Take a look at "roaming" in WvW

Hi guys. I was roaming for a bit and turned stream on for a friend, and had this all too common encounter.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/217320678

Under two weeks ago, I posted a thread about "roaming" in wvw, and how classes like the mirage and deadeye - with their endless teleports, stealths, and stun breaks, had changed roaming fights into "kiting infinitely until you eventually set up a one shot" abomination; however, the thread was deleted due to me using some caps locks in it.

This highlight clearly shows the capabilities of the dead eye class to infinitely, effortlessly, and undeniably avoid damage, break out of cc, while still doing very high amounts of damage. There seems to be very little trade off or means to punish such a play style - one which I am of the opinion should not exist in the game with such little trade off.

During the video, I talked about how he had kited in a very very small area, and was still nearly un-killable for a long duration that took 3 of us to down him. I talk about what would have happened had he not "committed" or continued going for the resets, and just how impossible it would have been to take down a player using such hit and run tactics. Try listen to my rant if you can, but the point of it is just to show how frustrating it is.

Now, some of you will undoubtedly point out that my build is not "optimal" for small scale roaming, and is potentially the reason that we struggled so much to take this player down (although the sword dagger thief on my side couldnt do it either, but I digress), or that I played badly (there was a time when I accidenally pressed bulls charge at the same time as hammer f1 and charged into nowhere and then the hammer f1 fell short). However, I would just like to ask all of you to reply in earnest to 3 questions that I have about this type of game-play existing

1) Are Thieves and Mesmers using the stealth + stun break + teleport builds (nearly all of them) to fight with this infinite hit and run style fun to play against? Can you even play against it? I urge you to remember that it is no longer a fight at all. It is just being on a wvw map, out in the open, while the thief or mesmer just infinitely resets so he can try to one shot you, then when he fails, does it again infinitely. I wouldn't mind if they committed to the fight afterwards, and we had a good 1v1, but currently, the game has made it all too easy to reset at very little cost.

2) Does this need to be fixed? What are some possible fixes for this?

3) Has this type of "wvw roaming" (which it isnt, by the way.... -_-) made other classes very very unviable to roam, unless you have access to very specific skills? The answer is undeniably yes. There are far less necromancers and guardians roaming than there are mesmers, thieves, rangers, and holosmiths (all of who utilize stealth + gap closers/escapes to remain roaming viable).

I guess even if you think I am terrible, please just address these question. I really am curious to see if I am overreacting, or if this genuinely frustrates other players. I very nearly uninstalled the game. Not only do I have to run around looking for fights, which sometimes you can go for hours on end without, but when you do bump into somebody, they just.... dont fight but try to one shot you and reset and repeat!

Note - I had just reset my razer synapse, so my microphone is very very low, which in this case, happened to be a good thing due to how much cursing was involved while trying to land a hit on the deadeye. Have managed to fix it, but only after the "fight".

Hmm I am very sorry but the clip that I made does not seem to be linking properly on this website. It is the 09:23 long video, thumbnail is of my charr warrior gliding down into wvw. I will keep trying to fix the link, but for now, please search and watch if you can!

Just type /videos/217320678 after twitch dot tv, and it seems to work.

Your build isn't very good at fighting DeadEye Rifle. Hammer is extremely telegraphed and easy to evade, hence why it's not very good for roaming (Dagger/Shield is preferred for SB roaming). Greatsword doesn't put up much pressure without any real setup from your Hammer. The DeadEye is free to dance around you all day long. Without Shield Reflect, you can't really expect to hit him very hard if you're never able to catch him.

There aren't many builds out there which have good match-ups vs every class & build.

@LaFurion.3167 said:thread was deleted due to me using some caps locks in it.

I ironically find this funny

Mirage is broken indeed. But THief been broken in wvw since 2012.

