Guild Wars 2

This thread is about pvp and wvw only.

I think thieves,in this current state,still build locked,and still need a bit of a lift due to other proffesions rising.

For instance,medi guards can now defeat thieves with much more ease than before patch.Mesmers can dispatch thieves and counter them much more easly now. Ele,rangers and warriors can handle thieves much more easly now.

The new defence traits/skills anet gave to other proffesions,hard counter thieves in such way that thieves now forced to prolong fights rather than be able to wrap up a fast kill and move on.

While all those things are nice and welcome,thieves were a bit left out with high cd/luckluster defence traits.

Things I thought needed to be for balancing thieves:
1.increase thieves health pool by about 5k to even match mesmer health pool
2.rework and/or lower the cd of some of the defence traits thieves got.
3.add or modify the existing traits to be much more effective.

not all need to be done,but some of the suggestion are most welcome. This thread is about ppl who finds thieves a bit left out in the new patch. Ppl who dosnt agree are most welcome to state it here by giving reasons. Other suggestion are welcome aswell.

I’d like to see the backstab being more usefull, since it takes a lot of skill and timing to get the burst right (I play DD thief) the damage of max 9k is just not justified, considering a mesmer GS2 F1 combo will onehit almost every class in the game, or simply the ranger LB 2 will burst you down in a second, I want to see that they either buff Backstab and Cloak & Dagger dmg, just by a little bit, or nerf the damage on some other burst skill, eg. take out the vuln stacks from Longbow 2

I Would also say that thief needs either more Base hp or more active defenses (Like dodges and a blind added to cloak and dagger), or Maybe Even both.
Right now there is no point in playing anything other than d/p as thief. Its hard enough with this weaponset and others are just lacking.
I Dont want other proffessions to be nerfed, no specific ones, Maybe a little less direct dmg on all proffessions (except ranger, Their dmg scales so horribly They arent Even doing more dmg Post patch).
Also burning needs to be looked at. Some proffessions can stack insane amounts of burning in super short time Without proper animations. Why should i want to Run Without toughness or low hp to burst someone when i can do the Same burst with huge defenses and burning? Something is wrong here.

Honestly, I think they [ANet] may wish to look into shrinking the health-pool gap a bit.

• Currently, low-health starts ~10k, medium ~15k, high ~18k.
• This was from before they removed stat boosts from trait lines.
• Would not a more logical setup be: 12-12.5k, 15k, 18k? At least that would help the low-health classes even out a bit. As is, one can argue that a 5k gap from low to medium, followed by merely 3k separating medium from high … was unbalanced by default.

Here is an idea: revert back feline grace to what it was before patch, done thieves are now more survivable.
But seriously acrobatics and shadow arts are weak defensive lines that need buffs.

Feline grace is okish, but i do not like how most of the traits are tailored to s/d, it is just stupid. Maybe change some of them to grand their effects on avoiding dmg with blind as well as the current on evade trigger -feline grace: gain vigor when you evade an attack or when a foe you blinded misses you-
This way the line would have more synergy with other sets feline g snd upper hand would be perfect candidates for this change.
Also buff endless stamina to make vigor give 100% regen. At this moment you can get more endurance by just auto attacking with dagger.

In shadow arts change the master minor trait to also extend stealth that you get through combos by 1 sec, since this trait dose nothing if you are using d/p. Also make cloaked in shadows a minor trait and give it a icd, reason for this is the same as mesmers getting illusionary persona baseline, it is to mandatory for many builds.

foste.3098:

Here is an idea: revert back feline grace to what it was before patch, done thieves are now more survivable.
But seriously acrobatics and shadow arts are weak defensive lines that need buffs.

Feline grace is okish, but i do not like how most of the traits are tailored to s/d, it is just stupid. Maybe change some of them to grand their effects on avoiding dmg with blind as well as the current on evade trigger -feline grace: gain vigor when you evade an attack or when a foe you blinded misses you-
This way the line would have more synergy with other sets feline g snd upper hand would be perfect candidates for this change.
Also buff endless stamina to make vigor give 100% regen. At this moment you can get more endurance by just auto attacking with dagger.

In shadow arts change the master minor trait to also extend stealth that you get through combos by 1 sec, since this trait dose nothing if you are using d/p. Also make cloaked in shadows a minor trait and give it a icd, reason for this is the same as mesmers getting illusionary persona baseline, it is to mandatory for many builds.

Yeah, the problem is FG was basically nerfed in multiple ways. It no longer stacks with vigor, it returns literally half of what it did before (7.5 endurance total over base regen), it has to actually evade an attack, and the return is an over time return.

