(edited by Grimwolf.7163)
Thieves need more than just constant nerfing
Let’s compare that with other options.
A Sword main-hand has the auto attack, and a utility type ability. It relies on the off-hand for any real offense. So with a dagger for example, the only real offense you have comes from the auto and the bugged out dual skill. Even assuming it were not bugged, this would still lead to you constantly spinning round and round your target with that one attack. The cripple is somewhat redundant when you already have the teleport sharing the same resource. Cloak and Dagger has solid utility, but no great interactivity between abilities because of the high cost and weak effect of the sword stealth ability.
Pistol off-hand has a similar situation with relying too heavily on Pistol Whip, though the two off-hand abilities are fairly solid and help round out the weapon. Without interactivity between the abilities though, it still is not interesting to use and has entirely too much Pistol Whip (which itself is a rather dull and straight forward ability).
Pistol Main-hand has a solid auto attack, but Body Shot is borderline useless for anything at all and makes the weapon significantly more shallow due to fewer options. The dual attack with a Dagger has decent utility, but it leaves the combination with no main non-auto attack. It’s also shallow due to only being useful specifically when trying to gain distance from a melee character and nothing else, which again becomes somewhat redundant when paired with the cripple from the dagger off-hand (which is overall superior and more versatile). Cloak and Dagger is the only saving grace for the offense of this combination due to the pistol having an effective stealth attack, but has large restrictions on how frequently it can be used, especially since its a melee ability on a ranged weapon.
Then let’s look at the Dagger main-hand. It has a solid auto-attack, and a decent resource attack with Leap Finisher status. So far so good. Except that Heart Seeker is meant as a finisher for dying opponents, while simultaneously operating with a low cost that encourages spamming. So if the opponent has high health, this isn’t much of an option. And when they’re low, you have to use a lot of it. Aside from the finisher status, its also a very straight-forward ability without much in the way of interesting mechanics.
With a Dagger as the off-hand, you end up with three separate attacks competing with each other with absolutely no interactivity between them. What this means is that, based upon your build, you pretty much just spam one of these attacks to the exclusion of the others, leaving your options extremely limited and making the whole thing incredibly boring and simple. Have a condition build? Spam Death Blossom. Have a stealth build or Hidden Killer? Spam Cloak and Dagger. Have anything else? Spam Heart Seeker. There is at least some mild variation in that you’ll rarely start out spamming Heart Seeker regardless of build, and with the first two you may still use Heart Seeker to finish someone off who’s nearly dead or to use a Combo Field.
The number of Combo Finishers available to this set up are fantastic, but you’ll have a hell of a time actually producing a Combo Field yourself to utilize this aspect. You absolutely have to rely on Utility slots for this, and even then there are only a couple capable of this; one of which has a long recharge and encourages NOT using the finisher attacks in it (since you should either be using Backstab or not attacking at all).
With a pistol in the off-hand you rely purely on your auto attack and Heart Seeker for damage. Heart Seeker also being terrible when the opponent’s health is high. So you have an attack meant to be used only to finish people who are low on health, and only your auto attack to get them low! That is likely the worst oversight of any combination the Thief has. You have solid utility, but complete garbage for damage. You can, at the very least, leap through the shadow field you can produce then Backstab someone to get them low, but this isn’t something you can easily quickly repeat or rely so heavily upon, and the initiative cost is massive for mediocre results.
You also lack any way to really stick to your target, since you have neither a cripple nor a reliable gap closer.
The one high point of this combination is that the abilities interact together well, between Gunpowder>Seeker giving stealth, and having an effective stealth attack.
<Continued>
(edited by Grimwolf.7163)
Now let’s look at the Utilities.
First of all there’s the fact that, inexplicably, MOST of them do not work underwater. As one prime example, Thieves have only a single Elite that can be used in water, and it is a spectacularly situational one that is only good with specific builds, and never in the water due to what the underwater weapons do.
Thieves have plenty of Combo Finisher abilities, but are absolutely starved for Combo Fields.
Four separate utilities are Venoms, which are all not only dull in their function, but are also heavily focused upon having Deadly Arts specifically if you want to use them effectively.
The traps are an interesting and fun mechanic, but incredibly weak in practice due simply to them not having as strong of effects as they should.
Shadowstep has an excessive recharge, due likely to the bizarrely placed powerful condition removal, as well as a laughably short window in which to teleport back. It tries to do too much and is just a mess because of it.
Scorpion Wire is fairly situational, but still maintains what seems like an excessive recharge even before considering how situational the effect is.