As a power stealth spamming mesmer, I actually agree with you! As someone piloting the class on full glass, I feel I have way too many get out of jail free cards via blinks, stealth, and stun breaks with stealth being the worst offender by far. I personally believe that stealth is an incredibly toxic mechanic and if implemented in short durations, is tolerable, but once an individual can start stealthing for +8 seconds especially repeatedly, then it starts to become quite infuriating. To fix this, I always thought that a player would receive the 3 second reveal debuff whenever the stealth effect ends, regardless of whether they damaged someone or not

@"LaFurion.3167" said:1) Are Thieves and Mesmers using the stealth + stun break + teleport builds (nearly all of them) to fight with this infinite hit and run style fun to play against? Can you even play against it? I urge you to remember that it is no longer a fight at all. It is just being on a wvw map, out in the open, while the thief or mesmer just infinitely resets so he can try to one shot you, then when he fails, does it again infinitely. I wouldn't mind if they committed to the fight afterwards, and we had a good 1v1, but currently, the game has made it all too easy to reset at very little cost.

i use a deadeye, more stealth uptime then the one in the video, more damage then the one in the video but less teleports as no sword. it is indeed fun for me to play against a power mesmer or a thief , because i can certainly oneshot them with a backstab and no counterplay to that and the 'fight' is more about getting the other one out of stealth by either interrupting their stealth stacking or by baiting them out if you know they wont backstab oneshot you. for instance most stealthy deadeyes i just wait visible till they shoot, dogge and backstab them or wait stealthed in their black powder so they reveal themselves. power mesmer is also really cool to onehit with backstab as you gain quickness from them to finish them off with AA, faster then their allies react.as for deadeye vs spellbreaker, i fight you guys mostly visible cause i can simply kite you. the moment the other thief entered i would have marked him for a nice ~20k backstab and killed you then.what you should have done in the case in the video is try limiting his space and focing him to fight melee by goind into the camp and use all objects and pillars for LoS. this way he wont be able to kite you as easily.

2) Does this need to be fixed? What are some possible fixes for this?

possible? not without making thief completely useless in WvW. the only thing that thief is best in WvW is being able to escape wich makes him perfect to flip minor objectives while avoiding larger groups. i do think alot of the issue is people dont know just yet how to fight stealth heavy thief builds wich we do see alot more with deadeyes, for a long time there were not many really stealth heavy thieves running around aside from some ghosts thieves, cause it was frowned upon using stealth too much, you even would get insulted by other thieves just for running SA. i do have some people in my FL from other servers, from my travelling around and so they tell me when people talk about me in their public ts, i too often am called a cheater cause too many people just got no clue what i am doing there, without even understanding what i do, how can they expect to counter it. i suggest playing like that a while to see the weaknesses and how to make the life of a stealthy thief really hard.

3) Has this type of "wvw roaming" (which it isnt, by the way.... -_-) made other classes very very unviable to roam, unless you have access to very specific skills? The answer is undeniably yes. There are far less necromancers and guardians roaming than there are mesmers, thieves, rangers, and holosmiths (all of who utilize stealth + gap closers/escapes to remain roaming viable).

no this type does not make other classes nonviable to roam, the fact that there are alot of groups running around and other classes cant avoid them is the issue. for group roaming necromancer and firebrand are actually quite strong.

I guess even if you think I am terrible, please just address these question. I really am curious to see if I am overreacting, or if this genuinely frustrates other players. I very nearly uninstalled the game. Not only do I have to run around looking for fights, which sometimes you can go for hours on end without, but when you do bump into somebody, they just.... dont fight but try to one shot you and reset and repeat!

from the whispers i have recieved i can assure you that it frustrates alot more people, but the main reason such a playstyle exists is people not being able to fight it. i mean my DJ rarely gets avoided, so why would i use other skills and put my self at risk if i know my opponent wont dogge? i mostly attack only to keep people from running away. one of my very first oneshots was against a warrior from drakkar lake he had 3,2k armor(he said) and was certain i am cheating, so i uploaded a recording of that shot ( i did terrible in that fight btw) and he quit gw2 for 3-4 weeks and then just logged in a few times, dunno if he plays regularly again. so yes other people do feel the same.

