brokerib

Loperdos’ Short Bow/Dual Pistol Build

Loperdos’ preface: I am by no means an expert on thieves, this is a build that I’ve been kicking around for the last couple weeks because I was curious if it could be done.  In the 350+ hours I’ve played on a thief, I wanted to see if I could run with a build that was a bit different, albeit not unique (given the immutable law of the internet).

I am fully cognizant of the fact that ranged DPS is quite a bit lower than melee DPS.  Pure DPS is not the purpose of this particular build, if that’s what you are looking for, look for a D/X backstab build, which will net you the most and highest damage.  That being said, the purpose of this build and the variant below (created by Phenn) is to provide an outline for a different weapon-set than most thieves are accustomed to using.  Some of the things that are different about this build as compared to other PvE builds is that you do not have to enter melee range, you have high mobility and survivability through that mobility, decent single target damage, great AoE and group utility.

Special thanks to Phenn for helping me work through this build and being there for the theorycrafting and testing phases.


THE BUILD



WEAPONS



HEAL/UTILITY SLOTS

Slot skills are a bit more open for two reasons.  First is that slot skills are largely situational, generally swapping between them depending on where and what is being fought.  In general running with at least 2 utilities that benefit from SA-I (20% CD reduction on Deception skills) makes it the most worthwhile.  



ARMOR & TRINKETS



TRAITS



CONSUMABLES (optional)



PLAYSTYLE TIPS AND TRICKS

Just like most thief builds, there are some basics that will help increase your survivability by loads(and yes, I realize that some of these are "duh" statements, skip if you prefer, I won't be offended, I promise ):

Phenn’s Short Bow/Dual Pistol Acrobat

THE BUILD (Click Here)

Like Loperdos’ build above, the following build depends on positioning and evasion for survivability, and maintains range at all times. Similarly, the primary damage-dealer is P/P’s Unload with SB for AoE and general support. The build utilizes the Short Bow and Dual Pistols, Berserker equipment and weapons, and depends on Crit Damage for DPS. Our choice in traits, utilities, food, and sigils however, will maximize our dodging potential:

• Feline Graces gives an extra dodge.  
  
• Healing gives Vigor with is a dodge every 5 seconds.  
  
• Signet of Agility gives two extra dodges.   
  
• Food increases endurance recharge with a flat increase of one dodge every 7.15 seconds.
  
• Sigil on offhand pistol gives two extra dodges after every kill.

You can see that dodging becomes a critical component of our build--so use them, and use them often. We don’t have to save them for pure evasion, but can (and should) use them as often as possible.


WEAPONS AND SIGILS



TRAITS 15/30/0/25/0

The build actually follows the most balanced trait distribution available to thieves. It offers flexibility in traits across all weapon sets, making it suited for our purposes, and allowing a shift to other weapon sets if necessary.



UTILITY/HEAL SLOTS

Much like Loperdos, we’ll be taking utilities that complement our primary defense mechanic, but in our case we’ll emphasize dodging.



ARMOR & TRINKETS




CONSUMABLES (critical for this build)



PLAYSTYLE TIPS AND TRICKS

The following are a few tips on playing this build in order to gain maximum effectiveness:

And there you have it.  The two builds put together by Phenn and myself.  Thank you for taking the time to read it, as I know its a long post with lots of descriptions.  I'm wordy, so shoot me.    As time goes on I will be editing, updating and contributing to any discussion that comes from this particular thread.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to in-game message me/add me as a friend: Loperdos.7924.

Posted to GW2 Forums, I don't expect it to last.  Please comment there as well.

TLDR: Points are boiled down here, but I encourage you to ready the body.

The Right to Make Money

No one is arguing against any individual or company’s right to make money.  What is generally a point of contention is how that money is made.  If oil was a clean, safe resource to produce, with absolutely no environmental impacts and operated in more of an open market than say, OPEC, there would be very few people who could complain about how they do business.  If the market crash had not occurred due to irresponsible lending and selling of securities, no one would have an issue with how much money the banking industry makes.

What this piece attempts to do is describe how poorly these practices are for consumers (ie: you) not just in terms of yourself, but for the game as a whole, and your fellow players.

More Money than a Flat Rate?

The product could in theory be sold on the  Cash Shop for a flat rate, especially if they are already being offered for a limited time.  The question becomes, why not?

