Guild Wars 2

Wait, with how weapon skills work on a thief with their initiative system, there is always going to be one attack that grants the best/most efficient form of damage. With no cooldowns, won’t that ability always be used? Isn’t that the reason we only HAVE one, maybe two damaging abilities per weapon set and the rest are utility based around that?

NAWP. QQ NEWB THIEF L2Press MOAR BUTTONS IDIOT.
^I literally copy and pasted that together from two different posts.

While there are changes that need to be made, it’s fallacious to assert it’s because we max our damage with 1 or 2 skills.

Most of the thieves go out and burn down opponents at 45-60% health with HS spamming. This is not skill.

Sure it can be countered, but 8/10 even a new player will down an opponent with that tactic at that amount of health. And HS is not the most effective skill we have, but noobs who chain spam it give thieves a bad name.

To the OP’s assertion: Pretty much, yes.

Most professions utilize most of the abilities on their bar regularly and hone their role by traiting and gearing towards it. Since thieves can use one ability over and over, thieves can hone their role through weapon ability use. When the role is doing damage, you’ll see a lot of spamming one ability. Other professions see this and believe that the problem is that particular skill is too powerful when really that particular skill is, by design, “the damage skill”. While thieves “damage skills” or “control skills” (looking at you, chain-daze headshot) might seem overpowered on their own, the entire skillset is meant to be roughly equitable with other professions’ weapon sets.

It’s not like playing cool-down whack-a-mole is any more skillful. Every class has it’s mix of good and bad players.

If you get yourself down to 45%-60% health with more than two enemies around you and didnt run or back off, you deserve to get aced by a thief with a full initiative bar.

That’s simply a thief using heartseeker for what it was designed to do – Fast burst damage on low health targets.

As a thief, let me tell you, if you over extend from your zerg and you go down to 40% health… YES I’m going to jump on you like an 8yr old on a trampoline.

If you chase me, all by yourself, far away from your group… well, now you’re in my house and I live in a house of pain.

but.. that’s what thieves do.. we pick off over-extenders and the slow members of the herd

Ive no concern for the glass cannon build, nor do I enjoy the concept of such build that much. Frankly, its a great build to stomp pubbies, but it’s also a double-edged sword. While the majority of players love to stomp pubbies by smashing haste+2+ w/e venoms they have + power/crit signet, they will also feel the pain of being finished off just as fast. Forget comparing thieves to other classes, a glass cannon thief vs a thief with an unknown or not as popular build shows just how terrible going full damage can do to a class. I personally believe people are diverting their focus of creating an unbeatable build to compromising with the easiest build thought possible. This is why I’m thoroughly disappointed with the majority of thieves so far, because the majority (if not all) focuses so much on damage that they’ve forgotten on how to even survive in pvp. The whole concept of surviving by killing is pure bullcrap, because there is no possible way of being capable of finishing another player down (especially with the down system) before their reinforcement arrives. This is why a lot of people believe thieves don’t contribute much in wvw, because most players limit themselves to assassination jobs and have little regard on the primary objective of taking points.

The biggest problem the thief will face is the initiative system, the reason for this is due to the fact that initiative rewards players for efficient usage rather than varied usage.

Just looking at the damaging abilities of the various weapon set combinations you can see that many sets have only one damaging ability that uses initiative;
Sword-Dagger: Flanking strike (4 initiative)
Sword-Pistol: Pistol Whip (5 initiative)
Dagger-Dagger: Heartseeker (3 initiative) AND Death Blossom (5 initiative)
Dagger-Pistol: Heartseeker (3 initiative) AND Shadow Shot (4 initiative)
Pistol-Pistol: Unload (5 initiative)
Pistol-Dagger: Shadow Strike (4 initiative)

That’s a list of initiative using abilities that deal significant damage, as you can easily see there aren’t enough abilities there for a thief to be anything but a one button wonder, hell with the way stats work in GW2 having a pistol in the main hand requires the use of condition damage and power to make it mediocre (otherwise it’s terrible) but those stats counter the use of Unload or Shadow Strike which benefit mostly from power/precision/crit damage.

