Guild Wars 2

“There are a lot of good things coming to thief in the next balance patch”

The above is a quote from the Livestream today when they had to move on due to time constraints, and it sounds like the only big nerf to thieves is the duration of each poison tick on choking gas (which, we have to admit, is ridiculous with the ability to stack up to 20 seconds with 0 Condi duration on a single field which is spamable. This will be nerfed from 5 seconds per pulse to 3 seconds. All poison fields for all classes are getting this nerf). So other than that, many buffs are coming our way!

Please keep the sarcasm and bashing to a minimum.

Before posting about the damage nerf to full berserker builds, please read this post which outlines why you won’t be dealing less damage if you have any trinkets that are more survivability-oriented.

Thief nerfed into oblivon in wvwvw roaming (our last place we’re viable)

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t destroy Pistol Whip.

I can’t play S/D anymore because of how they split the #3 skill. I just hate it so much. Now they want to take away S/P from me? =/

Thief WAS my favorite class but for the past couple of months I’ve only been using my warrior instead. I’ve been trying to get back to it recently and Pistol Whip is the only thing that doesn’t make me feel completely useless.

I agree with Big Tower as well. The damage nerfs are huge for Thief (10% less damage overall from crit builds) and now they are going to hurt us in PvE, again.

Bleh I need a break from Thief again it seems.

Big Tower.5423:

Thief nerfed into oblivon in wvwvw roaming (our last place we’re viable)

You are WRONG ! we are good farmer too with Cluster Bomb hahaha !

Anyway, Life of the Thief
Created
Nerfed
Deleted

Oh yea that 10 % crit damage nerf, that screams 10 % overall damage nerf for www roamer thieves that can barely keep their hats on in current aoe/condi/ bunker meta. Thats a nice buff, ty anet.

Kurr.4179:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t destroy Pistol Whip.

I can’t play S/D anymore because of how they split the #3 skill. I just hate it so much. Now they want to take away S/P from me? =/

Thief WAS my favorite class but for the past couple of months I’ve only been using my warrior instead. I’ve been trying to get back to it recently and Pistol Whip is the only thing that doesn’t make me feel completely useless.

I agree with Big Tower as well. The damage nerfs are huge for Thief (10% less damage overall from crit builds) and now they are going to hurt us in PvE, again.

Bleh I need a break from Thief again it seems.

I may be taking a break from the class depending on the overall changes, but I won’t be jumping to conclusions until I know the new formulas and how things work. They said that they would be balancing out Ferocity across all armor pieces and trinkets, making it so you don’t have to take X over Z. This leads me to believe that those of us who have Berserker armor and more tanky trinkets will actually have an overall damage increase due to the new stat allocations. It simply means that you should build a little bit tanker and not rely on your fights to last 2 seconds.

How would one actually use berserker armor and non-crit-damage trinkets when trying to balance (crit) damage with survivability?

The usual non-berserker pieces are the ones with relatively low returns on Crit-Damage for the ‘loss’ in the minor stat. As Ferocity will be a (minor) stat on gear and, assuming it all scales to current levels, then those pieces will suddenly add a bit more to damage output. Similarly the pieces that used to have a good trade off (trinkets and jewels!) will now no longer be the better choices for berserker.

And they’ll also have to look at crit-damage runes. Currently 3 / 6 runes (from a set) have attribute boosts, the other 3 do something else, where the else can be crit-damage. Will they simply change those to Ferocity and create runesets with all attrib boosts?

I like how the devs spent the absolute least amount of time discussing the thief.

I’m okay with the nerf to Choking Gas, but I think there are a lot of buffs thieves could use that would be far more useful than this nerf is.

As for PW… Not sure what to think about this yet. Unless there’s some kind of drastic change though, I don’t think splitting this skill up will help anything.

origano.5912:

Big Tower.5423:

Thief nerfed into oblivon in wvwvw roaming (our last place we’re viable)

You are WRONG ! we are good farmer too with Cluster Bomb hahaha !

Anyway, Life of the Thief
Created
Nerfed
Deleted

i understand u guys being scarred and also that it is terrible if your fave build gets hit. every class, apart from war, feels the same way.

mes: glamour nerfed by almost 60% making it completely useless, turned wvw mesmers into veilbots

ranger: were part of wvw, had their monment of shine with bm rangers. now are a complete joke in wvw.guild recruitment threds: hardcore wvw guild looking for war,guards, necro and eles. no rangers please!

d/d eles: got hit so hard that barely anyone in na plays them nowadays

engi: were bad and full of bus, got buffs and finally got a little spot in wvw zergs and boom nerfed again.

so u see everyone is going through this. but lets see what tuesday brings and maybe 1 or 2 of the changes will help u guys in other areas. it would be great if thief, ranger, mes could finally be part of large scale fights in future and not just gangers, roamers or veilbots.