There are various reasons.  The return on investment (ROI) of the lottery boxes is higher than that of a flat rate.  The cost of a flat rate in order to equal the return that the lottery boxes provide, a flat rate would appear to be too expensive, with too large of a price tag to pay in one expense.  This goes towards the wedge of individual experience, further below.

If it were a flat rate, you could determine whether you liked the product enough for it to be worth the flat rate quoted.  Or you could consider the product to be worth no money at all, at which point the company has lost your sale and has to make up the difference from a user who wants the product.

The drop rates are unknown until someone bothers to invest and do the research, either by grinding a lot of boxes or buying them outright, the latter of which is a net-positive for the company.  And by the time the results are recorded and posted, the company has already seen sales from consumers assuming that the drop rate cannot be that bad.

The Wedges of "Individual Experience" and "Personal Responsibility"

Divisiveness is the greatest weapon of any entity against a collective to shield from its greatest weakness. You want the populace to be split on issues because if a high percentage of the body every aligns itself against you, you will feel its effects.

The randomness of these boxes creates a variable experience.  However unlikely it is, it is possible for a lucky person to get the products he needs by opening a mere ten boxes.  Suddenly, his experience is “this is the best thing EVER.”  For another individual, they could open box upon box upon box and spend a large amount of money without getting a single claim ticket.

Since experiences vary, its harder to reach a consensus on drop rates.  There will be people satisfied with their experience and others who feel as if its unfair.  Some will be accused of merely being “unlucky.”  Some will engage ad hominem, attacking other consumers for buying so many boxes irresponsibly, despite that being the intent of the company.  Strife ensues and its much harder to direct blame against one specific entity as the customers squabble amongst one another.

It is therefore much harder to get consensus on implementation than if the product had a flat rate.

They benefit from these wedges to keep their customer-base from coming to a consensus on anything, even as far as debate the value of the implementation instead of the value of the product being offered for the price.

Instilling Urgency Artificially: Limited-Time Offers

If you could just grind these out through normal activity (gameplay), there are always going to be those who stick with the grind over the shortcut of buying the product outright.  So to convert even a tiny percentage of those people (a net positive for the company), the company has a limited time offer on the product.  That is greed.  The limited time offer on the product is nothing more than a trick, to artificially give a sense of urgency.

In games like Tribes: Ascend everyone can get access to everything.  If just takes time.  You can choose to grind it out or you can buy it outright.  There is no limited time offer.  There are sales to incentivize a period where you would like to see more income, but a gun in Tribes: Ascend is never going to disappear because you did not buy it this month. It is a psychological trick meant to make you spend more money, and is an anti-consumer practice.

This operates much like the Disney Vault, in which Disney only releases a movie for a limited time every seven years or so on home media.  This increases the scarcity of the movie and instills urgency to purchase the movie when it eventually becomes available.

Worse than Gambling

Gambling can be viewed as an experience. You play the game and the money is the barrier for playing the game, with more money as a reward for winning.  One usually goes in knowing that you will likely lose money, but there's also a chance you could come out of ahead.  It can get impersonal, such as with video poker machines or slot machines, but generally, it's an experience at playing a game of chance.

Common wisdom is that the results are stacked in the house's favor, and there is generally a poor outlook on people who think they can regularly come out ahead by playing, or in other words, playing to win.

Or going to a Dave & Buster’s (or Chuck E. Cheese’s).  Sure, you may be attempting to win tickets for a particular prize, but you are usually paying as much for the experience of playing the games themselves.  You get the experience.  It is a poor value and poor sense to play at these places just to win tickets and win prizes, especially without a particularly good run of luck, you would end up buying the prize outright than trying to win it with tickets.

But these lottery boxes are different.  You are not paying to gamble for the experience, generally.  There is actually no experience, or at least less of one.  The similarity is very much like buying a box of cereal you hate because it has an item you really want.  At that point, you are just ripping open the box, pouring out the cereal for the product and potentially getting nothing for your trouble.  Rinse and repeat ad nauseum until the limited time offer (artificially created sense of urgency) expires or you get the prize you want.

The Company’s Gamble

The company has its own gamble going.

It is relying on the obfuscated nature of its game of chance, with its accompanying ability to change the odds at their leisure, to keep its customer base arguing and speculating over the factual details as much as the subjective details.  If you knew all the details, it would be much easier to base an argument for (or against) purchasing the product outright and there would be less coloring and argument from individual experiences.

It is relying on the artificial sense of urgency to push people into buying the product without spending a lot of time thinking about it, as well as pushing those who attempted grind it out to ultimately buy into the lottery boxes from the Cash Shop at the eleventh hour.

