Guild Wars 2

Hello my thieving friends.

A friendly engineer here, with a question.
My main focus is WvW, and as I’m sure you are aware, the amount of thieves in WvW/PvP are getting ridiculous.
I’m not here to complain, I know how to handle thieves and in 80-90% of my encounters with thieves I come out on top.

I expect the thief population to go down once more people figure out how to counter them and other people start to realize being a thief isn’t babymode to victory.
But I’d digress.

I have a small pet peeve when it comes to your ability to escape from lost fights.
Even if I drop everything I’ve got on your kitten some of you still manage to slip away.
I’m fine with most thieves escaping, if done right. Using the shortbow’s abilities and the correct utilities to escape is just dandy and acceptable to me.
GG and we’ll meet again some other time.

Most of the time I just know when my thieving opponent will start to run because he is at the losing end of the stick.
Sinces thieves are hard to catch when they run I go all out in my attempts to stop them.
I’ll drop my supply crate (stun & immobilize if you don’t stunbreak fast enough) followed by glue bomb (immobilize) and further dps’ing.
In most cases, thieves are quick enough to stunbreak and create some distance.
Then I’ll pull them back in range of the net turret with magnet (a pull ability).
I’ll cripple you with box of nails and interrupt your escape anyway I can.

But here’s the thing.
Some of you just spam heartseeker to get away and there is literally nothing I can do.
Magnet does not work. When I apply magnet to a heartspamming thief he’ll fall flat on his face for a brief moment but he will not be pulled towards me.
The thief gets back on his feet and just happily heartseeks away.

To be crystal clear on this, my magnet ability will interrupt heartseeker and create a knockdown at the position where the thief is a that point, but will not be pulled towards me as it should.

The problem here in lies within heartseeker itself. (and magnet not doing what it is supposed to be doing ofcourse)
I have a thief alt and I feel what makes heartseeker the skill that so many bad thieves abuse and arguably slighty OP is the pretty big leap it does.

How do you thieves feel about it?
Try to look at it from my point of view.
Having a thief lamely escape with an obvious attack ability instead of using the many other escape abilities that you have under your respective belts out of a fight that they lost.
It’s just simply to easy to escape by pressing #2 multiple times instead of being able to think fast and come up with a solid exit strategy.

I don’t want to cry for a heartseeker nerf, but I would like to see a solution and your opinions on it.
Any ideas or opinions?

wait for ANet to fix the bugs that just about all pull abilities have

Yea it should pull him even when doing heartseeker. Same thing happens to thieves all the time with Scorpion Wire. Half the time they just fall down where they are and don’t get pulled. Best to try to net them or something when Heart-seeker spamming. They just spam it in one spot. I find when fighting other thieves, the best way is to simply predict when they will start thinking about running and act before that time. If you try to stop them after they have made the decision themselves it’s a lot harder.

If you are able to, try to slow the thief when he heartseekers away. Movementspeed abilities affect how far a leap goes. A slowed down leap is pretty short while a swiftness leap goes much further.

if the bug was fixed it wouldn’t be an issue. that said I wouldn’t mind seeing heart seeker get a 1 initiative cost increase. also, does the engineer have much access to cripple or chill? if so saving those for when the thief starts spamming HS will significantly reduce the distance he gets with the ability.

@Gungnir and Panacea
As an engineer if have a huge amount of control abilities.
I try to deploy them all vs thieves and yes, while cripple and other slowing abilities cut down the leap of heartseeker, I still won’t be able to stop it in the grand scheme of things.

Due to the ability to spam heartseeker for copious amounts in a row they simple outleap my cc’s and cripple durations.
Even when I’m using my rifle instead of my trusted pistol/shield, net shot will just blatantly miss when they are spamming away.

Even if I’m successful in placing all my slowdowns, the condition duration simply isn’t long enough to be able to chase him down.

I also have perma-swiftness, so that should count for something.

@ Stiv
I’m experienced enough to predict when I’ll have a runner on my hands and when he’ll start doing so.
But again, in 90% of the cases I dealt with a hs spammer, I was unable to catch them.
Our only source of chill is the grenade kit.
And I’m unwilling to slot that kit just for the sake of catching thieves because my other control abilities don’t work vs heartseeker spammers.

