Guild Wars 2

Is the current trend of punishing all thieves in an unsuccessful attempt to nerf burst going to continue? Because so far it is incredibly disheartening.

When the playerbase was crying about Pistol Whip -> Quickness, your answer was to reduce Pistol whip damage. This reduced Pistol whip near/below our auto-attack chain. When you use Pistol whip without quickness, your opponent can literally walk out of the last swings (they might have to dodge roll if you’ve crippled/chilled them). This results in No-one using Pistol whip anymore, because without quickness its a joke – we don’t need a kitteny cast time stun when we have Head shot, and who wants to let our opponent know we’ll be ready to be stunned/immobilizied/KD’d because we’ll be standing in place for a full second, swinging at the air? If we still wanted to run Pistol whip-> Quickness, it would work, people just don’t because whenever haste is down we’d only have auto-attack to do damage.

When the playerbase was crying about the instagib chain (Mug->CnD->Backstab), you mind-bogglingly decided to nerf CnD by 33%. This had a small impact on Instagib, and huge impact on everyone not running complete gas cannon. Look at the boards – most thieves and players are still pointing out how well instagib works, and now those of us who dont want to run cheese specs are paying the price. We’re paying 6 initiative for an attack that does 67% the damage it used to.

When the playerbase started crying about Dancing Dagger, you decided to cut the damage in half. That’s a third of our initiative bar for a skill that does what trickshot does, with a cripple, and now less damage. Dancing Dagger is a pretty Meh utility for chasing a target, or starting a fight off with a cripple (anyone with half a brain knows if a thief is chasing/approaching you with dagger OH, and you see him start to do something, you dodge, because its either Dancing Dagger or CnD->Steal/Inf sig). If the skill is going to cost 4 init, it needs to do better damage (probably not the damage it was doing Pre-patch, but definitely not 50% less. The damage should have probably been reduced 15-25%). If you want to make it a pure utility skill, remove the cast time and cut the init to 3, this way opponents can’t see the ability coming a mile away, and we aren’t dumping 1/3 of our initiative bar for kitten damage.

Losing .5 seconds off of tactical strike isn’t a big deal, honestly. (Edit: Its been pointed out to me that sigil of para is working, so a bunch of stuff I had here concerning it is no longer true). A 10% damage boost on an attack that did kitten damage isn’t much, TBH – tactical strike is a CC tool, not a damage tool. That would be like if you increased Headshot or Black powder damage by 25% – it sounds like alot, but it really isn’t because the base is so low.

The biggest slap in the face however was your complete lack of effort for our other weaponsets. We’re locked into using D/D, P/D, and S/D because our other weaponsets have glaring issues. P/P is a confused build without access to stealth (our primary survival mechanic), and worthless skill in the 2 slot, and an autoattack that doesn’t mesh well with its dual skill. Nobody plays it becuase it just isn’t viable. D/P is ruined because our primary gap closer roots us on hit – let me repeat that; our GAP CLOSER ROOTS US ON HIT – I don’t know if this is a bug or a design choice, either way its useless, the gap opens right back up…because we were rooted on hit. S/D is in use atm, despite the fact that flanking strike is a joke, primarily because we have so little working weapon options.

The cluster bomb reduction also reeks of kittening everyone to nerf glass cannons. The damage is rather good, but due to the travel time, its not an ability that can be “spammed” most of the time. I’ve seen glass cannons hit for 6-8k with the ability, so it probably needed an adjustment, but maybe one that only affects glass cannons.

The compensation we received for this massive loss of damage on our only working weaponsets? The blinding powder change was necessary, not a buff. Blinding powder was completely inferior compared to Shadow refuge in 95% of situations prior to the patch, seeing as they had the same CD and shadow refuge was 10 times as powerful. Cutting the CD to 40s was a good choice, but it wasn’t a buff, it was a fix to a poorly performing skill. Smoke screen is bigger now, thank you for that. Scorpion wire got a range increase, thank you for that. That’s the end of our “Compensation” section, sadly.

So, in short, our primary OH (Primary, Again, because its part of all our functioning weaponsets) lost 50% and 33% damage, with no reduction in initiative cost. Our broken/non-functioning weaponsets were not touched. The ability buffs intended to compensate us for massive damage nerfs were inadequate. This is the second time you’ve failed to properly address burst, and instead just weakened all us non-burst thieves. Please stop spitting in our faces.

Note: If you’re going to respond in either support or disagreement, please keep it civil. I am a person, the Dev team is made up of people. I’m trying to express my disappointment, and perhaps actually get an explanation that will shed light on my confusion. This post isn’t meant to be a rage dump for children to call people names.

evilapprentice.6379:

…..

