Guild Wars 2

My main is a thief. I played thief and necro through all BWE’s and decided on thief for launch. After getting bored with the class and going back to my necro, then going BACK to the thief, it occurred to me just how mind-numbingly boring the thief profession actually is, based solely around spamming something, which is sad for a class supposed to be completely the opposite. This is my own opinion that is based on PvP only.

D/D: BV > AS > CnD > Steal > BS > HS. If they don’t die, spam HS. If they have a friend, run away. Forced to run as glass cannon to be even remotely successful, so either instagib them or you get instagibbed. Boring. Or you can be a D/D bleed thief and spam Deathblossom until you run out of initiative, stealth, and repeat. Super boring.

P/P: Unload. The end.

P/D: Quite literally the most boring build in the game. Autoattack, hit 5 for CnD stealth, open with 1. Repeat. While when I initially quit D/D and went to the now typical 0/0/30/20/20 I enjoyed how easily I could win any fight 1v1, now I go back to it and it just feels disturbingly gimmicky. There’s nothing fun about playing or fighting this build.

S/P: PW > Steal > Haste > PW. Boring. Just as stupid as warrior 100b spam but with less damage.

D/P is just weird and doesn’t feel remotely effective. There’s no spamming other then HS.

S/D is probably the only build that when traited properly offers the type of dynamic gameplay available to the other classes. It’s got decent damage with a cleave and great mobility.

Underwater combat on the thief is literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a video game. All you do is spam Shadowy Assault. THAT IS IT. You don’t have to do anything else. Actually, anything else would be a terrible waste of time. Sure Haste > Deluge is cool before they actually notice you, but once they do, oh man. Time to spam 5. With a build high in initiative regen and traits for the same like Roll for Init and Infil Sig, you can just sit there all day spamming 5, killing things while evading the entire time. Sure it’s effective, BORINGLY effective.

No matter what you do, the class is based around spamming something. This is why Initiative is terrible. You’re either spamming 2, spamming 3, or spamming 5. Once you can’t spam anymore, you go stealth until you can spam again. Or you just run away. For some reason this is appealing to players as you can’t play any sPvP match without there being a ton of thieves on each team. In an 8v8 today my team had 5 thieves and theirs had 6. I’ve never seen so many people spamming 2 in my life. This isn’t a QQ nerf thieves thread. This is a plea for some diversity. I loved my thief, and after going back to it today I just couldn’t stomach it. Every build is just stale, repetitive, gimmicky, and boring.

Of course I don’t expect them to majorly overhaul a class, especially based on one person’s opinion. It’s just upsetting that such a supposedly fast-paced class is in reality extremely shallow and redundant. The class is effective, there’s no doubting that. But it’s not fun. They need to work on making it fun. Adding cooldowns and increasing the damage of certain abilities would be a huge step in the right direction.

what about short bow?

though I agree with everything you said, if all you do is 8v8 :P

in some way i agree 100% what you say. but i think it is a game/class problem.

Hanzo.9624:

P/P: Unload. The end.

Yea… No. Good luck with that though.
The only useless p/p skill is body shot like we all know and i can tell you if you aren’t fighting a scrub you’re going to need a lot more than press 3 until it dies.
The few thieves i fought p/p to p/p were actually thinking the same as you do, spec’d 30/30-something and trust me i mopped the floor with their heads.
Try 33333 against a shatter mes or a d/d ele, don’t ever use positionning, blind and rupts, and see what happens. Even a ranger autoattacking will beat you this way.

Underwater combat on the thief is literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a video game. All you do is spam Shadowy Assault. THAT IS IT. You don’t have to do anything else. Actually, anything else would be a terrible waste of time. Sure Haste > Deluge is cool before they actually notice you, but once they do, oh man. Time to spam 5. With a build high in initiative regen and traits for the same like Roll for Init and Infil Sig, you can just sit there all day spamming 5, killing things while evading the entire time. Sure it’s effective, BORINGLY effective.

Again, pressing 5 until it dies won’t work against anyone who actually has some live brain cells, i’m very sorry you never got to fight against such opponents though.
The issue with 5 is not how it kills things, it’s more of how you hardly die while spamming it, but the damage is actually not better than auto attacking.

