Guild Wars 2

They shouldn’t be able to go stealth in combat similar to WoW thiefs. Although they should have 1-2 ways to go invis, but with a long to medium C/D.

I’d be fine with 5 second revealed debuff when we attack from stealth. (instead of the 3seconds we currently have)
And a 2 second revealed debuff when we pop out of stealth without attacking.

But then condition thieves might need something to compensate for their loss in DPS, like a buff for pistol auto attack.

IMO, thieves only need one change… and that is their elite skill “spin to win”. I’m not saying this elite skill is OP, but this skill does not fit into the characteristics of an “assassin” class. Thiefs specialise in single target destruction, hence the high DPS output they have. I don’t see a problem with the DPS of thieves, they lack survivability and thus need high DPS to make up for it. I don’t see a problem in stealth, it can get annoying at times if they continue to stealth and then attack, but thieves with this play style rarely make an impact in WvW, and they are usually glass cannons which means they take the risk of being downed in an instant.

Now back to the change… “spin to win” effectively transforms thieves from a high single target dps class to a high multi target dps class. This defeats the purpose of the class and doesn’t really make sense that they would have a skill like that. I’m not complaining, it doesn’t bother me (because personally I find thieves one of the easier classes to defeat), but I’m just suggesting that if any change is needed to the class, it’s to replace “spin to win” with a more suitable single target elite skill for a single target specialty class

how many QQ, i don’t use a glass cannon build but a balanced S/D build, I’m just saying there are many ways to thwart GC thieves and the stealth, u need to LTP. And if a thief has no invisibility is dead meat if you really have to make any changes we want something consistent in return.

Cloud.7613:

They shouldn’t be able to go stealth in combat similar to WoW thiefs. Although they should have 1-2 ways to go invis, but with a long to medium C/D.

I don’t agree with this idea.
They should go stealth in combat. That’s the thing making the thief a thief.

The problem is not their stealth, the problem is their enormous awesome crits, damages and backstab. Just don’t let them hit crit for a while after they go out of stealth and nerf backstabbing. That’s all…

The problem is its only an issue in wvw due to rendering issues (ie, they render way too slowly: by the time i see the “smoke” de-stealth animation which occurs 1-2 seconds slower in wvw, they already have stealthed again via CnD. In sPvP stealth decloaks render much faster, so its way, way less of an issue. Unless they decide to make balance changes for thief specifically in wvw only and have essentially “2 different” thief classes, i don’t see how they will be able to fix it.

One thing they should do imo though, is drop priority on rendering pets, by alot. That might help a bit; and increase rendering priority on thieves in general (not sure how the system works but it like when it does its check on who to render it should do 1.) all thieves within 1500 range >2.) distance to you, (closer gets more priority etc.) yada yada.

Nashaan.3160:

Webley.1295:

Columba.9730:

Highest dps, permastealth, best mobility, decent ranged dng. What’s balanced about this? Thieves are in abject denial of god mode.

What needs fixing is peoples perception on thiefs

Highest DPS, Stealth and mobility. So thats a 30/30/30/30/30 build your talking about then. When can I spec like this? Because im limited.

And the OP is a warrior. Warriors, full glass cannon, invunrability and 20khp and massive leaps and good duration blocks, 6sec cooldowns. Yea ok. I rolled a warrior and laughed at the power compared to a thief

People need to learn to make proper pvp builds if they want to pvp and win

The difference is you can see a warrior coming, and if he starts losing mid fight, he doesn’t have the option to disappear and reappear 10 seconds later for another attempt. Likewise if he runs away you can see him do it.

Thieves ARE OP in their current state, but until the culling issue is addressed no-one can look subjectively at thieves to see if something needs toning down.

Warriors have invulnerability, KD’s & hastes. Low CD skills and blocks, if you can’t kill a thief with a warrior, then you’re just bad. Btw, an INVINCIBILITY on-the-fly skill is OP, self-rally when downed & getting a revive if you get revenge is OP.

Kaizer.7135:

Nashaan.3160:

Webley.1295:

Columba.9730:

Highest dps, permastealth, best mobility, decent ranged dng. What’s balanced about this? Thieves are in abject denial of god mode.

