Guild Wars 2

I would just like to begin by saying that I have played thief consistently for 3 years on pvp and have watched as it has slowly been drained of its power, more so recently than ever as other classes get maniacally buffed. There used to be a time when this extremely squishy class felt rewarded for beating another skilled player in a 1v1, an epic feeling of outplaying your opponent.. That seems to have been completely removed. It is almost impossible to beat any class in the hands of a skilled player at this point.

What bothers me so much is that I can be playing thief in absolute perfection and it is still impossible to kill classes that take a fraction of the skill that it takes to play a thief. It is literally a matter of landing 1 hit/ 1 round of conditions on a thief now.. That’s how weak we have become. If we are even hit once now we are generally one shot, if a set of conditions are applied we can only remove so many. The worst part about conditions is that in order to semi properly remove conditions as other classes do, we have to sacrifice all offensive utities in order to survive one attack…. This is absolutely absurd.

I can safely say I am an extremely skilled thief player and it is very frustrating to lose 1v1 to a class that can almost by accident win a fight because their class is so much more powerful, even with the array of daredevil dodges and mobility abilities granted to us, we are still beyond fragil and have no way to deal with the insane power creep of most classes right now. I hate that thief players are expected to play absolutely perfectly to be SUB PAR in consistency with others, and these others are all heavier/ have more active defenses than we do. What happened to high risk high reward?? Thief has become high risk no reward over the last year.. It’s very annoying and I feel sorry for any of your new players that roll thief, they have no idea but they have just entered the jungle for real by doing so.

At the end of the day, the point I am trying to get across is this. I am a skilled and experienced thief player. I should be on equal playing field with other classes that are also being controlled by skilled players. I don’t want to only be useful against new players and semi skilled players, I want to be viable competitively. This is the class I enjoy playing so no, I will not just retool some other class to win, it’s not fun forcing players to do this. I chose thief because I like thief, please make us viable again.
I highly suggest an increase in condition removal (for instance escapists absolution should be a minor.. It’s not that good to begin with and its terrible we lose the best part of the class in our choice from that trait line.) as well as increase our endurance gain through acrobatics again bringing meaning back to that spec. How is it fair that other classes are like fighting a freaking raid boss as far as active defenses, we have to deal with countless Invulns, generally high toughness and vitality tanks, blocks, stealths (that far surpass ours mind you..) the list goes on. The least we deserve is a better way to dodge more as the nimble class. We get one shot by everything, giving us more endurance gain seems completely fair.
Thiefs damage overall is ok with me, I am more concerned with how our defenses are becoming useless. We basically depend on dodges and shadow step as stealth has been basically destroyed recently and other classes do it better anyway. Please address these issues. Fixing acrobatics could put thief in a good place again and it could synergies with daredevil.

Here are the problems in a very simple, bullet point nutshell:

Our class is the assassin
People hate assassins
No one wants to die to assassins
Devs hate having upset players because that means no money
No money=no players=no game
Nerf assassins, problem solved.

We love our class, but everyone hates fighting assassins. Our offense is not ok anymore, we lost SO much damage and have never been given semi-decent defensive utilities. Staff is where it should be, in fact staff is where all of our weapons should be. Lemme make the problem more involved for you:

All trait choices need to have one of the 3: Power, Sustain, Survival. Read daredevil traits especially and it becomes apparent that is the intention. However our traitlines are more like this: damage, damage, damage. OH you want survival? damage, damage damage. Oh I’m sorry. crappy survival, ineffective survival, crappier survival. Wait people don’t want you alive: nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf. This is our lifestyle. We ask for buffs, but unfortunately putting this class where it should be is not possible because the devs are terrified for the playerbase and its inability to learn to play 90% of the time (oh look, multiples of passive defensive choices except on us. ho hum). To iterate my staff post, all Thief weapons (due to utility) should have these:

Fast, diverse, effective autos (read: poison, weakness+cripple, aoe damage, bleed. check. Staff got whirl=reflection. check twice)
An effective way to apply massive damage quickly because we are assassins (read: heartseeker, unload, vault. ret-roh. dagger mainhand, dual pistol, and staff only? oh noes)
A gapcloser or opener that is near instant (read: infiltrator shot, shadow shot, weakening charge/debilitating arc/ vault, p/d 3, infiltrator strike. oh noes, poor d/d + p/p)
A solid method to mitigate damage that does not empty our entire initiative pool (uuuuuuuuuuuh. infiltrator strike and uh debilitating arc and uh uhhhhh)

Wow more problems.

