Guild Wars 2

You know how in anime and samurai movies where they clash and stand for a moment or two then one of them drops dead from a suddenly appearing gash? If we have OH S introduced, can S/S duel attack or 5th attack be essentially that? Shadowstep behind your enemy who is immobilized for 1 second and then after that second they get quite a few stacks of bleeding for a short time.

Such an attack fits the burst style of the thief as well as mitigating the damage over a longer period of time without sacrificing power/mobility and giving the opponent a moment to react to the threat and having the risk of counterattack by rooting the thief as well.

Also probably scale the bleeding stacks with remaining health on target or on the thief themselves (if you’re both below 50% health they enemy get’s 10 stacks or something)

Cause I don’t know about you guys, but I would use that all the time, if not just for the look of the skill, that’s why I use flanking strike half the time, cause I look awesome doing it and no one can touch me (if I miss the enemy with my second attack on FS I just throw a Dancing Dagger and use 2nd Sword skill and I’m back in melee range, the Thief is adaptable). Because part of being a thief is to be flashy, we have a whole type of skills called tricks. Come On!

Would love to see a sword/sword setup for a classy brawler style of fighting.

1. Dual Slice: Pirouette around your opponent evading attacks and slice your opponents achilles with both swords crippling them.

1. Dancing Blur: Dance with blades doing AoE damage before vanishing in stealth

Okay I’m pretty sure it’s been stated before but I’ll say it again.

ShortBow – Nerf on Cluster bomb kinda ticked me off, but I don’t realize a BIG difference since I use it for survivability 70% of the time. I Believe Infiltrator’s Strike should have only 5 initiative cost or a slightly longer range. When using haste with disabling shot the range to evade backwards is bugged and that should be fixed. Other then that, I am very proud of Arenanet for making our Shortbow have unique skills.

Pistols/Pistols – Decent for kiting in pve but it’s pretty bad. The dps is pretty below average and some of skills are horrible. There should be some sort of other survibility skill other then black powder (such as, a dodging skill). To compesate for the low dps, unload should only have 4 initiative, and auto attacks should at least hit faster (it IS double pistols). If double pistol’s got the same attack speed as the pistol/dagger then there’s something wrong there…

pistol/dagger and dagger/pistol is fine as is.

dagger/dagger – The range on HS should seriously be reduced or raise the initiative cost.

Sword/Pistol – Like stated earlier from many thieves, P/W doing less then Auto attack was a horrible mistake. The utility Shadow Step has a range of 1200, why not give Infiltrator’s strike 1200 range as well? Headshot is only meant to interrupt therefore the damage is very low, BUT the initiative cost for headshot is so high and the range is laughable. Really hoping they fix headshot or something. When i think of headshot, i think of insta kill.. lol What I don’t understand is that a dagger offhand is melee and a pistol is ranged, yet a S/D has throwing dagger that does good dps and a pistol that does 1/4 daze with high initiative costs…

Sword/Dagger – I love the concept of it. But flanking strike needs some work done to it. The animation needs to be faster and the auto tracking needs to be fixed. the game screwing you over putting you in a weird position just destroys a s/d gameplay. Flanking strike damage is also kinda low… considering the fact that you have a sword as main hand..

I’m kind of saddened that there aren’t really much weapon options for thieves

(im going to post more but shift at work is almost finished)

Rehk.6574:

Reading these replies the one thing that disgusts me are the blatant posts by non thieves coming in here trying to nerf our class into the ground.

You really need to have separate forums for feedback BY thieves and feedback from people who don’t play them. You’d see the HUGE discrepancy between the two groups on just exactly what needs fixing and what doesn’t.

Taking peoples views at equal face value without first determining what side of this fence they are on is going down a bad path if you want real fixes.

Personally as a thief these are my top concerns:

Fix the culling bug – (before you address anything else)

Tweak Initiative cost on Dancing Dagger

Fix Flanking Strike

Possibly add the option to dual wield swords.

Look at Traps (right now they are rarely used)

Remove Quickness – or make it increase initiative gain (and or add vigor) for X seconds instead of attack speed.

Fix Pistols to be useful for something besides single target ranged.

Tweak Shortbow skills ( 2 is very clunky to use, too high of an arch makes it impossible to use in a tunnel and it takes entirely too long to land from when fired. )

Shortbow could benefit greatly from some type of timed skill that goes farther the longer we aim it. (maybe starting at 900, then going to 1050 then 1200 for a 1-2-3 second pull on the bow.) Giving us a REAL single target attack on the bow.

Don’t allow Cloak and Dagger to be precast before Steal (keep the dmg)

(and please, please, please dont be hasty with tweaking damage numbers until you FIRST and FOREMOST fix the bugs and things like precasting Cloak and Dagger first)

Precasting CnD before steal is not a bug, more classes have it too. Elementalists comes to my mind first.

lotusedge.6743:

Also as long as haste is an ability, there will always be spike problems with the thief in pvp. It would be best to get rid of the ability and replace it with new ability.

There’s nothing wrong with an attack speed increasing boon as a concept, but ideally it needs to be made a stacking boon up to 10 stacks, with 10 % attack speed per attack. This way activated quickness like is found on Haste can be selectively weakened while preserving Quickness that is not at all overpowered, like can be found on weapon and trait procs. It’d also introduce the opportunity to have stuff like weapon skills that grant quickness, or more chances to grant the group quickness without it being a high-cost huge damage utility.

PopeUrban.2578:

Steal
Steal IS good when traited for the build, but it pales in comparison to every other profession mechanic in terms of usability. I don’t have a problem with it being pseudo-random. That’s actually part of the fun, and part of what allows stolen skills to be as powerful as they are. Simply allowing it to be used slightly more frequently by lowering the base cooldown would match it in power with other profession mechanics, and further incentivize currently unliked Trickery focused builds. In addition, I believe that due to a lack of a 1200 range weapon option, steal should have an inherant range of 1200, and the range increasing trait should be moved to another function.

I don’t think straight up making Steal stronger is a good solution, although 1200 range non-traited might be in order. I’d like to see more synergy with steal to make those steal-centric builds viable though. Something like “Steal recharge rate increased by 100 % in stealth” would be intriguing, making SoS’ active instantly recharge Steal, or even shoring up some of the weaker weapon skills by having them knock a couple seconds off steal CD on activation.

