Guild Wars 2

Check the first and then the second dmg

Not like it’s pretty much agreed upon that vault and BD are overtuned in their damage and the rest of the staff and the entirety of the thief is horrible or anything…

So you’re basing the viability of a class only upon the damage done by 1 weapon skill? Then warriors should be even in a better spot than thieves. Also I bet you’ll be downed even before a match start in pvp with that build. Screenshots prove nothing, show how you actually play that build vs the other elites.

So much info is missing, how much might did you have? How much vulnerability did he have?

DeceiverX.8361:

Not like it’s pretty much agreed upon that vault and BD are overtuned in their damage and the rest of the staff and the entirety of the thief is horrible or anything…

This.

DeceiverX.8361:

Not like it’s pretty much agreed upon that vault and BD are overtuned in their damage and the rest of the staff and the entirety of the thief is horrible or anything…

Woah, a 2.25 multiplier on a skill that can be walked out of is overtuned?

Kolly.9872:

So you’re basing the viability of a class only upon the damage done by 1 weapon skill? Then warriors should be even in a better spot than thieves. Also I bet you’ll be downed even before a match start in pvp with that build. Screenshots prove nothing, show how you actually play that build vs the other elites.

That’s what anyone with a vendetta against a single class ever does. One skill makes an entire profession overpowered don’t ya know.

I got hit by a 12k Gun Flame and a 13k Arc Divider the otherday, one after the other. Does that mean Warriors are in a worse position than Thieves because they dealt less damage than the picture in OP?
Nah. Specific situations, specific circumstances. No amount of balance speculation can be made from a screenshot of your combat log.
Face a Thief vs every other class/build in the game 100 times each and then you have some okay results to form averages on.
It’s funny, really. When you look at the other forum sections for classes, the Thief subsection has the most amount of “buff us pls, we’re UP” posts. Whilst it doesn’t really correlate to a lot, it does shine some light on the situation as a whole.
Thieves being “Fine” or balanced is purely based on your experience as a player. Lots of none-thief players claim we’re fine or we’re balanced, lots of long-time veteran Thieves (we’re talking 2-3k+ hours played in WvW/PvP exclusively) have mixed views and seems to be 50/50.
The mid ground of Thieves generally believe the class is not in a good state right now and needs balance tweaks. No one likes being a +1/Decap bot in sPvP and in WvW, there are some builds a Thief just can not beat without the enemy going full potato and messing up catastrophically somehow.
I personally think Thief needs some minor balance changes, here or there. Along with the QoL changes it’s been needing a long time. Withdraw still missing 10%, Consume Plasma still doesn’t give all boons, Scorpion Wire still bugged but Magnet pull got fixed, ect.
Right now, the game is balanced all around sPvP. That’s PvE and WvW in the same basket for these changes. Plus, it’s balanced around the top 1% of sPvP because Anet wants the game to become more competitive/more of an Esport. Just like how League of Legends is balanced around the LCS or each regions variant. It’s kinda meh that way. I would love to see specific balance changes for sPvP/WvW and PvE, as all 3 have separate Traits/Utility bars and play out vastly different in each area of the game.

All we can do is close our eyes, put our hands together and hope that the Ranked Balance Patch gives Thieves buffs and not nerfs disguised as bug fixes.

video proof or did not happen.

I believe I should refer to you the fool who was complaining about gun flame, but I feel like you’d support him.

how do we know it wasnt someone without armor?

How do we know it wasnt set up with 25 stacks of might/vuln + all party buffs?

How do we know it wasnt in guild hall arena against a lvl 1?

No guys, don’t feed the troll kitten. This is a repeat of the gunflame thread. One sec, let me build a full damage ele and hit a 20k dragon’s tooth and scream that ele needs to be weaker.

Would you rather get hit by Vault or Gravedigger… yeah thought so.

SlayerSixx.5763:

I believe I should refer to you the fool who was complaining about gun flame, but I feel like you’d support him.

Gun Flame is an incredibly power attack but Berserker is in a poor spot so we don’t see it very often. I have been clipped for 8k pops with it in WvW and that doesn’t include the burning, daze, high distance, AoE, spammable nature of the skill.

If they improve the surrounding skills of the Berserker, players will be getting rocked by Gun Flame left and right. If the thief had it, EVERYONE would be complaining.

He hits a target twice in a row with vault (l2p issue). Idk why, but I’m certain the 18k hit was on a clone, since I can’t imagine any reason he’d do an extra 6k unless he’s running executioner, but if he was then he’d be running a super squishy and super situational build (see 11k HP).

A full zerk DPS berserker is still in a better spot than w.e the OP was running here. At most, he has steal to recover 1 dodge since he doesn’t appear to be running trickery. He has limited access to stealth through his blinding powder meaning fights with this guy end in a second with either him or the target insta dying as evidenced by the ranger’s pet (emphasis on pet) hitting him for 25% of his health. This build is, essentially, as gimmicky as they come.

