Guild Wars 2

Well I have definately seen a drop in the thief population… Sad day I have never seen this before, even the pioneer thieves have shelffed their thief, but have seen a tremendous increase of ranger population. Ranger wasn’t truly horrible, the people that played them normally had skill to play them and did very well, now the rangers are all LB and GS or S/WH for easy mode pew pew dead. Don’t get me wrong Rangers needed a good buff and they got a pretty good one at that. But GG Anet for pretty much killing the thief population, but I guess that is what they have been doing but this more was blatant and ballsy. Not saying this will even matter because no Dev looks at these just moderators. For the people that are going to troll this thread, for one make a thief and see how hard and skill it takes to pull out these combos, compared to anyother class, well except Ele. It isn’t just the nerfs, its all the stealing and teleport bugs that came with the patch and Anet is just Monkey fixing it. TBH they need to listen to the Top PVP players(which will never happen) from ALL CLASSES to fix the game, because the slow leak of people that stop playing this game will turn into fast moving rapids…

Yeah, after watching steal consistenly bugging out i don’t even bother doing pvp/wvw on my thief anymore. It is simply unplayable.

Its not just PVP its WVW as well. I dont mind getting outplayed, if I get outplayed thats one thing, but I learn from my mistakes and thats what makes you better, but not because of either exploits or bugs/glitches..

Hopefully this is actually true. It’s probably the ONLY way for anet to see us… Oh wait a decrease in thieves? I’m just contradicting myself… How can they see us if we’re extinct.

cause ranger is the shiny new toy, weeding out all the people who where playing htieves just for the perma blind.

I used to have a thief as a main… I got ascended gear, a fractal short bow, the legendary bolt, map completion and hundreds of hours of experience as a thief. I knew all the little things people don’t know about the class… but then it became such a problem for me I had to re-make my character as an engineer. I am not happy, but I will also not be happy as a thief. Why? For me it’s not so much the nerfs directly that ended it, it’s because the community have made me feel awful for playing a thief. It’s either thieves are useless in PvP and WvW or they are OP and cheese and I should feel bad for using one. Every now and then I hear the whole they are selfish and have no party support bit too… I loved the class and still do but now I am to the point where when I log on I just log off.

I want to have fun in a game where classes have no defined roles, but look, the community went and turned it into WoW and apparently thief doesn’t have a role anymore. I want to be a competitive PvPer, WvWer and do high end fractals.. but all that is a no-no for a thief. I’ve been trying to force myself to like engineer… thinking that I would eventually but I’m still not feeling it. GW2 is starting to feel a bit like a bad marriage. I want to love it again like I did at first but I just can’t. : (

It’s not ANet’s fault for the nerfs, it’s the people who keep attacking the thief class that ultimately caused them… if they have never said anything things would probably only be half as a bad or less.

Runewolf.8456:

cause ranger is the shiny new toy, weeding out all the people who where playing htieves just for the perma blind.

I can deal with revealed and buffed rapid fire. Hell, it’s even fun to watch rangers kill themselves shooting into reflect. They are all zerky now so I can kill them even faster. What I simply refuse to deal with it bugged steal and teleports, steal still fails half the times even after that “fix”. Sure some thieves jumped on ranger, most are just tired of trying to make their combos work.

why does everyone say Steal is bugged?
i can do BP>HS>Steal>BS without any problems
or is it random?

Lol I switched to my thief after the warrior adrenaline change, still loving d/d

Syncesta.7592:

why does everyone say Steal is bugged?
i can do BP>HS>Steal>BS without any problems
or is it random?

100% garanteed to bug out for me with HS+ BP combo, often doesn’t work with HS either; also there was undocumented nerf: you can’t use HS + steal outside of steal range like before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONcJFPEaqek

Because thief was the easy cheesy zerker class, now ranger zerker is easier?

I had been using an s/d thief from the first day. Back then it was officially the funnest assassin style build I had ever played in any mmo. I don’t I just love the idea of shadowstep and body flicker on an assassin. I endured all the nerf after nerfs. The dancing dagger nerf, the couple Ls nerfs, the fs nerf, the several ir nerfs, the zerker change up. I’m tired of enduring. Maybe thief is balance now idk but the style of which I have to play my build now is enjoyable for me. It’s just not fun. It’s clunky, unsynergized, clumsy, awkward. And many combos that were a result of creativity and discovery while putting in many hours as a thief have been crushed. They punish you for being creative. I’m done for a while, I’m not gonna reroll because I love being as assassin. The whole concept and look, I love. But Anet has dug the class into a hole and the balancing they do just makes the class high risk and punishment with low reward. I’m gonna be shelving the game for a while (I actually came back from a 3 month break just a couple days ago to see all the new changes).

