Guild Wars 2

“Thief

In the recent history of thieves, their damage roles have been largely burst-based due to initiative, while their autoattacks do little to sustain their DPS. In addition, initiative often needs to be used defensively, which can take a toll on overall damage output. Our design for this profession tends to lean toward damage, mobility, and evasiveness. In the first quarter of this year, we’ll be looking to drastically improve thief melee autoattacks until their overall sustained damage when coupled with initiative use is extremely dangerous. In addition to the damage improvements, we’ve done a bit of reworking and improvements to the Acrobatics specialization line."

This sounds promising..

No talk of preparedness baseline or hp pool base increase…. I’m still worried. Simple damage numbers won’t help if we can’t survive.

“drastically” improving auto damage. That sounds great. I love the idea of thief doing threatening damage outside of burst combos.

And if they improve Acro enough, we could see some really mean daredevil acro trickery builds.

If they increase our damage drastically, at least that might open up the possibility of our high risk high reward gameplay of kill fast or be killed… Not run fast or be killed. I have always run full zerker, even now. Staying alive was never the problem. Finishing the job has become the problem.

I feel bad for anyone who attacks one of the thieves whose been fighting the good fight this whole time when they finally take some of the chains back off. Thief 2016 “The Revengening”. Winter is coming.

I have hope although I know I shouldn’t.
D/D has been that unpopular for that long that no one knows too much about that set and therefore no one cares for it. And that was why it has been killed off in June.

Omg yes PLEASE! MAKE D/D viable again. Still my favourite weapon set and the most thematic!

Oh and “reducing the scrappers survivability”. Good. Good.

I’m very much a fan of the high risk high reward style of game play.. This could be the revival of the true assassin type profession.

Its a rare day that I applaud news of a thief buff, but as a warrior main, I offer a toast to my thief cousins – “Lets murder some bunkers and restore the balance of guildwars”

Serious Thought.5394:

No talk of preparedness baseline or hp pool base increase…. I’m still worried. Simple damage numbers won’t help if we can’t survive.

I seriously doubt thieves (or any other low health profession) will ever see a base HP increase.
Preparedness would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

If they actually hold to their promises, I may have to dust off my thief, she has been sitting as a Crafting mule for all my other Toon’sascended items.

Not a single word about pistols.

we aren’t sure yet.. this is just a tiny snip-it of the balance changes.. we can hold hope.

James Quall.6029:

Not a single word about pistols.

I’m guessing buffing autos on weapons include the pistol auto.
Karl was talking about a rework to Pistol MH a long ago, it’s probably still in the work.

Well they adressed the damage, initiative and acro.
The line of making us “dangerous” sounds too promising…
I wouldn’t get my hopes up, but it actually sounds like a nice opening I’m looking forward to read the patch notes

Other professions (mesmer, elementalist, warrior) had specific weapons named that are getting change, and I think thief pistol is worse off than any of theirs and surely worth some kind of mention if they were going to do something about it.

Instead we get an improvement to melee auto attacks meaning they’re leaving pistols out on purpose.

James Quall.6029:

Other professions (mesmer, elementalist, warrior) had specific weapons named that are getting change, and I think thief pistol is worse off than any of theirs and surely worth some kind of mention if they were going to do something about it.

Instead we get an improvement to melee auto attacks meaning they’re leaving pistols out on purpose.

But at least we’ll get a buff to melee.
Right now, our most useful weapon sets are melee and i wouldn’t really mind having them getting stronger especially if it means that D\D is back!

Nocta.5274:

I’m guessing buffing autos on weapons include the pistol auto. Karl was talking about a rework to Pistol MH a long ago, it’s probably still in the work.

Article specifically says melee, not ranged. Pistol needs a lot more than auto attack damage increase, and we’ve been without ricochet for over 6 months. If the pistol change isn’t coming this balance patch then when? How long are they going to leave a weapon set completely gutted before giving us a workable solution?

Tengu.5267:

“Thief

In the recent history of thieves, their damage roles have been largely burst-based due to initiative, while their autoattacks do little to sustain their DPS. In addition, initiative often needs to be used defensively, which can take a toll on overall damage output. Our design for this profession tends to lean toward damage, mobility, and evasiveness. In the first quarter of this year, we’ll be looking to drastically improve thief melee autoattacks until their overall sustained damage when coupled with initiative use is extremely dangerous. In addition to the damage improvements, we’ve done a bit of reworking and improvements to the Acrobatics specialization line."

This sounds promising..

I unfortunately disagree. It sounds like they’re pushing our damage back up…which sounds nice, until you remember why thief has been getting stomped with nerfs for the last 3 years.

