Bast.7253

I don’t know if anyone will see this because I’m unsure about most of where I am in life and what life is these days but wanted to say a few things just in case. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for the many years of enjoyment I’ve had in this game, the guild mates I’ve had, the adventures I’ve been on. I’d love to play again someday but I’m not sure if I’ll ever get the chance. The community here truly is, aside from a few bad occurrences and iffy game modes, the best I’ve seen though others have seemed to improve a bit. I will always cherish the time I had with you all, on Guild missions, in raids, etc. I want to give my biggest thanks to the devs and the studio. I’ve always been opinionated and I’ve definitely been more unfair than I should have at times. I can’t imagine what it takes to be able to put something like this together, to keep it going, and especially given the difficult times the studio has had over the past few years. To keep morale in an already difficult industry, the amount of talent you all have. I know I’ve said it before but my dream, long ago, was to make it out there in hopes of one day getting to the level of being able to work for the studio. I have nowhere near the skill level or knowledge of anyone there but it did inspire me to pursue an associates - wasted where I am - and a career in web dev though I’ve not exactly excelled in it. I just want to say thank you once again to the many people involved. To the fellow players, especially in pvp, I want to make a special note to apologize to the people I’ve argued with, ridiculed, and been outright nasty and unsportsmanlike to. I’ve always been a poor sport, a bit of a brat, and I’ve always had low self-esteem but it doesn’t excuse the way I’ve acted or the things I’ve said at times. I hope you can trust me when I say I’m not that person outside of the game, that I’m far more patient, that I tried to be better toward the end because I know I stepped over the line on multiple occasions and I wish you all the best in life. Truly, truly want to express how sorry I am for how loathsome I was to some of you. I hid behind anonymity and I let my anger get the best of me far too many times. We don’t know who is on the other side of the screen or what they’re going through and I’m so sorry. I hope you’re all enjoying life, the game, and everything in between. Lastly, I wish the studio a prosperous long future still. Special apology to certain studio members I mentioned in the past looking high on stream. That was not intended to be an insult and I fear it was taken that way. I can’t imagine what it must take to be up there or the amount of nerves it takes to be on camera like that and honestly I always looked forward to the livestreams after releases. Rambling, I’m sorry. I wish you all the best, players, devs, studio. With love, CT

I love the idea of this being a potential metric for whoever handles analytics and forum interaction. Oh - google analytics is showing 15 confused emojis events on this post, let's check it out! Welp, that was pointless. I don't really know what the emoticons were supposed to do. Metrics or just some cute way of interacting and a fun little pet project of one of the website devs. Idk. I definitely don't think it's serving any legit purpose at this point. Still mad props to the ui/ux team. The notification system, the ui, the responsiveness, are all so good. But anyway - 😕😕 😕 😕 😕 5 confused face rating for this thread.

You talking about the magnificent EZ Clap?

Don't really need any buffs when your main objective is running troll builds in the ffa.

As a recent bladesworn enjoyer that wins a fair share of fights it is entirely skill. These buttons don't just spam themselves and aegis isn't passive like it is on op guard.

#shotsfired Nope, sorry - all shots were reflected by skill 4. You've now been redirected to the login screen.

The last entry in the leaderboard is like 1420 or something isn't it? For reference to be on the leaderboard it used to be like plat 2'ish or somewhere around there. Of the ones on the leaderboard you have probably 2-3 alt accounts - So if I had to guess I'd say probably 300ish NA including non-leaderboard silver/bronze folks. And that's being generous.

I think the point is they don't WANT to attract more players because that's just justification for more work/resources. (Likely mandated by the NCSoft overlords.) Ideally, at this point, they want to milk the living story crowd with micro-expansions while they meet carefully planned checkboxes to fund their other ip's. So - what COULD they do and what WILL they do are entirely different. What you can expect is MAYBE one or two more micro-expansions, some more weapon unlocks, and your usual bi-annual draw a skill out of a hat coefficient nerf followed by six months of something being blatantly busted. Expecting any major reworks to anything at this point is just hopium and you can insist I'm a doomer but I think the writing is on the wall. Best of luck to them on their new ip's though. To be honest, at the rate gen AI is advancing by the time they finish these other ip's, or any other studio for that matter, the mmo/game market as we know it may be heading for sunset. Between advances like Apple Vision, ai video/image gen, things like LLM's that can be used to simulate real player behavior, eventually if not already present gen ai 3d models - I mean, we may be creating our own completely customized video games before too long.

