Guild Wars 2

I hates thieves, they make me want to hit things. But still I don’t like whats being done to them. Everything is being addressed but the real issues which are the burst they can do is a bit too much and too easy to occur as frequently as they can do it, and that there stealth doesn’t have what I would consider a hard counter. From there perspective too they die way too easy if they miss there burst attack or get hung our without stealth. I’m not going to sit here and say I know the answer to the damage issue because I think 8-10k backstabs are a lot considering they can CnD+backstab then stealth and backstab+HS your last 1-2k hp if you have any. To me it seems like too much damage for the risk, and offers the person taking the damage only a few seconds to try to do anything to counter. As to the stealth issue though why not just make stealth a regular boon that can be stripped or converted. Or make certain conditions like poison keep thieves from being able to stealth. That way thieves get to keep there stealth, we don’t have to adjust other classes or entire game mechanics around stealth, and poison which is a condition nobody uses by choice would be more relevant. Maybe even changing stealth in this way would help with the damage as people who knew what to do could use it to keep from being hit by huge burst out of re-stealth, but thieves could still keep most of there mobility and big burst damage. i don’t really think they need to be nerfed into the ground or we need traps to specifically counter there primary class mechanic…to me that kinda don’t seeem fair to them. We need a common ground that I think is very possible to achieve.

Stealth is what makes the thief. Stealth is fine. People who don’t know how to play against them will die. People will complain because they don’t know how to play against them. People who have never played a thief will also complain about stealth.

TL;DR: People complain about everything even when they know nothing about it.

They just nerfed our burst, missed the patch notes?

Im guessing you just got killed by a thief in PVP. “i’ll show that guy!” :Logs into forum: “I hates thieves, they make me want to hit things”

The problem is the Thief’s ability to repetitively apply stealth, within a short time. If stealth only came from healing, utility, and steal skills, then there wouldn’t be a problem at all. But ArenaNet aren’t going to redesign professions anytime soon, if ever, so you are better of just equipping that AoE whenever you see a Thief. Some additional toughness also helps.

I think you should go play a thief for a while. then, rewrite your thread.

Stealth is fine.

Thief burst is fine. Kind of wish they hadn’t nerfed mug but oh well. I don’t care to run a thief in WvW so it isn’t going to bother me.

Stealth removal traps incoming can’t wait

Hrithmus.2583:

Im guessing you just got killed by a thief in PVP. “i’ll show that guy!” :Logs into forum: “I hates thieves, they make me want to hit things”

No actually I was DEFENDING thieves due to the upcoming stealth trap/field and trying to offer a solution acceptable to both sides. But I should have known better than to try to be reasonable and logical with an open dialog with “that” community

thieves can return to stealth way too often and way too easily.

My problem is thieves can return to stealth very quickly after unstealthing. Once a thief comes out of stealth for whatever reason they should always get the 3 second debuff, no matter what – hit or miss, and restealthing abilities shouldn’t apply stealth until that debuff is gone.

Anet wants to give them the highest burst and highest mobility of any class (this they said themselves in the video not 3 weeks ago). Giving them so much stealth as well without a hard counter is too much.

D/D zerker builds are not a highskill cap you can be bad and spam to win atm which is not good design. Losing the fight? stealth and run… no risk.

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Stealth is fine.

With the exception of 4s reveal and any future nerfs, it’s fine.
People just get too angry when a Thief loses and runs away from them successfully. They might be mistaking Shadow Step for stealth though. Cuz Thief staying with you in stealth and continuing to fight you just leaves way too many counter options.

There’s been exactly 220,053 moments and 1/2 when I swung my weapon or used a skill and saw a downed Thief magically appear afterwards.

Let think of a class with just 1 skill.

It just says “you have 50% of Killing your target and 50% of outright dying”.

Is this balanced?
You have same chances as your target to win a duel….

well its not.
It completely ignores skill.

