Guild Wars 2

As most of you know, Thief burst damage is currently under observation. As a glass-cannoneer myself I know the extent of Thief burst damage and how stupid it can get against some classes.

Hence I want to debate how to best deal with the burst situation without gutting the class overall.

I’ll start by saying the best place to address this issue is by altering the traits. The good thing about traits is that you can always pick another if one gets nerfed overzealously.

I’ll also like to point out that one of the reasons why Thieves can have such high burst is because of various stacking effects. For example:

1. Venomous Strength + Singets of Might allow us to stack a large number of Might stacks to prepare for burst. Especially when coupled with the Assassin’s Singet this can result in quite an extreme damage boost.

2. Haste leads to more burst than any other ability in game. It’s a 100% DPS increase which, considering the fast nature of sPvP, can actually be valuable than a simple 100% damage increase. However since Thief abilities have no cooldowns, Haste is much more effective for Thieves than many other classes.

3. Volatile damage of Mug is something I’m finding hard to explain. In PvE Mug will typically hit for roughly 700 at level 80. Yet in sPvP it has been known to crit for over 5000 damage. Considering the range and instant nature of the ability, that does seem rather excessive. I’m not sure where this extra damage comes from but it needs to be looked at.
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My suggestions would be to alter some of the aforementioned abilities that stack Might onto already bursty abilities. They could reduce the number of stacks for Singets of Might for example while increasing the duration or simply replace it with a different boon or effect. Instead of stacking 5 Mights for 5 seconds it could stack 2 Mights for 15 seconds.

Haste I believe has no place on the Thief class. Without the limit of cooldowns on abilities it’s just going to result in other weird burst scenarios. If it must be kept, it should be limited to a 50% speed increase whereas you could probably remove the negative downsides. Overall however I think it would be healthier if the ability was replaced with something more interesting.

And regarding Mug, I think the damage formula needs a little fine tuning. It should be less volatile than it currently is. Anywhere between 1000 and 3000 damage seems reasonable. But beyond that is going to be hard to justify for such a low-tier trait.

Anyway, those are my 2 cents worth of how to balance Thieves. I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

The only change that needs to be made is that assassins signet needs to be reduced to 25% bonus on next hit with a 25 second cool down, the rest is pointless.

Haste works fine for the thief losing all your endurance is horrible its very situational in PvP and PvE, if you are talking about combining it with Pistol whip, well there are hundreds of replies on how to counter pistol whip builds with ease and I cant be bothered to go into it again

By burst you are referring to back stab I assume. And my suggested change would fix that.

In regards to mug it hits mobs for a lot less due to them having toughness, sure if you crit a warrior in frenzy you will get a huge number but that’s a rarity, I’ve been fire grabbed on my thief for 13k before running a glass cannon build… It is not the only skill that’s instant, on a long cooldown and hits hard. Hell I’ve been crit for 3k + by just auto attacks from warriors and guards

from PoV of a long time thief. i honestly think pistol whip needs changed, not nerfed per say, but changed. right now because of its self root and dependancy on stuns/haste a thief simply has more options to land the hit then the average player (specced appropriately) has escapes.

yes you can dodge, walk away, stun break, etc. but a pistol whip build has 2 gap closers they can pair it with, a haste option, a immobilize, and maybe ven a stoneform if they take it. thats 5 (most will probably have 3-4) ways to ensure that pistol whip lands.

its a very black and white ability. it either hits and devestates or misses/hits partially and does hardly anything.

i do think it needs adjusting, but i dont know in what way.

My short notes are something like this:

Base ability damage is fine. This includes Pistol Whip, which is underwhelming on its own but is by far the best skill to multiply with the stupid powerful Haste.

I think the big instant Mug damage is kind of silly, but really it’s the way it hits in concert with Cloak and Dagger or Pistol Whip – dealing a big nuke and guaranteeing those hard hitting abilities will hit as well.

Finally I think Assassin’s Signet is the biggest culprit for stupid Thief bursts, from how it stacks on top of other guaranteed crit abilities to do silly things.

I would personally start by re-working Assassin’s Signet to make your next attack a guaranteed crit instead of a damage bonus that stacks on top of crit; then I would re-work Steal to reset your animation when used (so it would break stuns, but you couldn’t use it mid ability either). Somewhere in there I’d want to re-work Haste to be longer lasting but provide less of a raw burst bonus.

The defensive stealth bonuses mentioned in the same dev post are something I do not think can be reasonably addressed until they do something about their model loading issues – stealth is disproportionately powerful right now because of how it lingers after being broken by rendering lag. If there is a problem after fixing that, it can probably be addressed by adjusting the amount of time on the Revealed debuff.