Guild Wars 2

Docherty.8372:

Esoteric.5490:

Thieves are not OP, people literally just don’t think how to kill them. If you stun or knockdown a thief, they are dead. I’m not sure they have a single stun break, at least not that is worth bringing.

Shadowstep.

Roll for Initiative.

Infiltrator’s Signet.

Haste.

Infiltrator’s Strike/Return – spammable teleport (no cooldown), breaks stun, scrubs condition, immobilizes opponent…

I carry three of these at all times on my Thief; if I’m holding a sword your control abilities are worthless, as I’ll hit return on IS and be back riding your nuts in under 1/2 a second.

Why do people keep defending Thieves… when they apparently know jack spit about what Thieves are even capable of?

I’m well aware of what they are capable of. This thread is in a WvW forum. In WvW, Thieves get cc’d and they die. If they shadow refuge, you Earthshaker and they have a 2 second stun. You are blowing a hell of a lot of initiative just to live, rolls and all. Point being, at that point you have to make a choice to survive or have damage. Not to mention that you can “stunbreak” all you want because if you are glass, then you will blow up before you get the chance. Also, if you aren’t glass, then I’d love to see you try to burst through my warrior.

Still not OP.

lettucemode.3789:

Magiofdeath.2745:

Lol lettuce, looks like you got served by proof.

I didn’t “get served” by proof, I politely asked for proof and he provided it. I’m sick of people complaining about thieves with nothing to back it up.

Opynn.2936:

You welcome.

Thanks for being one of the few people around who can back up what you say. I have about that much toughness on my Necro too but I haven’t died to a solo thief in a very long time. Death Shroud helps with that I guess. Do engineers have any instant-cast protection or healing?

It is nice to see people able to give and receive proof maturely without getting worked up about it.

@Opynn well played on taking screenshots. This happens to me a lot also despite being in full toughness/vitality gear and spec, I just haven’t had the diligence to screenshot my combat logs

Hepan.2709:

Sure rework our stealth and give us means to block/mist form/invoul/insert other form of completely negating damage. Im all for it. Might be something like Walk in Shadows: Walk in shadows and evade all incoming attacks for 3-5 secs.
Cause atm we have nothing BUT stealth to trick our enemies to swing at empty air and smart dodging to avoid the big hits.

I’ll like this also, make stealth like block/mist form..etc. long cooldown and only for 3seconds. perfect.

Bllade.1029:

Gaiawolf.8261:

And therein lies the problem. It shouldn’t take skill and experience just to match a player because he chose a certain class. That’s not balanced. OK, bad thieves are an exception, but average thief players nigh instant killing all but good players is what we have right now, and its not good.

I’m not saying give these thief skills hard nerfs that will reduce their efficiency in the hands of good players, but I would like to see these devastating combos require quite a bit more skill or setup to pull off.

But you have to do that with any class.

For instance and all of these are coming from a glass cannon perspective, if you try to fight a Ranger who knows what he is doing with a ranged weapon you’re gonna lose.

You try to Toe to Toe melee with a greatsword or hammer Warrior of the same skill level. You’re gonna lose.

You fight a bunker necromancer of the same skill level, without any condition removals or heals. You’re gonna lose.

It’s a combination of knowing what your profession is capable of, and what other professions are capable of. Not an imbalance, just experience.

You are right in a sense that in a one vs one situation, a thief fighting any other class that is glass cannon is going to have a huge advantage simply because they generally get the opening strike. Sure that’s true, but that’s not an imbalance.

Some professions are better at things than others, thats what makes them unique, and important in the WvW arena. Know what they are capable of and prepare accordingly.

While I agree with everything you said in principle, I still feel the learning curve for certain thief combos/builds is a bit too low (or the learning curves for their counters are a bit too high; take your pick), and grossly compounded by culling. Same goes for warrior to a lesser extent, and mesmer simply because noobs don’t know how to handle clones.

Like I said, hard nerfs might not be in order, just a few tweaks to the skill required to pull off or counter certain combos. You are right though, it’s not just thieves; thieves just have the biggest gap in skill to play vs skill to counter ratio, so they get the most attention, followed by mesmer, since mes also have very powerful utilities on top of being a tier 1 dueling class.

