saerni.2584

Thief auto attack on main hand pistol, Vital Shot, appears to have lost a significant amount of cast time/after cast. Now shoots much fast than before, not that I'm complaining if it was intended (but reporting it regardless).

Yeah, without a cast time it now shoots rapidly. Not sure how this showed up in the beta coding change. Shortbow is normal and hasn't changed from before beta patch far as I can tell.

At least in WvW, some NPCs randomly don't count for stacking sigils upon death. Didn't see the effect fail on killing players though.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_upgrade#Acquiring_guild_upgrades Start with the wiki. If you have any questions post them in the thread. The reason you can't claim a camp at level 0, and need to earn the ability to claim towers and keeps, is because guilds need to upgrade their Claim Aura to be more effective (thus restricting lower tier guilds with lower level Auras to less important objectives) and also need to craft or otherwise obtain Tactics for the objectives they are claiming/managing. Basically, the system Anet designed permits guilds with lots of resources more freedom to make claims than fresh guilds. Several people have noted that individual guilds can be leveled up solo, at least to where making claims is possible. However, most veteran players have multiple guilds they can claim with. I myself have 3 different guilds that have maximum claim authority and WvW upgrades. I'm basically the only one who uses them for that purpose so it's like having 3 personal guilds. Back to leveling up a guild the main thing is needing to run guild missions and then spending the currency the guild earns from those missions to upgrade. It helps to have 3 friends to run those because multiple of those missions are group content (it's a guild after all). Working on that doesn't require voice coms or anything, just some chatting and using guides (for example the guide for the guild Trek locations). Good luck.

I actually laughed when I saw the cooldown as a stun break. Then I saw it followed up with a long duration hard CC, and I was like, that needs at least a 30-40 second cooldown. It's basically a nicer positional version of what Daredevil gets with Bandit's Defense. Only it has a 50% longer duration follow up CC, and it blinds so it has an additional clutch usage.

15 second cooldown, evade backwards with blind, stun break, with a flip skill that is a 3 second daze. I can already see that cooldown getting a big nerf.

I'll be making a thief balance thread once we've seen the EOD thief specialization and played through some of the betas. I think thief is in an ok place compared to most professions now. But looking at the strengths of some (Willbender) of the new elite specs (unless nerfed from today) it will be necessary to boost thief survivability, damage, or both.

Sure, but I don't know how much a new player can actually learn about rotation/gameplay from simply watching someone else play. It can't hurt though so why not? On the main topic, thief is fine even if it could use a few buffs and some others need nerfs. More important, I think "reading the map" goes hand in hand with "reading your team." You can try to control your team with target calls or what-not, but there is no guarantee they will agree with those calls or even notice. Sometimes you have to try to adapt to their sub-optimal strategy—and often you won't be able to. Your skills as a player will be tested (and your build) by how well you can also deal with less than optimal team gameplay. Ask yourself, "why is my team losing? And what can I do about it?" Broadly speaking there are a few reasons matches are slipping away: 1. Team isn't winning fights 2. Team isn't rotating correctly 3. Team isn't contesting/taking map mechanics Things you can do: peeling, decaping, +1ing, disrupting. 1. Peeling — Figure out who their key players are for damage/support and then distract them while your team focuses another target. If it's a 3v3, you come in to make it a 3v2 and 1v1 or even 3v1 and 1v2. Your goal isn't to get killed, so stay alive, but peel off the problematic people so your team can secure kills and not get focused themselves. Thief should be/is hard to pin down so use that to your advantage when it comes to peeling. 2. Decap — There are two forms of decap. One is where the team rotates into a node and decaps it by keeping the opponents off the node, which is fairly common (I.e what they should be doing). The other, where you decap uncontested is all about stealth, individual speed and getting back to the fight quickly. Unless your team can hold out the goal is to divide their team by forcing one of their team to spend more time on that node rather than in the team fights. Ideally, a side noder could rotate in and contest / hold against multiple enemies. 3. +1 — Getting kills and downs is a critical part of winning, so this is probably your most important role. You need to know who is low on cool downs and HP and then finish them off quickly. Picking your targets is something that takes awareness and focus. Don't lose track of who you want to bring down. The longer it takes to +1 the more time the enemy has to regroup. 4. Disrupt — Read the map and make sure your team won't lose map mechanics uncontested. You need to also try to cut off enemies heading to map mechanics to give your team an easier time taking them. If they stall at the Bell they may be able to upset you. If you slow down their person even a little your team may snowball the node or even take it without a fight. Always look to the map and try to apply maximum psychological pressure. Other than that, get better mechanically and don't stress out. Your focus is what matters a lot and stress will often impair that focus. It's a game and sometimes your enemies are better or have more composition luck than you. Don't worry and try your best.

