Guild Wars 2

@OP

So if nerfs/buffs come… does that invalidate your entire argument? You seem to be implying that there is no OP/UP.

Thieves have the highest burst AND the best natural defenses (greatest mobility + stealth= ability to leave combat easily). This alone is OP compared to the other classes, but in conquest: they murder, then simply have no restriction to maintain the fight while abilites are on cooldown. Most people just want to kill, and thieves do it faster, easier, safer, better than anyone, and best in large groups.

When everyone misses the point it’s a good clue your point is dumb.

sPVP is 8 per map. tPVP is 5. Competitive PVP in this game is designed to be small scale. Telling people to always bring 2 people to everything is dumb because if you did that you’d lose pretty much every map.

Valhallen.1693:

First, no thief or warrior has ever killed you before you had time to react.

Thats right, you have TIME to react… you just can’t because you are stun/feared/immobalized for the 1.2567 seconds it take them to kill you.

Maybe they DOWNED you in 2 seconds since you have a slow internet connection or slow reflexes.

The difference is irrelevant if you get downed by a theif in pvp you are getting stomped by an invisible theif unless you are in a decent team. So you have to have godlike reflexes and ping to defeat the 3 button theif?

My question is, where was your backup? Why didn’t your teammate destroy the glass cannon after he burned his 45 second burst cooldowns?

So it takes a team to beat a theif? Also your buddy can’t kill him because he is…………. invisible.

you thought it was a good idea to run around the map by yourself like a one man army with no defensive spec and obviously lacking in sufficient PvP skills.

So theives only kill people who suck and have no defensive spect? That is simply not true. I think we have all seen the 10-15k crits coming off theives and its not just something that happens on people with no defence. In 5vs5 tourney games it is not always possible to run around in a constant clump just because there is 1 theif on the other team.

GW2 PvP is about TEAMWORK!

Except for the theif apparently.

Glass cannons, especially thieves, warriors, and to a lesser extent a few other professions, are good at ONE thing. They down one person every 45-60 seconds that isn’t paying attention or has “average” reflexes before they can defend themselves. Once they blow their combo, that’s it until it’s ready again.

So theives can’t do any damage until their long cooldowns are up? That is simply not true. When their cooldowns are up theives can insta gib a person…. without those cooldowns they can do decent damage and even still win fights.

If you had a friend with you, that thief that just backstabbed you for 11K wouldn’t have stood a chance of winning because his measly 14K HP would have been gone before he got off the stomp.

So you have to fight all theives 2vs1?

Game balance is NOT everyone being the same and being able to do everything equally well. You should not be able to play as a roamer, bunker, single target dps, AoE dps, and support with a single profession. Balance is one profession being good at one thing and another being good at something different

Your right….. a game can be perfectly balanced with a class that can insta gib you…. but games have to be more than just balanced, they have to be FUN. It is not fun for people to get insta gibed and even if they have mad skills and survive they insta gib it doesn’t matter because the theif can either finish them off (since they are at 1/4th health) or can just go invisible and escape easily even though they failed their gank.

Thieves are really good at taking out one person really fast.

Maybe this needs to be changed. Maybe this one spect of the theif needs to be nurfed a little so that the theif can’t insta gib people but needs to be buffed to give the theif a little more survivability for a slightly longer fight. People need to feel like they have actually had a chance to fight back.

No one has said that thieves are unbeatable or that you should make 5vs5 teams full of thieves because they are stronger than every other class. What people have an issue with is the specific theif build that lets you kill the majority of other classes in less than a second. Even if you are running a glass cannon build of another class and expect to take more damage in combat there is simply no other class than can deal out the near instant death damage of a theif. The closest is a 100 blades warrior but there are big differences, for starters you can see the 100 blades warrior coming, there are no culling issues, he has a hard time running away after he messes up his combo and he has to stand still while he uses it… none of these things apply to the theif.
The first thing that needs to be fixed are the culling issues with the theif’s stealth. I have seen on a consistent basis thieves able to 100-0 players while invisible on that players screen, this is simply not acceptable, 3 seconds of stealth should not be 6 seconds of stealth while you kill someone. After this MAJOR theif issue is fixed we can look at other details of the theif.

lol, sorry thiefs kill in 3 seconds.