What needs fixing is peoples perception on thiefs

Highest DPS, Stealth and mobility. So thats a 30/30/30/30/30 build your talking about then. When can I spec like this? Because im limited.

And the OP is a warrior. Warriors, full glass cannon, invunrability and 20khp and massive leaps and good duration blocks, 6sec cooldowns. Yea ok. I rolled a warrior and laughed at the power compared to a thief

People need to learn to make proper pvp builds if they want to pvp and win

The difference is you can see a warrior coming, and if he starts losing mid fight, he doesn’t have the option to disappear and reappear 10 seconds later for another attempt. Likewise if he runs away you can see him do it.

Thieves ARE OP in their current state, but until the culling issue is addressed no-one can look subjectively at thieves to see if something needs toning down.

Warriors have invulnerability, KD’s & hastes. Low CD skills and blocks, if you can’t kill a thief with a warrior, then you’re just bad. Btw, an INVINCIBILITY on-the-fly skill is OP, self-rally when downed & getting a revive if you get revenge is OP.

^^ Essentially this with only a few comments to it. I as a thief love fighting a good warrior 1v1. Those fights are typically amazing and challenging. A skilled warrior losing to a skilled thief doesn’t mean they’re bad, just that the thief has taken the time to understand the warrior abilities as well as the warrior understands the thief’s.

Every class has things that makes them OP. The thing that frustrated people is that thieves attack from being hidden, therefore they don’t see the hit coming before it hits. What amazes me tho, is what happens typically after I hit them, wait for my revealed to go away, and CND. They…. stand there. I’m still there. Every thief is still there. Somewhere near by. Just because you lost the target it doesn’t mean you stop.

I would emplore anyone who is having trouble killing thieves to do one of two things (this is an honest suggestion, and not a cop out remark). Find someone who can kill thieves and ask them for some guidance – or – Make a thief and play it to 30. I now kill thieves left and right on my guardian since I have learned how. It’s much easier than you may believe (especially GC thieves).

Reducing the damage by 50% across the board is a little extreme. Decent stats and gear designed to deal with a thief’s burst damage are a passive way to deal with thief damage, as well as situational awareness.

But stealth definitely needs to be dealt with. There’s no hard counter or balancing mechanic in place to prevent the thief being to stealth for a significant portion of the fight except for simply being a better player, and while I understand all the L2P posting in here, MMO balancing isn’t just dependent on how skilled players are. As it stands now, cooldowns aren’t long enough to prevent stealth from being a significant factor, there are no stats you can build to detect stealthed thieves, and no way to really interrupt the stealth or damage the thief that is visible to the opponent.

Instead of dealing with the damage, I’d introduce a way to detect stealthed players – such as being able to see them (albeit faded) if you were close enough. Abilities you use that actually damage the thief in stealth should give you damage numbers so as to give you an approximate location, if not knock the thief out of stealth outright. The other couple of ways would be through attaching stealth detection improvement to a defensive stat or attaching stealth knockout/detection to abilities, but I’m not really sure about those solutions as they might be too crippling to the thief’s intention of being able to control part of the fight through stealth.

Being able to passively detect stealthed players as well as visibly damage them in stealth will force thieves to be wary of engagements rather than be fearless about them. It will give other classes a hard counter to stealth while still ensuring that they need to be skilled to beat a thief (the people who stand still while I CND someone are asking for it, not to mention the ones that spam their abilities while I’m stealthed up so they have no abilities to use when I pop out).

There’s a lot of L2P posts in here, but I have an alt thief that is 80 in addition to a couple other classes, and no other class can control a fight like a thief can, and I’m not even that great of a thief. Most of that is stealth.

Nashaan.3160:

Webley.1295:

Columba.9730:

Highest dps, permastealth, best mobility, decent ranged dng. What’s balanced about this? Thieves are in abject denial of god mode.

What needs fixing is peoples perception on thiefs

Highest DPS, Stealth and mobility. So thats a 30/30/30/30/30 build your talking about then. When can I spec like this? Because im limited.

