Guild Wars 2

Right, I think I speak on behalf of the majority of the Thief community.

I have played thief since the beginning, and it is basically the only class I play as I only WvW and PvP, almost 0 PvE.

I have played a variety of builds. My favourite was P/D condition for WvW as I could solo up to 3v1, 2v1 if the players were really good. I did not win every battle but it was fun, a challenge and I enjoyed. I never enjoyed D/P as I prefered S/D over it, so I also played S/D in WvW

I played solely S/D in PvP.

The Main Issues I have is, in no particular order bar the first is…

1. Someone who has vast knowledge or mains thief needs to take responsibility for their balancing, as the person who currently works on them says he does not care about thief and touches it very rarely. He even forgot some of thieves traits when working on the latest patch. To me this is disgusting and shows that he is just a member of anet listening to cries from people who do not play thief

2. Revert both Feline Grace and Shadow’s Embrace. THESE 2 NERFS WERE UNJUSTIFIED AND ABSOLUTELY CRIPPLING ON THIEVES SURVIVAL. There was no justification for either of these, and they both destroyed a ton of builds all at once. goodbye to our sustain.

3. Look at putting Cloaked in Shadows back into the second spot, as this would bring back the variety for P/D and D/D builds. As it stands, D/D cannot function because they cannot blind and their sustain from Shadows Embrace is gone, or Infusion of they used that. The middle bunch of Shadow Arts traits are boring as it stands, and cloaked replacing shadow’s protector would be better because, with shadow’s rejuvenation you do not really need rejuvenation boon.

4. Our vitality needs a slight buff in my opinion, but not insanely.

BFMV.3198:

I never enjoyed D/P

Thief is balanced around that set lol.

BFMV.3198:

1. Someone who has vast knowledge or mains thief needs to take responsibility for their balancing, as the person who currently works on them says he does not care about thief and touches it very rarely. He even forgot some of thieves traits when working on the latest patch. To me this is disgusting and shows that he is just a member of anet listening to cries from people who do not play thief

Really? When and where did he say that?

If this is the case, then it’s an outrage that they paid for some guy with our money in full who is not even doing his work properly.

Thieves got kitten pretty badly after this patch compared to the rest of the meta. The problem isn’t that thief got super nerfed but rather didn’t receive that much of a buff compared to the other professions. I do agree they need to revert feline’s grace. Acro thieves had one of the highest skill cap in the game and generally had a lot of counters. But you could outplay said counters. So the fact that they kitten it so hard that it’s unplayable (or not as viable as the meta d/p) is kind of sad.

I don’t mind the new shadow’s embrace nerf. There are workarounds for it. But I think mainly, it’s not the nerf to shadow’s embrace that’s the issue but rather the necessity to nerf other profession traits. For example, elementalist’s blinding ashes + mesmer blinding dissipation. That would help a lot with bringing the other professions in line with thieves.

If anet doesn’t intend to nerf some of the top professions in the meta, then I’m for buffing thieves’ hp slightly. As for our sustain, it’s still good but we’re forced to stealth most of the time under constant pressure. Everything else just hits harder after the patch so it seems like our sustain got nerfed. Not quite. Thieves are truly glassy now.

I agree with the OP. I have over 3k hours on my thief, mained since pre-launch, but this is making me log in less and less. If Thief is not playable in a close-to-balanced state as it has been before(compared to now), I’ll end up quitting GW2.
Primarily because the unbalance is at a state where it is absolutely not fun to play. All character classes except Necro has some sort of invulnerability skill. Mesmers out-stealth thief, HOW is this even possible? What logic does this have. Mesmers are supposed to be master of illusion, not stealth, yet they surpass the mastery of stealth Thief is supposed to have.
Thief’s damage is not the problem. The survivability is. Thief vs Thief is basically about who initiates and how agressively. Burst or be bursted. Thief vs other classes? Well, if they use invulnerabilty skills it’s kinda kitten, considering we have none of those. Stealth you say? Whats the point if other classes’ skills keep tracking a thief after stealth? Sure, we can still beat other classes, but not when they are running troll builds that thief has NO WAY of possibly countering. What’s up with Guardian’s Symbols killing a thief in 1-2 ticks???? Dodge you say? We would if we had Feline Grace. Basically all Guardians have to do is attack until a thief dodges twice, and then just put down a couple of symbols.

