Guild Wars 2

hello evry1.
I’ve been seeing around the clock complains about spamming same skill on thiefs ( except thiefs themselves ofc … )

so what are the biggest problems on thief class , that the community has brought to light.

- HS spam
- DB spam
- Constant stealth with c&d

Here is the Easiest fix you’ll ever see ’ to fix thiefs spam without breaking the class.

- Put a 3-4 sec recharge on 2/3/4/5 skills of thief ( that is removed once you use another skill)

It would work a little like this :

thief uses HS => HS gets a 3 sec recharge => thief uses C&d => C&d gets a 3 sec recharge and ( leftover recharge on HS is removed ) = > thief can use HS again ….

this way its NOT possible for thief to use same skill twice after each other. ( spamming )
( but can still spam all his initiatief with a combo of skills )

evry1 that likes this idea plz do “+1” reply

evry1 that doesn’t like this idea , plz reply why ( and if you play thief or not )
( no flaming plz, just constructive reply’s / idea’s plz)

i Hope if we get a lot of “+1’s” , Devs will take a look at the idea ( and once and fore all fix thief’s spam issues )

kind regards
Jim

While Hs spamming is a little annoying, its only a minor concern. Thiefs because of initiative are DESIGNED to be able to use same skills back to back.

If you change anything about that you put a major handicap on the class, and something compensatory would have to be given.

I play a thief sometimes. Mesmers my current main. Look, all they need is to sligthly reduce HS range. Something like that, and thiefs fine. What your proposing, if u dont play thief you may not know, but what ur saying is a major nerf.

The fact is: thieves can spam most of those skills almost endlessly or at least while the combat still lasts. Plus have the easiest way to get out of trouble while being essentially invisible.

Any decently designed thief build has ways to make initiative regeneration faster. First which comes to my mind is infiltrator’s signet. Thieves have numerous traits, which either refund initiative or refill it e.g. quick recovery, quick pockets, kleptomaniac, initial strike, infusion of shadow, patience, opportunist and signet use. As a thief player I find it very rare to see my initiative run out.

Since the dual dagger thief build seems to be the most common, I will analyze it’s basic game play a bit:
1. Get close to your target
2. Use dagger skill #5, cloak & dagger, which applies stealth, vulnerability and does nice damage <- too goo to be true, because it only costs 4 initiative when used with the infusion of shadow trait
3. Wait few seconds and enjoy your invisibility if you want
4. Make sure you are close to your target still and use dagger skill #1, BackStab. For some strange reason backstab doesn’t require the thief to be positioned behind the target. You just need to be invisible, making it super easy to use. BS does more damage than any other fast repeatable skill in the game. It does more damage than a ballista hit in WvWvW! How can one tiny dagger hurt more than a ballista?!?
5. Now you can either put yourself in stealth again by repeating steps #1 to #4 or if the target tries to get away from you, you can just spam dagger skill #2, heartseeker, which which speed buff e.g. signet of shadows, pretty much instantly teleports to your target and does massive damage as well. Heartseeker has low 3 initiative cost, making it pretty much spammable.

So basically it is spamming buttons #5, #1, #2, usually in that order or #5, #1, #5, #1… not much skill required. :-)

Suggestions how to fix the thief class:
1. Reduce the damage from backstab and heartseeker. Let them still do significant damage, don’t make them useless. Maybe some of their damage could be slowly affecting bleed instead of instant direct damage. In fact bleed damage would fit the skill names very well
2. Increase the initiative cost of heartseeker to 4 (still pretty much spammable) and make its leap animation twice as slow, now it teleports to its target way too fast and easy.
3. Stealth can remain, but during stealth the movement speed should be halved. Now it makes no sense that thieves can have superb mobility (signet of shadows) and being able to remain in stealth roughly half of the time. Existing traits, like fleet shadow, could be used to counter the reduced speed while in stealth. This change to stealth behavior should apply to ALL character classes, so mesmers, engineers etc. who are using stealth should also get reduced movement speed. Also if being subject to any damage or initiating any attack skill should instantly lead to loss of stealth.

