Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, I realized that the extended duration for revealed really threw off a lot of players, but I don’t think any of the builds for our class are actually broken now.

I had spent so much time on my dagger/dagger and shortbow thief that i had a perfect rhythm for when to use my cloak and dagger again so that i could do as much damage as possible, or blind/condition removal etc. and i don’t think the “nerf” was that bad for us. For me the hardest part has been trying to retrain myself to get into a new rhythm. I’ll admit it sucks pretty bad to hit a cloak and dagger with 1 second left on revealed and blow half of your initiative, but after a while you start to get used to the new rhythm again.

I understand a lot of people are angry about the change to revealed, but i say give it 2 weeks and try to get back into the rhythm of things before we cry out to the dev team. ANET has been good with balancing things (in my opinion) and if it turns out that our extra revealed time is as bad enough to ruin the thief, im sure they will compensate us somehow or just revert the change.

TL;DR Give the update 2 weeks, try to get a new rhythm, don’t give up your thief.

The thing people are upset about isn’t the 4 seconds, it’s that the new rotation or rhythm is now in the middle of an autoattack chain and thieves are frustrated because it seems that this update was just put in at the last minute ( “so we’ve decided to pull this in favor of JUST adding 1 second…”) the devs post even showed some sense of carelessness in which they sat around a table at night all wanting to go home and just raised hands to get off of work rather than thinking it through.

thief isn’t broken, it’s just highly illogical to change stealth in a way that the CnD rotation falls in the middle of the autoattack chain and therefore removes any sense of rhythm because interrupting a chain for a rotation is odd.

Don’t misunderstand I’ll play my thief until I quit gw2 but this is one of the few updates on thief skills that seemed so out of place (and not to mention unexpected after the SoTG video where everyone got familiar with a proposed change which seemed better.) that Im getting worried about the future.

My issue with this patch is that it did nothing to the problem (c&d chaining thieves) but nerfed everyone that uses stealth properly’s dps, heals, condition removal, might stacking, etc.

The rotation feeling odd is messed up too.

Totally feels like they shoved it in at the last second.

Anyone that relies on repeated sneak attacks definitely took a dps/ultility hit. I’m not just talking about d/d here.

In the recent state of the game they talk about how thieves rely too much on stacking huge amounts of bleeds. They talked about giving them more cover conditions to at least let the bleeds last through a bit of condition removal.

The patch decreased the duration of caltrops and made revealed last 4 seconds.

P/D now has a full second longer before they can apply bleeds again, a 25% damage reduction in a 12 second fight, and conditions only shine during longer fights in the first place. Caltrops ticks 5 less times, 1/3 of the damage removed. Condition really took a hit here when it already suffers against direct damage mechanically.

Blind on stealth is also effected, in dungeons you could mitigate quite a bit of damage with it due to the attack lengths of npcs, but the extra second actually pushes it just past a few of them, less blind = less long term survivability, another thing they mentioned wanting to add to thieves in the SOTG yet it decreases with this patch.

Sword/daggers only redeeming factor, the daze spam, was also effected by this.

An entire trait line received a nerf with this.

No huge nerf, but adding all the things together really hurts any sort of long term fight. Which is sad because in pvp people are complaining about burst and perma-stealth. Neither of which was effected much at all. PvP wise it just makes me want to make fights end even faster because my weaknesses in a long fight are ever increasing.

Basically the thief is balanced around stealth and any changes to it will have far reaching repercussions. Just look at the thief downed #3, it does nothing in PvE anymore aside from give you an extra second before a mob starts attacking again ever since the aggro patch (which was much needed even if annoying now).

The general haste nerf also effected a trait that did not receive any duration buff like the ultilities did (same with the sigil too). Builds that used the sword relied on haste for burst, but have lost quite a bit from that too.

Edit: Actually while thinking about it I realized that that has to really suck for anyone running p/d and caltrops. That’s a lot of lost damage.

Caltrops nerf was significant; the difference is dramatic. I actually removed it from my bar, and I am trying some other utilities for a change, just using dodgetrops for now. The slightly bigger dodgetrops area is nice but I liked the old parameters for both of these better.

Sure caltrops is nice but, I am gonna try something else. I relied on it to do what it did before, so now that it is not as good, I will experiment with other things.