Shoring up weak thief skills by giving them Steal synergy is a better solution than just giving it raw boosts.

There are quite a few interesting posts here, but I don’t think Anet is asking for general thief feedback, as there are no similar topics on other class forums. We’re considered to be pain in the kitten by a large part of game population and honestly, last patch missed the point and changed nothing on how we’re perceived. That’s why we’re having such topic now.

So quickly to the point, there are probably 3 main issues:

1. Stealth – I think it’s fine on it’s own but is bugged due to rendering issues. One solution would be for server to keep sending information about stealthy / invisible characters to the game client. It would be of course flat character object holding no real information apart from the indicator that player is still around.
If that’s not possible then untill culling issue is fixed our “can’t stealth” period needs to be temporarily increased to account for the unintended “invisibility” bonus we get.

2. Burst – probably 95% of the burst complains we are facing are Mug, CnD and Backstab combos with the rest being Haste and Dancing Dagger issues.
CnD nerf helped nothing. It hurt other weapon sets and at the same time it reduced burst spec capabilities by no more than 10%. As many has already pointed out, the main problem here is not CnD or Backstab but Mug. Not only does it hit hard, but
also coupled with CnD it often pushes target’s hp under 50%, automatically increasing following backstab damagee by 20% (due to burst spec traits). Furthermore, as opposed to CnD and Backstab, Mug (due to high cooldown) cannot be regulary used in combat and it’s only purpose is to increase initial burst. Without Mug, initial frontload could be reduced by 20% to even 40% and would fix most of the burst complains we’re facing now.
In conclusion, my suggestion is to remove direct damage from mug and put some conditions instead. I believe changing it to apply several stacks of confusion would add more depth and grant some kind of control over the target.

As for the Dancing Dagger, last nerf was a really lazy one. I agree that skill was over the top damagewise, but the way it was handled was terrible. Please change nerf from 50% to no more than 10% and also, as few other people have stated, introduce damage reduction for each consecutive bounce (100%/75%/50%/25%).

As far as Haste goes it’s the skill that deserves a big fat 50% nerf (and if necessary increase its duration). I hope devs will finally realise that.

3. ‘Low skill’ factor, or heartseeker syndrome – I think it’s indisputable truth, that thief doesn’t require much skill to perform well in casual environment. Literally, in some cases I could unbind all skills but heartseeker, place monkey on a chair and watch as it kills opponents while mindlessly smashing the keyboard. The ‘it doesn’t work in competetive play’ argument is very shortsighted and its supporters are showing lack of imagination. A game, especially pvp one is like a food chain. There are weak, medium, good and top players. Adjactent groups need each other and to function properly, game needs to be balanced on every level.
That being said thief needs some changes to prevent mindless spamming. Good step would be, as it was already mentioned, introduction of initiative management. Adding brackets, for instance 100-75% /75-25% / 25%-0 for higher / normal / slower initiative regeneration would cause thiefs to be more concerned about how they spend their initiative.
Also, just as spamming CnD is not reasonable (apart from its high initiative factor), HS could updated with additional mechanism to discourage multiple chains: for instance lowering its damage output but at the same time giving an ‘exposed weakness’ 5/10/20% damage buff to the next thief’s attack that is not HS.

End.8794:

3. ‘Low skill’ factor, or heartseeker syndrome – I think it’s indisputable truth, that thief doesn’t require much skill to perform well in casual environment. Literally, in some cases I could unbind all skills but heartseeker, place monkey on a chair and watch as it kills opponents while mindlessly smashing the keyboard.

Treating the symptom here: But I think it’d be interesting if Heartseeker was altered to use a mechanic similar to the high-damage gun shot from the Halloween MOBA mini-game. Namely, a ground-targeted ability taking the form of a straight-forward line, a true skill shot. This would be a major nerf to spammability, so perhaps a range upgrade would be in order. It’d remove the ability to shamelessly mash the key while actually boosting the mobility aspect in competitive play by giving more perfect control.

What if, instead of fundamentally changing the way the Thief was designed by giving their skills cooldowns, etc., there was just a global 1 second cooldown tied to all of their weapon skills (except #1)? Without making thieves less powerful or distinctive in general, it would destroy broken combos, encourage a more tactical approach to combat by reducing ability spam capability, AND as a positive side effect it would get rid of the terrible accidental queueing that gets newbie thieves killed constantly.

After making this change, you would see how thief superiority in PvP is based on their gimmicky game-play and that when you disable those gimmicks they are in fact quite weak relative to other professions. The only thing that even makes them playable in PvE IMO is a couple of really good skills like Caltrops and Ambush Trap. I leveled a warrior before leveling my thief, and am now leveling a guardian. The difference between the thief and the warrior/guardian capabilities in PvE is hysterically obvious.

Thieves are easily becoming the dominant go-to-class in WvW. Many of my friends have dropped their first choice to become thieves just because they are so flexible and powerful in an open battlefield.

The issues inherent with stealth abuse are generally not fun for many of the players involved. Many of these issues can be overcome by player skill and experience, but the baseline power level of this class is just too high.

Stealth should probably be modified to not be so easily abused. The 2 init return going to stealth from Cloak and Dagger is probably the primary culprit here. At 6 init this skill isn’t that strong.

Heartseeker spamming is just annoying to deal with and promotes skill-less play. Raise the cost of this ability to 4 or reduce the range, add a condition such as weakness or vulnerability maybe.

Alot of issues were already mentioned here, which dont need to be repeated. Mainly the issue with synergy between weaponskills, redudant weaponskills and traits, traps and venoms.

This is from a PvP perspective.
People here who want stealth to be nerfed should realize that if you nerf stealth, you will force even more thiefs into a full zerker glass cannon backstab build and destroy even more diversity of which the thief doesnt has much anyway.

Thiefs can only do damage if they close in and melee your opponent, as thiefs have no good range weapon and every weapon needs to be used in melee or at least close range. But for that, thiefs lack armor, health, heal and protection boons to do that.
Other classes who fight in melee range have blocks, aegis, protection, lots of heals, lots of CCs… all these things stealth is supposed to do, so thiefs become viable in fights at all.
You can only outlast a long fight as thief, if you trait heavily into shadow arts to get healed in stealth and try to confuse the enemy with disappearing in battle, so thiefs catch less damage, or if you try to spam deathblossom to dodge most attacks.
Remove stealth and thiefs cant stay long in battle, they HAVE TO take the “one-shot” build.

