Guild Wars 2

I know this info has been out for a month but this still warrants serious thought. I’ve adopted the S/D thief specifically as an alternative to the stealth-abusing D/P builds that are the driving factor behind the Dec. 10 nerfs. What am I supposed to play now?

The thief is a squishy class, with tricks instead of tankiness. We have the lowest base health rate of any class in the game, and if we’re caught in a protracted punch-session, we’re pretty easy to knock down. Fine. To compensate, we’re supposed to be tricky and hard to pin down. We’ve been given the tools of stealth, evades, and mobility to help us survive fights.

Official website description:
“Thieves can move through the shadows, vanish into thin air… Thieves practice an agile, acrobatic fighting style, which can make them very hard to hit.”

So if R&D reduces those stealth, evade and mobility tools, we’re increasingly left with a squishy class that can’t do anything to help itself stay alive. You’re taking the trick out of the rogue class.

Referring to these Jon Peters quotes:

“…reduced the effectiveness of high evasion thieves by reducing vigor up time and adding some cast time to the Shadow Return skill on the sword. This prevents these thieves from evading too much and too easily dealing with being disabled (stun, daze, fear, knockdown, etc.)”
“This will reward thieves who are actively engaged in the fight rather than those who are just dodging over and over again.”

Is “being actively engaged in the fight” now defined as “being punched in the face”? Because we’ve already established that that’s not what thieves are supposed to do. So I can’t get punched because if I do, I’ll die.. But now R&D thinks they need to reduce the evasion and mobility. Was Sword thief broken? I would argue it was good, but niche. So why did it get hammered? The most prevalent complaints were far-and-away the most focused on D/P perma-stealth builds. If it wasn’t broken, why are we “fixing” it?

Running a 100% evasion build as a thief is extremely easy, just cause they’re reducing this effectiveness a bit doesn’t mean the sky is falling.

Also, since when did Sword/X become the ONLY theif build?

WereDragon.6083:

Running a 100% evasion build as a thief is extremely easy, just cause they’re reducing this effectiveness a bit doesn’t mean the sky is falling.

Also, since when did Sword/X become the ONLY theif build?

Since everything else sucked.

yeah, totally gonna have to get used to not using S/X anymore (in wvw and pvp at least)
sword 2 was the only thing that set had going for me to actually use it.

WereDragon.6083:

Running a 100% evasion build as a thief is extremely easy, just cause they’re reducing this effectiveness a bit doesn’t mean the sky is falling.

Also, since when did Sword/X become the ONLY theif build?

alas….another non thief player in thief forums. he said its the non stealth build. all other builds need stealth, atleast competitive ones. this is the only COMPETITIVE build that doesnt need stealth.

and yes …. when warriors are stunning every few seconds we do need no cast time on return for infil return. the sky does fall and buries this build. period.

warriors ahve knockdowns, stuns, pushbacks and almost a 6 second immobilize. and all this is on short timers. imagine that. yet we get infil return for 100-600 range gap creator … depending on where we are. its just QQers. thieves arent really competitive as is. get real. you too anet. keep ruining your game…see what happens.

Mirror Owl.7204:

I know this info has been out for a month but this still warrants serious thought. I’ve adopted the S/D thief specifically as an alternative to the stealth-abusing D/P builds that are the driving factor behind the Dec. 10 nerfs. What am I supposed to play now?

Warrior, Spirit Ranger, Necromancer, Engineer, cheese Mesmer that is getting buffed. Choose your poison (got it?)

Travlane.5948:

its just QQers. thieves arent really competitive as is. get real. you too anet. keep ruining your game…see what happens.

Eh, nothing will happen for now. I love this game, but I really dislike the direction it is taking for more than 1 year and how everything takes an eternity to fix or break even more. There’s actually no other good MMO coming out soon, so Anet can keep doing whatever they want. Once there’s one, oh boy…

S/D is so easy and has so many evades that I died every 10 seconds with it in combat today.

WereDragon.6083:

Running a 100% evasion build as a thief is extremely easy, just cause they’re reducing this effectiveness a bit doesn’t mean the sky is falling.

Also, since when did Sword/X become the ONLY theif build?

They are nerfing vigor traits that are not S/X specific though. D/X and P/X will be affected by it more so than the high evasion S/X builds as they are using actual dodges and not weapon evades.

Anet just wants Thief to revolve 100% around stealth~ that is, until we use it too much. Then they have to nerf stealth but make sure to nerf all other non-stealth things to keep us from not using stealth. :o What do?

Now we’ll have an entire grandmaster skill tree that’s useless (even more useless as non condition) since specing into Trickery all the way will be impossible since less vigor, no shadow return and being carrot on a sticked to 30 acrobatics.

Also, it feels like their impression is that when a Thief gets a stun landed on them, they’re supposed to take it like a man and die. o.O and they want those stuns to actually land more often.

S/D pretty much died when the meta shifted to bunker meta and LS can only steal 1 boon.

This seals the deal. RIP S/D you had a good run.