DeceiverX.8361

> @"LetoII.3782" said:

> > @"Ubi.4136" said:

>

> > I don't have any problems dying to ranger and thieves. Most days I can just stand there

>

> Wait weren't these problem classes a moment ago?

> Now you can just stand there no problem?

>

> > Thieves are very low risk, high reward. I spent the first couple years on thief, insta-killing people and running from anyone that didn't just explode.

>

> As the saying goes, fraps or it didn't happen.

> Or you could show us in person, we _are_ matched this week after all.

I really do hope he takes you up on this.

Please upload the recording for all to see.

> @"Haildam.3712" said:

> Thank you guys for all the advice! Yes I know that the thief is a +1 / decap but I'm truly fascinated when I see a thief that can duel one or even more guys

> Look at this video for example

>

>

> It is not a +1, he can controls more than one player "easily".

> Anyway, I'll try to improve my play (now I'm enjoying the S/D build) and I'll try to learn other professions (I have only a war and a thief).

> Thanks again!

Ehhhh a lot of those opponents were quite bad. The spellbreaker in that first fight especially...

Condi ranger? Equip shortbow and kite.

Most necromancer builds can't even keep up with their condition cleanses and you have enough gap-openers and damage negation/sustain to usually just drain them out.

Power ranger? Enable soulbeast, press 2, then press F1, repeat.

Ranger is vying as one of the strongest dueling professions in the entire game right now. Even if OP is skilled as a player, the build is just dreadful enough to the point where it doesn't actually matter.

I think even D/D thief is a stronger build than what OP is running. And that's WEAK.

> @"KeyOrion.9506" said:

> We have Entangling vines, but they only work when someone isn't got a whole slew of permastability on. Otherwise it's worthless. people say that's not true, and then i'd tell them play ranger for 8 years and get back to me. We have several abilities to "root" enemy down, but they only work when boon strips have been applied to keep the enemy from using Stability. Otherwise, NONE of them work. Vines. Hound. Traited interupt can root an enemy. Against thieves and mesmers and teleport guardians, they are ALL useless.

The problem ranger has is huge projectile reflection uptime. Soulbeast otherwise is basically just an easier, safer, and generally more mobile version of pre-rework BQOBK Deadeye. Without projectile reflection spam, the class quickly overruns the WvW meta, as seen by clouding/roaming groups running primarily SB + Sustain Ele + Thief + DH or Scrapper, and the lack of diversity in the small-scale scene for more melee-centric builds which can usually our-trade or burst the thief down. Even with less than 100 hours on soulbeast, my ability to dual and fight 1v2 is often times better than 5k hours on thief and 2k hours on reaper, of which I am one of the better reaper players given my history of having never found the reaper vs. daredevil matchup difficult, consistently out-dueling DE, and having trained more than one reaper to top50 in sPvP.

Ranger was originally intended to be kept a bit weaker at range because ANet forsaw the problem of pirate shipping before it happened years ago. There was a livestream in like 2013 about longbow damage back before they buffed RF for this exact reason. Then we got hammer Rev and we saw the same thing play out, and it still happens because of Hammer Rev.

The ranger also has some very unique and very potent group abilities to the point they'd be OP without nerfs elsewhere (looking at vines in particular), but the game's dependence on boon and spammed CC phases out the significance of most of them and their limited sharing uptime.

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> > @"MindWipe.3028" said:

> > the meta is as bad as it has ever been imo.

> > WVW: there is no longer any reason to bring a staff thief anymore as it's damage is completely outclassed by power guard. The only thing it provides is venom share which isnt bad but it isnt enough to justify bringing it over a power guard. In summary while it is useable there is really no longer any reason to bring a thief anymore.

> Completely ignoring the fact is still the only class that can abuse permastealth, it makes up a large part of the roaming meta and the only reason it cant claim to be top roamer is the fact soulbeast exist.

Ehh Holo is a pretty big contender for that title, too.

Really unnecessary to be honest.

If you need easily-accessible PvE strength, play minions. Reaper's shouts are some of the best-designed utilities as a whole of any elite spec mechanics, and even better than a significant number of core-game ones. When you start adding functionality for the sake of power balance, the identity of the skills shift and the class design becomes coupled to certain facets, cornering developers to either leave something OP or basically pointless for a number of builds when it has to be reigned in.