I’m sorry about this rant, but I’m sure the majority of the thief community will agree things are not looking good, and the person that was supposed to look out for our balance has absolutely no idea what he is doing. I thank him for the work thus far, but it’s far beyond time to admit things aren’t looking good, and the interest in that class is close to null, if not null itself.

If you’d like to know what has kept me playing so long, nerf after nerf, is due to how the Thief was primarily designed, pre-launch. The foundations it was built on made us capable, even after nerfs, of beating other classes. We were called OP, time after time, and nerfs were applied, and we still won. Again, we can still beat some players, but it’s not even fulfilling.

To know we’re not on equal fighting ground is just wrong. To know the one in charge of our class forgets about traits is just wrong. To know we’re 3 years into this game and we’re having an issue like this is just wrong. Of course, separating stats from traits, and doing other alterations ofr the sake of “balance” were bound to to bring issues with it. We all know that. But things like the trait redesign that were more susceptible to Human decision rather than coding variables is what struck me the most. Some of our traits alterations are so unjustified it’s just.. wrong.

Reinn.7436:

BFMV.3198:

1. Someone who has vast knowledge or mains thief needs to take responsibility for their balancing, as the person who currently works on them says he does not care about thief and touches it very rarely. He even forgot some of thieves traits when working on the latest patch. To me this is disgusting and shows that he is just a member of anet listening to cries from people who do not play thief

Really? When and where did he say that?

If this is the case, then it’s an outrage that they paid for some guy with our money in full who is not even doing his work properly.

During the 4hour live-stream showing off the upcoming Trait System and Thief changes back last month or so. I think a tear came to my eye when he said that.

EragamerLG.2390:

During the 4hour live-stream showing off the upcoming Trait System and Thief changes back last month or so. I think a tear came to my eye when he said that.

Thanks I’ll look into that if it’s still available. Lol

lol he never said he didn’t care about thief or hardly touches it. It was more along the lines of he hadn’t looked at them in weeks so he didn’t remember exactly everything they settled on as far as changes. I get that everyone there’s probably grinding on the HoT expansion but it’s obvious they didn’t put as much time and thought into the changes compared to the other classes, especially their precious pride-and-joy Elementalist. I mean, kitten, they still think after all this time that all venoms are equally worthy of a 40 sec CD. Hopefully they focus on us better when HoT development isn’t their main priority but i doubt it. Thief is always going to be the least tended-to class probably.

EragamerLG.2390:

Reinn.7436:

BFMV.3198:

1. Someone who has vast knowledge or mains thief needs to take responsibility for their balancing, as the person who currently works on them says he does not care about thief and touches it very rarely. He even forgot some of thieves traits when working on the latest patch. To me this is disgusting and shows that he is just a member of anet listening to cries from people who do not play thief

Really? When and where did he say that?

If this is the case, then it’s an outrage that they paid for some guy with our money in full who is not even doing his work properly.

During the 4hour live-stream showing off the upcoming Trait System and Thief changes back last month or so. I think a tear came to my eye when he said that.

Well, I don’t remember him saying that he rarely plays thief, but he did forget some of the trait names. To be fair, i forget trait names occasionally too. However, I don’t get the feeling when he talks about thief that he particularly enjoys it. Look back through the mesmer forum and you’ll see the Robert Gee appreciation thread. That guy has been working on mesmers since GW1. He’s passionate about the class and that’s a good thing. Part of what I think problem is is that it doesn’t seem like there’s a thief main dev. I just think there basically needs to be a dev per class who is the advocate for that class. Someone who says “look, this change would be awesome/awful because [reasons].” Karl might play thief a lot, but if you watch that preview, it seems like it’s not often because of his stated trait/weapon choices during testing. IIRC he talked about playing S/D power/condi with bewildering ambush during some of the play testing. I understand that they need to test a lot of things to see how traits interact, and some might not be optimal, the problem is I feel like we received some nerfs based on how strong a trait was against some scattered builds (like the one mentioned). Karl seems like he’s more passionate about ele (again, that’s good) because they received some essential stuff baseline and had some proposed nerfs not make it into the release which would obviously have been very detrimental to the ele in general. I think there needs to be a specialist dev per class so when they bring them on PoI or RU you identify them as the guy/girl who loves the class as much as you do.