Losing .5 seconds off of tactical strike isn’t a big deal, honestly….

kitten did i just read O_o

base reduction means enhancement tools ( like sigils and runes) will work on that base stat.

+33% of 1.5 secs is 2 secs

+33% of 2 secs is 2.6 secs ( rounded to 3, probably it was a bug).

This means that S/D theives lost a whole second of daze.

This is probably the worst nerf among all, yet people still says “slight nerf”.

lolwut.

edit:

however, i’d like some explanations, too.

In GW, devs team was very detailed with their explanations: you could take a look at the whole reasoning behind the nerfs.

In GW2 it all happens silently, with no explanations.

Altough i agree with lots of patch notes changes, the ones regarding the thief make ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

And even more since they said they were going to compensate .

But as people said and will keep on saying, if something is broken at its foundations, it’s quite hard to have it fixed.

Pls, aNet, just redo the whole class, it’s clear it’s not going as expected, and players REALLY HATE to reroll /change build anytime you (mis)think something is wrong.

Excellent post, well reasoned and thought out. I’d like to think it would get some kind of response from the dev team.

Let’s be honest, nearly permadazing a target is kind of overpowered, and against the spirit of the game. We weren’t designed to have access to a stun lock, so ATM, the tactical strike change seems fair. this is why I claimed it wasn’t a big deal. daze length not being affected by mesmer runes and so forth seems off however, because a 2s daze isn’t anywhere near as bad as a 3s daze.

Let’s be honest, if you get permadaze you should just quit this game.(period)

it takes skill to dazelock people, who knows how to dodge the 3rd strike of autoattack or dodge cnd after a very predictable 3 autoattacks. Why would a thief just auto attack if it was too predictable? well let me tell you, what does a thief kill someone with s/d wep set? flanking strike? (LMAO).

evilapprentice.6379:

Let’s be honest, nearly permadazing a target is kind of overpowered, and against the spirit of the game. We weren’t designed to have access to a stun lock, so ATM, the tactical strike change seems fair. this is why I claimed it wasn’t a big deal. daze length not being affected by mesmer runes and so forth seems off however, because a 2s daze isn’t anywhere near as bad as a 3s daze.

Pistol Whip has a stun lock through use of Haste. Their way of fixing this was to reduce the damage on Pistol Whip by 15%. We STILL have the stun lock through Pistol Whip. This proves that they really don’t care about stun locks.

There’s a reason break stuns exist. There is no “permadaze” in this game.

This is another uncalled for nerf that they refuse to explain as to why they did it. They even told us they would compensate in areas where the thief is weak, yet they did absolutely nothing to the builds that need buffs while nerfing the wrong areas.

This was actually incredibly well written, and surprisingly fact-based for a post on this forum.

I agree that Dancing Dagger hit too hard. I don’t think anyone is willing to argue that given the potential for 20k dmg for 4 initiative with 2+ people standing near each other. However, the initiative cost MUST be adjusted to compensate.

And I also agree the dev’s missed the mark 100% with the C&D nerf. First, the majority of complaints about the “burst” spec wasn’t even in sPvP, as it’s not viable in tournaments, but rather WvW, which has featured no change. Second, the burst spec has barely been touched, and neither of the two broken aspects about this were addressed. First, Steal should have a cast time; while short, it would prevent precasting C&D and using it to guarantee a hit on someone. It’s one thing to have a movement utility be able to be cast during an attack (like Shadowstep), it’s completely different with steal. Second, Mug hits a little too hard. Maybe a 10-20% nerf is in order here.

Best possible fix? Make the Mug trait do the damage it does now, but put a .5s cast time on steal ONLY with this trait. This way, it still adds more damage, but you have a fair trade as a result.

This solves the burst build issue without crippling some other builds (including my high-stealth dagger build which relied on C&D for a good part of it’s damage and DOESN’T instagib people).

Finally, when you nerf the damage of a melee oriented class that is squishy, you have to compensate. Our base HP is a good place to start; why do we have 2/3 the HP of most classes (and honestly, it’s not fair to Guardians or Ele’s either, but Guardians have lots of powerful utility to survive and ele’s have range), and almost half the base HP of warriors? I can honestly understand a 20% difference. But 90%? Come on. Stealth does not make us immune to damage, and any smart player will use abilities to damage the thief at all times (hell warriors don’t even have to be smart to do this).

I really hope we get a response, at least in regards to the +daze duration runes.

You can stun break out of a PW stun. there is no way to break daze. also, you can only stunlock when using haste, whereas you can daze someone whenever you stealth.

evilapprentice.6379:

You can stun break out of a PW stun. there is no way to break daze. also, you can only stunlock when using haste, whereas you can daze someone whenever you stealth.

