Dagger.2035

I'm glad other people are seeing this bug too since I was about to delete GW2 and re-download. I tried a repair today, but that didn't fix it.

This was the start of the problem. You can review the original comments and many of us predicted this outcome. Sustain is too high and once you outnumber your opponent by a certain threshold it is too easy to stack extra supports and be untouchable.

You're a butthole! 😂

Since they are buffing S/D it would also be nice if they finally fixed the Thief relic so it triggers on sword #2 and #3.

I hope they all suck since I didn't get the expansion. 😂

There are other ways to fix this issue: Buff skill coefficients. This is a multiplier so all attribute combinations will scale the same percentage, but power builds have more damage modifiers and will see more benefit. Buff offensive boon duration. If these boons have a high uptime without concentration, the concentration stat is wasted. Nerf defensive boon duration. This will reduce damage mitigation and which buffs higher damage builds. Nerf heal scaling. Again, this weakens the investment in the healing stat.

This bug hasn't been fixed for 147 days. It just seems like another bug that won't be fixed for years since it doesn't affect instanced PVE.

The axes seem very inefficient to me. You have to setup axes first and then send them at a target. They also aren't guaranteed to hit anything since they can be stopped by projectile hate. In quick fights you probably won't even get any damage off.

New Weapon Proficiencies Beta Feedback Update – GuildWars2.com Just another PVE weapon. This is disappointing for me as a WvW player. We really need a stronger ranged option for large-scale combat.

The thief relic still doesn't trigger on many skills and needs QA testing. For example, it doesn't trigger on Infiltrator's Strike, Flanking Strike, Larcenous Strike, or Unrelenting Assault. I'm sure there are many more broken skill interactions with this relic.

I guess that's my problem with this thread and anti-thief threads in general. When you look at what the other professions can do and the versatility of their builds, the thief appears to be the worst profession to play in WvW. You can try to switch thief builds to fulfill multiple WvW roles, but if you do anything besides roaming you will be on an inferior build. I can't even remember the last time I've come across a good thief solo roamer. When I think of some of the strongest solo roamers I've faced, I can only think of Catalysts, Renegades, Willbenders, and Harbringers.

I think this logic means Deadeyes should be the Joker of WvW. Deadeyes run away from good builds, and only exists to harass zerg builds and noobs.

The cooldown didn't exist in the beginning of the game and it should have never been added. It seems like a quick and dirty fix to try and balance stealth. We seem stuck with it since most thieves' abuse stealth and prefer it since it allows them to setup for a retry. A higher quality change would be to have all stealth attacks automatically reveal. This would both add more counterplay to stealth and prevent the cooldown from locking non-stealth builds from using auto-attacks.

It's a classic elementalist meme video from the past which I posted for a good laugh. My serious take on the state of the game is to not worry about roaming balance since Anet doesn't care about it either. It doesn't make sense to complain about one profession when all of them have very strong builds. If you aren't playing the best build available to you, then it is your own fault for losing. If you like a build just play it and have fun, but you will have to assume you will have to outplay your enemy at times and will encounter some matchups you can't win.

Here's what it feels like to play elementalist:

If only the same kindness was shown to thieves. 😂 Cluster Bomb: Increased the range to 1200 in WvW only.

I've never seen any elitism in WvW where someone in game references ArcDPS. Damage usually seems pretty consistent where the same group of people always end up in the top 5, and those players tend to be the type to not brag or disparage other players. I usually see toxicity from players newer to the game. You can click on them and they tend to be on the wrong professions or builds, running oddball stacking sigils, or condition food. Deadeyes seem especially popular in this regard.

I think if a player has played WvW long enough they can get a sense of what is going on, but the majority of players are in the dark since they don't run ArcDPS. There's been so many times a few players are doing most of the squad's damage. If those players back off or swap builds, and the squad loses the next fight without them, they have no idea what just happened. Install ArcDPS and try it out. You'll see the same few names always on the top of the damage chart.

After 146 days the thief relic is still broken.

The Axe doesn't add anything new besides a silly gimmick. Why doesn't it have a ranged AOE or a non-projectile auto-attack? Also, the thief relic is still broken after 3 months...

Of course, there are exceptions to people with low rank and I appreciate the people who make an effort to win fights. Lowering the skill ceiling to reduce what is possible on some builds is what you have to do to balance the game. I was trying to imply the other side effect is that it is way more difficult to carry bad players. When I refer to low rank players, I'm referring to people that are 0-100 rank or 100-200 rank and our server seems to have an endless supply of them. Since we are an open link server, I think it is just a never-ending, revolving door of new players. The result is that you can never go to EB on reset night since the fights are so bad. Even if you go to a borderland, you are lucky to get 40 people on the tag on a queued map. On off hours, five or fewer players do most of the squad's damage and we have little to no sustain. It just means the majority are potato players running potato builds. You guys already saw what my server did to Blackgate, the same thing will happen once we are linked with Maguuma. I was hoping for a Maguuma link since I'm betting that we can drop them out of T1 after a few weeks.

The extra cherry on top is that support builds now get better kill credit and bags than damage builds. If you are able to win fights playing support why switch to damage when you have far less chance of dying since you have a ton of access to condi clears, boons, stun breaks, and strong healing. It seems as though people are aware of this now since I've been in 30+ squads where I do more than 50% of the damage. People need to play damage so that we have a chance of getting bags. They've also been reducing the skill ceiling of both support and damage builds which hurts the open link servers. You are surrounded by low rank pugs which don't contribute at all. No damage and no heals or support. I'm not sure what they are running. Also, a large chunk of the pugs don't chase orange swords so people that want fights on reset night are perpetually outnumbered even though maps are queued. No amount of balance can fix this, but the recent balance patches made it worse. This is why we need world restructuring. These players need to be spread more evenly across the teams.

Great video and it speaks true to the state of the game. It seems like the balance decisions in the past two years may either be from increasing TTK to make GvG fights more enjoyable, or to promote a melee meta to increase build diversity. I'm hoping it is for GvG balance since that makes sense even if it causes smaller groups to dodge fights in WvW. The melee meta will never succeed since the side with greater numbers will benefit the most from melee engagements. Some of us tried to warn people that this would happen when they began nerfing strips and AOE damage in early 2022. Yet some people kept trying to argue strips and damage benefit blobs just as much as the cloud. It should be clear now that clouds benefit more from higher damage, CC, and strips. Clouds can easily attack the blob from all sides while the blob can't focus their damage on spread out targets. I'm sure someone will give me a hypothetic scenario where the blob is smart and splits their damage evenly to argue against this. Prior to all of these changes there did exist some blob guilds which only had sustain and non-existent damage and CC (I usually always see a couple ANet tags in one of them). I can't name guilds or servers, but these guilds were basically free bags for pug clouds. Even some of them had such low damage that they could be melee-ed solo on a full glass build. All of this means they were just bad at the game since they didn't realize damage must always be more effective than healing. If this was ever reversed people would be unkillable. Now these groups can just stand in red circles and win. People no longer fight back due to the state of the game since it is impossible to finish downs when a blob isn't forced to reposition themselves to avoid damage.

Thief really needs a more reliable ranged weapon for WvW with non-projectile attacks or low cost AOEs. My hopes were up when I heard this was a ranged weapon, but then I saw all of the blockable/reflectable projectiles in the video.

The same thing could be said about sarcasm. 😉 I was trying to make a point with my last post. The truth is we are all biased and there are so many different points of view, that discussions on WvW tend to go nowhere.