They need to roll ES and FG together and have a trait that returns endurance on crits (5 endurance,1 sec icd) so that the more aggressive you play the more endurance you are rewarded with. They said they were trying to eliminate dodge spamming, but if you spammed dodges without attacking, you’d quickly run out of endurance with this change.

What would balance thief is allowing blind to be stack able con

Another way would be to give thief an X buff well they sit in stealth something like. every second thief in stealth they gave 1% dmg mod to next hit. make it stack to 10 max. duration of 15 seconds on each stack.

Taobella.6597:

What would balance thief is allowing blind to be stack able con

-snip-

While this would be awesome, I can already hear the QQ from classes without good access to blind.

Maugetarr.6823:

Taobella.6597:

What would balance thief is allowing blind to be stack able con

-snip-

While this would be awesome, I can already hear the QQ from classes without good access to blind.

i know it would be epic <3

Taobella.6597:

What would balance thief is allowing blind to be stack able con

Another way would be to give thief an X buff well they sit in stealth something like. every second thief in stealth they gave 1% dmg mod to next hit. make it stack to 10 max. duration of 15 seconds on each stack.

Why do you think giving thieves anything that benefits from SITTING IN STEALTH is a good idea?

I think the whole problem stems from the short-duration model of repeatable stealth used in this game. It forces theives to be super fragile (because they’re expected to be able to restealth often as a form of defense).

I much prefer the longer-duration, very limited re-stealth version of stealth used for thieves in other games. Much more fun to play, allows a wider range of thief roles, and allows designers to make the class archetype more robust.

Taobella.6597:

What would balance thief is allowing blind to be stack able con

Another way would be to give thief an X buff well they sit in stealth something like. every second thief in stealth they gave 1% dmg mod to next hit. make it stack to 10 max. duration of 15 seconds on each stack.

… ppl like you shoud really stick your head out of the D/P heaven of yours… what do you thing would happen to the already suffering build diversity!!!?!

the problem is not necessaily on our side. Its more the instant meta the new patch encourages. As a thief we can evade, los, dodge major abilitys but not instants becouse guess what, they are instants. Nowdays if you dont get as many instans in your build as you can, you are not building optimally, and this is really sad. introducing feline grace rework meanwhile thorwing more instant snacks to other profs… have fun “skillfully” evading all those kitten out there with endurancebase for 2 dodges.

Advent.6193:

Honestly, I think they [ANet] may wish to look into shrinking the health-pool gap a bit.

• Currently, low-health starts ~10k, medium ~15k, high ~18k.
• This was from before they removed stat boosts from trait lines.
• Would not a more logical setup be: 12-12.5k, 15k, 18k? At least that would help the low-health classes even out a bit. As is, one can argue that a 5k gap from low to medium, followed by merely 3k separating medium from high … was unbalanced by default.

uhm, the lowest you can have with the thief is 12k… just fyi

MadVisions.4529:

the problem is not necessaily on our side. Its more the instant meta the new patch encourages. As a thief we can evade, los, dodge major abilitys but not instants becouse guess what, they are instants. Nowdays if you dont get as many instans in your build as you can, you are not building optimally, and this is really sad. introducing feline grace rework meanwhile thorwing more instant snacks to other profs… have fun “skillfully” evading all those kitten out there with endurancebase for 2 dodges.

Even if its not instants, they still have better means to set themselves up for a burst like warrior with cc → strong attacks, or necro with fear → right into a bunch of mayhem, or engi with any cc →condi overload or burst, etc.

Thief doesn’t have the defenses to last through these things without having to full retreat into stealth or port a dozen times to escape and try to ooc. Thief doesn’t recover very well and we don’t have the luxury of passive defenses outside of sitting in stealth which btw, = 0 dps.

They should stop trying to buff everyone’s damage and look at their defenses and see how ridiculously off set thief is. I won’t use d/p until they make some progress on thief build diversity.

I’d personally like to see thieves become less stealth reliant, to build up loadout variety and also because IMO the thief archetype =/= assassin. emphasis on the other playstyles and themes via less stealth reliance for some builds/kits (IE S/x, P/x, and SB)would be pretty cool.

this could be achieved by giving us buffs with dodges or other condi removal methods outside of SE and shadowstep. plus maybe even some defensive stat buffs or even offensive stat buffs(so taking defensive gear is less punishing) idk.

DHawk.2687:

Advent.6193:

Honestly, I think they [ANet] may wish to look into shrinking the health-pool gap a bit.

