Guild Wars 2

Hello,

Just sharing some interesting property of stealing I noticed. TL;DR at the end.

It’s possible to steal in every situation. Casting an ability? No problem, you can steal and land it on your target thanks to the teleport. That Pistol Whip stuck you in place and your target is escaping? Hit F1 and make him bite the dust thanks to the teleport. That abomination sent you flying a few dozen meters away? No problem, steal and you’ll be right at its feet thanks to the teleport (while it’s probably not the smartest move tactically speaking, it works).

I’ve been testing this and basically nothing but daze/stun (have to check if steal doesn’t stunbreak though) can stop a thief from stealing. While this can look as a trivial, non-game breaking issue, I saw on gw2 guru pvp forums something that actually made me write this topic.

This happened to a 20k HP engineer in sPvP.

http://i.imgur.com/ETbHf.png

Let me explain what happened here:

• Thief spots juicy target in stealing range
• Thief starts casting Cloak&Dagger (dagger skill 5)
• Right before the hit, Thief use the steal (dealing 4k robbing damage)
• C&D hits and does 5k5 damage
• Thief is cloaked and smile while quickly moving behind his poor target
• Thief double-backtab the poor guys dealing double backstab damage for 14k total

THAT’S RIGHT, THIEF DEALT MORE THAN 25K DAMAGE IN A 2 SECOND INTERVAL.

From the victim point of view this is called a One Shot. This shouldn’t be happening in PvP at any given time except in very special circumstances involving for example 3v1 gangbang. A lone character shouldn’t be able to do that alone (now, this particular thief may have had some might stacks involved).

A very easy way to correct this would be to fix steal to make it behave like any other ability: something that can interrupt channeled skills (like Pistol Whip) or at the very least cannot be cast while channeling or activating a skill.

I think the way Steal can be used to teleport to the target in any given condition is actually broken and is not something that was intended by the game designers. This is clearly shown by the fact I can still steal while being on the ground after getting knocked down…

I love playing this class and I don’t really like reading people complaining how thief is broken, but this is clearly a case of skill not working properly. A fix of the stealing skill would be in order so we can all enjoy a better game where PvP O-Shotting cannot be achieved without proper team coordination

TL;DR: Steal can be cast even when you shouldn’t be able to cast it and it can be used in a number of unintended ways, this needs to be fixed

It’s not a bug. Other classes have instant abilities that can be cast while channeling other skills too, such as the mesmer’s “Feedback” spell.

Anyway, your example with the 14k backstab: Your engineer buddy there was likely using his quickness spell, which can randomly cause one of three negative effects from other classes’ quickness spells. One of those is the warrior’s “take 50% more damage”. This is even more devastating on the engineer than on the warrior because of being in leather armor.

A. How are you doing double backstab.
B. How are you doing 5k with CnD I am pretty sure that just shows up when by mistake when the backstab is hit so quickly after (happens to me when I accidentally leave auto attack on)
C. Pistol whip is easy to explain away, it shouldn’t self root in the first place on a “Mobility” based class, so once that is fixed, Steal won’t necc be needed in that situation even if they end up reducing the damage on it to make up for loss of self root

knyx, he means the assassin’s signet on “double backstab”.

A) By “double backstab” I mean backstab with the 2x bonus you get from hitting from behind.
B) By going full glass cannon (like, all pieces of gear + jewelry being power/prec focused) I can easily see these kind of numbers showing up. For example by going full glass cannon one can do some awesome 15-20k Pistol Whips, at the expense of survavibility. Most thieves in PvP do this and we can end up with things like this and thief being called “broken”.
C) Pistol Whip does a kitten ton of damage already, add the ability to move while doing it and we basically break the thief even further. Even in PvP the skill is good, you just teleport to your target using sword 2 to immobilize, use haste ability and start the Pistol Whip fury. The last thing it needs to be balanced is a way we can move while casting it.

I think you didn’t get the point. I know HOW stealing while casting is possible since some abilities can do this too (most Signets for example), what I want to show is WHY Steal shouldn’t work that way, because it allows some exploit that makes Thieves able to achieve One Shot.

Thieves may be 1v1 specialist but pressing 3 buttons for instant kill is not what I call balanced. Regardless of the class played, anyone skilled enough should be able to at least survive an average thief long enough for a buddy to show up and help.

With the way stealing works now even complete noobs can take down more skilled players that just fail to see you starting to cast C&D from far away (and this is obviously something very easy to miss). In my thief player opinion this needs a fix, hence why I started this thread. I don’t want my class to become a broken machine of pvp killing doom and have people say that if I’m effective with my Thief that’d be because the class is broken and not because I’m skilled. I want to be on par with other classes and would like to see the Thief balanced

Ok I get it now, but you still didn’t answer what I said about CnD.

Also, damage wouldnt need to be touched on PW really if the self root was gone, but id 100% be willing to take a damage hit and loss of stun for mobility, these huge kills with PW are with quickness, there is no way around it, unless you are hitting an afk player/npc. Also note you can have a max 10 seconds of quickness every minute if you have the sigil+trait+haste and that is with all stars aligned. 10 seconds is not that much for combat uptime.

I hate to throw the thread a curveball on topic, but the problem with quickness for thief is double sided. Some abilities (mainly sword) are far too slow naturally for a class that is supposed to jump in an kill/not kill a target, and jump right back out. The self root on PW is the main issue, the attack speed is the nail in the coffin.

Elred is right. I’m sick of forumers saying that Pistol Whip spam and Backstab gank is fine and only bad players die from it. Almost every single match in spvp when there is a fight going on I’ll be killing someone… oh what’s that? I’m dead instantly for no reason? Must have been a pistol whip or backstab thief.

Yep it was.
And the Thief can unbreakable stun with Baslisk. So no, it isn’t fine.

But honestly, the only thing that really needs the nerf is: QUICKNESS That is the most overpowered thing in the game and IMO should just get completely removed.

14K backstabs are highly irregular. The usual damage for this skill is 6k on a crit.

For a 14K crit to occur you’d have to have two things happening at the same time to double its damage. First of all, the Thief would have to have activated Assassin’s Signet to get +50% on the next strike. Second of all the Engineer would have to be debuffed with Frenzy from Elixir U, causing damage recieved to be increased by 50%

so what you’re looking at is a Thief blowing two different 45 second cooldowns at the same time the Engineer was debuffed from using his own burst damage cooldown.

under normal circumstances the damage dealt in these 2 seconds would not have been 20k. it would have been more like this

2K from Cloak and Dagger
4K from Mug
6K from Backstab

the instant burst is like 12K damage, which is still very high, but is not instant death, its just like, a bit more than half of your life total.

Not another “I’m spec glass cannon and some guy destroyed me with 20k damage!”

Cut all those numbers by 60% and you’ll get the actual numbers vs. actual PvP gear. The Engineer has all Power/Precision/Crit gear, meaning he is a glass cannon, and the Thief profession is the anti-glass cannon.