Guild Wars 2

…When they said that thieves had too many ways of regaining initiative, and they were reducing the amount of ways they have of regaining initiative.

That is the only significant nerf to thieves that I personally feel is being made, and it is a big one.

Thieves have pretty much no passive survivability, all of their survivability comes from their attack skills, such as black powder, the evade from pistol whip, the blind from shadow shot, etc. Reducing how often thieves can use these abilities will significantly reduce their survivability.

At the moment, I feel that thieves are in a good place. They are passively very squishy, but this is balanced out by how often they can use their abilities. If, a-net, you want to reduce how often they use their attacks, then I suggest giving a significant buff to thieve’s base armor and HP. I personally would rather you leave that alone, along with their initiative regenerating traits. But if you are dead set on nerfing thieve’s initiative regenerating abilities, then that would be the best way to balance it out.

It’s hilarious because they buffed the hell out of Thief Initiative regen a few months back, I guess in an attempt to improve general Thief usability. Just shows the balance people really have no clue what they’re doing.

They honestly should just reset every skill and trait back to their pre-BWE states and hire a new team to tackle balance going forward.

Einlanzer.1627:

It’s hilarious because they buffed the hell out of Thief Initiative regen a few months back, I guess in an attempt to improve general Thief usability. Just shows the balance people really have no clue what they’re doing.

Because adjusting something after probably tweaking it too far means they have no clue what they’re doing.

If it’s broken, complain. I got by fine on kleptomaniac and preparedness alone. I’m fine with them trying to choke out permastealth.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Einlanzer.1627:

It’s hilarious because they buffed the hell out of Thief Initiative regen a few months back, I guess in an attempt to improve general Thief usability. Just shows the balance people really have no clue what they’re doing.

Because adjusting something after probably tweaking it too far means they have no clue what they’re doing.

If it’s broken, complain. I got by fine on kleptomaniac and preparedness alone. I’m fine with them trying to choke out permastealth.

This is one of those rare examples where I’ll admit I was far too snippy in the above post, so I apologize to all the forum posters.

I’m actually looking forward to the evolution of what’s being done for HoT. Poison buff through Deadly Arts will make D/D work better for condi/hybrid specs, for example.

Well they nerfed survivability in two ways honestly.

One was initiative regen and the other is endurance.

They also made it to where any condi clear(as though thieves had a ton to begin with) will have to replace endurance even more.

So endurance took a hit and then on top of that you have to choose between endurance or condi clear in the acro line.

DA took an awesome buff, and SA can be run with more builds, but SA is pretty useless in PvP. They really did a number on PvP thieves in the acro line and made Critical Strikes fairly useless.

On top of that they took out the initiative on crits.

Of which I love on my d/p executioner build.

So all in all they brought more damage but less survivability to thieves in PvP.

Of which the thief has no real passive defense like other classes, its all an active defense using dodges and attack skills.

Survivability took a hard hit.

Which is kinda funny as most complaints from the entire community about thieves is due to the SA line and the significant stealth and their answer was to throw nerfs at the acro line.

Of which they have a couple ways of fixing the acro line:

1. Revert FG and let HtC give swiftness instead. (Likely the most popular choice among those that run acro.). This way you can run Pain Resistance and HtC.

2. Change the resistance trait to above 75% health so you can gain resistance during a fight and not just on first hit. (With this you can run Vigorous Recovery and the resistance trait.) As of right now those two are fairly meh to put together as that resistance trait is fairly meh. Honeslty this would be my choice but others are really gunning for a revert on FG.