So to all the people complaining about one button wonder thieves, based on this information can you suggest any way for a thief to NOT be forced to spam one button when the system punishes us for using all of our skills?

Yewkon.5802:

If you get yourself down to 45%-60% health with more than two enemies around you and didnt run or back off, you deserve to get aced by a thief with a full initiative bar.

Right, because everyone can run from the thief; the most mobile class in the game.

Try playing another class before making a comment like this.

Yewkon.5802:

As a thief, let me tell you, if you over extend from your zerg and you go down to 40% health… YES I’m going to jump on you like an 8yr old on a trampoline.

Isn’t that the same thing you’ve said above? Run or back off when you get to low HP? And now its a bad idea…

Yewkon.5802:

If you chase me, all by yourself, far away from your group… well, now you’re in my house and I live in a house of pain.

but.. that’s what thieves do.. we pick off over-extenders and the slow members of the herd

So in other words, thieves are meant to win 1v1s?

What?

You’re not helping people to view thieves in a non-OP light here…

There is a major misconception among gamers; inability to tell player skill from management skill.

Reflexes, timing, reaction = player skill
Managing more buttons = management skill

Obviously Thief is one of the most player skill based classes when it comes to timing, reaction and reflexes.

Having more buttons to press doesn’t require more skill.

Redscope.6215:

Yewkon.5802:

If you chase me, all by yourself, far away from your group… well, now you’re in my house and I live in a house of pain.

but.. that’s what thieves do.. we pick off over-extenders and the slow members of the herd

…
So in other words, thieves are meant to win 1v1s?
…

The key words are “chase” and “far away from your group”, this makes combat all about mobility. I wouldn’t say “thieves are meant to win 1v1” is entirely correct, but “thieves are meant to win in mobility” certainly is. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll kill your opponent, or even get them down, but it does mean a thief likely won’t be downed themselves in this situation, since anything they can’t win against they can certainly escape from.

Whether this is balanced is debatable. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thieves having the most mobility, but it may be too available to thieves that aren’t actually putting any focus towards it. A thief running heavy acrobatics, “Uncatchable”, and multiple mobility utilities should certainly be king of movement, but a thief simply running SoS and a shortbow swap gets much of that benefit without really losing anything for it.

Lookie here. It doesn’t mean that one attack does the most damage and you’re spamming it. It means that this attack is totally self-sufficient and you don’t need to use any utilities to set up your damage.

Over the top damage – no need for quick interrupts, one HS will outDPS his heal anyway. Low cost – just spam, no need to use abilities or careful timing to regenerate INI. Gap closer – no need to cripple/stun/dispel Swiftness, just spam. Leap finisher – triggers Stealth and all kinds of beneficial effects easily with no setback.

Coffeebot.3921:

The biggest problem the thief will face is the initiative system, the reason for this is due to the fact that initiative rewards players for efficient usage rather than varied usage.

Just looking at the damaging abilities of the various weapon set combinations you can see that many sets have only one damaging ability that uses initiative;
Sword-Dagger: Flanking strike (4 initiative)
Sword-Pistol: Pistol Whip (5 initiative)
Dagger-Dagger: Heartseeker (3 initiative) AND Death Blossom (5 initiative)
Dagger-Pistol: Heartseeker (3 initiative) AND Shadow Shot (4 initiative)
Pistol-Pistol: Unload (5 initiative)
Pistol-Dagger: Shadow Strike (4 initiative)

That’s a list of initiative using abilities that deal significant damage, as you can easily see there aren’t enough abilities there for a thief to be anything but a one button wonder, hell with the way stats work in GW2 having a pistol in the main hand requires the use of condition damage and power to make it mediocre (otherwise it’s terrible) but those stats counter the use of Unload or Shadow Strike which benefit mostly from power/precision/crit damage.

