Guild Wars 2

Was super excited for this balance update. Heard that thief/daredevil was supposed to get a big buff since it got looked over with HoT’s release. Went to PvE… killing things took much longer, even though according to the notes I’m supposed to be doing more damage. Headed over to PvP…that was a joke. Still getting instant melted by engi’s that can pound on ya without losing stealth. It seems the only real improvement was basilisks venom.

Has anyone had any luck changing up their build since this bogus balance update?

Considering the fact that full on tanky amulets are removed, and we get a damage boost, we are probably more effective now.
If you are trying to bunker with thief, I’m sorry but you might be doing it wrong.

Link.1049:

Was super excited for this balance update. Heard that thief/daredevil was supposed to get a big buff since it got looked over with HoT’s release. Went to PvE… killing things took much longer, even though according to the notes I’m supposed to be doing more damage. Headed over to PvP…that was a joke. Still getting instant melted by engi’s that can pound on ya without losing stealth. It seems the only real improvement was basilisks venom.

Has anyone had any luck changing up their build since this bogus balance update?

Idk if we’re playing the same game. I’m killing everybody except Druids. Staff auto more powerful and Withdraw fixed. Other classes got nerfed which means a buff for us. Idk man, maybe l2p?

If you’re taking longer to kill things in PvE with a straight buff to dps numbers, I think your problem might not be the balance update. But instead something else between your keyboard and your chair.

Probably should take care of that problem before you head to PvP.

For me, instant reflexes isn’t working… at all. Upper hand isn’t working… at all. Signet of Malice is broken, it heals while I attack but if I activate it, it takes two seconds to take effect, and if I move, get hit, or anything it misfires. I’ve had 1 critical strike hit for 11,618 tonight, that was with vault. The rest crit at 2000… using daredevil rune so when I dodge it should crit next hit… only happens maybe 1/10 of the time.

I can only attest for personal experience. Was using staff.

I personally don’t like the staff at all, it’s not my play style.
However I haven’t had a chance to test out anything yet because of net issues.
When HoT was released, I had no problem playing teef in PvE what so ever, I had enough sustain, and had a lot of damage. I hardly doubt that after this big buff that teef got, killing something in PvE will “take to long”

the balance patch did encourage ppl to play thief thinking they’re op gods only to realized that they cant play thief…

I find Thief in sPvP significantly worth post-patch. I have no idea why, but the damage is worse, even with exactly the same build.

Oh, and sword AA is completely worthless in sPvP, too.

Korochun.5862:

I find Thief in sPvP significantly worth post-patch. I have no idea why, but the damage is worse, even with exactly the same build.

Oh, and sword AA is completely worthless in sPvP, too.

Lol

I don’t know. Thief forums are probably worst possible place, you guys are so kittening terrible at the game.

Thief was fine even before balance patch, meta was bit too tanky but thief did not need damage buffs.

Currently, thief is broken in my opinion.

Petoox.6570:

I don’t know. Thief forums are probably worst possible place, you guys are so kittening terrible at the game.

Thief was fine even before balance patch, meta was bit too tanky but thief did not need damage buffs.

Currently, thief is broken in my opinion.

We never asked for Damage buff we asked for sustain, Anet in their infinite wisdom gave us Damage buff instead. Sad really 90% of Thieves will agree we did not need a damage buff.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Petoox.6570:

I don’t know. Thief forums are probably worst possible place, you guys are so kittening terrible at the game.

Thief was fine even before balance patch, meta was bit too tanky but thief did not need damage buffs.

Currently, thief is broken in my opinion.

We never asked for Damage buff we asked for sustain, Anet in their infinite wisdom gave us Damage buff instead. Sad really 90% of Thieves will agree we did not need a damage buff.

Well there were 2 ways to go about helping thieves: upping sustain to make a moderate risk moderate reward class, or upping damage for a high risk high reward class. They went with the latter. I mean they did finally give us our first decent autoproc I guess (assuming it’s not buggy), but I prefer the more damage over the more sustain. Although I could just be the 1/10 thieves.

As guys who main only thief i agree i never though we needed more dps the bunkers need to be nerfed a little and we did need some more sustain to be true. But now they basically just nerfed the bunkers and increased the dmg

I sometimes wonder if we all play the same game. I am wrecking so much more in WvW now. Reapers are a bit tougher and Tempest are still bunkered all to hell but I am tearing up the DH builds which was near impossible before this patch. Scrappers don’t have infinite stealth any longer so at least there is a window to kill them and I see more running the Bulwark to compensate. Thank you Anet for the Chrono nerf. The tank is still in full effect but the clone, spam, reset build isn’t nearly as effective. Oh and I didn’t see a 5 digit CoR damage hit all night.