And finally, despite relying very heavily upon stealth, the Thief has only 3 utilities that grant it (not counting the combo effect of Smoke Wall that dagger main-hand specifically can trigger), 2 of which have very long recharges (Smoke Bomb in particular seems to have a pretty excessive recharge), and one which relies upon your enemy to trigger it and is therefore not real reliable.
Like many classes at this point, the Thief has a lot more to it that needs work than just some excessive damage on a couple abilities, and it annoys me to see all of this ignored.
I’m not saying the Thief is weak by any means, but they lack options, and many aspects are simply less fun than they should be.
I would like to discuss here what improvements the Thief needs other than simple nerfs, and hopefully bring them to the attention of ANet in the process.
That is a long post out there but I stopped reading after:
Admittedly Thieves did start out with some attacks that were significantly stronger than they should be, and they were brought in line.
No, they were not brought in line yet.
dam, big big big block of literature u got there.
It’s long because Thieves do have a lot wrong with them and I attempted to list a fair number of those issues.
Despite all that, we continue to see “20% less damage from X ability LOLOL” each patch and little else.
I think one of the big problems comes into build Variety based on weapon selection availability.
Thief has a total of 7 possible weapon configurations: D/D, D/P, S/D, S/P, P/D, P/P, SB
Warrior has 19 possible weapon configurations.
Q: Why do thieves always spam the same OP stuff at me?
A: Because we have nothing else.
Of the 19 possible warrior combinations, are some of them less than optimal? I’m sure. Do you see people running non-optimal builds in WvW because they don’t know any better? I’m sure they do.
In thief we have a class with a narrow focus that is well designed. If it seems like every thief is good, it’s because there are very few BAD options for thief.
Does that mean thief needs to change? I like to think so…. I like to think that we need more build diversity rather than a class design that forces us into narrow skill sets.
I hate to say it, but from a PvP perspective, build diversity is one of the things that can help separate the skilled from the less skilled. And as long as we’re locked into narrow weapon configurations, you’re not going to see much variety, so you’re going to see the same cookie cutter feeling things spammed at you.
LVL 80’s: Thief / Warrior / Guardian / Mesmer
That is a long post out there but I stopped reading after:
Admittedly Thieves did start out with some attacks that were significantly stronger than they should be, and they were brought in line.
No, they were not brought in line yet.
Way to misinterpret something and seriously overreact.
I wasn’t saying everything is perfectly balanced and nothing ever needs to be toned down ever again. I was saying that things did need to be nerfed and they were, but Thieves had other non-nerfy problems that needed attention as well.
In the context of my mention of the next patch which you say you skipped anyway, my sentiment was that by this point any overpowered stuff is so mildly overpowered that other areas of the class deserve some attention far more so, and it seems they’ll continue to ignore them even despite these present circumstances.
(edited by Grimwolf.7163)
OP this is a game-wide problem that ANet seems inept at understanding. All eight professions are riddled with bugged or useless skills/traits yet ANet completely ignores them and instead just tweaks numbers every patch. The result is that the number of viable build options for most professions is getting smaller and smaller and the bugs are funneling everyone into the same builds.
What I honestly cannot understand though is how ANet can hope to balance professions when half their skills/traits are not functioning as intended. Any number changes they make now will be pointless if/when they actually start fixing things.
Their apparent priorities just make no sense to me.
I would like to discuss here what improvements the Thief needs other than simple nerfs, and hopefully bring them to the attention of ANet in the process.
Thief’s could use another venom or two. That would give us more variance in our builds and open up more underwater options. However cooldown for all venoms should be moved up to 60 seconds. Too much build diversity.
Lastly, if they removed all weapons and offhand combinations from the thief except dagger/dagger I feel everyone would be less disappointed in the number of broken skills and overall less confused with what exactly it is they want us to do besides dagger/dagger.
OP this is a game-wide problem that ANet seems inept at understanding. All eight professions are riddled with bugged or useless skills/traits yet ANet completely ignores them and instead just tweaks numbers every patch. The result is that the number of viable build options for most professions is getting smaller and smaller and the bugs are funneling everyone into the same builds.
What I honestly cannot understand though is how ANet can hope to balance professions when half their skills/traits are not functioning as intended. Any number changes they make now will be pointless if/when they actually start fixing things.
Their apparent priorities just make no sense to me.
Exactly. The rational approach from the very start would have been to fix bugs and useless abilities before attempting balance tweaks, since new options will completely change the overall power of each class.
At the very least they could have tried both.
I think you have a good point OP, about Thieves being VERY limited in their options, and it is one of the main reasons for it’s seemingly lack of builds. Personally, I think it’d be great to be able to use traps in someway, or to be able to use D/P’s blinds more effectively.
