Guild Wars 2

You don’t understand my post I guess. The point was that the current situation is extremely similar to the complaints about 100blades and Backstab. And the L2P posts. And the nerfs that happened anyway.

So when you say to L2P and stop complaining, history seems to show it’s not the best route to take :o Myself I don’t care too much. I use a Ranger and have fun with RS, and I do think it needs a change but whatever.

Lazze.9870:

It’s almost amusing reading the comments from all the crybabies.

Learn and adept. kittening about it won’t help.

Complaining about 100blades and backstab worked and we got it nerfed, despite the many L2P posts like yours. Why shouldn’t we try? :p

Straylight.7529:

Always the same answer: they were deemed to confusing for new players causing them to panic and stop playing the game.

A game having flavor isn’t user friendly. We need blandness instead.

T raw.4658:

Back stab range is 130 steal is 900 not 1800-2100

There’s also the fact that once the backstab is done, the thief is left in 130 range of the guy he downed, which might very well be in very close proximity to the rest of his friends so he needs some escape plan.

It’s not just infodump. It’s extremely easy to be in a situation where you plain cannot do anything. Build related, one of the most frustrating things a new player can face is those immortal bunkers, or a dodge spam thief, or a clone/blink spam Mesmer.

Imagine a new player in that situation. He’s supposed to be a Zerker build, and yet he cannot really even drop the target HP under 90%? Why? He doesn’t understand at all and nothing in the game explains to him the problem.

As for the OP, you mention that one of the most important things in the mode is non combat related. Map awareness and proper rotations. I don’t think it’s a problem as much really because MOBAs actually do it, and many many noobs play them anyway. Heck, if you were a complete ultra noob to DotA, never player it and never ever looked at tutorials, how do you imagine understanding the concept of laning at all? And yet, even in the lowest of the lowest level, most players get it. Most players lane somewhat correctly or at least try to.

Map awareness is trained, proper rotations can be learned. In fact, I’d say the fact the game depends on those skills is better because it’s not as twitch and so it won’t bother too much the older gamers. But what’s the point if the new player just gets destroyed in combat? Completely destroyed, wrecked, and he doesn’t even have the minor idea on why, how and what he should do instead? And combat is the first impression he’ll get of PvP in the first place.

Getting stability during Dodge could indeed make for a nice GM trait that wouldn’t be too OP while still very gameplay defining. It would also make more sense for the Acrobatics line.

DeceiverX.8361:

And the full CnD combo usually includes mug which yields a total ratio of 1 + 1.5 + 2.4 = 4.9 before considering the effects of might and other readily-accessible boons thieves have access to in order to increase damage. It doesn’t matter that steal has a 30 second cooldown because your target is DEAD. One also needs to consider how burst thieves have access to 16 stacks of might for 10s instantly.

You cannot include Mug coefficient like that. Mug cannot crit.

niconori.7235:

How did u get 3.6? C&D is 1.5 in WvW and Backstab 2.4 thus the total skill coefficient is 3.9. This is higher than Rapid Fire.

Right, sorry, stupid mistake. Still the Longbow has 5% more base damage than the Dagger. As a result, the 3.75 coefficient does 5% more damage which means it’s equivalent to a 3.9375 coefficient skill if it was used by a dagger weapon.

niconori.7235:

I haven’t even add in the damage from mug.

And I haven’t added the 5 stacks of vulnerability a Ranger gets as an opening attack , I haven’t counted either the damage the Ranger does with it’s first attack, say, a normal arrow first (0.9 coefficient) that autocrits Let’s not talk about the 10 stacks of vulnerability added by Rapid Fire itself and the 5 more from your own pet opening strike. Or your own pet damage either. And the very high chance that Fire and Air sigil will proc from the 10 attacks you do.

niconori.7235:

Likewise, thief doesn’t need to be in melee range to initiate and deliver the burst damage combo. You can pretty much chain C&D into steal into backstab for a 900 initiation range, 3.9 coefficient dmg output in a grand total of less than a second. How long is the cast time of rapid fire again? Isn’t this more OP?

21s cooldown at most for that combo. And you didn’t mention the small fact that the thief, once his combo is over will be all sad and on melee range of whatever he didn’t manage to kill, like a tanky target. And his friend. And his friend zerg.