Sounds like someone playing the fotm profession trying to keep it that way all in the name of “team balance”. 1v1 balance is important. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it must get as close to 50%/50% win/loss as possible.

OP doesn’t know about quicknes stomp.

Soon OP will tell us that he is a skilled thief who knows to smash his 2 buttons better than the average thief. He probably has tried different professions but thief is the only one “which feels right”.

I wonder why thieves wouldn’t want to be fixed. Right now it’s not like getting killed by one makes you think that you got outplayed by a skilled player. Glass cannon thieves cannot be allowed such burst damage in their opener since the fragility that they are accepting in exchange for their burst is never actually exposed to their opponent, making for very unfair fights.

Unless you use one of the dozens of ways to mitigate the thieves damage, in which they fall flat on their face at your feet.

Being taken from 100% to 25% in a few hits while being poisoned and crippled at the same time might as well be insta kill because there’s no way to recover from it.

Rottaran Owain.6789:

Unless you use one of the dozens of ways to mitigate the thieves damage, in which they fall flat on their face at your feet.

If by fall flat on their faces at your feet you mean push a button and walk away while invisible to try and kill you again in a couple of seconds when you don’t have your miraculous damage mitigate ability that lets you anticipate the first attack of an invisible opponent and reduce the 15k damage available.

Valhallen.1693:

One on one, sure I’ll concede that a glass cannon thief or 100 blades warrior is stronger than most other professions. But s/tPvP are not designed around 1v1. Matches are designed around capturing and holding points, and most importantly teamwork. You getting rocked on your dps or “balanced” traited engineer while you ran around the map by yourself in quick join is not indicative of any kind of game imbalance. (Not to mention the fact that you failed to blind the thief and easily counter him)

Whilst some of your points are valid, you decidedly ignore situations where 1v1’s are very important.

This, of all MMO’s I have ever played has one of the biggest focuses on duelling I have ever seen. I have been in very close matches where everybody on the map is tied up in a team-fight except for one player on each side, often the winner of that duel can cause the team to win the whole game.

There are times when a defender can not get support and must 1v1 an attacker, sometimes the defender is there only due to opportunity and not actually specced (some bunkers lose to certain specs as well) for it, often it is the duty of this person to not necessarily win if counter-specced, but delay, you can’t delay if you die in 1 second.

The downed state is a loss if the other person has a decent amount of health, unless you’re a Mesmer, Ranger or Warrior with vengeance + quickness (lol 6k rogue crits okokok).

Not even mentioning Kylo, the map has so many places to be the most you often see is 2v2’s, with the occasional team-fight.

Stealth, Invincible (these are guarunteed), Quickness and Stability stomps also counter a someone stopping a stomp. The only thing that really stops a successful instant-kill from being complete tide turner is big 3+ team fights where multiple team-mates can rez faster than a stomp cast-time. At which the point the glass cannon becomes a liability to his team, so it has its ups-and-downs.

My 2 cents.

Yes, Warriors and Thieves have killed me and others before we had the time to react, it’s possible to die to Mug+CnD+BS right away. Stop lying, please, doesn’t help the discussion.

Just topped playing sPvP in frustration for the first time. The other team had 5/8 thieves. So yes they seem to be FOTM. As a necro with 23k health I was being stun killed by thiefs coming out of stealth. This is not fun. Nerf them. Fighting a thief that can leave the combat by going into stealth, even with dots on them is just plain OP.

I agree with everything the OP says. I only die to Theives when I am alone or seperated from my team. If they kill me, does that make them a better player than me? Not always. In fact, if I am alone and he is alone then both of us are probably not contributing to the team effort and we are both fail. As an elementalist, sure I can kill bad theives, but good ones, very rarely by myself. In that situation, I try to survive and kite back to my team.