• Currently, low-health starts ~10k, medium ~15k, high ~18k.
• This was from before they removed stat boosts from trait lines.
• Would not a more logical setup be: 12-12.5k, 15k, 18k? At least that would help the low-health classes even out a bit. As is, one can argue that a 5k gap from low to medium, followed by merely 3k separating medium from high … was unbalanced by default.

uhm, the lowest you can have with the thief is 12k… just fyi

I think the talking about core health(the one w/o gear)

Sandrox.9524:

DHawk.2687:

Advent.6193:

Honestly, I think they [ANet] may wish to look into shrinking the health-pool gap a bit.

• Currently, low-health starts ~10k, medium ~15k, high ~18k.
• This was from before they removed stat boosts from trait lines.
• Would not a more logical setup be: 12-12.5k, 15k, 18k? At least that would help the low-health classes even out a bit. As is, one can argue that a 5k gap from low to medium, followed by merely 3k separating medium from high … was unbalanced by default.

uhm, the lowest you can have with the thief is 12k… just fyi

I think the talking about core health(the one w/o gear)

I was, actually. Which is an even bigger problem now that stats no longer come from traits. A max-Acro Thief was gaining around 3k more, before the last “big” patch.
Not to mention, everyone is tossing higher damage around, lately.

Buff the HP pool, add endurance gain on hit #2 to sword to make up for feline grace nerf and since black powder is always > in utility than C&D add blind on hit to C&D to help even that out. Oh and make the old riccocet baseline.

I’d make these changes then adjust damage accordingly to balance if it ends up being too OP.

Introducing kittened-Off-Odyssey’s List of Common Sense Fixes & Approaches For Thieves That Should Be A No-Brainer but Seem To Elude Even Arena Net’s Best & Brightest:
(yeah, I’m fed up with Anet)

1. Assign someone with knowledge to balance Thieves. Send the Thief guy back to the Warrior cubicle & go find someone off the street.
2. Shrink the Health Pool gap by giving Thieves more HP.
3. Fix Disabling Shot’s (SB#3) laggy backwards evade animation. Make it smooth.
4. Give back some of Shortbow’s bite.
5. Give Thieves some form of better range.
6. Reset Acrobatics & start over from scratch. You’ve messed up.
7. Abandon the Vigor obsession. Bring back Feline Grace.
8. Bring back Ricochet. Delete Ankle Shots if you must.
9. Revert Shadow’s Embrace.
10. Fix Shadow’s Rejuvenation.
11. Fix Mug+Hidden Thief combo-interaction. Seriously, you re-introduce it every patch.
12. Lower Cloaked In Shadow. It is no where worthy of a GM spot.
13. Rethink ALL Critical Strikes’ Master traits. They are lack-luster.
14. Increase Death Blossom’s evade time frame.
15. Give Withdrawl’s promised 10% healing increase.
16. Rethink Dagger Training.
17. Rethink Potent Poison.
18. Buff Trickster so Bountiful Theft has competition.
19. Cut Roll For Initiative’s recharge & gain in HALF.
20. Fix Scorpion Wire by giving it the same one the Thieves Guild assassin uses.
21. Make all Thief traps circular like Ranger’s & buff their effects in the process.
22. Quick Pockets needs to include &/or become a weapon swap reduction trait.
23. It may be time to totally rethink the Steal mechanic. Melee range boon stealing or F3-F5 weapon bundle? I would rather be rewarded by defeating my opponent with strategy & wit rather than who can surprise who first in a 5 second battle.
24. Definitely time to rethink Venoms. They are awful outside Venom Share.
25. Change Shadow Protector’s Regeneration to Protection.
26. Buff Vital Shot.
27. Rethink Body Shot.
28. Rethink Unload’s damage & utility. Perhaps drain all initiative & base increasing effectiveness on each initiative lost?

MadVisions.4529:

Taobella.6597:

What would balance thief is allowing blind to be stack able con

Another way would be to give thief an X buff well they sit in stealth something like. every second thief in stealth they gave 1% dmg mod to next hit. make it stack to 10 max. duration of 15 seconds on each stack.

