Guild Wars 2

If you don’t feel like reading, there is a TL;DR below

I would like to talk about what purpose the thief may now serve in tPvP.

Previously the most popular thing was to use the thief as a roamer / far point assaulter, running a glass cannon burst build. (Usually D/P, sometimes D/D, but always Shortbow as a weapon switch). That was what the thief was best at: Burst down targets that are alone, travel the map quickly, help in teamfights with the shortbow.

Now that Mug have been nerfed, our burst capacity has been shut down totally. I would like to point out that a full GC thief in tPvP has around 50% crit chance, and the usual burst combo Mug + HeartSeeker + Backstab, had 1/8th chance to do real damage (3 crits) (the one combo that every one cried about), but it had the same chance of not critting anything at all as well (1/8th), most of the time we had 1 or 2 skills crit. And what made the combo powerful is that when you critted Mug, your opponent would be below 66% health, which would make HeartSeeker hit harder, lowering him again below 50%, which in turn would allow you to backstab at full damage (with the Executioner). Assuming your opponent is a mob of course and doesn’t use any kind of stun breaker, tp, dodge roll, aegis, protection, blind, stun, daze and all that kind of stuff.

Now, I think we can all agree that the backstab burst build has lost at least half its effectiveness.

Let’s talk about the shortbow. As all of you may have seen, at max range, trick shot can’t hit a moving target (haters will say that it’s now on par with everything else, except that other projectiles move way faster than our trick shot, set aside the Guardian Scepter Auto attack, which they don’t rely on as much as we do for trick shot when it comes to DPS).

So, in short, D/P is no longer viable, Shortbow has become useless except for the TP.

Sure instead we have the new flanking strike, it’s working decently well, but what’s the point ? You are not gonna burst down any target faster than a Mesmer, nor more easily than a Necro. (Above all else now, since the new 5 sec cooldown on cleansing wave for the eles, good luck getting rid of all the condis).
But let’s be clear here, except for Flanking Strike, S/D sucks. The auto attack is kind of okay, although very slow, tactical strike is kind of okay too, but with that 4s revealed debuff, hardly useful. Dagger off hand is useless as a whole, and Infiltrator’s strike is okay for the first part, but assuming you are getting kited with cripple / chill, it becomes really awkward to use it as a gap closer more than once, because you have to go back to your former location, then TP back onto your opponent, all that for 5 ini.

I personally cannot play without BlackPowder / Headshot in tPvP, it’s too useful for the team. Black Powder enables your teammates to free stomp anyone except Thief / Mesmer, Headshot prevents anyone from stomping your teammates except Guardian Wars and Eles if they feel like using a stab for that stomp, in which case you might still have a Shadow Refuge for them.

So I am wondering, what is it that the thieves can bring to a team in tPvP that no other class can ?

TL;DR D/P Burst has been totally nerfed, Shortbow has become useless in teamfights, S/D set is useless in competitive play with too many useless skills. So what is it that thieves can bring to a team in competitive tPvP that no other class can ?

1) I fail do understand why you say that D/D and D/P are useless since NOTHING changed for those specs except the mug trait that was in fact WAY overpowered, I’m actually surprised it took them this long to nerf it. Apart from that every singe skill remains the same and dealing the same dmg or even more with the 100% buff to Assassin’s Signet.

2) drop your Glass cannon build and Berserker gear, you will be surprised.

1) Mug was 40% of the burst combo. The three burst combos we had : Steal + Backstab / Steal + Heartseeker + Backstab / Steal + Cloak and Dagger + Backstab were so effective thanks to a 6k Mug, now it’s a waste to open with Steal if you have Mug traited.

2) I have, there are some interesting builds to play, unfortunately I hardly find any of them to be more effective at what they are supposed to do than equivalent builds from other classes.

I agree with a fair portion of ur post. My main disagreement is with infiltrator strike.. My gosh this is a fantastic skill, once mastered

With the backstab builds you really need to open with steal for the gap closer. This means no heal and about 2-3k dmg nerf, which is alot..

It was pretty rough in tPvP for a thief anyway. This was genuinely an odd set of changes to bring about without providing some improvement in tPvP desirability. Infinite dodger, infinite stealther and such are just no good in there for obvious reasons.

A new version of TL;DR: Some classes are OPness so I want my Thief to be that OPness too.

IMO, how about think of it the other way around? Why does people have to think GW2 is all about “Burst&Bunk”?