I’m not saying each class should be able to do everything equally, but the skill to pull of particularly powerful combos should be at least close to the skill required to counter them in most situations. That’s the imbalance, not class performance for certain tasks.

Beyondthelol.9504:

I swear that every person who defends the thiefs blatant overpoweredness does so because they themselves play a thief.

How about we have a new rule – if you play a thief you are not allowed to comment on if they are OP or not

Conversely, no one that QQs about them has ever actually played one seriously enough to really learn what the strengths and weaknesses are. Instead you get the mobile, bursty, tanky, regenerating, permastealth build posts where people insist on picking mutally exclusive traits and lumping into one “OP THIEF” thread.

The only thing I could mildly see being redone about the Thief is the length of the stealth. But not necessarily the length of the stealth itself, but the time that you’re immune to stealth that follows after. Half a second or a whole second added to that timer should keep stealth under better control.

But in all honesty.. If you can’t kill a glass canon thief.. You should try to learn your profession a bit better. Each profession has their own way of countering things. Don’t get stuck using a single build. Experiment and try stuff out. Don’t be afraid to do something new :-)

PS: My main character is a mesmer; and I can kill way too many professions with way too much ease. Because stealth is awesome if you use it properly.

Adaneshade.2409:

Beyondthelol.9504:

I swear that every person who defends the thiefs blatant overpoweredness does so because they themselves play a thief.

How about we have a new rule – if you play a thief you are not allowed to comment on if they are OP or not

Conversely, no one that QQs about them has ever actually played one seriously enough to really learn what the strengths and weaknesses are. Instead you get the mobile, bursty, tanky, regenerating, permastealth build posts where people insist on picking mutally exclusive traits and lumping into one “OP THIEF” thread.

Ah, yes the infamous 30/30/30/30/30 builds. To be fair, it happens to a lot of classes now. It tends to happen when people examine one specific situation where they either got “insta-gibbed” or just couldn’t kill some bunker profession and then it turns into, “what can I even do, look at all these options they have?!”

If you want to shoot your sides into orbit, go check out the mesmer subforum where someone was complaining about mesmers making 10+ clones and being invincible and blah blah blah.

I love when people genuinely want to learn, but some people are just more interested in making a scene than solving their problem and becoming stronger because of it.

Let’s not defend the ‘cause’ just in order to be politically correct. A WvW Thief is ridiculously overpowered. I don’t talk about the dagger burst, Heartseeker or whatever, a Thief is fightable, I’m used to it on the roaming Engi. But the culling issues + the crapload of escapes make them nearly uncatchable even with the CC spam I can provide, I could say that I’ve only killed 30% of all the losing Thieves who decided to flee.

But in order to avoid getting useless nerfs, I really want to push on an eventual fix to the rendering issues first. And then maybe… a mechanism consisting in getting revealed from stealth when taking damage. First one will make fights with them much more manageable (no more random disappearances + additionnal seconds of stealth). The second one is because the current mechanics gets a Thief to be forgiven even if he made quite alot of mistakes.

Now it’s definately not the worst of my troubles as the biggest one right now is being called Elementalist, outlasting me and every single trick my Engineer has, plus the mobility.

Adaneshade.2409:

Beyondthelol.9504:

I swear that every person who defends the thiefs blatant overpoweredness does so because they themselves play a thief.

How about we have a new rule – if you play a thief you are not allowed to comment on if they are OP or not

Conversely, no one that QQs about them has ever actually played one seriously enough to really learn what the strengths and weaknesses are. Instead you get the mobile, bursty, tanky, regenerating, permastealth build posts where people insist on picking mutally exclusive traits and lumping into one “OP THIEF” thread.

Hi – main Thief here, first toon rolled, love it, still play it every day – stealth is stupidly effective and downright bad design, the initiative system is broken and needs to be looked at very carefully. C&D needs to be downright removed and replaced with a skill which doesn’t ruin the game for everyone else.

It’s a bit like that satirical video ‘elementalist PvP exploit’ where the guy deletes his toon and rolls Thief – it doesn’t really matter what you do with your trait points/gear/whatever, if you take D/D, D/P and spam stealth in WvW you will dominate with next to no effort. So, you don’t like being told your class/playstyle is scrub-city? Too bad, the truth is out there.