More specific to this topic: I don’t see why they needed to nerf feline grace while simultaneously nerfing vigor. I don’t get why acro doesn’t have way more access to endurance regeneration traits. After taking away FG, the access to straight vigor for thief is actually pretty pitiful. It takes a combination of 4 traits to maintain 100% uptime when it honestly should be 1 major (adept) trait in the acro line. Look at the ele again (sorry, favorite alt) and how well the arcana line promotes evasion and how well it synergizes with itself. Renewing Stamina + Evasive Arcana has been a staple since launch that adds nicely to their survivability. Our version of that just got a serious nerf. I’d like to see acro made into a strong evasion line that is a contender for slotting again.

But truth be told, due to these inevitable nerfs and changes to our skillsets/stats, we thieves are probably one of the most brightest innovators out of all classes. Nerf this? Ok we think of another good build, nerf that? Ok, we do this. This is like a natural process of mankind’s adaptability to change.

But yet again, out of all the professions column here in the forum, the Thief corner is probably the one with the highest complaint threads.

Let’s just pray that the devs are willing to listen.

I highly doubt at this point that there will be any good changes to thieves. Ever. Unless they change company politics.

That being said, it leaves only one choice: complain about other classes so maybe one day they will be nerfed (which would be indirect buff to thieves).

I couldn’t agree more with a lot of points made here. S/D is pretty much the worst build there is out there. Of course you can still use it but you’d have to play with a lot more effort to make up for the lack of good traits in comparison with other builds in order to win against someone using a stronger class/build of the same skill level. I’m currently using S/P, D/D, and D/P on my thieves since I finally decided to give up on S/D a few days ago. For every major balance patch, the thief has been nerfed in ever one of them. Back then, if a Power Necro uses Lich Form or a Ranger/Warrior uses their Rampage skill, you can simply steal the stability to counter their ridiculous CC+DPS potential as a S/D thief. The number of boons ripped was even reduced by half and that was still ok. But with the current changes to the system, playing S/D thief with no might per dodge, no feline grace (or rather a terrible version of it remains), and a nerfed vigor, S/D thief is beyond horrific as far as thief builds go. The fact that every class outdoes thief in nearly everything doesn’t help either. Every class now has the potential to burst as much or even more than a thief. The only difference is that they can have a higher base HP, higher defense, access to invulnerability, stability, might stacks, and easier CC skills to land. Not to mention, Mesmers can now blind enemies and stealth much more often and easily than a thief. As for condition thieves, you might as well play ranger or necro for condi spams or stick to medi guardian burning stacks for invulnerability+raw DPS+OP burning stacks.

Replace Vennom Siphon with Cloacked in Shadows, mix that trait with Venom Share. As for the rest I agree with what you’ve stated and that you know who should be replaced with someone who actually cares.

^

I am also a thief player from beta and S/D for around 2 years.

Pretty much agree with most of what has been said, especially about endurance regen and blinds.

Why was mass blinds nerfed when other classes (ele) can do them? Why was great endurance regen nerfed when other classes (rangers) can do the same thing?

I pretty much think that the trait reshuffle/changes were not well thought out to the point of quitting/half hearted game play. My hours per day have easily halved since patch.

I still think that anet are still trying to force the idea of “stealing and using stolen items” onto the thief community which has been a sore issue between thief players and anet since beta launch. I do think that the changes made, mainly F2 for item use and the use stolen item twice trait, are good changes though others are less so, mainly the trait that reduces steal by 1 second while wielding a sword.

The above sword trait plus the trait that causes confusion on interruption are good examples of poorly thought out/planned trait changes and another example how s/d was given the short end of the stick again. (although the confusion on interruption might have been intended for P/P hybrid builds?) I really would like to know under what test conditions/though process the anet developers came to the conclusion that these traits will be desirable and effective.

I am also extremely annoyed by steal’s cd increase, the fact that they make you choose between condi and boon removal SE nerf, and the fact they premptively nerfed stolen items because they thought we would use it. All that on top of nerfing acro line to the ground which is a juge hit to my survivability in pve. They van take F2 back as long as I can have steal on 17s cd again.

Maugetarr.6823:

EragamerLG.2390:

Reinn.7436:

BFMV.3198:

1. Someone who has vast knowledge or mains thief needs to take responsibility for their balancing, as the person who currently works on them says he does not care about thief and touches it very rarely. He even forgot some of thieves traits when working on the latest patch. To me this is disgusting and shows that he is just a member of anet listening to cries from people who do not play thief

Really? When and where did he say that?

If this is the case, then it’s an outrage that they paid for some guy with our money in full who is not even doing his work properly.