Well yes, no matter how you look at it, your Magnet should pull them back, but it doesn’t, and that’s something that needs looking at with all pulling skills, really. Scorpion Wire for Thieves, too, is prone to failure. I just don’t bother using it anymore, because 90% of the time, it does exactly as you describe, but to a standing target.

I really think you need to place the fault here where it belongs, your magnet ability does not work. Thieves don’t need another nerf. Yes HS can be used multiple times, Initiative is not limitless and they will run out.

That’s only partially true Dundir.
True, my magnet ability does not work while the leap is in progress.

However, if my timing is lucky enough to pull him in between heartseekers it works.
He’s at my feet again. What do you think happens next?
He goes into hs spam again and getting out my grasp at a rapid pace and there is nothing I can do about it.

Sure, iniative is not limitless, but while he is spamming away from me, his stealth abilities and endurance is recharging.
He can easily chain dodges, stealth and hs spam to lose me quickly.

I’m not crying for a nerf, certainly not regarding the damage heartseeker pumps out.
I just feel that the heartseeker skill should not be so easy to spam and it certainly should not be a viable escape tactic.
Sadly, at this point it is.

Siofra Crumble.2098:

I just feel that the heartseeker skill should not be so easy to spam and it certainly should not be a viable escape tactic.
Sadly, at this point it is.

I swapped from d/d to short-bow for my bailing out swap. It ignores all forms of CC. Heartseeker is vulnerable to slows and root like everyone has said. Thieves in general are very vulnerable to knockdowns and knock-backs as well. Not much else you can do aside from rocket jumping to keep up after you have KD/rooted them.

The main thing here is a Thief probably can’t kill you when you set up your yard-sale. They have no choice but to move away. You don’t want them to move away because that’s where your advantage is. This is a stalemate type situation and I don’t think is a balance issue.

I tend to save my yard-sale for when they start running from me.
But sure, it creates a stalemate where I have they have the unfair advantage of being able to abuse heartseeker to get away.

Like I said, it wouldn’t be much of an issue if it wasn’t for their heals, dodges and utilities recharging in the meantime.

I have a decent shot at stopping shortbow users.
The high initiative cost of the #5 ability makes it fair and I’ve caught a fair share of them.

Looks like you know what you’re doing. Good to see people still asking constructive questions about HOW to counter us instead of just whining.

Do you have any long medium-long cripple skills available? If you could apply those during the fight, heartseeker will be useless to get away.

if the thief knows what he is doing it is almost impossible to stop him from getting away

@ Jefzor
No, all my cripple and immobilizes are melee range
The durations are fairly short and they can just double dodge, lose the cripples and heartseek away.

@Poizie
Sure, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

Even though this is sort of apples and oranges, what would you say about an elementalist’s Ride the Lightning?

Unfortunately, if he’s good, you won’t catch him. I’m always the dude saying and giving advice on how to counter bs and p/d thieves, but a thief is a slippery class. Nothing is as mobile, theres little one can do when a thief decides to run.

@Skinny
D/D ele’s can’t run from me.
Ride the lightning is one thing, I just pull them back in.
They can’t spam it.

@Doomdesire
If he’s good, he shouldn’t have to resort to spamming an attack skill to get away.
And sure, I can accept thieves slipping away. But again, it has to be done right.
Spamming heartseeker to get away is a lame way to do it, since there isn’t a reliable counter.

I’m not expecting some kind of resolution here, but I just wondered how thieves themselves felt about it.
I couldn’t just spam heartseeker to escape in PvP without feeling terribly guilty about it. So I never did.
That’s all.

We are built to hit and run. That means, we can run away.

Sorry but that is how the class is built and we should be able to use our tools to get away in pvp.

You know, we are thieves after all.

Sounds like your pull is broke against a specific ability. I think classes should use their abilities to their full potential even if a bit unorthodox. I will continue to travel with my short bow. Was it meant to get away or port to a target? I use it for mobility. You see a lot of thieves use HS to close the gap between them and their target to finish them off. Is that use acceptible? Not much difference to me.

As someone earlier in the thread already said, it sounds like your ability isnt working correctly in conjunction with HS. Thats the real problem.

Side note, I dont use HS to escape. I rarely use it at all.