Guild Wars 2

Yes, we all read about how thief is underpowered, etc.

While I do agree thieves need more build diversity because they are locked into the +1 Decapper role.

I also do agree thieves’ need more weapon diversity/buffs, you HAVE to take SB for mobility to do your role.

But, whenever I watch Sindernerr or Vallun’s Streams, thieves are a different beast and can overturn a match very quickly.

They also play their class very very well, and I just could not see how they are playing with their class on par with the other elite specs.

So what is really the problem with thieves? As far as I can see, basing it from those players, Yes thieves need a bit of work, buffing/tweaking/more diversity but I just don’t see how some people here on the forums make it like thieves are the worst spec.

No flaming please. I was just really curious about the situation of thieves.

As a thief player wanting to come back, I’m also curious. From my understanding it’s just that thieves can’t melt face fast enough anymore because the meta is geared torwards tanky builds lately, and can’t stay alive long enough to really justify the spot on the team. But I definitely would like to see what people have to say outside of the ranty threads before I abandon my class altogether.

Thieves have 3 major weaknesses, CC, blocks and blinds. Thieves rely heavily on hitting their target quickly, doing lots of damage, then running out.

Warriors are pressure based are drastically hurt as well because they cannot keep up their pressure damage when they are being tossed around like a ragdoll.

Thieves in the meta has been in trouble even before heart of thorns, when it comes to being an assassin-like class, mesmers are just better in every aspect. What kept them around was shortbow 5 but sadly in a meta where CC is spammed like auto attacks they cannot contribute much at all.

Building on Nova, this meta kills Thief- highly tanky player, tons of area abilities (for a 1v1 class), too many passives, too many damage mitigators…its just way too exhausting and time consuming when you could take any other class and actually fight. Especially the current bunker mesmer with portal.

Thief at most needs Preparedness and a vitality base boost (get us to 15k with the other medium hp classes?) because that opens up a lot of choices, which is far more helpful and balancable when you take a real look at it. Marauder amulet would still be good, but we’d be able to touch Berserker again. Instead of taking Trickery for a few boons and a stun, we’d be able to go SA/Acro for more defense OR crit for damage. Our initiative is balanced on Preparedness, more than many recognize.

Anywho, thats a side track. Thief is ~almost~ fine. Its just impossible for newer or less experienced Thief players to pick up because Thief is balanced on the remaining players. Friend of mine tried to pick it up last week and spent more time dead than contributing. Meanwhile on his Scrapper, he tanks 1v3’s and wins 1v2s. Just an idea

Hope I helped. Warrior has the same weaknesses, but different strengths. They are equally weak, just in different ways.

basically thief is in the same spot as pre buff necromancer, where you can be good and impactful IF you have a team build around a thief. That means teammates that compliment your play style, can support you and can help you set up a burst all while constantly communicating the target’s position they want you to burst on.

As you might expect almost none of this can happen in a random ranked game where you solo queue and have no communication with the team you get (voice or otherwise), let alone any build synergy.

On top of all that you can just play a shiro revenant (or a melee ranger with quick draw, seriously give it a try) and achieve the same play style, but with somewhat less mobility (especially vertical mobility) but in return you get more sustain/survivability, and more ability to stay in a fight. There is a good reason why pretty much every ‘pro’ player dropped their thief in favor of, well anything. Risk vs reward and the thief has a disproportionate amount of risk for little reward. This is largely due to overnerfing because allot of players whining and refusing to learn how to outplay, but also because of the current state of the meta (op elite specs, aoe cc spam, passives on top of passives riding passives, ect).

For what it’s worth my main was a thief before the specialization pach, i swapped to ranger.

Also i never heard of the streamers you mentioned, then again i do not watch twitch much.

From my experiences with thief lately, the reason it is not being played a ton isn’t really because it sucks. It’s because everything else is op and takes little to no effort to utilize. To explain exactly what I mean I will divide into 3 little paragraphs the reasons why thief is not being played much.

Damage:
In the game there is a serious amount of access to high damage with little investment into power. Part of this is base damage being too high on some things and the other part is might. The large amount of might access for many HoT specs allows builds that are extremely tanky to have high damage (lots of the time equal to or greater than that of the thief). Thief also possesses little acces to aoe damage hich was given out like crazy to every espec. The reason this is a big deal is because those aoe’s do higher single target damage than many of the thief’s higher damage skills making it more reasonable to take an aoe heavy class over a thief. And considering thief gets melted by aoe, it adds up to force thief out.

Mobility:
While the thief itself has the highest mobility overall in the game, many classes were given large amounts of mobility due to complaints from the community that thief was unkillable because of mobility. The mobility the classes were given isn’t greater than thief, but in a small space like pvp it is enough to actually compete with the thief in terms of map presence. These now highly mobile classes are also tanky with generally a great deal of cc and aoe damage making them overall a better option when building a team or solo-qing.