Stun breakers work on daze just like they work on stuns.

An S/D thief can be kited, and as soon as you avoid a C&D ( L2P issue), the S/D thief is already out of ini.

S/D thieves could be countered way easily, STILL it was our best duelist build.

Now it’s destroyed, and there’s no reason to choose a main hand sword over a main hand dagger.

Mrbig.8019:

Stun breakers work on daze just like they work on stuns.

Well, that’s not true.

If I’m dazed, and I use the Shadow Return of Infi Strike for example, I go back to the starting point, BUT the daze it’s still up. And SR it’s a Stun breaker.

Galandil.9641:

Mrbig.8019:

Stun breakers work on daze just like they work on stuns.

Well, that’s not true.

If I’m dazed, and I use the Shadow Return of Infi Strike for example, I go back to the starting point, BUT the daze it’s still up. And SR it’s a Stun breaker.

It never happened with Shadowstep. Most probably a bug.

Stun breakers work on daze exactly like they work on stuns.

Mrbig.8019:

It never happened with Shadowstep. Most probably a bug.

Stun breakers work on daze exactly like they work on stuns.

Well, I can assure you that the SR on IS doesn’t break anything except the stun.

Are you dazed? You port back with daze still on.
Are you knocked down? Same as with daze.
Etc.

BTW, did they fix the return part of Shadowstep? Or do we still return to a fixed-range point back, and not the starting point?

Mrbig.8019:

evilapprentice.6379:

You can stun break out of a PW stun. there is no way to break daze. also, you can only stunlock when using haste, whereas you can daze someone whenever you stealth.

Stun breakers work on daze just like they work on stuns.

An S/D thief can be kited, and as soon as you avoid a C&D ( L2P issue), the S/D thief is already out of ini.

S/D thieves could be countered way easily, STILL it was our best duelist build.

Now it’s destroyed, and there’s no reason to choose a main hand sword over a main hand dagger.

exactly!

those people saying otherwise simply do not use this set, and doesnt realize how ruined this weapon set it.

Not a big fan of condition builds, this weapon set was perfect for me. It allowed to me to go toe to toe people. If i kill anyone it was because I perfectly time all my cnd and tactical strikes, this is no where as easy as backstab build which only relies on ONE cnd > backstab combo. If i were to miss ONE tactical daze strike i would lose a chunk of hp. If i were to miss 3rd hit of my auto attack, the fight would substantially take longer!

I dont think Anet, or anyone not playing this set realize this. It takes Skill to play this set, and to dazelock someone gives a whole lot of sense of accomplishment because it means that person got outplayed.

Lets list what this set have left shall we.
pros
-auto attacks which is the only reliable damage this set can do
-sword 2: immobilization shares the same resource as cnd(which is more important if i want to continue autoattacking).

cons
-flanking strike: very situational, but with the current ini cost, id rather use cnd > tactical strike combo.
-dancing dagger: nerf to hell.
-cnd: did not do considerable damage before, much less now. It cost a lot of ini too.

In conclusion:
Weapon set, S/d build totaly destroyed.

evilapprentice.6379:

So, in short, our primary OH (Primary, Again, because its part of all our functioning weaponsets) lost 50% and 33% damage, with no reduction in initiative cost. Our broken/non-functioning weaponsets were not touched. The ability buffs intended to compensate us for massive damage nerfs were inadequate. This is the second time you’ve failed to properly address burst, and instead just weakened all us non-burst thieves. Please stop spitting in our faces.

Thank you, OP. What I quoted is the most important thing in your message.

However, I disagree with you on 1 thing. Dancing Dagger and Cloak and Dagger should be reduced in damage no more than 15%
What anet did, -50% and -33% respectively, is absolutely preposterous. And as you well said, it hurts us non-glass cannon/non-burst thieves the most.

I’m not very familiar with WvW/PvE in this game, but as far as I know, this doesn’t change things very much in those settings. For sPvP/tPvP, you’ve seriously kittened most builds that rely on Dagger Offhand.

i dont want any answers, but ill bump it anyways, just coz im curious… to see the reactions of playerbase to answers.

I want a statement of intent on this round of nerfs. What was the perceived issue, what was hoping to be accomplished?

The more information the developers give us about the decisions they make to affect professions, the better the players of those professions can discuss and provide feedback on the subject. I know the dev team is tight on manpower (most dev teams are), but communication with the community is so very vital to fostering a good relationship between players and developers.

