Guild Wars 2

I see tons of complains about the thief, and i can say most of them are accurate, some others totally irrilevant and wrong.

Due to “next” patch entering stealth counters when stealth itself is extremely weak, i would like to give some advices ( maybe if other good thieves could help me it would be cool) to aNet in order to balance it.

Stealth

Altough stealth has no counterplay, it’s a very weak resource for the thief in sPvP.
You cannot cap points, and as a far point assaulter the other team just needs to leave there a good proff to proficiently fight the thief 1vs1 without losing too fast ( while points tickle for them).

Giving how bad stealth thieves are, i would go straight to the source of all problems:

SHADOW REFUGE

Nerf it or totally remove it, don’t hamper the whole profession mechanic due to team stealth stacking and stealth ambushes ( which is the only real problem).

It is also frustrating for WvWers and in PvE it has no real use if not to jump content by avoiding mobs and stacking it with blinding powder ( for double ress).

Do it.

Just do it.

Next problem: S/D thieves

Don’t listen to people crying about Larcenous strike, it has never been a problem.

The problem is Infiltrator Strike and the ridicolous mobility it gives.

You can basically jump from a target to another in a second, disangage at will, and focus the nect one without losing too much damage ( give the high amount of sustain S/D thieves have).

A good change ( in primis) would be to make inf strike teleport to go only in orizontal axis , because it is actually ridicolous when a mesmer/ele/necro goes on a roof and you go through walls and still catch him.

Another good change would be to have shadow return available ( this is a very HARSH nerf) only if you hit your target/in range of the target to be hit ( or rather 600 range) instead of putting shadow returns everywhere in the map.

If you’re not in target range Inf strike will port you NOWHERE and you’ll stay in place

Currently this skill is brainless, just use it and port everywhere.

Let’s start to make this set skillful.

After that, buff the freaking thief and balance it decently ( like S/P or OH dagger being horrible, and condi builds LOLOLOLOL) because we’ve been gimmicky from the start and work only with gimmicks.

Just like rangers, but without the brainless AI.

Ok, thanks.

@mods

Don’t move this thread outside PvP forum, this is specifically relevant to sPvP.

Thanks.

it’s like you want to kill off thieves, if you’re suggesting to nerf both shadow refuge AND infiltrator strike.

i don’;t think any sort of buffs can make up for that. period.

PS this should be moved to the thief forum, as any nerfs that happen due to sPvP is pretty much global most of the time so all thieves deserve to chime in on this.

Excalibur.9748:

it’s like you want to kill off thieves

That’s what he is trying since beta, I wonder how he is able too keep it up that long.

inb4 moved to thief forum and get eaten alive.

Nerfing refuge makes no sense, especially since there seems to be more and more stealth accessibility on other classes.

If you’ve fought mesmers recently, lots of them run a stealth based build with veil and torch, along with mass invisibility. Mesmers pretty much play like a thief now in terms of stealth…now can you tell me how that’s fair?

Stealth SHOULD have been a mechanic that is exclusive to thieves, and IMO no other class should have access to stealth.

Now talking strictly about shadow refuge, it’s really one of the only utilities that a thief can bring that could count as a team utility. Nerfing it or removing it makes no sense at all. It allows thieves to make smart plays with their team amongst other tricks, but as you said, stealth ambushes is one of them. I don’t see how that is a bad thing? Every team decides to bring a class for a certain reason: you bring a necro because you want AOE condi cleave and condi control, you bring a ranger because of spirits and they can live forever, you bring a cc warrior because you want to counter necros + rangers. You bring a thief because you want to make stealth plays and dps. Every class brings something to the table, and nerfing or removing refuge is extremely crippling to the thief class.

S/P isn’t horrible wtkittend of hyperbole is this.

I agree to some extent with Kuro however.
Refuge’s duration out of field is stupidly long it creates this passive atmosphere where everyone just waits for 10 seconds for kitten to happen. Would prefer if it was 5s of stealth when the field ends, with a stronger heal inside or even damage mitigation while inside the field.
However waiting 10s for kitten to happen once the field is complete is frankly silly. You end up popping your own refuge half the time just so you can cut the horse kitten.
It feels odd for the devs to at one period of time say “Stealth is a short term defense” as their validation for it, and then have 10s stealth pops from Refuge. Even Mass and Shadowtrap go to 5-6s and Mass is an elite with a heavy cast time.

