Guild Wars 2

What is the over all opinion of the Dec. 10th patch and what went well and what went wrong?
Keep it civilized please!

Initiative gain is nice,
New heal would be nice if it wasn’t held back by 30 point trait.
I swapped assassin’s reward for pain response
and still won’t trait for hard to catch.

so all and all……meh

Upset with the nerf to vigorous recovery. I have 30% boon duration and can’t make it up to the old base value. It was nice that they rolled Quick recovery into our base regen, but I no longer see a reason to trait more than 15 into acrobatics. Opportunist nerf kept this an overall neutral change and just let me put 5 points somewhere else and rewards less aggressive play. Overall I think the nerfs exceeded the gains. I don’t want to go through changes to S/X as I already left that set; someone else still using it can cover those changes.

New heal is a good addition to the repertoire of the thief.
Vigor isn’t the main selling point of Bountiful theft, and it’s loss is not that large.
Ini changes are for the better, builds without ini traits are stronger for it. Which means they’re making headway in their diversity goal.
I have not tried it with S/D since I became pretty much Perma S/P in January but shadow return breaks the flow of the set a lot right now. To the point I’m starting to rather it just not be on the set anymore until they do their tweaks. I doubt S/D feels as fluid as well. It’s pretty easy to predict thief vulnerability and unfortunately hard to catch’s design doesn’t actually make it fit the role you would take it for…which is situations such as this.
Venoms gained more flexibility and I think they did well with this new skill to broadening that aspect of thief play.

I’d say the thief has been put into a decent transitional period, where frankly it feels incomplete, but they’ve put ground work in this patch to put the thief in a more polished and ….wholesome(?) direction than before.

Thus far. New heal’s interesting and they’ve finally managed to make my favourite weapon set since betas feel like an empty husk. I’ll see if I can continue using S/D.

Do not overlook the new swiftness. There a whole lot of people that feel forced to use a slot on the toolbar for that extra 25 percent movement speed or using runes to get that speed that might compromise other skills.

Swiftness is now 20 seconds after a kill. It stacks with a short 5 second cooldown between kills. That means 22 seconds per kill of swiftness. I was fooling around with it in PvE and was stacking up 2 minutes of swiftness without breaking a sweat. I took it into WvW and in Zerg Fights was at permanent swiftness. Roaming the map just kill a few trash mobs enroute and you fly around.

I am really liking the new INI with my p/d and d/d condition build. I get more attacks in without having to pick Roll for INI or hastened replenishment. This does mean more choices in the builds and using utilities I just never had room for before.

I am underwhelmed my the new heal when I compare to withdraw but continue to tinker to see if I can make it work. At this point withdraw just works better with the evade and those condition cleanses.

My new notion is trying it as my heal along with all deception (thus stealth) utilities in my toolbar along with Improv. On steal there a good chance one or the two recharges and I get either another heal and basilisk right away or all my deceptiosn recharged wherein I drop into stealth or use blind if in trouble.

INI not as bad as I had feared, and I see a lot of improvements. Let’s hope that we don’t get nerfed due to the level of buffs.

The initiative changes are pretty bad. It hurts certain specs while buffing others that really didn’t need the extra initiative (D/D & P/D). The reduction on initiative gain for signets hurts as well as the quick INI gain could be be used in pretty tight situations.

The vigor nerfs also hurt quite a bit but not as bad as I thought. I still don’t see how ANet think Hard to Catch is a viable substitute as that is just a trash trait and pretty much a death sentence if taken.

Infusion of Shadows is a fantastic nerf. Permasteath trash is gone and thats a good thing for the class. On the other hand IR nerf is the worst thing EVER. I understand the need of the nerf of the pseudo stun break, but why nerf this and leave Mesmer staff #2 alone? The cast time though means the skill loses so much potential in skill comboing.

Skelk venom…. LOL…. that all that needs.

I find it pretty interesting so far. Without having to take the ini traits, I’m able to play around with some ideas I haven’t really been able to before. I feel like I’m in a great place with S/P, able to keep AoE Blind up permanently throughout a fight. With 20 points in Acro, and 30 in Crit, I’ve got another 20 points that I’ve been moving around to different places. Thinking I may try out 1500 range on Steal? Maybe with Mug?

So disappointed I didn’t even log in, and instead played some ipad games like Asphalt 8 and infinity blade 3.

Really glad permastealth is gone though, that makes all the other nerfs worth it.

I like that they’re adding new skills, the problems with Skelk Venom aside. Even if it’s an unreliable heal and/or part of a bad skill group (which, in my opinion, it is), it’s another option and helps increase build diversity. That’s a good thing.

