Right now thief has a few very significant balance issues.
The big three are initial burst with essentially instant CnDMugBackstab for damage that can instakill anyone except a bunker, quickness and the ability to repeatedly restealth after unloading on an opponent.
1. Steal has to interrupt any skill that is in use when it is activated and it needs at least a 1/2 second aftercast. This will give people who are attacked about 1 second to register that they’re in danger and do something about it before CnD -> backstab ruins their day.
2. Quickness is a broken game mechanic, not just for thieves but for anyone who has it. You can’t take a game with numerous skill combinations that kill in seconds and then make them happen faster than a normal human can see, process and react to it.
Normal human reaction tests for something as simple as clicking a mouse button when a red dot appears on a black screen is .2 – .25 seconds. Add in the need to identify something specific (e.g. what skill your enemy is activating) and it becomes longer. Quickness lowers the threshold of many extremely lethal actions to faster than a human can recognize and respond to them. That’s a broken mechanic and bad game design. Quickness should not function in PvP or WvW.
3. Thieves should only be able to re-enter stealth if their initiative is full or nearly full. Right now, they can come out of stealth with both guns blazing for 3 seconds, and then just restealth while they regain their initiative and get ready to do it all over again. Their opponent has little time to actually fight back as the burst damage potential of the thief leaves most players on the defensive to begin with. It’s difficult to do a lot of damage when you spend the 3 second revealed debuff dodge rolling and using stun breakers to escape instant death. This change would force thieves to make tactical decisions about how they’re going to handle a fight. They can break stealth and burn their initiative in an attempt to kill their target outright, or they can be more tentative with mostly autoattack and maybe a low init attack or two before restealthing to assess the fight.
Less important is the low skill floor of abilities like Heart Seeker. Right now, HS is an auto tracking never miss when in range easy mode ability. I can literally point my camera away from my target and attempt to run away while spamming 2 and the ability still works 100% of the time. That is the antithesis of skilled gameplay. HS should be changed to work like the elementalist dagger skill Burning Speed. The thief would leap directly forward in the direction he is facing and if his path crosses his target then he scores a hit. This is both more interesting and engaging for the thief player and gives a counter play option to avoid the attack to the receiving player.
The best solution I’ve heard for the trap issue is as follows: Give them a much longer duration, and make them re-arm themselves after a given time period. This makes traps a long term ground holding investment wherein a thief can create an unfriendly environment for their enemies. Reset time would vary by trap, but this one would do well being able to go off every 10~ seconds
Yes please. This was mostly how I imagined traps would be when I first played the Thief … I was disappointed when I found out they only worked once.
some of our dual skills seems lackluster; shadow shot and shadow strike.
unload is too easily dodged, my suggestion is to make the initial shot do the most damage.
Shadow strike is actually nearly perfect from a design standpoint. If P/D wasn’t completely reliant upon CnD→sneak attack (alot of people are pointing out that it appears Pistols autoattack fires about half as quickly as it should, which would really reduce our reliance on sneak attack), you would use Shadow Strike tactically to open up gaps when CnD wasn’t a good option. Of all the times I’ve used it, it’s done exactly what you’d expect to (as opposed to day D/P with the root issue, or P/W doing less damage than AA), compliments the design of D/P well, and actually does decent direct damage for the init cost (when running a carrion ammy and decent power).
I’d like the ability to trait the Shortbow to 1200 range, similar to what the Warrior can do with his bow. Or at least normalize the shortbow to all the skills be 1000 range instead of 900/1200.
I think Hide in Shadows should be a Deception skill and benefit from Master of Deception. In general Guild Wars should have less General Heal/Utility?Elite skills. More skills should fall into one of the skill categories with the 20% recharge reduction trait.
If Thief is to remain a low hit point, medium armor, initiative based burst class, then it has to keep its damage burst. Nearly every other class can spam 10 skills in quick succession. Our initiative limits this so our initial burst has to be high otherwise we are left with just auto attacks.
More underwater skill options. Not just for Thieves. For everyone.
Or at least normalize the shortbow to all the skills be 1000 range instead of 900/1200.
I don’t think +100 range on trick shot and choking gas would be worth -200 range on cluster bomb. Unless you’re proposing IA would change as well, which I doubt.
Right now thief has a few very significant balance issues.
The big three are initial burst with essentially instant CnDMugBackstab for damage that can instakill anyone except a bunker, quickness and the ability to repeatedly restealth after unloading on an opponent.
1. Steal has to interrupt any skill that is in use when it is activated and it needs at least a 1/2 second aftercast. This will give people who are attacked about 1 second to register that they’re in danger and do something about it before CnD -> backstab ruins their day.
2. Quickness is a broken game mechanic, not just for thieves but for anyone who has it. You can’t take a game with numerous skill combinations that kill in seconds and then make them happen faster than a normal human can see, process and react to it.
Normal human reaction tests for something as simple as clicking a mouse button when a red dot appears on a black screen is .2 – .25 seconds. Add in the need to identify something specific (e.g. what skill your enemy is activating) and it becomes longer. Quickness lowers the threshold of many extremely lethal actions to faster than a human can recognize and respond to them. That’s a broken mechanic and bad game design. Quickness should not function in PvP or WvW.3. Thieves should only be able to re-enter stealth if their initiative is full or nearly full. Right now, they can come out of stealth with both guns blazing for 3 seconds, and then just restealth while they regain their initiative and get ready to do it all over again. Their opponent has little time to actually fight back as the burst damage potential of the thief leaves most players on the defensive to begin with. It’s difficult to do a lot of damage when you spend the 3 second revealed debuff dodge rolling and using stun breakers to escape instant death. This change would force thieves to make tactical decisions about how they’re going to handle a fight. They can break stealth and burn their initiative in an attempt to kill their target outright, or they can be more tentative with mostly autoattack and maybe a low init attack or two before restealthing to assess the fight.
Less important is the low skill floor of abilities like Heart Seeker. Right now, HS is an auto tracking never miss when in range easy mode ability. I can literally point my camera away from my target and attempt to run away while spamming 2 and the ability still works 100% of the time. That is the antithesis of skilled gameplay. HS should be changed to work like the elementalist dagger skill Burning Speed. The thief would leap directly forward in the direction he is facing and if his path crosses his target then he scores a hit. This is both more interesting and engaging for the thief player and gives a counter play option to avoid the attack to the receiving player.
You’re take on thieves is very, very off IMO. Your first point is just impossible. You’re talking about taking our class ability (which without traits is basically just a 45s CD gap closer) down from kind of bland to straight up bad. Your suggestion would nerf every single thief build in the game to stop 1 spec, something Anet’s been doing and the thief community has not enjoyed. I wont weigh in on whether or not Instagib needs to be nerfed, but if it does, Anet has to find a way to nerf glass cannons that won’t ruin the more moderate builds.
As for 3, stealth is already limited enough. Its short duration, has a CD (via revealed), and access to it isn’t guaranteed (its on dagger OH for half your standard initiative bar, can be accessed via utilities/one of our heals, or via combo fields). Limit it any further, and you’ll have to buff thieves survivability somewhere else, and we’ll turn into dodgy medium armor warriors.
Concerning quickness, yeah, its silly. Its too easy to mitigate the downsides (Sig of agility for thieves, endure pain for warriors, etc), and it’s just a bad idea.