These changes would not break the thief class, but would greatly reduce the annoyance factor and countless of forum threads about thieves being “overpowered”. The reduced movement speed while in stealth wouldn’t have that much impact in pve as most of the time is spent fighting against the mobs or pretty much stationary bosses.

Deniara Devious <- that character is actually a thief, but not my main as I find playing thieves a bit boring

Deniara Devious.3948:

The fact is: thieves can spam most of those skills almost endlessly or at least while the combat still lasts. Plus have the easiest way to get out of trouble while being essentially invisible.

Any decently designed thief build has ways to make initiative regeneration faster. First which comes to my mind is infiltrator’s signet. Thieves have numerous traits, which either refund initiative or refill it e.g. quick recovery, quick pockets, kleptomaniac, initial strike, infusion of shadow, patience, opportunist and signet use. As a thief player I find it very rare to see my initiative run out.

Since the dual dagger thief build seems to be the most common, I will analyze it’s basic game play a bit:
1. Get close to your target
2. Use dagger skill #5, cloak & dagger, which applies stealth, invulnerability and does nice damage <- too goo to be true, because it only costs 4 initiative when used with the infusion of shadow trait
3. Wait few seconds and enjoy your invisibility if you want
4. Make sure you are close to your target still and use dagger skill #1, BackStab. For some strange reason backstab doesn’t require the thief to be positioned behind the target. You just need to be invisible, making it super easy to use. BS does more damage than any other fast repeatable skill in the game. It does more damage than a ballista hit in WvWvW! How can one tiny dagger hurt more than a ballista?!?
5. Now you can either put yourself in stealth again by repeating steps #1 to #4 or if the target tries to get away from you, you can just spam dagger skill #2, heartseeker, which which speed buff e.g. signet of shadows, pretty much instantly teleports to your target and does massive damage as well. Heartseeker has low 3 initiative cost, making it pretty much spammable.

So basically it is spamming buttons #5, #1, #2, usually in that order or #5, #1, #5, #1… not much skill required. :-)

Suggestions how to fix the thief class:
1. Reduce the damage from backstab and heartseeker. Let them still do significant damage, don’t make them useless. Maybe some of their damage could be slowly affecting bleed instead of instant direct damage. In fact bleed damage would fit the skill names very well
2. Increase the initiative cost of heartseeker to 4 (still pretty much spammable) and make its leap animation twice as slow, now it teleports to its target way too fast and easy.
3. Stealth can remain, but during stealth the movement speed should be halved. Now it makes no sense that thieves can have superb mobility (signet of shadows) and being able to remain in stealth roughly half of the time. Existing traits, like fleet shadow, could be used to counter the reduced speed while in stealth. This change to stealth behavior should apply to ALL character classes, so mesmers, engineers etc. who are using stealth should also get reduced movement speed. Also if being subject to any damage or initiating any attack skill should instantly lead to loss of stealth.

These changes would not break the thief class, but would greatly reduce the annoyance factor and countless of forum threads about thieves being “overpowered”. The reduced movement speed while in stealth wouldn’t have that much impact in pve as most of the time is spent fighting against the mobs or pretty much stationary bosses.

Deniara Devious <- that character is actually a thief, but not my main as I find playing thieves a bit boring

Took a while but i read it all oef

I agree that its more or less a little to easy for thiefs to get a good initiatief regen
Tho nerfing dps on skills is something that’s sure to unbalance other things again

with my idea the thief has to make combo’s of skills to be able to spam them ( if he doesn’t the skill gets a 3 sec cooldown on the skill ( max 5 for like c&d))

This should make it a lot harder to keep up the endless supply of initiatief / or stealth .
Not touching any dps on the skills , just the way people need to play with them. Removing the 1 button spam , thief class promotes.

i play a lot of classes in pvp , (tryed them all out once even just to get an idea on what evry class coud do)
i got a realy good idea on how thief / mesmer / necro classes work.
started of as a thief , but didn’t like the spamming really when playing it even.
necros are challenging but rewarding , and mesmer are just plain fun to play ( i like making chaos )

ty for the constructive reply
glad to see i’m not alone that played thief and found it to rewarding.

