Guild Wars 2

I’m about to make a suggestion spreadsheet thread for thief to deal with balance inconsistencies (see links in signature for examples)

Before I do so, I’d like to collect information from other players:

What are the current balance problems of thief/daredevil?
What is too strong and overbearing in build diversity?
What is too weak and overshadowed by stronger options?
How is your experience in PvE / PvP / and WvW?

I look forward to reading everyone’s response.

First off, I don’t think class balancing is possible, if that means every class has an equal chance to beat any other class: it should be a rock / paper / scissor game (the fact GW2 fails at that is irrelevant), so to me the complaints like “I can’t beat x class, nerf it / buff us” are not valid.

That being said, there are a lot of core issues that screw thieves, but buffing the class won’t change that (WvW is completely messed up for instance).

Now concerning thief weapons:

- Staff: my favourite PvE weapon, ok in WvW (I don’t PvP) if you’re willing to sacrifice mobility and stealth. Staff #4 is pretty useless though.

- Daggers: nothing to change, really.

- Sword: S/P #3 is a failure, and that ruins the combo IMHO. As a former W:AR Witch Hunter, I would love to use S/P, but Pistol Whip’s rooting effect makes it completely ineffective, even in PvE: you won’t hit more than 3 times generally, and being forced to be static is so against everything thieves are… The rooting needs to be removed (or the stun duration needs to be increased).

- Pistols: there’s a recent thread about them, lots of good ideas, I let you check it: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Can-we-get-a-new-Pistol-auto-attack/first#post6022397

- Shortbow: great for mobility and spamming blast finishers, useless for fighting. Now the problem is we can only have 2 weapons (unlike GW1 where we could have 4): as a result, unless you’re willing to sacrifice a lot of mobility (which I do – and not surprisingly PUG often mock me for that), you are forced to use that weapon, which means you have only one weapon set to fight with. So much for gameplay diversity.

The game modes now:

- PvE: even before the last buff to the class, thieves were pretty strong, and I was often complimented for my DPS when I was duoing with a random. Really, there’s not much to change from this point of view IMHO. Thieves are even now welcome in raid PUGs…

- PvP: I’m a noob.

- WvW: Well, they can do the soloable dailies really fast and cap camps / shrines in a matter of seconds, they’re ok to good in 1v1 fights depending on your build, they are really helpful against lords due to their DPS, but they’re also pretty useless in zerg versus zerg.

I was talking about W:AR Witch Hunters earlier, and I really miss their gameplay. In zerg versus zergs, I would stealth , run to the enemy’s backline, backstab to death a soft target (healer or mage), and run for my life back towards my own zerg. Rince and repeat. That was really fun, that implied taking a lot of risks, but that was also really rewarding.

But in GW2… First soft targets are generally not so soft. Reaching them is also a challenge often next to impossible with all the AoE spam, and even if you do, evades and auto-targeting means everybody will be on you before you down him (unless he’s a real glass canon), and the down mechanics make all your efforts useless anyways: you will die or run before you can finish him anyways. Pretty depressing if you ask me, but that’s how WvW works…

Traits feedback is for another day.

Why should we accept bad balancing in mmorpg type games but not in other games? Why not strive to balance like a Street Fighter Game.

A good player in Street Fighter can use any character to beat someone else, even if some characters work good against other characters.

Many people cry “its different you cant do that with mmorpg mechanics”

WRONG. You can do that. First of All sustainability needs to be completely revamped. Mistakes need to be punished. Skill play needs to be rewarded. abilities that do not do this need to be significantly nerfed or redone. Necro Hp Bar In vulnerabilities, etc.

It boils down to sustainability and get of jail free cards. Simply allow better ways to counter these abilities or remove them all together.

Noone uses Shadow Arts anymore, that tree needs to be looked at. Some suggestions could be

-you gain +XX% bonus dmg after leaving stealth for 1-2 seconds.

-stealth duration increased by 3-4 seconds instead of just 1.