Sustain and defense:
HoT provided all classes with increased defensive abilities and sustain. Thief got some yes but it wasn’t as much as what everyone else got. The amount of sustain and added tankiness was so high that 1v1 or even 1v2 some classes can’t be killed unless they mess up real hard. To add on to the amount of sustain and defense that these classes have on weapons and such, they are covered by passives that prevent cc burst from thief in the form of basilisk venom with their own counter cc or with auto prot. As with damage, base heals are too high and many classes can have access to the ability to fully heal themselves on demand without the need to invest in healing power. So when people equip cele amulet and gain healing power they have ridiculous amounts of sustain, damage, cc, boons, aoe, mobility, etc.

All of this stacks up to prevent the thief from doing what it was intended to do: Move around fast and burst out low hp targets. Yes good thieves make it work and the payoffs can be huge but overall it is easier and safer to go with something other than thief which is why people complain when you play thief.

I appreciate all the posts.

But still the verdict stands, how come those two players I mentioned can play their class really well, amidst all these weaknesses you mentioned?

Really well to the point they can dominate matches.

With their performance, I could barely see some of the stuff you guys mentioned here.

Ario.8964:

HoT provided all classes with increased defensive abilities and sustain. Thief got some yes but it wasn’t as much as what everyone else got

This is not really true. The main defense/sustain thief got is with daredevil in the form of a 3rd dodge. But we already had that with acrobatics before it got butchered and resold as a part of the ‘elite’ specialization. We can get some more weakness and the 10% mitigation after a dodge true, but the main course the 3rd dodge we always had.

This is why the daredevil came as such disappointment to me.

StickerHappy.8052:

I appreciate all the posts.

But still the verdict stands, how come those two players I mentioned can play their class really well, amidst all these weaknesses you mentioned?

Really well to the point they can dominate matches.

With their performance, I could barely see some of the stuff you guys mentioned here.

Like i said idk who those 2 are or if they play solo, but there is a simple way to find out why we all wrote the above and how it all works (falls apart). You know what it is, all it takes is a non-occupied character slot.

foste, I think we are arguing the same thing. Daredevil did get defensive and sustain buffs (especially in the form of condi removal) BUT compared to other classes it was underwhelming which is why I too was disappointed with daredevil.

Imo daredevil should never have existed because acro should never have been gutted but there’s nothing we can do about it now.

Sticker,
The reason they can sway matches that well is 1) because they are good and good thieves will still do some serious good for your team 2) because their team is competent enough to support them and cover weaknesses. If the start a snowball with a good play their teams are good enough to push on that advantage and then they proceed to dominate the match.

Thief in comparison to other classes is not as good. However with the right player on the thief I still believe they can be one of the most valuable classes on a team.

foste.3098:

StickerHappy.8052:

I appreciate all the posts.

But still the verdict stands, how come those two players I mentioned can play their class really well, amidst all these weaknesses you mentioned?

Really well to the point they can dominate matches.

With their performance, I could barely see some of the stuff you guys mentioned here.

Like i said idk who those 2 are or if they play solo, but there is a simple way to find out why we all wrote the above and how it all works (falls apart). You know what it is, all it takes is a non-occupied character slot.

Sindernerr plays for Orange Logo.

Don’t get me wrong, I can’t play thief really well, it is the least class I played with Rev.

Im just wondering is the issue more of like “A get good issue” meaning, it could be there just a lot of bad thieves?

Again, I am not saying thieves do not need tweaks/buffs etc.

Well there are also a ton of bad thieves out so that’s part of what’s giving thief a bad rep.

StickerHappy.8052:

foste.3098:

StickerHappy.8052:

I appreciate all the posts.

But still the verdict stands, how come those two players I mentioned can play their class really well, amidst all these weaknesses you mentioned?

Really well to the point they can dominate matches.

With their performance, I could barely see some of the stuff you guys mentioned here.

Like i said idk who those 2 are or if they play solo, but there is a simple way to find out why we all wrote the above and how it all works (falls apart). You know what it is, all it takes is a non-occupied character slot.

Sindernerr plays for Orange Logo.

Don’t get me wrong, I can’t play thief really well, it is the least class I played with Rev.

Im just wondering is the issue more of like “A get good issue” meaning, it could be there just a lot of bad thieves?

Again, I am not saying thieves do not need tweaks/buffs etc.

does sind ever q alone?

Ario.8964:

foste, I think we are arguing the same thing. Daredevil did get defensive and sustain buffs (especially in the form of condi removal) BUT compared to other classes it was underwhelming which is why I too was disappointed with daredevil.

Imo daredevil should never have existed because acro should never have been gutted but there’s nothing we can do about it now.

Sticker,
The reason they can sway matches that well is 1) because they are good and good thieves will still do some serious good for your team 2) because their team is competent enough to support them and cover weaknesses. If the start a snowball with a good play their teams are good enough to push on that advantage and then they proceed to dominate the match.

Thief in comparison to other classes is not as good. However with the right player on the thief I still believe they can be one of the most valuable classes on a team.

The team is a no brainer.

But all those matches they played on the stream were solo q, but still they did amazingly well. Close matches too.

@Cynz

Those matches I watched were indeed solo q.

