Guild Wars 2

When you look at your skill bar, unless you’re a Thief, you’ll notice that some of your pretty awesome skills are on a 30+ second CD. The Thief class does not have this problem.

Initiative regenerates at approximately 1 per 1.11 seconds, traited. They can literally spam any skill that they so choose, until they’re short of Init, and in less than 7 seconds, they can use that skill again (the largest Initiative cost for a skill is 6).

Combined with Stealth, a Thief does not have problems waiting for Initiative to regenerate so that he can return to spamming a skill.

So how do you balance a class mechanic such as Initiative + Stealth?

Decrease Init regen rate, increase init cost for certain skills, or do not allow init to regen while in Stealth.

Any 1 of those would bring a Thief more in line with the other classes’ cooldowns.

You cry a lot about thieves. Why don’t you play tPVP. You rarely see them in there if you are having issues with them. Stop making pointless whine threads as this horse has been beat to death enough. The game developers have said they won’t listen to people whining on the forums about a class. They have their own system of review that they will use. This horse has been beat to death enough. Let it rest already.

Zachariel.5463:

You cry a lot about thieves. Why don’t you play tPVP. You rarely see them in there if you are having issues with them. Stop making pointless whine threads as this horse has been beat to death enough. The game developers have said they won’t listen to people whining on the forums about a class. They have their own system of review that they will use. This horse has been beat to death enough. Let it rest already.

Yes, coming in here and saying “Whine, whine, death horse” is productive and helps my argument even more.

How about you help everybody out, as a Thief player, and provide some counter arguments, thoughts, pros and cons about what I said? These are, after all, the forums.

Thiefs are pretty poor in team fights due to squishy and low hp. Correct.

Thiefs are great roamers right? Correct.

Scenario:
It’s foefire in a 5v5 on foefire. Red team has 4 members + mesmer. Blue team has 4 members + thief.

Red send 4 mid mesmer to quarry.

Blue send 1 wf, 3 mid thief to quarry.

Thief normally would lose against an equal skilled mesmer (arguably), so would have to either a) die or b) escape to mid.

In this example the 4 have taken mid vs the 3 and the red team mesmer is collapsing mid after the victory.

You’re already on the back foot. Now you could have sent the thief mid, but more than likely he’ll just go pop. he should be roaming.

Personal opinion and all that, but unless the thief is guarateed to be winning the 1v1’s, they generally are pretty awful in team fights especially if specd roamer.

The more thiefs in your team the more detreimental to your overall sucess. I’m pretty sure the meta will change to people not using thiefs and just run 4 tanky chars + 1 mesmer looking after point.

I actually hate thief. Got my to 47, played him to rank 10 in sPVP…hated the play style and most of what you have been complaining about only really works on noobs.

And if you read many of the other posts by players. You would see plenty of advice to kill a Thief. What you want is an iWin button that instantly kills them. Its called the yes button on the uninstallation confirmation screen. You win every time. Unless you forgot to back up that copy of microsoft office before you went to do a fresh instal. (face palm)

TLDR: Search button comes in handy. Use it and read with an open mind. Plenty of advice already.

Hsulf.9370:

Thiefs are pretty poor in team fights due to squishy and low hp. Correct.

Thiefs are great roamers right? Correct.

Scenario:
It’s forest in a 5v5 on forest. Red team has 4 members + mesmer. Blue team has 4 members + thief.

Red send 4 mid mesmer to quarry.

Blue send 1 wf, 3 mid thief to quarry.

Thief normally would lose against an equal skilled mesmer (arguably), so would have to either a) die or b) escape to mid.

In this example the 4 have taken mid vs the 3 and the red team mesmer is collapsing mid after the victory.

You’re already on the back foot. Now you could have sent the thief mid, but more than likely he’ll just go pop. he should be roaming.

Personal opinion and all that, but unless the thief is guarateed to be winning the 1v1’s, they generally are pretty awful in team fights especially if specd roamer.

The more thiefs in your team the more detreimental to your overall sucess. I’m pretty sure the meta will change to people not using thiefs and just run 4 tanky chars + 1 mesmer looking after point.

They have been actually getting booted from tPVP lately, Been seeing a lot of requests that specifically state, no Thieves.