The Thief is playing a different game to everyone else, that’s probably why I enjoy it so much. If I was stuck with the cooldown classes I would have packed it in months ago.

All they need is add a hit-effect when you’re hitting stealth characters.

Apart from that, recent culling changes greatly improved combat vs theves since stealth essentially doesn’t cull now except in massive zergs.

That said, killing theves is quick and easy from my warrior with on-demand 10-15k killshot (10k with a tanky build) while from my tanky S/D thief which sacrifices all burst, I can’t really do anything to d/d eles, tanky guardians, and certain mesmer builds.

Seems like the main complaint against le me profession is inability to target us “99%” at WvW. Ok…

1) Thieves are generally squishy, so if we are to be revealed for a couple of seconds more, then at least make us more durable to last a couple of seconds more as well. Increase our base health & toughness to last longer in proportion to the length of time of us being seen.

2) Alternatively, if it’s not too much to ask from Anet, intro a WvW only ‘vision’ function (in add to ‘interact’ & ‘targeting’) where the player will be able to detect outline of those in stealth mode (appearance will be similar to ‘invisible’ drake egg thieves at Bloodtide Coast), the tradeoff for such vision is inability to cast skill or attack when in ‘special vision’ mode. The player is still unable to target the thieves, but at least you have an idea where the thieves are.

I will prefer 2), bcos those who know how to play will skip this ‘vision’ function as they are more likely capable of predicting how a human thief player will behave. In addition, it won’t break the fear inducing element of stealth, bcos if the target is unable to let go of visual assistance, he is unable to attack. This will force those who don’t know how to play to group together instead of running alone recklessly.

Meanwhile Anet can intro more NPC enemies who use stealth based attack to the WvW maps to compliment this new function. Just my 2 cents worth.

Zephyrus.9680:

All they need is add a hit-effect when you’re hitting stealth characters.

Apart from that, recent culling changes greatly improved combat vs theves since stealth essentially doesn’t cull now except in massive zergs.

That said, killing theves is quick and easy from my warrior with on-demand 10-15k killshot (10k with a tanky build) while from my tanky S/D thief which sacrifices all burst, I can’t really do anything to d/d eles, tanky guardians, and certain mesmer builds.

Just a heads up, if your hitting a thief while they’re stealthed pay attention to the animations, you’ll know when you’re doing damage.

You wanna know how to deal with stealth? Fight the Mossman in the fractal. I know this is a WvW thread but he is good at pulling off thief tactics.

Escher.5342:

Zephyrus.9680:

All they need is add a hit-effect when you’re hitting stealth characters.

Apart from that, recent culling changes greatly improved combat vs theves since stealth essentially doesn’t cull now except in massive zergs.

That said, killing theves is quick and easy from my warrior with on-demand 10-15k killshot (10k with a tanky build) while from my tanky S/D thief which sacrifices all burst, I can’t really do anything to d/d eles, tanky guardians, and certain mesmer builds.

Just a heads up, if your hitting a thief while they’re stealthed pay attention to the animations, you’ll know when you’re doing damage.

Interesting and useful to know. I never really paid attention to the attack animations before. Thanks for that tip.

Most ranged weapons don’t really have an auto attack chain is the problem there. Warriors have chains for just about any weapon and since they all cleave, it is very easy to tell if you hit something. I have noticed that Sword is the most noticeable chain animation.

Would be nice if you see damage numbers when you hit something invisible though. Don’t see why it shouldn’t show you that. Even if something were to be “invisible” you’d still feel it if you cut it in half with a big kitten sword.

With necromancer if you have life leech attacks, you will see green numbers each time you hit a thief in stealth.

As an example:

http://youtu.be/EZSqtDayenM

7:05

Zephyrus.9680:

Escher.5342:

Zephyrus.9680:

All they need is add a hit-effect when you’re hitting stealth characters.

Apart from that, recent culling changes greatly improved combat vs theves since stealth essentially doesn’t cull now except in massive zergs.