Thief has a role, and it’s the best at it, still. Instead of having balanced squirmishes that you win, you need to +1 fights and instantly kill stuff to build momentum and constantly outnumber opponents everywhere, while taking decaps when your foes decide to comit to bigger team fights. Basically, you snowball the map by quickly ending fights and roaming between points.

The problem in the current meta is that it’s just not possible to quickly kill meta builds. If you watch recent ESL games, you’ll notice that even when a fight is won, the team that has the upper hand is incapable of snowballing because:

1) Mesmers and druids are far too mobile.
2) Mesmers, revs, druids, scrappers and tempests take ages to kill

So in definitive, thief is only marginally worse than pre-HoT, but the conquest strategy in which he has a role has completely disappeared, at least in tournaments.

You mentionned Sindrener and Vallun, which are perfect examples. Caed plays a staff build and plays well, but a power revenant could fill his role much better. What makes Sind and Vallun is that:

1) The players at their level have a better understanding of rotations, and can actually make use of the thief.
2) They play a very smart build. Dash, Scholar Runes, Palm Strike on interrupt, d/p: the idea is simple, never duel, just insta-kill. In the role they choose, not even shatter mesmer can compete.
3) They are mechanically better than most players. With all the condi/AoE/invuln/block spam around, playing thief requires amazing concentration (more than, say, scrapper). They’ve been playing thief for a long time, and they are good at it.

So yes, thief is rather bad currently. It should get better if bunker mesmer gets destroyed (sorry, I just don’t think that it’s a good thing to have a mobile build capable of holding a point), druid mobility gets nerfed, and some of the AoE damage and the block/invuln/blind flying around disappear, thief will be back in the meta, because while he can’t 1v1, he has a very distinct role in which he’s the best.

tldr : Vallun and Sind are good, but the team strategy associated with thief does not work anymore because of mobile, unkillable meta builds.

Cynz.9437:

does sind ever q alone?

Sometimes yes. He also queues with Helseth or Frostball, which allows for thief/mesmer burst, so it’s another reason why Sindrener has more success than most thieves.

@Sorel

So, you are saying that thief is in a good place right now, the only thing that holds it back is the state of the meta correct?

And let’s not forget maybe just open up more build diversity and weapon diversity and role diversity.

Imo, I just think there are a lot of bad thieves, esp here on the forums.

Another observation I had is, thief is very hard to utilize to full in solo q, I think organized teams are where thieves shine best.

Thief isnt undertuned, its just that this meta isnt favorable for them, but as you said, if you know how to play it its totally viable

Krysard.1364:

Thief isnt undertuned, its just that this meta isnt favorable for them, but as you said, if you know how to play it its totally viable

This was the bulk of my observations.

Hey do not get me wrong, I feel bad for thieves bec they have been stuck for 1 role in 3 years.

More Build diversity will help thieves a lot. Maybe they will be wanted for other roles they could fill.

It’s the meta, and it’s bad players.

This begs the question- would you balance by pro or by player? Because, the way you make it sound (and thanks for ignoring my post which literally said what you said…) you want the barrier to entry to stay so high that players freshly picking Thief will throw it away instantly. No one will pick Thief and go “jeez, this is fun, balanced, and enjoyable” it’ll be “why the kitten can they do that? better try me one of them other classes”.

To reiterate what I said earlier (and hopefully get someone to read it…doubtful. when you’re right, people look away or try to make you sound wrong)- the barrier to entry can be removed by increasing the hp from 11k base to the 15k base. This gives more leeway for mistakes. The barrier to viability can be REDUCED by making Preparedness baseline, as all costs to Thief weapons are based around ALL THIEVES having 15 initiative, thanks to that one trait. Don’t believe me? Play anything minus Staff (…), and watch how hard it is to be even remotely useful. The answer isn’t adjust init, because they gotta balance the 12 and the 15- the answer is just make it 15.

For reference- Rev has 15k hp, and can play marauder easily. Reason? Lots of self healing and a fairly durable class setup. Also, Mesmer’s got Illusionary Persona and a +15% phantasm damage boost because…reasons- but no prep for thief.

Anywho, betting money I get argued with for being right because someone wants to argue OR no one reads this.

tldr- you won’t read it, but the fixes are 15k hp (medium value, not the low value) and preparedness (+3 init) baseline. won’t happen, but it’d be the least amount of work for the devs and it’d bring players who thief back.

PS- I agree with Krysard to a point. Its not undertuned, but outdated and unloved. Weapons are just fine, the traits need help though. And a lot of our utilities (Signet of Shadows and Scorpion Wire are a fantastic start).

StickerHappy.8052:

Krysard.1364:

Thief isnt undertuned, its just that this meta isnt favorable for them, but as you said, if you know how to play it its totally viable

This was the bulk of my observations.

Hey do not get me wrong, I feel bad for thieves bec they have been stuck for 1 role in 3 years.

More Build diversity will help thieves a lot. Maybe they will be wanted for other roles they could fill.

It’s the meta, and it’s bad players.