A much better solution would be to offer more diversity in buildchoices as right now you can only go full glass cannon for direct damage to kill your opponent fast, or a condition/stealth based build (with some tiny changes here and there).

A possible way to do that would be more groupsupport/utility, which brings me to my idea on how to improve:

Steal
Anet cant give thiefs many nice things in their weaponskills which hard CC or work mainly as support as thiefs are capable of spamming these skills to easily. Due to that all support, CC and utility skills are in our utility slots which have a cooldown.
Yet the bit of supportstuff we have there is not that usefull, as alot of ppl here pointed out already.
My suggestion would rework lackluster steal abit and make it a more tactical choice.
Steal Idea
Give thiefs F1-F4 keys, while F1-F3 are slotted special steals, F4 is a shadow return without a stunbreak, which can only be used 0.5-1 sec after steal was used.

You can slot what for an item you want to steal and depending on the class you steal from it has a specific effect. Examples would be: Offensive Steal, Defense Steal, Heal Steal, Support Steal, CC Steal.

Depending which of these slotted steals you use, you get an ability which mirrors the one of the person you have stolen it from.
For instance:
Warrior
Offensive Steal – Whirling Axes
Defensive Steal – A shield which allows block (shorter duration as the warriors block)
Heal Steal – A regeneration Banner
Support Steal – Somekind of buff Banner
CC Steal – A hammer which you can throw to knock someone down

Engineer
Offensive Steal – A grenade you can throw.
Defensive Steal – An elexir which grants protection/aegis
Heal Steal – Regeneration elexir which you can throw on the ground
Support Steal -Some elexir which you can throw and buffs everyone you hit with it.
CC Steal – A bomb you can drop and does an AoE knockdown or Elexir which does a small AoE immobilize

Of course all F1-F3 steal skills should go on cooldown when you use one of them. F4 is for ranged thiefs who want to get the ability but get back to their former position afterwards.
As Steal became more tactical, you can also rework the trickery tree or other traits which buff specific steals, like more healing from stolen healing items, more dmg from damage items and so on.
End of Idea

Backstab Damage
Alot of ppl complain about backstab, but all of these complainments are based on WvW and not in sPvP where gear is normalized.
Problem with WvW is the gear difference and the possibility to get 100+% crit damage. To solve that I would simply include a softcap at crit damage at 50-60%. I for one run around with 61% crit damage, am not fully glass cannon specced and my backstab hits for about 5-6k on squishies and much less on thougher enemies. Nerfing backstab will force every thief who wants to do direct damage to specc glass cannon again, espeacily in sPvP.

Ways on how to do damage
Thiefs lack ways to apply damage.
Right now it’s backstab for direct damage and heartseeker as finisher, besides that there is not much a direct damage focused thief can do.
And condition specced thiefs use either P/D sneak attack or Deathblossom to apply their bleeds.
Which shows again the lack of diversity on how to play a thief. S/D and the strong daze combined with burst from Dancing Dagger was quite refreshing and gave another choice for thiefs, but that build got severely nerfed.

Tulisin.6945:

Treating the symptom here: But I think it’d be interesting if Heartseeker was altered to use a mechanic similar to the high-damage gun shot from the Halloween MOBA mini-game. Namely, a ground-targeted ability taking the form of a straight-forward line, a true skill shot. This would be a major nerf to spammability, so perhaps a range upgrade would be in order. It’d remove the ability to shamelessly mash the key while actually boosting the mobility aspect in competitive play by giving more perfect control.

That ability was a lot of fun to use in the mini game, but I think it would be a little sluggish and unresponsive in the much faster paced normal mode.

Changing HS to work like the elementalist ability Burning Speed would make it require at least a minimum level of skill to use and be more difficult to spam, while remaining a valuable tool in our arsenal.

Some changes I would like to see…

Backstab: Front damage increased by 20%. Back damage now deals damage equal to 150% of the front damage. So for example…

Old front damage: 100
Old back damage: 200
New front damage: 120
New back damage: 180

Description changed to the following:
Attack your foe from the shadow, striking for additional damage if you hit from behind.

Roll for Initiative and Withdraw: Counts as dodging/evading for traits.
More skill/trait interaction.

Infiltrator’s Signet: Active component also applies 4 stacks of Vulnerability for 4 seconds.
Helps support in group situations.

Basilisk Venom: Also applies Crippled for 3 seconds.

Thieves need a boost to be on par w/ the rest of the game’s classes.

People that are being bursted down by thieves need to realize it’s their own fault. Every class has the ability to negate the almighty BS combo.

WvW is where people are complaining about thieves…its not sPvP.

thx

Here’s my feedback about the thief and its gameplay: Prove you’re actually listening to us by engaging in discussion here. Otherwise, I have to assume that you’re just setting up the pretense for another round of class-destroying changes.

ArenaNet, If you want to engage in discussion with people about something, don’t just make a post, let it get up to hundreds of responses, and then say “thanks for your input.”

Maybe, you know, actually have a developer engaging in actual discussion with folks here. Responding to comments. Making it clear that you’re not just creating the illusion of giving a kitten about people’s responses.

Most of the things I’ve read here have been discussed to death in previous threads. Yet we’ve never gotten an official response. Now we have to shout them, again, in a thread where you are supposedly listening to us. But I’m not seeing the kind of engaged discussion from ArenaNet that I’d expect if someone was actually listening.

Your customers are paying attention to the level of your customer service. There will be — and are — other games. If you want folks to stick around and buy your gems, you need to seriously step up your active engagement in these forums.

Jahva.1895:

Otherwise, I have to assume that you’re just setting up the pretense for another round of class-destroying changes.

You know when I knew there was bad kitten coming our way? When they spotted someone from arenanet testing burst damage on dummies at the mists. If at this point arenanet did not have a good idea on what the damage output was on a very well known build, how can it know how the class actually plays and what issues it has?

Jahva.1895:

Most of the things I’ve read here have been discussed to death in previous threads. Yet we’ve never gotten an official response. Now we have to shout them, again, in a thread where you are supposedly listening to us.

