FrancisN.9276

I don't think it is intended, but an oversight which Anet will never bother fixing.

As a seasoned MMORPGamer, I have gone from an era of MMORPGs with low-polygon character design to an era of MMORPGs with characters much more pleasant to look at than me - some may say that is a low standard to draw comparisons. The combat system in almost all of them requires more gamer's attention to the cooldown bar than anything happening more than half the render distance limit from their character. It has been a norm for MMORPGs for so many decades that I had been used to it without realizing how oppressively confining it was, until I played the Thief profession in GW2. No longer do gamers feel the need to look at the cooldown bar every 3-5s because the Initiative bar is completely visible and adequately informational at the corner of their vision field. No longer do they have to press these buttons rotationally and blindly off cooldown, but rather they can play the game in a way more reactive to all things within their render distance. The Initiative system for weapon skills (reactive skills consuming "stamina" resource without cooldown) coupled with utility skills (skills with cooldown to simulate the preparatory nature of gadgets/gears) is the perfect balance created by the original designers of this class. I do hope that if GW3 comes out one day, their designers will take note of this system rather than letting it go into oblivion. P.S. please don't kill off Thief profession 😞

Although I love the idea of letting skyscale have the long range fireball attack, I still wish for it to have a dedicated button press for clinging onto walls because it keeps grabbing walls and ledges where I do not want to. Also, if there is a master for reducing altitute loss during flight, that will be the best thing ever for this mount.

Somehow this Kryptis skyscale skin looks remarkably similar to a flying cockroach 😥

This is exactly how I feel about Thief class. Much as I want to main an Anet's favorite like Guardian or Necro, I am totally hooked on the ingenuity and the freedom of the initiative mechanic. It is ahead of its time, while all other classes are still designed in old-schooled MMO style.

I am using Relic of the Thief since it fits nicely with Mali 7. Also, if you run One in the Chamber and cast cantrip often, Relic of the Deadeye gives more damage output.

Is it just my DE or does this happen to everyone's DE?

It can easily be reproducible if anyone playing as Deadeye use Deadeye's Mark on this meta boss. Without Deadeye's Mark, this class is useless during this boss fight.

If you read through the dodge iframe I mentioned earlier, you would know this is not true: the daredevil spinning jump dodge (whether it's D/D 3, staff 5 or the grandmaster dodge) only has iframe during the first 2/3 of its animation, while the final 1/3 does not, but you are still locked in the animation. This is not the case for vanilla dodge which all other classes use - they are not locked in vulnerable animation. Now, how to counter Daredevil dodge? Easy, just hold down your autoattack or any attack the moment you see DD dodges and you will hit them during DD landing animation and DD cannot do anything about it. This can be done easily in 1v1, and it is even worse with groups of people when their attacks spread all over the dodge frame. Funny, isn't it? Dodging - the main defensive mechanic for DD class (after Invigorating Precision being nerfed to the ground) - is plagued with vulnerable locked animation frame and noone has bothered to fixed that for years.

Playing as staff power daredevil or D/D condi daredevil has its high risk aspect, since you have to time your dodge right to avoid taking damage to your pathetically low HP. Even if you time it right, the iframe only last around 2/3 of the dodge animation, locking you in vulnerable position if the opponent combos, which they will certainly do because they are not stupid NPC mob sitting around and attacking once every 2-3 sec. Additionally, if you want to disengage, you have to save your resource for running away, which means your dps/cc during the fight does not hold a candle to the opponent - you'll lose the engagement anyway.

They can nerf all they want, since after the previous unwarranted changes, they have already lost the trust and financial support from thief community. Recession is going to hit hard next year and someone at Anet is going to lose their job. With the current balance team's popularity and their favoritism reputation, it is not hard to guess who.

Not just DE spec from thief is bad, but all of them are subpar. Take Daredevil's ultimate Impact Strike, for example: 2s daze with 25s CD, while Willbender (a class with even more mobility than DD) Heaven's Palm has 4s knockdown, almost double damage coeff with 20s CD.

Before the nerf, my power DE main's dps usually sit at anywhere between the 4th-6th spot in a full raid party, which was pretty average-underperforming for a class that has to sacrifice 75% of its mobility, having no cleave, no second ini bar for swapping weapon, no benefit from alac while still plagued by numerous "no valid line of sight" bugs. Now it's dropped down to 6th-7th spot, only above heal/boon. On the more positive note, I no longer feel any temptation to swipe my card for this game, whether for gems or future expansions.

