Guild Wars 2

Q: Is your thief;
out picking the pockets of dredge in excitement?
out beating up quaggans in frustration?
or hiding out in the basement getting your last few days of chain-linking-stealth on?

I am Out in WvWvW chopping enemies down with my sword/pistol & short bow.
Seriously , it does not matter what Anet does to stealth. Would not affect my game play anyway.

I just had a wonderful conversation with a thief that was attacking me in WvW, he thinks he’s a pro thief because he’s only visible for brief periods of time, I explained, that as of next week, Mr Pro Thief is going to get a very, very rude awakening

If you ain’t pistol whipping you ain’t doing it big.

I do not think this will effect how most thieves play, and more worry the truth of how much this will actually “nerf” thieves will not live up to the hype.

Just to be clear, I main a thief and am looking forward to the culling fix as well as the correction to being able to “chain stealth.” That to me always seemed to be a play style that was right on the thin line between skilled and exploitive.

If I understand how the change will work with the reveal debuff, perma stealth builds will still be possible though this should help downgrade their performance somewhat. Stacking stealth will also still be possible, as the notes did not seem to mention forcing a thief out of stealth, just that ones they are out they will be revealed for the standard time even if they did not do any damage to anyone.

I don’ care about the debuff thing too much, since I only play PvE, but I do like to run Stealth Builds sometimes and between that and the Agro alt – and the changes that came with that – it really limits your build choices. When something is taking choices away from the player, and giving nothing in return, that is a bad thing. The changes they are constantly making to shut the PvPers up are going to ruin Thief for PvE.

I am not upset about the change, per se, as I rarely stealth in anycase.

However, I seriously doubt that this change is going to do anything to assuage the frenzied mania for nerfs.

Even if by some incredible miracle, these people suddenly find a few seconds of stealth acceptable, they will simply move on with thier other demands. And I just cannot see them being satisfied with this change.

I’m looking forward to it

also, what boots are you wearing?

Looking forward to it as well. So tired of people just waiting for stealth to wear off, only to hit LDB, and then blinding powder into stealth again. kitten gets old… -.-

Dakarius.3284:

I’m looking forward to it

ditto, the possibilities….

Dakarius.3284:

also, what boots are you wearing?

Whispers Boots (from Order of Whispers)

I can’t understand how some thieves become invisible so many times in a short period of time. Can someone please explain me the trick?

I can’t wait. The sooner the QQing quietens down, the sooner we get buffs in other areas that we deserve. Sadly, I don’t think the QQing would end even if dagger auto-attack became “slice your own wrists and cause 25 stacks of bleeding to yourself. Enemy receives a written apology in your blood upon death.”

How do I feel about it? Apathetic. :P

Auesis.7301:

I can’t wait. The sooner the QQing quietens down, the sooner we get buffs in other areas that we deserve. Sadly, I don’t think the QQing would end even if dagger auto-attack became “slice your own wrists and cause 25 stacks of bleeding to yourself. Enemy receives a written apology in your blood upon death.”

The qq will continue maybe a week tops after these next nerfs. Nothing will change but our class thief which sooner or later will become unusable. Carry on

I feel…hmm

Well I have a warrior, ele, and ranger all 80 yada yada. All this really means is reworking a build that’s naturally sub par in pve and decent in WvW. I hate the spam evade builds they are way to cheesy in my opinion so I will stay away from those. I will figure out a decent stealth build even with the nerfs. If I can’t I will play the toons I play more often as it is and shelf my thief.

Neutral. The only thing it might (emphasis on might) affect for me is dungeon play. We’ll still get called OP noobs with no skill that don’t understand how it is for other classes (even if we have multiple 80s). Let’s see how it goes. I guess I’m slightly excited for the fact people can’t blame culling for losing anymore and that 20-30 people won’t appear on top of me.

Culling gone? Awesome. The stealth part, will have to see it in the game. Sounds interesting though but it may be annoying for me in pve. I mainly do pve on my thief, so that will be interesting.