Hi Anet. I pretty much only play PvP and consider myself hardcore casual – play most nights for say 2 hours. My feedback on the thief:
1. It’s great fun to play. Love the stealth and dodgy style.
2. The QQ comes from the extreme BS burst build opener – the precaset CnD – steal mug trait – which causes about 6-10K instantly. The thief is then also stealthed, and if they use the immobilise/stun poison, the target is dead unless they stunbreak. Even if they do stunbreak, a squishie is almost dead and the fight has only just begun. I think majority of the community feels this is unfair (and indeed for all similar super quick burst like mesmer stun burst, equally hard to avoid). The 33% CnD nerf does not fix this problem, it just reduces the opener dmg by about 600-2K – and even worse nerfs more balanced offhand dagger builds which alas pigeon holes even more thief players into BS burst builds… My preferred fix would be to give steal a .5 sec cast time, preventing CnD pre-cast, which will give the opener the 2.5-5K mug, and then target gets a second to avoid the CnD, which gives them that all important fighting chance. Yes, i know thieves could still use infiltrator signet (or possibly shadowstep util, but not as easily) to shadowstep and do the old CnD precast combo, but that has an opportunity cost on the utility bar, and does not come with the mug dmg, either. Alternatively… get rid of mug. Give us some other cool trait that somehow helps with sustained damage, rather than burst.
3. Dual Pistols need a boost. Pistol 2 is terrible. Pistol 1 is a weird hybrid of direct and condition damage. Maybe add something more to the trait which increases pistol dmg by 5% – for example perhaps also increases the speed of unload by 50% or something, I dont know. But pistol direct damage needs a buff to make it competitive with shortbow. Perhaps increase the bounce chance trait, it is so low at the moment no-one takes it i’m sure. I mean actually i would prefer if the shortbow 1 skill and pistol 1 skill were swapped over (giving some AoE to the pistol, and more condition dmg to the bow).
4. Please fix the flanking strike pathing. That set would be great but for this longstanding bug.
5. Re haste – i would prefer it not be in the game at all, but if it is in the game, thieves ought to have it. They need it for their burst. In my experience the higher rank PvP players all have ways to negate/avoid a quickness burst, especially given thieves have almost no access to stability (putting aside the daggerstorm cancel 8 sec stability or about 5 sec stability from the mesmer steal power). When i try quickness burst with pistolwhip i often get feared/stunned interrupt. I dont feel like it is OP.
Thanks for reading, hope this somehow helps.
(edited by Psikerlord.2569)
Hi,
first of all I have to say that even if I really have fun playing my thief (pve), there are some things that need to be looked at.
First of all, pistols feel weak. Indeed, Dual Pistols don’t seem to have a point, except for unload. The damage output is low, and there’s no real synergy between dual pistols and stealth for instance. Mobility -even though it should one of the strongest aspect for a thief- is limited too when you compare it to shortbow.
Pistol/Dagger is a great combo, but it could use some kind of rehaul : maybe adding shadow shot instead of dancing dagger would be great. Indeed, you need to be in melee range to stealth.
The same thing could be said for sword/dagger. Flanking strike is far from exciting and feels clunky. When i first read the tooltip i thought : “Great ! I’ll be able to create a real duelist!”
It’s not the case. Sword/pistol is more mobile and more powerful too. If the point is to make Sword/dagger some kind of mez/stun/whatever-the-hell-can-incapacited-something then you have to rely on stealth and the first attack.
That’s not as fun as it could be.
Finally, some traits are lackluster at best : Initial strike, for instance. It’s not as powerful as Opportunist, but is considered a major trait. Or ricochet. 5% is too low to even think about choosing it whatever the situation.
But TBH pistols are my main concern.
You’re take on thieves is very, very off IMO. Your first point is just impossible. You’re talking about taking our class ability (which without traits is basically just a 45s CD gap closer) down from kind of bland to straight up bad. Your suggestion would nerf every single thief build in the game to stop 1 spec, something Anet’s been doing and the thief community has not enjoyed. I wont weigh in on whether or not Instagib needs to be nerfed, but if it does, Anet has to find a way to nerf glass cannons that won’t ruin the more moderate builds.
As for 3, stealth is already limited enough. Its short duration, has a CD (via revealed), and access to it isn’t guaranteed (its on dagger OH for half your standard initiative bar, can be accessed via utilities/one of our heals, or via combo fields). Limit it any further, and you’ll have to buff thieves survivability somewhere else, and we’ll turn into dodgy medium armor warriors.
Concerning quickness, yeah, its silly. Its too easy to mitigate the downsides (Sig of agility for thieves, endure pain for warriors, etc), and it’s just a bad idea.
A free instant cast gap closer is as far from bad as class skills can get. The ability to trait it for a huge damage hit and/or stealth on use takes it from good to amazing. You need to play another class if you think a 1/2 second after cast on an instant cast ability is going to be a game breaking nerf. For most classes that isn’t even 1 auto attack. The ability to trait for stealth on steal means that you could even be invisible while you wait it out.
Your take on stealth just leaves me shaking my head. We have multiple ways to enter stealth, not just CnD. Right now it’s just not a fair or fun game mechanic to play against.
Or at least normalize the shortbow to all the skills be 1000 range instead of 900/1200.
I don’t think +100 range on trick shot and choking gas would be worth -200 range on cluster bomb. Unless you’re proposing IA would change as well, which I doubt.
Yes, a flat 1000 range to every shortbow skill (1-5). Or a 10 point trait to take them all to 1200.
I’d love a Flanking Strike fix… it’s kind of sad to watch this skill path anywhere but in a perfect out in the open.
Bring Dancing Dagger back for PvE, please. As previous posters have commented, you’ve implemented skill fixes in just PvP before… why clobber PvE thieves too?
Pistol Whip… yeah. Less damage than auto-attack? Please mention the lulz you’ve gotten on the forums on this one to the genius that came up with that. We appreciated it SOOO much.
Please god just fix [Steal/Mug + Cloak & Dagger]… leave backstab’s mechanics alone.
Other than that, I think the only real wackiness I see lies in the rendering bug with Stealth. Oh, and lolTraps. Maybe lolVenoms too… most of them anyway.
I would like to see a 1200 Weapon for Thief, that is all,
I was thinking a cross bow
I don’t mind the damage thiefs can output but the amount of damage in such a short amount of time.
Read my thread for proof as to why a character should not die in less than a second:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/FlameShieldOn-16k-Damage-in-1-Sec-OPSolution? Simply put a CD in between the skills themselves kind of like you do for elementalist on attunement swap. Make it like 1 second or .5 seconds. That way the thief can’t just face roll on their keyboard and deal 16k+ (I heard up to 20k!) in less than a second. Couple that less than a second burst + culling issues = nightmare in WvW.
Face roll for 16K+ damage? You clearly dont know anything about the thief then.
No one who does that much damage is just spamming skills, they have planned how their attack is going to go down. And a Cool down like that.. then just remove the Initiative system. If your going to put any normal cool down on the Thief, you have just killed it. The only kind of Cool down I would encourage on a Thief is one that increases the Initiative cost on our skills.
Honestly, the Thieves skill set has had so many holes punched in it with Nerfs and kittens, that Ive all but stopped playing. If we dont get some kind of general power back, and have to keep relying on stupid kitten gimmiks, then Im just gonna give up this game all together.
Thieves are, by far, the most fun profession to play (IMO of course). But what would make it even more fun would be to add Combo Breaker/Counter type mechanics to them (think kung-fu movie fights). This would apply to melee only attacks. By default, they’re a “martial arts” profession, thus having some quick counters to end opponent attacks to get away seems logical.
