Guild Wars 2

This patch I would say is an overall success. There are some debateable changes that were put into place but generally speaking it was a good patch in the way of balance for thief.
Why, you ask?
Well first let’s look at the changes to thief (not daredevil)
-Signet of agility has become a bulk condi cleanse to allow for better management throughout a fight
-More burst access with a reduced cd on assassin’s sig
-Sword has been buffed through the game with it’s immob duration
-Traps are being looked at in order to find ways to make them useful
-CnD was buffed (not a ton but still, it means they aren’t completely against buffing it)
Changes to daredevil:
-Bound has been hit to reward skillfull use of interrupts in order to prevent taking damage from the dodge
-Dodge spam has been hit (Huge nerf to evade spam condi)
-Acro has been hit not enough to make it bad but enough to make acro staff have it’s own share of weakness

Overall this hasn’t nerfed daredevil enough to kill it but it has done some serious work to prevent spam and promote skillfull play.

Why do I believe this is a step in the right direction?
1) Sets outside of d/p are being buffed and tweaked without destroying d/p (I.E we aren’t trying to magically fix stuff by nerfing d/p)
2) Anet has found good ways to give skills multiple situations they could be useful in (Ex. Sig of agility can now be an extra dodge in a hot moment or a condi clear when you are bursted)
3) Work has been done to help lessen the disparity between Elite and core builds (Buffs given to core aspects so thief can perform better and nerfs given to HoT aspects lessening the overperformance of elite specs)

What I think our next steps should be:
First start digging into weapon sets to find the best changes to make (Sword 2 jump cast made available again, return being instant without breaking stun or being usable while cced, s/d 3 cycling no matter what, aa speed increase, small damage increases on skills that need a little extra umph, etc.)
Then start digging into traits to find what can be made baseline to give the class more build diversity (Preparedness baseline, less extreme boonsteal made baseline, etc.)
Then buff utility skills more to open up new styles of play made possible by previous weapon and trait changes.

This is just my 2 cents on this change. Many will agree, many will not but that’s okay. It’s just a random internet opinion after all.

I agree. I’m actually glad they’re hitting those obnoxious dodge spamming builds. The most low skill build on Thief by far. Not that they’re unbeatable, on the contrary, most of those players aren’t very good. However, fighting them is completely annoying as hell. They’re not performing thoughtful decisions, just spamming dodges, and you’re just waiting till they run out of dodges to kill them. While I do think Daredevil is a strong elite spec, it’s design is mostly cancer and I should know! I was one of the first dodge spam users when HoT launched! xD Came up with one, if not the first, of the dual dagger condi Daredevil dodge spamming builds. I couldn’t believe how cheesy and easy it was to play.

I agree, I was expecting a bigger hit to all endurance gain (Endurance thief, minor in DrD, SoA and CV)

However the SoA I’m a bit.. How do I explain it, previously when it was 1 condi removal it required thought behind removing condis making it a little bit more skillbased to use, you had to think about what you condi cleared and how quick you were. Now you kinda just blow it and get away with clearing condis. I am more than fine with the changes, as I said I was expecting bigger nerfs to this, I think this helps a lot of lower tier players too I get a lot of questions on “how do you handle condis with your build?” well, for me it was never really any issue as long as you never overextended and knew your limits, this is still a nice change and allows for more aggressive play too against nec/mes/condiwar when you + 1 and the endurance change is obviously a nerf in many ways, people think it was only to use it as a escape/dodge in fights but i used SoA a lot of times to rotate so the rotation speed becomes a tiny tiny bit lower through out a full game which is still OK. Same goes for CV if you count it over a whole game (the amount of dodges it would have generated in total)

Condi cleanse with previous SoA being more “skillfull” example:
Druid taunting you with pet you getting a quick weakness procc and you cleanse the weakness instead if you are to slow to blow the signet, similar stuff to this.

Problem why they won’t revert the jump #2 which obviously was a very cool thing to use and made S/D being able to chase targets efficiently is that they also removed all kind of “jump” bugs, example being mesmer shield #4 where you can evade the clone and you could delay the clone spawning by jumping in shield #4, this got removed and that’s why I do not think they will revert the #2 jump thing.

Also you say that you want traits becoming baseline from trickery, I heard it many times but I think that traitline is so important as a thief in general that making prepardness baseline will still not help trickery being mandatory, for me personally I could never play without bountiful theft/Sleight of hand on any build I play wether it be D/P S/D S/P or Staff.

And if you would add Prepardness/BT/Sleight as baseline I think obviously that would open up to more diversity (people would play around with DA/CS/DRD or DA/SA/DRD etc etc but I think making those things baseline would also make thief pretty crazy strong hehe

Bluri, I liked your analysis of SoA’s usage. I agree with what you said about the endurance nerf but I think the condi cleanse was an overall better change to have for thief. Allows us to play aggressively vs condi burst classes without having to rely solely on EA. The endurance sacrifice is noticeable I agree there but it was needed imo.

