Guild Wars 2

First of all, I’d like to make it clear that this is sort of a QQ post about my choice of weapon set getting the nerf bat – I’ve played a D/P thief ever since the Dancing Dagger + Cloak and Dagger nerf (and after getting rekt by a hipster thief called Caed Aeterna who made me see the capabilities of what D/P could do). A QQ post as this may be, I’m not complaining about the rather unfair nerf to BP field 5. It’s something thieves will adapt to, no problem. Rather, with the post I wish to highlight the balance philosophy that drives ANet to make certain decisions, and hopefully get a reply from them with an explanation behind what they did and why they did it because I can’t make any sense of it.

About a year and a half ago, thieves used to live up to their “high burst/spike, squishy class” philosophy. We weren’t a class that could hold a point or assault one on our own. We aimed at getting around the map fast, using ports to get to high ground to scout positions and +1 fights to turn team fights in our favour. The way this was countered in high level team play is by calling out a thief’s position and being aware of where the thief was at all times. Mesmers used to be just as squishy back then as they are now, and in fact were primarily taken as close point holders, and thieves were a problem but nothing completely unmanageable because good teams could communicate where the thief was and have something like a valkyrie elementalist sit on him during the game to peel for their own squishes.
Then came S/D, and everything changed. Thieves were now assaulting far point, a la Jumper, and could still get out alive from 1v2s and 1v3s. Thief was no longer a “high spike, get in – get out” kind of class, but rather a team fighter that could camp mesmers and elementalists without taking any counter pressure and disregarding all sorts of positioning and such. As a result, we started shifting towards a bunker-ish meta that made the game unfun for everyone, thieves and bunkers alike. After months of the thief class running rampant with quite literally a broken spec, ANet decides it’s time to tone it down. But how is this managed? Not by sticking to the class philosophy of thief being a high burst class, but rather making it a class that could do sustain damage and still remain slippery as hell. The problem in question, imo, was always the sword #2 skill. However, with this latest patch, the thing ANet decides to nerf about the S/D thief is their on demand burst. Now this is something I simply cannot understand. Sure it “might” offer little more counter play for other classes, but as long as thieves know they can go ham and still have a way of escaping unscathed, that’s what they will do. You can still use your infiltrator return to LoS or move back to your team after you’ve unloaded all your damage onto someone or evade non-stop all the way back just to bait out enemy CDs, and this is something that really needs to be addressed. The new changes do not stop the sword thief from being the apex predator of everything that is berserker.
Now onto the D/P change that personally affects me. The blind field for pistol offhand was invaluable for securing stomps, and gave the thief his only chance of beating certain melee specs – warriors, beast master rangers, necromancers, thieves. Why was this changed? The blind field is definitely not a problem in team fights and by nerfing the utility of the only thief spec that remains true to the “land burst or die” philosophy, you’re indirectly encouraging thieves to follow the S/D path. Is this this the direction you want the thief class to take? No longer burst, but a safe class that can still put out a lot of pressure on anything that’s squishy? Anyway, the point isn’t that the nerf made D/P unplayable. Certain specs I went toe to toe with might now be even more challenging or unbeatable after this nerf, but we’ll get better and adapt. The rant is about the fact that the game is slowly moving away from the high risk, high reward play style that I personally enjoyed and still not addressing the little risk, high reward gameplay that it created for thief more than a year ago.

Sorry about my english. It’s a rather long post and english is not my native language.

Also, since these are my personal opinions on a somewhat controversial topic and there are bound to be disagreements, please refrain from overindulgence of emotions in your replies, especially if they are directed towards me.

it’s a really good point you’re making, if a nerf to thief was due it should have been aimed towards their more bunkerish specs, not the burstier ones, is thief still supposed to be a squishy burst class or did devs change thier mind on how is the class supposed to play?

given, they did change sword 3 somewhat making evade spamming more costly, but it’s not really a meta-shifting change.

Q: what direction is this class taking?

A: unload, unload, UNLOAD, UNLOAD, UNLOAD, UNLOAD!

adozu.6398:

given, they did change sword 3 somewhat making evade spamming more costly, but it’s not really a meta-shifting change.

Exactly my thoughts. It does prevent 3 spam and encourages thieves to count dodges and enemy cooldowns, which is good, but at high tier the gameplay for s/d remains quite unchanged besides giving adding a little counterplay to the thief. Most of your sustain damage came from porting in, doing a few auto attacks and porting out anyway with occasional dodges in between. The change also encourages thieves to go into the pseudo-tanky spec as S/D no longer has the instant burst.