So playing as a Thief, if another Thief or Warr is unloading on you, you could hit F2 or something, counter the attack, and have an ever so slight chance to escape. This alone could be OP, so some balance would be:
1) Require proper timing to counter a strike, making it more player skill than button mashing.
2) Cost a full bar of Initiative
3) Disabled all your attacks for 10 seconds regardless of successful counter.
While Backstab build it’s still really powerfull i don’t feel its OP in Spvp. Its a 45s cd combo and afteer taht yoou are rendered to a squishy glass cannon who will get eaten by any aoe.
The real problem is people running arround without stun breakers. And cmon let¡s be honest you see a thief comming to you with Basilisk venom and Assasin signet and you don’t have the finger ready on stun break? You are just bad then.
When playing S/D i’ve never ever ever been killed by a backstab combo. Shadowstep makes the job really easy.
Oh yeah. And give us a 1200 range option for WvW. Thanks alot much apreciated! A rifle perhaps.
I feel many skills are well balanced, but some(dancing dagger especially) suffer from the reduced power, yet keep a high initiative cost. Maybe a look into balancing init cost with the skills as they are is in order? I would love to see DD reduced by one init. This would go a long way into to balancing the thief more effectively without just cutting the damage output in seemingly random swathes.
I personally don’t feel any problem with DD..i used it mainly for crippling targets, and still using it for the same reason.. don’t care about dmg.
While Backstab build it’s still really powerfull i don’t feel its OP in Spvp. Its a 45s cd combo and afteer taht yoou are rendered to a squishy glass cannon who will get eaten by any aoe.
The real problem is people running arround without stun breakers. And cmon let¡s be honest you see a thief comming to you with Basilisk venom and Assasin signet and you don’t have the finger ready on stun break? You are just bad then.
When playing S/D i’ve never ever ever been killed by a backstab combo. Shadowstep makes the job really easy.
I play S\D too and it’s way better than D\D…much more viable, useful for your team and you can kill almost everything…BS can kill in 2 secs bad glass cannons and only every 45 secs…everything else would stand there and beat you to hell
Backstab thieves aren’t really an issue for me, but changing part of the damage to cond damage (say 1s of burning) could be used to reduce the upper crit damage. Could always improve Shadow Shot to balance out any viability concerns that come out as a result.
Traps are pretty bogus right now too unfortunately
Someone needs to give Tulisin a medal. I really couldn’t have said it better than his posts.
3. Thieves should only be able to re-enter stealth if their initiative is full or nearly full. Right now, they can come out of stealth with both guns blazing for 3 seconds, and then just restealth while they regain their initiative and get ready to do it all over again. Their opponent has little time to actually fight back as the burst damage potential of the thief leaves most players on the defensive to begin with. It’s difficult to do a lot of damage when you spend the 3 second revealed debuff dodge rolling and using stun breakers to escape instant death. This change would force thieves to make tactical decisions about how they’re going to handle a fight. They can break stealth and burn their initiative in an attempt to kill their target outright, or they can be more tentative with mostly autoattack and maybe a low init attack or two before restealthing to assess the fight.
That’s a nice idea.
You’re take on thieves is very, very off IMO. Your first point is just impossible. You’re talking about taking our class ability (which without traits is basically just a 45s CD gap closer) down from kind of bland to straight up bad. Your suggestion would nerf every single thief build in the game to stop 1 spec, something Anet’s been doing and the thief community has not enjoyed. I wont weigh in on whether or not Instagib needs to be nerfed, but if it does, Anet has to find a way to nerf glass cannons that won’t ruin the more moderate builds.
As for 3, stealth is already limited enough. Its short duration, has a CD (via revealed), and access to it isn’t guaranteed (its on dagger OH for half your standard initiative bar, can be accessed via utilities/one of our heals, or via combo fields). Limit it any further, and you’ll have to buff thieves survivability somewhere else, and we’ll turn into dodgy medium armor warriors.
Concerning quickness, yeah, its silly. Its too easy to mitigate the downsides (Sig of agility for thieves, endure pain for warriors, etc), and it’s just a bad idea.
Stealth limited enough? What? A DB spammer thief if well played is very hard to catch. Steath is 4 secs with the trait. Luckily most thieves suck so they don’t use c&d well but really c&d is not the only way to stealth…hide in shadows, shadow refuge etc.
Thief damage is fine as it is. Backstab is also fine, if you are pure glasscannon yea a thief can kill you in a few seconds, it’s their job after all. A backstab thief have low vit and tough, so he has to sacrifice pretty much everything to boost his dmg. This on paper…in reality their stealth abilities give them an awesome survivability. That’s the problem imo. If anything their dmg should be buffed for some builds, like p/p (this setup is a joke right now), s/p (this was already the easiest build to counter, the pistol whip nerf was an unneeded nerf imo).
To summarize this thread:
Thief player: “the class is fine as it is”
Non thief player: “the class is broken should be nerfed”
(edited by Fjandi.2516)
-Utilities-
The best solution I’ve heard for the trap issue is as follows: Give them a much longer duration, and make them re-arm themselves after a given time period. This makes traps a long term ground holding investment wherein a thief can create an unfriendly environment for their enemies. Reset time would vary by trap, but this one would do well being able to go off every 10~ seconds
That sounds like a really really great idea!
Honestly, I am 100% against sword as an off hand weapon, unless they feel like implementing a short sword. I just don’t see a thief dual wielding full length swords(it isn’t that easy. >.<). That said, I would love to see some S/X buffs. Make the set more formidable.
For those calling for more nerfs: Really? Really? Go roll a warrior and spec for burst. You want to see burst damage? Seriously. Go do it. I’ll wait.
…
…
You back? Ok. See? No. As for the cooldowns: Then what would be the point of initiative? After we’re out of that, we can’t do anything. Unless you also want ‘diminishing returns’ for using one of your skills within 3 seconds of it coming off of CD, then please, stop this train of thought.
Now, for rifles, those I wouldn’t mind seeing, but more as a ‘sniper’ style of play. I’m not looking for crazy tricks the warriors and rangers can do. I want bleed, cripple, and daze conditions.
Say….
1)“Gunnery”(aa) Bleeds[4s, stacks duration]; Sneak attack Cripples[4s, stacks duration] instead.
2)“Pass through shot”(3-4init) A ricochet type[1 bounce, bounce range 100, half damage for second target]
3)“Shell shock”(4init) Daze[4s, stacks duration]
4)-insert Black Powder from pistols- Combo field, 5s[Blind, stacks]
5)“Flee the nest” Stealth(6s), Root(1s), Speed Boost(10%; 4s)
… Kitten, now I want that…
(edited by Moderator)
Hi, Thief is very well balanced . Except Pistols. Please make them a bit stronger or mobile, at the very least look into re balancing the Initiative. I like Dagger+Dagger and Bow Skills fine. I can’t speak for sword+ anything because I personally didn’t like the play style, only thing I saw was that a human person using pistol whip DID NOT do all the attacks, just 4 while saying it does 9. I don’t know if this was intentional or bug similar to the “Spinning Axes” from warrior on the Asuras & whatnot.
Another note: If you guys do happen to nerf the BS, may I suggest a bit more… flashy effects? BS is just primarily used for a High burst build, making a condition user (like me, but that loves dagger & uses death blossom) would be to add some affects. I would think that instead of having a nerf add a special effect for those people that use conditions.