They’ve said they read the forums. There’s nothing that hasn’t been said in one way or another because the issue is really simple and that anyone could have spotted as they were discussing the changes internally. Thus there’s nothing new for them to read here, this thread doesn’t have extra “readingness” quality over the rest of the forum. The remaining use for this thread, then, is it being damage control.

I’m just re-posting something I posted in a different thread here:

Classes were obviously designed to have roughly the same offensive potential. Broken PvP builds rooted in the mechanics of Initiative and the bursty nature of PvP aside (which are not working as intended), this includes the Thief. This does not consider PvE, where the thief is not notably offensively stronger than any other class.

With that out of the way, where PvE is concerned, the mechanical differences between the professions are primarily in their defenses and their utility (which mobility is dependent on). Thief mobility and survivability through utility is above average, but not stellar, and certainly not good enough to compensate for their terrible defense. That is why people constantly complain about dying too much and feeling too weak in PvE.

The only way thief even feels viable in PvE is because of a couple of arguably overpowered skills such as Caltrops, which makes the efficacy of the Thief overly-reliant on player skill compared to other classes (except maybe the elementalist). While the devs are working on bringing certain builds in line for PvP, I hope they give some attention to some of the PvE issues the classes face.

I would argue that it was a mistake to attempt to balance the armor types through class abilities rather than within the armor categories instead. Why do the medium and light armor classes not have higher movement speed and/or endurance regeneration, for example?

End.8794:

3. ‘Low skill’ factor, or heartseeker syndrome – I think it’s indisputable truth, that thief doesn’t require much skill to perform well in casual environment. Literally, in some cases I could unbind all skills but heartseeker, place monkey on a chair and watch as it kills opponents while mindlessly smashing the keyboard. The ‘it doesn’t work in competetive play’ argument is very shortsighted and its supporters are showing lack of imagination. A game, especially pvp one is like a food chain. There are weak, medium, good and top players. Adjactent groups need each other and to function properly, game needs to be balanced on every level.

I am sorry to not be agree with you.
I don’t consider myself an bad player , but most of pvp’s i win with auto attacks, i use some heartseeker against running enemy’s. i rarely use cloack and dagger , except vs heawy armor users, i rarely use DB and i don’t spam heartseeker. I don’t switch weapons in PvP , and i win arround 98% of 1 vs 1 " pvp’s " in WvWvW . So in your opinion that would make me an bad player, or unskilled because i mostly use autoatack. I would kindly ask you to point me where i can find TOP players so i can watch and learn from skilled players.

I’m starting to think this thread is just a way to ‘clean up’ the thief section. Kitten, I’ve seen more activity from the Turbine devs in the Monk sub thread for DDO.

The problem with the thief “burst” build is actually not unique to thief, or damage in general. Stats in this game scale rather poorly in that you get unlimited effectiveness from stacking on particular stat which, when capitalizing on specific skill sets, allows one build to become inappropriately effective in comparison to others. For thieves and mesmers, who have a lot of escape mechanics, burst builds rule the day. For Guardians we have the more tanky “bunker” builds who are focused on mitigating more damage than anyone can conceivably put out.

While I do still think that more “focused” builds should have merit to them, the way stats in this game scale do not encourage anything but focused builds as being the most effective. Re-Scaling stats in such a way that you get greater benefits earlier, and lesser benefits beyond a specific “balanced” point will ensure better class balance can be achieved across the board.

In other words, Anet needs to implement a system of “diminishing returns” if it ever wants to encourage diversity among its’ playerbase. Nerfing one damage ability just ensures that people all jump to the next because the systems that let them achieve absurd “one shot” damage are still in place. Fix the scaling on Toughness/Armor so that is more effective around the 2500 range (and less effective beyond), and power/attack so that it is less effective after the 2500 range, and you will see a much more balanced PVP.

This may be a less useful post, but I feel that thieves don’t bring as much to the table as the other professions. When I play a elementalist or a warrior, I feel VERY different depending on my build and how I can help my team. As a thief, it feels the same no matter my build. Applying a low duration condition and a poison to someone is great but feels extremely lack luster compared to many of the other utility skills other professions receive.

I think the number 1 issue should be fixing the culling issue. This is a massive problem in WvW and is the cause of almost all ‘Thief is OP’ threads. I realise this is no easy fix, but fixing this is the only way we can balance the class properly.

Things that would destroy the class if nerfed(coming from a thief)

Increasing the debuff

I believe the debuff is fine at three seconds, however the culling and rendering issues is not. These should be addressed before, if any, stealth nerfs are needed. Stealth is an important aspect. If both the debuff and culling issues are fixed in the same patch, thieves would be relatively easy to kill, in my opinion.

tl;dr:Fix the culling/rendering before any stealth nerfs(not just the debuff) if needed

Adding cooldown to skills

This would completely destroy the point of thief in my opinion. Cooldown for skills is not needed. That and stealth is what makes us unique. Otherwise, we’re just squishy warriors. Keep the initiative system the same

Things I believe the thief class can suffice without

Backstab

I used to run a backstab thief. I never thought it was OP at all. In fact, it was too squishy for me, but a lot of hatred towards thieves comes with it, and I thieves can survive without it. A nerf to damage wouldn’t be too bad in my eyes, seeing as I don’t run it anymore, but it should still be a viable build(not nerfed to the ground). How I would go about this is making steal interrupt CnD, buffing back CnD damage, nerfing steal damage 50%, then a 30% nerf to backstab damage. This is still more than enough to kill squishies without needing to do follow up attacks, however it would also force the thief to take other, extra measures besides backstab again non glass cannon builds.

Some Buffs I think the thief deserves

Pistol number 2 skill

It’s just to weak and offers nothing yet costs initiative. I haven’t seen a single build that utilizes this. IMO, it should either by removed and a new skill put in place, or have a substantial buff or more added effects.

Adding a rifle

Thief needs variety. This is one of the main reasons why everyone is using backstab. We simply have no variety in terms of builds. Adding a rifle would really benefit balance, so long as no skills are extremely overpowered/underpowered. One thing if added though : please make the range 1200!!

Doomdesire.9365:

Some Buffs I think the thief deserves

Pistol number 2 skill

It’s just to weak and offers nothing yet costs initiative. I haven’t seen a single build that utilizes this. IMO, it should either by removed and a new skill put in place, or have a substantial buff or more added effects.