Kurr.4179:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t destroy Pistol Whip.

I can’t play S/D anymore because of how they split the #3 skill. I just hate it so much. Now they want to take away S/P from me? =/

Thief WAS my favorite class but for the past couple of months I’ve only been using my warrior instead. I’ve been trying to get back to it recently and Pistol Whip is the only thing that doesn’t make me feel completely useless.

I agree with Big Tower as well. The damage nerfs are huge for Thief (10% less damage overall from crit builds) and now they are going to hurt us in PvE, again.

Bleh I need a break from Thief again it seems.

Yeah I know how you feel no joke literally last night crafted my ascended zerker sword and pistol for thief. lmao. I literally thought even if they touch our dps no way in hell they are going to touch S/P after just buffing it into usefulness….

Not being sarcastic or bashing anything… but the positive changes are probably:
Arbitrary trap buffs.
And most definitely arbitrary venom buffs.
A possible buff to Hard to Catch, reducing it’s internal CD.

Arganthium.5638:

I like how the devs spent the absolute least amount of time discussing the thief.

I’m okay with the nerf to Choking Gas, but I think there are a lot of buffs thieves could use that would be far more useful than this nerf is.

As for PW… Not sure what to think about this yet. Unless there’s some kind of drastic change though, I don’t think splitting this skill up will help anything.

jon peters also talked about increasing daze effect of PW after Splitting,
however getting 2 skills will increase the effect to suprise enemies by not simple doing 1 Long Animation; also you can manage your initiative bar very well by not simply spending 5 INit. ….. maybe using flurry in a different/same way as mesmer
and ….
2 Signets on shortbow ^^ and rune-update …. more things coming 21th and I think maybe the first time buffs on thief will overshadow the nerf on choking gas

TheGuy.3568:

Kurr.4179:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t destroy Pistol Whip.

I can’t play S/D anymore because of how they split the #3 skill. I just hate it so much. Now they want to take away S/P from me? =/

Thief WAS my favorite class but for the past couple of months I’ve only been using my warrior instead. I’ve been trying to get back to it recently and Pistol Whip is the only thing that doesn’t make me feel completely useless.

I agree with Big Tower as well. The damage nerfs are huge for Thief (10% less damage overall from crit builds) and now they are going to hurt us in PvE, again.

Bleh I need a break from Thief again it seems.

Yeah I know how you feel no joke literally last night crafted my ascended zerker sword and pistol for thief. lmao. I literally thought even if they touch our dps no way in hell they are going to touch S/P after just buffing it into usefulness….

Yeah, I don’t even want to get ascended gear anymore to be honest. I’ve been waiting for the big balance changes to make the armor and weapon sets for my thief, just got my stuff to 500 and hording mats, because I knew I was going to get screwed soon.

Now I have to keep waiting, because they still seem to have a lot of ideas for how to bend thieves over.

Already Thief was so weak, why make it weaker is beyond comprehension for me. They should buff Thief damage overall by ~5-10% to compensate the loss from Crit Damage honestly. It’s the one thing we are actually good at, at least let us keep our damage (and it’s only the burst, warrior is still better sustainable DPS).

Already when I do the only difficult PvE content (Aetherpath, Arah, Fractals —- honestly I do worse on scale 11-20 on thief then I do on 30 on warrior) I feel like deleting my Thief and just playing my warrior as I get downed 3x more often on thief despite actually using a more defensive trait build vs my warrior’s full offensive/berserker trait + set up.

And yeah like someone said, the “positive” will be irrelevant changes to things no one uses or wants to use.

One thing I took away is that we will be better at evasion than the heavy additional defensive boon classes. Feline grace was not as good kitten (10 in the case of eles) Traits and will now be better than those easily accessible traits. I wish they didn’t nerf the other classes, butvat least they’re getting consistent in their balance choices.

Arkantos.7460:

Arganthium.5638:

I like how the devs spent the absolute least amount of time discussing the thief.

I’m okay with the nerf to Choking Gas, but I think there are a lot of buffs thieves could use that would be far more useful than this nerf is.

