Guild Wars 2

I mean, we have an exact line from a developer saying that dodge will not be enough to survive.

You don’t need to know the exact details to recognize that this constitutes a problem seeing as the core mechanic and all grandmaster traits of our elite spec are entirely based on dodge.

https://youtu.be/K2ZHhJQn0B8?t=67

Most of the content of heart of thorns where there’s gonna be a lot more pressure on the player that you simply can’t dodge to survive.

Can we talk about how this is a SERIOUS problem for the daredevil ? Our “mechanic”, and entire e-spec sounds like it’s going to be worthless.

The goal might have been to nerf the berserker meta, but thieves are getting shafted right along with it.

The question you have to ask yourself is this: Do you think arena net is willing and capable of fixing the thief in a balance patch?

In tandem with: Do you think the daredevil spec can even be fixed in a balance pass?

I think the answer to both of these questions is no, but I seriously hope that I am wrong.

Well I mean come on guys, think about how fast you can remove 13 conditions. Just dodge 13 times. Do the math. Duh. Nevermind that we don’t have access to vigor and the endurance restoration traits suck, and that dodge won’t be capable of handling the damage output in HoT per arenanet’s own admission… just dodge 13 times and remove 13 conditions! It’s simple, duh.

Christonya.3856:

To top it all off our new class ‘mechanic’ is one extra dodge. Which we were flat out told today, that dodging isn’t going to be enough in the newer content.

This is the biggest problem, right here. Clearly there is some heavy miscommunication going on at arenanet because this tidbit confirms that the daredevil spec is completely worthless.

The thief elite spec and HoT content is being developed in such a way that the two are incompatible. And the result is that thieves are screwed. This is even more outrageous than the sneak gyro or the druid’s super speed stealth.

nopoet.2960:

Thief – dodges …..

A dodge. Which is a lesser version of the minor trait they stole from the acrobatics line a few months ago.

I know I’ve stated this before but it bears repeating because it is so… freaking.. insane… that arenanet considers the daredevil spec something worth the title of “elite”.

Nike.2631:

Ok, some daydreaming…

• Flitting Shadows — Your dodge ability now either removes ‘Revealed’ or places you in stealth for 2 seconds.

That is a really cool idea.

Shalien.9018:

Aeroxe.8140:

-A class mechanic that is simply one extra dodge, and modified dodges, with RECYCLED ANIMATIONS

The class mechanic is only the dodge. The modified dodges are our grandmaster traits… If they are supposed to be the class mechanic they should function like all other elite specs and be baseline. Thereby giving us access to an actual set of grandmaster trait line.

I’d like to further point out that the dodge they gave is is effectively a recycled MINOR TRAIT that they removed from the acrobatics line.

Arenanet either actively dislikes thieves or just doesn’t care. I’m honestly not sure which is worse, but I’ll tell you one thing for sure, I won’t be playing my thief in HoT unless they make some really big changes.

The solution is simple. Now that everyone and their mom is getting easy, cheap and low cooldown reveal skills, the time for thieves to be self-applying reveal is over. Get rid of it.

This way classes have to choose to bring these thief counters if they want to counter us. Not getting by with a free pass by allowing the thief to counter himself.

Prior to this xpac the self reveal was fair. After all, there was hardly any reveal in the game. Now that cannot be said. Thieves are nowhere near the top damage in pve so this shouldn’t really have significant implications there either.

Raven.9603:

So many things wrong here.

Are there really? Let’s see what you’ve got.

Raven.9603:

1) Mesmers stealth too.

Never said they didn’t. Nice strawman. Next!

Raven.9603:

2) it wont be taken and you are freaking out over nothing

Never said that it won’t. Nice strawman! Next!

Raven.9603:

3) you can kill it with autos

Holy speculation batman. Now you’re just making things up. Next!

Raven.9603:

4) Stealth needs counterplay

Stealth already has counterplay as I previously specified IN DETAIL. Next!

Raven.9603:

5) You put 14 in all caps because… an engineer elite skill is better than a thief utility skill, as it kitten well should be?

This is a response to all the people saying “hurrr kill the drone”. Please try to consider context before you blatantly miss the point again.