*sigh. Body Shot may not be spectacular, but as has already been highlighted the real issue with Pistols is Vital Shot’s significantly slower-than-intended recast speed. I don’t mean to sound rude, but how this isn’t more obvious to people than it is is something I don’t understand.

Einlanzer.1627:

Doomdesire.9365:

Some Buffs I think the thief deserves

Pistol number 2 skill

It’s just to weak and offers nothing yet costs initiative. I haven’t seen a single build that utilizes this. IMO, it should either by removed and a new skill put in place, or have a substantial buff or more added effects.

*sigh. Body Shot may not be spectacular, but as has already been highlighted the real issue with Pistols is Vital Shot’s significantly slower-than-intended recast speed. I don’t mean to sound rude, but how this isn’t more obvious to people than it is is something I don’t understand.

Considering Rifles have the same fire rate as Pistols, and a base average damage of 1095.5, where as Pistols have 952.5…yea…I don’t see how people don’t notice a difference. That’s 143+ loss of DPS. Also, that is ignoring the fact that Pistol is 900 range, where as Rifles are 1200 range.

The whole Pistol thing on thief is severely lacking (amongst other things…including weapon sets). Only decent use it has is P/D C&D Auto Attack spamming, or Unload spamming on fights where you’re FORCED to stay at range.

Einlanzer.1627:

*sigh. Body Shot may not be spectacular, but as has already been highlighted the real issue with Pistols is Vital Shot’s significantly slower-than-intended recast speed. I don’t mean to sound rude, but how this isn’t more obvious to people than it is is something I don’t understand.

+1
Vital Shot is painfully slow

these are personal views on thief gameplay
from a pve standpoint:

-initiative system is fine imho. that’s what makes thieves unique
from the common ‘spam skill every recharge’ routine of other classes
and most other mmos.

its offset by you have to ‘pay’ for the skills with initiative points
rather than just wait for the next cycle; which you need to wait to
refill as well anyway.

if anything is broken, it would be some of the skills/ traits
which turns things out of balance.

-that said, quite happy that you’re implementing the pve/pvp skill split
more now, and would like to see them increase in the future.

-for example, perhaps your own usage data can attest to this, that certain
skills mainly designed for pvp, are almost never used in dungeons and
end-lvl pve. venoms/some traps/ some elites come to mind.
they have very long cooldowns and too short effect durations.
having little effect against the high and quick enemy density in
ex modes/fractals.

-maybe some of the ‘unused’ skills in pve could be tweaked to provide
more visible party-wide support.
there has been quite some instances where dungeon groups would
rather find other classes than the thief since they felt that they don’t
give enough survival support for the group.
other than shadow refuge/ cb blast finishers, party support from thieves
are somewhat lacking.

-personally think that the shortbow is very well designed right now
with each skill has separate distinct purposes.
finding p/p in isn’t synergistic much with itself though:
number 2 skill is so much lacking compared to the default auto attack
number 5 is a close proximity blind when you’re most probably going to use
p/p as a keep-away ranged single target option.

-d/d, s/p have distinct skills in themselves. so aside from a few numbers tweak
i’m ok with them. haven’t used the other sets much, so will not comment on them.
.

After playing thief today without abusing CnD -> Steal -> Backstab I think that backstab specc would be very fine if Mug wouldn’t exist. A “damage” ability with a long cooldown just doesn’t fit in GW2. I think a great fix would be to remove mug and just buffCnD back to his unnerfed state. Also steal’s cooldown should be reduced. Steal feels kinda “meh” atm, unless used to oneshot a squishy.

This thread started off very good, then became a mixed bag of responses. All in all though I’m glad we have a Anet started thread to voice our feedback. I’ve been getting discouraged by the way Thieves are shaping up patch after patch. I’m primarily a PVE’er, as unless I want to go for a few specific builds, WvW is nothing but frustration for me.

I’d like to throw my support in for Tulsin’s (sorry if I misspelled that) synopsis, and just relate my thoughts on another common request/concern I’ve seen here.

The Thief has to few weapon sets, and as someone else said, it limits us to only a few builds with little variety. I think besides fixing bugs, this is our most pressing concern. Give us new weapon options, probably the most commonly requested fix to the class. Then take a look at our balance and rework all our sets to be more cohesive and fun.

Take a look at our utilities, rangers already have traps covered, so why not get rid of a couple through consolidation and refinement? Give the Thief something unique and tricky. I feel one aspect of gameplay that the game lacks is playing with positions, both for defense and offense. We’re the closest thing to the Takuyan (GW1 Assassins) on Tyria, lets get some of that shadow magic back.

Thematically we’re to broad, narrow it down even just a little bit, and I think it could really inspire the sorts of changes that people are looking for. I’d like to ask the class design and balance developers a question;

“If you had to boil down the Thief class to one word and one word only, what would that word be?”

You can see people are craving new variety in their weaponsets, and most specifically for an off hand sword and rifle. I think these are two requests that would make a lot of players happy. Even if not all of us stuck with these two new options, we would appreciate the simple fact that we got them. That Anet listened and gave us something specifically asked for. Not only would the new additions be considered fun but it acts like a show of good will and a boost to player moral.

Don’t stop at those two though, look at other weapons (before getting into a new class of weapon of course) such as a mace. If the Thief is supposed draw on concepts of a thug as well as the other things, then this makes sense yes? Main hand only, off hand only, or both hands, it could work like a control/support set and free up options on our other weapon sets. This is just an example, not a personal request since its not really my style anyway.

Once we have these options, reexamine all the weapon sets. Is everything logical in that set? Is it synergistic with itself?

Lets take it further, when you have some skills ready to implement, take a sampling of players that focus on s/tPVP, PVE, and WvW and discuss them with them to get some feedback before sharing them with a wider audience.

Weapon set options are I believe what Thief needs first and foremost, and that it’ll pave the way to the rest of our problems being solved. An Anet developer said when traits were reorganized into trait tiers that having some restrictions creates more chances for creativity, but I say that having to many restrictions stifles creativity AS WELL as freedom.

