Jugglemonkey.8741

He only gets opportunity because nobody is bothering to scout the tower while he caps it, regardless of how he got in. That said it is one thing to know about an exploit like that and another thing to use it, so report him and move on. It will get dealt with eventually. Or not. You know how it goes.

Honestly speaking, that's just the nature of the Thief. But the Cat-vs-Mouse game isn't limited to Thieves and GW2. The same concept is easily experienced in flight sims. Take the WWII era for example. You have slower turn-fighters such as the Spitfire, Hellcat, Bf109, and Zero, then you have the faster energy-fighters like the Mustang, Focke Wulf 190, Corsair, and Thunderbolt... The entire basis of an energy-fighter's strategy was to come in on a target from a higher altitude so it would be going so fast that it could line up its guns, take the shot, and fly right past the target without ever giving its opponent an opportunity to return fire. After it passed the target, it could just continue flying away, extending the distance and regaining altitude until it had reset its initial positional advantage. Such tactics can be referred to as Hit-and-Run, Hit-and-Fade, or Boom-and-Zoom. The turn-fighter, on the other hand, was all about baiting the energy fighter into giving up the safety of its speed and altitude in order to get a clean shot by using its superior maneuverability to stay out of its opponent's gunsight. As long as both planes were playing their own game, the turn-fighter was absolutely at a disadvantage. While it had the ability to force difficult shots, it would always be at the mercy of the faster plane. It could not escape by outrunning... it could not counter by chasing. The energy-fighter, while virtually untouchable as long as it stayed fast, had difficulty lining up its sights on such a slippery target while at high speed. The energy-fighter could very well improve its chances at getting the kill on a pass by lowering its speed in order to get guns on target, however, that would leave it much more vulnerable to the slower, more maneuverable turn-fighter. Once the energy-fighter loses its energy advantage, it is dead... but that would only happen if the pilot chose to do so. Basically, if the pilot made a mistake. Which brings us back to the Thief. It is a Hit-and-Run fighter. That's its game. It's meant to harass and annoy. However, unlike airplanes, one solid burst from a Thief won't kill its target. It takes repeated "passes" for a Thief to achieve that kind of lethality. And not only does a Thief have to hit hard multiple times, it also has to avoid getting hit... because it only takes one to two bursts for the Thief to go down. In such an example, the Thief is like the energy-fighter that gets forced into a turn fight. It has to in order to do any decent amount of damage, but it's extremely vulnerable when it does. Its only hope of survival is to get enough guns on target before it has to go into a defensive dive for its life... and then extend out, climb high, and repeat the whole process again and again. Perhaps an even more appropriate example would be an energy-fighter versus a B-17 bomber. Yes, the fighter comes in hard and fast, and although the B-17 can't maneuver, it is tough, and it has 13 guns placed all over it, so there's constant defensive fire being shot at the fighter no matter the angle... all while the bomber is making its merry way to its target... A Thief not only has to make enough successful passes/bursts against its tough target, it also has to avoid all of the defensive fire (random AoE, channeling skills, etc.) while doing so. And it has to do so within a limited time in most cases (before a point is captured, target escapes, or enemy reinforcements arrive). Yes, a Thief can run away and hide all day long. A Thief player could avoid getting killed by just not logging on to play. But what's the purpose of either of those things? The game isn't about surviving, it's about capturing and defending points. In WvW, Thieves stalk prey... but for what? It's basically all they can do. Unfortunately, it's like hyenas hunting lions. The prey has a much stronger bite than the predator... it's just a matter of not getting caught by those teeth. The lion may not be able to catch the hyena, but it's a lion, so why does it even care about the existence of a lone hyena? The hyena knows it's a hyena, so it's just looking for relevance in the world. This is probably the best set of analogies I've seen for thief. Well done ^^