During the 4hour live-stream showing off the upcoming Trait System and Thief changes back last month or so. I think a tear came to my eye when he said that.

Well, I don’t remember him saying that he rarely plays thief, but he did forget some of the trait names. To be fair, i forget trait names occasionally too. However, I don’t get the feeling when he talks about thief that he particularly enjoys it. Look back through the mesmer forum and you’ll see the Robert Gee appreciation thread. That guy has been working on mesmers since GW1. He’s passionate about the class and that’s a good thing. Part of what I think problem is is that it doesn’t seem like there’s a thief main dev. I just think there basically needs to be a dev per class who is the advocate for that class. Someone who says “look, this change would be awesome/awful because [reasons].”

If they got a Robert Gee appreciation thread then I think we need a ‘petition to change the nonsensical balance thief dev’ to make it even. That’ll give them a new meaning to the term ‘balanced’.

ANET seems developing some kittens now

Eodwen.2613:

I am also extremely annoyed by steal’s cd increase, the fact that they make you choose between condi and boon removal SE nerf, and the fact they premptively nerfed stolen items because they thought we would use it. All that on top of nerfing acro line to the ground which is a juge hit to my survivability in pve. They van take F2 back as long as I can have steal on 17s cd again.

Yeah. Assuming everyone would use it. Prejudice fool!

Like Eodwen, as a S/D thief, I personnaly only really have an issue with condi bomb management.
There is trickster, and it’s pretty good, especially combined with improvisation (although sorta redundant, it’s a good way to have your tricks up at most times).
But if you roll trickster, you forfeit bountiful theft, and considering the food chain winners Cele eles and PU condi / stun shatter mesmers, without boon bane you might as well /sit.
And if you pick bountiful theft, then enjoy the everspam of non ending blind burn torment confusion.

I’d say the thief is actually in a very good position right now, steal buff is absolutely awesome and people are way too fast to forget about it, but those two ele/mes broken cheeseclass eventually overshadow it.

We don’t need a power creep style buff, we need, along with other classes, mesmers and cele eles (builds ofc) brought in line with the rest of the classes.

I’d agree on unnerfing Feline Grace, and at least looking at Shadow’s Embrace again. Hell, I’m also all for finally closing the divide between Shadows Arts and Acrobatics, as far as which has (overall) more desirable/powerful options.

It seems like this is ANet Thief Logic:

1. Design a class that relies on either stealth and/or maneuverability/evasion to survive.
2. Nerf either of those survival tools based on (mainly PvP, but also some WvW) QQ.
3. Wonder why Thief players are frigging miffed.
4. Restart the cycle.

This is rather illogical, when one considers how much defensive Boon access (sans Consume Plasma or lucky Boon-swipes) a Thief has. It’s not as if we’re dealing with a class that has a lot of Prot/Aegis going on. Let alone a whopping buttload of health …

Another problem, of course, is how they … “adjust” classes and abilities thereof. The game in general could benefit from more “fine-tuned” balancing. Manipulate a variable by 10-15%, instead of chopping it in half (or conversely doubling it). But, how long has that kind of logic been asked for, and not only from Thieves?

Having only picked up thief in the past 6 months, it’s a joke to see where they’ve ended up. Having played Ranger, Ele, and Warrior for the majority of my pvp matches, throughout every patch i’ve always found a way to hard counter a thief even if it meant sacrificing 1v1 status against other classes; it eventually got to the point where I won’t even bother with thieves unless they’re trying to take a point.

Thieves currently have the weakest survival skills/traits out of any class, bar necro they’re the only other class without an invul/direct damage negation, and necros have a huge base HP, DS, and amazing ability to sustain DS now. There is no argument to be made that a mesmer does everything a thief can, but 100% better now.

Most weapon sets don’t seem to meld well with any trait lines, SB is used purely for resetting or escaping, and traits seem to have poor synergy and really confusing/worthless options for minors and traits that likely belong in another line. Unfortunately I don’t see a thing happening until HoT is done, or there is some serious internal reorganization @ anet; I’ve never seen such a scatter brained and spread thin operation.

Stealth as a mechanic could use a serious overhaul, and imo thieves should have more skill options from stealth rather than just changing the #1 ability for each weapon. Steal also needs an alternate mechanic when using ranged weapons as to not further put you at risk of being bombed by any class by putting you in melee range.