Teabaker.9524:

After playing thief today without abusing CnD -> Steal -> Backstab I think that backstab specc would be very fine if Mug wouldn’t exist. A “damage” ability with a long cooldown just doesn’t fit in GW2. I think a great fix would be to remove mug and just buffCnD back to his unnerfed state. Also steal’s cooldown should be reduced. Steal feels kinda “meh” atm, unless used to oneshot a squishy.

I’ve mentioned it previously but I think Mug should not do damage, but instead do knockback/blowout (not to be confused with knockdown) like the Guardian Hammer #4 skill Banish.

Mug isn’t needed to be competitive but it does ensure we can annihilate up-levelled players in WvW. Replacing damage with a blowout would give us a utility/control that can be used in various situations, whether it be to create distance for ranged Thieves or to interrupt for Melee thieves.

Backstab and CnD should never be touched, they are fine as they are.

We definitely need more weapon variety, I would love to see:

• Staff
• Torch off-hand
• Sword off-hand
• Rifle

Quick thoughts on how to improve P/P:

First: focus P/P as a condition spec and shortbow as direct damage set

Changes for bow:

- Remove bleed stacking from clusterbomb.
- Change poison cloud to cause weakness OR vulnerability instead of poison.

Changes for P/P:

- Add short burning component per hit on unload
- Increase fire rate on vital shot
- Redesign Body shot to the following:

4 initiative cost
PBAoE blast finisher
1/2 second cast time
Knocks back up to 5 enemies within 5 yards of yourself, applies burn or bleed.

Could be used to stealth in smoke cloud, may require a cooldown or other changes to prevent it from being TOO strong versus melee.

Thoughts?

Why would you remove bleed stacking from cluster bomb?
This is an optional alternative, burst for non-detonation and condition for detonation, it works well and provides players with choice.
Why would you remove poison from choking gas cloud?
Poison causes weakness with 15points in deadly arts, and vulnerability is from pistols body shot, there’s no point in restricting us further with those changes IMO.

Body Shot causing a blowout instead of vulnerability sounds interesting but overpowered considering we can use it without cooldown.

Not trying to be argumentative, just pointing out discrepencies.

Reasoning was to focus the two weapon’s damage types more. Removing the bleed, but allowing to stack vulnerability (via new #4 effect) would allow for some large single hits and still adds utility in the form of increasing group damage over reduced healing on target. More of a flavor change than anything. Same goes for removing the poison damage from #4 in the first place- changes the focus of the set while still replacing some of the utility to better combo with the other skills. My main thoughts were on changes to P/P, and this was a way to differentiate the focus on damage sources. I’d be perfectly fine with shortbow remaining as is, and P/P being changed on it’s own instead.

The knockback might be too powerful if AoE, could be made single target or something else, the main change here was to make it a player based blast finisher to allow combo-ing with smoke fields and giving P/P a method to stealth.

Once again, these are ideas, and many iterations and balancing would have to be done before being viable. Just throwing these ideas out there to be dissected and discussed.

My issues with thief are utility and damage. True that in a 1v1, a thief will always out-DPS a warrior or Guardian, but in a team, the Guardian and warrior can both give Might to their team, raising their own party slot’s DPS by a vast amount more than the Thief’s single-target.

To fix this problem, the Thief needs more Might-sharing capabilities to the extent of the guardian/warrior or be able to deal even more damage in PvE (but that would be broken and playing together would not be beneficial)

I want Death Shroud to cure conditions on top of the regen it offers. I want Steal to drop to a 3s recharge if nothing is stolen. I want the trait about giving two stacks of Might to myself each time I cloak to be shared to the whole party around me (600 range like Empower, maybe). I want Dancing Dagger to cost less 3i but deal even less damage than now.

I can see now why the devs pushed out rushed unnecessary nerfs so far, instead of fixing the real issues.

The amount of rubbish they read in these threads/sub-forums is amazing. No wonder they don’t get proper feedback. They’re all piled over by rubbish from players who refuse to learn to play their own classes and get better at it, and would rather spend their time complaining and posting on forums to have their lives made easier.

I mean take for example this “Centhis.5071” guy. “She killed 15 of us without taking damage. This isnt the first time this has happened.” Seriously? Out of the 15 people, no one was competent enough to take down a SINGLE thief? These people need to stop posting on the forums, and go practice more PvP. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

Yes, the culling issue needs to be fixed, but other than that, there’s NO VALID reason for a group of 15 to die to a SINGLE thief.

I’m most probably going to get infracted for this…but, honestly, I’m so sick of reading these. This is RIDICULOUS…and I’m sure ANet has noticed this too. So, if you infract me for this…it’ll be nothing but hypocrisy.

My biggest concern with thief is in WvW. In PvE they’re fine (potentially too weak even), and I don’t really play much sPvP. What I have to say with regards to WvW is in small group, or even 1v1 or 2v2 action.

Thieves can initiate fights well and burst well. That’s fine. What’s not fine is that if I manage to survive their burst, they are so slippery that they can escape every time if they are halfway intelligent.

I understand that slipperiness was a design goal for a thief, but there is a huge difference between strategic and tactical stealth in a fight. Strategic stealth is what we have now, which is long periods where the thief can stealth, reposition, and plot – even completely run away. This is amplified by the culling issues in WvW, but still – it IS an issue. Tactical stealth would be more short duration (1-2 second) stealths, combined with similar duration mobility increasing mechanics to have the thief feel able to be elusive in combat. There would also have to be some mechanic to keep these from being chained to create strategic stealth, though this exists in some form currently through the revealed debuff.

Right now, thieves pay no price for failed burst, as they can stealth or teleport away with ease. Their strategic advantage makes it impossible to kill a thief who knows what he’s doing.

Not gonna write so much, because I’m on work but..
For the Cluster Bomb, why not change the Bleeding stack with a Burning one? It’s much logic, I think.

The main reason why I post here, is about Elite Skills. Is just an idea, but established that we have really little - no one maybe - choice, why don’t add news one?
New class skills like BAIT! I think the Thief need some BAIT’s skills, is just too cool and, for what I played a long the years, logic for a Stealthy profession.

What do you think?

Igneel.2618:

New class skills like BAIT! I think the Thief need some BAIT’s skills, is just too cool and, for what I played a long the years, logic for a Stealthy profession.

What do you think?

Before they even consider new mechanics, they’re going to try and fix current ones.