Lol. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tried to do that and came up an inch short or had a guard staff barrier block the entrance. Most of the time you’re just delaying a future death in the tower anyway. Idk. Way bigger concerns like necro, occasionally guard, and mostly ranger. Nothing like getting a ranger into down state and getting pelted with cc spam while they rapidly revive. Only other significant downstate is a power chrono/mes if they’re able to get you to downstate from skill 3 or finish you off but I’m assuming it’s been nerfed as I haven’t had this happen in years.

Yeah, tonight is one of those nights apparently. No duo's on my side against two duo's on the other. I thought this wasn't supposed to be possible?

Case in point - Just attacked a reaper and got them to 10% health. They ENTER SHROUD and crit me for 6800 damage. That's a decent backstab for thief. Please explain this balance.

idk - edibles/drunk are usually the times I play best. If you find yourself losing two matches in a row though it's probably best to just quit ranked for the night. This is a good indication - at least in my experience - that you're going to go up against the duo's and people intentionally queuing during that playtime because it's easier for them to move up in rank and matchmaking will do everything it can to pit you against people far above your rating because the population is too small and matchmaking is trying to make sure you have a guaranteed loss to keep the ratio in place.

Thief in general, in pvp, is not easy to play. There's so much cleave and passive aoe damage packed into traits in this game that you have to be very selective about where you stand and when you attack. It's also not easy to land high amounts of damage on a thief as it is with most other professions because of boons/projectile reflect/passive defensives and thief damage being generally lower than something like a holo that can just press two buttons and do more damage than you can with a few attacks and your largest hitting stealth attacks. Personally, deadeye is still very tricky to play. Sure, it's annoying to fight against and uses a lot of stealth - but you still have to be careful about when and who you attack. Dagger/pistol daredevil is the most common because it's more of a duelist but it's also less damage and takes more skill consideration. I've been playing the good ole core d/d thief build but it's pretty much a - you have one shot to land high damaging attacks and if you're not careful you could be stealing/teleporting into a mass amount of aoe ground clutter or cleave - or just have your damage negated because you're attacking something loading up with blocks. There really isn't a lot of build diversity for thief - Specter still has a condi variant that's decent and relies less on stealth. There's probably still a few people running the pistol/blind spam build. Really depends on your playstyle. I'd love staff daredevil to be viable again but it hasn't been since it's release in HoT and then it was apparently so appauling to the majority that they decided to permanently shelve it. - And power creep/specs released since then have just made the playstyle far too high risk - (combined with the janky animation frame of staff 5's evade that's too unreliable to really count as an evade imo.) Azure would probably have far better advice as I believe they play thief far more than me but if you're outnumbered - RUN. Just leave. Survive and move on. Most of the thieves I see playing well in matches never stop moving. For match-ups - this entirely depends on what spec/playstyle you are. If you're melee and playing core/daredevil, mesmer is generally a decent-ish 1v1 because it gives you a stolen skill that grants all boons - including aegis and resolution. (block and condition damage reduction) If I were you I'd watch some of Vallun's videos. He has build videos and talks about trade-offs and what to do in certain situations and presents it in a pretty beginner friendly fashion.

Aimlessly evade+jump spam on a warrior. It doesn't actually help you in anyway - that's spamming full counter or ammo skills on bladesworn. But you'll feel super epic and look like a really elite player while doing it. <3

There isn’t really a difference in rank anymore. I’ve had multiple matches the past few days against 1 or more people that are or have been in the top 5. Two that are consistently fighting for #1. Grim, Naru, whoever Pimap is, AGamer - I think they’ve been in top 5 haven’t they? Whoever JADEN is and was pretty high up there but I haven’t seen them that high up in previous seasons. The population is so small there isn’t really a different rank anymore. I had someone friend me from my matches that had a rating of 980. So uh… Idk. Depends on playtimes too. You’ll see the same 10 people often during certain times for a few hours, usually later in the evening. Difference in play also depends entirely on who they’re against and the victor is often decided beforehand by a few people queue syncing or the matchmaking deciding you’ve won enough for the day and puts you up against top 10. Oddly enough I had much better matches yesterday than I’ve had in a LONG time. Even fought a dev on a bladesworn the other night. My team lost of course as we did not have a bladesworn. 🤣