if you want to see my original intention behind playing a deadeye:when pof came out i returned to gw2 after a longer break and tested the Deadeye like 3 minutes against npcs .. i was certain omg this is so trash nobody will die to that.so i switched back to my old daredevil build, during the first 2 weeks i run daily into 6-7 OPEN FIELD anti stealth traps in outnumbered fights. that made me think: that new deadeye got that nice elite skill and the people i fight here are soo bad, i have to try if i can kill them with it, altho i did kill any deadeye i had encountered till then within a second. so i started killing them with deadeye and had alot of fun, not really understanding why i didnt get blown up by other thieves like i killed the deadeyes. but i was sure people would learn really fast: Laser => dogge or die. some actually did and the change that malice bonus for DJ works only against marked target made things harder against other thief/mesmer/freshair ele and in theory rangers, till i realized that i can onehit everyone that is a threat to me with a backstab. so now i use DJ against everyone that wont fall for a backstab onehit and very few avoid it, actually false out of range and obstructed messages are more common than people dogging / blocking /reflecting it. still alot of people spamm all their defense skills as soon as i mark them, so i dont even have a reason to attack and when they are done spamming stuff my malice is ready.for me if people would avoid oneshots more often, if they made my life harder when trying to stealth etc. then i would swap back to daredevil. in a 1 on 1 daredevil is just faster to kill their opponent and in outnumbered situation if people were not as stupid, i wouldnt finish anyone with deadeye, why i would still have a better chance by skipping downstate with final blow as a daredevil.the one thing deadeye is best in is hiding in keeps cause of the elite removing the effect of anti stealth traps, i run into alot of those.

Any competent roamer can beat a Deadeye...

(I don't mean for that to sound demeaning either, I don't see many people actually set up for roaming ----- Seems most roamers run a gimmick build such as 1 shot and when it doesn't work or if you kill them once, you won't see them again unless they have you outnumbered 5:1)

This game was designed around PvP (conquest), then balanced for 3 years virtually entirely around PvP, then with HoT they also balanced around PvE raids, as far as class design and balance goes WvW has never been given any real consideration, hence there is a lot of stuff that is completely broken in it.

Things like thief or mirage have a certain degree of balance in conquest, because the ability to engage / disengage nearly at will is offset by there being a punishment for that, which is not being able to contest a capture point and not making effective use of your time whilst the points are still ticking away.

In WvW on the other hand, that doesn't exist (unless someone is fighting over a camp), so if you have a class/build that can disengage the majority of the time, even when you screw up or get outplayed, then you have a situation which breaks a pretty fundamental design rule of PvP - risk vs reward.

Which is why for the vast majority of this game, when it comes to roaming (solo and to an extent duo) thief followed by mes have always been very common, they are essentially ez-mode if you are going to solo roam, of course the same thing to varying lesser degrees applies to pretty much everything else that becomes vaguely popular for roaming, like when HoT came out and before druid got nerfed, you had loads of druids, same thing with various warrior build over the years.

I remember a montage video by that Sindenrer guy (or however you spell it) where a thief thinks he is AFK, tries to gank, but fails / gets outplayed, so the thief starts to shoot off across the map and the only reason that thief died and was punished for his mistake / getting outplayed is because the Sindenrer guy also played thief so was able to catch him, if he played pretty much anything else the thief would of probably been able to get away and would not be punished for his poor play / getting outplayed, and that right there is one of the reasons roaming in this game is dead. (hint: duelling at south camp / SM or ganking players going to or at the back of zergs isn't roaming),

It's basically a Time To Kill issue. Many of the "poor" roaming classes have a very clear and defined TTK, they only have a 1 real moment to stall before they die (necro shroud, warrior endure pain/zerker stance, etc). They have 0 outs if they get caught in a bad situation and have basically no choice but to all in when in an unfavorable situation.