So to all the people complaining about one button wonder thieves, based on this information can you suggest any way for a thief to NOT be forced to spam one button when the system punishes us for using all of our skills?

Not all of those work Sword and dagger Flanking strike has slow animation, clunky pathing and sometimes misses on its own, i would not call that a damage skill, unless you are talking PvE wise, which again is offtheme.

Edelweiss.9815:

Lookie here. It doesn’t mean that one attack does the most damage and you’re spamming it. It means that this attack is totally self-sufficient and you don’t need to use any utilities to set up your damage.

Over the top damage – no need for quick interrupts, one HS will outDPS his heal anyway. Low cost – just spam, no need to use abilities or careful timing to regenerate INI. Gap closer – no need to cripple/stun/dispel Swiftness, just spam. Leap finisher – triggers Stealth and all kinds of beneficial effects easily with no setback.

If you are as dumb as a mob then HS spam will probably kill you. PVP isn’t for everyone but HS spammers are typically noobs who haven’t figured out that ability was nerfed. Proper damage needs to be set up (backstab specs do that), but the thief, the whole class evolves around making one ability take prio over others for maximum effect.

One thing I really didn’t get was what A-Net had to say about the PW nerf… that it promoted a 1 button gameplay… yeah, fair enough, but when PW is the single damage ability (with the exception of the auto attack ) for that weapon set while others are more debuff/utility, how the hell do you expect players not to abuse it especially considering you play a hit and run class with high damage and low survivability.

Hahaha I’ve found a wonderful build now. I have high hopes that it won’t be nerfed due to how players perceive OPness, even though this nasty build is probably my most effective one yet.

“Over the top damage – no need for quick interrupts, one HS will outDPS his heal anyway. "
If you’re fighting a dagger thief then I recommend not letting your health drop below 50% before healing, otherwise this might be the case. If you did then you failed to fight the thief properly.

“Low cost – just spam, no need to use abilities or careful timing to regenerate INI.”
The initiative system is global across all weapons so even though we have a weapon swap we don’t get a whole new 5 skills to use when our other ones have been spammed like with a cooldown class. This is the mechanic that makes the class unique and has been quite balanced. If you spam without a means to recover initiative then you’re SOL for quite some time unless you enjoy auto attacking for over half of combat.

“Gap closer – no need to cripple/stun/dispel Swiftness, just spam.”
Uhhh this makes little sense, however allow me to break it down into “Gap closers” and “Swiftness + spam.”
—Gap closers – Yes the thief has many gap closers. They cost initiative and, aside from heartseeker strike, they don’t do damage. If using heartseeker strike to gapclose then you have significantly less reliable means of escape. Use this to your advantage.
—Swiftness + spam – Yes, swiftness is horribly broken. Namely Pistol Whip + swiftness, in the thief’s case. I would love it if they’d fix the constant evading while stunning enemies without ruining the damage for everyone to the point where auto attacks are more DPS. Lucky for me I’m not a newb who has to use this cheesy tactic.

“Leap finisher – triggers Stealth and all kinds of beneficial effects easily with no setback.”
If you’re referring to how a move’s combo finisher can trigger combos off of fields… Then you just sat in a thief’s field while he used his leap finisher. Nice. Why learn how to position yourself when you can whine until the class in question gets nerfed?
If you’re referring to heartseeker strike doing more damage as a finisher when you’re low HP, then Idk what beneficial effects you’re referring to.
————————————————————————————————————————————————

This was fun. I’m going to continue stomping people in WvW and pumping out the most delicious numbers I’ve accomplished yet in PvE. Thank goodness I enjoy making my class effective as opposed to making my class iconic with a certain setup in mind, then being thrown to the hounds when it comes to what the developer nerfs when it comes to what people whine about. I feel sorry for more heavy RPers like that because they’re getting shafted. Oh well.

“If you are as dumb as a mob then HS spam will probably kill you.”

LOL nemo LOL.