Though I disagree on some of your points on P/D. P/D excels in control and condition builds. If you remove or alter it’s current elements, you just limited condition builds to pretty much only D/D #3 spam. P/D as a whole, from personal usage, is quite good right now, and I’d be sad to see it be changed. Like I said previously, P/D is all about control and/or conditions, the only exception is Body Shot, which seems very out of place and is hardly used. Shadow Strike is very good, as it adds a good amount of damage to the opponent and keeps safe distance. This is ideal for a ranged class. It makes sense for a ranged class to want to keeps its distance. Cloak and Dagger has it’s place. When you see how many opponents and NPCs tend to be on the battlefield, it becomes easy to keep stealthing with it. In 1v1 situations, I use Sneak Attack as my main damage output, and it’s not hard to do with Cloak and Dagger. I use steal, scorpion wire, and immobilizations to allow me to Cloak and Dagger → Sneak Attack safely while doing raw damage and conditional damage.
You mention venoms as if you don’t like them being in the Deadly Arts branch. I think it makes sense, for venoms add conditions, Deadly Arts passively increases condition duration. I need clarification though on your points of venoms. I tend to be an advocate of the notion that venoms are very good and fun to use.
Scorpion Wire is of course, another skill I use. I think the recharge time is good right now. I use 20% reduction in trick recharge time, and it lowers it to 24 seconds, which is quite nice as it cycles back around the same time my venoms do.
I don’t want to come off as being against you OP, as I honestly do think you have some well thought out arguments regrading the limitation in builds for Thieves. I just want to preserve some of the lesser used builds such as P/D, that are very effective in their current state.
Warrior – Whrawl
Thief – Radderic
Mesmer – Smash Kablooey
Thief – Radderic
Mesmer – Smash Kablooey
@Vile
I agree with what you say about P/D. The set does work, as does Cloak and Dagger within the set. The problem though is that it relies almost entirely upon Cloak and Dagger for damage outside of the auto-attack, which is difficult to use with a lot of frequency mostly due to the range.
The problem is not necessarily Cloak and Dagger itself, but rather that Body Shot is horrible and Shadow Strike doesn’t provide that gap of ranged resource damage either. And neither is Shadow Strike terrible; it’s just that with Dancing Dagger providing a similar function already it could be something more useful to round out the set.
Now, I do think P/D is fine as a ranged/melee hybrid, and Shadow Strike pairs well with Cloak and Dagger to let you run in, stealth, and teleport away when you’re done. As the only way to do things it makes the set a little clumsy though.
I think the easiest way to fix it would simply be to make Body Shot into something useful. It can’t be made into a raw damage attack I don’t think, because that would be redundant with P/P having Unload as well, and Shadow Strike can’t be raw ranged damage because I can’t imagine how a combination pistol/dagger attack could be a sensible ranged ability. So the easiest way is to just keep it mostly as-is and make Body Shot into some sort of worthwhile utility type attack. Especially since that would also correct the effectiveness of P/P.
My problem with Venoms isn’t that they’re used with Deadly Arts, but rather that you need so many traits to make them real effective. Whether or not they’re fun I suppose is subjective, but I feel they’re far too simple. They don’t have nearly enough of a tactical element to them.
The problem with Scorpion Wire is that the 30 second cooldown does not seem warranted. If it were more like 20 seconds it would still be far from overpowered, and would allow more reliable access to it for various situations, like say interrupting an ability or catching someone who’s fleeing.
Smoke Bomb is far worse though with that same problem. There is just no way that thing deserves a full minute recharge. I mean try comparing it to something like Hide in Shadows which has half the recharge, or Shadow Refuge which has the same recharge but is infinitely better in basically every way.
(edited by Grimwolf.7163)
I think the easiest way to fix it would simply be to make Body Shot into something useful. It can’t be made into a raw damage attack I don’t think, because that would be redundant with P/P having Unload as well, and Shadow Strike can’t be raw ranged damage because I can’t imagine how a combination pistol/dagger attack could be a sensible ranged ability. So the easiest way is to just keep it mostly as-is and make Body Shot into some sort of worthwhile utility type attack. Especially since that would also correct the effectiveness of P/P.
Right on the money, Body Shot is what is wrong with P/P. 4/5 are utility slots, auto-attack is condition based, and the dual skill is kind of weak and power-based. #2, if properly done, could tie it all together, but as it stands is incredibly mediocre.
Meant to say Body Shot was bad in the OP, not Vital Shot. That was terribly misleading.