Now stealth is all about prediction.

People Always says “but when you see a thief stealthing just do this and do that”.
Assuming thieves players are not NPCs they can feint thus the game reduces basically to a games of chance taking away “reactions, skills and tactic”.

Some thieves are predictable making them easy to counter ofr experienced players…..that doesn t mean that a good thief could not get an unfair advantage against a better player.

From thieves side they need some skill to do their job (positioning and stuff) so they think its fair because they don t take in account their opponent have to gamble….burning long cd skills and stuff.

Also they fear “balancing anet style” (read whack-a-mole) rather than a fair redesign….thus i can understand why they will answer l2p.

can’t really take out stealth off thief, that is their nature skill, but game should put in item like food buff, banner buff, potion buff to see stealth, it just logic to all rpg games there must have some way to see invisible/stealth, not as the way for now cause we got no way to see stealth/invisible.

People that complain about thieves (especially now after all the nerf) and stealth probably never tried the class or are still noobs that don’t know how to deal with them. PERIOD.

How does it “ignore” skill? if anything it is dependent upon it, is there luck in it? Yes.

But if a Thief with 30% HP stealths when fighting another class with health at 100%, what does your skill/experience tell you? He is going to run. Stealth or not, the player is going to run. Does stealth give it a bit of uncertainty? Yes, of course it does, luck is still in the equation, no one is saying it isn’t, however everyone else is saying that Luck takes over skill. It doesn’t, you still act and react based on what you know.

You guys make it sound like if a Thief stealths I have the same chance at hitting him if I were to throw an AoE at my feet, as if I were 1,200m away. Use what you know, use what he was doing before, use what you were doing and extrapolate data.

What makes Stealth different from someone pressing a skill that leaps? It isn’t fair because I couldn’t stop it mid-range because its too fast! <- Same arguement, which is flawed because other classes have things which do the same effect, but in a different way.

BECAUSE of all the complaints Thief and Mesmer are getting hard counters in the form of Arrow Cart skills and now Invisible revealing traps…which btw, I can tell you arnt going to work unless they bind us because even us going into stealth you claim is a hack, so by your logic something that removes us from stealth doesn’t fix the problem.

Doggie.3184

There’s been exactly 220,053 moments and 1/2 when I swung my weapon or used a skill and saw a downed Thief magically appear afterwards.

That’s why I say stealth is fine.

Revealed got reverted to 3 seconds in the last patch. Didn’t feel it needed to be increased in the first place.

Thieves don’t need any kind of nerf.

I don’t think this new trap thing is the proper solution. Sure it can work with people littering the battlefield in anti cloak fields but all this is is ANet trying to find a solution without directly addressing the issue because if they did then that would be them pretty much admitting that they f’ed up with regards to the stealthing system.

I think they should grow some balls and deal with it directly.

The thief’s defining ability is stealing, not stealth. Stealth has just become the end-all-be-all thing to do with them for a number of reasons.

While a thief doesn’t reset themselves every time they stealth, with the right traits (which are part of the build) a thief can get 75% reset. Which basically means (assuming they enter stealth every time their hp drop to 25%), they will get back 50% of their total hp (if not more) and will have 75% of the conditions gone (those not stripped will simply expire and the increase to hp is after the fact of damaging conditions doing their thing).

They’ve said they want the thief to be burst but that burst needs to have adequate time in between. DPS stands for damage per second which is derived by dividing the damage done over a specified period of time.

Having the thief be burst is fine, so long as their dps is comparitive to the other professions.

The two questions are;

How much damage is each burst?
How much time does it take to do multiple burst?

You have to consider multiple burst because if you take the time of just one, then the dps is going to be quite high. You need to factor in the time in between bursts and to do this, you consider the total time to perform multiple burst.

So, for example sake, if each burst is 5k and you can perform 3 burst in 15sec, then that works out to be 1k dps.

Now that you have the dps the final question you ask is, is this in line with the other professions?

