Guild Wars 2

Introduction

Thief was broken pre nerf.
This is my first post on the forum however I have played thief since day one and something I have noticed over time is that thief was rubbish from the get go.

The Problem

Thieves lack a viable mechanic. Look at mesmers for example, on a base level they use there clones for everything their class is built around it. Thieves have steal but the skills that you steal are not incredible, I understand that they are very useful and situational and that good thief players can get great effect from them. However the recharge time is incredibly high for that to be the class mechanic.

Every complaint made about the nerfs received by thieves, shows the issue of a lack of mechanic, as soon as you remove our high dps thieves fall apart. The issue isn’t a lack of damage, it’s that thieves can only viably do just damage.

Possible Solution

The solution is simple give thieves a mechanic. Now a mechanic doesn’t have to be a skill, a mechanic can simply be a system of combat.

It is my belief that thieves should use more disabling moves more knock downs, dazes etc. CC is the way a thieves combat system should play out. This way thieves have greater potential in combat, for example you could be a glass cannon single target stun lock thief, or an aoe debuff support specialist, or a complete lock down bunker whose damage output is low. However can daze, blind and confuse targets to stop the thief from taking damage.

Skill changes

Steal – Effect Changes: Disarms target for 2.5 seconds, applies a smoke field at the target,reduce cooldown of steal to 15 seconds
Trait Changes: Do not change slight of hand, the interrupt is great and the extra second of disarm would give survivability to the thief. Reduce damage of mug to 500 reduce damage of serpent touch to 1,653.

Sword
1 Slash – Effect Changes: Now applies 2 stacks of bleed.

2 Infiltrators Strike – Effect Changes: Applies a 3 second knockdown to target, knocked down will grant a 2 second stability after the knockdown to prevent permanent knockdown. reduce damage to 200 reduce cost to 2 initiative.

3.1 Pistol Whip – Effect Changes: Increase stun to last as long as the attack animations, after the attack target suffers from 3 stacks of confusion and cripple, damage reduced to 9*1000.

3.2Flanking Strike – Effect Changes: Applies 3 stacks of bleed initiative cost to 2
Larcenous Strike – Effect Changes Applies dazes target for 1.3 seconds, steals two boons, initiative cost increased to 3.

4. Dancing Dagger – Works perfectly

5. Cloak and Dagger – Effect Changes: Applies blind

Dagger

1. Backstab – Effect Changes: Front attack now applies bleed Back attack now applies confusion

2. New move Barbed lunge (replaces Heartseeker) – Effect: Lunge forward granting evasion and leave a tripwire behind that applies knockdown and bleed and cripple the trip-line will stay active for 4 seconds even if triggered allowing for thieves to trip an entire group of targets, cost 4 initiative.

3.1 Death Blossom – Effect Changes: disarms targets, increase evasion time to match animation. Reduce cost to 3 initiative.

3.2 Shadow Shot – Effect Changes: 2 second Daze.

4. As before mentioned

5. As before mentioned

Pistol

1. No change
2. Body Shot – Effect Changes : Remove immobilize added 2.5 second knockdown

3.1 Unload – Effect Changes : hits up to 3 targets added a 1.5 second immobilize.

3.2 Shadow Strike – Effect Changes : Added a 2 second daze and a 4 second cripple.

4. Headshot – Effect Changes: Also adds confusion for 3 seconds.

5. Black Powder – Effect Changes: Increase area to 150 increase blind to 3 seconds, reduce initiative cost to 5.

Heal Changes

Replace skelk venom with:
Idle Hands – Effect: Shadow step to your target stealing their healing skill and using it on yourself. Target will be unable to use their healing skill for the next 4 seconds if targets healing skill is on cooldown the cooldown timer will freeze for 4 seconds.

Stolen Items changes

Warrior – Item changes to a hammer knockdown up to 3 targets combo finisher blast.

Elementalist – Item changes depends on the attunment of the elementalist steal the number 4 ability.

Mesmers – Stays the same.

Engineer – Cattle prod Stuns target for 2 seconds

Guardian – Item changes to aura of retaliation grants thief retaliation for 4 seconds

Ranger – stays the same

Thief – Blinding Powder same as the ability blinding powder

Elite changes

New elite skill
Copy Cat – Effect Shadow step to the target copying its elite skill pressing Copy Cat again will use the stolen skill, Copy Cat will still recharge while the thief holds the stolen skill. Recharge 40 seconds.

Summary

Obviously everything here is merely my opinion and I look forward to hearing what people think about thieves in general.