-stealth grants you vigor

^ Shadow arts is used in WvW for venomshare (Venomous Aura)

To start it off a bit…

UnderPowered traits I can think of
(Acrobatics) Vigorous Recovery – compared to the other traits you can pick it’s in need of help
(Trickery) Flanking Strikes – I feel the recharge is a bit hefty
(Acrobatics) Swindler’s equilibrium: 1% recharge reduction, really? So three dodges is 3% , this should be 5-10% per evade

Underpowered skills:
Smoke Screen – because Black Powder exists & this blocks (so many anti-block right now)
Dagger Storm – nobody seems to use this anymore, possibly due to 8s of not being able to do anything else
Surprise Shot – damage is really poor , maybe double damage below 600 range, triple damage if you are below 300 range
Unload – I’d like to see some burning at the end of it since Pistol does condi damage

Slightly OP:
(Daredevil) Unhindered Combatant – simply a nightmare to play against in WvW ; one trait just about replaces Acrobatics (a swiftness reduction would probably be fair as far as Expeditious Dodger)
(Daredevil) Pulmonary Impact – this makes Pistol offhand and sword mainhand much stronger , Hook Strike, Bandit’s Defense/Fist Flurry/Distracting Daggers also …. it’s only kept in check because it cannot crit

^ Im tottaly sure I have seen Pulmonary Impact critting for 3500+

Infusion.7149:

^ Shadow arts is used in WvW for venomshare (Venomous Aura)

---

To start it off a bit…

UnderPowered traits I can think of
(Acrobatics) Vigorous Recovery – compared to the other traits you can pick it’s in need of help
(Trickery) Flanking Strikes – I feel the recharge is a bit hefty
(Acrobatics) Swindler’s equilibrium: 1% recharge reduction, really? So three dodges is 3% , this should be 5-10% per evade

Underpowered skills:
Smoke Screen – because Black Powder exists & this blocks (so many anti-block right now)
Dagger Storm – nobody seems to use this anymore, possibly due to 8s of not being able to do anything else
Surprise Shot – damage is really poor , maybe double damage below 600 range, triple damage if you are below 300 range
Unload – I’d like to see some burning at the end of it since Pistol does condi damage

Slightly OP:
(Daredevil) Unhindered Combatant – simply a nightmare to play against in WvW ; one trait just about replaces Acrobatics (a swiftness reduction would probably be fair as far as Expeditious Dodger)
(Daredevil) Pulmonary Impact – this makes Pistol offhand and sword mainhand much stronger , Hook Strike, Bandit’s Defense/Fist Flurry/Distracting Daggers also …. it’s only kept in check because it cannot crit

Swindlers equlibrium is a 1 SECOND decrease in steal cooldown coupled with a 5 percent bonus to damage.

With a 1 second ICD for that reduction to the steal recharge and while if hard to measure I find this tends to equate to around 4 seconds (4 evades in 21 seconds is not unreasonable to expect) per steal cycle when traited for SOH which is around 20 percent.

Zilvereen.2091:

^ Im tottaly sure I have seen Pulmonary Impact critting for 3500+

That’s non-crit. It just has a very high damage coefficient.

Edit:

As for Swindler’s, baba, it’s not even as good as 1s cooldown reduction. It’s 1 PERCENT reduction — .2 seconds per evade – which caps at close to 2 seconds peak if using perfect dodges and all initiative to evade with FS over the 21s. I’d argue SwEq is the worst trait in the entire game right now, or at the very least, close to the top.

Infusion.7149:

Underpowered skills:
Surprise Shot – damage is really poor , maybe double damage below 600 range, triple damage if you are below 300 range

Because the purpose of this skill is not to deal damage but to CC. This skill is amazing when fighting other thieves and to stop an enemy from rushing on a point, giving you this extra two second you need to cap/decap.

Infusion.7149:

Slightly OP:
(Daredevil) Unhindered Combatant – simply a nightmare to play against in WvW ; one trait just about replaces Acrobatics (a swiftness reduction would probably be fair as far as Expeditious Dodger)
(Daredevil) Pulmonary Impact – this makes Pistol offhand and sword mainhand much stronger , Hook Strike, Bandit’s Defense/Fist Flurry/Distracting Daggers also …. it’s only kept in check because it cannot crit

Without Dash, thieves would melt to pretty much any other classes that have access to cripples/roots and it would lose it’s role as a sPVP decaper.

Pulmonary Impact is indeed strong, but it’s mostly because it acts as both a defensive and offensive skill. The damage is good, but far from OP with all the sustain most classes have access to.

DeceiverX.8361:

Zilvereen.2091:

^ Im tottaly sure I have seen Pulmonary Impact critting for 3500+

That’s non-crit. It just has a very high damage coefficient.