Liewec.2896:

Q: what direction is this class taking?

A: unload, unload, UNLOAD, UNLOAD, UNLOAD, UNLOAD!

Love the gif xD

Thief new mid bunker ofc…since ppl also started playing esl without guardian lol

Liewec.2896:

Q: what direction is this class taking?

A: unload, unload, UNLOAD, UNLOAD, UNLOAD, UNLOAD!

the age of the pewpew thieves will begin

If the upcoming balance patch comes to be there will be a very significant drop in D/P thieves. BP is the most important skill to a D/P thief and the upcoming nerf will destroy all of its uses except its ability to stealth. This was also the final nail in the coffin for P/P

The changes to BP will now carry the bad opponents against us. If the opponent has any experience against thieves he/she should move out of the field after the first blind and try and land attacks from outside the BP. If the thief can hit you, you can hit the thief. A bad/inexperienced player will just stand in the field and imo doesn’t deserve to win. Against a good player only the first blind should matter and more blind pulses affects the bad players. With just 2 blind pulses anyone can stand in the field and melee us. A thief doesn’t fare well in melee. If you look at all the weapon sets, they all have a escape mechanism when they are stuck in melee. S/D can shadowstep back, or like D/D can make use of cloak and swagger. P/D can also use its #3 skill. We aren’t always sitting on 9 init so get out of a sticky situation.

Why do we need BP to secure stomps? Because we can’t beat most professions in a downed battle. I doubt it very much. Very often we manage to down someone with a quarter of our life remaining but in the process of securing a stomp we get feared or knocked back a couple of times and we go down too. When that happens our chances of winning most likely went out of the window unless we can manage to port behind an object and heal.

The worst part is that this is just a little poke to D/P SA. With SA you would rather use BP to stealth rather than using its blinds as a shield. A part of me feels that PVE is the main reason for this nerf. You rarely see players in spvp complain about being blinded continuously if they stand in the field for 4 seconds. They either dodge the blinding projectile (if at a distance) or move out after the first blind. The only enemies foolish enough to stick around in a blinding field for its entire duration aren’t even bad players but AI. I guess Anet finally decided they had enough of thieves soloing and selling Arah p1. If PVE is indeed the reason for nerfing BP, I have two propositions. The first one would be to fix AI and actually make mobs intelligent but this won’t happen because lots of players just want their gold. So the second option would be to separate BP between PVE and WvW/PvP.

What annoys me the most isn’t that they made BP more difficult to use or that they added the ability to counter it. They just straight up nerfed it. They could have increased the cast time and made it more telegraphed so people could see it coming an hour in advance and know to stay out of the little red circle, but nope. We could at least make it such that the blinding projectile had some good damage. BP was nerfed by 50% and it would be unforgivable to have it eat up 6 initiative if it weren’t for its ability to combo HS for stealth. BP is completely useless on its own unless it has a heartseeker to go with it. S/P can now only make use of headshot because BP is useless with it and P/P is now complete garbage.

It isn’t that D/P is completely unviable now but rather that S/D and P/D (power/celestial) are much better options. If the balance patch happens I suppose only the remaining hipster thieves will still use D/P

I agree that Anet is pushing us into using less bursty specs. They’re telling us to either sit back and shoot with pistol, or sit back and evade with sword or drop hidden killer and executioner and take up a (little!) bit of healing

They’re basically making thief an evade tank.

Evade with no aftercast, the only thing that will change is that now good thieves will bind stow weapon to larcenous when they want to fake it ( OMG SO PROOOO).

This change is imo kinda silly since it will force dodges on low damage skills ( flanking strike) so you’ll have less endurance when the attack connects, and they’ll just reduce a bit the burst since most thief damage comes from sigils.

On the other part, this change will make thief totally broken 1vs1, now you will never be able to count dodges on thief since he’ll be able to SPAM NO STOP WITH NO AFTERCAST flanking strike.

So they’ll nerf it like disabling shot and will break another set, just to go back to S/P again.

Anet way of balancing makes no sense whatsoever.

Mrbig.8019:

They’re basically making thief an evade tank.

Evade with no aftercast, the only thing that will change is that now good thieves will bind stow weapon to larcenous when they want to fake it ( OMG SO PROOOO).

This change is imo kinda silly since it will force dodges on low damage skills ( flanking strike) so you’ll have less endurance when the attack connects, and they’ll just reduce a bit the burst since most thief damage comes from sigils.

On the other part, this change will make thief totally broken 1vs1, now you will never be able to count dodges on thief since he’ll be able to SPAM NO STOP WITH NO AFTERCAST flanking strike.