So let’s say, if the other professions spec for damage, they too can reach 1k per sec. The next thing you have to compare is the thief’s survivability to the other professions with that dps spec. You can not compare the survivability of the 1k dps thief to the tank specs of the other professions because if the other profession can only match the dps if spec’ed for it and can only match the survivability if spec’ed for it, then you basically just showed that the thief gets the best of both.

So you compare the thief, whose spec gives them 1k/s damage, to that of the other professions with specs that give them 1k/s damage.

So let’s say that the thief can do that dps and shadow dance around in a fight all day long. Is this right? The way I see it, a thief that spec’s to stealth the way they do is their version of a bunker.

If the other professions can not deal 1k dps while spec’ed bunker, neither should the thief.

Jakeism.8136:

I think you should go play a thief for a while. then, rewrite your thread.

I’ll pop in here – I have a thief, just barely past lvl 70. He’s hands down my best wvwvw character. I dont’ die, literally cannot die, unless I do something stupid.

Stealth, poke at opponent, decide whether to A) burst him down, B)re-stealth and leave. Very rarely, I’ll find someone who nails me unexpectedly, but generally I can bail from those fights too.

As long as I don’t get caught in the open, I’m golden. None of my other chars offers nearly this level of choosing my battles.

I’ll grant, in a zerg, I’m not quite as potent, but still – for roaming, thieves are still the gods of wvwvw, and unless they change something about the stealth/burst combo, that’s not going to change.

Stealth is indeed broken, but I’m not sure the OP outlined a decent solution. What makes Stealth so powerful is that it gives (since we’re talking about the Thief here, all comments will relate to the Thief profession) the player an ENORMOUS margin for error. There are times in a fight/duel/encounter when opposing players know when one player has one and the other has lost. This is the point where the losing player either does his/her best to overcome the disadvantage or turns tail and runs. Turning tail and running almost always results in defeat—as it should.

Good on you if you can get away (because that can actually be quite difficult if you’re not a Thief), but know that when you lose: you’re supposed to lose. Be prepared for that.

In the case of the Thief, however, losing doesn’t really mean anything. “Oh, I’m losing? OK, I’ll just pop stealth and RESET THE FIGHT.” No player in this game should be given the opportunity to RESET A FIGHT. That’s insane. That completely negates opposing players’ efforts in the case that they outplay you and gives you an enormous advantage in literally every encounter.

Honestly, I’m not sure Stealth really needs a nerf as does the Thief’s ability to spam skills. At the moment, it’s incredibly easy to perma-stealth and avoid attacks/inflict high amounts of damage simply because of the Thieves’ ability to constantly use the same skills over and over again. The Thief’s spiritual predecessor, the Assassin, was balanced because it had chain skills that needed to be executed in particular order in order to have an effect. Playing the Assassin required pre-meditation, high amounts of situational awareness, some thought (on when to break off an attack or when to actually use skills within a chain) and a lot of timing. The Thief requires practically none of these. The fact that this was removed in GW2 is completely beyond me. Ask any Assassin in GW1 if they would turn down the option of spamming Twisting Fangs followed by Death Blossom over and over again so long as their energy held out. Not a one would probably say no.

In order to properly balance Thieves, there either needs to be some sort of chain-system implemented that upgrades Thief attacks over time based on the skills that they use (the complicated/creative solution) or put a limit on the amount of times a thief can use skills within a certain period of time (the band-aid solution). The latter would probably come off as: “Thieves cannot use their 2-5 Weapon Skills more than 3 times every 10 seconds. If they do, after the third time, the skills in question enter a 10-second cool-down” or something of that nature.

Once a nerf like the two above hit, people can start playing the Thief in that state and then re-evaluate its performance. After that re-evaluation, proper buffs and skill changes can be introduced in order to bring the profession back up to speed with the rest of them.

PROBLEM SOLVED.