YourFriendMarvin.4127:

I talk about counter play and flanking, because that was point of the flanking strike change. To be able to stop someone from setting up their burst by successfully blocking. Sure I can just dodge the larcenous, but most larcenous combos revolve around steal/infiltrators signet. That have no cast time, and with the limited dodges we can ever so have, and the amount of time you can get steal back (21 second c/d). In a mesmers perspective they get shut down. Anyways I have school, best post more thoughts in other thread to get more attention to this thread.

So, you seriously don’t have a problem with an Unblockable skill countered by blocks?

I’m pretty sure this change has nothing to do with allowing people to block an unblockable skill but to prevent thieves from precasting LS so that they can combo Steal and FS as an opener.

It has nothing to do with allowing you to dodge FS since you could just dodge it already and FS was a pretty big cue that a FS was coming.

The shame is that the way ANet prevented that, they gutted the whole skill and the whole weapon set in the process :o Suggested change : LS can combo into FS on a hit or on a block/evade/invulnerable. Only a miss because there was nothing in range will prevent the combo. There is a precedent for such behavior : the #1 skills chain even when you hit an invulnerable target.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Wich says nothing lol. This means, you leveled engie while it was still easier (you burst kill to unlock poison volley/confusion short/burn shot), and then finally your dps goes up enough to be a decent farmer.

Techincally (because I didn’t test it myself but it should work), you can just dance your way through the tutorial and you’ll be level 2 once it ends unlocking the skill #2. Then you just need level 4 for skill #3. It seems that Heart quests give a LOT of XP now at the start.

I think you should be able to get to level 4 rather easily and quickly without ever using your #1 skill.

Geiir.7603:

Wonder when we get a 1200 range instant cast skill that remove ranger pets for 6 seconds and take away the engineers ability to use toolbelt skills and kits for 6 seconds?

Something like replacing the Ranger pet skill by :
“Pet Food”
“Place some delicious pet treat on the gound. All ranger pets in 1200 will be attracted to the lure and fall asleep for 10s once they take a bite”

I didn’t say this change doesn’t bring counterplay. I said that Unblockable skills weren’t meant to be counterplayed by block/aegis in the first place. But now, since you cannot chain into LS, they are.

Otaur.9268:

Signet of Stone is an 80 second cooldown now.

If you go for a Longbow build, there’s no reason not to take the Signet CD reducing trait that makes it a 64s cooldown.

YourFriendMarvin.4127:

Flanking strike never had an unblock able portion, only the skill “Larcenous Strike” did.
Only Larcenous Strike would hit through a block/aegis, while Flanking evaded and took off aegis/not unblockable.

I said : “the previous version of FS=>LS was Unblockable for 2/3 of the damage and the boon steal part”

66% of the damage was Unblockable. Now, technically, 0% of the damage is Unblockable. This is a nerf. Do you dispute that?

And anyway, there was already plenty of counterplay in LS/FS before! You had a HUGE telegraph in LS that warned you that FS was coming so you could be ready to dodge the later.

No, the only reason why this change was done was to prevent thieves from precasting LS and opening a fight with FS. There were a lot of ways to prevent that without gutting the viability of the skill.

Otaur.9268:

False…
Thief C&D BS combo can do 12k instantly, whereas RF has 2.5 second cast time and can be dodged. Thief can spam 11111111 while stealthed until they hit, because being dodged/blocked does not reveal and prevent their burst.

C&D combo is WvW has 3.6 total skill coefficient. Rapide Fire has 3.75. Also, the longbow base damage is 5% higher than a dagger. Let’s also mention the fact that the C&D => Backstab combo power is gutted in sPvP : the total coefficient in this game mode drops to 3.1 due to a 33% damage nerf on C&D.

And lastly, the Ranger doesn’t need to get in melee range to deliver the damage which is a big part of the counterplay.

YourFriendMarvin.4127:

Same with flanking strike, why should you get unpunished for when a guy dodges, uses a block/aegis/ or successfully blinds you. It’s is unfair for someone who anticipated your flanking strike while you didn’t anticipate what they did to avoid it.