SIVA......VOLRATH anvi is 90% right. mug did need a SMALL nerf not a big one. burst is 100% not playable on a competitive level anymore. and as u see ehre http://www.twitch.tv/loljumper from a mediocre at best thief….he dies in less than 2 secs when directly attacked by 2 player if not hes at 25% hp the entire fight. evne when they ahve the best odds. ok lets put this in perspective….the trade off for thief dmg is loss of defense right? right now the loss of defense is like a 9/10 bc we die fast as an upscale. the dmg however should also be a 9/10 to balance that fact. but its not….its prolly around a nice average 6. so we have average dmg….if not actually sup par dmg as you will note the devs say they wanna up out base dmg bc we cant hit hard without puting all our spec into the crappy power traitline. Mug is not really a choosable trait anymore IMO. thieves cant go power healing toughness builds :P they just dont kill. any build a thief goes hes going down just as fast….doesnt matter what he picks….i mean he could pick the High hp bleed build which does give a lil bit longer survivability but really doesnt help as much with condi removal. anyway point is thief is unfairly traded off. id otn even care if we get dmg back. but the new LS sword skill isnt making up for our crappy defense. idk what the devs were thinking taking atleast 30-40% of burst combo away and not giving us any extra defense or survivability. you will see in time lS is cool but its not an answer and its not OP. warriors AND mesmers right now out burst thieves. that is a fact. they also both ahve more HP and more defense. that is also a fact. so anvi really is saying mostly truths. watch some post nerf videos with thieves now. u alreayd notice not many play tpvp or spvp….or even wvw….like 1/18 are thieves….they really cant stack up anymore…. 1 v 1 they still have a chance but even d/p is fragile when CC’d or Aoe’d or ranged. decent dueling build but not good for group play. sigh….i literally put my legendary dreamer in bank….done with that too now…ty anet :P gonna focus on my guard now.

Siva I am not crying about being not OP, what I am saying is, if I want to set up a competitive team and I have to decide what class I want each player to play, I cannot find a good reason for telling someone to play as a Thief.
If I need a roamer, I would ask for a Mesmer / War / Ele which all have a better ratio Dmg / survivability and still great mobility, they are also very good in team fights, where the thief is a lot less useful.
If I need an anti-bunker, I would rather have a Necro or a Mesmer rather than a Thief, even if I think a thief would be as good as those 2 classes a taking down a bunker with the new FS, Mesmer and Necro have a lot more uses outside of this (revives, very useful in team fights, portal …).
In every other role the Thief is way too inefficient to be considered.

If you have rock solid arguments that would justify taking a Thief in a competitive set up instead of another class, please share, because I can’t find any personally. (But I agree that all this is a matter of opinion)

yup. ^^ what he said. if you were to make a dream team of a 100 man zerg i might add in 3-4 thieves for venom share and have them sit in back and tell them not to die. really dont have much use for a thief in this game anymore. atleast before they had enough burst (with a teamates help) any bunker guardian in a few seconds…..which they couldnt do solo. idk….im stay as a guardian….my main thief is going away for some rest

Travlane.5948:

SIVA......VOLRATH anvi is 90% right. mug did need a SMALL nerf not a big one. burst is 100% not playable on a competitive level anymore. and as u see ehre http://www.twitch.tv/loljumper from a mediocre at best thief….he dies in less than 2 secs when directly attacked by 2 player if not hes at 25% hp the entire fight. evne when they ahve the best odds. ok lets put this in perspective….the trade off for thief dmg is loss of defense right? right now the loss of defense is like a 9/10 bc we die fast as an upscale. the dmg however should also be a 9/10 to balance that fact. but its not….its prolly around a nice average 6. so we have average dmg….if not actually sup par dmg as you will note the devs say they wanna up out base dmg bc we cant hit hard without puting all our spec into the crappy power traitline. Mug is not really a choosable trait anymore IMO. thieves cant go power healing toughness builds :P they just dont kill. any build a thief goes hes going down just as fast….doesnt matter what he picks….i mean he could pick the High hp bleed build which does give a lil bit longer survivability but really doesnt help as much with condi removal. anyway point is thief is unfairly traded off. id otn even care if we get dmg back. but the new LS sword skill isnt making up for our crappy defense. idk what the devs were thinking taking atleast 30-40% of burst combo away and not giving us any extra defense or survivability. you will see in time lS is cool but its not an answer and its not OP. warriors AND mesmers right now out burst thieves. that is a fact. they also both ahve more HP and more defense. that is also a fact. so anvi really is saying mostly truths. watch some post nerf videos with thieves now. u alreayd notice not many play tpvp or spvp….or even wvw….like 1/18 are thieves….they really cant stack up anymore…. 1 v 1 they still have a chance but even d/p is fragile when CC’d or Aoe’d or ranged. decent dueling build but not good for group play. sigh….i literally put my legendary dreamer in bank….done with that too now…ty anet :P gonna focus on my guard now.

You forgot to mention that mesmer have stealth (decoy, veil, etc) and warriors have invulnerability (endure pain). Other than that, +1.

Travlane.5948:

If you were to make a dream team of a 100 man zerg i might add in 3-4 thieves for venom share and have them sit in back and tell them not to die.

You don’t have to wait for the dream team zerg – make a venom share thief and jump into one of these “10/10 DEATHMATCH” custom arenas. It’s fantastic.