Guild Wars 2

Thieves has very good access to vigor and endurance gaining. In addition to their evade specialty, perma evading with attack skills makes sword builds op. If you play against a well-made evade build, you won’t even deal damage with some classes.

Solution : Each skill with evade allows evade for once, they won’t allow player to evade after the first use. It is to prevent spamming the same thing consecutively. Also 5+2 d/p perma stealth build needs more internal cooldown for stealth. With that, you can give thieves some more hp/toughness buff to compensate these spam nerfs. Please de-emphasize all kinds of spam builds in pvp including cc, pet, stealth, evade spams etc.

Look, I agree that Feline Grace should be nerfed, at least a little bit. I might even agree to a LS nerf, as long as other weapon skills are buffed (such as reverting or changing the boonsteal nerf on that skill- it’s caused many extremely powerful builds that existed before the LS patch in early 2013 to come back into prominence and become absolutely monstrous). Heck, Jumper stated most of the changes that needed to be made, and while I don’t agree with all of them, I almost completely agree with all of the sword changes, or at least their intentions.

That being said, you really need to L2P. Thief is by far my most-used class, and within the class, S/D was the weaponset that really "raised me into maturity" as a thief (not to claim that I’m some kind of amazing player, per se). I would be willing to bet that there are few other thieves out there that have displayed the same kind of absolute and undying worship devotion to the weapon set as I have, so that should at least give my following advice some merit. Anyways: thieves have multiple casting times, aftercasts, and "vulnerable spots" in their cast times that make hitting sword thieves possible. For example, at the end of Flanking Strike, a thief is essentially rooted in place for a short period of time, and is vulnerable. During the sword auto attack, each of the autos has a rather large after cast, which makes it possible to hit them if they don’t combine the aftercast with an evade (which is essentially Jumper’s "patent"). During Infi Strike, it is again possible to hit a thief quite easily due to the overall casting time and aftercast of the skill, unless, again, a thief is able to pull off combining an evade with the aftercast of the skill (which is admittedly also an extremely difficult maneuver to pull off). Larcenous Strike is the same as the previous two skills: you have to evade during the cast in order to reduce the aftercast. All of these maneuvers require a load of experience in order to master, and, quite frankly, it’s extremely difficult to even grasp a small understanding of them. Using them in play is near impossible.

Understanding that, you can probably beat ~95% of all S/D thieves extremely easily. There are a few resilient ones that have played the weaponset for months and continue to play it, and have thus gained a lot of experience with the weaponset, but, to be completely honest, I don’t think that anybody who picked up a thief and started playing S/D from scratch would live very long. It’s become an extremely dissatisfying weaponset to use, and is honestly pointless when you take into account the skill required to play this weaponset as opposed to playing other classes.

Even I am personally beginning to find myself getting sucked into my mesmer (with my newly "patented" 0/20/30/20/0 S/F+St Lockdown build, which oddly enough does a lot of damage from Ogre Runes and Zerker amulet, and while not as effective as most other LD builds, is fun as kitten to play) because of how much easier it is to play a _Lockdown_ mesmer (the type of mesmer that is typically viewed as being the most challenging), and to make things worse, a build that isn’t even meta- I made it up myself, completely from scratch, in about 1/20 of the time it took me to create and hone my other "patented" build on my thief (10/0/0/30/30 S/D + SB). The truth of the matter is that thieves don’t have as many resources to draw from as other classes do, so the real art of playing thief comes from utilizing what you do have to the fullest extent of your ability. Unfortunately, most thieves can’t do that, so most of your fights will be relatively simple with the aforementioned advice against S/D. The story I’ve been passing around recently is that the last time I played against an S/D thief (using the most "common" S/D build, 10/30/0/30/0), all I had to do was auto attack at the correct time and I won my fights.

EDIT: as for perma stealth, it no longer exists.

Evades are PART of thief’s survive-ability. Not an additional benefit on top of it.
So before any changes proposed to increase the amount of hits thieves actually take, changes to the amount of hits thieves CAN actually take should be considered.

Raise thief survival by other means and then we can talk about evades (and no, i don’t play evade spec and i hate it with passion actually).

Ok here’s the official class description of thief:
Experts at stealth and surprise, thieves can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air, or steal items from their opponents and use them as weapons. Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which can make them very hard to hit.

It’s not as if thiefs can handle any situation on their own like some other classes can.
As I said somewhere before: The reason you think thiefs are unfair is bc. they kill faster than any other class in the game … which is what they are meant to do (if they aren’t even trumphed by warriors in dps at the moment) but on the counterside, they also die REALLY REALLY fast.
So if you want to eliminate even one mechanic to stealth or evade, you need to give thiefs MUCH more armor and MUCH more health (I still think that thief having lowest HP pool beside Ele and Guardian is bullshöt).

Swimfan.8014:

Ok here’s the official class description of thief:
Experts at stealth and surprise, thieves can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air, or steal items from their opponents and use them as weapons. Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which can make them very hard to hit.

It’s not as if thiefs can handle any situation on their own like some other classes can.
As I said somewhere before: The reason you think thiefs are unfair is bc. they kill faster than any other class in the game … which is what they are meant to do (if they aren’t even trumphed by warriors in dps at the moment) but on the counterside, they also die REALLY REALLY fast.
So if you want to eliminate even one mechanic to stealth or evade, you need to give thiefs MUCH more armor and MUCH more health (I still think that thief having lowest HP pool beside Ele and Guardian is bullshöt).

The official class descriptions say a lot of things. For example Guardian’s says something like “They have low innate hp because they have the best passive health regen”. But this isn’t true. Warrior actually does have the best passive health regen.

Regardless, evades problem is that there is no hard counter available. There are unblockable skills in the game, toughness has vulnerability, dodge has weakness to lower dodge regen rate, boons have boon strip. Evade has nothing. Any time you see something being spammed repeatedly its because no counter exists to punish them for spamming.

Its not unreasonable to give classes ways to counter evade. It exists for everything else, why should thieves be a exception? Actually thieves have quite a few exceptions to rules which is why they are perceived as a cheesy class.

1. There is only one counter to stealth in game
2. There is no hard counter to evade
3. Chill doesn’t not effective initiative, but it affects the cooldowns of every other class in game.
4. Missing a attack/having it blocked or avoided in stealth does not reveal the thief.

These type of mechanics are bad for the game and lowers the skill cap of players. And builds up the idea that if such counters existed then the class will be broken. But in reality the only thing that it does do is require the person to actually think things through before carrying out their attack.

Counter play is good for the game, its needed to sustain balance.

the evade mechanic of this game is fine, also the last nerf on vigor for thiefs has done its Job, if you want “perma” vigor for thief you have to invest Minimum of 35 Points for it, fair …
but mesmer /ingi/guard and eles dont have to invest so much Points to get much more vigor as well …. this is real prob, because they all have more then evade to avoid dmg.

Also Feline grace is good as it is, if you having Problems with weaponskills, you should Name them and suggest a Balance Option.
You should think about more aspects of any class before simple Suggest nerfs on a mechanic, thief has no immunitie skills and not every thief has stealth, so what about thoose thiefs which playing p/p sh s/p ??

I think some ppl want thiefs as a stillstanding target which shouldnt do dmg….. when evading getting crippled and immobilized and everytime you stealthed getting instant downstate …….