Guild Wars 2

About 80% of my fights were: Invulnerable, invulnerable, invulnerable, block, blockittenk, block, block, invulnerable, evade, 3k, block, block, invulnerable.

In the calmest way possible, what the hell happened to the meta? This was every class except thief minus Bandits defense and the amount of dodging but I was already used to that BS. Warriors I used to be able to take on if I needed, but I have to avoid them now unless one is weak. They can take a lot of damage, neglect a metric kitten ton of damage and deal back the same if not more damage than I can. Guardians are also up there but maybe they’ve always been that way, I forget. It basically seems the only classes I can actually duel are necromancers (still risky), elementalists, and other thieves (still risky if equal or greater experience). Literally everything else either mitigates and bursts you out out sustaines the hell out of you with the sheer amount of blocking and invulnerabilities. You can’t do anything as a thief now, you’re not the highest dps dealer, youre sure as hell not the tankier person on the field.Or maybe I’m just bad.

It has been like this since HoT come. Became more obnoxious since everyone and their mother plays DH now.

Cynz.9437:

It has been like this since HoT come. Became more obnoxious since everyone and their mother plays DH now.

They hit so kittening hard. I was literally having an existential crisis. What’s even the point of this class outside of WvW stealth roaming? Besides mobility, every a thief can do another class can do better. Even then I had a Mesmer somehow catch up to me (which I have them props for).

Pickup a daredevil build where you can attack with evade chaining. Sounds lame but ya alot of people are playing some form of blanket immunity zerkers or facetank condi builds. It’s not their fault that it’s available though, just go with the tide.

Yes, it has made a glass cannon pretty obsolete.

You pretty much have to 1-shot someone now in order to bypass passive defenses.

Against a Warrior, you need to kill them with one attack when they are above 50% health or they get at least 4 seconds of immunity to direct damage.

As you can expect, that doesn’t happen much in PvP.

RedSpectrum.1975:

Cynz.9437:

It has been like this since HoT come. Became more obnoxious since everyone and their mother plays DH now.

They hit so kittening hard. I was literally having an existential crisis. What’s even the point of this class outside of WvW stealth roaming? Besides mobility, every a thief can do another class can do better. Even then I had a Mesmer somehow catch up to me (which I have them props for).

I just kind of gave up because of it. Discussing the game is pretty much more fun than playing it these days, because ANet doesn’t know how to balance or develop professions anymore it seems.

Man, when I did I become the thief forums Troller. I mean Trolling as in constantly glancing at this forum. I’m not normally a Thief player. But I tend to route for the under dog. Honestly, i learned DP thief first, then Pistol Pistol cheese, but none of that works. The only thing i have found works is my very OP DD build which Deals with all this meta crap in the same way I deal with people that kitten me off. Annoy the ever loving crap out of them until they go away.

emkelly.2371:

Annoy the ever loving crap out of them until they go away.

I’m almost tempted to request you do that to me…. so I can retire from GW2 :-P

What do you guys think about changing Assassin’s signet to include next “5 attacks are unblockable”
It’ll bring back some of the unblockable attacks from GW1 in the form of a signet
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/List_of_assassin_skills

Thieves making trade offs for some guaranteed damage

HECK NO! that would just make Pistol pistol Rediculously overpowered. Screw that.

With the amount of reflects in game it would be perfectly fine since it’s tied to a 30 sec plus cd

Unload would need a damage nerf.

It’s the best burst per unit of time in the entire game when it lands.

Come on we all know that Anet loves power creep lets get a chance at a ride on the power creep train…… I want to make Engies fear thieves for a little bit with P/P especially running assassins amulet. Lol

In all honesty I don’t think balance will get any better they have essentially said they want thieves as sole +1/ decap, I doubt any suggestions will be heard they just ignore the main issues and throw out unnecessary nerfs and changes.

DeceiverX.8361:

It’s the best burst per unit of time in the entire game when it lands.