Zachariel.5463:

I actually hate thief. Got my to 47, played him to rank 10 in sPVP…hated the play style and most of what you have been complaining about only really works on noobs.

And if you read many of the other posts by players. You would see plenty of advice to kill a Thief. What you want is an iWin button that instantly kills them. Its called the yes button on the uninstallation confirmation screen. You win every time. Unless you forgot to back up that copy of microsoft office before you went to do a fresh instal. (face palm)

TLDR: Search button comes in handy. Use it and read with an open mind. Plenty of advice already.

You are a fool. The post didn’t mention or ask anything about how to kill a Thief. And if you don’t main Thief, why are you bothering posting?

Exactly, they’re so over-rated by the hot join addicts. I actually don’t like playing with thiefs anymore in tpvp. Not unless they are specd into group utility, but then there’s other classes that just do group utility better than the thief.

Thiefs are are the equivilent of fizz in lol, or cannon rush in sc2. Gimmicky once worked out pretty poor.

I post because I enjoy talking to random shmos who cry about thief, mesmer, guardian, warrior, necro, ranger….haven’t seen anyone cry about Elementalists….maybe thats next weeks flavor as this week seems to be thieves as mesmer was last week.

To answer your question…I have no main. I play all the classes. Some I enjoy more then most. And I didnt’ say i stopped playing him now did I? ;-)

Hsulf.9370:

Exactly, they’re so over-rated by the hot join addicts. I actually don’t like playing with thiefs anymore in tpvp. Not unless they are specd into group utility, but then there’s other classes that just do group utility better than the thief.

Thiefs are are the equivilent of fizz in lol, or cannon rush in sc2. Gimmicky once worked out pretty poor.

Oh now don’t be nockin my little urchin….he does oh so well against Karthus :-). But yes I completely agree with what you are saying. They are relatively useless in organized PVP…which sPVP is anything BUT organized. Its just a bunch of people trying to get as much glory as possible with no understanding of the mechanics. It vaguely reminds me of an obese man at an all you can eat buffet. Disturbing and disgusting at the same time.

> OP in 8v8

> ‘crap’ in Tpvp

>still tell people its fine and that thiefs shouldnt get changed.

Some people are just insane or incapable of thought.

Could just make it so chill reduces Initiative regen by a certain amount, maybe not 66%.

But there, another counter.

GankSinatra.2653:

> OP in 8v8

> ‘crap’ in Tpvp

>still tell people its fine and that thiefs shouldnt get changed.

Some people are just insane or incapable of thought.

They are bad against the getting-tankier-by-the-second-meta in tpvp yes.

Initiative is a flawed mechanic, yes. But it also means that since Thief abilities can be spammed to an extent, that most of their weapon skills are rather simplistic by design.

Essentially Thieves are the Retribution Paladins of GW2.

Easy to learn and achieve good results with, but rarely found at a competitive level because of simplistic design.

I’ve been saying for ages now that thieves need a complete rework, as balancing them (anyone with a brain can see they have some broken skills….) will just be too hard. The whole initiative thing was fun for a while, but now it’s time to make the change to cooldowns.

People saying they have no team fight potential….cluster bomb….all a thief needs to do is sit as a ‘safe’ place spamming nothing but this, and occasionally the poison and he’ll be doing ridiculous damage, it’s one of the best tools for attacking any of the mid points, especially Keep, given how small it is and how close the platforms from the back-route are to the capping zone.

Just have to wait for the meta to shift away from this incredibly tedious double/triple bunkers + mesmers kitten we have now before we see how strong thieves actually are…

wow thats a rather GOOD suggestion.

Which is funny because warhammer online solves their stealth problem the same way, they made your combat resource drain while you were in stealth.

but right now I dont know any thieves who put 20+ points in the healing+vitality tree, yet i know many warriors, and rangers who do, and EVERY guardian Engi, Ele and necro does. when you can exit combat you dont have to worry about taking damage.

thieves are not bad against bunker, the spec you are using is bad against bunker. we all know bunker guardians work off Buffs and healing.
STEAL THE BUFFS and use poision to stop the healing and conditions to wear down the guardian. Works with the necro……………

When you look at your skill bar, unless you’re a Thief, you’ll notice that some of your pretty awesome skills are on a 30+ second CD. The Thief class does not have this problem.

