Guild Wars 2

I main a thief and can avoid heartseeker spam (dodge roll is so OP), but hear me out on this one. Make it an execute ability, have it do minimal (like 50 dmg above 50% hp and 200 abover 25%) until someone drops below a threshold of 25% then the full force kicks in. I believe HS spam would stop. What everyone else’s opinion?

all HS needs is to remove the jump and auto face effect on the skill, make it only jump forward like elementalists where you have to time and aim to have a slight chance of hitting. But then people will complain, omg i cant spam and kill people anymore its too hard to hit =/

Heartseeker is perfectly fine, no need to change anything about it.

Rezz.8019:

Heartseeker is perfectly fine, no need to change anything about it.

Only a HS-spamming thiev would say that HS is ok.
I am playing thief sometimes, and its definitly not fine atm.

You have a autofacing, following skill which is spammable – shouldnt be possible to spam only 2 and kill a guys, even if he dodges 1 or 2 times. Its ridiculous.

there is big skill cap between classes and HS is the best example for this. Its a charge with huge dmg, autoface and you can kitten spam it!
Just buff the other weapon sets of the thief class and in the same turn pls change this spam playstyle. If this happen I will go back to my thief

Heartseeker is fine. just reduce the range it leaps.. atm its 450 make it less, around 250 or so.

Something needs to be done about it. At least the evade needs to come off of it, of the range reduced, or the auto homing thing needs to be gone. As it stands now if you have two equally skilled players (one a thief) fighting, once they both get low the thief has the ability to spam heartseeker and evade the opponents damage, while still doling out damage. That is classified as an iWin button. Not only is a gap closer, it evades, auto homing, spammable, combat finisher, and conditions. The devs must have got ahold of that medicinal stuff to smoke when they were designing the thief.

Lixion.8457:

I main a thief and can avoid heartseeker spam (dodge roll is so OP), but hear me out on this one. Make it an execute ability, have it do minimal (like 50 dmg above 50% hp and 200 abover 25%) until someone drops below a threshold of 25% then the full force kicks in. I believe HS spam would stop. What everyone else’s opinion?

Please excuse me while I go laugh this off.

Trigr.6481:

Lixion.8457:

I main a thief and can avoid heartseeker spam (dodge roll is so OP), but hear me out on this one. Make it an execute ability, have it do minimal (like 50 dmg above 50% hp and 200 abover 25%) until someone drops below a threshold of 25% then the full force kicks in. I believe HS spam would stop. What everyone else’s opinion?

Please excuse me while I go laugh this off.

Wow, outstanding feedback. I think the devs should hire you for your amazing sense of constructive criticism. I think you could make this game better with thoughts like that.

Lixion.8457:

I main a thief and can avoid heartseeker spam (dodge roll is so OP), but hear me out on this one. Make it an execute ability, have it do minimal (like 50 dmg above 50% hp and 200 abover 25%) until someone drops below a threshold of 25% then the full force kicks in. I believe HS spam would stop. What everyone else’s opinion?

to me hs could do
zero (0) damage above 75%
poor dmg 75%<x<50%
rest as it is.

or zero (0) damage above 50%

as they want. i don’t like spamming hs and i feel sad when i see a spamming thief. more if he uses haste..

#Heartseeker now deals 25% less dmg when casted in rapid succession (2 second debuff)
(Similar to Kassadin/KogMaw mechanics)

Jumper.9482:

#Heartseeker now deals 25% less dmg when casted in rapid succession (2 second debuff)
(Similar to Kassadin/KogMaw mechanics)

I like that, but I would rather either have the homing portion of it taken off, leap distance lowered, or the evade taken off, mainly the first one.

Kirei.1792:

Heartseeker is fine. just reduce the range it leaps.. atm its 450 make it less, around 250 or so.

Lol who’s it going to hit then?
HS isn’t a problem but I don’t like that it auto-corrects itself if an opponent is behind you.

Trolls gonna troll.

I don’t think Anet will go for such a huge nerf. I think the two main problems with heartseeker are:

1. Hotjoin, where heartseeker spam playstyle is encouraged;
2. Lack of effective matchmaking, i.e. heartseeker is incredibly frustrating for new players to counter.

