DeceiverX.8361

> @Arcaedus.7290 said:

> One-hit KOs are bad for competitive videogames, period. If you look at DJ in a vacuum, it seems like an okay skill but a good Deadeye can make it work and can make it hurt. I had a series of duels just the other day against a deadeye. He spammed auto to build malice. Used stealth and standing rifle 4 to keep his distance. Once malice was full, he popped quickness and used DJ twice in a row. I (barely) dodged the first, hit by the second, 10k damage (3.3k armor and had protection boon on). Making deadeye otherwise complete trash does not justify having a skill that can 1-shot people. It doesn't matter if there is build up or not, this skill hits too hard.

Not really. a 1HKO is fine if it carries a substantial risk of performing. Full glass thief D/D backstab thief? Full berserker core mesmer power shatter mind wrack? Gravedigger full bererker power reaper? None of these builds are unfair to play against and fill a small niche for being able to make an uptrade for the most part.

In this case, like many others in this game, there are layers of protection which offset that risk.

It's the sole reason the long-ranged "stealth sniper" concept is not good for the game in general. It explicitly follows a low-risk : high reward design in a lot of cases.

Just too bad ANet can't recognize these kinds of things are really bad for the game.

> @Saraneth.6021 said:

> > @Alatar.7364 said:

> > > @Saraneth.6021 said:

> > > > @Alatar.7364 said:

> > > > It is Weak in PvE due to Rifles Single Target only DMG, unlike Rangers/Warriors Longbow it has no AoE skills.

> > > > So basically you should be swapping to your second Weapon set quite often for cleaves, etc. If you do that, then it's not necessarily Weak, only the Mindset behind playing with Rifle might make you think so.

> > >

> > > Na. Even on single target bosses the rifle falls behind pretty much everything else. Which is shouldn't. The damage is supposed to be on par with melee.

> >

> > I think in that case we can assume the Ranged dmg to be an advantage over Melee Dmg, cause you don't have to reach your target. In such case it would be only fair for Ranged dmg to be lower than Melee as compensation.

>

> Again! The devs said they were breaking their own rule when it comes to DE rifle. The damage was supposed to be on par and the down side to keep it balanced was the loss of mobility. That isn't what we have. We have sub par damage with mobility loss.

>

> If they now want the damage to be more on par with other ranged options, they need to give us back our mobility!

DPH and per-skill is comparable or higher in a number of cases. People forget there's a big difference between DPH "burst" and DPS "sustained damage."

DPS on MH dagger and staff are overbuffed and have been since they buffed the AA to make the thief competitive with the other busted-OP stuff that came from HoT. Prior to the massive powercreep of the first expansion, the rifle would still be brokenly overpowered.

The rifle is not intended to be a DPS weapon. Sniper builds do not deal high damage per second, and the design is explicitly made to not function this way. It is very, very obvious this is not ANet's intent with the concept of the DE and the weapon. Otherwise you have no downside to using the rifle because it's then safer + better at pressuring + better at bursting. The rifle itself =/= DE.

People wanted a 1HKO "sniper" concept. This is what the DE offers. Don't like it? Don't play it. Same was said about Daredevil. I still do not have Daredevil unlocked on my main thief for this reason. The rifle is not meta in raids because it by design isn't supposed to be. There will only ever be one or maybe two weapons that are in the meta for raids. It's all just a big math equation in the end, which ignores concept design and PvP-style balance.

If you have opinions otherwise, or have other opinions on the matter, you should have voiced your opinion earlier. There was pretty much a new thread popping up every day for a year and a half after HoT asking for rifle "sniper." Some of us advocated against the concept for this exact reason, but it's too late now.

At this point, retaliating against "don't like it - don't play it" is futile, anyways. ANet has proven over and over they are unwilling to make the changes the game needs for its general health of professions and build diversity. The game's original vision of allowing people to do what they want has completely changed. If you don't love the meta builds, their mentality is that it sucks to suck. Find something else because they're not going to change it. There's a reason I no longer play the thief or really much of this game at all anymore.