EragamerLG.2390:

I agree with the OP. I have over 3k hours on my thief, mained since pre-launch, but this is making me log in less and less. If Thief is not playable in a close-to-balanced state as it has been before(compared to now), I’ll end up quitting GW2.
Primarily because the unbalance is at a state where it is absolutely not fun to play. All character classes except Necro has some sort of invulnerability skill. Mesmers out-stealth thief, HOW is this even possible? What logic does this have. Mesmers are supposed to be master of illusion, not stealth, yet they surpass the mastery of stealth Thief is supposed to have.
Thief’s damage is not the problem. The survivability is. Thief vs Thief is basically about who initiates and how agressively. Burst or be bursted. Thief vs other classes? Well, if they use invulnerabilty skills it’s kinda kitten, considering we have none of those. Stealth you say? Whats the point if other classes’ skills keep tracking a thief after stealth? Sure, we can still beat other classes, but not when they are running troll builds that thief has NO WAY of possibly countering. What’s up with Guardian’s Symbols killing a thief in 1-2 ticks???? Dodge you say? We would if we had Feline Grace. Basically all Guardians have to do is attack until a thief dodges twice, and then just put down a couple of symbols.

I’m sorry about this rant, but I’m sure the majority of the thief community will agree things are not looking good, and the person that was supposed to look out for our balance has absolutely no idea what he is doing. I thank him for the work thus far, but it’s far beyond time to admit things aren’t looking good, and the interest in that class is close to null, if not null itself.

If you’d like to know what has kept me playing so long, nerf after nerf, is due to how the Thief was primarily designed, pre-launch. The foundations it was built on made us capable, even after nerfs, of beating other classes. We were called OP, time after time, and nerfs were applied, and we still won. Again, we can still beat some players, but it’s not even fulfilling.

To know we’re not on equal fighting ground is just wrong. To know the one in charge of our class forgets about traits is just wrong. To know we’re 3 years into this game and we’re having an issue like this is just wrong. Of course, separating stats from traits, and doing other alterations ofr the sake of “balance” were bound to to bring issues with it. We all know that. But things like the trait redesign that were more susceptible to Human decision rather than coding variables is what struck me the most. Some of our traits alterations are so unjustified it’s just.. wrong.

AMEN.

MakubeC.3026:

EragamerLG.2390:

I agree with the OP. I have over 3k hours on my thief, mained since pre-launch, but this is making me log in less and less. If Thief is not playable in a close-to-balanced state as it has been before(compared to now), I’ll end up quitting GW2.
Primarily because the unbalance is at a state where it is absolutely not fun to play. All character classes except Necro has some sort of invulnerability skill. Mesmers out-stealth thief, HOW is this even possible? What logic does this have. Mesmers are supposed to be master of illusion, not stealth, yet they surpass the mastery of stealth Thief is supposed to have.
Thief’s damage is not the problem. The survivability is. Thief vs Thief is basically about who initiates and how agressively. Burst or be bursted. Thief vs other classes? Well, if they use invulnerabilty skills it’s kinda kitten, considering we have none of those. Stealth you say? Whats the point if other classes’ skills keep tracking a thief after stealth? Sure, we can still beat other classes, but not when they are running troll builds that thief has NO WAY of possibly countering. What’s up with Guardian’s Symbols killing a thief in 1-2 ticks???? Dodge you say? We would if we had Feline Grace. Basically all Guardians have to do is attack until a thief dodges twice, and then just put down a couple of symbols.

I’m sorry about this rant, but I’m sure the majority of the thief community will agree things are not looking good, and the person that was supposed to look out for our balance has absolutely no idea what he is doing. I thank him for the work thus far, but it’s far beyond time to admit things aren’t looking good, and the interest in that class is close to null, if not null itself.

If you’d like to know what has kept me playing so long, nerf after nerf, is due to how the Thief was primarily designed, pre-launch. The foundations it was built on made us capable, even after nerfs, of beating other classes. We were called OP, time after time, and nerfs were applied, and we still won. Again, we can still beat some players, but it’s not even fulfilling.

To know we’re not on equal fighting ground is just wrong. To know the one in charge of our class forgets about traits is just wrong. To know we’re 3 years into this game and we’re having an issue like this is just wrong. Of course, separating stats from traits, and doing other alterations ofr the sake of “balance” were bound to to bring issues with it. We all know that. But things like the trait redesign that were more susceptible to Human decision rather than coding variables is what struck me the most. Some of our traits alterations are so unjustified it’s just.. wrong.

AMEN.

May The Colin have mercy on your soul.