However, I do not like the way it’s been instituted. 25 skill points? Really? For level 80 mains with hundreds of skill points and nothing to do with them, unlocking these new heals is no issue, but in no way is this alt-friendly. Nor is it accessible to new players, who are going to wonder why they have to farm skill points for a heal that isn’t all that spectacular.

The other changes have left me with a general feeling of “meh.” A lot of the changes—like Hard to Catch—seem nonsensical, and it looks and feels like they completely ignored the feedback they got from the Thief forums community on their proposal. The initiative buff is going to be a nice change for my build, but since I run S/D, I still feel nerfed. It’s disheartening to get that sensation after most major patches.

For now, I’m distracting myself with Wintersday activities until the dust settles. My opinion might change in the future.

My d/p burst build in tpvp got a boost with init regen.

My wvw build still works but frustrating fighting classes like mesmers who can stealth longer Zander eventually kill me.

- Infiltrator Strike had this nerf coming, though toggle could do with being less laggy.
- Pistol Whip startup is smoother
- Venomshare is still a suboptimal gimmick
- Still won’t ever need more than 15 in Acrobatics
- D/P permacheesers all rerolled mesmer

As people have said earlier, these nerfs are pretty sloppy and don’t particularly address the problem that thieves have a difficult time fulfilling anything except peripheral roles in the meta. Changes to vigor and sustain options are weird because anet was pushing for these things a couple months ago. Current rewards for sticking it out in combat raw are lackluster.

Maybe if they pushed the base heal up on Assassin’s Reward it would be worth taking but that would support scrubby spam play so whatever.

Initiative regeneration feels good. In WvW, I never ran with Infused with Shadow because I preferred having Cloaked in Shadow (Blind) and Shadow’s Embrace (condition cleanse), so this was a significant buff for me.

For PvE, Pistol Whip feels a lot smoother but I really feel the difference when I want to lay down Black Powder back-to-back on trash and maintain over 6 initiative for the 10% damage. Sword 2’s “nerf” hasn’t affected me at all.

I’ve never used the other traits folks are complaining about, and quite frankly I had to look them up to see what the fuss was about. Venoms bore me to tears so the new heal doesn’t appeal to me at all. Overall, the int buff was great and I feel just as mobile and evasive as before.

I keep seeing this infiltrators strike had this nerf coming. Do people not realize the the return range is 900, clearly there is no range wpn in the game that will reach that far..

Highlie.7641:

I keep seeing this infiltrators strike had this nerf coming. Do people not realize the the return range is 900, clearly there is no range wpn in the game that will reach that far..

It was a spammable pseduo-stun breaker and that alone made it EXTREMELY powerful. I would have preferred if they could have coded it to not be castable while stunned, knocked up, ect instead of adding a cast time. The skill lost not only its broken aspect, but also its ability to be skill comboed with other skills which makes it much more limiting that what it use to do.

With this being nerfed, idk why ANet didn’t touch Phase Retreat (Mesmer staff #2) or Illusionary Leap (Mesmer sword #3). Phase Retreat acted exactly like IS & IR, though on a 6s CD, and iLeap was an actually stun breaker on a 6s CD.

Let’s take a look at the changes from yesterday. This is from a PvP standpoint.Please remember to keep your responses polite, or else your post will be infracted.

Assassin’s Reward – the 35% bonus to healing power scaling has 2 major issues.

• Thieves do not have room for healing power in their specs.

• With 609 healing power, Pre-Patch AR heals 93 health per init spent, Post-Patch AR heals for 99 health per init spent – that’s an additional 1 point of healing per 100 healing power. This doesn’t strike me as a buff, much less one that would necessitate moving AR up to Grand Master tier

Hard to catch – This skill has a litany of issues which make it entirely negative and unusable.

• The teleport direction is random, which is disorienting and potentially harmful to players. Losing control of your character is universally recognized as a negative effect in any MMO.

• The distance is random, between 0 and 600 – a short distance teleport does nothing, and even the maximum distance isn’t enough to escape most stun heavy specs (Hammer warrior?) or outrange most classes ranged weapons.

• It doesn’t break the CC effect.

How can this be considered a survivability buff?

Initiative changes – The intention here was to open up specs so they didn’t have to rely on opportunist and quick recovery for initiative regeneration

• Thief Power/crit specs don’t go 15 points into CS for opportunist. They go 30 points in for Executioner, because it’s the only way to deal enough damage in a power/crit setup to actually kill your opponent. Your Init change didn’t solve pigeonholing, it simply made 30 CS specs weaker.

• You completely devalued quick recovery – instead of giving the trait an additional non-init related effect to compensate and make it worth taking, you left it at 1 init per 10s. The trait is now nearly worthless; this observation was made numerous times when the patch note preview was posted.

Infiltrator’s Return – It was predicted this would kill sword mainhand, and after rudimentary testing, those predictions appear to have come true.