I think the only times I died in PvE was because of afk :P Off to get an icecream bar and come back dead <—- glassy.
When I run out of initiative, yes, I do press 1. Guess what, the pistol 1 gives bleed dmg :P Thieves work on a different system than other classes. We can literally use up ALL of our allotted “other-button-skills” in 3 seconds.

Stin.9781

Not all of those work Sword and dagger Flanking strike has slow animation, clunky pathing and sometimes misses on its own, i would not call that a damage skill, unless you are talking PvE wise, which again is offtheme.

I was using that to show that there was one damage ability for that weapon set, not so much that it was a good damage ability, if we are honest about it neither Shadow Shot or Shadow Strike are used for their damage, if you have a Heartseeker build then you aren’t going to use Death Blossom (due to lack of condition damage) and if you have a pistol main hand then you really need condition damage to make it useful but that lowers the burst effectiveness of Unload, at present Pistol Whip seems to do less damage than auto attacking and you are correct about Flanking Strike.

The only good ability the thief class has is Heartseeker all the rest are lackluster in their output vs. initiative cost which still leads thieves to be a one button wonder… or more specifically thieves only have one useful initiative based damaging button from all their weapon sets.

If only there was a way to make the Thief profession more unnecessarily elaborate and cumbersome to play…

The only way to satisfy everyone out of the thief class is for thieves to just stand there and autoattack.

Other classes would do the same, if they didnt have a colddown.

And with 5 skills, its not exactly a whole lot of options.

For example in WvW I almost never use anything besides 1 and 2 on the shortbow. And since 1 is auto attack…

ColdSpyder – Two of the most commonly used and viable gap closers are Infiltrator’s Strike and Steal itself, one of which always does damage, the other of which is very commonly traited to do so. I wouldn’t say it is correct, then, to say “aside from heartseeker strike, they don’t do damage.” Furthermore, “swiftness” isn’t broken, swiftness is a runspeed increase, you’re thinking of quickness.

Ah yes, thank you Tulisin.
As for the gap closers, I’ve never traited my steal to do damage as there are other traits I prefer… but as for infiltrator’s strike, that does almost no damage. The key aspect of that gap closer is the brief immobilize it offers. I can assure you that spamming infiltrators strike in any amount for damage is… Ineffective. Besides, now that auto attack is the highest damage skill of any sword combo, you have no other damage to fear! ;P

As for the swiftness vs. quickness correction, again ty. Since those two words are synonymous I often mix them up XD. That being the case a thief DOES need to worry if his target is quicker than him. Many cases I will back off by using shadow return on infiltrator’s strike and wait for the buff to end and then gapclose back onto them and restart. While a handy counter to which you will have to devise a counter of your own, it still fails your assertion that battles are won by spamming.
Thieves have about one damage ability per weaponset. That’s just the way it is. A thief’s job is to use those other skills to get to a point where he can mash that damage onto you. It’s very tactical in its own right, in some ways more than pressing whatever button isn’t on cooldown.
The only “spammy” build out there that could ignore most circumstantial parameters is the heartseeker strike build, which got properly nerfed (Although I would’ve like to see a slight damage increase to our low-hp procs if they’re going to make it more particular as to when we can effectively use it). Any thief using this ability on you when you’re above 100% should be no threat, and if a thief was able to get you below 25 or even 50% with enough initiative left to spam this ability then you’ve been horribly outplayed, sir.

Honestly I was aware that thieves had certain OP sides to their class, but after the nerfs they are fine, in fact the Pistol Whip NERF was totally uncalled for. But now people just seem like they are out for blood. I had a guy complaining about the thief downed state too, leaving aside the moaning about HS, Initative, stealth, backstab and so on. I don’t think there’s ONE thing people have not complained about.

But yeah, few complain about warriors, I mean Bola+100 B tear kitten in PVP, yet PW got nerfed. I guess many complaining are warriors.
Guardians, ha! It’s just ridiculous fighting a guardian, on one side you got the ones that simply don’t die and the ones that can keep you pretty much stunlocked for half of the fight.