So 5 swings, zero hits. You almost struck out twice. Nice work!

I don’t have as thorough of ideas as a lot of the posters in here, but I’ll tell you 2 changes I would make immediately, both of which are reverting outdated nerfs to the sword.

- Larcenous Strike – now steals 2 boons as it used to

One boon is absurd, and sword/dagger is absolutely terrible in every aspect of the game.

- Infiltrator’s Return – is now instant cast again

It is embarassing that this remains nerfed with the crazy shadowstepping abilities of the revenant.

- Infiltrator’s Strike – range increased from 600 to 900

The sword definitely needs some love. Simply undoing these 2 dated nerfs and a slight buff to infiltrator’s strike would give thieves a reason to use swords again, and would prevent them from being embarassingly outperformed on the mobility front by revenants.

Mysterious Man.1703:

Same with me. My ISP is Cox if that helps some.

Same here.

Well, sorry to hear that but I’m glad I’m not the only one. I’ve been playing on and off since day one of the first BWE and have never had this issue. Anyone had it and fixed it? I see lots of old posts from the past 3 years with people having this issue, but none recent.

I was just playing about 30 minutes ago, closed the game to take a break, came back to receive this message.

Client is frozen – totally non responsive to drag attempts. I can’t even reach the login.

Please advise. Thanks.

Morfedel.4165:

The gyro, however, remains visible and can be destroyed.

As for the reveal pulse, mesmer and thief had really had it good with so much stealth and almost zero counterplay to it – it was time some counterplay became available. Unfortunately its skilled based and really just exists on one class, but in a way that’s good for you guys. Engineer has the only reliable anti stealth tools (though rangers hvae some sorta kinda abilities)

What they should really do is have some kind of counterplay built into the game itself, but not something that easily voids the stealth either. But I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

First of all, you have got to stop trying to bring mesmers into this. Mesmers aren’t even CLOSE to being as dependent on stealth as thieves are. I could go into much greater detail on this but I already have in this thread. Go read it if you’re genuinely curious.

Secondly, what exactly do you mean by “thieves have it good”? Thieves were overpowered for a brief point at the beginning of the game, but a series of increasingly harsh nerfs have brought them down to the point where they aren’t a threat against any competent player. Case in point: see the engineers in this thread saying they won’t bother bringing the sneak gyro, even though it 100% guarantees a win against a thief, even one significantly more skilled than you, because thieves aren’t a high priority class. This is a HUGE problem.

Finally, no counterplay? What need is there for counterplay? A stealthed thief has counterplayed himself. Here are a list of things a stealthed thief is NOT doing:

- damage
- pressure
- capping a node

What they are doing is regenerating some miniscule amounts of health, dropping a condition or two, an extra point of initiative.

In the meantime you can be doing whatever the kitten you want to be doing with no concern for the thief whatsoever. As for your no counterplay nonsense, here are some things you can do while you finish capping/neutralizing the node.

- put up a block or blind to prevent the thief opener from doing any damage.
- keep mobile – assuming D/P which is the only actual viable thief build, your goal is to keep the thief from getting behind you… which is trivial to accomplish. Just twirl in circles or spam the about-face button and you’ve got a 50-50 shot of cutting his opener damage in HALF.

Remember the thief just dumped 9 initiative – a whopping 75% of his resource bar, just to get in stealth. All he’ll be able to do is open on you and then be useless. And he won’t be able to stealth again any time soon. Oh did he shadow refuge? He just told you exactly where he is. Continue beating on him or just casually stroll away. Oh did he bring cloak and dagger? He ACTUALLY made a conscious decision to use offhand dagger? lolol. Laugh at him and kite him all day long. If you mess up and he gets in melee range just dodge roll the 10 year animation on C&D.

All kinds of counter play. This toolbelt skill is NOT counterplay. Detection Pulse is a game-over iWin button against thieves. Which engineers won’t even bother taking because why would they? Thieves already aren’t a threat. The stealth aspect of the gyro is just a slap in the face. “hey guys, we know that we’re giving engineers a free iWin vs thieves button on their toolbelt, so we thought we’d really rub it in by also giving them the best group utility and longest lasting stealth skill in the game.” Simply outrageous.