My suggestions:
Q/A Event – Moderated chat channel, questions are screened and answered.
Issues list – Each profession puts together a list of 4/5 questions on the forum that are then answered en masse by the development team.
Community representative – Development team appoints someone as a go-between for each profession that can be used as a source of good feedback on the profession and someone who can properly explain the intent of changes to the community in a way they’ll understand, if not accept. This option usually requires an NDA.

I’ve seen all three of these successfully used by MMOs in the past. Players won’t ever stop hating nerfs, but there’s a huge difference in morale between when developers say “this is our intent, this is broken, this is what we’re doing to fix it”, instead of just getting patch notes and leaving players wondering why.

I always try avoiding reading patchnotes whenever I can, and this round of path notes just validated the fear.

I agree Mrbig that the worst nerf is the one on the daze…. And was there a patch that came out since 28th of august that didn’t have a nerf for us honest Thiefs trying to make a living in that cruel world of Tyria?

I agree our weapons skills are not up to standerd I would love to see p/p redo since its just not worth using in the beginning I played p/p got the the achievement of pistol master as well but its just not that good in WvW or PvP they failed the p/p please help out the thief we are not asking to be OP we just want to be able to play with any weapon and not get punished for choosing p/p instead of d/d or any other weapon set

great post, I love playing thief its a great class, but sick of a nurf every patch.

I don’t have the figures to back it up, but the nurf to cluster bomb seems more that 15%

Hopefully we will get an answer!

Count me in for the “answers” also. Specifically about the SB. I did not see anyone complaining about the SB. I liked to be different and not run the FoTM. Now you have forced everyone to become what you tried to nerf.

Also agree with the post above. It is alot more the 15%. 5 to 6 shots before = death or the enemy running for their life, now 5 to 6 shots = enemy still near full health and me looking for a rez.

I would also like to point out they destroyed the dmg on 4 combos, by halfing the dmg on DD
psn arrow + dancing dagger = psn dagger.
steal (Tar) + dancing dagger = confusion dagger
Blind + dd =blind dagger
shadow refuge + Dd = life steal dagger.

sitting at 100% crit dmg this does 1000k on guards. while my normal 1 attack does 940 without crit. and doesn’t cost init..

Please raise the damage on dd 17%, (would make it -33% nerf instead of 50%)
The zerg is getting all powerful.. next whine: Anything that hits more then 1 target.

after trying andn trying, i decided to leave the S/D.

Overall, all thief power/crit builds are not really that viable anymore, and the glass cannon 30-30-0-0-10 ( and similars) was never viable from the start.

Not the only way to go is conditions, and i hate thief conditions builds ( 1-1-5-1-1-5 or 3-3-3-3-3-3, bah).

They killed all thief set ups requiring skill to be played at their best.

Disappointing.

I’ll probably hop again on my mesmer :sadface:

They just need to put thief back to the way it was on day one. I am tired of respecking and rerolling a class that was great that is now kitten.

Can we have something, Anet Dev’s? I’d like think I’ve been polite and measured in my request. I’m not claiming the sky is falling, I’m not calling you incompetent, and I think my take on the changes is fairly accurate.

Even if your response is just to let me know this is what you intended, I’ll at least know you’ve acknowledged my points and disagreed. I won’t understand how that could be, but at least we won’t be totally in the dark as to whether or not this is a trend you are intending to continue.

I play a Mesmer and agree with the OP. The “fixes” ArenaNet keeps releasing aren’t the fixes they promise. They promised to nerf BURST DAMAGE across the board. Well Mesmers can still shatter for 10k but our mechanics are broken, warriors can still one shot with hundred blades (which is fine since its easy to avoid), thieves can still backstab just as well as ever. This patch didn’t nerf a thief’s burst damaged, it ruins the other builds that aren’t glass cannons, which is quite a shame. Not saying backstab should be nerfed by any means, just stating that this “fix” only hurt people that play builds other than the glass cannon BS thief.

These people need to stop the obsession with s/d.

EVERY SINGLE BUILD THAT USES DAGGER OFFHAND GOT NERFED. Try to wrap your tiny brains around that.

If you want to cry about the daze reduction, which was needed and doesn’t hurt s/d at all (only for the unskilled), then make your own thread. A 2 second daze is plenty, and not hard at all to land.

Most of us thieves are rightly complaining about the ludicrous nerf to Off-hand Dagger, which affects every single thief that uses it.

shrewd.5319:

These people need to stop the obsession with s/d.

EVERY SINGLE BUILD THAT USES DAGGER OFFHAND GOT NERFED. Try to wrap your tiny brains around that.

If you want to cry about the daze reduction, which was needed and doesn’t hurt s/d at all (only for the unskilled), then make your own thread. A 2 second daze is plenty, and not hard at all to land.