I see the root of all evil at the Initsystem. You cant give thiefs alot of strong/usefull stuff like other classes have, as a thief can spam these skills.
At the same time you dont need 2-3 different damage abilities, as a thief can just spam one of them due to the init system. The only reason why you need different damage skills are different builds.
The Initsystem also breaks all reason to use weaponswaps as the init is shared between both of them. The only reason to switch is a change of your tactic.
In my opinion, the whole init system needs a revamp and maybe needs to be merged with a cooldownsystem. That way you can add more diversity into the weaponskills of a thief, add more weaponsets aswell and even make some of their abilities stronger as a semi-cooldown system runs in a much better controlled enviroment as a pure init system.
I thought about giving everythign a cooldown, but to use the skill while it is on cooldown you use init. For every init spend you lose some dmg.
That way you still can use init situationable and when it is necessary you can spam some skills fast, which leaves you in the end pretty weak… but you finished your job.
I dont see any other way to unkitten the thief with the current init system as you need to keep most skills rather weak due to the spamability of them.
Pretty much every profession has minor or major issues and may be subpar in either solo PvE, dungeons or sPvP; however some options or even entire professions being subpar in certain game modes doesn’t break the game but a single OP option does.
Therefor it’s more important to bring that OP stuff in line than fixing subpar options.
I see the root of all evil at the Initsystem. You cant give thiefs alot of strong/usefull stuff like other classes have, as a thief can spam these skills.
At the same time you dont need 2-3 different damage abilities, as a thief can just spam one of them due to the init system. The only reason why you need different damage skills are different builds.The Initsystem also breaks all reason to use weaponswaps as the init is shared between both of them. The only reason to switch is a change of your tactic.
In my opinion, the whole init system needs a revamp and maybe needs to be merged with a cooldownsystem. That way you can add more diversity into the weaponskills of a thief, add more weaponsets aswell and even make some of their abilities stronger as a semi-cooldown system runs in a much better controlled enviroment as a pure init system.
I thought about giving everythign a cooldown, but to use the skill while it is on cooldown you use init. For every init spend you lose some dmg.
That way you still can use init situationable and when it is necessary you can spam some skills fast, which leaves you in the end pretty weak… but you finished your job.I dont see any other way to unkitten the thief with the current init system as you need to keep most skills rather weak due to the spamability of them.
I don’t think the problem is necessarily the Initiative itself, but rather how most of the weapon skills were designed with it. The skills don’t encourage you well enough to use all of them.
Take D/D for example, which as I’ve said has 3 different raw-damage attacks all competing with each other. Worse yet, they’re not all useful to the same builds. So at any given moment you have one or even two skills that are useless to you, wasting space.
Ideally, you should have only one raw damage attack that has a measure of depth so it isn’t terrible to use frequently, and the others should have strong utilitarian or tactical advantages, like Choking Gas for the Shortbow.
Going into more detail, here are the problems as I see them:
Heart Seeker is just a quick and straight forward attack that isn’t fun to spam, and is built around being used only on low health targets anyway. First of all this should have a higher cost and damage so you’re encouraged to use it less frequently as a real finisher. Problem here is that your opponent is not often low on health so your options throughout most of any fight are more limited due to a slot being dedicated only finishing off a low opponent.
This ability should probably not work this way, and be changed into more of a primary attack as well as made a bit more interesting. This would help D/P as well, which is desperately lacking any primary attack.
Death Blossom has the unique advantage of allowing you to evade attacks extremely well due to the combination of the evasion and moving behind your target. It also has the niche role as AoE damage for the set. It is annoying that you’re encouraged to spam the crap out of it when fighting multiple targets, but discouraging the frequency of use in such scenarios would be a bit complicated. The high initiative cost also makes it too prohibitive to use as a defensive tool as you should.
Unfortunately, off the top of my head I just can’t figure out how to fix this one.
Cloak and Dagger has solid utility and is basically fine as is, but the problem is that the stealth attack that follows it competes as a main attack because Cloak and Dagger allows you to stealth with such frequency.
One option might be to increase the length of the Revealed debuff so you have to mix in other attacks in between uses, and maybe shave a point off the cost in return so you can do so more effectively? That would also make it easier to use for the pure utility of going invisible for uses other than just backstabbing.
Finally, I don’t see enough consistency in what type of build the weapon set is aimed at; the auto and Death Blossom benefit heavily from condition damage while Death Blossom benefits very little from direct damage, and Heart Seeker and Backstab benefit heavily from direct damage but not at all from condition damage. No matter which way you build you’ll have attacks that are very sub-par. They need to choose one or the other and stick with it; either condition damage or direct damage.