In case you forgot (or weren’t around for it), it was because our damage was so high that when combined with our mobility, we shut down every other zerker (marauder now) spec.

So, as far as I can tell, the changes will be nice for 6 months to a year before we’re nerfed again.

Oh, let’s also not forget how more damage doesn’t offer us much for getting around passive defense triggers.

As I just posted, anyone else concerned with the movement away from stealth gameplay. I know they’ve been doing it for years now, but without a proper rework this could leave thief significantly handicapped (as it is one of our main mechanics). What makes no sense to me is that they seem ok to give stealth to other classes.

Additional Note: Nothing about withdraw was mentioned.

I’m surprised I was surprised by this... I honestly thought they might buff something more meaningful. In the past, whenever they have said they will buff, they nerf something else to either even it out as if nothing changed, or to nullify that buff completely leaving only the nerf being felt.

Now, they nerfed acrobatics into oblivion, so it only made sense that when they say they will buff, that they would focus on buffing acro. A line hardly used when it was in its prime, can’t use anymore, and probably still won’t use with the inevitably disappointing, lackluster improvements they will make to such a trait line.

Speaking of auto attacks and initiatives. Would be awesome to have a trait recover 1 or 2 initiatives with a cooldown (maybe 2-3 seconds) on auto attacks. I mean I know we had a similar trait ages ago but it was based on % chance which pretty terrible.

Or bring back our trait: gain initiative on crit.

Alright, lets be honest: The “Goals” don’t really sound as if they’ve got an idea what to do – otherwise it already would be more than “goals”.
I would be fine if they said they had these “goals” but that stuff right now is too complex (we know) and that they more or less have to try out buffs and nerfs which they will review 1-2 months from now and then another 1-2 months until the game is roughly balanced again. I’m still pretty sure that they can’t get around another ferocity like patch to reduce the overall damage of everybody – and it would be nice if they had a look at what it does to certain classes this time around (they didn’t with the ferocity patch).

I wonder what all they looked at. Maybe Unload/Pistol Whip buffs too someday?

It sounds more like they want to make us specialized in melee…

i like how the future changes sound so far, with the little information we have, I really hope they deliver what they claim.

really so we gonna see more 1111111 pressing that is all?!
what about p/p range and dmg buff
what about condi build buff

we need options not the same dp boring meta with little but higher dmg the overcome the block block block, evade evade evade , invu invu invu

so now we have to wait untill our enemy use his dodge and utilitis to burst him down without help from his friends . so again 1v1 all over and no team gameplay

boring

Anet~ Don’t forget that our Range AA is horrible as well with weak dmg (especially condi) and no distance. We also can’t really burst DPS with Shortbow because Cluster Bomb defies gravity and moves super slow so we can’t use up all our ini at max range. Why is Cluster Bomb better at close range via detonating bombs directly in your own face? Was that really intended?
P/P relies entirely on using 100% of the ini bar at all times on Unload because Vital Shot is still weak.
Also, can you make Death Blossom ground target? :P

If the thief gets a bit more bursty and the sustain is toned down, there is some hope that thief may once again be feared by all.

I don’t think AA damage is what we want or really need, frankly.

AA’s don’t do damage if your opponent is sitting there invuln for 60% of the time.

Combat trivializes to spamming 1 if it becomes too strong, and frankly, we have an initiative system designed for repeated skill use; why should we want or even need to spam 1 when we effectively have no cooldowns?

We already have some of the best auto-attacks in the game. Revenant is what really kills us in the race for AA DPS.

All I’m getting out of this is they’re yet again attempting to “fix” something that isn’t broken while not looking into what’s actually causing limited build diversity and overall class functionality to begin with.

D/D now truly dead, for the the edge of burst is gone over D/P, the stealth is worse, doesn’t synergize with DD, and will now deal the same DPS which D/P is objectively better at doing for 1spam via Black Powder.

It’s like they’re actively trying to trivialize combat and remove every ounce of skill that was once needed to play the game on any class.

I’m really hoping they have more planned out than this. Sure the changes they talked about sounds pretty good I guess, but thief needs a LOT more work.

I agree the auto attack dmg are way too low. The necro GS has base dmg of 1000 and thief staff has 500. Also thief’s auto attack speed should be faster too, the tooltip says 1/4 sec for trick shot but its still shooting once ever 1 sec.

guys stop assuming. just learn from past buff.
remember AA pistol buff? no…
this is what it will be

:D

I hate you all :p

First I was " hum…let’s see what happends" then I read all the answers, and now I’m doubtful as hell.

you should be reincarnated in grench, all of you.