Edit:

As for Swindler’s, baba, it’s not even as good as 1s cooldown reduction. It’s 1 PERCENT reduction — .2 seconds per evade – which caps at close to 2 seconds peak if using perfect dodges and all initiative to evade with FS over the 21s. I’d argue SwEq is the worst trait in the entire game right now, or at the very least, close to the top.

Where do you get the one percent?

From the wiki

>>Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword or spear recharges steal by a static amount. Swords and spears deal increased damage.

A static amount is not one percent because it would not be static given a cooldown can be as high as 30 seconds and as low as 21.

from the wiki

>>Damage Increase: 5%
Recharge Time Reduced: 1 second

The ingame tooltip reads the same.

From the June 23 patch notes.

Swindler’s Equilibrium: Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword recharges steal by 1 second. This effect has a 1-second internal cooldown.

Again 1 second. I can not see a single source for this 1 percent cooldown.

EDIT. I just went in game to confrim. As far as I can see this 1 second off steal cooldown per evade. I stole to a critter and did evades using #3 and every one second with an evade the timer dropped by 2 seconds.

WvW isn’t really that balanced, even the role of a Thief is limited really, other classes can do heavy burst from range nowadays and sustain better, especially in zerg fights or GvG.

Sir Mad.1092:

First off, I don’t think class balancing is possible, if that means every class has an equal chance to beat any other class: it should be a rock / paper / scissor game (the fact GW2 fails at that is irrelevant), so to me the complaints like “I can’t beat x class, nerf it / buff us” are not valid.

I could beat any class, no matter what build, with my D/D thief before June (actually before February 2015, that was when the dragon patch hit and screwed D/D thief up) – and any class could beat me – so it already has been possible and it was great. A rock paper scissor is really boring “Oh noz, there’s a necro chasing me, buddy x, can you ask buddy y if he can come to point z to save me?”

ETA: And btw I never ran a “One Hit” build – it was all proper fights and I actually made a lot of friends while duelling, cause we both had fun.

babazhook.6805:

DeceiverX.8361:

Zilvereen.2091:

^ Im tottaly sure I have seen Pulmonary Impact critting for 3500+

That’s non-crit. It just has a very high damage coefficient.

Edit:

As for Swindler’s, baba, it’s not even as good as 1s cooldown reduction. It’s 1 PERCENT reduction — .2 seconds per evade – which caps at close to 2 seconds peak if using perfect dodges and all initiative to evade with FS over the 21s. I’d argue SwEq is the worst trait in the entire game right now, or at the very least, close to the top.

Where do you get the one percent?

From the wiki

>>Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword or spear recharges steal by a static amount. Swords and spears deal increased damage.

A static amount is not one percent because it would not be static given a cooldown can be as high as 30 seconds and as low as 21.

from the wiki

>>Damage Increase: 5%
Recharge Time Reduced: 1 second

The ingame tooltip reads the same.

From the June 23 patch notes.

Swindler’s Equilibrium: Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword recharges steal by 1 second. This effect has a 1-second internal cooldown.

Again 1 second. I can not see a single source for this 1 percent cooldown.

EDIT. I just went in game to confrim. As far as I can see this 1 second off steal cooldown per evade. I stole to a critter and did evades using #3 and every one second with an evade the timer dropped by 2 seconds.

Yea, seems they changed it and I never noticed (never paid attention to the trait as I never thought it would be worthwhile). The whole concept seems rather weak, though.

DeceiverX.8361:

babazhook.6805:

DeceiverX.8361:

Zilvereen.2091:

^ Im tottaly sure I have seen Pulmonary Impact critting for 3500+

That’s non-crit. It just has a very high damage coefficient.

Edit:

As for Swindler’s, baba, it’s not even as good as 1s cooldown reduction. It’s 1 PERCENT reduction — .2 seconds per evade – which caps at close to 2 seconds peak if using perfect dodges and all initiative to evade with FS over the 21s. I’d argue SwEq is the worst trait in the entire game right now, or at the very least, close to the top.

Where do you get the one percent?

From the wiki

>>Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword or spear recharges steal by a static amount. Swords and spears deal increased damage.