As for PW… Not sure what to think about this yet. Unless there’s some kind of drastic change though, I don’t think splitting this skill up will help anything.

jon peters also talked about increasing daze effect of PW after Splitting,
however getting 2 skills will increase the effect to suprise enemies by not simple doing 1 Long Animation; also you can manage your initiative bar very well by not simply spending 5 INit. ….. maybe using flurry in a different/same way as mesmer
and ….
2 Signets on shortbow ^^ and rune-update …. more things coming 21th and I think maybe the first time buffs on thief will overshadow the nerf on choking gas

First off it is a stun. Second the issue us a simple one. It is hard enough to land a full PW as it is vs a good player you might get half. Any player will know that you’ll have to blow the flurry before you PW again. Vs a flat out nerf (which it may actually be) it just a hassle. If they do not up the stun then with the second cast you likely won’t land the flurry. They did enough when they fixed the after cast. That being said the cast on the flurry and the duration of the stun is what we really have to worry about.

TheGuy.3568:

Arkantos.7460:

Arganthium.5638:

I like how the devs spent the absolute least amount of time discussing the thief.

I’m okay with the nerf to Choking Gas, but I think there are a lot of buffs thieves could use that would be far more useful than this nerf is.

As for PW… Not sure what to think about this yet. Unless there’s some kind of drastic change though, I don’t think splitting this skill up will help anything.

jon peters also talked about increasing daze effect of PW after Splitting,
however getting 2 skills will increase the effect to suprise enemies by not simple doing 1 Long Animation; also you can manage your initiative bar very well by not simply spending 5 INit. ….. maybe using flurry in a different/same way as mesmer
and ….
2 Signets on shortbow ^^ and rune-update …. more things coming 21th and I think maybe the first time buffs on thief will overshadow the nerf on choking gas

First off it is a stun. Second the issue us a simple one. It is hard enough to land a full PW as it is vs a good player you might get half. Any player will know that you’ll have to blow the flurry before you PW again. Vs a flat out nerf (which it may actually be) it just a hassle. If they do not up the stun then with the second cast you likely won’t land the flurry. They did enough when they fixed the after cast. That being said the cast on the flurry and the duration of the stun is what we really have to worry about.

at last, we have to wait till 21th

Maugetarr.6823:

One thing I took away is that we will be better at evasion than the heavy additional defensive boon classes. Feline grace was not as good kitten (10 in the case of eles) Traits and will now be better than those easily accessible traits. I wish they didn’t nerf the other classes, butvat least they’re getting consistent in their balance choices.

Somehow I’m doubtful about them improving our evasion… Considering there was already a QQ about SB’s evade … If we get buffed in that area that should bring in even more QQ’s…

Zero Day.2594:

Maugetarr.6823:

One thing I took away is that we will be better at evasion than the heavy additional defensive boon classes. Feline grace was not as good kitten (10 in the case of eles) Traits and will now be better than those easily accessible traits. I wish they didn’t nerf the other classes, butvat least they’re getting consistent in their balance choices.

Somehow I’m doubtful about them improving our evasion… Considering there was already a QQ about SB’s evade … If we get buffed in that area that should bring in even more QQ’s…

I wasn’t saying that they are improving ours, but rather ours won’t be outclassed by others’ 5 point minor traits because those are getting knocked down to base 50% uptime. A small moment of schadenfreude….

Maugetarr.6823:

Zero Day.2594:

Maugetarr.6823:

One thing I took away is that we will be better at evasion than the heavy additional defensive boon classes. Feline grace was not as good kitten (10 in the case of eles) Traits and will now be better than those easily accessible traits. I wish they didn’t nerf the other classes, butvat least they’re getting consistent in their balance choices.

Somehow I’m doubtful about them improving our evasion… Considering there was already a QQ about SB’s evade … If we get buffed in that area that should bring in even more QQ’s…

I wasn’t saying that they are improving ours, but rather ours won’t be outclassed by others’ 5 point minor traits because those are getting knocked down to base 50% uptime. A small moment of schadenfreude….

Ah… that would be well played… Hopefully that should hold off the QQ’s for a few months… before they begin to realize that we outclass them in evading… and then there shall be more QQ’s!

I like the idea. In terms of QQ’ing it just postpones it.

why did they spoke quite allot about all classes and the changes coming to them and wen it came to thieves they spent less than 2 min talking about it and only reveled 1 single change coming to us?!

I think it’s likely they will introduce a new weapon set.

But frankly I don’t think that will do much for the class.

Personally I’d much rather see them remake the stealth-mechanic in this game. It’s by far the most frustrating element for non-Thieves and by far the most overpowered thing about Thieves, especially when speced into Shadow Arts.

Thieves should have stealth, sure, but overall it would be better for everyone is they were less dependent on it and had less room to exploit it.

Dee Jay.2460:

I think it’s likely they will introduce a new weapon set.