Its not that thief need CC to be strong, thief always was and always will be the “cunning” one that need to outplay his enemies, our only problem is that every class got huge dmg buff and most of condi builds got viable again.
Thief dmg is ok not to strong not to low, problem is that our cleanse and survi relays on stealth, sicne evades got nerfed hard nothing other pays off.

We dont need new control mechanics, we need new options to protect ourselfs from insane dmg every other class can drop on us. Change this idiotic “feline grace” Change Acro to be real defensive trait line that would make you think before chosing SA. Right now even S/D thiefs go SA…

What we need is godmode for 1 sec for each hit(or after 3rd chan of combo) we do on back of our target
Flat Endurance regen on each sword hit
Evade on dumb heartseeker

Deathblossom revorked
Dancing dagger revorked
Pistols TOTALY revorked
Bow is fine- best thief weapon right now
I would add 100range to flanking strike.

Very interesting thread and I hope people get involved in this one. Most importantly I hope people agree with what you said.

I agree with you on the fact that a thief should be an obnoxious opponent that focus on stealth, and serious CC. I like comparing the viability of profession with real life.

The only way a thief would kill a warrior in real life, it would have to be with a serious amount of crippling, daze, and disorientations. Most importantly, it should be as fast as possible. If the warrior manages to survive the first onslaught, the thief is dead. plain and simple.

I think you set out the crippling, obnoxious, disorientation theme of the thief quite well.

Steal
When I first started playing the thief, I was expecting Steal to be sort of disarming mechanism. Stealing gw2, and especially in real life, should have very serious disabling consequences and I completely agree with this mechanism. I like the smoke field aspect of it. But I am affraid I will have to fight against the Steal CD to 15. I think 20 seconds is just fine.

Sword
Sword #2 suggestion is great. knockdown replacement of immobilize is good.

Dagger
dagger #5 I think everybody will agree that C&D needs blind instead of vul..

Healing skill
I like this one a lot. Stealing should be more done often than just everytime steal is available. Moreover, Thieves should be able to steal just about anything, and a healing skill just prooves that.
Now.. what about stealing more a thief who has Idle Hands or stealing from Warrior with healing signet? the regen probably won’t benefit the thief as much. I guess that’s a risk a thief is willing to take. I love the idea.

Stolen Items
I am glad you mentioned the change in stolen items, I started the Useless Stolen Items and I wish it had involved more people than it did.
I agree with all the stolen items sugesstions you put up.

Elite Skill
So Copy Cat is basically an Elite Steal. ME GUSTA.

I completely approve this message.

“9/10. This guy gets it” IGN

We need to understand that as Thieves… We steal VERY LITTLE and what we currently steal has such little impact on the overall fight. I want the thief to be a High Risk High Reward profession. I Want the thief to be such a risk that ,you never really know what you are gonna steal. Is it terrible heal skill? is it a weird stolen elite skill? oh well time to deal with it. kleptomania should know no bounds.

Compared to us thieves, other professions have some serious damage output and survivability (especially survivability). Yes, Anet can fix a lot of things traits and make us happy again. However, I really think it’s time to do a serious rework.

We shouldn’t settle by asking Anet to JUST fix traits. They should have done that a while ago, and I think Sparkz did it well by going beyond and go for complete reworks of mechanics and skills.

Mefiq my point was that thieves shouldn’t just be damage we aren’t assasins we are thieves. The reason I said give thieves a butt load of cc was for two reasons.

1. was the survivability if you a playing smart and playing well which is what alot of thieves do then you are going to be locking you target down, if a thief in the thick of it and getting blasted he/she doing something wrong it’s a thief not a warrior. Thats the reason I rolled thief in the first place, having to play smart and outwit my target.

2. The thief proffesion currently doesn’t work with the style of gw2 imo, this game is about freedom of play style thats why there isn’t a holy trinity in this game. At the minute thieves can only dps thats a problem they shouldn’t be working off of high numbers alone look at all the other proffesions and you will see that they use their mech to play any type they want dps healer tanks utility etc.

I’m not trying to say im right maybe im wrong and thieves should just get the talent changes and be happy but imo the issue with thieves is more indemic.

Thanks kocoff its nice to see im not alone in that thought.

The changes you suggest are too dramatic and change the overall feel of the class too much. A lot of people would be unhappy with these changes, me included.

And obv the numbers you are suggesting would be horribly overpowered.

That’s fair enough Zaerah, what do you think would be a better fix for the current state of thief ?

The first thing that comes to mind is to let us have some playstyle that doesn’t absolutely need stealth. Old s/d was something like that but got nerfed.
Also the profession mechanic could be a bit different, it is strong currently, but not because of the actual thing you steal, but for the crap load of other things that you get from it while traited. Though i don’t have any specific ideas how it should be changed.