The real answer to your question is simple and most people may know the answer and yet they do not actively realize it:

As long as you are mechanically good and understand conquest (and there will be the same amount of good thieves as with any other class), you will have great matches as a thief and then you will have matches where you feel you can’t have an impact on the match no matter what.

The reason for this is that thieves, like no other class, benefit from a snowball effect. If the thief’s team has the upper hand in terms of map control, allowing them to pick their fights or even better intercept single players in superior numbers on roads, they will not have to worry about their shortcomings (Crowd Control, AoE and Area Denial effects in general), because the enemy is forced to play defensively. As a result the thief’s combat uptime skyrockets often leading to the impression that the thief is everywhere at once (due to its mobility).

God forbid, however, the situation is reversed. A thief on the defensive who can not choose a fight that is already tilted in his team’s favor, will have some of the lowest combat uptime, giving the impression that the thief is always in the most wrong spot at the wrong time.

The better the player the more often the thief player will find himself in forementioned situations that are more suited to him. However, be aware that team composition and your team mates’ level of competence is much more relevant in determining which scenario you will find yourself in ultimately.

TLDR: The thief profession shines like no other class when you are already winning and suffers more than any other when your team is with its back against the wall. Depending on your team and their classes’ ability to pave the way for you, you will be more or less successful in the end. It’s up to the thief and his competence to take advantage of this, however and that is why some will perform better than others.

Problem 1: Thieves arent OP faceroll high burst, stealth, impossible to kill anymore

Problem 2: Inexperienced scrub thieves die a lot

Problem 3: Related to Problems 1 and 2, other classes can kill thieves now unlike in the past

Reality 1: Thieves are amazing on the team, just got to use them properly. Let them rotate quickly, let them, +1. The bunkers can hold the points. Ez kitten pz.

Serious Thought.5394:

This begs the question- would you balance by pro or by player? Because, the way you make it sound (and thanks for ignoring my post which literally said what you said…) you want the barrier to entry to stay so high that players freshly picking Thief will throw it away instantly. No one will pick Thief and go “jeez, this is fun, balanced, and enjoyable” it’ll be “why the kitten can they do that? better try me one of them other classes”.
To reiterate what I said earlier (and hopefully get someone to read it…doubtful. when you’re right, people look away or try to make you sound wrong)- the barrier to entry can be removed by increasing the hp from 11k base to the 15k base. This gives more leeway for mistakes. The barrier to viability can be REDUCED by making Preparedness baseline, as all costs to Thief weapons are based around ALL THIEVES having 15 initiative, thanks to that one trait. Don’t believe me? Play anything minus Staff (…), and watch how hard it is to be even remotely useful. The answer isn’t adjust init, because they gotta balance the 12 and the 15- the answer is just make it 15.

For reference- Rev has 15k hp, and can play marauder easily. Reason? Lots of self healing and a fairly durable class setup. Also, Mesmer’s got Illusionary Persona and a +15% phantasm damage boost because…reasons- but no prep for thief.

Anywho, betting money I get argued with for being right because someone wants to argue OR no one reads this.

tldr- you won’t read it, but the fixes are 15k hp (medium value, not the low value) and preparedness (+3 init) baseline. won’t happen, but it’d be the least amount of work for the devs and it’d bring players who thief back.

PS- I agree with Krysard to a point. Its not undertuned, but outdated and unloved. Weapons are just fine, the traits need help though. And a lot of our utilities (Signet of Shadows and Scorpion Wire are a fantastic start).

I 100% agree. And i want to highlight something- the people you all are talking about are professional players with ton of experience with the class .
do you really want to balance a profession around “pro” players? The community is much bigger, and most of the people who play pvp are -average+.
I think most of you will agree it is just not fair for normal players.

@Slim
Wow now that i think about it… it actually makes sense
Well i guess this is what creates that much hate about thieves- we either feel like gods to the person who got us as you said, and therefore get hated because that person thinks we’re OP etc and cannot accept defeat, or we just suck because of the team’s composition and the other stuff, and end up being hated by our team. Either way, we get hated
(Side Note: You wrote it in a brilliant way )

Serious Thought.5394:

Cut
.

Sorry dude, I was planning to reply regarding your post, But I have a 900 second post gate. I have forgotten to reply after entirely

You provide some good info although I disagree on some.

The comparison on rev is so so in general, we all know that rev is such a broken class, heavy armor, high boon uptime, high damage, decent sustain, no counterplay heal, and so on.

You can compare any damage class to revenant and that class would fail in comparison.

I do agree that thief needs higher hp since it relies on stealth on active defenses. 15 Initiative is too much, why? you wanna see evade spamming thieves even more?

About balancing for pros, everyone starts as a noob, even the pros started as noobs, I do not see why new players can’t practice to be better and we should just make everything easier in a sense.

So you guys are saying we should balance around casuals then?

Anet tried balancing around casuals and the especs came out in that form effectively breaking the game completely. Balance towards casuals creates gimmick builds and brainless spam of something that happens to be op at the time.

So no, do not balance around casuals. I don’t see why it is so hard to balance around the “pro” gameplay, if they intend on streaming it as an esport then that is what needs to be balanced because nobody likes watching gimmick wars. They want to see skillful plays not spam to win.