So they’ll nerf it like disabling shot and will break another set, just to go back to S/P again.

Anet way of balancing makes no sense whatsoever.

Agreed they reintroduced what they tried to remove with disabling shot, and it’s only going to end up with a clunky after cast and a worthless weapon set in a couple of months. They should have removed/nerfed power of inertia (offensive trait in a defense line), moved feline grace to grandmaster, and finally nerf the hell out fire + air.

Liewec.2896:

Q: what direction is this class taking?

A: unload, unload, UNLOAD, UNLOAD, UNLOAD, UNLOAD!

That attachement is awesome.

Thief will be fine, the changes hardly nerfs the class.

Adjust, play on.

Rome.3192:

First of all, I’d like to make it clear that this is sort of a QQ post about my choice of weapon set getting the nerf bat – I’ve played a D/P thief ever since the Dancing Dagger + Cloak and Dagger nerf (and after getting rekt by a hipster thief called Caed Aeterna who made me see the capabilities of what D/P could do). A QQ post as this may be, I’m not complaining about the rather unfair nerf to BP field 5. It’s something thieves will adapt to, no problem. Rather, with the post I wish to highlight the balance philosophy that drives ANet to make certain decisions, and hopefully get a reply from them with an explanation behind what they did and why they did it because I can’t make any sense of it.

About a year and a half ago, thieves used to live up to their “high burst/spike, squishy class” philosophy. We weren’t a class that could hold a point or assault one on our own. We aimed at getting around the map fast, using ports to get to high ground to scout positions and +1 fights to turn team fights in our favour. The way this was countered in high level team play is by calling out a thief’s position and being aware of where the thief was at all times. Mesmers used to be just as squishy back then as they are now, and in fact were primarily taken as close point holders, and thieves were a problem but nothing completely unmanageable because good teams could communicate where the thief was and have something like a valkyrie elementalist sit on him during the game to peel for their own squishes.
Then came S/D, and everything changed. Thieves were now assaulting far point, a la Jumper, and could still get out alive from 1v2s and 1v3s. Thief was no longer a “high spike, get in – get out” kind of class, but rather a team fighter that could camp mesmers and elementalists without taking any counter pressure and disregarding all sorts of positioning and such. As a result, we started shifting towards a bunker-ish meta that made the game unfun for everyone, thieves and bunkers alike. After months of the thief class running rampant with quite literally a broken spec, ANet decides it’s time to tone it down. But how is this managed? Not by sticking to the class philosophy of thief being a high burst class, but rather making it a class that could do sustain damage and still remain slippery as hell. The problem in question, imo, was always the sword #2 skill. However, with this latest patch, the thing ANet decides to nerf about the S/D thief is their on demand burst. Now this is something I simply cannot understand. Sure it “might” offer little more counter play for other classes, but as long as thieves know they can go ham and still have a way of escaping unscathed, that’s what they will do. You can still use your infiltrator return to LoS or move back to your team after you’ve unloaded all your damage onto someone or evade non-stop all the way back just to bait out enemy CDs, and this is something that really needs to be addressed. The new changes do not stop the sword thief from being the apex predator of everything that is berserker.
Now onto the D/P change that personally affects me. The blind field for pistol offhand was invaluable for securing stomps, and gave the thief his only chance of beating certain melee specs – warriors, beast master rangers, necromancers, thieves. Why was this changed? The blind field is definitely not a problem in team fights and by nerfing the utility of the only thief spec that remains true to the “land burst or die” philosophy, you’re indirectly encouraging thieves to follow the S/D path. Is this this the direction you want the thief class to take? No longer burst, but a safe class that can still put out a lot of pressure on anything that’s squishy? Anyway, the point isn’t that the nerf made D/P unplayable. Certain specs I went toe to toe with might now be even more challenging or unbeatable after this nerf, but we’ll get better and adapt. The rant is about the fact that the game is slowly moving away from the high risk, high reward play style that I personally enjoyed and still not addressing the little risk, high reward gameplay that it created for thief more than a year ago.

Sorry about my english. It’s a rather long post and english is not my native language.

Also, since these are my personal opinions on a somewhat controversial topic and there are bound to be disagreements, please refrain from overindulgence of emotions in your replies, especially if they are directed towards me.

Thieves are becoming the perfect troll class…….evade spam ftw I guess…..

o.O…….

I think we need a balance team that remembers the point of each class. Unfortunately, until that happens, we will just see a bunch of random changes.

Thief tears …….sweeter than expected.