If numbers are the problem, numbers are the answer. If design is the problem, design is the answer. Shouts being weak in PvE isn't really a design issue of the shouts themselves.

The only problems they have is that Reaper is so pigeon-holed in the elites it needs to take that the only ones which can actually be afforded in the valuable utility slot necro has are YSIM and Suffer, both of which are extremely balanced and very good if not superior options to pick depending on the build. And those general utilities are basically Spectral Armor and your choice of a mobility utility, be it SotL or Wurm. And on anything group-oriented, it's just wells, and always will be by their design.

> @"aleron.1438" said:

> How familiar are you with Conjure earth shield Manu?

Or literally Twist of Fate, offhand focus, and/or the earth trait line.

Weaver is one of the best classes in the game when it comes to raw sustain into thief and ranger due to its projectile deflection various on-demand forms of damage reduction and healing, optional crit immunity, low-cooldown stability, cleanses, and constant superspeed/in-combat mobility. Even its glassy FA variant oblierates thieves since its burst tracks stealth and spams blinds to prevent backstabs.

The problem is the disparity between builds and modes is huge. PvE ele is actually straight bad in the PvP modes, possibly one of the worst coherent builds in existence.

Like yeah if you're hard-camping Air/Fire on S/D with Air/Fire traits and no defenses you're gonna get slammed by roaming classes, but that's the case for nearly every class and build it fights.

Big toss-up between visual clarity and major boon overhauls/AoE boon nerfs. I'm not really sure which I personally think is more important.

I'm sick of everything being on the status bar or a laser-show of effects with glowing weapons/armor/infusions/consumables. The game was literally released with MO and CJ explicitly saying that they do not want players having to constantly check opponents' status bars.

Both require extensive work to fix correctly due to their rolling impact on other things, which is probably why neither have happened.

Reaper is much more fun than DE if you like to be proactive in your gameplay.

Even core thief is more fun than DE if you like being proactive.

It's funny how the concept of playing around revealed seems to change over time and with a fancy visual lol.

Some of the ideas I can get behind and are similar in nature to my OG Deadeye suggestion, especially so for playing around high Revealed uptime and rewarding combat commitment. However, there's a lot to disagree with here in terms of raw implementation.

I think it suffers from part of the great problem ongoing in the game right now where it just focuses too much on boons and duration-based unique effects for its critical gameplay rather than on what the kit actually does and the skills it uses to leverage advantages; the kit seems really OP when in stances but just downright terrible otherwise when you look at the broader picture of what core thief brings to the table. That kind of up-and-down is basically one of the major design flaws Mirage and Warrior have historically had and why necro is often buffed and nerfed so much. And with a weapon like Shortbow to potentially fix the engage/disengage problem, the class really difficult to balance around given how binary it becomes.

Aura of Displacement is OP in the competitive modes. Forced point decap or forced pin snipe trades will be really bad for the game.

A lot of these issues also probably stem from not having the skills fleshed out and with their respective numbers. I think this is a major issue and something you really can't look towards traits to fix or implement until the gameplay and skills are detailed more. Breaking away from dual skills solely for OH sword and then moving other skills around just to create synergy really begs for the weapon to be reworked entirely, as otherwise any consistencies with the thief's weapon skill mechanics are completely thrown out the window which is generally bad practice. If you're going to make the kit based around self-reveal, you'll have to implement forced reveal with Cut and just make OH sword provide no stealth, leaving everything else as-is.

By extension, there's no condition damage support here since you've fallen into the design trap of making the traits and utility skills first. One-handed weapons contribute to 3 skills on thief for every kit, per MH weapon. What you've basically done here is force the spec to play OH sword which appears to be power-only and invalidate P/S as a valid combination without getting into major cheese or OP-coefficients on skills 4/5.

There's also probably just a bit too much AoE Reveal here to make the kit feel fair, especially into builds which don't focus on stealth but rely on it in some auxiliary fashion, and nothing really that seems to make the spec have a major difference from S/S rev outside of just being really good at cannibalizing D/P thief and having slightly more mobility while having less dueling potential and long-term stickiness due to its weaknesses with stance downtime.

