I was looking forward to this 25th patch as the greatest oportunity Anet had to solve many things that were wrong about thieves, and I got ubber disappointed yesterday to the point that I don’t see why I should keep using my thief in WvW. These are my concerns:
- Thieves need more variety of builds. We are the profession with weapon swap with the least amount of weapons avaible, neither we have extra skills (attunements, elixirs, etc) asides from steal, which is nice but random. What we got?
->Nerf to sword, nerf to shotbow, nothing new to pistols, buffs to dagger initiative costs, even though daggers were always quite mainstream.
- Thieves need more options underwater. They have 10+ skills not working underwater, plus 0 stealth availability, which makes stealth builds and #1 slot underwater skills useless. What we got?
->Heavy nerfs to spear initiative costs.
- Thieves need an a 1200 range weapon like every other profession in the game that makes them useful in WvW siege situations, PvE hard-to-reach bosses when you need that extra range and some others. Something fair. What we got?
->Cluster Bomb got nerfed to 900 range from 1200. Being it a painfully slow blockable projectile which couldn’t be spammed unless in melee range and had a pointless active effect. No one complained about it and nothing was wrong with the shortbow. Why this?
- Thieves have scorpion wire as a grab, but it is extremely unreliable. Not only it barely hits anything, is easy to dodge, often blocked by terrain, usually grabs pets and is blockable and affected by stability. Those things could be fine, but the fact that it grabs you to the target if reflected by anti projectile skills, makes scorpion wire a coin flip that can insta kill yourself for no reason. Did the reversed grab got fixed?
->Nope. We got a nice CD and cast time reduction, but it was not the main problem.
- Thieves need a way to store stolen skills so they can use them more efficiently, not having to waste them on air in order to use steal again. There are also stolen skills which can block you from using F1 at all if you went underwater with them. What did we get?
->Buff to steal range and recharge, which is nice but doesn’t solve the stolen skills problem.
- Thieves also need a way to be more survivable in prolonged fights. This problem is known by Anet and the reason why they changed mug. What did we get?
->Nerf to sword stun breaker and boon stealing, nerf to shortbow range (which hurts suvivability) . Buffs to shadow art traits and the ability to use mug more often. Kinda 50-50. So it is still the same.
- Thieves need further access to damaging conditions, being their only ones bleeding and poison. While poison is extremely useful in sPVP, it does not work that well as a damaging condition. Being bleeding our only way to do condition damage, we easily reach 25 stacks, and can also easily be removed. What did we get?
->Death blossom initiative cost reduced and a new, completely useless, with long-CD and almost no damage venom that applies torment, hitting as hard as 3 or 4 stacks of bleed at best. None of them solve the bleeding problem of the thief.
- Thieves need a buff to their traps, which are very situational, don’t feel powerful, and very rarely will hit more than one enemy at a time, being extremely sub-par when compared to ranger’s ones. What did we get?
->Shadow trap now grants us power and fury and has a longer CD. Vulnerability on traps with a trait got buffed. None of this changes will affect the less used traps nor make them less situational.
- Basilisk venom is no longer powerful. At all. Can be missed and lost, only lasts one hit for 1’5 seconds for a 45 CD elite skill that also has a 1 second cast time. This skill is much worse than dagger storm or thieves guild, almost useless if not heavily traited. And even then, it is not great. Maybe a re-arrange of the venom traits will make them more useful, what we got?
->Nothing.
Where are they going to solve all of this obvious and well-known problems, instead of changing again and again the same builds every patch?