On another note for everyone who makes fun of thief for being high burst and high damage, this must be your first mmo. The Assassin class is supposed to be the highest melee single target burst in the game, not some tanky, condi spamming wannabe engi with more stealth like its becoming. They are not supposed to fight fair or with honor, they attack from the back. Fact is people don’t like being assassinated. JFK didn’t say “Oh yeah that feels so good, right in my brain”. It’s supposed to suck.

I don’t think anyone makes fun of a Thief for being a high burst, high damage, evasive profession. They make fun of the D/D thieves who only jumped on the profession because they saw some video on YouTube, thinking it was awesome that it had the ability to insta-gib someone. You know, the rather poorly skilled thieves, the ones that will Heartseeker spam. The ones that will abandon the profession over a balance change. If you get bored and want to play something else for a while, that’s different, that’ll happen to everyone on every profession, but if you leave the profession because of a balance change, you were there for the easy mode, the flavor of the month. Simple as that. The Thief is still good at what it does and a very fun profession to play. It’s still rather difficult to actually mess up so badly that you get killed on Thief, and if you do, you got greedy and you deserve to eat that dirt.

I would say it deserved little shaving. I’m playing thief (was my main) too and it was so op to just blackpowder everything and stealth spam with great dmg. Before wvw stacks were introduced I as an dd ele could burst down thief with succesful combo, now i can’t. The assassin class should be hard to play with high risk high reward, not blindstealthspaming/icantbekilled thing. I dont know why did they nerfed s/d which was the only skillful build and in wvw really weak comparing to d/p. Thief should gan more acces to removing condies by traits not just from sa. It would make more variety of builds not just stealth and because of that counterstealth builds (ranger, engi). Traitlines: acrobatic is kinda meh without a trickery

Absconditus.6804:

I don’t think anyone makes fun of a Thief for being a high burst, high damage, evasive profession. They make fun of the D/D thieves who only jumped on the profession because they saw some video on YouTube, thinking it was awesome that it had the ability to insta-gib someone. You know, the rather poorly skilled thieves, the ones that will Heartseeker spam. The ones that will abandon the profession over a balance change. If you get bored and want to play something else for a while, that’s different, that’ll happen to everyone on every profession, but if you leave the profession because of a balance change, you were there for the easy mode, the flavor of the month. Simple as that. The Thief is still good at what it does and a very fun profession to play. It’s still rather difficult to actually mess up so badly that you get killed on Thief, and if you do, you got greedy and you deserve to eat that dirt.

Players complain because their glasscannon exploded from a glasscannon thief who dropped them while they were afking outside a keep. The reason why you see “I quit the profession” threads is because after a few years of getting nerfed, most of the nerfs uneccesary/unneeded/unfair, the players get tired of having to adapt while the other party goes on doing w/e they do.

It’s like what Aguri stated it was: A bad marriage. If the other party isn’t committing and won’t change, then it is probably time to leave. That is what those players are doing.

Rudy.6184:

Before wvw stacks were introduced I as an dd ele could burst down thief with succesful combo, now i can’t.

Thats all I read please celestial ele is more OP than any thief build period. In fact once you get down attunement swapping/skills ele isn’t all that hard.

I haven’t seen a large decrease in thieves, but what I did find was a large decrease in good solo roaming thieves and a large increase in thief roaming groups where there would be 3-5 thieves all running different builds and just focus down 1 guy and /laugh.

Azawrath.7304:

I haven’t seen a large decrease in thieves, but what I did find was a large decrease in good solo roaming thieves and a large increase in thief roaming groups where there would be 3-5 thieves all running different builds and just focus down 1 guy and /laugh.

That’s something expected. Along with the Steal bug + LS nerf, thieves no longer can pull out massive burst due to the difficulty to get close to other classes. I logged in yesterday for the first time after the patch, just to feel how thief is like in post-patch. It was f-ing ridiculous. HS + steal, not working. Not only rangers, other professions’ projectiles now track you down as well when you’re in stealth. Like what’s the purpose of going into stealth then?

I used to main an engi, then switched to thief because I wanna experience some other unique play styles. But I guess that’s not important anymore, because the whole assassin experience is ruined and crushed. See a ranger? Pew Pew Pew Dead. They are even eager to pick fights on thieves now lol, but they forgot their days living like a rat in wvw.

Disappointment to this patch: OVER 9000.