I think you have a lot of work to do here before this becomes an idea with weight behind it. The principle is one I think the thief desperately needs, but you're going to have to change most of what you have here to make it work cohesively with the rest of the class and to keep its identity separate from S/S rev. Especially so given how the theme and weapons are already shared.

> @"UNOwen.7132" said:

> > @"ilMasa.2546" said:

> > The same goes for thieves and stealth. It wasnt mobility alone that led to

> > - solo Slothasor kill

> > - perma stealth condi trapper

> >

>

> Why are you bringing up PvE here? Also, the latter doesnt exist, and Im pretty sure never existed because of how bad traps were.

You lost your credibility here. It was grossly overpowered for nearly a year, even in WvW. You apparently don't know the history of this class.

I will not disagree the real problem here is OOC stealth and max stealth duration, however - but that's a sentiment I've literally been expressing **since 2013**. People who insist otherwise are either bad thieves who need to get carried by the mechanic or are inexperienced players who do not understand the game, the thief, or their own classes, and lack knowledge of say, D/D thief, to understand 3s stealth isn't a problem.

Remove stacking stealth across all classes, and only allow stealth when in combat. Rework SA. Rework DE. Remove trapper runes. Rework Sneak Gyro. Rework PU. Rework Smokescale. This endemic-huge-issue problem becomes solved.

> @"yiksing.9432" said:

> If you think thief is bad, go fight a thief as a necro. Any decent thief that doesn't succumb to bloodlust will be able to easily kite you to oblivion.

I very, very, rarely lose on my reaper against most thief builds. Really just S/D DrD messes me up because Spite is countered by Larcenous strike.

But thousands of hours of knowledge playing a class will make you learn all its weaknesses and strengths and make it very easy to beat.

In a strict duel, thief/necro is only like a 55/45 or maybe on the top end of thieves 60/40. Most thieves absolutely suck and really only get away with what they do because of Scaredevil or stacking stealth. Both of which are valid concerns of the class' bad mechanics at the cost of other playstyles.

> > @"SpellOfIniquity.1780" said:

> > I made a Thief recently and have been having a lot of fun. I've been playing a core D/P build with CS/DA/Trickery, and a mixture of Marauder and Valkyrie + Eagle runes.

> >

> > I don't have a problem with these images so don't misinterpret this as a complaint, but those of you saying "thEiF dOEs NO daMaGE" are out of your minds. I don't have a single piece of zerk on my Thief so I have 19k health, and I don't use Assassin's Signet and look at these crits.

> >

> > 

> > 

> >

It's been known and posted about (at least by me) for a LONG time that Shadow Shot is overtuned in its damage. If Backstab is hitting for 3k, Shadow Shot is hitting for about 2.2k. It's often worth casting repeatedly and has been for years - especially when it had a lower initiative cost - and is a major part of why I don't enjoy playing D/P. Backstab was also aggressively nerfed by nearly 30% in feburary whereas SShot was untouched, meaning it's even relatively stronger than it already used to be. So yeah. The class still has damage, but a lot of it is on skills which don't really make sense and on very limited builds. It comes from sources it shouldn't, which makes people complain, just like Warrior's old Dodge damage. When the damage isn't coming from major signature skills, people without much knowledge of the class don't realize the rest of the class can be weaker than they realize.

Dealing 7x damage isn't something that happens just because of some toughness on armor, though. 15k is unrealistic unless the opponent is running boonless with a light armor with a missing piece, no bonus toughness, no food, no PoK and has 25 vuln, where you have PoK + 25 might + max LA stacks + Assassin's Signet + shared modifiers from other players. It can happen, but it's so far beyond the point of it being a class issue it's really pointless to even discuss it. This is 12k reaper shroud AA's or an upwards of 35k backstabs pre-Feb patch. I even have doubts you ever even saw a backstab exceed 25k before the patch.

Soulbeast has the same issue thief does where there are a few facets such as ranged/OOC on-demand stealth and large mobility with very safe burst potential that make the class really oppressive when it's played at its strongest while having a really low bar for its success when played by less-skilled players. RF's initial burst is easy to negate, but it does create a resource deficit for the dodging player given it takes two dodge rolls to negate it, and following up with SA/Maul->Unmerge->Smoke->Swap->Leap->WI->Maul->PBS->RF isn't a difficult nor risky rotation for what is a seriously huge amount of damage relative to most other professions.

