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ASP.8093

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Everything posted by ASP.8093

  1. I think raids have a certain reputation because: They can be a pretty big time commitment. There are a lot of mechanics to learn, all going off together. Certain sections are way easier than others, but there aren't a lot of obvious "introductory" bits. "Raid" is an established MMO word that implies you're going to do something pretty hard and involved. Both Fractals and Strikes are popular, easy to organize on-the-spot via LFG, and have fairly accessible on-ramp content, though.
  2. When playing solo? It's the Boon Duration indirectly boosting every other stat. Boons and conditions are abundant in this game, they're often present on abilities that you'd use anyway even if they didn't add any boons or conditions (like a good spammable attack giving you a few Might stacks or the basic attack on your Power-focused weapon set applying a little bit of Bleed). Your Berserker gear character with 0 Might and your Celestial gear character with 25 Might have very roughly the same base attack damage (before precision/ferocity turn your attacks into crits). Now, it's more likely you'll self-generate some Might even with Berserker gear, but the Boon Duration means that it stays longer and therefore stacks harder. AND the Celestial character also has Condition Damage *AND* Condition Duration, which translates into a big power boost for their conditions as well (because Might boosts both). So it's like you stapled 60% of a power DPS character to 60% of a Condi DPS character. Oh, and the Toughness, Healing Power, and defensive Boon Duration give you a lot more self-sustain, too. Now, in a group setting, you've got dedicated boon support builds that stack Boon Duration in order to provide everyone with Alacrity or Quickness, and those same support builds are also spewing out enough Might, Fury, Regeneration, Protection, &c. to cap everyone's boons. So now your Berserker gear character does like 50%+ more damage than any Cele geared equivalent because you've got the more useful base stats AND you're both massively overcapped on boons. (n.b. The Celestial-geared character might themselves be a viable boon support in this situation, though i think more typically you'll see Diviner, Ritualist, or Harrier gear on these builds.)
  3. My reward for unlocking the skyscale like 4-5 years ago was 4-5 years of using the skyscale. I don't really need Anet to come up with special ways to baby me just because i spent a week doing PoF map hearts and playing catch half a decade ago.
  4. The story journal is constantly showing you where a new PvE thing-to-do is. You don't have to do the story in order if you don't want to (you can start any expansion / seasonal story you have bought without doing the ones before it), and you don't have to finish the core story if you don't care, but the story will constantly direct you to the next level-appropriate zone and the expansion storylines all include missions that act as tutorials for stuff you unlock via expansion masteries. The majority of the game world is level 80 areas, built up over more than a decade of incremental releases, and most of those areas are far more lively and challenging than the level 0-50 zones you've spent your time in so far. If you really really really want to improve your gear asap, here you go: https://metabattle.com/wiki/Guide:How_to_Gear_a_Character (You should have a set of level 80 exotic Celestial gear from your boost thingy, though, as others have pointed out. That can last you a good long while depending on the class.) If you hate your weapon, just buy an exotic (orange) or rare (yellow) one on the Trading Post for a few gold.
  5. They just need to make boss phasing reset the mark like a kill does.
  6. You want an ability like Shadow Meld in PvE to fix scuffed rotations on M7 builds, especially ones running Silent Scope. Otherwise you take a big DPS loss from having to wait out Revealed before you can cycle your Initiative.
  7. For mucking around in open world, try using Steal in the middle of casting Cloak and Dagger. Teleports you to the enemy, C&D hits them in melee, then you have stealth so you can do your Backstab. (Alternatively with Dagger/Pistol you can do Black Power, Heartseeker, teleport in the middle of the Heartseeker — you'll get the combo field stealth and the Heartseeker damage.)
  8. You can still do perma stealth pretty easily with Deadeye. And you don't really need perpetual stealth for a lot of situations; any thief type can stack up a good bit of stealth with Black Powder, or use Shadow Refuge to cover an important non-combat action (like claiming the Balthazar hero point in Auric Basin).