“Just kill the gyro” has got to be one of the stupidest responses I have seen in this thread. Good job thief. You just wasted a bunch of initiative and your opener on a pet. Element of surprise? Completely gone. Now you’re revealed for 10 seconds (4 from self reveal, 6 from detection pulse) with an engineer (plus up to 4 other surprise guests!) are beating on you. Oh sorry, did I say beating on you? That was wrong. They are finishing you because you downed way before you even got the gyro to half health.

Also while the drone does last for 30 seconds (11 pulses), keep in mind each pulse is 4 seconds – adding insult to energy, thief default stealth durations are 3 seconds – which means that there is a window of up to FOURTEEN SECONDS where the party is stealthed with no drone to destroy – during which time the drone is in fact recharging its 30 second cooldown. I put fourteen seconds in all caps because that is actually 1 second short of the duration of a full 5 pulse shadow refuge, for which we give up an entire utility slot and a 60 second cooldown.

Kitten outrageous.

imsoenthused.1634:

I find it distasteful in the extreme, but arena.net hasn’t declared it verboten, so this is what we get. Personally, I wish they’d make an official statement forbidding it, an then actively ban anyone who tried to do it. Of course, the kind of people who buy and sell these services are hugely offended about anyone who feels this way. They always immediately start screaming “How are they hurting you?” “shouldn’t they be paid for their skill?” etc. I could care less about their arguments though, it’s just tacky and sad, exploitative on the sellers side and pathetic on the buyers. At the very least if Anet banned it they’d have to make shady backroom deals on 3rd party forums and such, and you wouldn’t see it in the LFG tool anymore, and that would be much better. They could hang out in the dark alleys of the internet making shady, shameful deals all they want, always fearful that their dirty secret would come out and their account would be properly banned.

Lol someone is seriously overreacting to people who sell dungeon runs.

It is looking really really bad for thieves this xpac. It’d be great if someone from arenanet could speak up and explain why thieves are being left so far in the dust… Or even better, let us know what they have in store for us to compensate for losing an entire spec line and our most important mechanic.

Dirtyrascal.1023:

Losing 3/4 of your health bar to a thief or mesmer or indeed and engineer before even seeing your opponent is not fun.

Just my opinion but – stealth is annoying and the more counters to it the better.

THEN – classes that rely on stealth will need buffing in more interesting ways.

IMO this is good for the game.

Classes? There is one class that relies on stealth and that’s the thief. So where’s our corresponding buffs?? The elite specialization where we are the only class in the game that has to give up our grandmaster trait for the spec power? With horribly implemented dodge replacements and terrible copy paste hammer animations?

I don’t think so. We are getting shafted in this expansion unless something major happens in the next month.

Daniel Handler.4816:

The counter play is destroy the drone.

Did you read my post at all? Destroying the drone does nothing. The BELT skill is unaffected. Detection pulse can still be cast every 20 seconds for a free 6 second reveal in a massive area.

Ah ok, I didn’t realize that sneak gyro was an elite skill.

But as I said in my original post, the worst part of Sneak Gyro is Detection Pulse, which you didn’t bother responding to. Frankly I don’t blame you. It is disgustingly overpowered and completely ruins the most important class feature of the thief class.

We are 100% dependent on stealth for

-Condition removal
-Healing & survival
-Positioning & damage

There is zero counter play. It is a free 1800 circle of reveal with absolutely nothing a thief can do to stop it that totally removes all those aspects of the play from our class. Detection pulse needs to be massively nerfed. Cut the radius by 1/3rd and double the cooldown at minimum.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet:

Sneak Gyro. 30 second cooldown
Gyro. Deploy a sneak gyro to provide stealth to nearby allies.

Stealth(4s): Invisible to foes.
Duration: 30 seconds
Interval: 3 seconds
Radius: 300

So that’s 44 seconds of group stealth on what is effectively a 1 minute cooldown. The gyro is mobile so no, it isn’t just group stealth in 1 location. This is a pulsing group stealth drone that moves with you.

So not only is this by far the best team/group stealth skill in the game, it is also the longest duration stealth skill in the game. It’s not a thief skill. Freaking outrageous.