Heh. You’re always going to have a post-nerf decrease. The problem lies in not rebalancing the class you’ve nerfed. This is the point where Thief currently lies: been shafted on a lot of its main kit, and honestly needs a proper looksee. (Same thing happened to Eles, back when ANet smashed Hell outta the older D/D spec and RTL. Or Mesmers after the WvW Confusion Debacle.)

Now, the part that always gets me right bothered, is how long it then takes ANet to start reversing the process. Judging from what we’ve seen up until now, it could be anywhere from a half-year to a year entire until Thieves start to finally see some proper buffs to balance out some of these rather mistimed nerfs. Thing is, how many Thief players will be left in April or September ’15?

to be honest, thief DO need a revamp. Pre patch, they were fodder for good rangers, engineers and guardians (couldn’t kill em, or died trying to hard). Now, they are just fodder.

I played some PvP, but i try not to play LB/GS anymore. It has gotten too much attention, thus you get focused too fast, too often. I still notice that what was manageable for a thief pre patch, simply destroy them in milliseconds now. They got no counter unless the stars align.

As for next feature pack. I hope thieves get a better buff, i love my PP venom thief to death. It’s “fun”, but at the same time, very unrewarding.

Personally, as a ranger main, i do enjoy the buffs i got to my most beloved profession, however one thing i do miss. And that is the synergy between the medium professions. It is no longer there. Previously, you had engineer as the AOE condition applier, Thief as the spike damage and ranger as the bunker. They were quite distinct in that department. Ranger with its evades, regeneration and the split in DPS allowing it to specialize while not suffering too much. Engineer with its grenades and elixir gun…. now engineer is the bunker, ranger is still a solid bunker, but a much better spiker and thief, well, a squishy class that tries to be a condition bunker, but it has no basis as to succeed in that role.

As for the changes needed to thief; make traps go away, give the KD trap to rangers as an elite option. They would make good use of it.Then give thieves a sort of “mark”.
My idea would be; Apply mark – countdown starts, if thief has not been pushed out of range (say 900 to make things fair) or been downed, you take massive damage, get stunned for a long time, is chilled, lifesteal, condition + boon transfer…. stuff like that. Stuff that would be scary, but have distinct and reasonable counterplay even for less skilled players.

Thief is my main, haven’t touched him for a month.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Thief is my main, haven’t touched him for a month.

I feel you bro… Logged in the other day and jumped into WvW. My first encounter: one engineer and two rangers. Instantly got 6 seconds of revealed and rapid fired. Took 23.000 damage within the next two seconds. Went back with my ranger, full zerk with longbow. Doing on average 10k or more with each RF. And people seriously complain about a backstab of 4-8k?! That RF can be done from 1500 range and tracks targets. Backstab require you to be right behind your target. Yeah.

I was just thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen a thief in high level fractals for a while. Loads of heavies, smattering of everything else, and no thieves at all.

Is ascended armor now locking people down to heavy classes? I made ascended armor for my warrior and took him to 50 but I’m not going to make a set of medium ascended too, even though it would interesting to try my thief at 40+.

most of us r playing ranger right now. It is the “new” thief but without the need to get in harm’s way.

Stooperdale.3560:

I was just thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen a thief in high level fractals for a while. Loads of heavies, smattering of everything else, and no thieves at all.

Is ascended armor now locking people down to heavy classes? I made ascended armor for my warrior and took him to 50 but I’m not going to make a set of medium ascended too, even though it would interesting to try my thief at 40+.

i got kicked from group the moment i joined on my thief, didn’t even get to enter the instance…. been doing lv 49-50 for year now….

reasoning according to the group: no thieves

since there is no instance owner anymore, can’t actually make own party w/o risking to get kicked for playing the class :/

The current design of the thief is quite terrible. I hate even logging into this game. All of my hard work into L2P this class feels wasted since I don’t even want to play this buggy class, who’s half of their skills are useless, buggy, pointless. Traps are a joke. Weapon utilities are a joke. Even some traits are an absolute joke. Stability for 1.5 seconds after reveal? WTF?

Cynz.9437:

Stooperdale.3560:

I was just thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen a thief in high level fractals for a while. Loads of heavies, smattering of everything else, and no thieves at all.

Is ascended armor now locking people down to heavy classes? I made ascended armor for my warrior and took him to 50 but I’m not going to make a set of medium ascended too, even though it would interesting to try my thief at 40+.

i got kicked from group the moment i joined on my thief, didn’t even get to enter the instance…. been doing lv 49-50 for year now….

reasoning according to the group: no thieves

since there is no instance owner anymore, can’t actually make own party w/o risking to get kicked for playing the class :/

Thieves often got kicked on join even before the patch cos 1. Lack of obvious group support 2. Squishiness. A lot of about thief class is active so a mistake often leads to being 1 shot in pve. This makes new players on thief a nightmare in dungeons so people rather kick them then have to deal with that. Group support for most people means boons, boons and more boons.