… ppl like you shoud really stick your head out of the D/P heaven of yours… what do you thing would happen to the already suffering build diversity!!!?!

i do not even play d/p or stealth builds for that matter…

Odyssey.2613:

Introducing kittened-Off-Odyssey’s List of Common Sense Fixes & Approaches For Thieves That Should Be A No-Brainer but Seem To Elude Even Arena Net’s Best & Brightest:
(yeah, I’m fed up with Anet)

1. Assign someone with knowledge to balance Thieves. Send the Thief guy back to the Warrior cubicle & go find someone off the street.
2. Shrink the Health Pool gap by giving Thieves more HP.
3. Fix Disabling Shot’s (SB#3) laggy backwards evade animation. Make it smooth.
4. Give back some of Shortbow’s bite.
5. Give Thieves some form of better range.
6. Reset Acrobatics & start over from scratch. You’ve messed up.
7. Abandon the Vigor obsession. Bring back Feline Grace.
8. Bring back Ricochet. Delete Ankle Shots if you must.
9. Revert Shadow’s Embrace.
10. Fix Shadow’s Rejuvenation.
11. Fix Mug+Hidden Thief combo-interaction. Seriously, you re-introduce it every patch.
12. Lower Cloaked In Shadow. It is no where worthy of a GM spot.
13. Rethink ALL Critical Strikes’ Master traits. They are lack-luster.
14. Increase Death Blossom’s evade time frame.
15. Give Withdrawl’s promised 10% healing increase.
16. Rethink Dagger Training.
17. Rethink Potent Poison.
18. Buff Trickster so Bountiful Theft has competition.
19. Cut Roll For Initiative’s recharge & gain in HALF.
20. Fix Scorpion Wire by giving it the same one the Thieves Guild assassin uses.
21. Make all Thief traps circular like Ranger’s & buff their effects in the process.
22. Quick Pockets needs to include &/or become a weapon swap reduction trait.
23. It may be time to totally rethink the Steal mechanic. Melee range boon stealing or F3-F5 weapon bundle? I would rather be rewarded by defeating my opponent with strategy & wit rather than who can surprise who first in a 5 second battle.
24. Definitely time to rethink Venoms. They are awful outside Venom Share.
25. Change Shadow Protector’s Regeneration to Protection.
26. Buff Vital Shot.
27. Rethink Body Shot.
28. Rethink Unload’s damage & utility. Perhaps drain all initiative & base increasing effectiveness on each initiative lost?

Like most of them, mostly just #1.

Give the job of balancing thief to someone passionate about the profession, it needs special care at this point given the damage this recent patch did and the help we’ve been asking for that never came.

List of lazy “balance” changes to thief:

1. Making residual venom baseline: Cool! Helps out in a few ways; oh wait they nerfed DV by 1 second (went from 4 to 3 total immobilize) and lessened our burst window with BV (1.5 to 1). Did the people who double world boss health to allow critical hits inspire this change? Because both were awful ideas imo.

2. Shadow protector: Used to not apply regeneration if your ally already had it, which was very restricting but I get it, it had 10 seconds. Rather than give it a 10 second ICD and remove that restriction, they lower the regeneration duration to something completely useless. 3 seconds of regeneration? Really? We’re expected to restealth over and over just to see this or is this another change balanced around d/p restealthing over and over?

3. Last Refuge: I will say, THANK YOU for making it optional now. However you still haven’t fixed this trait to be helpful 100% of the time and being neighbors with SE (Which was nerfed for no good reason) I doubt anyone will pick it.

4. Guarded initiation: For a mobility trait line, it seems ridiculous to worry about vulnerability and slow which is a very uncommon condition. The original idea didn’t really make sense either but this trait seems like it was supposed to replace fleet of foot which was the only active condition removal acro had. Acro still wants to see active condition removal :/

5. Improvisation: Again, following the double health for world boss philosophy, they ended up nerfing 2 stolen skills already because of this trait. It’s only a matter of time before consume ecto and whirling axe are nerfed and I’m sure more after that. Glad to see they realized thief doesn’t have bundles but they could of gotten more creative with this trait especially for moving it to GM.

I’m sure this list will grow although I’d hope not.

Advent.6193:

Sandrox.9524:

DHawk.2687:

Advent.6193:

Honestly, I think they [ANet] may wish to look into shrinking the health-pool gap a bit.

• Currently, low-health starts ~10k, medium ~15k, high ~18k.
• This was from before they removed stat boosts from trait lines.
• Would not a more logical setup be: 12-12.5k, 15k, 18k? At least that would help the low-health classes even out a bit. As is, one can argue that a 5k gap from low to medium, followed by merely 3k separating medium from high … was unbalanced by default.

uhm, the lowest you can have with the thief is 12k… just fyi

I think the talking about core health(the one w/o gear)

I was, actually. Which is an even bigger problem now that stats no longer come from traits. A max-Acro Thief was gaining around 3k more, before the last “big” patch.
Not to mention, everyone is tossing higher damage around, lately.