And the OP is a warrior. Warriors, full glass cannon, invunrability and 20khp and massive leaps and good duration blocks, 6sec cooldowns. Yea ok. I rolled a warrior and laughed at the power compared to a thief

People need to learn to make proper pvp builds if they want to pvp and win

The difference is you can see a warrior coming, and if he starts losing mid fight, he doesn’t have the option to disappear and reappear 10 seconds later for another attempt. Likewise if he runs away you can see him do it.

Thieves ARE OP in their current state, but until the culling issue is addressed no-one can look subjectively at thieves to see if something needs toning down.

As much as I hate thieves, it is part of their class mechanic to use their stealth to defeat you. By running away and resetting the fight. It’s the same thing that rogues would do in WoW and it was easily counter able by most classes who knew what they were doing. The same is going on here, however I do agree that thieves could use a tad toning down. Not to the extent people are suggesting however.

FireRunner.9481:

There only needs to be one fix to thieves that is fair:

1. Place a ten second cool down on ALL stealth abilities.

Right now they can go stealth three times in a row using different skills. They need to change this so the stealth portion of those skills cannot be active if they were just stealth. As of now a thief can pretty much stay stealth all the time during battles.

This would break stealth as an offensive tool. It isn’t just something to break focus, several thief builds rely on stealthing and immediately attacking to get stealth-attack skills to go off.

CHIPS.6018:

The biggest problem is invisibility. An elite thief can pretty much invisible 24/7. This combined with their 4-8k a hit damage makes them very deadly.

It is very common for an elite thief to 1v3 guys, go invisible, look for softest target, and down him. Then he invisible again and “finish him”.

None of these assertions are true.

1. The source of thief survivability is mobility, not stealth. A stealthed immobile thief is easy to kill, a highly mobile unstealthed thief is hard to kill.
2. The only way to be “pretty much invisible 24/7” and contribute to a fight is culling. The only way to stay permastealthed involves not participating in combat at all, or needing to land an attack once every 4~ seconds, neither of which is going to help in an actual fight.
3. If this is actually happening to you in 3v1 you’re really bad, one person can kill most thieves with auto attack while they try to finish a team mate before the thief can complete the finisher. Countering stealthed finishing is cake.

Nashaan.3160:

A nerf of that size to the class would render them next to useless. They are SUPPOSED to have high burst dps. Should they be able to drop a player with 20k+ hp in 2 seconds with 3 or 4 skills? No, not in my opinion, but they should have the highest dps of all the classes because they sacrifice other things for it.

I disagree, thieves should have DPS potential when they gear/trait for it, just like every profession. This is the case right now. The ability to do damage isn’t an innate class attribute, just a role that most thieves prefer. Thieves aren’t railroaded into that role, nor should they be.

Thread moved to thief discussions.

I just have to point this out. To all you who say stealth should end on damage.
If you did that to stealth, Thieves would be unable to survive in dungeons or high level areas like Orre or Champion battles. They’d be unable to participate in sieges or Zerg v Zergs and thier only viable spec would be the Backstab combo.
Yes, this fix would completely break the class.

Stealth is fine as it is in my opinion. Personally I don’t use stealth that much, but have fought plenty that do, and I do not find it an issue. The only fix I would be happy with, if it really did need it, would be to have the stealth debuff effect you EVERY time you exit stealth, not just when you attack. That way the C&D trick would no longer be an issue, and stealth would not lose its functionality. But really, I don’t see the need for it.

And as to being revealed when taking damage? No. Just no. I have fought and defeated many stealth users before, it is not an issue once you get used to it and develope techniques to deal with them. Of course there are those players that really know how to use it properly and they can give me a good run around, but I am happy with that. That is how stealth should be in my opinion.

At the end of the day if a Thief stealths, one of two things will happen. They will either run away or attack. If they run away, there is not that much you can do about it, whether they are stealthed or not. If they attack, it is no different to defending against a big attack from any other profession. You know it may be coming so you prepare for it and take action to prevent it or reduce its effect (block, dodge, buff, etc). If anything, the fact that they stealthed is a bigger tell than some very hard hitting attacks other professions have access to, many of which give you very little or no warning. Forewarned is forarmed.

