Guild Wars 2

Let me preface this that I am generally positive regarding the balance preview for Thieves. While I don’t necessarily agree with every change I do like the boldness of it compared to the previously rather passive approach to balancing.

That said, regardless of the actual nature of these changes I feel they really miss out on addressing some fundamental Thief problems.

If you had asked me prior to the preview what I consider to be Thief issues I’d have mentioned.

• Lackluster Venoms builds
• Underpowered and inconvenient trap mechanics
• 4 second revealed in sPvP
• Channeled abilities vs. stealth
• Reliability of Shadowsteps
• A large number of unpopular or problematic traits (I’m looking at you, Last Refuge)
• Extremely limited combat range (wtb 1200 range).
• Conflicting DPS and weapon-sets.

Now are evade spam and perma-stealth problematic too? Yes, surely they are, but they are much more specific issues.

I feel it would be a missed opportunity to make such fundamental changes to Thieves without addressing many of their lackluster traits and abilities.

You hit most of them, I just want to add a few:

The uselessness of Smoke Bomb in the Downed State (in PvE)
Last Refuge
Pistol and Shortbow autoattacks being too weak/slow

They seem to have a problem of only focusing on microscopic details rather than looking at larger scale design issues. It’s pretty frustrating that we go patch after patch without any real significant updates.

Smoke bomb performs pretty fairly in PvE, contrary to the above post, only if you’ve traited into Shadow’s Rejuvenation. The extra heal boost from stealth in the downed state is amazing for second winds in low-DPS builds. I just wish that the downed state autoattack would apply bleeding so that condition builds are given a chance there as well.

Totally agree ! But i think that will be for the next balancing patch… Probably februari or march ^^

This completely illustrates my overlooked post in the balance trait… Anet is trying to do all the work itself and then asking us feedback. Balance should be adressed in a different way e.g.:

Make a new “balance-sub-forum” for each class where people are allowed to post, in the form of a thread, their ideas. Posts should be “professional”, meaning that the changes you propose have a reasonable logic behind them, are well-grounded, coherent, try to address most of the current issues, etc…

Instead of allowing other people post in these threads, simply allow to +1 the threads, this way Anet gets an idea of what people think are the most important issues to address and how to address them.

Afterwards Anet can post, based on the most +1’d posts and their own ideas, a preview of the balancing patch to which we can give feedback.

It will save Anet a lot of thinking, time, headaches and changing their original ideas. It’s much easier to collect ideas and see which ideas work well together to address the current issues then trying to come up with them all by yourself and then trying to organize feedback all posted in one thread about multiple classes…

had to say this… :p

Maybe next year we might actually see traps and venoms become viable choices.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Smoke bomb performs pretty fairly in PvE, contrary to the above post, only if you’ve traited into Shadow’s Rejuvenation. The extra heal boost from stealth in the downed state is amazing for second winds in low-DPS builds. I just wish that the downed state autoattack would apply bleeding so that condition builds are given a chance there as well.

Wrong smoke bomb. The trait taht gives smoke ind owned is not the “stealth” ability which would help with rejuvenation, but is actually the Smoke Wall that blinds enemies and nulls projectiles. so it really is a pretty useless trait.

Heizero.9183:

Viking Jorun.5413:

Smoke bomb performs pretty fairly in PvE, contrary to the above post, only if you’ve traited into Shadow’s Rejuvenation. The extra heal boost from stealth in the downed state is amazing for second winds in low-DPS builds. I just wish that the downed state autoattack would apply bleeding so that condition builds are given a chance there as well.

Wrong smoke bomb. The trait taht gives smoke ind owned is not the “stealth” ability which would help with rejuvenation, but is actually the Smoke Wall that blinds enemies and nulls projectiles. so it really is a pretty useless trait.

That would be smoke screen. Get your traits right.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Heizero.9183:

Viking Jorun.5413:

Smoke bomb performs pretty fairly in PvE, contrary to the above post, only if you’ve traited into Shadow’s Rejuvenation. The extra heal boost from stealth in the downed state is amazing for second winds in low-DPS builds. I just wish that the downed state autoattack would apply bleeding so that condition builds are given a chance there as well.

Wrong smoke bomb. The trait taht gives smoke ind owned is not the “stealth” ability which would help with rejuvenation, but is actually the Smoke Wall that blinds enemies and nulls projectiles. so it really is a pretty useless trait.

That would be smoke screen. Get your traits right.

I misread his post. I thought he was talking about the uselessness of Concealed Defeat which lays down a wall on downed. Last Refuge doesn’t even trigger on downed, it triggers on 25% health, that’s where I misread. -.-

EDIT: As far as Last Refuge go, it’s debatable. Sometimes it saves you, sometimes it dooms you. Concealed Defeat however is pretty much 100% useless.

The change to initiative seems to average out the initiative regeneration so that players who do nothing to control their initiative have more to spend, whilst min/max builds and skilful play cannot gain as much. That will prevent the thief from being such a tough class for new players but is it really a great advance for the end game?

I do agree entirely with the OP. If you were to ask 100 thieves what was wrong with the class, I doubt many would say that thieves are too reliant on traits for initiative.