When thieves say “l2p,” what they mean is “your reflexes are too slow.” There’s nothing wrong with that in theory—GW2 was designed to require twitch reflexes. Unfortunately, reflexes develop over time as a player learns to anticipate his opponents’ moves. Right now, new players meet situations that require extremely fast reflexes to counter, but with zero learning curve—if you can respond to a thief fast enough, you live, and if not, you die. The traditional MMO learning curve has to do with understanding your skills, your opponent’s skills, theorycrafting, and positioning. That makes GW2 a pretty hard slap in the face when people jump into their first hotjoin and realize that GW2’s “learning curve” is getting your twitch reaction time to a fraction of a second.

hharry.1967:

all HS needs is to remove the jump and auto face effect on the skill, make it only jump forward like elementalists where you have to time and aim to have a slight chance of hitting. But then people will complain, omg i cant spam and kill people anymore its too hard to hit =/

+1 otherwise make Ele d/d skills auto face AND evade attacks too kitten…

How about this.

If a thief uses heartseeker more than 2 times in a row his toon gets deleted and replaced by level 1 elementalist.

does anybody here know that if a thief is slowed or chilled the heartseeker range became a lot less?
btw i wouldn’t mind if they make changes to heartseeker, since heartseker spam is too easy, but a direct nerf or an heartseeker to aim would be just stupid.
the only thing they should do on this , like on many others thief ability is to convert the actual instant damage in some other abilites as much useful as the actual abilities

Jumper.9482:

#Heartseeker now deals 25% less dmg when casted in rapid succession (2 second debuff)
(Similar to Kassadin/KogMaw mechanics)

this will resolve everything.

I don’t think damage nerfs are the best way to go about balancing Heartseeker. It’s not the damage per say that makes it such a popular ability to use. It’s the fact that it’s so easy and effective to use.

Increasing the Initiative Cost to 4 (up from 3, while reducing Dancing Dagger to 3, down from 4) and reducing the Leap range from 450 down to 300 would be a lot more effective than simply nerfing damage.

u mean more descructive

HS obviously needs a slight fix and everyone who says it’s fine is a HS spammer.

Lixion.8457:

Trigr.6481:

Lixion.8457:

I main a thief and can avoid heartseeker spam (dodge roll is so OP), but hear me out on this one. Make it an execute ability, have it do minimal (like 50 dmg above 50% hp and 200 abover 25%) until someone drops below a threshold of 25% then the full force kicks in. I believe HS spam would stop. What everyone else’s opinion?

Please excuse me while I go laugh this off.

Wow, outstanding feedback. I think the devs should hire you for your amazing sense of constructive criticism. I think you could make this game better with thoughts like that.

Actually I have already have gave opinions and suggestions on heartseeker with 2 words, ground targeting. You force a thief to ground target with each heartseeker and you balance out the skill.

if you weren’t going to have it home in it would have to do aoe … like the eles attacks do. which i would be fine with me aoe heartseeker, lolz. but on a serious note i think the 25 % dmg reduction if used within 1 second of another heartseeker is a really good idea. this forces new thieves to adapt faster to a good style of play that allows them to survive when people start focussing them in tourneys. This will also help to make it easier for new players to not rage out at thieves when the thief is actually just playing badly, but for a new player hs spam is hard to deal with yes they will learn eventually if they stick through it long enough to learn how to counter it easily but alot of players will quit thinking pvp is just unbalanced. also im tired of people telling me i hs spam when i dont and only use it to get stealth through my black powder to then backstab.

Reduce the damage not the range, HS is the only gapcloser that you have if you are running D/D

Heartseeker itself is absolutely fine.

Its the initiative system that makes it broken kitten Every other class has to manage cooldowns; they can’t just spam their best skill at the start-middle-end of fights; they have to decide to use it either now, or later when its more likely to land (less roll/defensive cd chance)

What they should do is just remove the initiative system, its one of the reason why thief is kind of unfixable; there will always be one “optimal” skill to use, and due to the initiative system, that particular move will be used continuously to the exclusion of all the other skills. After removing it, rebalanced the numbers (probably gotta buff the damage slightly on all the skills) but they would not longer be spam able. Hell, even a 3 second cd on HS would be good enough really…

I main a ranger and I don’t really have an issue with HS.

