Pay attention to Red Falcon’s post here. If you play one of these classes, he has highlighted some of the key abilities they use to disengage when losing a fight (or about to be zerged). It is missing Whirlwind for the warrior though :-p (If you have Rush you have Whirlwind as both are Greatsword skills).
The issue, as I said, isn’t that the thief can disengage. It’s the combination of how easily the thief can disengage to reset a fight and the fact that countering several thief skills comes down to the luck of your guesses. Obviously, you can increase that luck by becoming familiar with the playstyle of the thief you are fighting against (each has a rhythm … though the best thieves change that up constantly). Sadly, we can’t see thief names, depending on specs fights can be quite short, and it’s ridiculous to try to remember the rhythm of each thief.
The issue is the guesswork involved with fighting a thief coupled with thief’s ability to constantly reset a fight. You can only guess correctly so many times when that Thief is going to use steal and when that thief is going to backstab you out of the 4 seconds available to them each time they stealth. Eventually, if they keep resetting the fight, you’re going to guess wrong.
Now, this isn’t an issue at the lower tiers because those thieves are garbage that largely think “more damage!” and wait till too late to try to disengage, but at the higher skill tiers this is quite an issue. A good thief knows pretty quickly how the pace of the fight is going.
normal? yes. acceptable? no.
the thief class is just the worst thing ever. 8k hits, stealth every 3 seconds… it truly a class for scrubs.
no complaining on the forums because you died to someone is for scrubs, 8k is hardly the highest damage obtainable in a single button press in this game and stealth is easy to counter if you actually pay attention and learn patterns.
let me guess… you play a thief.
let me guess… you play a glass cannon build with no defense who got ambushed once by another glass cannon build who managed to kill you and because you think your the all glorious master of the game that any time you die due to your own build choice everything else must be wrong?
yes but my glass canon ranger does 1k dmg on it’s 1 and 2 skill… not 3-4k and 7k hearts + 8k backstab. i also have no defense whereas a thief can stealth every 3 seconds.
care to continue this debate? nothing you can say can defend the thief class.
Uhhh…yes I can. First of all, glass cannons are really…really…bad to play for a ranger solo. Glass cannon rangers just in general don’t work in pvp, especially not solo.
If you want to play a glass cannon “ranged” class, go warrior. Put on full zerker armor and you’ll be hitting 10-15k volleys and 20k killshots on crit. You can literally one-shot (I mean shot) thieves (and your glass cannon ranger) with that kind of build. How does that kind of damage suit you? Warriors wear heavy, so they have slightly more damage reduction, have 20% more health, and their utility options don’t suck compared to those of a glass cannon ranger.
I was a glass cannon ranger once. I got 2 shotted by thieves, but of course, you can read the long tl;dr I posted just a few posts above.
TL;DR thieves aren’t OP and you need to l2p. This is coming from one who subs a lv 2 thief ONLY for spvp.
i’ll summarize so the others can also have a laugh:
only thieves and warriors can run glass canon because warriors have killshot (IE: the most useless 1v1v skill ever). since every other class is outclassed by a glass canon thief they shouldn’t try and should go bunker and try to survive thief strikes without hoping to kill them.
Uh, no. I said certain classes don’t work well as glass cannons, especially not 1v1.
Actually, glass cannon ranger without traps is most likely the absolute worst choice you could pick against a glass cannon thief.
I’m not even joking here.
Also warriors with 2600 armor can one-shot GC thieves with eviscerate. They can get even more armor and still one-shot GC thieves with killshot (hit for 9k from a warrior on my 3.2k armor guard.)
Is it 100% balanced? No, but try this. Create a thief jump into SPvP for a while and see how “easy” it is. There are plenty of counters. I run multiple classes and all have their optimum builds. They also have weaknesses. It happens.
normal? yes. acceptable? no.
the thief class is just the worst thing ever. 8k hits, stealth every 3 seconds… it truly a class for scrubs.
no complaining on the forums because you died to someone is for scrubs, 8k is hardly the highest damage obtainable in a single button press in this game and stealth is easy to counter if you actually pay attention and learn patterns.
let me guess… you play a thief.
let me guess… you play a glass cannon build with no defense who got ambushed once by another glass cannon build who managed to kill you and because you think your the all glorious master of the game that any time you die due to your own build choice everything else must be wrong?
yes but my glass canon ranger does 1k dmg on it’s 1 and 2 skill… not 3-4k and 7k hearts + 8k backstab. i also have no defense whereas a thief can stealth every 3 seconds.
care to continue this debate? nothing you can say can defend the thief class.
