Guild Wars 2

This thread is in response to a recent thread I came across about nerfing thieves. I can personally say that I am sick to death of seeing such threads even existing.

I honestly don’t think that anyone comes into a game after a big class nerf(when it’s their class) and says “oh god, it’s about time, I was doing far too good on this class, now I get to die more, phew!” at least not without it being some kind of sarcastic.

So this thread is a general suggestion to not nerf any class, if one class has something too powerful in pvp, perhaps think of a way to have other classes use an ability to counter that, it’s all about strategy really. As for pve, who in their right mind groups with an exceptional class, finishes the zone successfully then comes onto the forums and wines that the guy is too good and his class should be nerfed? Only jealous sacks would pull that crap.

As a general rule people love boosts to the things they love, and hate nerfs to the things they love.

So at the very least may I suggest that before any nerfs are implemented due to forum input, that it at least be checked that the person complaining about the class actually have that class at 80 and be using it as their main?(Really.. if they don’t then I don’t believe they have the right to complain about it).

my level 30 thief is 3 times as powerful as my necro, my level 27 elementalist is 2 times as powerful as my necro. My necro is 80 in full exotics.

Necro needs a boost (and I don’t care about that one build with that one set of skills and traits that make it ok in one part of the game).

I’m really good with my necro but it takes quite a while longer for me to kill something and comparing that to my little thief it feels like my necro is just tickling the enemies to death.

Some enemies are paper and I can tear through them in groups, but there’s some that just take forever for my necro whereas my thief can tear through it in seconds.

I think nerfing is necessar because if one class is to powerfull you had to make EVERY other class besser in order to preserve fairness. This would lead to an endless cycle of rapid buffing. We would end up with like 130k hp and 50k atk. That should not be the final result, since it makes everthing more complicated.
Additionaly this is just a psychological effect: If you see your class nerved you think “oh noes i cant play backstab anymore” and 3 days after you think well i got to find another build/class and you start experimenting – case closed. If every other class would be buffed it would actually be the exact same procedure with the only difference, that you would notice it immediatly. You maybe just would notice after 3 weeks that backstab doesnt work the way it worked once and you start experimenting. Actually the same.
It just seems that after every nerf people are flaming on the forums because even if the majority would love to see a bs nerf, the people who would be hit by it came here and flamed. In german we say “Hit dogs bark”.
@ Puppy – have a look at nemesis guides in the necromancer section (its a sticky thread). Before i watched them all i thought the same way – now i think its in most cases even more viable than the most classes. In pve and pvp!

The problem is with thiefs (and mesmers) specially they are not that intuitive to counter, but once you found out who they are kinda easy to counter, so yeah giving them yet another way to counter those classes would make the others too strong in the hands of a skilled player. Really the only thing that can stop that is to teach people how to counter them, yet a lot of ppl are not willing to learn it apparently, so waht we really need a shift in attitude of some ppl… and well Good luck with that…

My main character is a lvl 80 thief, and while I don’t have much to compare him with in PvE (since my secondaries are lvl 10-30), I can honestly say that I do need a nerf (or rather change that adds more depth to the class) in PvP (where I have some of experience of every class, especially the thief). And when people actually confess that their own class is OP… then things have gone too far, because just as you say, people don’t usually want to confess that they are OP whether they think that they need a nerf or not.
The main issue I have with playing as a thief is simply that the thief hardly requires any skill to be efficient. For example we have the basilisk-cnd-steal-backstab chain that gibs a glass cannon while dealing quite a lot of damage to others. Every time a player complains about it we use to respond “Learn to play and use stun-breakers n00b!”. But does it require any skill to use? Not really. Meanwhile we have some of the best getaways in the game having access to stealth, so survivability isn’t really a problem.
Another example is the IMO ridiculously boring skill called Heartseeker. When you get a player below 25% health and have a dagger main-hand, you should use Heartseeker. Oh, it was blocked/missed/he didn’t die? Then use it again! Why even bother backstabbing them when the heartseeker takes less effort, costs less initiative and leaps you to your foe.
And about the suggestion itself, (You need to have a lvl 80 main character of that profession to have any rights to complain about it) no, it wouldn’t work for several reasons. First of, even the most hardcore sPvP:ers are not necessarily lvl 80 in PvE, since PvP and PvE are pretty much isolated from each other. Secondly, everyone doesn’t necessarily have a “main” character, especially in PvP. The majority of the community will just keep defending and want buffs for their class anyways.
Playing a fair bit of every class provides the best overview of how the balance actually works. If anything I’d say that they should have a look at if the player in question actually plays different classes or just the same one.