A static amount is not one percent because it would not be static given a cooldown can be as high as 30 seconds and as low as 21.

from the wiki

>>Damage Increase: 5%
Recharge Time Reduced: 1 second

The ingame tooltip reads the same.

From the June 23 patch notes.

Swindler’s Equilibrium: Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword recharges steal by 1 second. This effect has a 1-second internal cooldown.

Again 1 second. I can not see a single source for this 1 percent cooldown.

EDIT. I just went in game to confrim. As far as I can see this 1 second off steal cooldown per evade. I stole to a critter and did evades using #3 and every one second with an evade the timer dropped by 2 seconds.

Yea, seems they changed it and I never noticed (never paid attention to the trait as I never thought it would be worthwhile). The whole concept seems rather weak, though.

It was not changed to my knowledge other than adding the 5 percent bonus to sword. It not all that bad a trait as is for someone going Acro line. In a typical fight (no trying to lower steal cooldown but just using tactics you normally would) I figure you can get 4 or 5 seconds shaved off a steal cooldown meaning it drops from 21 seconds to 16 with SOH.

depending on how you trait that can mean anything from more mugs/heals…more poison/weakness…more INI from klepto , more steals from Improv more endurance from endurance thief and an earlier opportunity to port to an enemy again.

Bundle it with havoc mastery and bounder and you got 22 percent bonus to the sword on its own. In a s/d build INI is generally high as the AA does most of the attacks meaning lead attacks will stay near its full 15 percent damage if you take TR. (upper hand also is significant improvement with INI return)

I still think a boost warranted. As example remove the ICD so on a multiple evade you can get multiple seconds shaved off the steal or increase the bonus sword to 7 percent.

Acro is getting very much better than it was before. The tweaks made in last patch were subtle but they make quite a difference.

The #1 balance problem in GW2 relates to attrition. While all classes operate similarly from an offensive and utility perspective, some classes are way, way easier to survive with than other classes are.

They are pretty good adjusting offensive balance issues, while being very poor at adjusting defensive ones.

babazhook.6805:

DeceiverX.8361:

babazhook.6805:

DeceiverX.8361:

Zilvereen.2091:

^ Im tottaly sure I have seen Pulmonary Impact critting for 3500+

That’s non-crit. It just has a very high damage coefficient.

Edit:

As for Swindler’s, baba, it’s not even as good as 1s cooldown reduction. It’s 1 PERCENT reduction — .2 seconds per evade – which caps at close to 2 seconds peak if using perfect dodges and all initiative to evade with FS over the 21s. I’d argue SwEq is the worst trait in the entire game right now, or at the very least, close to the top.

Where do you get the one percent?

From the wiki

>>Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword or spear recharges steal by a static amount. Swords and spears deal increased damage.

A static amount is not one percent because it would not be static given a cooldown can be as high as 30 seconds and as low as 21.

from the wiki

>>Damage Increase: 5%
Recharge Time Reduced: 1 second

The ingame tooltip reads the same.

From the June 23 patch notes.

Swindler’s Equilibrium: Successfully evading an attack while wielding a sword recharges steal by 1 second. This effect has a 1-second internal cooldown.

Again 1 second. I can not see a single source for this 1 percent cooldown.

EDIT. I just went in game to confrim. As far as I can see this 1 second off steal cooldown per evade. I stole to a critter and did evades using #3 and every one second with an evade the timer dropped by 2 seconds.

Yea, seems they changed it and I never noticed (never paid attention to the trait as I never thought it would be worthwhile). The whole concept seems rather weak, though.

It was not changed to my knowledge other than adding the 5 percent bonus to sword. It not all that bad a trait as is for someone going Acro line. In a typical fight (no trying to lower steal cooldown but just using tactics you normally would) I figure you can get 4 or 5 seconds shaved off a steal cooldown meaning it drops from 21 seconds to 16 with SOH.

depending on how you trait that can mean anything from more mugs/heals…more poison/weakness…more INI from klepto , more steals from Improv more endurance from endurance thief and an earlier opportunity to port to an enemy again.

Bundle it with havoc mastery and bounder and you got 22 percent bonus to the sword on its own. In a s/d build INI is generally high as the AA does most of the attacks meaning lead attacks will stay near its full 15 percent damage if you take TR. (upper hand also is significant improvement with INI return)

I still think a boost warranted. As example remove the ICD so on a multiple evade you can get multiple seconds shaved off the steal or increase the bonus sword to 7 percent.

