Guild Wars 2

Hi,
I’m proposing now a list of balanced changes, that keeps the thief still competitive. I mean, some suggestions i’m seeing are ridiculous and would ruin the class.

I think, that the thieves shouldn’t keep popping back into stealth so often. i like to see their time in stealth as carefully planning their next attack, not (LOL GOING TO ENTER STEALTH FOR BACKSTAB/UNLOAD,BRB).
To achieve this it would be best to increase the revealed timer. As it currently stands, the only thing it does is punishing people for having bad timing for prolonged stealth.
I’d say something like 5 or 6 seconds?
To balance this in favor of the thieves, i think 1 second increase on all their stealth skills would be fair.

This would both punish the thieves for making mistakes, giving enough time for the other class to kill him or at least cripple him severely, therefore reducing the whole concept the community has on the thief that bad players can play a thief with ease.
My intention is to make them stealth less and longer.

Another thing i would do is add 1 initiative cost to heartseeker. It’s a very strong ability ( Leap combo finisher, plus high damage on low health characters ).

Now these following changes are intended for P/D thieves only, their strongest, and on some professions impossible to defeat build.

-Reduce unload bleeding stacks to 4
-Bleed only when flanking
-Increase their direct hit damage, and reduce the bleeding duration.

What do you guys think? Would these changes balance thieves, or destroy them?

Edit: Make the revealed buff stack up, increasing it every time the thief stealths.

reveal timer increase would crush alot of different and cool thief specs that take alot of skill to pull off . I posted in another forum that it would be interesting if hs had a penalty if used within 1 second of another hs landing. Say if you use hs once then your next one will do 15-25 % less dmg maybe make it stack or not depending on how it actually works after testing. This will promote new thieves not to spam hs, which is not actually a viable way to play thief but works on new people because they simply have not had the time to learn ways to defend against it. This would help new players get into pvp then into tpvp because new players are turned off by being spammed to death when they do not know how to defend against it which i can understand, and as for p/d i cant say too much but I do not face it at all in paids, but i see it a lot in 8v8 pvp. for a fix for p/d for wvw though they may want to make it so if you have a dagger off hand it does less upfront dmg and a little more bleed and if you have a pistol off hand as well it does less bleed more upfront dmg, because p/p is in a bad place atm.

Maybe building on what the op said… they could make it so that being stealthed drains initiative over time… that way unloading and vanishing is impossible.

this will make stealth as a way to engage still viable but (as many have asked for) will make the thief commit to the fight to the death once engaged.

thieves are fine atm. please stop making threads about how good we are when people just need to spend more time fighting them to get a feel for how to fight them.

Akumetsu.8591:

thieves are fine atm. please stop making threads about how good we are when people just need to spend more time fighting them to get a feel for how to fight them.

Seriously, this.

You know P/D thieves are ALL condition damage right? Who doesn’t carry condition removal these days?

Ok, and stealth comes too frequently. Easy solution: Dodge or interrupt the CnD. It’s another one of the biggest telegraphed attacks in the game, not because of the animation, but if the P/D thief is running towards you, that is exactly what he’s trying to do. Thieves also hate getting immobilized, and will blow shadowstep for it (assuming they even have it).

Making them blow a 6 Init attack is a big deal. Not only are they visible still, but now they can’t use that for something else, like DB. It takes several seconds to come back up, and seconds in a fight can be an eternity if you have no other option but to spam 1 and eat whatever is coming your way.

P.S.: I would love to know what classes you think are completely incapable of handling a P/D thief.

A ranger is incapable of fighting a (GOOD) p/d thief because he can cloak and dagger off a pet. I have a P/D thief, i know how they work, this is not the opinion of someone that dies a lot to thieves and cries for nerfs.

I created my thief, took some time to get to know the skills ( ultimately realizing i only needed to press 1 and 5 and some utilities to maximize damage ), and in one morning learned how to play the thief. I did several 2v1s and even 3v1s with the combination of stealth stomps.

The first thing i thought when i was using it is how overpowered it is. You speak of condition removal. It doesn’t matter versus a p/d thief!

What really kills you is the 5 stacks of bleed from unload, which can be really easily and quickly placed in the target after the condition removal.

I can fight any kind of thief that isn’t p/d.

Akumetsu.8591:

reveal timer increase would crush alot of different and cool thief specs that take alot of skill to pull off . I posted in another forum that it would be interesting if hs had a penalty if used within 1 second of another hs landing. Say if you use hs once then your next one will do 15-25 % less dmg maybe make it stack or not depending on how it actually works after testing. This will promote new thieves not to spam hs, which is not actually a viable way to play thief but works on new people because they simply have not had the time to learn ways to defend against it. This would help new players get into pvp then into tpvp because new players are turned off by being spammed to death when they do not know how to defend against it which i can understand, and as for p/d i cant say too much but I do not face it at all in paids, but i see it a lot in 8v8 pvp. for a fix for p/d for wvw though they may want to make it so if you have a dagger off hand it does less upfront dmg and a little more bleed and if you have a pistol off hand as well it does less bleed more upfront dmg, because p/p is in a bad place atm.

This makes a lot of sense.

would explain a lot of the qq too. as HS spam is such a glaring animation one newbie sees someone pop AS and spam someone to the ground and there will be hell to pay

AlexRD.7914:

A ranger is incapable of fighting a (GOOD) p/d thief because he can cloak and dagger off a pet. I have a P/D thief, i know how they work, this is not the opinion of someone that dies a lot to thieves and cries for nerfs.

I created my thief, took some time to get to know the skills ( ultimately realizing i only needed to press 1 and 5 and some utilities to maximize damage ), and in one morning learned how to play the thief. I did several 2v1s and even 3v1s with the combination of stealth stomps.

The first thing i thought when i was using it is how overpowered it is. You speak of condition removal. It doesn’t matter versus a p/d thief!

What really kills you is the 5 stacks of bleed from unload, which can be really easily and quickly placed in the target after the condition removal.

I can fight any kind of thief that isn’t p/d.

I will admit this is entirely truth. The issue is, though that the ranger is simply still a weak class vs any good player. They deserve a ton of TLC from the dev team. The other classes are all kind of equalized at top tier PvP (maybe aside from warrior who could use some love there too).

The issue facing ANet is, do they balance around entry level or pro level, they can’t do both as they are mutually exclusive, unfortunately.

Reveal timer NEEDS to be extended. If you play p/d thief you will know, going into stealth every 2 seconds (by the time they render, 1 second of revealed is mostly gone) is kitten ridiculous lol. I don’t care about their burst or damage, but avoiding being targeted by players from stealthing every 2-3 seconds is a little crazy.

The thief defense team is strong is this thread. I’ll leave it at this, there is not a legitimate functional counter in this game to stealth. Telling people to learn to play is like telling them to learn to shoot targets in the dark.

as another thief and talking to my team who i play paids with. p/d thieves are not a threat. they maybe anoying to target but in a team fight they don’t actually do anything and as a point harasser they cannot live vs 2 people for very long, and do not do enough dmg to force the other team to send 2 people. rangers fill this roll alot better by far. They are a threat in team fights because the conditions they can throw out are pretty powerful but they come with a lot of team support and thus can turn the tide of battles. what i see in this thread is some one who got beaten by a thief and would rather blame it on game mechanics than there own skill. i do think heartseeker could be changed as i said before, not really as a nerf but as a change so bad thieves cant stomp new people and turn them off of pvp as easily.