Rapid Fire hits harder but cannot be chained together. However over a minute Rapid Fire bursts for as much possibly more DPS. Pistol Whip can be chained and has a slightly stronger DPS.

That said nothing beats AoE for potential DPS.

With the might stacking, Unload hits harder than PW, and its 5s initiative cooldown dealing roughly 80% of the damage of RF at zero might at 60% of the casting speed means chained unloads always beat out the potential damage output of any ranger. Given actual traits to play damage, unload without might on a single cast can also rival the damage provided by any single RF even at full pewpew arbitrarily-25-might-stacked power longbow ranger.

I’m not talking about DPS. I actually proved to someone doing all the math out even before the buffs to P/P, that unload-built thief does higher DPS than RF-built ranger in all cases, and can achieve similar numbers per cast on similar builds.

If you play without a build specializing in damage, of course the higher coefficient is going to do better burst. But that’s like pretending True Shot often hits harder than backstab when played by burst builds; it doesn’t. Not even close.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

With the amount of reflects in game it would be perfectly fine since it’s tied to a 30 sec plus cd

reflects count as blocks dude. can you imagine popping that and then using unload twice. It’s fine for gubflame because you can’t spam it three times in a row. it’s not for unload because unload is spamable, grants might. So no

emkelly.2371:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

With the amount of reflects in game it would be perfectly fine since it’s tied to a 30 sec plus cd

reflects count as blocks dude. can you imagine popping that and then using unload twice. It’s fine for gubflame because you can’t spam it three times in a row. it’s not for unload because unload is spamable, grants might. So no

Oh I know what I am saying is that they will only have to deal with it every 30 seconds while all reflects and blocks are on shorter CD so the other attacks will barely do damage. So have at it

I’m not too happy with how they buffed P/P either “Lets take might away from SA because it’s too OP – Whoopsie” – but anets answer to everything is MOAR damage. Their argument why D auto was buffed was because they acknowledge that thief also has to use initative for defensive purposes – and the same applies here: A P/P thief gives up all his defenses – so you can argue that unload is too powerful but the thief has got nothing left afterwards, so is nerfing it really justified (in the current state of the game)?

emkelly.2371:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

With the amount of reflects in game it would be perfectly fine since it’s tied to a 30 sec plus cd

reflects count as blocks dude. can you imagine popping that and then using unload twice. It’s fine for gubflame because you can’t spam it three times in a row. it’s not for unload because unload is spamable, grants might. So no

Reflects do count as blocks, but every bullet counts as a unique attack and would thus use one stack of the assassin signet buff, the same way they currently interact with it and venoms. So buffing assassin’s signet to make kittens unblockable would only guarantee one unload hitting, not repeated unloads like your post implies.

Even then, we’re assuming that they don’t go invuln to direct damage since the main classes you’d want to land this on (mesmer, warrior, guardian and scrapper) all have ways of doing that, or that they wouldn’t just dodge the next unload as soon as they see the signet cast.

Edit: Five hits. This censor is extremely picky haha xD

RedSpectrum.1975:

About 80% of my fights were: Invulnerable, invulnerable, invulnerable, block, blockittenk, block, block, invulnerable, evade, 3k, block, block, invulnerable.

In the calmest way possible, what the hell happened to the meta? This was every class except thief minus Bandits defense and the amount of dodging but I was already used to that BS. Warriors I used to be able to take on if I needed, but I have to avoid them now unless one is weak. They can take a lot of damage, neglect a metric kitten ton of damage and deal back the same if not more damage than I can. Guardians are also up there but maybe they’ve always been that way, I forget. It basically seems the only classes I can actually duel are necromancers (still risky), elementalists, and other thieves (still risky if equal or greater experience). Literally everything else either mitigates and bursts you out out sustaines the hell out of you with the sheer amount of blocking and invulnerabilities. You can’t do anything as a thief now, you’re not the highest dps dealer, youre sure as hell not the tankier person on the field.Or maybe I’m just bad.