Works for all mid-path projectiles as well, even if the thief is 1799 away from a longbow ranger and ports, the AA, if within range to be registered as a "hit" prior to the port, will still land after the shadowstep at 2999.

Way fewer people also purchased PoF in general than HoT.

There is a substantial group of players which will not make purchases until ANet fixes their first expansion.

For one, the rifle isn't a PvE spec. Anything over trash is too tanky. It's supposed to be a slow and methodical burst weapon. Rifle's design in terms of performance is similar to what you get from playing glass power shatter mesmer. The latter is horrible for PvE, but given its numbers, cannot be balanced for PvE unless its damage per hit gets nerfed. Which is of course adverse to the entire concept of shattering on the core mesmer.

You can't compare rifle to ranger longbow in regards to its durability or stating that the pet can tank unless you're in PvE, either. Players can and will ignore the pet.

And to be honest, if you're going to base solo-power and profession design or potency by solo PvE performance/durability/difficulty alone, the ranger has always been completely and totally broken in this regard. There was never even a close contender for second place. I've solo-killed world bosses on core ranger without even taking damage. That doesn't mean the ranger is overpowered; the pet is, and has been, absolutely horrible in the PvP formats, only ever made good by a few disgustingly strong abilities or builds like hard boonbunker druid (and that's more about the boonbunker build being broken than the pet).

> @LazerusKI.7485 said:

> there is nothing like that, deadeye has shadow flare to swap place with a thrown orb, and base-thief has the Infiltrator Signet which shadowsteps him to an enemy. so maybe that was used with daggers or so? as said above, there is a trait that lets deadeye stun with the first hit after marking a target, is there something on thief that increases damage against stunned targets?

I mean no disrespect, but you really need to learn more about the profession and game if you're going to make posts like these while simultaneously trying to offer high-level insight on what needs change. It ruins your credibility and honestly, ANet taking suggestions from people with limited understanding of the game is ultimately why we're here.

> @Saraneth.6021 said:

> > @Jana.6831 said:

> > I quit. Not because rifle didn't give me what I wanted but because anet have no clue what they're doing in general.

> > Had I the faith that they will make this game decent again I'd bought it no matter what.

>

> Hmm. All I can say is that it has only been a few days. Give them a chance. If you don't like something discuss it. Don't do what DeceiverX wants and stay quite. Be vocal. Being vocal about issues you are having is healthy. Just be nice about it.

>

You must be new around here to say I haven't been vocal about what the thief on the design-level needs.

Hell, I even proposed the Deadeye concept - even named the Deadeye - in a much different form with full implementation details nearly two years ago, did all the balancing math, and directly assessed what would happen if a stealth sniper were implemented and why it would be bad for the game. I've reiterated myself probably a hundred times in every stealth-sniper thread made about why this is the outcome people should have been expecting and why we shouldn't have gotten rifle/deadeye concept as it is. You can't make this concept fun and balanced for everyone. It's a gimmick, and I'm not the only one who was saying this about the stealth-sniper concept, either. It'll always either be mediocre at best, or completely dominant over everything else from being broken numerically.

I've just stopped playing thief in general considering they also removed my build from the game and nerfed/changed design direction on the power builds I found fun. I've picked up power reaper which I find simply more fun these days. Really, my GW2 time in overall is down to maybe 10% of what it used to be before HoT. I'm not buying PoF because I will not support ANet until they at the very least fix their first expansion, which they still haven't. If I can design something justifiably more mechanically solid in a few weeks than what ANet can come up with, and recognize the design problems of other concepts before they even get implemented, I find it fully admissible for me to say their design capabilities are poor. I've worked in the MMO industry. ANet isn't doing a good job.

Being a long-term advocate for this profession, and one of the more numerically-knowledgeable people on this class, I stick around for the sake of sticking around to help when people ask for it or have meaningful discussion to bring. Sadly, most people (on all professions) don't recognize the state of the rest of the game, and insist on getting frivolous buffs and broken concepts applied to their professions which further break the game long-term and reduce enjoyment for everyone involved.