Thieves aren’t OP and I’m a squishy elementalist. At least relatively. Stun/knockdown a thief and it’s GG for them like 80% of the time.

10% of the time they might escape by the skin of their teeth (and pray you stick around looking for them) and the other 10% is smarter then your average bear.

The problem is so many people run glass cannon right now, it’s stupid. The reason a thief can 2HKO most people is because they’re specced glass cannon.

Any good thief will get the jump on you and you will drop like a glass cannon.

Ring ring. That was your defense and vitality trait lines. They’re on 3-way. They want to know why you don’t call anymore.

They offer some pretty snazzy benefits skill/trait wise in addition to making you burst proof.

Yes, you will have to sacrifice just a bit of damage potential for a bit of survivability.

But, because everyone is facerolling glass cannon right now… you will be able to weather their blast and shatter them just the same.

Glass cannons take a ton of skill to use and their margin for error is slim to none.

In addition to this, thieves are uniquely designed as a burst class. A natural counter to such a build.

Thieves cannot sustain their assault and are very vulnerable to pretty much anything that didn’t get dropped by their chain.

Stealth is their unique defense and game mechanic, their specialty.

Thieves naturally lend themselves to the glass cannon playstyle and they have the advantage in that regard.

Ergo, ‘thieves are OP because they’re winning in this meta.’ Thieves will always thrive in a glass cannon meta.

This is the GW2’s touch ranger. TF2’s Spy. Adapt or die, it isn’t the class.

A legitimate problem is culling and how stealth/re-rendering messes with that. That’s what is broken. Let that get fixed first and see what that does for everyone.

I would increase the debuff of stealth to 5s to preclude permanent stealth.

Also, the condition damage thief needs to be better when fighting a player. Every class can easily remove the 25 stacks of bleeding that have consumed all your initiative to be stacked. And, after that, you are dead.

To sum up this thread. I don’t want to spec to or learn to fight thief. Nerf them so I can win.

Notice that there are players and specs that have no problem fighting thief? Yeah, learn from them.

Stealth in combat is what makes this class unique and fun to play. If you take away this mechanic you may as well remove the class as far as I’m concerned. That being said I will state that I’m all for a balanced game.

Before any nerfs are be made we should have the rendering/culling issues fixed. Then we can really see where the thief stands. I have gone up against thieves that were stealthed way more than possible. I have run around in a zerg and small groups out of stealth an no one has touched me, I attribute this to rendering/culling.

Blood~

Avalon.4809:

Culling is the thing I’m already talking about…

Then that’s it. Has nothing to do with thieves and will get fixed when they get the tech to work correctly.

Stealth spamming is an issue here.Just like many class that can chain invulnerability move

Maybe Stealth need some more depth.Add another Stealth debuff that stick longer.Under this debuff moving in character sight (about half of pistol range) will cause that character to see a shadow trail of thief. This debuff will stack if thief keep revealing himself too often causing the shadow trail to be seen more easily. It just the guy who got attacked by a thief got suspicious and try to look harder.

So this will only effect in pvp situation.It would’nt nerf the PvE aspect of thief.

we all forget that no one complains about thieves in sPVP.

sPVP are mostly closed space. not much room to run, less benefit from speed buff and long time stealth.Also the objective is to cap point not looking badges,easy money from soft target like checkpoint guards, dolyak,which are worthless to protector but profitable for attacker.

there is plenty of room to maneuver in sPVP. there is also plenty of room to run away. The point is, they are balanced in a controled PVP environment and in 1v1 fights. The only time a thief has been a challenge to me on my Guardian is when there is a major scale fight and culling becomes a factor. If you balance for that in WvW, you screw the thief in PVE and sPVP. It leaves ANET in a sticky situation.

Aveneo.2068:

Maybe make it that when a Thief gets damage, it actually breaks stealth?

Likewise make it so when we stealth it ends all inductions targeted on us.