Although sticker I disagree on the point you made towards condi thief with 15 ini. Reason being that 15 initiative is already what the class is balanced around having and forcing a person to use a traitline just to be able to effectively use their weapons is bad design. If it was baseline there wouldn’t really be an increase in condi builds as trickery would no longer provide extra initiative so it’s not like everyone would take it to have crazy amounts of initiative (besides those builds are 1v1 wvw gimmicks and can be nerfed if they become too out of line after such a change happens). And in all honesty it’s more likely you would see an increase in dps builds for thief as they would then have access to a whole extra traitline that may be something huge like crit strikes.

I fail to see the evade spam. Do you mean Staff? Because thats insanely easy to combat. Death Blossom? They want to take Trickery for that Bewildering Ambush. And that too is insanely easy to fight.

Evade spam would be from endurance, and if thats a problem research Weakness. Also, I was right. Someone would argue the very obvious minor moves Anet could make that would not even buff us- just shift power of the more confident players.

Thief has evade spam, but for it they do no damage and are murdered by weakness. This is a condi heavy meta, if you don’t have weakness you should not be playing with condis.

Serious Thought.5394:

I fail to see the evade spam. Do you mean Staff? Because thats insanely easy to combat. Death Blossom? They want to take Trickery for that Bewildering Ambush. And that too is insanely easy to fight.

Evade spam would be from endurance, and if thats a problem research Weakness. Also, I was right. Someone would argue the very obvious minor moves Anet could make that would not even buff us- just shift power of the more confident players.

Thief has evade spam, but for it they do no damage and are murdered by weakness. This is a condi heavy meta, if you don’t have weakness you should not be playing with condis.

S/D SB? don’t tell me this set does no damage, oh and yes some people use this set.

You do know that you can’t inflict weakness when you evade that said attack right?
Oh, if it was that easy then perma weakness spamming would be a thing by now.

Acrobatics thief was a thing before remember? now make ini 15 and add more evade spam to it.

It’s fine by me but you just have to take all things into consideration. If that happens, I am sure a lot of people will whine about evade here on the forums.

Thief isn’t half as bad as people say it is. Once Revenant drops out of meta or even just gets nerfed I’m sure that Thief will see its comeback.

With that being said I think that something needs to be done with Sword itself and especially S/D. The autoattack of sword has insane aftercast and the whole weaponset feels laggy since the trait overhaul. Infiltrators return still has a 1s cast time despite what the tooltip may say and Flanking strike/larcenous strike has lackluster damage and feels like you’re rubberbanding. I dunno what they kittened up in that patch, but it doesnt feel the same ever since then.

Also the discrepancy in damage between Vault and Backstab is absolutely ridiculous given that vault needs very little setup in comparison to BS.

Oh yeah and please delete acrobatics traitline alltogether, it needs to be redone with every single trait because you were too lazy to do a proper Elite spec and rather gave us Acro 2.0

Thieves have about the same DPS as all the other classes but are incredibly squishy, so what’s the point in using one? Their mobility is the only thing they’ve got left, but it’s just not worth it when they die in 2 seconds.

StickerHappy.8052:

I appreciate all the posts.

But still the verdict stands, how come those two players I mentioned can play their class really well, amidst all these weaknesses you mentioned?

Really well to the point they can dominate matches.

With their performance, I could barely see some of the stuff you guys mentioned here.

Because they’re better than everyone else?

No point in comparing the top player’s performances against the 99% of us that are not as good and never will be as good.

Slim said it best. In this meta, thieves tend slow down a defeat or speed up a win. They rarely carry a team. They aren’t optimal in all situations (mostly bad for come backs when there are no good fights to choose.)

I disagree about revs tho (even tho yes they do definitely need toning down) I don’t think revs are simply taking their spot. Revs are bruisers and thieves are more true assassins. Revs also can’t disengage to decap as well as a thief.

Its just that there are far too many bunkers, rezers, and cleave. When I play thief I get a lot of people down but often have to retreat because of cleave and they are instantly (practically) res’d.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Problem 1: Thieves arent OP faceroll high burst, stealth, impossible to kill anymore

Problem 2: Inexperienced scrub thieves die a lot

Problem 3: Related to Problems 1 and 2, other classes can kill thieves now unlike in the past

Reality 1: Thieves are amazing on the team, just got to use them properly. Let them rotate quickly, let them, +1. The bunkers can hold the points. Ez kitten pz.

1. Is false. Unless you are talking about the beginning of the game circa 2012.

2. Yes and has been the case for years.

3. False again since other classes have always been able to kill thieves.

Also your reality is a delusion since zero pro teams ran thief. Only toker played thief for 1 round on Kyhlo and let’s be honest….they would have won by a larger margin if he didn’t.

Stop with the false stories of thieves. I main mesmer and remember the hard counter, but even then i recognize the importance of that hard counter in terms of PvP balance.

Sticker, yes s/d can still be a thing (it’s my main set for thief) but it won’t be the evade spam for days unkillable while killing everyone else that you made it out to be.