Yes, in exchange, their skills are much weaker than other professions similar skills. Compare Head Shot vs Magic Bullet.

Just have to wait for the meta to shift away from this incredibly tedious double/triple bunkers + mesmers kitten we have now before we see how strong thieves actually are…

It’s probably not going to unless there are some major changes.

Ashanor.5319:

Just have to wait for the meta to shift away from this incredibly tedious double/triple bunkers + mesmers kitten we have now before we see how strong thieves actually are…

It’s probably not going to unless there are some major changes.

Well they are moving away from constant retaliation.

@Hsulf.9370

Have you actually played tpvp the last 2-3 days?? Close to 80% of the teams are playing Backstab “1shot-noob-build” and dominate teams that normally stomped them 500:100.

Bunker Guardian with protection up and close to 3k armor drops in 1 second.
Support Ele drops below 0.5 seconds unless he has mistform and there is no server lag.

Even if you survive the Steal-C&D- Signet-Backstab-Combo you will get either crittet for 6-8k Backstab every 3 seconds, or he will HS spam you for 4-7k crits because he is full iniative after 1 backstab combo.

This breaks every game right now. You cant leave a Bunker alone because obviously he wont be able to bunker. Team fights are quite a chaos so Backstab thiefs can instagib the Guard or Supp Ele and quickly finish them off with Quickness before even fading out of stealth.

On Khylo we had a team with a Backstab that camped clocktower entrance and the area between our treb. Every reinforcement or split got close to 1 shottet. Our Mesmer got hit by 5k steal + 6k C&D +13k Backstab (combat log ) right on top of the rep kit. He dropped faster than reaction time allowed him to press his blink.

The problem with thieves in general is that the WOW incarnation of the archetype and other games that followed shifted them from being a jack of all trades, support based trickster to a deadly assassin 1v1 specialist. This is not representative of the archetype at all they are more like ninjas than thieves. Sadly most players only know the archetype in this form and accept it as the traditional role of the class/profession.

The traditional incarnation of the archetype is actually really cool to me because it has a lot of style and personality to it. The way WOW and now GW2 has changed thieves into master assassins is disappointing to me.

The problem ultimately is that the profession has no options. I could be wrong about this but I see the people that play the archetype as people who just like gibbing others and don’t actually care for fare fights. I would love to see the class actually have some support diversity and defensive arts instead of being the class that everyone just expects to kill stuff as efficiently as possible. That’s so boring, not fun, and is the source of so much complaining among everyone which you can see in these forums.

Thieves need the same options as other professions to be able to either support or deal good damage but not both. Their evasive skills and traits should be tied into their support skills and group buff so that they can have great survivability through stealth and evasion while supporting their team. Give them support buffs through musical instruments their suppose to be a very charismatic archetype not the one that can insta kill you. They should arguably have the best support in the game. Their damage traits, the ones that make them into death dealers, should prohibit them from also having great survivability through stealth and speed. I’m ok with them getting sick damage I could see a thief rocking double swords and going straight up with a foe where it’s almost a dps race kind of thing and he truly is a glass cannon but as it is now they get all of that front loaded damage and still have lots of survivability as well. It’s not just this game. It’s not just the stealth bug. It’s been like this for the archetype for years now and it started with idiotic WOW and it’s the only incarnation most of you have seen which is sad because it’s not an actual thief it’s more like a ninja.

That would be wrong Pro. They were Assassins in many games long before WoW.

Care to expand on that Ash? Everquest came out around 2000 and I can’t remember exactly how they worked but that may have been the first time we saw such a perverted version of the classic fantasy archetype of the thief. Ultima online didn’t have classes anyone could do anything.

Before Ultima and the MMO industry thieves as an archetype in fantasy were highly charismatic, highly agile, jack of all trade types that brought a ton of utility and support to a group primarily but did mediocre damage and were very fragile. Note the focus on group support and utility rather than raw damage. Granted there was a subset of assassin types that were lumped into the archetype but it was far from the focus of it and they weren’t capable of anything even close to what we see in WOW or GW2.

I find the Anet teams use of the term thief which was the tradition D&D name of the archetype interesting and refreshing rather than the stupid “rogue” but it’s far from representative of the archetype itself. They took the classic name but kept the new age assassin concept which is exactly what makes it so bad and in a lot of peoples opinions OP. They shouldn’t even call them thieves they should call them ninjas or assassins because that’s the way they are designed in this game.