Spamming high damage abilities to put out as much DPS as possible is pretty much exactly what the class was designed around, which is why they use initiative with no CDs while everyone else deals with cooldowns. Only issue I see with it is I believe the initiative system was designed to make Thieves severely handicapped in protracted fights against other classes(like say, a battle of attrition with a necro), but since most fights with glass cannon classes only last at most 5-10 seconds anyway, this doesn’t affect the profession at all.

Oh, and Deniara, Backstab doesn’t require a thief to be behind the target, but using it without being behind the target makes it hit just as strong as the final attack in the autoattack chain. In other words, you might as well spam #1 if u dont stand behind your target for the double damage backstab. Also, C&D doesn’t give you invulnerability so I have no idea where you got that from. Those 2 things made me question your credibility.

Jonny.9370:

Spamming high damage abilities to put out as much DPS as possible is pretty much exactly what the class was designed around, which is why they use initiative with no CDs while everyone else deals with cooldowns. Only issue I see with it is I believe the initiative system was designed to make Thieves severely handicapped in protracted fights against other classes(like say, a battle of attrition with a necro), but since most fights with glass cannon classes only last at most 5-10 seconds anyway, this doesn’t affect the profession at all.

Oh, and Deniara, Backstab doesn’t require a thief to be behind the target, but using it without being behind the target makes it hit just as strong as the final attack in the autoattack chain. In other words, you might as well spam #1 if u dont stand behind your target for the double damage backstab. Also, C&D doesn’t give you invulnerability so I have no idea where you got that from. Those 2 things made me question your credibility.

helle there

I agree that the class is designed around spamming high damage abilities in short time " burst" ( abilities , not 1 ability )
But atm the problem the class has is that it can spam 1 button strings in to many scenarios.
Making it a rather unfairly rewarding character.

adding the small recharge on a skill that is canceled when using another skill makes it a min of 2 buttons needed to spam burst

Thief’s weapon skills are designed with specific purposes and most of them don’t combo well. A D/D won’t go 2345 because Heart Seeker is a direct damage skill, death bloosom is a condition damage skill, dancing dagger is a low damage AoE cripple and CnD is a moderate damage on hit stealth. They also barely have enough iniative to do that combo once. If you look at some other thief sets, such as Sword/Dagger, users actually use thier auto attack as thier sole source of dps.
Other classes can find rotations with their weapon sets because the cooldown system lends itself well to rotation and their weapon sets are designed with rotations in mind.

Thieves on the other hand are on a resource system and have to choose what will give them the most value for the least cost. So railroading them into forced rotation won’t work at all. Especially considering some skills costing a 3rd to a half of their resources

NO! Don’t change Thief. Change your build…

I have no problem when HS spamming thieves, or if they go stealth. There are plenty of skills to counter the common thief builds. You just have to create a build that uses them!

And before someone says it, it isn’t a “Anti-Thief specific” build only. The builds I use work in many situations. Not all of course, because that would be OP.

Jonny.9370:

Oh, and Deniara, Backstab doesn’t require a thief to be behind the target, but using it without being behind the target makes it hit just as strong as the final attack in the autoattack chain. In other words, you might as well spam #1 if u dont stand behind your target for the double damage backstab. Also, C&D doesn’t give you invulnerability so I have no idea where you got that from. Those 2 things made me question your credibility.

Thanks for pointing out my typo. I meant to type vulnerability, not invulnerability. Cload and Dagger applies 3 stacks of vulnerability on the target. I think the combination of all these 3 is too much (good damage, stealth + vulnerability). Anycase, I edited my original article.

It is true that backstab hits for less damage from the front. But seems that you don’t need to be directly behind the target. You get full damage from hitting from the sides. Really it makes no sense that one hit from a small dagger does more damage than a hit from a ballista.