Basically with the initiative system, there will always be 1 “optimal skill” to use relative the other. Heck on every class, every weapon set has 1 ability that is slightly better than the other 4 skills. Every other class has to balance around a CD usage though, so they have to play tactically (how do i set up this ability? should i use it now and hope to use it again later in the fight, or do i save it for when i can set it up easier, etc)

Thief doesn’t have this problem. The initiative system makes this choice for them. There is basically never a need to wait and hold back. You have the option to continually use your best skill so you don’t even need to worry about the others. Sure you can potentially run out of initiative, but you can always disengage or wait a few seconds since it regens fairly quick. It was supposed to make the class interesting and unique, but all it does is simplify the class a huge amount because it removes all the thinking/strategy that cd management forces on everyone else.

Nerfing HS won’t change anything. Even if they nerfed it into the ground, something else would take its place (like death blossum spam for example). There will always be 1 skill out of the 5 that is slightly stronger than the other 4, which will lead to the optimal choice for the thief class to spam that ability (since they can).

heart seeker is not our best ability. backstab is in my build. hs is jus ta gap closer for me and a way to gain stealth through my smoke field from my 5 from my pistol offhand.

Akumetsu.8591:

heart seeker is not our best ability. backstab is in my build. hs is jus ta gap closer for me and a way to gain stealth through my smoke field from my 5 from my pistol offhand.

Thanks for completely missing the point and/or having poor reading comprehension.

Let me put it this way. You can think of this game and the decisions you should make, much like a flowchart. The thief flowchart however, its much, much simpler because there won’t be divergence points in the flowchart that check for cooldowns like every other class, so the optimal decision will often loop around 1 skill.

You probably still won’t understand though since you seem to read posts to try to pick out mistakes and make yourself sound smarter, rather than read posts to understand the entirety of the argument being made.

Well HS spam it’s simply stupid and unuseful vs 95% of ppl (It really takes no effort to evade it, less that HB…nough said..)…please don’t nerf it more, HS spammers are free points, don’t want to lose them……..

Akumetsu.8591:

heart seeker is not our best ability. backstab is in my build. hs is jus ta gap closer for me and a way to gain stealth through my smoke field from my 5 from my pistol offhand.

You’d be ok then as none of the suggested “fixes” would affect you. What you’re doing is reasonably skillful.

Heartseeker is the only thing that keeps thieves from being completely useless. I don’t see any need for changing it, as there are so many ways to counter thieves. How come no one here suggested buffing their health or armor or anything? They’re just paper, and they’re similar to assassins in gw1, meaning they deal the highest amount of damage in short time, but they’re very fragile.
I can’t remember anyone complaining about assassins in GW1, even tho they would push 3 buttons and enemies would die.

Thief can use the Heartseeker about 4-5 times with full initiative. You can always dodge, that’s at lest 2 less hits on you. If you have a blind, thats another one less, immobilise will also be effective as the jump won’t work. There are also stuns, fears, knock-back and knock-downs.

I have no problems with thieves on my warrior (lonbow + hammer), it’s a simply matter of the right skill in the right time.

I havent had an issue with heartseeker itself since pre-nerf (ages ago), the problem I guess is haste.

Against hs chill (and I assume cripple but I dont use that much) and rolling away pretty much shuts it down (just in case you dont know chill reduces leap distance 66%).

A really important thing to know is that above 50% hp its going to do kitten all damage, so use your heals/defensive cd’s early to stay above 50%. Someone told me a long time ago that a fight with a thief is all about staying above 50% hp, soon as you go below you lose and he was absolutely right. This helped me a lot vs thieves.

Rezz.8019:

I can’t remember anyone complaining about assassins in GW1, even tho they would push 3 buttons and enemies would die.

You’ve made this comment a few times lately, and each time I have resisted the temptation to eat you alive. Well, I’ve decided I’m gonna bite.

No one complained about assassins in GW1 because they sucked. A new player with 0 experience of the assassin or even their own class could accidentally and unintentionally counter them without even realising it. The combo system was severely flawed. A single block, a single miss, all it took was for one skill to fail to land the assassin was shut down until the whole combo came off cooldown. The system made the assassin incredibly predictable, making them vulnerable to interrupts and +CDR skills which could go on to shut them down for up to a whole minute. Assassins were just laughably easy to counter.