That said, killing theves is quick and easy from my warrior with on-demand 10-15k killshot (10k with a tanky build) while from my tanky S/D thief which sacrifices all burst, I can’t really do anything to d/d eles, tanky guardians, and certain mesmer builds.

Just a heads up, if your hitting a thief while they’re stealthed pay attention to the animations, you’ll know when you’re doing damage.

Interesting and useful to know. I never really paid attention to the attack animations before. Thanks for that tip.

Another easy way is if you are using a melee attack with a chain, like most auto attacks, the chain progresses when you hit a player in stealth. So if you watch know when you are hitting them.

Adaneshade.2409:

Beyondthelol.9504:

I swear that every person who defends the thiefs blatant overpoweredness does so because they themselves play a thief.

How about we have a new rule – if you play a thief you are not allowed to comment on if they are OP or not

Conversely, no one that QQs about them has ever actually played one seriously enough to really learn what the strengths and weaknesses are. Instead you get the mobile, bursty, tanky, regenerating, permastealth build posts where people insist on picking mutally exclusive traits and lumping into one “OP THIEF” thread.

how about we start a new thread.. “your impressions on fighting a thief.” therefore no thieves allowed.

Thieves aren’t all bad. It’s the kittenty mechanics of the game that ANet refuses to fix, but there are a few of those so what are ya gonna do?
Not like ANet gives a kitten anyway. They just add fluff to the game every time they turn around. You can have a million different ridiculous looking backpacks, but no proper rendering or combat mechanics.

My thief is fun at times, but mostly I get bored with him really quick… especially in WvW. This game is nothing but 1 big AOE fest anyway, so what difference does it make in the long run? It’s just Zerg with massive AoEs, rinse, repeat, logoff & go to sleep.

1) Thieves are generally squishy, so if we are to be revealed for a couple of seconds more, then at least make us more durable to last a couple of seconds more as well. Increase our base health & toughness to last longer in proportion to the length of time of us being seen.

Well, my thief got more hp and more armor than my guardian so your point of “thieves being squishy” is either invalid or guardians need a much higher buff
My thief also deals more damage btw…

To weaken my argument a bit: The thief only got like 500 healing power where my guard has > 1k ^^

warriors vs thief? obviously a tactical warrior wins.

so what if thief got stealth its pretty much the only advantage so all you need is for it to come out and if 20 peoples cant beat one thief then they really need a wake up call asap lol.

TheGreatA.4192:

With necromancer if you have life leech attacks, you will see green numbers each time you hit a thief in stealth.

As an example:

http://youtu.be/EZSqtDayenM

7:05

The closest thing we have to a counter stealth skill…

If you’re a guardian and lose to a thief, you’re doing something wrong.

-GS/Hammer Guardian

So, we jump onto a DD ele, he uses vapor form to get away. Sounds legit; every class should have some mechanic to get away. We manage to down him; vapor form again and go through tower portal. Time between two vapor forms was maybe a few seconds max.

Lame.

iggybl.5034:

So, we jump onto a DD ele, he uses vapor form to get away. Sounds legit; every class should have some mechanic to get away. We manage to down him; vapor form again and go through tower portal. Time between two vapor forms was maybe a few seconds max.

Lame.

Haha, cool story bro. >3< I know how you feel. 4 of us would down 1 ele, and it would do this to hide inside SM/keep/tower/base. And I’d like to pull the hair off my head.

As already been suggested mutliple times: Just make tower/fort portals unusable in downed-state (or under the effect of a downed skill, whatever works). Currently this would affect vapor form and vengeance.

Thief should just get destroyed like Ranger.
Maybe then thieves would shut up already.
Freaking 99% stealth uptime with highest mobility, 100% bullet proof escape and 10k crits.
Good balance there Anet.

I’d level up a thief too if i had the time just to be able to eat my pizza while playing, having my left hand on 1 and 2.

