Twilight Tempest.7584

By and large, anyone who survives a zero-tell stealth bomb didn't survive because of their "skill" but because of their build. You're saying as much here: And therein lies the inherent problem with such stealth bombs: the only practicable counter is building for it--something you emphasize in almost every post here. Since when should every roamer be required to build for the 10% of players exploiting busted builds that are undeniable damage level outliers within the current meta, to the detriment of being able to handle the other 90% of encounters? Fully investing in vitality through Marauders stats and Brawler's Resilience is a choice to avoid melting against the abundance of condi-spam in the game, be it in small or large groups. Something far more prevalent than busted small-scale stealth bombs. Still, that does not mean the latter should continue existing when it is clear Anet's intent was to remove them from the game. Also, you keep referring to my build as "pure glass" and "1-shot boys" while in the same breath acknowledging it isn't actually built for one shots. That's because it IS built into a balance between survivability (Shadow Arts, Brawler's Resilience, Maruader's stats, etc.) and doing damage. It has no actual one-shot potential, and yet, being built to cover 90% of WvW scenarios, it's helpless against things that are objectively busted like current EE + GB from stealth. Most professions and builds are. I do appreciate your suggestions and have considered trying them, but it isn't easy without a set of legendary armor. With any luck, Anet will finally do what's long overdue, well before I get my hands on my first legendary set.

It's amazing how much being on thief in clips is derail bait. Like, had I been on any other class, this thread would be half as long.

Then why did you say earlier: ...when you know I'm running Daredevil (not core Thief) and SA, not CS or Deadly Arts? How would your build have fared in my clip above? Still instagib I think, unless it can tank 20K from stealth. Not knocking your build--it sounds interesting--but as @Lan Deathrider.5910 said: Can anyone name another build that can currently instagib (from stealth) everything but a full minstrel/Sentinel warrior, AND have enough juice to duel down another player? No? See the problem?

FIFY: Considering I literally didn't get to do anything before being downed, it literally does not matter what class/build I was on, now does it? You could mentally replace my character with whatever suits your fancy and it would change nothing about the actual point of this thread. You too! You might want to see someone about that teef PTSD!

Then I'm sorry you are so blinded by hate you can't see the forest for the trees. I know how the burst works. It's not rocket science and it isn't hard. That you're unironically defending it while throwing lots of unsubstantiated accusations at someone you don't know speaks a lot about your own insecurity. EDIT: By the way, I'm not the one reacting to your posts. Someone else is doing that insanely quick. 😆

Haha it's 2021, not 2015. And this thread is about Grenade Barrage, not Thief. Sorry if you were beat up by thieves so much that seeing a thief player fall victim to something objectively broken triggers you. omegalol xD Try an exercise: Pretend for a moment that the instagib'd player in the clip was on anything besides thief. Would that change whether what happened is busted or healthy? If you can't answer this straightforwardly, I guess your trauma is too severe. 😉

So you think Grenade + Explosive Entrance is fine in its current state?

Thanks to the magic of background recording, I believe you can just glimpse him riding in from the east at the 0:12 mark. I presume he dismounted and popped his stealth shortly after and walked over. Notice also how frequently I pan my camera, "looking over my shoulder" as it were. Helps awareness, but makes for lousy movies. Still wasn't enough, unfortunately. I'm just glad no one's said "you should have seen it coming" (yet). Completely agree.

Still making this about my build. 😑 Had I known being on Thief would be such a distraction I might have censored my character in my clips lol. I don't think it matters what people play. This Grenade Barrage with EE from stealth stuff is either healthy or unhealthy. Hint: It's already been nerfed in PvP. Only when it's an untelegraphed one-shot from stealth. If I were doing that, I wouldn't be running SA. My build is fine in 90% of encounters. If I spec Toughness instead of Vitality on an 11K base-HP Thief, I'm going to have an even harder time with condi-spammers, which are far more common than GB clowns.