I diliked the loss of ability to drop aggro in stealth alot too; I was not a big stealth user but I would use it and make it drop aggro sometimes. Now, I barely use stealth at all. I know some people like it, but I never had an issue with it automatically loosing aggro. I had to force it to drop aggro by positioning and distance .

We’ll see what new things will be mutated in a month I suppose. It all seems rather futile as nothing stops the hysteria from the wvw/pvp realm.

Some months ago, Rangers received a heavy nerf because of a very poorly thought out change when they “fixed” an animation bug no one knew of, resulting in drastically reduced speed for the shortbow and a REAL animation bug that reduced its effectiveness when combined with Quickening Zephyr.
The Ranger forums blew up as badly as these for weeks.
To this day they’ve not been compensated.
Anet is run by a bunch of children incapable of admitting when a mistake has been made.
This ham-fisted nerf won’t be fixed by them.

I think nerfing Caltrops was something that needed to happen, not because it was broken but because the dev analysis that Thieves were too dependent on bleed stacking is actually correct.

Caltrops was so powerful as a utility that it was practically mandatory to have it on your bar, and it artificially masked some very serious issues in other areas that Thieves have.

What needs to happen now are updates to a lot skills that have been extremely gimpy for a long time – Vital Shot (too slow), Body Shot (too situational), Smoke Bomb (lol), and, frankly, Stealth in general – which if anything should have different mechanics in PvE than it does in PvP because it currently is too weak to properly compensate for the Thief’s defenses.

Retanaru.2901:

Edit: Actually while thinking about it I realized that that has to really suck for anyone running p/d and caltrops. That’s a lot of lost damage.

It doesn’t suck that bad. It just makes things take longer.

Not a problem as a loner, problem if you’re in an impatient party.

Thinking it over, I can see some rationality in their change, just not exactly in their lazy half-finished approach to it.
I’ve always thought that CnD offered easier access to stealth than it probably should. Thieves should have frequent access to stealth, but every 3 seconds is a little excessive. Possibly even every 4 seconds.
But because CnD specifically offers so much stealth, the whole class is balanced around the assumption that you WILL have that degree of access to stealth regardless.
Shadow Arts in general is a perfect example of this.
So if you don’t have x/D on at least one weapon set, you’re kinda screwed.
They should simply have compensated us for this change. Given some of the promised mobility or something so the class in general would not still NEED that extra stealth.
D/D and P/D also rely COMPLETELY on CnD for their regular damage, and they shouldn’t. The problem there is mostly that Heartseeker is only good against dying targets and Body Shot is just a costly Combo Finisher.

My biggest problem is that attacks from stealth is the ONLY way thief had DPS that competes with other DPS classes – that needs to be fixed.

Daggers are fine – though want stealth back on 3s and reveal at the end of stealth no matter what.

Sword needs traits to make it an effective DPS weapon.

Pistols are what need the most love. P1 should attack much faster, or hit harder (at least as hard as Warrior rifle if it is to be as slow – though faster is preferred as I like differences). P2 I find useful in parties, but is useless solo. Utility should be looked at. P3 (unload – p combos with daggers are fine, with sword might be fixed with Sword traits) needs a DPS boost… ~10%. It takes 2 unloads to do 9/10ths of 1 rapid shot in a longer period of time. P4 is a debatable move – useful in PvP and bosses where interruption is more important that DPS, but considering it’s basically stripped of damage and still costs 4, think the daze should last 1s instead of 1/4. P5 is of course the super expensive smoke field – a dozen suggestions for this, all boil down to not worth the cost period as is unless you’re HS spamming in PvP.

i agree with you pantsforbirds. nerf on stealth isn’t that bad.. my main is thief but imo that nerf is just fine. . but imo D/D thief isnt that great cuz of this nerfed. so this build i made D/P best choice for pvp wvw in my opinion.

imo these nerf could have waited another month since they removed culling, they should have givit a month to se how the meta evolved instead of this “double nerf” all at once.
Also MUG is still a 10 point trait dealing 6k+ dmg….

Nerf MUG to the ground / move it to T2 / replace it but pls don’t punish us like this, pls… thieves atm are so non-fluid and counter intuitive….