Sand Shards

Anyone else think that this skill may be a little bit overpowered. I was jsut on an RA run and our A/D was able to kill entire teams by himself. Over 400 aoe dmg every 5 secs may be a lil much.

Your thoughts.

I agree, Sand shard seens over powered. I was just up against an A/D with sand shards and he took out our whole team, not even a boon prot can heal fast enough to heal just what the assassin was doing. While i think its an interesting skill, it seems just a little to strong to me.

Someone tell me the build please

I was happily going along in an RA team in TA, when two of these devils dropped us in seconds.

ummm sand shards plus assassin offhands and dual attacks that miss

perhaps D/Me would work... just casting Signet of Midnight to blind you and 1 foe constantly always a miss then

Perhaps they could change it from "whenver one of your attacks fails to hit" to "whenever one of your attacks is 'blocked' or 'evaded'"? Then it could only be used to counter actual enemy defensive abilities. Having it activate when you use an assassin off-hand or dual attack that you know you don't meet the prerequisites for seems rather silly.

At first I was thinking...

A mesmer/monk build? Mesmers have blackout, archane thievery(factions has the same skill in a different name) and some other disabling skills... powerblock?

monks have pacify where they cannot attack unless they get attacked

That might do the trick.. Damn I'm at work I wish I could try it out now

Maybe Mes/Nec or Nec/Mes I might create a pvp nec...
for this build I'm thinking
1. spiteful spirit = damage when you attack/cast spells
2. price of failure = damage when you miss
3. empathy = damage when you attack
4. there's another nec skill that damage their allies when they attack, that would be funy hahaha they'd kill their own men.
5. maybe the stealing skill spell
6. some healing mechanism?(ether feast probably, or some necro blood one i dunno)
res sig.

That sounds better than the mes/monk build hehe...

Damn its not 6 yet! hahah i wanna go home haha

I haven't had any real trouble with the Sand Shards assassins, playing both BL monk and DB/VIM Scythe Warrior. My monk runs away, my warrior cuts them down.

Does it work when it is being evaded or blocked? That might bring a rather successful counter to the use of certain sand shard builds, getting more use out of straight block abilities and stances to evade.

There are 2 WTF was Anet thinking skills I've seen so far, one is D/A obviously, sand shards and then just spam exausting assault (will always miss, recharge instantly, and lay down 4 attacks per second). This is obviously a stupid mistake by Anet and its just like wtf.

Then there is also stunning strike. Its broad head arrow, but impossible to dodge, and with a 5 seconds recharge and no energy cost (with ias). All I can say is wtf.

id prefer when blocked or evaded actually then its balanced to me it seems

this would be great for farming it sounds

Been observing HoH, and saw a few teams running 3-4 D/A's. They're like walking Balthazar's Auras.

The simple thing is:

A) Anet will nerf this thing very quickly. You will not see this after this PVP event is over. Hell, it may get the nerf-stick before it's even done. It's just too cranked. So don't get your panties in a bind. This skill is getting nerfed. Period.

B) It's funny that all the TA builds are running this currently. Everyone is. Literally. It's all you see, it's all you hear about. Tons of giddy kiddies saying "LOL PWN JOIN D/A SPIKE FTW!!1!". What's hilarious about it, is when they're facing the same damn thing. Who can sand shard faster? .... We shall see.

For all your D/A users. Enjoy your exploit. It won't last. And there's no skill involved to this thing. Point & click. Go back to Diablo II with that crap.

Until then, 3x Angelic Protection P's can give you just enough time to slap those weak ass D/A's with plenty of your own damage--and I love watching them burn.

Siphon Speed FTW, I ram monks until they are 0 energy and then they die. If warrior attacks behind my back, he will suffer greatly too and monk is too busy healing himself. Two deaths. Of course there is rare teams which know how to handle with this build but it is too overpowered anyway. Chance to get gladiator point is very high with this build in random arena.

Spiteful spirit works very well against these guys, in my experience.

But yes, Sand Shards is clearly to Nightfall's PvP weekend what Temple Strike was to Factions. It'll get whacked hard by the nerf bat after this weekend....I doubt they'll do a skill update mid-weekend, but we'll see. It's certainly trendy right now.

Tactical question: Does anyone know whether Sand Shards uses random hit locations, or always hits the torso?

i was trying sand shards and illusionary weaponry this morning it didnt work

It's whenver your attacks fail to hit, not whenever they fail to inflict damage. Illusory Weapon strikes still hit for 0 damage--which, incidentally, makes them quite effective against Reversal of Fortune.

Anyway, it seems reasonable to assume that having Sand Shards work with assassin attacks for which you do not meet the prerequisites is a bug.

Playing in RA and TA is pretty much useless right now I find.

I went through 20+ games and not a single one didn't have either a dual-steal toucher and/or a shard exploiter. It makes the game very annoying to play as balance and skill is thrown all out the window. Point and click gentlemen. That's what these kinds of obvious oversights degenerate this game into. Best defense: just run and run and run.