It is relying on human nature.  There are people out there who are gullible, naive, have little foresight and in some cases, an addiction to gambling.  These people with a clinical lack of self-control who will hand over money to engage in this process in hopes of getting the rush of a win.

Defending the Indefensible

The fact of the matter is that there will always be people attempting to defend these practices.  Usually, the sum of the arguments is that the company has a right to make money.  But why?  Why are these practices worthy of money?  And why do these people, who can only benefit as a consumer if these practices were revised to be less abusive, defend them?  Why implement these practices over a flat rate, offered through the Cash Shop, unless this lottery box implementation makes more money.

I tend to look towards a rather quotable piece of TotalBiscuit:

What the hell happened to gamers looking out for each other?  When did that suddenly fall by the wayside in favor of being an unemployed PR representative for a company that has been milking you for money?  When did this happen? Was this with the advent of the Internet?  Is this a recent thing?  I can’t exactly pinpoint when it happened, but fanboy culture has gotten to the point of being actively detrimental to video games.  It benefits nobody whatsoever other than the companies in question.

It’s wonderful that they’ve got a small little army of people that are willing to actively suppress dissent.  Actively lie about the game.  Actively try to character assassinate people.  Engage in ad hominems.  Slam them over social networks.  Downvote videos.  Lie in the comments section.  It’s wonderful if they’re willing to do that, if you happen to be [the company] or any other company that has people like that.  It’s terrible for the rest of us.  It’s really really bad.

…

Gamers don’t look out for each other anymore.  And that’s really depressing.  The last thing that should be happening is gamers actively trying to mislead other gamers because they want to feel better about their purchase.  Or because they want more players in their game, even though the game is clearly not up to spec.  Where do you get off doing that?  That is morally bankrupt.  That is ethically unsound in the worst possible way.  It sucks, and you suck for doing it.

People who defend these practices want the games they play to succeed regardless of how the company in question behaves, because they have some investment.  They either want the game to have more players, be more successful so it will stick around for a long time, get more development, release expansions, etc, etc.

TLDR: Ultimately, it boils down to the idea that the lottery boxes offer a better return on investment than just simply slapping a flat rate on the product.  It adds nothing to the product itself and is just a method for increasing profits, without doing anything.  It is a form of predation on consumers, it should not be tolerated, but there will always be people willing to defend a company’s decision either out of apathy, a belief it does not nor will ever affect them or some other selfish reason.

Edit: I lost a ton of formatting moving from Google Docs, and I'm adding it back in.

After seeing some posts here, and on the official forums for awesome recreations such as Dr Who, Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Roman Legionnaire and others, I thought might be good to put together a comprehensive guide on recreating these icons in GW2. Posting a character shot, then a recreation you made in GW2 of the person your emulating and a quick summary of what you used.

Mine is Nightmare, from Soul calibur 2 specifically. Heres the pic


And the recreation in GW2



Uses Dark Helm, Pitfighter Shoulder, Orrian Gauntlets, Nobleman's Breastplate, Heritage Legs, and Boots. Wielding Nightmare sword.

Anyone has a suggestion to make it better please let me know. Interested to see what others come up with. Will also try to posts others I find with credit to those that created them.

Maybe Twilight is overused. But I wanted it ever since i first saw it. Took a while, but finally got the last parts today and put it together.

I think Indo got the better of everyone on this entire forum. He makes a few posts and the entirety of SF's forum warrior squad enters the fray and ol' Digi-tard over here makes a long ass post about people hating TW liked by the entirety of JQ.

You even managed to get Kelo out of his den asking for 1v1s.

How can you not like TW?

Soki, on 30 April 2013 - 04:10 AM, said:

If you're going accuse a person of being a valiant defender of sub-par product, then at least acknowledge that you might be a negative-nancy about a decent product. It's all subjective and pointing fingers at each other isn't even a debate. There are three facts here, 1. ArenaNet has made changes post release. 2. ArenaNet has been consistent in their updates in regards to how often. 3. ArenaNet  will continue to make changes (updates) in future.

Whether these changes are good or not is purely subjective. I for one have liked most of the updates, only few things I didn't care for, but not enough to warrant a "make or break" mentality about it. Quite frankly I think it's rather premature to be suggesting it's a "make or break" update when we haven't seen it yet. Furthermore it will be months before some changes are out of beta.