Dont care about everyone higher dmg,if we get more base health pool that we should get by logic,it will be much better.Some wont see it now but when you will get those extra 3-5k vit you will see that it is alot of change. One anet will not give very willingly.

You’re asking for power creep.

Stop asking for more power creep.

Buffs to match buffs to match buffs.

Thieves are pretty strong as it is, nerfs like feline grace’s are a good thing demanding better skills.
Some other class builds need nerfs, cele ele, condi PU, stunlock shatter, rampage, etc.

Burning is a bit too strong but people seem to forget this is also related to how they made vulnerability affect condis too, which was a very poor decision imo.

I hope we won’t have to suffer this mesmer/cele ele nonsense for the next 6 monthes but otherwise the game feels way better than it has these past months, and as thieves i think most of us are glad the never ending reign of the hard counter engi lovechild ended. Though i can’t help but fear it’s just people who need adjustment and we may go back to it. Or maybe engi fotms are busy fotm’ing mesmers. Hope not.

Odyssey.2613:

Introducing kittened-Off-Odyssey’s List of Common Sense Fixes & Approaches For Thieves That Should Be A No-Brainer but Seem To Elude Even Arena Net’s Best & Brightest:
(yeah, I’m fed up with Anet)

1. Assign someone with knowledge to balance Thieves. Send the Thief guy back to the Warrior cubicle & go find someone off the street.
2. Shrink the Health Pool gap by giving Thieves more HP.
3. Fix Disabling Shot’s (SB#3) laggy backwards evade animation. Make it smooth.
4. Give back some of Shortbow’s bite.
5. Give Thieves some form of better range.
6. Reset Acrobatics & start over from scratch. You’ve messed up.
7. Abandon the Vigor obsession. Bring back Feline Grace.
8. Bring back Ricochet. Delete Ankle Shots if you must.
9. Revert Shadow’s Embrace.
10. Fix Shadow’s Rejuvenation.
11. Fix Mug+Hidden Thief combo-interaction. Seriously, you re-introduce it every patch.
12. Lower Cloaked In Shadow. It is no where worthy of a GM spot.
13. Rethink ALL Critical Strikes’ Master traits. They are lack-luster.
14. Increase Death Blossom’s evade time frame.
15. Give Withdrawl’s promised 10% healing increase.
16. Rethink Dagger Training.
17. Rethink Potent Poison.
18. Buff Trickster so Bountiful Theft has competition.
19. Cut Roll For Initiative’s recharge & gain in HALF.
20. Fix Scorpion Wire by giving it the same one the Thieves Guild assassin uses.
21. Make all Thief traps circular like Ranger’s & buff their effects in the process.
22. Quick Pockets needs to include &/or become a weapon swap reduction trait.
23. It may be time to totally rethink the Steal mechanic. Melee range boon stealing or F3-F5 weapon bundle? I would rather be rewarded by defeating my opponent with strategy & wit rather than who can surprise who first in a 5 second battle.
24. Definitely time to rethink Venoms. They are awful outside Venom Share.
25. Change Shadow Protector’s Regeneration to Protection.
26. Buff Vital Shot.
27. Rethink Body Shot.
28. Rethink Unload’s damage & utility. Perhaps drain all initiative & base increasing effectiveness on each initiative lost?

This.

And particularly the Cloaked in Shadow portion.

I’ve been playing thief since beta, and have been able to deal with the updates just fine up until this past “balance” update.

muscarine.5136:

You’re asking for power creep.

Stop asking for more power creep.

Buffs to match buffs to match buffs.

Thieves are pretty strong as it is, nerfs like feline grace’s are a good thing demanding better skills.
Some other class builds need nerfs, cele ele, condi PU, stunlock shatter, rampage, etc.

Burning is a bit too strong but people seem to forget this is also related to how they made vulnerability affect condis too, which was a very poor decision imo.

I hope we won’t have to suffer this mesmer/cele ele nonsense for the next 6 monthes but otherwise the game feels way better than it has these past months, and as thieves i think most of us are glad the never ending reign of the hard counter engi lovechild ended. Though i can’t help but fear it’s just people who need adjustment and we may go back to it. Or maybe engi fotms are busy fotm’ing mesmers. Hope not.

Power creep? wtf is that O.o
Only thing bothering me atm is the lack of dev interest,I made some mails regarding the dev involvment in our forums and yet to recive a reply.