@above, I’d agree with burning, but Guardians burn a lot already. It would be more of a nerf unless burning started to stack with intensity.

I think thieves need at least 1 skill that provides Burning condition.
Maybe as a pistol skill

Here is my feedback to my first and only one character, thief. The dancing dagger nerf makes the thief useless in aoe when using D/D . I am almost near death (most of the time down but tnx to 50% damage when down) everytime I encounter 2 mobs in orr. Before I can manage to handle 2 mobs. Then regarding backstab, I dont know why players keep complaining about it. When I play WvW, I am actually having a hard time trying this skill to hit. Shortbow nerf is kinda alright cause I haven’t feel the weight of its nerf. For now that’s all I can say.

First big issue: RANGE. The Thief has one skill with 1200 range. It makes some PvE fights and WvW sieges very difficult. It would be great to add a trait that increased Shortbow range to 1200, as that seems to be our defacto range siege weapon. If not that, then add a new weapon set for the Thief like Rifles and that give us a long range option that most other classes enjoy.

Second big issue: PISTOL + PISTOL. It’s the weakest weapon set available to the Thief. I’m sure there’s already plenty of feedback, but my quick feedback is the set needs to do more damage. Unload (#3) needs to channel faster, and perhaps up the damage to be inline with Pistol Whip. Headshot (#4) needs to do more damage, perhaps it should be inline with the old damage that Dancing Dagger use to do as it doesn’t hit multiple targets. Black Powder (#5) again this needs to much more damage, especially considering the initiative cost. It should be inline with Cloak’n’Dagger respective to PvE and PvP.

I have other issues with the class, like the lack luster of Traps and Poisons, but I will let others speak for that.

Thanks for listening!

I love the burst build and the high crits that come with it but I hate the fact that I got limited to use it every 45 secs in its full potential. Damage maybe can be spread a bit so you have options to play and I think it would me more interesting. Eg in my Elementalist every sec I have a skill to play to continue the fight instead of waiting my only strong ones I honestly believe it is indeed really annoying to get WTFpawned in 2-3 secs but it not less annoying that if combo fails there is not much I can do with this build at least against decent players.

Don’t mind so much about nerfing spikes but in exchange I would like to see additional gameplay options as long the combo is on cooldown.

On the other hand since we are talking about the Assassin class of the game it wouldn’t be the so “Assassin” if it didn’t have the highest spike in the game.

Finally I would really love to switch to P/P after initial combo to play a few skills and then switch to D/D again to finish off.

Ok some feedback after playing plenty of time with the Thief:

Steal: Needs a rework as a mechanic. Currently I use it mostly as “fake stealth” to gain 10 seconds of Swiftness while travelling, and to get an instant Cloak and Dagger charge. The stolen item perse is more like a bonus rather than the profession’s mechanic. Some of them are good, some of them are powerful but expose you too much, and some of them, I simply waste them on thin air so I have the Steal button available again (I’m looking at you Ice Shard stolen from elementalist that is like 0.0001% the good the other items are).

IMO, there is a need for pockets so the Thief stays optimal and can plan on his mechanic (it’s what defines the Thief after all, we should be able to plan on mechanics). Of course using one of them would put every pocket on cooldown, this way you avoid stacking 3 powerful items just to unleash an onslaught of stolen items.

Helping with our soft CC: I get that as initiative makes everything spamable, you can’t give the Thief strong CC on his attacks. But here is a sugestion I made in other thread and I think would help not only with Thief balance, but with most professions: Put a “recovering from CC” status effect (like stability but it isn’t a boon) on anyone who recently suffered from CC. Even 0.5 seconds. This would break any chance at stun locking for any profession in the game, and would allow for some longer control skills on the Thief as spamming them wouldn’t be so useful (I’m looking at you Headshot which Daze is more an interrupt with close to zero damage rather than a Daze).

100% Ranged Thieves: This profession mechanic has an aditional flaw: it has high chances to hurt Thieves that prefer all ranged weapons. P/D doesn’t have this problem because it actually feels comfortable at close distance, but when I’m using P/P, which usually requires a lot of dodging and snaring so they don’t catch you, using my profession mechanic hurts me because it completly exposes the Thief to melee. A profession mechanic shouldn’t put you in danger, and you should always want to use it, but it’s not the case.

I would sugest either to implement a shadow step back (like other shadow steps have already) or some sort of “ranged steal” related to shadow magic depending on if your main weapon is ranged or melee. I think the first option would be better because as I said P/D prefers close range, and having a shadow step back is useful for every set. Implementing the pockets system would allow for this as F1 wouldn’t be used for the stolen items.

P/P: This set deserves it’s own spot here. I really wanted to play it because I love the aesthetics. But it’s weak, and veeery boring: It’s a 333333 spamfest: Black Powder is useful mostly for melee where it’s very powerful, Body Shot damage+damage increase / initiative is horrible, and Headshot… well sometimes you will have something important to interrupt, but most times you will prefer to shut it with some damage from more Unload spamming.

With Black Powder, a sugestion I already made in other thread would be to make it shorter duration but make it give stealth BUT if you leave the small area, you lose Stealth (like Shadow Refuge trigger, but a much smaller area, not allowing for free roam at all). This way -/P sets have access to Stealth, and as it doesn’t allow you to move too much, it’s balanced as opponents can find you BUT you can activate your Stealth Skills, which would allow P/P users to switch from Condition Damage (Black Powder and Sneak Attack) to Direct Damage (unload) depending on the opponent or their stats distribution.

Another thing that would help, would be to make each bullet from Unload to apply 0.5 seconds of Weakness (4 seconds total). This way it’s not just plain damage and offers some protection.

Utilities: As others said, some of our utilities are completly forgotten. In the case of venoms, Skale Venom is really weak when Spider Venom can apply MORE weakness when traited, and Ice Drake Venom is inferior to Devourer Venom, so if you need to chose, you always go with Spider and Devourer on each case. The fact that all of them have 45 second recharge doesn’t make sense. If they have very different effects, they should have very different recharges.

Underwater: Most Thieves are forced to completly change their playstyle while Underwater. That our weapons are good underwater solves it a bit, but I don’t like being forced to change my skillbar. I know there is some work on making more utilities viable underwater, but here it’s a neccesity. We can only use Basilisk Venom underwater (I was told by Izzy during an AMA before release that Thieves Guild would probably be seen underwater), and there are skills that I simply can’t understand why aren’t available underwater when they would work exactly as in solid ground.

