Guild Wars 2

T raw.4658:

Chapell.1346:

T raw.4658:

Hrmm so after y’all get steal/trickery nerfed what will you demand to nerf on thieves now?

P/P?

Lets put it this way.
by nerfing steal and trickery you ruin p/p (atleast half of p/p viable build that i know in conquest).
i swear, people in this game need to stop watching their twitch.tv hero.

they havent nerfed the actual weapon skills.

Exactly,see how desperate they are?

watch unload channel to be decreased and zero projectile finisher slapped on

who knows, might be p/p or p/d with the upcoming venom 5sec reduction changes (deadly when traited) is the next meta to achive esports.

Edited for some future references

Solori.6025:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Honestly this article is redundant at this point. There is no way anything with respect to this game will change outside of an expansion. Otherwise they will be tinkering numbers when core issues stop the game being fun to a significant number of people (pvp wise).

The more you play the PvP the more you get disapointted with lameness. Everything is uncounterable. Thiefs spamming ports/evades. Mesmers spamming ports/damage from 1500 with massive insta burst. They are probably the two most frustrating to play against but on the whole every class is on some level frustrating to fight against. I guess massive sigil power also just adds to frustrations. Because you just die out of nowhere. That isnt fun to fight against. Thief having no cooldowns? Not fun. So many issues. And will never be resolved. So at this point making articles like this is pointless. It is better to either quit the game or just give up on any seriousness in the game and just enjoy it when you can enjoy it.

Either way, we all probably got our monies worth from this game. So thanks to anet for that. But in terms of a pvp game with lasting appeal. There is none due to how most of the classes are not fun to fight against. This is a design failure but it is minor compared to a good value for money game they produced.

You seem to be one of those people that just hate the game in general…

Why are you still playing if you don’t like any of the classes?

I don’t play anymore. Quit many times before, might play on occasion for fun when my friends play. Other than that…can you read? I said the game is good, it gives people their monies worth. But wanting it to be a league of legends like pvp success is just stupid. Its an MMO game built around PvE with PvP tagged onto it. What do people expect?

Lordrosicky.5813:

I don’t play anymore.

He raises a valid question, if you are not playing anymore then what are you doing here on the forums, adding your opinion to something you left?

kolompi.1287:

Lordrosicky.5813:

I don’t play anymore.

He raises a valid question, if you are not playing anymore then what are you doing here on the forums, adding your opinion to something you left?

If someone runs out of a burning building is it not ok for them to shout back “EVERYONE GET OUTSIDE!!!”?

kolompi.1287:

Lordrosicky.5813:

I don’t play anymore.

He raises a valid question, if you are not playing anymore then what are you doing here on the forums, adding your opinion to something you left?

A lot of us would love to play again if the game were even halfway enjoyable so it’s worth yelling into the aether in the very low chance that the devs actually listen.

Plus catharsis.

I would like to make a pun of this thread.

Haterz be like, “I ‘steal’ hate thieves, even after all the nerfs”

Thank you

Are we speaking of “steal” in general? Or after all 10 of the traits that effect it are applied in a build.

coglin.1867:

Are we speaking of “steal” in general? Or after all 10 of the traits that effect it are applied in a build.

From the original OP..
After all traits are applied.

Steal, underwhelming w/o traits, “op” with traits.

It’s hard to justify any sort of change to steal or its associated traits without giving us alternatives to those results. I feel pretty wasteful having a 35 second cooldown and not putting up several traits to pump it up. The former is quite depressing in most situations.

NinjaEd.3946:

Steal, underwhelming w/o traits, “op” with traits.

It’s hard to justify any sort of change to steal or its associated traits without giving us alternatives to those results. I feel pretty wasteful having a 35 second cooldown and not putting up several traits to pump it up. The former is quite depressing in most situations.

Coming Soon.

Shortbow auto attack is OP

More at 11

Anet should balance the profession as a whole, and not the use of one ability. Thieves are currently in a good place, balance wise. Despite OP’s list, thieves aren’t overpowered by any means. Nerfing steal would make them pretty underwhelming.

Alright, so, here’s the thing; talking about Steal is a tightrope of a balance discussion, and it simply can’t be looked at as a singular variable.

So many balance topics have been touched upon at once that it would be extremely difficult to have a reasonable balance discussion in this setting. To name a few:

• Line of Sight teleports (acceptable, unacceptable, maybe change how the game physics treat line of sight and objects moving along a line of sight path before changes get made)
• Condensed traitlines, or “mandatory” traitlines (do traitlines like trickery provide too much, or just too much of one aspect, and should they be so staple that they hurt diversity)
• The amount of functionality a single action can have (can a single action do too much, is having such a mechanic justified when it makes up for other imbalances, do the other imbalances exist simply so that a single action can be powered up to be strong)
• Disparity between investment and no investment (should something be near useless with no investment, should investment compensate accordingly when providing power, does some middle ground need to be met)

I mean, no offense intended to the thread because it’s definitely a worthwhile conversation, but (just like 99.9% of the other balance threads) taking something, listing out what all it does or can do, and then saying “therefore broken, fix it” doesn’t even present the argument as an actual problem, but an opinion that there is a problem.