So am I correct in thinking thieves aren't really after condi builds in pvp? Depends on the thief really, and it often depends how much the player plays thief. Most newer thieves tend to play condi more as the learning curve isn't as steep as power because of the added defensive stats, although there are veterans that have always played condi. There's also those veteran thieves that have been playing S/D power or D/P power forever because that's what was meta, and you'll never see them play anything else. Then there's buildcrafters, who play everything because they just enjoy making and testing builds to see what works. You can usually tell who fits into what group here based on their forum posts. I'm more of a buildcrafter, I've played my fair share of my own condi builds in WvW but I can't say I enjoy the condi build that is floating around PvP and WvW at the moment either, mostly because I think trailblazer is a very binary set to run. Either the enemy can deal with your condis and you are an easy kill, or they can't and they are an easy kill. This is boring from a build perspective imo, because the result of the fight largely depends on their build, not because of anything you did. I actually am really liking a celestial deadeye build I made for PvE and WvW atm. It's an attrition build (like condi was originally supposed to be) so it's not as burst heavy as marauder or trailblazer but it has the advantage of working around things like endure pain and stone signet and has surprisingly good DPS if you can sustain an attack, so I'm enjoying it in 1v1 and small scale fights. More to the point, the OP's suggestion would potentially allow a deadeye to stack poison from 1500 range (poison on steal), the poisons would have a duration of 20s with max condi duration so assuming you could use this button every 2s you'd build up and maintain 20 stacks of poison before the first application expires. On top of that you'd apply 25 vulnerability stacks (even the odds) all while never leaving stealth (stealth on mark). If you decided to get stealth from something other than steal, you could take trickery over SA and add 25 might from thrill of the crime, daze spam from sleight of hand, and stupid amounts of boonrip from bountiful theft and absorption sigil. There is just no way that this change is healthy because of how many things you can make your steal skill do, it should never be spammable. This is assuming the change resets mark, the skill simply removes the mark and puts mark on a cooldown of 10s or more, the change would serve absolutely no function whatsoever because with trickery mark is only on a 17s cooldown to begin with. I can only assume the OP didn't think through the consequences of the change. Edited as I realised I was envisioning a thief with 4 specialisations xD

I've had 17k true shot hits on my glassy thief, so sounds about right. It's not OP as the guy has to have perfect conditions for that sort of damage so pretty much any high damage skill will hit hard given those conditions, but occasionally you do see a guy sniping from the safety of his blob haha.

At this point it makes more sense to believe stories about the Loch Ness monster destroying Edinburgh. We've had about the same level of proof that they both exist, after all.

Didn't we do that already?

What server was he? FSP [EU] (but idk if we can speak about servers here, I remember mods were really strict about it). If you're complaining that the thief didn't stay and allow you to kill him, well, I'm sorry, but you're not entitled to a kill just for showing up. I'm complaining because I think every build should be able to be killed by at least another class/build or if outnumber, it was the latter case (we were 4 ppl trying to catch him!) but that thief was just impossible to kill or even catch. True, but there is a difference between not being able to kill and not being able to catch. I guarantee that if that thief hung around and tried to juke it out with the 4 of you in an even fight he would have went down like a sack of spuds, he just didn't do that because it was clearly a foolish thing to do, and if you had a decent D/P daredevil in your group he would most likely have been killed very quickly. This is the thing, tho. As long as you don't have a thief on your own side, it is basically impossible to kill a thief who doesn't want to get killed. Because their disengage is unmatched in this game, they are hyper mobile able to create twice the distance between themselves and every enemy that isn't a thief than these enemies are able to close.Then on top of that hyper mobility, they also have stealth for days, which allows them to just disappear from the screen. It is really annoying that thieves get to freely pick their fights, being able to disengage any time they want and there is nothing you can do against it as long as you are not a thief.Even had situations in which a thief repeatedly harassed me. He wasn't able to win a fight, but he engaged on me, tried to fight me, then when he noticed that he is losing the fight he was 3000 units away from me in a matter of 2 seconds. We both healed back up, he kept stalking me from afar and when all his CDs and health recovered, he engaged me again. Same thing, he was losing the fight, instantly disengaged that far that I couldn't even bother to try to catch up for the kill. He healed back up waited for his CDs..... then did it a third time. And that's the frustrating part about all this. You don't get to chose when to fight and when not, it is all decided by the thief player.I can understand that, I guess my main thought is that this is something that will always exist as long as all the classes have differing access to mobility. Whatever has the highest mobility in the game will always have the ability to play like this because it can outrun everything else. So even if we removed thief from the game now then mirage and holo will get complained about for doing basically the same thing as what that thief player did, wouldn't they? So the entire argument seems basically pointless, as logically you'd have to nerf everything til everyone has exactly the same toolkit or it will result in no overall change whatsoever. I get that it is frustrating. But unfortunately you or I finding something frustrating isn't actually a valid reason to nerf something, especially when the class is designed to do exactly the thing that is considered irritating. Pocket firebrands keeping people up in a 1v2 are frustrating, but I can't really fault someone for playing a class to it's strengths, no matter how cheesy or annoying I may find it.

