Straegen.2938

There are already builds that are nigh unkillable in equal footing. Why would anyone want more of that?

FB and Scourge need far more adjusting downward as they have become far too essential in the meta. Warriors need better stab to make them more relevant in large scale again. Their bubble is fine but it is pretty much the only thing they bring to a large scale fight. Mirage still has too much stealth, evasion, invuln for any one class which borders on OP in small scale. Few players like the massive stealth up time of thief, mesmer and engi. Stealth shouldn't extend beyond a couple seconds for any class. Pew-Pew SB still needs to have a better offense v defense tradeoff or more complex game play. Currently the rotation is so moronically simple my dog can play the class effectively. Too much D on a class that can explode players from a very long distance. I am fine with the damage but they should be manhandled when they are caught as opposed to popping stealth, invuln, blocks, leaps, etc. Scrapper is a good example of a class that has to make huge sacrifices on one side of offense/defense to gain the other. Those are the big offenders to me.

There is one already in the game. Build a massive condi spike build and watch the dismounts/kills happen in a couple seconds.

Every day crap siege or junk food gets built over gathering nodes just to troll players. Please create a minimum distance on siege/food placement near nodes. Thanks.

Simple concept. All players going into WvW get a temporary extra character slot and a level 85 upgrade with all specialties unlocked but no gear/bank access. Only those characters are allowed into WvW for that week. All gear will have to be sourced from killing other players, guards, critters, etc. Players would be allowed to delete that character and reset them to a different class. I would love to see a stripped down temporary WvW without all the legendary/ascended bloat. I love my gear but leveling the playing field in large scale combat would be interesting at least for a week.

It is a good feature for fight guilds in the short term. In the long term, it will suffocate WvW by leaving behind new players. So many players simply won't play WvW without a tag to follow. Thanks to the rally mechanic (the real issue here IMO), guild groups don't want rally bots near them so they run/ran silent for years. This is a nice feature they were already sort of using but ultimately it hurts recruitment. They need to end Rally so new/less experienced players are encouraged to join in the fray rather than discouraged.

If you ever fight the IE guild, they run a similar comp with scrapper/holosmiths instead of guardians. They are very efficient and maximize their terrain advantage with rangers. They spread out to draw enemies into 1v1 style fights then converge for a quick kill. They also converge when one of theirs is about to go down. Basically troll players with a single ranger, when one or two bites drop the hammer with blow up from DH and Whirlwind. If you can up your pulls, you can blow up bunkers efficiently but that will likely take a power mirage in the mix. If you want to stay close to each other, you will want to nuke control builds first followed by ranged softie DPS. You can pretty much straight up ignore scrappers, warriors, etc until everything else is killed off.

Zerg meta is pretty much Firebrand, Scourge and Scrapper. Everything else is pretty much unnecessary even if there are a couple useful classes/builds that can be added in such as Revenant. Roaming meta is pretty much thief, mesmer, warrior, ranger. Other classes roam but those are the ones you will see the most.

The biggest contributer to decline is players aging out of the game and moving on. GW2 has a very active population given its age. That said, they need to kill the rally mechanic because it really does prevent good guilds from being inclusive. Most guilds would run open tags if they weren't worried about the sheep rallying the other side.

WvW is always worth getting into as it is the best game mode IMO. PoF is worth it as some of the best specialties are there, it is relatively cheap and you are supporting perhaps one of the last games to not be centered around loot boxes and other pay-2-win systems. As for learning WvW, that is pretty simple. Just follow a tag around for a few nights and if you dig doing your own thing you will find your sPvP pays huge dividends against other roamers.

So much depends on your comp and their comp. If you are running DPS, targeting Pew/Pew and Necro builds can be vital. If you are running a sustain comp, grinding down their bunkers is more important as you can pretty much ignore their DPS. I run mostly thief builds with other thief builds so Rangers, Dead Eyes, etc are too dangerous to not pressure first.

So much this. WvW is a side hustle for ANet and GW2 with a tiny fraction of the players in the game overall. One could argue they love the mode because they have certainly poured more into the mode than they have gotten back out of it financially.

Poster is referencing the Deadeye Malicious Backstab thief build that use the Shadow Meld elite. Thief stealths up, positions behind a player typically one that is injured, marks them, lands backstab, pops Shadow Meld to instantly kill the reveal and restealth, stomps. With a macro running the entire process along with some extra assurances is a one button press affair. It is a gimmick build centered around a thief waiting long periods of time to land a killing blow on one player. It is largely ineffective in the grand scheme of things. However it can be a fun build to play and annoying as hell to those on the receiving end.

One hit dismount is already in the game. Just run a hyper condi build particularly fire based ones.

I simply don't understand the concerns here. If SoulBeasts can run with a 40% damage multiplier for months on an unblockable attack from long range with a ridiculously fast rotation, why can't Dagger get some OP love instead of constant nerfs. The class needs a few months in the sun instead of being handcuffed, shackled and tortured inside ANets basement. I really just want to see one trait, skill, etc change on the thief that makes me want to build around it. The last several patches have been nerfs or "that looks kinda interesting to sorta try on my already fully functional build".

Most thieves don't have 3 stunbreaks. Most run Shadow Step which is two technically but share a cooldown and maybe Acro, Roll for Initiative, Bandits or Blinding Powder. I have tried it and find it doesn't fill any holes in any of the builds I run. I also haven't found many thieves running it either.