Mesmer always had their stealths nothing changed, Mesmer has every sort of defense in the game other than reducing damage to 0 and condi immunity.

Anyways. The inf strike hate is shoddy. This skills been here from beta and has seen full powered S/P, pre-Dec S/D and gone through the quickness nerf, fine. To this date S/P uses it fine and playing through it is still not huge. It’s strength is being overstated given the rest of the kit.
In S/P, you have no stealth your defense against ranged attacks is LoS and control. Otherwise a ranger shoots 1 on you until the cows go home. PW is interruptible even after it stuns the target and if you don’t cancel it, hitting you right after the PW is quite feasible. Shadow return alleviates these qualms by giving a LoS break to combat range, and diminishing while not negating the significance of the root on PW.

You can basically jump from a target to another in a second, disengage at will, and focus the nect one without losing too much damage ( give the high amount of sustain S/D thieves have).

You can hop from target to target with Shadow shot as well, excusing Swirling winds popping up.
Inf strike has been there from launch with little qualm, it’s still on S/P and recieves little fuss. Literally this tirade on Inf strike came about when they put Flanking strike as a chain skill. You could’ve ported in all seriousness the whole Larcenous steal 2 boons, 4 ini on the original FS 2nd hit with updated tracking, and it would’ve caused no fuss because counterplay is as simplistic as Frenzy 100b was. They FS they have no choice but to do the flanking stab or cancel it and have to start all over for its benefits. Losing the full 4 ini each time they cancel it’s commit or lose it. Thing with the original FS is even if you got past the tracking (and you very well could) you land flanking stab and it’s mediocre, little reward for the effort, despite it often wanting some form of set-up, or strong ability to read enemy movements in the brief half second you had to DI yourself to a target likely kiting you. This is at current. FS is 1) Easier to land on both fronts, does more overall, Steal> Removal, 2> 1, Easy to land> Difficult to land, Unblockable noteworthy damage > Unblockable insignificant damage.
Im waiting for why S/P still isn’t seen on the same note despite Off-hand Pistol being hailed as superior to off-hand D, having the same inf strike. If you went by the forums with /P + Inf strike, then S/P should be vastly superior, but people generally say otherwise…what could possibly be the difference then? Sounds like the dual skills. If LS is so good that its carrying a “bad” off-hand then why the hell are we looking at inf strike?

Even then S/D is a broke incomplete kit since they changed off-hand dagger in Dec.

Too much apologies in issues you should not. The Thiefs Hallmark is its mobility and evasiveness. Inf strike does its job as it should.

Inf. strike is not a problem, like at all… S/P isn’t commonly used, nor is it op, and yet it has access to inf.strike.

Larcenous strike is the culprit, it is simply too good. Either nerf the damage, or remove how many boons it strips. Done.

You could nerf shadow refuge too for all I care, the stealth from it does last way too long.

@Amaterasu & Ensoriki

Shadow refuge stealth lasts way too long.

Stealth has no counterplay and it wouldn’t really be a problem if there were not so much access to stealth for so long time.

Giving counterplays to stealth ( as aNet has clearly stated) will just weaken D/P thieves which are already not in a good place, the same to P/D thieves which are a joke, and it’s all due to shadow refuge being too strong.

It has always been a must have in all thief bars for a reason, and will always be like this because stealthing the whole team will always trascend the meta, no matters what the meta is.

Stealth ambushes are not fun, neither rewarding “tactic wise” because the enemy can’t simply do a thing about it: entering “counters” will just force pick teams to choose those counters, and is not good for the health of the game.

We all know shadow refuge is too strong, why are we even arguing about it is beyond me: let’s give the thief more ways to support your teammates or let’s just force choices ( D/P thieves + blast finishers+ blinding powder) instead of giving everything to the best thief build according to the meta ( S/D in this case).

regarding Inf Strike

It’s not skillful. You can chase your opponents in z-axis by simply pressing a button, this skill alone is removing Mesmer and Eles from the meta, why can’t you understand.

Currently it’s not balanced, especially when there’re skills like Shadow shot ( best example) which make you waste initiative if your opponent simply dodges.

Inf strike can also be used with no target, without range requires, just to set your port then teleporting miles away from your opponent if you screw up, with no requirments.

It should just be like shadow shot, at least regarding range needings: if you are Out of Range, it should miss.

Spammable gap closers/maker with no range requirments is out of balance.