No matter what you do, the class is based around spamming something. This is why Initiative is terrible. You’re either spamming 2, spamming 3, or spamming 5. Once you can’t spam anymore, you go stealth until you can spam again. Or you just run away. For some reason this is appealing to players as you can’t play any sPvP match without there being a ton of thieves on each team. In an 8v8 today my team had 5 thieves and theirs had 6. I’ve never seen so many people spamming 2 in my life. This isn’t a QQ nerf thieves thread. This is a plea for some diversity. I loved my thief, and after going back to it today I just couldn’t stomach it. Every build is just stale, repetitive, gimmicky, and boring.

Haste > BS burst >222222222 is also extremely disappointing me and i can’t wait for it to get body shot’d so people have to actually learn to be better and stop getting free points while being that bad.

Of course I don’t expect them to majorly overhaul a class, especially based on one person’s opinion. It’s just upsetting that such a supposedly fast-paced class is in reality extremely shallow and redundant. The class is effective, there’s no doubting that. But it’s not fun. They need to work on making it fun. Adding cooldowns and increasing the damage of certain abilities would be a huge step in the right direction.

I may disagree with some of your statements but overall, i also think that right now the thief class is way to forgiving with bad brainless button mashing players, and i would be very gratefull if it could be tweaked with a much higher skill floor.

The positive fact is that it is already very rewarding with good players, what is not fine comes from how it is still rewarding for bad players.
We never ended up rewarding Wamos in GW1 (although yea gw1 would sometimes reward 1234) so i’m really not very confident as to where this will lead us in the future, if Anet doesn’t decide to ask their players to get a bit better soon enough, by deprivating them from benefiting skilless gameplay.

My main is thief… not because its OP or whatever you think. At launch it’s the class I thought looked interesting. I usually play ranged in any mmo I play but thought I’d switch it up this time. I always stick to whatever class I started no matter how underpowered or overpowered they are.

As a thief we don’t have any choice but to go for one extreme or the other(pure burst or pure condi) otherwise we aren’t viable. You can run a d/p, which is more of a distraction build but that’s about it. If there were other builds with a higher skill cap that you actually benefit from I’d be playing it but right now we have nothing. No matter what build you go or how good you are you just can’t get any respect as a thief. It’s not because of the players it’s just the way Anet set up the thief class. Honestly, I don’t think they will change it much. It’s always going to be one of the most annoying classes.

rmBossa.4621:

what about short bow?

though I agree with everything you said, if all you do is 8v8 :P

Shortbow is probably my favorite weapon.

Trick shot ftw!

Hanzo.9624:

My main is a thief. I played thief and necro through all BWE’s and decided on thief for launch. After getting bored with the class and going back to my necro, then going BACK to the thief, it occurred to me just how mind-numbingly boring the thief profession actually is, based solely around spamming something, which is sad for a class supposed to be completely the opposite. This is my own opinion that is based on PvP only.

D/D: BV > AS > CnD > Steal > BS > HS. If they don’t die, spam HS. If they have a friend, run away. Forced to run as glass cannon to be even remotely successful, so either instagib them or you get instagibbed. Boring. Or you can be a D/D bleed thief and spam Deathblossom until you run out of initiative, stealth, and repeat. Super boring.

P/P: Unload. The end.

P/D: Quite literally the most boring build in the game. Autoattack, hit 5 for CnD stealth, open with 1. Repeat. While when I initially quit D/D and went to the now typical 0/0/30/20/20 I enjoyed how easily I could win any fight 1v1, now I go back to it and it just feels disturbingly gimmicky. There’s nothing fun about playing or fighting this build.

S/P: PW > Steal > Haste > PW. Boring. Just as stupid as warrior 100b spam but with less damage.

D/P is just weird and doesn’t feel remotely effective. There’s no spamming other then HS.

S/D is probably the only build that when traited properly offers the type of dynamic gameplay available to the other classes. It’s got decent damage with a cleave and great mobility.

Underwater combat on the thief is literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in a video game. All you do is spam Shadowy Assault. THAT IS IT. You don’t have to do anything else. Actually, anything else would be a terrible waste of time. Sure Haste > Deluge is cool before they actually notice you, but once they do, oh man. Time to spam 5. With a build high in initiative regen and traits for the same like Roll for Init and Infil Sig, you can just sit there all day spamming 5, killing things while evading the entire time. Sure it’s effective, BORINGLY effective.