Course they buffed my build as it is a Staff build using Hidden Killer, Withdraw, Basilisk Venom and Bandits Defense. It was a minor buff overall but given the nerfs they handed out I certainly am killing a lot more. I got at least a dozen kills with just BV cutting through blocks.

I have not seen a single thief tonight who was doing any better than before the patch. Nor am I doing any better.

Acrobatics is a kittening terrible line still.

We are still lacking baseline things like Preparedness, so we only have two trees after mandatory Trickery.

I suppose if you spam 3 and 5/2 on PD you might still be okay. But that didn’t get much better, other than Dagger AA. If so, congrats. You can kill other thiefs and glass builds.

Korochun.5862:

I have not seen a single thief tonight who was doing any better than before the patch. Nor am I doing any better.

Acrobatics is a kittening terrible line still.

We are still lacking baseline things like Preparedness, so we only have two trees after mandatory Trickery.

I suppose if you spam 3 and 5/2 on PD you might still be okay. But that didn’t get much better, other than Dagger AA. If so, congrats. You can kill other thiefs and glass builds.

Technically speaking, I’m doing better, granted its the same song and dance but it’s easier.

If no one else is going to admit it I will. My aa dps was buffed enough that I can reduce/drop usage of heart seeker. Tore through a ranger and warrior 2v1, granted they were both kind of bad but the sheer skill spam should have given me some trouble, but I was fine.

If you’re not killing faster after this patch try dropping 2 spam on DP.

But I won’t contest your other beef, trickery is mandatory, and now for hit/run DD is as well. So far DD out performs acrobatics in every way.

So after screwing around a bit tonight I’ve actually found that I have better luck without trickery traits. Against my intuition I put together a DA, CS, DARE staff build, and have been able to survive a bit better. The acrobatics line is a cute idea, but in practice just doesn’t work….. sorry Anet, you tried. I’m finding ele and mesmer have been brought closer to thieves balance wise, engi’s are the clear meta, and revenant is a solid second place currently, with ranger/necro tied for third. Hopefully there are a few more tweaks coming from this winter patch thing that will fix the bugs and bring things more inline. I don’t want to be some “OP god”, that said I would like to have some good, fair fights.

I use S/D, so dagger AA changes are kind of irrelevant to me. It’s nice that you can drop HS spam, but Sword is still awful compared to everything else. It should be better, but it feels clunkier if anything. If anything, I now find myself trying to AA and getting instantly wasted because I am not dodging.

I’m not commenting on PvE, because who gives a crap? I can roll my face across keyboard and do well in PvE.

Link.1049:

So after screwing around a bit tonight I’ve actually found that I have better luck without trickery traits. Against my intuition I put together a DA, CS, DARE staff build, and have been able to survive a bit better. The acrobatics line is a cute idea, but in practice just doesn’t work….. sorry Anet, you tried. I’m finding ele and mesmer have been brought closer to thieves balance wise, engi’s are the clear meta, and revenant is a solid second place currently, with ranger/necro tied for third. Hopefully there are a few more tweaks coming from this winter patch thing that will fix the bugs and bring things more inline. I don’t want to be some “OP god”, that said I would like to have some good, fair fights.

I’m still not understanding your issue. My damage and everyone else I work with have noticed large improvements. Your difficulties sound like you missed a trait or simply didn’t build for damage, what are you rolling man? Stat wise.

Do you have executioner traited as well?

Link.1049:

So after screwing around a bit tonight I’ve actually found that I have better luck without trickery traits. Against my intuition I put together a DA, CS, DARE staff build, and have been able to survive a bit better. The acrobatics line is a cute idea, but in practice just doesn’t work….. sorry Anet, you tried. I’m finding ele and mesmer have been brought closer to thieves balance wise, engi’s are the clear meta, and revenant is a solid second place currently, with ranger/necro tied for third. Hopefully there are a few more tweaks coming from this winter patch thing that will fix the bugs and bring things more inline. I don’t want to be some “OP god”, that said I would like to have some good, fair fights.

CS has got no sustain – but alas, I don’t know too much about your build/weapons.

Anyway: We all knew this patch wouldn’t change much – so it’s a bit weird that you expected that much.