Uhhh…yes I can. First of all, glass cannons are really…really…bad to play for a ranger solo. Glass cannon rangers just in general don’t work in pvp, especially not solo.
If you want to play a glass cannon “ranged” class, go warrior. Put on full zerker armor and you’ll be hitting 10-15k volleys and 20k killshots on crit. You can literally one-shot (I mean shot) thieves (and your glass cannon ranger) with that kind of build. How does that kind of damage suit you? Warriors wear heavy, so they have slightly more damage reduction, have 20% more health, and their utility options don’t suck compared to those of a glass cannon ranger.
I was a glass cannon ranger once. I got 2 shotted by thieves, but of course, you can read the long tl;dr I posted just a few posts above.
TL;DR thieves aren’t OP and you need to l2p. This is coming from one who subs a lv 2 thief ONLY for spvp.
i’ll summarize so the others can also have a laugh:
only thieves and warriors can run glass canon because warriors have killshot (IE: the most useless 1v1v skill ever). since every other class is outclassed by a glass canon thief they shouldn’t try and should go bunker and try to survive thief strikes without hoping to kill them.
Actually, the message that was intended for you was more like: “Some classes are more inclined towards GC specs than others. If you’re getting facerolled on a glass cannon Ranger, you should probably rethink your build rather than make grandiose generalizations about an entire other class.”
He said nothing about Thieves outclassing other glass cannons, or that other classes can only go bunker in order to avoid the spike damage. But if you run a glass cannon build—especially a poorly-equipped one—getting spiked down by anyone is the risk you take, be it a Thief or a Mesmer or an Engineer.
You dont have to guess or be a pro at thief to know where the thief is going. If a thief uses CnD when hes not yet losing he WILL try to backstab you. Use that knowledge to your advantage.
Yes, I’ve covered this. He has 3 (4 traited) seconds to choose from as to when to backstab/tactical strike you. If he waits till the end every time then it’s easy. If he’s smart, he changes it up. Yes, a person can dodge roll, distortion, and/or block for those whole 3-4 seconds but then those are down for C&D, heartseeker, cloak and dagger, etc. and you had to use multiple to cover the entire 3-4 seconds of stealth.
For those that it wasn’t obvious … if 2 seconds have elapsed w/o a backstab, use a dodge roll, block, etc. as the backstab is about to land. 1-2 second window is remaining and that’s much more manageable.
If he is low health and uses CnD, he is probably backing off and so should you, because you cant stop him from backing off and he cant stop you because you will kill him in an instant if he engages.
Yep, we can’t stop the thief from backing off … but often the thief can stop us from backing off. This is one of the things that irks people.
These are just 2 simple examples of many many counters to stealth. As a necro, just place fear around yourself, mesmer can pull with focus 4 distortion blur blink decoy, warrior block with shield, ele can RTL away or stomp with dagger earth 4, guardian speaks for itself. And best of all, DODGE. CnD only lasts 3 seconds, he will try to BS you in those 3 seconds. If you have problems with thieves youre just an average or below average pvper. ( I play a mesmer btw )
I’ve covered necro marks/wells and ranger traps in another post. Those are wonderful as they give you an indicator of where the thief is while stealthed and force the thief to take those hits (they hate being hit) … but this is assuming the Thief isn’t smart/patient. You’re not going to kill one of these good thieves by sitting on marks/traps as they aren’t stupid/stubborn enough to rush into a full stack of marks/traps that will damage and CC them. They’ll bide their time, waiting for you to make a mistake or find a new target. They are the ultimate class when it comes to choosing fights and the good thieves know this. They don’t have to fight you on your terms.
Mesmer Focus pull is great … against Refuge. If you’re wasting it before that then you’re largely failing unless you have some other means of getting a Thief when they pop refuge.
Dodging it great, but a dodge covers 1 second at best. So you can cover 2 of those seconds with dodge rolls. Reveal debuff lasts 3 seconds. A thief can stealth quite often.
I play Mesmer as well and it’s only the really good thieves that give me trouble, in which case the cards all mostly in their hand and I often have to hope to juke them with clones + stealth as any time I am about to win they simply reset the fight with stealth and superior mobility and then either find someone easier or try again until I don’t have enough cooldowns and/or make too many mistakes. Bad/average thieves are just another corpse on the pile under my butterflies.
Culling in wvw is a different story and that is a problem though.
Yep, re-read my post.
Anyway my point is: L2P and you wont have to guess.
You’re right … just spam cooldowns and dodges every stealth till you’re out of them on the 2nd stealth, he resets, and you’re in trouble. Good plan :-)
It works against the bad/average thieves. It does not work against the great thieves.