No matter what you do, the class is based around spamming something. This is why Initiative is terrible. You’re either spamming 2, spamming 3, or spamming 5. Once you can’t spam anymore, you go stealth until you can spam again. Or you just run away. For some reason this is appealing to players as you can’t play any sPvP match without there being a ton of thieves on each team. In an 8v8 today my team had 5 thieves and theirs had 6. I’ve never seen so many people spamming 2 in my life. This isn’t a QQ nerf thieves thread. This is a plea for some diversity. I loved my thief, and after going back to it today I just couldn’t stomach it. Every build is just stale, repetitive, gimmicky, and boring.

Of course I don’t expect them to majorly overhaul a class, especially based on one person’s opinion. It’s just upsetting that such a supposedly fast-paced class is in reality extremely shallow and redundant. The class is effective, there’s no doubting that. But it’s not fun. They need to work on making it fun. Adding cooldowns and increasing the damage of certain abilities would be a huge step in the right direction.

S/D requires skill ?

Let’s nerf it into the ground, people will indeed enjoy more the 222222222 spam and 1-2-3 instagib with D/D.

/sarcasm

rmBossa.4621:

what about short bow?

Bad shortbow players: Clusterbombclusterbombclusterbombclusterbomb

Good Shortbow players: Offers a combo field to your team, one of the best blast finishers in the business, FANTASTIC mobility even with no mobility utilities, moderate damage output.

I do agree with the OP, in that many thief builds have to be boring in order to be viable, with shortbow being a notable exception. This is a direct result of the initiative system. If one ability does even remotely higher damage than another, the optimal build would be to spam it endlessly in order to dish out the most damage. After all, why waste initiative on an ability that does 2000 damage when you could be using it on an ability that does 3000 damage?

So how do we solve this problem then? Shortbow offers spamming as an option, at the cost of much of your mobility/versatility. Because of the initiative system, we can’t stop people from spamming the highest damage ability over and over and over, but we can encourage it. Some possibilities:

1. Using one ability for a second time 3 seconds or less after using it the first time will cost an additional initiative. The effect stacks. So the first lolheartseeker costs 3 initiative, the second costs 4, the third costs 5. That’s already 12 initiative.

2. BUFF THE OTHER ABILITIES. If we have a reason to use abilities other than lolheartseeker then most of us will give them a shot once in a while. But right now…

Pistol:
Body shot is a DPS loss 99% of the time, depsite being a supposed “open with me and you’ll do more damage!” ability.

Black powder shot can be walked, dodged, or evaded so easily it’s not even worth the initiative,

Flanking strike on land is too slow to ever actually hit anything, Flanking strike underwater has the same problem and kittens with your camera. whereas Shadowy assault doesn’t.

Spear’s normal attacks are actually pretty good, but the stealth breaker isn’t. 6 1/2 seconds of weakness might as well not be there at all.

Nine Tailed-Strike does comparable damage to shadowy assault, but doesn’t grant evasion, so Shadowy Assault is just flat out better 99% of the time. At least make this daze or something…

Tow line(I think that’s the name) has such a long recovery that your opponent will be out of range for anything else when it finishes.

All that’s left is Shadowy assault…

Goob.9752:

My main is thief… not because its OP or whatever you think. At launch it’s the class I thought looked interesting. I usually play ranged in any mmo I play but thought I’d switch it up this time. I always stick to whatever class I started no matter how underpowered or overpowered they are.

As a thief we don’t have any choice but to go for one extreme or the other(pure burst or pure condi) otherwise we aren’t viable. You can run a d/p, which is more of a distraction build but that’s about it. If there were other builds with a higher skill cap that you actually benefit from I’d be playing it but right now we have nothing. No matter what build you go or how good you are you just can’t get any respect as a thief. It’s not because of the players it’s just the way Anet set up the thief class. Honestly, I don’t think they will change it much. It’s always going to be one of the most annoying classes.

have you played Ranger or Engi yet?

I like it.

Message Body length must at least be 15.

Started out as a Thief,

Never got bored.

(Played all weapon sets from which S/D is my favorite.).

Personally I like farming with my Thief. I can eat a sammich, watch Hulu, and smash a single macro that garuntees I kill every single thing I target. The PvP in Thief Wars 2 is terribly boring without a sammich and Hulu.

I was S/D, they nerfed TS and C&D…thank you, now i can roll only full condition or condition/healing for tpvp….btw stupid hs spammers (I said stupid not op, actually you can laugh at them) continue to jump everykitteninwhere without knowing wtf are they doing..