I used to occasionally run story mode dungeons for newbs on my thief, it was always pain. It took ages, especially with very low lvl toons in party and I often had to finish the boss myself cos everyone died.

Made a guard a week ago, I could carry the group already at lvl 30 in ac story, with 15-25 might stacks even lowbs can burn through mobs like they are nothing, add other tasty boons and you can see why thieves are considered a selfish class in group support.

I guess Anet intended thieves to provide group support via conditions rather than boons but other classes can apply them too. I’d like to see Anet to give us the option to buff party with offensive boons, for example Furious Retaliation could give fury to me and to allies too. Or a new trait with x% change to gain and share might with allies on a crit or crit with sword equipped. Or share might with allies when using Signets of Power (with cooldown so we wouldn’t give 20 stacks to everyone in 1s).

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Cynz.9437:

Stooperdale.3560:

I was just thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen a thief in high level fractals for a while. Loads of heavies, smattering of everything else, and no thieves at all.

Is ascended armor now locking people down to heavy classes? I made ascended armor for my warrior and took him to 50 but I’m not going to make a set of medium ascended too, even though it would interesting to try my thief at 40+.

i got kicked from group the moment i joined on my thief, didn’t even get to enter the instance…. been doing lv 49-50 for year now….

reasoning according to the group: no thieves

since there is no instance owner anymore, can’t actually make own party w/o risking to get kicked for playing the class :/

Thieves often got kicked on join even before the patch cos 1. Lack of obvious group support 2. Squishiness. A lot of about thief class is active so a mistake often leads to being 1 shot in pve. This makes new players on thief a nightmare in dungeons so people rather kick them then have to deal with that. Group support for most people means boons, boons and more boons.

I used to occasionally run story mode dungeons for newbs on my thief, it was always pain. It took ages, especially with very low lvl toons in party and I often had to finish the boss myself cos everyone died.

Made a guard a week ago, I could carry the group already at lvl 30 in ac story, with 15-25 might stacks even lowbs can burn through mobs like they are nothing, add other tasty boons and you can see why thieves are considered a selfish class in group support.

I guess Anet intended thieves to provide group support via conditions rather than boons but other classes can apply them too. I’d like to see Anet to give us the option to buff party with offensive boons, for example Furious Retaliation could give fury to me and to allies too. Or a new trait with x% change to gain and share might with allies on a crit or crit with sword equipped. Or share might with allies when using Signets of Power (with cooldown so we wouldn’t give 20 stacks to everyone in 1s).

pve wise, class deinitely needs more group support…. venom share is not the answer since condis are a joke in pve and in pvp it is hardly usefull

honestly i think they should change traps for that purpose… kind of like banners
add fire field to traps so you can blast might
add some kind of healing or boon support (kind of like tree you can steal from ranger)
add a trap that pulls nearbly foes together and immobs them for x sec
smoke screen if traited should apply confusion and poison upon blocking projectile imo
there should be trait that allows you to place trap anywhere like necro mark instead of on top of the thief

suddenly thieves would have spot in wvw zerg too O.o

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Cynz.9437:

Stooperdale.3560:

I was just thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen a thief in high level fractals for a while. Loads of heavies, smattering of everything else, and no thieves at all.

Is ascended armor now locking people down to heavy classes? I made ascended armor for my warrior and took him to 50 but I’m not going to make a set of medium ascended too, even though it would interesting to try my thief at 40+.

i got kicked from group the moment i joined on my thief, didn’t even get to enter the instance…. been doing lv 49-50 for year now….

reasoning according to the group: no thieves

since there is no instance owner anymore, can’t actually make own party w/o risking to get kicked for playing the class :/

Thieves often got kicked on join even before the patch cos 1. Lack of obvious group support 2. Squishiness. A lot of about thief class is active so a mistake often leads to being 1 shot in pve. This makes new players on thief a nightmare in dungeons so people rather kick them then have to deal with that. Group support for most people means boons, boons and more boons.

I used to occasionally run story mode dungeons for newbs on my thief, it was always pain. It took ages, especially with very low lvl toons in party and I often had to finish the boss myself cos everyone died.