Dark Age of Camelot? Infiltrator, Shadowblade, and Nightshade ring a bell?

Sorry, but you are advocating for an archaic version of a class that just wasn’t that fun. Nobody wants to play that “jack of all trades” class that is a master of nothing. I want to play an Assassin. If Thief was some “jack of all trades” watered down boring class, I would have no interest in playing them.

Ashanor.5319:

Nobody wants to play that “jack of all trades” class that is a master of nothing.

That class would be warriors.

If Thief was some “jack of all trades” watered down boring class, I would have no interest in playing them.

Which is where all the complaints from disheartened warriors probably stems from as well.

The man does have a point. In a competitive pvp meta the whole “jack of all trades” basically equates to “jack kitten”.

Evie.1758:

@Hsulf.9370

Have you actually played tpvp the last 2-3 days?? Close to 80% of the teams are playing Backstab “1shot-noob-build” and dominate teams that normally stomped them 500:100.

Of course I’ve played in the last few days! And it would be wrong for me to say this build isn’t strong, but it’s gimmicky and has it counters.

I haven’t come across any tpvp games where thiefs are completly dominating our team. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Every class has it’s counter to the thief backstab build. The 4 classes I main

Staff Ele – static field cast on yourself prior to engagement folowed by frozen ground.
Necro – fear mark+chill mark prior to engagement, plus I use blind wells so gg ^^
Guardian – Aegis/knock back on shield
Thief – Let them waste steal and shortbow number 3 till they’re visible then annihilate.

The backstab build really is standard and if they miss it they’re kittened. Once assasains signet is on cd it’s a different story.

From what i’ve read you champion sceptor dagger as a playstyle on ele which is great, I love it too, but yes you will have issues with the Assasain Signet backstab build because you have no way to interupt the combo.

Best hope you can have is open with frost aura, Armour of Earth as a utility, heal up the damage and knock down, but yeah it’s going to hurt either way becuase you have no way of stopping the burst ^^

On that same note, assasain’s signet multiplier I feel is a bit strong, but we’ll see if it gets changed.

The ignorance in this thread is headache inducing.
1) What skill are they spamming? If it’s heartseeker or pistol whip, you fail. They’ve both been nerfed and they both are escapeable and counterable. Have a problem with them? Look up a counter, or study the mechanics and make up your own. What’s left? C/D? Here’s an idea, their probably going in for a backstab. Move, turn, aoe, dodge roll. Backstab is short range and it only does massive damage if it hits you in the back. Stealth wears off quickly, so just outlast it. Unload? It’s a straight forward attack, reflect murders it. Death Blossom? You can use it twice in succession before running out of initiative. Dancing dagger? Decent cc, nothing too special. Black Powder? More defense then anything, just treat it like C/D if they’re running D/P. Head Shot? A single target CC interrupt. Infiltrator’s Strike, Shadow Shot, Shadow Strike, and Infiltrator’s Arrow, all mobility skills. Body Shot? Applies vulerablility to a single target. Cluster Bomb and choking gas aren’t exactly spammy skills, due to cost and activation speed. And Disabling Shot is more a CC then anything. Flanking Strike is similar to Disabling shot, only it’s an evade and it has poor accuracy.
Summing that all up, that’s 3 spammable skills that focus on damage. Two of which have been nerfed, and one that’s incredibly simple.
2) Onto the big scary mysterious stealth. The mystical state that pulls you to a parallel existance and where you can warp reality into your favour and smite foes out of existance. Oh wait, no it doesn’t. A stealthed enemy is still there, and hittable, and avoidable. Now lets look at stealthed skills. Tactical Strike, no one cares about, Surprise Shot, no one cares about, Sneak Attack, no one cares about, Backstab, OMFG HEAD FOR THE HILLS! No really, let’s break it down for a second. Base attack: 403, Range: 130, special effect: Double Damage from behind. Key word here is “Behind”. Your hitbox has 4 sides. That means if the thief wants to hit you, you make your back hard to hit. Kind of like that game in gym class where you try to steal the other person’s tail. Avoid the backstab, see the thief unstealth, resume combat. If they use it to bail or setup a normal skill, act accordingly.
3) Let’s see, what else do you complain about? Daggerstorm? Don’t shoot it, find cover or move away.