What server was he? FSP [EU] (but idk if we can speak about servers here, I remember mods were really strict about it). If you're complaining that the thief didn't stay and allow you to kill him, well, I'm sorry, but you're not entitled to a kill just for showing up. I'm complaining because I think every build should be able to be killed by at least another class/build or if outnumber, it was the latter case (we were 4 ppl trying to catch him!) but that thief was just impossible to kill or even catch.True, but there is a difference between not being able to kill and not being able to catch. I guarantee that if that thief hung around and tried to juke it out with the 4 of you in an even fight he would have went down like a sack of spuds, he just didn't do that because it was clearly a foolish thing to do, and if you had a decent D/P daredevil in your group he would most likely have been killed very quickly.

I play deadeye mostly and if 4 people turn up to take the camp I'm sat in, odds are I will lose it. If I am lucky I'll get a kill before I am forced off, but if they opponents have half a brain I'm still losing the camp, so the result if I stay and fight is basically the same as if I'd stealthed and waypointed. At least from a PPT point of view, anyways. If you're complaining that the thief didn't stay and allow you to kill him, well, I'm sorry, but you're not entitled to a kill just for showing up.

I would love to retrieve my downed friends by hooking and dragging them with scorpion wire. Just seems such a thief-y way to support them lol haha xD

If the stealth from trapper runes is problematic then it would be easier to just change what trapper runes do, considering thief can't even use them anymore due to traps being reworked into preparations. No disagreement with the rest of what you said tho. I've suggested around 4 or so seconds stealth window to use Stealth Attacks, I don't think it's needed at this point though, while still allowing longer duration stealth for map travel and scouting. People in this forum would rather have no stealth and gamble with some unknown gimmick mechanic that would have to make up for it with possibly no tells like stealth has and likely something without the stipulation of having to come out of that state to do anything meaningful. Exactly. Removing stealth outright is like opening pandora's box, you'll have to give the thief something else to compensate. If you ever thought consume plasma was OP in a thief/mesmer duel, imagine what happens when that thief has constant access to stability and protection alongside blocks etc regardless of matchup. See a someone who stealths alot coming to u, dude can you wait..i need to quickly buy some target painter.If that fails.....dude there is a sentry up, can you follow me there and fight.Well if that fails also....then, dude can you wait abit, i just took this tower and need to upgrade it and put watchtower tactic. can you come fight me after that? All of these things do work against stealth thieves. If you insist on not using any of the stuff that exists in game to your advantage, it's like saying condi is OP because you don't bother running any cleanses. If that would be a L2P issue, I'm not sure how this isn't. So what about stomping using mist form/elixir S/stability/function gyro/stances etc? Those are ok because you can see the enemy stomping but (in most cases) do nothing about it, but stealth stomp isn't ok even though one AoE CC on the downed will stop it? Really? Yeah, it's learn to play issue for all those thiefs that can't play without perma stealtth Bro just get their health to 0 duh. Lets see you play without your bovine scat never ending stealths and evades you have keyed into a sngle macroWhy would I bind multiple evades or stealths into a single macro? Evades don't stack so a macro would be pointless, stealth doesn't need a macro (in fact, very little in this game does) and even if it did, binding it to a macro means I'd blow everything at once and would have nothing left when it expires, meaning a quick death. This comment alone implies you have never actually played thief.