I respect and appreciate your thoughts as a veteran, and I know you've acknowledged the issue in this thread. What I didn't want to happen, and what the person I responded to did, is derail this into a discussion about Thief. It really doesn't matter what profession I was on in this clip. I didn't get to do anything. Would what happened have been any more or less degenerate if I was on whatever profession the community thinks is the most respectable and wholesome? This is actually classic victim-blaming. ("You play D/P SA Daredevil so you have no right to complain!" Or to take another extreme, "Your skirt was too short so you deserved it!") Responding to some of what you said: 10-15K still isn't going to 100-0 most people who aren't full glass or under-geared (though I'm open to being shown otherwise). You might be able to meme around on the non-SA builds you mention, but it's totally burst or bust. A lot has to go right (see the long list of counter play to backstabs) and if you blow it, you have to bail. Not so with the Scrapper build in my clip. I cannot speak to the skill of the Mirage he managed to beat, but good luck pulling that on any "one-shot" capable thief build after bursting. In short, any thief build that can pull 10-15K isn't actually a viable thief build. Sure, it can probably gank the odd AFK or beginner, but if anything sneezes on you, good luck. And don't even think about mixing it up with condi builds. I saw that post and gave it the like. 🙂 It doesn't bother me as much as it might sound. Mostly because it's still pretty rare. The last time was in my August 29th post, and I have been putting in the hours essentially daily. But when it does happen, it's a reminder of the completely nonsensical balancing approach. Namely the fact this issue has been addressed in PvP, but for some bizarre reason, not in WvW, where it is arguably prone to even more abuse. I haven't proposed how to nerf it, other than to suggest a nerf is needed. The PvP nerf would seem a good starting point. Like you and others have suggested, I do think the coefficients on Grenades and/or EE need to be reduced. Even if nothing is done about the lack of telegraph from stealth, and the sustain that lets the build continue the fight after opening, at least reducing the spike would give a chance to react. As has been said in this thread, Anet was supposedly trying to balance away from this sort of thing.

"Whataboutism" never won any argument, and in this case, it isn't even particularly on point. DP DrD may be basic, but it's not easy to play effectively--definitely not as easy as "stealth, push 3 buttons, creep up (go ahead, you have 10 seconds, so take your sweet time), and hit the nuke button"--which is an AOE so can actually nuke multiple targets. Not to mention all of that is done while in stealth, so the only tell is being nuked from thin air. So if you want to call pressing 4 buttons or so within the comfort of 10 seconds stealth that is 100% guaranteed to instagib most targets, "skill", then you're not going to find much agreement from me, or anyone serious for that matter. Newsflash: DrD hasn't been able to reliably instagib anything forever now, and if it does, it certainly isn't going to hang around and duel a second player down. Mesmer burst also has more tell before the bomb drops. Stop trying to defend the indefensible. You lose all credit.

I think a lot of this debate centers around different win conditions. If the win condition is getting a kill, then yes, killing a decent thief isn't easy. At the same time, skill and numbers being equal, thieves generally have less kill-power than most DPS/dueling builds. To secure a kill, they generally have to expend more resources and play more skillfully than their opponent. ("Thief is a high skill floor/infinite skill ceiling class.") Stealth and mobility don't kill anything. They just help avoid being killed. ("Thieves excel at running from fights.") If the thief is running away, he or she isn't killing you either. If they reset, you usually, but not always, have a chance to reset as well. If the win condition is defending/capturing an objective, thieves are at a decided disadvantage since stealth prevents capture, they're not tanky or sustainy enough to camp nodes, and they lack mass-target AOE pressure, so they have no choice but to employ a single target, hit-and-run, in-and-out, bail if things go wrong playstyle. What we're left with is thieves excel at precisely one aspect of one win condition--not dying. They aren't particularly great at securing kills (others do it better with less effort). They aren't very useful for pursuing objectives. ("Thief is not a zerg class.") So what people are really complaining about, objectively, is their subjective annoyance with not being able to kill the thief, while ignoring the fact that avoiding death is the one and only thing thief does well.

Well this is still happening, and it's degenerate as ever. When is being able to nuke players with the press of a button, with zero setup, with zero tell, from 10 seconds of stealth healthy? And INB4 "that build is burst or die," notice it has plenty of steam left to duel and beat the Mirage. If that's not enough, this player later thwarted two attempts at taking a tower in small group skirmishes of about 3v4 by simply spamming grenades from stealth on slightly injured players engaged in fights. Grenade Scrapper/Holo with Explosive Entrance is just stupidly effective for the braindead level of effort. Add stomp gyros to the mix and the build practically plays itself. Seriously, this is the epitome of busted and it's long overdue for the nerf bat. The damage level is an outlier within the meta. It was already nerfed in PvP, and should be in WvW as well. Link to my clip from August at the top of this thread:

Yeah I understand the sentiment, even if it's no excuse for BM. Thieves' annoying factor can be level 9000 and the urge to say "hah!" if you finally pin them down is strong. It's less understandable when the thief is playing passively, and merely trying to run away from a gank group that gets the better of them. Bragging in those scenarios makes me question whether people can count or otherwise have any sense of fairness.