And that’s not even the worst part. What is the worst part? Glad you asked. As some of you may know, every utility skill an engineer equips comes with a free skill on their “utility belt” which is their F1-F4 abilities (default hotkeys). It is in no way shape or form tied to the utility skill other than the fact it’s an associated skill. They don’t share a cooldown. Basically engineers get 2 utility skills for the price of one. Let’s check out sneak gyro’s utility skill:

Detection Pulse. 3/4 second cast time. 20 second cooldown.
Remove stealth from enemies in a large area.

Revealed(6s): You cannot stealth
Number of targets: 5
Radius: 900

So not only did engineering just become better at stealthing than thieves with one utility skill – no need to invest in a specialization line or give up weapon skills or multiple utility slots or anything like that- but they get a super powerful 20 second cooldown 1800 diameter 6 second reveal for free to go with it.

Now let’s take a look at a thief favorite utility skill which has been repeatedly nerfed since the day the game went live:

Shadow refuge. 1/4 second cast time. 60 second cooldown
Deception. Create a pulsing refuge at the target area that heals allies and cloaks them.

Healing: 1775
Stealth (3s)
Pulses 5
Duration: 4 sec
Radius: 240
Combo Field: Dark
Range: 600

Now I’ll admit part of the reason I wanted you to look at this skill was to see how wildly inferior it is to the sneak gyro.

SG gets 11 pulses
SR gets 5

SG gets 4 second stealth pulses
SR gets 3

SG lasts for 30 seconds
SR lasts for 4

SG has a 30 second cooldown
SR has a 60

But the other reason I listed out the details of SR is to show you how completely Detection Pulse counters it:

DP has a 900 radius
SR has 240

DP has a 20 second cooldown
SR has a 60

DP is a BELT slot
SR is a utility slot

What a joke. I cannot describe how disgusted I am with arenanets utter failure to account for how badly this one utility/belt slot combo ruins thieves.

AcidicVision.5498:

The achievement was meant for raid levels of coordination.

You keep saying this despite it being incredibly obvious that it is not true. All you needed was a full zone. No coordination necessary once they limited each knight to 50 people.

I know you really want to feel special, but you aren’t. You just got lucky like most the people who got this achievement did.

I’d prefer cantha or crystal desert… Really the desert, we don’t have enough desert zones in the world and with arenanet’s art team I’m sure they could find a way to make deserts look gorgeous.

Add some arabian looking armor skins, some scimitars and some ali baba open sesame nonsense given arenanet’s penchant for fantastic level design and you could have some truly awesome zones.

Add dervish & ritualist classes and I would be throwing my money at the screen in anticipation.

AcidicVision.5498:

@Wolfpaq, you are cherry-picking my post. The achievement is not “luck based” it is organization and skill based. The people that get lucky are the ones that just happen to venture into an overflow where a community or alliance is making a run. That is bound to happen with any open world event.

You’re making it sound like the vast majority of the people who got this achievement were super organized and skilled. I hate to break it to you pal, but that’s simply not true. I know plenty of staff guardians and bearbow rangers who got this achievement without even trying or abusing overflow or pugging on some 3rd party site.

It has nothing to do with skill. It has nothing to do with organization. The fight is nothing more than a dps check, which in turn is nothing more than a body count check. Did you happen to fight the knights at the same time as x other people? If so, congrats on the free, easy and lucky achievement that you put zero effort into getting. If not? You’re screwed, and there’s nothing you can do about it, oh aside from exploiting overflows and falling back on 3rd party tools which is unhealthy for the game (i love how you totally act like there’s nothing wrong with this btw)

When games get stagnant, I take a break and play something else.

I just came back from a 7month+ break for gw2 so I likely won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Great thing about it being no monthly fee is there is there is literally no penalty for quitting when you don’t feel like playing and coming back later.

If you want to stick around you can level & gear alts, achievement hunt, world completion, ascended gear, legendary crafting, there’s plenty to do in the meantime.

AcidicVision.5498:

Six Minutes to Knightfall doesn’t allow that reward through laziness. And that makes people upset.