If you think I am some thief hater, I am not. I would want the burst damage of this game reduced. Yes, this means also toning down skills from some other classes e.g. hundred blades (if you stun your target, 100 blades is going to hit and hurt really bad).

The cooldown of most defensive skills is too high. *Give us more tools to fight against the burst. *Now it doesn’t help if the stun break skill has 60 second recharge and the player has already used it, another stun comes in. No matter how skilled that player is, stunned + high burst -> dead.

Good fights should last more than few seconds. Now I feel this game is a bit too much hit and run.

Deniara

There is no “Fix” possible, or even needed. Thieves were designed with 1 or (if they’re really lucky 2) “Damage” abilities per weapon set. That is how thieves do damage – they don’t have other options besides auto-attack. ANet is not completely redesigning thieves. GET OVER IT.

evilapprentice.6379:

There is no “Fix” possible, or even needed. Thieves were designed with 1 or (if they’re really lucky 2) “Damage” abilities per weapon set. That is how thieves do damage – they don’t have other options besides auto-attack. ANet is not completely redesigning thieves. GET OVER IT.

i appreciate your meaning.
but plz only constructive posts in here , i dont want it to turn out into a flame topic.
and in my eye’s more or less most weapon sets have 3 or more high dps ability’s on thiefs , maybe 1 or so is weaker cause its a defensief weapon set.

Dual.8953:

Thief’s weapon skills are designed with specific purposes and most of them don’t combo well. A D/D won’t go 2345 because Heart Seeker is a direct damage skill, death bloosom is a condition damage skill, dancing dagger is a low damage AoE cripple and CnD is a moderate damage on hit stealth. They also barely have enough iniative to do that combo once. If you look at some other thief sets, such as Sword/Dagger, users actually use thier auto attack as thier sole source of dps.
Other classes can find rotations with their weapon sets because the cooldown system lends itself well to rotation and their weapon sets are designed with rotations in mind.

Thieves on the other hand are on a resource system and have to choose what will give them the most value for the least cost. So railroading them into forced rotation won’t work at all. Especially considering some skills costing a 3rd to a half of their resources

ty for the constructive answer

i think alot of people misunderstand what i mean with the recharge that cancels on using another skill then before.

idea is use “2” , “4”, “2”,“4” , or any combo of skills without recharge
or spam 1 skill with real small recharge
“2” , ( 2sec recharge ) , “2” ( 2 sec recharge) , “2”….

i think there are plenty of weapon sets that could use a combo of 2 skills with the same initiatief regen thief builds have now ( you can have 7-8 ini regen / 10 secs easily realy without having to do to many troubles in the trait trees)

Void.4239:

evilapprentice.6379:

There is no “Fix” possible, or even needed. Thieves were designed with 1 or (if they’re really lucky 2) “Damage” abilities per weapon set. That is how thieves do damage – they don’t have other options besides auto-attack. ANet is not completely redesigning thieves. GET OVER IT.

i appreciate your meaning.
but plz only constructive posts in here , i dont want it to turn out into a flame topic.
and in my eye’s more or less most weapon sets have 3 or more high dps ability’s on thiefs , maybe 1 or so is weaker cause its a defensief weapon set.

I am being as constructive as possible with the material you’ve provided. Your making a case for something that’s just plain silly and impossible. Its obvious you’ve never played a thief, or you would never have typed the nonsensical words you’ve posted here. As a point of comparison, I will provide some hypothetical Post topics for other classes I feel are on par with this one, so you can understand from the class you plays point of view.

Necro’s have access to too many conditions
Warriors should be in the lowest Health bracket
Rangers have access to too many ranged weapons and pets
Get rid of guardian bubbles and reduce their blocks
Increase Elementalist Attunement cooldown 500%
Mesmer’s have too many clones/phantasms
Please remove Grenade and Bomb Kits from engineer, also all their turrets

I’m not posting these to be rude – there’s just no other way to explain to you how impossible, ill informed, and biased your suggestion is. You are 100% wrong – thieves spam skills by design, because that’s all that’s available to them if they want to actually kill targets. You’d know this if you played thief for an hour.