Weakness spam can be done fairly easily actually, the issue is it’s hard to maintain vs a thief with EA as they will shed those condis while you try to attack them if they are smart.

Making ini 15 wouldn’t add more evade spam to the set unless people went into acro and gave up on either the damage from trickery or crit strikes. I’d be more concerned about d/p if I were you in this situation.

Only reason anyone should complain about evade is when anet makes evades do something stupid like crit for 4k damage or stack condis. But that’s why I was upset with dd design in the first place. Defensive evades are fine (cause you can’t do damage if all you are doing is evading) but they should be used as defensive tools and I’m not sure anet gets that. Really they should just buff weapon damage on thief and then remove the damage type dodges because that was a silly design from the start (giving each a different type of utility would be awesome but doing damage should never have crossed their minds.)

Besides the people who will complain about evades are the ones that don’t know how to time skills and just try to just spam to hit and when it doesn’t work they complain about fighting someone who knows what they’re doing.

I’m slightly distracted so if my post went into a rant I apologize and I hope everything made sense :/

Edit: Azukas, while I’m very happy you recognized the fact that toker played thief for fun on that match and it had no effect on the outcome I disagree with you on the importance of “hard counters”. I personally feel it limits build and class diversity and such a thing imo should never be in the game. Soft counters are good because then it’s about playing what will give you an advantage but shutting out an entire build or class just because you play something is not good design from where I stand. Other than that I agree with what you said overall.

Ario.8964:

Sticker, yes s/d can still be a thing (it’s my main set for thief) but it won’t be the evade spam for days unkillable while killing everyone else that you made it out to be.

Weakness spam can be done fairly easily actually, the issue is it’s hard to maintain vs a thief with EA as they will shed those condis while you try to attack them if they are smart.

Making ini 15 wouldn’t add more evade spam to the set unless people went into acro and gave up on either the damage from trickery or crit strikes. I’d be more concerned about d/p if I were you in this situation.

Only reason anyone should complain about evade is when anet makes evades do something stupid like crit for 4k damage or stack condis. But that’s why I was upset with dd design in the first place. Defensive evades are fine (cause you can’t do damage if all you are doing is evading) but they should be used as defensive tools and I’m not sure anet gets that. Really they should just buff weapon damage on thief and then remove the damage type dodges because that was a silly design from the start (giving each a different type of utility would be awesome but doing damage should never have crossed their minds.)

Besides the people who will complain about evades are the ones that don’t know how to time skills and just try to just spam to hit and when it doesn’t work they complain about fighting someone who knows what they’re doing.

I’m slightly distracted so if my post went into a rant I apologize and I hope everything made sense :/

Edit: Azukas, while I’m very happy you recognized the fact that toker played thief for fun on that match and it had no effect on the outcome I disagree with you on the importance of “hard counters”. I personally feel it limits build and class diversity and such a thing imo should never be in the game. Soft counters are good because then it’s about playing what will give you an advantage but shutting out an entire build or class just because you play something is not good design from where I stand. Other than that I agree with what you said overall.

Okay fair points, but I have no idea why I am the only one proposing more build diversity for thieves to perform different roles.

Yes the problem is the meta, we all know that. But thief is practically stuck to 1 role so they can’t do anything about the meta.

If they had atleast 2-3 more options available to them, I believe thief can play accordingly to whatever meta comes about.

So that solves 50% of the problem, but the other 50% which are bad thieves will always be a problem, but atleast we get to a general consensus.

StickerHappy.8052:

Ario.8964:

Sticker, yes s/d can still be a thing (it’s my main set for thief) but it won’t be the evade spam for days unkillable while killing everyone else that you made it out to be.

Weakness spam can be done fairly easily actually, the issue is it’s hard to maintain vs a thief with EA as they will shed those condis while you try to attack them if they are smart.

Making ini 15 wouldn’t add more evade spam to the set unless people went into acro and gave up on either the damage from trickery or crit strikes. I’d be more concerned about d/p if I were you in this situation.

Only reason anyone should complain about evade is when anet makes evades do something stupid like crit for 4k damage or stack condis. But that’s why I was upset with dd design in the first place. Defensive evades are fine (cause you can’t do damage if all you are doing is evading) but they should be used as defensive tools and I’m not sure anet gets that. Really they should just buff weapon damage on thief and then remove the damage type dodges because that was a silly design from the start (giving each a different type of utility would be awesome but doing damage should never have crossed their minds.)

Besides the people who will complain about evades are the ones that don’t know how to time skills and just try to just spam to hit and when it doesn’t work they complain about fighting someone who knows what they’re doing.

I’m slightly distracted so if my post went into a rant I apologize and I hope everything made sense :/

Edit: Azukas, while I’m very happy you recognized the fact that toker played thief for fun on that match and it had no effect on the outcome I disagree with you on the importance of “hard counters”. I personally feel it limits build and class diversity and such a thing imo should never be in the game. Soft counters are good because then it’s about playing what will give you an advantage but shutting out an entire build or class just because you play something is not good design from where I stand. Other than that I agree with what you said overall.