Most of us thieves are rightly complaining about the ludicrous nerf to Off-hand Dagger, which affects every single thief that uses it.

It was an effective 1.5s reduction. It lost .5s base, and is no longer affected by mesmer runes, para sigil, or points in Deadly arts. This might be a bug, we don’t know (no one is talking to us.) I think a .5s reduction isn’t a huge deal if the condition duration boosts get back into the mix, but losing both is a bit overkill.

And S/D players are complaining about the Daze in addition to losing a kittenload of Damage on both their offhand skills, because of the OH Dagger nerf. The entire spec was nerfed across the board, seeing as it wasn’t a burst damage powerhouse, and their targets are now dazed half as long – if you claim that doesn’t change the way S/D plays, you’re 100% incorrect.

Lastly, Please try to speak more respectfully to your fellow players, whether you agree or disagree. I politely asked that in the initial post.

shrewd.5319:

These people need to stop the obsession with s/d.

EVERY SINGLE BUILD THAT USES DAGGER OFFHAND GOT NERFED. Try to wrap your tiny brains around that.

If you want to cry about the daze reduction, which was needed and doesn’t hurt s/d at all (only for the unskilled), then make your own thread. A 2 second daze is plenty, and not hard at all to land.

Most of us thieves are rightly complaining about the ludicrous nerf to Off-hand Dagger, which affects every single thief that uses it.

Oh, what an intelligent comment.

try to do some math, and you’ll find that S/D damage is being nerfed MORE than D/D backstab builds, because its main damage source is C&D ( heavily nerfed), not Backstab.

moreover, S/D builds oftend don’t have Mug, another damage source untouched for Backstab builds.

Moreover the daze from tactical strike has been hit hard by the nerf, since now the best you “would” get is 2 secs, which is effectively 1.5 secs, since runes and sigils are not working on it anymore.

Summary:

Even if the daze lasted 2 secs ( as it should, with mesmer’s runes), S/D wouldn’t have anymore the damage to bring down other competitive builds, due to the heavy nerf on C&D and dancing dagger.

While S/D builds were totally demolished , balanced dps pressure builds got hit hard but are still playable.

S/D players and balanced builds players are the only ones which should really complain for this patch nerfs.

I’m predicting next patch ANet will remove all weapon sets except for D/D.

Seems like the next logical step after seeing the latest patch changes.

I understand that it hurts to receive a direct nerf with no compensation, even though I rarely play a thief.

But I am consistently seeing more good tournament teams use two thieves now than I ever had before the patch. Why? Because with the bug fixes to bunkers, roamers are more viable.

The only area in which thieves saw a net loss in effectiveness with the last patch is the area of crushing inexperienced players. (They are still the best profession at it, though.) In competitive games, thieves are equally as viable as before, or slightly more viable.

(Yes, I realize there are issues with build diversity—but this post is about effectiveness in the best builds, not how many equally effective builds there are.)

tl;dr? Thieves are now less frustrating to new players, and equally or more effective against experienced teams. Diversity issues remain.

I simply feel that ANet is just rolling with whatever is being screamed on forums but then put a small twist of their own to it.

More often than not the issues that people have with Thieves are because of the inability to handle them due to lack of skill. If they are going to make changes to PvP they should do so based on high level tPvP play not on forum blabbing.
GW2 is a free to play game and ANet needs to make money. Their focus switched from aiming for eSports level PvP to cashcow PvE/WvWvW.

Tbh, looking at my Thief i have. Arenanet is nerfing everything, except for the things that need to be nerfed. In my opinion they are forcing us in a even smaller niche, making even less builds viable aside from the basilisk/backstab build.

NevirSayDie.6235:

I understand that it hurts to receive a direct nerf with no compensation, even though I rarely play a thief.

But I am consistently seeing more good tournament teams use two thieves now than I ever had before the patch. Why? Because with the bug fixes to bunkers, roamers are more viable.

The only area in which thieves saw a net loss in effectiveness with the last patch is the area of crushing inexperienced players. (They are still the best profession at it, though.) In competitive games, thieves are equally as viable as before, or slightly more viable.

(Yes, I realize there are issues with build diversity—but this post is about effectiveness in the best builds, not how many equally effective builds there are.)

tl;dr? Thieves are now less frustrating to new players, and equally or more effective against experienced teams. Diversity issues remain.