This could be implemented in two ways, either allow two types of hits, one from the back w/ only high direct damage (for those who like that build) and another one from the front were it can either do poison/bleed or some sort of second ability while sacrificing high damage. Allowing more flexibility w/ the daggers but still keeping the original purpose. The second way would be to lower burst damage but increase condition damage or increase tactical gameplay such as instead of high burst damage it adds 10 stacks of vulnerability or steals health instead.
I really like the idea of stealing health, and make it based on % w/ the traits of thief. Not only does it reinforce the whole “thief” idea but also gives survivability whenever we use stealth-procing traits/skills. Maybe we could see this be implemented somehow in the future to any of the skill lines?
(edited by xyger.7349)
To Thief players…
Name one other profession that can kill a player in under 2 seconds.
Frenzy HB and Mind Wrack. Questions?
As a lvl 80 Mesmer in full exotics I’ve been dropped out of the blue by a stealthed thief in WvWvW and died before I could respond (less than 2 seconds). And no, I don’t run with a glass cannon build.
I don’t cry about profession balance, ever. But this seems like an exploit to me. These are the sorts of incidents that drive people away from a game.
Dancing Daggers nerf (50%!) was imho too strong. Never heard anyone complaining about that skill. If you are going to weaken it that much, it shouldnt cost that much initiative.
I trust your judgement but a little more communication with the player base as to why certain changes occur would be great.
Tulisin said absolutely everything required. I would only like to add my own personal emphasis: please make S/D viable again, it was the style that I really enjoyed.
Dear Anet,
Please fix culling and rendering issues before changing any aspect of thieves. Therefore any beforehand thoughts of balance with thief may or may not be addressed with this bug fix.
Sincerely,
A thief
I’ve only got a couple things to cover. I’ll start with backstab because it gets the most flak. Once you really look at it, it becomes obvious the backstab isn’t the problem but that the other two abilities nearly always used with it are. C&D and the mug trait are where the most of the burst comes from. You’ve already decreased the C&D damage (acceptably in my opinion) and dancing dagger (too much imo). If it continues to be a problem the next obvious target would be to lower the damage from mug which does hit hard, but I’m forced to oppose this because lowering the damage on an offhand and a trait effects a lot more than just a “backstab” build. This is especially true with the already lacking Sword/Daggger combo ,which has amazing synergy, that almost no burst damage options aside from C&D and mug.
So the second problem with the “backstab” build is how fast the attacks land. To counter this I propose making it so that backstab rather than instantly applying its damage is turned into an unremoveable DoT that does damage the same way the Guardians greatsword pull does damage when you do not activate the second part. This might require renaming it to garrote or something more fitting and to stop a bug before it happens make it so that npcs remove it when they become friendly.
From here I want to talk about Sword and dagger’s dual skill flanking strike. It sounds amazing, but in reality it doesn’t perform well at all. You can simplify the problem down to that it takes too long to deliver it’s damage and suffers from pathing issues. You could fix the pathing issues by making it shadowstep the thief to either behind the target or to the other side of the target. This will cut down on the amount of time it takes too. From there in my opinion it should become similar to the D/P or P/D dual skill mechanic. When you activate the skill it should do the first stab that removes a boon, then shadowstep you for the “flank” and do the second stab that gives the damage.
Lastly, I’d like to talk about thief survive-ability. Most of it comes from stealth and evades. I don’t know if it was designed into the class, but another thing that can keep a thief alive is massive amounts of regeneration and traiting for other effects in stealth. Stealth is annoying to other players, and with all the traits that give it extra effects (condition removal, 5 second regen, a powerful innate regen, AoE blind, and faster initiative regen) it becomes extremely tempting to use it when ever possible. The other type of regen is the improved regen from leeching venoms (awesome buff to a underused trait!). Sadly the regeneration from stealth and leeching venoms do not work well together because they compete for the same trait slots. What I’m getting at is that thief wasn’t designed to take damage, and thus no one builds a thief to take damage. This means almost all thieves are building for damage first, and then survivability through simply not getting hit rather than living through damage (which is frustrating for other players in the PvP parts of the game). Buffing the regeneration side of thief by either outright buffs or the movement/changing of traits (make basilisks venom a utility and add a new signet that gives no damage, but more survivability as an elite? Make the haste trick a 4 second evade?)
would do well as giving thieves incentive to not build some new version of glass cannon. Maybe improving the non-off hand duel skills so that thieves are willing to sacrifice off-hand abilities to use them would spread the build types out more.
P.S. Other classes have single skills that do as much if not more damage than the “backstab” build combo ,let alone backstab by itself, in a similar if not less amount of time (killshot/hundred blades/mind wrack to name most I think), but are not being as targeted by complaints because there are many more choices for damage these classes can do. You may want to take this into account when balancing thieves who have very few weapons and thus skill options to use in builds. It would be interesting if thieves gained access to the other conditions.
(edited by Retanaru.2901)
thief was pretty balanced imo
it’s just the bad players complain too much to the point that it gets nerf’d
i do agree that nerfing backstab in spvp/tpvp but in normal/wvwvw is just plainly stupid. (beside, thief is pretty squishy, so what do we have to compensate it? well Damage output/burst? if you change that, i’d rather roll a warrior instead.
PVE aside, but wvwvw, it was designed for group play, not solo, so you can’t complain about being killed if you’re alone, especially to a stealth class
i do agree that need to fix a lot of things in wvwvw due to the fact that a lot of keeps/towers, thief can just teleport inside with shortbow’s 5th skill
for stealth capping, it’s all about tactic, ever heard of “buying time”? just complainers gonna complain
i do agree that need to fix a lot of things in wvwvw due to the fact that a lot of keeps/towers, thief can just teleport inside with shortbow’s 5th skill
for stealth capping, it’s all about tactic, ever heard of “buying time”? just complainers gonna complain
How do I do that? I’ve spent 10-15 minutes sitting outside a gate peppering it with shortbow attacks (cause I will die from going too close), being able to jump inside the keep, or at least up onto the battlements (while I don’t expect to survive long, the battlements are always covered in AoEs) I could provide necessary distractions to help my team break through quicker.
Another issue I have with the thief (aside from Infiltrator’s arrow not working across any gap despite that engineer can do the same with their rocket jump) is the strange way we don’t have a global mentality. Rangers commune with nature, all of their skills say this about them. Warriors hit things with swords and other blunt pieces of metal, everything about them accentuates this. Guardians strike a middle ground between punishing their foes, protecting allies and controlling the field. So what does the thief’s skills and weapons say about them? That they were unprepared to go toe to toe with an enemy? That they fight dirty? They like the color black? They have an absurd fear of the ground and spend as much time as they can hopping about above it?
I always saw the thief as someone who had very good eyes. They could find and stab a person in their weak points from 100 paces. That they could manage and control the distance between their opponent and themselves like no one else. That in their long an hard trials as a low life (or just being a sleazy dude, it’s your story) they made allies and earned favors they can count on in a tight spot. Lastly that they never leave home unprepared for any eventuality.
But the scatterbrain attitude and lack of much obvious synergy between skills doesn’t really make this apparent.
Also a 1200 range weapon would be awesome, I’d love to do more than wave at tower defenders and drop the occasionally useful poison field.
I want to take a moment to discuss some of the underlying mechanics that result in Thieves feeling overpowered to many players in PvP environments.
Fixing numbers alone can only go so far as there are some fundamental flaws in the design of the profession.