Sense not even once. HS gets spammed because its conditional requirement is a joke for what it does, shadow shot roots and dancing daggers is an expensive feather weight
Options of another rotation are impractical and highly situational. Thief’s supposed to be able to use any skill at least twice any recharge is nonsensical.

Void.4239:

evilapprentice.6379:

There is no “Fix” possible, or even needed. Thieves were designed with 1 or (if they’re really lucky 2) “Damage” abilities per weapon set. That is how thieves do damage – they don’t have other options besides auto-attack. ANet is not completely redesigning thieves. GET OVER IT.

i appreciate your meaning.
but plz only constructive posts in here , i dont want it to turn out into a flame topic.
and in my eye’s more or less most weapon sets have 3 or more high dps ability’s on thiefs , maybe 1 or so is weaker cause its a defensief weapon set.

Also, “Most weapon sets have 3 or more high DPS abilities”… that right there – thats how anyone who’s played thief for an hour knows how off base you are.

S/P – Auto attack is your best DPS, everything else is a utility, or a niche DPS move (PW).
S/D – Auto attack, everything else is a utility
D/D – Auto attack/BS and HS. CnD does alright damage, but its costs 6 init – its a stealth utility, not a DPS ability (you dont -ever- use CnD when going for the kill..no one does). If you’re condi, GL, ALL you get is Deathblossom.
D/P – Auto attack and HS – Shadow shot would actually be a good mix between DPS and utility if it didn’t root.
P/P – Unload, kind of. Auto attack/Sneak attack if your condi based.
Shortbow – Auto attack if you have 2 targets, cluster bomb.

I listed auto-attack just to be safe – No thief weaponset has 3 DPS skills. None.

The fix is to make it not auto-aim to the target. Make it a skill shot like burning speed and everything is fine. As it stands a thief doesn’t even need to know where their target is to land this ability.

There is no problem with the thief class. Go complain about mesmer like everyone else.

Yeah, glad to see thief getting some much needed attention.

The problem (if there is one) isn’t that thieves CAN spam 1 ability in rapid succession, it’s that they would want to.

They have 5 skills per weapon set, but really only a couple are viable. The reason they HS spam is because it’s mildly effective to do so (although not 100% optimal). When you look at a warrior, most of their abilities are situation and you wouldn’t want to use them back to back. Thief….not as much.

I think HS specifically should act as it’s designed, it should be a finisher move that is very effective at low health and does little to nothing at high health. Currently, it hits like a semi truck at low health and hits like a F150 at high health. Also, the auto-aiming gap closing may be a bit much lol

All in all, I like initiative and it gives thieves a unique feel; however, the moves themselves probably need to be looked at.

Anet have already said, spammer thieves are “working as intended”…
yes they intend for you to take 12k from heartseeker.

Thieves were designed by Anet to be able to use the same skill twice. The difference that most people don’t get, and I myself didn’t get until I made one, is that they can use their total skill pool LESS OFTEN overall than other professions. If you don’t believe me, make a thief and try to use all of your skills in the exact same manner you would with say, a warrior or ele.

With initiative, it is essentially a global CD on thief skills. Without traiting into high initiative regen (which most thieves don’t, since it tends to severely cut into their damage or survivability), if you blow your initiative at the wrong time, or just fail to hit with it, you are a sitting duck. Unlike other professions, you can’t just weapon swap and spam away. You’ll have to either blow a util to stealth and wait (while your enemy is recovering and capping a point), or sit there spamming 1 hoping the enemy doesn’t CC you in any way.

This means that timing is essential for a thief. Before my thief, I had a Necro and a D/D Ele. The ele I can safely say was incredibly easy to duel with compared to my thief, as I almost never really needed to think “hmm…Can I get away with using this now?” If I missed a skill or 3, no biggie, just swap to another attunement and use any of my other skills.