/end guide-rant

Ashanor.5319:

Sorry, but you are advocating for an archaic version of a class that just wasn’t that fun. Nobody wants to play that “jack of all trades” class that is a master of nothing. I want to play an Assassin. If Thief was some “jack of all trades” watered down boring class, I would have no interest in playing them.

Oh trust me I know exactly why all of you want to play the assassin. I get it. It’s exactly why it’s broken in every single game. It just doesn’t belong in these games. It’s exactly why the perverted version of the thief (aka assassin) is either UP or OP but never balanced. They took everything that made the archetype interesting and threw that out in favor of the “assassin.”

Merciless still mercilessly complaining about thieves one week after his horrible display with necro… what can we do? it just wont stop… right now thieves (because of crying) only have 2 possibilities, cond builds, that can spec into vit+tuf without any hindrance, or backstab; anet gave this 8v8 incompetent players what they wanted, nerfs after nerfs so they can, kinda, play their game… anet should have only nerfed heartseeker(wich they did) and tone down backstab,to apease this sore losers,and let us with our PW’s, etc, so we could be of some use outside venoms, these ppl got what they wanted, and still, they keep coming… the Op is another proof that there is a generalized ignorance on thieves features and mechanics, where did he get this “1 initiative every 1.11 secs?” does he know how many skills a warrior with fast hands or a ele can output per minute when compared to thieves? the only advantage of thieves initiative mech is that whenever his initiative is NOT full, any action they take that is not using any of the skills outside autoattack will not be detrimental to their full usage of skillset; infact, a ele or a warrior can output at least twice the number of skills a thieve can do, and will only lose some ground when they have to dodge, hide or watever instead of using a skill that is off CD, whereas, the thief, as long as its ini bar is not full, wont lose any ground; couple that with the ability to use the same skill a few times in a row at start of battle,and thats all initiative gives us,in the long run, any of this profs will outperform a thieve in number of skills used by a huge margin. This initiative discussion is old, with 15 initiative to manage TWO bars (whereas the other profs dont share Cd’s, so another advantage for non thieves), and with no points into ini management, a thieve will use 4 skills at start, and then, well, 1 skill every 7 secs (if using high ini skills) or 1 skill every 5 secs (if he uses low ini skills, wich as we know, are WEAK, most of times); compare that with an ele with 4 attunes…
Just for the record, initiative regens at a rate of 3 initiative every 4 secs,with klepto ull get 1 xtra ini every 11 secs, with hastened replen ull get 4 more every 15 secs (1 per 4 secs), with quick recov ull get 1 more very 5 secs, with quick pokets 1 more every 3.3 secs (if u swap, wich is not allways the best choice), and so on and so forth… of course, if u go this way, ull have spent 60 points into acro and tricks, thus, ure not a backstabber anymore…this is actually WAY more than 1 per 1.11 secs, but this is also a condition build, with all its traits wasted in… initiative replenishment, instead of other more useful stuff.
Advice? less backpedalling, more pew pew.

Everything’s cool guys. Eduardo cleared it all up for us.

Eduardo if it wasn’t for bunkers there would be nothing but thieves and mesmers running in 5v5s. You know this. I know this. We’re just one bunker nerf away from that really. Bunkers are the only thing standing between total burst domination of the meta and the bunkers actually developed as a consequence of the initial burst domination of the meta to counter it. Crazy how that works.

Proelitor: ur post as nothing to do with my post; second, thieves are almost useless now, any organized/vent team with non backpedalers will beat any team based on ur composition any day of the week,just because this game revolves around… reaching 500 points first, wich is, and ever was, about holding down at least 1 more node than ur opponent. Complaining about 1v1 is useless, thats not how you win the game, bacstab (a proper one, with sin sig) has a 36 sec cooldown, in that time a competent guardian will have earned…18 points, against 5 from the backstaber. Crazy thing,i know. And add to that the fact that a engie or a ele can do the exact same thing, and there u have it, 3 profs that earn more points than any egocentric-built thief. I once also thought that thieves were more usefull, but now… not so sure anymore.