Unlike cooldowns, Initiative allows us Thieves to dump a lot of damage into a target in very little time. Spaming a single ability for maximum effect was a popular strategy during the early days of the game and the effects are still felt today. There is also little to no punishment for using a lot of Initiative very quickly as our defensive abilities don’t require any. I believe the design of Initiative is really the core issue of thief design.
In order to fix this, you need to discourage “dumping” Initiative while still making it an option. If someone wants to chain 4 Heartseekers, he/she should. But it should be less effective than someone who spaces out his/her Heartseekers over more time.
That’s why I suggest lowering Initiative regeneration the less you have and increasing the regeneration rate at high Initiative levels.
Example: Standard Initiative regeneration is 1 point every 1.67 seconds.
When you have less than 5 Initiative it is lowered to 1 point every 2 seconds.
When you have more than 7 Initiative it is increased to 1 point every 1.2 seconds.
This would encourage people to manage Initiative as a real resource and punish people who “dump” Initiative very quickly. Other recent MMOs have used similar mechanics for various professions and it works quite well.
Next to Stealth, the ability to Shadowstep is probably what defines the Thief profession. This is problematic however, especially in the case of Steal is it makes it very hard for other players to see a Thief coming and react appropriately. This means Thieves often get to “jump” targets catching players off guard, which can feel unfair at times. Limiting the abundance of offensive Shadowsteps would probably go a long way in making the Thief feel “fairer” against his opponents.
While I personally would like to see a rework of the Steal profession mechanic a 600 range limit on Steal would probably go a long way. See details below.
Typically the ability to Stealth is regarded as a defensive tool on the Rogue archetype to make up for his lack of real defences. In Guild Wars 2 however Stealth is as much an offensive tool as it is a defensive one. Builds like Pistol/Dagger really on Stealth opener attacks to do any decent damage. For them Stealth is more than just an escape tool, it’s a major source of damage.
While it’s good to have Stealth openers deal various unikittenfects I don’t think they should be the core to maximizing DPS. Stealth should be used at the expensive of DPS, not to boost it.
Emphasizing Stealth’s nature as a defensive tool rather than a damage booster is important.
The fact that traps and poisons are either vastly underpowered or often redundant leads to many Thief pigeon-holing themselves into very specific, either burst or condition-centric builds. Increasing the viability of the Thief’s tool-set would go a long way towards increasing Thief diversity and reducing their reliance on burst or other “cheap” tactics.
Reworking Steal and Stealth
I wanted to propose a concept which would address many of the current issues with the Thief: Instead of having Steal as our profession ability we’d have Stealth instead. However unlike current Stealth the new Stealth would drain Initiative. This would address multiple issues.
1. No more base-line Shadowstep from 900 range
2. Emphasis on Stealth as a primarily defensive tool
3. No longer able to “dump” massive damage into a target coming out of Stealth.
4. Stealth use at the cost of DPS, not to it’s benefit.
The initiative systems doesn’t provide much consistency in regards to damage/utility, I would expect a skill with a cost of 5 initiative to do more damage/have more utility than a skill with a cost of 3, but this isn’t the case.
Many of the traps are lackluster and seem to only hit one target (many times not the target you wanted either), the tricks are OK although the cast time on caltrops is pretty significant for what it does and haste (quickness) should be removed from the game.
The utilities are used by too many thieves but mostly because the passive benefits outweigh the detriments of not using anything else.
The venoms don;t have a uniform UI layout (some have a hard coded number of strikes while others don’t) and their cooldown duration makes them pretty bad for anything except a venom build, there isn’t much reason to use venoms without 30 points into deadly arts.
Deception, actually I have nothing to add for deception skills because they are just good although I’d like smoke screen to have a lower duration and cooldown.
Our weapon sets have little synergy and no distinction, for example, pistols are bleed damage, swords are mobile auto attack damage and daggers are fast damage, instead they combine many aspects of each into a disorganized mess. For many weapon combinations the auto attack ends up doing more damage than the initiative skills AND it can provide more utility to boot, many of the 2-5 skills are but their nature gimmicks just waiting to be spammed because of the initiative system.
Steal as a class mechanic isn’t bad but due to its base cooldown it is comparatively terrible, case in point Shadowstep is a 1200 range ground targeted shadow step that also can returns you to your starting point and cure come conditions and its base cooldown is 50 seconds, steal is a 900 range shadow step that steals an item (too random to be useful in many cases outside of PvP/WvW) and has a base cooldown of 45 seconds. Sure steal can be traited to do things and doesn’t require a utility slot but our utilities aren’t well thought out so it doesn’t matter in the long run, what I’m getting at is steal is too much like other stuff a thief can do with other skills (and do better) which detracts from its power/uniqueness.
In conclusion, I think the thief could have been good if it didn’t have the current utility system OR if one or two other professions had a unique resource as well.
If initiative had of been thieves unique class mechanic and we had a number of function abilities to use it, while our weapon attacks recharged it (and had cooldowns) it would have been better, rather than all of our attacks having to be weaker because they can be spammed.
(edited by Coffeebot.3921)
P/P build fix (from another topic)
Vital Shot - This one is okay for me
Body Shot - Change it to a close range AoE that applies Vunerability, including in it a blast finisher. That way, it has a sinergy with Black Power, brings an aoe stealth to your team. Plus, Sneak Attack followed by Unload would be the combo from this build.
Unload - Increase the damage slightly.
Headshot - This skill is fine. If anything, increase the daze duration to 0.5 seconds.
Black Powder - Same as Headshot. If anything, increase the duration by 1 second or decrease 1 intiative.
D/D Backstab build:
- Nerf Mug.
- Increase Backstab casting time to 0.5 seconds.
- Increase Dancing Dagger by 20%
S/D build:
Fix the Mesmer rune and Paralization sigil to work with Tactical Strike.
Change traps mechanics (Tulusin solution would be great) as:
- Create a trait that allows you to use the same trap twice
- Increase Ambush thief’s HP
- Increase Needle Trap poison duration to 10 seconds.
Venoms:
- Lower their cooldowns, 45 seconds is way too long (and don’t put the same duration to all the venoms).
- Increase Spider Venom damage to 800+, keep the duration.
- Increase the vunerability to 3 stacks per attack on Skale Venom.
- Ice Drake Venom, increase chill duration by 1 or 2 seconds.
General thief’s solution:
- Make Dagger Storm usable underwater
- Increase Withdraw healing slightly (600 more maybe?)
- Remove/replace/change useless traits as Combo Critical Change (5% more crit chance for a master trait?) for an actually useful one (as the one mentioned in the trap’s change for example).
General PVP solution:
-Add 1 extra utility slot for all classes, change elite to hotkey ‘-’.
(edited by Asomal.6453)
You’re take on thieves is very, very off IMO. Your first point is just impossible. You’re talking about taking our class ability (which without traits is basically just a 45s CD gap closer) down from kind of bland to straight up bad. Your suggestion would nerf every single thief build in the game to stop 1 spec, something Anet’s been doing and the thief community has not enjoyed. I wont weigh in on whether or not Instagib needs to be nerfed, but if it does, Anet has to find a way to nerf glass cannons that won’t ruin the more moderate builds.
As for 3, stealth is already limited enough. Its short duration, has a CD (via revealed), and access to it isn’t guaranteed (its on dagger OH for half your standard initiative bar, can be accessed via utilities/one of our heals, or via combo fields). Limit it any further, and you’ll have to buff thieves survivability somewhere else, and we’ll turn into dodgy medium armor warriors.