Of the 8 skills you were allowed to take, an assassin had to find a res, 3 combo skills, you usually needed a 5 stage combo in order to get any good damage and to keep the foe locked down, backup lead skills incase you are shut down, increased movement speed / gap closer, attack speed steroid and survivability. It was an impossible feat and even if you did succeed by some miracle, you still didn’t bring anywhere near the same utility a warrior did.

It’s also important to note GW1 had monks. Do you think people would complain about thieves in GW2 if we had a monk stood behind us healing us for half of our health in a quarter of a second while the thief tries to burst us?

The thief and assassin can not be compared on any level, so please stop regurgitating this statement.

On topic: I haven’t had much trouble with HS specifically since its nerf ages ago. I somewhat agree with Recently with regards to the initiative system being the root of many problems, but I’d like to point out the initiative system transfers the opportunity cost from “If I use this now I won’t be able to use this later” to a cost which affects the entire weapon bar. Theoretically, thieves have to make decisions about how to utilise their damage: all in one go leaving nothing left for defences (eg Cloak and Dagger) or spread out in sustained damage? If they want to relentlessly spam the optimal skill until they run out of initiative fine, but they shouldn’t expect to be able to CC the counter burst. Sadly this doesn’t come across very well in game.

Rezz.8019:

Heartseeker is the only thing that keeps thieves from being completely useless. I don’t see any need for changing it, as there are so many ways to counter thieves. How come no one here suggested buffing their health or armor or anything? They’re just paper, and they’re similar to assassins in gw1, meaning they deal the highest amount of damage in short time, but they’re very fragile.
I can’t remember anyone complaining about assassins in GW1, even tho they would push 3 buttons and enemies would die.

Interesting observation…….stealth>toughness/health

ChaosStar.3162:

Rezz.8019:

I can’t remember anyone complaining about assassins in GW1, even tho they would push 3 buttons and enemies would die.

You’ve made this comment a few times lately, and each time I have resisted the temptation to eat you alive. Well, I’ve decided I’m gonna bite.

No one complained about assassins in GW1 because they sucked. A new player with 0 experience of the assassin or even their own class could accidentally and unintentionally counter them without even realising it. The combo system was severely flawed. A single block, a single miss, all it took was for one skill to fail to land the assassin was shut down until the whole combo came off cooldown. The system made the assassin incredibly predictable, making them vulnerable to interrupts and +CDR skills which could go on to shut them down for up to a whole minute. Assassins were just laughably easy to counter.

Of the 8 skills you were allowed to take, an assassin had to find a res, 3 combo skills, you usually needed a 5 stage combo in order to get any good damage and to keep the foe locked down, backup lead skills incase you are shut down, increased movement speed / gap closer, attack speed steroid and survivability. It was an impossible feat and even if you did succeed by some miracle, you still didn’t bring anywhere near the same utility a warrior did.

It’s also important to note GW1 had monks. Do you think people would complain about thieves in GW2 if we had a monk stood behind us healing us for half of our health in a quarter of a second while the thief tries to burst us?

The thief and assassin can not be compared on any level, so please stop regurgitating this statement.

On topic: I haven’t had much trouble with HS specifically since its nerf ages ago. I somewhat agree with Recently with regards to the initiative system being the root of many problems, but I’d like to point out the initiative system transfers the opportunity cost from “If I use this now I won’t be able to use this later” to a cost which affects the entire weapon bar. Theoretically, thieves have to make decisions about how to utilise their damage: all in one go leaving nothing left for defences (eg Cloak and Dagger) or spread out in sustained damage? If they want to relentlessly spam the optimal skill until they run out of initiative fine, but they shouldn’t expect to be able to CC the counter burst. Sadly this doesn’t come across very well in game.

Well written post. Playing an assasin in GW1 was fun in PvE, and not too terrible in Random Arenas, but I wouldn’t have dared to try Team Arena or Heroes Ascent on a sin.

Rezz.8019:

Heartseeker is the only thing that keeps thieves from being completely useless. I don’t see any need for changing it, as there are so many ways to counter thieves. How come no one here suggested buffing their health or armor or anything? They’re just paper, and they’re similar to assassins in gw1, meaning they deal the highest amount of damage in short time, but they’re very fragile.
I can’t remember anyone complaining about assassins in GW1, even tho they would push 3 buttons and enemies would die.