I honestly don’t understand why people keep bringing up damage as the sole base for their argument. It isn’t damage alone that kittenes people off about DH. It isn’t damage alone that kittenes people off about reaper. It isn’t damage that warrior complain isn’t enough. It isn’t damage that thieves are complaining isn’t enough.

I can go with a full zerk ele, setup a ridiculously uncommon situation and 1 hit 5 people with dragons tooth and tell you that I caught them off guard while they camped mid during a team fight, when in reality, I probably spent a minute stacking might and had a reaper down there spamming vuln on everyone in the circle. I wouldn’t be lying when I say that I 1 shot 5 people, but that’d essentially be a half truth since this is nothing but showboating numbers without any actual point.

kittenpost of kittenposts right here

Maugetarr.6823:

DeceiverX.8361:

Not like it’s pretty much agreed upon that vault and BD are overtuned in their damage and the rest of the staff and the entirety of the thief is horrible or anything…

Woah, a 2.25 multiplier on a skill that can be walked out of is overtuned?

They’re fair-sized AOE’s and offer both repositions and evades. Recall that flanking strike has been repeatedly nerfed because of this, and almost everyone agrees the first iteration of flanking strike (not the one with boon removal) was overpowered.

2.25 Coeficient on the wiki is wrong; the damage is higher than backstab’s and that has 2.41. Vault’s should be approaching close to 2.5 and Vault’s is 1.31; better than Cloak and Dagger.

So yea, I’d argue those two abilities are wildly overtuned in their damage as an attempt to compensate for the horridness that is the rest of the staff and the class in general.

I’d be willing to bet that the damage was on a downed enemy, given the large number and the two vaults in a row with virtually no damage taken in between.

Either way, pointing to one skill and saying that the damage is good does not somehow make thief as a whole ok. Unless you want to say that bearbows have always been OP as well, since damage was never their problem.

Well, depends on how you look at things.

I mean if you look at damage of two skills in one scenario, and ignoring the rest of the “world” of things, then yeah, totally fine!

DeceiverX.8361:

Maugetarr.6823:

DeceiverX.8361:

Not like it’s pretty much agreed upon that vault and BD are overtuned in their damage and the rest of the staff and the entirety of the thief is horrible or anything…

Woah, a 2.25 multiplier on a skill that can be walked out of is overtuned?

They’re fair-sized AOE’s and offer both repositions and evades. Recall that flanking strike has been repeatedly nerfed because of this, and almost everyone agrees the first iteration of flanking strike (not the one with boon removal) was overpowered.

2.25 Coeficient on the wiki is wrong; the damage is higher than backstab’s and that has 2.41. Vault’s should be approaching close to 2.5 and Vault’s is 1.31; better than Cloak and Dagger.

So yea, I’d argue those two abilities are wildly overtuned in their damage as an attempt to compensate for the horridness that is the rest of the staff and the class in general.

Well, I’ll agree with you that vault should be fixed at 2.25 unless the current damage was intended. However, with the evade on the beginning, the skill can still be interrupted or just walked away from because of the 180 radius.

Also, for a GM trait I don’t think that 1.3ish is overtuned since it’s virtually a glorified reckless dodge, but rather that X/D is pretty undertuned at this point, considering until recently that was a 1.5 in PvE and a 1.0 in PvP. Staff #2 is pretty awkward, but #3 and #4 aren’t that bad.

If #5 were to be brought down in terms of coefficient though, I’d argue the damage would probably have to be moved to the autos. The payoff for the stealth attack is minimal and the set isn’t great at chasing. It has no interrupts either, so it really just has damage and evasion.

…which leads me to think I’m largely agreeing with you except for the part where it’s overtuned. Without access to stealth on the set, the burst was moved, made better, and made telegraphed so it could be avoided. Its relative power makes up for the situational usefulness of the other skills. However, #2 is really the only skill that needs work. The others have their uses at the appropriate time.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

I’d be willing to bet that the damage was on a downed enemy, given the large number and the two vaults in a row with virtually no damage taken in between.

Either way, pointing to one skill and saying that the damage is good does not somehow make thief as a whole ok. Unless you want to say that bearbows have always been OP as well, since damage was never their problem.

Actually, bearbow’s damage was their problem. It was mathematically optimal DPS and burst to autoattack. None of the skills provided any amount of reasonable burst to deal with classes with sustained damage resistance. Even the thief could have eaten a RF and maintained 75%+ health as long as it was in stealth with rejuv. The damage was horrible, and the longbow autos due to the projectile speed at the time, extremely unreliable and easy to dodge. I’d like to point out that almost all of the suggestions I made on the ranger CDI have made it to the live game and have bolstered rangers’ viability massively as a consequence. Still not OP, and RF had a lot of QQ (and might still be overtuned for how well the class can now stack might, but I think that’s more of a might-stacking problem).