Concerning quickness, yeah, its silly. Its too easy to mitigate the downsides (Sig of agility for thieves, endure pain for warriors, etc), and it’s just a bad idea.
A free instant cast gap closer is as far from bad as class skills can get. The ability to trait it for a huge damage hit and/or stealth on use takes it from good to amazing. You need to play another class if you think a 1/2 second after cast on an instant cast ability is going to be a game breaking nerf. For most classes that isn’t even 1 auto attack. The ability to trait for stealth on steal means that you could even be invisible while you wait it out.
Your take on stealth just leaves me shaking my head. We have multiple ways to enter stealth, not just CnD. Right now it’s just not a fair or fun game mechanic to play against.
You’re right, that’s why I listed the multiple ways we can access stealth, and not just CnD (I’ve bolded it for you in your quote of me, so you can’t miss it this time). An instant gap closer on any other class would probably be awesome, but on a class that already has that on Sword 2, D/P 3, and a utility skill (and you can also probably count scorpion wire, because it pulls your target to you, and Shadowstep because It -can- be used to close a gap…and Inf arrow if you want to get really technical), it becomes a little less amazing.
I also pointed out that it was bland without traits. The traits make it nice, but I’d prefer it if the ability was more well rounded by itself, rather than relying on traits to buff it up. Those are traits that could be doing something better, being spent to make our unique ability a little less kitteny. A 1/2 second after stealth is an open invitation for a good player to counter you. “Hi, I’m here. Feel free to dodge, throw up protection, knock me back, go immune, start blocking, whatever you need. I’ll be standing here for a bit before I do anything”. 1/2 a second on steal would make it worse than Inf sig, which breaks stun, cools down faster, and restores init when its not in use. Let’s not also forget that a ranged focus build (except P/D conditions) probably isn’t too interested in closing gaps, making our unique class ability kind of a crap shoot for them.
Fun or not, Stealth is in the game. People knew that coming in. Stealth is more limited in this game than most, but most people won’t be happy unless it doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, it does, and the chances that they’ll completely redesign thief is slim. Stealth has a number of weaknesses people don’t seem willing to acknowledge – a stealthed thief isn’t immune, conditions still affect us (though we can trait to drop them slowly in stealth) and it lasts 3-4 seconds on almost every ability (SR being the single exception, and the new Shadow trap i believe is 5). You could literally run the opposite direction of a thief once they stealth, and without some sort of speed boost on the thief, or them using another gap closing ability (most of which would break stealth), they might not be able to catch you. Of course the above scenario has exceptions, but the fact that “Walk in a single direction for 3-4 seconds” is a viable counter to stealth in some scenario’s tells you what you need to know about it.
(edited by evilapprentice.6379)
One thing that has always disappointed me about the Thief is how lackluster P/P is. I was excited to use a gunslinger class but all it really involves is spamming 3 really not using anything else. I don’t really think it’s a matter of damage that turns a lot of people off from P/P, it’s because 1) how boring the playstyle is and 2) how ineffective it is in most PvE situations since it has no way of dealing AoE damage.
Here are what I think could help these problems
1) I, and I believe most, play the thief for it’s mobility and stealth aspects which P/P has none of in it’s first 5 skills. I think if skill 5 laid down the combo field AND stealthed the user you could make more use out of the main hand pistols steath ability and make for more tactical play being able to use stealth.
Also I don’t think many people actually use skill #2 on pistol. It could be changed to some sort of shadow step (though I can’t think of any skills involving a shadowstep that could be unique and balanced that aren’t just a rehash of the Shortbow’s #5 skill)
2) To give pistol the AoE, skill #2 could also be changed to a sort cone skill shot (like Grave’s Buckshot or Ashe’s volley in LoL).
I really hope you at ArenaNet consider some of these ideas if only to satisfy us P/P “gunslingers” out there.
One thing that has always disappointed me about the Thief is how lackluster P/P is. I was excited to use a gunslinger class but all it really involves is spamming 3 really not using anything else. I don’t really think it’s a matter of damage that turns a lot of people off from P/P, it’s because 1) how boring the playstyle is and 2) how ineffective it is in most PvE situations since it has no way of dealing AoE damage.
Here are what I think could help these problems
1) I, and I believe most, play the thief for it’s mobility and stealth aspects which P/P has none of in it’s first 5 skills. I think if skill 5 laid down the combo field AND stealthed the user you could make more use out of the main hand pistols steath ability and make for more tactical play being able to use stealth.
Also I don’t think many people actually use skill #2 on pistol. It could be changed to some sort of shadow step (though I can’t think of any skills involving a shadowstep that could be unique and balanced that aren’t just a rehash of the Shortbow’s #5 skill)
2) To give pistol the AoE, skill #2 could also be changed to a sort cone skill shot (like Grave’s Buckshot or Ashe’s volley in LoL).
I really hope you at ArenaNet consider some of these ideas if only to satisfy us P/P “gunslingers” out there.
I’m telling you folks, while Pistols are a bit lackluster in the utility department regardless, the main problem with Pistols is Vital Shot. It was balanced around having a faster rate of fire than it actually does. The result is that Pistol MH neither deals adequate direct damage nor stacks bleeds well enough.
in Thief
Posted by: Like Forty Seven Ninjas.6982
I started with an engineer, got him to 80, did a warrior, got him to 35, currently doing a thief am at 58 leveling in WvW. I cannot believe how much easier every single WvW fight is playing a thief. It is way too easy to pick the terms of the fight because of stealth. I can screw up multiple times (still learning!) and STILL get away or win a fight. Even at level 40 I attacked lvl 80s and bailed if I couldn’t kill them. There is no way in the world you would be able to do this with any other class. Mobility is key, but this is a little out of hand.
PvE isn’t any easier with the thief, haven’t tried sPvP with him, but in WvW thieves have a huge advantage because of the ability to pick the rules of engagement every single time. From being on both ends of a stealth superdamage build, I seriously think that the thief should de-cloak with any attack, not just one that does damage. Too many times my backstab missed, but I get another shot….doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I do think that the thief should have high risk, high reward playstyle, but stealth is by far the most powerful mechanism in the entire game. Also, being able to drop bleed, poison, burn, AND go stealth when you hit heal is complete BS. Maybe 1 of them, but not all.
This said, I love playing WvW with my P/D thief. It is a blast, can’t wait till I hit 80, cause if changes haven’t happened by then, things will be really out of hand!
(edited by Like Forty Seven Ninjas.6982)
The only recommendation I have is, don’t take recommendations from the forums. You may or may not get an accurate picture of the true state of thieves, and you’re susceptible to having the squeaking wheels skew your opinion of where the problems lie.
Too many people bend the truth, for example complaining about another class without having done the due diligence required to figure out a counter, or complaining while WvW’ing in less than optimal gear, or any number of variables into which you have no insight in this format.
This might be forgiveable if you didn’t already have the perfect laboratory for evaluating class balance – sPvP. The only guaranteed place in the game where all variables except skill and builds are normalized – gear, team size, etc.
Instead of seeking feedback on the forums I suggest you create an advisory group of top sPvP’ers, say the top 20% are invited. Then get spectator mode implemented ASAP, and use that to observe top sPvP matches, and reconcile that empirical/observational evidence against the advisory group’s recommendations.