Think the only way you're going to fix this is to change the server transfer frequency or limit it to certain times, as others have already said. Making transfers once every 3 months only seems the most sensible to me personally.

no, if you are 'skilled' you might be able to survive. A decent stealth player just disengages at will. And there is nothing you can do about it. Stealth is broken and must be removed from the game. OR speed: 10%damage: 5%no blinks, teleports etc while in stealth. Do the same thing to all invuln and block skills and we all good. Right?

I understand that you tried very hard to refute my truths. Oh well. """truths"""Judging by absolute lack of on-topic answer, I suspect I've not only "tried", but also succeeded. And it wasn't exactly "very hard", but thanks for comming by and writing... well... nothing. This is the guy that comments that thief OOC is in combat ressing in a thread on no downstate, when that really has absolutely nothing to do with the topic either. The dude will turn literally anything into an anti thief rant because he's a salty necro main, might as well let him have his catharsis and move on tbh.

Lol, I replied to your comment in the other thread with option 3 exactly, seconds before seeing this thread xD I do think that if the matchup is even (read, nobody has outnumbered) you should retain down state tho. That would mean it has no effect on zerg play outside of matchups where you're already hilariously outnumbering your opposition.

Thieves can break combat more easily than any other class, i.e. extremely easily, and come back. It's effectively in-combat reviving. If a thief getting OOC is akin to in combat reviving, then you won the fight didn't you? Stop complaining and just live your life, man.

I'd actually suggest a variant of this, where if the servers are evenly matched (read, no outnumbered for any side) then everyone has downed state, but if one server has outnumbered then only that server has downed state, the other two have no down state. That way it is directly tied to player population on the map, so a map with tags on each server won't be affected but roamers get to have their fun when they are basically alone on a map.

To be honest I'm having a lot of fun on the celestial deadeye build I linked earlier. I'm still messing with things to try get the best damage out of it but as others have said, it's not for burst. I have a valk build for if I want to try for a quick kill, celestial more of a survive and wear them down type of thing which is actually what I wanted from it anyways, and it does do surprisingly decent damage on P/D once the might stacks are up. I did try celestial on engi today and it was much worse than I remember lol - maybe the difference is that deadeye has a lot more active defense and easier condi application when compared to engi? This is the fun thing about legendary armor tho, you can try out odd builds without investing much gold or resources. Edit; odds are celestial deadeye is working out for me because of the damage reduction inherent to the class. You get 10% reduced damage from your mark from Iron Sight, 33% reduced damage from Flickering Shadows and another 33% from the protection from M7, adds up to roughly 50% damage reduction before taking toughness and food into account. The other thing is player expectations; I WANT cele to be a significantly different way to play the class, because otherwise you're basically trying to run a glass build with inferior equipment.

Isn't it 25% for 10s right now in WvW/PvP? (On Soulbeast, I mean.) I don't even know, I haven't used it in so long. Did it get changed in the Feb Patch? I was in Antarctica until mid March so I missed a lot.It' is 25% yeah. Incidentally, that's a pretty cool reason to be out of touch :P

Well Warrior sustain is pretty much reliant on generating might, so you'd see no Warriors that week lol. I think a better way of doing this though would be -95% boon duration week. That way classes that rely on +XYZ benefit when they receive a boon still get the benefit even if the boon just flashes for 1/8s. Another would be a -95% condi duration week :tongue: this will never be balanced. some builds will even become unplayable... or maybe not that much? it would be an interesting weekend to gather data.Oh yeah, I don't expect it to be. But if half the builds in common usage were unplayable, it would be pretty telling really.