To the OP's point, I consistently find lone thieves in WvW being on the receiving end of corpse jumps and tossed siege (literal hate) more than any other class, even when they managed to hang on for days severely outnumbered by being brilliantly wiley. It's like a hunting party finally catching a fox and then spitting on it for daring to outfox them.

Okay. But any idea why this is happening to begin with? If it's DR (which I don't think should be applied to me based on what I described), how long does it last? I guess I'll plan to use a different character at post-reset LLA tomorrow and see what happens.

Read the entire thread. Seems this has been going on for years. Well, I've had a daily reset Teq > LLA routine for years without issue, and now suddenly I'm on day two of MC jail. For the last several weeks, I've used a WvW character parked in an LLA map without issue. I spend many hours on that character in WvW daily, so it's hardly just an LLA farmer. But yesterday, I did the second-to-last LLA before reset because I hadn't done it during that reset period. Then some hours later when I went to do the post-reset LLA as usual, I got no bouncing chest despite getting an event medal and other drops. I tried the next LLA (in a different map) on a different character and got the chest, but it contained no MC. Today the exact same thing happened with each character at those slots. I guess doing LLA twice within ~ 4 hours (with reset between) triggered DR? Didn't even know it was a thing until I found this thread. But from what I understand, DR is character-bound, not account-wide? Right now, two characters seem affected: one getting a chest with no MC, and the other getting no chest at all. Feels horrible. Is there a way to fix this, or do I need to open a ticket and hope for an adequate response? EDIT: Just tried yet another LLA in another map, on a completely different character who's never even done LLA before (but has been doing Halloween stuff lately). They got a silver chest with no MC. This is so not right.

I mean, if we want to play mind reader, I could just as well say he paused at first because he realized there were more people inside the tower than he thought, and he hightailed it because said people jumped on him and chased him out.

Yep. Since making this thread, I've seen two more instances at this same tower. All were 100% on purpose as they were actual groups of people each individually doing it, one by one. The most recent was two people jumping onto the ledge on the left to dismount onto the top of the gate. They took the tower and proceeded to gank any solos who passed by. Recorded it, but what's the use.

100% agree that the LW model should be presented more clearly and that there should be a bundle option to buy them along with the related expansions, and of course an "everything" bundle that comes with everything. It would go a long way towards streamlining the new player experience and avoid the unpleasant "hidden cost" sensation. Also agree that GW2 and all of its content is an incredible value, especially considering the LW content can be obtained free, discounted, or purchased via gold-to-gems which can be earned in a reasonable time just by playing the game. That's exactly what I did as a new player. Tried the free base game for a few weeks, decided I liked it enough to buy the expansions, and earned gold which I gradually traded for gems to buy the LW content when it went on discount. I prioritized gems for LW seasons I missed before I started playing and I got current episodes free just by logging in. Really wasn't difficult. The only thing better is catching them all free like they've been since this summer. TL;DR: GW2 content is an incredible value, but the LW model should be presented more clearly to avoid unpleasant surprises nonetheless.

It's revenge of the Mesmers who want their dodge back. 😊

Saw this happen again today, but this time an entire gank group did it. Three or four enemies did it right in front of us (they'd been spawn-camping us for a bit already, abusing their support-heavy comp against random solos). There's no relevant option for reporting the players individually, with the options being: botting, inappropriate character name, spamming, verbal abuse, scamming, selling gold, and LFG system abuse. Surprised there's no "exploit" reason. Anyway, going by what people said here about it being a long known issue and being frequently bug-reported, I guess it's not a priority.

🤯 Video production to match the skill level even. Impressive! I have a feeling you're good all around, so you make broken stuff look even more broken. 😄

Link?

Thanks for answering. As a relative newcomer to WvW, I'm only seeing such exploits for the first time. Not really interested in looking them up either.