Just very very curious I guess! Cannot really say it is a nerf or anything. More like working as intended I guess. We are not ninjas or anything. The cloak and dagger chain of stealth didn’t really seem what the developers intended :P

really getting rid of culling is gonna do nothing for pve thiefs as soon as you would have normally broken stealth anyway the mob would be back on you where as the culling problem cause a rendering issue to other players so you would stand right next to them and they cant see if your friendly or enemy possibly even see you when out of stealth

Thieves are going to have to learn to choose the right time to attack now. If you can’t deal with that play another class. I’ve never seen a game where stealth works like it does in this one. It was only a matter of time before it got nerfed. Regardless of whether thieves are op or not the ability to conintue to blink in and out of sight in combat is op. Its not fun at all for people on the business end of it probably more so then any other mechanic. Shatter/Pet spam by mesemers is probably a close second. So when you have something the vast majority of the player base hates besides the people benefitting from it you don’t have to be a rocket science to understand it was going to get changed.

My main has been thief since BETA and I’m sad to see the stealth patched up. Nonetheless, I am now forced to try different game play styles out. Definitely going to clear out the dust from my pistols and try pistol whipping again and I might actually pick up a sword and try out some S/P and S/D combos.

It’s been a good run with stealth and I’m sad to see it go :‘( but ever since I’ve drifted away from PvE I’ve been too hooked on it. C’est la vie.

I can’t wait for this patch! The culling was a real problem and I really can’t wait for it to be gone. Else I’m looking forward to the debuff coming as it will make thieves think more before entering stealth.

I’ve played a thief since beta and it have been my main since then.

Kwll.1468:

Thieves are going to have to learn to choose the right time to attack now. If you can’t deal with that play another class. I’ve never seen a game where stealth works like it does in this one. It was only a matter of time before it got nerfed. Regardless of whether thieves are op or not the ability to conintue to blink in and out of sight in combat is op. Its not fun at all for people on the business end of it probably more so then any other mechanic. Shatter/Pet spam by mesemers is probably a close second. So when you have something the vast majority of the player base hates besides the people benefitting from it you don’t have to be a rocket science to understand it was going to get changed.

Thieves and mesmers punish the players that don’t understand them the most out of all classes. This causes a lot of the newer players to think they are OP. They are both fairly well balanced though.

Thief is hardly seen at higher levels of sPvP. If anything it needs some buffs in some way to make them stronger/more competitive in this bracket. Once you understand thief more you can predict them very easily. Thieves are very one trick ponies. I (and many other players) often will cloak and dagger → stealth off of another already stealthed thief.

I actually have some disagreements with some of the mesmer’s mechanics… if you blind/block/dodge at the time of summoning an illusion the mesmer doesn’t produce anything… this makes mesmer the ONLY class where aoe/multi hitting attacks (the dev’s stated they were attacks and not summons to justify this change) that don’t even occur due to a single blind/block/dodge. That’s messed up.

About the change… meh… as long as they go through with their desires to allow thief to stay in combat longer, be the most slippery class, and more mobile than Ele… I’m fine with it. It’s just the time in between when they are trying to figure out how they’ll do that which makes me : /

How do I feel? Waiting to see. It is pointless on my part to invest whether it will be positive or negative. Unless patch notes are released I have got no idea how I will handle the buffs and the nerfs.

Only gameplay will show.

Loco.4561:

I just had a wonderful conversation with a thief that was attacking me in WvW, he thinks he’s a pro thief because he’s only visible for brief periods of time, I explained, that as of next week, Mr Pro Thief is going to get a very, very rude awakening

You will be just as bad with one less excuse. Thats the only thing changing

I, personally, have already shelved my thief. I am a PvE player for the most part and after the last patch where agro reduction was no longer part of stealth, I had to look over the other 22 patch notes. In my investigation, I found a reduction of at least 33% effectiveness to nearly every ability in the thief arsenal over those patches. At the same time, I found 23 increases to the abilities of other professions in just one patch.

So, I began playing a Ranger. In PvE, my ranger is able to solo every vet out there and most champion mobs doing relatively nothing but sicing my pet on them and firing my short bow or long bow… thus taking little to no dmg from the mob and therefore never being in serious harm from the mob. I could not do that with my thief no matter what spec or build I used.