Acro is getting very much better than it was before. The tweaks made in last patch were subtle but they make quite a difference.

I’m near-certain it was a percentage, and was why I ignored it to begin with. It has some use but you’re absolutely right that to really optimize its performance, the ICD is counter-productive as-is.

I agree the ICD needs some changing, but I don’t think it needs to be totally removed. Imagine having FS evade a hasted Rapid Fire or unload; you’d be shaving off half the cooldown from steal basically from one evade. The ICD going to 1/2s or once per evade as to allow chained evades to benefit from cooldown reductions for each new attack evaded would probably be the best way to handle the trait. As far as the damage goes, the sword gains most of its damage from sustained combat via the AA and LS. 5%, even if modified, really won’t do much for how the weapon plays (especially with the crazy mitigation in the game these days), and I’d argue that the steal cooldown reduction is the big reason to take the trait over the damage, particularly when compared to HtC, which is one of the big draws to Acrobatics at this point.

As thieves, are you guys happy using the initiative mechanic?

TheBravery.9615:

As thieves, are you guys happy using the initiative mechanic?

Yes – although it can be hard to balance thief because of that.
But the initative gives me the freedom to play smart (or stupid, depends).

I’m having difficulty planning what “ideal” balance for a thief would be due to the initiative mechanic. Arenanet buffed auto attack to high heaven because they know that thieves have low sustainable dps- partly due to the initiative mechanic.

If i were to make a balance outline, would you be upset if the initiative mechanic was changed? Thought about making all skills just rely on cooldowns so they’re not spammy, but keep the initiative mechanic as a method to go into stealth.

edit/ upset is not an appropriate word to use. Everytime there’s a balance patch, I can expect at least one person to get upset- either that their profession got nerfed, or that another profession got buffed. There strives to be a healthy medium between these two, but it’s going to be very difficult to achieve.

What I meant to say was, would changing the mechanic into something that manages stealth be an unreasonable change for the profession?

What exactly do you want to know? It sounds a bit as if you don’t know anything about thief at all.
The D AA buff brought nothing – maybe a bit in PvE but that was it. We knew beforehand.
Thief wouldn’t be thief without initative – I already explained the why.
We already have a cooldown on stealth: self inflicted reveal.
Anet messed with stealth in June and with Hot – before they haven’t said how they’re planning to handle it (other classes outstealthing, forced reveal) I can’t say whether or not a longer reveal would be cool with me.

Thief is pretty much dead right now – you can take away more from it and no one really would care anymore anyway as we already resigned.

You seem to be looking at initiative the wrong way. It is a ressource we have to handle. Yes. Theoretically we can just spam the most powerful skill until we are out of it, that is the main reason, why thief is so hard to balance.
Thats why Arenanet is trying to handle it the way they currently do: All damage on AA, utility on the other skills.
Not the worst way to solve the problem, but not the best either.
A possible solution could be to drastically increase the damage on certain ‘attack’ skills but lower the initiative regeneration (probably also lower the consuption on mere utility skills.) So if you manage to score a good hit, you hit hard. But if you just blindly waste your ressources, and your enemy is not dead in the end, you are sure to be punished.
Right now, on an evasion focussed build, you can basically go on forever, without ever running out of initiative and endurance at the same time. But you still dont deal any damage. That is not the way, its supposed to be.
Another attempt could be to reward skill diversity. Im talking about simple mechanics here: like…increasing heartseeker damge against blinded enemies, so you could use shadow shot or blinding powder as a kind of setup. Or cloak and dagger increasing the duration of condition stacks already in place, so you could use it as a finisher after several death blossoms, leaving your enemy to bleed out.
Would be a lot of work to figure this out ofc, but has the potential to add ‘combos’ and ‘rotations’ to a class without cooldowns.

However, I think we can certainly say, that removing the initiative mechanic is a no-go.
It is, what makes our class unique and personally I consider static rotations to be incredibly…lame.

Edit: actually…I like my second idea (imsoawesome). Gonna work on that now, let you know if I should come up with anything valuable.

When I say “mechanic to manage stealth”, I say that because there’s another problem that needs to be addressed with thief: heavy reliance on D&P / Bounding Dodger / Steal trait to manage stealth.