The most logical way to have initiated responding to this thread would be to simply ask “why shouldn’t steal be able to do all of those things?” Or even “which of the associated functionality puts steal over the top?”

Then once all of that gets hashed out, you proceed to start discussing the bullet points and which ones would be the most applicable.

At the end of the day though, like many other things in the game, steal isn’t a simple fix. An outright nerf would be much more harmful to the class as a whole than the specs it intended to target. And really, it is only comparatively stronger than the next closest option, which brings up yet another balance point:

• Is it really that Steal is too powerful, or is it that other classes capabilities, particularly those that supplement the class mechanic, are not strong enough?

Most of the resulting conversations would be extremely fun to have, but ultimately way too subjective to make any sort of progress towards a conclusion because of all the differing opinions of what balance is, where balance should be, and how the game should and shouldn’t play.

So really, food for thought if the topic continues pushing forward.

kitten that’s a lot of stuff for one skill, traited or not. 20s cd too. lol

Chaith.8256:

Edit: I am down with increasing the limitations of Steal though, but I don’t agree with introducing counterplay by allowing good players to rofl-dodge it. Respecting the rules of LOS would be fair.

You mean like Warrior’s F1 skills ? Because that is where the Warrior is currently at. Thieves at least would have stealth/range/teleport to “auto” connect.

IMO, I don’t even think the ‘let it be dodgeable’ suggestion would actually change much with typical Thief play actually.

EDIT: I agree it is too much investment for a class mechanic (Steal traits should be combined and then spread out as GM traits in different lines).

if you are losing to a thief at this stage in the game you need to seriously reconsider build/play that you currently employ

if you are talking about tPvP then you need to realize that the thief is only strong as the 2nd/3rd man on a target. there is zero reason to change the ability unless you plan to fix the bugs that make it fail.

Thief is fine s/d is not need unitive cost by sword#2 by 1

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Actually shatter and steal are both skill-less builds since you are depending on the ability of you opponent to click on your character and nothing else.
miss click or miss dodge = gibbed.

Some kitten in this game really needs reliable counters (like retaliation was in the beginning) something that actually punishes going into zerk instead of making zerk the norm.

Any build that uses 1-2 buttons to drop huge damage has no reason to exist in this game tbh.

A Mesmer shatter/burst requires just about all the Mesmers buttons to be fired across two weapon sets, and quite possibly timing an interrupt or two to boot. And those buttons can’t all be pressed in the same instance.

So your comparison of shatter to steal fails. If it were true of shatter, you wouldnt have the thief > mesmer scenario that exists now.

JEFFARR.8163:

Thief is fine s/d is not need unitive cost by sword#2 by 1

That escalated quickly…

The build I’ve been running for like forever has received nerfs only (and a buff, basilisk v cd to 40s). I respect all changes as long as they don’t break classes, and bring balance.

Nerfing sword is not the way to go.

I’m just gonna take a shot in the dark a redefine balance for the purposes of this thread.

Balance: Nerf an entire class because some specs give me trouble so that those intended to be hit are meh and those that weren’t even considered were smashed into the ground with a 10,000 pound nerf bat.

All these cross-class comparisons prove absolutely nothing. You essentially say something should be nerfed because your equivalent of it isn’t exactly the same. “Oh burst skills can’t ignore LoS, please nerf”. Newsflash, adrenaline and burst skills aren’t Steal anymore than they are mantras. I could harp on the fact that thief’s damage mitigation doesn’t actually stop damage since attacks still hit you in stealth then whine and say thief needs more access to blocks like warrior or protection like guards, but that wouldn’t make any sense, because I’d be comparing two very different classes and expecting them to play exactly the same.

I am impressed with the OP though. They obviously put a lot of effort into misleading exaggerations and bargaining with potential nerfs, and most people don’t even go beyond “THIEF OP NERF PLZ”. Your suggested changes should be standalone, not reliant on changing several other things on completely different classes to make them reasonable. That’s where all of our problems come from, nerfs coming to classes that lowers them down and then at the same time no nerfs or buffs to classes that didn’t need them at the time, creating an even larger gap between the two.

Regardless of whether or not it is balanced, it’s not particularly good design to have everything stack onto a single ability like that. It would be much healthier if that power was distributed elsewhere in the class’ skill set.

This is mostly a function of the current (weak) trait design; as long as there are substantial differences in the power level of traits we’ll have a problem like this.

Ensign.2189:

Regardless of whether or not it is balanced, it’s not particularly good design to have everything stack onto a single ability like that. It would be much healthier if that power was distributed elsewhere in the class’ skill set.