Most thieves, most mesmers, the odd druid (tank ones), and Tools Rocket Boots burst Holosmith, etc; have extremely long TTK, thanks to their mobility (1200 range instant blink), and stealth (which forces your opponent to wait), despite their offensive presence. Their risk to reward is completely out of whack. Combined with the fact that their general game strategy is not about trading hits, you get an oppressive gamestyle that FEELS unkillable (you can hard counter the build, but they will never die unless they are greedy).

Since they are allowed to make so many mistakes and even just negate most (not all) of them if they want, it's obvious these classes would be go to. You can abuse the player being unskilled, sure, but it's basically always an uphill battle.

As for stealth, it's unbalanceable. Similar to fighting game 50/50 cross ups, stealth makes the defending player have to guess between 1 and 4 seconds that damage will arrive. There is no real way to instead go offensive against a stealthed enemy, due to power/mobility creep, so their only choice is to run or wait. Naturally, running is the superior option, as it should force the stealther to spend SOME resources to chase, but that just stalls the fight, rather than shifting it in your favor. And the thing is, unlike most fighting game, making 1 mistake against the stealther can lead to instant death (in the case of glass mesmer and all in 1shot thieves).

I have to agree with meepeY most warriors I see roaming are using shield. I was also surprised by the lack of damage. Most of your hits were only 2k and a single Larcenous Strike from the S/D thief should hit the Deadeye for about 7-10k.

WvW is not, has never been, and will probably never be balanced in any 1v1 scenario. Stealth in PvP means you lose cap on a point so it's perfectly balanced, not so in WvW. Some stuff is just outright broken in 1v1 encounters, but generally those builds are useless in larger scale fights. How many larger scale groups do you see sitting around wishing they had a condi mirage?

You can literally distil WvW group play to three classes, FB, Scourge, Tempest. Sure you will see a splash of other classes like SB and Herald, but you can get by with those three just fine, just sub optimal.

As people have said you can gear yourself to be better for certain encounters 1v1, but generally in roaming you dont have that time. Or go with the meta builds that are meta because they are the most efficient at dealing with whatever is thrown at you.

@Dagger.2035 said:I have to agree with meepeY most warriors I see roaming are using shield. I was also surprised by the lack of damage. Most of your hits were only 2k and a single Larcenous Strike from the S/D thief should hit the Deadeye for about 7-10k.

I often hit full zerker warriors for around 6/7k LS.it's the same old story though that every other class has a viable spot in a zerg where thief has none but is slammed for the only good thing they have left. I meleed a warrior on my thief and the fight ended in 3 seconds because I did not use mobility.

"The only good thing they have left"? Thief is great in spvp and has at least four great builds in wvw. Yes, they have not really viable zerg builds but most classes don't.The whole design of the thief class is utterly stupid. They bring mobility, stun breaks, evades, endless options to reset fights, stealth and high damage while not having the same high risk other classes with high damage have.Same goes for Mirage at the moment and for PU classic mesmer before PoF.Anet really has to balance this finally. It's a situation that has gotten worse with every expac.

@K THEN.5162 said:As a power stealth spamming mesmer, I actually agree with you! As someone piloting the class on full glass, I feel I have way too many get out of jail free cards via blinks, stealth, and stun breaks with stealth being the worst offender by far. I personally believe that stealth is an incredibly toxic mechanic and if implemented in short durations, is tolerable, but once an individual can start stealthing for +8 seconds especially repeatedly, then it starts to become quite infuriating. To fix this, I always thought that a player would receive the 3 second reveal debuff wenever the stealth effect ends, regardless of whether they damaged someone or not