Playing a thief isn’t exactly sneaky, stealthy, and suspenseful- it’s more like quick burst attacks and flashy attacks with a mechanic that wasn’t very well thought out (talking about stealth). There’s nothing wrong about that, but the identity of the thief is shared among other professions (scrapper in the HoT update for stealth, every other profession and their mothers for burst capabilities) and the distinction of the thief is diminished.

If I reworked how initiative worked, I could address these two problems simultaneously by allowing me to balance every skill as well as giving thieves a dedicated identity as a profession that excels at espionage. Normally I wouldn’t suggest such a drastic change on how thieves worked, but with the game’s current state, anything to thief could be seen as a positive or negative change. I hope this is the former.

What I have in mind:
F3 toggles stealth and drains initiative while you are in stealth. Requires an X minimum amount of initiative to go into stealth, drains very slowly while standing still, and at an increased pace when moving. Will also look into reworking how stealth and aggro works in PvE- giving mobs a line of sight.

Turn every skill on thief to use cooldowns rather than initiative

Pros: Enhanced stealth play, Gives thieves a distinctive identity, easier skill balance
Cons: Use of the cooldown mechanic for skill rotation

I don’t rely on D/P – people use it because it’s the “best designed set” thief has got (aka most faceroll as it has got no real opening, like ranger GS and scrapper hammer (and probably more but I usually only play thief)).
There’s tons of traits that go with steal – I’m no real fan of it, never was as there’s too much put into one skill – but, surprise, before June my steal was pure and I lived well with it.
You can be “sneaky” with stealth, June and HoT are a problem and stole the identity and also the mechanics of thief, yes, but you seem to have got a different idea of thief than I.
Your F3 is already in game – we drain initative while being stealthed because we have to use skills to remain stealthed (other than SR, the gigantic red target). We also have an increased pace when moving – but only really for D/P thieves.

Ok, again: Initative gives me the freedom to play smart and use every skill when it’s best to use it – I’d actually rather have all classes using initative than thief go without.

Jana.6831:

Ok, again: Initative gives me the freedom to play smart and use every skill when it’s best to use it – I’d actually rather have all classes using initative than thief go without.

Wouldn’t that statement also apply to the cooldown mechanic as well? (e.g. it’s not best to use elementalist meteor shower when the enemy is in your face)

@ Jana: rock / paper / scissor mechanics doesn’t mean you can’t beat any class with superior gameplay, it simply means you have natural prey and natural predators. From a dev perspective, it makes balancing much easier since all classes don’t have to be equal but simply need to be kept in check. It’s often a little bit more complex, but think about it this way: we have 3 groups of classes: A, B and C. A is 10-25% stronger than B and 10-25% weaker than C. Rock / paper / scissor. That adds diversity to the table (you want to have the 3 groups in your team), and it’s 100 times easier to balance since it doesn’t really matter if A is only 10% stronger than B, or 25%. And that doesn’t mean either that a good B player can’t beat a weaker A player.

Any attempt to make every class equal is doomed to fail. There will always be a few stronger classes, until they get nerfed and new stronger classes arise. I’m quoting you:

Thief is pretty much dead right now – you can take away more from it and no one really would care anymore anyway as we already resigned.

Even though I don’t share your point of view, this is the direct consequence of that kind of impossible balancing.

Sorry if I’m a bit off topic.

@ Asrat: I love the idea of conditional damage. Buffing AA was a bad move IMHO, at least in PvE. It makes you lazy. When you’re going melee against a boss with AoE needed to be dodged (think the gerent and his nuggets of doom for instance), using skills like staff #2 can be tricky (or even Vault, to a lower extant), but you had to do it to keep your DPS high. Now, you can very well play with AA only.

@ OP: Well I think the one thing that needs to be fixed for thieves is the “No line of sight” non-sense with skills like SB #5, Steal, or Scorpion Wire. Everybody hate that, and it’s often bugged (no line of sight on semi-flat grounds, or steal that seems to work completely randomly and sometimes let you jump to a target on top of a hill while it doesn’t 90% of the time…).

And while we’re talking about Scorpion Wire… Please, remove the CD when it fails – prevent us from using the skill instead if the target is too far or invalid.

Also the initiative mechanic somewhat mirrors mana or magic points of traditional mmorpgs. The problem here is that we have every other profession (minus revenant- which is another balance headache) using the cooldown system, and then there’s the thief using something completely different.

