Guild Wars 2

…now that you have gone and nerfed the thief’s heart seeker skill that was unjustifiable. Now my normally attacks does more damage in crits than a skill that costs me initiative to use, what is the point in that?

I always consider thiefs are like assassins in other mmos and when I first got my hand onto this game a thief is what I made, and it plays and feels like what an assassin should do – deadly in 1v1 but weak in def and in mob situations. And I have to play my thief by know it’s strength and weaknesses and I always strategise my moves when I engage in battle, in PVE and WvW. And I died lots to mobs in PVE but it’s fine, cause I know my thief is weak against mobs (until I unlock the dancing dagger skill but it has a hefty CD).

I do not like what you did with the HS nerf, expecially when the game is only weeks old and people don’t even know much about their own class to counter others let alone knowing what other classes’ weakness and strengths, and you would go and do changes to the fundamental workings of a class.

I was looking forward to play different races and different professions, with your recent action it does not fill me with much confidence in doing so, I may just pick up a bow, go stand on a castle wall, shoot some arrow to some knees and call it a day.

P.s this is my first Anet game and this is my first negative feeling I got since I started playing, otherwise my experience with Anet and GW2 was very positive.

P.p.s I don’t do Spvp but I do know that my thief dies easily in WvW so no, heart seeker is not and not even close to broken, just learn to play your class.

I think it was never intended for the thief to deal deadly damage by using a single skill.

The name “Heartseeker” suggest a finishing move to me. The patch made it more obvious that this is a finishing blow, rather than an attack chain.

Well, for a character that do not have heavy defence we are designed to deal damages. And since this is not a magic caster type then we can only deal physical damage. At the moment, it’s damage is lower than my normal auto attack crits, so now I get to kill things by hitting the button once and watch them die, slowly, and cast stealth and run away when it turns nasty since this “finisher” move doesn’t even deal enough damage to “finish” anything, and that is on normal monster.

Just use sword/pistol. Press 2 teleport to them use haste and press 3 hit them instantly for about 8k if they move Press f1 you will teleport to them while still hitting them with #3 at which point they will be below 50% health swap to daggers spam #2 fights over.

Dagger/Dagger wasn’t broken. Sword/Pistol is broken. Hundred Blades from warriors is broken. Any class that can end a match in 4seconds using these skills needs to be changed. Combat should require more then one trick ponys. At least dagger/dagger thiefs had to manage stealth and backstab. Sword/pistol thiefs just teleport to you an wack you in the face so easy to use a caveman can do it.

its was the best nerf i think becouse:
1. backstab build its still very good
2. you can use heart seeker as a finisher
3. you can still use the heart seeker to reach your target
and most of all no noob can rage about thief kill them.

I play PvP whole evening and i notice big lack of 22222 spamers.
Also i notice quite a big switch to condition builds.The 22222 spamers are testing if
33333 will work with similar results.It doesn’t…..
5 initiative ain’t equal to 3
Next we will see a quick check of a Pistol Whip.Then Haste+Unload,and when the scrubs
finally realize that no build will carry them w/o any playing skills we might notice a
big increase of illusionary unload mesmers…

Fury.6248:

Dagger/Dagger wasn’t broken. Sword/Pistol is broken. Hundred Blades from warriors is broken. Any class that can end a match in 4seconds using these skills needs to be changed. Combat should require more then one trick ponys. At least dagger/dagger thiefs had to manage stealth and backstab. Sword/pistol thiefs just teleport to you an wack you in the face so easy to use a caveman can do it.

its easy to Pistol Whip spam awful players. non-awful players will use a stun break and then dodge it, and then bash your head in while you’re stuck in the animation.

bad players lose to simple tactics. they lost to Heartseeker spam. They lose to Pistol Whip spam. They lose to Hundred Blades. They lose to whatever easily countered high-damage cheese people can come up with.

All these cheese builds, that focus on quick burst damage to the exclusion of other useful abilities are basically terrible builds that accomplish nothing other than killing bad players in pug vs. pug sPvP. i’d be embarassed to be caught spamming Heartseeker in PvP. I’d be angry at a warrior on my team if he just ran around trying to pop frenzy and then hit people with Hundred Blades.

i can tell you that when i play Guild vs. Guild pvp nobody on my team is using any of those one dimensional cheese builds because we actually try to win the map instead of just grief kill bad players.