No, people are upset specifically because it rewards luck, not skill or hard work. You would have known that if you bothered reading the OP or if you could even remember the things you write in your own posts:

AcidicVision.5498:

Sure you will end up with some players that just get lucky

You really ought to work to work on that short term memory problem. Or on putting together compelling arguments. Exploiting arenanet’s server code and using 3rd party tools to get an achievement might be cool with you, but for most of us it is not ok.

If a sigil library system is developed, it should be applied to legendary items automatically.

However, it should certainly not be exclusive to legendary items.

I love how OP is asking for the quickest way to level and yet several posters in here are trying to tell him not to level quickly /boggle

You seem to be missing the point of my argument. From the very beginning my stance has been “do not develop things just for legendary users, it is a waste of dev time because there are so few of them”. As you pointed out, there have been multiple uses for the stat selection dropdown, and I’m sure there will be more in the future (I believe that one thing you missed is ascended insignia/inscriptions recipe purchasing).

So yeah, great, a cool feature was developed for several reasons, give it to legendary users as well. It’s already something that is going to see widespread uses across the community, no reason to hold it back from legendary users. Let’s be honest, 1 item out of 13-14 PvE gear slots isn’t going to change that much. It’s just a convenience. If you’re changing your build from say zerker to dire that’s 1 less item you have to deal with. I’m totally fine with that.

If for whatever reason a sigil library is developed for all users, say as something you could craft/forge and attach to a weapon, I would be all for giving it to legendary users for free as well. The only thing I don’t want to see, and I believe I’ve been consistent about this, is exclusive game content that only legendary owners can access, which is essentially what your suggestion amounts to, whether you realize it or not.

Stat selection was not implemented exclusively for legendary weapons.

I’ve never had a legendary and I’ve used the system multiple times now.

Yet another bad analogy.

I mean, there’s nothing mathematical about it. Would your change give legendary owners a non-visual advantage over ascended weapon owners? Yes. Therefore, no thanks. You can have your 1 legendary and 7 ascended if min-maxing matters that much to you. Regular chumps like me will have 8 ascended. Legendary items were never intended to give you the functionality of 8 different sigils in 1.

Most companies, including arenanet, try to maintain a utilitarianism approach to their game enhancements. Greatest good for the greatest number. Your change would be a good change for a tiny number of people. On that basis alone it should be disqualified. Hopefully that helps you understand why your analogies are flawed. That isn’t to say legendaries should be neglected. I fully supported arenanet’s visual overhaul to them. After all, they were intended to be awesome visual rewards for the dedicated to the game and their graphics weren’t living up to arenanet’s standards of awesome. A brand new interface with completely new behavior though? Completely unrelated to the intended visual reward? Exclusively for people who own legendaries? No thanks.

Flissy.4093:

They shouldn’t have a maintenance cost.

They shouldn’t give any advantage over ascended weapons. A sigil library would be a significant advantage.

Furthermore spending dev time (programming brand new behavior & UI + testing) on something that only benefits a tiny percentage of the population would be a complete waste.

No thanks.

Flissy.4093:

Ascended is fine. It’s a lot more reasonable for players to purchase multiple ascended weapons. They tend to cost roughly 50g each, which, while a good sum of money, isn’t out of reach or a lengthy grind to obtain for most of the population now.

Meh, then no thanks to your suggestion. Legendaries are meant to be legendary If you are in the minority of people capable of grinding one keeping a 250 stack of the sigils you use isn’t out of reach or a lengthy grind for you.

Master Fuhon.1068:

IPeople could have kept adding on fancy skill animations like the one you posted, until this entire thread was cluttered with an illegible mass of them.

Then it would be just like playing the game! http://instantrimshot.com/classic/?sound=rimshot

Anyone who thinks line of sight is an exploit is not worth listening to. Line of sight was intentionally put into this game by the devs as an intentional way to avoid ranged damage. They specifically designed projectiles not to go through walls unlike certain other games. It is a 100% ANet dev & designer endorsed strategy for dealing with ranged attacks.

You have no clue what the word exploit means. Kindly stop using it & spreading misinformation. Thanks.

Nothing about the term zerg can even be remotely applied to pve dungeons. Stacking in one spot is a strategy, it is not a zerg.

Secondly, your definition of zerg is ludicrous: “a group of players that can stick together to make the things easier”. That definition fits basically every party ever created in every MMO ever. How do you intend to have a discussion with such loose definitions?