In the case of the thief/DD, the underlying mechanics and the deliberate design to rotate around only a few playstyle designs paired with a lack of skill and mechanic creativity in those skills have led to design stagnancy which has in turn resulted in poor balancing efforts through numbers-tweaking alone.

Without massive overhauls and rapid, focused iteration, the thief’s representation will continue to be binary in regards to blatant power disparities, be the effectiveness overwhelming or underwhelming.

There are very few raw number adjustments that can be made to help truly balance the class and increase its consistency, and I think the lack of dev inspiration involved in the class (the primary developers and almost the entirety of ANet’s staff do not play or even touch this class) to make it designed better on the conceptual level has created a scenario where they’re simply not knowledgeable enough to make these necessary changes while understanding the fact that number tweaks are not the right answer to the problem.

The result? Silence, much like the rest of the developers who are failing at their devices (guilds, WvW), because they know they can’t provide meaningful discussion and lack the inspiration or resources to learn.

This cycle is perpetuated by the deliberate lack of communication and discussion with the community to get a better understanding of topics they don’t know about. These teams appear to be operating on assumptions and theory not backed by informed inspection of the real world.

We saw the results of what proper communication can do for a company when the developers are not informed; the ranger CDI. This development led the class from being completely useless at almost everything to well-balanced in almost everything. Unfortunately this trend has failed to continue in a proper way with efforts being put in so many different places for all the wrong reasons.

The sad fact is that until new developers are found with an excruciating passion for the classes they play, or ANet changes its communication policy, nothing will change. The problems will continue to persist, maybe on another class, or a particular game mode, or whatever it may be, but without dedicated and passionate staff with a diverse set of interests and experiences, and lots of community interaction, the advances made will be minor at best.

DeceiverX.8361:

snip

I agree entirely on Anet’s uncalled for silence. But it’s mainly with us, props to Evan Nesh, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Svarnir-Cheftain-and-conditions/first#post5778115 look at how he is interacting with the community in the pvp forums….man I wish we had even a percent of that interaction here

RedSpectrum.1975:

DeceiverX.8361:

snip

I agree entirely on Anet’s uncalled for silence. But it’s mainly with us, props to Evan Nesh, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Svarnir-Cheftain-and-conditions/first#post5778115 look at how he is interacting with the community in the pvp forums….man I wish we had even a percent of that interaction here

Apparently “why thief is still missing the withdraw healing buff?” it’s not an “amazing question” that deserve so much attention by devs.

Kolly.9872:

Apparently “why thief is still missing the withdraw healing buff?” it’s not an “amazing question” that deserve so much attention by devs.

Honestly, it really isn’t a very interesting question. Sure it is probably something that should have been fixed, but thinking about the logic of your code is going to be FAR more interesting than changing some value.

blarghhrrkblah.3412:

Kolly.9872:

Apparently “why thief is still missing the withdraw healing buff?” it’s not an “amazing question” that deserve so much attention by devs.

Honestly, it really isn’t a very interesting question. Sure it is probably something that should have been fixed, but thinking about the logic of your code is going to be FAR more interesting than changing some value.

I was ironic. It’s interesting how devs decide to fix and give attention at things only based on what is interesting for them and not on what is broken and need to be fixed.
Svanir\Chieften surely need attention but so is for withdraw, but they seem to give priority to anything else.

blarghhrrkblah.3412:

Kolly.9872:

Apparently “why thief is still missing the withdraw healing buff?” it’s not an “amazing question” that deserve so much attention by devs.

Honestly, it really isn’t a very interesting question. Sure it is probably something that should have been fixed, but thinking about the logic of your code is going to be FAR more interesting than changing some value.

I don’t know, where I work, developers are typically eager to fix a bug that has been spotted by a user or a colleague. I guess it’s like being called out on kittening something up.

This section should be closed to all “non thieves”

I really think this is a learn to play issue more than anything.

Imperator totius Sylvari.9164:

I really think this is a learn to play issue more than anything.

Cinnamon sprinkles and applesauce

EDIT: disregard

I think Imperator was talking about the OP’s post which is definitely a l2p issue.

yolo swaggins.2570:

I think Imperator was talking about the OP’s post which is definitely a l2p issue.

Actually I had thought I was in the withdraw thread for some reason, OOOPS

Pure zerk with 0 survi with signet of shadows without proper condi cleanse… Dude you make me sick, i consider you on same lvl as any P/P thief that deserve to lose. Just cuz u lucky crit once on Ranger that will survive it anyway and put weakness on you and make u deal less dmg than archer creep on stronghold.
WOW 1 CRIT so STRONG THIEF is FINE, lets ignore all these years of pain, getting kittened hard by condi dmg. Thief is FINE.

P.S. You still dealt less dmg than DH traps.

No ranger alive would let a thief with 11k HP and zerker exist.