Guild Wars 2

PLEASE KEEP THIS HERE DEVS. THIS ISN’T JUST A THIEF TOPIC AND IS MORE ALIGNED WITH THE GOALS OF THE SPVP FORUM.

Alright, so I was meaning to do this at some point, because what seems to be a trend is that a lot of the game’s direction is spearheaded somewhat by the forums and reddit. In addition, there are misconceptions amongst players, and I felt that the forums was an a suitable way of getting rid of these misconceptions and reaching out to the developers. Also sort of inspired by the depth of discussion by Zuko’s post….I guess people can be objective. Anyways…

Yeah, I hate doing this but some credibility so that I don’t get flamed: I played in season 1 proleague, and will be in the challenger cup next week. I’ve been playing thief since beta days, and have played with many of the players in the “pro” scene on a team at some point. Anyways…

Let’s get started. Is thief viable? It is and it isn’t. If you’re queing up, any build can honestly work, as map rotations and awareness is what screws over people, as well as lacking a baseline of mechanical skill. You could run condi or bunker thief with wanderer’s amulet and it will work. I can’t stress this enough, but really, composition is hardly an issue in ques.

The issue at hand is whether thief is competitive and will be seen in proleague. Honestly, probably not. No teams I know of in high-level scrimmages will be running thief in their main composition, but I know some are having it as a backpocket (such as myself) against certain teams. So then why? Didn’t we just get buffed?

Take this with a grain of salt, but imo the class “balance tier” is:
Revenant>Necro>Ele>Engi>Mesmer>Ranger>Guardian>Thief>Warrior

The first issue is mercenary and paladin’s amulet. Anet’s balance philosophy was to maintain the “bunker role”, but reduce its effectiveness in the past patch. The problem is, these new amulets are very strong, and synergize extremely well with the most “broken” classes. Fights are still going on for way too long in scrimmages, but I will concede that there is an improvement. I think most teams will be running 4-5 of these amulets because of their sustainability. Thief can’t break this sustain that so many classes still have.

The second issue is the overtuning of certain classes, rendering thief damage insignificant to compensate for their lack of survivability. There is just a ridiculous amount of AoE in the current meta that a thief will literally die in 2-3 seconds when engaging on point. In addition, shortbow is much weaker due to the number of reflects that classes have access to. To make matters worse, almost every class has multiple “get-out-of-jail-free” cards to make up for poor positioning, such that thief will be hard-pressed to burst anyone down. Even if a thief is able to take someone down, there is still lots of res utility and cross-heals from other teammates to deal with. Stealth utility is rendered insignificant with the massive number of reveals and AoE spam.

These issues cause thief to be lackluster in not just teamfights, but in many 2v2s. So where do we go from here? What balance changes are needed?

Thief does not need to be buffed. Maybe a backstab damage increase or an acrobatics trait rework, but again I think the class is fine.

If I were to address the main issues, it would be revenant and necromancer. Revenant does an insane amount of damage , and it seems much like a thief 2.0. Thus, reducing its damage seems to be the way to go. Sword 2 is obviously very suspect, but I would also argue that equilibrium and phase traversal need to be looked at. Maybe a reversion to the old sword #2 and a decrease to 900 range for phase traversal. The AoE dragon thing on glint I think needs a longer cast time. Stab on dodge is ridiculous. Blocks and invulns need to be reduced, but this may be going too far.

The amount of chill that necromancer has is ridiculous, but I wouldn’t say that this is an issue with a thief running dash. However, necromancer tears apart every other class in teamfights, 1v1s, 2v2s…etc, rendering less support for thief. The tankiness of mercenary amulet allows this class to be make many mistakes and be very forgiving. Honestly, a removal of mercenary amulet and a further decrease in chill damage should be considered. Corrupt boon and the new curses build is beyond ridiculous.

Again, I wouldn’t touch thief too much, as I think the class is in great shape. The issue though, is how powercreeped everything else is, making thief inviable at the moment in top-tier play. But, in ques, anything is viable.

Let me know what you think!

Great post. Been saying this for ages. Falls on deaf ears.

If you are a good thief you are viable. I’ve only seen a handful of good thief’s so far, and one was out standing. So it’s all about skill.

BrotherBelial.3094:

If you are a good thief you are viable. I’ve only seen a handful of good thief’s so far, and one was out standing. So it’s all about skill.

Did you even read what he wrote?

Completely agree with the whole post, I am experiencing this kitten every day

Hey Aeroxe, it’s a good topic. I don’t think necromancers need to be addressed from a thief perspective. I’d be more inclined to focus on Revenant, as my opinion is they are what push thieves out of competitive teams. But I don’t think it’s just thieves Revenant impacts, I think it’s also Mesmers and potentially other roamers that lack sustain.

Revenant’s catch-up mobility is definitely the most valuable in the game. It’s the the least expensive because of the option to reset your resource pool. When roaming from point to point it’s effectively available more than twice as often as thief mobility, because of a combination of distance and the resource pool reset. Basically thieves have to be careful when engaging on a point they are traveling too unless they used shadow step to get there, because you have the escape option; whereas Revenants, phase traversal twice and legend swap if they want their resources back.

Revenant’s also push Mesmers out of the meta, which would be nice for thieves if shatter mesmer was viable, because revenants counter portal plays. Portal is the major value of Mesmers. And when you as a Mesmer can portal 1, 2, 3 or 4 players onto a point with a revenant and the revenant can chain evades, blocks + with stability because dodge trait, and invulns to the point that enough time passes for back up to arrive and the Revenant still doesn’t die, you’ve effectively given up map control for no benefit. Seriously though revenant, invuln chains need to die. The stability on dodge makes it so you can’t even counter with unblockable CC unless you have multiple of them.

I don’t think there’s much more to it than that honestly. If you fix how broken Revenant is, you bring Thief and Mesmer back into viability. If Thief and Mesmer are viable, there’s the potential Dragon Hunter’s counter pick option to use. I don’t know what fixing Revenant would do for warrior, if anything.

tl;dr
Focus on fixing how broken Revenant is with it’s +1 mobility and it’s invuln chains.

Rev is doing too much. Period.

Reaper chill stacking is too much. Period.

Aoe condition proc are cancer and far too large a radius. Period.

Did removing amulets change anything? Sure doesn’t feel like it. That should tell you something about class design right now.

Thief can 100-0 anyone 1v1 less than over 2 seconds.
Yes, destroying anyone in a blink of the eyes is not viable in pro league.

What else would you want? More damage, more mobility, more sustain?

imo thief was always the key to bring balance to the meta, once they removed them from meta the game has been more and more boring.
There’s not point of watching a match anymore, everybody has too much sustain and aoe spam there isn’t a single fight where you can see what’s happening with all the aoe thing and stuff.

What thief can do atm? +1 and decaps that’s a fact and no class will ever surpass this ability not even rev. That’s the only way thief is viable and as you can see no team will ever use a thief in this meta because you can counter it easily.

Also I agree with you that the main problem is rev, it’s literally thief 2.0 so why would you use a 1.0 version when you can upgrade to the 2.0 which is better and strong.

Rev is the new thief, while rev exists other roaming classes will be worse same as thief did time ago, the problem is that thief was always a fast and SQUISHY class but rev is fast strong and has one of the best sustain in the game.

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Thief can 100-0 anyone 1v1 less than over 2 seconds.
Yes, destroying anyone in a blink of the eyes is not viable in pro league.

What else would you want? More damage, more mobility, more sustain?

That’s not true, DH, Herald, Scrapper, Druid and Reaper are tanky enough to survive that even with power builds…