Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone!

I play a thief called Thorgar Shadebeast for almost 1000 hours now. Stealth has changed a bit, revealed debuff has been played with and in the state of the game of a few weeks ago, developers were talking about adding the revealed debuff EVEN if you didn’t attack.

Now I read that thieves would have rather had 3 seconds revealed EVEN IF YOU DID NOT ATTACK than the +1 second of revealed debuff if you DID attack.

I mainly do PvE so I cannot talk about any serious PvP experiences.

Is it REALLY that bad? I really do not see the huge mega QQ nerf a lot of the people are crying about right now. Thief completely useless in PvE? No! You can still deal significant amount of damage. Yes a warrior can out DPS us…tell us something new :P
As a thief you can still be a huge benefit to your team(if you are not the cheesy full zerker glasscannon backstab guy who cannot dodge and dies 20 times ikittenminute time-frame).

The patch did make me a little sad that there weren’t any real good changes to thief skills, mainly traps. I would love to use traps but they are severely lackluster compared to the other utilities we have. Sure some good thief player uses traps yadayada but it’s nothing to write home about. I am still hoping for a slight buff in venomous aura range…instead of hugging range it is now :P

Try something else perhaps? I have been running with a venemous aura build for around a month now, and it’s easily one of the best builds for a PvE thief out there. You can still stealth BUT you heal your team/chill melee foes/give party wide vulnerability to dish out to some mobs and take advantage of/immobilize foes/turn bosses into f-ing STONE!

Perhaps try sword/pistol aggressive play with deception skills, tactical stealth, use it when you need it.

Maybe all this crying of the stealth state is because people see the thief as a simple rogue/assassin spin-off. However with the stealth in this game, it never was that to begin with. I believe developers stated that the stealth in gw2 was for tactical purposes. The Thief however is no normal rogue/assassin. I see him more as a wanderer, trying to earn a pretty penny with whatever he can find on someone’s person. Hence why he is not limited to daggers.

But yeah back to the question! xD

Is the revealed debuff +1 REALLY that bad?

P.S. please keep it nice, no bullkitten n00b gtfo talk and all that

depends entirely on your build and your prefered play method and area.

For me its not that bad a change the worst part of it is its a view of how things are going to be handled in the future.

I have a suspicion that the April sPvP patch will add some mobility tweaks to the thief that weren’t ready to go in at the same time as the rest of this patch. Devs appear to want us to rely on stealth a little less, but skip around and be harder to hit instead. If that came out at the same time, you might not see as many sour grapes.

The 3 second Revealed seemed to fit just right with CnD to Auto Attack chain. The 4 second Revealed screwed this up, now we need to let the 1st Auto hit on a second chain before we hit CnD again. It’s just messy and rough. I run mostly PvE and run a CnD build. I’ll switch from S/D to D/D depending on the situation. Got my 6x Mesmer runes for S/D and with this change it lessens Tactical Strike. D/D is quite good sustained damage with backstab, this change reduced our ability to backstab there for reducing our DPS.

The changes lately are more than nerfs, they attack the core mechanics of the thief. A once ‘elegant’ stealth rotation is now clunky. The agro/stealth mechanic that once helped us stay alive is gone.

In PvE, yes, it is really that bad. You just took a big damage nerf to the teeth, and the class is a lot less polished and fun to play than it was a couple days ago.

In PvP, it’s not a big deal. D/D still bursts just as hard, D/P was largely unaffected. S/D just took it in the pooper though. From a PvP perspective I dare to say that the quickness change was a bigger deal.

Sustained damage took a hit because you can no longer string together C&D > BS/TS > auto x 3 > repeat. With Revealed lasting 4 seconds, you need to attack two more times before you can stealth again, by which point you might as well complete your autoattack chain for the third hit to gain maximum benefit.

So while technically Revealed was only increased by 1 second, they effectively doubled the time you must wait before you can stealth again.

Bloodgruve.6038:

The 3 second Revealed seemed to fit just right with CnD to Auto Attack chain. The 4 second Revealed screwed this up, now we need to let the 1st Auto hit on a second chain before we hit CnD again. It’s just messy and rough. I run mostly PvE and run a CnD build. I’ll switch from S/D to D/D depending on the situation. Got my 6x Mesmer runes for S/D and with this change it lessens Tactical Strike. D/D is quite good sustained damage with backstab, this change reduced our ability to backstab there for reducing our DPS.

The changes lately are more than nerfs, they attack the core mechanics of the thief. A once ‘elegant’ stealth rotation is now clunky. The agro/stealth mechanic that once helped us stay alive is gone.

I’m thinking of playing another class for a while, seems like its going downhill for thieves. It seems like we get some kind of nerf every single patch. I wasn’t glass cannon backstab in the first place but I still seem to get nerfed. It sucks :/

For my build it is.
I have the squishiest build and the only defense i had was stealth. So that 33% increase in time i have to wait really hurt my offense and my defense.

I play dagger/pistol and its played like this : black powder, heartseeker, backstab, black powder.. having to wait 3 second doing basicly nothing was pretty balanced i think.
With this nerf, the nerf of the healing consummable on crit , and the pve nerf to stealth i dont even know if i wanna play this thief anymore.

Among other things it messes with the entire Shadow Arts trait line. They just put the nerf in without considering what it might affect. And what happened because of that? New bugs like revealed lasting 5 seconds if you have the Meld with Shadows trait, Hidden Killer trait and who knows what more that we don’t know yet.

Bloodgruve.6038:

The 3 second Revealed seemed to fit just right with CnD to Auto Attack chain. The 4 second Revealed screwed this up, now we need to let the 1st Auto hit on a second chain before we hit CnD again. It’s just messy and rough.