> @Oglaf.1074 said:

> Big mistake not having metas in them. These maps are a huge leap backwards - they feel just as "dead" as Tyria open world. Dead and static.

>

> Very disappointing, honestly.

>

> > @"Just a flesh wound.3589" said:

> >The Devs have learned from the hate expressed for HoT style meta events and changed to a Living Story map formula.

>

> People don't hate the metas. What they hated was how maps like Tangled Depths were just so confusing and annoying to navigate because of how the minimap isn't up to snuff to clearly tell you which level you are on.

>

> So Anet missed a huge opportunity here: they could've taken what people loved about HoT maps (the metas, the alive-feeling of teh area) and applied it to a less complex map. That would've been win-win.

People hate when all of the map progress hinges on a difficult meta which depends on an organized, large group to complete. You can't solo TD or even do it with a smaller group like you can with other major fights like Dwayna.

People also hate how the loot is powercreeped into new maps which forces people out of the old ones. If you make the new maps have big meta-events which subsequently reward more loot due to their size/complexity, which can easily be zerged down, the other maps are similarly killed off because of a lack of incentive to play them at all.

Had they just released more maps like Orr but with better scaling from the getgo/in HoT and continued to do so, I don't think we'd have this problem. People would just be playing in the maps they want to play in.

> @Cerby.1069 said:

> > @"McKenna Berdrow.2759" said:

> > Charging the cata still increases the damage that it does. It now has consistent dps compared to before where charging it increased dps.

>

> I don't understand this.

>

> So are you saying that you lowered the max damage in a way where charging it and not charging offers the same dps? So in other words you are looking at those "seconds" it takes to charge and giving smaller bonuses than before to negate their impact?

>

> So I can proxy cat a wall using fully charged shots, and it would take the same time as it does to proxy it with tap shots?

> What kinda hp pool does this assume though? If I have a single cat on paper wall, there is likely to be one method of catapulting that is faster than the other....given that both do large %'s of dmg there will be a remainder that could lead to an extra shot on the charged or the uncharged.

>

> OR I guess I'll have to do the maths.......can u give us some stats to do the maths tho?

>

>

> guess im overthinking part of this.

> tl:dr: doesnt matter if I charge or tap, still gonna do the same dps ....yes? I don't know what u meant by consistent dps... you mean the same dps as the tap method? Same damage per second?

>

> Would be nice to have values so we could work out how to take down a wall t1/t2/t3 optimally with 2-7 catapults...whether to have them all charge shot or to all tap shot or mix it up a bit....

>

> Basically would need the wall % that the charged shot and the tap shot does vs each wall type....

The first bit: Yes in a sense; if you tap off cooldown, it'll do the same rate of damage to a wall as a cat would if you just held the button down to recharge and max charge off cooldown. Before, cats always dealt the most damage by maximizing the shot charge meter. People were then just point-blanking them at max charge for higher cat damage in general.

The second bit: I guess it would depend on how siege damage is calculated, but if it's all multiplication like normal damage is, then it doesn't matter what kind of wall it is. If they've done it to fully scale closely with the charge meter... then while I guess you "could" optimize shots, you're talking a matter of a few pixels and fractions of a second to optimize splash based on how granular the charge calculation is. The higher precision the calculation by charge, the less potential there is to create such an advantage, which would only really be doable/repeatable with some kind of script/illegal program given a high degree of precision needed. I mean, I guess something as broad as "one less hit" is learnable given the scale of the numbers and whatnot, but safe placement/hitting two walls usually takes priority, and perfect optimization would only be possible with some kind of cheating, which, for the record, I do not condone.

Really, if they want to encourage reasonable cat placements, damage should just scale on a bell curve with projectile airtime. Point-blank takes a penalty by being too close for ranged counterpressure/ballistae, and super-far-on-a-hill-physics-advantaged shots from cats that can't be targeted should take a similar penalty for also being too safe.

Dagger is a condi weapon. Use others. Idk why people think that they're forced into using the new weapon with elite specs.

Power DPS won't really ever happen with the weapon coefficients being so low for their attack speeds. SB is really far from worthless, however. It's capable of absolutely ridiculous burst damage and insane group support such that I downright expect it to get nerfed.