I would still say it's the best roaming class in the game, and the one with the lowest barrier of entry to play glassy on, though the aforementioned performance is not via the same build, and eking out its maximum is more difficult than say, reaching the upper limits on core necro or even holo. However, the glassy options it does have are extremely easy and moreover extremely safe with great gank presence (looking at DE and D/P ASignet thief historically); without a build dedicated to handling it, it's nigh impossible to deal with if it's played well, especially when there are multiple enemies, which amps its safety up dramatically, and where OWP and multiple soulbeasts really makes for a bad day. There's a reason Mag runs primarily soulbeasts as its cloud DPS; it's easy to create downs with, innately pretty tanky, and very, very safe.

As for Sic 'Em, there's really no reason to defend the ranger having this skill. The only skill ever competing for such a massive increase in damage on multiple hits was Assassin's Signet, at 5 strikes, with only 15%, which was also nerfed, along with all the % damage mod skills on thief in its DPS builds for being too strong. Ranged reveal on top of it makes the skill do too much, even if it's not ideal on the top-end of skilled play. If its primary application was on something riskier like D/D thief which has no mobility/disengage and no follow-through, I'd be fine with it, but it just seems to raise the lowest level of players and give them so much impact on a fight for no real reason at all.

Problem is boons are AoE-based and make up such mass quantities of stats. Boon builds basically get and then share having a second set of armor with each other, and have such fast re-application that there's no advantage in running boonless.

Corrupts similarly break builds which minimally depend on boons but get slaughtered because their 10s duration 5 stacks of might on a 30s cooldown gets instantly converted into 10s weakness, also hitting their endurance regen, and they have no answers. You can't race boons with corruptions.

It doesn't matter if it feels bad to have intermittent periods where you don't have swiftness or are missing some crit chance. Maybe build for it or understand your moments of strength and weakness better. Permanent boon uptime is bad for the game and so many traits which provide additional power for also having boons on is just stupid because it makes the disparity even bigger.

It just encourages more people to bandwagon for free stuff, as if bandwagoning wasn't already a worthwhile incentive for a majority of players who just want to ktrain.

It's not like people who want a PvP experience are going in for the loot, anyways. Fix the balancing and numbers will rise. Fix the boonball and AoE bomb effectiveness and the smaller scale fights will ensue with larger engagements demanding more tactics and leadership rather than stack and smack.

Nothing else is gonna make this mode get more players. The PvP audience recognizes the profession balance and design is horrible and the people wanting a content grind have no incentive to bother because PvE is always gonna be the best for that, else there's no point in making the content.

Unfortunately what ANet missed the boat on is that there's a massive amount of untapped players who want just PvP in the PC gaming sphere. See: LoL.

That was their original idea for the game with combat visibility and with loot selling for Karma and loot in WvW/sPvP rewards, but they abandoned ship because ten billion new currencies forcing you to play the game their way with the carrot on the stick makes more money from their PvE base than otherwise.

MMR systems are just a fancy graphs where players who lose games they're advantaged in will lose more points and those who win games they're supposed to lose gain more points. If you win a game you're supposed to win, you gain few points, because the outcome was already expected.

The determination for point gain/loss is determined by a history of who beats who; if player A beats player B, but player C beats player A, then C gains more points for beating A than they would for beating B. If B then beats C, the MMR stabilizes towards indicating all three players are roughly the same skill-level. If they all beat player D, the system determines player D is worse than all three. Over many games, the samples regulate and accuracy is determined.

Magnitude and accuracy of gains/losses is heavily based on the number of players competing and how often they play, though, especially since it's team-based. The problem is the sPvP community in GW2 is in shambles because the game is so horribly balanced, so you'll have to spam a lot of games, probably with a lot of the same players in various win/loss states, meaning it's difficult to find players in your appropriate bracket and get an accurate MMR.

With tighter balance and a subsequently larger community, the ranking system would be better. Unfortunately, you can'y force people to play a game they don't find fun to increase the accuracy of the MMR algorithm and larger pool of competitive players to group together appropriately.

Edited - It takes less time to decap from enemy-owned->neutral than to cap neutral->owned.