To top it off, these two arenas are notorious for having people who (a) can't seem to follow called targets, (b) don't run from the exploit/retarded characters and (c) say "stfu" when someone points out something in the hopes of helping the team to pull a victory, and not a poor defeat where everyone drops in seconds and it looks pathetic.

Bleh.

Fix this bull-excrement A.net. Get off your fat paid asses.

I demand the R in RA be changed from Random to Retard.Seriously.

As for Shard Storm,don't worry!It'll be fixed after the pvp preveiw and you won't be affected by it when the game comes out 3 or 4 months later!

YAY!

they should change it to evade or something or increase recharge time so it can be shatterd

Maybe they will be lazy and nerf it to an elite (similar to IW and Hundred Blades).

That wouldn't fix anything. You could still spam the double attacks like mad, they'd just cost energy, meaning you'd need to do something to get your energy back, and for both the Dervish and Assassin, that is very easy.

It's just something they overlooked people....

Some of the people here are acting like Anet did this for the sole purpose of annoying them. Give them time to sort it out, this is a Beta! Beta's are FAR from perfect. Anet did not make this skill to personally attack you or anyone else, nor did they do it to upset any kind of balance. It's just a mistake, something that was overlooked. You may think it was something obvious that they should have caught, but that's really not the way it works. Nobody found out how to exploit this until halfway through the first day. Developers aren't going to have thousands of people actively searching for ways to use skill combos, after all.

wait how does this build exactly work? wut skilsl are used? i know u use dual atks to miss to deal dmg wit sand shards, but i keep hearing about how they pump aoe dmg rapidly in huge amoiunts. dont the misses take the same amount of time as a hit? i see way of empty palm used to keep the dual atks from costing energy, but how bout the speed spam?

exhausting assualt=1/2 sec activation time you hit insanely fast with it

For some reason I see another assassin nerf looming in the horizon. Grats to people for making assassin viable in pvp even if for a short while.

my best bet against it is diversion and shatter enchant, but by the time i cast that, chances are im down, even as fast cast mesmser

I was just playing this in RA, and yes it's a nasty character. But counters against them are deadly aswell. Shatter enchant will deny all damage from them and empathy/spiteful will wreck them. This is a pvp BETA weekend, it's your (involuntary) job as part of the mass to test things, and push skills to it's full potential before the game comes out - hopefully so that the skill WILL be balance when Nightfall comes out.

If something seems overpowered in a beta, you carefully look for some way to counter it...it might be overpowered, but then again it might not, if you're not careful in considering it.

However, I think this one fits firmly in the realm of "exploitable bug," not "balance issue." If they were using Signet of Midnight to blind themselves so they'd miss, that would be a different issue, but off-hand and dual attacks that don't have proper prerequisites are almost certainly supposed to be considered skill failures, as if you got interrupted or something, not considered as swinging and missing.

Which is kind of inconvenient, in that as a bug I scruple to use it, rather than feeling free to copy the build until Anet rebalances things.


I just played in RA using the second Paragon template, had two Dervishes on my team which were not using this exploit, and we got a 4-win streak before we ran into someone who was, so RA is not entirely saturated with this exploit.

The amusing thing is that the person we ran into using this exploit wasn't even good at it. We had one of his allies dead and the next one half-dead (without any of my party dropping below half health) before I noticed there was an assassin standing next to me not attacking me I was getting rapidly hit by Sand Shards.



My suggestion for a not-that-good-but-highly-amusing counter: take off your torso armor (so you start taking around 70 damage per hit from Sand Shards, rather than 23ish) and use Spirit Bond (Monk protection prayer) to auto-heal yourself for 80 health every time you get hit for more than 60 from a single attack.

I was just testing out a Dervish build using 12 Mysticism + Pious Renewal to have enough energy to fuel Vital Blessing + Protective Spirit + Spirit Bond while wearing no armor except shoes (for a rune and +1 energy pip). Any hits that would normally strike for 20+ damage now get bumped up over 60, then capped to 60.5 by Protective Spirit, thereby setting of Spirit Bond to heal you for 70-80, and you actually have enough energy to keep them all up (and lose little energy even if they're stripped). I solo'ed (group size = 1) the Zaishen Obsidian Spike group without trouble.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a few too many sources of low-damage hits in real PvP to make it effective (someone torched me with one of the Conjure Element enchants as soon as I tried it in RA--you take around triple damage from anything that normally hits for under 20). It ought to survive this Sand Shards exploit build, though, which I find highly amusing.

Nerfed with new build

the old crip shot ranger still seems to work against them
i mean remember, theyre still a melee class

Tbh i couldn't agree more... (hell i'm even playing the toucher purely because it requires ALOT less effect than the Cripshotter i've been playing all morning). It seems they've nerfed it though now to be Scythes only... probably due to all this whining, even though i've only actually seen 2 SS abusers so far.

There is a new build right now, they probaly fixed it.

Already posted by TRUEGamer, It was Nerfed.

Sand Shards only works on Scythe Missed Hits.