I think Initiative is actually a really cool mechanic. There’s still a limit to how often abilities can be used, but it limits your overall ability usage instead limiting abilities one by one. That means you simply use whichever ability is right for the situation rather than letting cooldowns dictate which abilities you use. Instead of asking “should I save this cooldown?” you ask “is ability X worth more than A/B/C (or some combination of those)?”

I wish the entire game used initiative instead of cooldowns. How much better would 1v1s be if they never came down to who had their stunbreaks or elite skills available?

Eduardo.4675:

Proelitor: ur post as nothing to do with my post; second, thieves are almost useless now, any organized/vent team with non backpedalers will beat any team based on ur composition any day of the week,just because this game revolves around… reaching 500 points first, wich is, and ever was, about holding down at least 1 more node than ur opponent. Complaining about 1v1 is useless, thats not how you win the game, bacstab (a proper one, with sin sig) has a 36 sec cooldown, in that time a competent guardian will have earned…18 points, against 5 from the backstaber. Crazy thing,i know. And add to that the fact that a engie or a ele can do the exact same thing, and there u have it, 3 profs that earn more points than any egocentric-built thief. I once also thought that thieves were more usefull, but now… not so sure anymore.

Holding points is more important than kills, but that doesn’t make the kills useless or pointless. They do, after all, award you 5 points per kill towards that 500 goal.

And since I know you watched my video (thanks!), you saw how easily a Thief turned the tide of a battle between x vs bunker.

In a game where we have x amount of boons, conditions, CC’s and stun breaks, the Thief class is an anomaly in that it does insane amounts of dmg to effectively end a battle before you can recover from your jaw drop.

Eduardo.4675:

Proelitor: ur post as nothing to do with my post; second, thieves are almost useless now, any organized/vent team with non backpedalers will beat any team based on ur composition any day of the week,just because this game revolves around… reaching 500 points first, wich is, and ever was, about holding down at least 1 more node than ur opponent. Complaining about 1v1 is useless, thats not how you win the game, bacstab (a proper one, with sin sig) has a 36 sec cooldown, in that time a competent guardian will have earned…18 points, against 5 from the backstaber. Crazy thing,i know. And add to that the fact that a engie or a ele can do the exact same thing, and there u have it, 3 profs that earn more points than any egocentric-built thief. I once also thought that thieves were more usefull, but now… not so sure anymore.

No actually my post has everything to do with your post and the general defense of “thieves are only good in 8v8s not in 5v5s.” The only thing inhibiting burst total domination of 5v5s is bunker builds. That doesn’t mean the burst isn’t broken it just means that it’s being prevented from completely dominating super bunkers in organized 5v5s. They are already looking at the bunkers and they should be looking at the burst at the same time. I know it’s really hard to see the connection but at least try. I swear it’s like you guys have blinders on when it comes to seeing the big picture and how you fit in it.

Merciless.5349:

When you look at your skill bar, unless you’re a Thief, you’ll notice that some of your pretty awesome skills are on a 30+ second CD. The Thief class does not have this problem.

Initiative regenerates at approximately 1 per 1.11 seconds, traited. They can literally spam any skill that they so choose, until they’re short of Init, and in less than 7 seconds, they can use that skill again (the largest Initiative cost for a skill is 6).

Combined with Stealth, a Thief does not have problems waiting for Initiative to regenerate so that he can return to spamming a skill.

So how do you balance a class mechanic such as Initiative + Stealth?

Decrease Init regen rate, increase init cost for certain skills, or do not allow init to regen while in Stealth.

Any 1 of those would bring a Thief more in line with the other classes’ cooldowns.

what about the affects of PVE? or is that unimportant?

im also hesitant to say it would balance anything. not too mention there are specific traitns that INCREASE ini regen while in stealth (a extra 1 ini over 3 seconds to be exact) and one that refunds ini on a move that gains you stealth (2 ini).

you have to look at what is individually unbalanced about thieves (and dont say all, you say all, your nothing but a troll, lets have a good discussion please) and balance accordingly.

once the glass cannon build is addressed, once stealth bugs are addressed, and im sure some other changes willb e littered in there as well, we can better assess the strengths and weaknesses of a thief and fix it better (Stealth being a big one)

some things that you will not see happent to a thief tho

cooldowns on weapon sets
ini system removal

not unless anet coms out and says, ok guys, we screwed up, we cant for hte life of us fix this, so we gonna scrap it. hey it could happen, tho i wouldnt hold my breath

@Merci

Learn to punish and predict? Seriously with that mentality you probably are at a negative ELO, legit. Not like ELO is supposed to even mean anything but at 300 ELO in League, I’ve seen people on the forums with the same aura as you.