> @"Fueki.4753" said:

> Thieves excel in running away and Stealth.

> It wouldn't be reasonable for them to also deal damage on par with professions that lack equal disengage potential.

>

> Many (if not most) people expect Thieves to decap and cap nodes, and only going into fights when they can outnumber the opponents.

The problem is the first statement is true for more builds than others, whereas the ability to do much in-combat is... not really different build-to-build.

I watched the first loss and most of the win. For having started two months ago, it's a good start, so take solace in that you're doing well for being so new.

I'm going to break down game 1. In your win, most of these issues translated, but they didn't actually manifest because your opposing thief played... well... really badly.

Macro:

You're staying for fullcaps in most instances you don't need to be. It takes much Edit: ~~longer~~ **less time** to neutralize a node (decap) than to have it go from neutral to captured. Your goal for nodes is mostly just to set the opposition back and avoid the sustained teamfight rather than fullcapping (decap + cap) and then opting to gank. It's only really when your team is stuck and unable to contest/hold cap anything at all and/or if the enemy team lacks a thief themselves that you should be staying to cap full, so it should really only be done when necessary and your team can't seem to regroup as to pull their sides. You generally seem to know where to be - though game 3 you stayed mid and probably shouldn't have - I'm guessing you've watched some guides and done some homework which is good - but haven't figured out for how long yet. This is emphasized a lot in game 1, since your teammates were also just weaker individually than the opponents since you had double thief. This let you staunch a lot of bleeding, but didn't help you turn the tables that much. In instances where your team is struggling to control home and rotate between it and mid or give up a fight and fullcap far, you need to be just routing the decap to even the point score and then +1'ing a fight quickly. Backstab and heartseeker or shadow shot a few times (it does more damage with targets at half HP than HS, and **has an unblockable blind** to even up some damage or generate a down, and move on. This is particularly noticeable around the 8:00 mark where you stay to teamfight a point where you already had an advantage, and honestly, contributed very little as a whole. Instead of AA'ing with shortbow, you could have potentially turned the gank on the thief which was attacking your thief to get the immediate +1 and kill their decapper without having to move. At 9:30 when the enemy team collapsed and won the fight, you ended up getting chased by lingering too long as to try and hold (which thief just simply does not have the capacity to do as a class), and this was nearly a minute of time lost as the enemy team held the point advantage during your allies' respawn timers and maintained a foothold, and while all your cooldowns were burned and unable to kill the enemy thief and decap far while they held 2 and decapped home. The thing about thief is there's very little set-strategy for how to perform on it match-to-match, because the crux of it really is node management and +1'ing. Sometimes this pattern is harshly different game-to-game depending on what your enemies and allies are doing. If your own team is doing really, really well, there's little purpose on trying to hold or decap far when a constant stream of enemies is pouring in from respawn.

TL;DR: Haze offnode more and decap whenever possible rather than trying for full captures. Your entire goal is disruption; the thief is not designed to be a killing machine but rather something hard to lock down that can lay some quick damage in to turn the table on a fight and hold an enemy's points offline rather than yours online.

Micro:

Your play in terms of raw combat needs improvement on the class itself. Dealing with the DH in video 1 at 2:30 shows you panicked pretty heavily by burning IArrow well-under max range and then Shadowstep after that, then wasted BP twice before tunneling to a point and unnecessarily using HS without checking corners or what was going on behind you, as the enemy daredevil disappeared on map shortly prior. Big thing on thief is resource management. You CAN cast things repeatedly, but it's not always the right move. In this case, you could have gotten ready for the DH pull and shadowstepped during the pull itself to stunbreak it mid-cast and get away while maintaining initiative, or used IArrow twice to get out of range. In the death at 4:30, you stayed too long after losing a bunch of health, and you could have dodged out of the DH traps; you instead walked through the Test of Faith and tried running around while crippled within the SoJ. ISignet also had come up and was available to use its active to both remove conditions and refund an extra dodge even if your endurance wasn't available for a dodge at that moment. Throughout the video, you often let yourself get taken really low on-point from DH traps. Dodging OOC is okay to negate most of the damage, and you can also use shortbow 3 for a smaller evade line to stay on-point. If the enemy thief was smarter on their macro having known their team was better than your team, they'd be rotating into YOU to kill you as to deny decaps, too. Thief is a class which can very much cannibalize meaning it's extremely potent into mirror-matches when played well. If you rotate the decap, +1 the teamfight for an advantage/win, rotate back to cap, and then fringe roam and kill the enemy thief where it's decapping, you effectively win 3 fights in a very limited amount of time while contributing very few resources. Know your skills EXACTLY. Memorize how far they cast without even needing to look at the indicators. Understand relative movespeed differences and leverage Shadow Shot to be a more reliable closer than HS. Blind before securing a spike, either from Shadow Shot, a BlaP/BliP fields, CiS proc, or IArrow.

