Guild Wars 2

Ok at this point in the game a nerf is uncalled for. Allow me for a second to compare this pattern to SWTOR. SWTOR dev’s started listening to all the whiners on the forums. They used patches like bottles to pacify a baby everytime forum trolls whined. This was not broken, thief skills have much less diversity than other classes. Because the majority or players cant deal with a class due to lack of skill you nerf the class? I for one don’t respect this whiner-pacification. Please Anet for the sake of the MMO genre dont follow this terrible terrible path. Look at this for a second, your skilled team balanced the classes in the beginning. Are you so quick to give in to the whiners? What about your team who actually put in that work and research to begin with?

What are they nerfing about Thieves? I might not be affected.

They nerfed heartseeker….
And they will again because the whiners will still die in pvp. They die, cry, & tell mommy it isn’t fair.

Omg you can’t get away with 222222222222 anymore! Seriously, they balanced it to be a bit more dynamic, and make us have to work for those kills a touch more. I am a thief, and I like this “nerf”.

What exactly did they do? I am a thief and always thought 3 initiative for heartseaker was too little. On the other hand, if they nerfed damage, then we have a problem.

They lowered the damage done to an opponent at 100%-50% health by 20%. means you should probably use your other skills to widdle them down to 50% then go nuts mashing HS if you like. It is now a “finishing” move, which I believe is what they intended it to be in the first place.

Thief

Heartseeker: Reduced damage of the 100%-50% threshold by 20%. Damage thresholds changed. Old: 100%-66%, 66%-33%, 33%-0%. New: 100%-50%, 50%-25%, 25%-0%.

first i must say the nerf was reasonable.
Second if they really listen to whining lets start whine about the low ability choice for thief I mean look at ele or warriors!

I agree, the nerf is fine my only complaint is the change from 33% to 25%, annoying but not a huge deal, it’s still a great skill overall. On a side note, has anyone noticed Heartseeker missing on stationary targets like it did back in beta since this patch?

This isn’t a big deal. Heartseeker is still useful as both a gap closer and a finishing move. Nerfing the damage it did above target 50% health just hurts the Haste + 2222222222 spammers.

Kids spamming 2, like a trained monkey. Mediocre players killing mediocre players.

Here we go………………Blizzard drove me nuts with their nerf-nerf-buff-nerf-buff-nerf-nerf-nerf approach. People need to learn to adapt, I chose the most underplayed and difficult classes for a reason; to overcome. People need to learn to adapt.

Stop the nerfing A-Net, the game was in beta for a longtime, why was it not addressed before? Now that people complain we have this knee-jerk reaction, build up other classes to counter it instead of nerfing. Nerfing is a slippery slope……….

Lol thieves get nerfed… but warriors in HEAVY armor doing more damage than us didn’t. That’s legit. Heavy armor wearing thieves with cc’s shouldn’t be touched. /S

Seriously, this change is perfectly reasonable. Heartseeker has been and always was meant to be an execute not a general damage ability. The change to 100%-50% really has no effect at all on any Thief worth anything at all.

JStereo.6953:

This isn’t a big deal. Heartseeker is still useful as both a gap closer and a finishing move. Nerfing the damage it did above target 50% health just hurts the Haste + 2222222222 spammers.

Actually, it hurts our entire gameplay, making the skill far less worth using for every PvE and PvP engagement 50% of the time. Think of it – your most useful skill only usable 50% of the time without severely kittening yourself.

They promised not making these kinds of nerf-bat changes. And here we see it WITHIN 20 days. The Thief BEGS for skilled players to play it. There’s probably a 2:1 favor of skilled players playing Thief than any other class. Good players know they can turn the utility into massive K/D ratios. They could have done it on any other class, but the Thief begs for it to be used that way.

The only problem I have is the 20% damage nerf above 50%. If it becomes no better than your auto-attack, yes it still has use for a gap closer, but then you’re not using it 50% of the time. In fact, you’re punished for thinking of using it for damage now. In your mind, you’re going to be saying, “Ah nope don’t press that key, it’s not even worth it anymore until he’s at 50%”

Is that the game design everyone was promised? To have skills made unviable 50% of the time? Was the idea to take out the nerf bat within 20 days? Was the idea to make players not use 1/5 of their skills half the time? Or to at least be punished for doing so.

Just an odd nerf this early into the game.

Well, I guess if enough people complain about it must be true? People used to think the world was flat too.

/em rolls eyes.

Vexus.5423:

JStereo.6953:

This isn’t a big deal. Heartseeker is still useful as both a gap closer and a finishing move. Nerfing the damage it did above target 50% health just hurts the Haste + 2222222222 spammers.