Lies on multiple parts wtf is wrong with this forum.
1. S/P thief’s are completely viable and note to every ignorant individual on this forum…they don’t hav heartseeker. The idea that thief usefullness is based on heartseeker is a gross exaggeration. That being said, heartseeker is not Lucifer.

2. Lol did you play GW1 assassin? We got blasted several times from the start of our existance. The very idea that no one complained about Assassin’s is a joke, an Assassin could barely go a weak without hearing some bullkitten about us either in-game or on forums. Impale, Shadow prison, Aura of Displacement, Palm strike, Shadow of haste being GW2’s Shadow Return on steroids, BoA, Crit Scythes, not even touching all of the hate. PvE Shadow form, PvE us supposedly blowing up whenever an Afflicted sneezed. “Shadowsteps ruin the importance of positioning”, “Critical strikes makes energy a joke”, “Shadow steps need aftercast”. No one complained about Assassins, did we play the same game? Every profession in GW1 got complained about, unquestionably.

The only problem of heartseeker, is it attacks people behind you, when it should just launch you forward if you’re not in the proper range of sight. Cripple and Chill.

Heart seeker fix, heart seeker can no longer be used when foe is not in front of you

Okay well the fact that it’s spammable maybe they should fix that? How about limiting it to 2-3 stacks. You get 3 chances to use Heartseeker. After you use them, it goes on a ten second CD. Of course it is essentially spammable, but not as much as it was before.

If you bring someone to the next percent amount of health and you have no more heartseeker stacks, you have to wait on your ten second cd, but it will make the thief choose when he wants to use heartseeker.

The cooldown could be too long, so maybe 8 seconds. With a change as drastic as this they would have to increase back the damage on HS, to make sure its a kill and this would make heartseeker an execute that kills for sure.

EDIT: Forgot to mention there could be an ICD of 8-10 seconds also if one or two is used and it will refresh 1 heartseeker stack not all at once.

EoNxBoNx.9213:

Okay well the fact that it’s spammable maybe they should fix that? How about limiting it to 2-3 stacks. You get 3 chances to use Heartseeker. After you use them, it goes on a ten second CD. Of course it is essentially spammable, but not as much as it was before.

If you bring someone to the next percent amount of health and you have no more heartseeker stacks, you have to wait on your ten second cd, but it will make the thief choose when he wants to use heartseeker.

The cooldown could be too long, so maybe 8 seconds. With a change as drastic as this they would have to increase back the damage on HS, to make sure its a kill and this would make heartseeker an execute that kills for sure.

EDIT: Forgot to mention there could be an ICD of 8-10 seconds also if one or two is used and it will refresh 1 heartseeker stack not all at once.

Yo dawg. I just put a resource mechanic in your resource mechanic, so you can use two resource mechanics.

Archonis.7249:

EoNxBoNx.9213:

Okay well the fact that it’s spammable maybe they should fix that? How about limiting it to 2-3 stacks. You get 3 chances to use Heartseeker. After you use them, it goes on a ten second CD. Of course it is essentially spammable, but not as much as it was before.

If you bring someone to the next percent amount of health and you have no more heartseeker stacks, you have to wait on your ten second cd, but it will make the thief choose when he wants to use heartseeker.

The cooldown could be too long, so maybe 8 seconds. With a change as drastic as this they would have to increase back the damage on HS, to make sure its a kill and this would make heartseeker an execute that kills for sure.

EDIT: Forgot to mention there could be an ICD of 8-10 seconds also if one or two is used and it will refresh 1 heartseeker stack not all at once.

Yo dawg. I just put a resource mechanic in your resource mechanic, so you can use two resource mechanics.

Don’t see anyone else giving a valid suggestion other than just “dodge roll”. Which is fine and dandy until the next major patch and thieves get either nerfed or some minor buff that doesn’t do jack worth of kitten.

And some random person figures out how to kill other players within half of a sec instead of 1. Because that extra half of a second is just so much more efficient.

The problem with heartseeker is that it is way to easy to use for the damage that it puts out. I think if it had130-300 range with no gap closer it would be balanced.

Maybe make the animation slower? Anyone ever thought of that?
That way it will be easier to dodge (is already easy but with haste it’s a little tricky) and makes it less spammable while still making it a usable skill