Considering Back Stab/Assasin’s Signet is getting nerfed, why don’t you just learn to play vs. Thieves anyways so when they get nerfed they still won’t be as tedious to fight against?

Wolfe I think that’s a very well reasoned post. We’re just trying to get a dialogue going about it although I understand many on both sides go crazy in one direction or the other. Balance is so tricky it may very well be that once stealth is fixed thieves will be terrible we just don’t know and that’s the problem. One small change to a core mechanic could break a class even one that’s considered OP. Small changes are def preferable to big changes all at once with any class.

I personally think they should leave the burst and take away some survivability forcing glass cannons to spec for more survival or die every time they make a mistake which would actually be balanced. When I say survivability I mean stealth, speed, etc not hp which is already pretty low.

@Proeliator: What if they made is so backstab would disengage stealth, hit or miss? With the revealed Debuff. Or added an initiative cost to it. Something like 6 init.

@ Dual: Yeah I think thats exactly along the lines what what I’m talking about. Make a stealthy backstab rewarding but also costly if failed.

Initiative is inherently imbalanced and always will be by its basic design. It’s just a bad mechanic.

The sad thing is they had Blizzard’s years of experience to look at and they went and made the exact same mistake. Blizzard slowly and subtly changed the thief energy model from something that allowed people to dump to a much smoother more constant system. Arenanet ignored that experience completely.

honestly Yukishiro, i dont exactly agree, im not saying your wrong, but i question the validity of your statement. saying its imbalanced and always will be by design, but nobody ever explains this in detail.

Initiative is the only reason I play GW2. It’s the best system, which ALL professions should have been made in mind with. It is a system that actually requires skill and careful thought to use, whereas all other professions with cooldowns are nothing more than facerolls.

Wolfe.3097:

honestly Yukishiro, i dont exactly agree, im not saying your wrong, but i question the validity of your statement. saying its imbalanced and always will be by design, but nobody ever explains this in detail.

The problem is that a gimmick based around being able to DPS dump in return for a period of weakness afterward is inherently hard to balance. If you balance it to make the DPS dump bearable then the class is kitten because it only does balanced DPS when it dumps. If you balance it the other way you end up with burst dps that is too high for that short period.

You see the same basic problem with balancing Quickness in this game. Right now DPS is balanced around not having quickness, which means when you do have it people die too fast.

ya i can see the argument, tho i imagine there are ways to fix it.

tho while reading your reply i kept thinking, and this is why i wish they kept the seperate pvp and pve abilities and formulas like it was in gw1 eventually.

you lower it too much…now they are crap in PVE

The solution is to do what Blizzard did with rogues in wow. Energy in wow started out similar to initiative in GW2. But over time Blizzzard shifted the system away from a “dump then wait” model to a more constant gameplay style where energy pretty much regenerates constantly at about the same rate you use it.

@Wolfe: Which is why there should be separate balancing for PvE and PvP skills like there was in GW 1.

@Schwarhrheit: L2P comments are… unnecessary here. This is a clear discussion about a class mechanic, not how to beat it.

Personally, imo, I don’t agree with the comments that because of the Initiative system that Thief skills are weak or not as good as other classes’. That, to me, is a bit of a ludicrous statement, because, as everybody has seen or experienced, there are a lot of Thief skills, most of them spammable (unlike a 10+ second CD skill) that just plain do a ton of dmg.

as long as they dont do what they did from cata to mists, i have active sub and a 90 rogue on it…they are absolutly horrible and no level of gear scaling is gonna save them in there current state.

they arent even rogues anymore

The class mechanic is balanced because they can get punished just as hard if you actually “try” to predict or you know… be ideal when it comes to using AoEs. You want to complain about something? Complain about Mesmers and Engis.

Seriously I’m up to the point that my Whirlwind Attack can almost one hit KO Thieves.

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