My friend, I am worried for your sake. Do you need help with the verbal reasoning and analytical writing? I can point you to a good source to improve those skills.

They really did us dirty this time, rolling out this balance patch some weeks after they have us pre-order the expansion. Had I known the content of their lazy changes, I would not have bothered. At least, they cannot trick us again with future expansions.

Let's not forget the last balance patches introduced a quickness build that was not fully tested, which ended up being quite strong. And then they decided to nerf a completely irrelevant trait that hit every build, including some already underperforming ones, instead of rolling back the mess they created. This is pure laziness while pretending to save face with their employers, trying to make it look like their "patches" actually do something worth their paycheck. If you want meaningful changes, tell them with your wallet: stop swiping your credit card to buy anything from them until they do their job well.

The fact that they nerfed the underperforming dps DE is the last straw that broke the camel's back for me. I have liquidated most of my high-end mats and decided to take a long break from gw2, spending my $$$ on some other games this summer. By the way, any recommendations regarding which games are worth playing?

First, they killed off Daredevil by nerfing Invigorating Precision, which was nowhere near OP, resulting in an extra-squishy class with few defensive options and bunch of forced movement skills that lock it in vulnerable animations. Then, they killed off Deadeye, a class with mediocre single target damage and plagued with a whole lot of "no line of sight", "no valid path to target" bugs that they are too negligent to fix. I thought they were nerfing every professions to address power creep, but reading the patch notes for other professions proved me wrong - they further buffed two other OP classes that always place top/second on every party I joined while making better QoL changes for others. Why? I am absolutely perplexed.

Is there a single class that can output 25 might stacks on full uptime with a single button press? The best my profession can do is 5 might stacks for 10s on a 17s CD skill, so I guess it takes a couple sources to get 25 might stacks.

It is not that thieves can maximise their damage with just one weapon set, but it is that thief has to because their traitline has only one trait (not one traitline) that benefits weapon swapping and the rest are kind of speciallized into a single kit, in the sense that if you switch away from that kit, any other weapon skills do not play well with your traits anymore because of poor damage coefficiency or the lack of access to certain mechanics (let's not forget thieves have the lowest HP compared to other prof, and these mechanics, like stealth or dodge or shroud, are the only thing keeping up thieves' sustainability). Regarding your second point about adaptability with the second set, is that not what every other professions have as well? The simple solution to balance out the playing field does not require refunding ini on weapon swapping, but only removing or reducing the CD on swapping. With an empty ini bar, what OP thing can thief do with a swap anyway? And if the bar is not empty, thief can use any ini-efficient skill on the weapon he already has equipped just the same. It is true that swapping on shorter CD gives thieves more adaptability, but this has already come at the cost of not having a separate ini bar (equivalent to other profession's separate weapon skill CD) for different weapons. Or how do you feel if we make other classes share the same CD on weapon skills on swapping to make it fair?

Yeah, it is funny why they decided to let movement skills give that damage buff instead of dodges, which are the main theme of this traitline. At first, I thought the loss of 50% Vigor effect was worth the 10% damage increase tradeoff. After playing for a while, I realized it came with a huge loss in sustainability and 10% damage was not much of a gain to compensate for that.

I agree with you both on this. It makes more sense in terms of balancing if the CD on weapon swapping for thieves get removed or reduced.

Other professions have separate CD for different weapons equipped, so when they swap weapons, they have a full arsenal of skills ready to use. In those cases, 10s CD on weapon swapping makes sense. However, thieves do not get a separate initiative bar to use for a swapped weapon, then why do we have to suffer the same 10s CD weapon swapping penalty?

Thief identity has always been a good match with piercing/finesse weapons. I do not understand why an axe can be considered a good fit when it is neither a piercing weapon nor a finesse one, with most of its weight being distributed at the tip, making it off-balanced. It is high time Thief gets an offhand sword.

I agree with this as well. This can render pure dps build without sustain/condi cleanse much more risky and slow down the fights without making them tedious. Also, players may have to mix gears for some toughness/vitality to balance out their playstyle, so some prefixes may actually have their use ingame.