If I mis-time just about any 2 skills on my thief, it can easily cost me my life. This is the tradeoff, unfortunately.

With all that said, I actually wouldn’t mind something being done to heartseeker. Preferably make it manual aim. If they increase the init cost, it’s going to make D/P thieves (and any other thief not running the stupid BS build) suffer much more as HS with other builds is being used typically as a gap closer, execution skill, or leap finisher ie: Black Powder + HS for stealth, which btw costs 3/4 of your init pool currently.

Jericho.4521:

Thieves were designed by Anet to be able to use the same skill twice. The difference that most people don’t get, and I myself didn’t get until I made one, is that they can use their total skill pool LESS OFTEN overall than other professions. If you don’t believe me, make a thief and try to use all of your skills in the exact same manner you would with say, a warrior or ele.

With initiative, it is essentially a global CD on thief skills. Without traiting into high initiative regen (which most thieves don’t, since it tends to severely cut into their damage or survivability), if you blow your initiative at the wrong time, or just fail to hit with it, you are a sitting duck. Unlike other professions, you can’t just weapon swap and spam away. You’ll have to either blow a util to stealth and wait (while your enemy is recovering and capping a point), or sit there spamming 1 hoping the enemy doesn’t CC you in any way.

This means that timing is essential for a thief. Before my thief, I had a Necro and a D/D Ele. The ele I can safely say was incredibly easy to duel with compared to my thief, as I almost never really needed to think “hmm…Can I get away with using this now?” If I missed a skill or 3, no biggie, just swap to another attunement and use any of my other skills.

If I mis-time just about any 2 skills on my thief, it can easily cost me my life. This is the tradeoff, unfortunately.

With all that said, I actually wouldn’t mind something being done to heartseeker. Preferably make it manual aim. If they increase the init cost, it’s going to make D/P thieves (and any other thief not running the stupid BS build) suffer much more as HS with other builds is being used typically as a gap closer, execution skill, or leap finisher ie: Black Powder + HS for stealth, which btw costs 3/4 of your init pool currently.

This!!! Thieves can do a lot of burst dmg when traited but they are super squishy and lack a lot of survivability and therefore cannot stay in a fight for long. Coupled with good mobility, especially with crossbow, they are designed to get in, deal a bunch of damage, and then get out and run away. If they make a mistake and get caught, they go down very easily. This is all true for backstab thieves… which seems to be what people are primarily complaining about. What about p/d thieves? They are WAY harder to deal with!

THat being said, I agree HS spam is silly and it would be nice if they could find a creative way to deal with it – completely breaking thief class design by introducing a cooldown is NOT the answer at all. Perhaps reducing hte range or making it a targetable skill or something would be the answer – maybe even a trait to remove the targetting from it that forces thieves to sacrifice something to get spammable HS.

Get rid of initiative. I don’t see how it adds any value to the thief class.

Chi Malady.2015:

Get rid of initiative. I don’t see how it adds any value to the thief class.

Most of thief weapon skills are akin to utility skills, and they’re the worst class at face tanking, so initiative allows them to react to rapidly changing situations in short spurts.

To the person who said Thief were designed for burst, and aren’t made for attriction fights like Necro, please reconsider your position.

Check Wild bill bideo for a P/D attriction build, that’s more efficient then an attriction necro.

Also evilapprentice, I doubt any engineer would mind if you took our turret!

Making Initative Regeneration twice as fast while making the damage skills do less damage would greatly fix the class, it would give the less damage spells a much easier chance to be used: like body shot, ect ect…

For example: Head Shot the pistol skill was made when initiative was 1 per second, not 1.6 per second, and Black Powder used to cost 5 initiative, not 6, and was also made when initiative was 1 per second.

These were great utility, but now nobody uses them most of the time.

A lot of our skills damage wise, were not updated when they nerfed initiative regeneration.

P/D is the most ez-mode build a thief can have. Once they are ready to take the training wheels off, they move to Sword builds or at least something like D/P.