Don't res teammates on-point during a teamfight like at 6:50 because you're too squishy and can't handle the AOE's, and you never will being a thief. If their thief is downed off-point but also really close to a fight, it's usually best to leave it in downed state and move on. Them trying to deal with downed state not only delays their respawn, but also means if an ally of theirs comes to res, it delays their point capture or teamfight presence as well. Perfect example at 8:40. If they're far away from a fight/allies, obviously best to finish to prevent a res or self-res.

Make sure you double-HS the same BP; the stealth duration stacks up to 5 times via any means, and it's a waste of initiative to use it for just one cast if using it to travel the map, as the enemy will see you by the time you leave point.

Shadow Shot. It's legit what makes D/P as strong as it is, especially other thieves. If they're disengaging, odds are SShot will keep you absolutely glued to them and the blind lasts a long time and prevents a turn-and-burn of their own.

Tl;DR:

I'd say start learning combat on the class better. There's too much there to break down in one forum post. Find some groups and other thieves to practice dueling with and maybe even WvW roaming for getting better with faster-speed engagements since you deal and take a lot more damage than in sPvP. Things will seem a lot slower in sPvP after that, letting you put more focus on the nodes and your enemies rather than your own skills and timers. While the node management is what makes the class strong in sPvP, you really can't truly carry without knowing the class's combat limits and how to just downright duel/disrupt other thieves when the moment arises. Force their cooldowns during their traverse or force them to lose a decap while burning relatively little of your own resources, and they suddenly lose all their agency for potentially minutes at a time depending on the state of the map, as they'll be unable to duel you, +1 effectively, nor mirror your decap if your allies can hold.

Anything AI-controlled which affects AoE-targeting is going to be a bit passive by nature.

Aside from Flesh wurm - and consuming it instantly as if it was just a shadowstep skill - there's really no point in using the skills except to passively soak aggro and deal extra damage without doing anything, so yes, they are passive.

Balancing minions without making a dedicated AI-handling archetype which derives all its power from its AI is basically impossible. They either end up weak or OP, as we've seen from ranger pets, mesmer clones, and engi turrets over the years. The action output and control onto your opponent is either so high it becomes absolutely dominant in the top echelons of play (even if it were to take immense skill) if you force manual control that it makes most other game patterns irrelevant, or simply it ends up being too weak and never useful except to soak aggro and/or deal free passive damage.

With the necro's base level of sustain, it's not really viable; you're not playing meepo where a tiny misplay gets you killed. It's a durable class and summon-permanence calls for innately weaker creatures than say, a mesmer.

Seven years of "balancing" efforts, and people are back to spamming --and dying to-- heartseeker.

Brings me right back to 2013 lmao.

...It's almost like nobody's gotten better and ANet hasn't fixed a damned thing. Oh wait a minute, it's both!

TL;DR for this thread is a bunch of people who do not play both classes are incredibly wrong about various mechanics about each class.

Both have facets which are fundamentally busted, which prevent improvements elsewhere, and depending on the level of play and builds of both them and their respective opponents, will see massive sway in the matchups they face.

The ranger has the higher skill floor/is more effective at its lowest skill level, and both have about the same skill ceiling in a duel assuming both are built optimally. Ranger generally favors group play with druid and the class's higher sustain and support overall, making it the better teamfighter. Thief gets the bonus of picking engagements and having better reset potential if it chooses to build for it, ESPECIALLY Deadeye, making it still more reliable to +1/gank on.