I’m mostly bummed out about this for PvE. It was justified in PvP, but mobs don’t care if you spam the 2 key over and over, and against very weak enemies it was often the best option to take them down quickly and move on. It’s not like the damage was super crazy or anything anyways – a warrior will do far more and in an AoE. As a D/P thief I’m also basically worthless against champions/bosses until they get under 50%, because unshakable means black powder/head shot do almost nothing and heartseeker does next to no damage. Not much to do other than autoattack.

use D/D insted you can cluock and dagger and backstap realy offen
btw CD and backstab can do more dps than spam heartseeker in pve

It was perfectly justified. It still does plenty of damage if you use it the way it was intended to be used.

Zero skill gameplay by combining haste with something like HS, Pistol Whip and 100B shouldn’t be rewarded as far as I’m concerned.

And if Heartseeker was your best DPS against bosses, you should be worrying about something else… lol

Humorless.1573:

And if Heartseeker was your best DPS against bosses, you should be worrying about something else… lol

Okay, tell me what great and amazing options you have as D/P. You can spend 8 initiative to make a super weak heartseeker through a pointless black powder in order to backstab, but with all the time spent doing that and positioning around to the back I don’t think it’s any better than autoattacking.

Zplus.4217:

“I always strategise my moves when I engage in battle”

Zplus.4217:

“changes to the fundamental workings of a class”

Hahahahaha

So much crap for kids who keeps spamming Heartseeker. Recipe:

Poison -> 2222222222222222222222222 -> Stealth

Repeat until enemy dies or, you know… the key “2” breaks of overuse and exhaustion .

Vargs.6234:

Humorless.1573:

And if Heartseeker was your best DPS against bosses, you should be worrying about something else… lol

Okay, tell me what great and amazing options you have as D/P. You can spend 8 initiative to make a super weak heartseeker through a pointless black powder in order to backstab, but with all the time spent doing that and positioning around to the back I don’t think it’s any better than autoattacking.

in my game there’s this awesome ability called “weapon swap”. i press the ~ key get to use an entirely different set of weapons! amazing!

i’d suggest keeping a set of Pistol/Pistol or Sword/Dagger in your other slot if you want to have a good set to use against bosses.

metaphorm.6904:

Vargs.6234:

Humorless.1573:

And if Heartseeker was your best DPS against bosses, you should be worrying about something else… lol

Okay, tell me what great and amazing options you have as D/P. You can spend 8 initiative to make a super weak heartseeker through a pointless black powder in order to backstab, but with all the time spent doing that and positioning around to the back I don’t think it’s any better than autoattacking.

in my game there’s this awesome ability called “weapon swap”. i press the ~ key get to use an entirely different set of weapons! amazing!

i’d suggest keeping a set of Pistol/Pistol or Sword/Dagger in your other slot if you want to have a good set to use against bosses.

And my point is that we previously had a perfectly effective all-around weapon set that is now completely useless in a very common PvE situation, solely due to people whining about one ability in sPvP. Which is not great when you have such an incredibly limited weapon selection as the thief.

So yeah, now D/P thieves need to take along another weapon to deal with champions/bosses. But they already needed to take another weapon set for AoE, and I’m pretty sure Arenanet didn’t just add a third weapon set slot. The only setup that adequately satisfies both of those requirements is S/D, but hey, now you don’t get a ranged weapon.

Again, the people who are loving the nerf and saying “switch weapons lol” forget that the game design was about allowing people to play how they wanted. Non-condition build dagger thieves who want to put out damage have to wait for the boss, or any mob, to hit 50%, before they can ‘do damage’. Otherwise it’s auto-attack. Cloak and Dagger can be useful and powerful, and maybe we will see more of it, and maybe that closes the gap. It has no special Combo finisher, it has no utility except cloaking you and being ABLE to cause damage if you then press your 1 key again as it cancels auto-attack.

1/5 of our dagger weapon skills are nearly useless 50% of the time.

Stealth + Backstab has always been higher damage on enemies > 50% health even with the previous version of Heartseeker. If you’ve been playing intelligently all along you were already not using Heartseeker against high health enemies in PvE. I don’t see what has changed other then people being punished even more for playing badly.

Dagger+Pistol is a weapon set for 1on1 dueling. Its strengths are chasing ability and control with blinding. Why should you expect this specialized weapon set to be good in all situations? It does you no harm at all to equip more versatile weapon set when you expect to need versatile attacking abilities.