  9. I'd rather play against MoD than a condi burst mesmer, or any class that just piles on enough hard CC to put you on a timer of "you gotta kill me before you run out of dodges + stun breaks or I will kill you." If they're managing to consistently interrupt only my most important skills it probably means they're paying more attention to what I'm doing than I am. 😆
  10. In a game that lets you stop incoming interrupts and only puts your skills on a short CD when you cancel or interrupt them? Yeah, it's fine. The enemy team is actually giving up something in exchange for those quick interrupts in order to field that mesmer.
  11. Okay, but once they're investing serious cooldowns into interrupting you, you gotta stop and ask, "how is this all that different from another class just investing similar resources to straight-up kill you while you're trying to cast your heal?"
  12. This whole game is about spamming ports, blind, and evades. Come on now.
  13. "Elite skill" doesn't mean better, "elite skill" means "a skill with a high cooldown and a big effect." Most of the time they're on balance a little bit worse than a very good utility skill.
  14. If you look at Discretize, they still recommend Condi Specter (Alac or pure DPS): https://discretize.eu/builds/thief/condi-specter/ — as well as Power Staff Devil. You can play Pistol/Dagger condi Deadeye as well, it was the go-to thief build due to its huge damage output before End of Dragons dropped, but its rotation is a huge pain in the butt in comparison to Specter (dicier resource management and a lot of forced movement). I suspect Rifle or D/D Deadeye can probably do fine at this point as well, on account of the various buffs. But it's more situational since some bosses have *very* quick phases where you can barely do a full rotation.
  15. Seal Area occasionally shows up in SPvP. I think the Specter cuts may have kicked it out of the meta for now but the skill itself is viable in the context of a duelist-ish Thief build. Shadow Refuge: is kind of a newbie trap in many situations, but it shows up quite effectively in Improvisation-based D/P Daredevil builds. Err, isn't Shadow Flare standard in certain Snow-Crows-y raid builds? (Even though it can reveal you if you mess up!!) Binding Shadow is good enough at securing kills that it occasionally becomes part of the SPvP/WvW-roaming meta, and Shadow Gust is mainly a WvW troll skill but we can forgive that I think. Shadow Meld has a serious presence in every game mode. It fixes scuffed rotations, helps you counter "Sic 'Em," and just generally doesn't suck. In WvW/SPvP, any Deadeye build can basically run either Shadow Meld or Dagger Storm as strictly a matter of preference. Thieves Guild is mostly associated with condi P/D builds that can share venom to the thieves. … Smoke Screen got nerfed really hard to force it out of SPvP. Scorpion Wire is perfectly fine in SPvP/WvW, it's not meta but P/D type build can use it alright. People also swap to it when clouding in WvW. Smoke Screen is still serious business in PvE any time you need to negate projectiles.
  16. Uh, what? Dodge rolling didn't break you out of Kneel in the past. Only using 5 again, swapping weapons, or getting CCed.
  17. One weird trick for roaming: when you find yourself thinking, "I just can't manage to close the gap," focus on other ways to manage the gap instead. That feels counterintuitive when your build is melee, but the point is to change the relative value of your movement abilities vs. theirs. The relative value of "distance:" • Imagine a 95% "open-field" situation. • If I'm hitting you from 900-1200 range, you need to close the gap by 1200 units, whereas I just need to open up the gap a little bit in response to keep you off me. You move up 1200 units + I move back 600 units => I've still got the advantage, I can still hit you and you still can't hit me. So now if I can port backwards 600 units you gotta apply 1800 units worth of gap closers to pressure me. • Now imagine you move back 1200 units instead => I need to move up 1200 units in order to keep you in my weapon range. If I don't, we're both basically resetting our health and cooldowns and restarting the fight again. Okay, but how does that help you actually kill me? Well, any time you've burned more resources than I have, resetting the fight like that works to your advantage. Also, like, we're people playing video games — usually I want a kill just as badly as you do, so I'll try to chase you down a bit, probably burning some resources to do it. If you Rush away and I Shadowstep to follow you? That's 10x better for you than if you hit me with Bull's Charge and I Shadowstep away to save myself from your damage burst. Because you've still got the Bull's Charge ready to go. (And "get them to waste their Shadowstep and then kill them with Bull's Charge" is, like, a Warrior's dream when fighting Thief.) Terrain is powerful! • I'm hitting you from range. You can't really damage me right now. You're pretty sure chasing me down is going to be hard. • Okay, just go hug a rock or a pillar or a wall or something. Now I have to run around a bunch to change the angle so I can hit you. • The range gap between us is also a ratio of how much movement I have to do to counter your movement. If I want to stay at 1200 range I have to move like 1800 units per every 50 units you just side-step around the pillar, it's impossible to keep up with that. So, to counter your goofy little dance, I have to move closer => you just forced me to close the gap by 600-900 units without using any resources of your own! TLDR: Don't just get tunnel-visioned on chasing them, any time the odds aren't overwhelmingly in your favor you should be thinking about ways to frustrate them and make them come to you.