To be fair it's hard to run a site like that and keep it updated. People have lives and it's a thankless job, which you will 100% get hate for doing in part because meta builds still need to be played correctly in order to work (and may be countered by an off-meta variant) since you don't control your team composition in ranked. It's good for 100% newbies but tbh those people shouldn't worry and focus on their mechanical/rotational skills and ask around for advice about a build for their play style (assuming that makes sense for their profession).

Minor correction. Shadow Strike wasn't nerfed because of infinite kiting. Repeater was added to increase the damage potential of the weapon set (albeit at the expense of some kiting ability—which was never infinite because of the need to hit the target in melee range and the initiative cost of the skill). On topic, I don't think the initiative system is a problem. The use of skill X precludes the use of skill Y and Z through a loss of initiative. If the opponent can spam something to get an advantage then you need to dodge or change tactics and let them waste all their initiative by spamming. Whether skills need to be nerfed has more to do with whether they can overperform within the larger context of total initiative cost. Anet doesn't always get balance right—no one could be right all the time—but that doesn't mean we should blame a mechanic for that. Thief isn't the only alleged victim of poor balancing decisions after all, and we are the only ones with initiative. (That is, don't assume things will be magically better without initiative).

If you ask people will help you get Warclaw. I helped a new player just the other day with this. It isn't that hard and just takes some basics: 1. Unlock the Warclaw Mastery 2. Do the Warclaw Reward Track 3. Complete the Warclaw Meta Achievement The Warclaw is helpful but you don't need it to do well in WvW. And it's easy to get so you won't be without it for long.

To be fair, whether it is a reward depends on the subjective value the buyer places on the skin. If you value it at 200 gold + effort to do the reward track + 1, the value is greater than the cost and it is a reward. Implicitly, those who already bought it view it as more valuable than the cost (plenty of people have bought the skin). Since he still refuses to engage with people's actual points it's again hard to say exactly what his complaint is, but maybe he thinks the skin is over-priced based on his obsession with the word "reward." (I'd point out that it's a "reward track" unlock and not a "reward unlock." But I doubt he wants to play a game of semantics despite engaging in nitpicking himself).

@Obtena.7952 His disconnect is that the WvW Warclaw Reward Track skin is a "PvP achievement." As in, you pay gold to unlock the skin at the end of the track, meaning you can't earn the skin unless you pay the gold. Because you aren't just paying for the skin he feels like the option should be there for all players to earn the skin (I.e. not be locked out of the reward track). I get the impression that he would prefer to just have the skin sold in the gem store, although it isn't clear from his disingenuous claim earlier to simply be gathering feedback rather than making any specific requests. I'd suggest to him that the feedback shows his criticism is not well received. For one, people tend to view it as akin to buying a skin from the gemstore. There isn't any RNG involved (pay 200 gold and earn reward track progress to get the skin and other rewards along the way) so it isn't like a "loot box," which is characterized by being akin to gambling due to only having a small chance at getting the item. Further, the critique breaks down because the currency for the unlock is gold, not gems, and any player can fairly quickly save up the amount to unlock it (again if they want). Any player (pvp or PvE or mixed) can save the currency by playing the game and using it to unlock the content. The game has plenty of examples of optional content (the "I'm rich, you know" title comes to mind) where gold is exchanged for a reward. And, the entirely Legendary Crafting System is similarly set up to unlock progressive achievement collections behind (significant) gold sinks. TLDR: The Warclaw Reward Track is neither exceptional nor unwelcome by the vast majority of the player base. Nor does it fit into the category of "gambling" or "pay to win" as commonly understood. These complaints are substantively baseless—and because the complaint isn't paired with realistic suggestions (i.e. the suggestion the government has any cause or right to intervene) there isn't further merit in continuing the discussion.