I have said it before and I will say it again, my problem with the nerf is that HS is doing less damage then my auto attack crit, even when the enemy is low in hp, my HS is doing VERY slightly higher damage than my normal attack, since it has a jumping animation to do I can finish the enemy faster by NOT using the “finisher” move. And hence the nerf basically killed the skill. I’d be a lot happer if they nerf the damage when the target hp is high and kept the low hp damage as it was so people won’t spam them in spvp/WvW, where all the rages were about.

Really all I’m seeing are the complaints of people who have had their crutch taken away and are now having to learn to actually walk on their own.

If HS is well and truly doing less damage than intended, then Anet will balance it again. In the meantime why not try some different weapon comboes and trait/gear builds. You might find that there is a whole depth to thief that you weren’t even aware of.

P.S.: P/D thieves said hi, and hope you get well soon.

Heartseeker build was terrible before the nerf and is still terrible after the nerf. People who thought that Heartseeker build was good in sPvP are clueless and bad PvP players.

The fix to heartseeker was in the wrong direction:

If it’s a finisher, it should do more damage, cost more initiative and maybe even be conditional, perhaps only useable from the front or with a bleed or poison applied. That would make it a skill that talented players would use while locking out ‘2’ spammers. It was a no-talent skill to begin with, this put the nail in the coffin.

LoL, nerf nerf nerf! Every game is the same in this aspect. I love my thief and will continue to play him until he’s useless, then I’ll play another class until it gets nerfed. Don’t worry folks, nerf-bat hits everyone at one point or another. Thief was just the first class to take the hit. Just make sure to cry here on the forums about something miniscule so your nerfy nerff nerf dreams will come true.

I kill way more people with a S/P build anyway. If I play it right they aren’t able to escape my PW ethier.

I think the more important thing anet needs to do here is to fix Heartseeker from missing so much. It didn’t happen like this before the patch. Now it misses randomly at least 30% of the time.

metaphorm.6904:

its easy to Pistol Whip spam awful players. non-awful players will use a stun break

They don’t even need to stun break. The stun that Pistol Whip applies doesn’t last for the full duration of the sword slashing.

DrakeWurrum.6049:

metaphorm.6904:

its easy to Pistol Whip spam awful players. non-awful players will use a stun break

They don’t even need to stun break. The stun that Pistol Whip applies doesn’t last for the full duration of the sword slashing.

If you use Haste, it does. You can get off three Pistol Whips in a row, and the only way people can get away is if they use a Breakstun instantly. Problem is that most people only use utilities for massive damage and don’t actually build to counter anything. They then whine that something is OP, because they aren’t prepared to counter it. HS spam thief was pretty easy to counter, but people whined it was OP. I agree with the nerf, but I personally don’t think the percentages needed nerfed too. It’s pretty annoying that I can only use HS at 25% now instead of 33%, when just about anything would finish the squishy builds people are using now anyway.

Zplus.4217:

I have said it before and I will say it again, my problem with the nerf is that HS is doing less damage then my auto attack crit, even when the enemy is low in hp, my HS is doing VERY slightly higher damage than my normal attack, since it has a jumping animation to do I can finish the enemy faster by NOT using the “finisher” move. And hence the nerf basically killed the skill. I’d be a lot happer if they nerf the damage when the target hp is high and kept the low hp damage as it was so people won’t spam them in spvp/WvW, where all the rages were about.

I don’t see how your HS can do less damage than Double Strike, Wild Strike, or Lotus Strike. Mine certainly isn’t.

Ah. Had not considered using Haste and Pistol Whip together.

Also, no, Heartseeker is not doing less damage than auto attacks. It’s incredibly bursty… WHEN THEY ARE BELOW 25% HP

Which is how it’s meant to be.

Whargoul.9613:

I kill way more people with a S/P build anyway. If I play it right they aren’t able to escape my PW ethier.

On my mesmer I just port out of range followed by a block which stuns you and on my necro you get automaticaly feard if you stun me. Dont see any problem escaping pistolwhip.

@Blazer Hellsing.9184

Your feedback doesnt seem critical and valuable at all like your sig says. The one who made this thread was clearly talking about pve, why are you talking about spvp or pvp? Read first, read again a second time, then answer.