You can however quite easily spot the skill-level of the poster just by reading it, so I don’t think any of this is necessary.

This sounds like a bunch of metaphysical excuses. We all don’t want our classes nerfed, so lets just call it even… Absurd.

no thieves just need to be smacked into the ground by the nerf bat.

They should seperate pvp/wvw nerfs from pve, like they did in GW1. That would solve a lot of things.

the fact is that all the other class, mesmers included, if they go full berserker to maximize damage they need to be way too good to survive in pvp (pve is easier maybe not in dungeon but most of the time). while thieves just become invisible every few seconds.
so they can deal huge damage surviving quite good.
there are surely a lot of counters but sometimes they are not enough due to cooldown.
they not only can become invisible, they also can teleport away. leaving you to hit thin air and laughing at 10000 distance. mesmer portal and teleport only dreams to go that far and have long cooldown and few seconds of duration

edit: you rarely see mesmers using portals in the thick of the fight, it is a very useful but situational skill. and btw mesmer portals are quite visible to all enemies

Thieves do need some sort of cool down on Heatseeker or have to have a skill in between. However, I would love it if they gave classes some skill to see stealth. Would it be used all the time? Probably not, but it would be nice.

What I don’t get is, the developers of these games, do they not notice first off if a class is “OP”? Seriously they put in the exact coding for the dmg amounts that the class does with every skill and the reuse on those skills and the life amounts of mobs .etc, so WHY is there a need for nerfs.
All I can see is that either the devs don’t have their heads on straight or the players just spend too much time wineing and not enough time playing. I personally find the game to be fun and the all-powerful thief class does not ruin that for me in any way.

But the one person is right, there is always some need for balance in pvp in order to keep things fair, so ya, keep pvp and pve separate.

Other guy also correct, necros do need a boost, I had one for a bit, wasnt too fun imo, they seem underpowered even at low lvl and their pets seem weak(maybe it’s just me but they do).

Too each their own, is what I’m getting from this. I loved my necro. Im using a “wellomancer” build with no pets and will take your warrior on any day. And yet, I hate my thief with a passion. Talk about painful leveling. I spend more time repairing than I should be and in doing so, had decided that thieves are way too squishy and need to be improved and will not keep playing mine till they are.

I’m guessing, by the ranting in this thread, that I simply do not know how to properly play my thief, and that I am wrong to blame it on Anet. I suck playing the elementalist and yet I thoroughly thrash mobs and successfully heal allies with my guardian. I would imagine that the staff at Anet know how to play their characters and will make changes as they see actual issues.

Do thieves really need a nerf? Probably not. Can’t blame a skilled player for being skilled. I’m just obviously not a skilled player of thieves.

There will always be people complaining because there will always be a younger or less experienced set of people who just want to be “god”.

The problem with simply ‘boosting’ other classes to make them able to counter an already powerful class is that it’s a slippery slope that never ends.

For example, let’s say Thieves are slightly overpowered, rather than bring them down to the same level as every other class so that the balance is ‘closer’ than it was before, I decide (assuming for the sake of argument that I can actually do this (note: I don’t work for A.Net so I can’t)) to buff every other class so that they can keep up with thieves. Of course, now I’ve caused a bigger problem, because by doing that I’ve inadvertantly made three other classes OP, so now I have to buff all the others…

Eventually it gets completely out of hand because all the classes are always getting buffed and it becomes crazy to manage. Then there’s the impact that constant buffs have on PvE content. In order to keep everything ‘balanced’ I would have to revise all PvE content just so that the difficulty remained consistent and wasn’t turned into something pitifully trivial..

Nerfs are a part of the MMO cycle, rather than complain about it, find a way to deal with it.