Make it clear that instead of trying to please everyone, you will instead base class balance around 5v5 or 8v8 sPvP, and the reason is because it is the systematic, scientific environment where you can be sure all variables except skill and build are held constant. And by limiting to the top 20% of sPvP, you hold skill relatively constant as well, allowing unbalanced builds to be more clearly spotlighted than anywhere else in the game.
in Thief
Posted by: Like Forty Seven Ninjas.6982
2 Main Issues:
1) Culling
2) Can use Full zerker build and still have the same survivability and very little downside compared to other classes that have to spec for survivability (at the cost of dmg).Sorry I have to disagree, despite what non thieves say, thieves DO sacrifice survivability when going glass canon, just as they lose quite a lot of dmg when specing for stealth control or “support” (yeah the thieve profession has very little support but there is something there).
I know people say this ^^, but I’ve been playing (edit: a thief) since lvl 40 in WvW, my armor is maybe 2100, and health around 11,000. I have died 2x because I have stealth. Based on my experiences, I think I will go for ’zerkers on my first exotic set. Stealth is WAY more powerful than you thieves give it credit for.
I think what needs to happen is they need to have skills do different things for sPvP and PvE/WvW just like GW1.
(edited by Like Forty Seven Ninjas.6982)
The only recommendation I have is, don’t take recommendations from the forums. You may or may not get an accurate picture of the true state of thieves, and you’re susceptible to having the squeaking wheels skew your opinion of where the problems lie.
Too many people bend the truth, for example complaining about another class without having done the due diligence required to figure out a counter, or complaining while WvW’ing in less than optimal gear, or any number of variables into which you have no insight in this format.
This might be forgiveable if you didn’t already have the perfect laboratory for evaluating class balance – sPvP. The only guaranteed place in the game where all variables except skill and builds are normalized – gear, team size, etc.
Instead of seeking feedback on the forums I suggest you create an advisory group of top sPvP’ers, say the top 20% are invited. Then get spectator mode implemented ASAP, and use that to observe top sPvP matches, and reconcile that empirical/observational evidence against the advisory group’s recommendations.
Make it clear that instead of trying to please everyone, you will instead base class balance around 5v5 or 8v8 sPvP, and the reason is because it is the systematic, scientific environment where you can be sure all variables except skill and build are held constant. And by limiting to the top 20% of sPvP, you hold skill relatively constant as well, allowing unbalanced builds to be more clearly spotlighted than anywhere else in the game.
This is great if you want to balance only the top 20 % of sPvP, unfortunately the other 95 % of the game doesn’t play out quite the same. Even only using high-skill players is a problem, since it ignores how the game functions in a low skill environment. As much as devs have to watch out for best-case-scenario when it comes to balance it is just as much of a failure to fall into the trap of assuming that if you balance the best case scenario the average scenario will follow suit.
Too many people bend the truth, for example complaining about another class without having done the due diligence required to figure out a counter, or complaining while WvW’ing in less than optimal gear, or any number of variables into which you have no insight in this format.
Especially the variable of people playing only the thief class without even mousing-over the other available classes…right? The problem with these forums is that you run into a lot of class-exclusive players saying “Don’t nerf me bro!” when they’ve never played anything else competitively.
If there is anything I have to offer, its to take these “Don’t nerf me bro!” posts with a grain of salt. Most of them come from people who play the OP class in all MMOs just for the sake of winning.
And by limiting to the top 20% of sPvP, you hold skill relatively constant as well, allowing unbalanced builds to be more clearly spotlighted than anywhere else in the game.
The only problem I have with this is that most skilled players can turn a fight on its side regardless of class.
The bad thieves need to die just as quickly as the bads in any other class. Currently, they don’t. Bads playing the thief can do much more than bads playing any other class. That’s not a matter of skill.
Here are my thoughts. My comments are sPvP oriented.
1. Is there a problem with stealth? No, the stealth mechanism is conceptually solid and I believe has proper balance built into it via the cooldown. There is obviously a problem with culling that I have seen myself in WvW. Culling should be corrected. There is no stealth free lunch in a game without culling problems. Also, I believe there is a general misunderstanding between shadow stepping and stealth. Often times when a player is hit ‘out of nowhere’ it actually wasn’t out of nowhere; they were in line of sight and they were shadow stepped to.
2. Is there a problem with dagger/dagger glass cannon burst builds? No. Why? Because these builds require large sacrifices for their large dps combo burst. A d/d thief (25, 30, 0, 0, 15) makes the player behave in a particular way: get in and get out. With minimal toughness (916) and minimal health (14095), the builds pay for their burst dps in survivability. The insta-gibbing that players complain about happens only to other glass cannon builds and this is the bed those players have made for themselves. Also, max dps combo chains are often portrayed in strawman terms, as if they assured, undefendable, and completed at the stroke of a finger. Basilisk>Assassin’s Signet>C&D>Steal/Mug>Backstab>Heatseeker is a 6 stage combo that has several points of failure via order, time limitations (might), dodges, counter moves and importantly positioning (backstabs need to be landed on the back obviously). Landing everything perfectly can happen. However a well placed counter or any other opener breakdown and that glass BS thief better run for the hills and reset. Also, trying that on a non-glassy player will be a rude awakening. Often the success of that attack is by either catching someone unawares or because there’s an experience gap. Also, running a build like that often means the player has sacrificed a sole important utility: a stun break, a speed signet, a stronger heal, a stealth utility. You’ve already designed into the game real detriments to balance this approach. Good players can make it work via play style and it’s completely viable, and newer players might be able to pull off some big attacks, but will likely not be around much longer afterwards and will have to adapt.
3. S/D: it’s a wonderful weapon set, but to make it a really viable weapon choice the combined skill Flanking Strike needs to be modified. It is not usable at the moment. It often misses. It often places the player in odd locations. It is incredibly slow. The animation is so obvious that anyone can simply walk out of it. It does very little damage compared to other combinations skills. (Solutions: fix its targeting, speed up the animation, or have it land hits during the animation instead of 2 at the end, increase dps) The daze reduction to tactical strike should only have applied to sigil use—the real problem. Also the dancing dagger nerf combined with the c&d nerf really made this weapon set very much not viable beyond harassment. By trying to reduce burst damage on d/d builds—i can only assume—the nerf to c/d further hobbled a build that could be fun to play because of its finesse. I would love to see this weapon set made viable.
4. The overall 50% nerf to dancing dagger was an overreaction. Dancing dagger was OP’d—I’m not contesting that. Now it is underpowered with a large initiative cost. Either the damage should be restored with a 33% to what it was or the initiative cost should be reduced.
5.Cluster Bomb. The short bow is a necessity for mobility in PvP. By reducing cluster bomb dps by 15%—a perplexing move—the Short Bow is now a necessary equipped item with barely any teeth. While a lot of experienced PvP thieves saw the dancing dagger nerf coming and were ok with it, the CB nerf further reduced efficacy of a nearly mandatory weapon unnecessarily.
The design intent of the thief profession was well considered. It offers a large range of approaches from burst damage assassins, to condition damage approaches, to high evasion and mobility players. I believe the balance that has been struck between builds that gives and takes away these abilities is really well done. Moreover, balance is built into the profession as is, but it has a learning curve both to play and to play against. I truly hope that you do not break the class simply because there are aspects inherent in the class that other players dislike or do not understand—i.e. burst w/ low survivability and the stealth mechanism—and that is not meant pejoratively. Personally, I like 1v1ing other thieves, because I understand what they are doing. I am not surprised by anything my opponents do; that doesn’t mean i never lose; it just means i know why.
