Guild Wars 2

Hey,

This is not a complaint, but rather, I’d like to know the DEVS reasoning for implementing the 1ICD on stealth attacks for Thief. Some players have suggested if this is due to the new Rending Shade that the ICD be tied directly to the players with this trait.

Still have fun with my thief (although school has kept me from even finishing the latest episode), but I think an explanation would be helpful for a lot of us who are big time Thief players.

I hope this gets a response, because for now it’s all player speculation.

If you don’t deal damage then you’re not revealed, so if you’re blocked and you have no cooldown then you can just use it again immediately. Basically with 3s stealth it’s nearly impossible to line up an attack which is blocked/evaded/missed/interrupted and then use it again before stealth wears off. To get around the issue you can play shadow arts for the extra second of stealth.

Tl;dr cooldown is to make playing thief even higher-risk.

Also you’re not going to get a dev answer on an issue where you’re the only one currently asking, but best of luck. If you want some help with Thief then message me.

It was because they don’t want you to hit with Backstab, obviously. So instead of fixing Trickery, reducing dagger AA damage, fixing P/P, making Thieves less reliant on non stop evades, reducing D/P 3 or Heartseeker damage (if they don’t nerf AA), they instead add a 1 second CD if backstab doesn’t hit. Yeah that’ll fix the damage problem…

Actually, the change could have been made because they want SA to be used more. Of course a better solution is to make Trickery not mandatory anymore.

Zintrothen.1056:

It was because they don’t want you to hit with Backstab, obviously. So instead of fixing Trickery, reducing dagger AA damage, fixing P/P, making Thieves less reliant on non stop evades, reducing D/P 3 or Heartseeker damage (if they don’t nerf AA), they instead add a 1 second CD if backstab doesn’t hit. Yeah that’ll fix the damage problem…

Actually, the change could have been made because they want SA to be used more. Of course a better solution is to make Trickery not mandatory anymore.

This is pretty much it, more to the point than my answer. The reduced recharge on the F1 ability really belongs in the DD line imo, since it’s a core function of thief and HoT is supposed to improve upon the core profession (that’s my take on HoT anyways).

I’m not really sure what you mean by damage problem though, maybe you’re looking into reworking thief more deeply than I am. Fighting thieves is very annoying right now if you’re not DH b/c of all the evades, but making it viable for thieves to use SA over Trickery and removing stealth attack CD would mean more time in stealth, also making it extremely annoying to fight thieves without traps and hella blocks. Either way thieves are annoying, and making them less squishy and lower DPS (therefore reducing need for evades and stealth) would essentially reduce thieves down to something that’s not unique or particularly useful. Those are my thoughts, not trying to put words in your mouth.

This was a good change done at the wrong time. This was supposed to be done when thief was strong before HoT. They did it right when thief was weak because they wanted to give them an acrobatics passive that let them evade everything for 2 seconds at 50% hp and a few other buffs such as a.a buff. It was really uncalled for and thief is now easy mode with a multitude of evades but still only mid tier and really annoying to play if you don’t use perma evade builds.

Answering that question would be admitting own incompetence so don’t get your hopes up.

Before patch lot of guards were complaining that thieves can break aegis by using bs multiple times (not like guards didn’t hardcounter thieves on first place lol) – you see those posts anymore? no.

Then there was that recorded match before the nerf patch where Helseth made his goal to kill Anet employees as many times as possible with his thief.

Then patch comes out – all weapon sets (even those that nobody uses in pvp) from thief got nerfed. Put one and one together.