I feel your pain, but not so much since I switched to warrior about a month ago

After maining S/D for about a year and a half, I rolled up a sword/sword/shield warrior with stances. It’s like the difficulty slider went from 100% to 50%. The only class that consistently gives me problems now is mesmer and good DH’s.

When I get a matchup against a good thief in PvP, they can still give me a headache. But I do much better against every class in general. Like you said, I can block, block, block, ignore, ignore, ignore, etc. Meanwhile I burn foes when blocking, apply bleeds and vulnerability and cripple like crazy, and so on.

I have a better (more accurate) perspective on the game now. Thief still has a role, but it is easily the narrowest role in the game with the highest skill threshold. And the build diversity is nil for thief. Heck, my warrior isn’t even running anything resembling a meta build, it’s just something I cooked up for fun.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

emkelly.2371:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

With the amount of reflects in game it would be perfectly fine since it’s tied to a 30 sec plus cd

reflects count as blocks dude. can you imagine popping that and then using unload twice. It’s fine for gubflame because you can’t spam it three times in a row. it’s not for unload because unload is spamable, grants might. So no

Reflects do count as blocks, but every bullet counts as a unique attack and would thus use one stack of the assassin signet buff, the same way they currently interact with it and venoms. So buffing assassin’s signet to make kittens unblockable would only guarantee one unload hitting, not repeated unloads like your post implies.

Even then, we’re assuming that they don’t go invuln to direct damage since the main classes you’d want to land this on (mesmer, warrior, guardian and scrapper) all have ways of doing that, or that they wouldn’t just dodge the next unload as soon as they see the signet cast.

Edit: Five hits. This censor is extremely picky haha xD

If you think reflects don’t count as blocks, i’d love tp see you try and block a killshot with your shield while using Shield mastery. And i’d lagh at you as you took full damage.

Also. there is a venom that also makes attacks unblockable. Just pointing that out.

emkelly.2371:

Jugglemonkey.8741:

emkelly.2371:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

With the amount of reflects in game it would be perfectly fine since it’s tied to a 30 sec plus cd

reflects count as blocks dude. can you imagine popping that and then using unload twice. It’s fine for gubflame because you can’t spam it three times in a row. it’s not for unload because unload is spamable, grants might. So no

Reflects do count as blocks, but every bullet counts as a unique attack and would thus use one stack of the assassin signet buff, the same way they currently interact with it and venoms. So buffing assassin’s signet to make kittens unblockable would only guarantee one unload hitting, not repeated unloads like your post implies.

Even then, we’re assuming that they don’t go invuln to direct damage since the main classes you’d want to land this on (mesmer, warrior, guardian and scrapper) all have ways of doing that, or that they wouldn’t just dodge the next unload as soon as they see the signet cast.

Edit: Five hits. This censor is extremely picky haha xD

If you think reflects don’t count as blocks, i’d love tp see you try and block a killshot with your shield while using Shield mastery. And i’d lagh at you as you took full damage.

Also. there is a venom that also makes attacks unblockable. Just pointing that out.

I do think they count as blocks for projectiles, that’s why I said that in my last post. Reading comprehension FTW.

If I tried to block a killshot with shield on warrior, and the other warrior made his attack unblockable using the signet, it doesn’t matter whether I trait for the reflect or not as I’d take the damage either way, and if you play warrior you should know that. So your point was what, exactly?

Lastly, the venom makes one attack unblockable, nerfed from two because venomshare was rather arbitrarily made baseline. If the other guy has stability, that means one bullet of one unload will hit, for around 800 damage, and the rest would be blocked. Whoop de fricking doo. Changing assassins signet to allow kittens would allow one unload through a block, but no more. So it’s still less damage through a block/reflect than a gunflame followed by rifle 2.

Once you’ve fully understood the argument, feel free to post again.