Diversity issues are a big part of the overall issue I have. My complaint isn’t just that dagger OH was nerfed fairly hard (Maybe it was necessary; I don’t feel that it was, but who knows, I’m not a playtester or a game designer). My complaint is just that our broken weaponsets remained broken, it’s a combination of the 2. If I dislike the OH Dagger nerfs (and I do, it feels like I’m spending alot of init for very little damage in an S/D build), I can’t just say “Oh, i’ll just switch to pistol OH”…because the pistol offhand specs have varying issues that have been known about since launch (or introduced by Anet, like the PW nerf), and still haven’t been fixed/adjusted. They didn’t just nerf Dagger OH, they nerfed Dagger OH without fixing Pistol OH, leaving us with no options.

Nerf’s happen ALL THE TIME in MMO’s, I’m more than used to it. In those games though, I tend to have other spec/weapon options. I may not like the new spec/weapon option as much as my original, but i generally can’t complain that multiple abilities don’t work, or that my auto-attack is a better option than one of my activated abilities intended for dealing damage…or that they’re as poorly designed as P/P is at the moment.

Edit: To add, what really makes this annoying is that alot of the fixes are so simple. Infiltrators strike is a teleport to target attack that doesn’t root you on hit…fixing D/P’s dual skill shouldn’t be difficult. Rangers have an ability that is exactly like Flanking strike, only it works on moving targets (as far as I can tell, I tested this a long time ago, maybe this isn’t true anymore). Yeah, there would still be issues (P/P requires a redesign, which requires playtesting, that’s not something that can be fixed quickly IMO), but it’d be a huge boost to confidence if the smaller, easier things could finally be taken care of.

evilapprentice.6379:

The biggest slap in the face however was your complete lack of effort for our other weaponsets. We’re locked into using D/D, P/D, and S/D because our other weaponsets have glaring issues. P/P is a confused build without access to stealth (our primary survival mechanic), and worthless skill in the 2 slot, and an autoattack that doesn’t mesh well with its dual skill. Nobody plays it becuase it just isn’t viable. D/P is ruined because our primary gap closer roots us on hit – let me repeat that; our GAP CLOSER ROOTS US ON HIT – I don’t know if this is a bug or a design choice, either way its useless, the gap opens right back up…because we were rooted on hit. S/D is in use atm, despite the fact that flanking strike is a joke, primarily because we have so little working weapon options.

The cluster bomb reduction also reeks of kittening everyone to nerf glass cannons. The damage is rather good, but due to the travel time, its not an ability that can be “spammed” most of the time. I’ve seen glass cannons hit for 6-8k with the ability, so it probably needed an adjustment, but maybe one that only affects glass cannons.

The compensation we received for this massive loss of damage on our only working weaponsets? The blinding powder change was necessary, not a buff. Blinding powder was completely inferior compared to Shadow refuge in 95% of situations prior to the patch, seeing as they had the same CD and shadow refuge was 10 times as powerful. Cutting the CD to 40s was a good choice, but it wasn’t a buff, it was a fix to a poorly performing skill. Smoke screen is bigger now, thank you for that. Scorpion wire got a range increase, thank you for that. That’s the end of our “Compensation” section, sadly.

So, in short, our primary OH (Primary, Again, because its part of all our functioning weaponsets) lost 50% and 33% damage, with no reduction in initiative cost. Our broken/non-functioning weaponsets were not touched. The ability buffs intended to compensate us for massive damage nerfs were inadequate. This is the second time you’ve failed to properly address burst, and instead just weakened all us non-burst thieves. Please stop spitting in our faces.

Note: If you’re going to respond in either support or disagreement, please keep it civil. I am a person, the Dev team is made up of people. I’m trying to express my disappointment, and perhaps actually get an explanation that will shed light on my confusion. This post isn’t meant to be a rage dump for children to call people names.

Man this is what I was talking about, people was just ignoring me. Some weapons/weapon sets in this game are simply useless and every weapon/weapon set has a specific playstyle which annoys me. I want to play with wathever weapon I want with the style i want to play. They have to give us more weaponskills to chose form.

CihandaR.2395:

evilapprentice.6379:

The biggest slap in the face however was your complete lack of effort for our other weaponsets. We’re locked into using D/D, P/D, and S/D because our other weaponsets have glaring issues. P/P is a confused build without access to stealth (our primary survival mechanic), and worthless skill in the 2 slot, and an autoattack that doesn’t mesh well with its dual skill. Nobody plays it becuase it just isn’t viable. D/P is ruined because our primary gap closer roots us on hit – let me repeat that; our GAP CLOSER ROOTS US ON HIT – I don’t know if this is a bug or a design choice, either way its useless, the gap opens right back up…because we were rooted on hit. S/D is in use atm, despite the fact that flanking strike is a joke, primarily because we have so little working weapon options.

The cluster bomb reduction also reeks of kittening everyone to nerf glass cannons. The damage is rather good, but due to the travel time, its not an ability that can be “spammed” most of the time. I’ve seen glass cannons hit for 6-8k with the ability, so it probably needed an adjustment, but maybe one that only affects glass cannons.