However, I always try to stick with my team if I can. Dpsing one guy when your team is dpsing someone else is bad tactics. Always FF one target at a time and CC the rest. This is not acheived by one person, this is a group effort. People who do not understand that PvP is a group activity usually do are the first to cry inbalance. Are there inbalance’s in PvP now for soem classes, sure. But when 3 or 4 people FF the Theif supposedly criting people for 15k, he does not last very long. In fact, after he get’s FF 3 or 4 times most players will get frustrated that their cheeseball tactics do not work and now you have thrown a scrub out of his element and basicly removed his worth to his team.

Such bad reasoning. Can’t kill a bunker 1v1. Now can’t kill a thief 1v1 either. Tell me what fun is left for the other builds out there? As soon as you’re caught alone you’re dead meat unless you play a bunker or a thief? And then have to run back to your team with your tail between your legs like a beaten dog?

shaolin.9716:

Such bad reasoning. Can’t kill a bunker 1v1. Now can’t kill a thief 1v1 either. Tell me what fun is left for the other builds out there? As soon as you’re caught alone you’re dead meat unless you play a bunker or a thief? And then have to run back to your team with your tail between your legs like a beaten dog?

I have never been unable to kill a bunker in a 1vs1…. of course I play mostly necro so maybe I have an advantage in that area.

shaolin.9716:

Such bad reasoning. Can’t kill a bunker 1v1. Now can’t kill a thief 1v1 either. Tell me what fun is left for the other builds out there? As soon as you’re caught alone you’re dead meat unless you play a bunker or a thief? And then have to run back to your team with your tail between your legs like a beaten dog?

Why are you concerned with 1v1 in a group oriented game? If balance was based on 1v1 you would have complete inbalance in game. Trust me, comming from Age of Conan, I have seen what 1v1 balance does to a game, it ends it.

shaolin.9716:

Such bad reasoning. Can’t kill a bunker 1v1. Now can’t kill a thief 1v1 either. Tell me what fun is left for the other builds out there? As soon as you’re caught alone you’re dead meat unless you play a bunker or a thief? And then have to run back to your team with your tail between your legs like a beaten dog?

Hmm well wouldn’t that be the players fault? There re many builds that counter bunker with out being burst themselves and the vast majority of thief builds are susceptible to dots. Since I know both those can be beat one on one I have to question if a player chooses to run wouldn’t that be their own lack of skill at play. And running to your allies is not a bad thing. Smart players realize the situation getting support is never a bad idea as your failure to survive effects the whole team.

Fear someone off of a high enough ledge…thats an insta-death ;P

1v1 is actually the easiest scenario to beat a thief in, if you’re in a group fight a smart thief will wait until you’re occupied with someone else and then jump in, and chances are you don’t have all your cooldowns up and are at less than max health by that point, so unless you’re a bunker, you end up dead. Then again, if you’re a bunker the thief probably wasn’t targeting you in the first place.

Here we go again…another kool-aid drinker. Of course people are instantly killed. Team this team that..blah blah blah. If you die on the node (where everyone should be fighting btw), and if it is a close bout, I would not expect my teammate to stop trying to kill the enemy to have a minute chance of getting me up off the ground. Not all down state skills are the same. There is only so much certain classes can do. Then there is absolutely nothing other ones can do in that state.

@Zatria
If you continue to think like this then your team(if you run with one) will be having the most depressing one sided team fights. You must if safely possible get up your downed teammates. Allowing them to get a huge res when you could have collectively done something about it would be a big mistake.

@OP
There was no point in making this thread. People who believe that they have no way to react are beyond reasoning with. They feel they are the victims and cannot be wrong. I play guardian. I have the tools, the timing, and the knowledge of how the enemy works to successfully avoid every “1 shot spec”. The only thing that gets me is an unseen backstab. I can’t even be mad at that however as it’s doing it’s job.