I left Absorption out because I find it useful only after players have mastered the basics of that build . However you are correct and I do actually run it on my SB. Now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag... a weakness of most condi-thief builds is boon based enemies. Ele, Warrior, etc that rotate constant regen, stab, resistance, protection, etc. Absorption frequently is unnecessary, until it isn't. It is tempting to add more condi pressure (Torment), quickness (Agility) or similar for a better general DPS output. However the first time a player runs into a small group running Guardian, Scrapper, Tempest or some other bunker anchor Absorption can completely turn those fights. Essentially Absorption shores up a general weakness in the overall build. It is also ridiculously good in zerg fights. It takes some practice in setting up players with 5 stacks or more of poison so I still recommend condi pressure early on because it requires far less micro-management. I love the Torment stack from Trickery and use it on my P/P interrupt build but find stripping Resistance from Warriors and the like very important when moving away from Acro into Trickery. With Acro a player can matador many builds but without it I find having to cut through the defense rotations very important. I also like Trickster particularly if I start fighting heavy condi builds.

I was just copying the warriors Greatsword trait and applying the same mechanics to the Dagger trait. How about: Marauders Defense 5s - Evading an attack grants Quickness. Dagger skills that consume initiative cost one less. Quickness (3s): Skills and actions are faster.or Scoundrel's Equilibrium 10s - Successfully evading an attack while wielding a dagger recharges Steal. Daggers deal increased damage. Power: +120Additional Power: +60 per daggerRecharge Time Reduced: 50%Both of these traits are essentially reworked versions of other weapon traits available in the game.

Two that come to mind is the look back then teleport on Dead Eye allowing thieves to quickly teleport forward with one keystroke. Another is the Steal, Skirmishers Shot, Deaths Judgement combo which can be made into a single button press for massive damage. For those that don't know, a Deadeye can steal marking an opponent and going stealth, fire Skirmishers Shot then fire Deaths Judgement before Skirmishers Shot lands. Skirmishers Shot adds a malice stack before Death Judgement lands which in turn amps the damage of the stealth shot. Prior to the Deadeye stealth and Lead Attacks nerf, this combo was very OP and it still lands big shots on opponents but requires more setup now.

Anet does some pretty oddball changes but this isn't one of them. The idea of making the Scrapper more reliant on active offense rather than passive defense makes a lot of sense given how absurd their passive defense was made in the prior balance patch. Bunker Scrappers pre-changes could and did run around typing "/laugh" at players trying to kill them. They could stand in place and ignore 1-2 players. Now to keep their survival up they have to rotate their offense allowing for a lot more counter play. If this was the class balance brought to scrappers in the first rework patch, Scrapper players would be ecstatic. What some Scrapper players are upset by is that it was stupid OP for months and they don't like losing that.

Until seal is immune to stab and has a fast deployment time, it is useless. Long deployment time requiring the thief to be in the right spot and invis for more than 3s or die and on a fairly long cooldown. It is basically a junk skill much less one that needs a nerf. Thing is SB pre-nerf was a machine gun in the rock, paper, scissors small scale conversation. There are other builds (cough condi mirage cough) that need serious tuning but that doesn't negate the fact that a build with great mobility, stealth access, ridiculous multipliers, high quickness rotation, on top of a single button unblockable attack that rotates quickly all of which was packaged into an absurdly easy to play package needed addressing. Next? How about a balance patch that doesn't nerf the class for once. Anet has gutted the class. It has no purpose and has lost virtually all meta build variants. The class only excels in +1 now. Thanks to Warclaw it doesn't even run away well any more. Mirage, Holo, Scrapper, Soul Beast all better at virtually everything a thief used to do well.

How many decent roamers are going to get caught by a firebrands and/or a necro? These are the slowest classes in the game and they lack general control so no long stuns/knockdowns to manage opponents. In mid and large scale Firebrands and Necros are the foundation of a great team. In small scale they are at best good at holding a node. They cannot even take a camp if they are fighting a solid roamer, strong bunker, etc. I can hold a camp indefinitely against this pair on my thief, soul beast, scrapper while I wait for reinforcements and once I get a few more bodies this team will get ground down. Sure this team is going to have a very strong defense against 1-3 players as this is a brick wall but roaming generally is about flipping objectives, killing other roamers, scouting, escape none of which this duo excels at.

The fundamental flaw with preparations is that once they are deployed and sprung, they are effectively dead on a thieves utility bar while he is in combat. It takes 3s to deploy and the thief is vulnerable the entire time. Thieves simply cannot stop moving in combat for more than 1s or they become fodder. DH and Ranger Traps can be deployed ahead of time, sprung and redeployed with no or very little cast time making them still useful once the initial trap has been sprung. In combat situations the old traps are superior and even they essentially sucked. Thieves rely on their stellar utilities to stay alive/proc damage. Few thieves are going to pick a preparation full time over Shadow Step, Signet of Agility, Blinding Powder, Bandits Defense, Smoke Screen, Roll for Initiative, Binding Shadow, etc. Preparations are a gimmick that might be fun in certain situations but due to their slow deployment are nothing more than niche temporary utilities like Scorpion Wire.

There is a pattern after re-link. Any server paired with BG gets flooded so if you want to roll over everything xfer to BGs linked server. Then one sometimes two bottom tier servers becomes a destination for a few strong guilds. This results in some T3/T4 server becomes a juggernaut running over servers with half the population the first 2-3 weeks. Players that xfer to that new "winning" server destination will find they log in with guild blobs running tagless and they are mostly unwelcome. The "winning" server will eventually hit T1 where guilds duke it out until BG sends them back to T2. Rinse and repeat almost every relink.

Cannot kill any solid solo player. Better to run dual Holos with a lot more control and the ability to stealth each other. This combo no doubt scales tremendously well but in small scale I find the combo gets kited by other roamers far too easily. Basically any traditional roamer will find this a brick wall to fight against but little fear of actually losing to the duo since the combo lacks control and has very few gap closers.