  18. Trickery is incredibly good and if you didn't have the +3 Initiative, it would still be absolutely required for every single PvP Daredevil build because an instant-casting unblockable stability-piercing interrupt is one of the most powerful things you could ever be doing as a "+1."
  19. PvE Specter uses Scepter/Dagger with condi stats (Viper's for pure DPS, Ritualist's for DPS + alac support). The starting point is a "priority-based" rotation. Just do whatever you can closest to the top of the list and you'll get like 80% of the way to optimal play: 1. Utilities (wells or venoms) — these should be placed on the group because they're group buffs 2. Spam 3 (Twilight Combo) whenever you can 3. F1 on cooldown 4. When you're out of Initiative, hit F2 for Shroud. Spam 2, 4, 5 as much as you can. Leave Shroud (F2 again) only when Initiative is full. • Your Wells and Shroud 3 are also mobility skills, you can use them to move around in boss fights that involve a lot of running away from evil circles. • Note that you can do almost all of your damage at range — this is super valuable in fights like Anka where you're just not allowed near the boss sometimes — except for Shroud 4. • I usually take either Basilisk Venom or Shadowfall as my elite skill and just save it for big boss breakbar moments. (Basilisk Venom is really, really good in groups.)
  20. 15k-20k on the golem without any extra buffs, yeah. Start with just 3-3-3-dodge-1. Once you get the hang of that, you can mix in 3-3-3-F2-1 as well (when F2 is available). (This is all Kneeling with a target Marked.) Then try running around (not Kneeling) doing 2-2-2-dodge-1. Way less DPS but it's an easy way to kite stuff in open world. I use to play Greatsword Mesmer and switched to Deadeye to get better sustained DPS with a similarly mobile/slippery class.
  21. The Mark times out after 30 seconds (the cooldown on the F1 ability itself is like 25, or closer to 17 if you have Trickery). It will also be reset if you use Mercy (but you'll get your Mark back immediately). IME the Mark can be a bit of a problem with phased bosses, but I just went and tried out the Djinn and you can just pew-pew normally without any problems (and, if you have Trickery, use the Mark to break his bar as well).
  22. I mostly skipped that era as well, but afaik basically your Malice equivalent would charge passively instead of from attacks. Like you could mark a target and then just wait. It didn't have the same insane initiative-refresh capability as modern Deadeye, though. Also your sneak attack was "Cursed Bullet," a homing boon-ripping shot, while Death's Judgement was one of the #num skills. … Given the class' dire rep back in the day, I'd have to say I prefer the current iteration.
  23. For which game mode? PvP? PvE?
  24. In the end, they didn't reduce the range, what we got instead was a straight upgrade. Possibly including an all-new bonus skill (Shadow Advance), assuming that's not an early beta leak / programming error. Time will tell if that sticks around. The Shadow Arts rework was also a significant upgrade to WvW/SPvP Deadeye's DPS and staying power, the only real casualty there was Daredevil (already being pushed out of the meta by an overtuned Specter at the time) and Rifle/Rifle perma-stealth builds.
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