Your necro will work a warrior eh? Lol, how bout a guardian that can actually defend himself? :-P

I have a warrior and a guard and I played the guard through to 80 as my main because I love the survivability of it, my warrior is squishy in comparison. As for els they are awesome, glass canon yes but if they can thrash what they aim at before getting hit, they rock. Hate it when people cry about nerfing glass canons, ya they hit hard, that’s why they’re a “canon” but they fall like a sack of bricks if they take hits, that’s why they’re “glass” there’s a balance to it and no reason to nerf. Also I find I do my best dmg with daggers, which are awesome but they force me to go close range which especially on the case of pvp causes me to die more.

Xephier.1647:

What I don’t get is, the developers of these games, do they not notice first off if a class is “OP”? Seriously they put in the exact coding for the dmg amounts that the class does with every skill and the reuse on those skills and the life amounts of mobs .etc, so WHY is there a need for nerfs.
All I can see is that either the devs don’t have their heads on straight or the players just spend too much time wineing and not enough time playing.

ehmm what looks great on paper (ie in this case the numbers put into the game in first place) don’t always work as well in practice

Just keep the nerfs from affecting pve….it always goes that way, people whine and cry in pvp….and then there are totally moribund classes in pve due to outrageous nerfs.

I’d be happy if they would totally seperate the pve ruleset from wvw/pvp. Though as it seems the wvw thing has pve elements, they probably can’t do that. I’d like to be wrong about that.

Because the nerf cries will never end, I have watched classes nerfed to death ( they became so useless few played them, and those who rolled them mostly abandoned them)..and the demands for MORE nerfs followed. It is never enough to satisfy the hysteria.

Maybe the aforementioned nerfs were needed for pvp, I don’t really know, I never had any interest in it. But, please just leave pve out of this quagmire. It will never end.

I do not see that some classes need to be nerfed and others improved. They all have different pros and cons, play your character correctly and make the best of the benefits you get.
For me it’s a question about how to counter attacks and pros of other proffessions instead of nerfing everyone/everything that makes the game hard and challenging. In PvP for example I play with a build for anti conditions. It makes me particulary good at counteract classes that focus on conditions but weaker against those who don’t. So I have to pick my targets.

What I would like to see more in the game is more ways to do this. More spells to counter cc (I can’t find a single one that breaks cc on my guardian) and more combinations of spells (the build system in GW1 was really good). I more than often find myself in situations where my character is uncontrollable (due to stun, fear, polymorph or whatever) in several seconds and I’m sitting there watching him die.

Thief stealth needs to be re-looked at…and the devs need to look at them on live fully manned servers and not on their private server that has near no load problems. Distance of people from servers matter, they should be tryign to test their builds on european servers that are max capacity (as they are testign from the states) and balance around THAT. Currently their testing server is in the same building they work in…which rather ignores a lot of issues (culling is not nearly as big a problem when it only takes .023 of a second to get a repeat of what is around you).

Thieves have far too many stealthign tools, when it should be that for eachs tealth skill you have, your burst damage (backstab, heartseeker, etc) gets reduced by a flat %. Thus having more than 2 stealths/teleports would make your burst skills hit like a wet noodle. the theif skill was originally designed so that you would only stealth to get that one hit in and the rest of the time be visible. THAT was the design philosophy. They never took into account of players heavily stacking stealth and teleport abilities to maximize their ability to ignore things. Add culling ontop of it and we end up with a class that is heavily overpowered and in need of a change. Because culling is a problem that will not go away, stealth itself must be altered to take into account that culling adds several seconds of free stealth to thieves (and mesmers but they can only stealth once on a long CD so it is hardly an issue).

If theives would actually propose changes to the class that would take away the sheer faceroll ease of it (seriously, the stealthing+culling+heartseeker spam designs out there are faceroll easy and will get you easy kills) while purposefully self-nerfing the problem areas of stealth and teleportation being far too easy to use with zero downsides…ANet would be less likely to cripple nerf you and actually try to properly balance it.

Yes, thieves are OP. Currently Mesmers still need a bit of a nerf (clones are still exploding ontop of castle walls!!)but otherwise, every other class is fine. Every other class takes large survivability hits when going glass cannon.

Runiir.6425:

Thief stealth needs to be re-looked at…and the devs need to look at them on live fully manned servers and not on their private server that has near no load problems. Distance of people from servers matter, they should be tryign to test their builds on european servers that are max capacity (as they are testign from the states) and balance around THAT. Currently their testing server is in the same building they work in…which rather ignores a lot of issues (culling is not nearly as big a problem when it only takes .023 of a second to get a repeat of what is around you).