The next issue I had with my thief involved dungeons. I found my thief dying more and more because of the lack of agro reduction while mesmers, engineers, guardians, warriors, rangers, and ele’s were owning the bosses with little more than a wink of the eye and a chuckle. Since the lack of agro patch, even my downed skills became useless since I can no longer stealth on down (or use the stealth field on down trait) and heal while mobs walked away. Compare this to Rangers being able to summon their pets to heal them (even if the pet is technically dead)… this heal I noticed then becomes about 1000 health regen every pulse… so even if my Ranger did, by some drastic set of circumstances, go down, he was back up in a second or two… especially if the healing spring on down trait was specd.

This patch to stealth isn’t going to hit a PvE player as much as it will a PvP player or even a WvW player… but for them it will hit the thief class hard. For a class that already has relatively little utility in a dungeon or fractal setting, the class will become even more useless… this is assuming that the devs do exactly what they said in the video… See, thieves rely on stealth for heals, condition removal, dmg avoidance, might gain, ect… all the stuff that other classes have seen increases to. And yes, an Elementalist is more mobile and “slippery” than a thief.

With all the patches, thief has become a class without a role. I have seen this in so many games (Everquest, Everquest II just to name a couple). I have seen the population of thief players dwindle to nothing because the class had no utility and no use that wasn’t also available to another class. In Everquest, disarm traps was given as a spell to clerics and shaman, Back Stab became an ability of Necro pets, Hide in Shadows became a racial skill for Dark Elves, poisons became the foray of Shamans, find traps and open locks became a spell for all spell casting classes… and the list goes on. Sadly, I see the same thing happening here… thieves are being nerfed into mini (and less powerful, less survivable) warriors with less utility, less diversity, less ability. People complain about thieves being able to “perma-Stealth”… well, what about the invulnerability and heal of some classes not to mention their dmg output and evasive skills…

I really am done with games that take a single class, single them out because people on the forums make over dramatic claims that can not be substantiated as based on that class’s abilities… for example, the perma stealth of thieves really came down to Culling… which isn’t a thief ability, it was a problem with Anet… still people moaned because of that and instead of fixing the culling, Anet decided to nerf down a thief into useless oblivion,

Looking forward to it because I have 5 characters and everybody needs work.

ensoriki.5789:

If you ain’t pistol whipping you ain’t doing it big.

basilisk kitten sig into precast cnd steal backstab haste 1 second insta kill or you aint doin it big

cmon step it up.

I find it really funny actually. On my main thief I was enjoying fights like 1vSquad (up scaled + noobs ofc). We all know that ppl complain about thief’s chain CnD stuff, and that’s learn to play issue most of the the time because srsly, if you fight him 1v1, how can back stab thief land a back stab? he must be behind you. Is it really that hard to not showing him your back? Stealth is lasts 4 seconds, and you can’t do anything to avoid that bloody Back Stab? Don’t know how to avoid CnD? it costs 6 initiative btw. I also have an alt warrior and I love to troll newb thiefs. Anyway, a nerf is a nerf.

The nerfs won’t be that hard also i respec to lifesteal build.

I guess I won’t really care about the “nerf” they are putting in since I never really took advantage of the CnD chain(because its a waste of initiative). instead don’t play it the lazy way.. learn to manouvre with your thief and survive from that. the reason people feel nerfs so bad is beacause they all play these cookie cutter builds. Come up with something original, there is so much more to the thief than the most known builds out there…

Nerf will make thieves less survivable.

Apart from that, nothing really will happen, since it will only affect you if you don’t attack. If you do attack, well, there’s already the 3 second revealed debuff. Basically now if you screw up, you’re in a whole lot more trouble than you would have been in before.

I imagine the debuff was to stop chain veils for zergs as well.

It won’t matter a dandy to me. A fellow player whispered me (all in good nature) that I was a back stabbin mother___ makin’ him mad. Well with a flash of my sword and a bang of my pistol I shadow stepped away again.