Securing the node is “usually” more important than trying to rez someone who can just simply rez himself and run back 10x faster.

I play guardian. I have the tools, the timing, and the knowledge of how the enemy works to successfully avoid every “1 shot spec”.

It’s ok everyone! Guardians don’t get tooled by thieves! Nothing to worry about. Balance is here. If, of all the classes in the game, a Guardian can survive, then there’s really no excuse for all the rest of you guys, since we all know guardians have the weakest defensive cooldowns and least damage mitigation in the game!

Hey.

Wait a second…

Parakeet.6083:

If by fall flat on their faces at your feet you mean push a button and walk away while invisible to try and kill you again in a couple of seconds when you don’t have your miraculous damage mitigate ability that lets you anticipate the first attack of an invisible opponent and reduce the 15k damage available.

You might want to do a little research into this “15k backstab”

You’ll find out that failing to do it means he’s blown multiple utilities, his elite, and his steal.

It’s not “a couple of seconds” till he can retry. More like 45.

It’s a minute, and other than maybe blinding powder or smokescreen + heartseeker, the only other stealth option he’ll have left is a healing skill.

Suctum.6912:

shaolin.9716:

Such bad reasoning. Can’t kill a bunker 1v1. Now can’t kill a thief 1v1 either. Tell me what fun is left for the other builds out there? As soon as you’re caught alone you’re dead meat unless you play a bunker or a thief? And then have to run back to your team with your tail between your legs like a beaten dog?

Why are you concerned with 1v1 in a group oriented game? If balance was based on 1v1 you would have complete inbalance in game. Trust me, comming from Age of Conan, I have seen what 1v1 balance does to a game, it ends it.

That’s always the cheap reasoning in any mmo with huge balance issues. Don’t get me wrong, you will never have a “perfect” balance. However, as was already said, there are glaring issues between: guardians, thieves and mesmers and the rest.

Besides that, there are enough situations where there are 1vs1 or 2vs2 fights going on. And when you and your buddy meet e.g. 2 rogues they will more or less instant gib the squishier, stealth stomp him and then it is 1vs2.

Rottaran Owain.6789:

Parakeet.6083:

If by fall flat on their faces at your feet you mean push a button and walk away while invisible to try and kill you again in a couple of seconds when you don’t have your miraculous damage mitigate ability that lets you anticipate the first attack of an invisible opponent and reduce the 15k damage available.

You might want to do a little research into this “15k backstab”

You’ll find out that failing to do it means he’s blown multiple utilities, his elite, and his steal.

It’s not “a couple of seconds” till he can retry. More like 45.

It’s a minute, and other than maybe blinding powder or smokescreen + heartseeker, the only other stealth option he’ll have left is a healing skill.

Yup, every 45 sec a nearly guaranteed kill because if you get hit by 15k and are no tank, then the fight is over. Pressing a macro key must be hard. Maybe reduce the cd to 20 sec to balance the poor thieves? .)

Valhallen.1693:

First, no thief or warrior has ever killed you before you had time to react. Maybe they DOWNED you in 2 seconds since you have a slow internet connection or slow reflexes, but they didn’t kill you. My question is, where was your backup? Why didn’t your buddy stun and kill the glass cannon while he was stomping you? Why didn’t your teammate destroy the glass cannon after he burned his 45 second burst cooldowns? Oh, that’s right, because you thought it was a good idea to run around the map by yourself like a one man army with no defensive spec and obviously lacking in sufficient PvP skills.

Problem is I should be able to 1v1 a Thief without help, I shouldnt need someone elses CC just my own because then the team goes on this thief who will evade and dump all the pressure when he runs away. Meanwhile the enemy team is controlling you for not going on them. You ignore the fact that the Thief is not only insane pressure but very hard to catch.