Sigh. You know what? Sure. Go ahead and make assassins signet make attacks unblockable. I thought about it, and i’d love to see DH’s cry as they were made pointless by an unload thief.

Medi DH is a big problem for many kill or be killed style classes. I really do hope anet takes a serious look at Medi DH sustain because it has been overtuned for a longtime now.

DH Sustain is not so bad…Its the combination of sustain and massive damage. Engineer’s are the same way

emkelly.2371:

DH Sustain is not so bad…Its the combination of sustain and massive damage. Engineer’s are the same way

Also Berserkers, Druids – there’s some stuff wrong with vanilla warrior too (no idea whether it’s a bug or the traits that are just too powerful while allowing him to be tanky) also Torment really needs to be reworked (looking at mesmers).
I’m currently relearning this game since I haven’t been able to hit properly for a long time. It’s still pretty wonky. And the stuff I say might not be that accurate – because I’m basically a noob who doesn’t know how to face certain classes.

In the end, the damage calculation in wvw might really need to be looked at (out of control since June 2015) and PvP should be more similar to wvw, otherwise this game won’t have a chance to be balanced.

For a warrior to be tanky they have to play well. All warriors, regardless of build probably have 8 seconds on immunity from direct damage, and good resistance uptime. but once those are expended, they are very vulnerable.

Yeah but they still have a lot more sustain than a thief and dish out more damage – I duelled one yesterday. The problem I have is that I’m D/D so I’m close to my enemies – would be a different story if I were D/P.

DD condi or DD power?

Power

15 chars

It was some fun fights, guess we’re friends now, but I had no chance as I can’t really see when he’s about to use eviscerate or his GS. Additionally he used shield while I was “trapped” in SR – and he hurt really bad

Then again: D/D thief is really weak, so maybe D/D jsut needs a few buffs but I don’t get why I get a 13k+ eviscerate in while my backstabs hit for ~7,7k. I guess you know what I mean.

It seems like you were using zerk and the warrior was using demolisher w defense trait line. Plus the shield provides extra armor.

Valk/zerker but nothing would’ve helped me. A full Nomads thief would be interesting…

ETA: Thing is: Thief’s damage didn’t go up last June, the damage of all other classes did though – so thief has got comparatively less sustain than them – and that is a general problem, not only with thief, in wvw. Something in their calculations went wrong.

I think when specializations got implemented is when backstabs got nerfed. Plus the way lead attacks got inverted throws off my assassination setup. During pre-specialization, I could do valk signet bust and can do 14-10k, now I have to use shadow trap zerk/scholar to barely achieve the same if not less results.

Power thief vs any warrior should go like this. (not saying it ever does but this is how it SHOULD go)

Start-1.5 secs

• DD thief enters stealth if not already in stealth
• Thief powers the warrior down to 50% or lower
• Warrior gets Defy pain. (many warriors waste their shield block here basically wasting Defy pain

1.5-5.5 secs

• Warrior presses the advantage. If he hits you with a stun it’s pretty much game over
• Thief delays for 4 seconds. (I like to utilize Death blossom, or bandits defense)

5.5-Endure pain

• Thief gets back into stealth.
• warrior may try to time his block to cancel your next backstab. but its pretty easy to wait out
• Warrior may proc Endure Pain. (if he does he’s not very wise)
• Thief lands another backstab combo, fight ends
• or!!
• Warrior Times a perfect endure pain proc or block. thief resets fight by running away.

Not that easy with CnD “Just go into stealth!!” Also warriors are pretty mobile with GS and do lots of AoE damage.
But with some practice I might have a chance.
Bandits defense only works with daredevil which is pretty unsuitable for D/D power.
Like I said – maybe D/D just needs some buffs but warrior is pretty strong overall, not just Berserker.