I didn’t really change much tbh I just added some features what was it that I proposed btw that was over the top ? I only ask because that was what I was aiming for, a form of thief which makes being in stealth as viable as out of stealth

I just wish we could have something other than dps that works. Thief feels like the downed state, just fight till you die and the few thieves (not just thieves do this) that hit and run as soon as the fight gets ugly, it really contributes nothing towards inviting new players to thief or people to keep it for anything other than a relic.

They really should push thief into a sort of relocation profession, dirty fighter if you will. By this I mean having options similar to necro in turning good things bad, similar to Mesmer in sharing your bounty of boons, similar to engineer in the sense of having a wide range of tools to adapt to the situation rather than being 1 specialty. I don’t want to be a medium armor guardian with a fraction of the sustain and cower in stealth to re-enter the fight. Old acrobatics had this feeling but the air/fire sigil combo kind of ruined its skill level when you can IS in, dish out a few thousand damage and port out over and over with a surplus of brain dead evasion. Nevertheless, it was our 1 alternative to sitting in stealth and that’s essentially gone.

I think that this rework focuses too much on weapon skills and not enough on traits where the real problem is imo. A few weapon skills need tweaks, but not the sweeping changes you’re proposing.

I’ll start with weapon skills. I’ll talk about traits in a later post.

Short Bow:

#1: Fine as is

Stealth Attack: Fine as is

#2: Increase the projectile speed by 50% so we can use it from 500-900 more effectively. Think engi grenades.

#3: Revert the evade frames

#4: Increase the poison per pulse to 4 seconds

#5: Increase the projectile speed but make it a higher arc. It’s really frustrating to have a short shot because of the arrow clipping wonky terrain.

Pistol:

#1: Remove bleeding and add 8 seconds of vuln. Vuln affects both condis and direct damage now, so this would be useful for both P/D and P/P.

Stealth Attack: 10 bleeds for 8 seconds now (edited cause Iswapped numbers on accident). 1.5 multiplier. The autoattack will improve the damage from your bleeds and combined with the duration and count increase, it should make up for the loss of bleeds on autos.

#2: Make the vuln last 8 seconds so it can cover the bleed burst or even a couple of unloads. Remove immobilize and add weakness for 3 seconds so P/X has some defensive capabilities.

#4: Fine as is

#5: Fine as is

P/D#3: 3 torment for 8 seconds.

P/P#3: No changes

Overall, I’m trying to move the condi damage to the set that uses it while making common attacks between P/P and P/D useful for both. Since pistols deal relatively low single target damage, I want it to increase damage over time making the sustained damage and bursts more dangerous from both sets.

Dagger:

1.1:Fine as is
1.2:Fine as is
1.3:Fine as is

Stealth Attack: Fine as is

#2: Fine as is

#4: Remove the bounce and cripple. Improved damage to a 1.0 multiplier. Successful hit marks target yields a rollover skill for 10 seconds.
(#4.2): 2 initiative. Shadowstep to marked target. Instant cast. No damage. Lose 1 condition. Cripple your target for 3 seconds.

#5: Remove vuln. Replace with blind

D/D#3: Leave damage and bleeds unchanged. Total skill length (including pre/post casts) 0.75 second. Evade 0.5 seconds. Directional skill shot (like warrior’s GS #3). Slide/leap 300 in selected direction. Use the charr animation to make it less awkward looking.

D/P#3: Fine as is

D/P is in a great spot. D/D needs help. By making the D/D#3 a useful evasion, it becomes good for both power and condi. #4 having a gap closer helps D/D stick to their target like D/P while offering a condi removal as a tradeoff compared to D/P. Incidentally S/D would become masters of sticking to their target which is a fair trade-off since they lack the burst of D/X builds. P/D would see some fun combos from this as well. #5 would help the sustain of D/D and S/D.

Sword:
#1.1-1.3: Reduce the pre/post casts to make the entire chain 2.0 seconds long. Reduce the coefficients to 0.65, 0.65, and 1.05 (this is actually a 2% increase to AA DPS). Leave the weakness and cripple duration at 2 seconds.

Stealth Attack: In PvP, revert the duration back to 2 seconds.

#2.1: Fine as is
#2.2: Fine as is

S/D#3.1: Fine as is
S/D#3.2: Revert to 2 boons stolen

S/P#3: Remove the windup before the hit.