AkiraZero.8514:

Karolis.4261:

AkiraZero.8514:

Thieves are beyond OP, the fact they have high damage plus high mobility plus high stealth and high escapability all rolled into one far out weights the fact they are “squishy”.
If they didn’t have the high damage the other stuff would be bearable!
When it comes to Risk VS Reward, Thieves are all reward!
Had 1 theif yesterday making 10 of us run round like idiots trying to stop him, he knew he was trolling us too as he was just stealth’ing when we attacked him and then appearing and literally bouncing round like a kangaroo in circles for the fun of it!
I’m a hammer warrior, didn’t matter what skills I used to lock him down nothing worked, he’d go invisible right in front of me, I’d immediately hit hammer skill 3 which is a stun and the next thing I know he was bouncing around miles away!
If being able to run circles round 10 people with no risk at all isn’t overpowered then nothing is!

They need to rethink about the Thief package as a whole, either swing the nerf bat at their damage to compensate for the rest of the stuff or take away some of the stealth’ing capabilities so they can’t ditch and run quite so easily!

Don’t get me wrong, I think they are a great class and have the potential for amazing scouting abilities and such, but they don’t play as a team due to the fact they can just go gank teams of people for the lulz!

Now tho asked you to chase him around with 10 ppl grp ? dont you have places to be with such force instead of chasing solo thief ? Just turttle up and move your way lol.

Would have been a great plan except the thief was following us while we tried to take back supply camps, like I said, he was trolling us knowing full well we weren’t going to stop him. (Although we did eventually when more people turned up and he panicked and back himself up against a wall and everyone laid into him).
The point still stands that no class should have that much yummy goodness rolled into 1!

You need 10 to flip camps? No wonder he could dance round you. And you know he can dodge your mighty hammer too right? It isn’t instawin.

Mehrdad.9074:

Oh what about shadow mesmer ?!!!

Walk me through this… Shadow Mesmer o;

Arekai.5698:

I’d level up a thief too if i had the time just to be able to eat my pizza while playing, having my left hand on 1 and 2.

I lol’ed at this. Good one.

So how does one counter a Pistol/dagger thief?
One was wiping the floor with 5 players on my server… no one could touch him or lock on him.
I think best to just avoid :-)

Cina Reas.6938:

Warrior, Guardian and Elementalist v Thief

Thief wins easily by being invisible for more than 50% of the time.

To be more accurate invisible 90% of the time. I never seen such an overpowered class in pvp of all the MMO type games I played. Even the rogue in WoW wasn’t even close to being this bad.
High damage output if fine for him, but the invisibility is way out of hand.

Most players don’t know how the thief works and refuses to learn how the thief works. You fight the thief the same way with anybody else – crowd controls and start spamming where you immobilized him. Thieves are quite predictable. If you need to actually “see” him to kill him, then I plenty of Batman films to point out to you where that’s not how you want to fight a thief.

The only thing “overpowered” of a thief is how easy they are to use, it took me 2 or 3 days to use the thief to a decent level. Sure stealth is good and nice, and it allows u to escape most of the times, but u still die to aoe’s pretty fast.
The ele took me a week atleast, to use to a decent level, but it’s also true that the standar whatever/whatever/whatever/30/30 tanky build it’s the most overpowered thing u can imagine, the only thing it lacks is burst damage, and it doesn’t matter when u can stack 20 might’s. Add to that the abilities to negate enemy projectiles plus the downed vapor form, and eles are the king of WvW (and spvp).

Budchgon.2108:

So how does one counter a Pistol/dagger thief?
One was wiping the floor with 5 players on my server… no one could touch him or lock on him.
I think best to just avoid :-)

There is no counter other than just moving on. Even the dual pistol unload > stealth > unload > stealth > unload ones are pretty impossible to beat.

What will they tell you on the forums? “Use AoEs” What do they do in reality? Laugh at you while watching you throw AOEs like a fool while they stealth around you. The whole “use AoEs” is basically nothing but a luck chance.

The thing is, since thieves are such a popular class due to their OP, there’s a lot of bad thieves out there. So you’ll get your thief kills in from time to time. You may even kill several of them and start thinking “Ok I think I’ve got them figured out.” Then you’ll come across one employing a few more brain cells and you’ll be taking a dirt nap.

Just go head and roll up a thief or mesmer. That’s all WvW is evolving into.

Khanswrath.1032:

Just give us one pistol and no pants. Maybe then the upped levels will stand a chance. I held off an entire zerg last night with just my smile.