Ranger has problems in matchups/certain-sized engagements where it can't out-trade, since so much damage is frontloaded, like bunker weaver. Thief has basically one and a half viable builds and lacks options to play aggressively, making it feel incredibly weak to some players who did so prior to the balance shakeup because those builds are now downright trash.

There.

/thread?

> @"Bigpapasmurf.5623" said:

> I cant really think of a time ive ever got mad enough to request the creatures in WvW get nerfed.

>

> This nerf request is on another level imo

Would be nice if they just turned off all aggressive mobs. There's merit in keeping them, but not aggressive ones.

The number of times I've been unable to end a fight from dealing with in-combat movespeed or even lost one from specifically Ascalonian archer cripple or randomly getting my burst/combo blinded is enough where I'd rather see them removed than have them near keeps.

I don't really care about their presence or even so much the damage, but they really shouldn't have range, CC and be aggressive.

Red BL ones are also kinda overtuned with them just adding in HoT mods, especially now with the reduced damage professions deal to dispatch them quickly. A major problem, no, but having them be as strong as they are doesn't make a lot of sense.

> @"Lily.1935" said:

> > @"Dadnir.5038" said:

> > > @"Lily.1935" said:

> > > > @"Sombike.6291" said:

> > > > Not to self promote or anything, but this fight was one of many from yesterday ... and I'd say Scourge is still top dog in wvw, even after the NEEDED nerfs to the class!

> > >

> > > I'm sorry, but I don't see what you're providing in that situation. You're not doing a lot of damage and you're not beating the boons even close. It looks to me like the firebrand is doing all the labor while you are getting a free ride. Doesn't even look like you're providing much support either.

> >

> > What else would you expect of a zerg feist? It's just a large group of players mowing down another, no real subtility or player skill involved except for the lead. Scourge is still of value in there but not as overwhelmingly valuable than it was previously.

>

> I think they'd have been better off running core necromancer personally. More striking power and they offer up some valuable debuffs. That boon spam though is just awful. Its one of the aspects I despise about WvW. Both sides had almost permanent all boon uptime and its just a clash of whose the most booned.

Which is the reason scourge is played. Boons are literally everything when it comes to WvW, and the reason necro and its respective corruption has been the only consistent blob play class in the meta since the game's launch aside from Guardian, which has been the major contributor in area boon coverage and group sustain. As soon as you stop corrupting, the opposition and meta gets to shift its play towards being more selfish as well or focus on raw healing power sustain rather than boon coverage, meaning less of a need for stacking boons and just playing into raw damage or defenses. Boons and mass corruption are a cyclical problem that can only be resolved by nerfing both hard, otherwise the imbalance just shifts to a different dynamic.

The power here is also why I've advocated for PvP-esque encounter design for years in order to help necromancer out, instead of just bigger and badder AoE circles and obtuse mechanics. Necromancer becomes top tier if the PvE encounters start reflecting PvP environments, because it's absolutely dominant in opponent control and boon denial in situations where the opposition starts turtling hard through boons or can be corrupted and controlled as such. Necro doesn't strictly need high damage to be viable. It needs to be performative in the areas it's good at. As long as it works as an enabler for more damage, it'll be viable.

Core shroud is useless in ZvZ outside of just doing nothing and turtling after wells go down because Life Blast just cleaves your own side since most large groups have permanent projectile reflection, and core necro also offers no group utility which Scourge doesn't, and cannot be healed during major bombs when in shroud. Remember, everything about PvP in GW2 is winning the sustain fight (which is why core is dominant now), especially in this meta that's so slowed down where people can't be bursted out in aggressive, preliminary strikes. Having 30 supports will keep 50 people alive and make it way harder to prioritize targets in a large group where everyone supports a little bit. People who go down/die during bombs usually just get bad RNG from the skill target cap/assignment when within in the AoE, and the entire goal of playing a boonball and heal/barrier spam crew is to outlive the bomb and grind a few players down at a time through lots of numbers hitting a small number of targets, rather than solely raw stats.

If I hadn't been gifted a PoF code for a secret santa I wouldn't have bought it.

Gonna be a hard sell for me unless they make some damned compelling elite specs, and even then... I'm really not a fan of rewarding powercreep with money.

I've culled my gem purchases to basically nothing since HoT and don't really intend to change that. Maybe if they'd fix the broken PvP systems...