ETA: I guess warrior is one of the classes that’s either OP or UP – but there’s a lot of bugs in this game which have an influence on a class’ performance as well.

emkelly.2371:

Power thief vs any warrior should go like this. (not saying it ever does but this is how it SHOULD go)
…

• DD thief *

Almost all power thieves are D/P which has a much better match up against warriors. At least, I feel that way.

The only build that gives me an issue is boon duration + 40s of resistance (blind immunity). But you can kite that out and reset, which is the beauty of playing a thief.

If you’d like to play a class that is forced to brawl and go toe-to-toe, check out almost any other class. Thief is all about burning expensive enemy CDs and resetting the fight. At least, that’s the way I see it and experience great success with.

Note: I play WvW prettt much exclusively. I realize this is not an option in sPvP. But there we’re the BEST class at +1ing and decapping. So abuse it! (Or play another class if that’s not your cup of tea.)

I love the class flavor in GW2. If they improved thieves’ brawling, they would be forced to mute our mobility/reset-ability. There are more than enough brawler classes, we don’t need class homogenization. Especially in a game where level doesn’t matter in sPvP and tomes are handed out like candy for everything else.

There is literally no excuse for not getting to play a class that fits your playstyle!

@ Blaqtak:

I’m a bit confused here: at first you acknowledge that D/D can’t really do that much to warrior, then you say that thief doesn’t need better brawling abilities.
So what do you mean: D/P doesn’t need better brawling abilities?

I’m gonna take a stab here….I think he means (and i mean) that thieves don’t need more damage or skills fo inflict damage. what they need is higher HP. They should really have ranger base HP. Hell even in pen and paper rpgs thieves have midline HP pools. so why int his game do thieves have crap hp? When the game first came out it made since, because stealth was all over the place and a thief could remain in stealth indefinably, but now, they have whittled away at stealth and what stealth can do for so long that thieves need a higher hp pool.

What he said is the contrary.

“If they improved thieves’ brawling, they would be forced to mute our mobility/reset-ability. There are more than enough brawler classes, we don’t need class homogenization.”

Warrior has excellent capability of dispatching thieves (especially D/D with the BV change to 1 stack), particularly the primal power builds running around. GS3 cleaves and resets which screws over offensive power D/D, and GS5 has a similar effect. HB → SoP → Rage → AD is enough to take a thief 100-0 in most cases if they get CC’ed, which isn’t too awful to do against power D/D since it lacks blinds to make these skills miss and needs to get in close for damage with objectively lower mobility. D/D power can’t waste initiative on DB for the most part, anyways.

In most instances, the warrior will just block for the CnD attempts causing wasted initiative for the thief on cast and no damage taken enabling more aggressive play. 9 seconds of invuln and an extra dodge later, and it’s winning the fight if the thief doesn’t pretty much reset entirely… to which the warrior will still have his blocks available and see a quickly-draining ICD on Defy Pain.

Thieves don’t need higher base health pools, especially now with Daredevil. A thief can build for health in gear by pushing more vitality, and can trait into CS to compensate. Or, it can just play marauder and do neither while getting the benefits of both while reaping even bigger benefits of huge damage mitigation on power-creeped-to-hell-Daredevil.

Warriors are much easier to kill on S/P than any other set in my experience. Use 2 and dodges to make them waste their mobility skills, spike with pistol whip when they can’t easily escape or chase you. Pressure with headshot, kite after each spike and wait for their endure pains to expire. If anything, stealth is a hindrance as I find warriors waste more cooldowns trying to catch a thief they never lose sight of.

Bandit’s defense is also a must. Just don’t go near a warrior unless you have this ready.

@ Deceiver:
Still doesn’t adress how to make D/D viable against warrior (for example) – how do you buff D/D to be able to withstand the heavy melee damage (and the stuns)?

D/D has got too little sustain for warrior/ warrior has too much damage for D/D thief.
I don’t think it’s useful to assume that every thief is a D/P DrD. That’s my point.

