Guild Wars 2

Fact: There are no more good thieves walking around. They either quit/retired/took a break. The only thieves I see walking around now are ones who are just “trying out the class” because they used to get ganked so easily however long ago & they are bored of their warrior/gaurd/etc. Mix this with the fact that the thief has very little going for it right now & you have the current state of the thief, unskilled players playing a nearly broken profession.

We have 2-3 viable builds right now & if you aren’t running one of them you are at a complete disadvantage as a thief & will get rolled by any other class that knows what they are doing. Hell, even if you are running one of those builds, if you opp knows what they’re doing, no amount of perma stealth is going to help you, & your dodges can only get you out of so much trouble. The skill cap on these builds has been lowered so much from all the past complaints about the thief & now we literally have no place anywhere unless the people in your party don’t care, which means they probably aren’t that good & you aren’t going to have much fun losing with them.

PvE? “aww man, a thief? do you have an alt warr/gaurd/etc?”
WvW? Forget about team fighting, your range sucks now. Perma stealth & hope you find stragglers walking around by themselves. So fun.
tPvP? Don’t even get me started on this. If the #1 NA thief ie Jumper is considering switching to mes after he made thief meta, what does that say about the profession & how it’s doing here as well.

Call it QQ, but you’d be mad too if you put months of work into a class (glowing frac, precurse, +500g spent, nearly 150 tpvp wins) only to have it destroyed bit by bit. Not only it’s function, but it’s reputation. I’m tired of never being wanted in most parties, even some guild ones. Cmon. I’m about to go back to FPS. At least the nerfs there don’t affect your hard work.

& the kicker is anet has done nothing to help us out in any of these areas yet other than giving us back that 1 second of reveal. Thanks a lot guys, so generous of you.

And that one second revealed wasn’t taken away from sPvP (where people never complained about stealth).

I agree with most of what you said, but I do think the skill cap for any other build than D/D or D/P is pretty high. Try picking up S/P and P/P and head to WvW – you really need to think your traits, sigils and movements on the field way more than usual.

What I really hate is that Anet haven’t fixed the two things people have complained about: perma stealth (D/P) and zerker backstab builds (D/D). They can’t really do much to the backstab zerker but they can make our other builds and weapon sets more viable and tempting to use (give P/P some mobility!!). What they did to S/D is just unreliable. I was an old user of that weapon set until they added larcenous strike, I mean, WTF?! We never asked for anything like that. Flanking strike was just as strong as it should be. The only thing we wanted to change was the incredibly bugged animation that often sent us in the wrong direction, even against stationary targets… But they kittened it up by adding LS and now they made it useless by nerfing it. They could have just reverted LS and kept the new animation – fixed!

My ideas for fixing stealth would be this:

• Make it impossible to stack (fix D/P QQ)
• Have revealed applied wether we attack from stealth or not

This would fix nearly every single thing people have complained about when fighting thieves. But in turn they would need to buff our mobility.

The reason thieves are so hated in dungeons is because of all these bad thieves you talk about (players that are trying out the thief because the want to face roll everything). They think zerker backstab will work great in dungeons and get one shotted in the first encounter…. What I’ve always said and still say is that a good thief is welcome in ANY party. This game is more about the players skill and ability to read the enemy player than the strength of the profession. We are still superior utilizers of combo fields, and this is our key in dungeons and WvW – often in sPvP too.

I’m still playing around with a bunker (oh yes I did) for use in tPvP, and so far it’s pretty fun and challenging. The new buff to S/P made it even better. It’s actually a bunker that deals a lot of damage, so I’m not something that can’t kill anything. Nothing makes my day more than having a ranger wasting his burst on my smoke screen right before I’m right in his face pistol whipping him to infinity before I return to the node and then scorpion wire him and do a second pistol whip. I almost feel his tears x]

Anyways. Thief is not the strongest profession, not even close. But we excel at roaming WvW, stopping supply lines and taking camps. 1v1 doesn’t matter? So when a player is running supplies to get that trebuchet up it’s not good to have a thief slipping out of the shadows snapping his neck and then disappear? I think it is and so do my commander.

Thief is what I call a profession you really need to learn how to play and to play against. Our use of stealth forces our enemy to think out of the box to find us. We have a strong burst and survivability that other professions could do nothing but hope for. We utilize combo fields and slip behind enemy lines to kill the commander or any ranged zerkers in the back. It’s our role and it’s the way we work. What I only hope will happen is that Anet will buff our other builds and traits to have us choose them too, and not keep forcing us to play the back stab thief…

Geiir.7603:

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My ideas for fixing stealth would be this:

• Have revealed applied wether we attack from stealth or not
  …
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No, no, no. Here we have crappy connection to GW2 servers, so when I play my thief and go for a backstab I will miss ALOT of the time when I’m literally standing right behind them. Of course I get lag on every class, but with a thief, it can lower your effectiveness immensely.