Actually, it hurts our entire gameplay, making the skill far less worth using for every PvE and PvP engagement 50% of the time. Think of it – your most useful skill only usable 50% of the time without severely kittening yourself.

They promised not making these kinds of nerf-bat changes. And here we see it WITHIN 20 days. The Thief BEGS for skilled players to play it. There’s probably a 2:1 favor of skilled players playing Thief than any other class. Good players know they can turn the utility into massive K/D ratios. They could have done it on any other class, but the Thief begs for it to be used that way.

The only problem I have is the 20% damage nerf above 50%. If it becomes no better than your auto-attack, yes it still has use for a gap closer, but then you’re not using it 50% of the time. In fact, you’re punished for thinking of using it for damage now. In your mind, you’re going to be saying, “Ah nope don’t press that key, it’s not even worth it anymore until he’s at 50%”

Is that the game design everyone was promised? To have skills made unviable 50% of the time? Was the idea to take out the nerf bat within 20 days? Was the idea to make players not use 1/5 of their skills half the time? Or to at least be punished for doing so.

Just an odd nerf this early into the game.

If the skill increases in damage when the target is low health then it’s pretty safe to assume that it was intended to be an execution move. You don’t use execution moves on targets with high health. It’s a situational skill, there’s nothing wrong with a game punishing you for using a skill at an inappropriate time.

I disagree that heartseeker is the most valuable skill. Cloak and Dagger is great for weaving in and out of combat (and reducing toughness), Dancing Dagger is great for crippling multiple enemies, Death Blossom for the evade and going well with condition damage build. Are you seeing a trend here? D/D play should be that way, not just spam one skill until the enemy is dead or you’re out of initiative. This nerf only hurts people who relied on heartseeker too much to get their kills. Direct damage still has stealth/back stab to hurt the enemy and heartseeker to finish them off and/or close the gap.

We should whine about warriors hundred blades -.- ive seen it 1 shot people..

Anet Feeding the trolls? Thief Nerf

Or the alternative version would be Anet can spot a ‘cheese’ skill, just like many other people.

The punishment was less damage at high health. The nerf translates to ‘massively less damage where no one wants to use it anymore unless the enemy is low health’. Not just ‘Use it above 50% and get some benefit over autoattack, but see big differences when the enemy is low health.’ Spam HS on a 100% mob and see how far you get in 4 attacks pre-nerf. Nowhere. Maybe 70%. Now it’s even worse?

And I said most useful skill.

What other class is punished on a main damage skill 50% of the time?

Where else do the ‘mechanics’ of the attack make you feel it’s not worth using 50% of the time?

Trimethicon.7405:

Build up other classes to counter it instead of nerfing. Nerfing is a slippery slope……….

Thank god you’re not in charge of it!

Vexus.5423:

The punishment was less damage at high health. The nerf translates to ‘massively less damage where no one wants to use it anymore unless the enemy is low health’. Not just ‘Use it above 50% and get some benefit over autoattack, but see big differences when the enemy is low health.’ Spam HS on a 100% mob and see how far you get in 4 attacks pre-nerf. Nowhere. Maybe 70%. Now it’s even worse?

You shouldn’t be spamming heartseeker on a 100% mob anyway. Why would you even do that?

And I said most useful skill.

It still is a useful skill, just because you can’t rely on it doing damage above 50% target health doesn’t change the fact that it’s still an excellent ability that’s useful for closing the gap and finishing off your target. It’s less useful than before, yes, but it’s not going to ruin the Thief.

What other class is punished on a main damage skill 50% of the time?

Other than ele and guardian I haven’t played the other classes much, as far as I can tell heartseeker is totally unique in regards to it’s scaling damage with target health. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just means there’s a right time to use it and a wrong time.

Where else do the ‘mechanics’ of the attack make you feel it’s not worth using 50% of the time?

The fact that the class was nerfed doesn’t sit well with me at all either, but all I can say is that out of all of the ways they could have nerfed it (decreasing ALL damage, increasing initiative cost, decreasing range, for example.) they picked the least damaging way to the class to do it. In my opinion this doesn’t effect the thief in any significant way. I hope this doesn’t become a habit of theirs, this class really didn’t need to be nerfed in the first place.

Why would you not use it on a 100% mob? My point is, why not use it on a 100% mob, except now, you’re severely punished for doing so. As others point out, autoattack is going to be more effective. So why not just black out the skill until your target is at 50% health if it’s ‘meant to be for low health targets’?

Skills aren’t supposed to be ‘a right time to use it and a wrong time’ it’s supposed to be effective at any time, per game design promises made for years. Again I only contend the 20% damage nerf above 50%. There’s a 40-60% damage difference between the target at 51% health and 49% health now.

I wouldn’t be complaining with a 10% nerf to damage over 50%, but making it no better than an autoattack is kind of odd in terms of where they plan to go.