Dodge, maybe, but the previous version of FS=>LS was Unblockable for 2/3 of the damage and the boon steal part. Now with that change, for all purposes you can consider the whole skill to having lost it’s Unblockable part.

The skill wasn’t meant to be countered by block/aegis before and now it is! This is a plain and simple nerf and not adding counterplay.

Otaur.9268:

Ok then Thief Backstab needs more than 4 second cooldown, Warrior F1 abilities more than 7 seconds CD, Mesmers clones for shatters need to be changed so they cant chain shatter… you get the point?

Did you knew that the total damage from Rapid Fire is more than the Thief damage from C&D chained into a perfect Backstab? I think having a “4s” CD on Backstab is waranted to go with the 8s CD on Rapid Fire then.

Prysin.8542:

actually, the damage multiplier for LB2 is horrible. its 0.37986 per arrow, or something close to that.

So horrible. For a total of 10 arrows per cast, it means a very weak 3.75 total coefficient damage. Think about it : it’s only slightly more than a thief that does C&D and Backstab on a target!

At the minimum, they should make Flanking Strike Unblockable or cycle to LS even if blocked since the later is Unblockable and so the whole skill was meant to be used to steal any boon, even Aegis.

Walker.3056:

damage now comes much more from AA chain

This is very sad and makes for a very bland weapon set :/

Feaduin.7603:

Wow, OP asks for a small QoL improvement which will have no effect on game mechanics and everyone jumps on him…

You aren’t allowed to ask for improvements in this game. If you ask for improvements, it means you are saying the game is bad and there’s too much negativity in the forums already! So extra negativity will not be tolerated.

And the OP case is even worse here since he’s asking for a buff for thieves and we all know the thieves case.

Artaz.3819:

It was broken OP before …

Tell that to my 10k HP, medium armor, no protection, no stability, no blocks Thief :o

Terrahero.9358:

And secondly, why should we give certain professions special warnings for something that bothers them in particular? Im sure other professions can think of some special warnings that they would like the game to remind them off. So where does it end?

Because ANet said they don’t want us playing by the interface, and the Revealed debuff is exactly that. At least, when it was introduced, it was something self inflicted only and you could track it’s status yourself. But now it’s externally inflected through instant cast/no animation skills.

At which level can you ask your pet to stop attacking?

Atherakhia.4086:

They’re both 2.5 second channel spells. They both have access to the same trait to reduce cooldown by 20%. Ranger can get 5% from Eagle Eye and 10% from Hunter’s Tactics. Warrior will have 15% from power, 10% from bleeding, 3% if endurance full etc.

They really are quite close at everything but the range advantage if the Ranger runs EE.

Unless the Wiki is wrong, Volley is a 3.0 coefficient attack and Rapid Fire a 3.75. This means the base damage of Rapid Fire is 25% more than Volley. Also, it fires 10 arrows instead of 5 attacks so you get twice as many chances to proc sigils. And lastly, Rapid Fire applies vulnerability at each attack which Volley doesn’t.

Snowmoon.1758:

Yea i know u can waypoint, but kitten !! are they stingy about it.
Eg: Ascalon City all the way to the The Breach…and….no WP there.
Heck there isn’t even any WP to Old Ascalon!

I really don’t see why pple like this game so much.
To me, this is just another artificial way to add extra padding to lengthen the game.
For those people who played hundreds of hours of GW1, i bet at least 80% of those time was spent jogging all over the place.

Can someone please list out again what is it that makes GW1 good?

Well if it reasures you, I did find the pacing of the Prophecies quest to be too slow, the thing too long. Factions was better and the best was Nightfall. But I liked the Faction areas the most

I did start playing GW1 with an Assassin so I was dumped in Factions for my first contact. It probably helped. You can just ditch the Prophecies story line and start working on Factions instead at your point if you want.

As for your lack of waypoints in that part of the world, well this one is kind of a big adventure for you. It is a challenge to cross that whole place to reach the next town yeah. Maguuma Jungle is rather hard about that place too. It does make the areas feel a lot more wild/remote as it fits. Still, once you’ve unlocked the outposts the maps are all relatively easy to reach.

Except in Maguuma Jungle :p

Also, many story missions you do will actually dump you at the outpost for the next story or very close to it.