I’m in the same boat. Quit in July, came back a couple weeks ago.

Basically,

Dungeons for empyreal fragments

Champions for bloodstone dust

World events for dragonite ore

Guild missions for accessories

Pristine fractal relics for rings

Laurels for amulets.

lvl 500 crafting for weapons / armor.

Salvage… everything.

Craft your daily Lump of Mithrillium, Spool of Thick Elonian Cord, Glob of Elder Spirit Residue, and Spool of Silk Weaving Thread if possible (req 450 crafting level)

Really? I had no problems pugging AC1/3 and CoF 1 & 2 last night on my thief.

Nothing we can do really about the stacking technique, chalk that up to poor design and lack of desire to fix it on arenanet’s part. But that has nothing to do with heavy classes, really.

You can always find a guild that runs dungeons the way you like to if pugs aren’t working out for ya.

there are plans in the works to make it so Berserker’s gear and DPS doesn’t rule all.

Oh really? I hope that’s not a reference to the ferocity change, because mathematically zerker gear will still be the best.

There was just one more thing I wanted to say about difficulty before I bow out of this thread. Dodging the orange circles, standing in the knight specific circles to get attuned, yeah that’s all easy. “advanced” users sure can dart in and out of melee range for a mediocre dps increase (I still think my sb / p/p thief did more damage than any of your characters, I’ve lost track of how many “dungeon masters” I’ve seen laying at the feet of these knights).

But the part you’re seriously missing as you’re zooming in on the micro is the overall picture. You absolutely have to have x number of people to succeed. And that x is probably closer to 80/90 people. It can literally be impossible to get that x number. That is part of event difficulty! If you’re on a low pop server or get dumped into a low pop overflow, you’re kittened – there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. All your “pro” melee damage won’t amount to squat.

Or even worse, and this is the part I’ve experienced, it can be possible to have wayyy more than x people and still fail, if people don’t distribute properly. And thanks to the Anet removal of all the knight HP bars, there’s no good way to tell which knight is falling behind. Usually there’s at least one vocal person at each of the knights saying “hey, we have 15/20/30 spots left” and then you can sort of respond. But coordinating 80+ people is a nightmare, and moving your small party from one knight to another may not even be enough to fix the problem.

Logistics, coordination, these are important aspects of group play, and as your group size approaches triple digits with no real chain of command or structure or penalty for failure, those logistics turn into a nightmare. Compounded with the micro design flaws I pointed out in my original post, this was an absolutely necessary nerf, that has nothing to do with a noob bubble as the OP of this thread is insinuating.

I am surprised you consider LFR to be “hard” seeing as how everything in GW2 comes so easily to you. In less than 1 week I had a character tanking the “hardest” LFR instance in the game – successfully. When people have clearly defined roles, and there are only 25 of them, it is just so much easier to coordinate things. Post zerg, pre nerf knights were substantially more difficult.

Also, so your expectation that people go grind out a new set of gear, and change specs for 1 temporary 2 week encounter is mindboggling. Maybe if it didn’t take 3 months to grind a full set of gear, you’d have a point, but it does so you don’t. True, it could be done much faster with exotics, but it is still a significant investment for something that is very temporary. The bottom line is ArenaNet needed to make the event work for all classes and specs. They didn’t, and so they adjusted it. If the event was laughably easy, it wouldn’t have been nerfed.

>5)Movement is required of all classes in this event obviously

The obvious difference is that ranged can continue dps while moving outside of melee range. Thanks for clarifying that you didn’t actually melee the bosses, I expected as much.

I raided many times in wow. Technically, you’re right. The pre hp nerf knights weren’t anywhere close to WoW raiding difficulty. They were much harder. Arenanet made the correct decision and nerfed them.

1) Right, conditions in pve are useless, and this event reinforces that fact. That is HORRIFIC design. Glad we agree.

2) I mean, isn’t it obvious? Super high condition immunity uptime, super high health, and super high toughness. How is the damage supposed to be dealt? It’s not and it wasn’t. One of those factors had to be toned down. Arenanet went with health.

