Meridian.9103

The circle for Shroud 5 "Mind Shock" is not appearing for me anymore after June 28 patch

Acro is also one of these traitlines that's kind of dead in pvp. You would only take it for Swindler's equilibrium, but that's not really worth it. Damage boost isn't high enough and as specter you don't get as much value out of the steal reset. Other than that, acro offers mostly defensive utility which you don't really need as specter.

yes, way better in terms of damage. D A got overnerfed 2 years ago and doesn't really do anything anymore, unless you play condi.

There you go: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PaABsixrlhy2YpMVWLW2WnxWA-zVRYBxIG+DJMhQbqgOlAqcA-w

@Lonewolf Kai.3682 If you need a full build, i can set it up in gw2skills later.

Sorry to burst your bubble about large scale WvW, but specter is simply not good at that. Neither as a damage dealer nor as support. In Smallscale however, you can play the pvp power build (see post from @grx.8714 , traits would be CS and Trickery) to good success.

You seem to have missed, that I specifically talked about the CD reduction part of Hidden Thief, which should be nerfed or removed. You are right that the 1.25s (in pvp) stealth application on steal does not add much the overall stealth duration and survivability of thiefs, but the 20% CD reduction on Deception skills definitely does.

These Thief changes are really mind boggling again. They say one thing, and then proceed doing the opposite. Meanwhile the actual solution is so obvious: nerf/remove CD reduction from Hidden Thief trait instead of nerfing the CDs of Core skills. Aside from these short term changes, the prevailing problem is that thiefs have no real alternative to playing SA if they wanted to. kitten isn't doing any damage, while Improv is not good enough anymore to carry the entire traitline, and Acro is simply in a pityfull state, doing basically nothing. Crit strikes offers no defensive ulility (no, IP is not good with current thief builds), which btw becomes even more of a problem when you nerf defensive core skills.

Just encountered this issue again when switching to rev for a pvp match, realized it too late and had to play the entire match handicapped. Was super fun, obviously...

We had Arc templates before, which were simply better than the ingame system. Disallowing that made the game effectively worse. Holy cow, I'm still getting mad when I think of this template cashgrab story. Anet should not only increase the max templates per char, but also increase the amount of free ones to at least 6 each.

I'm absolutely devasted over what Anet did to Cantha and especially Kaineng. This whole Jade Tech thing can go to hell if you asked me. When i wanted Anet to make Cantha in GW2, i hoped for the total opposite than what we've seen today.

I'm in total disagreement with your base assumption here. The fundamental building blocks of wvw are the players that play often and identify with their guilds/communities, be it large or small. They make out the vast amount of contributing playtime in WvW, keeping the game mode alive. I don't want to be mean and deny the casual pug players of their fun in wvw, but I have to say they are not as important as you make them out to be. What I get from my surrounding people in WvW is that the alliance system is eagerly awaited, to finally get rid of this heavily flawed server/link system. Never have I heard somebody being against alliances as much I see a few people here in the forums, but I've explained in an earlier post on why I think that is.

The game still lacks a proper ingame explanation, that's true. But instead of complaining in the forums you could also do a quick Google search and get an explanation of the system in half of the time.

And why shouldn't it be the same with the new system? It's impossible to judge this when we only have a week long beta and team ratings won't stabilise over a period of time.

That's called matchmaking 😄. It's entire point is to prevent all players from just choosing the best team. Instead, you are now a part of the equation. Besides, you stated that you just joined a bg. Why would you care about the "optimal group" all of a sudden? Did you transfer to the optimal team after every relink?

You can ask the players in your guilds if and for which guild they intend to play. that already gives you plenty of information.

I see very few "legitimate concerns" here but mostly people displaying one of the following: - not understanding the alliance system - not understanding what a beta is - not understanding the system's state right now compared to what it is supposed to be when all features are implemented - refusing to put in a least bit of effort or to make a decision to play with the people they want to keep playing with The new system gives player's a lot of agency. Only 2 or 3 posts here have stated some extreme cases where it is not able to fully maintain the status quo. All in all, the notion that alliances will be "killing all social interactions" is nothing but an exaggeration in my eyes.

Couldn't this be solved by forming an alliance?

You can be in 5 guilds, only one of them has to be selected as your wvw guild and it doesn't have to be the same you represent. Is it really that much of a problem to form a guild with friends to simply solve this problem?

Just form a guild with your friends and select that as your wvw guild. Problem solved. Just a little bit of organising yourselfes goes a long way.

You obviously didnt understand the system. Worlds are created by the matchnaker based on wvw participation. If one large guild/alliance stacks many many active players, they will in turn get very few allies. Not too mention that there will be limits on how many active players can be in one Alliance (as their selected WvW alliance). In turn other worlds may consist of smaller alliances, but way more of them, hence balancing things out.

Looks like the game wasn't able to put every player on teams properly. The team name of our selected guild is "12,204" and we can't get into WvW at all. activating a portal, or opening the first tab in wvw panel only yield errors messsages. Match overview only shows "blue", "red", and "green" as team names.

100% agree. It feels like ArenaNet desperately wanted to bring in something new, but it simply doesn't fit into this game for all the reasons you said. Especially this explanation: "This may maintain a strong all-around support role for a focused target in certain gameplay, such as 2v2 PvP or playing with a friend in the open world, while allowing Specter to still fill healing and alacrity support roles for group play." is very telling. It sounds like they just now realized that there is not much need for any kind of single target support in this game. While on the other hand, your effective group heal and alacrity abilities are build on wells and leaving shroud, so circumvent the single target aspect entirely. In the end, Anet "mechanic creeped" Specter a lot to somehow hamfist support into the thief class, but all of this simply doesn't add up to something that's desirable in the way that Guild Wars 2 plays out.

Miller is dying only because it gets relinked with Elona over and over and over again. Why, Anet? Why?

Very dissapointed in the fact that Specter still has a 300cd trait. I thought we were past that, but apparently Anet does not even acknowledge this as a problem.