The thief class needs work, like every other class. Balance comes from all classes in the game, not nerfing one or two. Thieves being OP is over exaggerated by players lacking the gear/skill to survive an ambush. The whole point to thieves is to catch a player off guard, and if you panic then your dead.

Nethril.7413:

we all forget that no one complains about thieves in sPVP.

Exactly.

I strongly feel the best solution is to just let Anet fix the culling issue. If things get adjusted and lowered due to a bug that happens mostly in WvW and less in sPvP and 1v1 combats, you’re going to have one really unbalanced class. And when they finally fix culling, then they’ll have to rebalance thieves again. It’s more work for no good reason. Just fix the culling issue, and then wait for the players to adjust and see how it is before making any more changes.

Niim.9260:

crewthief.8649:

Mesmers have been ‘adjusted’, and so will Thieves, no two ways about it. Please, Thief players, stop being so obtuse and own up to some of this.

The problem is that these posts are not engaging and honest discussions of the class. They are generally uninformed drivel with little basis on reality, filled with suggestions that have no interest in a playable class as the outcome. You expect an honest discussion while throwing a mountain of trash on the forums to talk around. Surprise, you get trash posts in response.

I see little value in posting intelligent, well thought out views on what should be fixed with the thief class, both good and bad, when it is generally just a witch hunt.

Thank you for giving everyone an example of ‘obtuse’. Where, exactly, did I suggest nerfing the class into an unplayable state? Are you saying you wouldn’t be able to play a Thief well if they were brought in line with other classes in the game? Your class is overpowered, it isn’t a witch hunt…stop playing the victim here. Do you know what a noob tube is?

sil.4160:

Also, reduce thieves damage across the board by 50%. No other class can kill ppl with 2-3 hits without giving opponents a chance to respond. Thieves damage are too high.

A warrior killed me in one hit. And not with 100 blades. I guess since a class that can kill in 2-3 hits needs to be nerfed, warrior needs to be deleted then.

crewthief.8649:

Thank you for giving everyone an example of ‘obtuse’. Where, exactly, did I suggest nerfing the class into an unplayable state?

Well, right here :

1, nerf all thief’s skills damage (e.g. 50%);

And to counter that, the thief needs to put like, 60 trait points into various trait lines to restore it’s damage to normal values? You just destroyed the class from level 1 to 70 and that’s not even checking how horrible the suggestion is for level 80.

stof.9341:

crewthief.8649:

Thank you for giving everyone an example of ‘obtuse’. Where, exactly, did I suggest nerfing the class into an unplayable state?

Well, right here :

1, nerf all thief’s skills damage (e.g. 50%);

And to counter that, the thief needs to put like, 60 trait points into various trait lines to restore it’s damage to normal values? You just destroyed the class from level 1 to 70 and that’s not even checking how horrible the suggestion is for level 80.

Um…that was the OP, not me. Are you trying to doctor quotes using me as a scapegoat or something, LOL. Read the thread man, you clearly attached your ‘proof’ from another posters comment.

I really don’t understand all the whining about thief and stealth. Play one for a bit. It’s hard to do the things a very skilled thief player can do. Yes, I’ve been jumped by a thief in WvW. It’s really no big deal. If you don’t pay attention, they kill you. If you do, you kill them. The call for nerfs is absurd.

BTW, the culling “problem” is almost certainly a 10s fix (literally). Nearly all engines are extremely easy to tune wrt. culling. Typical would be via a single variable. The only reason you add it to a game is because of very low end computers. Upper/Middle and high-end comps will have no problems at all. Remember how things were before the culling was set so high? Things worked amazingly well for almost everyone and pretty much not at all for slow comps.

Now it works rather poorly for everyone in a crowded environment. That’s a step up for the low end and down for others. End result: the game “runs” on more computers, which means there are less returns by low-end owners.

It really should be a slider, but with localization issues, any UI change will probably be slow to come unless they decided to accelerate development on the native language code and branch it off for localization later (faster for english, slower for the rest).

IMHO, if they can’t or won’t do a slider, they should simply remove all culling and say “if you lag, upgrade or stay out of wvw”. The culling problem as it is now is a serious impediment to play in WvW (and pretty much nowhere else).