Guild Wars 2

the serious problem with thieves is that no matter what the devs do to nerf them, as long as the initiative system exists there will always be a skill that does this, the nerfed back stab they nerfed heartseeker they nerfed pistol whip… now its dancing dagger or shadow assault or whetever else is completely spammable form of damage that with enough of a range or stealth advantage will hit 2 to 3 times before you have a chance to react. or even if you do have a chance to react the nature of it is that after i dodge roll twice and pop “protect me” or any other form of damage mitigation ability they can stealth, run away and do it again.

this doesnt even take into account rendering bugs or what not.i got hit by unload a crap ton of times within the space of 4 seconds…it doesnt matter…its not the abilities that need nerfing…remove the initiative system all together if i could spam my “5” ability 4 times rregardless of what weapon it would be disgustingly over powered. give theives cool downs to manage and i am pretty sure without reducing the damage out put of another thief ability that we would find that thieves are still capable of great burst but more balanced. they would have a 14 second cooldown (Avg) on dancing dagger.

the ability itself would be ok damage and have good utility but not be spammable. shadow assault would have a 24 second cd, again still do balanced damage have great utility but wouldnt make them almost untouchable for 10 seconds.

i believe the devs will be forced to either remove thieves damage on every single weapon attack into mediocrity as long as the initiative system exists.

the nature of a thief is to find the best damage ability and spam that one attack over an over until the target is dead or runaway /stealth if they are not dead this has got to be the most boring form of play in the game.

they have all of these other abilities that are pretty good, but if they dont spam an ability the damage potential is reduced significantly. so why would they use other abilities. its the nature of the class until they remove the initiative system and replace it with cooldowns.

I propose removing the initiative system, allowing steal to do damage and stealth you with out traits, and lower the cool down to 25 seconds. add traits that enhance steal even more. making steal the core mechanic to the thief and adding cooldowns to all weapon skills.

this i feel would be a great first step at balancing the damage potential and allowing for a more diverse play style for a thief

I truly feel that whoever designed such a spammable mess of a class should just be fired. I would eat my pirate hat if its the same person as the one who made elementalists or necromancers. Whoever made such a class with mechanics that allow spammability and burst that no other class has must have been some Call of Duty ‘pro’ who has 0 MMO experience and got to design a class because its the main developers little nephew. Thiefs are hands down about the worst designed class or job or profession that i have seen in any recent MMO and they just dont fit in with a game where everything is about ability cooldown tracking and countering. Its just emberassing and sad, Thief Dev you should be ashamed and go play counterstrike instead.

maybe they will stop whinning about thief if they remove initiative system, and make our skills a cooldown type,

I’m gonna call bug on this one. Anyone see what Bladetrail’s been doing recently? (41000 in the last hit)

Dual.8953:

I’m gonna call bug on this one. Anyone see what Bladetrail’s been doing recently? (41000 in the last hit)

Bladetrail is a bug. This is not. It clearly states in the description how many times it bounces.

I’ve been playing thief since beta, am 80, and have near 30 ranks of PVP under my belt and will be the first to admit that we are excessively overpowered. This is not the fault of the thief but rather the devs and it will continue to be a problem so long as initiative exists.

This aside, you can’t deny that we (thieves) predominantly do not switch weapons. I can say this after now leveling a 2nd toon to 40 (Warrior) and find myself constantly swapping weapons. Thieves, by nature of initiative, have little reason to do so unless its to swap to short bow and teleport away. If ANet dumbs down the damage on our abilities AND focuses on upping damage/utility on our other weapon abilities then I think thief will become more in line with where they should be.

Let’s face it, you may be able to run D/P or S/P or even P/P with moderate success but few things beat D/D and near every build in use today focuses on their abilities (LDB spam, Backstab burst, DD, etc). If our other abilities get tuned to the point they become worth using, and dagger damage gets a nerf, I think we’d be ‘OK’ in the long haul.

My 2 cents but don’t expect any overnight changes.