I’m 50/50 on this.

• Good:
  - Thief has been recognized as being vastly underpowered

• Bad
  -Messing with thief damage may cause more problems than it solves. The problem was mostly with survivability moreso than damage.

Handle this very carefully, Anet. Fear should scale with skill, not class damage. I dont want to begrudgingly admit X player has a point when they come whining to the forums about ganks and then post irrefutable posts of 5-7k autos eating their hp.

[EDITED OUT]

Apparenty GW2 forums like to gobble my posts down and then regurgitate them when I’m not looking.

Bad dog. er. post.

It seems they ran out of ideas and things to buff/nerf.
I’m wondering what they’ll do with Acro though, it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, even if you haven’t bought HoT.

messiah.1908:

guys stop assuming. just learn from past buff.
remember AA pistol buff? no…
this is what it will be

:D

Woefully inadequate?

Honestly, I’m not at all impressed even by this tiny preview.

It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

AA buff? It’s not what we really need.
Acro rework? It could be interesting, but not really what we need, again.

Unless the new Acro will permit us to actually STAY in all them kittening aoes spammed by anyone and their mother-in-law, the AA buff will be utterly useless.

We don’t have survivability, no useful utility skills except the usual 4-5, traitlines are full of obvious choices. This is what should be improved, not AA.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.

Just add “attacks are unblockable for 6s” to one of our sigils. That would help.

I’d like to reiterate that our problem is, I assume by majority consensus, not that we cannot burst tanks down fast enough, but that we cannot survive long enough to implement a plan of action that would work against tanks.

If I can be frank, its missing the point. we have the slipperiness to kite tanks well enough, but it is offset at the moment by our glassiness when that mobility is not available.

We don’t want -easy- combat. At least, many of us do not. What we want is a reasonable amount of time to act on a strategy.

If any dev is reading this, take a look at the balance changes regarding thief and consider making us less squishy first and then implement any needed damage scaling in the iterations after.

I just want to be able to land my attacks. Is that so much to ask? I prefer fighting a 40k hp reaper than a 15k hp DH who is immune to damage 80% of the fight

I keep my Feedback simple:

Autoattack Buff?! … hell noooo!
Acrobatics rework?! … hell yeah!

The balance preview sounds a bit clueless.
Hope they dont forget about all the things that are not working. Pathing issues of skills etc.

Best regards!

Shino

Warhawk.7095:

I just want to be able to land my attacks. Is that so much to ask? I prefer fighting a 40k hp reaper than a 15k hp DH who is immune to damage 80% of the fight

they cant simply add 30% dmg to all autoatacks. No denying that. Adding some burn or bleed on autoatacks is useless on maruder amul.

However adding 25 voln on each auto might be op, but seems to be only way

Tengu.5267:

“Thief

In the recent history of thieves, their damage roles have been largely burst-based due to initiative, while their autoattacks do little to sustain their DPS.

+1 to Karl for finally identifying the role of the Thief.

In addition, initiative often needs to be used defensively, which can take a toll on overall damage output.

Another +1 to Karl for actually recognizing one of the main issues when playing Thief — which means, he had played the profession and experienced the problem first hand.

Our design for this profession tends to lean toward damage, mobility, and evasiveness.

Does this mean that if we use Death Blossom and successfully evaded an attack that we get the initiative cost refunded?

Does this mean P/P will have evasion and mobility in its weapon set skills? (P/P is the only set without evasion nor mobility)

In the first quarter of this year, we’ll be looking to drastically improve thief melee autoattacks until their overall sustained damage when coupled with initiative use is extremely dangerous.

-1 to Karl. Really, only melee auto-attacks? Karl needs to realize that in order to auto-attack is to have something passive that allows an auto-attack. Thief doesn’t have a passive defensive ability that will allow the profession to auto-attack.

So when he said “extremely dangerous” I think he didn’t mean that the auto-attack damage being extremely dangerous, rather the act of auto-attacking is, being that Thief is squishy.

Thief needs to evade to survive.
Evading means no auto-attacks.

He needs to figure this one out because he’s not making any sense.

In addition to the damage improvements, we’ve done a bit of reworking and improvements to the Acrobatics specialization line."

+1 on “rework” rather than “tweak”, thus I can expect some big changes.

pp and sb need work

i got hard when i read “extremely dangerous”. still thief is no match to rev. SADLY THERE IS NO WAY THIEF IS DANGEREOUS UNLESSS IT HAS UNBLOCKABLE ATACKS VS REV OR MES SHIELD

it looks like most of the people commenting here just are tinking about PVP. not all of us do PVP, remember that.