Thread for thief feedback, so here you are…
I finally got feed up with the constant suggestions of “learn 2 play” on thief forums, so I rolled a thief first. There are a number of issues people have with thieves that are generally based on wvw. Here are the issues I’ve found as well as ways that I would suggest to fix them.
1. Rendering – We have 3 seconds to see a thief. We’d like to see you please.
2. Stealth – Stealth in combat is a great idea, but there should be a method for an opponent to counter this in a way that removes you from stealth. I’m not talking direct damage and dots, but rather control effects such as daze, knockback and knockdowns. These are skills that disable a player but do not break stealth. For anyone with other classes than the thief, they’ll realise that these effects are constricted to specific weapons sets for each class and tend to have long cooldowns.
3. Burst Damage – We’ve all seen the screenshots of the 1 second burst ability of a thief. We’ve probably all looked at our combat log to see Steal – CnD – BS is all they needed to kill us. The major problem with this is Toughness failing to scale. 23k kill shots were1 glass cannon blowing up another glass cannon with the aid of the projectile bug (fixed). But when a lvl 80 exotic geared toughness build gets one-shot, people tend to get pretty antsy. Atm, our armour value is actually doing very little to protect us, while gearing towards pure damage is rewarding because of this fact.
4. Restrictive weapons sets – the reason that there are so many dagger/dagger thieves around is that it is insanely rewarding to equip this and then either spam heartseeker at your opponent or steal – CnD – BS. Fight over rather than having to think, time and react to your opponent. More thieves might try something different if there was something profitable in these other sets. Yes, you can make sword/dagger, dagger/pistol, etc. work, but why would some players even bother when they can hit 3 keys and win the fight.
1: 3 seconds is more than enough. It’s easy to dodge C&D and it eats away a thief’s initiative. If all they’re doing is spamming C&D, you shouldn’t be dying to them because the delay in the hits are incredible high to start with. If they’re P/D, predicting their C&D becomes all the more easier. Having said that, THEY ALREADY SAID A HUNDRED TIMES THEY’RE WORKING ON FIXING CULLING ISSUES. So stop with your WvW kittening. It’s not a stealth issue, it’s a culling issue. Even regular players show up invisible.
2: No! If they were doing this…stealth would need to be drastically made A LOT stronger…and all that would cause is make you and players like you come back to complain even more. Stealth does NOT make them invulnerable…and it’s not really that difficult to predict the movements of a common thief in stealth.
3: I haven’t seen this in my combat log in over 2.5~3 months. Perhaps I know how to counter it is why. Perhaps, that also means that it’s not unbeatable and in fact, ANYONE can do it if they learn to. So, my suggestion would be instead of sitting there pondering about what should be nerfed on another class, you should go learn your own class and figure out how you can COUNTER the specific issue you’re having. Believe me…glass cannon backstab thieves are BY FAR the EASIEST to kill (especially those that are carried by it and are clueless as to how to react once it fails). Do not hold your breath on any significant changes to armour. Bunker builds are already under heavy watch because they defy the combat mechanic ANet was aiming for. Armour is in fact fine. The difference in WvW damage is created from CRITICAL DAMAGE (2x in WvW as opposed to sPvP).
4: Other weapon sets needs some love…but that is NOT because the so called backstab thieves and HS spammers are “OP”. In fact, no one should be dying to a thief who can only spam HS. HS has been SEVERELY nerfed, and is actually a VERY poor skill to use on targets to try 100-0 them. The backstab build has also been nerfed and was made A LOT easier to counter. Thieves and Warriors aren’t the only classes that can kill in <3 seconds. Other classes can achieve these kills too IF they’re specced that way (just like thieves and warriors).