You CAN waypoint to all the towns and small outposts provided you visited them once already.

As for the miniquests, you can skip them to your heart content, unless you really want the skill one of those provides since it’s cheaper to do the quest than to buy it from vendors.

NinjaEd.3946:

Conclusion= thief is cheese in the eyes of the public. Now with our “epic” unload buff p/p will be added shortly. Expect a nerf from 5 to 7 initiative cost.

Don’t worry about that for now. People will be too busy complaining about the Ranger Unload for a moment :p

PS : I think it’s time for me to slot Dagger Storm and maybe even Smoke Screen.

Needle Trap (and Tripwire) are actually AoE skills. The trick is that, those two skills aren’t just some wire you put to drop down people. Tripwire in fact is a small landmine that knockdowns people when they break the wire!

The effect is obviously AoE. I do remeber the time where the low quality materials we had to work on to make those landmines meant that players that cut the wire from the edge were too far from the mine to even be affected in the first place :’(

Harpoon Gun stealth attack skill.

And before you ask, Deadly Strike is the Spear stealth attack skill too.

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

You do realize that ANET SPECIFICALLY gave that perk to Legendaries as a distinguishing characteristic from the next tier of weapons right?

You do realise ANet added that feature to Legendaries because the previous system where players reskined the Legendary on an exotic weapon of the correct stats would never work once they had to reskin their legendary on a much much more expensive Ascended weapon to get the desired stat right?

RyuDragnier.9476:

You rarely see D/D, P/P, S/D, or P/D thieves in WvW, or at least that’s how it is in Tier 2 from what I’ve seen. All I see is D/P thieves everywhere, just spamming BP->HS combo and Backstabbing for massive damage. I prefer seeing the other sets, which makes it a shame that I rarely see them.

But nerfing D/P might not be the way to get the other sets out in WvW. If they aren’t played, it’s probably because they aren’t viable in the first place.

Stooperdale.3560:

An ‘empty hand’ as an offhand weapon would be my ideal thief improvement. It would look far more elegant and deft than most other weapon suggestions. You would need some way to create stats and sigil for that ‘empty hand’ though.

Something like, a weapon you can equip and has stats and you put a sigil on it ?

Talyn.3295:

No. This isn’t needed. I don’t often agree with Solomon but on this I am with him. His points are correct. Stat swaps on the fly a perk for owning one of the rarest weapons in the game. It was a perk anet added just for them. And it should stay that way.

This game would be a better game with stat change on the fly for all items, not only ascended. And yet because a few priviledge people farmed legendaries we can’t have it?

The 3rd empty hand weapon skill is a weaker version of our dual skills. This isn’t meant to be used seriously except for level 1-2 thieves that didn’t get enough weapons yet.

There’s no point playing and balancing the game for empty hand sets, you are missing stats and one sigil !

Sir Vincent III.1286:

If used appropriately, yes, 10s is good enough time to finishing off a target. Typically Heartseeker will finish a target off within the 10s window.

Obviously, no matter how tanky the target is, you just need to wait for him to drop low enough in the first place and yeah, 10s is enough.

MakubeC.3026:

• Shadow Return’s 10s cooldown limits the hit-and-run capabilities of the skill. If my enemy gets me at the 11th second, I lose both: my escaping way and my condition cleaning.

You forgot something : Can you actually do something in 10s only? I mean, lot’s of players go around with very tanky builds. 10s is seriously short to kill them.

Remove main hand dagger, Withdraw and Roll for Initiative and it should curb those tendencies.

The fact we only got 10s to use the return is kinda disastrous too for using it in an assaulting way. If you miss the window, you threw out both a potent stun break skill but your main condition removal utility.

Of course, Pain Response could cleanse Torment and it’d still be a 30s cooldown trait that procs when you got absolutely no condition on yourself and so will be unavailable for you when you most need it.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

That’s my point, we can debate the situation when stealth is great and when it isn’t. Yes, I agree that no contribution is coming from a stealth Thief, same with a Warrior who cannot attack and build up adrenaline due to confusion, thus they cannot cleanse the condition, so they have to find other ways to remove the condition when they are out of adrenaline and at low health.