And: The damage in wvw went up with June 23th patch, vitality didn’t.

Jana.6831:

@ Deceiver:
Still doesn’t adress how to make D/D viable against warrior (for example) – how do you buff D/D to be able to withstand the heavy melee damage (and the stuns)?

D/D has got too little sustain for warrior/ warrior has too much damage for D/D thief.
I don’t think it’s useful to assume that every thief is a D/P DrD. That’s my point.

And: The damage in wvw went up with June 23th patch, vitality didn’t.

Yea, but blanket buffs won’t help D/D that much, either, considering the berserker is going to have the damage to take out even another 5-10k health on the thief with relative ease if he caught him to begin with. If D/D power ever gets competitive in its current weapon skills, then D/P- and likely the thief against everything else – is going to be objectively overpowered.

You mean if they get a vitality buff?

That is true but what do you do with D/D? Just leave it as it is because there’s other sets? Or try to roll back the game to a previous state in which the damage was more moderate?

ETA: Sorry, really tired and exhausted right now – I think about how to word this better.
I just think that there’s no way to buff D/D sufficiently. Some more stacks of blind for CiS? Would be interesting but might not help either.

I was going to make a long post and explain exactly why I am unhappy with the state of the game as a thief player, but I realize that for the amount of constructive criticism I would receive that would actually be constructive it would be pointless. Instead I’ll explain the general reason and leave specifics to those who still hope for balance.

My first MMO experience came from WoW… I never really accomplished anything in that game because of my obsession with alts. In the course of all the alts I tried I was able to discover which play style I prefer. The class I eventually considered to be my main was an arms / fury warrior, the nature of energy based classes make them extremely versatile and adaptable to a situation (especially when you don’t always know how much rage or randomly named energy units you may have) rather than rotation dependent, intrigued me and has emerged as my favorite play style. Fly by the seat of my pants if you will.

When GW2 came out I was determined to master one class so I could really enjoy the endgame, I picked thief because it had potential to outplay and what seemed to be a very clutch and compelling play style. Here we are 4 years down the road +4k hours invested in thief (adapted to every nerf, agree with about 50% of them, could name them if I wanted to have a more in depth discussion about thief mechanics and game play, but I fail to see a point in it) and I feel like playing has become more akin to working then something enjoyable.

At the end of the day since the point in mastering one class lay mostly in time management; if I have to start over I will do it in another game. Thanks for the fun Anet, I believe I have had about all there is to have here. Sorry if this comes off as ranty, not sorry enough not to post it. =-D

Jugglemonkey.8741:

Warriors are much easier to kill on S/P than any other set in my experience. Use 2 and dodges to make them waste their mobility skills, spike with pistol whip when they can’t easily escape or chase you. Pressure with headshot, kite after each spike and wait for their endure pains to expire. If anything, stealth is a hindrance as I find warriors waste more cooldowns trying to catch a thief they never lose sight of.

Bandit’s defense is also a must. Just don’t go near a warrior unless you have this ready.

pistol whip never spike someone if he isn’t braindead
that’s why you can’t see S/P thief as meta

Gibimo.2193:

Jugglemonkey.8741:

Warriors are much easier to kill on S/P than any other set in my experience. Use 2 and dodges to make them waste their mobility skills, spike with pistol whip when they can’t easily escape or chase you. Pressure with headshot, kite after each spike and wait for their endure pains to expire. If anything, stealth is a hindrance as I find warriors waste more cooldowns trying to catch a thief they never lose sight of.

Bandit’s defense is also a must. Just don’t go near a warrior unless you have this ready.

pistol whip never spike someone if he isn’t braindead
that’s why you can’t see S/P thief as meta

Actually, S/P isn’t in the meta because of limited stealth access without bound, and less immediate spike. The damage is very good still, and if you wait out cooldowns and dodges they can’t avoid it. More of a duelling spec than anything tho.

But anyway. You play what you enjoy and so will I