Reducing the time of the auto chain allows you to maintain weakness and cripple uptime better and proc more effects which is important for a set that lacks the burst of our other close combat set. Incidentally, by removing/shortening the pre/post casts, it’s much less likely that you’ll be stuck in a weapon animation when trying to use a dual skill defensively. Larcenous Strike needs the 2 boon steal back since it’s no longer an automatic rollover from Flanking Strike. Remove the windup from pistolwhip so this skill can be used to reactively evade an attack or interrupt/punish opponents in close combat.

I’ll talk about traits later as I do think that’s where the real problem lies.

I agree with most of those except the s/p #3 and pistol 1 skill.

Vulnerability helps only if you’re able to apply it in some noticeable amount and follow it with consistent attacks. For power it would be great, but conditions would no longer have that extra damage which becomes very noticeable when you go from relying some extra bleeding to none at all unless you stealth. Sneak attack is very predictable since p/d or p/p doesn’t have any reliable way of staying in stealth for more than 4 seconds, and the bullets are visible from the start so its very easy to just dodge and get hit by 1 or 2 bullets vs all 5.

I think they need to just relocate the bleeding duration to the stealth skill but keep some on the AA and slightly buff its power coefficient. The only build utilizing sneak attack is condition which uses stealth so it makes sense to make it more noticeable and turn the auto attack to a sustained flow of dps for both build types rather than somewhat helping 1 build and really helping another.

As for s/p, this skill is potentially spammable and can deal some serious damage. The windup is there for to require some effort to land it, best way to secure a landing is start with IS.

NinjaEd.3946:

I agree with most of those except the s/p #3 and pistol 1 skill.

Vulnerability helps only if you’re able to apply it in some noticeable amount and follow it with consistent attacks. For power it would be great, but conditions would no longer have that extra damage which becomes very noticeable when you go from relying some extra bleeding to none at all unless you stealth. Sneak attack is very predictable since p/d or p/p doesn’t have any reliable way of staying in stealth for more than 4 seconds, and the bullets are visible from the start so its very easy to just dodge and get hit by 1 or 2 bullets vs all 5.

I think they need to just relocate the bleeding duration to the stealth skill but keep some on the AA and slightly buff its power coefficient. The only build utilizing sneak attack is condition which uses stealth so it makes sense to make it more noticeable and turn the auto attack to a sustained flow of dps for both build types rather than somewhat helping 1 build and really helping another.

As for s/p, this skill is potentially spammable and can deal some serious damage. The windup is there for to require some effort to land it, best way to secure a landing is start with IS.

I had an edit to the pistol stealth attack since I messed up the numbers, but basically each hit from sneak attack should do 2 bleeds now for 3 seconds longer on each. So even if they dodge half of the attack, they still should have 4-6 bleeds continuously. The D#4 also allows for a higher torment burst with fun stuff like P/D#3>D#4.2>P/D#3 which would be 6 torment without the use of a utility like steal or ISig.

S/P spam would still be limited by initiative especially since it costs more in PvP. If anything, I think think the damage could be lowered if it becomes a problem, but I want pistolwhip to be a go to evasion when you see something like an earthshaker incoming.

Your concerns are valid though. It would definitely need some play testing to determine how balanced these ideas are.

That would still be a nerf to p/d a major one the only reason it’s still used is because of WvW dire,food and/or perplexity and no I don’t trust them. If ruin thief is too much of a stretch let’s say they increasing the gap between specs and weapons drastically.

Sagat.3285:

That would still be a nerf to p/d a major one the only reason it’s still used is because of WvW dire,food and/or perplexity and no I don’t trust them. If ruin thief is too much of a stretch let’s say they increasing the gap between specs and weapons drastically.

Well, both sneak attack is seeing an additional 220% condi damage and shadow strike is seeing 140% more condi damage with these changes. Additionally, you’ll be able to maintain ~9% more damage/condi damage from the autos.

I’ll make my own thread about this later because I don’t want to hijack this one any more than I already have.

Sorry Sparkz

Mefiq.7039:

Its not that thief need CC to be strong, thief always was and always will be the “cunning” one that need to outplay his enemies, our only problem is that every class got huge dmg buff and most of condi builds got viable again.
Thief dmg is ok not to strong not to low, problem is that our cleanse and survi relays on stealth, sicne evades got nerfed hard nothing other pays off.

We dont need new control mechanics, we need new options to protect ourselfs from insane dmg every other class can drop on us. Change this idiotic “feline grace” Change Acro to be real defensive trait line that would make you think before chosing SA. Right now even S/D thiefs go SA…

Deathblossom revorked
Dancing dagger revorked
Pistols TOTALY revorked
Bow is fine- best thief weapon right now
I would add 100range to flanking strike.

Everything here is true, objectively speaking.

Damage is okay, the problem is all of our defense relies on sitting in stealth atm, which means dps classes outsustain us.