What an amazing post.

Just another old hat Thief bash. /leave

Beyondthelol.9504:

I swear that every person who defends the thiefs blatant overpoweredness does so because they themselves play a thief.

How about we have a new rule – if you play a thief you are not allowed to comment on if they are OP or not

That’s not quite true from what I’ve seen. In my experience:

Really good players who play thieves will admit they are overpowered. The type of player who could pick up any class and be good with it in a short amount of time.

Average players or bad players who have thieves and are suddenly good players tend to defend the thief a bit more staunchly. They don’t want to acknowledge that the reason they are suddenly doing so well is due more to mechanics than it is to their ability.

That’s just what I’ve found, anyways. I’ve seen this same basic thing happen in other games as well when it comes to imbalanced classes at times.

Porky.5021:

Beyondthelol.9504:

I swear that every person who defends the thiefs blatant overpoweredness does so because they themselves play a thief.

How about we have a new rule – if you play a thief you are not allowed to comment on if they are OP or not

That’s not quite true from what I’ve seen. In my experience:

Really good players who play thieves will admit they are overpowered. The type of player who could pick up any class and be good with it in a short amount of time.

Average players or bad players who have thieves and are suddenly good players tend to defend the thief a bit more staunchly. They don’t want to acknowledge that the reason they are suddenly doing so well is due more to mechanics than it is to their ability.

That’s just what I’ve found, anyways. I’ve seen this same basic thing happen in other games as well when it comes to imbalanced classes at times.

I do not play a thief, and have in truth, never raised a thief above level 10~15.
I don’t think much of their class is particularly overpowered.
Some tweaking could be done to high-stealth thieves, but they don’t need their entire profession gutted like some people seem to think.

The only time GC Gank Thieves should really be a problem is when you’re fighting someone else and one just pops into the battle to do 20,000 damage to you. (I’ll admit that sucks, but I could do the same thing to other people as a mesmer or a warrior).

Stealth abusing thieves are certainly more annoying,
But not impossible to take out.
And in fact, the only times I find myself completely unable to neutralize a thief it is because it’s actually being played by a good player.

Bad players are bad players, not even the thief class mechanics protect them from that, it just makes it so they can kill other bad players and sometimes get the jump on a good one.

All these complaints about the GC thieves are fine and all… but the thieves that spend their traits differently those ones are annoying! The ones that have a blind on stealth trait… Super ridiculous…. Or a daze on steal… All in all its annoying guys… But if they nerf the backstab and mug damage you will see an even more annoying thief. That does not one shot but whittles you away from stealth with a near 90% up time on blinds… You will hate your life… that is all.

Thief’s burst BAD players with GC builds in wvw
Thief’s burst down players that are already low on health (build does not matter)
Thief’s have only 1 skill that gives stability and thats on a 90 sec CD
Thief’s have the lowest hp pool of medium armor classes
Thief’s still take the same amount of Dmg while in stealth

A burst D/D thief may have 1-2 stun breakers and only up to 13k hp

Myself as a Thief I can go toe to toe with GC thief’s and around 80% of the time come out on top because where thief’s go while in stealth is very very predictable.

D/p has way more cheese than d/d. At least you can stun break the combo and dodge c&d.

I thought of a couple fixes(and they will be consider a massive nerfs) that might balance out the Mesmer overpowered state. Mesmers are great to have around in PVE and WvW. Love them. But I think the Cloning/Portal abilities are way too abused and need another adjustment. I am by far no expert on mesmers. This comes from observing mesmers in action. These are just ideas.

My ideas:
1. A mesmer’s portal can only transport the equivalent of a party – 5 players. After which, it vanishes. Makes sense because the maximum number in a party is 5, so why are they allowed to transport 20?
2. The cloning ability. Needs a massive recast time adjustment – doubled(or substantial enough not to allow spamming). Durability of clones reduced – halved. Max number of clones able to spawn at a time needs to be brought down.

These are just ideas.

Heibi.4251:

I am by far no expert on mesmers.

That you clearly aren’t. In practice, p/d thief wins most competitive mesmer builds*. s/d is also very though opponent for any mesmer.