This spec is absolutely insane if you build into its strengths. 14k-18k opening strike AA's and 30k+ RF's is disgusting in the PvP formats.

People wanted a ranged burst "sniper" stealth kit, this is what that is.

It doesn't do high DPS because it isn't meant to; like ranger longbow, it's meant to burst from range and provide tools to deal with engages or apply pressure from range, rather than just spewing high numbers, and it's not going to be balanced or done well, because the very nature of the concept of a stealth-mobile-sniper can't be well-designed for what the thief is already. Rifle, as a sniper weapon in terms of general viability, is a *bad idea* when it comes to proper game design in terms of GW2. Even in PvE, there's no risk in kneeling when range in it of itself is so safe based on how aggro works etc.

If you take issue with that design concept, you should have been here earlier, objecting to the multitude of threads which popped up every single day asking for this concept to be implemented, or supporting my ES proposal which offered substantially better ranged killing potential without cheese if that was what you are/were after.

The entire concept of rifle in its overarching design is a gimmick and people need to accept that. It can't be "balanced" by design. It is not a PvE weapon.

If you have other problems with other professions dealing too much damage... take it up with those other professions, not to keep infinitely powercreeping the thief.

Otherwise you're just complaining about the fact it isn't "GG-ez" OP with a low skill floor like Daredevil has.

I can't draw well, but I'm a maker. Can I make a submission of an *actual* functional weapon I've personally handmade, so long as a picture of it fits within the template size boundaries?

Just swiftness in controlled territories, or preferably: Not at all.

Gliding already gave us enough problems...

They've also systematically removed a lot of the good spiking power builds or nerfed them while constantly bumping power-based mitigation. There's very little incentive to bother.

I mean look at signet thief which defined the notion of bursting priority targets in GvG. Its damage got dropped by almost 35% in one patch recently (the only thing it could do) during ANet's pathetic attempt to "buff" signets because they were downright terrible.

People need to stop being surprised. The profession team is failing this game and has been since before even HoT launched.

> @Allarius.5670 said:

> In my personal, general, anecdotal, limited experience, most forum posters have disagreements in some form with the direction or implementation of their chosen pet profession, but Necromancers and Mesmers stand out as having the most forum goers that fundamentally disagree with the underlying design of their profession and agonize over it rather than accept Anet's vision.

Given the ability to select more than one, I'd have said this exact thing as well. As of the new forums' release, I'm inclined to stick with my vote since necromancer's game-health is all over the place even still since last patch.

Necro walks a fine line between being completely overpowered and totally useless due to its design. ANet's struggled with the balancing for years (on all professions) and often doesn't make the changes which make the most sense in this regard. Frankly, ANet has rarely if ever addressed design-level problems with the profession/game, and there is thus a lot of grief over what people like and dislike. Paired with the fact that the classes try to cover so much conceptual ground (notably necro - minions/undead, soul/spectral skills, blood magic/vampirism, shadow-mage effects, etc.), the vision of what the class/builds should be vastly differs from player to player.

So people try to substitute their own ideas with what they think the vision should support,, what the profession needs mechanically in comparison to the rest of the game (which swings wildly with format), and often are therefore at odds.

Really, aside from warrior, guardian, engineer, and to some extent ele, the other professions have the same problems.

Thief: Assassin with huge burst? Stealth camper? Acrobat with lots of evasion and mobility?

Ranger: Archer/ranged DPS? Pet-based or lone-wolf survivalist? Rugged and martial or attuned to nature and supportive?

Mesmer: Illusionist to perplex people? Mega-wombo-combo burst damage? Stealth camping? Blur camping?

Rev: Resource-based or cooldown-based? Synergy with legends to traits? Diverse kits on legends or highly-specialized ones?

I'd actually call the Onslaught change a huge nerf to power reaper across the game. The AA pressure is only good if you're constently mobile, which given the SoS change... power reaper isn't, and the bulk CDR meant one could cleave a low-health target with a doublecast on stability and reset its cooldown on kill immediately into a second higher-health target.