In response to the jump thing cause I actually never knew about the mes one. They still have jump casting with staff 3 so you can remove the roll anim and just take the evade with little aftercast. The jump bug I’d argue with s/d added a whole new level of depth, skill, and decision making. It took skill from the user to know when it was best to use it with a jump or when to leave it as a possible escape. I don’t think there’d be too much uproar in the community if it was ever reintroduced because it wasn’t op and it allowed the set to be playable in more situations.

I agree with the fact that preparedness alone won’t make trickery unnecessary but that’s because all the steal buffs are in there. I proposed the baselining of both bountiful theft (Maybe only do 2 boons instead of 3 if it’s viewed as op) and preparedness because with those automatically on the thief trickery would still be helpful and widely used but it wouldn’t be mandatory. And like you said, it opens up room to play with other trait lines without losing function of your class mechanic. The recharge reduction from SoH should be baseline but I like the daze coming from a trait because it gives us the option to not proc auto stun passives from other classes if we opt out of taking it. Granted I never play without BT and SoH either so I know the feeling.

Ofc traits and other such things can be changed if thief becomes op but given how anet conducted this patch I’m sure they could handle that well enough.

bluri.2653:

I agree, I was expecting a bigger hit to all endurance gain (Endurance thief, minor in DrD, SoA and CV)

However the SoA I’m a bit.. How do I explain it, previously when it was 1 condi removal it required thought behind removing condis making it a little bit more skillbased to use, you had to think about what you condi cleared and how quick you were
…
(trimmed for post/quote length)

Condi cleanse with previous SoA being more “skillfull” example:
Druid taunting you with pet you getting a quick weakness procc and you cleanse the weakness instead if you are to slow to blow the signet, similar stuff to this.

Problem why they won’t revert the jump #2 which obviously was a very cool thing to use and made S/D being able to chase targets efficiently is that they also removed all kind of “jump” bugs, example being mesmer shield #4 where you can evade the clone and you could delay the clone spawning by jumping in shield #4, this got removed and that’s why I do not think they will revert the #2 jump thing.

Also you say that you want traits becoming baseline from trickery, I heard it many times but I think that traitline is so important as a thief in general that making prepardness baseline will still not help trickery being mandatory, for me personally I could never play without bountiful theft/Sleight of hand on any build I play wether it be D/P S/D S/P or Staff.

And if you would add Prepardness/BT/Sleight as baseline I think obviously that would open up to more diversity (people would play around with DA/CS/DRD or DA/SA/DRD etc etc but I think making those things baseline would also make thief pretty crazy strong hehe

The SoA change was a mediocre change for the Daredevil. I appreciate this change when looking at core thief, however. Aside from Shadowstep which would act as a primary stunbreak or sacrificing an entire line for SA/Acro which don’t remove control conditions while both struggle to cleanse a breadth of the DoT’s, the thief lacked no dedicated cleanse utility on a reasonable cooldown. I see it as a big step in the right direction to make the core kit a lot better.

It’s good to see that they are at least working on other jumpcasts to normalize things. IS/IR did add huge depth of play to the sword and was a pretty brutal change. That said, I don’t think it makes much sense mechanically to re-introduce it just because it was a weird interaction, and although balanced if not pretty critical to S/D’s usability at times, it was a bug. The 900 range bump is nice for IS, though I’m uncertain it’s enough. Most disengages are just as substantial if not larger, and the IR duration can’t change as it’d adversely affect the potential utility of the kit’s reset potential and cause initiative to be dumped for no good reason for fights the thief wants to commit to.

They’d need to do more than make Preparedness baseline for Trickery to change the need for it, I agree, and this is mostly just from BT, SoH, and LA; Pushing Unrelenting Strikes to on-steal in CS would help offset ToTC, but there’s little else to gain elsewhere that provides the very-much-needed utility TR gives, and just making so much baseline would be very excessive; 15-20k backstabs wouldn’t be too uncommon, and with all the utility the Daredevil has it’d be very oppressive.

I will say I think they should make SoH’s steal CDR baseline more than anything else if they were to do anything, or just merge it with baseline Trickery, and maybe take a stack from Bewildering to compensate. It’s not beneficial to CC players on-engage in many circumstances these days, notably outside of organized PvP where you’re not +1’ing consistently, which also contributes a lot to the dominance of D/P in general game-wide. I feel like most of the time I’d prefer to not have the daze due to some passive CC reflect or the likes.

As for the overall quality of the changes, nothing was really stellar, and the “buffs” to ghost thief and cheesy condi builds while not making them any more interesting definitely speaks volumes about ANet’s willingness to make necessary change for the profession. Most of the other weapons are still ineffective, and really none of them received anything at all.

I dont like they removed staff from thief.

Urejt.5648:

I dont like they removed staff from thief.

They didn’t remove staff from thief. They reduced evades across the board, and toned down some traits that were clearly overperforming. A staff thief or D/D condi thief shouldn’t be able to constantly attack and chain dodges in the way they were, and the quicker those changes hit WvW the better frankly.