this class is fine. Since it’s not. Certain specs are borderline OP and the recent nerfs we had almost never touched the really issue about them. I mean the real threat were those backstab burst thieves and those bleeding unicorn thieves (D/D + P/D or SB, with caltrops and almost perma stealth + evade) and not the sword thieves.

Stealth ain’t your onliest defense. When i combin all my evasive style attacks (leaping death blossom, withdrawal, roll for iniative … and lot’s of more) with my dodge rolls i can evade for almost 15 seconds permanently. If my endurance runs out I have stealth, if I don’t have stealth left I can rely on initiative to dodge/stealth. If I run out of initiative my endurance is back up for more evades since I can keep vigor up all the time. If both my initiative or endurance runs out I still have shadow refuge to reset the fight.

And alltho this isn’t enough allready we can regenerate decent health while in stealth when specced deep down the shadow arts traitline + leeching venoms. And for those heals you don’t even have to use any healing power at all to make them worth it.

My thief is the onliest char where I had no use for toughness gear so far, as I rarely (most likely never) was hit anyway. Therefor I call him out for having the “perfect defense”.

I suggest you playing another class atleast once and compare it to the backstab burst / unicorn build.

It’s interesting to see that you consider the necro as the hardest one to escape from.

I started out leveling my thief to 80, which bored me to hell since it is super easy to kill just anything. I searched for some more challenge and thought, that the elementalist would offer me what I was looking for so I leveled one of those to 80 too. I played lots of sPvP and tPvP with both of them of course (rank 25 here), aswell as WvW.

With none of both I ever had any trouble getting away from necros, due to multiple condition removals and mobility skills (like ride the lightning for my ele and infiltrators arrow on thief). We now could argue every necro I faced was a baddy, but I don’t believe that. Also there weren’t that much situations, where I actually had to run from a necro yet.

Once I geared out my ele I was looking for a new challenge and now finished lvling up my necro. While this class still has 2 powerful builds (conditionmancer and bunkermancer), atleast for sPvP I had a hard time figuring out any viable power build.

In my oppinion the core problem are those slow moving skills, like staff auto attack, death shroud number 1 skill and sometimes unreasonably high CD’s (staff for example) and their traits. They seem to have the most unappealing traits, atleast of those 3 profs I played yet.

If they really see the role of the necro as a class where you have trouble to get away from then either the mobility of other classes is way over the top, or the necro still lacks movement restricting skills he should have had from the start.

Ah I just noticed that it only affects life transfer and not siphons. You said you tend to pick 20 points in blood magic. Which second major trait would you use together with transfusion?

It just seems like the dagger #2 skill doesn’t work with the transfusion trait. I hope this is just a bug and will get sorted out.

I also realized, that you summon the healing minion and sacrifice him immediately for the blank heal multiple times. Wouldn’t you be bette roff with another heal skill then?

I’m currently starting on investigating if shadowfiend and bonefiend are even worth their slot. Flesh worm and fleshgolem seems to do the job way better.

This video really has reawakened my intention to actually bring my necro to lvl 80. Just 1 thing about Transfusion (the trait which heals nearby allies whenever you siphon): does it really heal your minions for you? I just tested it several times and it doesn’t seem to give them back any life at all.

Impressive. Can you tell me your amulet/rune/sigil choice?

hidden.9743:

@Daphoenix, So your build and playing has really turned me back onto my Ele. Today I was considering quitting my Ele and playing a mesmer. I only have a few questions for you if you dont mind my stupidity.

1# Is the PVT gear you switched to from SE? I am not finding it anywhere else.
2# Where did you find the PVT daggers?
I am still learning but am trying to get the gear rolling in my favor so I dont look like a wet cloth anymore XD
Thank you again
-Neer

I may not be daphoenix, but you get PVT armor from karma vendors in those Orr areals. Here is a nice and clean site to see where to get which piece:
http://dulfy.net/2012/09/08/gw2-templegod-karma-armor-sets/

The easiest way to get PVT weapons is doing ascalonian catacombs and collecting marks from it. Another way would be to get honor badges out of WvW. If you don’t have any karma to spent you can get the armor from these guys too.

Ring of Earth DOES add cripple.

Just for the record: this is the earth attunement #2 skill from mainhand dagger, and not the fire #4 from offhand dagger.