I think thieves are fine, mobie and deal great damage but they are really squishy, so they have a weak point, but yeah, I guess the quality of the typical PVP-er in GW2 preffers to complain instead of exploiting that weakness. And it’s so easy to do that…

@Shintai

I actually use the poison field if I see the enemy advancing through a tight space, it’s not a ton of damage, but it will hit them.

6 I use to catch fleeing enemies or flee myself.

It’s 3 that I rarely use, in PVE or PVP.

If an enemy is close I generally swap to melee set or use IA to get away, not a short hop away and a tiny duration cripple. Seriously you have to spam the skill 3 times to get a decent duration cripple on them.

Redscope.6215:

So in other words, thieves are meant to win 1v1s?

What?

You’re not helping people to view thieves in a non-OP light here…

Thieves are meant to prey on the weak and the stupid. Just look at all the “nerf thief” posts, and you can see that they are quite effective at this.

Nemo.6295:

One thing I really didn’t get was what A-Net had to say about the PW nerf… that it promoted a 1 button gameplay… yeah, fair enough, but when PW is the single damage ability (with the exception of the auto attack ) for that weapon set while others are more debuff/utility, how the hell do you expect players not to abuse it especially considering you play a hit and run class with high damage and low survivability.

That bit was especially funny because in order to be even slightly competitive, pistol whip needs a second button, a skill that is very poorly designed and what caused all the whining to begin with: Haste.

Witough haste pistol whip isnt playable, as long as any player is smart enought to dodge after 0.5 pass eating only 30% of your damage.=1 sword basic attack that crited. Is it more clear to you now ? W/O haste in pvp skill is beh, nuthing else… so boost the skill damage/stun duration or add slowed moving to Pwhip etc u can move but at speed of cripled person or something like that as atm , im more likely to hit 2 basic attacks in a row then 30+% of pwhip in competative pvp. Thats clear now ?

This has probably been stated before, but I haven’t read over everything here. Thieves often don’t have high damage outside of one or two skills within their weapon set (minus dagger, all of them actually do good damage). Take Dagger/Pistol for example you have Heartseeker and Shadow Shot that do good damage, although Shadow Shot isn’t really good DPS if it were spammed. The rest of the skills on D/P do less than auto-attack damage (far less), they’re there for situational/defensive purposes. As others have pointed out it’s the most efficient DPS skill that will be spammed, as I stated before all of D/D skills do good damage, but it’s not efficient to spam say Cloak and Dagger (I don’t mean for BS purposes) or Dagger Throw over HS (assuming they are below 50%). With most weapon sets we’ll honestly be spamming 1 for damage anyways S/D, S/P, P/D (throw in C&D for Sneak Attack) and D/P (until 50%).

With Dagger/Dagger you end up doing more damage with a more varied attack sequence than if you do heartseeker spam, but with every other set you do better damage spamming because the damage on the sets is focused on one skill.

Dagger/Dagger you can in one initiative bar (with the critical strikes initiative regen trait and acrobatics initiative trait) do dancing dagger, steal, cloak and dagger, backstab, and heartseeker again (hopefully finishing them), it will do more damage than simply heartseekering until you’re out of initiative, but not that much more.

But now just change up 1 thing, the offhand weapon to a pistol.

Heartseeker spam does more damage than something like steal > black powder > heartseeker > backstab > heartseeker.

A more interesting attack combo than heartseeker spam? Yes

Is it more effective? No.

Now if black powder did as much damage as cloak and dagger, then we’d be talking. If headshot did as much damage as dancing dagger, again, you’d see more variety in thief play.

But as it is? The skills do low damage so when damage is what you need in the situation, you don’t use them, you use the 1-2 skills on your bar that do the best damage.