Would like my Norn Guardian to look like this...



Pick by Greyall. Check out his Deviant page for more awesomeness

i look forward to your battles chuckles, ill be here wait in Maguuma Borderlands as always

/salute

Sea of Sorrows - The Comeback Kid

Sea of Sorrows has traveled a long road up to this point. We've had multiple matches with close calls as we climbed the WvW ladder to the very top rung. And then we fell right back down again. To no less than precisely where we began.

Six months has changed a lot. New tactics, new experiences and new faces - not least from now being able to see who you are actually fighting half the time. Through it all, Sea of Sorrows has found new resolve, stronger and bolder than ever before. You may have struck us down, but because of that we have become more powerful than you could have ever imagined.

We will not bore you to tears with the minutia - instead, we shall show you our resolve and focus. Here is a picture of our battle-hardened leaders plotting the downfall of our enemies:

Here too is a picture of our crack troops waging war and laying waste to our foes:

Yes, that is correct. We have embraced the idea that WvW is actually supposed to be enjoyable, not just a second occupation. Long gone are the days of needing to stay on for another two hours because you're behind on ppt and you have that coverage gap. Roll on the days when you spend another four hours in there anyway just because it was actually good fun and the "I'll go to bed after we flip this next tower" strategy just didn't work.

Sea of Sorrows has even embraced those which other "communinty-focused" worlds pushed to the side: Those who are inclined to PvE, those indecisive PvX folk, and even the rare and endanged PvP species. They are ALL welcome into our community. We do not believe in "All calls" or "gear checks" anymore. We have created a community that is accepting to any and all players.

It is because of this community foundation, that we are doing quite well in T4. So whats the problem then? Well, we're doing a little bit too well. Realistically, we're facing a situation where, at best, we are going to bounce between T3 and T4 - being too strong for one, but not strong enough for the other. At worst, we just end up with rather lengthy stays in T3. We don't really mind winning or not, but if we're going to be thrust up a tier, we'd at least like to be competitive to ensure an enjoyable fight between the worlds.

We would like to field more active WvWers across all prime-times (NA, SEA and EU); ideally bringing in guilds who enjoy all aspects of GW2 and are happy to support the server community. We may be underestimating here, but we consider underestimating how many are required to create a competitive match more favorable than bringing in too many. In our eyes a competitive match isn't being able to win in every timezone, it's each world having their own strength(s) and being able to avoid being completely dominated outside of that. We are not necessarily aiming to win.

We are in no particular rush. We would prefer that interested players and guilds take the time to get to know our community and be sure that we're the right world for them to call a new home.


For some specifics, here is what we have to offer

• Community Teamspeak
  
• Community website (gw2sos.com) with an active event calendar. All guilds are welcome to post events!
  
• Weekly WvW meetings to discuss strategy
  
• General Community Meetings held every other week
  
• Strong Oceanic base (we truly still do have the best Oceanics out there!)
  
• Lack of Laggy Zergs! (And Queues)!
  
• Active cooperation between guilds!
  
• Small Ops are highly valued. We want to see guilds of all sizes shine
  
• Strong PvE community (both NA & SEA) - Working on Legendary? Come grind with us! Need a temple open? Our PvE Commanders open temples on a regular basis to help people get their karma gear.
  
• Multiple guilds on SoS work together weekly to do t3 bounties - meaning guilds who are smaller, or more WvW focused can still get in on the action without needing to do much organizing themselves!
  
• Most of all - a family type community where people help each other and reach across the boundaries of guilds to all players in SoS.

If you are interested in learning more please feel free to contact Errawen (NA) at errawen.sos@gmail.com, Arakeem (EU) at charon@villanousity.com, or Rooster (SEA) at LeRooster.sos@gmail.com.


I will leave you with a video featuring some of the sexy ladies of SoS being mischievous!

No idea about this game before.. but their trailer sold me...

Scorpion, on 16 April 2013 - 08:24 PM, said:

Recommend for what? PvE, SPvP or WvW? For PvE i recommend having both. My warrior have full berserker and i always keep a helmet, leggings and chest in my inventory. What to choose is up to you. On advice, you need to know your character and the encounter if you don't want to die repetitively in full zerker and be a burden for your team. If you don't feel comfortable with it in the moment you should consider to get zerker trinket and knight gear. As you get more and more comfortable with your gameplay, you can replace gradually your knight gear for zerker.