*Some weird phantasms builds will probably destroy the p/d thief, but those aren’t good against anything else.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Heibi.4251:

I am by far no expert on mesmers.

That you clearly aren’t.

So instead arguing against the merits of my ideas, or come up with a better solution, you take the lower road. Any class should have a chance to defeat any other class if the balance was there. Clearly, the balance is out of whack when it comes to the mesmer. I think the most logical adjustment would be the portal option. The clone adjustment definitely needs work. That is why I said they were IDEAS.

Clones aren’t OP. You simply have to spot the REAL player, which is not hard if you have dealt with mesmers before, and have observant eyes. Once you do that, you can kill them quite easily. I don’t know if you have noticed, those clones do little to no damage (except maybe phantasms, but those are VERY EASY to recognize), mesmers only play with your mind.

Portal bombs are old-fashioned nowadays, just need to kill the mesmer before he drops the portal.

I don’t get why anyone would want to nerf portals to 5. Its a strong utility skill that can be put to good tactical use in an organized group situation. Changing it to 5 would diminish its usefulness far below the other competitive utility skills down into the realm of mantras or lower.

As for the “cloning ability,” its not an ability making the clones. Its many utility abilities, weapon abilities, and traits. Clones are already extremely fragile and do no damage. I’m not sure why they are in need of a nerf. They are only there to distract and their extremely basic AI means they dont’ do a very good job of that against any experienced player.

and as master of timespace said, i’m still waiting to find a mesmer that can beat my p/d thief. i don’t think its going to happen.

Heibi.4251:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Heibi.4251:

I am by far no expert on mesmers.

That you clearly aren’t.

So instead arguing against the merits of my ideas, or come up with a better solution, you take the lower road. Any class should have a chance to defeat any other class if the balance was there. Clearly, the balance is out of whack when it comes to the mesmer. I think the most logical adjustment would be the portal option. The clone adjustment definitely needs work. That is why I said they were IDEAS.

The IDEA is this: stop running a crap build. Since this topic is about thieves, I assume you are a thief. In such case:
p/d – wins against shatter burst mesmers and confusion mesmers.
s/d – can win against all mesmer builds if played very well. Some tanky builds might be able to outlast you though.

Any class should have a chance to defeat any other class if the balance was there.

The balance is asymmetric. One build may be good against other, but suck against something else. Among Guild Wars veterans this is known as “build wars”.

Elano, that still doesn’t deal with the imbalance. Solutions are needed, not, “I know more than you” statements. Mesmers are clearly overpowered. I think I’ve spotted the real mesmer at times only to be incorrect. And the portal bomb is way too overpowered. Party sized ports should be the limit. The WvWorlders will come up with a tactic, like more mesmers, to overcome that limit. Spam clones should be addressed.

So does anyone have a solution based idea to add to or expand on my ideas? i.e. A way to balance the mesmer, not how to spot a mesmer and such.

Heibi.4251:

Elano, that still doesn’t deal with the imbalance. Solutions are needed, not, “I know more than you” statements. Mesmers are clearly overpowered. I think I’ve spotted the real mesmer at times only to be incorrect. And the portal bomb is way too overpowered. Party sized ports should be the limit. The WvWorlders will come up with a tactic, like more mesmers, to overcome that limit. Spam clones should be addressed.

How often do you do duels against mesmers? Mesmer is a though opponent, but not more though than a good d/d ele for example.

I think I’ve spotted the real mesmer at times only to be incorrect.

Finding the real mesmer should be trivial in WvW setting where food buffs spoil any cover clones might give.

Why was a thread on thieves being OP necro’d to discuss mesmers?

OT?: Mesmer shatter builds are a bit ridiculous as are backstab thieves. However, both builds are one trick ponies, survive the burst and they will die quickly. The shatter build is literally a duelist build and if the mesmer were to get involved in any big fights they would just melt from aoe. Not sure why a duelist build should be nerfed because you can’t beat them with your generic zerging build. All classes have selfish duelist builds that, when played well, can beat a well played shatter mesmer.

Side note: I play a d/d ele primarily, and I leveled a mesmer and a thief to learn how they work so that I could beat them. They will still win occasionally as I do not generally run a duelist build, but that’s ok!