This would be interesting just to show how reliant people are on them atm

If you transferred at the weekend, you will have to wait until the reset on the 22nd before you get pips again as you have to be on a server for a full week's matchup (friday to friday) before you can get pips again.

Also, condi DE would be an abomination with condis on steal if it could reset mark at will without mercy. It's rare I agree with you, but yeah. Not a good change imo.

As a defender let me take it a different route. As a defender facing more numbers on a normal basis (again attacker chooses time and place of fight) , Presence of the Keep affords a defender what walls really should be applying but don't. Walls don't because they nerfed all defensive siege, made it obsolete (shield gens), reduced wall HP, doubled siege health. Its just a joke, you can have a treb behind the gate and enemy can just alpha/guild golem it down in less than 40 seconds. There is currently absolutely 0 counterplay to attackers that have more numbers. So instead defending is relying on overwhelming stats instead of defender actually having TIME to gather numbers and use siege to take down offensive siege, like pre-HoT. Passive stats are way more annoying for attacker when facing equal numbered groups thus they don't choose to do it, taking 5 to 15 minutes more to siege a keep was much more fun than running back from spawn + only being capable of farming much weaker players. We have arrived to situation where:Attacking is boring because you won't get decent fights, it lasts max 2 minutes to breach the objectives (provided you use shield gens like normal beings) and you wipe to worse players very fast if they can gather numbers. andDefending is hopeless outnumbered, none of the siege does nothing. Trebs/Acs/catas/ballistas don't work because shield gens, and even if they do, rams/catas only take half damage from them. Walls and gates have less HP. But alsoDefenders almost always have some amount people online (~15-25) ready to def things instead of playing actively and as everything upgrades superfast, there is just not much for small attacking groups to do as even side keeps on borderlands are usually T3 due to boosted upgrade times. All this arrived with HoT, while claim buff affects roamers and high level scene the most, upgrade times being boosted massively were another offender to reduce the amount of activity on maps. Tbf they tried to fix overpowered defending after HoT by buffing siege HP and reducing wall/gate HP, but in the end they didn't touch the real offenders, claim buff and upgrade times. We are literally at state where everyone stacks at servers that owns sm all daytime because attacking is terrible Overall objectives are just too weak, siege counterplay is terrible and this all should be fixed. In return claim buff should be reduced to +25 stats instead of +100. This would especially affect roamers because it does not only affect ganking and small fights within objectives but also open field massively.This is a much stronger argument than the previous posts. I still think that the buffs make marginal difference to roaming, but if changes were made to siege, upgrades (I always thought auto upgrades were a bad change) and defending in the way you're talking about then yeah, get rid of the claim buff because it wouldn't be needed anyway.

I've been messing around with celestial and soldier/crusader builds for deadeye recently, and they make a nice change of pace from the more traditional glassy builds. They are not as effective as my zerker P/D rifle deadeye in terms of just killing things dead, but they have their uses. The soldier/crusader build is basically the old valkyrie D/P rifle SA/CS/DE scholar rune build with more baked in toughness; http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PawAQhrlFwgYbsOmJWWPvvKA-zVhYCh2LYIEhwg8Ej6FYhkZR1aE0bqa7BIg/WqyMC-w It's really nice to run alongside a glassy build like zerker P/D rifle DE to provide safer stealth engages without blowing all your utilities, and it still does comparable damage to a marauder setup if you get caught out before swapping builds. The celestial build I'm running with SA/DA/DE and fireworks runes, using P/D and rifle; http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PawAQpjlFwyYbsOmJOuOvvKA-zVZYVh7TMCWgsRNcIZqoaVE0rUVxHAx1DPG8YpKzI-w Between fireworks runes, even the odds, M7 and strength sigil, you can get 25 might pretty happily as long as you keep attacking, and I've seen it get 4k total condi ticks while dealing consistent power damage. I started messing with this for open world and story instances, but it's a surprisingly decent build in general against a lot of things, you won't be one shotting people with it but it is fun to play. Thanks, this gave me some neat ideas for updating my build. You're very welcome ^^