Okay fair points, but I have no idea why I am the only one proposing more build diversity for thieves to perform different roles.

Yes the problem is the meta, we all know that. But thief is practically stuck to 1 role so they can’t do anything about the meta.

If they had atleast 2-3 more options available to them, I believe thief can play accordingly to whatever meta comes about.

So that solves 50% of the problem, but the other 50% which are bad thieves will always be a problem, but atleast we get to a general consensus.

Thief has had 1 role since the beginning of this game. From talking with the players who choose thief they were ok with the role they had.

Now they are a nonviable mess of a class that either needs one of two things to happen.

1. Give them the buffs they need to compete in this meta
2. Nerf everyone else

S/d has a two part evade- part one evade, part two highly telegraphed jab non evade. This is FAR from perma evade, they have to constantly dodge…so when they do this wait for them to overextend (this set is literally a l2p set, sorry for anyone disagreeing. never had a problem with it).
Shortbow 3 has a ridiculous aftercast. They added it because of “evade spam”.

And meta builds will still take trickery because again, less confident thieves want ToTC/BT/SoH. They won’t drop this line ever. Confident ones will ditch it instantly.

If you’re worried about DD, remember those are endurance evades. Not ability. If its staff problems, staff 3 has a HARD aftercast on anything other than Staff 4 (blind) and Staff 5 has 3/4 cast time so time an ability at 1/2 to go off. It has a 1/8 aftercast as well. I’m willing to teach, but again Prep and HP boost will literally fix Thief.

Thieves only need very minor buffs

-Increase base hp from 11k to 15 (this would allow for berserker / Sinister) while still being a “glass cannon” while mara would get you closer to a bruiser spec (be around 21k life)
-Clocked in shadow should be lowered from grandmaster.
-Swindler’s Equilibrium should increase IAS of sword abilities. as well as regenerate steal cd.
Those should work for sure. you might be able to tweak Pistol whip a bit, maybe remove the daze and add haste (for the PW animation, removes itself if you cancel casting, and does not stack with other forms) But since i already said IAS on S.E you might not even need it.

-S.Wire, change it to guardians version (It annoys me that thiefs have been asking for Swire on an F skill for years yet you gave it to guardians..)
-Roll for initiative Now breaks through Dragons Maw. (forcing every thief to use shadow step is not good for diversity) and since i have only seen the animation for dragons Maw 1 time since the patch released It’s bloody annoying. you could give it 1 stack of stability (3/4 second) that should do the trick.

Now to the OP, the problem with thiefs is simple, Anything i can do on this class i can do much easier on any other profession. Damage / Sustain / CC’s / Conditions the only thing we are “The best at” is mobility, but that is only with SB. and it leaves you out of iniaitive by the time you reach your point. on any other class they can just wpn swap into infinity. A “Nike Warrior” or “super speed Rev” isn’t that much slower then the thief (your talking about seconds, and that gap got smaller since you can’t stack inf strike into steal anymore (“change mechanics that have been in play for 3 years? well as long as its a thief!” -Anet)

Pistol Whips problem is that the stun is coded to be affected by quickness/slow. Use Haste then use PW, you’ll see. Its rather agitating since it should be a permalock kill, but the stun goes down to like…nothing. RoI needs something else, not a “ignore terrain” since that’d break it worse than Wire. I’d prefer a stick over an evade. Like PistolWhip pulled an Unrelenting Assault.

Edit: I’m more than willing to discuss Thief’s problems. Its been getting more outta hand since the 3 trait line thing happened.

I can’t argue with any of that.
I think Unrelenting assault fit’s the thief theme better then the reverant. but trying to convince the dev’s and other player’s might prove … difficult.

There are quiet a few bug’s on the thief class too. that’s probably having a effect on thieves overall “performance in the meta”

Extreme tankiness counters thief in the sense that a really good out-rotation might buy you a getting to a point 10, 15 seconds before backup arrives. If the opponents holding the point are reasonably squishy 10 seconds can be an eternity and you’ll get a lot of work done before backup arrives – if opponents are omegabunkers that can waste your time with invulnerability and AoE CCs, 10 seconds may not amount to much at all.

As thief is a much, much worse fighter than anything else in the game, once help arrives you are at a substantial disadvantage in an even numbered fight. When a team has enough bunkers that you can’t burst down in the small windows you create, you end up stuck with a permanent disadvantage in prolonged fights.

Revenant makes this worse in that Phase Traversal makes it pretty easy for a revenant to follow a rotating thief, making it difficult to open up a substantial +1 gap in the first place. If the other team has a Shiro revenant that camps the thief there’s very little you can do other than be at a disadvantage all game.

tl;dr – the burst is way less effective than it used to be, nullifying rotational advantages, and their extreme weakness in teamfighting is sinking them in its absence.

tbh if all this insta rez wasn’t in game thief would be more viable i think

i down people a lot, i just can’t stomp them fast enough not to mention that cleave is often useless (see mes, dh, ele, scrapper etc.)