This. Previously there was a fluid and well fitting combo. Now it’s rough and looks like no one playtested it at all.
Also this was supposed to be a PvP oriented nerf, but from what I gathered PvP thieves don’t really care, while PvE Thieves like us got hit by a truck that has giant rippling effects beyond just being out of stealth longer.

Gamed with the new changes last night.. using the same traits… (minus hidden killer, changed that to executioner).. in general PvE it only took 30 minutes to get used to the new rotation… Yes it is a little clunky and things dont fit quite perfectly as before.. but it is not that bad..

Thereotical top DPS took a hit.. (when you can stand there and DPS and not move.. for … ever) but i cant remember where that actually took place during any of the world bosses i was doing last night or the CoF run.. It was mostly CnD/Mug burst everything and when receiving splash dmg from boss dodge out and Shortbow it until i heal up.. and run back in with my daggers.

So my personal verdict is .. it is not that bad.. just clunky.

UndeadKemea, you might have a build a bit like mine with a mix of venoms and stealth effects coming from the shadow arts lines. I’m doing ok after the patch but there will be a mark down in performance when you have to wait an extra second for the stealth benefits. Waiting for the blind on stealth is the worst, and the attack chains seem severely out of synch now, but we can adapt. Basilisk venom seems to be working at 95% if not 100% of what it was. I’m not excited by pure damage numbers so those may well be down. The build is down but not out and I’m certainly not rushing to bookseller.

Combat feels very clunky now on my thief.
Before, you could go out of stealth, get one attack chain (sword or dagger) and fire a CnD to get back in stealth for daze or BS.
Now you have some extra time with not much to do. If you fire some other attack (HS or IS) you will have problems keeping the Initative for long fights, an extra attack from the chain is clunky and lacks dmg or conditions (your poison or weakness/criple will be out of time)
It really screw the flow of combat for thiefs.

For thiefs that used stealth for buffs/debufss and regen/cleanse its a HUGE nerf. You lost some important blinds, might buffs, regen, etc…

The extra second puts the whole combat out of pace for thiefs that used stealth in their combat chain.

Not to mention that clones and pets can still follow you around making it easy mode for mesmers (and some rangers too) to run after thiefs…

Yes, yes it is. For builds that relied on stealth to do their damage (not glassy zerkers) this is a 20% damage reduction. And an infinitely long time to get killed or cc’d.

They said that they want us to be the most slippery class with our stealth and tricks. In the SotG they mentioned that they wanted to add a 3 second de-buff even if we didn’t attack. This would have been much better!

Imagine the following scenario: I stealth in the middle of the fight, my enemy starts dropping some AoE where I am, and dodges away just as I’m about to land my backstab. Here my enemy outsmarted me and deserves recognition for it. But hey! I can just go straight back to stealth and try again. This time knowing what he will do I counter it and land the backstab, revealed de-buff applied I just heartseek and steal him to his death.

If I would have gotten the de-buff when I missed the backstab (as the devs said they would) my foe would have really got some sort of recognition for being a good player and outsmart the thief. High risk, high reward. Every time I stealth I would know that I need to land this backstab or he will have the better hand.

As it is know, I either have to go full backstab or go for a build that doesn’t use stealth at all. So please, fix this and do what you intended to do in the first place! That would have fixed the problem of perma stealth and forced us to think more before stealthing.

It ruins everyting now the skilled theves are forced to be unskilled becuse we have reviled when we have not even attacked, this ruins the class so much that im quiting this game im not goingto play or even buy the expansion if thay dont go back, ben playing since beta but now i cant get the feel of the game any longer becuse of this. I predicted this thay only lisens on the zerg of ppl who sickens screams out its to strong we cant do anyting bla bla bla, and thay nerf so Farewell guild wars 2 you were my world and life now you are my death.

Ares.9547:

It ruins everyting now the skilled theves are forced to be unskilled becuse we have reviled when we have not even attacked, this ruins the class so much that im quiting this game im not goingto play or even buy the expansion if thay dont go back, ben playing since beta but now i cant get the feel of the game any longer becuse of this. I predicted this thay only lisens on the zerg of ppl who sickens screams out its to strong we cant do anyting bla bla bla, and thay nerf so Farewell guild wars 2 you were my world and life now you are my death.

Nice necro! Also can I have your stuff before you rage?

Someone get the ‘drama queen’ awards out of storage … have plenty to give out … not sure my eyes can roll far enough into the back of my head to match some of these posts.

(1) It’s been stated as a bug
(2) It affects Sword+Dagger Thieves very little (woot)
(3) It affects Mesmers too
(4) Even if it wasn’t a bug … l2p should be the reaction … it would be far from the first time that a build/playstyle was nerfed a specific class (though in this case, it’d not just be Thief that’s nerfed but Mesmer too).

I stopped reading your argument when you felt it was of vital importance to give us the name of your character thief, like it matters.

Yes it’s that bad. I wish Anet would stop tinkering with the fundamentals of my main and move on to more important things.

https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/601028659407912961

It’s bad ofc.

Hey slapnuts this is a necro’d post.

Odyssey.2613:

I stopped reading your argument when you felt it was of vital importance to give us the name of your character thief, like it matters.

Yes it’s that bad. I wish Anet would stop tinkering with the fundamentals of my main and move on to more important things.

I stopped reading when I saw this thread was created 2 years ago.

Acotje.5689:

Odyssey.2613:

I stopped reading your argument when you felt it was of vital importance to give us the name of your character thief, like it matters.

Yes it’s that bad. I wish Anet would stop tinkering with the fundamentals of my main and move on to more important things.

I stopped reading when I saw this thread was created 2 years ago.

Oh wow, this thread dates back to when they destroyed Last Refuge. The memories.

Still not fixed.