This is mostly a function of the current (weak) trait design; as long as there are substantial differences in the power level of traits we’ll have a problem like this.

I like having one skill that does a lot of little things. It makes it risky for me to use and forces me to wait to use it until I think it’ll hit. It’s a risky skill to utilize because of all the little things it offers. If you use it for a specific beneift, such as the interrupt you may have wasted the healing it offers, wasted it’s boon removal (potentially), wasted it’s poison, or potentially anything else it does. You might have set yourself up to be corrupted. It all depends on the situation, and reality is that because it does so many little things, you have to figure out within the situaiton when the most optimal times to use it are.

I also think people don’t realize the amount of pressure invuln, stealth, dodges, evades, blinds, and blocks puts on a thief, especially when you want to steal, and especially in skirmishes/team fights. The biggest risk is missing steal. You’re left open to attacks while not dealing damage, which is the worst position for anyone to be in, but more impactful to a thief due to squishiness.

Keeping the effective power of everything as is, if it all gets distributed elsewhere, I may be able to use steal willy nilly and not care if I miss it, because everything that it used to do I just get for free from other parts of combat anyways. I rather like the decision making involved in using steal currently, because often times you realize that when you used it may have been a good time, but you can identify other times that would have been good to utilize is as well.

Regardless, thief isn’t at the top or bottom of the totem pole, so why make changes to it. Also making changes for the sake of making changes, which is what it looks like this is, seems like a waste of time to me.

Acandis.3250:

My only problems with steal are the following:

1. It is obstructed by absolutely nothing far too often.
2. It can rip Aegis, though it is not an unblockable skill.
3. It can be utilized even while you’re CCd
   • If you are hard CC’d, you should not be able to use any skill that aren’t stunbreaks. Plain and simple.

So to fix a skill you propose to change the entire system? Any skill that doesn’t have a cast time can be cast when stunned and all classes have such skills as a means to counterplay against hard CC should their stunbreaks run out (which should happen comparing the cooldowns of CC and stunbreaks). To me the only problem with steal looks like it can’t get obstructed.

Ensign.2189:

Regardless of whether or not it is balanced, it’s not particularly good design to have everything stack onto a single ability like that. It would be much healthier if that power was distributed elsewhere in the class’ skill set.

This is mostly a function of the current (weak) trait design; as long as there are substantial differences in the power level of traits we’ll have a problem like this.

The main problem is that every class is set up like this. A lot of the Elementalist’s traits deal with attunement dancing, Mesmers get quite a few things from shattering their clones, Rangers have a lot on the pet, Engineers on their gadgets, etc. All of the classes have a lot of powerful traits linked to their class mechanic, so it makes no sense to single out Thief like this, not unless you plan on doing an entire overhaul of the traits in the game.

In the spirit of keeping these forums a cleaner place, and to document the many various requests asked by many various posters, I’ve taken liberty of adding your steal adjust to the Nerf Wish List .

Sarrow.2785:

Am I the only thief who feels that the outcome of a fight doesn’t rely on a traited steal landing?

I win fights all the time when steal misses or is on CD.
I lose fights/have to retreat all the time when steal hits.

I don’t think steal is a big deal really. The only reasons I trait it is because a) the other traits are bugged or underwhelming and b) if you have the option to load traits on to a skill and then reduce that skill’s cooldown, you’re effectively reducing the CD of all the traits as well. Any intelligent player will try to maximise the synergy of their build.

shrug

Yes, actually.

It’s just people see all of the effects the skill can perform and QQ about it being too strong.

I’m not saying a fully-traited steal isn’t strong – actually, it’s very strong, at least in the scope of the sPvP meta – the problem is that it’s only strong on the basis that it can be used to counter pretty much anything and everything, and that this skill is a requirement for thieves in sPvP on the basis that every single other build is totally useless and has no role anywhere. It fuels a build dedicated to counter-play that has little counter-play to it… or at least in terms of the scope of what its role is. The problem, though, is that because everything else in the meta is so strong, both teams and thieves in general are dependent entirely on this kind of counter-play to be relevant.

So these complaints stem largely over fundamental problems with sPvP and the meta in general as well as the fact that every single other skill for thieves has been nerfed to oblivion to the point where this is the only utility and ability that the community and ANet has left them with to remain viable (thieves as a class have been directly nerfed in every single balance update to date). As per most complaints pertaining to sPvP, the source has more to do with the format and past changes rather than what’s actually being complained about.

Nerfing steal builds as they stand without major overhauls elsewhere would kick the thief entirely as a profession out of sPvP relevance. And it’s only there due to a very niche role fulfillment due to the existing meta.

It’s why I still prefer WvW-PvP because there is no real meta in the smaller scale, and a lot more builds are viable. If you complained about steal being too strong in WvW you’d get laughed out of the format.

@LOS: Fun fact, Guard’s JI ignores it as well.