Made a guard a week ago, I could carry the group already at lvl 30 in ac story, with 15-25 might stacks even lowbs can burn through mobs like they are nothing, add other tasty boons and you can see why thieves are considered a selfish class in group support.

I guess Anet intended thieves to provide group support via conditions rather than boons but other classes can apply them too. I’d like to see Anet to give us the option to buff party with offensive boons, for example Furious Retaliation could give fury to me and to allies too. Or a new trait with x% change to gain and share might with allies on a crit or crit with sword equipped. Or share might with allies when using Signets of Power (with cooldown so we wouldn’t give 20 stacks to everyone in 1s).

Haha.

Had a similar experience. Used to love taking my thief into dungeons. Made an ele, leveled it, and now thats pretty much all I run in dungeons because by the time a fight is over, there’s about 12-15 stacks of might on everyone from me plus about a minute of fury. Changing trinkets to celestial and traiting defensively can really help to carry newer players too with the aoe heals.

Thief does need quite a few fixes but population wise I am happy the numbers have gone down. It was difficult to use my thief all the time in spvp when I started a match and was joined by 2+ addition thieves while the other team had a nice balance and would guarantee the other team a rally bot during team fights.

I get to be the unique snowflake now.

Geiir.7603:

And people seriously complain about a backstab of 4-8k?!

If that’s the numbers you’re seeing, your build (not enough damage multipliers) and/or equipment is.. well.. rubbish. Or perhaps you don’t got Guard stacks or neglect using consumables. Sorry, but that’s the hurtful truth. You should at minimum be seeing Backstab hitting for that 8k you mention, on any target. There’s no excuse for it to be hitting for a measly 4k. It should hit for well above 10k in most cases. That’s why I got bored of Thief and started playing other professions.

PS: Pretty much all complaints about any class, stems from WvW, not sPvP.

Absconditus.6804:

PS: Pretty much all complaints about any class, stems from WvW, not sPvP.

You’re so wrong about this, so wrong, mate.

Galandil.9641:

Absconditus.6804:

PS: Pretty much all complaints about any class, stems from WvW, not sPvP.

You’re so wrong about this, so wrong, mate.

+1 you beat me to it

Grumpy.6027:

Ranger wasn’t truly horrible, the people that played them normally had skill to play them and did very well, now the rangers are all LB and GS or S/WH for easy mode pew pew dead.

I don’t play thief, but I know of their skills, and the bugged things should be fixed asap. But calling rangers easy mode is just a joke. For nearly 2 years now all my thief friends could kill 90% of the rangers in 3 seconds with up to 20k backstabs.

Let alone wrecking havoc to all zerker class builds, and having a get away card from each and every ocasion.

A lot of people just rolled a thief in order to roam /troll people in WvW, chosing when to die, downing players in 1v10 and stealth stomping them, and maintaining 25 bloodlust stacks all day long because a thief could not be killed unless he intended to.

So stop calling a class easymode just because all the fotm’ers rolled a ranger and people can’t accept that they actually need to dodge RF.

It’s like I’m staying and eating the whole 100b in the face and then shout that zerker warriors are godmode.

@Yelloweyedemon what we are saying since you havent played a thief is that to get those troll people and outrageous backstabs, it takes combos to get close and hit you in the best spot possible and to get the same numbers for a ranger(which I played for 1 year before patch) is way much easier and you stay at 1500 range. I am not saying ranger needed these buffs GREATLY but with that said they didn’t just nerf the d/p blindness which it might have needed but also they decided not to listen to the community(which they say they do) and nerfed sword in a way to be pretty much useless. It was great in SPVP, but some use it in WVW. If they wanted to change it then they could have went about it a different way and the whole blindness thing to stealth it takes initiative to get 10s stealth and that is either you die or we do because when we get revealed we dead if we dont kill you or get you on the ropes and then maybe we as thieves can close the gap to ranged toons. And tbh anet has tried to monkey fix the bugs but they dont fix it completly. I know its probably due to the exploits that people used to get into keeps without breaking walls and such and you know the saying (1 bad apple spoils the bunch) But honestly since the patch release I still enjoy my thief over any toons and I am on JQ so I am dealing CONSTANTLY with 50 man zergs and 2-3 roaming parties so it sucks more than being on T2 servers(thief wise) Ok guys sorry for the long response but if you havent played all classes for any period of time please try the class and then repond or dont respond at all thank you…

Cynz.9437:

Yeah, after watching steal consistenly bugging out i don’t even bother doing pvp/wvw on my thief anymore. It is simply unplayable.

Quite. My build went untouched (actually it got buffed), but the steal bug makes the class totally unplayable.