Thieves have far too many stealthign tools, when it should be that for eachs tealth skill you have, your burst damage (backstab, heartseeker, etc) gets reduced by a flat %. Thus having more than 2 stealths/teleports would make your burst skills hit like a wet noodle. the theif skill was originally designed so that you would only stealth to get that one hit in and the rest of the time be visible. THAT was the design philosophy. They never took into account of players heavily stacking stealth and teleport abilities to maximize their ability to ignore things. Add culling ontop of it and we end up with a class that is heavily overpowered and in need of a change. Because culling is a problem that will not go away, stealth itself must be altered to take into account that culling adds several seconds of free stealth to thieves (and mesmers but they can only stealth once on a long CD so it is hardly an issue).

If theives would actually propose changes to the class that would take away the sheer faceroll ease of it (seriously, the stealthing+culling+heartseeker spam designs out there are faceroll easy and will get you easy kills) while purposefully self-nerfing the problem areas of stealth and teleportation being far too easy to use with zero downsides…ANet would be less likely to cripple nerf you and actually try to properly balance it.

Yes, thieves are OP. Currently Mesmers still need a bit of a nerf (clones are still exploding ontop of castle walls!!)but otherwise, every other class is fine. Every other class takes large survivability hits when going glass cannon.

Again, this sounds like a cry for nerfing thieves in pvp, not pve so much but in pvp I’d have to agree a little, but I also fear that if the stealth is nerfed it may sway the class into becoming useless as that is their main mechanic really, or at the very least in ticking off a lot of people that have learned to play them that way.

Perhaps what would be more effective is to give other classes “see stealth” abilities, even pvp specific see stealth abilities, they’ve left a gap for those with some of the pve abilities that are not useable in pvp. Side note, temporary see stealth, like 1-2 seconds so the abilities are a thing of skilled use and not just toggle it on and you’re a thief killer.

I admit I only read most of the post in the thread fully, skimmed the rest. But hey, its still page one, so it’s not too late to quote the OP, right?

Xephier.1647:

I honestly don’t think that anyone comes into a game after a big class nerf(when it’s their class) and says “oh god, it’s about time, I was doing far too good on this class, now I get to die more, phew!” at least not without it being some kind of sarcastic.

Yeah, I can agree with that, although the last “Nerf Thief” thread I saw was posted by a thief. (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Stealth-in-World-vs-World-needs-a-nerf/first And I do congratulate you if you read the entire thread there…)

Xephier.1647:

So this thread is a general suggestion to not nerf any class, if one class has something too powerful in pvp, perhaps think of a way to have other classes use an ability to counter that, it’s all about strategy really. As for pve, who in their right mind groups with an exceptional class, finishes the zone successfully then comes onto the forums and wines that the guy is too good and his class should be nerfed? Only jealous sacks would pull that crap.

As a general rule people love boosts to the things they love, and hate nerfs to the things they love.

I like this, I really do. But it saddens me that I see so many problems with it. As per stated by Kynmarcher and Raph is Chilled

Keeping that in mind, however…

There is a way of buffing other classes without nerfing stealth, since we have
conditions <→ condition removal
buffs <→ debuffs
stealth <→ … Apples?

How about some anti stealth mechanism, for example, to me it would seem logical that if you are suffering from a serious case of “burning brighter than the sun” you wouldn’t be able to stealth.
Or if you were bleeding, you’re sprouting blood everywhere, how does that not give you away?
And when someone hits you in melee while you’re invisible? Seriously, their sword is lodged to your ribs, how can’t they tell you’re there?

Xephier.1647:

So at the very least may I suggest that before any nerfs are implemented due to forum input, that it at least be checked that the person complaining about the class actually have that class at 80 and be using it as their main?(Really.. if they don’t then I don’t believe they have the right to complain about it).

I can agree on “have the class at 80” however, I don’t think there is a reasonable way of determing the “main” character, nor is it really required. Having an alt at 80 still does to show that you know what you are talking about. (Especially if you have 100’s of hours logged on it)

I’m tired of “Nerf Wars” Seriously could you please stop saying nerf everyone except me because I can’t learn how to play an easy game?