Generally speaking, these changes were pretty poor.

Lmfao.

Inb4 outfit goes on sale and we have thousands of Balths running around as player characters.

> @Sarie.1630 said:

> > @Yasi.9065 said:

> >

> > If you want to play your necro, or you want a more casual run... then make your own lfg, or join one that is aimed towards that goal.

>

> Back when people cared about dungeons and you'd get aggressive warrior heavy meta-only groups there people would say the exact same thing. It's not bad advice, it's logical, but it doesn't always work. I will occasionally make an explicitly "casual" run for something because I want to play something non meta or, gasp, not want to care about rotations. More often than you might think you will get 3 people join you because it's a casual run, but then one guy joins and yells at people all the way through because you're not fast enough or understand the content well enough. You can't really defend against people joining but not taking cognisance of what the group is for.

>

> The attitude and inflexibility of people, and the "dps meter intrusion", however useful and justifiable people find it all, really turns me off group content in GW2 these days. Toxicity just escalates.

I went from level 70-80 spamming CoF on my necros (just before HoT) in greens/blues and only had an issue one time in a party with a guy who started raging because we didn't burn the final boss fast enough so he died because he didn't understand mechanics such as dodging and using heals. The killspeed was still reasonable enough since there were other 80's in the party, but being an open run it wasn't amazingly quick.

I told him to shut up and deal with it while the rest of us took it down. He didn't and kept raging, so I then kicked him mid-boss, and we proceeded to end the fight.

No loot for him, no competion for him. He just wasted his time. I don't understand why people let these players stay in their groups. Kick them without hesitation and fill the slot if truly necessary, and if you're an important member in a raid like a healer and can't manage the kick... just leave. Let these so-called "pros" spend the extra time waiting for a fill. There are tons of people strapped for time who'd like a faster run by starting halfway through if they can get one and the group can hold its own, and a lot who just want a relaxed run when they aren't.

Frankly, before HoT killed off dungeons, I almost never had a problem making my own groups to run casual groups, and these groups rarely ever had issues. One of my fastest runs ever was from a casual off-meta group timing just a bit over 5 mins for CoF.

The toxicity is definitely up since catering to the "hardcore" scene - PvE metas by strict definition don't exist; they're just optimizations dependent on balance patches from the developers, so every patch just becomes about whatever is optimal, and once people have hard data to back up their claims, they feel a need to enforce that you too must be playing in such a time-optimal fashion. For this reason, I've stopped playing PvE altogether since. It's so stale I don't see a reason to justify doing it, since the rewards are at best some shiny pixels which in the context of literally everything mean nothing.

The motivation for this toxic attitude ultimately comes from gating such strong/good rewards behind the content; people playing solely for rewards encourages this kind of behavior because then they just want to solve the equation for gaining loot faster to do whatever else is is they want to do that isn't running the same content over and over. Them running the content more and more doesn't help improve their attitudes, either, especially towards newer players.

Really, the problems behind the toxicity aren't solvable within just the confines of PvE changes or the community; ANet needs to recognize the precedent of going back to their manifesto and rewarding all players in all modes fairly equally, even in terms of skins, they need to be *much* faster at deploying profession changes to reduce staleness in both the PvP/WvW metas and to keep players guessing in PvE on what is optimal, and they also need to design encounters in ways which do not simply always get time of completion cut by pumping out huge damage numbers, such as timed onslaught fights (CoF) and miscellaneous other types of encounters (CoE lasers), or ones which also help justify tankier builds for more than just an out-of-combat one-off endeavor (crossing a dangerous area to unlock a shortcut for the rest of the party that requires a party split for example akin to the Dredge fractal).

> @DanAlcedo.3281 said:

> People seem to not understand it.

> In this pic the ranger(core) and the necro are on the same level of usefulness.

> The Ranger(core) needs alot of skill to match a noob Well Bomb Necro ( In a Zerg fight)

>

> You can give an idiot the Well Bomb Build and tell him Faceroll when the Commander tells you to and it works.