And again, 20 days! Who starts the nerf bat knee-jerk reaction that soon? They even had some dev post about balance on the Announcements forums about not doing just that. 20 days! 70% of everyone isn’t even 80, and 95% of everyone doesn’t know their true end-game build yet that fits their perfect play style.

It’s like if within 20 days of releasing Starcraft 2 they said, “Naw naw, Terran Reapers are OP nerf that build order now.” Instead of waiting for it to manifest how it did. It proved to be the only high level play, not just a variant, and as everyone here has stated, over and over, Heartseeker spam is the mark of low level play.

I don’t believe that ‘nerf’ is the proper word for it — imo they changed the behavior of heartseeker to be more in line with it’s intention. HS is much more of an execute ability but the high percentage damage was not in line with the intended use of the ability. By making it so that it’s not worthwhile to spam, it forces you to do more than spam 2. Essentially the change forces the playstyle to be a little more as it was intended. No thieves worth their salt are spamming heartseeker anyway at high health, so it’s almost unnoticed for us anyway.

If you were using heartseeker above 50% (well 66% my bad) you were doing it wrong. If you relied on it outside of utility for general purpose pve/pvp…you were doing it wrong. The skill was only ever useful for two things: gap closer and finisher, usually both at the same time.

This wasnt even a nerf, if anything it makes ppl play thief right instead kittening themselves with bad use of abilities. ANET helped everyone.

Problem is the HS crit Thief is OP. But I find it amusing that the insanely OPed Mesmer havent got the bat yet.

Well if you really want to press 2 that much lets have them change it again.

You can have the 20% dmg back, sure why not make it 35% dmg back just for fairness BUT than remove the increase in dmg the lower hp the target has. Fair change no? Cause I’m sick n tired of seeing 3-5k Heartseeker crits. So yeah remove the special thing about it and you can have 15% more dmg back than it did previously!

But no seriously I’ve played thief from 1-80 along with Engineer 1-80 and let me tell you that the only Thi… Correction the only people complaining about this nerf are the ones who dare not utilize anything other than dagger/dagger n Heartseeker.

Also saying that there’s no point using it on a 100% mob? Yes n no on that one since I’d still use it for leaping to the target than using cloak n dagger > Backstab… But seriously it’s been nothing but a crutch for bad Thiefs along with haste. To be fair I’d rather have them remove Haste, Frenzy, Quickening Zephyr etc cause Quickness being the proper problem in this. But that didn’t happen so don’t complain that they balanced it around the fact that it was used a bit too much in combat compared to the other skills.

For those now pointing fingers to 100 blades, sure it is darn overpowered but seriously you got “Roll for Initiative” for instance which lets you avoid most of the damage and than laugh at them for standing there like a fool hitting nothing.

Vexus.5423:

Skills aren’t supposed to be ‘a right time to use it and a wrong time’ it’s supposed to be effective at any time, per game design promises made for years. Again I only contend the 20% damage nerf above 50%. There’s a 40-60% damage difference between the target at 51% health and 49% health now.

What are you talking about? Thief has a lot of situational skills, hell a lot of classes do. Would you use headshot any time? Would you spam Death Blossom from far away? Would you spam Shadow Shot at melee range? There should always be a right and wrong time to use a skill, Heartseeker is no different. Even at 100% it has it’s uses as leap and a gap closer anyways.

Seriously has anyone noticed Heartseeker missing a lot since this patch? I’m constantly missing with it now in PVE when my target isn’t even moving.

This change is more of a fix than anything. You’re not “punished” for using Heartseeker on things above 50% health, you’re just not getting the most out of the ability. I know for a fact that, if the ability launched with the numbers it has now, nobody would dare say “punished.” They would tell you to L2P and not spam Heartseeker.

This was a good fix, HS is still a very good finisher as intended.

Just chiming in to say that, as a thief, I think the HS change was sensibly executed. It’s now a bit less lucrative to spam it mindlessly on people with high HP, which is fair, given that HS is supposed to be more of an execute move.

“Ah nope don’t press that key, it’s not even worth it anymore until he’s at 50%”

I have to quote this because this is the point of the skill!. It is meant to be an execution – not something that can be spammed repeatedly for high damage. If anything this change will make the people who were spamming it think twice about the viability of the option. All of the skills were meant to be used in harmony with one another (and this goes for every class) and at the appropriate time/situation.

Pretty much, if someone’s game was built around heartseeker being effective all-of-the-time then something is wrong. Even without the high damage when the opponent’s health is high it can still be used to close gaps.

This change will not hurt players who were already adept at Thief, nor will it hurt people still learning. It will only hurt people who don’t want to take the time to learn the class to its fullest.