Sars.8792:

Thief tears …….sweeter than expected.

Hopefully you’ll win your first 1v1 vs someone… anyone.

counting the days

1/2 a second base blind duration and one less pulse vs targets who will only stand in it once anyways?

Surely this is the end times.

As for S/D I like the changes tho tbh I think the risk vs reward is still not balanced but outplaying it will be much more in line with the rest of the game for mes and ele whom struggled the most.

Remember that these changes are not just for TPvP
They are for WvW and PvE as well
So try to look at changes from a game-wide perspective
As in ~ how the changes effect play in all game modes

^ He said in the PvP forums.

But it is true I feel like the nerf was more for PvE than anything.

Daishi.6027:

1/2 a second base blind duration and one less pulse vs targets who will only stand in it once anyways?

Surely this is the end times.

4 pulses with a pulse per second vs 2 pulses with a pulse every other is a huuuge change to how your opponent is going to play around black powder. Yes, the reason why black powder was a great skill was because a thief could use it as a position displacement to take some pressure off since nobody would stand in it anyway. After the change, that’s not a problem. Warriors can stand right in it and pew pew with auto attack to get rid of the blind to follow it up with a hammer 4, for example. The purpose of black power would no longer be to take some pressure off from melee classes but only to stealth yourself. If it’s a single blind that you want, you’re better off using Shadow Shot that will deal damage and blind much faster and more reliably than the black power projectile anyway.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Remember that these changes are not just for TPvP
They are for WvW and PvE as well
So try to look at changes from a game-wide perspective
As in ~ how the changes effect play in all game modes

I don’t really PvE much to understand the change from that perspective, but if the PvE AI was a problem, couldn’t they just adjust the attack speed and damage of the PvE mobs accordingly rather than change the balance of a class throughout all game modes?
A channeled flurry that a mob does that can go through black powder and can be interrupted…woah, counter play in PvE.

I guess my major issue, and why i’ve switched back to my engi. Is, Even tho there will still be a strong build for thieves to run. Why is it we constantly have to adept and make changes to keep what the class is “supposed to be” when other professions can just slam their heads into the keyboard and ruin us

Guild Wars PvP in a nutshell:

- Developers make certain builds to make the game accessible to new players

- Top players abuse these builds to make others uncompetitive.

Unless they split game balance in terms of brackets (or implemented custom server trait/amulet restrictions) this will carry on. That’s just how it is.

On S/D: This was to be expected, there is no nerf to on demand burst, this is a nerf to a rng-gimmick that only works because of double sigil procs. Since nerfing the sigils would affect other professions aswell the #3 part of the gimmmick was nerfed, they always do it that way. S/D was designed to be a sustained pressure set they will change it with that in mind. Basically preloading Lac and porting it in hopes of a sigil proc as the main damage source is like reducing D/D to cnd and backstab stuff like that will get changed live with it.

On Black Powder: This made thieves the bane of guardians and warriors in down state, by now you should know what happens to thief abilities that are actually helpful against those two professions, the changes to SB #4 come from the same direction it allowed to keep poison and healing reduction (if traited also weakness) up while stealthed, which was the thing to counter their superior healing while you waited for ini to come back, to good vs the “hero” professions.

The general direction (my speculations): Thieves will move away from jumping in and swinging a team fight fast with raw damage towards a fast support by control and utility profession, this tendency can be observed allready, more and more over the last year the builds dropped damage traits for utility and control. For S/D this will mean focus on daze, for D/P this will mean focus on blinds and interrupts.
Our “role” will be to disrupt the flow of the enemy team instead of being “the nuke”.

The thief concept is that the thief can appear anywhere with teleports, burst anyone down, and get out of anything with stealth.

turns out tthat’s not balanced, so they get some portion of … that. Never the whole thing

All speculations but i think, anet just wants us to play condi builds so badly for the sake of statistics that they won’t stop nerfing other builds untill condi becomes only option and we all either play it or reroll other classes.

The joke is, if i wanted to play condi i would rather stick ot necro or engi…

End line, i think fix to teleport stuck bug, ports not working because there is tiny rock on the way and what not would be way more usefull than wanna be buff to GM acro trait to increase stab by 0.5 sec (that can be still stripped and requires stealth while entire trait line has nothing to do with stealth).

As far as BP changes go, i think it won’t matter so much vs good players since those would move out of BP but will give easier time for noob players and clickers who can’t move 1 cm. I guess they want to promote skilless gameplay xD

Couldn’t resist, ripped off wow but somehow still applies for warriors o.o