Guild Wars 2

On many thief builds the class has been reduced to cycling through the AA for the majority of its DPS. Seemingly gone are the well timed Backstabs or well executed Pistol Whips. The days of weapon sets like S/D slicing a player to bits as they bounce around are vanishing as well.

Sure in the old days Heart Seeker spam was all the rage but at least that used initiative. Decent players could counter thieves that failed to manage their initiative well. Now, the thief’s biggest hitter requires no init and virtually no skill to execute. Add in a couple Bounds and call it a day.

I really don’t have a strong opinion on fixing the issue but I surely do miss the finesse of the class. Maybe one day the thief will return to high risk/high reward status but I don’t think it will be made whole until they find a way to make the Auto Attack a filler to larger more skill oriented initiative based attacks.

Straegen.2938:

On many thief builds the class has been reduced to cycling through the AA for the majority of its DPS. Seemingly gone are the well timed Backstabs or well executed Pistol Whips. The days of weapon sets like S/D slicing a player to bits as they bounce around are vanishing as well.

Sure in the old days Heart Seeker spam was all the rage but at least that used initiative. Decent players could counter thieves that failed to manage their initiative well. Now, the thief’s biggest hitter requires no init and virtually no skill to execute. Add in a couple Bounds and call it a day.

I really don’t have a strong opinion on fixing the issue but I surely do miss the finesse of the class. Maybe one day the thief will return to high risk/high reward status but I don’t think it will be made whole until they find a way to make the Auto Attack a filler to larger more skill oriented initiative based attacks.

Well the problem is outside the AA all thief utility/defensive or damage type weapon skills uses the same pool of INI. If too much of the damage must come from one of the skills 2-5 than the thief will have to burn off all that ini just to do sufficient damage leaving him woefully weak defensively. With more sustain across all builds the thief has to rely on the AA to do a good chunk of damage.

I really do not know a fix unless there something really off the wall like RED ini for damage related skills and blue Ini for utility and defensive both set at the same base of 12. That would mean an entire revamp.

Buff the initiative based attacks and nerf auto-attack. Give autoattacks a chance to regain initiative. Rebalance the initiative costs around this new paradigm.

While I’m at it….remove blind from Shadowshot. Buff backstab. Buff CnD to give back some initiative on successful hit.

Devs consistently nerfed all ini based and stealth spells – all what is left is AA (which got buffed lol).
Backstab (and frankly most stealth attacks) is not worth it due to lack of dmg – it gets so heavily countered with abundance of things like reveal on demand, passives, blocks, invuls, aoe, perma prot etc. You actually get punished if you try to land backstab so why bother anymore?

saerni.2584:

Buff the initiative based attacks and nerf auto-attack. Give autoattacks a chance to regain initiative. Rebalance the initiative costs around this new paradigm.

While I’m at it….remove blind from Shadowshot. Buff backstab. Buff CnD to give back some initiative on successful hit.

They already removed all that from Thief long ago. And what Anet removes from Thief is always permanent: Like Ricochet.

With the exception of steal requiring a target. That was a mess they had to rollback. XD

I personally like being able to save my Ini for when it’s important instead of nonstop spam. Too bad there’s still so many mediocre ini skills though and Ranged weapon AAs still suck.

Gotta appease raid people with 1spam for deeps, though.

Like all the professions, though, HoT took the finesse out of the game for the thief and gave it mechanics that make it probably the most spammy of them all.

Actually i hope they buff autoatacks even more. thif is no good now in pvp.

That’s just, unfortunatly, what we’re forced to do now.

I really wish that every single skill on all our weapons was useful enough to warrant using those sets, so that people could see some variety. I miss the days when I’d see D/D and S/D and S/P running around, I miss having to adapt my playstyle and not knowing what to expect. Now AA and SS does all the work for you, and it’s exactly what you should expect whenever you fight any D/P user (which is basically everyone).
Just feels like Thief has been dumbed down far too much.

And with the elite, the best condition cleansing in the game, two extra dodges at no cost, mobility-penalty negation at no cost, permanent swiftness at no cost, a block+stunbreak+cc on a 12s cooldown, extra healing at no cost.

Daredevil and the AA buff pretty much defeated the entire purpose of playing with any degree of finesse, and the changes for the stealth attack ICD and BV blatantly punish it.

Yep. I think I am just nostalgic for the “good ole days”. Sure the spike damage was ludicrous but whew was the game a lot more fun even as I died 10x more.

Cynz.9437:

Devs consistently nerfed all ini based and stealth spells – all what is left is AA (which got buffed lol).
Backstab (and frankly most stealth attacks) is not worth it due to lack of dmg – it gets so heavily countered with abundance of things like reveal on demand, passives, blocks, invuls, aoe, perma prot etc. You actually get punished if you try to land backstab so why bother anymore?

So true.

So, lets wait what the next balance patch has got for us.

Probably perma-revealed after a stealth attack. Oh no, I gave them an idea.
And all those facerollers agree to this with “ikm€shil,nn€ ,iiiiii” (emulating facerolling).

Jana.6831:

So, lets wait what the next balance patch has got for us.

Hopefully something for Condi after deleting my venom share build from the game. ;/ No reason to use anything beyond Spider Venom now.
Once again they not only nerf my build but literally delete it from existence… Merged Share into Venoms- Great, Reduced Radius- Terrible. Removed Might Stacking- Also terrible… Basically removed Life Leech and CD reduce till it’s moved to Deadly Arts because Shadow Arts isn’t worth having anymore.
The other time was when they deleted my Pistol/Pistol build by removing Ini on crit, Range boost, and Ricochet…