But frankly I don’t think that will do much for the class.

Personally I’d much rather see them remake the stealth-mechanic in this game. It’s by far the most frustrating element for non-Thieves and by far the most overpowered thing about Thieves, especially when speced into Shadow Arts.

Thieves should have stealth, sure, but overall it would be better for everyone is they were less dependent on it and had less room to exploit it.

Sure rework stealth… But give us something in terms of survivability… So that we can go stealthless and be able to last longer then ~10 seconds…

Anet says a lot of positive things coming for thieves, because they know if they reveal what these things are, they’ll get torn apart by the community. Look at the 33% more initiative addition. “It’s huge!” Yeah, right.

Every time there’s a balance patch, I need an herbal enema to get back to normal.

We just have to not get our hopes high….

I’m praying for a d/d #3 rework.

I can see it now…

DA/II: Corrosive Traps, increased vulnerability time from 8 to 10 seconds.
CS/IV: Concealed Defeat, ICD removed.
SA/V: Power Shots, increased damage modifier to 7% from 5%.
Acro/VII: Fleet of Foot, now removes Chill.
Trickery/XI: Hastened Replenishment, increased initiative gained from 4 to 5.

Galsia.4102:

I can see it now…

DA/II: Corrosive Traps, increased vulnerability time from 8 to 10 seconds.
CS/IV: Concealed Defeat, ICD removed.
SA/V: Power Shots, increased damage modifier to 7% from 5%.
Acro/VII: Fleet of Foot, now removes Chill.
Trickery/XI: Hastened Replenishment, increased initiative gained from 4 to 5.

That…sounds a lot like what we might get.

Zero Day.2594:

Not being sarcastic or bashing anything… but the positive changes are probably:
Arbitrary trap buffs.
And most definitely arbitrary venom buffs.
A possible buff to Hard to Catch, reducing it’s internal CD.

I agree, thieves can expect some MASSSIVE buffs like those you posted. Also, they will probably lower Last Refuge cooldown to make it a lot better.

Also get ready to have Pistol Whip split in two, the first one costing 2 initiative and the second one costing 3. Then have the second part of the skill cost 4. Then have the second part of the skill deal 10% less damage. Then have the first part of the skill cost 3 because a 2 ini stun is too much.

On a side note, how in the world will you land the second part if you choose to not use it immediately after the first part? And you’ll be locked out of the stun for about 5 seconds… that will prevent you to land an actual pistol whip.

Lucky Shot.7650:

Zero Day.2594:

Not being sarcastic or bashing anything… but the positive changes are probably:
Arbitrary trap buffs.
And most definitely arbitrary venom buffs.
A possible buff to Hard to Catch, reducing it’s internal CD.

I agree, thieves can expect some MASSSIVE buffs like those you posted. Also, they will probably lower Last Refuge cooldown to make it a lot better.

Also get ready to have Pistol Whip split in two, the first one costing 2 initiative and the second one costing 3. Then have the second part of the skill cost 4. Then have the second part of the skill deal 10% less damage. Then have the first part of the skill cost 3 because a 2 ini stun is too much.

On a side note, how in the world will you land the second part if you choose to not use it immediately after the first part? And you’ll be locked out of the stun for about 5 seconds… that will prevent you to land an actual pistol whip.

Yeah I can see that nerf happening… or the stun duration reduced… something will happen cuz 2init stun 2OP…

Lucky Shot.7650:

Zero Day.2594:

Not being sarcastic or bashing anything… but the positive changes are probably:
Arbitrary trap buffs.
And most definitely arbitrary venom buffs.
A possible buff to Hard to Catch, reducing it’s internal CD.

I agree, thieves can expect some MASSSIVE buffs like those you posted. Also, they will probably lower Last Refuge cooldown to make it a lot better.

Also get ready to have Pistol Whip split in two, the first one costing 2 initiative and the second one costing 3. Then have the second part of the skill cost 4. Then have the second part of the skill deal 10% less damage. Then have the first part of the skill cost 3 because a 2 ini stun is too much.

On a side note, how in the world will you land the second part if you choose to not use it immediately after the first part? And you’ll be locked out of the stun for about 5 seconds… that will prevent you to land an actual pistol whip.

Hey they would never do that. It’s not like they completely broke S/D by taking it’s main appeal, making it into an unusable 2 skill mess because of skill lag and even icon lag making near impossible to spam, hard to make it do what you want IE if you double tap 3 you only have a 50% chance of it using it twice… sometimes it will use it once, sometimes it will use it 3 times.