• S/X specs give up alot to do what they do. Stealth is either entirely devalued (S/D) or possibly only with utilities (S/P), meaning the thief is almost always visible. Sword mainhand does slow, steady DPS with stats a Dagger MH spec would consider “burst”. The spec relies on evading nearly every attack (including AA at times) to survive long enough to do lethal damage. Inf return was the only reason sword mainhand was viable – without it, you’ve killed sword mainhand. Again, predicted by the community.

Vigor Nerfs – 35-40% less vigor uptime for the only class in the game without access to stability or protection, no blocks, and no immunity skills.

• Thieves now have less endurance with which to actively dodge attacks, and were not given the survivability tools required to mitigate the damage from those attacks. This results in more easily killed thieves.

Skelk venom – Perhaps the most disappointing of all.

• Skelk venom is provably worse than Withdraw and HiS in any spec other than Venom Share – even if the heal was amazing with venom share (it isn’t, more on that below) this would be poor design – a new heal that only works with 30/x/30/x/x specs?

• If you dedicate 60 points and 4 major traits to venoms, Skelk venom becomes a decent group support tool, but it’s missing personal survivability which the thief needs. It does nothing for conditions – it only outheals Withdraw over time by using 3 traits (Residual, Quick venoms, leeching) AND only if you hit all 5 of your skelk venom triggers. After looking at all the other heals, I can’t help but feel this is tied for worst new heal with Necro’s signet.

Infusion of Shadow – The only deserved nerf.

• I’m ecstatic to see the death of D/P permastealth. I’ve always felt it was counter to the design of stealth in the game, and that it was cheesy. I wish they would have come up with a more elegant solution which would have allowed thieves to continuing using Blinding Powder while in stealth and SR to regenerate Init, but I understand the overall goal of the change and agree that it was necessary.

Dancing Dagger – The notes say “Dancing dagger’s tooltip changed to reflect actual cripple duration”, as if the cripple was always supposed to be lower than the tooltip. Either DD made it 2 years with incorrect cripple duration listed, or this was a stealth nerf.

The takeaway from all this? All of our nerfs were nerfs. Most of our “buffs” were also nerfs. Those buff’s that weren’t in actuality nerfs (Practiced tolerance, sundering strikes, critical haste) were so minor as to not mean much at all. The Class was average in competitive play prior to this patch – it’ll be non-existant until the next patch (imo) , and I for one am not excited in having to wait another 2-3 months for my class to not be clearly and overwhelmingly UP.

S/X Builds are DONE. NO MORE S/X BUILDS. SWORD IS COMPLETELY USELESS

Is it? I’m still using it. Feels fine. No issues, actually. A 1/4 cast time that allows me to move while I cast it doesn’t really affect me that much. In fact, the Buff to S/P #3 is pretty nice. I like it. I feel like I can take traits that aren’t JUST INITIATIVE in order to use Black Powder once in a while.

Go play Warrior and stop whining if you can’t survive out there anymore.

The hyperbole around here is extremely irritating.

I am also enjoying the new S/P; the change to Pistol Whip was just what the doctor ordered, and I can drop my points in Trickery without constantly running dry on initiative. I’ve been using the altered Sundering Strikes to good effect with the 9-hits of PW. Critical Haste is consistent, now: there’s somethings like an 80% chance that a Pistol Whip is going to get me quickness by the end.

The new Sword #2 is taking some getting used to, but it’s still useful for the things that I generally did with it in the first place.

Underrated change: Practiced Tolerance gave me the green light to drop some of my Valkyrie gear.

Pretty much every aspect of my build got buffed (except infiltrator’s signet … but who cares about that nerf anyway).

I’m worried that the thief is too strong and will get nerfed back into oblivion, but I’ll live it up while I can.

DakSevkla.3278:

S/X Builds are DONE. NO MORE S/X BUILDS. SWORD IS COMPLETELY USELESS

Is it? I’m still using it. Feels fine. No issues, actually. A 1/4 cast time that allows me to move while I cast it doesn’t really affect me that much. In fact, the Buff to S/P #3 is pretty nice. I like it. I feel like I can take traits that aren’t JUST INITIATIVE in order to use Black Powder once in a while.

Go play Warrior and stop whining if you can’t survive out there anymore.

I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.

Unfortunately, your level of enjoyment is not a metric with which we can measure competitive PvP effectiveness of S/X. By all of those metrics, S/X is dead.

I hope arena will nerf his and withdraw into oblivion, so ppl will be forced to take new poison heal. Yhats arena way.

I would imagine something is wrong if I actually changed my weapons into shortbow/shortbow from shortbow S/P. Good job anet, good job.

PS – I don’t bother with 1v1s in WVW, right now hiding behind the zerg is the safest.