Here is a google doc I made for myself of some great Karma to Gold recipes. I hope it is intuitive to understand as I made it for myself. I have stopped crafting for profit, so hopefully someone can take advantage of this info:

https://docs.google....RUE&usp=sharing

Let's get real. I bought SWToR and played it for 2 months. If I could sub to that crap I'll sub to anything promising what they are promising.

At least I'll have the right to bitch about it later if it explodes. That's worth $60-70 bucks at my age.

Dakan, on 14 April 2013 - 06:59 PM, said:

Dakan, on 14 April 2013 - 07:47 PM, said:

Ok, so I've been thinking about this and now that I'm finally on a computer again, I think I can properly respond.  In addition to my comment earlier about having perma-vigor (or at least as much vigor as you need, since its maxed at 100% increase, having "more" of it doesn't really benefit you, except longer duration...which is not beneficial if you are at full endurance anyway) there's something else that you are missing, mostly in regards to the bolded sections of your posts...

One of the overall questions/definitions that I think needs to be addressed comes into play with the first thing that I bolded in your statement.  They have a larger window in order to benefit from activating the skill (IE, 3s vs 1/2s or 1/4s or what have you), meaning they are easier to gain the benefit from...so does easier = better? That's the first question.

Now, the next thing that I think really needs to be taken into account, especially when comparing the various skills that the various professions have (since you so neatly dismissed most of the thief skills as viable evades based off one assumption ) is the overall use of the skill, rather than just the skill when it is activated.  Are Distortion, Blurred Frenzy, Elixir S and Mist Form (to name a few) better than Flanking Strike or DB, on activation? Yes. The real issue comes into play when you take the entire fight into account, rather than just at the moment of activation.  

With Distortion and Elixir S, you have a 3s evade compared to a 60s CD.  That's a pretty long time to be waiting around for your evade to come back.  I don't know about you, but I don't think a 5% up-time constitutes as an awesome skill (doesn't mean that its bad or doesn't have its usage).  Same thing goes for Mist Form, except you are looking at 3s vs a 75s CD (and yes, I realize that you can trait to reduce these CDs, but the most reduction you are probably looking at is 20%, since that's the basic CD reduction)...so here we have an even lower up-time on the evade.  Compare this to either FS or DB where you have a 1/2s or 1/4s evade built into the attack, with no CD.  This makes a HUGE difference.  The only CD that a thief has to worry about on its built in evades is the "global CD" of its profession mechanic, Initiative.  When it comes to CDs, this "global CD" is a soft CD because its quite easy to avoid running into situations where you are completely on CD.

Just randomly rejecting a 1/4s evade because you think its worthless isn't honest, because that 1/4s of an evade (which I wonder if the tooltip is actually correct because its definitely longer than that) comes in handy.  Is it more dependent on player skill and the ability to time the evade correctly? Absolutely.  The fact that its spammable makes it that much better, just like any of the other built-in evades that a thief has.

Better built in evades on skills.  Hm.  No.  Like I said above, on a single activation of a single skill, yes, the evades are better on other classes.  That's without factoring in the 60s CD on Distortion or Elixir S.  Do you know how many built-in evades a thief can do in 60s?  Quite a few .  Just with your basic Trickery + Acro build (using S/D for simplicity's sake) and you can drop 4 Flanking Strikes (3 because you have 15 init pool, and a 4th because you will almost certainly regen 1 init before you get through with the other 3 FSs) at a 1/2s evade each...which is 2s of evade total (not to mention the other benefits from it, because that's not relevant to the discussion).  With a Acro + Trickery build, you have some of the best init regen abilities of any build (throw in some CS and you've got it made), so you can drop a LOT of FSs in a short amount of time.  Even if you compare Blurred Frenzy (which in all honesty, does come closest to the thief's skill evades) you are going on a 2s evade for an 8s CD.  This is less bad, but its still not a great up-time at only 25%.

As I mentioned above, add in the fact that a thief can get perma-vigor via vigor on heal and steal to the fact that while the thief's individual skills may be harder to take advantage of the evade on activation, overall, they have more usage in anything longer than a single encounter.

TL;DR, take the thief built-in evade skills within the greater context of the class and you begin to see their usage compared to other profession's evade skills.

:B


EDIT: Seriously? NO ONE is commenting here about the first gameplay video of Dark Souls 2? INCREDIBRU!

My impressions are that graphics have been improved significantly and gameplay wise, I feel it a bit awkward, like if the character animations were faster than in DS1.