Technically, a Warrior with Cleansing Ire also builds adrenaline just by getting hit.

evilapprentice.6379:

Here’s a suggestion that’s actually in the realm of possibilities – Disconnect the ability shared by Venomous Aura from the venom itself. Instead of Venomous aura directly copying a venom, it should instead trigger a unique ability based on the venom used.

Was thinking about a similar thing. Say, our venoms apply 2 conditions each. Well, with Venomous Aura, our friends would only apply one of the two conditions, or a weaker version (immobilize => cripple etc…)

Another simple option would be to double the number of venom charges and make venomous aura halve them again.

Ok if Eviscerate does half damage from the front and isn’t a leap anymore but a plain melee attack.

Xiahou Mao.9701:

It’s pretty clear that they don’t intend to have Power Block have any special functionality towards Initiative skills.

It still doubles the interrupt cooldown effect, just like it does for any other skill

Shadow Step has 60s cooldown and is not only one of our stunbreaks but one of our major escape spell. And if you use the condition removal part of it, it isn’t an escape spell anymore.

3 conditions every 60s is hardly worth mentioning.

Confusion isn’t much of a problem because we are kind of good at waiting up that it passes by disengaging a little I suppose.

Warriors can remove 3 conditions every 8s provided they can get the adrenaline and their was supposed to be the class that has difficulties dealing with conditions!

alchemyst.2165:

Im gonna be honest, I don’t think its that big of a deal. And if we had Torment removal on those heals it’d probably be op. I mean, 4 condition cleanses? Especially on a 15 second heal.

It’s balanced by the fact it’ll only ever cure those 4 specific conditions, thus be completely useless when attacked with the others. It’s a case of overt specialization which means it has to be more powerful than normal to pay for it’s weaknesses.

And anyway, a Necro can cure every single condition at once every 25s. An elementalist can cure 8 conditions through a 15s channeling healing skill (although it is a looong channel). A warrior can cure 3 conditions every 8s while using his burst skill, provided he managed to fill his adrenalin.

alchemyst.2165:

Also I thought that if you had all the DoT conditions with SA you could cure them all with HiS? I thought it cured the condis, and then one last condi. But I could be wrong, cus I don’t really pay attention to it.

HiS cures a few specific conditions only. But there is a trait that cures you of one generic condition when you enter stealth, then 1 more every 3s you stay in stealth which must be what you remember.

Cam Ron.4170:

LOL exploit? It’s how the trait is MEANT to be used. Also, zero stun breaks and weak for anything other than eliminating single targets.

Also: p/p may actually be viable. Their main damage skill got 20% reduced cast time (pretty darn big), as well as getting a 150 range buff (14%). So now, Blinding power isnt as good/cheap, but they can pump out their damage 20% faster from 14% farther away.

Fear the Haste + unload spam (thats what Ill be using an you’ll be complaing about around november)

Pumping out the damage faster will not recharge your initiative faster.

BrunoBRS.5178:

2- the reason that trait sucks is because any buffs to it would make venom share OP. in fact, all the venom issues can be traced back to “but it would be OP with venom share”.

Yeah, then they should just make Venom Share halve the number of venom charges and double the baseline. But it seems too hard to do.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

The problem in GW2 is that they placed condition and hex under the same name, even though they function differently.

Hide in Shadow only remove the “real” conditions, thus it cannot remove a “phantasmic” condition (aka hex) like Confusion and Torment.

Until ArenaNet separate hexes from conditions, players will continue to be confused.

I guess immobilize and cripple and chilled are phantasmic hexes too?

The reality is that HiS was supposed to remove all DoTs, maybe a relic of a time where damage ticks would break Stealth?

And Withdraw would all movement impairing conditions because it’s a roll backward and doesn’t make much sense when you are rooted.

It’s my own desire to see patterns and logic relations that makes me say RfI and Withdraw should remove Torment. While it does wonders to make a game easier to understand and more logical, make more sense, it might not be the best for balance reasons.

It would be weird if Withdraw removed torment and not RfI so if we didn’t want the later to do it, only Hide in Shadows should remove Torment.

Btw, I did forget a trait : Pain Response. This one should be in sync with Hide in Shadows too and remove torment if the later does.