4) Mesmer damage is designed around their phantasms doing damage more than once. If you played a mesmer in this event, you were doing subpar dps. All of your phantasms got reset the second she jumped, or much sooner if you used anything but the duelist phantasm, which is one of the lower dps phantasms unless you trait specifically for it, which is a waste on the rest (yes, I’m talking about buggy as kitten phantasmal haste).

5) I’m highly skeptical of this. I’m guessing you moved out of melee range for at least part of the fight which is not melee’ing the boss. It’s partial melee, which is still less dps than actual melee, which is my entire point.

It really bothers me that you are listing the 25% knight health decrease as something arising from a lack of skill. That decrease has nothing to do with skill. It has everything to do with the design flaws which include…

1) Reflecting conditions. For at least half the fight, usually longer, knights not only are immune to conditions, but REFLECT THEM TO YOU. This is horrific design for a lot of reasons. Condition builds / classes are completely ineffective. Vulnerability isn’t stacked.

2) Knights have significantly higher toughness than… most of the game. I literally am dealing half damage to them than anything else in lion’s arch.

3) Unlike most group events, knights health doesn’t scale. If 10 people are working on red, red will not go down, period.

4) Knights go immune to all damage, evading all attacks and becoming untargettable, followed by an AoE sweeping damage frequently throughout the fight. That causes massive problems for classes like mesmers who rely on their phantasms to have regular uptime.

5) Consistent melee of any kind is impossible given the constant, untelegraphed 360 arc sweeps with no walls to dodge into and the constant AoE detargetting (see point #4).

So let’s review. To succeed at knights you need to have minimum 90 people working on the knights since the health doesn’t scale & they have absurdly high toughness. You need the 90+ evenly split. You need them all to be ranged. You need them to have zero condition damage on gear. You need them to be using skills that don’t apply conditions. You need none of them to be mesmers.

It’s awful. It was WoW raid levels of difficulty except requiring 4x the players with 1/4th the communication potential and zero meaning of communication beyond spamming map chat.

It has nothing to do with skill. It’s a stupidly designed encounter, plain and simple.

Tman.6349:

I main a Thief and a confetti shooting pistol and a short bow that fires unicorns is the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen and don’t give me the impression of a lethal killer that strikes maliciously from the shadows.

Yup, I completely agree as someone else who mains a thief. Fire dagger, electrical sword. Absolutely not thief material.

If there was one designed that worked conceptually with the thief class, I would probably work towards it.

Bevillian.1260:

5 Warriors can crush every single dungeon faster than any combo of classes

Uh, this is absolutely incorrect. Quad FGS is the fastest clear which requires 2 elementalists. 1 warrior for the banners and 1 thief to deal the highest damage w/improvisation.

The last class could be a warrior, but you’d probably be better off with a guardian or mesmer for the projectile reflection.

Projectile reflection, by the way, is the highest dps in the game, and warriors don’t have a practical means of providing it for the party.

OP seems to have subscribed to the arenanet “let’s call things exploits that aren’t actually exploits” newsletter.

I agree with your proposition on the condition that stat swapping and your proposed sigil swapping become available for all ascended gear.

It is absurd how much grinding is required to put together multiple sets of gear, or to experiment without gimping your stats significantly.

Stat swapping & rune/sigil storing should be a feature of all items ascended+. It would be a terrific improvement to the game.

Paul Kay.4891:

stale, boring, not too fun meta

Can you be specific about what exactly you find boring about the mesmer meta? I just started playing mesmer as I’m leveling one and I find the meta fascinating. There are all kinds of tweaks and variations available, practically every trait slot has a compelling alternative available for trait switching on the fly, and mesmer sword is AWESOME.

I’ve leveled 4 classes to 80 (thief, ranger, necro, guardian) and none of them have as many exciting traits & utilities available in the “meta” build.

The great thing about guild wars, and every other pay2play/free2play game is that you can take a break and come back later to see if you like changes for no cost. I’m on my 3rd run after two extensive breaks and I’ll doubtlessly be taking another one once I reach the point you’re at.

Advent.6193:

So Elite Focus doesn’t extend the duration of at least one Guardian Elite Skill? Unless that Trait got changed, it darned well does. /shrug

No, you’re right, I was mistaken.