Cynz.9437:

tbh if all this insta rez wasn’t in game thief would be more viable i think

i down people a lot, i just can’t stomp them fast enough not to mention that cleave is often useless (see mes, dh, ele, scrapper etc.)

The new elite was supposed to solve this, but I hardly see any thief actually bypassing the downed state with it.

Azukas.1426:

Cynz.9437:

tbh if all this insta rez wasn’t in game thief would be more viable i think

i down people a lot, i just can’t stomp them fast enough not to mention that cleave is often useless (see mes, dh, ele, scrapper etc.)

The new elite was supposed to solve this, but I hardly see any thief actually bypassing the downed state with it.

The cast is just too long, can be easily countered by CCs, stealth, quickness not to mention it locks thief in long animation in mid of all the aoe spam. Scrapper gyro on other hand is so much better -_-

Cynz.9437:

Azukas.1426:

Cynz.9437:

tbh if all this insta rez wasn’t in game thief would be more viable i think

i down people a lot, i just can’t stomp them fast enough not to mention that cleave is often useless (see mes, dh, ele, scrapper etc.)

The new elite was supposed to solve this, but I hardly see any thief actually bypassing the downed state with it.

The cast is just too long, can be easily countered by CCs, stealth, quickness not to mention it locks thief in long animation in mid of all the aoe spam. Scrapper gyro on other hand is so much better -_-

I honestly would rather see them make it more viable for thieves. From what I’ve gathered is the 1st skill has a short dash on it to get to the target while the other 2 do not. I would maybe put a dash on every single part of the chain and look into unblockable traits for the thief. Maybe work unblockable attacks into executioner since the other good GM trait it competes with has 2 parts to it. Dunno wtf line it is or wtf it’s called so lil help would be nice

Also the scrapper needs to be nerfed hard. They thief better than a thief LOL

Thief in this meta:

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/11119/111195208/4316029-2723587408-iWO8q.gif

There’s too much AoE crap on points.

Chronomancer wells ( grav well is instant death without shadowstep or RFI )
reapershroud abilities and scepter 2 / marks
scrapper lighting field stun, acid bomb and slick shoes, with aoe reveal if you try to disengage
dragonhunters traps that can’t be bypass by dodges, limiting movement options
malyx revenant undodgeable aoe condis, revenant mace 2 and axe 5
getting cc’ed by druids glyph without them targeting you

It’s just infuriating to play as thief when the environment you fight in is so hostile. Reducing the amoutn of CC in the game should be a priority.

Cynz.9437:

Azukas.1426:

Cynz.9437:

tbh if all this insta rez wasn’t in game thief would be more viable i think

i down people a lot, i just can’t stomp them fast enough not to mention that cleave is often useless (see mes, dh, ele, scrapper etc.)

The new elite was supposed to solve this, but I hardly see any thief actually bypassing the downed state with it.

The cast is just too long, can be easily countered by CCs, stealth, quickness not to mention it locks thief in long animation in mid of all the aoe spam. Scrapper gyro on other hand is so much better -_-

Adding to this, the final skill in the chain that causes the insta kill does very little damage to the tanky builds you face in this meta. Its also very frustrating to see this skill “absorbed” when an oppoenent goes into down state – this really should be fixed by now.

well, to answer your question, thief is not worst spec, because there’s still warrior

StickerHappy.8052:

Yes, we all read about how thief is underpowered, etc.

While I do agree thieves need more build diversity because they are locked into the +1 Decapper role.

I also do agree thieves’ need more weapon diversity/buffs, you HAVE to take SB for mobility to do your role.

But, whenever I watch Sindernerr or Vallun’s Streams, thieves are a different beast and can overturn a match very quickly.

They also play their class very very well, and I just could not see how they are playing with their class on par with the other elite specs.

So what is really the problem with thieves? As far as I can see, basing it from those players, Yes thieves need a bit of work, buffing/tweaking/more diversity but I just don’t see how some people here on the forums make it like thieves are the worst spec.

No flaming please. I was just really curious about the situation of thieves.

thief is the most mechanically and strategically intensive profession in the game. with absolutely zero reliance on passives for defense and minimal use of offensive passives, every action (down to minor things like movement) has to be intentional and well thought out to efficiently utilize what we have at our disposal; this is in stark contrast to professions like engineer, herald, tempest, and druid which are largely “auto-pilot” professions as they currently stand.

being harder to play would be perfectly fine if it meant we could still outplay someone and reliably win as a result, but that isn’t the case; and this is why im appalled at the incompetence of the balance team. it’s not small things that have snowballed into-now widely-recognized-as-imbalanced mechanics through the player advancement of the meta, but literally things that are totally outright stupidly stronger by design (i.e. Scrapper hammer).

tl;dr: despite being harder to play, thief has less to work with and is disadvantaged from the get go because the balance team completely just gave out free stuff to everyone but us and warrior

sneak gyro, eye for an eye, bristleback, scrapper hammer, dragonhunter virtues, well of gravity, scrapper protection uptime, revenant’s retribution traitline in full, druid CC/healing, tempest protection uptime, etc.

most of this stuff is just outright common sense and could’ve been avoided had anet hired balance developers that had any.