Larcenous strike is just a good skill, but what is making S/D so strong is its mobility, with no real skill required.

At least reward those good thieves who know how to keep range, instead of spamming abilities like brainless monkeys.

regarding S/P

S/P is bad due to not having a good damage dealing ability.

Pistol whip is slow, countered by reta, countered by stability: even with none of this, you can simply walk away from it while you dealth nothing more than 2-3k damage, time meanwhile you’re also vulnerable.

If Pistol whip was faster, dealt a little more damage and could be used on the move, i really doubt we would ever see any S/D thief in sPvP, due to OH pistol being 100 TIMES better than OH dagger.

Larcenous strike is not the culprit: you could remove the Boon stripping and the evade and putting in place a SINGLE SKILL dealing the same damage and people would still use S/D instead of S/P for the single reason that this skill could be used more reliably to do damage instead of a self-rooting, slow, bad damage dealing skill like Pistol Whip.

Again, they should shave what is OP ( in this case, Inf Strike and Shadow refuge) instead of nerfing the whole profession down, like they did with OH dagger ( in order to nerf D/D burst thieves, when OH dagger was never a problem to begin with).

Just think at it for a second.

Then let’s talk again.

Sidenote:

The “inf strike” hate was never needed before, simply because those sets ( S/D and S/P) never really worked properly: S/D was kept up by dazelocking ( which i don’t they ever intended to keep, altough it was a lot more skillful than current S/D) and S/P was kept up by Haste-pistol whipping.

If you have a working set like S/D currently is, the you start seeing the problem.

Mrbig.8019:

I see tons of complains about the thief, and i can say most of them are accurate, some others totally irrilevant and wrong.

Due to “next” patch entering stealth counters when stealth itself is extremely weak, i would like to give some advices ( maybe if other good thieves could help me it would be cool) to aNet in order to balance it.

---

Stealth

Altough stealth has no counterplay, it’s a very weak resource for the thief in sPvP.
You cannot cap points, and as a far point assaulter the other team just needs to leave there a good proff to proficiently fight the thief 1vs1 without losing too fast ( while points tickle for them).

Giving how bad stealth thieves are, i would go straight to the source of all problems:

SHADOW REFUGE

Nerf it or totally remove it, don’t hamper the whole profession mechanic due to team stealth stacking and stealth ambushes ( which is the only real problem).

It is also frustrating for WvWers and in PvE it has no real use if not to jump content by avoiding mobs and stacking it with blinding powder ( for double ress).

Do it.

Just do it.

---

Next problem: S/D thieves

Don’t listen to people crying about Larcenous strike, it has never been a problem.

The problem is Infiltrator Strike and the ridicolous mobility it gives.

You can basically jump from a target to another in a second, disangage at will, and focus the nect one without losing too much damage ( give the high amount of sustain S/D thieves have).

A good change ( in primis) would be to make inf strike teleport to go only in orizontal axis , because it is actually ridicolous when a mesmer/ele/necro goes on a roof and you go through walls and still catch him.

Another good change would be to have shadow return available ( this is a very HARSH nerf) only if you hit your target/in range of the target to be hit ( or rather 600 range) instead of putting shadow returns everywhere in the map.

If you’re not in target range Inf strike will port you NOWHERE and you’ll stay in place

Currently this skill is brainless, just use it and port everywhere.

Let’s start to make this set skillful.

---

After that, buff the freaking thief and balance it decently ( like S/P or OH dagger being horrible, and condi builds LOLOLOLOL) because we’ve been gimmicky from the start and work only with gimmicks.

Just like rangers, but without the brainless AI.

Ok, thanks.

@mods

Don’t move this thread outside PvP forum, this is specifically relevant to sPvP.

Thanks.

Not sure if troll or just stupid.

too late, it got moved

Amaterasu.6280:

Mesmers pretty much play like a thief now in terms of stealth…now can you tell me how that’s fair?

Not entirely true – Mesmer’s can leave clones/phantasms in play via their weaponskills and class mechanics to continue doing damage while they remain in stealth, whereas thieves in stealth are generally doing nothing but repositioning/biding their time (unless they’re running Ambush or Thieves guild). Their stealth skills do not require hitting a target like CnD does, or 3/4’s their entire “CD pool” (init) like BP->HS does.

Additionally, they’re able to gain aegis, and protection in stealth (or regen, which will trigger protection via a minor trait), while thieves have no in class access to aegis or protection at all.