Mirage has not the access to stealth of mesmer ( decoy and torch for most ) . Mass invisibility has a really huge cd and jaunt is better and veil is usefull if u play in a party ... not that great for roaming alone so in my opinion stealth on mirage is not a real issue . If you go power mesmer you 'll probably will have torch not traited and if you use your stealth offensively , if you fail your burst, you will not have great stealth to run away. What makes mirage op is not stealth but it is its great mobility

I meant ganking and or small scale roaming with in wvw. Most classes don't? Pretty much all medeim specs are not zerg viable compared to the rest of the games classes. Anyway theres arguments will never end because non thief players will always have a problem with this class while people who play thief and other classes say different, a prime example is the op- why are you going up agasint a deadeye as a hammer gs warrior? And then complain in stream about it, whip out your rifle, go find some Los.

@Turk.5460 said:There are not a lot of builds that will be effective against every other build. They all have some weakness to exploit, and most have a build from another profession that directly counters them.This!

@OP:Best thing you can do, when you want to have a less frustrating roaming experience is to run a build that can deal with the builds you can expect to encounter when roaming.

So roaming is pretty painful, if you can't deal with thieves and mesmers in general. And to deal with these classes you need at least (!) a non telegraphed (=instant) burst on a low cooldown (as they will reset the fight a few times). And even then trailblazer/dire condi mirage and condi thief are pure cheese.

Once again; the only solution is to redesign thief from the ground up with a competitive design vision. Until then, if you want to play against a healthy competitive rogue profession; need look no further than gw2 competitors

My issue with these complaints is that a good player running a meta roaming build would have been able to kill the Deadeye in a 1 on 1 fight. That's true for both the Spellbreaker and S/D Thief.

I dislike stealth and find it annoying to fight against, but what you have to realize is that they are standing next to you and can take damage. I finish off a lot of Mesmers and Thieves by immediately spamming Cluster Bomb as they enter stealth.

If I'm on a zerg build which can't deal with a roamer I just walk away since I know I'm at a huge disadvantage. The other option is to group up and play dirty by placing stealth traps. Nothing is more funny than seeing a thief panic after hitting a stealth trap.

@Fat Disgrace.4275 said:I often hit full zerker warriors for around 6/7k LS.I've been at 8/9k, but I gave up quite a bit of defense by replacing my Sigil of Energy so I have both Sigil of Force and Sigil of Strength. I've seen 10k hits but those are rare given the ramp up time.

@KrHome.1920 said:

@Turk.5460 said:There are not a lot of builds that will be effective against

every

other build. They all have some weakness to exploit, and most have a build from another profession that directly counters them.This!

What is an example of this on warrior? What spell can just instantly one shot him? Did you see how much I struggled to even be near him? Instant teleports, invis, re teleport, and my only chance is to one shot him?

@"Fat Disgrace.4275" said:I meant ganking and or small scale roaming with in wvw. Most classes don't? Pretty much all medeim specs are not zerg viable compared to the rest of the games classes. Anyway theres arguments will never end because non thief players will always have a problem with this class while people who play thief and other classes say different, a prime example is the op- why are you going up agasint a deadeye as a hammer gs warrior? And then complain in stream about it, whip out your rifle, go find some Los.

Typical thief player "yadda yadda". Just because your class isn't viable for zergs does not justify being ridiculously op for years in another part of the game. I played thief for about two years and it's nowhere as hard as most other roaming classes. It's the only class in roaming where you can fuck up big time and still have options to escape or kill an enemy. If you do the same kind of mistakes on any other class you die.And blaming the op for being hammer/gs warrior is pretty flawed too, because a) he doesn't know what he is going up against and his build maybe good vs. other builds and b) you can't fight what you don't see. I got hit by a deadeye for about 12k (basically 50% of my hp) from stealth yesterday while fighting someone else. That's just a bad design giving a glass canon build access to almost unlimited stealth. I'd really like to see thief players on the forums if warriors had the same access to stealth.

@zinkz.7045 said:

@"Fat Disgrace.4275" said:it's the same old story though that every other class has a viable spot in a zerg where thief has none but is slammed for the only good thing they have left.