> Give an idiot a Ranger(core) build and he will be nothing more than a wasted slot.

>

> Thats the problem here.

>

> In Pug Squads , you cant know the skill level of the player but you know his class.

> The chance that a Core Ranger has the skill level to match or surpasses a necro in usefulness is really low.

> Mostly because a skilled ranger(core) will probably has the IQ to understand that other classes start where his class(core) ends.

>

> So YES a Ranger (we always talk about core ranger) CAN be usefull in WvW , but the chance to meet one is next to 0%.

> (OH and sorry i only mean Zerg fight Ranger are awesome in roaming)

And the ranger is astronomically more useful in smaller scale fights or fending on its own. A well-bomb necro that can win a 1v1 against a competent enemy needs to be way better than a longbow pewpew ranger.

Skill requirements of different builds for zerging should not be a basis of comparison of power.

I think traits being passive is a substantially better thing than proc ones. They make combat a lot more predictable for everyone involved which really helps the game in terms of the competitive environments. Every former pro player and a vast majority of competitive players will state outright that proc effects are not healthy for the game.

Passives in shroud are still somewhat active in that you need to weigh whether or not to utilize shroud/cooldowns for them.

I think one of the big problems necro has is that it has a lot of "signature" traits that are just downright weak in comparison to the rest of the game's powercreep in particular. > @"Robert Gee.9246" said:

> This is a pretty cool discussion so far. I'm interested to see where it goes.

>

> > @Lily.1935 said:

> >One suggestion I've been pushing for years is to have your skills 6-0 always available to you, even when in shroud, but with a hefty cost. I've suggested that if Necromancer was to gain this utility it shouldn't be for free.

> Currently the "cost" for using these skills is that you need to drop out of shroud in order to use them. Rather than paying lifeforce, you are putting your defensive ability on recharge.

>

>

> > @kKagari.6804 said:

> > A majority of our GM traits are passive in effect, or doesn't have the two pronged effects that Cleansing Ire has. To increase skill ceiling, and depth for necro, changes should start from core specs; there are simply too many passive GM traits.

> I think it's okay to have some passive and simple GM traits. And some passive traits like Parasitic Contagion can act as keystone traits that players can build and play around. It would be informative to hear some specific examples of the traits you're worried about.

I think these kinds of "passive" effects are honestly what traits should be all about. Having constant power is so much healthier for the game than proc effects, RNG, hp-triggers, on-hit triggers, etc. While a few are tolerable, they make PvP'ing a total nightmare and are and have been historically a big, big criticism among the top players in the PvP and WvW scene. Stunlocking yourself because of an invisible trait your opponent has slotted when making the skilled/smart decision of CC'ing your opponent at a critical moment is just really unfun and makes a lot of the gameplay frustrating.

I know people want some power spikes, but the freebie procs really need to get toned down. I'd be completely willing to trade Chill of Death, despite its extreme power, for something like a hefty damage modifer and a single boon corrupt when shroud skills 2-5 land on a target. This could help Close to Death be reworked into something more beneficial for applying repeated chill or something as well.

Big-effect procs, though... I'd rather do without entirely

As for utility skills in shroud, it honestly wasn't that big of an issue before, but with the SoS cooldown reduction gone, shroud-based builds are super-weakened in comparison to before/the rest of the game in most circumstances. I don't know if allowing util use is the answer at this point given the state of necro (which could change), but simply giving rudimentary utils (like 1-5) to shroud on longer cooldowns would seriously help the profession. This would also allow some distinct sets of utils for each type of shroud that better-suits their respective style of play, such as giving the reaper a lower-cooldown stunbreak but core necro a corrupt or something. At the very least, the base cooldown on shroud could come down.

Just give the cashout participation max with a lockout for twelve hours once every twelve hours. This prevents people who don't intend to actually play WvW from really gaming the system, but gets people leaving the mode quicker and letting more people enjoy it, while also making placement/server status actually reflective of game hours spent playing and not afk'ing.

Anyone really interested in WvW will prefer to have faster queues, and people not into WvW just doing it for pips can just make it a small daily which at the very least gets people into the maps.