(edited by whipboot.3058)
@ Caffynated.5713: Out of curiosity…what class do you play? It’s kinda obvious thief is not your main…no where close. No offense, but you just sound like you’re here to qq about WvW damage (irrelevant imo)…and not actual thief gameplay. Which this thread seems to be about. There’s quite a few issues with thief gameplay…and on a side note, I haven’t been killed by a backstab glass cannon thief in over 2 months…and I don’t play bunker. So, I guess you’re talking about the ones that haven’t adapted yet.
Point 1: Steal is fine as is. There’s no need to change anything on it…unless it is being made better. What you suggested, does not make it better. Other classes have instant cast skills that can be used while other skills are being used as well. An easy comparison is an ele using a channel skill and then teleporting right on top of you. Thief has this one and only instant cast skill that is capable of doing this. The other instant cast skills are utility venoms (which are fairly garbage), and haste (discussed right below).
Point 2: Yes, quickness is broken…and even with that in mind, haste has the biggest drawback out of all the quickness skills in the game. Completely shutting out the squishiest class in the game from dodging (lol…suicide bomber). Your talk about human reaction contradicts your complaint about glass cannon backstabbers in WvW. The glass cannon backstab build is by far the EASIEST to counter in the whole game…and it certainly does not kill a target before they should be able to react. Issue is culling, not backstab thieves. Nothing needs to be fixed on backstab.
Point 3: What are you smoking? Have you actually played a thief or did you just fool yourself into thinking you played, by watching some videos or hearing stories from people. Thieves can constantly stealth and come out with both guns blazing? WTF? Seriously….WHAT? There’s no stealth on P/P unless you use utility skills, and those have a LONG c/d. P/P is also the WORST possible set and offers very little in PvP. It’s best used in PvE for unload spamming on bosses where they are FORCED to stay at range…because they have nothing better to use. From the sounds of it, you’re crying about P/D AUTO ATTACK thieves. I mean seriously…what class do you play?
Point 4: Heartseeker is FINE as is. It was nerfed A LOT. Show me ONE thief that kills you with NOTHING but heartseeker…and I’ll point out how they could have easily prevented their death.
If people are going to complain about WvW damage, then my suggestion to ANet is simple. Make it into sPvP type. You get predetermined armour, you get NO EXP, NO KARMA, NO GOLD, NO ITEM DROPS, NONE OF THAT. Make it into a duplicate of sPvP, just with bigger map and siege weapons. Let’s see the ones that like those parts of WvW come complain then.
Also, for members of ANet reading this thread, the following thread contains some great suggestions regarding changes in the class in case you haven’t already read over them: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Things-that-could-use-a-buff/page/4#post702481
PS: I’d appreciate it, if mods kept this thread constructive and only replies from actual players who plays(ed) thief and knows the pros and cons, and not just qqers from WvW (qqing about the same thing over and over and kittening over again, flooding this sub forum with rubbish)…because they don’t seem to realize the difference between WvW and sPvP, and what causes the differences in damage.
As of right now “skilled thieves” are the ones who switch to SB early and abuse their stupid high mobility to run away for free.
Thieves as they are now have no incentive to play skillfully, they have no cooldowns and a limited energy pool, Anet has only incentive’s them to mash the most damaging button they can find on a foe, there is NOTHING and I do mean NOTHING that can be done to skills as they currently are to stop this, being as most simply apply strait damage if you nerf one damage button they’ll just mash the next best one., short of making the most damaging button they have highly situation, so they actually would have to manipulate circumstances in order to get damage, I.E, 3* damage on blinded foes, weak damage otherwise, or things to that effect a Thief will always only ever be a class that hits a gap closer, and mashes there most damaging button.
Solutions: Make their most damaging button situational, Backstab and HS are actually great examples of this, though thieves have far to much access to stealth as it is…
2: Make them use a combo system like Assassins did in GW1, with lead offhand and dual attacks, Don’t know how it would be implemented, but it would be very interesting to see.
This problem honestly goes for Rangers and Warriors as well where their most effective builds are the easiest to run, in order for this game to progress Mindless sets like that need to be DRASTICALLY less effective than sets that require more skill to play. GS one trick warriors, and SB only rangers should be completely unviable in SPvP as the weapons are currently set up, either raze the skill cap or nerf skill capped builds.
P.S. I paly Thief Quite a bit, so this is mostly a perspective from the thief side of things.
This thread would be more useful if it were only thieves posting here but it would be impossible to moderate that. How can Arena Net collect accurate data when there is so much hyperbole and misinformation in here from non-Thief players
Please moderate this thread to remove non-Thief input
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(edited by Elthurien.8356)
Okay, so the skill you’re crying about reflecting your attacks is called “Dagger Storm”, that’s important ‘cause when you see people talking about being mad “Dancing Dagger” got nerfed we don’t want you thinking about the wrong skill. And, Dagger Storm is our big Antirange Elite – that’s what it does, then it goes on a nice long cool down.
And I wanna know who’s auto healing to full when they stealth so I can copy that build.
Fine Dagger Storm. But I’m not saying that skill is overpowered. It’s a mesmer/ranger killer when those professions don’t have a chance anyway. I am saying it doesn’t give enough info to attackers. If you don’t see the spin… like if there’s clipping (and good thieves know how to abuse that bug.) then the attacker has no idea that ability is being used. It should not be necessary to memorize every single skill off the wiki. The info given to hostile players must be clear.
- - Initiative
I believe the design of Initiative is really the core issue of thief design.
The Initiative system is a central part of the Thief class, if Init refreshed slower you’d quickly find yerself with no abilities to use but #1 for the rest of the fight.
If someone wants to chain 4 Heartseekers, he/she should. But it should be less effective than someone who spaces out his/her Heartseekers over more time.;
- - Abundance of Shadowsteps
Next to Stealth, the ability to Shadowstep is probably what defines the Thief profession
Stealth should be used at the expensive of DPS, not to boost it.
So, you’d rather what? We walk up to our enemies in plain view? You remember that part about us being the squishiest class in the game, right? Taking away the “attack from stealth” ability of the thief – which is a core part of most any thief class – would be like … I couldn’t come up with a good metaphor … but it would be ludicrous at burnin’ ludicrous at least.
Hello thanks for the post!
My gameplay experience is mostly in pvp (both wvw and spvp)
But my comment will mostly be for spvp
What I have noticed among most of the more experienced players is a playstyle that I did not imagine for a melee sneak archtype. The most popular style is full glass cannon, which is made viable due to combined high mobility and stealth. IMO this is great and functions perfectly for class dynamic. But it seems that the melee aspect plays a secondary role to range as a result.
Mainly short bow. Most thieves in tpvp run around with short bow a majority of the time doing aoe dmg and only switch to (dagger dagger/sword pistol) for a few seconds to drop the burst bomb and then retreat back to SB.
I believe this is due to a lack of more viable weapon sets and specs. The short bow is amazingly balanced and I am afraid that it is just going to be nerfed to address this issue. I would rather see some other weapons get some buffs with viable specs. Perhaps some that are not full glass cannon but still equally viable performing a different (more melee centered) roll in pvp. That would be great, players could choose which route they prefer and not feel pigonholed into one style.
Basically; please dont nerf short bow so thieves have to go into melee more but instead balance other sets/specs to foster more diversity in high end pvp settings.
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