The compensation we received for this massive loss of damage on our only working weaponsets? The blinding powder change was necessary, not a buff. Blinding powder was completely inferior compared to Shadow refuge in 95% of situations prior to the patch, seeing as they had the same CD and shadow refuge was 10 times as powerful. Cutting the CD to 40s was a good choice, but it wasn’t a buff, it was a fix to a poorly performing skill. Smoke screen is bigger now, thank you for that. Scorpion wire got a range increase, thank you for that. That’s the end of our “Compensation” section, sadly.

So, in short, our primary OH (Primary, Again, because its part of all our functioning weaponsets) lost 50% and 33% damage, with no reduction in initiative cost. Our broken/non-functioning weaponsets were not touched. The ability buffs intended to compensate us for massive damage nerfs were inadequate. This is the second time you’ve failed to properly address burst, and instead just weakened all us non-burst thieves. Please stop spitting in our faces.

Note: If you’re going to respond in either support or disagreement, please keep it civil. I am a person, the Dev team is made up of people. I’m trying to express my disappointment, and perhaps actually get an explanation that will shed light on my confusion. This post isn’t meant to be a rage dump for children to call people names.

Man this is what I was talking about, people was just ignoring me. Some weapons/weapon sets in this game are simply useless and every weapon/weapon set has a specific playstyle which annoys me. I want to play with wathever weapon I want with the style i want to play. They have to give us more weaponskills to chose form.

Destroying our current weapon choice with senseless nerfs surely is not helping at all.

Again, this maybe is the 1000000000000th time I say this, but the OH dagger nerf left totally destroyed any chance of creating a good balanced build that doesn’t rely on conditions.

Currently power/crit builds are too inferior to condition ones in terms of damage/survivability.

And this is not fun.

The thief profession is doomed.

This is how balance is done at arenanet, by JonathanSharp: "When we’re in those meetings, we’ll talk about hot topics, and issues that are currently a big issue for a certain piece of content. We also listen to high level players, we read the forums (sometimes we even take the best-written posts, print out 10 copies, and bring them to a balance meeting), and we play the game to get a feel for ourselves. Just because you don’t see a change that YOU want, keep in mind that someone else may disagree. Just because we don’t do every single change YOU want, doesn’t mean we don’t care about you or the game. We just try to make the best changes for the greatest number of players.

Full post here: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/245674-the-teams-that-work-on-pvp-wvw-balance/

shrewd.5319:

The thief profession is doomed.

This is how balance is done at arenanet, by JonathanSharp: "When we’re in those meetings, we’ll talk about hot topics, and issues that are currently a big issue for a certain piece of content. We also listen to high level players, we read the forums (sometimes we even take the best-written posts, print out 10 copies, and bring them to a balance meeting), and we play the game to get a feel for ourselves. Just because you don’t see a change that YOU want, keep in mind that someone else may disagree. Just because we don’t do every single change YOU want, doesn’t mean we don’t care about you or the game. We just try to make the best changes for the greatest number of players.

Full post here: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/245674-the-teams-that-work-on-pvp-wvw-balance/

They’re right. The greatest number of players are casual. A couple of patches ago, there were 6-10 thieves in most 8v8s and they were driving casual players away.

No one can blame them for making the best changes for the greatest number of players.

And hey, as a lot of people have said, thieves are still 100% tourney-viable. Certainly, not with a large variety of builds, but most of the other professions don’t have a huge variety of good builds, either.

NevirSayDie.6235:

shrewd.5319:

The thief profession is doomed.

This is how balance is done at arenanet, by JonathanSharp: "When we’re in those meetings, we’ll talk about hot topics, and issues that are currently a big issue for a certain piece of content. We also listen to high level players, we read the forums (sometimes we even take the best-written posts, print out 10 copies, and bring them to a balance meeting), and we play the game to get a feel for ourselves. Just because you don’t see a change that YOU want, keep in mind that someone else may disagree. Just because we don’t do every single change YOU want, doesn’t mean we don’t care about you or the game. We just try to make the best changes for the greatest number of players.

Full post here: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/245674-the-teams-that-work-on-pvp-wvw-balance/

They’re right. The greatest number of players are casual. A couple of patches ago, there were 6-10 thieves in most 8v8s and they were driving casual players away.

No one can blame them for making the best changes for the greatest number of players.

And hey, as a lot of people have said, thieves are still 100% tourney-viable. Certainly, not with a large variety of builds, but most of the other professions don’t have a huge variety of good builds, either.