Generally, disabling auto-attack is the easiest method to get consistent results with. You certainly can also try stowing weapons, or using about face, or other methods to disable auto-attack or at least stop firing while you Mark the target. Overall, I prefer disabling the auto and just knowing I need to manually fire auto attacks in some situations.

There is nothing technically wrong with people doing this imo. You don't need "your" supplies 90% of the time to defend because you can just take the enemy's supplies as you go. And if they have 8-10 people constantly draining all supplies on your map that's 8-10 people who aren't actively fighting on the server they are helping. It's a tactic that may give your side a hard time in very rare circumstances. But in most cases supply wouldn't make a difference because as long as you win your fights nothing else matters.

I won't comment on the quality of your team, except to say the people blaming someone else generally aren't playing their best either. Thief gets a lot of misdirected frustration by players who don't want to admit their own role in making the team unsuccessful. Often, the thief gets the hate when the thief is unable to do their job because the other team can afford to fight 3v4 at mid and send a second player to chase the thief around constantly. That isn't really the thief's fault but a player who isn't watching the map carefully only sees the thief not decap'ing and not in any fights. I will comment on a general philosophy that may help you: Thief is a roamer so you need to look at what kind of actions you specifically can take in any given moment to maximize your team's win potential. That may be something unconventional to turn around a game and not just running around like a "normal" thief. As an example, I watched a game on Twitch that exemplified this point. The enemy team was down around 100 points for most of the match on Temple. Now, this is a map where awareness is key because Stillness and Tranquility can get a lot of points in a very short time if you aren't paying attention. Towards the late game, the enemy thief managed to draw two players on the team I was watching into an endless fight on Tranquility. Now, the smart play would have been to let him take Tranquility because their team was losing team fights and would have been decapped anyway. Instead, the enemy thief was distracting 2 key players and stopping them from getting Tranquility at the same time. The result was that the enemy team won their 4v3, took Stillness and two nodes and ran away with the win 500-380. So don't just define your ability as a thief by plus 1 and decap. You can be where your team needs to be faster than anyone in part because of mobility but also because you are the one who is meant to rotate most freely in your team composition. Assess the state of the map, where your team needs you, and then move accordingly. Also, if your team is losing badly, change the dynamic. Most players will just keep doing the same thing (run mid and die) rather than try to change the status quo (targeting a different player, changing the rotation, aiming to capture the important map objective without it costing your team much time/effort). If you are looking to get better that's something you can start with. A lot of it is learning the right judgment calls so you can move quickly and react correctly.

How is it doing 100k burst after two nerfs? I'd point out that on rifle DE you can easily hit upwards of 100k in vulnerability phases on PvE bosses. I've had 200k Death's Judgment critical hits during those times. P/D DE lost over 50% of its torment application with the change to Malicious Sneak Attack. So how is it hitting 100k? Genuine question.

I think it makes it easier for small scale and for intermediate 10v20 or 20v30 to make smart plays and win by not needing to secure kills. It doesn't matter for 1v10 or 10v30 or 20v50. The lower numbers still lose. But that's the nature of the mode. In the end it is a fun, if rare for various reasons, event that I look forward to.

I'd like to chime in and just say I'm very confused how "fine tuning" existing balance changes involves cutting significantly into torment application. The biggest source of condi damage boost post May was in the change to breakbars and the change to how torment works. That's where the largest ticks of damage were happening. Before, assuming 7 malice Sneak Attack you had five stacks for 8 seconds (40 seconds total). Now you have 1 stack for 14 seconds. This is a huge decrease in overall damage and heavily impacts competitive play by making the torment applied to someone literally trivial. 1 to two stacks of torment can be face tanked. Even if the skill needed a nerf, the far easier change would be to nerf the duration applied. And, if you need to reduce torment damage you can also adjust down the maximum damage when a target is standing still. It also runs entirely contrary to the stated May patch goal of increasing thief build diversity. The notes didn't even discuss the change and said something vague about quality of life. This wasn't thought through and should be reverted or heavily modified. @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 @Fire Attunement.9835

It can work. I'd say your issue is dealing with mobility. You get a lot of mileage out of P/D in that respect. So you'd want to set up your utilities to give you a little mobility but it's certainly viable in a sense. Try using a M7 build. The might gain is redundant, but M7 also regens initiative so you won't be low on either damage or initiative. a bit glass cannon but should be very useful.