From a personal point of view: I’m doing a bit better in wvw – but then again the Elites are still OP for my vanilla build.
So on to another 7 months of waiting for at least me.
(Btw: I don’t expect my thief to ever be viable again – I knew he was dead last June – and alas I tried and tried on the forums but to no avail – so be it)

CS has no sustain….but for thief honestly… even our toughest builds are not “sustainable”. Actually leading up to this patch I was under the impression that thief was getting a major rework considering how poorly it’s been received in HoT. For WvW… congrats on doing better, keep in mind though that WvW is basically empty right now.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Petoox.6570:

I don’t know. Thief forums are probably worst possible place, you guys are so kittening terrible at the game.

Thief was fine even before balance patch, meta was bit too tanky but thief did not need damage buffs.

Currently, thief is broken in my opinion.

We never asked for Damage buff we asked for sustain, Anet in their infinite wisdom gave us Damage buff instead. Sad really 90% of Thieves will agree we did not need a damage buff.

I second this… I was doing just fine with the amount of damage I was putting out before hand. I asked for sustain, because the thief virtually had nothing going for them in that department.

People cry out that the thief is broken… But anyone who plays thief long enough can tell them that theif is REALLY easy to counter.

Evasion was really our biggest defense, and that meant we got three bars that could be depleted fairly quickly in a horrible situation.

We have an awful time generating boons, and giving them to our team (though we do have poisons…)

Basilisk venom is more of a oneshot panic button, that can bypass aegis for the next few attacks.

And there are several ways for us to get uncloaked, which was a huge component to our defenses…

There are three forced reveals that I am aware of.
Engi trait, stealth gyro, Dh trap. They rarely become an issue to me.

Sic’em can’t be applied without a target so I did not count it.

Thieves have no business in the boon department, no idea why that can of worms was opened.

If you haven’t been using basivenom in conjunction with your opener then I’m just confused.

Oh the patch did quite a bit to my d/p build- removing the aftercast on pistol 5 is the best part of this patch for me I don’t like having strong AAs (And btw, it’s not THAT strong imo- compare it to other classes’ AAs). I’d rather have a damage increase on BS or HS, or for god’s sake- some work on d/d and main hand pistol.

Third hit of dagger AA does more damage than frontstab.

For me that’s nearly 1.3k damage, factor in crit/ferocity and my Crits are 3k at least.

After executioner this damage goes up by 20%.

You can drop this damage as fast as Heartseeker, without the into loss of Heartseeker.

Who are you trying to fool here man?

Aidal.4901:

There are three forced reveals that I am aware of.
Engi trait, stealth gyro, Dh trap. They rarely become an issue to me.

Sic’em can’t be applied without a target so I did not count it.

Thieves have no business in the boon department, no idea why that can of worms was opened.

If you haven’t been using basivenom in conjunction with your opener then I’m just confused.

Herald’s Facet of Darkness blinds and Reveals.

As for my 2 cents on this matter, I think you expected too much from the update. There were some really good thieves in PvP that could hit Legendary solo queuing, showing if you were capable on the profession, you could excel well enough.
PvE, we are still lacking, naturally. Fighting mass numbers is not our forte.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Petoox.6570:

I don’t know. Thief forums are probably worst possible place, you guys are so kittening terrible at the game.

Thief was fine even before balance patch, meta was bit too tanky but thief did not need damage buffs.

Currently, thief is broken in my opinion.

We never asked for Damage buff we asked for sustain, Anet in their infinite wisdom gave us Damage buff instead. Sad really 90% of Thieves will agree we did not need a damage buff.

Where do you need sustain? +1 fights and end them quickly and you won’t need sustain. Ending fights is easy with Scholar D/P

I was never a fan of D/P play style, and I am just testing out builds that fit my play style.

For someone who likes S/D, P/x, and D/D-SB-Condi the most, it feels like not a lot really happened for me. At the most I’m greatful Diamond Skill isn’t insanely OP anymore.
All the D/P players can be happy though but it’s not a playstyle I enjoy and rather the class had more options.

I need way more than a few lines of patch notes every 4-8 months.

Doggie.3184:

For someone who likes S/D, P/x, and D/D-SB-Condi the most, it feels like not a lot really happened for me. At the most I’m greatful Diamond Skill isn’t insanely OP anymore.
All the D/P players can be happy though but it’s not a playstyle I enjoy and rather the class had more options.

I need way more than a few lines of patch notes every 4-8 months.

Interesting . on my d/d condition build I found the new ACRO improves survival significantly. There no need for any other condition cleanse outside the escapists the selh healing potential is huge.