It’s not like they also took the original usefulness of the skill and nerfed it into the ground for PvP and decided it was super OP in PvE as well despite it not being so. It’s not like they would ever do that to Pistol Whip and make the thief completely useless.

If ANet wants to fix the thief, they will :

-Add more range on Cluster Bomb. Seriously it was our ONLY FREAKING WEAPON IN ZERGS V ZERGS. Bring it back to 1200

-Give us the original S/D #3 back, as 1 skill with the original effect and stats. It is UNUSABLE in it’s current state and becomes a jumbled mess, making it difficult to tell which action your character is actually going to execute when you use it because of skill icon lag, skill lag, and the game arbitrarily using the skill or not when you use it.

-Fix P/D and P/P. The #2 skill and unload should be combined, with unload giving 3 stacks of vuln for 8s or something, and the #2 skill should be completely different (maybe weakness, something else… maybe a small AoE, who knows). Maybe even a small damage boost to unload (5% or so). P/P should be a single target destroyer, right now it’s like hitting a wall with pebbles.

-Make traps useful (ability to destroy them without them being hit for a boon, other effects that are useful to you if they didn’t serve their purpose). Also make them ground targettable at a small range to make them possibly useful.

-Buff venoms. No one will ever use them as is, the buffs on them are BAD. Also buff venomshare range to 900 or something at least!

-Half our traits are just pointless and bad. It’s better than before but it still needs work.

Yes, if ANet wants to fix the thief… half the work they have to do is reverting changes they’ve already made.

They already killed almost everything about this profession. I just won’t be able to keep playing it if they mess with YET ANOTHER weapon set and turn it useless. What the hell are we supposed to do?

Lucky Shot.7650:

Zero Day.2594:

Not being sarcastic or bashing anything… but the positive changes are probably:
Arbitrary trap buffs.
And most definitely arbitrary venom buffs.
A possible buff to Hard to Catch, reducing it’s internal CD.

I agree, thieves can expect some MASSSIVE buffs like those you posted. Also, they will probably lower Last Refuge cooldown to make it a lot better.

Also get ready to have Pistol Whip split in two, the first one costing 2 initiative and the second one costing 3. Then have the second part of the skill cost 4. Then have the second part of the skill deal 10% less damage. Then have the first part of the skill cost 3 because a 2 ini stun is too much.

On a side note, how in the world will you land the second part if you choose to not use it immediately after the first part? And you’ll be locked out of the stun for about 5 seconds… that will prevent you to land an actual pistol whip.

That’s the life cycle of “good things” for thief sadly. They should tattoo a tear on the face of the thief toon icon, just to express how we really feel inside.

Kurr you’re way off about s/d. They fixed that weapon set by splitting #3 into 2 parts! Most of us have no issue using it and now we’re not left with a skill that is sure to miss the 2nd hit while leaving us totally open to counter attacks. The subsequent nerfs like dropping the boons stolen were really questionable but not the initial decision to split them up.

I’m not sure about splitting pw up but I’m willing to see what it looks like. Currently it is next to impossible to get a full pw to hit but what if you waste the initial stun then sword #2 to immobilize them before the 2nd part?

I think pw doesn’t suffer from the same issues as FS / LS so I’m less confident that anet will get it right. Time will tell.

Some counterplay to the poison field, not really a big hit and it was needed, I wish the poisonfield would last for longer though. Engineers poison nades were hit way harder imo.

Mesmers wont be able to mindlessly spam clones with dodge,
Warriors pin down will be better visible, engineers net turret will have shorter immobilize duration, eles will be slightly buffed which they need although it’s not their sustain which needs a buff, the bugfixes to ranger were good, some minionmaster builds will be slightly less sturdy and dumbfire will receive some changes which I have mixed feelings about, the main source of vigor for guardians will be cut in half.

Ghostwolf.9863:

Some counterplay to the poison field, not really a big hit and it was needed, I wish the poisonfield would last for longer though. Engineers poison nades were hit way harder imo.

Mesmers wont be able to mindlessly spam clones with dodge,
Warriors pin down will be better visible, engineers net turret will have shorter immobilize duration, eles will be slightly buffed which they need although it’s not their sustain which needs a buff, the bugfixes to ranger were good, some minionmaster builds will be slightly less sturdy and dumbfire will receive some changes which I have mixed feelings about, the main source of vigor for guardians will be cut in half.

All in all, a good day. If they just stuck with these and did NOTHING to thief I’d be happy. I feel like our “good things to come” is just throwing powder sugar on manure. Our “jelly doughnut” isn’t going to be as appetizing and it’s made to be but even still, I have hopes. Small, microscopic hopes..