The game’s skill rotations are balanced around cooldowns, which made this a problem. I could suggest that every other profession use something similar to initiative (or mana) but that would require a total rework of the entire game.

TheBravery.9615:

Jana.6831:

Ok, again: Initative gives me the freedom to play smart and use every skill when it’s best to use it – I’d actually rather have all classes using initative than thief go without.

Wouldn’t that statement also apply to the cooldown mechanic as well? (e.g. it’s not best to use elementalist meteor shower when the enemy is in your face)

Yes of course, if it’s not on cooldown (I’m waiting that you finally get the point).

Hmmm. I see, where this is going. It would basically remove the dependancy on weaponsets for stealth, and I like that. It wold also make the thief thge supreme ruler of stealth gameplay once again…
But it might be too much. Instant access to stealth whenever you want to? Not having to work with limited durations but instead leave when you feel like it? It would render a couple of utility skills obsolete, exept for the few occasions, where group stealth is actually required.
All of that would be ok…but I am not going to give up on my fighting mechanics. Yes! Initiative has its flaws, but there must be another way!
What about having two pools? Two pools of initiative, or whatever you would want to call that ressource. Pool 1 would be used by offensive skills(most of the weapon skills), draining heavily and, like I proposed before, giving you a hard hitting, unforgiving source of damage.
Pool 2 could be used by defensive/utility weapon skills, for stealth or perhaps even instead of endurance.
Its not a very…nice solution, but its better than having to rely on cooldowns.

Sir Mad.1092:

@ Jana: rock / paper / scissor mechanics doesn’t mean you can’t beat any class with superior gameplay, it simply means you have natural prey and natural predators.
From a dev perspective, it makes balancing much easier since all classes don’t have to be equal but simply need to be kept in check. It’s often a little bit more complex, but think about it this way: we have 3 groups of classes: A, B and C. A is 10-25% stronger than B and 10-25% weaker than C. Rock / paper / scissor. That adds diversity to the table (you want to have the 3 groups in your team), and it’s 100 times easier to balance since it doesn’t really matter if A is only 10% stronger than B, or 25%. And that doesn’t mean either that a good B player can’t beat a weaker A player.

There’s a lot wrong with this kind of thinking and again: we had that – each class had some openings before June and HoT, the game design then went too well so nearly no openings anymore that is what led to the bunker meta.
Before June every class had to trade in some of their strengths (traits) to create a build – I hope you get my point.
Let me just think about how to explain it to you (might take a while).
You want all classes and builds to be “equally strong” in a game without trinity.

ETA: But I guess if you take what I wrote in this post you’ll already see the problem this game has got and how to fix it. As long as we don’t know what anet is going to do with the trait system/other classes it’s pretty useless to discuss how thief should be buffed.
And again: We already had a working balance before June – we didn’t need the 3 line trait system, now we’re back at square one.
And: I’m a wvw player, I don’t chose the players on my server according to their classes, we just happen to be at the same point at the same time – I’d still like to be able to play this game and not yell in map chat that we need 3 DHs and one Druid as backups to save a camp.

Unfortunately avoidance of a trinity is part of guild wars 2 design manifesto, so that’s out of the question

(then again, it does feel like they’re ignoring their manifesto in lieu of their recent updates)

Asrat.2645:

Hmmm. I see, where this is going. It would basically remove the dependancy on weaponsets for stealth, and I like that. It wold also make the thief thge supreme ruler of stealth gameplay once again…
But it might be too much. Instant access to stealth whenever you want to? Not having to work with limited durations but instead leave when you feel like it? It would render a couple of utility skills obsolete, exept for the few occasions, where group stealth is actually required.
All of that would be ok…but I am not going to give up on my fighting mechanics. Yes! Initiative has its flaws, but there must be another way!
What about having two pools? Two pools of initiative, or whatever you would want to call that ressource. Pool 1 would be used by offensive skills(most of the weapon skills), draining heavily and, like I proposed before, giving you a hard hitting, unforgiving source of damage.
Pool 2 could be used by defensive/utility weapon skills, for stealth or perhaps even instead of endurance.
Its not a very…nice solution, but its better than having to rely on cooldowns.

Of course, there’s other ways to achieve balance with this proposal- such as forcing self root and a channel when using F3 stealth.