Valhallen.1693:

GW2 PvP is about TEAMWORK! That means playing with other people. Glass cannons, especially thieves, warriors, and to a lesser extent a few other professions, are good at ONE thing. They down one person every 45-60 seconds that isn’t paying attention or has “average” reflexes before they can defend themselves. Once they blow their combo, that’s it until it’s ready again. If you had a friend with you, that thief that just backstabbed you for 11K wouldn’t have stood a chance of winning because his measly 14K HP would have been gone before he got off the stomp. You deserved to get your face melted for running off by yourself.

So the Thief is good at one thing? No he’s very good at damage, the ability to survive and disable team members due to his insane pressure aka control.

Valhallen.1693:

Game balance is NOT everyone being the same and being able to do everything equally well. You should not be able to play as a roamer, bunker, single target dps, AoE dps, and support with a single profession. Balance is one profession being good at one thing and another being good at something different, but when on a team everyone is able to contribute equally.

This is where you actually admit the Thief is overpowering to the rest, the Thief is all those things due to pressure and threat dumpage.

Valhallen.1693:

Thieves are really good at taking out one person really fast. Put them in a 5 on 5 with AoE and lots of conditions flying around, and they quickly become less useful than a mesmer, necro, guardian, or even an elementalist. One on one, sure I’ll concede that a glass cannon thief or 100 blades warrior is stronger than most other professions. But s/tPvP are not designed around 1v1. Matches are designed around capturing and holding points, and most importantly teamwork. You getting rocked on your dps or “balanced” traited engineer while you ran around the map by yourself in quick join is not indicative of any kind of game imbalance. (Not to mention the fact that you failed to blind the thief and easily counter him)

This is simply not true you are still in denial that the thief is a master of the holy trinity (Damage, Control, Support). Necro, Guardian and Ele do not do this kind of damage, because they have to spec to do what they need.

Valhallen.1693:

Seriously, stop complaining and L2P. Don’t just learn how to play your profession or even how to counter other professions. Learn how to play GW2’s style of PvP. This isn’t World of Warcraft where the only goal is to get your opponent’s HP to 0.

All in all, the Thief disables your time to do damage and hit with stealth, does more damage then you out of nowhere and can survive without specing into it.

Suctum.6912:

Trust me, comming from Age of Conan, I have seen what 1v1 balance does to a game, it ends it.

Age of Conan didn’t fail because of 1v1 balancing.

@zatria
rezzing an ally is far more important then trying to finish off that bunkerthe bunker will survive a 2v1 long enough for a friend or two to get there but a 3v1 probably not. you should always rez your teamates when they are downed

i cant think of a single situation where it is actually better to wait for rez timer and run back in a tpvp situation, then rez your teamate.

Really? Losing to a backstab thief is all because of reaction time, are you kidding. I got the first attack on one in a final round of Tpvp – for once. Had the fight going semi-well until he of course just stealthed and then 1 hit from backstab, 1 heartseeker and I’m dead. There is no reaction time to that. You can’t even see him to avoid a half your health skill then heartseeker just locks on anyway to finish me off. Unless I pop a invulnerability skill HOPING the thief backstabs me at that moment then I might be ok, but what player would ever do that? My only other option is run away when he stealths, but of course, the thieves mobility is unbelievable compared to my weak – at best- escape skills on my ranger – let alone I get only 1 invun that I’d have to go fully into marksmanship just to debate about taking.

Why not just give the Thief’s permanent stealth at this point? Make them like old school WoW rogues, unlimited stealth and a one shot ambush. We’re basically there already.

@Valhallen

Dead on, man. It seems almost impossible to convince some players that thieves are not as amazing as they seem.

Side note though: played against a non-glass cannon thief last night. Had some awesome 1v1 fights w/ him at quarry; good 1-2 min fights. Spoke w/ him briefly afterwards, but I cannot remember his name/build. All I can say is that, his dmg was not as bursty as 99.9% of thieves being played, but his survivability was immense. My entire perspective regarding thieves hae been changed. It is nice to see players like this. I just hope that anet doesn’t fall too victim to all of this op theif qq, ultimately hurting a good player like the one I’ve encountered.