I don’t want to make this longer than it should be, so here you go. I hope this helps the team.

Otec.5092:

My biggest concern with thief is in WvW. In PvE they’re fine (potentially too weak even), and I don’t really play much sPvP. What I have to say with regards to WvW is in small group, or even 1v1 or 2v2 action.

Thieves can initiate fights well and burst well. That’s fine. What’s not fine is that if I manage to survive their burst, they are so slippery that they can escape every time if they are halfway intelligent.

I understand that slipperiness was a design goal for a thief, but there is a huge difference between strategic and tactical stealth in a fight. Strategic stealth is what we have now, which is long periods where the thief can stealth, reposition, and plot – even completely run away. This is amplified by the culling issues in WvW, but still – it IS an issue. Tactical stealth would be more short duration (1-2 second) stealths, combined with similar duration mobility increasing mechanics to have the thief feel able to be elusive in combat. There would also have to be some mechanic to keep these from being chained to create strategic stealth, though this exists in some form currently through the revealed debuff.

Right now, thieves pay no price for failed burst, as they can stealth or teleport away with ease. Their strategic advantage makes it impossible to kill a thief who knows what he’s doing.

Great post! This is exactly my biggest concern with stealth!!

And because its so easy for thieves to disengage from combat and teleport away, they dont have to bother to much with defensive stats on items (toughness, vitality). They can mainly concentrate on damage stats because its so easy for them to disengage from combat just using their skills. That makes the massive burst damage from thieves even worse.

I dont know any other profession who can ignore toughness + vitality on items like thieves can.

Deadly traits is alright.
Critical traits are okay
Acrobatics are pretty nice
Trickery is pretty nice as well

Shadow arts traits is just crazy imba glyphs imho. You get rewarded while in stealth? regen while stealth, gain more initiative while stealth gain, 15 seconds of might when stealth? That’s just crazy and nonsense imo. That’s why decent players can’t kill some of us, once we stealth, we can remove conditions, re heal everything, regain all our initiatives and are ready to go for round 2+3+4 and so on.

Once upon a time there was this MMO Ragnarok Online that was pretty popular. In their cloaking system, while under cloak you slowly lose your mana, you walk slower (so you had to trait to walk faster), and once ur hit then you become uncloaked.

What I’m trying to say is that there should be pros and cons to thieves/assassins/rogues (w/e you wanna call em) when they are stealthed. Seems like the stealth system in GW2 is that you have everything to gain using stealth and nothing to lose.

Thieves should (have to) give something up for the ultimate reward (which is stealthing).

Seriously need more weapon selections for Thieves….
d/d, d/p, p/d is too much ez mode (with stealthing)
s/d main burst dmg skill (flanking strike) needs work
s/p auto attack does more then P/W and Headshot is just useless
Shortbow is freaken awesome tho!
p/p is…. yeah…..

Then I look at mesmers and their weapon selections and it makes me QQ

Thief isn’t half as squishy as people make out, you just have to choose between massive DPS or more def/hp and most people go for DPS. Personally I get along fine. However when lvling at the start it was hard as hell.

Pistol/Pistol – The auto attack animation should have both pistols being fired alternately, limited to 1 skill, unload, needs a rethink.

Sword Pistol is fine! learn to use the other skills.

Short bow has underwhelming DPS.

Stealthing on steal doesn’t always work as you end up hitting the mob with the last attack you made. This should always make you stealth as it can ruin a combo. I never use steal for skills it’s for initiative and stealth or gap closer.

- Vital Shot sucks
- Body Shot (still) sucks
- Flanking Strike doesn’t quite suck, needs to follow the target or have a much quicker animation
- Pistol Whip sucks

As a general statement, Thieves lack survivability in PVE. Stealth is a very powerful mechanic in PVP, but it falls short in PVE. It seems like we have to give up a lot of our offensive capability just to be able to stay alive, whereas proffesions like Warrior barely have to give up anything offensively to avoid being flattened.

I can’t tell you how lame it is that I can only fight one veteran or karka at a time on my Thief, but my Warrior (who is slightly less geared) can run in and take 2-3 at a time. I know Warriors are obviously intended to take hits better than a Thief, but my issue is that if a Warrior and a Thief have similar damage outputs, but a Warrior can survive substantially better, why play a Thief?

Blacksarevok.8104:

- Vital Shot sucks
- Body Shot (still) sucks
- Flanking Strike doesn’t quite suck, needs to follow the target or have a much quicker animation
- Pistol Whip sucks

As a general statement, Thieves lack survivability in PVE. Stealth is a very powerful mechanic in PVP, but it falls short in PVE. It seems like we have to give up a lot of our offensive capability just to be able to stay alive, whereas proffesions like Warrior barely have to give up anything offensively to avoid being flattened.

I can’t tell you how lame it is that I can only fight one veteran or karka at a time on my Thief, but my Warrior (who is slightly less geared) can run in and take 2-3 at a time. I know Warriors are obviously intended to take hits better than a Thief, but my issue is that if a Warrior and a Thief have similar damage outputs, but a Warrior can survive substantially better, why play a Thief?

Actually, in response to my last paragraph, I would like to see Thieves get an elite skill defensive signet. Something that gives a passive damage reduction and/or HP increase, and has a Use that restores endurance and grants a block or something.

LiuliRenai.3928:

And yet Thief burst is not as damaging as a shatter mesmer build.

If you hit with everything with the usual shatter+blurred frenzy combo it deals about 7k damage, just saying.

Marduh.4603:

Can be swapped active effects Infiltrator’s Signet and Signet of Shadows.

Signet of Shadows
Passive: Grants a 25% increase in movement speed.
Active: Shadowstep to your foe.

Infiltrator’s Signet
Passive: Regenerates one extra initiative every ten seconds.
Active: Blind foes near your target.

I think that this would make more sense (according to the names of the signets):

Signet of Shadows
Passive: Regenerates one extra initiative every ten seconds.
Active: Blind foes near your target.

Infiltrator’s Signet
Passive: Grants a 25% increase in movement speed.
Active: Shadowstep to your foe.