Until you lot stop making excuses for Arenanet “but those skills have so much utility! They daze for as long as it takes for you to blink and cost 1/3 of your initiative, the skill is fine!”, it’ll stay that way and thieves will continue to mash the 1 skill on their bar that does damage, unless a situation arises where they have to interrupt something (not as often as you’d like, because at least in PVE, the stuff you want to interrupt is on mobs that are immune to daze 75% of the time), or blind something, they’re not going for utility, they’re going for damage.

Red Falcon.8257:

Obviously Thief is one of the most player skill based classes when it comes to timing, reaction and reflexes.

The ammount of facepalms I just did, just does not cut it.

peopel that get 40-60% by heartseeker are bad pvp’rs getting killed by bad thieves

either that or they don’t understand that a 6-7k heartseeker when you’re at 10% health is a lot of overkiLL and not actual damage

I don’t see why this is a problem when warriors can dish out 100B which can hit for more than HS and they can use it every 6 seconds.

@brickforlife. Roll warrior and then you will understand why.

I have a warrior, and I use 100b just fine, it can be dodged, just like pistol whip could be dodged, and it can be sped up to near unavoidable by frenzy, just like pistol whip is with haste. The difference is hundred blades doesn’t stop their teammates from killing you while you’re rooted, and a certain dev really loves him some warriors and keeps them the most damaging class in the game while having the highest health pool and sharing highest base armor rating with guardians.

Pistol whip now does 7kish damage, 100b still does 30k

Yeah, aside from power/crit based d/d thieves, every other build revolves around mashing that one button.
The problem with power/crit based d/d thieves is that they typically are in the backstab build which, when executed correctly, Absolutely demolishes players who don’t know how to stunbreak before the thief can backstab.
I suppose I’ll be fine. I like a challenge; I’ll gladly come up with new and exciting builds as this class continues to see major changes every patch because newbies don’t feel like learning how to counter a class or build.

Btw, to all newbies who think thieves are OP… I think I actually figured out a 100% guaranteed counter to that thief you can’t kill. It’s a pretty complicated combat maneuver, but bear with me:
Spend more time on the forums whining instead of in the game learning how to play.

ColdSpyder.9082:

Btw, to all newbies who think thieves are OP… I think I actually figured out a 100% guaranteed counter to that thief you can’t kill. It’s a pretty complicated combat maneuver, but bear with me:
Spend more time on the forums whining instead of in the game learning how to play.

Yeah, that’s already been proven to be completely effective a couple times.

Pimpslapper.2047:

Most of the thieves go out and burn down opponents at 45-60% health with HS spamming. This is not skill.

Sure it can be countered, but 8/10 even a new player will down an opponent with that tactic at that amount of health. And HS is not the most effective skill we have, but noobs who chain spam it give thieves a bad name.

Noobs who chain spam it are better than the people they kill with it. If a player can’t counter someone when they know exactly without a doubt what the opponent is going to do than they deserved to lose the fight. They should look at their build and the way they played the engagement and learn from it.

That’s what I find so tragically, yet hysterically, ironic bwillb XD. Honestly, I didn’t mind moving the barrier for HS down from 66% hp. 50% is fine. I just wish it was more like 50%/30% and the numbers for the damage you did then were a bit higher to compensate for the narrowing of the niche for that ability.
Pistolwhip nerf was dumb. Outright. I agree it was OP in a certain regard, but it still is because of the issue with haste. I still assert that the stun and immunity period need to be scaled down the same ratio as the channel when quickness is applied. Tada, no more perma-stunlock from hitting two buttons.

I fully agree with heartseeker’s nerf, trying to encourage more complex skill chains would be nice, and the fact that just spamming heartseeker does almost as much damage as a more complex rotation that uses every skill but death blossom is a bit of a problem I think. I honestly think the damage above 50% health needs to be lower than an autoattack. You shouldn’t heartseeker a target above 50% unless you’re simply trying to reach them from range because it’s a leap or you’re leaping through a smoke field to stealth with it, in that case even if it is just doing an autoattack’s worth of damage it’s worth it because of the utility.

Now if only the other weapon sets had 5 good damage skills as well.