:P ANet didn’t ruine thieves… The QQ’ers did.

Add this post to the change wish list. (Not the nerf…)

Maugetarr.6823:

I think that this rework focuses too much on weapon skills and not enough on traits where the real problem is imo. A few weapon skills need tweaks, but not the sweeping changes you’re proposing.

The problem with thief is that they have no way of playing anything other than dps, thats why the nerfs effects us so much. Thief has pretty much always played as a kill them in 5 seconds get out or die class. Now we cant kill in 5 secs we are getting swatted.

examples
pre nerfs

s/p – combat style -The Hokey Cokey: Infiltrators in bp pw infiltrators out rinse and repeat.

s/d – combat style – The Hokey Cokey with less Cokey: Infiltrator cloak and dagger cancel into steal to give damage and poison auto attack chain infiltrators out rinse and repeat.

d/d – combat style – Crouching Wow rouge: Hide in shadows stupidly high backstab crit heartseeker cloak and dagger rinse repeat

d/p – combat style – Crouching o kitten stealth ran out: bp heartseeker stupidly high backstab crit cloak and dagger heartseeker rinse repeat

p/p – combat style – Bleed for me: Hide in shadow sneak attack with ricochet everyone bleeds and dies run away shooting stealth up again rinse repeat

p/d – combat style – Look mommy I’m pressing buttons: cloak and dagger cancel with steal sneak attack shadow strike cloak and dagger rinse repeat

Thats why I proposed the weapon skill changes, this way thiefs can be viable pretty much regardless of the traits. Not forced to do this I’m gonna crit you so hard game but to actally be able to play as a tanky thief or a support thief. Atm all you can be as a thief is pure dps, that doesn’t fit with the over all game of gw2 thats why thieves are facing a hard time imo.

Thats why other classes feel damage nerfs less, because their weapon skills allow them to play a variety of different styles not just nuker.

Sparkz.1983:

Maugetarr.6823:

I think that this rework focuses too much on weapon skills and not enough on traits where the real problem is imo. A few weapon skills need tweaks, but not the sweeping changes you’re proposing.

The problem with thief is that they have no way of playing anything other than dps, thats why the nerfs effects us so much. Thief has pretty much always played as a kill them in 5 seconds get out or die class. Now we cant kill in 5 secs we are getting swatted.

examples
pre nerfs

s/p – combat style -The Hokey Cokey: Infiltrators in bp pw infiltrators out rinse and repeat.

s/d – combat style – The Hokey Cokey with less Cokey: Infiltrator cloak and dagger cancel into steal to give damage and poison auto attack chain infiltrators out rinse and repeat.

d/d – combat style – Crouching Wow rouge: Hide in shadows stupidly high backstab crit heartseeker cloak and dagger rinse repeat

d/p – combat style – Crouching o kitten stealth ran out: bp heartseeker stupidly high backstab crit cloak and dagger heartseeker rinse repeat

p/p – combat style – Bleed for me: Hide in shadow sneak attack with ricochet everyone bleeds and dies run away shooting stealth up again rinse repeat

p/d – combat style – Look mommy I’m pressing buttons: cloak and dagger cancel with steal sneak attack shadow strike cloak and dagger rinse repeat

Thats why I proposed the weapon skill changes, this way thiefs can be viable pretty much regardless of the traits. Not forced to do this I’m gonna crit you so hard game but to actally be able to play as a tanky thief or a support thief. Atm all you can be as a thief is pure dps, that doesn’t fit with the over all game of gw2 thats why thieves are facing a hard time imo.

Thats why other classes feel damage nerfs less, because their weapon skills allow them to play a variety of different styles not just nuker.

That’s the thing though. Our trait lines should determine our play style and those trait lines should be compatable with any weapon combination. Our weapon skills themselves can’t be too powerful because they can be used multiple times until you run out of initiative. I think a lot of our current skills are just about there, but could use a little tweaking and you should pick your lines to compliments the style of thief you want to play. The fact that we are forced into DPS came largely from how acro was nerfed and D/D shadow arts was nerfed.

Sparkz, thieves are not only about dmg in this game. They got certain disruption role just like sub rogues in wow. If thieves were only about dmg there wouldn’t be a single thief in pvp atm as our dmg is pretty laughable atm compared to what other classes can pull while having better survival.

I do not think that adding some condi and controll effects to attacks would be a good idea because:
- for condis to be somehow effective thief would have to go full condi build (which is a joke in pvp)
- thief weapon spells are semi-spammable, i don’t think we need another CS mesmer… such buff would just lead to massive nerfs to our moblity and i think it (moblity) is what makes thieves so much fun to play