And that mentality is generally why we get maybe 1 no-downstate event per year, sometimes 2. The majority like playing with the extra cushion of being able to rally and not just have to run back to the group every time they get spiked. Downstate also creates more strategy at the large group level, where the majority spend their time, due to being able to play around a downed target(s) by creating the secondary role of focusing and "securing" downs as kills. No downstate tends to be the favored mode for smaller scale roamers who often fight outnumbered. It saves a lot of time and risk by being able to just kill a target and move on to the next. Also, most duo roaming compositions use stealth to enable resurrections on their allies and it is less "fun" for a solo roamer to down someone in a 1v3 only to see that down instantly, or stealth, resurrected without the ability to stomp or cleave sufficiently. That is compounded by some downed skills doing a lot of damage or cc, making it hard to just ignore the down and move on to the other targets who are resurrecting their ally. I like both. I think both have merits and that's why I enjoy the events when they happen knowing that 90% of the time I will be playing with downstate like normal.

Right, like claiming a 45% decrease is clearly hyperbolic and not realistic. You lost a little bleed duration and maybe 4 stacks of torment from the Shadowstrike rotation. But sure, 45% and he claims he got his account refunded and he's quitting...I'll see him back here in a week.

I've mained P/D since basically launch. I am very familiar with the profession and weapon set. But don't just take my word for it. Actually engage with my arguments. Saying "nope" isn't a valid response.

The nerfs are pretty minor. Some thoughts: 1) Repeater already had a silly low initiative cost. The increase however won't matter that much because the time it takes to get off Repeater + M7 won't significantly change the damage output of the build because initiative regen on the build putting out those numbers is so high. 2) Bleed duration decrease on a couple of skills is a bit silly. They just gave Trickery 150 Expertise and now they are...putting it back to where it was (as least as far as duration is concerned). But they also boosted bleed damage with the new Deadly Ambush so you still have stronger bleeds post patch and the numbers comparison is still favorable pre versus post balance patch. 3) Shadowstrike isn't the main source of torment on P/D Deadeye. Malicious Sneak attack is. Before Repeater was added to the game you could stack torment using Shadowstrike but you haven't been able to do that for a while now. You lose very little damage from going back to the original number of torment stacks given the limitation that Repeater puts on Shadowstrike. 4) Most of the high damage from P/D Deadeye comes from the underlying change to torment. For PvE this means cutting back on torment access to try and reign in the damage because so many NPCs spend time immobile and taking the full damage tick. But, the biggest increase in overall condi damage is the result of break bars increasing condition damage so much. So you have two very significant changes that the team would like to balance around and the DE changes here feel a bit like a bandaid on a gaping wound. IMO, the biggest issue post-patch isn't PVE damage (which is generally higher) but PVP damage (because players move a lot more than NPCs). If anything, WvW and PvP need to see higher torment stacks or duration (for example on Shadowstrike) to compensate for a fundamental change in how torment is applied. Movement impairments are easily and frequently removed so it's not that common against good players to get the full damage tick. To be sure there are NPCs and this would increase damage versus WvW tower lords (for example) but that is something for a rebalance of those NPCs (balance should be somewhat primarily about players and not NPCs in pvp modes).

SE is good, but you lose access to stealth on steal and the deception skill cooldown reduction. It's actually a pretty decent trade-off that Anet added to SA a while back. Shadow Savior has me scratching my head. Everyone who thinks SA needs a rework are forgetting SA was already reworked somewhat recently. This is what Anet wants SA to look like (other than tweaking a number here or there for balance patches).