Is it 100% balanced? No, but try this. Create a thief jump into SPvP for a while and see how “easy” it is. There are plenty of counters. I run multiple classes and all have their optimum builds. They also have weaknesses. It happens.
I did this. It was very easy as a Dagger+Dagger thief.
Sword+Dagger is a more difficult weapon set to master.
there are lots of ways to protect yourself for 3-4 seconds/make it hard for them to get into that position in that time, theres ways to prevent them escaping with a bit of prediction (its less luck and more processing the situation to calculate what routes they will most likely take, this sort of behaviour is needed against every class and every game in pvp really) and so on.
The issue, as I said, isn’t that the thief can disengage. It’s the combination of how easily the thief can disengage to reset a fight and the fact that countering several thief skills comes down to the luck of your guesses. Obviously, you can increase that luck by becoming familiar with the playstyle of the thief you are fighting against (each has a rhythm … though the best thieves change that up constantly). Sadly, we can’t see thief names, depending on specs fights can be quite short, and it’s ridiculous to try to remember the rhythm of each thief.
The issue is the guesswork involved with fighting a thief coupled with thief’s ability to constantly reset a fight. You can only guess correctly so many times when that Thief is going to use steal and when that thief is going to backstab you out of the 4 seconds available to them each time they stealth. Eventually, if they keep resetting the fight, you’re going to guess wrong.
Now, this isn’t an issue at the lower tiers because those thieves are garbage that largely think “more damage!” and wait till too late to try to disengage, but at the higher skill tiers this is quite an issue. A good thief knows pretty quickly how the pace of the fight is going.
You dont have to guess or be a pro at thief to know where the thief is going. If a thief uses CnD when hes not yet losing he WILL try to backstab you. Use that knowledge to your advantage. If he is low health and uses CnD, he is probably backing off and so should you, because you cant stop him from backing off and he cant stop you because you will kill him in an instant if he engages. These are just 2 simple examples of many many counters to stealth. As a necro, just place fear around yourself, mesmer can pull with focus 4 distortion blur blink decoy, warrior block with shield, ele can RTL away or stomp with dagger earth 4, guardian speaks for itself. And best of all, DODGE. CnD only lasts 3 seconds, he will try to BS you in those 3 seconds. If you have problems with thieves youre just an average or below average pvper. ( I play a mesmer btw )
Culling in wvw is a different story and that is a problem though.
Anyway my point is: L2P and you wont have to guess.
You’re describing an extremly preditable thief if every time he CnD’s, he goes for a backstab. In stealth, the thief sees if his target is preparing for a backstab – what is to stop him from immobilizing, then kiting with sb instead? Good thieves are patient and time their burst when their target is most vulnerable, not whenever cooldowns are up.
There are a lot of bad thieves who are easy to counter, but Sebrent is right: a good thief dictates the pace of a fight. The fact that in this game, stealth enables you to see what your enemies are doing while cloaking your own movement, so in essence, you should always be a step ahead of your enemy. This means fighting good thieves is largely guesswork, and if otherwise, it’s the thief’s fault for being predictable when he has the tools to keep his enemies guessing.
A good thief always dictates the pace of the fight or resets it. Why? Because if he isn’t dictating the pace he is quite likely to die. Thief is like Mesmer is many respects. This is one of them.
As much flak as I give Thieves, they share many characteristics with the Mesmer. Howver, there is quite the difference in what I hear in TS and guild chat when someone switches to try a Mesmer and when they switch to try a Thief is quite different (and hilarious when they try Mesmer). Most try the Mesmer and it’s immediately “what the …”. When those same try the Thief, they relay back how easy many things are … though those coming from Guardian or something similar do complain about being squishy when actually hit … can’t have it all buds, lol.
A good thief always dictates the pace of the fight or resets it. Why? Because if he isn’t dictating the pace he is quite likely to die. Thief is like Mesmer is many respects. This is one of them.
As much flak as I give Thieves, they share many characteristics with the Mesmer. Howver, there is quite the difference in what I hear in TS and guild chat when someone switches to try a Mesmer and when they switch to try a Thief is quite different (and hilarious when they try Mesmer). Most try the Mesmer and it’s immediately “what the …”. When those same try the Thief, they relay back how easy many things are … though those coming from Guardian or something similar do complain about being squishy when actually hit … can’t have it all buds, lol.
That’s actually interesting. I always related Thieves more to Eles, Engis to Mesmers, and Rangers to Necros. I always found the class niches to line up, and oftentimes the playstyle.
We can take that discussion offline if you want or create a different thread in a non-specific-class subforum :-)
I’m curious about your takes on them as well. We can always learn something new.
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