Ive been thinking again.
Stealth should not be the central mechanic of the thief class. It should be possible to make it the central mechanic, if you build for it, but you should not be forced into it.
Unfortunately, thats just what you are trying to do.
Actually, they handle that pretty good for now. You can use your initiative for direct combat but you can also use it to enter stealth, if you have a weaponset that allows stealth gameplay.
The access to stealth should be reliant on the weaponset. If I sue s/d or staff, I do not want to play stealth and thats that. But there should be better ways to stealth withh d/d, p/p and so on. Cloak and dagger simply doesnt do the job as good as it could.
It should also be more viable to enter stealth. Right now U use it to engage, run away or as a setup for a backstab.
A good start would be to slightly increase duration of stealth sources via traits and make you able to deny capping while stealthed.
All in all working with shadow arts should do the trick here, resilience of shadows, shadow protector and shadows rejuvenation could all need small adjustments.
Also what you, in the ‘warrior balance’ refer to as ‘true damage’ could work with stealth skills like backstab. It would also fit this profession much better to be honest.
The frontliner thief is actually not in a bad spot. I played some zerker staff matches recently (unranked ofc) and it feels pretty much the way it should: extreme damage output, high mobility, tons of evades and no mistakes allowed.
As soon as the op stuff gets toned down, this kind of thief will be fine in spvp. Just equalize the weapon sets and maybe slightly increase the health pool to make zerker builds a bit less suicidal.
The last way I can think of is giving us more options to buff ourselves. Thieves can deal amazing damage in pve, but only if they have a party to buff them. Thats what we miss for spvp content. Add some might here, some fury or even quickness there, and we should be able to really hurt some people, without influencing pve balance at all.

Looking at the weapon sets: Every set should have one peak skill. Like vault. An expensive, high damage skill, that can not be spammed infenitely and offers something else (like gap closer, gap opener, etc) The other weapon skills can be situational or used as utilities. Thanks to the initiative mechanic there will always be one single skill with max damage. There is no reason to try and make the others match it, as long as they offer something else.

There doesn’t need to be a trinity to create balanced design. A substantial amount of “balance” is subjective as really what constitutes game balance is the result of a utility function applied to a certain perspective (build, strategy, etc.) applied to gameplay scenarios, and then doing analysis on the results. Since said function is going to be limited in scope, and the problem space of the potential scenarios infinite with a dynamic environment and non-deterministic potential behaviors, there’s no real way to truly balance these kinds of complex games – only rule-creating super-AI’s with tons of heuristic data could come close. Only numerical games with much simpler mechanics can be balanced in this regard. The notion of a trinity doesn’t make a game much easier or more appropriately, fairer to balance so much as it designates a fixed optimization scheme under which game design and balance simulation can be performed under, while also enforcing social aspects of the game under a common and easy-to-identify scheme for improving marketability based on early RPG frameworks which were able to be balanced around due to their lack of dynamism etc.; in essence, it’s simply an incorrect assumption to believe a “trinity” is necessary or even preferable, for then the argument can be extended to include such a statement that all dynamism and strategical differences within the game should be reduced to nothing until mathematical proof can verify all strategies are optimal. Approaching higher levels of design via psychology, and philosophy, extensions even inclusive of some mathematical models such as inductive proofs to verify balance integrity could be ruled out, and implicitly-popular design may skew data metrics used in simulation, or may need to rule-out balance in the name of what can only be coined as “fun factor”.

As far as the topic of thief balance is concerned, the issues stem mostly from an inherent problem with the sub-par utility of some weapon combinations compared to others (D/D vs D/P is the big one as they also have largely-similar styles of play) paired with skills with dis-proportionate initiative costs for their potency (Body Shot 4 initiative, Shadow Shot 4 initiative), fluctuating initiative values/forced Trickery trait choice inhibiting even remotely-justified skill-initiative balancing, which compounds the previous problems, and lastly, a lack of essential trait/utility effect overlap to enable a wider array of builds to being “usable” by creating false-options through definitive needs, such as Daredevil or Shadow Arts for effectively any and all condition cleansing.

Most of the innate concerns with the thief’s state of usefulness (and subsequently wildly-swinging usage and wildly-swinging public perceptions) are due to design decisions on the fundamental level with given traits and skills rather than numbers problems.