So our weapon sets aren’t completely up to par. Our traits aren’t up to par (each line needs a method to dish out damage, mitigate damage, or heal from damage in it. this is not the case at all (by line I mean… DAREDEVIL TIME)) except in the new spec, and it feels weak to people because its new however in just the adepts alone you see how a trait line is intended to function——-
After dodging deal more damage OR apply weakness on crits (mitigate damage) OR gain endurance on phys skill. Look at that rip, reduce, recover. Its right there- apply this to all our traits, and my point to all our weapons and gameplay + efficiency goes up. Then we can talk where our damage should be. Also sorry for the rant. We need updating (not reworking, we are outdated) and/or our hp pool + defensive options to increase. I personally vote the latter because its a band-aid while they do the former.But this is my 2 cents and I’m sure people will argue with me or ignore my point. Or I may have just brutalized your post. So enjoy my… 2 dollars.

You have threads in other profession forums admitting their classes are overtuned and are expecting nerfs (must be nice). On the other end of that spectrum is Thief.. the red headed step-child of Guild Wars 2.

I used (notice past tense) to enjoy playing the Thief, and yes we who play the Thief are Assassins. I played the Assassin class in Guild Wars, fell in love with it, then over time it became nearly unplayable. I haven’t given up on the class altogether, I always hold out hope that someday we Thieves could be better balanced when compared to other classes. Sadly, you must play the class so cleanly in order to be even marginally effective, your expected survival is less than thirty five percent. I rack up more deaths than kills, and why not give Thieves an earned title for being ganked numerous time ..reach 5000 deaths you get a title like “Foolhearty” ..most Thieves have to be playing a weak and overtly nerfed class.

I won’t stop playing the Thief because of the inadequacy, I will continue to attempt to find a build that might give me that sharp edge to these butter knives I’ve been given instead of the daggers I was used to.

Arctarius.2649:

What happened to high risk high reward?? Thief has become high risk no reward over the last year.. It’s very annoying and I feel sorry for any of your new players that roll thief, they have no idea but they have just entered the jungle for real by doing so.

Hey there, I happen to be in the situation you have just described here. Not long ago I decided to try this game out as it became free to play. It’s progression system, which I’ve never seen anywhere else to be as efficient and feel so painless but still remaining a grind with more reward to those that go through it to some extent has certainly caught me in. Bought the next expansion and rolled as a Thief after reading it’s general description being “They’re deadly in one-on-one combat using their agility”.

Naturally, I was expecting to be much less efficient in group combat then any other profession, I was prepared for that and it felt like a tradeoff like in any other game perhaps. What I found instead tho was that I was extremely inefficient at both no matter what skill level X player/profession I was faced with so far.

I know a lot of you guys have much more experience with this profession and have played it for quite a while, nevertheless I think my opinion has a different type of value, “the fresh newcomer that has not seen the past and evolution of this proffesion that won’t suggest things to be brought back” kind of value (like this “Ricochet” I kept hearing about for example which did seem like something that didn’t need to be on this profession to start with since it’s against it’s 1v1 nature to be honest except maybe for the increased range part of it if it did have something like that)

Personally, I think a lot of the inconveniences with this profession also come from the fact that a lot of Traits focus on improving the Steal ability too much instead of focusing on the general profession.

Imagine all the traits that improve this ability taken out, can you see the free space there ?

Honestly I think either Steal needs to gain a different functionality for this profession instead of just being another gap closer (from my point of view thief already has enough of that and pretty much every other profession I’ve seen has much better class abilities.) OR … just remove whatever traits are associated with it and increase the general efficiency of this profession.

Just my opinion.

Since this profession hasn’t met my expectations in the slightest, if daredevil also won’t meet them, I’ll be forced to reroll.

“They’re deadly in one-on-one combat using their agility”

I remember earlier gw2 times where you could backstab nearly everything in pvp … ^^
not much skilled but effectiv
Now you cant even 1vs1 a class you have to 1+1vs1 to get good players down … I think the same thing will happen with revenant

I came here just to say thieves need a buff. I havent lost to a thief on my necro in so long I was wondering if theres been some major nerf I dont know about

Arkantos.7460:

“They’re deadly in one-on-one combat using their agility”

I remember earlier gw2 times where you could backstab nearly everything in pvp … ^^
not much skilled but effectiv
Now you cant even 1vs1 a class you have to 1+1vs1 to get good players down … I think the same thing will happen with revenant

I think everyone exaggerates with this concept of +1.
I mean… I play Sword/Dagger Thief and still constantly win 1v1’s in pvp against a wide spectrum of classes and builds, in ranked!

In fact, I usually only go down to either making a really bad play or getting 2+v1’d while fighting for a point.

I mean, I do agree core Thief needs some love but it’s in no way incapable of winning 1v1’s. Just wanting to point that out as people really downplay a Thief’s power right now like if it’s completely useless.

It’s not about your personal skill in combat.
It’s about the effort we must put vs the effort other classes put to down a thief. 1 error and we are dead, when we play in a perfect way, other classes can do lots of mistake snd sometimes even survive. Not counting that in contest, wasting too much time on a node is counterproductive