Guild Wars 2

I just did a 5 thieves dungeon run on COF, and the results… are disappointing.

It was truly epic, in a really bad way. The entire party was wiped out on the first sub boss, and one of the guys immediately said that he was leaving if the next attempt failed. The DPS was really miserable and we had to switch to all range with kites, and there were multiple downs with 4 minutes worth of shooting, but we finally got him killed. The final boss actually managed to kill one of the thieves, which I had to face-palm because it’s one of the easiest boss amongst so many others.

To be completely honest, I have no idea how well other professions do in a mixed group, i.e, necromancer/engineer/elementalist in dungeons or even 5 engineers, 5 elementalist, 5 necros etc, but I think thieves right now are at a all-time low.

The damage from thieves is pretty low right now, they are squishy and they don’t offer anything much other than shadow refuge. Every time I go to a dungeon, I find my self asking is it really worth it to outfit my thief anymore or even use “a thief” to go to COF instead of a warrior. After the recent patch, I finally give up and switched to my warrior alt.

I really have no idea what’s Anet doing. I think the rules of conduct say we can’t question the staff/Anet either… and in that case, I don’t even know what to say anymore.

As a first time player to MMO, Anet has been giving me mostly negative feelings about a game. I understand many decisions, but some of them really made me think that GW2 will be my first and LAST mmo, ever. I know in example, that the ranger’s change a few patches back was exceedingly unpopular (Ranger’s animation), and now we have the thief’s stealth mechanic messed with, which is almost core to the thief gameplay, I finally understand their frustration. Is the stealth mechanic REALLY overpowered?

I don’t see thieves doing more damage in PvE compared to other professions (otherwise warriors will get the nerf bat), and it’s just pretty much the complaints in PvP and WvW, and Anet seems to be happy to bow down from the casual players.

The quickness overhaul is another decision that’s not well thought out. The decision to change it from 100% to 50% has been asked for months, however to simply reduce the quickness and extend the duration is insufficient. It should have at least have the negatives change, i.e, receiving 50% damage to 30-35% damage for warriors, or losing 100% endurance to 60% or 70% endurance for thieves, etc.

It’s just depressing. I’ve been to the other various professions’ boards (the professions that have seen overhaul on skill system) . Feels like they are not happy too. You depress me, Anet. You really do.

And no, this isn’t an early April’s fool topic.

I completely agree with you. Though, having a Ranger to play, Rangers are 100 times worse than thieves in the fact that they barely do enough damage and they can’t survive for any longer than 5 minutes in a dungeon or in PvE. The time until death in PvP is lowered to about 10 seconds now. It seems as though every class except the Warrior, Guardian, and the Mesmer are getting nerfed into the ground. It would excite me to no end to see Anet successfully balance the classes. But, seeing as how that didn’t even happen to my Ranger in Guild Wars 1, it looks like it’s not going to happen any time soon. So back to WoW for me. Blizzard actually knows how to balance classes.

Guild Wars 1, throughout the entire life of the game, has never been known to be well balanced. In fact, the old head of skill balance Izzy was quite infamous among players for his lack of competence.
The only reason it worked out well was that the game was very heavily build focused, and the builds were spectacularly versatile.
When an overpowered build cropped up for whatever reason, it would become popular, and in turn everyone could easily create their own builds designed to hard-counter that broken and overused build.
Guild Wars 2, for better or worse, has no such ability in place to save it.
I’m glad the game is now more about skill and not 99% what build you’re using and what build your opponent is using, but it’s no longer possible for the players to cover the incompetence of the devs.
More than that, if a particular skill/mechanic is garbage, you cannot in many cases simply not use it.
For those old-school GW1 players, imagine what it would be like if every Ranger were forced to devote a skill slot to the original Otyugh’s Cry.
That’s the situation we’re in right now.
Their greatest balancing fall-back was also to OFTEN take a skill that was overpowered, and literally nerf it so bad that no one would ever be tempted to use it again. Instead of, you know, actually TRYING to balance it.
Doing something like doubling the cooldown on Shadow Refuge, or reducing the damage of Backstab by 70% would have been normal, simply because you had the option of taking something else instead and their objective was to FORCE you to.
This is what we’re dealing with here.

Grimwolf.7163:

Guild Wars 1, throughout the entire life of the game, has never been known to be well balanced. In fact, the old head of skill balance Izzy was quite infamous among players for his lack of competence.
The only reason it worked out well was that the game was very heavily build focused, and the builds were spectacularly versatile.
When an overpowered build cropped up for whatever reason, it would become popular, and in turn everyone could easily create their own builds designed to hard-counter that broken and overused build.
Guild Wars 2, for better or worse, has no such ability in place to save it.
I’m glad the game is now more about skill and not 99% what build you’re using and what build your opponent is using, but it’s no longer possible for the players to cover the incompetence of the devs.
More than that, if a particular skill/mechanic is garbage, you cannot in many cases simply not use it.
For those old-school GW1 players, imagine what it would be like if every Ranger were forced to devote a skill slot to the original Otyugh’s Cry.
That’s the situation we’re in right now.
Their greatest balancing fall-back was also to OFTEN take a skill that was overpowered, and literally nerf it so bad that no one would ever be tempted to use it again. Instead of, you know, actually TRYING to balance it.
Doing something like doubling the cooldown on Shadow Refuge, or reducing the damage of Backstab by 70% would have been normal, simply because you had the option of taking something else instead and their objective was to FORCE you to.
This is what we’re dealing with here.

I saw such a thing in an other game. Devs catered to pvp hysteria, from a very vocal but small group of pvp players ( most players had NO issue with the 2 sublcasses in question), and 2 subclasses became so unattractive that nobody wanted them or wanted to play them. Only new players who did not know rolled them. That did not last long either as the truth became clear.

Having decided to cater to that lynch mob, I suppose they could not simply delete the subclasses to shut up the whining, and reworking them would be a huge chore. So, they nerfed them until the issue barely existed, as nobody wanted to play one. And of course, no one in pve wanted them.

Inelegant but, it worked. Looking at the history here, the thief does seem to be on that track. I can imagine players just deciding…it is just easier not to play this class.

Last patch did not effect me too much, but the caltrops change I really dislike. I disliked the loss of our ability to make stealth drop aggro in the previous patch. I never had a problem with it, though seems some really did ( and they like this change).

But, I can imagine a point at which, the class will loose it’s fun for me. It has already for me from the Feb. patch, that I really disliked. But I continue to toy with the thief.

Fact is, since the Feb. patch I play it much much less. I have the bad feeling that this is how it will go, and eventually the accumulated changes are gona mutate the class to the point where I just loose interest.