And this is not what aNet said in primis.

they said " we want to increase the number of viable builds for competitive play, we’re investing tons of time in doing so".

then 15 november patch came, and the thief got polarized into only 2 viable playstyles.

yeah, so much diversity.

Indeed, you are atm forced to play lolinstagib D/D (Which still works flawlessly btw), condition D/D (3333333 all day) or condition P/D. (I personally don’t like S/D at all, flanking strike is sooo unreliable and buggy, not sure if it’s only me).

The thief class needs a big rework, some weaponsets are just completely kitten or just awful to play (Seriously, condition dagger/dagger, who came up with that O_o ?).

I love this game but my mmo-class, thieves, rather disappoint me

EDIT: Though I totally understand the nerfs they are just wrong. Thieves dominate sPvP pretty heavily and are very frustrating to deal with. But like I said, you (probably) wont fix the problem with damage nerfs, the thief class has tons of fundamental flaws, bad designs (bad synergy, badly designed sets, useless abilities etc).

I’m sorry but who thinks that D/D condition build it’s just a 33333 spam, it’s just plainly wrong.

Mind you, I was long time ago a lover of the S/P build. Then I tried out the S/D, and fell in love with it more than S/P. After this patch, the effectiveness of S/D went down the drain, and since I really hate the gimmicky backstab build, I went to a D/D bleed build.

True, Deathblossom is used a lot, but you can’t spam it forever, and after 3 uses you need to come with backup actions that are not straightforward/braindead. Moreover, one needs to adapt to his opponent, and just spamming as soon as you start the combat the 3 key, most often than not will give your opponent the edge in the fight (ofc, I speak regarding good opponents).

It’s sad, however, that all the builds involving Sword have been nerfed to death. Yes, one can use them with good results even now, but it’s undeniable that they’re not that effective in comparison to builds which use dagger as main hand.

I really wouldn’t mind the nerfs (past and future) if they actually fixed fundamental problems with the profession instead of addressing superficial number imbalances.

ANet needs to learn to address causes, not symptoms.

Thank you, OP. Your post was very lucid and provided a lot of information.

I became really attached to S/D when I started playing sPvP. It was more tactical than D/D, and—in my opinion—it required more active brain cells to use effectively. I liked the challenge of it. It was fun. Now I find myself getting frustrated because I’m essentially running out of initiative before I can do 75% of the damage that I used to.

I feel like I’m being forced into either changing my weapon set or changing my class. That’s a very demoralizing feeling.

Still nothing, Anet?

I think of all the things this game is lacking, transparency and communication are the biggest issues. We’re left in the dark concerning issues of design vs bug (D/P dual skill rooting on hit, people concerned that Pistol 1 is firing at half the speed of its listed activation time..and so on), and also left baffled about design choices in patches.

Most of us still can’t understand why PW does less damage than our autoattack (for 5 init while rooting us too!), or why so many of our weaponsets have fatal flaws making them unusable in a competitive setting, or why a 6 init skill lost 33% damage. How did that make it through playtesting? 33% is -alot- for an ability that costs half an initiative bar to lose… and when we ask for something, anything, we’re just ignored.

I’d be happy with a “we understand your concerns, we’re working on them/we’re looking into it/we disagree”…just about anything other that total silence.

Any kind of communication would be nice

This is one of my biggest frustrations in playing, and it’s causing problems with my friends and family who play. I have a hard time investing in a profession that is getting constantly more broken. As soon as I find a well-functioning method of play, it gets nerfed and I’m stuck struggling to keep up with everyone.

Can we get a clear design direction on Thief? I used to think having direct damage and condition damage abilities on the same weapon set was cool, but it really isn’t. Every weapon set leaves me wondering what playstyle this is for. Can we have one type of weapon be for crit and another be for con?

Some more weapon variety would be nice, but I think the allure of that is because of how awkward our existing weapons are. There are some very good suggestions on these forums. Can we have a Reddit AMA specifically about Thief?

I don’t usually like to make comparisons, but this is a huge departure from what I experienced with Rift. This isn’t a question of whether or not you liked their system, or whose you thought was better – this is all about the dev team.

Balance changes were discussed ad nauseam – there was constant feedback from the devs, and a test server designed for player testing – they made some changes (some they thought up, some community suggested), threw it up, and let the players test it out. Their system wasn’t perfect by any means, but it usually ended up with most of the playerbase being happy, and more importantly fully aware of what was going on, and on what kind of timeline these changes were being implemented.

Now I like the gameplay here better – the non-run-of-the-mill combat system, the skill required beyond just pressing buttons in the right order…. but I wish Anet had 1/10th the resources Trion did, because I’d kill for a little feedback.