The thing is, given ANet's track record, how willing do you really think the thief community is at saying "Yup, we need to redesign aspects of our class because of one case in one game mode."

I've advocated for years to properly fix the thief, but I'm almost beginning to agree that it's better for ANet to not get involved at this point.

Want the real fix? Remove non-hit stealth and smoke fields. No longer you have cheese D/P 1HKO thief, cheese stealth bunker/burst boon druid, and cheese 1HKO mesmer or the condi variant that just loads you up with conditions and durdles invisible if you cleanse.

S/D thief feels unfair because now both halves or FS/LS combo are unblockable which makes it basically guaranteed. Problem is this is just because of the rest of the powercreep since HoT; so few classes have so little defensive downtime that the skill otherwise quickly becomes useless.

The raw damage isn't the problem in most cases, either. My reaper Spirals for nearly 25k. I've auto'ed people on it for 6k and then 7k with GS into another 8k LSS on the same hit. Professions like the thief/mesmer strictly depend on these mechanics to stay alive just as much as warrior does DP/EP, guardians on blocks, etc.

While I agree chain stealth is busted (stealth itself isn't; CnD for example is one of the most balanced skills in the game), a lot of the issues at hand are just symptoms of way bigger systematic ones with all the professions right now. Take away the relative tools from these professions and they're literally worthless eveywhere. Buff the others more and they're just bigger stat sticks on the frontline and requiring a huge skill difference for others to pull a win from.

Thieves right now deal too much damage in spammable ways, for example. They were useless in PvE after HoT, so ANet buffed their AA's by 30-40% on base coefficients. Mind you, prior to HoT, this was already on the class with the second best AA chain in the game (by a very small margin) in terms of raw coefficients, beaten only by D/x necro, and packed a lot of damage modifiers for what was easily best DPS.

That's how much powercreep has happened with these expansions. ANet needed to buff that by 30-40% just to make the class not be literally useless in PvE.

The game was just generally a lot better when things were more telegraphed and cooldowns were appropriately long. At the moment, so much is instant-speed anime-style insanity that it really defeats the purpose of participating in PvP activities altogether. Welcome to Build Wars 2.

@LaFurion.3167 said:

@KrHome.1920 said:

@Turk.5460 said:There are not a lot of builds that will be effective against

every

other build. They all have some weakness to exploit, and most have a build from another profession that directly counters them.This!

imo warrior doesnt have a burst that is fast enough to threaten a thief currently. when i returned at PoF release from my break i found warriors freekills compared to before my break when they had faster burst from their berserk form with GS, there i had to concentrate to dogge properly - but that was removed during my break or for what ever reason noone uses it anymore. now everything is highly telegraphed and most skills dont do enough damage so i can tank a few hits.

Honestly, is it any different from the rangers who spam stealth and pew pew then reset, the warriors that have 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 damage markers for hours, guard sustain bots, ele sustain bots, holosmith double elixir X with rocket boots and oh yeah stealth, or necro dire barrier spammers? All classes are a bit out of control currently. Its snooze wars with all these invuls and stealth mechanics with a very lack luster of diversity.

The best time was early on in wvw, you had one "holy kitten" button your elite, and that's the way it should be. Today, you have an entire arsenal of "holy kitten" passives and skills at your disposal full escapes, stealth outta the butt, and invuls to reset yourself for an absurd amount of time. It was basic back then but it worked with what I think had more diversity with 5 trait lines to pick from. We are locked to 3 boring ones now.

Players want the satisfaction of the kill. I'm sure we all experience that moment, you get another player down to x% hp and you got them right? Nope, their passive kicks in and they tuck tail and run. Before you know it they blinked to queensdale.

Remove the passive crutches, remove the invul skills all together, remove the double dipping example: elixir X, signet of stone, and endure pain. You get a limited access and that's final. However, I doubt anet is willing to make that strict move being players will cry.